#oneaday Day 558: Blast a Nazi today

I love Wolfenstein 3-D a great deal. In fact, I love it so much that ten levels that I made as a teenager are part of the official Wolfenstein 3-D Super Upgrades pack that was distributed by original publisher Apogee. I made $200 from that — who says random encounters with strange men on CompuServe forums never lead to anything good?

Anyway, despite the fact that I adore Wolfenstein 3-D and its quasi-sequel Spear of Destiny, I have never actually played any of the other Wolfenstein games. None of them! I have always meant to, over the years, but somehow never got around to it. I have decided to finally correct this oversight, prompted by some enthusing on the part of some friends who particularly enjoyed the recent Machine Games entries in the series.

From what I understand, the various Wolfenstein games over the years since Wolfenstein 3-D have rebooted the series continuity multiple times, but I still wanted to catch up on all the games I'd missed, so I decided to jump into Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Xbox first of all. I went for Xbox because the console versions of the game have an extra prologue chapter on top of what the PC version offers, plus there's no need to faff around with mods to make it run on modern machines. I have little to no patience for modding these days, so a plug-and-play console version is just what the doctor ordered.

Anyway, I didn't really know what to expect from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, other than what little I had read prior to playing it. I knew that it was the first of several "reimaginings" of the series, for starters, rather than an actual "sequel" (despite the implications of the name) and that it focused to a certain degree on the Nazis looking into black arts such as necromancy. For those unfamiliar with the Wolfenstein series, who had been labouring under the assumption that it was a Serious War Series, undead, monstrous enemies have been part of proceedings since Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. (They were not, to my knowledge, part of the original 8-bit home computer Castle Wolfenstein games, but those have little to do with the various different continuities of the rest of the series anyway.)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein casts you in the role of recurring series protagonist William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American soldier who is a bit of a one-man army. While Wolfenstein 3-D began with Blazkowicz captured and imprisoned in Castle Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein's console versions open with a mission where our hero is investigating what the Nazis are up to in Egypt. It seems they're in the business of raiding tombs for something that they seem to think is important, so it's up to Blazkowicz to discourage them from doing so with a variety of World War II-era weaponry.

Following this, Blazkowicz and his contact, Agent One, get captured and taken to Castle Wolfenstein. Whether or not Agent One survives depends on if you are playing the two-player co-op mode or not. Either way, Blazkowicz has to bust out of Castle Wolfenstein, make his escape, throw some further spanners into the Nazi plans to dig up the mysterious "Death Knights" and mystical artifacts, and then proceed onwards to a series of Nazi-thwarting missions.

Thus far I think I'm about halfway through the game — I'm on the fifth mission out of eight — and I've mostly been having a good time. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter from the early 2000s, and there are times where you really feel the 25 years between this game and now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though; it means that Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a game that focuses on making its gameplay solid and interesting rather than indulging in overly spectacular setpieces. It also means that its levels strike a good balance between providing a decent amount to explore and keeping you heading on a clear path forwards. More than anything, the further I go in the game, the more it reminds me of something like Rare's GoldenEye — levels have different routes you can take, and there are various objectives to accomplish, and the exact way things unfold will vary according to whether you decide to go all-guns blazing or at least make a cursory attempt at stealth.

Stealth isn't mandatory for the most part, thankfully. There's one level where you'll fail if the guards set the alarms off, but for quite a lot of that level the guards can spot you and aren't within reach of an alarm, so you don't have to spend too much time creeping around. In other levels, it sometimes pays to know what's coming up ahead of time so you can prepare a suitable "ambush" with an appropriate weapon — the game has some excellent rifle weapons (both with and without zoomable scopes) that make picking off enemies from a distance a pleasure, and when it comes time to switch to closer combat, there are plenty of options there, too.

The weapons perhaps lack some of the oomph of more recent takes on the genre, but there are plenty of them, and the further you go in the game, the more ridiculous they get. While the early stages will see you using fairly conventional pistols, rifles and machine guns, later stages will allow you to wield the chaingun-esque "Venom" weapon, the "Panzerfaust" rocket launcher and even a flame thrower. None of these are an "instant win" button, either; the game's levels and encounters are designed quite nicely to encourage picking the right weapon for the job.

