#oneaday Day 866: In the palm of your hand

I've had my Analogue Pocket a couple of days now, and I really like it. So what is the game I have played the most on it so far? It is, and this is genuinely not a joke, Solitaire FunPak by Beam Software for original black-and-white Game Boy. (Apparently a Game Gear version also exists, but I haven't tried that yet.)

Given that "handhelds" these days are just as capable as TV-connected consoles, it's easy to forget that they were once quite a distinct breed. That's not to put them down or anything; there are plenty of games for even early-ish handhelds like the Game Boy that you can sink hours into. But there was, at one point, a marked distinction in both the technical capabilities of handhelds compared to their TV-connected big brothers, and the way in which games were designed for handhelds versus TV-connected consoles and desktop computers.

You've probably heard someone — perhaps even me! — say that something makes "a good handheld game", but what does that mean? The specifics have changed over the years, but one thing has remained fairly constant: the best handheld games are things that you can boot up quickly, play for a few minutes to either pass the time or as something to do with your hands while you do something else, then set aside without feeling any sort of "obligation" to keep investing large amounts of time into it.

This could mean any number of things. This could mean simple arcade-style score-attack games. This could mean platformers with short, snappy levels like the Super Mario Land series. This could mean shoot 'em ups. Or, indeed, it could mean board and card game adaptations.

Back when Game Boy was current, I suspect a lot of people would have looked upon something like Solitaire FunPak for Game Boy as not worth bothering with; spending a relatively large amount of money for something you could just do with a pack of cards. But now, with how easy it is to load up a device like the Analogue Pocket or a Chinese emulator handheld with games, these titles show their value: they are good handheld games!

I've actually secretly known this for some time. Not specifically that Solitaire FunPak is a good time, but that simple board and card games make for good handheld entertainment. The game that converted me in this regard was Nintendo's 42 All-Time Classics for Nintendo DS, also known as Clubhouse Games in America, because Americans can't count or something. I don't remember exactly what made me pick this up back in the day, but I do remember being very pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it was when I booted it up and spent some time with it. Plus the built-in Pictochat and single-cartridge multiplayer made it super-easy to play with others.

So in retrospect, I'm not surprised that I'm having a good time with Solitaire FunPak, which is a solid implementation of exactly what it offers in its title: a selection of solitaire card games, which you can play either individually or as a "tournament" in an attempt to attain the highest score possible. Even if you just play Klondike, there's plenty of value to be had here, but you have a bunch of other fun games to play, too, and they all work well with both the simplistic visual presentation afforded by the Game Boy's limited capabilities, and the likewise straightforward controls.

This is exactly what "a good handheld game" is — and, being on a device that isn't connected to the Internet, and whose games are completely self-contained affairs that don't need updates, you can just relax with it without the possibility of distractions. And it's so nice to play something that is designed as a simple pastime, and which hasn't been monetised out the wazoo or engineered to manipulate your "engagement" into playing for longer, thereby getting you to look at more ads.

Would I have bought Solitaire FunPak back in the day when I had a Game Boy? Probably not, although if I had I suspect I would have actually had a decent amount of fun with it. Am I having fun with it now, though? Most definitely. And I think I might just go play a game or two while I run myself a bath this evening…

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 865: Earnestness is neither cringe nor cheesy

I've run into a few creative works recently that were evidently put together with a great deal of earnestness, genuine thought and emotion. And people like them! But, more often than not, not without including some sort of "disclaimer".

Said disclaimer is usually some form of admission that "I know this is cheesy, but…" or "yes, this might be cringe, but…" before going on to give a genuine emotional response. For some people, it is seemingly difficult to just give that emotional response without feeling the need to justify it or explain it away.

Well, I'd like to say: own it! If you got hit in the feelings by something, that's okay! If you had an emotional reaction to something that was so strong it reduced you to a sobbing wreck, that's fine! That's good! You have a healthy relationship with your own emotions, and you are not afraid to express them!

I say this as someone who listened to this track from Ace Combat 8 earlier (which I knew the full narrative context of, having beaten the game a couple of days ago) and burst into full-on sobbing at it by the midpoint. Like, I was legitimately crying so hard I had to stop everything else I was doing.

If your immediate response to that is "wow, that's cheesy" or "I can't believe you admitted that", stop. Take a minute. Ponder why you are thinking that. Are you concerned about what other people might think of you if you exhibit some sort of vulnerability? Because that's not something you need to concern yourself with — particularly if you are sitting by yourself.

It's okay to have an emotional response to something. It's okay to have a physiological reaction to that emotional response. You aren't faulty. You aren't broken. You are being human — something it can sometimes feel like we are, in may ways, being discouraged from by the daily algorithmic bombardment from social media.

Sometimes those emotional responses can come from the strangest places — like the funny plane game.

