It seems that people of a certain — I don’t even know if it’s age, but it’s definitely a specific social group of some description — are incapable of describing something via any word other than “weird”. This is particularly apparent on YouTube, where there is a veritable surfeit of videos called, simply, “[x] is weird”.
Here’s one:
And another:
Here’s a brand new one with no views:
And here is part of what is apparently a whole series of the bloody things:
What these videos inevitably go on to describe is something that is emphatically not weird, usually rather mundane and which could have probably been better served with a more descriptive title.
At this point I’m sure someone desperately wants to bring up the American left-wing tendency to refer to anyone on the right of them as “weird”, which is a current trend in the run up to the next U.S. presidential election. This is a separate issue — and one which, I have to say, I’m kind of on board with, because nothing shuts down a raging idiot like telling them they’re being weird and making an idiot out of themselves — so I am not including it in the trend I am describing above, which has been around a lot longer.
I often find that the “[x] is weird” trend goes hand in hand with the tendency for Certain Types of People (again, not necessarily age-specific, but a definite type) to write things all in lower-case. You can see this in the first video example above. Nothing in the video title or the text on the thumbnail uses a capital letter, even when one is really needed (such as in the word “I”, on the name “Tony Hawk” and the abbreviation “THPS” for “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater”). And, again, the people who do this sort of thing often like to make out that exceedingly mundane things are somehow outlandishly remarkable.
I’m not even entirely sure why this bothers me so much. I think it’s that “[x] is weird” does the video (it’s usually a video), the subject matter the video is covering and the creator of the video a disservice. I’m sure many of these “[x] is weird” videos are actually quite interesting, but I am, at this point, completely put off from clicking on them almost as much as if I see “I played 100 days of [game]”.
I guess it’s just another example of Stuff That Isn’t For Me. And judging by the viewing figures on a couple of those videos I posted above, it seems I’m in a bit of a minority. But still. If you ever catch me posting a video with the name “[game name] is WEIRD” you have full permission to slap me. Even if I’m covering a French home computer game from the early ’90s. Now those really WERE weird.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
It’s very easy to be cynical about the state of modern gaming if all you pay attention to is triple-A. There are a bajillion YouTube videos on this very subject. I even made my own counterpoint, which you can enjoy here if you see fit:
Fact is, though, if you look outside all the identikit Live Service open-world player retention monetised-out-the-wazoo triple-A space (and the indie darlings who desperately wish they were part of that space), we’ve never had it so good.
We’re living in a world where, in 2024, there is a brand new Famicom Detective Club game out now, with an English version and a physical release. I bought it, because I really enjoyed the modernised versions of the first two. (You can read my thoughts on them here and here, and some more detailed thoughts on this new third entry will follow soon.)
We’re living in a world where preservation of retro games is not just taking place in the form of rereleases — and it’s great that that is happening in itself — but also in the form of fantastic “museum-style” pieces featuring interactive historical artifacts, video clips and all manner of other goodness.
We’re living in a world where Japanese games we once thought would never be localised are readily available in English — and with gorgeous big-box physical releases just like PC games from 25 years ago.
We’re living in a world where all the mainline Yakuza/Like A Dragon games are available in English, which I’m sure makes the guy who used to harass me on MoeGamer because he thought anime-style games were stopping Yakuza games from getting localised mad for some reason.
And, of course, we’re living in a world where thanks to emulation and related solutions, everyone has easy access to pretty much every game ever made, so if you ever claim you have “nothing to play” you really only have your own boring ass to blame.
There’s plenty that’s shit, of course. The aforementioned live service games. Perpetually unfinished releases with endless “roadmaps”. The scourge that is Game Pass. The death of traditional games journalism, particularly magazines. The general standard of “discourse” online (or lack thereof) surrounding video games. All of that sucks fat horse dick.
But a lot of it also doesn’t matter. Because you can shout and scream and yell about how shit you think “modern gaming” is… or you can actually engage with “modern gaming” until you figure out that it’s much, much more than just the incredibly shit bits. And the sooner you leave the incredibly shit bits behind — and yes, it absolutely is possible to do so, I have done since about 2010 and have been eating well games-wise ever since — you’ll find things better than ever.
So close that Twitter window where you’re complaining about Helldivers II or whatever, and boot up a copy of, say, Emio: The Smiling Man. And don’t look back.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
One of the nice things about being into retro gaming and computing these days is that there are a lot of very convenient things you can use that simply weren’t a thing Back In The Day for one reason or another. And while I’m not a huge fan of doing major modifications to classic hardware that effectively rips out the original “soul” of the machine, I do want to share a few things that just make life a little bit easier for various use cases.
