Revealed for the first time ever - Larry Bundy Jr and Paul Gannon explore the full, strange, tale of the 1980s electronic toy called Winkie...

So, here's a question that has been rumbling around in my head... is retro gaming sort of, y'know... over?

​I mean, there'll always be a place for nostalgia. People will always want to remember the things that have meant something to them. Today's young gamers will be tomorrow's retro gamers.

But... has the retro gaming mediasphere - for want of a better word - reached critical mass, and outward expansion has now ceased?

There are podcasts, websites, shows... and it feels like every other day a new retro gaming YouTube channel starts up. It feels like that big ball in Katamari Damacy, and every day it just gets bigger and bigger as more YouTubers are stuck to it, and if you're new it's impossible to stand out.  

Indeed, finding content for this site and the YouTube channel - which hasn't already been covered in some form or other - is incredibly difficult.

Yes, I know... it doesn't so much matter if it has been covered before, so long as I can find my own take on a topic, but I want to surprise and educate not only you lot - but myself as well. I'm sort of seeing it almost as a game, a challenge to myself, to find stuff that's obscure, and hasn't been covered.

It's tricky though - the likes of my Digitiser co-host Larry Bundy Jr have been doing their thing for years, and between the titans of retro gaming, and the billions of smaller channels - some doing utterly amazing work, others not so much - I do have days where I get a little despondent, wonder whether Digitiser has anything meaningful to contribute, and ask if it's worth it.

In the 80s - with popular culture violating my still-brewing brain with the message that a nuclear holocaust could happen at any minute - most of my nightmares were about nuclear war. Between Frankie's Two Tribes, Threads, The Day After, The Terminator, When The Wind Blows, Protect And Survive et al, it's no exaggeration to say that I lost count of the times I woke up shrieking and ululating in terror. It seemed like an inevitability. 

What do kids even have nightmares about these days? Brexit, probably. Or not having enough credit on their phone. Or their latest ASMR slime video being demonetised.

Oddly, I always survived my post-apocalyptic dreams. It was never the dying that scared me, but living on having lost everything familiar. Interestingly, Far Cry New Dawn plays entirely on this fundamental fear by revisiting the familiar world of Far Cry 5, 17 years after the events of its mushroom cloud-shaped climax (one of three possible endings).

In the new-look Hope County, your goal is to reestablish civilisation... but your efforts are threatened by The Highwayman, a band of biker leather-wearing goons, governed by a pair of psychotic twin sisters. Though you won't need to have played FC5 to understand what's going on, it surprised me that it's much more of a direct sequel than I'd anticipated. 

This isn't the first time Ubisoft have done something like this, of course. Far Cry 3 led to the Blood Dragon expansion, a glorious, 1980s VHS-tinged, cyber-noir shooter. New Dawn isn't quite as bold with its aesthetics, but instead offers a full-sized game, which reuses and remixes elements of Far Cry 5 to surprisingly decent effect. 

As I alluded to on the letters page last week, Digitiser now has a second channel, which will act as a lewd depository for all the more - ahem - esoteric stuff that I like making.

It'd be nice if you subscribed, for the full, panoramic, Digitiser experience. But if you don't want to... that's fine. That's the whole point.

Thus, above you have the video from the regular Digitiser channel - myself, Octav1us, Gannon and Larry attempting to answer gaming trivia questions, and being given electric shocks in return for failure. And below you have Eli Silverman from Cheap Show and Barshens reading a beautiful fairytale about a lonely carpenter and his wooden son...

Exodus, movement of Jah people, oh yeah,
Open your eyes and let me tell you this,
Exodus, movement of Jah people,
Exodus, movement of Jah people.

​And so on and so forth. 

It's weird how real-life tragedy inspires art. If the atom bombs hadn't dropped on Japan in 1945 would we have had Godzilla? Without 9/11 there'd have been no Cloverfield. And without the Chernobyl disaster we wouldn't have had Dmitri Glukhovsy's novel Metro 2033, which inspired the Metro video game series. 

When I visited Chernobyl 10 years ago, I was surprised by how much it affected me, particularly walking through the eerily empty city of Pripyat. It was clearly the perfect setting for a video game, despite being ground zero for an unspeakable tragedy.

Weirdly, one of my overriding memories is of a heavily pregnant dog wandering around outside the crippled, decaying, power plant, while we took in the scene and posed for photos. It was surreal and disturbing. 

