Had a productive weekend of making some videos. There are three new ones on the way soon, and I've got another Wolfenstein one with its voiceover recorded that just needs assembling into some sort of shape.
For the upcoming videos, there's a couple of Master System games involved. The Sega Master System is a platform that I'm very fond of that doesn't get nearly enough love — and which I haven't spent nearly enough time fiddling with, either. So these two games will likely be the first of many in total. I'm looking forward to exploring the library further, because as a Japanese console that was particularly popular in Europe and failed to make any sort of impact whatsoever in America, it's a thoroughly interesting platform.
It's one of those situations where I'm not entirely sure why it never broke America, either. In technical terms, it's quite a bit better than the NES, but as numerous generations of console hardware dominated by Nintendo have shown, it's not always the most powerful system that wins the race. You've gotta have the games, you've gotta have the cultural penetration, and you've gotta have a lot of luck.
I guess one could argue that the NES has more "iconic" games — there are three Super Mario Bros. games alone on it — but the Master System has some solid versions of Sega arcade classics, and some truly excellent Sonic the Hedgehog games. While not as fancy-looking and sounding as their 16-bit counterparts, many argue that the Master System Sonic games are, in fact, the better entries in the series. I haven't quite made my mind up in that regard — I do love a 16-bit Sonic — but I do know from covering a huge heap of Sonic games a few years back on MoeGamer that the 8-bit Sonic games are very good indeed. (Just avoid the Game Gear version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2.)
Anyway, the Master System games I covered today come from two extremes of the "spectrum", if you want to call it that. There's one game that I imagine is pretty readily available for not much money (although interestingly CEX doesn't appear to have it listed) and another that is notoriously rare and expensive. After beating it in half an hour today, I'm glad I haven't spent £400 on it. It was fun for that half an hour, at least.
So yeah. Those videos, along with an Atari 8-bit port of a true classic, are on the way for the coming week. Watch out for them and please enjoy them when they're live! Or don't, if you don't want to, particularly after what I said yesterday. But it'd be nice if you did. My channel's over here, if you've never paid it a visit.
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There are a few people I follow (and a few I've followed recently) that I primarily followed because I like what they do in terms of streaming — but I'm almost certainly never going to watch them. This is not because I dislike or do not enjoy what they do on their streams, but because I honestly don't understand how anyone has the time to sit and watch streamers.
This is probably at least partly a "me" problem. I am the sort of person who prefers to engage in a single activity at a time. If I'm playing a game, that's all I'm doing; splitting my attention between that and a podcast, video or stream feels like I'm being disrespectful to the developers of the game; they crafted it to be paid attention to, after all, and thus I feel like the least I can do is appreciate it as intended, with my full attention.
I sometimes feel like I'm in a bit of a minority in doing this, though. People talk a lot about "second screen content" — some streamers, like the excellent Josh Strife Hayes, make a recurring joke about it — but I've tried, and I just can't do it. The way my attentiveness works is that I can pay attention to one thing or the other, not both. If I'm paying attention to the game, I'm not listening to the podcast, video or stream; if I'm paying attention to the podcast, video or stream, I'm not giving the game my full attention.
I guess part of this is down to the games I play. I don't play any multiplayer-centric games or MMOs that demand you repeat things over and over again, and thus I don't really play anything that really lends itself to dividing your attention away from it. I am, as I always have been, generally inclined towards games with interesting stories or compelling mechanics, and in both of those instances you are robbing yourself of the full experience if you're not giving those your full attention. Perhaps I might feel a bit differently if I was grinding my way through a Battle Pass (ugh) or still on the Tomestone grind in Final Fantasy XIV, but I am not doing either of those things right now. I'm not ruling out a return to Final Fantasy XIV at some point, but I'm pretty certain my days of playing that game hardcore are well and truly behind me.
