Exclusive! Eight new secret fighters coming to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Oh good, it's Sonic the Hedgehog, said no one since about 1996.

It may be cold and wintry now, but cast your mind back to the heady days of last summer and everyone’s favourite boring trade show of underwhelming game reveals done by uncomfortable-looking businessmen dressed in ‘cool’ leather jackets a PA bought for them that morning – yes, that’s right, it’s E3!

As ever, it delivered a bumper crop of gaming goodness to look forward to over the coming 12 months, with loads of what we all love the most – risk-free, unoriginal sequels. And when you think of dead horses being flogged down to their component atoms, one name always pops into mind: Nintendo.

Their equine corpse of choice this time was SuperSmash Bros, which they belched forth about with a presentation that was so long, it may in fact still be happening. And what a presentation it was!

Who couldn’t be wowed by hour upon hour of character reveals for the latest iteration of their ‘yes it’s a fighter, but as we’re family friendly we can’t show people being beaten up – so instead there’s some sort of meaningless reverse energy counter that goes up to 800%, and eventually people just fall off the side like a drunk on a pier’ fisticuffs game?

You’ll no doubt already be familiar with the tag line for this version: “Everyone is here” – not least because they seemed to repeat it endlessly, almost as if they had nothing much else to talk about.

Now the game is out though it seems to be true, as (apart from a load of stupidly named dudes from Japanese RPGs that no one has ever heard of or cares about) SSBU boasts a vast roster of much-loved characters and favourites from gaming history! Oh, and Sonic is apparently in it too. Oh well.

But wait! Our sources have told us that there are 8 more fighters that Uncle Ninty just couldn’t cram into the game on release – a game so overfull, it was officially classed as morbidly corpulent – that will be winging their way to your Switch via everyone’s favourite feature of modern gaming: paid DLC.

So get your wallet ready and your ‘combat gland’ excreting its fetid unguent in anticipation, as here they are now!

"I'll destroy you all! Raaaaaaargh!"

1. Prince Philip

The Queen’s consort and one-time world’s strongest man (pretty sure this is true) may have retired from an exhausting public life of free holidays and gala lunches punctuated by casually racist remarks, but he’s still itching to duff people up! Just don’t mention that Mario is a foreigner, or there’ll be all sorts of awkwardness…

SPECIAL MOVE: Battle Royale. To take on his foes, Prince P summons the most dangerous man in Britain – his son, Prince Edward! Watch your opponents wither as the Earl of Wessex performs a worryingly arousing dance at them that he learned off of Andrew Lloyd-Webber while pretending to work in theatre, while Phil prepares to run down any survivors in his Range Rover.

It's no wonder people of my generation are so messed up. What? What do you mean it's just me??!?

2. Hamble from Playschool

Nobody likes a creepy old-style dolly, and ‘Big H, the toybox tyrant’ is the creepiest! Watch her smash her opponents into dust with her disturbingly club-like porcelain arms, while reliving nightmare flashbacks to your childhood about the time Floella Benjamin came to your school and you accidentally called her ‘mum’ in front of everyone.

SPECIAL MOVE: Brian Cant? Brian can! Hamble summons the poltergeist of the late pre-school children’s telly presenter to scare the pants off your opposition. Literally! Through terrifying electric shocks administered via the joycons, your fellow players will be coerced by the playful spook into removing their trousers and ‘throwing them through the round window’ (flushing them down the toilet)!

Luxembourg: we need a flag.
Netherlands: hey, look at our ace flag!
Luxembourg: hmmm
Later...
Luxembourg: hey, we too now have an ace flag!
Netherlands: b...but it's OUR flag, just lighter blue
Luxembourg: is it? Is it blue, or is it gold?
Netherlands: we hate you.

3. The entire population of Benelux

Smash Bros. games are already famous for their wacky team-ups featuring non-characters you forgot about years ago, or ones who seem horribly unsuitable for a combat game in the first place. So what better for the Ultimate version of this game than the ultimate massive bunch of bewilderingly ill-fitting protagonists? That’s right – every single man, woman and child from the politico-economic union of Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands!

SPECIAL MOVE: Euroverload. Your Switch crashes and immediately melts from trying to animate 29.2 million citizens of central Europe simultaneously, thus denying your opponents their victory. Sweeeet!

Must...not...pass...out...from...minor...exertion!

4. T.J. Hooker

When he wasn’t playing the girdle-wearing captain of a cardboard spaceship, William Shatner was a strangely unfit yet still on active duty policeman who also wore a girdle. But now, like so many other characters in Smash Bros. that would have been better left in the 1980s, he’s back in digital form! Relive all your favourite T.J. Hooker moves from the show, like when he threw his truncheon at a man, when he slid on a bonnet, and the other time he threw his truncheon at a man!

SPECIAL MOVE: Girdle your loins. After a particularly heavy meal, ‘The Shat’ just can’t keep it in any more and his man-corset gives out with explosive force, propelling your opponent across the screen! Bill then squats in a corner, reciting one of his famous spoken word albums until you get bored and turn the console off. Victory!

This, for me, precisely captures the fun and joy of all football videogames. In that there isn't any.

5. Peter Shilton from the ZX Spectrum version of ‘Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona’

Smash Bros. games have a great history of introducing characters from other franchises. But now all the good ones have gone and we’re well into the dross, who’s next? That’s right, an unrecognisable, pixelated 8-bit recreation of England’s former goalie!

