#oneaday Day 570: Some stuff I've written this year - MoeGamer edition (Part 1)

I've written a lot of stuff this year! I write a lot of stuff every year, much of it absolute nonsense, but I thought with the end of the year coming up, I'd highlight some bits and pieces that you might have missed, and which I was rather pleased with for one reason or another. The following lists will not include anything from this specific blog — you can review the archives yourself, after all — but instead encompass pieces from both my gaming site, MoeGamer, and the official Evercade blog.

In rough chronological order, then, I present a chunk of my MoeGamer output for the year, with more to follow tomorrow. The following are presented as embedded article excerpts; simply click through on them to read the full thing.

Fire Emblem newbie plays Fire Emblem Engage

Fire Emblem newbie plays Fire Emblem Engage

The excerpt says most of it: I am bad at strategy games, but I've always been interested in Fire Emblem, so I decided to give myself a gentle introduction by playing Fire Emblem Engage on Normal difficulty with permadeath turned off. And I had a lovely time, chronicled in this MoeGamer piece.

Revisiting Xenoblade Chronicles

With Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition releasing this year, I decided I wanted to refresh my memory on the very first game in the series, since the last time I played it was on Wii, and I was interested to try out the Switch-based Definitive Edition version. I wrote about my experiences and observations over the course of several pieces on MoeGamer, linked in the following extracts:

Revisiting Xenoblade Chronicles: the balance of X and Y

Xenoblade Chronicles as the successor to the classic "world RPG" format

Xenoblade Chronicles and the fear of the Other

Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Single-player arcade racing isn't dead, and should never have been assumed to be

Tokyo Xtreme Racer: single-player arcade racing isn't dead, and should never have been assumed to be

Hopefully self-explanatory. I am looking forward to the eventual full release of this game, as the Early Access version on Steam was delightful. I write a bit about that version in the above piece.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow: Gothic horror and tragedy done right

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow: Gothic horror and tragedy done right

I finally got around to playing the well-regarded point-and-click adventure The Excavation of Hob's Barrow this year, and I was very taken with it. I was particularly enamoured with how it is an interactive take on the Gothic literature tradition, and an exploration of Classical tragedy in the video games space.

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance and the bleaker side of Japanese life

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance and the bleaker side of Japanese life

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance is a really interesting adventure game developed by a team with a western background that has been living in Japan for some time. As such, it's unmistakably "anime" in style, but also provides the sort of perspective only an outsider to the culture can provide. The story is not only a compelling horror narrative, it's also a scathing takedown of the seedier aspects of Japanese culture and nightlife — but simultaneously respectful to the country's overall culture and sensibilities.

Expelled! – Coming for to carry you home

EXPELLED! – coming for to carry you home

Inkle's EXPELLED! is an excellent text adventure with beautiful presentation and a spectacular amount of player agency. Casting you in the role of a 1920s schoolgirl, the game challenges you to get out of trouble for a crime you may or may not have actually committed, using a quasi-roguelite structure that enables you to discover more information with each playthrough. Fiercely feminist, intensely thoughtful and immensely amusing throughout, EXPELLED! is one of the best games I played this year, and deserves your respect.

Homebody: the horror in one's own head

Homebody: the horror in one's own head

One of the most fascinating horror games I've ever played, Homebody is a combat-free, puzzle-centric game that sensitively explores matters of social anxiety, agoraphobia, isolation, obsessive-compulsive tendencies and lingering guilt. I played this as a "filler" game between big releases of the year, but it came out as one of my favourite things I played this year.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition

I'd been waiting for the return of this underappreciated, wonderful RPG for a very long time, and I was delighted by what the Switch Definitive Edition ended up being. Not only did it refine elements of the original that were a little tricky, it also added a new, more conclusive ending that, while divisive, worked well as a means of wrapping the whole thing up. I wrote several pieces about this game:

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Introduction

Xenoblade Chronicles X: the right way to do an open world game

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Battling for a new home

The Last Waltz showcases dancesport to educate and inspire

The Last Waltz showcases dancesport to educate and inspire

My pal Matt from Digitally Downloaded has been working on a visual novel for some time now, and has ploughed a lot of his own effort and money into making it as good as he wants it to be. I played through a demo version of the game's opening and penned some thoughts on the experience here. (You can wishlist the game on Steam here!)

