Sony has announced the games line-up for its upcoming PlayStation Classic mini console thing (out in December for ninety quid-ish). And you know what? It's slightly better than I expected... and also - get this, ya big cormorant - slightly worse!!!!

While I was surprised to see the inclusion of Final Fantasy VII... I was then equally confused by the lack of Tomb Raider, not least because the franchises are both now stuffed into the baggy, wet, burrow of Square Enix. 

Just as with the Super NES and NES mini, this dwindled throwback is struggling to please everyone. For my money, these tiny retro systems should be seen as the equivalent of those museums-in-a-book (you know: with replica relics, and "flaps" to lift up and that).

I mean let's face it, if you really want to play an old PS1 game, there are plenty of dubious and not-so-dubious ways of doing so. Instead, there's just something nice about having all of a system's most iconic games within one shrivelled recreation. But what's the point if you're not going to include the classics on your Classic?

While managing to feature at least some heavy-hitters, the PlayStation Classic does seem to miss out on a ton of the PlayStation's most iconic, system-defining, titles. I mean, it doesn't even have that famous t-rex demo. You know the one: where you could manipulate a 3D Marc Bolan, and make him fall off a stage. That's a cool reference there for your mums and dads, kids.

Here's the full list of what will be included on the European version:

Battle Arena Toshinden
Cool Boarders 2
Destruction Derby
Final Fantasy VII
Grand Theft Auto
Intelligent Qube
Jumping Flash
Metal Gear Solid
Mr Driller
Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
Rayman
Resident Evil Director’s Cut
Revelations: Persona
Ridge Racer Type 4
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Syphon Filter
Tekken 3
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6
Twisted Metal
Wild Arms

Below, I offer my suggestions for which of these games should've been replaced with something else...

Long story short, but I made the decision to drive to Blackpool for the Autumn Play Expo. It was unavoidable really; we had to be in Dartford on Sunday, for some reason, and the only way to be there on time was either to get the train back Saturday night, or drive home early on Sunday morning. 

I opted for the latter, so I could hang out a bit in the evening with some of the people who'd travelled up there for the Digitiser live panel I was hosting on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, that drive - as it was for everyone who took their car - was an epic. Over eight hours in total, with a route that dragged us over the Peak District in an effort to avoid the M6 crawl.

I didn't make it to the London Play Expo in August - being represented at that event's Digitiser panel by a pre-recorded video, and an army of guests from the series - but I attended the Manchester one a few years back, and the Blackpool show back in February. For me, it has a much nicer, more personal, feel to the Manchester show (and, from what I've heard, the London show). Even if the venue - the labyrinthine Norbreck Castle hotel - takes "faded glamour" and contorts it into "The Shining 2".

In February I announced the launch of the Kickstarter for Digitiser The Show. This time I was revealing some of the show itself - alongside two of my co-hosts, Paul Gannon and Octav1us, as well as two of the series' guests, Kim Justice and DJ Slope (alas, regular Digitiser hosts Gameplay Jenny and Larry Bundy Jr couldn't make it). 

The forum for this unveiling; a shambolic, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, live episode!

Toys. They're good aren't they? Remember how we'd all stand around in a circle in the playground chanting "TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!" until a teacher would come and break us up?

When I were a youth, no matter what toy I had it would end up re-appropriated as part of the Star Wars universe. Train sets. Matchbox cars. The Mastermind board game... Even my niece's Barbie Dream House became a flophouse for dossers (an Imperial base).

In short: I loved holding toys in my hand, and using them as a key to unlock my trousers (imagination).

And yet... the whole games-with-toys thing has puzzled me. I get that Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions were popular for a time, but I was only ever really tempted by Dimensions. Unfortunately,  I found toys and video games to be strange bedfellows - the toys being a barrier to me slipping into the game, and the game restricting the freedom of my creativity that toys usually offered.

I recall writing on Digitiser years ago about releasing add-on packs for games - essentially new outfits, levels and settings, treating games as an infinite action figure toybox. I didn't know it, but essentially I was predicting DLC years before DLC became a real, and controversial, part of gaming. And then the whole games-with-toys thing happened, and made it even more real, and I started to wonder if I'd been a big idiot.

I mean, I loved video games as a kid and I loved toys, but no matter how open world a game gets... you're still working within the limitations of somebody else's rules. When I'd play with my action figures, I could take them anywhere. Do anything with them. I wasn't confined by camera angles and invisible walls. 

