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).
This review is available in both written and video format. Both versions have the same ‘script’, so if you’re able to watch the video I’d recommend doing that, since you can see the game in action without worrying about missing anything I’ve written. Here’s the video:
Dotemu / Lizardcube PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC (PS4 version reviewed)
Streets of Rage 2 is one of my top 5 favourite games of all time. To my mind, it’s a virtually flawless game: one that would feel just as immensely satisfying during my thousandth playthrough as it did during the first.
Because of this, you’d think I would have been thrilled when it was announced that Streets of Rage 4 was finally on the way. On the contrary: having watched some of the trailers, I was worried that this may not be the Streets of Rage I knew and loved, and that in the 26(!) years that have passed since the last game, it looked like something special may have been lost.
When I was offered review code for the game a fortnight ago I reluctantly accepted, ready to have my heart broken. Instead, for the past two weeks my heart has been singing from the rooftops. Although it’ll never replace my true love, there’s no denying that Streets of Rage 4 is glorious. Continue reading “Streets of Rage 4 review”→
You can’t move for mini retro consoles these days. It’s a good job they’re so small, really.
Ever since Nintendo launched the NES Classic Mini three and a half years ago, we’ve been swimming in chibi versions of vintage video game systems.
The NES, the SNES, the Mega Drive, the Neo Geo… even the Commodore 64 was miniaturised (until someone saw sense and just re-released a full-sized one with a working keyboard).
Even Capcom decided to get in on the action, clearly revealing that they have no idea what ‘mini’ means by releasing a massive fuck-off arcade stick with a bunch of old coin-op classics on it.
Now it’s time for a dinky do-over of a system I desperately wanted to get the mini treatment, but didn’t actually expect we’d get: the NEC PC Engine. Well, a version of it, at least. Look, it’s confusing, but I’ll explain all in a second.
The EU version, the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini, was supposed to launch back on 19 March, but then there was some sort of virus thing – I think I saw it briefly mentioned in one of the papers – and by pure chance one of the tiny handful of buildings shut down as a result was the Chinese factory that was manufacturing them.
Although there’s still not a set date, I’m reliably informed a release is now imminent, which is why I was sent one of them for review purposes. Let’s get stuck in, then, and find out how the CoreGrafx Mini performs and where it fits into the bigger (smaller) picture of mini consoles.
I’m on the mend from an unknown illness that may or may not have been ‘that’ one, so let’s have a brief podcast to celebrate.
I’m not yet able to ramble on for an hour like I usually do without going out of breath and my throat getting really sore, so this one’s a little shorter than usual.
Still, it doesn’t stop me discussing the latest news and answering some listeners’ questions.
How to listen
If you’re just listening while browsing, the podcast was at the top of this article. Click play and you’re off and running.
If you’d rather have the MP3 as a downloadable file so you can stick it on your media player of choice, right-click and save this link.
If you’ve got iTunes, you can find the podcast there by searching for ‘Tired Old Hack’ or just following this link. Please subscribe if you enjoy it, and write up a wee review.
Alternatively, the Tired Old Hack Podcast is now on Spotify! You can listen to it by searching for ‘Tired Old Hack’ or by following this link if you have the appropriate app installed.
Or, if you’d rather use your own podcast app, use this feed URL to subscribe to the podcast and get access to new episodes as they’re added:
In case you missed it last time, The Fortnight in Games is a bi-weekly rundown of the bigger and more interesting stories that have happened in the gaming world, with a healthy helping of shit jokes dolloped in for good measure.
As ever, each story below contains a link to the fantastic Video Games Chronicle (VGC), the spiritual successor to CVG and the best site for high quality, well-researched daily gaming news.
For some reason, many of us have been staying home recently. Something to do with us all being anti-social or something, I haven’t really been paying attention to the news.
Whatever the reason, there’s a chance you may be at a loose end when it comes to keeping yourself entertained, and you may have found yourself spending your evenings taking part in that new national pastime: scrolling endlessly through Netflix’s menus and never choosing anything to watch.
Part of this is because the app versions of Netflix never really let you properly browse the full catalogue: often you have to specifically search for something by name to find it. But who’s got the time to investigate the catalogue and find all the good stuff?
HELLO THERE, FRIEND.
Yer man Scullion has put together a list of 40 movies and shows on Netflix UK related to video games. I haven’t seen them all and therefore can’t vouch for their quality, and some are clearly aimed at children: then again, some of us have children, and most of us are kids at heart anyway.
I obviously love video games, but I also have a love for horror movies: especially weird, cheesy or just plain terrible ones.
Before I started Tired Old Hack, I had my own site dedicated to these movies, which went by the name of That Was A Bit Mental. It’s still around, it just hasn’t been updated for a wee while.
When writing about video games was my full-time job, TWABM was my hobby and my way of experimenting with my writing style: it was my way of relaxing, because I was able to write freely without worrying about the editorial control that comes with writing for a publication owned by a company.
When CVG was closed down and I went freelance, I set up Tired Old Hack, and it rapidly replaced TWABM as my outlet for writing in my own style. As such, Tired Old Hack is now the site I use to relax and experiment with my writing style, while TWABM lies there like one of the many zombies dotted among its pages.
