You may have noticed that Twitter is basically Mad Max at this point, and that Elon Musk – who in this situation is the equivalent of that really old evil guy – keeps pulling rules out of his arse like he was Mick Foley with thumbtacks.
While I don’t quite expect Twitter to just suddenly go under any time soon, I also didn’t expect the one-time richest man in the world to call a cave expert a “pedo guy”, liken the Canadian prime minister to Hitler, tweet “pronouns suck”, ban journalists who reported on a story about a separate Twitter account tracking him, run a car company that was ordered to pay $137 million to a Black employee after he was repeatedly subjected to racial abuse without disciplinary measures being taken, give one of his children some sort of weird equation instead of a name, or decide that linking to other social media on Twitter would get you suspended.
So, you know, just in case.
On the off-chance that Twitter does implode, then – and since posting my Linktree is apparently now a bannable offence – here’s all the other places you can find me, if you decide that you aren’t quite sick of my bullshit yet.
Twitter – Still there for now, and the place you’ll find me most regularly until it does a Fight Club and collapses while the Pixies’ Where is My Mind plays in the background.
Substack – My new email newsletter. I was planning to start this in 2023 anyway, but the rumours of Twitter’s closure forced my hand a bit early, so while it’s quiet at the moment there will be regular newsletters in your inbox starting next year.
Tired Old Hack – I mean, not to be rude, but if you can’t find Tired Old Hack from here then you probably also can’t find your own arse.
Twitch – Now that I’ve finished writing my Dreamcast Encyclopedia, I’m going to be streaming fairly regularly going forwards, so follow me on there for notifcations any time I go live.
YouTube – As an accompaniment to Tired Old Hack, you can find a bunch of my game-related videos here already and there are a lot more to come starting next year.
Instagram – I don’t use this a lot but I’ll use it much more if Twitter ever pegs it, so follow me now for the occasional photo of retro hardware.
Discord – Did you know there’s a Tired Old Hack Discord server? Don’t say ‘no’, because I literally just told you there’s one, so if you say ‘no’ now you’re a liar, even it’s only been a couple of seconds.
TikTok – I’m about 20 years too old for this shit, but if Twitter goes under you’d better believe I’ll be giving it a go anyway. My days of worrying about my image are long gone.
That Was a Bit Mental – Not everyone is interested in reading my reviews of horror and B-movies, and that’s perfectly fine. If you are, though, this is coming back in 2023 so fill your boots.
Cohost – This is currently not being used, but is simply there as a backup. If and when Twitter does go under, this will probably be the social media site I jump over to instead.
Buy my books! – Finally, this isn’t technically any sort of social media or anything but if you think I’m going to pass up an opportunity to pimp my books again, you’re out of your mind.
Last year I went on a wee bit of a Twitter rant in which I explained that I was disappointed I’d only managed to write 26 articles on Tired Old Hack in 2020.
It wasn’t due to laziness or anything, mind you: it basically boiled down a number of things, most notably my daughter’s nursery closing down due to the COVID pandemic.
At the time I was working part-time and had hoped I would be able to spend a couple of days a week working on Tired Old Hack stuff, but when the nursery shut down my priorities obviously completely changed.
Artist’s impression of me taking care of my daughter
As part of my Twitter thread, I ended on a positive note, saying that everything was finally starting to fall back into place again, and that disruption was back to a minimum. I set myself a new goal: 100 Tired Old Hack articles in 2021.
The one you’re reading right now is the third.
Pardon my pessimism, but I don’t think I’m going to hit the milestone. But this isn’t a ‘woe is me’ article: quite the opposite, actually. The reason I’ve failed in my task is because life has continued to throw unexpected changes, and they’ve been good ones.
Because the pandemic rules allowed for childcare and because my mum used to be a professional childminder, she and my dad started looking after Serena as an alternative to nursery. In theory, because I was working part-time, this was going to free up two days a week for me.
I’d agreed to write two books this year: the N64 Encyclopedia and Jumping For Joy (my spin-off book about platformers). With two free days a week to hammer them, that would free up evenings for Tired Old Hack stuff.
