RIP Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton passed away at the age of 80. This is very sad news indeed, because Dolly Parton was the living embodiment of goodness. Among many, many other things, she made great music, she always came across as a thoroughly pleasant person in interviews and suchlike, she was an incredible ally to LGBTQ+ folks, she was responsible for millions of books being distributed for free to youngsters across the world, and above all, she was proof that you can be rich, beautiful, famous and not a shitty person in the slightest, all at the same time.

There seems to be some sort of unspoken assumption that you can only be a maximum of three of those at the same time (and it's usually rich, beautiful and famous) but Dolly proved that there was, in fact, no obligation to become a total piece of shit just because you were loaded.

Apparently Dolly's family has requested that in lieu of flowers and other memorials/condolences, people make a donation to the Dolly Parton's Imagination Library organisation. I've done just that, and I encourage you to consider doing so also. It is fitting that her generosity and selflessness continues even after her passing.

That's about all I am able to say on the subject for the minute, but I wanted to mark the occasion, at least.

Manic Miner's getting a dogshit-looking "remake"

I'll let you into a not-so-secret, dear reader: I don't think ZX Spectrum classic Manic Miner is very good. It has music that makes you want to tear your ears off, visuals that are… functional at best, gameplay that is unnecessarily infuriating and a difficulty curve that is more like a vertical wall, meaning I'm sure there are a significant number of people who have never seen beyond the first screen. There are many, many better single-screen platformers on 8-bit home computers — some of my favourites are Mr Robot and His Robot Factory and Miner 2049'er — and yet a lot of them just don't get their dues, while Manic Miner is consistently held up as an all-time classic. And don't even get me started on Jet Set Willy.

Anyway, BBG Entertainment GmbH — the people who have done some Boulder Dash reboots that are… not bad gameplay wise but kind of dogshit aesthetically — have decided what the world needs is a Manic Miner remake. And, moreover, they decided what a Manic Miner remake really needed was some absolute dog-arse generative AI for its visuals, trailer, pretty much everything. Including one of the most laughable "CRT filters" I think I have ever seen. Not only that, they have been very quiet on whether or not any AI has actually been used, by which I mean there is no AI usage disclosure on the game's Steam page.

(Yes, comments are disabled on YouTube, before you go and check.)

And, I mean, come on. Look at it. Look at it. Even the "retro" screens are wrong in terms of layout! Fuck's sake. If this isn't generative AI, they need to fire their art person. But let's face it, they probably already did that, which is why this has happened.

This isn't the first company doing some sort of "retro revival" who has shat out AI-generated garbage artwork all over a property that actually means something to some people and then denied that they have done so. Hey, I don't like Manic Miner at all, but I know plenty of people who do, and I feel bad for them to see garbage like this.

I've said it many, many times before, but I cannot fucking wait for this goddamn bubble to pop so we can be free of this never-ending torrent of shit.

Commodore is putting out a Cyberpunk 2077-themed C64 Ultimate

Why? In what world does this make any sense as a crossover? Plus with the relabelled keys it looks like a nightmare from a usability perspective, too. But I'm sure someone somewhere will buy it, then leave it in a box on a shelf and, roughly every 6 months or so, mention on all the Discord servers they're in, with an odd amount of pride, that they bought it and have never actually unpacked it.

Burnout Revenge

I have been feeling a bit burnt out on YouTube of late. I put out a video on Terranigma that I thought was a good adaptation of my article on MoeGamer, and it has performed like crap, even with yesterday's announcement of the Terranigma remake. I just don't even know before. YouTube is so incredibly unpredictable over what does well and what does poorly, and sometimes these things change massively over time, too. I have stuff that I put out several years ago which performed poorly to modestly on their original release, but which now has thousands of views — and I have stuff that I worked hard on and was very proud of which has done less than a hundred views. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to it — and, to be frank, I can't really be arsed to chase the why.

I feel like at some point I have drifted away from the things that used to have me fired up about doing things on YouTube. I have wanted to incorporate a much broader spectrum of things to reflect my own interests, but aside from a couple of standout exceptions to the rule, I don't feel that experiment has really been much of a success. And it's getting me down a bit; I don't particularly want or need YouTube to be a "big thing" for me, but it is nice when you do something and more than a handful of people appreciate what you do.

So I'm going to take a break from YouTube completely until I come back from holiday in mid-September, and at that time I'm going to do a sort of soft reboot back to some things I used to do, only with a bit more in the way of knowledge that I've picked up in the intervening years since I did them first time around. Specifically, I think I'm going to bring back Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z, because those series had a nice sense of structure to them, they were easy to produce but could result in a combination of celebrating big hits and discovering new favourites — and, perhaps most importantly, I really enjoyed making them.

Beyond that, I'll likely still do some occasional "scripted" videos when I feel like it, and perhaps some Evercade games, too, but so far as stuff outside of my "core" subject matter of Atari home computer stuff, it will be the exception rather than the norm. I basically built my audience for that channel on Atari-related videos, and I wonder if attempting to branch out to other platforms has just basically caused YouTube to go "we don't know what this channel is any more", meaning things like my Terranigma video just… go nowhere.

That's the plan, anyway. I will be using the things I've learned about thumbnail design and all that good stuff — plus continue with my current channel branding — and get things back to basics. At least then if only a handful of people watch my stuff, I know it's because they're genuinely interested in what I'm doing, rather than picking up on trends.

So yeah. Watch out for that in mid-September. In the meantime, go watch my Terranigma video. It'd be nice to at least get the sodding thing over 100 views.

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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The post #oneaday Day 809: Dolly, Willy and... uh... silly? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is excellent news, because it means I can buy a copy and not feel bad about playing it through on MiSTer. Not that I did anyway, but it will be very nice to own an actual legitimate copy and not have to pay through the nose for a cart-only SNES copy that almost certainly has a flat save battery and might not even work at all. I might even play it through again to see what improvements have been made.

For the most part, it looks as if the game is going to be kept true to its original incarnation. There's some modern-day UI fluff including bezels and an optional floating EXP window (that will be nice to have, actually) plus the promise of some new art and remastered music tracks, but we don't have many details about all that just yet. For most people, just the opportunity to own a copy of this excellent game will be enough — even if it's a modern rerelease and not the original original version.

Before anyone asks: no, I don't know if this means we'll be able to get it on Evercade. I will certainly be mentioning it to the people who make such decisions, but as I have said numerous times before, I have no control over that part of the business and thus it will simply be an emphatic suggestion. Square Enix is a company we haven't worked with as yet — although we have worked with TAITO, who are technically part of that whole conglomerate now, so I guess we sort of have. What I'd really love to see, personally, would be a cart that contains, at the very least, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, plus ideally Actraiser and The Granstream Saga also. Maybe one day I will be part of making that happen. We'll have to see.

But anyway! If you've never played Terranigma, you're in for a treat. If you want to know more, go check out my in-depth piece on it over on MoeGamer (linked above), but the short version is this: it's an excellent 16-bit action RPG that still looks, sounds and plays really well today. The English localisation is a little bit clunky — though nowhere near as broken as that seen in Illusion of Gaia — but it gets the incredibly ambitious storyline across, and the gameplay is absolutely wonderful.

It's nice to share some good news for once. I hope you all remember to pick up Terranigma this time, because I will not be having any mercy on you if you miss your chance this time around and then come crying to me about having to pay hundreds of quid for a copy. It's there. It's coming. You know what to do.

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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The post #oneaday Day 808: Terranigma is coming back! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the unfamiliar, Atarimania is a place where you can go to look up pretty much any piece of software that has ever been released on an Atari platform. It probably gets the most use for those who are interested in the 8-bit and ST ranges of home computers, but it also has substantial console sections for the 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar, though some of these are still under construction at the time of writing..

Most entries provide some helpful historical information about the piece of software in question, including the date of release (often just a year, as back in the day we apparently weren't quite as fastidious about recording the exact dates things released), the people who worked on it (with hyperlinks allowing you to quickly see what else they worked on) and various other bits and bobs of information. Many entries also allow you to download cartridge ROM files or disk images for the software in question, too, allowing you to quickly load it up in an emulator or even get it up and running on real hardware or an FPGA solution.

One of my favourite parts of Atarimania is the magazine section, which is full of PDF archives for a variety of publications. Some of these are specialist Atari 8-bit and ST magazines (including Page 6/New Atari User, which my Dad, my brother and I all wrote for at various points), but there are also things like Activision's Activisions newsletter, enthusiast user group zines and even some multi-format mags that happened to cover Atari, like Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE), which was a favourite magazine of mine back in the day. It's a wonderful source of authentic information from back when this stuff was current, and it's been a godsend for me when putting together videos.

Atarimania's redesign doesn't reinvent the site's functionality. So far as I am aware, the exact same information is being presented, just with a new look. Notably, it's mobile-friendly now, which it didn't used to be, which makes quickly accessing information on the fly much more convenient than it once was. I'll have to spend some time digging into it all, but from my brief look this evening, it all looks great.

Every time I look at Atarimania, I find myself wishing that a similar resource existed for other platforms. The C64 and Amiga have something similar in the form of Lemon64 and LemonAmiga respectively, the Spectrum has World of Spectrum and the other one I always forget the name of, and I'm sure others exist for other platforms. But for me, none of them quite match Atarimania for sheer comprehensiveness — and I also think that there's a real gap in the market for something similar, but for consoles. Like, I would absolutely love to see a SNESMania, a MasterSystemMania, a MegaDriveMania and suchlike. To my knowledge, nothing quite like that exists right now for console platforms — and I don't really know anything about creating a database-driven website like that, otherwise I would consider looking into it myself. If these sites do exist, they're not anywhere near as well-known as Atarimania is for Atari enthusiasts.

There's MobyGames, of course, and that is definitely a valuable, helpful resource, but it's not quite the same thing.

Anyway, eternal respect to anyone who builds and maintains this sort of thing. You help make the retro gaming hobby that much more enjoyable to participate in — and turbonerds like me happy when we need to research things. Please keep doing what you do forever!

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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The post #oneaday Day 807: Atarimania got a new look appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not entirely sure where this sense came from. Perhaps from years of playing old computer games that didn't include an automap facility. Perhaps from time in the Cub Scouts, at least part of which involved knowing how to read a map. Perhaps from how I used to enjoy just looking at maps. I remember having a kids' world atlas that I absolutely loved just… looking at.

Or perhaps it's something I developed a bit later. I know that I certainly became particularly aware of it once I had left home for university, because it came in very handy every time I got absolutely smashed and had to somehow find my way home in the dark. Despite numerous very drunken evenings, there was not one single occasion where I didn't make it home — even when the night had, for one reason or another, concluded at the house of someone I didn't know very well in an unfamiliar part of town.

Did I develop this skill back then? Perhaps. But it's something that's stuck around with me. I also feel very conscious of it any time I drive to a new city, because I tend to find that I can get a good feel for how all the roads connect to one another quite quickly, even when it's a place I've never been before. This came in quite handy any time I had a job interview in an unfamiliar place, because it meant that even if I initially had trouble finding the place I was supposed to go to — I always left with plenty of time to spare just in case this happened — I would come away from the day with a better understanding of this new place. This is information that may or may not have ended up being useful in the future, depending on whether or not I ended up getting the job.

I do find it especially helpful in virtual worlds, particularly when you have an experience like Big Walk which deliberately eschews the trappings of modern game user interfaces in favour of a more minimalist experience that is dependent on cooperation and communication. On multiple occasions in our session this evening, I was able to lead us right back to something we had previously visited without having to look at a map, and this, I feel, is a helpful quality in a group that is effectively orienteering in the wilderness in the hope of finding exciting and intriguing puzzles to complete. (Okay, I did take a wrong turn once, but nobody's completely perfect.)

One of the things I've determined via various means that I could really do with getting better at is acknowledging the things I am actually good at; the things about me that other people might actually value; the things that I can be proud of and feel okay about feeling proud of. After this evening's session, I feel quite confident in saying that yes, I am quite proud of my sense of direction; I feel it is a useful skill that can help both myself and others, and I am glad to be enjoying an experience where it actually comes in handy, and where people value it.

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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The post #oneaday Day 806: Absolute Direction (5 points) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Like I say, it wasn't always like this, though. Back in the SNES era, I, like literally everyone else I knew, had a copy of Street Fighter II, and played it to absolute death. I remember chatting about it with friends at school, discussing the various characters' endings — back then, people still respected the single-player mode of fighting games rather than treating them as the afterthought they seem to be today — and bragging about how easy we found such-and-such a special move to perform. (My friend Andrew was the only one of us who, he claimed at least, could perform Zangief's Spinning Piledriver.)

Beyond that, I remember having a good time with the original Tekken and Soul Blade on PlayStation, Soulcalibur on Dreamcast, the aforementioned Dead or Alive… it all feels a world away right now.

The obvious answer to this is to just try and play a fighting game again. But the temptation, given the amount of information out there today, is to try and look something up; to try and find a guide to "getting good" at one of these games, before you even start actually just playing it.

The trouble is, most guides these days — even supposed beginners' guides — are filled with impenetrable jargon, and move on to complex concepts way too quickly, making the prospect of even thinking about trying a new game difficult to contemplate. I read a guide the other day that said when you are learning a new fighting game from scratch, one of the first things you should do is look at a wiki and learn the framedata for the character you want to play.

Not "play the game, see how you like it" or "pick a character that you find sexually attractive, consider an aspirational figure or think is amusing for some reason". Look at a wiki and learn the framedata.

Now, while I won't deny that once you're taking a game seriously to a particularly sweaty degree, looking at a wiki and learning the framedata probably is helpful — but man! When you're someone who doesn't really know how to play a fighting game, like at all, but is interested in learning at the very least the basics, and then you're hit with something that sounds like the exact opposite of fun as one of the first things you're suggested to do… well, that doesn't feel like much of an incentive to play!

This is the trouble with having too much information available and the baggage that a large and active "community" brings. Back in the SNES era — and even onwards into the Dreamcast and early PS2/Xbox ages — none of us knew what the "FGC" was, and we didn't need to know. If we were lucky, we still had the original manual for Street Fighter II and knew that a fireball move was down, diagonal, forward and punch, and that was, somehow, enough. The way we played would have probably been considered "button mashing" by someone who knew the game extremely well, but again, it didn't matter! We were having fun with the game, we were enjoying playing it — and we were able to play it well enough to (after a lot of continues, in most cases) actually beat the single-player mode.

Like I say, though, the single-player mode of fighting games is seemingly barely given any thought whatsoever these days. The assumption from most of the "guides" out there appears to be that you must always be looking to get ready for competitive action, to be on top of your versus game, and to be able to perform every move absolutely flawlessly, exactly when you need to perform it. Playing against a computer? Ugh, literally disgusting. Get online and get wrecked, because that's the only way you'll learn.

That may be true, but I wonder how many other people out there are like me: having once enjoyed something like Street Fighter II before all this "advice" was everywhere, but now feel completely and utterly intimidated and demoralised any time they even contemplate picking up a new fighter — to such a degree that they just never even try a game that could potentially become an all-time favourite?

As I say above, I think the answer, honestly, is to simply ignore all this and just have a go. If you're only fighting against the computer, it doesn't matter if you suck. If the only skills you develop are "how to beat the computer" — and you do so enough to be able to see a favourite character's ending on a handful of credits? I think that can be enough.

I think you can make it enough. So y'know what? I think I'm going to make an effort to have a go at some of these absolutely beautiful NEOGEO games we have on Evercade. Sure, I'll likely be turning the difficulty level down to the minimum, at least to begin with — but that sounds a lot more fun than looking at charts full of numbers, abbreviations and terms like "Greco-Roman cancel". At least for now. Maybe I'll find myself wanting to do that at some point down the line — but for now, just playing the game sounds like a good idea.

Now the only question is which game to pick…?

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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The post #oneaday Day 805: Quarter-circle forward appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For some reason, a lot of people making animated series seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking there is only one way you can possibly make this sort of thing: irony-poisoned "adult animation" with a complete lack of sincerity and earnestness. And it fucking sucks!

Now, I'm not someone who swears off the sort of genre-savvy, quasi-fourth wall-breaking meta-comedy style as an automatic and immediate matter of course. There is a time and place for that sort of thing; we call it parody. Right now, I have been casually playing Agents of Mayhem by Volition, which is a spinoff of the Saints Row series that focuses on a band of gun-toting superheroes. It is full of this sort of humour, and it works because the whole thing is set up to be a parody of a particular genre. You go in expecting that sort of thing, and it delivers. You have to be in the right mood for it, but it is not throwing any particular curveballs.

Hell, it doesn't even have to be parody. I still enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, even though series creator Joss Whedon apparently turned out to be a bit of a dildo, to say the least. People who complain about the dialogue in modern Marvel movies often accuse them of being full of "Whedonisms", and that may be a fair point, given his involvement in several of them — but in the context of Buffy and Angel, again, this sort of humour worked, because it was a bunch of kids saying it, and in turn that made it highly quotable in the playground.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is another great example. I thought I was going to hate this series after the first episode, which was pretty "wacky", but I kept watching out of curiosity and was pleasantly surprised to discover a series with a lot of genuine heart, soul and sincerity — plus an appreciation of and admiration for Trek canon. Sure, it had its silly moments — a lot more than in most of the live-action shows — but it struck a good balance, and at no point did it feel like it was designed primarily to mock its source material maliciously.

But, like, Golden Axe? This is a beloved arcade game that, in its original form, played things reasonably straight for the most part, at least until its ending sequence. Sure, it had its silly elements like the treasure goblins and the weird mount creatures, but it's clear what the intent was: make a game designed in the style of pulp fantasy, complete with loincloth-clad barbarians, bikini-clad female warriors and hairy dwarves.

When you adapt something like this in the obnoxiously referential, wise-cracking "adult animation" style popularised by shows like Family Guy, you just put across the feeling that you don't respect the source material at all; there seems to be an unspoken assumption that if the creators of this show took Golden Axe seriously, then no-one, in turn, would take this animated series seriously.

You could make the argument that Golden Axe, as a franchise, didn't really have much meat on the bones in terms of narrative in the first place, and you'd probably be right about that. But there's more than enough there to act as a basis for something more — and perhaps to build something genuinely interesting which uses the lore that does exist as a starting point. That could have been cool! There aren't that many good fantasy-themed shows out right now other than Game of Thrones and its spinoff, House of the Dragon, and those are very much an acquired taste (not to mention the poster children for "dark fantasy", which is distinct from more traditional approaches to fantasy) — and there's definitely scope for one in the animated space. Remember stuff like Xena: Warrior Princess? Golden Axe could have been a new Xena: Warrior Princess, but animated!

But no. Instead we get a show that just feels like everyone involved with it has complete and utter contempt for the fantasy genre, for the source material, and for the audience. And I don't really know why! It's not as if animated adaptations which take potentially rather silly source material seriously don't exist — look at Castlevania! That turned out great! It managed to tell a compelling, serious, earnest story with interesting characters and even incorporate some humour without it all feeling forced and filled with such a sense of not giving a shit.

I guess ultimately it's no real skin off my nose, because with Golden Axe being on Paramount+, I'm not going to watch it — and I'm certainly not going to make an effort to seek out some alternative means of watching it (be that official or "unofficial"), based on that trailer. It's just frustrating that this sort of thing is so very predictable; it makes it difficult to have any excitement for announcements of potentially interesting adaptations of video game properties into other forms of media, and very easy to be cynical.

I can't say I was particularly hungry for an animated adaptation of Golden Axe generally — and thus, honestly, I'd rather they hadn't bothered at all than come out with this predictable nonsense.

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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The post #oneaday Day 804: More like Golden Shower appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Being someone who is "into" classic home computers — and particularly less popular classic home computers like the Atari 8-bit line — I have plenty of possible answers to this challenge, and even more that stem from my modern tastes of games that are a bit off the beaten track and often ignored by the mainstream press. So what to pick?

Well, I think it has to be a home computer game, as I saw yet another example of people who have probably never even seen an Amiga making jokes about European computer games earlier, and it annoyed me. It annoyed me enough to want to write about a home computer game that is genuinely good, but which doesn't get talked about that much.

I eventually settled on Jupiter's Masterdrive, a 1991 game for Atari ST and Amiga that was developed by "POF Corporation" (who, to my knowledge, never made anything else under that name) and published by a very early incarnation of Ubisoft, back when they spelled it "Ubi Soft". If you want to see it in action, I played it on my YouTube channel five years ago:

Although I have shelves filled to the brim with Atari ST games up in my study, Jupiter's Masterdrive is actually a game that I have never owned a full boxed copy of. My sole encounter with it Back In The Day was on a cover-mounted disk from ST Action, a magazine I used to enjoy, and this was, as you might expect, only a playable demo.

I remember finding it quite striking when I played that demo, though — even though it was obviously unfinished. (If I am remembering correctly, the demo had no sound whatsoever!) It was a top-down racer, but with an unusual sci-fi theme: not only were you racing on moons, other planets and satellites, you also had access to weaponry with which to upset your opponents. Races were as much about survival as they were about coming out in front.

The game moved smoothly, which was never a given on the ST, which lacked the hardware scrolling facilities of its great rival, the Amiga. The play area was deliberately constrained to a relatively small window on the screen, presumably to keep the frame rate up a bit — but it was also possible to play the whole thing in a split-screen two-player mode, and to my recollection, performance didn't really suffer when doing so. My experience with the game — particularly the full version I played in the video above — was almost exclusively with the single-player mode, but I suspect I would have at least tried the two-player mode with a school friend once or twice.

Demo disks of the era were great for this sort of thing. Despite the fact the demos in question had to be squeezed onto a single floppy disk — and often a single side of a floppy disk in order to cater to those who only had a single-sided drive, with bonus demos on offer for those lucky enough to have a double-sided setup — they were often quite generous in terms of how much they would let you play; certainly enough to give you a good idea of what to expect from the finished product, and often a lot of fun in their own right.

In the case of Jupiter's Masterdrive, that playable demo with no sound lodged itself firmly in some dust-covered recess in the corner of my mind for years — no, decades — after I originally played it, so when I was doing my Atari ST A to Z video series and got to "J" one time, the memory leapt out and bellowed "Jupiter's Masterdrive!" at me. "Oh yeah," I thought. "I liked that demo. I wonder what the full game is like?"

