#oneaday Day 285: On that thing what Gareth Southgate said

Former England manager and renowned penalty whiffer Sir Gareth Southgate recently delivered the prestigious Richard Dimbleby lecture, as reported by The Guardian (and doubtless some other places, but The Guardian is where I saw it).

The thrust of Southgate's speech was the plight of young men, and how they are, I quote, "feeling isolated, grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society".

I agree with this part, though I'd probably broaden it to "most men" rather than just "young men". We are encountering a problem I could have predicted a decade ago: that strides forward in progressive attitudes are leaving some men feeling somewhat cast adrift.

This isn't to say that the broad shifts in progressive attitudes are in any way wrong, I hasten to add, whatever the current United States administration might be attempting to do right now. No, on the contrary, it's good that, on the whole, we have much less sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia than we used to have. We haven't eliminated any of these problems, unfortunately, but progress has been made.

As part of all that happening, though, there was a certain amount of demonisation of privileged groups in society. Not universally, by any means, and again, I'm not saying that white men deserve to be "better" than anyone else. But for a good decade or more, men have been facing something of an existential crisis as society attempted to "make up" for their historical position of privilege. And this, in turn, has led to things like the loneliness epidemic among young men, the alt-right pipeline and all that business. That's a thing that has happened. The question is why.

Southgate argued that these men "spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography". This quote, unsurprisingly, is the one that has been largely taken out of context and objected to. And I don't disagree with the people who did that. While gambling is hard to defend, I firmly believe there's a place in society for both gaming and pornography, and that neither of them are inherently evil things. The problem, as with so many things, is the groups that spring up around those things.

Which, as it happens, is what Southgate's speech went on to criticise.

"This void is filled by a new kind of role model who do not have their best interests at heart," he said. "These are callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain. They willingly trick young men into believing success is measured by money or dominance, never showing emotion, and that the world — including women — is against them. They are as far away as you could possibly get from the role models our young men need in their lives."

The key nuance that Southgate is missing here is that while some "influencers" (ugh, I hate that word, but I'll use it for the sake of quotations in this instance) in the gaming, gambling and pornography spaces are having a harmful effect on young men's wellbeing, this is not a universal thing by any means. (Again, I'd make the argument that gambling is the hardest to defend here, but even that's by no means a universal negative — look at things like The National Lottery and the charitable organisations attached to them.) I hate to be all "not all [x]", because people seem to take that as you having lost an argument, but it really is the case in this instance.

What he's getting at is exactly what I described above (and back in this post) — disenfranchised young men are finding what they believe to be "role models" in figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, who are saying the things they want to hear, and reinforcing harmful attitudes. And these figures "recruit" from fields that young men are interested in — like gaming, gambling and pornography.

The nuance is that gaming, gambling and pornography aren't themselves to blame for the existence of Tate, Peterson and others like them, but rather they just happen to be where figures like that found their most fertile markets. Being into gaming, gambling or pornography doesn't mean you're immediately going to get sucked down the alt-right pipeline into a life of perpetual fury at the world — but I can see how that happens, as I've described elsewhere.

I think it's important to highlight the positives of these things. Gaming, in particular, is probably the fastest growing creative medium in the world, and is a truly democratised form of art. Anyone from a solo independent developer to a huge multinational corporation can make a game, and the market will support that. Granted, it's harder for a solo independent developer to make as much of a splash as a huge multinational corporation with an army of marketing specialists, but it's not impossible — look at stuff like Vampire Survivors and even Minecraft's origins.

Gambling, as I say, is harder to defend, but not impossible. While a gambling addiction can be utterly devastating to individuals and families alike, I don't see the harm in an occasional flutter on the National Lottery, particularly when the money is going to Good Causes™. Sports betting, I'm not even going to try and defend. But you hopefully see my point.

And pornography. While there has always been exploitation and suffering surrounding the production of pornography, today we have a society where sex workers aren't treated as something shameful to be swept under the rug, but where they have meaningful contributions to online discourse, and where the most prolific, uh, performers can make a surprising amount of money, often for just posting videos online. We have artists who focus on drawing pornography as a means of self-expression, or to cater to the tastes of their audience. And that audience gets to explore their fantasies and learn about their tastes in a safe environment.

All of these fields have their negative, toxic ends. "Gamer" discourse surrounding the recently released Assassin's Creed Shadows, for example, shows that we still have a lot of work to do with regard to racism. I don't know anything about the gambling influencer sphere, but it doesn't seem like… something I want to get involved with. And, of course, pornography still has the exploitation element, even in seemingly democratised scenarios such as OnlyFans.

But then… doesn't anything have its toxic element? Southgate's own field of football has its own problems with racism, homophobia, xenophobia, hooliganism and violence, but I don't see him acknowledging that. It feels just a little disingenuous to specifically pick out the things he did in his speech; it's approaching "moral panic" territory, and while there are things we can work on with regard to all of those fields, I don't think it's justified to make blanket statements like "gaming is an unhealthy alternative to having a father figure".

