Old man rant.

Last week I touched on how I found myself wondering how I got by in console generations past. Although we're late in the day in the lives of the PS3 and 360, I've only just noticed that this is really the first console ever that I've not been hurting for space on. Thank the lord for 250 gig hard drives.

When I shelled out for my first Xbox, I plumped for the 20 gig model. I was too oldschool for my own good at the time. I'd seen the offerings on XBLA and decided I wanted no truck with it. Frankly, those early games looked pretty naff. A list of vintage arcade games that I could easily emulate on my PC with MAME. I thought digital distribution would never take off. I figured 20 gig would be ample space for my savegames.

Shows how much I know.

Some time after I got the Xbox, Geometry Wars 2 dropped. And it was incredible. From there there was no looking back, and I ended up having more XBLA games than boxed ones. But there was a problem. After around two years of gaming bliss I found myself banging my head against the suddenly restrictive 20 gig HDD. I found myself wishing I'd paid the extra few pounds for the Elite model. Fortunately, some might say, soon after this happened, the old Xbox red ringed and I had an excuse to upgrade. I got the old one repaired, gave it to my sister and never looked back. There are more than thirty XBLA games in my 250 gig Xbox, and it still isn't close to half full. It's wonderful, and I take it for granted. So long as I resist Microsoft's attempts to turn my GAMES MACHINE into some kind of media hub, I can't see myself ever filling it up.

This is in direct contrast to my PS1 and PS2.

Last week, I started Persona 4. Or at least I tried to. How on earth did I squeeze saves from all those games into 24 meg? Saying it nowadays sounds totally absurd when you think about it. Mobile Phones come with ten times more memory than that now. Jimmying around my savegames across the three 8 meg memory cards to free up as much space as possible without deleting anything took the best part of an hour. Of course, there was a minor detour into the still fabulous SSX3, but it was only to check which of the duplicate files was further along. Honest.

Going further back. How the hell did we manage with a measly single megabyte of memory on the PS1? I have five memory cards, into which are squeezed the completed, or near completed saves of upwards of 65 games. As I've written this, I've remembered what used to happen when I ran out of blocks on my memory cards. A moment of frustration, then ages spent working out how I was going to rustle up the considerable sum of pocket money a new memory card would cost me. My parents got the consoles, but apart from that,  I had to fuel my gaming habit myself. A memory card was a considerable investment back then.

Bizarrely, I find myself in the curious position of having to buy my first console memory card in around six years. It feels strange.

One extra step into the past, we didn't really even have memory cards. My MegaCD was the first console I ever had with internal memory. It never filled up because I could never find enough games to fill it with. But who remembers having to write down passwords to continue in your Megadrive games? I do. My copy of Road Rash 2 still has a load of paper in the box that is covered in sequences of random numbers and letters. Entering those is an experience I can tell you. Especially when you do it and you find out that you're worse at the game now than when you were when you were eleven. It's a sobering feeling. Worse was the password system for James Pond 3. It was a long set of objects in different colours. I genuinely have a notebook somewhere full of passwords written out in the format of, blue teacup, red umberella, blue laser, yellow laser, et cetera. Who thought that was a good idea? They always seemed to be EA games too.

I never owned a Snes or a Nes, so I may be utterly wrong on this, but I have vague recollections of Nintendo carts with battery backup saves on them. Did they ever go flat? What happened if they did?

Kids these days don't know they're born. With their massive HDDs, high definition and high speed optical media. It's all so easy you can ignore it. You think loading times on a PS3 are long? Try loading a game from both sides of a C90 cassette (old tech, if you don't know what a cassette is, google it), only to have the game crash at the 89th minute. It really used to happen, back in the days when Atari made their money out of computers rather than the royalties from slapping their logo over hipster tee-shirts.

Progress is amazing. We've got it so easy now.

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A Scattergun shot of a post.

A lot can happen in a week, HMV went into administration, I completed Bayonetta, and discovered that I'd been taking the virtually unlimited memory in my 360 for granted. Somewhere amongst that I should really make room for my impressions of the Wii-U too.

