#oneaday Day 399: Tiresome

It is the weekend, and I am tired. It has been a very busy period at work for various reasons. It would probably be unprofessional of me to explain further, but suffice it to say for now that the struggles we've been dealing with have been external in nature, and the people who've been pestering us about certain things for years had better bloody well appreciate what we've been getting up to!

It's tiring, but it's also worthwhile. I spent a goodly portion of this afternoon just Getting Things Organised, and it was a lot more satisfying than I thought it would be. I had been putting off this particular specific task of Getting Things Organised for a while, but I had said I would get it done by the end of the week, and that's exactly what I've successfully done. My Things That Are Now Organised will hopefully help me out in the day-to-day running of my job, and, with any luck, make my life a bit easier. We shall see.

There's lots of exciting things coming up for Evercade. The new Super Pocket devices are out now, bringing with them a built-in selection of NEOGEO and Data East games. I've also got an early copy of our first NEOGEO cartridge, so I will be looking forward to sitting down and actually taking some time to enjoy these games, rather than writing documentation for them or testing them. I'll also be spending a bunch of time playing Roguecraft DX when that comes in, but we haven't had the advance copies for that just yet.

Then there's all the stuff we haven't announced yet! There are some great things coming later in the year and early next year. I've been working on some of the first cartridges that we have planned for 2026 recently, and it's going to be another fantastic year. Evercade really has gone from strength to strength since it launched against all odds in 2020, and I'm proud to be part of the whole thing. If you'd told child me that one day I'd be working on producing official rereleases of some of my all-time favourite games, I'm sure he'd be delighted. He might wish that this role had come about a little sooner in my life, but, well, we can't have everything, and at least I can enjoy it now. I am right in the target audience for the products I'm working on.

I'm looking forward to a nice break, though. I think I mentioned the other day that Andie and I are going to Center Parcs again later this year, in September. It's going to be lovely to have some time away, particularly as we're staying for a little longer than we have done on previous visits. It will hopefully be time to thoroughly unwind and relax before having to jump back into our respective job roles, both of which have been a tad stressful for a while!

Still, rather what I've been doing than… well, pretty much anything else I've done in what can laughably be called my "career" to date. I'm doing something I (mostly) enjoy in a field I care deeply about, my contributions are appreciated, and I'm paid well for the privilege. Not a lot to complain about, aside from people being rude on social media. Things could be (and have been, at various points in my past) a lot worse!

Anyway. I'm off to go start enjoying my weekend, perhaps with a few of those NEOGEO games. I never have finished Metal Slug before… perhaps it's time I gave it a proper shot?

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 398: I just want to buy the game

Yesterday, I happened to watch the Giant Bomb folks playing through the new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, and thought it looked like fun, so I thought I might actually buy it.

So I looked on Amazon to track down physical copies, and every single version available was marked with a bit "INTERNET REQUIRED. CONTENT DOWNLOAD NEEDED". The Nintendo Switch 2 version didn't even have a game cartridge — yes, they eschewed even the odious Game-Key Card system in favour of the even more pointless Code in a Box format.

This is frustrating, because we're seeing this happening more and more, and it concerns me greatly. While I've bought a fair amount of digital stuff on PC largely because it's the only option to buy pretty much anything now, I'm still very wary of consoles going digital-only or at least digital-centric, because it, of course, raises the question of how long those games are actually going to last.

I'm not talking about online servers remaining up so people can play multiplayer or check their rankings on leaderboards. I'm talking about the game just being straight-up playable. Like, if I were to buy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 on PS5 or Switch 2 digitally, sure, I could keep it on my storage device theoretically indefinitely, but at some point with the size of today's games, I'd likely need to uninstall it to make room for something else. If, then, I decide maybe 10 or 20 years down the line that I'd actually quite like to play it again… will I still be able to download it and reinstall it?

You may think that sounds silly, but considering that there are 40+ year old games that I still play on a regular basis, I don't think that's especially ridiculous.

Thus far, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have kept digital downloads available for "dead" platforms, even when they've closed the actual storefronts. You can still download things you bought on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii, Wii U, 3DS and Xbox 360 — you just can't buy things any more. (Though there is a kind of sort of loophole with PS3 and Vita — if you add credit via the Web, you can actually still buy things; you just can't pay on your console any more.)

