#oneaday Day 527: Dangerous toys

Do kids play with toys any more, or are they just plonked in front of a tablet or smartphone as soon as possible, and left to it? I guess in many ways this is the same question as people were probably asking twenty or more years ago, only with "tablet or smartphone" replaced by "TV or computer".

I occasionally think back and have fond memories of playing with toys as a kid. I was fortunate enough to have parents who would buy me cool things for birthdays and Christmas, but who were disciplined enough to not cave in to my every demand at other times, thereby helping me to understand the concepts of Enjoying What You Have and Delayed Gratification. On top of that, I have a brother ten years my senior, which meant that I had a bunch of cool hand-me-downs that I was able to enjoy. They may not have been the latest and greatest, but I still enjoyed playing with them, regardless.

I had all sorts of different things. I've written about Manta Force before, and that was definitely a favourite. I was also very fond of Scalextric and the Hornby train set we had — though both of those were something of a "luxury" option that only got taken out on particularly special occasions and/or when we could convince my Dad to go up into the loft.

There were smaller bits and pieces I have fond memories of, too. We had a big brown plastic box full of Lego, for example, and I used to enjoy fitting together the big "road" pieces from some sort of city set, and attempting to build buildings and cars to go into these scenes. Among this Lego was a beautifully constructed house that (I assume) my brother had built at some point in the dim and distant past, and I could never quite bring myself to take it to pieces — I never quite managed to make something quite as elaborate as that myself, but I enjoyed the attempt, and the tactile nature of just putting the pieces together.

One set of toys that stick in my mind oddly vividly is a collection of sci-fi themed-toys from a firm called Britains. These were distinctly 1950s "retro" in style, but I always thought they were pretty cool as they were modular — in other words, they came apart, and you could slot them together in different ways to make your own custom spaceships and vehicles.

They didn't really do anything by themselves, but for child me, they were a powerful spark for the imagination. Much like I did with Manta Force, I would imagine myself being among the little toy soldiers and their vehicles, playing out a story in my mind, not even thinking about the possibility of getting lead poisoning from these solid-metal models.

I sort of miss that, and I do often find myself wondering if today's kids have any concept of what playing in that way feels like. I, likewise, find myself wondering quite how many adults of my age take a bit of time now and again to disappear into an imaginary world, helped along by a few potentially toxic props. Because, after all, isn't that all people are really doing with a train set or Scalextric track?

Note to my wife: don't worry, I'm not about to start collecting 1980s toys. I absolutely do not have the room to do that. But I am thinking about maybe getting the old Scalextric out again for an evening or two…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 526: Full Metal Schoolgirl

Full disclosure: the other day when I said I was going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl, I actually ended up playing more Tears of the Kingdom. I didn't feel bad about that, either, but it did mean I haven't been able to talk about Full Metal Schoolgirl.

Until now! Because I played it this evening.

Full Metal Schoolgirl is a roguelite action game. I know, I know, we're not exactly short of those, but this one had my attention for a few reasons. Firstly: mecha gyaru schoolgirls. Secondly, it's developed by Yuke's, who do cool stuff. Thirdly, the entire concept of the game is savagely anti-capitalist, and frankly, with the world the way it is right now, that was rather appealing.

You take control of one of two mechanised schoolgirls, each of whom have their own reasons to want revenge on the local megacorporation, which has been turning its workers into cyborgs so they can work more hours without having to take a break. The upshot of this is that they have become "The Working Dead", doomed to continue working their meaningless, joyless jobs even after death.

Enter our schoolgirls, who raid the company's 100-floor headquarters, only for the one you didnt pick to get immediately injured and, predictably, show up as a recurring boss character at various points throughout proceedings.

Your gal has a melee and a ranged weapon. Ranged weapons either have infinite ammo and an overheat gauge, or a limited clip size (and thus the need to reload) but an infinite stock of ammunition. Melee weapons, meanwhile, use up a stamina bar with each strike, and this bar is also used for dashing, dodging and blocking.

The game flows on a room-by-room basis. You're not always locked in each room and have to defeat all the enemies to proceed, but you often are, particularly when some of the game's special mechanics come into play.

Clearing a room rewards you with loot, which can be replacements for either of your weapons or shield, a battery for healing, or a mod which confers a reasonably significant passive bonus of some description, along with a small passive penalty. You also gain various materials with every kill and most bits of scenery destroyed, and there's a currency that only applies to your current run that can be used for various purposes, such as opening locked item chests that can guarantee items of a particular rarity.

Part of the game's setup is that your chosen gal is livestreaming her massacre, and as she progresses, requests will come in from the viewers. These usually take the form of clearing the room in a time limit, without healing or without depleting your stamina bar completely at any point. When one of these comes in, you can accept it, or you can accept a harder variant for a bigger reward. If you successfully complete the request, your gal earns cash donations which do carry over between runs, and these, along with the materials, are used to upgrade her Base capabilities between runs.

