#oneaday Day 345: For the sake of fun

I recently picked up the Capcom Fighting Collection 2, primarily on the strength of it having Project Justice in there — one of a few games from the PS1-Dreamcast era that I seriously regret letting go of at some point in the past, considering the prices they command now. (The other is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1.) And, spending a bit of time mashing buttons through a brief attempt at Project Justice last night, it got me thinking: I should spend more time with games that are not just about getting from beginning to end, and then being done with them.

I've had this thought before, of course. But I'm feeling particularly conscious of it once again, particularly after rolling credits on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at the end of last week. Games that have a clear beginning, middle and end are great, and nothing will ever make me want to step away from experiencing games with particularly strong stories. But I'm also very aware of the fact that there are gaming experiences I specifically shy away from because they're not something you can start, work your way through, and finish.

I'm not really talking about what some people call "lifestyle games" like Fortnite and Minecraft. I'm talking about things like arcade games, fighting games, that sort of thing. But also the kinds of games that are friendly to just dipping into for a bit, having a good time and then setting them aside again for a while.

I think part of the problem I have is that so many games these days want to attach a story to the experience. It can feel like a somewhat overwhelming commitment to have multiple titles on the go at once, if you hope to keep all these narratives straight in your head. Of course, some might argue that the stories in some games aren't really worth thinking about too hard — but at the same time, I've played enough games over the years that have been less than favourably received critically, but which actually turned out to have meaningful and worthwhile things to say. I want to pay attention, but sometimes it feels difficult and overwhelming to.

Having finished Clair Obscur, I'm heading back into the Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition trenches as my "main" game. But perhaps I shouldn't think of it like that. If I think of something as a "main" game, that invites a sense of guilt when I play something that is not that. And, realistically speaking, I have zero obligations to anyone in terms of what I play. I never have done, except perhaps when I was working on gaming publications and was obliged to have played the things that I reviewed. (And quite right, too.)

This is definitely, as I think I've said before, a mindset that I have accidentally conditioned myself into. Back in earlier times — I think probably Xbox 360/PS3 and backwards — I had absolutely no problem jumping back and forth between all manner of different games according to mood. When I found something that gripped me, I'd stick with it; when I wasn't in the mood for something, I wouldn't play it, and I certainly wouldn't spend any time feeling a weirdly anxious sense of quasi-panic about whether I really should be playing it just because I'd started it.

Part of what got me into this mental mess is the desire to create things online: videos and articles. I've always loved creating things, and having the opportunity to just share all these things that I love with the world is great. But it also, at times, affects my brain in somewhat unwelcome ways. Should I play this game For Fun, or should I play it with a mind to Making Something About It? The correct answer is "it doesn't matter, it can be both, or it can be just one, just do what you feel like you want to do at any given time rather than agonising over it".

I don't think the answer is specifically scheduling my time. I tried that a while back for a feature on MoeGamer, and while the experiment was an interesting one, I think it's too inflexible, and it takes things too far in the other direction. What if I'm not in the mood to play a sim on Tuesdays? What then?

This hobby is supposed to be fun, and with the sheer amount of stimulation it offers these days, it's easy to get very overwhelmed. At times like that, you need to take a step back, think "yes, I actually do feel like playing Project Justice this evening, even though I still have Xenoblade on the go" and then go bloody well play Project Justice.

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 343: MiSTerious

I have been, as you do, contemplating my impending ownership of a MiSTer Multisystem 2. And, as so often happens with such things, I have been pondering how I might make good use of it as something that spurs me on to be creative.

The obvious, simple answer is to use it to write about things and make videos in the places I already have: this site, my YouTube channel, MoeGamer. But part of me also wants to start something new, something a bit different.

Let me tell you the idea I've been kicking around in my head. I'm not particularly looking for "feedback" on this, but I think it will help me out to get this out of my head and onto the page.

You know how everyone likes to say they have a "newsletter" now, rather than a "blog"? Well, I was thinking about that, and thinking about how it might be fun to take that "newsletter" idea a little more literally. Specifically, I was thinking about how practical it might be to do some sort of newsletter/blog thing where, rather than individual articles being about one thing, each post was actually an "issue", like a magazine.