This is vaguely encouraging, but how long will it really last? At some point, presumably, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are going to want to turn off the servers that maybe double- or triple-digit numbers of people are using each year, and that'll be that; those games will just be gone. At that point, one would hope, the pirates will have likely "preserved" them in an unofficial capacity, but when it comes to that, you start getting into a territory where games aren't exactly "plug and play" any more. I can still pop in anything from the Atari 2600 to PlayStation 2 era and, assuming the media itself is still in working order, play the game contained therein. For the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era onwards, things start to get a little more dicey; from the PS4/Xbox One era they get a lot dicey.

I guess there comes a point where one has to consider whether they are buying games to enjoy now — in which case whether or not they're still playable in 10, 20 or more years doesn't really matter all that much — or if they're building a library that can continue to be enjoyed for many years to come. I have, up until now, very much fallen into the latter category, and old habits die hard. But from the moment I preordered the Switch 2 I found myself wondering if I'm going to be forced into changing the way I think about things.

I don't know if I'm going to buy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 as yet. If I do, it'll be a digital version, because there's absolutely no point purchasing a physical version which doesn't actually contain the game. I guess the only question I need to reconcile in my head is if I care enough about this to take a principled stand and "vote with my wallet", as it were, or just to suck it up and enjoy the game while I can.

Oh well, Donkey Kong Bananza is out in a week, and that is on a proper physical cart, so that's something, at least.

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#oneaday Day 397: Cool Sites: where are they now?

Earlier today, prompted by some discussion online, I found myself pondering the concept of the Cool Website. You know the kind of thing: the places you used to point your browser at on a semi-regular basis before everyone collectively agreed (apparently) that the only websites worth a damn now are social media, "newsletters" and whatever "legacy media" rag people are angry at this hour.

I've been trying to think of some Cool Websites that I used to visit at various points in my long-term Internet history, and I thought it might be interesting to see what happened — if anything — to each of them that I can remember. Sound like fun? No? Well, I'm doing it anyway.

1up.com

I must confess familial bias here: since my brother helped launch it and was a key part of its team that helped to establish what we know today as The Gaming Podcast, 1up.com will always be special to me. But it will always be special for another reason, too: it's where I met a number of like-minded folks that I enjoy discussing video games in great depth and at great length with. Honestly, I always spent at least as much time on 1up.com with the community features as I did with the staff's writing, but it was just a damned good website all round, really.

Where it is now: 1up.com officially closed in July of 2013, but everything that had once made it special had disappeared long before that. I put it probably around 2008-2009 or so when most of us made a grand exodus off the site to try and find a new collective home; we never quite settled in one place since, more's the pity, though most of us had at least brief dalliances with Facebook, Twitter and even Google+. 1up.com itself though is long-gone, now, though; not even a holding page remains, and the nature of how the site was programmed means that archive.org can't even get particularly reliable snapshots to pull out of the ether. So this one is, sadly, long dead.

Persian Kitty's Adult Links

Picture, if you will, a land and a time before PornHub. Indeed, a time before YouTube. A time where watching a pornographic video meant a significant commitment in order to download a 10-second video that filled a quarter of your screen, because no-one was streaming filth over dial-up connections. In that environment, Persian Kitty's Adult Links became legendary for me and my friends after one of us saw it mentioned in a magazine. This was a site that updated daily with new links to free galleries of ladies with their kit off. Sometimes there were even videos. Most of these galleries were trying to get you to sign up for a pay site, but there was plenty of material available that was perfectly suitable for a wafty crank of an evening.

Where it is now: Astonishingly (or perhaps not, given the enduring nature of online pornography), Persian Kitty's Adult Links still exists as a website… though it is a shadow of its former self, consisting of little more than some banner ads for various adult livestreaming sites. Four, to be exact, two generic "sex/adult cam" sites, one BDSM-themed site and one MILF-themed site. I'm happy that the Persian Kitty flag still flies, but less thrilled at what the site has become. It always kind of was a big ad, but now it's not trying to hide that.

Kongregate

For quite a while, Kongregate was the place to go for online Web-based games. All the big Flash game makers posted their stuff there, and the site had a bunch of interesting features like achievements, real-time chat, online multiplayer and even a site-wide metagame where you could collect trading cards by playing individual games, then battle other players with those cards in its own self-contained area. While I never got as big into Flash games as some others did, there were some legit all-time classics on Kongregate, with Desktop Tower Defense being the one that springs most readily to mind.

