#oneaday Day 309: The most enduring game genres are the ones we used to think were too prolific

I settled down this evening to play some PC Engine games on my Coregrafx Mini, a delightful little mini system that I'm very fond of, but which I realised contains a number of games that I haven't explored at all as yet. The pull of Soldier Blade is, I'm afraid, often far too much to resist, as it was once again this evening — though I did at least spend some time with Lords of Thunder, which I've not got around to trying before. (It is hard.)

One thing occurred to me while I was playing, and that is the title of today's post: the fact that game genres we used to think were overdoing it a bit have ended up being the most enduring; the ones that have "aged the best".

What I mean by this is that back in the 16-bit console era in particular — I'm talking Mega Drive, Super NES and PC Engine to an extent (yes, I know the PC Engine isn't actually 16-bit, but its capabilities put it pretty much up there with the Mega Drive, so shut up) — reviewers were often a bit jaded and cynical any time certain types of game showed up. There was a near-constant cry of "where's the originality?" among critics of the period, and this, to an extent, filtered down to members of the public who, at the time, only really had the word of the folks who wrote for the magazines to go on, since the Internet wasn't yet a thing.

There are several game genres that spring immediately to mind when I think about this: shoot 'em ups, fighting games and beat 'em ups. Yes, the latter two are different, despite the term "beat 'em up" being used interchangeably to describe both in the UK in the late '80s and early '90s. (If you're wondering, fighting games refer to competitive games where combatants — either human or computer-controlled — fight in closed arenas one-on-one, or perhaps in tag team battles, while beat 'em ups typically involve one or more players cooperating against a stream of enemy characters, often, though not always, going on a journey as they do so.)

Shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games reached a point where they elicited little more than groans from the jaded reviewers of the period. This led to situations that are laughable in retrospect, such as the TV show GamesMaster rating the UK release of the absolutely classic and genre-defining NES beat 'em up River City Ransom (known as Street Gangs over here) just 32%. In the show's defence (slightly), the game didn't show up over here until 1992, three years after its original release and well into the next generation of games consoles. Still, 32% is an embarrassing rating for a game that is quite rightly regarded as incredibly important to gaming development and history. But I digress.

The point is, members of the games press were — perhaps understandably — jaded at the number of shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games that were coming out, particularly from 1991 onwards, post-Street Fighter II. I say "perhaps understandably" because gaming back then didn't have quite the same breadth it does today; technology precluded certain types of game that we take for granted today from being made back then. Consequently, for someone whose job it was to look at the games coming out each month and then write about them, one could understand why it might get a bit tiresome if there didn't appear to be much variety — or originality, as was the constant refrain back then — in each new crop of new stuff.

But, as it turns out, there were a lot of shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games made for a very good reason: these are three very flexible genres that you can do a lot with, and all three of them have also scaled well with advancing technology.

Let's focus on shoot 'em ups, because that's what I've been playing this evening. You can go back to a shoot 'em up from 30-40 years ago (Xevious is 42 years old, fact fans, and Space Invaders is just shy of 50) and still have a good time with it today, even if you weren't there for it first time around. The genre has evolved over time, yes, in terms of both presentation and mechanics. But there's a timeless quality to it that means, outside of games that really didn't get it even when they were originally released — and there are plenty of those — the 30-40 year old games are just as playable and accessible today as they ever were. Likewise, if it were possible to take a game like, say, Eschatos back to the past, a Raiden fan would be immediately at home.

The same is true for both fighting games and beat 'em ups, too. I probably don't need to tell you that fighting games remain one of the most popular forms of competitive video game out there; while they have grown in complexity over the years, the fundamentals are still pretty much just as they were in 1991 with Street Fighter II. In fact, some fighting game pros even specifically recommend beginners should start with Street Fighter II to get accustomed to the genre without added complications like special meters and peculiarly named mechanics found in later titles.

The beat 'em up has had a slightly rougher ride over the years — at least it seems that way to begin with. It found favour until the early '90s due to it being a great means of showcasing beautiful character and background pixel art. It reached a particular high with Konami's excellent licensed arcade games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons and Asterix (kudos if you played the last one, it remains my fave of those games), but then sort of fell off the map a bit for a while.

At least, it seemed to. What actually happened is that it became the basis for a whole bunch of other, brand new genres that were suddenly made possible thanks to the advent of the 3D age: action-strategy games like the Dynasty Warriors series; arena combat games like the Senran Kagura titles; character action games like the God of War, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta series. All are definitely their own discrete types of game these days, but they can all be traced directly back to beat 'em ups. And, in more recent years, the traditional belt-scrolling beat 'em up has made a triumphant comeback with excellent titles like Streets of Rage 4, Fight 'n' Rage and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge.

I think the difference people would point to today, as outlined above, is that these days, we have a lot more choice. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of new games come out each week, and they cover all manner of interactive experiences, ranging from the comfortably familiar to the gleefully experimental. Shoot 'em ups, fighting games and beat 'em ups are no longer seen as passé and unoriginal because they get more lost in the noise these days — and, with the possible exception of fighting games, they have somewhat declined in importance to the overall market. If a company wants to make money these days, they do a big open world game or a cinematic action game about a middle-aged white dude being sad. Shoot 'em ups and beat 'em ups in particular have become niche interest, and fighting games, although popular and doubtless very important to the bottom line of companies like Capcom, have a considerably higher barrier to entry than they used to.

