#oneaday Day 103: A solution?

Following yesterday's ponderings, something blindingly obvious occurred to me earlier: there's quite a simple solution to what I was contemplating, and that is to actually finally start doing some streaming.

I've tried streaming a couple of times and not had a terrible time doing it, but I fell off from doing it because I didn't really set aside a specific time to do it and haven't (yet) put in the work to try and get any sort of "community" going. To be honest, it's that "work" part that kind of puts me off a bit; one of the nice things about YouTube is that I've been able to just sort of do it slowly and gradually build up an audience naturally without having to faff about promoting myself or whatnot.

Twitch is a platform that is still quite alien to me. There's a lot I don't like about it. It's noisy and filled with distracting features that don't play nice with my autistic brain. I feel certain portions of the Twitch audience have unreasonable expectations of what a streamer can be expected to do to keep them "entertained". And I've seen far, far too many people burn themselves out because they "needed" to get Partner, or Affiliate, or whatever their monetisation program is called.

But at the same time, I kind of like the idea of having a platform where I might be able to make some new friends, chatting about the stuff I love. If I do decide to kick off some streaming, I'll almost certainly keep it retro-focused — at least partly because in my study, which is the place that is really "set up" for streaming, I don't have either a gaming PC or a current-gen console — but I think there's plenty of potential to cover things there, between Evercade, the various mini systems I have (Atari 8-bit, Amiga, C64 and, later this year, Spectrum) and, of course, the gigantic Launchbox library I have on a 5TB hard drive.

It's kind of a scary prospect, though. Even more so than YouTube, Twitch is "putting yourself out there" and inviting comment from any old random who happens to stop by. I should probably comfort myself with the fact that the kind of people I wouldn't want to engage with probably wouldn't be watching retro gaming streams, anyway — but it's still somewhat nerve-wracking.

Perhaps I'll give it a go this weekend as a sort of trial run. My wife is going into town with a friend for a bit, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to try some bits and pieces out back then. If you'd like to stop by, here's my Twitch page. No promises, but I have mentally "pencilled this in" for this Saturday, and we'll see how it goes.

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 102: Pondering YouTube... again

Having one of those days where I'm pondering my approach to YouTube. Y'see, my latest video, which covers Atari's Yars Rising and is essentially just a video version of this article, has gone and done very well. Relatively speaking, I mean, and by that I mean it's broken a thousand views.

For a small-scale sub-5,000 subscriber YouTuber like me, getting anything to break 1,000 views is significant. I've had a few successes over the last couple of years, and most of them have had something in common: they've been pre-scripted videos, as opposed to the "Let's Play" style I built my channel on, and which I think I probably enjoy doing the most.

Probably my most significant success to date is the above video, which covers the excellent modern isometric racer Super Woden GP. This video has, to date, managed 87,000 views and is still trickling along. This was absolutely overwhelming to watch happen, to such a degree that I ended up having to "pause" the comments section because I was getting so many people commenting.

My second best is the above, which covers Moonring, an excellent modern take on the classic Ultima RPG formula, developed by one of the folks who worked on the original Fable. Plus it's free. This one has been a slow burn; to date it's done over 29,000 views, but it got off to quite a slow start. Compare the graphs for these two videos.

Here's Super Woden GP 2:

And here's Moonring:

Notice that the latter one spiked for some inexplicable reason about 250 days after I posted it. I don't really know what happened here; I can only assume that it got shared somewhere and a lot of people showed up. But the analytics seem to suggest that YouTube just decided to suddenly start pushing it one day, so it started appearing when people were just browsing around the site:

The Yars Rising video hasn't done anything like the numbers of these two, but it's also still early days for it — at the time of writing, it's just two days old. But it's had a strong early push:

The one thing that the Yars Rising video has in common with the Super Woden GP 2 one in particular is that it was something timely. I made the video shortly after Yars Rising came out, when there was still some discussion going on about it. That, presumably, helps. But it doesn't account for what happened with the Moonring video.

Anyway, the point is, any time something like this happens, I end up wondering if I should change tack a bit with YouTube. The approach I've taken for the vast majority of my videos is one where I introduce a game with a bit to camera at the start, then do a "Let's Play", where I explain the game as if I'm sitting down to play it with the viewer.

