It was about time I owned this.

Is it a guilty pleasure? I don't know. I don't shy away from my affection for Aerosmith, despite the fact they are, undeniably, incredibly embarrassing. I'll blame the fact that I was introduced to their albums when I was very young, and my music tastes basically amounted to anything up-tempo that made reference to explosions. They seem like a weird band for kids to be into, but they've always courted young-skewing media, from The Simpsons to Wayne's World 2 to, most shockingly of all, Rugrats Go Wild. They've also been curiously videogame-positive, from Midway's rubbish lightgun shooter, Revolution X, to Quest for Fame, to the interactive minigame you got when you inserted the Nine Lives CD into a Windows 95 PC, and of course, the classic chatroom/immersive 3D MMO, Aerosmith World. Apparently, Steven Tyler's cousin, the ever-venerable Tommy Tallarico, served as a bit of a bridge between the band and Activision, resulting in this oddly early Aerosmith-themed version of Guitar Hero.

In the grand scheme of things, Guitar Hero was still fairly new at this point, hadn't really delved into DLC, and this was the first game in the series devoted to one artist. In retrospect, The Beatles Rock Band really is the gold standard for this stuff, and that's kind of an edge-case scenario with a media entity that's famously fussy about licensing-out their content (particularly in the pre-Spotify days). Aerosmith are the polar opposite. These games were still being made by original PS2 developer, RedOctane at this point, before the series was entirely handed to co-developer, Neversoft, and its vintage really shows. The primary focus is on playing through a band's career, moving to larger venues, and completing the story. There are extra songs that are purchasable with in-game "money" (not the real stuff that Activision would become so ruthlessly keen on in the following decade), and they're accessed via a separate menu because they're not canon, or something. You also have to select a classic generic Guitar Hero character to perform as, with all their cartoony animations. Don't worry. You'll still get to play as Aerosmith, but the Guitar Hero characters are here to play as a sort of opening act, weirdly playing non-Aerosmith songs. There's Joan Jett, Mott the Hoople and fucking Ted Nugent in this, and the career mode insists on you playing through those songs to progress. Back at this point, there was a patronising intent for Guitar Hero to introduce young audiences to "real music", and not just allow them to access songs they already liked. These other artists' songs are rarely the original recordings, and rather, covers by RedOctane's in-house bands, and they stick out quite bitterly to audiences accustomed to the standards of the more recent Rock Band titles.

I'm also reminded why I drew the line so definitively against Guitar Hero games when Rock Band first became a rival franchise. Rock Band immediately took more of a light sim approach, attempting to faithfully map guitar parts to a five-button game controller. Guitar Hero's charts have far more videogamey bullshit running through them, and the 3+ button "chords" you're faced with on Expert mode are Bad. Harmonix always had more credibility, and have remained hopelessly devoted to combining music and videogames in ambitious, wildly impractical ways, while Activision were more out of touch and cynical. I feel like I'm sacrificing much of my own values (read: prejudice) by turning this on.

The worst thing in the game is a misguided "Guitar battle" stage. I'm pretty sure these were in a couple other Guitar Hero games around this time, and they still hadn't learned their lesson by this point. Your Guitar Hero character and Joe Perry each play a phrase, unlocking Mario Kart-style power-ups for successfully playing a sequence. You activate these by engaging "Star Power" (holding your toy's neck vertically), and they're all really bad. If you get hit by one, you may need to press twice as many buttons, or get shifted up a difficulty level, or the most rubbish of all - rapidly jam on the whammy bar until you're allowed to play again. You might as well tell me I'm not allowed to play until I hop on one leg for ten seconds. It's definitely not the experience that anybody who bought this game wanted, and thankfully, it's just one level, but it's mandatory, and it's really fucking crap.

