Have you seen these comedy dinner shows they do? Basically, it's a sort of chicken-in-a-basket night, where actors flail around the diners pretending to be characters from classic sitcoms; Fawlty Towers, Only Fools And Horses, 'Allo 'Allo, and - Thor help us - Mrs Brown's Boys.

Familiar costumes and catchphrases appear in lieu of anything approaching actual creativity, the actors looking slightly off, but not so off as to be completely jarring - so long as you squint. It's warm and familiar, and audiences laugh out of recognition, because some people are sufficiently stupid for that to be enough. 

Anyway, that's what Marvel's Avengers kind of reminded me of. It's Marvel's Avengers: The Comedy Dinner Show. 

"Don't mention The Infinity War! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it."

"Hahahahahahahahaha!"

Except here you have to pay extra if you want Iron Man to do that bit where he falls through the bar.

Ghost of Tsushima is the PS4's last big honk, its final big platform exclusive, discharging into our laps a month or so after the penultimate big platform exclusive, The Last of Us Part 2.

To say I enjoyed TLoU2 would be an understatement. It would also be inaccurate. I mean, it's the most miserable video game ever made. I don't think anybody could actually enjoy that amount of relentless anguish and anxiety. It was like being strapped into a gnarly chair, with your eyes forced open by a couple of uncomfortable metal hooks, while Twitter scrolls in front of you on a big screen. 

Also: the room is full of hungry rats. And you're not wearing shoes or trousers. 

It probably didn't help that I binged it in three days, by the end of which I emerged bow-legged from its unrelenting emotional pounding. That isn't a criticism; it just shows you how effective The Last of Us 2 was at making me feel stuff. In my view, there's no doubt it's one of the greatest video games ever made, its lustre dimmed only by the radicalism of bigots.  

While I accept it may have driven its development team to near collapse, it doesn't so much raise the bar for the right way to achieve video game storytelling and characterisation as strap it to a rocket it and fire it into the moon. 

Tsushima, therefore, had a tough act to follow. Regardless, there's no bar-raising here; they keep it firmly on the ground, surrounded by all the predictable comforts we've grown accustomed to. For a game so full of horses, it is perhaps understandable that it did so little to scare them.  

Whereas TLoU2 had a story that could never be easily summarised in a single sentence, Tsushima can be encapsulated thus: a samurai man does some things, because the Mongols have invaded the pretty island where he lives. 

Wait. Two sentences: sometimes he gets a new hat!

And you sometimes see his bare bum. 

Three sentences, then. 

I only consider myself to have one foot in the retro gaming community these days. Though I continue to write a column for Retro Gamer magazine, since Digitiser The Show went out I've kind of drifted away from active involvement. Last year was a turning point, as you'd have no doubt picked up from the feelings I wrote about in the multiple posts on here, and Patreon, while trying to figure it out.

Fact is, I didn't play games as much as I had done in the past. Partly, I just didn't have the time or energy. I was incredibly busy with the day job, and... gaming wasn't how I wanted to spend my down time. 

I'd not gone off games, but my interest in writing or making content about them was starting to wane. Over 27 years, I can't imagine how many words about games I've written, and I knew I needed to keep my powder dry when it came to gaming-related projects I did choose to do (Retro Gamer being one, Digitiser Live 2.0 being another). Gaming, broadly, was starting to feel like a straightjacket in terms of my creativity.

However, in truth not all of my move away from games content was due to that sense of ennui. There was also an increasing feeling that rarely a day went by on social media where there wasn't some new retro gaming drama unfolding. 

Every fandom has its dramas of course - I mean, just look at the state of Star Wars - but because I was Mr Biffo, it seemed that there were those, both publicly and behind the scenes, who wanted to draw me into it. I'd get told gossipy stuff uninvited, or be asked for my opinions on the latest scandal, and I just didn't want any part of it. I didn't like the way some of my acquaintances revelled in it.

There are two sides to every story, and, unless I was party to both, or had some vested interest, I tended to stay out of it. But it kept happening. Countless troll accounts. Horacegate. Hate videos. Copyright claims. Whispers and rumours etc. etc. It was ugly and depressing.

Unfortunately, as many of you will no doubt be aware, it has come to light over the past week that many of the dramas the community has been wrestling with over the past year appear as if the may be the work of just one person.

One person - if true - who otherwise acted as a well-intentioned member of the community, who befriended many while stabbing them in the back, who has secretly sat at the heart of all this, like some sort of Machiavellian, retro gaming, spider.

