#oneaday Day 325: It's technically my birthday

It is, as the headline says, technically my birthday, but only because it has passed midnight due to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33-related reasons. I will celebrate my "official" birthday with tomorrow's post.

I spent most of today making some videos. I haven't made any for a few weeks, and I wanted to get back into things, so I picked out a few favourites from the Atari ST back catalogue to cover. Expect videos on Star Fleet I: The War Begins!, Continental Circus and Total Eclipse very soon — all three are games that are quite dear to me for one reason or another, so I'm happy I've finally made some time to play through them and provide some commentary.

This was the first recording session in the "new" study, too, and things went well. Not that there was any reason they shouldn't, mind, since the actual layout of the study hasn't really changed, just the decor. I also have a lot more stuff "put away" when I'm not using it now, too, so it's not quite as chaotic. The tidiness is rather nice; I should try my best to keep it that way. I have succeeded thus far.

The trouble with mess is once you create a little bit of it, it then inevitably spreads to cover all available surfaces. Leave a coffee cup on the side for a day or two and more will join it. Leave wires dangling everywhere and you'll eventually reach the conclusion that "ah, it's fine" and add more wires. Leave books and magazines out rather than on the shelf, and more will gradually pile up atop them "just so you know where they are". Chaos, inevitably, ensues when all of these things happen at the same time.

I do wonder sometimes why it's so hard to keep things tidy. I remember often being told as a young'un that I should tidy my room, and I often found it a bit challenging to keep my student houses under control. I suspect at least some of it is down to autism/ADHD-adjacent considerations, as I know that some other folks who deal with these mental health issues also have similar tidiness problems.

The one thing I console myself with, even when the house is an absolute pigsty, though, is that I've never got into the "hoarder" state one person I used to know had their house in. One time we went to visit them, and I'd never been in there before. I was genuinely shocked to find a house like something off a reality TV programme: literally no floor visible underneath all the crap that was everywhere. And the whole house was like it. I didn't say anything, because it's impolite to and there are almost certainly private, personal extenuating circumstances for when a living situation gets to that state.

But I've always used that as a sort of benchmark. As long as things don't get that bad, a bit of tidying up — with a bit of moaning and complaining along the way as required — it's fine. And nowhere I've lived has ended up in that state just yet, thankfully.

Anyway, that was a stream-of-consciousness ramble of the kind you only get at 1am. Time for bed. Then I can wake up and officially be a year older. G'night!

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 324: A quiet weekend

First things first: I wrote about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 over on MoeGamer, so go give that a look if you've been curious about this game and want to hear about it from my particular perspective. I have been playing this game for most of the weekend, so it's fair to say that I like it very much indeed.

As much as I enjoy having eclectic tastes and celebrating the overlooked and underappreciated games of the world, it is nice to be able to be part of "the big conversation" once in a while. For various reasons, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has seemingly been hitting the right notes with many different types of player, which is a good thing. I hope it 1) does well and 2) inspires other developers to do something like it. Because I'm all for good RPGs that aren't The Elder Fucking Scrolls making a mainstream comeback.

Anyway, aside from that, I've got the next three days off from work because I took them off. It's my birthday on Tuesday and I'm buggered if I'm going to work on my birthday. And the days surrounding it.

I've definitely written about this before, but I'm of the firm belief that one's birthday is absolutely sacrosanct. One should never have to suffer anything "bad" on their birthday, and one should absolutely not have to work on their birthday. The last "big corporate" job I had at Garmin allowed you two extra days off per year: once for your birthday, and once for your anniversary of starting your job there. I wish that was standard practice; it was a very nice thing for them to do, and certainly a far cry from the shitty way other corporate jobs I've worked treated their employees.

I don't think we're doing anything particularly exciting or elaborate for my birthday. I suspect we'll get a nice dinner delivered from somewhere and I will drop some hints to Andie that I would like a cake of some description. I may be coming up on 44 years old, but the Inner Child is still very much present and correct, as if you needed that spelling out for you.