It's a lot of fun so far! There's some nice weight to the combat, and plenty of variety in the guns. Since the enemies are robotic, they explode and shatter into pieces dramatically when you blast or slice them, and each room is furnished entirely with physics objects, meaning you absolutely wreck the joint with each encounter.

There are a variety of different enemy types that change up with each block of levels, including some who have a "job title" and act as a miniboss. These can be staggered, which leaves them open to a "Retirement Blow", a satisfying cinematic attack that usually defeats them outright.

Thus far I've enjoyed what I played, and it kept me occupied for a good two hours solid earlier. I'm looking forward to playing it some more — it's a nice, silly, fun game, and that's exactly what you want sometimes.

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#oneaday Day 525: Less than diVine

Apparently the erstwhile Twitter and Bluesky founder Jack Dorsey has funded a relaunch of the social video service Vine in the form of "diVine", a new app/service that not only does what Vine did, but also has an archive of "more than 100,000" Vine videos from before the service shut down.

Vine, for the unfamiliar, was a service where you could post six-second looping videos. And that was pretty much it.

Some people I've seen are really excited about this and I do not understand it. To my eye, Vine's six-second videos were not only the height of pointlessness, they were the beginning of one of my least favourite evolutions of the Web: the obsession with "short-form content" that has led us to today's TikTok-obsessed society, and the fact that some people would inexplicably rather get their news in vertical video form from someone holding a camera too close to their face, yelling and presenting subtitles for what they're saying one word at a time in an obnoxiously loud font.

To some folks, Vine was the height of comedy, and I still don't get it. I've seen supposedly popular Vine skits and found them painfully unfunny. To others, it was a place to enjoy music loops, but I'd rather listen to full tracks rather than six-second loops. To others still, I'm sure it was a place to perv on girls dancing (which is, to this day, one of the first things many people suggest to me when I indicate my distaste for TikTok), but if I want to get my rocks off to sexy girls, the Internet has been built on that for decades.

When Vine was originally a thing, I downloaded it to see what all the supposed fuss was about, but deleted it in less than an hour after completely failing to understand the appeal. I had absolutely no desire to make six-second videos of my own, and the six-second videos the app had put in front of me as a new user did not convince me of the platform's value as a means of expressing oneself.

Like I say: to me, Vine was the beginning of the brain-addled, attention-deficit Internet of today, where no-one is capable of focusing on anything for more than about six seconds. I didn't want to support it back then, and I'm certainly not celebrating it coming back now.

Interestingly, this sort of ties in with something else I wanted to talk about, which was that Metroid Prime 4 previews have been met with a certain degree of consternation following the reveal of an apparently quite annoying "sidekick" character. I can't comment on whether or not he actually is annoying myself as I haven't really looked into any of the coverage as yet, but what I did find interesting was the following Bluesky post:

Alexa Ray Corriea
‪@alexaray.bsky.social‬

You wanna know why we're having nag line discourse in 2025? Because developers know we're fighting an attention economy war we'll lose no matter what. Players don't read, have TikTok open next to them, god forbid we are scared you miss something and then blame us for not giving you all the info.

"Nag lines" are those moments when a sidekick or companion character continually bugs you to do something in a video game, with one of the most notorious examples being the now-elderly "Shoot the Hinges" YouTube video. These days they tend to be a little more elaborate, but they're widely disliked by a lot of people for either stating the obvious or giving away things that the player could have otherwise discovered organically. In some cases, games that launched with extensive "nag lines" ended up patching them out after people complaining — Alexa Ray Corriea, author of the above Bluesky post, cites Horizon: Forbidden West as just one example.

But she also has a point. Nag lines are there because of the not-unreasonable assumption that a statistically significant proportion of people playing a game aren't really paying attention. Whether it's because they're listening to a podcast, watching a YouTube video or stream, scrolling through social media, posting in group chats, flipping through TikTok, swiping people on Tinder or whatever it is people do these days, their attention isn't 100% on the game, because today's Internet practically encourages you to act like an ADHD squirrel rather than settling down and focusing on anything.

And to me, Vine was the beginning of that. Actually, that's not quite true; I was very resistant to joining Twitter in the beginning, because I wasn't a big fan of the microblogging format for similar reasons, but I got over that and found some value there. Vine, though… I never found that value there. I never understood what it was for, or what the appeal was. And I firmly believe that Vine and its subsequent imitators like TikTok had an incredibly adverse effect on anyone who found themselves addicted to them, because they normalised and commodified short-form content and turned people into dribbling consumers of content.

