One of the main tools I have to use in my day job is a flaming garbage fire of suck, but our team's procedures are so entrenched in the stupid pile of shit that there's no point in even attempting to talk about all the things that are wrong with it. So I thought in an attempt to provide myself with some sort of catharsis, I would list all the things that are wrong with it here instead. This probably won't mean anything to any of you, but it'll make me feel better, at least.

Okay. Here we go.

Hi [redacted], I just wanted to raise an important issue: the fact that [redacted] is a colossal pile of garbage and should be cast in the trash as soon as possible, along with its useless developers. Here are all the things that are wrong with it, and that will almost certainly never be fixed:

• The stupid pile of crap doesn't fit on any monitor I've ever used it with. Horizontal scrolling is a huge no-no in web design. This is amateur-level stuff. Add some — any — CSS to make it responsive, or at the very least fit on a normal-resolution monitor.

• The "Generation" page, which is supposed to export the content we work on, fits on the screen so badly that the labels for the options tickboxes at the side of the screen are actually underneath all of the tickboxes instead of next to them. As in, all the tickboxes are blank and unlabeled, then there's a list of labels.

• Talking of "Generation", if I export a project that amounts to one title field and a short piece of copy (about 20 words or so), the resulting file should not be thirty megabytes — so big that it doesn't fit through the dumbass "File Transformer" application to turn it into something actually usable.

• Also talking of "Generation", is it too much to ask that [redacted] can actually export things in the format we need it to? Having to export it, delete things from the resulting zip file to make it small enough, run it through "File Transformer" then finally import it to our CMS is the most cumbersome nonsense I've ever seen.

• You keep complaining that we don't respond to the comments from various locales on the projects. This is because 1) there are no notifications when new comments are added, 2) the button that indicates there are comments if you do happen to look at the right page at the right time is presented in bright yellow on white and 3) the specific comments are indicated by a small dot that is literally 4 pixels wide, which you will only see if you are looking at one of the 300 pieces of content that make up a single project.

• If my login times out due to it taking a while to complete a task, I would like to resume where I left off after logging in, rather than being informed that my "MySearch has expired" or that the "edition is not found".

• If I click a "generate email" button to send a message to people, I expect it to 1) actually generate an email, 2) actually send it to people and 3) actually include the correct information rather than requiring me to trawl through pages of pointless information looking for a GUID then copy and paste it manually into an Outlook message (having run it through the "Swapping Tool" to generate specific links for each locale, of course!)

• Putrid green, white and grey is not a nice colour scheme.

• Please read a book on UI and/or UX.

• Please ditch this atrocious software and hire someone who knows what they are doing to develop something that is actually designed for what we are doing with it.

• [REDACTED] IS SHIT

Thank you for indulging me there. I feel slightly better. Until tomorrow, anyway. Back to the grindstone, I guess.

Thought I'd steal a meme from Twitter as a prompt for today's post. You can find the original here.

HyperX, whoever they are, wanted to know the first games people played in various genres. I thought I'd list them and elaborate a bit. Feel free to share your lists in the comments!

🥇 First/Third Person-Shooter: Wolfenstein 3D

I'd played 3D games prior to this — most notably the Mercenary series on Atari 8-bit and ST platforms — but so far as actual first-person shooters go, I was there pretty much from the beginning. Wolfenstein 3D was the first I played; I also played the Catacomb games quite early on, too.

So far as my personal tastes go, I love '90s style single-player first-person shooters — stuff like Doom and the Build engine games. I also very much like the modern Shadow Warrior games. Call of Duty can suck a fat one, though.

⚔️ MOBA: League of Legends

I played this for a few minutes and knew I was not going to get along with it. I tried Dota 2 and felt the same, but even more strongly. I tried Heroes of the Storm with friends, and fared a little better, but didn't like it enough to want to pursue it further. MOBA is not a genre for me. Multiplayer in general isn't, in fact. I get frustrated when people are mean. And people are mean a lot in competitive multiplayer. And in cooperative multiplayer. You'd think being mean was antithetical to the concept of cooperative multiplayer, but no. That's another story though.

