I love Final Fantasy VIII! I played it at a particularly formative point in my life — my first year of university — and it left a significant impact on me. It's a game I played with someone who was very important to me, it's a game that I shared some good times with friends over, and it's a game that I legitimately enjoyed from start to finish.

The typical argument from the Final Fantasy VIII haters is that it's a "bad" game because "the best way to play it is not to engage with its systems". Bollocks. I beat the game, including its superbosses, precisely because I engaged with its systems. Junction up a bunch of Aura, Ultima and other high-level spells to your important stats, cast Aura on yourself to get your special attacks rolling as often as possible, and watch the damage fly. Immensely satisfying. And, as "game-breaking" as it felt to do that, it is 1) what the game is designed to allow you to do and 2) really no different to what you do in any number of other RPGs; one of the most fun things about them as a genre is that there is usually a way to "break" them beyond their usual limits and start dealing astronomical levels of damage. Certain games even design themselves around this philosophy; titles like Disgaea, Omega Quintet and Trillion: God of Destruction very much fall into this category.

But I've learned that it's not worth even attempting to have this discussion when someone has decided to start yelling about how much they hate this twenty-seven year old game. I don't know if it's a weird form of clout-chasing, algorithm baiting or what, but it just seems bizarre to me how often I've been seeing this come up, usually completely unprompted, just recently. Perhaps I'm just Baader-Meinhofing myself, but I don't think it's that; I mean, it's weird, right? That game came out twenty-seven years ago, and people have suddenly decided that they're mad about it? I really don't get it.

I especially don't get it because back when Final Fantasy VIII was current, everyone I knew loved it. We had a running joke among our friendship group that every time we went to visit the local independent computer shop, at least one of us would ask when Final Fantasy VIII was coming out. This was such a running joke that my friend Woody even incorporated it into his unfinished (barely started, really) Klik and Play project called Resident Evil EX, in which Agent Wesley Wilson infiltrated a zombie-infested mall, where one of the survivors was cheery ol' Richie, proprietor of First Compute, and, indeed, walking in there would prompt a conversation (voice acted by us) about exactly when Final Fantasy VIII would be coming out.

Final Fantasy in general seems to attract these sorts of passionate haters for some reason. People really hate the fact that the series has been constantly reinventing itself over the years — despite a stated, explicit philosophy of the creators being "if it's not new, it's not Final Fantasy". And this, in turn, leads to people just… making shit up about the various games that, for one reason or another, are perceived as unpopular. It seems that it is Final Fantasy VIII's turn right now, since Final Fantasy XIII hatred appears to have died down a lot just recently.

But I mean it! I don't remember seeing anything anywhere near this level of hatred for, just to remind you, this twenty-seven year old game, prior to this year. Perhaps it was out there. Perhaps I just didn't see it. But I find that a bit difficult to believe. It just seems to be nothing more than the fashionable thing to crack wise about right now — just another meaningless, pointless social media trend that takes away from the possibility of ever having a real, sincere, meaningful discussion with anyone online any more.

Anyway. I just felt like saying that today. This is not an invitation for you (yes, you) to come into my comments and start rabbiting on about how much you hate Final Fantasy VIII. I honestly absolutely do not care. Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm not interested. Put a bit of that energy into telling me about something you do like — perhaps something I've never heard of! That's much more fun. Believe me. I've been making that the basis of what I write about games online for quite some time now, and it's far more rewarding than just hate, hate hate.

But I guess it was forever thus. The "funny" bad reviews in games magazines were always the ones people remember the most. The bad reviews on today's websites are scientifically designed to maximise "engagement". And someone blurting out, completely unprompted, how much they hate a twenty-seven year old game that isn't even that bad? I don't know what that is, but I don't think I want to be part of it.

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The post #oneaday Day 695: Final Fantasy VIII was fine appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Thus far the project is standing at 16,826 words. I anticipate that by the time I finish this — which will be a pretty long time from now — that number will be in the high six digits at the very least. There's a lot of work still to do, but I feel good about this; I feel like this is a worthwhile undertaking, and one that I'm enjoying doing.