There are treats for the bigger Aero-heads in the audience. The band seems to have been heavily involved in the game's development, and even rerecorded a couple of early songs whose master tapes weren't suitable for use. Fair credit to them. They were still able to capture their 70s sound far into the 2000s, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell that they were recorded by the post-Just Push Play/Honkin' On Bobo version of the band. I'm especially giddy that the TERRIBLE Bright Light Fright somehow made the tracklist, as its lyrics have been a source of many in-jokes for me through my twenties. There's also mercifully few of the one-per-album ballads in here, with a focus on heavier rockers and big Joe Perry solos. They likely cut some of their potential sales by leaving Don't Want to Miss A Thing off this, but I'm very grateful for that. Why am I making out like I'm above this? I like Rag Doll. I like Sweet Emotion. I like Back in the Saddle. I'm the key demo, here. This game belongs on my shelves like a regrettable tattoo. For whatever you have to say about Aerosmith, they do have a back catalogue of big silly rock songs with wild guitar solos, and that pairs well with Guitar Hero. Ultimately, though, the thing I like most is that it costs £1 in CeX, and I paid that entirely with trade-in credit.

Whoa, I can see! I know this was a big part of the AAA Brownaissance of the mid-to-late 2000s, but compared to the remaster of the first game, this is practically vibrant with color. It's nice to be able to tell the difference between enemies and teammates from more than 10 feet away!

Before this month, my only experience with the Gears series was a single evening of Gears 2's Horde Mode at a buddy's house in 2008, so my wife (who had played a few of these with her brother) decided we needed to tackle them together. They're a little nostalgic for her, so she talks about rending grubs in half with a Lancer like I talk about Kokiri Forest. You can imagine my surprise when this sequel to an already gritty/edgy game spends a good chunk of its time being straight up misery porn! Gears 2 is a bit of a downer! When entire cities aren't getting obliterated, innocent people are either losing everything they have or getting kidnapped and tortured for unknown purposes. I normally can't stand dour stuff like this, so the fact that I had such a great time with it is truly a testament to how compelling the gameplay is.

It's a fantastic evolution on its predecessor, going bigger and better with each of its levels and set pieces. There aren't a lot of new weapons, but the Mortar is more than enough to satisfy me. Once I got the hang of eyeballing distances, the Mortar became one of my favorite weapons in any game I've ever played. I remembered someone telling me 16 years ago that there was a level inside a worm, but I was not prepared for "Avoid the Digestive Teeth". There's enough absurdity in here that I was laughing at the game's audacity more often than I was thousand-year-staring at its cruelty, so I guess that's a win? Good game!

But why do they say "Jacinto" like that?? With a hard "Juh"?? Right in front of Dom???

Not long into this, my other half and I realised the mysteries we were soaking in would never have any kind of satisfactory answers. That we were totally fooled by the fakeout ending ("well, THAT was SHIT") is a testament to how little we were invested. But then it does something really interesting! But then it goes back to being a shootybang.

I don't mean to be cruel, there's some fantastic stuff in here, but your only real contribution to this world of endless possibility is violence. One sidequest has you run back and forth between two NPCs until one of them dies. Do they stay alive if you just don't do the quest? Yes or no, either outcome is ultimately meaningless.

As many have pointed out, this is basically SCP: The Videogame. But you could just read some SCP and you wouldn't have to play a videogame.

You know what this reminds me of? Moon: https://www.backloggd.com/u/JimTheSchoolGirl/review/204858/

I recently purchased a "pack" of Oreo X PAC-MAN Limited Edition biscuits, and felt a tinge of impostor syndrome. Am I really a big enough Pac-Fan to eat these? I mean, sure, I can accurately identify Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde no problem, and I know all the words to Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" off by heart - a song that rips the songwriting traditions of the blues out of the Mississippi Delta and righteously appropriates them to discuss the real hardships (being a gamer) - but I don't really rate Pac-Man as one of my favourite Namco games. It's almost a little too elemental. Too primal. It's a chase game, and that clearly had influence on personal favourites like Dig Dug and Metal Gear, but it doesn't have any of that Dig Dug or Metal Gear stuff that I like in it, either.

