GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

Museums are pretty great – where else can you see dinosaur skellies, poorly taxidermised cross-eyed apes and probably cursed mummies in the same place? What’s not great, though, is going to a museum with someone who insists on taking in every word of every single information panel.
 
You know the sort: while you want to move on to the T. Rex and that bit where you can pull levers and make a dented ping-pong ball go down a pipe to represent nuclear fission, they’ll be reading a novel-length epic about a lump of bauxite in a dusty corridor that hasn’t been visited in decades.
 
Worse still, they’ll even linger to read plaques in the human reproduction exhibit, right in front of the disturbingly hirsute nudey models who look like they’re from that ‘funny yoga’ book you found under your mum and dad’s bed in 1982. Perverts.
 
Now, imagine that you’re with 3 or 4 people like that, and you ALL have to read the information boards before you’re allowed to move on whether you like it or not. Does that sound like fun? Does it, Dennis? Of course it doesn’t. So you’ll be as delighted as I was to discover that this craptacular gaming mechanic has inexplicably been made an integral part of Fallout 76’s multiplayer experience.

​Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Of all the original PlayStation icons, Spyro the Dragon was one that I never expected to endure. Somehow, the character - albeit eventually coming to be buried beneath a coagulation of fellow dish-eyed cartoon characters - saw his series evolve into the long-running Skylanders franchise, despite having all the distinctness and personality of a clog that somebody had scrawled the word "DUDE" on in biro.

Despite that, when my kids were little, Spryo was something of a fixture in our household.

​My youngest daughter was never big into games, but the Spyro series (and, later, Kameo: Elements of Power) were her games. Consequently, the splashback nostalgia she still radiates has given me a sort of latent sentimentality towards the Spyro series.

She's 22 now, but even asked for a second-hand PS1 and a copy of Spyro for Christmas last year. Naturally, I was happy to oblige, given that she usually just wants crystals, and dreamcatchers, and all that shit. Though I have noticed that they now do a Spryro incense burner, which is a surprising confluence of things she's into.

Actually, for £29.99 they can fuck off. She can have socks.

Four years late, I've finally read Blake Harris's book Console Wars. Why so long? Well, I mostly read books on my Kindle, and I'd foolishly bought a physical copy of Console Wars which doesn't even light up or anything, and thus it sat unread on a shelf, emitting the occasional whine of lament.

The book covers the Sega VS Nintendo battle of the early-90s, and ends at the point Sony enter the market with the PlayStation. It's a period in the games industry that is of obvious interest to me, because that was when I was first douching my duffel as a games journalist.

As I've written elsewhere, I never wanted to become a games journalist - or, indeed, any sort of journalist. My thing had always been drawing pictures - that's how I thought my career would continue - and I ended up with Mr Biffo and Digitiser quite by accident.

Obviously, it was The Best Job, and I went from being somebody who played games for fun, to somebody who played them for a money, like a "brass" - and found myself having to cultivate relationships with the people who made them.

Digitiser always had a volatile love/hate thing with Sega. We were hard on them in a way we never were on Nintendo, and in return they seemed to deal with us with a sense of heavy resignation and/or unhinged rage. 

One of their PR guys hated us and wouldn't give us the time of day - most memorably,  on one occasion we arrived for a pre-arranged meeting, only to have him storm into the reception of Sega Europe HQ - red-faced and fuming as if we'd turned up unexpectedly and done a poo on his cat - to tell us that we'd dragged him away from a meeting with the guys from Mean Machines, just so that he could tell us that the Mean Machines guys were more important and we were plankton and that we shouldn't have pooed on his cat.

"We didn't poo on your cat though..."

"I HATE YOU!!!!"

His replacement was a lovely bloke, who despaired when we refused to pull our punches, or when we drew penises in the notebook on his desk, and he did his best to get us on side. We slightly loved him... the company he worked for not so much.

Nintendo, on the other hand, we had very little to do with. We'd always receive review copies on time. We'd get invited to their press events. But in terms of anything more personal... their PR team was always remote and unknowable. Indeed, I found it interesting how my own experience of Sega and Nintendo are reflected in Console Wars.