Toxic influencers are a different issue to the games industry in general. The games industry has its own problems that it still needs to grapple with, but it is not a direct, straight line from gaming to Andrew Tate. Southgate argues that "success is about much more than the final score; it isn't a straight line, and it's not a single moment". The same is true for negative cycles, too; you can't point to one single thing and go "that is the cause of all my woes".

For my part, I believe the increasingly abusive practices of algorithm-driven social media are more harmful than anything else when it comes to the situation men find themselves in these days. Because social media is how those harmful messages get out and how they are spread — often with the full approval of the platform holders, because they know the most toxic waste of the Internet is that which gets the most "engagement". But social media is just part of a much more complicated picture, and one we could do well with trying to zoom out and see the entirety of.

Men are suffering. Men are feeling isolated. Men are grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society. Gaming and pornography, like anything else, within reason, can be a comfort for those men when engaged with in moderation. They are not the enemy. It is, however, correct to say that toxic "influencers" are a real problem, so that is what we should perhaps be looking at more closely.

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 284: It's almost Xenoblade time

Just two more days until Xenoblade Chronicles X arrives on Switch. Well, actually, in 15 minutes (as I type this sentence), it will technically be "Xenoblade Chronicles X is out tomorrow".

I am, if it was not already clear, really looking forward to diving back into this wonderful game. I am a little concerned it's going to get lost in the rush of other stuff that's coming out this week — most notably the new Assassin's Creed game, which, after a lot of people tutting and clicking their tongue at Ubisoft for the last few years, everyone seems to be all over, regardless.

One doesn't have to cannibalise the other, of course. I have zero interest in Assassin's Creed, but am eagerly awaiting Xenoblade Chronicles X, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in the same position. My concern is that the people with the loud voices and the column inches to spare will concentrate entirely on Assassin's Creed and not give Xenoblade more that a cursory look. And that will be a great shame indeed.

But rather than moaning about it, I am going to do what I do best: hyperfixate on it for an indefinite period of time, and write extensively about it over on MoeGamer. That's right, I'm essentially resurrecting the "Cover Game" feature, though I don't know if it's going to be a fixture. I certainly am going to give Xenoblade Chronicles X the multi-article treatment, though, taking a look at its mechanics, narrative, setting, worldbuilding, aesthetics, music and all manner of other good stuff in a frankly obsessive amount of detail. Because, dammit, it deserves it.

My whole thinking behind the Cover Game feature on MoeGamer when I first started it was that I wanted to give niche-interest games the same level of blanket coverage that big-name triple-A stuff gets. And, while I've covered a few games that some might argue were triple-A in and of themselves — most notably Final Fantasy XV — I stuck to that philosophy, without clickbaiting and without resorting to a million pieces of "guide content" to juice up the SEO.

It's been a long time since I've done that over on MoeGamer, primarily because when I was in my prime of doing it, I was working an incredibly boring job that afforded me an extraordinary amount of time to doss off during the daytime without anyone noticing. So rather than just sitting around being bored, I used that time to write. And I wrote a lot.

Today, my day job is more actively involving, and I'm busy pretty much every day, so any kind of writing has to be done in my free time. I don't begrudge myself that time, to be clear, but it does mean time I would otherwise be spending researching what to write about has to be taken up… doing the actual writing, y'know.

Anyway. Xenoblade Chronicles X is worth it. It's a spectacular game. If you've never come across it before, it, for me, remains the benchmark "lost on an alien planet simulator", even beating out far more sprawling affairs such as No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous. These games aren't directly comparable, of course, but taking a look at Xenoblade Chronicles X — and indeed the Xenoblade series in general — shows what a difference having a large but nonetheless handcrafted world can make to your immersion in something. No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous may have a bajillion killion haptimillion planets and solar systems to explore, but since they're all procedurally generated, a lot of it is… well, a bit boring. That's how I feel about them, anyway; I've struggled to hold my attention with either of those games, despite respecting what they're doing.

Xenoblade Chronicles X, meanwhile, dumps you on just one wonderfully crafted world and tells you to get on with things. One wonderfully crafted world with several very distinct areas, at least one of which will be heaven for anyone who has ever appreciated a Roger Dean album cover, from what I recall.

But anyway. Xenoblade Chronicles X is nearly here, and I'm looking forward to it. The press may yet surprise me and give it some solid coverage, but regardless of whether or not that actually happens, I will be there, pen in hand, ready to report from the front lines of Mira.

BLADEs assemble!

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#oneaday Day 282: A lost art - the GameFAQs Legal section

If you've been playing video games for as long as I have, doubtless you remember how important GameFAQs once was to folks trying to beat games, before commercial games websites worked out that the SEO juice for posting one (probably AI-generated) "guide" per individual thing you have to do in a game was more potent than a thousand reviews.

One of my favourite things about the FAQs that were posted on GameFAQs was when the author decided to use the "Legal" or similar section to have a good old rant about something which obviously meant something to them. Here, for example, is the copyright section of "Kertra"'s 2003 guide to Metal Slug on NeoGeo:

This FAQ is for personal use only. Do not distribute it or use it for profitable purposes. If you want to post this FAQ on a website, contact me before doing anything and send the URL of your site. Plagiarism is a crime, just ask. I have no objection on my FAQ being posted on someone else's site but you must give credit where it is due. 

