Toomanywires

We're getting new versions of two GOATs later this summer. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is due late August, followed by Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater  at the end of September. Lucky us! Lucky me. That's two of the greatest of all time - number one (Snake Eater) and number five (Tactics) on my list - and while I'm certainly looking forward to both, the wait won't kill me. Probably. I'm excited but I'm not bursting at the seams. August and September will be here in the blink of an eye, as time doesn't make sense anymore, so there's no need to count down the days. I don't have the time or the energy to work myself up the way I used to. It's different when you're young(er). Your enthusiasm is through the roof, and waits are agonising. You count down the months, weeks and days until the object of your obsession is in your possession and you have full confidence that, once it is in your grubby little mitts, it'll be exce...

I said goodbye to my dad over the phone. I told him that I loved him.  He passed away a few minutes later. I listened in, helpless in my grief. I'd always told my family that I could be back in the UK within a day, in the case of an emergency. I often repeated that in conversation, to reassure myself just as much as it was to put my family at ease. Until very recently, it was accurate. The greatest fear when living abroad is not being able to be there for your loved ones back home, when they need you the most. You know that there will come a time when your world will be turned upside down, and you'll be pulled in two directions at once. My dad had been battling cancer on and off for the last decade. It seemed like he'd beaten it, until he fell ill again last Christmas. Surgery followed in the New Year, and I was able to be there for him, alongside my mum and brother. I didn't realise it then of course, but that would be the last time I'd see him. The last time I cou...

When we were kids, my brother and I tried our hand at a number of different professions. We ran a Boglin protection agency which, despite our best intentions, quickly became an excuse to shoot imaginary mercenaries in their imaginary faces as the helpless rubber gremlins looked on. For a while we were wrestlers, but no matter how many Speedo sponsored pay-per-view events we organised, we just couldn't attract an audience. Our singing career also went tits up, as the world just wasn't ready for our dub-step, country hybrid. For a while we fancied ourselves as authors. We tended to ape the format of the Point Horrors that were all the rage, but occasionally we would branch out with topics that felt closer to home, such as cyborg cowboys and time travelling zombies. Unlike our other early ventures, this one endured. I would take pride in creating a gruesome font cover for my pulp horrors, usually featuring a mixture of blood, axes and teen-hunting corpses. Once I had finishe...

Pork cutlets and cardboard are the first two things that come to mind when I think back, almost two years ago to the day, when I returned to England having spent the previous four years living in Tokyo, Japan. The pork cutlets (tonkatsu) were my carefully selected last meal on the eve of my long flight home, enjoyed in one of my favourite eateries in my favourite part of town: Akihabara. I still remember the taxi ride home and peering through the back window as the neon signs of my old haunts disappeared into the distance. It was at that moment that I realised a part of my life was coming to end, and I wondered how long it would be before I would see those familiar sights again (only nine months as it turned out - I'm an impatient bastard). The less delicious, but equally as important cardboard is of the boxes that contained all my extra bits and bobs that I was hauling around Narita airport on the morning of the 12th January 2010. I rushed from counter to counter completing a ...