Really good, as it happens. The additional time that POF Corporation worked on the game between the release of the demo and the final game coming out over a year later was evidently well-spent, as the result was a well-crafted, polished, slick game that ran extremely well, even on the humble ST, and was a lot of fun to play.

It had some fun and interesting twists, too. From the demo, I had assumed the whole game would be circuit-based racing, but the full version also shakes things up with some arena-based events in which your aim is to collect a certain number of special objects before an opponent. The small play area isn't a hindrance in these events, either, thanks to a well-implemented radar display that allows you to see at a glance where you, your opponent and the target objects are.

Between races, you can spend the credits you earn and win on various upgrades for your car, including enhancements to your car's performance as well as weaponry and armour to help you survive a bit longer in the tougher events.

It's a game I don't think I have seen anyone else ever talk about online, but for one reason or another it's one that, as I say, got into my mind as a youngster and never really went away. I was really pleased to discover (when I finally tried it) that the full game ended up being as good as it is — and encourage you to give it a look, particularly if you've ever said anything disparaging about home computer games.

This is a quality title that holds up very well indeed, and is a great example of why there's a ton of value in exploring this area of gaming history rather than just laughing at those silly Europeans for "making do" with their stupid old STs and Amigas back in the '80s and '90s. We had a perfectly fulfilling, satisfying time, I think you'll find, as games up to the standard of Jupiter's Masterdrive were by no means an uncommon sight — and if you take the time to explore a bit, you'll find some wonderful games that deserve to be talked about a whole lot more.

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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The post #oneaday Day 803: Write about an obscure game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As part of Aftermath's article, reviewer Isaiah Colbert remarked that the manga had had its "announcement treated like a Klan rally in the comments and quote-retweets of its English localization on Twitter". I was, sadly, unsurprised to hear this. But I'm not entirely sure why I did what I did next.

I found an old, defunct Twitter account that I once had that is still active, and I logged into Twitter to have a look. I haven't even looked at Twitter for months at this point; even while I was doing social media for the day job, I spent as little time on there as possible. The whole place just had seriously bad vibes for quite some time now, but I didn't stick around to find out quite how bad. And part of the reason I deliberately stepped away from social media for my work at the day job is because I didn't want to expose myself to that crap at all, let alone "any more than necessary".

Today, I confirmed: things are bad. They're real bad. We're talking blatant, unashamed, absolutely fucking disgusting racism, without even any attempts at plausible deniability. We're talking racist slurs in response to the post; we're talking edits of the cover image to turn it into a racist caricature; we're talking, inexplicably, a lot of antisemitism.

I feel like it takes a fair amount to shock me these days, given how many years I have breathed Internet fumes for, but today I was genuinely taken aback and disgusted by what that site has become. I have no regrets about jumping ship long before it got this bad — and now I have a complete understanding of anyone who has harsh words for those who stick around on the site at all.

The entire place has become a free-for-all cesspit filled with the absolute worst dregs of humanity, all of them feeling safe in the knowledge that they will see zero repercussions for their foul behaviour. Indeed, in the quote-tweets thread for the post in question, one user noted that they reported one of the racist caricatures to Twitter's laughable "safety" department, and got told that the post had, somehow, not broken any rules. At this point I'm not entirely sure Twitter has a safety department any more; there's a non-zero chance that a lot of moderation is left up to Grok, and given that Grok has proven itself to be quite happy to produce child sexual abuse material with minimal encouragement, that makes me feel like it's probably not going to be a good judge of whether something is racist or not.

It's kind of incredible how this has happened. Twitter was once, genuinely, the "town square" of the Internet. It was the "default" social media app for everything. TV shows had official hashtags. Brands had active presences. People actively wanted to be on there to be part of the conversation. And while it's always had its issues and its bad actors, for the most part the truly odious individuals were corralled off into their own little corners rather than being people you will almost definitely run into if you poke your head in there for more than five minutes.

It is no longer a safe place to hang out online. Everything that has happened on that site in the last few years has corrupted it into an utterly disgusting shadow of its former self. And Musk still wants to make it "The Everything App"? He wants people to trust a site like that with their money?

I don't know why I looked at Twitter tonight. I had no need to. But I guess I was curious quite how bad it had actually gotten since I last looked a long time ago; whether the things people had said about it were real, or if they were exaggerations.

They were not exaggerations. Get off that fucking platform if you're still on it.

And no, I will not call it "X".

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The post #oneaday Day 802: However bad you think Twitter is now, it's worse appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Ys is not the only series I am very behind on, of course. I am also very behind on Yakuza, which is at least partly why I started Yakuza 6 on a whim the other day. Technically I'm not "behind" on Suikoden because I never started it prior to this — though I am enjoying it a lot — but I do want to play, at the very least, the first two in the HD Remaster collection.

Then, of course, there is Trails, that which has apparently become Falcom's flagship series. To date, I have played the first Trails in the Sky… twice. I also made a start on Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, but almost immediately after I started playing that game, Falcom announced the remake of the first Trails in the Sky (and its subsequent follow-up), so I figured that I would delay starting a proper, honest to goodness attempt to "do" that series until all of these remakes were out. And in the meantime, the far end of the series continues to extend further and further into the distance; I am several games behind in terms of actually buying the games at this point, so hopefully by the time I do actually start playing Trails properly, they will still be reasonably available.

Does it all matter? No, of course not. So long as these games continue to be available and the hardware to play them on remains in working order, I can play them at any time. That said, I do feel considerably more "pressure" of sorts to play current stuff sooner rather than later, given how many of them have downloadable updates. I do tend to make a habit of primarily purchasing limited-print stuff, which tends to be fully up to date on cart or disc, but in the case of stuff that gets a broader retail release — like the Trails games now do — there are often updates of varying degrees of necessity from the moment you put the disc in.

And don't even get me started on Game Key Cards, still officially the worst thing about Nintendo Switch 2.

Anyway, at some point, then, I think I will probably be jumping into Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. I did actually make a start on this ages ago, during a time when we had some friends over, they got a bit drunk and wanted to see some sort of RPG. I haven't touched it for ages, though, so if and when I do start again, it will be going from the beginning once more. I'm also quite tempted to revisit Ys Origin, purely for its finale music. And then there's the Switch versions of Oath in Felghana and Memories in Celceta, both of which I've played, but which it would be fun to have another look at.

And then after that there's Ys IX and Ys X to play, too. Ahh, an embarrassment of riches, truly. And yet how long do you think I'm going to stare at a wall, wondering if I really should start something new when I already have two big games on the go?

No. Fuck it. You know what, I'm just going to do it. I need some howling Falcom guitars in my life right now, and I'm damn well going to go and get them. You see if I don't!

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The post #oneaday Day 801: Eeeeeeees appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In no particular order…

First up, here's my writeup on Lapis x Labyrinth, a thoroughly unusual game from Nippon Ichi that blends elements of platformer, action RPG, arena combat game, shoot 'em up and pachinko. (Don't worry, there's no actual gambling or microtransactions.) It's an incredibly compulsive game that knows how very appealing it is when you do something in a game and things explode into a shower of shiny things. Narrative-wise it's almost completely forgettable, but in terms of presentation and particularly gameplay, it's a wonderful thing indeed, and highly recommended if you want to play something quite unlike anything else you have experienced.

Next up, here's a look at Root Letter, a visual novel/adventure game hybrid that I once described as "Ace Attorney for the over-30s", and very much stand by that description. It's a thoroughly compelling mystery story with some spooky elements, and does a great job at juxtaposing the energy and optimism of youth with the glum reality of early middle age. I still have not yet played the expanded version of this which adds the option to replace the hand-drawn artwork with photographic stills; I think probably enough time has elapsed between me playing the original version and now that I can (and should!) give it a go, given that it's on my shelf, and has been for quite some time.

Dragon Quest V is not what I'd exactly call an "unknown" game, but this piece which I wrote on the game's treatment of fatherhood — specifically, as experienced by a child, and how I related it to my own life experiences and memories of family life as a child — remains something that I'm very pleased with. I was emotionally invested in the subject matter, and I think that came across in what I wrote. I'm sure the things I describe will be familiar to at least some of you.

Here's a piece on Criminal Girls, a thoroughly interesting — and oft-misrepresented — role-playing game in which you take on the role of a jailer in Hell, tasked with leading a group of "delinquent" girls on the path to getting a second chance at life and a chance of "redemption" from their "sins". The game explores matters of trust both in its narrative and, quite remarkably, through its mechanics, making it a thoroughly interesting example of how a game's thematic elements are woven throughout the entire fabric of the game rather than simply used as set dressing.

Here's a piece on Namco's Star Ixiom, a game from the company's PlayStation era that never, ever gets talked about — but which is actually really, really good! It's the follow-up to the company's Famicom Star Raiders-like, Star Luster, and is absolutely packed with both depth and a variety of things to do, with multiple ways to play according to whether you prefer a linear, mission-based structure or a more freeform, strategic game. Vastly underappreciated game that I'm bummed I never even heard of back when the PS1 was current — but thankfully, I can enjoy at my leisure today.

Finally, let's close off today with a look at SWERY's The Good Life, a game from this unusual and widely beloved creator's back catalogue that, once again, I never see anyone talking about. It is a thoroughly interesting game that combines elements of cosy life sim, murder mystery and open world adventure, allows you to turn into both a dog and a cat, and you can also ride sheep. It is somehow less "wacky" than it sounds, and has some real heart and soul to it — as well as a thoroughly convincing interpretation of the Lake District landscape to explore.

There are many other games I've covered on MoeGamer to date, so if you want more than the above links, stop by the All Games page on MoeGamer and check out an index of every game I've covered to one degree or another. Or you can hit up the article index (also available organised by date) and browse that way instead, if you prefer. Either way, if you've never paid MoeGamer a visit and you like the things I write about games, stop by and have a look around! It's my favourite thing that I've created on the Internet, and I intend to keep it standing for many years to come, so please enjoy what I've put there to date.

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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The post #oneaday Day 800: Some interesting games I've covered appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I mean, sure. I won't deny that my various dalliances with social media — particularly the "public-facing" kind such as Twitter (as it was before… what it is now) and Bluesky — have exposed me to people I might not have otherwise had the opportunity to get to know, and even allowed me to make some friends… I think, anyway.

But sometimes I find myself wondering if there's a reason I might not have come into contact with certain types of people were it not for the "global town square" nature of public-facing social media. I am starting to feel, looking at my Bluesky feed, like I felt when I first fell out of love with Twitter. It feels less about the conversation, sharing and making new friends, and more about performatively saying the right things in order to ensure that you are seen as a "good person" with the "correct" opinions. And I'm really fuckin' tired of that shit.

I won't go into specific examples right now, because that will date this post immediately — plus I'm not altogether keen in getting embroiled in the current "discussions", however indirectly — but suffice it to say for the moment that as soon as you start feeling genuine trepidation about saying certain things, lest the Mob pounce on you for something you might not have actually intended from what you said, then that's the time you should probably start thinking about how you are using social media, and how you might be able to make it better for yourself.

The simple answer is, of course, mute, unfollow or even block the people who are making you feel that way. On Bluesky in particular, the "nuclear block" function means that it is hard (though not impossible) for anyone you have blocked to check up on what you are saying. But on the other hand, I feel like blocking sends a certain message that perhaps isn't exactly what you intend; there's an inherent message of disapproval to it that might not be what you want to say; the same is true for unfollowing, to an arguably slightly lesser extent.

Probably the subtlest approach you can take is just to mute someone who is irritating you, but who you don't particularly want to send that message of disapproval to by blocking them. No-one knows when you've muted them, and you don't see their posts come up in your feed; you may, however, see that there have been posts from accounts you have muted, and the temptation is always to click that thing to see exactly what people have been saying. It's rarely anything worthwhile, and yet still we click. We always must click.

The trouble I find is that a lot of the absolute most insufferable people on social media are also people that I originally followed because I'm interested in the thing that their account suggested was their main interest! But at some point you have to ask the question: "am I still following this person out of a sense of obligation or the increasingly vain hope that they will post about the thing I followed them for, or because I want to see what they are actually posting on an hourly basis?" If the answer is the former, unfollowing or muting them is probably a good idea. Particularly if they aren't following you, in which case they probably won't even notice your absence.

But then that can, itself, be a bit disheartening. It can sometimes be frustrating to post something that I've worked hard on over on Bluesky and it seemingly pass by completely unnoticed, and then post some inane throwaway reply to someone about AI boosters being garbage people and get non-stop notifications of people liking and reposting that ultimately meaningless message for the next three days.

I think I'm just not built for social media. But, paradoxically, it's one of the only means I feel like I have of being able to connect with other people these days. And it sucks that it's that way. The alternative is just being alone, and I don't really want to do that — because I feel like I've proven beyond a doubt over the course of the last few years that if I just disappear quietly, absolutely no-one seems to notice or gives a shit.

And so, ever onward, until the end of time, I Post. Not because I want to, or because I enjoy it, but because I feel like I have to; like that is the only option to prove one's existence.

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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The post #oneaday Day 799: The exhausting town square appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

At some point, my then-wife and I made the decision to move back to Southampton. I forget exactly what the reasons for us doing this was — it may have been the fact that I had got a job at the then-new Apple Store in the WestQuay shopping centre, or it may have been some other reason — but regardless, we found ourselves coming back to Southampton, initially in a ground-floor flat in an area on what I will always think of as "the far side" of Southampton, known as Sholing.

My enduring memory of living in this place will always be, on our day moving in, walking in to the Indian takeaway that was next door to the block we lived in — as everyone knows, British moving days are fuelled by takeaway curry — and the proprietor of said establishment bellowing "WELCOME TO THE SHOLING!" as we walked in. It was a great little takeaway, that place, and I was always grateful for the warm welcome the owner provided.

We rented that flat off a woman who had a cat. We kind of wanted a cat, but we had lived in so many rented places that didn't allow pets that we didn't think to ask if we could have a cat. When we moved out, the landlady said that not only would she have been more than happy for us to have a cat in that flat, we could have had her cat. I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about that.

Anyway, it was a nice flat with some big rooms and a lovely oversized comfy sofa in the living room. My "study" of sorts, where the computer lived, was also a utility room, so I had to share space with the tumble dryer. My Sony Vaio desktop PC, which had been a loyal companion for a number of years, died in that flat, which I was annoyed about, because it was a great system. But one day it just started inexplicably screeching at me, and that was that. I eventually ended up replacing it with an iMac, which I got for a generous discount thanks to working at the Apple store.

At some point, we moved out of that flat. Again, I don't entirely remember why, but we ended up moving into the town centre of Southampton, into what appeared to be quite a new block of apartments. It was a really nice flat with a huge living room, a massive kitchen and a generously sized bedroom. It was a very comfortable place to live, with the only real hiccup being that one day I came home to the sound of rushing water downstairs in the block. It turned out the basement was flooding from somewhere, which ultimately knocked out the power in the whole building and meant I had to spend several days staying on a friend's sofa.

However, this is also the flat where my first wife and I parted ways, so as nice as it was, it will always be the most bittersweet of past places I lived, and the subject of a number of posts from around that time.

Due to a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, including not only the end of my marriage but also being bullied out of a job that I once loved, I ended up unable to stay in that lovely flat by myself, and having to temporarily move back in with my parents. At the time, I was mortified at the prospect of having to do this; today, I am eternally grateful for the fact they supported me while I picked myself up after such a massive setback.

While living back in my childhood home — which was still familiar despite having changed a bit — I eventually ended up meeting Andie, my now-wife. Both of us had experienced a somewhat challenging period in our respective lives, and ended up finding one another at what appeared to be a good time. I was also in the process of building a new career at that time, and I was gradually getting to a point where I felt I would be able to support myself again. So Andie and I eventually agreed to move in together.

We ended up moving to Chippenham in Wiltshire, which was near to where Andie was working at the time, and since I was working from home, I could do that from anywhere with an Internet connection. We had a nice house there, and were greeted almost immediately by the two cats who lived next door, Artie and Chester. Chester was a black cat who liked sitting on suitcases, and Artie was a long-haired tabby who liked shouting at towels. The pair of them were absolutely lovely cats who paid us a visit on many occasions, and we always welcomed them in.

During our time at Chippenham, we also decided that, in the absence of being able to have our own cats, we would try keeping rats, and we discovered the joy of these little creatures — as well as their sadly short lifespans. Also the smell, which you soon get used to. During our time at Chippenham, we had a wonderful time with Willow (who sadly did not live very long as she was quite poorly), Lara and Lucy.

Our house in Chippenham is another place I have somewhat mixed feelings about, as both Andie and I were facing numerous challenges in our own lives at that point in time — among other things, I lost my job at GamePro when we all logged in one morning to find out the parent company had unceremoniously laid us all off — and also there was apparently a murder in the Sainsbury's car park that was, like, two minutes away from our house.

Our next move was, once again for me, a return to Southampton. We found ourselves a lovely flat whose only mild inconvenience was the fact it was on the third floor, which made moving everything in a bit of a pain. We ended up having to buy a whole new sofa because the one we had bought while we were at Chippenham simply wouldn't go up the staircase; it lived in the garage for a whole year, and thankfully survived, though we ended up replacing it some time later.

This flat, I have fond memories of. Both Andie and I had overcome some significant troubles in our own lives, and things started to seem like they were getting back on track. I still wasn't in what I would call a position of stable employment, but I was getting by, initially by writing about odious mobile and social games, and subsequently being a founder staff member of the now-defunct USgamer.

We also still kept rats in this flat — Lucy, Clover and Socks — though after the last survivor of the various pairs we had cared for, our dear Clover, hung in there for a lot longer than we expected she would, we decided that we should maybe take a little break from keeping pets. It was sad to eventually say goodbye to Clover, but we feel like she stuck around for us even as she got old and life clearly became a bit harder for her.

Eventually circumstances dictated that Andie and I would be in a position to actually buy a house instead of renting, and that's how we ended up where we are now — and have been here for over ten years at this point. This is officially the longest I have lived in one place for, except for my childhood home. As I said yesterday, we're not ruling out moving someplace a bit bigger some time — just not yet — and we've done a lot to make this place into our home — not least of which is having cats. The dearly departed Ruby and Meg will always be in our hearts, and Patti and Oliver bring us so much joy in the here and now I cannot imagine ever being without such wonderful companions again.

I've lived in many places over the years. All of them hold their own memories, both good and bad. All of them have helped make me into the person I am today, for better or worse, and I'm sure I will always remember them all.

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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The post #oneaday Day 798: Home is where the heart has been, part 2 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Every so often, I like to think back over the various places I've lived, because they all have different memories attached to them. Some memories are good; some are bad. Most are good. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I do have good memories at every place I've lived; it's just that some happen to have more bad memories to go along with them than others.

My first house that I lived in is the only one I don't remember at all, because we moved away when I was just one year old or so. We kept a vague attachment to the area in which it was, though, because some friends of my parents still lived in that area, and one of them was also our family dentist. When we'd go to visit these friends, my parents would often point out the house in which we used to live, but while it was interesting to know, I felt no real attachment to it. I felt more attachment to the homes of these friends, as we visited them quite a few times in my youth.

The next place I lived is the house my parents still live in to this day. That house will always be "home" more than anywhere else, I think. It's a nice house with an unusual split-level design, with the living room on a "middle" floor between the ground floor and the floor with all the bedrooms on it, and a garage that is below the ground floor, but still above ground, if that makes sense. (To put it another way, you go up some steps to get to the front door, and the garage is on the level where those steps start.)

My parents have made a few changes to that house over the years, but it's mostly still the house I grew up in. A bit older, a bit dustier, but most of the things I will always remember about it are still in the same place they always have been, and looking the same as they always have done. The cupboard where the biscuits are still squeaks incredibly loudly — we used to joke it was an "alarm" for someone "biccy-nicking" — and the upstairs toilet flush mechanism still doesn't quite work properly.

The first place I moved to after leaving home for university was a halls of residence. Well, technically I spent a week staying in another halls of residence for a pre-term music course, but I consider that more of a "trip" than actually "moving in" there. The place I spent a week was a bit of a shithole, being an old tower block that has, at some point in the intervening years, been demolished. The place where I spent my first year of university, however, was really nice.

It was a brand new complex when we moved in, meaning that everything was clean and in good condition. Remarkably, it was still clean and in good condition when we moved out, as the occupants of our flat were all pretty considerate about such things. Okay, most of us occasionally let the washing up pile up a bit, but we eventually all settled into a routine of keeping things neat and tidy in the communal kitchen, then if we wanted our rooms to be a pigsty we could. But since they were pretty nice rooms, none of us did.

I have fond memories of living in that flat, even if it's unthinkable now that I once lived out of a single en-suite room that was my own, along with a communal kitchen. It was good times with good people, and I was enjoying being at university. I have a few memories from there that make me wince slightly out of embarrassment, but on the whole I have no real bad memories there whatsoever.

In my second year, we all moved out into houses and flats around the city. I had agreed to move in with a friend's girlfriend (who was also my friend; the boyfriend in question was going to university in another city) and we had a fair amount of trouble finding a decent place for an affordable amount of rent; I forget exactly why, but I do remember it being a stressful time finding it.

Eventually we found a flat that looked pretty nice, but was in fairly shabby, dirty condition when we viewed it. The landlord promised that it would be cleaned up in time for us to move in. It very much was not, which meant that our moving in day was mostly spent cleaning. We eventually got it looking presentable, though, and once we were settled, it was a nice flat with absolutely enormous rooms. There was a huge living room at one end, then down a corridor there were the two bedrooms: my friend's first, then mine at the far end.

Oddly, my most vivid memories of living in this flat are of the fact that I lived two minutes' walk away from a Blockbuster Video, and quite often went in there to buy games and DVDs. I remember plucking up the courage to buy an erotic Kathy Lloyd Playboy DVD on one occasion, but I also remember buying Baldur's Gate II and Diablo II there.

This flat was a fair distance away from both the university and the rest of my friends, so I quite often spent time "couch-surfing", staying over at various people's houses so I didn't have to walk all the way home. My flatmate was quite often away to visit her boyfriend, so during those times, rather than sit all on my own, I would tend to spend my time with friends.

In my third year of university, we again found ourselves having trouble finding a place — but this time we lucked out by finding an absolutely lovely house that was incredibly cheap rent-wise. Sure, it was in a notoriously fairly shitty area, but the house was in excellent condition, and the landlords didn't seem to be scam artists. It was also, to date, the only house I have lived in that literally looked like the drawing of a house you draw if you can't draw a house. (See illustration.) That year, I was supposed to have a second housemate along with my friend's girlfriend, but despite always paying her rent and bills on time, she never even moved in. I don't know what happened there — and I was mildly gutted, as I quite fancied her — but still, she helped keep that house nice and affordable for the two of us, so we were grateful!