Also, please keep in mind that under no circumstances, are you allowed to make any changes to this FAQ! It must remain as it is and moreover, you are not allowed to rip off part(s) of this FAQ to put in another FAQ. No banners or advertisements are to be attached to it and it must remain in its original form (NO HTML!). Moreover, the site must be a non-commercial and non-profitable one. 

This document is protected by US Copyright Law, and the Berne Copyright Convention of 1976. I'm well aware of my rights and will not hesitate to take legal action against you if you don't follow these guidelines. If you wish to take some info from this FAQ to include in a more elaborate one, write to me first and tell me what it is all about and I'll think about it.

This is excellent stuff. I love how it gradually builds and escalates as it goes on, culminating in threats of legal action under both United States copyright law and the Berne Copyright Convention. Amusingly, they'd researched enough to know that the Berne Copyright Convention existed, but got the date wrong on it: its most recent revision appears to have been 1971, not 1976. It goes deeper, though; 1976 is actually an important date to copyright law, because there was a revamp of the United States copyright legislation that year.

The exhortation to not attach banners or ads to the FAQ and the stern NO HTML! appears to have not been legally enforced by poor old Kertra, mind, as GameFAQs is now owned by Gamespot, and I suspect if I turned off my adblockers to look at it, there would be at least one banner ad somewhere, and the site now automatically HTML-ises all FAQs rather than hotlinking directly to the text files.

Let's see if we can find some more of these. Here's a good one, from DingoJellybean's Final Fantasy VII FAQ of 2001: (As a bonus, check out this archive link for DingoJellybean's old GeoCities site, featuring some delightful early 21st century HTML jank and an early example of a blog.)

NOTE: From now on 1/10 Final Fantasy 7 messages regarding how to beat the game will be answered. If you ask me a question already on the walkthrough, your email will be submarily deleted. Use Crtl+F to search what you are looking for. Even if you beg me to read the email I will most definitely delete the message. Too many stupid questions already in the walkthrough has been asked of me. I got over 700 emails regarding this game alone, I will delete those with the subject Final Fantasy 7 on it. If you do subject a title something else, but you ask a Final Fantasy question on the message, your email will be permanently blocked, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I updated this FAQ massively, in hopes that questions will be answered in the FAQ. I've included everything to make sure dumb emails won't come to me again. If I'm in a good mood, I'll answer your email, but when I see another FF7 question that puts me out on a bad mood. If you want to talk that's fine, but I know what is in my FAQ and what is not. I will read your message occasionally and decide what to and what not to reply, and if you flame me or criticize me negatively I will send a flame right back at you and block your email address so that you can never contact me again unless you create a new email account and behave. This is also quite possibly the LAST time I will ever update the FAQ. If enough requests comes in(which I doubt) the FAQ will be updated if you are specific in which areas needs to be updated. Also take a look at Mr.Prolific's million dollar worth FF7 FAQ, its great and has massive information only Kao Megura can provide.

Now that's a quality rant. Okay, it's not a "copyright" or "legal" section, but this is another prolific subgenre of GameFAQs rants: people who wrote an FAQ getting absolutely apoplectically furious that anyone emailed them about their FAQ, when more often than not they put their email address in the FAQ.

I'm a particular fan of the threat to "submarily delete" [sic, obviously] your email and the tonal whiplash that is "if you flame me or criticize me negatively I will send a flame right back at you and block your email address so that you can never contact me again unless you create a new email account and behave". Magnificent stuff.

Let's see if we can't find another good one. Oh, this one is nice, not for being mad (which it isn't), but for actually being remarkably pleasant. I would place good odds on this one, from a Sonic the Hedgehog FAQ written in 2003, being by a girl, just because of the sheer lack of overtly aggressive posing:

If you are going to use this guide on your site, the least you can do is ask permission first by e-mailing me at <REDACTED BY PETE>. Make the note short and sweet. If you're e-mailing me about anything, whether it's related to this guide or another one or what, put what you're talking about in the subject line of your message. I need to be able to differentiate the spam from the important stuff. I really can't keep people from stealing guides, I mean, it's going to happen, what can I do? But you know. Whatever. Just ask before you do it. Most people can do it with little or no problems.

If you use my guide on your site, you may HTML-ize the text or change the way it's set up on the page, but don't change a single letter. All words must remain the same - don't alter anything whatsoever. I would like to see screenshots added to some of my guides though. I always thought that would look super-sweet.

"Snow_Dragon", as the author calls themselves, also gives a shoutout to their Dad in the credits section for "moving the big computer into my room". Sweet.

It's weird to say, but I miss this. All this represents a long-gone era of the Internet, replaced, as with so many things, by social media. There are still folks out there writing FAQs on GameFAQs — and God bless 'em, as I'd still always rather go to GameFAQs than a clickbait guide on a commercial website, even if GameFAQs is part of Gamespot now — but the earnestness, the passion, the inexplicable fury of those little personal asides in late '90s/early '00s GameFAQs submissions is just one of many things that I don't feel like we really see any more.

