#oneaday Day 371: I finally played Undertale

This is a cross-post from my gaming site MoeGamer. I figured if I spent several hours writing this, that absolutely counts as Me Having Written Something for today. So please enjoy, even if you don't normally frequent MoeGamer. I will likely be doing this more going forward.

Last week, I got around to something I've been meaning to do for ages: play through Toby Fox's modern classic Undertale, and attempt to understand why it is so well-regarded and popular.

I'd held off for quite some time for a few reasons: first and foremost was simply a matter of making time for it, since as anyone who knows me will be well aware, I have a lot of video games on my shelves. But I was also quite keen to play the game divorced from the context of its somewhat… passionate fanbase.

I have nothing against the Undertale fanbase, I hasten to add — I've never really come into contact with it directly — but for a game like this, I was keen to approach it with as much of a beginner's mind as possible. I wanted to try and understand what, exactly, it was about Undertale that resonated with people so much when it first released. And I think I got there in the end.

Spoilers follow.

Undertale, for the unfamiliar, casts you in the role of a kind-of-sort-of self-insert character. I say kind-of-sort-of because the protagonist is deliberately gender-ambiguous and you can't customise their appearance. You can customise the way they behave, though, and that's something we'll come back to in a moment.

As Undertale begins, you have fallen down a big hole into the land of monsters. Supposedly, many years ago, humankind and monsters lived together on the surface of the world, but a great war eventually led monsters to becoming trapped underground while humans dominated the surface. This is all the context you're really given at the start of the game; in short order, you meet up with a kind-but-a-bit-too-much monster named Toriel, who wants to take you in and look after you.

Toriel is a rather overbearing, motherly type to a borderline sinister degree, and thus it is natural to want to break free of her clutches and explore the greater world in which you find yourself. You can achieve this in a couple of ways, and herein you get to know probably the most important thing about Undertale, and the tagline it's used in various places in more recent years: this is an RPG where no-one has to die.

It's true! In every combat encounter you run into throughout Undertale, you have the option of fighting the monsters you come face to face with, or attempting to placate or otherwise peacefully resolve the conflict somehow. The exact way you go about this varies from monster to monster, but it is indeed possible to pass through the entire game without anyone dying by your hand.

Interestingly, resolving conflicts peacefully does not reward you with "EXP" that allows you to increase your "LV", meaning that if you choose to do a peaceful playthrough, your character will never get any "stronger". Undertale takes great pains to never actually use the full terms "experience points" and "level" for very good reason: in its world, that is not what "EXP" and "LV" mean. Instead, "EXP" stands for "Execution Points", hence you only acquiring them when you kill someone, and "LV" is short for "LOVE", which in turn is short for Level Of ViolencE.

In combat, regardless of whether or not you choose violence, you will have to fend off enemy attacks in short action sequences loosely inspired by shoot 'em up bullet patterns. By controlling the protagonist's SOUL (all caps, but not an abbreviation or acronym to my knowledge), represented as a heart, you can avoid taking damage from enemy attacks. Each enemy type has its own unique attacks, and the further into the game you go, the more varied these become.

One key variation comes with some enemies' ability to change the colour of the protagonist's SOUL. This causes it to behave in various different ways; for example, when it's blue, it's affected by gravity, meaning it has to "jump" over incoming attacks; when it's purple, it can only move between and across set "wires" on the screen. Enemy attacks also have colours, too; blue attacks are harmless if you stay still, orange attacks are harmless if you're moving when they pass through you, and green "attacks" are actually beneficial, providing a small amount of healing and also often triggering special effects. The green attacks most frequently come up when attempting to peacefully resolve conflicts.

But why might you want to spare the monsters of Undertale, when RPG convention has it that you are "supposed" to kill everything in your path? Well, that's because Undertale makes a specific effort to, for want of a better word considering we're talking about "monsters", humanise everyone and everything you come into contact with. Even fodder enemies have personalities and quirks, and it takes the most steely of resolves to look past all that and murder them. But, crucially, the option is there.

Not only that, but Undertale also keeps track of all manner of other things in the background. If you inadvertently killed someone in a first playthrough and then reset the game without having saved, it will know. On subsequent playthroughs, characters you "haven't met yet" will have recollections of you. And if you went all-out and did a "Genocide" run as your first playthrough, there are some fairly significant differences to how everything concludes.

Undertale is a game that is designed to make you think. Not in the sense that it's especially complicated or difficult to understand, but it really does make you think about the consequences of your actions — and how "game logic" might work were it applied to a "real" situation.

A good example comes if you complete what is known as a "True Pacifist" route. This is only possible after "beating" the game once, and fleshes out the story, resolving in an eventual "true ending" where the monsters finally escape the underground and are able to once again live free on the surface. If you open the game up again after you've reached this ending, the game tells you in no uncertain terms that yes, you absolutely can play again by making use of what it calls a "True Reset", but in doing so you are depriving an entire society — and yourself — of a happy ending. And why are you doing that? Just to see what happens? Is that something you can really justify doing?

A valid response to this is, of course, to say "no, I can't", and to close the game down, never to open it again. You got your happy ending. No need for any "what ifs". No need to satisfy your curiosity as to what might happen if you did the most morally reprehensible thing possible at every opportunity. No need to ruin the lives of a significant number of people.