I mean, I guess I could have put a podcast or video or stream on while I was playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment recently? There are some repetitive missions in that, but then there are also story missions where I want to pay attention to what's going on, and I like enjoying the whole audio-visual experience of that game: the graphics; the sound; the music; the voice acting. Now I've reached the postgame, I could feasibly grind my way through some of those challenges with divided attention, but I'm not sure I'm going to do that; I'm likely going to move on to something else instead, and maybe dip into the postgame any time I just feel like punching Moblins.
My wife, meanwhile, has YouTube videos on constantly, whether she's playing Final Fantasy XIV or whichever farming and crafting game has caught her attention recently. She even does some work sometimes, inevitably with a YouTube video on.
See, I even find it quite difficult to do work with a distraction like a video, podcast or stream; I do work quite well with a musical accompaniment, mind. I think it's the talking. If someone is talking, my mind tells me, repeatedly, pay attention to this. And if, for whatever reason, I'm not able to, I start to feel genuinely stressed out. I know this because I'm very conscious of it any time someone tries to talk to me while I'm in the middle of, say, watching a video, or TV show, or something like that. Two people talking at the same time makes my brain melt and I don't like it.
The other completely unrelated issue is that many of the streamers I might otherwise be inclined to watch are often playing games that I want to play at some point. And if I haven't played that game myself yet, I will tend to avoid anything else about it online (including reviews) until I have at least tried it for myself. That's just a habit I've fallen into — although I must admit, there have been occasions where I have watched a YouTuber like GameGrumps or ProJared play something and thought "yeah, that looks fun, I'll give it a go myself".
Because yes, it's not that I don't watch any video game stuff online at all. We quite often watch Game Grumps with lunch or dinner. But those are 20-30 minutes at most, focused on the game (well, focused on Arin and Dan's experience of playing the game, at least) and coming to a clear conclusion after a set amount of time. Your average stream, meanwhile, is several hours long and includes boring bits of downtime, shout-outs to donations and subscribers and all that stuff, and I just find all that very distracting.
I dunno. I guess I just have to come to the conclusion that there are parts of the Internet experience today that I just don't really get and probably won't ever get. And I think I'm fine with that.
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One thing I found while doing my Atari A to Z Flashback series a few years back was that I actually rather enjoyed a lot of Atari 2600 sports games — because they put "being a fun video game" first, a realistic simulation of the sport a distant second. Likewise, I rather enjoy Irem's 10 Yard Fight, as it is by far the most accessible take on American football I think I've ever seen — with Doug Neubauer's Super Football for Atari 2600 close behind.
The reason these games are so accessible is because they implement the sort of basic understanding of the rules that can be picked up very quickly and don't get bogged down in the intricacies. They don't assume knowledge beyond "man kick ball, score point" and don't throw you in at the deep end with a series of impenetrable-seeming options that, as a beginner, you have no idea what to do with.
I've felt like this about American football titles in particular for a very long time, ever since I first played the original John Madden Football on Sega Mega Drive all those years ago. Yes, the parallaxing, quasi-3D field was super-impressive, and back then that was reason enough to boot the game up, but as soon as those "play selection" screens popped up, I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to do with them.
And what's worse, the documentation for those games doesn't explain anything about it, either — meaning that, for someone who has only ever been vaguely aware of American football as a sport that exists, and who occasionally was allowed to stay up late with his Dad to watch it on Channel 4, there is seemingly no real route "in" to picking up and enjoying these games. And, rather than modern games getting more accessible and inclusive, they've just become more and more complex over time.
I feel the same about wrestling games. The last time I played a wrestling game was Smackdown 2 on the original PlayStation, and I didn't entirely understand what was going on there. Oh, sure, I knew what the buttons did, but not how you were actually supposed to use those buttons effectively to demonstrate your skill at the game.
I've tried wrestling games that came out both before and after it, and I have not found a single one where I felt comfortable that I could explain to anyone else "how to play". At least Smackdown 2 had that incredible character creator, and to be honest, that was where the majority of the appeal was — we had many a drunken night at university making digital recreations of people we knew, cartoon characters and, on one memorable occasion where my friend managed to get the sliders to go outside of their usual ranges, an absolutely horrific looking monster known as "The Freak", who would burst on stage with his iconic war cry, "Baggogh!", and stare his opponents down with a growled "Durgogh."