Again, I have fond memories of this house. There was a nice TV cabinet in the living room, where I put my enormous CRT TV that I bought from a second-hand shop in Portswood. It was surrounded by shelves, where I put my new PS2, and I vividly remember a friend of mine, upon visiting, telling me how much he loved the blue LED on the eject button. It is pretty nice, to be fair.

We didn't mow the lawn once during our time at that house. Well, not until it was approaching time to leave, at which point we discovered why you should mow your lawn more than once a year.

My most enduring memory of that particular house is probably my friends coming down and bringing a copy of the newly released Silent Hill 2 with them. I was given the task of playing it while the others watched, but the pair of them both fell asleep after a hearty curry and some relatively heavy drinking, and only woke up as I was rolling credits on the "In Water" ending.

We also had NTL cable in that house. I remember signing up for one night of the Adult Channel and setting the VCR to record it all. I also remember being mildly disappointed in the overall quality of the smut on the resulting tape, but it served its purpose.

In my fourth year of university, my friend had moved on, so I was moving in with a new friend I'd made through the university Theatre Group, along with some other people she knew but I didn't. We found a really lovely house that, again, was very affordable. It had a weirdly narrow kitchen, though, and a strange arrangement at the back where there was a standalone toilet, then a bathroom next to it. These were both on the ground floor, behind the kitchen. It was a very odd arrangement, but we learned to live with it.

One unfortunate memory I have of that place is, being the first one there, thinking I had pick of the rooms and thus picking the big one at the front. I subsequently found out that my friend had bagsied that room first, but I had already moved all my stuff in by then. She didn't seem to mind getting the room next door. She laid down laminate flooring as the first thing she did when she arrived. She was… like that.

I have good memories of that house, despite the fact that I didn't really interact with any of the other residents. My friend was absolutely never there, and I didn't really know the other two guys at all. I was intimidated by the one who was growing weed in his wardrobe, and the other one just gave no indication whatsoever that he really wanted to get to know me at all. They all seemed to appreciate my big TV and surround sound system in the living room, though.

I spent a lot of time drinking wine and… enjoying the company of someone who was quite special to me at that house. We'd drink until we were giggly, watch Spaced and Black Books on repeat, and… well, other stuff, too. It was nice, though I ended up wanting more from the arrangement than she did. Still, I have no regrets.

After finally finishing university, I moved to Winchester with someone I knew from my music course, who was training to be a midwife. We were extremely fortunate in this case to find a gorgeous flat almost in the dead centre of Winchester. It was fully furnished — and well furnished — and just a beautiful, beautiful place. We absolutely loved living there, but we could only enjoy it for a year, because after that the landlord decided that they wanted it back so their kid could live in it, which I suppose is all right.

I fitted an extension phone socket in that flat, without any consideration of the fact that I probably wasn't allowed to hammer that many pins into the walls of a flat I didn't own. Still, I wouldn't have been able to access the Internet if I didn't do that, and given that I was having my first contact with Final Fantasy XI around that time, I needed that Internet connection.

Probably my fondest memory of that particular flat is one I've shared numerous times before: the time I had several friends over to play LAN party Halo, and we all got drunk and took our shirts off. My housemate came home in the middle of all this, took one look at the living room full of half-naked, drunk men and declared the game "Gaylo" which, you know, fair.

It was in this flat I was first starting to have doubts about teaching — the career I had, at that time, chosen. While I never developed a problem as such, there were numerous evenings when I would seek, shall we say, chemical comfort after a particularly hard and trying day. Mostly gin and tonic, though a friend did once leave me an "emergency joint" that I made use of on one particular evening that felt like an emergency, only to discover it was so strong that after finishing it, I immediately threw up (in the toilet) and then passed out on the couch. To be fair, after that I wasn't thinking about the day I'd just had at the chalkface.

After being turfed out of that flat, we moved into a strange little cottage that backed onto a little river, quite close to the previous flat, so we didn't have to move far. It was in a bit of an awkward location on the Winchester ring road, though, and it subsequently transpired that the place was full of damp and mould that the landlady tried to blame on us when we eventually moved out. My housemate, who doesn't take shit from anyone, took her to court and… resolved the situation. I don't know exactly what went down, but I know we did eventually get our deposits back.

It was while I was living in that house that I met my first wife online, and after she moved back to the UK after spending some time abroad, she would often come down to visit and stay. As a result, I have some bittersweet memories of that time; I think enough time has passed now that they err mostly on the side of "sweet", to be honest, but I do know that my housemate did not like my wife-to-be very much. Still, it never came to a confrontation or anything, so that's all right, I guess.

After that, my wife-to-be and I moved away from Southampton so we could both be close to the schools in which we were working, which were in Surrey. Our new flat was technically in a shitty area, but it was actually a really lovely place; some sort of huge converted single-floor house with enormously high ceilings and massive rooms.

It was while we were living at this house that I had a nervous breakdown and finally determined once and for all that teaching was not, in fact, my chosen career. (That didn't stop me trying again once more later, but I recognised the signs and escaped from that before anything bad happened.) It's a shame, because my memories of this place are otherwise nice; it was a lovely place to live, and I was sorry to have to leave it.

You know what? That's two and a half thousand words, so I think I'm going to call time there and ponder the rest tomorrow. This has been a fun exercise, though, so join me tomorrow as I remember other places I have lived! Gosh, I bet you can't wait.

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The post #oneaday Day 797: Home is where the heart has been, part 1 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am having an evening off from exercise. I bought some dumbbells and have been using those in alternation with my walks out on the Common. This appears to be a good thing, though my complete lack of any weight training whatsoever for a good long while now means that I have proven myself correct in purchasing a fairly low-impact set to get up and running with. I can definitely feel when I've used them, too, which is probably the most satisfying thing about weight training — that feeling that you've actually done something, and that you can now enjoy a rest while your body recovers.

Some combination of the exercise and the calorie counting is paying off, too — in the last two weeks I've lost about 6 pounds, and I'm currently the lowest weight I've been for quite some time. I still have a very long way to go, of course, but it is encouraging to feel like I am working past what, in my mind, has been a bit of a plateau for some time.

The trouble I've had in the past is just sticking with it and remaining motivated — it's all too easy to reach a point where you're just knackered and want to throw up your hands and say "fuck it, I'm going to eat an entire bag of Haribo". You can get away with that occasionally — even within the context of a calorie-controlled diet! — but if you start doing it, like, a lot, then that's when you start having difficulty. And that is something I've struggled with in the past; my motivation fell off, I plunged back into bad habits, and any good work I might have done ended up undone, often with additional "damage" on top.

No more, though! He says, aware that he very seriously contemplated getting McDonald's for lunch today. But then here's the thing: there's absolutely nothing stopping me having a McDonald's for lunch, so long as I build the rest of my day around that and don't go overly crazy with what I order. Today, having resisted the McDonald's lunch and having been fairly restrained generally, I have been able to have Quite A Few Digestive biscuits without any guilt whatsoever. And it's nice to feel like I have the flexibility to be able to do that.

I'm aware that right now, my relatively generous calorie allowance is given to me due to the fact that I am large and thus need more calories to just… function. Over time, as I lose weight and approach something more akin to a regular human being's proportions, that calorie allowance will drop. And I won't lie, I'm a little bit concerned about that, because right now I can very easily fill my current allowance and even feel like I want a bit more. But at the same time, I'm also aware that as you change and establish habits and different ways of thinking, the things that you think you "need" will change, too. Once I am smaller, I will need fewer calories to simply remain upright, and — I hope — will thus feel proportionally less inclined to consume a lot of calories.

I've already found that following the diet for a relatively protracted period of time results in my appetite being a lot less than it is when I'm at my worst — and I'm sure that pattern will continue, particularly if I can continue to develop the self-discipline I need. It's that more than anything; I'm sure that I have done a fair amount of "self-medicating" with food over the years, and that, as much as anything else, has contributed to how I am today. If I can develop alternative coping mechanisms that have a more healthy outcome, so much the better.

So yes. Anyway, upshot of all this is that I'm quite tired this evening after doing some dumbbells yesterday and a walk the day before, so I'm having the evening off with no guilt.

Oh, also I guess there was a solar eclipse this evening, too, so that's cool. The moon didn't explode, so I guess the chap who went into that pyramid back in 1930 successfully destroyed the shrine to Re. Good job, that man. I could never manage it.

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The post #oneaday Day 796: Midweek appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Much has been written by people much smarter than me about how the "cosy" and "wholesome" spaces are actually not all that wholesome at all — and in fact can harbour some of the truly most odious, harmful outlooks on life it's possible to have. Fairly high on this list is the complete unwillingness to be challenged by fiction in any way whatsoever — and I don't even mean "avoids material with complicated and difficult themes that even the most strong-stomached would find uncomfortable"; I mean absolutely completely and utterly unwilling to deal with something perfectly normal on the grounds that it isn't "wholesome" by the exceedingly narrow definition they have inscribed inside their own head.

Here's the post that kicked off the whole discussion today. It apparently hails from a mod for the recently full-released Fields of Mistria that makes a character "SFW" (safe for work).

To be clear: Fields of Mistria is not a porn game. It is not even an ecchi game — one with mild lewdity that stops short of full-on, explicit nudity or sexual content. These are some characters from Fields of Mistria:

And this is the specific character the commenter above is getting upset about:

Busty? Moderately, but not excessively so. Provocatively dressed? Mildly, but I think we can infer from her facial expression, pose and general demeanour that this is a character that is supposed to be sexy — and moreover, one who is very comfortable with that. This is emphatically not the same as her sprites being "sexual". I know nothing about Fields of Mistria but I can immediately infer the intent behind this character just from looking at these three sprites. And, indeed, her official description backs up pretty much everything I suspected about her — and none of it involves her sexual proclivities:

Juniper is a mysterious sorceress drawn to Mistria when she learns that magical mists and monsters of legend have begun appearing in the area after the recent earthquake. She then starts up a bath house. The bath house is largely a cover for testing her newly empowered potions and spells on the player and other unsuspecting townsfolk, usually resulting in buffs (and occasionally funny accidents)

The crucial thing though? This is not porn. This is not even ecchi levels of provocativeness. (Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things in an appropriate context, anyway!)

This is a character in a fantasy game, dressed in a style that fits with the personality and aesthetic the writers decided that she should have, in the context of the fantasy world. There is nothing offensive about this character unless you specifically choose to make it offensive.

And that is precisely what the commenter above has chosen to do. Not only that — and this really pisses me off — but they have chosen to weaponise autism as their justification for this.

No! You do not get to do that! I am autistic and fuckin' love titties! Your autism has nothing to do with you feeling "uncomfortable about her sprites". And, furthermore, it is the height of fucking disrespect to an artist (and the writers behind that character) to request that a third party deface their artwork so you don't have to confront your inability to process a non-sexual image of a female character that happens to dress in a way that shows a bit of skin.

Go outside! There are people who dress like this! (Maybe not the last one, unless it's a special occasion.) There are people whose bodies look like this! If you go to a swimming pool or beach — shock, horror! — you may even see someone dressed like the image in the middle! If your brain's first response to seeing someone dressed like any of the women above — but particularly the ones with visible cleavage, who may or may not have above-average sized breasts — is to immediately start shouting "I AM THINKING ABOUT SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH YOU" and emitting the "awooga" sound from old Tex Avery cartoons via some unknown part of your body, you have a problem!

And, I hate to break this to you, but it is not autism. It is, at its core, an unwillingness to see a woman as anything other than a sexual object for your own potential gratification. You can try and make yourself out to be "wholesome" by very publicly shouting and screaming about how you don't approve of this and how it makes you so uncomfortable and how this lascivious temptation must be removed from your sight, lest you know not what you might do… but in reality you simply have a problem with a woman dressing the way she wants to dress, expressing herself the way she wants to express herself, and, highly likely, not having sex with you.

I will close with a quote on the matter from the Japanese translator, Thomas James:

Shit like this is why I give wholesome games as a movement a constant stink-eye because what that audience often wants isn't relaxed, low stakes fare. They want content with zero intellectual calories that won't challenge them for being emotionally stunted. What a miserably boring way to consume art.

Quite.

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The post #oneaday Day 795: Titties - deal with them appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

On my walks on the Common, I have been rediscovering some of the playlists I made many years ago, and I thought today I would share some of my favourite motivational tracks with you. I highly recommend adding these to an exercise playlist if you're struggling with motivation!

Bein' Friends (Super Smash Bros./Earthbound Beginnings)

I wouldn't say I'm the biggest fan of Super Smash Bros. — though I did make an honest attempt to get into it with Ultimate — but I do absolutely love this theme from the "Onett" stage. It's a good one to kick off a workout with because it combines drama, whimsy and triumph into a delightful tune that always makes me smile.

The Elite (Split/Second)

Here's another great one to kick off a workout with, because the beginning just builds anticipation — a fine accompaniment to a warmup, or just as you're getting into the swing of things. Then the main part of the track kicks in and you're ready to explode into action. And possibly have a near-uncontrollable hankering to play Split/Second again. Man, that game was good — and criminally mishandled in the marketplace.

Perfection! Space Elementary School Band! (Space Channel 5 Part 2)

Man, I could pick any number of tracks from both Space Channel 5 games to put in here, but I'll try and restrain myself… a bit. Anyway, this track demonstrates one of the things I love about the soundtrack as a whole: the way that each section starts in a familiar way before branching off into something completely different and sometimes unexpected. I love the high tempo of this one — it's a favourite part of the game, and recalling my enjoyment of the sequence that this track accompanies is a powerful motivating factor, for sure.

Riders of the Light (Bayonetta)

Fly Me To The Moon is, understandably, the Bayonetta theme that gets all the attention, but I always thought this theme was just… better, generally. I know I certainly got absolutely hyped up any time a battle was accompanied by it — and it works great for motivational music, too. My favourite bit is that piano-heavy bit after the initial section. Such delicious chord sequences.

Be The One (Trauma Team)

Finale music is, as you might expect, absolutely great for motivation. This one, from the beginning of the buildup to the grand finale of Atlus' incredible game, Trauma Team, is a good example. We're not taking things too over the top, but we are making it feel like we should be taking whatever we are doing seriously. It doesn't matter if you're out for a walk in the park, putting up shelves or cutting into living flesh (with the flesh owner's consent, of course) — this is music to get you In The Mood to… well, Be The One.

Sins of the Father (Beyond Good and Evil)

Man, what a great game Beyond Good and Evil was. We're never, ever going to see that sequel. But that doesn't matter, because you can put this banging track on when you're doing exercise and you'll feel like you can do anything! Particularly during the bit with the dramatic buildup and the creepy chanting. This track has a few good sections that feels like they're good for "exploding" into action. You'll know them when you hear them.

A Toccata into Blood-Soaked Darkness (Castlevania: Curse of Darkness)

Hitting a wall? What you need is Castlevania! The combination of overdramatic orchestra and Gothic-infused rock and electronic rhythms has always got me fired up, and this particular track is a personal favourite of mine — even though it hails from one of the Castlevania games that I haven't actually played. (PAL copies of this one are pricy today.)

Got all that? Should get you through an evening's workout. And if it doesn't, blast out One-Winged Angel to finish off your session. That'll sort you right out.

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The post #oneaday Day 794: Motivational music appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Prior to USgamer's closure in 2020, I backed up most of my articles that I could find and/or remember. I saved them as local copies on my computer, with the intention of gradually republishing at least some of them on MoeGamer — a process I started but still need to get back to. (Some of these articles found their way over to VG247, but they're buried in an archive and not exactly what I'd call "easily accessible" today, so I have absolutely no qualms in taking these pieces and republishing them myself.)

Anyway, after my enforced reinstall of Windows a little while ago, it suddenly occurred to me that I might have lost these locally saved archives. Thankfully, I had apparently had the foresight to back them up to my Google Drive (I know I should get off Google, I know) and thus I was able to recover them. After extracting them to my Documents folder, I thought I'd have a browse through a few to remind myself of what I'd written back then.

The first one I attempted to open — a review of Imageepoch's Time and Eternity, a game which I liked but none of the rest of the Internet did — opened for a split-second before automatically redirecting to some website I'd never heard of: "spl.zeotap.com", which is apparently an "AI-powered Customer Data Platform that helps enterprises unlock the true value of their customer data". Of course it's a fucking AI thing now — though I don't know what it was back in 2020 when I archived these pages. Whatever it was, it is broken, because every time I open certain articles from my locally saved archive, they immediately redirect to part of "ZeoTap"'s website that no longer exists, with no way of telling the browser to go "Back" and just look at the fucking page I was trying to look at in the first place.

Thankfully, this isn't the case for everything in the archive — and I've determined that you can tell which ones will fail by the file size of the main article HTML file — and I also found a workaround using Firefox's Developer Tools. Unfortunately it's not a workaround I can just apply globally; I have to do it every time I open one of these bastard articles. So for the sake of my future self, I'm going to recount the process here, just in case:

• Open a new tab
• Open the Developer Tools console
• Go to the Network tab of Developer Tools
• Drag the problematic HTML file into the browser window
• Scroll through the stuff in the Network tab that appears until you find the problematic ZeoTap URL request
• Right click on it and choose "Block URL"
• Drag the HTML file into the browser window again
• The article should now appear, and you can close Developer Tools to read it
• You have to repeat this process each time you open a new tab or browser window

This is fucking annoying though, isn't it? I would have thought that the entire point of saving a web page locally would be so that you could, you know, look at it locally without having to be online — or, indeed, dependent on URLs that no longer resolve correctly. But apparently at some point in USgamer's history, certain pages on its site became so dependent on whatever the fuck this ZeoTap thing is that it became impossible to just look at the damned pages. And that dependency is somehow maintained when you save the page for offline viewing.

Well, you might think, surely it's just a matter of looking at the page source, searching for that troublesome URL and removing the bit of the HTML file that references it? You'd think, wouldn't you?! But there are so many fucking Javascript files, so many CSS files, so many external HTML files that are loaded when just looking at one sodding page, which, I'll remind you, is saved locally, that it's impossible to track down which one of these myriad dependencies is causing the problem!

I remember a while back, someone posted on Bluesky that they looked at a page on somewhere like PC Gamer, and before the article had appeared the browser had downloaded something like 20MB of… stuff to their computer. I think back to the good old, bad old days of dial-up, when downloading a single megabyte of anything took upwards of an hour at the best of times, and wonder exactly how we let the Web become such an unwieldy mess.

(Ads and tracking is the answer, of course. But you knew that.)

Anyway, thankfully I have at least found a workaround that appears to work for the articles that are affected, so I guess I will prioritise getting those pieces onto MoeGamer sooner rather than later!

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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The post #oneaday Day 793: The Web is so broken even offline copies of pages are fucked up appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is a small thing and some might argue "beating three video games" as not being something particularly worth crowing about, but I am seeing this as a victory for several reasons.

Firstly, it's something I've been "meaning to get around to" for literally years at this point, and have never just, y'know, made the time to do it. But with my lovely MiSTer Multisystem setup on my childhood CRT, it felt like the right time to give these games the time and attention they deserve. Because they're all really, really good! Even with Illusion of Time's absolutely dogshit English translation!

Secondly, one of the reasons I've been putting it off for so long is because I knew I wanted to write about each of these games as I played them, and I wanted to do each of them justice while I did so. Now I've written an article about each of them (with the exception of The Granstream Saga and Actraiser, which I will… contemplate doing in the near future) of about 3-4,000 words each, I am satisfied. I think I have done them justice. And I am glad I have finally taken the time to experience something that I was inadvertently keeping just out of arm's reach by myself. There was nothing stopping me playing these games at any time. I just didn't.

I suppose you can look on it as a sort of mental health issue. When you build something up in your brain to be somehow "important", it can start to seem further and further out of reach — particularly if, in your life generally, you are also pursuing far-off goals that will take a long time to accomplish. As such, you start thinking that you'll never get around to The Thing, because it has taken on such a scary amount of "importance" in your brain that you subconsciously start avoiding it so you don't have to face it directly.

I'm aware that this sounds stupid! We're talking about some video games that are commonly agreed to be very good, so why should I find myself not wanting to "face them"?

Well, that's the thing about mental health. It doesn't always make sense. It doesn't always make you behave rationally, or see things for what they really are. And that's why, at times like this, you need to celebrate the victories that you have achieved. Because if you can achieve victory over something that seemed like it was far off, but was actually relatively straightforward to accomplish when you get down to it, you can also achieve victory over those longer-term goals, as your brain has been treating them in almost the exact same way.

Since, as I've said, I have a bunch of my own long-term goals to accomplish — primarily with regard to my health, fitness and weight — thinking about things in these terms is immensely valuable. You wouldn't think that completing a 30 year old SNES game would provide motivation to better your life in general, would you? But that's what I'm feeling right now, and I'm not sure I've explained it 100% effectively. Regardless, that is what I'm feeling right now — and I'm going to do my best to ride that wave of motivation as far as I can.

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The post #oneaday Day 792: A goal, complete appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

But there is another issue which I'm not sure is quite the same thing. It's definitely related, but I'm not sure it's exactly the same thing. It doesn't really matter. Anyway, what I'm talking about is the fact that Digestive biscuits that are more elaborate than "chocolate" are smaller than standard plain and chocolate Digestives.

I spotted this a while back with the caramel ones, which are very nice. I'm pretty certain they used to be the same size as a regular Digestive, but now their diameter is noticeably and significantly smaller.

Why is this? I suspect the answer is simple: to make the thing with the more elaborate recipe have the same number of calories as the old thing. Indeed, this is the case with both the caramel and the new "Jaffa Cake" Digestives (very disappointing, by the way — they might as well have just called these "Chocolate Orange" flavour, but then gullible idiots like me would probably be less likely to pick them up and go "ooh, Jaffa Cake Digestives, those sound nice" and buy them) and, looking on the McVities website, it is also true for the new "Seriously Chocolatey" variety, which is basically a chocolate digestive with a chocolate chip, cocoa-y biscuit instead of a regular Digestive. All of these varieties, along with the common-or-garden chocolate Digestive, have approximately 80 calories per biscuit.

