This is a little batshit crazy. Thankfully it seems fairly tongue in cheek, though just the idea of Guitar Hero on the DS with a hand grip add-on sounds hugely embarrassing.

Press releases can be a great source of both amusement and depression. This month, vaguely game related FpsBrain takes the cake and rams it up the anal cavity of our soul. Why exactly? Because FpsBrain - the drink that claims to increase your mental powers for gaming performance (kind of like Red Bull, but made for German FPS gamers) - now claims to be supporting Tibet by not being produced in China.

Righto. I recognise that most things in the world are manufactured in China nowadays, however this doesn’t apply to food and drinks. Said products tend to be produced near the market they’re sold in, for a variety of sensible reasons, and China doesn’t have a sparkly clean reputation in regards to food production - indeed, here in Hong Kong, ‘Mainland Chinese Food Danger!’ is pretty much a weekly headline, as we’re informed of yet another suspicious artificial food substance to avoid due to high levels of MSG or lead paint.

So the point is, FpsBrain would never have been produced in China in the first place, unless its producers stupidly thought shipping cans of sugar water halfway around the world made sense. Their press release claiming to “boycott China” as an act of support for Tibet, is essentially self publicising bullshit, because it’s not a boycott at all.

On the positive side, FpsBrain will be donating €1 from every order to the Tibet Initiative Deutschland. It’s not really like Tibet’s got a lack of high profile backing though.

In other news, Games Asylum has revealed to cheering onlookers that we’re boycotting fascist regimes and using only, erm, ourselves, to write these words. Indeed. Ni hao. Ni baba, mama shenti hao ma?

As expected, Grand Theft Auto IV is breaking records and making headlines on its launch.

In the UK alone, it sold 609,000 copies on launch day, making it the fastest selling game in the UK (a 20% sales increase over GTA: San Andreas). It’s expected to sell around 6 million copies worldwide in the first week, which makes for some insanely high profits.

There’s the usual controversy too of course. In Croydon, a man queueing at the midnight launch for GTA IV stabbed a man in the neck. Right…

At the same time, idiots like Jack Thompson are already proclaiming GTA IV evil, something which must be banned, before they had even played it. To quote the man himself;

“Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio.”

Rockstar must be pissing themselves whilst rolling in their piles of cash.

So, Grand Theft Auto IV is just a day away (unless you managed to get a copy early). Suddenly I’m starting to feel a little bit excited - the big games sites have published their reviews (10/10s all round), and some juicy gameplay videos have started appearing online. Here is one such video;

How about converting your PlayStation 3 into a laptop?

I’m not quite sure what to make of it. On the one hand, well done that man for spending 14 months squeezing his PS3 into a new case. Though, it does look wrong - not the design so much, rather the notion that someone would need a laptop version of a PS3.

It’s not exactly the most portable laptop ever - about the same size as a normal PS3, with a 17″ 720p LCD monitor built in. A good effort definitely, but possibly pointless.

For a variety of reasons (laziness, real life, not being bothered) I have quite a few games lying around that I should have reviewed by now. Some I spent a great deal of time playing a few months ago, but never got around to actually writing any words about (such as Assassin’s Creed and FIFA 08, both of which were surprisingly good, the latter of which I’m actually still playing and is my most played game currently).

It doesn’t help that a few of the games I should be reviewing this month, I played exhaustively more than six months ago thanks to slow European releases. Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds is a case in point, only out now in the UK, it was released nine months ago on this side of the world (Asia). It’s not exactly a text heavy Japanese RPG, so there’s no excuse for a long localisation. It is a very good game - simple and great fun, with a cute little online lobby mode and it genuinely works well as a social game with a group of non-gamers. But I stopped playing it in 2007, which is so last year.

Currently sitting beneath my PS3, collecting dust but quietly pleading to be reviewed, are too many games to mention, but Burnout Paradise and Army of Two are giving me the biggest guilty eyes. Sorry EA… they’re not bad games (well, Burnout Paradise at least), they’re just a little too predictable, and I’d rather be playing Fifa 08 instead, or better still, lying back watching a movie. It’s not like those games have had any lack of coverage in the media, both reviewed by practically every gaming magazine and website on the planet (except this one, of course). So no one, myself included, is too worried that we didn’t bother with our review. They’re both nice, polished, shiny games, but somehow I’d rather be playing something like Desktop Tower Defense.

