Here’s a hi-res photo of that stupid gold PSP, for all you people with blogs who once a week “discover it” and write a tired news story featuring the phrase “bling bling”.

We’re fed-up with seeing the low-res version all over the whole internet, that’s all. This has been a public service update, and is therefore not meant to be funny. Which is JUST AS WELL ISN’T IT?

…as seen in this week’s Megatokyo. You see, this is why we hate “Japan” people. Not because we hate Japan or the Japanese or anime or anything, but because of the whole unshakable conviction that Japan is a magical paradise of video games and cartoons.

Japanese kids just DON’T play video games, and the problem has got so bad that Namco gave it as one of the reasons they’ve merged with Bandai. They own handheld consoles (on which to play Pokemon or Starfi) till the age of seven, because that’s how long it takes for their hands to be big enough to hold a controller. They then get either a Gamecube (for Pokemon Stadium) or a PS2 until they hit tweenage. At this point they either mate with it for life (in the case of boys) or throw it away to pursue a youth filled with boys, mobile phones, selling underwear to old men and trying to turn their skin from yellow to black and their hair from black to yellow (in the case of girls).

The ONLY reason a Japanese teenage girl visits an arcade is:

1) To do “Novelty” stuff like printing stickers of their faces and downloading ringtones from the Konami net terminals.

2) To play adorable games about bursting brightly coloured bubbles

3) To look bored with their boyfriends

4) To watch said boyfriends feed quid after quid after quid into the prize machines in an attempt to impress them, NOT BECAUSE THEY WANT THE PRIZE, but because they want to guage the extent to which he’ll break and humiliate himself for them in order to better assess how easy he’ll be to crush beneath their heel should the relationship turn serious

…EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER ARCADE IN THE WORLD.

Fred Gallagher is a profession real live manga artist!!1 and was once less than ten meters away from a real live Japanese person (although they could have been Chinese or even Korean – they were fat and the lighting was bad and they all sort of look the same).

Some good news and some bad news about Sonic Rush on DS:

Cream’s in it!!! Albeit only in a menu screen capacity, but when just looking at Cream makes you happy a menu screen is all you need. :)

They’re using that 3D tunnel thing for the bonus round AGAIN. :(

Rinko apparently really likes the number 23. You should mention it to her as many times as possible to her if you meet her, it will make her like you more.

COSPLAYING AS SNOW WHITE

……..they’ve sort of lost us with this one, we’ll admit.

HOVERING HOVERING MULTIPLICITOUSLY ABOVE ARCADES

We’re not sure what most of that says because it’s written in ridiculous cutesy Japanese, but we’re told the one in the middle says “EEEEEEEVERYONE BECOOOOOOME HAPPYYYYYYY!”

SHILLING GAMES AND MOBILE PHONES (DUH)

It’s well known that no matter how much you pay a Japanese girl, they just CANNOT smile convincingly about anything. Singing, comics, lesbian porn, they ALWAYS look at the very least just a little bit like they’re scanning for the quickest escape route and calculating how fast they can run in their Ulala platform shoes which they’re being paid to wear.

Pity poor Rinko though. Her job is to sell RETRO SEGA GAMES. This means that in this photo she is DEFINITELY being stared at by a horde of overweight, thirty-ish Sega fans. That’s GENUINE FEAR you can see in her eyes.

TOWERING FOUR FLOORS HIGH OVER DOGENZAKA HILL

Your mission for this week is to see if you can find us an MPG or something of the Princess Rinko TV commercial. We’ve only seen it once and we have no idea what it’s for, but it features ten or so children running round and round, playing air hockey and chanting “SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA!” in a shrill, high pitched scream while Rinko looks on and says “Piiiiiiii! Puuuuuuun!” (which appears to be her catchphrase).

“Please be gentle, eh? This is Princess Rinko’s part time job. How do you do. This is Princess Rinko. The joys of Sega Ages 2500 are coming to everyone of Earth from the Sega Joy Star. The Sega Joy Star is a shining star where the spirit of everybody’s spirit of enjoyment of games gathers. From now on, I will be supporting Sega Ages 2500!”

So, here’s what you have to buy in order to get to smell the lovely Rinko’s finger.

SPACE HARRIER 2 COMPLETE COLLECTION
Every console version of Space Harrier 2 ever made, emulated down to the last frameskip, even the ones that ran at 3 frames a second and gave you brain cancer. We’d make a nasty comment on that, but we had the Amstrad version of Space Harrier that was in wireframe 3D and we know what suffering really is.

SEGA SYSTEM 16 COLLECTION
Two games on this one. The first is SDI, the lovely little Reaganite trackerball-based shooter refangled for the Playstation mouse. The second is Quartet, everyone’s favourite game that was unspeakably shit but everyone played it because A) It was a Sega game and the lovely, chimey, upbeat music and primary colours got you high and B) It was a one of the only squad based games available in 1986 (and frankly a root canal operation was preferable to playing Gauntlet again).

