#oneaday Day 215: Memories of Me: The Rough Book

Life changed for me and my friend Ed in secondary school when we discovered that the school library would sell you a new, blank exercise book in the colour of your choice for something like 30p. Ostensibly the option was there for those who had lost their exercise books and were replacing them at their own expense (the school would provide new ones for free when old ones were full, they weren't that stingy) but the librarian, Mrs Miller, didn't ask too many questions.

Mrs Miller was an interesting character, actually. As is often the case for school librarians, she developed something of a reputation for being a stickler for the rules and wanting to ensure everyone was silent at all times in the library. Of course, much of this was exaggerated by playground gossip, and Mrs Miller was, in fact, a thoroughly lovely person with a fun, dry sense of humour, and she was much more willing to demonstrate this side of herself to those who were further up the school.

But I digress. The important thing is that Mrs Miller would sell you a new exercise book for pocket change, and this meant you could use that book for whatever you pleased. Ed and I took to branding these quasi-illicit exercise books our "Rough Books", and they were used for all manner of things — primarily doodling, playing silly games and comic strips. It was in Rough Books that we established several fixtures of our teenage sense of humour, including:

The German Stickmen. A four-frame comic in which two German stickmen would get into an argument over something stupid, culminating in them going "Nein!" "Ja!" repeatedly at one another until one of them bellowed "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, you know) and inflicted some form of horrible (usually explosive) violence on the other. My favourite ran "Ich bin Fred." "Nein, du bist James." "Nein!" "Ja!" "Nein!" "Ja!" "ACHTUNG!" (nuclear explosion).
The X-35 Plasma Gun. Actually a creation of our mutual friend Daniel, the X-35 Plasma Gun didn't have a fixed form, but there was one constant in all its depictions: it was a gun one would hold with a pistol grip, but which carried a comedically large variety of attachments atop it, including not just additional weaponry such as bazookas and '50s-style laser guns, but also practical functions such as a washing machine and full-size bath. I will have to draw one of these again someday to truly get across what I mean, because I feel that description doesn't really do the X-35 Plasma Gun justice.
Adverts for games that we were making with Klik and Play. One day I acquired the budget release of Clickteam's Klik and Play, and thus began a new obsession of us trying to make our own games. We only ever finished one — Pie Eater's Destiny, a game that featured idealised versions of me and my friends (actually ripped and recoloured Contra III sprites) battling giant digitised heads of our classmates in space. But that didn't stop us from drawing fake adverts for the many, many half-finished games we made that are now, sadly, almost definitely lost to time.
Edlock Holmes and Watson. I talked about this in my video on The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, but the gist is this: Ed and I were obsessed with The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, so we made a comic that cast us in the role of "Holmes and Watson", and sent our virtual selves on various comedic adventures. There's probably an entire post of Edlock Holmes lore in me at some point, but that will have to do for now.

One of the most significant features of multiple Rough Books, though, was My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters. I feel the title for this is probably self-explanatory, but let me elaborate.

At school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, often for the most mundane reasons, like them acknowledging my existence, holding a conversation with me or allowing me to work in a group with them in class without being physically repulsed by my presence. I was too much of a socially awkward (retrospectively: autistic) teen to ever be able to express my feelings adequately to any of these girls, mind you, and thus most of my teenage years were spent feeling like a doomed poet, forever to suffer unrequited love from afar.

I secretly quite enjoyed the feeling of "being in love", though, regardless of whether or not anything actually happened. There was something about that teenage "butterflies in the stomach" feeling which was oddly… addictive, almost, and so, over time, I would flit from girl to girl, deciding that this time, she was absolutely the one for me, despite in most cases me not actually knowing that much about her at all, because that would involve talking to her and not making a complete idiot of myself, which my brain successfully convinced me on a daily basis was a complete impossibility.

Any time I fancied someone new, I would keep it quiet for a while, but after some time the feelings inside me would "boil over" to such a point that I had to admit it to one of my friends, even though I knew they would almost certainly take the piss out of me for it. And one of the ways they took the piss was getting hold of my Rough Book, then performing the sacred art of My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters.

The ornateness of how the name would be written varied from one occasion to another. Sometimes it would be in beautifully crafted, pencilled block letters. Sometimes it would be scrawled in multiple colours of felt-tipped pens. On one particularly memorable occasion, my Rough Book was returned to me with the name "NIKKI" (my affections returned to Nikki on multiple occasions; she was, to my teenage eyes and hormones, feminine perfection and, retrospectively, possibly the source of a mild tights fetish) beautifully painted in watercolours, which I feel was rather more grandiosity than the situation warranted, but such was the nature of my curious little friendship group.

I say they did this to take the piss. In their own way, I think they were showing a funny kind of "support" for my feelings. They knew that I was extremely unlikely to ever actually go up to any of these girls and ask them out, so they did what they could to make my feelings feel… "special". Sometimes they even went out of their way to try and put me in a situation with the girl in question — situations I would tend to squander due to my social ineptitude — and I don't think every one of those was an attempt to embarrass me in a malicious way.

Some of them absolutely were, mind. I have vivid memories of our class having been studying Romeo and Juliet in class, learning the expression "taking one's maidenhead" and numerous puns surrounding that phrase as euphemisms for taking a young lady's virginity. One lunchtime, one member of our class — Luke, a peripheral member of our friendship group at best — bellowed at the top of his voice "PETE WANTS TO CHOP DANIELLE'S HEAD OFF" while the Danielle in question (who I was, of course, exceedingly attracted to at the time and would have concurred privately with Luke's assessment had I not considered it a little disrespectful to contemplate the status of others' maidenheads) was most certainly well within earshot.

