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.
Nintendo / Intelligent Systems, Koei Tecmo Nintendo Switch
There are two genres of console game that strike fear in the heart of reviewers: RPGs and turn-based strategy.
Both tend to take many tens of hours to beat, and given that this inevitably results in a need to ‘take our work home’ with us and commit a large chunk of time to them, the thought of reviewing one fills many with dread.
Yer man Scullion received review code for Fire Emblem: Three Houses about a week ago. Considering it’s not only the latest game in a much-loved turn-based strategy series but also has new features that make it more like an RPG than ever, it’s a lethal cocktail of free time devastation.
The reality, dear reader, is that this game can’t be beaten in a week. Not if you want to play it properly, and also have an adult life with a family and a job. As such, this isn’t a completed review.
After asking my lovely Twitter followers whether I should keep playing and turn in a review late, or just review what I’ve played so far, they showed their commitment to the cause by turning in a reliable 228/228 vote. So I’ve just decided to do the latter.
To make it categorically clear, then: this is not a full review. I have not completed this game. And from what I’ve been told by some peers, there’s a moment something like 40-50 hours in (that I have yet to reach) where shit goes down and everything properly kicks off, so this isn’t even a review of the meat of it.
E3’s all well and good but yer man Scullion can’t be doing with all that hassle. The 13-hour flight to LA would be bad enough, but given my global celebrity status I’m sure I also wouldn’t be able to move for autograph requests, people asking for selfies and offers of marriage.
Thankfully, Nintendo recently invited me to its UK headquarters to spend time with some of its E3 demos, away from all the hustle and bustle of the main show.
Not only that, I was also allowed to record footage for some of the games, meaning below you can see the likes of Link’s Awakening and Luigi’s Mansion 3 in perfect quality as recorded by yours truly.
Let me just make something clear so you know where I stand before going into this review: I’m very much a left-brained person.
For those unaware of the concept, it’s said that people who are more creative and artistic tend to use the right side of their brain more, whereas those who are more analytical and logical favour the left side.
Most of the time games are perfectly suited to both left and right-brained people: you’re given a task and can reach the goal using whatever logical or creative means you see fit.
Every now and then, however, you get a game that mainly appeals to right-brained, artistic types, where most of the fun is achieved through making your own creations. You know the type, games like LittleBigPlanet, Minecraft and Super Mario Maker.
For left-brained folk like me, these games are not a cavalcade of possibilities: instead, they more often result in staring blankly at an empty canvas with no bright ideas on how to fill it. For us, these games live or die not by their creation tools, but by everything else they offer (usually user-created content).
With that in mind, then, this review of Super Mario Maker 2 is going to do something a little different. You can already find plenty of reviews of the game on other sites, most of which will presumably have dedicated a hefty chunk to the creation tools.
From a completely blind approach – I never read other reviews before writing my own – I see that my long-time pal and former CVG editor Andy Robinson has reviewed the game over at VGC, so based on his track record I’m going to confidently assume that’s where you should go for a ‘proper’ review of the game, creation mode and all.
I joined the Official Nintendo Magazine as staff writer (and started my career in games journalism) on 2 May 2006, the week before E3.
Five days before that, on 27 April, Nintendo had announced that its new console, the Revolution, was actually going to be called the Wii. And then, on 10 April, Nintendo held its conference where it showed off the final console and its games for the first time.
Now, given that I was only a week in the game, I obviously wasn’t sent to Los Angeles to cover the event: instead, I stayed at ONM Towers in London, writing all the previews for the special E3 issue of the mag: issue 5, my first full one as a staff writer.
Meanwhile, editor Lee Nutter and deputy editor Chandra Nair did indeed travel to LA to cover the event, and Chandra – as he always did when he was editor of Cube magazine – brought his ruddy big video camera with him.
He used that camera to film as much stuff as he could on the E3 show floor, with the purpose of putting it all on a free DVD to be included alongside issue 5.
This turned out to be a genius move. It’s hard to believe now in this ear of 4K, 60fps streaming video, but bear in mind that in 2006 many of the online E3 videos being published on various big sites looked more like this:
Because of this, the fact we at ONM had actual DVD quality footage (albeit slightly compressed to fit onto a single-layer disc) meant our readers had probably the best quality video from E3 2006.
This also means that, to the best of my knowledge, this is the best quality footage you’ll see of cancelled games like Project H.A.M.M.E.R., Wii Sports Airplane (which became part of Wii Sports Resort) and Rayman 4 (which became Rayman Raving Rabbids a mere five months later… which is suspicious).
Now, Future Publishing – who owns the copyright to everything ever created during the ONM days – is fairly strict when it comes to people republishing their content.
