#oneaday Day 887: PREVIEWS of FORTHCOMING ATTRACTIONS

Recorded and edited a bunch of videos over the course of the last few days, to be released over the course of the next few weeks. The first one is out right now, in fact. Go see me revisit the Atari 8-bit version of David Crane's Ghostbusters game right here!

These recording sessions have thrown up a nice mix of games that I've enjoyed exploring. We kicked off with the aforementioned Ghostbusters, which is a great game that is still pretty enjoyable to play — though I'm definitely out of practice. It's a solid example of how to do a good movie license game: rather than adapting the story of the movie slavishly, you simply make something that fits in with the overall vibe and concepts of the license, and do something creative from there. Ghostbusters works well not because it's a good adaptation of the movie specifically, but because it's a good game about being the Ghostbusters.

Also on Atari 8-bit, I took a look at a shoot 'em up called Humanoid that was a very late release from a Polish developer, and appears to be a game that has "borrowed" (or possibly stolen?) all the graphics from Hewson's Subterranea and bunged them into a game that is a little bit different. I couldn't find the story behind this one, so I do find myself wondering if it started life as an official port of Subterranea that was subsequently cancelled, then they figured they might as well do something with the work that had already been done. Waste not, want not and all that.

Finally on the Atari 8-bit front, I took a look at a type-in listing from ANALOG magazine called Incoming! This is a very simple game in which you control a rotating but immobile machine gun turret, and have to blast down aerial targets. It initially appears simple, but gets impressively frantic as the stages progress, and there's a lot more to it than just simple blasting. Losing points for each shot fired forces you to be tactical, and the stages alternating between dropping paratroopers and city blocks on you keeps things thoroughly interesting along the way.

Switching over to the ST, I actually ended up recording four videos because when preparing my "A to Z" I inadvertently skipped the letter "E" completely accidentally, so I had to fit something in. First up, though, came "D", and I finally took a look at Driller, the first of the "Freescape" 3D games. I've been putting off exploring this one because even after reading the manual I didn't really understand how to play it, but having actually spent some time with it now I have a much better understanding of it.

The "E" I quickly had to fit in took the form of Paul Woakes' excellent port of his classic Encounter! to the Atari ST. This is a lot better than I remember, and I really enjoyed spending some time with this one. I love the 8-bit version but always had somewhat mixed memories of the ST version. Turns out that was mostly in my head; the ST version is excellent.

For "F" I brought in an all-time favourite: Flood by Bullfrog. This is an oft-forgotten part of the legendary studio's heritage, but it's a perfect example of what they brought to the table in the 16-bit era: lots of audio-visual polish and solid gameplay that provides interesting twists on conventional formulae. Flood is a platform game at heart, but its little tweaks to the basic genre standard make it thoroughly enjoyable, and still a lot of fun to play today.

Finally, for "G" I took on The Grail, a showcase title for the Talespin adventure game creation software package. While The Grail is only middling as a game in its own right, its existence as a quasi-visual novel long before any of the Japanese visual novels ever made it to the West is thoroughly intriguing to me — and makes me want to check out the Talespin software itself in its own right.

Anyway, all those are rendering and uploading now, so I think I can say I've had a nice, productive day. Now I think it's time to settle down for a few hours of Zelda! I've definitely earned them.

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 885: A day off is different from the weekend

I am, as I have previously noted, On Holiday this week. On Holiday in the sense that "I don't have to work" rather than "I am going anywhere", although I am taking a trip back to East Anglia towards the end of the week for various things I talked about the other day.

Today has been a day of pretty much nothing but Zelda, which means I don't have a whole lot to talk about other than Zelda, but I shall resist doing so for now as there has been a lot of Zelda recently. Instead, I thought I'd talk about how a midweek day off always feels just a little bit different from the weekend.

I'm not really sure why this is. I think it's most likely to do with the fact that you know under normal circumstances, at this time you would be doing work, but right now, you have no obligations. That, in itself, makes it feel like a separate and distinct thing — and, in my mind, made me feel like "I have earned a day off". Hence, the aforementioned day of nothing but Zelda.

