I competed in the Trackmania Daily Cup today, largely by accident. I just happened to be playing around 6pm BST, which is when the Daily Cup qualifiers start, and then managed to set a time, which put me into a match. I did not win, but I had a lot of fun!

The Daily Cup in Trackmania is a scheduled daily competition that takes place on the featured Track of the Day. During the qualifying stage, you simply set a time in the usual "time attack" format, then this is used to match you with players of a similar-ish skill level. Once the qualifying period is over, you can then join the main Daily Cup match if you want to — there's no obligation to, of course.

The Daily Cup match unfolds differently from the usual Trackmania multiplayer format. Instead of having a set amount of time to record the best possible lap time with as many retries as you want, the Daily Cup is a straight-up race to the finish across numerous rounds. After the first round, the four drivers in last place are eliminated until there are 16 drivers left. I'm not sure what happens after that because I didn't get that far. I survived a good 6 or 7 rounds though!

It was really fun, and the more "organised" nature of it felt like a proper "sporting" event in contrast to the rather more casual nature of regular multiplayer. The difference between having a formally organised match as part of a local league versus a casual kickabout on a Sunday afternoon, I guess.

Anyway, it was a fun way to enjoy Trackmania, so if you happen to be online at the right time, I can highly recommend jumping in and giving it a go!

I successfully managed to get up considerably earlier than my usual "five minutes before work starts" this morning, and went over to the Common to have a walk. I'm going to start trying to do this every day, because I am majorly unfit after the last year — not that I was particularly fit in the first place, but I've been feeling uncomfortably unfit of late.

I could, of course, get up early and go to the gym — but right now, to be honest, I feel like I want a bit more of a gentle start to get back into the rhythm of things. The gym can come later — plus going for a walk is free and gets you out in the fresh air, which can be quite nice first thing in the morning.

I made a deliberate choice for said walk to involve no technology whatsoever, too. I didn't have headphones on listening to music, I wasn't tracking my distance done with RunKeeper, I kept my phone in my bag on silent so I didn't even think about it. I wanted to just enjoy the relative peace of the morning on the Common — and it was a very pleasant experience. I hesitate to call it "relaxing" because I was exerting myself a little with the walking, but it was certainly nice.

As I've said numerous times before on here, a lot of the challenge in making positive changes for yourself is in establishing new habits and finding ways to avoid your own "resistance" to change. By positioning these walks as something pleasant to do first thing in the morning — which I'd only be wasting sleeping otherwise — I hope I can establish them as a helpful and somewhat healthy part of my daily routine. But I guess time will tell in that respect!

At the time we did our podcast on action roguelikes, I already had a copy of Demon's Tier+ on the way from Limited Run Games, but it hadn't yet arrived. Now it has, so I thought I'd spend a little while playing it this evening just for the sake of providing some initial impressions.

It's good! If you listened to the podcast already you'll know this already, but it really is good. Simple and accessible, yet a good level of challenge on offer to keep things interesting. A nice variety of enemy types, each of which need to be dealt with in different ways. Some absolutely lovely pixel art, both for the characters and the bosses in particular. And a soundtrack that sounds like a Squaresoft game from 1992. Genius.

There's an interesting risk versus reward thing going on where you accumulate currency as you go, and this currency is required to unlock new characters or purchase upgrades — but if you die in the dungeon, you drop it all. You then have one chance to make it back to the point where you died to retrieve your stash, otherwise it's gone forever. And the only way to actually keep your loot is to either escape from the dungeon with a magic rope, or clear the "tier" you're currently exploring.

The twin-stick shooter format works well with this. There's a relatively deliberate pace to the blasting rather than it being super-frantic, and there's some fun special abilities to make use of. The "dodge" move — actually more of a block, from what I've seen so far — is especially helpful in boss battles when they get a bit bullet hell-y. And oh they do.

So far I'm impressed! It's a nice "coffeebreak" sort of action roguelike, with individual runs not taking very long at all, making it eminently friendly to those times when you just feel like you want to play something, but nothing too complicated. I'm sure I'll be coming back to it quite frequently!

I accidentally stayed up until 2AM playing Atelier Shallie. I wanted to see if I could finish my second playthrough today. As it turns out, no I couldn't, but I did make an impressive amount of progress this evening. There'll be a new part of the Atelier MegaFeature based on my experiences so far with my second playthrough at some point tomorrow, then I should finally beat the whole thing once and for all in the next couple of days.