Ideally it would be nice to see some other folks and have a proper celebration with cake, presents and video games, but honestly, I've kind of stopped bothering trying to get people to come and see me. There have been so many excuses on so many separate occasions that I just can't be arsed right now. I know that's probably selfish and self-absorbed and other things beginning with "self", but really, there's only so many times one can take resistance and rejection before one just thinks "fuck it" and resigns oneself to a life of loneliness. At least with my wife and my cats I am not completely alone, and I am sure I will hear from my family on my birthday, too.

But anyway. The weekend is coming to a close and I probably shouldn't blast Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's soundtrack at high volume for too much longer, if only because my wife has to go to bed and get up for work tomorrow morning. But maybe just an hour or two more…

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#oneaday Day 323: Bing biddly bing bong bingy bong boooo

Regular readers will recall I started rewatching Friends a while back. I'm up to the fifth season out of ten as of the time of writing, and I'm really enjoying it.

The "culture shock" of watching it for the first time in more than ten years has mostly dissipated now, and the fact that no-one is ever seen fiddling with a mobile phone, looking things up on the Internet or experiencing life entirely through their camera lens feels pretty much natural now. Stop to think about it, and it's still clear that the world has changed a lot — mostly for the worse, I'd say, unfortunately — but after a while, Friends has, for me, shown that it has that magical "drawing you in" nature that means it doesn't matter that it's dated in some ways.

Friends was never really about a specific time period, anyway. Sure, it acts quite nicely as a snapshot of the late '90s and early (pre-smartphone) '00s now, but I'm not sure it was ever intended to be that. Instead, it was a show that was always about the people: specifically, it was about the concept of found family, and how the group of people you chose to surround yourself with was just as important as — or in some cases, more important than — those you were related to by blood.

I must admit to a certain melancholy about viewing Friends in this light, because for all the wonderful conveniences and whatnot we have today, I miss just… hanging out with friends. I miss everything from walking a couple of miles into town during a free period of sixth form in order to get peer pressured into buying a new N64 or PlayStation game. I miss skipping lectures to go play Perfect Dark. I miss Board Game and Curry Night being a regular thing. In short, I very much miss having that "found family", because in 2025… it just doesn't feel like it's there any more, for a whole manner of reasons, not just technology-related.

But at the same time this is why I find an occasional rewatch of something pleasantly familiar like Friends to be extremely comforting. I may not literally be there with the main cast — and I wasn't back at the time, either — but the nice thing about the show is how it makes you feel included. You see the ups and downs of each of the main cast's lives; you see the little in-jokes they have with one another and you understand where they came from, because you were there when they were first coined. And you root for them; even seeing what colossal dildos they all are at various points in the series — particularly both Ross and Rachel — you cannot help but root for them and wish them happiness.

And the nice thing is, you know they get that happiness, because it's that kind of show. Even if you've never seen the show all the way to the end, you almost certainly know what at least some of the main "resolutions" are going to be. Arguably it's only really Joey who is left without a real sense of wrapping things up neatly — and his spin-off series didn't really fix that either, though I must confess I haven't seen it — but even so, one gets the feeling he's probably going to be all right.

It's a bit sad how many of the Friends cast are no longer with us. Matthew Perry was, of course, a tragic loss a couple of years back, and I was sad to learn recently that James Michael Tyler, who played the recurring coffee house barista Gunther, passed away in 2021. Add this to the fact that several people from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I watched all the way through a while back, are also no longer of this world, and it's a little bit sobering. At least they all have a wonderful legacy to leave behind.

This got a little more morbid than intended, but whatchagonnado. Friends is still a wonderful thing, and I am really enjoying my rewatch of it. There's nothing quite like returning to the media you loved in your formative years to bring a teensy bit of comfort to the bleakness of modern existence. If you haven't done it for a while, I highly recommend it.