This isn't a review. Well, it sort of is, a bit. But also... not really. Actually, maybe. I DON'T KNOW.

​Red Dead Redemption 2 is enormous. Like, two discs enormous in an age when games no longer come on multiple discs. I'm barely over 25% of the way through the main story - not even accounting for the side missions and activities I could spend time with - and seen but a fraction of the world... but I'm itching to talk about it.

So... let's talk. 

I loved Red Dead Redemption. I might've loved it more than Grand Theft Auto V in fact. I loved the Wild West setting, the writing, the characters, the depth. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a literal return to that world - or, rather, a first visit, as it's a direct prequel featuring many of the same characters and locations - but with more of everything. Wads more.

It's also very much a Rockstar game. It shares its DNA with the GTA series - the controls are familiar, the writing and humour offers the same giddy swerves from maturity to broad satire... and the visuals make it feel like part of the same lineage. And - with some serious caveats - I like that it's part of that family. 

As with everything Rockstar does, it's a deliciously epic game, and though I might have grown tired of open world adventures featuring forests and mountains, and the character models might not be the best, there's something alluringly grounded about RDR2's look. What it lacks in flash it more than makes up for in grittiness and scope.

Why am I talking about RDR2's graphics first? Because I want to get it out of the way before I launch into an impassioned tirade about everything that drives me mental about this game.

Somebody pass me a bib; it's time to start foaming at the mouth!

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.

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.

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!

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. 

I've been thinking a lot about Lara Croft over the past week, ever since I wrote an article criticising the character's ongoing development, or lack of. 

I mean, aside from getting a bit of grief from TR fans over my "tired schtick", I also get tweeted at by no less a luminary than Rhianna Pratchett - the writer of the first two Tomb Raider reboot games - having mentioned her and Jill Murray (lead writer of Shadow of the Tomb Raider) in the piece. 

Here's what she had to say to me: "Paul - You know how games are made. How many people are involved. The tumultuous nature of AAA development. The relatively low power that writers wield. The story by committee that often happens. You know all this.... Yet throughout the TR games, you seem to aim blame squarely at the writer(s). Myself in the past, and now Jill. Regardless of how you feel about the tone of the games/Lara that is an unfair and inaccurate call out."

Over the weekend, Rhianna doubled down, sharing this tweet by Jill Murray: "Y'all. A game's Lead Writer is not its only writer or the person most in charge of story. We have narrative directors, cinematics directors, creative directors, brand, editorial... I'm flattered ppl know who I am but only tagging or crediting or criticizing me is hecka strange."

It might feel hecka strange to Jill, but she did numerous interviews to promote the game, and her name was all over the marketing, so... well... y'know.

True story: last month, while I was still in bed on the morning I was due to go on holiday, a spider fell from the ceiling and landed on my nose. Being a frightful wuss, I howled like a startled bonobo, leapt to my feet, smashed the bed apart with a chair, set fire to both chair and bed, and then moved out of my home for ever.

Unfortunately, such were my cat-like reflexes, the spider never had the chance to bite me, and I didn't develop any spider-powers. Indeed, I was disappointed to learn later that I couldn't even excrete silk from my anus. And believe me - I tried. I even ate a taffeta scarf! 

What sort of actual spider-powers does Spider-Man actually have anyway? He can stick to walls, and that's about it. Spiders do this because they have special hairs on their tentacles or feet or whatever they are. Do we ever learn that Spider-Man has hairy hands and feet? And if so, how do the hairs work through his shoes and gloves? Because, let's face it, even his other most notable "spider" power - spinning webs, any size - is something he invented, rather than a natural ability.

I'd like to see him adopt some other spider traits, like the courting ritual of the male wolf spider, who taps on "dry leaves" to attract a lady friend. Or maybe he could develop "pedipalps" - a pair of appendages between his teeth and his legs, which he uses during mating to transfer sperm from a special "sperm web" right up the female's lady parts. Horribly, some male spiders even rip off their own pedipalps to bung up the female so that other spiders can't go there.