My copy of the Atelier Mysterious Trilogy DX pack hasn't yet arrived from Play-Asia so I'm not in too much of a rush to leave Atelier Shallie behind, but I don't want to drag things out too much — if only because I'm sure I'll run out of things to say and ways to present them at some point! I'm having a lot of fun with the game still, though, and I'm curious to see how the "True" ending will wrap up the Dusk trilogy — will there be some sort of "conclusiveness" to it all, or will it be left open for a future "Lulua, but Dusk" sort of fourth-installment situation? (That's a rhetorical question; don't spoil me if you know.)

I'm looking forward to the Mysterious games as, like Dusk, they're part of the series that I know very little about right now. And unlike Dusk, they're not installments that seem to get talked about all that much — which is a shame, as the little I do know of them makes them sound rather interesting.

Getting into the Mysterious games also feels like a significant milestone, and that the finish line is in sight. I know in practice there's still six games left to go (Sophie, Firis, Lydie & Suelle, Nelke, Ryza, Ryza 2) but I feel like we're nearly there. Maybe we'll even make it before the inevitable Ryza 3 happens! We'll see.

Anyway. I didn't mean to stay up this late as there's stuff I want to get done tomorrow. So with that, adieu, sleep well, have a pleasant weekend!

Making good progress through Resident Evil Zero so far, though I'm finding that it's oddly exhausting to play. Not that it's not enjoyable, mind — it's that it involves a surprising amount more brainpower than a lot of modern games.

As I wrote in my piece on the subject over on Rice today, Resident Evil Zero absolutely has its roots in classic adventure games — and I'm talking properly old-school adventure games of the text parser era, not just point-and-clickers. Limited inventory space? Yep. Ability to drop items? Yep. Often find yourself running around the same five rooms over and over in the hope of being struck by inspiration on what to do next? Absolutely yep.

With so many modern games making real effort to lead you by the hand through their narrative without really putting up much resistance — a lot of titles these days are more tests of endurance and patience than skill or intelligence — it's actually rather refreshing how often Resident Evil Zero has been making me genuinely think. Not about the narrative, of course; it's Resident Evil and is, of course, absolutely delightful B-movie nonsense. But in terms of what I spend my time doing in the game.

Who will I send ahead to scout out the next area? Who should carry what? Should I take Billy and Rebecca together or go separately? Can I afford to spend some ammunition on these enemies, or should I just trust in my abilities to get around them? Do I need to go that way? Is it safe to open that door? Is this thing I've been carrying around ages really useless or have I just not found what I'm supposed to use it on yet? Should I still find the giant spiders genuinely horrifying at the age of 40?

It's good stuff, but after a long hard day and a couple of hours battling through the mansion basement, it's time for a little break, I think. I've not challenged today's Trackmania Track of the Day, after all, so I think it's probably about time I took a look at that…

I love Trackmania, and I'm really enjoying the new one. I'm glad that I stumped up the whopping £8 for the "standard" access, because I think I'm having the most fun with the "Track of the Day" mode, wherein a submission from the community is reviewed and rated by the community, then picked for a whole day's racing in both single player and multiplayer. When it's all over, you can keep the track, even if you don't subscribe for another year of standard or club access afterwards.

I really enjoy playing these courses multiplayer, as there's a real sense of camaraderie as everyone tries to make it around together. And with the huge variance in skill level throughout the Trackmania playerbase, there's a fun feeling of having the opportunity to hang out with the "big boys" and perhaps get some ideas from them, while still having fun yourself.

Yes, I have never come anywhere near close to winning a Trackmania multiplayer match; in today's Track of the Day efforts, I came 53rd out of 60. But it didn't matter; as I noted in my video the other day, Trackmania has always been a game where, more than anything, it is fun just to participate. It's ridiculously fun to drive around these crazy tracks, develop your skills and simply feel yourself improving — even if those improvements don't let you get anywhere near the top of the leaderboards.

For the last few days, a quick spell on Trackmania has become a bit of a daily routine; it's nice having a regular activity like this to do, and feeling like you're sharing it with other people, even if people are mostly too busy racing to chat. (That said, my experience so far with the Trackmania community is that they are thoroughly pleasant and more than willing to help each other out while simultaneously engaging in healthy competition — even if you tell someone how to complete a track more efficiently, they still need to be able to do it, after all!)

I bet it'd be a fun game to stream, though as always I have a few reservations — not least of which would be the fact that I wonder if people seeing a "Trackmania stream" would be expecting someone who is good at Trackmania! I know I'd certainly enjoy watching someone fumbling their way through though — maybe I'll give it a go sometime.

I wonder what it is that makes you so specifically attached to the music you listened to growing up — to such an extent in some cases that you find stuff that came later actively distasteful. I was listening to Mansun's Attack of the Grey Lantern earlier — an album that I grew up with — and I was struck with how good it was, and how I enjoyed listening to it in the car on Spotify just as much as I once enjoyed listening to it on my CD player in my bedroom.

