Monkeyspill

I don't know if I was just lucky, but the garbage was actually helping me get tetrises. It seemed to be piling up but leaving a convenient gap at the edge.

Tried this for the first time. First go I really fucked up as the controls seem a bit off for me (keep accidentally hard dropping). Second go, I came in second place despite really fucking up again. I'm never sure of the rules for battle Tetris. Should I be going for Tetrises, T-spins etc?

Animal Kwackers - a cheap and nasty British version of Banana Splits (also it was terrifying):

It’s been mentioned so many times that mentioning it is a cliche in itself but this reminds me of the classic: QUIT GAME YES/NO Left and right just cycles between them and they’re different colours rather than properly highlighted - so you don’t know which one is selected.

Sewers. They're dark and a bit boring. Plus they would really smell of shit. The most you see game characters do is moan a bit about the smell; you don't see any of them retching and/or refusing to go down there.

Typing of the Dead

The PlayStation (and probably Saturn) version of Tomb Raider had save crystals you had to collect. The PC version let you save anywhere as often as you wanted. I don’t remember the crystals being annoying at the time, but I wonder why the PC doesn’t didn’t have them.

I really hate that last one. I often end up reloading earlier saves in case I missed something useful. All games should let you backtrack (and clearly mark where a level ends).

I'm excited about this. I'm not usually a massive fan of straight racing games but I always liked arcade racers. Burnout 2 is one I'd count as one of my favourite games ever. I'd finished university at the time and was out of work - I ended up spending a lot of late nights playing certain courses over and over. I pretty much perfected the airport terminal tracks. I've still never played the original Burnout - I vaguely remember reading about it when it was in development and really liking the look of it (wasn't it in development for PS1 at one point, or did I imagine that?), but I was skint when it came out.

Binary good vs evil alignment. On Red Dead 2 again as an example: Done a few murders and lost some honour? No problem - doff your hat to a few ladies and gents to regain it. It just seems a bit silly and pointless, reducing any meaningful impact of bad or good deeds you might have done. *Despite complaining, I actually really really liked Red Dead 2 and have put more hours into it than on anything else on PS4 (unless I count the original Dark Souls + Remastered over various platforms).

Rockstar’s tap X really fast to run faster mechanic. And anything (lockpicking etc) where you have to rotate the sticks. It’s just annoying and fucks up control pads. It’s the modern equivalent of waggle the joystick, or tap two keys really fast.

Yes, but you can’t stop pressing on the stick in whatever diagonal direction you’re pushing or it will deselect the square on the wheel. So you have to let go of that at the same time as the shoulder button. It’s like a game in itself.

That’s basically it, but it still tripped me up. And selecting items in the menu is madness. Hold a shoulder button to keep the menu open, press the other shoulder button to cycle menu screens, hold the stick (accurately) in the right direction, another button to cycle items in a group, let go of all buttons at exactly the same time to use item. Even David Cage isn’t that insane.

I must have played it for more than 100 hours and while I got more confident, I was never 100% about whether I was going to interact with someone or pull a gun on them. Also - I never figured out how to permanently equip weapons without them disappearing back onto the horse. It’s worth persevering with though.

Here’s something I seem to remember but not sure if it was a myth or not. The Commodore 64 tape deck had a long bit of metal wire sticking out of the back - if you touched it to the right pin in the cartridge port, you could reset the machine (to enter POKEs); if you touched the wrong pin, it would destroy the machine. Also, you shouldn’t touch the wire during loading as it would fuck up the loading. Edit: Oh, and keep the tape deck and wire as far as possible from the telly while loading. And preferably get out of the room as soon as you hit Commodore key when the program’s found.