#oneaday Day 151: Scribbling down an idea

Hello. Indulge me this evening, if you please, because I want to make a note of an idea I have for a longer article that I’ll likely publish on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. It stems from a discussion I’ve previously had with my friend Chris (my MoeGamer Podcast co-star) about how RPGs are “categorised”, and how “western RPG” and “Japanese RPG” are woefully inadequate terms to talk about the RPG as it exists today.

I’m not going to go too into it today but I wanted to jot down the ideas that were rattling around my head while I was playing Silent Hope this evening. And that is to devise some sort of “taxonomy” for RPGs as they exist today. I’m thinking at the top level, you can split them into two distinct categories: narrative-centric RPGs, where the core of the experience is on enjoying the unfolding story; and mechanics-centric RPGs, where the main point of the game is fiddling with its various systems, optimising your characters and suchlike.

There are some games that straddle that line, of course, but for the most part, it’s pretty easy to split them down the middle like that based on what is clearly the main priority. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, is a narrative-centric RPG. Demon Gaze is a mechanics-centric RPG. Where things get quite interesting is that long-running series often go back and forth between being narrative- and mechanics-centric — Final Fantasy is a prime example of this.

You can then divide each half into further subcategories. Narrative-centric RPGs, for example, could be divided into cinematic RPGs, sandbox RPGs, visual novel RPGs and storytelling RPGs, while mechanics-centric RPGs could be split into first-person dungeon crawlers, isometric action RPGs, massively multiplayer games, roguelikes and various other categories, some of which intertwine and cross over with one another.

I haven’t thought about the idea in a lot of depth yet, as you can probably tell from the vagueness, but I think there’s an interesting concept to write about there. The reason I’m not writing about it in detail right now is because it’s 1am and I, as ever, have forgotten to write anything on here sooner. It is not beyond my capabilities to bash out a 3,000+ word epic at 1 in the morning, but I do have to work tomorrow and would rather do so having had something approaching a decent night’s sleep.

So that’s that. I will flesh out the concept in the very near future and post it on MoeGamer. Might even turn into a fun video. We shall see. Anyway, I have recorded the idea here now. Next job is to completely forget that I wrote it down here and revisit the idea in roughly 36 months.

Good night!

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 137: No, NTSC YOU

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is make using my NTSC-U (North American) PS2 more convenient, particularly now I have a RetroTink 5X to get a lovely picture on the big TV. I make the intended process sound more complicated than it really was: all I essentially needed to do was to get another video cable to connect to the American PS2, but for one reason or another I’ve been putting it off forever.

No longer! I grabbed a set of component cables from Retro Gaming Cables and hooked them up to the Tink today. The reason I went with component rather than RGB SCART is that I already have my PAL PS2 connected to the Tink via RGB SCART, and going with component means I can plug both in at once without having to change cables over — all I need to do is switch the input on the Tink. The quality is, from what I’ve seen so far, near-identical on both; the only sticking point I had was when I first plugged them in, I got sound and no picture, meaning I had to navigate the PS2 menu by sound alone (and with judicious referring to my working PAL one) to switch it to YPbPr mode. But once that was done, everything was fine and dandy.

I don’t have that many North American games, but the few I do have are quite precious to me. On the PS1 front, there’s Parasite Eve, Brave Fencer Musashi and Xenogears, three games that I originally picked up around the same time on a trip over to the States to visit my brother. The copies I have now are not the same ones I had as a kid, but they’re in almost as good condition, and I’m looking forward to revisiting them.

On the PS2 front, there’s Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy, which I played and adored a couple of years back, plus the first and third Xenosaga games because, inexplicably, we only got the middle episode here in PAL-land. I haven’t played those yet but would like to set aside some time for them at some point, as I know they are very well regarded.

Having all this up and running makes me want to seek out a few more North American titles I had back in the day. I’m tempted to try and track down the Lunar games, but since those are getting ports to modern consoles soon it’s probably not worth the expense. Final Fantasy Tactics is another tempting one; I know the PSP port is “better” in many ways, but I still have extremely fond memories of the PS1 original. Other NTSC titles I had back then — most notably Final Fantasy IX and Metal Gear Solid — are readily available in PAL format; I got them back in the day because back then, North American releases were months ahead of European releases, sometimes even years.

