No-one told me a new TrackMania game came out last year. Indeed, from what I can tell, I don't think Ubisoft really told anyone that a new TrackMania came out last year either — though as always with TrackMania, there seems to be a small but dedicated community who engage with the game fully and keep it constantly lively and interesting to play.

If you've never come across TrackMania before, it's an arcade-style racer with a strong emphasis on time trials. Tracks are typically very short form, with most taking less than a minute to get from start to finish, and are full of increasingly ridiculous stunts and obstacles as you progress through the game.

TrackMania's big attraction over the years has been its included track editor and the ease with which you can share your creations. This has led to a thriving multiplayer scene where no two sessions will ever be quite alike, simply thanks to the sheer number of custom tracks there are available online.

Developer Nadeo have experimented a bit with the formula over the years. TrackMania United, which was a real high point for the series, featured a variety of different environments, each with their own unique cars. TrackMania 2, meanwhile, sold each environment as a separate game that could bolt on to the others if you so desired. And this new TrackMania is free to play.

Don't run away screaming, though; they've actually handled this quite nicely. What you get for your zero up-front cost is access to the game, the simple version of the track editor, the 25 seasonal tracks (which are updated every, well, season) and the "Arcade" mode, which features a rotating selection of player-created tracks, changing every few hours. This is more than enough to have an enjoyable TrackMania experience in both single player and multiplayer, particularly if you're a more casual fan. Oh, and the super-fun hotseat local multiplayer mode is present and correct in the free version, too.

If you want to take things a little further, you can buy a year of Standard access for about eight quid. This gives you all the free stuff, plus the ability to play the curated "Track of the Day" mode in both single and multiplayer mode, plus the ability to join any of the myriad player-run "club" servers, which tend to be themed around a particular type of track. In this way, if you're in the mood for a particular type of experience, you can go in search of it rather than hoping it shows up in Arcade mode.

If you're super serious about TrackMania, you can buy Club access for a year for about 25 quid, or three years for 50 quid. This lets you create your own clubs, run your own "rooms" on either Nadeo/Ubisoft's servers or your own dedicated servers, run private events and all sorts of other benefits. This is basically the "full" TrackMania experience that you get when you buy the earlier games, only this time around it's a subscription.

TrackMania actually kind of makes sense as a subscription, because it's always been a "live" game that is updated regularly, and maintaining those servers isn't free. This approach allows the most active players to continually support the game over the long term, while those who just want to pop in and enjoy a quick race now and again can do so without having to make any sort of commitment.

Anyway, I've been greatly enjoying the new version so far, so if you're a fan of previous TrackMania titles I'd encourage you to check it out — the multiplayer modes are lively and fun, and there's already a huge variety of custom tracks to enjoy. This one will be in my gaming rotation for quite some time, I feel!

Happy birthday to me! I think I've probably heard from a lot of you already today, so if so, thank you very much for the birthday wishes.

It's been a nice, albeit a fairly unremarkable day. It was a working day, so I got on with some stuff for the day job, then this evening Andie and I had a veritable feast of Japanese food — we actually ordered a bit too much so we've got a little left over for tomorrow's lunch, which will be nice.

Things don't feel super different now that I'm 40, and with the day job being in a good place one of the main things in my life that was stressing me out and making me unhappy is behind me. That's not to say I don't have days where stress, depression and anxiety strike like never before, of course — you never can really shake them off altogether — but I don't wake up in the morning dreading the day ahead any more, which is nice.

I've had some nice presents; couple of video games, a book I was interested in exploring and an Amazon Alexa Echo thingy with a screen that I am looking forward to having a proper fiddle around with. Birthday money from numerous sources has been spent on fun things, don't you worry.

So while it's been a quiet birthday, I can't say it's been a bad one. And that's good; I've always been of the opinion that one's birthday should be a completely sacrosanct time of the year, so it always smarts a bit if something bad happens on it, as I've experienced a couple of times in the past.

Thankfully, none of that this year. At three minutes to midnight, I can go to bed satisfied that my first day of being "over the hill" has been a perfectly respectable one.

We got a new TV and soundbar setup today. After several ultimately failed attempts to fix our old "nice TV", Andie eventually gave up and bought a lovely up-to-date replacement for the living room, and the cheapo model I bought a while back has now been relegated to bedroom duty.

For the curious, we got a Samsung Q60T TV with an HW-Q800T soundbar — there was an offer at the retailer we got them from to get this normally £500 soundbar for £300 off, so we thought we'd replace the £50 Currys own-brand one we had while we were on.

Both things are a massive improvement on what we had before; I wasn't expecting them to both be quite as good as they actually are. The TV has a beautifully crisp, clear picture (that is noticeably better than the cheapo Hitachi TV I bought a while back) and plays nice with Windows in 4K, which the previous TV did not for some reason. The soundbar, meanwhile, has a hell of an "oomph" to it, with some impressive presence, deep bass and nice virtual surround effects.

