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.

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. 

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.