It's weird how certain things resonate in your memory, even if you haven't really thought about them for ages.

This happened to me most recently with the video I've prepared for Thursday's episode of Atari ST A to Z, which is on the subject of Microdeal's isometric adventure Airball, one of the earlier titles I remember owning and playing for the ST back in the day, and a monstrously difficult affair I never really got anywhere with.

Revisiting it recently, I discovered that 1) I'm still not very good at Airball and really have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to do in it and 2) Airball inexplicably "means" a lot to me.

I've been trying to pin down exactly why I feel that way. I don't believe I associate it with a particularly important moment in my life, or a specific event, or anything like that. There's just something… indescribable about it that really means something to me.

Perhaps it's the music? Airball has great music. The compositions throughout the game aren't especially complicated and use one of the most cliched chord progressions in the world, but those pieces of music have stuck with me ever since I played that game for the first time back in the '80s. There have been times when I've been doing things that vaguely remind me of Airball, and snippets of the music have come into my head, unbidden, even though the last time I played Airball before recording the game footage over the weekend was probably nearly thirty years ago.

Or perhaps it's the atmosphere? This is something I talk a bit about in the video, so please look forward to that. Suffice to say for now that Airball has a really interesting atmosphere about it. Its story is absolutely dumb as shit, but that doesn't stop it being an unusually atmospheric and emotionally engaging game for the Atari ST.

Or perhaps it's just a cool game that I've enjoyed revisiting. Whatever the reason, Airball means a lot to me, and you get to see me revisit it for the first time in a very long while on Thursday! I hope you enjoy.

(After-the-fact note: This was written before the Great ProJared Controversy of 2019. I stand by what I said here, because it's how I felt at the time, and however one might feel about his alleged behaviour, I can't deny that his professional work inspired me to create.)

This is a topic I will doubtless revisit fairly often, but today I wanted to talk about a creator that has inspired me, and who has had quite an influence on at least certain aspects of my work — specifically, the video side of things.

I'm referring to a chap called ProJared, who is a gaming YouTuber that both my wife Andie and I very much enjoy watching. He used to have a channel where he did more "scripted" videos and is apparently most well-known for his "one minute review" series. I actually thought the latter was among the weakest of his scripted content, but then I generally prefer longer stuff anyway — hence the fact my own videos tend to err on the longer side. (People often say that they put Let's Plays on as "background noise" — the wife and I certainly do while we're falling asleep — so long videos are great for that.)

Anyway, Jared's main channel has been largely defunct for quite some time now. I'm not sure of the reasons behind this, but from what I understand it is down to personal and mental health issues that are no-one's business but his own. He has, however, been ramping up both his streaming and Let's Play efforts on his second channel, ProJared Plays, and over time I've actually found myself enjoying this content more than his scripted stuff. This surprised me, because when I first stumbled across his channel, I thought I'd prefer his more "produced" content, but actually the opposite has ended up being true.

Jared is an exemplary Let's Player, so far as I'm concerned. He's passionate, he's friendly, he reacts like a human being rather than a screeching teenager, and he manages to pull off that incredibly difficult balancing act between being progressive and inclusive and not being an incredibly obnoxious twat about it. His Let's Plays include the audience in what he's doing (he refers to things that are going on by saying "we" rather than "I", a habit that I've subconsciously picked up while recording Let's Plays, but am quite happy to keep) and he has a great sense of humour about everything he does.

I also greatly respect him for taking on a variety of games that are a bit off the beaten track rather than just going for either the popular games or "streamer bait". Some of the first videos I saw of his were his explorations of the old Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons games for PC, as well as an almost entirely forgotten Westwood D&D production for Turbografx, of all things, called Order of the Griffon. But it's not all old stuff; he often tries out newer indies and visual novels, and is a particular fan of both narrative-centric stuff and scary games.

You're probably building up something of a picture of why I like him, huh.

