GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

One snag with videogaming is that regardless of the topic, the word ‘game’ itself often conjures up ideas of playful excitement and enjoyment – like the happy, smiling funsters you get on boardgame boxes, all sat around having a jolly time poking each other with Ker-Plunk sticks or trying to work out why so many faces in Guess Who? look like a poorly disguised Julian Assange.
 
Films and books don’t have this problem, of course, as both are just the name of the delivery device, not a description of what you’re getting in itself. If you say “I’m going to the cinema to watch a film”, no one is any the wiser as to whether it’ll be a happy film, sad film, thrilling film, or complete waste of £10 and 2 hours you’ll never get back – you know, like the dreary-arsed DC comic book movies (and THAT WAS A JOKE before anyone writes in).
 
Games, though, come saddled with some expectation of what you’re going to get and how they’re going to make you feel built in because they’re ‘games’. Which might be why some people still dismiss storytelling in gaming as immature by default – they inherently think they’ll only ever get something light, shallow and frothy.
 
But this isn’t 1982 anymore, and the narratives possible in gaming have moved on a bit from ‘help Bumbo collect dragon eggs from the haunted cave for his monster custard factory’.
 
Stories in games aren’t always happy ones. Or easy ones. And as a consequence, sometimes calling a game a ‘game’ is almost unfairly trivialising it. Because of course you can still appreciate something and very much enjoy the experience of it, and feel better for having had that experience, without it being a laugh a minute or an action-packed thrillfest.
 
Which brings us to Gris.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE
​
If there's one thing we all secretly love, it’s bashing the ruddy heck out of 3D geometric shapes with some sort of rod or staff. Why just last week I smacked an oxo cube so hard with a chopstick it turned into a brown mist, and it’s the best time I’ve had in ages!
 
And now, thanks to Beat Saber, you don’t have to do your shameful polygon mauling in secret in your shed or lavatory – you can do it in the comfort of your lounge in virtual reality, with the added bonus of obscuring the faces of your disapproving family as you do so!
 
Beat Saber is ostensibly a rhythm game, but to me is more like a Tetris-esque experience. A game so absurdly simple and yet so absolutely spot on and finely tuned, you’ll both adore it and be furious you didn’t think of it yourself and sell the idea to a developer in equal measure.
 
Cubes of one of 2 colours (red or blue) advance towards you, and you have to hit said cubes with either your matching red or blue lightsaber in the direction shown on the cube by an arrow. That’s essentially it – there are some obstacles to dodge, bombs to avoid, cubes with arrows that disappear and such, but the core gameplay is as straightforward as it gets.

Circa 1987, I was a big fan of U2. Don't judge me for that. There was a time before tax havens and saving the world and built-up shoes and shoving themselves onto your iPhone when Bono was actually sort of cool.

I had a massive poster for The Joshua Tree on my bedroom wall, and a couple of mates and I went to see them play at Wembley Stadium. Well, technically, we went and stood outside Wembley Stadium, because we didn't have tickets, but the gates were opened about 15 minutes before the end of the show, presumably to ease congestion, and we were swept inside by a stampede of other ticketless fans, and got to see the end of the concert.

Some might argue that the end is the best part of any U2 concert...

I liked the next couple of U2 albums, but then... something shifted. U2 started sounding like U2 trying a bit too hard to be U2. Every album began promising a "return to basics", when - in truth - U2 never really deviated from the sound that everyone associated with U2. They never did a Radiohead. They just kept ploughing the same musical furrow, and it got... boring.

When it was published at the arse-end of 2012 on the Wii U - the equivalent of U2 announcing that their new album would only be available for the Zune - New Super Mario Bros. U was the proverbial "back to basics" album. The difference between it and the last four or five U2 albums - aside from the fact that one of them is a video game - is that Mario had earned the right to go back to basics. 

