#oneaday Day 495: Bullying

Inspired by, of all things, an episode of Death in Paradise that had bullying as its core motive for murder, I feel inspired to reflect on some past incidents where I have encountered bullying. Because there have been quite a few, and, honestly, I'm not sure that many of them ever ended up being resolved in a particularly satisfactory manner. (I have not, to date, committed murder.)

This might be a long one, just to warn you. I haven't written it yet, so I don't know, but I have a feeling this might be a long one. You have been warned!

I have always been a somewhat awkward individual to varying degrees. In my middle age, I now know this to be an autistic spectrum disorder, of course, but growing up (and onwards into young adulthood) I never really sort of felt like I quite fit in.

In primary school, I somehow attracted the attention of several bullies. I don't recall doing anything in particular to rouse their ire initially; I guess I was just seen as an easy target. The kid with the unfashionable hair and the big ears and the posh-sounding voice.

This started early on. Kids from the upper end of the school would pick on me, a kid considerably younger than them, mercilessly. I would be taunted for my ears, I would be insulted, I would even be beaten up. Occasionally I would lash out, and inevitably get in trouble for doing so. On multiple occasions, I recall my frustration at the sheer injustice of it all being such that I ended up deliberately provoking the bullies in question so they would do something they shouldn't have, and I would do my best to ensure it was within eyeshot of a dinner lady. But, again, I don't think anything substantial ever really got done about it.

Oh, sure, the bullies might have been put in "the yellow book" once or twice (our headmaster thought it was cute that people getting in trouble could get put in "the yellow book" or "the red book" according to the severity of the transgression, using football's yellow and red cards as an analogy) but they suffered no lasting consequences for their actions and demonstrated no remorse whatsoever.

What's worse about being bullied at school is when some people see you getting bullied, they decide to side with the bully — whether just for a quiet life or because they genuinely wanted to be seen as one of the "cool kids" — and that, on more than one occasion, included people that were supposedly my friends. On multiple occasions, I fell out with these supposed friends because they had decided to pick on me, not in that sort of silly, lighthearted way you do with your friends, but in the same way as the bullies. It really sucked, but pretty much every time I eventually forgave them, for ours was a Christian school, and forgiveness was What You Did.

As I progressed up the school and my former tormentors left, I still wasn't free. Some days people that I otherwise got along perfectly fine with would just turn on me, and I'd be left with nowhere to go, full of anger and frustration at a world that just wasn't fair. I was doing well academically — probably one reason the bullies decided to pick on me, as shameful as that might sound — so it was upsetting and frustrating that I couldn't just enjoy school. What made things worse is that there were other people in the same "top groups" for various subjects at me, and they never suffered like I did; they were "in" with the "cool kids" and thus never had to contend with this.

When I arrived at secondary school, I hoped that it would be a fresh start. And it was, to a degree. On my first day, I was sat next to a kid named Murray, who I didn't know because he had come from a different primary school. I turned around to my friend Matthew and said, with some genuine anguish, "I can't remember how to make friends," but he just shrugged and continued getting along with the person he had been sat with. I attempted to make small talk with Murray, but it didn't really go anywhere.

Some time later, Murray decided that I would be a suitable target for bullying, and he took to insulting me and physically abusing me to varying degrees. It was relentless, and all too familiar to me — and this time, it was coming from a member of my peer group, and thus someone I couldn't easily escape from.

I cracked one day. After he'd been flicking rubber bands at me all morning, I turned around, grabbed him by his collar and thumped him really hard in the face. Unfortunately, the moment I had picked to do this was exactly as our headmaster was walking around the corner, and he saw everything.

To the credit of the school's senior staff (and my parents, when they were informed), they agreed that I had been pushed too far by Murray's behaviour, and they understood why I had lashed out, but they also made it clear that what I had done in response was also unacceptable. My secondary school wasn't a Christian school like my primary school, but it still very much held the attitude that the "correct" way to respond to a bully was to "just say 'no' to them". Like that helps when you're being beaten up.

As a result, I ended up put on "report", which meant that for a week, during lunchtimes and breaktimes, I had to report to a member of staff every five minutes and get a sheet of paper signed. As a deterrent for doing anything stupid, it was certainly effective, but it was also mortifyingly embarrassing. I recall bursting into tears in the dining hall, surrounded by my bewildered friends, at the frustration of the situation. Because it was frustrating, but in that instance, I, at least, knew that Murray had suffered a harsher punishment than I had. I believe he was suspended for a short period; he may even have ended up expelled at some point, because I actually don't remember running into him again beyond year 7 — though that may just be the haziness of the distant past talking.

At secondary school, I once again suffered those occasions when people would inexplicably turn on me without provocation. I absolutely was not a cool kid as a teenager; I had terrible hair (and no understanding of how to make it not-terrible, a trait I maintain to this day and primarily avert by shaving my head), I had teenage zits, I probably smelled bad, and I wasn't into anything cool like football. I understood early on that cliques formed, and I was fortunate enough to find myself in a little clique of my own, and those friends mostly stuck by me for the majority of secondary school. But there were still days when, for one reason or another, they'd decide to play up at my expense.

