#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.

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 835: All night long

Remember how yesterday I said a group of friends and I were going to play Big Walk "this afternoon"? Yeah, well, we started in the afternoon, my time… and concluded twelve fucking hours later. I have never, ever had a multiplayer session so long that the batteries in my headset went flat. Until now! (It's also been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter on a video game, but those are usually solo.)

There are some mild Big Walk spoilers ahead. I will not be sharing complete puzzle solutions, but I may talk a bit about the thought process involved in some of them. You have been warned.

I don't think any of us expected the session to go on for so long, since we were in Big Walk's "postgame". We had partly (and correctly) assumed that the postgame would just involve going around and cleaning up any puzzles we didn't complete as part of the process you go through to "beat" the main game, but we were also aware that we'd discovered a place where there were fifteen empty slots for the "Kong" figurines that are your rewards for completing the various puzzles, and thus there was probably still a fair amount of work to do. We didn't know what the end result of doing said work would be, though.

We should have known, really; in our process of beating the main game, there weren't fifteen puzzles left over. And sure enough, once you get into the postgame, a selection of "purple Kong" puzzles unlock in a part of the map that was previously inaccessible. These mostly take the form of challenges similar to puzzles found elsewhere in the game, but made significantly more difficult and/or time-consuming somehow.

That said, there were also two puzzles from our "main game" leftovers which had left us reasonably stumped, so we had intended to come back to them. Both of those proved to be extremely time-consuming, too, so in retrospect it's no surprise that solving fifteen puzzles in total took twelve hours. We did make up for it with one of the other main game leftover puzzles taking us less than two minutes, though, because our team are now Big Walk pros, apparently.

Some of the most interesting challenges we encountered involved having to split up the party in various ways. One puzzle tasked us with looking through telescopes to find a series of four pedestals, and once there was at least one person at each pedestal, we then had to find a way to synchronise our button presses. Another challenged us to find a specific sound somewhere on the island. Another still involved locating things that we had used in various other puzzles and taking them to another location. In each of these situations, the challenge was communicating over a long distance: the game does have walkie-talkie items, but given you are limited in what you can carry — you can hold one thing in your hands, one on a belt loop (once you've found one) and one on a backpack (likewise), but you cannot access the belt or backpack items yourself — it's not always practical for everyone to carry one of these. And besides, you have to find them first anyway!

We found a way in each instance, though. And it wasn't just the long-distance puzzles that gave us these communication challenges, either. One of the "purple Kong" puzzles required us to figure out how to communicate complex information between two different rooms, when one room could use an intercom but the other could only respond by turning a light on or off. Another tasked us with communicating auditory information between rooms with a completely soundproof barrier between them. Another still tested the limits of how precisely we could verbally communicate visual information.

The one we left for last was a harder version of an earlier "golf" puzzle involving an extremely heavy ball that we had solved earlier in the game. The initial, main game implementation of this puzzle was fairly easy to solve, but the postgame variant involved getting the ball over a significantly longer distance, which required some creative thinking and teamwork. Among the many talents and skills that Big Walk tests, patience is one of the most significant of all of them. In this modern, attention-deficit world, I suspect there will be at least some groups who find the patience and endurance challenges to be some of the most taxing.

Still, the "true" ending was worth it, and I was grateful we didn't have to go through the immensely difficult "finale" of the main game again. That finale was a great experience, but having to do it again after twelve hours would have probably killed me.

One thing I really appreciated about Big Walk as a whole is that it's just an excellently designed game. It's a game which understands that when you're tasking people with confronting some significant, cooperative challenges together, it pays to have a clear, distinct visual language that everyone can learn to understand quickly and easily. Subtly, and without explicitly telling the player at any point, it introduces you to various concepts as you progress through the game — many of which are in the "starter area" — and coming to recognise those different elements of the game and what they mean is a key part of learning to play Big Walk effectively. Communicating your understanding of those elements to the rest of your group is important, too; if you know something but the others don't, it won't help the group as a whole if you keep it to yourself!

