#oneaday Day 608: Channel update

I posted an update on my YouTube channel yesterday. You can watch it right here! I also play some Galaxian on Atari 8-bit in an attempt to participate in the current "High Score Club" challenge over on AtariAge.

I thought I'd talk about the things I mention in the video for today's post, because… well, because I want to.

The main takeaway from the update is that I'm giving up on doing longer playthroughs of stuff on video. For the most part, anyway. I'm not ruling out the possibility of doing another full playthrough of something reasonably short like an adventure game, as those are fun videos to make. But long RPGs as a playthrough series are out of the window.

There are a few reasons for this, chief among which is it makes playing one single game take for-fucking-ever. If you're only playing a game when you're recording videos for it, that inevitably means you're not playing it all that regularly (I have a life outside YouTube videos!) and thus it takes ages to get anywhere. If you combine that with a game that involves a fair amount of going back and forth grinding for experience, money or whatever, that doesn't make for particularly fun video-making, and it almost certainly doesn't make for particularly fun watching, either.

The other reason is that although I don't really care about viewing figures in general, the number of people who were showing up for episodes of The Granstream Saga in particular was utterly woeful. And, I mean, I get it; if you get an hour and a half long video in your feed that's part 7 of a series, are you going to click on it if you're not already invested? Probably not, even if the video has a link to the full series playlist in its description — because you still have to actually click on the video in the first place to know that.

So what I'm going to do is that, in future, for long games that I want to cover on the channel somehow, I'm going to make sure that I record some footage of the game while I'm playing it, then write a proper script for a "review-style" video of the game to be posted at some point afterwards. This will probably also be combined with a written version of the piece for MoeGamer, because I know that some people prefer to read and some people prefer to watch, so it just makes sense to do the same thing in both places — and that's what I've been doing with a number of recent pieces.

This means that for the "Let's Play"-style videos, which I want to keep on doing, because I think they're a good means of exploring retro games in particular, I will focus on doing one-offs. I'm not going to fret over doing "series" or sticking to one platform specifically, because there are many, many, many retro titles that I would love to talk about (in many cases while I'm trying them for the first time) and I just think it will be best for my own sanity to keep things breezy. This isn't a job, after all, it's a hobby. Were I relying more seriously on income from YouTube, I'd be 1) fucked and 2) making a lot more effort to bait the algorithm, post consistently and all that other gubbins. But I'm not, so I don't.

Regular readers will know that I've been wrestling internally over what exactly to do with the YouTube channel for a long time. I enjoyed the period back in about 2018-2020 or so when I was doing up to five videos a week and specific series such as Atari A To Z, Atari A to Z Flashback and suchlike, but it's also pleasing when the scripted videos perform well — and they tend to do a lot better than the Let's Play-style stuff in general.

But, as I say, I think the Let's Play-style format is a good means of showcasing and explaining retro games. My "vision", if you want to be pretentious about it, is that of me sitting down with you, the viewer, to "go on the computer" and explore a game together. I have very, very fond memories of having friends over after school to "go on the computer" and play games together; in many cases, these were single-player games, and we'd take turns, or my friend would watch and ask questions, and what I at least attempt to recapture the feeling of with my Let's Play-style videos is that sort of thing.

So that's the plan. Go back to/keep doing one-shot Let's Play-style videos of Stuff I Just Find Interesting, then scripted review-style videos of stuff that benefits from being explored in a bit more depth, or which is too long to practically sit down and commentate over the entire duration of.

It was important for me to make this video, if only to "give myself permission" to admit that some things weren't working, and I didn't need to ride them out to the bitter end just for the sake of pride or whatever. I already feel like I've lifted an entirely self-inflicted weight off my shoulders by doing so, and hopefully this will mean some renewed enthusiasm for Doing YouTube in the coming weeks.

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 607: Ruined by the grindset

I read an interesting post that someone shared from Reddit earlier. You can read the full thing here.

The gist of the post is that the person in question has spent so much time and effort "optimising" their life, tracking everything from their water intake to the amount of time they spend on their morning routine, and have come to the conclusion that none of that has made them in any way happy. In fact, it has made them miserable and incapable of feeling joy in anything; worse, it has made them resent things that should be good, like having a pleasant date with a nice person or consoling a friend after a bad breakup.