Thankfully, Danielle was cool, and someone I counted as an actual friend as well as someone I fancied, so on that occasion I actually successfully plucked up the courage to talk to her about it, apologise for Luke's outburst and successfully block myself off from ever being able to really admit I liked her by, in effect, friendzoning myself. (I also knew that she was, at the time, already going out with someone a bit older than her, and that fact intimidated me somewhat, as I did not want to end up on the receiving end of a beating from "Carmine", I believe his name was. Why do I remember this shit?)

Anyway. I got off the point there a bit, but I hope you enjoyed my memories of the Rough Book. I wish I still had some of them. I have a few bits of miscellanea from my teenage years, but sadly the Rough Books are not among them. By their nature, they were a transient form of media, doomed to end up in the bin so my parents and teachers didn't find them. But while they lasted they were a wonderful part of my secondary school days, and, as odd as it may sound, a big reason why I mostly look back on those days with fondness.

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

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

#oneaday Day 214: Anticipating Xenoblade... again

I'm a big fan of the Xenoblade Chronicles series from Monolithsoft and Nintendo, though I must confess I am very behind; I haven't yet played Torna, The Golden Country (the spinoff to the second game) or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 yet, nor have I replayed Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition on Switch. And yet here I am, gradually getting hyped for the return of Xenoblade Chronicles X in March.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is kind of special, see. While most of the rest of the series is pretty well-known to be awesome, outside of the few folks who can't handle anime-style aesthetics, Xenoblade Chronicles X has always been more of a cult favourite. For starters, it came out on Wii U, which means only a few people bought it, and it's also quite a different beast to the mainline Xenoblade Chronicles titles, arguably making it a bit more of an acquired taste for some.

Lest you're unfamiliar, the Xenoblade Chronicles series are a range of vast, open-world RPGs that take the concept Final Fantasy XII kicked off — MMO-style mechanics and structure in a single-player game — and run with it. For miles and miles and miles.

The mainline Xenoblade Chronicles titles are beloved not just for their expansive, beautifully crafted worlds, but also for the wonderful characters that make up the main cast. Each of them feature a wonderful balance between player freedom and in-depth storytelling, allowing you the opportunity to experience a truly epic narrative while also getting to know the complete, vast world very well.

Xenoblade Chronicles X differed a little from what was, at the time, its only predecessor, in that it downplayed the central narrative somewhat. Indeed, it's possible to blast through the entire main story of Xenoblade Chronicles X much quicker than any other game in the series. And this led some people to think that it "wasn't as good" as the original Xenoblade Chronicles.

In fact, Xenoblade Chronicles X isn't any lighter on story content than its predecessor. It's just structured very differently, primarily because of its overall concept. Rather than going on a long "hero's journey"-style quest, you're simply part of an organisation. Sure, you end up being the one who does some important and noteworthy things, but when it comes down to it, you're just another cog in a machine much bigger than you are.

Xenoblade Chronicles X's concept is that you, and a chunk of other humans, have crash-landed on an alien planet called Mira, and there's absolutely no hope of getting your spaceship back into space; moreover, there's likely no Earth to go back to, since the whole reason you were in space was escaping an alien invasion.

Consequently, rather than sitting around crying and gradually turning into cavemen, the former crew of the spacecraft decide to repurpose what's left of the ship as a city, then set about exploring the planet and making the best use of the resources that surround them. To that end, you're recruited as a BLADE: a Builder of the Legacy After the Destruction of Earth. This means you need to go out, find resources, build things to exploit those resources, deal with the local fauna, collect things and just generally make a big ol' map of Mira as a whole. And Mira is very big.

While playing Xenoblade Chronicles X, there's a really nice feeling that you're playing a game that is as much strategy/management game as it is RPG. On the Wii U, the Gamepad's second screen featured a hex-based map of the planet that you could use to plan your expeditions, build things and invest in areas; the long-term gameplay of Xenoblade Chronicles X involves "conquering" each of these hexes in various ways, be it through completing missions, discovering landmarks, defeating powerful foes or various other objectives.

And every time you come back to the city of New Los Angeles, as it becomes known, you will have new people to talk to, new sidequests to discover, new little stories about humanity's home away from home. It's a massively immersive game that I feel like I barely scratched the surface of back when I played it on Wii U, and I'm really looking forward to giving it another go when the Switch version rolls around.

Couple that with some interesting and quite innovative online features — which will be much easier to take advantage of on a platform people actually own — and you have a game that promises to take up a lot of your life.

Oh, and it has an amazing soundtrack that you will either love or hate.

I'm sure there's plenty more about the game that I've forgotten, but I do remember the game as a whole with great fondness from when I first played it and declared it my Game of the Year nearly ten years ago… and bemoaned the fact that it didn't get anywhere near the press attention and general praise that it clearly deserved, likely primarily because it was a Wii U game, and what kind of idiot bought a Wii U? (Hi.)

So yeah. Expect great enthusing about Xenoblade Chronicles X when it comes out. I'm just wondering whether or not I can fit in Torna, The Golden Country and/or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 before that happens… given that I'm playing through Fire Emblem Engage also right now.