That's all pretty horrific and graphic - not least when you spend upwards of an hour thinking about a human "spider-man" doing something similar - but it's just how it is. Nature is a misogynistic freakshow, and David Attenborough should be ashamed of himself for promoting it. 

Fortunately, while Sony's Spider-Man does take some liberties with the character, this is one area that their new game stays away from. 

Back in my day, there were about three game genres; the jumping one, the shooting one, and the fighting one. And the driving one and the puzzle one. And the strategy one. And adventure games.

Whatever, brah.

Anyway, the point is... we had a manageable number of genres, and those genre labels pretty much accurately described the game they were applied to.

Nowadays, young people games journalists - you know the sort - in addition to using the word "agency" about 20 times per paragraph, and in-between cribbing from other people's reviews - have added two new sub-genres to the list, and every time I see them used, it's like rusty nails down the blackboard of my spine.

The two biggest offenders are "rogue-like" (named for the long-forgotten 1980 dungeon-crawler Rogue), and "metroidvania" (a portmanteau, obviously, of the sprawling, side-scrolling, action platformers Metroid and Castlevania). I know what these two terms are supposed to mean. I know what they relate to. I just don't like them. What's wrong with "randomly-generated" or "action platformer"? That's what we used to call these sorts of games back in the day. 

I mean, where do you draw the line? Release a game that's a bit like a cross between Assassin's Creed and Dark Souls, and decide it's a new genre called "AssSouls"? 

Do you see? It's a real good joke!

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

I hate Captain Toad. Not the game, you understand – that’s excellent (and more on that in a minute).

No, I hate the character, because he reminds me of the terrifying 1980s mushroom marketing board adverts from the telly, where a platoon of marching fungus guys would sing "Make room for the mushrooms!" while stomping ever closer.
 
For the disgustingly youthful amongst you, I should explain this was an effort to encourage people to put more allegedly delicious mushrooms on foods.

​You know: like on pizzas, in cakes, in big mouldering piles all over a roast dinner, and probably in cups of tea as well. Mercifully it wasn’t a suggestion you ‘make room’ by taking immunosuppressants to render yourself a thrush-addled leper, but then the mushroom ‘troops’ on the advert looked fairly militaristic so WHO KNOWS WHERE IT WOULD HAVE ENDED?
 
In light of that potential mycelium-based coup it’s probably just as well everyone ignored the request on the basis mushrooms just taste vaguely of dank cellars and potting compost, and are thus horrible: no one in their right mind really wants the ones that are already there, let alone wanting to make room for extra ones. What? Oh yeah, I’m supposed to talk about the game, aren’t I?

DRUNK PURCHASE
​Like many a Switch title, Captain Toad started out life on the Wii U. But as only about 7 people accidentally bought the beleaguered console while drunk, then hid it in a hedge out of shame without getting any software for it, Nintendo have sensibly realised they can re-release the game and it’ll be new to more or less everyone. And that’s grand, because Captain Toad is a bit of alright.
 
A spin-off from the bonus levels found in Super Mario 3D world, Captain Toad sees you guiding the bulbous-headed dude around a bunch of mostly small, rotatable levels, collecting stars and coins and stuff as you go.

This revolve-o-tron mechanic is the key to the whole game, as all but the simplest stages have plenty of hidden tunnels, lifts, doors and the like to navigate that you’ll only discover on closer investigation of the whole stage, not just the view from the front.
 
It’s also essential to your progression because, despite how it looks, Captain Toad isn’t really a platformer as we’d usually know it.

PUZZLE BOX
Why? Well unlike Mario, Toad has crippling sciatica (a heavy backpack) so can’t jump; circumventing this physical rubbishness means you have to find him a walking route to his goal – a bit like when you’re out with your Nan in her scooter and you have to go round and round the access slope to get out of Lidl, rather than forcing her to ‘off road’ down the steps like you did last time when she ended up dropping all her pickled onions and gin down a drain.

This means every level is a sort of little 3D puzzle box to solve. You’re not entirely helpless though, as an onscreen cursor is used to activate things around your fungal adventurer to aid him as he goes.

Or, in 2-player mode, a friend can irritate the hell out of you by taking control of this cursor and not listening to a bloody word you say about where they need to point it.
 