I think my least favourite incident in this regard was the time when, on attending the local county concert band, as I did on a weekly basis, I overheard a girl I thought I got along well with (and rather fancied, truth be told) talking to her compatriot from another school on Second Clarinet. She was being less than complimentary about someone, but the conversation sounded amusing and fun. So I asked her about it during the break in the rehearsal. She laughed it off and said nothing, and I knew immediately that it was about me. I don't know if she intended me to overhear, but I never quite felt the same about her after that.

On one particularly memorable occasion, a fight was organised between me and another kid also named Peter; I had no particular beef with him, so this fight being organised was more baffling to me than anything. I suspect it was the kids responsible wanting to feel like they had "power" over people, like they could make them do anything. I hope they were severely disappointed when neither of the two Peters turned up to the supposed fight time and place.

As I progressed through secondary school, bullying became less and less common, and completely non-existent by the time I reached sixth form, which is one of many reasons I look back on that period as one of the best times of my life. It was bliss to be in an environment where I could thrive, surrounded by people I got along with and liked, and not bothered by people who, for whatever twisted reason they had justified in their mind, wished me ill.

I was fortunate enough to not encounter any bullying during my time at university, either. I had a good group of friends who were very supportive, and we were a close-knit group that did a lot together. That staved off any interference from anyone who might wish any of us harm — we had one another's backs if it came down to it, but it never did, thankfully.

When I finally left university as a qualified teacher, I once again encountered bullying — not just as a teacher tasked with resolving such incidents in his class, but also as a member of staff. I felt ostracised and unwelcome among much of the staff of one of the schools I taught at, including my own head of department, and felt very unsupported. It was this, among other things, that contributed to my having a nervous breakdown on the job; I will forever be grateful to the few teachers on that staff who would give me the time of day, and who were supportive, both during that particular episode and when I just needed a good rant come 3.30 in the afternoon — the head of the English department and the head of Drama in particular.

And that wasn't the end of it. When I worked in retail, I had what appeared to be a dream job for quite some time, progressing through the positions it was possible to have at the store, and learning a lot in the process. Then one day, I learned that one of my colleagues and friends was being mistreated quite badly by management; I agreed to act as a witness in some frankly unwarranted disciplinary proceedings he was suffering, but managed to end up with a target painted on my back as a result. I ended up bullied out of that job, even going so far as to bring official grievance proceedings against the managers responsible — but of course, that went nowhere.

Management closed ranks and completely ostracised me from thereon, so I wrote them a six-page resignation letter than explained exactly why I was leaving. To my great satisfaction, this letter caused the entire management team to lock themselves in a meeting for an entire day. It didn't help my career — I had already committed to leaving, anyway, but it sure felt good.

The penultimate incident that happened is one that still genuinely causes me traumatic flashbacks to this day — and I will name and shame the company in this instance. SSE, the energy company, by far the worst place I have ever had the misfortune to work, and that includes three failing schools.

SSE's corporate culture is to obsess about safety. And I'm not joking. This is a company where you get told off and written up if you're seen not holding a handrail going up stairs; where you get a stern warning from your manager if you drop a pen under your desk and don't wear a "bump cap" to retrieve it; where the obsession with Safety is an active detriment to productivity.

My problems there actually didn't stem from this side of things at all, surprisingly; it stemmed from my team leader and her team leader, both of whom one day apparently decided to take a dislike to me. I had been working well as someone who helped keep SSE's poorly organised website up to date, and I had even led up a project to completely refresh M&S Energy's website, since that was actually part of SSE. I was a productive member of the team, and, up until this point, I had thought I was getting along with everyone.

One day, I was pulled aside by these two individuals and presented with a letter saying that I was to face disciplinary action for looking at my mobile phone too often during work hours. This was back when I was big into Twitter, and thus my phone was something of a lifeline for communicating with far-off friends, particularly since the friends I saw in person on a semi-regular basis were already starting to become… less regular sights.

Also, I didn't really feel like it would be a problem, since not only was I completing all the work that had been assigned to me in a timely manner and to an excellent standard, all the other members of my team — including the one accusing me now — were on their phones all day every day, and I even caught one of them writing a fucking novel on her computer when she was supposed to be working.

Apparently, because I was still technically on my probation period, they decided to treat this complete non-issue with the severity of if I'd just fucked the photocopier and made the CEO watch or something. I was given notice of a disciplinary meeting whose outcome was clearly decided in advance, and given the opportunity to plead my case. I did so. I was fired, and because I was still on my probation period, that was that, then and there. It was abundantly clear that I had just been bullied out of a second job for no discernible reason other than two people had inexplicably decided to take issue with me. Maybe I made them look bad by getting work done more quickly and better than them. To this day, I genuinely have no idea; I just know that I hate those two individuals.

