Category: Video Games

#oneaday Day 554: The Battle of Polytopia

After my post the other day, concerning a mobile game developer complaining that mobile games aren't taken seriously because people (correctly) assume that the scene is a "world of predatory monetisation and low quality", I decided to be fair to the chap and actually give his game a try.

The game in question is called The Battle of Polytopia, and it's a lightweight 4X strategy game heavily (heavily) inspired by the classic Civilization series, swapping semi-realistic visuals (aside from the city-sized horses) for a distinctive, untextured, voxel-esque "low-poly" look.

In The Battle of Polytopia, your task is to be the civilisation that comes out on top. In the default "Perfection" game mode, this requires you to have scored the most points by the end of 30 turns; alternatively, you can play in "Domination" mode, which is a last-man-standing mode; there's also a "Creative" mode that allows you to set up a game however you please, with up to three computer-controlled opponents (or no opponents at all, if you prefer) and the ability to play in the previous "Perfection" or "Domination" modes, along with an "Infinity" mode that has no win state. You can also play multiplayer, and the official website seems to indicate there are regular tournaments going on.

There are a selection of civilisations to play as, but the only real differences between most of them are the tech that they start with, the number of "star" resources they begin with, and their aesthetics — however, there are some tribes available as one-time in-app purchases that add some unique mechanics to the mix, such as being able to live and build in the water, having the ability to use magic, or an emphasis on poisoning and corrupting the land.

Once into the game, you're presented with an isometric view of the land around your starting city, with the remainder of the map covered by fog of war. Tapping on resources in the tiles around your city allows you to harvest them in exchange for the generic "star" resource, and doing so will add population to your city. Once the city's population has reached a certain stage, it will advance a level, and this usually rewards you with a choice of two benefits. These vary from level to level; sometimes you'll be able to expand the borders of the area the city controls; at others you'll be able to build special one-time only buildings that provide additional benefits; at others still you'll have the opportunity to "scout", which uncovers part of the fog-obscured map.

Some resources can have buildings constructed on them, which allows them to provide an income of stars each turn. Some buildings can be boosted by having other buildings in close proximity. Many of them require you to have unlocked a particular technology in the tech tree, which, again, costs stars.

Cities can also construct troops, which can then be sent out into the world to explore, uncover more of the map and potentially attack other civilisations, and the exact troop types you can build are determined by your unlocked technologies. Some troops can move further, some can attack from range, others still are better suited for a defensive role.

Other civs aren't necessarily hostile when you encounter them, but the game feels balanced in such a way that conflict will become inevitable before long, particularly if you want to expand your territory beyond its starting area.

And that's basically it. The game is easy to pick up and play thanks to it being considerably less complicated than the games that inspired it, and I can see it being a reasonably fun little diversion to play on one's phone if you want to while away a few minutes and don't have any other gaming devices with you. It's not obnoxiously monetised and it doesn't blast ads at you every five minutes, which in itself is worthy of praise in today's mobile sector.

But, I don't know. I played it and I felt… nothing. I didn't really feel attached to my little civilisation, I never really felt like there was much threat from the rival CPU-controlled players — although, granted, I was playing the tutorial map, which is likely set to the easiest difficulty level — and I didn't feel like I was making a lot of meaningful choices along the way.

The area where this stood out the most was in the tech tree. Simply unlocking features with the currency you earn each turn makes the "discovery" of each new tech feel quite underwhelming, particularly as in the late game you can unlock a whole bunch at once without really feeling like you've had to work for them or prioritise what to concentrate on next. There's no real "weight" to the game, for want of a better word, and that leaves the whole experience just feeling a bit unsatisfying.

"Civilization Lite" can work, as anyone who ever played the excellent but largely forgotten Civilization Revolution on Xbox 360 will attest. The Battle of Polytopia plays it just a bit too "lite", though, leaving it feeling like pretty much every other mobile game for me — fun for a few minutes if there's literally nothing better to play, but ultimately rather forgettable, and not something I'm going to go out of my way to spend time on.

And definitely not Game of the Year material!

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#oneaday Day 551: Mobile gaming is perceived as a "world of predatory monetisation and low quality" because that's what it is

A recent article on Gamesindustry.biz drew attention to a LinkedIn (ugh) post from one Christian Lövstedt, CEO of a company called Midjiwan AB, who is complaining that people don't take mobile gaming seriously.

Midjiwan AB, if you were curious, apparently make a mobile game called The Battle of Polytopia, which I've never heard of, which I suspect is at least partly what this is all about. In fairness to all the following, The Battle of Polytopia does not look all that bad… but I'd still rather play a game like that anywhere other than my phone. But I digress before we've even begun, so let's get back on track.

"Mobile gaming is one of the most played and most profitable platforms in gaming," Lövstedt says, "currently representing 55% of the global gaming market, but is often ignored and looked down on [because] it is perceived by too many as a world of predatory monetisation and low quality."

Okay. Let's start with this. People love to trot out that "over 55% of the market" figure (with variations on the exact figure quoted) but let's be real about this: the reason why mobile accounts for so much revenue in the global games market is precisely because it is a world of predatory monetisation and low quality.

Consider some of the most popular mobile games out there. Candy Crush Saga, which charges up to £34.99 for cheats that allow you to bypass levels — coupled with design that makes it near-impossible to win without buying these cheats. Gacha games such as Azur Lane, Granblue Fantasy and Fate/Grand Order, which exploit horny young people (particularly, though not exclusively, men) with attractive JPGs of hot anime characters, necessitating that you pay at least £20 at a time to be in with a reasonable chance of actually getting the character you want. And I'm pretty sure there are still plenty of "tap and wait" games out there that ask you to pay up to make things go faster or be able to simply play the game more.

When you consider that the term "whale" was coined to describe those who spend excessive amounts of money on free-to-play games, particularly in the social and mobile spaces — and that pursuing these whales to exploit them (at the expense of providing a good experience to free players) is a primary goal of the developers of these popular games — you will perhaps start to see exactly why mobile accounts for so much of the "market". It's because one user playing one heavily monetised mobile game will account for considerably more revenue than one user playing one pay-once-play-forever premium game on PC or console.