But a day off from what if I'm already not working? Well, anything, really. I have some videos scripted and ready to record, but I thought about doing them today and my mind just went "nope, do as little as possible today", so for once I listened to it without guilt and did exactly that. I will probably make a start on these videos tomorrow.

In these busy, perpetually online days where at times it can feel like your whole life is on display whether or not you want it to be, it's easy to feel like you "should" constantly be "doing something". This is particularly true if you are someone who enjoys making things and posting them online — be they articles, videos, podcasts, anything like that. It's very easy to succumb to the temptation that "everything must be content" — when in fact, it's perfectly fine for some, even all of the things you do for fun, to be just for you.

I mean, yes, I am almost definitely going to write about Zelda when I've finished it, but writing about the games I have played is part of my process of enjoying them at this point. It helps me to reflect on what I've just played, what I liked about it, and it also, in years to come, serves as a record of the things I've enjoyed and the experiences I've had. It's nice to look back on all this, because it's surprisingly easy to forget individual things that you've spent your time doing as the years go by.

But aside from the knowledge I will write something up when I've finished Zelda (and likewise Final Fantasy Resonance), I am not worrying about turning these things into "content". I don't need to add another Zelda video to YouTube as there are almost certainly hundreds, thousands already. One might argue that, therefore, I don't need to add another Zelda article to the mix, either, but for me, posting a video and posting an article are two quite different things; the former requires a lot of forward planning to ensure I get the footage I want, while the latter is something I can do much more "on the fly" once I'm finished with something. And, as I say, it's basically part of my "hobby process" now, anyway; writing about the game and contemplating it after I've finished is as much a part of the routine as simply experiencing the thing.

Anyway, this is a lot of words to say I didn't really feel like making any videos today, so I didn't do that. I have enjoyed my day, regardless, and I feel somewhat revitalised to tackle the self-imposed challenges ahead of me tomorrow!

For now, though, back to Zelda…

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#oneaday Day 884: No more resisting. I am a Zelda fan

I have written about this a number of times in the past (most recently exactly a year ago, weirdly), but I think it's time to admit once and for all that I am, in fact, a fan of The Legend of Zelda.

This is not a controversial opinion, I know, but let me talk about it a little bit, because I find my own response to the series kind of interesting. I have, over the years, convinced myself that I am a bit "meh" on Zelda as a whole, and I'm not entirely sure why, given how I've always had a good time with it. With the recent Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, though, there really is no mistaking it: The Legend of Zelda is, to me, one of the greatest series of video games ever created, and continues to be wonderful to this day, with nary a misstep to its name (aside from the CD-i games, but those don't really count).

(This is not an invitation for you to tell me how much you don't like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I don't care.)

I mentioned in my post last year that a lot of my… resistance, I guess you'd call it? Yeah. A lot of my resistance to the series over the years stems from that period when Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time were both the "big games" that my friends and I were playing through at almost the same time.

Final Fantasy VII had blown us all away with its spectacular, cinematic, deep and lengthy story and — to us as RPG newbies, anyway — unusual, interesting gameplay. Ocarina of Time, meanwhile, while undoubtedly a good game, just didn't feel quite as… impressive to our shallow, ill-informed eyes. We used to joke that after playing Final Fantasy VII, my friend Woody refused to believe that any game that came on fewer than three CDs would ever be any good — but we all secretly sort of felt something similar. Although in retrospect it's impressive quite what Ocarina of Time managed to achieve in 32MB of cartridge space — compared to Final Fantasy VII's three CDs, most of which were filled with FMV sequences — at the time it was hard not to feel like it was a bit less overtly… wow.

Then there was the "inverse hype" problem, where for a very long time prior to Ocarina of Time's release, it was hyped up as being akin to the Second Coming of Jesus, like all other video games were going to cease to matter; as if just standing within the shadow of Zelda 64 (as it was known prior to the Ocarina of Time subtitle being revealed) would cause every other game to spontaneously turn to dust and scatter on the wind. On the one hand, if you bought into this, it was exciting, but at the same time, it did, at times, feel a little excessive — especially for those of us who, at the time, had both PlayStations and Nintendo 64s and thus felt no real need for fanboyism or favouring one platform over another. Eventually, it just got kind of exhausting.

