I watched today's Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct and… I still don't get it.

Not for lack of trying, mind; I played both Wild World on the DS and New Leaf on the 3DS and got some enjoyment out of them, but I tired of both very quickly, and find it difficult to understand exactly what it is that has people so hyped up for a new one.

The most common thing I've seen people say is that it's a "comfy" experience. And I can understand that; it's nice to have something you can just relax with and not feel like it's assaulting your senses or making you think too much. For me, though, I still need a certain something in my "comfy" experiences; games like the Atelier series and Nippon Ichi Software's Destiny Connect (which I'm currently playing on my lunch breaks at work) provide that, whereas Animal Crossing always felt like work; like an obligation.

I guess when you boil it down it's really not all that different from grinding in an RPG or something; you do something repetitively in order to acquire various rewards, then you use those rewards to acquire other, perhaps more tangible rewards. The difference between Animal Crossing and an RPG is that those tangible rewards are things like wallpaper, haircuts, furniture, whereas in an RPG your tangible rewards tend to be things that make bigger numbers pop up in fights.

Note that I'm not saying Animal Crossing is "bad" or anything like it; I just feel like I've never really managed to latch on to the core appeal of the series, despite giving it a fairly substantial go on two separate occasions. I ended up feeling like there were lots of things in the game that were nice to look at, but getting frustrated that there wasn't a lot you could really "do" with them. And I 100% did not understand what the multiplayer mode was for besides appearing in a friend's town, looking around then buggering off again. Perhaps that is all it actually is for.

Anyway. Regardless of my own personal feelings on Animal Crossing as a whole, I'm glad that the Direct went well and seems to have been very positively received by those who have a better understanding of the series than I do. People seem super-hyped for the new one, and that's great; I know this Switch version has been keenly anticipated for a long time now, so it's wonderful to see that it looks like living up to everyone's expectations.

I probably won't pick it up when it releases in March, but I'll definitely be interested to hear some stories from those who do. I always enjoy hearing about experiences from outside my own personal area of expertise and taste, as it just highlights to me what a wonderfully broad and welcoming medium modern gaming is; there really is something out there for everyone.

I think I've talked about this before, but I'm struggling for inspiration today so I'll talk about it… possibly again.

It always baffles me how companies can have proprietary tools and software built for them… and that said software is some of the hottest, stinkiest garbage you will ever find out there.

I've encountered this on numerous occasions. When I worked in the commercial games press, every CMS I used was a complete sack of crap, because for some reason most of these sites refuse to use an off-the-peg solution such as WordPress. Why? Fuck knows; there's really very little reason to use a bespoke solution these days, what with WordPress and its competitors being enormously expandable and customisable.

At my current day job, I encounter this on a daily basis. Without getting too much into the details, my work primarily consists of managing the localisation of various bits and pieces. I don't actually do the localisation myself; I do, however, get the content out of the place where it's supposed to be, send it off to the actual localisers, then put it back where it should be.

This should be a simple process, you would think. Export content -> send to localisers -> receive back from localisers -> import content.

Do you want to know what our actual process is?

Copy US content to UK field -> Manually correct US spellings -> Export content -> Manually copy HTML line by line into an Excel spreadsheet to compare variations on the content and see what we might be able to share -> Manually copy HTML line by line into a new XML file with completely proprietary tagging system to prepare for "localisation management" software -> Import to "localisation management" software -> Break something -> Fix it -> Copy content into web-based tool so it turns XML into HTML rendering that the preview in the "localisation management" software can actually display, since it doesn't have an appropriate XML interpreter -> Use Inspect Element to copy HTML output -> Copy HTML output into "HTML Beautifier" so it doesn't look like unreadable shit -> Copy HTML output from HTML Beautifier into preview field of localisation management software -> Find something wrong -> Correct XML -> Have to do the whole bloody process to generate the preview again -> Copy CSS from web-based preview tool -> Paste CSS into new "library" in the localisation management software -> Export all the shit I just imported in a completely different XML format to send to the localisers -> Receive back from localisers -> Import XML -> Correct the mistakes the localisers inevitably made with variable names etc -> Export content from localisation management software in some indecipherable format that generates 300 files across approximately 15MB even for the smallest page update -> Run indecipherable output through "File Transformer" to turn it back into the content format we originally exported approximately three weeks ago -> Import content back to main CMS

This is stupid. And yet it's one of those processes that is apparently so ingrained, so entrenched in the people who have been there longer than me that there doesn't appear to be an alternative; our boss gets super-pissy if we don't follow "the procedure", even if it's obviously a colossal waste of time, energy and motivation.