I read this with interest because some of it sounded familiar. I've never gotten that deep into "optimising" my life, but over the last few years in particular, I have started to feel like it is undesirable to track everything about your life, record it in an app and obsess over numbers. This is a far cry from how I felt during the birth of the "gamification" craze, nearly 20 years ago.

In fact, I specifically recall being excited about the release of an iOS app called Epic Win, which basically positioned itself as a to-do list with experience points, allowing you to assign every job an XP value and a relevant stat, allowing you to "build a character" according to the things you'd been doing. When I eventually downloaded it, I found that it wasn't quite as fun as I thought it would be, but that didn't stop me from thinking that the "real world XP" thing was a good idea, hence my experimenting with the now-defunct Fitocracy, an app that gave you XP, levels and quests for going to the gym.

Now, about the only thing I track is my daily calorie intake, and that's because I'm specifically trying to lose weight. I'm not obsessing over the number of steps I take in a day, I'm not obsessing over "streaks" on anything except my underpants, I'm not obsessing over hydration. Because, as that Reddit post demonstrates, you can do too much of all that. If you project manage your entire life, then your entire life is going to feel like work. And that is not something that anyone should find desirable.

I mention this because I know on several occasions I have considered whether or not scheduling my days down to an extremely granular level would be beneficial. In some respects I feel like it probably still would be a good idea, as there are lots of things I would like to do but never make the time to do so. But then I feel like if you schedule things too much, you start to get resentful when things don't fit into neat two-hour blocks — because inevitably they won't, much as the Reddit poster discovered. And that's a sure-fire method to end up demotivated and bored with existence.

Much better to try and get yourself into solid habits in a natural-feeling, sustainable way. People have been doing that for thousands of years, so I refuse to believe that 20 years chained to our smartphones has completely removed humanity's capability to function independently without obsessing over statistics that relate to every little thing we do.

This is, in many ways, why I don't obsess over view counts on this blog, MoeGamer or my YouTube channel — it's not fun, and I'm not doing any of those things for a job, so I shouldn't treat them like one.

Your life doesn't need KPIs. I would argue that a lot of jobs don't need KPIs, either, but that's a whole other discussion, I feel…!

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#oneaday Day 606: How evil is too evil?

Every new reveal from the Epstein files seems to bring with it brand new and exciting horrors to be disgusted by. It is unsurprising to see a veritable Who's Who of The Worst People In the World cropping up as having had contact with the rancid old paedo — and yet with every new name that bubbles up from the sewer, I find myself wondering, more and more, if anything is actually going to happen because of all this.

You'll forgive me for not having a lot of faith that these people will suffer any consequences whatsoever.

We live in a world where companies can just set fire to billions of dollars a year for a technology no-one wants, and where no amount of people going "please fuck off, please fuck off" will make them fuck off.

We live in a world where the President of the United States is demonstrably both an actual criminal and an incompetent fuckhead who shits himself in public, but nothing is done about either of these things — both of which, one would argue, should probably put him out of the running for being in charge of one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

We live in a world where the world's richest man proudly takes over what was once a good method of online communication and turns it into his own personal playground, where his antisemitic, CSAM-generating chatbot floods the world with disinformation and allows some truly vile examples of humanity to thrive. (At least, in this case, something is being attempted in response, though due to all of the other things I'm talking about today, I don't have much faith this will end in any other way than someone paying a lot of money to make it all just "go away".)

The world is dominated by rich people who are making existence for everyone except themselves objectively much, much worse. And I feel like they're going to get away with it. I know legal action takes time and money to come to fruition, and it's entirely possible that things are going on behind the scenes to bring some of these scumbags to some sort of justice, but I somehow doubt it at this point. I suspect what will happen is that some of them will get a slap on the wrist at most, and then maybe asked to pay some money that is a meaninglessly miniscule fraction of their total fortunes, and then we will all be expected to forget about everything.

As the quote frequently misattributed to Final Fantasy Tactics goes, "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that crime only exists for the lower class". It's true. If Elon Musk is made to pay even several million dollars by the French authorities for his CSAM-generating chatbot, it means nothing to him. Same for Donald Trump. Same for the myriad rich folks who engaged in barely literate email exchanges with Epstein about "partying" (and we know what that means, unfortunately) on his special paedo island, or how they were going to manipulate and fuck up the economy, politics, tolerance and inclusivity… the list goes on.

