#oneaday Day 187: Anxious mess

I’ve been an absolute ball of pent-up anxiety for… probably a few days this week, if I’m honest, but it’s been particularly bad today. As is often the case when I find myself getting panicky, there isn’t really a concrete root cause of it, but there are plenty of factors that haven’t helped.

I’m having one of those times where everything just feels a bit overwhelming, and I feel like I can never quite get “on top” of things. It’s not necessarily having too much to do or think about, more a disproportionate sense of how “important” everything is.

The rational part of my brain knows that nothing I’m presently fretting about is important or worth worrying over, but when your brain enters panic mode, none of that matters; it just builds and builds and builds until you feel ready to burst.

Like, right now I’m typing this on my phone and the inaccuracy of the keyboard is winding me up way more than it would do under normal circimstances.

I think being ill hasn’t helped matters. Part of what I’ve been worrying about is whether or not I would be better enough to attend tomorrow’s work Christmas activities. They should be fun, but they’re also filling me with a certain amount of trepidation and social anxiety, and worrying over whether or not I’d be well enough to attend has just been making me feel worse.

But I’m going to try and clear my mind, get some sleep, then go and enjoy myself tomorrow. I get to take a trip to London, then enjoy making cocktails, a nice dinner and then some evening drinking and socialising. And no worrying about travelling back late from London, as we have a hotel laid on for us. So that will be nice.

It will be nice. There’s no need to worry. Then at the weekend I get to go see my brother because he’s making one of his occasional trips across the pond back here, and see my parents for a bit (prior to seeing them again at Christmas!)

Everything will be fine. I just need to keep telling myself that. None of what I have just outlined is any reason to be uneasy, scared or anxious. So I just need to calm down, chill out, relax and sleep.

So let’s see if I can achieve at least one of those.

#oneaday Day 186: Alpha male

One of the reasons I was quite keen to get my hands on Evercade Alpha, the latest product from my place of work, was to give Getting Into Fighting Games an honest go. I’ve attempted to do this a few times — I even bought Street Fighter 6 on launch — but have always ended up bouncing off for one reason or another, and the notoriously impenetrable nature of the genre hasn’t helped matters.

This evening, I sat down and had a few goes at Street Fighter Alpha. And I actually had a good time! I won’t say I was especially “good” at it, and the intricacies of the genre still elude me somewhat, but playing with good quality arcade controls on the Evercade Alpha made the whole experience feel a lot more accessible and intuitive than ever before.

I think one of the things that confuses me most of all about fighting games is how each character has an absolute shit-ton of moves that you can perform: with six buttons and an eight-directional joystick, that’s already a lot of possible moves, and then add command inputs or charge moves into the mix and you have an overwhelming variety of possibilities. My biggest question when pondering fighting games from afar has always been “how the hell do you decide what to do when?”

I don’t have an answer to that just yet, but even with just a few games of Street Fighter Alpha I started to feel things becoming a bit more intuitive. I moved away from my SNES-era strategy of only ever using the heavy attack buttons, and found success with some speedy jabs and good use of projectiles — which are much, much easier to pull off with an arcade stick, if anyone were still in any doubt about that. I felt like I had a reasonable grasp of “the basics” with Ryu, and I gave Rose a bit of a go, too. She’s rather more complicated to use, from the looks of things, but I actually had my overall best performance out of several shots at the game using Rose. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to “main” her just yet — I’m nowhere near the level where I even contemplate having a “main” — but I’m definitely intrigued to try her out a bit more and get to grips with what some of her moves actually do.

Because I think the answer to my earlier question — “how the hell do you decide what to do when?” — comes with experience. The more you play a character, the more you understand what each combination of button and direction does, and that, in turn, gives you a better idea of what might work well in different scenarios. You’ll get a feel for the different moves’ reach, power level and vulnerability to countering, and, over time, you’ll (theoretically) be able to make snap tactical decisions in the middle of a match.

I’m nowhere near there, yet. But I’m actually looking forward to spending some time learning. I don’t have any grand designs on being a competitive player or anything like that, but it would be nice to be able to play at least a couple of fighting games to a level beyond basic button-mashing. And, so far, Street Fighter Alpha has felt surprisingly accessible, with its relatively limited roster and fairly straightforward mechanics. Plus the art style is great — and only gets better later in the series. (But the later Alpha games also get considerably more complicated!)