Games like this, you see, don't just ask you to buy them and are then happy with that. No; the most "successful" mobile games — measured by most folks who complain about mobile not getting its dues as the ones that generate the most revenue — are the ones that provide the opportunity for perpetual monetisation: the ones that entrap players into dark patterns that make them feel like they have to continually pay money into the game, month after month, in order to remain "relevant" and "current".

When you start from there, it's understandable why people see mobile gaming as rife with predatory monetisation and low-quality games. But let's look at the rest of this open letter.

"While some amazing mobile-first titles, like Monument Valley, manage to get the industry's attention," Lövstedt continues, "many other extremely popular and successful titles do not."

Monument Valley came out in 2014. That's over ten years ago! If you can't think of a more recent example than that of Doing It Right, I think we may have found the problem!

But he continues:

"Mobile games like Clash of Clans, Temple Run, Crossy Road and Candy Crush Saga are critically and commercially successful, yet are never or rarely acknowledged at game awards."

Perhaps that's because Clash of Clans, Temple Run and Candy Crush Saga are all prime examples of games with predatory monetisation and low quality? I actually don't know about Crossy Road, so I am willing to take a moment to actually research it before I brand it with the same scarlet letter. Give me a moment.

Tangent: Pete tries Crossy Road

"Contains ads. Contains in-app purchases". We're not off to a good start already. But let's download this and see.

After an initial tutorial, during which the simple tap-and-swipe, Frogger-inspired gameplay is introduced, I am given a "free gift" of in-game currency and then immediately invited to "win a prize". It costs the 100G of in-game currency I was just "gifted" to draw from a virtual gacha machine, which awards me with a mallard duck avatar to play in the game instead of the default chicken.

I am then taken to a main menu screen where I get an immediate popup about a new time-limited game mode and "sweet sales in the store". I'm then taken into that mode without having asked to play it. After playing it briefly, I am shown my top score with two non-descript icons, the purposes of which are not made entirely clear. It seems the one that the eye is most immediately drawn to — i.e. the one where you'd expect an "OK" button to be in typical UI design — is a "share" function for you to send a screenshot of your concluded run to any of your phone's connected social services or contacts.

After that, I am given a timer countdown to my next "free gift" and informed how many "G" of in-game currency there is "to go" until my next blind box of whatever the fuck you unlock in this game.

To Crossy Road's credit, it has no play-throttling energy system, no paying to bypass timers and it does have a one-off payment of £7.99 to remove all ads (if you're not already blocking them), but it also sells extra game modes, has "limited time sales" on special characters and sells a power-up to double your in-game currency income. And you can bet that it gets regular "content updates" to ensure there are always new things for people to pay for.

But it's just not very fun, the countdown timers and grind for currency make it feel more like work than play, and the "business" part of it being so front and centre is exactly why people don't take it as seriously as premium, pay-once games for PC and consoles.

So in conclusion to that little bit, while Crossy Road isn't as egregious as the other examples cited, it's still not… great. And certainly not the sort of thing that is in any way deserving of an award.

"Just because [low-quality] games [with predatory monetisation] like that do exist in the mobile market, it should not diminish the achievements of the market's best games," Lövstedt continues. "It perhaps makes them more impressive. And if we're honest with ourselves, there are AAA industry darlings crammed with the same monetisation mechanics."

Two things to pick out here: firstly, outside of the aforementioned Monument Valley (which, again, is eleven years old at this point), he cites no specific examples. And yes! Yes, triple-A does pull all this shit, too! And you know what? People hate it there, too!

"D.I.C.E., one of the better award bodies for acknowledging mobile gaming, has only ever nominated a mobile game for Game of the Year twice," he continues. "Angry Birds HD and Pokémon Go. And they were the only dedicated game awards body to nominate them, despite how commercially and culturally impactful both games are."

Okay. I have to look into this. Bear with me.

Tangent: Pete looks into the D.I.C.E. Awards

Angry Birds HD was nominated for Game of the Year in 2011 alongside Mass Effect 2 (which won), Call of Duty: Black Ops, God of War III and Red Dead Redemption. Honestly, the fact that it was even nominated is borderline laughable, because Angry Birds is not a particularly amazing video game. It's fine for what it is, but in 2011 people were still feeling the novelty of playing games on a tablet — the iPad first launched in 2010 — and the calibre of the other games that were nominated is just in a completely different league. What Lövstedt doesn't mention is that Angry Birds HD did win a D.I.C.E. Award that year — for Casual Game of the Year. Which is absolutely fair, although given it was up against Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled 3, it wouldn't be my vote. (And I don't even like Plants vs. Zombies.)

Pokémon Go, meanwhile, was up for the 2017 Game of the Year award, where it was up against Overwatch (which won), Battlefield 1, INSIDE and Uncharted 4. My personal tastes put that as a much weaker overall lineup than that of 2011, but there's still a world of difference between gamifying Google Maps and the cultural phenomenon that was Overwatch in its first year. And, again, Pokémon Go won a perfectly acceptable award for what it is: Mobile Game of the Year.

Lövstedt is right; Pokémon Go in particular did have a certain amount of cultural impact, particularly as we moved into the pandemic years. But, again, it's just not a very good video game, which is why it lost out on the overall Game of the Year award. "A lot of people played this because they were bored" is not the same as "this is an incredible video game that should be celebrated as the pinnacle of its medium".

In conclusion, then, I have to reiterate that mobile gaming's reputation as being filled with low-quality games with predatory monetisation is well-earned. This isn't to deny that there are developers apparently doing interesting things on mobile — Lövstedt's own The Battle of Polytopia looks quite worthwhile, so I might have to actually give it a go — but at this point, the damage done by Apple introducing in-app purchases (and Google following suit) has already been done. There's no easy way to turn that back; no easy way to reclaim mobile gaming's reputation from those who, thanks to their greed, generate enough income to account for a supposed 55% of the global games industry's revenue.

Because what are Apple, Google and the other app store platform holders going to do? Just suddenly give up such a profitable revenue stream? Because let's not forget they get a cut of every purchase, so it is absolutely not in their interests to try and fix this.