The game features a beloved feature of early 2000s first-person shooters, which is enemy characters who have conversations while you approach them. Many of these are quite silly — though none quite match the classic No-One Lives Forever, trope codifier for this sort of thing — and although clearly a threat, the game also makes many of the Nazis appear cartoonishly incompetent.

There are a few minor annoyances, chief among which is the complete lack of subtitles for spoken audio. There's not a lot of critical in-mission speech, but it does sometimes get drowned out by everything else that is going on. The cutscenes are well-mixed, at least — and hearing Tony Jay in the role of the Director of the Office of Secret Actions, the organisation that Blazkowicz works for, is an absolute delight.

The game balance at times feels a little questionable, with enemies seemingly either spraying bullets everywhere but your location, or hitting you right in the middle of your head and knocking out most of your health bar with a single shot. There are a few enemies that have seemingly superhuman reflexes at times, which can lead to some frustrating sequences where you'll have to repeat things over and over and over until you master them, but there are usually some things you can try differently to tip the odds in your favour — and the ability to save at any time, as well as automatically at checkpoints, is very welcome indeed. I'm not sure how much of my difficulty with a few sequences stems from my playing on "Bring it On" difficulty, which I guess is technically "Hard" mode — but, well, I've come this far now, so I will continue as I have been doing!

I'm enjoying the game, then. I wish there were a few more homages to the original Wolfenstein 3-D — it would have been nice to hear some remixes of the classic music, for example — but I am led to believe that Wolfenstein 3-D itself unlocks as a bonus extra when you beat the main single-player campaign, so if that's the case then all will be forgiven. I suspect this is probably going to be the weakest of all the post-Wolfenstein 3-D entries in the series — or, at least, this is the most obviously aged of them all — so hopefully it'll only be improvements from hereon. I'm certainly looking forward to finally discovering how the series evolves.

Now I think I might go blast a few more Nazis before bedtime…

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#oneaday Day 557: How to torch universal goodwill with one simple interview

Today, Larian Studios, makers of the Divinity series and the universally acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3, found itself in the crosshairs of the Internet's ire due to comments made by its CEO, Swen Vincke during an interview with Bloomberg.

According to Vincke, Larian has been using generative AI behind the scenes to, in his words, "explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text". None of which are things you need generative AI for, and all of which are things that people have been perfectly capable of doing with their own human brains for decades. In fact, there are people who specialise in elements of what he described — most notably concept art, which is the area a lot of critics have been focusing on.

Vincke's comments are remarkably ill-considered given the number of times that generative AI use in video games has been subject to backlash from the general public and journalists alike over the course of just the last year — and for many of the same reasons that Vincke is arguing in favour of.

The otherwise well-regarded sci-fi game The Alters was irreversibly poisoned for a lot of people earlier this year when it became apparent that they had used ChatGPT to generate placeholder text for background textures and localised strings for non-English languages.

The umpteenth reboot of Everybody's Golf came under fire for non-specific use of generative AI that I'm not sure anyone ever quite got to the bottom of.

The new Let It Die game, which has no involvement from the previous game's original developers Suda51 or Grasshopper Manufacture, has been lambasted for extensive use of AI-generated material.

The promising "people sim that isn't called The Sims" inZOI turned huge swathes of prospective players away by its game's heavy reliance on generative AI, as well as its publisher Krafton's insistence that they are pivoting to becoming an "AI-first" company.

The latest hot "extraction shooter" (I still don't really know what that is, and no, I don't really care) ARC Raiders got dinged with a 2/5 review score for its use of AI-generated voices — not just because they were AI, but because using AI-generated voices is at artistic odds with the story the game is trying to tell.

Even the once-beloved Oliver Twins, former stars of the UK "bedroom programming" scene in the '80s, got a kicking from press and public alike for their absolutely terrible AI-generated "follow-up" (and I use the term loosely) to their old Spectrum game, Ghost Hunters.

