#oneaday Day 662: Nexus announcement day

I get to talk a bit about the day job today! I say "get to" like someone hasn't been allowing me to do so. What I mean is: we had a big announcement today, and I'd like to talk about it!

That announcement was for Evercade Nexus, a new Evercade handheld featuring a much bigger, brighter screen, significantly louder speakers, dual analogue sticks and a host of other cool features. You can see the trailer here:

Evercade has always been a platform that plays a wide variety of retro games — the library actually covers six different decades (from the 1970s up until today) — but Nexus has been designed with a bit of a '90s flavour, hence the somewhat different look and feel to the new trailer. The dual analogue sticks are designed to complement 3D games from the 32-bit era that we already have in the library (and have planned for the future), as well as our upcoming brand new native ports of 64-bit legends like Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, and these games all hail from the '90s, so it makes sense for the branding to reflect that.

You can still play classic Atari games on it as well, though, (plus, of course, all the other classic consoles the Evercade library covers!) and the bright colours found in your average old-school pixel art title will look lovely on that screen — plus with the all-new extra-loud speakers, you can subject everyone in the vicinity to the sound of Pitfall Harry and/or Lara Croft falling to their death for the umpteenth time.

I've said it before, but I'm super proud to work on Evercade. Ever since I first went for the "All-In" bundle of the original handheld back in 2020, which came with the first 10 cartridges released for the platform, I knew it was something special — and hoped that one day I would be able to be part of it. Well, now I am part of it — I have been for some time, and will hopefully continue to be for a long time yet — and it's a delight to be able to look at a product like the Nexus and think that I played a part in that, along with every cartridge release we do.

It's an interesting feeling to have lived long enough to remember these games from first time around vividly enough to still be excited about helping rerelease them on a new device. I never stopped loving games like (Bruce) Lee, MegaMania, Checkered Flag and myriad others — it's a genuine privilege to have been part of making official rereleases happen. Right now I'm working on the Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie double pack that is bundled in with Nexus, and it's hard work, but also immensely rewarding when I think about how good this release is going to be when it's finished.

And there are many more exciting games coming down the road — including a bunch more of my all-time favourites. I can't wait to share them with you all, and if you're new to Evercade, I hope you'll consider jumping on board with Nexus or one of our other devices! Preorders for Nexus open tomorrow — you can find out more here.

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 661: When people would gnaw off an arm for a freelance writing gig, using generative AI is unforgivable

In the last 18 years, 4,535 posts and 3,263,700 words (yes, really, I got a plugin to count them and everything), I have never once felt the need to outsource my thinking and creativity to a machine. There are two posts written by "guest authors" (which, spoiler, were actually both me in a cunning disguise!) and there are a couple of posts where I perm i tted drunken friends the opportunity to contribute a sentence or two to a post I was writing while out and about, but the remainder is all me, scooping out the contents of my brain and plopping it onto the page for no other reason than the fact that I enjoy doing so, and occasionally find it helpful.

Today, this notice appeared in the New York Times on a book review it had published:

Editors' Note: March 30, 2026:
A reader recently alerted The Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian. We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an A.I. tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on A.I. and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of The Times's standards. The reviewer said he had not used A.I. in his previous reviews for The Times, and we have found no issues in those pieces. The Guardian review of "Watching Over Her" can be read here. (link)

This, to me, is unforgivable. Supposedly there are plenty of writers out there who are doing this — or something like it, anyway — but to me, it is unfathomably awful. To be a writer, someone who cares about one's craft, you have to give a shit. And absolutely nothing says "I don't give a shit" quite like relying on generative AI so heavily that your article has to be pulled because its plagiarism was too obvious.

I mean, when you think about it, it's obvious that this would happen, given the way generative AI works and is trained — if it's pulling all its wording from existing texts that it has absorbed (without any compensation for the original authors) from around the Web, then of course it's going to come up with some of the same things, perhaps even the exact same phrasing.

You'd think it would be obvious, anyway — and that any writer worth their salt would not, as a result, rely on it — but apparently this is not the case. Much how the above-linked Wired article should really result in all the authors named being blacklisted from every freelance writing pool, effective immediately, this incident should be the end of Alex Preston's career. There should be no second chances. To quote the old Batman meme, this is the weapon of the enemy; we do not need it; we will not use it.