I yelled obscenities at the gathered group around the table, because I figured if I was never going to see them again, I might as well. I was fucking furious. And I still am, every time I think about this scenario. During particularly low ebbs of mental health, I find myself back in that room, surrounded by people who inexplicably hate me for no reason, and I want nothing more than to lash out more than I actually did. Flip the table. Fling a phone at someone. Beat someone with their folder of "evidence" (which, aside, was remarkably empty-looking). Go much further than yelling "fuck you" and storming out of the room, slamming the door so hard a picture fell off the wall.

That side of me scares me a bit, to be perfectly honest. It scares me that my mind conjures up such images — and it scares me that every time I feel like I've been pushed to feeling like that, it's because I've been bullied; it's been a situation that has been beyond my control.

There is a more recent example, too, that relates to my time at USgamer, and honestly I've always been hesitant to talk about it in specifics for a whole manner of reasons, but suffice to say that, too, was a very obvious instance of bullying. More than ten years later, I am still furious with the person responsible, and how they have never, ever seen any consequences for their actions — and likely never will. The most I can do is never, ever buy a book with his name on — and perhaps punch him in the balls if I am ever unfortunate enough to be in a room with him.

And this is to say nothing of the numerous minor incidents I have encountered over the years where a complete stranger will insult me and threaten me because of the way I look, and my weight. All of those are bullying, too. The most recent of those was just a couple of weeks ago.

As I say, the most frustrating thing about bullying is that, more often than not, there is no closure. There is no justice. And, if you've ever been a victim of it, that really sucks — because all you can do is pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and hope it never happens again. That this last incident, finally, will really be the last time you have to suffer.

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

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 494: Goddamn gacha

Recently, Square Enix announced that it was doing a new Dissidia Final Fantasy game. For a brief, blissful moment, I was hoping that we might actually have a proper new Dissidia, and not whatever that last thing on PS4 was, but no. Of course it's a fucking free-to-play gacha game. Of course it is.

I'm so sick of gacha games. I'm sick of them exploiting people, I'm sick of them being poorly designed games, I'm sick of them being the only peep we hear from once-beloved franchises, and I'm even sick of them leaning hard into the "sex sells" angle. And I say that as a card-carrying lover of anime tiddies.

The new Dissidia game supposedly has Final Fantasy characters brought to real-world Tokyo and has full Japanese voice acting. Great! Why isn't it a proper game? Because I'm sorry, another thing I'm sick of is people who scold you for "looking down" on gacha games "because they're successful".

Gacha games are shite. They're marginally less shite today than they once were, but they're still shite.

I'll give you a bit of context. Following the surprise and sudden closure of GamePro, I found myself working on a business-facing publication that looked at mobile and social games. Free-to-play games — both on mobile and, at the time, Facebook — were really starting to take off around that point, so I was paid a frankly impressive salary to suffer through playing them every day.

One that I remember specifically being encouraged to look at was Rage of Bahamut by Cygames. This, I was told, was part of a new trend for what was, at the time, known as "card battling" games. Great, I thought. I like Magic and Ascension and Dominion — this'll be a great fit for mobile.

Except Rage of Bahamut had about as much gameplay as a '90s webpage — and had an interface to match. Progressing through the game's plot literally involved nothing more than clicking the "Advance" button multiple times, watching your "Energy" bar decline with each step and your "Experience" bar increase concurrently. Occasionally you'd be thrown into "battle", during which the numerical values of the cards in your hand were added up and compared to your opponent's, and whoever had the bigger number won. There was absolutely no interactivity whatsoever — the sole "strategy" for the game, if you can call it that, was making those numbers as big as possible. And, of course, the most efficient way to do that was to pay money, which would guarantee you "rare" (higher value) cards.

Zoom forward a few years and you have games that are at least attempting to hide this formula somewhat, but they're all still, at their core, nothing but "make bigger number than opponents" games. Two of the most popular examples, Cygames' Granblue Fantasy and Aniplex's Fate/Grand Order, dress it up with fancy turn-based battles that look like they're from proper RPGs, but ultimately both are about just making sure you have valuable enough cards to overpower everything in your path.

The frustrating thing is that these games often have quite good, interesting stories to them, but the gameplay is so unimaginably tedious that I have absolutely no desire to play them whatsoever — and even if that wasn't the case, the utterly exploitative monetisation would do the trick for me.

Most of the gacha games in my experience provide various different "packs" of the premium currency required to draw new cards, characters or whatever, but pretty much every one has required that you spend at least twenty quid in order to get a worthwhile draw. The alternative is grinding, grinding, grinding through the tedious, shitty gameplay in the hopes of being given a scrap of premium currency to draw some rare cards once in a blue moon. Twenty quid can buy you multiple good games that you can just enjoy at your leisure from thereon!

