Yeah, yeah, "it's months since you did the last one" etc. etc. What, do you think we spend ALL day surfing the 'net looking at pictures of girls!?

...and at time of going to press, Squall is WINNING! Get over to GameFaqs and vote for Knuckles NOW, you lady bastards! The pride of Sega is at stake - Knuckles MUST go on to face Vincent Valentine in the bracket 2 final!

London!

Australia!

New York!

Three cheers for Sega! Now it's taking up the burden of having to educate our children, via the medium of logic puzzles in its new PSP game Sega Brain Trainer Portable.

It's sure to rock, probably hard, and we'll no doubt convince ourselves we like it even though it's a bit shit, just like we did with all those Dreamcast games.



We haven't got "anything funny" to say about this. This is one of those updates that's more like us going "Hey, here's some interesting news about Sega" than "Here's a funny joke". So don't make yourself look stupid by posting on the internet about this not being funny. It's not meant to be -- like Channel 4 News, or Panorama. Nobody posts on the Channel 4 News site that it isn't funny.




We'd buy it if there was a section on how to talk to girls about things other than the internet, video games and if they remember Babylon 5.

OTHER POSSIBLE "JOKE" CAPTIONS FOR THE WOMAN PICTURE:

"Just hold this while I get the bucket of spunk"

"Just hold this while I get the transparent plastic toilet seat"

"Just hold this while I find the bit of pipe that goes from his penis to your mouth"

"Just hold this while the bath fills up with piss"

THE OBLIGATORY LINK TO THE OFFICIAL SITE SO YOU CAN COPY THIS FOR YOUR OWN BLOG:
brain.sega.jp

What with the recent announcement of Shenmue 3, we feel it's time we did an Edge-style retrospective of the development of the video game "Epic," just to show that such a thing CAN be done in less than twenty five thousand words. It's easy, all you have to do is remember that video gaming is an area that's always riding the wave of what you can get away with on the technology and resources available, therefore the milestones are by and large defined by the limitations. Hence:

THE PROBLEM: Shigeru Miyamoto needs a memorable character for his new game. However, he has only sixteen pixels and a handful of colours to work with, no graphic artist on the project and no skill at drawing faces himself.

THE RESULT: He gives the character a big nose and moustache to hide his face and plumber's dungarees to make the arms visible against the body. Mario and the character-based franchise phenomenon are born.

THE PROBLEM: Hideo Kojima wants to make a Rambo style game, but the MSX-1 can't keep track of more than two or three bullets without the machine having an eppy.

THE RESULT: He makes a game where the idea is NOT to shoot people. Metal Gear and the cross-genre story-based epic are born.

THE PROBLEM: Will Wright is a sadistic cunt who wants to convince the world that a game where you have to do the washing up for eighteen hours is more fun than one where you shoot zombies in the teeth and kung-fu people's knees off.

THE RESULT: The Sims.

THE PROBLEM: Yu Suzuki is a sadistic cunt who wants to convince the world that a game where you have to do the washing up for eighteen hours is more fun than one where you shoot zombies in the teeth and kung-fu people's knees off.

THE RESULT: Shenmue.

Let's hope that part three adheres to Yu's world-beating formula of one hour of awkward button mashing interspersed with twenty nine hours of doing the washing up.

First there was You Got The Horn, now comes...



Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is finally out today on Xbox and PlayStation2! We gave it 8/10 in a proper review we wrote of it and said it's "an essential collection of the finest Sega puzzle fun" (that's what we sound like when writing seriously!).

We've been anonymously emailed loads of hi-res photos of Yuji Naka visiting a German hedgehog sanctuary!

We thought about maybe not using them, before thinking "who the hell else in the world is going to want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary apart from us?" and deciding to use them anyway.



The only other person in the world who might conceivably want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary apart from us is Adam Doree. He'll be really jealous when he sees these! Uploading these means we love Sega MORE than Adam does!




Perhaps Naka-san is researching about hedgehogs for a new Sonic The Hedgehog game. It might be for Xbox 360 or PlayStation3! It could even be unveiled in a few weeks at the Tokyo Game Show! Imagine that! He might be HAVING AN IDEA for a new Sonic character in his genius mind right there!




You'd think he'd be a bit bored of researching hedgehogs, what with having to do things about hedgehogs for 15 years now. With Google, you can find out everything there is to know about hedgehogs in about five minutes.




