#oneaday Day 544: Wild HORSES

The latest casualty in the ongoing wave of New Puritanism which appears to be spearheaded by Visa and Mastercard is a short, arty game known as HORSES. Thus far, it has been banned from release on Steam and withdrawn from sale on the Epic Games Store and Humble's store. (Edit: apparently Humble have put it back now.) At the time of writing, you can buy it from GOG.com. It's £3.99 and is apparently 2-3 hours long. If you're in the mood for something arty, unsettling and apparently the worst thing that has ever happened to society so far as payment processors are concerned, go grab it while you still can. I'm certainly intending to after this.

This whole ongoing situation has been really disappointing to see, because, as I say, it's a real wave of Neo-Puritanism that has been affecting all sorts of different online storefronts, types of media and subject matter. And, as people working in the more "adult" end of things have been yelling for a long time at this point, once these things start happening to material that you, personally, might find distasteful, it's not long before things that you, personally, are completely okay with start getting affected. Which is what has happened here.

The frustrating thing about this is that no-one wielding any of the power in this is ever honest about things. Visa and Mastercard won't say "no, we're not letting people buy porn". Valve won't say "this specific scene is why you can't put your game on Steam". Epic seemingly even went so far as to overrule the developer's content rating submission to ensure that it couldn't be sold on their storefront. And let's not even get into why it's ridiculous that the ESRB (or equivalent) "Adults Only" rating should preclude adults from being able to purchase material on an online storefront.

For quite some time, it looked like we were making some real progress in that area. The European games rating board, PEGI, allows explicit sexual content under its 18 rating now — there are even Nintendo Switch games that have explicit nudity and sexual content, though the fully "uncensored" versions tend to be physical exclusives. And yet, probably not coincidentally alongside the worst United States politics have been for many, many years, we are seeing legitimate businesses being forced to sit around twiddling their thumbs, potentially not being able to pay the bills, because someone, somewhere got a stiffy and got scared because it had never happened before.

It's ridiculous to see the amount of misinformation flying around, too. In the case of HORSES, the developer admitted that there was, at one point, a scene in the game that featured a 14 year old girl riding on the shoulders of a naked woman clad in a horse mask — and to those inexplicably defending the decisions of Valve, Epic and Humble, this is the same as illegal child sexual abuse material. Never mind the fact that the scene involved nudity but was not sexual — the two things are different! — or that the scene ended up being changed to involve a young woman in her twenties because the developers thought that fitted the tone of the scene better. No! To these people, HORSES is, was and always will be kiddie porn and thus the big, powerful corporations — step on me, Daddy, and I will lick your boots — are absolutely right to banhammer it so hard it leaves a crater right down to the Earth's core.

It's really discouraging to see the world continuing to find new and exciting ways to suck more. But I am glad that people — press and public alike — appear to be rallying behind the HORSES developers, and that people who might have previously gone "ew, porn is icky" are starting to see why sex workers and those who work in various forms of adult media are often considered to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to matters of censorship.

I'm off to buy a copy of HORSES now. If this is the world's cleverest marketing campaign, I salute the people responsible. But somehow I think it's just the world reminding us that we're living through a really shitty age right now.

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 540: Actual socialisation

This evening, we had some friends over! Good Lord. Actual socialisation. We even played a board game — Betrayal at House on the Hill, if you were curious. This is a game that hasn't hit the table for a long time — hell, no games have hit the table for a long time, for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with this evening — so I was excited to be able to get some use out of it. And, as usual for this wonderful game, it offered a completely different experience to any of the previous times we've played.

For the unfamiliar, Betrayal at House on the Hill is an interesting theme-centric game that unfolds in two distinct phases. In the first, a veritable Scooby gang of adventurers decides to investigate the titular House, which is generated semi-randomly by drawing tiles and laying them out across the board. At various points, new rooms will cause the people discovering them to have to draw items, "omens" and events, and these will have various effects.

So far so conventional cooperative dungeon crawler, you might say. The big twist, as you may have surmised from the title, is that partway through your jolly little jaunt to the abandoned house, things go horribly wrong. Specifically, each time you draw "omen" cards (which typically represent spooky items you find around the house which can be used later) you roll for a "haunt", with the likelihood the "haunt" will happen increasing with every omen card drawn.

