GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE
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If there's one thing we all secretly love, it’s bashing the ruddy heck out of 3D geometric shapes with some sort of rod or staff. Why just last week I smacked an oxo cube so hard with a chopstick it turned into a brown mist, and it’s the best time I’ve had in ages!
 
And now, thanks to Beat Saber, you don’t have to do your shameful polygon mauling in secret in your shed or lavatory – you can do it in the comfort of your lounge in virtual reality, with the added bonus of obscuring the faces of your disapproving family as you do so!
 
Beat Saber is ostensibly a rhythm game, but to me is more like a Tetris-esque experience. A game so absurdly simple and yet so absolutely spot on and finely tuned, you’ll both adore it and be furious you didn’t think of it yourself and sell the idea to a developer in equal measure.
 
Cubes of one of 2 colours (red or blue) advance towards you, and you have to hit said cubes with either your matching red or blue lightsaber in the direction shown on the cube by an arrow. That’s essentially it – there are some obstacles to dodge, bombs to avoid, cubes with arrows that disappear and such, but the core gameplay is as straightforward as it gets.

Whereas Nintendo guards its characters and properties to an almost fanatical degree, Sega has always been a little more laid-back.

This may explain why there are about 30 different origin stories for Sonic The Hedgehog and his assorted hangers-on - appearing across a variety of media - and why so many Sonic The Hedgehog games are terrible. And why there's a film coming out featuring a creepy, buff, version of Sonic who looks like he could crack a bull's sternum with his bare hands. 

Here are 10 examples of how Sega allowed others to run rampant with what remains its most valuable franchise. 

I never loved the Xbox. Everything about it was too bulky, too noisy, and it never really - to me anyway - justified its need to exist. Microsoft already had Windows and Solitaire and Minesweeper. Leave the consoles to people who know what they're doing.

Still, it gave the world the grossly overrated Halo franchise, but it wasn't until the 360 was released that I finally understood why Microsoft was even bothering. Fact is, the Xbox 360 is now probably my second favourite console after the Super NES.

Regardless, the original Xbox did well enough - over 24 million were sold - to make the 360 and One possible, and there must be a reason for that. And that reason is this reason: there were some genuinely good games available for it.

Here are ten of they. 

So, EA dropped a "demo" for Bioware's Anthem in the last few days, and by all accounts it's a bit on the buggy side, and servers have struggled to cope. This tells us two things: their decision to call the beta a demo has backfired - it's clearly a beta - and that lots of people are (or were) interested in playing Anthem.

Also, it's possible that - thanks to the wildfire-like way that negativity can escalate across social media - Bioware might be in for a rough ride, and they'll struggle to escape the stink of failure. Once bad news gets locked in, turning it around can be like trying to smuggle a fully-grown narwhal through customs.

I don't even know what that means.

Suffice to say, following the flaccid response received by Mass Effect: Andromeda, Bioware needs another flop like it needs a bum in its face (not a good thing, despite what some of you perverts may think). This is despite the fact that bugs in new games are no big surprise anymore. I mean, name a triple-A game in recent memory which hasn't required a patch in the first few weeks of release, or been beaten with the shitty stick on YouTube. 

These games are so huge, so complex, that - especially when you throw in the added unpredictability of making it an always-online multiplayer nonsense - you can't really blame developers for failing to prepare for the unexpected. After all, they're only underpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, humans struggling with the pressure of having to meet unrealistic market expectations.  

None of this is a surprise. What is a surprise to me, however, is that Anthem is even getting so much attention in the fIrst place, and I can only assume it's because we're being told this is the first big release of 2019. A nude in a nudist camp is no surprise and doesn't stand out. However... a nude in a supermarket (unless it's a nude supermarket) will have all eyes on him. 

Look, I get that Bioware is a company with a following. I get that this is Bioware moving somewhat outside of the genre they've typically focused upon. But what I don't get is that anybody is remotely interested in this game, which looks - to all intents and purposes - like Destiny, but with flying. 

Wooooh! Yeah! Gimme some of that delicious more of the same! 

Again now with another edition of Digitiser, from some 19 years ago - an era when the index page was at its most unmemorable. ​- an era when the index page was at its most unmemorable. 

Thanks to @ZXGuesser for the recovery. If it wasn't for these brave heroes and their digital archeology, so much of Digi's history would be lost. Instead, we can all revel once more in Digi's review of Pokemon Yellow, The Man having an existential crisis, and some dull Neo Geo Pocket news.

​Behold...!

Circa 1987, I was a big fan of U2. Don't judge me for that. There was a time before tax havens and saving the world and built-up shoes and shoving themselves onto your iPhone when Bono was actually sort of cool.