But none of them have gone away. None of them have declined in importance so much as to be completely unviable as a commercial prospect today, or completely unknown to those who came to gaming in more recent years. And many of those games that were decried as unoriginal, boring takes on crowded genres back in the early '90s are judged much more generously and accurately today.

And that's good. When the day comes when there's a gaming system with no good shoot 'em ups or beat 'em ups (I can personally take or leave fighting games, to be honest, but I do respect them), that's the day I don't buy that gaming system. Thankfully I don't think that day's coming any time soon — and even if it did, there is a vast library of stuff from the years that have led us up until this point to explore, both through emulation and official rereleases for modern platforms. I think I'll probably be OK.

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 308: The apparent need to hate

It's been interesting to see the public response to Blue Prince since it came out yesterday. A bunch of folks on Steam, the absolute worst place to talk about video games, seem oddly resistant to the idea that it might actually be quite good.

(For the record, I'll note that for now, after about 6 hours of play, I'm definitely enjoying Blue Prince, but I'm not yet convinced of all the "Game of the Year!" accolades it's already getting. I am open to it convincing me, however.)

Earlier, I saw someone praising a negative review by saying "finally, an honest review", and others noting that the "positive reviews are suspicious", despite the vast majority of them being articulate and knowledgeable about the game and its appeal elements. In the Discussions tab, which is where hope really goes to die, there are some folks getting legitimately angry that some people are enjoying the game more than they do.

I'm not entirely sure why this is occurring, either. Blue Prince is not, to my knowledge, a particularly — and you'll pardon me for using this obnoxious word — "woke" game in that it doesn't force Gamers™ to acknowledge the existence of black, female, homosexual or transgender people. (If it does later, it certainly doesn't within its first 6 hours of play. This is not a criticism — more a side-effect of the way the game is designed and structured, since you are alone while you play, and the other characters appear in photographs, notes, journal entries and suchlike.)

I mention this because the attitude I'm seeing from some people is normally reserved for the "anti-woke" crowd when they want to tear a game down for challenging their narrow-minded perceptions of the world. But… there's seemingly nothing like that in here, which makes the sheer passion with which some people seem to hate this game on principle all the more confusing.

Now I will admit that Blue Prince is probably not a game for everyone. It is slow-paced, thoughtful and contemplative. There's nothing that one would call "action". It requires that you learn its rules through play rather than having your hand held through tutorials. And it is a game where, despite there being no real "skill" involved from a hand-eye co-ordination perspective, you will still fail a lot before you roll credits on it — and where you will doubtless fail even more after those credits have rolled and there is more to discover.

I get that. When I encounter a game like that, my response is to go "Eh, okay, I see why some people like that but it's not for me." Then I turn it off, uninstall it, whatever, and I don't play it again. I might return to it when some time has passed — there are several games I've come to appreciate many years after I bounced off them when I first encountered them — but, in most cases, I won't be mad at the game. I think the maddest I've got at a game was with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, because I found the single-player campaign in that singularly insulting to my intelligence, but even then I just… did what I outlined above. I uninstalled it, then I didn't play it again. Job done.

The funny thing about the people getting absolutely frothing mad about Blue Prince right now is that in most cases, they are revealing themselves to have not understood what the game is doing. Blue Prince is deliberately obtuse in some ways, yes, but I am particularly stupid when it comes to things like this and I got the general vibe of what's expected of me pretty quickly. The people getting most upset by it are the ones who seemingly want a simple, straight line to the finish, to max out all the achievements and say they're "done" with it. Rather delightfully, Blue Prince is not at all forthcoming with achievements and trophies; it eschews the usual "started the game!" and "got a Game Over!" achievements in favour of a small collection of awards that demonstrate you've made meaningful progress. The fact that this is probably making some people mad is quite enjoyable.

Also whiny little babies pissing and moaning about "no ultrawide support" can get in the bin. Buy a normal person monitor, or play the game in 16:9. No-one gives a shit about your "no ultrawide, no buy" policy.

Anyway, Blue Prince has been a good time thus far. Like I say, so far I remain unconvinced of its "Game of the Year" status, but I'm willing to keep plugging away at it to see what I can discover, because there's enough here that I do like. And if I end up tiring of it? I won't be mad, and I won't feel like I've wasted my time. It's nice to be part of the current conversation for once and to experience something that has clearly resonated with a lot of people for one reason or another.

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#oneaday Day 307: Blueprints to my brain

After seeing the glowing praise it's been getting recently, I decided to give the new indie darling Blue Prince a go. I've been suspicious of sudden indie darlings ever since I absolutely detested my time with Jonathan Blow's Braid, but everything I was hearing about this one made it sound thoroughly interesting. As such, I was more than happy to forego my usual suspicion and give it a go.

For the unfamiliar, Blue Prince positions you in the role of an heir to a rather curious mansion. Said mansion supposedly has 45 rooms… except it doesn't, and there's actually a super-secret hidden 46th room somewhere. Your dead uncle has challenged you from beyond the grave to find said 46th room. Succeed, and you inherit all his stuff; fail, and you're doomed to perpetual roguelike hell.

Yes, Blue Prince is a roguelike of sorts in that it's based around repeated runs of the same thing with a heavily randomised element. But it's not a combat-based game, nor a role-playing game; instead, its focus is purely on exploration. While the roguelike descriptor is apt, Blue Prince is perhaps better thought of as being akin to tabletop games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill.

