mkjones

A few months ago I approached the newly founded ‘Give Us Back Our Game!‘ organisation to offer my services and design them a much needed Logo.

I found out about the campaign after tuning in to a Radio 5 Live! interview with their founder Paul Cooper.

After a few attempts I came up with this:

Which thankfully Paul and his team loved. It was recently used on their newly launched website:

• giveusbackourgame.co.uk

The strategy behind ‘Give us Back our Game’ is quite simple. They hope to re-ignite passion for football in today’s youth.

From the website:

We are concerned that the beautiful game is in decline. Football for children is now very different from earlier generations when the only adult involvement was a call from your mum that your tea was ready. Football is no longer beautiful for our kids anymore: it’s ugly.

I was instantly hit by this campaign as I was never a fan of the beautiful game as a child mostly due to the ugly and sometimes quite scary environment in which it is played.
(Keep reading)

Weirdly, after I had just written my recent post on gaming industry changes I found a decent article by some old Sega fan named Lucas DeWoody over at Advanced Media Network.

It details how Sega’s gaming quality has somewhat diminished since they left the console hardware industry:

To claim that Sega stopped producing quality games after leaving the console market would be a total lie. The real problem was that the Sega fanbase was forced, perhaps too abruptly, to make a seemingly overnight transition to multi-platform gaming, and Sega made poor judgments on which games should have gone to which platform, and when. Forcing their fanbase to make that adjustment, then signing various exclusive deals was a huge disservice to gamers.

Link

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This ad for the original PlayStation was used in an article I read today:

When viewing the ad my mind fell blissfully back to the early 90s when gaming was still a semi-nascent industry feeding off the a mixture of youthful nerds and gadget fans.

When ads like this one started being broadcast on prime time TV everything started to change.

This ad is a typical early gaming ad, its fast paced, almost impossible to understand and never really gives away the fact that it is in fact an ad for a games console till the last moments.

Ads like were clearly aimed at what was known back then as the MTV Generation. People with short attention spans, time on their hands and money in their pockets, or at least in their parents pockets.

Most of these people were not gamers. Sure the SNES and MegaDrive/Genesis had impacted on a lot of people. But it was still very niche.

Sony were trying their best to change this, much to the detest of some gamers at the time (me included).

Ads like this are responsible for me never owning a PlayStation. This ad, and the many others like it, made no sense to me at the time. I hated seeing PlayStation ads on TV, I hated the idea that Sony, maker of TVs and Walkmans had simply jumped into the gaming market and started to change it.

Of course, gaming ads had been on TV before. But not like this. They were never ‘cool‘ or ‘edgy‘ they were a bit ‘awkward‘ and ‘nerdy‘. They were also aimed at kids and teenagers, not the 16-35 year olds which gleefully prop up the gaming industry today.

I hoped, prayed even, that Sony would fail. That they would go back to making CD players and leave the gaming world.

History tells us that this did not happen. Sony are now the current kings of the gaming world. Sure the PlayStation3 is having a few issues but my god they did a good job at brainwashing the public and bringing gaming out of basements and bedrooms and into the living room. (Keep reading)

Digg, Digg, Digg… What have you done. I have given up, on what used to be fun.

My digg widget (on my homepage, see it? No? Look over on the right, under the category list, lower, lower, you got it…) has been rather lacklustre of late. This is simply because, over the past 2 months, I have started to use Reddit for my social news listings:

Reddit is a lot different to digg in many ways. But the main reasons I have found more solace in its environment are:

1. Interesting stories stay on the homepage longer
2. Submitting is policed better
3. A more mature user base
4. MUCH quicker load times
5. The option to ’save’ (bookmark) or/and ‘vote up/down’ (digg) stories

Also, this is just hilarious… (Keep reading)

Loco Roco is a wonderful game but what makes it even more special is the entertaining soundtrack.

The words used are absolute gibberish as the language was ‘made up’ for the game by its developers. This makes the tracks even more palatable as you can sing along without ever worrying about messing up the words.

A few days ago I found this gem on YouTube:

Watch it, sing along and be happy and gay

I even managed to rip the audio and use it as my new ringtone

I can’t help thinking that’s strange
Baby I just want you to know
I won’t go through it again
Yes, those clouds are closing in

The all new Xbox 360 Elite got a tentative UK release date today (September 2007).

A lot of friends and collogues are quite excited about the release of this piece of kit but not me. I just don’t like it. Its not the HDMI or the 120gb Hard Drive, its the colour.

Call me a traditionalists but I like my 360s white.

Another Arsenal player has come out with more pap about England and the Premierehip today.

Last time it was our friend Jose Antonio Reyes who claimed that:

“Everything in England is shut at 5pm”

Now have Julio Baptista AKA ‘The Beast’ who is on loan from Real Madrid as a swap for the afore mentioned Reyes coming out with these pearls of wisdom:

The weather over here is killing me. We get one day of sunshine for every 30 days of rain.

Your in England mate. They don’t call it the The Soggy Isles for nowt.

“My girlfriend and my mother are frightened about not seeing the sun in England. They miss being in Madrid.”

Another jibe about the Weather? I thought it was only the English who were obsessed by it??

When he finally got around to talking about football he had this to say of the English game:

“The moment you stop to think, someone has taken the ball off you and knocked you to the ground.

Its not 5-a-side mate. Its the Premiership. Spanish defenders are obviously rubbish.

“Over here they value a corner kick more than a fancy flick. I am lucky to be with Arsenal, as they are a team that likes to play proper football.”

God shut up you ponce. If English football is so negative how come we still have 3 teams in the Champions League?

Full story can be found here at BBC news.

I for one hope the send the moaning prat back to Spain. That or keep him and force him to play every minute next season as punishment for being such an arse.

I finally got the chance to download and install Microsoft DeepFish on my SPV C600 today.

It a very novel mobile web browser which renders pages in miniature and then allows you to ‘zoom’ in on certain areas. Very similar to the DS browser.

More info from the Microsoft site:

Deepfish is a lightweight client application that leverages a powerful server side technology for delivery of content such as web pages to a Windows Mobile device. Content is displayed in a familiar desktop format that requires no additional work by the content or site author.

Deepfish provides:

• A familiar look and feel of web pages on mobile as seen on desktop.
• Bandwidth optimized rendering for faster content delivery.
• Address bar web navigation.
• Intuitive zooming, panning and cue map for quick navigation and browsing.
• Support for simple link navigation and form submission.

(Keep reading)

Is it just me, or does the new Xbox 360 keyboard-chat accessory look like it could kill your thumbs?

I suppose BlackBerry fans will lap it up.