Every so often, I get a strange urge to want to learn how to play either American football and/or wrestling games. And every time I am hit with the same issue: there does not appear to be any good way to "learn" them. There do not appear to be any helpful guides online that don't assume you already know how to play the games (and have an in-depth knowledge of the sports themselves); the documentation for them is threadbare at best and non-existent at worst; and any "tutorial" or "training" modes in the games focus on telling you which button does what, rather than actually how to play effectively.
I feel like there would be a good article or two in learning how to play these games! I could even tell other people how to learn how to play them, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who has looked at these two genres (and other, related types of game like, say, baseball, or football management) and thought "I'd bet I'd like that if I understood it"!
Only trouble is, I don't understand them. And I don't even know where to begin doing something about that!
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I've always been extremely fond of Olympics-themed video games, ever since I played titles like Epyx's Summer Games and Activision's Decathlon on the Atari 8-bit. I haven't always kept up with all of the Olympic releases over the years, but I have added a few to my collection in more recent years. And I'm a bit sad, as the Winter Olympics are unfolding at the time of writing, that the official Olympic video game is no more. At least, on consoles and PC; I believe for the last Olympics, there was some horrible mobile game that looked like absolute microtransaction-riddled garbage. So that's the end of that, I guess.
I'm not sure exactly what it is I like so much about these multi-disciplinary sports games. They are, in essence, just a collection of minigames, and some don't get more adventurous than asking you to tap a button or waggle a joystick very fast. But I have always enjoyed them a lot — at least in part because they tend to simulate sports that you don't otherwise get much of an opportunity to engage with in the video game space.
One of my favourite Olympics video games was Sega's official Tokyo 2020 game — released just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the "real" Tokyo Olympics were postponed. This was a huge amount of arcade-style fun, made all the better by the fact that you could create custom characters. Yes, multiple; while you spent most of the game playing as your one "main" athlete, you could also create a team of other athletes who would show up in events that required multiple participants, such a rugby sevens, soccer, judo and suchlike.
What made this even more fun is that Sega decided to err on the side of "silly" to a certain extent, so these characters were somewhat cartoonish in their proportions, and you could unlock and dress them up in all sorts of thoroughly silly outfits as well as vaguely plausible athletic gear. If you wanted someone to enter the swimming competitions dressed like a spaceman, you absolutely could do that.
These games were always great fun with friends, too. While it's been a very long time since I had the opportunity to play one of these games with other people, I have very fond memories of enjoying them together when I was younger.
One of my favourite memories in this regard was the first time I went up to the Edinburgh Festival with the university theatre group. On my first night there, I felt like I might have made a bit of a mistake coming along, because my social anxiety was making it enormously difficult to involve myself with the other members socialising. I actually ended up sitting up late, in tears, over the whole situation.
Yes, I know I said this was a "favourite" memory; I'm getting to that.
Two of the theatre group members found me in the corridor being thoroughly sorry for myself and took pity on me. They sat with me, helped reassure me that people did like me and appreciated my presence, and then they played some International Track and Field on PlayStation with me. I chose to play as Germany, and attempted to enter my name as "HELMUT" because I thought that was funny, but there were only enough letters to put "HELMU". My nickname within Theatre Group remained "Helmu" for several years, until it was replaced with "Beast Man". That's probably a story for another day.
Anyway, I will always be extremely grateful to those two lovely people from Theatre Group — known colloquially to everyone as Stiffy and Des — for taking the time to bring me under their wings. That night, I actually stayed in their room instead of the one I'd been assigned, and it was enormously comforting. It was definitely a turning point, and means that International Track and Field, as relatively a minor part as it had played in proceedings, will always be rather special to me.
That got well off the point, didn't it? But still. I like Olympics games, be they summer or winter-themed, and I think what we have there is definitive proof that they can bring people together — just like, in theory, the real Olympics.
