Toomanywires

I really wanted to like No Man's Sky. It has a wonderful sense of style. I love the warm colour palette and it absolutely nails the seventies sci-fi vibe. No Man's Sky looks a treat, but I'm struggling to think of anything else nice to say about it. Expectations were through the roof. I'm not interested in whose fault this was, who should be thrown in prison or banned from NeoGAF. What might have been a PSN gem was instead miscast as a AAA experience. Hello Games is a talented studio, but this was never going to be Mass Effect Infinite or Skyim: The Next Generation. I was expecting something more limited in scale. I thought it would be a beautiful and relaxing game of exploration and gathering, something I could chill out to after a stressful day at work. I wanted to be able to wind down by picking some Martian flowers and discovering some oddly-shaped rocks. That sounded pleasant, and realistic, but NMS let me down. It should have worked as an explore-and...

I never really bothered with the Dreamcast. Back in 1999, I was content with my PlayStation and had lost patience with Sega, following the premature demise of my beloved Saturn. Sega, the platform-holder of my childhood, was entirely absent from my late teens. It was all about PS1 during my final years at school, and university was dominated by PS2 and GameCube. I have hazy but otherwise excellent memories of three gloriously boozy years playing Quake Arena, ISS and Timesplitters with friends. Shen-who? A decade later, after moving back to England after my first stint in Japan, I decided to buy a Dreamcast and catch up. It was part of a short-lived and expensive eBay infatuation. I picked up half a dozen games and played them for a couple of hours in total. I thought they were nice, but soon returned to my PS3, Wii and 360. Fast forward another half a decade, and I'm wanting to give the DC a proper go. I'd been considering it for a while, but it was the recent Summer...

WARNING: This post is full of spoilers for Until Dawn I wanted them all dead. I spent the first two chapters of Until Dawn hoping that the killer would hurry up and slaughter the cast of annoying, generic, horror-movie teens. I decided that I would do my best to speed things up, purposefully missing QTEs and choosing options that looked likely to result in death. I wanted a speedy resolution so I could move onto something else. But I couldn't keep it up. Within an hour, I had made an about-turn and was doing my best to keep these horny idiots alive. I started to care, and enjoyed trying to keep them out of harms way. The twists were fairly obvious but that didn't impede my enjoyment. I had the flame-thrower guy pegged as an ally from the moment he offered his hand to Emma and Hannah, and it was pretty obvious that Josh was the “killer” in the house, though the saw stunt threw me for a minute. I thought the totem pole clues were an excellent addition, providing just ...

Last month, I tried Rez Infinite VR at Tokyo Game Show. It was a very short demo of a very familiar game. It confirmed something that I already knew, that Rez is excellent, but overall I was underwhelmed by my first experience with VR. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to try Rez Infinite again, this time at a launch event. Enhance Games have set-up shop in an event space in Harajuku and are running demos into next week. It's open to the public and appointments are made on the day, so do check it out if you're in town. I arrived at 7pm and was able to claim one of the last slots of the day. With thirty minutes to burn, I grabbed a bite to eat, drank some beer and LINE'd a few friends to let them know of my evening plans, before returning for my demo. It was a rather pleasant start to my Saturday night. I love being back in Tokyo! From the outset, it was a much better experience than the TGS demo. Better surroundings, better explanation and set-up, a tighter fit o...

Something strange happened the other day. For the briefest of moments, a split second of madness, I thought about buying an Xbox One. Forza Horizon 3 was to blame. I don't need an Xbox One. I'm quite content with my PS4, and the 3DS and Vita have me well covered when the telly is unavailable. My back-up home console this generation, the Wii U, has been boxed-up since March and I see no reason to unpack it any time soon. I struggle to put aside an hour each evening for games and, when I do play, I'm usually drifting off during load screens. So very hardcore. Honestly, I don't want an Xbox One. There's not enough space under our TV, Yen in my bank account or games on my Xbox, must-play list. I couldn't give a toss about Halo; Gears of War bores me and I can't think of any other Microsoft exclusives of note. Is Crackdown a thing that people play? Most importantly, I don’t want to be the only person in Japan to buy an Xbox One this week, because that ...

This is the last of my TGS 2016 posts. You can find the rest here: Preview Day One Round-up Day Two Round-up TGS in Pictures Persona 5 Hands-on Yakuza 6 Hands-on FFXV, XII and World of FF Hands-on Rez Infinite & Sony VR Hands-on Resident Evil 7 Hands-on I originally posted this preview at Critical Gamer Of the non-VR games on offer at Tokyo Game Show, Horizon Zero Dawn was the most popular. The wait for the twenty minute demo rarely dipped below two hours on the press days, and I imagine it was a nightmare once the public joined the fray. It was a very straight forward demo that revealed nothing of the story. It was set in the middle of an autumnal looking map, full of trees and undergrowth, bordered by hills and a lake beyond which we were not allowed to pass. It looked lovely, if not a little bare, but the trailers have hinted at more populated areas to come. It was a very small playground, but gave a good idea as to what the larger world might look like. ...

I originally posted this at Critical Gamer Lantern, an extended version of the Gamescom Resident Evil 7 demo, opened with an unpleasant game of hide and seek. I was chased into a rickety old house by a lovely old crone who desperately wanted to bash my brains in. She's a bit mad, you see. It was all in first-person and shared the same grainy visuals as the first, publicly available demo. The house was dilapidated and dank, the kind of place you'd want to avoid even if it weren't patrolled by a psychotic old lady. And it was night time, because these things aren't nearly as frightening in the light of day. I ran and I hid; I fumbled desperately for door knobs, solved a puzzle using shadows and eventually crawled under the floorboards. Inevitably, Granny caught me and that was that. Only not quite. The demo closed with a new, minimally interactive scene set around the dinner table. The Baker family had invited me for tea, or more likely dragged me kicking and...