HANNA SMITH’S PLAYING TIPS*

* Spelled differently just in case The Old Gods are renewing their copyrights without telling us.

This week’s tip is for Kid Icarus on the Japanese Famicom. When you’re in a shop, if you hold controller two up to your face and have an UNCONTROLLABLE CRYING FIT into it, the shopkeeper will break down, take pity on you and lower his prices.

Obviously we’re not going to take a second mortgage on the house in order to get a Japanese Famicom, a disk drive and a copy of the game to test this out; nonetheless WE DID NOT MAKE THIS UP. The source for this material is a history of 20 years of the NES put out by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As God is our witness, this is the last time we take the piss when people start banging on about how we owe everything we are today as gamers to the 8 bit Nintendo.

SOME WOMAN OR OTHER MOANS ABOUT SOMETHING TO DO WITH GAMES

Our least favourite thing (apart from students that are also DJs) is women who write about the games industry “from a woman’s perspective”.

Sadly, “from a woman’s perspective” always means “I’m going to moan for 1500 words about how I don’t think enough women make games”.

The below article has lots of points where women agree with the woman that not enough women make games. It also uses the words “disingenuous” which is probably something to with periods or chocolate.

IT’S COMPLETE RUBBISH:
Guardian Unlimited | Online | Jobs for the girls

The only woman we want to hear talk about games is Cheryl Tweedy. The game would be Hide The Sausage Up My Arse, for Xbox 360.

Our next job could be mocking up box shots for Play.com.

THE UK:R SUMMER RINGTONE TOP 10

All over the world ringtone technology is improving, and all over the world idiotic companies are using it to produce a more bass-heavy version of the theme from Inspector Gadget or The A-Team. ONLY UK:Resistance can offer the ringtones that are assured to take their customers back to their childhoods.

10 – Spectrum “Agent X” theme
9 – Pounding heartbeat and tolling bell from Knightmare
8 – Sound of muffled crying from bedroom next door
7 – Looped sample of Jet Set Willy death noise
6 – Slamming door
5 – Sound of datacorder being played for 20 seconds, stopped, rewound and replayed, repeatedly and tearfully
4 – Infantile crying accompanied by heavy, pacing footsteps. VERSION 2 – Pacing becomes more urgent and threatening the longer you allow the phone to ring!
3 – Theme tune from Top Of The Class. WARNING TO COMMUTERS – side-effects include Debbie McGee-induced Pavlovian erection
2 – “It’ll be our secret” whispered menacingly over and over
1 – “Children Of The Sun, Stick Your Fingers Up Your Bum”

Offer open only as long as it takes for Tim Childs to Google himself and sue us. Pre-order NOW! When Volume 2: The 90s launches, pre-order customers receive two ringtones – both Saturn memory card being frantically re-jiggled AND Saturn MPG card being frantically re-jiggled – FREE!

NOKIA N-GAGE — PRODUCT TESTING ‘HELL’ OF STAFF

Our update about how rubbish is it to be a games tester got the following response, from someone who knows how rubbish it is to be a Nokia N-GAGE tester.

These people work in Hell, which we can exclusively reveal is located just outside Brighton.

This advert is a temp agency advertising for Babel Media. Babel Media in Hove, Brighton are the sole UK testers of N-GAGE SOFTWARE. There is a special room for N-Gage testing called the “Nokia Lab”. Nokia have DEMANDED that *NO* N-Gages or code or anything leave the room, nor any electronics of any kind (laptops, computers, USB sticks, the works) ENTER the room. You can’t even take a bag in. The room has CCTV and electronic locking devices, Metal Gear Solid style. Even Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all let debug and test hardware roam around an open plan office as long as it is locked up at night.

No food or drink is allowed in this room. N-Gages have to be logged and checked at all times. And get this: if the MMC needs to be removed (old style, before the QD revision) for any reason, Babel Media are required to FILM THE N-GAGE BEING OPENED on VIDEO CAMERA and have two signed witnesses sign the video tape. You cannot use a witness more than once.

One of the Technical Requirements of N-Gage software is that the game must not run at more than 24 fps. Another is that software cannot require more than two buttons to be pressed at once. Every other week and on random occasions, men from Nokia arrive to check conditions. They wear black suits and sunglasses, ala Men In Black. They still haven’t spotted the irony of the MIB2 poster on the wall.

I swear on Ed Lomas’ life that all the above is true, but if you reprint any of this, please don’t print my name. Call me “Jason Ho” or something.

Jesus, it’s only an N-GAGE game not anything actually important.

Thank you Jason Ho, for exposing the shame of the N-GAGE regime. If you have a regime you’d like to expose the shame of, please email in. There’s a link down there to the right. Thanks, and we won’t get you sacked by saying who you are (unless your name is Jason Ho, in which case we are sorry).