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

#oneaday Day 213: Knotwords is a Mobile Game That Isn't Shit

Mobile games are, to me, mostly absolute bobbins. I have no desire to engage in tap-and-wait non-gameplay, I don't want to play rigged puzzles designed to get me to cough up money for "boosts" and I absolutely want nothing to do with fucking gacha. On top of that, I have zero desire to play "console-quality" experiences on my phone because touchscreens fucking suck for games like that.

As a result of all of the above, there are very few mobile games that I will give any time to whatsoever. One of them is Take It Easy by Ravensburger, an adaptation of a tabletop game that I think works a lot better as a video game because you don't have to do any of the maths or checking for valid moves yourself, but that's not what we're here to talk about. (I talked about it at length here, and I am always pleased to note that it is still supported after originally being released in 2015, which is practically caveman days in smartphone gaming terms.)

No, today I want to talk about Knotwords, a simply presented game by Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger. This is a game that is, for me, an ideal mobile game. It has short play sessions, it's easy to control using nothing more than the touchscreen, and perhaps most importantly, it's not trying to shake you down for your life savings or make you endure ads every ten minutes. No, in fact the game is ad-free, and simply monetised via either an optional subscription (£4.59 a year) or a one-off purchase (£11.49).

The free version of Knotwords allows you to play the daily "Mini" and "Classic" challenges (the difference simply being the size and complexity of the complete puzzle) as well as a monthly "Puzzlebook" (though I would add that at the time of writing, the Android version of the game has broken this feature, asking for an update that doesn't exist). Paying up allows you to access a mode called "Twist" (which I don't know anything about because I haven't paid) as well as the archived previous Puzzlebooks, plus a couple of extra benefits such as additional hints, if you need them.

So what is Knotwords? It's a word puzzle based on crosswords, but also drawing influences from sudoku (or perhaps more accurately, kenken) and anagram puzzles. You're presented with a blank crossword divided into areas, with each region telling you which letters go in it, but not the order those letters should be in. Your job is to untangle these "knots" and solve the crossword using valid words, ideally as quickly as possible. That's it — at least for the Mini and Classic puzzles; I don't know if Twist is any different.

The pleasant thing about Knotwords is that it's simple to understand, but it gets you thinking. Supposedly the puzzles are easy on Mondays and ramp up in difficulty as each week approaches Sunday, but I haven't been playing the game regularly enough to notice the differences as yet.

I have been playing the game, though, which is more than I can say for pretty much any other mobile game released since… well, 2015, when Take It Easy came out. I appreciate a game that makes good use of the platform it's on, doesn't constantly bug me to pay up, and which is simply a fun little challenge. A Knotwords puzzle is the sort of thing you can do on the toilet or before going to bed; it doesn't demand a lot of commitment, but it does get your brain working in a way that doomscrolling the shitty end of the Internet absolutely does not.

The only thing I don't like about it is its use of "streaks", a la Wordle, because that's a shitty way to engage players and I dislike it intensely. But it's also easily ignored, so I'm not particularly mad about it. I do feel sorry for the people online who seem to have a genuine addiction to anything with a "streak" involved, though, including this. You should be playing things like Knotwords because you want to, not to Make Number Go Up.

Anyway, Knotwords is A Good, and I'm happy to have randomly stumbled across it the other day. If you're burnt out on Wordle (or just feel weird giving the New York Times any of your time and/or attention, regardless of reasons) then I highly recommend giving it a shot.

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

#oneaday Day 212: Engage!

I've been playing Fire Emblem Engage since I finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and I've been having a lovely time. Fire Emblem is a series that has always passed me by despite it being, in theory kind of in my wheelhouse.

I say "kind of" rather than "completely", because while I absolutely love the high drama fantasy RPG side of the narrative, I've always had a bit of a rocky relationship with strategy games. I'm not good at them, see, and I've always had a hard time trying to determine how to get better at them. Because while there are plenty of guides out there for games like Fire Emblem, none of them simply sit you down and talk you through how to play them effectively. And that, for me, has always been a problem. It's why I bounced off Fire Emblem Awakening on 3DS, the last entry in the series that I tried, and why I have held off on playing the copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses that's been on my shelf for several years at this point.

Why am I playing Fire Emblem Engage when Three Houses, a game almost universally considered to be superior in every way, is right there on my shelf? Well, because I had somehow got it in my head that Engage was a little more "straightforward" — and, perhaps more importantly, shorter. Three Houses is an absolute beast of a game, particularly if you do all the narrative routes (which I'm assured you should), whereas Engage is a once-and-done sort of affair, with replay value coming from the harder difficulty levels.

Mechanically, I don't think Engage is any more straightforward than what I know of Three Houses. There are elements where it's arguably more complicated, in fact — most notably with regard to the Emblem Bond and Skill Inheritance systems — but I wasn't to know that going in, and I'm about 25 hours in now, so, well, I guess I've dealt with it successfully.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm playing on Normal difficulty and Casual mode — i.e. the one without permadeath. I was having enough difficulty with the initial missions in the game that adding the opportunity to completely gimp my playthrough via poor performance seemed like an unwise choice. I am new to the series, I am still finding my feet in how it all works and how to play effectively, and thus I want minimal barriers to just enjoying myself. The options are there, so I'm using them.

With that "guardrail" in place, Fire Emblem Engage is still quite challenging. If you lose a unit during a mission, you still have to do the rest of the mission without that unit, and that can really fuck you over. It took me a few early-game missions to figure out what I was doing wrong, but then something interesting happened: I figured out what I was doing wrong.