The way it works is like this: each in-game day, you begin a new run with 50 "steps" of stamina available to you. Each time you cross the threshold from one room to another, whether you're making progress or backtracking, you use up a step. Your initial aim is to make it from the entrance hall in "rank 1" of the mansion to the antechamber in "rank 9"; things get a little more complex later, but I haven't got that far yet, so I can't talk about that side of things with any great authority as yet.

Each time you open a door in the mansion, you pull three room "cards" from the deck you have available and can pick one to draft. This room then attaches to the door you just opened, and you gradually build out the mansion map from there. Rooms are automatically oriented based on the direction the door you opened is facing, and in this way you can plan out your route to a certain extent; as time goes on, you'll familiarise yourself with the "deck" of room cards and know which ones work better where. For example, you might want to find a means of safely ditching "dead end" rooms as soon as possible so they don't come up later in your run, but various rooms have special effects (both positive and negative), too, so you'll need to bear those in mind.

As you progress through the mansion, you'll acquire various resources. Keys are used to open locked doors. Gems are used to draft certain particularly powerful or helpful rooms. Coins are used to purchase items in special "shop" rooms. Dice allow you to redraw three room cards if none of the ones you initially drew tickle your fancy. And then there are a variety of items that show up along the way, too; for example, the metal detector makes it easier for you to locate keys and coins, while the shovel allows you to dig in patches of dirt to find additional resources and items.

You'll run into puzzles of various types in the mansion. These appear to take two basic forms: firstly, there are self-contained puzzles that always show up in specific rooms, and these usually reward you with resources or items if you solve them correctly. Secondly, there's the overall meta-progression puzzles, which involve you figuring out the somewhat convoluted means through which you can actually move forward and, once you reach it, get into the Antechamber.

Blue Prince does have a few things that carry over from run to run, but the main thing is knowledge. Information you learn in one run can be used in the next; there's no not being able to do something because your character hasn't seen a particular piece of info in this particular run. As such, it pays to take notes and/or screenshots as you play, because as you discover new pieces of information, you'll eventually find a use for it. It might not be right away, but you'll get there in the end.

The game also isn't completely randomised. As previously noted, you can learn the deck so you can have a good idea of what rooms you should burn early on in order to draw more helpful ones as you get deeper into the mansion. Certain rooms will only show up in certain positions on the map, or display particular scenery elements if positioned in the right place. A "coat check" room allows you to stash an item in one run and pick it up in the next; under normal circumstances, you lose everything at the start of each new day, aside from the knowledge you, the player, have accumulated.

I've played for about three or four hours tonight and I'm starting to get a feel for it. It's a really interesting game. Some folks claim to have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing this and this intrigues me; the central gameplay mechanic is intriguing and enjoyable, but I am very much under the impression that "winning" the central challenge is just the beginning of what makes Blue Prince so interesting. Right now, everyone is being deliberately obtuse about things — partly at the developer's request, and partly just not to spoil it for everyone else — but I am definitely intrigued to see where things go.

My only concern is that I fear I may be too stupid to figure this game out by myself. But that's what talking about it with friends online is for, right?

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#oneaday Day 306: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I finally got around to reading a novel my mother has been bugging me to read for ages now. It's by Gabrielle Zevin and is called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of those titles that looks more and more wrong the more times you type it out in succession. I didn't know much about the book going in other than that it was somehow related to video games, and I deliberately didn't read anything about it prior to starting it, so I had gone in with the (mistaken, as it turns out) assumption that it was going to be another Ready Player One sort of situation.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is rather different, though. While it does indeed draw inspiration from the world of video games, it is not a sci-fi novel, and the games are used more as a backdrop to what is going on rather than in-your-face references. The main story concerns two individuals who meet as children in a hospital: Sam Masur is a traumatised young man with a mangled foot after a car crash that killed his mother, while Sadie Green is an intelligent young woman who had initially been attending the hospital to visit her sister, who had leukaemia, but who subsequently managed to strike up a friendship with Sam.

The pair bond over video games, something which was clearly already important in both of their lives; Sam displays himself to be a skilled player of Super Mario Bros. when Sadie first encounters him, while Sadie has long exchanged in-jokes relating to The Oregon Trail with her sister. Sadie discovers that her interactions with Sam have caused him to speak for the first time in a very long while, and she is encouraged to see him regularly as part of the "community service" requirements for her bat mitzvah. Sam eventually discovers this — helped along by Sadie's rather jealous sister — and, understandably, begins to doubt Sadie's friendship, causing a rift between them that lasts for several years.

The pair meet again by chance several years later, when they are both nineteen years old and studying at institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT. They once again bond over video games; Sadie introduces Sam to a video game she composed called Solution. Solution is an early example of an "art game"; it positions players in the role of someone working at a factory, but "completing" the game reveals that one was actually producing weapons for the Nazis in World War II. Players can alternatively complete the game by uncovering "the truth" about what they are actually up to earlier on.

Aside: real-life developer Brenda Romero believes that Solution is based a little too closely on her board game Train, which had a similar concept of going "surprise! You're a Nazi!" at its conclusion, but, as the name suggests, a different focus. I can see how she arrived at that conclusion — particularly as Zevin acknowledged the game's influence — but Sadie's Solution approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, and Sadie, rather than Romero, being the creator is important to the story. So I think we can maybe let that slide for now.