Looking back, of course, it was silly to compare Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time, as they're both very different kinds of game that can — and do — quite happily coexist. Knowing that also allows me to view the Ocarina of Time remake on Switch 2 through relatively clear eyes. And you know what it's teaching me? I've actually always liked Ocarina of Time a lot more than I had previously thought or cared to admit.

You might think that this is just the shiny new remake talking — but honestly, the remake is so true to the N64 original in terms of structure and gameplay that it is helping me appreciate and remember things about the older incarnation — things that are amplified, but not changed, in the remake. Consequently, I know that if I were to boot up the N64 version right now, I'd have as good a time with it as I am with the Switch 2 version.

Like, for example, I'm sure there are at least some of you out there who have always thought Zelda is kind of twee nonsense. Little fairy kid with pointy ears skips through the forest and beats a big bad guy? Childish nonsense, surely. But no; spend some time with the Zelda series as a whole and you'll develop a firm appreciation of the fact that it is actually surprisingly dark on a fairly consistent basis — with Ocarina of Time, in many ways, being second only to its direct follow-up, Majora's Mask, in terms of moodiness.

I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say the game has been designed with adults in mind, which is something I would say about the Metroid series, but there is definitely a strong amount of "fairy tale fucked-upness" about Zelda that, with my old and jaded eyes, I feel that if anything, I am appreciating more now than I ever did back in the day. It's the subtle things; the things that you wouldn't necessarily notice as a wide-eyed child, but which you appreciate as a cynical adult. Especially, yes, That Bombchu Lady.

And when I think back on the time I have spent with the Zelda series over the years, I can honestly say that I've never had a bad time with a Zelda game. This curious sense of "resistance" that I describe above sometimes prevents me from making much progress with them — particularly the sprawling quests of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom — but, partway through Ocarina of Time as I am right now, I think I can quite comfortably and confidently say that yes, I am, in fact, a Zelda fan, and I really should get it out of my head that I am somehow not. And then, after I'm done with Ocarina of Time, finally get around to scratching Tears of the Kingdom off my "to complete" list, too.

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#oneaday Day 883: Just like old times... hopefully

I have the coming week off work. I am going to spend most of it just chilling and relaxing, because it's been an intense, stressful few months for various reasons, but towards the end of the time I am doing a few things: stopping by to visit my parents, attending the Retro Computer Festival at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (I will be bringing Evercades of various descriptions, though I will not be there in a "professional" capacity, just as an enthusiast), and, arguably most importantly in my head, I am seeing a couple of friends from my school days that I haven't seen for a good few years at this point.

This little encounter is actually quite important to me, because as those of you who know me reasonably well will probably know, I have had some… difficult experiences with people I thought were my friends of late, and that has left me feeling rather depressed, distrustful and hesitant to "let people in" — or perhaps to open myself up, to put it another way. It is something that, unsurprisingly, I have talked about a lot at therapy. Over the course of those discussions it has become clear — well, even clearer than it was — that I have been hurt by those experiences, and that, in turn, has left me feeling lonely, not great about myself generally, and somewhat adrift in terms of just… having people to hang out with.

I don't ask for much from friendships: just some people that I can see every so often, share some good times with and, ideally, share in the experience of the hobbies that we have always found enjoyable together. A willing ear during turbulent times is helpful, but to be honest, it's the first bit that I most keenly feel the absence of in my life right now; I just want to be able to share the things I love — and that, in some cases, I am proud to have been part of — with people I care about. Some of my fondest memories from the years and decades gone by are not big, huge, exciting events, but times I spent at someone's house, just hanging out, possibly intoxicating ourselves via various means, playing video games and making stupid jokes together. These days I can live without the intoxication part, but the other bits I really miss.

Which is why I'm quietly excited about this little meet-up that is happening next week. It's just a couple of friends and, again, we're not doing anything big: just piling around someone's house, hanging out, playing some games and probably having a few drinks. It will be the first time I have done this with people I regard as "old friends" for quite a long time; my wife and I have been enjoying playing some HeroQuest with a mutual friend (someone she knew and introduced me to, who has now become a "shared friend", as it were), so it's not as if I've been completely without social contact, but that has been an occasional thing up until now. (That reminds me; I should probably arrange the next session of that.)