At the same time, the game absolutely does provide plenty of meaningful changes if you do decide you want to see what might happen if you kill everyone. And then, if you decide to do that "True Pacifist" ending again just to "set everything right", there will be consequences to that, too.

This is the stuff that makes Undertale so clever and noteworthy. The moment-to-moment storytelling and dialogue is charming and memorable — I'd go so far as to say that this is a game with one of the clearest senses of authorial voice I've ever played — but the really interesting stuff comes about once you've been through the whole thing once and you start to contemplate and understand how differently some scenes can unfold depending on your previous actions. Various characters can be seen in rather different lights, and encounters can be resolved in other ways depending on everything from the things you've said to other characters to the objects in your inventory.

Of course, under the hood it's all an illusion based on hidden flags and counters, but in the moment, it absolutely works. Undertale is enormously emotionally engaging from start to finish, and I defy anyone to play through to the conclusion of the True Pacifist route and not at least hesitate before contemplating doing a Genocide run.

As previously noted, a lot of this is down to author Toby Fox's excellent writing, but Fox doesn't just use well-crafted dialogue to infuse his characters with personality; he uses visual elements such as fonts and the case in which characters' text-only dialogue is presented to help you build up a mental picture of each character. Probably the best example of both of these comes in the case of Papyrus and Sans, two skeletal characters you encounter early in the game after freeing yourself from Toriel's oppressive motherliness.

Papyrus is loud, brash and outspoken — if he had voice acting, he'd absolutely sound like Skeletor — but is this way in order to cover up intense insecurity and loneliness. We can tell this from the combination of his facial expressions, the things he says… and the fact that, as his name suggests, all his dialogue is presented in all-caps Papyrus font, a font that certain types of people tend to use if they want people to like them. Not only that, he's so desperate for validation and friendship that even if you've been on a Genocide run up until this point in the game, your encounter with Papyrus represents a key opportunity to turn back and change your ways.

By contrast, Sans is much more chilled out. Again, we can tell this from the way he looks at us and the things he says, but also the fact his dialogue is all in lower case Comic Sans, a font that everyone knows to be awful, but it serves a function. It's little stylistic things like this that are almost entirely unique to video games; one could get away with the typeface thing in written creative works, but here, it's the way this is combined with other visual and auditory elements that makes it work quite so well.

Expand this to a whole 7-10 hour game, with a variety of other characters who are all equally well-crafted and play very different roles on your overall journey, and you have something that really gets deep into the emotional centres of your brain, and which will stay with you long after the credits roll. This is a game where the characters feel real enough for you to be personally invested in them, and where all but the most hard-hearted will find it very difficult to make the decision to put them to death.

At least, that's how I felt about it, anyway. The nice thing about Undertale is that you can also go in completely the other direction with it, and look at it as an experiment in how video game narratives can manipulate one's emotions so that we believe in things which very much are, by their very nature, unthinking, unfeeling fabrications of someone's imagination. There's no logical reason why you should feel "bad" for "killing" a character in a video game, because you're not actually killing them. After all, think about how many anonymous grunts you've shot in the head in other games; how many slobbering monsters you've hacked and slashed your way through in your average RPG; how many societies you've doomed when you've set a game aside, never to return to it.

Among other things, Undertale makes us think about the context of our actions in video games, and how that might translate to something a bit more real. At its heart, it's not trying in the slightest to be "realistic", hence its deliberately slipshod visual presentation; it behooves us, then, to ask exactly why we end up caring so much more about these characters presented in low-resolution, often monochromatic pixel art than we might do about, say, an anonymous enemy soldier in a Call of Duty, or an enemy knight in a strategy RPG.

The answer, probably, is love. We don't care about grunts in a first-person shooter because we're never given any reason to. We have no opportunity to get to know them; they have a single mechanical function, and that is to stop us achieving our objectives. And, in turn, as Sans points out to us in the late game, "the more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself; the more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt… the more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others."

In Undertale, meanwhile, every potential "enemy" is depicted as someone or something that could also, under different circumstances, be a friend. Even characters like Papyrus, who might initially appear to be set up in such a way to be a "villain", with his fixation on capturing you and seeming inability to actually follow through on this, end up expressing their support and validation for you. And a lot of this happens early on, making those first kills — the ones from before you find it "easy to distance yourself" — hard to perform.

Yes, part of Undertale's effectiveness comes from the fact that it makes you feel good. Because you are playing "you" — despite not being able to customise the player avatar — the game and its characters are effectively able to address you directly. And many of the things both the game and the individual characters have to say are positive, uplifting and supportive. Would you punch someone in the face if they told you that they believed in you, and that they could see you were trying your best?

Some of you might, and Undertale accepts that as a valid response. Some of you, like me, might be a lot more open to what is essentially emotional manipulation (positive), and thus find yourself staring at that post-game screen, unable to click "True Reset" and undo everything you'd done up until this point.

So yeah. I get it. Undertale is excellent. And I'm glad I finally understand why.

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 368: Punked

I decided to nab Cyberpunk 2077 from the Nintendo Switch 2's launch lineup. I haven't particularly followed the game since its original semi-disastrous launch several years back, but I figured the Switch 2 port would be a good way to jump in with zero expectations. I also wanted to support one of the few third-party developers releasing their game on an actual game card instead of a Game Key Card. Vote with your wallet, send a message and all that.