And many of these games are flagrantly, transparently attempting to use quasi-erotic artwork as a means of extracting money from their player base. Azur Lane is one of the worst in this regard, with more recent competition from Nikke: Goddess of Victory, a game with more jiggling arses than I think I've ever seen, even in Senran Kagura. They'll offer a "limited banner" of some exceedingly attractive character in a skimpy outfit, and players will gullibly throw money at the game in the hopes of getting a PNG or a Live2D image of their waifu, and the cycle will repeat over, and over, and over again.

These games have no soul. These games have no value. And I wish they would go away. But after over 10 years of suffering their presence, it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere any time soon, with a significant number of companies now seemingly reliant on the obscene income they draw in (and the minimal expenses they almost certainly cost to run).

Mobile gaming is dead to me. And, apparently, so is Dissidia. At least I still have the two PSP games to enjoy.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 493: The breakneck pace of Final Fantasy IV

As one of several games I have on the go right now — for a bit of variety, like — I decided to start up Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster. I've played Final Fantasy IV I think twice before — and one of those was on PlayStation, so your sympathies are gratefully received, though that version at least isn't quite as bad as PS1 Final Fantasy VI — and remembered it being quite short, though I had forgotten quite how fast it moves.

I'm two hours in and already — apologies in advance if any of this is a spoiler, but the game came out in 1991 — the main character has committed a war crime, adopted an orphan child that he was directly responsible for orphaning, become separated from his best friend (who inevitably turns traitor), rescued his loved one from a deadly bout of Desert Fever by retrieving a valuable gem from a slobbering Antlion, rescued a prince from the ruins of his devastated castle and his broken heart, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to fend off an assault on another kingdom.

It moves so fast. I had forgotten how fast. I have played so many modern (relatively speaking) games that feature epic-length story sequences between the core "gameplay" sections that it almost feels rushed. I mean, hell, after two hours in a Persona game from 3 onwards, you're barely through the initial character introductions and you almost certainly haven't set foot in a dungeon yet.

This is both a strength and a weakness of Final Fantasy IV, looking at it with a 2025 pair of eyes. It's a strength because it means that there's never particularly long to wait before you're doing stuff again — exploring the world, clearing dungeons, fighting monsters, levelling up, buying new equipment — and that is quite a refreshing change from today's narrative-centric games that, while undoubtedly considerably more ambitious in their storytelling, sometimes do feel like they're getting a little bogged down. Not only that, but Final Fantasy IV is done and dusted in less than 20 hours, which makes it a veritable light novel by RPG standards.

However, it's also a weakness, because there are some sequences that were clearly intended to be quite significant narrative moments, but the way the game just whizzes through them makes them feel almost laughable.

I'll give you an example. Rydia, the girl that the protagonist, Cecil, rescues from a war crime he inadvertently committed at the behest of his king, is a Summoner in Final Fantasy Job terms. This means that not only can she summon big things to deal heavy damage, but she can also cast both white and black magic spells. When you first get her, she's an inexperienced kid at level 1, so she barely knows any spells, but a bit of levelling in the field will net her a few initial, useful spells. Except you'll notice one black magic spell is prominently missing: Fire.

Think about it for a moment and it's obvious why: because she lost her entire village, including her mother, in a fiery explosion, she is, of course, going to be hesitant to call upon the power of fire. This little bit of characterisation is initially delivered without the game drawing any attention to it whatsoever, but you can notice it early from a simple browse of the menu. Very cool. Ambitious for the time, even!

What is less cool is when the party finds their path up a mountain blocked by a big chunk of ice, and the other members, eventually getting Rydia to admit that she "hates fire", pretty much tell her to stop snivelling and get over it because they jolly well have a quest to accomplish. It's almost certainly not intended to come across that way — the other members are all "yay, you did it, I always believed in you" after she does successfully cast her first Fire spell, presumably with tears streaming down her face and the knowledge that this is probably going to need years of therapy to truly deal with — but with at least a couple of decades' worth of games that handle sensitive topics rather more delicately behind us, it does feel rather… blunt.

But, again, you have to remember that this was 1991, just a year after the SNES had come on the market, and Final Fantasy IV was on a cartridge that contained less than a megabyte of data in total. In fact, during development, the script had to be cut considerably to fit on its cartridge; lengthy exposition was something that developers simply couldn't afford to do back in these days, because every byte mattered, and text can potentially take up a lot of space if there's enough of it. As such, it's not altogether surprising that some sequences feel like they move a tad fast by modern standards — short of shipping on a larger capacity cartridge, which was presumably a decision that needed to be made relatively early in development, there were very real constraints on what Final Fantasy IV would be able to do.

Of course, Final Fantasy IV has been expanded on quite a bit in later remakes such as the polygonal 3DS version, the Game Boy Advance version and the PSP version; each of these had their own additions to the basic Final Fantasy IV formula.

But the Pixel Remaster; that's based on Final Fantasy IV as it originally existed, graphics and music aside, and thus you have the plot that speeds off over the horizon as you just think you're getting caught up on proceedings.