Some of these videos have done quite nicely. This one, on Seven Cities of Gold for Atari 8-bit, broke a thousand views:

As did this one on Beamrider for Atari 2600, though that's over the very long term:

I like making those videos. I think they're a good way of helping people to understand how to play and figure out the appeal of retro games. And yet the numbers don't lie: what gets people watching is pre-scripted, more "review-style" videos.

Don't get me wrong, those are fun to write and to make, also — plus I can generally cross-post them between YouTube and MoeGamer for two completely different audiences to see them — but any time I ponder maybe switching to doing that kind of video all the time, I think of the people who have very kindly stuck with me since the earliest days of me fumbling around with the platform, figuring out what the hell I actually wanted to do with my YouTube channel.

I suspect it's not an "all or nothing" question. I suspect the answer is something I know already: that the optimal approach would be to do a bit of both. Perhaps "Let's Play" style videos on simpler, earlier games, and more elaborate scripted affairs for more complex, longer games.

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. If I was a bigger channel I'd just say "fuck it" and start a second channel then split the two types of video between the two channels, but it seems foolish to do that as a small creator.

But anyway. I'm glad the Yars Rising video is doing reasonable numbers, at least. It's a cool game and I'm glad people want to know more about it. So if nothing else, I can be glad about that!

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#oneaday Day 101: Body Harvest

Today, inspired by yesterday's post and my recent acquisition of an EverDrive 64, I decided to have a "fuck it, I'm playing something new" evening and booted up an N64 game I've always been curious about but never actually tried: DMA Design's Body Harvest, often described by many as a proto-Grand Theft Auto 3. Naturally, as with any sort of widespread and oversimplified opinion, that does Body Harvest something of a disservice, but it is an interesting game that I'm going to spend some more time with.

For the unfamiliar, Body Harvest is a quasi-open world action game in which you take on the role of time-travelling supersoldier Adam Drake in a quest to defeat a bunch of pesky insectoid aliens who show up every 25 years and attempt to eat everyone in sight. For reasons it's best you don't ask too much about — the game's original designer and writer has more on that — it has been decided that Drake should travel back to each of these instances of the aliens arriving on Earth and obliterate them rather than, you know, just attempting to cut them off at the source.

This then unfolds as a series of absolutely vast open-plan 3D levels in which you can control Drake on foot or in a wide variety of vehicles. It's open world and it has vehicles in it, therefore it's just like Grand Theft Auto 3, see?

No, if anything, Body Harvest is closer in execution to something like 16-bit classic Hunter, but with a bit more focus. Because despite unfolding in wide open environments, there's not a lot of incentive to go off exploring; for the most part, completing the game involves running through a series of objectives one at a time, dealing with alien invasions that tend to punctuate getting from one place to another, and attempting to ensure that the little meter indicating how many humans have been eaten doesn't fill up.

It's a game I'd always assumed to be a bit more complicated than it actually is, though to be honest I'm kind of relieved. Body Harvest, although incredibly clunky by modern standards, and even by N64 standards, feels like it has some focus to it, and you're rarely left in a situation where you have no idea what to do or where to go. Being a game from the fifth generation, though, you're not bombarded with tutorials and guide NPCs telling you to shoot the hinges or whatever, meaning there are sequences where you'll have to determine what the best course of action is — even if that action makes you a bit of an asshole, such as a point where you shoot the blades off a windmill because you need one of the cogs that runs it.

Body Harvest scatters a lot of vehicles around the map with good reason: it's a lot easier to get around in them, and they provide considerably more protection for Drake. It's possible to fight while driving a vehicle, either using Drake's weaponry if it's a civilian vehicle or the weapons fitted to the vehicle itself if it's military hardware, and the game's excellent lock-on system means that you don't need to faff around aiming too hard; you can just concentrate on positioning yourself strategically and/or avoiding incoming attacks. In fact, the lock-on system is so good I can't help but wonder how they managed to completely balls that aspect of Grand Theft Auto up so badly, and not even come anywhere approaching to fixing it until the ever-present, never-ending Grand Theft Auto V, which is, of course, the twelfth game in the series.

But yes. Aside from unfolding in a kind-of-sort-of open world and having vehicles in it, Body Harvest doesn't have much to do with Grand Theft Auto. There's no picking and choosing what missions to do, there are no side activities aside from a few collectibles here and there, and your progress through the game is, outside of a couple of opportunities to sequence-break, linear.

But that's fine. It works well for the game, and it keeps you on your toes, always pushing you onwards into the next section of the game world rather than keeping you confined to one place. I appreciate how the game gives you a feeling of freedom, but doesn't overwhelm you with it.

