I was pleased to discover today that at some point in the near past I had remembered to back up all of the episodes of The Squadron of Shame SquadCast, which is a podcast I used to be part of quite a while back. The podcast — and the Squadron — have since scattered to the four winds for various reasons, but I was glad to rediscover these episodes.

So I've put them online! You can find them all in a handy playlist over on SoundCloud here:  https://soundcloud.com/moegamer/sets/the-squadron-of-shame-squadcast 

A bit of background for those unfamiliar.

I'm quite old. As such, I was around for the beginning of the Internet, and the gradual growth of various pre-social media community sites. One of those — which my brother launched and was in charge of, as it happens — was 1up.com, which was essentially an online counterpart to Ziff Davis' Electronic Gaming Monthly and other gaming magazines.

1up.com had a very strong community aspect; every user had their own MySpace-style profile, the ability to blog, and the ability to start and join "clubs" with communal message boards. There were also more traditional forums.

One of the forums was dedicated to the various podcasts 1up.com hosted. I frequented that forum quite a bit since, as my brother regularly appeared on the podcast, I listened to the show a lot. One day, the guys — my brother, Garnett Lee and Luke Smith, as I recall — were talking about the concept of "the pile of shame"; all those games you've bought and never got around to playing. They agreed that before the next episode, they'd all try a game that none of them had gotten around to yet: Tim Schafer's Psychonauts.

As it happened, none of them managed to do it. But we on the forum thought it was a good idea, so we picked it up and ran with it. And thus the Squadron of Shame was born, effectively acting as something of a "gaming book club", where members would play through the same thing at the same time, then discuss it together on the forums.

When 1up went through some… changes (which involved merging all the specialist forums into obnoxious NeoGAF-style "Games" and "Not Games" forums) there were some problems. People who weren't used to the Squad's "walls of text" (which used paragraphs and pictures and everything) got a bit abusive. So we jumped ship. It was around then that the podcast was born.

The podcast kept the "book club" spirit alive, at least for its initial run of 29 episodes. We'd all play a game, then we'd get together and talk about it. Later episodes took a more topic-based approach as this was a little more friendly to everyone's schedules, but we still took the time to cover a few specific, very special games such as Katawa Shoujo and Deadly Premonition.

I was the editor of the podcast because I knew how to use GarageBand and Logic — for the early part of the show, I was working for Apple, so I had had training in both — and because I did a decent, thorough job of it. The sound quality is noticeably worse than anything today, mind; the reason for this is the fact that back in 2008, people got a bit sniffy if a podcast episode weighed in at more than 100MB, so with the amount of time we typically rambled on for, I typically had to cut the bitrate down quite a bit to save everyone's bandwidth! Well, that and everyone had radically different microphone setups; I tended to have to do what I could with what I had.

I enjoyed being a part of the show. I was a little intimidated by all the smart, confident people participating alongside me, but I always appreciated how they gave me the opportunity to speak about the things that were important to me, and how they respected my editing skills. It's quite interesting to listen back to some of these shows and hear a very different Pete to the one you hear now in The MoeGamer Podcast and my YouTube videos.

Unfortunately, the podcast and the community eventually fell apart. Katawa Shoujo was the beginning of the end, really; it led to two of our number deciding that they weren't comfortable being associated with it due to the sexual content — despite the fascinating story behind the game's development being seemingly tailor-made for the Squad to discuss — and from there we kind of just lost steam after a few more episodes. It also didn't help that this roughly coincided with the uptick in obnoxious and overbearing political posturing online, with a few of our number regrettably jumping on that bandwagon.

I remained resolute in my refusal to get involved with that sort of thing and my desire for things to just carry on how they had been quite comfortably up until that point — any sort of conflict stresses me out immensely — and I ended up with some former friends making quite unpleasant (and untrue) assumptions about me. I knew around then that that really was it; the end of an era.

It's sad how it all came to an end, and the loss of some of those friends is something that still kind of cuts deep and upsets me. But the surviving podcast episodes are a reminder of happier and simpler times, before today's endless and pointless Twitter arguments, before anyone knew what "woke" meant, before everyone felt the endless need to prove what a "good" person they supposedly are. A time when everyone was just happy to sit back, chill out and enjoy some casual conversation about games.

I miss those times. But at least I can enjoy some of the best moments once again — and you can too.

Have you seen that TV show where James May takes a thing apart and then puts it back together again? I did that, but with an Atari ST, and without taking everything out of it. And I videoed the whole process. The results were pleasing!

Been thinking about how to fix up that "new" Atari STE I got… or the one I had from before.