Then there’s a ton of RPGs that never made it to Europe that I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on at some point… trouble is, PS1 games have been steadily increasing in price for a while, particularly RPGs. So it’s entirely possible that I might never be able to get my hands on some of these, which will be a shame. (I’m also super-salty that I got rid of my excellent condition PS1 copy of Symphony of the Night back in the day, but at least there are multiple alternative options for playing that today.)

Still, it’s nice that I now have a solid solution for playing the games that I do still own on original hardware. Because as fun as emulation is, there’s still something altogether magical about having the originals of these games.

Anyway, it’s not as if I’m short of stuff to play. But options are always good! Now, should I revisit Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve or Xenogears first…?

#oneaday Day 123: In my restless dreams, I see that town

As I type this, I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of my PS5 copy of the Silent Hill 2 remake. I was skeptical when this was first announced, but after playing the Resident Evil 4 remake a while back — I still haven’t actually played the original — I have a bit more faith that a modern developer can do justice to a PS2-era classic.

I absolutely adore the original Silent Hill 2, and I have some vivid memories attached to it.

It was my third year at university, and I was living in a nice but relatively pokey house in the middle of “the Flowers estate”, also known as “the dodgy bit of Bassett” in Southampton.

The house was quite a find; its rent was incredibly reasonable (like, in the region of £30-something a week, compared to our previous year’s shithole that had been £57 a week) and the house was in, frankly, amazing condition for something that was being rented out to students. So I, my friend’s girlfriend and our perpetually absent housemate snapped it up. (Seriously. She didn’t stay a single night in that house during our entire year there. Her room just sat completely empty, but she dutifully paid her rent and bills on time every month from… somewhere. To this day I have no idea what the deal was.)

If you’re wondering why I was living with my friend’s girlfriend, it’s because she also happened to be my friend; I refer to her as “my friend’s girlfriend” because I knew my friend, the boyfriend in question, first. He was one of my best pals in the latter years of secondary school and sixth form, as it happens. He was studying in Reading and subsequently in the Netherlands, whereas she was studying in Southampton, so when it came to time for everyone to find a place to stay in their second year, we decided to team up and help each other out, since both of our respective groups of friends had sorted themselves out without us.

As it transpired, while he was in the Netherlands he got super into weed (like, proper addicted to it, to a degree it was severely affecting his behaviour) and became kind of abusive and horrible, so he stopped being both my friend and my friend’s girlfriend at some point during that period. You’d think this might have made things a bit awkward, but no, she appreciated having me as a non-judgemental confidant; she knew that despite chappy being a good friend from school days, I wasn’t going to side with him being a complete drug-addled tool to her. And this wasn’t a “nice guy” thing in the hopes of getting some either; I liked the lady in question, but just as a pal, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. Just so we’re clear on that note. I did fancy our perpetually absent housemate, though, after meeting her once. But then I never saw her again, so that was that.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Silent Hill 2. One day, some pals from back home — former school friends again — came by this very house to visit for a few days. We did the usual things you do when getting together with friends in your early 20s: we got drunk, we ordered takeaway curry, we repaired a Sega Saturn controller using only a cotton bud and a bottle of cheap vodka. You know, the usual.

One of these friends was someone who always bought the “big” new games the moment they came out, and this time was no exception; he’d brought his shiny new copy of Silent Hill 2 along with him. We’d all enjoyed the first Silent Hill while we were still at school, so we were excited at the prospect of the sequel, intending to play it through together.

What actually happened is that my two friends fell asleep, full of curry, vodka and alcopops, while I played through the entire thing in a single night, surrounded by the increasingly fragrant remnants of our takeaway and the dregs of the bottles we’d glugged our way through. I got the “In Water” ending. And I was blown away.

My friends and I had already become convinced that video games could absolutely be art after playing Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, but there was something about Silent Hill 2 that even my undergraduate self could tell was truly special. This was a game that was about far more than just what was being depicted on screen and explicitly said. This was a game where the horror was not about scary monsters and loud noises — though both had a presence — but rather about the lurking horror and gradual realisation of psychological trauma.

It was around this time in my life that I first started learning about mental health, and particularly depression. A young woman with whom I was particularly intimate was the first person with depression that I’d really had close contact with, and she was happy to talk about and explain things to me. It helped me a great deal; it helped me to understand that I, too, had been suffering from it for quite some time and just hadn’t really had the words or the knowledge to be able to express that.

