This advert is currently doing the rounds all over The Internet.

Ooh, what’s this, then?

Wow, disturbing material, eh? Sounds juicy.

Ooooh, dear. Looks like a load of kiddy paraphernalia scattered on the floor. A scene of violence, indeed.

Yeah, the fact that some people beat up kids and that is pretty horrific. Charities like this really do deserve all the support they can get… and… wait. What’s this?

Oh! Oh a-ha ha ha! Because child abuse adverts are simply ripe for parody, aren’t they?

Is it just me, or is this advert bang out of order?

… in Prince of Persia.

This is what people on The Outside think videogames and gamers are like, as encapsulated in some sort of horrifically-generic American murder-mystery pap TV show.

We’re not going to list all the WRONG WRONG WRONGO things that are going on here, primarily because there are just too many of them and you’re all definitely smart enough to spot them for yourselves.

Oh, the horror, the horror. Who writes this grot?

Quick as you can, will someone make a videogame that features a level in which watching half a series of ‘Life’ unlocks a special spreadsheet inside your TV, please?

Goodness knows who owns the rights to this, given Reflections’ connections with Atari and, most recently, UbiSoft but whoever does needs to make a 3D next-gen remake immediately.

While at the time Shadow of the Beast stood out for its outrageous number of parallax scrolling layers and rather spiffy graphics it could have been argued that it didn’t really deliver anything new in the gameplay department.

At the end of the day, Beast was a fairly standard scrolling platformer albeit with some pretty snazzy upgradeable weapons (including a jetpack - woo!), but it was in its style where it shone.

Bosses were huge, varied, and altogether weird and having a hero which looked almost shamelessly peculiar was original even back then - before the standards of robots, scientists, disproportionate women, and chiseled muscle-men had kicked in.

So bring back the Beast - it’s about time we had another game whose graphical style really makes you sit up and say, “Whaaa?”

Read the Amiga Format Review (1989)

Gamers: odd bunch, generally. Depending on your point of view, this story is either insanely creepy or outrageously sweet:

“On November 3, 2007 ‘Moviesign’ made a Forge map in Halo 3 and set up what his girlfriend of over two years (furtive penguin) thought was going to be a two-on-two match with his friends.

They started the game and Moviesign led furtive penguin to a spot where he claimed he’d put an energy sword.

Instead there was a nice top-down view where he had spelled out a proposal in weapons.

Best of luck to them, I somewhat suspect they’re going to need it.

CGEmpire brings you all the really important news, doesn’t it?

Wizball, eh? Remember that?

Of course you do, because it was one of the best C64 games ever and the brainchild of the team that would go on to make Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder.

Well now it’s back, courtesy of Graham Goring, in the form of a wonderfully jazzed up remake! Featuring art by Smila of Mersey Remakes fame and music by Chris Nunn, the remake is every bit as good as the original, but with extra “whizz”!

Go get it here!

Recently there has been somewhat of a furore over credits in videogames, which it seems are often incorrect or incomplete. Jason Della Rocca of the International Games Developers Association is spearheading a campaign to establish some kind of crediting standard across the Games Industry.

Now this seems all well and good in principle. Generally, credits get overlooked until near the end of development and what’s more tend to be cobbled together somewhat hastily.

Here, for the exclusive benefit of CGEmpire readers is the inside scoop on how The Credits tend to get done: the Producer swans into the office one morning with a cup of tea ready for his morning session of Minesweeper when an e-mail flagged with one of those big “urgent” exclamation marks pounces into his inbox informing him that the manual is going to be printed tomorrow, and if they don’t get the developer credit list in an hour then it’s not going in.

Since this will be the only point during the whole of development that any time whatsoever will be set aside for doing credits, the list produced at this point is it - it`ll go in the manual, and it’ll go in the game.

As a result, all the staff that left mid-development get forgotten about, as do team members from other projects who helped out during alpha. Sometimes it’s a genuine mistake and sometimes, according to Della Rocca, it’s an “intentional snub”.

So some sort of standard to ensure that all companies conform to the same guidelines can only be a good thing for the industry, right?

TV channels have guidelines about size and layout and that sort of thing, but production time is typically a matter of months not years, the teams tend to be exponentially smaller and credits invariably just get squished into a tiny box so the channel can plug the next thing. And if they are a decent size, then they’re usually zooming across the bottom of the screen at a million miles an hour. You can’t even read them, so what’s the point?