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I posted an update on my YouTube channel yesterday. You can watch it right here! I also play some Galaxian on Atari 8-bit in an attempt to participate in the current "High Score Club" challenge over on AtariAge.
I thought I'd talk about the things I mention in the video for today's post, because… well, because I want to.
The main takeaway from the update is that I'm giving up on doing longer playthroughs of stuff on video. For the most part, anyway. I'm not ruling out the possibility of doing another full playthrough of something reasonably short like an adventure game, as those are fun videos to make. But long RPGs as a playthrough series are out of the window.
There are a few reasons for this, chief among which is it makes playing one single game take for-fucking-ever. If you're only playing a game when you're recording videos for it, that inevitably means you're not playing it all that regularly (I have a life outside YouTube videos!) and thus it takes ages to get anywhere. If you combine that with a game that involves a fair amount of going back and forth grinding for experience, money or whatever, that doesn't make for particularly fun video-making, and it almost certainly doesn't make for particularly fun watching, either.
The other reason is that although I don't really care about viewing figures in general, the number of people who were showing up for episodes of The Granstream Saga in particular was utterly woeful. And, I mean, I get it; if you get an hour and a half long video in your feed that's part 7 of a series, are you going to click on it if you're not already invested? Probably not, even if the video has a link to the full series playlist in its description — because you still have to actually click on the video in the first place to know that.
So what I'm going to do is that, in future, for long games that I want to cover on the channel somehow, I'm going to make sure that I record some footage of the game while I'm playing it, then write a proper script for a "review-style" video of the game to be posted at some point afterwards. This will probably also be combined with a written version of the piece for MoeGamer, because I know that some people prefer to read and some people prefer to watch, so it just makes sense to do the same thing in both places — and that's what I've been doing with a number of recent pieces.
This means that for the "Let's Play"-style videos, which I want to keep on doing, because I think they're a good means of exploring retro games in particular, I will focus on doing one-offs. I'm not going to fret over doing "series" or sticking to one platform specifically, because there are many, many, many retro titles that I would love to talk about (in many cases while I'm trying them for the first time) and I just think it will be best for my own sanity to keep things breezy. This isn't a job, after all, it's a hobby. Were I relying more seriously on income from YouTube, I'd be 1) fucked and 2) making a lot more effort to bait the algorithm, post consistently and all that other gubbins. But I'm not, so I don't.
Regular readers will know that I've been wrestling internally over what exactly to do with the YouTube channel for a long time. I enjoyed the period back in about 2018-2020 or so when I was doing up to five videos a week and specific series such as Atari A To Z, Atari A to Z Flashback and suchlike, but it's also pleasing when the scripted videos perform well — and they tend to do a lot better than the Let's Play-style stuff in general.
But, as I say, I think the Let's Play-style format is a good means of showcasing and explaining retro games. My "vision", if you want to be pretentious about it, is that of me sitting down with you, the viewer, to "go on the computer" and explore a game together. I have very, very fond memories of having friends over after school to "go on the computer" and play games together; in many cases, these were single-player games, and we'd take turns, or my friend would watch and ask questions, and what I at least attempt to recapture the feeling of with my Let's Play-style videos is that sort of thing.
So that's the plan. Go back to/keep doing one-shot Let's Play-style videos of Stuff I Just Find Interesting, then scripted review-style videos of stuff that benefits from being explored in a bit more depth, or which is too long to practically sit down and commentate over the entire duration of.
It was important for me to make this video, if only to "give myself permission" to admit that some things weren't working, and I didn't need to ride them out to the bitter end just for the sake of pride or whatever. I already feel like I've lifted an entirely self-inflicted weight off my shoulders by doing so, and hopefully this will mean some renewed enthusiasm for Doing YouTube in the coming weeks.
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Today I've been doing something that I haven't done for probably 30 years or so: I have attempted to paint some miniatures. As I alluded to a while back, this is a field where "technology" (for want of a better word?) appears to have come on quite a bit in the years since I last tried it, and I was particularly interested in trying out something called "Speedpaint".
