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World exclusive – A look at all the Sonic characters in Mario & Sonic At The Rio 2016 Olympic Games

Published on March 9, 2016March 9, 2016 by Chris Scullion4 Comments

Mario & Sonic At The Rio 2016 Olympic Games, the fifth game in the Mario & Sonic series, is released in Europe on 8 April, which coincidentally happens to be my birthday.

The last Mario & Sonic game featured 20 playable characters, ten each from both the Mario and Sonic universes.

Recently Sega dropped a bombshell by revealing that another TWENTY characters would be added to the Rio game, on top of the 20 already there.

Naturally, this has led to some wondering what Sonic characters are left, considering the previous game had fucking Vector the Crocodile in it.

Well, here at Tired Old Hack I can finally bring to you this world exclusive look at every character in Team Sonic, thanks to Sega who gave me unprecedented access because of the whole birthday thing or something.

Enjoy, and remember where you saw this first – for future news bombshells, keep it tired and keep it old. Continue reading “World exclusive – A look at all the Sonic characters in Mario & Sonic At The Rio 2016 Olympic Games” →

Satoru Iwata (1959-2015)

Published on July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 by Chris Scullion11 Comments

As I write this it’s after 1am and news has just broken that Satoru Iwata has passed away, so please forgive me if this isn’t articulate or is a little more rambling than usual.

Satoru Iwata was a man who embodied everything Nintendo stood for. He was a man who put fun before finances, entertainment before enterprise, smiles before sales.

Before he became the first President of Nintendo who wasn’t part of the Yamauchi family, Iwata was a programmer. He was a developer first and a businessman second.

It was this inherent love for gaming, this passion that he took with him right to the tragically early end of his life, that made Iwata the perfect man to lead Nintendo.

It’s no secret that Nintendo’s finances haven’t been great of late. But it’s a testament to Iwata that despite this he continued to receive sterling approval ratings from the company’s many shareholders. Continue reading “Satoru Iwata (1959-2015)” →

Hands-on with Nintendo’s E3 2015 games

Published on July 1, 2015July 1, 2015 by Chris Scullion6 Comments

This was on the wall outside the event. Nice work

It’s fair to say that Nintendo’s offering this E3 didn’t exactly blow the world away.

Sony cleverly stole the show with three “ah but” games – Shenmue III (“ah but it’s crowd-funded”), the Final Fantasy VII remake (“ah but it isn’t exclusive”) and The Last Guardian (“ah but we’ve known about this for years”) – while Microsoft went down the “well, we’ve got loads of stuff actually coming out this year” route.

Nintendo, however, had what felt like one of its trademark ‘stop-gap E3s’, where it presented a bunch of seemingly less impressive games to tide fans over until next year’s big reveals of Zelda Wii U and the new NX console.

That said, some ‘gamers’ went a little overboard in terms of criticising Nintendo’s E3 wares. From some saying it was a disgrace to others outright petitioning to cancel the development of one announced game, I’m struggling to think of a time I’ve felt so ashamed to be associated with other so-called gamers.

I’ve been gaming long enough to remember when people were up in arms about Nintendo turning Metroid into a first-person shooter, or turning Zelda cel-shaded. Fast forward more than a decade and, surprise surprise, Metroid Prime and Zelda: The Wind Waker are heralded by Nintendo fans – many of whom whined at the time – as classics.

To be clear, my point is not that Metroid Prime Federation Force will be considered a classic a decade from now. All I’m saying is you should never judge a game until you actually get the chance to play it. Which is why I headed over to Nintendo’s top-secret post-E3 event in London yesterday to go hands-on with ten of the Wii U and 3DS games shown off in LA a couple of weeks ago.

Here are my full, honest impressions of everything I played, in the order I played them. Continue reading “Hands-on with Nintendo’s E3 2015 games” →