I'm super impressed so far, and I'm looking forward to experiencing lots of things in what feels like a "new" way. The soundbar has really shown its capabilities with music in particular — high-quality tracks from Spotify actually sound noticeably clearer, fuller and richer — so I'll doubtless be listening to a lot more music while I'm working during the daytime.

I don't really have any devices that support 4K other than the PC, but 1080p output from the Switch looks lovely and I've had zero issues connecting things up to it so far. Hopefully this TV lives a long and happy life — it will certainly be loved!

My wife watches a lot of "white girl YouTubers", and they annoy me. I've been trying to determine exactly why they annoy me, because it annoys me that they annoy me so much — and also I don't want to be unfair to my wife when she puts up with me watching Gawr Gura in the bath and Amelia Watson talking nonsense.

I think my main issue with them is just that there seems to be very little actual creativity on display.

There's one channel she watches where the gist of things appears to be "I'm pregnant, and this is my boyfriend", and hundreds of thousands of people watch those videos. Another has a British girl eating toast who I can't help feeling sorry for, because her family almost certainly hate her for constantly having a camera on while she's doing inane bullshit. And another starts every video promising a "very exciting video" before spending half an hour talking about three pairs of not very interesting trousers.

Vlogging has been a thing for a while, of course, so I can't get too mad about that side of things. (Although the "very exciting video" woman is genuinely excruciating to listen to.) What I do genuinely get annoyed about, though, is the number of videos that fall into one of the following categories:

• 5 Minute Crafts is a Terrible YouTube Channel, Let's Give Them Exposure by Watching Their Videos and Laughing At Them

• I Only Ate One Type of Food For a Week in the Mistaken Assumption That Someone Would Find It Interesting

• I Watched a TikTok Video That Did Well, So I'm Doing It in a YouTube Video to Try and Get Some of That Sweet Viral Attention

• I Hate Everything, So Let's Watch a Video About Something I Hate and Laugh At It

• Someone Said Something Mildly Stupid on Twitter and/or Instagram, so Here's a 40-Minute Video Explaining What an Awful Person They Are

And what compounds the problem is that all of these videos are inevitably edited with the same annoying memes that every vaguely large YouTuber uses — the Spongebob "Three Hours Later" cards; the use of Kevin MacLeod's Local Forecast, officially the most overused piece of music in existence; the use of the X-Files theme for something vaguely "mysterious" (that actually isn't mysterious); the use of Wii music to show "lol we r nerdy".

I get that certain things are popular and seem to "work" for the YouTube algorithm, but I find it mentally exhausting to see and hear the same things over and over from myriad different "content creators". And that really is what they're doing; they're churning out mindless "content" that will be forgotten about within a day, rather than doing anything that has been created with leaving any sort of lasting impact in mind — or, indeed, with any sort of individuality about it.

That doesn't sit right with me. We're better than that. At least we should be.

One thing I've been meaning to try in more games for a while is something a friend has long advocated for when playing open-world games: turn off the minimap. As it happens, Oblivion doesn't have a minimap, and as such by fiddling around with the game, I'm getting the chance to try out this philosophy of open-world gaming — and I like it.

The trouble with minimaps is that they encourage you to stare at them. You end up spending all your time looking at the minimap and the markers on it rather than actually paying any attention to the world around you. You'll inevitably end up trying to take "straight lines" to the nearest markers you need to get to, and you'll usually miss some of the more interesting, well-crafted parts of the world in the process. This isn't always the case, of course — Final Fantasy XIV strikes a nice balance between the minimap being useful and navigating by sight being important — but in Oblivion it really drives home how much more immersive things are if you're actually looking where you're going.

It's beneficial in the long term, too. If you need to get somewhere quickly, it's much better to be able to navigate by visual landmarks than attempting to parse a 2D map into 3D. It gives you a much better sense of where things are in relation to one another — especially helpful in towns — and just helps the whole "worldbuilding" thing feel a whole lot better.

Plus it encourages you to go on adventures and get into mischief. My most fun times in Oblivion so far have involved just following a path, then seeing something that looks interesting and going to see what it is. You don't get any of that if you're staring at a minimap or, worse, fast travelling everywhere. And then I would never have won a fight by allowing a wolf to hurl itself off a slope too steep for itself, leading to it dying from fall damage rather than a killing blow from me. Marvellous.

Spent a while playing some more Oblivion today, and I've found myself doing something I always thought I should go back and do — just wander around the world and get into misadventures rather than trying to "tick things off a list".

