#oneaday Day 642: I will never use Gemini when I'm bored

yelling formal man watching news on laptop — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

The website "Android Police" posted an incredibly stupid article today, headlined "I use Gemini when I'm bored — and it's better than doomscrolling". I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the premise of this article is spectacularly dumb and the author, Anu Joy, should feel bad for having written it… if indeed they are actually a real person. You never can be sure of that with engagement-bait articles these days, and the author's complete lack of online presence beyond LinkedIn doesn't fill me with confidence that they actually exist. But never mind.

I'm not going to link to the article because it doesn't deserve it, but I am going to systematically destroy it for today's post, which features a lot of swearing. Hope you don't mind, about either part of that statement. If you do, well, tough titties.

Cock!

Turning boredom into a 5-minute adventure

The first lake-boiling, environmentally ruinous use of the lying plagiarism machine that Anu Joy cites as an antidote to boredom is "turning it into a mini choose-your-own-adventure generator", with her argument being that "rather than passively consuming content, I now engage with short, interactive stories that unfold in real time, making them ideal for five-minute boredom gaps."

In response to this, I would like to introduce any Gemini-brained fuckwits to the long, rich and deep history of the interactive fiction genre, all of which has been written by actual humans, and designed to occupy you for anything between a few minutes and multiple hours — possibly even days or weeks if you get stuck and have the willpower to not look at a walkthrough.

It's easy to get involved with interactive fiction, too! There are plenty of great standalone games that fall into this category, such as Inkle's excellent titles 80 Days, Overboard!, Expelled! and more, plus their adaptations of actual choose-your-own-adventure-style gamebooks such as Sorcery! The indie marketplace itch.io has a whole tag for titles developed in Twine, which are essentially hypertext-based choose-your-own-adventure games. And if you want to get into the history of the medium and its rich diversity developed over the course of the last 40+ years, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) has more interactive fiction than you can probably get through in a lifetime, much of which can be played online right there in your web browser.

Or you could, I don't know, actually read a Choose Your Own Adventure book. They still exist, you know! And, as an adult, a single "run" through one will probably only take you about five minutes!

"Oh, but Gemini can make me something that's never been done before!" No it fucking can't! That's sort of the problem with LLMs! They will never, ever have an original thought because their entire fucking functionality is built on plagiarising other people's work. So why not actually go and enjoy a human being's work rather than burning down a forest to get the obsequious chatbot to "tell you a story?"

FUCK.

Quizzes, riddles and brain-teasers on demand

Do I really have to dignify this with a response? Okay, here are some places you can take quizzes online that don't involve getting a lying robot to make shit up:

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the place where we used to go to look things up before the Internet, has a whole page full of quizzes.

Puzzle publishing company Lovatts has a straightforward and flexible quiz you can challenge any time.

Fucking Buzzfeed, the website where clickbait goes to die, has tons of quizzes. They're sort of famous for them! (EDIT: I had forgotten that Buzzfeed "pivoted to AI" a couple of years back. Maybe forget about this one.)

The best news of all is that these quizzes are put together by actual humans, so the answers should be right, which is not something you can guarantee with the garbage LLMs like Gemini spew out!

FUUUUUCK.

Curiosity on demand, without the time sink

"Oooh, but Gemini is so good at research and telling me fun little facts!"

Heard of Wikipedia? They feature a different article on their front page every day. And those articles are written by humans. (They're specifically trying to fend off the lying chatbots right now.) Not only that, if you want to dive deeper, they are sourced, so you can actually follow up on the things they say.

If you really want to surprise yourself, bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random — that will take you to a completely random page, where you can start a whole new knowledge journey that doesn't involve polluting the drinking water of any communities. (Fun fact: you can use /wiki/Special:Random on any sites that run on the MediaWiki software, not just Wikipedia!)

FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Gemini as a creative partner

"Some days, I'll argue whether pineapple on pizza is a culinary crime or a stroke of genius," Joy writes. If that's the level of your creativity, I suggest throwing a dart at Reddit and posting about how cool and random?! you think bacon is, you t3hPeNgU1NoFd00m, you.

