Got a lot recorded today — expect Retro Select to debut this week, probably on Friday. I've been tempted to experiment a bit with YouTube's Premiere feature as a sort of happy medium between what I do and livestreaming (if you're unfamiliar, it allows you to release a video at a specific time with live chat while it plays for the first time), but the trouble with that is finding an optimal time to get some people to show up for it. Friday evening seems like it might be a fun time to try it out with Retro Select, but the question remains — whose Friday evening?

Anyway, doesn't really matter I guess. I got things done, and I feel satisfied, even if it ended up taking most of the day. Well, that's not quite true; we both got up very late today, so the morning was… well, it didn't exist, so I could have probably gotten more done if I'd got up earlier, but that didn't happen. It's the weekend, after all.

Retro Select feels like it's opened up a lot more avenues of things to explore that I'm very excited about. As I mentioned previously, the first two episodes cover an Xbox game and a PC Engine game — in lieu of allowing you early access to the episodes (they're rendering right now!) I can exclusively reveal that they're Midtown Madness 3 and Soldier Blade, both games that I love a great deal but that I've come to relatively recently.

I don't have a "content plan" (ugh) for Retro Select; all I plan on doing each time recording time rolls around is picking something I fancy playing, whether it's something I enjoyed back in the day, something I always wanted to try or something I just thinks looks interesting. I think the series will gradually develop into something fascinating over time — plus, as I say, I fully intend to keep "platform playlists", so if you're just interested in, say, PC Engine games, you'll be able to watch all those episodes in a single playlist.

Anyway, it's past midnight after getting all that shiz edited, so I'm going to have a sandwich and some crisps then hopefully get some sleep. Except I saw that Game Grumps are playing Uninvited, so there's no way I'm not watching that as soon as possible. Call it an accompaniment to supper or something.

Anyway, hope you all had a good weekend and the fathers out there had suitably Father's Day-esque celebrations. I bought my Dad a copy of the Falcon Collection on GOG.com; we used to love the original Falcon on Atari ST and Falcon 3 on PC in particular, so hopefully he'll get a chance to revisit and enjoy those.

Forgot to write yesterday, apologies. I'm sure you don't mind too much. I was just kind of exhausted after the week and I've still felt exhausted today. Had a long nap in the middle of the day and I'm not sure it helped, but, well, it happened.

I have a productive day planned tomorrow, though, and I'm excited to get down to it — I'm going to record the first episodes of Retro Select along with the new Atari A to Z episodes. Retro Select will doubtless cover a wide variety of different platforms in the long term, so it's going to give me plenty of scope to fiddle around with some games that I haven't spent nearly enough time with to date.

We'll be kicking off the series in its first couple of weeks with an Xbox and a PC Engine title. Both of those platforms are a bit underrepresented in online retro video stuff, so I think it will be good to have some explorations out there.

Xbox in particular I think tends to get bundled in with "oh, its games are just pretty much what's on PlayStation" — but there's a lot of really good exclusives on there, along with a bunch that are not backwards-compatible with the modern Xbox consoles. So that's one of many things I want to put some focus on with Retro Select in the long-term.

The only real issue I might have is that as time has gone on, games have gotten more complex and longer, and demanded that you spend more time with them in order to appreciate them. This has always been a thing with RPGs, of course, but there are plenty of other games for which this is true, too. I'm not going to rule out the possibility of doing multiple episodes on a game for Retro Select if I think it might be relevant, but the priority will be on highlighting a selection of interesting games and just giving them the sort of "quick look" treatment.

Anyway. That's all stuff to think about when it becomes relevant. I'm sorted on what I'm covering for the first couple of weeks, and I'm not exactly short of other stuff to play with, too. Looking forward to getting it all started — and I hope you enjoy it once it's underway!

Various influences have made me want to try some new things with video — most notably the ever-excellent Rob "hellfire64" Caporetto's work on his channel. Be sure to check his work out if you haven't already — he does some wonderful stuff on a variety of oft-overlooked and underappreciated retro stuff across a whole host of platforms. I was just watching his piece on Bloodshot this week, and it just got me thinking "I want to do a broader range of retro stuff".

The thing that I often feel holds me back in starting new things is the sense that I've made some sort of "commitment", and that I'd be letting someone (possibly myself) down if I didn't stick to those "commitments". That's why I was hesitant to call time on things like the long playthroughs a while back — though that was ultimately for the best, I think.

Anyway, what I'm planning to do is something a little more freeform alongside the existing, established Atari A to Z series that are the channel's main attraction. I'm going to launch a new "series", for want of a better word, but that series will simply be "whatever I want, on a retro theme". I will then post that series into playlists that are both "all of the episodes of this series", and "episodes by platform", so that people who just want to watch, say, all the Mega Drive games will be easily able to watch just the Mega Drive games.