I don't know what the evening will hold. I'm hoping to introduce my friends to the stuff I've been doing with Evercade, firstly because it's stuff I'm super-proud to have worked on, but also (mainly) because there's a bunch of multiplayer stuff, particularly from among the NEOGEO cartridges, that I think it would be fun to spend some time with — and I get the chance so rarely to be able to actually play this stuff with other people that I'm really excited about the possibility. I can see Doom going down particularly well. The Instagib mode we added is insanely fun and the only chance I've had to play it was when we were testing it in the office!

But anyway. Spend some time with the people you have, in the past, called your "friends". Just drop them a text or something if you don't have the time to hang out. I can guarantee they'll appreciate it.

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#oneaday Day 882: The Maybe-Returner

I don't know if I'm going to go back to Final Fantasy XIV. I have had some wonderful times in that game — I proposed to my wife for real during our in-game wedding! — and every time I hear the soundtrack I feel an urge to reinstall and resub. But I don't know.

I have a few reasons for feeling a bit mixed on whether or not I want to go back. First and probably foremost is the fact that I'm very aware that, for several years, it completely dominated my gaming time. I don't resent the time I spent with wonderful people enjoying the game during that period — but I have always found it difficult to get that elusive "balance" between being able to enjoy a big, deep, time-consuming game like Final Fantasy XIV and still having a varied gaming diet elsewhere. There are a lot of games I still want to play, and I just worry that getting back into FFXIV — like really back into it — will mean I just never get to them.

The second is that I soured on the broader community as time went on. When I first started playing, the FFXIV community was one of the most friendly, welcoming, helpful communities I had ever played with, and this helped enormously with the sense of anxiety I felt over partying up with strangers for Dungeons and Trials. I even spent a bit of time as a tank class — in many ways the de facto "leader" of most groups, given that it is they who set the pace for everyone else — which is something I never thought I'd do.

Over time, though, things started to change. A lot of players started caring more about "efficiency" than enjoying the game. They'd speedrun through dungeons, pulling multiple groups of monsters at once and making the individual encounters considerably less interesting. They'd get pissy and abusive at anyone who wanted to enjoy the experience at a more leisurely pace. They ruined a potentially interesting mechanic called "The Hunt" by zergrushing every enemy that appeared as part of it with massive groups organised on Discord servers using bots. They made it nigh-essential to have spreadsheets and wikis open while you played certain parts of the game, rather than allowing you to enjoy it in a more freeform nature.

Granted, a lot of the game can now be enjoyed properly solo thanks to the Duty Support and Trust systems, but when you get to endgame, if you want to enjoy the raid storylines — which are often great! — you will still have to play with others. And, to a not-insignificant portion of the community, it seems there is only one way to play. The not-fun way.

The third is that prior to Dawntrail coming out, I ploughed through a New Game Plus run and straight into the expansions I hadn't yet done (Shadowbringers and Endwalker), burning myself out quite severely in the process. As part of this process, I started finding myself dreading the increasingly predictable structure of the game: go to new settlement, do story quest, suddenly sidequests pop up everywhere in the settlement. Do sidequests, advance main story a bit, suddenly a second set of sidequests pop up. Repeat until you get a bit of variation from a Dungeon or Trial. It got to a point where it just felt like exploring the world was becoming a bit of a chore, because there was no real danger from the enemies you'd encounter in the field, and nothing really to "find" other than the stuff you had marked on your map as quest objectives.

The third one is very much a "your mileage may vary" sort of scenario, I'm aware, and it may just have been that rushing through all those story quests made me cynical about the way the game is structured. It didn't prevent me from enjoying the game, and indeed the finale of Endwalker brought me to tears. I just didn't like feeling so cynical about a game that had been such an important part of my life for so long.

Thus, I'm rather torn about whether or not I'll go back for Evercold. Right now, I just don't really feel anything in the way of excitement for it, but at least part of that is down to simply not paying any attention to anything Final Fantasy XIV-related since the base story of Dawntrail. The rest is down to enjoying the varied gaming experiences I'm having away from FFXIV right now, and not wanting to end up back in a position where my own lack of self-control makes it difficult to still have those while playing FFXIV.