If you just want someone to talk to, that is literally what social media is for. I know there are lots of things one can criticise about social media (particularly the Nazi bar that is Twitter in 2026), but if you just want to start a conversation with someone, there are few things easier than typing "@random hello, I disagree with your opinion on the Star Wars prequels, let's have a fight" or some other such bollocks.

If you want to talk to someone you don't know, there are services for that, too! Join a random Discord — or even better, one for something you're interested in! Play an MMO! Go on IRC! Brave Chatroulette! (Omegle apparently doesn't exist any more after some nasty shit went down there, so maybe don't go there.)

Just don't waste your fucking life talking to the cunting chatbot. It doesn't love you. It never will. And you're making the worst people in the world richer just by looking at it.

FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!

Boredom doesn't stand a chance

If you are bored in the world as it exists today and can't think of anything better to do than open up Google fucking Gemini, you are a lost fucking cause. There is more entertainment, more media, more games, more reading material, more opportunities for socialising online than there have ever been. Not only that, there are unprecedented opportunities for you to get creative and express yourself in all manner of different ways, regardless of your past experience. You could even start your very own blog where you yell at people who might not exist!

There is no fucking excuse for turning to the chatbot "because you're bored". Even if the absolute limit of your creativity is "debating the merits of pineapple pizza", which Joy mentions twice in that dogshit article.

I realise that I have given the article in question far more attention than it ever deserved. But hey! It was the inspiration for something actually creative. And who knows? Someone might actually find some of the links I've provided useful.

Friends don't let friends use chatbots. So if I ever hear that you, dear reader, have turned to Google Gemini "because you're bored", I will hunt you down, wherever you are, and I will slap you repeatedly about the face with a wet trout.

Here endeth the lesson.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 641: Learning something new and pointless

Every so often, I get kind of a hunger to learn something new, but a little gremlin in my mind almost always stops me from pursuing that thought with a simple phrase: "there's no point".

His thinking is that learning how to do something new absolutely must be something useful that you can use in your day-to-day life, and preferably make money from. And the reason I listen to him is because I understand where he's coming from; we live in a mercenary world with a cost of living that continues to escalate, and thus it would seem eminently sensible to learn something that would, at the very least, have some value in the job market.

But at the same time, there are things I want to learn about that, while arguably "pointless", I think would just be fun and interesting. One that I keep coming back to is the concept of programming — but specifically programming on the Atari 8-bit home computers.

I used to dabble quite a bit in programming in BASIC when I was a kid. I had several floppy disks' worth of BASIC listings that represented a combination of things I had typed in from magazines, things I had adapted from things I had typed in, and completely original creations. I never got particularly good at programming in Atari BASIC, but I did enjoy doing it. And for the longest time I've found myself wondering "what if I actually applied myself and tried to rediscover and expand on those skills?"

That's about where the gremlin enters the picture, you see. There is no rational reason why I should spend time learning how to program a long-defunct computer that you can't buy any more and which, in the grand scheme of Home Computers People Have Heard Of, ranks far behind the Commodore 64 and Spectrum, despite having capabilities at the very least on a par with, and often superior to, both of them.

"It's a waste of time," he says. "There's no point. You won't make any money from it. No-one will want to hire you based on that."

Well, frankly, who gives a shit? I'm not getting any younger, and I feel like learning new things is a good way to keep the brain active. So I think what I might actually do is put some serious time into this. Maybe devote an evening or two a week to it and see what happens.

It might not go anywhere. But at least I'll have been trying something new. And that's quite an exciting thing.

Another thing that has been holding me back is not really knowing where to start, but a blog I stumbled across by chance earlier today gave me some good recommendations of books to take a look at. And if people back in the '80s could learn how to program using just these books and no Internet to look things up on, I'm sure I can do something similar.

Maybe. We'll see.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 640: I hate 2026

I am tired and frustrated. This is nothing new, of course, but I am feeling it particularly keenly today. I can't go into the specifics for reasons that are probably obvious, but as an attempt to vent at least a little bit of the fury festering inside my spleen, I am going to vaguepost my way through this.