Lifted straight out of his shameless cash-in on the 1986 world cup ‘incident’ that had bull-necked toughs sobbing about deliberate misplacement of an air-filled leather bladder, the Shiltmeister (as he was never known) is ready to rumble – and hey, it’s no weirder than including the guy from Game & Watches!

SPECIAL MOVE: Don’t touch my balls! Maradona himself is summoned to the arena by P. Shilt, who then proceeds to distract your opponents by seemingly having a massive heart attack because he’s ingested a lot of real bad stuff. He’s a very unwell man, which shows cheats never prosper!

Let's be honest. We've all rented worse places.

6. Some rancid junk fly-tipped in a disused car park

Surely great-grandpa Nintenduss is as out of characters to use by now as I am tiresome combinations of relatives and misspellings of their name? Not by a long chalk, because here’s…er…2nd Cousin Nintola’s most imaginative combatant yet!

Remember how Pokémon Go encouraged naïve children to wander around derelict industrial areas while paying scant attention to their surroundings? Well this is just one of the fascinating and not at all dangerous (in a ‘we’re legally liable for it’ sense) things they may have discovered while doing so. And: at least it’s not a bloated corpse!

SPECIAL MOVE: Bin day bonanza. When activated, an aggressive group of scrap dealers descend upon the screen, pestering everyone for ‘hennnnnnnnyyaauuuullldiirraaaaaaann!’ while attempting to manhandle combatants into the back of their untaxed transit van.

On the basis of this picture, they may have been called the Golden Girls because of their strange complexion..

7. The really old lady from ‘The Golden Girls’

Remember The Golden Girls – the stupid one, the lewd one that was horrible to think about in that sense because she was an old lady, the tall one and the tall one’s mum who was only about a year older in real life? Well one of them is back, and it’s the one least suitable for combat! They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but now we can find out whether a pithy remark from an octogenarian is mightier than a fist to the face! (It isn’t!)

SPECIAL MOVE: O.A.Pow! Just as your opponent is about to land a punch on you, you unleash the most powerful weapon in your arsenal – a request for the nice young person to help you set up your email on your ‘new iPad’ so you can see pictures of your grandkids. They’ll be tied up trying your half-remembered passwords on a horribly, underpowered tablet that lovely man from Dixons sold you for hours!

I got an E at GCSE art. Can you tell?

8. ‘Bario’

We’ve got Mario, and when you flip that M you get Wario (where do Nintendo get these amazing ideas? They’re crazy creative!). Well now get ready to turn that M another 90 degrees and squint a bit so it looks sort-of like a B, because heeeeeeeere’s Bario! This character is so new, we’ve only got a very rough sketch of how he’ll appear in game. But just look at those muscles, those fists, that ‘tache and that ‘super hat’! You know Bario’s going to have some mega-skilly moves. And…is that a skateboard? Radical!

SPECIAL MOVE: Mega-mimic. In a way that absolutely isn’t a lazy route to get extra fighters into the game with minimal effort, Bario will have the EXACT same moves as Mario, so he can match everyone’s favourite plumber blow for blow. He’s so good at copying, you’ll probably not be able to tell the difference! But he IS copying, yeah? It’s not just a re-skin and it’s a genuine plot point. Promise.

Battlefield V

"I'm really hot in here!"

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.

Just over a year ago 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.

"Here, let me help you up!"
"Oh, thanks...Hey, wait a minute! You've stabbed me!"
"War! LOL!"

Let’s go over the basics first. As with many of its predecessors, B:V is a massive multiplayer online shooter with a light smearing of single player action as a starter (like the sort of nice-but-not-really-satisfying puffy canape you might get at a wedding in the near-intolerable period before it’s polite to crack open the wine).

In B:V, these ‘war stories’ take the form of a handful of short campaigns that spirit you to varied scenarios across WW2. Each one introduces you to how to play the game, and at a relatively sedate pace so you’re not overwhelmed when you get thrown in with real people online.

This is a bit too sedate at times though, to be honest – there’s a lot of stealthing about that’s entirely at odds with the rapid pace of multiplayer; there’s not much point teaching you to crawl slowly through a thicket to silently take out an enemy, when attempting this against human opponents is about as optimal a tactic as hopping about the battlefield in a luminous sack.

While these wee missionettes do a grand job of showing off how bloody marvellous B:V’s visuals are, accompanied by suitably stirring orchestral themes here and there, what they don’t do is anything particularly novel or engaging. It’s standard ‘go here, blow this up, go there, kill those Nazi guys’ stuff, and each one is all over just as you’re getting into it.

They’re all enjoyable in their own right, though some bits are also way too silly to take seriously – ‘awright guv’nor!’ cockney bomb guy sounds straight out of some direct to DVD Vinnie Jones masterpiece, and skiing knife trick assassin lady is more James Bond than Imperial War Museum. These feel awkwardly out of place given the sombre tone elsewhere.

"So let me get this straight, squadron leader - our planes are painted white for camouflage as we're flying over the mountains, but we fly them in the sky, yes?"
"Yes, that's right."
"The sky. The big, exceptionally clear BLUE sky."
"Yes, the big bl....OH NO!!"