Believe me, at this point I've heard every pro-AI argument there is — some, like the nonsensical "back in the '90s some people thought the Internet would be a bad thing!!" one, more than others — and none of them stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. AI does not make you a better writer. AI does not make you a writer. The only thing that makes you a writer is, quite simply, writing. And if you are not sitting down and writing something for yourself — whether that be through putting pen to paper, tapping away at a keyboard or dictating your words verbally — you are not a writer. And no, "writing" your prompt to get the bot to churn out a thousand words for you does not count.

Humanity's written languages have survived for thousands of years — albeit with plenty of evolution — through people being taught how to use them. It is, today, a fundamental part of your early socialisation process to learn how to read and write; yes, some folks have specific learning needs that make it harder or even impossible for them to do so, but even for them, generative AI is emphatically not the answer, as we have plenty of assistive methodology and technology that can allow these people to thrive that does not rely on the odious fad that is presently bleeding the planet dry.

So I'm sorry, I have no patience left whatsoever for any incidents like this. The people involved in the Wired and New York Times articles above deserve to be kicked out of their career. Because if they have no respect for writing as a craft, why on Earth should any readers be expected to have any respect whatsoever for the shit they've churned out through the bots?

There are myriad people out there who would chew off their own arm for an opportunity to have a byline beneath a prestigious masthead — and every one of them who relies entirely on their own writing abilities, rather than outsourcing their creative process to the planet-burning chatbot, deserves those opportunities a million times more than those who clearly have no respect for themselves, their peers, or their readership.

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#oneaday Day 660: This one particular type of headline is very annoying

Did you click on this article? Probably not, because statistically speaking most of you read posts from the site's front page (where the full posts are published) or in your email inbox. (The really cool ones read via RSS, of course.) I don't feel the need to clickbait on this site largely because 1) it's my personal site and I don't really care if anyone reads it (though it is nice) and 2) I have always found clickbait incredibly annoying.

I don't know if I'm just in a bad mood right now or if there really has been a rise in clickbait headlines of late, but I feel like I'm noticing it a lot more of late. I'm talking about stuff like this:

That's a piece from Kotaku about LGR building himself a warehouse. I find it very difficult to believe that anyone reading Kotaku on a semi-regular basis does not know who LGR is, so to deliberately obfuscate his identity in the headline just feels like it's being annoying on purpose.

One could argue that this headline has been written appropriately, however; it gets the broader point across in a way that is accessible to all, regardless of whether or not they know who LGR is. So I will begrudgingly give it a pass.

I do not give the following (from GameSpot) a pass, particularly because they "spoil" it in the accompanying image:

Just say Hercules. We can see it's Hercules. Also I'm not 100% sure Hercules counts as one of Disney's more "iconic" movies. I guess it was in Kingdom Hearts.

GameSpot is very fond of this sort of shit right now:

Yeah, fuck off with that. Just tell me what it is.

Double fuck off for this being based on a "rumour", something which I was always discouraged from reporting on when I was working the news beat in the games press. If your headline has "could" in it, just stop.

But let's not pick exclusively on GameSpot.

Let's also pick on GameRant, which, to be fair, is part of the odious Valnet group. This headline can get right in the fucking bin. (It's Elder Scrolls Blades, if you gave a shit.)

This one can, too. (Horizon Chase Turbo in this case.)

Look, I get it. If you're on the endless churn and trying to juice your site's SEO results in order to maximise your KPIs for men in suits who don't know what video games actually are, it's easy to feel like it's necessary to pull this shit in order to "get people curious enough to click". But people are savvy to it now, to such a degree that it's a practice that gets routinely mocked.

Just say what the article is actually about rather than this bullshit playground teasing ("I know something you don't!") and if the story has any merit, people will click through to it anyway to find out more details. Those "more details" someone clicks through to find out more about should not, repeat, not be the name of the subject of the story.

This sort of thing is rarely the fault of the individual reporters — although I'm sure there are a few out there who love pulling this little stunt. No, it's inevitably an edict from on high for the reasons just stated. With the general health of video games media being deep within the "critical danger" territory, the suits want quick solutions that, in theory, get results.

