#oneaday Day 114: dotHack and Slash

I’ve been playing .hack//Infection for the last couple of days on PlayStation 2. I’ve had the full set of four games on my shelf for a very long time and been meaning to properly run through them all, but have somehow never gotten around to it. I have previously completed Infection a very long time ago, but I’ve never gone through all four games and seen how it all ends — nor have I been spoiled on any of it. I also own a copy of the .hack//G.U. remasters on PlayStation 4, so I’ll have to get to those at some point, too, but I wanted to knock out the PS2 games first.

For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) “MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real” series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a “real world” story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.

That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of “you”, an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable “early 2000s MMO” sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or “Orca” as he’s known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.

But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is “Data Drained”, leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it’s then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there’s any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.

The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.

Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.

What’s quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood “MMOs” at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so “MMO” up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.

The World is closer in execution to something like Sega’s Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as “Root Towns”) where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It’s not quite the same as the “instanced” areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you’re relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.

Anyway, let’s not get bogged down too much in details as I’ll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I’m finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart’s content — and it’s probably advisable to, since you’ll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.

.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it’s enjoyable. There’s a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you’re about to face.

I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there’s not a lot of variation to them. And yet there’s something about .hack that I’ve always found fascinating and compelling. I think it’s the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it’s very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.

I’m in no rush to plough through all four games, but I’ve enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.

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.

#oneaday Day 113: Missing the point of UFO 50

Since UFO 50’s release, I’ve had a few Thoughts. Firstly, UFO 50 is one of the most noteworthy interactive creative projects ever put together. Secondly, there are a lot of (obviously) young people who really Do Not Get It and, in that inimitably entitled way 21st century gamers do, they think it should change entirely to accommodate how they think it “should” be.

Aside: I’m covering UFO 50 both on MoeGamer and on YouTube. Check out here for the written articles, and here for the video versions of the articles. You can also enjoy the whole playlist embedded below.

A significant portion of the “unrest”, if you want to call it that, comes from Barbuta being the first game in the collection. Barbuta is, as you’ll know if you’ve read or watched my piece on it, a game that is ostensibly from 1982, and which follows the mould of the “arcade adventure”, a genre of game that doesn’t really exist any more, but which was a major part of the ’80s home computer scene.

In the “lore” of UFO 50, which, if you’re unfamiliar, concerns a completely fictional games console known as the LX System, Barbuta was the first game to be developed — and by an individual who had never made a game before, no less. Consequently, it’s janky, slow and unrefined — deliberately so. The nature of how it is janky, slow and unrefined makes it very clear that Derek Yu and the various other developers who put UFO 50 together are intimately familiar with ’80s home computer games — but it also sets expectations for the rest of UFO 50 accordingly.

One of the most significant things about UFO 50 is that it is, in part, a demonstration of how game design can be inherently intuitive. None of the games feature full instructions beyond their basic controls and sometimes a little bit of in-game information text, and yet they’re all designed in such a way that you can figure things out without too much difficulty. In Barbuta’s case, the main challenge comes from determining what all the items you can collect actually do — because the game certainly doesn’t tell you.

But here’s the key thing: it all makes sense. It’s easy to determine what all the items do, either by logical deduction or simply observing what happens on-screen. And this is true not just for Barbuta, but also for pretty much all of the other games in the collection, too. You just have to use your brain a bit.

This isn’t enough for some “gamers” though. There’s a guy on UFO 50’s Steam forums spamming pretty much every thread he can find about how he believes the games are a “joke”, that it’s “not funny” and that the package as a whole is a “scam”. There are others complaining about Barbuta as if it’s the only game in the collection, refusing to even contemplate trying any of the other 49 that are available. And there are those who simply do not get it.

UFO 50 is a work of art with something to say. It’s an acknowledgement both of how rapidly game design evolved over the course of the 1980s, and how modern ideas can be applied to these classic formulae to give them a fresh new twist. Demanding that it change to better fit the needs of attention-deficit zoomers is entirely missing the point. These are games that are supposed to be tricky and perhaps not immediately clear, because that’s what games from the ’80s were actually like — but dig into things just a little deeper and you’ll discover that every single game is inherently fair in a way that only 40 years of evolving game design can manage.

