#oneaday Day 565: It's almost Christmas

Which means it isn't Christmas, I know. Christmas where I am at the time of writing is in 52 minutes.

We're at my parents' place for this Christmas, as my brother is over from the States, and it's a rare opportunity for our Mum and Dad to have the whole family together at a special time of year. (We're going to the in-laws for New Year, then next year they get us for Christmas.)

I've waxed lyrical over the years about how Christmas kind of loses its magic a bit as you get older, but I think there might be a kind of inverse bell curve thing going on, as I feel like I powered through Christmas being a bit "meh" over the course of the last decade or so, and I'm back to it feeling rather nice to get together with family and share some good times.

Of course, there was a hefty period of my life where things were not going particularly well, and that didn't exactly help with the festive spirit, but while I'm not in a position where I can say my life is "perfect" or 100% where I want it to be, I'm a damn sight more grounded and, for the most part, content than I was back around 2010 or so.

As I say, there are plenty of things I want to work on and improve in the coming year, and the festive season, of course, always gets one in a reflective sort of mood and keen to kid oneself that yes, this next year will be The Year.

I don't yet know if next year will be The Year. I suspect we all have many uphill battles to continue fighting in our own respective existences — and the world itself, for sure, needs to overcome its current challenges and, eventually, heal.

No-one really knows what the future holds. So while you're in a pleasant present, you might as well at least try and enjoy it.

I hope any of you out there reading this have a pleasant conclusion to 2025, whatever you might be doing to see it off — if anything. I certainly intend to try — beginning with a nice long sleep right about now.

#oneaday Day 564: The lost art of playing together

There are many things I mourn about Times Gone By, but I think the biggest thing I miss is being able to enjoy video games together with other people. Oh, sure, you can play online with anyone in the world, but getting someone in the same room as you to play something with you — or even just sit and watch while you play! — feels like a distant memory at this point. And yet it used to be such an important part of our daily lives!

When I was growing up, I used to spend a lot of time "going on the computer". This was primarily a solitary activity, though I do recall my Dad and brother getting involved in the very early years, giving me an introduction to programming in Atari BASIC and teaching me how to use both the Atari 8-bit and ST machines.

One of the things I loved doing when I either went to a friend's house or had them over to my place was "going on the computer" together. At my friend Matthew's house, we'd play on his BBC Micro when we were younger, and later on his Archimedes. His Dad worked for Acorn, so these were the computers in his house; although I was an Atari fan by virtue of the computers we had in our house, I enjoyed the unique experiences that both the Beeb and the Archie offered, since they were often completely distinct from what I could enjoy at home.

I believe I went to my sometimes-friend Dale's house on just one occasion, and I remember that was the one and only time I played on a Sega Master System as a kid, but I remember really liking the few games he had. My friend Mike, meanwhile, had an Amiga, and we had a lot of fun with that — not just playing games, but also fiddling with creative programs like Deluxe Paint and the like.

Once we got to secondary school, my closest friends went to one another's houses a lot, and we would play on both computers and consoles together. At my friend Edd's house, we'd play on his Amiga and Mega Drive; at my friend Andrew's house, we'd play on his MS-DOS PC and Super NES; later, we'd all get Nintendo 64s and PlayStations, and we'd play together on those.

At university, we spent a lot of time going to one another's houses to play Nintendo 64 in particular, as that console remains unmatched for the sheer breadth of multiplayer titles on offer. But a little later, when the next generation of consoles rolled around, I would have friends over and we'd play Grand Theft Auto III together, despite it not being multiplayer, and we'd play through entire cooperative campaigns of games like Halo and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. I have some truly wonderful memories of enjoying games like that.

Today, though, it is almost unimaginable to play through an entire game with a single co-op partner in the same room as me. Hell, at this point, it's unimaginable to even have a few friendly matches on a fighting game, first-person shooter or racing game.

And this sucks! I've got easy access to more games than we have ever had at any point in our lives, but getting anyone to actually want to come play them with me is like pulling teeth from a particularly bloodless stone. That makes me intensely, terribly sad, and I wish things could be different. But the world has, apparently, moved on from this sort of thing as a regular, normal thing to do; I just have to take whatever opportunities I can get — which very occasionally come up, but not often — to enjoy this long-lost art of having fun together.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 563: My top 10 Evercade games for 2025

It is, of course, my job to love and appreciate everything we release for Evercade — and for sure, there is not one single game from the library that I have not been able to "find the fun" with to date.

But of course there are some that I like more than others. So in the spirit of all the "top 10" lists that are going around right now, I thought I would go through my 10 favourite Evercade games that we've released this year, drawn from all the cartridges we released in 2025: Indie Heroes Collection 4; Broken Sword Collection; Atari Arcade 2; Tomb Raider Collection 2; Gremlin Collection 2; Windjammers, Karnov & Friends; Roguecraft DX; NEOGEO Arcade 1; TAITO Arcade 1; TAITO Arcade 2; NEOGEO Arcade 2; NEOGEO Arcade 3; Activision Collection 1; Rare Collection 1 and The Llamasoft Collection.