Speedpaint is a formulation of paint that, in contrast to the usual thick matt acrylics, is very thin and semi-transparent. You brush it all over a model and the nature of its formulation means that it works its ways into all the little nooks and crannies by itself and naturally darkens and lightens according to the undulations of the model. In other words, it goes darker when it gets into deep cracks, and creates natural highlights in elevated sections.
I was especially interested in trying out the "Speedpaint Markers", which combine the simplicity of Speedpaint with the straightforward, mess-free approach of using a pen rather than a brush and palette. And for the most part I'm very impressed with the Speedpaint Markers; they're a convenient and easy way to get some colour on to a model, and the Speedpaint within them works exactly how it's supposed to, making it easy to create convincing and realistic effects with just a single coat.
I've been painting some of the furniture from HeroQuest today, as these are fairly large pieces that are, for the most part, relatively straightforward to paint. And in doing so, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Speedpaint Markers have become apparent.
They're great for covering large areas. Painting one of the door miniatures, the tomb, the tables and the stonework around the fireplace was simplicity itself. The paint did its thing and created some nice shadows and highlights with minimal fuss; I found that it needed just a little more than a single coat to look good, but it's still a very quick way to get something painted.
The weakness of the Markers is that although their tips are relatively fine, they're still a long shot from a proper detail brush, and as such it's difficult to paint very fine details with any great accuracy. This means that it's difficult to, for example, paint the books on the bookshelf miniature, or the little bits and pieces scattered around the alchemist's table.
Thus I have concluded that the best approach, for now, is to have both the Markers available for large, simple areas, and some more conventional brushes, paints and a palette around for more fine detail work. This means that I have spent considerably more on this little experiment than I perhaps initially intended — and part of me, the cynical part, suspects that this is how they "get" you — but will hopefully be able to do a much nicer job once I have some more appropriate bits and pieces.
I've enjoyed what I've tried, though. The results I've had with the Speedpaints today are considerably better than the cack-handed attempts with acrylics I did back when I was in my early teens and didn't really have the right brush for the job. In fact, in retrospect, it was not having the right brush for the job that put me off taking things any further; I got frustrated that I felt it was too difficult, and just sort of gave up.
After today's little experiment, I'm keen to have a proper crack at it though. It'd certainly look very cool to have at least some painted minis on the table the next time we play HeroQuest (which, all being well, will be next weekend).
So I guess I'm Someone Who Paints Miniatures now. I suspected that Someone was always inside me, what with the inherently nerdy nature of the surrounding hobby. I've just come to it a little… late, is all.
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I received the sad news earlier today that a far-off friend of mine, Jeff, aka "Cpt.Carnage", passed away last night.
I don't really know how to process this, so I'm just going to start typing and see what happens.
Many moons ago, you may recall me talking about a little group called the Squadron of Shame that originated on the 1up.com forums. We were a group of people who eschewed the big hits of the day in favour of the overlooked and underappreciated; our collective name was inspired by the term "Pile of Shame", which we first heard discussed on the 1up Yours podcast.
For the unfamiliar, the Pile of Shame is the pile of "stuff" you have that you keep meaning to get around to, but never do. You can have a Pile of Shame of pretty much any form of media, and pretty much everyone has one these days; some refer to it as their "backlog". The concept behind the discussion on the podcast was that the participants would take a game that they felt had passed them by — in this case, Psychonauts by Double Fine — then play it through independently and come back later to discuss it.
That never actually happened on the 1up Yours podcast because everyone involved was much too busy to be able to devote any time to such a project. But a group of us on the "Radio" forums on 1up.com thought it was a great idea, so we ran with it instead, playing through Psychonauts together and discussing it on the forums. We quickly gained a reputation for lengthy, in-depth discussion, but the Radio boards were a good place for that sort of thing, since they were generally relatively quiet, and free of the general console fanboy wars that were going on in the more generic forums.