SDrive-MAX (Atari 8-bit)
One of the most common points of failure on classic hardware is old media — both in terms of the media itself, and the hardware required to read it. I have several disk drives for my Atari 8-bit computers, and none of them quite work properly. One of the 1050s can be coaxed back into behaving itself by taking it apart, giving it a poke and putting it back together again, but that’s a bit of a pain and I’m always wary of doing so.
So what’s the alternative? Well, enter the SDrive-MAX, a little gizmo that plugs into the Atari 8-bit’s SIO port (precursor to USB, fact fans) and effectively acts as a virtual disk drive. Like most convenient add-on gizmos these days, it’s based around a little Arduino mini computer that basically pretends to be an Atari disk drive. Set it up with the default gubbins and it automatically boots to a convenient menu screen — using the Atari’s own OS, not anything you’ve “bolted on” to it — where you can choose from disk images and executable files you’ve put on an SD card. You can even create new disk images to save things — such as documents in productivity software and saved games in games — and mount multiple disk images simultaneously for easy swapping between.
It’s a lovely little thing, and has effectively removed most of the need I might have for a classic Atari disk drive. There are some old files and documents trapped on old Atari floppies that I’d like to find a solution to preserve at some point, but if I just want to play a game or something on real Atari 8-bit hardware, the SDrive-MAX is all I need.
UltraSatan (Atari ST)
A similar sort of thing for Atari ST is the UltraSatan. This, once again, is a little gizmo you plug into a port on the base spec micro without having to make any modifications, and it allows you to load things from SD card rather than having to rely on floppy disks. There are ways to make it boot floppy disk images, but by far the most convenient thing to do is set it up as a virtual hard drive and boot everything from there.
One of the most popular things to do in this regard is contact a slightly intimidating member of the Atari enthusiast community who has diligently worked to convert a massive selection of Atari ST games to run from hard drive. Not only that, but he’s set a lot of them up to support save states and quick quitting back to the desktop without having to reboot the machine — and he’s also put in the work to ensure that the vast majority of things work on all variants of the ST’s operating system, thereby completely eliminating one of my biggest bugbears with the ST: the fact that some games will only work on certain models of ST.
Like the SDrive-MAX, the UltraSatan fitted with the “PeraPutnik” driver and hard drive image turns the ST into a ready-to-go gaming battlestation, loaded up with every game you might possibly want to play (and some you’ll never want to touch). And because using it doesn’t involve faffing around with anything inside the ST — it plugs into the hard drive port that already exists on most STs — you can still use your old floppies, too.
MemCard Pro 2 (PlayStation/PlayStation 2)
One thing PlayStation enthusiasts have almost certainly run into at some point is the challenge of remembering which memory card has what saved games on it. If you have a large PlayStation and PlayStation 2 collection, it can be easy to lose track of what is saved where, unless you’re diligent about labelling and cataloguing your cards, which I’m willing to bet most people are not.
Enter the MemCard Pro 2, another little gizmo built on a tiny computer. This time, it’s not for booting game images; it’s for creating virtual memory cards on an SD card. This means you can easily organise and catalogue your saved games without having to constantly swap cards; changing memory cards is a matter of pressing a button on the device, or using the Web-based interface from your mobile phone to select a “card” directly.
It supports both PlayStation 2 and PlayStation memory cards, and the only limit to how many virtual cards you can have is the size of the SD card you put in it. And with PS2 memory cards being 8MB (and PS1 being 192KB!) you can fit a lot on even a small SD card.
Even better, if you’re just getting into PlayStation collecting and you start a game for the first time, the MemCard Pro 2 can automatically detect and create a memory card specifically for that game. If you use this feature, you basically never have to switch anything ever again — though if you have existing saves on old memory cards, you’ll probably want to spend some time copying them across to the MemCard Pro 2 at some point.
8bitdo Retro Receiver (PlayStation/PlayStation 2)
Finally, you can easily upgrade your PlayStation or PlayStation 2 to modern wireless controls with this lovely little thing. You can pair it with all manner of devices, including Sony’s own DualShock 4 controllers to keep the authentic PlayStation feel, and finally bin all those old DualShock 2s that have been making weird rattling noises for years. Lovely stuff.
I’m looking forward to adding the Dreamcast GDEMU (and I also ordered an EverDrive for the N64) to this mix. Modernised retro consoles ahoy!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’ve bought an ODE for my Sega Dreamcast. For the unfamiliar, an ODE is an Optical Drive Emulator: a replacement for ageing optical disc drives that instead loads disc images directly from some sort of flash storage — usually an SD card of some description.
I’ve been meaning to do something like this for a while, but the seemingly prohibitive cost of doing so was putting me off a bit. But it turns out I was looking at the absolute most expensive possible way of doing it, known as a “MODE” device. This is apparently a nice bit of kit, but a much more affordable means of doing almost exactly the same thing is known as a GDEMU.
