Apparently, 2007 was very much the year of online video. But a lot of people don’t realise that some crazy fools were posting videos on the internet before the days of Web 2.0, Jack Thompson, and Myface, and even before Teabagger Evoroth was actually born.

So this year the Webby Awards honours the 12 most influential online videos of all time. There are some firm favourites in there, and some I’ve never even heard of (kids these days…), but I can guarantee that at least some of them are kind of good not too shit possibly influential.

As it happens, though, you don’t actually need to visit the site at all, because I embedded by far the best one right here. And you thought AYBABTU was dead.

Prepare for more lame stuff like this…

With the Fall Dashboard Update coming this time next week, Microsoft have announced a Social Networking-esque facility dubbed - Friends of Friends.

The new service will allow gamers to find old buddies or even new chums via Xbox Live and their already existing mates. It will also allow users to check out the profiles of friends of friends, send messages, invite people to join games and compare achievements.

If, of course, like me, you like a little privacy with who you enjoy your gaming with or don’t actually give a crap, make sure you pay a visit to the Xbox site on how to hide yourself from those god awful people that’ll be trying to add you as soon as it’s available.

So that’s why they bought a slice of Facebook pie…

Teabagging Time

Team Teabag are pleased to announce the grand opening of our shiny new web-based shoppy thingy. Visit now for all the gift ideas you could possibly need for Christmas and more.

For a limited time only, our official merchandise is available at cost price! So order now to avoid disappointment. All items are priced in US dollars, but shipping is only $7, so take advantage of that weak-ass American currency now and get your merchandise on.

…And finally, here’s yet another link to our shop, in case you missed the others.

VP Was Originally A Mobile Phone Game With More Realistic Animals.

Viva Pinata, a game which all of us at TTB quite sadly love to bits, will be celebrating it’s first birthday on December 1st. To celebrate, a Rare developer known only as BIGsheep is releasing never-before-seen slides, notes, and screenshots from the development process of Viva Pinata.

Today’s slides include the original design brief, a screenshot of VP when it was intended to be a mobile phone game, and some concept art of some potential animals to be featured in the game, created before the idea of “pinatas” ever came about. It’s interesting stuff, and it’s going on all week until the 1st.

So go and check out the first load of information on VP fansite Pinata Island by clicking here!

As you can probably tell, all of the team here at TTB are avid Xbox 360 fans, we might even go as far to say that some of us are fanboys of that lovely White Box (or Black if you own an Elite), and because of this, there’s nothing that gives us more joy than seeing that little grey box pop-up on screen when we’re playing a game, telling us we’ve actually achieved something in a game. So when I saw this article over on Joystiq, the little Achievement Whore within me almost wet himself with glee.

If some posters on Valve’s official forums can be believed, achievements are going to be rolled out to some older games on the Steam service before year’s end.

Some guy on those forums going by the name of “slugz” says he received the following note from Erik Johnson at Valve in response to a fan letter he’d sent in: “We’re planning on adding achievements to all of our games you touched on in your mail [Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Day of Defeat: Source and Counter-Strike: Source]. We’re just now coming out of the post-shipping haze, so these should start showing up on Steam pretty quick here. We’re also planning on adding a bunch more to TF2, starting with an achievement pack for the Medic in the next week or so.”

I’m currently in the process of drafting an e-mail to those peeps at Valve to see if we can get any more information on the subject.

Buying An Xbox 360? Here’s A Handy Guide To All The Great Games You’ll Be Playing.

Well, it’s that time again, when Christmas is just around the corner and Doting Mother is out hitting the shops in search of an Xbox for Little Johnny. What our Doting Mother really needs, of course, is my excellent guide to the top ten Xbox 360 games released so far, so she can stock up on all those gory, violent games that LJ so loves. Well, if she’s reading this, then she’s in luck, because that’s exactly what this is: my top ten Xbox 360 games so far.

Note that I’ll only be covering retail games here - a feature on XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) games should be along shortly. With that in mind, let’s roll…

Read the rest of this entry »

Has Shatner Made Love To This Thing? Probably.

The old Star Trek series’ were well-known for the huge variety of incredibly cheesy aliens, which used to attack the hapless Enterprise crew on a weekly basis. That’s why I admire comedy genius Lore Sjöberg (the guy behind the hilarious Brunching Shuttlecocks) for his valiant attempt to pick out 10 of the cheesiest for a feature in Wired, as this must have been no easy task.