I'm open to being proved wrong on all this. But at the moment it feels like there simply isn't anyone to hold these rich fuckheads to account… aside from The People themselves. And, despite growing evidence that people in the States are willing to hit the streets when it really counts, I'm not sure The People have the motivation or the strength to be able to undo all this damage that's been done.

I hope one day we can look back on this period from a better place, and feel like we all learned something from it. After all, the world has recovered from terrible things before. But has anything ever really been quite like what we're dealing with right now…?

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#oneaday Day 605: Bob Mortimer's Pocket Meat

I got a copy of Bob Mortimer's autobiography, And Away… for Christmas, and just finished reading it last night (having started it… maybe last week sometime, I think?) — it's a really good read, and Bob's voice shines through clearly for the duration. Which is interesting, because he spends a lot of the book talking about how for much of his life and career, he has been exceedingly self-conscious and shy, feeling like he has never really been able to show his actual "self" without the support of others like Jim "Vic Reeves" Moir.

That said, his conclusion — that, after a heart bypass and some independent projects he did without the crutch of Moir to rely on, he was able to properly "find his voice", such as it were — is fitting, and certainly seems in keeping with how much we've seen him by himself over the course of the last decade or so, rather than being "…And Mortimer".

Mortimer's decision to not construct the book as a simple "this is what happened in my life in roughly chronological order" was a solid one. With the initial chapters using a scare over his heart health — and the worry that his heart issues might bring a career he had grown to love to a screeching halt — as a framing device, we get a series of fun snapshots of Mortimer's life, both past and present, and really feel like we're being included in the varied scenes. Mortimer often addresses the reader and encourages them to go and explore certain things for themselves — there are several YouTube videos whose comments sections now largely consist of "Bob Mortimer sent me" now — and the whole thing feels like you're having a story told to you, rather than a "celebrity" on a throne talking down to you, the great unwashed public.

Many folks will likely be familiar with Mortimer's notoriously hilarious appearances on the beloved panel show Would I Lie To You? — and, indeed, many of the stories he tells (and the names featured therein) throughout And Away… will be familiar to those who have heard him spin a tangled tale on the show. Pocket meat, Steve Bytheway, Garry "The Sniper's Dream" Cheeseman, "we do beg your pardon, we are in your garden"… they're all here, and Mortimer admits in a couple of chapters that he's making some of this stuff up. But with the way he tells these stories, I could quite easily believe everything he's written in the book, because his tales are not only memorable for their surreal edge, but also for the fact that he has clearly taken something worthwhile and meaningful away from each and every one of them.

It's particularly heartwarming to hear his tales of how first seeing Vic Reeves' Big Night Out helped him to come out of his shell somewhat, gradually becoming part of the act and growing in confidence as he did so. His description of reaching a certain age and not really having the energy to maintain friendships — and being satisfied with that — also resonated somewhat, although not because I feel like I'm there myself. On the contrary, as I've mentioned on quite a few occasions in the relatively recent past, I've been going through a period where I really do feel exceedingly lonely at times, but I had also become exceedingly weary of feeling like I was the only one putting an effort in. So I guess maybe I was there, kind of. Ah well. Either way, reading Mortimer's reflections on it made me feel… a little better, maybe? I don't know.

Anyway, without getting too maudlin, I found the book very enjoyable. By turns hilarious and relatable, it is a pleasure to read, and confirms what I'm sure many of us have always suspected: that Bob Mortimer is simply a thoroughly nice, hilariously funny man — and one who, finally, is at peace with and comfortable with the person he's always been.

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#oneaday Day 604: So many words

I've written two pieces over on MoeGamer today: one on Inkle's excellent TR-49, and another on Size Five Games' hilarious Earth Must Die. Please go read them, then buy both games, as they're both fabulous and I want to play more stuff from both developers.

It's now quarter to five in the afternoon (we got up late) and it's dark and miserable outside. I'm a bit hungry. One of the cats did a poo on the doormat this morning. We think it was a dirty protest informing us that it was time to empty the litter trays, so we did that.

Now I'm a bit tired. My plan for most of the rest of the evening is to have something nice for dinner (maybe a weekend "treat" of some description, since I have the calories for it and I've been good all week!) and then play Rosewater for the rest of the night. I am, if it were not already apparent, very much on an adventure game kick right now, and there are so many amazing ones that have come out recently that I have a veritable string of them to play.