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#oneaday Day 322: The Expedition

Hello. It's after 1am and I haven't written anything, I need a bath (that can wait until tomorrow) and I'm quite tired. So this will probably be a short one. I did want to acknowledge something, though, which is that I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this evening, and it's real good.

I was a little skeptical about it after feeling a bit burnt by the Blue Prince situation, but this time around it's just flat-out a good game, not "a good game if you have the right kind of brain and 150 hours to plough into it".

I will write more about it on MoeGamer anon, but I did want to acknowledge that my first impressions are very good indeed, and that it has a very distinctive atmosphere about it. I'm getting quite strong Nier vibes from it in terms of its rather melancholy atmosphere — indeed, my wife walked in at one point and asked if it was another Taro Yoko joint. I explained that no, it's French, but I can completely see why she would think that just from overhearing the music.

Oh man, the music. One of the most important things to get right in a dramatic RPG, and boy did they get it bang on in this game. Sweeping orchestral pieces, triumphant choirs, lonely soloists, tinkling pianos, it's all there, and it all hits one right in the Feels.

I was a little concerned about coming to a "J-style" RPG that everyone was saying was the best thing ever when chances are the last "JRPG" they played was Persona 5; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has been consistently engaging with this type of game for the last 20 years, while many other folks haven't for various reasons. And I think it's still going to be interesting, but so far my impressions are that no, this isn't just "good if you haven't played an RPG in the last 20 years", it's a good RPG.

There's Nier, there's Final Fantasy, there's even bits of Souls in Expedition 33's DNA, and it all works together in a thoroughly interesting fashion. But, like I say, it's after 1am and I really should probably go to bed. I will write more about this game — much more — over on MoeGamer very soon. But for now, I bid you good night!

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#oneaday Day 321: My Switch 2 concerns

I still have my preorder in for a Nintendo Switch 2 and I'm looking forward to having a play with it. But I am quite concerned about some things that seem to be cropping up in these initial pre-launch months.

Chief among these is the "Game Key Card" thing. For the unfamiliar, this is effectively a replacement for the "code-in-a-box" nonsense some publishers pulled with Switch games, where you'd buy a "physical release" and get nothing more than a box with a voucher for the digital version of the game in it. The box was then completely useless because there was nothing to put in it. The sole justification for this, one might argue, is that it allows "digital" games to be given as gifts. But only the ones that have actually had this treatment, of course.

Game Key Cards is… possibly a step forwards from this, but still not in any way desirable. Effectively how they work is that they're a cartridge you put in your Switch 2, and this then automatically causes the digital version of the game to download from the eShop. There are a few justifications for this: it keeps costs down while still allowing for a boxed release of sorts, which in turn can be given as a gift just like code-in-a-box.

Unlike code-in-a-box, however, Game Key Cards are transferable. They need to be in the Switch 2 to play the game even once it's downloaded, and they can be loaned, traded or sold to others. This is arguably an improvement in that they make digital purchases more portable — you can take a game over to a friend's house, for example, although one might argue the inherently portable nature of the Switch 2 makes this a moot point anyway — but one suspects it is going to be used by a lot of companies as an excuse for cost-cutting.

We're already starting to see a number of games that have announced their "physical" release will be on one of these Game Key Cards, with no other option than the digital-only version. As a collector of physical media, neither of these options are desirable.

Some have conjectured that this situation has arisen because Switch 2 carts are, supposedly, expensive — like, $16 a unit expensive. That means once companies have paid their cut to Nintendo, paid manufacturing costs, paid marketing expenses and everything else that goes into making a game, there potentially won't be much left for games sold around the £30-40 mark. This is, apparently — and remember this is mostly hearsay at the moment — the reason that physical releases like Mario Kart World are £70 or more.