From a company’s perspective, do they really want their staff members names lit up in lights on the game? If the game’s good it’s like a big advertisement, “Hey, come poach our staff!”. In fact, there are games companies which take a policy of not including staff credits in their games for this very reason. If the IGDA get their way, are they going to be forced to include the names? If not, and the system is voluntary, doesn’t it render this whole damned debacle moot?

The Entertainment Industry does seem to be the only industry where staff members’ names are scrawled across their product… It’s not like if you break your arm and go to hospital your plastercast has the names of the doctors that treated you emblazoned on it.

“This colonoscopy was brought to you by Nurse Gladys. These shoes were handmade for you by Faisal, age 6.”

So why should a game list the names of the artists, the programmers, the designers, testers, producers, translators etc? Is it not enough to know that it was published by Publisher A, and developed by Developer B?

As far as we can tell, there is one reason - and one reason only - for credits to exist in videogames. It`s because without a credit sequence, there`d be no way that you could make those swanky James Bond stylee intro sequences that are becoming so trendy nowadays. Imagine the beginning to Half-Life without the cool credit-sequence-while-in-train bit, it’d be horrible.

Having said that, there’s never any reason why Joe Public needs to know who did the localization in Kenya during the intro sequence. That sort of thing would make them last forever. Key staff only would be sensible, and put the full list (including the tea lady) in the manual.

Hell, put whatever you like in the damned manual. In this day and age of interactive tutorials that tell the player what key to press to ‘duck’ you’ve got to put something in there, right? Otherwise you’re just needlessly slaughtering innocent trees…

There’s an interesting piece up at MTV of all places about where Nintendo is going with all this multiplayer malarkey. Seems they’re pretty much bashing nails into the coffins for the good old single player game:

“Where I’m going with all of this is the idea that “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” may be a relic of a previous era. When the Wii is old, I expect that game to look like an aberration: a freakishly lonely experience offered in a library of titles designed primarily for group indulgence.”

Thinking about it, there’s nothing I like more than gaming when someone else is joining in. I haven’t cried so long and hard as the first few competitive games at Wii Sports.

Even stereotypically single player games like Lumines took on a whole new lease of life when chasing my girlfriend’s high score which, I hasten to add, is impossibly high; presumably due to torrid, torrid cheating on her part. Regardless, the banter between us is what made the experience remarkable.

I spent the weekend playing Half Life: Episode 2 with a good friend behind me reminding me to reload and laughing every time I fell to my death down a hole.

What do you think? Is the single-player experience destined to go the way of the Dodo? And what can developers do to make traditionally single-player games a more sociable affair?

We love this game already and it’s not out until some time next year!

If it’s not the ridiculous amount of characters that excites you, or the stages based on the catalogue of Nintendo games, then let it be this… the music!

Super Smash Bros. Brawl has got the most delightfully wonderful remixes of classic Nintendo tunes ever - I’d buy the soundtrack if it was ever available and play it on loop, forever. The music ranges from the cute (like the theme from Yoshi’s Story or Animal Crossing) to the grand (like the operatic Fire Emblem or Main Theme), with classics along the way that make you want to hug the musicians (like the amazingly fab Ocarina of Time Medley).

This could possibly end up being the most fantastic videogame soundtrack of all time at this rate (except for the ending song from Portal, of course). Click those links and go have a listen, or go here to listen to the complete set.

Phew! Let’s just take a moment to breathe a collective sigh of relief…

It turns out that in traditional Nintendo style, the highly anticipated Super Mario Galaxy on Wii is bloody marvellous!

Marvellous according to Eurogamer, that is, who have recently given the game a whopping 10/10 - and Eurogamer are always right about these sorts of things.

Bright, bold, unrepentantly loony, Galaxy is everything you wanted it to be. It’s beautiful and inventive. It’s pure-blood Mario without being a retro indulgence.

After the slight little hiccup that was Super Mario Sunshine, it would appear that all is alright in the world again! Hooray!

Read the review on Eurogamer here!

Congratulations to Bignobody for winning this round of CGEmpire’s Colo(u)rThis! pixel art contest!

You can see previous round winners in the Colo(u)rThis! Hall of Fame!

The next round will begin shortly.