Anyway, Jared has been a big inspiration for me. When I was pondering what to do with YouTube that would be something unique rather than just rehashing other content in a different medium, his Let's Plays were extremely influential in me developing a style that I was comfortable and confident in, and that you've hopefully seen me grow into over the course of the series that I've been experimenting with.

I've tried to follow suit with his friendly, audience-inclusive style of presentation and I've received a few kind comments saying that my videos remind the viewers in question of good old days sitting around playing games with friends, which was exactly the sort of vibe I was going for, so I'm really happy about that.

I'm not trying to ape ProJared by any means — I can only dream of his viewer counts! — but I wanted to acknowledge that he has been a great inspiration and a strong influence on me. And perhaps encourage you to check out his work if you haven't enjoyed it for yourself! His recent playthrough of a cooperative Super Mario World ROMhack with his "Miss Editor" (who is as much a personality-packed part of his videos as he is at this point, despite only ever appearing as disembodied text during videos) has been a particular highlight, but there's a whole lot of goodness to be found among his past work, too. If you want a really good giggle, check out his "Mario Go Fish" drinking game and the following two absolutely hammered Minecraft videos. (All three are collected in one convenient playlist here.)

You're not reading this, Jared, but thanks. Not just for giving me some great ideas, but for continually entertaining me, even when I've had difficult days, weeks, months. There have been times where your videos have really helped me out of a dark place. So I'm proud to count you among the growing list of people who have influenced and inspired my work.

Five days until a blissful two weeks of freedom!

Yes, after this next week is over I've got two whole weeks off from the day job, which will be blissful. I don't hate my day job or anything, but like most jobs, it is frequently exceedingly boring, and with my mood having been a bit low recently this boredom hasn't exactly been conducive to making me cheer up a bit.

I'm not doing anything particularly specific during the two weeks off. My wife Andie is going away for some of the time to go and meet up with some Final Fantasy XIV friends — one of whom is coming from abroad — and I'm on cat-sitting duty. Which is fine by me — to be honest, more often than not, a "holiday" at home is absolutely wonderful, because you can just do the things you want without having to worry about the things you have to do. Unless you booked holiday specifically to do something, obviously.

I'm going to use the time productively rather than sitting around in my pants (well, there will probably be a fair amount of sitting around in my pants, because the things I want to do are not necessarily incompatible with sitting around in one's pants) because there's lots of stuff I want to get done for the site and for YouTube. I may be bored in my day job, but I've been feeling super fired up about my various projects just recently, so this couple of weeks off will be an ideal opportunity to get a bunch of stuff prepared and ready to go.

Specifically, I'm hoping to prepare a whole bunch of videos for the coming weeks so the YouTube channel can pretty much take care of itself, and then alongside that I will, of course, be doing plenty of writing. I'm also going to assemble some more books, too; I'll be "announcing" Volume 1 officially tomorrow and I'm aiming to have Volume 2 ready for the end of next month. Then Volume 3 will follow, covering 2018, and after that I might have a few smaller collections to put together, too.

With regard to Volume 2, I will probably be leaving out the Grisaia feature, because I haven't yet played through The Eden of Grisaia and I would kind of like to collect all the Grisaia stuff together, perhaps into one single standalone book. This would make a certain amount of sense, as the Grisaia stuff is very long — the current article on Yuuji is 10,000 words by itself, for example! I have The Eden of Grisaia (and the various spinoff games) pencilled in to cover in the next few months, as it's high time I put that series to bed, but I've been waiting for the right opportunity to do it "properly".

Anyway. Before all that I have a week of work to survive, so wish me luck!

I went out to our local CEX earlier today — CEX is a nationwide chain of second-hand video game shops, for those unaware and/or American — in the hope that I might find a copy of Lost Sphear I had seen a few weeks back.

Chris (of podcast fame) had reminded me that Lost Sphear had only seen a very limited physical release direct from Square Enix, so a copy out in the wild was something worth nabbing — particularly as it was only £22, which is cheap as chips for a boxed Switch game.