Only I'm not convinced this sort of practice does get results any more. Like I say, people are wise to it now. I refuse to believe that I am the only one who simply won't click on an article whose headline is a deliberate cocktease.

Look at it this way: why should I give a shit that "a Switch game is being delisted on June 1"? There are thousands of the fucking things, many of which I don't care about. "The eShop is full of crap" is a meme for a reason. I do, however, own a copy of Horizon Chase Turbo, and thus would be interested in hearing why that specific game is being delisted. (It's stupid, by the way. And you can blame Epic for it.)

Anyway, that has been your nightly grump. Please write meaningful headlines, especially if you want the few remaining dregs of the video games press to be taken even a little bit seriously.

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#oneaday Day 659: Justice for RTS: achieved... again

I realised I never followed up on RoseTintedSpectrum's recent YouTube woes that I posted about a while back. Chances are if you're familiar with Rosie's work, you already know that there was, thankfully, a happy ending to the situation: he got his YouTube Partner Program status back, which means he can get paid again, with the only unfortunate news being that there would be a month or so's delay before he would be able to get what was owed to him during the demonetisation incident.

If you're not familiar with Rosie's work, however, I thought I'd take today to highlight some of the great things he's been doing, because he's a hardworking lad who makes consistently entertaining YouTube videos on a variety of subjects. He shot to (relative) stardom when he decided to cover the questionable classic UK TV show GamesMaster, and, having previously been a channel primarily about old games (and longstanding GamesMaster rival-though-not-actually-that-similar show Bad Influence!), he decided to lean into what had brought him some success, and cover old TV instead.

GamesMaster is still a recurring feature — his most recent video covers the legendary "Dave Perry Super Mario 64 Incident" — but he also looks at old kids' TV shows, too, and offers commentary that is both hilarious and insightful, and without dropping into either dry, boring quasi-academia or just straightforward summaries of the shows accompanied by occasional "oh my God, you guys, I can't believe they did that" reactions.

Anyway, here's some of my favourite videos from him. I recommend subscribing to his channel and giving them all a watch — many of them are on the long side by the very nature of covering entire series at once, but he punctuates these with short videos about fluff like Rainbow and Rosie and Jim if you want something a bit shorter.

Here's the aforementioned video about GamesMaster and The Dave Perry Incident. It's worth watching the prior videos in the run-up to this, as it's interesting to revisit the show and contemplate how it evolved (and not always for the better) from series to series, but this one, which many of the newer members of Rosie's audience have been eagerly awaiting for some time, represents some of his best work to date.

California Dreams is not a show I remember ever seeing back in the day, and having seen Rosie's retrospectives on it, I'm not sure whether or not I would have been into it. It's undoubtedly rubbish, particularly when viewed from a modern perspective, but it's also a really interesting show to explore, and Rosie's videos on the subject do a great job of explaining why. You won't come away from them desperate to watch the series as a whole, but even if you never saw it back in the day, you'll feel like you have a better understanding of its existence and its context.

Tottie: The Story of a Doll's House is another show I don't think I ever saw, and I'm not sure I would have watched it when I was a kid even when it was on. However, like his retrospective on California Dreams, Rosie manages to make a look back on the subject compelling, interesting and frequently hilarious — as well as pointing out the weirdly dark nature of a show about stop-motion animated toys, in which the title character is, by a significant margin, the least important character in everything that unfolds on screen.

And finally, from his earlier (pre-GamesMaster) channel, a video on Xenon 2, and how the reality of a game that was popular back in the day can differ quite significantly from the critical consensus on its original release — and how people who cling relentlessly to the latter can make it quite difficult to talk about something.

Rosie's a good lad who puts a ton of effort into his videos, and I'm happy to see he's enjoyed so much success over the last few years. His recent woes with YouTube — along with a similar, but worse situation back in 2024 — are an unfortunate reminder that this sort of success can be worryingly fragile through no fault of the creator. So go give him a view or two, and if you like what you see, consider becoming a YouTube member or a Patreon supporter. Good work — particularly when it's achieved without the usual manipulative "influencer" tactics — deserves to be compensated, or at the very least, appreciated.

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#oneaday Day 658: A random selection of pieces of music that make me smile

It's getting late and I haven't thought of anything to write and I'm full of curry, so let's do a MULTIMEDIA POST, shall we?

