I have a sordid relationship with Post-it notes. I can’t pass a pad of them without drawing a crappy, nonsensical doodle on it to “amuse” (and I use that in the broadest definition) the owner.

However, for some reason, I’ve never had a pad on my desk, ever. So I fixed that, and nicked some.

So next time I get bored/frustrated/whatever, I will draw something. then photograph it for posterity, and upload it at my new site: http://www.pos-tits.com

I’m sure giving the site a name like that can’t POSSIBLY have any negative repercussions.

So, Nintendo have realised that the only sure fire sellers on the Wii are Mario related titles, and are exploiting that in their new advertising campaign, with the slogan:

“MARIO – Part of the family since 1985″

Now with the internet and the idea of the “global marketplace”, it’s easy to forget about the 1980′s. I don’t though.

You see, the thing is… Back in the 80′s, unlike in the US where “Nintendo” became synonymous with playing a videogame, and the NES was a huge seller, it really wasn’t in the UK when it was released in 1986 (Not 1985 – That’s when it came out in the US).

We all played games on home computers. The ZX Spectrum and the C64, then migrating to STs and Amigas later… The consoles at the time, the Master System and NES, really didn’t have much market share due to the stranglehold of the home computer market.

Even then, Sega easily outsold Nintendo over here. Mainly due to the fact that Mattel distributed the NES, and sold it as a toy, while Sega’s stuff was sold by Virgin Mastertronic, a company well versed in the UK games market – So much so, Sega bought the company and turned them into Sega Europe at the start of the 16-bit console era.

As the home computer scene died in the early 90′s, and Nintendo finally opened a European branch, sure the SNES made a mark, and sold much better than it’s predecessor, but UK was still behind Sega more, and it stayed that way until the Playstation era.

With 10 or so years of Sony dominance, The N64 and Gamecube were 3rd-placers during their respective generations too.

In fact, it’s only with the Wii, and Nintendo’s marketing to the “Blue Ocean” audience, that has let them achieve a popularity in the UK on par with their great US monopoly with the NES, back in the 80′s.

So, surely, if Nintendo were to make a truthful ad regarding Mario’s place in the UK, shouldn’t it be:

“MARIO – Attempting to be part of your family since 1986″

Update

Someone has mentioned to me that I’ve completely glossed over the handheld market, and that Nintendo have dominated that market since the Game Boy.

Give me a break – Who honestly plays handhelds? You buy one, play it while having a dump a few times, and relegate it to the shelf, gathering dust, in favour of games on a proper TV.

Would you rather this tagline then?

“MARIO – Part of your shitting regime since 1990″

Hello.

Sometimes there’s nothing good on TV, so I make up films to watch in my brain.

These are some. In no particular order:

No, not the absolutely awesome Climax that no fucker bought except me, resulting in MS dropping the game to half price within a couple of months.

Nononono… We’re talking the original this time.

Did you know there’s a storyline to go with that game, cunningly hidden via special button inputs that you must press when your jet is refuelling?

Apparently so. It’s all about rescuing a girl called Lucy from some guy called Match, who apparently isn’t very good at Ma Ma Lemon. Whatever that is.

Until today, this 23 year-old secret appears to have gone completely unnoticed by the western world. In fact, searching for the phrase used in the topic in Google resulted in 1 solitary result, for an English speaking Kyoto-Based company selling After Burner T-Shirts.

Anyway – Videos. Here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNzrprLWZ8

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G72I5bIp0Q

Microsoft casually avoid talking about the elephant in the room.

E3 2010 will go down in my personal history as the straw that has broken this camel’s back. I think I’m all but done with videogames.

Microsoft’s over-saturation of their new motion controller, watching obvious actors pretend to play obviously pre-rendered video footage of games, Sony… Well… Being Sony, and Activision throwing giant amounts of cash on a celebrity-filled music show, which was more concerned about telling the audience how much cash they have to throw about than ACTUAL FUCKING GAMES.

Nintendo’s showing has probably been the only one that remotely impressed me. Showing off games for old skool fans instead of the casual crap of the last few years – Being the rabid classic-era Sega fanboy I am, I’ve never been interested in those franchises, but still… And you can’t say that the 3DS doesn’t look like a spanky new piece of tech.