I'm probably overthinking it. I overthink a lot of things. I know I would go back in a heartbeat if I was able to help friends who had never played it before do a "story run" through the various main scenarios. But going back "just for me"? I'm not sure I have it in me.

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#oneaday Day 881: It is 2026 and I'm playing Ocarina of Time, Doom and Final Fantasy

It is very easy to shake your head at Modern Gaming™ and despair, but at the same time, great things are happening — even at the big-budget, top-tier end of things. They are especially great if you are a Gamer of a Certain Age.

For me, some of my fondest gaming memories hail from the mid to late 1990s. Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake are defining gaming experiences for me. Final Fantasy VII shaped my primary gaming tastes. And, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a wonderful shared experience for all of us who owned Nintendo 64s at the time it came out. Which was, basically, everyone in my entire friendship group.

Now, nearly 30 years later, it's kind of amazing to think that I am still here, still playing games… and still playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Doom and Final Fantasy — albeit not in their original forms. I'm playing the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Ocarina of Time, which is beyond beautiful; I'm playing Doom on a console I helped bring to market, in a release that I wrote the documentation for; I'm playing Final Fantasy in the form of Final Fantasy Resonance, a game which is both an excellent Final Fantasy in the old-school mould, and a wonderful homage to Final Fantasy history in its own right.

It's kind of funny in a way. I often think about games that have come out in the last… 15-20 years, say, and wonder if any of them will ever have the same kind of cultural penetration of things like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Games that, while you might not necessarily want to play them all the time, can be universally agreed upon to be both important and good. The games I've previously mentioned all fall into this category, too; Doom has endured for so long for very good reason, and has seen numerous rereleases over the years; Ocarina of Time is actually on its second remake and third rerelease after the Gamecube port and the 3DS remake; and Final Fantasy is a series that has very much moved with the times — not always in a way that everyone likes, but one cannot deny that it has always done its very best to stay up to date.

I look at something like Horizon: Zero Dawn — which, admittedly, is a game I didn't like very much — and wonder if people are still going to be talking about that in 20 years in the same way that the aforementioned titles are held in complete and utter reverence by both players and game makers. What about Gears of War? Halo? Gears is apparently having a bit of a comeback, but Halo has been absent from many people's lives for so long at this point that it has almost become irrelevant.

I wonder how much of it is down to a sense of universal appeal versus things that are ostensibly aimed at "adults". Of the titles I referenced above, only really Doom can, perhaps, be argued to be aimed vaguely in the direction of adults — and even then, not really. Doom is, at heart, a teenage, heavy metal, power fantasy. Even back on its original release, its violence was almost cartoonish, despite being relatively bloody; its "scary" elements tempered somewhat by a driving soundtrack and a relentless pace. People remember Doom and Doom II a lot more fondly than Doom III because Doom III tried to go all-in on the "this is a scary game for adults" thing, and while it was good — it really was! — you just… don't hear people talk about it any more.

And that's where I kind of fall with a lot of the modern games that seem to be a big hit one minute, then almost completely forgotten about the next. Sure, having a middle-aged protagonist who is sad and says "fuck" a lot is very much a sign of the times… but it doesn't have that same timeless appeal that things like Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy do.

As someone interested in gaming history, I feel like it's going to be very interesting looking back on the last 15-20 years or so in retrospect. It's already interesting to look back on the Xbox 360/PS3 era, because there's a whole ton of stuff that completely flew under the radar on those consoles. That's a different thing from having timeless appeal, of course, but it can sometimes throw up some thoroughly interesting experiences.

That's probably a tale for another day, though. For now, I'll just say that the couple of hours of Ocarina of Time I've played this evening are absolutely marvellous, and I'm delighted that this remake has come out as well as it has. It strikes that perfect balance I was talking about the other day, where it is simultaneously respectful to its source material, and simply a great new game in its own right, for those who have never played it before.

I would play some more but I smell real bad so I better go have a bath.

