#oneaday Day 268: Microsoft's greatest UI crime

Microsoft is guilty of numerous UI crimes from over the years. The "Ribbon". Metro Tiles. Centre-justifying the taskbar. But for me, all of these pale in comparison to what is, for me, one of the most annoying things they have ever done. And that is the introduction of these buttons:

If you don't recognise those buttons, they're right in the middle of a modern-day Xbox controller. Introduced with the Xbox One, they replaced what used to be there, which is this:

I'm sure you can see what the issue is with the top set of buttons, but in case you can't, there are numerous problems.

Firstly, what the fuck are any of them called? I bet you don't know without looking them up. I don't even know what the middle one does, and that icon isn't much help either. Is it for removing liquid from a container? Fuck knows.

Secondly, if you can't remember what either of them are called, this makes it infinitely harder to remember which way round they are, necessitating you look at your controller any time you are asked to press them. This is not a problem that the Xbox 360 layout had, since the buttons themselves had helpful arrows indicating which side they were on. And they had the names of the buttons on them too. We'll leave aside the unnecessary replacement of the conventional "Select" with "Back" for the moment.

Thirdly, if you are using an older controller that still has Xbox 360 button labels on it, but a game insists on using the newer Xbox iconography, it's really hard to know which one you're supposed to press, particularly if you've never had an Xbox One/Series controller in your hands before. This, again, is not a problem that the Xbox 360 layout had, all because of those simple little arrows.

Part of the problem with the newer buttons is that they assume consistent functionality. The one with the three lines is called the "Menu button", and makes the assumption that any time you press it, a menu will appear. This is not always the case, however; sometimes it might pause a game or a cutscene, sometimes it might be used to start a game, sometimes it might do something extremely specific that is only relevant to a single game.

Likewise, the button with the two overlapping squares is called the "View button", and even Microsoft's own website doesn't have a good explanation for it, saying only that "the button's functions vary depending on the app or game." There's no real reason for it to be called the "View" button, because, as Microsoft themselves say, there is no fixed purpose for it. Much like the "Menu" button, it can have all manner of uses, many of them having nothing to do with the word "View" whatsoever. (As an aside, the above link doesn't even mention the middle one, either. So maybe Microsoft don't know what it does, either.)

One could argue that these criticisms could quite reasonably be levelled at the "Start" and "Back" buttons also. But there's an important difference: up until that point, it had been standard convention for a controller to have, at the very least, a "Start" button, and often a "Select" button also.

And the uses for those buttons had remained both pretty constant over the years and relevant to the button names: "Start" had always been used to start games, like a Start button on an arcade machine, and had also been used for pausing (in fact, the Nintendo Gamecube had specifically labelled it "Start/Pause") and then starting them again after you paused them. "Select", meanwhile, used to be the button you used to toggle through selections on a menu — this is most commonly seen in old Nintendo games — before it was decided that navigating using the directional pad made more sense, particularly in more complex menus.

Microsoft's "Select" replacement "Back", meanwhile, while not always used to "go back", often was used in that way in Xbox software, thereby giving it 100% more practical use than a "View" button that its own manufacturer admits doesn't have anything to do with viewing things.

While we're on the subject, I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo replacing "Start" and "Select" with "+" and "-" either, but at least those make a sort of logical sense; "+" is on the right while "-" is on the left, reflecting how you would expect to see a line of numbers presented, with smaller ones on the left and larger ones on the right. We'll leave aside the fact that these buttons are very rarely used to increase and decrease values in Switch software, and instead are used as, you guessed it, pretty much what the old "Start" and "Select" did.

I'm sure someone somewhere thought they had a really good reason for changing the Xbox buttons to what they are now. But they suck. They always have done, and every time I play a game with my (still working) Xbox 360 controller and have no fucking idea which button I'm supposed to press because I can never remember which way around the stupid Menu and View buttons are because my controller doesn't have them, it's immensely annoying. Kudos, then, to those developers who bother to put in different options for button labels according to Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation and Nintendo conventions, then. You guys are unsung heroes.

That has been your pointless rant of the day. Yes, I know the United States is imploding and something something Ukraine, but I was just reminded of these stupid-ass buttons today, so I felt like having a good old whinge about them. You may now return to your previously scheduled Sunday of wasting time on the Internet.