GAMING WORLD ROCKED AS SCIENTISTS DISCOVER TWO NEW COLOURS OF GAY

A development by scientists working on how best to regulate internet insults this week has led to a discovery that could possibly blow the whole field wide open. It was previously believed that the gay spectrum was divided up from the bottom into two halves – the gay and the uber-gay – with each half further divided into “Gay” and “Ghey,” and each of these divided into subsections of “Gay” and “Teh Gay.”

“The forthcoming generation of gaming devices is threatening to take things out of our hands,” said Prof. DarkVejitto9-11 MA(hons) – Professor of Gay with Special Responsibility For How Much Things Suck On A Scale Of One To Ten – at a press conference. “Previously the field stood on relatively solid ground. Everyone agrees that the Gamecube was definitively teh uber-ghey. I mean, Mario Sunshine? Gay. Pikmin? Gay. That animal thing? Gay. I’ll admit that that Eternal Evil thing where you kept hallucinating your own death was pretty sweet, and at least it had a version of Splinter Cell – but the light sourcing on that was completely gay.

“Now, however, we are faced with the problem of where the goalpoasts will shift to once the Nintendo Revolution is released. Buying a Nintendo console must, once and for all, be an act of complete and decisive gheyness, with a launch week purchase tantamount to an admission of wearing ladies’ underwear. Nonetheless, it’s going to be pretty rockin’ to be able to play Excitebike and shit on it, that’s what Greg says and his dad works for a magazine. It is therefore vitally important that the field expand as fast as the market does – if we become stuck trotting out the same insults over and over, we’re just going to look totally gay.”

REMAPPING THE PLAYGROUND INSULT

Not only does the planned introduction of the areas of Post-Gay and Meta-Gay present scientists with the headache of charting out the new territory, but it presents worrying implacation for those who had, in the past, attempted a unified theory to fit “GAAAAAAAAAAAY!” into the present system. It was previously assumed that “GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!” occupied a grey area in the center of the gay spectrum, reserved for jovially yelling from the back seat of the car whenever one’s male peers admit that Tom Cruise is pretty good looking. If the gay spectrum turns out to be larger than previously thought and the choosing of a middleground to have thus been an arbitrary piece of wooly thinking, insurmountable problems could result from the metric system’s shortcomings in providing a system whereby gay can be divided.

This will bring further confusion to an area already beset by controversy. Dr. Mark Ph.D DIAC of Dublin University has published numerous theoretical papers in which he postulates that using a dark alleyway as a controlled environment and a blunt axe as variable, dividing three gays into two is not only possible but elementary. Mark’s work has drawn fire from other thinkers, however, who cite Russel’s Paradox – an argued flaw in gay set theory laid down in Bertrand Russel’s “Principia Pillowbiter” and stating that the group of gay things which ironically references itself cannot ever be truly gay – as proof that he is a big poof.

KNOWING AND SARCASTIC SPITE TO BE SET BACK TO Q1 2006 AS ADMINISTRATIVE NIGHTMARE LOOMS

The broadening of the gay spectrum promises not just a theoretical minefield, but a logistic one as well. “I cannot overemphasise the magnitude of the task faced by my coworkers [of Clan ne0-apoKKKalipz],” the Professor continued. “Obviously reading is totally gay, but Greg lent me this one once about this electric book that was quite good because the world blew up, and there was this dude who was insulting the whole universe in alphabetical order, and that’s basically what we’ve got to do now. Only this is real, so it sucks even worse. I’d say a thirteen or a fourteen, at least.” His fraternity are as yet unable to project exactly how long it will take to re-insult everyone on the internet with their new, adjusted status. They remain cautiously optimistic that ground can be covered quickly via MMORPGs, but the matter of casual gamers who have to use their computers for work remains problematic. Initially some will be sent their reclassifications via AIM, but left out in the cold will be those using other chat clients such as MSN and ICQ which have been eschewed by the clan as “Fucking gay.”

In winding up the press conference, the Professor was asked whether he could describe what the new entries to the spectrum will look like. He refused to be drawn on scientific details on the grounds that the chromodynamics would take many hours to even begin to explain. However, he hinted that the layman could get some inkling by visualising the kind of colour worn by creepy thirty year olds who hang around PSO playing a ten year old girl.

“Pinkish purple, or maybe some kind of fuschia,” he said. “You know, something gay.”

XBOX 360 REVIEWED…

…on Amazon, by children.

According to Ross Haymes from Bedforshire; “The XBOX 360 offers nothing new in the way of gameplay sticking to the same roots as the fairly unsucessful XBOX and offers nothing that has not allready been seen in a games console.”.

Hmmm, maybe we should wait for PS3 after all. Thanks for the advance heads-up, Ross.

Well done Ross, you’re almost as good as Dan “one star” Emery.