The plan lasted a fortnight, because on 15 January I agreed to return to professional games journalism and work full-time for VGC. Yes, yer man is back in amongst it again. Look, we’ve even got a podcast and everything!
I’m so happy to be back doing what I know best again, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t mess up my year a bit. Working full-time is great, but I had already committed to writing two books in 2021, under the impression I’d be working part-time.
Long story short, that’s why Tired Old Hack has flatlined this year: I simply don’t have enough hours in the day, and it’s the only thing I’m juggling that doesn’t have contractual or family commitments to it, therefore it’s the only thing that can realistically take a back seat.
Importantly, though, it’s a temporary one. I’m currently working on The Nintendo 64 Encyclopedia, with the aim to finish it by the end of the year, so the site will probably remain pretty quiet until it’s done because all my free time will be spent working on that.
However, Jumping For Joy was originally planned to be the first in a series of genre-based spin-offs. When I still thought I was going to be working part-time, the plan was to write a genre book, then an Encyclopedia, then a genre book and so on. The second book was going to be about racing games and I was going to start it in January 2022.
Now that I’m full-time again, I just can’t write two books a year. That’s crazy. So the publisher and I have agreed to scrap that series, turning Jumping For Joy into a one-off.
It’s looking good, mind
This basically frees up the entire year for me to write Encyclopedia 5 next year, which in turn will give me more free time again, which in turn will see Tired Old Hack returning.
When the site comes back in 2022, the focus will be almost entirely on retro gaming. Any modern gaming coverage I’ll be writing will be for VGC, with the exception of daft comedy stuff, which will be better suited to here.
Kartography will be back, the VHS Preservation Project will be back, loads of feature ideas I’ve had sitting waiting but haven’t had the chance to implement yet will still be coming too. I’ll also be doing retro reviews of games requested by Patrons (I’ve still got a list of requests from the first time I asked them, and will be doing those first).
And I’ll also be kicking off my ONM issue tours, which will see me taking you through every issue of ONM, complete with loads of brand new video footage as I re-review every game featured. Here’s the prologue for that if you haven’t seen it yet:
Long story short, then, the site is going to stay asleep for the rest of the year, with only a couple of exceptions (most notably the article that will let you pre-order for signed copies of the Mega Drive Encyclopedia: expect that in a few weeks, all going well).
Thanks for your patience, everyone. Please do continue to keep in touch on Twitter while the site’s having some downtime, and I hope you enjoy what I’ve got planned next year once my schedule becomes manageable.
I’ve declared my love for Avicii Invector a couple of times in the past.
I reviewed the Xbox One version for VGC late last year, and stated: “For the sake of transparency, this reviewer had very little interest in the man’s music before playing this game, and now has his entire discography added to a Spotify playlist. If this is the impact the game can have on someone indifferent to Avicii’s body of work, we can only imagine how it will affect fans.”
The following month, I declared it one of my top 10 favourite games of 2019, explaining that it “feels like the result of some sort of unholy orgy between DJ Hero, Frequency, Aaero and Rez”.
Then, just last month, I got my hands on a preview version of the upcoming Switch version, Avicii Invector: Encore Edition, which contains 10 bonus tracks bringing the total number of songs to 35.
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.
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.
I’m bored of loot boxes. They’re a poison running through the veins of modern gaming, preying on the willpower of those with addictive personalities. Games should be designed to be fun first and foremost, and the money will follow as a result: games designed to make money first are everything that’s wrong with this industry today.
I’m bored of the fact that loot boxes have now made microtransactions seem acceptable, because they’re the lesser of two evils. I remember 12 years ago when Bethesda released horse armour as DLC for Oblivion, costing $2.50. The entire population of the internet ridiculed the very notion of paying money for something that was purely cosmetic. And yet look where we are now: DLC skins and the like are the norm, not something to be mocked.
I’m bored of the way that some microtransactions aren’t even ‘micro’ any more. It seems that almost every free-to-play mobile game I download these days seems to think that by being ‘generous’ enough to not charge the player to start playing, they’ve earned enough goodwill to charge obscene amounts of money for virtual currency. Games like Disney Heroes – which I recently started up to find a message offering me a great deal on an £84.99 item purchase(!) – are the gaming equivalent of drug dealers hooking people by saying “hey, the first one’s free”. The fact many are aimed at children is a special kind of vile.