The one aspect that I can see being troublesome is the save system. Each level is absolutely enormous, and is split into several distinct "stages", each of which culminates with a boss fight of sorts, which, early in the level, tends to take the form of eliminating a large static structure that is trying to pelt you with lasers. Upon clearing one of these "stages", a beacon is dropped which acts as both a save point and a fast travel point; outside of that, you can't save, meaning if you fuck things up after an hour of poncing around the open world, you'll have to do all the important stuff again.

Still, this at least gives failure some degree of consequence, and encourages you to perhaps find more efficient ways to complete your objectives — or just memorise the things you need to do. I haven't fallen foul of it yet, but I suspect I will before long!

As an N64 game, Body Harvest is ugly. It was renowned as a particularly ugly N64 game even on its original release and, as you might expect, time hasn't been all that kind to it. But if you can look past that — I certainly can — there's a really enjoyable game with a menacing atmosphere, a moody soundtrack and some satisfying bug-squishing combat to enjoy. I like, so I'll definitely be playing some more of this.

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#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

As I reach 100 days of daily blogging for the second time around, this symbolically significant but practically unimportant milestone seems like a good place to reflect on the fine art of Doing the Thing, inspired by this video that I've seen floating across my YouTube feed a few times, and which I finally decided to have a look at.

For those disinclined to click on random video links — don't worry, I am too under most circumstances — the summary of the video is simple. A lot of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves with more limited amounts of free time and, paradoxically, we seem to spend an awful lot of that "free" time agonising over what we "should" be doing. The focus of the video is on picking a video game to play, but really the principle applies to anything where you have a choice to make.

Analysis paralysis is the enemy. It's a peculiar form of anxiety where you get so overwhelmed by the possibilities that surround you that you find it impossible to decide to engage with just one of them on the grounds that it might be the "wrong" one.

The video maker uses the video game StarCraft II as an analogy. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, which means you control a bunch of little dudes and tanks and make them blow other little dudes and tanks up. Because it's real-time, it's rare you get the opportunity to stop and think, so the best StarCraft II players are those who make decisions quickly and decisively — to the tune of several hundred minor decisions per minute if we're talking about professional-grade players.

The secret is not to worry if the choice you make is the "wrong" one. If you make a choice and subsequently discover there was a more "optimal" thing you could have done, who cares? You made the choice, now all you need to do is deal with the consequences of it. And for the vast majority of decisions that we make in our day to day lives — particularly when it comes to our leisure time — neither those decisions nor the consequences of them are particularly important.

Let's take video games as the example again. Let's say you have about an hour and a half of free time before you need to go and do something important — and that thing is important, but up until it is time to do the important thing, your time is completely yours. You have, at least, made the decision that you would like to play a video game. This is one of those decisions where both your options and the consequences are unimportant. If you chose to play a video game, great, you get to play a video game. If you chose to do something else, great, you get to do that instead.

The only really "wrong" choice in this scenario is not making the choice in the first place, as sitting by yourself getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as what form of entertainment you want to spent 90 minutes of your day engaging with is the height of absurdity if you stop to think about it. This is supposed to be your time to enjoy yourself, not to put pressure on yourself about something that is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Most people can successfully make that first decision: "I would like to play a video game". The next step is, in many folks' minds, the harder one: "I would like to play this specific video game". And yet, really, that decision is just as inconsequential as the other one. No-one but you really cares what you're going to spend the next 90 minutes doing, so, again, the only "wrong" choice is not making a decision in the first place. Because then you've just wasted your 90 minutes, when you could have been doing something that relaxes or invigorates you.

If you're someone who does creative stuff online, I'm willing to bet you're probably prone to that second point of analysis paralysis, because there's that constant lingering thought in the back of your mind that you "should" do something that you can write an article or make a video about. But the thing we all need to get well and truly fixed in our mind is that deciding to Do the Thing is not the important part of the process; actually Doing the Thing is the important bit. And if you never get as far as even Starting the Thing, then you're probably going to be annoyed with yourself, regardless of whether or not the Thing you decided on is "productive" or not.

I'm trying to be better about this. I think back to how I enjoyed games before social media, blogging, the Internet and YouTube, and I want to recapture that feeling. I want to be able to be decisive enough to say "tonight I am going to play Yakuza 5" and not spend the next 90 minutes second-guessing myself.

