Toomanywires

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is done , and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is still a week away. I am enamoured with Tactics. Big love for it, and I'll be dropping everything to play it at launch. I even pre-ordered the new art book that should arrive at my door a few days later. It's a book that's got art in it; Tactics art. October will be all Tactics, all the time. But it's not October yet, it is September, and I've got a little time to play other things. Nothing too significant, as I don't want to commit to anything I can't finish, or at least get my fill of, by 9/30. This is an ideal opportunity to get through some of my backlog, and I've already started to take advantage of this brief window. Last week, I got the Wii U out, so that I could make use of its Wii backward compatibility. I  picked up a handful of Wii games when I was back in the UK in August and fancied putting a dent in them. However, I didn't get very far, a...

I've been on holiday. A trip back to the UK for two weeks. Sun? Yes, there was a bit. Pretty decent for an English summer. Sea? Only seen from the plane as we crossed over from mainland Europe. CEX? Yes, several times. It's lovely seeing family of course, but I also get excited about the little things when I go back to the UK. Popping in to Tesco, buying socks that fit properly, Marmite on toast for breakfast, takeout from the curry house, jogging an old route, and a trip or two to CEX to buy games. I'm not sure whether I ever stepped foot in a CEX, a leading retailer of second-hand media, when I lived in the UK. Maybe there were less of them? I certainly didn't buy many used games back then, and I'd save most of my retro purchases for trips to Japan. But now that I live outside the UK, I consider CEX a little treat and will visit a couple of times whenever I'm back. Inside CEX, the UK residents are looking for a few quid off PS5 games, and the collectors are co...

Prince of Persia 2008 is a rare thing: an action-adventure game where the player's actions are largely consequence-free. For our titular prince and his companion Elika, the stakes couldn't be higher, as they strive to bring a halt to the darkness that is enveloping the realm. Yet even as they awaken different parts of the city, and fill them with colour, the kingdom remains devoid of life. It is a carcass. With the exception of a donkey and a few guards in the opening moments, we never meet another living soul. A splash of colour and some reinvigorated flora doesn't hide the fact that this world is dead.  What exactly are we saving and would it even matter if we failed? There are no game-over screens here. No resources to be lost following an ill-advised jump or a poorly-timed parry. No progress to be thrown away or limited continues to fret about. When you fail, Elika saves you. Prince of Persia is almost entirely without stakes, and some might say without challenge. Whate...

My Xbox 360 still thinks it's 2012. Trials Evolution showing as my last-played, The Witcher 2 still in the tray, and my full-body avatar jiggling on the dashboard. My 360 is a time capsule of early 2010's gaming, untroubled by system updates thanks to a decade spent in storage. I dusted off my frozen-in-time 360 earlier this month when I was back in the UK. The reason? OutRun 2, of course. I'd long been aware of its existence, but despite my enjoyment of the original and general fondness for arcade racers, I'd never played OutRun 2. This was most likely the result of unfortunate timing and the platforms on which it appeared. It came out on the original Xbox, a console I've never owned; a semi-sequel, OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, arrived a few years later when I was at the very tail end of an extended period of relative disinterest in video games. I simply wasn't paying attention, so OutRun 2, in all its guises, entirely passed me by. Presumably due to an expired ...