What you have to remember is that when real ’80s games came out, they had nothing to refer to on how to do it “right” — and some of them got things what we could consider “wrong” by modern standards. What UFO 50 does is take the conventions of these ’80s games, eliminate the things that just flat-out don’t work, and gives you a collection of titles that feel authentically retro, but also completely fair and modern in their execution. There’s no moon logic, no inconsistent behaviour, no technical shortcomings making things harder through no fault of the player.

In short, it’s a work of genius. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that some people don’t get it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be frustrated that there are people who want to deface it with mods. Perhaps I should just enjoy it myself, and screw the people who don’t understand.

Yes. That sounds like a good approach. I’ll keep doing that. Please enjoy my series of articles and videos on each and every game!

#oneaday Day 108: Punch punch punch

Because I’m sick of feeling like a decrepit old man and I can’t quite muster up the mental wellbeing to head to the gym right now, I dusted off my copy of Fitness Boxing 2 for Nintendo Switch and have been giving it a go for the last couple of days. I considered grabbing the new Hatsune Miku version of the game, but it’s £50 and I haven’t yet established a good routine with the two previous entries in the series I have on my shelf. So I thought I’d do something about it.

The trouble with exercise is that it always feels like it’s going to be a bloody nightmare to get started, particularly after a long period of inactivity, but then once you actually do it it’s rather satisfying. My two sessions of Fitness Boxing 2 over the past couple of days have been hard work for someone as out of shape as I am — though my rhythm game skills have netted me a “Fitness Age” of 24 on both occasions, thereby proving once and for all that such a metric is, as everyone suspected, complete bollocks — but I’ve come out of both of them feeling like I’ve done something worthwhile, and something that, in the long run, will be good for me.

For those unfamiliar with Fitness Boxing, it’s a game that somewhat follows the mould of Nintendo’s classic Wii-era fitness games, only with a bit more of a specific focus rather than providing lots of minigames. At its core, it’s a rhythm game, tasking you with using the Joy-Cons to punch in various ways and, in the more advanced workouts, ducking, weaving and suchlike, too — though pleasingly, given how dodgy the motion detection can be on movements other than punching, you can turn any troublesome exercises off, or set the game to automatically score you “Perfect” on them, regardless of what the Joy-Cons tell the Switch you were doing.

A full daily workout consists of several stages, beginning and ending with some simple stretches. In between, you’ll have a series of specific workouts of varying degrees of intensity and difficulty, typically following your opening stretches and preceding your closing stretches with something relatively gentle and putting one or more fairly high-intensity (and longer) ones in the middle.

Each individual stage tends to unfold in the same way. You’ll start in “orthodox” stance (left foot forward, right foot back) and gradually be introduced to a complete combo, usually one move at a time but sometimes a bit quicker in the shorter, lower-intensity stages. You’ll gradually build up to performing the full combo, and in a special “Zone” sequence where you get more points, you perform the full combo multiple times in rapid succession — typically four, six or eight times in a row without a gap in between, depending on the length of the combo.

After that, you switch to “southpaw” stance (right foot forward, left foot back) and then do the exact same thing, but the other way around. In the higher intensity, longer workouts, you’ll then do another combo, again both in orthodox and southpaw stances, and then you’re done.

Typically a short stage lasts about 5-6 minutes, and longer stages are about 11-12 minutes apiece. The “Normal” intensity workout for a day consists of stretches, two short stages and two long stages, totalling about 35-40 minutes of activity altogether; you also have the choice of doing a slightly shorter or longer workout, which equates to about 25-30 or 45-50 minutes of activity respectively by varying the number of stages in the complete workout.

As someone who is desperately unfit, the pacing of the exercises seem OK to me at the moment. The longer stages definitely feel like an effort to endure, but that’s good — they’re not so difficult that I can’t make it through them, but I do feel like I’m doing some actual work that will be beneficial.

I could be doing them better, of course; the game suggests that when you’re not punching, you bob back and forth in time with the music and I can’t quite manage to keep that up constantly along with all the other stuff, but I’m sure I can get there over the long term. The important thing is, after all, getting started.

