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.

According to my parents, I first saw Star Wars during a family summer holiday.

Yet, according to my brain, my dad first took me to see Star Wars one night after school, on a warm, early summer, evening, and I distinctly remember being in my school uniform.

Both of these vague dates chime with what I'd believed was Star Wars' release date of June-ish 1977 (it was in fact released in America on May 25th that year, and I'd always thought we'd gotten it a month or so later).

Either way, both sets of memories can't be right; either they've got it wrong, or I've got it wrong. My money had been on them getting it wrong because, frankly, they're old, and Star Wars didn't have the same sort of impact on them as it did me. Plus, I want to believe that what I remember is the truth.

In fact... it isn't. And neither is their version: both are wrong.

Star Wars didn't open in the UK until December 27th 1977 - and even then it was only in two cinemas in central London, and it stayed that way for a month or two. I've learned this troubling, foundation-rattling, truth from a book entitled The Star Wars Phenomenon in Britain, by one Craig Stevens. 

It has upended everything I thought I knew about my life with Star Wars, and has confirmed that much of what I remember about Star Wars is merely the American version of its history.

The film didn't really start rolling out in the UK until early 1978. Some areas didn't get it for another ten months, while it had a staggered release from January onwards. Having dug into my local newspaper archives, I've since learned that it opened in what was then my local cinema on February 5th 1978 - which was the earliest I could've possibly seen it. 

Now I'm questioning everything.

Special guest Eli Silverman, from Barshens and Cheapshow, joins Biffo and Gannon to ubox their mystery mail, which includes practical jokes, weird snacks from around the world - and even more random items. A series of taste-tests ensues!

Before Nintendo got its act together, the company's NES covers adopted a sort of uniform, pixel art, approach. Though it didn't seem to "prang" the success of the NES too badly, the results were, it needs to be said, mixed.

While third-parties were slathering glorious, fully-painted, artwork on their facades, Nintendo's game covers were rather ugly, and sometimes bore little resemblance to the games they purported to portray. Suffice to say, many of its earliest NES games were subsequently re-released with new, less humiliating, artwork.

Here's a gallery of original NES game covers of said pixel art variety - but wait - the titles have been changed! Using your knowledge, reason, and a very long pole with a hook on the end, can you identify the real titles?!

Don't worry: it's just a bit of fun. Chill out, yeah?

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.

An exclusive interview with Edmund McMillen, creator of the games Super Meat Boy and The Binding Of Isaac, and James Interactive, creator of The Legend of Bum-Bo. Which, regrettably, gets sidetracked when Beanus takes over...

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I may have already described my slightly pertinent experience with getting Rage 2 up and running. Three hours it took me to try to install the game on my PS4, before I gave up and just bought it via Stadia. I was playing within minutes.

Blah blah blah, and thanks for the backhander, Google. 

No, this isn't another Stadia-just-works polemic, but that does factor into it. This is more about why it's really important to believe, above all others, your own, first-hand, experience. And even then... take what you think you believe with a pinch of salt. 

You see, I'm really enjoying Rage 2. I'd liked the first one quite a bit, though I associate it with an odd time in my life, when I had just come out the other end of a long marriage that hadn't exactly worked, and I appreciated the chance to lose myself in its wasteland. 

I bought Rage 2 upon release, with a view to reviewing it on here, but the other reviews I read put me off. I was busy earlier this year, and fitting a big open world-game that was barely just sort of okay, into my free time wasn't something I found particularly appealing. So I left it in the shrink-wrap, until last week.

​And while I'm glad that the game has gone beyond my (admittedly very low) expectations, thanks to that lowering of this expectations due to others, I'm annoyed I ever allowed opinions to influence me.

I did a review of Google Stadia on Friday, having given my initial impressions over on Twitter. As I wrote in the review, I got a lot of... let's charitably call them "comments", from people who insisted I was either an idiot, or lying, or wrong in some way. People who, broadly, hadn't used Stadia, but who were of the unshakable belief that it doesn't work.

I've issues - quite significant ones - with what Stadia offers at the current time. The selection of games doesn't exactly 'wow', they're overpriced, and it all feels very bare bones. However, the technology - the thing which so many people told me, back in the summer when I first wrote about Stadia, wasn't going to work - does work. It works great. For me, at least. 

Now... it's important to stress that it might be that Stadia doesn't work great for everyone. Certainly, I know that Digi2000 contributor SuperBadAdvice hasn't exactly had a seamless experience with it. However, my first impressions continued to be backed up by my personal experience over the weekend, to a point where I forgot I was streaming the games.

Honestly, I had a sudden moment of realisation while playing Rage 2 (thus far, an underrated game that I can't believe I put off playing for so long) where I remembered, and was stunned. I'd been playing for hours with no noticeable lag, no stuttering, and graphics that, if they aren't 4k (the naysayers insist that Stadia upscales its visuals), as close to 4k as to be irrelevant. 

We can get into the whole not-actually-owning-your-games debate another time. I just want to talk about why so many people are still insisting that Stadia doesn't work, in the face of evidence to the contrary. Why are they trying so hard to convince themselves, without any first-hand, experience, that their belief is right? 

Let's take a look at that.

Biffo and Ashens go down the tubes, sampling some of the weirdest flavours of Pringles from around the world. These may include "egg sandwich flavour"... 

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The knives are out for Google Stadia, and I struggle to understand why. Or, at least, I struggle to understand the scale of the incoherent, frothing, red mist rage being directed at it. 

Yesterday I gave my first impressions of the service on Twitter, and dozens of utter dickheads, who don't even follow me, decided to chip in with their own unwanted opinions.

They actually searched for "Stadia" to have a go at random people. Who cares about any product so much that they'd actually do that?

I even got an un-ironic "OK boomer" from one of them.

It seems to be that the issues some people have with it - which, in all honesty, they've had since Stadia was first announced - are as follows:

a) You won't be able to store your games on a shelf, where you can look at them, and get turned on by them, until you die.

b) Google is a big evil corporation and ruins everything. 

c) Google Stadia could never possibly work.

d) Something to do with them stealing your data, or identity, or something. 

e) They just really, like, hate it, for reasons they aren't emotionally articulate enough to understand.