Or perhaps a song developed by a father, based on the near-gibberish his young daughter writes as "stories":

My immediate response to this was just "aw, that's cute and adorable… and surprisingly well-produced for what is essentially a silly joke video". I won't lie, I listened to it multiple times in succession for its pure catchiness.

Then I read the comments to the "Living Room version" of the song (actually just the song with an animation rather than the vertical video of the chap singing). And the emotions hit me, hard.

Y'see, if you haven't listened to the song, the end part features the repeated motif that "everything all fell down, but he picked it up". In the context of the original story and lyrics, it's a silly moment; the main character, the "Little Tall Prince", dropped a cup in the grocery store which caused everything to fall over, so, being a good little prince, he picked it up. Simple, silly, right?

Except human beings have the tendency to ascribe meaning to things where it might not have been the original intent, but it most certainly fits. That video has comment after comment of people expressing the sincere hope that "we can pick it up" — that we can fix the world after "everything all fell down" over the course of the last few years or so.

The world is broken. Peoples' souls are broken. And they want nothing more than to begin the healing process. Little moments like this song give just a glimpse of a world we once knew; one where we could have hope for the future and not find ourselves continually enraged and saddened by the latest stupid, wasteful, obnoxious, tragic, violent, unjust things happening on a daily basis. Hope for the future, through the eyes of a child.

I saw the number of people expressing this sincere hope, completely earnestly, and it hit me right in the heart. I'm not too proud to admit that I shed a few more tears there. And listened to the song a good few more times.

I want to believe that we can pick it up. I want to believe that we can come together in a Song of Wings as one. It is not cringe, embarrassing or cheesy to think such things. Take a moment and have a good cry over something today. I can't guarantee you will necessarily feel better, but you will almost certainly feel some relief at having let out emotions that have probably been pent up within you for a long time.

That's what I felt after putting my own emotions through the wringer over the last couple of days. Sometimes self-care is just about allowing yourself to feel.

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#oneaday Day 864: Grab bag

It has been a fairly boring day, so I will attempt to make it more interesting by talking about several things. Look at me go!

First up, my Analogue Pocket arrived today. Did I need another retro gaming handheld, particularly one that is quite pricy (and extremely pricy when you add the extortionate shipping and customs charges that come with getting one shipped to the UK)? No, of course I didn't. Did I get one anyway? Yes, of course I did. I have been interested in the Analogue Pocket ever since it was first announced and immediately sold out, so I have always been keeping an eye out for them becoming available again. As it happens, they became available again and I was in a position to be able to buy one without guilt, so that's exactly what I did.

I don't have a lot to report on it so far as I've only really set it up and given it a quick try with a few games so far. I am impressed from the little I've seen, though; the extremely, extremely high resolution screen means that it's capable of doing some wonderful display effects to recreate things like the original Game Boy's dot matrix display and the distinct "line" patterns on things like the Lynx and Game Gear displays. It can also do a nice Trinitron CRT simulation, as well as a number of other "generic" effects — or you can mix things up a bit, like applying a simulation of the DMG Game Boy screen onto something that would not have used that!

I'll doubtless have a lot more to say about it in the near future, but suffice to say for now that this thing seems to be built like a tank in handheld terms, and setting it up to use the MiSTer-style openFPGA cores using an application called PocketSync was quick and easy. PocketSync also takes care of things like downloading BIOS files, so it really is just a few clicks to get the thing set up to load any ROM you'd care to name on one of the supported platforms. It's nice to have the option for original cartridges, though, which was the Analogue Pocket's original unique selling point.

Anyway, that's the Pocket. Like I say, I'll do a more detailed writeup about it in the near future, as it's worth exploring in depth, I think. I'm particularly intrigued to try the nanoloop music creation software that comes built-in. It seems fiddly at first glance, but I'm sure once you get your head around the various button controls and know what everything does, it will become much more usable.

What else has happened today? I tried some American flavours of sugar-free Monster that one of our local convenience stores (the one we call "Funny Shop" to distinguish it from the nearby Tesco Express, and in homage to the fact that it sells unusual imported food products from around the world as well as domestic products) and they were both actually very nice. I tried the "Ultra Red White and Blue Razz" one, which is obnoxiously "patriotic", but, as the name suggests, just tastes of blue raspberry, while the Ultra Sunrise flavour might, in fact, be my all-time favourite Monster; it tastes like actual oranges. Not like orange soda flavour, like an actual orange. Highly recommended. I hope we see it more "officially" over here at some point; in the meantime, I will be counting on Funny Shop to keep me stocked.