Where it is now: The site still exists and still offers many of the features I mentioned above, but the distinctive Web-based nature of the old Flash games has disappeared with the retirement of Flash as a commonly used Web technology. What we have now are pretty much the same free-to-play games you'd see on your average storefront, including licensed junk and a bajillion Raid: Shadow Legends knockoffs. Of greater concern is the site's new tagline at the bottom, which states "Kongregate is an open platform for all web games and a pioneering game developer in the blockchain space." Yeah. Fuck that.

hairytongue.com

I don't even remember what the main point of this site was — I think it was just a general "Internet humour" site similar to b3ta.com (which still exists and I don't think has updated its design since about 2005, but which still appears to be quite active) — but I do recall there being an extensive gallery of photoshops based on the easily provable hypothesis that Jamie Oliver is a flabby tongued Mockney wanker.

Where it is now: It is nowhere, save for a GoDaddy holding page. Thankfully, archive.org just managed to grab its last wheezes of life on this Earth. I was surprised and saddened to discover that it was as long ago as 2003-2004 that this site apparently ceased to exist. Oh, and if you were wondering, it was a site about hangovers. But mostly about mocking Jamie Oliver.

Weebl's Stuff

This was, among other things, the home of badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom, and was a mainstay of popular Internet culture for many years. As with several of these other sites, the decline of Flash meant there's now a whole generation who (probably) haven't grown up with the adventures of Weebl and Bob, Magical Trevor and numerous other pieces of absolute nonsense.

Where it is now: It's still there! Not only that, but Weebl himself is still making videos, and from the sounds of some recent posts on Bluesky, has found himself a creatively fulfilling Actual Job involving writing.

I think that's probably a nice place to leave this, isn't it? Definitely a subject I might return to at some point, though… once I can remember what websites used to exist, that is…

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#oneaday Day 396: The purity of early gaming

I consider myself quite fortunate in that I'm able to enjoy a full spectrum of video gaming, ranging from the very earliest titles up to the most modern releases. The only part of gaming that really leaves me cold is multiplayer-centric titles — I just find they don't hold my interest in the long term.

I feel particularly blessed to be able to enjoy stuff from the early '80s, because I know the primitive presentation of stuff from this era can be a turnoff to some. But I absolutely love it; settle me down in front of a bunch of Atari 2600 or Intellivision games — or, indeed, home computer games from the era — and I can quite happily fill an evening just as well as I could playing a modern, complex title.

As I've grown older and spent a significant portion of my life writing about and making videos about games, particularly those from this early era, I feel like I have a solid appreciation for simple but solid design, and games that are inherently designed to be highly replayable. Sure, you can't "finish" a lot of these games in the same way as modern titles, and to some that's inherently less satisfying, but you have to look at them a bit differently.

Take one of my favourite games of all time, River Raid, for example. River Raid is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up that, in theory, goes on forever. You can't "beat" River Raid. But you can develop a sense of satisfaction from attaining a high score, or reaching a particular level when starting from the beginning, or overcoming a specific challenge that has given you grief for a while.

But it's not even about making progress sometimes. Sometimes it's just about engaging with an inherently pleasing experience. The best early '80s games feel good to play. They achieve this through good handling, effective presentation, a feeling of fairness, and plenty of other elements besides. I enjoy playing Night Stalker on Intellivision not in pursuit of high scores, but simply because it feels nice to play it.

So with that in mind, for this trip down to the office and the accompanying overnight stay — this time at my parents' house because my usual hotel was fully booked — I've brought nothing but early '80s fun to occupy myself. And before I head off to sleep, I think I'll enjoy a round or two of some all-time favourites. Maybe some Cloudy Mountain to start off…?

#oneaday Day 395: A place for authors

One thing I've found myself wondering about a fair bit of late is whether the world still has a place for authors. By that, I mean people who primarily write books as their main contribution to existence; people whose job it is to write things that are, by their very nature, more long-form than your average 500-word Internet article.

Because, you know, I'm a little concerned. I'm a little concerned that a lot of people simply don't seem to have the mental capacity to digest anything written that is more than 250-500 words these days. Worse, there are people out there who genuinely believe that getting ChatGPT to "summarise" books for you is the same as "reading" them.