I wasn't anticipating it still being there as the last time I went into that CEX must have been a month or two back, but as fortune would have it, it was still there! I guess it's a game that was just a little too obscure for your average CEX-goer to pick up and go "ooh, I'll 'ave that". Anyway. I now have a copy of Lost Sphear, which is nice.

I took the opportunity to grab a bunch of cheap stuff for older platforms too, and came away with an armful of goodies for just £30 in total. Besides Lost Sphear, I nabbed Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2, Dark Sector and The Club for Xbox 360, and International Cue Club 2, Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament, Primal, Pipe Mania, Tourist Trophy, Fighting Fury, Gottlieb Pinball Classics and Fantavision for PS2. Most of these were 50p. Bargain.

Can't do that with your fancy-pants Google Stadia now, can you?

I was actually talking about "the good old days" of pre-social media Internet communities before I got distracted, wasn't I? Let's revisit that.

I've already talked about my earliest experiences with the "gaming community" as being on CompuServe's GO GAMERS forum. I guess my next encounter with them would have been 1up.com, a site which my brother was in charge of from its launch onwards and for several years afterwards.

1up.com is defunct now, but it was very ahead of its time in a lot of ways. Besides the articles from the staff, it allowed each and every user their own personal homepage to set up how they saw fit, and as part of this homepage every user had the opportunity to post a blog. This was, I think, my earliest encounter with blogging, and although I'd previously done some professional writing work for PC Zone and Official Nintendo Magazine at this point, this was probably the first time I'd written purely for pleasure about games since firing up AtariWriter on the 130XE and printing out my own "reviews" of games I'd been playing on our Epson-compatible Star dot-matrix printer, the noise of which used to mildly terrify me.

User homepages were just part of the 1up.com puzzle though. The site also played a leading role in establishing the format of gaming podcasts thanks to its long-running 1up Yours show, which I even appeared on a couple of times. And as a companion to the podcast, there was a forum specifically for discussing matters relating to "1up Radio" — the podcast and surrounding projects, such as the later video-based 1up Show.

The 1up Radio boards became a spiritual home for me. The people there were intelligent, articulate and wordy. People liked to discuss things in depth and detail, with a respectful tone even when there were disagreements, and at one point the community here even collectively established a project to continue an aborted features on the podcast: the exploration of our collective Piles of Shame, the games we'd bought but had never gotten around to finishing or even playing in some cases.

A loose collective quickly became a more organised group known as The Squadron of Shame, and we took on "missions" in a sort of "book club" format; we'd pick a game together, then play it through at the same time, posting our thoughts in a dedicated thread on the 1up Radio forums. We often got a shout-out on the podcast for continuing the work the podcast hosts hadn't been able to find the time for, and in the process each of us discovered some interesting games. Among other things, my early time with The Squadron of Shame was my first encounter with the Project Zero/Fatal Frame series.

One of the best things about the Squad and, more broadly, the Radio boards, was that we had a little corner of the Internet to call our own. The platform-specific boards on 1up.com were full of the usual fanboy arguments, but the Radio boards were different. The population was, on the whole, older and more mature in attitude; people liked to talk and discuss rather than make drive-by statements. It was an eminently pleasant place to hang out.

Then one day, everything changed. Someone behind the scenes decided that it would be a good idea to merge all the 1up.com boards — of which there were probably 15-20 or so? — into just two: "Games" and "Not Games". I'm sure you can imagine what happened next, as the 12-year old fanboys were suddenly thrown into the pit with intelligent people in their 20s and 30s. Chaos. Absolute chaos.

The first Squad mission we attempted after this great "merge" was Psi-Ops on PS2. The person who posted the initial "briefing" post on the forum, as always, went into detail about the game, why it had been chosen and some bits and pieces about its history. The first response? Some moron complaining about a "massive fucking wall of text". We knew then that this was no longer a good place to host our discussions; throwing everyone into the same pool forces the lowest common denominator to become default.

The story of the Squad continues further from there, but the important thing here is that our best years were during the period where we were part of a clearly "gated" community. We had our own space in which we felt safe and able to discuss things in the manner that we found interesting and enjoyable. When that was taken away from us, that was, in many ways, the beginning of the end — though we struggled on for a number of years across various platforms beyond this.