This is not something that normally happens with strategy games. I normally end up being trounced by whoever I'm playing against, then never wanting to play it again as a result — or, in the case of tabletop affairs, not getting much opportunity to "practice". But with Fire Emblem Engage, I've ploughed on, and I've started to get a real feel for how the strategy works, and what is effective. I still make mistakes now and then — and the game's generous "Draconic Time Crystal" mechanic that allows you to undo stupid moves has been very helpful here — but I am definitely getting better at How To Play Fire Emblem. And that's a good feeling.

Because Being Able To Play Fire Emblem means that you can Enjoy Fire Emblem. And there is a lot to enjoy. The story of Engage, while relatively clichéd RPG fare — dark dragon long thought safely sealed away has come back, heroic band must gather a bunch of rings to summon enough power to drive the bastard back to the abyss — has been really compelling so far, and the character-centric nature of modern Fire Emblem is exactly what I like in this sort of game. I'm getting a real feeling that I'm getting to know the individual characters, both through the protagonist character's interactions with them and their interactions with one another.

For the unfamiliar, modern Fire Emblem features a relationship mechanic whereby units can "support" one another by fighting alongside each other in combat and doing activities together between battles, and your reward for reaching a new milestone in two characters' relationship with one another is a "support conversation", which depicts the two of them getting to know one another. There's not a Support mechanic in play for every pairing of characters in the game, but plenty that make logical sense, and it's lovely to see everyone getting to know one another, having comedic misunderstandings and deepening their feelings of friendship.

Anyway. I'm not sure how far through the game I am — I reckon probably about halfway maybe? — but I've been playing it all weekend and having a great time. I should almost certainly have it finished ahead of Xenoblade Chronicles X coming out on Switch in March — because you better believe I'm revisiting that game thoroughly having adored it on Wii U — but in the meantime I think I'm a convert to the series. I'm sure longstanding fans will scoff at me playing on non-permadeath mode, but I bet all of them reload a save the second anyone dies anyway. Also it doesn't matter how someone else enjoys a video game.

So yeah. Fire Emblem, pretty good. Who knew?

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

#oneaday Day 211: Things that don't exist any more

I was watching a Game Grumps episode where they were playing Supermarket Simulator earlier, and, as is often the case with that series, discussion got well and truly off the topic of the game and onto other matters.

One of the subjects they talked about was "secret tracks" on CDs. The existence of these used to be common knowledge, but with digital music having been A Thing for so long now, it was pretty much necessary for Dan to explain what one of these actually was.

I doubt anyone reading this is young enough to not know what a secret track on a CD is, but on the off-chance you are (or if you've just forgotten), it's where the last track on the CD would end, but the CD would keep playing, often for 10-15 minutes of complete silence, before cutting in with an unexpected new song that wasn't on its own individual track.

You could generally identify a CD with a secret track by if its last song was more than 10 minutes long, though there were, of course, some bands who really did close out their album with 10+ minute prog rock-style epics. There were also, apparently, some bands who found ways to hide secret songs in the "pregap" before track 1, allowing you to "rewind" from the beginning of the CD and find something new. This is one thing I actually never knew existed, as I never came across any in my time listening to CDs — but, like secret tracks in general, they are a thing of the past.

Most streaming versions of albums have the "secret tracks" as a separate, discrete track, thereby making them no longer secret. This also eliminates the "surprise" element, where the CD ends but you're in the middle of doing something (typically homework, essays and suchlike at the time I was listening to CDs rather than digital music) and, ten minutes later, you get suddenly shocked by the appearance of a piece of music you weren't expecting.

It's a little thing, but it's a bit sad to think that such a phenomenon no longer exists. And the episode went on to describe some other things that don't really happen all that much any more, either — like getting together with pals and playing a split-screen game of something like GoldenEye.

Local multiplayer games still exist, of course, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of you reading this haven't engaged in one for quite some time — and if you have, you certainly don't do so regularly.

While I was at university, we had a definite routine. Get up, go to lectures (probably), get some lunch at the student union, head back to my friend Tim's house, where we'd drink and play N64 games, typically Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye or, later, Perfect Dark.

It's funny to think back on this time as I type this across the from from my 55-inch widescreen wall-mounted 4K television, because we were almost certainly playing these games on a CRT that was no bigger than 20 inches, likely even smaller. I remember getting (if I remember rightly) a 26-inch TV from a local second-hand store and being blown away by how enormous it was. (It was also a nightmare to dispose of when it finally gave up the ghost; I ended up illegally leaving it in the bottom of a dumpster outside the block of flats where I lived at the time. No-one ever traced it back to me, so I got away with it.)

These things may seem like little nothings, but I'm saddened to lose them. Of course, one can still experience secret tracks on CDs that still exist — and I'm sure some artists still releasing stuff on CD are still sneaking in secret tracks — but it's no longer something that's just part of regular mainstream popular culture. And one can still get friends over to play split-screen games on the Switch in particular — although given my experiences in recent years, good luck getting anyone to ever commit to anything, even a simple evening of gaming, less than 8 months in advance.

Those of us prone to nostalgia are that way not just because we pine for our younger days, when life seemed simpler and our minds and bodies were perhaps in better shape, but because there were things that existed back then that pretty much… aren't a thing any more. And so, we do our best to remember those things, and why we liked them. And now and again, we get a reminder of something like secret tracks on CDs, and it prompts some fond memories. (And, in some cases, a sudden desire to start collecting CDs again, I'm sure. I have remained mostly immune to this to date… though I will admit to being tempted on occasion!)