So, kudos, Nintendo. Not remotely fucking interested, but kudos, nevertheless.

Maybe this was just inevitable. I was already getting to the point where I was hard pressed to turn on my console for a gaming fix.

I’ve had Red Dead Redemption in my 360 for over 2 weeks, just waiting to be played, and just can’t be bothered. The last few times I turned it on was just to watch a film on Sky Player, and that’s only because of a bug in the PC version, that stops your PC being detected as the main computer (thus disabling some channels/programmes from being viewed).

At the grand old age of 35, I’m seriously starting to think it’s time for me to put away childish things

A game on Xbox Live Indie games, produced by a company called Ancient.

Don’t know who Ancient are? let me fill you in… It’s a small, Tokyo based game development company, run by the Koshiro family. You might recognise the name of one of their top employees – Music composer Yuzo Koshiro. Yes… THAT Yuzo Koshiro.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or just aren’t that interested in specifics), Ancient were partially responsible for the Streets of Rage series, with Yuzo’s sister, Ayano, aiding in design and production. They also produced the Story of Thor/Beyond Oasis games.

They worked on a fair few games with Sega back in the day in fact, including Shenmue.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTgGBimNHSM

The best way to explain the game, is it’s a stupidly addictive, 4 player retro-styled cross between Gauntlet and a survival/defence game, all played very tongue in cheek with an awesome 8-bit stylee soundtrack.

It’s also worth looking at their website and comparing the Japanese version, and the “specially ruined for western audiences” version, styled like the packaging/instruction manuals of a bygone era.

Japanese version
Western version

Anyway, the game is 240 MS points. That’s 2 QUID in human moneys, assuming you’re buying 2100 points cards at the RRP of £17.50 (getting them straight from XBL is more expensive, but on the other hand there’s companies on the web that will digitally deliver the scratchcard codes for cheaper than RRP).

So if this in anyway grabs your goat, here’s a link to it’s marketplace page.

Link-me-do

It can also be found is you browse all Indie Games through your 360, but because it’s title is in Japanese, it’s right at the bottom of the list – Around 970 of 974, meaning unless we all spread the word around, this game will become tragically overlooked.

Playing After Burner Climax.

If you haven’t bought it, you’re a cunt.

Sony, desperate to drum up hype for their new motion controller, the Playstation Move, have tried to rationalise why the “hardcore” market doesn’t like motion control, and why this will change with their new controller.

“Hard-core gamers have looked down their nose at motion gaming: it’s not particularly satisfying for them because it’s not terribly precise or challenging, it’s more social. So we’ll have games that the whole family can play that are very social , but we’ll also be able to do hard-core gamer games via a motion device that has never been done before.”

Now before I rip this concept to shreds, I will say I do see one action that the motion control should be able to do better than the common controller, and that is as a targeting or pointing device, for very much the same reason I think a mouse is better to play FPS games with. So maybe all those Halo/Battlefield/CoD players out there (and fucking hell is there a lot of you) might be better off with motion control. Makes a good lightgun substitute for games like House of the Dead too.

But as we’ve seen with the Wii, developers have had a history of shoehorning motion controls into games that really just don’t need them. No doubt with the arrival of the Playstation Move and Project Natal, we’ll see the same thing happening to PS3 and 360 games too. There just lies one simple problem:

Pressing buttons and moving a joystick/d-pad is better.

Every time you press a button or move in a direction on a traditional controller it is programmed to do the precise thing the button/stick/d-pad is meant to do. Not only that, anything in the game world that you react with is programmed to to respond to whatever actions those button presses represent.

(Sure there are games where that doesn’t happen, due to poor collision detection, bad AI, etc, but that’s more due to the fact they are badly programmed games so lets forget those, or at least try to.)

Now with motion control we have a system that, at it’s worst, is programmed to execute what a button press can do with a gesture, basically making you exert more effort that is needed just to do a simple task.

