Author: Chris Scullion

Chris Scullion is a Scottish video games journalist who's been covering video games professionally for 16 years. For the first six years of his career he worked at the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK, then became the Games Editor of CVG before its untimely end. After setting up his own site, Tired Old Hack, Chris then joined Video Games Chronicle (VGC) where he is currently Features Editor. He has a passion for retro games and cataloguing their history, hence his ongoing series of console encyclopedia books (search his name on Amazon).

Layton’s Mystery Journey (3DS) review

Published on by Chris Scullion5 Comments
Nintendo / Level-5
3DS, iOS, Android (3DS version reviewed)

I remember back in November 2008 when Professor Layton And The Curious Village was released on the DS in the UK.

The DS was massively successful at the time, partly thanks to the likes of Brain Training and partly thanks to the fact the Wii was doing similar degrees of gangbusters.

As such, following a TV ad campaign, the first Professor Layton game sold out all over the UK and became nigh-on impossible to buy until well after Christmas.

Now, here we are nearly a decade later and it’s fair to say the situation has changed. Nintendo is once again massively popular thanks to the Switch and 3DS, but the Layton series doesn’t appear to have enjoyed the same continued success.

Instead, Layton’s Mystery Journey is out tomorrow and it’s fair to say social media isn’t exactly white hot with hype surrounding it. Continue reading “Layton’s Mystery Journey (3DS) review” →

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions (3DS) review

Published on by Chris Scullion2 Comments
Nintendo / AlphaDream
Nintendo 3DS

There aren’t many game series that manage to last more than a decade with the same developer intact, but AlphaDream has been rocking the Mario & Luigi games for 14 years now.

Although it continues to see critical success with each Mario & Luigi game released though, the fact that the first title in the series – Superstar Saga on the Game Boy Advance – is now nearly a decade and a half old means many of today’s gamers never got a chance to play it.

That problem has now been resolved with this 3DS remake of Superstar Saga, and it’s a testament to the 2004 release that so little of the core game has been changed here. Continue reading “Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions (3DS) review” →

Review round-up: Switch eShop special

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Last week a metric fuckton of games (trust me, I weighed it) were released on the Switch eShop, so I spent the weekend rinsing the shit out of some of them for your consumer advice pleasure. In today’s round up:

• is Thimbleweed Park more like Monkey Island or Space Chimps?
• is Golf Story a legend at fore play, or an awkward fumble out-of-bounds?
• does Picross S offer another brilliant square meal, or should it be blocked?
• is Butcher a glorious helping of gore, or a grotty little gunge pit?
• does Binaries offer double delights, or a second helping of slop?
• does Conga Master Party have toe-tapping skills, or two left feet?
• is Deemo an operatic masterpiece, or a Fisher Price xylophone? Continue reading “Review round-up: Switch eShop special” →

VHS Preservation Project #3: Blown Away (PS1)

Published on by Chris Scullion1 Comment

The Video Game VHS Preservation Project is an attempt to digitise as many video game VHS tapes as possible for the purposes of preservation. Click here for more information.

For the third of my VHS Preservation Project videos, it’s time to move away from the SNES and focus on what could have been its successor in an alternative timeline.

Blown Away is a video commissioned by Sony in 1996 to showcase the games coming to the original PlayStation in late ’96 and early ’97.

It’s got some interesting imagery and loads of stylishly put together game footage. Well, stylish for its time.

Continue reading “VHS Preservation Project #3: Blown Away (PS1)” →

SNES Mini tips special (’90s style)

Published on by Chris Scullion4 Comments

What’s the haps, kidz?

The SNES Mini is finally with us, and gamers all over the world are reliving (or discovering for the first time) the glory days of early ‘90s gaming.

Some of these SNES classics can be on the tricky side, though, which is why back in the day every games magazine worth its salt had a tips section.

It doesn’t really happen much these days – partly because simple ‘cheats’ like passwords and controller inputs are rare in modern games – but there was nothing quite like the excitement of buying a new mag, flipping to the tips section and finding a new cheat for a game you owned.