I'm probably going to continue with my exploration of the Wolfenstein series after Rosewater though, then after that I'm going to try and cross both Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom off my list. Then there's just Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and Death end re;Quest Code Z to finish off and I've successfully recovered from my "oops, I started too many games at once" situation from the end of last year.

Back to work tomorrow, of course. We're going through an extremely busy, quite stressful time at the moment, but with any luck all the hard work everyone is putting in is going to result in some truly spectacular releases later in the year. It's going to be an amazing year for our company, all being well, and I'm excited at the part I've played in all this.

For now, though, I think I've earned a bit of rest and relaxation, so it's off to Western Vespuccia I go for the continuing adventures of Rosewater!

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#oneaday Day 603: Awesome minis painted quick

Today I've been doing something that I haven't done for probably 30 years or so: I have attempted to paint some miniatures. As I alluded to a while back, this is a field where "technology" (for want of a better word?) appears to have come on quite a bit in the years since I last tried it, and I was particularly interested in trying out something called "Speedpaint".

Speedpaint is a formulation of paint that, in contrast to the usual thick matt acrylics, is very thin and semi-transparent. You brush it all over a model and the nature of its formulation means that it works its ways into all the little nooks and crannies by itself and naturally darkens and lightens according to the undulations of the model. In other words, it goes darker when it gets into deep cracks, and creates natural highlights in elevated sections.

I was especially interested in trying out the "Speedpaint Markers", which combine the simplicity of Speedpaint with the straightforward, mess-free approach of using a pen rather than a brush and palette. And for the most part I'm very impressed with the Speedpaint Markers; they're a convenient and easy way to get some colour on to a model, and the Speedpaint within them works exactly how it's supposed to, making it easy to create convincing and realistic effects with just a single coat.

I've been painting some of the furniture from HeroQuest today, as these are fairly large pieces that are, for the most part, relatively straightforward to paint. And in doing so, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Speedpaint Markers have become apparent.

They're great for covering large areas. Painting one of the door miniatures, the tomb, the tables and the stonework around the fireplace was simplicity itself. The paint did its thing and created some nice shadows and highlights with minimal fuss; I found that it needed just a little more than a single coat to look good, but it's still a very quick way to get something painted.

The weakness of the Markers is that although their tips are relatively fine, they're still a long shot from a proper detail brush, and as such it's difficult to paint very fine details with any great accuracy. This means that it's difficult to, for example, paint the books on the bookshelf miniature, or the little bits and pieces scattered around the alchemist's table.

Thus I have concluded that the best approach, for now, is to have both the Markers available for large, simple areas, and some more conventional brushes, paints and a palette around for more fine detail work. This means that I have spent considerably more on this little experiment than I perhaps initially intended — and part of me, the cynical part, suspects that this is how they "get" you — but will hopefully be able to do a much nicer job once I have some more appropriate bits and pieces.

I've enjoyed what I've tried, though. The results I've had with the Speedpaints today are considerably better than the cack-handed attempts with acrylics I did back when I was in my early teens and didn't really have the right brush for the job. In fact, in retrospect, it was not having the right brush for the job that put me off taking things any further; I got frustrated that I felt it was too difficult, and just sort of gave up.

After today's little experiment, I'm keen to have a proper crack at it though. It'd certainly look very cool to have at least some painted minis on the table the next time we play HeroQuest (which, all being well, will be next weekend).

So I guess I'm Someone Who Paints Miniatures now. I suspected that Someone was always inside me, what with the inherently nerdy nature of the surrounding hobby. I've just come to it a little… late, is all.

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#oneaday Day 602: A farewell to Cpt.Carnage

I received the sad news earlier today that a far-off friend of mine, Jeff, aka "Cpt.Carnage", passed away last night.

I don't really know how to process this, so I'm just going to start typing and see what happens.

Many moons ago, you may recall me talking about a little group called the Squadron of Shame that originated on the 1up.com forums. We were a group of people who eschewed the big hits of the day in favour of the overlooked and underappreciated; our collective name was inspired by the term "Pile of Shame", which we first heard discussed on the 1up Yours podcast.

For the unfamiliar, the Pile of Shame is the pile of "stuff" you have that you keep meaning to get around to, but never do. You can have a Pile of Shame of pretty much any form of media, and pretty much everyone has one these days; some refer to it as their "backlog". The concept behind the discussion on the podcast was that the participants would take a game that they felt had passed them by — in this case, Psychonauts by Double Fine — then play it through independently and come back later to discuss it.

