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.

Many, many, many years ago... I got myself into a right lather of anticipation for Sonic Spinball.

Remember dat? It was a - ha ha ha... ha ha ha - "spin-off" of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise, which took that series' Casino Night Zone pinball-y bits, and built a whole game around them. At least, that's what it did in theory.

As ideas go; that's brilliant. A platformer that's also a pinball game. Except, Sonic Spinball wasn't terribly good. It was achingly mediocre, more pinball than platformer, and failed to live up to the expectations I'd built for it in my guilelessly optimistic mind.

23 years later... the game that I'd wanted Sonic Spinball to be has finally arrived, in the form of Yoku's Island Express. By way of a commentary on Sega's historic mismanagement of an open goal, it stars - rather appropriately - a dung beetle.

You know: a disgusting little creature that pushes poo around, and doesn't seemingly understand why nobody wants to eat it.

One of my favourite games of all time is Super Tennis on the Super Nintendo.

I played it again not so long ago, and got a bit hooked on it for a second time. I was pleased to discover that it remains every bit as good and addictive and challenging as I remembered it. There are no bells and whistles. It's just a decent little tennis game, with a deceptive level of depth.

Super Mario Tennis Aces is not a game lacking in bells and whistles. Indeed, there are bells, whistles, klaxons, rattles, people smashing cymbals together, eleven screaming goats, a lost child crying for its mummy, and being stuck in a sweat box for 36 hours with a hen party, that wacky bloke from your office, and a box of comedy photo props.

It is - in a number of important, fundamental ways - the single most irritating tennis game I have ever played. Heck, forget tennis; I think hit might be single most irritating game I've ever played, regardless of genre. 

Many years ago, I got to spend a special day at a zoo. It was - at the time - part-owned by my friends from the Centre For Fortean Zoology, and I'd been invited there to attend a conference on big cat sightings across the UK. That's a whole other story in itself, but to give you some idea of what it was like... upon arrival, I met a man who - within the first two minutes of our conversation - told me he'd been the uncredited drummer on The Bay City Rollers' 1975 hit Bye Bye Baby, and was clearly still bitter about it.

Also, another man came to give a talk about a panther that he'd seen walking along some train tracks behind his flat, but he'd forgotten to bring the photos he'd taken of it. From the way he described it though, it was definitely a panther.

Significantly, I'd brought two of my many daughters along with me, and they were due to be spending the weekend helping the keepers.

On our tour of the zoo, we were introduced to a "teenage" gibbon called Udo, who apparently was in the grip of puberty. Female keepers weren't allowed to enter his enclosure alone, as - were they to do so - the dirty gibbon would attempt to do rudies with them. Amusingly, every time my daughters passed by his cage, Udo would hang from the ceiling, pucker his lips, and press his genitals up against the bars. Whenever I walked by, he would turn his back on me.

We spent some considerable time exploiting the hilarious behaviour of this hairy little pervert - while I pretended not to feel rejected - and then around five minutes feeling a bit bad about having done so.

Importantly, it wouldn't have been as funny if primates didn't look - and behave - so much like people. What I always find interesting about them - and apes in particular - is what they can teach us about ourselves. Unfortunately, most of it isn't pretty, but it saddens me that gorillas are considered critically endangered, and possibly won't be around forever. 

The more we learn about them, the more we discover how similar they are to us. Maybe we should bring them out of the jungles and invite them to live in our towns and cities and put them on benefits. Admittedly, I offer this suggestion not because I want to save the great apes, but because I don't want to waste any opportunity to laugh at them.

​It makes me wonder how many of these so-called "conservationists" are secretly operating with a similar motivation.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

​It’s hard to know where to start with something as left-field as Nintendo’s Labo kits. There’s the games, the ‘build’ experience, the extras, the genuinely fun little ‘how it works’ videos, and all the other Easter eggs and bells & whistles. Like the kits themselves, it’s not so much one thing but loads of parts all coming together into one hearty ‘activity soup’.
 
There is something I need to mention straight away though: this soup is PIPING hot. If you’ve come here expecting to see a cynical beatdown administered to a ‘silly cardboard kiddies toy’, then I’m afraid you will be horribly disappointed. Also: you are probably a joyless sack of curmudgeonly grump. There, I said it.
 
