Bobfoc

It did until this year. Now it's gone all hip and new.

Looking at the leaked Download Festival announcement has really driven home how little I know about that particular scene these days. Plenty of people are raving about bands I've never heard of. I really should try to listen to more new music.

Don't forget Rotherham.

I find it funny to think that game developers would add to their already crushing workload to add in major unlockable features that required ridiculously labyrinthine methods to access. It's an especially odd mindset to have when you also consider that they were usually having to scrap to fit their games into the limited cartridge or disc space they had available.

It's a Microsoft-published game, so you can rule out a Playstation port. A Switch version is probably unlikely as well, given that they haven't even put it on Xbox One.

Well, there are two Sean Waltmans if that's what you're into.

Neil Warnock has unretired for the umpteenth time to take over at a Championship side. This time round, it's Huddersfield.

It sounds as though Leeds will see this as one as a big missed opportunity.

BBC is reporting chants about the Munich disaster from Leeds fans.

That reminds me of the rumour that Street Fighter 2 had a character called Sheng Long. Ryu's victory quote was "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance", which was a mistranslated version of "You must defeat my Shoryuken to stand a chance".

Well, there's no better time than now to play Liverpool.

So far, yes.

This has to be Ireland's tournament to lose now.

Both Forest's starting centre-backs have been injured in the first ten minutes.

This is a bit of a niche one. There was a game called Hover that came with the Windows 95 CD. It involved piloting a hovercraft to find all the blue flags in a level before the AI opponents found all your red flags. Anyway, someone told me you could jump over the walls surrounding the playable area and unlock an entire new zone to explore. As it turns out, there is a way to do it by exploiting a glitch, but it just results in the player going out of bounds and unable to do anything.

I stopped for the same reason when I tried it on Game Pass.

You could do it in Smackdown 2, but not through a table.

I have strong memories of all the rumours surrounding Mew and Bill's Secret Garden in Pokemon Red and Blue. While they didn't pre-date the internet itself, nobody I knew had an internet connection at the time. That meant that all kinds of wild, labyrinthine methods to unlock the secrets were spread around. I'm sure people have made rom hacks to add them all in, but it would be amazing if Game Freak made a special version of the games with all the made-up Pokemon in.

The Game Boy games were the highlight for me, although Pikmin 4 comes close.

Probably because you can always recruit more units in XCOM, whereas Fire Emblem has a limited pool of soldiers with personalities. Granted, in this game, those personalities boil down to two or three variations of shallow anime archetypes who all talk like children.

The rumoured Nintendo Direct will take place tomorrow at 2pm PT/5pm ET/10pm GMT. It will last about 40 minutes.

Apparently, Hogwarts Legacy has an NPC who is a trans girl. Obviously, that's a good thing in and of itself, but the nature of the conversation surrounding the game means that cynicism regarding the motives behind it is inevitable.

I'm quite sure review scores only exist now as clickbait, to stir up "engagement" (read: angry squabbles) in the comments section and so that publishers can use them in their marketing campaigns. As far as I know, most reviewers don't like having to use them. I can guarantee that any site that gives the next Zelda game anything other than a perfect score will be inundated with death threats and DDOS attacks, just like last time. They also seem to have drifted to a point at which 7 out of 10 is considered average, so even the most generic and forgettable big-budget games tend to get that score slapped on them. Another thing I've noticed is that, every so often, a story-driven game gets lavished with embarrassingly over-the-top praise. Look to the likes of GTA IV, Bioshock Infinite, Telltale's The Walking Dead and The Last of Us series as examples. Now, I'm not saying they aren't games loved by many people, but when reviewers hail them as the long-foretold coming of the thing that will finally convince the most ardent of sceptics that games are finally, and indisputably, works of high art, it all gets rather over-the-top. It feels as though some people are so desperate to be there when gaming's "Citizen Kane moment" arrives that they can't help throwing out sentences like "In a medium where everything else is John Wick, The Last of Us Part 2 is Schindler's List" and "GTA IV gives us characters and a world with a level of depth previously unseen in gaming and elevates its story from a mere shoot-em-up to an Oscar-calibre drama". It's fine to love a game, but reel in the outlandish bollocks.

There are some Switch games on clearance offers at Tesco. Stock will be different at each shop, but I managed to get Pokemon Shining Pearl and New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe for £18.50 each. Other similarly priced games that were out of stock where I looked included Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Mario 3D World, Pokemon Legends: Arceus and Super Smash Bros Brawl. There were even sightings of OLED consoles for just over £150, but they sold out very quickly.