I can't decide whether releasing Pac-Man as a standalone Neo Geo Pocket Color game in 1999 was an act of extraordinary hubris, or an earned confidence. I mean, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on the Game Boy Color was one thing, but this is fucking Pac-Man. No new modes or anything. Pac-Man. One step up from fucking Pong. Maybe if you're younger, all these 20th century years seem to blend together in a big "I don't care" grey area, but we were playing Quake III online by then (or at least, we'd heard someone's big brother did it once, but he had to get off the internet after one match because it was costing a fortune on the phone bill). Seeing this on the shelf below the Game Boys and Pokémon instantly lost all credibility SNK may have hoped to have gained with the under-20s crowd. In the 90's, "retro" was incredibly niche. Like, I was aware of the Street Fighter and Bubble Bobble collections on PS1, but when I imagined someone buying them, they were like studious historians, analysing the software like it had just been dug out of a pharaoh's tomb. These things weren't conceivable as "entertainment" for "people". Who the fuck bought this at launch?

Now, I am that decrepit auld bastard. NGPC Pac-Man is cool. A little obnoxiously so, actually. It kind of predicted the retro boom that would start to take hold in the following decade. Pac-Man is a gaming icon. Literally. He's probably the little button you press on your phone screen to get the emulators on. It's difficult to view him objectively as The Packing Man, unencumbered by the decades of cultural impact that followed, but having a little one-and-done cartridge like this helps.

NGPC Pac-Man's big feature is a little rubber ring that comes in the box. You attach it to the NGPC's microswitch stick and it blocks off the diagonal directions. It's actually really effective, and makes the game feel much snappier, as you're locked to 90 degree turns. SNK are an arcade developer, first and foremost, and their approach in designing a two-button handheld is actually really cute. I think if you're happy to go along with that, and not moan about how naive it is to use this strategy to compete with the Game Boy Color, it's super cool that they put Pac-Man on here. And they set aside some of the budget to manufacture a little piece of rubber to make it as satisfying as it ought to be.

Pac-Man is fun. It's immediately speedy. You don't even press a button, and you shoot right out of the gate. All you can do is steer, avoiding the ghosts, attempting to squeeze into a corner of the map that still has power pellets on it, and seeing if you can keep dodging the baddies long enough to clear the board. Each ghost has their own characteristic, and theoretically, you should be able to use this to determine which direction they'll take at a crossing, but I've still to take the lesson of which one's "Speedy" and which one's "Pokey" to heart. Even ignorant of the specific attributes, it adds something to the game, to know that they're each subtly distinct, and it's a fun dynamic to have in the background, as you do your best to survive.

If you've played enough 80s arcade games, you'll know that Pac-Man can be done very wrong. Have you ever played Wizard of Wor? Fuck me, man. What a nightmare. Pac-Man was pioneering. Most games of the time were either about fighting, sport, or attempting to rip-off Star Wars as liberally as Lucasfilm's legal representation would allow. Pac-Man wasn't trying to be something else. It was proud to be a videogame, and it did something that could only really take the form of a videogame. It was praised for its original, non-violent concept (eating ghosts is not in violation of the Geneva Convention, apparently). It didn't assume anything of its audience. It opened up videogames to entirely new players. Anybody could play this. All the Nintendo oldguard see Pac-Man as the gold standard, and Miyamoto's even pulled the strings, buddying up with Namco bigwigs, to get his own four-player fangame bundled in with copies of R: Racing Evolution. Without a strong affinity for videogames, Keita Takahashi signed up with Namco because they made stuff like Pac-Man, and what other business was committing themselves to fun, novel ideas like that? We all benefit from Pac-Man's glow, and we ought to respect him.

Will you play it for more than five minutes? Probably not. But that's okay, too. We need little games like this.

You never really hear about PS3 homebrew, do you? After hacking my PS3, I found out why. It's a fucking pain in the arse.

If you know where to look, and join a private discord, you can find people modding old PS3 games. I almost found myself motivated to pursue this when I found out that fans have brought back MGS4's online mode, but that didn't feel like something I needed. Apparently, having the whole of Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour as Rock Band DLC was.