So yeah. That’s what I’ve spent my evening doing. I was going to play some Super Mario RPG, but by the time I’d finished wrapping Christmas presents earlier, the amount of time before “I should probably go to bed” had elapsed to such a degree that playing some short-form arcade stuff was probably a more sensible idea. So that’s what I did.

And now, I should probably go to bed.

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.

#oneaday Day 185: ‘Tis the season for Nintendo

As I alluded to the other day, I’ve been spending my time playing Super Mario RPG on Switch for the past few days. I rolled credits on it this evening and am very happy I took the time to play this. (There’s a surprisingly extensive postgame that has been added to the Switch version, but I will be waiting until tomorrow to check that out, as it’s getting late.)

One of the reasons I decided to start playing this is that the holiday season, for me, will always be associated with Nintendo. I’m not exactly sure why, as there was only one Christmas where I actually received something Nintendo-related under the tree — a Super NES with Super Mario World — but I’ve continued to make that association ever since. I think it goes along with how I associate Disney movies (the good ones) and Star Wars (ditto) with the holidays, too; fond memories of times gone by spent with family.

And Nintendo, it can be argued, has a fair amount in common with the House of Mouse. They’re both gigantic corporations that absolutely dominate a particular industry. They both do business in a way that the particularly anti-capitalist people really don’t like. And they have both, over the years, put out some absolutely magical pieces of work for people to enjoy: pieces of work that don’t necessarily require you to engage your brain too heavily, but which are nonetheless extremely memorable and enjoyable.

Take Super Mario RPG. By console RPG standards, it’s short, simple and very easy. You can roll credits on it within 12 hours. But every bit of the game feels like it’s there for a good reason. There’s no filler, no grinding, nothing that feels unnecessary; sure, there are some minigames you can engage with to a frankly obsessive degree that reward you with some optional items that aren’t at all necessary to beat the game, but if you’re just playing the game through to enjoy it, nothing feels out of place, nothing feels like it’s actively getting in the way of your enjoyment.

And the presentation is wonderful, too. Sure, the Switch may be creaking a bit in its old age, but after a few minutes with something like Super Mario RPG it just doesn’t matter. The music, in particular, is astounding. I hadn’t realised it was the work of Yoko Shimomura, but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense — particularly with the newly orchestrated arrangements found in the Switch remake. The ending theme, in particular, was beautiful; it was like a full-on orchestral finale to something you’d watched in the theatre — with a touch of honouring the original by starting with the SNES mix of the music, then bursting into full orchestra by the conclusion.

(Don’t ask why the creator of that video felt the need to brag about it being “4K” when the Switch only outputs 1080p, and a significant proportion of that end sequence is deliberately heavily pixelated.)

Anyway, I had a lovely time with Super Mario RPG, and I will be taking a look at the postgame stuff tomorrow. I’m happy I’ve finally played this — even if it wasn’t in its original form, which, let’s not forget, never came out in Europe back in the day — and now I feel suitably equipped to take on the Paper Mario games without feeling like I haven’t played “the original”. (I know Paper Mario is a distinct series from Super Mario RPG, but both it and the Mario and Luigi games count it as a common ancestor, so I’ve always wanted to give it a go.)

So that’s that. If you’re in a holiday funk, fire up a Nintendo game. I can guarantee it’ll put a smile on your face remarkably quickly.

#oneaday Day 184: Deprecated feature

I went into my Amazon wishlist earlier today, as I know it’s the first port of call for several family members when trying to determine what to get me for Christmas, and I was a little perturbed to discover that it is seemingly not possible to change the order of the things on your wishlist any more. Or, to be more accurate, you can rearrange the order of the items in the first three rows in Grid view, but everything else doesn’t respond to clicking and dragging like it used to.

I did a little research online and, indeed, it seems that Amazon deliberately removed this a while back. It’s a “deprecated feature”, apparently.

I always find the idea of “deprecated features” bizarre, because inevitably the features that get “deprecated” are ones that are actually useful, and in many cases they don’t actually get replaced by something with similar functionality. In the case of Amazon wishlists, aside from the Grid view exception I note above (which I suspect is a bug) you can now only sort them in various automated ways, or you can push something to the top of the wishlist by going to its product page and “re-adding” it. You can also move it to another list and then move it back to the original list. Both of these are, I’m sure you’ll agree, inferior to being able to just drag the damn thing to the position you want it — or, indeed, click a “send to top” button, which I’m sure also used to exist.