I’m bored of season passes and special edition pre-orders where you only get stuff by pre-ordering from specific shops. They’re bullshit ways of making you commit to buying a game in its first week – when its all-important chart position matters for the publisher – before magazines and websites get a chance to post a review telling you the game’s shite.
I’m bored of the increasing obsession with frame rates. I’ll be the first to tell you I love a game with a smooth 60 frames per second frame rate, but I hate seeing gamers on forums and comments sections saying that something running at 30fps is “unplayable”. I love the Digital Foundry videos and find their technical breakdowns fascinating, but then I look at the comments and see that some people genuinely choose not to buy games because they uncover frame skips: when someone decides to pass on a game because it occasionally drops to 57, it makes me question whether I even want to be a part of this industry.
I’m bored of hackers ruining secrets. Congratulations, you decrypted an online store to find out what DLC will be before it’s launched: I hope the 70 seconds of internet fame you get for it goes some way to filling the emptiness in your life. Meanwhile, Nintendo decides to reveal the entire Smash Bros Ultimate roster well in advance to stop some random prick from Nowhere, Oklahoma leaking it early, meaning gamers don’t get to enjoy the surprise of beating the game and encountering King K. Rool without prior warning.
I’m bored of ‘games as a service’. There are countless incredible games out there, offering an astonishingly wide variety of sights, sounds and experiences. But Activision, EA, Epic and the like want you to keep playing just their one game, every day, and they’ll drip out time-limited content that only lasts a few days to make sure you keep logging in. When one of your main reasons for playing a game is ‘FOMO’, that’s a bad thing.
I don’t play FIFA 19 every week, it plays me
I’m bored of every second indie game being procedurally generated or using ‘retro’ graphics (that never would have been possible on older systems). I get that lower budgets mean that indie games can hardly be expected to look like a triple-A publisher’s games, but I feel that sprite-based graphics often just play the nostalgia card, a card that’s overused these days. As for procedural generation, give me good level design any day.
I’m bored of mandatory installs filling up shamefully small hard drives. My Xbox One X has a 1TB hard drive (less when you take into account system files), and Forza Motorsport 7 takes up nearly 100GB alone. It seems that as consoles are getting bigger and assets are getting larger, disc read speeds and hard drive sizes aren’t growing at the same rate. Even Switch games, which can be bought on physical cartridges, sometimes need you to download some of the game first before playing.
Most of all, I’m bored of being a modern ‘gamer’, because of the baggage that brings with it. If it isn’t the term being made toxic by misogynists and those with other agendas trying to decide who gets to be a ‘gamer’ and who doesn’t, it’s entitled whiners insisting that games’ endings are changed, or harassing redundant employees telling them to finish the series they started and didn’t get to finish, or signing petitions demanding that some games (like Metroid Prime Federation Force, which was actually decent) be outright cancelled because they weren’t the exact ones they wanted.
I hate that gaming has become less of a fun hobby you take part in to relax and enjoy yourself, and more of a race to become the most famous person on the internet. Maybe it’s the ‘old’ in Tired Old Hack talking, but I don’t get Twitch: when I was younger there was nothing worse than sitting with someone and watching them play a game, because it meant I wasn’t playing it.
Now it feels like it’s more about the player than the game: watch old Nintendo E3 reaction videos filmed at the Nintendo World store in New York, then watch recent ones and see how the crowd that used to sit cross-legged on the floor – watching the screen and cheering at the announcements – is now a swarm of egos jumping in front of each other, all pointing their cameras at their own faces because their reaction is clearly more important than the games themselves.
Look at the screen, you absolute fucking WEAPON
When I was a kid I used to be embarrassed to call myself a gamer because of all the stereotypes that came with it: a nerd, in his bedroom, ‘waggling his joystick’ (guffaw) with no friends. These days I’m even more embarrassed to call myself a gamer, because the connotations are so much worse.