I'm partly inspired by a discussion I had earlier in a Discord that I'm a member of, in which we talked about things we liked from creators who clearly just made things for the joy of creating them — not in the hope of "going viral" or making a living out of them. I'm talking about stuff like Badgers, Badgers, Badgers and its ilk — although as it happened, a lot of those works did end up going viral and doubtless making their creators a fair amount of money. The point is that they weren't created with that in mind from the outset.

Funny, silly comedy songs and animations aren't the only thing I want to talk about today, though. More broadly, I just want to share a few things that always make me smile. Not always because they're funny, but because I just find them uplifting in some way. And where better to begin than with the irrepressible Hatsune Miku?

I'm not sure what exactly caused me to hyperfixate on this piece of music from Hatsune Miku Logic Paint S so much, but make no mistake; I most certainly did hyperfixate on it, as for a significant portion of my time playing the Picross-esque puzzles in Logic Paint S, I had set the in-game playlist to be nothing but this track.

I think I like this just because it's undeniably cheerful, bouncy and upbeat. It feels like it fits Miku nicely, and it's a good accompaniment to doing some puzzles — or just for when you need a bit of a pick-me-up.

My first encounter with Cave's classic bullet hell shoot 'em up series Dodonpachi was on iOS devices, where there was an excellent version of Dodonpachi Resurrection. One thing which still stands out about the mobile version of this game is that it features an exclusive game mode that not only has its own mechanics, it has a completely different soundtrack to the game's regular, rather more moody score.

People like the standard Dodonpachi Resurrection music a lot, and to be sure, it's good. But there's something I really like about these completely new tracks from the mobile version — and particularly this one, which accompanies the opening level. It's got that real adventurous "we're setting off on a brave, bold mission!" feel to it that I really like; it's full of hope for the future, rather than a bleak sense of submission to the endless horrors that await. And I think we could all do with a bit of that right now.

I maintain that Inti Creates' Gal*Gun games are some of the best games that no-one will admit to playing because they're about making girls collapse in euphoric ecstasy by pointing at them. All three of them are really solid rail shooters, each with their own distinctive mechanics and story to follow, and they all have great soundtracks, too.

This track, used for a lot of the regular levels in Gal*Gun 2, is a short but sweet track that really sums up the game's energy. There's not a trace of maliciousness anywhere in any of the Gal*Gun games, and their music never fails to make me smile.

Right, time we had a silly one. I remember coming across this one for the first time and absolutely pissing myself laughing. It still always makes me chuckle now… particularly the "Cock!" break in the second verse.

This sort of thing is very representative of what was going on in the Badgers, Badgers, Badgers-adjacent space on sites like rathergood.com, b3ta.com and Weebl's Stuff back in the mid '00s to the early '10s. The thing I like is that although endearingly lo-fi, particularly in the vocal samples, the whole thing is very well put together and works as a standalone song. It's just better with the animation.

Regrettably, the original animation for this piece is no longer available. It used to be that you could type in "2204355" into Google Search, hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" and it would take you to a technicolour Flash animation featuring a pixelated dancing guy from an old KFC advert and this delightful chiptune remix of the theme from ALF. Thankfully, the person behind the music came forward and published the music in its full glory on YouTube some 15 years ago, so even though the Google trick doesn't work any more, we can, at least, still enjoy the tune.

Side note: this blog is old enough that I blogged about when I first found this. It was, it has to be said, a particularly dark period in my life, when I had just split from my first wife and was at the lowest I've ever been. I happened to stumble across this one evening and found that it drove the darkness away for a few minutes at a time, so I watched that stupid animation over and over for hours. Thank you, mystery 2204355 creator, and thank you, Zalza, for helping me in my hour of need, even if you have no idea that you did so.

I wrote a bit about Sbassbear the other day, but I can't not mention their most recently published Game Grumps remix, as it's one of their best yet. Once again, this is a video I just keep returning to because it makes me smile.