Modern software — be it stuff you run on your computer or that which powers billion-dollar ecommerce platforms — seems to be full of stuff getting “deprecated” without any real net benefit to the user. The usual interpretation of this is that the creators of said software want to discourage users from doing something in favour of doing something else with a similar function. But in Amazon’s case I’m really struggling to see why I might be discouraged from reordering my wishlist into whatever order I want… particularly as there is no real alternative, aside from the rather clunky options I’ve just outlined.

There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about how tech is genuinely getting worse year on year, and it’s not just people “getting old”. The writer, blogger and tech commentator Ed Zitron does some great work in this field, and I encourage you to check out his blog Where’s Your Ed At and his podcast Better Offline, because while both paint a bleak picture of the tech landscape as it exists in 2024, some of you might find it reassuring that no, it’s not just you, things really are getting worse in terms of usability and overall functionality.

As for me, well, I guess it’s time to go re-add some stuff to my wishlist so it gets pushed to the top!

#oneaday Day 183: Plague day with Mario

Felt particularly rough this morning when I woke up with a raging headache and a cough that could wake the dead. I was hoping to get some The Dagger of Amon Ra recorded this weekend, but I rather wisely decided against doing any today; we’ll have to see how I feel tomorrow.

Instead, I spent a significant chunk of today playing the Super Mario RPG remake for Switch. I’ve never played Super Mario RPG in any form, so I’ve been curious to try this for a long time, and something in my head makes an inextricable association between the holiday season and Nintendo games, so I thought I’d start it up and see how I got on with it. After all, what was originally a collaboration between Squaresoft and Nintendo was sure to be fun, right? And people always seem to be making references to both the game and some of its unique characters.

I’ve been very impressed so far. It’s a lot of fun, and it moves at a brisk old pace, as RPGs that originated in the 16-bit era tend to, but that doesn’t mean it feels like it’s rushing things. Rather, it’s paced well so that you’re constantly moving forwards, exploring new areas, meeting new allies and discovering new items. And, pleasingly, the game is a lot more than just running from story trigger to story trigger; there are some actual puzzles along the way to solve, too, along with some light platforming. The only thing I’m not a super fan of is the Hidden Treasure system, where equipping a particular accessory just tells you that there is a Hidden Treasure somewhere in the room you’re in, and then you just have to flail around hoping you headbutt it by chance.

As one would expect for a modern Nintendo title, the soundtrack is fantastic. I don’t know the original Super Mario RPG soundtrack all that well — aside from a couple of MIDIs I downloaded in the late ’90s to use in Klik and Play projects — but we have a fully reorchestrated version of the full soundtrack to go along with the updated visuals and the re-translated script. No speech, of course — it still doesn’t feel quite right to have a talkie Nintendo game — but the writing so far has been concise and pretty witty. Perhaps not to the same degree as Paper Mario, which is a series that essentially built off the back of Super Mario RPG, but I wanted to play this one first before I jumped into the Paper Mario titles for the first time. Yes, believe it or not I’ve never played one; my wife Andie has played most of them, however.

Anyway, Super Mario RPG helped make an otherwise fairly unpleasant day — the weather has been awful here today, too — fairly tolerable. And I even made some time to get all my Christmas shopping done earlier, too. So that’s good. But now it’s probably a good idea for me to go back to bed, and here’s hoping I feel a tad better in the morning. Not only do I want to record that The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but I have the work Christmas do in the week, and I’d rather not still be coughing my guts up and feeling like a roasted dog turd by the time that rolls around.

#oneaday Day 182: Unpopular gaming opinions

As a veritable old fart of video games, I am, of course, fairly set in my ways, as older folks are wont to be. And as such, I have come to hold certain opinions that appear to deviate from “the norm” among younger folks. You are not “wrong” to think differently to what I am about to describe below, but know that you are not going to convince me to change my viewpoint, because I have felt this way about all these things for years now.

So why am I writing this? I dunno. Something to write about, innit? Plus there might be some of you out there who actually agree with some of these. It doesn’t really matter. Let’s just start, shall we?

Games don’t “need” updates for months or years after their release

Baldur’s Gate 3 happened to drift across some form of feed that I was looking at the other day, and the thumbnail image that came with it proudly boasted something along the lines of “Community update 30”.

Now, whether this was just the 30th blog post for the community or the 30th actual update for the game I don’t actually know, but both are equally offputting to me. I haven’t even considered touching Baldur’s Gate 3 yet because it launched unfinished and apparently is still getting bits and pieces bolted onto it after the fact.