When the haunt is eventually triggered, the combination of the item drawn that triggered it and the room the triggerer was in determines which of a multitude of scenarios the game will follow from thereon. One or more players are designated as "traitors" according to the scenario, and they are then given their own, usually secret goals to accomplish. The remaining regular players then have their own goal to accomplish, also. At this point the game switches from being cooperative to competitive, with the "hero" players attempting to defeat the "traitors", thwart their schemes or whatever.

It's a really interesting game, because each scenario not only has a different story setup, it also tends to have radically different mechanics. In the probably seven or eight times I've played this game now, we've never had the same "haunt" twice, and each one has been markedly different from the last. It really is a lot of fun, and I'm glad we had the opportunity to get it out for the first time in ages this evening.

Now, I've had a drink or two so I think I will probably sleep well this evening. Remains to be seen if I feel up to making any videos tomorrow…!

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#oneaday Day 536: Restlessness

I've been weirdly "restless" with regard to the games I feel like playing of late. I have a bunch of cool things on the go — Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Death end re;Quest: Code Z, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and probably some others I've forgotten about — but I'm having real trouble feeling settled of an evening. For the last few evenings, I've been playing nothing but Evercade games (hence yesterday's post) specifically, a combination of Spectrum classic Atic Atac (which I finished for the first time last night!), Activision 2600 games and various NEOGEO games.

And I've been having a lovely time doing so! Part of me, of course, feels like I "should" play at least one of those "big games" I have on the go, but honestly, just recently I've been feeling a tad run down, and thus some straightforward, right-to-the-point retro gaming has been pretty much what the figurative doctor ordered. Nothing to "commit" to, but something enjoyable and satisfying to engage with — and helping to broaden my experience with and appreciation of some games I might not have had the opportunity to spend a ton of time with previously.

The NEOGEO stuff is probably top of the heap in this regard. When I was young, the NEOGEO was the great legendary white whale that we only ever saw from afar (and occasionally on GamesMaster) and that no-one ever actually got to touch. Given that arcades were only really found on the seafront during my childhood and adolescence, I don't think I ever saw a NEOGEO MVS in the wild back in the day, so my sole point of reference for the machine was the fact that people talked about its cartridges costing a frankly remarkable three-figure sum each.

I always struggled to understand quite why NEOGEO games were so expensive back in the day, but I suppose a lot was riding on the fact that you were literally getting arcade-perfect games, due to the console model, the AES, having fundamentally the same guts as the MVS arcade machine. These days it seems especially absurd, given that pretty much all NEOGEO games are, as you might expect, short-form arcade-style affairs, and thus rather on the short side if you're counting "press start to end credits" as a game's "length". Can you imagine an entitled Steam reviewer pitching a fit over a game that cost £120 and lasted twenty minutes? I certainly can.

But then that's not the whole story, is it? As arcade games, NEOGEO titles were — are — inherently replayable: for high scores, for greater mastery, for competition with friends. Granted, there's probably a cap to how good you can get at something like Metal Slug or Shock Troopers, but fighters like Garou: Mark of the Wolves and the The King of Fighters series can potentially keep you busy forever if you have at least one other person to play with. When you consider it in those terms, that three-figure sum for a single game doesn't seem quite so unreasonable — particularly when you bear in mind that the three-figure sum gets you the whole damn game with no updates or DLC.

Yes, I know it's a cliché for old men like me to rail against modern games with DLC roadmaps and other such nonsense, but when you look at something like, say, The King of Fighters 2000, which has a whopping thirty-six characters in it, it's hard not to feel a bit nickel-and-dimed at modern fighting games with multiple "season passes". At the other end of the spectrum, the relatively limited playable cast of Garou: Mark of the Wolves makes it much easier to pick a single character you might want to get to know how to play a bit better, rather than overwhelming you with a huge amount of choice right from the get-go.

And then, of course, NEOGEO games don't cost three-figure sums any more, unless you're going for those original cartridges — in which case they are, as you might depressingly expect, at least three or four times their original asking price today. The NEOGEO carts for Evercade are twenty quid and have six games each — and I don't think it's a spoiler to say there's more coming next year.