Here are the problems that need solving:

• The STE I had from before has a knackered joystick port. This is a common problem that can be fixed by resoldering the connections on the joystick ports, which are actually on the keyboard's PCB. Unfortunately we don't have a suitably delicate soldering iron — though my wife reckons she can borrow one from someone at work.

• The "new" STE I have acquired doesn't boot Rod-Land for some reason, showing corrupted graphics and three bombs. Three bombs indicates an "address" error, which, depending on who you ask, can mean something is wrong with the RAM or the floppy drive, or both, or perhaps something different altogether.

There are a few possible solutions, none of which are guaranteed at this point:

• Solder the joystick connections on the "old" STE. This is a well-established fix, but potentially risky — plus, as I say, it requires us to borrow a soldering iron with a bit more precision than the one we have here.

• Swap out the RAM from the "old" STE to the "new" one to see if that fixes the problem. Getting the RAM out isn't a huge problem since STEs used easily removable SIMMs, much like DOS/Windows PCs, but opening the STE up does involve taking out lots of screws — and swapping RAM from one to another requires that to be done for two machines. There's also no guarantee this will fix the problem.

• Swap out the floppy drive from the "old" STE to the "new" one. Exactly the same considerations as above… plus I'm not 100% sure how "swappable" those floppy drives are. There's no reason why they shouldn't be… but again, there's no guarantee this will fix things.

• Swap the keyboard PCBs between the two machines — I know the joystick port on the "new" one works, so this is probably the simplest solution, and the most likely to work without the potential of anything messing up. The only downside is the "new" STE has much more yellowed keys than the "old" one. If I really felt strongly about that, I could always swap all the keycaps over. There's also the possibility that the joystick ports in the "new" one could fail in the same way as the "old" one, at which point soldering either or both of them will become necessary.

Computers are never straightforward, are they? Still, at least when you're dealing with hardware from this era, you tend to be dealing with actual, relatively easily identifiable, physical problems rather than the sort of seemingly indecipherable issues you have to deal with today. You can look at a knackered ST and tell what is wrong by looking at it in most cases, whereas if your PC doesn't boot, it could be any one of a thousand different things. Believe me, I know, all too well!

Well, whatever we decide, we'll give it a try later this week. I might even try to be brave and do it myself, but we'll see! 🙂

Sunday night. Time for the inevitable putting-off-going-to-bed routine that is inevitably counter-productive because one has to get up on Monday morning regardless of how late one goes to bed on Sunday night, and thus it's probably better to get marginally more sleep.

I've calmed down a bit since Friday, but I'm still not feeling great. I'm going to try and see the doctor this week, not necessarily to get signed off or anything, but just to talk about how I've been feeling and see if there's anything different I can try — perhaps a change in dosage of meds or something. I don't really want what I felt like on Friday to happen again, and just running away from the situations that trigger those sorts of feelings — the most extreme form of which is just quitting work — isn't a practical option in the slightest, unfortunately.

Anyway, it's been a good weekend, aside from oversleeping this morning. Chris and I recorded a great new podcast episode on beat 'em ups that should be with you tomorrow sometime, and I'm getting stuck in to Atelier Iris for the first stage of the MegaFeature. I've actually been playing Iris sort of on the back burner for a little while now, but I can devote more time and attention to it now. It's unfortunate that there's not an easy way I can take it to work to enjoy on lunchtimes — I have to wait until the Switch games before that's something I'll be able to do.

I hope you've had a good weekend, and I hope your week goes well. I know a lot of people seem to have been having a rough time recently for one reason or another and, experiencing my own rough period, I can completely empathise and sympathise. Stay strong; February is typically a shitty time of year, but it passes. Also the new volume of Interspecies Reviewers is out next week, so you can look forward to that if nothing else!

Anyway. G'night.

Chris and I recorded a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast today. It's going to be on the subject of beat 'em ups. We were going to talk about both retro and modern titles, but we spent so long talking about older games that we're going to save the modern talk for a future episode!

In preparation for editing tomorrow — and to save myself a bit of time — I've been recording a bunch of footage of the games we talked about this evening. It's been really interesting to play a bunch of these games in rapid succession and see how differently different games do things — and how experimental some of these games are. Sengoku on Neo Geo is really weird, for example — and I'm not 100% sure I like it — but Sengoku III on the same platform is a completely different beast — and I'm 100% sure I like that one!

It's been nice to revisit a few favourites and discover some new ones. Probably most notable in this latter regard is the Denjin Makai series, which Chris is all about and I'd never heard of. Now I have heard of it, however, I'm a big fan; it's exactly the sort of ridiculous I really like, and it has some fantastic playable characters to enjoy. I'll probably have to write something more substantial about these on MoeGamer when I've spent a bit more time with them and found out a bit more about them.

