Six years ago we were watching Dave Perry on Games Master, getting angry at the programme's producers for using too many PlayStation games in its challenges when it was clear they should be using the superior Sega Saturn range of software instead. In fact, it was the "Is Dave Perry A Wanker?" vote spawned by a particular Dave/Games Master incident which made UKR popular in its day, therefore everything we are now is directly down to Dave. Join with us, as we celebrate the life and career of Dave "Unstoppable Games Animal" Perry.

Hilarious "What thing are you?" quiz!
It's the hilarious trend that's sweeping the internet!

Join in the hilarity, as we ask the hilarious question: What photocopier model number are you??!

Chris in accounts was a Hewlett Packard PC-101!!! LOL!! While Mark from human resources turned out to be a Canon JP-2000! ROFL!!! It's blinking crazy!

Dave Perry -- The interview!
The Unstoppable Games Animal speaks to UKR! Six years ago we asked you to vote whether he was a wanker or not. The answer was a resounding "Yes". But he doesn't care. He remembers, but he doesn't care. He didn't get where he is today (Exeter) by caring about what people think. Our questions were engineered to allow him maximum boasting opportunity -- he did not disappoint. The Games Animal never disappoints!

UKR: How did your nickname "Games Animal" come about?

Dave "Unstoppable Games Animal" Perry: I felt the games industry lacked a 'character' other than just the usual animated rodents, robots and evangelistical programmers. Someone a bit larger than life, very crass and 'in everyone's face'. I decided to go with the moniker 'The Unstoppable Games Animal', after hearing Chuck D describe himself as an 'Unstoppable Rhyme Animal' on Public Enemy's 'Bring The Noise'. It seemed so completely over the top and sure to offend the prissy, scared-of-change, faction within the industry that I immediately went with it. It was also memorable. You imagine the first day you walk into work and proclaim yourself to be 'The Unstoppable Games Animal.' It took a lot of conviction to make work, but it did.

UKR: What sort of animal is the Games Animal? We imagine it to be a tame urban fox...

DP: Yeah, that's right. You keep thinking that...

UKR: Are you really any good at games?

DP: You don't get away with calling yourself 'The Games Animal' unless you are sure you can take all comers. Through the years, I have played in countless challenges and competitions all over the country, never turning down an opponent. I used to challenge games company experts on their own games every
month when I ran Mega Power, and before I presented Games World for Sky One I took part in a televised magazine champion challenge, where I took on and beat professional magazine players from all the major publications. I could go on, but the funny thing is, no matter how often I played, or how many
players I beat, many people still want to believe I was a fake. When in fact I was a phenomenon!

UKR: Which one game could you beat anyone at?

DP: What have you got?

UKR: Are your reflexes slowing with age? Ours are.

DP: Definitely. In my prime I used to go into an almost trance like state and look 'through' the screen, letting my reflexes respond without the slowing down effect that thought has on reaction time. These days I watch and calculate everything. I rely more on guile and experience.

UKR: Were you really set up on Games Master?

DP: You know, I filmed over 300 shows for various shows on various channels, and yet this one moment still keeps coming up. Which I guess shows what a landmark it was for people to see me 'beaten'. Yes it was a set-up. A lot of the challenges on GameMaster were set-up. It's funny that people still think that a show like GamesMaster was for real.

UKR: When did you last speak to Dominik Diamond?

DP: Don't remember. Probably the last time somebody paid me to do so.

UKR: Who's the biggest wanker -- you or Dominik?

DP: Oh me definitely, by a good two inches!

UKR: Do you mind being hated by most people in the games industry?

DP: I've always thought that any reaction is better than no reaction. The people who hate me generally mean nothing to me, and the more they bitch the more they add to my notoriety. Which is fine by me. I've certainly never been so insecure that being 'liked' would ever influence my actions or decision making process.

UKR: Why do you annoy people so much?

DP: Because I can. I like to push buttons. Some people just ask for it.

UKR: Are people just jealous of your success and TV fame?