I was thinking it might be interesting to do such a thing with the MiSTer Multisystem 2. Each "issue" could have a brief summary of any news about the system itself — and perhaps about the broader MiSTer ecosystem, though as I type this I know absolutely bugger all about that — and then move on to some magazine-style features, perhaps with a theme for each issue. There could be a "preview" of an upcoming "modern retro" game by one of today's indie developers. There could be a "big review" of a noteworthy game that particularly fit the theme. There could be tips and tricks for classic games. There could be short, capsule reviews for smaller games. And, of course, there could be straightforward features on a particular subject, using the MiSTer Multisystem 2 as a means of exploring and researching that subject.

Realistically speaking, I'm not sure such a thing would really work, because you know what people's attention spans are like these days. Were I to put all that in a single blog post or email newsletter, how many people would read beyond the first paragraph? Perhaps it might be better to do individual posts on an existing site, and then provide some sort of separate newsletter that people could subscribe to via email. I used to do this with Rice Digital and it was fun. The newsletter had a good number of subscribers, too, but honestly I inherited most of those from the previous owners.

The reality of the situation is that it would almost certainly be piss in the wind, because you almost certainly know how hard it is to get noticed online these days. The recent rise of independent publications is great, but in a lot of cases these are already well-established names, and I think (no, I know) there's a lot of great individual independent creators out there who just don't get the credit they really deserve when putting their work out into the world.

So I dunno. I have a lot to think about, but I also have a lot of time to think about it, given that the MiSTer Multisystem 2 isn't arriving until August.

I could also just enjoy the damn thing without worrying about any of this nonsense, but where's the fun in not agonising over things that don't matter, hmm?

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#oneaday Day 342: Palette Cleanser

Yes, I know it's "palate cleanser", but I'm making a Clair Obscur pun, see. 'Cause I finished it last night, and boy, was that ever a good game. So much so that I'm sort of sitting in this weird afterglow right now where I don't quite feel ready to go back to Xenoblade Chronicles X, but also feel mildly dazed and confused about what, if anything, I might want to play next.

I won't go into specific details about how Clair Obscur ends right now — that's probably a job for either a podcast or an in-depth article on MoeGamer — but suffice to say that I think, or I hope, anyway, that people will be talking about this game for a very long time. For me, it's the first game that has felt like a notable step forward in the medium for quite some time. Yes, technology has advanced, graphics have got better and load times have got shorter, but I'm not sure the games have got any better.

Clair Obscur, though, is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. Sure, if we're getting technical about things, almost the exact same game could have probably been made (with somewhat worse visuals) one, two, maybe even three generations of console hardware ago. We had the fundamentals of its game design, the way it tells its story, its mechanics and aspects of its presentation back in the PlayStation 2 era, but somehow, all of those elements have never quite come together in this exact form until just now.

In fact, I think one of the best things about Clair Obscur is that it takes influences from a number of different "eras" of gaming. It has the "world map" structure of PS1 and even 16-bit RPGs. It has turn-based combat that, in some regards, feels like it owes something to Final Fantasy X. It has timing-based parry and dodge mechanics that owe a debt to FromSoftware's work. And, of course, it all looks bloody lovely thanks to Unreal Engine 5. I think that's the reason we haven't seen something quite as sumptuous as Clair Obscur for quite some time, because we've needed all those previous generations of influences for them to be able to merge together into this piece.

Anyway, I said I wasn't going to talk a lot about Clair Obscur and then I went and did. What I'm mulling over as I type this is exactly what I might want to play next. And the reason I made the increasingly regrettable pun in the title of this post is that I'm feeling like I might want to play something fairly short as a palate-cleanser before I return to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Or perhaps to play alongside Xenoblade Chronicles X, because I feel like I should probably try and get out of the habit of only feeling "able" to play one game at once, particularly given how many of the bloody things line my walls.

