There’s a new episode of Consolevania out, and what a scorcher! In every way possible.

You see, this particular episode is Consolevania XXX, focusing on the best the games industry has to offer “adults”. Judging by the fact that the likes of GTA San Andreas were seen by some to herald a new age of maturity in gaming, you can see where this is going.

Fortunately, only one of the games featured tries to be anything other than decent, honest-to-God porn. There’s terrible-looking adventure game Lula 3D, some porn version of the classic CU Amiga giveaway Bally 3, and the motherlode: Hentai 3D.

I’ve never seen the point in hentai, so excuse me while I find the idea of a game based around it to be hilarious and not titillating in the least. The concept is simple: you get some computer-generated Japanese ladies thrown onto your screen, you make small talk with them - er, if that’s what you call dialogue choices including “hey you little bitch”, or something along those lines.

And then you dress them up and insert things in them.

The most impressive part? There’s even a tentacle scenario. And the saddest thing? It’s graphically very nice. I did have a screenshot here, but it’s been lost in the mists of time and the vagaries of the Internet - just as well, really.

Hentai 3D. Get a demo here, if you’re a freak.

Today’s target for my bile and rage is Just Adventure+, a rather smaller site than last week’s Slashdot, but no less deserving of a good cussing.

Follow that link and you’ll feel like you’ve been smacked in the face with a horrible design unchanged since approximately 1989, mostly because that’s what will have just happened. I can overlook that - looks aren’t everything - but what’s this tagline? “The largest and most-visited adventure site on the Internet”? I don’t know what they base that on, but even a cursory comparison of the membership and posting figures displayed on their forums and those of their less shit competitors will disprove that. Dubious claims aren’t cool!

On to the primary purpose of any good gaming site, the reviews. They exist to tell you what’s hot and what’s not. Unfortunately, what’s not hot on Just Adventure+ is, apparently, Monkey Island 2, considered by everyone except them to be one of the high water marks of the genre. There are two reviews on JA+, and the highest mark is a B-. What’s that mean according to their review guide? It’s “a superior game”, but “lacking either the innovation or perfection required for a grade of ‘A’”. Hmmm.

That should be enough by itself, but hey! This is a rant! Let’s take one more of their reviews, this time with reference to a review I trust more from vastly superior site Adventure Gamers. The game: Hauntings of Mystery Manor.

Have a look at that review from Adventure Gamers. Looks a pretty lame game, doesn’t it? The sort of game someone could (and indeed, did) knock up in Adventure Game Studio by themselves? Yes. AG’s score of 1.5 stars (out of 5) looks entirely justified. Now let’s have a look at Just Adventure’s version.

“Nothing short of remarkable” it says. “Final grade: A” it says. That makes it “one of the best games available”, and it “should be on the shelf of every adventure gamer”, according to the grading system guide. Tally-Ho, when you wrote this review, did you have a crush? Are you the author’s mum? Why weren’t you edited into oblivion?

Again, as with Slashdot, it’s not so much the concept of the site I mind. Everyone is free to create their own little corner of the Web - I should know that. It’s the fact that JA+ loves to tout itself as the biggest and (by implication) best adventure gaming web site in existence, when it’s clearly rubbish, that rubs me up the wrong way. If a single person arrives at JA+ and think it’s representative of adventure gamers as a whole - basically undiscerning idiots who will welcome bad games as the second coming because they are “produced and published by ONE PERSON![!!!!]” - then JA+ has done everyone a great disservice.

Phew, that rant was a long time in coming. More cussings-in soon!

“This is a part from earlier on in the game. It’s called ‘jump over a tramp’. It’s a lot of fun.”

Ooh (shut that door) - the drought of Consolevania episodes is finally at an end! And what a cracking episode too. It’s well worth watching just for the review of Mark Ecko’s Getting Up - I have no idea who Mark Ecko is either - but there are other gems too.

A dramatic expose of game shop staff, only a tiny bit fabricated! An exclusive preview of Rockstar’s new table tennis game! And a review of Shadow of the Colossos that should prove an infinitely better marketing tool than the PR stunt Sony decided to pull in Manchester city centre a few weeks ago, where gameplay images were projected onto the side of a grimy 1960s office block, where the grey concrete and streetlighting below conspired to reduce them to little more than a smudged mess.

Go and download Consolevania 2.3 immediately.

That’s “facts”, that is.

I don’t want to give you some lame fact that you’ve all heard before, though! Instead, have this tidbit from the VideoGaiden blog, or whatever they want to call it:

“See that White Witch costume that Joanne was wearing in the Narnia review? That was the ACTUAL ONE from the classic BBC version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. A bit of TV history, shipped up special from that London. What about that, eh?”

I recognised that costume, I did.

See that bit on the blog where they say they were in a meeting with the BBC about the future of VideoGaiden, yesterday? I’m hoping the meeting was more “please have a 500 part series on BBC1 starting next week” and less “piss off home.”

Can I have my Consolevania Christmas special soon, please? It is February.

People were understandably shocked and upset when this shower of bastards cancelled Sam and Max 2, but then came the hints that it might be saved! And so the hilarity began.

Bad Brain Entertainment, a previously unheard-of German outfit, began posting subtle hints that Sam and Max 2 might not be quite so dead after all. Subtle hints like “we can’t tell you what we’re talking to LucasArts about, but it involves a dog and a rabbit!!!”. I may be paraphrasing a tiny bit.

