I finished reading Sid Meier's Memoir! recently — it was another great autobiography from an established name in the games industry, and like Howard Scott Warshaw's book Once Upon Atari, provided some interesting insight into how Meier put his games together and his overall philosophy behind them.

Meier has always been an interesting figure to me, because he's done so many different things over the years — and Memoir! makes it clear why. He's always looking for something new and interesting to do with gaming, at least partly to see whether or not it's possible — and over the years he's learned a lot of helpful lessons.

One of the most important rules he figured out quite early on was what he describes as the "Covert Action Rule", which essentially boils down to not trying to do too much in one game. I really like Covert Action, but Meier was deeply dissatisfied with it, believing that none of its disparate gameplay elements were quite up to his own exacting standards, with the result, to him, feeling like a bit of a disjointed mess. I see his point, but I still like the game — that said, following his Covert Action Rule ever since has led him to develop some magnificent games, so I'd say he probably knows best.

I was particularly interested to read about the early days of MicroProse, who were a software company that I grew up with. It was fascinating to hear the tales of Meier and "Wild" Bill Stealey establishing the company, and how it evolved over time to such a degree that Meier ended up giving up his part-ownership but continuing to work there. It was also noteworthy to read that although Meier was particularly well-known for his pioneering flight sims in the early days of home computer games, he wasn't especially fond of them, and certainly has never felt a desire to return to that field.

Mostly, though, it was a very good read. Meier is a great storyteller — though in a markedly different style to Warshaw — and he has plenty of interesting tales to tell from over the years. So if you're at all interested in this particular bit of gaming history — as the creator of Civilization and a pioneer in the strategy game space in general, Meier's kind of a big deal — I can highly recommend Memoir!

I spotted a piece of music software appear on Steam last week, and was tempted to pick it up; I was a bit short on cash at the time, though, so I resisted. It's payday this week, though, so I finally nabbed it and have given it a quick spin this evening. It's fun!

The software is called 1BITDRAGON, and originated over on Itch. It's not trying to be a full-on digital audio workstation or anything — but what it is is an interesting sequencer and composition tool that provides a fun means of composing pieces of music, then experimenting with structure and effects.

1BITDRAGON is primarily piano roll based. You have several instruments to play with at the side of the screen, which can be freely assigned from a selection of both modern and chiptune-style instruments. Each instrument has its own piano roll that covers a few octaves of a pentatonic scale — i.e. notes that tend to go well with one another regardless of what combination you pick. Then all you have to do is draw your notes in, play it back and see what happens.

The nice thing about 1BITDRAGON is that you can also get it to generate simple patterns and accompaniments for you, too. For example, you can put together a solid drumbeat by customising where the main and "lighter" beats are for several different drum sounds; melodies and harmonies can be arpeggiated automatically (or jumbled up randomly) and it's dead easy to copy things around to produce variations.

There are limitations — specifically, the number of bars in a pattern, the number of patterns available and the overall number of instruments — but often working within such limitations can be a good creative spark to produce something interesting, in my experience.

Probably the most interesting thing to me is that rather than simply "bouncing" your composition to an audio file when you're done, you actually have to "record" it. That means you have the opportunity to "perform" your song as you see fit — jumping around from pattern to pattern and even bar to bar simply by clicking on them while the music continues to play. In this way, you can try out all sorts of different mixes and structures for your song before committing one to being your "final" version. There's even a "Live Mode" that allows you to apply various effects in real time, DJ-style.

1BITDRAGON is obviously designed for a very specific type of music rather than being a universally useful compositional tool — but if you're interested in ways of producing electronic music that are a little different from dropping samples in place, it's a really interesting piece of software. I'll be fiddling around with it a lot more in the near future, I'm sure.

Taking it easy has been doing me some good, I think — I've still got a lot on at work, but not putting too much additional pressure on myself outside of work is providing me with the opportunity to reflect on a few things. Most notable among these is exactly what has been causing me to be feeling such a sense of "struggling" lately.

