Excited to meet your idol, you gather together the ingredients for a packed lunch, check the directions to his home, the Ecuadorian Embassy, and head into London.
This is going to be a great day!
Congratulations! You have won a competition in Heat Magazine to spend a day with your favourite celebrity: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange! Excited to meet your idol, you gather together the ingredients for a packed lunch, check the directions to his home, the Ecuadorian Embassy, and head into London. This is going to be a great day!
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Nintendo might not be what it was, but few would argue that it isn't still one of the best and most pure video games companies in the world. However, Nintendo has done much to paper over some of the less glorious chapters in its history, which include a number of somewhat seedy missteps, rip-offs of other, more successful, products, and near financial ruin. As we are all aware, the real history of Nintendo begins in 1981. Here's everything you need to know about the century or so before that... 14 GIANT PIECES OF GAMING HARDWARE AND WHAT THEY CAN TEACH US ABOUT OUR PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE4/2/2016 We are so small. We delude ourselves that anything we do matters a cosmic jiff next to the enormity of space and time and elephants and giraffes and cranes. Such is the arrogance of the longpig. To put our relative tininess into some sort of context that you can understand with your video game-ravaged brain, here are 14 examples of, like, really big gaming hardware, yeah. How did things go so very badly wrong for Sega? When we think of Sega, most of us tend to think only of the Mega Drive and Sonic the Hedgehog - and the subsequent highs and lows. Nowadays, Sega is a shadow of its former self, limping along as if it barely knows what it's for. However, long before any of that happened, Sega did as much to define video games as anyone. This is a company that owns brands such as Zaxxon, Wonder Boy, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Bonanza Bros, Shinobi, Space Harrier, Hang On, OutRun, After Burner, Crazy Taxi, Daytona USA, Jet Set Radio, Panzer Dragoon, Ecco the Dolphin, Space Channel 5, Streets of Rage, and Virtua Fighter... Yet go to the Sega website, and all you'll find are games such as Tembo the Badass Elephant. And that's not even a joke. Except, perversely, it is a joke. A sick, sick, joke. How has it gone so wrong for the company? Let us tell you how: because somehow, inexplicably - and unlike its arch-rival Nintendo, and the band Take That - Sega forgot where it came from. Here's a quick whistlestop tour of Sega's pre-Master System history. I miss Britishness in games. Don't misunderstand: I'm not some flag-waving patriot, swinging from a red postbox with a Charles & Di memorial mug gripped between my jaws. In fact, I abhor nationalism, and I think that comes, in part, from belonging to a nation that doesn't have any real idea of what it is to have national pride. We seem to be a country that fumbles in trying to define itself. On the one hand, we don't want to let go of tradition... and on the other we don't want to be seen as old fashioned. Plus, it doesn't help that so much of what it was to be British - specifically English, let's face it - is wrapped up with how we stamped all over the rest of the world. Still, it isn't like that has ever stopped the Americans... I feared Scotland gaining independence, because so much of who I am comes from Scotland; I spent a big chunk of my formative years up there. Losing Scotland would've somehow meant losing part of myself. In part, that might be attributed to wanting to borrow that sense of identity and pride the Scots seem to have; as a kid, I told people I was from Scotland. I didn't think telling them I was English really meant anything. And yet... I can watch a TV show or read a book, and say it feels British - English even - without really being able to articulate why. Too bad there aren't any games about which I can say the same thing. Boom! I'm Cyber-X. You probably remember me as one of the top games journalists in the country in the 1990s, and from the top interview I did last year where I did my best to end the career of the veteran games developer and pompous liar "Perris Moyne". It has been 12 months since I last spoke with "Moyne", and in that time he has kept his pledge not to speak to the press. I caught up with this controversial figure to see what he's been up to while maintaining his dignified silence. It doesn't take much for a bit of a storm to brew up in the games industry, and the people we blame are the ones at the centre of the storm. These are the ones who break promises, dare to have opinions or personalities, or just look a bit too funny