Oh well. At least all those lovely examples of the art form in its prime still exist. Here's hoping GameFAQs is around until the very end of the Web.

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#oneaday Day 281: Bedmods and Boomsticks

I saw an interesting bit of discussion over on Bluesky earlier, and thought it might make for a blog post worth pondering, so here we are. The subject is video game modding, a matter for which I have feelings that are probably best described as "complicated" and "somewhat nuanced". I appreciate that these descriptors are generally best avoided on the Internet at large, but this is my blog, so I do what I want with it.

Anyway, the discussion stemmed from this post by John Linneman of Digital Foundry, quoting another user with whom he had been having a discussion about the raytraced modified version of Half-Life 2 which has been doing the rounds recently.

"Fumseck"'s argument was that RTX-ifying Half-Life 2 was compromising the creators' original artistic vision for the game by adding technology to it that wasn't possible on its original release, and adding in things like lighting effects that weren't present in the game's original incarnation.

Half-Life 2 is actually a rather complicated situation to ponder with regard to mods, because the game (or at least the Source engine) was built very much with modding in mind, and Half-Life 2 developer Valve have themselves gone back multiple times over the years to completely rebuild Half-Life 2 with more up-to-date features and tech. So surely RTX-ifying it is just a natural progression from this?

Thing is, I see Fumseck's argument. Not necessarily for Half-Life 2, which was already a game whose visuals were taking aim for something approaching "realism", and thus raytracing is a natural inclusion. But definitely for other games.

For example, a little while back, this video did the rounds:

It's about a modified version of Doom II which has raytracing. Now this, I'd argue, is a step too far for my personal tastes, because while the raytraced version of Doom II does indeed look very lovely and atmospheric and all that… it doesn't look like Doom II any more. It looks like a modern game that is inspired by Doom II and deliberately using features such as sprite-based enemies and items as a means of paying homage to Doom II. But it doesn't look or feel like Doom II.

In adding the raytracing, the modders have made it look nicer, but I feel they've compromised the distinctive look and feel of Doom II. Doom II was built with the technological limitations of the era in mind, and as such, everything it does, it does for a valid artistic reason. If you eliminate some of those limitations, you fundamentally change the way the game's aesthetic is designed, and that's when you're stepping into "compromising the artistic vision" territory, so far as I'm concerned. Half-Life 2, meanwhile, already had dynamic lighting and HDR; adding raytracing atop that is a natural fit because it doesn't fundamentally change the way Half-Life 2 looks.

Same with Minecraft. I actually rather like the way raytraced Minecraft looks, but I also feel playing it like that is compromising the artistic style of the game. Minecraft was very deliberately designed to look like an old game, but combine those aged aesthetics with things that wouldn't have been possible on older tech, such as its vast world, its completely destructible landscape and the player's ability to build anything, anywhere.

So I think when it comes to visual mods, my attitude is "if visual mods are enhancing what the game is already clearly trying to do, they're maybe fine, so long as they don't overdo it; if visual mods are fundamentally altering the core aesthetic and stylistic choices of the game, I don't like them."

So that's one aspect of modding covered. But modding is much more complicated than that. And, as a result, so are my feelings towards it.

As I've already noted, I'm fine with games that are built with modding in mind from the outset. My earliest contact with these was way back in the Atari 8-bit era, when numerous games shipped with a "Construction Set" or similar on disk, or sometimes available as a separate purchase. Mr Robot and His Robot Factory. Dandy. Boulder Dash. All these games, and numerous others, were designed in a way that they could be modular: the artistry was mostly in the combination of the game's aesthetics and the way its mechanics worked — though of course, some praise should be given to the built-in level designs, too. Just because you have access to the Boulder Dash Construction Set doesn't mean you can immediately make a good Boulder Dash level, after all.

A game that is built in this way can, in theory, be enjoyed indefinitely, because once you've mastered the built-in levels, you can make some new ones, or you can swap your creations with friends. With games like this, I do find myself thinking "well, I don't really want to be playing this game forever", but that's entirely a "me" problem; the way I play games is that I like to focus on one "big project" at a time, and if that "big project" turns out to be something that just has no end, I often end up not even starting it in the first place.

Looking further forward, games with modding support have always been a thing. It was easy to replace the map and graphics files in Wolfenstein 3-D, for example, though I don't think id Software themselves necessarily expected the modding scene to take off for that as much as they did. Hell, even I made two hundred dollars by making Wolfenstein levels!

They paid attention, though, and both Doom and Quake (and their numerous spinoffs and sequels) were very much built with modding in mind. Quake even gave direct access to the game's core mechanics and logic through its "Quake C" programming language, allowing you to completely change the fundamental way the game worked — see mods like Quake Rally, Quess and AirQuake.

The explicit, developer-approved "Construction Set" being a thing is somewhat rarer these days, but it still exists. Bethesda games often ship with creator tools of some description, for example, and the Neverwinter Nights series set the benchmark for role-playing games with user-generated material, so far as I'm concerned. Then of course there's games where "creation" is a core part of the overall package right from the outset, like the TrackMania series.

