Sonic the Hedgehog is Sega's mascot. We all know that, in the early stages of his development, he was a rabbit, before evolving into a hedgehog called Mr Needlemouse, before his creators settled on the super-fast, blue, icon we know today.

However, was Sonic the Hedgehog really the best mascot Sega could've come up with? Unfortunately, as shall shortly be demonstrated, he doesn't really stand up to scrutiny...

The NES was a phenomenon, or - as I like to call it - a "pheno".

Alright, most of us in the UK didn't own one, but in Japan and America it was bigger than Krablex. It reinvigorated the games industry following its crash of '83, spawned cartoons and breakfast cereals, and turned Mario into the icon he is today.

Suffice to say, this was a bandwagon that many people tried to jump aboard, no matter how ill-conceived and half-baked their efforts to do so were. 

You all know about the Power Glove and Nintendo's own Robotic Operated Buddy, but here's another ten unusual, mostly useless, peripherals.

If you've ever fired a real gun - and I've done it a couple of times at shooting galleries in the US - there's one scary truth about using them which advocates of gun control tend to overlook. And that fact is this fact: it feels, really, really cool to shoot things.

I mean, I won't pretend that I felt anything other than enormous sense power with a gun in my hand. There's just something immensely satisfying about pointing a heavy bit of metal at a thing, and then watching that thing get blown to pieces. In many respects, they're the ultimate fidget spinners.

That shouldn't, of course, mean that guns should be freely available to every last hillbilly or emotionally damaged Nirvana fan with a grudge - or maybe at all. I mean, if you want to know why guns should never get into the hands of anybody other than stable, trained professionals, go hire a belt-fed M64 for half an hour.

But then, you're a normal, stable, person, probably, and of course there are people who want to own guns so they can eke back a sense of control in their lives. Unfortunately, the psychology of gun ownership never seems to factor into the debates. 

Anyhow, I'm sure that's precisely the sort of thing a filthy centrist would say. Heck, if I went back to a shooting range now, the targets probably wouldn't be pictures of Muslim men anymore - but photographs of centrists!!!! 

You've played video games, so you know - to a point - how shooting feels, and it's likely why there have been many attempts (though, admittedly, not so much in recent times) to recreate it faithfully in the home without actually killing anybody.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the home light guns we've had over the years.

Mini mini mini miniiii - ah-aaah-aah-ah-ah-ahhh!

Everything's getting smaller; nuclear missiles, the moral integrity of US presidents... and the games machines we grew up playing. We've had two mini Nintendo plug-and-play machines, the C64 Mini, and now it looks like we're getting a proper Mega Drive Mini. This is good. This is almost exactly what I want. 

There have been countless other machines which have tried to emulate the Mega Drive experience (for example, the Mega Drive Flashback from the makers of the Mega Drive Mini), but - to date - they've all felt a bit cheap-and-cheerful. Hopefully things will be different this time, given the precedent set by Nintendo, and that Sega will be working closely with manufacturer AtGames to ensure its integrity. 

The Mega Drive Mini wasn't the only Sega retro news to ooze out of the spout last week; a remastered Shenmue 1 & 2 package is swaggering towards the PS4, Xbox One and PC, and classic Sega games (starting with the Mega Drive, but later expanding to include Saturn and Dreamcast titles) will begin surfacing on Nintendo's Switch eStore later this year. 

Add all this to the fruity reception which embraced last year's defiantly old-school Sonic Mania, and it feels like there is, at last, enough fresh air since Sega was forced out the hardware game for people to start looking more fondly at its antediluvian "bulge".

To be honest, it's overdue.

Weirdly, the original PlayStation isn't remembered for its platform games.

​The system was so heavily marketed as a "cool" lifestyle accessory - with Sony encouraging people to take it to nightclubs with them, and raise glasses of Southern Comfort and Coke ("So-Co") in its honour, and likening it to a tattooed frenum - that it is largely forgotten that it also played host to a number of properly decent platformers. 

History is in the process of being rewritten, however, with the recent remaster of the Crash Bandicoot games, and the upcoming reimagining of the system's premiere platform hero, Spyro. But if we dive deeper into the PS1's platform game pool, what other treats might we find feeding on its bottom?

Here are ten such games which deserve a re-evaluation. 

I've decided that, after first-person shoot 'em ups, my second favourite genre of game is the side-scrolling beat 'em up. If you think about it, the two genres have a lot in common, despite the differing perspectives; the waves of easily-dispatched enemies, climactic boss fights, the power-ups found randomly strewn around the stages...

However, whereas first-person shooters can come in all shapes and sizes - a seemingly infinitely flexible format - it seems that the traditional side-scrolling fighting game must adhere to a number of weird rules in order to be accepted into the club. It doesn't matter whether the games are set on the mean streets of a neon-lit city, Ancient Egypt, or some fantasy realm... it's probably the least diverse "genus" in gaming history.

​And here? Here are those boxes which must be ticked.

​GO!!!!!

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

Wipeout may have been around in some form or other since the beginning of time (22 years), but that misplaced capital E still annoys the bejesus out of me. It just makes it read like it’s saying wip-E-out, and I for one am not ‘whipping’ my ‘E’ out for anyone. Especially not in VR, when I can’t see what’s going on around me and could be accosted while unawares by a passing deviant.
 
Also: what is that singular ‘E’ even supposed to represent? It could well be ‘egg’, and whipping an egg out would require a level of biological dexterity I’m not sure I’m capable of. At least not without major interspecies transplant surgery and a significant amount of strong hormone tablets. So yes: please fix this, Sony.
 