Thing is, I'm not sure I understand why they're so expensive. They're essentially flash carts. Admittedly, in the case of Switch 2, they're high-speed flash carts, which are slightly newer (and thus more pricey) tech. But $16 a unit for something that supposedly only goes up to 64GB seems… high. (Oh yes, that's seemingly the other reason some are going for the Game Key Card approach — games such as Street Fighter 6 flat-out won't fit on one.)

I've long said that if a console generation arose that was digital-only, I would probably bow out and stick to my existing library of games — which, as most of you probably know, is pretty enormous. Nintendo, whose consoles have long been a champion of physical media — Switch 1 carts are the only releases of the current(ish) generation that don't require lengthy installs before you can play — seem to be pushing towards that all-digital future that I'm not sure anyone really wants, particularly those involved in a hobby that has always been, to some degree, about collecting.

I'm willing to give Switch 2 a chance. I'm even getting the bundle with the digital version of Mario Kart World included — I figure as a game with an online component, it's probably going to have regular updates and/or DLC, making the physical edition useless after a while anyway — but I'm still a bit concerned.

I guess one thing worth waiting to see is what the limited-press physical houses do — if anything — with Nintendo Switch 2. A significant portion of my Switch 1 library consists of limited-print physical releases of games that would have otherwise been digital-only. If that situation continues, then I think I'll be all right. I know some folks hate the limited-print stuff, but I suspect it's going to become an increasing reality of video game collecting in the coming years. We'll have to see, I guess.

I wish we could just be excited for New Thing. It feels like a long time since we've been able to be unreservedly excited for New Thing. The last few New Things we've had — particularly in gaming — seem to have had particularly big caveats involved, and Switch 2 is no exception.

Think back to the run-up to the PlayStation 2's launch. Nothing but excitement. A new system that could produce incredible visuals, could take full advantage of the new DVD format for storage, and which was fully (almost) backwards-compatible with the previous PlayStation? Sure, the price was a sticking point for some, but that came down. And the PS2 went on to be one of the most beloved systems of all time, with good reason.

I wonder if the last couple of generations of console hardware are even going to have a legacy to leave behind once their digital services are turned off.

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#oneaday Day 320: Attempting to list one turn-based RPG a year for every year between Final Fantasy X and now

The recent release of Obscure Claire or whatever it's called has spawned some frankly toxic discourse about turn-based vs. real-time RPGs and the perceived accessibility of the RPG genre, so I thought I would take a moment and see if it was possible to name at least one turn-based RPG that had come out every year between Final Fantasy X, which a frightening number of people think was The Last Great Turn-Based RPG, and now.

I'm taking English language releases as gospel here, not Japanese release dates in the case of games that originated there. Because we're talking about English people and their weird selective memory. I'm also going to try not to include more than one entry from a series, and I'm not restricting the list to just "JRPGs". Anything where you take turns to make numbers pop out of monsters is fair game.

Are you ready? Here we go! (Ya ya ya ya… wait, no, wrong genre.)

2001: Final Fantasy X
2002: Suikoden III
2003: Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (yes, they count)
2004: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (aka Final Fantasy Tolkien)
2005: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
2006: Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
2007: Eternal Sonata
2008: Etrian Odyssey II
2009: The Last Remnant
2010: Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland
2011: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2
2012: Fire Emblem: Awakening (strategy RPGs are still turn-based RPGs!)
2013: Bravely Default
2014: South Park: The Stick of Truth
2015: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
2016: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
2017: Blue Reflection
2018: Octopath Traveller
2019: Death end re;Quest
2020: Trails of Cold Steel IV
2021: Mary Skelter Finale
2022: Dungeon Travelers 2-2
2023: Sea of Stars
2024: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Cor. Some crackers among that lot, for sure, many of which I'm still yet to play.

And, it should probably go without saying, these were far from the only turn-based RPGs released each year, to say nothing of RPGs that don't specifically use turn-based mechanics but are nonetheless particularly noteworthy, such as the Xenoblade Chronicles X rerelease this year.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: turn-based RPGs have never, ever gone anywhere. The only difference with Clair Obscur is that all eyes are on it thanks to it using fancy new Unreal Engine 5 tech — which some are already saying is a bit of a hindrance rather than a benefit.