The trainer voices throughout are rather repetitive, but helpful in giving you cues and encouragement, and the visual demonstration of what you’re supposed to be doing (“mirrored” so you can follow along more easily) is very helpful. The game-like feel to the whole thing makes it feel more “fun” than some other forms of exercise, and there’s a wide range of musical accompaniments to go along with your workouts — including both instrumental versions of “real” songs and some original stuff composed specifically for the game. The original stuff is actually quite a bit better than some of the Kidz Bop-tier arrangements, but honestly part of the fun of the game is the absurdity inherent in aggressively throwing punches to something like Hot and Cold by Katy Perry or the frigging YMCA.

I have a long drive tomorrow afternoon after work, and then a long drive back home after work the day after, so I’ll likely take a rest for at least tomorrow and possibly the day after also, depending on how I feel when I get back, but I intend to get back to this as soon as I can. It feels pitched at about the level I can deal with right now, and I think it’ll just be helpful to get moving a bit in any way. Because I’m sick of waking up aching all over like someone twice my age, and I suspect a significant part of the reason that is happening is because I haven’t been exercising.

#oneaday Day 105: Time to sleep

I barely slept last night. I’m not sure what the problem was, but I’m pretty sure I woke up at least once every hour in varying forms of discomfort, and consequently I’ve been rather tired today. Still, I made it through the day — and without sneaking off for a lunchtime nap, even — so now I feel justified in collapsing, ready for the weekend.

I’m still hoping to try doing a stream tomorrow, likely around lunchtime or early afternoon my time (UK time). I’m not going to make a huge effort to publicise it because I’ll be using the session in part to make sure I’ve got everything figured out and set up properly, but if you do fancy stopping by and saying hello, my Twitch channel is right here.

UFO 50 still feels like a prime choice to stream. It’s current, it’s timely and it’s thoroughly interesting. I’m only three games into it so far — I spent a hefty amount of time playing the second one this evening, and took a brief glimpse at the third one — but there’s a hell of a lot to explore, and each game is substantial in its own distinctive way. The first game, Barbuta, which I wrote about here and made a video you can see below, was a solid arcade adventure affair in the mould of classic home computers; the next two are completely different.

As the existence of the above article and video implies, I’m going to do a full series on all the games in UFO 50, because it deserves that much, and I suspect there aren’t going to be many other folks who explore it in that much detail. I’ve already seen a ton of ten-minute reviews go up on YouTube, and there is no way that they go into any sort of depth other than “retro game go brrr” so soon after release.

Sure, some folks probably just want a simple “is it worth buying?” but there’s definitely scope here for some in-depth analysis. So that’s what I’m going to do. On my own time. Because I like making work for myself.

Anyway, the second game is an interesting blend of strategy game and deckbuilder, then the third is an arcade-style autoscrolling platformer. Both of these are going to be a lot tougher to beat than Barbuta was, I can tell — those little gold trophies you get for beating all the games in the collection (and the cherries you get for beating them in extra special super pro ways) aren’t going to come easy, it seems!

And that’s good. I’m sure it must have been tempting for the team behind UFO 50 to make all the achievements and unlockables relatively straightforward, so everyone has a chance to see everything the game has to offer. But that’s not how real retro games worked; real retro games were tough, because you often only had one or two of them, particularly if you were a console rather than a home computer player, and thus they needed to last you a while.

I’m not going to be too upset if I don’t get all 50 shiny gold trophies and juicy cherries in UFO 50; I’ll be satisfied if I’ve simply figured out how each game works and what you’re supposed to do in it. Because that’s the first real challenge in the package; determining what real games each title is a bit like — with their own unique twists — and getting to grips with their mechanics and structure.

I’m looking forward to playing some more, but for now, I think I need to go to bed and hopefully sleep a bit better than last night! Perhaps see you tomorrow for the stream?

#oneaday Day 104: A Plan

I think I might have a very good idea on what to do for a stream on Saturday. UFO 50 by Mossmouth (Derek Yu’s software house, best known for Spelunky) came out recently, and hoo-whee, is it ever a good time.

