After 50 years of convincing girls that thin is in, Mattel is trying a new approach to Barbie; you'll soon be able to buy the iconic doll in a variety of different body shapes - including 'curvy'. Additionally, Barbie will also be available in a number of new "empowering and imaginative" roles - a spy, president, vice-president, fashionista, and - get this - game developer. What other Barbies might Mattel be considering in a bid to bring the brand up to date? Digitiser2000 has speculated so that you don't have to.
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![]() "Welcome to the world. Society is mandatory. Drop out, refuse to conform, and you will be punished." Society seemingly benefits us all, but certainly benefits some of us more than others. The only way to ensure this structure perpetuates is through control, and society controls us in ways that are both overt and covert. Rules, laws - these are obvious. But then society exerts its influence on us in ways that are more subtle, insidious, covert. We're told about doing things for "The good of our society" (or country...). Well, whose society is it? We're never handed a choice to opt out... though given that society is everywhere, where would we go anyway? Society gives us roads, gives us electricity, gives us television, and Sainsburys and Star Wars and a justice system. If you want all that, you have to be a part of it. Alas, society is also hugely, intrinsically, unfair, and has been manipulated to primarily benefit a tiny elite - and from birth we are brainwashed into going along with this conspiracy. "Grow up" we're told from a very young age. And so, grow up we do, in the belief that it's the right thing to do, and that one day - if we're very grown up - we too might be able to spend most of our lives on a yacht in the Caribbean. Frankly, it's rubbish. So thank Bushnell for video games. ![]() Greetings, dicks. Doctor Ashley Tagg here again. Sorry to be back so soon, but the head of the faculty, my good friend Professor Lawrence Katz (for some reason, all the students call him "LOLCats" and claim that we should appear together in a TV detective show called "Hashtag and LOLCats" - I don't know why), asked me to share something with you. Lawrence has invented a powerful strain of pathogenic bacteria which only infects the straights. He's very much hoping his creation will be transmitted virally to the world, thus hastening the fall of society, as a joke. Consequently, he's chosen the single most viral thing imaginable to be the carrier of his virus - a list of amusing animal pictures. ![]() I'm afraid to say that if you have read this far, there's a very high chance that it is too late for Yu (that is - Roald Yu, a straight I know who is also my lab assistant). Notice: don't make the same mistake Yu did, and please be sure to check your shits for signs of internal bleeding. Finally, I thank you with all my heart for taking the time to consider this list, and your kind help with the work of my esteemed colleague. Here is the full list of pictures and symptoms. Goodbye, Yu. ![]()
Greetings, dicks. My name is Doctor Ashley Tagg. My closest friends call me Ash, while my students refer to me as Doctor Hashtag, although I don't understand why. And I certainly don't find it funny. I have six GCSEs, and I own a car.
I work for the Institute of Video Game Recruitment, or some shit like that, and I come to you today seeking applicants for the post of Next Big Platform Game Star. Do you have what it takes to become an icon of gaming? Please answer the following questions honestly, and to the best of your ability, so that we are able to make a fair and accurate decision. I thank you with all my heart. ![]() The first PC game I ever played was Doom. As firsts go, that was a bit like losing your virginity to, I dunno... Jane Russell or Errol Flynn. We somehow managed to get it running on the woefully underpowered Teletext PCs - albeit in a postage stamp-sized window - just enough to be able to fudge a review. So, more like losing your virginity to Jane Russell, if Jane Russell had been a primordial dwarf. And imagine that you then had to write an article about your experience, without letting on that she only came up to your knees. ![]() Video games often portray the horrors of war, but until now no video game has ever been created by somebody who actually started a horrible war. Donald "Known-Knowns" Rumsfeld may be better "known-known" as the Secretary of Defense to US President George W Bush, and the architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but he's now a video game producer. His first iOS game, Churchill's Solitaire, is based upon a version of the famous card game, apparently invented by the British wartime Prime Minister, Branston Churchill. Though Rumsfeld may be the most unlikely producer of a video game ever, he's not the only unexpected figure to have done a game. Here are eight more unlikely people what have also done one (a game). ![]()
Hello, everyone. Mr T here. You possibly remember me from TV's 'The Eh? Team' - a short-lived show I was in about a group of partially-deaf mercenaries.
