Toomanywires

My friend was adamant that Sensible Soccer was better than FIFA. One day after school, he invited me over to prove it. It would've been around 1995, and I think we played it on either his Mega Drive or Amiga. I grew up in England, so everything was played on a Sega or a personal computer. None of us were cool enough to have a PlayStation that early - they were for ravers and older boys - but we were all cool enough to not have a SNES.   To be honest, Sensible Soccer didn't make much of an impression. I can't even say for sure whether I'd tried a FIFA game up to that point, so I wouldn't have been able to make any meaningful comparisons between the two. Besides, I was 11 years old and did not yet have the tools to formulate nuanced, critical takes. I remember far more about my friend's enthusiasm for Sensible Soccer than I do the game itself. He'd committed to defending it and would not allow its good name to be besmirched by the FIFA crowd. We were of that a...

Nothing makes less sense than the Call of Duty launcher I tried to navigate last night. I wanted to play the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, the latest Call of Duty that had been added to Game Pass that morning. Expecting a sizeable file, and being that I'm very smart, I got the download underway around dinner time, so that it'd be ready for an evening session. Or so I thought. Fast forward to 11 p.m., and I'm freshly showered and in my jimjams. I grabbed my Starfield Xbox controller - an 8/10 game but a 10/10 peripheral - turned on the Xbox and sunk into the sofa. The Call of Duty app was awaiting me on the dashboard but, surprise surprise, it was only partially downloaded. Fortunately, enough progress had been made to be able to launch the game. It's time for murder, I thought. But there would be no killing. The game loaded - so far so good. A mini-intro to Call of Duty played, providing brief glimpses of characters past and present. Some of them I recognised - Price, the ...

A friend told me to keep an eye out for beaver-like creatures that roam the banks of the Kamo River. I need little encouragement to seek out unfamiliar animals. I saw a large snake on one of my evening runs just last week, and was thoroughly delighted; my tanuki encounters earlier in the year will likely remain 2024 highlights. Anyway, as you might expect, I was well up for spotting this mystery river-dweller. It was on the second night of drinks on the banks of the Kamogawa, a river which runs through central Kyoto, that I spotted one darting through the grass. Unbothered by the hundreds of revellers, many of whom were in town to attend annual indie game show BitSummit, it came within a metre or two of our group. It must've been 2 a.m., and we were several drinks deep, so at first I wasn't sure whether I was seeing quite what I thought I was seeing. So I got closer and, sure enough, it was a big rat-looking, beaver-ish creature. I pointed it out to the group, but they weren...

I've been busy studying for the N2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) over the last month, and haven't had time for words about games. Fortunately, that's over now, or at least it is until December, when I expect I'll be resitting it!  But that's ages away. So, words about games: 1. Chants of Senaar and the Dream of Fluency It was fitting that I played Chants of Sennar, a game about an incomprehensible, fictional language becoming comprehensible, as I studied for my Japanese exam. It's about language acquisition through context, experience and a dollop of guess work. It's far from realistic, of course, as it mightily speeds up the process of learning a language. Think Tom Cruise picking up nuanced grammatical structures just by listening to the locals for a few weeks in The Last Samurai, as opposed to me still struggling with Japanese fluency after countless years living here and fits & starts of committed study.  While it may fast track the proce...

Starting a family overseas, or moving your family abroad, is a huge decision. Venba captures the weight of that choice, distilling twenty years of family life into a couple of hours by focusing on a handful of key moments, all of which involve home cooking. It's charming, touching, entertaining, and refreshingly brief. Venba and her husband, Paavalan, have left their home of Tamil, south India, to start a new life in Toronto. In an early scene, we see them agonising over whether this decision to uproot was the right one. They ponder the opportunities and challenges their new life presents, and what it will afford their unborn child, Kavin. They talk about their struggles to find work befitting their experience, the difficulties of mastering a new language, and openly wonder how this will affect their soon-to-be expanded family.  These are conversations I know all too well, as I've had them with my family many times. My wife (Japanese) and I (British) had lived between our two h...

It'd been more than 15 years since my last return to Shadow Moses. When I went back earlier this month, everything felt reassuringly familiar. Gaia, on the other hand, took a little more getting used to. It wasn't exactly how I remembered it, but it came pretty close to how I'd like to view it now. I recently wrapped up a delightful 70 hours with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and followed it up with a brief, but equally entertaining, return to the original Metal Gear Solid, via the Master Collection Vol. 1. Rebirth is an improvement over Remake. Freed from the confines of the Midgar slums, a setting that was never intended to host the player for more than a few hours, Rebirth allows us to explore a much larger and vibrant slice of Gaia. Avalanche and friends are lovingly realised and expanded upon, and the combat is up to the challenge of keeping us entertained across a typical RPG runtime. Most crucially, Rebirth successfully balances the need to meet narrative expectations w...

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has finished with me, but I'm far from finished with it.  I spent sixty glorious hours with Ichiban, Kiryu and crew, and I have an overwhelming number things I want to tell you about it. So here's a collection of musings, which I'll keep spoiler-free at first. I'll give you plenty of warning when it's about to get spoiler-y. 1. A Mini-Review It'd been a while since I'd played anything worthy of disturbing my GOAT list.  Infinite Wealth, however, had me scrambling to nail down the precise order of my all-time favourite games, so that I could decide whether or not I needed to make room for a new entry. I still haven't quite decided, as it's still too early to say; I need to let it sit for a while longer. However, the fact that I'm even considering this should let you know just how much I enjoyed Infinite Wealth. A lot. I enjoyed it a lot. I took to Hawaii far quicker and more completely than I thought I would, and the...