#oneaday Day 275: The quantum shift in engagement with games

I have been rewatching a lot of some of my favourite YouTube videos recently: the back catalogue of Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, who was a big inspiration to me back when I started doing YouTube things. Throughout his various runs of his show Classic Game Room, Mark primarily focused on what we today describe as "retro games" — meaning, in his instance, pretty much anything from PS2 backwards, though primarily focusing on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles such as the NES, SNES and Mega Drive.

One thing that strikes me any time I either go back and explore games from this era either by myself or when I do it vicariously through a show like Classic Game Room is that the way we engage with video games has fundamentally changed at some point. I don't mean the way we interact with them — though control schemes have, of course, become more refined as time has gone on and "best practice" has become established — but rather what we consider to be a "worthwhile" experience.

For many years, the majority of my gaming has focused on long-form games like role-playing games and visual novels. This started back in the PlayStation era, where I discovered Final Fantasy VII for the first time and promptly started devouring pretty much every RPG I could get my hands on. But it wasn't always that way; when I think back to the time I spent playing games on the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and Super NES, the games were (typically by necessity, as a result of their technology) more short-form, immediate experiences. And, back then, I derived just as much value from those as I did the longer-form stuff I started playing with the PlayStation.

Okay, I do recall my sessions on the Atari 8-bit often involving booting up one game, playing for a bit, then loading something else up, playing that for a bit and so on — like most early home computer owners, we had a big disk box full of pirated games, so I wasn't exactly short on choices — but I also feel like it was a lot easier to become engaged and invested in something simpler, shorter and less narrative-focused. I'd spend a lot of time playing Super Mario World, Starwing and SimCity on my SNES, for example; while one might argue both Super Mario World and SimCity are each in their way "long form" games of a sort, they're a different breed to your average RPG, and neither focus on an unfolding story; they use nothing but their mechanics to keep you engaged, and SimCity in particular flat-out just doesn't have an end.

These days, I feel like I'm easily falling into… I don't know if I want to call it a "trap" as such, so let's call it a "routine" instead… where I tend to focus on one "big" game at a time, and that "big" game is something with a lengthy storyline. Over the last couple of months, I spent 120 hours playing through Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and its expansion Future Connected, for example. And that's the main thing I played during that period; I had the odd diversion for a few bits and bobs along the way, but for the most part, I was focused on that one game.

There's value in those shorter games, though, and finally fixing up my retro consoles with Everdrive units and equivalents (as well as all the stuff I work on for the day job with Evercade) is really helping me rediscover that, as there's a definite magic to playing on the classic hardware that emulation still just doesn't quite capture perfectly. (Mostly the scrolling. Real hardware scrolling is flawless; emulation still has just enough tiny hiccups, even on a powerful system, to remind you that it's not quite perfect.)

Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 was a real pleasure to finally explore, as previously discussed, and I've always had a very soft spot for Tetrisphere. I had a pretty limited library of SNES games back in the day — Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, Starwing, SimCity and Zelda — so there's a lot to discover on SNES. And when my Mega Everdrive Pro arrives for the Mega Drive hopefully later this week there's a whole other library of 16-bit goodness to play with, too.

The danger, of course, is giving yourself too much choice, which can lead to the dreaded Analysis Paralysis, which in turn leads to enjoying nothing at all. But I've got a nice expanse of time between having finished Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition coming out later this month. So I intend to make good use of that time to explore some short-form fun.

And finish Soul Blazer. I'm already halfway through that, and that's sort of a Big Game, but also kind of not. I'm enjoying it a lot, either way, so I will probably try and bash that out before Xenoblade X day on the 20th. That and I finished Tokyo Dark: Remembrance today, too. I'm doing well!

Anyway, for now, bed. Perhaps with a little bit of 16-bit action before that…

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 274: You should have a blog. And you should read more blogs. And you should share your blogs with me

Time moves on, and things change. I didn't really notice the gradual disintegration of the "blogosphere" because it was just that — gradual. But with social media taking its place as many folks' primary means of self-expression online, it's hard to deny that, now, the age of the personal blog would, at first glance, appear to be over.

I look at my WordPress reader and it's a bit sad; folks that I used to enjoy reading the posts of on a near-daily basis haven't updated for a year or more, and since their blog was the primary means through which I kept up with them, I don't know what they're up to now, or even if they're okay.