I’m generally hesitant to go for console modifications because I’m not at all confident with my own skills at taking things apart, putting things that weren’t originally supposed to be there inside, then putting it all back together again — and the instructions for doing so are usually put together by the sort of person who installs Linux for fun. But the Dreamcast GDEMU operation looks so simple I’m pretty sure even I can do it. You unscrew the case, unscrew the disc drive assembly, take the disc drive out and then plug the GDEMU directly into the same socket the disc drive was in. And that appears to be it — aside from a slightly scary-sounding suggestion that you stick some resistors in one of the bits of the power supply to help prevent overheating since the disc drive is no longer using that part of the power supply.
The way I see it is this: my Dreamcast is already a battered old thing that likes to reboot Sega Rally while I’m in the middle of playing it, and I’m pretty sure that the disc drive is to blame for all the woes I have with it. So if you take that out of the equation and replace it with something solid-state, then it will become much more enjoyable to use, and thus I will probably be more likely to use it on a more regular basis. If it all goes wrong, I’m left with a Dreamcast that didn’t work all that well in the first place, so no biggie. And if it does work, I have a revitalised machine that will hopefully be a lot of fun to use.
The reason I’m considering this at all in the first place is because although Dreamcast emulation is in quite a good place, it’s nowhere near as “near-perfect” as emulation for the classic cart-based systems and the PlayStation at this point. There are just enough little graphical glitches and considerations with Dreamcast emulation to make me want to take this approach with real hardware; I’m sure that will change with time, but for now, I think it’s going to be a more practical, enjoyable option.
The Dreamcast is a delightful system with a small but well-formed library filled with some great arcade-style games. It’s probably the last console where classic arcade-style games was a priority of the library — and while that probably contributed to its downfall as more ambitious, more hefty games took hold of the public’s imagination on other platforms, it makes the Dreamcast a very appealing prospect today. An ideal system for when you don’t want to get involved in anything too deep, but you still want to play a game.
So I’m looking forward to giving all this nonsense a go. It’ll be a while before all the parts I need arrive, but I’ll give a full report when they do.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I am failing hard at my weight loss and fitness goals, so I am going to use today’s opportunity to give myself something of a pep talk. Hopefully laying down the things I’ve been feeling — and how I feel about things not going the right way — on “paper” will help me put them into perspective and move forwards.
First of all, I’ll say that “failing” is probably the wrong word. I have suffered a temporary setback. It is a temporary setback that has been going on for probably a couple of months at this point, but if we’re looking at the big picture, I’m still a stone lighter than when I started all this. That is Progress, and I shouldn’t put myself down too hard when I have made Progress.
However, my trouble is that I’ve become complacent. My brain has figured that it knows what I’m “supposed” to do in order to keep the weight loss going, and it has led me to assume that it knows best and is able to do the “right” things instinctively.
Well, brain, you cannot do these things instinctively. You have been making a right hash of things of late. But it’s not too late to sort things out. You need to take a moment to reflect why you’re doing this, then recalibrate yourself to follow the Slimming World programme carefully, methodically and fastidiously. No thinking “oh, a quick Meal Deal won’t hurt”. No thinking “ah, one Greggs won’t hurt”. No thinking outright potentially harmful thoughts like “maybe I just won’t eat for most of tomorrow”.
No, brain, instead, you know you have a clear structure within which to work. And that means making an effort to prioritise the foods that Slimming World defines as “free” — for the unfamiliar, this includes not only the usual sort of fruits and vegetables that you’d expect, including potatoes, but also pasta, rice and some grains.
On top of that “free” stuff, you have two “Healthy Extra A” choices, which are carefully measured things in the dairy area, and one “Healthy Extra B” choice, which is fibre-related, and usually takes the form of something like a carefully measured bowl of Shredded Wheat, two slices of wholemeal bread, stuff like that.
And on top of that, you have your “Syns”, which covers everything else. And these are the things that are probably the most important to count. Because while you can technically have anything on Slimming World, it’s important to ensure you’re 100% aware of what you’re putting in your mouth and how much of it you’re putting in your mouth, too. One or two little treats that are a couple of Syns each are fine; a whole “Sharing” bagful is not.
Since the first time I did Slimming World (and had a lot of success with it first time around), they’ve started to place a greater focus on “trigger foods”, and I think that’s something I really need to be mindful of. Trigger foods are the things that “set you off” onto a path that will harm your overall weight loss. In my case, it’s things like getting a big bag of some sort of “treat”, be it sweet or savoury, and telling myself “I’ll just have a bit at a time”. I inevitably do not have a bit at a time and end up eating the whole bag. This is, as I’m sure you can appreciate, a Problem.