That probably explains partly why this site is the way it is. But it is also worth blaming the entire games industry to a certain degree - they need to churn out less derivative crap. Not that their current derivative crap is bad, just that it’s… derivative. Games are better produced than ever, but it’s hard to be genuinely excited about any new games on the horizon. What am I looking forward to in the next few months? Grand Theft Auto IV, and perhaps Little Big Planet. That doesn’t bode too well for the state of things. The fact that a FIFA game is my most played though, might just be a sign that I’ve become mentally retarded. In its defense, it does play a very good game of football this year, and it’s not like there’s anything else worth playing at the moment.

The other day I was listening to some games journalist go on about games piracy. His view was quite clear; ‘pirates are bad, don’t pirate games you wouldn’t buy, pay for your games or burn in hell scum’. I understand his view, though he like me gets the majority of his games for free via publisher PR departments, so to have such a strong opinion from such a position is a little strange.

However I was thinking of the other side of the argument. Not the usual lazy student side, where said layabout defends piracy on the basis that they wouldn’t have bought the product anyway (which is often true, and they’re only harming themselves by gaming instead of studying, so who really cares?). No, I’m talking about the argument for the ‘land of accepted open piracy’, otherwise known as my current abode Hong Kong (and the same applies to almost all of Asia outside Japan).

Here literally every Nintendo DS and PSP owner (and there are a lot: at least half a dozen per train carriage each morning, of every age and gender) owns an R4 cartridge or a similarly cracked PSP. That’s not an exaggeration - almost every single DS has a little R4 cart and SD card sticking out of the back, so much so that most shops sell the DS with an R4 cartridge bundled in.

In such a situation, what hope do the anti-piracy brigade really have? The thing is, in this case it’s their own sodding fault, because Nintendo insist on selling DS games in Hong Kong for HK$300-350 (£20-24, but add 30% once the US$ exchange rate normalises), which is the same price as a PlayStation 3 game and actually a fiver more than the typical Xbox 360 game here. And they wonder why the entire handheld gaming population is pirating their games here?

Microsoft are the only ones that have seen the big picture, pricing Xbox 360 games quite reasonably at HK$240-300 (£18 on average), but they do have to contend with the fact that their DVDs are easily copied unlike Blu-ray. Even still, it doesn’t seem like any of the big games publishers understand the concept of cost of living throughout the world. Whilst £20-24 doesn’t seem bad for a PlayStation 3 game, in a country where the average real salary is less than half that of western Europe, it’s a bit silly - it’s much worse in the rest of Asia where salaries are a mere fraction of the comparatively rich countries like Hong Kong and South Korea.

Seeing as software really is almost free to duplicate, it begs the question why have no publishers bothered to price their games reasonably in Asia or similar places? Selling ten times as many games for a tenth of the cost to Chinese gamers would be just a profitable as selling them in the USA or Europe. People are already buying the consoles here, they’re just not bothering to pay for the games, the simple reason being that they’re massively over priced. It seems just idiotic.

Of course, cheap games in Asia might threaten to flood out to the western markets, but Sony and Nintendo seem to like cracking down on exporters already. In the future we’ll be seeing more games as digital downloads, and they’re a piece of piss to enforce region restrictions on - just like how the BBC only allow people inside the UK to watch their iPlayer (the bastards!). The exact same argument applies to the film market too. Will either of them learn? Probably not soon enough.

Occasionally I’ve toyed with the notion of creating a GA podcast. Fortunately I’m too lazy to bother with such an idea and fear that it would end up awful, aside from the lack of a professional recording studio. However, I do enjoy listening to the odd gaming podcast nowadays (and whatever the video ones are called). Admittedly, gaming podcasts are at the bottom of the podcast barrel, significantly below the likes of the Mark Kermode and Adam & Joe podcasts. But still, they’re entertaining and informative enough, and most importantly, can be enjoyed passively while I’m half asleep on the train.

So I thought I’d recommend my most played gaming podcasts for you the ear-bearing public.