I think for the most part it is down to a deep-seated frustration with today's online culture. And part of this is almost certainly me getting old and shouting for people to get off my lawn — but another, probably more significant part is the fact that the world of "online", as vaguely defined as that was, is a field in which I once felt like I "belonged", but no longer feel that way at all.

Put it this way: a good… probably 15-20 years or so ago, I would have quite happily said that the way I carry myself online is actually a better indicator of who I "really" am than the shy, awkward individual I might appear to be in reality, particularly when first meeting people. The reason for this was that when interacting with people online, I had confidence and I didn't feel judgement. There was a sense of acceptance, particularly if you found the right communities to be part of — birds of a feather flock together and all that.

These days, though, with the way in which online communities have all ended up mostly forced to hang out in the same place — social media — I feel considerably more uncomfortable. I'd go so far as to say that I feel like I'm experiencing social anxiety online almost as much as I do in person these days, and that really sucks — because communicating with people online used to be my outlet that made me feel better about having difficulty in person.

Now, I know that online communities outside of social media haven't ceased to exist completely, but for a long time the kind of "specialised" experience that I particularly enjoyed hasn't been a thing. It started back when 1up.com decided to merge its various forums into "Games" and "Not Games", which caused the average quality of conversation to plummet considerably, and I feel like it's rare to find a community willing to actually fence areas off for different types of people these days.

The biggest gaming forums out there mostly follow the "Games" and "Not Games" model (with some making the eminently wise choice of ghettoising political discussions) — whereas what I'm looking for is the experience I used to have back on the 1up.com Radio forums, which were primarily home to discussions of the 1up.com podcasts, but which also played host to the most articulate and intelligent conversations on the site. This was the days well before memes (even before "image macros") and certainly well before the tedious "stock responses" that people come out with today. I miss it.

And before you suggest it, Discord isn't the answer for me, either. Discord servers cause me no end of anxiety — not just from the social angle, but from the autistic "I need to clean up all these notifications, but they never, ever end" angle also. Discord is built in such a way that someone like me feels like they need to read everything, even if that is not in any way practical or desirable to do, and that absolutely does not work for me.

The upshot of all this is that I don't really feel like I have a place that I "belong" online any more — from a social perspective, I mean. Rice Digital is absolutely my "home" now, and I love both writing there and working with our team of freelancers on what we put on the site. That's great… but it's just one part of the equation. I feel great having a platform where I can say pretty much what I want to say — but it's not the same as having a group of friends with whom I can discuss my passions.

I guess this feeling is being compounded somewhat by the fact that most of my "real-life" friends seem to have very little interest in actually being the slightest bit sociable with me, even when I prompt them with occasional messages about things I thought they might find interesting or amusing, or suggestions of games they might want to play — or, heaven forbid, an actual invitation to come and visit.

In other words, I was already feeling pretty lonely and isolated in my day-to-day life thanks to this situation, and becoming conscious of how alien the online world feels to me today is just making me feel worse. I actually had a full-on panic attack last night that I'm pretty sure was at least partly caused by these feelings, and I don't really know what to do about them any more.

It's true what they say, I guess: the more "connected" the world is, the more isolated some people end up feeling.

Played a bit of Utopia from the Gremlin collection on Evercade over the last couple of days. Having actually written the manual for it, I hadn't really spent much time actively playing it beyond figuring out what everything in the interface did, because that was essentially all we had room to cover in the manual. And, while playing, something occurred to me: I had no idea how to "win" Utopia. It hadn't come up during my research of the game at all.

Curious, I looked over the materials that I'd used to figure things out while assembling the manual — including some dodgy retyped versions of the Amiga manual and a GameFAQs document that was surprisingly comprehensive considering the author said he didn't like the game all that much. And, sure enough, nothing anywhere listed an actual win condition.

You know why? 'Cause there isn't one. I'd forgotten that this was once a thing, but nope — Utopia is a completely open-ended "sandbox" game (in the original use of the term) where you simply… play until you're fed up of it, then you either go play something else, or you start a new game, perhaps using one of the other predefined scenarios to begin with.