I'm honestly not entirely sure if Jeff was with us right from the beginning, because to be perfectly honest he's felt like a fixture for as long as I can remember. In that respect, I think it simply doesn't matter whether he was there from the start or not; fact is, he was a part of our little group. A precious friend. A valued contributor to our discussions. Part of something bigger than each of our own, individual selves.
After 1up.com went through its slow, agonising death, much of the Squad drifted apart for one reason or another. Many of us moved to Twitter (from the period before it was The Worst Place On The Internet — yes, believe it or not, there once was a time like that) and there were several attempts to build our own little communal spaces online through shared blogs and forums. We got together and did our own podcast. Some of us even managed to meet face-to-face — and yes, that includes me, despite the vast majority of the Squad being in the U.S. and Canada. On one occasion I was happy to meet Jeff, who was pretty much how I had imagined him. That's a good thing.
The 2010s were, generally speaking, a fairly dark period for me for all manner of reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today, but the net result was that I lost touch with a lot of people for a good few years, including former Squadmates. But when I emerged from the other side of things and found that there was a small but dedicated little unit of the Squad still hanging out online, chatting and sharing war stories, it was enormously comforting — and a big part of that comfort came from the fact that I saw Jeff was still there. He had always been there, even if I hadn't.
Jeff was the sort of person I always enjoyed seeing in the chat — and, of course, on that one occasion we were actually in the same place. He always had a kind word, something to contribute or something to share that he thought we'd be interested in. He was someone that it was simply nice to have around; as I say, he had always felt like a fixture, in a good way.
It's shocking, upsetting and scary to think that he could be gone so suddenly. The world has lost a wonderful person while so many other complete shitbags continue to exist.
It's not fair. It's not fair on Jeff, it's not fair on the people he leaves behind. But I hope, wherever he is now, that he knows how much people cared for him, and how much people are going to miss him now that he's gone. And that whatever is next is a better, more peaceful existence than the world we live in right now.
Farewell, Jeff. Forever a Squaddie.
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I've been looking forward to a game that released today: Earth Must Die! by Size Five Games, creators of Ben There, Dan That, Lair of the Clockwork God and numerous other excellent games. Today isn't a "review" as such — I'll save some more substantial thoughts on the game for MoeGamer and YouTube once I've finished it — but I did want to pop down some initial thoughts and give a hearty recommend to it. As an indie title, the first few days of sales are critical for visibility on Steam, and this is a game that absolutely deserves to see some success from what I've played so far.
Earth Must Die! casts you in the role of VValak Lizardtongue, third in line to the throne of the planet Tyryth and its empire, the Ascendancy. After tricking his two brothers into murdering one another, VValak ends up in charge, and inadvertently causes the Terranoid forces of Earth to invade. That's as far as I've got, but as the name suggests, one can expect that the remainder of the game will involve VValak finding a way to get revenge on the Terranoids and get his empire back. Or maybe not…?
It's an adventure game, but with a few interesting twists from the usual formula. You have direct control of your character's movement, and interacting with hotspots is done using a cursor that can be popped up. It's clearly designed to be played with a controller and works well like that, but can also be played with WSAD movement controls and a mouse cursor. I think I might have preferred a simple mouse-only interface for its non-controller implementation, but not enough to want to kick off about it or anything.
VValak, as an arrogant (wannabe) tyrant, refuses to touch anything himself because poor people might have touched it before him. Thus you have to solve all the situations in the game without VValak ever getting his own hands dirty. This sometimes involves using his companion robot and former nursemaid, Milky, to perform various actions, and sometimes involves convincing other characters in the scene that they should carry out your orders. It's an interesting mechanic that sidesteps the usual inventory puzzles.
Like I say, I'm not too far in the story as yet so I am hesitant to say too much more in that regard, but one thing I will highlight is the incredible voice cast, which includes numerous big names in British comedy such as Alex Horne, Tamsin Grieg, Matthew Holness, Alasdair Beckett-King, Don Warrington, Mike Wozniak and many more. Plus, of course, Ben Starr is in it, because Ben Starr is the Nolan North of the 2020s (complimentary). That cast might not mean much to anyone who isn't British, but you should know that this is a full-on celebrity cast of comedy royalty, and it's incredible to see them all coming together for a video game.