I learned today that something I had been looking forward to happening — which would be a good thing for me, and particularly for my mental health — might not be happening, through no fault of my own, and through no fault of the person who was organising this Thing. Instead, the blame can be placed squarely (albeit slightly indirectly, removed by a degree of, like, one or two) at the feet of the perpetual garbage fire that is the tech industry in the mid 2020s — specifically, the chip shortages caused by all the AI crap.

Every so often I see an AI booster wanking on about how much more "productive" AI has made them, and I do stop to question if I've got things right. And the answer is inevitably "yes"; every time I ask this question I find myself feeling more and more resolute in my absolute, complete and utter distaste for AI and what it is doing to the tech industry — and, more broadly, what it is doing to anyone who wants to do anything that isn't AI-related in the tech space.

It's just the latest in a long line of examples of people and organisations with a lot of money and influence taking everything that other people might need, and making (supposed) use of it for something that no-one actually wants — and which causes knock-on effects on multiple steps down the "ladder". The really galling thing about this all is that it's arguably not even organisations with a lot of real money; the seemingly daily billion-dollar deals that are being bandied around are all being done with money that doesn't actually exist, that has no intention of existing, and which will never exist as anything other than a means of making the worldwide economy collapse completely.

I can go to the shop these days and get a few snacky bits and it'll be £50 or more. I shudder to think what the current Happenings are doing to petrol prices. And, of course, it's getting near-impossible to buy anything even vaguely related to computer memory or storage for what one might call a "reasonable" price. Not all of these are directly and specifically related to AI, of course, but they do all relate to how the economy is utterly fucked as a result of everything that has been happening for the last few years.

And of course it's selfish for me to speak up about this stuff because it's something in my life that is being specifically affected by it — but regular readers will know that I have been pretty staunchly opposed to All This Bullshit long before the still-vagueposted news that I had today.

I'm just so tired. When I was young, I thought there was a point you'd get to in your adult life where everything was just sort of sorted and you could get on with living and enjoying your life. I feel like my parents had that. (They might disagree. But it's the impression I got.) But no-one living through this horrible, horrible time in existence is getting any degree of peace, because everyone is being affected by the absolute worst pieces of shit in the world to varying degrees.

I'm tired of it. So very tired. And I wish there was an easy way to make it go away.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 639: The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies

There's a telltale sign you can use in any online argument that it is Time to Step Away From the Computer, and that is someone pulling out what I like to call The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies.

What I mean by this is that point in an online argument where people start going on about "ad hominem", "strawmen", "motte and bailey" and "No True Scotsman". And probably some others.

These are all valid logical fallacies, of course, but the sheer frequency with which they are trotted out by people absolutely desperate to win an online argument makes it absolutely exhausting to even attempt having a discussion about some things. Because more often than not, the person busting out The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies isn't actually interested in getting their point across or changing anyone's mind; they just want to feel like they "won" the argument. And, at the point The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies enters the picture, this is usually part of an attempt to paint themselves as the victim.

Other telltale signs include attempting to argue that positive representation of marginalised groups is actually a form of racism and/or sexism (against straight white men, obviously), taking great offence at the concept of fascism even being mentioned (and often expressing a desire that it be "discussed" or "debated"), using the term "diversity of opinion", claiming that women, non-white ethnic minorities and/or transgender people in leading roles are somehow "unrealistic" and, of course, turning to that old favourite term: woke.

Now, I won't lie. There were a few years where I found myself skating around this territory. I've talked more about that in this post, so I won't repeat the soul-searching and heart-opening from that post (though I encourage you to read it if you would like to know more). However, people can learn, grow and change, and that is exactly what I have done over the years. Across the COVID years and into Trump's second presidency, I have come to see that a lot of the things the people I once dismissed as online firebrands were attempting to warn us all about have actually come true.