I also tried the Taco variant of Buldak noodles. I have mixed feelings on this. It had a pleasant Mexican-esque smell once the powder and sauce went in, but in terms of flavour it was mostly overwhelmed by the Buldak hot sauce. The "flakes" pouch also contained some of the most unidentified foodstuffs I think I've ever seen. There was something that I assume was supposed to be a bit like taco meat, but I have no idea what it actually was, and it didn't really taste of anything. I am yet to find a Buldak variant that beats the regrettably discontinued Curry flavour, though the sweet fried chicken one is pretty good (yes, that means it is a sweet fried chicken flavour hot chicken flavour noodle) but seemingly getting a bit harder to find. I also tried the Rosé one the other day and had trouble distinguishing it from the Carbonara variant. It was nice, to be sure, and I'll probably seek it out again, but I'm not sure how it distinguishes itself from Carbonara.

Well, that's my day. I think a bit more handheld play is in my immediate future…

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#oneaday Day 861: Round. One! FILM!

I went to see the Street Fighter movie today. I enjoyed it a lot! In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I legitimately find it quite baffling that some people have been seemingly quite angry about not liking it. I was watching Giant Bomb's Bomb-A-Thon livestream for part of last night, and one guy in the chat appeared to be furious that he had been to see it and not Digger. Each to their own, I guess.

Anyway, I went into the Street Fighter movie expecting something that was dumb but fun, and that's exactly what I got. Even as someone who is not particularly "into" Street Fighter, there was plenty of series fanservice in there. Rather wisely, the movie is set in the early 1990s, so the vast bulk of the cast consists of the most familiar faces from the series' early days — in other words, the cast of Street Fighter II, and a couple of additions from Super Street Fighter II (Cammy, Akuma) and Alpha (Dan). There's also an incredibly deep cut in the form of Joe, who only ever appeared as a non-playable enemy character in the first Street Fighter game.

The story, as you might expect for a Street Fighter movie, primarily concerns Ryu and Ken, who are given some extensive backstory, presented using extremely stylish anime-style sequences. Ryu beat Sagat in the first World Warrior tournament (as depicted in the original Street Fighter), but in doing so came perilously close to giving in to the Dark Hado and becoming Evil Ryu. His desire not to fall to evil resulted in him being unable to fully unleash a Hadouken when Gouken, sensei to him and Ken, was under attack by Akuma. This drove a wedge between Ryu and Ken, leaving Ryu to go into hiding, believing that he should leave fighting behind, and Ken to become a self-styled "sports entertainment" celebrity, hoovering up brand deals with the assistance of his manager, Dan.

I don't know Street Fighter lore extensively, but I got the impression that the movie plays a little fast and loose with the characters' backgrounds. As someone who doesn't particularly care about Street Fighter lore, I also don't care about this. In the context of the movie, their backgrounds and motivations for getting involved in the ongoing plot made sense — inasmuch as anything in this gleefully chaotic movie makes sense, anyway.

I won't summarise the entire plot here, but suffice to say that it involves M. Bison being Up To No Good, Akuma putting in an appearance, Chun-Li double-crossing the villains in her role as an Interpol agent, Cammy in her pre-having-broken-free-from-Bison phase and lots of people thumping one another.

Not all of the core cast of Street Fighter II are directly involved in the Big Plot, but they all get at least one fight scene. E. Honda, for example, only shows up for a fight with Ryu in a sauna so the latter can take the former's place in the tournament that forms the centrepiece to the plot — but it's a pretty great fight, with Honda using both his Hundred-Hand Slap and Flying Headbutt manoeuvre. (Unrelated fact: one of my friends once thought that he was saying "guffcake" when performing this move in the original Street Fighter II, and now I cannot know that move as anything other than "guffcake". I had to look up its actual name.)

Zangief is probably the most under-used of the core cast, with his role primarily consisting of getting angry that Ken ruined his steak dinner. He still performs a good few crowd-pleaser moves, though.

What I enjoyed most about the movie is that it's funny. Not in a "funny because it's so bad" sort of way, but in the sense that it's funny because it knows how silly and camp it all is, and absolutely leans hard into it. Bison even gets a "…for me, it was Tuesday" line in homage to the 1994 Street Fighter movie.

Ken is a particular highlight throughout, because he's a dickhead. Various entries in the series have both downplayed and emphasised this aspect of the character, and he's a real dickhead here, but not so irredeemably awful or unlikeable that he has no chance of redemption. On the contrary, he's mostly a dickhead because he's an idiot, and that makes for plenty of endearing comedy, particularly when paired up with Dan, who doesn't do a lot of fighting but has some amusing lines. There are some especially amusing scenes when Ken, Dan and Guile all try out out-masculine each other — with Dan, of course, coming off the worst.

In series tradition, the actual "tournament" isn't really an important plot point at all, as the main thrust of the story is Bison Being Up To No Good and what everyone else is doing about that. David Dastmalchian is a wonderful Bison, striking the perfect balance of sinister and absurd, and he frequently steals the show in the scenes where he appears. It's a bit of a shame he doesn't really get a good kicking — the ending is very clearly attempting to set up a sequel — but given the amount of other spectacular clashes throughout the movie (and the fact Bison does get a "behold my true power" moment when squaring off against Chun-Li), I can't really be too mad.