People hate this shit — and with good reason. Generative AI is a lazy, soulless solution for feckless CEOs to foist on their creative teams because they think it will "add value" for shareholders, when in fact there is growing evidence by the day that the entire generative AI scene is financially, environmentally and societally ruinous.

On top of all that, it doesn't work well enough to be worth using! Every single AI "tool" currently available carries a prominent disclaimer that it "might" (read: "will") get things wrong from time to time, making them fundamentally useless for doing anything useful with — and their "fun" uses are causing the Internet to become overrun with even more meaningless, pointless slop than was already splattered everywhere in the first place, on top of boiling all our lakes. At least stupid things from a bygone age like Badger Badger Badger and Seepage (to name just two examples from what I believe to be the golden age of Internet nonsense) are the result of both genuine human creativity and skilful use of creative tools that don't involve typing "make me funny video garfield giant boobs mechahitler piss filter" into a chatbot.

Vincke's point was not that the new Divinity game will be riddled with AI-generated voice lines or visuals. In fact, he claims that the studio is "neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are [they] looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI", but that AI is "a toolset for creatives to use and see how it can make their day-to-day lives easier, which will let us make better games".

Vincke has, apparently, been receiving some pushback from within Larian about this — and he's certainly been getting some choice words from former employees today, too. The situation escalated to such a degree that he issued a statement in response to IGN earlier today. Unfortunately, said statement doesn't really say anything — and, worse, attempts to obfuscate his earlier statements by pointedly using the term "ML" (for "Machine Learning") rather than his earlier use of "AI" — today typically interpreted to mean "generative AI" when used in contexts such as this.

For me, the worst thing was his final paragraph:

While I understand [generative AI] is a subject that invokes a lot of emotion, it's something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone's working day better, not worse.

Here's the thing. You see that people are getting sniffy about generative AI, something which is well-established by this point to be A Thing The Public Fucking Hates. The sensible thing to do from a public relations perspective at this point, regardless of what you actually think, is to go "okay, you know what, we hear you, this sucks" or something along those lines, and then promise to "do better" or the like. A bunch of people won't believe you, of course, but this is better than going "no, well, I actually do think everyone at Larian should use this, and by 'discussing internally' I probably actually mean mandating that all employees have to use it at least a certain amount", which is how this is all coming across right now.

The particularly dumbass thing about this episode is, as I said above, none of the examples he gave are situations that need generative AI — or even where it is particularly beneficial. In fact, several creative types have commented today on how using "good enough", plausible-looking placeholders is actually detrimental to the entire creative process. Former Rocksteady employee Amy-Leigh Shaw commented thus on Bluesky earlier:

Placeholder text isn't supposed to be unique per line. It is supposed to be an instruction to the writer with a great big warning sign slapped on the top, so that it doesn't slip into the finished game. Unique sentences of bland writing are the least helpful thing to use for that purpose!

I also find that one of the more frustrating blockers to writing is when there's already a (bad) suggestion of what you should say. You are no longer able to organically find the idea because the suggestion in front of you knocks you off the track of your natural thought process.

Shaw is talking specifically about writing here, but several artists agreed that this is the case when dealing with concept art, too. The difference between a hastily scrawled Microsoft Paint doodle and the "this sort of looks right" thing that generative AI spits out is enormous — and in the latter case, it will absolutely colour an artist's interpretation of a scene or character, often unconsciously.

In other words, there's no defence of using generative AI as "placeholders" for text, concept art, voice acting, music — anything that a creative person is actually going to get involved with. The entire point of a placeholder is that it's something obviously shit and out of place so it can be easily spotted and subsequently replaced by a specialist at some point in the development process. Because generative AI produces something that is often "good enough" to the untrained eye or someone not looking closely, it's easy for it to get missed — as happened with The Alters earlier in the year.

