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).
The infinite food scenario is the most commonly used example: if you were stuck on a desert island and could only eat your favourite food for the rest of your life, you’d still probably be sick of it after about a month. Even if it was Nando’s.
This was the fate that befell the ‘plastic guitar’ sub-genre of rhythm action games spearheaded by Harmonix, who created Guitar Hero and then – in an odd twist of fate – went on to create its rival Rock Band after being purchased by MTV. Continue reading “Rock Band 4 hands-on preview – It’s Rock Band, innit”→
If you’re the sort who even slightly follows gaming news you’ll probably already be aware that FIFA 16 will feature women’s football teams for the first time in the series’ 22-year history.
To say I’m excited about this is an enormous understatement: not just because it offers the ‘new content’ FIFA critics demand on an annual basis, but because of what it stands for.
Let me be honest: I’m not a massive follower of women’s football. I would be lying if I pretended to know a lot about it. I’ve only been to two women’s games and though I keep an eye on the Celtic Women and Scotland Women teams, my involvement doesn’t go much further than knowing Kelly Clark is a bloody good player:
What excites me, then, is what I might end up learning about women’s football by playing FIFA 16. I’m not the sort of person who’ll just randomly watch a football match (men’s or women’s) if my team isn’t playing, but I am the sort of person who’ll play a random match on FIFA regardless of what team I’m controlling.
I am a big fan of the Windows Phone operating system. It’s intuitive, it’s time-saving and its little grid-shaped layout looks cool as hell.
Besides, as a self-confessed Xbox achievement hunter, the added benefit of mobile games that add to my Gamerscore is too much to resist.
There’s just one problem (other than the aforementioned achievement obsession): my Windows Phone of choice, a Nokia Lumia 1020, had major battery issues since launch for reasons I could never pin down.
Any time I booted up Internet Explorer – which, incidentally is the best mobile browser I’ve ever used by far – the phone would rapidly heat up and the battery would start plummeting. Even after closing it down and turning on its battery saver functionality I’d still find myself losing 10-20% battery an hour.
After 18 months of putting up with this, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and go for my first ever Android phone. I will always love the Windows Phone operating system, but it’s time to move on. With this in mind, I’ve decided to pen this song, to the tune of Candle In The Wind by Elton John: Continue reading “An ode to the Nokia Lumia 1020”→
I launched Tired Old Hack at the end of January and right away my introductory article got a decent response, mainly thanks to my lovely Twitter followers getting on board from the beginning.
Here’s how much fun I’m having writing this site: I can put up a crap stock photo of a monkey using a laptop and I couldn’t give a fuuuuuck
Since then, while the quantity of articles hasn’t been as great as I’d have liked – thanks to freelance work and job-hunting, which have to take priority just now – I’ve been happy with the quality and, hopefully, so have you.
While I loved being a paid video games journalist for the best part of nine years, it’s so refreshing to have no limits on deadline, article length, topic of discussion or what have you. I’m having fun slowly building this site and I hope that shines through.
Until now I’ve just been posting articles as ideas pop up in my head, so you’d be forgiven at this stage for wondering just what exactly it is this site is supposed to be. Is it a news site, a reviews site, a features site?
In truth, it’s whatever I feel it is each day. I’m not fussed about having a structure at this early stage in the site’s life and I’m enjoying that freedom.
That said, I do feel it’s worth letting you know the sort of content you can expect on Tired Old Hack in the coming months, so you’ve at least got an idea of my short-term plans for the site. Continue reading “Plans for the site”→
Last week Tired Old Hack got all sentimental, kicking off with my article ‘I remember‘, in which I shared some of my childhood gaming memories in a manner designed to aim directly at your delicate heartstrings and give them a bloody good tugging.
This then spawned ‘You remember‘, a follow-up article in which I invited readers to share their own memories, which it turns out were similarly lovely and awww-inspiring (see what I did there?).
We aren’t quite done with the nostalgia though. One reader, my lovely chum Caitlin, didn’t just deliver a few paragraphs of memories: she dumped an entire bastard Word document in my inbox.
Normally I’d guiltily cut something like that down to a more manageable size and hope the writer in question didn’t notice (they always do), but as luck would have it I bloody loved Caitlin’s article, so I’ve asked her if it was okay to publish the whole thing in its entirety on the site, all illustrated and that.
Here, then, is the first ever guest article on Tired Old Hack: a lot earlier than I expect to be posting one, but hopefully you’ll agree it’s worth it.
I remember getting a second hand BBC Model B when I was nine. It was already an old platform by the time I got my hands on it, but that just meant it came with tons of games to get into.
I remember never getting anywhere in the text-based Lord Of The Rings game: no matter what direction I went in, the Black Riders would come. On one unprecedented occasion, I found a mithril shirt and got to the stone giants.
Far more interesting was the discovery I made whilst playing Sam. I was carrying nothing, Merry had pumpkin, Pippin had some matches and Frodo, obviously, had the ring. In a fit of pique over the fact Merry wouldn’t give me any more pumpkin, I typed: Continue reading “Guest article: Caitlin remembers”→
Last week I posted ‘I remember’, an article in which I shared some of my gaming memories to show how looking back on them can cheer us up when we’re feeling down.
I had a lovely response to the article – for which I’m massively grateful – and a similarly brilliant response to my request for your own gaming memories. You delivered them by the virtual bucketload.
Here, then, are a selection of memories from Tired Old Hack readers, Twitter followers and friends. We’re all different people and we were all brought up in different situations, but we’re all united by the warm feeling we get when we think back to when video games made us happy.