Of course, all these things are very much a PC thing for the most part; while I'm not sure I'd go as far as Linneman's point that they are a foundational aspect of gaming on PC, it's rare to see console players have the opportunity to tinker with their favourite games. Modding does happen, of course, but it's a much more niche interest thing when it comes to console games. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Because here's what I think my fundamental feelings about modding are: Not every game needs to have mod support. Not every game needs to be modded. And if a game "needs" mods to be worth playing, it probably wasn't very good in the first place.

I'm fine with folks making new levels for Doom, Quake and their successors (and rereleases!). I'm fine with folks making new quests, characters, monsters, dungeons and whatnot for Bethesda games. I'm definitely fine with people making TrackMania tracks, Neverwinter Nights campaigns and Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory levels. (Although my digital Atari 8-bit library wishes some groups would maybe cool it a bit on the Boulder Dash levels.)

What I'm not fine with is people booting up something like UFO 50 and immediately thinking "wow, this needs mods", which I saw in the discussion pages around its launch. No. Absolutely not. That is an example of a game that has a very specific reason for existence, and that is as an interactive, creative work of art. Not only does modding it show the height of ungrateful entitlement — it implies it "doesn't have enough content", when it has 50 full games in it — it also completely compromises the whole reason for its existence. Modding something like UFO 50 is defacing it, vandalising it, so far as I'm concerned, and not something I'm okay with, regardless of what platform it's on.

Likewise, I'm not really OK with things like character mods for games. Sure, it can sometimes be funny to see a different character running around in a game they're not supposed to be in, or see a character running around with no clothes on or whatever, but for me, again, that's compromising the artistic vision of the work, defacing and vandalising it, for no real good reason other than "because I can" and "this is mine now, I can do what I want with it".

And sure, you can do whatever you want with the games you have. There are bajillions of excellent custom levels for Doom and Quake out there, amazing new cars and circuits for BeamNG.drive, wonderful new aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator, lots of amazing things. And if you want to make all the characters in a game you like naked, there's nothing I can do to stop you.

There's plenty of really interesting things being done in the fan translation and ROM hacking communities, too. But those are a bit different, I think. Fan translation in particular isn't about defacing someone else's work; it's about making it more accessible. ROM hacking is not an area I'm particularly interested in, but in most cases those projects are presented as their own self-contained things — whole new games built on the core of something that exists, rather than "hehe, I modded Super Mario World so his willy is out all the time". They're creative projects perhaps best looked on as something akin to using an off-the-shelf engine to build your game.

But I'm pretty steadfast in the beliefs I outlined above: not every game needs to have mod support, not every game needs to be modded, and if you recommend I install 300 mods before even starting to play a certain game, I'm probably… not going to play that game.

While PC is the platform on which modding is easiest and most widespread, I don't think modding is (or should be) a fundamental aspect of PC gaming for everyone.

For some, it is, and that's great; for many, a passion for modding has led to a career in game design and development.

But there are plenty of us with bulging Steam libraries that we have no intention of fucking with the contents of, and I think that's also a perfectly valid, acceptable viewpoint to have. I also think that certain games are sacrosanct, for which modding is simply defacement and vandalism; that's the part I suspect to get the most pushback on, but it's the core of my beliefs on this subject.

It's a topic for which you have to take things on a case-by-case basis, and for which I suspect most people will have their own nuanced viewpoints. To be clear, if you're someone who enjoys nude mods and breaking things like UFO 50, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that; I'm simply saying I don't like it personally, and I won't get involved with it. Ultimately I don't give a shit what you are doing with the games you've purchased, so long as you're not fucking with the games I've purchased, or telling me that I'm "wrong" or "missing out" for enjoying them as the creators originally designed them.

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#oneaday Day 278: I've been Expelled!

I saw some reviews for a new game from Inkle called Expelled! earlier today and was immediately intrigued. I'm a sucker for a game with a school setting and I'd never played one of Inkle's games before, though I knew several of them were rather well regarded. And, indeed, having spent most of the evening playing Expelled! I can understand why. This game is great.

The game is set in a posh British boarding school in 1922, and you play a girl named Verity, who is from the North and is attending the school as a result of the school's charitable scholarship programme. Almost immediately, you are presented with the core mystery at the heart of everything: the school's Head Girl and hockey team captain Louisa has fallen (or been thrown) through a valuable 500 year old stained glass window in the library tower, and is now seriously injured. For reasons that aren't immediately apparent, Verity is immediately blamed for this and, on your first playthrough, expelled almost straight away.

The game is then framed as Verity attempting to retell the story to her sympathetic father, but continually getting details wrong and/or lying about things that happened. Thus, the game has a sort of "time loop" structure, whereby a single playthrough only takes about 30-45 minutes or so, but you have the opportunity to learn new things each time around. Indeed, a crucial moment in the game comes when you discover how to recover Verity's "notes" and memories of previous things she's learned, allowing you to carry information and knowledge from one playthrough to another without having to repeat the same actions over and over.

