Yeah, yeah, "it's months since you did the last one" etc. etc. What, do you think we spend ALL day surfing the 'net looking at pictures of girls!?

...and at time of going to press, Squall is WINNING! Get over to GameFaqs and vote for Knuckles NOW, you lady bastards! The pride of Sega is at stake - Knuckles MUST go on to face Vincent Valentine in the bracket 2 final!

London!

Australia!

New York!

Three cheers for Sega! Now it's taking up the burden of having to educate our children, via the medium of logic puzzles in its new PSP game Sega Brain Trainer Portable.

It's sure to rock, probably hard, and we'll no doubt convince ourselves we like it even though it's a bit shit, just like we did with all those Dreamcast games.



We haven't got "anything funny" to say about this. This is one of those updates that's more like us going "Hey, here's some interesting news about Sega" than "Here's a funny joke". So don't make yourself look stupid by posting on the internet about this not being funny. It's not meant to be -- like Channel 4 News, or Panorama. Nobody posts on the Channel 4 News site that it isn't funny.




We'd buy it if there was a section on how to talk to girls about things other than the internet, video games and if they remember Babylon 5.

OTHER POSSIBLE "JOKE" CAPTIONS FOR THE WOMAN PICTURE:

"Just hold this while I get the bucket of spunk"

"Just hold this while I get the transparent plastic toilet seat"

"Just hold this while I find the bit of pipe that goes from his penis to your mouth"

"Just hold this while the bath fills up with piss"

THE OBLIGATORY LINK TO THE OFFICIAL SITE SO YOU CAN COPY THIS FOR YOUR OWN BLOG:
brain.sega.jp

What with the recent announcement of Shenmue 3, we feel it's time we did an Edge-style retrospective of the development of the video game "Epic," just to show that such a thing CAN be done in less than twenty five thousand words. It's easy, all you have to do is remember that video gaming is an area that's always riding the wave of what you can get away with on the technology and resources available, therefore the milestones are by and large defined by the limitations. Hence:

THE PROBLEM: Shigeru Miyamoto needs a memorable character for his new game. However, he has only sixteen pixels and a handful of colours to work with, no graphic artist on the project and no skill at drawing faces himself.

THE RESULT: He gives the character a big nose and moustache to hide his face and plumber's dungarees to make the arms visible against the body. Mario and the character-based franchise phenomenon are born.

THE PROBLEM: Hideo Kojima wants to make a Rambo style game, but the MSX-1 can't keep track of more than two or three bullets without the machine having an eppy.

THE RESULT: He makes a game where the idea is NOT to shoot people. Metal Gear and the cross-genre story-based epic are born.

THE PROBLEM: Will Wright is a sadistic cunt who wants to convince the world that a game where you have to do the washing up for eighteen hours is more fun than one where you shoot zombies in the teeth and kung-fu people's knees off.

THE RESULT: The Sims.

THE PROBLEM: Yu Suzuki is a sadistic cunt who wants to convince the world that a game where you have to do the washing up for eighteen hours is more fun than one where you shoot zombies in the teeth and kung-fu people's knees off.

THE RESULT: Shenmue.

Let's hope that part three adheres to Yu's world-beating formula of one hour of awkward button mashing interspersed with twenty nine hours of doing the washing up.

First there was You Got The Horn, now comes...



Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is finally out today on Xbox and PlayStation2! We gave it 8/10 in a proper review we wrote of it and said it's "an essential collection of the finest Sega puzzle fun" (that's what we sound like when writing seriously!).

We've been anonymously emailed loads of hi-res photos of Yuji Naka visiting a German hedgehog sanctuary!

We thought about maybe not using them, before thinking "who the hell else in the world is going to want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary apart from us?" and deciding to use them anyway.



The only other person in the world who might conceivably want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary apart from us is Adam Doree. He'll be really jealous when he sees these! Uploading these means we love Sega MORE than Adam does!




Perhaps Naka-san is researching about hedgehogs for a new Sonic The Hedgehog game. It might be for Xbox 360 or PlayStation3! It could even be unveiled in a few weeks at the Tokyo Game Show! Imagine that! He might be HAVING AN IDEA for a new Sonic character in his genius mind right there!




You'd think he'd be a bit bored of researching hedgehogs, what with having to do things about hedgehogs for 15 years now. With Google, you can find out everything there is to know about hedgehogs in about five minutes.




It's a HEDGEHOG, Yuji. Don't act like you're suprised about what it is or what one looks like (unless you're genuinely surprised that German ones are brown and not blue like they are in Japan).




The male hedgehog gently holds the female before sex.




Yuji Naka's rubbish! He's only just about as tall as a car! It's amazing how quickly you go off someone when you realise they're actually very short.