LAST BRONX
Hooray! The Saturn is back! That’s a good thing! Isn’t it!? Isn’t it? Oh god. Someone tell us what to say.

SEGA MEMORIAL SELECTION
Head On, Tranquiliser Gun, Congo Bongo, Borderline and Doki Doki Penguin Land. Perhaps some kind of sick joke? It’ll be that Sega bullfighting simulator from 1984 next.

GUNSTAR HEROES!
Gunstar Heroes!

ADVANCED WORLD WAR
Gunstar Heroes!

GALAXY FORCE 2
Neat old shooter using the Space Harrier / Afterburner engine. Nothing spiteful or cynical to say about this; after all, Gunstar Heroes!

PANZER DRAGOON
We’ve seen a trailer of this we downloaded off the internet, and it looked as horrible as the Saturn original. We saw it running at TGS, and it looked the same. Perhaps it’s a cruel punishment that Sega has been instructed to inflict on the Japanese for only buying fourteen X Boxes. *CHECKS FAMITSU* Oh, wait. Thirteen. One of them broke.

DYNAMITE DEKA
The best thing about Dynamite Deka (aka Die Hard Arcade) is that it got slammed by the mainstream press on incisive and well thought-out grounds such a “WHAT THE HELL? THIS GAME HAS INFINITE CONTINUES! I FINISHED IT ON MY FIRST TRY!” As such, every single well-played game of DD that you perpetrate is a direct smack in the teeth to EVERY ONE OF THE TRAITORS WHO MURDERED SEGA. With a big plank. With splinters in it. That’s been on the floor and everything.

We love standing up for the little man! Actually, we prefer standing next to the little man so we look tall and manly in comparison (if you’re a little man and would like to hang out with us at a selection of fashionable London bars, please get in touch. We can probably be friends).

BUT ANYWAY
Someone’s complained about the Pek Ham reference on the site, wherein a reader said it was “a substandard SPAM substitute from Poland”. Apparently it’s of a superior quality to SPAM in the eyes of some!

THE FULL COMPLAINT IN FULL:

Hello

I would just like to pull you up about your article on Pek Ham:

Pek Ham is also a substandard SPAM substitute from Poland that you can buy from ALDI, LIDL, or any other questionable quality food stores.

My chinese friend buys it. You do not want to know what ‘in natural juices’ means, or how much actual pork is in it.

Well I used to work for Ridpath Pek before it was taken over by Animex and made into Smithfield Foods. Pek Ham is not only sold to “questionable food stores” it is also sold to Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Waitrose, Morrisons as well as many small independent food stores and shops.

As for being substandard well that is your opinion. We often received many compliments about our product telling us it was preferred over Spam, although most of these comments came from the North of England. We didn’t get as many compliments from the south for some reason only complaints about supplied staining, go figure. Also Pek Ham does not just come from Poland, it is also made in Ireland although the Irish product it not as nice as the import from Poland. I do not usually eat tinned meats as a rule but during my time at Pek I also acted as quality assurance and so got to do taste testing and I have found that I prefer Pek Ham to Spam.

“Natural Juices”… um… I never saw that on the label, it must have been changed since I left so I can’t comment on that one. However I can tell you that Pek Ham or Pek Chopped Pork to give it its proper name is made from 100 percent pork. Pek Gold is actually one of the healthiest canned meats that you can purchase as it is 100 percent pork with less then 3 percent fat.

So there you go, that’s you told.

Tanith

PS: Please don’t take this seriously; I just feel the need to enlighten everybody into the joys of Pek. I don’t know why though. I should hate them. I had a great job at Pek, good money, great people and then Smithfield came along and said they would make me redundant unless I moved to Norwich. So it was bye-bye cushy Job, hello horrible real world. Still at least I had almost 4 months to concentrate on my games collection while I lived of my redundancy money.

Readers! Has anyone threatened to make YOU redundant unless you move to Norwich? If so, please get in touch. We can’t be friends with you, but may be able to forward your details onto someone that can.

World exclusive: The Tokyo Game Show Wasn’t Shit This Year…

…and it was ALL THANKS TO SEGA and Sega-related products. Plus the booth babes were all around 25 or over and the cosplayers were almost all overweight or a bit creepy, so good work all round.

PSO
Look! It’s Phantasy Star Online… but it isn’t rubbish! You can choose from fifty kind of hairstyles, tops, bottoms and shoes and use advanced morphing technology to define everything from the shape of your eyebrows to the angle of your ears. You can have a different weapon in either hand, and there are PROPER action movie style special moves instead of just hit-hit-hit like in a REAL action RPG. You have your own apartment that you can customise, just like in Animal Crossing. Best of all though, instead of a mag you have a little helper robot that can transform into a childlike miniature human, then you can feed it monofluids until it’s too drunk to say no or cry for help any more!

SEAMAN 2
The Seaman stand was this big bush in some water. We watched it for quite a long time to see if Leonard Nimoy would come out and talk to us, but nothing happened. Maybe we weren’t shouting “WAKE UP, FISHY!” loud enough; we presume that’s what the worried-looking Sega employees were trying to tell us.