Let me correct myself: I have spent approximately five hours this evening playing one of the 50 games in UFO 50. The first one. I have an idea brewing for a video and/or article series covering each and every game in the mix, so I’ll save the specifics for when I kick that off, but suffice it to say for now that when they say this isn’t a collection of microgames or minigames, they really mean it.

Let’s back up a moment for those unfamiliar with UFO 50. It’s a project that has been on the cards for quite some time — and was delayed by the development and release of Spelunky 2 — but now it’s finally hit Steam. (Other platforms are apparently “TBC”, so it’s Steam or nothing for now.)

The concept behind it is that a hitherto-unknown game system from the ’80s has been discovered, and you’re taking a look at its library. Laid out in front of you are 50 disks for the system, each containing a game. It’s your job to play them, as much or as little as you want.

Each of the games is designed in part as if it was running on technology of the ’80s. That means low resolution pixel art, limited sound capabilities and a palette consisting of a whopping 32 possible colours. However, as a nod to modern accessibility, all of these games run in widescreen, which is something that wouldn’t have been possible on the CRTs of yore, and annoying limitations from real systems like sprite limits causing flickering and suchlike are omitted. Essentially what we have here is a collection of “enhanced retro” games — games like you want to remember the ’80s as being like, as opposed to what they actually were.

That said, the first game in the collection, Barbuta, which I’ve spent a lot of time on this evening, has very little in the way of sounds and is resolutely old-school in its punishing difficulty and deliberate obtuseness. I absolutely loved it because it feels like something you’d play on an ’80s 8-bit micro, but I would completely understand if anyone bounced off this one hard. In UFO 50 “lore”, this game dates back to 1982 and, outside of the deliberate enhancements mentioned above, it could absolutely pass for something from the period.

And no, there are no save states. If you want to beat one of these games, you have to do it as if you were using the real machine. That said, there is a mysterious “Terminal” function built in to UFO 50, which looks as if it might be the sort of thing you put Game Genie or Action Replay-style codes into, but I haven’t figured anything out about that as yet. I’m not sure anyone has, but I’m sure some turbonerd on the Steam forums will have datamined it and spoiled it for everyone by the weekend.

Anyway, from my experience with just one of its 50 games, I can highly recommend UFO 50 so far. It’s a fascinating way of looking at gaming history and the evolution of game design over time, plus simply a really interesting project. Making 50 worthwhile games and bundling them all together for just shy of 20 quid is quite an achievement, and the indie all-stars team behind it should be very pleased with what they have seemingly accomplished.

I’m looking forward to investigating further. I actually beat Barbuta after that five hours of playing and retrying this evening, so tomorrow I can move on to some of the other games! Looking forward to it a lot. And, as I said at the start, I think this seems like a great game to do some streaming with. So I will pencil it in for Saturday while my wife is out, and see how things go from there!

#oneaday Day 103: A solution?

Following yesterday’s ponderings, something blindingly obvious occurred to me earlier: there’s quite a simple solution to what I was contemplating, and that is to actually finally start doing some streaming.

I’ve tried streaming a couple of times and not had a terrible time doing it, but I fell off from doing it because I didn’t really set aside a specific time to do it and haven’t (yet) put in the work to try and get any sort of “community” going. To be honest, it’s that “work” part that kind of puts me off a bit; one of the nice things about YouTube is that I’ve been able to just sort of do it slowly and gradually build up an audience naturally without having to faff about promoting myself or whatnot.

Twitch is a platform that is still quite alien to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about it. It’s noisy and filled with distracting features that don’t play nice with my autistic brain. I feel certain portions of the Twitch audience have unreasonable expectations of what a streamer can be expected to do to keep them “entertained”. And I’ve seen far, far too many people burn themselves out because they “needed” to get Partner, or Affiliate, or whatever their monetisation program is called.

