Toomanywires

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...

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Japanese launch of the Sony PlayStation. To celebrate, I decided to dust off the PlayStation Demo 1 disc that came with my PS1 in the summer of '98, and relive some memories. Physical demos were once of great importance. Or at least they were to me. Packed-in with consoles, given away as freebies at the point of sale, or bagged with magazines, they were to be held on to and enjoyed over and over. I played Mission Impossible on my Official PS Magazine demo disc so many times that I could swear I actually owned the full game. Ditto with Steep Slope Sliders and Panzer Dragoon Zwei on Sega Saturn. Two paragraphs into a celebratory PlayStation post, and I'm already talking about the Sega Saturn! I'm nothing if not reliable. Porsche Challenge, which was featured on PlayStation Demo 1, is another example of a demo I played to death. I can remember racing through the streets of an unnamed US city, screeching around corners and trying, and...

I was looking forward to playing UFO 50. An anthology of 50 fictional 8-bit-style games, it sounded like the perfect thing to dip in and out of between the longer, more demanding games that seem to eat up so much of my time these days. I consider anything over 15 hours to be long and demanding, and am right to do so. Anyway, I'm not playing UFO 50, and that's because it's currently PC-only and I don't have a gaming PC. I just assumed that it would, at the very least, already be on Switch, but I was wrong. I'm sure it'll eventually land on consoles but, right now, I've got serious FOMO.  Or UFOMO, if you will. In an age of dwindling platform exclusives, and as a multi-platform owner, I rarely find myself missing out. But back in the day, things were different, and that fear led directly to hardware purchases that I wouldn't have otherwise made, or asked my parents to make come Christmas or birthdays. Some of these purchases were inspired, others less so. ...