DISCLAIMER: You are an intelligent person and I should not have to say this, but I am going to anyway. The following list represents my personal opinion and does not reflect any sort of professional judgement or the collective opinion of my employer. It should not be taken as any particular games or cartridges having received any sort of preferential treatment, either personally or professionally, nor that I have received any sort of incentive (financial or otherwise) from any of the license holders to feature their games on this personal blog that no-one reads. Also any cartridges that do not end up featured in this list does not mean I think those carts are shit, it means I have 10 slots and a lot more than 10 games to choose from.

Got that? All right, let's Top 10 this thing.

10. Twinkle Star Sprites

I think Twinkle Star Sprites was one of the first NEOGEO games I was ever introduced to, back when DotEmu did those absolutely terrible ports for PC a while back. I was sold on it by the promise of it being a blend of shoot 'em up and puzzle game — two genres I adore — and that is exactly what it provides: the frantic action of a shoot 'em up, combined with the competitive piece-matching, combo-building and garbage-throwing that is the competitive puzzle game genre.

It's a super-fun game, which I only put relatively low in these rankings due to the inevitable "arcade bullshit difficulty" that it pulls on the solo player from partway through proceedings. If you have the opportunity to challenge a friend, take it — there really is nothing quite like it.

9. Rohga: Armor Force

I'd never heard of this side-scrolling mech 'em up until we started work on the Windjammers, Karnov & Friends cartridge, but it quickly became a favourite with its gorgeous anime-inspired pixel art, its rocking soundtrack and its excellent gameplay.

Taking a strongly cinematic approach despite the relatively limited tech it's running on, Rohga: Armor Force is a thrill ride of a shoot 'em up that offers something just a little bit different from the norm. If you enjoy making things explode in a hail of bullets from a side-on perspective, this is definitely one you need to spend some time with.

8. Atic Atac

Atic Atac is a game that I played back in the day — I think on a friend's BBC Micro — and while I never understood what you were supposed to do in it back then, I found it immensely striking for a number of reasons: its top-down perspective; its personality-packed sprites; and the unusual "chicken" health bar, where your proximity to death is depicted by how picked clean of meat a chicken carcass is.

Now I know what you're actually supposed to do in Atic Atac, I like it even more. It's a nice evolution of the formula established in games like Atari's Adventure and Haunted House, and its randomised elements and multiple playable characters make it eminently replayable.

7. Murtop

I absolutely adore the minor trend there's been of modern developers making brand new games that look and feel like classic arcade games. Last year we had the incredible Donut Dodo, and this year we had Murtop, a blend of elements from Dig Dug and Bomberman. Best of all, the version for Evercade was specially redesigned to look great on a horizontally oriented display — it looks especially good on the 4:3 screen of Evercade Alpha.

Murtop is one of those games that is very easy to learn, but tricky to master. It's also a game where you will feel a sense of absolute exhilaration when you have "the perfect run" that just sees your score continuing to escalate. Also it has a brilliantly energetic soundtrack that has been stuck in my head ever since we featured it as a "Game of the Month" title in 2024.

6. Super Gridrunner

The Llamasoft Collection is a massive pile of woolly goodness from the one and only Jeff Minter, and there are a lot of games I really like in this collection — including some that I've only played for the first time between this cartridge and Digital Eclipse's interactive Llamasoft documentary.

If pushed, though, I'd have to pick an old favourite: Super Gridrunner, originally released on Atari ST. This frantic blastathon has beautiful, distinctive presentation, challenging gameplay and a wicked (occasionally sadistic) sense of humour. It's been a favourite of mine ever since we had the original ST version on floppy disk (I still have it!) and it's a delight to be able to play it on Evercade.

5. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

I'm not a Fighting Game Guy. I played and enjoyed Street Fighter II back in the day, and I've had some fun with the Dead or Alive ladies over the years, but most fighting games released post-Street Fighter II overwhelm me with their complexity. As such, I've never really found a good in-road to the genre, despite appreciating 2D fighting games in particular from afar thanks to their beautiful character art and animation.

For some reason, Garou: Mark of the Wolves clicked with me almost immediately. I think it's because it's specifically not overwhelming in any way: there's a relatively small cast of playable characters, making it easy to pick a character you want to get to know better; its mechanics are straightforward to understand; its special moves are relatively easy to perform; and it has an excellent "make the game easier for me" button any time you have to continue, meaning if you're primarily in it to see all the beautiful stages and the various endings, you can do that without too much frustration.

4. Tazz-Mania

This is another game I'd never heard of prior to our work on Atari Arcade 2, but it became an immediate favourite thanks to its simple but compelling gameplay. It's one of those games that you can feel yourself getting better at — and see yourself improving by climbing up the score rankings.

As an arena shooter, there's not a lot here that you haven't seen before, but its solid mechanics and little twists, such as the player character's rapid-fire machine gun and the walls closing in on you as you attempt to clear each stage, help elevate this well above being a simple Robotron clone.

3. MegaMania

Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for an official modern rerelease of Activision's Atari 2600 output? I absolutely adore these games, and it's always been a bit frustrating to me how dodgy the emulation of them is in their last official rerelease, Activision Anthology.

