Call us crazy radicalists, but if we were asked to make a flash game about Sonic for the internet we like to think we could come up with something a little bit more innovative than the world's 1,500,475th tedious Breakout clone.

This is clearly symptomatic of the general malaise surrounding the Sonic franchise.




At least it makes the ring sound when you press something. 6/10.




Innovative interactive features! Although when we sent ourselves a postcard we just got a broken image. This, once again, is clearly symptomatic of the general malaise surrounding the Sonic franchise.




It was made by one man. SEGA should give the contract to make the next Xbox 360 game to Michael Dobbins. Can't be any worse and he's bound to be cheaper. If you are Michael Dobbins, please can you email us. We would like to interview you.

THIS LINK TO THE FLASH GAME MIGHT WORK:
Sonic Chaos Crush (Breakout).

Overly black emo goth blog Insert Credit managed to beat us in getting a clip of Wii being reviewed on Newsnight's snobbish-but-fun arts Review section. It was good.




It featured arty grown-ups being all coy about actually enjoying playing games, mainly because Wii makes them so easy to play even posh MILFs can manage to work out what's going on. PS3 didn't go down so well and was only mentioned in passing. The tide has turned.

Wii DISCUSSED BY BOFFINS ON NEWSNIGHT:
YouTube - BBC Newsnight talks about Wii and PS3

And we thought this was a VERY BAD IDEA, until we read to the bit about it only being plastic poo. That's probably OK and not against any laws. Especially in Spain. Good on you, crazy Europeans. Here's how it works:

Sponsor a Poo and send it (with a personal note) to Sony
By El Alcalde de Tomelloso and Cubitorah

Are we men or mice?

Are you tired of abuse?

Gamerah is, and we have decided to do something about it. We are going to show Sony that in Europe there is no humiliation without response. We are going to show them that we are not an unimportant third-rate market. A pound of flesh.

Delays, higher prices, sloppy translations, harassment of import stores, and, even worse, cheekiness. What does Gamerah say to all this? Gamerah says: NO! And the way we propose to let the evildoers at Sony know is very simple: by sponsoring plastic poos which we will send to Sony's higher echelons in Spain in one or many boxes.

Imagine: you are angry with Sony since the delay, or since they cancelled your order at play-asia, or even since the death of Dreamcast, like some resentful Sega fans in our staff. Anyway: your patience has run out. What can you do? Very simple.

1. Send us an email to apadrinaunacaca@gamerah.com. Include your nickname and your comment/complaint to Sony (one line). Just one grievance per poo, although you can send as many poos as you like.

2. We will reply to you with a bank account number and an identification number.

3. Transfer 4 euro and include the identification number on the transfer's subject. This way we will know it is you.

4. We will attach your message to one of the fake excrements and put it, along with your nickname, in the box we will send to Sony's Spanish headquarters. Of course, we will also include a petition asking them to forward the poos to their bosses in Japan.

Some examples of what you might write:

Tonio87: For the HDMi cable.
Pacotazo: For killing Lik-Sang.
Pepoto: For having no typographical criteria.

Here is an example of what they will look like. Imagine Phil Harrison's face! Hohoho!



The rubber band is provisional.

Just remember: no direct insults or death threats. Be subtle, as in our examples. We know you can do it.

THANKS, SPANISH JURY
Gamerah are the people who made the fake Horoshi Yamauchi interview a while back, so they'll probably go through with it as well.

Labels: GONZO

Specifically the photographs of mountains Sony keeps sending out to illustrate Gran Turismo "HD".




That's definitely just a photograph of a mountain. It's not really impressive that PS3 can display photographs. You can get 1080p photographs off Google, and most phones can display photographs these days.




Philips CDi could display photographs as backgrounds. So could the MEGA CD. This is not clever.




You can see the join.




Sony certainly faces its own 'Everest' in making people believe any of the shit it churns out these days.

IN NEXT WEEK'S EPISODE:
Sony expects us to be impressed by Singstar's ability to play back music.

This is instead of a review. You really don't want to read a review and we don't want to have to write it or be the ones to break it to you. Writing a review of Sonic on Xbox 360 would be like writing a letter to a child explaining that their dog has died, and that the reason the dog died is because it was in the car with mummy when it got stuck under a lorry and caught fire.