Also, playing games on a touchscreen — particularly on small ones like those found on phones — sucks ass. This, honestly, is one of the biggest reasons I have zero desire to play any games on my phone today — even if they weren't low-quality games with predatory monetisation. Which a significant portion of them are, so I have precisely zero incentive to look any deeper — particularly because the vast majority of those which are cited as "good examples" (including the aforementioned Monument Valley, plus titles like Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors) are available on platforms with control schemes that don't suck!

So in summary: if you want to be taken seriously, release your game on a platform that people will take seriously. Have you seen the shit they let onto Steam these days, recent examples notwithstanding…?

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 549: The Yakuza games are the ultimate video games

I've been thinking it for a long while now, and finally making some time to go back to Yakuza 5, which I left half-finished a good few months back, I have cemented my feeling that the Yakuza (or Like A Dragon, as they're now known, to be more true to the original Japanese title Ryu ga Gotoku) games are, in fact, Peak Video Game.

By this I mean that if there is a single game you are going to invest a lot of time and effort into playing, a Yakuza game is an excellent choice. And there are a whole bunch of them now! Best of all, given that each one unfolds in a different time period, they all have a markedly different feel from one another — and, of course, as the series goes on, it expands beyond its original setting of Kamurocho to a much wider variety of locales.

Thus far in my journey through the series, Yakuza 5 is the series at its most broad. Like its immediate predecessor, the game is split into several distinct parts, each with a main protagonist taking the leading role. Unlike Yakuza 4, however, which was entirely set in Kamurocho, Yakuza 5 features several town centres for the various different protagonists to explore before they all meet up for the finale.

So far I'm on the third part out of four, which means I've finished the initial part with longstanding series lead Kiryu Kazuma living under an assumed name and working as a taxi driver in Fukuoka, the second part that involves Taiga Saejima breaking out of prison, living for a brief while in a mountainside hunter village, then hanging out in Sapporo for a bit, and I'm now on the first half of the third part, which concerns Kiryu's adoptive daughter, Haruka, and her quest to become an idol in Osaka.

Thus far, each main section of the game has been very different from the last in terms of tone. Kiryu's started with a bit of "everyday life in a small city district" feel before ratcheting up the yakuza angle once the story got underway. Saejima's was quite a personal story of this imposing, hulking brute of a man and the soft centre within. Haruka's, so far, has been deliberately a bit silly, but also with a hint of the sleaziness and darkness that underpins the real-life idol industry.

The nice thing about giving each protagonist their own areas to wander around is that it allows them to have different activities available to them. Yakuza 5 introduces the concept of each character having a "Side Story" as well as the series' iconic "Substories"; each "Side Story" is quite an involved plot that runs parallel to the main scenario, and generally concerns the main character developing their skills in an area that is somehow important to them. In Kiryu's case, we get to work his job as a taxi driver; as Saejima, we take him through learning how to hunt on the mountain; as Haruka, we follow her idol career from its humble beginnings and onwards into greater success.

In each instance, the Side Story is handled in a different way rather than just being a glorified way of marking your progress through a series of cutscenes. Kiryu's taxi driving Side Story, for example, involves a combination of driving people around Fukuoka and ensuring that they get good service, punctuated by some extremely silly arcade racing sequences as he investigates a racing gang. Saejima's hunting sequences involve unique mechanics surrounding avoiding detection by wildlife, shooting rifles in first-person, surviving in extremely inhospitable conditions, and setting traps. Haruka's Side Story sees her having Dance Battles in the street, building up her performance-related stats in various ways, and working through an ever-lengthening list of obligations her career places in front of her as she grows in prominence and fame.

If the Yakuza games were just about the main plot, these Side Stories and the Substories, they would already be extremely substantial. But then there's all the other stuff too. Eating at all the restaurants. Training with each character's "master" to learn new moves. Seeking out unusual happenings to have "Revelations" that, again, unlock new moves. Playing darts, pool, bowling. Playing real-life Virtua Fighter 2. Playing a fictional but nonetheless enjoyable shoot 'em up. Catching prizes in the crane game. Hitting some balls at the driving range and batting cages. The list goes on.

The great thing about Yakuza games is that you can engage with them as much or as little as you like. If you want to plough through the story and just see what happens, you can do that with no real penalty. You might not have levelled up as much as if you'd thoroughly completed all the Substories, but you can do it.

Alternatively, I suspect most players will find themselves unable to resist engaging with at least some of the optional activities — because each of them are handled with such thoroughness, and are so enjoyable in their own right, that they could quite feasibly have each been their own standalone games.

This is the genius of Yakuza. Back in the '80s, the software publisher Imagine got itself into a lot of trouble as it attempted to develop a series of "Mega Games" for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, but none of these projects ever came to fruition — though some had some successor projects.

Yakuza games, meanwhile, are "Mega Games". Each entry is a single game that you could quite feasibly play for a very long time indeed — possibly even forever, depending on how much you like mahjong and shogi — and there is absolutely nothing quite like them out there.

And they're a markedly different experience from western open world games that provide a huge, boring map littered with objective markers and expect you to hoover them up systematically while working through a tedious skill tree that gives you 0.1% poison resistance with every level up or something equally meaningless. No; although Yakuza games are full of things to do — and each comes with a handy "Completion List" marking how much of all its component Bits you have "completed" — not one of them feels like it has been designed with "player retention" in mind. Not one of them is designed for the explicit purpose of 1) being your "forever game" and 2) monetising the crap out of its user base.

No; Yakuza's wealth of things to do is all in service of creating one of the most detailed, compelling worlds in all of gaming. And although I'm very behind on the series at this point, I am well and truly determined to catch up and see where things go from here. Because after this many hours, this many games and this many in-game years having passed, I care what happens to these characters!

If you've never played a Yakuza game and are daunted by the prospect of there being (counts) 11 games set in the main series continuity, a further two spinoffs in the same setting but not directly connected, and a wealth of other, non-canonical spinoffs that range from historical adaptations to a Fist of the North Star-themed adventure, don't be afraid! Start with Yakuza Zero, play it, love it, see how you like it. And then you'll understand. And, several games later, you'll be about where I am now.