While our Activision Collection 1 cartridge may lack Tainted Love and its ilk on the soundtrack, it's a collection of 15 great games, all of which I absolutely love having easy access to again. I could have picked any number of these for my top 10, but going purely on the number of times I've played it since the Activision Collection 1 cartridge came in, I think MegaMania has to take the top spot.

2. Metal Slug

Metal Slug is a series that I've always meant to explore, but have somehow never gotten around to. Now I have no excuse — and as I could have predicted, I really like it. Now, I'm sure there are some of you out there with strong opinions as to which Metal Slug is best, but I'm going with the first one purely because, so far, it's the one I've played the most of and got the best at.

It's a brilliant example of why the NEOGEO is so beloved for its pixel-pushing capabilities — despite the series, collectively, being some of the worst-performing games on the platform in terms of slowdown — and just a great run-and-gun shooter that is easy to get into and incredibly satisfying to get better at, a little bit at a time.

1. Roguecraft DX

Finally, I have to put the wonderful Roguecraft DX at the top spot for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it's a really good game, taking the traditional roguelike formula and making it incredibly accessible while resisting the temptation to overwhelm players with mountains of persistent progression and unlocks. Secondly, it's a brilliant showcase of why the Amiga rocks. And thirdly, the folks at Badger Punch Games, whom we worked with closely to get this release out the door, are really lovely chaps.

Roguecraft DX is an endlessly replayable, delightfully fun game that is eminently suitable to both quick handheld sessions and longer session in front of the TV. It's my number one highlight from our releases of 2025, and I'm thrilled to have been part of making that release happen.

So there you go: my top picks for the year. It's been an incredible year to be part of the Evercade project, and next year promises to be even more exciting. But you'll just have to wait and see what we have planned for you, non?

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#oneaday Day 562: This is not sponsored by Manta Sleep

A while back, my pal RoseTintedSpectrum blew up on YouTube (in the good way) with his coverage of classic TV shows, which naturally caused the sponsors to come a-knockin'. Since Rosie is well aware of the number of scammy YouTube sponsors out there — he, like me, is part of a Discord group of YouTubers, and we frequently share and discuss news from around the platform — he wasn't just going to immediately jump at the first dodgy online counselling or grocery delivery service that came his way. As such, I knew that if and when he did take on a sponsor, it would be someone that he felt comfortable recommending.

That sponsorship deal eventually came in the form of Manta Sleep, a luxury sleep mask company. And a while back, I did something I don't normally do: I bought something that I had seen advertised online. Specifically, I bought a pair of Manta SOUND masks — one for me and one for my wife — during the site's Black Friday sales, which meant they were considerably cheaper than they would be under normal circumstances.

Manta Sleep's "thing" is that rather than just being a blindfold you put on to go to sleep, their masks are designed to be both comfortable and effective. The band is made from pleasantly breathable fabric and is nice and soft, and the front of the mask features padded eyepieces that completely cover your eye sockets, blocking out absolutely all light without applying pressure to your eyes. And they really do offer complete blackout to such a degree that you will see the same thing whether your eyes are open or closed: total darkness, even if a light has been left on in the room.

The Manta SOUND mask, as the name suggests, also comes with Bluetooth headphones integrated into the mask. Rather excellently, the part of the mask that has all the electronics in can be detached from the bit that comes into contact with your face, so you can actually throw the thing in the washing machine without having to perform surgery on it beforehand. (Or, indeed, frying the electronics because you forgot to perform surgery on it beforehand.) The two earpieces are very thin and light, meaning you can lie on your side without them digging into you, and can be easily adjusted forwards and backwards in the special little pocket they're in to match the shape of your head and the position of your ears.

The sound quality is very good, too! There seems to be relatively minimal audio bleed out into the room when you're listening to something, and the sound you're listening to has a decent amount of presence. Obviously by nature of the design they're don't have quite as much oomph as a pair of "proper" headphones, but when you're trying to get to sleep, you don't need oomph — you need comfort and reliability, and that's what these have provided so far.

I've been really impressed with the Manta SOUND. They're pricy — and I'm glad I got the Black Friday deal on them — but they're clearly a premium product. And it's worth noting that for those who don't want or need the "sound" part, Manta Sleep's other masks are a tad more affordable, and just as comfortable and luxurious.

So yeah. This blog post is not sponsored by Manta Sleep, but I decided to try them out because my friend was sponsored by Manta Sleep, and now I will quite happily and comfortably recommend Manta Sleep to anyone who asks about them.

Manta Sleep.

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#oneaday Day 561: A world of misinformation

We mock Donny Trump's obsession with "fake news" because he always busts that out whenever someone criticises him, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that we are living in a world that is riddled with misinformation right now — particularly if you're the sort of person who primarily gets their information from social media. And, distressingly, that is quite a lot of people these days.

Not all bits of misinformation are dangerous, of course, but they're no less frustrating to see. The other day, for example, I saw a post on Bluesky where someone commented that someone waxing nostalgic over the original Quake for being "from the days before you needed to spend thousands on graphics cards" or suchlike was "the funniest game they could have picked to comment this on". Funny! Except Quake didn't need a 3D accelerator card, as it ran entirely in software, meaning that while a decent non-3D graphics card would help in unlocking graphics modes, it was primarily dependent on how good your CPU was. Its 3D-accelerated version was never officially supported, despite being developed by id Software, and was primarily put out as a test for what they were planning to do with Quake II, which was 3D-accelerated by default.