Quite by chance, my trip coincided with a competition being run by Marillion - yes, ha ha, Mr Biffo likes Marillion - to win VIP tickets to one of their bi-annual Marillion Weekends; you had to take a photograph of yourself wearing one of the band's t-shirts. Naturally, I donned a shirt featuring the cover of their 1998 album Radiation (which I had to beg off a fellow fan, as I didn't own one; it's a horrible design).

Sort of inevitably, I won the competition, got the VIP tickets, met the band, and told them of my trip.

And then a few years later, their guitarist Steve Rothery released a pleasant instrumental solo album called The Ghosts of Pripyat. Was I directly responsible for that? I like to think so. Even though when I told him about my visit, the most overt response I got was a slight nod, and perhaps a mumbled "Oh right..." 

But those cogs must've surely been turning in his head...

Shortly after its release in 1980, the arcade shoot 'em up Berzerk was associated with a string of mysterious deaths. Digitiser explores this dark and strange tale...

Though it never sold as well as Sega expected, Toejam and Earl nevertheless succeeded in becoming one of the most memorable games on the Mega Drive. It was a true original, with a unique aesthetic,  and surreal sense of humour, ensuring it built a dedicated hardcore of followers.

And yet, if the characters were so iconic, why were the sales initially so underwhelming? Unfortunately, it seems that having an idiosyncratic sense of whimsy is great for passionate cult appeal, but generally seems to annoy more people than it appeals.

But then, most people are massive idiots with sediment for brains, whose idea of cutting-edge comedy is a panel show with interchangeable jokes, featuring stand-ups whose only distinction from one another is how much hair they have - the comedy equivalent of a Boney M concert (what does the "M" stand for? Mudflaps).

I'm not bitter. 

In fact, the original 16-bit Toejam and Earl is so iconic, that people tend to forget that there was an unloved third game in the series released for the Xbox.

Truthfully, if I peel back my nostalgia flap, I always found Toejam and Earl a case of style over substance. Yes, it boasted an aesthetic that was unique for its time, its tongue wedged firmly in the cheek of its conviction, but the gameplay was woefully slow and - dare I say it - a bit boring.

It's probably heresy to say it, but I sort of preferred Toejam and Earl II, precisely because it ditched the randomised wandering around in favour of a more traditional platform game (albeit still with the same wacky hip-hop stylings).

This is why I approached Toejam and Earl: Back In The Groove with a degree of trepidation (the worst type of idation). I liked the characters, I liked that Toejam and Earl was at odds with almost everything else around at the time... I just didn't really love that first game, and everything about Back In The Groove appeared to be a homage to the original.

And, indeed, there's no escaping that this is more remake than sequel, with little in the way of fresh ideas.  

Gorillas don't really have a sound do they?

Dogs go "woof", cats go "meow", pigs go "oink", birds go "ca-caw/caw-ca" and "twit-twit-a-twit", cow go "moo", horse go "neigh-nonny-no", frog goes "ribbit", sheep go "bong", foxes scream like they're having their snout tweaked by a pair of tongs (giving birth to the phrase "It has all gone a bit Pete Tong"), and I just think it's a bit sad that gorillas never got their own noise. 

If I'd been the person whose job it was to dish out the animal noises, I'd have given gorillas something really cool and distinct, like "b'tooo!" or "frobisher!" or "grootu-grootu-hai!".

That said, gorillas probably have enough going for them already, what with the big, hairy, muscles, and come-to-bed eyes, whereas all of the aforementioned animals are only good for one thing: being eaten.

Anyway. The point of all that was to introduce this notion: there is a gorilla in the game Ape Out. You are that gorilla. And you have to get out.... of laboratories, prisons, office blocks, and army camps. 

"Frobisher!"

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

Blergh. The world’s in a bit of mess at the moment, innit?
 
You’ve got a nylon-coiffured tartrazine lardhippo in charge of the USA. A PM here who’s basically a broken speak & spell stuck in a diagnostic loop, shoved into an M&S old lady shop dummy. Catastrophic climate change that means we’ll probably all be underwater in a few years – assuming we haven’t died of sunburn first. People rioting over alternative sausage rolls.

And that’s only the stuff that’s annoyed/terrified me this month.
 
It’s all such a massive cluster of fetid mank, it’s a wonder we’re not all constantly blind drunk to blot out the sheer awfulness. So thank criminy for Pikuniku: the game we all need to play right now. Why? Because it comes packed to the membranes with misery-busting free booze! (Fun!)

Biffo and Gannon take a look at a rare knock-off bootleg handheld console that Biffo found in some shop - featuring no fewer than 788 games - including Star Wars, Donkey Kong, and more...!