It's increasingly difficult to find spaces like that these days. Forums like NeoGAF and Resetera still follow the "Games/Not Games" formula rather than making more sensible subdivisions, and the overzealous, draconian moderation on the latter in particular makes it an undesirable place to go and hang out anyway.

For me, setting up MoeGamer was an important means of me being able to express myself about the things that are important to me in a way that I am comfortable and confident with. I'm extremely happy to welcome people into that space, and I've made some good friends in the process. But I'm still aware that it's not quite the same as those pleasant days of our nice, quiet "gated community" away from the noise and chaos of the broader gaming public. I don't think those days are ever coming back while social media continues to be a thing, and that makes me a bit sad — but at least I still have those fond memories!

So Google announced Stadia recently, and tech enthusiasts have been tripping over themselves to be the first to declare it "the future of gaming".

I really hope it isn't. Past experience with tech such as OnLive and PlayStation Now suggests that it probably won't be. But the risk factor is significantly higher now than it has been. And if it somehow does end up being the future of gaming… well, that's where I jump off from staying "current", and start to fill out my collections for past generations.

For the uninitiated, Stadia is a platform that allows you, through any web browser and theoretically any Web-connected device, to stream video games. That means no downloads, no installing, no patching, just click on a game and start playing. The game itself runs on Google's hardware — which they claim is more powerful than the current PS4 Pro and Xbox One X combined — and the video output is streamed back to you, in glorious 4K 60fps HDR and all those numbers and acronyms that only people more interested in tech than content care about.

It's a good idea on paper. A standardised platform will be good for triple-A developers in particular, who would be able to focus on making one version of their game work really well rather than three or four, and no-one will be left out in the cold because they don't have the latest iteration of a particular hardware platform. So long as your Internet connection is up to the job of streaming 4K 60fps HDR video, of course. And for many people at the moment, that's a big "if".

There are so many problems I have with this, though — chief among them being the idea of ownership. With a streaming service, you don't own anything, you're renting at best. And as such, you're even more at the mercy of publishers, licensing agreements and all manner of other bullshit than we already are with the digital marketplace. Want to play this game which the license for the cars used in has already expired? Tough luck, it's gone. Want to play that game in which a Japanese voice actor got into trouble for being caught with cocaine? Sorry, we had to remove it. Want to play Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? Never heard of it!

Meanwhile I can go to my PS2 shelf right now, pull down OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast and play it. Hm. Score one for the physical generation.

The physical matter is a big deal to me. I value games as possessions as much as the experiences I have with them. I've long been a proponent of the idea of "crystallised memories" — the idea that physical possessions can be embodiments of experiences that were important to you. And for me, this is true whether it's an indirect association — the object makes you think of something tangentially related to it — or a direct one where you remember specific things you did with that specific object.

One might argue that placing importance on this side of things leads to hoarding, and perhaps that's true for some people. But I only keep hold of those things that are genuinely important to me. Over the years, I've ditched lots of things that I just… "had". But the games in my collection? I have associations with important memories for pretty much each and every one on my shelf, and they are not things I want to abandon. With "the streaming future", that significant and important part of my hobby would be denied to me in future years.

There's also the question of disposability. Few can deny that music and movie streaming services have very much found a place in modern society… but even the most ardent enthusiasts of these services acknowledge that they devalue the individual works and make them far more disposable.

Music is particularly prone to this. When was the last time you sat down and actually listened to a full album from start to finish? (For me, it was February 11 of this year) Probably not for a while. Chances are you've picked and chosen your favourite tracks from several thousand albums and added them to your "chillout" or "motivational" playlists, then put them on while you're trying to get things done. They're just background noise rather than something to be appreciated on their own merits. And this isn't even getting into how much harder the streaming world has made it for musicians to make a living from what they do.