I'm pretty impressed so far. While the game doesn't run at 4K 60fps, I wasn't expecting it to; it does, however, run at what appears to be a perfectly stable 30fps in 1080p, and it also taught me that my TV apparently does have a 120Hz mode, because despite not actually running at 120fps, it switches to that mode when playing Cyberpunk.

I haven't played a lot of the game so far, but what I was hoping for was something with a similar sort of vibe to classic PC games like Deus Ex. While I don't think Cyberpunk 2077 goes quite as hard on the "immersive sim" side of things as some games like that, I've been enjoying what I've played so far. Playing a CD Projekt game from first-person is a fun novelty, and Night City seems like an interesting location to explore so far. They've also nailed that thing where they drop you into a setting and everyone is using what will initially be unfamiliar slang, but you soon pick up the lingo and feel like you're part of the world.

I haven't really decided what kind of character "my" V is going to be as yet. With games like this, I do often tend to gravitate towards stealthy and hacking-type abilities, but I appreciate there's a stat in this just called "cool", which involves doing cool things like taking down enemies using pistols and being street smart.

Thus far the combat seems to be all right. It's of the "point a gun at someone and numbers pop out of them" variety, but supposedly with the right combination of skills, weapons and good aim, you can do things like knock enemies down with a single headshot and suchlike. The close-up melee combat appears to be a bit cack, however, but no first-person game has ever really nailed this, and at least it's not quite Elder Scrolls levels of wafting blindly at an enemy right in front of you; there is at least a nominal sense of impact when your blows connect.

I think I'm out of what is essentially the tutorial missions now, so I'm going to spend a bit more time with it tonight and see how I get on. I still have several other games on the go so starting a brand new one is probably a terrible idea, but you know how it is. Shiny new toy, you want to try it out as much as you can. And, outside of Mario Kart World, this was probably the most interesting thing from the launch lineup.

So anyway. Cyberpunk 2077 thus far appears to be A Good. Further bulletins as events warrant.

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#oneaday Day 364: I should probably play Undertale

I've never played Undertale. More impressively, I have somehow not been spoiled on Undertale as yet, but I'm feeling increasingly like I should probably play it. I do own a copy, after all, and now its follow-up Deltarune is out on Switch 2, I feel like the risk of inadvertently stumbling across spoilers in the wild is about to take a sudden spike back up.

I don't really have a good reason for not having played Undertale. It's not that I don't want to play it, it's just never been a particularly high priority for me. Part of that is down to the "reverse hype" thing, where so many people are playing it and making memes about it that I just want it to go away in order to appreciate it on its own merits. In fact, I think that's probably most of the reason I haven't played it as yet. Which is arguably a bit silly, because as I have seen with a number of other games in the past — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Mario Kart World being the most recent ones — it's sometimes fun to feel like you're part of the "current" conversation.

I'm still in the process of weaning myself off the habit of only playing one game at a time. While it definitely pays to devote yourself to something lengthy like Xenoblade Chronicles X (which I'm closing in on 90 hours of) it also certainly doesn't hurt to play some other things in the meantime, too.

The way I've found most helpful of thinking about it is in terms of TV shows: back in the prime of serialised TV shows in the late '90s, you'd watch maybe five or six ongoing shows all at the same time and still be able to keep them all straight in your head, even with a gap of a week in between each episode. While that's not how most people enjoy TV shows today, it absolutely is still possible to watch and enjoy multiple TV shows simultaneously (well, not simultaneously, but you know what I mean) without feeling like you've "abandoned" one in favour of another. And the same should be — is — true for games, too.

Very few games have such an intense structure that they demand your undivided attention for hundreds of hours; in the case of Xenoblade Chronicles X, for example, the main story is split into discrete chapters, and in between each chapter there are a bunch of "side" missions (which are actually also very important to fleshing out the overall setting and narrative) that can be tackled a bit at a time. With that structure, it's easy to find a natural stopping point — on the micro level, after completing a single mission; on a more macro level, after completing a story chapter, or clearing up all the accessible missions between story chapters — and then go do something else for a bit.

So y'know what? This weekend I might just start Undertale. I believe it's not particularly long, either, so it might be a nice palate-cleanser, and then I can play Deltarune and be part of the conversation over that. Maybe.

In fact, I will make that a commitment. Tomorrow I will start Undertale. I have no real commitments for the weekend, so I'll sit down with it, give it some time and see what I think. As I say, I know pretty much nothing about it at all, so I am very interested to finally give it some time.

For now, though, bed. Or maybe a Mario Kart race or two before that…

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#oneaday Day 363: It's Switch Twoursday

Come on, Nintendo, "Switch 2sday" was right there and you blew it. Sega had this shit sorted back in the '90s… although given the trajectory they took shortly afterwards, probably best not to take too many cues from them on the hardware front.

Anyway. Yes! It is the Nintendo Switch 2 launch day and I have been fortunate enough to get one on launch day. I ordered from Argos when pre-orders first went up, and I was half-expecting my order to be cancelled. But no! It arrived mid-afternoon today, so I went through the whole "transfer" process from my original Switch, and I've been happily enjoying Mario Kart World and Ridge Racer this evening.

I'm going to write something more substantial about both of those games over on MoeGamer at some point in the very near future, so I thought today I'd talk a little about my initial experiences with the Switch 2 in general.