I feel like this is a problem we need to address. Actually, I feel like we're long overdue addressing it. Because at the moment the norm, particularly in big-budget triple-A games, which is where "nag lines" are most frequently heard, is to pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of attention span and intelligence, and that results in experiences that are annoying and patronising to anyone even slightly above that minimum basic standard.

But the statistics back it up, unfortunately. Do you know the most depressing YouTube analytic? It's "watch time", which indicates that a significant number of people will click into a video, watch it for less than ten seconds and then click away. The same is true with websites; the assumption — which is, unfortunately, not too far from the truth — is that people will decide whether or not to stick around within less than five seconds.

There is so much competing for our attention online at any given moment, and the modern Internet has conditioned many of us to believe that we must consume as much content as possible, as quickly as possible. A member of a Discord I'm in once proudly explained how they "kept up" with all the content they wanted to consume, and it was a frankly terrifying account of watching some things at double speed, trusting AI summaries (which, let's not forget, are frequently wrong) and never actually taking time to really enjoy and digest something.

I am, at least, thankful that the entire world hasn't gone the short-form, attention deficit route. I am presently playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and that game couldn't be further away from this whole philosophy if it tried. No nag lines, no pressuring you to constantly be doing, no constantly rewarding you for every little meaningless thing you do, no achievements, no social features — just a big ol' world to explore, with lots of things scattered throughout it that you'll only ever stumble across by accident if you're being curious, taking your time and really drinking everything in. (I say all this with the caveat that the Switch 2 version features a certain amount of ADHD gaming features such as a "daily bonus" you can access via your mobile phone, but all this stuff is easily ignored — and by that I mean "it doesn't appear unless you specifically ask for it", not "it only does a few little pop-ups" — and can be turned off altogether if you find it intrusive.)

I've said many times over the last couple of decades that I don't feel like the modern world is built for me at all. And I mean that in numerous different ways. I am thankful that I still have a few ways to escape from the sheer manic energy of it all, but I worry that one day it won't be possible to hide from all this any longer.

In the meantime, "diVine" can go fuck itself. Actually, no. I will give it a moment's praise for the fact it is specifically weeding out AI-generated slop and not allowing it on the platform. But then I will still tell it to go fuck itself.

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#oneaday Day 524: Steam powered

So Steam announced a bunch of new hardware, and some of it looks quite nice — though the fact that no prices have been mentioned as yet is a bit of a concern.

Of the items that have been announced, I find the "Steam Frame" probably the most interesting. This is a standalone VR headset that can either stream games from another computer, or run games installed on its own storage. It doesn't have to be VR games, either; you can play standard 2D games on a big "virtual screen" in VR.

There are a number of attractive things about this. Firstly is the fact that it looks like being a relatively lightweight, comfortable headset — certainly a far cry from the units of even just a few years ago. Secondly is, of course, the Steam compatibility; by running things from your Steam library just like a Steam Deck (or the newly announced Steam Machine), it has an immediate ready-made library of thousands of games to choose from without having to worry about whether the platform will be supported over the long term. Thirdly is the fact that it's a standalone headset that has nothing to do with Meta — since up until now, your only real option in that regard has been a Quest.

Now, of course, being tied to Valve and Steam has its own concerns. Steam's community features remain a rancid cesspit of the very worst examples of humanity, for example, as discussion forum after discussion forum is overrun by right-wing fuckheads crying about "DEI" and "woke" at the slightest hint of a female character in a leading role. That is something that the company probably should address, but it also feels like it's probably much too late for them to be able to do anything about at this point. We are very much in "lunatics running the asylum" territory at this point, since it's extremely rare anyone from Valve actually steps in to deal with a situation; mostly it's up to developer and publisher community managers to stem the tide of absolute sludge from the dickheads of the Internet — and I absolutely do not blame any of them who simply refuse to engage with a Steam discussion forum on principle.

Then, of course, there's the matter of several of Valve's games encouraging a form of gambling with their lootboxes and tradable items and whatnot. Add the exploitative (and easily exploited) trading card system to the mix and you have a whole mess of ethically questionable stuff going on, because this stuff probably makes Valve a lot of money.

And finally, of course, there's the fact that Steam is the one example of online-centric DRM that everyone has been sort of fine with for a long time. Sure, there are many games that can run without Steam being open, but it can be a bit of a pain to find out which games this applies to, and which require you to have a stable Internet connection. There's no good way to take your games "out" of Steam in the same way that GOG.com provides, either; no making your own physical copies or backups of Steam games.

There's also the fact that Steam was pretty much single-handedly responsible for completely destroying the collectible physical market for PC games — although I will be fair here: if you're going to be gaming on a standalone VR headset you probably don't want to be inserting discs into it while you're trying to get your game on.