When I first played Oblivion, Achievements were new and exciting, so naturally I wanted to pursue them. So I ended up fast travelling from place to place, romping through the various Guild questlines for the Achievements, and leaving it at that.

Doing that killed not only my enthusiasm for Oblivion, but enthusiasm for Achievements too. So I don't recommend it. Instead, doing what I've been doing this time around is a lot more fun.

Specifically, I've been eschewing fast travel altogether and walking manually from place to place, deciding whether or not I want to take detours for dungeon delving along the way. (I usually do.) This also means that I stumble across the small settlements you probably otherwise wouldn't see, and many of these have their own little questlines going on.

A particular highlight today was one where I found a village with what appeared to be an invisible person tilling his field. I thought the game had bugged out for a moment — it is a Bethesda game, after all — but no, there was a whole entertaining little questline about restoring this village back to visibility.

I've also found that impromptu dungeon delving tends to provide a good means of raising skills without needing to "grind". As a mage, dungeons provide plenty of opportunity to cast a variety of spells for both exploration and combat.

I'm wondering if developing some weapon skills might be worthwhile in the long term though. Combat spells have been plenty up until now, but the last dungeon I delved into had some goblins who seemed a fair bit tougher.

Anyway. That's a decision to make another day. I am enjoying my renewed enthusiasm for exploring this game — I feel like it's yet another case of returning to something well after its original release being a good approach. Maybe one day in 20 years I'll like Skyrim…

Once again, I have found that returning to something I had felt somewhat "meh" about for quite some time with the benefit of the additional knowledge and experience I have accumulated over time has caused me to appreciate it a great deal more than when I first tried it.

In this case, as will probably be obvious from some of my recent posts, it's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I didn't hate this game by any means, but back when it was a bit more "current" I achievement-whored my way through both it and Shivering Isles, and that kind of soured me on Bethesda games for quite a while afterwards. (That and I don't like the Fallout setting, and I find Skyrim's relentless brownness exhausting.)

Returning to it after enjoying Amelia Watson's recent streams has been a lot of fun, though — and as a result of some of the work I've done on various games for my various projects, I'm now seeing it in a new light. Specifically, I'm seeing it in terms of being a successor to the classic Ultima format of computer role-playing games, in that you get plonked into a big ol' world, given a broad objective that you should probably complete at some point if you can be bothered, and are then invited to wander off in whatever direction you want.

I'm thinking particularly of the earlier Ultima games here; as the series progressed, it became more narrative-centric, but still maintained a significant degree of freedom. Oblivion — and indeed The Elder Scrolls in general — has never made characterisation and storytelling a particular high point, and this has always been a big black mark against it for me. But returning to it now with this new outlook, I can appreciate it a lot more.

Oblivion is a game in which you go about your business and you aren't an especially important person in the game world; you're just one of many people wandering around and doing your thing. I mean, sure, you can become the Hero of Kvatch pretty early on, close shut the jaws of Oblivion and all that good stuff, but so far I haven't touched any of that whatsoever and I'm having a lovely time. Instead, I'm enjoying just wandering around the world, exploring dungeons I come across, gathering loot and practicing my spells.

I'm playing as a pure mage this time — all my major skills are spell and alchemy-related. I've never played an Elder Scrolls game like this before, as I've always felt being able to take a bit of punishment and hit things with sharp objects was important, but I've been enjoying it so far. I've especially been enjoying the added strategy that being able to summon a skeleton to "tank" for me while I sneak up behind enemies and freeze their bollocks off brings to the table; it's certainly a lot more enjoyable than Oblivion's wafty melee combat.

But yeah. As I've been playing, I've been getting those strong Ultima vibes, and I feel like I'm "getting" something about this game that I never really understood before — perhaps because my sole experience with Ultima had been Ultima Underworld, which is a rather different beast in many ways. That lack of characterisation and the severe lack of voice actors is unfortunate, but after a while it doesn't matter too much; as with living life in the real world, the people you have only passing contact with on your journey are of little real importance in the grand scheme of things; they're a means to an end.

In other words, it's very much a case of approaching Oblivion with an open mind as to what it offers as to what you think it "should" be offering, and you'll have a much better time with it.

With that in mind, I'll be revisiting my Oblivion adventures every so often here as I try a bunch of things — for the first time in some cases. Now, maybe just another dungeon or two…

PC players are mad that the new version of Nier Replicant doesn't run properly at 144Hz and doesn't support 21:9 ultrawide displays, just like they're mad at every other console-first game that has had a questionable port to PC.

Meanwhile, I'm over here having deliberately picked up an Xbox 360 copy of Oblivion to revisit it after enjoying Amelia Watson's recent streams so much — safe in the knowledge that yes, it is indeed the inferior version to the PC release, but I (1) like it more and (2) didn't need to do anything special to make it run.