When I buy a game, it's because I look forward to the experience I will have with it. I've mentioned before that I specifically add games to my collection not to particularly try and be "complete" or anything, but because they are things I am interested in experiencing and writing about. I buy a game with the intention of experiencing it to its fullest; things I buy with Cover Game features in mind in particular are games that I know I'm going to be playing from start to finish, no questions asked.

I make an investment in these games. Even if I have no intention of playing a new acquisition immediately, it's an investment for the future. It has value. I've specifically chosen to bring it into my life, and as such I intend to make the most of it.

With a streaming service, I have none of that sense of "attachment". It becomes more of a case of "what do I feel like today?" and picking from a huge list. And I feel this, ultimately, will discourage people from seeing games through to their conclusion — something that the industry as a whole already struggles with, hence the rise of odious "games as a service" practices that aim to keep people invested (both in terms of time and money) in the long term. Because even if you're just paying a flat rate to access all of Stadia's content — and the details of this haven't been announced yet — you can bet your billy-o that EA and its ilk will still be ramming their games full of microtransactions. In fact, they'll have even more incentive to do this if they're competing for a slice of subscription fees rather than getting people to buy new copies of games at launch.

Thankfully, there is a certain amount of hope here. In both the music and movie sectors, the physical markets may be smaller, but they still exist — and even cater specifically to those who place importance on physical versions. Vinyl, a format once thought completely dead, is making a comeback. CDs are often cheaper than digital albums. Alternative methods of physical distribution such as USB devices and Blu-Ray discs are being explored.

Similarly, the gaming industry is responding. There will be a physical version of Cuphead — a previously digital-only game — on Switch, and if Nintendo has any sense, more like this will follow. "Boutique" limited-run publishers are thriving. Niche publishers put out affordable, high-quality limited editions that celebrate their new releases. And, talking to people online, I'm not the only person who still likes holding a new game in their hands rather than just clicking "download" — or, worse, "stream".

The future of gaming? Not if I have anything to say about it.

Morning folks! Couple of things to share with you today.

Firstly, you may have received an email about upcoming changes to Patreon. Apparently there has been the usual misinformation and rage flying around about this elsewhere on the Internet (having ignored Twitter completely for a week now, I have remained blissfully unaware) but I wanted to reassure you all that the proposed changes will have no impact on either me or you.

Patreon already takes a cut of what you kindly pledge to me — that's how they operate as a business, they're not a charity! — and thus if I see any changes at all to my income, they will be minor at best, particularly as a small creator without any large reward tiers. Likewise, you kind Patrons shouldn't see any changes either; your continued support is very much appreciated, and is always invested into something that will be useful for my projects, be it equipment, software, operating costs or simply new games to cover!

Short version: nothing to worry about here.

Right! Onto the second, far more exciting thing. And that is that The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available, including a compilation of the Cover Game features from 2016! My proof arrived much earlier than anticipated and I'm very happy with it, so it is my great pleasure to announce that it is now available to purchase at this link. I will be officially announcing and promoting this more actively starting next week, but feel free to share the link with anyone you know who may be interested.

The book is available in softcover and hardcover imagewrap variants, as well as a PDF electronic version. Here's a look at the hardcover version:

It's a weighty old tome — about a kilogram, to be exact. I won't lie, it's extremely satisfying to hold that in my hands and recall that it represents just a fraction of what I've created over the course of the last few years.

The hardcover version has a matt imagewrap on the outside. There was the option of creating one with a removable dustjacket, but that would have bumped the cost up a bit — and since it's a substantial book already I didn't want to get too extravagant.

Here's the back cover. It has an ISBN and everything. It's a real book!

Inside, you'll find each "chapter" begins with a colour page like this, featuring some artwork from the game or series in question. Since the book is primarily a collection of the feature articles, do note that these are the only pictures! While I'd have loved to make a fully illustrated book, that would have bumped up both the page count and the cost considerably.

Instead, the main content is presented in this nice readable font that I think looks rather pleasant. The articles themselves are mostly unchanged from their original form on MoeGamer, though in the case of those that made heavy use of references to images and video, I've made some minor edits to make them fit with the text-only format. I also haven't included the RPG Maker MV feature from 2016, since the majority of that consisted of image-heavy tutorials. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll expand my RPG Maker content and do a full, illustrated book on just that.