I had a massive poster for The Joshua Tree on my bedroom wall, and a couple of mates and I went to see them play at Wembley Stadium. Well, technically, we went and stood outside Wembley Stadium, because we didn't have tickets, but the gates were opened about 15 minutes before the end of the show, presumably to ease congestion, and we were swept inside by a stampede of other ticketless fans, and got to see the end of the concert.

Some might argue that the end is the best part of any U2 concert...

I liked the next couple of U2 albums, but then... something shifted. U2 started sounding like U2 trying a bit too hard to be U2. Every album began promising a "return to basics", when - in truth - U2 never really deviated from the sound that everyone associated with U2. They never did a Radiohead. They just kept ploughing the same musical furrow, and it got... boring.

When it was published at the arse-end of 2012 on the Wii U - the equivalent of U2 announcing that their new album would only be available for the Zune - New Super Mario Bros. U was the proverbial "back to basics" album. The difference between it and the last four or five U2 albums - aside from the fact that one of them is a video game - is that Mario had earned the right to go back to basics. 

The Mario franchise had, for the most part, been doing things 3D since the release of Yoshi's Island (most of us forget that it was officially branded as Super Mario World 2) in 1995, and New Super Mario Bros. U was exactly what some of us wanted.

Of course, it wasn't fresh and original or noisy enough to help Nintendo make a success of the Wii U. In fact, if anything, making the big Wii U launch game a 2D platformer probably contributed to a sense of disappointment, and affected sales.

But here we are, six-and-a-bit years on, and 2D platforms are no longer a dirty nonsense. Whereas in 2012 there was too much riding on New Super Mario Bros. U, the Switch is already a success. The time feels right for Mario to go back to his roots.

OR DOES IT...!??

GUEST ARTICLE NONSENSE by SUPER BAD ADVICE
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It may be cold and wintry now, but cast your mind back to the heady days of last summer and everyone’s favourite boring trade show of underwhelming game reveals done by uncomfortable-looking businessmen dressed in ‘cool’ leather jackets a PA bought for them that morning – yes, that’s right, it’s E3!
 
As ever, it delivered a bumper crop of gaming goodness to look forward to over the coming 12 months, with loads of what we all love the most – risk-free, unoriginal sequels. And when you think of dead horses being flogged down to their component atoms, one name always pops into mind: Nintendo.
 
Their equine corpse of choice this time was SuperSmash Bros, which they belched forth about with a presentation that was so long, it may in fact still be happening. And what a presentation it was!
 
Who couldn’t be wowed by hour upon hour of character reveals for the latest iteration of their ‘yes it’s a fighter, but as we’re family friendly we can’t show people being beaten up – so instead there’s some sort of meaningless reverse energy counter that goes up to 800%, and eventually people just fall off the side like a drunk on a pier’ fisticuffs game?
 
You’ll no doubt already be familiar with the tag line for this version: “Everyone is here” – not least because they seemed to repeat it endlessly, almost as if they had nothing much else to talk about.
 
Now the game is out though it seems to be true, as (apart from a load of stupidly named dudes from Japanese RPGs that no one has ever heard of or cares about) SSBU boasts a vast roster of much-loved characters and favourites from gaming history! Oh, and Sonic is apparently in it too. Oh well.
 
But wait! Our sources have told us that there are 8 more fighters that Uncle Ninty just couldn’t cram into the game on release – a game so overfull, it was officially classed as morbidly corpulent – that will be winging their way to your Switch via everyone’s favourite feature of modern gaming: paid DLC.
 
So get your wallet ready and your ‘combat gland’ excreting its fetid unguent in anticipation, as here they are now!

For me, there has always been something beautifully sort of universal about Nintendo's games. I struggle to think of one which wasn't accessible to all. Pick any Mario game. You're introduced to gameplay elements gradually. You're allowed the space to get used to its quirks. Any fresh wrinkle is explained, and you're given the room to learn and make mistakes.

Best of all, Nintendo has always managed to balance this welcoming, deceptive, simplicity with a surprising depth, proving that you don't need to juggle 500 sub-menus and punish players to get your point across. Even Breath Of The Wild - arguably at the deeper end of Nintendo's pool of games - still manages to be open and friendly.

It's one of the reasons why Nintendo is frequently referred to as being the Disney of video games. Like Nintendo, Disney succeeds in being universal, profound truths that use reachable tales as a delivery method. You can dismiss both companies as being overly twee, but even the cutest kitten has claws.