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 546: Why are we still arguing over "games as art"?

Back in April of 2010, the first time around on this #oneaday malarkey, I wrote a post responding to the late Roger Ebert's ill-advised argument that "video games can never be art".

Today, on the 5th of December 2025, some 5,710 days later (or "over 15 years" if you want to be a bit more normal about it), we are, apparently, still having this argument. Roger Ebert is, of course, dead, so this time around it has come from someone else: Ian Bogost, a professor at Washington University, St. Louis and hilariously forever doomed to be "most known for the game Cow Clicker" so far as the broader Internet is concerned.

A bit of context if you've not come across this chap before: Cow Clicker was designed as a satirical take on the rise of "social games", as they were known when they first started appearing on Facebook. You know the sort of thing: wait for timer to expire, click on thing, get stuff. Pay up if you want to get stuff more quickly. Marvel at the meaninglessness of existence.

Cow Clicker was good satire! It made some solid points about the way social games abused not only their players, but the broader community surrounding those players. Anyone who lived through Facebook in the 2010s will almost certainly remember being spammed with "invitations" to "help" on someone's "farm" or similar, because although it was patently obvious to anyone who had ever played a video game before that social games were absolute dog eggs, they introduced a lot of people who had never touched video games before to the idea of playing games on their computer or mobile phone. And, as a result, they are indirectly responsible for those tedious shitheads who argue that Candy Crush Saga is relevant to modern gaming rather than yet another abusive, predatory free-to-play game.

Anyway, I hadn't seen Bogost around for a while, but I'd always thought that he had vaguely… sensible ideas. Today he came out with these humdingers — relating to, of course, HORSES, the hot topic du jour (as you will know if you have read my last two posts and my piece on the game over on MoeGamer):

(Bluesky screenshot) ‪Ian Bogost‬ ‪@ibogost.com‬ I’m going to get in trouble for this, but fuck it. I’ve been at this a long time. Games culture wants the spoils of cultural sophistication without doing the work. It wants a guarantee that the intention to make work guarantees not just a living but a thriving one. It is a medium for children. (Quoting the following post:) ‪Aftermath‬ ‪@aftermath.site‬ Despite the controversy, Horses is only shocking if you're unfamiliar with the history movies, theater, literature, or basically any art form that does not have stats.
(Bluesky screenshot) Ian Bogost ‪@ibogost.com‬ The interesting, sophisticated thing about games is not whether they can tell stories as well as books or movies (they can’t) or float shocking themes as well as fine art (honestly, who cares). It’s the manipulation of systems, the play of contingency, the brokenness of machines.
(Bluesky screenshot) Ian Bogost ‪@ibogost.com‬ Q-Up and Candy Crush, say, are more serious works of game than Horses (which seems fine and even innocuous!) or whatever embarrassing anime RPG trash is on Steam or Nintendo EShop.

There are some truly amazing bad takes in this mini-thread, but his argument appears to stem from "I am older than you, therefore my opinions are the correct ones." At least he correctly assumed that he would "get in trouble for this".

He falls into the usual traps of assuming that books and movies are inherently superior forms of media because they have been around longer and are thus more refined, but this exceedingly shallow viewpoint fails to accommodate the existence of books and movies that are unashamed to be absolute pulp fodder, trash, blockbuster nonsense or whatever other mild pejoratives you might care to fling at them. Not only that, but gaming is a medium that has grown much quicker than both books and movies, at least partly because it was able to draw on artists' experiences in developing those mediums, and adapting the things that work into the interactive space.

Now, one area where I do kind of sort of align with Bogost is where he notes that games are "the manipulation of systems, the play of contingency, the brokenness of machines". However, where I drift apart from him is his seeming assumption that that is all there is to gaming.

Games can be about the manipulation of systems, the play of contingency and the brokenness of machines. There are some truly compelling games that focus exclusively on those things — and yes, there are plenty of those that I would well and truly describe as exhibiting their own form of artistry. There is an elegance to a well-designed, well-balanced game — it keeps you playing; it keeps you invested; it plays on your mind even when you're not directly engaging with it, in much the same way as a great work of art that you, personally, found particularly impactful "stays with you" long after you were in its physical presence.

This side of things is something that I feel the more "artsy" side of game criticism — and the more artsy side of gaming enthusiasts, for that matter — could do well to study more. As someone with an appreciation for both narrative-centric and mechanics-focused games, it is inordinately frustrating to see those who prefer narrative experiences completely dismiss the artistry of mechanics-centric games. At the same time, it is also frustrating when people who are primarily appreciators of mechanics will completely discount the artistry of a good story.

You see, games aren't one or the other! They can be both, or they can be one of those things — or they can probably be neither of them if you're determined enough. But in most cases these days, there's a little of column A and a little of column B in there — and both of those aspects have been developing rapidly as the medium and technology have evolved, to such a degree that it is an astonishingly galaxy-brained take to say that "games cannot tell stories as well as books and movies" as a blanket statement.

HORSES is an interesting one because it's not a very "good" video game in terms of its mechanical aspect, and there are arguments to be made that its narrative aspects aren't anything particularly out of the ordinary either. I enjoyed my time with it well enough — I found it compelling enough to play through in a single sitting — but I also found myself wondering if anyone would remember it a year from now, particularly if the whole situation with it being "banned" from various platforms hadn't happened. There are plenty of artsy-fartsy walking simulators out there, and some have done their job better than others; it's actually a surprisingly challenging genre of game to get "right", and opinions vary wildly on exactly what getting it "right" really means.

But that's art! Art provokes discussion and debate. It sometimes makes people feel uncomfortable. It sometimes carries deep meaning for people. It resonates with some people more than others, and for different reasons even among those who all found it "meaningful" to a similar degree.