The biggest problem though is they’re just a little too short and not quite sweet enough to really make them feel like much more than the training wheels they fairly obviously are.

This is a shame, as the production values on them are sky high and the characters you play quite interesting, and they touch on some themes that could have been expanded upon to make genuinely engaging tales if given a bit more leg room.

For example, the token mission where you play ‘the baddies’ involves a non-Nazi German struggling with his actions, and the story of the Senegalese soldiers and the racism faced by them from their own allies is a very different take to your standard square-jawed hero fayre.

Regrets about brevity aside, once you’ve cleared the stories that leaves the main course: multiplayer. This is huge, often chaotic, and exactly as much fun as you find these sort of things to be. Which sounds like a cop-out opinion, but there’s no pretending it’s something it isn’t. There’s a good range of weapons and vehicles, everything looks wonderful, and if you like 32 vs 32 squad-based shooters with strongly-defined classes you’ll love it.

Or rather, you probably will when it’s finished. There are bugs, y’see. Bugs, and a fair amount that’s still to come down EAs ‘content hose’ to land in your lounge with a wet plop.

In fact, this review is probably going to be as out of date as a tin of 1940s corned beef rations soon, as there’ll be so much more in the game. EA have launched B:V with a plan of updates to be delivered over the next year or so – including, yes, a bloody battle royale mode. Because apparently, gaming hasn’t been messed up enough yet by the clammy arse of Fortnite being dragged all over it.

All this ‘stuff’ is coming for free (thankfully, EA seem to have taken the lessons of Star Wars Battlefront II’s horrendous microtransaction fiasco on board), and patches are already being delivered, but there’s no escaping the fact here and now you’re not getting the complete package. Heck, even one of the four single player missions available was missing initially.

Which begs the question – why didn’t they wait a bit and release the game when there was more of it, and less AAA competition to (das) boot?

"You know you're holding that upside down, yeah?"
"No...it's just..a...new model of gun?"

Moments like flying a plane through a dense cloudbank, or the chaos of fighting over a narrow bridge with bullets whizzing everywhere really shows off what the game is capable of (the best bit of all is actually the lengthy, playable prologue), but for now the review score reflects the incompleteness of the game and the brevity of the parts that are there. You can’t make tonight’s dinner with tomorrow’s onions, and all that.

In future, and probably the inevitable next game rather than this one even with the updates still to come, Battlefield also needs to decide what the bejesus it wants to be and focus on being that thing. Right now, it’s like a jigsaw assembled by drunks out of bits of other jigsaws – and a picture of a horse with the face of a steam train is only amusing for so long.

A full beans single-player ‘war stories’ game with this level of polish and space for the plots to really grow could be fabulous. Equally, a multiplayer game with the same graphical quality would be more fun if it had a larger amount of content and a lot fewer bugs from day 1.

As it is, you’ve got half of one game, a third of another, an ongoing IOU and a grating juxtaposition between being told all about the harrowing realities of war on a personal scale on one side and a full-on free-for-all with anonymous, immortal respawning soldiers on the other. It’s even lacking the historical intrigue of the more archaic WW1-era kit to tide you over until the holes are plugged.

Battlefield V could be an absolute monster. Right now, it’s a partially finished Frankenstein with an arm off and poorly fitted buttocks. Like an overused latrine in a field hospital, I’d give it 6 months if I were you.

VI.5 out of X

Fallout 76

While this might look fun, here's a top tip: it isn't.

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.

I don't know for sure, but I think this is someone who bought the deluxe edition pondering their awful life choices.

Fallout 76 is Bethesda’s latest grope of the udder of the franchise cow, and unfortunately if this is game is anything to go by she’s currently got crippling mastitis. Unlike previous games in the series, this new instalment takes the whole shebang online. There are still a host of missions and tasks to do of course, but now you can team up with up to 4 chums (or randoms you meet along the way) to tackle them.

Team-based fun with friends in the Fallout world as a concept clearly sounds great. So what went wrong? Answer: most things went wrong.

First off, it’s got that trademark Bethesda bugginess – and by this I don’t mean irradiated cockroaches. Like a desperately unsuccessful clubber attempting to breach a VIP area, I got stuck behind a roped-off section before I’d even left the alleged safety of my bunker and had to restart the whole sodding game from scratch – and having checked online, it seems this particular bug has happened to a lot of people.

Framerates also stutter frequently, even on a PS4 Pro, and character and scenery models often glitch and warp all over the shop. Often hilariously, until you remember (a) this cost you 50 quid and (b) this nonsense has been going on with Bethesda games since Oblivion.

So far, so arse then.

I don't know for sure what's going on here, but I can say with some certainly that a bug probably happened shortly afterwards.

Once you’re outside and in the wilderness though, things must pick up, surely? Well in the sense you have to go and pick up a load of stuff, yes. Otherwise, not so much. Because if you’re hoping for a world full of interesting characters and survivor stories, you’ve come to the wrong postapocalypse. Fallout 76 is empty. So very, very empty.

Bethesda made the decision that, as this was going online, to avoid confusion there would be no humans in this game other than fellow players (explained away by the storyline of this game happening very early on in the Fallout timeline – i.e. everyone else is either freshly nuked or still hunkered down underground). The take-away fact though is Bethesda think you’re too stupid to tell a genuine person from an AI character, which is nice of them.