DP: I think that is part of it. I stand up and do what many people aspire to because I don't care about other people's reactions. Nice guys always come second. Me? I scream and shout and step over people. I'll never be happy to perform in a mirror, I always want as big an audience as possible.
Underachievers with over-inflated but unjustifiable egos -- which is generally what my detractors are -- hate that. You don't win medals by sitting in the trenches.

UKR: Would games be as popular today without your input on the industy throughout the 90s?

DP: They certainly could have been bigger if people would have just followed my lead instead of sniping. What the games industry has always needed is spokespeople. Media friendly personalities. Without them it will always be vulnerable to the disbelievers and nay sayers. That is why we don't have decent games television shows or regular new slots on shows or in the tabloids. The people who control mainstream media don't 'get' games and don't believe in them. As a result, what we do get is so sanitised and diluted that it doesn't work, which means we keep getting locked into a vicious circle of mediocrity. And who's going to put them straight? Spyro the Dragon? Mario? Get real. Small mindedness and petty personal picket fencing has kept this hobby small. Only a new generation of 'Games Animals' could take this hobby to the next level.

UKR: What has been you career highlight so far?

DP: Being asked on a date by Denise Van Outen, being voted in the UK's Top 50 Bachelors by Company magazine, sharing a dressing room with the Angels on Series 5 of GamesMaster (oh yes), being asked to appear on Richard and Judy and turning it down.

UKR: We saw you on shopping channel QVC a while back. Did you sell many stereos?

DP: Ha, ha! Yeah I did actually, or they wouldn't have asked me back. I decided to do QVC for one reason -- the money was absolutely phenomenal. In one show I would get more than I did for a whole series of GamesMaster (although I shouldn't say that because many people didn't get paid for their
appearances on GamesMaster). I worked for about a year on and off for QVC, made all the money I needed, then stopped. There are certainly harder ways to make thousands and thousands of pounds than standing in front of a camera and talking people around a piece of hardware.

UKR: Did you try it on with any of the girls from the make-up shows?

DP: Listen, everybody wants a little bit of Animal in them! And who am I to deny them that?

UKR: Are you still an eligible bachelor?

DP: No. But I held out for as long as I could.

UKR: Did you ever work with a woman called Marieclare?

DP: Yes I did, at Rapide Publishing in Exeter. How do you know her? I could tell you some stories... Once in the back of a hired coach after a magazine party in London...

UKR: What's beneath the bandana? Many believe it's masking complete baldness...

DP: The Game Brain.

UKR: Describe your hair to us...

DP: Bleached peroxide yellow and spikey all over. A bit like the bastard offspring of Rod Stewart and Johnny Rotten.

UKR: Why was the bandana a Stars & Stripes one? Surely a Union Flag would've been better?

DP: I had over 70 different bandanas, but the stars and stripes one was the most memorable. I did wear a Union Jack one too, in fact the whole of Series 3 of GamesMaster saw me wearing a Union Jack bandana, and the caricature produced of me by the Rise of the Robots programmers, that adorns my new website, also has me in a Union Jack bandana. You are right, the best games player in the world was British, and I should have pushed that more.

UKR: What is your headwear of choice nowadays?

DP: Blondes.

UKR: Do you get recognised in the streets of Exeter much?

DP: I get recognised about two or three times a week still. Which is amazing, seeing as I have deliberately stepped out of the games industry limelight for the past three years. Just wait until the new website gets going.

UKR: When's your GamesAnimal.com site going to appear?

DP: November 1st.

UKR: Why should people read it?

DP: I don't want people to just read it, I want people to get involved. I am constantly looking for content, opinion and humour. I don't want this to be a site just about me preaching and boasting, I want it to be full of thousands of people preaching and boasting. I want Gamesanimal.com to be a soapbox for games players. A place to display gaming knowledge, writing talent and give an opinion. I'll provide the publicity and marketing, every one else can just use it to get published and communicate. I want all the
reviews to eventually be written and updated by the 'real' experts, the people who buy the games, I want the whole country to know what is great and what is shit about the industry, and I want Gamesanimal.com to provide an honest, uncensored forum for that. I also want to help people with any queries they have about gaming and so on. It's a lot to ask I know, but I want to provide fertile ground for the current generation of game heads like myself to spread their wings and grow. I'll pay for the bandwidth, you just bring the talent!