Part of me wants to write a book, or perhaps more accurately, multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction. I've always wanted to do this, and to my shame I've never pursued it to any particular degree, when I probably should. But these days I find myself wondering if I haven't left it too late. Is anyone even reading books any more? If I were to write a complete book that was all me, conjured up from the depths of my imagination, would anyone even believe that it wasn't AI-generated these days?

There's also the question of what to write about. There are numerous things I've started writing over the years, but only a few I've actually finished. Some of them you can read on this blog; one I even turned into an actual, physical self-published book. But that big question always hangs over my head: would anyone give a shit? Would anyone care enough to read it? Does that even matter?

Well, of course it matters to a certain degree. Writing a book is a significant amount of work, and putting all that effort in only for no-one to actually read it is… a suboptimal outcome, to say the least. And the trouble is, I feel, that the longer I leave it, the more likely that suboptimal outcome is to come true. The fewer people will be reading books. The fewer people will ever care about me, a nobody in the grand scheme of things, having found some means of expressing my creativity.

I've just been back and had a rummage through my "Creative Writing" folder that I have on my Google Drive. There's a few things in there that are the start of a good idea. Perhaps I should develop some of those. Perhaps I should try and start something completely new. Perhaps I should try and actually finish the story I've had half-complete in my mind since the age of about 15.

Or perhaps I should just accept the world as it apparently is today, recognise that I have maybe left it too late, and attempt to content myself with the other creative things I do.

I dunno. That last one doesn't feel altogether satisfactory. I still clearly have some thinking to do in this regard, it seems.

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#oneaday Day 394: Motivation located

I finally got together the motivation and energy to make some videos, which you'll be seeing over the course of the next little while over on YouTube. I made four in total, which I'm pleased with, as that means I don't need to be in a rush to make any more for a little while. Not that I ever "need" to be in a rush, but I've felt in a bit of a rut with the channel recently, and have really struggled with motivation.

Not so today, though! I think it helped that it's rained a fair bit over the last few days, and that's cooled things down a bit, meaning it's not quite so unbearable to just exist. It's amazing quite how much energy a bit of heat can sap from you; I'm sure I could have probably mustered up some energy to do something vaguely productive if I really cared that much, but I think the "break" also did me a bit of good and revitalised my enthusiasm for some of the things I want to cover.

Today's videos see me returning to the Atari 8-bit for the first time in a while. Every time I come back to the humble 8-bit after spending a bit of time away, I'm reminded how much I love that system. Seeing its fonts is like coming home; it's a comforting, warm blanket that makes me feel thoroughly pleasant. I'm sure part of this is nostalgia talking, but I do genuinely mean it when I say I find it a comfort. I got to know the Atari 8-bit and its capabilities so well when I was a child fiddling around with Atari BASIC that just the sight of half-height, double-width Graphics 1 characters is enough to make me smile today. Throw in the games I grew up playing, and, well, that's a happy place I feel like I should probably spend some more time in, judging by how much I enjoyed today's recording session.

The games I covered today are Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mountain King and Stealth. There was no particular reason for picking these, aside from knowing that Donkey Kong Bananza is on the way for Nintendo Switch, so I thought it would be fun to look at the "Nintendo on Atari" games; Mountain King I chose because I happened to rewatch Classic Game Room's review of the 2600 version the other day, and Stealth… I can't quite remember what brought that to mind recently, but it's a game I've always loved. Or, perhaps more accurately, I always loved its prototype version, Landscape, which we had on one of our Big Box of Pirated Disks that everyone had back in the 8-bit era.

I haven't published any of the videos yet, but make sure you're subscribed over on YouTube if you want to see them when they go up. I'll likely put one up tomorrow, and the rest over the course of the next little while. I have my monthly trip to the office on Tuesday night to Wednesday this coming week, so that will be… fun, probably? I don't relish the long drive every time I have to do this visit, but it is always nice to see everyone. Unfortunately I don't get to stay in a hotel this time because the usual place I book was full up this time around, and the local Travelodge wanted £120. I'm not paying over a hundred quid to stay in a fucking Travelodge, particularly with how they've repeatedly fucked up bookings I've tried to make with them in recent months. So anyway. I will be staying with my parents and delivering my Dad his belated Father's Day gift, which I inadvertently delivered to myself instead. Whoops.