So yeah. There's definitely value in these games, as "short" as they might seem to be. And apparently they're just what my brain is craving right about now. So I will continue to enjoy them for as long as my brain desires them.

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#oneaday Day 535: Five of my favourite Evercade games

Yes, I know Metal Slug's not on this list. Call it a runner-up.

As you hopefully know, I do a lot of the blog posts on the Evercade website. I had a small flash of inspiration the other day for a recurring series of posts where I and the other chap who has started contributing to the site alternate between just doing a grab bag of our favourites from the library. No particular theme, just "here's five games I, personally, like, and think you should spend some time with".

We've already got this week's blog post covered, so I thought I would use today to shamelessly pinch my own formula — and I'm making no promises that I won't pick these exact five for the first time I do the new feature over on the Evercade site. If I do, I will probably talk about them marginally more professionally.

But for now, dear reader, with apologies to Rob of the excellent Beyond the Scanlines YouTube channel, here are Five Evercade Games I Just Think Are Neat. Note that these are not "the five best games on Evercade", they're just five arbitrarily chosen games that I particularly like. So if I missed your favourite, don't worry; I probably like it too.

Burnin' Rubber

Hailing from Data East Collection 1, one of the Evercade's launch lineup, Burnin' Rubber almost certainly holds the crown for the Evercade game I have, over the last five years since the system's launch, spent the most time in.

For the unfamiliar, Burnin' Rubber is a follow-up to Data East's arcade game Bump 'n' Jump. Indeed, in some locales this console version is just known as Bump 'n' Jump, but it's considerably enhanced and expanded over its arcade predecessor, making it more of a sequel — and a much better game. The concept is simple: drive your car up vertically scrolling stages, avoiding obstacles and smashing other cars out of the way either by ramming them into walls or leaping into the air and crashing down on them from above.

Burnin' Rubber is easy to learn but hard to master, and to date I haven't yet managed to beat it. But it's infectiously compelling thanks to its combination of straightforward controls, challenging but fair gameplay and inordinately catchy music. Ever since I first played it back on the original Evercade handheld, it's been a firm favourite of mine, and absolutely one of my top titles on the entire platform.

World Rally

Staying on the vehicular theme, World Rally from Gaelco Arcade 1 is next up. This high-speed isometric racer has absolutely sublime arcade-style handling, and is a real "in the zone" kind of game that probably makes you look like a superhuman to anyone watching over your shoulder.

Its genius lies in its brilliantly handled controls: rather than giving you complete freedom to turn your car in any direction, World Rally kind of "snaps" your car to the correct orientation as you exit a corner (assuming you remembered to actually steer around it) in a sort of "slot car" fashion. This prevents frustrating instances of oversteer and keeps the game pacy and accessible while still offering a gradually escalating challenge factor through increasingly complex courses.

Presentation is lovely, particularly with Gaelco's trademark low bit-rate digitised guitar noodling on the soundtrack. The sequel is lovely, too, and arguably looks nicer, but I think the original has the slight edge for me, personally.

Night Stalker

Possibly my favourite Intellivision game? It's definitely right up there with Tower of Doom and Cloudy Mountain. Anyway, Night Stalker is, for me, the best game on the Intellivision Collection 1 cartridge, and a game I come back to regularly.

The concept is straightforward: you're stuck in a maze, and robots are coming to get you. You must shoot the robots before they get you. The longer you survive, the more dangerous the robots get. You move slowly and have limited ammunition, so you need a certain amount of strategy to survive — and the ability to adapt as the situation changes.

Night Stalker is super-simple, atmospheric and enjoyable to play. We also mapped the Intellivision's somewhat idiosyncratic "disc and keypad" controls to the Evercade directional pad and buttons in an eminently sensible way, making it arguably more fun to play on Evercade than on original hardware. I'm sure there's some sicko out there who is all like "no, the Intellivision hand controller is the optimal way to play, actually", but for human beings with functional hands, you'll thank us for our control mappings on this one.

Tomb Raider

I enjoyed the original PC version of Tomb Raider back when it was current, and I remember not liking the PlayStation control scheme all that much — perhaps because I was so accustomed to the PC's keyboard controls. But returning to the series when we released Tomb Raider Collection 1 for Evercade gave me an all-new appreciation for this game's methodical puzzle-platforming.