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 267: Do some exercise

For a little while, my left knee has been absolutely killing me. It hurt to bend it, it hurt to kneel down, it was even quite painful extending and bending my leg to go up and down stairs. It was getting so painful that I was reaching a point where I was genuinely quite concerned I had somehow fucked it up beyond all hope of recovery despite not having actually done anything to it other than "be fat".

Taking advantage of a brief (brief) moment of motivation earlier today, I decided to set up the treadmill my wife bought a little while back, and which the pair of us have failed to make good use of since it arrived in the house and we realised we don't really have a super-convenient place to keep it. I plonked it down in front of the living room TV (where it just about fits between the sofa and the media cabinet) and plugged its ridiculously short cable into an extension, then into the wall. Then I set it going at a gentle 3.5 speed (mph, I presume) and just did ten minutes while I watched a bit of an episode of Friends.

When I got off, my knee wasn't in agony any more. It's still a little bit painful, but it's not at the "oh my God, are they actually going to have to chop my leg off?" level of pain it has been in the last week. So I am forced to conclude that after many, many years of a largely sedentary lifestyle, my body is finally reaching a point where it is literally screaming out for me to do some exercise. Which is nice.

I joke, but it sort of is nice to have some actual, unavoidable motivation for doing some exercise. I'm not averse to the idea at all — numerous gym memberships, periods of going swimming regularly and even just about surviving a 10K in the pre-COVID days will attest to this — but summoning up the motivation in the last five years has been really difficult, particularly if "doing some exercise" involves putting in some effort before you can even start — getting equipment out, getting changed, rearranging a room or driving to the gym.

But the treadmill, currently propped up against the wall in our living room, is reasonably easy to set up — I just have to move the coffee table out of the way, plug it in and we're away. So I'm going to start doing just a little bit every day. Just ten minutes at a time to begin with, as I don't want to overwhelm myself and kill off that motivation before it leads to any sort of productive gain in ability level or fitness. Just ten minutes of putting these tired old legs to a bit of use, and apparently that works wonders.

Who knew? Everyone did, of course, but sometimes it helps to have a little reminder that people who tell you to get some exercise aren't just talking out their arse or trying to get you to do something you don't want to do. It actually, really does help. So I'm hoping starting slow will help with the feelings of physically painful lethargy that have been becoming increasingly apparent since COVID. And we'll see how things go from there.

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#oneaday Day 266: Beetle Drive

After writing a bit about flash cartridges the other day (and, err, ordering one for my Mega Drive when I saw it was payday) I thought it was probably time I sat and played some of the stuff I had on my Everdrive 64 X7 hooked up to my Nintendo 64. So I did. And I'm reminded that while the Nintendo 64 was a rather odd system in many ways, it also had some great games.

I will probably write some more on these over on MoeGamer at some point, but in the absence of anything particularly interesting happening today, I thought at least a couple of them would make worthwhile blog fodder.

The first one I decided to give a bit of a go was Beetle Adventure Racing, a game which I remember reviewing well back in the day, which I know is often featured in "best of Nintendo 64" retrospectives, which I know my brother likes and which, somehow, I have never gotten around to trying. So I decided I would fix that issue and try it.

Beetle Adventure Racing is really good, you guys. I'm kicking myself for not trying this sooner — and kicking myself for not taking a punt on it back in the days when the N64 was current, either, because I would have absolutely loved this.

For the unfamiliar, Beetle Adventure Racing is an arcade racer from Electronic Arts (boo, hiss, I know, but we still liked them back in the N64 days) and Pilotwings 64 co-developer Paradigm Entertainment. It was created at least in part as a sort of "advergame" for the new-model Volkswagen Beetle, which launched in the late '90s, right when the N64 was in its heyday. It's not obnoxious about it, mind; it's just a game in which all the cars happen to be '90s New Beetles, and apparently Volkswagen weren't all that precious about what EA and Paradigm did to them, because Beetle Adventure Racing sees you doing some ridiculous things with them.

At its heart, Beetle Adventure Racing is a relatively straightforward arcade racer. You can play single events as either full-field races, duels against a single opponent or time trials. There's a championship mode with several difficulty levels, each of which unlocks some new tracks. You can play two-player races. And there's a four-player battle mode that, back in the days when I had three-dimensional friends and we, as a people, went around to each other's houses on a fairly regular basis, I feel we would have had a lot of fun with. One day. Maybe.