One of the interesting things about the game is that, early on, the school's headmistress encourages Verity to stand up for herself rather than being a meek, feeble and pathetic young woman who will always be servile to others. This is tacit approval for the player to go on and make all the obviously "nasty" or "bad" choices in order to build up a meter that reflects Verity's overall nastiness. Sometimes these choices are just mean, but on many occasions they represent her demonstrating strength of personality and determination — things that she will need if she hopes to get to the bottom of what really occurred.

The game uses a time-based mechanic, whereby Verity taking actions and moving around the campus takes varying amounts of time. Various things happen at set times throughout the day, including Verity's classes (which she can opt whether or not to attend) and characters moving around the campus for various reasons. Improving your knowledge of the situation involves getting a feel for who is going to be where (and doing what) when, and being able to take advantage of that fact, even if doing so makes Verity even more "naughty" than she already has been.

Thus far, I've played for about three and a half hours and uncovered several interesting pieces of information and am now trying to determine how best to use that information to ensure Verity comes out on top. I've had a couple of situations where Verity has successfully been able to survive to the next term without being expelled, but there's plenty more to explore and discover after that: the next item on the "checklist" you get at the end of each playthrough is to remove her rivals, which appears to involve "proving" (or framing?) one of the other characters for pushing Louisa out of the window.

There are lots of interesting decisions to make along the way. The game is very much a text adventure (albeit parser-free) rather than a visual novel, and you have a great sense of agency throughout, particularly once you've got Verity nice and comfortable with doing things that she "shouldn't". I'm intrigued to see where the plot goes now I've found out various potentially helpful pieces of information, and since there are no guides or walkthroughs available just yet (the game only came out today!) everyone is in the same "discovery" process right now, attempting to figure the game out for themselves.

If you enjoy text adventures, Expelled! is a great time. There's a lot of reading, sure, but there's also some lovely visuals and some exceedingly limited but very good voice acting. Pro-tip: be sure to turn the "Profanity" setting on (it's off by default), because hearing Verity going "oh, fucking hell" after a failed run will never get old.

I'll doubtless have more to say about this when I've seen things through to their conclusion. For now, though, this seems like a safe recommendation to me: grab it today and bring out your inner naughty 1920s girl!

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#oneaday Day 277: Pretending to have a Mega CD

My Mega Everdrive Pro arrived today. For the unfamiliar, this is a flashcart for the Sega Mega Drive that supports Mega Drive, Master System, and perhaps most intriguingly, Mega CD games. More on that in a moment.

I haven't spent much time with it as yet, as I was working, then I had to make dinner, then eat dinner, then I needed a poo and now here I am, responsibly writing this post before I go off and do something "fun". (Not that this isn't fun, but this is a self-imposed obligation, whereas what I intend to do next is pure recreation.) I loaded up an SD card with everything I wanted to put on it earlier, fired it up briefly and checked it was working, and all seemed in order (aside from a bit of rolling interference on my screen that the Internet tells me is the fault of a crappy aftermarket power supply for the Mega Drive, so I'm replacing that soon). But aside from that, it's up there waiting for me right now.

Obviously a big part of the appeal here is easy access to both Mega Drive and Master System games (for the unfamiliar, the Mega Drive actually contains most of the necessary guts to run Master System games pretty much natively) but one thing I'm particularly intrigued to explore is Mega CD compatibility. Or, more accurately, Mega CD hardware emulation. The Mega Everdrive Pro features some FPGA shenanigans that I don't really understand the workings of, and the upshot of it is that you can make it convince your Mega Drive that you have a Mega CD connected, even if you have nothing of the sort plugged in. (You cannot do the same with the 32X; you still need a real 32X if you want to go down that road.)

I've always been curious about the Mega CD, because it's one of a few consoles from the era that I had absolutely no contact with whatsoever. I had friends with Mega Drives and my brother often brought one home when he came to visit but I didn't know anyone with a Mega CD. I remember reading articles about the games on Mega CD in the magazine my brother was working on at the time (Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, if you were curious) and thinking they sounded really cool, but I have never gotten around to exploring that library at all… yet, anyway.

Of course, retrospectively we all know that the Mega CD wasn't a particularly successful add-on, and there aren't a ton of Mega CD games that are particularly worth playing. But there are a few, and I'm excited to try them. (I'm excited to try some of the "bad" ones too, just to understand the platform a bit better!)

With the addition of this to my collection, I now have Super NES, Mega Drive/Master System (outside of the few incompatible games) and N64 all hooked up and ready to play pretty much anything I would care to throw at them. Just the thing for when I'm in the mood for something short and sweet, like I talked about the other day. And like I'm feeling right now.

So I think I can't put it off any longer. It's time to go get Blast Processed. With Compact Disk power!

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#oneaday Day 276: Writer's Block, Occurrence #976,425

I've been pootling through the "Random Post" option at the top of this blog for the last half an hour, trying to think of something to write about, and nothing has been particularly forthcoming, so I'm just going to do what I usually do in this situation, which is to start typing and just see where things go from there. Expect stream of consciousness, and nothing of any real consequence.