Anyway, we successfully completed all of the game — with the only thing (I think) we didn't find in our playthrough being the "shiny paint station". It was very much worth it, and if you have at least one good friend to play it with, I highly encourage you to do so — and to take the time to play it from start to finish. It takes a while, but it's very much a worthwhile activity to spend a few sessions on together. I certainly won't be forgetting our experiences in a hurry.

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#oneaday Day 834: Gaming update

One of the things I was originally thinking about doing with MoeGamer was doing more regular "updates" on what I've been playing recently. I still haven't actually done that — at least partly because I haven't determined a good way to do it; perhaps a weekly "What I've Been Playing" column? — so for now, today, I am going to provide that update in the form of a blog post here. Strap yourself in!

I've had several games on the go recently. My Final Fantasy XI playthrough stalled when Oliver went missing and I haven't picked it up again since that; I've got to a point in that game where it feels quite demanding to play in terms of attention span and patience, and I haven't quite felt up to that yet. That's not a criticism — I think one of the best things about Final Fantasy XI is its depth and complexity — but I do very much have to be in the mood for it. I also have the issue that I finished the bit of the game that I was most interested in playing — the Chains of Promathia expansion — and thus I'm early in Treasures of Aht Urhgan and it hasn't quite "hooked" me in the same way just yet.

I have, however, started a few other games. Probably the "main" one of these I'm playing at the moment is Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, which I've been meaning to have a look at for pretty much the last ten years. I did start it one evening when we had some friends over, we all got a little tipsy and one of them wanted to see an RPG, but I set it aside after that because I was already playing some other things. This time around, I started over (again) and have been thoroughly enraptured by it; it's an excellent game, with speedy combat and progression, a real, genuine sense of adventure, and a compelling story. It's very long for an Ys game — I'm 40 hours in and only just getting hints that we might be getting towards an ending, but my map exploration rate is only about 75% — but I think it works. "What Ys is" has changed a great deal over the years, and it seems that this one is (quite rightly) regarded as one of the best of the "modern Ys" titles.

I've also been playing Suikoden as part of the HD Remaster collection, and I've been mostly enjoying that. It's another game that I feel like I have to be in the right mood for, although this is less to do with its complexity and more to do with its relatively sedate pace of proceedings. I need to get back to it and finish it, because I was enjoying it a lot (aside from the army battles, which suck) and I would like to see how it ends. I also believe it's quite short, and I'm a good way through it, so it would be nice to cross it off the list sooner rather than later. Perhaps I'll play some of that today.

The next "big game" I have on my radar to play is Wadjet Eye Games' Nighthawks, a text-based RPG which is heavily inspired by (but not licensed from) the White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade setting — with some notable differences, such as "no Masquerade". I played the demo of this a while back and it looks like being something incredibly special. Beautiful art, excellent voice acting, a well-crafted script with memorable characters — I'm looking forward to giving it a good amount of attention, and almost certainly writing something about it once I've spent some time with it.

I was hoping to get both Ys VIII and Suikoden finished before Nighthawks came out, but I don't think that's going to happen, given that Nighthawks is out early next week. I should be able to polish off at least one of them, though; at the rate I'm going, I think Ys VIII is likely to be down for the count first, but we'll see.

On the non-narrative game front, I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 after really enjoying (and completing) the first one while we were away on holiday. I've also been playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which is a game I like a lot, but for some reason find it difficult to focus on for long periods of time.

I think part of the issue with Kirby is that each level has a bunch of optional objectives to complete, and it doesn't reveal them until you've either already done them, made progress on one that has multiple steps, or just completed the level without achieving them. In the latter case, it only reveals one of the optional objectives at a time, so if you have absolutely no idea what they are, it takes up to four playthroughs of a single level to get all the Stuff. This feels a bit like padding, but the game as a whole is so charming (and the levels so relatively quick to play through) that I should probably just get over myself and get on with it. I've actually been doing just that at lunchtimes this week.