Anyway, enough bragging about my glittering career! It's time now for me to test your knowledge on my favourite topic - bins! Click onwards for my very own Big Bin Quiz! It won't be easy - but make sure you do your best to stay away from my wrong bin answers! LOL! ![]() Boxes have never been more popular. Why, there are now so many types of box in the world - Pandora's box, cardboard box, box jellyfish - that there is literally a box for every occasion. But what if one wishes to play games of a video nature? Is there even a box for that? Why, yes there is, child! It is called the Xbox One, and it is a very special box indeed! But, please... what doth the logo of the Xbox One most commonly resemble? Read on to discover this most profound of mysteries. ![]() I know I was a lucky kid, compared to many. I lived in a real house. I got to eat boil-in-the-bag mince most nights. And I was only occasionally bitten by my mother's horrible little dog. Though my family wasn't wealthy - at points they were sufficiently hard-up that I had to share a bedroom with my parents, so that my room could be given over to a procession of hairy lodgers - I had all the toys a boy could want. Well... except for Big Trak (an excellent, remote-controlled tank thing), and the Six Million Dollar Man bionic transport and repair station. Other than that, I mostly had all the toys a boy could want. More or less. Though... a lot of them were second-hand. And I never got the Action Force plane that I'd asked for. But, yeah, I had, at least, some of the toys a boy could want. A few of them anyway. One or two. As I've established previously in this series, I was an out and proud Spectrum owner. Some of my friends had the Commodore 64, one of them had an Oric Atmos. And a few - though I struggle to really consider these bourgeois dandies as friends - owned the BBC Model B. ![]() Is it possible to have true objectivity in journalism? And has any game review ever started with a more thrilling opening sentence? Honestly, whatever happened to the days of "Wowzers - this game is so hot it burnt our fingers!" for pity's sake? Seriously, though, guy: we've all got prejudices, we all see the world through our own cracked filter. Can you ever truly switch that off? It depresses and frustrates me how much the left and the right are blinkered by their own beliefs, and I sometimes despair when people will refuse to engage with an otherwise valid argument, by their inflexible, knee-jerk, adherence to left-wing or right-wing cliche. You see it in the papers, on the news, on Facebook... and it drives me mental. More than that: it makes me more politically apathetic than I want to be, because there's no debating with it. ![]() They're here - the brand new Digitiser t-shirts are now on sale! Our two new designs feature the full text of the famous Roaming Thomas ad, and none other than the reanimated legend that is Zombie Dave (which features print on both the front and the back). We also have new stock of our Digitiser logo and Mr T-shirts, if you missed them the first time around. More excitingly still - all orders will receive a free 'Dog-A-Rhythm' sticker, while stocks last! Go now to the official Digitiser shop! Or - better still - go there once you've read the rest of this important message. ![]() Do you remember when you'd spend 30-odd quid on an arcade-style game that only had one idea in it? The Bug Butcher is precisely the sort of thing that, once upon a time, would've been priced at the equivalent of an Assassin's Creed or a Call of Duty. And because we didn't know any better, we would've lapped it up, like the ignorant proles we were. Now enjoy this noise: hurnh-hurnh!! For we now have a resurgence in indie gaming, and all those sorts of games are back - except now they cost under a tenner. That's about the same price as an organic almond milk latte in some parts of London... You know the parts we mean: where the streets are paved with beard wisps. ![]() Boom! I'm Cyber-X. I used to be one of the top games journalists in the entire country - and I still am, even though Top Mega Ultra Top Mega Games shut down 15 years ago, mate, and I've spent most of the intervening years drunk by 2pm, talking to old men in the pub. I'll tell you what though - being such a top games journalist this long has given me a right old overview of the way games have changed. And let me tell you another thing - things have never been so good, mate. Want some proof? Curl your peepers around this lot - it's what people had to do back in the day, before all the proper games started coming out. Boom, mate! Love it, yeah. ![]() Last night Billy Connolly won a Special Recognition honour at the National Television Awards, cementing him as a bit of a national treasure. I didn't watch it. I find awards ceremonies stupid and arbitrary, frankly. It's nice to win or be nominated, but thinking they mean anything, or allowing them to be any form of validation, is a dangerous game. Says a man with a BAFTA nomination certificate displayed proudly in his hall, and a Royal Television Society Award taking pride of place on his mantlepiece (albeit hidden behind a pot plant - nobody appreciates a show-off)... Still, I like Connolly. After reading the news this morning I took to YouTube to watch my favourite performance of his. It occurred at the inaugural Comic Relief concert in 1986. I used to have a VHS of that show, and watched it so many times that it's a miracle the tape never snapped. It's a pretty famous bit that Connolly performs, where he talks about his experience of Australia, and how deadly it seemed to him ("Beware: Stingers!"). So imagine my surprise to find that I - presumably, along with much of the rest of the nation - had somehow forgotten the moment where he went on a two-minute, context-free, racist rant about the Japanese. |
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