And, as an extension of that, I came to see that some of the times I was needlessly defensive and insular, I should have been standing alongside people. After all, my beliefs have always erred on the left-leaning side of things; my frustration from those dark years was, as much as anything, frustration at being lumped in with right-wing-to-far-right-outright-Nazis based on nothing more than the media I enjoyed — particularly anime-adjacent stuff that often took a walk on the lewd side of life.

I knew that I wasn't a bad person, and I knew that enjoying the things I enjoyed didn't make me a bad person; frustration at being assumed to be a bad person based on those tastes was what caused me to lash out and, at times, do and say things that I regret. And yet even back then, I could see those deploying The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies as what they were: people who didn't really care about anything other than scoring imaginary Internet Points. They were not my allies. They were not my friends. They were insufferable dickheads.

Today, I recognise that it is, in fact, possible to have the interests and tastes I do and not find yourself drifting towards the shit-encrusted mouth of what is typically referred to today as "the alt-right pipeline". There are lots of left-leaning folks who do love sexy stuff, and one thing I will say for online discourse is that discussion over such things has improved over the course of the last ten years or so. There's still a way to go, but it's better.

As part of that, it's important to recognise that certain parts of popular media do have a far-right problem. And as part of that recognition, it's important to stand up and say that you will not stand for tossers ruining the thing that you love, rather than being frustrated at feeling like you're getting lumped in with said tossers. You probably aren't, so long as you're not using their talking points.

Such as, you know, The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies. There really is only one type of person who busts out The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies during an online discussion. And believe me, you don't want to be that person.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 638: Actual progress

I'm pleased to report that my weight loss efforts are actually making some meaningful progress. Not only have I crossed the "1 stone lost" boundary, I've also crossed a bit of a "plateau" I had felt stuck at for a very long time, meaning the big number at the start of my weight has gone down by one.

This is a meaningful, worthwhile step because although "1 stone lost" is also a milestone, it somehow feels more significant when your actual weight has a particularly noticeable difference in it — like the "stone" figure being different. This, to me, is a good sign that what I'm doing is working — and, more to the point, that it's something sustainable that I'm not about to get bored with and give up on in frustration.

The trouble with a lot of diets is that they become demoralising and boring. And very few things make you want to eat like boredom — at least that's the case for me. What I've found, by calorie counting each day, is that I can still enjoy all the things I like to have and still lose weight. Along the way I'm finding ways to be more "calorie efficient" with those things that I like, too, while not feeling guilty about having an occasional treat — usually within the boundaries of the daily calorie count, but I've found that having a day a week when you "cheat" does wonders for the morale.

I'm sure the challenge factor will increase as my weight lowers and the number of calories I can have per day falls accordingly, but one thing that I've found having successfully stuck to this for quite some time now is that I'm not feeling the same urge to want to overindulge that I have done in the past. I'm finding that having a modestly sized breakfast, lunch and dinner and a number of guilt-free snacks throughout the day keeps me going and well within the calorie count. Essentially it's following the principle of never allowing myself to get hungry enough to want to demolish an entire large bag of Doritos or something.

Like I say, though, the best thing I've found so far is that I'm able to enjoy things that I just plain like eating, and haven't had to turn to the sort of "success stories" you read in weight loss magazines — you know the sort of thing, "I used to have a massive fryup for breakfast every morning, now I start my day with a glass of water, half a banana and a handful of chia seeds". Nope, I can still quite happily have cereal with chocolate in it for breakfast, a bacon sandwich or noodles for lunch and pretty much whatever I want for dinner.

Of course, I might lose weight more quickly if I was having more salads and vegetables and fruit and whatever — but I have to be realistic about this. If I eat something that I don't enjoy or don't find filling and satisfying, then I just end up wanting to eat something I do like later, and I end up having much more food than I really need. Right now, with the weight I am, I need a decent amount of calories just to keep ticking over, so I'm going to continue enjoying the success I'm having the way it's working at the moment. When I weigh significantly less and will need much fewer calories per day to continue losing weight, then we'll have a look at even "healthier" options as means of keeping the weight off.