UKR: Will you get some new photos taken for it? That one of you wearing the bandana and leather jacket is ancient...

DP: Fuck yeah. I look so much better now. I will have to get some new ones done. But the image you are talking about is so iconic. It is everything I love about being The Animal, and everything everybody else hates.

UKR: Finally, do you have a message for your fans at UK Resistance?

DP: Slick marketing by major corporate players may have made gaming feel like a commodity that has become controlled and packaged in recent years, but it will always be your industry. Without you, the large corporations can't function. They need your money. You control your money. So ultimately you
are their boss. Don't be afraid to kick the doors down every once in a while. It is very easy to hang a man wearing a tie!

GOOD THINGS ABOUT LIVING ALONE: #1
Being able to scrape the excess margarine off the knife back into the tub, regardless of how many toast crumbs may be on it. No one's gonna see. No one cares. No one will ever know. Sometimes we just eat the margarine.

REVIEW SCORES FOR SALE
UKR is proud to announce the launch of its Custom Review Service for games industry PRs. For a one-off fee of £150, we will give YOUR GAME 10/10, say exactly what you want us to say about it, and include ANY quote you tell us to!

Simply email us the quote you'd like us to say and we'll incorporate it into a review, then upload it to the site in a 'reviews' section for you to 'discover', circulate and quote on adverts in MCV.

Quite similar to the scheme one games magazine publisher has been running for some years, in fact.

Shit things about the internet: #6: Popbitch
Headlines for October 17th:

Which man is GAY?

Which famous woman likes HAVING SEX?

Which once-interesting web site is now so full of lies that there's no point reading it any more, unless you've sent in some lies yourself and just want to see if they've uploaded them as fact?

Fun with the Fujitsu-Siemens promotional photo archive!
You've gone out. You're in town, a full 45 minutes from home, when you realise you've left your copy of Anal Airport #26 in the video recorder. Not only that, but there's a suspiciously wrinkled and damp sock on the coffee table, and your mum only went to the shop over the road to get a pint of milk before you left. It's the porn realisation cold sweat moment!

UNSPEAKABLY SHIT PHOTOSHOP JOKE OF THE WEEK FOR YOU TO EMAIL ROUND ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND CO-WORKERS LIKE YOU'RE SOME BIG FUCKING COMEDY GENIUS WHO ALWAYS FINDS EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET FIRST:

#6: A true survey about what there is on every train seat.

Other things that aren't funny any more. #6 Train journeys
It used to be so exciting. Ham sandwiches, travel Scrabble, perhaps a trip to the buffet car for a £5 packet of crisps, staring intently out of the window at the scenery and feeling the "whoosh!" kick of an oncoming intercity flashing past at the impossible speed of 125 miles an hour! Train trips used to be the highlight of the year! For a kid, catching the 14:55 to Nottingham was akin to the thrill level felt by an adult manning an Apollo trip to the moon.

But nowadays every other motherfucker has got Mission: Impossible as a ring tone, while each carriage contains at least three groups of braying university students talking TOO FUCKING LOUDLY about what banal things their crazy friend Dean did last night while drunk on three pints of stout. And the "mobile-free" carriage simply replaces the annoyance of novelty phone rings with the louder complaints of people whining to the ticket inspector about someone nine rows behind them reading a text message.

Parts of women we really like. #2:
The tits area.

Frozen in time!
When Sega sites give up. Numer Six: Barry the SuperScot's Super Sega Website!, frozen in time, August 5, 2000.

Sample quote: "After months of speculation of whether Sonic Team's "Mad Monkey Maraca 'em up", Samba De Amigo will be brought to Europe at all has been put to rest because I can exclusively reveal that Sega of Europe have the good sense of doing so! (according to Game Over)
Yes!! Now we can all in our own homes shake those Bright Red Maracas all night! Why you might (Read: "Most definitely will!") look more stupid than... er, a very stupid person".

NOTE: This youth used to hassle us endlessly for mentions/links on the old UKR. How ironic that his dream finally comes true as we are now mocking his site's death.

SUBmissions/DOMain
The only bit of the site that's getting bigger, thanks to us not having to do it. Even this intro now barely takes up more than a line.