“But Mentuss… What about 1:1 Motion control like the MotionPlus and Sony’s new Move controller? That’s far more precise!”, I hear you (and the execs at Sony) say.

Oh yes, 1:1 Motion control! That will fix everything.

The problem with that lies in how the environment reacts to you. Sure, you can stand in front of the TV, waving your controller in the air (waving it like you just don’t care), and see it perfectly replicated on screen. But you still end up having to do the same motions time and time again because that’s what the environment responds to… It’s the only way you can kill something/open a door/jump to the next platform/etc, which just ends with the reasoning that you might as well still be pushing a freaking button!

This is before we even get to talking about the limits of human physiology. When you have to react to something happening on a screen, pressing a button to perform a pre-programmed result is always going to be more reliable than having to flail your limbs about performing the moves yourself. For a large percent of people, the reaction time for pressing a button compared to waving a limb is going to be much smaller too, purely because we human beings are a diverse bunch and not everyone playing a game is at peak physical fitness.

This is where Sony’s argument that motion controls “just weren’t precise enough” falls down: It’s not about the precision of the controller, but the precision of the people using it!

If you want proof, just take a look at Tony Hawk Ride. Not only did the game need tremendous dumbing down due to the use of a new motion based controller, but the controller made what was left of the game an unplayable mess on high difficulties, as you needed the reactions and physical fitness of a real pro skater to play it.

If instead of shoehorning the tech into games that just don’t need it, you build games around the technology, it’s not like there isn’t a market for for them. Heck, the Wii has proved that ten times over. But does it really matter that those games don’t strike a chord with the old school/hardcore gamers? What the hell is wrong about making different games for different markets using different control systems?

The only answer I can see is greed. Pure and simple, and it’s kind of sickening. You see this huge market of people who would rather play with motion control because its “simpler” to them, a market that dramatically increases sales, and you think that by adding this type of controls to a game will increase your potential sales, you don’t give a shit if changing the control system pisses off the people who used to play the controller-based versions of your games because the sales are now multitudes higher. If you are one of the people making the decisions in the games industry that thinks this way: Fuck you. Because one day, the giant money train you’re riding could just crash and burn, and I hope it fucking does.

But here’s a whole new side to him… Mentski.co.uk proudly presents: VIGO THE JANITOR!

I am embarrassed and ashamed of you.

So Sega do what everyone knew they were going to do 2 weeks ago, and anounce that Project Needlemouse was, indeed, Sonic 4. They release a trailer with all of 3 seconds of gameplay, and what do you do? Whine and complain like bitches.

Sega, for the first time in years, stop making Sonic games that by their own admittance, are aimed at children, in favour of a game aimed at the audience that loved the original 16-bit games, and all you do is fucking nitpick.

“Waahhh waaaahh! They’ve used the modern Sonic design! He’s got the homing attack! His running animation isn’t right! They’re reusing badniks and level designs from the previous games! I’m boycotting this! I’m giving up on the franchise forever!!!!!!1111ONEONEONE”

Shut the fuck up! You sound like spoilt fucking children. The average classic fan is in their mid-twenties or over… Act with a little more fucking maturity!

YOU’VE SEEN 3 FUCKING SECONDS OF GAME FOOTAGE OF A GAME THAT DOESN’T COME OUT FOR 6 MONTHS.

No doubt an opinion like mine will be met by some of these so called “classic fans” telling me I’m just not hardcore enough, that I don’t understand, So let me tell you my history regarding the games:

• I played the first game in 1991 at the age of 16.
• I finished the second game so quickly after release on the morning of “Sonic 2′s Day”, that I was interviewed by the TV show “Gamesmaster” about it.
• Every aspect of all the 16 bit titles are ingrained into my brain to such an extent that I can play them almost on automatic… So when a company like Backbone fuck up the emulation of them, making them play ever so slightly differently, I can fucking tell.

…So nobody ever fucking say that I don’t know my fucking Sonic games.

Sure, be a little cynical about the game, but on the other hand show a little optimism, wait until you see more of the game, and then give Sega a little mature feedback instead of chucking your toys out of the pram.

Because the way it stands at the moment, you don’t fucking deserve this game.