#oneaday Day 409: Beneath the Old Skies

I've talked a bit recently about how the adventure game genre is probably in a better place than it's ever been — in fact, I think I'd even argue that now, it's better off than it was in its supposed heyday of LucasArts and Sierra in the early '90s.

The reason is games like Wadjet Eye's Old Skies, which I've played a good four hours of this evening. This is a masterfully put together adventure game in terms of involvement, emotional engagement and just being a plain compelling interactive narrative. While there are some who have criticised it for not having interesting "mechanics" — by that, what they really mean is that it doesn't have any puzzles they got stuck on — I think there's a strong argument to be made that the genre has moved beyond the necessity for being overtly and deliberately obtuse for the sake of inflating playtime.

Y'see, while Sierra and, to a lesser extent, LucasArts games put in deliberately complicated and sometimes baffling puzzles as a means of hiding the fact that their total runtimes were, in many cases, only one or two hours at most, today's adventure game developers have the resources, budget and ability to put together games that are much longer. As such, there's no real need for these games to artificially inflate their length through obtuse puzzles, because the core of what they offer — their narrative, and the player's involvement in it — is compelling enough to stand on its own merits.

This is definitely the case for Old Skies, which has a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable premise. You take on the role of Fia Quinn, a time-travelling agent who accompanies clients on recreational jaunts to the past in order to ensure that they don't get up to mischief or cause any paradoxes that are too significant. The nature of time travel means that there will always be a certain amount of impact on the future, reflected in the game world by flashes of purple light that signal a "Chrono-Shift", where something notable changes in the "present" due to interference in the past, but the Earth depicted in Old Skies also has sufficient technology to "Chrono-Lock" anything that is particularly important, protecting it from such instances.

Each main chapter of Old Skies focuses on one of Fia's jaunts to the past with her client. The first is a relatively short trip back to the New York of 2024 as a renowned scientist hopes to resolve some lingering regrets. Things… do not go entirely according to plan, setting what one would anticipate to be a template for the rest of the game. But interestingly, the second immediately subverts that expectation by being much longer, more involved and more complex, both mechanically and narratively. In this chapter, set in the "Gilded Age" of the late 19th Century, something still goes "wrong", but in an entirely different way, forcing both Fia and her client to work through a complex series of events in two closely related time periods (six months apart) in order to set things what is, to their best interpretation, "right".

The whole thing raises some interesting questions about the very ethics of something like time travel. How do you ensure someone's selfish actions don't make a real mess for everyone in the future? How, exactly, do you police such things? Who decides who and what is "important" to the coherence of the overall timeline — and how? Why were they given that opportunity?

I'm looking forward to seeing how the story evolves, and it also appears that this game is going to be pretty substantial by adventure game standards. At four hours to complete the first two chapters, and I believe at least seven in total, this is looking like a fairly beefy adventure, though its chapter-based structure also means that it feels nicely episodic, so you can leave it at a natural break and come back to it another day.

Thus far, I haven't really seen the problem that some reviewers argue is the game's "weak mechanics"; the game doesn't rely much on using inventory items on things in the game world to progress, but instead prompts you to think carefully about the pieces of information you gather, how they relate to one another and, in some cases, how closely related time periods might relate to one another, too. There are some particularly clever sequences in the second chapter, requiring you to jump back and forth to revisit the same locations six months apart and manipulate the information you find in order to secure an advantageous outcome for everyone involved… as much as is possible, given your own interference, anyway.

The game is beautifully presented, with some absolutely stellar voice acting and music, and some really nice animation on the main characters. It's also nice to see an adventure game breaking free from the seeming "obligation" that some developers feel to use '90s-style pixel art; Old Skies instead adopts a true high-definition look that feels like a true successor to the brief period of "Super VGA" adventures during the winding-down of the Sierra and LucasArts "golden age".

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say in the coming days/weeks as I work my way through it on evenings where I feel like something a little more chilled out than Donkey Kong Bananza. In the meantime, if you're a point-and-click type, I can highly and confidently recommend Old Skies; it's another fantastic game from Wadjet Eye (developed by them this time, as opposed to the numerous other titles they've published in recent years) and well worth the £17 it costs. Take that, £75 video games!

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.