Actually, to hell with it, there's another Sbassbear one I love also, and I can't pick between these two, so you're getting both:

I love BEANS because it's just so chaotic and ridiculous. But I love Shnigedy Ding Dong because it encapsulates the feeling you get when playing Tetris Effect Connected — and specifically, the wonderful mode where three people team up against another player, every so often bringing their independent wells together into one giant superwell, accompanied by a massive crescendo in the music and… as Dan says in the video, "ohhh, I love it so much!"

Right, that's enough. Off to bed with me now.

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#oneaday Day 657: Drain Blaster

After over 4,500 posts on this blog (and another 2,300 or so on MoeGamer), it will probably not surprise you to learn that I sometimes have difficulty thinking of something new to write about. Indeed, there are a number of topics I have written about multiple times, often without realising it — and often with inadvertently using some of the exact same arguments and phrases each time I do so. At least nobody can say I'm inconsistent in the way I do things.

With that in mind, and given that this is a personal blog, it stands to reason that I should probably start talking about weird, hyper-niche things that, statistically speaking, very few people probably give a shit about. But if Chris "Papapishu" Person's work over on Aftermath is anything to go by, there will always be an odd little audience who are very much into weird, hyper-niche things.

I guess part of the reason I tend to hold off on writing about weird, hyper-niche things is worrying about whether or not I will actually be able to fill a convincing blog post on the subject, but, well, I've taken care of about half of what I consider the "bare minimum" for each day with this preamble, and thus I now feel suitably equipped to actually tell you what I want to talk about.

Today I would like to tell you about our toilet plunger.

A plunger is one of those things that you don't really think about needing until it's too late. At least, I've always been that way; I am fortunate in the fact that my wife likes to be prepared for all sorts of eventualities, and thus she is the sort of person to purchase a toilet plunger in the anticipation that we might need one at some point.

But my wife didn't buy just any old plunger. Oh, no. She bought a Drain Blaster.

You might think that looks quite like a normal plunger, and you would be partially right; like a regular old plunger it has the big rubber thing that you put over the hole in the bog, along with a smaller head for dealing with, presumably, plugholes. (I have only ever used it for the toilet.)

Where a Drain Blaster differs from a regular plunger may well already be apparent from the picture above, but just in case it isn't: it's all in that thick cylinder of a body, and the handle above it. Because you can pull that handle out to fill the cylinder with air, and then blast the air back out by plunging the handle back in.

And you know what? It does an amazing job of unblocking a toilet. I don't really know how one uses a regular plunger for the same job other than just sort of… plunging it in there and hoping for the best, but with the Drain Blaster it really is as simple as putting the rubber bit over the hole in the toilet, pulling up the handle and pumping it a few times until you hear everything proceed on its merry way down your soil pipe. I am yet to encounter a blocked toilet that has been able to stand up to even the briefest assault from a Drain Blaster, and, as someone who blocks the toilet more frequently than he would perhaps like to admit, I am exceedingly grateful that, at some point in the past, my wife decided to go hard on our choice of plunger.

I am reminded of a legendary group text (it may have been an MSN Messenger conversation, given the era) from among my friendship group at university, when one of our number (not me, surprisingly) admitted that he had produced a poo so formidable that he absolutely could not get rid of it. It eventually took several kettlefuls of boiling water to break up the beast enough for it to finally vacate the premises, and he chronicled the entire process, which was unfolding late at night when, being university students, many of us could be relied upon to be a little bit tipsy and thus very receptive to such a saga. Thankfully this was an age before smartphones, so there were no pictures involved, but the entire process was chronicled in exhaustive detail. I will never forget it.

I mention this because I wonder how different his experiences would have been if he had a Drain Blaster. I don't even know if Drain Blasters existed back then, though given that the device is essentially a bike pump with a plunger head, I would be surprised if they didn't. Could the sheer volume of this legendary turd stand up to the relentless assault of a Drain Blaster, or would the boiling water still be necessary? I guess we will never know.

Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. If you read all of that… uh… well done, I guess?

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#oneaday Day 656: User error

One reason I absolutely cannot wait to ditch my professional social media responsibilities (which will be at some point in the next few months, in all likelihood) is the phenomenon of users making an error themselves, then yelling at us for their own mistake. There have been two separate examples of this just today, and I'm glad I was too busy to reply to them (the chap who's been helping us out with social media handled them) because I'm not sure I would have been able to resist being sarcastic. (Naturally, I won't name and shame or give the exact examples here, but anyone who has worked in any sort of tech with a vaguely public-facing aspect will likely know the sort of thing I'm talking about.)