That never actually happened on the 1up Yours podcast because everyone involved was much too busy to be able to devote any time to such a project. But a group of us on the "Radio" forums on 1up.com thought it was a great idea, so we ran with it instead, playing through Psychonauts together and discussing it on the forums. We quickly gained a reputation for lengthy, in-depth discussion, but the Radio boards were a good place for that sort of thing, since they were generally relatively quiet, and free of the general console fanboy wars that were going on in the more generic forums.

I'm honestly not entirely sure if Jeff was with us right from the beginning, because to be perfectly honest he's felt like a fixture for as long as I can remember. In that respect, I think it simply doesn't matter whether he was there from the start or not; fact is, he was a part of our little group. A precious friend. A valued contributor to our discussions. Part of something bigger than each of our own, individual selves.

After 1up.com went through its slow, agonising death, much of the Squad drifted apart for one reason or another. Many of us moved to Twitter (from the period before it was The Worst Place On The Internet — yes, believe it or not, there once was a time like that) and there were several attempts to build our own little communal spaces online through shared blogs and forums. We got together and did our own podcast. Some of us even managed to meet face-to-face — and yes, that includes me, despite the vast majority of the Squad being in the U.S. and Canada. On one occasion I was happy to meet Jeff, who was pretty much how I had imagined him. That's a good thing.

The 2010s were, generally speaking, a fairly dark period for me for all manner of reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today, but the net result was that I lost touch with a lot of people for a good few years, including former Squadmates. But when I emerged from the other side of things and found that there was a small but dedicated little unit of the Squad still hanging out online, chatting and sharing war stories, it was enormously comforting — and a big part of that comfort came from the fact that I saw Jeff was still there. He had always been there, even if I hadn't.

Jeff was the sort of person I always enjoyed seeing in the chat — and, of course, on that one occasion we were actually in the same place. He always had a kind word, something to contribute or something to share that he thought we'd be interested in. He was someone that it was simply nice to have around; as I say, he had always felt like a fixture, in a good way.

It's shocking, upsetting and scary to think that he could be gone so suddenly. The world has lost a wonderful person while so many other complete shitbags continue to exist.

It's not fair. It's not fair on Jeff, it's not fair on the people he leaves behind. But I hope, wherever he is now, that he knows how much people cared for him, and how much people are going to miss him now that he's gone. And that whatever is next is a better, more peaceful existence than the world we live in right now.

Farewell, Jeff. Forever a Squaddie.

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#oneaday Day 601: January progress

So, January has been coming to a close. How are things going?

Not all that bad, really. The only thing I've been lax on for Things I Wanted to Achieve In January is piano practice. I've been so tired and achey of an evening that I just want to zombie out, and sitting with proper posture at the piano has been the last thing on my mind. I am starting to feel a bit better, though, particularly with good progress in other regards, so I will try reintroducing that to my "routine" shortly, along with some more exercise.

The most notable progress so far has been on weight loss. Since I started sticking properly to the calorie plan, I've lost 10 pounds. This is good! Of course, there is still a lot more to go, but it's a good start, and proof that what I'm doing is working.

What's particularly good about what I'm doing is that I feel like I've found a plan that offers a good balance between me not feeling like I'm starving myself — which can end up with me just wanting to binge, which is counterproductive — and still allowing the weight to come off. I know, realistically speaking, that I can't expect 10 pounds to fall off every two weeks — the first weeks following a new plan are always the "easiest" for some reason — but as long as the general trend skews downwards over the medium to long term, I will be satisfied.

And the nice thing is that I'm by no means depriving myself of Nice Things. I had some digestive biscuits yesterday! I had some Cheez-Its at lunchtime! I might have a bacon sandwich for breakfast tomorrow! The important thing, as is probably obvious to the vast majority of people who are not My Size, is moderation. Eating a measured, weighed-out portion of Cheez-Its and taking the calories into account? Fine. Getting a whole big bag of Cheez-Its and eating all of them in a single sitting because I have no self-control in that scenario? Not fine.

It's easy to feel like a supposed "portion" of something is stingy, but in actual fact it can be quite surprising how satisfying a "portion" of something can be. To return to the Cheez-Its, a "portion" is 30g, which is actually quite a generous helping of them, and certainly not depressingly unsatisfying. The only thing I've found myself exceeding the "recommended" portion size on is sultana bran cereal; 30g of that really is stingy, and 40g is much more satisfying for not that many more calories, so that's where I've settled on that.