Perhaps he stroked and caressed small children when researching for NiGHTS?





We really will upload anything we get sent these days. Here's two men standing in a sort of garden. We're well aware of how this isn't funny, so don't post on the internet saying this isn't funny.




1500 euros can provide food and clothing for 125 African children for a year -- or keep 6 German hedgehogs living in luxury for a month. If you've got any hi-res photos of things happening at SEGA you'd like to email in to us, please email them in to us. We will almost certainly use them.

EDIT:
Stefan Walters "off of" SPOnG said he might conceivably want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary as well because he loves Sega about as much as us and Adam Doree, and he does own a Sega iDog so we're inclined to believe him.

At three in the morning last night after a particularly vivid dream about Star Soldier, we found ourselves wondering whatever became of "Master Takahashi;" the main sprite for the Nintendo version of Sega's Wonderboy. One of the greatest gamers of all time, and the possessor of the legendary "16-blast" technique which allowed him to press a fire button sixteen times in one second (back in the days before autofire joypads).

...and so...

TOP 5 GOOGLE RESULTS FOR "16-BLAST!"

1) 16 policemen amongst 18 dead in Iraq blast
2) 16 die in French blast
3) 16 years have passed since the blast at Chernobyl
4) Jamba Juice Speciality Smoothies: 16-Size Green Tea Matcha Blast! (Bookmarked that one)
5) 16 square miles of densely populated area were destroyed by the Hiroshima blast

...and so...

We went back to bed and cried under the duvet with a Mars bar. We want to go home, but mum lost the house to pay for our degree in Journalism from Tottenham University.


BONUS GAMER FACT! For those of you who peeked at the internet to find the answer, Takahashi is at Hudson and happily still living the golden days (at a job he got for PLAYING VIDEO GAMES) now that his career as an actor and idol singer (which he got for PLAYING VIDEO GAMES) has faded. (CUNT.)

Featuring the squarest blocks and an enhanced pushing engine, new Lara Croft: The Elixir of Life puts you at the heart of the crate pushing experience like no other video game!



This is from mobile phone game Tomb Raider: Elixir of Life, or as we refer to it Tomb Raider: Gradual Decline Into Miserable Lonely Death. If this was an internet game, we'd click on the link then get bored before it even finished loading. This is also the sort of selling of cheap, farmed-out, generic tat to kids for lots of money that makes us WISH WE'D THOUGHT OF DOING IT OURSELVES.

And the answer is "YES!" And the qualifying part of the statement is "ESPECIALLY IF YOU LIVE IN AUSTRALIA!" -- thanks to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image letting some people (probably students but we'll let them off seeing as they're doing good things for Sega) do a Sonic The Hedgehog exhibition in their gallery.



The Australians are particularly well known for their appreciation of fine art.

sonic the hedgehog

"All users will be awarded a special Yahoo Mag! Prizes to be awarded after September 19, 2005."

|~| (Slashed wrist emoticon)

...seeing as it's the only games magazine left we can take the piss out of without getting another written warning. The worst this lot can do is send us a stroppy email or post that we're a cunt on the forum! And that happens every day so we don't mind!



360 is LIFESTYLE! You can tell it's lifestyle because the logo's in white. After it sells no copies because everyone thinks it's a car magazine that some kid's dropped on the games shelf, they'll make it look like a games magazine by making the logo red with a yellow dropshadow. Probably by issue four.




TYPO ON PAGE 12! "Quality, innovation and excellent are paramount". Having a typo in the bit where you say how quality you are is a world-class balls-up. Theyve realy set they’re stal otu their! In issue two they should say this was an ironic joke that set out to lampoon other lower quality magazines, the sort of shite rags that would have spelling mistakes in the bit where they say how excellent they are.




AN IRONIC PANEL ABOUT WHERE X05 *WON'T* BE HELD! This is humorous lifestyle journalism at its finest! Hull! Ha ha! Yes, imagine if Microsoft DID hold X05 in Hull. The thousand pictures these words paint are all hilarious. Imagine J Allard in Hull. He'd get kicked in for looking gay within seconds! We can't stop laughing at that mental image. There must LITERALLY be a joke every 60 seconds in their zany office.




DVD AND CD REVIEWS. These'll be ditched during issue 7's sales crisis emergency redesign meeting after the first ABC sales figures come out next February. It will be replaced by "Tips", as everyone realises the readers don't care if Mike Richardson likes Goldfrapp or not.

APART FROM THAT
It's not bad and could actually have been worse in several areas. Everyone thinks the design is adequate, but feels the copy could "do with some work" and no way should it be FOUR WHOLE POUNDS. We'd give it 5/10, but only because we can put it on expenses. If you don't work where you can buy magazines on expenses, it's more like a 3.