It's not something I plan to make any money from; it's not something I plan to plaster ads all over; it's not something I'm doing to "be famous" or anything like that. It's just a project based on something I enjoy that I think will help others to enjoy said thing as much as I do. Plus it's an excuse for me to dive down some thoroughly interesting research rabbit-holes.

Doing this is reminding me that I love writing, particularly about the things I'm passionate about. (Go on then; I'll give you a little hint as to what the project is about: it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, about games.) I love the little journeys that bits of research take you on; I love trying to craft a narrative from those nuggets of information you find; I love trying to get my enthusiasm across in a way that is hopefully enjoyable for the reader to engage with.

I don't know if I'll ever finish this. I would certainly like to, and while I'm feeling the strong Autistic Hyperfixation Energy, I intend to keep taking advantage of it as much as possible. I reached what I consider to be the first major milestone in the project this evening… out of many milestones along the way, yes, but a significant one, nonetheless. It feels like finally cresting a particularly steep hill, so I am going to "reward" myself with some nice relaxing time tomorrow. I haven't played Pragmata for a few days and need to get back on that, but this has been taking priority while I've been feeling very much in the mood for it.

On that note, though, it's after midnight, and I think I should probably get some sleep now.

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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The post #oneaday Day 694: The joy of hyperfixations appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

At this point, I'm not even surprised any more. The broad concept that is "the video games media" is almost completely gutted at this point, with only a few sites still holding on. IGN and Gamespot still exist; Polygon still (kind of) exists; smaller, platform-centric sites like Push Square and NintendoLife still exist; and Kotaku has come back from the "dead" more times than I can count at this point.

I find myself pondering a few things about the whole situation. First of all, given that gaming is bigger than ever, how on Earth are we unable to sustain a specialist media sector focusing on it? Someone on Bluesky suggested it was because a significant number of the people who "play games" are little more than "content consumers", just "consuming" the latest thing that comes along and then banishing it from their mind; not taking the medium seriously as an art form, in other words. There's certainly an element of that, but I don't buy that it's a satisfactory explanation for what has been going on with the media over the course of the last few years.

Perhaps it's some sites discovering that certain "types" of games journalism just don't work? Those of you of a certain age will probably remember discussions over "New Games Journalism" and the question of whether we would ever have a "Lester Bangs of Games Journalism". These discussions were happening back in the late '00s, and centred around the idea of games journalism and criticism in particular moving away from the bog-standard news, preview, review, guide format in favour of something that was more… experiential, I guess you'd call it. Treating games more akin to how literary and artistic criticism treats other, more well-established art forms. "Telling the stories of the people behind the games", all that sort of thing. Things that look like they might be admirable when you look at them as part of a mission statement.

Thing is, I'm not sure that's what the readers want. The one thing you might notice about all the sites that have managed to survive for decades at this point is that they are, for the most part, still beholden to the same old news, preview, review, guide cycle that has been in place since the days of print. And my theory is that this is, as stale as it might be, what people still want from games journalism. "The stories of the people behind your favourite games" can be interesting, but when all a lot of people want to know is whether or not Pragmata is any good, I feel like those articles — which often take a hell of a lot of research, networking and general access to their subjects — may not be entirely sustainable, particularly on a site that needs to keep the lights on through ad revenue.

I'm not saying this is a particularly desirable situation. The overreliance on ads has lead to the "guideslop" era we're in at the moment, where every game that looks even vaguely likely to attract a few clicks gets three thousand pieces of "guide content", each one focusing on a single hyper-specific thing about the game in question, rather than a single, quality, well-crafted walkthrough. This is a load of old shit; there are a lot of writers who could be doing much more interesting work stuck on the guides beat, and I'm very much willing to bet they are some of the hardest working but lowest paid people in the business.

But I think back to old games magazines and why I enjoy reading them, and it's because each of them captures a moment in time. Times when we were excited for games that we knew the name of, but very little else about besides a couple of tiny, fuzzy screenshots; I think some mags got pretty much a full year of news stories out of two "Zelda 64" screenshots back in the day. Times when we were excited for the new possibilities that seemingly mind-blowing new platforms would offer us — and then the crushing disappointment when they turned out to not be that good after all. (Philips CD-i and 3DO say hello.) Times when an amazing new game would be the cover star of a magazine and turn out to be even better than we had ever hoped for — or in some cases, catastrophically bad.