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#oneaday Day 408: Don't spoil yourself

One thing that I've become quite frustrated with in the last 10 years or so is the prevalence of "guide content" on video game websites. Guides and walkthroughs have always been a thing, of course, and I completely understand why sites feel the need to get guides up day-one when a big new video game comes out: they are freshly-squeezed, ready-mixed SEO juice just waiting to be taken advantage of, and if you're a site that makes the majority of its money from ad impressions, you would probably be foolish not to take advantage of the immediate thirst for knowledge that comes with the release of a new game.

Now, I won't be hypocritical and say I've never looked at a guide for a game. Some games, one feels, were designed in such a way that looking at a guide — particularly the Official Strategy Guide, back when those were still a thing — is near-essential if you want to see everything that the game has to offer. Take something like Final Fantasy VII's chocobo breeding, for example; while you probably could work all that out yourself, it would take a very long time to do so, and it would be hard not to end up resenting the time you'd spent on failed experiments.

But I feel like the deliberate, immediate posting of Guide Content the second a new game releases is destroying the sense of wonderment and discovery we should have with a brand new game. Hell, game developers themselves are absolutely spoiling their own games — one can't help but feel that Pauline's reveal in Donkey Kong Bananza would be a thousand times more impactful if we hadn't had it completely spoiled weeks in advance by Nintendo's own trailers — but all Guide Content does, for me, is instil a sense of FOMO, and that one should be playing the game as "efficiently" as possible. Consume content until next product, then get excited for new product, or whatever the quote was.

I've been deliberately trying to avoid looking at guides for Donkey Kong Bananza while I'm playing it, and I'm having a good time doing so. Of course, the game featuring a "checklist" of all the things you have and haven't found also instils that same sense of FOMO, even though you absolutely do not need to "find everything" in order to 1) have a good time with or 2) beat Donkey Kong Bananza. As such, I've found it very hard to resist just sneaking a peek at a guide or two just to fill in the few frustrating spaces I have left in my list. But that stops here and now! I'm going to get through the rest of the game at my own pace, and then use the game's own built-in features — you can buy maps with the in-game gold to show you where the collectibles are, but you still have to determine how to get there yourself — to finish the game to my own satisfaction.

Games shouldn't feel like work, and the risk you run when having a guide by your side at all times is turning them into a chore. Games like Donkey Kong Bananza, Zelda and suchlike are made to be enjoyed, savoured, experienced at the player's own pace; you absolutely lose something if all you do is immediately look up where everything is.

I will add at this point that none of this is to take away from the sterling work good guide creators do. IGN's guides are particularly impressive, featuring interactive maps and checklists so those who do want to play the game in that way can not only read the guide, but also mark off their progress. I just wish there weren't so many of them, and that looking up information for a game around launch didn't immediately bombard you with the temptation to spoil the shit out of it for yourself.

I guess it's all about self-control. GameFAQs has been a thing almost as long as the Internet has, after all; all that's happened now is that commercial sites are using guides to juice their own SEO. Which makes commercial sense, but also, speaking as someone who was laid off from a publication and immediately plonked on "Guide Content" duty to keep him out of trouble during his notice period, is immensely demoralising and frustrating to see.

There are amazing writers out there crying out for opportunities to do good criticism and analysis. And yet it feels like nine opportunities out of every ten posted online in the games biz these days are to be a "guides editor" — a job that, in most cases, is underpaid, utterly thankless and easy to blame if the site's traffic figures aren't where they should be.

Anyway, back to Donkey Kong Bananza. Without a guide.

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#oneaday Day 407: More Death in Paradise

My slide into middle-age is ongoing as I find myself continuing to watch Death in Paradise, the murder mystery show about a fish-out-of-water detective from jolly old England finding themselves solving murders on a Caribbean island with probably the highest murders per capita figure in the entire world.

I'm up to the fifth season now, which is well into second lead Kris Marshall's tenure on the show. His arrival at the start of the third series, thanks to the impressively ballsy move of murdering the former lead, DI Poole (played with aplomb by Ben Miller), marked a notable shift for the show, but it handles it well. Most crucially, it continues to be enjoyable and appealing for much the same reasons as when Miller's Poole character had the leading role, and I suspect that later changes in the core cast will continue this trend.