The "Adventure" part of the title comes from the design of the courses. While they're relatively straightforward (albeit surprisingly long by genre standards) circuit races at first glance, it won't take you long to notice that there seem to be a lot of scenery elements that just beg the question "I wonder if I can go over there". And the answer, usually, is yes. Track splits in two? Pick a direction. Road goes one way, railway lines head the other way into a boarded-off tunnel? Crash through that sucker and see what's in there! Curious-looking pathway running parallel to the main course, then branching off in a different direction? Check it out next lap.

Now, the nice thing about the course design in Beetle Adventure Racing is that taking these detours doesn't put you at a disadvantage, despite, in some cases, appearing to lead you in a completely different direction to the "official" course. Nope, a lot of them are, in fact, shortcuts that let you skip parts of the track — or at the very least take a different route to get to the same destination.

In the championship mode, they have a secondary purpose, too: they tend to conceal boxes with numbers on them. Crashing into these boxes gives you points. If you get 50 points in a single race, you get a continue that lets you try again if you mess up. If you get 100 points, you get a "bonus" that the game is rather coy about — I believe it's extra stages for the battle mode. There are also, I've just discovered, three hidden "flower boxes" in each stage that unlock "cheats". I haven't even seen one of these yet.

Anyway, the long and short of it is in Beetle Adventure Racing it pays to really explore the different tracks, understand the different routes it's possible to take and practice nabbing the bonus boxes at every opportunity. Because while it's relatively easy to win the novice-level races without putting yourself out too much, combining the point-scoring (and the flower box-hunting) with still winning the race makes things much more interesting than your average arcade racer.

And the tracks! While obviously a little limited by the late '90s tech and the system the game is on, they're proper "thrill ride" courses. One takes you through a not-particularly-subtle Jurassic Park homage, complete with T-Rex bursting through the bushes at the side of the course. One takes you through a volcano. An icy course sees you careening through crystal caves and negotiating huge frozen obstacles. And, as previously mentioned, they're all long, meaning you get plenty of time to enjoy them, and there are plenty of opportunities to spot the different shortcuts, detours and otherwise optional areas.

It's not quite the same as today's "open world" racers, where it's possible to go very off-piste, often to the detriment of your race performance. In Beetle Adventure Racing, the alternative routes are very much designed as integral parts of the courses, rather than simply a thing to go "huh, cool" at, then return to following the guide line for maximum efficiency.

It's a joyful, silly game that I've had a lot of fun with so far — and will likely continue to do so for quite a while yet. In fact, I think I will go and do just that right now.

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#oneaday Day 265: Corporate Inefficiency

I have worked for Big Corporations before on a few occasions in my life, and while my experiences were… mixed, to say the least, there were some occasional good times. At one of them, anyway. The other was inoffensive at best; the last is a period of my life that I would set fire to if it was possible to do such a thing with an expanse of time.

But my God I do not miss corporate policy and procedure, also known as the three thousand steps you are supposed to take in order to get anything done.

I obviously can't give specifics for various reasons, but I have been contending with this sort of thing just recently. I work for a small company who, by virtue of its size, is able to Get Shit Done in a pretty timely manner for the most part. Occasionally we have setbacks, but we deal with them, we communicate directly with one another and, for the most part, we handle the challenges each day presents us.

Just recently, I have been having to deal with a large corporation. As noted, I can't say who, or what, or why, and I wouldn't even if I was able to. Let's just say it's a large company and leave it at that.

On the 7th of this month, I sent something over to our contact at this company for them to review, give their stamp of approval and let us get on with our jobs. It is now the 27th of this month, my contact is still "putting a team together" to look at one document I sent them twenty days ago and I'm just sitting here wondering what on Earth these people are doing all day.

In working with all manner of different companies to do what we do, I have encountered many different responses to "can you just give this document a quick once-over and let us know if everything's OK with it?".

The absolute best people to work with are the ones who go "yeah, that all looks fine, we trust your judgement" and let us get on with it, usually responding within a day or less. These are not as uncommon as you might think, but I do wish they were a bit more common. This usually happens when you are dealing with an individual rather than a company.