Anyway, videos are uploaded, eyelids are drooping and it's a school night so I guess I better get to bed. Enjoy the vids once they're up!

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#oneaday Day 393: Howling in a box

It was Patti the cat's annual checkup and vaccinations today, which meant we had the always-heartbreaking task of putting her in The Box and then listening to her howl all the way to the vet's.

Cats have got it sorted. They know exactly the right noises to make to have an emotional impact, and while of course they don't have "words" in the same way we do, they are absolutely capable of communicating, both through sound and through action.

Thankfully, Patti's checkup was all fine, and the one arguably fortunate side effect of her not liking trips to the vets (or people other than us, generally) is that she behaves herself while she's there. Okay, yes, the fact it's because she's paralysed with fear makes me feel awful every time, but at least she doesn't react like our dearly departed Meg, who was such a troublesome patient she had a note on her file. I always found this kind of hilarious, because at home she was always the sweetest thing, and she enjoyed company, including strangers.

Oliver, meanwhile, has had nothing but good visits to the vet to date. He of course does not like being in The Box, as no cat does, and he of course let's out the plaintive howls of heartbreak on the way, but once at the vets, he's always sociable, friendly and extremely susceptible to treats.

Patti has, I think, forgiven us for today's trauma, because as I type this she's sitting on me, occasionally making a point of reminding me she's there. I know you're there, Patti; you are precious family and I will always be here for you.

Anyway, I've had a few drinks, I'm tired, I'm hot, and Patti has got one of her claws stuck in my pants. So I think I probably better leave that there!

#oneaday Day 392: Never forgive them for what they have done to the computer

[Recommended reading: Ed Zitron's "Never Forgive Them", from which the title of this post is taken.]

This evening, my computer inexplicably ground to a halt while I was doing… nothing in particular. Browsing a few webpages, doing a bit of research in preparation for some videos I'd like to make, if I'm being specific, but it really wasn't anything the slightest bit demanding. For whatever reason, though, everything just stopped, nothing was responsive, and the only thing I could do was force the power off and restart.

When the computer restarted, it took 10 solid minutes to become responsive because a piece of software for a controller that isn't connected decided to spontaneously uninstall and reinstall itself, while at the same time popular chat app Discord decided to install 18 updates that were apparently essential, despite the fact I'd updated it yesterday, Steam updated itself (which, all credit to it, it did without complaining or holding anything else up) and, of course, Windows is bugging me to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

At the same time, my phone has been repeatedly sending me notifications telling me it "needs optimising" and "must restart", despite everything working absolutely fine, and despite it never having insisted on this process before. (It does, however, insist on "Optimising Apps" every time you turn it on or restart it, though, which makes what should be a very simple, quick process — turning it off and on again — take a good few minutes.)

This is what people mean when they say "enshittification". All of the above is unnecessary. All of the above are examples of tech deliberately making itself worse, for reasons that are not apparent to the end user, but which I'm sure are "providing shareholder value" via some means or another. This is what Ed Zitron means when he says "never forgive them for what they have done to the computer".

I love that description. I feel like people don't say "going on the computer" any more, because most of us spend pretty much our entire waking life joined at the hip to one form of computer or another, be it a PC, phone or tablet. When I was a kid, "going on the computer" was a discrete activity. You'd come home from school, do your homework, have some dinner, then go on the computer. And the computer would oblige. You'd turn it on, and there it was. If something went wrong, you turned it off, waited a moment, then turned it back on again, and nine times out of ten, the problem would be gone.

Now, granted, "the computer" that I'm talking about here is several orders of magnitude less sophisticated, powerful and, arguably, useful than the PC I'm typing this post on. But it still feels like we've lost something. Things have been taken out of our control. I could literally do nothing while those stupid update processes were running on my PC, because they were so badly programmed that they monopolised the system to such a degree that I couldn't even bring up Task Manager to stop them. And, as I discovered, turning the PC off and on again wouldn't have helped, because they'd have just started again — or, perhaps worse, fallen over because of the half-finished job I switched them off in the middle of.