Anyway, Solution made people in Sadie's game design class absolutely furious, as you might expect, but Sam sees something in it. And thus begins a rather tempestuous working relationship, as the pair decide to make games together — some of which are huge successes, and others of which are big fat flops.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about video games, but it's also about the creative spirit and the balance young professionals often have to find between truly expressing themselves and doing something that will actually make them some money. It's about the wild mood swings the creative temperament can bring, and about how different ideals can sometimes lead to seemingly irreconcilable differences — and how the truly strong friendships can weather those storms, even if it takes years to do so sometimes.

The games are used as a backdrop to the main story of the relationship between Sam, Sadie and the other people who are part of their lives, both personally and professionally. Author Gabrielle Zevin admits that there are a few anachronisms in terms of the games she mentions and the times at which people are playing or discussing them, but notes that this is all in service of the story. We are, after all, talking about a fictional world that refers to a variety of things that exist in the real world — ranging from the classic arcade game Donkey Kong to the gaming lifestyle website Kotaku — and couples them with events that never actually happened. In this sense, it's an "alternate history" novel of sorts, only this history is about video games rather than, say, Hitler never having been born.

It's an interesting approach. The novel's perspective jumps around in time and in terms of which character it is focusing on at any given time. Sometimes you're "in the moment" as the events of the past are occurring; at others, the narration presents Sam and/or Sadie being "interviewed" by a real-life site (such as Kotaku) about something that never actually happened in the real world, but which was an important occurrence in this alternate history. Aside from a few early hiccups where Zevin refers to "3.25 inch floppy disks" on more than one occasion (which made me wince slightly every time), the effect is mostly very convincing; it doesn't take long before you're swept along with this account of something that could have happened in this world, but which didn't.

The novel is not just about how video games have changed over time. It's also about how attempts to introduce progressive themes into games have, at times, met with uncomfortable challenges. The novel takes this to something of an extreme — more so than anything that has, to my knowledge, happened in the real world — but the point it makes is convincing. As far as I'm aware, no-one has gone and shot up a game company in the real world over the inclusion of gay and transgender characters in a video game, but the idea is depressingly plausible. From a broader perspective, the inclusion of a sequence in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow where one of the major characters is shot dead following such an encounter can be looked on as criticism of gun culture and violence in America, and how more often than not mass shootings are the result of a disaffected white dude who has snapped about something in his life or society.

Some of the most effective sequences in the book are where Zevin isn't afraid to get a bit weird. After the aforementioned shooting sequence, there's a peculiar second-person sequence presented as the reader occupying the role of the fatally shot character in the present tense as their life slips away. There's another sequence later where a depressed Sadie is playing a massively multiplayer online game, but it never actually mentions the character we're following is Sadie; everything is presented "in character" and "in world". Like the world of video game development, the literary techniques that Zevin uses throughout Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow never remain constant; they're always changing, developing, moving on, advancing.

It's also a novel about how women struggle to be taken seriously in what is still perceived to be a "boys' club", even with more and more evidence to the contrary that women have always been a part of gaming. Sadie continually struggles to be seen as the artist she is because Sam is better at the business aspect. Despite being depicted as somewhat awkward in the early hours of the book, he ends up becoming a confident "face of the company" when promoting their work, suggesting that there may be some sort of mental health issues in an autistic/ADHD-adjacent area at work with Sam's character; his behaviour is very consistent with hyperfixations and intense, deep passions for very specific things.

But Sadie struggles too, despite being less obviously "broken" than Sam is. She may not have suffered the traumatic, violent loss of a parent, she may not have physical mobility issues and she may come from a background of relative privilege, but there are times when she struggles. There are times when she finds herself swept up in an abusive relationship because she thinks its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. There are times she falls into an inconsolable depression, when even those closest to her cannot reach her. There are times when she simply doesn't know what to do, despite her intelligence. She suffers, too — perhaps even more than Sam does — and the story of her own trials are an important part of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

I'll refrain from spoiling too much more of the details of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because I do recommend it, even if you're not "a gamer". Having the context of and an understanding of the video games referenced throughout is helpful, certainly, but this is not a story that is specifically about those video games. Instead, they're used to support the narrative and its approach to a fairly mundane but nonetheless impactful alternate history; the thrust of the story is, instead, about love, friendship, creativity, artistry and the range of challenges creative types (with varying degrees of mental health struggles) have faced over the course of the last 30-40 years or so.

So there we go. Now my mother can stop asking me if I've read it yet, because now I have!

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#oneaday Day 305: In the Attic

I am doing my monthly(ish) visit to the office, so you join me once again from a hotel room. This time around I have had mostly good luck: while I am technically stuffed into the "attic" on the third floor, my room is next to the lift and stairs and it has a bath.

So I had a bath. It's always nice to have a bath in a hotel, because their baths tend to be much bigger than ours. And as a large gentleman, it is nice to have a large bath to match. Even if I miscalculated, as I always do, the amount of water displacement my fat arse causes, leading to me semi-flooding the bathroom. I managed to mop most of it up with one of the towels, but the annoyance of that threatened to put something of a dampener (pun intended and not apologised for) on my evening.

I wasn't feeling great anyway. The drive down here was stressful. Occasionally I find myself… I don't know if "dissociating" is the right word, but I'm going to use it anyway. I feel sort of "detached" from myself, like I'm watching things going on but as if I'm sort of a step "back" from them. Then, inevitably, I become conscious of my dissociation, which inevitably occurs at an inconvenient time, such as when driving, and that freaks me out and makes me stressed. So I end up in a bit of a cycle.