It's better to just laugh at the silly bits that look like inter-species sex and pretend everything's still all OK:




In the overall scheme of things, Xbox 360 Sonic The Hedgehog ranks beneath Game Gear Sonic Drift 2 and just above Tails' Skypatrol in the list of all-time best Sonic games.




It's OK, Sonic, let's not get into the nitty-gritty of who's fault it is now. We'll do that at length over the next three years on various internet forums.




Doesn't this look like sex is about to happen? Xbox 360 Sonic is out today. There are some reviews of it on the internet, but you'd be best off not reading them if you love or even used to like Sonic a bit. Just watch the bizarre end sequence movies and leave it at that.




This is a pretty one. You can click on it to look at it full size - it's so pretty we went the extra mile with the html and image resizing. If you just look at this one image for a very long time and don't think about anything else you might be able to convince yourself everything really is still OK.

By which we mean some words about it and some YouTube videos we were sent, which hopefully won't get taken down two minutes after we upload them like everything else we link to on the world's most uptight video sharing community.

The reason it's jerking about all over the place is because the game's in a hydraulic cabinet. The cameraman isn't severely disabled. To our knowledge.

DR VANGTROS' AFTERBURNER CLIMAX REVIEW

AFTERBURNER CLIMAX
By Sega AM2, aka Angels in Heaven

"Firstly, it controls like the original. Which is great as next-gen games that take the original source material and 'make it better' often make it worse. I can't remember if you could speed up or down in the first one, but you can now, and there's a bullet-time style function called 'Climax'."

"When I Climax, everything doesn't slow down, so I don't know why this is. Maybe the Japanese do. Anyway. It plays a lot like the good Starfox games, Panzer Dragoon and the SEGA Star Wars Arcade game that was brilliant, but FASTER. A lot faster. And more chaotic with the amount of violence that comes your way. You basically spend the whole time moving and weaving around in circular paths and occasionally doing barrel rolls (which you can now do by pulling one direction, then another very quickly)."

"Some enemies will shoot one missile at you, some two and others FIVE. When these guys pop up, you have to roll away or you get completely shafted, but you feel it's your fault and not Sega's for being poo at design. Because they aren't... except with that Sega Casino game and Shadow the Hedgehog, which we'll pretend never happened."

"You lock onto enemies, then use bullets which are good for close range death or heat seeking missiles, which do the job better and seem to be infinite in number. If only love was infinite in number. Then we wouldn't have to 'liberate' all those girls coming home on the way back from sixth form college every other Wednesday."

"You can also rack up combos and the bullet-time Climax mode helps you do that. We managed to get around 40 once. The overall level progression structure is like Panzer Dragoon's, where you have multiple branches that weave in and out of the same narrative, and multiple endings. I kept getting the 'you are crap at life' one – Ending C. I'm sorry Afterburner; I'll try harder next time."

"Levels include the classic Oceanic landscape from the original, some canyons, cities at sundown and at night, cloud battles, areas filled with live volcanoes, a desert and an underground base chase where you fly through tunnels, avoid walls and lasers and need to fly slow so you don't die and disappoint the game, which ranks you as you play."

"We started off with a lot of high rankings, but as we were reminded of our inferiority through the crisp visual splendour of the game mocking our lack of talent of ever being able to replicate such godly work, we descended into sadness and forgot how to play the game."

"As for whether this could hit console, I asked the producer of the game who was on-hand to talk about it - which was impressively developed in under a year. Sadly, he said there are "no plans to bring this to console". Of course, that was probably the PR-safe answer he gives everyone, because we know it's coming out Xbox 360 and NOT PlayStation3, because Sega didn't really sign Virtua Fighter 5 to them. It was a spelling mistake."

More movies and impressions here.

EMERGENCY BACK-UPS
When YouTube, SEGA, AM2, the police and the secret shadowy organisation hell-bent on undermining us by having all our YouTube videos deleted as soon as we link to them has these videos deleted (or if you're using a computer the council hands out to poor families for free that can't play YouTube videos), emergency direct-download links to the Afterburner Climax footage are located here:

MOVIE 1

MOVIE 2

MOVIE 3

MOVIE 4

MOVIE 5

MOVIE 6

MOVIE 7

MOVIE 8

MOVIE 9

Labels: ENTHUSIASM

Here's another Wii advertorial, this time from the pages of woman's magazine Glamour. And you thought the DS Lite was a bit effeminate...