I'm not sure sites writing about labour conditions in the industry, unions and quarterly financial results are really what gaming enthusiasts want from the press that supposedly represents them. I know it's certainly not what I'm particularly interested in.

I don't really read any gaming sites any more, and I often ask myself why that is. There are still quite a few out there doing good work, and there's a decent amount of diversity in the types of coverage out there, still… at the moment, anyway. I'm just not sure some of it is sustainable in the long term, and I wonder if a desire to focus on that unsustainable stuff just because it seems like "the right thing to do" — which it very much is in many cases — is what has got the games media as a whole into the messy position it's in today.

So what's the answer? I have no idea, really. In my ideal world, we'd go back to reading magazines every month, but despite the fact some magazines do still exist in print — I recently resubscribed to Retro Gamer, for one — it seems that is perceived as even more unsustainable than everything I've described above.

As someone who, as a young 'un, wanted nothing more than to follow his brother's footsteps into video games media, it's extremely sad to see all this happen. But I'm also kind of glad that I'm no longer directly in that space, because it seems like a hell of a bad time to be a video game specialist writer right now.

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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The post #oneaday Day 693: Another one bites the dust appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The product today is Clearasil's Rapid Action Pads. They look like this:

If the name "Clearasil" is familiar, it's because you probably know them for their numerous varieties of zit-clearance products from over the years. The brand's been around for a long time at this point, and is, I would assume, something of a Trusted Name.

I came to these pads because a few weeks back, I found myself getting a few zits around my mouth, so I thought I should probably do something about them beyond simply attempting to pop them and then doing stifled screams when I was reminded, through bitter experience, that popping zits that are on or near your lips is excruciatingly painful.

My initial intent was to go out and find a product I used to use as a teenager known as "Oxy Duo Pads", but I wasn't convinced that Oxy anything was a thing any more, because the last time I had even thought about these things was more than 30 years ago. As it happens, when I searched for "Oxy Duo Pads" on Amazon, these Clearasil things are the first thing that came up — although a brief Google reveals that Oxy is apparently still a thing if you know where to get them.

Anyway, Oxy Duo Pads were little fabric pads that were a bit rough on one side and a bit smoother on the other side, and they were coated in the sort of stinky chemical that was unmistakably for blasting zits. The theory was that you'd rough up your skin and open the pores with the rough side, allowing all that delicious chemically goodness to seep in (and burn like fuck if you were a bit sore) then smooth things out a bit with the smooth side. In the process, you'd almost certainly realise that your face was a lot more dirty than you thought it was.

These Clearasil pads are essentially the same thing, without the "Duo" part — in other words, they pretty much just have what was the "rough" side from the Oxy product. They still smell unmistakably like some sort of flesh-burning chemical, and they're still pretty danged good at not only getting the filth off one's face, but also discouraging zits from coming back.

However, that's not the reason I want to recommend them. I want to recommend them for an added bonus feature I discovered after just a couple of days of using them.

For most of my life, I've suffered with dry skin, particularly on my face. It's possibly some sort of genetic thing, as my Dad has always had it, too, particularly around his nose. I had resigned myself to it just being sort of there all the time, and having to put up with, in the words of Alan Partridge, "my pillow [being] like a flapjack" when I woke up of a morning.

Two days of using these damn things, and the skin on my face was clear, soft and not peeling or sore even a little bit. Sure, that first day made me feel like I was voluntarily inflicting serious chemical burns on myself, but after the second day, I noticed a difference. And, using them every day since then, I haven't had even a hint of dry or sore skin on my face.

I believe the reason for this is that the Clearasil pads include something called salicylic acid. This is something that I've seen among my wife's numerous skincare products on the bathroom windowsill, but never thought to even ask what it was for. It turns out that it basically strips the top layer off your skin, which is not as horrifying as it sounds. The net effect, it seems, is that the outer layer, which was all dry and crispy and horrible, is removed, leaving soft, fresh, new skin underneath. And I believe you are unlikely to whittle your own face down to the skull while using this stuff, because we all grow new skin on a pretty regular basis. Also it's apparently vaguely related to aspirin, and taking it orally is inadvisable. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Anyway, if you, like me, have ever suffered with a face that seems to want to come off at the most inconvenient times, it seems the answer is to regularly douse it in a form of acid that, in itself, will also cause your face to come off, but in a more useful and less messy way than when your face wants to do it itself.