For now, this is working. And I'm pleased about that. It's making me feel like I might actually be able to do this; I might actually be able to beat this. Let's see how things are looking in a few months' time.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 637: Slow Roads

I'm very fond of weird little software toys that don't really have a point, but which have obviously had some love, care and attention devoted to them. One of my favourites in this regard is a Web-based driving "sim" of sorts known as Slow Roads. You can fiddle around with it here.

Slow Roads isn't really a "game". There's no objective, no win state, no fail state, no punishments for doing things "wrong" and indeed no "right" way to do things, save for the implied suggestion that you stay on the road. As you can see from the screenshot above, this is not mandatory.

Slow Roads plops you into a procedurally generated world based on either the rolling English countryside — the sort of undulating terrain you'd see if you were driving around the Peak District, say — and invites you to just drive. There's no other cars on the roads so you can drive as safely or unsafely as you like; this is a pure playground in which you can take your electric car, bus or futuristic motorcycle and just go. It's a pleasantly liberating, relaxing experience that I find myself turning to in quiet moments when I just want to do something, but I don't want to have to think about it too hard.

I forget who first pointed me in the direction of Slow Roads and even when it was. I've definitely had it on my bookmarks bar for several years at this point, and over the course of those years it has continued to evolve gradually. The first version I tried only had the car and the countryside terrain in the daytime. Over time, more features have been added, including the ability to adjust the countryside scene between four different seasons and four times of day and set the weather conditions, choose how winding (or not) you want the road to be, how wide you want it to be and a variety of characteristics about how the controls handle.

The game has somewhat sim-like tendencies in how it handles. You have to slow down for corners, and the three different vehicles have a very different feel to how they handle; the bus, for example, appropriately feels like a large, lumbering vehicle that it's probably not a good idea to throw into a corner at 80mph, while at the other end of the spectrum, the bike provides a frighteningly fast thrill ride, and could probably get you around the most twisty roads at high speed once you learn how to handle it.

That's it. That's all Slow Roads is. There's no point to it. And yet I love it. It's not trying to be anything that it's not. It's not being designed for "player retention" or "monetisation". It just is. It's a lovely little thing, and if you've never spent any time fiddling around with it, I highly recommend it.

The one long-term goal for Slow Roads appears to be for it to have a standalone Steam release, which looks set for April of this year (2026 if you're reading in The Future, assuming we're not all dead by then), with a demo towards the end of this month. It will be great to see this project finally come to some sort of "fruition", such as it is, and I have whiled away more than enough hours in the Web-based version to quite happily toss the developer a few quid when the full version finally arrives.

Now, maybe just a few miles before bed…

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 636: Esoteric Ebb and Flow

Well, my original plan was to play at least one of the bonus episodes of Resident Evil Revelations this evening, but then I was distracted by some screenshots of a game that apparently came out recently, and which I hadn't previously heard of: Esoteric Ebb by Christoffer Bodegård, published by the "indie publisher to watch" of the moment, Raw Fury.

Here's one of the screenshots that convinced me to buy and play this game:

If you're looking at that and thinking something along the lines of "cor blimey guvnor, that sure does look like Disco Elysium and no mistake", you'd be absolutely right. The game isn't trying to hide its inspiration. But the other thing you may well notice from this screenshot is that this is Disco Elysium, But Fantasy.

In Esoteric Ebb, you play the role of The Cleric, an ostensible agent of the government who has been sent in to investigate an explosion in a local teahouse. As befits a CRPG hero, whether or not you actually get stuck right in to this "main quest" is entirely up to you, because the small but well-crafted world of Esoteric Ebb certainly has lots of distractions. You do have a time limit, though; the setting is having its first ever democratic election in five days' time, and the current sitting government would really rather all this unpleasantness was quietly dealt with before that happens.

If you've never played Disco Elysium (or, indeed, games like it, since they appear to be Becoming a Thing right now) the simple pitch is this: they're a cross between classic "Infinity Engine" RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment and the like, with almost all of the combat removed, and a strong emphasis on the game responding to you a bit more like a human dungeon master during a tabletop gaming session would. That means all of your stats get a workout, with most sequences in the game involving either passive skill checks (which you will just automatically pass or fail based on your current stats) or active skill checks (where you roll a die and your stats can potentially boost or penalise the score).