We, er, accidentally bought this while meaning to buy Nuts or Zoo. Or FHM or Maxim or that one about cars.




Pink pages. Nice touch. That'll draw them in.




Still, we mustn't complain. If "the girls" want to stay in and play video games while we go out to drink Stella and snort poppers at strip clubs, that's just fine by us. Sounds like a great emerging new world order, in fact.




We think this panel might be hinting at the fact you can stick it up your fanny.




Just like any other party, only with a games machine awkwardly tagged onto the bottom. You go, girls.




Keep checking Glamour magazine for more Wii exclusives!

ALSO IN GLAMOUR MAGAZINE THIS MONTH:

50 really obvious arguments for car journeys

A thing about how celebrities are fat so you feel better

Lots of rubbish albums given 5/5

How having shoes is better than being thin

Labels: MEAT BAGS (WOMEN)

Ha ha! We've only been joking for the last ten years! Sony rocks! Let's all go and buy PlayStation3s and not even sell them on Ebay the next day! Let's buy 50 just to put in a cupboard! Come on, everybody! The PS3 party queue starts right behind us!




TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The Utility Belt: Sony's loss is at least $240 on every PS3, triple Xbox 360's

Labels: LIES

And the amazing thing is the reporter managed to find one man who was buying it for his kid, and not just to sell on for profit. The great thing about this, of course, is that no one will buy any games and Sony will just lose loads of money on the hardware everyone's buying to sell on. So carry on, greedy Ebay losers! You're actually doing us a favour.




We'll just be staying inside and not wasting our money on an over-priced rubbish thing we don't need.




Just checking his Ebay listing...




You know they've already spent the profit they think they're going to make by selling the shitbox for twice the price to some loser next week. But what on? Crystal meth?




This fat fuck thinks he's going to sell his PS3 on Ebay for two grand. Please, America, don't fall for it. Wait until Sony cuts the price or there's at least a game for it you really want instead of a deeply boring one you're pretending to want - i.e. Resistance Fall of Man.




Make sure you watch the video until the end. He clearly doesn't have a clue about the whole thing.

Labels: LIES

The organisers sound worthy enough, but you know it's mainly about getting girls to send in photos. Like these:












Yes, let's celebrate the diversity of the female gaming community by picking which one is the hottest out of a big online meat catalogue. It's enough to make you almost pity girl gamers... but not quite. They're the ones that sent in their photos after all.

PAGE 5, ROW 2, FURTHEST ON THE RIGHT:
Browse the meat catalogue here. Hopefully it's all one big sting, and as the girls walk through the doors of the venue there's no floor - just a slippery ramp leading down to a huge mincing machine. We'd certainly buy some girl sausages. Even though some of them look a bit gristly.

Labels: MEAT BAGS (WOMEN)

In Osaka, apparently. The writing says that the 23rd of each month is SEGA Day.




THE SEGA DOORMAT IN A VARIETY OF RESOLUTIONS:

640x480

800x600

1024x768

1152x864

1280x960

1280x720

1280x768

Original - 2592x1944

Labels: GONZO

We never liked Consolevania. Well, we never watched it, actually, as it was suddenly the new funny thing that everyone liked a few years ago, which meant we had to not like it as that's just how we are. We can't go liking and watching a thing that everyone else likes. Also, it didn't load the first time we tried it.

Anyway, series two of their TV show Videogaiden is now on TV, or a part of the TV called BBC Scotland at least, and you can also watch it on the internet if you live in the right part of the world.

So here's something about it.




Like we always thought it would be, Videogaiden is two podgy blokes with regional accents being all blokey about games while wearing cheap costumes.




Their big thing is a 'Make Shenmue III' campaign. Lots of people emailed us about this suggesting we join in. Sadly, Shenmue is shit and we hope SEGA never makes another one as it would cost too much money and no one would buy it again, just like last time. Also, if we were to do anything about Shenmue III we would have done it five years ago when it was relevant. Consider this a 'contribution' to the debate.




Anyway, the show's quite watchable even though it's 'A Bit YouTube' in places. And it's nice to see men who know the subject doing stuff about the subject, instead of a cheap version of Kate Thornton reading out the back of the box.




You can see it on TV if you live in Scotland or have the internet. It's not bad. It might even be funny if you can understand their weird Scottish words and sayings. We didn't laugh at it, but that might be because we're bitter about it not being us on the telly being all wacky and wearing wigs. Or maybe it's supposed to be more about games than funny.