So yeah. I really enjoyed it. Not only did it do a good job of capturing the "vibe" of Street Fighter, but it was also an enjoyable, compelling movie. I like it better than Resident Evil; I didn't dislike Resident Evil, as I wrote the other day, but it did feel more like a series of entertaining vignettes rather than a coherent movie. Street Fighter, meanwhile, felt like it went places. They were often absurd, ridiculous places, yes, but one should expect nothing less from the series. It has, after all, always been extremely silly — no matter how seriously some people like to take playing the games, the series will always be the one with the stretchy-armed Indian, the green-skinned monstrous Brazilian, the American military man with the implausible hair and too many other examples of delightfully delirious nonsense to list in full here.

I feel you have to be a special kind of miserable to come out of that movie not having had a good time. No, it's not great art, it's not thought-provoking, it won't make you think about the human condition or any number of other philosophical concepts. It's a movie about people punching each other. And it's a good movie about people punching each other. If you go into it expecting anything else, that might be a you problem. And that's my final word!

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#oneaday Day 858: Long rest

I fell asleep at like 7pm yesterday. I had been feeling rough all day, so I thought I would get an early night. I didn't intend it to be quite so early, but evidently I needed the rest. I feel mostly better today, at least, but it did mean I forgot to write something before passing out yesterday. So here I am!

I wasn't really sure what to write about yesterday anyway. And to be honest, I'm not really sure what to write about right now, either. Oh, maybe I'll talk about cards. I made a video on an Atari ST game imaginatively called Cards, which will be releasing in the next couple of weeks, and doing so got me looking up some card games that I remember I used to play, particularly when I was at my grandparents' house. (The ST game also taught me how to play Cribbage, which I'd never come across before, but now really like!)

Either my Nan or my Grandad taught me to play a fair few card games, including some variation of Rummy (I'm not sure which one offhand as there seem to be about a million), along with several forms of Patience (or "Solitaire", if you prefer.)

I, of course, learned how to play what I now know as Klondike Solitaire as one of the first ones. I wonder why this one became one of the most popular games? Still, yes, I learned how to play that pretty early on. What I find slightly more interesting are two completely different solitaire games that I learned around the same time.

The first of these I knew as "Clock Patience". This involves dealing the pack face-down to make a "clock face" with a single "hand" in the middle. You end up with thirteen piles of four cards each, and your aim is to create the "clock", with A-Q acting as the numbers 1-12 and K acting as the "hand" in the middle. After dealing the cards, you draw the top card of the middle pile, then place it underneath the appropriate "clock" position, then turn over the top card of the same pile. You then repeat the process until you have either completed the "clock" or turned over four Kings; if the latter happens first, you lose. It's an entirely luck-based game with an apparent exact 1 in 13 chance of being able to win, but I always found the aesthetic aspect of it to be enormously pleasing.

The second unusual solitaire game I learned was known as Elevens. Here, you deal 9 cards onto the table in a 3×3 arrangement. You then look for either pairs of cards that add up to 11, or the J-Q-K sequence. When you have found one, you draw new cards from those that remain in your hand and put them over the pair or sequence, thereby updating the board. Your aim is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. Again, I think this is probably mostly luck-based, but there is at least a bit of brainpower involved in adding things up and spotting the sequences. I used to like this game because it was quick and simple: a lot easier to set up than Klondike, took up less space than Clock Patience, and very fast to play. I recall deliberately trying to clear a game of Elevens as quickly as possible for an additional challenge. Lots of fun.

Card games are fun for the tactile element, though it's hard to beat the convenience factor of playing on computer — particularly for games like Cribbage, where the scoring can get quite complicated. One of the nice things about those three forms of solitaire that I learned, though, is that they're all pretty straightforward to play without needing to make complex calculations or check your "working" as you go. I remember they used to keep me busy in a time before portable games consoles (or being allowed to take my SNES with me!), along with playing games like "Dots and Boxes" and "OXO" with my Nan.

"OXO" you say? Draw a big grid, place X's and O's on it anywhere, your choice. If you complete the word "OXO" you get a point. Deep strategy! Not really. But I found it fun.

There we go, a post. Happy now? I'm off to get some lunch.

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#oneaday Day 856: Flurry of activity

As so often happens after I have a day of feeling a bit maudlin, today I had a day where I got a lot done. Six videos, to be exact, including both Atari 8-bit and Atari ST videos. It's good to be getting back into the rhythm of these, and I really enjoyed the games I played for these vids — hopefully that comes across in the final products, which will be released over the course of the next few weeks!