Overall, my impressions have been very positive. Outside of the thing refusing to connect to my Wi-Fi on one side of my study (a problem that is by no means exclusive to the Switch 2), everything has gone pretty much as smoothly as you would ever want.

If you're upgrading from an original Switch, there's a straightforward transfer process you can run. This involves putting the two consoles physically close to one another, presumably so they can establish a direct wireless connection between one another, and then triggering the transfer process from both ends, perhaps with a login or two along the way depending on how you have your accounts set up. It even asked for the microSD card from the original Switch to transfer over captured screenshots and videos.

When it was finished (about 15-20 minutes later), all of my saves, settings and account details had been transferred over to the Switch 2, and the Switch 2 made a start on redownloading all the digital software I had on my original Switch. This was fine for my purposes, though those who have larger digital libraries may have run into issues, since the largest microSD Express card you can get for Switch 2 (and it will only take microSD Express, except for the aforementioned screenshot library transfer process) is 256GB. OG Switch, meanwhile, would happily take 512GB or more.

The auto-download thing was fine, but for some reason it did stop partway through and didn't resume. I assume this is because I started doing something that talked to online — that's what generally happened with downloads on the original Switch — but I would have expected it to start downloading again afterwards. This didn't happen. Not a huge issue, since I can easily manually redownload anything I want to put back on the system, because the icons for those pieces of software are there, but it would have been nice for that to be fully automated.

One of the biggest upgrades is to the eShop. No longer a slow, annoying mess to navigate, the Switch 2's eShop seems perfectly functional, and it already has some hentai shovelware games ready to go. So the curation issue isn't exactly solved, but the painful user experience side of things is, at least, fixed now.

I briefly fired up the new Gamecube app you get with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and boy, those games sure do look lovely all HD-ified. I'm looking forward to having a play with Soul Calibur II and F-Zero GX in particular; I'm in no hurry to replay Wind Waker, meanwhile, since I played the Wii U version a few years back and while I enjoyed it, I also don't have much desire to play it again just yet.

Handheld, the screen looks lovely. While not OLED, it's bright, large and smooth. Games look great on it. I haven't tried any original Switch titles on it as yet, but Switch 2 stuff looked pin-sharp and super-slick. It's also a bit bigger than the original Switch, meaning it'll probably be more comfortable to play more complex games in handheld mode than the original Switch was. I will likely still keep it connected to the TV for the vast majority of the time, but I feel more inclined to play handheld with that lovely screen than I do the original Switch. No shade on those who primarily played OG Switch handheld; I just preferred the TV experience by quite a considerable margin.

Thus far, then, I'm happy with my purchase. I still have plenty of concerns about things like Game Key Cards, software prices and suchlike, but we'll see how things pan out long-term. I do find myself wondering if Nintendo will be able to capture the same lightning in a bottle that the original Switch was — historically speaking, they've tended to follow an astronomical success (Game Boy, SNES, Wii) with anything from middling-to-solid commercial performance (N64, Gamecube) to catastrophic failure (Virtual Boy, Wii U), so it will be interesting to see where Switch 2 falls on that spectrum… or if it will continue a run of good luck for the company.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I have one, I like it and I'm looking forward to playing with it some more. So I'm going to do just that before I head to bed. Mario Kart World calls me!

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#oneaday Day 362: Switching to a new era

Switch 2 is officially out tomorrow. Some folks have been getting theirs today. Mine looks on track to arrive tomorrow, so I should be able to get some time in with Mario Kart World and Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer tomorrow evening. Doubtless I will have things to say about both of those.

Today I just wanted to offer a tip of the cap to the original Switch. It's not a "farewell", because the Switch 2 will (hopefully) allow me to continue to enjoy all the original Switch's games, and if not, well, I still have that original Switch.

I love the Switch. I actually don't use its main tentpole function of being a handheld all that much, but I do take advantage of its easily portable nature quite frequently. It's much easier to bundle a Switch case and dock into a suitcase than it is a PlayStation 5, after all, so when I travel, the Switch typically comes with me.

I've also amassed an enormous collection of Switch games — 405, to be exact, if my collection database is to be believed, plus a number of digital-only games. That's more than any other single system in my collection — PS2 comes close with 282, but Switch has definitely been the front-runner for a long time. I would often buy multiplatform games on Switch by preference, even if they weren't the "best" version in terms of graphics and performance; even though I didn't play the games handheld all that much, that aforementioned portability factor remains a great thing.

Plus there's the fact that the Switch plays host to a ton of games that I wanted to play! In particular, it took up the mantle from the PlayStation Vita in terms of anime-inspired RPGs and visual novels, and some clever publishers even found a means of getting full-on sexually explicit games onto a console for the first time. A Nintendo console, at that.

I'm not just talking about lewd games, though. Tons of great Japanese games came — are still coming — to the original Switch, and there are loads on my shelves that I haven't gotten to just yet. The thriving limited-print scene, which I know is divisive, has been particularly strong on Switch for those who want packaged versions of indie games — and best of all for collectors, most of those releases are truly complete on cart in terms of DLC and patches.

Sure, Switch has had its annoyances, most notably Joy-Con drift. I also had a drifting stick on my Pro Controller for a bit, but taking it apart and putting it back together again fixed that and it's been absolutely fine since. The eShop has long been a bit cack, though, both in terms of speed and the amount of AI-generated slop it's been subject to. Early reports would seem to indicate that Switch 2's eShop has taken care of the former issue, and the latter is something more endemic to the entire digital distribution scene, not a Nintendo-exclusive thing by any means.