Yes, the combat kind of sucks, but that's why I picked the first Tomb Raider: it's not a particular focus, whereas later games tried to play up the combat to varying degrees. You'll have the odd encounter with some nasties to deal with, but the majority of your time will be spent by yourself figuring out exactly how you're going to scale the enormous structure in front of you and probably breaking Lara's legs a few times in the process.

It's fashionable to bash the early Tomb Raider games today, but approach them with the appropriate mindset — i.e. that they're not Super Mario 64, nor are they trying to be — and there's a lot of fun to be had across the five games available on Evercade.

Shock Troopers

It's been a delight to get to know the NEOGEO a bit better with our NEOGEO cartridges for Evercade. Shock Troopers, which is on NEOGEO Arcade 1, is actually one of the games I did know reasonably well beforehand — in fact, it was one of the first NEOGEO games I ever played, with dotEmu's awful PC port from a few years back — but having it on Evercade is giving me a sense of rediscovered appreciation for it.

Shock Troopers isn't a remarkably original game — it's a top-down run-and-gun, Commando-style, albeit not scrolling exclusively vertically. Where it shines, though, is in how satisfying it is to play. Weapons have a real sense of oomph to them, ripping through enemies and blowing up vehicles and structures. The different characters all handle differently, catering to different play styles. And the game offers a stiff but fair challenge that allows you to make gradual progress if you stick with it and learn the enemy encounters. Plus multiple routes through it add replay value — along with a two-player mode.

It's one of the best-sounding NEOGEO games, too, with some excellent digital music and meaty sound effects. One day I might even be able to get beyond the second stage without having to credit-feed — but regardless of my own ineptitude at it, it's a game I always enjoy every time I fire it up.

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#oneaday Day 534: An evening of arcade

In gaming today, it's tempting to always want to be making progress on your "big game" of the moment: a lengthy epic that goes on into the tens or even hundreds of hours in length. But one thing I find it helpful to remind myself of on a regular basis is that short-form games very much have their place and their appeal, too. And it's in this area that retro gaming in particular tends to excel.

In recent weeks, I've been having a lot of fun getting to know the NEOGEO games we've released on Evercade this year. Most notably, I've been spending some time with the ever-delightful Metal Slug, which I hadn't spent a ton of time with prior to the Evercade release, and I've even been dipping my toes into the notoriously obtuse fighting game genre a little with Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which first impressions would seem to indicate is one of the more accessible SNK/NEOGEO fighting games in existence.

These games are immediately rewarding and fun. You probably won't be able to beat them on your first go — although in most cases, you can credit-feed — but there's a definite appeal element in the form of gradual mastery. With each attempt from the beginning of Metal Slug, I get to know the game a bit better, I learn more about how to play it effectively, and, assuming I'm paying attention to what I'm doing, I get a little bit further. At this point, I can occasionally make it up to the start of Mission 3 without losing a life; with each new attempt, that "occasionally" becomes "more frequently", and that's a really satisfying, rewarding feeling.

My concern is what I feel like is an increasing number of people getting to a point where they're writing off these short-form experiences as having no real inherent value. Perhaps it's because these games aren't telling a deep, thought-provoking or emotionally engaging story. Perhaps it's simply because they're short. Perhaps it's down to assumptions that short-form or arcade games are inherently "lesser" than 100+ hour epics on computers and consoles today.

I don't know. But I know that I definitely derive value from them, and I continue to feel proud that I'm involved in helping to preserve these games and educate new generations in their appeal elements thanks to my day job.

One day I still want to write a book. Or, at this point, probably several books, given the sheer number of games that are on Evercade by now. I should probably just stop thinking about doing that and actually do it, no?

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#oneaday Day 531: Riding the air

Kirby Air Riders is out today, and I've spent the evening playing it. Specifically, I've spent the evening playing the "Road Trip" mode that I didn't know anything about prior to starting the game. This is a single-player mode that is presumably intended to get you up to speed on everything you might be doing at any point in the other modes, but it also unlocks a bunch of stuff in a similar fashion to Smash Bros.' single-player modes from over the years.