I, Robot: Minter's still got it

I, Robot: Minter's still got it

If ever there was going to be someone to reimagine one of Atari's weirdest games, it would have to be Jeff Minter, and the man did us proud.

I'm not sure how I feel about Blue Prince

I'm not sure how I feel about Blue Prince

I wrote this while I was still playing Blue Prince. I don't abandon many games once I've started them, but this ended up being one of them. I am now sure how I feel about Blue Prince: I do not like it at all, for most of the reasons outlined in this piece. (This does not mean I think Blue Prince is bad! I am glad so many people got so much out of it. I just did not enjoy it at all.)

Initial thoughts on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from a devoted "JRPG" player

Initial thoughts on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from a devoted "JRPG" player

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is probably my personal Game of the Year, with the caveat that they get a big ol' slap on the wrist for using generative AI at any point in their creative process. "It was just a placeholder!" Yeah, sure. Long before this little kerfuffle, though, I was skeptical about whether this game that had come out of nowhere was actually a big deal, given that turn-based RPGs have been nowhere near as dead as some people think for quite a long time now.

The Sword of Hope: Adventure and RPG, together again

The Sword of Hope: Adventure and RPG, together again

Nintendo added an obscure Game Boy game to the Nintendo Switch Online lineup this year, and I found it thoroughly interesting. So I wrote about it.

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer and the art of pacing an investigative adventure

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer and the art of pacing an investigative adventure

I really enjoyed the first Kathy Rain, and the second one is even better.

I finally played Undertale

I finally played Undertale

Well, I did. And I enjoyed it!

Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer – the new best way to enjoy a classic?

Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer – the new best way to play a classic?

Hamster kicked off its new Arcade Archives 2 range with a port of the arcade version of Ridge Racer, marking the series' first "new"(ish) release for quite some time.

Raiden Nova: it's like the PS2 never left

Raiden Nova: it's like the PS2 never left

(Complimentary.)

My thoughts on Switch 2 so far

My thoughts on Switch 2 so far

My thoughts haven't changed a lot from here. 90% of the time, my Switch 2 is a slightly better Switch — but I have enjoyed the exclusives I've played on it this year, including Donkey Kong Bananza, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and Kirby Air Riders. It's perhaps telling that at the end of the system's first year on the market, I only have four physical games, though.

The Death end re;Quest Code Z limited edition is enormous

The Death end re;Quest Code Z limited edition is enormous

Well, it is.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – a delightful remake of a lovely game

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – a delightful remake of a lovely game

One of my favourite Zelda games got a remake a couple of years back, and it turns out the remake is just as delightful as the original. (Plus it runs great on Switch 2!)

Whew, that's more than I thought it was. Let's pick up where we left off tomorrow — that lot should keep you busy for a while, after all!

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

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#oneaday Day 569: Returned to Castle Wolfenstein

I have crossed something off my gaming To-Do list! Yes, I have beaten Return to Castle Wolfenstein, kicking off my exploration of The Bits of the Wolfenstein Series That Aren't Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. I wrote about my experiences over on MoeGamer if you'd care to check it out. I appreciate that doing one whole click is challenging and exhausting, so I will be very grateful if you successfully accomplish that.

Anyway, to summarise, I had a mostly good time with Return to Castle Wolfenstein. You can tell it's over 20 years old in numerous ways — both good and bad — but I had a mostly good time with it. I'm looking forward to investigating the rest of the series; I know the Machine Games stuff from more recent years is very well regarded for the most part, but I'm perhaps most intrigued by the Xbox 360 entry in the series, which doesn't seem to get talked about all that much. There may well be a reason for that — or it may just be that it sort of fell by the wayside a bit.

As you can see, I'm still enjoying my drawing tablet and Clip Studio Paint. Clip Studio Paint, I have discovered, has a strange quirk where it won't start unless you tell it to run in Windows 8 compatibility mode, but aside from that it seems to work great with my tablet, and it's a lot of fun to use. I've barely scratched the surface of it thus far, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with it a bit over the coming days, weeks, months, years. I can't promise an overly elaborate drawing every day, but there will be, at the very least, a stickman doodle drawn by hand rather than by mouse.

