Toomanywires

I was very excited for NBA The Run, until I wasn't. It appeared as a spiritual successor to the much-celebrated NBA Street series, the EA BIG production that brought together streetball culture, arcade gameplay and an unforgettable visual style. At its best - that would be  NBA Street Vol. 2  - Street is recognised as not only one of the finest basketball games ever made, but one of the best arcade sport experiences period. While The Run certainly looks the part, it's missing one of the elements that made NBA Street such a compelling package: a deep and entertaining single player mode. And that's why I didn't buy it at launch. My enthusiasm was all but killed off by the online-multiplayer-only announcement, which came after the launch trailer had already gotten my hopes up.  I wanted to enjoy it at my own pace. I wanted to improve incrementally over un-rushed sessions, where I'm solely responsible for my own entertainment, and not at the mercy of teammates who don...

That's the 1999 San Antonio Spurs, flying home from the NBA Finals. They're pictured returning from their Game 5, 78-77 victory over the New York Knicks, where they clinched their first NBA Championship. The Larry O'Brien trophy is in the bottom right.  To celebrate, they are doing the most 1999 thing possible: having a StarCraft LAN party! Apparently, this was a very popular hobby amongst Spurs players. And here's video proof , featuring future Hall of Famer, and arguably the greatest Power Forward of all time, Tim Duncan. Twenty seven years, and several StarCraft updates later, and we're running it back. That's right, the Spurs are taking on the Knicks in the NBA Finals, tipping off 6/3. San Antonio is no stranger to winning. Having successfully built around Duncan across two decades of excellence, the Spurs made six Finals appearances from 1999-2014, winning five times. The Knicks, on the other hand, were largely irrelevant throughout the 2000s and 2010s. One...

1. Lumines - Arise a Contrarian I like Lumines.  Electronic Symphony is my favourite, and it lived in my Vita for years on end, and I put countless hours into the PSP originals, as well as the recent-ish remaster. However, I've struggled to click with Lumines Arise. In that respect, I seem to be in the distinct minority. My social media feeds have been full of gushing praise, from Lumines-heads and via Tetris Effect-converts alike.  By no means did I dislike Arise, it's just that it never got its claws into me, not how I hoped it would. I wasn't seeing falling blocks when I closed my eyes nor fighting off the urge to have one more go at silly hours. I was essentially done with it within a week or so, and that bugged me. So I decided to think really hard - really, really hard - and get to the bottom of why we didn't gel. And I think I got it. In Arise, the total marriage between the core gameplay and music is a hindrance to my enjoyment of Lumines. When defining that enj...

If I were allowed one stopwatch related wish, I’d ask for a life-long game clock that could travel back in time and record every last minute I've spent playing video games and consoles, from the Master System 2 to the Wii U. If this dream watch were to become a reality clock, and given the gift of speech, I’m convinced its first words would be “Matt, you’ve played an awful lot of video games”. And I have played an awful lot of video games, some of which weren't Call of Duty. A recent thread on the Play Station forum got me thinking about the highlights of my twenty plus years of button bashing and stick fiddling. The subject was favourite games by year, looking back as far as you dare. I spent some time on Wikipedia and Moby Games before committing to my yearly favourites, and found some years more difficult than others, thanks to an overabundance, or sometimes lack of worthy options (I have included my selections at the end of this post). While compiling my list, I was st...