Because the game comes in these bitesize chunks it’s a perfect fit for the Switch – you can bang out a lot of levels at home, or drop in for a quick play on the move.

​For a bit of variety there are also on rails levels (in this case, literally on rails as you’re in a minecart) where you’re hurling turnips FPS-style, and bonus collectables where you have to search every level for a tiny ‘pixel toad’ character – and some of these are absurdly well hidden.

MAKE ROOM FOR THE MUSHROOM
​You might think all this plodding about sounds fairly uninspiring, and it probably would be in the mitts of some developers.

However, as we all know Nintendo can’t help but rub their ‘magic musk’ all over their games, and Captain Toad is as aroma-sodden as you’d expect. It’s full of delightful little touches, hidden secrets and clever mechanics that’ll bring a smile to the face of even the most jaded gamer.
 
Sure, it’s not going to do anything for the occasional criticism that Nintendo just make games for kids, but then it’s worth recalling that the sort of person who says that is usually a joyless blancmange who probably smells a bit funny from spending too long indoors playing some intense, grim online shooter.

And there’s the delicious irony – they’re probably riddled with fungal infections like athlete’s foot, whereas Captain Toad is infectious simply because it’s clever, fun and charming. That, and the cartridge comes covered in mysterious spores. Oh mama! It’s the mushrooms again!

SCORE: Toads (loads) out of Mush (much)

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

The brain is a funny old blob of goo. Despite being little more than a mix of snot, brine and electro-beeps, it’s able to regurgitate for you the entire feeling of being somewhere else from the tiddliest of inputs, like a multisensory version of Google. (Only unlike Google, it doesn’t e.g. sell your email to every sodding carpet shop in a 200-mile radius so they can bombard you with marketing guff just because you once thought about buying a new doormat.)
 
An example of this kind of thing is that, for me, the whiff of petrol on a warm summer evening triggers memories of a lovely family holiday in Canada.
 
The son of the friends we were staying with had a cruddy, fuel-leaking trails bike he was forever tinkering with, hence the general pong of ‘gas’ pervading our hols. A lungfull of hydrocarbons now, and I’m transported right back to that place and time – which is why (other than the lure of discarded rustler’s burgers) I’m often found lurking round the back of Esso garages; 4-star-based reminiscence being a hell of a lot cheaper than another transatlantic holiday, after all.
 
Regardless, I mention these nostalgia chunks because on level 2 of Danger Zone 2 there’s a moment that triggered another such a mem-o-reaction. On the stage in question you hit the boost button and – as well as your car hoofing off forwards at an absurd rate of knots – suddenly the field of view falls back and the horizon telescopes away.

Inside is not a new game. It has been around a couple of years, but it has just draped itself onto the Nintendo Switch - and feels like a perfect fit for the system's handheld qualities.

I've been diving deep into the Switch's indie game crannies over the past couple of weeks. A lot of it has seen me catching up on games which have been available on other formats for a while, but also it has been about countering a degree of fatigue I've been feeling towards triple-A games.

I've had Detroit: Become Human sat next to my PS4 for ages now, and not been able to muster sufficient enthusiasm to play it. The joy of Indie games is that they're cheaper and shorter, but tend to be more authored, more personal - and stuffed with more ideas than most blockbusters.

Frequently, they offer as much worth, and similar gameplay values, to the best games I grew up playing. Albeit with the benefit of everything we've learned since. 

To be fair, Inside is not a tiny-budgeted game - it was created with the help of a $1 million grant from the Danish Film Institute (which also assisted Lars von Triers' controversial Nymphomaniac) - but it nevertheless feels like a singular vision. As, indeed, did its thematic predecessor Limbo.

The two games are similar in a lot of ways; they both have a dark, almost monochromatic, art style, both are physics-based platform/puzzle games, and both are unremittingly bleak. In many ways, they're an extension of games like Flashback and Another World; a mute protagonist finds himself in a strange and mysterious environment, where progress is made via repeated deaths, and the buildings are full of power buttons.

Inside, however, builds on everything that made Limbo so feted, while also pushing video game storytelling forwards in an incredibly brave fashion.