The whole package is very Smash Bros., in fact, including the way you navigate the menus, the way you adjust your settings for a play session and the overall structure of the game. It's a very customisable game, from the look of things, so I'm looking forward to investigating the other aspects of it soon.

Road Trip, meanwhile, that I can talk about. In this mode, you pick a character and initial "machine" to ride on, and progress through a series of stages, each of which is split into a series of "encounters" on the road. Under most circumstances, you have a choice of three encounters to choose from at any point, with different rewards on offer for each. Successfully beating an encounter generally rewards you with some Road Trip-specific currency and a stat increase or two. Outside of the competitive events, you may also run into shops (where you can, of course, spend the aforementioned Road Trip-specific currency) and weird things that determine which of several branching paths you will take at the conclusion of the current stage.

The events you'll compete in on the Road Trip are generally pretty short in duration — races tend to be one or two laps at most, and the events which aren't races are all time-limited. It's enough to give you a look at the different things you can do in the game's other modes, but in a way that you never get particularly bogged down in anything. You rarely do the same type of event twice in a row, and the difficulty curve progresses nicely from "very easy" in the early stages to "genuinely quite challenging, but not annoyingly so" as you get closer to the conclusion.

As you progress through the Road Trip, you'll gain the opportunity to earn "memory shards", which tell the unfolding story. This is surprisingly dark, considering this is a Kirby game, involving a mechanical creature that has sat for aeons without being able to move because it requires someone's "strong will" to allow it to do anything, a terrifying orbital satellite that, among other things, constructs an army of robotic ants to rip this aforementioned creature to bits and rebuild it into a world-crushing weapon, and the implication that everyone's vehicles in the game are like Pokémon, if Pokémon were forms of sentient transporation rather than creatures that liked to fight. So maybe not all that much like Pokémon at all, other than the fact that they clearly have "personalities" of sorts, and partner up with the people of Kirby's world, Popstar, in a quasi-symbiotic relationship.

In the events, Kirby Air Riders is chaotic. For those concerned that it might be a bit too much like Mario Kart: it's nothing like Mario Kart. My wife saw me playing it briefly and said it looked like "Wipeout, but Kirby" and honestly she's not far from the truth there. There's a touch of F-Zero, a bit of Burnout, even a bit of Twisted Metal in there, depending on the type of event you're playing. I can see it easily being overwhelming for some players, but there is clearly method in the madness.

Probably the most clever thing it does is use an incredibly simple control scheme, much like Kirby platformers tend to. There are only two buttons to worry about: characters accelerate automatically, and the only time you need to press a button is when you want to slow down (which also charges up your boost) or use your character's "Special", which can only be used when a particular meter has charged.

The "Boost Charge" mechanic has a nicely tactile feel. You're effectively "pulling back" your character, winding them up and then letting them twang forward, though the exact implementation of this depends quite significantly on the machine you've chosen to ride. Some are built for drifting around corners; others stop dead when charging a boost and can thus immediately change direction when going around 90-degree bends; others still can't drift or boost at all, but make up for this with other strengths.

These differences between the machines, along with individual machines' special capabilities (such as the "Vampire Star" machine's ability to "bite" opponents, damaging and slowing them down and stealing their power-ups) and the stat growth throughout Road Trip mode mean that there's a surprising amount of depth considering how simple the game is to control. Different machines are eminently suitable to different types of event, so it pays to try and build up a collection — indeed, I believe to get the "true" ending for the game, you need to collect all of them prior to reaching the final encounter, though this is made more straightforward through a New Game+ option that lets you carry over the stuff you've already acquired.

There are some other interesting little things, too. A significant portion of the Road Trip mode involves the "Top Rider" mode, which is racing from a top-down perspective on simplified tracks. This is a lot of fun, though obviously less spectacular and chaotic than the 3D races — and it's nice that this is a whole mode you can play given equal weight to the "main" game mode. There are even different control options, depending on if you prefer "turn left and right" or "push the analogue stick in the direction you want to go" for these top-down sequences.

