Had a real "up and down" day today in terms of mood and general mental health — and I only partly mean that as a pun on the Atari 8-bit game I recorded a video for today. Got up late and felt pretty miserable this morning, then had a coffee and a cake and felt a bit better, then felt a bit miserable partway through recording stuff, then felt a bit better again. Right now I'm sort of in that in-betweeny "meh" sort of stage, which I think is mostly tiredness. Better than crashing back down to "miserable" again, I guess.
On the plus side, got some really interesting vids coming up this week — don't forget to subscribe to Rice Digital's YouTube channel as well if you want to see everything I'm up to in terms of video. Rice's channel is pretty much the home for more "modern" stuff I do now, so check over there for regular quick looks at newer games, as well as ongoing Final Fantasy playthroughs. I'm making great progress through Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster; looking forward to moving on to the other ones.
In other news today, I was delighted to find a (sadly incomplete) archive of Maverick Magazines on archive.org today — for the unfamiliar, Maverick Magazines was the second place my brother worked after working on the first (and only?) weekly games magazine Games-X over at Europress, and it's where he had his first stints of being Editor of a magazine. At the same time, his then-girlfriend Allie was working on a different magazine under the Maverick banner, and between them they provided some of my favourite Mega Drive and Super NES-related reading material.
Looking back over Control, the Super NES magazine that Allie worked on in particular — I can sort of see initial hints today's outlook of perpetual cynicism and need for criticism, though. Control (particularly once it relaunched itself as Super Control) was distinctly scathing about a lot of games, particularly where it wasn't quite warranted — many of the games they gave a notably more tepid reception to than the community in general have gone on to be regarded as all-time classics.
Thinking about it, this may have been the birthplace of my own desire to explore things outside of the "critically approved" list. I remember looking at a lot of things in Control (and Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, which my brother worked on) and thinking "oh, that actually looks pretty cool and interesting" and wondering how it ended up with such a low score. Of course, these days I know that ratings are complete bollocks — however "mathematically" Control claimed to calculate theirs — and so I just try anything I think I might find interesting. And I'm yet to steer myself wrong.
Back when I was reading Control, of course, I was, what, 11 or 12 years old, I think? (In fact, there's a feature in one issue of Control where Allie returns to her old school — which would have been my school at the time — and I recognise a lot of my classmates!) As such, I wouldn't say I had a lot in the way of disposable income, and with Super NES games being £50 or so even back then, they were (relatively speaking) actually a lot pricier than games are now. As such, I didn't really have a lot of opportunity to spend my own money on new SNES games, which would account for why despite owning and loving a SNES, I never had all that many games for it.
Anyway, that was a tangent and a half, and I'm not even sure there was a point here in the first place. If you're curious, do check out the link above and see what Maverick Magazines' stuff was like — cynicism aside in Control's writeups (I haven't revisited Mega Drive Advanced Gaming as yet; I'll be interested to see if the tone there is the same) they're still an entertaining read, even if a lot of things rather casually said in their pages would probably get them in trouble with the fun police on Twitter these days.
Time for bed and Top Racer!
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