NEXT WEEK:
EDGE issue 154 goes under the microscope!*

*Joke for management.

GLOBAL NEWS FLASH OF SERIOUS MEGA-EXCLUSIVE POWER!

We just found this in some of Microsoft's official Xbox 360 marketing materials -- a table indicating that backwards compatibility with Xbox 1 games is a feature ONLY available if you own a 360 hard drive.



This almost certainly means you have to download patches to make old games work, but we're already massively out of our depth with all this technical stuff so can't say for sure.

...THEY'VE ONLY GONE AND MADE THE EVERQUEST II ANTONIA-HUNT BITCHES WEAR BIKINIS!!



There's a link at the bottom of this page that says "see all 178 images": IGN: Quest For Antonia Pageant. See what you've got coming, UK Frag Dolls? You should probably all go out for a run tonight, instead of eating buns on the sofa.

We've never seen a game character so perfectly posed for the insertion of a Photoshop penis as Lara Croft here, from Tomb Raider: Legend.

Is this an attempt at viral marketing? Do they WANT every internet forum to be full of fake Lara Croft blow-job porn to hype next-gen Lara's all-formats Q1 2006 release?



We would make one ourselves, but there's a big difference between getting caught with Blogger open on your work PC (verbal warning) and photos of men's cocks (massive personal shame).

Wow! What a day that was! Thanks to everyone who attended the UKR Lan Party, a good time was definitely had by all!

Now, the PHOTOS!!



Forum mod PK-Jones PUMPING THE MAD DANCING SKILLZ on DDR Revolution!!




Mikey900 kicked some ASS at Halo 2 because he had previously ran out of chewing gum!!!




This is Sarah. She arrived at 4:00pm, then left crying at 4:07pm. Thanks for coming, Sarah! Hope to see you at the next meet!! :)

The role of women in videogames - sorry, Women In Videogames - is as follows.

- Getting shot
- Getting stabbed
- Getting blown up
- Getting shot
- Getting kicked to death
- Getting choked with fibrewire
- Getting shot
- Getting cut up with chainsaws and katanas
- Getting hurled from fifteenth story windows
- Getting their hair caught in a waterwheel and dragged backwards over it repeatedly until dead from drowning or broken neck
- Getting slowly crushed in the gears of a giant music box
- Getting shot

...JUST THE SAME as the role of men in videogames. DO YOU SEE HOW THAT WORKS, girls, or are you too busy playing Da Urbz on your pastel pink DS?

Good old Konami! Supporting the contentious "women in games" issue with wrestling game Rumble Roses XX for Xbox 360. See? There are LOADS of women in games. What the hell are these moaning lesbians on about?



It's Rumble Roses XX on Xbox 360. It's got hot bitches in it, so we'll probably end up going on about it loads, then taking lots of screenshots of gussets and cleavages when the game eventually appears on Bittorrent, then uploading them with the sort of sexist comments not seen since women were given the right to speak in the 1970s. God, we're getting predictable.

This update is entirely for the benefit of those who use NewsNow. It's sort of a joke about the bottom-feeders of the news-gathering scene who just copy news off other sites all day as their main job that they get paid for. It's too hot in the office to think it through any more than that.

Just scroll down and look at all those whopping tits, then come back tomorrow for a joke about LAN parties.

A bunch of Las Vegas hookers ranging from $100 to $250 an hour for a full service (A-levels, CIM, French, oral W/O) have applied to be the living embodiment of Everquest II box-art-girl Antonia Bayle.

And they've all got HUGE MONSTER TITS! If this is what they mean by "getting more women into games", we're ALL FOR IT!



This is probably the only time it's ever been cool to work for IGN. Look, some quite pretty girls have been told that THEIR ONLY JOB FOR TODAY is to smile at you. Your self-esteem would rocket up from minus ten to minus five, or perhaps even zero (until you get home and accidentally look in a mirror).




Imagine if you worked for IGN. You'd work with fat, over-confident, loud American teenagers in an office that STINKS of sweat and last night's dried-up spunk, and you'd only talk about the relative merits of Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 all day, perhaps pausing to sit in silence and play World of Warcraft while eating potato chips for an hour at lunch time. Then, one day, you get sent out to take photos of THESE!




It's like if UbiSoft had a bigger budget for hiring Frag Dolls. Aleks Krotoski isn't going to like this, it's set back the cause of "women in games" by at least a decade. Well done, sexist MMORPG boffins!

LOADS MORE GRINNING, FAKE-TANNED WHORE PHOTOS HERE:
IGN: Antonia Finalists Dazzle in Vegas

"We'll be pretty much just playing Halo 2 and Pro Evo all day" said clan founder Damien Dvorjees, aka AMBASSADOR_KOSH on Xbox Live, aka COMMANDER SINCLAIR on Starcraft, aka ZATHRUS on World of Warcraft and aka LONDO MOLARI on Guild Wars.