If we look at the calories per 100g, the picture should become clearer. Regular-ass chocolate Digestives are 496 calories per 100g, caramel ones are… hang on a minute, 479? And the Jaffa Cake ones are 478?

This leads me to the conclusion that, presumably, the extra bit of filling in caramel and Jaffa Cake digestives makes them weigh a little more than a regular Digestive, hence their size has been reduced to compensate, and that, in turn, makes them the same number of calories per biscuit as a regular chocolate Digestive. Does that work? My maths isn't functional enough this evening to calculate if that makes sense.

But anyway! It's not the point! When I have a Digestive, I want it to be a honking great biscuit that is eminently suitable for dunking in a cup of hot liquid! Regular Digestives are just the right size for your average mug in that you can dunk them without there being a lot of clearance around the outside, making it less likely that you will accidentally drop the whole thing. The smaller ones are far too small for this purpose.

If the answer to this is some misguided attempt to make all Digestives equal in terms of calories and thus make people assume they are equally "healthy" — to that I say they are biscuits! Anyone eating a biscuit is not concerned with being healthy at that exact moment in time! Consequently, I also suggest that it is okay for a more elaborate biscuit to weigh a little more and have more calories than its more common counterpart! If you really want to have a biscuit and kid yourself that you're "being healthy", the Rich Teas — and, if you really hate yourself, Snack-a-Jacks — are right over there!

In a funny way, this reminds me of the time back when the iPad first launched, when "HD" versions of apps would cost £5 more because they had more pixels in them, despite being functionally (and often aesthetically) identical. It's all part of the tapestry of dark patterns that Capitalism uses to squeeze money out of us. And I should probably feel bad that it works on me.

Still, caramel Digestives are nice, even if the Jaffa Cake ones are a bit disappointing. Biscuits!

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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The post #oneaday Day 791: The better thing shouldn't be smaller appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I did a brief (about 15 minute) workout using them to do a few different things, including some curls, goblet squats, lunges, twists and shoulder presses, and dear Lord am I feeling the regret today. I think I might have overdone it a bit, given that both my arms and legs have been feeling a bit wobbly today and my left buttock is experiencing a sensation I can only describe as "repeated twinges" — and I was exhausted when I woke up this morning.

I don't think it's a bad idea to do some mild weight training at home, though, so I've ordered myself a set of wuss-ass pastel-coloured dumbbells for girls in an attempt to shame myself into being capable of doing something more manly. Or, more accurately — because I hope I have made abundantly clear on numerous occasions, I have absolutely zero desire to appear particularly "manly" — I have purchased myself some relatively low-impact exercise equipment which is probably what my body, in its current state, needs to get kickstarted into activity again. Big metal dumbbells can come later. Much later.

The walks around the Common are good, and I think they are having an effect. On past occasions when I have done exercise, though, I've found that complementing the cardio with some solid weight training of some description (usually on Machines if I've been a gym member at the time) tends to have an actually quite noticeable effect, particularly on my arms, and I think it's probably time to start incorporating that side of things again if I actually want to take this seriously.

And I kind of do! I mean, I know I want (and need) to lose weight, but for some reason I'm feeling oddly… enthused about the prospect of Getting Some Fitness Done at the moment. The last time I felt like this I was watching How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift?, which was a work of anime genius that I should probably watch again, or at least read the manga, which was also excellent.

Anyway, all this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm having a night off doing anything useful and/or productive this evening, and I shall feel no guilt about that whatsoever! I'm not even going to write about Terranigma, even though I finished it last night. I will save that for tomorrow or the weekend — at least partly because my work announced our two Big Projects for the year today — the Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack which had already been revealed, and The DOOM Collection, which everyone kind of already knew about. But still. Not that I'm suggesting my online ramblings will take away from professional marketing, but I kind of just want to let that be out there tonight — and, indeed, to have a nice relaxing night off for myself.

Now the question is: what to spend that night off doing? Do I go play some more Visco arcade games? Do I play some Forza Motorsport? Do I start something completely new? Deciding that is going to occupy the next half an hour or so, I suspect, so let's leave that there. Also I need a wee.

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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The post #oneaday Day 790: Twinge appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I say I don't feel able to cycle, but I don't know that. I feel like I am probably too heavy for your average bike, though, and I don't really want to put myself in a situation where I'm putting that to the test, because of the potential embarrassment. As such, "being able to cycle again" is one of many things that are filed away under "things to do if you are ever able to successfully shift all this weight ever again". A box that has been frustratingly out of reach for quite a few years at this point.

Thing is, I know I can shift weight, because I did it once before. Unfortunately, the method I used last time around — following the Slimming World programme — hasn't really worked for me on subsequent attempts for various reasons, and I also found that I've never had quite as strong a connection with any Slimming World consultants since the chap mentioned in that linked post. Paul Glass was someone truly special, and it was a sad day when he had to leave us. (He's not dead, to my knowledge, he just chose to finish being a consultant for his own reasons.)

And it's frustrating, because I remember how great it felt to be if not "slim", then certainly more "normal-sized", according to my own self-perception. I remember leaning back in the car and smiling at the fact I could see my whole body rather than just my belly. I could cross my legs. I wasn't repulsed by my own reflection. I could buy clothes from regular shops. I wouldn't hesitate at the prospect of reuniting with old friends based on the shame I feel over my current appearance. And, yes, I could ride a bike without worrying about it.

I want those great feelings back again! And it's not as if I'm not trying to get back there — even having some mild success through counting calories and getting a bit of tentative exercise with my walks in the park — but it's a long road ahead of me, and I'm also conscious of the fact that at the end of that road, if I ever get there, I have to face a lifelong fear and get surgery to sort out this hernia that I've been dealing with for probably getting on for a decade at this point. And that fucking hernia is one of the biggest things holding me back right now; it's that which I'm most self-conscious about in terms of my appearance, it's that which makes a lot of things a lot more difficult to do than they perhaps could be, and it's that which, at times, still causes me pain that I can't really do a whole lot about until I've made it through this whole process.

The end result of all this effort will be worth it. I have to keep telling myself that, and reminding myself strongly about it when I feel like just giving up on the whole thing and just trying to live with the size and shape I am right now.

But I'm not at all happy with that. I would go so far as to say that my feelings towards my own appearance and general physical state are the absolute worst things in my life right now. You might not understand quite how all-encompassing those feelings can be if you've not been in this state before — and believe me, I strongly discourage you from doing so if at all possible — but I really do feel like if I can fix this, it will make my life immeasurably better in almost every possible way.

That goal really does seem so far away, though. Some days it's hard to keep going, but I guess it's one of those things you just have to take a step at a time, and eventually you will get there, so long as you don't take any particularly stupid detours along the way.

I am mildly prone to stupid detours, is the trouble. But let's just see where I end up as time goes on. Maybe one day I'll get back on a bike.

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The post #oneaday Day 789: Longing for the saddle appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Yes, I know we have some Big Names lined up for the rest of the year, one of which everyone already knows about (The Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack, which is releasing alongside Evercade Nexus in October) and another of which is pretty bloody obvious if you've been paying any sort of attention, even though it hasn't officially been announced as yet. And don't get me wrong, both of those carts are great. I am proud of the immense amount of work we put into them, and I think people are going to have some thoroughly pleasant surprises with them besides just rediscovering some old favourites. (There are also two more carts we haven't talked about at all yet, which are also going to be a fun time.)

But Visco Arcade 1 and 2? These carts reflect one of the main reasons I, personally, got into Evercade in the first place: the celebration and enjoyment of weird and wonderful stuff that I've never heard of before, and which has never seen official rereleases for one reason or another. (That's not quite true in the case of the Visco games, in that current rights holder PixelHeart sells NEOGEO cartridges, but the ability to enjoy those is dependent on you owning a working NEOGEO, which is… not something a lot of people have just lying around… although it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, the upcoming NEOGEO AES+ has on the market. But I digress.)

Anyway, yes. Visco Arcade 1 and 2 are both jam-packed full of games I'd mostly never heard of prior to working on the cartridges, and which are now titles I find myself playing and enjoying quite a lot. I'd previously come across the shoot 'em up Andro Dunos and the fighting game Breaker's (although we all learned recently about the apostrophe in the name, which is seemingly not common knowledge despite it being right there in the logo) and I also knew the Drift Out series by reputation (if only because everyone always mistakes Gaelco's excellent World Rally series, which is on Evercade too, for Neo Drift Out) but the others? Brand new to me.

Helicopter shoot 'em up action in Ashura Blaster! Time-travelling jet fighter shoot 'em up fun in Asuka & Asuka! Triple weapon space blasting in Galmedes! Driving a definitely-not-Volkswagen Beetle around mazes and hunting for treasure in Maze of Flott! Hacking and slashing Sengoku-style in Ganryu! Delightful, one and all.

Two of my favourite discoveries are Battle Flip Shot and Bang Bead, two games that are effectively evolutions of Pong, in which you control colourful anime-style characters and try to knock down targets behind your opponent. I partly like these because they're just simple, fun, well-presented arcade games — and I suspect they'd be great with a friend — but I mostly like them because they remind me of a Klik and Play project my friend Edd made once, which he dubbed Impact!

Impact! was a game in which two of the default, included sprites from Klik and Play — "Merlin" and "Street Puncher" — faced off against one another on a top-down representation of a tennis court. They then proceeded to knock an energy ball back and forth, each attempting to hit the item of fast food behind their rival in order to either score points or deplete the opponent's energy bar, I forget which. I believe Street Puncher guarded a hamburger, while Merlin guarded a pizza, though it may have been the other way around. There were lots of burping and farting noises, and it was an endearingly stupid, completely unbalanced but enormously fun way to while away an afternoon with a friend.

I couldn't stop myself from laughing when I booted up Battle Flip Shot for the first time and realised what the game was. "This is just Impact!" I said to myself, realising that there was absolutely no-one around who would have any idea whatsoever what I was talking about. That made me a bit sad, but mostly I smiled at the good memories, and consequently both Battle Flip Shot and its fairly similar (but notably different) successor Bang Bead suddenly became quite special to me, despite me only learning about them relatively recently.

In fact, if I think about the dates we were most likely fiddling with Klik and Play — between 1997 and 1999, during our time at sixth form, primarily — it's entirely possible that Impact! did, in fact, predate Battle Flip Shot, which came out in 1998. And certainly none of us were playing NEOGEO at that time; around then, the NEOGEO was a mythical beast, spoken of only in hushed tones in multiformat games magazines, and we didn't have any arcades anywhere near us to go play an MVS cabinet, either. So Edd's creation was all original do not steal.

I have idle thoughts of trying to get The Old Gang back together for some sort of Event that will likely involve drinking, cake and video games. I am also not entirely sure how to go about organising such a thing, as there are several members of said Old Gang I have not spoken to, let alone seen, for many years at this point. But that is, at least partly, why I think it would be fun to get everyone together and have a drunken Battle Flip Shot tournament. And see how long it takes Edd to notice that we're really just playing Impact! – Pro-Gear Spec Edition.

[Obligatory note, since I am talking about Work Stuff: the above is my opinion and my opinion alone, and does not reflect or represent the views of my employer and all that guff.]

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The post #oneaday Day 788: Visco does what Nintencon't... or something appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not sure I agree with (or entirely understand) the piece's core thesis, but I am particularly conscious of the subject today, as there have been a number of glowing reviews dropping for Big Walk, the new game from House House, the company previously known for Untitled Goose Game. I have reached a point where I am immediately suspicious when all the particularly online critics on Bluesky are all over a new indie game, because the last time that happened was Blue Prince, and I fucking hate Blue Prince. But I'm also aware that Big Walk, as good as it might actually be, is fundamentally inaccessible to me.

You see, I don't really have anyone that I might have been able to enjoy that game with right now. Oh sure, I have people that I know and like online, but I don't know any of them that might be interested in playing a game that, for one reason or another, appears to be getting nudged slowly but surely towards the bin marked "Friendslop (complimentary)".

And folks that I would have previously regarded as my "IRL" friends, with whom I have enjoyed online multiplayer shenanigans of various descriptions? I haven't heard from any of them in over a year, after they severely upset me around my birthday last year.

Thus, I am mostly alone, so far as gaming is concerned. And this is frustrating, because although I have always found social interactions to be a tad challenging in various ways — which I learned late into my adult life is at least partly because of my existence on the autistic spectrum, and is the main reason I don't play with strangers — for many years, gaming was something that, while I often enjoyed as a solitary pursuit, I absolutely loved sharing with others just as much. Many of my absolute fondest gaming memories are about times spent playing together — and not necessarily in a "multiplayer" context, either! Let me try and think of a few.

Those days in school, where you had made a new friend and you plucked up the courage to ask your parents to let you go to their house. Fond memories of visiting my friend Edd and playing on his Amiga, and of him coming to my house and playing on my ST, SNES and, later, the PC. That time we played Flashback and had trouble with the big gooey boss thing on one of the last levels and ended up singing "The membrane, the membrane, the membrane is dead!" over and over after we finally beat it.

Those days in sixth form that felt like they'd never end — but sadly did — where we'd wander into town, grab some lunch from the local bakery, visit the local computer shop and buy a new game for PlayStation or N64, then all pile around someone's house to play it for hours. The time we played Mario Kart 64 and wrote down all the obscenities we hurled at one another for a feature in the sixth form magazine we produced. The time when none of us were really all that into football, but we played the World Cup 98 N64 game anyway, because it was fun. The many recording sessions we had to produce "voice acting" for our Klik and Play games, and the out-takes that made us laugh until we thought we'd piss ourselves. The time we introduced our head of sixth form to the one and only Klik and Play game we finished, where he was the main villain.

Those days in university, where after lectures were done, we'd pile around someone's house and play split-screen GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Diddy Kong Racing and Mario Kart 64 for hours. The advent of the PlayStation 2, and how an experience as new and fresh as Grand Theft Auto III was something we could enjoy together, even though it was a single-player game. The time my friends brought a copy of Silent Hill 2 with them and I finished it in a single evening while they passed out, hammered and full of curry, in my living room, only to wake up and see the credits rolling.

Those days when I lived in an amazing flat in Winchester, and I had a bunch of friends over, we all got absolutely munted and took off our shirts to play LAN party Halo for some reason. When my housemate came back to find a living room full of half-naked men, she decided it was to be called "Gaylo" from then onwards.

And what I once thought were the incredibly enjoyable "Davison Cup" tournaments I hosted for my birthday celebrations for several years, which provided not only a rare opportunity to play games together with friends in the same room for once, but also a chance to introduce them to things they might not have experienced before — things that were important to me, personally. These memories in particular are somewhat bittersweet now.

I miss being able to share these experiences. It's not one single thing that has left me feeling so lonely and friendless; it is a veritable mountain of causes — some external, some internal, some self-inflicted, some caused by others, some caused by the general direction society (and the way in which we interact with one another) has moved in the last 30 years. All I really know is that I don't like it — and part of the reason I continue to write about the things I love and the things that are important to me, both here and on MoeGamer, is in the vain hope that it might provide even a hint of those personal connections I used to enjoy and appreciate on a daily basis.

It all feels a long time ago now, and I'm very tired, and I'm hurt. I don't even really want to play Big Walk all that much. It'd just be nice to feel like I had the option.

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The post #oneaday Day 787: Friendfreeslop appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I'm typing this, it's lunchtime, and this makes me think about what games are suitable for lunch break play. Really, you can play anything over your lunch — and indeed I have done in the past — but there are certain types of games that are eminently more suitable than others.

Long RPGs, for example, are probably not optimal for lunch break play — unless they're designed with a sort of "bite-sized" structure. Good examples of this that I've enjoyed in the past include the Neptunia series, which has small dungeons you can delve into, beat up some enemies, get some crafting materials and maybe complete some quests, and be done in less than an hour. The inverse of this is the grid-based dungeon crawler, where you really need to sit down and concentrate on what you're doing, lest you completely lose the thread of your explorations.

I found Splatoon Raiders to be an ideal lunch break game, because each of its stages are no more than about five minutes, tops. That means you can dip in and play a good few levels in just a short space of time, and feel like you've had a worthwhile experience. Recommended.

Driving games can also be good for this — in fact, after I'm done here, I might just boot up Forza Horizon and drive around a bit. Again, the bite-sized nature of most events in driving games make them eminently suitable for short sessions, such as playing over lunch.

Then, of course, there are arcade games, which are the very definition of this sort of thing. Arcade machines were designed for you to pass by, think "ooh, that looks fun, I'll have a quick go" and while away a few minutes. In most cases, the games are challenging enough, or designed with a built-in maximum play time, that you can enjoy one game multiple times during a short break — or you can sample multiple for a varied bit of fun.

This is why handhelds used to be brilliant to take to the office pre-COVID. Back in those Before Times, I had an office job that was about a 15 minute drive away, so in theory I could come back home and play something at home — indeed, on several occasions I even managed to get a full YouTube video recorded over lunch, which I'm not sure how I achieved in retrospect — but it was much more practical to pop the Vita or 3DS in my bag, stick on my headphones and just blot everything out while I sat on the sofa near the coffee machine, eating sandwiches and playing Neptunia.

I kind of miss that! I mean, I don't miss having to go out to work every day, but having a reason for handhelds to exist was fun. These days, of course, it would probably be the Switch 2 and/or the Evercade EXP-R coming out with me, and both of those are amply stocked with plenty of good "lunchtime games".

But now I work from home, I have a lot more choice. That can sometimes be overwhelming, but it's also nice. It means I can enjoy a wide variety of different things over my lunch break, and then easily get back to work at a suitable stopping point.

So that's what I'm going to go and do right now…

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The post #oneaday Day 786: Lunchtime games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's a misguided (and probably legally enforced) attempt to get us all to practice better portion control and, collectively, to Be Less Fat. However, we all know what actually happens: people look at that "portion" advice, then just double it (or, in some cases, multiply it by four or more) in order to calculate what they are actually eating. And I just feel like food companies could probably save everyone a lot of time and effort if they just put what the calorie value for the whole thing was.

Like, take a pizza. Buy a frozen pizza and the calorie information will probably be for half of it. Buy a takeaway pizza and the calorie information will be "per slice". Motherfucker, if I am buying a pizza of any description I am eating that whole thing, so just tell me what the damage is so I don't have to get the bloody calculator out. I will accept full responsibility for my actions. Just tell me.

Likewise, take one of those massive bars of Dairy Milk. According to those, "1 portion" is "3 squares". No it fucking isn't. The only time people buy a massive bar of Dairy Milk is when they are depressed, and when that happens they are almost certainly going to eat the whole thing while crying in front of the TV. (Ask me how I know.) So just tell me how many thousand calories are in that whole bar of chocolate so I can come to terms with the consequences at a later time when I am feeling less emotionally fragile.

I feel calorie information on food packaging might actually have more impact if it was more honest like this! "If you eat this whole quiche, that's most of the daily calorie intake for an average human being!" Great! Now I know, and I will thus probably think a little bit harder about whether or not I actually really want to eat that whole quiche, or if I'm just doing so because I'm in the middle of a binge-eating spree that is almost certainly fuelled by some combination of depression, anxiety and/or autism.

And don't even get me started on foods that are clearly portioned out, but which will only ever give you calorie information "per 100 grams". That's the point where I really don't want to start doing maths. Don't make me do fucking percentages just to figure out how guilty I should be feeling for eating the thing. Just give me the calorie information for a realistic portion, and perhaps for the entire packet of the thing just in case it accidentally ends up all taking a trip down to see Mr Tums.

To put it another way, stop trying to shame me for eating more than I "should" and help me make an actually informed decision using helpful information! By the time I am able to successfully curtail my appetite, I don't mind dividing some of these things into halves or quarters or whatever, although one would hope once you have reached a good, "healthy" weight (which is its own discussion, I'm sure) you have less need to be exacting about counting calories. But during that period where accurate calorie information is actually helpful — i.e. when you're trying to lose weight — I think it would benefit everyone to be completely honest and lay out the cold, hard facts. I think it would genuinely be a lot more effective at helping to get people to reconsider before overeating!

And stop trying to kid yourself that anyone is eating half a tube of Fruit Pastilles!

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The post #oneaday Day 785: Portioning the blame appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My first — and, prior to last night, last — encounter with Forza Horizon was with Forza Horizon 4, which I had extremely mixed feelings about. Sure, it was cool to have an open-world driving game set somewhere that looked and felt a bit like the UK, but the way it was structured to have all the hard edges completely smoothed off, lest some player somewhere felt any "friction", made the whole thing feel utterly meaningless. We're talking about a game where you can come last in every event you enter and still make progress. Not what I'm looking for in a driving game, so after getting frustrated with that, I pretty much swore off the subsequent entries in the series.

However, I was aware that earlier entries in the series were very well-regarded, and in the absence of owning an Xbox One or Series Whateverthefuck, the only one accessible to me was the first one for Xbox 360. This has apparently been delisted from everywhere for some time now, but you can still get second-hand physical copies, and indeed, that's what I did on a trip to CEX some time ago.

I booted it up last night for the first time and found it quite enjoyable. However, one thing became increasingly apparent the longer I played: the fact it, plus all its DLC and microtransactions, had been delisted from sale made it well and truly "dead" — to such a degree that there are certain functions in the game you just flat-out can't access any more, despite the menu options still being there.

This is apparent right from the game's title screen, where you have the option to play "Horizon Rally"… except you don't, because you need the Horizon Rally DLC for that, and you can't get that any more, leaving you with a completely useless menu option, plus a number of loading screen tips informing you that you can buy it from the Xbox Marketplace… which, as previously noted, you cannot.

I thought I was going to have a real problem when I opened the map screen and there were button prompts for "Treasure Map" and "Fast Travel Anywhere". Now, you see a button prompt in a game, and it's reasonable to think that it's a built-in function of the game, right? You press the button indicated, and the thing happens. That's how it usually works, right? Not in Forza Horizon land. Pressing either of these buttons gives you a pop-up informing you that you can buy those two pieces of functionality — which, respectively, allow you to immediately teleport anywhere on the map, and reveal the location of hidden items on the map — using "Tokens", which you can, of course, get from the Xbox Marketplace. Except you can't do that because everything about Forza Horizon has been delisted.