I have the farts this evening. I don't think I've eaten anything particularly fartworthy, but I am cracking off some rippers. I had a bit of a stomachache last night, so perhaps it's a remnant of that. It doesn't really matter. All that does matter is that I am trouser-trumpeting like a good'un, and I haven't even shat myself. Winner. Nothing worse than following through on a fart, which is something I have, to my knowledge, only done once, and in my defence I was already quite ill with something else at the time. (It was not, before you ask, being intoxicated in any way.)

I've spent much of this evening chasing down additional endings in Tokyo Dark: Remembrance, which I've been playing on Switch. This is an adventure game that was recommended to me a while back, and happened to come up as a recommendation just as a limited-press physical release became available, so I snapped it up. Hearing that it was on the short side, I figured it would be an ideal game to squeeze into this gap between finishing Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X arriving, and indeed it has been. I'll write in more detail about it on MoeGamer at some point in the next few days, but suffice to say for now that it's an interesting blend of detective work, a touch of yakuza shenanigans, and some Shinto-inspired ghost stories. Good times.

I reckon next up I'm probably going to work on finishing Soul Blazer on SNES. I'm into the fourth main chapter of that now — I believe there are seven, but I could be wrong — and have been really enjoying it. There's something about the tone of the whole thing that I really like; doubtless it's partly down to the relative limitations placed on the text (and the localisation) due to the platform it's on, but it has a strangely… earnest tone to its dialogue that I am finding rather compelling. Again, probably more about that on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.

More farts. And I've left this a bit too late to write anything of any real substance, so I think I'm going to go and have a poo (just in case, you know) then go to bed. Tomorrow is a new day that… will be much like this one. And now the robot vacuum has started up, so it's definitely time to go to bed. Good night!

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#oneaday Day 275: The quantum shift in engagement with games

I have been rewatching a lot of some of my favourite YouTube videos recently: the back catalogue of Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, who was a big inspiration to me back when I started doing YouTube things. Throughout his various runs of his show Classic Game Room, Mark primarily focused on what we today describe as "retro games" — meaning, in his instance, pretty much anything from PS2 backwards, though primarily focusing on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles such as the NES, SNES and Mega Drive.

One thing that strikes me any time I either go back and explore games from this era either by myself or when I do it vicariously through a show like Classic Game Room is that the way we engage with video games has fundamentally changed at some point. I don't mean the way we interact with them — though control schemes have, of course, become more refined as time has gone on and "best practice" has become established — but rather what we consider to be a "worthwhile" experience.

For many years, the majority of my gaming has focused on long-form games like role-playing games and visual novels. This started back in the PlayStation era, where I discovered Final Fantasy VII for the first time and promptly started devouring pretty much every RPG I could get my hands on. But it wasn't always that way; when I think back to the time I spent playing games on the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and Super NES, the games were (typically by necessity, as a result of their technology) more short-form, immediate experiences. And, back then, I derived just as much value from those as I did the longer-form stuff I started playing with the PlayStation.

Okay, I do recall my sessions on the Atari 8-bit often involving booting up one game, playing for a bit, then loading something else up, playing that for a bit and so on — like most early home computer owners, we had a big disk box full of pirated games, so I wasn't exactly short on choices — but I also feel like it was a lot easier to become engaged and invested in something simpler, shorter and less narrative-focused. I'd spend a lot of time playing Super Mario World, Starwing and SimCity on my SNES, for example; while one might argue both Super Mario World and SimCity are each in their way "long form" games of a sort, they're a different breed to your average RPG, and neither focus on an unfolding story; they use nothing but their mechanics to keep you engaged, and SimCity in particular flat-out just doesn't have an end.

These days, I feel like I'm easily falling into… I don't know if I want to call it a "trap" as such, so let's call it a "routine" instead… where I tend to focus on one "big" game at a time, and that "big" game is something with a lengthy storyline. Over the last couple of months, I spent 120 hours playing through Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and its expansion Future Connected, for example. And that's the main thing I played during that period; I had the odd diversion for a few bits and bobs along the way, but for the most part, I was focused on that one game.

There's value in those shorter games, though, and finally fixing up my retro consoles with Everdrive units and equivalents (as well as all the stuff I work on for the day job with Evercade) is really helping me rediscover that, as there's a definite magic to playing on the classic hardware that emulation still just doesn't quite capture perfectly. (Mostly the scrolling. Real hardware scrolling is flawless; emulation still has just enough tiny hiccups, even on a powerful system, to remind you that it's not quite perfect.)

Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 was a real pleasure to finally explore, as previously discussed, and I've always had a very soft spot for Tetrisphere. I had a pretty limited library of SNES games back in the day — Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, Starwing, SimCity and Zelda — so there's a lot to discover on SNES. And when my Mega Everdrive Pro arrives for the Mega Drive hopefully later this week there's a whole other library of 16-bit goodness to play with, too.

The danger, of course, is giving yourself too much choice, which can lead to the dreaded Analysis Paralysis, which in turn leads to enjoying nothing at all. But I've got a nice expanse of time between having finished Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition coming out later this month. So I intend to make good use of that time to explore some short-form fun.

And finish Soul Blazer. I'm already halfway through that, and that's sort of a Big Game, but also kind of not. I'm enjoying it a lot, either way, so I will probably try and bash that out before Xenoblade X day on the 20th. That and I finished Tokyo Dark: Remembrance today, too. I'm doing well!