THIS WEEK'S BEST SUBMISSION:
Aptly summarising that feeling you get upon being sent the same hilarious 9.7Mb shockwave animation for the fifth time that FUCKING morning, it's "Vib Gibbon" and his touching tale of teenage angst set in a small Scottish council estate starring Timothy Spall as unemployed coal miner Mike Hangis. Vib earns an extra ten points for his artistically justified use of the word 'cunt'.

FIRST RUNNER UP :
Actually a bit funnier than the above pic, but we cannot wholeheartedly endorse any form of humour that contains homosexual imagery. Apart from that -- excellent. From Chris Day, who we assume downloaded some gay porn movies specifically for the creation of this image. That's dedication.

THIS WEEK'S BIGGEST SUBMISSION:
From Simon Dominguez working under an ill-advised Star Wars-alike psuedonym, who we remember from years ago. He sent us a text-based featurette about some old game or something, complete with images and supplied picture captions. We smell a semi-pro freelancer, it's just all too perfect. We shall penalise and undermine his work by presenting his submission in the unglamorous Times New Roman font, thereby making it look shit.

Friday the 13th article, by NyarthMaul It's a hard life being a seasoned gamer with an old-skool pedigree. Since we all discovered emulators five years ago and duly sat down to finish every Final Fantasy clone ever programmed, our lives have suffered a furious change of pace. It's easy to be so absorbed with downloading Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza from Streamload and sobbing into a cup of instant noodles to forget where your roots are Yes, Ikaruga has its humble beginnings in Space Invaders, Unreal Tournament 2003 has its humble beginnings in 3D Monster Maze on the BBC and the end sequence to Xenogears is a shot-for-shot remake of Lunar: The Silver Star Story on the Saturn. As we're only too happy to point out to the legion of quisling teeny Playstation fucks who practically soil themselves at conventions going on about how Square games are SO BEAUTIFUL and SO ORIGINAL. This week (month? year? whatever) sees the release of John Carpenter's The Thing for Playstation 2. The Thing represents a leap in the way people think about team-mate AI. Not only do you have to balance your team's skills and decided who you can trust, but the AI characters are programmed to be making the same judgements about you. Many will claim that the implementation of these common themes in such a way will constitute a new genre, the "Paranoia Game." For this reason, we decided to take you back to the retro roots of paranoia gaming - Friday the 13th on the Spectrum. Friday the 13th was pretty simple - there were 13 or so stick men at Camp Crystal. One of them was Jason (you didn't know who) and was going to try and kill everyone. You just had to protect the campers and stop him. One might almost say it was one of those games with a simple premise and astonishing hidden depths (this and other mouthjism copyright Edge). It probably would have been as well, if it weren't for execution so pitifully, comedically bad that the game was a laughing stock in an era where the best games had graphics and dialogue worse than an 11 year old leetie's personal home page. Would a clean grotto have been less scary? Insert funny "Pop Idol" joke here. Ostensibly, there are two ways to play the game. The first is to establish a sanctuary, and lead all the kids there one at a time so that they'd be safe from Jason. They wander off eventually - I'm sure the programmers would like to believe that this is because all the NPCs are programmed with an advanced "Horror Movie Teenager" AI rather than the fact that you wouldn't wipe your arse on the game code. The other way is to stalk around the camp, hoping to unmask the killer. Now, there's plenty wrong with this game. For a start, there's only one real event which you can run into if you're lucky, and that's Jason trying to kill someone. If this happens then Jason will attack because he's obviously not going to let you live once you've seen him, so either he kills you or you kill him in which case you win. However, this genius system of "Only one event and when it happens the game stops" only gives you a glimpse into the laughable gameplay twists that make this one of the classics of our "Wanking over the Game Over advert in ACE" period. The sharper among you will have spotted that the game has a pretty strong premise (kids to protect, hidden killer) but that on the score of why it's so riotous we have thus far remained as silent as the mutilated corpse of Trip Hawkins in that dream you get where you're mutilating the corpse of Trip Hawkins. Fair enough, here is the reason. If you take a kitchen knife and stab one of the campers with it, they lost hit points. If they're Jason, though, they drop their disguise and fight back. One of you wins, the game ends. It is therefore possible to finish the game in minutes by simply thwacking every character oncea round the head with a plank until you find Jason. Use of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad method of interrogation in this way turns the game from a horror movie to one of those black and white films starring two men in workman's overalls, one of whom may or may not be carrying a plank on his shoulder (and provided me with seven and a half minutes of endless fun when I was in secondary school). Where the game really does goose it up though, is the fact that in this game Jason Voorhees is about as tough as a regular guy, only twenty times stupider. Now, Jason's a six foot tall indestructible zombie with a huge arsenal of weapons. You're meant to be scared of him. He's unstoppable. In this game, you can kill him by throwing a spoon at him. I think it's a spoon, anyway. There are about 800 weapons in this game (chainsaw, pitchfork, sword, dagger, er, spoon...) and they all look like sticks. This causes any feeling of tension the game might have salvaged to go soaring out of the window - it's like playing a version of Resident Evil where the Nemesis can be killed by flicking him with a rubber band a few times. All of the clever game design thus comes down to one event - one stickman picks up a stick, another stickman attacks him with a stick and they hit each other with sticks until one of the stickmen kills the other stickman with his stick. A stickman and Kenny, yesterday. The stick that resembles a yale key is actually a chainsaw. 00000 L0L j00 $uXX0r j4$0n 0wnZ j00!!!!!!1111111 This is where the game got me hooked. Once I could locate and fillet Jason in under a minute, I started to take on other challenges. I became obsessed with killing Jason with absolutely every weapon on the map. I began stalking him. Eventually I turned my attention to the other campers, seeing how fast I could exterminate every other living being in the camp. Now the game had some sense of purpose for me. The tension that the programmers intended to be in there was breathing down my neck, flowing from the unspoken terror that Jason might get to one of the kids with a blunt gardening instrument before I did. At some point in the future, it is my fond wish to reprogram this game so that the loading screen says "You are Jason! Some muppet is hanging around your killing grounds and shafting your prey first! Dispose of him and the other teenagers... UNLESS THEY DISPOSE OF YOU FIRST!"