I initially thought that this was a little peculiar — I was expecting something along the lines of Civilization's victory conditions, where you had to defeat all your opponents, reach a certain tech level or something… but nope. You just play. And then it occurred to me: this was once, for this kind of game, completely fine. You can't "win" at SimCity either, and Utopia's creators specifically went on record as saying they were making a sci-fi twist on SimCity, so things start to make a bit more sense from there.

I actually rather like that. It enables you to truly treat the game as a sort of software toy — which, indeed, is how SimCity used to be referred to — and just see what happens when you do various things. Since it's also quite hard to lose at Utopia — the only real way you would find yourself in a genuinely unwinnable situation would be if you ran out of money and all your buildings ended up destroyed at that exact moment, which is statistically quite unlikely — you can fiddle around with things to your heart's content, safe in the knowledge that the worst thing that can happen probably won't be all that bad, at least on the earliest scenarios.

Now that I'm secure in that knowledge, I feel much more inclined to play Utopia some more as a sort of chill-out game, experimenting with its mechanics to see what happens. It's clunky as heck, of course, being a Super NES port of an Atari ST and Amiga game, and one that was really designed to be played with the SNES mouse, but there's something oddly compelling and intriguing about it. And I'm kind of interested to see if it's capable of sparking the same sense of creativity that SimCity can. I suspect it might struggle to do so on quite the same level — but it's definitely going to be intriguing to explore further.

Now, question is, will I ever figure out Premier Manager 97?

I was having some idle musings earlier about whether or not I should experiment a bit with YouTube's "Shorts" thing that they won't stop pushing at every opportunity, but the conclusion I came to was that I hate everything about it. I hate the form factor, I hate the format, I hate what they say about the audience, I hate the way in which they're typically used, and I hate that creative types feel the need to pander to attention-deficit zoomers with shit like this.

I feel exactly the same way about TikTok, because it's essentially the same thing. I hate the fact that everyone is ripping off the exact same idea, also. It's the very worst of 21st century cynical "product design" at work, where everything is the same and nothing is actually for the purpose it might initially appear to be for.

Let me at least attempt to back up the reasons why I dislike Shorts (and TikTok, and Instagram Reels, and whatever other shit is doing the exact same thing) though, rather than just ranting about it.

First, the form factor. Vertical video — remember when that was something to be mocked? — sucks for anything other than portrait-perspective "face shouting at camera" videos. And I hate portrait-perspective "face shouting at camera" videos, because in today's social media landscape they appear to have taken the place of actually well thought-out, considered pieces of writing. Why think about what you're saying when you can just yell at a camera in the hope of going viral? But I digress.

I detest the 9:16 form factor because it's impractical for anything I might be interested in doing, which would involve game footage. You either end up cropping a narrow strip down the middle of the game screen, which looks dumb, or squeezing the game screen into a tiny letterboxed space, which also looks dumb. The one idea I'd been toying with was 4:3 retro gaming footage at the top of the available space, with text underneath displaying a few interesting facts or bits of commentary over the course of the 60-second video. But then I remembered people can't (or, rather, won't) read any more.

I hate the format because limiting things to a minute is symptomatic of the aforementioned fact that no-one online has any attention span any more. To be fair, this has been a problem for a long time — I remember old 1up.com forum threads being derailed by people yelling about "walls of text" in the mid-'00s — but it's become particularly noticeable with the rise of these shitty video formats.

I hate what these shitty video formats say about the audience because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: make "content" (ugh) for self-absorbed zoomers who don't actually care about anything and all you will attract are self-absorbed zoomers who are only swiping through as much "content" as possible because they are incapable of sitting still without a phone in their hand.

I've already mentioned why I hate the way they're typically used, but it can't be understated: I find the average use of this video format genuinely insulting to my intelligence. Out of curiosity, I downloaded TikTok a week or two ago just to see if there was any genuinely interesting gaming stuff on there, and after coming across a guy who was clearly old enough to know better going "Back in the OLDEN DAYS we had to plug our CONSOLES into a TELEVISION with CABLES!!" I uninstalled it and tried to forget about what I had just witnessed.