Game Theory
This one’s a fine podcast, informative and intelligent enough. Presented by a couple of British gaming journalists in America (and an American), it covers the industry news most weeks. It does suffer from being a little bit tedious at times, talking about Phil Harrison too much for comfort, but it’s not bad.

1Up Yours/Show
The weekly podcast (and video cast thing) of 1Up and EGM, hosted by a variety of American games journalists, but mainly by Garnett Lee and the slightly hyperactive Shane Bettenhausen. It’s informative and they’re all very enthusiastic about their games, though they do have a tendancy to act like Americans and be frankly too enthusiastic about certain games.

PlayStation Nation
Does a surprisingly good job of keeping you up to date with the latest PlayStation 3 news. Enthusiastic, informative, American. So two out of three isn’t bad (I jest).

Totally Rad Show
Not actually a podcast at all, but one of those video things that’s essentially a weekly online TV show. Not strictly about games either - the three chirpy American hosts discuss and review movies, TV shows, geek stuff and games too. It’s not as bad as Diggnation and the hosts are mostly likeable, so well done them.

So, there are some links for you. Download some, or plug your own favourites.

As you can probably tell, the site has changed a little. In part, thanks to a messed up software update, and also just due to our fickle nature.

We’ll be trying to restore service to normal over the coming hours and days, albeit with a camp new look, but in the mean time you should post in the comments here or over on the forum, or else.

While you’re at it, if you have any suggestions as to how we can improve the site and be less rubbish, feel free to tell us a penny’s worth of your thoughts.

Slight shock-horror - Gran Turismo 5: Prologue has reached the top of the all-format charts, making it the fastest selling PS3 game to date and possibly the first PlayStation 3 game to take the chart’s top spot - perhaps, we haven’t actually bothered to research that, feel free to find out and correct us. The even more shocking thing? The chart only counts sales of the Blu-ray retail package, ignoring sales of the game downloaded via the PSN Store (as we bought it). The horrifying element - it’s a demo that people are paying £25 for. People are buying it though, so now we’ve all justified Sony’s strategy of selling us demos. What fools we are!

In other chart news: everything else is pretty much the same in the top ten, but Sega’s Viking: Battle for Asgard is a new entry at #8. The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return makes it in at #21, and God of War: Chains of Olympus enters at #29 which isn’t too terrible for a PSP exclusive. Capping off the chart is Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz which makes a feeble entry at #40, which is probably deserved seeing as Sega have milked those monkeys on every format possible. It’s probably not a bad game, though they’re clearly whoring the franchise now, even on the bloody iPhone.

Next week: Dark Sector might enter the charts, that looks vaguely alright. April 18th sees the release of UEFA Euro 2008, which we’re strangely excited about - the demo (available on both Xbox Live and the PSN Store) is very good, similar to Fifa 08 but with a few things (speed, controls, response) immensely improved. Some people are saying it’s the best football game around, which is odd for a licensed EA title.

Good news motor fans - the European edition of Gran Turismo 5: Prologue will have a special bonus, in the form of an unlockable Ferrari F1 car. It’s the one from the 2007 season, and it looks very nice indeed.

So there, almost a justifiable reason to go out and pay money for a game demo. Gran Turismo 5: Prologue will be released this March 27th in both Blu-ray and download forms, for an almost acceptable £25. Strangely the downloaded version costs exactly the same as the boxed Blu-ray copy though, the cheeky bastards.

It is admittedly a glorified demo that they’re charging money for, but it does include 70 or so cards and half a dozen tracks, and at this rate the full version of Gran Turismo 5 will be lucky to make it out before 2010, so it’s possibly worth letting Sony rape your soul just this once.

For the handful of people who might be interested in such a thing, our forum is back online now. We did briefly remove the forum and hope the comments section would take its place, but we didn’t count on the spambots posting hundreds of messages each day proclaiming “boiled! swastika mellowed? vital resistant brim, scorching backbends!”.

We hope some of you will use the forum, all five of you even. You could for instance, say what you’d like to see more of on the site or what direction you’d like us to go in. Ignoring the obvious comments like “more, better content” cause we’re too lazy for that stuff.