I was concerned in the former case that this meant the entire fast travel feature would be unusable because you couldn't buy a fucking microtransaction any more, but thankfully progressing a little further revealed that there is still a built-in fast travel facility — it's just a bit more inconvenient, since you can only fast travel to specific landmarks that you've previously visited and not, like, the various race events that appear across the map. I wasn't so concerned about the treasure map, meanwhile, since all it is, basically, is a cheat code that you have to pay for.

Little remnants of Forza Horizon really, really wanting you to pay up for microtransactions that no longer exist are riddled throughout the entire game. At least one load screen tip for every loading break will have some sort of exhortation to buy something. Those broken Fast Travel Anywhere and Treasure Map buttons don't go away. If you want to buy a new car in the game, you can do so with the credits you earn through gameplay or "Tokens" that you can no longer purchase with real money.

I guess I should be thankful that Forza Horizon is, at least, still playable, even with all its online functionality and purchasable bullshit inaccessible. If anything, I prefer the fact that there's now no means of simply paying money to not play the game, which is what at least some of these options amounted to. You'd just think they'd, you know, turn all that shit off in a patch if they knew it was no longer going to be available. I mean, presumably they added in the "Horizon Rally" option at some point when it was actually available — why not just remove it again in a final update when the servers and DLC went offline?

We're going to start running into this more and more as time goes on, and it's not always going to be optional DLC and microtransactions that are affected. Thankfully, we have not yet reached a point where patch servers are no longer available for console games that require them, but at some point we are going to have to reckon with the fact that a lot of today's physical releases ship either broken or incomplete, and I'm not sure the work has been adequately done to prepare for that time when the "official" patch servers are no longer available.

This, of course, is a big part of what the whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is about — and I know that certain parts of the gaming history and preservation communities are at least starting to have a think about the best way of handling all this. I'm just concerned that it's going to be too late by the time we find a solution; how many more games out there are technically functional, like Forza Horizon, but have elements that are now completely inaccessible?

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The post #oneaday Day 784: Playing a dead game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

You see, in my case, comparing myself to others inevitably leads to feelings of inferiority and frustration when really there is no reason for me to be comparing myself to anyone other than… well, myself.

Take one thing I'm always very conscious of when I go out for a walk, as I did this evening: because of the size I am, and because of my general overall fitness level, I walk quite slowly, even when in my head I am thinking "I am walking quite briskly". I can be walking at an exertion level that makes me slightly out of breath, and people who are just out for a casual stroll will be overtaking me without any evident effort on my part. Were I to pay attention to this — like I have done in the past, which is why I can say all this at all — this would be frustrating! Why can't I walk as fast as a "normal" person? Am I annoying the "normal" people who walk much faster than I do? God, I'm such a waste of space and energy!

But no. The sensible part of my brain, which I am growing better at listening to, reminds me that I have absolutely no reason to be comparing my walking speed to that of anyone else, because I am not, in fact, getting in anyone's way. The Common is a big place, and its paths are more than wide enough for anyone who wants to go faster than me to just walk around me. And, moreover, I am not walking with any of those people, meaning that my overall speed is not causing anyone to have to wait around for me to catch up.

(This is, however, something I am conscious of any time I am out and about with friends or work colleagues, and we are all walking somewhere together. I simply cannot keep up with most of them under many circumstances. And that is frustrating, from a combination of people showing me an often unintentional lack of consideration, and my own annoyance at not being able to do things like a "normal" person.)

When I'm by myself, then, the only thing that really matters is me. The only thing I should be comparing myself to is myself, because it's quite nice to see gradual improvements in your own performance — and even with the fairly casual nature of my walking excursions over the course of the last couple of weeks, I have already seen a slight improvement in terms of the amount of time it takes me to cover the two kilometres of the route I habitually take.

But then there are times when you don't even need to know that. It's not a competition. It's not a race. There is no way you can speed up this whole process. It is something that happens gradually, through building good habits, and thus, when it comes down to it, the only really important thing is that I am just doing the thing at all. Have I successfully got out of the house into the fresh air and got some exercise? Yes? Then great. That's a success.

This is the thing. When attempting to improve yourself — particularly if you are neurodivergent — the temptation can be to give up when you can't immediately fix the problem you're trying to solve. But it doesn't work like that. Instead, you should allow yourself to celebrate those small victories, even if they are much smaller than victories you have had in the past.

I'll give you an example. A good few years ago at this point (2011, to be exact, since I was blogging here at the time!), I successfully "ran" (and I use the term loosely) the Bupa 10K in London, along with some friends I have since, sadly, fallen out of touch with. (Miss you, Vee and Gracie!) This was, for me, an incredible achievement — and one that only came about because I had successfully followed the Couch to 5K and Bridge to 10K programmes over a long period.

I cannot run a 10K now. I cannot even contemplate walking 10 kilometres right now. I cannot even really contemplate walking five kilometres. And that's OK! 2011 was fifteen years ago. I wasn't in amazing shape then, but I was in considerably better shape than I am now, and I was also fifteen years younger. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to try and compare myself against that yardstick (or should that be 10K-stick?) because so much has changed in that intervening period. Yes, it would be nice to be able to get back into a state where I could contemplate surviving a journey of 10 kilometres on foot — be it by walking or jogging — but right now, it is an irrelevant target for me.

Right now, my target is just to get up of the sofa, get out into the fresh air and just do something, at least a few times per week. I have given myself the arbitrary goal of two kilometres because that just happens to be the exact distance of a "lap" that I do on the Common right now, and because that is something which, in my current state, feels attainable but still challenging — in other words, it's a level of effort that I feel is actually doing something.

I was tempted to write "even if that might not seem like very much to some of you" after that, but stopped myself. Because, as I say, what it seems like to anyone else doesn't matter. Everyone's circumstances are different. I'm sure I know plenty of people who can jog 5K, 10K, even more, without even thinking about it. And, right now, it achieves nothing for me to compare myself to them because they are simply operating in a completely different league. And that is, once again, fine.

So I will continue muddling along at my own pace. At some point, I will up the distance and/or time that I will be walking, but I don't feel ready for that just yet, so I'm not going to do that just yet. I will do it when the time is right, not when anyone else says that I "should" do it — but when I feel I want to do it.

And, with any luck, this will build itself over time into a healthy habit that will be of great benefit to me. That's all that really matters!

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The post #oneaday Day 783: Nothing compares 2U appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been feeling this a bit recently, particularly with regard to recent releases. There are exceptions, of course — I've picked up Star Fox, Rhythm Paradise Groove and Splatoon Raiders for Switch 2 over the course of the last month, and when I got home from CEX, I found myself ordering copies of the first four Saints Row games (original versions, not remasters, as I've heard mixed reports about the latter) as well as the newly announced EDITIONS from LostInCult for Sektori, Dread Delusion and Easy Delivery Co. So in actual fact I probably spent a lot more than I would have spent if I'd come out with an armful of 360, PS3 and PS4 games from that CEX.

But I don't know. I just wasn't feeling it in the store today. I had a couple of things in mind that I thought I might like to look out for (notably, the aforementioned Saints Row games, following a discussion with a pal earlier) and those did not appear to be in attendance, and there wasn't much else jumping out at me. I thought about trying to expand and/or complete my collection of Need for Speed games on Xbox 360, but the vaguely responsible part of my brain pointed out that I haven't played the parts of that collection I already own as yet, so it would probably be a little silly to get more. (Actually, it wouldn't have made much difference; they were like £1.50 each; I just couldn't be arsed.)

I don't want to say that I'm falling out of love with gaming, because that very obviously isn't true. But with all the recent, unwelcome moves in the current industry — Microsoft continually stepping on rakes, Sony putting an expiration date on physical media, Nintendo continuing to push Game Key Cards — it's hard not to feel a bit cynical about current things, and that my relationship with the hobby is changing. On top of that, stuff that is a few years old now is still good! Since I'm not someone who has ever got particularly sniffy about resolution and frame rate, I'm pretty sure I'll have just as good a time with those Xbox 360 versions of the Saints Row games as I would have done if I'd picked up the (pricier) PS4 or Switch versions.

I mean, hell, outside of Splatoon Raiders, the other "big game" I'm currently playing is on the SNES. And I'm glad that I have the ability to enjoy this broad range of stuff — ranging from late '70s/early '80s computer and console stuff right up to brand new releases. I know not everyone feels able to do that for one reason or another, and honestly I feel a bit sorry for those people who can't. Perhaps you just had to "be there" for it all to have those positive associations, and if I was 20-30 years younger I might feel differently about games that ran at sub-1080p resolutions and less than 60 frames per second.

But, as it happens, that is not the case, and thus I will continue to enjoy my Old Shit alongside very carefully selected and curated New Shit, and try not to spend too much time mourning an industry that, in its current state, seems determined to self-destruct.

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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The post #oneaday Day 782: Slow the rate appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not really sure why I slept so badly last night — conditions in the bedroom (ooer) weren't particularly different from any other given evening, as we had the air conditioning blasting, I had my blackout sleep mask on with some calming noises playing, but still I kept waking up, feeling uncomfortable and/or needing a piss. At 4am I got up and evacuated what must have been over a litre of piss from my body. That'll learn me for Hydrating.

I'm going to get an early night tonight, I think, so I am writing this post in good time to be able to do that, and I'm probably going to skip a walk around the Common this evening also. There are times when you have to listen to your body, and my body right now is telling me that it needs some decent rest. So that's the plan for later tonight, at least.

In the meantime, I have plenty I could be doing, but I think I'm probably going to play some more Terranigma this evening. I've been playing a lot of Splatoon Raiders — it's a great "lunchtime game" with how bite-sized each individual "raid" is — and I want to make some progress on Terranigma. Interestingly, my video on its immediate predecessor, Illusion of Time, overtook my video on Soul Blazer in a fraction of the time in terms of views. Neither have done amazingly in terms of total views, but as I always say: the views are not why I'm doing this. I do this because it's fun, and because it's nice to have a sort of record of the things you've experienced and your thoughts about them.

Same reason why MoeGamer exists, really. I have loved writing about the games I have enjoyed ever since I was a young child — I bet my parents still have the ring binder with all my dot-matrix printouts of "reviews" I wrote when I was a kid somewhere — and I don't see that changing any time soon. It's my way of just sort of "getting a bit more" out of an already rewarding and fulfilling hobby. The feeling of creating something, even if it's just some blurted-out thoughts representing your opinion about something, is always satisfying — and I can look back over both this site and MoeGamer and feel pride in what I've created to date, and excitement for what is still to come.

Also it gives me a sort of perverse pleasure that MoeGamer has now lasted considerably longer than the site I was laid off from when I made it in the first place. I guess passion will always trump commercial interests.

Anyway! That was a random string of consciousness, for which I make no apologies. I am off to have some dinner, play Terranigma and then at least attempt to be in a position conducive to getting some sleep before the clock strikes midnight.

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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The post #oneaday Day 781: Broadcasting from Tiredsville appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I was fortunate enough to have my work featured on the site on a few occasions, with my most popular piece by far being an adaptation of Bayonetta's opening scene as if graphics didn't exist and the entire thing unfolded as a text adventure. (Aside: attempting to track down an archive of this is how I learned that most of Bitmob's original site content is still online, but some "Software as a Service", probably AI-related company appears to be leeching off the site's SEO from back in the day.)

Anyway, in the absence of anything else to write about (although right now I could write something about companies leeching off past sites' SEO… we'll save that for another day though, as this absolutely will not be the last time I come across this phenomenon, I'm sure) I thought I would do the same for my walk around the Common this evening. Are you ready? Let us begin.

You inexpertly guide your little car into the narrow parking space and realise that you have parked a little too close to the car next to you, so you reverse out and manoeuvre yourself into what you think is a slightly more advantageous position. When you attempt to open your car door, you realise that you have not, in fact, made things any better at all. Giving up before humiliating yourself further, you squeeze through the slightly too narrow gap between your car and its neighbour, and prepare to face the early evening.

A WALK ON THE COMMON
Copyright (c) 2026 Petefocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
A WALK ON THE COMMON is a registered trademark of Petefocom, Inc.
Version 69 / Serial number 420069

Cemetery Road, Car Park
You are in the car park of the common — actually just a narrow side street with some parking spaces demarcated down one side. The sun is low in the sky, such that it is difficult to look in a westerly direction, and the air is warm and a little humid.

The road (and car park) continues to the northwest. To the southeast, you can hear the rushing traffic of The Avenue.

Your car is here.

What would you like to do?
> INVENTORY

You are carrying:
Your keys
Your wallet
Your phone
A pair of headphones (worn)
Your watch (worn)
Clothes (worn)

What next?
> REMOVE CLOTHES

You feel that would probably be a bad idea while you're out in public. Also, in a park? Talk about clichéd. If you're going to streak, do it somewhere a bit more imaginative.

What next?
> SE

You came all this way to have a walk in the park. No point turning back now. And anyway, if you want to go back that way, you're better off getting into your car.

What next?
> EXAMINE WATCH

This is a fancy-pants fitness tracker thingy that your wife got you. She wasn't dropping a hint; you had indicated that you might be interested in using one in an attempt to actually get fit.

The watch's display is off.

[You won't see "What next?" any more.]
> TURN ON WATCH

The watch's display lights up immediately. A picture of Patti, one of your cats, greets you, along with the time. It is 7.30pm.

> USE WATCH

Please be more specific about how you want to use the watch.

> TRACK FITNESS

I don't know how to "TRACK" something.

> START WATCH

You flick the screen over to the right, choose the "Walking" activity and wait for the countdown to begin.

Your watch begins tracking your steps.

> LOOK AT PHONE

Your phone has the album "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath cued up and ready to go. The play button looks inviting.

> PRESS PLAY

Your phone starts blaring Black Sabbath at full volume. You quickly press the Pause button. Perhaps you should turn the headphones on first.

> TURN ON HEADPHONES

You turn on the headphones. They make a soft "beep" sound, then a second "beep" to indicate they have connected to your phone.

> PRESS PLAY

Black Sabbath begins to play inside your head, thanks to your cheap and cheerful bone-conducting headphones. Now you're really ready to get started.

> NW

Cemetery Road, Carriage Drive Entrance
You've reached the end of the "car park" section of Cemetery Road. The road itself continues a short distance to the northwest, but becomes a dead end shortly thereafter. A path into the Common itself proceeds to the north. Painted white letters on the ground indicate that this particular pathway is known as "Carriage Drive South".

> N

You begin walking.

Carriage Drive South
You've entered the Common proper. To the south is Cemetery Road and the car park. Either side of you are some pleasantly rustling trees. Carriage Drive continues in a northerly direction for a short distance.

> N

Carriage Drive Corner
Carriage Drive makes a sharp turn here. Squinting against the low, early evening sun, you can just about see an small lake behind a fence in the distance to the west. One of several entrances to the Common lies to the south.

A man with no shirt on zooms past you. He is upsettingly toned and even more upsettingly sweaty. You cannot even begin to imagine what it would feel like to be able to move at that speed using nothing but your own legs.

There is a Really Good Dog here. And their owner too, I guess.

> LOOK AT MAN

He's long gone. You're not sure you want anything to do with him, anyway. Just being in his presence for less than a second made you feel inferior.

> LOOK AT DOG

Are all dogs good dogs? It doesn't matter, because this one is.

> W

Near Cemetery Lake
Thus named because it's near the cemetery, not because they've buried people in it — not to your knowledge, anyway — Cemetery Lake is a filthy but nonetheless relatively picturesque pond that occupies a space to the north of the path you're currently on, behind a fence. A bunch of ducks are languidly paddling around on the grimy surface of the water, evidently looking for remnants of the last generous visitors. Carriage Drive proceeds to the east and west.

> N

You can't go in that direction. The fence is in the way.

> CLIMB FENCE

You don't think that would be a good idea. Not only are you not good at climbing things, you also have an excellent talent for hurting yourself quite badly when doing things you are not good at.

A child riding the tiniest bicycle you have ever seen wobbles past, followed a few seconds later by what looks like a long-suffering parent.

> W

Park's Edge Corner
You sense you're quite close to the edge of the park, as you think you can hear traffic on the other side of the bushes. The path makes another sharp turn here, proceeding to the north, parallel to the edge of the park, or to the east, back towards Cemetery Lake.

You think you can smell weed.

> N

Park's Edge
The pathway continues in a north-south direction. Trees flank the path on both sides, giving the area a pleasant "tunnel of green" look.

You can definitely smell weed.

> N

Suspicious Bushes
The greenery thins out a little on one side to reveal a clearing with a bench, and some bushes behind it. The bushes look suspicious. You figure that if you were going to get up to no good, these would be some great bushes to do it in. The pathway continues in a north-south direction.

The smell of weed seems to be coming from the direction of the bushes.

> LOOK AT BUSHES

You figure they're probably having a nice time without you. Leave them be.

A woman wearing a pair of shorts that are so tight you think they might just be painted on jogs past.

> LOOK AT WOMAN

Before you are able to make a definitive determination of whether or not the shorts are real or just an illusion, she is long gone.

> N

Junction
You've reached the point where several paths meet. To the west is one of the Common's numerous exits. The pathway continues to the north, southeast and south.

A child, in tears and holding a balloon, waddles along the path, closely followed by a mother who looks about ready to murder someone.

Through your headphones, Black Sabbath is interrupted by the robotic voice of your watch indicating that you have successfully completed a kilometre in 14 minutes and 59 seconds.

> POP BALLOON

As entertaining at that would be, you unfortunately don't have anything sharp on you.

The child and distraught mother pass by. The former's wails fade into the distance, and an almost tangible air of despair follows shortly afterwards.

> SE

The Flats
This area of the Common is called The Flats, because it's really flat. It's also the widest open space on the whole Common, and the place where events tend to happen. Right now, in the heat of the summer, all the grass is dead, the whole place looks like a desert and nothing much is going on, other than a few kids having a half-hearted kickabout. So much for "public green spaces". The path continues to the southeast, and reaches a junction to the northwest.

The upsettingly toned man runs past again. You wish he would put a shirt on.

> SE

The Flats, Starting Lines
This part of The Flats is evidently where they start races of various descriptions, because there are two starting lines: one red, one blue. Judging by other markings on the path of the same colour, the red route is about 2.5km in length, while the blue route is 3.5km. The pathway continues into a wooded area in the southeast, and back to the middle of The Flats to the northwest.

A woman jogs up the path in the opposite direction to you. The pockets on her shorts appear to be inside-out and are flapping up and down in a mildly distracting manner as she bobs along at her own pace.

> TALK TO WOMAN

Are you mad? Talking to a stranger? You are not only autistic, you are also British. Besides, she looks busy.

> NW

Not to artificially constrain your adventure, but for the purposes of this blog post's tortuously convoluted narrative I will remind you that this is the direction you just arrived from, and thus you probably want to go southeast.

> SE

Near The Hawthorns
You're in a wooded area of the Common, close to a small building that proclaims itself the "Hawthorns Urban Wildlife Centre". The gate to the Centre is closed and locked. The pathway gradually bends around to the south, and proceeds in the other direction, towards the Flats, to the northwest.

> OPEN GATE

I mean, I did tell you it was locked, but you had to go and check for yourself, didn't you? The gate is locked. Now perhaps you might give your narrator a bit of respect.

> S

The Corner of the Common
You've reached the corner of the Common. A gate kind-of sort-of blocks the path in such a way that vehicles wouldn't be able to drive in, but people can still get around. To the northwest is the Cemetery Road car park, and the pathway proceeds towards the Hawthorns Urban Wildlife Centre to the north.

The upsettingly toned man runs past again. You feel like he is accelerating. You begin to wonder if, were you to keep walking, he would eventually reach infinite velocity, then realise that this is probably a rather silly thing to wonder and go back to wishing he would put a shirt on his sweaty, rippling, muscly back.

> CURSE MAN

You mutter a curse under your breath. To your surprise, the man bursts into flames with a horrifying scream. A moment later, the screams have ceased, and there is nothing more than a pile of ash on the floor. That'll learn him.

> NW

Cemetery Road, Car Park

Your car is here.

Through your headphones, Black Sabbath is interrupted by the robotic voice of your watch indicating that you have successfully completed two kilometres in 29 minutes and 26 seconds.

Congratulations! You have completed A WALK ON THE COMMON. You probably shouldn't have murdered that man, but how were you to know that you were capable of inflicting truly horrific curses just with the power of your mind? No-one will ever believe it was you, anyway.

Probably.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 780: A Walk on the Common - The Text Adventure appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I mentioned the other day that I had been going through the basics of DaVinci Resolve, largely out of necessity because my prior video editor of choice, Hitfilm Express, is no longer available — and, indeed, the company that made it no longer exists, it seems. I had been putting off learning DaVinci Resolve for the longest time because it's the sort of application that you open up and you can feel its UI laughing at you. "You'll never know what all these buttons are for," it says. "You may as well just close me right now and not even bother."

Well, today I decided that I was going to put my three chapters' worth of training to the test and edit myself a YouTube video. And, to my great pleasure, it was immediately just as straightforward as the last seven years I've spent using Hitfilm Express. Yes, there are a number of differences between the two applications — most notably that DaVinci Resolve is a considerably more complex, fully-featured program that can do other things besides editing video — but it seems that I have successfully ported over all the important knowledge from Hitfilm Express to DaVinci Resolve.

I haven't yet done everything in DaVinci Resolve that I used to do in Hitfilm Express — notably, I still need to learn how to do titles and keyframe-based animation and compositing — but taking on the relatively simple project that I did today has given me the confidence to explore the application further, either with or without the training manual by my side. After all, I learned Hitfilm without any real training material — most of the knowledge there I ported over from past experience with Final Cut Pro on Mac, which again, had its own way of doing certain things.

When tackling anything like this, it's taking that first step that is always the most difficult. In fact, I'd go so far as to say when doing pretty much anything, the first step is always the hardest — whether you're talking about working on an elaborate project, or simply motivating yourself to stand up and go and do something with your day.

I have proven myself victorious over several little things like that today — firstly, getting off the sofa and recording the voiceover for my video, then actually going through and editing the thing, and finally, troubleshooting a little issue I had with the export — and I am officially giving myself a pat on the back for my achievements. Now I can spend the remainder of the evening Doing Something Fun without any sort of guilt or feelings of obligation whatsoever.

Getting rid of those feelings of guilt and obligation completely are a whole other matter, of course, but one step at a time and all that. One step at a time.