To further ensure that I don't constrain myself to a potentially restrictive format, I'm not going to brand this an "A to Z" series. Instead I think I'm going to call it "Retro Select", with the thinking being that each week I'll just, well, select something that I fancy playing for one reason or another. The channel will then have easy access to playlists called things like "Retro Select: Full Series", "Retro Select: Mega Drive", "Retro Select: PC Engine" and suchlike for easily tracking down the platforms you're most interested in — or just watching the whole lot.

I'm gonna stick with the "intro/Let's Play" format that I do on my other series because, frankly, that format minimises the actual amount of work I have to do on each episode besides recording it — you all know how busy I keep myself, so being able to do fun things like this without it ending up feeling like "work" is super-important!

short;Play will continue as an occasional thing when there's perhaps something a bit more recent I want to show off, but it won't be a regular thing. Retro Select is something I feel I can make on a regular basis without adding too much pressure to myself, though, and I think it'll be fun to expand the range of platforms I'm covering without any real constraints.

Chris and I are also in talks about a revamp of the podcast, too. You'll likely see the fruits of those discussions in a few weeks' time, so please look forward to that, also!

It's been a little bit cooler today — as I type this it's raining outside, bringing some blessed relief to the relentless, uncomfortable heat of the last few days. I suspect the heat will be back with a vengeance before long, but for now I can at least enjoy this somewhat.

The sound of falling rain is one of my favourite ambient noises. I've had a particular appreciation for this ever since Cub Scout and school camps back when I was at primary school; I remember finding the sound of rain on the tents being rather comforting if I was finding it difficult to get to sleep, which I inevitably was, because I always find it difficult to get to sleep.

It's a sound effect I always appreciate in a video game, too, particularly if there's a nice stereo spread on the ambience. I've been known to deliberately hang out in rainy areas in some games just to soak up (no pun intended) some of that pleasing sound.

Attempting to reproduce the sound of rain artificially (through an "ambience" app for phone or similar) never quite has the same effect, because I think an important part of the experience is the environment, too. I'm particularly enjoying the rain outside the window right now because it's accompanied by a nice cool breeze — it's not too cold, and it's pleasant to feel after the blazing heat of the last few days.

Anyway, I don't really have a particular point on that subject, it just struck me as something to write about while I was here. Hope you've all had a pleasant Wednesday and that the weather isn't treating you too badly where you are!

Nintendo's eagerly anticipated Direct from E3 2021 was today and… it was okay. There were some nice reveals — most notably a 2D Metroid game that has apparently been in development hell for a long time, which is cool to see, and Project Zero 5 getting ported to modern systems — but the whole thing left me rather underwhelmed.

I certainly didn't come away thinking that they'd "saved" E3, as some people have been arguing. The fact that people were saying that at all is more an indictment of how moribund the other offerings this year have been — and things haven't gotten any better since, with what could have been a cool and interesting Bandai Namco stream ending up being 5 minutes on a game that no-one really gives much of a toss about.

The one thing you can say in Nintendo's favour is that they didn't forget to show the games, and they didn't waste time having some anonymous suit coming on stage and spouting business garbage.

They showed quite a lot games, in fact. It's just… I'm kind of finding it hard to get excited about the increasing number of "remasters" we're getting these days.

Being able to play Super Monkey Ball again will be cool, I guess, but I've already played Super Monkey Ball. And Advance Wars… while it'll be great to see that series back, I'm not big on the new art style for the units; Advance Wars always felt like a series that should have stuck resolutely with pixel art. But times change, I guess.

It'll be nice to have all the Danganronpas (except Ultra Despair Girls, annoyingly) in one place, particularly with the stupid prices V3 goes for these days, but that's not exactly an E3-worthy "big reveal".

I guess the best thing to do with Nintendo's presentation is look at not necessarily what all this means right now, but what it potentially means for the future.

A Project Zero 5 rerelease means there could be more Project Zero games in the future — or just some more enhanced reimaginings like Project Zero 2 got, that would be neat. (An official localised release of the fourth one would be great, too.)

A new Cruisin' game is a high-profile acknowledgement that the arcade racer is far from dead.

And the aforementioned remasters of Advance Wars potentially open the door for new games in the series in the future, which I don't think anyone would complain about.

So like I say… I wasn't super-impressed by Nintendo's offering this year, but I wouldn't necessarily say I was particularly disappointed either. I just think they've done much, much better in the past — and I suspect the ongoing COVID situation probably has a lot to do with why this year's lineup was so relatively weak.

Anyway, here's hoping for some actually exciting news to come from the "show floor" (not that there is one this year) because otherwise E3 as a whole has been pretty much a bust for 2021.