I guess I have a "skincare routine" now, such as it is.

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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The post #oneaday Day 692: Another hyper-specific product recommendation appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm still not going to tell you what it is, because my aim for it is to finish it before unleashing it on the world, rather than doing it piecemeal. My reasoning for this is that… well, I have prior experience. At one point a while back, I started doing a website whose long-term intention was to go through every cartridge available for the Philips G7000 "Videopac" computer and write something about all of them. I stalled on that project for various reasons, and at some point a WordPress update broke my layout on the page and I haven't been able to summon up the mental fortitude to go and fix it. As such, it's just sort of sitting there in a broken, unfinished state, and will likely continue to do so.

My thinking is that if I work on this thing a bit at a time, trying to knock off a little bit of it every day, I'll have something impressive to show off when it's complete. (Once it's "complete", it will continue to evolve by virtue of what it is, but there will definitely be a moment when it reaches "version 1.0" status and I am happy to reveal it.) Conversely, if I were to launch what I've done now, people might just go "huh, cool", realise there's not all that much to it yet and then never think about it ever again.

So that's my plan. And I've made a good dent in starting this whole project over the course of the last few days. Starting these things is always one of the toughest bits, because you keep thinking of little bits and pieces you might want to do to refine the experience — and if these revelations come too late, it can be a bit of a faff to implement them. Thankfully, I'm happy with the situation I've got things into now, and I can now focus on the real meat of the overall project.

Make no mistake, though, this project is going to be a lot of work. There is somewhere in the region of 800 "little jobs" to do in the name of putting the whole thing together, and so far I have completed (counts) nine. Still, every journey begins with a single step and all that, and now I've got started, I feel like I can bang out a bit of this whole thing each day until it is all done. And it is something that I think will feel good when it is finished.

I apologise for being vague about all this, but hopefully you understand my reasoning for it. I want the grand unveiling of this thing, whenever that might end up being at some indefinite point in the future, to be a worthwhile and meaningful event for those it is relevant to. And I feel like teasing it too early will be counterproductive to that. So this is the approach I'm taking. And this probably won't be the last time I mention it in such vague terms. But you'll see… eventually. Hopefully, anyway.

On that note, I'm off to take a break from this self-inflicted "work" and enjoy the rest of my birthday before I have to go back to work tomorrow.

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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The post #oneaday Day 691: It is my birthday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I used to read The Beano pretty much every week. I had Beano annuals most years for Christmas, and when I was lucky, I'd get a Bash Street Kids or Dennis the Menace annual to go along with it. My parents used to read The Beano when they were kids, too; they have some pretty old Beano annuals knocking around somewhere, and probably (hopefully?) still all my old ones, too.

I liked The Beano because it was straightforwardly funny, and it was something that I could share my amusement about with my family. We all particularly enjoyed Calamity James, a comic strip about an unlucky boy that always featured an absurd amount of background detail that was often more hilarious than the actual happenings in the strip — plus at least one smelly sock in every single full-page strip.

I wasn't sure what to expect from a copy of The Beano in 2026. Would it be filled with impenetrable Young Person Slang? I wasn't sure it would be, as although it was kid-friendly when I was young, I don't remember it being too tryhard about trying to "sound like" us. The thing I was most expecting was that it would be childish humour that I simply wouldn't find funny — but then I remembered that I still find burps and farts hilarious, and felt that even if it was childish, it would probably be about my level.

So I dove in while enjoying a sandwich. And I enjoyed it! It even elicited some genuine out-loud laughs on multiple occasions. There are, as you might expect, quite a lot of changes that have happened in the intervening 30+ years, but a lot of things have stayed the same, too. So let's look at a few highlights.

Dennis the Menace is still the cover star, though his strip no longer adorns the front and back covers — there's a more conventional "magazine-style" cover on the front now, though there's still a strip on the back for the "Make Me A Menace" feature, where readers can send a photo of themselves in and be featured in a comic strip.