I've definitely made the right decision to refocus my YouTube effort back on what I was having the most fun with in the first place. I am never going to "make it big" on YouTube and I have no intention of making it into a second job in an attempt to do so; I already keep more than busy enough for the day job, and I want YouTube to be fun. But I also want it to reflect the things that are important to me — hence the refocus on Atari stuff.

I think part of the reason I pressed pause on the A to Z series a while back was because I was worried I was going to start running out of things to cover. But going through the spreadsheet of reviews I put together a while back, it's clear that isn't going to happen for a long time, on either Atari 8-bit or Atari ST. There may be some individual letters that are a little short on things to cover — as I recall, I was running out of games that began with "Y" on ST, unless I wanted to cover various iterations on Yahtzee over and over again! — but I can just skip those if necessary. Or, indeed, I can play a multitude of Yahtzees, since I'm sure at least some of them do something vaguely interesting with the concept!

Anyway, as a preview of what's to come, I will be covering Desmond's Dungeon, Eastern Front (1941) and Firefleet on Atari 8-bit, and Archipelagos, Blasteroids and Cards on Atari ST. Most of these are new to me, which is exciting; I'd played Eastern Front and Blasteroids before, but I was a bit young to understand Eastern Front when I was a kid, so it's been interesting to return to that now I know what a wargame is. I'm not convinced I know how to play effectively, but it was fun giving it a go, regardless.

I think the biggest pleasant surprise of the day for me was Archipelagos. I remember seeing this back when it originally released and thinking it looked thoroughly interesting, and it really, really is. The version I was playing had a strange bug where every fifth level kills you instantly, but since you can just skip levels at will — and there are 9,999 of them — you shouldn't feel too bad about just skipping those ones that don't work. The version I was playing was the hard disk converted version by Pera Putnik, so it's entirely possible that the conversion process just made something go a bit skew-whiff somewhere; I haven't yet tried a disk-only version of it. Either way, it's a thoroughly interesting game, and you'll get to see exactly why quite soon!

So yeah. It's been a good day. Okay, I didn't get up until noon because I was having strange dreams and they put me in a bit of a funk at the start of the day, but I began my day with the intention of making some videos, and by jingo I've gone and done it: recorded, edited and exported, all in a day. Not bad, eh?

Now I think I've earned an hour or two of Ace Combat to celebrate. And maybe some ice cream.

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#oneaday Day 852: Rotting retro

You know, I have historically thought that out of all the subcommunities of computer and tech enthusiasts, the one which would have more respect for doing things "the hard way" than anyone else would be the retro fans. These are people who, in many cases, grew up seeing genius programmers making limited hardware do things far beyond its supposed capabilities, and, even if they never saw fit to take up programming themselves, could at least understand why it was impressive when, for example, someone made an Atari 8-bit display 256 colours on screen at the same time.

Sadly, it is increasingly looking as if the retro sphere, much like everyfuckingthing else, has been infiltrated, corrupted, poisoned and rotted by the scourge that is generative AI.

In just the last week, I have seen myriad vibe-coded "recompilation" projects, slop peddlers attempting to submit 50k lines of changes to an FPGA core that was already working just fine, the Oliver Twins making it abundantly clear what their odious stance is, web-based editors for the ZX Spectrum games Chaos and Target: Renegade slapped together using AI coding tools and someone making the bold claim that they have been "working on" (i.e. they prompted Claude to do it for them) multiplayer conversions of a variety of classic games for home computers and consoles, including Wizard of Wor, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. Oh, and someone who claimed to have decompiled Adobe's entire Creative Cloud suite of software and made a "clean room" version of it that doesn't work, like, at all, but that's not exactly retro. Still relevant, though.

The irritating thing is that a lot of these projects sound like they could be potentially interesting! 4-player Pac-Man on Atari 8-bit is a cool idea! Simultaneous co-op in Super Mario Bros. and Metroid are potentially intriguing twists on classic games! Tweaking retro games to play in different ways has been a proud tradition ever since everyone learned what the POKE command does!

And yet, I cannot, will not support any of these projects in good conscience. I just cannot. I cannot bring myself to give any sort of "reward" — and attention is a form of reward — to someone who thinks that throwing something into Claude Code and getting it to spit out something that looks convincing at first glance (but is probably deeply, deeply broken under the hood) is "working on something". I do not care that it looks impressive, at first glance, that you can click a button and some sort of functional-seeming, executable code pops out of the other end.

Because, really, what is the point? These projects are not put out into the wild with any attempt of aiding our collective understanding of things; they are put out in an attempt to accumulate clout, pure and simple. People want to be the first to do something, or the only person to do something, and the assumption, today, appears to be that the best way to do this is "just get AI to do it". Except then you haven't done anything yourself, have you? You have used a technology based on the stolen creativity and expertise of humanity, which consumes vast amounts of energy and water, which is unsustainably expensive to maintain beyond the next couple of years at most, which often gets things flat-out wrong, and which is responsible for making the Internet seven hundred thousand orders of magnitude worse than it has ever been, and you have got it to churn out something that, if you had to debug it yourself, you almost certainly wouldn't know where to start.