The next best people to work with are the ones who provide helpful and timely feedback. The ones where they might have a few specific "requirements" when working with them, but who are perfectly helpful and nice about the whole thing, and get back to you promptly. This usually happens when you have a single point of contact who you have a good relationship with at a reasonably sized company.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the ones who come back with an absolute mountain of last-minute feedback that it would have been nice to know a little bit earlier, but who are still remarkably understanding about the whole thing and often quite apologetic. This can be annoying, but at least it's workable. This tends to happen if there is a bit of a language barrier that precludes more "real-time" communication and feedback.

And then you have this situation, where you send out one document and twenty days later it doesn't appear that anyone has looked at it whatsoever because they're still arguing about who should look at it. This happens when you are dealing with a larger company, although the exact degree depends on the company.

This is by far the most frustrating experience I've had with this whole "getting sign-off" step in the grand scheme of what we do on a day-to-day basis, and I'm aware I'm being vague about all this, but I sort of have to be.

But I also wanted to express my frustration. Because it's really fucking annoying, not just for me but for the other people who need to use my document (once approved) to get on with their jobs. And there is no good reason for it. It will inevitably be some sort of Corporate Policy and Procedure that is bogging things down, some capital-P Process that is being followed internally their end while we are left completely in the dark as to why we've been left twiddling our thumbs for twenty sodding days.

If you're someone who replies to emails immediately, thank you. If you're someone who trusts professionals to do their job, double thank you. And if you're the one responsible for creating stupid, pointless, irritating corporate delays like this… well, I hope you step on a Lego brick in the very near future.

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#oneaday Day 264: Flashcarts: a retro essential?

I can't remember if I mentioned it on here before, but even if I did, I'm going to mention it again anyway: I recently ordered an FXPak Pro for my Super NES, to add to my collection alongside the Everdrive 64 X7 I got a while back for my Nintendo 64, and long-term I intend to also get Everdrives for the Mega Drive, Master System, NES and possibly Game Boy Advance.

For the unfamiliar, an Everdrive is a cartridge for a retro gaming system that allows you to pop in an SD card full of game ROMs, then play them on original hardware. The FXPak Pro is a similar device, but it's distinguished from Everdrives primarily due to its origin, but also because it is capable of emulating the custom chips that many SNES cartridges had in them, such as the famous Super FX chip that powered Starwing.

Most of these devices also have additional benefits such as being able to back up save data and even make use of emulator-style save states in some circumstances — one model of the Mega Drive one can even full-on emulate a Mega CD without having to have an actual Mega CD attached — but their main appeal element is the ability to play any games you want on original hardware without having to use original cartridges. Of course, this generally involves piracy, but at this point, none of the original makers of games on old games consoles are making any money from you buying an original cartridge anyway, which means the often exorbitant prices they go for are pretty much pure profit for the individuals or organisations involved.

A while back, I was all about building a curated collection of games for vintage systems, and there's part of me that would still like to do that. But I have had a few considerations arise over the last couple of years: the first being the available space I have, which is rapidly running out (although I've reclaimed some by banishing some items to the loft and rearranging some of the other shelves) and the second being that I had a run of bad luck with buying second-hand cartridges.

To give specifics, I attempted to buy the game Desert Strike for SNES, a game I never actually owned back in the day, but always enjoyed any time I borrowed it from a friend or played it at their house. I paid £8 for a copy from CEX, and was a little put out to discover when it arrived that it didn't work. Well, it sort of worked; the Electronic Arts logo on startup was garbled, in-game graphics occasionally corrupted and it would just randomly reboot sometimes. This problem persisted even after several sessions with the contact cleaner and cotton buds. The cart was just fucked.

No matter, I thought, it's only £8, I'll buy another copy and return this one if I can be arsed — though I knew from experience that if I attempted to return it to CEX, they'd almost certainly test it, find it didn't appear to work, then refuse me a refund, despite them selling it to me in a faulty state in the first place. So I bought another copy. And the same thing happened.

Couple that with several experiences I've had where I bought games where the save batteries had failed, and, y'know, I just can't be bothered with all the faffing around with aging, failing media when there's a better option just sitting there. Playing on original hardware definitely has its own distinct appeal from playing on emulation or even official rereleases on modern systems, so going the Everdrive or FX Pak Pro route just makes a lot of sense when my priority is not "investing" in a collection, but instead just enjoying the games.

I will add to the above that, if a game I'm particularly fond of or always wanted to play should suddenly become available commercially, I will happily pay up money for it, and have done on numerous occasions, even if I'd already played and beaten the game via "unofficial" means. It's the right thing to do. But there are myriad games out there that are never getting a rerelease for all manner of stupid reasons, and that doesn't mean no-one should be able to play them any more.