It's not just the lead that changes, either. While Danny John-Jules' excellent Officer Dwayne Myers remains in place for a significant portion of the run — I believe he finally stops being a regular around the seventh season or so? — the other "main characters" shift around a bit. The lead detective's second, initially a young woman named Camille (Sara Martins), departs the show partway through the fourth season after having been a failed love interest for both Miller and Marshall's characters, and is replaced by Florence (Joséphine Jobert), who initially takes the place of Fidel, one of the uniformed officers in the show, and is subsequently promoted to take Camille's place after the latter takes a job in Paris. The open "second uniformed officer" slot is then taken up by JP (Tobi Bakare), who stays in place, as far as I can make out, until the end of the show's present run.

Anyway, point is, the cast undergoes some quite substantial changes over the course of the show's complete run to date, but it still feels coherent. There's a good sense of "handover" from prior cast members to new ones, and the overall "feel" of the show remains remarkably consistent.

Part of this is entirely deliberate, and somewhat lampshaded by the structure of the show — especially the denouement, during which the lead detective gathers all the main suspects and witnesses together, then dramatically explains whodunnit, how and why. Early in Marshall's run on the show, he is introduced to this format as being how DI Poole did things, and there are plenty of jokes in subsequent episodes when certain individuals talk about going to arrest a suspect, only to be told "that's not how we do things around here".

It's intensely, extremely formulaic, but in many ways that's what makes it so comforting. The details of each case are different enough to keep each episode feeling fresh, but the structure of the storytelling is always the same. It's a structure that works, and is effective at telling a fun murder-mystery story over the course of each hour-long episode.

I've always had a real spot for detective stories. I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories as a youth, in a book that basically reprinted all the old Strand magazine pages they originally appeared in, in extremely tiny print. I played a bunch of detective-style adventure games with my mother as a kid — and continued to do so into my adult life. And I don't think there's a detective-style TV show that I've watched to date that I haven't enjoyed.

There are some today who would probably argue that this sort of show is "copaganda", and I get that. There are many things one can criticise the real-world police for, and in more recent years I really feel like I understand why some people feel quite so aggrieved at the very existence of police forces.

But at the same time, a good old murder mystery is a classic story format with good reason, and a cast of police officers is an ideal vehicle for telling a story like that. So I don't feel the slightest bit guilty in unironically enjoying shows like Death in Paradise simply for what they are. The real police may, in many ways, suck, but that doesn't mean you can't root for fictional detectives to crack each case!

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#oneaday Day 406: Kong for me

My copy of Donkey Kong Bananza arrived today, and I've spent most of the evening playing it. It's really good! As with most things video game-related, I'll likely do a full write-up on MoeGamer once I've beaten it, but for now I wanted to give a few immediate impressions based on a few hours' play this evening.

The first thing I'll note is that in exploratory games, I am almost certainly absolutely insufferable to watch, because I will never go straight for where I'm "supposed" to go. You drop me into a discrete level, the first thing I will do will be turn around and see if there's anything behind the starting point. I will deliberately run off in the opposite direction to any objective markers, and in many cases find myself running into obstacles well before the game considers that I'm "supposed" to encounter them, often resulting in me having to work out how to use controls that haven't been explained to me yet — or in some cases, finding creative exploits to overcome obstacles without the player's full toolset available.

The reason I note this is because Super Mario Odyssey, the spiritual precursor to Donkey Kong Bananza (they're by the same people), was absolutely built for me. At every point I went climbing around the levels into places I wasn't "supposed" to be going, I'd find a Moon waiting for me, rewarding my curiosity. It felt like the game's designers had anticipated players like me exploring the game to the fullest, and they had ensured that there were plenty of rewarding things available if you did choose to play that way.

Donkey Kong Bananza is, it will doubtless not surprise you to learn, exactly the same. Only this time, you have the option of pummelling a significant portion of the level geometry into oblivion while hunting for hidden secrets. While bashing a tunnel through a mountain often isn't the best way to get somewhere — and the game does have enough "indestructible" materials to mean you can't just dig your way around the whole map — it is often an option. If you have a general idea of where to go but are struggling to find the route you're "supposed" to take… just make your own. Nine times out of ten, you can do that.