All in all, it seems like a really solid game given that distinctive Sora Ltd. polish. I'll be interested to see whether it has the juice to go for the long term on the multiplayer circuit; I can see this being a really solid multiplayer game, but, of course, it needs a community for that to work over the long term. I don't yet know if the broader community will take to it in the same way as something like Mario Kart — but then, Splatoon came out of nowhere on Wii U and managed to be a big enough hit (on the Wii U!) to spawn two sequels, so there's precedent for a Nintendo game not called Mario Kart or Smash Bros. to have a thriving online community.

More than anything, it's nice to see the Switch 2 finally picking up the pace with some solid releases — and on proper game cartridges, too. Now, if they'd just quit doing that dumbass Game Key Card thing completely I'd be very happy indeed…

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#oneaday Day 530: My way is always better

The review embargo for the "Analogue 3D" FPGA-based N64 clone system came up yesterday, and as is usually the case with such things, about a bazillion reviews all dropped at the same time. The machine looks like a nifty bit of kit — although calling your brand "Analogue" and then not actually having any analogue outputs on your device is a bit weird — and has been reviewing well. As an owner of a MiSTer Multisystem 2, I have no real need for one — just as well, since ordering Analogue stuff is an absolute fucking nightmare — but I'm glad this thing exists and, moreover, appears to be pretty cool.

What has been less cool are the inevitable arguments that have been breaking out in the comments of pretty much every single video and article I have seen on this thing. It's utterly ridiculous to see grown men (and I would place good money on it being all men) of a certain age all getting pissy over how different people choose to experience retro games.

Here's my feelings on the subject: I don't care. Really! I do not give the slightest shit, so long as you're having a good time and you aren't causing anyone else any trouble.

If you want to set yourself up with a MiSTer stack you built yourself, fab. If you want to buy a MiSTer Multisystem 2 to take the hard work out of building an FPGA device, great. If you want to buy a SuperStation One, I hope you love it. If you're running Batocera on a mini PC, more power to you. If you do all your retro gaming on an Anbernic handheld running its stock OS, have fun. If you've spent several weeks finding the perfect alternative operating system for an Anbernic handheld, I hope you've had a fulfilling time doing so. If you're an original hardware junkie with a massive physical collection, can I come and visit? If you have your childhood console and nothing but an Everdrive, amazing! And I'm probably contractually obliged to mention that if your experience with retro gaming begins and ends with an Evercade or Super Pocket handheld, that is 100% fine, too.

Y'see, the important thing with enjoying retro games, to me, is, funnily enough, the games themselves. So long as you're able to experience the games you want to play in the way you enjoy experiencing them, it absolutely does not matter how anyone else wants to do it.

And yet you just have to look through any of these comment threads to see the FPGA nuts arguing with passionate advocates for RetroArch; Windows vs Mac OS vs various flavours of Linux; "download for free!" types against "I prefer to buy official rereleases" people. Basically, if there are two opposing viewpoints possible in this area — and there are quite a few of those — you can count on representatives of those viewpoints all yelling at one another.

Why? Why does it matter to you that some people think the Analogue 3D is a cool device, and you don't? Why does it matter to you that you use software emulation on your Mac and some people prefer to use an FPGA solution?

It's just another example of the Internet being constantly, unnecessarily adversarial, and it's really rather tiresome. As I say, so far as I'm concerned, I have no personal pressing need for an Analogue 3D, as I already have a suitable solution for enjoying N64 games in place — but I absolutely, definitely do not begrudge anyone their desire to add one to their collection! So if you happen to be one of the people lucky enough to have one coming your way soon, I sincerely, absolutely hope you enjoy it. And that you play Beetle Adventure Racing if you haven't already.

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#oneaday Day 526: Full Metal Schoolgirl

Full disclosure: the other day when I said I was going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl, I actually ended up playing more Tears of the Kingdom. I didn't feel bad about that, either, but it did mean I haven't been able to talk about Full Metal Schoolgirl.

Until now! Because I played it this evening.

Full Metal Schoolgirl is a roguelite action game. I know, I know, we're not exactly short of those, but this one had my attention for a few reasons. Firstly: mecha gyaru schoolgirls. Secondly, it's developed by Yuke's, who do cool stuff. Thirdly, the entire concept of the game is savagely anti-capitalist, and frankly, with the world the way it is right now, that was rather appealing.