And here's evidence that it is indeed a chonker. 394 pages of chonk, to be exact, and something I'm very excited to have on my shelf. As with most things I do, I've primarily done this for my own gratification — and as a means of having a nice "hard copy" of my work should, God forbid, anything happen to WordPress or MoeGamer — but I'm very happy to make it available to you fine folks and the broader general public. I'm not expecting to sell many (any?!) copies but the option is there — plus the small profit I make on each book is another way you (and perhaps your friends and family!) can support my work on MoeGamer and Atari A to Z.

Thank you, as always, for your kind support! There will be more of these books coming in the very near future to cover 2017, 2018, 2019 (when it's over!), regardless of how this one sells, and perhaps some other collections of articles too. If there's anything on the site you might be interested in seeing collected together into a book, please let me know — now I've got the basic template set up it's pretty straightforward to put more together.

You know what I miss from "the good old days" of The Internet? (And by that, I mean "the pre-social media age") Clearly demarcated communities. I'm going to talk a bit about my past experiences with these over the course of the next few posts.

Nowadays this sort of thing isn't a fashionable thing to say and brings forth accusations of "echo chambers" and suchlike, and to be sure there's a certain amount of truth to those words. But I have far more fond memories of being a member of various "gated" communities rather than the messy, free-for-all that is modern social media. Sadly, this seems to be an age long gone.

My first experience with online interactions was via online service CompuServe, which I discovered the other day is still sort of around in the form of a pleasingly simple, straightforward and rather retro home page. These interactions on CompuServe took a few forms: there was the real-time "CB Simulator", which was an early incarnation of real-time chat. There were the forums, which is where I spent the majority of my time. And there was email, which I mostly used to try (and fail) to hook up with girls I'd met in the CB Simulator, all the time conscious that I was sharing a single email address with my parents.

The gaming forum on CompuServe, GO GAMERS, was a fun hangout — although in retrospect I don't remember doing a ton of interacting with others there. Instead, I'd spend a lot of my time downloading shareware and freeware that previously I'd have had to rely on magazine cover disks and the local shareware library to get copies of.

I did have one significant interaction, though: I met a guy whose name is now lost to the mists of time (I want to say Clayton something?) who claimed to be from renowned shareware publisher Apogee, and he was on the hunt for fan-created levels for Wolfenstein 3-D that could be included in an upcoming expansion pack. I'd recently got into Wolfenstein editing, and had been discussing level design and editor software in the forum. Long story short, this guy offered me $200 for my levels. I talked it over with my parents, and they didn't see any particular danger — the guy wasn't asking for any unreasonable personal details or anything, and besides, we had clear records of all of my communications with him should anything untoward happen.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting anything to come of this particular interaction, but I was happy to take a chance on it. I sent him my pack of ten levels and waited. He thanked me, then there was nothing for a little while.

Then a few months later, I got a package in the post. Contained within were three floppy disks: one containing a copy of the full registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D (which I actually didn't own at the time — all my levels had been created for the shareware version!) and two that held the "Super Upgrades" expansion he'd been telling me about. As well as that, there was a cheque for $200. I attempted to cash it and it was indeed real.

$200 is a lot of money to a secondary school kid. It did not, however, take long for my friends to convince me to spend it on video games. A fool and his money and all that.

All of the above is irrefutable proof that I'm technically a professional game developer. All thanks to GO GAMERS, may it rest in digital peace.

Something occurred to me the other day that… I think I'd always known, but for one reason or another, it came into sharp focus while I was writing an article.

Have you noticed that, when looking back to gaming eras such as the PS1 and PS2 in particular, the games that tend to attract the most excitement and interest among wannabe gaming historians and retro collectors tend to be the ones that were a little more obscure, perhaps a little more clunky, perhaps a big bit "weird"?

Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the "big name" well-known games from those ages have been rereleased several times over the years — franchises like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid are prime examples — but it's also down to the fact that a lot of the lesser-known games simply didn't have a lot of time and attention devoted to them in the press of the period… and the Internet wasn't around for the community to pick up the slack.

Somehow, though, many of these games have endured and become cult classics or highly prized on the collector's market, and I think that's cool. Well, maybe not the "collector's market" bit; it's nice to be able to afford things sometimes! But more importantly, it's also a good reminder of why I started doing what I'm doing with MoeGamer, and indeed before that with my JPgamer column on USgamer… and before that with my work on Games Are Evil.

The vast majority of the games I cover on MoeGamer — particularly the Cover Game features — are deliberately chosen because they don't get a lot of column inches devoted to them in the current commercial press. The reasons for this are many and varied, the most likely being that there simply isn't time to cover every game out there, and the EA, Ubisoft and Activision games of the world are always going to pull in more ad impressions than some peculiar RPG. Their audiences are inherently larger, which means more readers for coverage, which means more ad revenue for commercial sites. It makes business sense, but it doesn't do a lot to paint a broad picture of this era of gaming from a historical perspective.

The realisation I came to is that what I'm doing now is basically what some people are still doing today with relatively unheard-of PS1 and PS2 games: finding experiences that are somehow interesting, unusual, creative or otherwise fascinating, and celebrating them regardless of their perceived "status" in the industry. We live in an era now where there are distinct "tiers" of game releases, different people have different tastes, and a game selling ten million copies doesn't necessarily mean that it's either "good" or universally appealing; it just means it's a blockbuster.

That's why I get fired up and excited about what I do. There aren't many places out there writing about the things I do in the amount of depth I do. And while my audience may be small in comparison to some other destinations on the Web — I'm a one-man show, remember, with the exception of Chris' excellent contributions to the podcast — I like to think I'm doing my little bit to highlight some unusual, off-the-beaten-track experiences now rather than twenty years down the line… which hopefully means people won't be stuck having to pay £80 for a copy of [insert obscure RPG here]!

If nothing else, people stop by literally every day to read about Honey Select Unlimited on MoeGamer, so there's always that…

My parents stopped by to visit today. We haven't seen them for a while, so it was nice to catch up, particularly now they're doing a lot better than when we saw them around Christmas. (They are also reading this, so be nice!)

My Dad was good enough to brave the loft at my childhood home and attempt to retrieve a few additional bits of software that I thought was still lurking somewhere or other. Specifically, I knew that there were a few MicroProse titles for Atari ST that it would be nice to have hold of, plus a few games that I knew we once had that seemed to be missing from the collection they brought down last time they came to visit.

Well, he found three full boxes of stuff:

The contents included both PC (DOS and Windows 3.1/95-era) games and software, plus most of the ST stuff I'd correctly assumed was still lurking somewhere or other. Here are a few highlights:

Here's a DOS-era PC game from Accolade that I remember being very interested in because it was sort of "illicit" thanks to its stomach-churning horror imagery. I liked the game itself, too; I just never really got anywhere with it, though judging by the graph paper in the box, I'd at least attempted to at some point.

This was one of my favourite games back in the day: Space Rogue by Origin. This was an interesting combination of space sim and role-playing game, the likes of which I haven't really seen since. The space sim was full-on 3D polygons, including navigation, combat and flying through warp gates to get from sector to sector, while the role-playing game section was presented like its contemporaries from the Ultima series, using a combination of top-down tile-based graphics and text.

One thing I absolutely adored about Origin's games was that they always came with a bunch of "in-character" stuff that could help you immerse yourself in the game world. Here, for example, is a promotional flyer for the galaxy's hottest new arcade game, Hive! And yes, you can actually play Hive! as part of Space Rogue.

The manual for Space Rogue was presented as an actual manual for the spaceship you spent the duration of the game in, annotated with comments from the ship's previous owner, plus added coffee stains here and there.

Here's another beast of a package: Spectrum Holobyte's Flight of the Intruder, the sequel to their popular F-16 simulation Falcon. Flight of the Intruder was based on a novel which, conveniently, was included as part of the game package.