I highlighted these first frames because I thought they were a good visual gag. The strip, which ran for four pages in total — so much longer than in his cover-mounted days — told the story of how Dennis refused to cut his hair until Beanotown United won three games in a row, and this caused his hair to grow so long that it became sentient and started eating people. Thoroughly silly, and exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see in The Beano back in the day.

Calamity James is, unfortunately, a shadow of its former self. It's clearly done by a different artist now, and it's only a three-panel strip alongside fellow Beano veteran Billy Whizz and newcomer Addams Family wannabes Number 13. All the wonderful background detail and silly visual gags are gone — no more smelly sock! — but I'm pleased they kept James looking like a slightly deranged pencil. The gag is, I have to admit, mildly funny, too, though it does rely on an awareness of stupid modern trends like "6-7" and thus would probably be impenetrable to my parents at this point.

One of the biggest changes since I read The Beano as a kid is the addition of quite a few non-white characters, including some who have their own strip, such as in Har Har's Joke Shop here. Doubtless this made the "anti-woke" people furious at some point in the past, but it's a sensible change for the comic to make, as it reflects the multicultural nature of our society while at the same time highlighting how people having differently coloured skin doesn't mean they suddenly become completely alien types of person; the non-white characters in The Beano fit right in with all the usual mayhem without being picked out as being something "unusual" — which is a good message to send to kids.

This idea continues with the changes to The Bash Street Kids. While all the old cast are there, a couple have had name changes in the name of sensitivity — Spotty is now Scotty, and Fatty is now Freddy, though Plug (as in "plug-ugly") is still as he was. New additions to the crew include Cuthbert (the chief "softy" from older Dennis the Menace cartoons, though I wonder if he's been retired from that role in the name of not promoting bullying) along with Harsha from Har Har's Joke Shop and apparent newcomers Mahira, Stevie and Khadija, all non-white characters of various descriptions.

This was a good gag. I'm pleased to see The Beano come down on the anti-AI side of things. I find that oddly reassuring.

Elsewhere, the comic is apparently in the process of serialising Bananaman's origin story. I was just explaining to some baffled Americans about Bananaman the other day, and it turns out he's still relevant, apparently. I would never have expected that.

Perhaps most reassuring of all, though, is The Beano's willingness to include a full-on fart gag. Oddly enough, despite being plenty mischievous back in the day, I don't recall ever seeing Beano characters burping and farting, except perhaps sometimes in the background of Calamity James strips. This little beauty from newcomer Rubi's Screwtop Science, featuring a lead character in a wheelchair, gave me a good giggle, though…

…as did the fact the comic apparently April Fooled people by suggesting you could scratch and sniff Minnie the Minx farting in a prior issue. I love this because I feel like there's a whole bunch of layers to this gag, some of which only the grown-ups will get. I'll leave them to your imagination.

All in all, I enjoyed my first look at The Beano in more than thirty years. It's nice to see how inclusive it's become, though like I say, I suspect there are certain Daily Mail-reading portions of the population who believe it's an outrage that there's a character wearing a hijab in The Bash Street Kids. Thankfully I have never run into them, and I hope I never do.

It's most reassuring to see how funny it still is, though, even as an almost-45 year old man. (45 tomorrow!) Will I keep buying The Beano? I don't know. I actually wouldn't be averse to the idea. So let's maybe have a think about that…

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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The post #oneaday Day 690: I bought The Beano for the first time in more than 30 years appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

However, the recent news that has come out about the upcoming expansion, Evercold, has me thinking that I might return. There are a few reasons for this.

First and foremost is the social angle. I like the people that I used to play with. It would be fun to be able to hang out with them again. There are also people I know who are vaguely interested in giving Final Fantasy XIV a go, and shortly the legendary Free Trial will be adding everything up to and including the Shadowbringers expansion, commonly agreed to be one of The Best Bits, which may make it easier to convince people to join in.

Secondly, I do miss the game a bit. I have had some special times in Final Fantasy XIV over the years, and I will always, always love the soundtrack. Soken has worked miracles with that game, and I feel almost like I'm letting him down to not be playing. He has no idea who I am, of course, but still. He is a wonderful person and a brilliant composer, and enjoying his stuff in context is great.

