As most of you are probably more than aware, shoryuken.ie has been quiet of late. Not for a lack of trying. Sure, motivation is a key part of not blogging more about games and gaming culture, but even more than that – some staff have left us, some have joined us to post occasionally but the core crew (including myself) are just very, very busy.

And as such, to help the process of re-invigorating the site a series of changes will be coming over the next few days and weeks. We’ll still have fresh news, reviews and opinion, but the site will be better laid out to handle it. Even more, we should see an increase in speed on the server (it’s been quite slow – our database is huge).

These changes have already begun in the background. In fact, it took all day to get one change committed to the server but I can see it making a difference already, even if readers can’t see it!

As such, over the next few days expect some changes, expect some errors and certainly expect more content coming your way. If there are any suggestions, bugs or anything else please email me!

I’d also like to take the time to thank everyone for their continued visits and support. I still get lovely emails from people about the site. We (somehow) get more hits then ever, despite a brief period of relative inactivity. So for that all the staff here can only thank you!

Once again, if there’s anything you want to say get in touch. We’re also keen on getting new writers on board, so email me even if you want to contribute a single post, or even a regular column!

GT5 was delayed, but you can still play it. Not got PS+ to get into the KZ3 beta? Who cares, you can play it with us? Intrigued by Move? Try it out before you buy it!

Friday 22nd October, 2010 at 7PM, we’ll be exclusively taking over the Playstation Hub on South William Street, Dublin 2 (map below). For two hours you can meet and greet fellow nerds gamers humans people while enjoying Sony’s future lineup in a swish centrally located pad. Furthermore, there’ll be a few drinks to be had too. All of this is completely free, but places are seriously limited, so by way of keeping the peace RSVP yourself by emailing hub@shoryuken.ie. If you want to RSVP+1 (i.e. bring a friend), tell us. Otherwise it could be messy if we book out the room and everyone brings extra people.

As I say, places are limited and we’ll do our best to cater to everyone… so email us. You’ve a week to get in touch!

Remember it’s Friday 22nd of October at 7PM until 9PM. Places are limited, so email hub@shoryuken.ie if you want to go! If your email isn’t working, or you’re on a mobile browser that’s being finicky, leave a comment and I’ll do my best.

See you on Friday!

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Not sure how I feel about the collective back slapping but hey, the game still looks like a ton of fun. Some of us in Shoryuken will hopefully be getting our hands on it tonight when Sony roll the ModNation team into town!

Ohhh, header. Kinda like the old one...

Ireland has a very strange, crowded market with games sites but I think the calibre of writing skill and technical gaming know-how of the various writers here sets us above the rest, and I know plenty of you come here for a daily dose of news and critical commentary on the industry and the software it gives us.

So, moving forward as we get ready to celebrate a year in existence, what’s in the pipeline? Well, first and foremost, more of the same. We’ve built a good solid readership over the year, and a few of you regularly comment on our articles (the more who comment the better, though… if you keep emailing me for a forum it’s useless until we have plentiful threads!). We were promising a podcast, and we hope to do extra media stuff this year for you all. How that turns out we’ll have to see, though.

Working as well as the current one. Yes, that is todays posts. Yes, it is LIVE, but in a secret location

Biggest of all is a planned revamp of the site design. What we have is lovely, but it could be better. Maybe not more functional, but it’s time to move away from somewhat plain and into sexy. But classy. Too many sites look gaudy and awful, no more so then on Irish blogs (not just gaming ones, mind you). The images attached to this post are a sneak preview. So, what do we think?

Cheers for the first year of reading our drivel, here’s to another!

Some bloke from Cork and his team of merry men and wimminz put together the nominations list for this years Irish Blog Awards, and shoryuken hit the polls in three categories: “Best Group Blog”, “Best Specialist Blog” and “Best Newcomer”.

It’s a surprise and a delight to be nominated in the first place, but three times is special. Especially since we’ve only been up and running since last May. Although these nominations do get whittled down into actual shortlists we’ll keep our fingers and toes crossed, and let you know if we advance to the next level of blog awards-ness. If we do get nominated it then goes to a public vote as to who wins at the event itself where, should we be shortlisted, a bunch of gamer nerds will be present, slurring irrevocable shite

Again, thanks to anyone who nominated us. I would also like to make a quick mention of our brothers-in-arms (but they’re more nerdy because they talk about comic books and non-interactive games, or “films” as they call them), Burn All Zombies who re-tooled their site recently to look cooler then usual and picked up two nominations for their efforts!

View the rest and share the love here

Action moments happen every 60 seconds in this game

So, what plucky developer made the game that we collectively agree’d was the best of the year? While many were deserving, only one can actually win. And more people voted for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves then any other game.

By far one of the most popular games of the year, it’s beautiful, has a well-written script, likable characters and brilliant gameplay. Anyone people didn’t like about the first iteration of the series was removed, and replaced with little drops of awesome, dotted throughout the game.

Xbox fans will be sad not to have one of their favs in the top spot of the year, but rest assured, the game was so good it’s worth buying a PS3 for – even if you can’t stand the Sony brand underneath your TV.

Our full golden five-star review can be found here.

Honourable mentions go to: Batman Arkham Asylum, Street Fighter IV & Left4Dead2

Stay tuned for our “best of the decade” stuff as we look back at ten years that saw the next gen happen, twice.

In May this year, our little site began life as a humble experiment to write freely about games. A few crazy folk who shared the dream joined me in this writing-about-games lark, and as the year went on we got better at it, and took a lot of viewers into our vortex of nerd-dom. We’ve built a very, very good site now. 2009 for most was a horrific year that we’ll be delighted to see the end of, but at least we can smile when we think about our little site that went big.