Anyway, the result is all the NPCs are robots or mutants, and all your tasks come from recordings or text files left by corpses because everyone else is stone dead. The knock-on of this is you don’t have any sense of feeling connected to the plot: anyone you could possibly get invested about the story of is already taking the big dirt nap, so who cares?

But what it ALSO means is that you have to read or listen to a lot of canned exposition to advance the quests you’re on, or indeed have any clue why you’re doing them in the first place. There’s no in-game storytelling here, because there’s no one left alive in game to tell it. And if you’re doing a quest with other players, this is where the aforementioned ‘museum bore’ factor comes in – because you ALL have to do ALL quest steps to progress.

So if that’s listening to a recording, or clicking through 5 screens of text on a terminal, every single one of you has to do each bit.

This obvious teeth-grinding tedium aside, it makes teaming up with people to complete quests in the first place a mess too; you have to be on the same quest step or wait for whoever is behind to catch up, or you’ll be horribly out of sync. It also means you can’t properly work as a team to do quests more quickly – after all, how can you divide up goals if you all have to do the same ones?

As design ideas go, it’s as stupid as building a house out of yoghurt.

You can nuke things in game. Sadly, you can't nuke the ACTUAL game.

Talking of building, you can make your own little base with crafting facilities wherever you like – and you’ll need to, because the other grindtastic feature of Fallout 76 is that like a cat with worms or a hot tramp, you’re constantly getting hungry and thirsty. In other Fallout games eating and drinking acts to restore stamina and hit points. Here, it’s a constantly decaying stat that needs to be periodically topped up or your max health and HP will drop.

This means time that could be used for exploring – one of Fallout 76’s few saving graces is that it is still occasionally a fascinating world to mooch around – is instead spent on crushingly dull chores. Get water, boil water. Kill rat, cook rat bits and so on. I boiled so much water in my first few hours the game felt more like a kettle simulator.

What about combat then? Regrettably, this too is a ‘Parson’s milkshake’ – a meaningless phrase I’ve just made up because I’m so annoyed at how poor it is, it doesn’t even deserve a legitimate insult.

The usual Fallout VATS system wouldn’t work here because of course you can’t slow down time for each person in an online multiplayer world without breaking reality. So instead, there’s a heavily neutered version that works as a sort of auto-aim bonus. Which you may well need: Fallout has never exactly been a stellar shooter, but now you’re bereft of the ability to target a shot in bullet time real-time combat is all you have. And gawd, is it clunky.

Enemies aren’t particularly threatening unless in large numbers, but the shooting is so cumbersome you’ll often favour running away if you can just to avoid the bother of killing them. And melee combat is awful – your character can flail about in first or third person, but regardless of which you choose it just feels like you’re thrashing away and blows are landing out of chance rather than skill.

If an enemy scoots off, you’re left with the choice of burning through your ammo reserves trying to hit them at range with the gutted remnants of a system designed for slow-mo precision shooting, or sprinting after them and hoping you can get close enough to land a hit in some sort of ultraviolent homage to a Benny Hill chase sequence.

PvP is a bit of an odd experience too. It does exist, once you’ve levelled up a bit, but you do greatly reduced damage until the other person shoots back. So rather than the tension that could have been created from having to fight off fellow scavengers for the scarce resources on offer, you’re left with a weirdly polite situation where you shoot someone, wait for them to shoot you back to indicate they’re up for it, and only *then* engage.

Or, you just have to hope they’ve left their controller and gone to the toilet so you can get in enough shots with your weakened attacks to kill them before they return and simply bugger off. Your reward for a kill though? Next to nothing and a Wanted bounty on your head.

No, I don't know why Bethesda thought basing a theme park on Camden was a good idea either.

This all acts to shove players towards co-op play in an entirely unsubtle manner. Which to be honest is no bad thing, as the most enjoyment in Fallout 76 is to be had is in just exploring the open world with another few players – when you have no mission requirements to hamstring you, it’s a big and occasionally fabulous-looking world to explore, with plenty of secrets to stumble across.

But just as you’re actually starting to enjoy yourself, something moronic like a cow floating past at head height, or an open-world event causing mobs of inexplicably high level enemies to instantly spawn into a previously safe, empty area and insta-kill you will happen, dragging you back to reality. Or, worse still, you’ll have to boil some more bloody water.

Fallout 76 is like a quiche someone dropped in a sink. All the bits are there, but it’s gone all wet and runny, and doesn’t hold together. Is it salvageable (the game, not the quiche)? Possibly, but that will depend on Bethesda’s commitment to a title that’s been received as warmly as a mandatory injection of wasp sting juice to be delivered direct to the perineum.

The real question though is, why would you even hang around to see if they do fix it? While it’s true other big developers have made massive stink-ups of open world launches before, like Destiny 2 and The Division, there’s always been a very obvious somethingthere to make player perseverance in the hope of improvement worthwhile – a good story, or pin-sharp gameplay mechanics to (re)build on.

Fallout 76 doesn’t even have that, though. Well, unless you enjoy trudging about looking at scenery (and you’d REALLY have to like it) while periodically being gnawed on by rats. I liked the theme music, so I suppose that’s something. Other than that, boring chores, rubbish fighting, bad design choices, bugs galore and a (dead) cast of characters you don’t give two hoots about does not a fun time make. Hugely disappointing.

