Toomanywires

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...