There are numerous reasons for (1). Firstly and most simply is that the first time I played Oblivion, it was on Xbox 360, and it was gobsmacking at the time. It was one of the first games you could boot up and feel like we'd taken a significant step forward in terms of gaming tech. I have fond memories of my time spent playing the Xbox 360 version, and thus revisiting the game on Xbox 360 just made the most sense for me — because it would provide the same experience I once had.

There are doubtless people out there who would argue that I "should" want the "definitive" experience from a game like Oblivion, but I've never really felt that way. When looking back on stuff like this, I like to remember how it existed when it was current and enjoy it as I enjoyed it back then. In that regard, Oblivion is still an impressive game many years after its original release — particularly when you regard how early in the Xbox 360's life it came out.

This is true for stuff that goes further back, too. I'm not into emulating PS1, PS2, Gamecube, Wii and the like at super high resolution and full widescreen support — because again, that's not how I remember those games. On top of that, I tend to find the bigger the disparity between the original release date of a game and the tech you're running to make it look its "best", the more absurd a game looks. A lot of PS1 games deliberately worked within the constraints of the system's low resolution and limited polygon count, for example, and buffing those up to HD resolutions just looks weird to me.

"Oh, but you can mod PC ga–" Don't care. Do not care. Actually, that's not 100% true; I do care when it comes to older stuff like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D — the Castlevania Total Conversion for Doom was amazing — but the more recent a game is, the less likely I am to want to piss around with mods for it. A friend of mine started up a Minecraft server recently; he promptly installed literally 800 mods on it which caused the game clients to take more than ten minutes to load the game and my enthusiasm for ever playing it completely evaporated.

Again, this ties in somewhat with wanting to experience the game as it was originally created, and as I remember it. The jank is part of the Elder Scrolls experience, and modding everything "broken" out of it means it's not really Oblivion any more. I'm not interested in that, just as I'm not interested in modding characters into Smash, modding nude patches into games with pretty ladies or indeed pretty much anything today's mod scene comes up with. This isn't to say I don't respect the amazing work modders do under often difficult circumstances — it's just not how I'm interested in experiencing my games.

So I think my tastes in this regard can safely be summed up as a pursuit of imperfection. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact I grew up with an Atari ST, a system that usually came off worst against its main rival the Amiga when it came to games, and thus I've always had a certain inherent tolerance for "imperfect" versions of games.

But also, I see arguments about frame rates on Twitter when you could be talking about infinitely more interesting things and I just think… yeah, I'm happy how I am, thanks.

Big Evercade announcement tomorrow at 2pm BST. You can catch it at this link — they're doing a YouTube Premiere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdUEBPScfGk

I already know what this announcement is, but I'm not giving anything away. It's pretty damn awesome, though, and I'm happy to have had the opportunity to play my own small part in this whole project since starting my new gig.

It really is kind of astonishing what the Blaze team have managed to achieve in just a year — they're a small group of dedicated, hard workers who have managed to successfully release a brand new console in the middle of a global pandemic, and in the same year as the new-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony too. And honestly, with both the PS5 and Xbox Series series being wet farts in terms of exciting features and games, the Evercade genuinely was my favourite console launch of last year.

Tomorrow's announcement is an important moment for the platform — though there are still some other exciting things waiting in the wings to be revealed later in the year. I know what most of these are too, but again, I can't tell you anything right now, I'm afraid! Just suffice to say for now that this platform's going to be sticking around for a while, and that even more exciting times are coming.

On that note, I'm going to go play my new Jaleco Collection 1 and Piko Interaction Collection 2 cartridges in bed! What better way to end a day?

As I write this, I am being bothered by a cat. Specifically, I am being bothered by Patti, who is quite frequently the most bothersome of cats, but I wouldn't want her any other way at this point. It's part of her personality, and I'm absolutely convinced that she is communicating various things to us when she bothers us like this; right now I'm pretty sure she wants me to go to bed so she can cosy up around our feet like she normally does, then inevitably "go long" at about 3 in the morning, also like she normally does.

Having pets is one of the absolute best things, and I've known this pretty much all my life, having grown up with two wonderful cats and, prior to having Patti and Meg (and our dearly departed Ruby before Patti), a succession of delightful rats.

Pets bring a wonderful sense of comfort to a house that can sometimes feel overly quiet during times like the ones we've been enduring for more than a year now, and pets always have a kind ear to listen to your problems. Sure, they might not be able to help much directly, but they will at least listen to you and never judge you for the things you say. They'll judge you for all manner of other things, mind, but never the things you say.

And because Patti is such a precious friend to us both, that's why I don't get mad at her when she bothers me repeatedly… or claws the shit out of my chair. Which are both things she has done in the last five minutes while I type this.

I should probably go to bed to keep her quiet.