I'll be interested to see what people think of these new machines once they're out in the wild. I have no particular need for a Steam Machine, as I have a perfectly competent "living room PC" that can run most games I'm interested in playing on PC rather than console — but, as I say, the Steam Frame is of at least moderate interest to me for gaming purposes. If I do end up getting one, I will almost certainly keep my living room PC up and running as it is, as I don't just game on it; it's also an entertainment centre, my video editing system and where I do just… general computery things. I'm not entirely ready to make the switch to Linux (which SteamOS is a flavour of) as yet, but I suspect that time will come at some point.

Anyway, I'm reserving judgement until I've seen prices and I've heard what people I trust think of these things. But there's definite potential for Valve to have something special here. I certainly think they're well-placed to fill the growing Xbox-shaped hole in the games industry with Microsoft's continual missteps in that regard.

We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 523: A deluge

There is a veritable deluge of good games that have come out recently, and this statement applies pretty much regardless of the specific types of game you are into. From my own personal perspective, I've been having a great time with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Absolum, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and Lumines Arise from recent releases, and a copy of Full Metal Schoolgirl arrived today, begging me to "just give it a quick try" this evening. Then alongside that, from varying degrees of "the past", I have Death end re;Quest: Code Z and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the go. And I'm playing Space Rogue and The Granstream Saga for video series.

Honestly, it's easy to get overwhelmed at times like this and get struck down with the dreaded analysis paralysis. But I've been trying hard to fight through that any time I feel it of late — and that, in part, is how I've ended up with quite this many games "on the go" at the same time.

You see, the way I figure it is that if you have just one "big game" on the go at a time, sometimes you're just not in the mood to play that one game, and thus it pays to have other things you can turn to. It's easy to start feeling "worried" that you won't get around to finishing any of the things you've started, though, but realistically, with the way today's games are designed, you can devote an evening to one thing, play something else another evening, play something else another evening, and so on.

It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get through something — and to some people, whether or not you get through it at all, though I don't fall into that category, as I do like to finish what I start. The important thing is just that you feel like you're spending your time in a way that is enjoyable and beneficial to you. So if you're in the mood to fest on a single game for multiple days straight, do that. If you're not in the mood for that one "big game" one evening, don't spend hours agonising over whether or not you're "allowed" to play something else — just go play something else. And, heaven forbid, if you're not in the mood to play anything at all of an evening? Stick the telly on and watch a few episodes of a favourite show. Yes, it can even be something you've watched myriad times previously if you really want.

Part of the "I must stick to one thing" mentality that I have been doing my best to shake off is down to my time working in the games press, when it was important to get reviews done in time for embargoes so you could have competitive coverage. And I even self-inflicted this somewhat with MoeGamer, too, in the name of being able to give single games or series more in-depth coverage. But none of that needs to happen. It's nice to be able to write stuff for MoeGamer or script videos, but it's not an absolute requirement of everything I play.

Honestly, I think part of the reason I worry over such things is because I want to feel like I have made a contribution to the world of video games through writing about stuff — particularly stuff that doesn't get a lot of love or attention from mainstream outlets. And I do still feel like I want to do that — but also I have to remember that I am also making a contribution to this world through my day job, and my work in that regard is probably getting seen by a lot more people than articles on my own personal websites. Probably, anyway.

All this is a long way to say that I think I'm going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl this evening, and I'm not going to feel the slightest bit bad about it.

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#oneaday Day 522: Bravo Eurogamer

Just recently, Eurogamer published a review of Arc Raiders, the latest multiplayer craze, and ruffled more than a few feathers when the reviewer, Rick Lane, dinged the game with a 2/5 star rating, primarily due to the game's apparent use of generative AI to create many of its voice lines. The developer, Embark Studios, has form in this area, with its previous title, The Finals, also featuring AI-generated voice lines.

The reviewer's justification for giving the game such a low score was not simply "AI bad" — it was because, from an artistic perspective, getting a soulless robot to voice the human characters in your game that is about robots who have taken over the world and forced humanity underground feels just a little too incongruous to be able to pass without comment.

And I agree. I also firmly, strongly and resolutely believe that the use of generative AI in video game development is an obnoxious, odious, wasteful, exploitative and ethically reprehensible practice — and I have a firm policy that I will absolutely not engage with a game that appears to have been tainted with generative AI garbage. It's why I didn't play The Alters, it's why I haven't played the latest Everybody's Golf, and it's why I won't touch Arc Raiders. (In the latter case, it's also because I suspect I won't like Arc Raiders, but that's beside the point right now.)