Naturally, all the above is just my opinion: there will be many people out there who say that gaming’s better than it’s ever been, and to those people I say: more power to you. I’m delighted you continue to thoroughly enjoy this remarkable hobby. But most of the time these days, I don’t.
I’ve always said that Tired Old Hack was going to be different from other gaming sites because it was going to celebrate games in a positive manner, not constantly look for ways to make readers angry by pointing out various scandals or outrages in the games industry. But there are just so many things dragging my beloved hobby down that to continue to focus mainly on modern gaming and try to be positive at the same time would essentially turn into me having to lie about how happy I am with the industry at the moment.
For those who don’t know, the Tired Old Hack name is a joke. When CVG was closed down and I was made redundant, some prick sent me an email saying he was glad I was losing my job, because I was just a “tired old hack” who constantly went on about how retro games were better than modern ones. So rather than let it affect me, I decided to nick his insult.
For the first time, though, it feels true. I’m tired of modern gaming. I look at kids ‘flossing’ and doing other Fortnite emotes while happily chucking their pocket money at loot boxes and I feel old (ancient, in fact). And when I look at the way self-proclaimed ‘gamers’ continue to give the community a bad name with their entitled and toxic beliefs, it’s safe to say I feel hacked off. The Tired Old Hack name is no longer a joke: it’s a description.
That has to change, and it changes tomorrow.
That email prick said I was a “tired old hack” because I used to harp on about the way older games on legacy systems were more entertaining than today’s titles. Well, you know something? The more I think about, the more I’m convinced it’s true.
I miss the days when you got extra outfits and characters for completing the game. When a game’s longevity was increased with bonus content because you reached the end credits, not because you reached for your credit card.
I miss the days when the word ‘multiplayer’ immediately conjured up the image of sitting on the couch with your brother, or your sister, or your pals, instead of sitting alone with a headset on, listening to 12-year-olds rhyme off a shopping list of sexual positions he and your mother frequently dabble in.
I miss the days of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, when frame rates were similar to your auntie’s holiday slideshow but you didn’t care because you were playing something special you’d never seen before.
GoldenEye 007 – named after the number of frames per second
I miss when those early polygonal games had edges that were jaggier than a shark’s gumshield, and nobody at the time said “oh no, it has jaggies? Looks like I’ll need to give it a miss then”. Instead we all bought WipEout, with its serrated ships, and we adored it.
I miss the tradition of buying a console and buying its launch day Ridge Racer, because it always looked a million times better than every other launch day game. I bought Ridge Racer games on day one for my PS1, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, Vita and 3DS: a new console without it is like a new pair of jeans without pockets. And the arse missing.
I miss when your controller didn’t have a battery.
I miss when you put in a game – be it cartridge or disc – and the bastard just loaded. No installation, no day one patch, no pre-order unlock key, no need to download a 30GB multiplayer component.
I miss when you bought a video game magazine and felt like part of a club. There was no chat about financial results or CEO remarks or Twitch scandals, you got that pleasantly familiar routine of News, Letters, Previews, Reviews and Tips and the editorial staff injected some of their own personality throughout.
Look at how glorious Mean Machines was. Just LOOK at it. This was my bible
When I joined Official Nintendo Magazine back in 2006, it’s that feeling of being part of a club that I always aimed for. I was always on the ONM forum talking to the readers, and I always tried to make silly in-jokes that ran through each issue (usually at the expense of Hull).
It’s that spirit I’ve tried to keep going in Tired Old Hack. I appreciate that the site’s not getting millions of readers (for now), but I’d like to think that those who do read the site and follow me on Twitter and YouTube also feel like they’re part of a wee club who gets some of the in-jokes here (like the irrational love for Night Trap). Every time I see someone on Twitter refer to me as “yer man Scullion” I smile: that feeling of familiarity is what I’m going for.
I want you to feel like you’re one of my pals when you’re reading Tired Old Hack, and part of that comes down to my enthusiasm. It needs to be contagious and, truth be told, not a lot of today’s gaming landscape excites me enough to pass that enthusiasm on to you.
To be clear, there are still some elements of modern gaming I still enjoy, and I plan to continue covering modern gaming to an extent on the site. However, that said, tomorrow marks a new chapter in Tired Old Hack.