Whenever I see something like this, it just comes across as a completely alien way to react. If I'm using a device, and it behaves in a way that I don't expect it to, the first thing I look for is if I'm doing anything wrong — which I inevitably am. I use it as an opportunity to learn exactly what it is that I'm doing wrong, then to never make that same mistake ever again, because I learned what the problem was and how to fix it. The absolute last thing I would consider doing is going on social media and yelling at the company who makes the product in question — particularly when there is absolutely no way of them solving my issue without making me look, at the very least, a little bit stupid.

I get that people are frustrated when things don't work the way they expect and they don't know why. But receiving a message filled with swearing and abuse because you didn't think to press a single button that would immediately resolve the problem you are having — yes, this really was one of the incidents today — does not make the person who has to answer that message feel particularly inclined to want to help you. I mean, most of the time they will go out of their way to help you, even for particularly stupid questions — contrary to popular belief, there are, in fact, stupid questions — but you can rest assured that they're having a good giggle at you behind your back.

Note that I absolutely do not have a problem with someone who does have a question with a simple and straightforward answer, and who asks that question without becoming abusive. I am more than happy to help anyone like that out. But someone who bursts into an inbox with no prior contact and fills their message with "wtf" and "ffs" and all that sort of shit… well, they're not getting their relationship with us off on a particularly good foot now, are they?

The only time I've ever yelled at a company on social media was when CEX missold me an expensive arcade stick with the promise it would work on the consoles I asked if it would work on, and it did not do that. After the staff in the shop refused to help, I had little option but to Karen it up a bit and eventually got the situation resolved. I'm not particularly proud of that little episode, but I did manage to get it resolved without any swearing or abuse at the staff in question — just a lot (a lot) of repeating myself.

Anyway, don't be rude to staff of a company if the fault is actually completely of your own creation. It's not hard.

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#oneaday Day 655: I would rather play Atari 2600 games than mobile games

I probably don't need to say anything more than the headline, but I will expand on it for the sake of having actually written something today. I mean what I say, though! I would genuinely rather play literally anything on the Atari 2600 than a modern mobile game. And with the 2600 being so easy to emulate these days — not to mention the fact I have worked on both devices and game cartridges featuring Atari 2600 games — you can even take the experience on the go with you.

I remember when mobile gaming first became a thing with the Java phones. Well, actually, technically it first became a thing with Snake and the other games no-one remembers on the Nokia 3210 and company. But expandable mobile gaming — by that I mean the ability to download new games onto your phone — really took off in the Java era.

At first, it was mildly exciting… at least until you downloaded a Java game and realised that a lot of them were Not Very Good. Often not for lack of trying, and there were some genuinely decent ones — I recall a good version of Lumines, for example — but for the most part, they were a pale imitation of even the dedicated handheld games consoles that were around at the time. The Game Boy and its successors ruled the roost in that regard for a good long while — and deservedly so.

The advent of iOS was a huge shift, though. Anyone who was around for the launch of the App Store will doubtless remember things like ngmoco's output (before they became free-to-play garbage peddlers), Epic's "Castle" tech demo that eventually became Infinity Blade, and doubtless many others that are lost to time. Quite literally in many cases, because these were digital-only games that were often exclusive to iOS — and while I'm sure some have been preserved, I bet there are plenty more that we'll never see again.

Things seemed… interesting for a while. The ambition of this new breed of mobile game was hard to fault, but many folks (including me) found that touchscreens were less than ideal for console-style experiences. The best games were ones that were built around the inherent limitations and inaccuracy of a finger-based touch interface — or which used other methods of control, such as tilt.

Then, one day, Apple announced that it would be introducing the concept of "in-app purchases". I knew immediately that this would be an awful idea, as the general gaming community had a collective bee in its bonnet about DLC at the time, and adding DLC to mobile games sounded like a really bad idea in that climate.

Unbelievably, though, I underestimated quite how awful things would end up becoming in the mobile space. While there are still a few "premium" games available for a one-off purchase these days, most of them are available on other platforms with actual controllers, leaving the vast majority of mobile-exclusive titles these days as free-to-play gacha crap.