Still, I made it here safely, accompanied by the second episode of the Fun Factor Podcast, which I can highly recommend if you're as interested in classic video game magazines as I am. This time around they take a look at a magazine I'm not familiar with, not being from North America, but a lot of the stuff discussed was familiar — including the full postal addresses of actual children being published in a continent-wide magazine and no-one seeming to think that might be a bit of a dodgy idea.

Anyway, I'm here now, I've eaten Hotel Snacks and now I'm ready to just sit and vegetate a bit before going to sleep. The usual Police Interceptors garbage is on TV and I have some video games and ebooks with me, so I think I can safely stave off any further stress or dissociation with either or both of those.

Oh, I did finish a book last night, but I want to talk about it a fair bit and there ain't no way I'm going to battle my phone's keyboard to do that right now. So perhaps tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow)…

#oneaday Day 304: Web maintenance at the worst times

I found it very hard to get out of bed this morning. The reason for this is simple: I stayed up until 2AM doing maintenance activities on this site and MoeGamer that could have almost certainly waited until a more sociable hour, but once I'd started, I wanted to see them through.

Y'see, both my sites have gone on a bit of a journey. They were both originally hosted on WordPress.com, with this blog being on a free account and MoeGamer being on a "Premium" paid tier. I was starting to reach the limits of what I could do with the Premium account in particular — most notably with regard to media storage space — and thus I moved MoeGamer to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation on a Bluehost hosting account.

Before anyone jumps in to decry Bluehost as being shit: believe me, I know. That is the reason neither of my sites are hosted with Bluehost at this point. But we'll come back to that.

As anyone who has ever tried to migrate a large site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org will tell you, the supposedly simple and straightforward migration process is anything but. What is supposed to happen is that you hit "Export" on your WordPress.com site, which spits out your site's contents as XML files, then you hit "Import" on your WordPress.org site, wherever you've hosted it, and it will recreate your site. Posts, pages and comments will go right back in, and the import process is supposed to look for any media you posted and automatically go and retrieve it from your old site, then transfer it to your new one.

Notice how I emphasise "supposed to". Because in the multiple times I have done this over the years, not once has it ever worked how it is, apparently, supposed to. Not only that, but the documentation on WordPress' own site refers to features and options that do not actually exist. Take these instructions for exporting your Media Library, for example. By following these instructions, even if the "automatic" process described above didn't work, you should be able to just tell WordPress.com to export all your media files into a big ol' .zip file, then import them all in one go to your WordPress.org installation.

Just one problem: the options they tell you to click on do not exist. Maybe they once existed and now do not, but right now — and for multiple years at this point, since I've done this several times with different sites — they do not exist, making them completely useless as instructions.

There are plugins that are supposed to help with this sort of thing. You can't install plugins on a WordPress.com site unless you're subscribed to the obscenely expensive "Business" plan, but you can install plugins on WordPress.org. Except you then run into the minefield of whether or not the plugins in question actually do what you think they're supposed to do, or if they're just some dodgy, shady thing trying to get you to sign up to their "Pro" account because the one vaguely useful option they have is paywalled.

And this is to say nothing of most web servers' tendency to crash if you throw too much data at them in one go. I have several thousand posts on both here and MoeGamer, and attempting to import them all at once would crash the import process every time. I ended up having to go a hundred at a time, which took a very long time, I can tell you, particularly as it would still crash on occasion. And amid all that, if it wasn't already clear, it didn't automatically import my old media and transfer it across to the new site; instead, it just left links to the old media and then… didn't do anything else.

So what I ended up with was two sites that were full of images that were hotlinked from an account I wasn't paying for any more, and which I wanted to close down. And it took me until last night to figure out some possible solutions.

For the record, I used two distinct plugins. Firstly, I used the Auto Upload Images plugin, which actually does do what the media import process is supposed to do: it looks for externally hosted images, then it imports them to your media library and updates the <img> tags to point to your new media library copies. The one downside I found with this plugin is that rather than importing the old images under the same date structure as the old site, it imports them all "today". This is down to a limitation with how WordPress handles files, I think, so no big deal — but it did cause an issue.

On both my sites, a lot of older images had automatically been set to allow people to click on them to see the full size versions. The links were now pointing at the old version of the image, while the <img> tags were showing the new versions. Not only that, but the mismatch in dates meant that some of these clickable links were just completely broken.

To resolve this, I took something of a nuclear option: I used the Broken Link Checker plugin to scan my site for all its links, searched those links for anything that was pointing at the old wordpress.com site and then just batch "unlinked" them. That means that the new images would be safely in place, the broken links would be removed and everything from thereon should, in theory, be hunky-dory.

There are a few things that have broken along the way, like any Gallery posts I hosted have lost all their images and I don't see any means of fixing that aside from doing them all manually, plus there's been the usual "link rot" of old copyright-infringing YouTube videos no longer being available online. Plus any audio media seems to have gone walkies, too, but again, no big deal, really; I don't think anyone expects a website that has been around for nearly 20 years to suffer from no link rot whatsoever.

But anyway. I got rather involved in this process last night, starting around 11pm. I knew, looking at the clock, that I shouldn't start doing something like this so late in the evening. But then I did, and hyperfixation kicked in, and I kept going until everything was, so far as I can tell, sorted. I mean, my galleries and audio bits are still broken, but I can live with that. What I didn't really want to live with was several thousand broken image links that led nowhere. And I think I've fixed that issue.