4 megatons out of 10 megatons (also: the tons are tons of poo).

PLEASE, MASTER: WHAT’S PC GAMING LIKE THESE DAYS ON A CHEAP(-ISH) COMPUTER?

This isn't my computer, but IS almost identical to my old work computer. But I can't tell you what that was like for gaming, as apparently 'playing videogames isn't suitable in an office environment'. Spoilsports.

Right, let’s get the contentious issue out of the way first: I’ve always been a console gamer at heart. My first ever games machine was an Atari 2600 – the one with a bit of wood stuck on, no less, which I’m sure my 7-year-old self reallyappreciated (you know, young kids and their love of teak veneer and all that).

And – aside from a brief diversion for the ZX Spectrum and an Amiga (sorry, Biffo) – I’ve stuck with consoles ever since. In fact, I last properly dipped my beak into all things PC about 20 years ago, when I managed to get Tomb Raider 2 running on a horrible beige Pentium 75 tower I had at university.

So obviously, I’m the ideal person to do an article about PC gaming!

Why the console preference? Well I’m dead lazy, so I like the lack of platform faff with no driver updates, setting tweaks and security updates for one thing. I’m also a big right-on hippy and like the fact that on console, everyone gets the same experience (and yes, that’s slightly less true these days what with the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro – but only a teeny bit).

Dell, here, showing off their almost legendary flair for captivating designzzzzzzzz....

On a more controversial note, I much prefer joypads as a control ‘medium’ too.

Yes, I know mouse control is very accurate and FPS enthusiasts swear by it, but keyboards? Keyboards as game controllers is just someone taking a thing that was handy and using it to do a thing they needed done, and it’s now the norm through familiarity even though as soon as you think about it, you realise it is this: well stupid.

If they were really such great input devices, the centre console of an F-22 fighter jet would be an Olivetti typewriter.

On a personal level I also don’t ‘get’ dedicated PC gaming hardware: it’s mostly still a hideous ‘1980s nightclub’ colour scheme of black plastic with garish red highlights. Throw in rainbow LED light-up keyboards & logos, viewing windows and other nonsense and most gaming rigs look like they’re designed to appeal to either the worst sort of clichéd nerd stereotype, or kaleidoscope enthusiasts.

As a representation of modern gaming? Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

But my main love of consoles comes from the fact I can plonk down my money, safe in the knowledge that in most cases the hardware will be good for every single game on that format for a solid 4 or 5 years with no further outlay (i.e., I’m a tightwad).

Even in the rare instances where it isn’t true, such as the Dreamcast or Wii U, 9 times out of 10 if you hang onto your hardware for a decade or so you can sell it on to a daft retro gaming enthusiast at a vastly inflated price! It’s win–win!

For PC gaming, even the biggest PC platform enthusiast would have to agree that the quality of your experience ultimately still comes down to cash (and a lot of it), and that towards the top end – like with new cars – the moment you buy a new PC gaming setup it’s already depreciating at eye-watering speed.

A few years on, and the 4-figure high-end kit you splurged on is probably worth less than half what you paid. And sure, consoles come down in price too – but the starting point is a hell of a lot lower as well.

Hello. I am Sir Alan 'you're terminated!' Amstrad. I'm like Clive Sinclair, only less randy! Would you like to buy a phone? It has too many buttons. Much, much too many.

So if I feel this way, why dis article exist, guv?

Thing is, not long ago I started to get more interested in PC gaming on the basis I had recently picked up a Windows laptop to use for work. So as I had it anyway, where was the harm in seeing what it could do?

(Don’t get me wrong – I’ve owned a computer for years and I’m not some luddite who’s previously been banging out articles on an Amstrad E-m@iler plus. I just couldn’t game on it because it’s a Mac, so woefully underserved in that capacity.)

The laptop I now own is by no means a gaming rig, but it isn’t something chronically anaemic like the feeble netbooks of yesteryear either. So do my old prejudices still hold true? Well after 6 months or so, this is what I reckon.

The one thing that has vastly improved from yesteryear (yet in another way, has got worse – I’ll get on to that in a minute) is getting games in the first place and getting them running well.

Why isn't the steam logo a kettle? Idiots.

Thanks to services like Steam, Battle.net and EA Origin, as well as better hardware autodetection in games themselves, it’s a lot easier to access a lot of titles and get them optimised for your PC without wasting hours twiddling with sliders and performance options to eke out a few more frames per second.

But also: it’s worse, because there are a lot of these services all bellowing for attention, and on some (Steam – I absolutely mean Steam) discovering the good stuff is a nightmare because the interface is woeful. Steam’s storefront is akin to a library where all the staff are blind drunk, and they’ve organised the books by spinning round until they’re sick and then kicking them up random shelves.

You also have to tolerate updates to the launch platforms as well as the games (an extra layer of downloadery), and they tend to sneak in everywhere and start leaving their ‘dirt’ (icons, shortcuts, auto-startup clients and notifications) all over your desktop too, like a guilty dog with the runs bum-scooting across a rug.

That’s all background shenanigans though – what are the actual games like?

Here, I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised. You can get a massive array of really good and often fairly recent games at sometimes stupidly cheap prices, and – for the most part – they look pretty decent. The indie selection is also far and away wider and newer than even well-served consoles like the Switch.

