Toomanywires

We had a mid-week public holiday last week. They're nice, mid-week holidays, but they're also a bit useless. You're not going to get up to anything too exciting, or travel too far afield, with just 24 hours sandwiched between regular workdays. I think they're best spent at home. Go to bed a little later than usual the evening before - an extra 30 minutes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard - tackle a few chores on the day to slightly free up the weekend, bake something; go for a daytime jog. Or, as I decided to do, get the PlayStation 2 out.  A week later, and I have yet to put it back away. I've bought a handful of PS1 and PS2 games the last couple of months but have been putting off trying them. I just didn't fancy going through the whole rigmarole of unpacking the PS2 and getting it hooked up to the monitor, especially as I didn't know whether it would still work or not. I'd plugged it in a couple of times last year and found it to be increasingly unreliable...

I keep a record of the games I play. It lives on my phone in the Notes app.  It's nothing fancy. No pictures, no sentences; not even scores. Just a plain text note, littered with spelling errors as well as abbreviations that'll only make sense to me.  I love to add a new entry and spend time scrolling through it, mumbling things to myself like "Oh yeah, I played that", "I liked that", "I didn't like that" and "Is that how you spell Veilguard?" It's a simple yet effective solution to tracking my games-played and seeing how my year is shaping up. Despite only being a month and a half into 2025, my list for this year is already looking pretty good. It's got a bit of this, a bit of that. With no big new release to focus on, I've been switching between multiple games, some old and some new, getting through backlogs and revisiting favourites. I've felt very productive, pressing my buttons and rolling credits.  The next fortn...

I needed to focus.  The final stage of Gitaroo Man Lives required my full and undivided attention. Without it, I had no chance of seeing the final credits. A dozen previous attempts had been thwarted by a variety of maladies including, but not limited to: thumb cramp, screen glare, itchy face, an unresponsive circle button, a general lack of rhythm, and people trying to talk to me. I needed to be left alone so that I could focus. So I grabbed my headphones, mumbled something to my family about needing to do a thing upstairs, and retreated to a quiet corner of the spare room. I closed the door, drew the curtains, rolled up my sleeves and decided that I would not emerge until I was victorious.  Twenty minutes, and another dozen or so attempts later, and the credits rolled. I had done it! I had beaten Gitaroo Man Lives, a game that I both loved and loathed, depending on my performance. Just in case you don't know: Gitaroo Man Lives!, or Gitaroo Man Live! in Japan, is a 2006 PSP p...

If I could travel back to 2006, I'd buy the full set of Bit Generations games on the Game Boy Advance. Twice. I'd also grab that Sega Wondermega that sat in Akihabara Trader's cabinet for ages. I'd probably try to prevent some wars or whatever too. The Bit Generations series was once far more reasonably priced than it is now. Accessible for even the most cash-strapped of GBA owner. You'd spot them straight away when you entered any well-stocked store, with their distinctive form factor and simplistic but eye-catching cover art. I remember them well, but knew them by sight only.  As I'm writing this post, it dawns on me that I'm likely describing new copies, or at the very least newly-used. They were launched exclusively in Japan in July 2006, which was my first summer living here. I am remembering, or misremembering, old games before they were old, otherwise known as new games. Oddly, it feels like they were always "retro"; a throwback at launch. E...

The Best & Worst of: 2023 /  2022   /  2021  /  2020  /  2019  /   2018  /  2017  /  2016  /  2015  /  2014  /  2013  /  2012  /  2011  /  2010 I bought a GameCube this year. It's orange. I also bought and played things that aren't twenty years old. New things.  Whether I was pumping dozens of hours into the latest blockbuster, discovering a charming indie, revisiting an old favourite, or ticking something off my endless retro-must-play list, I had plenty of fun with games in 2024. And I bet you did too. I spent the vast majority of my game time on PS5 and Series X, and continued to strongly favour digital purchases over physical. I don't need new boxes cluttering up my shelves, as I've got plenty of old ones already doing that. I mostly opted for PS5 for blockbusters, whereas Series X was for whatever was on Game Pass.  The first half of the year w...

As kids, we were sometimes allowed to play games on the big TV, but only on special occasions. The big TV in the living room, shared by everyone. You couldn't hog that with your Sega or Sony. And besides, there was no room under the TV to permanently store a console. It'd have to stay out on the carpet, a mess of RF boxes and power cords; controllers and cartridges. No one wanted that, and god knows what our spaniels would've done with an exposed Sega. Terrible things, I'd imagine. We, my brother and I, usually played upstairs. We were fortunate enough to have portable TVs in our rooms, albeit tiny ones. And I do mean tiny. Looking into the screen of my TV-VCR combo was like peeping through a letterbox. Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter 2, Sega Rally, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 7 - everything pre-PS2 was experienced on that minuscule screen. Games that still loom large, played on the smallest of displays. Sometimes, our consoles came downstairs. For example, on bi...