Finally, this afternoon a group of friends and I will be playing some Big Walk, which we've been working our way through at the weekends. We finished it a few weeks back, but we're going back in to try and clean up some of the puzzles we didn't complete prior to heading for the ending. It's been a really good time; I was worried that it would be another Blue Prince kind of situation, where a bunch of critics lost their shit over how "good" it supposedly was, but I'd end up hating it, but no; I've been really enjoying it.

Anyway, that's where I am. I think some Ys for a few hours, then Big Walk later. Then tomorrow I'll do some video recording. Sounds like a plan to me!

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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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#oneaday Day 818: Gaming is doing everything it can to drive its oldest fans away

I've been playing video games for as long as I can remember existing. I grew up playing games on the Atari 8-bit and ST home computers, and since then, I have followed along with the explosive growth and technological advancement of the medium every step of the way. And yet today, in 2026, I feel like I'm being specifically pushed away in so many ways.

There are lots of contributing factors to this, but the things that come immediately mind today both relate to Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the upcoming third and final part of the Final Fantasy Remake project. We have a release date for it at last — April 8, 2027 — but two things came to light today which pissed me right off: firstly, the fact that not one, but two pieces of DLC and an "expansion pass" have been announced for it more than half a year before the game has been released, and secondly, the physical editions on all platforms will require you to download the bulk of the game rather than installing it from disc, thereby making said physical editions almost completely worthless.

On the first point: you have spent three games telling this story which once took one 40-hour game to tell. Just include everything in this fucking final part.

Those who have embraced an "all-digital" future will doubtless not be bothered by the second point, but I am someone who has cultivated a collection of over a thousand physical releases across a variety of platforms, and a big part of the reason I have done that is as a sort of investment in my future entertainment: for the next significant number of years, I will be able to enjoy a whole variety of different video game experiences on a bunch of different consoles. And with this looking like it may well be the last generation of consoles I have any interest in whatsoever, thanks to Sony's plans to give up physical media and the adoption of the odious "Game-Key Cards" on Switch 2, it feels increasingly important to have all that stuff ready to play.

Now, for a lot of the stuff I've bought, I can just put it in a console and play it. It's one of the big reasons why I've bought a lot of limited-print stuff — I know a lot of people don't like those companies for various reasons, but one thoroughly admirable thing that pretty much all of them have committed to is only putting out a physical version when a game is finished. That means you buy it, you put it in, you play it. No downloading updates; no DLC (there have been a few exceptions to this, but for the most part anything that was once DLC is included in these physical versions) and no requirement to be connected to the Internet. You know, like physical media always was prior to everything we own being perpetually connected to the Internet, and gradually, slowly but surely, getting increasingly fucked-up over time?

This news for Final Fantasy VII Revelation fucks with this, though. I have copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth that I can install from disc and play right now, even if my Internet connection isn't working — or, in the years to come, if Sony were to decide to just switch off the servers that were delivering downloadable game files to people. Were I to buy a physical copy of Revelation, though, I would not be able to do that, because the whole game isn't on the damned disc. So what happens if, in 20 or 30 years, assuming I'm still around and capable of playing video games at that point, I decide I want to replay the entire Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy? I just… can't play the last bit if the servers are no longer online?

And you might think that's an extreme scenario, but there are games I have on my shelf that are 30+ years old that I am still pulling down and playing. And I will continue to play an original copy by choice if it is available. So it's entirely possible that multiple decades from now, I will want to play something that was released in the 2020s.

Of course, it's also possible that in the future, storage costs will continue to plummet, and it will be practical to have some form of storage device loaded up with a huge library of PS5 and Switch 2 games, just like I have a chunky SSD full of everything from Atari 2600 up to PlayStation and Saturn games hooked up to my MiSTer. At that point, physical copies may well have ceased to matter.

