Good evening everyone! I'm very happy to finally reveal something I've been teasing for what feels like ages because certain aspects of the launch were out of my hands.

You may recall that I've been talking about doing some "retro-related" project at work for a while. Well, here it is — I present to you Retro Unite!

https://retrounite.wordpress.com/

(Please let me know if this doesn't work, they only turned it on today.)

I'll be working on this alongside my work on Rice Digital so updates may be a little slow until we get things rolling and completely organised (we have a social media person to put in place, for example) but yes, this is up and running now!

Retro Unite is a website that is simply about the joy of retro gaming. We'll be covering all manner of different things on the site, as you can see from what's already there. Long-term we hope to have some interviews with interesting people and coverage of some community projects, so we really hope that this will become a fun hub for retro fans to hang out at and celebrate their love of old games.

So far as staffing goes, it's a bit of a skeleton staff to begin with while we get everything in place; I'm also not 100% sure of the budget we have (if any) to begin with, but if it turns out we do have some freelance budget available I'll be sure to come a-knockin' on some of your doors to help out.

In the meantime, if you have stuff you want to announce or share and you think it'll make something interesting for Retro Unite's readers to check out, be sure to let me know. I'm already planning on using the "Video" section to feature relevant videos from around the retro gaming community rather than just our own work, so if you're working on things and would like to get them in front of a new audience, just shout. I'm always up for watching new fun stuff, too, of course!

Anyway. That's all I have to say about that for now, but check back regularly on the site for new articles and all manner of other good stuff. Hope you enjoy!

I'm once again feeling a tad frustrated at how difficult it is to get people to pay attention to things you actually put effort into.

I see it every day, not just from my own tweets but from other people too: genuine tweets inviting people to check out something they've worked hard on get little to no "engagement", while some lazy, mindless meme-of-the-week format gets three bajillion likes and retweets.

It is, I guess, confirmation of what we all half-jokingly say: that the vast majority of people out there on the Internet aren't interested in anything that they have to spend more than two seconds to "engage" with. If it's not an image or a GIF or a fucking TikTok video then they don't care.

As a writer — and as someone who enjoys long-form creative work including both writing and interesting videos — it's frustrating to see, because I know a whole bunch of people who work hard on what they do and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve for what they do. And that, in turn, makes me both frustrated and worried for what I do as a job.

I don't know how to "fix" this, either. It seems to be a cultural shift that has occurred gradually over the course of the last ten years or so; back when I was just blogging about any old thing a decade ago, it was relatively straightforward to get people to pay attention even to my weirdest stuff — and even in the early days of MoeGamer, I picked up a whole bunch of followers. But these days it seems that if you're not a very particular type of person online, you're simply going to "stagnate" in terms of numbers.

Which once again makes me question if social media is even worth it at all — and I'm forced to conclude that, unfortunately, it remains a necessary evil. Because even though it fucking sucks to get people to pay attention to (and, heaven forbid, share) the things you've done, it is at least still a good means of getting in touch with developers and publishers so I have things to write about. And at least those folks are grateful when they get some coverage.

I dunno. I'm grumpy after a few days of both Andie and I feeling rough and I'll probably feel better in the morning, but this evening I'm just feeling frustrated about it all.

Been exploring some of the stuff from Steam Next Fest today — there's some really cool upcoming stuff among those demos, so I've written about a selection of them on Rice Digital. There's a roguelite magical girl shoot 'em up, a gorgeous exploration platformer with run and gun elements, and the very promising classic style survival horror Tormented Souls — I have a few more queued up to take a look at soon, too.

After the wet fart that was E3 this year, it's nice to know that there are some things worth getting excited about. None of them are the sorts of things you'll ever see on "stage" (or digital equivalent thereof), but every one of these things I've written about over the past few days is infinitely more exciting than 95% of the stuff that was shown at this year's E3. (The remaining 5% is Metroid Dread and the return of Project Zero, pretty much.)

It's so, so easy to forget that there are myriad talented developers out there today doing their best to create amazing games — and an absolutely criminal number of them go overlooked and underappreciated. So it's on us, the audience, to go looking for these things and sharing them when we do find them. Many of these projects live or die on word of mouth — and it'd be a real shame to see some of them die.

So while there's still a few hours left in the Steam Next Fest, take a moment to download some demos, check 'em out and then tell all your friends about them! I'd love to hear about some of them too, so let me know if you've tried anything particularly intriguing!