I hear it’s very good. I believe that it’s very good, as Larian has a good track record. But I have precisely zero desire to play it until it’s finished, because when a game as big as this gets significant updates after I’ve already ploughed a significant number of hours into it, I feel a bit hard done by. Worse, if I’ve already finished it by the time a significant update shows up, I feel very hard done by, because I should just have waited to play it.

Unfortunately, regular updates to games are expected by a certain class of The Gamers™, particularly those on PC. Look at the Steam reviews for any game that hasn’t had an update for a month or two and you’ll see people complaining about “devs abandoning the game” and it being a “dead game”.

No. Sometimes it’s just finished, and sometimes the devs would like either 1) a break or 2) to go and work on something else. I am, sadly, in the minority on this, but few things make me lose interest in a game faster than if it launches with a “roadmap”. Just delay the thing a few months and finish the fucking thing. Then I will play it.

DLC is worthless

As an extension to the above, if a game releases and then immediately announces that it is getting a bunch of DLC, I will also immediately lose interest. Not only does it make me feel like stuff has been cut out of the base game to make the DLC — and don’t throw the “well actually it’s developed at a different rate to the main game” argument at me, that is an easy problem to solve — but I am struggling to think of a piece of DLC that I have genuinely thought was actually worth the money.

I remember being particularly disappointed with the DLC chapters for stuff like Dragon Age and Mass Effect back in the day, and I haven’t seen much to change my opinion ever since those days. And, at the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Stellaris, where there is now so much DLC that it’s impossible to know what the “best” way to get started with the game is. So I just… don’t.

Mods are vandalism

“You should play games on PC!” the PC gamers say. “Because of mods!”

Fuck mods. I hate mods. A significant portion of them are outright vandalism to both the artistic and mechanical design of the teams that worked on a game. I saw someone on Bluesky earlier sharing an image of someone who had installed a “QoL” (“Quality of Life”) mod to STALKER 2 to remove all encumbrance mechanics from the game. STALKER 2 is a game about survival in difficult circumstances, and the encumbrance mechanics force you to determine whether you really need to carry various things around with you. By removing it, you’re stripping out part of the game.

Likewise, graphical mods can get in the bin, too. Games are designed with both a particular artistic vision in mind and are a reflection of the era in which they were designed, and I don’t really give a toss if you can add ray-tracing to something that didn’t have it before, or if you can make a game look like Generic Photorealistic Open World Game #927.

And I’m sure I don’t need to say anything about nude mods. I say this as someone who enjoys a good sexy game.

“But I need 357 mods to make Skyrim fun!” Then Skyrim isn’t a very good game, is it? Maybe play something else.

My only begrudging exception to this is in the case of games where extensibility is designed to be part of the game — stuff like Doom/Quake/Duke/whatever levels are fine with me, because those games were designed to be extendible. Although I must confess, when I play any of those games, I tend to stick to their official campaigns. And in some cases, mods for a game specifically designed to be mod-friendly inevitably remain perpetually unfinished and not as good as the stuff built-in to the game: most stuff for the excellent driving sim BeamNG.drive falls into this category, to name just one example.

I don’t want to join your Discord

I use Discord when I absolutely have to, for work and for the few groups of friends who are only reachable there. But I do not want to join a fucking Discord for every single game I play, and I don’t want to be bugged to join your Discord on the title screen for your game. Go away, leave me alone, and if I decide I want to engage in the official community for your game, I will seek out your Discord myself.

I absolutely do not want to have to join your Discord to read documentation or download helpful files. Host that shit on your website like a normal person.

I want your game to end

It’s all very well offering “potentially limitless replayability”, but I do actually want to be able to finish your game. If I can’t finish your game, I almost certainly won’t start it, because the way my brain works means that I will get annoyed by the fact I’m playing something that doesn’t have a “point”.

This is one of numerous reasons I think idle games and incremental games are dumb. Sure, numbers get big to a point that they become largely meaningless… but that’s it. There’s no sense of having achieved anything there. And I strongly suspect that a significant number of idle game fans have no idea that the genre largely stems from a pisstake at the expense of people who grind their way through mobile games with no conclusion.

Anyway, that’ll do for now, because I’m sure I’ve pissed someone off with at least one of the above. As noted at the beginning, though, I don’t care. I am an old man, I have things I like and things I dislike. And all of the above can get in the bin. A good evening to you!