Thirdly, the changes that are coming to Evercold sound really interesting. I'm particularly intrigued by the "Evolved" battle system, which promises to reduce the number of actions you'll have to assign to your hotbars by having more of the dynamically changing buttons that were introduced with Dawntrail's new jobs. Supposedly most jobs will be able to function perfectly well with 16 action bar slots in Evolved mode, which means a lot less in the way of remembering some obtuse button combinations, particularly when returning to the game from a long break. (Of course, it means learning some new button combinations, but they will, at least, be simpler.)

I'm also interested in the move away from "endgame currency" as a progression system. I don't think we've really had it explained in much depth how exactly the new "seasons" system is going to work, but Yoshi-P seemed determined to emphasise the point that it's not a Battle Pass or free-to-play type "pay to win" situation. What it looks like is a flexible system where you earn points for doing… stuff. And rather than being forced into grinding the same old Roulettes and high-level stuff, it looks like you might have the opportunity to do a broader range of activities, which will be nice.

Perhaps I will hop back in once the new patch arrives tomorrow. There's the new Beastmaster job to explore, plus I didn't do much with Blue Mage, and of course I have plenty of other jobs still to level too — as well as just re-learning the game after so long away.

I think I probably will go back. I'm just not sure quite when yet, or how it will fit into my life more broadly. But we'll see. We'll see.

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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The post #oneaday Day 689: Do I return...? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I will be peppering today's post with photos from today's trip.

The event today centred around a talk by Ian "h0ffman" Ford, a veteran of the Amiga demoscene who returned to coding and composing on classic computer hardware back in 2010, and has been spending much of his time since COVID fiddling around with disassembling and porting classic games from one platform to another. To date, he has ported the MSX2 version of Metal Gear to Amiga, the MSX game Knightmare (no relation to the TV show) to Amiga also, plus Shinobi and Golden Axe from Sega's System 16 arcade board to NEOGEO, plus the modern Unity game Cecconoid to Amiga. His talk explored how most of these projects came about because of repeatedly falling down rabbit holes while satisfying his own curiosity.

Outside of h0ffman's talk, which happened after lunch, all of us in attendance were free to explore The Cave, the Arcade Archive, and the organisation's newly renovated workshop space, known as the Pump House. (The entire operation is in an old mill, and the Pump House used to be part of the site's earlier purpose; it's not just a funny name they gave it.)

The Cave is up on the top floor of the mill, and is a large, open-plan room filled with old computers and consoles of various descriptions, including some fairly exotic machines from outside of the UK, Europe and North America, such as the beautiful Sharp X68000 from Japan. This is an absolutely gorgeous machine that, if money were no object, I would very much have in my collection. If you've never come across one, it's a 16-bit computer that has the audio-visual capabilities of its console contemporaries, meaning it plays host to a lot of excellent games, including some near-perfect arcade ports.

There's also lots of interesting console obscurities, too, such as NEC's ill-fated PC Engine spinoff, the Supergrafx, a console noteworthy for, outside of backwards compatibility with the aforementioned PC Engine, only having five titles in its library. And you thought the Wii U was a flop. Despite this, it's an exceedingly cool little system worth having a play with in an environment like The Cave!

Another nice thing about The Cave is that it acknowledges well-known, popular hardware in unusual configurations, such as this kiosk multi-game version of the NES that you would have found in electronics stores back in the '80s. All the stuff at the Cave is hooked up to great quality screens, too, with many of them being professional video or broadcast monitors, Sony Trinitrons and the like.

Here's another one: Sega's Mega-Tech arcade system, which was basically a Mega Drive you bought time on back in the day. Here, as with all the other arcade machines in The Cave and the Arcade Archive, it's set to free play, so you can enjoy a selection of 16-bit classics in the arcade form factor.

Nintendo had done something similar with the PlayChoice-10 machine, which provides you with a selection of NES games to play using arcade controls. It's a very strange feeling to play the original Super Mario Bros. with a stick and arcade buttons, but it works pretty well! Not surprising, really, since so many games from that era were at least inspired by arcade games if they weren't direct ports.