That’s why I’m extremely grateful to Future’s legal department for granting me a licence to re-publish this DVD in its entirety on this site.
We all know how the internet works, though, and it’s clear that if I’d just put up the entire DVD untouched someone would have it ripped and plonked on their own YouTube channel by the end of the afternoon.
To get round this, I’ve recorded a commentary for the DVD. I’m sorry this means you won’t be able to watch it without hearing my dulcet tones over it, but it should at least give you some context to the 13-year-old footage you’re watching, along with some anecdotes from the ONM days.
So, pour yourself an Irn Bru, get this loaded up on your TV’s YouTube app (it’s a long video, so you’ll need to get comfy: it’s easier to find it if you subscribe to my channel) and get stuck into the entire 97-minute E3 2006 DVD from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 5.
If you want to help me write more articles and publish more videos like this, 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 my work in general feel free to chuck yer man Scullion a couple of quid and help stock up my Irn Bru fund so I can continue working away like a bastard.
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Well, I think it’s fair to say the first Tired Old Hack Game Club was a success. Well over a hundred people joined throughout the course of the month to take part in a Zelda II playthrough, helping each other out along the way.
Many even finished the game for the first time, commenting that were it not for the Game Club they probably wouldn’t have managed it. Which is lovely to hear.
There once was a time, long before the days of the internet, when groups of friends would gather in playgrounds all over the world and discuss the games they were playing.
I grew up having daily lunchtime chats with my pals about the big game of the moment, sharing secrets and offering advice to each other along the way.
I told one of my pals about the warp zone in the whale area in Super Mario Bros 2. He told me how to solve the Deborah Cliff puzzle in Castlevania II (he got it from a magazine: there’s no way we’d have figured it out otherwise).
That sense of camaraderie is still there to an extent these days: when new games are released, they’ll enjoy the spotlight on Twitter for a week or so while people share screenshots and clips of stuff they’ve done.
Retro games, though, no longer get to enjoy this. Because the emphasis these days is on playing the big new games on day one because of the old FOMO issue, anyone trying to discover an old game for the first time will most likely be doing so on their lonesome.
It’s a shame, because older games are often the ones that most need to be discussed with others. In the days before hand-holding was commonplace and many games became about simply running to the next flashing point on your map, 8-bit and 16-bit games were regularly happy to leave you in the dark and make you figure it out yourself.
I miss the days when friends would come together and share their experiences, their advice and their enthusiasm for the purposes of helping each other out, rather than to try and get likes on Twitter. So I’m trying to get those days back.
Grasshopper Manufacturer / Nintendo Nintendo Switch
Cult game designer Suda51 has always made games that divide opinion.
Whether it’s the heavily stylised Killer7, the sexually provocative Lollipop Chainsaw, the punk rock demon hunting of Shadows Of The Damned or the combo-based bloodfest that is Killer Is Dead, gamers have always been split into two camps: those who believe his games have always felt a little rough around the edges, and those who say his often eccentric and bizarre storylines make up for it.
On Nintendo systems, Suda’s best known for the two No More Heroes games, which very much embodied this division. The story of nerdy otaku Travis Touchdown and his quest to kill everyone on a global assassin leaderboard was criticised by some for its slightly clunky combat and repetitive action, but praised by others for its outlandish plot, lashings of gore (in some regions) and tendency to shatter the fourth wall into tiny polygonal pieces.
It’s been eight years since No More Heroes 2, and those who fall into the second camp (including me) have been desperately praying for a third game in the series. Travis Strikes Again isn’t it, but it’s a fun spin-off that should satisfy their cravings for a while. Continue reading “Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes (Switch) review”→
Nintendo / Nintendo EAD Nintendo Switch, Wii U (Switch version reviewed)
The Switch will be two years old in just a couple of months, and Nintendo has diligently been ticking its way through the boxes to ensure each of its much-loved series are represented on the system.
Mario Kart? Tick. Zelda? Tick. 3D Mario, Smash Bros, Pokemon? Tick, tick, tick. At this point there are more ticks than you’d find at a particularly grubby pet shop.
Up next, then, is the series that kickstarted Nintendo’s home console success in the first place, Super Mario Bros. More specifically, a port of the Wii U’s offering, New Super Mario Bros U.
This Deluxe version pairs the main game with its Luigi-based DLC, adds a couple of new playable characters, and chucks in a resolution boost from 720p to 1080p for good measure. This makes it the definitive version of the game, but there are a couple of caveats in there. Continue reading “New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe (Switch) review”→
There are two genres of console game that strike fear in the heart of reviewers: RPGs and turn-based strategy.
Let me just make something clear so you know where I stand before going into this review: I’m very much a left-brained person.
Tired Old Hack 