I think Switch 2 is going to be a lot of fun. I also think it's going to see a few teething troubles, with the most notable being the Game Key Card situation. There are a lot of games that people want to play that are being released on these stupid things, and that concerns me. I do not want the Switch 2 to be a platform that forces me to go all-digital because I like collecting games. My quiet hope is that the early Game Key Card releases are such a flop that the publishers cheaping out by using them rather than proper cartridges will abandon them, Nintendo will quietly retire the practice before long and these games will get reissues on a proper cartridge. But I guess we'll have to wait and see on that. It feels like it might be unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Anyway, I am looking forward to playing Mario Kart World and Ridge Racer tomorrow, and I, of course, still have to finish off Xenoblade Chronicles X — pity that one doesn't appear to have a "Switch 2 version" upgrade, as it could really benefit from the additional oomph! — so the future, for now, looks bright and enjoyable. And, tomorrow, there will be much racing!

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#oneaday Day 360: Lacking in inspiration

After rather longer browsing through the "Random Post" option than I would like, I am no closer to determining what I might want to write about today. So, as ever in scenarios like this, I am just going to start typing and see what comes out. It might be coherent, it might be nonsense; it might be meaningful, it might just be a summary of what happened today. I don't know yet because I haven't written it yet; the only rule is that I'm not going to stop typing to think. No, think, always type.

I published my video on Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer yesterday. It's done… all right, but this further cements my complete lack of understanding of what "works" on YouTube. Sometimes I'll post something that I feel is completely throwaway and it'll do very good numbers (obscenely good in the case of something like my Super Woden GP 2 video from a while back), then at other times I'll post something that actually had some meaning to me, and it'll struggle to break a hundred views. I think the most galling instance of this happening was back when I covered The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, a thoroughly interesting game by SWERY65 that really got me thinking and learning some things. It was, in many ways, a very personal video, and it did absolute bobbins performance-wise. But I'm still glad I did it.

My Kathy Rain 2 video isn't exactly "personal" in the same way, but I did enjoy the game enough to want to share it with others, because it was a very good point-and-click adventure, and I hope it does well. But at the time of typing this, it hasn't broken a hundred views yet, and I feel like it's been tough to get people to pay attention to it on socials also.

There are times when this happens where I find myself wondering if I should bother keeping on with things like MoeGamer and my YouTube channel. They're both "work" in a sense, and I could probably have a lot more time to myself to enjoy things if I ditched both of them and just lived my life to enjoy myself.

But the trouble is, I really enjoy doing both of them, and neither of them have ever been about viewing figures. Sure, the occasional payout I get from YouTube is a nice little bit of pocket money (and nothing more) but I don't really do either videos or articles for the sake of making Number Go Up. I do them primarily as means of expressing myself about things that I am enthusiastic about, and to share that enthusiasm with others — particularly people I consider to be close friends.

Now, I've found out to my cost and frustration that there are some people I considered to be close friends who don't give a shit, and have never even tried to give a shit when I shared things with them. So I've just stopped trying with them, and instead I just concentrate on doing these things for my own enjoyment, and perhaps to share with people that I know will appreciate them.

Sure, it might be nice to be able to do YouTube as a living, but would it really? Would it really be nice to have one's income completely beholden to the fickle fates of The Algorithm and the massive variation one can see in viewing figures from one video to the next? Probably not. So that is not — and never has been, really — an angle that I'm pursuing.

Best thing is just to keep these things as hobbies, and if certain people happen to stumble across them and enjoy them, great. If not, at least I have something I can look at myself and be satisfied with — and be content in the knowledge that generative AI hasn't come anywhere near those things I've created, either.

Anyway, I have spent enough time randomly pondering absolute nonsense this evening, so I think it's time to go and unwind with some video games. I think some Castlevania: Lords of Shadow might be in order; I've been playing that a bit for the last week and really enjoying it. Patrick Stewart!

So that's what I'm off to do now. And all my self-imposed commitments are already taken care of well before midnight, too. Look at me, I'm growing.

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#oneaday Day 358: Retrofest 2025

Today I went out! All by myself and everything. Specifically, I went to Retrofest 2025, a new event held in sunny Swindon that promised a room full of sweaty old men and their peculiar computers, and delivered on that promise in spades. While the event was short on things to actually buy and come home with, it was thoroughly interesting to see some of the things people (and a few organisations) had chosen to exhibit from their personal collections.

I took a few photos from throughout the day. This isn't a comprehensive rundown of everything by any means, but I'll attempt to remember what everything was and tell you a bit about it. In no particular order:

Those who know me well will know that I have a major soft spot for Philips G7000 "Videopac Computer", a games console with a membrane keyboard. This is the "PS5 Pro" equivalent of that system: the G7400, which only came out in France to my knowledge. It runs all the G7000 games, including enhanced visuals for some of them, as well as more advanced titles specifically designed for it. That big grey lump on the back of it is a module that attempts to turn it into more of an actual computer, featuring additional RAM and Microsoft BASIC for programming.

Sadly, this wasn't up and running to play with, but it was a pleasure to actually see one.