Roll on Tokyo Game Show, I say!

Finished the Resident Evil 2 remake this evening, and I really enjoyed it. (I also appreciate the fact that finishing one character's second playthrough story opens up the other one without you having to play through the "A" scenario again.)

I'm really impressed with what a good job they did on this. It's a game with triple-A production values that doesn't forget what makes games interesting — art style, personality and, more than anything, never forgetting that it's a video game.

Resident Evil 2 isn't a "cinematic experience". It has some nice cutscenes along the way and the mocap and facial animation is some of the best I've seen, but as with the classic PlayStation and GameCube versions, narrative is kept to a relative minimum, and you spend the majority of your time exploring, manipulating items, avoiding or fighting enemies and just generally playing the game.

On top of that, at various points you unlock some interesting vaguely "arcadey" scenarios to play — these include a take on "The 4th Survivor" from the original release of Resident Evil 2, plus three special "The Ghost Survivors" scenarios that appear to be sort of "what if?" tales that explain who a few otherwise unexplained characters you stumble across in the main story actually are.

Structurally, then, it feels like a PS1 game. This is a good thing. Play, finish, unlock more stuff, play more, unlock more stuff, play more. Plenty of value. Plenty of reason to replay. I can see speedrunning attempts at this being quite fun — even if my first playthroughs for both Leon A and Claire B were ridiculously slow. (They always were on the PS1 version if I hadn't played for a while, too.)

The fact it plays like a modern game (in a good way) makes it much more desirable to go back and try for better ranks or unlocks, though. The clunky controls of the original Resident Evil games always made it feel like a bit of an effort to go through it all again, but Resident Evil 2 remake plays so well I'd be quite happy to zip through it again — if I wasn't also trying to get through the series as a whole. Maybe I'll return to it in the future though!

Anyway, it's a good thing. Time permitting, I'll write something on the subject tomorrow on Rice Digital, because E3 sure as hell isn't throwing up anything interesting at all to talk about.

Been playing through the Resident Evil 2 remake this weekend, largely so I can catch up on the Resident Evil Retrospective feature I started doing over on Rice Digital.

I've been struck by quite how much I like Resident Evil 2 remake — it really does demonstrate how to do one of these remakes right. It's revamped and modernised just enough to make it palatable to a modern audience, but remains recognisable enough in style to keep fans of the original happy. And there's enough brand new stuff in there that even those who played the original to death can enjoy it as a new game.

Basically, they've gone, "this was a good game in 1998, what if it was a good game now?" and then completely rebuilt it from scratch. Best of all, they've managed to do so without falling into the pitfalls that many other modern triple-A titles do: there's no unnecessary RPG-style mechanics; there's no obnoxious upselling of DLC (though I believe there are some costumes available) and the generous swathes of bonus content feels authentically "retro".

It's also nice to play a game that is short, too — it took me just shy of 8 hours for my Leon playthrough, which is a bit longer than the original Resident Evil 2, but still easily digestible, and I suspect my Claire playthrough will probably go quicker. At no point did the game feel like it was padding itself out for the sake of things; it felt like it was always moving forwards, but provided plenty of opportunity for exploration and discovery along the way.

In short, if you haven't tried the Resident Evil 2 remake as yet and you enjoyed the original — hell, even if you didn't enjoy the original but are fond of the series — then Resident Evil 2 remake is definitely worth your time. More on Rice Digital on the subject this week!

The limited-press houses Special Reserve and Super Rare have both announced that they're starting to do "physical-only" releases — games that will never have a digital release (supposedly, anyway) and which are exclusive to that initial print run.

I like this idea, for reasons I'll get onto in a moment. But there are also a fair few people who seem to be super mad about this, making some seriously questionable arguments against it, too. I've even seen some people go so far as to say releasing on a digital storefront (where, let's not forget, we've already seen plenty of games vanish without trace for years, often permanently) is better preservation than sticking something in a box.

For my money, I think it's great, because it solves the one big problem that a lot of indie developers making risky projects have: discovery. Release something a bit weird onto Steam or Itch, and chances are it will disappear into the depths of the flood of stuff released every day, sinking without trace unless you're fortunate enough to have made something that goes viral or becomes a meme.

Conversely, through the programmes these companies are offering, they help fund development of projects that probably wouldn't have been greenlit through conventional publishing houses, then provide a lengthy open preorder window for people to pick up a copy and devote their marketing efforts to promoting that game, making people aware of it and ensuring that copies get into the hands of reviewers ahead of launch.

The downside to this — and the source of most people's objections — is that if you weren't in that initial batch of preorders, you're not getting that game. But realistically… if you didn't buy that game on its launch weekend on Steam, Itch or wherever, were you really going to buy it anyway? It's still relatively rare that indie titles become sensations years or even months after their original launch; more often than not they're just lost.