I guess it speaks to how earnestly I love The Beatles. They weren't just a bunch of guys who played good songs. When they emerged out of the early sixties, they were like a whole new kind of person. They broke the conventions of what an adult was supposed to be, and with their wit, intelligence and compassion, made all those guys look ridiculous. They made it okay not to live for the expectations of society or your family name, but your passions. Maybe you're not a fan of the band personally, and that's fine, but I think if you have any interest in pop media, fringe political thought or the embrace of foreign cultures, I think you owe some gratitude to The Beatles' influence. I can't imagine there would be a videogame industry without The Fabs. (This is beside the point, but did you know all those Atari 2600 cover artists were Yellow Submarine animators?)

Playing PS3 Rock Band in 2024 at all is a pain in the arse. If you didn't buy all the equipment 15 years ago, and held onto them for the following decade and a half, you have some very expensive eBay purchases ahead of you if you want to get in on this. I've still got a couple of the guitars, but thanks to multiple house moves, and weird, malicious flatmates who may not have appreciated my vocals on Debaser, those USB dongles were long gone. And it's not as if you can just buy any old dongle. With very few exceptions, they will only pair with their specific controller. And I have one of those fancy George Harrison Gretsch Duo Jets that you couldn't even buy in highstreet shops. I'm not willing to readily give up how much I spent on the dongle when it finally showed up for sale. Unless you're emulating (and seriously, if you're new to all this, please consider emulating), there's no new devices that are compatible with the PS3 games. Harmonix remedied this a little bit with the release of Rock Band 4, which supported full song exports for the previous games (which require DLC keys that are no longer purchasable) and are still playable on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles today, but one-off games like The Beatles Rock Band, which didn't allow you to transfer their highly-valued content to other titles, are still trapped on PS3, Wii and 360, with all their awkward "it made sense at the time" quirks.

So, hacking. I'm not confident I can recall the process well enough to provide even the most rudimentary of tutorials, but if you're going to hack your PS3, you'll need to be on a specific outdated firmware release, and it matters what kind of PS3 you have. You can utilise custom firmware on original PS3s and some slim models, but if, like me, you currently own a "superslim", you'll have more limited access to homebrew software. You can still do it though, with the Homebrew Enabler software ("PS3HEN"), but it's just a little more awkward. Each custom song needs to be transferred to the PS3 via FTP software (something that the installation guidelines only give a cursory mention of, and I hadn't used since college), you may need to make a direct Ethernet connection between your computer and PS3, and you'll need to keep every track in a special folder on your PC to use an executable to recompile the full tracklist each time you want to modify it. You also have to transfer over a special bit of software to make the game modifiable in the first place, and in the haze of everything I tried and retried, I really can't remember how I did this. This isn't a casual undertaking.

I'd argue Harmonix are one of the most under-valued development studios out there. Even in their smaller games, like Super Beat Sports, that nobody cares about, they're stuffed to the brim with extra modes and optional content. Rock Band was an insane logistical undertaking. Not only are thousands of songs accurately transcribed for multiple instruments and difficulty settings, but the on-stage bands are authentically animated, too. They made enormous bespoke electric drumkit controllers and sold them to American normies. By the peak of all their energy and ambition, on Rock Band 3, they were even including tracks for two backing vocalists, "Pro Guitar" mode (which would have you plug in either a midi-compatible electric guitar or a special, expensive plastic one with buttons on every string of every fret, to play the real guitar parts) and keytar, and barely anybody was playing the game like that. That doesn't even scratch the surface of how much of an undertaking it was to acquire the licences to an incredible range of pop and rock songs from a huge number of different publishing houses, and re-sell them. Of course, modders don't have to worry about the legal aspect, but it's just as ambitious for them to attempt reverse engineering the game to play home-made content and match the level of quality that Harmonix established.