Because taking time to engage with something you enjoy — and to take care of yourself — is never time misspent. Time agonising over things you're supposed to be enjoying absolutely is wasted time, however.

So, y'know, cut it out. Stop it. Stop it. And go enjoy something. Anything. I don't care what. Just go and do it now.

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#oneaday Day 99: Yakuza time again

I've been making a start on Yakuza 5 alongside the other stuff I've been playing recently. I'd put off starting this one after playing Yakuza 0 up to Yakuza 4 pretty much back-to-back (and playing Kiwami and Kiwami 2 in place of the original PS2 games, and the PS4 remasters of 3 and 4) because I knew this one was the largest and most ambitious of the PS3-era games in the series.

One of the nice things about Yakuza games, though, is that they're quite "dip" friendly, particularly if you're the sort of person who likes to enjoy the side activities before moving the main story along. It's perfectly enjoyable to play Yakuza 5 for an evening, not move the main plot along at all but still feel like some meaningful "progress" has been made.

Unlike its immediate predecessor, Yakuza 5 opens with you playing as main series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, though following all the shit he's put up with over the course of the previous five games, he's now hanging out in Fukuoka under a pseudonym and driving a taxi for a living. As you might expect, this translates to a number of significant things in gameplay terms.

Because yes, Kiryu working as a taxi driver isn't just for show; you have the option of engaging directly with his job. And his work in the taxis takes several forms, which is rather fun: regular taxi jobs demand that you drive sensibly and carefully, while "race" missions allow you to let loose on the highway while Kiryu attempts to take down some street racing gangs. The former types of job have quite realistic handling; you have to take care not to accelerate or brake too sharply, ensure you indicate to go around corners and try not to hit anything. By contrast, pretty much anything goes in the race missions, which are distinctly arcadey in execution — to such a degree that you have a boost that leaves trails of blue flames, and "Heat Actions" that can be used at various points on the course for silly, cinematic events that usually put you at an advantage over your opponent.

Outside of that, it's business as usual for the Yakuza series, with this game once again being set a few years later than the previous one, now bringing us into the 2010s. You can go out, eat food, get drunk, play darts, play Virtua Fighter, hang out at cabaret clubs and chat up hostesses, get into street fights and pick up trash for the good of the community. The main plot has something about Daigo Dojima going missing but honestly I haven't moved this along at all other than to get Kiryu into a position where I can do the taxi missions.

And, of course, there are substories aplenty to discover, ranging from the simple to the absurd. One thing I've always liked about Yakuza is that it recognises how it's a video game, and thus it isn't afraid to be very, very silly at times; it juxtaposes this silliness with the rather serious nature of the main narratives, and it's always very effective. It's a reminder that people are complex, and even someone as stern-faced as Kiryu has a more light-hearted side that he enjoys indulging at times.

Anyway, as I say, I'm not that far into the game as a whole as yet, but I'm enjoying what I've played so far. I'm looking forward to getting the opportunity to soup up Kiryu's taxi a bit… I get the impression it's going to be necessary to clear some of the later racing missions.

For now, though, it's after midnight so I should probably sleep. Probably. Except you and I both know I'm probably going to watch an episode of Deep Space Nine first.

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#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn't enough, the latest feature that it's impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is "YouTube Playables", a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can't possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don't get it. Who looked at YouTube and went "you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!" Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it "gets more people into gaming". Frankly, I've always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn't belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I'd almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don't work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk "adds value", so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there's no "AI" features in YouTube… yet. Don't you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

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#oneaday Day 97: EverDriving the '64

Inspired by my success with the GDEMU for the Dreamcast, I decided to pick up an EverDrive 64 for my Nintendo 64. Long-term, I'm planning on grabbing one of these excellent devices for all my cart-based consoles, as I've been burned just once too many by duff cartridges purchased from second-hand sources. As much fun as it is to collect things and have the satisfying tactile thunk of slamming a cartridge into a slot, it's even more fun to have games that actually work.

For the unfamiliar, an EverDrive is a cartridge designed to work with a cartridge-based system… obviously. In most cases, they have a micro SD card slot, on which you load some simple OS files for the thing to be able to do its thing, and then any ROM files you want to use. This effectively means in most instances, you can carry around the complete library for a system on just one cartridge. Very convenient — particularly as the EverDrive also takes care of managing save data, and even allows you to back up and restore Controller Pak saves so you don't need umpteen of the little buggers to be able to save your progress.