GUEST ARTICLE by DAVID HESLOP

What did you get up to on your Christmas holidays? I know, I know; we’re already well into January. The decorations are back in the loft, the only Celebrations left in the tin are Mars bars and Bountys, and no one at work will shut up about how they have to spend the month doing a poo on a chemical toilet because it’s “Caravanuary”.

But, like an over-enthusiastic primary schooler, I’m here to tell you about my Christmas. Because I got two things: a Bluetooth-enabled Xbox controller (presumably my last one communicated in semaphore) and an invite to Microsoft’s xCloud beta.
​
xCloud, for the uninitiated or plain uninterested, is Microsoft’s still-in-the-oven game streaming service. Currently operating mostly in a closed invite-only beta test, it can be seen as a rival to Google’s controversial Stadia platform.

​Like many, I read with great interest Mr Biffo’s experiences with Stadia, which went against the prevailing gaming press opinion (and the opinion of lots of people on the internet, presumably all of whom have played it extensively before commenting with such vitriol). I’ve not got Stadia – looks a bit too expensive for what it is from where I’m sitting, but I can very much imagine it works well enough – but I was asked by Mr B to share my experiences with xCloud.

Somehow, it seems like we're never going to run out of bad game artwork. Such as the troubling cover of Mole Hunter, above - replete with what is presumable a phallic-looking mole, a dead snake, and a hammer-wielding, pin-headed, mole hunter. 

​Here are another ten.

Remember Tomy's Furby, Zoids, Kongman and Screwball Scramble? These are just some of the classic toys and games we're not looking at in this episode!

However, Biffo, Gannon and funny Eli from Barshens and Cheapshow do take a look at Aaaargh!, Wow!, and Pocketeers!

Also, in arguably our most poor taste segment yet, Biffo ponders what is and isn't acceptable to eat.

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https://www.patreon.com/digitiser2000

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Google Stadia, eh. Remember that? Remember when it came out way back in - oooh, what was it? - November 2019?

Things were different back then. We were different. The past is a foreign country, and so on and so forth.

Hey, remember how loads of people hated on Stadia? And how loads of people hated on me for daring to say it actually worked - for me - which rather undermined their assertion back when it was announced earlier this year that it wouldn't, couldn't, possibly work for anyone?

Remember how those same people sought out those singing Stadia's praises, and then attacked them, accusing them of being paid by Google to say nice things about Stadia, and they even set up social media accounts to spread anti-Stadia sentiment?

You can't blame them; that's just a normal, rational thing to do. They went all red in the face, and steam came out of their ears, making a noise like a boiling kettle. That literally happened. It's quite, quite, normal. 

These brave souls, these modern Luddites - doubtless inspired by Ned Ludd's anti-technology rebellion of 1811 to 1916, which saw armies of aggrieved workers destroying lacemaking machines and sending anonymous death threats to magistrates (and which famously cut short the Industrial Revolution before it even got underway, and that is now why we all toil in factories...) - should be seen for what they are; anti-progress heroes, whose sacrifice we should honour and remember forever. 

Or maybe they just really hated looking like idiots, so have gone all-out to look like even bigger idiots, so they then stood a chance of winning The Biggest Idiot In The World Award, which is at least some sort of achievement, I suppose. 

Fun times. Fun. Times...

It has been a few weeks, and I'm missing the hate, so I thought I'd check back with you all about how my Stadia experience has been going. Does it still work? Do I still, broadly, think this is the future of gaming? 

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE
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Saying Bethesda are struggling a bit of late (at least quality-wise – financially they’re still lolling about nude in filthy great piles of cash) is an understatement on par with saying questionable perspiration-phobe and unlikely Italian chain restaurant fan Prince Andrew has had ‘a recent dip in popularity’.
 
Their last few games have been, frankly, dire (Bethesda, that is; A. Windsor might be knocking out homebrew indie bangers on Steam on a weekly basis for all I know), and – as shown by the awful ploy to add an outrageously chonky monthly subscription to the already struggling Fallout 76 – even when they do have a userbase, they’re happy to cram them into the contempt-o-tron and set it to ‘rinse the suckers’.
 
Essentially, Bethesda are real big poltroons. And The Outer Worlds, made by former collaborators Obsidian (who helmed the splendid Fallout: New Vegas) just underlines quite how far they’ve slid face-first into the slops bin. Mainly by it being ruddy fab, and reminding you what it is you liked about the pre-crap act Bethesda of old in the first place.

Even after 30 years, the jury is out as to whether Sega's original template for its Master System covers were an example of clean, crisp, iconic graphic design... or a half-arsed abomination.

Either way, the artwork dd lend itself open to reinterpretation, as this gallery attests.