It's a HEDGEHOG, Yuji. Don't act like you're suprised about what it is or what one looks like (unless you're genuinely surprised that German ones are brown and not blue like they are in Japan).




The male hedgehog gently holds the female before sex.




Yuji Naka's rubbish! He's only just about as tall as a car! It's amazing how quickly you go off someone when you realise they're actually very short.




Perhaps he stroked and caressed small children when researching for NiGHTS?





We really will upload anything we get sent these days. Here's two men standing in a sort of garden. We're well aware of how this isn't funny, so don't post on the internet saying this isn't funny.




1500 euros can provide food and clothing for 125 African children for a year -- or keep 6 German hedgehogs living in luxury for a month. If you've got any hi-res photos of things happening at SEGA you'd like to email in to us, please email them in to us. We will almost certainly use them.

EDIT:
Stefan Walters "off of" SPOnG said he might conceivably want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary as well because he loves Sega about as much as us and Adam Doree, and he does own a Sega iDog so we're inclined to believe him.

At three in the morning last night after a particularly vivid dream about Star Soldier, we found ourselves wondering whatever became of "Master Takahashi;" the main sprite for the Nintendo version of Sega's Wonderboy. One of the greatest gamers of all time, and the possessor of the legendary "16-blast" technique which allowed him to press a fire button sixteen times in one second (back in the days before autofire joypads).

...and so...

TOP 5 GOOGLE RESULTS FOR "16-BLAST!"

1) 16 policemen amongst 18 dead in Iraq blast
2) 16 die in French blast
3) 16 years have passed since the blast at Chernobyl
4) Jamba Juice Speciality Smoothies: 16-Size Green Tea Matcha Blast! (Bookmarked that one)
5) 16 square miles of densely populated area were destroyed by the Hiroshima blast

...and so...

We went back to bed and cried under the duvet with a Mars bar. We want to go home, but mum lost the house to pay for our degree in Journalism from Tottenham University.


BONUS GAMER FACT! For those of you who peeked at the internet to find the answer, Takahashi is at Hudson and happily still living the golden days (at a job he got for PLAYING VIDEO GAMES) now that his career as an actor and idol singer (which he got for PLAYING VIDEO GAMES) has faded. (CUNT.)

Featuring the squarest blocks and an enhanced pushing engine, new Lara Croft: The Elixir of Life puts you at the heart of the crate pushing experience like no other video game!



This is from mobile phone game Tomb Raider: Elixir of Life, or as we refer to it Tomb Raider: Gradual Decline Into Miserable Lonely Death. If this was an internet game, we'd click on the link then get bored before it even finished loading. This is also the sort of selling of cheap, farmed-out, generic tat to kids for lots of money that makes us WISH WE'D THOUGHT OF DOING IT OURSELVES.

And the answer is "YES!" And the qualifying part of the statement is "ESPECIALLY IF YOU LIVE IN AUSTRALIA!" -- thanks to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image letting some people (probably students but we'll let them off seeing as they're doing good things for Sega) do a Sonic The Hedgehog exhibition in their gallery.



The Australians are particularly well known for their appreciation of fine art.

sonic the hedgehog

"All users will be awarded a special Yahoo Mag! Prizes to be awarded after September 19, 2005."

|~| (Slashed wrist emoticon)

...seeing as it's the only games magazine left we can take the piss out of without getting another written warning. The worst this lot can do is send us a stroppy email or post that we're a cunt on the forum! And that happens every day so we don't mind!



360 is LIFESTYLE! You can tell it's lifestyle because the logo's in white. After it sells no copies because everyone thinks it's a car magazine that some kid's dropped on the games shelf, they'll make it look like a games magazine by making the logo red with a yellow dropshadow. Probably by issue four.




TYPO ON PAGE 12! "Quality, innovation and excellent are paramount". Having a typo in the bit where you say how quality you are is a world-class balls-up. Theyve realy set they’re stal otu their! In issue two they should say this was an ironic joke that set out to lampoon other lower quality magazines, the sort of shite rags that would have spelling mistakes in the bit where they say how excellent they are.




