WipEout was sort of all right for a bit.















































































































































EyeToy was fun cos it also worked as a PC webcam.

The 'Bits Babe' is BACK ON TV! That is, assuming Sky Channel 166 counts as being on TV. It's at least a step up from selling DVDs of yourself naked on the internet, anyway.

Greetings once again Bouff fans!

At long last we can confirm that Emily is now defintely back on the telly and can currently be seen regularly presenting a quiz programme on Sky Channel 166! We're currently putting together a small gallery of images but in the meantime here's one to whet your appetite!

Emily has recently been away touring Thailand which is why there hasn't been much news from Bouff.tv recently. But she's back now and is back on the box which is great news for all you lucky SKY viewers outTHERE!!

http://www.bouff.tv/newsletter.php

"A week after everyone else I've made a hilarious revolution joke" says reader Tom Gaulton. "It's got sound and everything" he adds, which is quite impressive to us.



Download here [177k]. It's quite poor, but we haven't got anything better for today. Or tomorrow. Or [insert day].

Kuja turns into Sephiroth at the end, so we were right and you can all start apologising now for saying we buggered it up. Money would be preferable, but if any of you weigh less than 83 kilos then it would be nice if you could pretend to be our friend at "Industry" events in case the Fragdolls are there and we need to make them jealous.

Advent Children is now available for import on DVD and UMD assuming you have the cash, equipment and inclination. Seems an awful lot of bother just to see buggers jump, though.

Here comes a joke! The joke is we upload a screenshot of a crap PSP game, suggesting it "downgrades" PSP by simply being rubbish. As in, it "downgrades" the perceived value of the console, rather than the operating system.

It's a topical joke that wouldn't be out of place on a video game-themed edition of Have I Got News For You? presented, perhaps, by Dominik Diamond and airing exclusively on Bravo very very late at night. We'd be one of those guests you'd think would be funny, but then sits there and never says anything and only features in cut-away shots smiling and nodding when Paul Merton says something good (that we thought of as well and were just about to say, hence the nodding).



We chose Space Invaders "Evolution" to illustrate downgrading a PSP. It is the kind of game you get for free when buying a bargain bundle from Toys R Us or Woolworths, is out in November and has, amazingly, been made into 3D now that technology has progressed enough to properly realise the Space Invaders dream.

...with Nintendogs puppies! This is why people say having a dog is a great way to pull girls -- even a bus-faced, rabbit-toothed old Japanese man looks cute when he's holding a puppy:



It's OK, he's been neutered (this happens to all Japanese men by law when they hit 40).




It's OK, he won't bite (but he may try to put Mario in you).




CAN WE HAVE ONE. MUM? PLEASE? PLEASE? OH GO ON. PLEASE. WE WON'T LOCK IT IN THE FREEZER LIKE THE LAST ONE.




WE WANT THIS DOG. THIS ACTUAL DOG. NOT ONE LIKE IT, THIS ACTUAL DOG.

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.

The games industry continues to make its own jokes today:



A PLEA: Would anyone from Gizmondo like to anonymously tell us what's going on inside the company? It's bound to make a good update, and will definitely be funnier than anything we've managed to do since 1997.

And he's taken some photos with a digital camera it looks like he got out of a Christmas cracker to prove it.

Hi chaps,

Just in case you weren't crazy enough to buy a CDi, like myself, and therefore couldn't take a photo of Philips' unique CDi control pad, I went to the liberty of taking one myself and emailing it to you.

Apologies for the poor quality. [APOLOGY ENTIRELY NECESSARY]

Still, now you can create, oooh, I'd say a good 387 different visual joke gags about how Nintendo's new pad looks exactly like Philips' old pad. And to think, people thought Nintendo and Philips broke up in the 90s, how wrong they were!

I hope this is of some help, I spent a good 5 minutes charging my camera to send this pic.

Regards,
Micheal Colardale

PS: The flap at the bottom of the pad can be opened to reveal all the CDi buttons, which actually makes it look even MORE like Nintendo's Revolution pad. Do you want me to send another photo showing this? [WE DIDN'T REPLY BUT HE SENT IT ANYWAY, 16 MINUTES LATER]

Here's an image of the CDi pad "open".

Closed (left) and open. Not really very much the same as the Nintendo Revolution controller thing, but thanks for writing in anyway, Michael! you have no idea how grateful we are for the little distraction of getting an email. Each "bing" is like a ray of sunshine that temporarily lifts the Shadows from our soul and makes us put the knife down!

Despite being quite old, we remember virtually nothing about the Philips CDi. This is because when it came out we instinctively knew there was no need to remember anything about it because it was clearly doomed. This freed up valuable brain space for remembering early 1990s pop lyrics instead, such as all the words to 'Insanity' by Oceanic and 'Naked in the Rain' by Blue Pearl.

OTHER THINGS FROM OUR CHILDHOOD WE DIDN'T BOTHER REMEMBERING ANYTHING ABOUT:

- The Commodore CD32
- The cartridge-based C64
- The other CD-ROM thing Commodore did that we don't think even came out
- The FM Towns Marty
- Amstrad stuff
- What uncle Steve used to do to us in bed

It's 10:55am and people are STILL standing around monitors pointing and laughing at the photos of it.