Amazon.co.uk: PC & Video Games: Xbox 360 Console

WOULDN’T

Recently, concern has been expressed at the idea of a female writer being allowed to contribute to UK: Resistance. Many dyed in the wool (oh God, please let it be only dye) fans feel that the site’s traditional misogynistic edge would be compromised by such a move. Rest assured, however, that it merely strengthens our position. Not only do women actually like making fun of women even more than men do, but we do so with a genuine hatred unalloyed by a sense of “Ooh, look at us! Aren’t we postmodern and daring!” We are also unfettered by the nagging doubt at the back of the mind that maybe the bird at the end of our devastating satirical cattleprod might be reading our site, and that we might meet her one day at an industry function, and that would be our chances blown.

For example, we can do things like this.

Don't miss next week's issue of Well You Wouldn't Would You Weekly

Visit www.kasumin.net now (we swear there’s a letter G missing from the end of that title) and receive four broken links! …and that’s actually it. A lonely beacon in the eternal onyx night of the internet, bearing nothing more than witness to the urges of one lonely girl who doesn’t even have tits as big as ours to show the world that she doesn’t have the foresite to put her makeup on BEFORE a liberal dose of Dutch courage.

Where are they now that their websites are frozen in time, these trailblazers of low self esteem? These burglar’s dogs who have cracked the DaVinci code and realised that dressing up as video game fantasy figures transforms them into the belle of the ball in less time than it takes to say “What in the name of Jay Maynard’s TRON costume is THAT?”

Maybe crying.

Maybe wanking.

We just don’t know.

DON’T WORK AS A GAMES TESTER

This advert makes being a “games tester” sound really cool…

…but the reality of being a games tester is this:

  • The games testers sit in a Portakabin several hundred yards away from the main office.
  • The Portakabin is naturally quite cramped.
  • It will smell quite bad.
  • You will be playing games that crash every five minutes and then take five minutes to load again.
  • You will play each level several thousand times.
  • You’ll be playing a level that isn’t even finished yet, so any bugs you report will change into new ones when the next build arrives, heightening the sense of futility you will be feeling.
  • You don’t get invited to the launch parties.
  • You’ll be lucky to even get a boxed copy of the game.
  • The lovely PR ladies (myth #1) won’t ever have sex with you (myth #2).
  • This is probably for EA, so you’ll be doing FIFA Street 2 :(

    totaljobs.com – Play games all day long!! – South East

  • ANNOUNCING THE UK:R ISP SERVICES LAUNCH

    Are you one step away from slashing your wrists with a cheese grater? Worry no more, because UKRISPS is here.

    UKRISPS isn’t just an ISP. It’s the most sophisticated web filter and suicide prevention package on the planet, for just 5% more than you pay for your existing service. With the magic of the UKRISPS filters, we can prevent you from EVER AGAIN having to see:

    – Ringtone advertisements
    – Winky smilies
    – Harry Knowles
    – The word “OWNED” spelled with a P
    – Placeholder index pages
    – Photoshop jokes
    – Anything at all to do with Colin Mochrie

    …and that’s just the start! UKRISPS Will also totally restrict your access to any webcomic apart from Penny Arcade, User Friendly, Sluggy Freelance and PvP. (Sluggy access limited to thirty seven months before it went shit. You know, the eighteenth or nineteenth time that Oasis died.) The illusion doesn’t stop there, though; subscribe to UKRISPS Gold and receive repeats of past websites! Visit Seanbaby.com and pretend that it’s still acceptable to enthuse about things that you like! Imagine that classicgaming.com is still updated! Behave as if you were still in a magical wonderland of re-mapping your lost childhood or misspent adulthood! ADDED BONUS FOR JUNE: FREE access to over 10,000 emulator roms makes you able to pretend that Tim Eckel never existed!

    Each new user will not only receive their own 50k of webhosting and simulated dialup access speed (so that when you’ve downloaded something you feel happy with it no matter HOW shit it is), but also a free email account which will automatically generate emails from people who haven’t betrayed you yet and whom you think you like!

    So join us at UK: Resistance Internet Service Provider Services. When you’ve had enough of being ready to rock… it’s time to live under one.

    UKRISPS. Welcome to 1998.

    SILENT HILL 2’S CHRISTINA AGUILERA COPYING SHAME

    We’ve stolen this off the Gaming-Age forum, but it’s OK because we’re highlighting how something else was stolen from somewhere else so it’s actually ironic copying and not worth emailing us about.

    Anyway, here’s pop slag Christina Aguilera — who we’re not obsessed about any more — pictured in 1999, wearing an outfit that was obviously copied by the shameless, idea-stealing developers of 2001’s Silent Hill 2:

    Gonna get... EATEN

    Zombie clearly modelled on pikey scab Justin Timerlake.