I've been disappointed at quite how many people I've seen handwaving away this aspect of Arc Raiders in particular. Indeed, the Eurogamer review has a comments section that is at least as much of a trash fire as you would expect, because Video Game Good, and you're not allowed to take a firm ethical stance about something in a review because then the Gamers™, the good little consumer piggies that they are, will get mad that you said their Favourite Forever Game This Week was perhaps not to your taste for a perfectly valid reason.

The unfortunate thing with Arc Raiders is that its use of AI and machine learning (which are different things) is a bit shrouded in uncertainty right now. Some folks say that its generated voice lines are fine because it's actually just a fancy text-to-speech system; some folks are taking this argument further in order to weaponise disabled people and accessibility features; some are saying that it's fine because the actors the voices were trained on were aware of what they were signing up for.

But regardless of whether or not Arc Raiders' voices were generated by supposedly consenting voice actors, or if they were the product of the more environmentally disastrous end of generative AI, the entire thing rubs me the wrong way. The really stupid thing is that the generated voices in Arc Raiders are for things that voice actors could have very reasonably just recorded — things like vendors, NPCs and suchlike — and Embark's justification for using generated voices is that it's "quicker". On top of that, the results are markedly, obviously inferior to using an actual voice actor recording the complete lines, so one has to question if cutting corners in this way is really worth it.

Embark's not a small, frugal indie company, either. They have the resources to be able to afford voice actors to do a proper job. They're just refusing to. And regardless of the tech that produces the not-very-good end result, it sets a poor precedent to do that.

The arguments in favour of generated voices aren't very convincing, either. The most common one that comes up is that "one day we'll have games where every NPC conversation will be AI-generated, and you'll be able to talk to them about anything!" And to that I say: I absolutely do not want that.

When I'm playing a game that has characters in it, a narrative, a setting, all that stuff — I want to experience the vision of the creators. I want to enjoy something that someone else has created, with a clear vision and purpose behind it. I want to be able to reflect on the way a writer composed a piece of dialogue; how a character's mannerisms tell us more about them; how the tone of the whole piece gives a feeling of coherence to the game as a complete creative work.

If you're AI-generating your dialogue, you get none of that. You get a hodgepodge, incoherent mess that is easily exploitable — and, indeed, we've already seen that numerous times already, whether it's Darth Vader saying fuck or a character in the latest HoyoVerse game apparently having no idea who they are, what their background is, what their personality is or what is around them.

I refuse to accept the "genie is out of the bottle" argument. We've been making video games for 50+ years at this point, and the reason the medium has continued to endure is because of human creativity. We have seen incredible advancements in storytelling, mechanics and the overall craft of making all manner of different games over the years — and the AI glazers seem to want nothing more than to just throw all that experience away in favour of some "vibe coded" garbage with AI-generated dialogue and synthesised speech.

Couple that with the fact that AI is insanely wasteful, growing increasingly likely to make the worldwide economy crash, disastrous for the environment and taking valuable resources away from doing things that might actually make life better for people who really need it to be better? Nah. Don't need it. Don't want it. And will not support anything made with it, no matter how much you argue "no no no, but this is a good use of it, actually."

I say bravo to Rick Lane of Eurogamer for having the balls to stand up and say "no" to this garbage with a thoughtful and well-considered critique. If only we could see a bit more of that kind of thing, and less of this sort of rubbish.

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#oneaday Day 521: Everyone got really old

It's almost certainly a turning point in your life when people in the public eye that you've always thought of as being a similar age to you, perhaps a few years your senior, start to look old. Or perhaps it should be more accurate to say, start being cast in the role of older characters.

It's happened to me twice in the last week, and both instances occurred while I was spending my lunchtime watching Beyond Paradise. For the unfamiliar, this is the Kris Marshall-fronted follow-up to Death in Paradise, where his Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman character returns to the UK with his fiancée and begins a new life in the fictional Devon town of Shipton Abbott (in reality a Cornish fishing village named Looe). It's a fun show, but the specifics are beside the point for today.

Much like Death in Paradise, Beyond Paradise is a show where you will often see relatively famous faces putting in a guest appearance for an episode. I'm not talking about tedious celebrities who are famous for the sake of being famous (or, God forbid, "influencers") — I'm talking well-known, well-established actors who you will have almost certainly seen in something from the last 20-30 years.

In two episodes I've watched this week, I was mildly dismayed to see how much Mark Heap (who I will always think of as Brian from Spaced) and Caroline Quentin (whom I suspect most people will always think of as either Dorothy from Men Behaving Badly or Maddie from Jonathan Creek) have apparently aged. I still think of both of them in terms of their most famous roles, which are kind of timeless in their own sort of way. And so, despite seeing them in the credits of the show, I had to double-check that the characters I thought they were playing were, in fact, the actors I thought they were.