"And when I press this, the Anal Love Bullet starts vibrating"

Write a 'comedy' games site? Need a Revolution controller joke right now? We've saved you the effort and the 30 seconds it takes for Photoshop to load up, simply cut-and-paste one of these hilarious images to your site and be the funniest person on the internet. Hurry up though, there'll be at least 4357 similar jokes appearing online in the next 20 minutes.

This is an Arm Holdings promotional photograph, because Arm Holdings did some of the technical stuff inside GBA. They made some of the "silicon chips" that make the graphics work, sources close to Arm Holdings have exclusively confirmed to us today.

This photo might also be taken from the cover of a book entitled 'How To Lure Children Back To Your House So You Can Have Sex With Them' but suggesting that would be super-libellous and against the law, even on the internet.



Awesome staring eyes, tangible sense of menace. We spend ages practising this look in the mirror, but for some people it's a natural gift. Click on the picture to download it as a convenient 1024x768 desktop image. We're confident there has never been a better promotional photograph than this.

AND WHAT IS NEO_KITTY DOING TONIGHT?
She's off out dogging with Neil.

Hold on to the edge of your bedsit's sofabed, it's...



A wireless controller for PlayStation2! The exclamation mark we've used there is a sham. Oh dear, it's like they've Photoshopped "SEGA" over where it used to say "Joytech".

Oh, OK then -- we'll have sex with you all. But you'll have to come up with a rota. There's only three of us here and Ensign Teela can't get erections any more due to gender confusion issues. Wear something nice, this is the sort of thing we like.

Meet the frighteningly large-headed Liv Brent, who MUST be really into games because she's holding a controller -- the right way up AND with her fingers on the triggers!



Liv and her AMAZING HUGE HEAD will be presenting something about games called "Sci Gamer" on the Sci-Fi channel. It will almost certainly have "comedy" features and will get axed after one series. We've seen it happen too many times.

Click here to have Liv's AMAZING ONE-DIMENSIONAL HEAD fill your entire screen.

We had to turn up sober to work this morning to raise the two quid necessary to buy this game, so let nobody say we don't suffer for our art.

Blimey! It's a game about Japanese girls... IN SPACE! This just proves that our so-called Japanese friends are keeping all the good stuff to themselves.

The gameplay revolves around having a large number of girls in the fridge. You get them out, look at them for a bit then put them back in the fridge again. You can watch FMV and pretend that you're playing Kriss Kross: Make My Video on the Mega-CD again, but mostly it's all about the fridge.

It's still rubbish though. Maybe if we knew more about Morning Musume (apart from the fact that one of them is cross-eyed and one has spazzy teeth) then the experience would be better for us. This is worse than when they made that movie about vampire goth girls in tight leather fighting warewolves in Matrix style bullet time, and it STILL sucked.

It's going to be REALLY awkward when we inevitably meet them at some UbiSoft industry event now, but we'd be letting you down if we didn't pass comment on the UK wing of entirely fabricated girl gaming clan the Frag Dolls.

SO HERE GOES!

1. Voodoo!



She's obviously first. Look! Scroll up and look! She's got lovely big brown eyes like a cow, and that's not an insult because we love cows. We know two men that are already obsessed with her having met her at preliminary Frag Dolls events, and for this reason we should probably put her last, seeing as we're realists and know there's no point pursuing Miss Lovely, but... SHE HAS SUCH BIG BROWN EYES :(


2. Lucky!



She's like a quite ordinary nice girl who's spent twice as long as usual doing her make-up this morning, probably because she's going to the pub with her male work colleagues after work tonight and wants to try and have sex with one of them. If we were one of her male work colleagues, we'd certainly buy her triples without telling her in order to get her drunk enough to agree (or not be able to say no) to doing the sort of things we like to do to women!


3. Sarin!



This one's all right. Given that this is probably the first time she's ever been told how to stand for a photo, she's doing an OK job. God know why she's called herself Sarin though. Sarin is a poisonous nerve gas the Nazis and Saddam Hussein liked to use. She must have body image issues if she thinks she's that bad.


4. Kitt!



Not really. That said, though, at the launch party for Ghost Recon: Whatever Part 3's Called, when we've already had eight double vodka cranberries before we even got there, we'd probably try our patented pulling technique out on her (this involves staring at girls from quite far away, then hoping they come over and talk to us about games or the internet because they noticed us staring at them. Currently we're at 0 for 278 with this technique, so it's bound to work soon).


5. DISQUALIFIED: Jam!



We've put Jam last because we kind of, sort of, half know her a bit, having been made to meet her in a gay bar with lots of weird Goths once, so admitting to wanting to have sex with her (or not wanting to have sex with her at all) would make things even more awkward than they already are (and at the moment they're already as awkward as carrying a fridge up some stairs on your own when only allowed to touch the fridge with your feet and the stairs with your face). That said, we'd *RESISTING REALLY HARD, HARDER THAN EVER BEFORE THROUGH GRITTED-TEETH SMILEY FACE*

SUMMARY:
It's out of our hands.