I won’t spoil some of the surprises that lay within, but I will say that the fuzzy, testicle-esque Tribbles that fellow blogger and raving Trekkie Evoroth loves did indeed make it in there.

Finish The Cake

I just spotted this over on Kotaku, one of my favourite gaming sites. A Kotaku reader known as “Brandi” had this awesome cake made for her husband’s birthday by a local caterer.

Obviously it’s not a perfect replica (the Chief’s now sporting a rather bulbous end on the top of his helmet - ooh Matron) but considering how hard it must be to sculpt using nothing but the medium of cake, it’s quite an achievement.

Now all we need is a Portal-themed cake, or would that be a bit too obvious?

Big Bada-Boom

I suddenly got inspired to play Boom Boom Rocket with my guitar hero controller today. It was all thanks to a mysterious friend of mine on Xbox Live (I still have no idea who you are) playing the game, and I decided it would be a laugh to have another go at the achievement for surviving 5 laps on Endurance mode. I didn’t manage the achievement just yet, but I did discover just how excellent the guitar support in BBR really is.

For a start, the rockets all burst along the top of the screen in the right order, ie, green on the left, blue on the right, with red and then yellow in between. Without this it would be damn near impossible to play the game with the guitar, but thankfully they took it into consideration. Also, the strum bar works as expected, and as a very very nice touch, bonus mode is activated in the same way that “star power” is in Guitar Hero, ie, by tilting the guitar up.

This game is absolutely excellent with the Guitar Hero controller, and as a big bonus, it’s not nearly as vomit-inducing as that fretboard in Guitar Hero itself can be. If you haven’t tried playing BBR with a guitar yet, you should definitely give it a go and see just how good it is for yourself. What I want to know is, though, just what happened to all that downloadable content we were promised?

The Intertube Junction Box Is Now Fully Teabagged

As you may or may not have noticed, the DNS propagation is complete and teamteabag.com is now fully functional. Today is a big day, because it marks the day when this site is officially launched. Basically, if you’ve been here before today, you’ve been an unwitting beta tester for the site - because that’s how TTB rolls, baby.

So, what’s new behind the scenes?

• We have the Google XML Sitemaps plugin running, which is regularly building sitemaps of the site and submitting them to Google, Ask, and Yahoo. That means that we should appear on these, and in turn, the other major search engines pretty quickly and get some traffic to the site.
• The Gravatar system seems to be working well, so we’ll stick with it. Remember to sign up for your Gravatar!
• We now have a working submission form for post ideas and a page which introduces us a bit. The content on there is a bit lame, though, so it’ll probably be updated in due course.
• All the RSS feeds are now running through Feedburner. For those not familiar with Feedburner, they are a service which formats and re-shapes feeds to make them more user-friendly, and they also supply statistics (to us) on how many people are reading the feeds. If you’ve subscribed to the old feeds, you’ll need to do it again to make sure you get the new and improved Feedburner feeds. The process for signing up is still the same (that’s the box to the right under the gamercards, or the feed icon in the address bar).
• Finally, we also now have a favicon. It’s a little picture of a teabag and should appear in the address bar, on the feeds, and in your bookmarks when you bookmark the site. Which you will…

I think that should about do it for now. Enjoy TTB, and look forward to many exciting posts and great new features in future! Not bad for something we only came up with on Wednesday, huh?

Live To Win

Today I have a very special edition of WAIP (or “What Am I Playing?”) for everyone, because I’ve currently dropped everything else Xbox-related to pursue a personal gamerscore mission of mine. You see, at the time of writing, my gamerscore is 12,309. That means that I’m 36 points away from 12,345, and to cut a long story short, I’d really like to hit that number just to see it on my gamertag (without using Photoshop!).

But how?

I first thought that Luxor II would be my best bet, as all of the achievements have odd numbers attached to them. However, I realised that I’d really need the achievement for perfecting all of the bonus levels. Not a problem, as I’m on the last few levels now and have perfected them all so far, but that would mean that I’d have to complete the game, which would net me some other achievements and possibly put me over my goal.

So, I think the key to this could be Forza Motorsport 2. Fellow blogger OwningXylophone won it as part of his massive “gamerscore challenge” haul, and as he already had a copy, very kindly donated it to me. I haven’t played it yet because I’ve had so many other games to keep me distracted, but I think that the time for Forza has finally come.