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#oneaday Day 880: Remakes and originals can and should coexist

Earlier today, the one and only Jeff Grubb of Giant Bomb posed the question "what game remakes have effectively replaced the original?" It's an interesting question, so I thought I'd take today to ponder it myself in a bit more detail than my skeet in reply to him.

Remakes are on everyone's mind right now because the Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is out tomorrow, and the reviews have been glowing. To most reviewers, it appears that nu-Ocarina is a respectful remake that simultaneously pays homage to the original and provide a solid, self-contained experience in its own right, accessible to newcomers as much as it is to series veterans — or, indeed, old farts like me who were There For It First Time Around.

My simple response to Jeff was that a good remake doesn't replace the original; it complements it. What happens next is down to the individual, with the remake pointedly not saying one way or the other is the definitive approach.

Someone who plays a remake could find themselves interested in the history of what they just played; having learned it is a remake of an earlier game, they could find themselves drawn down a rabbit-hole of investigating games from a different time — and, in the case of younger players, games that may well have been released before they were even born. This could, in turn, develop an interest in broader gaming history and retro gaming as a hobby — something which I, of course, would heartily encourage.

At the same time, someone who plays a remake could find themselves completely satisfied with the self-contained experience that the remake provides. They know it's a remake of an older thing, but they also know that it stands by itself and doesn't require or assume knowledge of said older thing. They can enjoy a brand-new, modern game that is informed by classic titles of the past, but not have to deal with all the challenges that looking into old games can present you with — whether that's dated visuals, lower quality sound, less refined controls and game design. These are not things that bother me personally, but I can imagine that someone who grew up with, say, the PlayStation 4 and Switch as their first gaming consoles might find it hard to go back to games from the original PlayStation and N64, for various reasons.

Then, of course, there are situations like the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, where what they're doing is not really a "remake" at all, but rather a considerably expanded retelling of a story that goes off in some interesting other directions. These can still be responded to in both of the above ways, however; some folks who came to Final Fantasy VII Remake first might find themselves curious to play the original Final Fantasy VII, while others will be happy with the modern games as their sole point of contact.

Of course, I would absolutely love it if all people were willing to dive back into gaming history and give older games the time of day. There's still a ton of value to be found in older games — even in ones that, for example, use control schemes that have long since been abandoned in favour of modern analogue controls.

Take the original Tomb Raider, for example. This is a game designed entirely around its rather rigid, clunky-by-modern-standards controls. It is a product of its time and represents a style of gameplay that we don't really have in the same form any more — but it's still perfectly playable if you meet it on its own terms and learn how to play it. At the same time, I understand completely why the more recent Tomb Raider games have gone in a more "modern third-person shooter" kind of angle. But one absolutely does not negate the other, at all.

I know not everyone is a fan of them, but I like remakes. They provide a new way to experience an old thing — and, if you were around for the old thing's original appearance, might just remind you why you used to like it so much. And, at the same time, they make the old thing much more accessible to newer or younger players. What happens from there is really up to them — but I hope it's the beginning of an enriching, fascinating journey of discovery.

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#oneaday Day 879: Pocket-sized

I mentioned a while back that I had got an Analogue Pocket, and I don't think I've written much about it as yet. So I might as well do that tonight!

The Analogue Pocket, for the unfamiliar, is a premium-grade (i.e. quite pricy) retro gaming handheld, fashioned in a similar mould to Nintendo's classic Game Boy (i.e. it's a vertical handheld) and featuring four face buttons (plus Start, Select and a Menu) button and two shoulder buttons. It features a cartridge slot that takes Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance cartridges, and can play these right out of the box. With optional adapters (which appear to be perpetually out of stock) you can also play Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket Colour, Atari Lynx and PC Engine/Turbografx-16.

Analogue Pocket has a couple of distinctive selling points. The first of these is its inordinately high-resolution (1600×1440) screen, which you might think is the last thing you need for retro games, but in fact it makes its benefits very clear almost immediately by accurately simulating the classic displays of the aforementioned handhelds — including the distinctive "dot matrix" look of the original Game Boy, the visible scanlines of the Game Gear and Lynx, and the "grid" pattern of the original Game Boy Colour screen. You can turn this feature off if you want, but it's implemented so well that it really does recapture the feeling of using the classic systems.

