WotR #67 - "They queued for seconds this month."

Hot Sauce.
Bill's Sauce on Yer Chips.

Cable Round-up - Part 1: SCART.
Scartalogical.

This Gaming Life.
Pedrolambadas.

Happiness.
With My Kid in America.

The Bestest Score in the world.
Parental Pacman.

Showing Off.
The First and Only Time.

It’s nice to be pampered.
Ooooh deluxe.

Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy - PS2.
We Love Katamari?

Bike or Die - Palm
Weird physical science.

Geist - NGC
Paranoid Android?

Destroy All Humans - PS2/Xbox
Well... except me, obviously.

Darkwatch - PS2
Cross-eyed Moody Cowboy.

Virtua Tennis - PSP.
It's an Ace. Or a Birdie. Something good.

Gunpey.
Go with a smile.

Pong Holiday.
Competition.

The Curious Emissions of CGEUK.
With Dr. Judith Mann.

Image of the Month.
Hidden Sex Game Mods.

Russ
"Nobody ever warns you how much swish room you need with a light sabre.

If I was ever attacked by a light sabre weilding maniac I'd head for the nearest enclosed space and watch him swish his way out of that one.

Unless, of course, he just stabbed me with it. but then I doubt it would make the humming noise - this rendering the kill null and void."

Thalamus
"You should buy everything on the pretext that it's for your daughter.

Then, when it arrives, you hog it. Far from moaning, your missus will smile softly to herself as she folds the laundry while you play with the new toy, like a trinket in the hands of a giant, and remark to herself that you're just a big kid and look very cute, and then you'll catch her looking, she'll turn her face away slightly, then back, and you'll drop the PSP and walk towards her, the late evening sun clawing through the window as you meet in a warm embrace, knowing everything in your world is good and pure."

Koworld
"Things I did on holiday:

Stand in the till queue at M&S behind a man with OCD. He spent an agonising amount of time laying out his stuff in one single uniform line on one side of the conyeyor. He then spent more time shuffling the items for a perfect heavy-to-light distribution.

I do wonder if my next action was akin to waking a sleep-walker but I'm ashamed to admit that in response I piled my own produce into a stack so high and so full of precarious gaps that it resembled a game of tetris played by a man with no hands.

Mr OCD twitched somewhat each time the belt moved.

I'm not proud."

We present Rodent's world famous bid to list the top 5 of everything in the world.

Rodent's
Top five things to spend £4 on rather than buy a copy of Imagine Publishing's new 360 Magazine.

6 beers in Bratislava

A shovel and a bucket from B&Q's own brand range

A stylish-yet-cheap pair of deck shoes from Shoe Zone

Almost enough ingredients for a go on TV's Ready Steady Cook

Edge, or FHM, or Total Film, or My Weekly, or the local free paper, or a toilet roll you can scribble on yourself, or a parish newsletter, or The Radio Times, or Q, or a box of informative cereal such as Kelloggs' Wheatos (or Crunchy Nut Mini Shredded Wheat at a push)

Rodent's
Featured favourite indie game.

Pendulumania
Found by: Baboonanza
"Basically you control a nut (as in nut and bolt) with the mouse. This nut is attached via a piece of elastic to a golf ball that you swing around in hope of hitting other balls that appear on the screen. Except if you stretch the elastic too much it snaps and it's game over. Man. This will happen a lot, and very frequently at first because this game is hardcore, but once mastered it becomes like a ballet. Only with less fit birds.
Get it here:
http://jn.swee.to/cano/pmania/index.shtml
(scroll down and look for the disk icon. It's in .lhz format so you'll need WinRAR) "

Title
SSX On Tour (Gamecube).
Genre
Mind-boggling IP Abuse.
Publisher
EA Big.
Description
We haven't made this up. That's no photoshop job there. Yep, the Gamecube version of the next SSX game includes unlockable Mario, Peach, I dunno, fucking naked bowser and probably a talking fucking mushroom. Really, this is utterly beyond parody. The timing is extraordinary mind - in case you missed it, here's the very same Rodent Featured Game slot only one month ago: before we heard news of this latest dilution of an already domestic-market-Budweiser-thin original IP. Oh and how that word 'original' reads so ironic now.
Rating
Do me a favour.

Complete set of back issues here

Sixty-Seven...

If there’s one question that I get more than any other, when I attempt to evangalise about the Original Spirit to the great unwashed, it’s this – “What the hell is Way of the Rodent?”

That’s a good question.

See, Way of the Rodent is not a web-forum. We have one of those, and very nice it is too, but, and I realise that this may come as something of a shock to the system, we’re not really here just to whil’ away the long hours at work.

Way of the Rodent is most definitely not a ‘retro’ games site. Most of us are old, in videogaming terms, but we’re not stuck in the past and we don’t attempt to preserve past glories in some kind of virtual formaldehyde. Many of our very favourite games are ‘retro’, but that’s because they’re ace, not because of their age.

Way of the Rodent is not a news portal. Quite frankly we don’t have the time, and checking all those facts and figures is in blatant disregard of Rule One. We’re as excited as anyone about the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Revolution et al – and as soon as we can get our grubby little mitts on them we’ll let you know - but there are better places to go to if you need up to the nanosecond reports. Besides, we like making stuff up too much.

We’re not a reviews site either, although we do review games. Confusing isn’t it?

No, we are, in some small measure, all of these things – and many more – but what we are, above all else, is an outlet - written by gamers, for gamers. We want to celebrate all that is great, all that is good and even all that is evil about videogames. And it’s our writers that allow us to do that, whether they’re regular contributors or one-hit-wonders. Without them, without you, we are as dust.

This month’s Original Spirit invokes a good mix of both, with Fuseball checking in with a suspiscious green hue to his skin, PaulEMoz continuing to chronicle his adventures across the pond and Bog, well, Bog’s got something to get off his chest… Less frequent visits come from PyramidHead who, it seems, has the best parents in the world ever and The Son of Yesterday reminiscing over a great lost machine.

Last month also saw the first Classic Game Expo UK – inspiring Judith Mann to come out of early retirement and TT to produce possibly the finest thing we have ever published. Read it to find out why.

As for the name? Tcsch, I neither know nor care. It’s funny, it’s ours, it’s the original spirit.

Chris Ahchay, Editor August 2005

Next month:
The War Issue.
This is your chance to contribute. We are looking for articles by readers reflecting on the role of war in videogaming. Choose any angle you like - we will be featuring some serious, some sad, some funny, some wry open views on the thing. Just e-mail me your text or your idea and we promise to get back to you.
Don't be shy - it's about your perspective not your technical writing profitiancy.
editor@retailkings.com is your friend in this.