The Bitmap Brothers were among the first "rock star" games developers - an image they chose to cultivate, with photographs of them in sunglasses and denim jackets, fannying around next to helicopters.

From 1988 to 2001 they released a string of diverse games - from the arcade shooting of Xenon and Xenon 2 to the futuristic sports of the Speedball series - becoming best known for their distinct visual style... which was all sort chunky and shiny, with no deep blacks... Look, I know that's a terrible description of it, but you try coming up with something better. 

Truthfully... I loved what The Bitmaps' games looked like, but always found them a bit wanting in the gameplay department. They were too tough, too fiddly; often a case of style over substance. Still, you know what people are like; they just want good looking games that have been made by some men in sunglasses who fanny around near helicopters, pretending to be cool.

And here we are in 2019; one of The Bitmaps' most heralded Amiga/ST games - Gods - is back to be reevaluated in the harsh, unflattering, light of the 21st Century. 

It's weird how your memory plays tricks. A couple of years ago my dad and I drove past what I'd always believed had been my aunt and uncle's old home.

I mentioned this to my dad, asking him when it was that they'd moved out, and he didn't know what I was talking about. I was taken aback; I'd had the most vivid memory of being in that house - it has a very distinct red front door (actually a side-door)... but... no. Apparently my aunt and uncle had never lived there, nobody we knew ever lived there, yet somehow I remember walking through that red front door... I remember the layout inside... but - according to both my parents - I've never been inside. 

Reincarnation? Uh.... Based upon experience elsewhere, it's more likely my mind had basically done its own thing, irrespective of reality. 

I mean, take the Nintendo 64. I've got two sort of conflicting, incompatible, memories - actually, more like feelings - about it.

The first of these is that I enjoyed a lot of games on the N64; Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Waverace 64... The other memory is that I didn't like the N64, that it's my least-favourite Nintendo console, that the joypad was horrible, and the graphics blurry and indistinct. I had this belief challenged recently when I went back to have a crack Mario Kart 64 on the original hardware, and was rendered aghast by how well it played.

It gets weirder still; I never played Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. And also... I definitely did play Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

The former is a conviction that I've held onto for the past 22 years. I remember the reviews generally praising it, while criticising the fog/limited draw distance which shrouded its levels... but was pretty certain I never had any first-hand memory of all that.

And yet... I must've done, because I've been playing this re-release of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Switch, and I'm having all these Manchurian candidate-style flashbacks to the first time I must've played it. So... I dunno.

​Conclusion: brains are idiots, and you should never trust the veracity of anything anybody ever says.

You want some heresy? I'll give you heresy! I'll shove that heresy right down your fat, greasy, neck: Yoshi's Island was considerably better than Super Mario World. 

Despite being subtitled Super Mario World 2. it somehow never gets the recognition I truly believe it deserves. It remains the Super NES game I've played more than any other in the years since; the one I always return to. 

See, Super Mario World, brilliant as it was, lacked Yoshi's Island's gorgeous, hand-drawn, visuals, as well as its sheer weight of ideas. Most single stages in Yoshi would introduce a gameplay element which entire other games would've been based around, before throwing it aside and moving on. 

​And talking of throwing... what's the deal with Yoshi and the eggs? He eats enemies, and then lays an egg, and then uses the eggs as projectile weapons? What's the deal with that? Is there another animal in nature that uses its own reproductive system as a form of defence?

Do hens kick their eggs into the faces of foxes, or try to smother them with their cloaca? Do frogs drown predators in their own frogspawn? Do marsupials stick their wet young onto their fists, and use them as makeshift boxing gloves?

I appreciate that I may be overthinking this.

In the 80s - with popular culture violating my still-brewing brain with the message that a nuclear holocaust could happen at any minute - most of my nightmares were about nuclear war. Between Frankie's Two Tribes, Threads, The Day After, The Terminator, When The Wind Blows, Protect And Survive et al, it's no exaggeration to say that I lost count of the times I woke up shrieking and ululating in terror. It seemed like an inevitability. 

