E4 SUMMARY -- DISAPPOINTING
We stayed up all night to watch E4, and there wasn't anything mentioned about video games at all :(
Joey and Chandler did play on a PS2 for a bit, but it was the old model. Glad we didn't go all the way to America for this.
Here's what we saw on E4:
9:00pm -- The OC. Nothing mentioned about PS3 or Nintendo Revolution.
10:00 -- Six Feet Under. Failed to reveal Xbox 360 specs.
11:00 -- Friends. Nintendo Revolution controller not featured.
11:30 -- Friends. No more PS3 games announced.
12:00 -- Dawson's Creek. Joey and Dawson reveal no next-gen console details.
*** BOUFF.TV 2005 SUMMER SALE NOW ON! ***
The Bouff.tv 2005 SUMMER SALE is now running with price reductions on a plethora of official Emily Booth items. We've dropped the price on ALL the superb 'Bouff Select' prints along with many of the items in the Bouff.tv merchandise section. And that's not all! If you spend over £20.00 on the Bouff.tv site you will also receive a gorgeous A2 sized Emily Booth poster totally FREE OF CHARGE! Head on over to www.bouff.tv and pick up a bargain today ...
*** TOP 100 WAR FILMS - WHERE WAS EMILY? ***
It would seem that Channel 4 decided not to use Emily's contribution that she filmed for Channel 4's '100 Greatest War Films' show. Our apologies if you sat through the whole show hoping for a glimpse of our favourite gamer-girl ... That's the fickle world of TV I'm afraid folks!
*** EVIL ALIENS PREMIERED AT CANNES! ***
At long last the Jake West sci-fi splatter-flick 'Evil Aliens' (featuring Emily Booth, Chris Adamson, Norman Lovett, Jodie Shaw, Samuel Butler, Peter McNeil O'Connor) has received an international premier screening - at the Cannes Film Festival no less! The good news for Emily fans is the film has now been picked up for distribution and will hopefully be shown in some UK cinemas later this year. Keep an eye on www.jakewest.com for more news about the movie and its impending DVD release.
More Emily Booth news and exclusive SPECIAL OFFERS can be found in the 22nd Bouff.tv newsletter: http://www.bouff.tv/newsletter.php
"None so eventful -- nay -- life altering as seeing Sonic in real-time on Xbox 360"
"It was like the anime opening from Sonic CD in the real world: Absolute euphoria. I seriously nearly wept"
"I just had to tell who ever is listening that Sonic is (unofficially) coming to 360 and, for anyone who grew up playing Sonic games , it's going to feel like the first time all over again"
Hi - Video gaming is the fastest growing sector of the entertainment industry.
Below are the latest statistics relating to video gaming compiled by GMI. We have pulled out some of the most interesting figures:20% of the 13,000 polled spend up to half their leisure time playing video games More than 80% of those polled believe people will spend more time playing video games in the future 40% of those polled said they want to spend more of their free time playing video games In the UK more women than men (between the ages of 18-44) want to spend more time playing video games 58% of respondents do not feel gaming is a good social activity however in India and Mexico a high percentage of gamers (49% and 64% respectively) play to interact with friends 57% of those polled do not feel that gaming is a good way for a family to spend time together
For UK specific statistics, visit http://www.gmi-mr.com/gmipoll/press_room_wppk_pr.phtml and click on the hyperlinks within the release.
"'I'm as excited about 50 Cent: Bulletproof as I am about the success of my album, The Massacre and that means a lot since music has always been my life," said 50 Cent. "The new freestyles and the addition of Eminem and Dre show that this game is on the right course to follow in the successful footsteps of my music'."
"The game will offer a sound studio mode in which gamers can mix and match new original freestyles by 50 Cent with new beats straight from the G Unit camp."
"In 50 Cent's video game, 50 gets caught in a web of corruption, double-crosses and shady deals that lead him on a bloody path through New York's drug underworld."
"The streets heat up as 50 Cent takes on the most dangerous crime families in the city, uncovering an international conspiracy with devastating implications."
"More information about the game can be found at http://www.the50centgame.com/
Greetings to all you Emily Booth fans 'outTHERE'!
This is just a quick reminder that Emily will be taking part in 'The 100 Greatest War Films' which is being shown on Channel 4 this weekend. The first part is being shown on Saturday May 14th at 9:20pm and the show concludes on Sunday night at 9pm.
For details about the latest offers from Bouff.tv including info about the superb Bits series 5 DVD check out the latest Bouff.tv online newsletter:
Emily Booth Newsletter
Hello, you lovely UK-R people.