But now we have Starlink: Battle For Atlas - which comes with real, physical, toy spaceships which sit on your joypad, and you can customise and have your customisations reflected in-game - and it has me wondering all over again whether I, as a 12 year-old, would've dug it.

Maybe. If my parents had been really rich, and not so poor that they had to get a succession of lodgers, including one called Keith who apparently once chased my mother around her bedroom.

​But that's not important right now.

Games and consoles and that, yeah? They cost loads don't they? Yeah, well, they do, and it'd be nice if everything could cost, like, a couple of quid, but what are you gonna do? It is what it is.

Right now, you may be wondering whether games and consoles and that actually cost more today than they used to? What if we were able to adjust the prices of classics games machines and their games by accounting for inflation? Why, if we did that we would learn whether they are more or less expensive than they were back in this thing: the day!

So let us perform this task and put the nonsense to bed. Come on, everyone!

...That was a really weird intro. I don't know if it made sense.

I MIGHT BE GETTING A MIGRAINE.

GUEST ARTICLE by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

Get this, plebs: the other week, I descended the solid bronze staircase from my emerald castle, rummaged in my top hat for a few thousand pounds-worth of gold coins in loose change, then threw them at a tramp and told him to go forth and buy me the most popular advanced console there is. And a Christmas goose for everyone!
 
(That’s right: I’ve gone and bought myself a cheap second-hand PS4 Pro on eBay. And a load of dead geese!)
 
The Pro has been around for a while now of course, but I suspect many of you are in a position much like the one I was in when I took the plunge: my original PS4 was busting at the seams with data, I’d got myself a 4K telly in the past couple of years anyway, and I’ve been increasingly tempted by the growing number of ‘enhanced’ games for the Pro.
 
The tipping point for me, other than not fancying my hand at a hard drive upgrade, was the imminent arrival of the Pro-enhanced Red Dead Redemption II and its obscene file size – a corpulent 100+ GB. Justified as, of course, nothing is more important to modern gamers than the data-heavy, ultra-detailed textures needed to render horse genitalia and dirty cowboy chaps in 4K.

It's a real big shame what happened to Sega.

Once upon it was the little games company that could - taking on the market-dominating Nintendo, and aggressively positioning its Mega Drive as one of the two market-leading formats. Unfortunately, we all know what happened next; Sega got too big for its own boots and developed terrible callouses on its toes and heel. Then its feet fell off completely, and it almost choked to death on its own frenum.

We all know the main reasons why Sega toppled from its lofty perch - the 32X, Saturn, Dreamcast - and the machines which put it there in the first place - the Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive - but they're not the full story. 

Here are 11 more Sega hardware releases which history has decided to forget about. 

REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

If there’s one consistent thing about Nintendo, it’s their bewildering inconsistency.
 
One minute they’re taking what on paper should be utter disasters such as a console controlled with a wand (the Wii), an underpowered tablet with funny handles (the Switch), or literal cardboard trousers (Labo), and turning them into beloved works of utter genius.
 
The next, they’re making a total honk-up of ideas and services that should be the proverbial chunk of Battenburg.
 
Observe, love: they sauntered into mobile gaming years late, then made weirdly paranoid and irritating choices such as needing a constant internet connection on Super Mario Run for it to work. Mario himself is always skulking in dank pipes and tubes, but can you play his mobile title on a train going through a tunnel? No, no you cannot. Bloody hypocrites.


​Hardware is no exception either. All they had to do to replicate the Wii’s success is make an HD follow-up and not ruin the formula. Instead, in the Wii U they guffed out the clunkiest, most charmless machinery this side of early 1970s Soviet cars, with a gimmicky controller everyone largely gave up on not long after launch.
 
Short of making it out of Bakelite and putting games on punch cards, it couldn’t have looked more dated even before it launched.
 
Plus, of course, they inadvertently created their own biggest nemesis when they utterly messed up their relationship with Sony while co-developing the SNES CD drive – a cack-handed move which led the latter to shove all the electronic bits they’d developed into in a bag with some pig organs, creating a real-life Frankenstein! (The original PlayStation.)
 
Hence, much as I love my Switch, it was with a fairly jaded eye that I approached Nintendo Switch Online, their new service that lets you play games against people not in the same room as you. You know: because you’re an antisocial loner.

Back in the day, I always lived in hope that Digitiser would eventually start reviewing Neo Geo games.