If you happen to notice anything wrong with any old posts you find yourself reading, do let me know and I'll see if it's possible to fix them. In some cases, that may be possible; in others, less so. As I say, it's part and parcel of a site being live for this long, even if it has moved hosting and domain names multiple times in its lifespan. But hopefully it's going to stick around right here for quite some time, so I wanted to fix as many of the annoying little issues as possible. So here we are!

I hope the three or four of you who actually read this appreciate the work I put in!

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#oneaday Day 303: Uhoh, new hyperfixation

The thing with being autistic, I have both been led to believe and experienced first-hand, is that every so often you get a Great Idea in your head about something you are going to be Into. Sometimes these Things That You Are Now Into stick around and become long-term hobbies and interests, at other times they fall by the wayside. But in my experience, they're usually worth following along with for at least a little while, unless they involve a major uprooting of your entire life. Which they usually don't.

While at the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con yesterday, our friend Dan spoke a little about collecting stickers. For some reason, Dan's enthusing about this tripped something in my brain, which suddenly and uncontrollably exploded with a chorus of "I want to be into collecting stickers!".

I actually used to be into collecting stickers when I was a kid. For two separate years, I collected stickers for the Panini sticker album themed around The Beano, and I used to swap stickers with my friend Joanna. Joanna herself is probably a story for another day — and one that, for once, I don't think I've actually told here previously — but all you need to know for now is that we were both pretty avid Beano sticker collectors, but I don't think either of us ever actually completed one of those albums 100%.

Panini stickers were, of course, one of the original "booster packs", and doubtless our parents grit their respective teeth any time we asked for a pack of stickers to go in our albums, particularly if a significant number of them ended up being duplicates of ones we already had. But it was a fun thing to do as a child, and an opportunity to socialise, too; I don't remember anyone else collecting Beano stickers, but I always enjoyed the chance to spend some time with Joanna. As I say, though, story for another day.

So anyway, with that in mind, my brain decided that Now I'm Into Stickers, so I immediately took the opportunity to wander off and buy a few packs of stickers that had caught my eye earlier. And, today, I dug out one of the lovely "journal"-style notebooks I've had in my drawer for ages but never really done anything with, and I started sticking stickers in it. Not only did I stick the stickers I bought yesterday in it, but I stuck some stickers I've had hanging around for ages in there, too; I had, up until this point, resisted sticking them anywhere because I was worried about the "permanence" of whatever I might have stuck them on.

This is actually something that Dan expressed yesterday, too, and thus my immediate solution was to stick them in a book. What's more permanent than a book! Unless you throw it away, obviously. But I'm not planning on throwing this away any time soon.

Anyway, do you want to see? Of course you do. Here:

I like doing title pages in the style of Victorian novels. I have done this for many years now, and I have no intention of stopping.

On the first page, a Neptunia sticker that's been floating around various rooms in my house since Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution showed up. I finally stuck it in something. So to speak. On the second, one of the first batches of stickers we did as a bonus extra in Evercade cartridges: a selection of sprites and artwork from Indie Heroes Collection 1, a compilation of "modern retro" games made by today's indie developers for vintage systems.

On the next page, some stickers from Piko Interactive Collection 2 for Evercade, which technically came out before Indie Heroes Collection 1 and thus was the trigger for me to add the "in no particular order" caveat to the title page of this volume. On the following page, a selection of stickers from the Goodboy Galaxy/Witch n' Wiz dual cartridge for Evercade, focusing on the former game. If you've never played Goodboy Galaxy I highly recommend it; it's an excellent exploratory platformer.

Then we have the stickers that came with Toaplan Arcade 3 and Data East Arcade 2 for Evercade, mostly based on the original cabinet or marquee art for these games.

And the same deal for these stickers, from Toaplan Arcade 4 and Atari Arcade 2.

Then a bumper crop of stickers from the Strictly Limited Games release of Sisters Royale, a shoot 'em up by the folks who made the Castle of Shikigami series. A lot of folks have beef with Strictly Limited for the amount of time they take to make their physical editions of games — I have some orders that have been outstanding for multiple years — but they always come through eventually. Their special editions are some of the highest quality but most affordable special editions I have on my shelves.

A bit of overflow of Sisters Royale stickers here, plus the first of the sticker packs I bought yesterday from the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con. This "Pretty Girls Sticker Pack" is by an art studio called Kumigaki.

And finally, for now, anyway, a few Final Fantasy VII-themed stickers I nabbed from a local outfit known as Taroball Studios.

So there we go. Stickers! And none of the dissatisfaction with empty spaces you got with Panini albums. I wonder if I'll ever fill this book? Only one way to find out!

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#oneaday Day 302: Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con

I went out today! SHOCK. Specifically, I went out with my wife and two of her friends that I happen to also get along well with, and we all went along to the Portsmouth Anime and Gaming Con, an event organised by a group called "Animeleague", who claim (as you do online) to host "The UK's most popular anime cons".

The event took place at a Marriott hotel in Cosham, a part of Portsmouth that is so shitty the first things that come up when you Google it are the crime statistics. But the Marriott itself was nice enough, even if its main reception and bar area, where most of the con took place, looked like an aircraft hangar had been clumsily bolted on to the side of the actual hotel. (Aside: I have previously encountered this kind of arrangement once, when I was teacher training, where the school I was placed at had very obviously taken a concourse that was once outside and decided to make it inside using some of the most industrial-looking architecture imaginable.)