Got a lot recorded today — expect Retro Select to debut this week, probably on Friday. I've been tempted to experiment a bit with YouTube's Premiere feature as a sort of happy medium between what I do and livestreaming (if you're unfamiliar, it allows you to release a video at a specific time with live chat while it plays for the first time), but the trouble with that is finding an optimal time to get some people to show up for it. Friday evening seems like it might be a fun time to try it out with Retro Select, but the question remains — whose Friday evening?

Anyway, doesn't really matter I guess. I got things done, and I feel satisfied, even if it ended up taking most of the day. Well, that's not quite true; we both got up very late today, so the morning was… well, it didn't exist, so I could have probably gotten more done if I'd got up earlier, but that didn't happen. It's the weekend, after all.

Retro Select feels like it's opened up a lot more avenues of things to explore that I'm very excited about. As I mentioned previously, the first two episodes cover an Xbox game and a PC Engine game — in lieu of allowing you early access to the episodes (they're rendering right now!) I can exclusively reveal that they're Midtown Madness 3 and Soldier Blade, both games that I love a great deal but that I've come to relatively recently.

I don't have a "content plan" (ugh) for Retro Select; all I plan on doing each time recording time rolls around is picking something I fancy playing, whether it's something I enjoyed back in the day, something I always wanted to try or something I just thinks looks interesting. I think the series will gradually develop into something fascinating over time — plus, as I say, I fully intend to keep "platform playlists", so if you're just interested in, say, PC Engine games, you'll be able to watch all those episodes in a single playlist.

Anyway, it's past midnight after getting all that shiz edited, so I'm going to have a sandwich and some crisps then hopefully get some sleep. Except I saw that Game Grumps are playing Uninvited, so there's no way I'm not watching that as soon as possible. Call it an accompaniment to supper or something.

Anyway, hope you all had a good weekend and the fathers out there had suitably Father's Day-esque celebrations. I bought my Dad a copy of the Falcon Collection on GOG.com; we used to love the original Falcon on Atari ST and Falcon 3 on PC in particular, so hopefully he'll get a chance to revisit and enjoy those.

Forgot to write yesterday, apologies. I'm sure you don't mind too much. I was just kind of exhausted after the week and I've still felt exhausted today. Had a long nap in the middle of the day and I'm not sure it helped, but, well, it happened.

I have a productive day planned tomorrow, though, and I'm excited to get down to it — I'm going to record the first episodes of Retro Select along with the new Atari A to Z episodes. Retro Select will doubtless cover a wide variety of different platforms in the long term, so it's going to give me plenty of scope to fiddle around with some games that I haven't spent nearly enough time with to date.

We'll be kicking off the series in its first couple of weeks with an Xbox and a PC Engine title. Both of those platforms are a bit underrepresented in online retro video stuff, so I think it will be good to have some explorations out there.

Xbox in particular I think tends to get bundled in with "oh, its games are just pretty much what's on PlayStation" — but there's a lot of really good exclusives on there, along with a bunch that are not backwards-compatible with the modern Xbox consoles. So that's one of many things I want to put some focus on with Retro Select in the long-term.

The only real issue I might have is that as time has gone on, games have gotten more complex and longer, and demanded that you spend more time with them in order to appreciate them. This has always been a thing with RPGs, of course, but there are plenty of other games for which this is true, too. I'm not going to rule out the possibility of doing multiple episodes on a game for Retro Select if I think it might be relevant, but the priority will be on highlighting a selection of interesting games and just giving them the sort of "quick look" treatment.

Anyway. That's all stuff to think about when it becomes relevant. I'm sorted on what I'm covering for the first couple of weeks, and I'm not exactly short of other stuff to play with, too. Looking forward to getting it all started — and I hope you enjoy it once it's underway!

Various influences have made me want to try some new things with video — most notably the ever-excellent Rob "hellfire64" Caporetto's work on his channel. Be sure to check his work out if you haven't already — he does some wonderful stuff on a variety of oft-overlooked and underappreciated retro stuff across a whole host of platforms. I was just watching his piece on Bloodshot this week, and it just got me thinking "I want to do a broader range of retro stuff".