CLEVEREST REFERENCE:
An Asian girl using the internet to download photos of European schoolboys, cleverly turning the usual order of things on its head for comic effect. This came from Jim Blonde. Well done there.

WITH MERIT :
Yeah! Girls are shit! Girls suck! PCs rule! From frustrated IT technician (most likely) Murray Philbrick.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED :
Using the popular man's-thought-coming-from-off-the-side device, Murray's second submission deals with the modern day equivalent to mum finding magazines under your matress.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED :
Two exceedingly large submissions from Charles Bedwell, who obviously doesn't understand the concept of bandwidth limitations on small, non-profit making UK games web sites.

LEFTOVER SHE-YIT:
Ms Dynamite showing you can take the girl out of the council estate but not the council estate out of the girl -- from Vib Gibbon again, internet girlfriends from Jim Blonde, and two banner-shaped attempts from Dave Cleeve.

IN OFF-SITE NEWS...
"Screwball McGoo" sent us a link -- not the way we'd like things to work, but acceptable we suppose -- to this site: http://sluggy.keenspace.com/d/20020127.html

Dan Thompson sent us a link to here -- mental men dressed like Sonic and Shen Mue characters.

And you could do it too. Submit to us and we'll upload it. Although we're thinking of initiating some sort of quality control from now on, now that all the good people seem to have sent stuff in.

Richard Jacques Update
Rich sent us an email telling us what he did at ECTS. It seemed to involve a lot of drinking, and frankly we're worried and think he needs to start taking things a bit easier. We tried emailing a reply, but the domain name 'richardjacques.co.uk' was rejected by our email server. In fact the whole site seemed to disappear for a while. It's back now.

PICTURES WE JUST FOUND ON THE INTERNET, CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH, BUT REALLY WANT TO PUT UP ANYWAY:
Some foot fetish material.

It's amazing what you innocently stumble across while
researching serious video game news.
http://dailydosage.com/wnew.html

Your task for the next two weeks...
Tell people the reason you haven't got a girlfriend is because you're gay. That'll shut them up.