Couple all this with Sony's eagerness to fight the apparently mistaken assumption that we are "buying" games when we click the "buy" button in their "store", and it doesn't give one a lot of hope for the long-term preservation of what is still, at its core, an incredibly exciting creative, artistic medium.

At this rate, we're going to have everything up to about PlayStation 2 preserved perfectly, but after that things are going to start getting a lot more patchy. No pun intended, given the additional considerations that post-launch updates bring to the table.

I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't bother thinking about this stuff. It's entirely possible that by the time any of my concerns actually start to matter, I'll be long dead. I just don't like seeing something that I have cared deeply about for my whole life continually make itself worse and worse and worse, all in the name of the "perpetual growth" rot economy and the pursuit of never-ending, continually unsatisfied greed. I don't want to feel that future generations simply won't be able to enjoy gaming the way I've enjoyed it for the last 40+ years. And it's hard to flip the switch to the "I don't care, just enjoy it now" setting, after so long of actually caring!

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#oneaday Day 814: Death of a publication

I've finally finished my efforts to catalogue all the games-related articles (including roundups, re-reviews, type-in listings and issue disk bonuses) from Page 6/New Atari User. My data sheet has over 2,000 rows in it, though some of those are repeats. Even so, that's a lot of material to work with.

As I found myself reviewing the latter-day issues in the magazine's run, though, I found myself feeling an intense sense of melancholy and almost mourning, I guess. Over the course of the publication's complete run, you can see at a glance when it was doing the best (full-colour covers with specially commissioned artwork or photography to appear prominently and attractively on newsstands) and when things started to go downhill (single-colour covers, the return to a subscription-only model) and when things were nearing the end (a switch to an A5 format, with less and less in the way of commercial releases covered each issue).

Here's a shot from Atarimania, which hosts a full archive of Page 6/New Atari User issues, that shows three stages of this evolution:

I found myself feeling sad all over again while working my way through these issues — because I remember this happening first time around. I remember getting Page 6/New Atari User every month, and in those latter years, feeling like something which had been a fixture in my life for as long as I could remember was ailing and would eventually die. Page 6 started before I was old enough to know what a computer or a magazine was, so it was always present throughout my childhood and adolescence.

Its final issue — in which the editor, Les Ellingham, made an unfortunately unkept promise to readers that there would be six more issues of the magazine before it finally closed for good — is a sad read. Even my Dad, who had been a contributor from midway through the magazine's run up until its very last issue, had given up writing about specifically Atari-related stuff, and was instead posting a regular column about the wonders of the then-nascent (at least in consumer-accessible form) Internet and World Wide Web. My article spreadsheet has just a single game-related entry for that final issue: a public domain version of Tetris for Atari 8-bit.

One of the most remarkable things about Page 6/New Atari User is that it wasn't the Atari ST coverage which lasted until the b(l)itter end. No; the last few issues contained pretty much nothing but Atari 8-bit coverage, which provided the first hints of the fact that the "Atari Classic" scene, as the magazine referred to it at the time, would continue to thrive in the years to come, even in the absence of a major specialist publication.

The ST scene is still alive too, but I can't help but feel like there's a lot more Atari 8-bit enthusiasts out there than Atari ST people. After all, the ST marked the beginning of the shift towards all home computing being PC-based; the ST certainly had its own distinctive, unique features, but it also marked a point where the distinction between purportedly different platforms was less pronounced in various ways. Thus, I suspect what happened, is people who were once ST enthusiasts just sort of… "upgraded" to MS-DOS and then Windows-based PCs and then never looked back. That's certainly what my family did — although I certainly never quite left the Atari machines behind, as they had been so important to me growing up, and continue to be important to me to this day.