After a lot of years of badgering from my recent guest blogger, I decided to start Persona 4 on Monday. This required the not inconsiderable action of connecting my PS2 up, since it's space on the component input on my TV was taken by the Xbox when I got Rocksmith to cure the game's lag. Cables duly swapped, I blew out all the dust and fired up the PS2. I'd forgotten how loud it was. Although it is 11 years old now. The game starts and tells me I have no room on the memory card.

Well this is novel.

I swapped it for another and that turned out to be full too. So I swapped it for the third. Also full. With 250gb of memory in the 360, this is an issue I haven't come up against in a long time. Saving stuff nowadays is pretty much fire and forget. How did I squeeze the saves from almost seventy PS2 games into a paltry 24mb? Cue a bit of cursing and then an hour spent cross referencing saves and booting games to see which of the duplicate saves were further along before deleting them and copying from one card to another to free up enough space for a save on Persona.

While doing this I found myself playing SSX 3. Completely by accident.

Persona 4 got started on Tuesday. It's a slow burner, and frankly it looks like ass compared to a lot of late PS2 games, but that really doesn't matter. It's beginning to draw me in. I'm looking forward to continuing it. I did promise I was going to start it after completing Bayonetta.

After slightly fewer years of badgering from my recent guest blogger, I finally got round t0 Bayonetta around a week ago. I used to wax lyrical about Devil May Cry and I knew that Bayonetta would be right up my street. Frankly I don't know what took me so long.

It's extremely Japanese, with all the high camp, overlong cutscenes, nonsensical story, miscellaneous quirks and badass fighting systems that come with the label. It's saddened me to see the proportion of Japanese games that I own on the 360 shrink so much compared to the last generation. Bayonetta is a great reminder of just how good Japanese games can be. The game was difficult, even on normal and when I first started, the high camp, overlong cutscenes, nonsensical story and miscellaneous quirks grated. Eventually though, I stopped caring and let myself get swept along in the silliness of it all. Bayonetta is a great character, hypersexualised yes, but assertive and strong at the same time. She's a woman that's always on top of any situation, whether she's staring down a huge boss, riding a missile in a great Space Harrier tribute or sliding a motorbike under a lorry in my personal favourite section of the game, the Outrun inspired, Afterburner soundtracked Route 666.

The real star of the show was the combat though, balanced, nuanced,  precise, yet hyperkinetic, showy and over the top. If I died it was because it was my own bloody fault rather than the fault of the game. It's never cheap, but it is busy. You need to keep track of everything, but there is no attack that cannot be dodged. If you're properly dialled in, you can't be touched.

The game is chock full of Sega references, and I wonder, with Nintendo publishing the sequel as a Wii-U exclusive, what Platinum Games are going to pull out of Nintendo's past to play with. One thing is for certain though, Bayonetta 2 on the Wii - U is going to be interesting.

I suppose this brings me neatly onto the Wii - U, which I had the good fortune to experience over christmas.

First impressions were:

1: It's small. Really small. Around half the volume of my 360.

2: The Gamepad is going to take some getting used to.

3: Oh, I get it now. It's like a giant, superpowered DS

We were playing five player Nintendoland, and I have to say, it was a whole lot of fun. A bit like Mario Party without the hateful boardgame segment. The fact that it was so much fun isn't really all that surprising. Nintendo excel at local multiplayer. Of all the games companies out there today, Nintendo is the only one that doesn't seem to have lost sight of how great getting your mates together around the TV can be. The two best games were variations on hide and seek, Mario Chase and Luigi's ghost mansion, where the player with the Gamepad used the screen to get away from the other players or sneak up on them. Getting one over on your mates without them seeing where you came from is a great feeling.

My only gripes are that there aren't any analogue triggers on the Gamepad and that the touchscreen could have a higher resolution and could be multi touch. But really, these are small issues that won't matter. Even though I've only spent time with one game, I think the Wii - U will shape up to be a really great machine, if the developers can step up to the challenge that the gamepad presents. I'd hate to see it loaded down with shovelware like the Wii was.

And finally, something to get off my chest.

