Toomanywires

We had a mid-week public holiday last week. They're nice, mid-week holidays, but they're also a bit useless. You're not going to get up to anything too exciting, or travel too far afield, with just 24 hours sandwiched between regular workdays. I think they're best spent at home. Go to bed a little later than usual the evening before - an extra 30 minutes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard - tackle a few chores on the day to slightly free up the weekend, bake something; go for a daytime jog. Or, as I decided to do, get the PlayStation 2 out.  A week later, and I have yet to put it back away. I've bought a handful of PS1 and PS2 games the last couple of months but have been putting off trying them. I just didn't fancy going through the whole rigmarole of unpacking the PS2 and getting it hooked up to the monitor, especially as I didn't know whether it would still work or not. I'd plugged it in a couple of times last year and found it to be increasingly unreliable...

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...