Sure, there are a few still happily going about their business — particular shoutouts to Infernal Monkey's thoroughly NSFW but hilarious wanking blog, Kresnik258gaming's retro Sony games site and Ernst Krogtoft's excellent in-depth explorations of retro gaming for just a few sites I've been following for years that are still actively updating at least semi-regularly — but my Reader is no longer the active community hub that it once was.

I miss seeing folks like Irina of I Drink and Watch Anime, Leth of Lethargic Ramblings (which appears to no longer be online) and the whole #oneaday crew; various others that I once knew by name and considered friends, but who, in many cases, appear to have vanished into the ether. That's their choice, of course, and I don't blame them for wanting to just quietly retreat with the way the Internet is these days, but I still miss them.

Going along with that is the fact that people just don't seem to be reading blogs any more. This place used to get a few hundred views a day, which is obviously peanuts in the grand scheme of the Internet, but it always felt like a noteworthy number of people who were interested in the daily life of a relative nobody like me, particularly when I was never making a particular effort to SEO optimise this place or write about trending topics.

D'you wanna know how many page views I had yesterday? Five. This isn't really a complaint, because the only reason I'm writing here is more as a journalling exercise than anything else, and that's how it's always been — but those figures are a stark contrast from when I started daily posts first time around here, when #oneaday was a community effort.

And the more I think about this, the more I wonder why this has happened. Sure, social media is good for a quick dopamine hit if a post does numbers, but you are, by design, limited in what you can say — and the sites that are still the biggest in the world despite both having gone down the right-wing toilet are both algorithmically driven to an abusive degree, making it near-impossible to actually see something you might be interested in rather than something which is "suggested".

Blogs, meanwhile, are completely freeform. There's no algorithm at play. You follow a person's blog, you get that person's blog. When they update that blog, you get that post. When you want to respond to what they said, you can comment right on that post, assuming they've left comments turned on. Over time, you can really get to know the person who owns that blog, even if, in the case of larger sites, you never become "friends" with them as such.

But even then, there's a personal touch that social media simply doesn't match. I remember years back I wrote a post about how inspirational I found Allie Brosh's hilarious (and, at the time, enormously popular) Hyperbole and a Half blog, and the lady herself came and commented on my blog to say thank you.

That was amazing to me at the time, but nowadays, I suspect that sadly, relatively few people know who Allie Brosh is; her one lasting legacy on the Internet is the "[x] all the things!" meme, which began its life in an innocuous post from 2010 about how hard it was to be a functional adult with depression and ADHD, but which I suspect is not known by a lot of people using the funny cartoon of the gremlin with the broom to make some sort of "hilarious" point online.

One strange development I've witnessed recently is that blogs have sort of come back, except folks don't call them "blogs" any more. They call them "newsletters", based on the assumption that most folks will subscribe to them via email. And while there are some excellent examples of those — my favourite is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is a sole voice of sanity in a tech world that seems to be going increasingly insane — I kind of don't like the name change. "Newsletter" implies something of some importance; something that you follow in order to keep up with important things. And as such, it feels kind of silly to sign up for a "newsletter" from some random person online that you don't know. Newsletters are things you get from the local church, or that one place you bought PC parts from that one time, or a software company you like. They're something that organisations send out, not people.

And I think it's important to make that distinction. Because if you're positioning your work as a "newsletter", you're automatically placing a certain amount of pressure on yourself to make everything you write "newsworthy". Your newsletter needs to be about something, and you need to stick to that subject, lest you lose those all important subscribers and Number No Longer Go Up.

A blog, meanwhile, is just a public diary. Sure, it can be more than that, and yes, of course you can specialise its topic — that's what I've done with my other site MoeGamer — but at its heart, it's a public diary: you write something, you date-stamp it, you post it out into the void. That thing you write doesn't have to be important, it doesn't have to be thought-provoking, it doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be anything. But the one thing it will always be is personal. Anyone reading it is getting a glimpse into your mind, your personality, your soul.

Newsletters are not replacements for blogs. Social media is not a replacement for blogs. And fucking Discord absolutely is definitely not a replacement for blogs.

I miss your blogs. And you're missing out by not reading more blogs. So if you have a blog — or indeed if you are, for some inexplicable reason, inspired to start one after everything I've written above — please let me know. I'll happily add it to my subscriptions. Because heaven knows social media hasn't been fun for a long time, and while Bluesky is definitely an improvement over Twitter for the most part, it still lacks the magic that blogs once had.

So c'mon, let's hear it. Let's build up a kickass blogroll and party like it's 15 years ago.