It drives me absolutely bonkers, because it's so obviously stupid, and yet people seem unwilling to acknowledge this. Why? Fuck knows. It's one of many reasons I feel I'd be much happier making a living from doing my own thing in my own way… but, well, in the meantime, I gotta pay the bills.

Talking with fellow writers, it always surprises me how differently different people approach the writing process.

My approach is to sit down, decide something to write about, then write it. And, barring extenuating circumstances, I don't stop until it's done. There are exceptions to this rule, such as writing something longer than can reasonably be done in a single sitting, but for the most part, I sit down, think of something to write about, then write about it.

Sounds pretty simple, right? And yet I know quite a few people who don't write in this way. I know quite a few people who seem to have fragmented thoughts that manifest themselves in the form of half-written posts and drafts that, in some cases, are nothing but a title. Or, in one memorable case, just the word "Mo" with no context or indication of what it might have once been about. I feel like we'll never know, given that said draft dates back to 2016.

This isn't to say anyone is "right" or "wrong", of course; with something inherently creative such as writing it's always best to approach the task in the way you feel most comfortable with. Some people work best when they focus on a single thing at once; others work best with a more scattershot approach, picking at various tasks until each of them, gradually, one by one, get finished.

I just always find it interesting to hear how other people approach things, having always done things the same way for as long as I can remember. Respect to those of you who can have 70+ drafts on the go and not feel a crippling sense of guilt!

Since my post the other day about The Goon Show, I've been revisiting a bunch of '50s and '60s BBC radio comedy shows, including more Goons, and also another favourite of my family's, Round the Horne.

Both shows remain fascinating to me, because they are both the perfect example of what radio as a medium had to offer — particularly in a time where not every household had a television. Both are fantastic examples of how vividly talented performers can conjure an almost visual image in your mind using nothing but their voices; both are wonderful examples of how a creative format can produce something truly memorable.

And dear lord, they are both dirty. As a kid, I had a vague idea of some of the more scatological references — it's hard not to notice Major Bloodnok's gastrointestinal problems in The Goon Show, for example — but in the last few days, I've been reading up on a few bits and pieces about both The Goon Show and Round the Horne, and it seems like both shows were able to slip a hell of a lot past the BBC higher-ups. Although in the case of Round the Horne in particular, there are suggestions that the BBC higher-ups were very much in on the joke, and more than happy to skirt the boundaries of what would be considered "decent".

I've learned a lot I didn't previously know. I didn't know that Grytpype-Thynne's habitual insult of "Charlie", for example, is actually an abbreviation of the rhyming slang for what is considered to be one of the most offensive words in the English language, even today — or indeed that Grytpype's name was a reference to one's bumhole, though in retrospect I should have figured that one out much sooner.

And in the case of Round the Horne, I learned that the flagrantly homosexual characters Julian and Sandy (who, let's remember, were on the radio at a time when it was still illegal to engage in homosexual activity here in the UK) were not, as I'd originally believed, speaking a strange nonsense language, but in fact a real form of cant slang known as Polari. This was used among the homosexual community — and numerous other groups besides, including those in showbusiness and the criminal underworld — prior to the reforms brought about by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 as a means of communicating without attracting any… unwanted attention.

There are some aspects of these shows that wouldn't fly today — particularly some extremely racist caricatures performed without shame by the cast of The Goon Show… though at the same time it's also worth noting that the show had a black man (Ray Ellington) performing musical interludes on the show every week. Ellington often made cameo appearances in the main show, too — inevitably playing some sort of racist stereotype and seemingly genuinely having a lot of fun doing so.

It was a different time, for sure. A better time? Probably not; society has made a lot of progress since then in a lot of ways. But when you bear in mind the context in which these shows were originally recorded… they were truly cutting-edge. And as time goes on, it kind of becomes more and more awe-inspiring to me that these shows not only existed in the first place, but remain relevant to a certain degree even today.

I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but I thought I'd talk about it a little here, too: I preordered an Evercade. More accurately, I preordered the "All-In" edition, which comes with the system, a carrying case and 9 cartridges, which is all but one of the ones that will be available at launch. (The 10th was originally set to release a little later, but the overall release date was pushed back slightly. At least I think that's what happened.)

I'm really excited about this system. If you've not come across it before, it's a new dedicated gaming handheld from a company called Blaze (who are part of the group that is made up of PQube, Rice Digital and Funstock Retro) specifically geared towards retro gaming. And it's clearly been designed by people who know what gaming colllectors and retro enthusiasts want.

Lovely packaged versions of games with manuals? Check. No Internet connectivity, which means no necessity to download patches or updates to games? Check. Pleasantly chunky physical media that is satisfying to handle and put in the system? Check. Ability to connect to a TV to enjoy these old classics on the big screen? Check.

And perhaps most importantly… stellar lineup of games? CHECK.