Thing is, I am aware of the behaviours I’m exhibiting, and how they’re symptomatic of someone with an addiction. I have seen them in other people who were addicted to things other than food. Trouble is, an addiction to food, which is clearly what I am having to deal with, is not something which is taken anywhere near as seriously as an addiction to alcohol or drugs, but clearly it can be harmful.
And it’s not as if I don’t want to fix myself. I’m fed up of not being able to sleep well because my whole body hurts. I’m fed up of not physically being able to do things because I’m too big. I’m fed up of it being difficult to find clothes that fit. And I’m fed up of still living with this fucking hernia that randomly flares up into excruciating pain on an unpredictable basis, and being unable to get treatment for it because I’m too fat.
Annoyingly, I’ve tried seeking medical help for this, and all I got was a useless “course” where I spoke to someone on Zoom once every two weeks, got no particularly helpful advice that I didn’t know already, was repeatedly asked if I wanted bariatric surgery (I emphatically do not, for a variety of reasons) and made hardly any progress. So I guess it’s up to me.
So brain, you have two options. Give up, which I know you don’t want to do, or start taking this seriously. Start writing down everything you eat, including when you have “too much”. Start measuring those Healthy Extras and counting those Syns. And be fastidious about it. Don’t be afraid to mess up and acknowledge that you messed up; in writing this post in the first place, I’m admitting to myself that I messed up. And don’t be in denial that there is a problem here which needs to be solved.
This evening, it is time to reflect and consider the situation. From first thing tomorrow morning, it’s a clean “break” from the past, and a new beginning. Let’s get this done.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I decided to hop on board with a friend’s “high score” (well, “best time”, really) challenge over on his Discord today. The game? Sega Rally on the Saturn, a game (and console) I have precisely zero experience with outside of an occasional go on an arcade machine back in the ’90s.
Unsurprisingly, I am not yet at a standard where I can even enter the challenge, given that it requires participants to complete all three stages of the game and post a time on the game’s high score table. But I’m not mad about that. In fact, it brought something into focus that I’ve probably been aware of for a good long while, but which I hadn’t really thought about actively before.
A key difference between older, arcade-style games and the stuff we typically get today is that older games demand that you specialise — get really good at one very specific thing — while today’s games only demand that you reach a bare minimum acceptable standard in a wide variety of different activities.
Using racing games as an example, when you play Sega Rally, outside of stuff like the Time Attack and two-player modes, you’re always doing the same thing. You’re always racing the same three courses in the same order using one of the two same cars each time. Minimal variables. Minimal randomisation. Maximum scope for learning how to play the game well, and developing specific strategies that work for you.
Compare with a modern-day racing game. Leaving aside the fact that arcade-style racers barely exist any more outside of the indie space, today’s racing games are much more likely to give you hundreds of individual challenges to complete, and never really demand that you get good at one of them to a notable degree. Rather than specialising in one very specific thing, you are developing a standard of generalised mediocrity — enough to get by, but nothing more.
Of course, some players choose to take things a little further and want to top the online leaderboards or beat things on the hardest difficulty, obtain “S-Ranks” or whatever. But I’m willing to bet that a statistically significant portion of players of any given game featuring a wide swathe of content (ugh, I know, but bear with me) will play each thing the precise number of times they need to in order to mark it as “complete”, and then never touch it again.
I’m not saying either of these approaches is wrong per se — although I suspect a game as “content-light” as Sega Rally would be a hard sell as a full-price game today — but it is interesting how different those two types of game feel. My brief jaunt with Sega Rally this afternoon was genuinely exciting. I could see myself improving as my lap times got better with each attempt — and the successful completion of the challenge was within sight. Add the competitive element to that (once I’ve actually cleared the three races, of course) and you have even more exciting thrills.
This isn’t to say that games like this don’t exist in the modern day, either — although they’re less common. The last time I really feel like there was a highly competitive, specialised game that I spent a significant amount of time with was probably Geometry Wars 2 on Xbox 360, and that must be pushing 20 years old at this point. But it was the exact same sort of thing I was feeling today with Sega Rally: a specific, well-defined, non-randomised challenge, and the desire to do well at that one thing.
The other benefit of games like this is that they’re much more friendly to shorter sessions. This makes it ideal for those of you who have been browbeaten into believing you “don’t have time” to play games any more, or if you only have a half hour before your food arrives, or before you have to catch the bus, or log on to Teams and pretend that you’re working or something.
There’s something to be said for the “no strings” aspect of these games; the fact that they don’t demand your commitment over the long term, and they’re not trying to bribe you into making that one game your complete lifestyle with things like Battle Passes, microtransactions, progression systems and other such shenanigans. On top of that, it often just feels like games that have a small number of very specific challenges to complete are probably better designed; if you only have three tracks in your racing game, you better make sure they’re damn good ones, whereas if you have 100 tracks, who cares if one or two are a bit of a stinker?