It was Mark Heap's episode first. He was playing an affluent middle-aged widower who lived in an old house with a lot of history, and he was haunted by visions of his departed wife — helped along by a criminal element, of course. When I first saw him, I thought "I vaguely recognise that person, who is it…? Is it Mark Heap? No, it can't be, he looks too old…" — and then the credits rolled, and I realised that it was, in fact, Mark Heap. It became a bit more obvious once the episode proper started and he got a few more lines, as he still has his very characteristic delivery and mannerisms.

Caroline Quentin was almost unrecognisable when I saw her playing a middle-aged farmer matriarch. She had completely obscured what I think of as her particular characteristic mannerisms, so it took me a lot longer to clock it was her than I did for Mark Heap. But again, she seems to be doing a great job.

I know it sounds harsh to say that people "look old", but it's not really about the individuals themselves. Both Mark Heap and Caroline Quentin are excellent actors, and it's good that they are clearly still getting work and settling into roles that suit them well as their career continues. I can imagine the acting business becomes considerably more challenging once you hit a certain age, so I have all the respect in the world for people I was watching when I was in my teens still getting acting jobs to this day.

No, what it's really about is the growing sense of consciousness that time is passing, that you can't go back, and that things continue to change around you as you continue on life's journey. Some of those changes are for the best — even if they might not seem like it at the time — while others can be painful and lead to regrets. And seeing things like actors you recognise looking visibly much older than they were the last time you really noticed them? It brings all that into focus, and inevitably makes you wonder if you've done the right things, if there are still things you "need" to do, and quite how much time you might have left in which to do all of them.

It's a little maudlin, I know, but I suspect it's something that everyone, once they reach a certain age, has to start coming to terms with. Nothing stays the same for ever; nothing lasts forever. You just have to enjoy everything you love — people, places and things — while they are here with you in the moment, and to continue enjoying the memories you have of those things for as long as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 520: Roguing it up

After spending yesterday primarily playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I thought I'd make some time to do some recordings today, so I kicked off recording for my Space Rogue series on Atari ST.

I'm glad I did this. It was a lot of fun to record, as there's lots of nicely written text throughout, which makes for good things to say out loud, and I also maintain that this format, although long and cumbersome at times, is a great way of showing exactly why some games are worth sticking with in the long term.

One fun and/or slightly inconvenient thing that we've lost today is the fact that when you started playing a game like Space Rogue seriously back in the day, you had to make a commitment to it. And it was a physical commitment in the form of a save game disk — or, in the case of games like Space Rogue, which would save your position to the game disk itself, making a backup copy of said game disk to be the copy that you play from "just in case" something happens to the masters when saving.

These days, meanwhile, it's all too easy to pick up a game, play it for half an hour, then set it aside and never think about it ever again. This is all the more easy to do with services like Game Pass, which is one of several big reasons I find Game Pass in particular an absolutely odious development in the games industry. Once you'd made a save game disk, though, you were in. You'd set aside valuable magnetic media for the specific purpose of saving your progress through a video game. And you were damn well going to use it.

Of course, the version of Space Rogue I have installed on the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is installed to a virtual hard drive, so there's no worrying about disk swapping, and the load times are much faster, which is nice. This would have been an absolute luxury option back in the day — I've been reading some old Atari User magazines recently, and it's always funny to read about a 20 megabyte hard drive being "more storage space than you will ever need" and costing as much as the computer itself.

Anyway, I've been giving the Space Rogue videos a bit of "deluxe" treatment in terms of editing. Because the game is so quiet, I've added some background audio in the form of the CD soundtrack from the FM Towns version, and some gratuitous Star Trek ambience that fits in nicely with the setting. I think the end result videos are going to be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to publishing the first of these sometime this week.

Now, of course, my head is spinning with all the possibilities of old games from back in the day that I might want to give the long playthrough treatment. I'm definitely going to do at least some of the Ultima games, I'd like to do Times of Lore (though which version, I haven't decided, as the ST, Amiga and C64 versions are all significantly different from one another) and there are, of course, still plenty of adventure games I haven't covered.

But recording Space Rogue was a lot of fun today, and I'm looking forward to doing more. Maybe I might even finish it this time around. Or indeed actually get anywhere in it at all. We shall see, but the first two episodes bode well for what comes next!

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#oneaday Day 519: Hero of Hyrule

In my head, I've had a bit of a weird relationship with the Legend of Zelda series over the years. There have been large tracts of time when I haven't played any games in the series, and there are still a number of entries (primarily handheld) that I haven't tried at all. I've known Zelda obsessives over the years, and I've never counted myself among them; likewise, I don't think I've ever bought a Zelda game on launch… with the exception of the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, which I'm sure someone will argue isn't a Zelda game, but it actually is — just a different kind of Zelda game.