I'm truly astonished that we're still in a situation where games are having to justify their existence as an incredibly creative, artistic medium in 2025. Yes, there's garbage out there — although let's not even get into the casual racism of Bogost's "embarrassing anime RPG trash" statement right now, which is another matter entirely — but there are garbage books, movies and paintings out there, too. To put "established" forms of media on some sort of unassailable pedestal purely because they've been around longer and because the Big Scary Professor At Washington U Says So is just absurd. Because if video games as a medium are not "established" by this point… exactly when is the cutoff point for them to be taken the slightest bit seriously?

There are certain people out there who seem weirdly desperate for video games to forever be regarded as toys for little children — particularly little boys. We are long past that. And I would expect someone like Bogost to know better by this point.

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 545: Couldn't drag me away

I played HORSES this evening. I wrote about it in depth over on MoeGamer, so go read that if you want to find out a bit more about it. Short version: it was a decent Art Game, I'm not sure it'll be remembered in a couple of years' time, and the controversy surrounding it is, frankly, laughable.

That side of things is worth pondering a moment, because it's been an absolutely absurd game of telephone that has culminated in some people — including professional games journalists! — coming out absolutely convinced that the game was justified in being banned because at one point during its development it had something they considered to be child sexual abuse material.

For context, this is the scene as it ended up in the final game. The only change is that the woman atop the horse-masked individual is now in her twenties rather than being fourteen.

If you think that scene is in any way sexual, I really don't know what to tell you. There's nothing the slightest bit titillating about the whole scene, and for the majority of it, it looks like this:

That's "you" on the left, and the girl on the right is the daughter of a wealthy businessman considering purchasing one of the "horses" in the game (actually enslaved, naked humans) — during this scene even the dialogue isn't remotely sexual; instead, the woman delivers a lengthy diatribe about how people should know their place in society, how those with morals perceived to be "loose" tend to have "dangerous" ideas, and how those who live their lives "recklessly and indulgently" end up getting what they deserve.

HORSES is provocative — deliberately so — but honestly, having played through the whole thing this evening, it is so laughably tame compared to some other video games out there that the entire situation just feels bizarre. There are people thumping tables out there arguing that this game deserved to be banned while having absolutely zero knowledge of what the whole thing is actually about, but for once it seems like the majority opinion — even among games journalists — is that this game doesn't deserve the treatment it's gotten.

And that treatment is worth talking about. As Chris Person notes in his excellent piece on the game over on Aftermath, HORSES encountering such difficulty with getting a widespread release is a troubling sight for the industry. "If this is what's considered the limit for which games can and cannot be sold on mass marketplaces," he writes, "then we're all in trouble, and everyone involved in that decision should be thoroughly embarrassed."

The problem is that Valve holds a near-monopoly on the digital PC games market with their Steam platform, and thus a game from a small, independent team with a limited budget not being able to release their game their is very bad news for that team and their game. HORSES has probably sidestepped this particular issue thanks to the widespread press coverage it has had, but it's a solid case study in why the present situation is a bit of a problem.

"Well, just release it elsewhere!" some of you might say. And sure: you can buy the game on GOG.com and Humble. But for most PC gamers, neither of those storefronts are the first place they look to get new games. For most PC gamers, PC gaming begins and ends with Steam — particularly if they do their gaming on a device like a Steam Deck, which, as the name suggests, obviously prioritises Steam as its main source of material.

As I say: HORSES itself is probably going to be all right after all the coverage it's gotten. But will the next game to suffer this situation be as lucky? Probably not.

And besides, part of the reason the HORSES situation specifically is so absurd is the fact that there is much worse stuff already on Steam with zero issues. Not only do reasonably big-name recent releases like Silent Hill f feature more explicit, disturbing content than HORSES does, but you also have shovelware shit like the Sex With Hitler (yes, really) series happily existing with zero issue. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this is a rather major problem with consistency and transparency.

Transparency is, honestly, probably the biggest problem with all this. HORSES' developer Santa Ragione did their best to try and work with Valve on ensuring that it was compliant with all appropriate platform policies, and when its initial version was rejected, they changed everything that could have been remotely considered to be a bit dodgy — even if, as outlined above, it almost certainly wasn't dodgy. But they were given no chance to appeal, no second chance — it was just gone from the platform, and with it a significant opportunity at organic discovery.

The Epic Games Store situation is even more bizarre. It seems like Epic themselves re-submitted the game to IARC, an international body that issues local content certifications for digital games, and that caused the game to end up with an "Adults Only" rating from the ESRB, which isn't allowed on Epic (except for blockchain and NFT-based games, because Tim Sweeney is a cunt). This is unusual because it's not Epic's place to submit games to IARC or any ratings bodies — it's the responsibility of developers and publishers, and a storefront going out of their way to re-submit something that had already attained a rating is unheard of, and probably not actually allowed.

Anyway, it's all a shitshow, and with this coming amid payment processors continuing to cut off adult content creators and sex workers from their sources of online income, it's just generally a pretty dark, shitty time for various forms of self-expression.

I enjoyed my time with HORSES. I wasn't blown away, but I enjoyed it. It's definitely worth four quid and a couple of hours of your time if you're on board with narrative-centric games that have minimal mechanics. I wonder if it will be remembered in a few years for anything other than this whole situation with the platform holders.

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#oneaday Day 544: Wild HORSES

The latest casualty in the ongoing wave of New Puritanism which appears to be spearheaded by Visa and Mastercard is a short, arty game known as HORSES. Thus far, it has been banned from release on Steam and withdrawn from sale on the Epic Games Store and Humble's store. (Edit: apparently Humble have put it back now.) At the time of writing, you can buy it from GOG.com. It's £3.99 and is apparently 2-3 hours long. If you're in the mood for something arty, unsettling and apparently the worst thing that has ever happened to society so far as payment processors are concerned, go grab it while you still can. I'm certainly intending to after this.

This whole ongoing situation has been really disappointing to see, because, as I say, it's a real wave of Neo-Puritanism that has been affecting all sorts of different online storefronts, types of media and subject matter. And, as people working in the more "adult" end of things have been yelling for a long time at this point, once these things start happening to material that you, personally, might find distasteful, it's not long before things that you, personally, are completely okay with start getting affected. Which is what has happened here.