You take control of one of two mechanised schoolgirls, each of whom have their own reasons to want revenge on the local megacorporation, which has been turning its workers into cyborgs so they can work more hours without having to take a break. The upshot of this is that they have become "The Working Dead", doomed to continue working their meaningless, joyless jobs even after death.

Enter our schoolgirls, who raid the company's 100-floor headquarters, only for the one you didnt pick to get immediately injured and, predictably, show up as a recurring boss character at various points throughout proceedings.

Your gal has a melee and a ranged weapon. Ranged weapons either have infinite ammo and an overheat gauge, or a limited clip size (and thus the need to reload) but an infinite stock of ammunition. Melee weapons, meanwhile, use up a stamina bar with each strike, and this bar is also used for dashing, dodging and blocking.

The game flows on a room-by-room basis. You're not always locked in each room and have to defeat all the enemies to proceed, but you often are, particularly when some of the game's special mechanics come into play.

Clearing a room rewards you with loot, which can be replacements for either of your weapons or shield, a battery for healing, or a mod which confers a reasonably significant passive bonus of some description, along with a small passive penalty. You also gain various materials with every kill and most bits of scenery destroyed, and there's a currency that only applies to your current run that can be used for various purposes, such as opening locked item chests that can guarantee items of a particular rarity.

Part of the game's setup is that your chosen gal is livestreaming her massacre, and as she progresses, requests will come in from the viewers. These usually take the form of clearing the room in a time limit, without healing or without depleting your stamina bar completely at any point. When one of these comes in, you can accept it, or you can accept a harder variant for a bigger reward. If you successfully complete the request, your gal earns cash donations which do carry over between runs, and these, along with the materials, are used to upgrade her Base capabilities between runs.

It's a lot of fun so far! There's some nice weight to the combat, and plenty of variety in the guns. Since the enemies are robotic, they explode and shatter into pieces dramatically when you blast or slice them, and each room is furnished entirely with physics objects, meaning you absolutely wreck the joint with each encounter.

There are a variety of different enemy types that change up with each block of levels, including some who have a "job title" and act as a miniboss. These can be staggered, which leaves them open to a "Retirement Blow", a satisfying cinematic attack that usually defeats them outright.

Thus far I've enjoyed what I played, and it kept me occupied for a good two hours solid earlier. I'm looking forward to playing it some more — it's a nice, silly, fun game, and that's exactly what you want sometimes.

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#oneaday Day 524: Steam powered

So Steam announced a bunch of new hardware, and some of it looks quite nice — though the fact that no prices have been mentioned as yet is a bit of a concern.

Of the items that have been announced, I find the "Steam Frame" probably the most interesting. This is a standalone VR headset that can either stream games from another computer, or run games installed on its own storage. It doesn't have to be VR games, either; you can play standard 2D games on a big "virtual screen" in VR.

There are a number of attractive things about this. Firstly is the fact that it looks like being a relatively lightweight, comfortable headset — certainly a far cry from the units of even just a few years ago. Secondly is, of course, the Steam compatibility; by running things from your Steam library just like a Steam Deck (or the newly announced Steam Machine), it has an immediate ready-made library of thousands of games to choose from without having to worry about whether the platform will be supported over the long term. Thirdly is the fact that it's a standalone headset that has nothing to do with Meta — since up until now, your only real option in that regard has been a Quest.

Now, of course, being tied to Valve and Steam has its own concerns. Steam's community features remain a rancid cesspit of the very worst examples of humanity, for example, as discussion forum after discussion forum is overrun by right-wing fuckheads crying about "DEI" and "woke" at the slightest hint of a female character in a leading role. That is something that the company probably should address, but it also feels like it's probably much too late for them to be able to do anything about at this point. We are very much in "lunatics running the asylum" territory at this point, since it's extremely rare anyone from Valve actually steps in to deal with a situation; mostly it's up to developer and publisher community managers to stem the tide of absolute sludge from the dickheads of the Internet — and I absolutely do not blame any of them who simply refuse to engage with a Steam discussion forum on principle.