The fact that a lot of the above games don't get much attention outside of niche-interest circles is, more often than not, down to a refusal to engage with anything that might be on the lower budget side of things, or particularly if it involves an anime art style. I know people who have missed out on some absolutely fantastic games just because they refuse to engage with anything that looks a bit anime, regardless of subject matter. And that's their loss.

Getting people to "read" a bit more widely is, I'm sure, a problem with every medium. But dear Lord is it ever frustrating when you've spent years of your life screaming about games you find fascinating, only for people to shrug and make it very clear that they haven't paid any attention whatsoever.

Oh well. As I say, their loss. I know what I like, and I have plenty of the stuff that I like on my shelves. And I guess that's all that really matters at this point.

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#oneaday Day 319: Construction complete

You wanted to see photos of the finished study/office/retro gaming room, right? No? Well tough titty, you're seeing them anyway, because my wife worked her arse off on this all week, then I did a bit of work putting stuff back where it's supposed to be. The results are, I hope you'll agree, striking and pleasing.

First, a slightly out-of-date "before" shot, if it please you:

The whole thing was getting a bit cluttered, so we had a bit of a clear-out a while back. With a heavy heart, I packed away the "real hardware" Atari computers, since the vast majority of stuff I do with them for video is via emulation anyway, and those went in the loft. A bunch of the software that didn't really need to be on display — mostly stuff like productivity software for the Atari ST, and big box PC games I didn't have a means of installing (and which, in most cases, I had digital copies of anyway) — also went in the loft.

Over on the desk on the right, I also upgraded to a two-monitor setup to use with the mini PC I bought a while back, so I could make the room dual purpose: retro gaming space and home office. Aside from those changes, this is pretty much the state of the room before. Note the grotty horrible carpet that came with the house and the unnecessary wall-mounted TV. (We put that in with the intention of using it for Chromecasting YouTube videos and suchlike, but I never used it, so my wife has reclaimed it to put in her shed.)

Behold, then, the glorious transformation that has unfolded over the last week!

Would ya look at that? A few simple changes and it looks like there's much more space. Plus you will hopefully notice the subtle change in overall design, colour scheme and theming. My wife wanted to go loud with the decor in here, to fit with the "retro" vibe. I wasn't entirely convinced on her colour choices to begin with, particularly the yellow, but I had also made a moderate deal out of not really caring what colours she picked, because, frankly, I didn't.

Y'see, I grew up in a house where the default was to paint the walls white. This isn't a criticism of my parents; it made for a nice, consistent, clean look throughout the whole house that could then be supplemented with additional wall decorations such as pictures, bookshelves, ornaments and suchlike. It works for them, and with the house having looked that way for so long now, I wouldn't have it any other way, even if as a kid I sometimes wished they wouldn't be so boring every time they painted a room.

To be fair, I don't remember them redecorating any rooms very often, which is the one benefit of painting them something plain: you don't really need to redo them unless you damage them significantly, which never happened in my time living in that house. The one major change they've made since I moved out is expanding the downstairs toilet into a full-on shower room, replacing a little weird closety alcove thing that used to be at one end of the entrance hallway.

But I digress. Fact is, I grew up in a house that was predominantly painted white, and thus I never really developed any particularly strong preferences about decor. Walls were just walls.

Andie had a plan, though, so I trusted in her sense of style (which has done the rest of our house proud, to be fair) and allowed her to do her thing, painting the coving, skirting boards, doors, frames and radiator bright yellow, with a contrasting deep turquoise for the walls and ceiling. Two walls would be a sort of "feature" with that incredibly loud wallpaper.

One of the main reasons Andie wanted to do up this room was not to change its design and colour scheme, but to replace that horrible carpet. And, she figured, since we'd have to rip everything out to do the floor, we may as well change up the design a bit also.