🛡️ RPG: The Temple of Apshai Trilogy

I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on in this game when I played it as a kid. The concept of RPGs was completely alien to me. The first RPG I played and understood was Final Fantasy VII, many years later! Now I'm a diehard fan of the genre.

🔮 MMO: Everquest

I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of Everquest, though I found that the actual expectation didn't live up to my expectations. I had no idea what to expect when I finally got the damn thing working on my old clunker of a PC and a dial-up connection, so I played it completely "wrong".

I'd roleplay my character making grunts and noises in /say chat while I was fighting, much to the amusement of people around me; I didn't understand the whole "level-stratified" structure of the world, so took it as a personal challenge to make it to the next town over without dying (and succeeded) rather than stabbing rats outside the city gates for 16 hours; and I had no idea what I was "supposed" to be doing without a central narrative to follow.

Later dives into the genre (World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV) went much better, largely thanks to having people who knew what they were doing showing me the ropes!

🎶 Rhythm: Bust-a-Groove

Amazing game. Well, amazing music; gameplay-wise it doesn't quite hold up as the central competitive mechanic is fairly flawed, but I'll always have a soft spot for this game.

This game also taught me that Japanese and PAL PlayStations run at different speeds, even when both playing a PAL game. I was playing against my friend Woody, who was making a real hash of things, and insisted it was "my PlayStation" that was the problem. He was so convinced of this that he cycled seven miles back to his house to get his PlayStation (and then seven miles back again) to prove it. He was right.

♟ Strategy: Legionnaire

Another game I fired up for the first time as a kid and had absolutely no idea what was going on. This was a very early strategy game for Atari 8-bit by (I think) the legendary Chris Crawford, and I did not know how to play it at all. I did, however, like the scrolling map and the thumping sound effects.

First strategy game I played and vaguely understood was the original Command & Conquer. I've never been good at strategy games, but I did manage to beat Command & Conquer on the GDI side, as well as nuke my friend Ed a few times on networked PlayStation games.

🥊 Fighting: International Karate

This game is evidence of how differently fighting games were back in the very early days of home computer gaming. There were no life bars, no special moves, just you against a friend with an eight-directional joystick and a single fire button, with every direction (and every direction with the fire button pressed) doing something different.

To this day, I don't really understand how the mechanics of this work — i.e. how it determines who "wins" — but I always liked the graphics and the animations in this one at least.

So what are your "firsts"?

The whole coronavirus thing basically put paid to our dieting plans that we were following a while back, since we weren't able to reliably get hold of the things we needed to follow it properly. But after a few weeks of going "ah, fuck it", I think we're going to try and make a new start from next week onwards — i.e. eating all the crap we have left in the house before getting back "on track", as it were.

I'm going to start trying to get a bit of exercise done again. I was hoping to bag a copy of Ring Fit Adventure for Switch, but it seems to be sold out absolutely everywhere except price-gouging scalpers on eBay and Amazon Marketplace, so balls to that for now. I have Fitness Boxing for Switch, and that was good fun, if a little limited.

I feel I need it. While I've said numerous times I don't have a problem being stuck in the house, I can feel myself getting pretty lethargic, and I sometimes wake up with a bad back in the morning. I know at least part of this is becoming an old fart (I'm 39 at the end of the month!) but I could probably make life a bit easier on my poor, creaking, suffering body.

Anyway. That's the plan. Next week, draw a line, get started on some degree of… well, I don't know if you'd call it "normality", but back on track with the things we wanted to achieve, anyway.

For now, maybe a crisp sandwich… 🙂

It's been a good long weekend. I've got most of the way through Final Fantasy VII Remake, so I can get right back on the Atelier Iris 3 train once I'm done there, and I also got a bunch of videos edited and ready to publish over the course of the next couple of weeks.

Plus, today, I got to play a shoot 'em up about blasting the clothes off cute girls. I'd say that's been a pretty productive few days, all told — and I didn't even have to leave the house.