The thing that I often feel holds me back in starting new things is the sense that I've made some sort of "commitment", and that I'd be letting someone (possibly myself) down if I didn't stick to those "commitments". That's why I was hesitant to call time on things like the long playthroughs a while back — though that was ultimately for the best, I think.

Anyway, what I'm planning to do is something a little more freeform alongside the existing, established Atari A to Z series that are the channel's main attraction. I'm going to launch a new "series", for want of a better word, but that series will simply be "whatever I want, on a retro theme". I will then post that series into playlists that are both "all of the episodes of this series", and "episodes by platform", so that people who just want to watch, say, all the Mega Drive games will be easily able to watch just the Mega Drive games.

To further ensure that I don't constrain myself to a potentially restrictive format, I'm not going to brand this an "A to Z" series. Instead I think I'm going to call it "Retro Select", with the thinking being that each week I'll just, well, select something that I fancy playing for one reason or another. The channel will then have easy access to playlists called things like "Retro Select: Full Series", "Retro Select: Mega Drive", "Retro Select: PC Engine" and suchlike for easily tracking down the platforms you're most interested in — or just watching the whole lot.

I'm gonna stick with the "intro/Let's Play" format that I do on my other series because, frankly, that format minimises the actual amount of work I have to do on each episode besides recording it — you all know how busy I keep myself, so being able to do fun things like this without it ending up feeling like "work" is super-important!

short;Play will continue as an occasional thing when there's perhaps something a bit more recent I want to show off, but it won't be a regular thing. Retro Select is something I feel I can make on a regular basis without adding too much pressure to myself, though, and I think it'll be fun to expand the range of platforms I'm covering without any real constraints.

Chris and I are also in talks about a revamp of the podcast, too. You'll likely see the fruits of those discussions in a few weeks' time, so please look forward to that, also!

It's been a little bit cooler today — as I type this it's raining outside, bringing some blessed relief to the relentless, uncomfortable heat of the last few days. I suspect the heat will be back with a vengeance before long, but for now I can at least enjoy this somewhat.

The sound of falling rain is one of my favourite ambient noises. I've had a particular appreciation for this ever since Cub Scout and school camps back when I was at primary school; I remember finding the sound of rain on the tents being rather comforting if I was finding it difficult to get to sleep, which I inevitably was, because I always find it difficult to get to sleep.

It's a sound effect I always appreciate in a video game, too, particularly if there's a nice stereo spread on the ambience. I've been known to deliberately hang out in rainy areas in some games just to soak up (no pun intended) some of that pleasing sound.

Attempting to reproduce the sound of rain artificially (through an "ambience" app for phone or similar) never quite has the same effect, because I think an important part of the experience is the environment, too. I'm particularly enjoying the rain outside the window right now because it's accompanied by a nice cool breeze — it's not too cold, and it's pleasant to feel after the blazing heat of the last few days.

Anyway, I don't really have a particular point on that subject, it just struck me as something to write about while I was here. Hope you've all had a pleasant Wednesday and that the weather isn't treating you too badly where you are!

Nintendo's eagerly anticipated Direct from E3 2021 was today and… it was okay. There were some nice reveals — most notably a 2D Metroid game that has apparently been in development hell for a long time, which is cool to see, and Project Zero 5 getting ported to modern systems — but the whole thing left me rather underwhelmed.

I certainly didn't come away thinking that they'd "saved" E3, as some people have been arguing. The fact that people were saying that at all is more an indictment of how moribund the other offerings this year have been — and things haven't gotten any better since, with what could have been a cool and interesting Bandai Namco stream ending up being 5 minutes on a game that no-one really gives much of a toss about.

The one thing you can say in Nintendo's favour is that they didn't forget to show the games, and they didn't waste time having some anonymous suit coming on stage and spouting business garbage.

They showed quite a lot games, in fact. It's just… I'm kind of finding it hard to get excited about the increasing number of "remasters" we're getting these days.

Being able to play Super Monkey Ball again will be cool, I guess, but I've already played Super Monkey Ball. And Advance Wars… while it'll be great to see that series back, I'm not big on the new art style for the units; Advance Wars always felt like a series that should have stuck resolutely with pixel art. But times change, I guess.

It'll be nice to have all the Danganronpas (except Ultra Despair Girls, annoyingly) in one place, particularly with the stupid prices V3 goes for these days, but that's not exactly an E3-worthy "big reveal".