The standard counterargument to all this is "well, if this person hadn't done their little Claude Code project, it wouldn't have happened at all". And that, to me, is not a convincing case. It's a waste of time and money (but not effort) to produce something that, at first glance, appears to be "good enough" rather than something which has actually been crafted to work properly and perfectly — and in the meantime, it discourages people who are still doing this sort of thing properly to continue with their own projects, because that whole part of the scene has now been tainted with Claudeslop, and we've already seen with a variety of projects how disheartening that can be for some.

I think my biggest concern with all this is the long-term brain drain effect it will have. We're already seeing frightening numbers of people completely surrendering to the AI's "judgement" (which isn't a thing, but they believe it is) rather than thinking for themselves. And the end result, the longer all this goes on, is that actual skills and knowledge will atrophy. As the people who did this "the hard way" back in the day start to pass on — and many of them are passing on at this point, sadly — there will not be a generation of people who can take over. And when all this AI nonsense eventually collapses — which it will, as there is no way the world's economy can keep up this absolute insanity forever — it's going to leave a lot of people, projects and AI-corrupted enthusiast scenes in a real mess.

Now, you might think that doesn't matter for 40+ year old 8-bit home computers, but it absolutely does. Understanding how things work and how to recreate the conditions from back in the day is a crucial part of preserving the history of the medium, and the second you prompt Claude to just do it for you, you are wilfully saying that doesn't matter; you are wilfully disrespecting people who still know how to do all this stuff the old-fashioned way.

It matters. Your personal clout, on the other hand, does not, particularly if said clout has been accumulated by not really doing anything.

Maybe I should learn 6502 assembler just to spite these people.

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#oneaday Day 850: Fuck the Oliver Twins

I don't say this lightly, as I am that rare breed who legitimately, genuinely enjoyed the Dizzy games and believe a lot of their other prior output is excellent — particularly Firehawk on NES, which is an excellent tactical helicopter shoot 'em up that actually predates Desert Strike! But after seeing their recent output, and particularly reading these comments over on Time Extension, I say a full-throated, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart fuck off to Philip and Andrew Oliver.

The Oliver Twins are the textbook examples of "bedroom programmers" from the classic British home computer scene. They made games at home using their own skills and creativity, and achieved quite deserved success with many of them. Yes, I know a lot of people denigrate the Dizzy series in particular these days — particularly people from North America — but the fact is, these games had a place, and they achieved what they set out to do: provide a fun, distinctive mascot character, and a varied selection of games in which he appeared.

As such, I've always had respect for them and what they achieved. They helped define the British home computer scene of the 1980s, which, as you know, is a sector of gaming that is of enormous personal interest and relevance to me — even if I only had a chance to come to their stuff once we were into the Atari ST era, since they didn't make anything for the Atari 8-bit. I have genuinely fond memories of playing their stuff from back then, even if some of it doesn't hold up brilliantly (hello, Panic Dizzy on ST) and I had a lot of fun discovering a variety of their games I'd never played with The Oliver Twins Collection from the first year of Evercade, prior to me joining the company.

But with their current stance on AI, they have absolutely lost the fucking plot and seem to be wilfully ignorant of the overall mood in the room.

Let's go through some of the things they said in response to the questions from John Szczepaniak of Time Extension, shall we?

"We believe that, as creatives, it is another creative tool."

Literally the first answer is parroting the inevitable, probably LLM-generated in the first place, copypasta about it being "just a tool". Try harder.

"…in the right hands, we can create some awesome stuff that would have been impossible to create any other way."

Bollocks. Citation fucking needed. How, exactly, would it have been "impossible" to churn out things any other way than using generative AI?

"I'm sorry, but as an experiment, to create Emerald City, and all the art that went into this, it would have been an over-a-year project with a couple of artists, probably a hundred thousand pounds, all said and done when you're looking at all the costs."

Motherfucker, you literally ran a Kickstarter to fund your AI slop project. Ask for that £100,000 then pay some fucking artists with it! The reason your £5,000 Kickstarter failed is not because it was a fundamentally bad project, but because the project page, all the promotional material and literally everything about the project was drenched in generative AI imagery. This meant that people, on the whole, did not want to fund it. Because what is the point in paying for something the creators clearly have so little respect for themselves? Why would anyone want to fund your token habit?

If you had been honest and open about needing money, time and specialists to pull something off, I'm pretty sure a name as well-known and once-respected as the Oliver Twins would have been able to run a successful £100,000 Kickstarter without a problem. And whining and complaining that a project would take over a year, oh boo-fucking-hoo, creative projects require work over a significant period of time? Who would have fucking thought it?