Granted, you won’t get the benefit of all the graphical bells and whistles in AAA games you’d see with super high-end systems, if they run at all, but the gap between a £500 laptop and a £2500 gaming desktop is much closer these days.

For example, my laptop has a midrange processor from 2017 and integrated (i.e. fairly rubbish) graphics rather than a dedicated chip, but can still put out a level of detail I’d consider more than acceptable AND move it about without it being so slow it looks like a powerpoint presentation.

I'd probably have enjoyed Destiny 2 on my PC, had I not shut it down fairly rapidly because I thought the fan was going to fly out through the casing, it was spinning that fast.

As you might expect I only really struggled with very new and/or very flashy games: I got the PC version of Destiny 2 running, for example, but it was only at console-level refresh rates and horribly grainy PS2-era graphics quality.

Something a bit less demanding though, and it was no problem. Mass Effect: Andromeda looked great and ran really well. (Which, ironically, was a bit of a shame as it really allowed the dire gameplay and lousy script to ooze through.)

So am I a convert of sorts? I think so – I wasn’t bothered about PC gaming at all a year or so ago, but now I’m keen to get a minor upgrade* just so I can enjoy games at a bit higher resolution. There are also a fair few games I meant to pick up on console I never got round to that are so stupid cheap on PC, it’d be rude not to.

In short: what I assumed I could get to run, how much bother it would be, and how good it would look turned out to be well short of reality.

At the same time though, there’s no way I’d ditch my PS4 simply because I still want to be able to play the newest games too, and I think that’s the balance: PCs are undeniably the best if you want the absolute cutting edge of graphics quality. The newest games on the newest PC gaming systems blow consoles away, no argument. But that still comes with a huge price tag.

And that’s the strength of consoles – that middle ground. Access to the same brand new games a high-end PC can run (and that a mid-range one maybe can’t), but at a vastly reduced asking price with only a small hit to quality. Until broadband-reliant stream-o-game services like NVidia’s GeForce NOW really take off, I can’t see that changing.

I still think high-end PC gaming is, realistically, off limits for most because of its astonishing cost and comparatively short hardware lifespan. But a midrange PC will last you years and not cost a lot. Couple that with a console, and that’s the real best of all worlds – and probably still cheaper than one of those awful LED light-up monstrosities to boot.


*EPILOGUE: I got that new PC - a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip - and it's like night and day. It's yet to fail to run anything I've thrown at it too. How long it'll be able to keep up playing new(er) stuff is questionable, but despite being a 2017 model it more than meets the suggested spec for Anthem. So who knows? I'm still buying Anthem on PS4 though anyway. Because KEYBOARDS ARE STILL RUBBISH CONTROLLERS.

The PS4 Pro: is it worth it?

Stood up like this, the Pro looks a lot like an air conditioning unit. Which, if you're unlucky enough to get a certain model, is probably closer to the truth than Sony would care to admit...

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.

This isn't my actual oven, by the way. For one thing, it's clean.

The minimum hard drive on the Pro is a whopping 1TB – double the 500 GB of the original PS4 – so you can see the appeal there. And yes, I know hard drive upgrades are supposed to be relatively easy on the PS4, but the last thing I tried to upgrade was the air intake fan on our old cooker. This? This did not go well.

Despite the repair allegedly being a simple case of swapping out a broken part for an identical replacement and hooking up a couple of wires, I forgot to turn the mains off before I opened the cooker up and thus electrocuted myself.

This caused me to yell our oven was a ‘hot metal bastard’ loudly enough for our neighbour to hear and come round, thinking we were being attacked by a burglar (who, I assume, they must have thought was a sexy yet villainous robot).

To make matters worse, after all that I went and fitted the fan backwards so it pumped the kitchen full of greasy hot air. This meant I had to open it up all over again and, in my haste to do so, re-electrocuted myself in the exact same way.

Consequently, although I can now charge batteries just by looking at them, my DIY attempts at anything involving wires are probably best avoided. But back to the PS4 Pro. Now I’ve got one, the big questions are was it worth it? And do I think it would be worth it for YOU?

To which the answer for both is a decidedly non-committal hmmmmmmmmm.

The PS4 Pro is of course able to render you running away from big monsters in tremendous detail.

The problem is, unless you have a stupidly opulent gaming setup you’re never going to see the picture from a Pro next to the picture from a vanilla PS4 simultaneously. So while all games on the Pro have some degree of benefit from HDR colour, lighting and so on, you simply won’t notice much difference a lot of the time because you have no immediate frame of reference.

This is all the more true in the heat of the action when you’re not paying attention to (graphical) detail.

It’s like mineral water and tap water: if you’re thirsty, you’re probably not going to care that the former has been filtered through igneous rock in the Andes before being collected in a crystal bucket by an ‘artisan aqua barista’, rather than spurting out into your kitchen sink in Stevenage via a plastic drainpipe.

Don’t get me wrong – there are times when it’s obvious you’ve got something with way more power. Running Shadow of the Colossus in performance mode so it’s hitting a constant 60 frames a second is beautiful, and going back to a janky 30 fps afterwards is akin to regressing from a SNES to a NES and then watching it through a zoetrope.

Equally, some of the games that offer specific graphic-enhancement modes really lay the pretty on thick. Horizon: Zero Dawn being one: you can see a lot more detail, see it from a lot further away, and with much lovelier, more realistic lighting. It’s not game changing at all for sure, but it’s definitely game enhancing.