If you haven’t played a “specialised” game like Sega Rally for a long time, I highly recommend the experience. Boot it up, spend some time with it, enjoy the experience, then set it aside and do something else. Far from being a “waste of time”, as certain quarters of modern gaming might like you to believe, I think you might be surprised what a pleasantly invigorating experience it is… and how likely you might be to come back and try again later.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’ve decided that to help me out when I want to write a longer, more substantial piece on MoeGamer about a particular game, I’m going to start using my daily posts here — when I don’t have anything “better” or more pressing to talk about, that is — to keep notes on my impressions about what I’m playing as I go along.
So, having finished Doom 2016 and not quite feeling in the mood to get back to Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter just yet — and very much feeling like I wanted something with a bit of colour and joy in it, given my general low mood — I decided to fire up Rance Quest Magnum for the first time.
For the unfamiliar, Rance Quest Magnum is the eighth title in the Rance series of 18+ role-playing games from Alicesoft. The Rance series, if you’re unfamiliar, is noteworthy for being almost as old as Final Fantasy, and an important part of Japanese gaming history. It was very late to get localised, however, as the fact many of the games feature a hefty amount of sexual assault in them (including incidents perpetrated by the protagonist) presumably meant a lot of companies thought it was too much of a risky prospect.
But MangaGamer, bless them, got over it, and have been steadily releasing Rance games for a while now. They started with Rance 5D and VI — with 5D being a soft reboot of the series, and thus a good starting point — and continuing on with the remakes of the first two games in the series, Rance 01 and Rance 02, the grand strategy game Sengoku Rance, then Rance Quest Magnum and most recently the penultimate installment Rance IX. I’ve written about a number of these in the past — see MoeGamer for my thoughts on Rance 5D, VIand Sengoku, and Rice Digital for my exploration of Rance 01 and 02.
You can find more (a lot more) about the history of this series at those links, so if you want to know more, go give them a click so I can get on with talking about what I actually want to talk about.
Rance Quest Magnum, like most entries in the Rance series, completely reinvents its core structure and mechanics. While Sengoku Rance was a grand strategy game with some RPG elements, Rance Quest Magnum is kind of-sort of a more conventional RPG. Except it’s a kind of-sort of conventional RPG in a different way to Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth, which was a first-person “blobber” dungeon crawler at heart.
Rance Quest Magnum instead adopts a heavily quest-based structure. There’s no “world map” to wander around, and quests are self-contained challenges, some of which have unique dungeons, others of which reuse maps used elsewhere. The main “RPG” action of the game primarily unfolds from a top-down perspective, with Rance represented as a polygonal “chibi” form of himself, similar to how stablemate Evenicle does things — and yes, I’ve covered that also. Although Evenicle had a world map so itself was a completely different sort of game to Rance Quest Magnum.
So each quest in Rance Quest Magnum unfolds across one or more top-down maps. On each map, you explore, find treasures, get into fights and attempt to complete your quest objectives. When you’ve completed your quest objective, that’s it — you leave the map. You can, however, repeat previously completed quests, which allows you to investigate the map more thoroughly, see events with choices unfold in different ways (which in turn can unlock new quests), acquire new treasures and, of course, grind for experience, money and items.
Rance Quest Magnum‘s core mechanics make use of an interesting skill system. Each character has a certain number of skill slots, and is usually able to increase these by purchasing a particular passive skill on level up. The skill slots can be used for either active skills, which are used in combat, or boost skills, which directly impact stats and overall effectiveness in battle. Characters can also have completely passive skills, which they just need to have learned in order to take advantage of; they don’t need to be slotted.
Active skills have a set number of uses per quest, and you can increase this count by spending the skill points acquired on level up. If you do this, it, of course, means that you can’t learn a new skill instead — but sometimes it’s more helpful to be able to perform a particular action more often than have a greater choice of actions available, particularly given that you can only equip so many of them at once anyway.
Among the passive skills, meanwhile, are skills that appear to have nothing to do with combat; the character Sachiko, for example, who is a student, has a skill that represents her putting some time in to study when Rance isn’t dragging her along to dungeons, and Rance himself, of course, has a “Sexual Prowess” skill.
The limited number of times each active skill can be used is sort of a callback to how Rance VI: Collapse of Zeth and Sengoku Rance did things, though a little different to both cases. In Rance VI, each character had a “stamina” rating, which represented how many battles they could participate in before becoming exhausted; aside from that, they could use any of their skills as you saw fit according to the situation. Sengoku Rance, meanwhile, gave each character a certain number of “action flags”, representing how many actions they could take in a single battle or dungeon delve. In the latter case, you could swap out characters from your complete squad if someone became exhausted or incapacitated.