Here's an Atari XE Games System, colloquially known as the XEGS. I've never actually seen one of these in the flesh. This was an attempt by Atari post-ST to revitalise the flagging 8-bit range by rejigging the 65XE computer into a games console with a detachable keyboard. Unlike the 5200 from several years earlier, the internals of the XEGS were identical to the Atari 8-bit home computers, so you could use pretty much any software and peripherals with it.

If this all sounds a bit like Atari didn't really know what they were doing at the time… you would be absolutely right. This thing is still cool, though. I like how the function keys look like those flying saucer sherbet sweeties.

I was really interested to see this, a device known as both the CreatiVision and the Dick Smith Wizzard. Those who follow my videos may recall I saw this device advertised in an early issue of Page 6 magazine and had never heard of it. I asked the owner, Quang from Asobi Tech, about it. Apparently it's an Italian system from a roughly similar era to the ColecoVision (as one might expect from the design). Its capabilities are also roughly similar — which in turn means that it has similar capabilities to the MSX standard — but it's not cross-compatible with either the ColecoVision or the MSX itself.

Its notable feature is the full keyboard that spans the two controllers. These can either be used as an individual set of buttons for two players (presumably with overlays available) or "docked" into the system for a full-width keyboard of sorts.

The system wasn't a success, but it somehow made it to Australia, which is where the Dick Smith branding came from. Dick Smith was basically Australia's Alan Sugar, and he loved putting his mug on everything he sold, and the "Wizzard" was no exception.

Here's a fully working Asteroids Deluxe cabinet, the middle-sized one that lacks the "floating" backdrop of its larger counterpart. I spent quite a lot of time playing this today, and it turns out I don't dislike Asteroids as much as I thought I did.

Part of it was down to playing with those lovely leaf-switched arcade buttons and hearing the sound booming out from the internal speakers. But I just found myself enjoying the game in general a lot more than I have in the past.

The owner of the Asteroids Deluxe cabinet, streamer Rage Against The Retro, also brought a selection of other systems, all playing Asteroids. On the left there is a Vectrex, and situated next to it is an Apple Macintosh Plus. There's an Amiga A600 just to the right, also.

It occurred to me when playing both the Asteroids Deluxe cabinet and the Vectrex that I'd never actually played games on an authentic vector monitor before. The effect (which absolutely does not come through on either photos or video) is stunning, particularly the piercing brightness of your shots. This is one thing that emulation absolutely cannot do complete justice to.

Here's two very tiny TVs, both hooked up to games systems. The bigger one was hooked up to the A600 from the previous image, while the teeny one was attached to a Spectrum. Both were playing variants of Asteroids; the Amiga had follow-up Blasteroids, while the Speccy was playing a decent recreation of the arcade original.

More Asteroids! This time we've got an Atari 7800 playing a recent(ish) port, plus there's the Spectrum running one of the tiny TVs. Note the custom arcade controls Rage had set up to mimic the arcade version's control panel.

Here's some interesting rarities. On the left, we have two variations of the COMX-35 computer, which was designed to be low-cost, but which seemingly failed to leave any impression on the industry whatsoever. At least part of that may be down to the fact that it used the distinctly non-standard RCA 1802 processor while most other home computers of the era were using either the Zilog Z80 or the MOS 6502. It also had a peculiar 35K of memory. But it did have a built-in joystick, making it a nice little games machine.

On the right, we have Bandai's RX-78 "Gundam" home computer. And yes, it was named after the giant robots in an attempt to make it more appealing. This completely failed, however, as the system disappeared quickly with only about 20 pieces of software available in total. It looks neat though!

Here's a closer look at the COMX-35, with its chiclet keys and its fun quasi-industrial design. The more I look at this thing, the more I like its overall aesthetic.

And the RX-78 up close, too. Note the BASIC cartridge plugged into the back, ready for 10 PRINT "FARTS" 20 GOTO 10 shenanigans, and the matching joystick to the right.

This beauty is a Commodore RX-64, a "luggable" version of the Commodore 64 with integrated keyboard, floppy disk drive and monitor. Unsurprisingly, this beast of a thing completely failed on the market due to the fact it weighs ten and a half kilos and cost over a thousand dollars in the mid '80s, when the C64 itself was less than half that price.

It is a lovely thing though, and Commodore enthusiasts seem to enjoy it a lot. I can see why — it's fun to have everything integrated, and despite a few differences in the OS ROMs, it's mostly fully compatible with disk-based Commodore 64 software. It can't load tapes, though, as it has no tape controller at all.

This may look out of place, but the show was at Swindon's "STEAM" railway museum, and this little display was part of a display on train sets run by digital controllers from the 1970s. I didn't look into this too closely, but as someone who occasionally had the opportunity to play with Hornby trains when I was little (my family had a nice collection stuffed up in the loft that occasionally came down for an outing), it was nice to see this.

Here's some prototype Acorn machines. Without these, you might not have a smartphone! Yes, that's right, the "A" in "ARM" was originally for "Acorn", though now it is for "Advanced". ARM processors first appeared in Acorn Archimedes machines, which were a generation beyond these initial prototypes; these things would have ultimately become the BBC Micro and the Electron.

This is a teletype machine! This was an incredible amount of tactile fun to type stuff on, and unlike a regular typewriter it would type things back at you! You could also run a program on it that would punch out a message on the roll of paper tape to the side. I don't really know what this was "for", as such, but it was very cool!