Likewise, when a near-complete version of Resident Evil for Game Boy Color was unearthed and released to the public the other day, there were people talking about how it "included" the pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 version (it doesn't, they are low-resolution pixel art recreations) and how it "used the same isometric perspective" as the PS1 version (neither the PS1 nor the GBC versions are depicted from an isometric perspective).

I didn't comment on either of these at the time because that would have made me an "Um Actually" guy, and no-one wants to be one of those. But as someone who cares about this stuff — particularly about game history, and modern folks appreciating the many varied and wonderful things that classic games were doing — it was frustrating to see these statements go completely unchallenged.

The problem, as I've already alluded to, is people seeing someone saying something on social media and then immediately taking that as gospel truth without verifying it for themselves. In cases such as the above, perhaps younger people might not know what they would need to search for in order to verify those things — or indeed even if they needed verifying in the first place. Neither of those cases particularly matter in the grand scheme of things, but they're a microcosm of times when more serious misinformation — misinformation that could, say, seriously damage someone's reputation — has found itself spreading in one way or another.

They say "the Internet never forgets" — and with the sterling work the Internet Archive does, that's mostly true. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that the Internet never forgets something that was wrong in the first place. And once that misinformation takes root among enough people as being "the truth" — or, perhaps more accurately, "good enough" to sound like the truth — it's very hard to dig it out again to correct things, because not only does no-one like an "Um Actually" guy, even when they're correct, people are simply very resistant to having their assumptions challenged and corrected.

That feels like it might be a problem we should deal with sooner rather than later. But how…?

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#oneaday Day 560: The weapons-grade Game Boy

Earlier today, the company ModRetro announced that it would be producing a special edition version of its "Chromatic" FPGA-based Nintendo Game Boy clone.

ModRetro is a company that is already on the shitlist of a lot of people thanks to its founder, Palmer Luckey, also being the cofounder of Anduril Industries, a company that makes autonomous weaponry. Drones, in other words.

Up until now, a lot of people have sort of begrudgingly been able to separate the two — the Chromatic is supposedly a very good FPGA Game Boy, and the fact that the company has been releasing new Game Boy-compatible cartridges for it, showcasing a variety of modern indie developers' work on the platform, would initially appear to be quite laudable.

At the same time, the brand has had vociferous critics, keen to point out at every opportunity that Luckey is a dangerous bellend who profits from atrocities. Indeed, the man himself makes no attempt to hide this fact on a blog post on the ModRetro website.

The more… outspoken of these critics have, in the past, engaged in behaviour that I personally found a tad distasteful — by which I mean borderline harassment of people who had written about the Chromatic as simply being a very good FPGA Game Boy, without spending their entire article waxing poetic about how much of a warmongering shitbag Luckey is. On the one hand, I understood these criticisms, but the way in which they were expressed, on more than one occasion, was not, to my eyes, particularly acceptable or productive.

Today, though… I get it. Because the new special edition Chromatic that ModRetro announced is explicitly Anduril-branded, and advertises itself as being "finished by hand in America with Cerakote, the same ultra-durable ceramic-polymer formulation that protects Ghost — Anduril's flagship autonomous air vehicle". Later in the product page description, it spells things out even more explicitly by noting "the body of Chromatic is made from the same magnesium aluminium alloy as Anduril's attack drones".

This is… weird, right? Why would you explicitly sell an FPGA Game Boy that, in your own words, is made from the same materials as devices that cause death and suffering, if not to thumb your nose at the people who have previously criticised the brand for its association with an arms dealer? Granted, the thing looks classy and sounds like it can stand up to a lot more punishment than most other handheld gaming devices in the world — but if you're going to make a really durable handheld, why bring up "attack drones" and "autonomous air vehicles" at all, if not to specifically provoke certain people out there?

Not only that, but you can bet that there are certain types of people out there who are going to buy this thing specifically to spite people who have, in the past, spoken out against Luckey for one reason or another — even if it does mean paying over four hundred dollars for a Game Boy.

This whole thing leaves a particularly foul taste in the mouth. It's very clearly not about giving retro gaming enthusiasts the best possible experience, and all about whitewashing what "Anduril" means in the modern world. Let's not even get into how many modern companies doing terrible things (like Anduril) have adopted nomenclature from J. R. R. Tolkien without even the slightest trace of irony or understanding of what Tolkien was actually saying in his works.

It's going to be interesting to see who has the balls to actually call this out for being as odious as it is — and then standing their moral ground to back up their criticisms — and who treats it as just another silly little gaming story.

I certainly won't be touching anything ModRetro-branded any time soon.

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#oneaday Day 559: Event horizon

I've been thinking recently: with all the annoyance and frustration over CEO after CEO saying that their game development studios are using generative AI in their work, are we finally at a point where one could actually completely stop buying new stuff, and subsist entirely on titles developed and released prior to this AI bullshit getting everywhere?

