#oneaday Day 871: How Colleen got her groove back

You see, it's funny, 'cause the original book was How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and Stella was the internal name for the Atari 2600, but I am more of an Atari 8-bit computer man, and the internal name for the Atari 800 was Colleen. Do you get it? No? Never mind. It made me happy, and that's what's important.

Anyway, yeah, I thought I'd update and reflect on my decision to refocus my YouTube channel back on the Atari computers that have always been so important to me, and it's been going well! Viewing figures for the last few videos have been very good (even bearing in mind YouTube changing the way it counts views a little while back), and I've been getting some good comments on each and every video, with a lot of regular viewers coming back for each new video.

In other words, I think this was the right decision. The temptation was always there to want to cover as much stuff as possible on YouTube, but in doing that you risk a few things: never being able to cover anything in as much depth as you want; never being satisfied that you've covered every thing you want; and never being able to nail down a consistent, recurring audience. Because while "retro gamers with broad interests" is definitely an audience, on a platform as saturated as YouTube is, specialising really does seem to be the way forward. As with, I would argue, pretty much all kinds of media; sadly, the mainstream video games media never learned this lesson and now we barely have any. But I digress.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to share my recent videos on the off-chance you've been reading this for God knows how many days and you've still never paid my YouTube channel a visit. I've somehow made 1.2 thousand videos on there over the years — although I will grant you that there are a chunk of those which are nothing but raw gameplay. The vast majority involve either my "live" commentary, or a reading of something I've written, though. The former, with a brief(ish) introduction to give some historical context, are where I've settled on what I enjoy doing the most; the latter occasionally break out and do very well, but the former is, for me, the more sustainable format that I can keep on doing without it feeling like work. Because I want YouTube to be a fun hobby, not something that becomes a second job.

Anyway, with that in mind, I don't make a lot of effort pushing these videos outside of their immediate audience and a cursory share on Bluesky when they're first published. I frankly cannot be arsed with all the promo work you're "supposed" to do if you're trying to build an audience, and to be honest, I've never really been trying to build an audience. All I'm doing with YouTube is doing something that amuses and entertains me, and if people happen to stumble across it and find it entertaining or informative, so much the better. Same as what I do with my writing, really; I have no great designs on being "famous" or anything, but it is nice when someone happens across your work and is able to take something worthwhile away from it.

Enough of that, though. Here are some videos about old games on older computers.

The rebooted Atari A to Z series, focusing on Atari 8-bit computers, began with a look at a game I've been meaning to cover for ages: Astro Chase by First Star Software. This is a cool multidirectional shoot 'em up with some flashy graphics and cutscenes. It even made it into arcades… kind of, anyway. It's a great game, but one I've just never gotten around to until now.

Next up is Batty Builders, a game by English Software, a company that was renowned for its high-quality output on Atari 8-bit in the early to mid 1980s. Batty Builders is an intriguing take on the action-puzzle game, and pre-empts pretty much every other "falling block" puzzle game I can think of with its own distinctive twist on the formula. Its balance is questionable, but it's a game I've always been very fond of.

Then we come to Clowns and Balloons, a game by the prolific Frank Cohen, and one of the first games I remember playing on Atari 8-bit. It's a simple game about bouncing a clown on a trampoline to pop a bunch of balloons, but it's well-presented, looks and sounds great for the time, and plays well. This is one I regularly go back to if I'm just playing Atari 8-bit for fun of an evening.

Next we have Desmond's Dungeon, a game I remember hearing the name of a lot, but which I had never looked into. Loosely (very loosely) based on the arcade game Bagman, or at least modern commentators tend to conjecture, it's an arcade-style game with some good presentation, solid mechanics and decent overall gameplay. Perhaps a bit repetitive over the long term, but it at least introduces some intriguing elements to the mix as you progress through its difficulty levels.

Archipelagos is the game that kicked off my new "season" of Atari ST A to Z. This is a game I always thought looked amazing back in the day, but could never picture how it actually played. Turns out it's pretty simple, but thoroughly compelling and very atmospheric. This is one I intend to spend some more time with by myself now I've made the video.

Eastern Front (1941) is a wargame designed to be deep and complex, but also accessible and easy to control. Sure enough, it is very straightforward to get started in, but the intricacies of play could keep one busy for a very long time indeed. Suffice to say as a wargame newbie and strategic idiot, I barely scratch the surface of its possibilities in this video, but it should be enough for those interested to "get" what it is going for. Noteworthy for being the creation of the immensely talented and very clever Chris Crawford, who produced some of the most interesting, deep, inventive games on the Atari 8-bit.

We return to a classic Atari series with Blasteroids, the third entry in the Asteroids series, released during the "Atari Games" era. The Atari ST port of this game is pretty solid, though Atari Games pulling a lot of its usual bullshit — tutorial messages, constantly draining health, harsh difficulty spikes — does mean it puts up a bit of a fight. I have always been rather fond of this game, though, and it was nice to revisit it.