The Data Design employee letter prompted me to e-mail you about the time I spent with those shysters at Jester Interactive. We toiled on mostly music-related products and some unseen games (including a Dreamcast title called Hellgate, for which many still bare the scars of naivety and all-nighters due to our fear of "job dependancy deadlines"), and one of the "50th Fastest Growing Companies in Wales" almost never made it. Christmas 2001 - we were callled into the office while we joked "Haha! Merry Christmas, lads! You're sacked!". Well, guess what..? Yep, we were all sacked! Before Christmas! Haha! This was blamed on spending much money on Hellgate, but we liked to think it was more likely the £1million pub which our boss spent money on, handily located in the middle of nowhere. A skeleton staff worked while a lot of us had a pretty miserable and uncertain Christmas - mostly beloved programmers getting paid a lot more than they should of been paid.
We all came back though in the New Year after Jester was saved by Big Ben Interactive, and soon they helped release Super Trucks to an unwanting world in new premises with slightly less staff. Super Trucks featured the "Truck Damage System" or "TDS". Yes! Tedious! That was actually intentional too, but none of the management managed to pick up on that one. The game famously got 4/10 in Official Playstation2 Magazine after our boss unwisely told Manic Miner obsessive "The Starglider" to "f**k off dickhead" via e-mail in response to an innocent query about the game. No one thought nothing of it in management, even when it hit the messageboards and made the top news story in PC Gamer. We then started work on TT Superbikes, which was a labour of love for the management themselves. They love motorbikes! They revved their prized motorbikes outside our windows! What could we do? Besides slowly leave one after the other, while management made no effort to bring you back unless you were a programmer. Jester was relying more and more on external resources, and this kind of upset the established employees who had been with them for some time.
The company meant well with the Manx TT arcade machine in the foyer, but that soon ended up in a state of disrepair and wasn't fixed. Each day we'd come into the building and be greeted by this malfunctioning piece of videogaming history, and compare it to the crumbling company we were working for. The main boss bloke soon decided to bail out, but not after gleefully leeching money from the coffers. More psychological attempts were made to keep staff. Management would walk into our room and talk about "all those UK developers hitting the wall" before adding "good job you guys are still with us, eh?" before leaving us in a state of frantic paranoia. More staff left though, including many of the directors, leaving the actual culprits of manglement terror. Soon Jester was rightly put into administration. The attached local newspaper front page image confirms this.
Hang on though. How can this be? Why, they're still out there! They have the same company name! The same logo! The same IP! Well, here's the thing. They're now called "Jester Interactive Publishing Limited" and are still operating after a nifty deal with the bank. Did I say nifty? Maybe I should of said illegal and completely wrong. TT was released, but only after a huge amount of pre-orders from very patient punters put the game up at number 5 in the charts. Here's a tip for all developers/publishers wanting to get high in the charts - make your userbase wait and wait and wait while they desperately grasp their pre-orders. When you eventually release your game after 2 years of the proposed release date, be amazed at your chart position! The "FIFA Street" effect will soon take hold, as causal gamers see your game in the top ten and purchase it because, well, it must be good. Right? It must be! It's in the top ten!
Jester are the Michael Jackson of the videogame world. They could be caught red-handed forcing people to buy TT Superbikes at gunpoint, only to have the court case fall on its arse and the company get away with it once again. Programmers who could of left and sealed the fate of Jester returned because "they couldn't be bothered with finding new jobs". Ironically, Big Ben tried their magic with TT Superbikes and, er, soon went into administration themselves. Also due to the "fear of poaching", Jester made sure that everyone who worked hard on the TT Superbikes game would not get any form of credit in the manual or the game, except via a cheat mode which the management didn't actually know about. Surely we'd at least all get a free copy for our hard work?
Nope.
I just hope soon this terrible evil will be cleansed from the land. I'm sure there are decent, honest devcos out there which have hit the wall, where all they had to do to stick around was lie to their employees ("Missing pensions? No, no. The money was just resting in our accounts!"), make very shady deals and dubious decisions. My only comfort is knowing the evil management are actually going to Hell.
I would like to remain anonymous, though thank UK-R for the laughs over the years. Keep up the sterling work.
Anon.
Hello chaps,
You featured a game the other day something to do with monkeys in balls, sorry Hamsters in balls. The company that developed it is called Datadesign Interactive who, about 2 years ago, went bust. I know, I was working for them at the time.
Now here's a funny story. Supposedly they are still going, well, obviously they are! How I don't know. The guy who "owns" it has used all sorts of names -- "Data Design Interactive", "Datadesign UK Interactive" so on and so on!