We've replaced nearly all our carpets across the whole house with laminate flooring now; at this point, only the spare bedroom still has carpet; all of the rest save for the toilet (tiles) and bathroom (vinyl flooring) is laminate floor. It's a change for the better; much easier to keep clean (particularly with cats) and it just looks plain nice. It gives rooms a nice feeling of space that grotty old carpet just doesn't quite provide. I might feel differently if we had had nice carpets in here originally, but we emphatically did not.

We took the opportunity to tidy up my setup a bit, also. Rather than having everything connected all at once, I decided to put just the main console units on display on the shelves, and keep the SCART cables and power adapters in an easily accessible set of drawers beneath one of the desks. That way, if I want to play on a particular console, I can just bring it down off the shelf, pick out the appropriate cables, hook it up and play.

To better facilitate this, we also invested in some desktop plug sockets, which are a brilliant thing. No more ferreting around behind the desk to plug and unplug things, which was always a nightmare even when I wasn't as fabulously fat and unfit as I am now. Now I just plug and unplug from the desktop itself. Sorted.

Here's Patti checking out the Atari ST games. Yes, I know the spine for Hostages is the other way around to all the other games. For some reason, a significant number of French games insisted on printing their spines the opposite way around to literally everything else on the ST. Ah, the French, and all that.

And here's Patti offering her thoughts following her inspection of the entire room. I think she approves. I certainly do.

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#oneaday Day 318: Renovations, again

My wife has very kindly spent the last week renovating my study, and we spent the vast majority of today putting stuff back into it. She's replaced the horrible carpet with laminate flooring to match (most of) the rest of the house, painted a couple of walls and put some exceedingly 80s-inspired wallpaper up on two of the walls. We're not quite finished putting everything back in there yet, but I'll be sure to share some photos when everything is where it should be.

Like most projects like this, it's been an opportunity to take stock of what I have, what I want to keep out and readily accessible, and what can safely go in the loft or bin. We already had a fairly ruthless clearout of stuff into the loft a few weeks back, but these renovations have been the next step. While it is nice to have all one's Stuff out and accessible, there comes a point where you have to consider if you're really ever going to use Timeworks DTP for Atari ST, or if it was just out on the shelves because it looked nice on the shelves.

The basic summary of what we've done is thus: I've kept out all the Atari ST games and the few Atari 8-bit games I have non-pirated copies of. These are both a nice backdrop for my videos and handy to refer to when making said videos, even though I actually make the videos using emulation of various descriptions rather than real hardware. The real Atari 8-bits and STs have, regrettably, made their home in the loft for the moment, as although I love using them both and will never fully get rid of them, emulation for both is in such a good place now that there's really little benefit to having the real things out, particularly as video capture from emulation is about a zillion times easier than capturing from real hardware.

I've also rethought my previous setup of having all the consoles hooked up and ready to go, with just a SCART cable needing changing to switch between them. Instead, I have just the consoles out on display on the shelves, and the power bricks and SCART/aerial cables are in a set of drawers under the desk, easily accessible. This means I don't have to worry about the horrific tangle of wires that was down the back of the desk, particularly as we've fitted some desktop plug sockets to make plugging in and unplugging stuff super-easy. It also leaves me with a lot more desk space, and means that I can play with the console a bit closer to me when I do want to use the real hardware — very helpful for easily changing cartridges or just hitting "reset" to go back to the various Everdrive menus.

The one thing we haven't quite had the energy to do today is move my home office back to where it should be. I'm going to continue working from the downstairs living room for tomorrow, and we're going to take care of putting the office stuff back in its appropriate place tomorrow evening. Then it will all be done, and I will share photographs and you will be in awe. Or at least you'll think "that looks like quite a nice room", I hope.

Anyway, we're both very tired, so it's time for a nice sit down and then a big sleep. Or, at least, a regular-sized sleep until we both have to get up for work tomorrow. Boo!