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

#oneaday Day 210: Making some video plans

I was hoping to make more videos over the course of December for "DOScember", but a nasty cold with a cough that's been lingering for a while (and still is a bit) put paid to those plans. I was really hoping to play through both The Dagger of Amon Ra and the spiritual successor to the Laura Bow series, The Crimson Diamond, but that hasn't happened. I did start trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but my throat gave out in less than ten minutes, so I abandoned that plan.

I mean, there's no reason they still can't happen, they just won't be "DOScember" features any more. And that's fine. So I think I may well still go ahead with those, 'cause doing adventure game playthroughs is always a lot of fun.

I've been pondering other things to do along the way, too. One thing I definitely want to do is spend some time exploring other microcomputer systems alongside the Atari stuff I've done a bunch of to date. There was some interesting discussion on Bluesky earlier today about how the overly "Americanised" canon of gaming history has a habit of erasing stuff like the European microcomputer scene, so I want to spend some time redressing the balance there a bit. I've obviously done a lot of Atari stuff already, and I intend to keep going that because it's a personal passion, but I also want to make some use of the C64 "Maxi", TheA500 Mini and The Spectrum that I have, because those are all thoroughly lovely machines.

As good a place as any to start with those would be to work through the built-in games on each, since that's actually not something I've done to date for anything other than The400 Mini. So a cautious plan I have is to spend a bit of time exploring each of those systems' built-in libraries, then onward into some other stuff on each of those platforms, just like I've done with the Atari 8-bit.

Assuming my voice holds out, then, I think that's what I'm going to try and make a start on this weekend, along with maybe a bit of The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I've also reached a conclusion I think I've known all along: I am absolutely not cut out for streaming. I just can't be arsed with it. It's a lot of setup and effort to get going, it's a pain to promote (particularly given my potential audience is all over the globe and thus there's no "good" timezone for it) and the number of viewers I get (both live and on the archived version on YouTube) is crap compared to my standard videos. I know that's something that improves with time, but this is supposed to be a hobby, not work, so I'm just going to stick with what I know and enjoy, and which works well — which is YouTube.

I'm not ruling out occasional "special" streams for events, charity drives and suchlike, or occasional chats with my buddy Chris in a quasi-podcast format. But I'm not going to make it a regular part of my routine. I know several people who want desperately to "make it" as a streamer, and they seem to spend a lot of their lives being miserable, and I have no desire to get into that situation. I do this for fun.

So, amid a bit of game room reorganisation that may be happening this weekend, I'm going to make a start on another year of retro computing fun. Broadening my remit will be an interesting journey for me to take, and it may well bring some new people to the channel, too. I know from previous times I've done this that there are a couple of people who get a bit sniffy when I cover non-Atari stuff, but y'know what? My channel, my rules. I am interested in gaming and microcomputer history, and while Atari stuff will always carry significant personal meaning for me, I want to know more about the other parts of this side of things, too.

So that means C64, Spectrum and Amiga stuff! There's a huge library of things for me to explore on all of those platforms, and still plenty of Atari material I haven't covered, either. So I certainly don't think I'm going to be short of things to play and talk about this year. Now I just need to make the dang videos!

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

#oneaday Day 209: Memories of Me: Primary School

Sometimes I wonder what pieces of actually helpful information go in one ear and out the other in favour of the long-term storage of memories I don't really need to (or in some cases want to) hold on to.

Chief among these are some memories of primary school that I just can't get rid of. Most people I know can't remember a lot about their primary school days, and for sure, there are doubtless many, many days at primary school that I cannot remember. But these particular instances — or perhaps just general vibes rather than specific memories — have stuck in my head over the long term, and they're not going anywhere.

"Lazy work. Very poor."

I learned quite early on that despite not being particularly terrible at it, I absolutely hated maths lessons. And so it was that in either Class 1 or Class 2 — definitely the Infants half of the school, either way, so I would have been no older than maybe 6 or 7 — that I had two, to me, utterly shameful pages in my maths exercise book.

On the left of the spread, a maths lesson where I had completed one (1) sum in the entire lesson. This has been marked as "Lazy work." On the right, a separate lesson where I had completed three (3) sums in the entire lesson, two of which I had got wrong. This, in turn, was marked "Very poor."

I was upset by this spread of pages, even though I knew both comments were completely and utterly deserved. I don't remember why I had such outstandingly bad performance in these two lessons in particular — as I say, I wasn't particularly bad at maths, overall, and was always in the "top group" for it — but that negative feedback shamed me into trying a bit harder in subsequent sessions. I don't recall having any work in my exercise books ever being so shameful ever again. So… I guess it sort of worked, despite making me feel like shit?

Lunchtime fury

I don't know why (or rather, I've forgotten why) but in my later years at the primary school I went to, I spent a lot of my lunchtimes being furious and taking out my aggression on one of the "dinner ladies", actually a volunteer who would keep an eye on the kids in the playground at lunchtime.

I vividly recall deliberately getting furious about something in front of her and trying to provoke her, on multiple occasions, but not why. I would kick over the bin, I would yell at her, I would, inevitably, get in trouble. I feel like I was trying to achieve something or make a point, but that point is long lost, leaving me with just memories of ill-focused fury.

