Toomanywires

Mortal Kombat X was all over our internets last week due to some unpopular, day-one micro transactions which make it easier to perform end-of-bout fatalities. 79p buys you five of these consumable, gory finishers, which replace the more challenging input commands with a simple two button sequence; £3.99 gets you thirty. I kan't believe I'm writing about Mortal Kombat again! This DLC pack attracted a lot of negative attention in a quiet week for video games. I can understand why some people would be interested in buying this, as it simplifies something complicated and makes it easier to get more out of the game. Obviously, it also makes perfect business sense. Still, what amounts to a decreased difficulty level, albeit for a tiny part of the game, seems like a very cynical use of DLC/micro transactions, especially when it is sold as a consumable. But that's enough about Mortal Kombat. Here are some unusual DLC and micro transactions that I have just made up.

Guitar Hero is back! Rock Band is back! 2008 is back! The guitar controller is an icon of the last generation. Living room rock stars spent a fortune on plastic instruments, and no house party of the mid-to-late 2000s was complete without a couple of rounds of Guitar Hero or Rock band. These two series were worth a fortune to their developers and publishers, who were understandably keen to cash-in on unprecedented demand for cheaply made peripherals. The market was soon flooded and the bubble eventually burst, all but killing off the rhythm game genre. There are few things more seventh gen than the guitar controller. It was expensive and faddish, the height of publisher greed, yet it reached and appealed to an audience far wider than the average video game. The Rock Band/Guitar Hero guitar was a peripheral of its time, and I wonder whether consumers will be willing to re-embrace it when Guitar Hero and Rock Band are re-launched later this year. Looking through my

I couldn't give a toss about Mortal Kombat. Even as a bloodthirsty youth, I saw right through the spine-ripping and head popping fatalities - I knew it was krap and was far happier mashing my way through Street Fighter 2. Now, as a fully adult man, I still cannot think of anything less appealing than playing Mortal Kombat, and I have an excellent imagination. Whenever a new game in the series is announced, I do my best to ignore it. Mortal Kombat is one of a handful of major series that I choose to tune out. I will skip pages, ignore tweets, fast forward through podcasts and end friendships in an effort to steer clear of them. It's not that I hate these games, at least not all of them, I'm just not interested in giving them the time of day. Unless of course I'm short on topics for a blog post, in which case I'll happily throw five hundred words their way. Mortal Kombat might have improved since the mid-90s, but it still looks like it has been designed

Bloodborne is outstanding. You probably already knew this, either from first-hand experience or thanks to all the gushing reviews you’ve seen online. I could tell you how much I'm enjoying it, how after even the most brutal of sessions I'm desperate to jump back in, but you will have read that post elsewhere. So let's try something different. Because I'm a bit of a contrarian, and there are only so many times I can write "great" before I get bored, I thought I'd share a couple of the issues I'm having with Bloodborne. No game is perfect, not even the second coming of Dark Souls, so let’s get to it. 1. Central Yharnam That first stretch is a nightmare. Under powered, ill equipped and clueless, you must pass along narrow streets, trying to split a mob of disturbed locals into smaller groups, ready for slicing and dicing. Throw in a couple of dogs, some rifleman, nightmare crows, a large and aggressive oaf and two werewolves and you ha