All this is no shade on Final Fantasy IV, of course; it's a game I like very much (though it's far from my favourite Final Fantasy) — I just found it interesting to revisit this after so many years and be reminded that at one time, RPGs moved a lot more quickly than they do now!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 492: Character progression

On this particular stint of post-holiday weight loss, I have thus far lost 13.4 pounds, which is as near as dammit to a stone. (I have to look up how many pounds are in a stone every time, because Imperial is stupid, but it's still the default way one weighs oneself here in the UK, despite us being metric in every other area of life.) Granted, on said holiday I put on a lot of weight, so this is pretty much putting me back to where I was, but at least I know that much is possible, and thus it must continue to be possible to lose more.

There's no secret this time around, no fad diets or artificial restrictions on what I'm eating: just simple, straightforward calorie counting. And it appears to be working! For now, at least. So long as I stick to my limits for the vast majority of the week, I can even have complete days off — such as my work trip to London, or yesterday, when Andie and I both just fancied a nice treat from the local bakery — and still lose weight. This is good!

It takes a little mental adjustment to recalibrate yourself to a calorie limit, particularly if you've been less than attentive to your daily intake, but once you're there, I find you can gradually start to intuit how much you can allow yourself per day. And, given that I'm a big lad and thus naturally burn a fair amount of calories just by existing, I have not, to date, felt like I'm having to "deprive" myself of anything. I can even enjoy multiple chocolate bars per day — so long as they're not, say, 750g Dairy Milk bars.

I say there's no secret; I guess the one thing I would say that I've… I don't know if learned is the right word, but I've certainly established it firmly in my mind at this point… is that it pays to understand the things you reach for when you fancy a snack or a little treat during the day. By ensuring that we always have reasonably low-calorie offerings in the house for when we both fancy such things, it means we are much less inclined to go to the shop and buy a big bag of Haribo or the aforementioned 750g Dairy Milk bar.

I had inadvertently trained my mind into thinking that something wasn't "satisfying" if you could consume it quickly, and that really doesn't have to be the case at all. Lidl do these fake Kinder bars on their "Mister Choc" brand that are small enough to be about 100 calories each, and even though you can devour them in three bites, they're enough to stave off cravings for quite a while. If you want to go even lower calorie, then "Skinny Whip" bars or own-brand equivalent (I think Lidl's are just called "Whipped") are about 76 calories, and pretty much as good as something like a Milky Way.

I've also pretty much switched entirely away from cans of pop to squash with carbonated mineral water. I have a thing, particularly with diet soda, that I don't really know how to describe — I get to a point where it feels like it will be undesirable to drink them, because it… not burns exactly, but doesn't feel nice going down. I find this is much more likely with diet cola drinks than diet fruity sodas (Fanta, fake Lilt etc) but there are definitely times when my body goes "no fizzy pop, no". At those times it is seemingly absolutely fine with some orange squash made with carbonated mineral water, so I've been drinking quite a lot of that. And that, in turn, has been helping me just drink more generally, which I think is helpful.

I feel a bit better, too. After the holiday I was feeling exhausted, achey and generally Not Good, and the reason was because I was heavier than I'd ever been. I still have a very long way to go before I am where I want to be — the long-term, often unattainable-feeling goal is to lose enough weight to finally get this damn hernia that I've been suffering with for a very long time treated — but right now, I am feeling more positive about all this than I have done for quite some time.

Hopefully I won't find myself reaching a plateau any time soon, because that is always the worst feeling, and involves having to completely rethink the habits you thought you had established… but that hasn't happened thus far over the course of the last month, so here's hoping that things continue in the correct direction for at least a little while yet.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 491: Some first impressions from Death end re;Quest Code Z

I am a big fan of Compile Heart's Death end re;Quest series. For the unfamiliar, it's a series of three (to date… with it looking like there's more on the way) narrative-centric console RPGs with strong horror themes, and involvement from some maestros of the genre like Makoto "Corpse Party" Kedouin on scenario duties and Kei "Mary Skelter" Nanameda on the art.

What I've found very interesting about Death end re;Quest to date is that all the games in the series have been very different from one another. Mechanically, the first two were quite similar, but tonally and thematically they were very different. The first game primarily involved an "if you die in the game you die for real" kind of MMO-gone-mad situation, while the second was based around horrible goings-on in a tiny European town that doesn't appear on any maps. As Compile Heart games, both of them also involved more than a touch of yuri to them — particularly in the case of the second one.

Death end re;Quest Code Z, meanwhile, changes up both the narrative setting and the game's core mechanical conceits. Narratively, I'm not far enough into the game to know exactly what the situation is, but it involves characters from both of the previous two games, many of whom didn't interact with one another directly in their original games — and, moreover, some characters who were very much dead in previous games, such as the father of the second game's protagonist, Mai — are alive in this one. I can't comment on that further as yet, but I'm interested to know more.