The frustrating thing about this is that no-one wielding any of the power in this is ever honest about things. Visa and Mastercard won't say "no, we're not letting people buy porn". Valve won't say "this specific scene is why you can't put your game on Steam". Epic seemingly even went so far as to overrule the developer's content rating submission to ensure that it couldn't be sold on their storefront. And let's not even get into why it's ridiculous that the ESRB (or equivalent) "Adults Only" rating should preclude adults from being able to purchase material on an online storefront.

For quite some time, it looked like we were making some real progress in that area. The European games rating board, PEGI, allows explicit sexual content under its 18 rating now — there are even Nintendo Switch games that have explicit nudity and sexual content, though the fully "uncensored" versions tend to be physical exclusives. And yet, probably not coincidentally alongside the worst United States politics have been for many, many years, we are seeing legitimate businesses being forced to sit around twiddling their thumbs, potentially not being able to pay the bills, because someone, somewhere got a stiffy and got scared because it had never happened before.

It's ridiculous to see the amount of misinformation flying around, too. In the case of HORSES, the developer admitted that there was, at one point, a scene in the game that featured a 14 year old girl riding on the shoulders of a naked woman clad in a horse mask — and to those inexplicably defending the decisions of Valve, Epic and Humble, this is the same as illegal child sexual abuse material. Never mind the fact that the scene involved nudity but was not sexual — the two things are different! — or that the scene ended up being changed to involve a young woman in her twenties because the developers thought that fitted the tone of the scene better. No! To these people, HORSES is, was and always will be kiddie porn and thus the big, powerful corporations — step on me, Daddy, and I will lick your boots — are absolutely right to banhammer it so hard it leaves a crater right down to the Earth's core.

It's really discouraging to see the world continuing to find new and exciting ways to suck more. But I am glad that people — press and public alike — appear to be rallying behind the HORSES developers, and that people who might have previously gone "ew, porn is icky" are starting to see why sex workers and those who work in various forms of adult media are often considered to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to matters of censorship.

I'm off to buy a copy of HORSES now. If this is the world's cleverest marketing campaign, I salute the people responsible. But somehow I think it's just the world reminding us that we're living through a really shitty age right now.

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#oneaday Day 536: Restlessness

I've been weirdly "restless" with regard to the games I feel like playing of late. I have a bunch of cool things on the go — Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Death end re;Quest: Code Z, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and probably some others I've forgotten about — but I'm having real trouble feeling settled of an evening. For the last few evenings, I've been playing nothing but Evercade games (hence yesterday's post) specifically, a combination of Spectrum classic Atic Atac (which I finished for the first time last night!), Activision 2600 games and various NEOGEO games.

And I've been having a lovely time doing so! Part of me, of course, feels like I "should" play at least one of those "big games" I have on the go, but honestly, just recently I've been feeling a tad run down, and thus some straightforward, right-to-the-point retro gaming has been pretty much what the figurative doctor ordered. Nothing to "commit" to, but something enjoyable and satisfying to engage with — and helping to broaden my experience with and appreciation of some games I might not have had the opportunity to spend a ton of time with previously.

The NEOGEO stuff is probably top of the heap in this regard. When I was young, the NEOGEO was the great legendary white whale that we only ever saw from afar (and occasionally on GamesMaster) and that no-one ever actually got to touch. Given that arcades were only really found on the seafront during my childhood and adolescence, I don't think I ever saw a NEOGEO MVS in the wild back in the day, so my sole point of reference for the machine was the fact that people talked about its cartridges costing a frankly remarkable three-figure sum each.

I always struggled to understand quite why NEOGEO games were so expensive back in the day, but I suppose a lot was riding on the fact that you were literally getting arcade-perfect games, due to the console model, the AES, having fundamentally the same guts as the MVS arcade machine. These days it seems especially absurd, given that pretty much all NEOGEO games are, as you might expect, short-form arcade-style affairs, and thus rather on the short side if you're counting "press start to end credits" as a game's "length". Can you imagine an entitled Steam reviewer pitching a fit over a game that cost £120 and lasted twenty minutes? I certainly can.

But then that's not the whole story, is it? As arcade games, NEOGEO titles were — are — inherently replayable: for high scores, for greater mastery, for competition with friends. Granted, there's probably a cap to how good you can get at something like Metal Slug or Shock Troopers, but fighters like Garou: Mark of the Wolves and the The King of Fighters series can potentially keep you busy forever if you have at least one other person to play with. When you consider it in those terms, that three-figure sum for a single game doesn't seem quite so unreasonable — particularly when you bear in mind that the three-figure sum gets you the whole damn game with no updates or DLC.

Yes, I know it's a cliché for old men like me to rail against modern games with DLC roadmaps and other such nonsense, but when you look at something like, say, The King of Fighters 2000, which has a whopping thirty-six characters in it, it's hard not to feel a bit nickel-and-dimed at modern fighting games with multiple "season passes". At the other end of the spectrum, the relatively limited playable cast of Garou: Mark of the Wolves makes it much easier to pick a single character you might want to get to know how to play a bit better, rather than overwhelming you with a huge amount of choice right from the get-go.

And then, of course, NEOGEO games don't cost three-figure sums any more, unless you're going for those original cartridges — in which case they are, as you might depressingly expect, at least three or four times their original asking price today. The NEOGEO carts for Evercade are twenty quid and have six games each — and I don't think it's a spoiler to say there's more coming next year.

So yeah. There's definitely value in these games, as "short" as they might seem to be. And apparently they're just what my brain is craving right about now. So I will continue to enjoy them for as long as my brain desires them.

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#oneaday Day 535: Five of my favourite Evercade games

As you hopefully know, I do a lot of the blog posts on the Evercade website. I had a small flash of inspiration the other day for a recurring series of posts where I and the other chap who has started contributing to the site alternate between just doing a grab bag of our favourites from the library. No particular theme, just "here's five games I, personally, like, and think you should spend some time with".

We've already got this week's blog post covered, so I thought I would use today to shamelessly pinch my own formula — and I'm making no promises that I won't pick these exact five for the first time I do the new feature over on the Evercade site. If I do, I will probably talk about them marginally more professionally.