"Now, as for scraping IP and all of that kind of stuff, I believe there should be regulations about what AI is trained on. I, unfortunately, do not run OpenAI or any of these other big gigs. As humble little guys just making Dizzy games, we can't control that. We could completely ignore a very powerful creative tool and then decide to produce nothing because it's too difficult to produce the quality that we want. And so we could go quietly into our retirement, or we can go, this is exciting! We love tech. We are sci-fi guys. This is an incredible time to be alive for a creator."

I can't believe they actually said the "humble little guys" thing out loud. We're just humble little guys who deserve some crumbs of stolen creative material. Have some fucking principles. You may not run OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other shits destroying everything nice at the moment, but you can have the principles to not engage with the product that everyone hates and which is making everything worse. You can read the room and understand that people fucking hate this, and they hate shit that looks like your Emerald City garbage, but for the most part people are too polite to say that to your face or within potential earshot of you.

All it sounds like is that you wanted to be able to churn out something quickly, cheaply and with minimal effort, which does not sound like being a "creator". It sounds like two old men trying desperately to jump on a trend and cynically produce a product — worse, content — with no lasting value, and a morally bankrupt attitude towards the way it is produced.

Fuck the Oliver Twins, and fuck their stinking attitude. I once respected them as creators — and still do respect the work they both did when they were younger. But the men they are now, and the slop they are apparently desperate to produce as quickly and cheaply as possible? Completely and utterly dead to me.

Cunts.

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#oneaday Day 849: Do people really not finish games?

I've seen it often suggested that "no-one finishes games" these days. Is that really true? I don't know. I am certainly not a representative example here, because I tend to only start games that I know I am going to finish for the most part. It might take quite a while to finish some of these games, if they're epic-length RPGs, but I will generally make an effort to finish everything I start. I have a mostly positive success rate.

I'm interested in this perception that no-one finishes games any more, because it's one of those things that is an alien concept to me — particularly with story-based games. Can you really derive any sort of satisfaction from playing a narrative-focused game and just leaving it unresolved? I guess in some ways it's the same as watching part of a TV series and then dropping it partway through. But it's still kind of alien to me.

So I thought what I'd do today is go through some games I can think of off the top of my head that one might regard as "popular", then see what the Steam Achievement rate is for "finished the game" or equivalent achievements. I appreciate this is an imperfect metric, because it doesn't take into account other platforms (particularly those which don't have achievements, like Switch) but it'll do for a rough idea. All right, let's take a look.

Pragmata

42.3% of people who played Capcom's Pragmata on Steam finished it to the point of seeing the credits roll on a first playthrough. This is a reasonably respectable number so far as I'm concerned, and I'm unsurprised to see this so relatively high to kick us off. Pragmata was praised as one of the first genuinely excellent triple-A games for quite a long time, so it's encouraging to see this many people play it through to completion.

It is less than half of the people who started it, though.

We see a big drop-off when it comes to completing optional material, though. 13.4% completed the main objective in all the Training Simulator side activities, which I completely empathise with; the Training Simulator is by far the worst part of the game and I absolutely hated every second of it. I am, therefore, unsurprised that a similar number of people went through and completed the postgame scenario, "Unknown Signal", since that involves running through a series of Training Simulator-like missions — only without the annoying bits. However, if you weren't to know about the "without the annoying bits" part, I can completely understand you not wanting to bother with it. And the additional bit you get on the ending for completing Unknown Signal is absolutely not worth it, either.

Resident Evil Requiem

Would you look at that? Nearly 75% of people have beaten Resident Evil Requiem, one of the most well-regarded entries in the series for quite some time. Only 65% of them beat it on "Standard (Modern)" difficulty, though, suggesting that all the Difficulty Level Discourse we've been having for the last few years has had an effect; there's a small but statistically significant number of people who had no qualms about playing on the lowest difficulty level.

Interestingly there is a different percentage for "complete the game on at least Casual difficulty" and "complete the game" ("Hope and Requiem"). I wonder how that happened?

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

We look at a longer game now with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Here, just under 40% of people actually finished the game. I can sort of understand it in this case, because although Expedition 33's main narrative is thoroughly compelling and emotionally engaging, the gameplay is challenging enough that I can see a significant number of people falling off before the end. It's one of those instances where although the developers made a huge, beautiful world and obviously want as many people as possible to see it, they also weren't willing to compromise on the mechanical intricacies of the game. Respect to them for that, but it does mean that significantly less than half of the players who started the game finished it.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Pity poor Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, though, a game where only just over a quarter of people who started it played it through to completion. This is another one that is arguably understandable due to the vast size of the game, but the team behind the game have got to be looking at that figure and feeling a bit disheartened.

