So I'm close to finishing my first album 'The Indoor Type'. One of the songs is about video games. It's called Pacman Vs The Zombie Apocalypse. Check it out below :D
Pacman VS The Zombie Apocalypse by philhaynes

Just something I wrote about my life with video games so far :) Feel free to check it outhttp://www.myspace.com/philhaynes/music/songs/the-ballad-of-wasted-youth-75689228. I've been told I mumble to here are the lyrics :)

I got a Sega Master System in Christmas '92
It came with Double Dragon and the mighty Sonic 2
It wasn't quite up with the times but it was good enough for me
It had all the cool games like Speedball and Shinobi

The big black box served me well but it was time for us to part
So I got me a Sega Megadrive 'cause the sprites moved so fast
They called it blast processing but to me it was witchcraft
But there was no denying that Sonic kicked mario's arse

Then came the age of polygons and lazy summer days
We spent them all in a room playing split screen co-op games
There were times we got competitive, I'm not going to lie
But that's why those guys at Rare made Perfect Dark and Goldeneye

Me and my friends decided to make a short film. I did the music :) Please let me know what you think of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbTSTNNPoGQ

I don't know why it took me so long, but I absolutely ADORE the trilogy now. I bought Prime 1 back on the GameCube but I couldn't get into it. I had trouble working out where to go and the controls were pretty unintuitive. When Corruption came out on Wii I figured I'd give the series another chance and found it a bit easier to get into, but still didn't particularly enjoy it that much. Then, when the Trilogy was released on Wii I decided to give it yet another chance, and for whatever reason I'm now completely obsessed with the Metroid franchise and Samus Aran as a character. I finished Prime 1 in two 6 hour sittings and I'm now onto the second - which I've heard is the hardest out of all of them - so I decided to play it on Veteran on my first time through! Y'know - for fun :P

At the moment Metroid is all I play. If I'm not soldiering through Echoes (just got to the Dark world) I'm playing Fusion on my GBA... or I'm reading stuff about Samus' back story... I'm tempted to buy Super Metroid on virtual console now. I had the game when I was a kid but hated it because I always got stuck and couldn't work out where to go or what I had to do... which made me hate it because I spent months saving up the money for it. Maybe its time to let the bitterness go and give it another chance :)

I'm an avid Wii gamer. I always post on Wii forums (both here and Gametrailers) and own almost 30 Wii games as well as many titles from Wiiware and virtual console. That said, I am NOT a blind fanboy. I also own an Xbox 360 and PS3 (the latter being my preferred system) as well as 20 other consoles. I am living proof that Wii can cater for more 'traditional' gamers and can function as a main console. Let's see... Strategy? Check. Batallion Wars and (to an extent) trauma centre will provide me with hours of strategy-based fun. Puzzles? Look no further than World of Goo and Zack & Wiki.. Platformer? Duh! Mario Galaxy or De Blob! Rail shooter? HOTD2&3 or HOTD: Overkill. Sandbox game? Godfather: Blackhand Edition or Scarface. Violence for the sake of violence? Check. Manhunt 2, No More Heroes and Madworld is out soon...

I could go on but you see the point. Fact is, Wii caught third parties off guard but support is slowly building up this year. I've already bought 2 third party games - Deadly Creatures and HOTD: Overkill. Both are great. It seems the HD business model doesn't work for everyone and one flop is enough to kill a studio (looking at you, Factor 5 and Free Radical). This makes Wii look more appealing for medium sized third parties and I think we can look forward to some awesome titles being announced throughout this year.

I've had my PS3 for a year now and have had to endure this incredibly frustrating problem - getting disconnected from the internet every 15 seconds. I've read hundreds of threads on various problems trying to remedy this problem but NOTHING worked.

So how did I fix it? It was really simple. I made my router recognise the PS3 by its MAC address instead of its IP and now it works flawlessly! The simplest solution is sometimes the right one. As for PS3 online, I'm having a lot of fun with COD4. I've not experienced any lag yet, which is really encouraging considering the PSN is free and everything. The only annoyance is that the Metal Gear Online beta has been pushed back :( Damn you, Konami! :evil:

Today a british newspaper (I'm now ashamed to be british) reported that Xbox is like "crack" for young children's frail little minds. What is with all the hatred for games in the press nowadays? Gaming is growing every year and has long sinced passed the 90's cliche of only targetting spotty depressed teen and has grown into something that's social. If you have 360, you can sign in on live and hang out with your friends. If you have a Wii, you can dig it out at family gatherings and almost certainly have some sort of interest expressed towards it. The press seem to have an incredibly out-dated idea of what the average gamer is like.

Because obviously the millions of people who have played the Grand Theft Auto's and Manhunt's of the industry all go out and steal a car or shove a crowbar into a security guard's brain and swirl it around a little. Games are blamed for so many crimes when weshould be pointing the finger at something higher up. When we are very small we are taught to supress negative emotions and only express the positive. You can see this when a mother is despperately trying to stop her child from crying in a supermarket because it is embarassing. We are taught that expressing yourself in this manner is wrong.

So, people grow up, they leave the protective bubble of the educatory system and enter the real world. They have no idea what to do, they get a job, over time it becomes incredibly tedious, monotonus and they grow to hate it with every fibre of their being. Like we're taught when we're kids, most of the people will bottle up all of this negative emotion because they feel they should like their job just like tv tells them to. Eventually, this person is gonna crack and SOME of the people will do this in a violent manner. Personally, I let off steam playing video games. It's much safer :)

I haven't really been a fan of the PS3 so far. Meh games, meh controller, horrible interface... But last night I decided to set up remote play and I LOVE it. The streaming of video's to the PSP is suprisingly smooth. I've also been playing MGS1 and FF7 on my PSP via remote play and both work really well. The only annoyance is that the PSP obviously doesn't have L2 and R2 buttons, so you have to hold select and press L to use L2 and R to use R2. It's alright on those games though because they don't exactly use those buttons that much. There is a LITTLE bit of lag on the controls sometimes, but overall both of the games are highly playable, which is AWESOME because they're both two of my favourite games. Who would have thought Sony would have implemented such a feature to benefit customers with no major drawbacks? :D It really is proof that Sony value their customers in my opinion. They could have easily forced us to re-download our favourite PS1 games through PSN to play on our PSP's but they didn't!

.. That's right. It may not be glamourous or anything but I know I'm going to enjoy it... From this day forth I am a games tester :D My brother's friend gave me the number for this local, independent company and I got an interview with them.I've just done a practical 'bug hunting' test. I basically had to play lego star wars 2 and write down any bugs I found in a clear and precise manner.

I did pretty well. I wrote nearly 2 pages of bugs/glitches I found in my 2 hour session. I felt really sorry for the other guy who was trying out though. He was sat next to me testing Fable on the XBOX and he hadonly written a few sentences by the end of it. I could see the pain in his eyes as he watched me obsessively write massive paragraphs... Oh well. At least I'll be sitting in a cosy office playing games in 8 hour shifts... It is like I'm getting paid to be myself :D heh.

A completely refreshing experience. In the days of realistic gaming pretty much dominating everything it just makes Mario seem a lot better. This is everything a game should be - incredibly creative, off the wall level design and physics, incredible art style and an amazing soundtrack that really adds to the experience. I mean what is more fun? Racing a car in on a pseudo-photo realistic track or surfing a stingray/fish thing on a track of water in the middle of the sky? :D

I've had the game forr a day and I've already got 49 stars. Man, I don't want it to end :(