The one small issue I've found is that when running NTSC games on my PAL N64, there's a horrible "ghosting" effect on the image that makes playing those games undesirable. It's a bit of a shame, as there are a few North American NTSC N64 titles I wouldn't mind playing, but to be honest, I suspect the EU library will keep me busy for quite some time.

This evening I've been exploring a few games I've always been curious about, but never had the opportunity to play for one reason or another. The two that I've probably had the most fun with are both Midway titles, as it happens, and both arcade conversions: San Francisco Rush and Gauntlet Legends.

San Francisco Rush is an arcade racer that is markedly different from most other arcade racers from the '90s that I'm familiar with. Probably its most notable standout feature is that its courses are relatively "open", often offering alternative routes and shortcuts, and in some cases allowing you to proceed around a section of the course in the opposite direction to the rest of the pack and still end up where you're going.

Of course, open-structure races aren't a particularly uncommon sight these days — to be honest, it's harder to find a modern racing game that isn't open world outside of the hardcore sim sector — but I suspect back in the '90s, San Francisco Rush would have been quite the unusual little thing.

It's also noteworthy in that it's an arcade racer where you really do have to slow down for corners. If there's a drift function, I certainly haven't got to grips with it; thus far I've had a reasonable amount of success with just actually using the brakes (or at the very least letting off the accelerator) ahead of sharp corners — and with the game being set in San Francisco, there are lots of sharp corners.

The visuals are fairly ugly by modern standards, though I found that I quickly stopped noticing the low-resolution blurry nature of the game, and the fact that many of the races are covered in fog is entirely appropriate for the setting. It thus far seems to be an enjoyable racer, and with a decent amount of longevity, too; the main "championship" mode is 24 tracks long, thankfully with the ability to save your progress.

Gauntlet Legends, meanwhile, is a successor to the classic 4-player dungeon crawler from Atari Games. It takes the action into the polygonal 3D realm, though still plays mostly like a top-down maze game. It has all the classic Gauntlet elements present and correct: finding keys to open doors, standing on switches to open up walls, blasting generators to stem the tide of monsters. It adds a few new elements to the mix, though, including an inventory where you can activate and deactivate power-ups at will, and some RPG-lite mechanics whereby you can level up and improve your stats.

Perhaps most importantly, your health doesn't tick down gradually as you play. Bliss! This makes it one of the few Gauntlet games that it doesn't feel utterly futile to play; as much as I like old-school Gauntlet, the various home ports tend to trivialise themselves by providing you the opportunity to "insert coins" as much as you want, affording you effectively unlimited health.

Not so in Gauntlet Legends! Instead, you lose health at a much more sensible rate if you get hit or caught in a trap, and healing items give you a meaningful amount of health back. Plus you can buy more health with the gold you earn in levels, and you also get more health every time you level up.

Probably the thing I'm most impressed with about Gauntlet Legends is how smoothly it runs. While it doesn't run at a rock-solid framerate, it happily gets up to a full 50fps (I'm running PAL, remember) when you're wandering around exploring, and while the frame rate does drop a bit when the screen gets busy, it's never to an unplayable degree, and the controls always remain nicely responsive.

I'm looking forward to spending a bit more time with both games, along with revisiting some old favourites and discovering some new titles. If you have an N64 and a bit of cash to splash, I can highly recommend an EverDrive; I suspect it's going to revitalise my interest in this classic system, and I'm looking forward to getting one for my other classic consoles, too. After payday, though; they ain't cheap!

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#oneaday Day 96: Lower Decks

I was resistant to the idea of watching Star Trek: Lower Decks for quite some time. I was put off by a combination of some truly terrible trailers, the fairly generic-looking "adult animation" art style it uses, and the fact that its creator had some involvement in Rick and Morty, a show I couldn't even make it through the first episode of without feeling mildly ill.

But then I got thinking: I fucking hate it when people write stuff off based on superficial things like art style, so I should endeavour to not do that either. And, discovering that the complete run of Star Trek: Lower Decks to date appears to be on Prime Video, I decided to watch an episode or two, just to see what it was like.

And you know what? It's all right. The first couple of episodes are a bit heavy on the Gen Z-baiting manic energy, but after that it settles down a bit and starts to be a lot more witty and fun. There's still a certain amount of that 2024 "energy" to it, which I'm sure will turn some people off, but it's by no means a tedious Seth McFarlane-alike show. In fact, despite having a very different tone to live-action Star Trek, it actually manages to do quite a good job of feeling plausibly like what a comedy set in the Star Trek universe would feel like.