Vincke's comments — and his subsequent follow-up statement — have torched a significant amount of goodwill that people had for Larian Studios in the space of just a single day. People fucking loved Baldur's Gate 3 and the previous Divinity: Original Sin games! It feels like it shouldn't have been a difficult job to maintain that goodwill while hyping up your new game — even if some found themselves a tad squicked out by a rather grim trailer at The Game Awards. But no. C-suite gonna C-suite, I guess — and it appears that this is true for companies people had, up until now, actually liked, as much as it is for companies people love to hate. And the net result of this for Larian is that people who were previously excited about a new Divinity game are now not going to touch it.

I know this has certainly given me a great degree of pause on wanting to check out any of Larian's work. I've been meaning to look at the Divinity: Original Sin games and Baldur's Gate 3 for a while — but now I'm in even less of a hurry to do so than I was already.

I'm so very tired of this. I, like many others, cannot wait for this fucking bubble to pop so we can get back to something approaching "normality", whatever that even means any more.

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#oneaday Day 556: Customer non-service

Generative AI has, supposedly, revolutionised a number of sectors, with customer service being one of the most commonly cited areas that benefits from having a lying chatbot front and centre.

Except it doesn't benefit at all, does it? Because all the chatbot adds is an unnecessary step between someone who needs some help with something and them actually getting that help. And, in a lot of cases, the chatbot passes completely incorrect information on to the few remaining real people who might actually be able to do something.

My current predicament is that I'm trying to return something to a retailer. A pair of shoes. They didn't fit. Should be simple enough, right? On the retailer's own website, they allow you to set up the return and organise a courier service to come and collect it.

The courier service of choice for the retailer, Schuh, was Evri. This will probably strike fear into the hearts of most people, but honestly, up until now I've not had a huge problem with them (or their previous incarnation, Hermes). But it seems that Evri, specifically, is having a few issues right now.

My particular problems started ten days ago, when the courier was originally supposed to pick up my package to return it. They did not show up. My wife and I were in all day. There was not a single knock at the door, and I got a notification that there was "no answer" when they supposedly called to pick up the package.

No matter, I thought, checking the tracking information. They said they'll be back the next working day.

They were not back the next working day. Or the one after. So I attempted to contact Evri in order to sort things out.

Initially I got a chatbot that promised to "escalate" the issue and then did absolutely nothing. Like, it just stopped responding to anything. So I tried again. This time I tried some different options and seemingly got a message through to someone.

Except the people on the other end of my correspondence are all absolutely convinced that I am awaiting a package delivery, despite me telling them repeatedly that I need the package collecting from my house. And thus I suspect what is happening is that they are rummaging through their big pile of parcels, hoping to find the one they think they are supposed to deliver to me, not finding it, going "oh shit" and then just not doing anything else — when, in fact, the package that I want them to collect has been sitting in my house's front hallway for the last 10 days.

This isn't the first time I've encountered a situation like this since the dawn of AI chatbots, either. Earlier in the year, I had an Ikea chair break on me, and it was under guarantee, so I tried to get it replaced. After laying out very clearly that I needed the entire chair replaced under the guarantee thanks to the nature of the problem, and receiving assurances that yes, I would receive a full replacement chair from the possibly-human-probably-not thing that I was interacting with online, I waited two weeks… and then received a package through the post that contained a single chair leg.

How is anyone looking at situations like this and thinking "yes, that's a big improvement over what we had before"? The blame isn't entirely at the feet of the AI chatbots, I know, because in all of these cases there's an obvious degree of (possibly) human error involved, but the AI chatbot certainly isn't helping the fucking situation. In every case that I've had the misfortune to interact with an AI customer service chatbot, the bot hasn't been able to help with what should be a very simple enquiry and has passed me on to what is supposedly a human being that speaks English. And in every case it has seemingly passed on incorrect information — information that the supposed human being won't fucking listen to me correcting, even when I do so repeatedly and very, very clearly.

Just another way that the cyberpunk dystopia we live in completely and utterly sucks. With no real benefits to go along with all the suck.

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#oneaday Day 555: Silly things from around the Web

Yes, that's the NCSA Mosaic logo. I am that old.

