Month: July 2022

Gotta learn it all; it might be the toughest Pokémon battle there is

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Pokémon Stadium 2 (2001)

Alright, before we go any further, I want you to answer one thing: are you any good at Pokémon battles? Obviously if you say ‘no’, then you can get off this page immediately. That’ll be the end of it, I will not pursue you, I will not point and laugh at you. If you say you have a bit of battling ability, then I’ll have to cast a suspicious eye over you. Can you back that up? Did you make your fair share of other children cry, in playground Link Cable battles? Are you Mewtwo, or Mewpoo? Machoke, or Majoke? Hitmonchan, or Hitmonsham? You get the idea.

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Keep your chin up and maintain your radiance, even as the job market Crits you

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (2005)

We’re at that time again, fellow lemmings, time that I left my job to get a new one. For a start, I can tell you that I’ve never subscribed to this whole theory of never leaving a job unless you’ve something else lined up. I suppose there’s that mature fear where you’ll turn out to be a wee bit less of a tantalising employment prospect than you had thought, which is always a hefty blow. Not to mention it makes the mortgage payment look about ten times bigger.

But you can’t tell me that you just become immediately unemployable on the Friday afternoon that you finish up. The last job I left, no sooner had I given a fairly rubbish speech than I was out the door and in a car, booting to the airport for a drunken weekend in one of my favourite cities, Liverpool. When I got home on the Sunday, I was able to sleep through the Monday while the other plankton had to go to work. It was great – I felt like Ferris Bueller.

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Nothing gets the pulse racing like a harmless spot of online stalking

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Metroid Fusion (2002)

I’d better declare something to you right now, so you know just what type of creepy sleazebag you’re dealing with here: I’m an absolutely world-class stalker. I particularly excel in the digital sphere, where I can find people’s entire life stories based off the smallest detail, like a plug socket, or the type of knitting used on their socks, all from the grainiest photo.

And I don’t have any of your fancy image recognition computers either, you know, where some smug, well-hung Fox Mulder PI can say “Enhance by 20”, and the computer somehow not only understands the verbal instruction but gets the photo resolution high enough to get the killer’s full gimp suit reflected in the whites of the victim’s eyes. No, I’m talking about the good old-fashioned method of having a hundred tabs open on your browser and combing through your mark’s entire online history.

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Fancy a Wii whack in the head, old sport?

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Wii Sports (2006)

They always manage to get you, do advertisers. We think of advertisers as snake oil salesmen, wearing suits that almost seem to shine. A lot of them tend to look incredibly young, perhaps on a Patrick Bateman morning routine, except their demeanour is impossibly sleazy. They’d never in a million years make a sale, you’d think.

And yet some of them, the best ones, the only ones worth a damn, they prove incredibly adept at delving into your psyche and, crucially, making away with your hard earned cash. Think of a younger, much less foul-mouthed Ricky Roma and you’ll get near to the stereotype.

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Everyone’s got a plan until they get mauled by the bear

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Banjo-Kazooie (1998)

Do you plan everything in your life? I certainly don’t. Life is at its most fun when it’s unplanned, spontaneous. I truly believe this can be applied to all facets of life. You may have found yourself holidaying with some awful people who try to plan everything to the letter. Distressingly, they bring in the use of something called an itinerary. I know, sounds like something for itinerants, but it’s worse than that. At 10 AM, we do this, at 12 noon we do that, it’ll involve walking 100 kilometres a day and if you wanna sit down and rest your little booties, forget it.

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