I've done my time in the gacha mines. I've made the mistake of thinking I'd sling a game twenty quid to "support" it because I'd been playing it quite a bit and I liked the look of the current character banners. But in more recent years I've become hyper-aware of quite how much those games exploit horny young men in particular, with massively sexualised artwork designed not to add depth to the characters they depict, but purely to get said horny young men convinced to open their wallets in the hope of acquiring a JPG — or an animated GIF if you're lucky — of their favourite waifu in a skimpy outfit. And I say this as someone who likes sexy games!

No more. I swore off all mobile games quite some time ago now, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Now, at the times when I would typically want a mobile game — when I have a few minutes to spare, when I'm bored, when I just want something to do with my hands that I don't have to think about too much — I will quite happily reach for an Atari 2600 game, because those fit the bill perfectly.

Your average Atari 2600 game can be played for sessions of maybe 1-5 minutes at a time, and that feels like a satisfyingly self-contained play session. You can keep playing to beat your high scores, or to get a little further, or compete against a friend if you're playing together — or you can move on to something else, and have another 1-5 minutes of fun. And at no point in the entire process will these games attempt to monetise your erection.

On that note, may I remind you that Activision Collection 2 is coming to Evercade next month…?

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#oneaday Day 654: Jensen Huang is an enemy of the arts

The headline is probably not news to most of you reading this, but I feel like it's worth commenting on, because the NVidia CEO just can't seem to keep his mouth shut.

To recap: a little while back, NVidia introduced its new "DLSS5" technology via transparently obvious Digital Foundry advertorial video. I still don't really know what DLSS is, or what it used to be I guess, but this latest incarnation of it did… not go down well, to say the least.

The reason? It's fucking generative AI, because of course it is. In this case, it's generative AI that takes two multi-thousand dollar graphics cards to render a slop filter over the top of the perfectly functional graphics the game already had. Early defenders tried to convince everyone else that it was just "improving the lighting", but then Huang came out and said the following:

First of all, [the critics are] completely wrong. The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI. It's not post-processing at the frame level, it's generative control at the geometry level.

(Tom's Hardware)

Okay. So it is generative AI. Which sucks. And everyone hates. And in this instance, it is adding what is colloquially referred to as a "yassification" filter atop character graphics in particular, making them look markedly different from their actual, canonical designs. You know, the ones that artists worked on.

Today, Kotaku posted what I would argue is a bit of a fluff piece on the subject, quoting Huang extensively. Huang is presumably in some sort of "damage control" mode — although not that much, because the part of NVidia that makes decent graphics cards for gaming PCs and consoles is of very little importance to a company that has very much thrown its entire lot in with generative AI.

From the Kotaku piece, quoting Huang, who was speaking on a recent episode of Lex Fridman's podcast:

DLSS 5 is 3D conditioned, 3D guided. It's ground truth structure data guided. And so the artist determined the geometry we are completely truthful to. The geometry maintains in every single frame.

Okay, first of all, what the fuck does "ground truth structure data guided" mean? Secondly, I'm sure the geometry is still there, it's just underneath a hallucinated AI-generated image.

He goes on (emphasis mine):

Every single frame, it enhances but it doesn't change anything. The system is open, you could train your own models to determine, and you could even in the future prompt it. You know, 'I want it to be a toon shader, I want it to look like this kinda,' so you can give it even an example. And it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, you know, the style, the intent of the artist. And so all of that is done for the artist, so that they can create something that is more beautiful, but still in the style that they want.

So let me get this straight. It "doesn't change anything", but it does "generate in the style of" how it is prompted, am I getting this right? So it does, in fact, change something?

And who is doing this "prompting", exactly? Who is saying "I want it to be a toon shader"? The end user? Because that sure as fuck doesn't sound like being "consistent with the artistry and intent of the artist". Or is it the artist? Because if an artist wants their visuals in a toon style, they'll design them in a fucking toon style in the first place and they don't need the slop machine to do it for them. Or they don't if they're an artist with any fucking skills, anyway.

