What's New? (30th Nov, 2007)

Well, it's my birthday tomorrow for one.

Feature by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on 30 Nov 2007

Ever since Eurogamer moved into its new proper amazing office with more than one room, those of us who do the words have been encouraged to compose the bulk of them within its fine bounds, perched upon its fine chairs which are not to be rolled across its fine carpets and no eating at your desk.

There have been problems, but for every water coming out of the ceiling there has been a silver playing Super Mario Kart at lunchtime. For example, not knowing how to check voicemail on the fancy new phones was forgotten very quickly once we worked out that you can send SMS messages to each other and then an inflectionless tribute to Fiona Bruce will ring you up and announce that in West Philadelphia born and raised on the playground is where I spent most of my days chilling out maxing relaxing all cool and then shooting some b-ball outside of the school.

However, there are some problems that cannot be overcome by Fresh Prince of Bel Air, diversity awareness or grenade damage indicators, such as the inevitable exhaustion of local lunch options within two weeks, or the smell of greasy garlic that wafts through the editorial room whenever we open the windows, or that cans of Coke in the newsagent next door cost 65p and that the woman never smiles at me even though I've said good morning to her every single day for a month.

And then there are problems like having to write What's New on weeks where the main games of note concern shooting aliens, shooting aliens, shooting terrorists, shooting criminals, shooting Germans and shooting zombies. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not that we don't like violence - Ellie lives in Forest Hill, for goodness sake, which is basically Sarajevo for cockneys - but can't we think of something else to do games about?

Fortunately, according to the other games which aren't the ones the piss poor media flock to instinctively (see above), we can! For example, Jenga on the DS. If that's really out today - and the only reason I've got to suspect it's not is that I'm writing this on Thursday and they always, always slip this shit at the last possible moment - colour me intrigued! Colour me less intrigued now I've looked on Metacritic, but all the same! Then there's the RealPlay range of PS2 games, which are motion-sensor efforts a bit like Wii except presumably tackier and with a name that reminds you of having to faff around with a bloated PC program in order to stream repeats of Just A Minute.

So alright, none of it's going to change the world, but at least we can all go home from What's New today safely rejecting the premise, and that's the important thing.

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