#oneaday Day 181: Hanging in there

I’m still ill. I have just about survived today, with only a little nap after finishing work, but I am feeling pretty rough now. It is not fun, because I have work to do, I have things I want to enjoy, and coughing and spluttering through the day does not make any of those processes more enjoyable.

Still, at least we had a reasonably fun thing to do at work today: tease something for next year! If you happened to miss it, here:

That’s right! We’re doing the Neo Geo! That’s all I can say on the subject for the moment because we’re not revealing the details of this deal with SNK beyond the fact that it involves Neo Geo stuff until early next year, but this is something people have been asking about for a while, so it’s great to finally be able to say “yep, we doin’ it”.

Naturally, because no-one on the Internet is ever unconditionally happy any more, we had our fair share of people moaning about things we hadn’t actually said, but for the most part, the response has been great. Neo Geo games are top-tier retro, and having a bunch of them in the pipeline is great.

Like I say, that’s really all I can talk about on the subject for the moment, because Marketing. Looking more broadly, though, signing an agreement like this only shows how Evercade is going from strength to strength. We’ve got a couple of other big agreements waiting in the sidelines, too, but we’re not even teasing them just yet (although I guess I just did) — you’ll find out more about them next year. All I’ll say on the subject is that between these deals, we should be making a fair ol’ chunk of people happy, and that’s always a nice feeling. As for the people who immediately assume the worst when receiving what should be a highly positive announcement? Balls to them, I say. It’s really not my problem if someone is unable to find happiness in something specifically designed to bring people happiness.

Right. I’m off to bed to try and shake off this cold. I would like it gone by the weekend, as I have another Laura Bow mystery to play — and work Christmas do next week, too!

Shit, that reminds me, I probably better get my Secret Santa pressie sorted, I guess…

#oneaday Day 180: Post-work lurgi

I think I’m getting a cold. I had one of those situations on the drive home from the office today (a 3+ hour trip) where I felt the “ill” hit. I got one of those annoying coughs where you cough and it doesn’t shift whatever is making you cough, so then you cough more, but it doesn’t move anything, and it’s really annoying and ugh. I really do not want to be ill, but it is the time of year when I often get ill, so.

Also, being in contact with other human beings for once may have something to do with this, too. I don’t normally get ill after a trip to the office — I’m not completely hermetically sealed in my house — but I think I recall one of my colleagues saying that they’d had a bit of a cold recently. If this is their fault then… I will have a good old grumble, but not blame them, because it’s not their fault.

Anyway, with feeling like general dogshit after driving for more than three hours, I don’t have a lot of energy left to write something for today, I’m afraid. So I hope you will indulge me in this particular occasion and just let me head to bed. I will try and be extra-interesting tomorrow — except we all know I’ll just be my usual self. So I’m mostly just making a promise to myself to at least try and write a bit more tomorrow than I have written today.

That’s it. That’s the post. Good night!

#oneaday Day 179: Your occasional reminder that AI can fuck off

I saw a TV ad for “Apple Intelligence” yesterday. The concept of the ad is that someone is angry someone at their workplace keeps stealing their pudding — hahaha, so hilarious and cosy and relatable — and writes them a furious email. They then click the “Friendly” button on Apple Intelligence and the email is rewritten to be the most milquetoast, handwringy, insincere thing you’ve ever seen. And this is supposed to be a selling point.

Elsewhere, a YouTuber I know had someone in their comments getting pissy about how they pronounced “ZX81”, and, presumably in an attempt to further their argument, the commenter in question then copy-pasted a ChatGPT conversation — without editing out the “ChatGPT says:” bits — that didn’t even particularly help their cause.

I keep seeing YouTube thumbnails made with AI art-stealing machines. Coca-Cola made a Christmas ad with AI. The memorial lunch for beloved broadcaster Steve Wright had an invitation that was made with AI. Entire websites are made of AI slop. And even here in fucking WordPress, I can’t escape the sodding “Generate with AI” button.

I fucking hate it. I want it to go away. I want people who say “but it’s good for summarising things” to drown in the sea. I want people who say “but it’s better than doctors at diagnosing problems!” to be the victims of the worst malpractice the medical industry has ever seen. I wish eternal loneliness and desolation on those who use it to write emails. And I want it out of the pieces of software I use on a daily basis.

We’re even starting to get accounts on BlueSky that pretend to be real people, but simply respond with ChatGPT answers that are tuned to be deliberately argumentative. What is the fucking point of all this shit? How is it benefiting humanity and productivity in any way whatsoever?