You can do this in Rance Quest Magnum, too, though the number of times you can swap party members around is limited by Rance’s “Charisma” stat, which starts at zero to represent him bumming around being a violent nuisance at the outset of the game. For context, towards the end of Sengoku Rance, Rance’s longtime companion and slave Sill Plain became encased in enchanted ice that doesn’t melt naturally, and despite being firmly in denial, the beginning of Rance Quest Magnum indicates that he has not taken this all that well. His level has dropped massively, he’s reverted to his very worst extremes of brutish behaviour, and he’s generally having a negative impact on the world and people around him.
Rance is a thoroughly interesting character in that although he is indisputably an asshole, he has had a major impact on world events for the better across all his previous adventures. Indeed, if you look into the overall lore of the Rance series, his very existence is considered to be something of an anomaly, with the “gods” behind the running of the world keeping him around because he keeps things interesting. He’s not a “hero” by the definition of the “Planner Scenario”, which the world of Rance operates under, but he does have the interesting distinction of being born without a level cap, which means it’s possible for him to grow to extraordinary levels of power over the course of Rance Quest Magnum.
This is why it’s interesting to see him effectively starting again from almost zero in Rance Quest Magnum. His “loss” of Sill has clearly hit him hard, and it takes a fair bit of encouragement from the people around him to get him off his arse and pursuing some sort of cure for her. In the early hours of the game, he’s completing quests for pretty much selfish reasons, but I’m willing to bet that over the course of the game as a whole, his attitude will change — particularly if and when he manages to sort out Sill’s situation.
I’m really enjoying the game so far. Like most Rance games, it strikes a nice balance between interesting gameplay, well-written dialogue and cheeky, provocative humour. The mechanics and progression systems in particular look set to be very interesting indeed, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the quests progress as you continue through the game.
I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say on the game after a few more hours with it, but suffice to say for now, I think I made the right choice deciding to make a start on it.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I think it’s kind of interesting how specific colours have very much come to be associated with specific flavours — and that those colour assignments are almost (albeit not entirely) universal, at least when it comes to packaging.
Take a green packet of crisps, for example; you know that depending on if it follows the Walkers or Golden Wonder model, it will be either salt and vinegar or cheese and onion flavour. Red packets will be salted. Crimson will be smoky bacon. Orange will be chicken. Brown will be beef.
But it’s not just crisps. You can generally identify tinned fish by its colour: sky blue for tuna, pink for salmon, sardines and mackerel can vary, but often red or dark blue.
And it’s not even food for humans that follows these conventions. The packets of cat food we have follow a similarly recognisable system, too: sky blue for tuna, pink for salmon, red for beef (outside of crisps, this is a common assignment), orange for chicken.
These often make a certain degree of sense. Onions are greenish, for example, so it makes sense for them to be assigned the colour green. Bacon is pink and goes a bit darker when you cook it — particularly if it’s smoked — so crimson makes sense. Blue makes sense for tuna because it’s from the sea and the sea is commonly represented as blue, and salmon is iconically pink, so its packaging is pink. Brown and red both make sense for beef based on its colour after and before cooking, and its status as the most common “red meat”.
I suspect we’re at a point where we can directly associate tastes with colours in an almost synaesthetic manner, even outside of the examples that have some logic behind them. If someone says a fizzy drink “tastes like red”, I bet you know what they mean, don’t you? And interestingly, a drink tasting like “red” does not mean it tastes like either salt or beef. This even progresses into areas that make no sense, like “blue raspberry”. Raspberries aren’t blue. And yet if I say “blue raspberry” to you, I bet you know what it tastes like. (Very little like raspberries, as it happens.)
I’ve mentioned in my writing and my videos before that I feel like I have a certain degree of synaesthesia. When I’m playing a video game, for example, sometimes on-screen actions will be satisfying in a way that I can only describe as them “tasting” nice or having good “mouthfeel”. I wonder how much of that is something that has happened independently of all this, and how much is a result of how much, today, we directly associate colours with flavours.
Apparently from a casual Google, I’m not the first person to feel like this. There’s a paper from 2015 published on Biomed Central that is “on the psychological impact of food colour”, for example. Their hypothesis was that “colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink.”
I’ve only skimmed the study so won’t go into detail, but one interesting thing that was picked out was how these colour-flavour assignments can have different cultural meanings. For example:
The paper’s “conclusion” section seemed remarkably inconclusive, though it did admit that “colour cues influence our food and drink-related behaviour in a number of different ways” and “food colouring undoubtedly plays an important role in driving liking and the consumer acceptability of a variety of food and beverage products”.