I'm leaning towards something platformer-y. Maybe a Castlevania, or something like it. I have the Castlevania Advance and Dominus collections that I haven't explored yet, so that might be something. Or there's always a racing game. I like racing games. Fuel is currently in my PlayStation 3 because I've been playing that a bit recently, but I also think I maybe might want to play something different. Or maybe I do want to play Fuel. Fuel is good, after all.

In fact, yes. Decision made. I will play some Fuel. I like Fuel. It is a comfort game, and that is what I feel like I need right now. So let's go be comfortable!

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#oneaday Day 338: Bomb Reignited

Boy, it sure has been an… "interesting" time for the games media recently, as I've alluded to a few times recently. To catch you up: Valnet, the sweatshop of the media industry, has bought Polygon and laid off the vast majority of its staff, which, of course, suggests that Polygon is going to become yet another SEO slop factory where its writers are paid peanuts to produce nothing of any real cultural value.

For a time, it looked like the longstanding site Giant Bomb was going the same way, with upsets over "brand-friendly" (or, more accurately, "brand-unfriendly") shenanigans on streams causing a sudden halt to… seemingly everything the site was doing. Giant Bomb has changed hands numerous times over the years; until recently, it was in the hands of Fandom, the people who ruined Wikia with obnoxious autoplaying pop-over videos and links to "related content" that was not, in fact, related to the thing you were looking at in any way whatsoever.

You'll notice I say "until recently". That's because Giant Bomb is no longer under the Fandom umbrella; it was announced on a panel at PAX East yesterday that Fandom and the Giant Bomb staff reached an agreement for the latter to purchase the site and turn it into an employee-owned outlet, much like the growing number of other worker-owned arrangements that are really finding their feet these days.

This is excellent news. I must confess despite being in the official Final Fantasy XIV guild for Giant Bomb, I never really hung out there all that much, but I did know that Giant Bomb, for many folks, was all about the community — similar to the old 1up.com days. The site looking like it was going under thanks to corporate interference was really sad to see — and for once, the corporate interferers saw what was going on, had a seemingly genuine "oh, shit" moment and changed course. Strongly. You can criticise Fandom for many things, but the agreement they reached with the Giant Bomb staff is, to my knowledge, absolutely unprecedented in the online media biz.

I've decided to make an effort to join the Giant Bomb community a bit more. I've rescued my account that I apparently signed up for in 2010 (with a different email address that thankfully I still had access to) and pledged $10 a month to help the folks on the site out. I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, getting to know the community and perhaps, hopefully, finally having a decent place to hang out and talk games.

What does this mean for all the other things I do online? Nothing. I'm still going to be blogging here, I'm still going to be writing about games on MoeGamer — it's just I might be posting a few more bits and pieces on Giant Bomb from hereon, in both the forums and using the site's blogging facility. If there's one thing I really miss from the Internet Gone By, it's 1up.com and its sense of community; I'm really interested to see if Giant Bomb can prove to be an adequate replacement, particularly for someone who is essentially "new" to proceedings over there. I'm intruding on 17 years of history (huh, the site is the same age as this blog) but the "Duders" are supposed to be thoroughly nice people, so we'll see.

Mostly I'm happy to see my pals Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti back in action, because I know very well how hard those two chaps worked to claw their way up the mountain of shite that is the games media industry, and it was a massive bummer to see them seemingly kicked back to the ground. I've known both of 'em since the 1up.com, Bitmob and Squadron of Shame days, and it was wonderful to see that they'd made something of their passions — and that they will continue to be able to do that.

So yeah. Giant Bomb is back. Now, if we could just do something about the rancid degradation of everything else online…

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#oneaday Day 336: The new old

I am presently awaiting two new games consoles with "2s" in their names: the Nintendo Switch 2, and the MiSTer Multisystem 2. And I think I might be more excited about the latter.

I've never used anything FPGA, but I'm led to understand that it's a marvellous thing. And the sheer number of different things that the MiSTer supports is exciting me. With the setup I intend to slot it into, I'm looking forward to being able to use it as a retro computer as well as every games console ever up until the PlayStation, Saturn and N64.