Because while we all know graphics aren’t everything, they clearly are something – if it really didn’t matter what stuff looked like we’d all still be happily clonking about on ZX Spectrum +14s, 8-bit colour clash and all.

Funnily enough I was playing Destiny 2 the other night, and fell off the map at almost precisely this point. Mad skills! 

However…the jumbo bag of eye candy isn’t so lovely that I can hand on heart say ‘this is the next generation’. Because let’s face it – it isn’t. It’s still a device for playing PS4 games, albeit ones that are nicer looking to varying degrees that don’t suffer framerate drops, and the PS4 has been around for yonks now.

In that, it’s an upgrade to what you know, not a jump to the next level – it’s buying a regular car with air con, heated seats and a turbo, not a private jet.

Take a game like Destiny 2. That’s a good-looking game anyway, but is HDR-enhanced on the pro. Yet all I can honestly say I noticed is that it’s a bit darker and the colours are more saturated – something I could have done a fair job at replicating by accident just by sitting on my remote control.

There are also potential downsides too. Depending on your telly, it’s a pain in the HDMI port to configure everything correctly to make sure you get the best possible picture.

Turns out it also doesn’t integrate properly with the original-generation PSVR headset (which, inevitably, is the version I own), meaning whenever you want to use it you have to do a marathon amount of faffing about with cables – undoing everything you did to get the best picture in the process.

Worse still, I’ve had more system lock-ups in a week with the Pro than in 6 months with my old PS4. Though I have got lucky with the noise factor – my Pro is actually much quieter than my original PS4, which is remarkable given a quick Google search shows that some Pros sound like you’ve installed an Airbus testing facility in your lounge; it seems what you get in this regard is basically pot luck.

All this means the value of the proposition is going to depend on a lot of factors.

If you have a capable TV, need more storage, play a lot of the titles that have the best enhanced modes like God of War and Spider-Man anyway, and can get a deal/trade in your old PS4? Yeah, like me you’ll probably be happy – assuming you don’t get a ‘loud boy’.

If you don’t have a 4K TV though, or aren’t fussed by something approaching gaming PC level smoothness and nicer lighting?

Despite my being a sucker for new hardware, I’m inclined to say don’t bother.

The chances you’ll notice any improvements are minimal, and – crucially – you still get to enjoy the exact same games. There are no PS4 Pro exclusives, and that’s not ever likely to change.

In the right circumstances, then, it’s an undeniable upgrade. In others, I can easily see someone wondering what on Earth all the fuss is about. Now, can I interest you in a used goose?

500 GB out of 1TB

NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE

"So...how can we make a banner poster announcing an online service seem exciting?"
"I dunno. Just say 'online' a lot?"
"Sounds good to me. Pub?"

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.

"Hey, that company we did the banner ad for also want a shot of the system in action. What will grab people's attention?"
"A drab, static menu of game saves?"
"Genius! Pub?"

The launch of the service has been long delayed for one thing, and for another it’s adding no-brainer stuff like cloud saves; something that should have been on the Switch from Day 1. Plus you need a smartphone app (and, obviously, a smartphone to run it on too) for voice chat – a ‘feature’ that has been standard on the PlayStation and Xbox for generations.

So what do you get for your money then, and how much of that precious coin do you need to part with to get it?

Well, one thing in the Switch’s favour is that Nintendo’s online service is cheap – potentially REALLY cheap. A year is 18 quid, or you can pay monthly for a small extra premium, but get this: you can buy a ‘family pack’ of 8 memberships for 35 quid. And in an entirely un-Nintendo move, rather than applying some arcane rule stipulating these must go to people who you have a minimum 85% DNA match with, they don’t give two hoots who you dish them out to.

In short, get yourself a group of Switch owners, club together, and save some £££. This is the option some Switch-owning chums and me went for, meaning 12 months of the service cost us all of £4.50 each. That, clearly, is a bargain.

Regardless of what you pay, you of course get online gaming. This is what it is and works fine, as you might imagine. The app-to-chat is an extra layer of faff and wiring, but I can kind-of see why they did it: Nintendo guard their kid-friendly status fiercely, so don’t want impressionable young ears wandering into chatrooms where people call each other smelly poo bums (OR WORSE).

Or, at least they don’t want that to happen without the get-out clause that someone had to have enabled it via giving a kid access to the phone and app so it’s all YOUR fault, you terrible parent you.

There’s also the aforementioned cloud saves, which finally allow you to move from one Switch to another without losing your game progress – and given the portable nature of the Switch, this is one console likely to take more ‘in transit’ damage than most and need replacing. After all, it’s not that often you’d be in a position to drop your XBox down the toilet.

And finally, a feature some people might find enticing enough to justify the whole service: NES Online. A load of classic NES games, free to play, with more titles added each month.

"Hey, it was really nice of that company to give us one of their game machines after we made them those great adverts that we spent ages working on."
"Yeah. But the graphics are a bit rubbish. I might go back to FIFA 19 on my Xbox."
"Really?"
"Nah, just kidding - I spend all my money on class A narcotics!"
"Hah! You are a one. Pub?"