to scrape through life without being abused by strangers. Fortunately, thanks to social media, it's easier than ever to corral an angry mob to make life more miserable for these ghastly arseholes (assholes) - or "ghastholes" if you so wish. Thus, here we round up the ten biggest arseholes in the games industry - those most deserving of your crowd-sourced ire. History is written by the victors, they say. Which is a bit strange, given that we don't recall Simon "Schama" ever winning a war. Still... when it comes to the console wars, we all know who the big winners and the big losers were. Who we are less familiar with are the collaterally damaged - the systems that got caught in the crossfire, and were "holed" below the "water line" before they barely pumped off a shot. This is the story of those forgotten consoles. Though, technically, it's more of a listicle than an actual story. But... y'know. This is 2016, guy. If The Bible had been written today, even God would've included some sort of bossy listicle in it, and called it something like The Top 10 Commandments You Totes Need to Follow, or something like that, but funnier. Whatevs. FML. Being British, we suspect the closest we'll ever come to experiencing life without a National Health Service is taking our pets to see the vet. On the one hand, you do get a remarkable level of service - they weigh your cat or dog, measure it, look at its teeth and bottom. On the other hand, you have to pay through the nose for such treatment, and must tolerate them reminding you how important it is to get your pet insured. Loosely related to that, here is a gallery of veterinary training mannequins. On the one hand it's good that they exist... on the other hand you might feel a bit funny while looking at them. GUEST POST BY 'SUPER BAD ADVICE' Despite sounding like the second tier of the Greek football league, The Division: Beta is actually this: an invite-only test run for Ubisoft’s new open-world, always connected RPG/3rd person shooter amalgam. It’s been running this past weekend and I’ve been playing it right up the wazoo so I can bring you some first impressions. By which I mean what I thought of the game, not an exercise in amateur mimicking. Since the dawn of gaming, every generation of hardware has instigated a war between supporters over which is best. History may declare the winner by how well a system sold, but that's not how we do things here at Digitiser2000: we're too drunk to look up the figures. Nevertheless, we have appointed ourselves The Arbiters of Taste, and have decided to settle, once and for all, every debate ever regarding which games system is the best - "best" being an entirely arbitrary epithet that we shall struggle to quantify, coming, as it will, from our gut - the same place, not coincidentally, where our poo doth lurk. So here we go then: let's do this. Let's solve everything. One of the biggest issues the games industry has faced over the years is how to inject a touch of glamour into what is, arguably, an unglamorous profession. Whereas movies go to real places and blow things up, and rock stars get to prance around on stage while tripping their gourd off on the latest cool drug, games are made exclusively by sad, lonely people sat in front of computers surrounded by toys and pasty crumbs. That's just a fact. This could explain why games companies seem so intent on crowbarring actual celebrities into their games. Unfortunately, this has led to another issue: an encounter with the uncanny valley, described as "the phenomenon whereby a computer-generated figure bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it." Here are 10 such revolting experiments in attempting to recreate our celebrity gods. Do schools still do that thing on the last day of term, where the kids get to bring in toys? In fact, do kids even have toys anymore? Nowadays, their big last day of term treat is probably being allowed to use their phones in class, so they can sit there Snapchatting one another. Being an old, old man, I struggle to imagine what it would've been like to own an iPhone as a kid. Back then, phones never left our homes, photographs were something you picked up from Boots, and if we had wanted to face-swap with someone we'd have had to use a Stanley knife. And imagine owning a handheld thing upon which you could store hundreds of games - in full colour! With sound! And 3D graphics! One last day of term, I remember David Dunlop bringing in a Star Trek phaser and communicator. I brought in a toy Lotus Esprit from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, which shot rockets out of the rear windscreen. Kevin Hill had Connect 4. And Jason Quirke... well, Jason Quirke had something called a Game & Watch. That was when everything changed. |
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