It also noted that “identifying consistent colour-flavour mappings and training the consumer to internalise other new associations is one of the important challenges facing the food marketer interested in launching new products or brand extensions in a marketplace that is more colourful than ever.”
So basically, a lot of it comes down to marketing. I still think it’s interesting how obvious “standards” have developed, though — and it’s interesting to consider that those standards might not be universal from one country to another.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
A little while back, I felt the need to start something new and not RPG-shaped, so I thought I’d finally get around to giving the Doom reboot from 2016 a go. After several nights of playing it and being roughly halfway through the single-player game, I’m not 100% sure if I’m enjoying it or not.
This is not a slight against anyone who does think it’s good — I know how annoying it is when you love something and someone turns up to shit all over it. But I wanted to pop my thoughts that I’ve had about the game on paper so I can make better sense of them, and perhaps get a better idea of whether or not I actually like it.
The fact I’m asking this question at all can be looked at in one of two ways. Firstly, if you have to ask if you’re enjoying something, you’re probably not. Alternatively, secondly, if you’re not sure you’re enjoying something but you hesitate to say that you dislike it, you probably are enjoying at least something about it. So my opinion is somewhere between those two extremes, I guess.
First, let’s ponder the things I do like. I do like the way the weapons behave and the overall “feel” of the game. There’s a really nice fluid sense of movement to how you move around, defeat enemies, clamber up onto platforms and perform Glory Kills. The way enemies are highly reactive to how you shoot them and blast into bloody chunks feels entirely appropriate for a modern take on Doom, but also reminds me of older games such as Sega’s The House of the Dead. This is a good thing.
It’s nice to play a first-person shooter that moves at speed, has levels that aren’t linear corridors, and which doesn’t kill the pacing of its combat with constant reloading. Doom 2016 has all its weapons act like its classic counterparts, where direct analogues exist — that means no reloading ever, with the exception of the shotguns, but there it’s just part of the overall firing animation anyway, so no harm done. The chaingun is particularly great; the original Doom’s chaingun always felt rather weedy (at least partly because it just played the pistol sound effect in rapid succession) but Doom 2016’s is an absolute beast — as it should be.
Now, onto things that I am less crazy about. Chief among these is the game’s overall pacing. Whereas progressing through a classic Doom level feels like it always keeps you on your toes, in Doom 2016 it feels like you’re moving from “encounter” to “encounter”. It has that thing where you’ll be clambering through the environment and come to a wide open area, and immediately your brain will think “I’m about to get swarmed by enemies”. It’s inevitably right. It’s predictable, and it doesn’t quite feel right. It makes the levels feel like you’re jumping from “exploration mode” to “battle mode”, whereas classic Doom felt like it integrated the two aspects much more elegantly.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. The Shadow Warrior reboot from a few years back was also designed like this, and I think it worked rather well there. It just doesn’t feel quite right for Doom.
The one thing I don’t like at all is how it clearly thinks it’s being some sort of witty anti-corporate satire, but it’s so absurdly over-the-top about it I just find myself being pulled out of the experience. Any time you hear the UAC pep talks over the computer systems on the Mars base, the things being said are increasingly ridiculous, and it crosses the line between plausible satire and just being stupid for the sake of it. I don’t come to a Doom game for the plot in the first place, so this aspect of things feels incredibly ham-fisted and I do not like it at all.
The parts I can’t quite make my mind up about are all the bits where it’s not being a fast-action first-person shooter. The levels are all huge and quite interesting to explore, particularly with all the hidden collectibles around the place, but it also feels like it brings the “explore, battle, explore” cycle into even sharper focus than it already is — at the end of a level, you’ll typically find the exit door sitting there ready and waiting for you, and the rest of the level open for you to explore almost completely unopposed in most cases. Sometimes a few enemies are tucked away off the critical path, but more often than not the secrets are concealed behind traversal puzzles rather than combat encounters. This doesn’t feel very Doom.
I do, however, like the fact that every stage has a reasonably obvious terminal where you can download the full map data for the level and thereby see which areas you have already explored and which you haven’t. Collectibles are also marked on the map, so there’s no farting around pressing the “Use” button (why on Earth is it R3, by the way?) against every wall in the hope something might open up somewhere.
Parts I’m leaning towards disliking are the presence of an upgrade system and “Challenges”. There are times when Doom 2016 almost feels like it wishes it was Diablo or something of its ilk, whisking you away to a completely separate environment to complete a self-contained challenge and rewarding you with some sort of “loot” if you are successful. Some of these challenges are incredibly irritating to complete, such as one where you have 1 point of health and have to defeat 8 increasingly tough enemies using just the basic Shotgun weapon. They’re optional, yes, but once you’re in one if you’re anything like me you’ll likely feel like you have to complete it before you continue on your way.