I'm pretty sure we are. In fact, I'm pretty sure we've been there for a while. I still buy a fair few new games, but right now, given the size of my physical and digital libraries, I'm pretty sure I could just flat-out stop buying games altogether and still have enough to keep me occupied until my dying day.

I mean, hell, just on Evercade there is somewhere in the region of 700 games. There are over a thousand games in my Steam library. Another 540 in my GOG.com library. In my physical collection, I have 422 Nintendo Switch games, 169 PlayStation 4 games, 147 Xbox 360 games, 92 PlayStation 3 games, 282 PlayStation 2 games and plenty more besides. On the MiSTer Multisystem 2 I have every game from pretty much every platform I care about from the Atari 2600 up until the PlayStation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64. I really could stop buying games today and I would still be entertained until the end of time. Hell, I think I could probably get by on Doom and Final Fantasy VII replays.

Part of me wants to try doing this, but a certain degree of FOMO prevents me from committing to it entirely, because I know there are games in the pipeline that I definitely want: the third Final Fantasy VII reboot; Ace Combat 8; the Trails in the Sky: 2nd Chapter remake. The limited print publishing companies — which, honestly, is where I buy the majority of my games from these days anyway — have been doing a great run of physical versions of otherwise digital-only games that I want to play, and new versions of games I enjoyed back in the day, but which are a pain to get up and running on modern PCs.

I think we have reached a sort of "event horizon" similar to that found in other media, where enthusiasts of the medium can comfortably drift away from the mainstream, popular, current side of things and subsist entirely on niche interest material from the past that they find personally resonant. This absolutely happens in other forms of creative media — there are people who enjoy listening to music who never touch chart hits; there are people who love movies who have never seen a "blockbuster"; there are people who love reading who read nothing but classic literature.

So I think what I'm going to do is not necessarily commit to a complete purchasing blackout, for the reasons I've already outlined. I am still going to buy whatever the third Final Fantasy VII remake project game is; I am still going to buy Ace Combat 8; I am still going to buy any limited-print games that come up which I have been eagerly awaiting a physical copy of.

But what I am going to do is curtail impulse purchases. A significant portion of the physical library I own I picked up because I knew I wanted to play the games in question someday, and when that day rolled around I didn't want to find myself in a situation where it would cost three figures (or more) to be able to do so. I already feel a great sense of regret from the day I traded in my copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PlayStation, and I have no desire to feel that way again.

What I do find myself feeling to an increasing degree from modern video game publishers and developers, though, is… nothing. Honestly, I just looked through the list of everything announced at the recent The Game Awards, and the only thing that registered even a slight twinge of excitement for me was Ace Combat 8. Everything else just sort of drifted past me and I had no particularly strong feelings about it. And the recent behaviour of Larian Studios' head honcho has put me right off wanting to get caught up on the Divinity series.

So here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to finish all the "finishable" games I have on the go right now, which includes Yakuza 5, Death end re;Quest Code Z, an Ace Combat 7 replay, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Cyberpunk 2077. I'm already giving myself anxiety by having so many half-finished games on the go, some of which I haven't touched for months, so I want to check all these off my list because I've been enjoying all of them and want to see them all through to their respective conclusions.
Throughout the year, I'm going to buy anything that I already know I want without guilt. That includes the stuff I've already mentioned, plus any surprise announcements in series that I follow and appreciate, or from companies that I consistently enjoy the work of.
Throughout the year, I'm also going to buy any limited-print stuff that I already know I want. This primarily includes previously digital-only stuff that has been out for a while, and modern rereleases of titles I loved in the past like Heretic, Hexen and the System Shock games.
I am not going to buy games just because I see them while browsing a shopping site and think "ooh, that looks interesting", because these are the things that end up on the shelf and don't get played for literally years at at a time.
I am not going to buy games for previous-generation platforms unless I know they are games that I have already played and want to revisit, or games that I never got the chance to try back in the day.

I say all the above with the caveat that if something like this year's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 comes along and surprises everyone, I reserve the right to jump in and explore it for myself. While I was initially cynical about that game when it first appeared, it ended up being one of my top games of the year. (Conversely, I really didn't like Blue Prince at all.)

This might all sound a bit half-arsed and I freely admit that it is. But I wanted to acknowledge the feelings of… discontent that I have with the current direction of video games while still allowing myself the opportunity to enjoy the things that I am looking forward to.

I love video games, you see. Love them. And I always will.

I'm just not sure I love Video Games That Were Made In 2025 And Beyond, going by some of the recent happenings.

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#oneaday Day 558: Blast a Nazi today

I love Wolfenstein 3-D a great deal. In fact, I love it so much that ten levels that I made as a teenager are part of the official Wolfenstein 3-D Super Upgrades pack that was distributed by original publisher Apogee. I made $200 from that — who says random encounters with strange men on CompuServe forums never lead to anything good?

Anyway, despite the fact that I adore Wolfenstein 3-D and its quasi-sequel Spear of Destiny, I have never actually played any of the other Wolfenstein games. None of them! I have always meant to, over the years, but somehow never got around to it. I have decided to finally correct this oversight, prompted by some enthusing on the part of some friends who particularly enjoyed the recent Machine Games entries in the series.