The other reason I find the vehement objections so puzzling is because we had nearly seven hardware generations of "physical only" being the way we bought games. Games getting simultaneous physical and digital releases only started to become a thing in the mid-to-late PS3 and Xbox era — and, as I've spoken about elsewhere before, small-scale indie games ended up ghettoised into digital-only marketplaces like Xbox Live Arcade, which a lot of players assumes offered somehow "lesser" experiences.

I guess a lot has changed in the outgoing hardware generation in terms of attitude, but I've never been a big fan of "the digital future" anyway. I recognise that it's allowed a lot of creators to release things that they never would have otherwise been able to release — but as time has gone on that has become more and more of a mixed blessing. With each passing year, the market has become more and more flooded with ever-increasing piles of low-effort crap, meaning the genuinely worthwhile stuff often gets drowned.

And the media have a part to play in this, too. Compare how many column inches were spent on that fucking $8 calculator app for Nintendo Switch versus, say, the outstanding Astalon: Tears of the Earth. You can see why some indies might want to try something a bit different.

Anyway, that's my two penneth on the subject. I'll be doing what I always do with games: grabbing stuff that looks like it might be of interest, and passing up on things I know probably won't be my jam. So far as I'm concerned, this is pretty much business as usual.

Been playing Midtown Madness 3 a bit today; watched a couple of LGR videos on the first two and was intrigued by the third one on Xbox, even knowing it was developed by someone different to the first two. (It was actually developed by DICE, who are now, to my knowledge, known for Battlefield and nothing but Battlefield, if you were curious.)

I've been enjoying it a great deal and once again I've found myself struck by how very much this feels like a game of its time — something that we probably wouldn't see today.

There are numerous reasons for this; firstly, a lot of open-world racing sims these days tend to take themselves a bit too seriously, whereas Midtown Madness 3 is pure, gleefully unrealistic chaos. Pretty much every roadside object can be bashed out of the way, meaning you can improvise your own shortcuts in all sorts of places.

Secondly, it's full of "foreign" accents you probably wouldn't get away with today. The entire Paris section of the game sounds like it's an audition for the next Inspector Clouseau film and, you know what, I frigging love it.

I'm probably not supposed to say that I love that sort of thing these days, but sod it — it's funny because it's ridiculous, not because of any sort of maliciousness. The voice actors involved (one of whom sounds quite a bit like Jennifer Hale, but I don't think it's her) are clearly having an absolute blast going over the top with their silly voices, and it really adds to the comedic feel of the game.

More than anything, it's just a really fun game with an irreverent sense of humour that knows what it is, has a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve — and it achieves it. It feels like a complete, self-contained package; it doesn't feel like anything is missing or going to be patched in later or added through DLC. It's just a good game, and it's easy to forget how nice that is sometimes.

Wish I'd listened to my friend and picked this up back in the day now! Oh well. At least I can enjoy it now!

Watched a bit of the Geoff Keighley stream earlier on. Sadly I missed the reveal of Metal Slug Tactics, which is an awesome thing to know exists nonetheless — but I found the rest of the show so excruciating after a while I had to turn it off before it finished.

The trouble with shows like this is that they feel so false. Every time some corporate representative from a company (let's face it, from Activision) stepped out and started waffling on about delivering the quality and excellence their consumers expect from their robust content roadmap, I just wanted to wring someone's neck. None of them actually said anything; it was all just empty management speak that didn't reveal anything whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Geoff Keighley kept commenting on how he was "honoured" to feature certain indie titles in the presentation, and my only thought was — if you're that honoured to feature them, why not actually invite the developers on to talk about them? I suspect most of the developers of these "honourable" indie games would be far more interesting than Generic McGenericpants from ActiBlizzard tellling us in a flat monotone about how "the team feels passionately" about something that doesn't matter, like the supposed "story" in a competitive multiplayer shooter.

Every time I see a show like this I think about all the words I write every year about the games I love. I think about how enthusiastic the people I talk to online are about the games they enjoy. And I think about how little of that comes across in these woefully artificial corporate presentations.

I'm not saying everyone on stage needs to be a screeching, frantically gesticulating YouTuber — the prevalence of the concept of "Influencers" can eat a fucking dick — but it'd be nice to have a gaming event that remembers what a love of gaming is like, rather than feeling like a corporate quarterly all-hands meeting that no-one is really paying attention to because nothing of any real worth is actually being said. I left them behind with my last job; I don't need them in my entertainment!

Ah well. I wasn't expecting much from the presentation and as such I wasn't really disappointed. As always, the most interesting news tends to show up when you least expect it.