Admittedly a proper Wii-style virtual console would be even better, and some of the games on offer really show how retro gaming is at best 20% good, 80% ancient tedious dross, but there are enough genuine gems in the mix to keep it interesting such as Super Mario Bros 1 & 3, the original Zelda, and Gradius to name but a few.

The real seller for these oldies though? They’re also online multiplayer compatible. That means you can laugh at the horribly dated visuals and gameplay of 2-player titles such as Double Dragon with someone else, even if they live at the bottom of a well!

What’s the verdict then? Well it’s all about value for money. If you can get a group together to take advantage of that sweet, sweet family discount, go for it. It’s barely more than the price of a baguette and a coffee for a whole year’s access.

But what if you’re horribly unpopular, and have no friends?

That’s trickier. If you don’t care much about the golden oldies (and bear in mind some of these are more golden dog eggs…), and/or aren’t that fussed about online play given the Switch’s obvious strengths in local multiplayer, I’d leave it – for now.

If the NES online service expands to SNES online (or better still, N64 or GameCube online) and the price remains broadly the same, this will be an essential purchase. It’s a reasonable start, and that pricing is a cracking idea to get groups of Switch owners together and a whole social gaming thing going, but it’s still a bit threadbare.

It covers the online basics, but unless you really love the retros or are forever smashing your Switch up and need those cloud saves, have a good old think first.

8 bits out of 16 bits.

DANGER ZONE 2

I suspect this may affect my no claims bonus...

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.

As ever, the battle for parking spaces in the Asda car park was brutal.

It’s a speed effect that took me right back to the Gamecube era, sitting in my manky flat in Oxford with its CRT telly and the damp-covered lounge wall my landlord had ‘fixed’ by painting over it with white emulsion and a horrible framed picture of a dog. (Given the fact the wall was covered in patterned wallpaper, this was as classy as covering a scratch on your car with Tipp-ex.)

At the time I was playing a game that totally blew me away. I’d always loved driving games, but this was the first one that I felt ticked all my personal boxes for the genre. That game, madam? Burnout.

The fact that effect shows up here again is, of course, about as coincidental as finding a set of instructions titled ‘where to send secrets pls’ and a sticker saying ‘Good boy!’ written in Russian in D. Trump’s top pocket. Danger Zone 2is written by Three Fields Entertainment, a group made up of core members of the team responsible for Burnouts 1 thru Paradise, and is a spiritual sequel to Burnout’s crash mode and a very actual sequel to 2017’s nice but a bit limp Danger Zone.

While this could be the M25, you can tell it isn't real because the traffic is actually moving.

The aim of each level is as straightforward as making a milk-flavoured milkshake in a wobbly dairy – reach the ‘danger zone’ without crashing, then on arrival mash your vehicle into everything to cause as much carnage as possible.

The skill is in mastering this; you have subtasks to complete (such as hitting every caravan on the motorway, like a pilled-up Clarkson), score multipliers to snag, and smashbreakers to pick up or earn. The latter being ruddy great explosions you can trigger to propel your wrecked jalopy into yet more traffic for even more points.

The first Danger Zone was fun, but as anaemic as a vegan Dracula – all the zones were indoors in a crash test dummy type area, with short run-ups and not much variety in cars or layout. But while DZ2 might share the same sparse, almost 8-bit look when it comes to menus and the like, the game itself is far more turgid.

Tracks now have substantially long run ups, the locations are outdoors and vary greatly, and there’s a much wider array of cars (and a massive 18-wheeler) to play with. This feels like a proper driving game now, rather than something that to be honest wasn’t really much more than an amusing tech demo.

Yes, you’ll probably get through each level and its secondary objectives easily enough. But getting platinum medals and climbing the leaderboards? That’s the ‘one more go’ itch that will keep you coming back for a scratch. It always feels like you were just a car away from another combo and racking up a huge score.

I can see my house from here! And also, now, my freshly-regurgitated lunch.

Danger Zone 2 is the very definition of cheap, daft, cheerful fun; it’s so simplistic, it’s almost retro-game like in its appeal. It’s screaming fast in places (speed-wise, the F1 car levels are right out of the latter parts of Burnout 3), menus aside it looks lovely, and it can be picked up for a quick blast but also has a ton of replayability if you really want to snag the top spots on the global leaderboards (and on that note, it’d be ideal for porting to the Switch for games on the go).

So, is this review over? Well no, not quite: we need to address the elephant in the room. A big, furious elephant with a massive turbo strapped to it and the legend ‘TAKEDOWN!’ emblazoned along the length of its flailing proboscis. Because DZ2, you see, is not only an elephant but confusingly also a sort of trunk-wielding, tusked-up Trojan horse.

Yes, it’s a fun little game in its own right, but also (for a small developer) a necessary stepping stone in the development process of another game due later this year. We’re told this other game (currently called Dangerous Driving) is a more ambitious, well rounded, single-player track-based racer. One with remarkably familiar-sounding takedowns and boost chains…

And that’s the other reason to mull over picking up DZ2: as a warm-up for what’s just round the corner. It might be called something else now – heck, it could be named Ainsley Harriot’s Late-Night Onion Touching Challenge – but from its DNA and the taster we have here, it’s pretty clear what it really is.

Whisper it, everyone – proper Burnout might finally be coming back. And I can’t chuffing wait.

Score: 10 licence points out of a 12-point automatic disqualification.