But at the same time, I kind of like the idea of having a platform where I might be able to make some new friends, chatting about the stuff I love. If I do decide to kick off some streaming, I’ll almost certainly keep it retro-focused — at least partly because in my study, which is the place that is really “set up” for streaming, I don’t have either a gaming PC or a current-gen console — but I think there’s plenty of potential to cover things there, between Evercade, the various mini systems I have (Atari 8-bit, Amiga, C64 and, later this year, Spectrum) and, of course, the gigantic Launchbox library I have on a 5TB hard drive.

It’s kind of a scary prospect, though. Even more so than YouTube, Twitch is “putting yourself out there” and inviting comment from any old random who happens to stop by. I should probably comfort myself with the fact that the kind of people I wouldn’t want to engage with probably wouldn’t be watching retro gaming streams, anyway — but it’s still somewhat nerve-wracking.

Perhaps I’ll give it a go this weekend as a sort of trial run. My wife is going into town with a friend for a bit, so maybe I’ll take the opportunity to try some bits and pieces out back then. If you’d like to stop by, here’s my Twitch page. No promises, but I have mentally “pencilled this in” for this Saturday, and we’ll see how it goes.

#oneaday Day 101: Body Harvest

Today, inspired by yesterday’s post and my recent acquisition of an EverDrive 64, I decided to have a “fuck it, I’m playing something new” evening and booted up an N64 game I’ve always been curious about but never actually tried: DMA Design’s Body Harvest, often described by many as a proto-Grand Theft Auto 3. Naturally, as with any sort of widespread and oversimplified opinion, that does Body Harvest something of a disservice, but it is an interesting game that I’m going to spend some more time with.

For the unfamiliar, Body Harvest is a quasi-open world action game in which you take on the role of time-travelling supersoldier Adam Drake in a quest to defeat a bunch of pesky insectoid aliens who show up every 25 years and attempt to eat everyone in sight. For reasons it’s best you don’t ask too much about — the game’s original designer and writer has more on that — it has been decided that Drake should travel back to each of these instances of the aliens arriving on Earth and obliterate them rather than, you know, just attempting to cut them off at the source.

This then unfolds as a series of absolutely vast open-plan 3D levels in which you can control Drake on foot or in a wide variety of vehicles. It’s open world and it has vehicles in it, therefore it’s just like Grand Theft Auto 3, see?

No, if anything, Body Harvest is closer in execution to something like 16-bit classic Hunter, but with a bit more focus. Because despite unfolding in wide open environments, there’s not a lot of incentive to go off exploring; for the most part, completing the game involves running through a series of objectives one at a time, dealing with alien invasions that tend to punctuate getting from one place to another, and attempting to ensure that the little meter indicating how many humans have been eaten doesn’t fill up.

It’s a game I’d always assumed to be a bit more complicated than it actually is, though to be honest I’m kind of relieved. Body Harvest, although incredibly clunky by modern standards, and even by N64 standards, feels like it has some focus to it, and you’re rarely left in a situation where you have no idea what to do or where to go. Being a game from the fifth generation, though, you’re not bombarded with tutorials and guide NPCs telling you to shoot the hinges or whatever, meaning there are sequences where you’ll have to determine what the best course of action is — even if that action makes you a bit of an asshole, such as a point where you shoot the blades off a windmill because you need one of the cogs that runs it.

Body Harvest scatters a lot of vehicles around the map with good reason: it’s a lot easier to get around in them, and they provide considerably more protection for Drake. It’s possible to fight while driving a vehicle, either using Drake’s weaponry if it’s a civilian vehicle or the weapons fitted to the vehicle itself if it’s military hardware, and the game’s excellent lock-on system means that you don’t need to faff around aiming too hard; you can just concentrate on positioning yourself strategically and/or avoiding incoming attacks. In fact, the lock-on system is so good I can’t help but wonder how they managed to completely balls that aspect of Grand Theft Auto up so badly, and not even come anywhere approaching to fixing it until the ever-present, never-ending Grand Theft Auto V, which is, of course, the twelfth game in the series.

But yes. Aside from unfolding in a kind-of-sort-of open world and having vehicles in it, Body Harvest doesn’t have much to do with Grand Theft Auto. There’s no picking and choosing what missions to do, there are no side activities aside from a few collectibles here and there, and your progress through the game is, outside of a couple of opportunities to sequence-break, linear.

