Toomanywires

In Japan, there is no escaping Capcom's headline series, Monster Hunter. Board the train and you’ll find yourself surrounded by solitary hunters, eyes down, engrossed in portable slaughter. Journey to Akihabara and you'll come across groups of teens huddle together for multiplayer hunting, oblivious to inquisitive foreigners peering into their circle in hopes of glimpsing Japanese pop culture in its natural habitat. You cannot visit a video game shop without tripping over something MH related, as most stores are filled to the rafters with special edition software, spray painted consoles and feline hoodies. Supermarkets and convenience stores offer little respite, as branded goods and product placement line the shelves. Why settle for a regular energy drink when you can slurp your sickly syrup from a Monster Hunter can? The series also pops up regularly in awkward, cross-cultural conversation. Inquisitive Japanese students, unsure of their English and suddenly afforded t

Unless something earth shattering happens in the next two weeks, such as a Timesplitters 4 reveal or Keiji Inafune saying something complimentary about Japanese games, I won't be updating toomanywires for the rest of the month. There are plenty of topics I'd love to write about - Metal Gear Solid 3 HD, the state of the Vita, Binary Domain, PixelJunk 4am and more - but at the moment I'm struggling to find the time to blog. I’ll be back with a vengeance in June, just in time for E3 speculation, surprises and disappointment. In the meantime, there are 200+ posts in the archive for your perusal and I'll still be jabbering away on twitter @toomanywiresUK. I'll see you back here in June. Cheers Matt

I was having a bit of clear out over the weekend when I stumbled upon a pile of PlayStation 1 era demo discs. A treasure trove of pixelated playables and badly cut trailers, they came packaged with issues of the Official PlayStation magazine back when I was a regular reader in the late 90s. These demos once kept me entertained for weeks on end and were an invaluable resource for planning future purchases at a time when I’d only buy a handful of games each year. Putting our spring clean on hold, I dusted off the shiny throw-backs and fed them to my PS3. The majority of the discs were happy to co-operate, running smoothly on futuristic hardware, but some clung stubbornly to a decade-and-a-half’s worth of scratches and dust, and were quickly disposed of. Persevering with the working copies, I was greeted by an eyesore of a menu screen with nineties techno, garish neons and pulsating menus. Unfortunately, the trailers offered little respite. Dub step is now the staple of video