The con was… kind of shit, to be honest, but in a charming way. We all had a good time and certainly didn't resent the train fare and ticket prices, but there's no way we would have been able to fill a full weekend with the activities that were taking place there.

The entire con consisted of a fairly small artist's alley (populated with some admittedly talented artists and craftspeople… as well as some other folks who were very obviously reselling AliExpress anime merch) and a "dealer's room", which primarily consisted of a huge booth from a company called Estatic Anime, which sold everything from katanas (a lot of people had been "studying the blade", it seems) to grab bags of Japanese snacks, but which also had some more artists and craftspeople around the periphery. And a wall of Funko Pop landfill relegated to a back corner, as it should be.

The "Gaming" part of the con consisted of a few side function rooms with a bunch of consoles set up, ranging from a number of Switches playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, some laptops with Minecraft and a few retro consoles, including all the major "minis" from the last few years, plus a couple of real retro systems such as a SNES, Mega Drive and a PlayStation. These rooms were pretty busy so we didn't spend a lot of time in them; as Andie said, "we can just do that at home". Quite. I believe there were supposed to be some actual tournaments going on throughout the day, but we didn't see any of that as it was mostly in games we weren't super-interested in watching.

There was a fairly small main stage in one of the hotel's function rooms, and there were Things Happening there all day. We went along to a couple of them: we caught the end of a writers' workshop hosted by a woman who appeared to be exceedingly nervous, but I'm sure addressing a room full of nerds, at least 40% of whom are in elaborate cosplay, is fairly daunting, then stayed on for a "lip-sync battle" where they struggled to find willing participants, then crashed their web browser for a good 10 minutes before they could actually start the competition. Then later in the day we returned for a "cosplay masquerade", which was probably the main attraction we were looking forward to seeing.

The lip-sync battle was quite entertaining, and I have to say, fair play to everyone who got up there, including the two incredibly nervous young girls in full cosplay who got up there, stood stock still and just about mouthed Japanese lyrics if you squinted and looked closely. They were, of course, shown up by those who had a natural talent and flair for performing on stage, including a Junko from Danganronpa performing an exceedingly (and appropriately) slutty take on Kesha's Joyride and an Ichigo from Bleach who was having the time of his life performing Thunderstruck by AC/DC. Both of these had clearly choreographed their routines in advance. One of the con staff also got up and did an excellent performance of You'll Be Back from Hamilton, a song (and show) I'm not familiar with, but which Andie assures me I absolutely should see. But still. It took guts for the two nervous girls to even try, so I cannot and will not take the piss.

The cosplay masquerade was… kind of similar, to be honest. It opened with a bunch of cosplayers who had signed up in advance and had clearly devised themselves some suitable dance (and, in the case of a Deadpool cosplayer, comedy) routines to establish a rapport with the audience rather than just standing there and looking nice. Then there were a few folks who had signed up on the day and either just stood there looking nice, or made some shit up on the spot to show off their costume.

The eventual winner of this was a Sakura Miku who did a fairly elaborate dance routine, but who Andie believes should have been disqualified for not ironing her shirt, making it pretty clear that she had just bought the costume rather than made it; by contrast, there was a spectacular Lulu from Final Fantasy X, who clearly had made her own costume, and she came in second place. Robbed, I tell you. Robbed.

Anyway, we bought some tat (and some sour cherry mead, which is delicious) and then came home to have a pizza. All in all, I'd judge that a pretty good day; as I say, the con itself was not necessarily something I'd particularly recommend to anyone unless they were particularly into bootleg Dragon Ball merchandise, but we didn't have a bad time there, and it was nice to get out of the house and spend some time with the three-dimensional people.

We've got some loose plans to go along to Portsmouth Comic Con, which is… next month, I think? That's in a larger venue so will probably be a bit more of an elaborate affair, so it should be pretty fun. For now, though, I think maybe a snifter of mead before bed, then sleepytime. And I forgot to buy milk. Bugger.

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#oneaday Day 301: Weird things from Lidl

My wife Andie and I have started doing a lot of our food shopping at our local Lidl. It's not really any further away from the Tesco and/or Sainsbury's we had typically been going to up until now, it's generally a bit cheaper, and there's something just a bit more fun about it, inasmuch as grocery shopping can ever be fun. Also, I am nearly forty-four years old, and thus several decades too old for people to take the piss out of me for going to Lidl.

For the unfamiliar, Lidl is a budget supermarket that, as well as having the usual supermarket groceries, tends to have a bunch of random crap down its middle aisles ranging from portable greenhouses to cookware via dog toys, and also has an aisle or two that have a rotating "themed" selection of foods, with the theme usually being a particular geographical area.

The one… challenge we have, if you want to call it that, is because Lidl has these interesting "novelty" sections each time you go, the temptation is to do that thing where you go to another country and visit their supermarkets, and then you want to do stupid shit like buy their version of Corn Flakes to see if they taste any different, stuff like that. I know I'm not the only one who does this because Andie does it too.