The second is that it is not a cheapo emulator handheld like the stuff from companies like Anbernic. It's an FPGA device, which means it emulates systems on a hardware level rather than simulating them in software. This, in theory, leads to much more accurate recreations of how the various systems work. Cores for the systems that take the aforementioned cartridges are built in to the Pocket, but the latest firmware updates allow you to install "openFPGA" cores on there, too, and these can be used with ROM files as well as original media. The openFPGA cores also cover consoles and computers as well as handhelds, allowing you to turn the Pocket into a portable powerhouse if you so desire — particularly if you pair it with its optional dock that allows you to connect it to a TV and use external peripherals.

It's an absolute delight to use. After a bit of fiddling around to get it set up — much less than a MiSTer, particularly now there are helpful tools available, though of course you have to avoid the AI shit — it's a wonderful bit of kit. Quick to start up and jump into a game on any of the supported systems, and pretty much flawless performance on almost everything I've played. The only games I've had issues with are a couple of Lynx titles — Gauntlet: The Third Encounter has some iffy screen tearing due to an odd refresh rate (plus the core doesn't seem to support display modes when you rotate the screen, as is necessary for that game) and Rampart refuses to display the image that is supposed to come up before the "rebuild" section but is otherwise fully playable — and everything else has been just as if I'd bunged in a real cartridge and was playing on a real system.

Its ease of use and portability means that I'm very likely to pick it up and just have a play with it when I'm at a loose end — and in doing so I've already discovered some delightful handheld games that I'd like to play more of. Plus SNES, Mega Drive and PC Engine games look amazing on it.

In short, this thing wasn't cheap, but it was a very worthwhile investment. If you enjoy handheld and retro gaming, I highly recommend one.

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#oneaday Day 878: I could probably play DOOM forever

DOOM is one of my all-time favourite games. I fell in love with it immediately when I played the shareware version all those years ago — though I never convinced my parents to get me a Registered version — and, over the years, I reckon it is one of the games I have come back to more times than any other.

As you can probably imagine, it is an enormous thrill and an immensely satisfying career moment to have been part of an official DOOM release — in this case, the Evercade version, for which I put together the text for the manual (paying homage to the original version's documentation), the digital descriptions (the stuff you see on the Evercade menu) and worked as part of the dev team, testing out various features and providing feedback.

We were working on this for so long, along with Banjo-Kazooie, that it felt like we'd never be able to just settle down and enjoy the fruits of our labours. But finally, I have my copy of The DOOM Collection for Evercade, along with three Evercade Nexus handhelds (plus all the myriad other Evercades I already have) and I can, at last, sit back and… well, play DOOM again.

It will probably not surprise you to hear that DOOM still holds up very well. I am currently in the middle of playing through on the Ultra-Violence difficulty level, which, I must confess to my shame, is actually a relatively new experience to me; traditionally I have stuck to Hurt Me Plenty and still find some parts pretty challenging. However, I've been really enjoying playing on Ultra-Violence; it really does ramp up the action and make things even more exciting, and it kind of feels like a brand new experience, even though I'm just going through familiar levels for the umpteenth time.

That said, there's still a fair old chunk of DOOM that I either haven't played or am just less familiar with. I've only played DOOM II through once in my life, for example, and I've never played the two parts of Final DOOM. I do have it in my head that DOOM II and everything that came after is significantly harder than base game DOOM — and I'm probably right about that — but I have successfully beaten No Rest for the Living and SIGIL in the not-too-distant past, so it's not as if I'm incapable of meeting these greater challenges. So I'm going to work my way through and enjoy every moment of this wonderful version of DOOM we've put together.

And this isn't the end of it, either; we have some really interesting plans for what we can continue to do with DOOM, which will likely show up at some point next year. We have a lot of other work to do first, though, so in the meantime I'm going to kick back on the sofa, grab my new Evercade wireless controller and once again indulge in one of my all-time favourite games — one I don't think I will ever tire of.