Finally, for now, we have Firefleet, a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up by the same guy who gave us Batty Builders. It's riffing on the Caverns of Mars formula, but has plenty of its own things that make it appealing and interesting. Caverns of Mars is, overall, the better game, for myriad reasons, but this is certainly an interesting title that those who have the patience to deal with its difficulty wall seem to really like.

And that's that for now. I have another Atari ST video in the pipe ready to go out later this week, then at the weekend I'll likely be making some more videos. I'm settling into a good rhythm of doing these, now, so hopefully these will be reasonably regular. I hope you enjoy them, whether you're a newcomer to my channel or you've been stopping by for ages. And if you've never experienced the games of the Atari 8-bit and ST computers, well, I have a huge library of both for you to take a look at on the channel!

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 869: Mittenacht

It's after midnight, and we're staying over at my parents' place. It's a slightly delayed visit from when we originally intended; we wanted to stop by for my Dad's birthday in September but various things conspired against us to prevent that. But we're here now.

Of course, that means getting out of the usual routine, and as such I am writing this post (as I did the last one) on my phone, which I don't like doing because the Jetpack app for posting on WordPress is a bit crap, and also with every passing year, I come to loathe typing on a mobile keyboard with autocorrect just a little bit more. But I can probably suck it up for a night.

It's been a nice, quiet, relaxing weekend as it always tends to be when we come here. My parents keep themselves busy, but they're also — there's no polite way to say this — growing older, and as such seem quite happy to have a couple of days where just not very much happens. Honestly, I'm fine with that too; not that a lot goes on with our daily life when we're back home, but things are especially laid back when we come here.

I spent today playing Thank Goodness You're Here, a game which I've watched Andie play and have also seen Game Grumps play, but which is still a delight to experience. I also made a start on replaying The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, as I thought my Mum, a lapsed adventure game fan, might find it intriguing.

I also spent a little time playing some Doom on Evercade Nexus, because we worked hard on both the console and the game, and it's nice to finally be able to see the finished project, enjoy it and think "we did good". Because we did! We still have lots of work ahead of us for coming releases (and some additions to both Doom and Banjo-Kazooie, our big releases for this year) but the hardest slog we've had to date has, it seems, paid off, thankfully!

Anyway, it is late and I want to sleep, so regardless of the unknown word count, I'm going to leave that there. Business as usual will resume tomorrow!

#oneaday Day 866: In the palm of your hand

I've had my Analogue Pocket a couple of days now, and I really like it. So what is the game I have played the most on it so far? It is, and this is genuinely not a joke, Solitaire FunPak by Beam Software for original black-and-white Game Boy. (Apparently a Game Gear version also exists, but I haven't tried that yet.)

Given that "handhelds" these days are just as capable as TV-connected consoles, it's easy to forget that they were once quite a distinct breed. That's not to put them down or anything; there are plenty of games for even early-ish handhelds like the Game Boy that you can sink hours into. But there was, at one point, a marked distinction in both the technical capabilities of handhelds compared to their TV-connected big brothers, and the way in which games were designed for handhelds versus TV-connected consoles and desktop computers.

You've probably heard someone — perhaps even me! — say that something makes "a good handheld game", but what does that mean? The specifics have changed over the years, but one thing has remained fairly constant: the best handheld games are things that you can boot up quickly, play for a few minutes to either pass the time or as something to do with your hands while you do something else, then set aside without feeling any sort of "obligation" to keep investing large amounts of time into it.

This could mean any number of things. This could mean simple arcade-style score-attack games. This could mean platformers with short, snappy levels like the Super Mario Land series. This could mean shoot 'em ups. Or, indeed, it could mean board and card game adaptations.

Back when Game Boy was current, I suspect a lot of people would have looked upon something like Solitaire FunPak for Game Boy as not worth bothering with; spending a relatively large amount of money for something you could just do with a pack of cards. But now, with how easy it is to load up a device like the Analogue Pocket or a Chinese emulator handheld with games, these titles show their value: they are good handheld games!

I've actually secretly known this for some time. Not specifically that Solitaire FunPak is a good time, but that simple board and card games make for good handheld entertainment. The game that converted me in this regard was Nintendo's 42 All-Time Classics for Nintendo DS, also known as Clubhouse Games in America, because Americans can't count or something. I don't remember exactly what made me pick this up back in the day, but I do remember being very pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it was when I booted it up and spent some time with it. Plus the built-in Pictochat and single-cartridge multiplayer made it super-easy to play with others.

So in retrospect, I'm not surprised that I'm having a good time with Solitaire FunPak, which is a solid implementation of exactly what it offers in its title: a selection of solitaire card games, which you can play either individually or as a "tournament" in an attempt to attain the highest score possible. Even if you just play Klondike, there's plenty of value to be had here, but you have a bunch of other fun games to play, too, and they all work well with both the simplistic visual presentation afforded by the Game Boy's limited capabilities, and the likewise straightforward controls.