Tomorrow it's back to the day job (from home) and it's my beloved Tuesday morning full of conference calls, so I'll be taking most of those from my bed as usual. I am very much not in a "work" state of mind right now, but perhaps I'll feel a bit more productive in the morning. I'm not counting on it, particularly with the soul-sapping nature of the aforementioned calls!

I have a couple more days off towards the end of the month — my day job gives us "free" days off for both our birthdays and our work anniversary, and it just so happens that both of those fall within April for me, so I get a nice couple of days to myself on the 28th and the 29th. Yes, I did indeed deliberately pick a Tuesday to take off, the reasons for which should be abundantly clear by now…!

It's 1.15 am again and I'm now 23 hours deep into Final Fantasy VII Remake. I am loving it. Having been imagining what a "remake" of this game would look like pretty much ever since the original was current, I can say with confidence that this isn't what I expected — but I am very glad they did what they did.

It kind of baffles me a bit that some people are getting genuinely furious about Square Enix "not respecting the source material" due to the changes and additions to the story, but I can't get on board with that argument. What we have here is a considerably more fleshed out exploration of what was an interesting but rather brief part of the original. It has some nice foreshadowing for what is to come — which, of course, people who knew the original will be ready for — as well as some unexpected elements.

I particularly like how you feel a much better sense of "context" of Midgar itself in terms of how things connect together. It would have been cool to spend a bit more time topside, but FFVII's story was always about the slums and the fact that those living atop the plates were the great untouchables, living a life of luxury while everyone beneath struggled to get by.

The Wall Market sequence was a particular highlight. I was delighted to see that they very much did everything you expect from Wall Market in Final Fantasy VII a wonderful amount of justice, and the additional characters who helped push things along were fantastic. The Honey Bee Inn sequence is a bit different from what it once was, but the new one is a lot of fun and entirely in keeping with the tone of things.

As I said before: this is a new game that just happens to hit a bunch of the same story beats as Final Fantasy VII. It is not the original Final Fantasy VII. And thus it should be enjoyed and experienced on its own merits… which are considerable.

Anyway. Enough blabbering on, I need to get some sleep. Hope you've all had a good Easter weekend!

Quite a few people seem to be going a bit stir crazy with the quarantine, lockdown, whatever you want to call it. I'm finding it a little hard to understand, since I'm having a thoroughly pleasant time — particularly on workdays!

I appreciate that some people have a much harder time doing their job from home, and some people thrive on social interactions… but the way I've always looked at it, home should be a place where you are comfortable and content and where you want to spend time when you have no other commitments.

Some people aren't lucky enough to have a home like that, I know. I've had a couple of occasions in my life when the place I called "home" was not a happy place for one reason or another, and it would absolutely suck to be caught in such a situation. Thankfully, I'm not in a place like that any more, and I'm very much appreciating the time I get to spend with my wife, my cats, my writing and my hobbies.

I wonder how many of the people complaining right now will be right back to complaining that they "never have any time to do anything" when the nation's doors open up once again?

Me, I played Final Fantasy VII Remake for over 5 hours today, as well as getting a couple of videos recorded. I'm quite happy right now, thanks!

Spent a lot more time playing Final Fantasy VII Remake today; I'm now about 10 hours into it. To give you an idea of how much more substantial this is than the original, that puts me at the point after Cloud has just walked Aerith home for the first time, and it's looking like I'm about to have another "sidequest central" area.

The game looks set to alternate between these sort of "hub" areas where you take on smaller sidequests, and lengthy sequences of plot-critical stuff that is relatively linear. During the plot-critical stuff, there are no sidequests to distract you, which is a good choice; there are, however, some of those aforementioned "Discoveries" I talked about yesterday, which it turns out aren't just for getting to know characters better — they also do things like highlighting optional treasures that you might not want to miss. In one sequence, for example, they led to the Choco-Mog summon materia, which is as much of a delight as you might expect.

Aerith is great. I'm not sure how I feel about her protesting very sweetly that she isn't a princess that needs treating gently, and then lets out a "Shit!" when she's having trouble climbing up something, but the combination of gentleness and sass she has going on has always appealed to me, ever since the original.