The Mario franchise had, for the most part, been doing things 3D since the release of Yoshi's Island (most of us forget that it was officially branded as Super Mario World 2) in 1995, and New Super Mario Bros. U was exactly what some of us wanted.

Of course, it wasn't fresh and original or noisy enough to help Nintendo make a success of the Wii U. In fact, if anything, making the big Wii U launch game a 2D platformer probably contributed to a sense of disappointment, and affected sales.

But here we are, six-and-a-bit years on, and 2D platforms are no longer a dirty nonsense. Whereas in 2012 there was too much riding on New Super Mario Bros. U, the Switch is already a success. The time feels right for Mario to go back to his roots.

OR DOES IT...!??

Death is universal. There's no escaping it. It defines our lives, be it losing those we love, or those we admire. And, ultimately, we're all running the wrong way down an escalator, away from our own inevitable end. 

Despite the universality of death, grief can be a very unique and personal thing. If life can be viewed as a river, a loss of any magnitude will alter the course of the river's flow. It changes us, it changes our lives, and it comes to define us. There is no escaping grief. Even when we feel we've outrun it, it can catch us up when our guard is down, and remind us that it's just over our shoulder. It is insidious and cruel and indiscriminate, dripping its paralysing poison into our ears.

How we deal with that is down to the wiring of the individual. 

I saw the power of loss at too young an age. My family suffered a year where four close family members fell like dominoes.

While still grieving a cousin and an uncle, I remain haunted by the memory of hearing the phone ring, a week after the death of my nine month-old niece, and sitting on my mum's bed as she answered it. Numbed and battered, all she had to say before hanging up was a resigned, matter-of-fact, "Thank you for letting me know".

The call had been to tell her my beloved grandad, her father, had taken his own life by stopping the pills which had for years held back the massive heart attack which ultimately consumed him. She didn't have the strength to comfort even me, but by that stage it almost felt routine.

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​Not being one to pass up an easy gag, let’s talk about the ludicrous sequelitis of the Battlefield games. Here, I’m regurgutating a review of Battlefield V. V being for Victory, which totally gives away that for this game we’re back in 1940’s Hitler-punching territory: an era never before seen in gaming, assuming you have rampant amnesia coupled with crippling lethargy when it comes to fact checking.
 
V, of course, is also Roman for ‘Very nearly 6’, which they often shortened to 5.
 
Last year we had Battlefield 1, so named as it was set in World War One. Regardless, 5 doesn’t often follow 1. (Well, unless you’re my Mum: she once stapled the tip of a snapped tape measure back on, forgot about the repair truncating the start of one end of it, and then bought me a pair of mismeasured school trousers that were so tight I thought I’d put on about 2 stone overnight.)
 
Battlefield 1 itself followed Battlefield 4, so really that game should have been Battlefield 5 and this year’s effort Battlefield 6. Worse still, inbetween B1 and B4 there was the numeral-free Battlefield Hardline. But before B4, mercifully, was B3. So are the incorrect numerals just a recent thing?
 
Alas, no. Before B3 came Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943, Bad Company, Battlefield 2142 (what?), B2, Battlefield 1942 and…that’s it (and I haven’t even touched on expansions). There was never a game just called ‘Battlefield’ and Battlefield V, which should arguably be Battlefield VI, even arguablier shouldn’t be that eitheras it’s actually the 16thgame in the series – a series whose numbering, we must conclude, has been kept track of by idiots. 
 
Having slogged through this terrifically laboured mockery, you’ll be vastly relieved to hear there is actually a point to it. Two, in fact, and here they are: like its numerical positioning Battlefield V is more than a bit lost and confused, and in its 16thiteration it’s a regrettable example of the law of diminishing returns.

What about that weather, eh? Grr! Bloody weather <WAVES FIST AT SKY>.

We British love discussing the weather, and we love complaining about the weather, which is all a bit weird when you consider that our default weather tends to be "grey". I suppose that's why we get all excited when we hear it's going to be sunny, or there's snow on the way. Anything to break up the monotony. 