There's a really impressive launch lineup for this beast. Companies like Atari, Data East, Namco and numerous others are on board — and, delightfully, we're seeing some games among their respective collections that aren't just the same things we always see rereleases of. The Atari collections, for example, rather than simply being another Atari Flashback release, contain Atari 7800 titles for the first time — including the legendary Ninja Golf.

Interestingly, they've chosen to provide the console versions of the games in most cases, because they fit the device's screen a bit better. Arcade games are supposedly coming a bit later, but for now, the games are primarily geared towards a 4:3 landscape display.

So why's the screen 16:9? For flexibility, of course. The wider screen allows later games that use this aspect ratio to use the full screen — and devices that have an unconventional screen size, such as the Atari Lynx, can also be accommodated by this display. And, as I mentioned in yesterday's Patrons Only video, the Evercade is also going to be bringing back Atari Lynx games in an official capacity for the first time… ever, I think.

I'm really looking forward to this device, and you better believe there will be lots of articles about it on MoeGamer once it's in my hands! There's more than 100 launch games to get through, after all, so that should keep me busy when I'm not playing Atelier games, shouldn't it…?

The recent announcement that the upcoming Evercade handheld will have Atari Lynx cartridges got me interested in revisiting some old Lynx games… and, as it happens, some kind soul has archived the entire set of official Lynx ROMs over on archive.org.

So I thought I'd revisit Gauntlet: The Third Encounter, a favourite from back in the day. Join me!

Every so often, I contemplate current gaming, and how incredible it would sound to young me. Not for the reasons you might think, either; the most recent thing that has got me thinking this way is the existence of the Sega Ages collection on Nintendo Switch.

Think about it. Back in the '90s it would have been absolutely unthinkable for Sega to be making Nintendo their primary platform. If you'd told someone in the playground that you'd be able to play Alex Kidd, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Thunder Force IV, Gain Ground, Virtua Racing, Out Run and numerous others on a Nintendo console, they would have laughed at you and probably given you a "dead arm".

But here we are today. I can fire up my Switch and, within seconds, be playing any of the above, or Space Harrier, or Phantasy Star, or Fantasy Zone and… soon, hopefully, G-LOC Air Battle.

I'm particularly looking forward to G-LOC as it was an absolute favourite arcade game growing up. Any time we went to the seaside — which was the only time you'd see a gaming arcade here in the UK — I would absolutely always want to play on G-LOC with its awesome hydraulic cabinet and its extortionate (to my Dad) asking price of 50p per credit.

And G-LOC isn't really a game I've had much opportunity to revisit over the years, either; the home ports of it at the time were mostly pretty crap, particularly on the home computers, and the arcade version was, for a long time, a bit dodgy in MAME. It mostly works fine now… but it'll still be nice to have an official version to enjoy for the first time in… well, ever, really.

Gaming's come a long way. But it brings me a certain amount of comfort that so many of these games remain relevant after twenty or thirty years or more… and that companies like Sega are so willing to celebrate them in the best way possible.

I've had quite a few chats with my podcasting partner Chris Caskie about British comedy, so this post is primarily for him — but I thought it'd be something a bit different to talk about today.

I've been listening to some episodes of The Goon Show over the last few days, one of which can be heard in the YouTube video above. I haven't heard many of these since my childhood, when my parents would put one of our many, many cassettes containing various episodes on in the car whenever we were taking a long journey.

For the unfamiliar, The Goon Show was a BBC radio programme that ran between 1951 and 1960, and it's widely regarded as one of the pioneers — if not the pioneer — of modern, alternative and surreal comedy. And listening back to it today for the first time in probably more than 20 years… yeah. It's still got that magic.

Most of that magic comes from the incredible cast, which mostly consists of Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. Sadly, none of them are with us any more, but they each left their own lasting legacy on culture in general — and, with The Goon Show, on comedy in particular.

The Goon Show's genius is that it's utterly nonsensical, surreal, chaotic and frequently shambolic — it's not at all uncommon to hear Secombe, Sellers and Milligan all corpsing their way through their scenes — and yet it somehow manages to stir the imagination in incredible ways. This comes about through a combination of Sellers and Milligan's superhuman capacity for producing hilarious and memorable characters using nothing but their voices — Secombe was always a bit of a one-trick pony, but this was embraced rather than hidden by making him the recurring protagonist — and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's wonderful and creative use of sound effects, which in their own way were revolutionary and trendsetting.

If you've never come across The Goon Show, it's doubtless something that might take a bit of getting used to, as it is a particular brand of glorious, joyful nonsense that we just don't seem to get in quite the same form any more. Every episode comes across as everyone involved simply having an absolutely fabulous time and focusing on that side of things rather than trying to be "perfect".