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#oneaday Day 317: Kitchen essentials

I'm not a particularly amazing cook or anything, but I do make a decent chilli and curry. Over the years, my wife and I haven't been super-extravagant in the things we've bought for our kitchen, but in the last couple of years or so in particular, we've come across a few things that are pretty much essentials, and which I recommend anyone who spend any amount of time in the kitchen, regardless of ability level, should invest in.

The first is simple: non-stick pans that are actually non-stick. We'd been working with the same pans for a long time, but a few trips to Lidl ago, my wife picked up a couple of new frying pans that she thought looked both decent and reasonably priced. Reader, they are a marvel. I do wonder how long they will remain this way, but certainly right now, frying anything in them is an absolute pleasure.

Absolutely nothing gets stuck to the bottom, even with my typically rather aggressive approach to heat management (somewhat unavoidable with induction hobs, in my experience) and this, in turn, means that they're very easy to clean. And as we all know, chipping burnt-on crap off the bottom of pans is no fun at all. So save yourself the hassle; spend the money and get some decent non-stick pans.

The second is an air fryer. I know it's a haha funny meme (for some reason) to enthuse about air fryers, but seriously, if you don't have one, get one. Not only is it good for "frying" stuff without immersing it completely in oil, it also makes an excellent substitute for your oven if you're cooking small stuff, like, say, a portion of chips or some breaded chicken breasts.

It will take you a little experimentation to convert "oven" times to "air fryer" times (you generally need quite a bit less time — in my experience, anywhere between 50-75% of the stated oven time) but once you've nailed that, it's so much more convenient. And, like the non-stick pan approach, air fryer trays are a lot easier to clean than a whole-ass oven.

You can get cheap air fryers, but I would recommend you splash the cash a bit and go for a good one, preferably one that has multiple baskets. We have a Ninja one and it's great. The two baskets can be set up independently, and even "synced" with one another so the second one comes on after the first one has been cooking for a certain amount of time. No more bunging everything in the oven for the same amount of time and hoping for the best!

I will also note that an air fryer makes a surprisingly good toasted cheese sandwich. It's not quite up to Breville standards, but it's a whole lot less messy to clean up afterwards. If all you care about is that your cheese sandwich goes "crunch" a bit, then air frying a cheese sandwich is a great thing.

The third thing is a rice cooker. These come in all manner of levels of complexity, but ours is a super-simple one: you just pop in the amount of rice you want, add an appropriate amount of water (in my experience, roughly twice as many cups of water as you have rice) then turn it on and leave it. Pretty much perfect rice every time, though ours does have a tendency to stick a bit to the bottom. It's easy enough to clean, though, because the main pain is removable and can even be stuck in the dishwasher if you're super lazy.

Between these three things that I've outlined above, we cook almost everything we eat. They are, without a doubt, the best kitchen investments we've ever made — and if you're lacking any or all of them, I highly recommend adding them to your kitchen, too.

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#oneaday Day 316: Mario Kart World looks like fun!

You will doubtless be aware of the impending release of the Nintendo Switch 2, and its launch title Mario Kart World. You may also be aware of the fact that people are complaining about the price (not unjustifiably). And you may even have sat down and watched the Mario Kart World-centric presentation the other day.

Some people seem to be a bit down on Mario Kart World. I had to banish a video from my YouTube recommendations earlier for it claiming to offer "the unfortunate truth" about the new game, when said "truth" was just that the video maker, who hadn't played the game, didn't think it going open world was a good idea.

I'm not going to get into whether he's right or wrong (he's definitely wrong, though), but instead I want to talk about my own personal response to what I've seen of Mario Kart World so far, with the caveats that I haven't played it, I haven't been to any of the "Nintendo Switch 2 Experience" events, and that have preordered the Switch 2 bundle that comes with a digital copy of Mario Kart World, so I am perhaps predisposed to like the thing I've spent money on.