Another Nintendo series that I'm very fond of due to it catering to my very worst, most obsessive tendencies in this regard, is Splatoon. While the various single-player campaigns in the Splatoon games and their DLC were all discrete, relatively small levels, they again rewarded player curiosity and willingness to diverge considerably from the critical path. There's some of that DNA in Donkey Kong Bananza, too, because as well as the large, quasi-open world "layers" you explore for the majority of the game, there are also a variety of special challenge missions that you access through special doorways and hatches around the place.

While the combat-centric challenges are usually pretty straightforward — and there's usually a "trick" to each one to complete it efficiently — the more "platformy" challenges typically have three Banandium Gems, the game's main doohickey, to find. Two of these will usually be straightforward: there's usually one at about the halfway point of the challenge and one at the end, the other one is typically concealed a little more deviously. You'll need to peer over the edge of levels, look under things and get creative with your exploration, just like tracking down the optional objectives in Splatoon campaign levels. And it's great.

So yeah. I'm having a lovely time so far. Down to the second "layer" now — didn't quite get all the bananas in the Lagoon layer, but I think I was only missing about four or five in total, so I'll go back for them at some point. That's my weekend sorted, I guess!

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#oneaday Day 405: No Kong for me

I was hoping to have been playing Donkey Kong Bananza for several hours by this point in my life, but sadly, it seems the Royal Mail have let me down. Despite my copy having been shipped from Nintendo HQ on Monday, it is currently milling around the North West Midlands mail centre, and has been since yesterday. Joy!

Still, no biggie. As my wife said earlier, at no point will I look back on my life and wish I'd had the chance to play Donkey Kong Bananza a day earlier than I actually got to. Assuming I don't die or lose the use of my hands tomorrow, obviously.

Anyway, I spent much of the evening playing Scar-Lead Salvation, a third-person shooter roguelike-esque thing from Compile Heart. This arrived along with Death end re;Quest Code Z a few weeks back and I gave it a quick go one evening when I fancied playing something a bit different. Honestly I wasn't super taken with it from that first session, but playing it this evening feels like it's "clicked" somewhat.

I'll write in more depth about it over on MoeGamer when I've beaten the main story mode — it looks as if that involves two runs through the game, but since there are only three main "areas" to progress through, that shouldn't be too bad, assuming the difficulty level doesn't ramp up too drastically. Which it's entirely possible that it might, what with this being a game with somewhat vaguely roguelike tendencies.

What Scar-Lead Salvation is at heart is a game about spotting enemy patterns and then successfully dealing with them, sometimes with several going off at the same time. Each enemy type has a very distinctive silhouette that you will come to associate with its distinctive attack pattern, and success in the game involves knowing what each enemy is going to do — and how to handle it. This involves a bit of target prioritisation, a bit of careful aiming and a bit of nimble dodging. It's not a particularly out-of-the-ordinary combination of elements, but it works well, the controls are tight and responsive and the encounters are satisfying.

Where the game falls down a tad is in its environments, which are drab and boring, albeit thematically appropriate for the narrative, which I won't get into right now. This isn't a game where "exploring" is particularly fun — largely because, so far, each level has been a completely linear path, and I don't yet know if that changes — but, to be fair to it, it sets expectations pretty clearly up front that the main focus here is going to be the combat and the progression, and both of those aspects are pretty good.

Anyway, like I say, I'll have more to say on that once I've actually beaten it — though if Donkey Kong Bananza arrives tomorrow, that will delay any completion efforts significantly — so please look forward to that. In the meantime, if you like third-person shooting with shoot 'em up-style bullet patterns to deal with, consider giving Scar-Lead Salvation a look. It won't knock your socks off or anything — it is a Compile Heart game, after all — but it is pretty solid at its core.

Now, since I spent much longer than I intended playing it this evening — told you it "clicked" — I should probably go to bed. I will almost certainly feel like death in the morning, given that it's nearly 1am, but I feel like death every morning, so I guess it doesn't matter all that much. Either way, I'm off to bed now, so there.

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#oneaday Day 404: Today's AI idiot story

The latest hilarious story from the world of artificial "intelligence" is the sorry saga of a Redditor who "worked on a book" (and I use the term "worked" loosely) with ChatGPT and found that they couldn't download it.

You want to know why? This is the best bit. It's because ChatGPT hadn't actually created anything, because it can't do that. It had outright lied to the person because, as a large language model — which, let's not forget, is essentially fancy predictive text, not actual intelligence — it believed, based on the data it had ingested, that telling the user it had successfully created 487MB of book was what the user wanted to hear.