I can't think of anything in particular to write about today, so I'm going to just talk about a few random things I happen to have seen around the Web recently, or perhaps not-so-recently in a few cases. Hopefully that will at least provide me with some inspiration to say something about each of them. So let's begin.

Lord Heath's farts

This is one of those things that I don't remember the specifics of how I stumbled across it, but I was thoroughly glad that I did. There's a chap on YouTube who goes by the name "Lord Heath", and his channel primarily consists of him doing short, light-hearted review videos of various soft drinks.

However, at various points in his past, he has also committed to video some of the most impressive flatulence ever emitted by a human being. I present to you exhibit A, which still makes me literally cry with laughter every time I watch it (and, more importantly, listen to it):

Everything about this is perfect. The earnest explanation. The explosive opening. The gradual howling of descending pitch. The crescendo towards the end as it comes in to land. The final thrust that accompanies the last burst. The fact that he's naked. Absolutely no notes whatsoever.

Five years I have been pissing myself laughing at that specific video. And I suspect I will continue to do so for many more years to come.

Jucika Daily

Jucika Daily originated on Twitter before migrating over to Bluesky when everyone realised that the place had become a Nazi bar. It's an account that posts Jucika strips, with Jucika being a mostly wordless Hungarian comic strip that ran from 1957 up until its creator's death in 1970.

Jucika centres on the life and times of an attractive young woman called Jucika and the various misadventures she has. She is depicted as being somewhat saucy, risqué and romantically forward, but the comic mostly parodies sexist attitudes rather than objectifying Jucika herself. Indeed, more often than not, Jucika is shown taking advantage of the sexist attitudes of the men around her in order to put herself at an advantage.

The Jucika Daily account posts comics from the 500 strip strong Jucika archive every day, and often includes helpful context in the alt text for each image. While the comics are almost always entirely free of dialogue, there are occasional Hungarian terms that appear on signs and suchlike, so the creator goes out of their way to explain these things where necessary.

At the time of writing, the account's creator is facing a large medical bill for an emergency kidney operation, but they are continuing to post strips while promoting their crowdfunding efforts. Even if you have no intention of handing over money to a complete stranger on the Internet, do at least go and check out the comic strips — they will make you smile.

CheapShow

The CheapShow podcast is ostensibly a show about going through the bargain bins and Poundlands of Great Britain and coming back with the treasure from amongst the trash, but really it's an excuse for best friends Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman to hang out and get very silly with one another — and to include us, the audience, in with their nonsense.

CheapShow has a number of regular features, including The Price of Shite, where Paul and Eli have to guess the prices of various pieces of tat purchased from charity shops; Off-Brand Brand-Off, where one or the other does a blind taste test of branded and unbranded variants of a particular product to determine which is best; and Eli's Country Urban Noodle Test-lab Kitchen, in which the pair taste-test different varieties of instant noodles. Alongside these, which tend to rotate in and out with each episode, the pair also often go on real-life "walkabout" episodes, where they decide to follow a walking tour on a route that falls outside of the usual "tourist" spots in London, and perhaps learn something along the way.

CheapShow works so well because Paul and Eli have magnificent chemistry with one another, and brilliant senses of humour that will resonate well with anyone around the age of 40 or so — particularly those who enjoy a good bit of old-fashioned British toilet humour. Paul and Eli are also both thoroughly lovely chaps outside of the podcast, and they deserve your support.

That'll do for today. I hope you find some enjoyment from these — I certainly have!

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#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 553: Cream crackered

I am lying on the prison-like bed of a Travelodge somewhere in deepest, darkest Kings Cross, and I am absolutely exhausted. As noted yesterday, today was our Work Christmas Do, and as anticipated, I have bowed out of proceedings before the evening drinking in a bar because I absolutely could not even contemplate spending any time whatsoever in a busy, noisy London bar right now. We spent about half an hour in one while waiting for our dinner reservations earlier, and that nearly made me want to run away screaming, so voluntarily subjecting myself to more of that is firmly off the table.