Anyway, for now, bed. Perhaps with a little bit of 16-bit action before that…

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#oneaday Day 273: On the Spectrum

One of the things I've been keen to do with my YouTube channel for a while is branch out into areas that are less familiar to me. I've done a lot of championing Atari stuff, and while I don't see that going away any time soon, the fact it's so easy to play with all manner of different platforms today through emulation and suchlike means that I really don't have an excuse for not educating myself on things like the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga libraries. (Especially since I have modern recreations of all of them!)

I've already covered a couple of Spectrum games previously on my channel, but the one I published today is one that I had been oddly worried about spending some time with. Here's the video if you fancy following my journey:

Ant Attack is an all-time classic for the Spectrum, frequently appearing in "Best of Spectrum" lists and suchlike. But Lordy is it hard to get started with. Keyboard controls which were clearly designed by a madman. Mechanics that are baffling and unpredictable. An engine that often struggles to keep up with what you're doing. I honestly would not blame anyone for trying it out for five minutes, going "fuck this" and booting up a NES emulator to play Super Mario Bros. 3 for the umpteenth time.

I've never been about that on my channel, though. My philosophy is always to "find the fun" — an idea that, if I remember rightly, I borrowed from Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, an influential early gaming YouTuber who, among others, was a big inspiration on me getting into YouTube in the first place.

Finding the fun isn't always easy, but I always make a point of giving a game a bit more of a chance than most people might. I'm aware that in a lot of cases, old games are all well and good if you grew up with them, but if they're brand new to you, they can take a bit of effort before they show their true charms. And, indeed, this is very much the case with Ant Attack.

My first couple of attempts went badly. I didn't know what I was doing wrong, it was frustrating and I was a little tempted to give up. But I didn't; I kept going, I kept exploring, I kept an open mind. And while I won't say I came away from the game loving it, I can at least say with honestly that I appreciate and quite like it now.

Possibly more than any other vaguely popular retro platform, I think the Spectrum library rewards this kind of persistence. If the Spectrum was all you had growing up, doubtless you learned to live with QAOP control schemes and all the other little idiosyncrasies the system had to offer — but I bet even for some folks who were hardcore Speccy fans back in the day, it's difficult to go back to some of these games. It's even harder if you have no nostalgia for these games; you're coming at them blind from a modern perspective, and so there are a lot of things "against" the experience from the outset: garish colours, the notorious "colour clash", screechy beeper music, sluggish controls and game design from an era where people hadn't quite figured out "good" game design yet.

Honestly, though, for me, all that is what makes it so interesting. The early days of computer games were a wild and experimental time, and no, not everything worked. But you have to make mistakes in order to make progress, and the popularity of the Spectrum means that it was absolutely instrumental in shaping modern game development for a significant portion of the world.

That's why I stuck with Ant Attack for nearly an hour. I wanted to "get" it. And, by the end, I think I did. And I'm looking forward to exploring other parts of the system's library over the long term.

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#oneaday Day 272: A productive day!

One of the troubles I am sure anyone with any sort of "online presence" will be familiar with is the feeling that you "should" be doing something "productive" with any free time you happen to have. Such is the case with me; I've been on holiday all week, and I've had the lingering sensation that I should make some videos for my YouTube channel, since it's something I enjoy doing, and having a bunch of free time available is, surely, the ideal time to do such a thing.

And yet. And yet. There's always a part of your brain at times like this that says "no, fuck that, you booked time off so you don't have to work, so just relax and enjoy yourself". Of course, making YouTube videos is a relaxing and enjoyable activity, but it also requires effort, so you can see the quandary.

Anyway, I made some time to get some stuff done today. I'd already scripted the intro sections for several vids yesterday, so all I had to do was set aside a few hours to record the intros and gameplay sections, and there we were.

I'd been meaning to do several of these videos for a while, but had put up a bit of a mental block towards a couple of them, because they involved games and a platform that are unfamiliar to me: specifically, two Spectrum games that had the potential to be rather challenging to cover.

And they were challenging to cover, but I found a solution. Mostly dogged determination, to be honest, though in the case of one of them, copious use of save states and rewind functions. And the result is, I hope, some videos where I demonstrate how a lot of Spectrum games can be something of a "slow burn", particularly if you didn't grow up with them, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort, there are potentially rewarding experiences that await you.

All in all, I got five videos done altogether today: three Spectrum vids and two Atari games as a palate-cleanser. Want specifics? Oh, all right then; on the Spectrum front, the two I was worried about were Ant Attack and Army Moves, the latter of which is where the majority of the save state/rewind "cheating" took place, because fuck that game's first four levels, plus Auf Wiedersehen Monty, which I knew probably wouldn't be an issue and, sure enough, wasn't. The two Atari games were Lode Runner's Rescue (which is a really interesting game I'd never heard of until very recently!) and Frogger II (which I just like).

That's pretty danged productive, so I should be pleased with myself. So I am! I'm looking forward to sharing these videos with you, as I think they're all a lot of fun. Watch out for them over the course of the next couple of weeks.

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