The mods for the weapons have some quite interesting effects, but I think I’d rather just have an alt-fire mode for each weapon and not have to faff around with upgrading it. Because upgrading it involves acquiring “upgrade points”, which you get through killing enemies in a stage and finding secrets. I guess if one is being charitable, one can look on it as a modernisation of the “Kills / Items / Secrets” breakdown you get at the end of a classic Doom stage, only here it actually has a tangible benefit on your game. But still, unlocking abilities doesn’t feel very Doom.
Same for upgrading your health, armour and ammo maximums. The former two almost feel worthless given how quickly monsters batter down your entire health bar (and how quickly you can restore the whole thing with a Glory Kill or two) and the latter just makes the early game frustrating as you’re constantly running out of ammo in a game where that shouldn’t be an issue.
I understand there is an “Arcade Mode” available in the game and I’m now wondering if I should have just played that from the outset, because it’s all the extra bells and whistles that have been added atop an attempt to modernise the classic Doom formula that feel like they’re annoying me to varying degrees.
On the whole, I don’t hate the game. The bits that annoy me aren’t putting me off enough to not want to play it through to completion. But the game as a whole is reminding me what a beautifully polished, finely honed game the original Doom is — and how, without a doubt, I would probably still rather play that than this, particularly now its recent 576th rerelease, this time running on Night Dive’s excellent Kex Engine, has a bunch of new levels (again) in it.
I’m going to see Doom 2016 through to completion. But I don’t think I’m inclined in any way to want to “100%” it or spend any additional time with it beyond that required to beat the single-player campaign. And I guess that’s fine. I only paid about a fiver for it, after all, so I can’t really complain all that much.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’m due a phone upgrade. This is probably the first time I’ve come to that point and haven’t been tempted to immediately get a new shiny phone. And the reason? So many of the latest models appear to be absolutely rammed to the gills with “AI” features I don’t want anything to do with.
And it’s a shame, because some of these phones do otherwise look good. The Google Pixel 9 looks like it has an excellent camera, for example, and that’s pretty high up my list of priorities these days. The newest Samsung devices also look quite nice, and having had a Samsung device for my last couple of phones, I’d be quite happy to go with them.
If it wasn’t for the bloody AI crap, that is. I know I could just “not use it”, but that’s not really the point. I don’t really want to send any sort of message that AI junk is something that I’m interested in in the slightest, and my concern is people happily jumping on with Google Pixel 9 and “just trying out” Gemini will just prolong the amount of time we all have to suffer with AI garbage being jammed into places we don’t want it.
I’m sure there are some “valid” uses for AI, but honestly, I don’t really see the usefulness right now. Earlier on, I watched a Marques Brownlee review of the Google Pixel 9, and everything that was “AI-powered” seemed very superfluous and unnecessary. An on-phone image generator? Cool, now I can steal artwork wherever I am in the world! An assistant I can talk to about what I should do about a wasp infestation? I’d rather talk to a real person that doesn’t hallucinate, thanks. The ability to turn on my lights with my voice? 1) I can already do that with several other devices and 2) I don’t want to do that. The ability to insert myself into a photo I wasn’t in? Cool, now I can create “memories” of things that didn’t actually happen. I’m sure that’s healthy.
It’s the voice stuff that really gets me. I genuinely do not understand how any of that is desirable. How is getting an Amazon Alexa, Google Gemini or whatever to read out your email headers better than tapping on the email icon and looking at them? How is getting a device to give you a “daily briefing” better than just doing a quick round of your favourite websites to check on the headlines? How is bellowing “SET A TIMER FOR THREE MINUTES… no, THREE minutes. THREE. MINUTES.” better than going to the clock app and typing the number “3”?
It isn’t. These things are all gimmicks. They’re not actually useful. The grand dream is presumably some sort of omniscient, omnipresent Star Trek-style capital-C Computer that we can call upon to dispense its knowledge and information wherever we are at any time of day. But we’re not there yet. We’re not even close to being there yet, with how unreliable and hallucination-prone modern AI still is. And if reports are to be believed, we’ve already pretty much hit a cap on how good the current “AI” tech can get, because the various models are already starting to feed on themselves, making hallucinations more likely, not less likely, as they inadvertently guzzle up AI-generated swill rather than material that has had a human involved at any point during its creation.
I cannot wait for this odious trend to be over. And I suspect it will be over within a few years, as the money is almost certainly going to run out. None of these models are sustainable; none of them have a “killer app” that convinces naysayers that actually, AI might be quite good after all; none of them even really have a marketable product beyond “look at this thing that might one day be able to do something vaguely useful (but doesn’t just yet)”.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