This is exactly what "a good handheld game" is — and, being on a device that isn't connected to the Internet, and whose games are completely self-contained affairs that don't need updates, you can just relax with it without the possibility of distractions. And it's so nice to play something that is designed as a simple pastime, and which hasn't been monetised out the wazoo or engineered to manipulate your "engagement" into playing for longer, thereby getting you to look at more ads.

Would I have bought Solitaire FunPak back in the day when I had a Game Boy? Probably not, although if I had I suspect I would have actually had a decent amount of fun with it. Am I having fun with it now, though? Most definitely. And I think I might just go play a game or two while I run myself a bath this evening…

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#oneaday Day 864: Grab bag

It has been a fairly boring day, so I will attempt to make it more interesting by talking about several things. Look at me go!

First up, my Analogue Pocket arrived today. Did I need another retro gaming handheld, particularly one that is quite pricy (and extremely pricy when you add the extortionate shipping and customs charges that come with getting one shipped to the UK)? No, of course I didn't. Did I get one anyway? Yes, of course I did. I have been interested in the Analogue Pocket ever since it was first announced and immediately sold out, so I have always been keeping an eye out for them becoming available again. As it happens, they became available again and I was in a position to be able to buy one without guilt, so that's exactly what I did.

I don't have a lot to report on it so far as I've only really set it up and given it a quick try with a few games so far. I am impressed from the little I've seen, though; the extremely, extremely high resolution screen means that it's capable of doing some wonderful display effects to recreate things like the original Game Boy's dot matrix display and the distinct "line" patterns on things like the Lynx and Game Gear displays. It can also do a nice Trinitron CRT simulation, as well as a number of other "generic" effects — or you can mix things up a bit, like applying a simulation of the DMG Game Boy screen onto something that would not have used that!

I'll doubtless have a lot more to say about it in the near future, but suffice to say for now that this thing seems to be built like a tank in handheld terms, and setting it up to use the MiSTer-style openFPGA cores using an application called PocketSync was quick and easy. PocketSync also takes care of things like downloading BIOS files, so it really is just a few clicks to get the thing set up to load any ROM you'd care to name on one of the supported platforms. It's nice to have the option for original cartridges, though, which was the Analogue Pocket's original unique selling point.

Anyway, that's the Pocket. Like I say, I'll do a more detailed writeup about it in the near future, as it's worth exploring in depth, I think. I'm particularly intrigued to try the nanoloop music creation software that comes built-in. It seems fiddly at first glance, but I'm sure once you get your head around the various button controls and know what everything does, it will become much more usable.

What else has happened today? I tried some American flavours of sugar-free Monster that one of our local convenience stores (the one we call "Funny Shop" to distinguish it from the nearby Tesco Express, and in homage to the fact that it sells unusual imported food products from around the world as well as domestic products) and they were both actually very nice. I tried the "Ultra Red White and Blue Razz" one, which is obnoxiously "patriotic", but, as the name suggests, just tastes of blue raspberry, while the Ultra Sunrise flavour might, in fact, be my all-time favourite Monster; it tastes like actual oranges. Not like orange soda flavour, like an actual orange. Highly recommended. I hope we see it more "officially" over here at some point; in the meantime, I will be counting on Funny Shop to keep me stocked.

I also tried the Taco variant of Buldak noodles. I have mixed feelings on this. It had a pleasant Mexican-esque smell once the powder and sauce went in, but in terms of flavour it was mostly overwhelmed by the Buldak hot sauce. The "flakes" pouch also contained some of the most unidentified foodstuffs I think I've ever seen. There was something that I assume was supposed to be a bit like taco meat, but I have no idea what it actually was, and it didn't really taste of anything. I am yet to find a Buldak variant that beats the regrettably discontinued Curry flavour, though the sweet fried chicken one is pretty good (yes, that means it is a sweet fried chicken flavour hot chicken flavour noodle) but seemingly getting a bit harder to find. I also tried the Rosé one the other day and had trouble distinguishing it from the Carbonara variant. It was nice, to be sure, and I'll probably seek it out again, but I'm not sure how it distinguishes itself from Carbonara.

Well, that's my day. I think a bit more handheld play is in my immediate future…

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#oneaday Day 861: Round. One! FILM!

I went to see the Street Fighter movie today. I enjoyed it a lot! In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I legitimately find it quite baffling that some people have been seemingly quite angry about not liking it. I was watching Giant Bomb's Bomb-A-Thon livestream for part of last night, and one guy in the chat appeared to be furious that he had been to see it and not Digger. Each to their own, I guess.