But that’s fine. It works well for the game, and it keeps you on your toes, always pushing you onwards into the next section of the game world rather than keeping you confined to one place. I appreciate how the game gives you a feeling of freedom, but doesn’t overwhelm you with it.

The one aspect that I can see being troublesome is the save system. Each level is absolutely enormous, and is split into several distinct “stages”, each of which culminates with a boss fight of sorts, which, early in the level, tends to take the form of eliminating a large static structure that is trying to pelt you with lasers. Upon clearing one of these “stages”, a beacon is dropped which acts as both a save point and a fast travel point; outside of that, you can’t save, meaning if you fuck things up after an hour of poncing around the open world, you’ll have to do all the important stuff again.

Still, this at least gives failure some degree of consequence, and encourages you to perhaps find more efficient ways to complete your objectives — or just memorise the things you need to do. I haven’t fallen foul of it yet, but I suspect I will before long!

As an N64 game, Body Harvest is ugly. It was renowned as a particularly ugly N64 game even on its original release and, as you might expect, time hasn’t been all that kind to it. But if you can look past that — I certainly can — there’s a really enjoyable game with a menacing atmosphere, a moody soundtrack and some satisfying bug-squishing combat to enjoy. I like, so I’ll definitely be playing some more of this.

#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

As I reach 100 days of daily blogging for the second time around, this symbolically significant but practically unimportant milestone seems like a good place to reflect on the fine art of Doing the Thing, inspired by this video that I’ve seen floating across my YouTube feed a few times, and which I finally decided to have a look at.

For those disinclined to click on random video links — don’t worry, I am too under most circumstances — the summary of the video is simple. A lot of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves with more limited amounts of free time and, paradoxically, we seem to spend an awful lot of that “free” time agonising over what we “should” be doing. The focus of the video is on picking a video game to play, but really the principle applies to anything where you have a choice to make.

Analysis paralysis is the enemy. It’s a peculiar form of anxiety where you get so overwhelmed by the possibilities that surround you that you find it impossible to decide to engage with just one of them on the grounds that it might be the “wrong” one.

The video maker uses the video game StarCraft II as an analogy. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, which means you control a bunch of little dudes and tanks and make them blow other little dudes and tanks up. Because it’s real-time, it’s rare you get the opportunity to stop and think, so the best StarCraft II players are those who make decisions quickly and decisively — to the tune of several hundred minor decisions per minute if we’re talking about professional-grade players.

The secret is not to worry if the choice you make is the “wrong” one. If you make a choice and subsequently discover there was a more “optimal” thing you could have done, who cares? You made the choice, now all you need to do is deal with the consequences of it. And for the vast majority of decisions that we make in our day to day lives — particularly when it comes to our leisure time — neither those decisions nor the consequences of them are particularly important.

Let’s take video games as the example again. Let’s say you have about an hour and a half of free time before you need to go and do something important — and that thing is important, but up until it is time to do the important thing, your time is completely yours. You have, at least, made the decision that you would like to play a video game. This is one of those decisions where both your options and the consequences are unimportant. If you chose to play a video game, great, you get to play a video game. If you chose to do something else, great, you get to do that instead.

The only really “wrong” choice in this scenario is not making the choice in the first place, as sitting by yourself getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as what form of entertainment you want to spent 90 minutes of your day engaging with is the height of absurdity if you stop to think about it. This is supposed to be your time to enjoy yourself, not to put pressure on yourself about something that is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Most people can successfully make that first decision: “I would like to play a video game”. The next step is, in many folks’ minds, the harder one: “I would like to play this specific video game”. And yet, really, that decision is just as inconsequential as the other one. No-one but you really cares what you’re going to spend the next 90 minutes doing, so, again, the only “wrong” choice is not making a decision in the first place. Because then you’ve just wasted your 90 minutes, when you could have been doing something that relaxes or invigorates you.

If you’re someone who does creative stuff online, I’m willing to bet you’re probably prone to that second point of analysis paralysis, because there’s that constant lingering thought in the back of your mind that you “should” do something that you can write an article or make a video about. But the thing we all need to get well and truly fixed in our mind is that deciding to Do the Thing is not the important part of the process; actually Doing the Thing is the important bit. And if you never get as far as even Starting the Thing, then you’re probably going to be annoyed with yourself, regardless of whether or not the Thing you decided on is “productive” or not.

