Toomanywires

Japan has gone Halloween mad over the last few years. Shelves are stacked with gruesome tat and cute pumpkins, and thousands of fancy-dressed youths pack into Shibuya on Halloween weekend. We’re not yet at trick-or-treat levels of stupidity, but we may only be a few years away. It’s a fucking nightmare. To celebrate my favourite seasonal event, I thought I’d share some video game related scares. Because I like video games and have played lots of them. The First Dead Space Video games aren’t scary. If someone tells you otherwise, then they are either a big baby or a liar. Interactive media should excel at making you jump, yet the best horror games don’t come close to matching movies for shocks and scares. I can only think of one exception, and that’s Dead Space. I felt genuine dread each time I rounded a blind corner, opened a door to an unexplored room or found myself stranded in an unlit space. I felt uncomfortable throughout, thanks to the eerie sound design, the dereli...

I was fascinated by history long before I was into video games. As a child, I’d daydream about knights and castles, and spend hours flicking through my Weetabix Illustrated Book of British History. For years, I thought Henry VIII was a crispy, breakfast biscuit. As a teenager, I read wacky theories about precursor races and dense tomes on the ancient world. I pored over epics like Gilgamesh and the Iliad, and read widely on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. I studied Modern History at university, in part because it was the cover-all-your-bases subject for students undecided on their future profession, but also because I was still fascinated by the past. History and games don’t mix as well or as often as I’d like. Historical periods are well covered in the RTS genre, but outside of that it’s slim pickings. Alternate histories are popular, though the actual setting is rarely of any great consequence, and the FPS has an on/off relationship with WW2 and other semi-modern periods...

One hundred and eight yen. One hundred and eight yen for Final Fantasy IV. A cart and a plastic sleeve, but no box, found in a junk crate at my local Book Off. One hundred and eight yen for Final Fantasy IV on the WonderSwan Color.  Bandai’s WonderSwan was a Japan-only, handheld console. Released in 1999, it was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind Nintendo’s Game Boy. Tragically, it would be his final, major contribution to the industry, as he was killed in a traffic accident in 1997. The original, monochromatic model was replaced by the WonderSwan Color within two years of release, and finally the SwanCrystal in 2002.  Bandai’s 16-bit handheld hung with the competition at first, thanks to its low price point, long battery life – up to 40 hours on a single AA battery – and initial support from some of the biggest third-party publishers, including Squaresoft. Ultimately, however, the competition was too strong. The Game Boy Advance claimed an overwhelmin...

This is the last of my Tokyo Game Show 2017 posts. You can find the rest here: Preview Roundup TGS in Pictures Metal Gear Survive Hands-on Dragon Ball Fighterz Hands-on Monster Hunter World Hands-on Yakuza Kiwami 2 Hands-on I originally posted this preview at Critical Gamer It has been dubbed “Anime Dark Souls”. A lazy categorisation, but it’s easy to see how the comparison might arise. Code Vein is an unforgiving action role-playing game, where you will die over and over again, fight infinitely respawning enemies and be expected to learn the intricacies of combat if you want to succeed. You’ll also swear a lot and perhaps throw a controller or two. Sound familiar? According to the press blurb, Code Vein is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, where the consumption of blood grants power. Exploration is key, and the full game will be open-world, though just how open remains to be seen. The Tokyo Game Show demo was set in a dark cavern - dark, but lit well eno...

I originally posted this preview at Critical Gamer Tokyo Game Show and the Yakuza series go together like wine and cheese, Sonic and Tails, Nintendo and needlessly complicated voice chat functionality. Going back to the days of Yakuza 3, the series has had a major presence at the show and has dominated Sega’s booth almost every year since. It’s just not TGS if there isn’t a new Yakuza to play. Yakuza Online and Hokuto ga Gotoku, a Fist of the North Star game with a Yakuza twist, were both present but not playable this year. Yakuza Kiwami 2, however, was playable across two different scenarios. A remake of Yakuza 2, with many added features, it was available at both Sega and Sony’s booths. The demo was lifted from Chapter 2 of the full game, and contained two different scenarios. The first followed series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu in Osaka, as he visited Sotenbori, a fictionalised version of the Dotonbori district in Japan’s second city. The other scenario starred the sometimes a...

I originally posted this preview at Critical Gamer When the doors opened on day one of Tokyo Game Show, I ran straight for the Capcom booth and the Monster Hunter World demo. It had been a last minute decision, but it turned out to be a good one. It was perhaps the most in-demand demo of this year’s show, and I was able to try it twice, in both multi and single player. I’m a lapsed monster hunter. I briefly dabbled in the PSP games, played about two hundred hours of 3 Ultimate and continued for another fifty in 4 Ultimate before I lost interest. I was happy to hear that the series is returning to Sony, and more specifically home consoles, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the details. Monster Hunter had largely passed me by, but if the TGS demo is anything to go by, then I’ll be back on board from here on out. The demo featured three quests: easy, moderate and hard. Each one focussed on a single monster, though other creatures could be found wandering the map in each sc...

I am a fighting game ignoramus. I don’t watch Evo, I don’t have a favourite Street Fighter character, and I don’t know if it’s pronounced “Blaze Blue” or “Blaz Blue”. I was convinced for many years that Dead or Alive was a volleyball game; I think that Mortal Kombat is for knobs and can’t imagine anything worse than having to play Smash Brothers. My mother-in-law once beat me at Street Fighter V. I have minimal interest in fighting games, yet my 10 minutes with Dragon Ball FighterZ might’ve been the most fun I had at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. And I’m going to try to explain why, without using any fighting game parlance or researching any of the details about Bandai Namco’s latest brawler. This is me trying to share the reasons why I was so impressed by Dragon Ball Fighterz, without the aid of Google, Wikipedia, a press kit or spell check. Apologies in advance. You start by choosing three characters from a roster of familiar faces. Goku, the other Goku, the guy who looks a bi...