Anyway, I went into the Street Fighter movie expecting something that was dumb but fun, and that's exactly what I got. Even as someone who is not particularly "into" Street Fighter, there was plenty of series fanservice in there. Rather wisely, the movie is set in the early 1990s, so the vast bulk of the cast consists of the most familiar faces from the series' early days — in other words, the cast of Street Fighter II, and a couple of additions from Super Street Fighter II (Cammy, Akuma) and Alpha (Dan). There's also an incredibly deep cut in the form of Joe, who only ever appeared as a non-playable enemy character in the first Street Fighter game.

The story, as you might expect for a Street Fighter movie, primarily concerns Ryu and Ken, who are given some extensive backstory, presented using extremely stylish anime-style sequences. Ryu beat Sagat in the first World Warrior tournament (as depicted in the original Street Fighter), but in doing so came perilously close to giving in to the Dark Hado and becoming Evil Ryu. His desire not to fall to evil resulted in him being unable to fully unleash a Hadouken when Gouken, sensei to him and Ken, was under attack by Akuma. This drove a wedge between Ryu and Ken, leaving Ryu to go into hiding, believing that he should leave fighting behind, and Ken to become a self-styled "sports entertainment" celebrity, hoovering up brand deals with the assistance of his manager, Dan.

I don't know Street Fighter lore extensively, but I got the impression that the movie plays a little fast and loose with the characters' backgrounds. As someone who doesn't particularly care about Street Fighter lore, I also don't care about this. In the context of the movie, their backgrounds and motivations for getting involved in the ongoing plot made sense — inasmuch as anything in this gleefully chaotic movie makes sense, anyway.

I won't summarise the entire plot here, but suffice to say that it involves M. Bison being Up To No Good, Akuma putting in an appearance, Chun-Li double-crossing the villains in her role as an Interpol agent, Cammy in her pre-having-broken-free-from-Bison phase and lots of people thumping one another.

Not all of the core cast of Street Fighter II are directly involved in the Big Plot, but they all get at least one fight scene. E. Honda, for example, only shows up for a fight with Ryu in a sauna so the latter can take the former's place in the tournament that forms the centrepiece to the plot — but it's a pretty great fight, with Honda using both his Hundred-Hand Slap and Flying Headbutt manoeuvre. (Unrelated fact: one of my friends once thought that he was saying "guffcake" when performing this move in the original Street Fighter II, and now I cannot know that move as anything other than "guffcake". I had to look up its actual name.)

Zangief is probably the most under-used of the core cast, with his role primarily consisting of getting angry that Ken ruined his steak dinner. He still performs a good few crowd-pleaser moves, though.

What I enjoyed most about the movie is that it's funny. Not in a "funny because it's so bad" sort of way, but in the sense that it's funny because it knows how silly and camp it all is, and absolutely leans hard into it. Bison even gets a "…for me, it was Tuesday" line in homage to the 1994 Street Fighter movie.

Ken is a particular highlight throughout, because he's a dickhead. Various entries in the series have both downplayed and emphasised this aspect of the character, and he's a real dickhead here, but not so irredeemably awful or unlikeable that he has no chance of redemption. On the contrary, he's mostly a dickhead because he's an idiot, and that makes for plenty of endearing comedy, particularly when paired up with Dan, who doesn't do a lot of fighting but has some amusing lines. There are some especially amusing scenes when Ken, Dan and Guile all try out out-masculine each other — with Dan, of course, coming off the worst.

In series tradition, the actual "tournament" isn't really an important plot point at all, as the main thrust of the story is Bison Being Up To No Good and what everyone else is doing about that. David Dastmalchian is a wonderful Bison, striking the perfect balance of sinister and absurd, and he frequently steals the show in the scenes where he appears. It's a bit of a shame he doesn't really get a good kicking — the ending is very clearly attempting to set up a sequel — but given the amount of other spectacular clashes throughout the movie (and the fact Bison does get a "behold my true power" moment when squaring off against Chun-Li), I can't really be too mad.

So yeah. I really enjoyed it. Not only did it do a good job of capturing the "vibe" of Street Fighter, but it was also an enjoyable, compelling movie. I like it better than Resident Evil; I didn't dislike Resident Evil, as I wrote the other day, but it did feel more like a series of entertaining vignettes rather than a coherent movie. Street Fighter, meanwhile, felt like it went places. They were often absurd, ridiculous places, yes, but one should expect nothing less from the series. It has, after all, always been extremely silly — no matter how seriously some people like to take playing the games, the series will always be the one with the stretchy-armed Indian, the green-skinned monstrous Brazilian, the American military man with the implausible hair and too many other examples of delightfully delirious nonsense to list in full here.

I feel you have to be a special kind of miserable to come out of that movie not having had a good time. No, it's not great art, it's not thought-provoking, it won't make you think about the human condition or any number of other philosophical concepts. It's a movie about people punching each other. And it's a good movie about people punching each other. If you go into it expecting anything else, that might be a you problem. And that's my final word!

