Toomanywires

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has finished with me, but I'm far from finished with it.  I spent sixty glorious hours with Ichiban, Kiryu and crew, and I have an overwhelming number things I want to tell you about it. So here's a collection of musings, which I'll keep spoiler-free at first. I'll give you plenty of warning when it's about to get spoiler-y. 1. A Mini-Review It'd been a while since I'd played anything worthy of disturbing my GOAT list.  Infinite Wealth, however, had me scrambling to nail down the precise order of my all-time favourite games, so that I could decide whether or not I needed to make room for a new entry. I still haven't quite decided, as it's still too early to say; I need to let it sit for a while longer. However, the fact that I'm even considering this should let you know just how much I enjoyed Infinite Wealth. A lot. I enjoyed it a lot. I took to Hawaii far quicker and more completely than I thought I would, and the

We needed a second Cait Sith. I'd already won one in the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth lottery, a raffle-like event that kicked off last weekend in a limited number of participating stores. You pay ¥880, pick a sealed ticket from a box, open it up and see what prize you've won. It's a fairly common type of event here, usually scheduled to commemorate a new pop-culture release. Anyway, we needed a second Cait Sith. My daughter had taken a shine to the blocky, faux PS1-effect figure that I'd won on Saturday morning. Problem was, so had I. So we decided to try and win another, and put our minds to finding the best way of guaranteeing this outcome. We quickly ruled out robbery, as I only have one balaclava. Instead, we settled on a more scientific approach: we re-boxed the figures we'd already won, exactly as they'd come, and looked for ways to tell the different ones apart, so that we could make the right choice in-store. The figures come in blind boxes, so they all lo

The icon for the SingStar launcher is still present on my PS3 dashboard. A reminder of a time past, a series long since discontinued, and a developer, PlayStation London Studio, that is now no more. That SingStar icon probably isn't going anywhere. Back in 2012, it was made a permanent feature of the PS3 XMB for all European users, when the base game went free-to-play. Try as they might, joyless PS3 owners could not delete it - SingStar and PlayStation, together forever. A series of competitive karaoke games, featuring real music videos, SingStar debuted on PS2 and would later come to PS3 and PS4. Released across dozens of instalments, covering a wide range of artists and genres, it was a huge part of Sony's success in PAL markets, while barely making a dent in other territories, most notably North America. For some, it was a core part of the PlayStation experience in the 2000s - early-2010s, and it appealed to a diverse group of gamers and non-gamers alike. I hadn't though