I appreciate that updates are sometimes necessary to add new features, fix bugs and, in the case of operating systems, plug security holes that could be exploited by malicious actors. But man, do I ever miss turning on the Atari 8-bit, booting right into BASIC and being able to just get on with things. Those "things" may have been considerably less elaborate than what I can do on "the computer" today, but was that really so bad…?

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#oneaday Day 391: Step out of my Game Room

Every now and then, I like to hit the "Random Post" button on this site and see what I was writing about at some point in the past, be it a few weeks ago or, in some cases, years ago.

Today, the Random Post button threw up this post from early in my first run around the #oneaday track. For those too lazy to click (I know you are, everyone is these days), it was a post about the then-imminent arrival of Game Room on the Xbox 360, and some feelings of positivity towards the whole thing.

For the unfamiliar, Game Room was a piece of software for the Xbox 360 that allowed you to kit out a virtual arcade and populate it with not only virtual tat, but also real games. The software was free, but in order to get any real use out of it, you had to buy either individual games or bundles of games. These games could then be placed into your arcade as "machines" that you could go and play, and, in an attempt to get people to care about Xbox Avatars, you could sometimes see virtual representations of people from your friends list wandering around and playing the games.

What was rather interesting about Game Room for me at the time was the fact that it included not only arcade games — which we already had a few of in downloadable form via Xbox Live Arcade — but also Atari 2600 and Intellivision console games. I had a passing familiarity with some 2600 hits at the time, but Intellivision was completely alien to me, so I was fascinated by the prospect of discovering some new favourites from the dawn of gaming.

There were a lot of objections to Game Room prior to its release, though. Indeed, that post was partially in response to a post on the official Xbox forums (RIP), where an Xbox player called "A Patch of Blue" described the upcoming programme as "a shameless attempt to siphon off Microsoft Points by dumping regurgitated content into our laps with a pretty bow on it". Their primary objections were that the games cost an equivalent of $3 each (a bit tight, I feel) and also that "guests" in your arcade could only play a game once before having to pay-per-play to the tune of 40 Microsoft Points (approximately 50 cents) unless they went away and bought it themselves.

Here's part of my response:

The biggest concern people have with digital distribution is that one day, your content will be switched off and, despite having paid for it, you’ll no longer be able to use it. This is a fair concern, as no-one likes splashing the cash on things that they won’t be able to use at some point in the future – but when you think about it, in the world of tech, this is nothing unusual. Products come and go, specifications increase, chipsets change – and at some point it’s necessary to leave the old behind. Did people complain that the Amiga wasn’t backwards-compatible with the Commodore 64? Do music enthusiasts complain that it’s getting harder and harder to find a cassette deck to play those old albums that you only bought on cassette because they were cheaper?

Well, yes, they probably do, but that’s beside the point. What I guess I’m trying to say is this: isn’t the “built-in obsolescence” of digital distribution the same thing? I have a stack of PC games in a box here, some of which it isn’t possible to run any more. Okay, maybe with some tweaking and playing with software like DOSBox it’s possible to get it going – but to a (for want of a better word) “casual” user, they’re defunct and obsolete. The only difference with potentially expiring digitally distributed products is that there’s no workaround like DOSBox. Once the content’s gone, it’s gone. And yes, that’s not a great thing, but it’s not something to be surprised about.

Oh, dear 2010 Pete. How silly you were. How foolish. How you should have probably listened to A Patch of Blue. Because you can't play anything you bought for Game Room any more, can you? No, you can't, because they switched the servers off, and that means, for some reason, you can't play any of the stuff you paid for.

Actually, I do maintain that Game Room was a lot of fun while it lasted. In particular, I adored the real-time leaderboards, because it was a genuine game-changer in stuff like River Raid for 2600 to see yourself climbing the rankings as you played. No-one has done anything quite like it since; even Hamster's otherwise excellent Arcade Archives releases on modern platforms only update the leaderboards after you've completed a run and specifically told it to update your score.

That sort of stuff, being server-driven, obviously couldn't last forever. But completely switching off the entire application, meaning you could no longer play anything, even single-player stuff with no leaderboard functionality, was kind of shitty, and I'm still a tad bitter about it.