Anyway, the thing I think I find most sad about the slow death of Page 6/New Atari User is that it was clearly taking a mental toll on Les. In some of the last few issues, he described how the editor of an American Atari newsletter had found himself succumbing to ill health, at least partly due to the stress of working on his publication, and he indicated that he had no desire to do himself a mischief in the same way — particularly because, in these latter years, he was also trying to support himself with handmade crafts. In one of the last issues, he mentions that he thinks he might have to get a part-time job to continue supporting himself, because between the magazine and his crafts, there was no longer enough money coming in to completely make ends meet.

But all good things have to eventually come to an end, and in the tech space in particular, the rate at which things progress can be absolutely mind-boggling at times. I don't think there's any shame in Page 6/New Atari User's eventual bowing out, even with the regrettably unkept promise from Les' final editorial. To consider that this was a publication which continuously supported both the Atari 8-bit and, once it hit the market, the ST, from 1983 up until 1998 is absolutely mindblowing. Les' refusal to let go until it was absolutely, definitely no longer viable to continue in any way whatsoever is incredibly admirable — as is the commitment of the freelance contributors who kept sending in articles issue after issue, without fail, like my Dad.

So yeah. While reliving the end of something that brought me so much joy as a child has made me a little bit maudlin, I also continue to celebrate everything this publication achieved — and continue to derive joy from it as I grow older, since I am now in possession of the complete run of issues that I grew up with.

It saddens me a bit that when something similar happens these days, in the form of a website going down and no longer being accessible, that there is often no easy way to simply look back fondly over past "issues" in the same way as you can with a magazine. There are many, many online publications that are just gone these days, and while The Internet Archive has done an incredible job of preserving some of them, there are others that we'll just never see again in any form. I know — I've worked on a bunch of them, and now most of my articles are now buried, nigh-unsearchable, in the archives of other sites that ingested the data of the closing publications, often introducing a bunch of errors in the process.

Page 6/New Atari User, though, that will always exist in the form that I knew and loved it. So although I'm sad all over again at the end of such an important publication, I know that I will continue to derive joy — and attain knowledge — from browsing that archive of issues over and over again. One day I might even get around to learning how to program the Atari 8-bits properly beyond simple BASIC. You never know.

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#oneaday Day 813: That sure was a big walk

We finished Big Walk this evening. It was excellent! I am going to share some spoilers after the image, so consider yourself warned. If you would like to read something not spoileriffic about Big Walk, may I direct you to the article I wrote about it here? Thank you.

One of the things Big Walk continually impresses on you is the importance of communication, whether that's communicating over short to moderate distances in order to collaborate on puzzles, taking the time to just have a chat, or finding a means to get one another's attention from a long distance apart if you happen to find yourself separated.

I suspect every group will find their own ways of dealing with this particular challenge — and every group will have its own members that, for one reason or another, present additional challenges to everyone, including themselves — but it's something you will likely settle into fairly quickly in collaboration with your walking partners. I'd be interested to try it with other people and see how different the dynamic is between group members and group sizes — though I'm also conscious that once you've solved a lot of these puzzles once, it's a lot easier to play through the game, so I don't know how inherently replayable the whole thing is.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because towards the end of the game, Big Walk takes away two very important things that you have likely been using for your communication up until this point: your visual identity — in other words, the colours you have chosen to represent your character, which you can "paint" onto each other in the introductory stage of the game — and your voice.

Yes, the finale sequence of Big Walk completely takes away the ability to voice chat with one another, meaning you will have to find ways of communicating not only each participant's part in a puzzle solution, but also determine between you what on Earth you are supposed to do in each puzzle.

Thankfully, Big Walk does have a fairly robust gesturing system that allows you a surprising amount of flexibility in terms of waggling your noodle arms around, but you still have to find a way to agree what each gesture means, having likely not had an opportunity to do so verbally beforehand — unless, of course, you had the foresight to do so "just in case" you were not able to communicate through voice. But why would you need to do that? Taking players' voices away in a game built around cooperative play and communication would just be mean, wouldn't it?