From what I understand, the various Wolfenstein games over the years since Wolfenstein 3-D have rebooted the series continuity multiple times, but I still wanted to catch up on all the games I'd missed, so I decided to jump into Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Xbox first of all. I went for Xbox because the console versions of the game have an extra prologue chapter on top of what the PC version offers, plus there's no need to faff around with mods to make it run on modern machines. I have little to no patience for modding these days, so a plug-and-play console version is just what the doctor ordered.

Anyway, I didn't really know what to expect from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, other than what little I had read prior to playing it. I knew that it was the first of several "reimaginings" of the series, for starters, rather than an actual "sequel" (despite the implications of the name) and that it focused to a certain degree on the Nazis looking into black arts such as necromancy. For those unfamiliar with the Wolfenstein series, who had been labouring under the assumption that it was a Serious War Series, undead, monstrous enemies have been part of proceedings since Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. (They were not, to my knowledge, part of the original 8-bit home computer Castle Wolfenstein games, but those have little to do with the various different continuities of the rest of the series anyway.)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein casts you in the role of recurring series protagonist William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American soldier who is a bit of a one-man army. While Wolfenstein 3-D began with Blazkowicz captured and imprisoned in Castle Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein's console versions open with a mission where our hero is investigating what the Nazis are up to in Egypt. It seems they're in the business of raiding tombs for something that they seem to think is important, so it's up to Blazkowicz to discourage them from doing so with a variety of World War II-era weaponry.

Following this, Blazkowicz and his contact, Agent One, get captured and taken to Castle Wolfenstein. Whether or not Agent One survives depends on if you are playing the two-player co-op mode or not. Either way, Blazkowicz has to bust out of Castle Wolfenstein, make his escape, throw some further spanners into the Nazi plans to dig up the mysterious "Death Knights" and mystical artifacts, and then proceed onwards to a series of Nazi-thwarting missions.

Thus far I think I'm about halfway through the game — I'm on the fifth mission out of eight — and I've mostly been having a good time. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter from the early 2000s, and there are times where you really feel the 25 years between this game and now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though; it means that Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a game that focuses on making its gameplay solid and interesting rather than indulging in overly spectacular setpieces. It also means that its levels strike a good balance between providing a decent amount to explore and keeping you heading on a clear path forwards. More than anything, the further I go in the game, the more it reminds me of something like Rare's GoldenEye — levels have different routes you can take, and there are various objectives to accomplish, and the exact way things unfold will vary according to whether you decide to go all-guns blazing or at least make a cursory attempt at stealth.

Stealth isn't mandatory for the most part, thankfully. There's one level where you'll fail if the guards set the alarms off, but for quite a lot of that level the guards can spot you and aren't within reach of an alarm, so you don't have to spend too much time creeping around. In other levels, it sometimes pays to know what's coming up ahead of time so you can prepare a suitable "ambush" with an appropriate weapon — the game has some excellent rifle weapons (both with and without zoomable scopes) that make picking off enemies from a distance a pleasure, and when it comes time to switch to closer combat, there are plenty of options there, too.

The weapons perhaps lack some of the oomph of more recent takes on the genre, but there are plenty of them, and the further you go in the game, the more ridiculous they get. While the early stages will see you using fairly conventional pistols, rifles and machine guns, later stages will allow you to wield the chaingun-esque "Venom" weapon, the "Panzerfaust" rocket launcher and even a flame thrower. None of these are an "instant win" button, either; the game's levels and encounters are designed quite nicely to encourage picking the right weapon for the job.

The game features a beloved feature of early 2000s first-person shooters, which is enemy characters who have conversations while you approach them. Many of these are quite silly — though none quite match the classic No-One Lives Forever, trope codifier for this sort of thing — and although clearly a threat, the game also makes many of the Nazis appear cartoonishly incompetent.

There are a few minor annoyances, chief among which is the complete lack of subtitles for spoken audio. There's not a lot of critical in-mission speech, but it does sometimes get drowned out by everything else that is going on. The cutscenes are well-mixed, at least — and hearing Tony Jay in the role of the Director of the Office of Secret Actions, the organisation that Blazkowicz works for, is an absolute delight.

The game balance at times feels a little questionable, with enemies seemingly either spraying bullets everywhere but your location, or hitting you right in the middle of your head and knocking out most of your health bar with a single shot. There are a few enemies that have seemingly superhuman reflexes at times, which can lead to some frustrating sequences where you'll have to repeat things over and over and over until you master them, but there are usually some things you can try differently to tip the odds in your favour — and the ability to save at any time, as well as automatically at checkpoints, is very welcome indeed. I'm not sure how much of my difficulty with a few sequences stems from my playing on "Bring it On" difficulty, which I guess is technically "Hard" mode — but, well, I've come this far now, so I will continue as I have been doing!