With that in mind, I’ve gone through my own personal archives and dug up some never-before-seen SNES tips I wrote way back in the early ‘90s. Yes, I definitely wrote these 20+ years ago and am not making that up for an inevitable comedic payoff layer. Honest. Continue reading “SNES Mini tips special (’90s style)” →

SNES Mini review

Published on by Chris Scullion6 Comments

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is one of the finest games consoles ever created.

Of the 783 games officially released for Nintendo’s 16-bit console in the west, an impressively high number are now considered classics.

The SNES Mini takes 20 of these games, adds one that was never released, and bundles them all in a self-contained miniature tribute to that glorious grey box that shaped the ‘90s for so many gamers.

The result is a solid piece of kit that does a good job of showing what the SNES was capable of… even though the number of games included does sort of undersell that a bit.

Continue reading “SNES Mini review” →

VHS Preservation Project #2: Donkey Kong Country Exposed (UK version)

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

The Video Game VHS Preservation Project is an attempt to digitise as many video game VHS tapes as possible for the purposes of preservation. Click here for more information.

The second of my VHS Preservation Project videos is one that will be a little more familiar to US readers than the Super Mario All-Stars Video was.

This Donkey Kong Country VHS was also made available to American subscribers to Nintendo Power magazine, and was called Donkey Kong Country: Exposed.

This UK version is more or less the same, except for a couple of changes. It doesn’t feature the US tape’s hidden ending, which gives a sneak peek at Killer Instinct.

It does, however, include four or five minutes of UK Nintendo TV commercials. Continue reading “VHS Preservation Project #2: Donkey Kong Country Exposed (UK version)” →

VHS Preservation Project #1: The Super Mario All-Stars Video

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

The Video Game VHS Preservation Project is an attempt to digitise as many video game VHS tapes as possible for the purposes of preservation. Click here for more information.

It’s time to finally kick off my VHS Preservation Project, and what better way to start it off than with the Super Mario All-Stars Video?

This was a promotional tape given away by Nintendo UK in 1993, to promote the release of Super Mario All-Stars.

Despite this, it doesn’t really feature much in the video. Instead, most of the time is spent reviewing other games, showing you how the Nintendo Hotline worked and taking you through the making of Nigel Mansell’s World Championship with Gremlin Graphics.

Best of all though, it’s presented by Craig Charles, better known as Lister in legendary British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. Continue reading “VHS Preservation Project #1: The Super Mario All-Stars Video” →

Introducing the Video Game VHS Preservation Project

Published on by Chris Scullion19 Comments

Over the past 30+ years as a gamer, I’ve gathered a load of gaming memorabilia. A lot of this has been sold or traded over the years but some of it has stayed with me all this time.

One thing that has remained is a large part of my video game VHS collection.

During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, gamers like myself would regularly get VHS tapes related to gaming.

Some of these were promotional tapes put together by hardware or software manufacturers, in the hope that seeing their games or consoles in action would inspire you to buy them more than mere words and screenshots in a magazine could.

Others were game-related videos made by magazine publishers or other companies: tips videos, player guides or even (always failed) attempts at a regular video magazine.

For 20th century gamers, these VHS tapes were the YouTube of their time. But there’s a problem: video tapes don’t last forever, and the picture quality degrades with every view.

Many of these tapes are already becoming scarce: there’s only really a niche market for them, and so most are just thrown out as people get rid of their VHS collections and move exclusively to DVD or Blu-ray.

Others are being sold for crazy money on eBay as traders realise their increasing value and try to make a daft profit off them.

There will eventually be a time when none of these tapes exist any more, either due to them being thrown away or simply deteriorating over time.

I want to preserve as many of them as possible before that happens, to ensure they remain available online as a way of documenting how games coverage and promotion has evolved over time. Continue reading “Introducing the Video Game VHS Preservation Project” →