So, long-term, I'm intending that all my retro systems will be equipped with Everdrives or equivalents so they can be used and enjoyed without having to roll the dice on whether aged media is still in working order. And once that's all sorted out, I'm looking forward to spending some quality time with some classic games — both ones I loved back in the day, and hopefully some new discoveries, too.

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#oneaday Day 263: Room service

It is, if you will pardon my deliberate misuse of a term typically used to mean something else, that time of the month again: the time when I get to drive two and a half hours from my home, hole up in a hotel for the evening and then go in to the office tomorrow.

The hotel I normally stay at, known as The Broadway, is quite nice. The rooms are pleasant and the beds are comfortable. My only real objection is that its bathrooms are very inconsistent. Sometimes I'll get a room with a lovely big bath, which it is a delight to luxuriate in after that long drive. And at others, you'll get ones like the one I have this time, featuring a shower cubicle far too small for a human being (let alone a larger gentleman such as myself) and a toilet placed in such a way that you have to lean around the toilet paper dispenser to be able to sit down and do a poo.

Oh, and they use those horrible office-style single sheet toilet roll dispensers, too. I have taken to bringing my own proper toilet roll rather than spend my poos here scrabbling away at sheets of toilet paper far too thin to have any practical purpose whatsoever.

The one thing I will particularly compliment the Broadway on is its food. In the morning, you get a lovely breakfast included, and it's much better than what you'd get in something like a Travelodge or Premier Inn, in that someone cooks it for you to order rather than batch cooking everything and leaving it to congeal under heat lamps.

I hadn't had dinner here before, so I thought I'd treat myself this evening, and it was excellent. I had a full rack of ribs followed by a chocolate sundae, and both were delicious as well as being generous portions. Bad for the diet, of course, but these trips away always mess with any good intentions to eat healthily, anyway. Back on track when I get home tomorrow.

Tomorrow's session at work promises to be interesting. Rather than just a regular day at the office, we're having a day of brainstorming product ideas, so I'm intrigued to see exactly how ambitious the organisers think we should be. I obviously won't be able to tell you anything that is decided or discussed tomorrow, but I have some fun ideas that it will hopefully be enjoyable to brainstorm a bit.

And with that in mind, it's probably time to get some sleep. So I'm off to do just that.

#oneaday Day 262: Just a little bit worse

I'm aware that the following is going to make me sound painfully middle-class, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's important to the story.

When I was a kid, the ultimate treat for enduring a shopping trip with my parents was not a trip to McDonald's or a big bag of sweets. It was going to the Marks and Spencer food section, getting a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich and a can of Caribbean crush, and enjoying both of those in the car park before the drive home. I'm not exaggerating when I say those sandwiches were delicious, and I'd give anything to experience them again.

"So just go to Marks and Spencers and get one," you may well say. And to that I would simply say… they're not the same. Just as so many other things are not the same as they used to be; just as so many other things have been gradually, subtly, almost imperceptibly enshittified over the years, so too have Marks and Spencer prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches.

In fact, pre-packed sandwiches in general have been on a downward spiral for many years now. When I was a little old to be dragged around Cambridge shopping with my parents, my friend Plummer and I would often go out for a drive of an evening, perhaps stopping by a nearby "old man pub" that we enjoyed, then swinging by the 24-hour Tesco petrol station to enjoy some midnight sandwiches before going home. While those sandwiches were never quite of the same quality as the mythical Marks and Spencers prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches, they were still pretty good.

Nowadays, every time I stop by a shop and think "oh, I'll get a Meal Deal" I also accompany that thought with "maybe the sandwiches will be better this time". But they never are. The bread is always soggy and too cold, the fillings are always underseasoned, nigh-flavourless in many cases, and as someone who physically retches if he can taste raw onion, my options are often a bit limited, to boot.

The possibility had occurred to me that perhaps I was nostalgically romanticising the concept of pre-packed sandwiches, and particularly the Marks and Spencers prawn mayonnaise sandwich. But then I consider all the other things which are indisputably worse than they used to be, and it's hard not to feel like everything now costs more but is also considerably worse.

