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).
We’re very much living in the age of the mini system, with practically every relevant company eagerly miniaturising its consoles and computers in the hope that lightning will strike again with the same intensity of the NES Mini.
These mini systems almost always come with full-sized controllers, which makes perfect sense: after all, it’s all well and good shrinking a Mega Drive down to a fifth of the size but the technology doesn’t exist yet to shrink our hands to the same degree.
What happens, though, when the original control method wasn’t that small to begin with? What if the system was, say, a dirty big arcade cabinet? Cue the Capcom Home Arcade, the ‘mini’ system that’s bigger than pretty much every full-sized one.
Containing an interesting selection of 16 Capcom arcade titles spanning from 1988 to 2001, the Capcom Home Arcade is huge in plenty of ways, from its dimensions to its price tag, to… okay, it’s huge in two ways.
The return of Tired Old Hack also means the return of the Tired Old Hack podcast!
After a little recap on what I’ve been up over the past six months of downtime, yer man takes a look at today’s claim that Nintendo is planning to port two more Wii U games over to the Switch in 2020.
I then take on a bunch of listener questions, covering topics as diverse as the all-digital future of gaming, whether Nintendo will have a quiet first six months of 2020 and where the WWE 2K series can go now after its latest shambolic effort.
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This article is available in both written and video format. The video shows the games in action while I read the article as a voiceover, so if you watch the video you don’t need to read the written article that follows since it’s the same ‘script’.
And so, the curtain draws on 2019 and it’s easily been one of the most exhausting years for yer man Scullion, most notably with the completion of my SNES Encyclopedia, which should be out in August 2020.
That’s not to say I haven’t had time to squeeze in my fair share of gaming, though, so here’s my ten favourite games of the past year. Continue reading “The 10 best games of 2019”→
Earlier this year I found myself spinning a hell of a lot of plates. Not only was I dealing with the usual juggling act of my 9-to-5 job, my freelance work and my Tired Old Hack work, I was also still getting used to the ‘new father’ role: my daughter only turned a year old this past June.
In the second half of this year another fairly large plate was added to the mix in the shape of the SNES Encyclopedia, another 180,000 word epic that soaked up all my free time.
You can blame this one for the lack of regular content. The kid, not Shenmue III. I haven’t even had time to start that one yet
Eventually some of the plates had to stop spinning, for the sake of my own health. The first was my 9-to-5 job: I decided to take a financial hit and drop down to two days a week, so I could watch my daughter for the other three days.
Because the move to part-time meant freelance money was more important than ever, and because I was also contractually obliged to finish the SNES Encyclopedia in time, I had to temporarily stop another plate spinning: Tired Old Hack.
Since I started the SNES Encyclopedia in June, I’ve written just 14 articles on the site. They weren’t all full-fat articles, either: two of them were linking to YouTube videos I’d made, two were podcasts and two were Game Club articles, essentially inviting readers to play a game together.
That leaves eight ‘proper’ written articles in six months: this is nowhere near the level I wanted to hit, but there simply weren’t enough hours in the day, and the reality was that my paid commitments had to take priority.
Finally, however, my situation has changed: the SNES Encyclopedia has been written and sent off to the publisher, Serena’s a little older now and is a little easier to take care of, and I’ve set a routine in place that means when I start on my third book it’ll no longer take over my life like the SNES one did.
What this ultimately means is that I can finally do something I’ve been looking forward to doing for months: I’m picking up that plate, putting it back on the pole and spinning it again, with the aim of not stopping it this time.
We’ve had four Tired Old Hack Game Clubs now. The first two were a success, with oodles of players joining forces to play Zelda II and StarTropics together. Then we tried with Earthbound and Phantasy Star and the numbers dropped drastically.
The formula now seems clear: folk are happy to get involved if they don’t have to spend much money (which is understandable). So, with the Switch now in possession of a growing number of SNES games, let’s go with one of those. Or two of them, as it were. Continue reading “TOH Game Club 5 – Breath of Fire I & II”→
WARNING: As if it wasn’t already clear by the title, this article is a little swearier than usual. If you have Pokémon-loving kids, please don’t let them read this. Send them to Serebii instead, which is the ultimate Pokémon site.
Pokémon Sword & Shield are now a little more than a month away, and fans are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the series’ eighth generation.
Well, that is, except for one little issue: it’s been known for some time now that not every Pokémon will be included in the game. Some of the older ones are going to be axed, with developer Game Freak citing development time as the main reason.
This begs the question, then: which Pokémon will be in, and which ones will be out?
Yer man Scullion’s stepped in to solve the problem. Here’s my list of 20 Pokémon we could all happily do without.
To the best of my knowledge – not counting the ridiculous 24-hour stream that’s currently running at the time of writing – none of the Pokémon listed below have already been confirmed for the game (with one exception).
This means almost all of them could still potentially be missing when the game releases on 15 November.
Note: if Vanillite hadn’t already been confirmed it definitely would have been in here too, because it’s just a fucking ice cream cone.
When it comes to the Legend of Zelda series, one game stands out in particular as something of a black horse: a game that defies the normal conventions of the series and introduces a bunch of new ideas.
That game, of course, is Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
What’s that? You were expecting it to be Link’s Awakening? Nah mate, Zelda II. It’s proper side-scrolling and everything. Give it a go, it’s good.
Gemhunter hits the 15-episode milestone with a return to the PS2, and this time we’re taking this shit to the beach.
I’m reliably informed that this one is actually called Summer Heat Beach Volleyball, even though the box clearly makes the title look like Beach Volleyball: Summer Heat.
Regardless, this is one of the last games published by Acclaim, which went bankrupt just a year later. Should it be blamed for it, or was it actually a good game? Let’s find out.
Gemhunter is my video series in which I try out forgotten, ignored, licensed or shovelware games I’ve never played in the hope of finding a hidden gem. The video is presented unedited so you can experience the game for the first time as I do. Enjoyed this video and want to see more? You can find past Gemhunter episodes here.
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Hack of All Trades is my regular video series in which I try out ‘simulator’ games based on actual jobs to see how well I’d fare doing those jobs in real life.
I recorded the first Hack of All Trades a mere fortnight before my daughter was born, so it’s hopefully understandable that episode 2 comes a mere 13 months later. Safe to say the third video will have a much smaller wait.
This time I’m taking a look at PC Building Simulator. Released on the PC earlier this year, it’s just launched on Xbox One, Switch and PS4. I decided to give the Xbox One version a go to see if I’ve got what it takes.
PC Building Simulator is available now on Steam, Xbox One, Switch and PS4.
In order that I could make this video, I received a code for the game from a PR. The content of the video was in no way influenced by this.
If you enjoyed this and other videos and want to help me make them more frequently, please consider donating to my Patreon account.
Don’t want to commit to a regular payment? I’ve now got a PayPal ‘tips’ jar: if you like what you read feel free to chuck yer man Scullion a couple of quid here or there and help stock up my Irn Bru fund so I can continue working away like a bastard.
Alternatively, if you can’t afford to support me on Patreon, please do your normal Amazon UK shopping via this link or Amazon US shopping via this link. Tired Old Hack is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.co.uk and affiliated sites.
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