Typographical oddness aside, Wipeout Omega is neither a new release, nor is it even new stuff – it came out in June 2017, and is a cut-and-shut of Wipeout 2048 (a launch title for the much-neglected PS Vita) and 2009’s Wipeout HD/Fury for the PS3. So why are we looking at this dusty pile of well old antiques, guv?

I never had a Commodore 64, but I had a couple of mates who owned one. For most of the 80s, I was a loyal ZX Spectrum owner, but not so blindly zealous that I was above flirting with other hardware... coquettishly twirling a stray lock of hair, licking my lips - one after another - and smashing my groin against a bar stool (as I understand flirting to be). 

I had mixed feelings towards the C64. Clearly, it was a more powerful machine than its rival - capable of displaying as many as 64 shades of brown simultaneously (hence the name) - and with a proper keyboard (also brown) to boot. Indeed, it's a little known fact that The Bristol Stool Chart was originally called The Commodore Stool Chart. 

​However, somehow I never wanted a C64 instead of my Speccy. I'm not entirely sure why. It might be the colours. I joke about all The Browns, but there was something vibrant and magical about the Spectrum's garish colour palette. The C64, by comparison, seemed dull and muted. Everything was sort of washed-out, like you were watching some sort of avant garden performance piece featuring cardboard puppets, entitled Monsieur Marron Se Rend à la Ville de Marron.

But get this: now I do own a Commodore 64. Sort of. It's this: The C64 Mini, clearly inspired by the success of Nintendo's miniature NES and Super NES, hosting a collection of original Commodore 64 games stuffed into a cute little C64 replica. 

Do you know what's really pointless? Definitive "Best Thing Ever" lists. If that's what you're after... walk away now. Go do something else. Go and look at some sales data, you stupid robot. You know: 'cause sales are always a definitive way to gauge the goodness of a thing aren't they? Tsk.

"TSK!"

You see, it's very hard - if not impossible - to be objective about anything when, ultimately, we all have our own subjective experiences, likes, dislikes, and opinions. Yeah, you might be able to have a fair crack at a list of the most influential or important games, but... a list of The Best Ones? It's always going to come down to individual preference, no matter how much you may claim to be taking yourself out of the equation. 

So here, then, because it's long overdue, is MY list of the best games ever. At least, this is where I'm at today. Tomorrow it might change. Or I might remember ones I've left off. That's how people work, stupid: we're fallible! Stop trying to think we all have to be perfect. God's sake.

Do I really think all of these games deserve to be on such a list? No, but their inclusion is down to a myriad of factors; how did they affect me? How did they make me feel? Did they stay with me long after I finished playing them?

And were they the first games which sprung to mind when I thought I should do a list like this? 

Sigh. So, here we go then. Let's give Far Cry 5 a review. Regrettably, this isn't the review I wanted to write...

In case you missed it, I wrote an article last week expressing my bafflement at how many reviews I'd read - both by professional games journos and those on social media - which placed what I felt was undue critical focus on the game's somewhat woolly politics... and it backfired horribly. 

It might've been an issue of timing; thanks to the Kickstarter campaign for Digitiser the Show I'm suddenly more unpleasantly visible than I've been since my Teletext days, and there was a clear subtext of envy in some of the grief I got. I was blocked by people on Twitter, I lost backers on Kickstarter, and for the first time in a long time I vanity-searched my own name and discovered some people "hated" me and that I am "a prick".

Most of you are rational people, so you don't need me to point out what a ridiculous overreaction this is. I mean, I thought if anybody was going to be angry with me it'd be games journalists, as they were the ones who I most directly took the piss out of.

Still, I'm fairly broad-shouldered these days, and I can't say any of it has done lasting damage, but it nevertheless irritated and frustrated me. How can we progress as a species and a civilisation if we allow ourselves to become so entrenched in our views? Honestly, I despair.  

One of the most hilarious criticisms which came my way was that I was a "centrist". Ie; somebody who aligns with neither the left or right, politically-speaking. Which, absurdly, wasn't at all what I was expressing. I didn't state any personal political affiliation in the piece, merely my bafflement that anybody would've expected anything different from a Far Cry game than what we got.  

Next Sunday, the Kickstarter campaign for Digitiser The Show comes to an end. It has been a long and exhausting month. Way more so than the one for Found Footage... and with that campaign I was even drawing silly teletext pictures for backers. 

Frankly, between things I've done for YouTube, podcasts, and whatnot... I'm sick of hearing my own voice and seeing my face, so apologies if you are too. On the plus side, I've lost half a stone in weight.

But once it's all over... that's when the fun work begins. We've already started planning, as much as we can without knowing the final budget. We'll also be sending out the rewards that we can as early as we can, so we know what we have have remaining in the budget once all those are paid for. There's a lot of work ahead, but at the end of it there will be a show that, hopefully, you'll love.

If you've backed it - thank you. If you haven't backed it because you can't afford to - that's okay.  Whoever you are, though, please, please... in this final week... spam the entire world with links to the Kickstarter.

Tell everyone how important this show is. People who enjoy games are still seen by broadcasters and the wider media as a sort of underclass. We aren't, and we don't have to be. A successfully - and healthily - funded Digitiser The Show sends a message that they won't be able to ignore. The support we've had from other, much bigger, YouTubers than I should tell you that I'm not alone in thinking that this show - and the success of the campaign - is significant. 

I mean, if you watched that Channel 4 games show starring Rob Beckett you know what broadcasters are content with giving us: a show about video games featuring Scarlett Moffatt from Gogglebox dressed up as a New Romantic, laughing at Pac-Man.

It doesn't have to be like this! Together we can change things.

​Anyhow... here's a sampling of some of the things I've done on my seemingly endless promotional trek (you can also enjoy me pre-and-post half-a-stone weight loss by comparing me in Ashens' Blockbusters video to the latest star-studded promo vid)...