2009 didn’t just give birth to gaming sites, oh no, there were games to enjoy, too! And here we’ll run down all of the games in one big post. Nope, not drawing it out over a laborious week long affair. One post, folks. There will be more later in the week to discuss what the entire decade gave us, but first, let’s see who came up big in 2009!

The votes were cast by the guys who write for shoryuken, so with that in mind I polled the guys and came up with this list of the finest collection of gaming in 2009. Enjoy.

Best PS3 game

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Honourable mention: Killzone 2

Best 360 game

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Honourable mention: Batman Arkham Asylum

Best Wii game

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

Honourable mention: Wii Sports Resort

Best PSP game

Dissidia

Honourable mention: Pixel Junk Monsters Deluxe

Best DS game

Spirit Tracks

Honourable mention: GTA Chinatown Wars

Best PC game

Left 2 Dead 2

Honourable mention: World of Warcraft, WOTLK patch 3.3

Best mobile game (iPhone, android, symbian, etc.)

Flight Control

Honourable mention: DOOM Classic

Best driving game

Wipeout HD Fury

Honourable mention: Forza 3

Best shooter

Killzone 2

Honourable mention: Call of duty: Modern Warfare 2

Best RPG

Dragon Age: Origins

Honourable mention: Borderlands

Best sports title

FIFA 2010

Honourable mention: Forza Motorsport 3

Best PSN title

Final Fantasy VII

Honourable mention: Pixel Junk Shooter

Best XBLA title

Battlefield 1943

Honourable mention: ‘Splosion Man

Best multi-platform title

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Honourable mention: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Best Multiplayer title

Killzone 2

Honourable mention: Battlefield 1943

Game of the year will be given its own post.

Stay tuned over the next few days as we’ve a lot going on as we look back at 2009 and the decade that it closes.

Hope Santa brought you all the gaming goodness you asked for. Have fun!

Hoo-rah, folks.

Yes, folks, it’s my first ever public state of the union address to the public of shoryuken.ie – strap on your boredom hats.

The history of this site is as bland as the history of some sort of vegetable. I registered a cool domain, and was shocked I got it from the EIDR (Irish domain registrar). My plan was to start a video game blog. No reason or rhyme to it other then to spout my crap about gaming, because I’m a fan. A lifelong one (so far) at that. I do enjoy my gaming, and I have every single bit of equipment necessary to play them. From consoles, to PC’s all the way to the big fancy TV and surround sound system. All barely ever used for anything other then games. But then along came some lads who ran other game sites in Ireland. They were pretty awful. I say were, because for the most part, these sites are gone. They asked people on forums and the like if people wanted to write for their awful sites.

So then I decided to copy them, except do it right. And a few good men willing to deal with the stresses of writing for a game site later, we had shoryuken “properly” launched in April to a few hundred visitors for the month. May came and went, and we doubled our hits. Then June, July & August doubled those numbers recursively. Then September came, and blitzed it. And now in October the stats show thousands of unique visitors popping on – and most of which come back! 65% of our hits come from direct links or bookmarks, which is amazing.

The boring stats are that 75% of you use Windows, ahead of Mac OS X at 16% and a load of random stuff afterwards – including some people using iPhones and PSP’s to visit, with a total of 35 hits since April via Sun Solaris operating system. The most popular browser is Firefox, closely followed by IE (most IE users are using IE6 – which indicates a lot of readers looking while at work!). All in all, pretty average stats!

Comments are harder to track because I changed the system during the summer – but there are a fair few comments to say the least. I would like more, of course, to spur on the creation of a dedicated forum – but I’m a patient man.

Anyway, I want to thank all of the readers who pop on and read our spooge. Most of us are untrained writers (hard to tell, I know…) and do this out of a passion for games and enough of an opinion to write to the masses. I’ve always said I want this site to be – above all – honest, and I think we are. Negative reviews have garnished some hate, strange stat patterns (my bad Need for Speed review, for example, had a huge number of hits from the developers’ forum) and importantly – debate.

We’ve gotten good relationships with PR people in Ireland. It’s a shame more game companies don’t come over and push their wares on us, but the ones who are here have been incredibly professional and a joy to deal with.. so as much as we need to honour our writers and viewers, the folks at the bold face of the industry need to be thanked too. They make it easier to do a site like this!

So the future, what’s that hold? Well, it’s likely the site will grow even more – we’re no longer doubling hits, we’re quadrupling them monthly which is a scary thought. We don’t generate any money (despite the google ads) but are having fun so the server costs are worth it. Hopefully we can move on to create more of a community here and I’d love to host events locally and get some charitable stuff going on as a way to use the site’s celebrity for good. I also expect some of the guys writing for the site to move onto bigger and better things within the games or journalism industry. Some talented folk write their stuff here. None of which are me, incidentally. I also expect myself to make more effort with the facebook page (I apologise for that!).

Anyway, I really wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved. Readers, writers, industry-folks and so on. As we come into Christmas this site will blow up even more, I hope & expect. Stick with us as we blow up, and hopefully give you all some good fun along the way. We will keep it honest, interesting and regular – you just keep showin’ up

I have no idea who this guy is but hes a boring guitarist and amazing lyricist, singing about his addiction to video games in particular the sublime Street Fighter 4. So lighten up this shitty Tuesday morning by throwing you arms in the air with your lighter (unless you’re in an office that is) and sing along, Haadooo oo oooken, Shoryuu uuuu u u ken.

Take a look