Here's a selection of obscure Japanese computers, including one from Sega. I don't know much about these, but they all look lovely, and it would be fun to have a fiddle around with them one day.

Here's some more obscure Japanese computers, just because. That Sharp X1 is a lovely looking thing. I actually didn't give the keys a clack, but it looks like they would feel nice to type on.

A little closer to home, here's a selection of lesser-known home computers, including the Oric-1, Tatung Einstein, Dragon 64 and Sam Coupé. A lot of these are lovely looking machines; they just failed to make the same impact as the bigger hitters of the era like the Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Here's a thing that I really wanted as a kid, but never managed to get hold of (i.e. convince my parents to get for me). It's an LCD game adaptation of Sega's After Burner, but with an elaborate control panel that makes the game feel a lot cooler than it actually is. The joystick is satisfying to grapple with the throttle control makes a pleasing "clunk" when you move it between speed settings, and a cool thing I've not seen before is that the LCD screen has an LED behind it so when you destroy enemy planes, there's a red "flash" where they're exploding. It's a pretty neat toy, but, given that we had computers at home that could play much more interesting and complex games, I'm not surprised that my parents never bought me one of these — and I'm not mad about that, I hasten to add!

There are lots of things to play at The Cave. This lovely setup has a selection of consoles hooked up and ready to play multiplayer just like we used to back in the day. The Gamecube and N64 were most readily accessible today, and they looked great on the Sony monitor.

One of my favourite parts of The Cave is the fake "software shop", set up to look like an old WHSmith upstairs. For any non-Brits reading, WHSmith was a shop that was mostly known as a newsagents where you'd buy magazines and newspapers, but also tended to carry stuff like stationery, art and craft supplies and, in the 1980s, computer and video games. There were a lot of shops like this in the '80s that performed what I would argue was their "primary function" downstairs, then they'd do computery stuff upstairs — one of my favourite examples in this regard is Boots, which is a pharmacy. Why would a pharmacy sell ZX Spectrum games on cassette? Same reason they'd process your photographs or sell you picture frames, presumably — to make a bit of extra cash from jumping in on popular hobbies and pastimes.

It's tricky to get good shots of them by the very nature of the environment, but on the ground floor of the mill is the Arcade Archive, a noisy room full of classic arcade machines, many of which have been lovingly restored to fully working condition by the Retro Collective folks, and some of which make use of modern solutions such as the MiSTer. These cabs — from left to right, Bubble Bobble, Galaga '88, BurgerTime and Double Dragon, all in the sort of generic cabinets you'd see in a fish and chip shop in a town centre circa 1989 — are, as far as I'm aware, restored originals.

Conversely, there's a NEOGEO MVS cabinet that I forgot to take a photo of that is running off the new MiSTer Multisystem 2's JAMMA arcade cabinet incarnation, which allows you to use plastic NFC cards to switch games as if you're swapping out cartridges. You get the enjoyment of playing with "four bright buttons and two joysticks" on a CRT, along with the modern conveniences of the MiSTer such as the ability to easily swap games, or play the console versions of games on the arcade cabinet.

Here's a lovely thing, showing up much better thanks to its position near the door to the outside: Atari's Star Wars arcade game. This is still a supremely playable 3D shoot 'em up with beautiful vector graphics and a wonderfully immersive, involving analogue yoke control system. Great fun to play — just a pity there's no sit-down version in the Archive, though I don't think there'd be room for one at the moment anyway!

Here's a few more machines in the Archive, including OutRun on the right, then Silkworm, Robotron 2084, Ghosts 'n' Goblins and, back in the corner, the original Space Invaders. I realised I'd never actually played Robotron in its original twin-stick arcade incarnation, so I took the opportunity to rectify this. It's a lot of fun!

More interesting and unusual things with this Tetris arcade machine. I'm not sure of the origin of this, but it was a nice looking machine, and Tetris' gameplay is, of course, a great fit for the arcade.

And that's pretty much that for now. It was a thoroughly lovely day that I enjoyed a lot. h0ffman's talk was interesting — even if some of the more techie stuff went over my head a bit! — and it was nice to see some people I haven't seen for a while. I even met someone who actually watches my YouTube videos! I guess I better make some more then, huh.

