…which is presumably why they scored it lower than the original, despite it being BETTER BY MILES.

You’re not just limited to drawing patterns on clothes and stuff any more, you know! Now you can cover the whole village in your textures. You can chop down the trees, install a football pitch and put all the animals in the strips of your favourite team. OR! Make brightly coloured chequered textures, and make the whole place look like a level from Sonic The Hedgehog.

Imagine that! Your own personal Green Hill Zone, populated by flickies who live there and want to be your friend and give your presents. And it’s snowing. It started snowing yesterday because it’s Christmas. Christmas in happy pretend land.

And all that’s BEFORE you’ve even connected it to the internet to find people to come and visit your village and be your friend! Then you can go to the new all-night piano bar and drink loads of coffee and stay up REALLY LATE. It’s cheered us up so much that we actually bumped into two people on the way to work today because we were looking at the sky and cheerfully muttering and humming to ourselves.

Animal Crossing Wild World — It’s going-back-to-work-after-lunchtime-completely-sober-TASTIC!

It’s called Disco Dream. The idea is you just give your money STRAIGHT TO SEGA by putting it in a slot. This saves Sega money on R&D and marketing, plus you still get that Sega arcade thrill of putting money in a slot and then seeing some bright lights go off in time to music!

Meet you all at the Trocadero tonight then. The campaign for an Xbox 360 version starts NOW. Who wants to be in charge of the internet petition?

SEGA’S REASON FOR MAKING THIS KIND OF THING:
“Sega’s promise of diversifying its product range a year or so ago will be evident at this year’s (ATEI 2006) show. Its venture into the pusher market was tested at the Preview last year when it showed its ‘all singing all dancing’ six-player Disco Dream. Then it was shown to gain operator reaction and feedback. The result is a product that has been modified to suit European legalities and operator requests. The game features a massive glitter ball ‘Cash Splash’ feature, dancing Divas and a multitude of plasma screens and features.”

ADDITIONAL NOTES ABOUT DISCO DREAM:

10p slots easily switched to 2p slots for deployment in poor Northern towns.

Uses a modified SUPERSLOT MIKANU MAX-YEN board with two additional on-board coin slots.

Just after midnight on the second of December Microsoft set off a sort of big indoor firework, played the Xbox 360 “Jump In” advert and got a DJ to play “Jump” by Van Halen. We’re not commenting on that, not even ironically or satirically, just reporting the bare bones facts of what happened.

Here are the only photos we took that came out OK:

The room was big and dark with men in it.

Then it got lighter. Someone’s excited!

Then as has become sadly customary, we got lost going home.

These bottom two are the main road we walked home down after falling asleep on the bus and getting lost in Woolwich. Proportionally speaking, the main road bit was the biggest part of the night and the least fun.

We hope your game sells a million copies, or three million copies, or five million copies, or however many millions of copies it needs to sell to be considered a massive global success.

And thanks for “helping out” with the Dreamcast. Beat you later, losers!

Then all the outsourced Mexican testers can have a merry Christmas and no one gets killed or sued!

JUST TO RECAP:

Don’t kill anyone, ever.

Don’t even try to shit people up by saying you’ve got a knife.

And we’re not ones to turn down fully-formed, VERY BITTER updates that only require the pressing of CONTROL+A, CONTROL+V then PUBLISH BLOG* to get on the internet.

How to get ahead in games development…
By “Ensign Huey”

Here are some tips on how to succeed in the games industry (after all you’re special).

1. Ignore any advice given by gamers, despite their intuitive insight built upon several decades of actually playing games, your coke addled mind is “thinking outside the box” and doesn’t need any extra help.

2. Have lengthy discussions about games review scores but always make sure that you score lower than your peers to get that critical edge (you also need to pout as you deliver your “definitive” score).

3. Dismiss frame rate problems out of hand because you’ve read in Heat that “nobody notices anyway”.

4. When you invariably lose on your game during a huge press event, don’t admit that you did testing on it. As rule, don’t acknowledge games testing exists at all.

5. If you’re a girl you can sleep your way to the top. Gaming needs more people that look pretty and there’s nothing worse than having to work with someone who does their job properly.
NB: Be selective on your conquests; the last thing you want is one of the muppets blabbing about what a lousy shag you were to a reporter.

6. As shit hits the fan about a bug or a series of bugs that the testers that don’t exist found but you ignored and then swathes of the gaming public encountered anyway, hide in the toilet and fill your nose with charlie. If it’s an online bug; shrug and carry on nonchalantly thumbing through whatever (anybody who’s important doesn’t plays online anyway).

7. Don’t hire anyone that knows more about games and/or has more talent than you, if you did it would only take people’s attention away from your spiky and badly dyed blonde hair.

8. Treat artists and programmers like shit. They only make the games and are thus utterly expendable.

9. Belittle new game ideas put forward by your team. The public don’t want fresh new games with a tangible sense of fun; they want the same banal and mediocre gaming fecal matter already available everywhere.

Remember, as long as you’re alright that’s all that matters. People will forget about GoldenEye Rogue Agent and the Eye Powers and the fact that you said it would be better than Halo 2. After all, if you weren’t in the games industry you’d be the failure that everyone said you’d be. You showed them, oh yes.

*Actually we had to save it as raw text so the apostrophes came out OK, insert some “blockquotes” and spellcheck it. Which took about five minutes.

It’s like FIFA 05 but with slightly better graphics. It’s not as good as Pro Evolution Soccer 5.

Graphics 5/10
Sound 6/10
Playability 4/10
Overall 2/10

When people say something “made them want to cry” on the internet it’s usually an exaggeration. Usually an exaggeration so the other people who read their livediaryblognal think they’re all emotional and sensitive and reply with messages like “AAaaaWwwwww :((((” then possibly meet up for sex.

But this is not an exaggeration. There’s a bit in Sonic Rush where Cream asks Blaze if they can be friends. It made us want to cry.

Yes, Cream. We would like that. We would like that very much. We would like it more than anything else in the world. More than you can possibly imagine. We wouldn’t be any bother, we’d stay with you and sleep on your sofa and play with you all day, than tidy up after ourselves and go to bed at night. Every day. Forever. Oh god, if only it was possible.

It would never work out though. The last woman we got close to only ended up getting hurt (with a coat-hanger, then some scissors, then a saw but she lost consciousness halfway through that bit so then it would’ve stopped hurting). We know we will never be friends with Cream, which is the really painful part.

So we’ll just fuck her mum, and leave her alone to dream her sweet innocent dreams.

By which we mean this is our last wankable picture of Sega’s retrogame poster girl. We hope it keeps you going till Sega Ages: Gunstar Heroes comes out in February (click for larger image).

THIS is why Paris Hilton isn’t selling any video games to us — she’s NOT A SPACE PRINCESS. She has clearly never been interviewed by Ulala, and we doubt she’s even heard of the “Sega Joy Planet.”

We’re a bit sick of the 360 now that everyone is suddenly an expert about it, so we found some old game that came up when we searched for ‘good and wholesome’ and tried to figure out what it was about by looking at the screenshots and guessing, just like a real gaming site!

If this was a launch title for the 360 it would cost twice as much and get 9/10 from every games magazine in the universe.

Answer questions about stuff!

Do other stuff that we can’t figure out!

We know we said we wanted to live in a pretend land, but the bible is a bit too pretend for us. It doesn’t even have any blue skies. 3/10