The net result is that the game sounds like a late-night Channel 4 comedy show (complimentary), and it has some really beautiful animated 2D art to go along with it. It's very much designed along the lines of games like Discworld II, with large, cartoonish sprites and plenty of close-up animations — and much of the humour will be familiar to those who enjoyed Terry Pratchett's work, too.
That's about all I want to say for now. It's an easy recommend if you enjoy silly games that will make you laugh, and is a seriously impressive project from Size Five in terms of scope. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in over the next few days, and, as I say, I will have a full report, likely on MoeGamer and YouTube, once I'm done with it!
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There's been a lot of grumbling over a new game called Highguard just recently. I don't really know what Highguard is, which is part of the problem — apparently it was initially shown off at The Game Awards last year, then just went pretty much radio silent until its… launch? Now? Something like that?
From what I can make out, Highguard is a live service multiplzzzzzzzzzzz — ah, so that's why I haven't really been following it. But that's not precisely what I want to talk about today. I, instead, want to talk about the discussions that have been happening over the last few days on the subject of coverage of Highguard.
It started with an op-ed over on IGN written by Senior Editor Simon Cardy, whose article Can We Stop Dunking on Highguard Before It's Even Out, Please? is fairly self-explanatory in terms of its core thesis. Cardy argues that it's annoying when a game is seemingly randomly picked as a whipping-boy and becomes the butt of jokes before anyone has actually gone hands-on with it and is thus in a position to comment on it from an informed, experienced perspective.
I get this. I kind-of-sort-of agree with it. It is annoying when there's something you're interested in, and all you can find in terms of coverage is How Bad Does This Game Look?! clickbait. And it is a bit daft for people to be pre-judging Highguard based on a single trailer and a remarkably quiet marketing department.
At the same time, as this piece by Autumn Wright argues, there's a strong argument to be made that the press covering a particular medium is under no obligation to remain what they describe as "poptimistic". It is not the press' job to go to bat for a particular game or company — especially not ahead of its release — and there are a lot of things about Highguard that do warrant discussion. Exactly why has its marketing been so non-existent? Does the world really need yet another live service multiplzzzzzzzzz? I'm so uninterested in the game as a whole I can't even think of a third possible question, but I'm sure there's something else that needs asking.
The problem, as ever, is in how different people see the role of the enthusiast press.
Some see it as an extension of marketing — and indeed, there are plenty of outlets that operate like this. There are plenty of outlets that have since gone under that operate like this, and there will be more in the future. It's a bit of an occupational hazard; by engaging with the standard news-preview-review cycle, you are part of a Marketing Plan, whether you want to be or not. And that's always been the norm for the games press, dating right back to magazines. It was never really questioned all that much until relatively recently; people wanted to know what was coming up, and they wanted to know if the thing they had thought looked cool for the last six months actually ended up being any good or not.
Others see it as fulfilling a critical role — critical in the sense of "administering criticism", not as in "really important", though the people who feel this way would probably argue that also. People who feel this way are interested in the stories behind the games and how games can fit into broader cultural commentary. They ask what particular games can tell us about society, and what the artistic meaning behind a work — both intended by the author and perceived by the audience — might be.
The challenge, of course, is access. The former group gets access to games because they tacitly agree to being part of the Marketing Plan. They get invited to press events to try out a new game; they get sent preview and review codes early; they agree to embargoes so the publisher of a game, not the press outlet, remains in control of the coverage. The latter group, meanwhile, tends to have to fend for itself to a certain degree. This gives them a lot more freedom in terms of what they cover and how, of course, but they can't rely on having access — whether that means "getting an early copy of a game" or "being able to pick the lead writer's brain without a PR person breathing down their neck".