Crucially, failure is not necessarily a bad thing, because it can lead to amusing situations or alternative solutions — much as real tabletop sessions are often at their best when things get a little improvisatory.

Skill checks are only half the story, though. The other defining feature of a game following the Disco Elysium mould is that your stats "talk" to you, reflecting your character's often conflicted inner monologues about the situations in which they find themselves. Exactly how helpful you will find these "Chimes", as Esoteric Ebb calls them, depends on those aforementioned passive skill checks; failure often means you misinterpret a situation, fail to notice something or do something clumsy, depending on the context, while success can mean anything positive: performing a complicated physical task correctly, finding just the right words to say in an awkward situation, feeling empathy for the person you're talking to.

Esoteric Ebb adds a few additional features atop this, too. One of the most notable is that you can examine any of the interactable characters, and a skill check of variable difficulty (with the exact stat being tested depending on the character you're examining) will determine how much information you can tell about them just from looking at them. Failing to pass the check at all means you just about notice their basic appearance; passing higher difficulty level checks will let you know their level, class, stats and even pieces of information they would rather remain hidden — you might recognise someone who is trying to conceal their identity, for example. These pieces of information can often be used in conversation.

Other interesting features are the interconnected web of quests in place of the usual quest journal; this indicates how various happenings around the city relate to one another, and upon successfully finishing one of the major quests, you then get to reflect on the situation and allow your stats to "debate" one another, with the eventual result being a nice chunk of experience and a new feat based on the eventual conclusion you came to. In this way, there's a real sense you're building your character just by playing the game; you do "level up" in a conventional RPG style, and you can increase one of your stats when you do so, but it's not just about gaining experience — and, indeed, given that it's a game where it's impossible to grind, you're best off just exploring the world and seeing what happens.

This can, of course, sometimes have fatal consequences in unusual ways. Thus far I have died from attempting to retrieve a shiny object that was stuck in a set of gears, which caused me to get crushed and then fall to my death just to make sure, and from being eaten by a "Roper" enemy hiding in the rocks. I also narrowly escaped death in the very first scene of the game, where I felt an uncontrollable urge to try and eat a path through a room-filling pile of apples, but thankfully my sense of self-preservation kicked in early enough to allow me to survive.

It's a really fun game, so long as you're on board with a slow pace. There are combat encounters in the game, but rather than being a matter of lining up and attacking or quasi-strategic combat, these instead unfold much like all the other encounters in the game: through skill checks, dialogue and choosing actions to take that are always more interesting than just pressing "attack".

I played for a good few hours this evening, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further. The full thing is apparently about 10-15 hours or so, so it's not a game that outstays its welcome. This, to me, is a selling point. It also means it's potentially replayable, and in a choice-heavy game like this, that's always a good thing.

So yeah. A confident thumbs-up from me on this one from my few hours with it this evening, then. Grab it on Steam (don't think there's any news of console or alternative PC storefront releases as yet) — it's 10% off until the 14th.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 635: Revelated

I finished Resident Evil Revelations 2 this evening. I've got what I think will be an interesting article in the tank for some point in the not too distant future, so I want to save that for MoeGamer. I do want to talk a bit about the game, though, so here I am!

I say "finished" — I've beaten the four main episodes and seen both the "bad" and "good" endings. I haven't yet done the two extra episodes; it's getting late tonight, so I will likely save those for tomorrow.

I was initially dismayed that getting the "bad" ending is the result of making a choice halfway through the third episode that would seem to make narrative sense at the time, and a bit annoyed that correcting this "mistake" would involve having to replay half of the third episode and the finale half of the fourth episode — about 3 hours' gameplay in total. But then I figured that I was already invested in this story and game, so I might as well do it.