Now, the one difference between the Nintendo Switch 2 and the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is that the latter is going to require a lot more setting up and fiddling around with than the Switch 2 will. But I am hoping that any tinkering will be a one-time process, and that once it is done, the MiSTer will be able to just sit there and do whatever I want it to. Within reason, obviously.

I'm going to hook up a keyboard and mouse to the system as well as a controller, so it can be used for actual computing as well as just playing games. I'll probably get another one of the 8bitdo retro-styled keyboards for this purpose — the C64 one would certainly be thematically appropriate, in the absence of an Atari ST or Atari 800XL one, though the one that looks a bit like an IBM Model M is also quite nice.

I'm also probably going to invest in some nice speakers rather than relying on the single mono speaker of my trusty Trinitron CRT. That built-in speaker is surprisingly decent considering its size and placement, but it would be nice to be able to give console games in particular a bit of oomph.

So all told, I think the setup will probably look something like this, but with less wobbly freehand mouse-drawn lines.

With that, I should be sorted for some retro gaming and computing fun for quite some time. At some point I might consider looking into the various solutions available for using real classic controllers on the Multisystem 2, but I don't think I'll make that a priority to begin with. Let's get it up and running and working — and doing what I want it to do — and then we can talk customisation. Because there's a lot of customising you can do with a MiSTer, I'm led to understand!

It's an exciting new world that I can't wait to get involved in. I have a bit of a wait before that happens — the Multisystem 2 is coming out in August — but I guess I can occupy myself with the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World in the meantime…

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#oneaday Day 331: Visit The Cave

It occurs to me that a while back, I went to visit the Retro Collective museums over in Gloucestershire, and I don't think I actually wrote about the experience. Looking back at my Google Photos, it seems that it was 2023 (wow) when I went, and I hadn't yet kicked off this particular round of #oneaday shenanigans back then. In fact, the only thing I wrote about on this blog in the month that I went was a vitriolic diatribe on how much I detested the TikTokification of comedy, something which, rewatching Friends, the subject of much of that post, I still maintain my position on. But I digress.

So! Anyway, what am I talking about? Well, the Retro Collective is a group of people and organisations that make their home in an old mill in Chalford, Gloucestershire, just outside of Stroud. The main attractions for most visitors are the two hands-on interactive museums: "The Cave" upstairs for retro computers, consoles and general gaming tech, and the "Arcade Archive" downstairs for… well, I think you can probably guess.

The Cave is run by Neil Thomas, a thoroughly lovely gentleman who started a retro tech YouTube channel back in 2012, and gradually became considerably more ambitious with what he was getting up to. Notably, he actually followed through on those ambitions, and the result, in collaboration with the other members of the Retro Collective, is a fantastic day out for anyone with the slightest interest in the history of computing and video games.

Neil still makes YouTube videos along with running The Cave — an operation which has a number of regular staffers and volunteers helping out — and he often does restorations on classic computer hardware. If you're into that sort of thing, his YouTube channel, which is now the home of the whole Retro Collective on YouTube, is well worth a follow. You might even see a familiar face in the video below:

The Cave is designed to be nostalgic and comfortable to explore and experience. The main room is absolutely packed with classic computer and console hardware, and the vast majority of it is hands-on and interactive. If you had a favourite computer or console growing up, chances are it's there, and there are plenty of games available to play on it. But there are also lesser-known devices to fiddle around with too, some of which are on a bit of a rotation thanks to being on loan from other collectors, and others of which are part of the permanent collection.

A particular highlight when I went back in 2023 was the Sharp X68000, which, as any fans of Japanese gaming will know, is a bit of a "holy grail" of home computers. Immensely capable and home to some near-as-dammit arcade-perfect ports, as well as games that were as good as — if not better than — the 16-bit consoles of the era, it was a pleasure to finally have a play with this, even if I inadvertently found the inevitable hentai puzzle game that had snuck into the collection of games installed on the machine's hard drive! (I wasn't looking for it, honest. I was more enamoured with the system's excellent version of Namco's Star Luster, anyway.)