I think we can probably all learn something from that; love what you do and throw yourself into it with passion and enthusiasm. It doesn't need to be perfect, it doesn't need to be professional — in fact, if it's neither of those things, it often ends up having much more heart and soul than something that has been polished to a fine sheen.

I was pleased to discover today that at some point in the near past I had remembered to back up all of the episodes of The Squadron of Shame SquadCast, which is a podcast I used to be part of quite a while back. The podcast — and the Squadron — have since scattered to the four winds for various reasons, but I was glad to rediscover these episodes.

So I've put them online! You can find them all in a handy playlist over on SoundCloud here:  https://soundcloud.com/moegamer/sets/the-squadron-of-shame-squadcast 

A bit of background for those unfamiliar.

I'm quite old. As such, I was around for the beginning of the Internet, and the gradual growth of various pre-social media community sites. One of those — which my brother launched and was in charge of, as it happens — was 1up.com, which was essentially an online counterpart to Ziff Davis' Electronic Gaming Monthly and other gaming magazines.

1up.com had a very strong community aspect; every user had their own MySpace-style profile, the ability to blog, and the ability to start and join "clubs" with communal message boards. There were also more traditional forums.

One of the forums was dedicated to the various podcasts 1up.com hosted. I frequented that forum quite a bit since, as my brother regularly appeared on the podcast, I listened to the show a lot. One day, the guys — my brother, Garnett Lee and Luke Smith, as I recall — were talking about the concept of "the pile of shame"; all those games you've bought and never got around to playing. They agreed that before the next episode, they'd all try a game that none of them had gotten around to yet: Tim Schafer's Psychonauts.

As it happened, none of them managed to do it. But we on the forum thought it was a good idea, so we picked it up and ran with it. And thus the Squadron of Shame was born, effectively acting as something of a "gaming book club", where members would play through the same thing at the same time, then discuss it together on the forums.

When 1up went through some… changes (which involved merging all the specialist forums into obnoxious NeoGAF-style "Games" and "Not Games" forums) there were some problems. People who weren't used to the Squad's "walls of text" (which used paragraphs and pictures and everything) got a bit abusive. So we jumped ship. It was around then that the podcast was born.

The podcast kept the "book club" spirit alive, at least for its initial run of 29 episodes. We'd all play a game, then we'd get together and talk about it. Later episodes took a more topic-based approach as this was a little more friendly to everyone's schedules, but we still took the time to cover a few specific, very special games such as Katawa Shoujo and Deadly Premonition.

I was the editor of the podcast because I knew how to use GarageBand and Logic — for the early part of the show, I was working for Apple, so I had had training in both — and because I did a decent, thorough job of it. The sound quality is noticeably worse than anything today, mind; the reason for this is the fact that back in 2008, people got a bit sniffy if a podcast episode weighed in at more than 100MB, so with the amount of time we typically rambled on for, I typically had to cut the bitrate down quite a bit to save everyone's bandwidth! Well, that and everyone had radically different microphone setups; I tended to have to do what I could with what I had.

I enjoyed being a part of the show. I was a little intimidated by all the smart, confident people participating alongside me, but I always appreciated how they gave me the opportunity to speak about the things that were important to me, and how they respected my editing skills. It's quite interesting to listen back to some of these shows and hear a very different Pete to the one you hear now in The MoeGamer Podcast and my YouTube videos.

Unfortunately, the podcast and the community eventually fell apart. Katawa Shoujo was the beginning of the end, really; it led to two of our number deciding that they weren't comfortable being associated with it due to the sexual content — despite the fascinating story behind the game's development being seemingly tailor-made for the Squad to discuss — and from there we kind of just lost steam after a few more episodes. It also didn't help that this roughly coincided with the uptick in obnoxious and overbearing political posturing online, with a few of our number regrettably jumping on that bandwagon.

I remained resolute in my refusal to get involved with that sort of thing and my desire for things to just carry on how they had been quite comfortably up until that point — any sort of conflict stresses me out immensely — and I ended up with some former friends making quite unpleasant (and untrue) assumptions about me. I knew around then that that really was it; the end of an era.

It's sad how it all came to an end, and the loss of some of those friends is something that still kind of cuts deep and upsets me. But the surviving podcast episodes are a reminder of happier and simpler times, before today's endless and pointless Twitter arguments, before anyone knew what "woke" meant, before everyone felt the endless need to prove what a "good" person they supposedly are. A time when everyone was just happy to sit back, chill out and enjoy some casual conversation about games.

I miss those times. But at least I can enjoy some of the best moments once again — and you can too.

Have you seen that TV show where James May takes a thing apart and then puts it back together again? I did that, but with an Atari ST, and without taking everything out of it. And I videoed the whole process. The results were pleasing!