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Does anyone watch the Snooker World Championships other than purists?

Gex 64: Enter the Gecko NA release: 25th August 1998 PAL release: 26th February 1999 JP release: N/A Developer: Crystal Dynamics, Realtime Publisher: Midway (NA), GT (PAL) N64 Magazine Score: 59% Gex is a series of platformers that started out in 2D on the 3DO before moving over to the PlayStation with Gex 2 in 3D (which was then ported to the N64). While the series is seen as an alright platformer, it’s mainly known for its humour. So how well does the humour hold up? I think the bigger question is “was the game ever funny in the first place?”. The attempts at humour seems almost entirely disjointed with the game itself, with almost all of it being a random selection of quotes from Gex himself, spoken at random intervals – they have nothing to do with what’s happening on screen and they repeat very quickly. It’s like making a pun when there’s no thyme or plaice for it – it doesn’t work without context. Most of the rest is in the level names, with the levels themselves being generic themes. There are a few moments, such as Gex in a bunny outfit fighting Elmer Fudd, where the parody creeps in to the actual level, but definitely not enough to be a focus of the game. There’s also a few musical rip-offs, most notably the Indiana Jones and James Bond themes. For the most part, Gex is a very generic platform game that doesn’t do anything special with its levels. It also has a few crippling issues. It’s extremely difficult to judge where objects are in relation to each other, so you’ll end up missing a lot of jumps because you thought a platform (or Gex) was somewhere else. The camera is also atrocious – even on manual mode, it likes to try to “correct” itself. This means that when you’re running on a narrow platform, at some point the camera will decide to quickly turn around to be behind you. This may sound good, but it also affects your controls, so before you’ve had time to react to the camera change, you’ve already ran off the side of the platform due to Gex turning in relation to the camera. Gex doesn’t have enough moves to keep the game interesting. You have a jump and tail attack, along with an awkward to use high jump and a running kick, both not really needed. Sometimes a collectable will be slightly out of reach, but there’s enough in the level to just ignore those ones He can also climb up walls, but this is only possible on a very small number of walls and the feature is never used for anything interesting. Enter the Gecko is a surprisingly unimaginative game that is quite annoying to play. Remake or remaster? There a semi-emulated remaster in the works of the PlayStation version. At the time of writing, it’s unknown if this will include any of the N64 specific levels. Official ways to get the game. There is currently no official way to get Gex 64 (or a version of the game), but that will change shortly.  

After playing a game with possibly some of the best writing ever (and some naff gameplay), I decided to go with the complete opposite. A game with possibly some of the worst writing ever (and some pretty addictive gameplay) - Pokemon Arceus I got reasonably far with this the first time i played it, then trailed off a bit as I couldn't stomach any more of the crap dialogue and cut scenes. I thought i'd come back and try and finish it off (the story at least). I got as far as defeating the 3rd angry pokemon, and had 6 stars, so i'm maybe around halfway through? Not sure how far i'll bother trying to fill out my Pokedex. Probably just keep playing until I get bored.

Yesterday, Jeff Grubb spoke briefly about how Perfect dark is coming along.   Just what the heck has been going on over at Microsoft's studios over this past generation? It seems like a lot of stuff is just stuck in development hell.

Anyone but Real Madrid. Their plot armour in the Champions League is just infuriating. Re-match of the 12/13 final, and then Bayern losing out to the Harry Kane curse would be perfect I reckon.