The growth of this format is the most out-of-touch I've ever felt online, and I know that's a recognised side-effect of growing up and/or old. But as a creative type who favours stuff that demands a modicum of intelligence and attention span to appreciate and enjoy, I feel kind of pissy that everything seems to be continually moving in the CONSUME MORE SHORT-FORM CONTENT MADE BY CONTENT CREATORS, CONTENT CONSUMERS direction rather than allowing specialists the opportunity to… well, specialise.

This was a pointless rant, I know, and I still might try my idea above with YouTube Shorts just to see if it's worth bothering with. But as someone on the autistic spectrum, I find myself feeling obliged to be uncomfortable with change and to complain about it!

I'm done now. I'm off to play the Renovation cart on Evercade.

I think — no, I'm pretty sure I know — I've been feeling more burnt out than I either realised or cared to admit. After giving myself "permission" to take a break from various projects last week, I've been very conscious of not just exhaustion, but also a general feeling of being rather overwhelmed, stressed out and depressed.

This sort of thing is generally "background noise" for my daily existence, but it's felt particularly bad recently, so I can only conclude that the break I'm taking is a good idea — and that when I return to my various projects (besides the day job) I take it a little more easy than I have been in the past.

I honestly don't have a ton of energy left to write much more than that right now, so I'm off to get a good night's sleep. I'll be okay!

For both days this weekend, both Andie and I have slept in very late indeed. We both absolutely needed it, as the last few weeks have just felt exhausting for both of us — both in terms of what we've been doing in our own professional lives, and all sorts of external stimuli like what is euphemistically referred to as "the current world situation".

I find when I sleep in late, I tend to dream particularly vividly in the "morning" hours, and these last few days have been no exception. Specifically, I've been having some very vivid dreams about the characters in the light novel series I'm presently reading, My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me! — which I wrote a bit about on Rice this week.

I feel like it's testament to the quality of the characterisation, worldbuilding and overall writing of a book when I find myself actually dreaming about the characters — and not just recreating the situations in the book, actually doing things with them in alternative scenarios. And this continues to further back up my own strong feeling that Japanese popular media, whatever the form, is immensely good at building strong, memorable characters who stick in your mind, imagination and apparently subconscious even when you're not actively engaging with the piece of media in question.

I've always struggled to define exactly how this is achieved, though. In the case of light novels, it's certainly not because of a large amount of descriptive text, because the format of light novels tends to mean that they're mostly fast-paced dialogue — and unattributed dialogue for the most part, too, meaning that the reader is expected to keep track of who is saying what rather than the author providing continual "he said, she said" synonyms for page after page.

Perhaps that's part of it, though; because you're having to engage strongly with that dialogue in order to consider who is saying what, you're getting a better idea of how the different characters speak and the things you'd expect them to be saying. But that's very much something that is exclusive to the light novel medium; in other forms of Japanese popular media, dialogue is attributed to the appropriate characters in various ways, be it through speech bubbles in manga, voice acting and animation in anime and video games, and text labels in visual novels.

Maybe it's also down to the fact that you spend quite a lot of time in the company of these characters in total, too. Sure, a single volume of a light novel may not be anywhere near as long as your average Dan Brown (I have no idea who today's bestselling western authors are) novel, but you rarely get just a single volume of a light novel, either. Plus the relatively "condensed" action in a light novel volume means that your encounter with the cast is a relatively intense and in-your-face one — sure, there's plenty of potential for subtlety, but energy and pace is part of the formula.

In the case of video games, this is absolutely the case, with your average RPG or visual novel typically being around the 20-40 hour mark or beyond. Manga, like light novels, tends to go on for multiple volumes, and anime, of course, is split into seasons of predefined length. In all those cases, you spend a goodly amount of time with the same characters in a variety of different contexts, giving you a good picture of how they respond to different things and what they're like in everyday life as well as more extraordinary circumstances.