Anyway, I think I've come to the conclusion, many years too late, that yes, I, in fact, do like the Legend of Zelda series, and I always have done.

I think I know where my hesitancy over this came from, and it dates back to the late 1990s. I had just discovered console-style RPGs with Final Fantasy VII, and then Ocarina of Time came out, offering a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy VII, and… I felt like I didn't like it as much. At least, not in terms of story. Final Fantasy VII's narrative was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in gaming at that point, while Ocarina of Time was basically reading from the same script as A Link to the Past, which I had played (and enjoyed a lot) several years earlier.

Link didn't speak, either, which made the narrative immediately less interesting to me.

Of course, I know this is a silly comparison now, because Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time are so different from one another as to basically be completely different genres — and that's not getting into the interminably tedious arguments over whether Zelda is "an RPG" or not.

No; I can see very clearly now that the intent behind the two series, and those entries in them in particular, is very different. Final Fantasy VII was all about delivering a spectacular, emotionally engaging narrative; Ocarina of Time was about being a well-designed video game. And, although Zelda plots have become more and more elaborate over the years — not to mention the series' timeline becoming ever more convoluted — this distinction has, for the most part, remained.

This isn't to say that Final Fantasy has bad gameplay or that Zelda has a poor story, mind. It's simply that their focal points are different, and, as with anything, if you go in with the wrong things in mind, you're almost certainly not going to resonate with it as much as you would if you had more realistic expectations.

Anyway, I think back over the years and the many Zelda games I have played, and I don't think I've ever had a bad time with a Zelda game.

My first ever encounter with the series was with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on a family friend's NES. When I first played this, I didn't understand it at all, as I was very young and had never really encountered a game like it before. With how different Zelda II was from the rest of the series, I at least know I wasn't alone in feeling like that — although today I respect Zelda II immensely for having the balls to do something so drastically different from its predecessor.

I have a few oddly vivid memories of that first time I played Zelda II. The towns of Ruto and Rauru, both of which would lend their names to characters in the series many years later. The slightly wobbly melodic line on the music. The distinctive overworld map theme — which starts very similarly to the well-known Zelda theme before branching off in its own direction. The caves that are too dark to see until you get a candle. Link making a noise that sounds like he's going "whoops" every time he takes damage — a sound effect shared with Simon Belmont from Castlevania. The BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL noise and strobes when you lose a life. And the fact I always thought Link looks like a chef when he's doing his "damage" pose. I saw it once, I can't unsee it now.

A few years later, I got a Super NES, and one of the games I asked for one Christmas or birthday was A Link to the Past. I knew absolutely nothing about this game, save for the fact that magazines talked about it in tones of reverence, and I remembered quite liking my time with Zelda II.

I got it. And I was absolutely blown away by it — particularly the music. To this day, I'm still impressed that the game has full-on orchestral cymbal clashes in its music. Absolutely one of the best uses of the SNES' sound chip there ever was.

Anyway, I dutifully bought Ocarina of Time like every self-respecting N64 owner was supposed to back in the day, and I quite enjoyed it, with the caveats mentioned above. What I liked a whole lot more, though, was Majora's Mask, the direct sequel, which never seemed to resonate with the public in quite the same way despite getting good reviews — but which gets its dues much more frequently these days.

Majora's Mask basically corrected what I felt was lacking a bit from Ocarina of Time: the emotional engagement angle. Because it offered a story that wasn't just a retelling of the usual Link vs Ganon legend, it was immediately much more interesting — and its time-based mechanic allowed the narrative to go to some seriously interesting places. To this day, I'm yet to see anything quite like the conclusion of the "Anju and Kafei" questline, which resolves with literally seconds before the world ending.

I didn't get along with The Wind Waker when I first played it on Gamecube, but when I played the rebalanced Wii U version some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Likewise, I skipped Twilight Princess on its original release and played the Wii U version, enjoying it greatly.

I was late to the party with Breath of the Wild and it took me a long time between starting it and actually finishing it, but when I had done so, I was very glad I had taken that journey. I am having a similar experience with Tears of the Kingdom in that I have come to it very late, but playing it alongside the new Hyrule Warriors, which acts as a prequel and/or parallel storyline, is going to be very interesting indeed, I think.

I know some folks don't love the direction the series has taken with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and to an extent I get that — but then there has also been the excellent Link's Awakening remake and the equally good Echoes of Wisdom for those hungry for a more "traditional" Zelda experience.

All in all, it's a thoroughly interesting series, and one that very much deserves its long and proud history. And, at this point, I may as well admit that I think I'm a Zelda fan. Particularly as I've played 15 hours of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment since yesterday evening.