"Oh good! Something new to complain about!"

Remember last summer's extended heatwave, and how we all lolled around like we were dying, and missed the greyness?

If you'd bought into the previews, you'd be under the impression that weather plays a big part in Just Cause 4, but we'll get to that in a moment.

First I want to apologise for this review being so late. Truth is, I couldn't quite work up the enthusiasm to write it. Not because Just Cause 4 is a bad game, but because I feel like I'd already reviewed it. At least I've actually played this one, unlike the latest Call of Duty, which remains shoved down the side of my bed, still in its shrink-wrap. 

You see, for vast swathes of Just Cause 4 I felt I was playing Just Cause 3. And there were times when it could've been Just Cause 2. And adding to the sense of familiarity was that, if I squinted during certain sections, I could've been playing any one of a number of other open world destroy 'em ups.

However, just like an 100m athlete who has created a super-fast clone of himself that lacks a body from the neck down... I'm racing ahead.

Yes, you're right: that is a tortured metaphor. But hey - at least it's not raining, yet.

I've long had a well-documented love/loathe relationship with VR. My issues have been myriad, but chief among them is that, following an ear infection a few years ago, I've become susceptible to motion sickness.

I appreciate that this makes me sound like a decrepit geriatric, but thick colds give me the sensation of being strapped to a waterbed during an earthquake, theme park rides render me clammy and woozy,  and when I made the mistake, a couple of days before Christmas, of looking at my phone while in the back of a cab, I came so close to "airing my stomach" that I wound down the window and started screaming at passers-by.

Suffice to say, I've not played anything in VR since Resident Evil VII - which was great and all that, but resulted in me fleeing outside to vomit over my neighbour's fence. Old-fashioned it may be, but I'm of an age where I prefer entertainment which doesn't make me throw-up. 

And then there's the other thing which was putting me off using my PSVR: the wires.

It was a faff-and-a-half to set up. The floor around my TV already resembles an eel farm, and the PSVR invited a fresh bed (the collective term for eels, apparently) to join this "liquorice orgy". It was only a matter of time until the wires got all knotted, and my bun-fisted behaviour ended up ripping off one of the HDMI connectors. And that is indeed what has happened. Which is fine, because I didn't want to play the thing anyway - because of the "ralphing".

And yet... VR as an idea still appeals. I get why people think it's the future. I get the potential. And thus, because it takes me a long time to learn my lesson, just before Christmas I splashed out on a mid-range Oculus Go in the hope that it would offer some family-friendly whimsy.
​
Behold, then, a very belated review of this.

I still remember the first time I spilled my eyes on a PlayStation, months before its release, hidden from syrupy fingers within a perspex box at a trade show. It looked - and still looks - gorgeous, losing none of its design classic status in this: its new shrunk-down form.

As is the trend for these miniature "classic" machines, the PlayStation Classic offers an HDMI cable, USB controllers, and... no AC adaptor. The latter doesn't bother me much - I've plenty of spare USB power plugs lolling around - but it needs mentioning if only to point and cackle at everyone who has thrown their toys out of the pram over something so insignificant. 

If that's the sort of issue which fuels your boiler then congratulations: you've clearly got nothing else to worry about in your life. 

Of course, this reproduction minikin offers a wad of old games; 20, in fact. Indeed, in some respects, the PlayStation Classic has more of a reason to exist than the Super NES, NES and Commodore 64 minis, given that PlayStation games are something more of a faff for the average pleb to get working with an emulator. 

Because, let's be blunt here, these mini consoles are not for the hardcore retro enthusiast (not that this stops the hardcore complaining). We know you can shove ALL THE GAMES into a Raspberry Pi. We know you like playing on the original hardware. These machines are for those gamers who remember enjoying a PlayStation back in the day, and will appreciate a quick nostalgia fix, before shoving the thing under the telly come December 27th, never to touch it again. 

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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.

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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.