Well, yes, it would, but it also makes Big Walk's finale sequence incredibly memorable. There are, I think, seven puzzles you have to complete in the run up to the actual ending, and each challenges your group to think on their feet and find a way to get various messages across to one another without using words and without being able to visually identify who is whom. It really works extraordinarily well — I won't spoil the actual solutions for the puzzles here, for the sake of anyone who didn't heed my spoiler warning but is still intending to actually play Big Walk, but I'll just say that the "kettle puzzle" was my favourite for how gleefully silly it was.

Anyway, once you finish Big Walk, there is a "postgame" to play, too, which we're probably going to tackle in a subsequent session. There are a lot of puzzles on the map that we didn't solve in our various explorations, and we found a place where you have to put a whopping fifteen of the collectible thingies (we call them "Kongs" after their resemblance to a classic dog toy) in order to do… something? We don't know what yet ,though I have a suspicion. That's a job for another day though.

I'm impressed how substantial the game actually is. It took us three very long sessions to get through the entirety of the "main" game, and there's still a fair bit more for us to do. This is one of numerous reasons why I don't think it fits into the ill-defined "friendslop" category; to me, "friendslop" says games that you play with your friends that are over and done with in one session, and which "don't matter". Not in the sense that they're worthless, but in the sense that they don't have a long-term overarching goal; each session is self-contained, like an individual play of a board game, rather than part of a broader "campaign" in which you're working together to achieve something.

Anyway. I had fun! And aside from one of those finale puzzles, which I found very difficult to get my head around for some reason (as did everyone else, I think) I am relieved that Big Walk, despite whipping much of games media into a similar frenzy as we saw for Blue Prince last year, is a very different sort of experience. And for me, it's nice to actually be able to enjoy an indie darling for once, because on a significant number of past occasions, they have left me cold. This led me to doubt that Big Walk would actually be any good, but I'm glad I decided to give it a try. It was very much worth it.

Now it's nearly 1am and I need to sleep. But that was, indeed, a Big Walk.

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#oneaday Day 812: Research update

My efforts to catalogue all the noteworthy mentions of Atari home computer games and software (including type-in listings) that I might, one day, want to make a video about are proceeding apace. I have finished reviewing issue 50 of Page 6/New Atari User, and my spreadsheet is up to 1,179 lines. This may have been a mistake.

I joke, of course. This is actually proving to be a very valuable, helpful exercise for a variety of reasons: first of all is my originally stated, intended purpose for all this: to be able to easily track down press coverage for games I might want to do videos on for my Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series. But some other benefits are coming to light, too. For example, a number of these games have multiple entries on the list thanks to being featured in various types of articles — besides straight-up individual title reviews, there are also compilation reviews and broader topic roundups — which means I can see how (or if) various titles were responded to differently by different reviewers or in different contexts.

Sometimes a game might be a hard sell at full price, but a decent use of some pocket money if and when it comes to a budget label. Sometimes a game might not have resonated with one reviewer, but really hit home with another — or vice versa. Sometimes a game might be a good inclusion as part of a compilation, but not quite strong enough to stand on its own merits. It's interesting to see all these things, and to have the various issues that relate to the various mentions of all these titles at my fingertips.

The other main benefit is more personal. I originally stopped doing the regular Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series because I was worried I was running out of interesting things to talk about. This nearly 1,200 line spreadsheet — which is set to increase considerably in size as I continue to review Page 6/New Atari User issues up until the final Issue 85 from Autumn 1998 — has shown me that there is a veritable wealth of stuff I haven't even thought about tackling as yet. Whether or not I'll be able to stick to the original "A to Z" formula I haven't yet determined — as you might expect, there are some letters that just aren't all that commonly used to begin titles — but in terms of the sheer number of things, to have this amount just from one magazine's run is kind of incredible.