Now time for a bit of Tears of the Kingdom, I think…

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#oneaday Day 518: '80s Activision had the juice

I frigging love '80s Activision games, particularly on the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit. I grew up with the ones on Atari 8-bit, of course, and since I never had a 2600 back in the day, those are a (relatively) more recent discovery. But I adore every one of them, and I'm beyond thrilled that I've been part of bringing them back to a new audience on Evercade.

The first of our Activision cartridges isn't out yet, but I, of course, have a copy. Perks of the job and all that. It's already becoming one of my most-played Evercade cartridges, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We're actually doing three collections in total (this isn't Super Secret information, it was in our press release) and I've been largely responsible for the curation of said collections. All three of them are very strong indeed (you'll have to wait and see the lineup for the others, which are coming next year!) but this first collection comes out of the gate swinging with some of my absolute favourites.

My personal highlights are MegaMania, Enduro, Crackpots and River Raid, with honourable mentions to Beamrider and Demon Attack, games I've gotten to know a bit more recently.

MegaMania is one of the absolute best fixed shooters of the early '80s. Pitting you against waves of strange household objects, this "space nightmare" keeps things constantly interesting, as each wave has its own distinctive movement pattern — and then once you've cleared a complete loop of all of them, they go and change up their patterns a bit, just to keep you on your toes. It's a beautiful example of how utterly elegant some early games can be: it's simple to understand, has a brilliantly paced difficulty curve, a well-crafted scoring system and is endlessly replayable.

River Raid is, of course, a pioneering vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, whose noteworthy features include the ability to adjust your speed as you fly and the necessity to refuel your aircraft while negotiating obstacles and blasting enemies. The fact that this game was crammed into 4 kilobytes of ROM will never not be amazing to me. Carol Shaw was an actual wizard — not just for the game's technical accomplishments, but for the fact that, like MegaMania, it's an incredibly well-paced, considerately designed game that is likewise replayable until the end of time.

Enduro is the spiritual precursor to the home computer game The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a game which I played as a child many years before I ever encountered Enduro for the first time. Enduro is, partly by necessity of the more primitive hardware it's running on, a simpler game, but I think its simplicity is also a core part of its appeal. All you have to do is overtake a set number of cars as a full day-night-and-weather cycle of a set duration proceeds: overtake 200 cars on the first day, then 300 each day thereafter. Your final score is how many "miles" you successfully drove before failing to qualify for the next day, and the score is presented using a lovely rolling analogue counter effect. I would have loved that as a kid — hell, I love it now.

Crackpots is a relatively recent discovery, and a game I feel I would have probably been terrified of as a kid. Again, the concept is simple: bugs are climbing your building, and you must drop flower pots on them. With each wave of bugs cleared, a new colour appears, and each colour of bug has a distinctive movement pattern. When you've cleared one loop of all the bug types (black, blue, red, green) the cycle repeats, but faster. The bugs chew through a layer of your building every time you let too many past you, and this affects the pace of the game from thereon. After too many layers of your building have been eaten, the game is over. It's pure high score fodder, and once again, beautifully paced and designed, with a dynamic difficulty level that raises and lowers according to how well you're doing.

Beamrider is, in essence, another fixed shoot 'em up, but it probably has more in common with Atari's Tempest than anything else, in that rather than moving freely, you switch between distinct "lanes" that the enemies proceed down. Thus there's a much stronger element of precision and even strategy to Beamrider than some other games, and the presentation, considering the host platform, is very good indeed. It's another game I got to know quite recently — there is an Atari 8-bit version, I believe, but I never encountered it back in the day.

Demon Attack is a game that I became familiar with after watching Classic Game Room's Atari 2600 reviews many, many times. It's a very simple fixed shooter, in which all you have to do is blast demons in the sky above you. Only three demons appear at once, and only one of them fires at you. It should be primitive and stupid and dumb, but it's incredibly compelling, particularly once the pace of the game increases and the demons start splitting into smaller bits. This one actually wasn't an Activision game back in the day; it was by Imagic, but Activision got the rights to all the Imagic stuff at some indeterminate point in the past. So yes, the Evercade Activision cartridges will have some of the Imagic stuff, too.

I'm quite fond of Activision Anthology on the PlayStation 2, but the last time I played it, I spotted quite how poor the emulation is in that version. It's not altogether surprising — there have been 23 years of advancements in emulation since — but, given how accessible good quality emulation of these games is about to become with the Evercade cartridges (and, hell, how easy it is to get 2600 up and running on systems like MiSTer and cheapo Chinese handhelds) it's a little hard to go back to. The built-in "badge" challenges, weirdo visual effects and '80s soundtrack are fun, though. I feel like we'll never see a compilation quite like that ever again.

But anyway. I am banging on about this because I spent today making a video about the upcoming cartridge. Watch out for it on the Evercade YouTube channel soon!

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