Or maybe it's not anything specific, and it's just the fact that, for me, these stories and characters tend to resonate particularly strongly with me for one reason or another. I am, of course, well beyond the age bracket that many of these stories are theoretically aimed at — though I'd argue that many authors these days are keenly aware that even when they're writing high school stories, there's a substantial "ageing otaku" audience out there — but, for one reason or another, they hit me right in the heart and speak to me.

That's always a lovely feeling with any type of media — and while I love my Japanese gaming and visual novels, I'm particularly pleased that I made the decision to start delving into manga and light novels more, because I'm finding the enjoyment of both to be a nice relaxing thing to do that is away from a computer screen and, more importantly, away from the Internet. Bedtime reading on my Kindle has become part of my routine now — and I suspect that will continue for some time yet. After all, there's a lot of light novels out there still to read…

Hi folks, as I've already noted on YouTube, I need a break. I've been making videos almost non-stop nearly every week for a very long time now, and I need a bit of time off, particularly after a tiring week of lots of things to do!

With that in mind, I'm going to take a couple of weeks off from making videos, and in early April I'll come back, perhaps with a revamped schedule to take a bit of the pressure I've been putting on myself away. Right now, I'm doing four videos a week, which is quite a lot considering YouTube is by no means my full-time job — and my full-time job now is a lot busier than it was when I first started taking YouTube a bit more seriously.

For context: when I really got into doing YouTube stuff, I was working a job where my days were so full of pointless meetings I could literally fall asleep for 2-3 hours in the middle of my workday and no-one would actually notice. I eventually took to making videos in those gaps (and occasionally sleeping) and thus I was able to get a lot of stuff done.

Now, though, my day job fills up my whole day. Between writing stuff for Rice and working on stuff for Evercade, I rarely have a "free" moment — which is emphatically very good for job satisfaction and an overall sense of happiness, but not exactly conducive to squeezing in one's own creative projects during convenient periods of "downtime".

This has, as you might expect, been making me feel a bit anxious, because I don't want to feel like I'm letting people down, particularly as the YouTube channel has seen such impressive growth (relatively speaking) over the course of the last year or so. I feel like I might have set unreasonable expectations for myself, and I'm concerned that if I don't match up to those expectations, people might bugger off. And, while I've always said that I do my creative stuff primarily for me, it is nice to know that people are watching — it's been particularly pleasant to see the uptick in actual conversation in my comments section recently, too.

So I guess as well as some reassurance from those reading, I'm also interested in the thoughts of any creative types reading on what you think is a "reasonable" commitment to make in terms of something that is essentially a side project. Four videos a week is fun and satisfying to put out, but I don't think it's sustainable.

So what do I do instead? Do you think a monthly cycle (week 1: Atari A to Z, week 2: Atari ST A to Z, week 3: Retro Select, week 4: Evercade A to Z) might work? That means much slower progress through all the series, but would definitely take a lot of the pressure off.

Anyway, that's my thinking right now. Don't feel obliged to offer any thoughts — I primarily wanted to let you know about the two-week break more than anything. So, regardless of what I decide, I'll be back on the videos in early April! If I can find the time and energy to do so this weekend, I'll do a video announcing the short break over on YouTube to remind everyone, too.

Thanks for your understanding and continued support!

Whew, that was a very long week, and a few things fell by the wayside, as you may have noticed from the lack of daily posts! There's still lots of Things to Do in the coming weeks, but I think the mad flurry I've been dealing with for the last couple of weeks or so will start dying down a little bit from here. It's been a busy and somewhat stressful time, for sure, but it's also been fun to feel like I'm doing something useful and helpful to others.

This evening I've spent a good few hours playing Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. I picked it up on PS4 and it runs just fine. The "performance" mode puts the whole thing in a low-resolution mode the likes of which I haven't seen since Doom in low-detail mode, but it does run lovely and smooth, but the "resolution" mode runs perfectly acceptably and still looks nice. I can only assume the PS5 version has its in-game graphics looking more closely in-line with the FMV cutscenes — but rest assured, if you've been considering this one on PS4, you can absolutely enjoy it even on a base model system.