Probably the highlight for me so far, though, is how much more fleshed out the other Avalanche members are. There are some fantastic sequences involving them with some genuinely hilarious dialogue. The "I'm really sorry about your ass" sequence springs immediately to mind here.

Anyway, I played until 1am, so I should probably get some sleep now! Doubtless there will be more of this tomorrow, but I'll probably make some time for Atelier Iris 3 too… probably…

Spent four hours with Final Fantasy VII Remake this evening and it's confirmed several things I suspected about it.

Firstly, that although it is rooted in love and respect for the source material, it is best to treat it as a whole new game. After all, we're talking about something that is expanding what was five hours of the original game at most into a 35+ hour game. That means there's a lot of new stuff. New areas to visit, new characters to interact with, new storylines, new setups for various situations, new contexts for events you might be familiar with.

Secondly, the mechanics represent a blend of all the best bits of more recent Final Fantasy games — specifically, XII, XIII and XV in particular. It works really well, and it sidesteps a lot of the commonly cited issues people tend to bring up when talking about those particular installments. The combination of XV's rhythmic basic attacks with XIII's Active Time Bar management and XII's somewhat more "open" structure is pretty great; combat is pacy and interesting, and it's especially enjoyable when you're managing multiple characters. The first boss battle in the Mako Reactor remains a great showcase of this.

Thus far I'm coming towards the end of chapter 3, which is where Cloud and company arrive home in the Sector 7 slums. This is expanded considerably over some fairly brief, exposition-centric scenes in the original; there are six sidequests to take on, for example, and accomplishing all these gives you the opportunity to pursue a "discovery" — in this case, spending a bit of time with Tifa "off the clock", as it were.

Rather nicely, rather than expecting you to wander all over the map looking for people who might have quests for you, starting a chapter immediately unlocks the sidequests (except for those with prerequisites), so you always know exactly where to go. And the game does a great job of making the random NPC chatter as you wander around react to what you've been doing. They've really done a great job here.

I'm going to spend some more time with it over the long weekend — but I haven't forgotten about Atelier, don't you worry yourself!

I gave Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold a quick go earlier, as I wanted something I could have a quick bit of fun with over lunch before settling down with something more substantial over the coming long weekend. And I'm thoroughly enamoured with it already!

As Chris noted on our recent podcast, Snack World is a wonderfully silly, post-modern setting that pokes fun at pretty much everything, and does a fine line in puns that rival Final Fantasy XIV in terms of their frequency and ferocity.

What I wasn't expecting was for the gameplay to have a certain amount in common with Final Fantasy XIV, too, despite being more of a Diablo-style action RPG. Combat is a little more measured and timing-based than Blizzard's classic, and of particular note are the visible telegraphs that enemies put out for their various attacks. This side of things really culminates in the boss battles, which feature strong elements of pattern recognition and understanding how to "do mechanics". Appropriate for a game with a multiplayer element!

I haven't played far in the game as yet, but I'm thoroughly charmed, and intend on dipping in and out of it over time. I'll write something up on it when I've got a bit more of a feel for what's going on — there are seemingly lots of very interesting mechanics to figure out in here!

I'm having a real blast with Atelier Iris 3 (and, pleasingly, I'm getting through it nicely ahead of schedule, too, as I still have at least a couple of Iris 2 articles I want to post!) — I'm really glad I've finally got around to playing these.

Iris 3 does something that I absolutely love in RPGs — putting a layer of deliciously "video game" abstraction atop the battle mechanics, making it highly enjoyable to engage with, whether you're fighting bosses or just grinding through random enemies.

The highlight for me is the "Burst Chain" system, whereby hitting enemies adds to a meter at the bottom of the screen, and filling this up then whacking the enemy as many times as possible before it either runs out or you kill everything results in experience and money bonuses. Pretty much every action you take, be it normal attack, physical skill or spell, hits more than once, so there are various ways of building up both the Burst meter and the Chain bonus — getting to grips with the different ways of doing this makes each battle feel like a puzzle to be solved.

And the characters are great, too. I'm absolutely 1,000% in love with Nell, but that's a discussion for a whole other day, I think. Now to figure out how to juggle playing this and FFVII Remake…