All this just confirms exactly what we've known for a while now: Jensen Huang is an enemy of the arts. He doesn't give a shit what the "style and intent of the artist" are, because his magic slop machine can just overwrite it and make it look "more beautiful". Fuck the artists who worked hard on each scene, each character, each object. Fuck having a coherent, distinctive artistic vision and visual style — bring on the uncanny valley AI slop! Fuck everyone who makes it their life's work to bring interactive worlds and the characters who inhabit them to life!

Jensen Huang, you are a rancid little fuckboi who, years after this bubble pops, will be looked back on as one of the most insidious, dangerous influences on the arts that there has been for a very long time. I'm not sure what sort of legacy you think you're leaving behind, but I can tell you with great confidence that it will not be a flattering one.

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#oneaday Day 653: Web best (forgotten) practice

When I was first interested in Making A Website, back in the early days of being able to Go On The Internet, itself part of Going On The Computer, I learned a number of supposed Best Practices that I still habitually follow to this day as much as possible. And yet reading a recent article about how a single article on PC Gamer is a 37MB initial download, followed by nearly 500MB of ads downloaded in the background over the course of five minutes or so, I can't help feeling like a lot of them have been forgotten about.

Here's a few that I can remember off the top of my head:

Keep your pages lightweight. Don't be afraid of all-text pages. Compress your images. Don't upload them at an unnecessarily huge size or using a file format that doesn't compress them unless there is some reason for needing to see them at high resolution and lossless quality. Arguably this one is even more important today as a lot of people are looking at websites on phones, but 37MB for an initial download is bananas, even bearing in mind today's average Internet connections, even over the airwaves on your phone, are much faster than they were 20+ years ago.
Hyperlinks should be inline rather than an instruction. That means if you're linking to something, you put the hyperlink where you mention the thing rather than spending a whole other sentence saying "Click here to see the thing!" This one is quite often argued against these days in favour of "calls to action", but if your website is not a marketing website, you don't need to give a shit about "calls to action". Save yourself some words, make your writing better and just link to the thing. The "click here" is implied by the text being a different colour. That's how hypertext works!
Hyperlinks to other pages on your site stay in the same tab/window. Hyperlinks to other websites go in a new tab/window. target="_blank" is so easy to include, and most CMS packages have the ability to choose whether or not a link opens in a new tab without you having to do any sort of HTML shenanigans yourself. The reasoning behind this is that you actually want to keep people on your website, so if you're linking to something relevant that is not on your site, when the reader closes the tab for that external resource, your site will be right there waiting for them where they left it.
Metadata doesn't belong in content. We all know that social media made a real mess of this, but outside of platforms designed around metadata being part of content, you don't need to put things like #hashtags in your articles, because most CMS platforms have some sort of tag facility built-in, and even if you're hand-coding a site, you can still include metadata tags in a way that is invisible to the end user. You are (hopefully) writing a page to be useful to a person, not a machine. In fact, in these days we live in, making a page more friendly to a person than to a robot will make you stand out considerably.
Don't interrupt the reader. If someone has clicked on a page, they're there to read the thing they clicked on, not to subscribe to your newsletter, not to watch a video and not to click away to a related article. If you must include those things, put them at a relevant point in the text (e.g. a video showing the thing you're talking about in the article, a link to a source you're quoting) or, if they don't fit into the flow, at the end of the piece so the reader has somewhere to go next. If you're giving the reader "FURTHER READING:" options after just one or two paragraphs, all you're doing is implying to the audience that the rest of the article isn't worth reading.

Most of these are broken on the daily by commercial websites, usually in the name of "SEO best practice" or whatever. The last one in particular drives me bonkers. I just want to read the article! I do not need linking to something tangentially related after I've only read the introduction, and I certainly do not want to subscribe to your fucking newsletter until I have read your entire piece!

Many of these rules were originally put in place because a lot of people were still using dial-up Internet at the time, and if you gave someone with even the very fastest dial-up modems a 37MB single page? Well, they just wouldn't be reading that page. In the process, however, these rules made for a Web that was clean, straightforward to navigate and consistent in its design language. And we've lost a lot of that in the attention-deficit, ad-riddled, bloated mess that the modern Web is.

"I want the old Web back" is a lot more than just starting your own blog in favour of corporate-controlled social media websites. The rules above are a good start. Generally respecting your audience — including their time and network bandwidth — is a good next step.

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