So I did it this evening — and I enjoyed it! It helped that for the finale chapter, I had unlocked one of the bonus weapons with infinite ammo, so this all but eliminated any worries over not having enough ammo for the final boss. You can only get a "C" rank for a chapter if you use a bonus weapon, but I was primarily in it for the story, so I wasn't particularly interested in getting a high rank. The additional "stuff" in the "good ending" was definitely worth the effort required.

For the unfamiliar, Resident Evil Revelations 2 determines which ending you will get based on which of the two playable characters finishes off a boss. This isn't a matter of simply fighting as the "correct" character, since there's a narrative consideration: throughout the relevant part of the game in question, only the "lead" character, recurring series heroine Claire Redfield, is able to use firearms, and her companion, Moira Burton, is traumatised from a past event and unable to even contemplate picking up a gun. During the sequence in question, Claire ends up pinned by the boss monster in its death throes, and you have the choice between either making her use her willpower to reach her dropped gun, or switching to Moira and giving her a nudge in the direction of overcoming her trauma.

Okay, yes, it's unrealistic and probably disrespectful to anyone suffering similar trauma, but it does make narrative sense for the more "dramatic" option — Moira overcoming her fear and blasting the shit out of the monster to save Claire — to be the "correct" choice that leads to the "good" ending. My initial frustration was down to the fact that I also felt it made sense for Claire to be the one to make the kill; as a generally nice human being, Claire would have respect for Moira's trauma and thus wouldn't want to make her pick up a gun if she didn't absolutely have to.

But part of Resident Evil Revelations 2's narrative concerns our responses to fear and trauma — the game's virus affects people differently according to how much fear they feel — and thus the concept of someone becoming stronger as a direct result of overcoming their fear, which is what is implied happens to Moira to allow her to survive being buried under a bunch of rubble, does make sense, in retrospect. And having to replay those two half-episodes didn't take that long altogether.

Anyway, I enjoyed Resident Evil Revelations 2 a whole lot! I think it's a very good Resident Evil game, and one I suspect often gets overlooked due to technically being a "spinoff". Its original release as a downloadable episodic game (remember that brief trend?) probably didn't help it either, but these days you can just buy the whole thing (including what used to be DLC) on a disc and enjoy it all in one go. And I recommend you do that, because it's a really great take on the series that strikes a good balance between the more action-oriented nature of post-4 Resident Evil games, and the traditional "survival horror" feel of the earlier titles.

Intrigued to try the extra episodes tomorrow, and then move on to Resident Evil 6. I understand people don't like Resident Evil 6 all that much, but as regular readers will know, I often take "people don't like this" as a challenge and do my best to find the good in it. Will I manage that with Resident Evil 6? I have no idea at this point — but if not, I can at least take solace from the fact that some of the series' most well-regarded recent entries await on the other side.

For now though, bed, and doubtless a few dreams about slobbering monsters.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 634: Revelations... too

With all the talk over Resident Evil Requiem recently, I thought it about time I resumed my efforts to catch up on the series. When I last left off, I had played all of the mainline games (in the form of their most recent incarnations/remakes) up to and including the first "episode" of Resident Evil Revelations 2, which means after that I still have Resident Evil 6, 7, Village and now Requiem still to go also.

I forget why I pressed pause on Revelations 2, because returning to it now, I'm enjoying it a lot. I remember when Resident Evil 4 was first announced, I was skeptical about the series' apparent shift towards being more action-oriented, but the two Revelations games are underappreciated examples of this working really well, having shed the clunkiness from the original incarnations of Resident Evil 4 and 5 to behave a bit more like how we today understand a conventional third-person shooter to play.

That said, Revelations 2 doesn't feel like a relentless third-person shooter; it's nicely paced, with a nice ebb and flow between moments of quiet menace and dread, and moments of all-out action. It's still got enough "survival horror" in its DNA to make it so that if a zillion enemies are coming your way, the best thing to do is, in fact, to run rather than attempt to fight them all off, since standing your ground will almost certainly result in you running out of ammunition.