I have bought a copy of the new HeroQuest base set, First Light, and hopefully we're going to be putting that through its paces sometime soon. I'm interested to try this, as although it lacks some of the fancier features of the "big" base set (which is still available, and which I still might pick up a copy of) it has some notable new features, such as a double-sided board for variety in map layout, plus a unique series of 10 quests that are different from the standard ones included in the regular base set. For the unfamiliar, modern HeroQuest is a recreation of the MB Games version from the late '80s, but with all the Warhammer references removed, and with the Evil Wizard player being named "Zargon" instead of "Morcar". I believe this latter change is to bring the game in line worldwide, as the North American version of the late '80s version used "Zargon" as the Evil Wizard's name. He'll always be Morcar to me.

Modern HeroQuest has a whole bunch of expansions available, too, which is exciting. I'm going to resist splurging all my money on them immediately, but I'm hoping our prospective players will enjoy the game sufficiently to want to take on a reasonably lengthy campaign of quests — at the very least, the 10 from the base game, and hopefully onwards into an expansion or two. We shall see, though. As anyone who has attempted to run an ongoing game of something will know, these projects often start with good intentions but run out of steam unless someone steps up and keeps things running. I will likely be the one to do that in this instance, as I have been wanting people to play HeroQuest with regularly since… well, since the late '80s.

All right, that's about everything for today. It's been a nice quiet one at home for us today. We're out of food in the house and we've both been resisting going out in the cold to get something to eat, but we're going to have to do that eventually. In fact, I might go and do that now, because I'm getting a bit hungry and Andie is busily playing Final Fantasy XIV with her friends.

Food!

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#oneaday Day 568: Doodling is fun

I'm going to make no attempt to convince you that my doodlings are in any way "good", because I know that I have precisely zero technique and don't do things "properly", but man, doodling is fun! I just spent a little while fiddling around with Clip Studio Paint (which I bought a copy of, because if I've got a tablet I might as well use some good software with it) and that resulted in the above nonsense. There wasn't any real thought behind it other than an experiment with how to bring the cartoonish representation of me into a slightly more "detailed" space than the stickmen I've been drawing up until now.

Don't get me wrong, I love stickmen and I doubt I will be abandoning them completely, but when one has better drawing tools at one's disposal, one inevitably feels like one should be doing a little "more" with them. And so we have the above.

With the above images, I was channelling some of my past cartoon-drawing experience — specifically that of my time in secondary school, doodling with my friend Ed in our "rough books". The styles I've experimented with over the years have a few influences, but one I keep coming back to is inspired to a certain degree by Jim Davis' work on Garfield — particularly in the area of the eyes. I've always liked Garfield-style eyes as two slightly "protruding" spheres on a character's face; it's not at all realistic, but it can be immensely expressive, which is why I think I've always been rather fond of it as a style.

The uncoloured top-right doodle in the above is somewhat akin to how Ed and I drew our shared "Edlock Holmes and Watson" cartoon strips when we weren't doing them as stickmen (which, eventually, we adopted as the "primary" style) — big noses, eyes inspired a bit by Sonic the Hedgehog's big "mono-eye with a perpetual frown. Fiddling around with that style today, I feel a bit less fond of it than the other approaches: the aforementioned "Garfield-style", and an adaptation of what I was doing with the stickmen, with simple lines for eyes.

One thing I've discovered with Clip Studio Paint that I'm quite fond of is colouring the images in! Using layers, you can leave your line art "on top" and paint behind it, and that, it turns out, is immensely satisfying to do. All of the above are coloured by hand using a paintbrush tool rather than a flood fill, and I really enjoyed doing that for some reason. Given the output of the tool is rather "solid" you probably can't see much in the way of "brush strokes", but I feel that colouring things in that way introduces just enough in the way of human imperfections to give it a bit more of a personal touch.

One thing I really like about drawing with a tablet on the computer is the smoothness of the lines it produces. There's still some "humanity" in there due to things like variances in pen pressure and suchlike, but there's a pleasing smoothness to lines drawn as one continuous motion that is hard to recreate even using real materials. You can't do that with a mouse, either — not even a fancy-pants high-DPI model — and, for me, it's one of the ways that computer art strikes a nice balance between the physical and digital spaces; a real way that the medium makes itself stand out as something unique, rather than an attempt to recreate something that already exists.