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#oneaday Day 273: On the Spectrum

One of the things I've been keen to do with my YouTube channel for a while is branch out into areas that are less familiar to me. I've done a lot of championing Atari stuff, and while I don't see that going away any time soon, the fact it's so easy to play with all manner of different platforms today through emulation and suchlike means that I really don't have an excuse for not educating myself on things like the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga libraries. (Especially since I have modern recreations of all of them!)

I've already covered a couple of Spectrum games previously on my channel, but the one I published today is one that I had been oddly worried about spending some time with. Here's the video if you fancy following my journey:

Ant Attack is an all-time classic for the Spectrum, frequently appearing in "Best of Spectrum" lists and suchlike. But Lordy is it hard to get started with. Keyboard controls which were clearly designed by a madman. Mechanics that are baffling and unpredictable. An engine that often struggles to keep up with what you're doing. I honestly would not blame anyone for trying it out for five minutes, going "fuck this" and booting up a NES emulator to play Super Mario Bros. 3 for the umpteenth time.

I've never been about that on my channel, though. My philosophy is always to "find the fun" — an idea that, if I remember rightly, I borrowed from Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, an influential early gaming YouTuber who, among others, was a big inspiration on me getting into YouTube in the first place.

Finding the fun isn't always easy, but I always make a point of giving a game a bit more of a chance than most people might. I'm aware that in a lot of cases, old games are all well and good if you grew up with them, but if they're brand new to you, they can take a bit of effort before they show their true charms. And, indeed, this is very much the case with Ant Attack.

My first couple of attempts went badly. I didn't know what I was doing wrong, it was frustrating and I was a little tempted to give up. But I didn't; I kept going, I kept exploring, I kept an open mind. And while I won't say I came away from the game loving it, I can at least say with honestly that I appreciate and quite like it now.

Possibly more than any other vaguely popular retro platform, I think the Spectrum library rewards this kind of persistence. If the Spectrum was all you had growing up, doubtless you learned to live with QAOP control schemes and all the other little idiosyncrasies the system had to offer — but I bet even for some folks who were hardcore Speccy fans back in the day, it's difficult to go back to some of these games. It's even harder if you have no nostalgia for these games; you're coming at them blind from a modern perspective, and so there are a lot of things "against" the experience from the outset: garish colours, the notorious "colour clash", screechy beeper music, sluggish controls and game design from an era where people hadn't quite figured out "good" game design yet.

Honestly, though, for me, all that is what makes it so interesting. The early days of computer games were a wild and experimental time, and no, not everything worked. But you have to make mistakes in order to make progress, and the popularity of the Spectrum means that it was absolutely instrumental in shaping modern game development for a significant portion of the world.

That's why I stuck with Ant Attack for nearly an hour. I wanted to "get" it. And, by the end, I think I did. And I'm looking forward to exploring other parts of the system's library over the long term.

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#oneaday Day 272: A productive day!

One of the troubles I am sure anyone with any sort of "online presence" will be familiar with is the feeling that you "should" be doing something "productive" with any free time you happen to have. Such is the case with me; I've been on holiday all week, and I've had the lingering sensation that I should make some videos for my YouTube channel, since it's something I enjoy doing, and having a bunch of free time available is, surely, the ideal time to do such a thing.

And yet. And yet. There's always a part of your brain at times like this that says "no, fuck that, you booked time off so you don't have to work, so just relax and enjoy yourself". Of course, making YouTube videos is a relaxing and enjoyable activity, but it also requires effort, so you can see the quandary.

Anyway, I made some time to get some stuff done today. I'd already scripted the intro sections for several vids yesterday, so all I had to do was set aside a few hours to record the intros and gameplay sections, and there we were.

I'd been meaning to do several of these videos for a while, but had put up a bit of a mental block towards a couple of them, because they involved games and a platform that are unfamiliar to me: specifically, two Spectrum games that had the potential to be rather challenging to cover.

And they were challenging to cover, but I found a solution. Mostly dogged determination, to be honest, though in the case of one of them, copious use of save states and rewind functions. And the result is, I hope, some videos where I demonstrate how a lot of Spectrum games can be something of a "slow burn", particularly if you didn't grow up with them, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort, there are potentially rewarding experiences that await you.

All in all, I got five videos done altogether today: three Spectrum vids and two Atari games as a palate-cleanser. Want specifics? Oh, all right then; on the Spectrum front, the two I was worried about were Ant Attack and Army Moves, the latter of which is where the majority of the save state/rewind "cheating" took place, because fuck that game's first four levels, plus Auf Wiedersehen Monty, which I knew probably wouldn't be an issue and, sure enough, wasn't. The two Atari games were Lode Runner's Rescue (which is a really interesting game I'd never heard of until very recently!) and Frogger II (which I just like).