What do kids even have nightmares about these days? Brexit, probably. Or not having enough credit on their phone. Or their latest ASMR slime video being demonetised.

Oddly, I always survived my post-apocalyptic dreams. It was never the dying that scared me, but living on having lost everything familiar. Interestingly, Far Cry New Dawn plays entirely on this fundamental fear by revisiting the familiar world of Far Cry 5, 17 years after the events of its mushroom cloud-shaped climax (one of three possible endings).

In the new-look Hope County, your goal is to reestablish civilisation... but your efforts are threatened by The Highwayman, a band of biker leather-wearing goons, governed by a pair of psychotic twin sisters. Though you won't need to have played FC5 to understand what's going on, it surprised me that it's much more of a direct sequel than I'd anticipated. 

This isn't the first time Ubisoft have done something like this, of course. Far Cry 3 led to the Blood Dragon expansion, a glorious, 1980s VHS-tinged, cyber-noir shooter. New Dawn isn't quite as bold with its aesthetics, but instead offers a full-sized game, which reuses and remixes elements of Far Cry 5 to surprisingly decent effect. 

Exodus, movement of Jah people, oh yeah,
Open your eyes and let me tell you this,
Exodus, movement of Jah people,
Exodus, movement of Jah people.

​And so on and so forth. 

It's weird how real-life tragedy inspires art. If the atom bombs hadn't dropped on Japan in 1945 would we have had Godzilla? Without 9/11 there'd have been no Cloverfield. And without the Chernobyl disaster we wouldn't have had Dmitri Glukhovsy's novel Metro 2033, which inspired the Metro video game series. 

When I visited Chernobyl 10 years ago, I was surprised by how much it affected me, particularly walking through the eerily empty city of Pripyat. It was clearly the perfect setting for a video game, despite being ground zero for an unspeakable tragedy.

Weirdly, one of my overriding memories is of a heavily pregnant dog wandering around outside the crippled, decaying, power plant, while we took in the scene and posed for photos. It was surreal and disturbing. 

Quite by chance, my trip coincided with a competition being run by Marillion - yes, ha ha, Mr Biffo likes Marillion - to win VIP tickets to one of their bi-annual Marillion Weekends; you had to take a photograph of yourself wearing one of the band's t-shirts. Naturally, I donned a shirt featuring the cover of their 1998 album Radiation (which I had to beg off a fellow fan, as I didn't own one; it's a horrible design).

Sort of inevitably, I won the competition, got the VIP tickets, met the band, and told them of my trip.

And then a few years later, their guitarist Steve Rothery released a pleasant instrumental solo album called The Ghosts of Pripyat. Was I directly responsible for that? I like to think so. Even though when I told him about my visit, the most overt response I got was a slight nod, and perhaps a mumbled "Oh right..." 

But those cogs must've surely been turning in his head...

Though it never sold as well as Sega expected, Toejam and Earl nevertheless succeeded in becoming one of the most memorable games on the Mega Drive. It was a true original, with a unique aesthetic,  and surreal sense of humour, ensuring it built a dedicated hardcore of followers.

And yet, if the characters were so iconic, why were the sales initially so underwhelming? Unfortunately, it seems that having an idiosyncratic sense of whimsy is great for passionate cult appeal, but generally seems to annoy more people than it appeals.

But then, most people are massive idiots with sediment for brains, whose idea of cutting-edge comedy is a panel show with interchangeable jokes, featuring stand-ups whose only distinction from one another is how much hair they have - the comedy equivalent of a Boney M concert (what does the "M" stand for? Mudflaps).

I'm not bitter. 

In fact, the original 16-bit Toejam and Earl is so iconic, that people tend to forget that there was an unloved third game in the series released for the Xbox.