Then, of course, there's the matter of several of Valve's games encouraging a form of gambling with their lootboxes and tradable items and whatnot. Add the exploitative (and easily exploited) trading card system to the mix and you have a whole mess of ethically questionable stuff going on, because this stuff probably makes Valve a lot of money.

And finally, of course, there's the fact that Steam is the one example of online-centric DRM that everyone has been sort of fine with for a long time. Sure, there are many games that can run without Steam being open, but it can be a bit of a pain to find out which games this applies to, and which require you to have a stable Internet connection. There's no good way to take your games "out" of Steam in the same way that GOG.com provides, either; no making your own physical copies or backups of Steam games.

There's also the fact that Steam was pretty much single-handedly responsible for completely destroying the collectible physical market for PC games — although I will be fair here: if you're going to be gaming on a standalone VR headset you probably don't want to be inserting discs into it while you're trying to get your game on.

I'll be interested to see what people think of these new machines once they're out in the wild. I have no particular need for a Steam Machine, as I have a perfectly competent "living room PC" that can run most games I'm interested in playing on PC rather than console — but, as I say, the Steam Frame is of at least moderate interest to me for gaming purposes. If I do end up getting one, I will almost certainly keep my living room PC up and running as it is, as I don't just game on it; it's also an entertainment centre, my video editing system and where I do just… general computery things. I'm not entirely ready to make the switch to Linux (which SteamOS is a flavour of) as yet, but I suspect that time will come at some point.

Anyway, I'm reserving judgement until I've seen prices and I've heard what people I trust think of these things. But there's definite potential for Valve to have something special here. I certainly think they're well-placed to fill the growing Xbox-shaped hole in the games industry with Microsoft's continual missteps in that regard.

We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 523: A deluge

There is a veritable deluge of good games that have come out recently, and this statement applies pretty much regardless of the specific types of game you are into. From my own personal perspective, I've been having a great time with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Absolum, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and Lumines Arise from recent releases, and a copy of Full Metal Schoolgirl arrived today, begging me to "just give it a quick try" this evening. Then alongside that, from varying degrees of "the past", I have Death end re;Quest: Code Z and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the go. And I'm playing Space Rogue and The Granstream Saga for video series.

Honestly, it's easy to get overwhelmed at times like this and get struck down with the dreaded analysis paralysis. But I've been trying hard to fight through that any time I feel it of late — and that, in part, is how I've ended up with quite this many games "on the go" at the same time.

You see, the way I figure it is that if you have just one "big game" on the go at a time, sometimes you're just not in the mood to play that one game, and thus it pays to have other things you can turn to. It's easy to start feeling "worried" that you won't get around to finishing any of the things you've started, though, but realistically, with the way today's games are designed, you can devote an evening to one thing, play something else another evening, play something else another evening, and so on.

It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get through something — and to some people, whether or not you get through it at all, though I don't fall into that category, as I do like to finish what I start. The important thing is just that you feel like you're spending your time in a way that is enjoyable and beneficial to you. So if you're in the mood to fest on a single game for multiple days straight, do that. If you're not in the mood for that one "big game" one evening, don't spend hours agonising over whether or not you're "allowed" to play something else — just go play something else. And, heaven forbid, if you're not in the mood to play anything at all of an evening? Stick the telly on and watch a few episodes of a favourite show. Yes, it can even be something you've watched myriad times previously if you really want.

Part of the "I must stick to one thing" mentality that I have been doing my best to shake off is down to my time working in the games press, when it was important to get reviews done in time for embargoes so you could have competitive coverage. And I even self-inflicted this somewhat with MoeGamer, too, in the name of being able to give single games or series more in-depth coverage. But none of that needs to happen. It's nice to be able to write stuff for MoeGamer or script videos, but it's not an absolute requirement of everything I play.

Honestly, I think part of the reason I worry over such things is because I want to feel like I have made a contribution to the world of video games through writing about stuff — particularly stuff that doesn't get a lot of love or attention from mainstream outlets. And I do still feel like I want to do that — but also I have to remember that I am also making a contribution to this world through my day job, and my work in that regard is probably getting seen by a lot more people than articles on my own personal websites. Probably, anyway.

All this is a long way to say that I think I'm going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl this evening, and I'm not going to feel the slightest bit bad about it.

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