I’m eyeing one of the 1 point achievements to help me get up to a round number again, and then I only need 35 points’ worth from either Forza itself, or one of the many other games I’m yet to get some low-scoring achievements in. The Orange Box springs to mind, as it has plenty of 5-pointers for progressing through the story.

Trouble is, as always, I don’t have any kind of plan at all. Will it end in tears as I accidentally hit 12,355?

Quite possibly, but you’ll have to watch this space to find out. Also, I hear that my aforementioned fellow blogger is about to hit 55,555, which would be pretty awesome. Perhaps if, like women who’ve lived together for too long, our bodies were synchronised, we could have hit 12,345 and 54,321 simultaneously.

Unfortunately that would have meant actually being organised, and we all know Team Teabag better than that.

I bet you’re all wondering where the name “Team Teabag” came from.

No?

Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It actually originally came from a paintball game we had, when Timmy (aka PurpleWand) kept insisting to the marshals that we were, in fact, “Team Teabag”. Well, until one of them said that it sounded gay…

But these days we use it to describe the act of simultaneously teabagging our foes in the heat of battle, and as you can see from this awesome YouTube video taken on a cold October night, it’s an act that usually gets us killed. Still, the ensuing carnage is pretty spectacular, so I’m going to share it with you all.

I bet we’ve all had this thought…

Today Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was finally released in the UK, I’m guessing that nothing has been done to fix the dodgy wireless guitar, but still an excellent game none the less… I can say this as I bit the bullet and imported a copy from ‘Play-Asia’ as I’m too much of a Guitar Hero fiend to wait… If any UK players want to join my tour group, Autofelacio, then follow the link over to the Guitar Hero website and join me (although I can’t tell you how…).

But more importantly, yesterday the Halo Theme tune (MJOLNIR mix), played by guitar legend Steve Vai, was released as a free download for the game. For all those who are curious as to exactly how this sounds and plays, watch this YouTube video of some GH god getting 5 star on it in expert…

As fellow Teabagger, SmellyGeekBoy, will vouch for, the song itself is not too difficult and quite good fun to play… Plus it’s frikkin’ Halo! What more do you want?

Bearded Hippy Programmer-Extraodinaire In Internet Rant Shocker!

One of my all-time heroes and creator of some of the best games of the 16-bit era, Jeff Minter, has gone off on an emo whinefest today about the lack of downloads of his most recent game, XBLA’s Space Giraffe. He specifically mentions the popularity of old arcade games such as Frogger, which outsold his game 10-to-1 in one week.

Straight from the llama’s mouth:

“not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.

OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga.

We’ll shut up trying to do anything new then.

Sorry for even trying.” - Stinkygoat

Let’s forego the discussion of how the bastard lovechild of Tempest and the 360’s visualiser isn’t a remake of an “old, shite arcade game”, and instead try to picture Jeff right now. He’s sitting in the corner of his bedroom, black eyeliner on, screaming “I hate you!!! I wish I could fucking die!!”, listening to some My Chemical Romance and attempting to slit his wrists, but giving up because it hurts too much.

Of course, we only have to look at the popularity of other great, modern games like Geometry Wars, Small Arms, Boom Boom Rocket, and Zuma to know that new games can indeed be big sellers on XBLA. They’ve proven that the system can work, it’s just that Space Giraffe didn’t. It’s not even a bad game at all, it just wasn’t that well received after all the hype.

I like Jeff Minter and I’m a big fan of his work, but this is just silly. I’m hoping that this is all just a clever marketing ploy, or maybe a bout of depression bought on by LSD flashbacks. We shall see.

Half-Life 2 On PS3 Is Slower Than A Garden Gnome

Well, there you have it. Those lucky enough to have a choice between the Xbox, PC, and PS3 versions of The Orange Box have just had that decision made a little easier, because according to a preview by 1UP, the PS3 port (handled by EA, nonetheless) is absolutely atrocious. Playtesters found framerates in the single figures in large parts of the Half-Life games, and a server issue which prevented them being able to test Team Fortress 2 at all.

Of course, this isn’t the final version of the game (1UP describe it as “near-final”), but as the game is from a company that are well-known for their dislike of the PS3, owners of the console shouldn’t get their hopes up. Couple that with framerate issues in many other PS3 games, and all does not bode well for The Orange Box, which is a shame really as it’s probably the best game of the whole year.