Right, on that note, I'm knackered, so I'm going to go and collapse into a puddle of goo for the remainder of the evening. Visit The Cave if you get the chance — it's a truly lovely day out that I can highly recommend.

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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The post #oneaday Day 688: Cave dweller appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Anyway, it's also my birthday in a few days time, and Andie couldn't think of what to buy me as a present, so she paid for us to have a night in a nice hotel ahead of our Cave visit, rather than having to drive there early in the morning. It's about two hours' drive from us, so getting there for an 11am start would have meant getting up much earlier than we normally do on a weekend. Yes, we are still teenagers in that regard.

The hotel is nice. It's a four-star hotel, so it evidently was pretty swanky in its prime; today, it could do with a lick of paint and some repairs here and there, but it's not in bad condition. The facilities are nice — there's a great pool and spa area that we spent a bit of time in this afternoon — and the food at the restaurant we had for dinner was really tasty. Moderately pricy, but not unreasonably so, particularly considering we had three courses.

I'm looking forward to visiting The Cave again. My visit a couple of years back is a fond memory, and the place has had more work done since then, plus some new additions to the collection. h0ffman's talk should be interesting, and it will be nice to show my wife and a friend of ours what it's all about.

Anyway, I'm typing this on my phone because I didn't have the foresight to bring a keyboard with me, so I'm going to leave that there. It's after midnight anyway, so we had better sleep. I will try and remember to take some photos tomorrow!

The post #oneaday Day 687: Minibreak appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is such a valuable thing to have, whatever form it takes. And I know I say a lot of things on this blog, but there are certain things I have second thoughts before posting about. Just this evening, I deleted the start of a post where I was going to have a go about something, then decided that the potential arguments it might start (it's not anything racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or anything like that, don't worry) just simply would not be worth the stress it would cause.

To put it another way, the benefits I would gain from getting those thoughts out of my head and onto paper would be far outweighed by the stress any subsequent "discourse" might cause. (Or it might not. But in this instance I think it's best to just not take the risk at all.)

Modern life is exhausting, and talking to the people who are closest to you can sometimes be difficult for all manner of different reasons. When that's the case, you can find yourself bottling up emotions, particularly frustrations and anger, and not really having any way to release them. And that's why having a space to say things is important.

Your space to say things doesn't have to be Going to Therapy. It could be a journal that you keep for yourself, written by hand and locked in a drawer, for your eyes only. It could be a password-protected note in your note-taking app of choice. It could be a voice memo you leave for yourself. It could be abstractly represented through a piece of art, music or writing you choose to create. It could be something you tell your cat when no-one else is around.

It can take many forms. What's important is that you feel like you have it. Ideally it provides you with a feeling of "release", that you've let those emotions out of your brain, acknowledging their existence and how they are making you feel, and perhaps contemplating why you are having them in the first place.

Is the thing you think you are mad about really the thing you are actually mad about, or is it a symptom of something more broad that you need to deal with? Is the whole thing a situation you have put yourself in that you can just as easily extract yourself from? Take a step back from the part of you that is angry and frustrated, and talk to them. What, exactly, is upsetting them? Why are they feeling that way? What do they think they should do about it? What do they think they can do about it? What do they think the consequences for doing something about it might be, and do they think those consequences are worth the temporary catharsis of doing the thing?

There are no easy answers about this sort of thing, but it always pays to be reflective and contemplative. The modern world — and particularly the Internet — is set up in such a way to deliberately make us nearly constantly mad and frustrated, and it's easy to forget that when the red mist starts to descend and all you want to do is yell at someone. That's what a significant amount of the Internet wants, and I'm not just talking about trolls. It's in corporations' interests to keep you mad, because being mad means you're engaged. And engagement, after all, is the be-all and end-all of modern-day "KPIs".

I've taken a step back from the thing I was mad about. I'm still a bit mad about it, but on reflection, it's really not something that is all that worth getting mad about. It is something I can, relatively easily, put to one side and never think about ever again.

So I think I'm going to do that. Or at least try to, anyway.

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.

The post #oneaday Day 686: A space to say things appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.