Toomanywires

In Case You Missed It: Back to Blogging / Revisiting the Mansion (RE1 HD) / In Praise of Yakuza / The Correct Length February Playlist 1. Resident Evil Remake HD:   I’d forgotten just how good the first Resident Evil was. I’m gradually making my way through Jill’s campaign, having finished with Chris’ earlier in the month - I achieved the best ending where Jill and Rebecca fall asleep in a helicopter. I will do everything in my power to ensure that Barry also has the chance to nod off in a chopper. 2. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate:   I’ve only played a measly five hours, as of late I have been struggling to go more than fifteen minutes without falling asleep and dropping the 3DS on my face. Still, I’m sure that I’ll be playing this for months to come. Words: New 3DS XL, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Dragon Age Inquisition This month I bought my third 3DS, because I like new things. I marked the release of one of my most anticipated games of 2015, Monster Hunter

Five hours is not the correct length for a game about steam-punk, Victorian werewolves, especially one that isn't very good and might actually be seven hours. £40 divided by five is a lot of money per hour for a game on a per hour basis, at least when evaluated at a per hour rate, which is what I'm doing. Five hours is the equivalent of three Journeys, but Journey was a lot cheaper and was also art * , which meant that it was fine. You can't put a price on art, but if you had to then £15 would be about right for an hour and a half of it. Steam-punk werewolves are not art and therefore five hours is unacceptable. Just to be clear, I was referring to The Order: 1886 in the above paragraph. Apparently, it’s only five hours long. In this time of austerity, we have to make sure we are getting plenty of bang for our bucks, pow for our Pounds or something for our Yens. If a game is running short, developers owe it to their customers to pad that shit out. Recycle a bo

Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid and Yakuza are my favourite modern, video game franchises. Uncharted is the peak of action-adventuring; Metal Gear Solid is silly and sublime, and Yakuza is more fun than playing Just Dance with your trousers off. There is nothing quite like Yakuza, and that's why I love it. Yakuza is somewhat of a rarity - a SEGA, home console franchise that is in rude health, in Japan at least. Produced by Toshihiro Nagoshi, a long-time Sega employee who has worked on everything from Daytona USA to Shenmue, Yakuza has sold millions of copies in Japan but has struggled to recreate this success elsewhere. For the most part, it has been a PlayStation exclusive, with the lone exception being a doomed Wii U port. It has also been adapted into a film, directed by cult favourite Takashi Miike, which succeeded in capturing the style and feel of the games. Yakuza debuted in 2005 on the PS2, but my first experience wasn't until 2011 and Yakuza 3. I have played

I'm currently making my way through Resident Evil HD Remaster. It is a prettier version of a remake of a game that I haven't touched for at least seventeen years, a game that I have fond memories of playing on my gone-but-not-forgotten Saturn. A lot has changed in seventeen years - I now have facial hair and a PS4 - but Resident Evil remains a compelling experience. With its B-movie production values, memorable setting, and refusal to hold the player’s hand, it is exactly the game I remember. It is a familiar experience, albeit one that I now approach in a very different way. I'm used to being able to save where I want, when I want, and expect games to have my back should I neglect to save before a game-over. Forget online multiplayer and digital downloads, auto-save is the single greatest feature of modern gaming. Resident Evil HD wants no part of this nonsense, as it retains its antiquated save system: a tiny number of manual save points (typewriters) which

  I want to blog again. I want to complain about Ubisoft, predict a new TimeSplitters before every games convention, write about ludonarrative dissonance in Puyo Puyo Tetris and discuss the hats of Dragon Age Inquisition.   For these reasons and many more, I am reviving Toomanywires. It has been very quiet here of late. I managed to bang out three posts last year ( Best and Worst of 2014 / E3 2014 in a Thousand Words / Musings of a Gamer: Catching Up ) and I put a lot of time and effort into an end of generation series at the tail end of 2013, but I haven't posted regularly for almost two years. Despite my lengthy absence, I’m confident that I have retained the majority of my blogging skills and I'd like to think that I can still construct a semi-coherent sentence. However, I have completely forgotten how to write InFAmouS correctly, so please be patient. In an effort to fit blogging back into my routine, I will be taking a slightly different approach to my w