That might sound silly these days, when pretty much everyone on the Internet is self-diagnosing their own litany of mental health conditions on a daily basis, but this was 2001, we were still using dial-up Internet and social media hadn’t been invented. So it was all very new to me, and while it was a bit bleak, it was also interesting. The workings of the mind had always fascinated me — my creative writing projects for GCSE and A-Level English had always involved a heavy psychological component — and finally getting a sense that I was starting to understand why I sometimes felt the way I did was a revelation.

Silent Hill 2, dealing with a lot of heavy themes concerning mental health, came at exactly the right time for me. It came at a time where I was learning to understand and recognise these feelings and how different people deal with them, and living through James Sunderland’s traumatic experiences on the screen of my 27-inch CRT telly in the lounge was oddly cathartic. It was one of a few games from the period that I felt really spoke to me, and it’s continued to occupy an important space in my head ever since.

It’s a game that I’ve replayed and loved many times over the years, so I’m excited to see what looks set to be a genuinely interesting but respectful take on it with the new game. Whether it will recapture that same magic remains to be seen, but having heard some thoughts on it from people who have already played it, and whose opinions I respect, I feel positive about what I’m about to head into.

Now I just have to wait for the dang thing to arrive. Come on, Argos!

#oneaday Day 117: Car Racing

This evening, I felt like playing some random PlayStation 2 shenanigans, so I fired up R: Racing for the first time. (My wife misheard the name as “Car Racing” and was somewhat incredulous; I almost didn’t want to correct her.)

For the unfamiliar, R: Racing is a game from Namco where they sort of wanted to make a new Ridge Racer, but also wanted to get in on this “racing sim” action that had been growing in popularity since the original Gran Turismo at the tail end of the previous generation. To that end, they made what is essentially a new Ridge Racer game, but featuring real cars and circuits along with the requisite tuning options that no-one understands.

One of the things that excited me most about R: Racing back when it was originally announced was that it had an actual story mode. This was very unusual for racing games at the time, and when it first released I still hadn’t come to the conclusion that no, not all games need stories, a subject that I was sure I’d blogged about at some point in the past, but couldn’t find any evidence thereof.

Anyway, long story short, for one reason or another I never picked up R: Racing back in the day, despite it being something that appealed quite a bit… but it is one of the many titles I added to my PS2 collection when I stumbled across it in CEX for somewhere in the region of 50p and subsequently never got around to actually trying. Until now!

Honestly, of all the things it reminds me of, it’s actually most akin to the Ace Combat series. Perhaps not surprising, since they’re both Namco titles — and there’s a strong argument to suggest the Ridge Racer series unfolds in Ace Combat’s Strangereal setting — but it works pretty well. The narrative sequences are kept short and snappy — arguably to a fault — but it provides a certain incentive to progress through the game’s 14-chapter “Racing Life” mode, which appears to be primarily intended as an introduction before what I assume is “the real game” starts. Put it this way: I’m 6 chapters into that 14-chapter story after a little over an hour of play, and my save file says it’s 12% complete. That suggests you beat the story and there’s a whole lot more stuff to fiddle around with.

The narrative involves Rena, a female protagonist — quick, alert the Woke Content Detector idiots! — who works as an ambulance driver. One day, she displays some fancy moves on the job, and her coworker, who apparently never sleeps, signs her up to be part of a mysterious organisation known as “G.V.I.” who are somehow involved with motorsports, but in what appears to be a not entirely trustworthy sort of way. Rather than being a racing team themselves, it appears that they work with racing teams and… honestly, I don’t really understand at the point I’m at in the narrative because it hasn’t really explained anything other than the fact it somehow caused Rena’s amply-bosomed rival Gina to be pissy with her pretty much immediately upon first meeting her.

What then follows is a series of races and championships, beginning with a straightforward speedway race that is easy to win, and progressing through track, street and rally racing across several courses, many of which appear to have several variations in the same way that the Ridge Racer series’ tracks typically unfold as different routes through the same environments.

R: Racing’s unique selling point appears to be its “pressure” mechanic, whereby if you get up another driver’s arse for long enough, a bar above their car starts filling up, and when it fills, they’ll get so stressed out at your proximity to their rectum that they’ll do something stupid, allowing you to pass easily. There’s no obligation to fill the bar, and indeed doing so for every opponent is probably quite inefficient, but it’s fun nonetheless — and it’s a mechanic I’ve not really seen in a racer before. Presumably it’s attempting to reflect the sort of stress the player feels when they have an opponent bearing down on them in their rear-view mirror; in execution, it’s a tad “artificial”, but, well, it’s a mechanic that is there to be taken advantage of, so you might as well do so!