Here's a pre-production prototype of the Dragon 32, the computer that Americans know as the TRS-80. Well, there are a few differences, but they're pretty similar internally. I don't know much about this machine but it certainly has its fans on both sides of the pond.

This is a Commodore MAX. I don't really know what this is! Apparently this was a cousin to the Commodore 64 that was mostly sold in Japan. It has similar capabilities to the C64, but a lot less RAM and a really horrible membrane keyboard. It also lacks much of an internal OS on ROM at all, making it more of a games machine that can do a few computery things than a full-on home computer.

This is a Spectravideo device that allows you to program in BASIC on the Atari 2600. At least, it does if you can figure out how on Earth to actually type things on it, because it uses a weird keyword-based system where pressing a single key inputs a full command, similar to Sinclair's BASIC. This is another thing that I'd seen in a magazine in a video I'd made, but had no idea even existed until quite recently. A thoroughly interesting little thing, though!

Finally, here's probably the rarest thing at the show: a Mattel Aquarius II home computer. The Aquarius range was such a flop for Mattel that it was cancelled mere months after its release, and as such very few Aquarius II units made it out into the wild. We're talking like maybe 25 out there — and this is supposedly the only one known to be in full working order. It's owned by a chap who has been developing games for the system for a while — at this point, he has now made more games for the Aquarius range than were released for it in its original lifespan.

And that's that! It was a really fun day out, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was good to see some YouTuber friends, set a few high scores, have a play with some intriguing rarities and see what the retro enthusiast community in general was up to. Particular shout-out to this guy, who is doing near-arcade perfect ports to the BBC Micro, of all things. His Missile Command and Frogger were particularly stunning.

Anyway, now I am very tired so I am going to go and lie down. If you're in the Swindon area tomorrow, first of all, I'm sorry, and second of all, maybe try and pop in to Retrofest — I'm pretty sure there's still a few tickets available. You can find out more here.

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#oneaday Day 356: Bellyachin'

Well, I didn't finish Kathy Rain 2. I think I'm on the last "day" of it, though, so I should have it all wrapped up by the end of tomorrow evening, I reckon. I could have probably pushed through it tonight, but I hadn't written this, and I hadn't done stupid social media things that I do every day (the "#365games" tag on Bluesky) and I have had a stomachache all day, so I thought I should probably call it a night.

Of all the aches and pains it is possible for one to experience, few are worse than a lingering stomachache, because while something like an achey back or joints can be at least temporarily relieved by moving around a bit, a stomachache stubbornly sits there and demands your full attention, even when you have a lot of things to do. And I had a lot of things to do today, let me tell you.

It was the Evercade 5th Anniversary Showcase today, during which we revealed two more NEOGEO cartridges, two cartridges from Taito (surely a pleasant surprise for everyone who thought Taito stuff was forever confined to built-in games on specific pieces of hardware), and a single-game cartridge featuring the truly excellent Roguecraft DX, an enhanced and expanded version of a very good (and award-winning!) Amiga game that came out last year.

It was a good show all round, and I think most people were happy. There were the usual moaners and complainers, but I'm pretty much just tuning them out at this point, because 95% of them are moaning and complaining about things we haven't said, just working on doomsaying and assumptions. And when someone's being like that, it's frankly not worth getting involved.

I'm really excited about the stuff we've got coming up this year. It's a relief to have been able to let the cat out of the bag for some of it today, but there's even more coming later in the year that I think people are going to be even more excited and surprised by. Evercade has been going from strength to strength in terms of the quality licenses we've been able to agree each year, and this year in particular is a string of big names. I obviously can't tell you what the unrevealed ones are as yet, but if you're into your retro gaming, you'll be pleased to see them, I can tell you that.

I should probably stop typing before I say anything I shouldn't, and go and lie in bed groaning until this stomachache goes away. It is small consolation that Andie has also been suffering today, suggesting to me that something we both ate yesterday probably wasn't good, likely the burgers we had for dinner. That also, hopefully, means we'll both be feeling better tomorrow. But for now, I anticipate an uncomfortable night ahead, perhaps with a side of thunderous farting. Yes, I could definitely go for a thunderous fart or two right now.

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#oneaday Day 355: Soothsayer

I've spent the evening playing Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. I played Kathy Rain: Director's Cut a few years back and apparently didn't write about it, but suffice to say I enjoyed it. As such, I was excited to see the sequel show up a few days back — one of several interesting-looking adventure games that have released recently.

I've played about 4 hours of it this evening and I'm not sure how far through I am — most estimates seem to place it around 7 hours in total — so I'm not going to give any conclusive thoughts just yet. I'll save those for MoeGamer and/or YouTube another time. I can give some first impressions, though, and those first impressions are very good indeed.

Like its predecessor, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer is a point-and-click adventure presented in deliberately low resolution pixel art, albeit making use of modern widescreen resolutions and colour depth to provide a level of detail that wouldn't quite have been possible back in the classic VGA age. It is, I believe, an Adventure Game Studio affair, which accounts for its interface being rather similar to The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, another excellent modern adventure I played a little while back. That's no bad thing, though; Adventure Game Studio is a well-respected engine, used by a lot of modern adventure developers with good reason.