Of course, I've been here before, with Things Going Well for a couple of weeks and then just falling off at some point afterwards, usually with the flimsy justification of depression, tiredness, illness, frustration or any manner of other things. But right now I'm feeling pretty good about how things are going, and the possibility of being to maintain this over the longer term. So let's hope I can actually stick to that and see where things go from here.

I know I can do this. I've done it before. And it will make my life so much better if I can accomplish it again. So I will keep at it.

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#oneaday Day 600: My CD shelf

Every so often — and a lot more frequently just recently — I find myself thinking back to the collection of music CDs that I once had, and ponder whether or not I should attempt to rebuild that collection. After all, with streaming services generally agreed to be a net shitter for the music industry — and several of them starting to bring in AI slop, because I don't fucking know — it is becoming fashionable, once again, to have a physical collection of Stuff.

Now, you know me. I know this. I have a living room whose walls are at least 85% video games. But I got rid of my whole CD collection when we moved into this place, because… well, there wasn't really room for it anywhere, and at that point, the digital future of music seemed pretty certain. Also the few quid I got for the collection by sending it to musicMagpie certainly helped.

One of the things I find myself getting hung up on is exactly what was in that CD collection. It has literally just occurred to me that I can probably just look at my musicMagpie account and see what I traded in 11 years ago, but that's much too easy. (EDIT: also, apparently I did not create an account when I traded all this shit in.) So I'm going to attempt to do it from memory, with explanations where necessary.

In no particular order other than as they come to me:

Definitely Maybe (Oasis) – the first album I ever bought with my own money, after I learned about what modern music it was "cool" to like. Embarrassingly, I bought it literally the day before (What's the Story) Morning Glory? came out, which got me some ribbing, but not that much, because Definitely Maybe was still a decent album.
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (Oasis) – I actually don't think I bought this for myself, because I had it on cassette, not CD. I often considered buying it on CD but never quite got around to it because I always thought my money was probably better spent on something I didn't already have. I quite liked the tape version. It was easy to play in the car.
Be Here Now (Oasis) – People seem to hate this one now. I thought it was good.
Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette) – I'm actually not sure why I bought this, because I had heard its greatest hits so many times on the local radio station the school bus always had on, and was thoroughly sick of them. But for some reason I did buy it — and I'm glad I did, because I ended up liking pretty much all the songs on it, particularly after reading along with the lyrics while listening. Fun fact: I'm pretty sure this album taught everyone in my friendship group and surrounding acquaintances what the term "going down on" meant.
Blurring the Edges (Meredith Brooks) – After accepting that yes, I actually did quite like Alanis Morissette, I sought out some other "girls with guitars" albums. I became rather fond of this one. Not every track is a winner, but there are some great songs on here, with Bitch probably the most well-known of them.
Left of the Middle (Natalie Imbruglia) – Not quite "girls with guitars", but sort of adjacent. I wasn't really thinking about that, though. I primarily bought this because several of us really fancied Natalie Imbruglia.
Footprints (Holly Valance) – See above, with even more tenuous justification.
Spice (The Spice Girls) – I have told this story before.
Spiceworld (The Spice Girls) – I'm not sure that justifies this, though.
Travelling Without Moving (Jamiroquai) – My best friends at school were super into Jamiroquai. It didn't take long for me to join them, subsequently adding Emergency on Planet Earth and Return of the Space Cowboy to my collection also.
Essential Indie (Various) – A CD that came free with my Discman when I got one for Christmas or a birthday or something. My favourite track on it was Sick & Tired by The Cardigans, primarily for its unusual flute and bassoon backing.
Essential Acid Jazz (Various) – A double CD that I picked up not long after getting into Jamiroquai. This was a varied selection of acid jazz weirdness, with only really one track by the Brand New Heavies being familiar. My friends and I all enjoyed this album a lot though, and a copy hastily recorded to tape was a fixture in my mum's car (which I often borrowed of an evening) throughout most of my time at sixth form. Favourite track was, without a doubt, Big Kahuna by Jeremy Bun, a track which my friends and I parodied in our brief incarnation as the sonicfunkstars shortly after we learned to use Sony's ACID Music. (Fun fact: my Xbox Live Gamertag is still sonicfunkstars, because I am not paying Microsoft money to change my fucking name.)
The Lord of the Rings (Unknown) – The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies came out while I was at university, and we all enjoyed them. I bought this album because it had a cool box with a nearly naked lady on it and it said The Lord of the Rings on it. I didn't mistake it for the official soundtrack or anything (which I also bought) — if I'm honest I primarily bought it because of the titty lady. When I got it home and opened it up I discovered that titty lady actually got them out in the sleeve notes. When I put the CD in the player, I discovered that the whole album was literally just noise. I have no idea what it was supposed to be or why. I was so ashamed of the purchase I actually threw it out. To date I haven't been able to rediscover exactly what this fucking weird CD was — as I'm sure you can imagine, tracking down something just called The Lord of the Rings is not easy — nor am I sure I want to, because I think it might have been haunted.
Painkiller (Judas Priest) – My friend Owen, who I did teacher training with, introduced me to metal. A particular favourite of us both was this excellent album. On one memorable afternoon, in a chemically induced haze, we produced a spectacular Judas Priest remix using ACID Music. It helped distract from the horrors of the working day.