But at least it's not the original Final Fantasy VII, which only 8.7% people who played it on Steam have finished. It's a shorter game! But there's also the fact that a lot of the people who would be inclined to buy Final Fantasy VII on Steam have nostalgia for having played it on PlayStation back in the '90s, and as such they may have just fired it up for a session or two to indulge that nostalgia, then set it aside. Less than 10% kind of sucks, though, because I'm sure there's some people coming to it for the first time, starting it and then never seeing it through to its magnificent conclusion.

Blue Prince

Honestly I'm surprised that nearly 40% of people finished Blue Prince, because it's the kind of game that repels you hard if you're not into it. But then you might say that the sort of people inclined to pick up Blue Prince probably already know that it's a game they'll like, and thus there should be a respectable proportion of them who finish it.

I didn't stick with Blue Prince long enough to know if this trophy encompasses all the endgame bullshit you have to do other than playing the annoying house layout game, but either way, even getting as far as just finishing the annoying house layout game is worthy of respect so far as I'm concerned.

Fuckin' hate that game.

I think that'll do for now. I know that's probably far from a representative or statistically significant sample, but on the whole, it seems like, on average, less than half of the people who start a game on Steam finish it. The games that are more likely to get finishes are ones that are on the shorter side, like Resident Evil, while longer RPGs inevitably see a much more significant drop-off. More niche-interest titles likely enjoy a slightly higher completion percentage due to the people playing having a sort of "vested interest" in the game and the genre it occupies, but still.

Anyway, I'm not sure I have a point here. So long as games that you can complete continue to exist, I will continue completing them, one at a time, because that's how I enjoy playing. If you're someone who doesn't beat games, do make an effort to finish one or two. I can pretty much guarantee you'll find it to be a satisfying experience. Just be warned: once you start in earnest, you'll want to beat everything you play… and for some, that way lies madness!

At least you're not chasing platinum trophies. That really is a sure-fire way to ruin all enjoyment of video games.

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#oneaday Day 848: Initial impressions from St. Amelia

I've been playing Silent Hill Townfall! It is good. I think I am enjoying it more than Silent Hill f, but I do intend to go back and give that another go (and a shot at one or more of the other endings) for the sake of fairness, comparison and suchlike.

Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different sort of game, though. For starters, it's presented from a first-person perspective rather than Silent Hill f's third-person viewpoint, and it places a strong emphasis on stealth rather than combat. There is combat — and it's modern-day, weighty, get-hit-once-and-half-your-health-bar-is-gone combat — but for the most part, sneaking around pretty much always seems to be an option, and in some cases is outright essential. I am fine with this.

I know some people don't like stealth much, but when it's executed well, it can be a great part of a game — and it's especially fitting with the horror genre. It makes absolute thematic sense to be creeping around monsters who very much do not have your best interests at heart rather than attacking them, and it especially fits with Silent Hill's traditional idea of a relatively "normal" person being the protagonist.

Silent Hill Townfall also provides you with some excellent tools to help with the stealth part. The main one is a little portable CRT television which you can "tune in" to monsters' frequencies, and this allows you to "see" them, even through walls. At other times, you have a pager whose LCD display shows the direction that monsters are in, but not details. Most of the monsters move in clear patterns, so the stealth sequences tend to boil down to puzzles of sorts: how best to get across the area while avoiding ending up in their line of sight.

There's excellent use of sound, too. When you're visible and vulnerable to a monster, the background audio builds in a gradual crescendo before eventually giving a "boom" when they're actively pursuing you. Likewise, you can tell when you've reached safety, because the background audio chills out a bit. Very clever and subtle.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the narrative as yet, but that's par for the course with the series. There is a lot of… medical stuff going on, though. Medical stuff in general gives me the squick, so it's ideal horror fodder for me; when combined with some of the other stuff Silent Hill Townfall is doing, I'm very happy at the experience it has provided thus far.

Highlights for me in the seven or eight hours I've apparently played since yesterday include some puzzles that involve creatively interpreting video footage to determine a combination number subtly hidden within; an inordinately stressful sequence in which you are tasked with performing various medical procedures on a patient while a complete cunt of a doctor yells at you over an intercom for being incompetent; and a puzzle based around locating blood bags, pairing them up with the appropriate medical charts, and then combining them to crack a code that unlocks a door.

I'm not crazy about the "instant death" monster who showed up during the blood bag sequence (only during the hunting for the blood bags, not during the puzzly part, thankfully) but, as previously noted, the sneaky-sneaky nature of most of the game means that you're already well-trained at avoiding monsters by the time you run into it anyway.

I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes. There's already been some intriguing weirdness to it all, but I have no idea where it's going to end up just yet. We shall see, I guess — that is, if Ace Combat 8 doesn't distract me from it too much…

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