I remember my old man coming home with a rubber keyboard Speccy in an old Tesco bag that he hadn’t told us he was buying. The whole family crowded round our huge CRT TV in total amazement at what we were seeing. I can still remember being in total awe of the graphics in Pajamarama and playing that and School Daze endlessly even though I was rubbish at both of them.
Skool Daze
I remember visiting the Golden Goose arcade and the very start of the peir in Llandudno. Rightly or wrongly it was always the highlight of visiting my grandparents and I was introduced to so many games that turned out to be genre-defining classics, although I didn’t realise it at the time.
One time a guy asked if he could join my game of Golden Axe and when I said “sure thing” he proceeded to kick the the life right out of me, before my 10-year-old eyes. I was too busy laughing at his audacity to be angry and mourn the loss of my precious 10p. We ended up gaming together for an hour or so until Thunderblade had swallowed the last of the week’s spends.
You’re right, gaming gives us all memories that we can look back on fondly as well as providing a fantastic distraction from the heaps of actual manure that comes along with adult life.
Your article got me thinking and I’m so grateful for my old man introducing me to computers at such a young age (Vic-20 era) even though he had little interest in them himself. It was that spark that started a lifelong passion for gaming that doesn’t seem to be dimming at all.
Having the opportunity to see games develop from Radar Rat Race to Grand Theft Auto V is a journey that not everyone had the chance to experience. Watching these games evolve over my 37 years on this planet has been such a special experience and not every generation gets to witness something like that.
I remember being extremely young, maybe three or four, and playing Dangermouse In The Black Forest Chateau with my dad on his ZX Spectrum 48K. It was a text adventure and he’d read it out to me like a story and I’d tell him what I wanted to do.
I have very few memories of being so young but for some reason this one sticks out. Being unable to read at the time, it’s the only vivid memory I have of seeing weird symbols (the words on the screen) and somehow knowing they meant something, but not knowing what. Continue reading “I remember”→
This is the fourth in my ’30 Best’ series of articles in which I discuss my favourite games ever on a system-by-system basis for the first time. In case you missed them, I’ve already covered the 30 best DS games, 30 best GameCube games and 30 best Dreamcast games.
As before, because this is my own personal list and not a collaborative effort for a magazine or website, there will be some glaring omissions of games I simply didn’t play or didn’t like. So yes, I know SimCity and Civilization aren’t on there: deal widdit, as the kids say.
If one of your favourites isn’t on the list, feel free to give it a shoutout in the comments below (politely though, mind) and tell everyone what it meant to you.
Xbox One versus PS4? Pffft. Xbox 360 versus PS3? Load of pish. Mega Drive versus SNES? Wouldn’t wipe my balls with it.
The Amiga 500, the first major Amiga model
The two biggest wars among gamers – in the UK, at least – were between computer owners, not console owners.
The ’80s saw a brutal three-way battle between the ZX Spectrum (hooray!), the Commodore 64 (yes, well played) and the Amstrad CPC (hahaha, aye, okay mate).
When these systems died out and were replaced by 16-bit computers, the war evolved and two new competitors stepped forward (because nobody counts the Acorn Archimedes).
I’ve interviewed a number of game developers and other personalities over the years. Of them all, two stand out as personal favourites: Suda 51 and Shigeru Miyamoto.
I’ll cover my first Suda 51 interview in a later article, but for now let me focus on Miyamoto.
Plot twist: I was wearing trousers, he wasn’t
If you’ve got any sort of gaming knowledge, you know that Miyamoto is, quite simply, the man. If you don’t have any sort of gaming knowledge, I think you’ve ended up here by mistake, probably because you were searching for “Emma Watson upskirt” and Google brought you here because of this sentence. In which case stick around, you sick bastard, you might learn something.
Miyamoto is the single most influential video game creator and developer of all time. People will argue with this. Those people are wrong. Don’t fight them, pity them.
I’ve actually interviewed Miyamoto twice, and both were special for different reasons. The second time was in person, and led to the photo you see above, so naturally it was special for that reason alone: a one-on-one chat with the man whose work shaped my childhood and, ultimately, my career and life. Continue reading “My first Miyamoto interview from 2007”→
Believe it or not, I’ve never really been a massive fan of Lego sets.
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely want to be. I absolutely love what it stands for, I adore how timeless the design is, and I enjoy seeing all the different things people make with it.
I’m just not a very creative person when it comes to making things. It’s the same reason I don’t like Minecraft: any time I play it the result is me just standing there going “ummmm…” and never deciding what to make.
The Lego products that interest me most, then, are the pre-set construction kits that give you all the pieces you need in the box and let you build shit like the Millennium Falcon, the Simpsons’ house and even the United Nations headquarters.
Much as I’d love to get stuck into those however, they’re just too pricey. The recently-released SHIELD Helicarrier from their Marvel Super Heroes line is a wallet-squirming £269.99. Smaller things, like the Eiffel Tower, are still £30 a pop: that’s just too much money for me for something I’ll play with (i.e. build) once and never use again.
Most of my relationship with Lego, then, consists of playing the brilliant Lego games from Traveller’s Tales / TT Games. From the original Lego Star Wars all the way up to the recently released Lego Batman 3, I’ve owned all sixteen licensed Lego games and am pumped for the two upcoming offerings, Lego Marvel’s Avengers and Lego Jurassic World.
It’s possible to have too much of a good thing.
Tired Old Hack 