Oh, and here's the vid, if you want to watch it:

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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The post #oneaday Day 779: Celebrating a small victory appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm unsure where this particular anxiety stems from, but it's not an altogether uncommon phenomenon. It seems it is most frequently associated with ADHD, which I have not been formally diagnosed with, but which from talking to people who do have it, I recognise a lot of the things they mention — much like I did with autism before I went and got myself diagnosed. I'm not in any great hurry to get myself diagnosed in that regard, though I suspect, as with the autism diagnosis, that having it confirmed (or otherwise) might help me to think about my own brain in a more helpful way.

But regardless! That doesn't fix the immediate issue, which is my brain is currently doing somersaults wondering what I should actually do today. And it's not as if I have a shortage of options. I could play some Final Fantasy XI, now I am into the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion. I could play some Terranigma, which I started the other day and enjoyed a lot. I could play some Splatoon Raiders, which I am also having fun with. I could record a voiceover for my Illusion of Time video and then edit said video now that I have learned the basics of DaVinci Resolve. I could even record some voiceovers for some work videos and get those out of the way if I really wanted to.

Or I could do something completely different. I could actually leave the house for some reason, perhaps pay a visit to CEX in town and see if they have anything interesting. I could go for a walk on the common (although I feel like the exact time I'm typing this is probably not the best time to do that, given how hot and humid it appears to be outside, so I will probably save that for later). I could pull down a random game from the shelf and give that a go. I could do some creative writing. I could write about a game I've been playing recently. I could record some Let's Play-style videos (again, I think it might be a bit too hot to do that right now). I could learn what "colour grading" is. I could practice some Japanese.

This is the problem, y'see. The problem is not that I have nothing to do, it's that I have a lot of options for what I could do, and pretty much all of them would be enjoyable and/or fulfilling in some way. One might say that this means it doesn't really matter which one of them I pick, as I will be having an enjoyable and fulfilling experience regardless. But for some reason, when this sort of mental block strikes, it doesn't quite work like that; my brain starts to feel genuine anxiety over whether or not I am picking the "correct" or "best" option, whatever that means — and there really is no "correct" or "best" option here. There is nothing I have to do; there is nothing that will make my life significantly better or worse if I do or don't do it. So all I need to do is just… pick something.

My intent was to follow that paragraph with something along the lines of "So I'm off to go and… [x]". But as I went to type that, my brain started a tug-of-war process with itself, still worrying over whether or not I was making the right choice. So I'm going to set myself a firm but friendly ultimatum — without being aggressive or sergeant-majorish about it — and say that by the time I finish writing this paragraph, I will have made a decision of what to do for the immediate now, not necessarily the whole day, but for the period immediately following completing this paragraph. Whenever I finish this paragraph. I am absolutely, positively, definitely not stalling for time while I attempt to get my mind in order. Definitely not. Perish the thought! Who would do something like that, even? That's ridiculous. I can absolutely, definitely make a decision on what Nice Thing I would like to do today.

I'm going to go and play Terranigma for a bit. Then we'll see what happens from there.

There, see, that wasn't so hard, was it?

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 778: That feeling you should be doing something appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to confront the fact that Hitfilm Express, my video editor of choice for the last 7 years or so, no longer exists in any form, but I had been putting off learning the most commonly recommended replacement for free hobbyist video editing: DaVinci Resolve.

I've loaded up DaVinci Resolve before to have a look. I was immediately daunted by an incredibly complex-looking interface, closed it down and went back to Hitfilm Express. Now, however, I don't have that option, unless I want to spend time faffing around looking for a dodgy download of the old version of Hitfilm Express I was using, and spending even more time trying to track down my license key for it — a license key I can't just log in and retrieve, because although the software would still activate online with it last time I had to reinstall, the actual website for it is no longer in existence. Which is, y'know, nice.

Anyway, tonight I was at a bit of a loose end, so I decided I would bite the bullet, install DaVinci Resolve and start working through some initial tutorials. The people behind DaVinci Resolve are good enough to have a bunch of training materials on their website — including full written books (which you can either buy as a physical book or get a free PDF of) as well as the obligatory video tutorials. I work much better from a book than a video, so I am extremely grateful for them offering those free PDFs — though it's a little fiddly attempting to read it on the same screen I'm using DaVinci Resolve on, so I may try and upload it to my Kindle.

The Beginner's Guide to DaVinci Resolve that I've been following along today seems to be very good. It doesn't assume knowledge, but it also doesn't move at such a glacial pace that people like me, who have past experience with other video editing software, get bored and switch off. In a couple of hours this evening, I have probably built up enough basic knowledge of the software to be able to reasonably comfortably do most of the things I could confidently do in Hitfilm Express, with the exception of a few bits and bobs about keyframing, animations, titles and such.

I'm impressed with DaVinci Resolve thus far. Although its interface is maddeningly crammed — not at all uncommon in today's creative software, as anyone who has used a recent Adobe product will attest through gritted teeth — once you know what you're looking for, you can get things done very quickly in a variety of different ways: through menus, through drag-and-drop, and through keyboard shortcuts. I'm going to have to unlearn a few of the ways I did things in Hitfilm Express, to be sure, but since I was almost entirely self-taught on that software and doubtless only using a fraction of its capabilities, I don't think that's going to be too much of a problem.

I'm especially impressed by how easy it is to add things like transitions and basic motion graphics — it's so easy to do these things that it almost feels like cheating. It's also very flexible in how you can edit clips together — including replace, ripple, roll and slide edits — so I think it's going to be a lot of fun to get to grips with once I start using it for my own projects.

I'm going to keep working through the training material for the minute, though, as there are some things covered in there that I've never really learned — like colour grading, for example. I don't know how much detail a self-professed Beginner's Guide is going to go into in that regard — although there are further, more specialist books to work through after I've had my fill of this one — but it will be nice to have an understanding of something that, to date, has remained a bit of a mystery beyond "drag the sliders around a bit until you think it looks OK".

I have a few videos in the pipeline that I will need to edit soon — a bunch for work, and at least one personal project — so it will be interesting to put DaVinci Resolve to the full test by doing something other than a tutorial on it. But from my experiences thus far this evening, I think it's going to be less of an issue to make the switch to this program than I thought it was going to be — which is, frankly, a blessed relief.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 777: Newfound Resolve appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the unfamiliar, Splatoon Raiders is a Nintendo Switch 2 game that, in contrast to the prior three Splatoon games, places the single-player experience at the forefront. Those of you who have never played a Splatoon game before may be surprised to note that there is, in fact, a single-player game in every Splatoon game, and even more surprised to hear that it has been consistently very good in the past — it's just very few people ever really talk about it, as the focus of the series has always been on its competitive multiplayer modes. And that's a pity, because although each game's single-player campaign is perhaps a little on the short side, they (and the DLC for the more recent ones) have been consistently excellent, featuring top-notch level design and some quality gameplay that blends action, platforming, puzzle solving and simple observation skills.

Splatoon Raiders is a little bit different. Although it unfolds in a series of self-contained levels, these are, for the most part, a tad more open than the rather linear, abstract levels of prior Splatoon campaigns. There are some stages that very much have the feel of classic single-player Splatoon — mostly the "Sample Dungeon" stages which challenge you to overcome a series of obstacles and encounters with a specific loadout — but on the whole, the focus is a bit different.

That's no bad thing, though, and one thing Splatoon Raiders does pretty well is keep things varied. On some levels you'll be fighting your way through a relatively linear path to an end point, where you receive a treasure. On others, you'll be in an arena, battling to defeat enough enemies to build up an energy bar before time expires. Some levels present you with a series of these arenas. Others still are more open, tasking you with building up energy by defeating enemies on a relatively large map until you are able to mine a large crystal and obtain its resources.

The very nature of the game means that there's not quite as much of the clever platforming and observation challenges of classic single-player Splatoon, but that's not to say it's completely absent. In fact, most of the non-arena stages have a series of hidden items on them, and tracking these down very much has the feel of the older Splatoon campaigns, because they will require you to go a bit off the beaten track, investigate interesting-looking areas and sometimes take a few risks. And the rewards are worthwhile; besides scrolls that contain lore, most of these stages also contain a compass, which unlocks access to a semi-secret level — one of the aforementioned "Sample Dungeons".

I'll doubtless have more to say about the game when I've played it a bit more, but so far I'm impressed. The "looter shooter" element provides plenty of interesting opportunities for progression — and incentive to try various different types of weapon — without being overly obnoxious or overloading you with pointless variants on the same equipment. A variety of simple and straightforward crafting systems allow you to unlock new abilities and features. And the ability to revisit past levels in "Spicy" mode provides alternatives for gathering materials and loot than simply grinding the same level over and over again.

The only thing I'm not entirely sure about is the music. I get why it is the way it is — it's an attempt to reflect the chaos of the battles in which you find yourself — but dear Lord, there are certain tracks that sound like a school orchestra tuning up and then immediately launching into a failed attempt to play the complete soundtrack to Darius. I would have much rather had music somewhat akin to what there was in the multiplayer matches of regular Splatoon, but you can't have everything I guess. It certainly creates an atmosphere of sorts, I'll give it that!

There will, of course, be a full write-up of Splatoon Raiders on MoeGamer when I'm satisfied that I've played enough of it to be able to speak with complete confidence about it. But for now, I'm happy to say that I'm having a good time, and I'm looking forward to playing some more!

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The post #oneaday Day 776: Splatting Salmonids appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been trying to get over a bit of a mental block for the easiest possible form of exercise, which is just going out for a walk. I do like walking around my neighbourhood — and heaven knows we did it a lot while Oliver was missing — but the unfortunate thing, as I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, is that we live on the top of quite a steep hill, meaning that whichever direction you set out from, you always end up having to climb said steep hill on the way back. Unless you do what I did on one excursion, which is to just keep walking and then catch the bus up the hill before walking the last little bit from the bus stop back to my house.

My trips to the Common are an attempt to get over that mental and physical block. The Common is relatively flat, you see, meaning that you can have a nice walk around it and not feel like any part of the journey is significantly more difficult than any other. There are a few undulations around the place — the route I've been taking is a slight incline on the way out, then very slightly downhill on the way back — but it's definitely manageable for someone in as poor physical condition as I am.

Also it's just a nice place to be. The Common has lots of different little areas within it — pleasantly secluded wooded areas (which I probably wouldn't go into after dark) and a nice wide open bit in the middle, which is where any Common-based events tend to go on. There's often a funfair or something in this big open bit, but right now, it's proper "big sky" territory.

One thing that is a little shocking, however, is how desert-like the whole thing looks right now after the heatwave. The grass is just dead. I've never seen it so bad, and I've always associated the Common with being, well, "green space". And to be sure, all the trees are still nice and leafy and green, but the ground… man, it looks more like what I imagine places like Arizona and Texas to look like than what I typically associate with England. (Important note: I have never been to Arizona or Texas and have also never really looked at photographs of what they actually look like.) It's a barren wasteland, and it's a little disheartening to see.

Still, I'm sure it's not the first time this has happened in recent memory — we've had similar heatwaves in the summer of the past few years, after all, and I actually haven't been to the Common for a while — so I'm sure it will recover as soon as we get a bit of rain. That isn't looking likely any time soon, admittedly, but as we pass through summer into autumn I'm sure it will get at least some of its green back. Maybe.

It is, however, a stark reminder of the fact that we are very much killing the planet. Seeing a desert-like park space would have been unthinkable when I was a child; I grew up with both my primary and secondary schools having access to large amounts of green space, and I welcomed that. It was nice to be able to be outside, and for the outside to feel like it had some life to it — without that "life" being, like, lots of bugs and spiders or shit like that. I have fond memories, both of my early childhood and my teenage years, of spending time just sitting on the grass with friends (and occasionally having farting competitions), enjoying one another's company and the pleasant environment that we were able to take advantage of.

At this point, there is just plain no denying that there are significant issues with the climate. "England's green and pleasant land" shouldn't look like a barren wasteland you'd expect to see dried-up tumbleweed rolling across. And yet that's where we are right now. It's scary stuff, and at the rate we're going I wonder if we'll be able to get things back to how they "should" be — whatever that might be.

Anyway, maudlin thoughts about the fate of the planet aside, I have been enjoying getting out and about. Although it's been pretty warm in the daytime, I've found going out around 7pm has a good balance between having some light left and the air just generally being a bit cooler thanks to the sun starting to set. I've even seen marginal improvements in my own performance over just those three days — not that I'm particularly caring about performance right now, since the goal is just to get out and do something, but it is nice to see that just a little effort can pay off almost immediately.

So yeah. I'm going to enjoy a night off tonight, then get back out there tomorrow. Now I have Salmonids to splat!

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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The post #oneaday Day 775: Perambulation appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

What do you know? It works. Okay, I had to install a plugin. But that plugin works.

some vapid fool

sonicfunkstars

Listen on Bandcamp

00:00 / 00:00

• 1 sonicfunkstars : C'mon 03:56
• 2 sonicfunkstars : Dream 02:04
• 3 sonicfunkstars : Let Yourself Go 04:24
• 4 sonicfunkstars : Wandering Mind 03:20
• 5 sonicfunkstars : Nemesis 04:19
• 6 sonicfunkstars : Serenity 03:12
• 7 sonicfunkstars : Suck My Car 05:50
• 8 sonicfunkstars : World in Ruins 04:33
• 9 sonicfunkstars : Good Times 04:16
• 10 sonicfunkstars : Pandora's Box 04:43
• 11 sonicfunkstars : The Big 69 02:22
• 12 sonicfunkstars : Darth Vader Ate My Balls 02:56

Here's the official first sonicfunkstars album, consisting of some early experiments using ACID Music and culminating in a thoroughly silly track composed in collaboration with my friends Woody and Edd, whose title should be fairly self-explanatory.

I was originally inspired to get into using ACID Music by my brother doing some experiments with it under the artist name "ME", and I thought it looked like fun. My friends and I had also spent some time fiddling around with Dance eJay and had developed a taste for sample manipulation, so ACID Music was a natural next step. I had great fun putting these tracks together, even if they have absolutely no concept of "mastering" and the album as a whole has no real concept or theme holding it together.

The title "some vapid fool" came from the University Theatre Group's obsession with the words "vapid", "facile" and "asinine", which we used at every opportunity. Making an album seemed like a prime opportunity to do so, particularly when combined with that cover art — which, yes, is me, aged approximately 18 years of age, drinking in Chamberlain Bar, our nearest halls of residence-based drinking establishment. It was '70s night when that photo was taken, and I am sporting some charity shop specials.

txtr's thumb

sonicfunkstars

Listen on Bandcamp

00:00 / 00:00

• 1 sonicfunkstars : Lonely Night 03:32
• 2 sonicfunkstars : Are You Afraid of the Dark? 02:50
• 3 sonicfunkstars : On a Mission 06:21
• 4 sonicfunkstars : The Boy in the Dragon Shirt 05:32
• 5 sonicfunkstars : txtr's thumb 03:48
• 6 sonicfunkstars : My Lil' Sister 04:39
• 7 sonicfunkstars : What Lies Within 01:42
• 8 sonicfunkstars : Romeo's Lament 03:33
• 9 sonicfunkstars : Chopin in the City 01:52
• 10 sonicfunkstars : In the Shadows 03:10
• 11 sonicfunkstars : It's Okay to Cry 06:11
• 12 sonicfunkstars : Tenochtitlan 04:35
• 13 sonicfunkstars : A Love That Lasts Forever 03:57

Much like the first album, this second one was largely experimental — though this time I incorporated a combination of MIDI sequenced tracks and live-recorded keyboards on top of the samples. There is a vague concept to this one — it's supposed to be a sort of reflection of the hormonal turmoil of my mind during my university years, and I think the somewhat… back-and-forth nature of its emotional core reflects how I was feeling at the time rather well. There's some tracks among this lot that I really like, and a few that I'm mildly embarrassed by. I have left off the one I am most embarrassed by, in which I attempted to rap. That one is never seeing public release.

London Taxi Chase II OST

sonicfunkstars

Listen on Bandcamp

00:00 / 00:00

• 1 sonicfunkstars : Title theme 05:20
• 2 sonicfunkstars : The Bus Shop 04:23
• 3 sonicfunkstars : London Taxi Chasing Again 03:25
• 4 sonicfunkstars : Bonus Round 03:25

This short little collection of tracks was composed for a Klik and Play project I had been working on, in which a London bus repeatedly attacked a taxi for no real reason whatsoever, other than the fact we thought it was funny and those were two of the default sprites in Klik and Play. The… album, EP, whatever you want to call it, was an attempt to remix a single track into multiple different styles, with the exception of The Bus Shop, which is loosely (all right, quite heavily) inspired by the first village theme from Xenogears.

Pie Eater's Destiny Gold Edition OST

sonicfunkstars

Listen on Bandcamp

00:00 / 00:00

• 1 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Megamix 06:22
• 2 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's New Beginning 01:56
• 3 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Advance 01:36
• 4 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Double Trouble 01:55
• 5 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Desperation 02:10
• 6 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eaters In the Groove 02:17
• 7 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eaters Test Their Might 01:42
• 8 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Pathetic Bastards 02:28
• 9 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Flight 01:42
• 10 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Last Stand 02:10
• 11 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Smash Court 02:27
• 12 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Arena 01:43
• 13 sonicfunkstars : Pie Eater's Fight for the Future 08:50

Finally, we come to probably my favourite collection of tracks, composed for my "Gold Edition" remake of a Klik and Play project we had made at sixth form. The original game used MIDIs we'd downloaded from the Internet, but for Gold Edition I wanted to compose an entire soundtrack. So I did!

NOTE: The first track, Pie-Eater's Megamix, contains some naughty language. Sorry about that. It was more than 20 years ago. We are better people now. Probably.

I've also just noticed that I hyphenated "Pie-Eater's" in the first track and not any of the others. I must now correct this.

I have now corrected this.

The Gingerbread Saga

sonicfunkstars

Listen on Bandcamp

00:00 / 00:00

• 1 sonicfunkstars : With a Hammer 03:04
• 2 sonicfunkstars : Return of the Gingerbread Man 05:01

Then there's this, which was the result of watching Shrek multiple times in one weekend (including playing with the "dubbing" feature on the DVD) and then getting roaringly drunk. The storyline was entirely improvised. You can't really tell.

Fringe Benefits

sonicfunkstars

Listen on Bandcamp

00:00 / 00:00

• 1 sonicfunkstars : Annie, Annie 02:48
• 2 sonicfunkstars : Let's See Your Todger 03:38
• 3 sonicfunkstars : The Creeping Vet 03:39

And finally, this, which consists primarily of samples recorded during rehearsals for our 2002 trip to the Edinburgh Fringe to put on Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the tracks and the albums. Please do not feel obliged to buy any of them, as you can stream them for free; I only put a nominal price on them so it doesn't eat into an allocation of free downloads per month. If you really want to own a copy of these, though, I won't stop you.

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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The post #oneaday Day 774: Archiving past nonsense appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am thinking of this with particular regard to musical tastes, as I went out for a walk this evening, and rather than taking the opportunity to listen to something new to me, I decided to put on DJ Yoda's How to Cut & Paste Mix Tape Vol. 1. To be fair, this is an album I haven't actually listened to for quite a long time, so in a way it was a bit of a change from constantly spinning one track from the Gal*Gun 2 soundtrack (this one, if you were curious) because said track makes me smile. But there are also other DJ Yoda albums that I have never listened to — and, going on the fact I enjoyed How to Cut & Paste Vol. 1, 2 and '80s Edition plus Unthugged, I will probably enjoy them also. And yet. And yet. Here I am, hitting Play on things I've been listening to since 2001.

I'm conscious of this every time I put on Dream Theater's Octavarium, an album I like 100% because I enjoyed Panic Attack in Rock Band on the grounds it "sounds a bit like Castlevania", instead of trying out any of their other albums.

I'm conscious of it every time I listen to Movement in Still Life by BT — and it has to be the version of it I'm familiar with — because I remember being introduced to that specific album by my brother, and buying a copy the next time I had the opportunity.

I'm conscious of it every time I listen to Time by ELO, because it's an album I have fond memories of listening to with my Dad.

And I'm conscious of it every time, when faced with the limitless possibilities today's streaming platforms provide, I inevitably revert to the exact same few albums, time after time. Which were likely the ones I ripped and uploaded to Google Play Music before they made it shitter and turned it into YouTube Music anyway.

I don't have a physical CD collection any more, aside from a bunch of soundtrack CDs I've acquired from various limited edition releases of video games. For many years, I didn't regret getting rid of the pile of CDs I had — a collection which dated back to my teenage years, and Oasis' Definitely Maybe, the first piece of popular music I bought for myself with my own money — but just recently, I have been missing them. I have been feeling tempted to make an attempt at rebuilding a collection — with the main thing that is stopping me being the fact I don't think I have a lot of room for CDs. (Although I feel like I could probably make room quite easily.)

I know what will happen if I do that, though: I will inevitably pick up all the albums I remember owning, and probably not anything else. After all, why on Earth would you take a risk on buying some music that you might not like?

This is silly, of course, and it's in direct opposition to how I used to feel about buying music. I used to have absolutely zero shame in the music I bought, as it happens — and I still do feel that way in some respects. I'll listen to pretty much anything, regardless of how cool or uncool it might be — although I do tend to draw the line at tedious X-Factor ballads.

It's just that, as I've grown older, I've felt more and more ensconced in that one canonical set of "albums I like", and stepping outside of that always feels surprisingly difficult — even when it comes to artists whose output I, generally speaking, know that I like.

So y'know what. In an attempt to broaden my own horizons, when I go out for another walk one evening later in the week, I will make an effort to pick something I have never heard before from an artist that I know I like as the accompaniment. I might even discover some new favourites!

As for tonight, I had forgotten about the track called Stupid Poo on How to Cut & Paste Mix Tape Vol. 1 that uses farting as a significant part of the beat, and I thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering it. I will leave that with you.

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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The post #oneaday Day 773: Locked-in tastes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My most recent acquisition in this department is a set of "bone-conducting" headphones. I have been curious to try this technology for a while, and as it was a nice day without being "can't breathe" levels of hot today, I thought I would go for a walk and try them out.

For the unfamiliar, bone-conducting headphones are exactly what they sound like. Rather than sticking them in or on your ear, they sit just in front of your ear on the bony bit that is there. They then transmit the sound through that bone and into the complicated stuff that is inside your ear. This means they bypass your eardrum, which has a number of benefits — most notably allowing those with hearing issues to hear things much better than through things you put in or on your ear — but for me their main appeal element is the fact that… well, they don't sit in or on your ear.