Unfortunately, that would've required a) Having a Neo Geo on which to review said games, and - at £600-plus (the games alone could be several hundred quid) - it was unlikely that either Teletext or myself was going to buy one, and b) It was only really available in the UK via import, an offering for lunatics who didn't have anything better to do with their money. 

The most alluring aspect of SNK's Neo Geo - apart from it being sternum-disruptingly expensive - is that it offered true arcade-quality graphics in your own pantry. 

Yeah, the Super NES and Mega Drive may have intermittently claimed the same, but the Neo Geo really was an arcade machine; its innards were designed for something called the Multi Video System - a multi-game arcade Jonesy, which used cartridges that could be swapped around by arcade owners.

SNK later released a rental-only version for home users, thinking nobody in their right mind would've been stupid enough to pay the astronomical asking price to own one. Ultimately, though, the company caved to pressure from stupid people who were clearly not in the right minds, reconfigured it - in the process making it the first home console with removable memory cards - and flogged it to consumers as a high-end, luxury, proposition.

You know: like the console equivalent of a Heston Blumenthal-branded prawn cocktail from Waitrose (it's just like a normal prawn cocktail, except that it costs forty quid, and the secret whimsical ingredient is a dugong's cortex).

Unfortunately, it arrived in homes just in time to have a brief window where it strutted supreme as the console with the best graphics, before its cheaper rivals started offering 3D visuals which the sprite-laden Neo Geo didn't have a hope in Hot Hairy Heck of displaying. 

​And now? Now, in celebration of SNK's 40th birthday, it is back as the Neo Geo Mini! Although, there have been Neo Geo machines released steadily since the system's 1991 debut, most recently in 2012 with a Neo Geo handheld.

But anyway....

Thrrrrrrppppp-pp-p-p!

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, click the button for notifications, and share the living heck out of this. The full series launches next month! 

I went to Athens once, just for the day. I visited the Parthenon, which features in Assassin's Creed Odyssey in its brand-new - and seemingly historically accurate - form.

A few things stood out to me.

Firstly, given that it's probably Greece's number one landmark, I was taken aback by just how utterly ramshackle the organisation was. Frankly, you'd have thought that this was the first day it had been open to the public, given the way crowds sort of all tried to push their way in, while panicked employees shouted at them to stop. Also; if you were in a wheelchair, or - like me - are profoundly resistant to physical exertion, best of luck climbing the health-and-safety guideline-challenging steps.

And secondly, I was alarmed by how many stray dogs were openly wandering around the site. I mean, what's that about? Why are there so many stray dogs in Athens, and why are there loads of them lounging around the Parthenon? You don't get stray dogs inside the Tower of London. I mean, I know Greece has had a rough few years, but some fences wouldn't be that expensive.

Or just hire somebody who enjoys kicking dogs off mountains or something. With a youth unemployment rate of almost 40%, Greek teenagers would jump at the opportunity.

Then again, most continental tourists attractions are, in my experience, similarly shambolic. See also Italy's Mount Vesuvius.

On the day we went up that, a couple of gentlemen were stood handing out wooden walking sticks for climbers. On the way back down we learned that these gentlemen had expected renumeration for their gesture - and were furiously snatching the sticks off of people demanding, in broken English, "Tip for stake!" (actually, they were bellowing "Tip for sake!", which you only would've read either as a typo, or as a contraction of "Tip for fuck's sake!" - which, with hindsight, they might've actually been saying).

At least the Parthenon dogs just lay there in their own filth, or wandered around being disgusting and malnourished, and didn't solicit payment.

Brexit can't come soon enough. 

If I wasn't writing about old video games and that on here, I'd probably be writing about theme parks. Whatever it is that appeals to me about games, theme parks stimulate the exact same gland.

It's a fatuously expensive interest to have, given that most of the really good theme parks are overseas, but I got hooked on Orlando back in the mid-00s, and like all passionate love affairs... logic and common sense are flung out the window. To be candid, rarely a day goes by when I don't watch a YouTube video about theme parks, and my Kindle is straining at the hems with books about the history of Disney and Universal Studios.

For me, the appeal is a heady brew of history, unparalleled accomplishment in art, design and customer services, the immersive nature of the theming, and sheer human achievement. And the fact that, for the most part, the best theme parks are just, y'know, really nice places to spend time. For me they're a celebration of human potential, somewhere to forget that the world can be a pretty grim place.

Until recently, my passion for theme parks had failed to intersect with my love of video games. That all changed back in 2015, when Universal Studios and Nintendo announced a joint venture to smash theme parks and video games into one another's face.

Wait. What? What mean dis?!