Okay, the Corn Flakes thing is an exaggeration, but the natural response to seeing unfamiliar but tasty-looking things in a supermarket is to go "ooh, that looks unfamiliar but tasty, I'll give it a try". You will then repeat this process approximately 10-15 times over the course of your complete visit to Lidl — along with deciding that you actually do need a new frying pan, and the one they had in the middle aisle really wasn't that unreasonably priced — and end up with a shopping bill a good £20-£50 more than if you'd just gone to Tesco.

This, I guess, is the genius of Lidl. They can position themselves as a budget supermarket, because they are, but the way they merchandise their products means that people are, on the whole, probably more likely to spend more than they normally would. This is a work of dastardly genius, but I'm not mad about it.

I like being able to do the weekly food shop and discover weird American snacks that are a cross between Wotsits and a bag of salted peanuts. I like knowing that when I'm buying bread and milk, I have the option to also purchase a chainsaw at the same time. I like the fact that I could show up to Lidl at any hour of the day, purchase a large pack of toilet paper, some lubricant and a large item of garden furniture and no-one would look twice at the contents of my trolley. Well, all right, they might in that last instance.

Also, you remember a while back I talked about my lifelong desire to rediscover the brownies the friends of my parents once served me in America one Halloween? Lidl's in-store bakery brownies are the absolute closest thing I've had to those brownies. I still don't think they're quite there, but they are, by far, the closest I've had to those brownies from all those years ago. And thus their merchandising genius can't be all that evil, can it? Unless they're lacing those brownies with something that makes you inherently more suggestible…

Oh well. Anyway, we need to do a food shop soon, so I will be intrigued to see what nonsense we come back with next time. Perhaps I'll even report on it. Bet you can't wait, no?

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#oneaday Day 300: Paying the tax

I make no apologies for admitting that I preordered a Switch 2 today, even after everything I said yesterday. I thought about it a bit, and I basically came to the conclusion that I was almost certainly going to get one regardless of how much I complained about certain elements of it — and that in doing so I may well be Part of the Problem — and so I might as well just get it out of the way and do it.

So I did. Someone I know happened to spot that Argos had preorders go live today, so I snagged one. I went for the one with Mario Kart World pre-installed, so I basically get that game for £30 instead of £75. Not having a physical copy sucks a bit, but at the same time, Mario Kart World is one of those games that is going to get lots of updates and DLC, making a physical version arguably useless in the long term. That's a thing that happens these days, and that's not going away, so I may as well just enjoy the things while they are current, and I may well be dead by the time it's no longer possible to access the online elements. (Not that I'm planning on being dead any time soon, but you know what I mean.)

There's enough about Switch 2 that I like to make it worthwhile. The "Switch 2 Versions" of original Switch games are compelling, for one; I haven't yet played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and now it will be nice to be able to do so at higher resolutions and frame rates. I'm by no means a frame rate and resolution snob — I was eminently satisfied with how Breath of the Wild looked and performed — but if the option is there to make it better officially without getting into hacking, modding and piracy territory, I'm all for it.

There's also some of the multi-format "big" games that are quite appealing. I might finally play Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2, for example, or Hitman: World of Assassination. The nice thing about Switch 2 versions of these coming so late is that they should be "complete" versions with all their additional DLC, updates and what have you baked into the Switch 2 version from day one. And hopefully with a physical release.

One thing I'm not super enamoured with is this "game key card" business. If you haven't seen it yet, it's the replacement for the "code in a box" system, whereby you could buy a Switch case that contained nothing more than a download code. This new version actually has a Switch cart in it, but the cart doesn't have the game on it; instead, it lets you download the game and play it while the cart is in. I initially thought this was utterly stupid, but if you read the fine print on the Japanese website (which a pal graciously translated for me earlier) it became clear that this is not the same as redeeming a game on your account from a code; it is transferable, so you can lend it to others, take it round to a friend's house, all that sort of thing. It's still a bit of a weird way of doing things, but I don't hate it as much as code-in-a-box.

(And look, I get why code-in-a-box is a thing; it lets people buy digital games as gifts and give the person something physical to open on their special occasion. But it's still a pisser to find what you think is a physical release of a game only to discover it's… not that.)

I can sort of understand why the game key card thing is being used for stuff like Street Fighter 6, which is a game that gets updated regularly with balance patches, DLC and suchlike, and which has a massive filesize. I'm a bit pissed the Bravely Default remaster is using this system, though; there's no way that game wouldn't fit on a low-capacity cartridge. But oh well.

Like I say, though, there's enough about Switch 2 that I do like to make it, I think, worthwhile. It will be interesting and fun to use the social features if (and that's a big if right now, particularly with the chaos ensuing from Trump's dumbshit tariffs in the States) my friends happen to pick a Switch 2 up; it would be nice to get some sort of regular "game night" going, and the built-in chat features could even be a decent means of recording a podcast or streaming something in collaboration with another person.

Plus Mario Kart World does look good. I'm still not convinced it's £75 good, but I'm sure I can get £30 value out of it.

It's certainly going to be interesting to spend some time with Switch 2 when it arrives in a couple of months. I'm looking forward to it. Yes, I'd love it to be cheaper. Yes, I'd love it if we had a 100% guarantee that original Switch games will work on it (which we don't, yet, but they are supposedly working on it.) Yes, I wish I didn't have to buy a new format of memory card for it.

But I also understand why all these things are the case, and moaning and complaining about them almost certainly isn't going to change anything about them this close to release. So I may as well suck it up, pay the money and enjoy the thing I knew I was always going to enjoy anyway. And so that's exactly what I'm doing!

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