Toomanywires

Fuck me, it's E3. Twitter snark, adult men in video game t-shirts, Ubisoft gobshites, 3 AM live streams, Need for Speed, Jason Derulo. E3 is many things to many people. I was convinced that E3 was another week away, but it isn't. So I've hurriedly written a preview, because there aren't enough of them online already. This a stream of consciousness, a preview with no research and little understanding of what has or hasn't already been announced. Get educated. MICROSOFT Scorpio, yeah? The Xbox One with extra graphics, a richer price tag (presumably) but no exclusive games. I really don't get the appeal of iterative consoles, but MS are banking on my being in the minority. Scorpio will be the focus and we'll all be sick of it by the end of next week. As an Xbox One owner, I'm genuinely excited about seeing Crackdown 3. It's the only upcoming exclusive that I'm interested in, or even aware of for that matter. That's a dire situatio...

I was minding my own business. The English guy with the hair was sharing recipe ideas, muscles was grunting and the little one was attempting some banter, and missing by a mile. Business as usual for Final Fantasy XV's superfriends. I was minding my own when a cat decided to give me a side quest. Me, Nigel, the heir-apparent of a kingdom I know nothing about, who's traveling to a funeral or something with some other guys in a car. I'm in a real rush and this cat's all up in my face.  A wedding! The boys and I are going to a wedding, possibly mine, though I'm not sure which of my buddies I’m marrying.  Anyway, this cat. He knows I can't resist a quest-giving animal, no matter how much of a rush I'm in, so he plonks himself in my path and waits. A fluffy roadblock, stuffed with XP. He knows I'll approach and press X to interact and/or jump on the spot a few times - why on earth would you map interact and jump to the same button? I take the...

I’m done with Dark Souls 3. I finished the main game in around forty five hours last year, and then returned twice for the DLC and a further fifteen hours of hack-roll-estus-hack-estus-estus-roll-roll-roll-estus-bonfire. It was an excellent game, albeit one that had clearly run out of new ideas. Sixty five is a lot of hours. You could watch The Wire from start to finish in that time, or even play through the majority of Persona 5’s tutorials, or so I’m told. In DS3's case, I stretched those hours out over the course of a year and was motivated to return for each slice of DLC, so it didn’t seem too onerous.  However, for the most part, I’m very reluctant to invest that kind of time into a game. This is a fairly new development, as I spent my youth pouring countless hours into NBA Live and Final Fantasy – I was a rather unsociable child - and I’m only a few years removed from dedicating over a hundred hours to Skyrim and twice that to Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. But I can n...

The PS3 has been discontinued in Japan after an eleven year run. To mark the occasion, I’ve written  a couple of posts about my favourite console. *** That's right, I’ve written a sentence about every single game I played on the PS3! All 180 of them, because I like words and I like PS3 games. If you like those things too, then boy are you in for a treat.* .detuned – A “game” in which you dance around a chair until you sprout a trunk and start to wonder what you just wasted a fiver on. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand – Where’s my skull, bitch? After Burner Climax – Worth it for those blue, Sega skies. Alex Kidd in Miracle World – This game had been kicking my arse since 1991, but thanks to save states I was finally able to beat it. Aliens vs Predator – Yet another piss poor Aliens game. Aliens: Colonial Marines – Fucking hell. Assassin’s Creed – Many of the series’ defining features were already in place, but we’d have to wait another two years for good AC....

The PS3 has been discontinued in Japan after an eleven year run. To mark the occasion, I’m writing a couple of posts about my favourite console. *** These are actual things we said about the PS3. We said them with our mouths, in our heads and on our blogs. Opinions, invented in 2005 by IGN, were all the rage during the seventh generation. We all had them, and were desperate to share. We complained, wrote thousands of words about the state of the industry, made sweeping statements, asked questions on “forums” and complained some more. With our mouths, in our heads and on our blogs. “It gets better after twenty hours” One of the most disappointing games of the last generation, Final Fantasy XIII confined players to tight corridors for twenty hours before opening up into something better resembling a FF game. If you stuck with it long enough, you were treated to a middling JRPG, albeit a pretty one. It spawned two sequels that no one liked. “Is it an easy Platinum?” No one care...

The PS3 has been discontinued in Japan after an eleven year run. To mark the occasion, I’m writing a couple of posts about my favourite console. This week, I want to highlight a few memorable games - memorable, but not necessarily my favourites. I’ve written thousands of words over the years about Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Shatter and other all-timers, so here I’ll do something a little different. These are some of the first games that come to mind when I think back to the PS3. Max Payne 3 (2012) Imperfect, yet brilliant; flawed yet strangely memorable. I hated Max Payne 3 at first, but it grew on me. Just like Lost Planet 2, Prince of Persia and Call of Juarez Bound in Blood, it left a lasting impression, despite it faults. MP3 is a dark tale of violence, substance abuse and redemption, of a sort. Full of memorable scenes, and perfectly scored, it was a colourful nightmare. My enduring memory of MP3 is of Max, head shaven and rocking the most grotesque Hawaiian shirt, ...

After more than a decade on the market, Sony is ending production of the PlayStation 3 in Japan. The last remaining SKU, the 500GB standard, will be phased out by the end of the month. It was a tumultuous eleven years for Sony. They started off full of confidence, expecting to retain first place in hearts, minds and on the high street. But the PS3 was prohibitively expensive and lacked a killer app; it quickly fell behind the Xbox 360 and Sony spent years playing catch up. The 360 was widely viewed as the home of AAA and online multiplayer, and the Wii was where we went for family gaming and motion controls. Sony’s competitors had claimed the major, defining features of the seventh generation. Sony suffered through a catastrophic hack, which they handled poorly, never fully tapped into the potential of Home and struggled with the widely held belief that games ran better on 360. Once celebrated for innovation, Sony became reactionary, aping the competition and doing a lacklustr...