I'm enjoying the game, then. I wish there were a few more homages to the original Wolfenstein 3-D — it would have been nice to hear some remixes of the classic music, for example — but I am led to believe that Wolfenstein 3-D itself unlocks as a bonus extra when you beat the main single-player campaign, so if that's the case then all will be forgiven. I suspect this is probably going to be the weakest of all the post-Wolfenstein 3-D entries in the series — or, at least, this is the most obviously aged of them all — so hopefully it'll only be improvements from hereon. I'm certainly looking forward to finally discovering how the series evolves.

Now I think I might go blast a few more Nazis before bedtime…

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#oneaday Day 557: How to torch universal goodwill with one simple interview

Today, Larian Studios, makers of the Divinity series and the universally acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3, found itself in the crosshairs of the Internet's ire due to comments made by its CEO, Swen Vincke during an interview with Bloomberg.

According to Vincke, Larian has been using generative AI behind the scenes to, in his words, "explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text". None of which are things you need generative AI for, and all of which are things that people have been perfectly capable of doing with their own human brains for decades. In fact, there are people who specialise in elements of what he described — most notably concept art, which is the area a lot of critics have been focusing on.

Vincke's comments are remarkably ill-considered given the number of times that generative AI use in video games has been subject to backlash from the general public and journalists alike over the course of just the last year — and for many of the same reasons that Vincke is arguing in favour of.

The otherwise well-regarded sci-fi game The Alters was irreversibly poisoned for a lot of people earlier this year when it became apparent that they had used ChatGPT to generate placeholder text for background textures and localised strings for non-English languages.

The umpteenth reboot of Everybody's Golf came under fire for non-specific use of generative AI that I'm not sure anyone ever quite got to the bottom of.

The new Let It Die game, which has no involvement from the previous game's original developers Suda51 or Grasshopper Manufacture, has been lambasted for extensive use of AI-generated material.

The promising "people sim that isn't called The Sims" inZOI turned huge swathes of prospective players away by its game's heavy reliance on generative AI, as well as its publisher Krafton's insistence that they are pivoting to becoming an "AI-first" company.

The latest hot "extraction shooter" (I still don't really know what that is, and no, I don't really care) ARC Raiders got dinged with a 2/5 review score for its use of AI-generated voices — not just because they were AI, but because using AI-generated voices is at artistic odds with the story the game is trying to tell.

Even the once-beloved Oliver Twins, former stars of the UK "bedroom programming" scene in the '80s, got a kicking from press and public alike for their absolutely terrible AI-generated "follow-up" (and I use the term loosely) to their old Spectrum game, Ghost Hunters.

People hate this shit — and with good reason. Generative AI is a lazy, soulless solution for feckless CEOs to foist on their creative teams because they think it will "add value" for shareholders, when in fact there is growing evidence by the day that the entire generative AI scene is financially, environmentally and societally ruinous.

On top of all that, it doesn't work well enough to be worth using! Every single AI "tool" currently available carries a prominent disclaimer that it "might" (read: "will") get things wrong from time to time, making them fundamentally useless for doing anything useful with — and their "fun" uses are causing the Internet to become overrun with even more meaningless, pointless slop than was already splattered everywhere in the first place, on top of boiling all our lakes. At least stupid things from a bygone age like Badger Badger Badger and Seepage (to name just two examples from what I believe to be the golden age of Internet nonsense) are the result of both genuine human creativity and skilful use of creative tools that don't involve typing "make me funny video garfield giant boobs mechahitler piss filter" into a chatbot.

Vincke's point was not that the new Divinity game will be riddled with AI-generated voice lines or visuals. In fact, he claims that the studio is "neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are [they] looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI", but that AI is "a toolset for creatives to use and see how it can make their day-to-day lives easier, which will let us make better games".

Vincke has, apparently, been receiving some pushback from within Larian about this — and he's certainly been getting some choice words from former employees today, too. The situation escalated to such a degree that he issued a statement in response to IGN earlier today. Unfortunately, said statement doesn't really say anything — and, worse, attempts to obfuscate his earlier statements by pointedly using the term "ML" (for "Machine Learning") rather than his earlier use of "AI" — today typically interpreted to mean "generative AI" when used in contexts such as this.

For me, the worst thing was his final paragraph:

While I understand [generative AI] is a subject that invokes a lot of emotion, it's something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone's working day better, not worse.

Here's the thing. You see that people are getting sniffy about generative AI, something which is well-established by this point to be A Thing The Public Fucking Hates. The sensible thing to do from a public relations perspective at this point, regardless of what you actually think, is to go "okay, you know what, we hear you, this sucks" or something along those lines, and then promise to "do better" or the like. A bunch of people won't believe you, of course, but this is better than going "no, well, I actually do think everyone at Larian should use this, and by 'discussing internally' I probably actually mean mandating that all employees have to use it at least a certain amount", which is how this is all coming across right now.

The particularly dumbass thing about this episode is, as I said above, none of the examples he gave are situations that need generative AI — or even where it is particularly beneficial. In fact, several creative types have commented today on how using "good enough", plausible-looking placeholders is actually detrimental to the entire creative process. Former Rocksteady employee Amy-Leigh Shaw commented thus on Bluesky earlier:

Placeholder text isn't supposed to be unique per line. It is supposed to be an instruction to the writer with a great big warning sign slapped on the top, so that it doesn't slip into the finished game. Unique sentences of bland writing are the least helpful thing to use for that purpose!