During the height of my TWABM phase I wrote two ebooks, each offering special ‘extended versions’ of 100 reviews from the site, with extra jokes, little bits of trivia at the end and advice on where to get them on DVD. I’ve had these ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle Store for a while now and they’ve always brought in a few quid here and there.
With the coronavirus currently doing the rounds and more of us being confined to our homes as each day passes, I figured I’d try to help you pass the time by offering you both ebooks for free. That’s 200 reviews of weird movies, spread out over some 180,000 words.
They’re in PDF format and are just saved as basic text, so you can either read them right away by clicking the links below or save them and read them on any e-reader app or device that suits you.
In today’s busy times, it’s sometimes difficult to keep on top of all the big gaming news.
Although there are a number of high quality websites out there reporting news on a daily basis, sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to sift through hundreds of articles.
Yer man Scullion is here to help with The Fortnight in Games, a fortnightly (obviously) rundown of the bigger and more interesting stories of the past two weeks.
Every story below contains a link to the wonderful Video Games Chronicle (VGC), the spiritual successor to CVG and the very best place for high quality, well researched daily gaming news (and I’m not just saying that because I write the odd review for them).
If you want to know about any of the stories you see below, clink on their respective links to head to VGC and get significantly more detail. And fewer shit jokes, which is an extra bonus.
Kartography is my regular series in which I look at licensed kart racers throughout gaming history, and figure out where they fit on my all-time karting game leaderboard.
Digital Jesters / Neko Entertainment PS2, PC, DS, GBA (PS2 version reviewed)
Before Tired Old Hack went on a brief hiatus, the Kartography series had ended on a high note with Team Sonic Racing, an enjoyable karting game whose tight handling and teamwork gimmick made up for its relative lack of character diversity.
Now it’s time for Kartography to return, and what better way to mark its comeback than with one of the most notorious karting games ever made?
Crazy Frog Racer is one of the titles that’s regularly rhymed off by folk when the topic of bad licensed racing games arises. But is it truly as bad as it seems, or is it one of those Metroid Prime: Federation Force situations where it didn’t get a fair shake because gamers were ready to hate it anyway?
In March 2018, British company Retro Games Ltd launched THEC64 Mini, a dinky version of the classic Commodore 64 hardware from 1982 repurposed for the modern era.
Although it was undoubtedly great to see the ‘mini’ treatment being dished out to a home computer that was big in the UK back in the day, it’s fair to say THEC64 Mini had some fairly major issues (and not just the awkward way it was spelled).
Now Retro Games is back with a distinctly less mini version of THEC64 – which I’m now going to refer to as The C64 for my own sanity – and what it loses in charm it gains in functionality. This is exactly what I was hoping for the first time around. Continue reading “The C64 (full size) review”→
Header image shamelessly stolen from Nintendo Life
My games journalism career started on 2 May 2006 when I joined the Official Nintendo Magazine (ONM) as a Staff Writer.
In 2009 I was promoted to Games Editor, which basically meant I was in charge of deciding which games should get covered, figuring out how many pages they should get and contacting the publishers and PRs to get review code.
The first issue of ONM I ever worked on: Issue 5, July 2006
I eventually left ONM after six fantastic years to work on the Nintendo Gamer site, but continued to work for the mag on a freelance basis, providing reviews and features and occasionally appearing on the ONM podcast.
Given that these six years covered the entirety of the hugely successful Wii’s run – and the vast majority of that of the DS – it’s probably no surprise that most of my Twitter followers (or at least those who like voting in Twitter polls) have been with me since the ONM days.
These days, the magazine is no more: it closed down in October 2014. The website was wiped too, meaning unless you want to go trawling through archive.org you’re going to struggle to find any ONM articles online.
Before the mag closed down, I accessed its content database and downloaded PDFs of almost every article I’d written: as many of my reviews, previews, news items, guides, letters pages and features as I could get my hands on. I needed to keep hold of some sort of tangible evidence of those six years.
The result is a folder (along with a backup folder on an external drive) consisting of 1051 articles, coming in at over 5GB in size, all containing the words I wrote for the publication that meant so much to me.
Now, much as I’d love to just upload all 5GB and share it with the world, the reality is that Future Publishing still owns the copyright to everything that was created under its roof. It’s issued takedowns to other sites for posting old magazine articles in the past, and I’m not a fan of going to lots of effort to do something only to have it undone.
In December 2018, though, I reached out to Future to ask if I could put together a sort of ONM Advent Calendar on Twitter where each day contained one of my favourite articles from my time at the magazine. They generously gave me permission to republish 24 old articles, which I duly did.
You can only do so much on Twitter, though, and I’d have loved to have said more about each of the articles. So, here they are again, along with more detailed ‘liner notes’. And, just to bring things up to a round 25, I’m also adding my Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 reviews (which Future had also previously given me permission to republish on Tired Old Hack).
My time at Official Nintendo Magazine remains one of my highlights of my life. Hopefully these 25 articles, all written by yours truly, go some way to explaining why it was such a fun and rewarding time. Continue reading “My 25 favourite ONM articles”→
Tired Old Hack 