As well as all the classic machines that are set up and ready to play, there's a bunch of less common, more valuable stuff on display, with resources to learn about them. There's a huge library of magazines you can browse through at your leisure. And one of the most impressive parts is a little side room built to resemble the software section of a WHSmiths circa 1990. Not only is this an immensely nostalgic recreation of a long-gone shopping experience, but it's interactive, too; the room is equipped with a MiSTer Multisystem hooked up to a barcode scanner, which allows you to scan the barcode of any game in the "shop" and play it. Very nifty.

The Arcade Archive, meanwhile, for which tickets are sold separately — though you can buy tickets for both The Cave and the Arcade Archive at the same time, visiting one in the morning and the other in the afternoon — is situated downstairs in the mill, and is… well, it's just a recreation of a classic arcade. It's dark, lit with neon signs, filled with the noise of a variety of machines competing for your attention, and they've all been lovingly restored to full working order (and free play!) for you to explore and play as much as you like.

Like The Cave, the Arcade Archive has both a permanent collection and a rotating selection of guest cabinets on loan from other collectors. At the time I visited, a particularly noteworthy inclusion was a little-known Nintendo arcade machine known as Sky Skipper, which had quite an interesting story behind it.

Elsewhere in the mill is the engineering company Heber, who work on a wide variety of interesting things, many of which have a retro gaming focus. Notably, they're responsible for the design and manufacturing of the aforementioned MiSTer Multisystem and its upcoming follow-up model, but they also make accessories and all manner of other bits and bobs.

I can't recommend The Cave and the Arcade Archive enough if you want a great, highly interactive day out, whether you're a grown-up or a kid… or just a kid at heart. The museums are immaculately kept by people who absolutely love what they do, and you feel the passion for everything the moment you walk in the door. It's a truly special experience that everyone involved with the Retro Collective has created, and I'm looking forward to paying the place another visit sometime soon.

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#oneaday Day 329: Open your wallet

One thing that has been a constant in all the discussions over the death of Giant Bomb and Polygon yesterday is that we need to support independent creators. We need to support worker-owned organisations, we need to support publications that aren't corporate-owned, and perhaps most importantly, we need to support individual creators who, in many cases, do not have the backing of a corporation or even an organisation to help them out.

What this means in practical terms is that if you like something a particular creator or group of creators does, you should open your wallet and toss them a bit of change now and then. It doesn't have to be a regular pledge, it doesn't have to be a lot of money, but it's something we all need to get better at doing.

Of course, for those of limited means, ways of supporting creators that don't involve spending money are helpful, too. Telling others about the creators and their work; sharing links to ways people can support them; telling their own stories about why that creator and their work are important to them.

But there has to be a slightly mercenary element to this: there are people out there working hard who deserve to get paid for the work they put in — particularly if it is their actual job — and that payment shouldn't be contingent on SEO optimisation and ad revenue. The obsession with those to the exclusion of all else — including the quality of the work — is what has led us to a situation where almost the entirety of the traditional games press has collapsed, with the scraps being hoovered up by corporations that pay peanuts for absurdly unreasonable quantities of work. And when that happens, you get an Internet flooded with shite. And when there aren't workers to do that but the content still needs to flow, that's when you get an Internet flooded with AI-generated shite that is riddled with errors as well as being crap.

In many ways, the democratisation of information that the Internet has brought everyone is an amazing thing. There is no need to spend thousands of pounds on an Encyclopaedia Britannica because you have access to all that information and more via the Web. But the trouble is, this same democratisation of information has led everyone to expect everything for free. And that is simply not sustainable. People who make things as their job need to get paid. That money needs to come from somewhere. And we've proven pretty clearly beyond any shadow of a doubt that the ad-driven model is not a good way of doing things, for a variety of reasons: the workload it places on underpaid workers; the unreliability of it as an income stream; and the fact it encourages a race to the bottom in terms of content churn rather than the production of actually meaningful, worthwhile work.

So I say again: open your wallet. Think back to the days when if you wanted to read something about your hobby, you'd walk into Smiths and pick up a magazine, maybe flip through it a bit, then walk over to the counter and pay a few quid for it. You might do this multiple times a month for different aspects of your hobby, or, hell, for different hobbies altogether. You might even set up a subscription so you got the magazines sent straight to you. In doing that, you were supporting the people who made the magazines, the people who wrote the articles, and you were helping to ensure the continued existence of that magazine.