I guess the best thing to do with Nintendo's presentation is look at not necessarily what all this means right now, but what it potentially means for the future.

A Project Zero 5 rerelease means there could be more Project Zero games in the future — or just some more enhanced reimaginings like Project Zero 2 got, that would be neat. (An official localised release of the fourth one would be great, too.)

A new Cruisin' game is a high-profile acknowledgement that the arcade racer is far from dead.

And the aforementioned remasters of Advance Wars potentially open the door for new games in the series in the future, which I don't think anyone would complain about.

So like I say… I wasn't super-impressed by Nintendo's offering this year, but I wouldn't necessarily say I was particularly disappointed either. I just think they've done much, much better in the past — and I suspect the ongoing COVID situation probably has a lot to do with why this year's lineup was so relatively weak.

Anyway, here's hoping for some actually exciting news to come from the "show floor" (not that there is one this year) because otherwise E3 as a whole has been pretty much a bust for 2021.

Roll on Tokyo Game Show, I say!

Finished the Resident Evil 2 remake this evening, and I really enjoyed it. (I also appreciate the fact that finishing one character's second playthrough story opens up the other one without you having to play through the "A" scenario again.)

I'm really impressed with what a good job they did on this. It's a game with triple-A production values that doesn't forget what makes games interesting — art style, personality and, more than anything, never forgetting that it's a video game.

Resident Evil 2 isn't a "cinematic experience". It has some nice cutscenes along the way and the mocap and facial animation is some of the best I've seen, but as with the classic PlayStation and GameCube versions, narrative is kept to a relative minimum, and you spend the majority of your time exploring, manipulating items, avoiding or fighting enemies and just generally playing the game.

On top of that, at various points you unlock some interesting vaguely "arcadey" scenarios to play — these include a take on "The 4th Survivor" from the original release of Resident Evil 2, plus three special "The Ghost Survivors" scenarios that appear to be sort of "what if?" tales that explain who a few otherwise unexplained characters you stumble across in the main story actually are.

Structurally, then, it feels like a PS1 game. This is a good thing. Play, finish, unlock more stuff, play more, unlock more stuff, play more. Plenty of value. Plenty of reason to replay. I can see speedrunning attempts at this being quite fun — even if my first playthroughs for both Leon A and Claire B were ridiculously slow. (They always were on the PS1 version if I hadn't played for a while, too.)

The fact it plays like a modern game (in a good way) makes it much more desirable to go back and try for better ranks or unlocks, though. The clunky controls of the original Resident Evil games always made it feel like a bit of an effort to go through it all again, but Resident Evil 2 remake plays so well I'd be quite happy to zip through it again — if I wasn't also trying to get through the series as a whole. Maybe I'll return to it in the future though!

Anyway, it's a good thing. Time permitting, I'll write something on the subject tomorrow on Rice Digital, because E3 sure as hell isn't throwing up anything interesting at all to talk about.

Been playing through the Resident Evil 2 remake this weekend, largely so I can catch up on the Resident Evil Retrospective feature I started doing over on Rice Digital.

I've been struck by quite how much I like Resident Evil 2 remake — it really does demonstrate how to do one of these remakes right. It's revamped and modernised just enough to make it palatable to a modern audience, but remains recognisable enough in style to keep fans of the original happy. And there's enough brand new stuff in there that even those who played the original to death can enjoy it as a new game.

Basically, they've gone, "this was a good game in 1998, what if it was a good game now?" and then completely rebuilt it from scratch. Best of all, they've managed to do so without falling into the pitfalls that many other modern triple-A titles do: there's no unnecessary RPG-style mechanics; there's no obnoxious upselling of DLC (though I believe there are some costumes available) and the generous swathes of bonus content feels authentically "retro".

It's also nice to play a game that is short, too — it took me just shy of 8 hours for my Leon playthrough, which is a bit longer than the original Resident Evil 2, but still easily digestible, and I suspect my Claire playthrough will probably go quicker. At no point did the game feel like it was padding itself out for the sake of things; it felt like it was always moving forwards, but provided plenty of opportunity for exploration and discovery along the way.

In short, if you haven't tried the Resident Evil 2 remake as yet and you enjoyed the original — hell, even if you didn't enjoy the original but are fond of the series — then Resident Evil 2 remake is definitely worth your time. More on Rice Digital on the subject this week!