The soundtrack hails from post-Ridge Racer V Namco so unfortunately we’ve left the funky acid jazz beats of the late PS1 era far behind and are into cacophonous EDM territory. R: Racing’s soundtrack isn’t quite as obnoxiously awful as Ridge Racer V’s, but it’s almost aggressively bland, which is a bit of a shame. The Ridge Racer series has some serious highs when it gets music right, so it’s always unfortunate when an entry doesn’t really live up to those standards.

Still, it’s an enjoyable enough game. Although definitely more sim-esque than the mainline Ridge Racer titles, it’s also a lot more forgiving than the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports (do they still make those?) of the world. There’s a braking assist function for those allergic to actually using the brakes themselves, which makes the game feel really arcadey (and a tad easy), but you can still throw the cars into power slides if you’re aggressive enough with them. It’s just not necessarily the best thing to do at every opportunity in R: Racing, unlike mainline Ridge Racer.

I enjoyed what I played this evening! I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further. It occupies a nice sweet spot between sim and arcade that I rather like, and the story mode is intriguing, even if, as I suspect, it turns out to be a bit rushed and doesn’t really go anywhere. Even if that does end up being the case, I suspect the “Event Challenge” mode, or whatever it’s called, will have a fair bit of meat on the bones to fiddle around with. We’ll see, I guess, and I’ll write something more substantial once I’ve spent some more time with it.

For now, though, an evening well spent, I say.

#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 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 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!

#oneaday Day 90: Dream modding

The Dreamcast is a notoriously unreliable and temperamental console, particularly now the poor old thing is getting on a bit in years, so I’ve been meaning to look into optical drive emulators (ODEs) for a while, as I mentioned here.

Well, today I finally got together all the bits for one of these possible ODE solutions, known as GDEMU. This included the GDEMU board itself along with a mounting kit that plugs the gap left behind when you remove the Dreamcast’s original GD-ROM drive, and also allows easy access to the “disc change” button for multi-disc titles. (It also supposedly helps with airflow; having a honking great hole inside the Dreamcast supposedly isn’t great for that.)

I’d looked up instructions on how to fit a GDEMU and for the most part it seemed like a very simple job. I normally hand over anything that requires delicate use of tools to my wife as she’s much less cack-handed (and much more handy) than I am, but this looked like something I thought I could probably do myself. So I decided to be brave and to do it myself.

And you know what? It was easy. There were just a few steps to the process that went roughly as follows:

Remove three screws from the bottom of the Dreamcast
Remove the modem (it just pops out)
Remove the screw that is revealed when you remove the modem
Pop off the top of the Dreamcast
Remove three screws holding the GD-ROM drive in place
Remove the GD-ROM drive (it’s just plugged directly into a connector that sticks out from the bottom of the casing)
Screw the mounting kit to the GDEMU board (I forgot to do this, but getting the board back out to do it was easy… I then also forgot to put the button for the disc change in the mounting kit, but, again, it was easy enough to undo the work and correct the mistake)
Stick the GDEMU board into the socket the GD-ROM drive went in
Screw the GDEMU board into the Dreamcast case where the GD-ROM drive used to be
Put the case back together
Put the four screws in the base back in
Put the modem back in
Done!

Most places online also recommended putting some resistors in the power supply between the 12V pin and one of the three Ground pins. This is apparently because without the original GD-ROM drive drawing from the 12V… whatever it is, the inside can get a lot hotter than it would do normally, but this can be avoided with the resistors, which basically trick the power supply into thinking the GD-ROM drive is still drawing power. I don’t entirely understand everything about it, but I understood what I had to do, which was twist the wires on three resistors together, then poke one end in the hole with the 12V pin, and the other end in the hole with one of the ground pins.

This was the one part of the procedure I really wasn’t sure about. I haven’t done any sort of fiddling with electronic components before (outside of maybe a term’s work on very simple circuits — mostly logic gates — in secondary school Design and Technology and Science classes) so I was a bit nervous I’d poke something in the wrong hole and make things go bang. I was reassured by some people who take apart old computers and consoles all the time that it was very unlikely putting a few resistors in would make anything go bang, but I was still a bit concerned the resistors might not stay where they were supposed to be or would short-circuit something.