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#oneaday Day 856: Flurry of activity

As so often happens after I have a day of feeling a bit maudlin, today I had a day where I got a lot done. Six videos, to be exact, including both Atari 8-bit and Atari ST videos. It's good to be getting back into the rhythm of these, and I really enjoyed the games I played for these vids — hopefully that comes across in the final products, which will be released over the course of the next few weeks!

I've definitely made the right decision to refocus my YouTube effort back on what I was having the most fun with in the first place. I am never going to "make it big" on YouTube and I have no intention of making it into a second job in an attempt to do so; I already keep more than busy enough for the day job, and I want YouTube to be fun. But I also want it to reflect the things that are important to me — hence the refocus on Atari stuff.

I think part of the reason I pressed pause on the A to Z series a while back was because I was worried I was going to start running out of things to cover. But going through the spreadsheet of reviews I put together a while back, it's clear that isn't going to happen for a long time, on either Atari 8-bit or Atari ST. There may be some individual letters that are a little short on things to cover — as I recall, I was running out of games that began with "Y" on ST, unless I wanted to cover various iterations on Yahtzee over and over again! — but I can just skip those if necessary. Or, indeed, I can play a multitude of Yahtzees, since I'm sure at least some of them do something vaguely interesting with the concept!

Anyway, as a preview of what's to come, I will be covering Desmond's Dungeon, Eastern Front (1941) and Firefleet on Atari 8-bit, and Archipelagos, Blasteroids and Cards on Atari ST. Most of these are new to me, which is exciting; I'd played Eastern Front and Blasteroids before, but I was a bit young to understand Eastern Front when I was a kid, so it's been interesting to return to that now I know what a wargame is. I'm not convinced I know how to play effectively, but it was fun giving it a go, regardless.

I think the biggest pleasant surprise of the day for me was Archipelagos. I remember seeing this back when it originally released and thinking it looked thoroughly interesting, and it really, really is. The version I was playing had a strange bug where every fifth level kills you instantly, but since you can just skip levels at will — and there are 9,999 of them — you shouldn't feel too bad about just skipping those ones that don't work. The version I was playing was the hard disk converted version by Pera Putnik, so it's entirely possible that the conversion process just made something go a bit skew-whiff somewhere; I haven't yet tried a disk-only version of it. Either way, it's a thoroughly interesting game, and you'll get to see exactly why quite soon!

So yeah. It's been a good day. Okay, I didn't get up until noon because I was having strange dreams and they put me in a bit of a funk at the start of the day, but I began my day with the intention of making some videos, and by jingo I've gone and done it: recorded, edited and exported, all in a day. Not bad, eh?

Now I think I've earned an hour or two of Ace Combat to celebrate. And maybe some ice cream.

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#oneaday Day 852: Rotting retro

You know, I have historically thought that out of all the subcommunities of computer and tech enthusiasts, the one which would have more respect for doing things "the hard way" than anyone else would be the retro fans. These are people who, in many cases, grew up seeing genius programmers making limited hardware do things far beyond its supposed capabilities, and, even if they never saw fit to take up programming themselves, could at least understand why it was impressive when, for example, someone made an Atari 8-bit display 256 colours on screen at the same time.

Sadly, it is increasingly looking as if the retro sphere, much like everyfuckingthing else, has been infiltrated, corrupted, poisoned and rotted by the scourge that is generative AI.

In just the last week, I have seen myriad vibe-coded "recompilation" projects, slop peddlers attempting to submit 50k lines of changes to an FPGA core that was already working just fine, the Oliver Twins making it abundantly clear what their odious stance is, web-based editors for the ZX Spectrum games Chaos and Target: Renegade slapped together using AI coding tools and someone making the bold claim that they have been "working on" (i.e. they prompted Claude to do it for them) multiplayer conversions of a variety of classic games for home computers and consoles, including Wizard of Wor, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. Oh, and someone who claimed to have decompiled Adobe's entire Creative Cloud suite of software and made a "clean room" version of it that doesn't work, like, at all, but that's not exactly retro. Still relevant, though.

The irritating thing is that a lot of these projects sound like they could be potentially interesting! 4-player Pac-Man on Atari 8-bit is a cool idea! Simultaneous co-op in Super Mario Bros. and Metroid are potentially intriguing twists on classic games! Tweaking retro games to play in different ways has been a proud tradition ever since everyone learned what the POKE command does!

And yet, I cannot, will not support any of these projects in good conscience. I just cannot. I cannot bring myself to give any sort of "reward" — and attention is a form of reward — to someone who thinks that throwing something into Claude Code and getting it to spit out something that looks convincing at first glance (but is probably deeply, deeply broken under the hood) is "working on something". I do not care that it looks impressive, at first glance, that you can click a button and some sort of functional-seeming, executable code pops out of the other end.