Perhaps it was a defence mechanism of sorts. I got bullied a lot at primary school, particularly by the older kids when I was still in the Infants classes, so perhaps I thought if I was extra annoying to the dinner lady, I would be taken into a sort of "protection", despite being "in trouble" myself. Retrospectively, that seems like the most logical conclusion, but I can't be sure that was ever the reason at this point.

Pissing myself in P.E.

For some reason, having to go to the toilet during lesson time at school has always been the ultimate taboo. In secondary school, it's discouraged because it's often assumed that those who "escape" lessons, ostensibly to go to the toilet, will take the opportunity to skive off, go for a smoke or otherwise do something they shouldn't be doing. In primary school, it is perhaps a little less justifiable.

And so it was that I commenced a school P.E. lesson in my '80s shorts, urgently needing the toilet and being told I couldn't go. This was an inaccurate assessment of the situation, because I could, in fact, "go", and did so right there on the playground. Oddly enough, I don't remember being mocked or anything for it; I just remember being curiously fascinated by how pissing with clothes on could still result in piss going everywhere, not just "wetting your pants", as the vernacular had it.

The Log

At primary school one day, we were inexplicably provided with a large log, ostensibly as something to play on and around. And The Log was, for quite a long time, a really cool place to play.

The more daring kids would climb atop it and run along it, but for many, the greatest appeal was "making piggy dust", which involved getting a twig and scraping away at the wood to create sawdust. Over time, we carved the shit out of that damn log, making it so it had natural platforms and footholds along the way; the poor thing lost all its external bark as part of this process — and, I recall, the teachers and dinner ladies often made half-hearted attempts to discourage us from "making piggy dust".

I don't know what ultimately happened to The Log. I'm pretty sure it remained in its place at the edge of the playground for the entire time I was at primary school, but it, unsurprisingly, was no longer there the last time I happened to pay a visit to the school in question.

It

Most of you reading doubtless have variations on Tag (or "It", as we called it) that you played in the playground. The ones I can recall are thus:

It: One person is "It". They have to tag someone else, who then becomes "It". Sometimes the semicircular areas at the ends of the netball court on the playground were considered "homey", where you couldn't be tagged, sometimes they were not.
Bulldog: One person starts as "It". When they tag someone, that person also becomes "It". The game continues until everyone is "It". "Homey" was more commonly in use in Bulldog than in It.
Chains: As Bulldog, but all the Its had to hold hands, making an increasingly long human chain the longer the game went on. This game inevitably turned dangerous, leading to it being discouraged by most teachers and dinner ladies who were on duty.
Top Gun: The rules for this one were ill-defined, but it was mostly It, but instead of tagging you had to repeatedly punch someone in the arm. (That was you "hitting them with your machine guns").

To determine who was "It" to begin with in any of these games, some variant of "Foot In" was used. For the unfamiliar, this involved someone yelling "FOOT IN FOR BULLDOG!" or whatever we were playing, and everyone who wanted to play standing in a circle with one foot in the middle. Then, whoever started shouting "FOOT IN FOR [whatever]" would perform one of the following rhymes, pointing to each foot in turn according to an accepted rhythm that wasn't necessarily matched to the syllables or words:

"Ibble obble black bobble, ibble obble out." (Whoever was declared "Out" would not be it and would remove their foot from the circle. The process would then repeat until everyone except one person was "Out", and that person would become "It".)
"Ip dip dog dip, you are not it." (Officially this was supposed to be "ip dip dog shit" to better rhyme with "It", but we knew better than to swear in earshot of teachers and dinner ladies. As with "ibble obble black bobble", this resulted in a gradual elimination of people until you were left with one "It".)
"Ip dip dog dip, you are it." (A surprise variation that usually occurred when the caller calculated the least popular member of the group would end up as "It" if they said the rhyme this way. Almost always resulted in arguments.)

Learning the word "Shit"

One time in Class 2, we were doing some… form of class work. I forget what. I was in Blue Group, which was a group of the most "able" kids, and we were being taught by Mrs Powell, who wasn't our regular teacher but who would often cover things when Mrs Robson, our usual teacher, was not present. This was one of those days.

I think we were doing some sort of English exercise. Like I say, I don't remember exactly what. What I do remember is Natalie Forster, the only girl in Blue Group, spelling out "S – H – I – T" to herself while writing something down. Having never heard the word before (I was like 6 and my exposure to even PG movies had been somewhat limited) I promptly said the unfamiliar word out loud.

"Shit?" I enquired, confused. I thought she was trying to spell "ship" but had gotten it wrong somehow. I genuinely didn't know it was a swear word at the time. But the rest of Blue Group did. "Ummmmm!" came the inevitable cry of kids around you about to tell tales on you. One of Blue Group — it may even have been Natalie Forster herself — reported my inadvertent transgression to Mrs Powell, who yelled at me.

"I certainly hope you did not say that, Peter Davison," she bellowed, loud enough for the whole class to be looking at me. "Or I shall have to wash your mouth out with soap and water!"

Ah, public shaming and threats of physical abuse. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Bundle

One kid would shout "BUNDLE!" and jump on another kid. Then everyone else would jump on him. (It was always a "him", as girls never got involved in Bundles.) The result was a large and painful pile of boys. There was no game here, it was just something we did. This is one of those things that I understand was quite common, but I have no idea how the concept is transmitted from one schoolyard to another. I don't remember being explicitly "taught" it, it was just something that one day we knew we had to do whenever someone shouted "BUNDLE!"