Because that's what it is. It still has many of the elements of classic Trek: characters with a bit of depth to them; relationships that come to light over the course of several episodes; creative takes on alien races; and, of course, the all-important technobabble. It just has a rather more overtly irreverent tone than live-action Trek; this isn't to say that live-action Trek was never funny, but rather it tended to be a more gentle, subtle sort of humour, whereas Lower Decks is rather more self-conscious about it.

Of the episodes I've watched so far, I think my favourite has been the third one, Temporal Edict, which is a funny take on something my wife and I discuss rather frequently: the amount of time wasted in an average day at a full-time job.

The episode concerns the captain becoming aware of the crew's use of "buffer time", a concept where they tell a superior that a particular job will take much longer than it will actually take, allowing them to look like a "hero" when they complete it in a fraction of the time they said they would, and also affording them time to slack off without anyone noticing. The episode explores the disastrous situation that would arise if everyone was well and truly "on the clock" at all hours of the day, and how it would almost certainly be counterproductive to try and micromanage people to this degree. It was a clever episode that, like classic Trek, takes a look at a real-life concept through the lens of sci-fi and invites us to have a good old think about it.

In short, I'm rather impressed with Lower Decks so far, and am pretty sure I'll watch it all the way through on Prime Video at the very least and perhaps even pick up the series on disc to keep. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not it wears out its welcome by the end of five 10-episode seasons, but everything I've heard from people who are already fans seem to suggest that it only gets better from hereon. I'm certainly willing to give it the chance to prove itself further.

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#oneaday Day 95: Yars Rising - First impressions

My copy of Yars Rising, the new game from WayForward and Atari, arrived today. I've been playing it for the last three hours or so and I really like it. It's a solid exploratory platformer with a great soundtrack and the interesting wrinkle that in order to unlock new abilities, open doors and acquire upgrades, you have to play numerous variations on the Atari 2600 classic Yars' Revenge.

I'm disappointed by how some people I know have been reacting to this game, though. Today I've seen people writing it off without trying it on the grounds of its anime-inspired art style, the dialogue in its trailer and even its price. (For the record, it's £24.99, which I think is an eminently reasonable price for a good quality game with decent production values, which is what this is.) I also saw people prepared to write it off based on its first two published review scores, which both happened to be low.

This is one of those situations where, I suspect, review scores will be utterly useless. I defy anyone to play it and conclude that it is a "4/10" game, which is what those first two publications suggested. Yes, one of them was the notoriously stingy Edge magazine and can thus probably be ignored by most people. The other complains of "poor execution", which is simply nonsense however you look at it.

Anyway, I am satisfied with what I have played so far; it is very much in line with what I thought when I tried the demo in a Steam Next Fest a while back. It's a smooth, slick exploratory platformer with satisfyingly weighty combat, a wisecracking heroine who manages to be cocky without going full Marvel movie about it, and some interesting mechanics. The soundtrack, featuring music from some very cool artists including frequent Atari collaborator Megan McDuffee, Moe Shop and more, is excellent, and the voice acting is of very good quality.

Most of all, it just plays well. Anyone who has played a WayForward platformer will know what to expect from this one: an expansive map that frequently teases you with areas that you can't reach yet and thus will have to come back to later. One of the best things about Yars Rising is how these areas are marked on the in-game map: not only are "blocked off" areas marked as such, they also indicate what the "problem" is when you select them. The map also updates to show you newly accessible areas when you acquire new abilities, too, so you can always quickly see at a glance any areas you might want to return to in order to investigate.

The game invites this sort of exploration pretty much from the outset. While there is always a big flashing beacon on the map indicating where the next major story event is, at any given moment there are usually some other areas you can go off and investigate. The game doesn't specifically point you at them so in theory you could "miss" them, but anyone who has played this sort of game before knows how to be thorough, I'm sure.

Yars Rising also resists the temptation to make getting around too easy. There is a "fast travel" system of sorts in the form of the elevator in the QoTech building, but accessing each set of doors (which becomes a fast travel point from thereon) is generally behind a relatively challenging platforming sequence that you'll have to overcome. The game strikes a good balance in this regard, though; while you will have to redo some tricky platforming sequences when backtracking or exploring, any particularly time-consuming sequences such as avoiding patterns of lasers are usually a "once and done" sort of affair, with the lasers turning off after you've passed through or activated the terminal beyond them.