Once this process is finished, I would like to expand my efforts to other magazines. Initially I will likely cover the other early Atari magazines — Atari User, Antic and ANALOG being the main ones — but may well expand to some slightly later ones such as Atari ST User and ST Action, both of which I used to read back in the day. I'm already seeing with the choice of titles covered just in Page 6/New Atari User that they didn't even attempt to cover absolutely everything that was coming out in time for each issue, so it's very likely indeed that each magazine I look at will cover different things at different times. This, in turn, will make it interesting to compare reactions to titles between a European (Page 6 and New Atari User) and North American (Antic and ANALOG) audience, among other things.

Anyway, this is a substantial project, but it's going well and I'm getting a little bit done each day. I've already got more than enough to make use of when I start up the video production machine again, but it would be great to have enough material to last me a very long time indeed. (Honestly, I probably already have that, but the more the merrier, I say.)

I'm actually getting quite excited about rediscovering this focused approach. Checking the dismal viewing figures on my recent Terranigma video only convinced me further that this is probably the right thing to do for the sake of my own enjoyment. It may not necessarily lead to particularly impressive viewing figures, income, subscribers or anything like that — but honestly, I'm happy with how my channel has gradually grown over the course of the last few years. I have nearly 4,200 subscribers on YouTube now, and I would guess that a significant proportion of them are there for the Atari stuff that was my channel's main focus for quite some time. Switching over to something that I specialise in allows me to say "fuck The Algorithm, this is for me and anyone who happens to want to come along for the ride". And that's much more fun when the whole thing is supposed to be a hobby!

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#oneaday Day 811: Playing a game with no "point"

While out on a walk this evening, I was listening to the soundtrack of a game that I really love, played a lot some years ago… and haven't really touched since. That game is A Valley Without Wind.

As my thoughts wandered during my little 2km circuit of the Common, I started to think about why I haven't really played it much since (checks dates on Achievements) 2020? No, I definitely played it well before that. Mid-2010s. They probably added Achievements later after some entitled little prick on Steam got pissy that they couldn't have their meaningless shinies. (checks blog) Ah. 2012. Fuck me.

Anyway, before I got distracted, what was my point? Oh, right, the reason why I haven't played this all that much since 2012… and a brief return in 2020, apparently. I think it's because A Valley Without Wind is one of those games that there is no real "end" to. You have a long-term objective to complete, yes — defeating an Overlord — but once you do that, the game continues. There is a never-ending stream of Overlords to defeat, of gradually increasing difficulty, but, as far as I am aware, no way to "win"; no way to "beat" the game completely.

As time has gone on, for one reason or another, I have drifted away from games like this, and I'm not entirely sure why, because it's certainly not because I don't enjoy them. Over the years, I've had a lot of fun with various types of "freeform" experience, ranging from Starflight on Atari ST through SimCity on SNES, SimCity 2000, SimCopter, The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3 on PC, and, yes, A Valley Without Wind. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I absolutely adored A Valley Without Wind when I first started playing it.

There was just something about it that… resonated with me. It was probably a combination of things: the janky but creative gameplay; the sense of emergent narrative; the chiptune-esque music; the baffling aesthetic which looked like half the team wanted to make an Amiga game and the other half knew what "Super VGA" meant. I played that game a lot when I first got it, although Steam claims I've only played it for 10 hours. I'm pretty sure the bulk of my playtime was before Steam started recording how long you'd played something.

But yeah. I haven't gone back. And I think the reason is that knowledge that it doesn't end. There's no way to "finish" the game, and thus it feels like there's never a good time to start it. This is a silly way to think about it, of course; there are lots of really good games that never end, and if I thought this about all of them, I'd never play any of them!

Weeeelll… I kind of don't. Y'see, I find finishing games enormously satisfying, and I love seeing the variety of different ways that games handle a narrative and/or mechanical finale sequence. Given that my tastes tend to skew towards the narrative-centric RPG end of things, you can see how I might find it tricky to figure out how to fit in a game like A Valley Without Wind. It's easy to fall into a trap of feeling that these games have no "point"; that it's not worth starting them if you can't finish them.

