What's going on with these Far Cry 5 reviews, eh?

Most of the ones I've read have thrown a couple of paragraphs in at the end - at most - which address what it's actually like to play the game... having blathered on in the preceding five million-word essay about the game's political content.

Or, rather, lack of political content. 

Far Cry 5 is set in Montana, USA, or somewhere, and a religious cult has taken over Hope County, or wherever, and you play a deputy US Marshall, or something, and... there's some stuff about zombie-like drug addicts, and lots of American flags and crucifixes and that... but ohhhh... apparently it doesn't do anything interesting with them!

It wastes an opportunity to make a political statement about America today, see. It plays it safe, see. Its "message" is all sort of vague, see. The good guys are as bad as the bad guys, see.

You know what? Go away and get a grip. Seriously. If you're complaining it's because you're annoyed that Far Cry 5 doesn't stand with you on whatever particular personal pedestal you've hitched yourself to.

I mean, I know I'm tired at the minute. It has been a tough month, and I think I'm coming down with a cold... but I honestly don't have the energy today to be diplomatic. Speaking more broadly, I'm just so weary of the outrage fetishising in the media and on social media.

Everyone is shouting at everyone else all the time, looking for reasons to be furious, trying to rally troops to shore up their own arguments and self-identity, and it's like watching a bunch of nursery school kids fighting over who gets to play in the sandpit.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE
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If you were looking for somewhere to go for tea and saw a restaurant review that said ‘Fabulous food, but we guarantee you will turn your buttocks inside out with the runs tomorrow’, then chances are – unless you’re astonishingly constipated and see this as a boon – you’d give it a miss and go elsewhere.
 
This guaranteed bum cloud to VR’s silver lining is its biggest problem: you know it’s an experience that more often than not is going to make you feel mildly queasy at the very least.
 
In fact, Mrs SBA was chatting to a friend the other day whose husband used to work as a games tester, and he mentioned when his team were bugfixing VR games – for whole days at a time – they all had sick buckets installed next to them in the office. And worse still, they all had to make use of them.
 
Say what you like about the glamour of stacking shelves in Lidl compared to playing videogames as a job, but at least needing a spittoon to periodically regurgitate into isn’t part of the deal with the former.

Get this: Tetris was created 34 years ago this year! You know what else happened 34 years ago? The Space Shuttle gone and done its maiden flight, Tommy Cooper did a big grunty-squawk on stage, and The Herrey's won the Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden with their song Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley (no: they really did... sample lyrics: "Diggi-loo diggi-ley, life is goin' my way/When I'm walkin' in my golden shoes/ Everything I ever dreamed of has suddenly come true!").

You are surely aware that the man most credited with the birth of Tetris was bearded Russian darling Alexey Pajitnov (who had some help from Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov, neither of whom had beards).

Following its creation, Tetris became mired in a swamp of contractual issues, format spaghetti and multiple versions (by the end of the decade, half a dozen different companies claimed rights over it). Somehow, it still managed to land on a whole bunch of systems, including the Amiga, Atari ST and NES - though it's fair to argue that it resisted becoming a cultural phenomenon for several stubborn years.

It was only following complex negotiations between Nintendo and - not a joke - Pajitnov, Robert "Disgraced Yachtsman" Maxwell's Mirrorsoft, and the Russian government that it transcended its tumultuous origins to become a bona-fide, epoch-defining, classic. 

Tetris came out for Nintendo's Game Boy a couple of months after release, but in the rest of the world, it was bundled with Nintendo's dinky hardware, and its place in gaming history was, at last, secure. To wit: it became one of the biggest video games of all time, and ensured that the Game Boy was the handheld console of choice, farting all over the face of Atari's Lynx and Sega's Game Gear.

But what happened next? How does a kindly-faced bearded fellow, who looks like a Lord of the Rings character, follow-up such a colossal hit?

Here's how: by burrowing a big cranny into the earth using nothing but his own mouth, teeth and lips (with some games which didn't do nearly as well, and were mostly a huge disappointment)!

I've done a fair few immersive theatre things in recent years, everything from genuinely creepy zombie battles in an abandoned shopping mall, to a weird, experimental, artsy-fartsy nonsense which took place in a load of old shipping containers in London's Docklands, to Secret Cinema's recreations of Hill Valley in 1955 and Mos Eisley circa A Long Time Ago.

Last year, I twice visited Alice's Adventures Underground, in the old vaults beneath Waterloo Station. The show had some truly jaw-dropping set design, a little more audience participation than I was comfortable with (both times I got picked out by an over-friendly chef to roll pastry while doing a dance), and - memorably - a sense of humour, which too many immersive shows tend to forget.

Immersive theatre appeals to that same sense of exploration that I get from playing games; that feeling you've been transported elsewhere, of being taken out of the mundane, and becoming part of something beyond the ordinary. Certainly, my two favourites have been those staged by Punchdrunk Theatre, Drowned Man and Sleep No More, which somehow succeed in being just pretentious enough to kind of be art, while making them sufficiently free-roaming that you have an experience that's unique to each individual.