That's pretty danged productive, so I should be pleased with myself. So I am! I'm looking forward to sharing these videos with you, as I think they're all a lot of fun. Watch out for them over the course of the next couple of weeks.

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#oneaday Day 271: Caught on camera

The other day, I was caught on camera doing something I shouldn't have. Nothing serious, I might add, but the whole event concluded in a rather more positive way than I have typically come to expect from situations like this.

Here in Southampton, there's an area known as Portswood which has a bunch of little shops, a supermarket that has changed hands/brands several times (I think it's currently a Waitrose, which seems remarkably out of keeping with how the area is primarily students) and is one of the main routes from the outskirts of town (where the university is) to the town centre.

At least it was. At some point in the last six months, they have changed the main bit of Portswood into an area that only buses, taxis and "authorised vehicles" can go into, and it's camera-protected.

The other day, I was giving my wife a lift to the hospital (nothing to worry about, just a routine test) and, on the way back, I drove through this area, completely missing the signs indicating that I'm not actually allowed to drive through there any more. I didn't notice until my second journey through, when I was picking my wife up. And my heart sank; I knew that I'd gone through when I really shouldn't have, and that it was my own fault I hadn't seen the actually quite clear and prominent signage. There was no defending this in the same way you can get out of parking charge notices on private land (which is something I have successfully done in the past).

So I braced myself for a fine or whatever punishment was coming my way. Nothing happened for a few days, so I started to wonder if the "camera" signs on the area were just a deterrent rather than, you know, telling the truth.

Today, I got a letter. I saw it was from "Southampton Parking Services" on the return address, and I thought this is it, I'm going to be hit with a fine, or points on my license, or something.

But no!

I was very surprised to discover that the letter was just a "warning", telling me that I had indeed broken the rules, but that because it was less than six months since these new measures had been put in place, I wouldn't be fined or punished in any other way, so long as I didn't do it again.

I'm not accustomed to local councils or those in charge of traffic measures being so reasonable, but I assume there's some sort of legal situation in place that requires them to implement a "grace period" like this when they make some sort of drastic change to the traffic restrictions in an area. After all, I doubt I'm the only one who made an honest mistake and passed through, completely oblivious to the signs because I had no reason to be looking out for anything different to how things were the last time I'd driven through there. And while if they fined everyone who passed through when they weren't supposed to I'm sure they would make absolute bank, I suspect they don't want to be dealing with the inevitable court cases and legal wrangling that would result.

Whatever the reason for it, I'm grateful for it; it means that I avoided a £70 fine. I would have gladly paid the fine if I had been required to, since I will hold my hands up and say the situation was my own fault for not paying enough attention. But I am happy to have been let off with a warning and no further consequences. And I'm pretty certain I won't accidentally make the same mistake again!

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#oneaday Day 270: New Suikoden being a mobile game sucks, stop trying to pretend it doesn't

Apparently Konami announced a new Suikoden game! Hooray! Hold your horses there, Bucko, they announced that it's a free-to-play mobile game with microtransactions. How do you feel about that?

If your first reaction to this was violent revulsion, congratulations, you still have good sense. But I've seen a surprising amount of resistance to the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that a beloved series getting a free-to-play mobile game is shit. And I think we're long past the point where we should be making excuses for this sort of thing.

"But phones are the most popular gaming platform!"

This argument has been trotted out for nearly two decades at this point, and it doesn't mean anything. Yes, you can point to numbers, and based on raw figures, there are probably more people playing games on phones than on any other platform — possibly all platforms put together. But those numbers don't mean anything.

Instead, we should be focusing on the quality of the experience. And while there certainly are games for phones that are peers of full-price PC and console games, designed to keep you feeling invested and involved in the gameplay over the long term and make you feel like you got value for money, the overwhelming majority of them are free-to-play, microtransaction-infested shitholes that inspire some of the most formidable instances of Stockholm syndrome I think I've ever seen. (And the phone games that are the peers of PC and console games… are probably available on PC and console.)

Pro-tip: if you ever have to use the phrase "it feels like a proper game" when you're playing a mobile phone game, that game is not a good game. Likewise, if you ever have to utter the phrase "well you don't have to spend any money at all", you have already lost the battle.

I've been through my gacha phase, during which I said both of those phrases on more than one occasion.