But for now, dear reader, with apologies to Rob of the excellent Beyond the Scanlines YouTube channel, here are Five Evercade Games I Just Think Are Neat. Note that these are not "the five best games on Evercade", they're just five arbitrarily chosen games that I particularly like. So if I missed your favourite, don't worry; I probably like it too.

Burnin' Rubber

Hailing from Data East Collection 1, one of the Evercade's launch lineup, Burnin' Rubber almost certainly holds the crown for the Evercade game I have, over the last five years since the system's launch, spent the most time in.

For the unfamiliar, Burnin' Rubber is a follow-up to Data East's arcade game Bump 'n' Jump. Indeed, in some locales this console version is just known as Bump 'n' Jump, but it's considerably enhanced and expanded over its arcade predecessor, making it more of a sequel — and a much better game. The concept is simple: drive your car up vertically scrolling stages, avoiding obstacles and smashing other cars out of the way either by ramming them into walls or leaping into the air and crashing down on them from above.

Burnin' Rubber is easy to learn but hard to master, and to date I haven't yet managed to beat it. But it's infectiously compelling thanks to its combination of straightforward controls, challenging but fair gameplay and inordinately catchy music. Ever since I first played it back on the original Evercade handheld, it's been a firm favourite of mine, and absolutely one of my top titles on the entire platform.

World Rally

Staying on the vehicular theme, World Rally from Gaelco Arcade 1 is next up. This high-speed isometric racer has absolutely sublime arcade-style handling, and is a real "in the zone" kind of game that probably makes you look like a superhuman to anyone watching over your shoulder.

Its genius lies in its brilliantly handled controls: rather than giving you complete freedom to turn your car in any direction, World Rally kind of "snaps" your car to the correct orientation as you exit a corner (assuming you remembered to actually steer around it) in a sort of "slot car" fashion. This prevents frustrating instances of oversteer and keeps the game pacy and accessible while still offering a gradually escalating challenge factor through increasingly complex courses.

Presentation is lovely, particularly with Gaelco's trademark low bit-rate digitised guitar noodling on the soundtrack. The sequel is lovely, too, and arguably looks nicer, but I think the original has the slight edge for me, personally.

Night Stalker

Possibly my favourite Intellivision game? It's definitely right up there with Tower of Doom and Cloudy Mountain. Anyway, Night Stalker is, for me, the best game on the Intellivision Collection 1 cartridge, and a game I come back to regularly.

The concept is straightforward: you're stuck in a maze, and robots are coming to get you. You must shoot the robots before they get you. The longer you survive, the more dangerous the robots get. You move slowly and have limited ammunition, so you need a certain amount of strategy to survive — and the ability to adapt as the situation changes.

Night Stalker is super-simple, atmospheric and enjoyable to play. We also mapped the Intellivision's somewhat idiosyncratic "disc and keypad" controls to the Evercade directional pad and buttons in an eminently sensible way, making it arguably more fun to play on Evercade than on original hardware. I'm sure there's some sicko out there who is all like "no, the Intellivision hand controller is the optimal way to play, actually", but for human beings with functional hands, you'll thank us for our control mappings on this one.

Tomb Raider

I enjoyed the original PC version of Tomb Raider back when it was current, and I remember not liking the PlayStation control scheme all that much — perhaps because I was so accustomed to the PC's keyboard controls. But returning to the series when we released Tomb Raider Collection 1 for Evercade gave me an all-new appreciation for this game's methodical puzzle-platforming.

Yes, the combat kind of sucks, but that's why I picked the first Tomb Raider: it's not a particular focus, whereas later games tried to play up the combat to varying degrees. You'll have the odd encounter with some nasties to deal with, but the majority of your time will be spent by yourself figuring out exactly how you're going to scale the enormous structure in front of you and probably breaking Lara's legs a few times in the process.

It's fashionable to bash the early Tomb Raider games today, but approach them with the appropriate mindset — i.e. that they're not Super Mario 64, nor are they trying to be — and there's a lot of fun to be had across the five games available on Evercade.

Shock Troopers

It's been a delight to get to know the NEOGEO a bit better with our NEOGEO cartridges for Evercade. Shock Troopers, which is on NEOGEO Arcade 1, is actually one of the games I did know reasonably well beforehand — in fact, it was one of the first NEOGEO games I ever played, with dotEmu's awful PC port from a few years back — but having it on Evercade is giving me a sense of rediscovered appreciation for it.

Shock Troopers isn't a remarkably original game — it's a top-down run-and-gun, Commando-style, albeit not scrolling exclusively vertically. Where it shines, though, is in how satisfying it is to play. Weapons have a real sense of oomph to them, ripping through enemies and blowing up vehicles and structures. The different characters all handle differently, catering to different play styles. And the game offers a stiff but fair challenge that allows you to make gradual progress if you stick with it and learn the enemy encounters. Plus multiple routes through it add replay value — along with a two-player mode.

It's one of the best-sounding NEOGEO games, too, with some excellent digital music and meaty sound effects. One day I might even be able to get beyond the second stage without having to credit-feed — but regardless of my own ineptitude at it, it's a game I always enjoy every time I fire it up.

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 534: An evening of arcade

In gaming today, it's tempting to always want to be making progress on your "big game" of the moment: a lengthy epic that goes on into the tens or even hundreds of hours in length. But one thing I find it helpful to remind myself of on a regular basis is that short-form games very much have their place and their appeal, too. And it's in this area that retro gaming in particular tends to excel.

In recent weeks, I've been having a lot of fun getting to know the NEOGEO games we've released on Evercade this year. Most notably, I've been spending some time with the ever-delightful Metal Slug, which I hadn't spent a ton of time with prior to the Evercade release, and I've even been dipping my toes into the notoriously obtuse fighting game genre a little with Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which first impressions would seem to indicate is one of the more accessible SNK/NEOGEO fighting games in existence.