And yet I'm conscious that I'm deliberately depriving myself of things that I know I enjoy. Focusing on one or two "Big Games" at a time is certainly a good way to get through your library and, over the long-term, have a range of experiences that are both broad and deep. But it certainly doesn't hurt to punctuate those Big Games that have a definitive beginning, middle and end with something that just… doesn't end.

I mean, I have no problem spending an evening playing arcade games. Some of those never end. Even the ones that do are built to be replayed. And so why am I holding myself back from playing games that I know I like?

Perhaps I just need to make more time for experiences like this, and stop worrying about whether or not it's ever the "right" time to play something in particular. If I'm in the mood to play something, just play the damn thing!

Aren't brains fun? We're talking about something that is supposed to be relaxing entertainment here, and here I am, agonising and stressing over it. I need to stop doing that and just do what feels right, fun and just plain nice in the moment.

I need to go and have a bath as I'm stinky and sweaty after walking 2km in what turned out to be an incredibly humid evening. But after that, y'know what? I might just fire up A Valley Without Wind for the first time in six years. And realise that I have almost certainly completely forgotten how to play it.

(Aside: you can finish A Valley Without Wind 2, and in many ways it's a better game, with a belter of a theme song. But there's something I've always just really, really liked about the first one.)

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#oneaday Day 810: Compiling information

It will probably not surprise you to hear that, as an autistic person, I quite like organising sets of information into a visually pleasing and/or easy-to-refer-to manner. To that end, ahead of my intention to reboot my Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series, I have been doing something I have been meaning to do for a while that will aid with research.

I've been going through old magazines — just Page 6/New Atari User to begin with, but I will expand my efforts at a later time — to determine which issues had reviews (or otherwise substantial articles) of what in them, and recording that information in a big ol' searchable, filterable, sortable table. Or, y'know, a spreadsheet. (I guess this makes me a "spreadsheet person" after years of resisting such things.)

This will (hopefully) make it much easier to track down these articles when researching something — and might also give me some ideas on what to cover, too.

One of the things I find most interesting when either revisiting old favourites or discovering new ones is taking a look at what the "professionals" had to say about them, and seeing if they treated them fairly, or if they were talking nonsense. I don't really mind either way; there is value to both confirming a critical opinion from back in the day, and having the opportunity to look at it from a more detached, modern perspective and perhaps disagreeing with what was said back then.

It's also kind of interesting to, in some cases, give these games a bit more time and attention than they might have perhaps had back in the day, particularly if the reviewer in question clearly didn't have a lot of time to spend with them, or didn't understand them completely. I mean, we're only talking a play session of maybe 20-60 minutes when it comes to most of my videos, but sometimes you do notice properly intriguing things about games after spending a bit of protracted time with them, rather than spending a few minutes on them and then moving on to something else.

Alongside the traditional "reviews", I'm also recording mentions of games in things like topic-based roundups, type-in games (which can be just as interesting and worthwhile as commercial software!) and… basically any mention of something I might want to cover, and which I might want to refer to what was being said about it Back In The Day.

It's going to take a while to compile all this information — particularly if I want to throw other magazines into the mix — but I think it's going to be a worthwhile endeavour that will be helpful for the direction I think I want to take the YouTube channel (back) in. It also gives me a good reason to look back at old computer and video games magazines, and I will always welcome any opportunity to do that. Not that I need a reason. But it is nice to have a reason to do so.

Anyway, my intent is still to hold fire on YouTube until after our holiday, then get back into the swing of things with the rebooted Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series in mid-September, likely with my first recording session being the weekend of the 19th (meaning the first of the new videos will come out the following week). I'm sure I'll have a good chunk of this organising done by then, and I think it will be enormously helpful in adding some additional insight to my videos that will hopefully be as interesting for anyone watching them as it is for me making them.

Right this second, though, after taking care of 28 issues of Page 6 today, I think I've earned a bit of video game time. So it's back to Ys VIII for me!

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