I played some Fate: Grand Order, some Granblue Fantasy, Arknights, Azur Lane, Goddess of Victory Nikke, Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and Dragalia Lost. I even played some obscure ones even further back — anyone remember Ayakashi: Ghost Guild? Brave Frontier? Valkyrie Crusade? Didn't think so. Anyway, one thing was constant with all of these games when I played them: I spent more time trying to find the "proper game" in each of them than they really deserved, and came away from each and every one of them wishing that they were something else: something more substantial than boring interaction-free story sequences followed by battles that required no strategy beyond "equip items to make big number". Final Fantasy Brave Exvius came the closest to feeling like an actual Final Fantasy game, but it was all smoke and mirrors; the "wandering around town" part had no substance to it whatsoever.

Not one of them felt like an actual game. And I gave all of them tens of hours in an effort to understand their appeal. And I was forced to conclude that, indeed, they were little more than thinly veiled casinos where you gambled real money in the hope of getting the picture (and sprite, if you're lucky) of the hot anime girl you most wanted to fuck.

And in some cases, the "sex sells" aspect of this was so flagrantly transparent — Azur Lane and Goddess of Victory Nikke are particularly outstanding in this regard — that it's actually offensive. Not because of the content of the artwork, which, let's be clear, is absolutely lovely and super-sexy when taken in isolation, and totally fine that it exists in and of itself. The offensive thing is how that sexy artwork is used to manipulate lonely, horny players into spending way more money than any of these games deserve.

So I swore off them, and I am seeing nothing about this new Suikoden game so far to suggest that it's going to be any different.

Is this elitist? Supposedly it is. But as someone who has been involved with video games since their very earliest days, I absolutely cannot look at a mobile phone game that asks you to pay up repeatedly and without limits, and which ties both mechanical and narrative content to what is effectively gambling, and see it on the same level as a game developed for PC or console where you buy it once, pay up front and then play it as much as you want without it even looking in the direction of your wallet.

Because let's face it, this is exactly the form the Suikoden mobile game is going to take. No amount of fancy 2D-3D HD pixel art on polygonal backdrops is going to change the fact that it will be gacha hell at its heart. The number of musical tracks on its soundtrack does not mean that it is going to be a good, fair game. And because games like this are "live service" games, folks who could be making a proper new Suikoden game for PC and console, like people actually want, will be doomed to continually churning out content for this until it is inevitably "sunset" in a year's time when they realise that no, they actually can't take on Genshin Impact.

There's been a lot of talk today about people being overly negative about this, not having played the game and suchlike. And look, I get it. I hate it when people are negative about things they haven't played.

But this is different from someone talking shit about a game that you like. There is considerable historical precedent for a free-to-play mobile game based on a beloved franchise to be a pile of predatory, manipulative bullshit that closes down six months after launch because no-one ever actually wanted it.

And I have seen zero reason so far to believe that a Suikoden mobile game will be any different. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I am not holding my breath.

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#oneaday Day 269: It was my bloody SNES

In retrospect, when I had two game cartridges fail in the exact same way as one another, I should have probably considered the possibility that it was, in fact, the game console itself that was at fault rather than the cartridges. But, well, I was going to get an FX Pak Pro anyway, so all that's really happened is I spent £40 more than I thought I was going to, traded in the few loose N64 carts I had lying around (and which were now redundant thanks to the Everdrive 64 X7 I have) and now have two SNESes: one with (presumably) a fried chip that means anything involving "Mode 7" scaling and rotation (and adjacent graphical techniques) is borked, and my new acquisition which, so far, appears to work just fine.

I'm a little sad at the apparent death of my old SNES; that thing had followed me since childhood and has always been a treasured part of my collection, even at the times it wasn't getting much use. I suspect it probably is possible to fix somehow, but that would involve getting stuck into some electronics that I'm not confident enough to explore just yet, and my wife Andie, who is quite happy to get the soldering gun out, is in the middle of numerous other projects, so I don't want to bother her.

So anyway. Yes. CEX did not, in fact, sell me two consecutive faulty copies of Desert Strike, it was my bloody SNES after all. At least that's all resolved now, and with the FX Pak Pro safely in place, I can now just enjoy the thing without worrying about dead batteries, corroded connections and all that other good stuff that we never even thought would be a consideration back when these things were new.

I am looking forward to spending some quality time with the SNES library. As I've alluded to a few times in the past, despite owning that SNES since… probably '92 or so? I didn't have all that many games for it. I had Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario All-Stars, Starwing, SimCity and American copies of Street Fighter II and Chuck Rock. Plus two of those converter thingies that allowed you to play games from another region by plugging a "native" game into the back and the game you wanted to play into the top.