And the Yars' Revenge-themed hacking sequences are excellent. I was concerned in the demo that they might run out of ideas pretty quickly, but so far there have been no direct repeats. As you progress through Yars Rising, more and more individual mechanics are introduced to the hacking sequences, and the more challenging hacks (particularly those in optional areas) combine these different elements together in creative ways. Of particular interest to longstanding Atari fans will be the way in which these sequences pay homage not only to the original Yars' Revenge, but also other Atari classics such as Missile Command and Centipede. There's even some non-copyright-infringing Space Invaders-style sequences, which acknowledges how the port of Space Invaders to Atari 2600 was something of a "killer app" for the console in the early days.

This is a game that has been made with love and respect for both the modern exploratory platformer genre, and Atari's heritage. It disappoints me to see how many people are refusing to even contemplate it based on something exceedingly superficial — with some coming annoyingly close to the usual casting of aspersions on anyone who likes games with an anime-inspired art style.

But anyway. I'm enjoying myself, and ultimately that's what really matters. If you enjoy a good exploratory platformer and have a love for classic Atari, I encourage you to check it out; it's a good time.

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#oneaday Day 94: Streaks are unhealthy

I know, I know, it's pretty rich saying that while I'm tracking how many non-stop days of blogging I've done, but my opinion stands. Streaks, as implemented everywhere from Wordle to Duolingo, are unhealthy. They're transparent attempts to get "engagement metrics" up, designed to guilt-trip people into doing things on the assumption that getting people addicted to something is the same as encouraging them to develop a healthy habit.

My daily blogging here? Something I'm doing by choice, and not punishing myself if I happen to fail to live up to. Forget a daily lesson on Duolingo, though, and you can expect to be on the receiving end of multiple guilt-tripping notifications (assuming you haven't turned notifications off for everything like I have) and emails with crying owls suggesting in no uncertain terms that you are an awful person for forgetting to study a foreign language today.

I tried Duolingo for a bit a few years back, and found it quite good, but eventually got annoyed with this. It's always bugged me about Wordle, too, because it doesn't just encourage you to play every day — it encourages you to cheat. Because you break your streak if you don't get the word. And what person in their right mind would break their streak when they can just Google "five letter words that end in READ"? (Me, that's who, though I am making no attempt to position myself as being in any way "of sound mind".)

Building healthy habits is, as I've said elsewhere on this blog, a good thing. It is also a difficult thing, and I think the prevalence of "streaks" everywhere these days actually makes things more difficult. The original intent behind this sort of thing — incentivise and reward continued engagement — may well have been honourable, but now it just feels cynical and manipulative, with Duolingo being by far the most obnoxious implementation of it by a long shot.

Streaks, as implemented via technology these days, are designed to get you addicted to the Skinner Box mentality: to get you checking in regularly so you make Number Go Up. More often than not there's no actual incentive to do anything beyond checking in to the service in question to keep your streak unbroken — though some sites (Duolingo again is guilty of this) also implement things like "leaderboards" to make things really unhealthy.

How do I know this is unhealthy? Because I've experienced it. Duolingo isn't incentivising you to do well by guilt-tripping you into checking in every day, or even by inviting you to attempt to top the leaderboards. It's encouraging you to game the system, because inevitably these systems are intensely, deeply fallible and can be manipulated without too much effort. And once you figure out how to do that — and a lot of people do — any value these systems might have once had in building healthy habits goes right out of the window.

If you need further evidence of how such systems are fundamentally broken, look at the PlayStation Trophies/Xbox or Steam achievements systems. In theory, these systems should enable people who are good at a game to be rewarded for that. What actually happens is that people deliberately purchase games where they can get an "easy Platinum" in order to buff up their statistics. More often than not, this takes the form of a visual novel that the person in question will just stick on fast-forward mode, ignore completely and then claim their completely pointless virtual shiny thing.

It's the same with Duolingo, or anything else that uses such a system. Why bother with letting the things you're learning truly sink in when you can just check in, quickly click through the answers until you get the right ones, then enjoy Number Go Up?

I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule — people who do find streaks helpful in motivating themselves. If that's you, and you use them honestly, fair play to you. Keep it up. But I've seen enough of how people behave in 2024 to know that is not the norm at all. If there's a way to cheat — even if doing so provides no real benefit whatsoever — then people will find and use it.

Now I'm off to go watch some Deep Space Nine. Wouldn't want to break my streak, now, would I?

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