Month: November 2018

There are a lot of top first date ideas, but none of them involve hiking

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Ice Climber (1986)

It’s enough to make any man self-conscious. After weeks of pestering and creepy-crawliness, you’ve finally secured a date with that girl and she hasn’t yet deigned to ghost you or cancel right at the last minute with no mention of a reschedule. You’ll now be relying on two things to help make the date go well – firstly, you’ll need to have good patter, otherwise that crucial ‘spark’ will not be there and you’ll be out of pocket forty nicker. Secondly, you need to make sure that you’ve got a good plan as to what you’re both going to do, because you better believe she won’t be making any suggestions. Get this wrong, and you’ll be agonising over it for a very long time once she gives you the bad news a few days later.

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 4)

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 4)

We’re through the looking-glass now. The original 151 Pokémon are considered iconic, but there’s a few monsters on here that you won’t have remembered until pointed out to you. Seaking, I’m talking about Seaking here. Maybe Seadra too, since it’s been overshadowed by its evolution. You couldn’t move for the Normal, Water and Poison types in Gen 1, you know. But if you wanted a Ghost or a Dragon type? A viable Bug type? A Rock type that could stand up to Water Gun? Stop fooling around. Continue reading “Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 4)” →

You shouldn’t hit a girl, even if she’s shooting at you

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Perfect Dark (2000)

Things have calmed down quite a bit in recent years, but there was a time in and around the height of Call of Duty 17 and Battlefield Minus One that seemingly every popular game out there was a first-person shooter. If you were a developer and you decided you wanted to release a 3D platformer or something, a proper game for the ages, then you could forget it.

If it wasn’t shooty-shooty-bam-bam time and there weren’t 12-year-olds online in an over 18s game, it wasn’t worth your while. It wouldn’t sell, and you would be branded an unbankable developer, with emphasis on ‘leper’, and you’d be beat back down to mobile games with icons of shouty bearded cartoon men. Why couldn’t you just have done the necessary for your now-starving family and made something like Perfect Dark instead?

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My dear Gaspar, history is for the anoraks

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Chrono Trigger (1995)

Alright, philistine time: I was never much interested in history. You’re better off making history than studying it, right? It was great when we got around to studying the World Wars in school, though. Men love war, and those two were the best rammies of the lot. Unfortunately the curriculum in Ireland is a bit slow to update, and the history books when I was in school never featured 9/11.

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Want to know what a breast is? Check out Wookieepedia

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Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (2007)

Oh boy. There are an awful lot of Lego games out there – and no shortage of Lego fans either. And however many strong the legion of AFOLs is (Adult Fans of Lego, do look it up, it’s a technical term), the number of Star Wars fans must be astronomically higher again. That means I’ve got a huge amount of people to potentially annoy to death with this piece, and I’m quite looking forward to it.

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 3)

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 3)

We really ought to be frank here. I’m trying to weigh up all of these Generation 1 options for a Pokémon team, and provide you with six of the best. But two of those slots are always going to be taken up by Mewtwo and Charizard, aren’t they? They automatically rank as the coolest, and you’d risk dreadful social embarrassment if you left these two out. The other starters and the legendary birds will probably get first refusal after these guys as well. And rounding it off is Mew if you’ve got a bit of flair, Snorlax if you don’t, and Gengar is there to fill in any remaining gaps. Stacked up against all of these odds, an overlarge seal and a bunch of magnets aren’t really going to register, are they?

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Big Brother is watching you smash into other cars

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GT_Sport_logoGran Turismo Sport (2017)

Circumstances dictated that I never got to race my first car, which is a crying shame. Of course, as an antiquated VW Polo with less than a 1-litre engine, it wasn’t really going to inspire on the straights. Come to think of it, its propensity to leak power steering fluid meant it wasn’t a dream cruiser around corners either.

But when you’ve got that special, fire-forged connection between man and machine over several years, where you can communicate fully with your motor, it’s beautiful. You and your car can come together in beautiful harmony, through your hands for steering and gears, your footsies for the pedals, and your bum getting rattled about by the nasty vibrations. And then something deep down under the bonnet (sorry, ‘the hood’) fails, and the car turns around and breaks your heart.

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Phones and PR disasters aplenty from Blizzard

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Diablo Immortal (2019)

Shockwaves of negative PR rippled throughout the gaming sphere last week when the latest Diablo game was shown off at this year’s Blizzcon. As a quick primer, the Diablo series is as hardcore PC gaming as it gets, and diehard fans were wet with anticipation for a long awaited Diablo 4. Blizzard/Activision, now joined in unholy matrimony, had initially hyped up a big announcement for Blizzcon 2018. Once this hyping up had its desired effect, and fans began frothing at the mouth, the company tried to downplay all expectations.

What happened next may well go down in Public Relations lore as a shining example of getting something wrong every single step of the way.

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It looks like Toon Link’s gone the same way as penmanship

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Legend of Zelda, The: Phantom Hourglass (2007)

I’m often described as being “differently abled”, something I always take umbrage with. After all, I do apply for the Special Olympics every four years, but I get snubbed every time. And I can’t join the regular circuit of the Olympics either, because my 100-metre times don’t especially measure up and Ireland is, unfortunately, a member of the drugs governing body WADA. But I know that I do have one physical ailment that sets my life back considerably, and that’s the fact that I’m left-handed.

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