AN IRONIC PANEL ABOUT WHERE X05 *WON'T* BE HELD! This is humorous lifestyle journalism at its finest! Hull! Ha ha! Yes, imagine if Microsoft DID hold X05 in Hull. The thousand pictures these words paint are all hilarious. Imagine J Allard in Hull. He'd get kicked in for looking gay within seconds! We can't stop laughing at that mental image. There must LITERALLY be a joke every 60 seconds in their zany office.




DVD AND CD REVIEWS. These'll be ditched during issue 7's sales crisis emergency redesign meeting after the first ABC sales figures come out next February. It will be replaced by "Tips", as everyone realises the readers don't care if Mike Richardson likes Goldfrapp or not.

APART FROM THAT
It's not bad and could actually have been worse in several areas. Everyone thinks the design is adequate, but feels the copy could "do with some work" and no way should it be FOUR WHOLE POUNDS. We'd give it 5/10, but only because we can put it on expenses. If you don't work where you can buy magazines on expenses, it's more like a 3.

NEXT WEEK:
EDGE issue 154 goes under the microscope!*

*Joke for management.

GLOBAL NEWS FLASH OF SERIOUS MEGA-EXCLUSIVE POWER!

We just found this in some of Microsoft's official Xbox 360 marketing materials -- a table indicating that backwards compatibility with Xbox 1 games is a feature ONLY available if you own a 360 hard drive.



This almost certainly means you have to download patches to make old games work, but we're already massively out of our depth with all this technical stuff so can't say for sure.

...THEY'VE ONLY GONE AND MADE THE EVERQUEST II ANTONIA-HUNT BITCHES WEAR BIKINIS!!



There's a link at the bottom of this page that says "see all 178 images": IGN: Quest For Antonia Pageant. See what you've got coming, UK Frag Dolls? You should probably all go out for a run tonight, instead of eating buns on the sofa.

We've never seen a game character so perfectly posed for the insertion of a Photoshop penis as Lara Croft here, from Tomb Raider: Legend.

Is this an attempt at viral marketing? Do they WANT every internet forum to be full of fake Lara Croft blow-job porn to hype next-gen Lara's all-formats Q1 2006 release?



We would make one ourselves, but there's a big difference between getting caught with Blogger open on your work PC (verbal warning) and photos of men's cocks (massive personal shame).

Wow! What a day that was! Thanks to everyone who attended the UKR Lan Party, a good time was definitely had by all!

Now, the PHOTOS!!



Forum mod PK-Jones PUMPING THE MAD DANCING SKILLZ on DDR Revolution!!




Mikey900 kicked some ASS at Halo 2 because he had previously ran out of chewing gum!!!




This is Sarah. She arrived at 4:00pm, then left crying at 4:07pm. Thanks for coming, Sarah! Hope to see you at the next meet!! :)

The role of women in videogames - sorry, Women In Videogames - is as follows.

- Getting shot
- Getting stabbed
- Getting blown up
- Getting shot
- Getting kicked to death
- Getting choked with fibrewire
- Getting shot
- Getting cut up with chainsaws and katanas
- Getting hurled from fifteenth story windows
- Getting their hair caught in a waterwheel and dragged backwards over it repeatedly until dead from drowning or broken neck
- Getting slowly crushed in the gears of a giant music box
- Getting shot

...JUST THE SAME as the role of men in videogames. DO YOU SEE HOW THAT WORKS, girls, or are you too busy playing Da Urbz on your pastel pink DS?

Good old Konami! Supporting the contentious "women in games" issue with wrestling game Rumble Roses XX for Xbox 360. See? There are LOADS of women in games. What the hell are these moaning lesbians on about?



It's Rumble Roses XX on Xbox 360. It's got hot bitches in it, so we'll probably end up going on about it loads, then taking lots of screenshots of gussets and cleavages when the game eventually appears on Bittorrent, then uploading them with the sort of sexist comments not seen since women were given the right to speak in the 1970s. God, we're getting predictable.

This update is entirely for the benefit of those who use NewsNow. It's sort of a joke about the bottom-feeders of the news-gathering scene who just copy news off other sites all day as their main job that they get paid for. It's too hot in the office to think it through any more than that.

Just scroll down and look at all those whopping tits, then come back tomorrow for a joke about LAN parties.

A bunch of Las Vegas hookers ranging from $100 to $250 an hour for a full service (A-levels, CIM, French, oral W/O) have applied to be the living embodiment of Everquest II box-art-girl Antonia Bayle.