Take a Kellogg's Variety pack, for example. I used to love these, because it was a bunch of little cereal packets, one portion each, that meant you could have a varied breakfast each day. Some of them were "healthy" (and I use the term loosely with regard to breakfast cereal, I'm aware), such as Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, but there were always some "treats" in there too: Frosties, Ricicles, Coco Pops. I used to love getting a Variety pack when I went to go and visit my Nan; she'd always get them in for me because she knew I enjoyed them, and she'd always make me jelly and ice cream. I miss her and my Grandad.

A while back, Andie and I went for one of our occasional holidays at Center Parcs. While I was there, I thought "hey, I'll get a Variety pack! I haven't had one for ages." I was disappointed to discover that not only to Ricicles just flat-out not exist any more, but the balance in the Variety pack was now overwhelmingly in favour of Rice Krispies, one of the most boring cereals on the planet. Two packets of regular Rice Krispies and a packet of Rice Krispies Multigrain Shapes, whatever ungodly abomination of the breakfast table those might be. (They're not awful. But they're also not interesting.)

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, too, used to be my all-time favourite cereal, but the last box of them I've had has been immensely disappointing as has the box of Weetos I got alongside them. Neither of them are so bad as to make me want to throw them out completely, but they're also both considerably inferior than they once were. They just seem to lack a lot of the flavour that they once had.

I know the answer, of course: it's sugar. Everything has far less sugar in it these days, because sugar is the great sin that has made us all fat. And perhaps there's some truth to that — but then I also find myself thinking that numerous previous generations had full-sugar, full-fat diets and came through the experience without ballooning into an obesity epidemic. So what went wrong? How is it that our bland, flavourless, low-sugar, low-fat, joy-free food of today is still making us fatter than we've ever been in our lives?

Reflecting on things, I think part of the problem might be that the lack of sugar in "staples" such as the everyday breakfast cereal specifically makes me crave some actual sugar. And that's when I go out and get a chocolate bar or a cinnamon bun or whatever. And because I feel that so frequently, and so often indulge myself, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a fat fuck.

Would I feel differently if my everyday food had more sugar, more fat, more flavour to it? I don't know. I know that I have gradually gained weight over the course of the last 25-30 years or so, but the vast majority of that weight has been in the last five years, since COVID. In those last five years, I've felt far more cravings for things that are bad for me than ever before, and I think that's a big part of the problem. When your everyday foods are leaving you feeling unsatisfied and craving more, you're tempted to binge on the things you're craving just to try and feel a little more fulfilled.

It's a more complex situation than that, of course; as I've alluded to numerous times on this blog, my relationship with food is more akin to an addiction, and is tied closely to my mental wellbeing. But I do often find myself wondering that if our everyday food and drink was a bit less artificially bland, we might all paradoxically be a bit better off.

No way to know, really, I guess. All I'm left with is the absolute certainty that if I get a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich from Marks and Spencer today, I will be left disappointed thanks to soggy bread, flavourless prawns and reduced-fat mayo. Not a patch on the real thing from 30+ years ago. And I don't think we're ever getting that back.

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#oneaday Day 261: Two for one

Two for the price of one today! Aren't I generous? Of course, I could have probably put what I'm going to say in this post into the previous post, but then I wouldn't have "caught up" having missed a day, and I (and, let's face it, no-one else) would feel bad.

So with that in mind, I'll do my best to try and talk about something completely different in this post.

I've spent my evening playing some Midnight Resistance on Evercade. I do like that game a great deal, and there is, in fact, a reason I've been playing it outside of just "because I want to", but I also just wanted to.

With the general size of modern-day games, it's easy to forget about the appeal of classic arcade-style games from earlier generations of hardware. It's easy to think of these games as being somehow "lesser" thanks to them not having in-depth storylines, not having hours upon hours of gameplay (assuming you can make it through them) and not having in-depth secrets and lore for theorycrafters to post six-hour video essays on YouTube about.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. When I sit down to play a game in the evening, I'm usually prioritising whatever my "big game" is at the moment — Xenoblade Chronicles at present, for example. But sometimes, as I alluded to the other day, I'm in the mood for something different. And that's generally when I bust out something that doesn't take as long to play, but which I often find is still incredibly rewarding, relaxing and enjoyable.

