#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!

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 103: A solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 101: Body Harvest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 99: Yakuza time again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 97: EverDriving the ’64

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 95: Yars Rising – First impressions

My copy of Yars Rising, the new game from WayForward and Atari, arrived today. I’ve been playing it for the last three hours or so and I really like it. It’s a solid exploratory platformer with a great soundtrack and the interesting wrinkle that in order to unlock new abilities, open doors and acquire upgrades, you have to play numerous variations on the Atari 2600 classic Yars’ Revenge.

I’m disappointed by how some people I know have been reacting to this game, though. Today I’ve seen people writing it off without trying it on the grounds of its anime-inspired art style, the dialogue in its trailer and even its price. (For the record, it’s £24.99, which I think is an eminently reasonable price for a good quality game with decent production values, which is what this is.) I also saw people prepared to write it off based on its first two published review scores, which both happened to be low.

This is one of those situations where, I suspect, review scores will be utterly useless. I defy anyone to play it and conclude that it is a “4/10” game, which is what those first two publications suggested. Yes, one of them was the notoriously stingy Edge magazine and can thus probably be ignored by most people. The other complains of “poor execution”, which is simply nonsense however you look at it.

Anyway, I am satisfied with what I have played so far; it is very much in line with what I thought when I tried the demo in a Steam Next Fest a while back. It’s a smooth, slick exploratory platformer with satisfyingly weighty combat, a wisecracking heroine who manages to be cocky without going full Marvel movie about it, and some interesting mechanics. The soundtrack, featuring music from some very cool artists including frequent Atari collaborator Megan McDuffee, Moe Shop and more, is excellent, and the voice acting is of very good quality.

Most of all, it just plays well. Anyone who has played a WayForward platformer will know what to expect from this one: an expansive map that frequently teases you with areas that you can’t reach yet and thus will have to come back to later. One of the best things about Yars Rising is how these areas are marked on the in-game map: not only are “blocked off” areas marked as such, they also indicate what the “problem” is when you select them. The map also updates to show you newly accessible areas when you acquire new abilities, too, so you can always quickly see at a glance any areas you might want to return to in order to investigate.

The game invites this sort of exploration pretty much from the outset. While there is always a big flashing beacon on the map indicating where the next major story event is, at any given moment there are usually some other areas you can go off and investigate. The game doesn’t specifically point you at them so in theory you could “miss” them, but anyone who has played this sort of game before knows how to be thorough, I’m sure.

Yars Rising also resists the temptation to make getting around too easy. There is a “fast travel” system of sorts in the form of the elevator in the QoTech building, but accessing each set of doors (which becomes a fast travel point from thereon) is generally behind a relatively challenging platforming sequence that you’ll have to overcome. The game strikes a good balance in this regard, though; while you will have to redo some tricky platforming sequences when backtracking or exploring, any particularly time-consuming sequences such as avoiding patterns of lasers are usually a “once and done” sort of affair, with the lasers turning off after you’ve passed through or activated the terminal beyond them.

And the Yars’ Revenge-themed hacking sequences are excellent. I was concerned in the demo that they might run out of ideas pretty quickly, but so far there have been no direct repeats. As you progress through Yars Rising, more and more individual mechanics are introduced to the hacking sequences, and the more challenging hacks (particularly those in optional areas) combine these different elements together in creative ways. Of particular interest to longstanding Atari fans will be the way in which these sequences pay homage not only to the original Yars’ Revenge, but also other Atari classics such as Missile Command and Centipede. There’s even some non-copyright-infringing Space Invaders-style sequences, which acknowledges how the port of Space Invaders to Atari 2600 was something of a “killer app” for the console in the early days.

This is a game that has been made with love and respect for both the modern exploratory platformer genre, and Atari’s heritage. It disappoints me to see how many people are refusing to even contemplate it based on something exceedingly superficial — with some coming annoyingly close to the usual casting of aspersions on anyone who likes games with an anime-inspired art style.

But anyway. I’m enjoying myself, and ultimately that’s what really matters. If you enjoy a good exploratory platformer and have a love for classic Atari, I encourage you to check it out; it’s a good time.

#oneaday Day 93: The Truly Tragic Tale of the “Woke Content Detector”

One of the most truly insufferable things about the “gaming community” over the course of the last decade has been the rise of the “anti-woke” crowd, which started to really raise its head around the same time as the Gamergate saga — and, indeed, which many people still point to as the real point behind Gamergate rather than any legitimate concerns over ethics in games journalism.

To be clear and completely transparent, around the time of Gamergate being active I may well have expressed some sentiments and concerns that might have got me lumped in with this crowd.