To be fair, it was what the user wanted to hear, only they wanted that 487MB of book to, you know, actually exist.

The Redditor's eventual conclusion was thus:

After understanding a lot of things it's clear that it didn't [generate the book at all]. And it fooled me for two weeks.

I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.

Several other Redditors commented, quite correctly, that this is perhaps not the ideal takeaway from this lesson. This is my absolute favourite response, though. This response deserves to be framed and put in a museum as a monument to how utterly stupid the age we're living in is:

At least you're finally admitting that ChatGPT is working on creating this fictional thing instead of you having "worked on it together". lol. Meanwhile real writers don't need this nonsense to be creative.

As a wise person once said: why would I invest more time reading something than the author spent writing it? Best of luck on something literally no one, including you, will read.

Absolute perfection.

Even more hilarious is the fact that the original poster was supposedly trying to create "a collection of a lot of children [sic] stories with moral lessons that [they] wanted to present in a colourful manner with underprivileged kids of [their] area". They claimed that the text was "all theirs" and that they were using ChatGPT to "refine the flow"… and generate 700 images.

Because what the world needs is an AI-edited book of children's stories almost certainly ripped off from existing tales, illustrated with AI slop images.

Dear Lord. I absolutely despair that we're living in an age where people are this fucking stupid.

Let me be 100% clear on this: if you're using ChatGPT to generate or "refine" anything you want to publish, you are not an author. You are certainly not the illustrator.

Learn to write. Practice it. It is a craft like any other. Develop your own unique, distinctive voice, because AI very much has a "voice" of its own — a particularly obnoxious, hand-wringing, obsequious, simpering one — and it is immediately recognisable. And, if you want to improve, hire a fucking editor. Or, at the very least, just give it to another sodding human being to look at.

ChatGPT is not an editor. ChatGPT gets things wrong a significant proportion of the time. And, as this story shows, ChatGPT just fucking makes things up quite a bit, too. You cannot trust it. You should not trust it. It is not a person. It is not intelligent. It doesn't "know" anything.

And if you need art? Two options: one, learn to do it yourself, which can be rewarding and fulfilling in its own right. Or two, and you'll like this, can you guess what it is yet? That's right, it's hire a fucking artist.

I truly despair for the fucking dumb age we live in right now. I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop and all this stupid shit to go the way of the Metaverse and NFTs. Because it's actually driving me insane what it's clearly doing to people. We're going to end up completely incapable of producing cultural artefacts if we're not careful. And that's not a world I want to live in.

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#oneaday Day 403: Falling asleep to Let's Plays

Not for the first time, I find myself reassured by an article from Aftermath, this time on the subject of falling asleep to Let's Plays, which is something my wife and I do on the daily. Nightly. Whatever.

Anyway, I knew that falling asleep to some sort of "noise" was becoming increasingly widespread for various reasons — not least of which being the huge ball of anxiety pretty much all of us appear to be carrying around inside our respective heads at all times these days — but I wasn't sure how common specifically using Let's Plays was. I especially wasn't sure about the use of Game Grumps, one of our shows of choice.

But, according to the article, it seems that it's not only common (right down to using Game Grumps!) but that there might actually be a certain amount of value to it. And that's an actual neurologist saying that.

I never used to "need" noise to get to sleep, and I'm not sure I really do now. But my wife Andie finds it difficult to deal with complete silence, particularly in the dead of night, and so we've both fallen into the habit of having something playing when we are ready to go to sleep. Most of the time, it is either the aforementioned Game Grumps — or my own videos, which, as it turns out, are pleasantly relaxing to listen to.

In fact, I'll be honest here — and I'm aware that this may well make me sound much more narcissistic than I actually am — I find my own videos to be the absolute best thing to help me get to sleep. I think it's because I'm already so familiar with all of them — both from having made them, and from having listened to each of them many times each at this point — that they strike a good balance between making enough noise to distract me from Thinking Bad Thoughts, and from not engaging me enough to want to pay attention to them. The trouble I occasionally have with Game Grumps is that I enjoy listening to them so much — particularly if it's a series I haven't watched or listened to before — that I end up paying attention to them rather than concentrating on getting to sleep.