Game Room was a great idea for numerous reasons. As I point out in that post from 2010, Game Room was the first real attempt to put out a fully legal, officially licensed, console-based multiplatform "emulator for the common man" system out there. There was no faffing around with configuration, no diving into dodgy ROM sites looking for the games you wanted. You just fired it up, bought the stuff you wanted, played, and enjoyed the features it offered. It's unfortunate that it's no longer accessible, as there was no "end of life" plan beyond "just turn it off".

These days, we have other options for officially licensed ways to play classic games, including my place of work, the aforementioned Arcade Archives series, compilations for modern platforms and numerous other products. Most of these have been designed in such a way that they will continue to function indefinitely — assuming you have them downloaded, in the case of digital products like the Arcade Archives games — which is an improvement over Game Room's completely closed, proprietary and online-dependent ecosystem.

I still miss Game Room, though. I'd love to see someone take its really good ideas — chief among them that real-time leaderboard thing — and run with them in a way that's a bit more considerate to players over the long term, and compliant with things like the Stop Killing Games initiative.

Hell, this sort of thing is the exact situation Stop Killing Games is seeking to prevent happening again: it's not saying that Microsoft would have needed to run things like the leaderboard servers indefinitely, because obviously that's not practical or cost-effective. But in an ideal world, I'd still be able to open up Game Room today and still play all the games I bought to use with it. As it stands, the money I spent on it — and I seem to remember I spent a fair bit on it — now has absolutely nothing to show for it.

So yeah, 2010 Pete. I admire your optimism, but I'm sorry to say that it was misplaced. Still, I know you enjoyed it while it lasted, so it's not a complete loss. But I hope you learned your lesson.

I did.

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#oneaday Day 390: Over Nine Thousand

Microsoft apparently laid off somewhere in the region of nine thousand people today. This is simultaneously horrifying and difficult to conceptualise. I think I've only ever worked at one company where it would even be possible to lay off nine thousand people at once and still have a company left afterwards, so it's borderline unthinkable to imagine how many people's lives and careers have been destroyed today. To put it in context, laying off nine thousand people would be akin to completely obliterating the company I currently work for approximately 450 times.

And the gall. The gall of the memo that delivered this news, telling everyone that the company has "more players, games and gaming hours than ever before" before giving some mealy-mouthed nonsense about "prioritising opportunities" that doesn't really say anything, and doesn't even have the courage to say, outright, that people are going to lose their jobs.

But then, it's always like this, in my experience, whatever size company you work at. When the layoffs come, they're always sudden, without warning, and without any support for those affected. I have been through the process more times than I would have liked to, and it's been hellish every time.

The first time I experienced it was when I was still working as a teacher. It was my first "proper job" out of university, and while I didn't love it, it was a stable income and a job that I could take a certain amount of pride in. Unfortunately, as my year at that school progressed, it became clear that the school was struggling quite a bit, and that redundancies were looming. Naturally, as one of the last in, I was also one of the first out, and I was given an utterly humiliating and pointless opportunity to "plead my case" to the headteacher and the board of governors before they confirmed the decision that they had absolutely no intention of changing.

The second time I experienced it was when I was working on GamePro. One morning just before Christmas, I awoke to find a flurry of activity on social media and in my email inbox. Several of my colleagues had announced that they were leaving, seemingly out of the blue, and then the email came. This time there was no opportunity for discussion, no support. Just a firm boot out of the door because the company didn't want us or our work any more. Truly horrible.

The third time I experienced it was when I was on USgamer. On the morning of my birthday, I received an email out of the blue from the head of what was then Gamer Network, who informed me that my services would no longer be required. On this occasion, I was given about a month's notice, but I was given no support, no severance, no assistance in finding a new position, not even a little bit of empathy or sympathy.

In every instance, these ultimately boiled down to poor leadership. And yet it's never the leadership that takes the fall; it's always the workers at the bottom of the pile; the ones who need those jobs just to survive. And the leaders get their golden handshakes for successfully "prioritising opportunities" and "streamlining the business", adding to vast fortunes that are already far more than any one person could ever possibly need to have in their personal assets, while real people suffer.

My heart sincerely goes out to everyone who has been affected by a situation that is clearly out of their control. Not just at Microsoft, but everywhere that is slashing workforces right now. Whether it's out of an attempt to save money or ill-advised going "all-in" on generative-fucking-AI, it always sucks, and I wish we, as a society, could find a way to move past this. Where does it end?

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