Also, when I say "remember manuals?" I'm not referring to the little pamphlets you used to get with PS2 games. I'm talking about beasts like this one. Spiral bound! Over a hundred pages!

The heaviest package among today's acquisitions is undoubtedly A320 Airbus, a game about flying an A320 Airbus. Well, "game" kind of undersells it a bit; this is a realistic flight simulator in the Flight Simulator mould, only with a particular emphasis on commercial flight, and including some game-like structure where it evaluates your performance in handling various situations.

Much of the bulk comes from the collection of high altitude enroute charts and a book of ILS approach charts, both of which are genuinely useful during gameplay for navigation and setting up landing approaches.

The bulk of that manual shouldn't be underestimated though. Look at the state of that. Beautiful, high-quality coated paper and a glossy front cover. Delicious. This wasn't a MicroProse game, but you could generally expect this sort of quality from their titles too — very much a feeling of these games being "premium" titles for grown-ups.

Despite the thickness, the A320 Airbus manual is actually kept rather readable with large print and broad line spacing. This helps make what could be an extremely daunting game seem a little more approachable.

And the final highlight for today has to be ERE International's Teenage Queen, a strip poker game for Atari ST that was my second ever encounter with lewd games, following Artworx's imaginatively titled Strip Poker for Atari 8-bit.

Teenage Queen, like most strip poker games at the time, followed a slight twist on five-card draw poker and saw you facing off against an anonymous opponent designed by artist Jocelyn Valais. Valais worked on a few titles in the 16-bit computer era, but seemed to disappear off the face of the planet following Infogrames' simple digital adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Teenage Queen became somewhat legendary for a couple of reasons: firstly, all the "spectaculor" images for the heroine's various states of undress were stored in unprotected .pi1 image files on the disk, allowing you to make use of the popular graphics program Degas Elite (for which .pi1 was its native format for 320x200x16 colour low-resolution images) to simply ogle to your heart's content without having to play all that pesky poker.

The second was that once you got the young lady in the nip, she carried on playing, until this happened:

Oh no! She was a robot all along! Oh well. Given the advances in technology in that regard in recent years, I don't think that would stop a lot of people I know.

Aaaanyway… having now found a home for these new acquisitions plus the other goodies in those boxes, my upstairs "study" now looks like this from various angles:

On the left we've got big-box PC stuff, both 3.5" floppy disk and CD-ROM. Across the top shelf from the middle onwards we have some Atari 8-bit stuff and then some Microsoft Windows stuff I couldn't find any other home for over on the far right. The other stuff you may well have seen before if you've been following me for a while; on that middle shelf we have a NES and a few games, a Saturn (sans cables or controllers), a Game Gear with a knackered speaker and partially buggered screen and an old digital camera. Then over on the far right we have my collection of Philips Videopac games for the G7000.

Here's a better view of the Videopac stuff, plus my cool Pong poster signed by Nolan Bushnell. That turned up in the post one day while I was working on GamePro; I can't remember why, because this was long after Atari had tried to "reboot" Pong on PS1. Perhaps it was just some sort of goodwill gesture from a PR company. Either way, I like it.

Here's what's on the desk: an Atari 520ST with two floppy drives (one single-, one double-sided), a Philips G7000, a Sony Trinitron TV-monitor, and an Atari 130XE with two disk drives and a tape deck. The tape deck currently lacks a power cable, but the two disk drives work. Also apparently some cat ears from somewhere.

And here's the shelf at the side of the room. This is all Atari ST stuff, mostly games, but there are a few cool bits of software in there, like the various releases of the Replay sound sampling software and some music sequencing packages such as Steinberg Pro-24. I also chose to keep all the beautiful Psygnosis boxes together up the top there.

And panning left a bit, here's the majority of the big-box ST games collection. Plenty of old favourites I still enjoy booting up there — and some new acquisitions today that I'm really looking forward to revisiting for the first time in a good few years.