Women being represented as bimbos in games
Hardly a day goes by without some giant-breasted, wasp-waisted virtual walking wet dream designed by idiots with adolescent minds and perpetual hard-ons dropping onto some publisher’s release schedule. It’s about time we had some female role-models that weren’t also ’sassy’, ’sultry’ or ’sluttier than a roadside prostitute’.

Not enough bimbos in games
Hardly a day goes by without us waiting for some giant-breasted, wasp-waisted virtual walking wet dream designed by curve-obsessed artists with minds like the top-shelf at a dingy newsagents to drop onto our perpetual… Er. Hang on…

ThreeSpeech website
Sony UK’s attempt at an edgy community-based website couldn’t have been more ill-advised – apart from maybe the US alliwantforxmasisapsp debacle.

The problem is, on the Internet it’s really hard to gain respect when you’re essentially an extension of a corporate PR machine – especially when you initially try to pretend you’re nothing to do with Sony. (At least Major Nelson makes it very clear he’s paid by Microsoft…)

The most painful episode was when ThreeSpeech commissioned a well-known games hack to write a review of Heavenly Sword. Wait. So that’s Sony, paying someone to write a review of one of their own games. For their own website. And you expect us to like Three Speech?

People who just read the scores
4/10

Dungeons
Hey, let’s spend the next two hours of our precious gaming time exploring another dingy, boring dungeon, running around for keys, fighting identical monsters and looking for chests that contain such precious treasures as the Teflon Pants of Defecation (+2 Armor, -4 Comfort).

Unnecessary censorship
Hostel exists. Ichi The Killer exists. Pulp Fiction exists and is rightly lauded as a classic. We give these movies 18 or R ratings and let people see them, because we trust mature people to deal with this stuff. When it comes to games though we forget that people have brains, and censor or even ban them “just to be on the safe side” in case someone forgets they’re playing a videogame and goes on a killing spree.

Hey, guess what? I know this stuff isn’t real! I’m controlling it all by pressing buttons! And when I stop pressing those buttons, the stuff stops happening! It’s a bit of a clue.

Clones
Ideas are good. Ideas make good games. That game that you want us to think your game is the same as? It’s good because its designers had ideas.

Now go and have an idea. You never know, it might be a good one.

Games your nan buys you for Christmas
You asked her for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on PS3, but somehow that’s lost in the process of her writing it down on a piece of wet tissue in her spidery handwriting and showing it to a bored game shop attendant who just charges her full whack for a copy of Ben 10: Protector of Earth on PS2 because she’s old and helpless.

“Yes nan, that’s just what I asked for. Now where’s the receipt.”

Lethal game peripheral packaging
We’re sure there’s a decent reason why new joypads come in hermetically sealed plastic cocoons. If there isn’t we’re suing someone’s ass.
Even after you’ve snapped a pair of scissors, bent a kitchen knife and sliced a hole in the table with a box cutter only a small corner of one end of the Kevlar reinforced plastic can be perforated.

Frustration leads to the foolhardy bit – attempting to prise the packaging apart with your BARE HANDS – a bad move considering the plastic edges have now taken on shiv-like hand-gouging abilities.

We recommend: heavy duty gloves, goggles, a vice and a thermal lance.