I don't really know what the answer is, or even if there is a satisfactory one. I don't quite fall into either of the above categories with what I do over on MoeGamer, but then that's a site by an individual run as a passion project, not a commercial venture. As such, I have the freedom to pick and choose what I cover, and to exclusively concentrate on things that I, personally, feel have some worth and value — or, at the very least, are interesting enough to want to talk about. That means my site skews positive, which is anathema to some people, but I'm not there to do a PR company's bidding — nor am I there out of any obligation to criticise things just because they "need criticising". I simply choose to focus all my attention on games that I think are worthwhile, and that I think more people should check out.
I hate to sound like I'm "both sides-ing" the issue, but the reality is, there are valid points from all angles here. It is silly to pre-judge Highguard with little to no information — or perhaps it's more accurate to say it's silly to make assumptions about what Highguard will be with little to no information. At the same time, though, outlets have no obligation to hype up a new release — and especially, one would argue, when the marketing department doesn't appear to have been doing its job at all.
This is, I can guarantee, the only thing I am going to write about Highguard. Because the one thing I have managed to glean from the discussion over it is that I don't really give a shit about it. So I'll just say I hope it's as good/bad as you were anticipating, and leave it at that.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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One of my favourite purchases in recent memory is the MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber, which is an all-in-one console designed around the open-source MiSTer framework. If you're unfamiliar, this is a specification for hardware-based emulation of classic computers and games consoles, using a technology called FPGA. The advantage of FPGA is that it produces much more accurate results than typical software emulation, and thus it is a good substitute for original hardware, particularly if you're going to go the whole hog and use analogue CRT displays.
I think the most valuable thing about the way I've set mine up is that it is now effectively an interactive reference library of video games from the Atari 2600 right up until the PS1, N64 and Saturn. I invested in a large amount of external storage early on precisely so I could load it up with absolutely everything I might ever want (and quite a lot of things I will probably never want) and thus never have to worry about tracking down ROMs and disc/disk images ever again. (Until I discover a New Favourite Console, of course. Which has been known to happen.)
This is a useful resource both for my own curiosity and for my day job. We're working on something thoroughly interesting in the latter regard right now — no, you won't get any hints here — and an important part of that is ensuring that the project is accurate to the original version. Having the MiSTer Multisystem 2 up and running right next to me in my study means that, at a moment's notice, I can flip it on, check something and capture video for my colleagues to compare to. This is a good thing.
Having a storage device full to bursting with ROMs and disc/disk images, of course, runs the risk of the dreaded "analysis paralysis". But at the same time, if someone says something like "oh, I used to really like Enduro Racer on the Master System", I can pull that up and check it out immediately, knowing that the experience I'm having is authentic to the original hardware, and all without having to swap around cables, power adapters and controllers.
I have a lot of original hardware, which I like owning. But pretty much all of it is now primarily on display on the shelves rather than being used directly — because with very few exceptions, the MiSTer Multisystem 2 works just as well as the "real thing", with little in the way of compromise. And some improvements in some cases; it's absolutely no contest between a modern 8bitdo controller and the dreadful original Sega Master System joypad.
The one thing that is a compromise is the tactile nature of using original computers. Different computers had their own different case designs and keyboards, and thus a distinctive feel to using them. I have the 8bitdo mechanical C64-style keyboard as a suitably "retro" input device for computers, and it's great — but it does mean I miss out on little things like the distinctive shape of the Atari ST's function keys or the unique keys on certain systems' keyboards. (And documentation on exactly what these unique keys are mapped to on a modern keyboard is remarkably lacking, it has to be said!)
You also, of course, miss the fun tactile aspect of working with physical media. There's still something undeniably lovely about putting a cartridge in a slot or loading up a disk and listening to the whirr-snark of a floppy drive, and it will be a sad day when no-one remembers doing that. But with original hardware — particularly floppy disks — becoming more unreliable and prices for second-hand copies of retro games going through the absolute roof, at this point attempting to collect games for old computers and consoles feels like a complete waste of money.
Meanwhile, I have not regretted a single pound I have spent on my MiSTer setup. And, with any luck, given the lack of moving mechanical parts in it, it will last for a good long while, too.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