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#oneaday Day 873: Enjoying the whole thing

A while back, I wrote about how (relatively) few people finish games these days. And last night, I played through all of Mappy Kids on Evercade, a game that I've had a copy of for several years now, but which had somehow never played through to completion.

I had a really good time! And thinking about that has got me pondering how it would do us all good to just slow down a bit, pick and choose the things that we want to enjoy more carefully, and then actually enjoy those things to the fullest.

To be fair, this is something that I already do. A big change in my game-playing habits occurred… probably in the late '90s or so, but really in earnest from around 2010. I started finishing games. In my defence, earlier games from the 8-bit and 16-bit home computer eras were extremely difficult or even impossible to finish, but there came a point where it became practical, desirable and fun to play a complete game through from start to finish.

I don't know if it was the first game I ever completed, but one that really sticks in my mind was Super Mario World on the SNES. I got to the ending of that game and was blown away by how elaborate the credits sequence was. Of course, in modern terms, it's actually pretty simple — just a parade back through previous backgrounds, showing off all the sprites in the game — but back when I first reached it on my own, it was an incredible moment. Not all games have a satisfying ending like this, of course — particularly when you look at earlier titles — but there's always a special kind of thrill that comes with knowing you have beaten a game and seen everything it has to offer.

Since that time — and especially since Final Fantasy VII showed me how epic a finale sequence could truly be — I've really made an effort to try and beat the vast majority of the games I play. Except I've sort of fallen into a pattern of thinking that certain experiences are inherently more "worthwhile" in this regard; usually based primarily on how narrative-centric they are, and how long they are.

It's an easy mindset to fall into. Retro games in particular can feel rather "disposable" at times, given how easy it is these days to load up a handheld or emulation station with every game ever released for a variety of platforms, then promptly never settle on one thing to play, dipping into hundreds of things for a few minutes at a time and never really having a meaningful experience with any of them.

What you have to remember, though, is that every single entry in that massive ROMset you acquired via questionable means was once an individual release that cost anywhere up to £50 or £60. And back when that was the case, you made those games last. You made those games matter.

It's not hard to see how one can fall into a mindset where you inadvertently devalue short-form experiences or retro titles — particularly as most retro titles, when they do get an official rerelease these days, tend to come as big bundle deals with tens to hundreds of other titles alongside them for the price of one "big" game. I'm conscious of this with what I do for the day job: Evercade cartridges represent excellent value, particularly when compared to buying original media for platforms like the NEOGEO, but when you have 5, 10, 20 or more games on one cartridge, I don't blame anyone for treating the whole thing like a casual buffet when what some of these games really demand — or crave is perhaps a better word — is for someone to sit down with them for a protracted amount of time and take them seriously.

I wonder how many other people have had Namco Museum Collection 1 in their Evercade lineup since launch and have never played Mappy Kids all the way through from start to finish. Turns out it's quite easy, and pretty short! But I don't regret the time I spent playing it through last night; I ended up with a much better understanding of what the game is doing, and had an enjoyable, coherent experience as a result. Also the music in that game is brilliant.

And what about the more substantial games in that collection? I genuinely do wonder how many folks have got beyond the second mission in Metal Marines, because I know from firsthand experience how easy it is to sit down, play the straightforward but satisfying first mission and then think "oh, I better move on to something else".

Why? Why had you "better" move on to something else? I don't have a good answer as to why our brains work like that these days — other than to acknowledge that the modern media and particularly online landscape encourages this sort of attention-deficit behaviour, where everything is content, and all of the content you consume must be varied and engaging for a couple of minutes at a time, before something in your mind goes "NEXT!" and demands something new.

It takes work to resist that. But it's worthwhile to do so. If, in your travels through ROMsets, Evercade collections, retro compilations or anything similar, you have come across something that really looked cool or appealing in some way, but you only ended up spending 5-10 minutes with it, I encourage you to dedicate at least an evening to exploring it further. You might just be surprised at how much you can make one of these individual experiences really matter and feel worthwhile. Yep, even seemingly simple arcade or Atari 2600 games.

Plus, the bonus effect is that if you're one of those people who bemoans the fact that you "never have any time" to play video games any more, most retro games are pretty short! I beat Mappy Kids in a fraction of a single evening, and you can too!

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