However, I made an effort to distance myself from the movement as a whole, because I could see it was something of a scarlet letter, regardless of whether or not an individual had legitimate, worthwhile concerns.

My issues were always to do with the games journalism side of things, with my particular focus being on reviews and articles that treated Japanese titles (particularly those which featured sexually provocative content) unfairly and from an ill-informed perspective. I steered well clear of any discussions where it was clear people were being full-on racist and sexist — i.e. objecting to a game because it had a woman in a leading role, or a non-white person appearing prominently. I was entirely concerned with how certain portions of games journalism were treating specific games — and the people who enjoyed them — like absolute shit: nothing more, nothing less.

To put it another way, I always thought the people who were objecting to “woke” content in games were being massive weirdoes, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. Where games did feature obnoxiously over-the-top “look how progressive we are!” content, I tended to just steer clear of those — or perhaps comment on them in terms of alternatives that did the same thing, but better. To date, my favourite example of this is Read Only Memories and VA-11 HALL-A. Both of these games unfold in the same “world”, with the latter being a spinoff of the former, developed by a completely different team. Read Only Memories is absolutely obnoxious about how it handles progressive themes; VA-11 HALL-A integrates them extremely well into the plot.

But I digress. I have zero time for people who object to games purely on the grounds that they contain “woke content”. Particularly when the definition of “woke content”, as defined by the Woke Content Detector group on Steam, is so broad. I invite you to take a look at their official spreadsheet of which games are and are not “woke” and have a good laugh at it, and we’ll pick out some classics below.

Starfield

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly Pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Pronoun selection including the option for they/them. All populated areas are equally diverse. Many important people are POC."

Here’s a prime example of what this list is actually about: being sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this definition, other than to clarify for those who are somehow unfamiliar with Starfield that it is an open-structure role-playing game set in space, in which you play a self-insert character. Therefore having the option to select your name, gender, ethnicity and appearance makes a lot of sense. The implication of “many important people are [people of colour]” is that in The Future, we will have moved beyond white dominance and oppression of non-white people, but this is a bridge too far for the anti-woke crowd.

Civilization VI

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. Race swapped Suleiman and added historically unimportant female leaders. Global warming and carbon capture mechanics."

This one is particularly hilarious. A game about running a civilisation on our planet, and considering important matters that both occurred in history and which might occur in the future is “woke” for acknowledging things like climate change. I guess we add “climate change denier” to the “sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic” list. Some racism and sexism on open display there, too.

BioShock Infinite

A screenshot of the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly anti-western society and overtly pro-DEI messaging. Colombia's residents are hyper-exaggerated, racist caricatures of 19th century Americans. Heavy social commentary on racism."

Another good one. The funny thing about this one is that they clearly got the point of BioShock, but then got offended by it.

Forza Horizon 5

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Prnoun selection including an option for they/them. Uses unlabeled presets instead of clearly defined male and female options during character creation."

I have to include this one just for how stupid it is. Forza Horizon 5, the game in which you spend your entire time in a car, is “woke” because it allows you to choose how the in-game characters refer to you. Because only big strong boys play car games, you know.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Prominently displayed pride and BLM flags. The new POC main character overshadows Peter Parker."

This one is brilliant, because it’s criticising the fact that the protagonist named in the game’s title is “overshadowing” the character who is explicitly not the protagonist. Because he’s black. Let’s not beat around the bush here: this is racism. Again.

Disco Elysium

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Features multiple LGBTQ+ characters, including the player character. Heavy social commentary regarding communism. Whether pro or anti is unclear."

I’ll take “I played Disco Elysium and didn’t understand any of the big words” for 2,000, Alex. If you played Disco Elysium and didn’t understand whether it was pro or anti communism, you don’t deserve to be playing video games that have words in.

Final Fantasy VII

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains subtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains subtly pro-climate action messaging. Forced cross-dressing. You start the game working for an ecoterrorism group."

And I have to include this one just for the giggles. Final Fantasy VII features “subtly pro-climate action messaging”. Yeah, Final Fantasy VII is real subtle about its environmental message, guys. Real subtle.

I’m utterly amazed at how committed these people are to being pathetic and weird. Because that is exactly what they’re being. There are 386 entries on their “Recommended” (i.e. “not woke”) list, while there are 746 “Not Recommended” (“WOKE!!!”) titles and 299 “Informational” (“A BIT WOKE!!!”) titles.

That’s a thousand and forty-five games that these people will refuse to consider because they might be exposed to a black person, a gay person or, heaven forbid, a woman. There’s no way you can look at that and not think it’s utterly pathetic.

Unless you’re one of them. In which case fuck off. I don’t want to know you.

#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.