I played a few other SNES games through borrowing them from friends. I borrowed Super Star Wars from my friend Andrew on multiple occasions and liked that a lot; these days people seem to remember that as a ludicrously difficult game, but I don't remember it striking me as being unusually hard back in the day. Definitely one to revisit, and I was always curious to try Super Empire Strikes Back and Super Return of the Jedi, because I never even saw those running.

I'm also going to make some time to play through Soul Blazer, Illusion of Time (better known as Illusion of Gaia) and Terranigma, because I like Quintet's work (and their subsequent work as Shade) but have never settled down to spend a good amount of time with any of these games. I've played the start of all of them multiple times and enjoyed what I saw in all instances, but I definitely want to play them properly.

Then there's just the odd stuff. While loading up a flashcart or emulator with a bunch of ROMs is often a ticket to Analysis Paralysisville, one of the things I like about retro gaming is that you can pick something pretty much at random and probably be able to figure things out without too much difficulty. Sometimes when you do this you make wonderful discoveries of things you never would have thought to try otherwise; at others, you realise why these games aren't better known.

Earlier today, I tried the Infogrames Asterix game. I was a big fan of Asterix as a kid and am still rather fond of it; I still have all my old Asterix books, and the Konami arcade game is, I maintain, one of their best belt-scrollers. I was always frustrated that there was no home version of that arcade game, though, and for one reason or another never came into contact with any of the console games. This particular one isn't anything particularly remarkable, but it does have some of the Asterix wit and charm about it, and Roman soldiers go "PAF!" when you punch them, which is nice.

Another nice thing about the FX Pak Pro is that it functions as a Super Game Boy 2, meaning you can load up Game Boy ROMs as well as SNES ROMs. I found a couple of games that don't seem to work with it — The Smurfs, sadly, which is a shame, as the soundtrack for that game is way better than you would think it would be — but Rod Land does, which is all that really matters.

So mixed feelings today, then. Sadness at the apparent death of my childhood SNES, but joy at the world the FX Pak Pro is about to open up to me. And when the Mega Everdrive Pro gets here in a few days… well, I'll be in 16-bit heaven for quite some time, I feel.

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#oneaday Day 268: Microsoft's greatest UI crime

Microsoft is guilty of numerous UI crimes from over the years. The "Ribbon". Metro Tiles. Centre-justifying the taskbar. But for me, all of these pale in comparison to what is, for me, one of the most annoying things they have ever done. And that is the introduction of these buttons:

If you don't recognise those buttons, they're right in the middle of a modern-day Xbox controller. Introduced with the Xbox One, they replaced what used to be there, which is this:

I'm sure you can see what the issue is with the top set of buttons, but in case you can't, there are numerous problems.

Firstly, what the fuck are any of them called? I bet you don't know without looking them up. I don't even know what the middle one does, and that icon isn't much help either. Is it for removing liquid from a container? Fuck knows.

Secondly, if you can't remember what either of them are called, this makes it infinitely harder to remember which way round they are, necessitating you look at your controller any time you are asked to press them. This is not a problem that the Xbox 360 layout had, since the buttons themselves had helpful arrows indicating which side they were on. And they had the names of the buttons on them too. We'll leave aside the unnecessary replacement of the conventional "Select" with "Back" for the moment.

Thirdly, if you are using an older controller that still has Xbox 360 button labels on it, but a game insists on using the newer Xbox iconography, it's really hard to know which one you're supposed to press, particularly if you've never had an Xbox One/Series controller in your hands before. This, again, is not a problem that the Xbox 360 layout had, all because of those simple little arrows.

Part of the problem with the newer buttons is that they assume consistent functionality. The one with the three lines is called the "Menu button", and makes the assumption that any time you press it, a menu will appear. This is not always the case, however; sometimes it might pause a game or a cutscene, sometimes it might be used to start a game, sometimes it might do something extremely specific that is only relevant to a single game.

Likewise, the button with the two overlapping squares is called the "View button", and even Microsoft's own website doesn't have a good explanation for it, saying only that "the button's functions vary depending on the app or game." There's no real reason for it to be called the "View" button, because, as Microsoft themselves say, there is no fixed purpose for it. Much like the "Menu" button, it can have all manner of uses, many of them having nothing to do with the word "View" whatsoever. (As an aside, the above link doesn't even mention the middle one, either. So maybe Microsoft don't know what it does, either.)