Now, I hate this company, the wages they paid were awful, the games they made were awful, surely they should be shut down in some way. I think everyone in his family has owned the company, maybe even his dog!
Surely they can't still legally be trading, if the company was declared bankrupt or whatever 2 years ago? Go play Lego Rock Raiders or Nickelodeon Party Blast to see how bad they are.
Best story to come out of the company was... The owner tried to pay one guy with ice cream... true story!
The second is that for the company to keep goin when it was failing (after bankruptcy -- you work it out, it makes my head hurt) one of the artists at the time took out a 3 or 5k bank loan to give to the owner so that he could pay for stuff (including the artists wages).
He's a complete cowboy still touting his much failed GODS system.
Any help you can give to collapse this company would be great. Send constant emails to SEGA if you have to, make an online petition anything please help get rid of this disease.
A former employee of Data Design.
Also for my own benefit, please if you refer to this email in any way can you leave it anonymous. I still work in the industry and would like to do so for a long time.
Anon.
A Sega Dreamcast emulator A Sega Saturn emulator A Sega Mega Drive emulator A 10Gb Memory Stick A free PSP off Sony
1. EA Canada (93,513,089 pounds generated at UK retail) 2. Rockstar North (71,067,230) 3. Maxis (31,907,533) 4. EA Redwood Shores (30,600,306) 5. Ubisoft Montreal (22,930,009) 6. London Studios (SCEE) (22,914,433) 7. KCE Tokyo (22,127,973) 8. Sonic Team (20,762,935) 9. Codemasters (19,153,610) 10. EA LA (18,934,945)
"By showing off your modding and driving skills, you'll gain 'Respect' from the rival crew chiefs, and will soon be invited to their race events, challenge them to race 'for pinks' via video calling and bet against them for cash. As your notoriety grows, new drivers will call you up to ask to join your crew, opening up the never before seen 'crew races' where your skills at managing your drivers while you race are key to beating your rival crews."
Three thousand Jeff Minter lookalikes. Ring tone "Hymn Zone" for the kids. EA spies scoping out if it's a demographic worth buying into. Us doing our OutRun2 sermon. Assorted conversions. Recently unemployed UK developers getting religion. Disc duplication forum -- how to turn one DVD into 5000.
A site about games and game paraphernalia and how nothing's as good as we remember it, probably because we used to inhabit a FANTASY WORLD.
MICRO-BLOG
What are we half-heartedly skimming RIGHT NOW? RECENTLY...
Each post .02% worse than the last. ADVANCE NOTIFICATION OF "CHANGE" LITERALLY 30 PHOTOS FROM A MAN'S "SEGA HONEYMOON" A NASCAR TATTOO THAT TWO MEN THINK LOOKS LIKE DAYT... "EA ANNOUNCES COLLABORATION BETWEEN HOT NEW POP TA... "RICHARD JACQUES STUDIOS CONTINUES TO GO FROM STRE... CODEMASTERS HAS A GO AT 'URBAN' FOR 'FUEL' TRANS-EUROPEAN LARA CROFT STALKING UPDATE NINTENDO WINNING CRITICAL LIFESTYLE PHOTOGRAPHY BA... WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO IDIOT TOYS? THE HTML ERAS
When men used to till the pages by hand. |
SHOPS
Use our Play or Amazon Shops to buy those shit Wii games you secretly like, helping the effort. ARCHIVES
12 years of wheat and chaff in one vast and impenetrable mass. |
Some updates weren't universally hated by the entire world within seconds of being uploaded.
1. The Animal Crossing Wild World mega-feature and public-service review
2. Sonic CD - screenshot parade
3. Cream The Rabbit sexual diagrams
4. OutRun2 screenshot-taking guide for the benefit of inept journalists
5. The personal UKR SEGA Toys Homestar planetarium review
6. Trying to buy an Xbox 360 in London
7. (STILL) THE MOST AMAZING PROMOTIONAL PHOTOGRAPH OF ALL TIME
8. A trip to GamesMaster (in Peckham)
Links to that blog of yours you started up and were excited about for a whole weekend.
FRIENDS
Some people we might've MET. Or at least seen in a room and been near. One Thousand Tiny Things I Hate "LIFESTYLE"
Other sites we are happy to officially endorse without requiring Adwords spend. PRIVACY POLICY
Having one is compulsory, apparently. Ours is here. It is not meant to be funny. |
ACQUAINTANCES
People off the internet. Quality and commitment levels may vary. |
It came with the template. Maybe in 2014 we'll jump on board the Twitter train and put that in here. Or a radio. That'd be nice.