And they've all got HUGE MONSTER TITS! If this is what they mean by "getting more women into games", we're ALL FOR IT!



This is probably the only time it's ever been cool to work for IGN. Look, some quite pretty girls have been told that THEIR ONLY JOB FOR TODAY is to smile at you. Your self-esteem would rocket up from minus ten to minus five, or perhaps even zero (until you get home and accidentally look in a mirror).




Imagine if you worked for IGN. You'd work with fat, over-confident, loud American teenagers in an office that STINKS of sweat and last night's dried-up spunk, and you'd only talk about the relative merits of Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 all day, perhaps pausing to sit in silence and play World of Warcraft while eating potato chips for an hour at lunch time. Then, one day, you get sent out to take photos of THESE!




It's like if UbiSoft had a bigger budget for hiring Frag Dolls. Aleks Krotoski isn't going to like this, it's set back the cause of "women in games" by at least a decade. Well done, sexist MMORPG boffins!

LOADS MORE GRINNING, FAKE-TANNED WHORE PHOTOS HERE:
IGN: Antonia Finalists Dazzle in Vegas

"We'll be pretty much just playing Halo 2 and Pro Evo all day" said clan founder Damien Dvorjees, aka AMBASSADOR_KOSH on Xbox Live, aka COMMANDER SINCLAIR on Starcraft, aka ZATHRUS on World of Warcraft and aka LONDO MOLARI on Guild Wars.



"This joke has probably already been done by The Onion, but we can't be bothered to check" said clan second-in-command Michael Zorg, on the clan's official blog.

We've come into possession of some brand new, never-seen-before screens of Sega's upcoming sequel to Feel the Magic (aka Project Rub) for Nintendo DS.

It looks fantastic!



The game utilises the Nintendo DS stylus -- poke it in and out of the microphone socket to get the girl excited.




Wi-Fi compatibility lets a friend join in!




Sega's kooky visual style is as impressive as ever.

Thanks to Virtua Tennis World Tour on PSP:



Then we're going to imagine Maria Sharapova doing "powerful strokes" for a bit.

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS:
JESUS GOD WOW!!! SONY ROCKS! PSP RULES! 50/10

Just get one of these and a bit of wire or straightened-out coathanger:



PRO TIP: Try to get one that comes with a "remote control" for the convenience of changing channel from the comfort of your sofa.

8231 hits for people saying "Why is there no cosplay porn?" on forums.

1023948 hits for "PORN COSPLAY ANIME FUCK RAPE HENTAI SNUFF ASS GANGBANG" and so forth.

29347 hits for "Welcome to cosplayporn.com, the premier web search and information resource on the internet!"

359312 hits for "This page is under construction. Cosplayporn.com is coming soon! Reserve this domain name NOW!"

236 hits for the Ulala thing we did a few months ago.

9834 hits for people who stole the idea and linked it on their blogs.

450 hits for videos and DVDs of suicidally uncomfortable Japanese girls dressing up as nurses, schoolgirls and tennis players culminating in the removal of their underwear and the disappearance of their abdomen in a snowstorm of digital mosaic.

This.



This is what it's come to. You can't even use the internet to find PORN any more. It's not as if we ask much. Freedom. The pursuit of happiness. JPGs of Shenhua and Nozomi impaled on a double-ended length of plastic.

Ryo can bring the pizza in.

By Consumer Editor Michael Zorg

Confused about HDTV formats? Then be confused about HDTV formats no more!

HDTV BUYING TIPS:
From what we can work out, there are two kinds of HDTV set -- EXPENSIVE SILVER WIDE ONES, and CHEAP BLACK SQUARE ONES.





CONCLUSION:
The expensive silver wide ones are probably best to buy because they cost more.

SCORES:
Silver Wide Ones 5/5
Black Square Ones: 3/5

What next for the crusading Miami attorney?

1. People who LOUDLY CHEW GUM
2. Asians and blacks

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

1. An office re-fitted in the 1980s or early 90s
2. Some imagination
3. A willingness to affect change in your life.




HOW TO PLAY:
Try to calm down a bit. Lean back in chair. Unclench fists and teeth and buttocks. Look at ceiling for at least an hour. Try to calm down a bit more. Imagine each square is something you're angry about. See angry squares merge and disappear. Imagine light fittings are things you're frustrated with. Imagine them also joining together and disappearing. Unclench fists and teeth and buttocks again. Go home, and when asked if everything is OK, say "IT IS FINE" and lie down until it is tomorrow.