It took a few attempts to get it done to my satisfaction, but eventually I got the resistors in the right place and was satisfied that they were as secure as they were going to be without getting hot glue involved, and I put the whole shebang back together.

And, believe it or not, when I booted it up, it all worked first time! I was expecting something to go wrong somewhere, but no — everything went very smoothly, and I now have a Dreamcast that has a nice selection of games built right into it. No worrying about the drive failing mid-game and causing a reboot to the system menu; no worrying about discs not reading properly; no worrying about region, either.

I’m very happy with how things went, and I’m looking forward to using my Dreamcast a lot more now it’s been “revitalised” like this. It also encourages me to look into similar solutions for other consoles — particularly the Saturn. I have a Saturn that I acquired at some point (but no power supply, AV cables or controllers… or indeed games) that it would probably be fun to get loaded up with games in the same way. So I’ll probably do that at some point.

Long term I’d like to get all my classic systems hooked up with a solution like this, such as the Everdrive range for cart-based systems. As fun as it is to collect for old consoles, I’ve been burned just a few times too many by cartridges that don’t work — I have two copies of Desert Strike for SNES that don’t work in the exact same way, for example — plus I don’t really have a lot of room left for collecting, either.

There’s still a certain magic about playing games on classic hardware — and part of that, admittedly, is using original media; the clunk of the cartridge slot on consoles like the SNES in particular is a fun part of the experience. But as many of these old games are starting to run into reliability issues by virtue of their age, it’s great that we have alternative solutions that allow us to still enjoy the consoles themselves, even if the media is past its best. And for everything else, we have emulation and modern, officially licensed solutions like the Evercade.

Now maybe time for a bit of Dreamcast before bedtime, I say.

#oneaday Day 87: The most toxic person in retro gaming

One of the things that continually surprises me is quite how toxic the retro gaming community, particularly in the UK, can really be. I’m fortunate that I have only ever really encountered people who are thoroughly nice and lovely — and, even better, have been able to draw inspiration from them to make my own creative work better.

In this regard, I’d particularly like to throw some love (and some links to their YouTube channels) at, in no particular order and off the top of my head, RoseTintedSpectrum, WhatHoSnorkers, Timberwolf, Gouldfish on Games, Dudley of Yesterzine, Kim Justice, Slopes Game Room, Digitiser, More Fun Making It, Beyond the Scanlines, Gears of Games, Yawning Angel and doubtless myriad others that I’m forgetting. All of these folks are thoroughly lovely, supportive people that I am happy to have had direct contact with to varying degrees at various points over the course of the last few years. Click those links and subscribe to all of them. They do amazing work.

Sadly, there’s a really unpleasant underbelly to the retro gaming community in the UK, and a lot of it centres around an individual known variously as “George Bum”, “George Cropper” (not his real name), “Funky Spectrum” and any number of other aliases. “George” is a serial harasser who has been thrown off YouTube for his behaviour, and now festers in his own filth on his own little website (which, no, I’m not linking to), surrounded by chirruping sycophants who hang on his every shit-encrusted word — many of whom are very much old enough to know better.

I’m not pulling any punches here: “George” is an absolutely vile human being, and the way he has picked on several members of the retro gaming community for years at this point without any sort of punishment is utterly repugnant. He has particularly targeted the YouTuber Octavius with stalker-like obsessiveness, and is almost as bad with his fixation on Peter “Nostalgia Nerd” Leigh and his Norwich-based vegan bar-cum-arcade Barcadia. Most recently, he’s had Kim Justice in his sights, because he thinks her well-researched book is not as good as his AI-generated drivel that he listed on Amazon for £250.

And yet no-one does anything about him. Because there’s not really anything that can be done about this festering waste of space any more.

He’s in his element on the Twitter of 2024, which is a disgusting sinkhole full of the absolute worst people on the entire Internet — many of whom are openly spouting their garbage under their real names — although I take some small comfort from the fact that anyone with any sense has abandoned the platform long ago.

He’s been banned from YouTube for his harassment videos. (Of course, he maintains he did “nothing wrong”.) Now, at least, he’s confined to his stupid website. Sadly, as it’s self-hosted I suspect there’s not much anyone can really do about him short of actually raising a legal objection to some of the things he posts on there. And I doubt anyone wants to go through the time, energy and expense involved in doing that.

Which sucks, really, because it means this festering boil on the arse of UK retrogaming will never truly get lanced. All I can really do is encourage anyone reading this to never go anywhere near him. He is Bad News.