Anyway, it should be a good episode. Tomorrow is editing day… but with it being 2AM now, I should probably go to bed. Have a lovely weekend!

I'm struggling a bit at the minute. I had an anxiety attack at work this afternoon that was so bad it made me want to go to the doctors and get signed off sick immediately. Unfortunately (or thankfully?) they weren't able to make an appointment for me at 4.30pm on a Friday afternoon, so I wasn't able to really sort anything out. But I'm starting to feel increasingly like I need to take some time for myself, away from the things that are stressing me out (none of which are my creative endeavours, I should hasten to add — they are a safe haven for me), so that I can get my head into a somewhat more… functional place.

Only trouble is, I'm kind of scared to do so. I've mentioned previously about my workplace's somewhat overbearing attitude towards sickness absence, and I kind of feel like they won't necessarily be super-supportive of mental health issues. This is probably the anxiety talking, of course — they may well, in fact, be super-supportive of such things — but right now I am a bundle of paranoid nerves, absolutely terrified of everything that goes on at work. When, rationally speaking, I know there is nothing going on that I should be terrified about; I'm still doing the things that are asked of me to a good standard, and there are still things I'm able to do that, say, my line manager isn't able to do.

But I feel crazy stressed. I don't think it's necessarily work itself that's causing it — although I suspect being a bit bored and frustrated may have contributed to it — but the workplace does not feel like a particularly healthy environment for me to be when I'm feeling like this. I'm worried that someone is going to "pick up" on something or other, and I'll end up snapping at them or saying something stupid that will make things worse.

I'll see how the weekend goes. I have my "coping with worry" workshop tomorrow morning, and I'll try and make a doctors' appointment first thing next week, if only to just talk about things and get their opinion on whether or not I should have some time off. I can't keep going like this though.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and have a pleasant weekend; we're recording a new podcast tomorrow, so that should take my mind off things.

One of the challenges I face running MoeGamer as a solo operation is coming up with things to write about each day, particularly as I prefer not to write too many news or opinion pieces. I mean, there's no shortage of games to write about… but I still need the time to actually play the games and get experience with them to write about them!

It's with this in mind that I've experimented with various ongoing feature formats over the last few years. I've had another idea that I'm planning to start experimenting with soon, particularly as I'll be wanting to devote my attention to Atelier from now on.

My idea is Genre Guides. What I'm thinking of doing here is breaking down broad categories — shooting, fighting, driving, that sort of thing — into specific subgenre, then composing an article looking at the history of that genre, providing some notable examples from my own experience and linking to relevant articles elsewhere on MoeGamer. I'll also update and expand on these pieces over time as I cover more relevant games so that they can really become a useful and/or interesting resource for people interested in exploring very specific types of game.

I may well be seeking some suggestions on specific genres soon! I've started putting together a list already but these sorts of things are always better with several perspectives. So once I think I've listed everything I want to do — each of which will correspond to one Genre Guide article — I'll share that with you lot and see if you have any further ideas.

Anyway, that's the plan for now! I'll probably kick this off next week alongside some Atelier stuff, so please look forward to it!

The name on the letter said, "Mary"…

Wait, no, no it didn't. It looked like this, although with less pixelated address information:

What could it be?

It's Atari goodness, is what it is! This first item goes with the Go-Moku/Renju game I covered a while back. I don't know how to play Bridge, but perhaps I can learn with this!

I never actually played this game. As I recall, it's a port of the NES game, rather than the arcade machine. There was an attempt to port the arcade game a bit later, but I don't think it was very good.

The Turtles box felt suspiciously heavy, so I wondered if it still had some goodies in it. Sadly, it seems the Panini stickers were long gone… but there were a bunch of mysterious other disks in there. They look like shareware or public domain software or something; the front one appears to be a Spectrum emulator for the Atari ST.

Indy! Sadly, it's not the good Last Crusade game — the point-and-click adventure — but I've always been curious to try this one.

Celebrity-endorsed sports games are not a new thing! Here we have "the Great White Shark" himself endorsing a golf game from Gremlin.

It's not all games; there's some programming and productivity stuff in here too. I don't know if I'll ever use this, but it's cool to have.

There are two packs like this; they look like the sort of package that came with the computer as a bundle. The cardboard case comes with full manuals for each title, plus another cardboard folder containing the floppy disks.

