The nice thing about old games is that they can kind of spring up on you. Like the mood will just take you, and all of a sudden, you're back in. For whatever reason, I found myself playing much more Bubble Bobble recently. It's a game full of weird secrets and surprises, and it can catch you off-guard. I guess I dug a little deeper. The temptation for most people is to play it in two-player, constantly adding more credits and playing for as long as you like, with little threat or conscious engagement. It can be a nice way to play it, but I think you're missing a lot of what the game's doing, that way. The single-player high score run is a thrill. You try to capture as many enemies into bubbles as you can, grouping them and exploding them at the right moment. If the group is surrounded by empty bubbles, you'll get more rewards for that. It can be a frantic dash to collect all the bonus items before they disappear, but if you're sitting on a blank screen before the next stage starts, you can boost your score further by rapidly blowing and bursting more empty bubbles. The power-ups are total gamechangers, radically adding to Bub and Bob's abilities, allowing you to move quicker, navigate the screen more efficiently, and attack enemies quicker, but their status effects will only last as long as you can hold onto your life, making you much more attached to the idea of not dying. There's far more going in the game than you'd likely assume, and that likely made it more of a point of spectacle in the arcade, when someone who knew what they were doing jumped on a machine, but the depth of Bubble Bobble's appeal is an increasingly obscure facit of this funny little game where bubble dragons' mouths open up at 45 degree angles. If you like Bubble Bobble, I'd very much encourage you to try getting better at it.

I'm still buzzing about what my CRT can do for the visuals of old games, especially when invest in nice cables. In 2023, I bought an RGC PACKAPUNCH PRO RGB SCART CABLE for my GameCube, and holy moly. I remember getting the console around 2003, with Metroid Prime and the Resident Evil remake, and it blew me away, but it hadn't made me feel that way in a very long time (particularly as I seem to have lost my original official composite cables at some point, and had been hooking the thing up with a third party solution that washed out the picture). The console can look spectacular, though. I've tried every disc I own, since the new cable arrived, and it does wonders for it. Dark games with artful lighting, like the Resident Evil games, look particularly good, but then the vibrant, bold presentation of killer7 and The Wind Waker might look even better. I did worry that it might just be a party piece, though. That I wouldn't actually use the thing, when I've got more convenient access to these games through ports, remasters and emulation. Resi 4 put my worries to rest. Even in the tiny letterboxed display that the game forces when you play it on a 4:3 TV, it's a treat. I needed a palate cleanser after the remake, and I absolutely appreciated getting closer to the version of the game that Shinji Mikami personally developed. The original QTE button prompts and the calculations that went into figuring out how many polygons they could dedicate to Leon's hair for it to render on this hardware. It means so much to me to have access to the authentic version.

Here he is, again. One day I'll finish it, and I'll explode. Following the investment into my GameCube, I finally picked up a Game Boy Player. I then sold the disc and got an Action Replay so I could run the far superior Game Boy Interface, and it immediately put any interest in the Analogue Pocket and Game Boy screen mods way down the priority list. My CRT is still the most exciting piece of hardware I own, and nothing can really compete with the pleasure I feel in getting Game Boy, GBC and GBA games running natively on the thing. Again, I've tried everything I own on it, and I'm really pleased (special shout-out to Kururin Paradise, here), but it's always Pinball Land that I come back to, time after time. This year, I almost did it. I did the three bosses in a row, met Dedede, and totally shat it. I can't really face the idea that I'm capable of finishing this game, but that time seems to be growing closer. Maybe my life will have a post-Kirby's Pinball Land era in it. I can't imagine it.

Don't get too excited. Pokémon still doesn't do it for me anymore. This game's here to signify that 2023 was the year I finally got into soldering, and now my Pokémon Silver cartridge can retain saves again. Not only that, but so can my copy of Unirally. And my PSone doesn't do that thing where one of the lines is out of sync. I fixed them all, and I didn't need to pay some company to do it for me at a ludicrous fee. It really is pretty easy. The Game Boy CR2032 replacement, at least. Not much harder than swapping out a couple AAs. You could absolutely do it, and definitely should if you're sitting on some old Pokémon carts. Folk will pay megabucks for a copy with working saves. Go ahead. Flood the second-hand market with the things. Its value could do with depleting a little.

Oh, yeah. A few months before I got into soldering, I did my last big expensive purchase on one of those hardware mod services. My SNES broke, and I decided to get it up to standard. Now it can play Super Famicom carts. I'm still in the shallow end with that stuff, and I haven't bought anything that cost more than £12 (Hoshi no Kirby Super Deluxe is SO much cheaper than Fun Pak), but I don't have to suffer letterboxed 50Hz versions of my favourites anymore. Like Super Mario Bros 3 before it, World is a game that massively elevates the console it was made for, and I'm very glad to own a copy that runs as well as it was intended to. I'm a little thankful that all these mods and hardware upgrades are so complicated and expensive, as it pushes me to appreciate the last one I did before I rush onto the next. I do find myself thinking a lot about how crap my Xbox is right now, though. I'm using fucking RF for my Dreamcast. Oh, god.