Sure, you could read the whole thing for free in Smiths if you wanted to, but I think most people were honest enough to actually pony up for a copy of a magazine if they had a quick flip through and saw one or two things they thought were worthwhile. More often than not, you'd find things you didn't expect to find interesting when you later perused the magazine in its entirety later in the day. And sometimes, you'd even return to that magazine years later and rediscover things you had forgotten about, or notice things you never saw first time around.

You can't easily do that with the churn of SEO optimised website content because of the sheer volume of it — and the inability to guarantee that the information will still be there [x] years down the line. Someone on Bluesky earlier noted that they were doing research for a video they were making and found a good article from 2014, but was unable to follow up on any of the sources that article cited because every link in it was broken.

So, I say again: open your wallet, if it is within your means to do so. Help writers produce fewer articles with more words that are better and which stick around for longer. Help video makers produce fewer videos that are better quality, more in-depth and completely devoid of SEO or ragebaiting.

And if anyone makes a new paper magazine about your passions, you throw those goddamn heroes a subscription.

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#oneaday Day 328: Polygone

Well, another one bites the dust. Today, we learned that gaming site Polygon has been sold to Valnet, the sweatshop of online media, and that, as is standard practice in this situation, pretty much all the regular writing staff have been let go, to be replaced by contractors who will be paid absolute fucking peanuts to churn out SEO-baiting drivel and contribute nothing of any real value to the broader conversation about video games.

I was never a huge fan of Polygon, I'll confess. But this isn't about me. It's about yet another significant pillar of Video Games Journalism collapsing — because make no mistake, being sold to Valnet means that your brand is going to have very little value left afterwards — and the entire landscape of this section of the media getting just a little bit worse.

To make matters worse, it appears that Giant Bomb is circling the drain, too. I don't think anything "official" has been announced on that front yet, but from what some of the people involved have been saying publicly… yeah, that site isn't long for this world, either.

Why does this keep happening? Why are we allowing sites that are demonstrably good at what they do to get destroyed in this way? At this rate, we're going to have absolutely no "big names" in the games press left.

And perhaps that might, over the long-term, be a good thing. Because every time something like this happens, it feels like more and more worker/creator-owned outfits pop up and show that yes, it is possible to do things a bit differently; it is possible to put together an interesting and enjoyable site without resorting to SEO-baiting bilge and Guide Content; it is possible to build a sustainable publication that doesn't rely on ad-revenue and instead asks its most interested readers to pony up a couple of quid a month in exchange for stuff that is actually worth reading.

But will this successfully become the norm? We have to make that happen. We have to look beyond the search engine algorithms, start following the sites we actually care about… and support them. One of the worst things to ever happen to the press in general — not just in gaming — was to set the expectation that everything, everywhere, should be free, always. It's devalued the hard work of people working in the media, it's normalised paying people an absolute pittance for hard work, and it's actively making useful information and meaningful commentary harder to find. None of that seems the slightest bit desirable, but we keep heading down that path.

I already support a few folks I like via Patreon. I think it's probably about time I start ponying up for a subscription or two for sites I think are doing worthwhile work. Off the top of my head, I recommend Aftermath for gaming-related stuff, and 404 Media for tech journalism. Both are doing great work, and both are doing well through support from their audiences.

The issue, of course, is that if you end up supporting a lot of sites in this way, it can get pricy. But then think of it this way: did you buy every magazine that existed every month, or did you have a favourite? There you go. I guess the answer is to read fewer, better sites. And don't support the shittier behaviour of the sites that have already been fed to the Valnet monster, or which are in the process of sliding down that drain. You can solve today's Wordle by yourself, believe me. I believe in you!

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#oneaday Day 326: It's officially my birthday

It is, as promised, Actually My Birthday now, since I have been to bed since last night's post and woken up since then. I have had today (and the days surrounding it) off work for reasons I've already outlined, so today has been mostly about playing more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and then going out for a nice pub dinner with Andie this evening. I have simple tastes.