Basically, I'm well up for what Mario Kart World has to offer. I like common-or-garden Mario Kart to a decent degree, and it usually comes off the shelf any time friends are over. But despite the improving tech, visuals and course design with each new installment, the overall structure of the game hasn't really changed all that much since the SNES original. Mario Kart has always had a bit of a problem with its single-player modes being a bit bare-bones, and this is something that has never really been fixed over the course of 8 mainline installments. It was particularly apparent in the Nintendo 64 era, where Rare's Diddy Kong Racing offered an impressively substantial single-player "Adventure" mode that really made Mario Kart 64's paltry grand prix offerings look a tad weedy.

Granted, today the enduring appeal of modern Mario Kart games is in playing online, where you get the performance and visuals of single-player but the thrill of competing against real opponents. But that's not something that everyone enjoys — particularly since, as a popular game, it's filled with people who have no-lifed their way into mastering the most important "skills" (and/or exploits) in order to win every time. Playing Mario Kart online as a casual player is a great way of testing whether or not you really believe that "it's not the winning that counts, it's the taking part". Because after myriad sessions of seeing the frontrunners scream off over the horizon, never to be seen again, and not really knowing why or how they did that, it gets a bit old.

Mario Kart World, now, though, that's different. Online is still going to be an important part of the experience, and with the Nintendo Switch 2's GameChat feature, it looks like a potential return to the early days of Xbox Live, when it's easy to get folks together to shoot the shit while you're playing games — and not necessarily the same games. The key difference, this being Nintendo, is that GameChat is restricted to your friends, so no jumping into public lobbies and immediately being screamed at or called a racial epithet, unless that's what your friends are like. In which case you should find new friends.

But perhaps more importantly, judging by what we've seen so far, is that Mario Kart World offers a substantial single-player experience, and it's all down to that open world. Driving games are one type of game where it makes perfect sense to have an open-world map, and theming the game around rough-and-ready vehicles such as go-karts and motorcycles makes it feel less weird to go off-road exploring. One of my favourite games in this regard is Codemasters and Asobo Studio's Fuel, which has an absolutely vast open world filled with events to participate in and things to find. Plus it's just plain fun to drive around and see how a variety of different vehicles handle the various terrains.

Fuel is a semi-realistic game, though; Mario Kart World, meanwhile, is not beholden to the laws of reality, being a game set in a cartoonish fantasy world. That means we can have a map with incredible geographic diversity, weird and wonderful things to discover and a real sense that you might find anything around the corner. For all I love Fuel, its overriding colours are dull green, grey and brown, and any changes in the map you encounter as you pass from region to region are gradual rather than drastic. Not so in Mario Kart World, and I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

One of the things I really like the sound of is how the races link together, with circuit races leading to point-to-point races that take you to the next course in the sequence. I absolutely love point-to-point races — a side-effect of growing up with games like OutRun and Lotus Turbo Challenge — and Mario Kart World sounds like it's going to implement them not only as interstitial races in the main Grand Prix events, but also as non-stop "knockout" rally competitions that unfold as one long race taking you between multiple areas, with the bottom [x] participants being knocked out at every checkpoint.

But then the open world is filled with collectibles to find — the exact function of which we don't know just yet — and "P-switch challenges", which task you with completing various missions that test your driving skills. It's this exploration aspect that I think I find most exciting, particularly as you can not only play it solo, but you can bring friends along, too. Burnout Paradise was excellent fun in its multiplayer free-roam mode — sadly, I only ever really got to play it with friends once — and I can see this being very enjoyable; a great way to virtually hang out with friends over GameChat while having a meaningful, but relaxing and not-too-demanding, gaming experience.

Whether or not all this is really "worth" £75 for its physical RRP remains to be seen, and "game worth" is a completely subjective thing anyway. But I know that after seeing the announcement and the subsequent Direct, I'm very much on board with Mario Kart World, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it when June finally rolls around.

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