Remember the TV version of The Incredible Hulk? You know: the one with the really sad music, that was like The Littlest Hobo, except it wasn't a show about a dog wandering from town to town helping people, but about a man wandering from town to town trying not to get angry, and when he did get angry - once per episode - he'd turn into a big green fellow with terrible hair, who'd roar and throw bins around.

​And then at the end of the episode the sad man would walk away, and the sad music would start, and you knew he was just going to end up in another small town, and somebody would make him angry, and then he'd get sad all over again. 

I used to watch that show just waiting for the moment where he turned into The Hulk. I didn't care about the rest of it; I just wanted Hulk. I wanted a whole show of Hulk, not a show about a sad man, who turned into The Hulk for about two minutes per 45 minute episode. I didn't understand that the drama came from him avoiding anything that might make him angry, but that his better nature would invariably lead him towards situations where there was a risk of him unleashing his green alter-ego. I just wanted a monster throwing bins around.

But that was fine. I got that it was probably a faff to cover a large man in green paint, and probably expensive to get all those throwable bins in. I knew that two minutes of Hulk was all I'd ever get each week. I could live with that, because I still got to see the character I loved from the comics come to life, and knew that the boring bits were there for the people who didn't like super-heroes. This was the price to pay for having the moments I wanted.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

My mind would've collapsed in on itself if I knew that within my lifetime I'd see all of my favourite Marvel super-heroes brought to life in a way that wasn't limited to just once every 45 minutes, that the boring bits would all be stripped out. That those who didn't like super-heroes were now the minority, and the comics fans were the ones being catered for.

Yes: I'm talking about Avengers: Infinity War, like everyone else is. But this isn't a review. It's about snobbery.

I've been a father almost as long as I've been an adult. My eldest daughter was born about two weeks before my 19th birthday, so being a parent has - for more than half my life - defined me. It wasn't why I later fell in love - and chose to settle down - with somebody who also had three daughters, but it is why having three step-daughters felt like the most natural thing in the world. 

It's interesting to note that, as the average age of gamers creeps up, there are more games being made which are specifically about parenthood. Pretty much, I think that's why I connected so unexpectedly with The Last of Us. Indeed, when The Last of Us was released in 2013 I'd been hit hard with Empty Nest Syndrome. I related to Joel losing his daughter, and wanting to protect Ellie. I related to how that can often feel like a thankless, desperate, task. 

They slip through your fingers, and have to go their own way, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

My kids were all adults, suddenly, and I felt as if my purpose - my entire reason for existing - had been taken away from me. It's probably no coincidence that I started this site the following year; I needed to rediscover who I was away from being a parent. Heck, the first couple of years of this site were full of self-reflective blog posts, which were essentially a case of me working some of that out.

I always figured I'd love it when my kids grew up, and I got some of my freedom back, but really... it was rubbish, and the transition from being a dad of children to being a dad of adults was harder than I'd expected. I'm over it now, mostly, but - just between us - I'm counting the days down until I'm a grandfather. 

Anyway. What does any of this have to do with this new God of War reboot? Well, it's all about being a dad, see. Also: a god with a bad case of regret and guilt and stuff.

So, all about being a dad then...

Nintendo started life in 1889 as a nude playing card company. It diversified greatly over the following century, into taxis, love hotels, and toys. Of course, it wasn't until the decaying years of the 20th Century that Nintendo found its true calling; nipple clamps (video games)! 

Even then, its entry into the games industry was faltering, and - before it struck it big with 1981's Donkey Kong - Nintendo flailed around like a squid in a bin.

Here are all (some) of the games which led the way. 

Sega has been around in one form or another since the 1940s, but the modern version of the company properly began in the 1960s, when it began releasing electro-mechanical arcade games.

Indeed, over subsequent decades Sega became a true pioneer in arcade gaming, releasing the first ever stereoscopic 3D game (SubRoc 3D), the first arcade game on Laserdic (Astron Belt), the first game with isometric graphics (Zaxxon), and the first game to feature a live nude man trapped inside (The Clothe-less Screamer).

These days, Sega's arcade division is still distributing games, but they tend to be of the ticket-dispensing variety (you know the sort: they churn out tickets which you can then hand over to a disinterested/irritable arcade employee in return for a malformed rubber pencil topper). 

Here are ten very obscure arcade machines from across Sega's history.

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.