I’m trying to be better about this. I think back to how I enjoyed games before social media, blogging, the Internet and YouTube, and I want to recapture that feeling. I want to be able to be decisive enough to say “tonight I am going to play Yakuza 5” and not spend the next 90 minutes second-guessing myself.

Because taking time to engage with something you enjoy — and to take care of yourself — is never time misspent. Time agonising over things you’re supposed to be enjoying absolutely is wasted time, however.

So, y’know, cut it out. Stop it. Stop it. And go enjoy something. Anything. I don’t care what. Just go and do it now.

#oneaday Day 99: Yakuza time again

I’ve been making a start on Yakuza 5 alongside the other stuff I’ve been playing recently. I’d put off starting this one after playing Yakuza 0 up to Yakuza 4 pretty much back-to-back (and playing Kiwami and Kiwami 2 in place of the original PS2 games, and the PS4 remasters of 3 and 4) because I knew this one was the largest and most ambitious of the PS3-era games in the series.

One of the nice things about Yakuza games, though, is that they’re quite “dip” friendly, particularly if you’re the sort of person who likes to enjoy the side activities before moving the main story along. It’s perfectly enjoyable to play Yakuza 5 for an evening, not move the main plot along at all but still feel like some meaningful “progress” has been made.

Unlike its immediate predecessor, Yakuza 5 opens with you playing as main series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, though following all the shit he’s put up with over the course of the previous five games, he’s now hanging out in Fukuoka under a pseudonym and driving a taxi for a living. As you might expect, this translates to a number of significant things in gameplay terms.

Because yes, Kiryu working as a taxi driver isn’t just for show; you have the option of engaging directly with his job. And his work in the taxis takes several forms, which is rather fun: regular taxi jobs demand that you drive sensibly and carefully, while “race” missions allow you to let loose on the highway while Kiryu attempts to take down some street racing gangs. The former types of job have quite realistic handling; you have to take care not to accelerate or brake too sharply, ensure you indicate to go around corners and try not to hit anything. By contrast, pretty much anything goes in the race missions, which are distinctly arcadey in execution — to such a degree that you have a boost that leaves trails of blue flames, and “Heat Actions” that can be used at various points on the course for silly, cinematic events that usually put you at an advantage over your opponent.

Outside of that, it’s business as usual for the Yakuza series, with this game once again being set a few years later than the previous one, now bringing us into the 2010s. You can go out, eat food, get drunk, play darts, play Virtua Fighter, hang out at cabaret clubs and chat up hostesses, get into street fights and pick up trash for the good of the community. The main plot has something about Daigo Dojima going missing but honestly I haven’t moved this along at all other than to get Kiryu into a position where I can do the taxi missions.

And, of course, there are substories aplenty to discover, ranging from the simple to the absurd. One thing I’ve always liked about Yakuza is that it recognises how it’s a video game, and thus it isn’t afraid to be very, very silly at times; it juxtaposes this silliness with the rather serious nature of the main narratives, and it’s always very effective. It’s a reminder that people are complex, and even someone as stern-faced as Kiryu has a more light-hearted side that he enjoys indulging at times.

Anyway, as I say, I’m not that far into the game as a whole as yet, but I’m enjoying what I’ve played so far. I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to soup up Kiryu’s taxi a bit… I get the impression it’s going to be necessary to clear some of the later racing missions.

For now, though, it’s after midnight so I should probably sleep. Probably. Except you and I both know I’m probably going to watch an episode of Deep Space Nine first.

#oneaday Day 97: EverDriving the ’64

Inspired by my success with the GDEMU for the Dreamcast, I decided to pick up an EverDrive 64 for my Nintendo 64. Long-term, I’m planning on grabbing one of these excellent devices for all my cart-based consoles, as I’ve been burned just once too many by duff cartridges purchased from second-hand sources. As much fun as it is to collect things and have the satisfying tactile thunk of slamming a cartridge into a slot, it’s even more fun to have games that actually work.