I'm looking forward to experimenting a bit more with this drawing tablet, and I'm going to try and scribble something as a companion piece to each post each day, just like I've been doing up until now with the stickmen. As I say, I can't promise that some days won't still have stickmen — I know they have their fans, and I still like them myself — but I also want to experiment with pushing myself a little more, and perhaps developing a bit of a style that I can absolutely call "my own".

Also the sassy gal in the bottom left is cute, no? She will definitely be making more appearances.

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#oneaday Day 567: I got a tablet

I got a drawing tablet for Christmas. It's something I've always wanted to experiment with a bit, but the price on previous occasions I've looked always felt a bit prohibitive for something I don't know if I'll stick with — but in more recent years, these things seem to have become quite a bit more affordable, so I didn't feel too bad sticking one on my wishlist.

As such, you can expect the stupid drawings on this blog to take on a certain… different quality from what they have been in the past. I am making no promises whatsoever that they will be better, but at least now they will be drawn by hand with a pen rather than scrawled using a mouse that isn't really fit for the job.

Drawing is something I used to love doing when I was a kid. I have particularly fond memories of being at my Nan and Grandad's house, armed with nothing but a pad of paper and some pencils, and that would keep me occupied for hours at a time. Sometimes I would draw things from my own imagination; at others I would attempt to recreate things I had seen myself elsewhere. I recall one of my best pieces of work being a recreation of Asterix from the famous comic book series; that was in full colour and everything and, of course, my grandparents were good enough to proudly display it on their fridge.

Doodling was a big part of my time at school also. I've talked on numerous occasions about the "Rough Books" my friend Ed and I had, and these were inevitably filled with silly cartoon strips, fake adverts and doodles of our favourite characters that we had created. On more than one occasion our predilection for doodling got us into a bit of trouble, but I think most teachers knew that it was ultimately fairly harmless compared to what some of the other kids got up to.

A tablet is half of the equation when you're talking about digital art. The other half is the software you use. Up until now, the free and excellent Paint.net has always been my tool of choice, but I feel like if I want to do a bit more with this thing, it might be worth looking at some other tools. I know Clip Studio Paint is quite well-regarded, so I may have to give the free trial version of that a bit of a go and see how I get on. I also have access to Photoshop via work, but modern Photoshop has so much shit going on in its interface that I find it borderline indecipherable compared to the CS2 and CS3 versions I'm mostly accustomed to, so I'd rather not get too involved in that.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to having a play around. And you will hopefully excuse the inevitably variable quality of the illustrations you will see on these pages as I get to grips with my new toy!

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#oneaday Day 566: Merry Christmas

Just a short one for today, as it's Christmas and I'm very tired indeed, plus we have things to do tomorrow!

A very Merry Christmas to anyone reading this. It's been a pleasantly quiet one here on Davison mountain, as we've just had the immediate family together for the first time in quite a while, particularly after some have had a bit of a turbulent year, to say the least.

Everyone got a nice selection of presents. I got some books, a nice Samsung smartwatch/fitness tracker thing and some other bits and pieces. I bought Andie a Soda Stream, as I thought it would be fun and we use quite a lot of sparkling water generally anyway.

Tomorrow we are attending a "handfasting" ceremony for my brother and his partner — not something I'm familiar with, but it sounds like a nice little event for close family. After that, it's the long drive home to reunite with the cats, who have been having to fend for themselves (with the food and water we left for them, obviously!) since Christmas Eve.

Anyway, I'm pretty wiped out so it's time to sleep. I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas if at all possible, and that you at the very least get some nice time off for the end of the year.

#oneaday Day 565: It's almost Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 564: The lost art of playing together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Twinkle Star Sprites

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

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

9. Rohga: Armor Force

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

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

8. Atic Atac

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

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

7. Murtop

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

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

6. Super Gridrunner

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

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

5. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

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

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

4. Tazz-Mania

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

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

3. MegaMania

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

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

2. Metal Slug

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

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

1. Roguecraft DX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manta Sleep.

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#oneaday Day 561: A world of misinformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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