Dizzyland

This was a game of sorts that involved putting both arms out to your sides, shouting "DIZZYLAND!" while giggling, then spinning around as much as you could for as long as you could without falling over. Bumping into each other was encouraged. Theoretically whoever stayed standing the longest was the "winner", but I don't recall it ever really getting to that point, as we were usually gently discouraged from doing this by teachers and dinner ladies on duty.

Bumper Cars

Fold your arms. Then run as hard as possible at another person. Ideally they will have folded their arms also, so you "bounce" off each other, but there was often a certain amount of catching people by surprise involved. There was no real "game" here, again, it was just something we did for a while. Eventually, someone would get bored, and Bumper Cars would cease.

Mr. Edwards

Teacher of Class 3 (years 3 and 4) at my primary school when I was there was Mr. Edwards, a rather hippie-like individual with a mullet and a moustache. I remember him being a good teacher who was always pretty calm about things, and we used to have a nice regular "Circle Time", where he'd get out his guitar and we'd sing stuff like Worried Man Blues together.

I don't remember a lot about lessons under Mr. Edwards, but I remember his class having a thoroughly nice vibe to it all.

Mrs. Barratt

Mrs. Barratt was in charge of Class 4 (years 5 and 6) at my primary school, and everyone who was not in those classes was terrified of her. She was a severe older lady who drove a Mercedes and spoke posh, like. She had a reputation for cracking down on troublemakers with an iron fist, so most people were afraid of ever crossing her. In fact, I remember coming to the close of my time with Mr. Edwards and being genuinely scared of joining Class 4 the following school year; I desperately wanted there to be a shift round of which teachers did which classes (as there had been a couple of times while I went through the years) and Mrs. Barratt to avoid our cohort altogether, but it was not to be.

Happily, Mrs. Barratt turned out to be one of the absolute best teachers. She was clever, she was funny, she encouraged everyone to do their best. She absolutely didn't take any shit from anyone, but it was rare anyone in her class gave her shit, because they respected rather than feared her.

I attribute at least some of my love of learning and writing to Mrs. Barratt, because she would set us interesting research tasks for a bit of light homework to bring in the next day, and in carrying out those assignments I learned a lot about topics I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about. I also vividly remember somehow incorporating "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" into the Daily Spellings lessons (and spelling them correctly), which got me some credit.

Mrs. Barratt's class is also the first time I remember doing a lot of things, with two of the chief ones being making cakes and science experiments. We wouldn't actually bake the cakes ourselves, but we'd do all the prep work, mixing and putting into tins and suchlike in class, then they'd be baked in the school's oven in the staff room for us to take home at the end of the day.

As for the science experiments, the one that sticks in my mind is one where we'd put an empty tin on a little electric camping stove and put cling film over the top, and we'd see the cling film "bulge" out as a visible demonstration of how hot air rises. I don't think we actually performed this one ourselves, as I suspect we wouldn't have been trusted with camping stoves at the age of like 10, but I do remember being so struck by the stern warnings that "if you don't take this off soon enough, it will explode" that I incorporated "exploding can-stove-cling-film" traps into some of the first ever custom HeroQuest quests I created for myself, not realising that "explode" meant "the cling film will pop" rather than "action movie-style explosion with fire and smoke".

So it's fair to say my time at primary school was… mixed at best. I have some good memories and some awful ones. Certain aspects of the experience helped shape who I am today, for better and worse. But regardless of all that, it seems these memories are there to stay, for one reason or another.

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

#oneaday Day 208: Yet another new beginning

Yes, it's 2025! Hooray and all that. I'm sure all of you are winding down after the holiday period, and I suspect many of you are not relishing the idea of returning to work tomorrow. I know I'm certainly not — and I like my job. Still, at least it's only two days before another weekend, then we have to get properly back to the grindstone as normal.

Doubtless many of you are contemplating new year's resolutions, too. I certainly have been, even though I know they generally don't lead anywhere particularly productive. I am determined, though, to make this the year that I have a positive impact on my physical and mental wellbeing. I have been in a sorry state since the COVID lockdown years, and I want to get back to a state where I'm feeling vaguely human again.

To that end, tomorrow is a fresh start on Being Sensible With Food. I'm not jumping into anything like Slimming World or WeightWatchers or anything — just doing what the wife and I were doing before the holiday period, which is counting calories and being sensible about what we put in our mouths each day. I'd also like to make an effort to drink much more water each day, too; it is commonly cited that when you think you feel hungry, you're actually thirsty, and drinking plenty of water throughout the day helps deal with that very well indeed.

Only trouble is that the water which comes out of our taps is rank. It's always been kind of minging thanks to us living in a hard water area, but just recently it's really started reeking of chemicals, too. Actually, just recently it hasn't been so bad, but back in November or so it was barely drinkable. (Then we completely lost water for about a day and a half in mid-December, so that was nice.)

So yeah. My plan for action is to get up early, kick off this process by weighing myself before breakfast, and taking care to record everything, ensuring I don't go over the calorie limit each day. I was actually doing pretty well with this before the holiday season hit, so I think it will be fine to get back to this. I just need to stick to it over the long term, which is where the NHS app that helps you track calories comes in. That aims to get you following the programme non-stop for 12 weeks to see what an effect it has, so my first and only resolution this year is to do that 12-week programme.

That is, as they say, a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based goal. SMART, if you will. From there, we'll see how it goes. I'm feeling vaguely positive right now, so time to knuckle down and get on with it.

If you're in a similar situation, where you want (or need) to achieve something to better yourself, best of luck with it. I suspect the year ahead is going to be challenging for many, but if you take care of yourself, that's one fewer thing to worry about, ain't it?

