Toomanywires

Guess who'd never heard of Guy Savage until last week? It is me, the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater-liker. I had no clue who or what Guy Savage was until I saw a very confusing repost on Bluesky last Friday. "Guy Savage nightmare game confirmed for MGS Delta Snake Eater, developed by Platinum Games". I read that post multiple times in an attempt to untangle the meaning, and could not make head nor tail of it. Who or what is Guy Savage? Is the mention of Snake Eater a copy/paste error? Platinum Games, what? My head hurt, so I decided to treat the message as nonsense. None of my business. I resumed scrolling. But he kept appearing on my feed. Guy Savage this, Guy Savage that. I eventually found a link to a  news story  and all was revealed. I was confused, a tad embarrassed, but mostly fascinated by this bonus mini game that had somehow eluded me for twenty years. For those who are unaware (embarrassing!), Guy Savage is a hack-and-slash mini game hidden in MGS3, which only...

The rosters in NBA Street Vol. 2 are based on the 2002-2003 NBA season. That year, Derrick Coleman, nearing the end of his career, averaged 9.4 points per game. He was a serviceable role player on an above-average Philadelphia 76ers team that was built around the dynamic Allen Iverson.  That same Allen Iverson stars for the 76ers in NBA Street and he has the skill-set to shine on the asphalt: speed, agility, explosiveness, a killer crossover and a nice headband. Yet it has been his older, slower, less dexterous teammate who has been making my life miserable in perhaps the greatest NBA game ever made. An ankle-shattering crossover, then a step-back 3-pointer. A between-the-legs, 360 windmill dunk on my entire team. A block at one end followed by a tomahawk jam at the other, where his knees grazed the top of the backboard. Time and time again, Derrick Coleman has delivered well above reasonable expectation and foiled my attempts to beat the Sixers. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ag...

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...

The icon for the SingStar launcher is still present on my PS3 dashboard. A reminder of a time past, a series long since discontinued, and a developer, PlayStation London Studio, that is now no more. That SingStar icon probably isn't going anywhere. Back in 2012, it was made a permanent feature of the PS3 XMB for all European users, when the base game went free-to-play. Try as they might, joyless PS3 owners could not delete it - SingStar and PlayStation, together forever. A series of competitive karaoke games, featuring real music videos, SingStar debuted on PS2 and would later come to PS3 and PS4. Released across dozens of instalments, covering a wide range of artists and genres, it was a huge part of Sony's success in PAL markets, while barely making a dent in other territories, most notably North America. For some, it was a core part of the PlayStation experience in the 2000s - early-2010s, and it appealed to a diverse group of gamers and non-gamers alike. I hadn't though...

"Why are you so bad?" Alright Auto Modellista, calm down. I'm not here to be insulted by your excitable in-race announcer. "Don't be silly!" Look, I didn't mean to smash into that wall, spin 180 degrees and then start driving in the wrong direction. I know that's not how you win races. Honestly though, this wouldn't be happening if the cars didn't handle so appallingly.  It's 2024 and I'm being slagged off by a PS2 game. Fucking state of this.  Auto Modellista is very pretty though, so I've been happy to put up with the abuse over the last week, as I played it for the first time. The distinctive cel-shaded graphics make it far more palatable than most other racing games of that era. More than twenty years removed from release, it looks beautiful, a feast for the eyes regardless of whether you're playing it through original RGB or scart, an HDMI solution, or running it through some expensive magic box. It is strikingly attracti...