Whatever. Nothing will replace Dominik Diamond :(

This is a promotional (ie, paid for by Nintendo) advertorial (ie, an advert pretending to be part of the magazine) in UK magazine Prima.

What's unusual about this is that Prima isn't a video game magazine, it's a magazine about clothes and shopping and diets and "Ooh! This one's got flowers on it!" aimed at bored housewives.




Nintendo is saying that Wii is family fun that could stop your wayward 14-year-old daughter huffing lighter fluid and wanking off boys in stolen cars. Before you know it your family will be like a family from a TV sitcom instead of like a family from the news, all thanks to the unifying family force of... Nintendo Wii.




"Time indoors can be quality time too". It's nice to see a positive spin applied to the world's most anti-social hobby.




We've got another girlfriend off MySpace.




AND WHAT IS THIS?! Has Nintendo granted the Wii Animal Crossing world exclusive first-look to UK woman magazine Prima?!




The "health benefits of a little light exercise"? Nintendo is trying to make Wii sound like something that will make fat women thin. This could be a genius move. After all, this is how we became lettuce millionaires in the early 1980s.




Prima - first for Nintendo Wii exclusives. And also for stuff about PMT and hormone replacement therapy and what trousers to wear to the office party.

Labels: MEAT BAGS (WOMEN)

And released webwards by world-famous ROM collector. If you're new to all this, you need an emulator like Gens to make it work, and a PC made since 1998. And preferably a joypad of some sort, as Sonic's magic is diminished significantly when 'X' is down and 'D' is right and 'Space' is jump.




Now you don't have to pretend to like the Sonic games released since 1995 any more!

GET IT HERE:
Hidden Palace - News / Sonic 2 early prototype

OR HERE:
The site hosting it appears to have died. Allow us to 'help out' by hosting the ROM here.

Labels: HISTORY

And they/it sent us a copy of it, which presumably means we're allowed to review it and they won't go mad if we say it's rubbish.




It's not rubbish, but also not as good as the book we would've written. But no one really wants to publish a million words with no full stops or commas about having anal sex with non-threatening female cartoon characters, so The Triforce would appear to have won this particular battle.




We briefly flicked through it looking for factual inaccuracies to point out, but couldn't find any because what the hell do we know about The Sims or Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy? This was very disappointing.




It's got Animal Crossing: Wild World in it, and OutRun, and Lumines, and Tony Hawk 3, so would appear to be on the right track.




WRONG THINGS: Pro Evo 5 is the slowest and worst Pro Evo of them all, Rez is little more than waving your mouse around your PC screen while listening to some music you downloaded but don't really like, and why isn't Sonic The Hedgehog in it but Jet Set Radio Future is?




"THE GAME IS THE STAR" - this line could only come from people that have sat in numerous development and product marketing meetings.




"The most fun you can legally have with your clothes on" is a line we would imagine was inserted by the publisher without the authors' knowledge or consent, seeing as it really belongs in a 1985 Zzap! magazine review of Paradroid. They'll probably say it's meant to be ironic. Taking your clothes off also doesn't mean more fun - it means being cold and feeling disgusted with yourself.




Still, it's nice to have, especially for free, and a rare thing we got sent that won't immediately get listed on the mortgage payment war chest fund (eBay). Thanks. We hope we have stimulated debate and enthusiasm for the project.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ONE OF THE TRIFORCE
We sent questions via email to all three of the Triforce. David's answers were abrupt and abusive, Simon's cleverly highlighted the flaws in the email interview process, and Ste didn't bother but said he would if we wanted. We said not to bother.

SO HERE'S SIMON'S INTERVIEW:

WHY ISN'T SEGA RALLY IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Sonic The Hedgehog

WHY ISN'T SONIC THE HEDGEHOG IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Daytona USA

WHY ISN'T DAYTONA USA IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Streets Of Rage 2

WHY ISN'T STREETS OF RAGE 2 IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Nights

WHY ISN'T NiGHTS IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Phantasy Star Online

WHY ISN'T PHANTASY STAR ONLINE IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Shenmue

WHY ISN'T SHENMUE IN IT?
Because it's not as good as a Virtua Fighter of any kind

WHY ISN'T A VIRTUA FIGHTER OF ANY KIND IN IT?
Because it's not as good as Pong