It’s still a work in progress
Since Louise and I moved into our new home and we had our gorgeous daughter, free time has been at a premium. I just don’t have the hours in the day to commit to these 80-hour epics and this ‘games as service’ bollocks. So I created a games room and have been filling it with retro systems, and I’m falling in love with gaming all over again as a result.
As of tomorrow, Tired Old Hack will continue to look forwards to an extent, but for the most part it’s going to be looking back. Back at the days when gaming made me smile.
If you’re a fellow retro gamer, I hope the site gives you that warm nostalgic feeling and maybe unearths some memories of games you’ve forgotten for years or even decades. If you’re younger, or maybe not interested in retro gaming, I hope my writing style continues to entertain you regardless and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be tempted to give it a go yourself. I’m planning plenty of articles to help newcomers to retro gaming get into it in an affordable way.
Expect a new lick of paint on the site tomorrow, along with another post explaining the new focus for the site and detailing some of the new (and returning) features you can expect in the days, weeks, months and years to come.
Thank you so much for reading Tired Old Hack so far. It’s been nearly four years, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing everything on here. But it’s time to change focus so I can continue to enjoy it, and I hope you’re as excited as I am to look at old games in a new way.
Ever since I got the original Super Mario Kart 26 years ago, I’ve always been tickled by the idea of countless developers and publishers imitating the formula with any group of licensed characters they can get their hands on.
What makes it interesting to me is that the karting genre – maybe more than any other – has continued to stick to a solid set of rules that’s almost always the same across the board.
Cups consisting of four or five races. Boost starts. Weapons, some going forwards, some going back, some homing. Maybe a power slide or drift mechanic. Unlockable tracks or characters. The vast majority of karting games tick all those boxes.
What intrigues me, then, is seeing how developers take a wide variety of licensed IPs and try to pour each one into this rigid mould, with the success of the resulting creation varying wildly.
Every time a new karting game comes out, then, I can’t help being interested to try it out. Even though the vast majority are utter piss, I’m always curious to see how each IP is treated and how the developers managed to shoehorn it into strict karting game guidelines.
Sometimes it’s a hit: Star Wars Episode I Racer was a no-brainer. And sometimes – most of the time, actually – it doesn’t work quite so well (step forward, Crazy Frog Racer).
Tired Old Hack is now nearly three and a half years old, yet I still feel like the site’s in its early stages.
The most important thing about the site is clearly the readers, though: after all, if you aren’t happy then I’m basically talking to myself and that only gets me so far.
In late 2016 I launched a Tired Old Hack survery and over 250 people responded to it: it was massively helpful in guiding the direction of the site. Time to do it again, then.
I’d employed the help of a small little-known research company called Cambridge Analytica, but they recently closed down, forcing me to steal your personal data get your feedback on the site myself.
So, that said, here’s your chance to give your opinion on various aspects of the site and let me know what you think about it.
It’s entirely anonymous (although you can enter your name at the end if you want) and there are a load of GIFs in there to stop you getting bored. Maybe.
It explained that I was about to start work on a new project that would “take up a massive chunk of my free time” and that as a result the number of articles on the site was going to take a hefty knock.
Six months later, that project – a 190,000-word book – is now complete. Expect more information on that in a while: there’s still some work to be done by the publisher before we’re ready to share the news and I can start trying to convince you lovely swines to pre-order it.
That’s news for the future, then. The news today is that – now the book’s finished – Tired Old Hack is back up to full speed again, meaning you can expect far more regular and varied articles instead of just the occasional reviews and podcast episodes I was posting during the site’s downtime. Continue reading “It’s (Tired Old) Back!”→
In the past couple of years my readership has grown to the extent that a decent chunk of my readership now knows me for Tired Old Hack rather than my work on the likes of the Official Nintendo Magazine, Nintendo Gamer or CVG.
As such, many of you may not be aware that before Tired Old Hack existed, yer man Scullion ran a different website between 2010 and 2016.
I’ve declared my love for Avicii Invector a couple of times in the past.
Tired Old Hack 