Toomanywires

I have to locate and gun-down some white supremacists. A guilt-free delight. 
I'm playing as Lincoln Clay, a black veteran and an absolute unit. My pasty targets have congregated in an affluent suburb of 1968 New Bordeaux (New Orleans), so I'm going to stand out like a sore thumb. They are having a BBQ in some cunt's back yard. There'll be burgers, chicken, ribs and a side helping of old-timey, Southern racism.
I forgot to bring a bottle, but I did bring a rifle and a fist full of grenades.
I arrive outside the property and see the red markers appear on my radar. That means I've found my villains, but I'm confused by several blue symbols that seem to be mingling with the reds. Blues are cops. Blues aren't my friends, but for the most part they have been a separate enemy, better avoided than directly confronted. But they're here at the racism tea party.
I approach cautiously. I hop the chainlink fence and hug the wall alongside the house. I can hear the BBQ …

1. Vita-ing in 2020

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I recently un-retired my Vita. Unfortunately, my memory card was corrupted so I lost all of my saves and everything needed to be re-downloaded. So, over the last month, I have been reinstalling my library piece by piece. While I was at it, I decided to try some of the dozens of untouched titles that I'd accumulated over the years, most of which came from PS+.

Severed was the best of the bunch. I bought it in 2018, but discarded it early on; I just wasn't in the mood. My experience was very different this time around, however. I love the art style, the manic swiping and the dark, vague story, and I played it right through to the very end. I also finished Burly Men at Sea, an adventure as short as it is charming (it is quite charming). I was starting to get into Titan Souls, but the 15-20 seconds delay between dying, respawning and re-confronting your foe is too long in a game where death is constant. It desperately needed a S…

I am a fraud.

I had a copy of Sega Rally Championship from 1996-1998, back when I owned a PAL Saturn. I rebought it in 2006, when I grabbed a Japanese system, and have held onto that version ever since. It is one of my favourite games on my favourite retro console, and is something that I've played on-and-off across four different decades. It is arcade racing perfection - fun, colourful, inviting, easy to pick up but difficult to master.

Sega Rally Championship features three courses - Desert, Forest, Mountain - and two cars - the Toyota Celicia and the Lancia Delta. This was known. Or at least it was, until my world was turned upside down over the weekend by a picture retweeted into my timeline. It was a screenshot of a fourth course and an unfamiliar car, claiming to be from Sega Rally Championship. Must be some sort of PC mod, I thought to myself. Those PC gamers are out of control.

But then I dared to dream. Could it be possible that I'd been completely unaware of an extr…

I still can't believe that those mad bastards remade Final Fantasy VII. I always dismissed it as a fanboy fantasy, for which Square Enix would never have the appetite. I was wrong.

I finished Final Fantasy VII Remake last week, and I'm glad that it exists. It adds something worthwhile to the VII menagerie. It works both as a companion piece to the Seven canon and as an interesting deviation.

I enjoyed it, but much of that enjoyment was down to nostalgia. Remake is good, but Remake is also bad. It's complicated then, but so are most games that are worth remembering.

In an attempt to organize my thoughts, I have committed them to a "wot I liked" and "wot I didn't like" blog. Or a MidYah and MidNah blog, if you will.

Because Midgar is the setting of Remake, and Yah sounds like a exclamation in the affirmative and, well, you get it.

SPOILERS, obviously.
MidYah: Nostalgia
Square Enix invented nostalgia two decades ago, when they started repackaging and re…

I'm in need of focus this week, as the work-from-home marathon enters its second month. So I'm going to use some of the time I'd usually spend commuting to write a short post every day, Monday-Friday.

The last two Assassin's Creeds, Origins and Odyssey, were outstanding. Long since freed of the Desmond nonsense, and paying minimal attention to the always boring modern-day rubbish, the are hugely entertaining adventures set during fascinating periods in history. They also gave us interesting characters for the first time since Ezio departed in 2011.

It's really nice to be excited for Assassin's Creed again.

Following some time off, the series is set to return with Valhalla. It was announced yesterday via a weird drip-feed stream, and we're expecting more concrete details later today. Based on the reveal, it's safe to assume that this will be the long rumoured Viking AC. The prospect of marauding across Northern Europe is a tantalizing one, and I wouldn&#…

I'm in need of focus this week, as the work-from-home marathon enters its second month. So I'm going to use some of the time I'd usually spend commuting to write a short post every day, Monday-Friday.

My five-year old daughter can, on occasion, beat me at Street Fighter. In my defence, she's almost six.

Street Fighter has become part of our work/play-from-home routine. A snifter of Ultra IV to finish up our lunch break before I get back to Zoom-life and excel nightmares, and she returns to colouring Disney princesses and making Lego towers. We usually go a few rounds. She likes Cammy, Chun-Li, Ryu and Zangief; I like to mix it up. From time to time, she beats me. Sometimes I let her win, but other times I'm desperately trying not to lose. I'm happy for her but I'm also despairing at the ongoing atrophy of my already lacklustre beat-em-up skills.

I'm good at knowing about video games, but I am not good at being good at playing video games.

I didn't g…

I'm in need of focus this week, as the work-from-home marathon enters its second month. So I'm going to use some of the time I'd usually spend commuting to write a short post every day, Monday-Friday.

During the 1994-1995 season, Sam Cassell appeared in all 82 regular season games for the NBA Champion Houston Rockets. A key role player, he came off the bench in all but one of them. He was good, and would later become very good, but he was never a star nor a household name. He was certainly not someone you would expect to find on the front cover of an NBA video game.

Yet there he is, gracing the sleeve of the US and Japanese versions of Total NBA '96 (Japan and EU) / NBA ShootOut (America land). He is immortalized mid-layup, presumably about to notch up two more points. Exciting stuff for fans of layups and/or Sam Cassell.

The Total NBA series was generally well received, before fizzling out in the early-mid 2000s. It was developed in-house by Sony as an alternative to …

I'm in need of some extra focus this week, as the work-from-home marathon enters its second month. So I'm going to use some of the time I'd usually spend commuting to write a short post every day this week, Monday-Friday.

A week ago, I turned on my Vita for the first time in two years. I was delighted to rediscover bubbles overflowing with games. Vita-exclusives, indies, retreads, PS1 and PSP standouts and a massive helping of PS+ offerings. For a console that had no games, the NGP was home to a shit tonne of worthwhile titles.

Unfortunately, I couldn't play any of them. My 64 GB bastard memory card, filled to the brim with games, was corrupted. So I had to reformat it, losing all of my game saves in the process. I foolishly assumed they'd been uploaded to the magical cloud, but apparently that's an option you have to enable in the menu and is not an automatic function. Cloud saves continue to be a mystery, a decade-long crapshoot as to what will be preserved a…

It's been ten days since I last scoured a video game bargain section.

Almost two weeks since I rummaged through a junk bin, visited a Book Off, shook my head disapprovingly at an over-priced Saturn game, or fingered an off-white Famicom.

I've been working from home most of the last week and a half, and have kept myself stashed away at the weekend. Even if I were moving more freely, I'd think twice before visiting a used-game store. Nerds are filthy creatures.

I miss the excitement of finding an unwanted game from generations past, for only a couple hundred Yen. A game that passed me by initially, now at a price that's perfect for a test drive, with limited expectations and no promises of lengthy time investments. A chance to add yet another game to my "tried that" list and cement my position as the unassailable gamer. A guilt-free taster for the cost of a convenience store coffee.

Pre-working from home, I had bought a handful of very cheap PS3 games. I adore…