As with most modern adventure games, interactions in Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer are kept nicely simple. Click on things to either look at them or do something with them, click on inventory items to examine them, drag inventory items onto items in the scene or other inventory items to use them on things. Conversations unfold using a Gabriel Knight-style keyword system, where Kathy accumulates (and erases) keywords over the course of her investigation and can ask interactive characters about them, along with also being able to ask them about things in the scene or her inventory. It's a simple but effective conversation system that works well, and there are occasional traditional dialogue options that appear when Kathy has multiple things to ask about a situation.

Kathy's case this time around is that of a serial killer known as the Soothsayer. This individual has committed five murders over the course of the last few months, with the most recent being a local celebrity writer. As a rather down-on-her-luck private investigator, Kathy sees the $200,000 reward money and decides she'd like a bit of that action, so she proceeds to go about her investigation in her own mildly anarchic style. I say "mildly" because while she flouts a few rules and laws over the course of her investigation, she does draw the line at doing anything likely to get her thrown in prison — or, indeed, lose the confidence of her contact in the police force, who, as you might expect, is a helpful resource to draw upon, particularly as he very much wants to get into Kathy's pants.

Thus far in the 4 hours of play, I haven't felt like I've got "stuck" at all, which is good — and the game has kept up a decent pace as a result. The puzzles, while not super-easy, won't take long to solve for experienced adventure game veterans, but they are nonetheless satisfying. There's no moon logic on display here; everything makes logical sense, and those who really struggle can check out Kathy's notebook to get some hints on the objectives she needs to accomplish. The presence of the notebook and a list of objectives in the first place is a helpful addition not normally present in this type of game; it helps keep you focused without spoiling the sense of player agency or working things out for yourself.

I remember the original Kathy Rain getting a bit weird towards the end — and I didn't have a problem with that, I hasten to add — and I have a suspicion something similar is probably going to happen in this one, too. The "weird bit" of the first Kathy Rain led to some eye-opening revelations about the character, so I will be very surprised if something similar doesn't occur this time around, too. But we'll have to see, I guess.

Thus far, then, I've been thoroughly absorbed by this new investigation. The game looks great, has a wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack and decent voice acting, and it plays very well, too. Plus at what looks like it will be 7-10 hours in total, it's a decent length for this type of game, too — particularly when you consider most of the "golden age" adventures from Sierra and LucasArts could be beaten within an hour or two (or even less, in some cases) if you knew what you were doing.

I'm looking forward to seeing how things end up. At this rate, it's looking like I might beat it tomorrow. I will definitely pen some more substantial thoughts for MoeGamer and/or my YouTube channel when I've finished the whole thing. For now, though, it's an easy recommend for adventure game enthusiasts.

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#oneaday Day 353: Too much media?

The world can be an overwhelming place for all manner of reasons, and one of the things most likely to overstimulate all of us at one point or another is the sheer amount of media that there is. There is more stuff in the world than one person can reasonably experience in a single lifetime, and most of us likely feel at various times like we're being pulled in multiple directions, the constant threat of Maybe Not Enjoying The Thing You Picked As Much As The Thing You Didn't Pick a common source of analysis paralysis.

Case in point: this evening, I happened to see over Andie's shoulder that she's watching a TV show called Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators. I can tell from the bits I've watched over her shoulder that I would almost certainly enjoy this show, but is it something that I "should" add to my plate, given I have games on my shelves I haven't played, DVDs and Blu-Rays on other shelves that I haven't watched, and an entire Internet full of possibilities just a click away?

The answer, of course, is "stop overthinking it, and if you think you might enjoy it, watch it". And I think I just might. It's not as if I have to commit to watching it to the exclusion of all else, and it's not as if I have to watch it every day without fail otherwise I'll forget what's going on. As a TV show, it's designed to be inherently "disposable", as horrible as that sounds to say about a creative work; perhaps "transient" is a better descriptor. It's something designed for you to enjoy in the moment, then not think particularly hard about. There are plenty of other TV shows that I've watched in the past that fall into this category — I quite often look back over past entries of this blog and see entries about shows I apparently watched but have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever — and I don't feel too bad about that. I enjoyed them in the moment, which was their purpose.

Not everything needs to have meaning, to be life-changing, or to have a particularly strong and powerful message to deliver. Sometimes entertainment is simply for entertainment's sake, and there's nothing wrong with that.

So y'know what? I think I might just start watching Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators. It looks like a fun show that I think I will enjoy, and my instincts are usually pretty good on these things. I may not remember it a year or two down the line, but does that really matter? Not at all; if it's enjoyable now, and it helps distract from the shitshow that is life in 2025, bring it on, I say. The planet might have burned down in a couple of years, and when that time comes it's not going to matter one jot what my media consumption habits were.

This isn't even a new problem. For as long as television has existed, people have doubtless agonised over which channel they should watch, or if they should do something other than watching television. That particular problem is compounded for those who had satellite or cable TV, of course, as they had even more choice. And in times before electronic media, were people agonising over which book they should read, which painting they should admire or which sonata they should play on the piano? Entirely possible.

Life is short; much too short to agonise over decisions as ultimately trivial as what you're going to do to entertain yourself of an evening. So if you feel like you might fancy something, just take the plunge and enjoy it. There are no wrong choices. (Well, there are, but that's not the sort of decision we're talking about here.) Taking care of yourself is of paramount importance, and allowing yourself to get trapped into a mental spiral of trying to prioritise things of equal unimportance is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserable.

So, y'know, don't do that. I am going to try and take my own advice here.

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