Because that’s the biggest thing about Nintendo Labo. Yes, it may be bits of card and that, but it’s all been distilled out of drips of more or less pure joy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, all about being a dad then...

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

Wipeout may have been around in some form or other since the beginning of time (22 years), but that misplaced capital E still annoys the bejesus out of me. It just makes it read like it’s saying wip-E-out, and I for one am not ‘whipping’ my ‘E’ out for anyone. Especially not in VR, when I can’t see what’s going on around me and could be accosted while unawares by a passing deviant.
 
Also: what is that singular ‘E’ even supposed to represent? It could well be ‘egg’, and whipping an egg out would require a level of biological dexterity I’m not sure I’m capable of. At least not without major interspecies transplant surgery and a significant amount of strong hormone tablets. So yes: please fix this, Sony.
 
Typographical oddness aside, Wipeout Omega is neither a new release, nor is it even new stuff – it came out in June 2017, and is a cut-and-shut of Wipeout 2048 (a launch title for the much-neglected PS Vita) and 2009’s Wipeout HD/Fury for the PS3. So why are we looking at this dusty pile of well old antiques, guv?

I never had a Commodore 64, but I had a couple of mates who owned one. For most of the 80s, I was a loyal ZX Spectrum owner, but not so blindly zealous that I was above flirting with other hardware... coquettishly twirling a stray lock of hair, licking my lips - one after another - and smashing my groin against a bar stool (as I understand flirting to be). 

I had mixed feelings towards the C64. Clearly, it was a more powerful machine than its rival - capable of displaying as many as 64 shades of brown simultaneously (hence the name) - and with a proper keyboard (also brown) to boot. Indeed, it's a little known fact that The Bristol Stool Chart was originally called The Commodore Stool Chart. 

​However, somehow I never wanted a C64 instead of my Speccy. I'm not entirely sure why. It might be the colours. I joke about all The Browns, but there was something vibrant and magical about the Spectrum's garish colour palette. The C64, by comparison, seemed dull and muted. Everything was sort of washed-out, like you were watching some sort of avant garden performance piece featuring cardboard puppets, entitled Monsieur Marron Se Rend à la Ville de Marron.

But get this: now I do own a Commodore 64. Sort of. It's this: The C64 Mini, clearly inspired by the success of Nintendo's miniature NES and Super NES, hosting a collection of original Commodore 64 games stuffed into a cute little C64 replica. 

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE
​
If you were looking for somewhere to go for tea and saw a restaurant review that said ‘Fabulous food, but we guarantee you will turn your buttocks inside out with the runs tomorrow’, then chances are – unless you’re astonishingly constipated and see this as a boon – you’d give it a miss and go elsewhere.
 
This guaranteed bum cloud to VR’s silver lining is its biggest problem: you know it’s an experience that more often than not is going to make you feel mildly queasy at the very least.
 
In fact, Mrs SBA was chatting to a friend the other day whose husband used to work as a games tester, and he mentioned when his team were bugfixing VR games – for whole days at a time – they all had sick buckets installed next to them in the office. And worse still, they all had to make use of them.
 
Say what you like about the glamour of stacking shelves in Lidl compared to playing videogames as a job, but at least needing a spittoon to periodically regurgitate into isn’t part of the deal with the former.

GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

When I was a kid, I had a friend who really, really loved Guns ‘n’ Roses. So much so, after he went to see them live he almost exclusively wore a vile tour t-shirt he bought. It featured a terrible drawing of a half-nude, partially dismembered zombie lady with enormous boobs who’d been tied to a pole for some reason.
 
It was, as the description hopefully imparts, utterly repellent. Yet, he wore it everywhere – even once to a wedding reception. In fact, it would only have been marginally more offensive if it had been a cartoon of Hitler kicking Gandhi in the teeth while simultaneously wiping his bum on the Turin shroud.
 