The most obvious difference between Death end re;Quest Code Z and its predecessors is that it's now a Mystery Dungeon-like. For those not familiar with such things, this is a Japanese take on the roguelike genre that typically (though not always) favours cutesy visuals; grid-based, turn-based movement and combat; a heavy degree of resource management; limited inventory space; and, of course, a series of increasingly deep, procedurally generated dungeons in which to hack, slash, explore, level up and loot.

Death end re;Quest Code Z mostly plays things relatively straight in this regard, with the exception of one thing: rather than an "energy" or "hunger" bar, the protagonist, Sayaka, has a sanity rating. This gradually declines as you explore, with various "milestones" on the gauge corresponding to her field of view contracting, the background audio becoming more distorted (or completely replaced) and, in the case of extremely low sanity, interface elements like the minimap being unusable and the likelihood of her harming herself going up considerably.

This is very much in keeping with the horror tone the series has always had, but it also means that the game has quite a "survival horror" feel to it as well. Since you're juggling your health, sanity and available items as you progress through each dungeon, you have to make some tough and interesting choices as you play — particularly if you're playing on the "Expert" mode (which I actually recommend in this case), where Sayaka's level is reset every time she leaves a dungeon, and she suffers notable losses in terms of inventory items and weapon power-ups if she's actually killed.

The other interesting thing relates to the series' titular "Death Ends". In prior games, Death Ends came about if you made bad choices during the storytelling sequences, and usually resulted in the protagonist and/or members of the core cast suffering a horrifying, gory death, described in excruciating detail. Towards the end of the first game — mild spoilers, I guess — one of the characters becomes aware of you, the player, and starts addressing you as "God of Death" in recognition of the number of times you have led the cast to a sticky end, and Death end re;Quest Code Z builds on this further by having the main protagonist, Sayaka, constantly aware of and communicating with you — even putting her trust in you.

There's some interesting conflict here, because Sayaka trusts you to lead her through the challenges ahead of her, and you need to successfully do so in order to progress through the story. But! And this is a big but: if you let her die, you can make her stronger. Because every time you see a unique Death End in Death end re;Quest Code Z, Sayaka gets a skill point that you can invest in passive boosts to her basic abilities and resistances, and even complete immunity to certain status effects. The more she dies, the stronger she gets and, presumably in theory, the easier the game gets.

But that places you, as her "Partner" (she very pointedly keeps referring to you as such) in a difficult position. Because in keeping with series tradition, every time Sayaka carks it, there's a lengthy narration of exactly how she dies, often delivered in something of a mocking tone. This is coupled with a gory (and often somewhat sexualised) event image depicting her dying yet again. Thus you are faced with a quandary: do you kill Sayaka a bunch in order to power her up? Do you deliberately lead her to her death multiple times in succession to score some easy skill points at the outset of the game? Or do you actually try and take care of her somewhat, knowing that in doing so you are leaving her as a somewhat sub-optimal character?

Death end re;Quest Code Z forces the player to interrogate their relationship with the death of their on-screen avatar — particularly one that is supposedly aware of them. Sayaka never remembers any of her deaths, but you know you caused them, and there's a helpful checklist of all 104 possible ways to die and the skill tree itself to remind you quite how many times you've seen her devoured, eviscerated, beaten to a bloody pulp, disintegrated, decapitated and any number of other nasty words you might care to mention. Undoubtedly the most "efficient" way to play is to repeatedly let Sayaka die in the first dungeon, but doing so is tedious — and thinking that should give you pause. You are repeatedly murdering someone, and it's boring. Are you that desensitised to violence that you can bring yourself to do that?

Some of you will be absolutely fine with it, I'm sure, and I'm not judging you for it. But after a few initial deaths in that first dungeon, I really started to hesitate and think "hang on a minute, this doesn't feel right at all". And I can't remember the last time a game made me feel quite like that about the protagonist, through my actions, being killed off.

This has made me determined to see how far it's possible to progress without killing Sayaka repeatedly. I've reached a point where I don't give a toss about PlayStation trophies any more, so I don't have the "pressure" from the two that related to getting all the Death Ends and unlocking all the skills weighing on me — and thus it really is up to my own feelings of morality about whether I want to buff up Sayaka by murdering her over and over again, or if I genuinely want to see her succeed, taking her shortcomings into account.

Thus far this is turning out to be one of Compile Heart's most interesting games. I'd expect nothing less from a series whose other two entries were also thoroughly fascinating. I'm intrigued to play more — and it certainly is the season for a bit of horror.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor

I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 488: Home ports deserve remembering too

I feel like I've talked about this before, but whatever. I feel like talking about it today, so talk about it I will.

In this age of being able to easily emulate the original arcade versions of games, I feel like one thing gets easily lost from the "preservation" aspect of retro rereleases on today's systems: home ports that are notably different from simple attempts to recreate the original arcade games.