The level of detail and scale of both Punchdrunk shows was immense. Indeed, in the case of Drowned Man, probably too immense - based over multiple floors of a vast warehouse, it had entire deserts, forests, and old 1930s movie studios to explore. By the end we all felt we'd only experienced the tip of what it had to offer.

What makes Punchdrunk's work so successful is that it lets you wander through the location without hand-holding. You might choose to follow a particular character's path... or just nose around the rooms and sets at your own pace, rifling through drawers and spying on the actors. It's up entirely to the individual.

They also encourage you to split up from your group. One of the joys of the best immersive theatre is coming together at the end and comparing experiences. It's truly unique, and - even if you don't do theatre - something which I believe most video game fans would get a lot out of. Heck, even if you have no interest in "the arts"... you surely can't argue with running around an old department store, shooting at the undead.

At the weekend I visited Somnai, a more contained, slower paced immersive show than many of the others, but the first one I've done which uses Virtual Reality. 

Here's my spoiler-lite review.

GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

When I was a kid, I had a friend who really, really loved Guns ‘n’ Roses. So much so, after he went to see them live he almost exclusively wore a vile tour t-shirt he bought. It featured a terrible drawing of a half-nude, partially dismembered zombie lady with enormous boobs who’d been tied to a pole for some reason.
 
It was, as the description hopefully imparts, utterly repellent. Yet, he wore it everywhere – even once to a wedding reception. In fact, it would only have been marginally more offensive if it had been a cartoon of Hitler kicking Gandhi in the teeth while simultaneously wiping his bum on the Turin shroud.
 
However, it also happened to have a verse of the song ‘Paradise City’ on it (the t-shirt, not the Turin shroud). This turned out to be a godsend, as my friends and I finally got this guy to stop wearing it by repeatedly singing “’Take me down to Welwyn Garden City’, ‘I haven’t got a car’ ‘Oh that’s a pity!’” at him.

Despite that being a rubbishly innocuous jibe, we soon discovered our dissing his favourite band made him inexplicably furious. Of course, as we were teenagers and thus terrible human beings we all found this hilarious, so we kept it up until he eventually crumbled and wore something less grim to stop the mockery.
 
The moral of that story though? Never take yourself too seriously when you’re not doing (or wearing) something remotely serious in the first place. And that, ladies and/or gents, is kinda why Burnout Paradise: Remastered is long overdue and so very much appreciated.

I don't own a lot of original gaming hardware. Truth is, I can never quite justify the expense to myself. I feel guilty treating myself to stuff at the best of times, and especially when I know it's something that nobody else in my family is going to benefit from.

I've got a few little bits and pieces, on the cheaper end of the scale. I've got an original Astro Wars machine that I've had for years, a Tomytronic 3D handheld (because I never had one back in the day), and a Digital Derby Auto Raceway. I don't tend to pick up old consoles because, frankly, it's so much more convenient to play old games through emulation. And even then, I'd still rather lob a few quid at the Nintendo Store to play an old SNES game than download it for free. 

In fact, this is the reason why there are only really two old games systems I've ever thought about owning, because they're the two which are the hardest to emulate; Nintendo's Virtual Boy and the Vectrex.

The Virtual Boy got a lot of stick upon release, and is undoubtedly Nintendo's biggest flop. Nonetheless, it's a quirky looking thing, and I've long liked the idea of owning one. I guess I've got a bit of a soft spot for the underdoggos, and it's a gap in my gaming knowledge that I'd like to one day plug.

The Vectrex, however, is a machine I've desired since I was a kid. I think I first saw ads for it in imported US comics, and it looked too good to be true. 

I'd always had an abundance of love for arcade games with vector graphics - they're somehow timeless, and still look futuristic to me. Oh, how disappointed I was when I played Asteroids on the Atari 2600... but here was a machine which would let me have actual, real, glowing vector graphics in my own home! I mean, it even had its own screen, for pity's sake!! To an 11 year-old, that was hands down the coolest thing I could conceive of.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been tempted by a Vectrex on eBay. I've come so close on a number of occasions, but common sense has always kicked me to the kerb. Fortunately, my resolve was reinforced last year after I attended to Retro Revival event near Birmingham. I played on a Vectrex and came away disappointed. The control stick was incredibly loose and unresponsive, and I decided that were I ever to own one it would probably gather dust. 

​Well, was I ever wrong...

But first: some history.

I've not enjoyed any other Tomb Raider game as much as I did the original. Admittedly, it hasn't aged terribly well - in all kinds of ways - but at the time it was entirely new.

Furthermore, the restrictions it was working within somehow enhanced its atmosphere. Those caves and tombs were empty and eerie, Nathan McCree's minimal score remains possibly my favourite ever in a video game, fitting perfectly with the sense of isolated exploration, and Lara - as originally depicted - didn't feel as awkwardly sexualised as she later became. 