In contrast, there's not a lot of today's popular music I would even be able to name, let alone pick something I actually like from. Trends in popular music have been headed in a direction I'm not a big fan of for probably about 20 years or so at this point, so some time in that period I decided to just tune out completely, enjoy what I liked from back in the late '90s — and pick out some selected bits and bobs from the lesser-known side of things from around the world, such as J-pop, idol music, J-Rock and other such things.

Mind you, now that I put that down on paper, that might just be what I always did anyway. While it was fashionable to like "indie music" — which really came to prominence in the late '90s — I tended to make a deliberate choice to listen to stuff that was less on the "chart toppers" side of things and more selected from things that I either found cool and interesting, or that my friends had recommended to me. On occasion, some of that cool stuff found its way into the charts, but for the most part, the indie music scene — or what tended to get referred to as such, anyway — was about sleepers that you could feel suitably smug about knowing and liking when no-one else did.

But I think there's something else there, too. The time in your life that you get into music is inevitably one of the most defining periods of your life: adolescence. It's at that time of your life that you truly start to define who you are, what your outlook on life is, what your core attitudes, opinions, ideas and ambitions are. All of those things can change over time, of course — they certainly have in my case — but since adolescence is such an important time of life when you truly start to nail these things down for the first time, you tend to make positive associations in your mind with the things you were experiencing at the time you were busily defining yourself.

I primarily got into indie music because I fancied a girl called Stacie, and she recommended the compilation "Shine 7" to me. From there, I found some artists I like and branched out from there, picking up some of their albums — interspersed with the albums of artists I'd maybe heard once or twice on the radio and found quite striking. There was a bit of a balancing act there, though; if I heard something on the radio too much I'd never want to hear it ever again. Radio 1's obsession with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers throughout the early years of the new millennium is the main reason I cannot listen to that band at all ever again. And to those thinking "just turn it off" — we had the radio on on the school bus every morning. There was no "turning it off". B97! A better music mix for Bedford!

I never did get off with Stacie, I should probably add, even despite getting really drunk at a party and trying quite hard for someone who had been suffering with social anxiety for his whole life up until this point but had never known what it was called or that it was a thing. My friends called me "non-pulling Stacie freak" for several weeks afterwards. Good times.

But I digress. Several times. I had a point somewhere in all that, but I'm not sure what it was. Oh well.

Listen to your old favourite music; you'll probably find you still like all of it.

Someone (I'm not sure who, since there was no gift note on it) bought me Resident Evil 7 for my birthday, so I figured it was probably high time I checked out the series as a whole.

Back in the ol' PlayStation and Dreamcast days, I used to rather like the series, but to my shame I've never played Resident Evil 4 or any of the other ones that came after that — and I've found it rather hard to go back to the old ones because the control schemes were horrid back in the day, and feel even worse now we're all even more accustomed to proper analogue control.

So I decided to nab myself copies of all the PlayStation 4 releases, since they were all pretty cheap on Amazon. Call it a birthday present to myself or something — plus it's always nice to have the entirety of a series on a single platform.

I've spent a few hours playing Resident Evil Zero this evening. I know that's not necessarily the best place to start, but it is one of the pre-Resident Evil 4 games in the series that I've never played through to completion — or indeed very far past the initial "train" section. I've been enjoying the experience quite a bit, as this is a type of game we don't really get these days outside of the indie sphere. (Caveat to that statement: I haven't played Resident Evil 7 yet, so I have no idea what sort of game that is and how it compares to the more "action-oriented" installments.)

Specifically, I've been enjoying the amount of lateral thinking involved, particularly in terms of inventory management and getting puzzles solved between the two playable characters. It's genuinely satisfying to figure things out for yourself, and for the most part in a lot of modern games, that actual aspect of "puzzle solving" is largely absent. Just something as simple as having to go into your inventory and choose "use" on an item rather than the game taking care of it for you is a forgotten art — though the Resident Evil series has always been good enough to automatically use items like keys when it's blatantly obvious what they're for.

I remember the first time I played Devil May Cry on the mistaken assumption that it would be a Resident Evil-like game — as many of us assumed back when it first came out — and being disappointed that you didn't need to manually use inventory items to solve puzzles. And I've disliked the whole "you have the right item, so just interact with the right hotspot to use it automatically" idea ever since; while having to use your inventory is undeniably clunky, there's just something much more satisfying about doing it yourself. You feel like you solved the puzzle, rather than the game solving it for you.

And talking of puzzles, I miss survival horror games with gratuitously stupid, incongruous puzzles to solve under critical circumstances. To finish the first part of Resident Evil Zero, you have two maths puzzles to solve while under a strict time limit. Dumb? Absolutely. But I love it.