I was reminded of this when watching the YouTuber Classic Gaming Quarterly playing Gauntlet for NES earlier. I legitimately had no idea that Gauntlet for NES is not, in fact, a straight port of the arcade game and is, instead, a completely different game. I did know that Gauntlet IV for the Mega Drive also pulls this stunt, but I did not know that this extended back to the NES version. And for my money, pretty much all the home ports of Gauntlet are much more fun than the quarter-munching arcade version — particularly if you're playing on emulation and thus have infinite credits and therefore infinite health.

There are others, too. The Mega Drive port of Toaplan's Slap Fight features an entirely new game mode. The NES versions of the Double Dragon games are completely different to their arcade counterparts. And I'm sure there are countless others — to say nothing of the "home-exclusive sequels" we saw to numerous arcade games, often put together by western developers who didn't quite get what made the Japanese originals so good. (That said, I will happily go to bat for OutRun 2019.)

A few publishers are cottoning on to the fact that there is value in preserving multiple versions of classic games, including both the arcade originals and popular home ports, but it's by no means the norm. The reasons are likely due to licensing complications — in many cases, while the rights to the original arcade game remain with the original creators (or a company that has succeeded the original creators and/or bought the rights), home ports were developed by different teams, meaning that the rights would, I assume (IANAL), be split between the original creators of the arcade game and whoever made the port. This is not a problem when those are one and the same — like the Double Dragon games, for example — but there are plenty of situations where the home versions of a game were made by a completely different company, or even an individual at times.

The takeaway I have from all this is something that I've thought for a while: in many cases, I actually prefer playing the home conversions of games to the original arcade versions, even when the arcade version is obviously technologically superior. There are several reasons for this: firstly, those home conversions are often a good example of what their host platforms are (and are not) capable of. Secondly, since home ports are not obliged to keep people feeding coins into a machine, they are often balanced much better than their arcade counterparts. And this, in turn, makes them considerably more enjoyable to play.

Because there absolutely are arcade games out there that take "quarter-munching" way too far. I adore the beat 'em up genre, for example, but I'd much rather play Streets of Rage 2 than the arcade version of Final Fight, simply because Streets of Rage 2 is balanced much more fairly — and the beat 'em up genre appears particularly prone to this issue. The same is true for any sort of competitive game with a "1P vs COM" mode, be it a fighting game or a puzzle game. In their arcade incarnations, these tend to become absolutely impossible after just one or two levels, whereas in their home incarnations, they tend to save their biggest bullshit for their final challenges. Still annoying at times, yes — particularly in puzzle games, where final bosses tend to have superhuman capabilities as well as, more often than not, ways to "cheat" — but a little less galling than only being able to get through two or three stages before having to wipe your score and "Continue?"

Thankfully, while official licensors are seemingly hesitant to let those often flawed ports back out into the wild when one can just emulate the arcade version on a veritable toaster of a machine these days, one can make use of alternative means to enjoy them through software emulation or FPGA solutions. And I would encourage everyone to do so, because while everyone will inevitably have a preference as to which version of something is "best", it's worth exploring those versions rather than simply assuming the most technologically advanced version is automatically the most enjoyable.

Now, I think I might give Gauntlet on the NES a bit of a go for myself!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 487: Deeanddee

One of my biggest regrets — all right, probably not biggest, but one I find myself thinking about occasionally — is not getting more into Dungeons & Dragons when I was younger.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I was interested — at various points I have owned Player's Handbooks, Monster Manuals and Dungeon Master's Guides for at least three generations of the game — but outside of a few isolated opportunities, I never really had much of a chance to play it. And I understand that these days, at least partly due to Fifth Edition and/or Wizards of the Coast's possible mismanagement of the franchise, interest in the system is, on the whole, waning.

That's not to say there are no people playing tabletop role-playing games out there, of course. And I'm sure someone, even now, is preparing to type an epic comment telling me how much better their roleplaying system of choice is. I'm sure it is. But I will always have a particular soft spot for Dungeons & Dragons.

Why? The video games, of course. I must confess, I haven't played many of them, and even less of them to completion — I think Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and its first expansion Shadows of Undrentide are the only ones I've actually beaten — but I like the ruleset(s), I understand the ruleset(s) and I often find myself wondering what it would have been like to get involved in a lengthy campaign.

I played a little bit at university as part of the Games Society. I had a thief character named Singol Nithryan, and he was constantly robbing my friend Tim, whose arrogant arse of a fighter was constantly asking for it with his behaviour. I don't remember a ton about the adventures we went on, but I do recall it being a lot of fun sitting there in the Student Union coffee bar while the Society took it over for a few hours, losing ourselves in our imaginations and the rolls of a bagful of dice.

"It's never too late," of course, and there are probably online groups and solutions also. But as an autistic adult with fairly severe social anxiety, self-esteem and body image issues, the prospect of finding a suitable group is a fairly daunting one. I don't even know where to begin, to be perfectly honest.