I also find that one of the more frustrating blockers to writing is when there's already a (bad) suggestion of what you should say. You are no longer able to organically find the idea because the suggestion in front of you knocks you off the track of your natural thought process.

Shaw is talking specifically about writing here, but several artists agreed that this is the case when dealing with concept art, too. The difference between a hastily scrawled Microsoft Paint doodle and the "this sort of looks right" thing that generative AI spits out is enormous — and in the latter case, it will absolutely colour an artist's interpretation of a scene or character, often unconsciously.

In other words, there's no defence of using generative AI as "placeholders" for text, concept art, voice acting, music — anything that a creative person is actually going to get involved with. The entire point of a placeholder is that it's something obviously shit and out of place so it can be easily spotted and subsequently replaced by a specialist at some point in the development process. Because generative AI produces something that is often "good enough" to the untrained eye or someone not looking closely, it's easy for it to get missed — as happened with The Alters earlier in the year.

Vincke's comments — and his subsequent follow-up statement — have torched a significant amount of goodwill that people had for Larian Studios in the space of just a single day. People fucking loved Baldur's Gate 3 and the previous Divinity: Original Sin games! It feels like it shouldn't have been a difficult job to maintain that goodwill while hyping up your new game — even if some found themselves a tad squicked out by a rather grim trailer at The Game Awards. But no. C-suite gonna C-suite, I guess — and it appears that this is true for companies people had, up until now, actually liked, as much as it is for companies people love to hate. And the net result of this for Larian is that people who were previously excited about a new Divinity game are now not going to touch it.

I know this has certainly given me a great degree of pause on wanting to check out any of Larian's work. I've been meaning to look at the Divinity: Original Sin games and Baldur's Gate 3 for a while — but now I'm in even less of a hurry to do so than I was already.

I'm so very tired of this. I, like many others, cannot wait for this fucking bubble to pop so we can get back to something approaching "normality", whatever that even means any more.

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#oneaday Day 556: Customer non-service

Generative AI has, supposedly, revolutionised a number of sectors, with customer service being one of the most commonly cited areas that benefits from having a lying chatbot front and centre.

Except it doesn't benefit at all, does it? Because all the chatbot adds is an unnecessary step between someone who needs some help with something and them actually getting that help. And, in a lot of cases, the chatbot passes completely incorrect information on to the few remaining real people who might actually be able to do something.

My current predicament is that I'm trying to return something to a retailer. A pair of shoes. They didn't fit. Should be simple enough, right? On the retailer's own website, they allow you to set up the return and organise a courier service to come and collect it.

The courier service of choice for the retailer, Schuh, was Evri. This will probably strike fear into the hearts of most people, but honestly, up until now I've not had a huge problem with them (or their previous incarnation, Hermes). But it seems that Evri, specifically, is having a few issues right now.

My particular problems started ten days ago, when the courier was originally supposed to pick up my package to return it. They did not show up. My wife and I were in all day. There was not a single knock at the door, and I got a notification that there was "no answer" when they supposedly called to pick up the package.

No matter, I thought, checking the tracking information. They said they'll be back the next working day.

They were not back the next working day. Or the one after. So I attempted to contact Evri in order to sort things out.

Initially I got a chatbot that promised to "escalate" the issue and then did absolutely nothing. Like, it just stopped responding to anything. So I tried again. This time I tried some different options and seemingly got a message through to someone.

Except the people on the other end of my correspondence are all absolutely convinced that I am awaiting a package delivery, despite me telling them repeatedly that I need the package collecting from my house. And thus I suspect what is happening is that they are rummaging through their big pile of parcels, hoping to find the one they think they are supposed to deliver to me, not finding it, going "oh shit" and then just not doing anything else — when, in fact, the package that I want them to collect has been sitting in my house's front hallway for the last 10 days.

This isn't the first time I've encountered a situation like this since the dawn of AI chatbots, either. Earlier in the year, I had an Ikea chair break on me, and it was under guarantee, so I tried to get it replaced. After laying out very clearly that I needed the entire chair replaced under the guarantee thanks to the nature of the problem, and receiving assurances that yes, I would receive a full replacement chair from the possibly-human-probably-not thing that I was interacting with online, I waited two weeks… and then received a package through the post that contained a single chair leg.

How is anyone looking at situations like this and thinking "yes, that's a big improvement over what we had before"? The blame isn't entirely at the feet of the AI chatbots, I know, because in all of these cases there's an obvious degree of (possibly) human error involved, but the AI chatbot certainly isn't helping the fucking situation. In every case that I've had the misfortune to interact with an AI customer service chatbot, the bot hasn't been able to help with what should be a very simple enquiry and has passed me on to what is supposedly a human being that speaks English. And in every case it has seemingly passed on incorrect information — information that the supposed human being won't fucking listen to me correcting, even when I do so repeatedly and very, very clearly.

Just another way that the cyberpunk dystopia we live in completely and utterly sucks. With no real benefits to go along with all the suck.

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