I don't know if I'm a textbook "insomniac" as such, but I've always found it difficult to get to sleep. I get stuck in a sort of loop where I lie down and close my eyes, then my brain suddenly pipes up and goes "you don't actually know how to make yourself go to sleep, do you?" I then spend ages thinking "I really want to go to sleep, I wish I could go to sleep right now", but the act of thinking those things means that my brain is not shutting down and actually going to sleep. This can go on for hours at a time, particularly if the room is silent.

And that's where the Let's Plays help. If there's some noise on, my brain can latch onto that, and it doesn't get caught in that self-destructive cycle. It has to be the right kind of noise, though; I've found that music doesn't tend to work, and neither does simple, straightforward white noise (and/or its variously "coloured" relatives). But talking does, particularly if it's about something I find relaxing, familiar and comforting.

And so that's how we typically fall asleep: either to Danny from Game Grumps playing King's Quest IV or Space Quest for the umpteenth time… or to me playing old Atari games (including, on occasion, King's Quest and Space Quest games).

I'm reassured to learn that this isn't "a weird thing that we do"; it's a thing that seemingly is quite widespread.

Now, I just need to decide what's on the playlist for tonight…

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#oneaday Day 402: I heard you

Do you ever catch yourself behaving in a particular way and think "why on Earth do I do that?" I do quite frequently, with one of the most common offenders being the fact that I will often ask people to repeat something that I heard perfectly well the first time, particularly if they're asking me to do something.

An example: earlier, my wife asked me to bring a cloth upstairs, because we were both in the process of attempting to figure out what in our bedroom smelled of stale cat piss (we think we found it, but we were scrubbing everything down to be sure) and, despite having heard her perfectly well the first time, I still responded as if I hadn't heard her correctly.

Why? I don't know. Perhaps it's a subconscious thing, where I want to "confirm" requests people have made of me before attempting to carry them out, but if so, I would have thought I'd find myself doing it more frequently — at work, for example. Perhaps it's a related thing to hearing a shouted request from another room and pretending not to hear on the grounds that if I wait until the second time someone asks, I have a few more minutes to myself. Plus it determines whether or not the thing being requested of me is actually important. (I don't do this often. But I must confess to doing it sometimes, particularly if I'm in the middle of something.)

Human behaviour is, at times, strange and chaotic. I suppose that is what makes us interesting, and why people have, over the years, attempted to understand The Way We Are in numerous ways over the years: philosophically, psychologically, physiologically, and perhaps some other words that begin with "p" too. The assumption, presumably, is that someday at least one person will somehow Get It, and then human nature will be a solved problem. Until that day comes, though, we have everything from inexplicable but ultimately harmless behaviour such as that which I describe above, to the sort of horrible hatred we are, rather disturbingly, starting to see on a rather more regular basis than, say, 10 years ago.

I wonder if we ever will solve a problem like humanity? Is there even a solution to be found? What would that look like? And what would we do with that information? Taken to its logical extreme, if there is a "solved" human with an "ideal" set of behaviours, that implies that everyone who doesn't behave like that is somehow imperfect and flawed — but at the same time, if everyone did behave in the exact same way, we'd have no individuality whatsoever. And that individuality is, in itself, an important, even core, part of what makes us human in the first place.

I don't know where these rambling thoughts have come from, dear reader. I was just a bit confused about why I asked my wife to repeat herself when I heard her perfectly well the first time that she wanted me to bring a cloth upstairs. And the bedroom still smells a bit of cat piss.

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#oneaday Day 401: Kountdown to Kong

I'm looking forward to playing Donkey Kong Bananza. I say this as someone who has always found Donkey Kong himself to be one of Nintendo's least appealing characters, and who has never played any Donkey Kong games past Donkey Kong 3. Yes, that's right; I am a bad enough person to have never played any Donkey Kong Country games, nor did I ever play Donkey Kong 64 back in the day — although there are, I'm sure, some who would say that, DK Rap notwithstanding, I dodged a bullet on that one.

But I'm finding a lot appealing about Donkey Kong Bananza. Chief among this is the fact that it's the Super Mario Odyssey team working on it, and Super Mario Odyssey was superb. Not only was it simply an excellent Super Mario game, but it also remains one of the most technically impressive, visually stunning Switch games. Given how good that game looked on the original Switch's underpowered hardware, I'm confident that Donkey Kong Bananza is going to be particularly pleasant to look at.