Considering Bad Brain were supposedly under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, nobody was too surprised when “negotiations” broke down. Fast forward to 2005 and the Bad Brain CEO Blog, a veritable gold-mine of comedy. Here we discover that those high-powered negotations involved… one email exchange and no further contact.

Oh dear. On this same CEO blog, we also discover that Bad Brain found their corporate logo on the Internet. Wolfgang, top CEO, named his upcoming game i-Jet after seeing an inkjet printer in his office.

Something similar happens in Fun with Dick and Jane. But that is, you know, a comedy film.

The latest development is that some guy from the Adventure Gamers forums has been on an internship with the company. Nothing strange about that, you might think, but after reading his article I can’t shake the feeling that he’s the entire creative force behind the company. It’s just that nobody has mentioned that to him yet.

I’ve linked to it before, but it’s very apt. Had old Wolfgang decided to set Bad Brain up fifteen years ago, his enthusiasm would probably have got him somewhere. But this is 2006 and it costs millions to bring a successful game to market - unless you convince your potential fanbase to make your game for you, or something. Oh Wolfgang, you wouldn’t!

I am evidently a connoisseur of the hiddenest of the hidden, the gemmiest of the gemmy - that is, to use words that aren’t made up, the most obscure hidden gaming gems ever.

Look at Joystiq’s top ten hidden gems of this generation - I own the games at positions #5, #2 and #1. Not bad considering how few games I buy! All of them are fully deserving of their places, though I would switch the top two games around - Beyond Good and Evil is, for me, still a better game than Psychonauts.

Sorry.

“War, eh, what is it good for? Absolutely everything.”

“Aye, you can’t beat a bit of war if you want to get your hands on some oil.”

“Is that the BBC having a go at America again?”

“Looks really impressive. Probably more impressive than real war, although don’t quote me on that.”

VideoGaiden, the videogames review show from BBC Scotland, finished its run yesterday. And oh man it was great from start to finish!! Despite each episode lasting only ten minutes, every second of it was a slice of videogaming heaven. The reviews were insightful, hilarious, and even the comedy sketches worked! Kind of.

No review of Beyond Good and Evil, but they did take a look at Psychonauts to make up for it. Yes, in episode two.

If you live in the UK, get over to its official site and view the episodes online. Go on, show the BBC that you care!

Demo cabinets for the Xbox 360 are apparently popping up across the country, and who was I to resist? This morning I set out on a mission to track them down!!! By which I mean pop into Game and Gamestation and look for them.

And yes, they both had them. Both playing Kameo. Do you like first impressions? I do!

First, the looks. Unlike the original Xbox, the Xbox 360 doesn’t look hideously ugly and it isn’t the size of a Challenger tank, which is a bonus. It might look a little bit like a tower PC, but it’s a sleek and shaggable tower PC, at least.

The vast improvement was thrown into sharp relief by this monstrosity for the original Xbox, on sale in Game.

Kameo looks tasty from a distance - lots of lighting, depth of field effects and lovely creatures flying around - but from closer quarters it looks horribly pixellated. Urgh. This is probably down to the very shiny plasma display the display cabinet was using, but still - wot no Hi-Def? I’m a bit surprised by that, as I had assumed Microsoft would be driving their demo displays at the highest possible quality, regardless of the experience the average (standard bedefinitioned) home user will be getting.

I’ll probably sneak back at some point for another look, hopefully when there isn’t some girl monopolising the machine - oh yes, it will be mine.

You may remember that I am banned from Xbox Live. Not only that, but I signed up with a credit card that has now expired, so when I started getting reminder emails from Microsoft about my subscription, I thought it would be quite safe to ignore them. My subscription would lapse and I would lose my account.

The email headed “Your Subscription Cannot be Renewed” just confirmed what I already knew. They wouldn’t be able to take any money from me and everything would be fine. Hooray.

So imagine my surprise when I checked my credit card statement and there was a charge for £39.99 from “Microsoft Online Services” for another year of Xbox Live. Cheeky sods! Even being banned from the service and having an expired credit card on file isn’t enough to keep Microsoft’s grubby paws off your cash, it seems.

In fairness to Microsoft, after a brief phone call and a short argument with the person at the other end over whether the email had said “cannot,” or “might not be renewed”, I got my money back in full, despite leaving it nearly a month between seeing the charge and complaining about it.

And the person on the phone didn’t seem to be able to tell that I was banned - which was a bonus. I didn’t really want a phone lecture on the evils of modchips.

The lesson here? Microsoft = bastards.

Bloody Microsoft. What they have done, in effect, is remove the only reason I had to buy bone fide Xbox games.

Here’s my reasoning. If you have a chipped Xbox and you play on Xbox Live with the chip activated, they can detect this immediately and turn you away (as far as I understand it). This makes sense - with the chip active, you may well be playing a pirated copy of the game in question.

If you turn the chip off, however, you can’t possibly be playing a copied game because your Xbox will only boot official game discs. For the same reason, you can’t possibly be running the game from hard disk, even if you have naughtily upgraded it against Microsoft’s crazy rules. Your only option if you want to play a game on Xbox Live is to buy a kosher copy of it.

However, Microsoft have banned me merely for having a modified hard disk in my system, even though I cannot use it while playing on Xbox Live. What does that leave me with? A broadband connection I can no longer use with Xbox Live, and no reason to buy Xbox games - I might as well just download them.

Not that I will, of course. I do believe in supporting game publishers and developers, and I barely play the games I have already bought. But this policy still doesn’t seem terribly well thought-out.