There's a bunch of compilations also — including Shine 7 and 8, which I talked about here — but those are most of the ones I can remember without taxing my memory too hard. I know there were a lot more than that. And now I really want to know what happened to that receipt for all the CDs I traded in 11 years ago. It must be somewhere!

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#oneaday Day 599: Earth Must Die!

I've been looking forward to a game that released today: Earth Must Die! by Size Five Games, creators of Ben There, Dan That, Lair of the Clockwork God and numerous other excellent games. Today isn't a "review" as such — I'll save some more substantial thoughts on the game for MoeGamer and YouTube once I've finished it — but I did want to pop down some initial thoughts and give a hearty recommend to it. As an indie title, the first few days of sales are critical for visibility on Steam, and this is a game that absolutely deserves to see some success from what I've played so far.

Earth Must Die! casts you in the role of VValak Lizardtongue, third in line to the throne of the planet Tyryth and its empire, the Ascendancy. After tricking his two brothers into murdering one another, VValak ends up in charge, and inadvertently causes the Terranoid forces of Earth to invade. That's as far as I've got, but as the name suggests, one can expect that the remainder of the game will involve VValak finding a way to get revenge on the Terranoids and get his empire back. Or maybe not…?

It's an adventure game, but with a few interesting twists from the usual formula. You have direct control of your character's movement, and interacting with hotspots is done using a cursor that can be popped up. It's clearly designed to be played with a controller and works well like that, but can also be played with WSAD movement controls and a mouse cursor. I think I might have preferred a simple mouse-only interface for its non-controller implementation, but not enough to want to kick off about it or anything.

VValak, as an arrogant (wannabe) tyrant, refuses to touch anything himself because poor people might have touched it before him. Thus you have to solve all the situations in the game without VValak ever getting his own hands dirty. This sometimes involves using his companion robot and former nursemaid, Milky, to perform various actions, and sometimes involves convincing other characters in the scene that they should carry out your orders. It's an interesting mechanic that sidesteps the usual inventory puzzles.

Like I say, I'm not too far in the story as yet so I am hesitant to say too much more in that regard, but one thing I will highlight is the incredible voice cast, which includes numerous big names in British comedy such as Alex Horne, Tamsin Grieg, Matthew Holness, Alasdair Beckett-King, Don Warrington, Mike Wozniak and many more. Plus, of course, Ben Starr is in it, because Ben Starr is the Nolan North of the 2020s (complimentary). That cast might not mean much to anyone who isn't British, but you should know that this is a full-on celebrity cast of comedy royalty, and it's incredible to see them all coming together for a video game.

The net result is that the game sounds like a late-night Channel 4 comedy show (complimentary), and it has some really beautiful animated 2D art to go along with it. It's very much designed along the lines of games like Discworld II, with large, cartoonish sprites and plenty of close-up animations — and much of the humour will be familiar to those who enjoyed Terry Pratchett's work, too.

That's about all I want to say for now. It's an easy recommend if you enjoy silly games that will make you laugh, and is a seriously impressive project from Size Five in terms of scope. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in over the next few days, and, as I say, I will have a full report, likely on MoeGamer and YouTube, once I'm done with it!

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