For the unfamiliar, an EverDrive is a cartridge designed to work with a cartridge-based system… obviously. In most cases, they have a micro SD card slot, on which you load some simple OS files for the thing to be able to do its thing, and then any ROM files you want to use. This effectively means in most instances, you can carry around the complete library for a system on just one cartridge. Very convenient — particularly as the EverDrive also takes care of managing save data, and even allows you to back up and restore Controller Pak saves so you don’t need umpteen of the little buggers to be able to save your progress.

The one small issue I’ve found is that when running NTSC games on my PAL N64, there’s a horrible “ghosting” effect on the image that makes playing those games undesirable. It’s a bit of a shame, as there are a few North American NTSC N64 titles I wouldn’t mind playing, but to be honest, I suspect the EU library will keep me busy for quite some time.

This evening I’ve been exploring a few games I’ve always been curious about, but never had the opportunity to play for one reason or another. The two that I’ve probably had the most fun with are both Midway titles, as it happens, and both arcade conversions: San Francisco Rush and Gauntlet Legends.

San Francisco Rush is an arcade racer that is markedly different from most other arcade racers from the ’90s that I’m familiar with. Probably its most notable standout feature is that its courses are relatively “open”, often offering alternative routes and shortcuts, and in some cases allowing you to proceed around a section of the course in the opposite direction to the rest of the pack and still end up where you’re going.

Of course, open-structure races aren’t a particularly uncommon sight these days — to be honest, it’s harder to find a modern racing game that isn’t open world outside of the hardcore sim sector — but I suspect back in the ’90s, San Francisco Rush would have been quite the unusual little thing.

It’s also noteworthy in that it’s an arcade racer where you really do have to slow down for corners. If there’s a drift function, I certainly haven’t got to grips with it; thus far I’ve had a reasonable amount of success with just actually using the brakes (or at the very least letting off the accelerator) ahead of sharp corners — and with the game being set in San Francisco, there are lots of sharp corners.

The visuals are fairly ugly by modern standards, though I found that I quickly stopped noticing the low-resolution blurry nature of the game, and the fact that many of the races are covered in fog is entirely appropriate for the setting. It thus far seems to be an enjoyable racer, and with a decent amount of longevity, too; the main “championship” mode is 24 tracks long, thankfully with the ability to save your progress.

Gauntlet Legends, meanwhile, is a successor to the classic 4-player dungeon crawler from Atari Games. It takes the action into the polygonal 3D realm, though still plays mostly like a top-down maze game. It has all the classic Gauntlet elements present and correct: finding keys to open doors, standing on switches to open up walls, blasting generators to stem the tide of monsters. It adds a few new elements to the mix, though, including an inventory where you can activate and deactivate power-ups at will, and some RPG-lite mechanics whereby you can level up and improve your stats.

Perhaps most importantly, your health doesn’t tick down gradually as you play. Bliss! This makes it one of the few Gauntlet games that it doesn’t feel utterly futile to play; as much as I like old-school Gauntlet, the various home ports tend to trivialise themselves by providing you the opportunity to “insert coins” as much as you want, affording you effectively unlimited health.

Not so in Gauntlet Legends! Instead, you lose health at a much more sensible rate if you get hit or caught in a trap, and healing items give you a meaningful amount of health back. Plus you can buy more health with the gold you earn in levels, and you also get more health every time you level up.

Probably the thing I’m most impressed with about Gauntlet Legends is how smoothly it runs. While it doesn’t run at a rock-solid framerate, it happily gets up to a full 50fps (I’m running PAL, remember) when you’re wandering around exploring, and while the frame rate does drop a bit when the screen gets busy, it’s never to an unplayable degree, and the controls always remain nicely responsive.

I’m looking forward to spending a bit more time with both games, along with revisiting some old favourites and discovering some new titles. If you have an N64 and a bit of cash to splash, I can highly recommend an EverDrive; I suspect it’s going to revitalise my interest in this classic system, and I’m looking forward to getting one for my other classic consoles, too. After payday, though; they ain’t cheap!