Toomanywires

It's the end of a decade! To mark the occasion, I'm sharing memories and experiences that I associate with some of the games of the last ten years.  You can find them all here . During the summer of 2012, I didn't like games. They bored me. I couldn't bear the thought of having to go through the rigmarole of starting up a new one, learning controls and systems, and buying into poorly written stories and characters. For one summer, video games were rubbish. I've been playing games since the early 90s, which makes me very wise indeed. I've played every genre - shooting and non-shooting - and once paid  £ 80 for an import copy of Final Fantasy VI. In 1995, I almost convinced my parents to buy me a Mega CD. My rampant gaming can be split into four distinct periods. Childhood : Games were just for Christmases and Birthdays. They were toys and they weren't my main interest. GI Joe, plastic guns and Boglins were. Teens : My interest in games burgeoned....

It's the end of a decade! To mark the occasion, I'm sharing memories and experiences that I associate with some of the games of the last ten years.  You can find them all here . The first few months are the hardest, we were told. You won't sleep much, you'll keep unnatural hours, and your baby will do nothing but feed, shit, sleep, throw up and cry. Sometimes it will do all of those at the same time. There will be times when you'll think that your baby is smiling at you, and it'll make it all feel worthwhile. But she isn't. She doesn't have the ability to do that yet, and that grin is just wind. Also, you're looking at a stuffed toy. Where's your baby? You should really get some sleep. And they were right, obviously. Those first few months are the hardest. There's plenty of joy and emotion, but for the most part you're too tired to fully savour it. You operate on instinct alone and sleepwalk through much the day. There are time...

It's the end of a decade! To mark the occasion, I'm sharing memories that I associate with the games of the last ten years. You can find them all here . It'd been an age since I'd last played basketball. A group of friends and I were playing weekly pickup games in Tokyo in the mid-to-late-2000s, but interest eventually waned, ankles got sprained, lives got busier and our meet-ups ended. Fast forward to 2015, the Year of Luigi + 2.  We'd been back in England for a few years, and I really wanted to play basketball. I was a little overweight and in need of a new type of workout. I also wanted to get out of the house for a couple of hours a week and see if I could remember how to socialise. On top of that, I wanted to see if I had magically gained the ability to dunk after almost a decade of inactivity. Seemed like a reasonable expectation. Maybe my hops had matured? Someone pointed me toward a meet-up app that listed local sport groups, and I found a game ne...

As you know, it's nearly 2020. Which means it's time to start agonising over which games were the best of the last ten years. Initially, I was going to re-pick my favourite games of the decade. However, I've been writing "Best and Worst" of the year posts since 2010, and will be writing another before the end of this month. So let's not do that again. Let's do something a little different. I'm going to write around some of the games of the last ten years, instead of writing about them directly. I'll use them as inspiration and share memories to which they are intrinsically linked. So without further ado, let me tell you about the time I got rat-arsed on mead. ************ It's December 2011 and my wife and I are on our way to Manchester. We've got a lovely weekend planned. We'll meet some friends and hit the Christmas Market in the city centre. The next day, we'll do some exploring and Christmas shopping, before get...