Part of the reason I've been playing this this evening is that I'm considering doing some sort of lengthy, ongoing feature over on Rice Digital about the series, as part of the hype surrounding Resident Evil Village's release. Seems as good a time as any to dive into the series in depth, and I may as well do it for the day job while it's relevant!

Played a bit more Oblivion this evening and I'm once again being reminded of how much I missed out on by playing it in an "achievement whore" style when it first came out. The game is infinitely more enjoyable if you just let it unfold organically and see what happens — you'll stumble across quests, dungeons, treasure and all sorts of things, and you'll inevitably get yourself into situations where something as simple as ensuring you have enough money to stock up on resources is an adventure in itself.

This evening I did a quest I've never seen before, which involves a mage who had been experimenting with a magical amulet that would allow him to explore his own dreams. Unfortunately, he messed something up somewhere, meaning he got stuck in his dream. Naturally, it's up to you to go and sort things out, because what could possibly go wrong.

What then unfolds is a completely unique dungeon with a series of interesting puzzles and challenges quite unlike anything else in the rest of the game. You have a "Test of Perception", where you need to avoid traps that are hidden in plain sight; a "Test of Patience" where you need to decipher a scroll written in runes in order to solve some puzzles; a "Test of Courage" that involves diving deep into a seemingly endless pit of water; and a "Test of Resolve" that is a straightforward battle against a couple of beasties.

It occurred to me while playing through this section that, while The Elder Scrolls is most certainly a triple-A series, the way it's put together is the polar opposite to a lot of other triple-A games. What I mean by this is that a lot of modern triple-A games take great pains to ensure that you see everything in one way or another — they either do this by adopting a linear "interactive movie" format, or in the case of open world titles, littering your map with markers right from the outset so you can see exactly where you need to go to see everything.

The reason for this is simple: triple-A games are expensive to make, and the creators of those games want to ensure that the budget wasn't wasted. What's the point in spending a bajillion dollars on a lovingly rendered scene if no-one ever sees it?

Oblivion takes the exact opposite approach to this. It buries cool stuff in the middle of nowhere, makes it dependent on you talking to one of its many generic NPCs at the right time, and often makes it challenging to get through if you haven't prepared accordingly. The parts where it gets a bit weird and experimental are by far its best bits — and you can easily miss them. One might argue that the entirety of Shivering Isles falls into this category, since you can quite easily forget about the mysterious door that leads you to the expansion for several hundred hours of gameplay.

And Shivering Isles is genuinely awesome; even in the depths of my "I don't like Bethesda games" feelings, I still thought Shivering Isles was great. But I feel like that's a story for another time… I still have plenty to do in Cyrodiil, from the looks of things!

My copy of the Henk Nieborg/Bitmap Bureau project Battle Axe arrived the other day, and I've been giving it a few shots over the last few days. It really is an excellent game — and in some respects not quite what I expected. In a good way.

For the unfamiliar, Battle Axe is an arcade-style game designed to evoke distinct feelings of nostalgia for around about the 16-bit era of gaming — specifically, it looks (and plays) like a lost Neo Geo game. In it, you take on the role of one of three characters as you fight your way through several fantasy-themed top-down levels, rescuing hostages, battling enemies and destroying enemy generators.

Each character has their own distinct "feel". Iolo the druid has the most powerful shots, for example, while Fae the "Drizzt, but female" character has the fastest melee attacks. All three characters can attack up close or at range — and you'll need to use both abilities throughout the game, especially during boss encounters.

Lazy critics have described Battle Axe as "Gauntlet meets Golden Axe", and this is not really an apt comparison. If anything, it's closest in execution to something like Shock Troopers on Neo Geo — but it has its own distinct feel all of its own. Fluid, responsive combat, satisfying visual and audible feedback and plenty of goodies to grab along the way — it really is one of the best arcade games that never existed.

And one thing I particularly love about it is that it's been very much designed with home play in mind. You have no continues; you just have to play as far as you can get before you run out of lives. And if you don't beat the game? Well, tough luck; you better go back and try again. Some might argue this is a cheap way of adding longevity, but if you really want to wuss out and/or just see what the later stages look like, there is an easy mode to play — plus there's also a separate "Infinite Mode" to enjoy, as well as a New Game+ option that presumably unlocks after you beat the arcade mode once.

So far Battle Axe has been a real pleasure to play. Some pillock online somewhere is probably whining about it being "too short" or "not having enough content" or "needing updates", but this really is one of the most unashamedly complete-feeling, self-contained games I've played in a long time. Bitmap Bureau are masters of what they do — just look at Xeno Crisis if you need further proof beyond Battle Axe — and they have done the unthinkable in the modern age: they've put out a game that is finished. And I love it!