Hoodies. HOODIES. In Sega’s flagship RPG. Not even camp Japanese snorefests about the love lives of jailbait space elves in the future are safe from being chavved up now.

Yo, the Motavia Crew is challengin’ you to- no, it’s no good. We can’t work under these conditions any more.

The latest bewilderingly detailed update on the progress of Xbox 360 linchgame Gotham 3 is here, and comes with the below grid of Gotham 3 images.

You might be able to find some clues about the game by looking at it for a long time in a methodical manner, like a modern day and internet-based Lieutenant Columbo!

It’s 73 wide and 68 high which makes 4964, then you subtract the 38 blank squares at the bottom right to get 4926, Carol. This has been an enjoyable update to do, as it combines problem solving maths and a game we’re really looking forward to, AND we’re going to make a joke about wanting to die so we look all sensitive.

THE ONLY OTHER GAMES WE WANT TO PLAY BEFORE WE DIE:

Ninja Gaiden Black

Virtua Tennis… whatever it’s called on PSP

Sonic Rush

That Jeff Minter light thing

That really is about it, which means we can die in November.

The time has passed when you even had to have any photoshop talent to take part in an interweb craze. See?

“Show the world we’re not afraid of what happened in London,” they bleat. Let’s see how brave you’d have been if you’d seen half a burning double decker bus full of charred man turning somersaults through the air.

There has to be a better way to hurt strangers than to Google the internet for masturbation sites and make posts on them like “Dipping a cotton bud in toothpaste and inserting it into your urethra will give you the most intense orgasm EVER!!!!!” There just HAS to be.

Sorry, not sex shows. That’s our imagination running wild again. Rich is doing some live MUSIC shows, playing orchestral arrangements of Sonic and highlights from his critically acclaimed Headhunter soundtrack, as part of the Video Games Live concert tour.

Speaking EXCLUSIVELY TO US BECAUSE HE LOVES US MORE THAN ANY OTHER WEB SITE OR PEOPLE, Rich said “I had some Headhunter music played, plus I arranged and orchestrated a suite featuring the music from Sonic the Hedgehog, and put together a Classic Arcade Medley featuring everything from Pong, Tetris, Outrun, Rastan, Donkey Kong etc”.

AND HERE’S RICHARD DOING IT LIVE:

If we’d been there watching this our heads would’ve EXPLODED with joy at Richard Jacques doing the music off Sonic, live. Seriously. They’d still be wiping the brain (and semen) off the seats and probably even the roof.

Crikey, Richard Jacques AND Yuji Naka standing next to each other! This sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed, in case some sort of freak accident (meteorite, explosion, spurned gay serial killer rampage) happens and they both get killed and destroy most of what’s left of what’s good about the games industry.

Look! Elijah Wood is pointing at Richard, because he knows Richard is the more famous and best person! The weasly little shit. He’s not making us jealous. We don’t care. WANKER.

Find out more about Video Games Live here. HINT: Read the forum. There’s a very attractive female organiser you might like to get obsessed about (it’s safe because she lives in America, so when she says she’d rather just be good friends you can reply saying “yes, that’s what I was thinking too, actually, despite what I wrote in that really long email this morning. Long-distance relationships never work”).

Make it look like you care about something other than yourself, dinner and having sex via the medium of plastic!

Friday 15th July 2005… The Entertainment Software Charity (ESC), the computer and video games industry’s official charity, has announced details of its latest fundraising initiative, the launch of four ESC Gamers wristbands, giving the UK’s gamers a chance to express their passion and raise money for young people’s charities.

A must have for all gamers from eight to eighty, the wristbands are inexpensive, make a statement, are socially responsible and help to raise funds for a variety of important charities. More than a mere fashion statement; the ESC wristbands can really make a difference.

ESC CEO Mark Strachan commented: “The ESC wristbands will be the must have item of the late summer and autumn. Many major charitable causes have adopted this method of fundraising. The wristbands give people the opportunity to make a statement and show their support and we are sure that gamers will be wearing their bands with pride.”

Thanks, but we’ll stick with the Handkerchief System of signalling that we like it (a) rough, (b) with no strings, and preferably (c) with a girl who weighs less than we do.

Don’t laugh, that would’ve been you on the left if you’d been born ten years earlier:

Even in the 1970s the poor girls just stood there, looking bored and staring into the middle distance as the Alpha Males competed. If only you could still shut them up by giving them a balloon.

Retro Arcade – a photoset on Flickr

Sorry it’s taken us so long to do another one of these but we’ve been holding out for Google to invent something that can make you draw well.

We are still waiting. Image created in Photoshop 7, Adobe Illustrator 6.2 LE, Macromedia Dreamweaver, DrawMax UltraHand 9, Freehand Handstyle Web Edition and Bic Biro 1957 Classic.

Hooray! Kagero is back! No, we’d never heard of it either until this one, (apparently) the third in series of Dungeon Keeper style trap-setting simulators. Don’t run away, though! Look, this one’s about lovely girls in fetish gear!

There’s some bollocks here about a lone princess defending her castle against invaders, but put simply this is a game for everyone (us) who used to build fantastically complex Bond-style deathtraps for their Legomen (often involving gunpowder, corrosive chemicals and being frozen in a block of ice) that would have made a child psychologist steady themself on the furniture.

Now they have grown up and sit at their desks, daydreaming about how many pieces could be cut off the last one to reject them before they went crazy or blacked out from pain or fear. Thank the Lord that Tecmo is there for them (us.)

The latest Kagero gimmick is gigantic setpiece traps called Dark Illusions. These include a web of giant meathooks which hurl the intruder into the air causing him to be struck by lightning, and the much-touted “Twelve Killer” in which the victim is impaled on a giant clock and slowly crushed to death by its rotating hands.

Kagero is the work of Keisuke Kikuchi, a man who probably fits one of the following profiles.

1) Likes looking at pretty people and hurting things
2) Spike obsessed sex case whose games all dwell relentlessly and gleefully on breasts and horrifying murder
3) Genuinely feels this is what women do to you when they catch you

Whichever is correct, we think he’s a strong candidate for UK:R special friend of the week. (He made Fatal Frame.)

Seeing as the official UK chart is full of such RUBBISH, let’s check out the Bittorrent sites and see if “da hardcore gamers” can do any better:

Konami’s PS2 action slasher Oz from the Suikoden team tops the inaugural UKR Bittorrent Download Chart, followed by Tekken 5, Killer 7, Genji and something else we’ve really never heard of.

So no, the download charts are full of obscure Japanese games being downloaded by the sort of people who want to boast about how they spent the weekend (by this they mean 20 minutes until they got bored and confused then stopped) playing something Japanese. Still, glad we never started up that video game import business.

…still, at least things aren’t about to get worse, eh? Eh? Are they? Eh?

Ha ha! Do you see what we did there? We FOOLED you with the MAGIC of Photoshop! It’s all just a big joke. EVERYTHING is going to be okay, and there isn’t really a Mario Dance Dance Revolution game coming out this week at all! Is there? *nudge* Is there? *vicious jab* IS there? *sets down a pile of fireworks and douses it with petrol* IS THERE? *sits on it an lights match*

We’re going to video game heaven! Join us. Come on, it’ll be great. The Metroid bloke’s already up there, and everyone else is in their fifties or older. We can save a seat for them, and then when they die and come to join us they’ll be our special friends forever! And Richard Jacques.

(Note: At time of reading this, Rich may or may not be actually dead depending on whether we get the four thirty connecting train at Chelmsford. Don’t worry about phoning to warn him, he’ll understand that we love him and just want to set him free.)