However, it also happened to have a verse of the song ‘Paradise City’ on it (the t-shirt, not the Turin shroud). This turned out to be a godsend, as my friends and I finally got this guy to stop wearing it by repeatedly singing “’Take me down to Welwyn Garden City’, ‘I haven’t got a car’ ‘Oh that’s a pity!’” at him.

Despite that being a rubbishly innocuous jibe, we soon discovered our dissing his favourite band made him inexplicably furious. Of course, as we were teenagers and thus terrible human beings we all found this hilarious, so we kept it up until he eventually crumbled and wore something less grim to stop the mockery.
 
The moral of that story though? Never take yourself too seriously when you’re not doing (or wearing) something remotely serious in the first place. And that, ladies and/or gents, is kinda why Burnout Paradise: Remastered is long overdue and so very much appreciated.

GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

Sony’s Team Ico aren’t exactly what you’d call prolific. Since forming in 1997 they’ve only made 3 games, and one of them took 9 years and ended up being finished by another developer (presumably because the original designers died of extreme torpor).
 
But if you’re only going to make 3 games, what a trio to make. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian are all much-acclaimed titles – the first 2 especially. It’s no secret that Ico and SotC are considered all-time classics.
 
With that in mind, you might think Sony doing an update of the best of the bunch with zero involvement of the original team is a bit risky, no? It’d be like making a ‘modern’ version of The Empire Strikes Back that’s the exact same film, only with a load of photoshopped-in iPhones and Darth Vader redubbed by Stormzy. 

I love Disney almost as much as I love Star Wars. When my kids were younger, I spent far too much money taking them to Disney World. I've spent the years since I last visited wanting to go back, and I dream - almost daily (and that's not an exaggeration) of being able to afford to.

It's hard to pin down what it is about the place which got under my skin.

I think, partly, it's because, for an organisation of that size and scope, Disney has an incredible ability to make every customer feel special. It would be easy to be cynical, but until you've experienced The Happiest Place On Earth, I urge you not to judge. There's something unique about the Disney parks, that comes from a singular approach to customer service.

I mean, go to pretty much any UK theme park and it's night and day in comparison with Disney parks. They might have the rides, but they don't take things to the next level; theming will be the bare minimum, food will mostly be bog-standard fare, staff are more likely to spit at you than engage you in conversation.... Disney fans can be obsessive, but they're obsessive because Disney treats them like they matter. 

When Disney bought Marvel, and then Star Wars, I was optimistic. I couldn't think of another company  that could handle those properties better. I knew that they would put pleasing audiences, by emphasising the creative side of things, at the forefront of the movies. By doing that they knew that profits would follow, but - as it has proved to be - the product always comes before the bottom line. 

So you've got to imagine, given the unprecedented backlash against Battlefront 2, that Disney and LucasFilm are regretting ever handing Star Wars over to Electronic Arts to look after; a company that very evidently puts profit over product.

A few years ago, I spent a long weekend in Morocco.

Among the highlights of the trip were getting lost in the Souk late at night and having to pay a drugboi to take us back to our riad; being given directions by a local who led us to a foul-smelling leather tannery and then wanting to kill me because I refused to give him money; and going on a camel ride into the Sahara - eating dates out of a filthy bucket on the way, so as not to offend a local date farmer - with the promise of sleeping out beneath the stars.

Instead of the romantic experience I'd hoped for, we got caught in what our guide assured us was an "historic" thunder storm, which saw us having to be rescued by some men in a jeep. Soaked - and having not brought a change of clothes, because this was the desert rather than, y'know, the UK - we later shivered and dripped through a meal while a feller banged a drum, and some other blokes wailed and danced around.

Being on the back of a terrified camel, miles from civilisation, while lightning burst over our heads and a sandstorm fired needles into our eyes, was all very exciting - and, importantly, I've got some great video of the chaos to prove I'm not a liar - but the main thing I took away from it is that they were able to get full mobile phone signal in the middle of the Sahara Desert, whereas I struggle to get it in my living room.

Anyway. Of course, Assassin's Creed is set in Ancient Egypt, not modern Morocco, but - y'know - roughly the same part of the world. Point is, such is the depth of authenticity of Origins, for much of the time I played it, I couldn't get the smell of boiled cattle out of my nostrils.