WAYNE'S WRITING TUTOR SAYS: "I'm a big fan of EA's FIFA series and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the final version. The game is very popular with many other players, especially when we travel together for away matches, and it's a great honour for a young player like myself to be chosen to be featured on the cover of FIFA," said Wayne Rooney -- IN EXCHANGE FOR MONEY.



"Your face, Wayne. HOLD IT OVER YOUR FACE"

This is going to save the controller-faking community thousands of man-hours over the coming months.

Here's a Nintendo Revolution Controller we just made:



We made it look like a sick puppy with a squiffy eye so it appeals to the female demographic!

Nintendo Controller Fake Editor - by claudiotosado

It's from EA game From Russia With Love, so it's not like we'll ever see this again:



The artists have trimmed off about three stone and a few centimetres of jaw bone, apart from that it's quite accurate.


THE SOURCE MATERIAL:



UKR FACT: We had a pretend girlfriend called Natasha for two years, so our parents didn't worry about us being (a) lonely, or (b) gay.

Xbox 360 Ridge Racer 6 is going to feature HEAD-TO-HEAD ONLINE RACING, and better still, you can UPLOAD YOUR TIMES to a central server!

The press release spells out how genius Namco is going to make these amazing new gaming features happen:

"Utilizing a Worldwide Player Matching system, players can match up against drivers from around the world in intense head-to-head drift racing match ups"

It's one brand new feature after another!



Three cheers for magical innovationalists Namco! Oh, and Ridge Racer 6 is now confirmed as an Xbox 360 launch game, which is like PROPER NEWS.

There's a game called F.E.A.R. coming out on PC. In the amazing, ironic way our mind works, this got us thinking about the Ian Brown song that's also called F.E.A.R. -- in which Ian 'Crack-face' Brown sings a whole song only using words that start with F, E, A and R.

AND THEN!
We though we'd try and come up with some F.E.A.R.'s for what the game F.E.A.R. might be about. We're not going to bother trying to make them rhyme with each other, that'd be going too far.

You might want to skip this update and come back tomorrow. We're not expecting anyone to email in saying they liked this, if that helps take the pressure off.

OUR VIDEO GAME F.E.A.R.'s (please read them in the style of the Song):

Fantastic Early Artwork Renders
Futuristic Earth's Apocalyptic Remains
Find Every Ancient Route
Familiar Exploration, Awful Resolution

Forgotten Enemy After Revenge
Fight Endless AI Robots
Fucking Enemies All Respawn
Final Enemies Are Repetitious

Fire Energy At Retreaters
Frag Everything And Run
Fuck Every American Retard
For Elevator, Access Required

Fire Everything At Robotnik
Fight Earth, Alien Race!
Fire EMP, Axe, Revolver
For Ever As Ryu

Futile EA Annual Remake
False Enthusiasm At Retail
Feeling Endless Aeris Remorse
Forgettable Ending Adds Regret

Face Evil Attacking Relentlessly
Something Something, Ages Reloading.

That's it. That's how funny we are these days. With this and a rubbish joke about the RIAA suing radio listeners we've officially lost too many brain cells to be left in charge of web sites.

*JOE PASQUALE LOOKS ON FEELING SUPERIOR SMILEY FACE*

THE ALL-TIME LIST OF FUNNY THINGS:

1: Fat women tripping over and falling into fountains (14th consecutive year at number one!)
2: Really excited dogs
3: Someone knocking a cup of tea off their desk and it going right in their bag
...
...
...
9,999,998: Dad’s bowel cancer
9,999,999: The new Ricky Gervais sitcom 'Extras'
10,000,000: UK:Resistance circa 2005

The drama queens at anti-piracy boredom-enforcer ELSPA have decided to jump on the "blame benefit claimants for everything" bandwagon, using such ANGRY TABLOID PHRASES as "falsely claiming benefits" and "lining their pockets with tax payers money" in an attempt to make video game piracy sound as important and dangerous as, say, smuggling drugs or having a gun.