I really like the game, too. It's absolutely not Final Fantasy Souls in the slightest, though I suspect lazy reviewers and commenters are going to call it that. No, rather it feels more like what I think they were going for with Final Fantasy XV, with a lot more in the way of refinements, variety and satisfaction. It is combat with a great sense of weight and impact to it, but which also rewards (and provides ample opportunity for) tactical play. It also features what is, I think, one of the best implementations of a caster in an action RPG that I've seen to date, so I'm likely going to be focusing mostly on the magic-user job progression paths first of all.

I won't say too much more because part of my own personal joy of this game has been going in fairly blind. I will, however, say that if they had called this Final Fantasy I Remake and positioned it like Final Fantasy VII Remake — as an alternate retelling of the story — then I don't think anyone would have complained!

Not looking forward to the inevitable deluge of "I'm going to kill Chaos" memes from people who haven't engaged with the game on anything more than a surface level, though. But then, I don't look forward to any memes these days. Oh well. Not to worry. I have better things to do. Like play more Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin!

Really enjoying Gran Turismo 7. I picked it up mostly out of curiosity to see how well the PS4 version compared to the PS5 version (quite well, from what I can tell) but have been very much enjoying it ever since I first fired it up. It is — and I mean this emphatically as a compliment — a game that feels like it was made 20+ years ago, only with today's graphical technology.

What do I mean by that? Mostly, the game's sense of fun. I'm planning to write more about this on Rice tomorrow, but compared to previous Gran Turismo titles I've played, there's something about this one that just feels very pleasingly… gamey. You unlock stuff. You complete objectives. You take on gradually more challenging things. It doesn't try to sell you stuff (though you can pay real money to get more in-game currency, which is a feature I wish wasn't there) and it feels like it's a complete game in its own right.

There's a lot more structure to it than the previous Gran Turismo titles I've played, too — though admittedly I think the last one I played might have been 3 on the PS2. But the "Menu Book" system this one adopts, despite having both a stupid name and concept, works really well; not only does it provide a means of you building up your car collection bit by bit, but it also gradually encourages you to check out more and more of the game and become more ambitious in the challenges you take on.

Presumably there will come a moment where you've "done" all the Menu Books, and from there it'll be up to you as to what you want to achieve, much like in the old games. But for now, the objective-based approach is working quite nicely — though I can see it frustrating some people, since it even locks off stuff like the multiplayer until you've made sufficient progress through the main game. Doesn't bother me, personally — I doubt I'll ever go online against other people — but for those who relish the idea of online racing, that might be an annoyance.

One of the things I particularly like about it is that despite it ostensibly being "The Real Driving Simulator", it doesn't forget about aspects of game-like presentation. Cinematic sweeps around your car before the countdown. Rolling starts. Arcadey musical jingles and sound effects. And music.

A while back, I played Project Cars 2 when I first got my Logitech G29 steering wheel. I like that game a lot, but it felt like it was missing a few things — like music. When I went and looked on the forums for the game to see if anyone else had asked this question — or, indeed, if I was missing something — I was confronted with some of the most snobby elitism I think I've ever seen online. Project Cars 2, it seems, is not a silly game where you have music, because you should be listening to the sound of your car. (The sounds in that game are excellent, admittedly.)

Gran Turismo 7 has none of that attitude about it. It wants you to come on in, enjoy it however you see fit — and it's going to play a selection of excellent music while you do that. There's original tracks, there's some excellent classical music remixes — including several tracks from the legendary Hooked On Classics series — and there's a track with Idris Elba mumbling about Bugattis or something.

When I wrote a bit about the game the other day — or, more accurately, I wrote a bit about the game's installer — I commented that this is the first game I've played for ages that feels like it has old-school PlayStation energy about it. And it's absolutely true. And you know why it's got that old-school PlayStation energy? Because Sony, for once, let one of its Japanese teams make a game instead of giving us drab American triple-A moroseness.

I hope they learn something from this. I absolutely positively definitely know that they won't, but it is still something worth noting.