Because, really, what is the point? These projects are not put out into the wild with any attempt of aiding our collective understanding of things; they are put out in an attempt to accumulate clout, pure and simple. People want to be the first to do something, or the only person to do something, and the assumption, today, appears to be that the best way to do this is "just get AI to do it". Except then you haven't done anything yourself, have you? You have used a technology based on the stolen creativity and expertise of humanity, which consumes vast amounts of energy and water, which is unsustainably expensive to maintain beyond the next couple of years at most, which often gets things flat-out wrong, and which is responsible for making the Internet seven hundred thousand orders of magnitude worse than it has ever been, and you have got it to churn out something that, if you had to debug it yourself, you almost certainly wouldn't know where to start.

The standard counterargument to all this is "well, if this person hadn't done their little Claude Code project, it wouldn't have happened at all". And that, to me, is not a convincing case. It's a waste of time and money (but not effort) to produce something that, at first glance, appears to be "good enough" rather than something which has actually been crafted to work properly and perfectly — and in the meantime, it discourages people who are still doing this sort of thing properly to continue with their own projects, because that whole part of the scene has now been tainted with Claudeslop, and we've already seen with a variety of projects how disheartening that can be for some.

I think my biggest concern with all this is the long-term brain drain effect it will have. We're already seeing frightening numbers of people completely surrendering to the AI's "judgement" (which isn't a thing, but they believe it is) rather than thinking for themselves. And the end result, the longer all this goes on, is that actual skills and knowledge will atrophy. As the people who did this "the hard way" back in the day start to pass on — and many of them are passing on at this point, sadly — there will not be a generation of people who can take over. And when all this AI nonsense eventually collapses — which it will, as there is no way the world's economy can keep up this absolute insanity forever — it's going to leave a lot of people, projects and AI-corrupted enthusiast scenes in a real mess.

Now, you might think that doesn't matter for 40+ year old 8-bit home computers, but it absolutely does. Understanding how things work and how to recreate the conditions from back in the day is a crucial part of preserving the history of the medium, and the second you prompt Claude to just do it for you, you are wilfully saying that doesn't matter; you are wilfully disrespecting people who still know how to do all this stuff the old-fashioned way.

It matters. Your personal clout, on the other hand, does not, particularly if said clout has been accumulated by not really doing anything.

Maybe I should learn 6502 assembler just to spite these people.

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#oneaday Day 850: Fuck the Oliver Twins

I don't say this lightly, as I am that rare breed who legitimately, genuinely enjoyed the Dizzy games and believe a lot of their other prior output is excellent — particularly Firehawk on NES, which is an excellent tactical helicopter shoot 'em up that actually predates Desert Strike! But after seeing their recent output, and particularly reading these comments over on Time Extension, I say a full-throated, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart fuck off to Philip and Andrew Oliver.

The Oliver Twins are the textbook examples of "bedroom programmers" from the classic British home computer scene. They made games at home using their own skills and creativity, and achieved quite deserved success with many of them. Yes, I know a lot of people denigrate the Dizzy series in particular these days — particularly people from North America — but the fact is, these games had a place, and they achieved what they set out to do: provide a fun, distinctive mascot character, and a varied selection of games in which he appeared.

As such, I've always had respect for them and what they achieved. They helped define the British home computer scene of the 1980s, which, as you know, is a sector of gaming that is of enormous personal interest and relevance to me — even if I only had a chance to come to their stuff once we were into the Atari ST era, since they didn't make anything for the Atari 8-bit. I have genuinely fond memories of playing their stuff from back then, even if some of it doesn't hold up brilliantly (hello, Panic Dizzy on ST) and I had a lot of fun discovering a variety of their games I'd never played with The Oliver Twins Collection from the first year of Evercade, prior to me joining the company.

But with their current stance on AI, they have absolutely lost the fucking plot and seem to be wilfully ignorant of the overall mood in the room.

Let's go through some of the things they said in response to the questions from John Szczepaniak of Time Extension, shall we?

"We believe that, as creatives, it is another creative tool."

Literally the first answer is parroting the inevitable, probably LLM-generated in the first place, copypasta about it being "just a tool". Try harder.

"…in the right hands, we can create some awesome stuff that would have been impossible to create any other way."

Bollocks. Citation fucking needed. How, exactly, would it have been "impossible" to churn out things any other way than using generative AI?

"I'm sorry, but as an experiment, to create Emerald City, and all the art that went into this, it would have been an over-a-year project with a couple of artists, probably a hundred thousand pounds, all said and done when you're looking at all the costs."

Motherfucker, you literally ran a Kickstarter to fund your AI slop project. Ask for that £100,000 then pay some fucking artists with it! The reason your £5,000 Kickstarter failed is not because it was a fundamentally bad project, but because the project page, all the promotional material and literally everything about the project was drenched in generative AI imagery. This meant that people, on the whole, did not want to fund it. Because what is the point in paying for something the creators clearly have so little respect for themselves? Why would anyone want to fund your token habit?