Here's how they've tried to make video game piracy sound as important and dangerous as smuggling drugs or having a gun:



Tax payers money? TAX PAYERS MONEY? We'd rather it went to video game pirates -- who at least give us something in return -- than students. What's ELSPA doing about students? NOTHING. That's the real crime. If you eliminate the students, you eliminate the demand for getting things for free. We'd even vote for the Liberal Democrats if they said they were going to "stop students".

PS:
We want a secret cupboard. Their secret cupboard was obviously rubbish. Ours would be so secret that Michael Rawlinson wouldn't ever find it.

By way of an apology for all the bad things we've been saying about women recently, here's a photo of a lovely one in her underwear -- proving that the USELESS MOANING BITCHES do sometimes serve some sort of purpose: Employee of the Week.



Next week: Abi Titmuss. After that: Jennifer Ellison. After that: Abi Titmuss. After that: Jennifer Ellison. After that: Abi Titmuss. After that: Jennifer Ellison. After that: Abi Titmuss. After that: Jennifer Ellison. After that: Abi Titmuss. BUT THEN... Jennifer Ellison again.

After this we'll stop. Promise.

A SQUARE PEG IN A WORLD OF ROUND HOLES
By Commander Michael Zorg

STARRING:

- Claudia Christian as L-shaped Girl

- Michael Zorg as Steve Square

Sometimes you feel like you just don't fit in. That pretty orange square over there -- what would she ever see in a stupid old multi-coloured square? Not only a stupid old multi-coloured square, but a useless, rubbish diagonal square that's orange in one corner and grey in the other and doesn't fit into any holes at all!

Oh yes, that's me all right -- Steve Square, the original misfit in the Lumines world. But don't worry about poor old Steve. It's always been like this for me, ever since I was born on the wrong side of the screen. "Just pile the useless diagonal ones over there" says the voice of the Controller, dumping me and the other unwanted diagonals on the far edge while he has fun organising all the prettier and cooler straight-split conventional squares.

Oh yes. Nobody wants us diagonal squares. We're a liability! I tell you, some days I wish I'd never been dropped.

Today was another of those days. Those same days. The uniform squares all piled up together, chaining, having fun, linking together and disappearing in beams of light -- and all us useless diagonals dumped in a messy pile. No one cares about us enough to work us out.

Oh, and here comes another one. Another useless diagonal, getting dumped in the miscellaneous pile and forgotten about until it's Game Over.

No, wait! It's not a diagonal square, it's a different shape! It's a... it's a three of one colour and one of another colour one -- IT'S A GIRL CUBE! And she's coming down my side of the screen!!

Oh, but hang on. What's the point getting excited? Diagonals aren't compatible with other shapes. She'll just get stuck with me until it's Game Over time and she'll hate every second of it.

Here she is now.

"Sorry" she said, as she landed awkwardly beside me.

Wow. What a beautiful square she was. Three orange mini squares and one grey one for a face! Such a sweetie.

"Sorry" she said again, "I didn't mean to touch you. Sorry" she added, as she rotated her pretty grey face further away from me and landed beside me, her beautiful orange side pressing my awkward, mis-matched grey and orange side.

"Oh that's fine, I'm just... waiting" I said, hoping she hadn't noticed my stupid diagonal pattern and how stupid and ugly it looked. She obviously would though. She'd notice and ignore me, waiting for a better all-orange square to dock herself with. They all do. I'm used to it by now. It's the way for all us diagonals.

"Are you... a diagonal?" she asked, without even looking at me to check. She must've noticed my ugly diagonal deformity from the top of the screen -- no, wait -- she'd have noticed it from the Pending Column over on the left before she even got on the screen! That's how stupid and ugly us diagonals look. I bet she was really sad when she got plonked down next to me.

"Um..." there was no denying it, "yes, I'm a diagonal. Are you a..." I paused. What's the word for something that's three of one colour and one of another? Oh my god! What on earth do you call something like that?!

She laughed nervously, like she knew I was struggling and wanted to help me out. "Oh, I'm just a stupid odd shape" she said, "there's not even a name for the shape I am!" she added, rotating her grey square face one rotation away so I couldn't see her lovely single grey square.

"Oh, I don't know" I joked, awkwardly. You're a sort of... L shaped!"

"No, I'm not, I'm a rubbish square with one bit missing. I don't fit in and... and..." she tailed off.