Take The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, which I played and wrote about recently. I decided to play this pretty much on a whim, but almost as soon as I started I knew that I would be devouring this game within a day or two. And, rather than coming away from the experience feeling like I hadn't had value for money from the game because it only lasted for 6 hours, I came away not only immensely satisfied with the experience I'd just had, but also inspired to write nearly 3,000 words about it.

It's the same any time I jump into something a bit shorter. I need to stop thinking of these as "filler" games, as it's easy to do, and actually settle down and spend some proper time with shorter experiences. Because there's a lot to appreciate in them, and it's valuable to consider the various different ways that interactive entertainment can engage our brain, excite us and distract us from the misery that is generally existing in 2025.

I'm feeling increasingly attracted to 16-bit games specifically, and with that in mind I've ordered an FX Pak Pro for my Super NES. This is a flash cart from the Everdrive maker Krikzz, based on an open source project known as SD2SNES, and it supports pretty much every SNES game you can think of, including the ones with the funny custom chips like the Super FX chip or DSP chips — and supposedly it even runs Game Boy games via the Super Game Boy 2 setup. I'm looking forward to loading it up with European SNES ROMs — the TV I run my SNES on doesn't like doing 60Hz — and spending some quality time with some excellent 16-bit games in the very near future.

And, once my wallet has recovered from the not-inconsiderable amount that the FX Pak Pro costs, I'm going to do the same for the Mega Drive and have an absolutely delightful selection of games to spend some time with when I just feel like kicking back and playing things that aren't too demanding of my time.

I do like collecting retro games, but realistically speaking, I have a few considerations: firstly, I don't have a lot of space for more games, and the priority on the remaining space is for current stuff; secondly, retro is getting very expensive, and not always worth the amount you need to pay to get stuff in reasonable condition; and thirdly, retro is also getting a bit unreliable at times. I bought the game Desert Strike three times from CEX and all three cartridges have an issue in the same way. It's not my SNES because that runs absolutely everything else just fine. Combine that with the fact that batteries in carts with save game functions are starting to fail and it's just easier to go the flash cart route. It's not as if buying a second-hand copy of a game from CEX is sending any money back to the original devs, after all — and as a general rule, if something I enjoy gets an official rerelease on a modern system, I will happily pay up for a physical copy of it. (Even better, often with Evercade I get to be part of making those physical releases!)

So yeah. 16-bit is where it's at for me at the moment. And with that in mind, I think a few more attempts at Midnight Resistance before bedtime.

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#oneaday Day 260: Catching up

Did I miss a day? I think I missed a day. With that in mind, I'll attempt to think of two posts' worth of things to say today. Well, even if I didn't write on here yesterday (which I don't think I did), I did at least write something about The Excavation of Hob's Barrow over on MoeGamer, which you can read by clicking on this link. Click it. Go on.

I actually often find myself wondering if it's even worth linking things any more, because I really don't know if people actually click on them any more. I feel like everything I was taught about the Web and supposedly "good" Web design back in the relatively early days has pretty much gone out of the window these days as everyone's collective attention span has declined and the whole Internet, in general, has kind of gone to pot.

I sort of think we've brought that on ourselves to a certain extent, though. I know at the day job I've often been asked to "make things shorter" or suchlike, based on the belief that people won't look at anything that takes more than six picoseconds to digest, and while I don't doubt that people will click away if they're not immediately blasted in the face with some sort of blaring short-form media designed to obliterate their attention span even more than it already has been, I feel like consistently pandering to that perceived audience is just making the problem worse.

When I write, I generally write with my own preferences in mind. When I read something online, I want to feel like I got something out of what I read. It doesn't necessarily have to be learning something completely new to me, but I do need to feel like I got some sort of "value" from the experience. Maybe I got to know the writer a bit better. Maybe I found out a new detail about something I was already familiar with. Maybe I learned to look at something from a new perspective. All of those things are what keeps me reading, not whether or not an article has a bullet-point summary before the text begins so I can decide whether or not to grace this page with the honour that is my attention.

I feel like if you constantly pander to people who have no attention span, all you're going to attract is people with no attention span. I don't think there's anything wrong with someone writing something online — whatever the purpose — and effectively saying "no, fuck you, I have things to say and you are damn well going to sit down and listen to them, or just piss off". This is why I respect writers such as Ed Zitron so much; Ed works with an editor on his blog, but each individual post is still thousands of words long — even longer than the longest posts I've written here or on MoeGamer. Sitting down to an Ed Zitron post is an event, and on no occasion have I come away from the time it takes to read one thinking "I wish I'd spent that time doing something else".