If you had been honest and open about needing money, time and specialists to pull something off, I'm pretty sure a name as well-known and once-respected as the Oliver Twins would have been able to run a successful £100,000 Kickstarter without a problem. And whining and complaining that a project would take over a year, oh boo-fucking-hoo, creative projects require work over a significant period of time? Who would have fucking thought it?

"Now, as for scraping IP and all of that kind of stuff, I believe there should be regulations about what AI is trained on. I, unfortunately, do not run OpenAI or any of these other big gigs. As humble little guys just making Dizzy games, we can't control that. We could completely ignore a very powerful creative tool and then decide to produce nothing because it's too difficult to produce the quality that we want. And so we could go quietly into our retirement, or we can go, this is exciting! We love tech. We are sci-fi guys. This is an incredible time to be alive for a creator."

I can't believe they actually said the "humble little guys" thing out loud. We're just humble little guys who deserve some crumbs of stolen creative material. Have some fucking principles. You may not run OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other shits destroying everything nice at the moment, but you can have the principles to not engage with the product that everyone hates and which is making everything worse. You can read the room and understand that people fucking hate this, and they hate shit that looks like your Emerald City garbage, but for the most part people are too polite to say that to your face or within potential earshot of you.

All it sounds like is that you wanted to be able to churn out something quickly, cheaply and with minimal effort, which does not sound like being a "creator". It sounds like two old men trying desperately to jump on a trend and cynically produce a product — worse, content — with no lasting value, and a morally bankrupt attitude towards the way it is produced.

Fuck the Oliver Twins, and fuck their stinking attitude. I once respected them as creators — and still do respect the work they both did when they were younger. But the men they are now, and the slop they are apparently desperate to produce as quickly and cheaply as possible? Completely and utterly dead to me.

Cunts.

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#oneaday Day 836: Torrent of slop

It feels like pretty much every day for the last few months we've seen a story that claims some game or other has been translated for the first time ever, or ported to PC for the first time ever… and I feel like a good nine times out of every ten of these projects that show up, the project ends up being vibecoded slop.

I'm afraid I don't give any credence to the theory that AI development tools "democratise" development of stuff like this. The biggest problem — besides the fact that AI models are all built on stolen data, of course… and the environmental impacts — is, without a doubt, the fact that people using them end up shitting out something that they have absolutely no understanding of. Thus, when a problem arises — and you can bet a problem will arise with something shat out by AI — they have no idea how to fix it.

"Well, just hand it over to someone who knows what they're doing!" you might say. And to that I say, any developer worth their salt will not accept such a project. No-one wants to debug the spaghetti code shat out by a plagiarism robot. Not only will that be a lot of work, much of which wouldn't have needed to happen if the project had been done properly in the first place, but the person fixing the job will end up with their reputation tarnished purely by virtue of having worked on an AI project.

Unfair? Perhaps. But at this point, people have to know that using generative AI is going to attract backlash. People fucking hate it! People would rather not have a thing than have a thing that was pumped out using generative AI tools! And any short-lived kudos you might attain for being the "first" person to do something (except you didn't actually do the thing yourself) will, in short order, absolutely torpedo your reputation. At this point, with all the high-profile cases there have been of backlash against projects that involve generative AI, you would have to be either wilfully ignorant or just outright sticking your fingers in your ears to be unaware of the resistance to all this.

And the thing that sucks is that, for me and numerous others like me, the torrent of vibecoded slop projects has completely destroyed any interest or excitement we might have had for things that should be interesting and exciting. The decomp/recomp scene should be fascinating, and the non-vibecoded examples of these games put out amazing results that can potentially breathe new life into all manner of different games. But I've seen so many announcements that conclude with "…and this was made with Claude" that I'm afraid I just don't give a shit any more. I just do not care. I do not have the time, energy or inclination to sort through everything just to find the few things that have been made with genuine human knowledge and craft. And so I just can't be arsed to keep up with any of this sort of project any more, be they fan translations or decomp/recomp efforts. It's enough of a pain having to resist generative AI bullshit in full-price commercial titles already.

I know pushback against generative AI is repetitive and tedious and annoying, but, frankly, the signs are very much apparent that we haven't been pushing back hard enough. We need to get to a point where even thinking about using generative AI for something like this makes these dorks flush their own heads down the toilet. I'm sick of it. And, if you're reading this, you probably are too.

Still, with any luck the bubble will burst soon, and all of this garbage will go the way of NFTs. I cannot wait. Cannot wait.

Advance notice to any AI boosters already composing an indignant comment: I think I have made my stance on this abundantly clear at this point. If you come in here with any of the usual garbage about "just a tool" and "what about the motor car" or "Amazon Web Services" or "Luddites", you will be banished to the pit of I Never Have To Hear From You Ever Again. You have been warned. Go cry to your precious Claude about it. And it will not care, because it can't. You are going to die alone. And you deserve it.