Obviously, Tomb Raider didn't remain a small, quirky, release; it was the biggest gaming phenomenon of the 90s - and it's still going today. There's a third game in the successful reboot trilogy due later this year, and a new Tomb Raider movie, inspired by the reboot, out now.

Here are eleven things you might not have known about the series' origins.

So, here's a thing. Recently, I've been playing a lot of old games.

Some of them are proper, proper old games - like, from the early-80s. I'd talked about Space Invaders recently, and how much I appreciated its simplicity... but I've spread myself beyond it now and realised how many old games - particularly old arcade games - are similarly good for having the same clarity of vision.

Defender, Pac-Man, Phoenix, Q*Bert, Tempest, Asteroids... all these games have essentially one idea, and one gameplay mechanic, at their core... and they run with it. They're so different from what constitutes a blockbuster game of today, when epics like, say, Grand Theft Auto V are essentially an entire arcade in a single package, lurching from one style of gameplay - driving, skydiving, tennis - to story, and back again.

You get your money's worth to be sure, but they also lack the singular focus that really early arcade games had. It feels like everything these days gets buried beneath layer upon layer of busy work and distraction. Most games are just so over-stuffed, so hard trying to be all things to all people, that they lack personality.

However, what I've found weird in my recent forages into gaming history is that once you get into the home computer era of the Spectrum and Commodore 64, things take a turn for the worse. The simplicity on display in something like Space Invaders suddenly gets replaced by more complex games, which - frankly - were all a bit wonky and challenging for the wrong reasons. 

Whereas in Pac-Man I knew that if I died it was my own fault.... if I die in Jet Set Willy it'll often feels it's happened because the game is going out of its way to spoil my enjoyment. 

So why do I regard my ZX Spectrum as my favourite games system of all time?

The 1980s were a curious time. Fashion and pop culture was all rainbow colours, neon, and fannying around on yachts singing about girls called Rio who dance upon the sand.

It was a starkly optimistic, probably necessary, distraction from the reality of British life for many people, which was all miners strikes, IRA bombing campaigns, unemployment and Mrs Thatch.

It was also the year that the British games industry was born, thanks in no short measure to the release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The bedroom-coded nature of games development during the 80s meant that singular, idiosyncratic, visions were the norm. Nobody really knew what a video game should be, so they explored personal ideas which offered suggestions for what they could be. And often, what games were was a depressing reflection of real British life wrapped up in some truly eccentric gameplay.

Here are ten such games which nailed it. For better and worse...

Bad video games are not uncommon, but slightly too often... there have been bad video games which happen to be sequels to good video games. Or, at least, sequels which aren't as well received - for whatever reason - from the game that spawned them. 

Sometimes an overabundance of hype is to blame. Other times its a switch in development teams. Sometimes, the prevailing winds are just blowing-off in a different direction.

Here are ten such games which ended their franchises with not so much a bang... as an apologetic shrug of the shoulders...

Bloody hell. Thank you. In 24 hours you not only smashed the funding goal for Digitiser The Show – more than three times over – but also beat what we achieved on my last Kickstarter at the end of the entire funding period.

I sort of don’t know how to thank you really, beyond getting into being a bit gushy, but hopefully you know how sincerely I appreciate this. I’ve said it before, but I don’t see this entirely as you backing me personally… more that you’ve put your faith in me to shepherd something you want to see.
 
The last 24 hours were chaotic and overwhelming, but amazing. We’ve already had interest from a bunch of potential new guests, offers of amazing filming locations, and other help.
 
The brilliant Gameplay Jenny described what we’re trying to achieve to me as nothing less than a cultural shift; showing that there’s still a place on YouTube for well-written, funny, ambitious, well-produced, and original gaming content.
 
We’ve already reached our first three stretch goals – Mr T, me eating a load of goujons, and a Christmas Special, and now we’re closing in on the fourth one, a regular Datablast of info at the end of each ep. If we can raise £25,000 – and I’m actually confident that we can – you’ll also get a scary Halloween ep.
 
When we get to £30,000… the stretch goals are going to start getting a lot more mental. I’ll tell you here exclusively that for the £30,000 stretch goal we’re going to beat Elon Musk at his own game and put a goujon in space. Or, at least, try to. It’ll make sense within the context of an episode. Or won’t. Don’t matter.
 
Anyhow… if we’re going to make this as big and noisy and ambitious as I think it can be, we need as many people to hear about as possible. Already I’ve been amazed at how many old Digi readers are discovering this.
 
So, a quick call to action. Please keep spreading the word. Tell friends, tell family, spread it across your social media accounts. We’ve barely had any press, despite my best efforts – thank you, Gizmodo and Retro Gamer for being the only major sites to run articles – so we have to do this by word-of-mouth alone. But hey; that’s how Digi did it back in the day. Wouldn’t feel like our thing as much if the mainstream media gave us attention, right?
 
Thank you, again. So much. More news soon. Moc-on!
 
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