I'll admit to the HMV issue hitting me by surprise, and to having a vested interest. It saddens me to think that they might go under. I have fond memories of the place. If you know me, you'll know my first album was What's the Story, Morning Glory? by Oasis, it was on cassette, but the first actual CD I bought with my own money was Feeder's Echo Park, and I bought it from HMV. While I was at college, HMV was pretty much the sole provider of the soundtrack to my life. A significant proportion of the sixtyish PS1 games I own came from there too. The internet was a pretty new thing back then, I think I was still on Dial Up, and it hadn't begun to eat into HMV's sales in the way that eventually sent it into administration. 

After a few years in the wilderness in a rubbish job, I accidentally wound up working for HMV, and I felt like I belonged there. I left last year, but my offices still join to those of my old spot at HMV and I see my old colleagues there all the time, and now I worry for them. Whether you were bothered by the news or you thought HMV had it coming because they were rubbish / too expensive / too corporate, don't forget that real people with bills and houses and children will be losing their jobs if a buyer isn't found. I don't like ending on a downer, but we all know losing your job through no fault of your own is a horrible thing. Nobody likes going to the jobcentre. Let's not wish it on the thousands of people who work for HMV.

You had me at WipeOut

Those who know me know I like WipeOut. I mean I really like WipeOut. I love the graphics, the handling, the sleek, minimalist aesthetic, the consistently fantastic and bang on trend soundtracks, the lot.

It’s responsible for a lot of snap decisions to buy a console that in the past have wound up being pretty fruitful. I decided on a Playstation when I first played WipeOut 2097 at a school friend's house and it’s a decision I feel I will never regret. Mainly because Wip3Out came out two years later and glued itself into my disc tray. To a lesser extent, the same goes for WipeOut Fusion for the PS2, which I never really mastered, and WipeOut HD on the PS3, which I most certainly have mastered.

Recently I tried WipeOut HD in 3D and I was sold instantly. After years of scepticism over 3D cinema, suddenly it made sense. Somehow there wasn’t even any of the ghosting which puts me off seeing a 3D film at the cinema. It was smooth as silk. Vineta K looked beautiful as it stretched into the distance, and watching my quake disruptor disappear into the screen was just incredible Admittedly one race at Rapier Class did completely fry my retinas and melt my brain, but I was so blown away, I told myself I could get used to it. I probably couldn’t, and I'm yet to try a Zone race, but I can't help myself. I get such a buzz out of WipeOut that it just makes my mind susceptible to a dumb idea or two.

WipeOut suckered me into buying a PSP. And while I love WipeOuts Pure and Pulse, a lot of the games on that system never really did it justice, even though I built up a fairly decent sized library of games. On release of the PS Vita, Sony nearly got me again. My local Game store had a demo unit running Wipeout 2048. It was beautiful. It was awesome. And holding the Vita gave me cramp, but I still wanted a Vita there and then, and I very nearly bought one, but I'm an adult now and I can be objective when that amount of money is going to fly away from my bank account. I took a step back and had a look at what other games the system had to offer, and with the exception of Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the answer was none.

There was next to nothing on the Vita on release that screamed, “BUY ME,” apart from those two games, and even now, it feels like most of the games on it are home console conversions. Don’t get me wrong, conversions are nice, but I already have them to play on my big screen at home, where games like that belong. With the exception of Gravity Rush, there is still nothing on the Vita that makes me want to own one, and I can’t abandon my sanity and spend that much on one to play three games. I made that mistake with the PSP. I don’t need another slab of plastic gathering dust on my games shelf.

I know it’s been said already, but this is an issue Sony really needs to address. A system lives and dies on the standard of its games, and it seems that everyone, publishers, developers, consumers, everyone, is ignoring the Vita. Without the games, the Vita will go the way of the 3DO. And even if we do see some unmissable content arrive for Vita, with the way its life has started, it could go the way of the Dreamcast instead. Loved by the few, ignored by the many.

So this goes out to Sony. I want a Vita, I really do, but I can’t justify buying one yet. Not until you give us games that only Vita can do. Games like Tearaway. If there were more like that, I’d buy one tomorrow.

Another Wipeout might help too.