It isn’t. All it’s doing is continuing to make tech worse, year on year, while keeping oblivious shareholders — who aren’t interested in anything but seeing “growth” — happy that companies are providing supposed “new innovations” that actually don’t provide any sort of useful functionality whatsoever.

I’m aware I’m ranting incoherently, but honestly right now it feels like it’s pointless to even try and come up with a cogent argument. This shit is infesting everything, and it’s becoming impossible to escape from. And I legitimately do not understand how anyone can possibly think this shit is in any way better than what we had before.

I guess the one upside is that with how much AI is being used pointlessly to provide “summaries” of Google Searches, YouTube videos and other such shite, the planet will burn down all the sooner, so eventually we won’t have to worry about it at all. Then the Great Thinkers of the day — assuming anyone survives — can stroke their chins for two hundred years about “where it all went wrong”.

Here. Here is where it all went wrong.

#oneaday Day 178: Acceptable mediocrity

My Bold Proclamation of the Day is that I feel like it would probably behoove us, as a society, to be more comfortable with mediocrity than we are.

This evening, Andie and I went out for dinner, because we both just wanted to get out of the house for a bit. We went to a local chain pub that we’ve been to a few times before and always liked, and the food was fine. It was perfectly acceptable. If we were living in a world where star ratings were used properly, I would rate it three out of five stars. It was not the sort of meal that I will remember for the rest of my life (or indeed the rest of the week, probably) but it also wasn’t so terrible that I wanted to throw it in the face of the chef who microwaved it.

Thing is, I don’t feel hard done-by to have a three-out-of-five meal at a place like this. In fact, that’s pretty much what I expect. But I feel like the way we live life today, a three-out-of-five meal would be seen as somehow “unacceptable”, and my commentary on how it was perfectly fine and exactly what you want sometimes, would be ignored completely, with nothing but the star rating being seen as a sort of “inverse recommendation”.

Back when I worked at the Apple Store in the late ’00s, the company introduced a scheme called NetPromoter. Initially I thought this was an Apple initiative, but I have learned in the years that followed that it is quite a common thing in the service and retail sectors generally.

If you’re not familiar with NetPromoter, it goes like this. You engage with a customer and provide them your service or sell them something. Then, after they have departed your premises/website/whatever, they get emailed a short survey in which they are asked to rate their experience out of 10. Higher scores are, of course, good, and are regarded as “Promoters” — people who are actively likely to recommend (or “promote”) your store or service to family, friends and colleagues. Conversely, low scores are, naturally, bad, and are regarded as “Detractors” — people who will recommend against your services.

All sounds reasonable enough, right? What if I told you that only scores of 8 and above were regarded as “Promoters”, and anything below that was considered a “Detractor”? Because that’s how it fucking works. There’s no option for “this was fine, I had no complaints, but it also wasn’t anything particularly special that I feel like shouting about” either. If we assume someone who felt that way believed that was worth a 5 or 6 out of 10, the poor old employee responsible for that perfectly acceptable service would probably find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of disciplinary action. Because yes, of course, systems like NetPromoter are inevitably used to browbeat employees into submission, rather than to actually improve things for the customer.

The same is true of online reviews for pretty much anything. Have you ever noticed how when an app on your phone bugs you to rate it, it’s never “Leave us a review!”, it’s always “Leave us a 5-star review!”? That’s because to most folks online these days, there are only really two ratings: 5-star (good) and everything else (bad). The video game sector has, of course, also been guilty of this for as long as the games press has been a thing; “70%” is seen as a barely average passing grade, and anything below that will almost certainly be ignored or considered “bad” by a significant portion of the games-purchasing public.

I’ve spoken numerous times about how I’ve had the absolute best times with games that, on average, net scores of 65% and below, and it’s often for very similar reasons that I find mediocrity in other areas of life perfectly acceptable: sometimes that’s precisely what you’re in the mood for. This evening, we were in the mood for some average pub food, and by golly, that’s most certainly what we got. When I’m in the mood to play a Neptunia game, I also know exactly what I’m getting and am in the correct mindset to appreciate it, too.

It’s time we embraced perfectly acceptable mediocrity. Perfection is the enemy of good, as the aphorism says, and I absolutely agree with that. If you spend all your time looking for something that is really worth that 5-star rating, you’re never going to be satisfied with anything.