"And what?" I asked.

"And... no other squares ever want to go beside me because I'm all awkward and ugly and don't match!"

And with this the poor little L-shaped girl square started sobbing, as over on the popular side of the screen a whooshing sound emanated from the partying, collapsing neat rows of popular uniform squares.

"Don't cry!" I said, "we're all funny shaped a bit! Look at me! I go orange-grey up one side, then grey-orange up the other! I'm rubbish, me!"

She didn't look at me, she just carried on crying and staring on the ground.

"Look! I'm diagonal! I don't fit in anywhere!" I said, as I rotated one rotation to the right to prove my point, bringing my stupid lopsided grey quarter to the top of my cube nearest L-girl.

"Look!"

The L-shaped girl rotated her grey face upwards one rotation, but still couldn't see me.

"Rotate one step further and look at my stupid, ugly diagonal face!" I shouted!

The L-shaped girl slowly rotated one step further around, bring her grey face square level with my grey corner square. And... OH MY GOD! Her orange lower square matched my orange lower square too! We were... JOINED! Suddenly we matched PERFECTLY! This was like NOTHING THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE!

Her grey face square and orange lower body square perfectly matched my grey top-diagonal square and orange bottom-diagonal square! Then another two diagonals fell on top of us making a PERFECT CUBE!!

Light exploded! A whooshing sound filled my ears! Myself and the L-shaped girl became ONE CUBE! Our faces JOINED, in a BEAUTIFUL ARTY WAY not a HORRIBLE HORROR WAY! We existed only as beings of light and evaporated like all the other cubes, freed from the chains of block-based existence and soaring off into the night sky! It was beautiful! We were together, but without the awkwardness of having to speak to each other because we were gaseous beings of light without mouths!

Then we sort of became solid for a while and had sex in all three positions and I spunked on her lower orange square and got some on her upper grey square.

THE END.

This is Japanese opposition politician Yoji Nagaoka. His claim to fame, as of yesterday, is that he hung himself - because of "Concerns over postal privatisation."

This is EXACTLY what we need more of. Do you even dare to consider the good that could be done if normal people were prone to indiscriminately committing honourable suicide? Imagine getting up in the morning to be greeted by the following headlines:

BILL GATES HANGS SELF OVER UN-BACKLIT SP OUTSELLING XB IN JAPAN

PETER MOLYNEUX CREATES COMPLETELY UN-BUGGED GAME, HANGS SELF FOR RUINING RECORD

(Ha ha, the very idea)

TRIP HAWKINS HANGS SELF ON GENERAL FUCKING PRINCIPLE

JACQUES: "ANYONE WHO LIKES ME CAN COME AND LIVE IN MY HOUSE AND DO MY LAUNDRY FOR ME AND CUT MY TOENAILS AND MAKE ADORABLE LITTLE LUNCHBOXES FOR ME FULL OF LITTLE SONIC THE HEDGEHOGS MADE OUT OF MEATBALLS WITH COCKTAIL STICKS STUCK IN THEM"

Actually, that last one was just a dream we had after eight hours of drinking Diamond White. We know that Sonic's nose would be made out of an anchovy because we experimented with raisins, chocolate chips and those evil little oriental pickles that taste like crap. We were going to send it to Rich, but it went stale in the time we spent staring at it and trying to work up the courage to do it so we threw it out of the window and sat at the kitchen table weeping uncontrollably instead.

Turns out star PSP game Lumines was designed ON PURPOSE to make us like it and feel happy:

'Lumines has "call & response" that lets users feel music with not only ears but eyes and a body. Thus, we could make a game that satisfies physiological feelings such as "feel good" and "fun".'

That explains why playing Lumines makes us feel as happy as that time the doctor put us on a combination of Prozac and Zoloft after we had that month when we couldn't get out of bed for crying constantly!



Those strange, unusual feelings we've been having -- they are "fun" and "feeling good" as experienced by our eyes and body! Now we know what fun feels like. We must try to feel it more. If you would like to assist us in the experiencing of "fun" -- or know where fun can be had -- please get in touch. We can be fun buddies.

Full Q&A with Lumines producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi here. It's a bit plain-looking because we stole it off the internet somewhere and don't have a non-Blogger page template, but is an entertaining read if you're also newly obsessed about Lumines.