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#oneaday Day 820: We need the Adventure-obsessives back again

In the early days of home computer and video gaming, there was an enormous amount of excitement over what many publications referred to as capital-A Adventures. It wasn't uncommon to see computer mags in particular devote entire issues to Adventures, and a lot of them had a monthly column in which the writer (who often went by a pseudonym for some reason) would talk about recently released adventures, offer tips and advice to readers who had written in, and sometimes provide full solutions for particularly tricky games.

One recurring feature of this Adventure coverage back in the early '80s was a marked disdain for graphics. To the devoted Adventurer, the most vivid, spectacular images of all are those which are conjured up by one's own mind when reading some well-crafted prose, and thus no form of computer graphics would ever be able to match up to the possibilities afforded by one's own imagination.

There was a certain amount of pretentiousness here, yes, but they also had something of a point at the time; the graphical capabilities of home computers at the time were relatively limited, at least until the 16-bit micros became more well-established, and thus in many cases the graphics in illustrated adventures were somewhat… primitive, to say the least. In cases where they weren't, you ran into another problem: memory and storage space. Since 8-bit micros had anywhere between 8 and 128 kilobytes of RAM on offer, there was a hard limit on how much game data you could include in a game — and "data" in this case covered both descriptive text and graphics.

On systems with widespread disk drive adoption, such as the Atari 8-bit and C64, this issue was at least partly sidestepped by publishing Adventures on floppy disk, with the relevant data being loaded into memory from the disk only when needed — something it was only possible to do with the random access of a disk, since cassettes could only load data in a linear fashion (and took a long time to do it anyway). You still ran into hard caps, though: a disk could only hold so much.

It became pretty widely agreed among Adventure enthusiasts that straight-up text-only Adventures were always going to be the superior option, because you could fit a lot more text than graphics into either memory or the available space on a floppy disk, and the sort of person playing an Adventure was likely to be someone who enjoys reading anyway. So leave the fancy graphics for the arcade game fans and keep giving those Adventure fans that delicious plain text!

It didn't last, of course. As graphics technology got better, computers had more memory and storage solutions had greater capacity, we got to a point where it was possible to have well-written Adventures that also had excellent illustrations. Some of the earliest to see success in this regard were the titles from Magnetic Scrolls, such as The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter. These still placed most of the emphasis on the text, but the illustrations (which could be turned off) supported the story.

Then we started to get more in the way of "graphic adventures", beginning with Sierra's "3-D Animated Adventure Games" such as the King's Quest series, which initially gave you direct control of an on-screen character while keeping interaction via a text parser. From there, we ended up with the entirely mouse-driven point-and-click adventure, as popularised by titles such as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. At that point, the purely text-based Adventure appeared to have been completely left by the wayside in favour of a more visual form of interactive entertainment. In many respects, this made these games a lot more accessible to those who perhaps weren't comfortable attempting to communicate with a computer by typing verb-noun phrases, but for those who still enjoyed to read, things were never quite the same again.

Today, of course, there's the never-ending push for photorealism that has been taken to its natural, absurd extreme with technologies like Nvidia's AI slop bimbofication filter, sorry, DLSS5, and some people are, quite understandably, starting to feel fatigued with how a lot of games feel like they look very similar to one another. What happened to using our imaginations as the ultimate graphics chipset?

Well, good news: the good old text-based Adventure never died! In fact, it quietly flourished as the years went on, with an enthusiast community continuing to make use of this venerable but undeniably effective means of enjoying an interactive story — and even creating their own original Adventures that would have gone down extremely well with the Adventure enthusiasts of the early 1980s. Meanwhile, the similar-but-different visual novel genre has enjoyed gradual but steady growth over a similar period, making its way from niche-interest curiosity to something quite commonly seen today. People, it turns out, still like to read.

Every so often, I get a hankering to explore some text-based games. What I have referred to in the preceding paragraphs as Adventures tend to be described as "Interactive Fiction" these days. If you're being particularly pedantic, there is a difference between "Interactive Fiction" and "Text Adventure" — the former emphasises an unfolding text-based story, while the latter has greater focus on exploration and puzzle-solving — but "IF" tends to be used as a shorthand for all text-based, parser-driven games these days, and it also encompasses games that use multiple-choice or hypertext interfaces, such as those made with the popular Twine tool.

Thankfully, there are plenty of places to explore Interactive Fiction. A good place to have a look is the annual IFComp, or Interactive Fiction Competition. Right now, you can download and play a whole host of games that cover probably every piece of subject matter you might be able to think of. And you (yes, you!) can judge them, too. I bet you'd like that. You love judging things, don't you. Well, go on then! Go judge something! I think I know what I'm doing tomorrow!

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