"This joke has probably already been done by The Onion, but we can't be bothered to check" said clan second-in-command Michael Zorg, on the clan's official blog.

We've come into possession of some brand new, never-seen-before screens of Sega's upcoming sequel to Feel the Magic (aka Project Rub) for Nintendo DS.

It looks fantastic!



The game utilises the Nintendo DS stylus -- poke it in and out of the microphone socket to get the girl excited.




Wi-Fi compatibility lets a friend join in!




Sega's kooky visual style is as impressive as ever.

Thanks to Virtua Tennis World Tour on PSP:



Then we're going to imagine Maria Sharapova doing "powerful strokes" for a bit.

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS:
JESUS GOD WOW!!! SONY ROCKS! PSP RULES! 50/10

Just get one of these and a bit of wire or straightened-out coathanger:



PRO TIP: Try to get one that comes with a "remote control" for the convenience of changing channel from the comfort of your sofa.

8231 hits for people saying "Why is there no cosplay porn?" on forums.

1023948 hits for "PORN COSPLAY ANIME FUCK RAPE HENTAI SNUFF ASS GANGBANG" and so forth.

29347 hits for "Welcome to cosplayporn.com, the premier web search and information resource on the internet!"

359312 hits for "This page is under construction. Cosplayporn.com is coming soon! Reserve this domain name NOW!"

236 hits for the Ulala thing we did a few months ago.

9834 hits for people who stole the idea and linked it on their blogs.

450 hits for videos and DVDs of suicidally uncomfortable Japanese girls dressing up as nurses, schoolgirls and tennis players culminating in the removal of their underwear and the disappearance of their abdomen in a snowstorm of digital mosaic.

This.



This is what it's come to. You can't even use the internet to find PORN any more. It's not as if we ask much. Freedom. The pursuit of happiness. JPGs of Shenhua and Nozomi impaled on a double-ended length of plastic.

Ryo can bring the pizza in.

By Consumer Editor Michael Zorg

Confused about HDTV formats? Then be confused about HDTV formats no more!

HDTV BUYING TIPS:
From what we can work out, there are two kinds of HDTV set -- EXPENSIVE SILVER WIDE ONES, and CHEAP BLACK SQUARE ONES.





CONCLUSION:
The expensive silver wide ones are probably best to buy because they cost more.

SCORES:
Silver Wide Ones 5/5
Black Square Ones: 3/5

What next for the crusading Miami attorney?

1. People who LOUDLY CHEW GUM
2. Asians and blacks

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

1. An office re-fitted in the 1980s or early 90s
2. Some imagination
3. A willingness to affect change in your life.




HOW TO PLAY:
Try to calm down a bit. Lean back in chair. Unclench fists and teeth and buttocks. Look at ceiling for at least an hour. Try to calm down a bit more. Imagine each square is something you're angry about. See angry squares merge and disappear. Imagine light fittings are things you're frustrated with. Imagine them also joining together and disappearing. Unclench fists and teeth and buttocks again. Go home, and when asked if everything is OK, say "IT IS FINE" and lie down until it is tomorrow.

WAYNE'S WRITING TUTOR SAYS: "I'm a big fan of EA's FIFA series and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the final version. The game is very popular with many other players, especially when we travel together for away matches, and it's a great honour for a young player like myself to be chosen to be featured on the cover of FIFA," said Wayne Rooney -- IN EXCHANGE FOR MONEY.



"Your face, Wayne. HOLD IT OVER YOUR FACE"

This is going to save the controller-faking community thousands of man-hours over the coming months.

Here's a Nintendo Revolution Controller we just made:



We made it look like a sick puppy with a squiffy eye so it appeals to the female demographic!

Nintendo Controller Fake Editor - by claudiotosado

It's from EA game From Russia With Love, so it's not like we'll ever see this again:



The artists have trimmed off about three stone and a few centimetres of jaw bone, apart from that it's quite accurate.


THE SOURCE MATERIAL:



UKR FACT: We had a pretend girlfriend called Natasha for two years, so our parents didn't worry about us being (a) lonely, or (b) gay.

Xbox 360 Ridge Racer 6 is going to feature HEAD-TO-HEAD ONLINE RACING, and better still, you can UPLOAD YOUR TIMES to a central server!

The press release spells out how genius Namco is going to make these amazing new gaming features happen:

"Utilizing a Worldwide Player Matching system, players can match up against drivers from around the world in intense head-to-head drift racing match ups"

It's one brand new feature after another!



Three cheers for magical innovationalists Namco! Oh, and Ridge Racer 6 is now confirmed as an Xbox 360 launch game, which is like PROPER NEWS.