There are amateurish custom Beatles Rock Band DLC tracks out there, but they're not the ones made by the core TBRB Customs devs. For the most part, you'd really struggle to tell them apart from the official Harmonix ones without prior knowledge. Sure, they have to lean on the handful of environments that were established for the original game, some of the surreal Pepperland visuals wear a little thin when applied to multiple songs, and in a post-Get Back world, Twickenham and Apple Studios seem like crucial Beatle locations, so it's a shame that they haven't been incorporated, but man, they managed to hack the Magical Mystery Tour bus into this. Would you have even the slightest idea how to make your PS3 games do that? They've been pretty clever, utilising the established assets to animate each new song, and the multiple costume changes during Glass Onion's callbacks are a particular treat.

TBRB Customs have set themselves the goal of creating custom DLC for every studio-recorded Beatles album, including the Past Masters singles collections and Giles Martin's remix album, Love. It's a lofty ambition, and the team have approached the to-do list with a completionist mindset. Frustratingly, this means that many of the most wanted tracks have been held off on for now, while we're stuck pissing around for the files for Sie Leibt Dich and Hold Me Tight. So far, there's been a huge number of tracks from With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, but no All I've Got To Do or You Can't Do That, and I personally find that extremely distressing. No Baby's In Black, no Hide Your Love Away, no Bad Boy, upsettingly few White Album songs - we're promised them in the future, but apparently, there were no new releases in the whole of 2023, and the team's recent focus has been on making previous tracks available for the Wii version of the game. I really want to believe they'll complete the tracklist, but I worry their energy may run dry when they see how many years they'll need to devote to the process.

There's also the fact that the modders seem to be young American Beatles fans. The kind who cried over 2023's Now & Then and think all of Paul McCartney's solo career is worth paying attention to. They don't have the same interest in the back catalogue as us slightly older fans who still think John was the big Beatle to like, despite the things he's alleged to have done after hearing of Nixon's reelection. They're insular and memey, and if you look into the more amateurish Anthology and Solo Career projects, you'll have to wade through some rake of Spongebob shit to get some comparatively rough content. It's very annoying that they've made a custom track for George's terrible White Album off-cut, Circles, while we're still waiting for Happiness is a Warm Gun, but I shouldn't upset the babies too much while they're working so diligently on my precious Rock Band DLC.

There's always a bit of a fear of custom Rock Band stuff. The most hardcore fans seem to be those who never got over Through the Fire and Flames, and not just guys who really like songs. While the focus in this DLC has been on matching Harmonix's precedent, there's still a wee bit of that Guitar Hero elite in here. We were never supposed to play the tape loop at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, and I think you know this. Please take your job more seriously, unpaid hobbyists.

Many have approached the custom content as a thing strictly for emulators, and sensibly, it's the only way I can recommend a fan to go through this rigmarole. That strips out so much of Rock Band's appeal for me, though. For me, accessibility was such a draw to these games. I've played them at house parties with exchange students who really struggled with conversational English, but were delighted to see those falling note icons and become part of the band. If fellow Big Bad Beatleborgs are over, I can show them my special game that has twice as many songs as anybody else's copy, and we can delight in playing the whole of the Long Tall Sally EP. Nobody should go through the embarrassment of having to navigate a docked Steam Deck in front of another person. Now I've got everything set up, Beatles Rock Band is just as inviting to casuals as it was in 2009. I can grumble about minor details or the trajectory of the project, but really, it's so cool that any of this is possible.

An entertaining yarn that manages to mash up some Lovecraftian lore with the general plot of the original game is the backdrop to a decent survival horror title that leans far more towards puzzle solving and exploration over combat and, in the current gaming climate, that gives it a more unique feel.

I also liked the 'creepy, but not scary' vibe. It's more Are You Afraid Of The Dark than The Exorcist, relying on atmosphere over jump scares and gore for the most part. Again, although not necessarily something I'd want every horror game to do, it makes Alone In The Dark feel quite fresh.

Combat is serviceable at best and definitely the game's weakest suite and the story, although absolutely interesting, gets a little lost in its own sauce towards the end and this stops Alone In The Dark from being absolutely essential but if you're a fan of the original or would like a modern survival horror game that has the sensibilities of those 90s PC/PS1 titles, I think you'll find a fair bit you'll enjoy with this one.