Let's stop talking about modding and CRTs and authenticity. Here's a game I played via heavily criticised port that removes content and runs at half the framerate of a copy I already own. Substance is such a good game to have on the Switch, though. I made it through all of VR/Special Missions before this, and Substance's missions are such a treat in comparison to that. You actually have analogue control over aiming the sniper rifles, for a start. They also seem to have much more fun with the variety of level themes, too. VR Missions tended to fill up its mission list with PRACTICE and TIME ATTACK variants of the same stages, but Substance is far more ambitious, with several difficulty variants of different levels depending on which character you play as. I've unlocked MGS1 Snake now, and I think I've hit a wall with my progress, but I was really surprised with how much fun I had getting to that point. Anyone who bought Zone of the Enders on release became intimately familiar with the dynamics of MGS2's mechanics, and Sons of Liberty didn't really do enough with the finer points to justify most of them. It's actually exciting to really explore their depth, and pay off on all those hours you spent repeatedly getting to the Olga fight. I never could see myself putting the hours in on PS2, but on a pick up and play system like the Switch, it's such a treat to come back and take another crack at a bastard hard level. I actually loved it. Substance. Who'd have thunk.

I initially dismissed the game as pointless. A shot-for-shot remake of a game whose appeal was so thoroughly rooted in mid-nineties pre-rendered whimsy. I did like the thought of playing that game on the Switch, though, and I didn't feel too bad when I handed Amazon.co.jp £30-ish for a download code. The game they released shows the benefits of a remake. All the little refinements add up, despite their subtlety, and much of the charm remains. The limited character poses and jumpy animation has been respected and replicated, and if they ever tinker with them, you can almost hear the developers' arguments when someone suggested them. I do like the wartier, more accidental version of the game, but I'm not going to pretend there isn't something nice about a version with auto-saves. My biggest issue is with the designs of the main Mario characters, who now sit awkwardly between the 1996 CGI versions and the 2023 non-specific series merchandise. Mario is pretty good, and I'm sorry, but I can't act like I've expressed my opinion about this game without discussing how Peach looks here. I'm not cool with it. Mid-nineties Peach is one of the greatest sources of passion in my life. The weird clash of goddess-like status - celebrated in stained-glass and floating down to earth surrounded by heavenly sparkles - and innocent, unpretentious wholesomeness - sending handwritten letters to invite Mario to the castle to share a cake she made, and delightfully sitting among the flowerbed at the start of the RPG. That's something that the old pre-rendered sprite captured, and I don't see in this awkward chibi version of NSMB Peach. The animations are still pretty great, but I'm reminded of how much frame would have been deliberated over in the nineties, as the characters were posed on Silicon Graphics workstations, screenshotted, and redrawn for the limitations of SNES's sprite field. Now, all the models are in-engine, and the Switch can effortlessly keep them ticking away in the RAM as you browse the eShop. This is a comfy way to play Super Mario RPG, but am I ever going to want to come back to this version after the credits roll? I don't know. I might be too cool a dude for that.

The game so nice I completed it twice! Something has been lost in games, and it's so overwhelmingly omnipresent in Pikmin 1. It's like an experimental Japanese art piece. Games used to be like that. I'm so hooked on the feeling, I've never really been able to leave it. It's become who I am. A PS2 Disco Stu. I get the impression now that if Nintendo are aiming for a CERO A, they might consult children during the game's development, or at very least, consider how they might feel while playing the game. I'm quite certain they did not do this for Pikmin 1. This is a cruel, stressful and upsetting game, full of sincere expressions of dread and loneliness. It fucking rules. I love how dated the visuals are, too. The excessive chrome and bubble lettering. It's all very iMac G3. I went through the Wii and Switch versions of the game in 2023, and I can hear the GameCube original calling to me. I don't know if I can ignore it for a whole year.

Should I talk about this? I've never got too far in it, but I put it on around Halloween, and I fairly enjoyed the experience. I know how much this game means to people. Sorry. Forget I said anything.

Despicable. I'm not proud. But that NSO trial at the start of the year got me a little addicted to a Ubisoft game, and it calmed me down during the stress of all the flat viewings and moving town. I got good at it. I... uh... enjoyed it.

Anyway, I like to end these things by arbitrarily propping one game up as the Old Game of the Year, and why not make it Metal Gear 2's turn? I love the game. I remember when it was a footnote, and people didn't really know it was different from Snake's Revenge. It's been gratifying to see it step out of Subsistence Disc 2's shadow, and get listed on all the digital storefronts (albeit as a two-pack with Metal Gear 1). Metal Gear Solid was a partial remake of this, and I suspect that may have been more true if the game didn't spend so long in pre-production while the software engineers figured out how to work with the PS1 hardware, but it gave up so much of Metal Gear 2's eccentricity along the way. This is MGS's equivalent to A Link to the Past, full of equivalents to the flute boy and bunny transformation. Lighting a cigarette to determine the best weather for hang-gliding and hiding in a mop bucket. This is the whimsical side of Kojima that he denies himself as he chats to CEOs and movie stars. It's the stuff that delights me most. It's been so great to see more people discovering the game, and just as good to have an excuse to revisit it. Long may its relevance continue.