There is a silver lining to all of this, of course. Testers found that Portal was a near-perfect port and didn’t have any issues with it at all, so it’s nice to see that EA have their priorities in order.

-

Update!

Well, it seems that IGN and Gamespy’s preview copies of the game weren’t quite so bad. While Half-Life 2: Episode 2 has some noticeable framerate issues, the game is more than playable and it’s not the end of the world for Half-Life loving PS3 fans.

From Kotaku:

“IGN’s Hilary Goldstein writes that The Orange Box for the PlayStation 3 “is still a fantastic collection and runs well for the most part, but there are some technical issues that put it behind the 360 version.” He then tempers that with a stiff upper lip, writing that the “technical issues aren’t going to be enough to deter anyone who wants to enjoy Orange Box on PS3.” and that “unless you require your games to never dip below 30fps, you should not strike The Orange Box off your PS3 holiday wish list.”

Gamespy is also forgiving, writing that the dip in framerate doesn’t introduce itself until Episode Two. Those drops “don’t rival a slideshow, but they’re noticeable” according to author Sterling McGarvey.”

Phew!

Some fast paced FPS goodness - shame about the pace of development though

Probably one of the few games worth playing in the Playstation 3 has now been delayed until the first quarter of 2008. Haze was reported last week as being on schedule for a December release and being the only version of Haze still in development.

Ubisoft, those wonderful people that last week brought us Assassin’s Creed, had just re-confirmed a December 14th release date for Haze in Europe, along with a December 4th U.S. date, has said the game “will now be launched in the fourth fiscal quarter”. Along with this delay, comes Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction that has now been announced as being pushed even further back to Ubisoft’s fiscal year 2008-2009.

There is some good news with these two little bombshells however, Ubisoft have also announced Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 for release around the same time as Haze. Wonderful.

Lego….nuff said.

Jumping on the Bandwagon of child friendly MMO’s, Lego are bringing their own game to the Intertubes, dubbed, Lego Universe.

They’re joining a whole host of Children’s MMO’s that are currently in development/live, such as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online and really that’s all I can think of.

It’ll be interesting to see what they make of the world of Massive Multiplayer Online, and all I can say is, I shall be signing up for the Beta to have a play around at least. Everyone loves Lego.

Doo Doo Doo Da Doo Doo De Doo Doo…

So, I’m quite happy with the theme we’ve got here (although it will undergo a lot more tweaking before it’s done), but one thing that my fellow blogtards OwningXylophone and Evoroth don’t seem to agree with is my excellent grey colour scheme (that’s a “gray” “color” scheme if you’re a ‘merkun). In my defense, it was the quickest thing I could come up with that looked semi-professional, even if it is a bit dull.

So, I’m throwing it open to everyone. What colours do we go with? We have full control over the skin, so we can have gradients or whatever. You can try tweaking things on the fly with Firebug if you’re a Firefox user. You could even take a screenshot and upload it somewhere.

Any suggestions, anyone? Or do we stick with the awesome grey theme?

New places, new image and a new site? Well all that’s missing in that case is a new feature!

As I found myself at home today, I took the time to tab the Electric, Acoustic and Bass tracks of The Metal by Tenacious D. You’ll mostly be needing Guitar Pro 5 to use this tab as I tabbed it all out in that. It’s quite a fun song to play regardless of the instrument and isn’t too difficult either.

The song uses standard E tuning.

Find the download after this video:

Download the Guitar Pro Tab by following this link.

Alternatively, view them online by clicking the links below:

The Metal - Lead
The Metal - Acoustic
The Metal - Bass

Apologies for the layout, but I hate doing them by hand and so what you see is what was exported by Guitar Pro.

Also, I swear that it’s Dave Grohl in the Metal Demon suit.

Mr. T. (I pity the Fool.), William Shatner (that guy from Star Trek, and as of late, some Kellogg’s ads) and Verne Troyer (Mini-me.) have all signed up to do a series of Ads promoting Blizzard’s fantastic MMO - World of Warcraft.

As of now, you can watch Shatner’s and the big T’s ads over on the WoW site, or alternatively, you can check them out below.

For the time being, the Verne Troyer ad is not available on the WoW site or on YouTube. The most I get from these ads myself though is that Mohawks and big gold chains are back in this season.