Unlike Disney, however, Nintendo has one exception to the rule: Super Smash Bros., the Nintendo franchise that continues to bewilder me, and annoy me, and banish all goodwill that might've built up over the decades.

And worst of all, it's simultaneously the most Nintendo-y Nintendo franchise Nintendo has ever Nintendoed.

Death is universal. There's no escaping it. It defines our lives, be it losing those we love, or those we admire. And, ultimately, we're all running the wrong way down an escalator, away from our own inevitable end. 

Despite the universality of death, grief can be a very unique and personal thing. If life can be viewed as a river, a loss of any magnitude will alter the course of the river's flow. It changes us, it changes our lives, and it comes to define us. There is no escaping grief. Even when we feel we've outrun it, it can catch us up when our guard is down, and remind us that it's just over our shoulder. It is insidious and cruel and indiscriminate, dripping its paralysing poison into our ears.

How we deal with that is down to the wiring of the individual. 

I saw the power of loss at too young an age. My family suffered a year where four close family members fell like dominoes.

While still grieving a cousin and an uncle, I remain haunted by the memory of hearing the phone ring, a week after the death of my nine month-old niece, and sitting on my mum's bed as she answered it. Numbed and battered, all she had to say before hanging up was a resigned, matter-of-fact, "Thank you for letting me know".

The call had been to tell her my beloved grandad, her father, had taken his own life by stopping the pills which had for years held back the massive heart attack which ultimately consumed him. She didn't have the strength to comfort even me, but by that stage it almost felt routine.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

​Not being one to pass up an easy gag, let’s talk about the ludicrous sequelitis of the Battlefield games. Here, I’m regurgutating a review of Battlefield V. V being for Victory, which totally gives away that for this game we’re back in 1940’s Hitler-punching territory: an era never before seen in gaming, assuming you have rampant amnesia coupled with crippling lethargy when it comes to fact checking.
 
V, of course, is also Roman for ‘Very nearly 6’, which they often shortened to 5.
 
Last year we had Battlefield 1, so named as it was set in World War One. Regardless, 5 doesn’t often follow 1. (Well, unless you’re my Mum: she once stapled the tip of a snapped tape measure back on, forgot about the repair truncating the start of one end of it, and then bought me a pair of mismeasured school trousers that were so tight I thought I’d put on about 2 stone overnight.)
 
Battlefield 1 itself followed Battlefield 4, so really that game should have been Battlefield 5 and this year’s effort Battlefield 6. Worse still, inbetween B1 and B4 there was the numeral-free Battlefield Hardline. But before B4, mercifully, was B3. So are the incorrect numerals just a recent thing?
 
Alas, no. Before B3 came Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943, Bad Company, Battlefield 2142 (what?), B2, Battlefield 1942 and…that’s it (and I haven’t even touched on expansions). There was never a game just called ‘Battlefield’ and Battlefield V, which should arguably be Battlefield VI, even arguablier shouldn’t be that eitheras it’s actually the 16thgame in the series – a series whose numbering, we must conclude, has been kept track of by idiots. 
 
Having slogged through this terrifically laboured mockery, you’ll be vastly relieved to hear there is actually a point to it. Two, in fact, and here they are: like its numerical positioning Battlefield V is more than a bit lost and confused, and in its 16thiteration it’s a regrettable example of the law of diminishing returns.

What about that weather, eh? Grr! Bloody weather <WAVES FIST AT SKY>.

We British love discussing the weather, and we love complaining about the weather, which is all a bit weird when you consider that our default weather tends to be "grey". I suppose that's why we get all excited when we hear it's going to be sunny, or there's snow on the way. Anything to break up the monotony. 

"Oh good! Something new to complain about!"

Remember last summer's extended heatwave, and how we all lolled around like we were dying, and missed the greyness?

If you'd bought into the previews, you'd be under the impression that weather plays a big part in Just Cause 4, but we'll get to that in a moment.

First I want to apologise for this review being so late. Truth is, I couldn't quite work up the enthusiasm to write it. Not because Just Cause 4 is a bad game, but because I feel like I'd already reviewed it. At least I've actually played this one, unlike the latest Call of Duty, which remains shoved down the side of my bed, still in its shrink-wrap. 

You see, for vast swathes of Just Cause 4 I felt I was playing Just Cause 3. And there were times when it could've been Just Cause 2. And adding to the sense of familiarity was that, if I squinted during certain sections, I could've been playing any one of a number of other open world destroy 'em ups.

However, just like an 100m athlete who has created a super-fast clone of himself that lacks a body from the neck down... I'm racing ahead.

Yes, you're right: that is a tortured metaphor. But hey - at least it's not raining, yet.