It also looks like it's going to be really fun. The super-destructive nature of the gameplay and the fact that you can seemingly smash the absolute shit out of each level is very appealing to me, but it seems like there's going to be plenty of depth and exploration, too. With the various special abilities and collectibles on offer, the game looks almost like it's going to hew closer to a Zelda than a Super Mario game — or perhaps it will be its own distinct thing, which I'm suspecting will be the most likely outcome.

The trailers so far have been pretty spectacular, too, and it sounds as if the music is going to be outstanding. Since the game features a teenage Pauline, whose song Jump Up Super Star! from Super Mario Odyssey was a real highlight of that game's soundtrack, I'm anticipating that there will be at least a few vocal numbers, and indeed the trailers would appear to back that up. In fact, and this feels like a very strange thing to say about Donkey Kong, it looks like this game might actually be quite emotionally engaging.

To be clear, Nintendo is absolutely capable of making a game that can grab you in the feels and make you cry. It's just the absolute last place I would expect to encounter such a game would be in the Donkey Kong series — but you watch the most recent trailers and listen to the soundtrack revealed so far and you tell me that there won't be at least a couple of tearjerker moments throughout.

On top of all that, if the Nintendo eShop is to be believed, the whole thing fits into just 10GB, which is dinky wee tiny by modern game standards, particularly on a 4K-capable console. (For context, Super Mario Odyssey is 5.7GB, so if Donkey Kong Bananza is a project on a similar scale, being roughly twice the file size would track considering the jump in hardware generations. For further comparison's sake, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is about 15GB, as is Xenoblade Chronicles X.)

Given modern triple-A games typically break the 70-100GB boundary these days — and even smaller-scale affairs such as the Tony Hawk remakes are pushing 40GB — it's impressive to see what Nintendo is apparently capable of with a fraction of that file size. Because I'm willing to bet that 10GB will have plenty of substance to it.

Having finished the Switch version of Link's Awakening today, I now have a few days to burn prior to Donkey Kong Bananza arriving. Perhaps it's high time I actually tried some of those older Kong games…?

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#oneaday Day 400: I can't do LinkedIn

After closing my original account a few years back — I'd never used it, I'd never got a job using it and I didn't see the value in it — I opened a new LinkedIn account a few weeks back. I still absolutely hate it.

Not only is its interface second only to Facebook in terms of general clutter, user unfriendliness and AI being rammed in your face everywhere, but the general tone of everyone on there is just insufferable. Every post is some great life lesson that they've learned from their time in business to business sales; every little happening at work is cause for twelve paragraphs of pontificating; every opportunity to brag about how you absolutely are not a "low performer" or similar is taken, and festooned with emoji.

I cannot imagine ever thinking at any point "I know, I think I'll check LinkedIn, that sounds like a fun use of my time". The fact the thing constantly emails me to let me know I have "1 new message" when all it is is some spam ad in my message inbox pisses me off. The fact it emails me to tell me I have "new notifications" when it's people I don't know starting jobs at companies I've never heard of pisses me off.

In short, I don't really know why I opened an account there again. I guess I was just curious to see if it was in any way "useful" for "networking", as some people like to say. And perhaps it is useful for that, if you're the insufferable business-speak type. But that is emphatically not me. I struggle to take posts even from people I know seriously, and I fear that if I spent any protracted amount of time on the platform, I would almost certainly tell at least one person (no-one specific) to stop being so up their own arse, and if they really think they have something worthwhile to say about "the world of work", as our careers advisors at school used to call it, perhaps they should try writing a self-help book that management consultants can put on their shelves and never read rather than inflicting their bilge on the broader Internet community.

I can't do it. I struggle with social media at the best of times these days, but the fact it's pretty much the only way to get in touch with some people really rankles me. I miss the good old days of email chains where people put time and effort into the messages they sent one another; late-night chats on MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger; hell, even text messages felt more personal than what we have today.

It's one of the many ways I feel completely and utterly left behind by the world as it exists today, and I absolutely hate it. So don't expect to see any activity from me on LinkedIn any time soon. I can think of very few worse ways to spend my time.

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