MAN
Aaaaaaaah, Sonic Bloke. It just wouldn’t be the same without you giving gigantic thumbs-ups and hugging delighted children. You have done a man’s job, sir; they are truly OUR CHILDREN now.

MIZUGUCHI’S NEW PSP PUZZLE/MUSIC THING
Puzzle + Music = ACE! We don’t understand what it’s supposed to be, is about, or even what you’re supposed to call it or how you’re supposed to write its name, but anything by The Miz is worth getting the horn over — even if it is called Every Extend Extra and is based on an old PC freeware game. Oh, and we completed Lumines the other day.

DS STUFF
In the afternoon we fired up DS Pictochat. We were the only foreigner talking so we didn’t really know what to say, though. Someone said something about SNK, so we drew him a picture of Iori from King of Fighters. Minutes later he rewarded us with this terrifyingly detailed drawing of a crab-faced man holding a dildo! It was AWESOME! This must be what having friends is like. After that everyone started talking about their Nintendogs and we kind of lost the thread of the conversation, but when people started writing two digit numbers lower than 23 it became clear that someone had asked how old everyone was (so we pretended to run out of batteries and left swiftly).

LOCO ROCO
We hate people that automatically like kooky Japanese stuff because it’s kooky and Japanese. But sometimes things go so far beyond the kooky barrier they demand love, and rolling a yellow sphere down holes and bouncing it off flowers looks like fun. And at least your yellow sphere doesn’t have to do “drive-bys” and “gang bang” purple spheres.

PAPIER MACHE
Now THIS is what we’re talking about. Climax’s booth. No babes, no three storey plasma screen, just a dramatically detailed model of the first level in Landstalker which was used to design the game, with white PSPs set up on it to demo the new handheld version. Stick THAT in your Lego pipe and smoke it, Molyneux. It was surrounded by starry-eyed people in their late 20s – early 30s with crumpled, defeated expressions watching the rolling movie of Nigel walking around the first village to an orchestral rendering of the game’s music. As it reached its most exciting crescendo the camera zoomed in as he jumped on the dog’s head and let it carry him around. Remember doing that on the Megadrive? YOU DO, YOU BLOODY DO.

THE NINTENDO REVOLUTION VIDEO
Never before has the dividing line between how stupid a photo of something looks and how great it seems to be to play with been so pronounced. In photos it’s RUBBISH! In video, demonstrated by giggling Japanese honeys bopping flies on the head, it’s clearly the best thing ever and the invention that’s going to save all of video games from getting buried in another hole in another desert.

CHROMEHOUNDS
It looks awesome, but we mainly like it because according to Sega’s official press release you’re supposed to write CHROMEHOUNDS using CAPITAL LETTERS. And we’re really starting to get into robot porn at this kind of resolution. Look at its tubes and pipes! You can even see its access flap. Filthy robot bitch.

GOTHAM 3
Lovely. We can’t stop looking for clues in the reflections.

AND…
There were a lot of other things there, but most of them only warrant small mentions, like Xbox 360 and PS3 (which look somewhat like Xbox and PS2, so no cause for concern there). We tried to get an ironic photo of chubby fanboys taking photos of a female cosplayer in a swimming costume who was actually chubbier than them, but a security guard thought we were a stalker and shouted at us. We tried to cheer ourselves up by being the only site with pictures of the Mushi King zone too, but they wouldn’t let us in because we didn’t have a child with us.

All in all, we give this year’s TGS a score of Sega out of ten. It really does look like the games industry is stroking our hair and saying “Come back to us baby, we didn’t mean to hit you, can it ever be the same as it was?” We’re going with “Probably not.” *

* And by “Probably not” we mean “Shadow The Hedgehog.” **

** And by “Shadow The Hedgehog” we mean “Emphatically not.”

This means he must’ve TALKED TO THEM! He probably said “Hey, sexy girls! Can you hold this while I take a photo?” then they probably said “OK, what is that thing?” then he would’ve said “It’s a Dreamcast” and they would’ve said “Is that like a PlayStation?” then he would’ve just sighed and said “Yes” because he would’ve realised the futility in trying to explain to booth babes what Dreamcast is (was) when you’re pressed for time and there are lots of people around.

That’s how comfortable we are in a suit, too. More pics here.

IN OTHER ‘THING HOLDING’ NEWS:
The results from the Thing-Holding World Championships are in!

From the people that bought you 458 Japanese Women Holding Things comes the latest in a series of international promotional lady-stalking:

We’re calling this one 23 Photos of Models at the Tokyo Game Show. It’s our new utilitarian link naming system.

…then chicken out because you’ve decided that you actually quite like them.

Sorry, everyone. We’ll try to make up for it by getting you some pictures of boothbabes and teenage cosplayers wearing skimpy outfits from the Tokyo Game Show tomorrow, promise.

Failing that, some pictures of women ACTUALLY fucking dogs.