One could argue that these criticisms could quite reasonably be levelled at the "Start" and "Back" buttons also. But there's an important difference: up until that point, it had been standard convention for a controller to have, at the very least, a "Start" button, and often a "Select" button also.

And the uses for those buttons had remained both pretty constant over the years and relevant to the button names: "Start" had always been used to start games, like a Start button on an arcade machine, and had also been used for pausing (in fact, the Nintendo Gamecube had specifically labelled it "Start/Pause") and then starting them again after you paused them. "Select", meanwhile, used to be the button you used to toggle through selections on a menu — this is most commonly seen in old Nintendo games — before it was decided that navigating using the directional pad made more sense, particularly in more complex menus.

Microsoft's "Select" replacement "Back", meanwhile, while not always used to "go back", often was used in that way in Xbox software, thereby giving it 100% more practical use than a "View" button that its own manufacturer admits doesn't have anything to do with viewing things.

While we're on the subject, I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo replacing "Start" and "Select" with "+" and "-" either, but at least those make a sort of logical sense; "+" is on the right while "-" is on the left, reflecting how you would expect to see a line of numbers presented, with smaller ones on the left and larger ones on the right. We'll leave aside the fact that these buttons are very rarely used to increase and decrease values in Switch software, and instead are used as, you guessed it, pretty much what the old "Start" and "Select" did.

I'm sure someone somewhere thought they had a really good reason for changing the Xbox buttons to what they are now. But they suck. They always have done, and every time I play a game with my (still working) Xbox 360 controller and have no fucking idea which button I'm supposed to press because I can never remember which way around the stupid Menu and View buttons are because my controller doesn't have them, it's immensely annoying. Kudos, then, to those developers who bother to put in different options for button labels according to Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation and Nintendo conventions, then. You guys are unsung heroes.

That has been your pointless rant of the day. Yes, I know the United States is imploding and something something Ukraine, but I was just reminded of these stupid-ass buttons today, so I felt like having a good old whinge about them. You may now return to your previously scheduled Sunday of wasting time on the Internet.

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#oneaday Day 267: Do some exercise

For a little while, my left knee has been absolutely killing me. It hurt to bend it, it hurt to kneel down, it was even quite painful extending and bending my leg to go up and down stairs. It was getting so painful that I was reaching a point where I was genuinely quite concerned I had somehow fucked it up beyond all hope of recovery despite not having actually done anything to it other than "be fat".

Taking advantage of a brief (brief) moment of motivation earlier today, I decided to set up the treadmill my wife bought a little while back, and which the pair of us have failed to make good use of since it arrived in the house and we realised we don't really have a super-convenient place to keep it. I plonked it down in front of the living room TV (where it just about fits between the sofa and the media cabinet) and plugged its ridiculously short cable into an extension, then into the wall. Then I set it going at a gentle 3.5 speed (mph, I presume) and just did ten minutes while I watched a bit of an episode of Friends.

When I got off, my knee wasn't in agony any more. It's still a little bit painful, but it's not at the "oh my God, are they actually going to have to chop my leg off?" level of pain it has been in the last week. So I am forced to conclude that after many, many years of a largely sedentary lifestyle, my body is finally reaching a point where it is literally screaming out for me to do some exercise. Which is nice.

I joke, but it sort of is nice to have some actual, unavoidable motivation for doing some exercise. I'm not averse to the idea at all — numerous gym memberships, periods of going swimming regularly and even just about surviving a 10K in the pre-COVID days will attest to this — but summoning up the motivation in the last five years has been really difficult, particularly if "doing some exercise" involves putting in some effort before you can even start — getting equipment out, getting changed, rearranging a room or driving to the gym.

But the treadmill, currently propped up against the wall in our living room, is reasonably easy to set up — I just have to move the coffee table out of the way, plug it in and we're away. So I'm going to start doing just a little bit every day. Just ten minutes at a time to begin with, as I don't want to overwhelm myself and kill off that motivation before it leads to any sort of productive gain in ability level or fitness. Just ten minutes of putting these tired old legs to a bit of use, and apparently that works wonders.

Who knew? Everyone did, of course, but sometimes it helps to have a little reminder that people who tell you to get some exercise aren't just talking out their arse or trying to get you to do something you don't want to do. It actually, really does help. So I'm hoping starting slow will help with the feelings of physically painful lethargy that have been becoming increasingly apparent since COVID. And we'll see how things go from there.