The rest of the day has been good fun though! Monopoly Life-Sized was quite entertaining, though also subject to Overeager Forced Fun from the staff. I can't blame them for that, though; it's almost certainly drummed into them that they have to be high energy at all times, even if it is patently obvious that the grumpy middle-aged group in attendance is very much Not Up For dancing, chanting and shouting.

The game itself was enjoyable, if a little chaotic. We had four teams, three of which consisted of our group and the fourth was a bewildered looking couple who got lumbered with us. Each turn, two teams got to roll a die and move around the giant (but hugely condensed) Monopoly board, while the other two got a "Strategy" turn, where they could either build a house or hotel on a property they owned, or take on a challenge to earn a bit of in-game cash.

When landing on an unowned property, the team had to go into a little cubicle behind the "space" and complete a challenge to take ownership of it; these varied enormously, including a bar billiards-esque ball-rolling game, a cooperative rhythm game, frantically pedalling an exercise bike at arm level, and various puzzles. There was a lot of variety, and the games were fun, if quite easy for the most part.

Building a house or hotel, meanwhile, tasked you with assembling a Tangram-like puzzle in the shape of a Monopoly house piece. The "community chest" challenges were mostly puzzles themed around various well-known Monopoly cards, though they included both mental and skill-based challenges.

All in all, it was a good time, though the game attendants were a little too willing to "cheat" on your behalf in order to ensure no-one spent too much time "failing". This felt a bit patronising, but again, it's probably in their "script".

For dinner, we went to a steak specialist restaurant, and most of us had, of course, steak. It was really good, and the bread and butter pudding dessert was also delicious. I was absolutely ready to call it a night by the time we were done there, though, so here I am now.

I think I'm mostly over "going out" — particularly going out for drinks. The brief period we spent in a Leicester Square pub prior to dinner was actual hell for me — thankfully, there was an outside area, and I even managed to get a seat before too long. Much needed, as the entire Monopoly thing had been standing up, and I was very tired.

Anyway, like I say, it's been a mostly pleasant evening aside from all the walking and that brief period in the pub, so I'm glad I came along. I am very much looking forward to getting home tomorrow, though.

#oneaday Day 552: Christmas party season

It's the Work Christmas Do tomorrow. As is (apparently) usual, we're going to London to go and Do a Thing, then Eat Some Things, then Drink Some Things. I suspect I will probably bow out of the latter quite early like I did last year, as London bars are rather overwhelming. But we shall see.

I don't really know what to expect this time. The Do a Thing step for tomorrow is "Monopoly Life-Size", which I have heard is a lot more fun than actual Monopoly, because each of the "spaces" has a little room where you have to go and Do Stuff. I can see there being potential for some fun there, and my work colleagues are always a good laugh to hang out with on occasions like this.

For dinner in the evening, we are seemingly going to some sort of steak-centric restaurant. I am all for this, as I love a good steak, and it's something we tend not to have all that often at home. I think it will be a tad less pretentious as a meal than the last time we got together, where we went to one of the numerous The Ivy restaurants — the one in Covent Garden, rather than the famous club, though they are run by the same group — but I anticipate it will still be tasty. Plus being fed and not having to pay for it is always a great thing.

It's been a very tiring year work-wise, but it's been a good one — and I'm looking forward to the future. At some point relatively early next year, my role at the company will be changing somewhat; I'll be stepping aside from the social media duties I currently have and do not enjoy in the slightest, and becoming more involved in the development side of things, primarily on the testing front. I'm excited about this, as it means I can have a direct impact on the quality of the stuff we put out, plus I anticipate I'll get to learn a fair bit, too.

I won't be leaving aside the more creative parts of my job, though. I'll still be producing manuals for Evercade cartridges, and supporting those with material for the website and YouTube channel. Those are the parts of my work that I really enjoy — even if in 2025 it's an absolute fucking nightmare to get anyone to read anything. Still I persist, however; I still like to read stuff, so I'm sure there are at least a few people out there who appreciate some written material! (If you've never seen my written Evercade stuff, check out the Evercade Blog and you'll see all my stuff is marked with my name.)

