Now, predictably, you can.

This is too much. We’ve only just flushed away the phenomenon of “Girl Gamer” websites getting an extra two hundred thousand hits every time they make a sly WINKY SMILEY reference to the Rez Trance Vibrator. Action must be taken to preserve our sanity. It’s time to retrofit the entire history of video games with shit blog referentialism so that we can pretend things were always as bad, then we can not feel the pain any more and just slip away.

OMG INTELLIVISION IS TEH HUGE!!!!!

So much for the internet killing magazines off! This one (the FIFTH Xbox 360 magazine in the UK now) is by Uncooked Media, which we’ve never heard of but are reliably informed is a small-to-medium-sized name in the world of anime magazines.

This is what it’s made:

It’s only three quid and definitely green enough to be about Xbox.

It’s only three quid because it comes with a “free online disc”. It turns out an “online disc” is a web site you go to to download really old movies of Kameo from E3 by typing in a password out of the mag.

Suffice to say? The use of phrases “suffice to say” and “sweaty mitts” reveals the people writing this magazine are (a) old, (b) isolated from modern pop culture, and (c) probably haven’t read any games magazines in the last 20 years else they’d realise what tired old cliches they’re using.

They have an interview with the Frag Dolls. It’s a bit boring, because they don’t talk about which ones they’d like to have sex with, nor do they refer to them by their proper title — which is “Entirely Fabricated Girl Gaming Clan The Frag Dolls”. They’ve also managed to ask the least interesting interview question we’ve ever seen; “Who would win in a fight between Joanna Dark and Lara Croft?”. Whoever did that interview must have even less experience at talking to girls than we do!

Some rubbish about clans. The problem with doing things about Xbox clans is there’s only about three of them that ever join in with things like this, so after a while you run out. These ones have already been in all the other Xbox magazines’ clans sections.

This is why putting photos of the readers in a magazine is always a bit of a bad idea. He’s not a weirdo or anything, just not… aspirational.

The editor’s letter is probably a bit wordy. When we write imaginary editor’s letters in our head for the imaginary time someone lets us be in charge of an imaginary magazine, they’re much shorter. And loads funnier!

NEW LOW REACHED: A war game feature with the headline “War! What is it good for?”. This is the oldest, laziest, most well-worn headline in magazines today. Maybe if this was 1984 and Zzap! magazine it would be just about acceptable. If we were ever in charge of a magazine and one of our staff seriously suggested calling a war feature “War! What is it good for?” we’d compose a very strongly-worded email for them to read when they sit back down at their desk.

AND ANOTHER ONE: “Around the World in 60 Games” is also shit and old and massively over-used. Changing it to “360” doesn’t make it any better. We can’t wait for next issue’s Games of 2006 feature, which we’re prepared to bet our lives on being called “2006: A Games Odyssey”.

SO ANYWAY
It’s a bit poor, but for a first attempt at a games magazine by new people that obviously aren’t aware of the “veritable smorgasbord” of over-used gaming cliches from the last 20 years, it’s an OK go at it. 5/10.

By making a flashgame about it. We hoped for a bit that this WAS Shadow the Hedgehog and that no more would be said about it ever again.

We just know this is a secret admission from Sega that they know EXACTLY how shit this game is, because everyone knows that flash games are UTTER SHIT. They’re even offering a Shadow Beanie to people who are stupid enough to pre-order, it’s like they’re secretly talking to us and admitting they were wrong!

We didn’t make this up! Torture yourself here if you don’t believe us.

There is no point even trying to resist any more. TRON is going to be in Kingdom Hearts 2, and Donald Duck is going to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with Cid and Yuffie against the David “Jesus Christ” Warner. This is assuming you’re still alive after Pirates of the Carribean World, and haven’t been found dead in your chair with a big smile on your face like in the original Batman movie.

Click for a larger image, as if we were a proper website and everything. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter anyway – the fan service apocalypse has arrived, and everything is finished forever. Anyone fancy a daisychain?

“Ow, my childhood!”

Seriously though, you can’t even crawl while you’re wearing the jetpack and the only way to remove it (and thus advance in some cases) is to kill yourself. What happened? Were we all too blinded by the glory of Outrun and Space Harrier when we were children to notice that games like this were terrible, or did we just eat a lot of marker pens? More to the point, what in the name of Jay Maynard’s Tron Costume persuaded us (now that we’re older) to go and spend fifteen quid on a version of it that we can’t even play on the train?

Oh… right.

So, how does the new, souped-up Counter-Strike differ from the old?

1) See above.

2) Shit J-rock soundtrack by a guitar outfit called “SEX MACHINE GUN.”

3) Costs a quid to play for ten minutes plus the bus fare to your local arcade, instead of NOTHING AT ALL AT HOME.

We fully expect it to be a big hit in England, where going into an internet cafe costs that much anyway. Keeping the vodka in a used Lucozade bottle instead of in a cracked unwashed coffee mug on the pile of crispy socks next to the monitor is going to be extra work, though.

Carol Vorderman, aka Pythagoras, will be playing Sudoku online from 21:00 hours on Friday November 18.

She’s looking a bit old nowadays. Her arms have turned into liver-spotted grandma claws :(

That pen could easily be replaced by a willie! The Sudoku game could easily be replaced by any other game apart from a Sudoku game.

A QUOTE FROM CAROL HERSELF!
As a self-confessed Sudoku addict, the Channel 4 Countdown presenter says: ‘I have become completely obsessed and a bit of a saddo. I love competitions with friends to see who finishes first. I go for the fiendishly hard one and have got my time down from five hours to under twenty minutes.’ She adds, ‘Mind you I’m told off at home, at work and even in the hairdressers for going “into the Sudoku zone” and “not listening to a word anyone says”.’

HOW TO PLAY SUDOKU:
Simply stare at someone who is playing Sudoku, and wonder why they’re playing Sudoku when they could be spending their time more productively by looking at the ceiling and imagining themselves being superheroes or shagging lovely girls, or thinking about being in space or on a mission to Mars.

Every year we look forward to the new Sonic game being called the fastest Sonic game ever. It always happens and means it’s time to post off our Christmas present list to mum!

More stuff about it here. We’ve played it for a bit and it was very OK!

This is .hack – some of you may already have seen it. It’s an offline RPG about a pretend online RPG being taken over by hackers that pretends to be an online RPG by having buckets of independent characters mailing you all the time to say “OMFG DUDE WTF!?”

Then there’s the .hack anime, which is a cartoon where characters are meant to be real people playing a real version of a pretend RPG that pretends to be real in the real world, and watching it confers privileges in the game itself.

Get ready to put another three or four of your NGJ hats on, though, because HACK IS GOING ONLINE FOR REAL. Not only will the pretend but real game about a pretend game pretending to be really online be really online, but if you have a PC you can link it up to your PlayStation’s USB port and play as a hacker – really pretend hacking the pretend real online pretend game that is now really online with you hacking it only in pretend.

The sad thing is that it actually sounds like really good fun, but we’ll never get to play it because A) Our heads just exploded just trying to categorise it, and B) Will Wright will have already put a contract out on the life of the game’s creator for stealing his crown of “World’s Most Postmodern Man.”

To celebrate Paris burning to the fucking ground, here’s a lovely picture of Wheelchair Girl.

*sigh* Oh, Wheelchair Girl. If it were all real, would YOU travel half way around the world to fight evil with US? You’d get 15% off if you did.