This is an interesting mix of stuff; STAC is an adventure game creation package that I was always interested to look at. Not sure what "Prince" is. A quick glimpse at Atarimania suggests it might be a strategy game I probably won't understand.

Here's the second of these two packs, focusing on productivity software.

Here's some educational stuff. I have quite a few of the educational packages I grew up with and that my Dad reviewed, so I thought it might be interesting to look at some more. These appear to be Atari-published, and might have been bundled with a computer.

This isn't a blurry photo; the inlay for that game is actually that badly printed. If you look at the "Atari ST" text at the top, you can see that the yellow print is misaligned with the rest of it, making the whole thing look like one of those old 3D glasses images. I have no idea what the game is.

Paranoia about viruses truly got started in the 16-bit era. Here's a delightful bit of software designed to profit from that panic.

I don't know virus history, but I thought this list on the back of the package was interesting as a historical record of some of the things 16-bit computer owners had to worry about!

Here's Yogi's Great Escape, which I covered on Atari ST A to Z a while back. Now I have a legitimate copy!

And some other Hanna-Barbera stuff from Hi-Tec, too. I'm interested to try these; their quality seems to vary quite a bit, judging by the two Yogi Bear games I've played to date.

Apparently this game is monstrously difficult, so you can look forward to me being terrible at it in the near future!

And then finally, the star of the show: a slightly dusty, slightly yellowed 1040STE, which I'm hoping has joystick ports in a better state than my existing STE.

Where did all this stuff come from? It came from Luke over at Hundstrasse, who got in touch with me on Discord the other night and asked if I wanted some stuff he was either going to throw out or donate to a computer museum. Of course I said yes, and it will most certainly be put to good use!

Luke is a member of the WordPress community and a fellow gaming enthusiast. He's a particular Resident Evil fan, and has done some incredibly in-depth comparisons of the various versions of each installment available — among plenty of other things, of course! — so be sure to give his blog a follow and drop him a nice comment.

A sincere thank-you to Luke for the kind donation — and if any more of you have any crap you think I might like that you want to offload on me, do be sure to get in touch and I'll happily help you clear out your loft… wife (and space) permitting 🙂

I've already mentioned this on both Twitter and MoeGamer but it bears repeating: I'm extremely pleased that the commercial, mainstream publication Nintendo Life has changed its tune with regards to niche-interest games, be they complex shoot 'em ups or sexually provocative anime-style games.

In case you missed all this: they've decided to hire freelance, specialist writers to cover the games in question rather than relying on their staff writers or regular contributors. In doing so, they will hopefully avoid the rather large disconnect there has been in the past with regard to some games, where a critic who had no intention whatsoever of engaging with a title on its own terms or with any consideration of its target audience would treat it unfairly and, at times, borderline offensively.

I've been arguing for the necessity of specialist writers for ages now, so it's good to see a publication experimenting with this approach. Whether or not this will go anywhere in the future remains to be seen, but for now I'm pleased to see it happening at all — both with my Prison Princess review today, and some recent shoot 'em up reviews, which have been looked at by someone who obviously knows the genre extremely well. (His reviews are, for me, a little too anal, to be honest, but I know some shmup fans are extremely picky about all sorts of seemingly miniscule aspects of the games in question, so he's a good pick, I feel!)

If you can do me a big favour when you have a moment and give my review a click, share it around, and perhaps send a supportive message to @NintendoLife on Twitter — or even leave a comment on the article, that would be great. For as much as it's fun to rag on the stupid things the games press does… it's arguably even more important to celebrate and show gratitude when things are done the right way. So let's do that!

You know how sometimes you do something and immediately afterwards you look at the fruits of your labours and think "yeah, I'm really pleased with that". That was me with this video on 198X, which I recorded almost immediately after writing and publishing the article on it today.

I hadn't really heard of 198X prior to this weekend, when my brother mentioned it to me and we sat and played it through together. It left a real impression on me immediately, so I played it through again today, and its impact hadn't diminished at all. In fact, having had some time to reflect on the things I'd seen and experienced in the game, I think it might have been more effective as a piece of art.

Anyway. I knew I wanted to write about it, and I knew I wanted to make a video on it. So I did. And I'm very happy with the result — particularly the video. I'm not sure what it is; I think I'm just quite satisfied with my delivery in this one, and think it fits well with the tone of what I'm talking about and the themes of the game in question.

198X isn't going to be for everyone, but it's a game that ended up being quite special to me, so I'm glad the work I produced relating to it is something I'm very satisfied and happy with. I hope you enjoy it.

Unrelated: $5+ Patrons, I owe you a wallpaper, I know; it's coming soon! I just haven't had time to put one together as yet.