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#oneaday Day 266: Beetle Drive

After writing a bit about flash cartridges the other day (and, err, ordering one for my Mega Drive when I saw it was payday) I thought it was probably time I sat and played some of the stuff I had on my Everdrive 64 X7 hooked up to my Nintendo 64. So I did. And I'm reminded that while the Nintendo 64 was a rather odd system in many ways, it also had some great games.

I will probably write some more on these over on MoeGamer at some point, but in the absence of anything particularly interesting happening today, I thought at least a couple of them would make worthwhile blog fodder.

The first one I decided to give a bit of a go was Beetle Adventure Racing, a game which I remember reviewing well back in the day, which I know is often featured in "best of Nintendo 64" retrospectives, which I know my brother likes and which, somehow, I have never gotten around to trying. So I decided I would fix that issue and try it.

Beetle Adventure Racing is really good, you guys. I'm kicking myself for not trying this sooner — and kicking myself for not taking a punt on it back in the days when the N64 was current, either, because I would have absolutely loved this.

For the unfamiliar, Beetle Adventure Racing is an arcade racer from Electronic Arts (boo, hiss, I know, but we still liked them back in the N64 days) and Pilotwings 64 co-developer Paradigm Entertainment. It was created at least in part as a sort of "advergame" for the new-model Volkswagen Beetle, which launched in the late '90s, right when the N64 was in its heyday. It's not obnoxious about it, mind; it's just a game in which all the cars happen to be '90s New Beetles, and apparently Volkswagen weren't all that precious about what EA and Paradigm did to them, because Beetle Adventure Racing sees you doing some ridiculous things with them.

At its heart, Beetle Adventure Racing is a relatively straightforward arcade racer. You can play single events as either full-field races, duels against a single opponent or time trials. There's a championship mode with several difficulty levels, each of which unlocks some new tracks. You can play two-player races. And there's a four-player battle mode that, back in the days when I had three-dimensional friends and we, as a people, went around to each other's houses on a fairly regular basis, I feel we would have had a lot of fun with. One day. Maybe.

The "Adventure" part of the title comes from the design of the courses. While they're relatively straightforward (albeit surprisingly long by genre standards) circuit races at first glance, it won't take you long to notice that there seem to be a lot of scenery elements that just beg the question "I wonder if I can go over there". And the answer, usually, is yes. Track splits in two? Pick a direction. Road goes one way, railway lines head the other way into a boarded-off tunnel? Crash through that sucker and see what's in there! Curious-looking pathway running parallel to the main course, then branching off in a different direction? Check it out next lap.

Now, the nice thing about the course design in Beetle Adventure Racing is that taking these detours doesn't put you at a disadvantage, despite, in some cases, appearing to lead you in a completely different direction to the "official" course. Nope, a lot of them are, in fact, shortcuts that let you skip parts of the track — or at the very least take a different route to get to the same destination.

In the championship mode, they have a secondary purpose, too: they tend to conceal boxes with numbers on them. Crashing into these boxes gives you points. If you get 50 points in a single race, you get a continue that lets you try again if you mess up. If you get 100 points, you get a "bonus" that the game is rather coy about — I believe it's extra stages for the battle mode. There are also, I've just discovered, three hidden "flower boxes" in each stage that unlock "cheats". I haven't even seen one of these yet.

Anyway, the long and short of it is in Beetle Adventure Racing it pays to really explore the different tracks, understand the different routes it's possible to take and practice nabbing the bonus boxes at every opportunity. Because while it's relatively easy to win the novice-level races without putting yourself out too much, combining the point-scoring (and the flower box-hunting) with still winning the race makes things much more interesting than your average arcade racer.

And the tracks! While obviously a little limited by the late '90s tech and the system the game is on, they're proper "thrill ride" courses. One takes you through a not-particularly-subtle Jurassic Park homage, complete with T-Rex bursting through the bushes at the side of the course. One takes you through a volcano. An icy course sees you careening through crystal caves and negotiating huge frozen obstacles. And, as previously mentioned, they're all long, meaning you get plenty of time to enjoy them, and there are plenty of opportunities to spot the different shortcuts, detours and otherwise optional areas.

It's not quite the same as today's "open world" racers, where it's possible to go very off-piste, often to the detriment of your race performance. In Beetle Adventure Racing, the alternative routes are very much designed as integral parts of the courses, rather than simply a thing to go "huh, cool" at, then return to following the guide line for maximum efficiency.

It's a joyful, silly game that I've had a lot of fun with so far — and will likely continue to do so for quite a while yet. In fact, I think I will go and do just that right now.

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