The two story threads, visiting many of the same locations six months apart, work well and are intriguing enough to keep things interesting, but the game never lets its narrative aspect overwhelm the gameplay side of things; this is a game where it feels like playing the game is the important bit, and a snippet of story is your reward for succeeding. Over the years, I've had changing thoughts about the relationship between story and narrative, and I'm still not sure I have one, single coherent position — it generally depends what mood I'm in — but at the moment, I'm very much enjoying the fact that in Resident Evil Revelations 2, you spend the majority of your time actually doing stuff.

Also the game fully embraces the cheese factor. One of the first lines in the game features an admirably excruciating pun about terrorism that part of me can't quite believe made it into the final script, and frequently throughout the rest of the game, characters reference some of the most notorious moments in the early games' terrible dialogue sequences. Yes, that includes "master of unlocking" and "Jill sandwich" — albeit it's "Claire sandwich" here.

Another nice thing about Resident Evil Revelations 2 is that, much like earlier entries in the series, the whole thing has no shame whatsoever about being a video game. Finish an episode and you unlock special "Countdown" and "Invisible" modes, challenging you to make it through the same scenarios with special conditions. The real long-term appeal comes from the "Raid" mode, though, which is a development of something introduced in the first Revelations. Here, you take control of a character in a series of completely narrative-free, arcade-style challenges and battle for high scores, power-ups and goodies. You can play it multiplayer, too, and I bet it's a ton of fun to do so — maybe one day I might actually get to try it with someone, although nailing anyone down for a multiplayer session of something these days is, much like anything else involving social interaction, like pulling teeth.

Anyway, regardless, I'm having a lot of fun with Revelations 2 right now. I'm just about to start the fourth and final episode this evening, then after that I'll have to decide if I want to fiddle around with some of the extra modes, or move right on to Resident Evil 6. I know people don't like Resident Evil 6 very much, but I am curious to play it — and if I'm doing the whole series, I might as well give the less popular entries a chance. (For the record, so far my least favourite by far has been Resident Evil 5, which does not surprise me, given its less than stellar reputation. But I was at least open to trying it, and I didn't hate it by any means.)

On that note, then, it's time to go… back to the mansion! Wait, no, that's something else.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 633: Garfield had it right all along

Pic unrelated. I was just experimenting.

I hate Mondays. I mean, I hate getting out of bed most days, but on Mondays it's always particularly challenging, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious, of course, is that getting out of bed on a Monday is an acknowledgement that the weekend is, in fact, over, and that you are going to have to do something vaguely useful with your existence for the next five days.

For me, I have the added annoyance that Monday is Meetings Day. I have one at 10am, another at 11am, sometimes another at 2pm and yet another at 3pm. Somewhere amid all that I have to figure out a week's worth of stuff to get done in the space of a couple of hours so that I can actually use the rest of my week in a manner that is productive and useful to the rest of the team.

I despise meetings. I always have. I'm not sure I've ever had a meeting that I walked out of where I felt "that was an excellent use of my time". I got in trouble at one job for finding a meeting so boring that I actually fell asleep in it. When working from home started, I discovered that I could literally go to bed and fall asleep during the 60-90 minute long "Good Morning Call" meetings we had every Tuesday at the job I was working at the time, and no-one ever noticed. I am the embodiment of the concept "This Meeting Could Have Been an Email".

And yet certain people are obsessed with the idea of having meetings. I'm talking generally here, not about anyone specific at my current or previous jobs — these are just some observations that I've seen over the course of various occasions of employment. But yes. Some people are obsessed with the idea that having everyone looking bored on Zoom or Teams several times a week is somehow productive, when in fact everyone would be much more productive if they were left alone to get on with their job, and only got bothered when someone specifically needed their attention on something.

I sort of get the justification. The idea is that if you all get together — preferably face-to-face — on a semi-regular basis, you will communicate better with one another because you are more likely to think of one another as actual people. But I can't help but feel there are much, much better ways to do this than Having A Meeting.

I don't know anyone who relishes the prospect of weekly meetings, at any job I have ever worked at. I know plenty of people who dread it, particularly if they have been forced into having to speak or present something, but no-one who actually enjoys these things. So why do we continue to insist on them?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.