Over the long (long!) term I'd like to put together something like a book on Evercade and its games, but while I've had all the other responsibilities to juggle, this is not something I feel like I've been able to make a ton of progress on planning and proposing, let alone realising. We'll see if that changes in the future. My goal is something along the lines of Limited Run Games' "The Complete Run" books, which will go through all the Evercade releases sequentially and provide Something Interesting To Read about all of them, be that historical information, tips on playing or just some interesting things to look out for. In essence, it'll be like my blog posts, but more formalised. If I can achieve that, I think I'll be satisfied that I've done something good for the world, on balance.

But anyway. All this is stuff to ponder in the future. Right now I smell bad so I need a bath, but I have a chat to moderate first. After that, it's off to bed, and then on to sunny London tomorrow daytime. I will doubtless be reporting in from the hotel tomorrow evening, so I shall see you then.

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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…?

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#oneaday Day 550: I'm so tired of online

I've had to block two different people on two different platforms today, both for the same reason: showing up uninvited and spewing some sort of borderline-abusive quasi-scolding because they happen to disagree with something rather innocuous that I had said. The details don't really matter — though if you must know, they really were innocuous opinions, firstly on the fact that localisation into English is not "censorship" (which it isn't, and if you're already typing an angry comment, I invite you to stop, take a deep breath, and just leave), and secondly, that it was surprising someone with terrible handwriting and an obvious lack of care in what they were writing could actually spell a rather complicated surname correctly. Hardly the stuff of epic meltdowns, I'm sure you'll agree — although the localisation topic does tend to bring some of the absolute worst people on the Internet out of the woodwork.

I have a zero tolerance policy for rudeness these days. If a complete stranger were to show up at my door and start hurling abuse at me, I would slam the door in their face. And as such, if a complete stranger decides to show up at my digital door online and start hurling abuse, I will gladly slam that door in their face, too. The platforms on which I blocked these two particularly odious individuals today — my other site MoeGamer, and my Bluesky account — both have pretty robust self-moderation tools that allow you to put nasty little piggies out of sight, out of mind, permanently.

My favourite moderation tool in this regard is YouTube's "Hide user from channel" function. YouTube does many, many stupid things, but this little option is a work of genius. Effectively acting as a shadowban, using this function on a user not only makes the comment you used it on disappear from everyone else's screens, including yours, it also prevents any future comments from that person from appearing on any of your videos. However — and here's the good bit — the user in question has no indication that this has happened to them, meaning they can quite happily continue spewing their hateful rhetoric "at you", and you will remain completely oblivious, while they inevitably get more and more frustrated. This is just delightful.

But you know what? I'm tired. It sucks that these mechanisms have to be in place for a quiet life online these days. And I'm increasingly fatigued with the very idea of putting myself out there — for what, exactly? — only to get chucklefucks who are incapable of responding to a post without resorting to The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies crapping up the comments sections.

I don't do anything online with the intention of pissing people off, or even being a little bit provocative. I'm honest about things — I'm honest about the person I am, I'm honest about the things I feel and believe, and I'm honest about the things I enjoy. The thing I am most honest about is that I have absolutely zero desire to argue with anyone online, which is why, as a general rule, on platforms such as my YouTube channel and MoeGamer, I make a specific effort to focus on the good and the positive.

Yes, I rant and rave and complain a fair bit here — I will freely admit that! — but this place is for me. It's my place for self-expression, for self-therapy, for processing my own thoughts, feelings and emotions, and it just happens to be publicly accessible. That does not mean I crave sweaty Internet-poisoned dudes in my mentions arguing with everything I say. I am more than enough sweaty Internet-poisoned dude for myself; I certainly don't need any more.

It might be time for another social media break over the holidays. I've already dialled things back a lot from where I was, which is good. But the holidays promise to be a nice time with family, so I'm looking forward to enjoying the peace and quiet. And that peace and quiet will have to be, at least partly, of my own creation.

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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.

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