One thing many of you will have doubtless discovered as you get older is that people inevitably find it harder and harder to buy presents for you. Gone are the days when you could circle things in the Argos catalogue and hope that one of them would be your "main" or "big" present on the big day. Nope, much more common as a grown-up to get a few little bits and pieces from your Amazon wishlist — which I'm very grateful for, by the way, those who sent such things! — and "I'll just give you some money" from the parents.

I would like to reiterate: this is fine, and not in the "room is burning around me" sense. This is good, even! Much better that one is able to get something they actually want to celebrate their birthday rather than running the risk of getting gifts they already have, gifts they don't really want but are obliged to look like they like or any of the other situations in which people in 2025 are, in my experience, brazenly ungrateful.

I got some very generous monetary gifts from both my parents and my mother-in-law, both of whom are very clearly trying to spend some of their accumulated cash to minimise the impact of inheritance tax in the future. My parents' gift paid for my Nintendo Switch 2, which is nice, and my mother-in-law has bought (well, pre-ordered) me a MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber Electronics.

If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it's an all-in-one FPGA console designed for playing retro games from a wide variety of home computer, arcade and console systems. FPGA means something inordinately technical that I don't understand at all, but it basically means that it's the hardware pretending to be a classic system rather than a piece of software doing its best to imitate it. That means that the recreation of the experience is pretty much 1:1 of What It Was Actually Like without any sort of emulation quirks, but with modern benefits such as HDMI out, USB storage and suchlike. There are even addon thingies you can get to use original controllers and other peripherals.

To put it simply, the Multisystem 2 is a console that plays almost any retro game you can throw at it, making it a nice all-in-one, self-contained system for authentic-feeling retro game fun, on either a classic CRT or a modern HDMI display. (Or both at the same time, even!) With old gaming hardware and media becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to collect for a variety of reasons, this is a great option for just… enjoying retro games. Which, ultimately, is what I really want to do with all this stuff. And having the opportunity to easily hook it up to capture hardware via HDMI is even better, 'cause then I can share what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and the things I've discovered.

So yeah. My "big presents" this year are a Nintendo Switch 2 and a MiSTer Multisystem. Pretty great, I'd say. I know my child self would be thrilled, even if I have to wait until June for one and August for the other.

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#oneaday Day 322: The Expedition

Hello. It's after 1am and I haven't written anything, I need a bath (that can wait until tomorrow) and I'm quite tired. So this will probably be a short one. I did want to acknowledge something, though, which is that I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this evening, and it's real good.

I was a little skeptical about it after feeling a bit burnt by the Blue Prince situation, but this time around it's just flat-out a good game, not "a good game if you have the right kind of brain and 150 hours to plough into it".

I will write more about it on MoeGamer anon, but I did want to acknowledge that my first impressions are very good indeed, and that it has a very distinctive atmosphere about it. I'm getting quite strong Nier vibes from it in terms of its rather melancholy atmosphere — indeed, my wife walked in at one point and asked if it was another Taro Yoko joint. I explained that no, it's French, but I can completely see why she would think that just from overhearing the music.

Oh man, the music. One of the most important things to get right in a dramatic RPG, and boy did they get it bang on in this game. Sweeping orchestral pieces, triumphant choirs, lonely soloists, tinkling pianos, it's all there, and it all hits one right in the Feels.

I was a little concerned about coming to a "J-style" RPG that everyone was saying was the best thing ever when chances are the last "JRPG" they played was Persona 5; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has been consistently engaging with this type of game for the last 20 years, while many other folks haven't for various reasons. And I think it's still going to be interesting, but so far my impressions are that no, this isn't just "good if you haven't played an RPG in the last 20 years", it's a good RPG.

There's Nier, there's Final Fantasy, there's even bits of Souls in Expedition 33's DNA, and it all works together in a thoroughly interesting fashion. But, like I say, it's after 1am and I really should probably go to bed. I will write more about this game — much more — over on MoeGamer very soon. But for now, I bid you good night!

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