I believe in Pikmin. I am certain that human life will end through nuclear war or ecological negligence, and someday a funny little man will land here on a spaceship and pluck doting vegetable guys out the ground to fight mutant spiders and frogs. I think the setting raises interesting and prescient ideas about the nature of survival and social hierarchies. It's the central reason I have such a problem with Pikmin 1 receiving a staight-to-VHS comedy sequel.

Having survived the first game by the skin of his teeth, Olimar arrives home and is immediately sent back to Pikminland because his boss is skint. I hate this miserable coda. I hate that his longing to see his family again is put on hold to chase money. I hate that earth is immediately seen as a place to mine for resources. I think there's a kind of dark satire about capitalistic greed in it, but I do not enjoy this part of the fantasy. I feel sick.

Pikmin 2 isn't a game about survival anymore. There's no time limit, except the daily clock, which seems more of an irritation here than the structural grounding it served as in the original game. The game's more willing to kill off your Pikmin now, because you can just go farm more. Olimar and Louie can stay here as long as they want, and seemingly, the only reason to rush is to complete the game with a score you can boast about. There's still the familiar Pikmin gameplay, but that's largely relegated to the overworld sections. The bulk of Pikmin 2's content is found in the caves; RANDOMLY GENERATED dungeons with a series of floors to excavate treasures from. Pikmin 2's quite antithetical to 1's carefulness. The Pikmin are fodder now. If they die, tough luck. Fuck your wasted time. Go find some more and try again. They probably don't have souls, right?

I've got as much distaste for randomly generated content and roguelikes as anyone, and it's a big sticking point with the game for me. It's tempting to lay it on too thick. In reality, Pikmin 2 is generating content from a fairly well-crafted library of pieces. There's still humanity in the product. Some cave floors are clever and creative. One uses a toy train track to create a central barrier that Pikmin can walk on top of without falling off, but they can walk under the drawbridge. It's cute and smart, even if it does undercut the game's setting pretty dramatically. Random elements generally come in the form of enemy and item placement, and it never creates anything unplayable, even if there are a few too many dead ends and groups of explosive nightmares.

This review follows the new Switch release of the game. It's an awkward thing. I became a Pikmin fan through the original Wii U release of 3, and the New Play Control versions of 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. To me, pointer controls are just how Pikmin is supposed to play. I'm aware there's GameCube folk who think being able to aim all over the screen messes with the intended balance, but it's just a much more deliberate aiming system than wobbling a cursor based on where your character's facing. I think 4's implementation of a lock-on system was a decent compromise, but Nintendo's already come up with the solution to this problem. Going back to the classic controls feels like playing an FPS on the Dreamcast. There is motion control support in here, but it's the airyfairy implementation from 4, where you can manipulate your cursor within the character's throwing range, and it doesn't feel any easier or more intuitive than just accepting the rudimentary 2001 standard.

In an act of curious apathy, Nintendo have chosen to base the widescreen implementation on the Wii version's clumsy presentation. While gameplay and cutscenes are presented in a native 16:9 aspect ratio, menus and text are consistently stretched to fit the dimensions of modern TVs. As the traumatised Captain Olimar is sent back to PNF-404, I'm being dragged back into the horror of friends' 2004 living rooms to suffer wrong-looking Simpsons.

I'll admit I've had a better time with Pikmin 2 on Switch than I did on my initial Wii playthrough. Knowing this is the one I didn't have much emotional attachment to helped warm me to the idea of the Pikmin gameplay grab-bag. It's a shallow pleasure, and I'd be callous enough to suggest its biggest fans have shallow appreciation for the games' setting. That said, previous releases of the game featured licensed products as its "treasures", and I've always felt a bit of a thrill from their subversive implication. The human race is dead, and the only remaining evidence of their civilisation is capitalistic waste. The Duracell batteries and Haribo bags are, understandably, not in this new version, I'll always have a bit of respect for Pikmin 2 for how it egged corporations into painting themselves as the problem.

Some people think Pikmin 2 is the best in the series. Who am I to say otherwise? Maybe you'll love it. I just hope I helped you understand why I really don't.