I don't like earbuds because I've never found a pair that are comfortable or that will stay in — and with how bloody tiny wireless ones are these days, I'd be terrified of losing them if I'd paid any sort of premium for them. I do like over-ear headphones, but they do make my head hot, so they're not especially practical for wearing out and about, particularly in the summer. And you just don't really seem to see on-ear headphones much these days. At least, I haven't. Maybe I just haven't really been looking.

These bone-conducting headphones I got were a cheapo pair from Amazon, because I wasn't about to pay through the nose for these if they were any sort of unknown quantity. They're wireless, have USB-C charging and Bluetooth, which is all I really needed. There are fancier (and much more expensive) pairs you can get that have on-board music storage, heavier waterproofing that lets you use them while swimming, and all manner of other features, but I figured just for now, just to begin with, something basic and affordable would be plenty.

And they are! I wore them out for a walk around the Common earlier today, and they definitely do the job. Music is audible and clear, and the fact they're not stuffed in your ears means that if you keep the volume down a bit you can still hear everything going on around you; if you turn the volume up, meanwhile, you can get almost as much immersion in the sound as with a regular pair of earphones.

Sound quality is okay. If you had a Walkman back in the day and had a pair of those over-ear headphones with the foam ear covers, the sound quality seemed roughly equivalent to a pair like that — nothing super-remarkable, a little lacking in the bass end, but perfectly adequate for most things, particularly if "listening to music" is not the primary activity on your agenda and you just want some background noise.

I'm surprised how effectively the bone-conducting method works. I was expecting it to feel weird or be somehow "unusual", but when the music's on, it just sounds like it's being piped into your ears like with a regular pair of headphones. The only real notable difference I noticed is beyond a certain volume level, you can feel the vibrations a little bit, giving a slight tickly sensation around the temples. I found a decent balance between sound quality, not being tickled and being able to hear important noises around me to be a few steps down from max volume, whereas on a lot of other headphones I tend to find myself whacking them up to max and leaving it there.

While I'm not going to go and recommend these things as a replacement for proper audiophile gear — I suspect even the more expensive models will be somewhat limited in their sound quality by the very nature of the tech — they're absolutely a great solution for having some music on while you're out and about, and they're discreet enough that you can just leave them on all the time even while you're not actively using them.

I'm definitely going to be using these a lot more, as I'm definitely (haha) going to be getting out and having a nice walk on a more semi-regular basis than I have been. Weather-permitting, of course; I suspect with how most days have been of late, I will be having a lot of evening walks rather than going in the daytime!

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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The post #oneaday Day 772: The Lovely(-Sounding) Bones appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To give another example — and the one that prompted me to write this today — I am currently playing Quintet's Illusion of Time (aka Illusion of Gaia to North Americans) and I have been thoroughly impressed by its visual design overall, but one of my favourite things is the fact that its parallax backdrops, when it uses them (it's a top-down game) accurately reflect the things that you're supposed to be "above". To put it another way, when you're high above something, the things you can see down below are accurate to what you would see if you were actually down there.

Looking back over my Soul Blazer video, I'm pretty sure Soul Blazer did this in a few places as well, but Illusion of Time seems to do it fairly consistently. And I'm impressed! They didn't have to go to that much effort, but they did!

The reason this impresses me is that a lot of games like this would have used a fairly generic parallax backdrop, and no-one would have minded too much. The illusion of depth would be there — which is what parallax is used for — and the fact that it wasn't "accurate" wouldn't have mattered, because it has no real impact on the actual gameplay.

For example, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past uses a very simple tiled parallax backdrop to show that there is something beneath you rather than it being a bottomless pit. You can use this information to recognise which pits it is safe to jump down — to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, for example — and which it is not. While an accurate reflection of the floor beneath's map might be helpful in this situation, Zelda has enough other features to allow you to calculate the place where you will end up without having to be able to see down the hole. And, indeed, with the limited area you can see through Zelda's holes (pardon me), it's probably more practical to just look at the map and recognise "this is a hole I can jump down" rather than try to figure out exactly where you'll land from the tiny bit of parallax background you can see through said hole.

In Illusion of Time, however, these parallax backgrounds are purely there to look cool. In one sequence where you're exploring a mine, for example, you initially see ropeways with hanging platforms "in front of" the screen, suggesting they're above where you currently are. Later in the stage, you get up to the level of the ropeways and ride one across a large gap. Since, so far as the game is concerned, you are in a different "room" while you're doing this, there probably didn't "need" to be a parallax background at all, but not only did Quintet include one, it was a full, accurate map of the floor beneath.

That, to me, is impressive! It is not impressive by today's standards, because today you would just build your entire level in 3D and be able to see through holes and chasms to the floor beneath naturally. I am impressed with this in Illusion of Gaia, however, because I know that it wouldn't have been that simple to do. Well, it might have been relatively simple — all it really needs to be is an image of the floor below's map used as the parallax background — but it's a level of effort I recognise as being outside of the norm for the time, and thus I appreciate it.

This is where having an understanding and an appreciation of a wide range of things within your hobby is helpful. Someone who had only ever played modern games would think nothing of this little feature. But having grown up with all these different "generations" of gaming hardware, developing a vague (if non-technical) understanding of their capabilities (and lack thereof) along the way, I can recognise when something is an impressive achievement for its original time of release.

I hope I never let go of this trait. It adds so much depth of enjoyment to my appreciation of older games — and I encourage you to try and develop it, too.

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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The post #oneaday Day 771: Anachronistic wonderment appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To take exercise as an example, it's easy to say to yourself "I should exercise for at least half an hour at least three times a week" and then immediately feel like a failure the moment you don't manage to achieve that. (I am aware that is not very much exercise by some people's standards, but it's just a hypothetical baseline for the scenario I'm talking about here.) Setting yourself unrealistic "minimum" targets and then feeling bad when you fail to achieve them is not the way to develop long-term, healthy, sustainable habits, because you come to resent your unsuccessful attempts to live up to the completely arbitrary target you have set yourself, and end up not doing anything as a result. And with anything worth doing, doing that thing a little bit is always, always better than not doing the thing at all.

When I was talking about this, my therapist pointed out that I had a clear shift in my tone of voice. I was speaking purely in abstract terms about how my mind approaches such things, but I had subconsciously shifted to a rather stern-sounding voice (which she described as "the Sergeant-Major") when talking about not being able to meet those "minimum" expectations. And it's true; if you constantly berate yourself for not achieving something, that is, for most people, not a way to motivate yourself to achieve that thing. (It may well work for some people — I am not one of them.)

Conversely, when I think back over the times when I have had the most success getting myself to achieve something — or the times when I've been most convinced by another person to do something — it's always been when kind, gentle encouragement is on offer. A recognition of the fact that something might be difficult, at least to begin with, but a calm suggestion that I at least try something and see how I get on — and if I'm not able to achieve the Grand Target right away, that's fine! Taking a first step is still a step on the road to success, and however small that first step might be, it's better than stumbling so hard you decide the whole thing just isn't worth bothering with at all.

So this is something for me to work on. Acknowledge my successes. Take things one step at a time, a little at a time. Track my progress to celebrate my achievements, not to measure up how close I am to an arbitrary target that ultimately means nothing to anyone but myself.

Because, frankly, I can do that. Look at the post number on this post. Contemplate the fact that this is the third time around on this train, and I have successfully been motivated to do that day after day. This is exercise for the mind. Exercise for the body can be achieved in a similar way. One day at a time, a little at a time, until you wake up one day and you've achieved something that is important and worthwhile to yourself. Others may not recognise your achievement in the same way, and that's fine! It doesn't matter. So long as you have achieved something that you, yourself, find fulfilling, you have succeeded. And you can build from there.

To quote Soul Blazer, which I finished recently (and wrote about! and made a video about!): "Like good sleep comes after hard work, good rest comes after an honest life." I'm not planning on reaching "rest" any time soon, of course — touch wood and all that — but I do, honestly, want to ensure that I have no regrets. And living that honest life comes by taking things one step at a time, recognising your achievements every step of the way.

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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The post #oneaday Day 770: Motivation: the Sergeant-Major vs the kind voice appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There are a couple of reasons this has been a slow process. Firstly, I'm using a cheap-ass USB DVD drive, which I think is knackered. It's developed that particular trait that cheap-ass and knackered technology does where just breathing anywhere near its USB cable causes it to disconnect and then reconnect again — which, when you're talking about a storage device and attempting to get media off it, is not ideal.

Secondly, these CDs must be more than 20 years old. This is part of the reason I'm looking forward to having a play with them again: any music created with them will be so gleefully anachronistic that it will be an absolute delight. Back in the early 2000s, when I first got them, they may well have sounded clichéd. But now! Now they will just sound dated and stupid! And I live for dated and stupid.

The CDs in question were part of a range of packs that the "eJay" label put out, ostensibly (I guess) as an option for those who wanted to move on from the super-fun but rather simplistic Dance, Techno and Hip-Hop eJay sample sequencers, each of which came with a bunch of their own samples. These ones, meanwhile, covered a wide variety of different styles, including various forms of dance, house, techno, hip-hop, trip-hop, alternative, grunge, pop, industrial and many others. It always used to be a great joy putting mismatching samples together to see what happened, and I'm sure that's going to be even more fun now a lot of these "genres" don't really exist any more — at least in the same form as they did in the early 2000s, anyway.

Originally, when I first got these CDs, my school friends and I had a loosely organised collective known as "sonicfunkstars", which is still my Xbox Live Gamertag to this day. We made a bunch of silly (and not-so-silly!) tracks between us, and I get nice fuzzy feelings of nostalgia when I listen back to them. What's that? You want to hear one? Well, I think that can probably be arranged.

This is Txtr's Thumb, which I specifically composed to irritate the piss out of anyone with a Nokia mobile phone. Which was absolutely everyfuckingone at the time I made this. Its impact is somewhat diminished today — unless you have specifically set your phone up to make Nokia noises, which is a possibility, if you're one of those weirdoes who doesn't have your phone on silent at all times — but it does have a thumping beat that I was pretty pleased with back in the day, and still enjoy now. Bonus points for the unnecessary, pointless and nonsensical "lyrics". Baby. Baby! Everything, baby.

More? More.

This is Let's See Your Todger, which is composed almost entirely out of sound clips I recorded on my MiniDisc player of a Theatre Group rehearsal at university. If that doesn't give you some idea of how early 2000s we're talking… well, there you go. Also, sex noises (which weren't actually sex noises, but we thought they sounded like sex noises), which are funny.

One more, go on then. I should probably assemble all these onto a proper page at some point.

This is Good Times, which was an attempt to create the cheesiest-sounding thing possible with the samples I had available. We were into our cheese, we were, while we were at university, so I wanted to pay homage to that in my own way. It even features multiple Boyband Keychanges, just for added fromage factor.

That's a little taste of sonicfunkstars for you. At some point, as I say, I'll pull all this stuff together and archive it properly, along with the stuff I worked on with a pal during teacher training under the name Angry Jedi. Yes, indeed, the source for the original URL of this blog. But I think that's probably a tale for another time at this point.

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The post #oneaday Day 769: Sample CDs and sonicfunkstars appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Yeah, I know. Hardly worth making a big song and dance about, is it. But I tried to analyse why I fell off doing doodles on this site in the first place, and it was because I think I was trying to do a bit too much too soon. I thought that if I got a fancy graphics tablet and started faffing around with a fancy piece of software, then some sort of latent artistic ability would suddenly emerge and I would be able to produce something truly amazing, immediately.

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Not only does producing things that are genuinely amazing take time and effort, everyone also has their own distinct ways of working that they find most comfortable. For me, that has always been stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces. And so, I think for the immediate future at least, the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces are back for now.

The thing I've always liked about doing the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces in the past is that they make me think a little bit about what I've just written. I wouldn't go so far as to say sketching a companion doodle for a post makes me really reflect on things in any great depth, but it does at least make me think about how — and if — it would be possible to get the general vibe of the post across using a quick and dirty doodle.

Often that takes the form of a stupid joke. Back when I did three-panel comics on this blog — which I know at least one person enjoyed, but no-one else ever mentioned, so I stopped doing them just in case I was actually embarrassing myself with them — there were even some running storylines that went along with the blog posts, and sometimes the blog posts and the comic storylines would feed off one another in various ways. That was always pretty fun, actually, but like I say, outside of one once-regular commenter who I haven't seen for a long time (I hope you're well, Jud!) and my wife Andie, who bought me a large canvas print of one of my comics that still hangs above our bed, no-one ever really mentioned them, and I had no great designs of being "a webcomic" or anything anyway; it just seemed like a fun thing to do, and I had a copy of Comic Life on my Mac, so things just sort of went from there.

When you have your own site, though, I think it's important to make your own little mark on it somehow. I mean, obviously you already do that if you're writing things on it, but we are creatures that respond well to obvious visual stimuli, so if the overall look of the site helps get someone's personality across, so much the better, I say. I have tried to do this to a certain degree with the use of the Atari ST's system font for headlines — I tried putting the whole site in it once, but several commenters said it was difficult to read, and it probably was — but nothing beats a bit of scrappy artwork from someone who doesn't really do visual arts.

I've told the story of why I like drawing expressive stickmen many times before on this blog, but for the benefit of those disinclined to go searching through the archives, it stems from, as so many things do, my time at school.

I did pretty well for myself at secondary school. What eventually turned out to be an autistic spectrum condition (though I wouldn't know that until several decades later) meant that I kind of thrived in the structured environment where I was always learning things. But I wasn't, like, the school swot or anything. I had a mischievous streak, which was brought out of me by my friends — and particularly my good friend Edd, who I sat with in many different lessons.

Edd and I liked to doodle. We would doodle all sorts of things, all the time. It was one of our favourite activities — though we knew not to do it anywhere that we might get in vaguely "serious" trouble for. No drawing on desks, no defacing school property, and no doodling on our exercise books that the teacher would mark. (I must confess, however, that during one especially memorable Year 7 Humanities class, my other friend Daniel Blyth and I went through an entire History textbook and drew at least one dick on every single page. My favourite was the one that was poking out of a Roman water gourd, inexplicably shouting "I SCREAM!")

No, Edd and I would doodle on paper that we would specifically bring in for that purpose, or our "Rough Books", which I know I have talked about multiple times on this very site, so I won't tell that specific story again. But anyway. Given the opportunity to doodle, we would take it. And one of the things that we loved doodling was stickmen doing stupid things.

One of the earliest things we did with stickmen began in German lessons, which were so boring we eventually came to the conclusion that was some sort of temporal disruption around the Modern Languages department. (I successfully freaked several of my friends out by using the "countdown timer" feature on my snazzy Casio digital watch to make it look as if time was indeed running backwards.) We livened things up with "The German Stickmen", which was a four-panel comic in which two people would argue about something really stupid in German in the first frame, the second frame would devolve into them yelling "Nein!" "Ja!" at one another multiple times, the third frame would always be one of them shouting "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, see) and drawing some form of (usually explosive) weapon, and the final frame would inevitably involve some form of extreme violence or, most commonly, a mushroom cloud.

Over time, our ambitions for the stickmen became more elaborate. We'd already "created" (and I use the term loosely) the characters Edlock Holmes and Watson as a result of our shared enjoyment over the point-and-click adventure games The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and when we went on holiday to Gran Canaria together, we produced an epic-length stickman comic, drawn in extreme haste and with no real care, called Fate of Thingy. This thing took on a life of its own and was rewritten multiple times, and I still have it somewhere — though I think it's missing one or two pages. The intent, you see, was to do a "rough" version of the comic using stickmen, then when we got home we'd do a "proper" one. I did, indeed, start doing a "proper" version, at one point, but we both decided we liked the stickmen so much they would become the canonical versions of Edlock Holmes and Watson. As Fate of Thingy continued to expand across multiple parts, all further development was in stickman form — and continued to be on the bright yellow legal pad Edd had acquired from his mother's workplace, until we ran out of that and had to start using bog-standard notebook paper.

So yeah. Stickmen are important to me, as ridiculous as that might sound. I have an intense, nostalgic and emotional attachment to them. And thus I think they should continue to be an important part of this blog. I will, therefore, from hereon, endeavour to provide you with a stupid little doodle to accompany each post (except when I really can't be bothered). Is that enough of a commitment for you? Well, tough shit, because it's all you're getting.

Nein!
Ja!
Nein!
Ja!
ACHTUNG!

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The post #oneaday Day 768: Sketchin' appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's a fair question. Over the course of the last eighteen years, I have written 3.35 million words on this site across 4,642 posts. (Okay, technically a chunk of those were originally posted on my now-defunct blog on Patreon, but since that effectively took the place of this site while it was active, I am counting them.) I could stop at any point. In fact, I have stopped on multiple occasions. And yet something keeps bringing me back. And, moreover, every time I come back, the absolute last thing on my mind is to get the lying, lake-boiling plagiarism robot to "write" something for me.

Because why would you do that? If you want to write, just fucking write. Generative AI isn't "democratising" the creative process, as some people argue, because the creative process was democratised the moment everyone could afford writing implements and things to write on. Moreover, if you get the stupid dumbass robot to regurgitate some vapid garbage on your behalf, you have not written that. You do not deserve any credit whatsoever, even for "engineering" the prompt. You are a lazy, feckless idiot who does not want to do something creative; you want to fill the world with more content that no-one actually wants. To quote a memorable Reddit post I saw once in response to someone like this: "best of luck on something literally no-one, including you, will read."

"Oh, but it helps for resear-" Shut up. Shut up. It demonstrably gets things wrong a statistically significant proportion of the time, thereby making it completely worthless for research by its very definition.

"Oh, but it helps for brainsto-" Shut up. Shut up. What you are talking about is the creative process. Brainstorming is part of it all! The creative process doesn't start the moment you start typing, writing, recording or using your tools. It starts the moment a little light goes on in your mind and you have a vague idea that you want to make something. It starts the moment you get a flash of a character you want to construct. It starts the moment you get the hint of a melody. It starts the moment you read something else that inspires you to want to write something on the same subject — as I am doing right now.

I do not want generative AI. I did not ask for generative AI. I have no use for generative AI. And I think people who rely on generative AI to conjure some shit up out of a vague prompt rather than writing things themselves are, as previously noted, lazy, feckless idiots who have no interest in genuine creativity. They do not care about the quality of their eventual output; all they care about is that they have produced content. Consistency of content is key! Churn it out like a good little drone! Doesn't matter if it's good or not, so long as it gets engagement!

(Aside: I will begrudgingly admit that generative AI does have some potential use cases, but only as part of a human-led workflow and only if it is not being used as a means of attempting to replace the skills and knowledge of a real person. Even then, I can't help but feel there are other, less damaging ways to achieve the same thing — often with better results. And, indeed, many things that are now labelled as "AI-powered" are, in fact, not generative AI-based — they are just using "AI" as a supposedly fashionable buzzword, apparently blissfully unaware of the growing distaste for anything labelled "AI", when what they actually mean is "computer-controlled" or "based on machine learning". The auto-accompaniment mode on the Yamaha keyboard I used as a child would probably be labelled "AI" today when it is nothing of the sort.)

I often find myself thinking about all this, considering that I write something on this site every day as the result of a self-imposed but only loosely enforced challenge — and part of that challenge is to just write something, regardless of if it ends up being any good. At no point do I feel like I am creating content, because I am not doing this for anyone other than myself, and I am certainly not doing it for "engagement". I am doing it because I enjoy it; because I find it a helpful means of expressing myself; and because, occasionally, it allows me to form a connection with another person, when something I have written resonates with them, for one reason or another.

This website has over 3.5 million words on it, but not a single one of them has come from a machine. Not a single one of them has been written out of a desire to create content. Every one of them has come out of my brain because I wanted to write them, because there was something I wanted to express, because there was something I wanted to remember or because there was something I wanted to process. This may seem like a stupid, pointless website to the casual observer, but to me, it is immeasurably valuable.

If I had sullied even the tiniest bit of it with generative AI, it would no longer be mine. And yes, I'm aware that by the very virtue of it being On The Internet, it has probably already been ingested into one or more of the AI models out there. But I'm not taking it down or giving up on this valuable means of self-expression, because fuck you, Clammy Sam Altman and Wario Amodei, that's why.

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The post #oneaday Day 767: Why I continue to write in an age of AI appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Answering the phone by giving your phone number to the person who just dialled it. This is one of those things that, when I was young, my Mum gave the impression of it being really important. I always felt weird doing it, but we continued doing these even after phone numbers got longer. "Great Gransden [xxx]" became "[xxx][yyy]". (Numbers censored so you don't phone my parents, who are still at the same house and phone number.)

Answering the phone at home with a "script" to determine who is calling, please? If I felt awkward reciting digits to a mystery person before I knew who it was, I felt really awkward acting like a receptionist. I wonder how much feeling obliged to do this as a kid has contributed to my general distaste for using the telephone today.

Having a phone number that, excluding area code, was three digits long. Yep, really; we had an area code that was five digits long, and a phone number that was three. During my childhood, this changed to a different five-digit area code with a "1" as its second digit, and which covered a wider region, and a six-digit phone number.

Being able to accurately dial a full-length phone number using a rotary phone and not panicking halfway through that you're not sure if you pulled the "9" around far enough. The phone in our hall was a rotary one. While I never really liked having to use the phone, dialling it was pretty fun. If you like mechanical noises, I encourage you to go play with a rotary phone, as it makes some very good sounds.

Being able to remember at least five phone numbers that were not your own. At some point, I could remember my own phone number, my Nan B's phone number (but not my Nan D's), my friend Matthew's phone number, my friend Edd's phone number and the phone number for my school. And possibly some more. Now I can just about remember Andie's mobile number… plus my parents' phone number, which is the same as it's been for nearly 50 years (and used to be "mine" also) so that one's kind of cheating.

Having a phone that actually rang, like, with a bell, not an electronic beeper. Again, the hall phone had a proper ringer and dear Lord it was loud. Heaven help you if you were standing next to it when it rang. Interestingly, every so often I do think I hear a proper ringer phone somewhere — I believe they might use them in places like construction sites still, as that piercing ring can be heard from a mile off.