And yet everything about the modern Web seems to be discouraging that kind of in-depth, thoughtful writing. We have websites posting an estimated reading time at the top of their articles, along with the aforementioned bullet-point summaries. We have asides linking to completely different pages after just a couple of paragraphs, before anyone could have possibly read the whole article. We have unrelated videos inserted into the middle of articles, vapid polls whose results aren't used to inform anything whatsoever, and, of course, if you're still foolish to browse the web without ad protection, advertising.

We are constantly bombarded with things vying for our attention and seemingly, at every opportunity, discouraging us from diving deep into things. I was looking up information on a wiki earlier and while I was doing so, a sidebar popped up with "popular posts" that were being pulled from a completely different fucking wiki on a totally different subject.

It takes effort and mental fortitude to resist all this, and honestly I don't blame anyone who just doesn't feel like trying any more. It is a real effort to maintain your focus on something these days, but I would argue it is a worthwhile effort. And to that end, I would encourage everyone who feels like they have ever been struggling to take some time and unplug from the noisiest parts of the Internet — or the Internet altogether — and immerse yourself in something that demands focus. Whether that's a blog you want to catch up on, a book, a TV show you always meant to watch, doesn't matter. What's important is that you pick that thing, then you focus on it to the exclusion of all else. Put your phone down, close all your other browser tabs, just focus.

I can guarantee you'll feel a thousand times more relaxed and about a bajillion times more intelligent after doing this for a bit.

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#oneaday Day 259: Excavations

I successfully did what I planned yesterday — for two nights in a row, even. Last night I spent some time with Smashing the Battle on Nintendo Switch, which I'll write a bit more about once I've spent some more time with it, and tonight I have seemingly spent nearly six hours playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, a point-and-click adventure by Cloak & Dagger Games, published by modern adventure game specialists Wadjet Eye Games.

It always does my soul good to see how not-dead the point-and-click adventure genre has been for quite some time now, because there was definitely a period in the mid 2000s and early 2010s where it felt like there weren't any being made. 3D tech was getting better and everything was suddenly all about cinematic action games — something that certainly hasn't gone away in more recent years — but, looking back, it's clear that adventure games never really went anywhere. And these days, I'd say they're thriving more than they ever have done, even in their supposed golden age. Because not only can we enjoy the established classics from that golden age, there's a host of new ones seemingly being made all the time.

I'll write more specifics about The Excavation of Hob's Barrow when I've fully completed it — I've pressed pause on it for this evening as it's a quarter to one and I should probably sleep. Suffice to say for now that it's very good, though.

In The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, you take on the role of Thomasina Bateman, an antiquarian who has made it her mission to document the various ancient burial mounds scattered around the English countryside. We join the story as she arrives in a remote Northern village, supposedly the home of the titular Hob's Barrow, but she's immediately confronted with mysteries as her contact is nowhere to be seen and no-one seems to want to talk about Hob's Barrow.

That's all I'll say on the plot for now. The interface uses a pretty standard two-button system, with left-clicking "doing" things and right-clicking "looking" at things, but there's plenty of thinking required. Thus far there has been no real "moon logic" to speak of, just a sequence of tasks to complete that provide a sense of relative freedom without overwhelming you with possibilities. In fact, the game is quite cleverly designed in that the "freedom" you feel is not really present at all; there's quite a fixed sequence of things to do with a chain reaction of dependencies, but the fact you discover the beginnings of all these various threads before you start figuring out which order you need to solve them in is what makes this game really work.

It's beautifully presented in low-res pixel art combined with modern graphical techniques and greater colour depth, which gives it a wonderfully distinctive aesthetic. The voice acting is very good, too, seemingly making use of native Northerners in many cases.

I'm intrigued to see where it goes, but not quite enough to pull an all-nighter on it. After all, GOG Galaxy says I've already spent 5 hours and 28 minutes on it this evening and I've only completed two of the in-game "days". I don't know how many there are in total, but it does feel as if the third one is going to be somewhat climactic, so I estimate I'm maybe a little over halfway to two-thirds through? We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, if you're jonesing for a modern point-and-click adventure, I can definitely recommend this one. It's kept me pretty enraptured for the whole evening and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all concludes.

For now, though, sleep. Sleep!

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