These games are immediately rewarding and fun. You probably won't be able to beat them on your first go — although in most cases, you can credit-feed — but there's a definite appeal element in the form of gradual mastery. With each attempt from the beginning of Metal Slug, I get to know the game a bit better, I learn more about how to play it effectively, and, assuming I'm paying attention to what I'm doing, I get a little bit further. At this point, I can occasionally make it up to the start of Mission 3 without losing a life; with each new attempt, that "occasionally" becomes "more frequently", and that's a really satisfying, rewarding feeling.

My concern is what I feel like is an increasing number of people getting to a point where they're writing off these short-form experiences as having no real inherent value. Perhaps it's because these games aren't telling a deep, thought-provoking or emotionally engaging story. Perhaps it's simply because they're short. Perhaps it's down to assumptions that short-form or arcade games are inherently "lesser" than 100+ hour epics on computers and consoles today.

I don't know. But I know that I definitely derive value from them, and I continue to feel proud that I'm involved in helping to preserve these games and educate new generations in their appeal elements thanks to my day job.

One day I still want to write a book. Or, at this point, probably several books, given the sheer number of games that are on Evercade by now. I should probably just stop thinking about doing that and actually do it, no?

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#oneaday Day 531: Riding the air

Kirby Air Riders is out today, and I've spent the evening playing it. Specifically, I've spent the evening playing the "Road Trip" mode that I didn't know anything about prior to starting the game. This is a single-player mode that is presumably intended to get you up to speed on everything you might be doing at any point in the other modes, but it also unlocks a bunch of stuff in a similar fashion to Smash Bros.' single-player modes from over the years.

The whole package is very Smash Bros., in fact, including the way you navigate the menus, the way you adjust your settings for a play session and the overall structure of the game. It's a very customisable game, from the look of things, so I'm looking forward to investigating the other aspects of it soon.

Road Trip, meanwhile, that I can talk about. In this mode, you pick a character and initial "machine" to ride on, and progress through a series of stages, each of which is split into a series of "encounters" on the road. Under most circumstances, you have a choice of three encounters to choose from at any point, with different rewards on offer for each. Successfully beating an encounter generally rewards you with some Road Trip-specific currency and a stat increase or two. Outside of the competitive events, you may also run into shops (where you can, of course, spend the aforementioned Road Trip-specific currency) and weird things that determine which of several branching paths you will take at the conclusion of the current stage.

The events you'll compete in on the Road Trip are generally pretty short in duration — races tend to be one or two laps at most, and the events which aren't races are all time-limited. It's enough to give you a look at the different things you can do in the game's other modes, but in a way that you never get particularly bogged down in anything. You rarely do the same type of event twice in a row, and the difficulty curve progresses nicely from "very easy" in the early stages to "genuinely quite challenging, but not annoyingly so" as you get closer to the conclusion.

As you progress through the Road Trip, you'll gain the opportunity to earn "memory shards", which tell the unfolding story. This is surprisingly dark, considering this is a Kirby game, involving a mechanical creature that has sat for aeons without being able to move because it requires someone's "strong will" to allow it to do anything, a terrifying orbital satellite that, among other things, constructs an army of robotic ants to rip this aforementioned creature to bits and rebuild it into a world-crushing weapon, and the implication that everyone's vehicles in the game are like Pokémon, if Pokémon were forms of sentient transporation rather than creatures that liked to fight. So maybe not all that much like Pokémon at all, other than the fact that they clearly have "personalities" of sorts, and partner up with the people of Kirby's world, Popstar, in a quasi-symbiotic relationship.

In the events, Kirby Air Riders is chaotic. For those concerned that it might be a bit too much like Mario Kart: it's nothing like Mario Kart. My wife saw me playing it briefly and said it looked like "Wipeout, but Kirby" and honestly she's not far from the truth there. There's a touch of F-Zero, a bit of Burnout, even a bit of Twisted Metal in there, depending on the type of event you're playing. I can see it easily being overwhelming for some players, but there is clearly method in the madness.

Probably the most clever thing it does is use an incredibly simple control scheme, much like Kirby platformers tend to. There are only two buttons to worry about: characters accelerate automatically, and the only time you need to press a button is when you want to slow down (which also charges up your boost) or use your character's "Special", which can only be used when a particular meter has charged.

The "Boost Charge" mechanic has a nicely tactile feel. You're effectively "pulling back" your character, winding them up and then letting them twang forward, though the exact implementation of this depends quite significantly on the machine you've chosen to ride. Some are built for drifting around corners; others stop dead when charging a boost and can thus immediately change direction when going around 90-degree bends; others still can't drift or boost at all, but make up for this with other strengths.

These differences between the machines, along with individual machines' special capabilities (such as the "Vampire Star" machine's ability to "bite" opponents, damaging and slowing them down and stealing their power-ups) and the stat growth throughout Road Trip mode mean that there's a surprising amount of depth considering how simple the game is to control. Different machines are eminently suitable to different types of event, so it pays to try and build up a collection — indeed, I believe to get the "true" ending for the game, you need to collect all of them prior to reaching the final encounter, though this is made more straightforward through a New Game+ option that lets you carry over the stuff you've already acquired.

There are some other interesting little things, too. A significant portion of the Road Trip mode involves the "Top Rider" mode, which is racing from a top-down perspective on simplified tracks. This is a lot of fun, though obviously less spectacular and chaotic than the 3D races — and it's nice that this is a whole mode you can play given equal weight to the "main" game mode. There are even different control options, depending on if you prefer "turn left and right" or "push the analogue stick in the direction you want to go" for these top-down sequences.

All in all, it seems like a really solid game given that distinctive Sora Ltd. polish. I'll be interested to see whether it has the juice to go for the long term on the multiplayer circuit; I can see this being a really solid multiplayer game, but, of course, it needs a community for that to work over the long term. I don't yet know if the broader community will take to it in the same way as something like Mario Kart — but then, Splatoon came out of nowhere on Wii U and managed to be a big enough hit (on the Wii U!) to spawn two sequels, so there's precedent for a Nintendo game not called Mario Kart or Smash Bros. to have a thriving online community.

More than anything, it's nice to see the Switch 2 finally picking up the pace with some solid releases — and on proper game cartridges, too. Now, if they'd just quit doing that dumbass Game Key Card thing completely I'd be very happy indeed…

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