Truthfully, if I peel back my nostalgia flap, I always found Toejam and Earl a case of style over substance. Yes, it boasted an aesthetic that was unique for its time, its tongue wedged firmly in the cheek of its conviction, but the gameplay was woefully slow and - dare I say it - a bit boring.

It's probably heresy to say it, but I sort of preferred Toejam and Earl II, precisely because it ditched the randomised wandering around in favour of a more traditional platform game (albeit still with the same wacky hip-hop stylings).

This is why I approached Toejam and Earl: Back In The Groove with a degree of trepidation (the worst type of idation). I liked the characters, I liked that Toejam and Earl was at odds with almost everything else around at the time... I just didn't really love that first game, and everything about Back In The Groove appeared to be a homage to the original.

And, indeed, there's no escaping that this is more remake than sequel, with little in the way of fresh ideas.  

Gorillas don't really have a sound do they?

Dogs go "woof", cats go "meow", pigs go "oink", birds go "ca-caw/caw-ca" and "twit-twit-a-twit", cow go "moo", horse go "neigh-nonny-no", frog goes "ribbit", sheep go "bong", foxes scream like they're having their snout tweaked by a pair of tongs (giving birth to the phrase "It has all gone a bit Pete Tong"), and I just think it's a bit sad that gorillas never got their own noise. 

If I'd been the person whose job it was to dish out the animal noises, I'd have given gorillas something really cool and distinct, like "b'tooo!" or "frobisher!" or "grootu-grootu-hai!".

That said, gorillas probably have enough going for them already, what with the big, hairy, muscles, and come-to-bed eyes, whereas all of the aforementioned animals are only good for one thing: being eaten.

Anyway. The point of all that was to introduce this notion: there is a gorilla in the game Ape Out. You are that gorilla. And you have to get out.... of laboratories, prisons, office blocks, and army camps. 

"Frobisher!"

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

Blergh. The world’s in a bit of mess at the moment, innit?
 
You’ve got a nylon-coiffured tartrazine lardhippo in charge of the USA. A PM here who’s basically a broken speak & spell stuck in a diagnostic loop, shoved into an M&S old lady shop dummy. Catastrophic climate change that means we’ll probably all be underwater in a few years – assuming we haven’t died of sunburn first. People rioting over alternative sausage rolls.

And that’s only the stuff that’s annoyed/terrified me this month.
 
It’s all such a massive cluster of fetid mank, it’s a wonder we’re not all constantly blind drunk to blot out the sheer awfulness. So thank criminy for Pikuniku: the game we all need to play right now. Why? Because it comes packed to the membranes with misery-busting free booze! (Fun!)

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

Hoooooo boy. Where to start with this one, eh?
 
Let’s go with the safe ground to kick off: Anthem is a multiplayer online game in the ‘looter shooter’ genre – you rob various sweet old pensioners at gunpoint (shoot villainous types) and then trade in all their silverware at Cash Converters (get guns and gear). Then you do it all again when they’ve claimed on the insurance and got a new tea set (respawned). 
 
If you’ve played Destiny or The Division you know broadly what you’re getting here (and indeed whether you like playing this sort of hobby grind game or not), though I say ‘broadly’ because there are differences – the way the loot system operates is more Diablo-like than simply ‘here’s a new gun that shoots a bit more quickly’. The perks and stats of gear and how abilities work mean you have a lot of scope to build a character to play exactly how you want to.
 
As you progress through the story, side missions and freeplay (pottering about on your own), you level up, allowing you to take on tougher and more numerous enemies, missions and the like. After you defeat the final boss, there are ‘endgame’ events – missions and quests to do that are much harder, designed to keep you playing until new story content arrives.
 
Well that’s that out of the way. Now on to the part you’ve really come here for: Anthem is like buying a mystery prize hamper where it turns out some of the gifts inside are really cool stuff like funky expensive trainers and iPhones, but most of them are month-old dog turds. And then it turns out the trainers are full of furious wasps.
 
Basically, it’s a ruddy great mess.

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.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

​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.