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

#oneaday Day 207: Happy new 2025!

I'm writing on mobile and you hopefully know by now how much I hate doing that, so I'll keep this brief.

A very happy new year to each and every one of you.

We all know that, practically speaking, the turn of a new year is not particularly "meaningful" or important. But we, collectively, have ascribed a symbolic importance to January 1st and the beginning of a new year.

It's a time for fresh starts, new beginnings and, yes, resolutions. I'll get into those tomorrow, but for now let's just say that if you've been putting off some sort of Big Project, be it a creative work, home improvement or self-betterment in some way… now is as good a time as any to get stuck into it and start making some progress.

You may not necessarily be able to maintain momentum for the whole year, and that's fine. The important thing is to make that start, and the symbolic time of "rebirth" that is a new year is the perfect time to make that start.

I know we're all facing our own challenges, and folks in the States in particular are facing down a particularly miserable period in their history. On top of that, we have the scourge of AI devastating the planet and ruining the economy. It is, I'm sure, easy to feel hopeless.

But do what you can — just for yourself if for no-one else. You may not be able to make a difference to all the shit going on in the greater world right now, but you can make a difference for both yourself and those close to you.

Best of luck for another year of this shit. We're going to need it — but we've also survived this long, so what's another year?

#oneaday Day 206: Impending reorganisation

The living room, which is wall-to-wall video games of all descriptions, is fast approaching a point where it needs a Big Reorganise. I'm conscious of this because 1) my wife keeps bugging me about it (which, to be fair, she's entirely justified in doing), 2) because my Switch shelves, by far the most "active" in my collection, are approaching capacity, and 3) because at some point in the not-too-distant future, there's going to be a Switch successor and, assuming all the reports about it being backwards compatible are true — that better include having a cartridge slot and not just be a digital affair — that part of the collection is only going to continue expanding.

I dislike having to think about this because it involves making some tough choices. I'm disinclined to get rid of much stuff completely, largely because a lot of the stuff I own I either want to have on hand to be able to play, or wouldn't be worth that much were I to drag it all down the local CEX and trade it in. (The stuff that would be worth trading in from a financial perspective is all stuff I want to keep readily accessible.)

That leaves the main alternatives being seeking somewhere larger to live, which neither my wife nor I really want to do, or going through, being a bit "selective" about the stuff that is kept readily accessible, and squirrelling away the less "important" stuff up in the loft. This latter approach is looking like being the most practical and/or desirable thing to do right now.

So the big question is: what stays down here and readily accessible, and what goes in the loft?

Right now I'm thinking the following, from all the stuff that is currently on my shelves both in the living room and in my study upstairs:

Big box PC games, presently in the study, can go in the loft. I have nothing with which to read that original media, and any of those games I do want to play I almost certainly have on GOG.com, Steam or the eXoDOS archive.
Atari ST games, also presently in the study, I am a bit torn on. While putting them up in the loft would free up a lot of shelves for other uses, I like having them on display, because they're my childhood. Also, while I'm still making videos about Atari home computers, it's nice to have them on hand to be able to look at the documentation and packaging. So they're a "possibly stash away if I really need the space".
Atari hardware, currently filling up the closet in my study, can realistically go in the loft. As much as I adore the original machines, I do the majority of my Atari-related stuff on The400 Mini for Atari 8-bit, and Hatari running on my mini PC for ST. Freeing up some space in that cupboard would be a huge benefit.
Nintendo DS and 3DS games, presently on one shelf in the living room, can probably be organised and stacked a little differently to take up less space. This consideration is of increasing concern as the Evercade library, which is presently on the shelf above, expands, as it's nearly at the limit of the one shelf it's on.
PS1 games can stay down here. I don't have a lot of these and they don't take up much room.
PS2 games I think I can go through and strip out a big chunk of the collection I'm unlikely to spend a lot of time with any time soon. I have a lot of "interesting curiosities" in the PS2 library that I'm loathe to get rid of (and which, as outlined above, probably won't net much in a trade/sale) but which I'm unlikely to spend a lot of time playing in the immediate future. Once I've gone through and picked all these out, I can probably trim the fat of the PS2 library quite considerably and pack the rest away to get back out if we ever move, or if we figure out some form of alternative storage solution.
PS3 games can stay where they are. I don't have a lot of these.
Likewise PS4 and PS5. Of the three, I have the most PS4, and there are also a lot of games among the PS4 library that are on my "to-play" list for the near future.
Wii games can probably undergo a "trimming the fat" session like PS2. I don't have nearly as many Wii games as PS2, but still a good couple of shelves worth, some of which likewise falls into the "interesting curiosities I want to keep but am in no hurry to play" pile.
Wii U can definitely have the fat trimmed to those games that haven't been ported to Switch, and those games which have been ported to Switch that I haven't (yet) bought the Switch port of.
Original Xbox is slim pickings so can stay as-is.
Xbox 360 can undergo a PS2-style fat-trimming process, for exactly the same reasons.
Switch can stay as-is.
The Limited Editions I have on display, taking up quite a few shelves, can probably be organised a little differently or more tightly, freeing up a bit more room.

That sounds like a plan to me! I'm sure that was of very little interest to any of you reading, but I feel better having got a rough plan down on "paper". I'll be tackling this once the Christmas decorations come down, so not for a little while yet, but I'll be sure to share the results once the process is complete!

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