I'll tell you what I miss, and that is Neverwinter Connections, a website designed for aspiring roleplayers to get together with fellow enthusiasts of Neverwinter Nights and make use of that game's astoundingly good (and never since recreated) multiplayer mode, in which one player could take on the role of the Dungeon Master, controlling NPCs and monsters rather than leaving it all up to the game's AI. I have exceedingly fond memories of playing the sorcerer Jay Wrekin (and his pixie familiar Sianie, whom I was delighted to discover it was possible to "possess" and speak as during multiplayer) with several thoroughly lovely people that I miss quite a bit.

Ah well. One day I might get the chance to roll a THAC0 again. Yes, I know they don't do THAC0 any more (I don't think?), but Second Edition will always be special.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 486: Investing in retro the right way

I've talked about this once or twice before, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. I firmly believe that we've reached a point in time where collecting retro games is impractical, undesirable and inconvenient.

Don't get me wrong; there will always be an appeal to having original hardware and original media, and I don't begrudge anyone their choice to build up a substantial retro collection. I also think it's a bit sad that we've reached the stage we're at now. But with the absurd, exploitative prices that are being charged for both systems and media today — coupled with the fact that there's no real guarantee either of those things will actually work when you get them — I am very much a convert to the school of thought that says you're better off spending the money you would have spent on one copy of Rule of Rose for the PlayStation 2 on ways to get a "modern retro" setup up and running.

There are many ways you can do this. The absolute simplest way is to buy retro rereleases, either on modern platforms that you happen to own, or with specialist devices such as mini consoles or, of course, the Evercade. There are many benefits to these modern rereleases, such as bugfixes of games that shipped in a dodgy state back in the day, modern convenience features such as save states, rewind functions and in-game reference material, plus the fact they're generally a whole lot cheaper than buying the original releases and still fun to collect. If you were to buy all the games on the recently released NEOGEO Arcade 1 cartridge for Evercade in their original format, you'd be talking four figures. The cart is twenty quid. Do, as Atari once said, the math.

The only downside to officially licensed rereleases is that those licenses are sometimes hard to come by — or even completely impossible. Don't expect to see too many rereleases of racing games with licensed cars or licensed soundtracks, for example. Don't expect to see movie licenses making a return, either. But you might be surprised what licensors are still willing to play ball with, as the Evercade library to date shows.

Another relatively straightforward way is to devote a PC or similar device (like a Raspberry Pi, Steam Deck or Chinese gaming handheld) to it and install a suitable suite of emulators and organisation tools.

For Windows PCs that you also want to do other things, I would recommend Launchbox (even if they took to using odious AI images in their promotional emails of late), as this is not only a good means of organising all the games you might want to play, it also automatically retrieves additional information like box art, descriptions and even PDF copies of manuals where possible. The paid version also has a "Big Box" mode where the interface is designed to be used with a controller on a TV.

For other devices that are going to be dedicated to retro gaming, I highly recommend Batocera, which is a Linux distribution, but don't run away scared. It's all preconfigured to work in a similar fashion to something like Launchbox, and is pretty straightforward to get games up and running in. It's also highly customisable, so you can make the whole thing look and feel how you want it to.

The relative "luxury option", particularly if you still have a CRT knocking around that you want to use for the authentic look and feel, is MiSTer. As I've alluded to in a few posts recently, the absolute easiest way to get started with this is with a prebuilt device like the Multisystem 2 (my device of choice) or the upcoming SuperStation One. Alternatively, you can built your own — that's nowhere near as scary as it sounds, and it allows you a tad more customisability, though with the pricing of the Multisystem 2 and SuperStation One it's actually cheaper to buy one of those prebuilt options in a lot of cases — though note you will still need to provide accessories and storage.

If you're lucky enough to still have working classic hardware around, the first thing I recommend you do is investing in a modern power supply for them. My Mega Drive was prone to rolling noise on the screen with its original power supply, but replacing it gave a completely stable, flicker-free picture.

Once you've done that, invest in an EverDrive. Cheaper flashcart options exist, but EverDrives are premium products that support pretty much everything you might want to play on a piece of classic hardware. Not only that, in the case of systems that had add-ons, they can simulate the presence of the add-on, too — for example, the Mega EverDrive Pro can run Mega CD games.

For classic home computers, flashcarts are also available, or there are also plenty of media emulators you can use to "trick" the computer into believing it's using a real floppy drive or tape deck. For the Atari 8-bit, for example, I enjoyed using the SDrive-MAX device, which allows you to load executable files, disk images and tape images from an SD card. Similar devices are available for most classic computer platforms.

I won't lie; it's easy to spend a few hundred quid on this stuff — possibly even over a thousand. But once you're done, you have a great setup for what is, after all, the important bit of being interested in retro games: actually playing the games. And the kit you have will play pretty much anything without you having to pay some rando on eBay a three-figure sum just to play one game.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.