"Going on the computer" being a discrete activity rather than the default behaviour. Get home from school, do homework, have dinner. Then, if I had been "good", I could maybe "go on the computer", as long as my Dad wasn't using it for anything. I feel like we lost something when we plugged ourselves into our PCs semi-permanently — and definitely when we effectively started carrying around a tiny PC in our pocket.

Sweet treats costing less than a pound each. There was an ice-cream man who came to our school every lunchtime — I assume (hope) he had some sort of special arrangement with the school — and he sold cans of drink for 30p, and "2p sweets" for… well, you know. (You could buy a bag of 2p sweets, too. I don't think we got screwed over with those.) Nowadays you'll pay a quid or more for a can of Coke, and the same again for a basic bitch chocolate bar. Don't even get me started how a "quick trip to the shops for some snacks" can end up costing £40 or more these days.

Going to a newsagent and coming out with something paper that you can read. I'm not even sure we have a newsagent anywhere near us any more. There's a pathetic little "Magazines" section in our local Sainsbury's, but it's nothing compared to the glory days of my Mum getting pissed off at my Dad for standing around reading Computer Shopper in WHSmith rather than actually buying a copy. I internalised my Mum's objections and preferred to buy a magazine that I wanted to read; it was much more fun reading it at home at my own pace.

Going out of the house to be with people who shared an interest. While I'm eternally sorry that I'm just a little bit too young to have been able to enjoy the phenomenon of "Computer Clubs" and "User Groups" in the early days of the 8-bit micros, when I was a kid I did have things that I went to each week and enjoyed, along with my peers. Cub Scouts was probably the highlight of these; that was an interesting time where I learned a lot of things that I probably otherwise wouldn't have found out about, had the opportunity to go (extremely heavily supervised) camping, and just generally had a pretty good time. I know that "interest groups" for grown-ups do exist, but I don't really know where to begin looking for them these days — particularly with all the dogshit information that is out there on platforms like Facebook these days. I miss the simplicity of your parents just knowing that there's a Cub Scout pack in the next village over, and wouldn't you like to join it, your friends are going to join!

So there you are. That's my age. I hope you enjoy it.

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The post #oneaday Day 766: Verify your age appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have two particularly fond memories of times when I have been able to indulge in some role-playing, and interestingly enough, neither of them involve a well-established, rules-heavy system. In both cases, they were simple acts of collective creativity — and they were vast amounts of fun as a result.

The first time wasn't really an organised session as such. I was in my second year at university, living in a grotty old flat that had very large rooms. Some of my friends from my school days had come down to visit, and they were sleeping in the living room; rather than retiring to my own bedroom down the hall, I decided to sleep in the living room with them. And before long, rather than falling asleep, one of our number kicked off a completely improvised role-playing session where our probably drunk, definitely tired and increasingly delirious selves got our characters into increasingly ridiculous situations — inevitably with the worst possible outcomes constantly happening to one of our number, because that was the funniest way things could go.

I forget the details of the "adventure", such as it was, but I do recall that my friend Edd found himself under attack by a giant penis monster at one point. So, naturally, he decided to cast the spell he'd made up called "REMOVE COCK", and you can imagine what the actual result of that was. It was an utterly ridiculous evening that I will always remember immensely fondly — and not a single die rolled along the way.

The other occasion was when I was around at a friend's house, and one of said friend's friends with whom I had previously become casually acquainted said he was going to run a role-playing game session for us, using what he described as a "freeform system" that he'd devised himself. Said system had just three statistics: Attack, Defence and Power, and all three of those statistics fluctuated according to the things we were doing; you'd "spend" points from each on various actions, and could regain them in various ways, usually by making progress through the adventure.

Because the system was so freeform, we were invited to come up with any kind of character we wanted. Being big into Japanese role-playing games at the time — not like now, obviously — my character was somewhere between a vaguely imagined half-elf character I'd mentally doodled at various points over the prior months, and basically Dante from Devil May Cry. Lots of flashy moves, big sword, pyrotechnics, all that sort of thing. His name was Rush Hurin.

Alongside Rush we had The Luggage from Discworld, a sentient suit of armour named Arryth, a cloud of amorphous pink gas and the archangel Tyrael from Diablo. It was a motley crew to be sure, but we had some grand adventures — and the skill of our dungeon master was such that he was able to devise dungeons and scenarios on the fly that meant we all had an opportunity to shine along the way.

Okay, yes, he pulled puzzles from a straight-up Big Book of Puzzles that he brought along with him — and on more than one occasion we entered a room in a dungeon with an elaborate-looking mechanism that had a big sign on it saying "COME BACK LATER" — but even using that "source material" and occasional little "cheats" to keep things flowing along, we ended up with an enormously entertaining adventure that culminated, as I recall, with us fighting a skyscraper-sized flaming demon, each using our own unique abilities to bring it down in various ways — culminating with The Luggage swallowing it and sending it to an unknown other dimension, as most of our other encounters concluded.

Both of these were great fun, yes, but I also just kind of… hunger for an opportunity to play something as basic bitch as Dungeons & Dragons, even though I know that's not fashionable any more. I always thought Vampire: The Masquerade would be fascinating to play, too — hence why I had a bunch of sourcebooks for it back in my early 20s — but that, more than almost anything else, strikes me as something you very much Need The Right Group For.

Why am I talking about all this? Well, I watched an episode of Mythical Kitchen this evening where they had the cast of Critical Role on there, and it reminded me that I've never… watched, listened to, whatever you do with Critical Role, and I was thinking I should probably correct that at some point. Sure, it's not quite the same as being part of my own campaign, but I think I might enjoy it… maybe it's time to add it to the "bedtime listening" rotation.

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The post #oneaday Day 765: Role-playing appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Several people, as part of this process, pointed out that the term "retro" is not really all that helpful any more, and I'm inclined to agree. And yes, I'm aware I say this as part of a company that specifically markets itself as "retro gaming"-focused — and someone who has a "Retro Video Games" category on his blog — but what I'm about to talk about applies to all that, also.

My feelings are pretty simple: drop the "retro". They're just games. Zork? Game. Adventure for 2600? Game. The Last of Us? Game. The Witcher 3? Game. Gone Home? Game. (There, that should have covered everything that might piss at least one person off.)

The reason I say this is that as soon as you introduce the word "retro" into the mix, you also introduce a perceived barrier to entry. "Retro gaming" is perceived as a markedly different hobby to "gaming", whereas this doesn't really happen with any other medium. You might have people who are into different genres of books, movies, music, TV shows and suchlike, but you don't get people going "yeah, I'm a retro reader". Even people who make the majority of their reading time involve pre-20th century literature just "enjoy reading" — because most of them don't confine themselves to that one, single niche all of the time. Why? Because that's daft. Just because you like Jane Eyre doesn't mean you can't enjoy The Da Vinci Code or whatever. And you're not any less of a "reader" if you do.

The net effect of this when it comes to gaming is that you get people who will only ever play the latest and greatest games, and if it came out more than three weeks ago it might as well not exist, and you get people who will happily play a triple-A cinematic blockbuster one evening, an 8-bit home computer game another and a PlayStation RPG the next. You also get people who fall somewhere between those two extremes, which is a perfectly reasonable and healthy way to approach things. No-one is saying you have to enjoy everything from throughout the entirety of gaming history, but to draw a completely imaginary "hard cutoff" line between what is "modern" and what is "retro" based on, let's face it, nothing other than vibes is kind of ridiculous.

Case in point: currently, I am playing through Soul Blazer. This is a game originally released for Super NES in 1992 (1994 if you're PAL like me). There is absolutely nothing about this game that someone who has only ever played games released in the last three weeks would not be able to grasp. There's a common misconception that "retro games are complicated, you need to read the manual", but Soul Blazer is literally "move in four directions, hit things with your sword", and everything else is introduced either organically through gameplay, or explicitly told to you. You could release Soul Blazer today, completely unchanged — gorgeous pixel art has never gone out of fashion, thankfully — and it would be regarded as a good game, because it is a good game. It's not a good retro game, it's just a good game.

I think some of this likely originally stems from the crossover between the Mega Drive and SNES era to the age of PlayStation, Saturn and N64. Rumours abounded at the time that developers were specifically being discouraged from making 2D pixel art games on PlayStation, because polygonal 3D — even the relatively janky polygonal 3D of the PlayStation — was regarded as the One True Future. But I'm not sure quite how true that ever was, because one of the absolute most beloved games of that particular period — Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — was resolutely 2D, with only very occasional polygons used for special effects or parallax backgrounds. And there are countless other beautiful, wonderful and well-loved 2D games from that era — particularly on Saturn. Marginally less so on N64, but that was operating in a bit of a world of its own anyway. (Also, play Mischief Makers.)

That doesn't really explain how this sort of thinking appears to have persisted for this long, though. Yes, over the last 20 years or so there very much has been a rise in the sort of gamer who only ever buys that year's Call of Duty, FIFA/Madden or equivalent and leaves it at that, who doesn't really consider the history of the medium. But there seems to be the perception that there are plenty of people who have been gaming since the '80s — even earlier in some cases — who, for whatever reason, will not play anything released before a certain date — or, at the very least, will corral those experiences into a distinct "retro gaming" category, distinct from the implied "proper" modern gaming sector where they spend the majority of their time. I don't doubt people like that exist, but I wonder how widespread they really are.

Some of this is down to access; we're all familiar with that Video Game History Foundation report, or at least I hope we are at this point. But "not commercially available" is by no means the same as "inaccessible" these days. You don't even need original hardware; emulation of pretty much everything up to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era is in a good place, and after that (some would argue during that period) the newer games consoles were basically just PCs anyway, so outside of a dwindling number of genuine exclusives, you can play all that stuff pretty easily, too. At this point, everyone, everywhere, so long as you have some combination of an Internet connection, a computer and a monitor or TV, can enjoy pretty much any game released within the last 50 years without very much in the way of effort.

And modern rereleases of stuff that first came out many years ago are happening, too, if you don't want to delve into the proverbial high seas! There's Hamster's Arcade and Console Archives series on the current consoles. There are numerous bespoke releases of classic console, computer and arcade games on various platforms. Evercade, the platform I work on, has a huge number of cartridges at this point, covering more that 700 games between them, all of them officially licensed rereleases!

Any perceived barrier to entry that "retro gaming" might have had in the past — be that the technical knowhow required to get old finicky hardware up and running; the possession of vintage CRT TV hardware; an understanding of what "RGB" is; the ability to recap an Xbox or replace the battery in a Dreamcast — has not been there for a good long while, unless you want to enjoy a specific type of experience. (Snobbery over whether you're "doing retro gaming right" is a whole other discussion, mind, and it's hopefully already clear where my opinions fall on that side of things.)

If you enjoy games, you (hopefully) just enjoy games. There is absolutely no rule written down anywhere that places down a hard boundary of what you are allowed to enjoy, based on whatever combination of "year of release" and "age of player" people are using to calculate their completely arbitrary definition of "retro". Sure, some older stuff might take a little adjusting to if you're unfamiliar with it — much as reading Jane Eyre takes a bit of adjustment after reading The Da Vinci Code — but it's still the same basic form of entertainment at heart: push buttons, fun (or at least interesting) stuff happens.

Go on. Spoil yourself. Play something from a system you've never explored before. Revisit a game you haven't played since childhood. Fire up a copy of that one game you always saw in magazines and lusted over, but which you never got for Christmas or birthdays. And, with an appropriately receptive and open mind, I pretty much guarantee that you'll have an experience just as interesting, compelling and worthwhile as if you played something that released last week.

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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The post #oneaday Day 764: Just games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

(That said, I'm here, aren't I? So maybe it's all starting to solidify again a bit.)

Patti, being a black cat with a fairly dense coat, has been suffering a bit in the heat, I think. She has taken to spending most of the day in what we call her "hole" — a little bit of the catio that attaches to the cat flap in the back of the house, and which is now a nice shady spot because Andie has put a bunch of seedling trays on top of it. She seems fairly content when she's in there, and she's up, about and active when the worst of the day's heat has passed by, so perhaps she just has the right idea — sleep through the worst of the heat and get up to cause mischief as the sun starts to set. And yes, she's getting plenty of water and the opportunity to cool off in the air conditioned bedroom whenever she wants.

Oliver, meanwhile, has been just fine. He's very much back to his old self: full of energy and mischief, and putting across the distinct impression that he doesn't even know what the word "sad" means. I am glad. I was concerned that his experiences living rough for three weeks might have traumatised him in some way — and perhaps they have — but he certainly seems to have adjusted back to life with us perfectly well.

The only real change we've seen in him — aside from all the weight he had lost when we first found him, which he's mostly put back on again now — is that he seemingly wants to be near one or both of us the vast majority of the time. He doesn't necessarily have to be interacting with us directly — sometimes he just wants to sit on the floor in the hallway near where we're working, or lying on the floor in the spare room next to my study, knowing that I'm there. He also follows me around the house even more than he did previously, which is adorable, but I do worry that one day I will trip right over him!

Andie is also suffering a bit, as she's on some medications that make it difficult for her to regulate her temperature, which I'm sure you can probably appreciate are not ideal to be taking in the middle of a heatwave. I am… kind of sort of OK, aside from the melty brain predicament I described at the start of this post. I often catch myself just sort of staring into space, wanting to go and do something fun, but having great difficulty mustering up the energy and enthusiasm to do so. Still, acknowledging that I am doing this thing, much like I acknowledge elements of my self, thoughts and feelings in therapy, is a helpful step towards breaking out of that cycle and going to do something.

The next challenge I need to tackle is exactly what to spend the remainder of the evening on. I could play some more Soul Blazer, or some Final Fantasy XI, or some Rhythm Paradise Groove, or some Star Fox, or…

Oh dear. I think my brain melted again.

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The post #oneaday Day 763: My brain has melted appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Then I looked at what I had written and thought, "no, I should not give in to despair, even if it does seem like it has been a very long time since anything has happened which I can honestly say is to the betterment of humanity as a whole". So I deleted all of it, replaced the image of horseshit with a picture of Patti (above) and decided that a helpful thought exercise would be to ponder some Nice Things. Doesn't matter what they are, how big they are, how important they are — just that they are Nice Things that I thought were worth celebrating. So let's pick out… ooh, let's say, five, as that's a nice number to work with. And I'm going to focus on gaming because a lot of stuff in gaming sucks right now.

Mike Bithell's new game looks cool

Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame, has been teasing his new game for a while, and yesterday he finally revealed it. It's called Vampirium: 1997 and is set in an alternate near-history where Dracula is the king of England, and you are one of his retainers, with dark powers all your own.

Bithell describes the game as an "immersive sim", but if you're thinking of a first-person adventure-style affair — which is what the term "immersive sim" usually gets applied to — you might be surprised to discover that this is a rather more abstract affair that, from what we've seen so far, looks to take a lot of cues from tabletop gaming. The "immersive sim" aspect comes from how you have a lot of freedom to tackle situations as you see fit — supposedly you can "click and combine game tiles to access verbs and craft your own diabolical resolutions". Sounds pretty interesting to me!

The game doesn't have a release date as yet, but will be launching into Early Access in the near future, and having a bunch of stuff added to it as the community gets to grips with it. It will then have a "1.0" release when all that is done, and we should have another great vampire game on our hands.

Wadjet Eye Games is 20 years old

If you (yes, you!) have ever uttered the fateful words "adventure games are dead" at any point in recent history, you have not been paying attention, because one of the absolute best developer-publishers to ever Do That Thing turned 20 years old today. Yes! Wadjet Eye Games has been releasing excellent adventure games since 2006, and their work has been going from strength to strength year after year — both in terms of the stuff they've made themselves, and the titles they've published from other developers.

I honestly, genuinely believe that the point-and-click adventure game is in a better place today than it ever was back in the LucasArts and Sierra heyday; don't get me wrong, I adore the "golden age" games and always will, since they were formative experiences for me. But you cannot look at incredible recent(ish) releases like The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (developed by Cloak & Dagger and published by Wadjet Eye) and Old Skies (developed in-house at Wadjet Eye) and think "nah, it was way better back then".

It fills my heart with gladness to know that amid all the chaos in the games industry right now, a company dedicated to releasing games of the kind it believes in — not what shareholders want, not what passing trends say you "should" be making, not what is supposedly the most profitable — is able to not only survive, but thrive. I sincerely hope Wadjet Eye Games continues to stick around for many years to come.

Scott Pilgrim EX is fun

My limited edition copy of Scott Pilgrim EX, which comes in a lovely oversized NeoGeo-esque clamshell case, arrived yesterday, and I spent most of the evening playing it through. It's a lot of fun! It successfully manages to feel true to the prior game — which is an all-time favourite — while shaking things up a bit and keeping things interesting.

I'll have more to say about this over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future, but suffice it to say for now that I had a lot of fun with my first playthrough — and with a full run through the game only being about 2.5 hours in total, I can see plenty more in my future, particularly with the possibility of online multiplayer in the mix.

Soul Blazer is great

I already knew this, but my recent starting-a-new-playthrough-and-I'll-probably-definitely-finish-it-this-time go at Quintet's awesome SNES action RPG Soul Blazer has reminded me how much I like that game. Again, I will write more about this on MoeGamer when I've actually beaten the damn thing — I'm a little shy of halfway through so far, I believe — but I am happy to say, right now, that if you have never played this delightful little game (and it is pretty little — I reckon it'll take less than 10 hours to beat, which begs the question why I've never gotten around to doing so) then you are very much missing out on one of the most charming 16-bit games there ever was.

I have finished "The Best Bit" of Final Fantasy XI

A lot of people seem to agree that Chains of Promathia is the best bit of Final Fantasy XI and now, outside of the epilogue quests and the optional Bahamut fight (which I might wait to do until I'm level 99 for the sake of simplicity) I have finally beaten it! This has been a kind of "gaming ambition" for me pretty much ever since I played Final Fantasy XI for the first time, and I have finally made it a reality.

This is another thing I would like to write about on MoeGamer in the very near future, so I will simply say that I enjoyed myself, and I'm glad I finally took this journey. I think I need at least a short break before heading off to seek the Treasures of Aht Urhgan though…!

Anyway, those are Five Good Things of Varying Relevance in gaming right now. I post these not to diminish the impact or importance of the Bad Stuff happening at the moment, but instead to hopefully provide a little reprieve. I sincerely wish that everyone who is going through tough times right now — and there are a lot of people going through tough times in the industry right now — is able to at least find some joy in the day-to-day, and doesn't give in to despair; I also hope that many of these people will tell their stories, frankly and honestly, because they need to be told. And they need to be told by the people who have been affected, not by some random idiot on the Internet.

One day, I hope these terrible times will be behind us, and we will be able to look back on them and go "fucking hell, never do that again". Until then, take care of yourselves. Don't give up. And play Soul Blazer.

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The post #oneaday Day 762: Some nice things appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Some of my fondest memories of playing games in the early (relatively speaking) days of PC gaming were of id Software titles. Commander Keen. Wolfenstein 3-D. Doom. Quake. All absolute legends of gaming history, each for their own reasons.

I didn't just love id's games for the games themselves — though that was a big part of it. I loved them for the way they brought my friends and I together over shared enjoyment of them. I loved them for helping me come out of my shell a bit and do some part-time work for a local shareware library. I loved them for how they allowed me to relate to the people I worked alongside during my Year 10 work experience in the PC Zone offices.

And, of course, I loved them for introducing me to shareware, providing me with hours of entertainment for absolutely no cost whatsoever. I played the shareware episodes of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom to absolute death, only coming to the full versions some time later — many years later in some cases. At the time I was playing these games, I was still a teenager, and not financially independent enough to do something as serious as mail-ordering the full version of a game from the States. I kind of wish I had at least ordered a copy of Doom; those original mail-order boxed versions are worth a fair bit now!

And there's all the surrounding culture, too. Wolfenstein 3-D introduced me to modding games. I'm not generally a huge fan of modding games these days, but back in the Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom days I found it fascinating, and highly enjoyable to make Wolfenstein 3-D maps in particular. (At the time, I found Doom editing to be a bit confusing and never really got on with it. Maybe I should try it again now I am old and, in theory, less stupid.) Hell, as I've told the story numerous times before, modding Wolfenstein 3-D once earned me $200 and a place in the official "Super Upgrades" expansion pack by Apogee — an oft-forgotten but nonetheless official addon to the original game.

Of course I'm aware that the id Software of today is very different from the id Software I grew up with — but I'm sure there were at least some people who have built a whole career and a life there. While the company isn't going away entirely, I am saddened to see it take such a devastating blow; the current state of the games industry is, frankly, really quite worrying, and I'm concerned a lot of well-established names aren't going to survive what is increasingly looking like a full-on crash.

I'm not going to be angry and yell about what has happened, for a variety of reasons. Most of all I just want to raise a glass to id Software, makers of some of the greatest games of all time, and celebrate the amazing times they have given me over the years — and continue to give me, as I so often return to their most famous works.

Who knows what the future holds? I certainly don't. I sincerely hope that, in the long term, it looks a lot brighter, especially for everyone who has been affected by Recent Happenings.

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The post #oneaday Day 761: The depths of the id appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

If you're reading this, you probably don't need me to tell you my feelings about old games, but I'm going to talk about them anyway — if only for the benefit of anyone who might be stumbling across this blog for the first time, or for anyone who, somehow, did not know the following about me.

I love old games! I always have done. For as long as I can remember, I have loved going back to earlier gaming systems and either rediscovering old favourites, or discovering brand new ones. I quite regularly boot up the MiSTer's Atari 8-bit, ST and Amiga cores to play the games of my childhood — and the games that I lusted after in my childhood. I also explore the libraries of consoles that I never had the opportunity to own, or which were prohibitively expensive, or which just passed me by for one reason or another. It's a constant delight, and I think, as the article linked states, it has done me a lot of good, too.

Probably the best thing that Being Into Old Games has taught me is not to give a rat's ass about performance, unless said performance is actively detrimental to the overall experience. I grew up gaming on systems that could barely manage simple flat-shaded 3D polygonal scenes at about 10 frames per second, and had a ton of fun on platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, both of which have graphical capabilities it would be very easy to find laughable today if you're a snobbish dickhead.

There really are people out there who will declare games from this era (and earlier) "unplayable" because they run at an inconsistent frame rate, or a low resolution, or have blurry textures, or use a "weird" controller. (Fun fact: the Nintendo 64 controller is absolutely fine when playing games that were designed for it! That said, if you really don't get along with it, I recommend either this for modern USB devices, or this for original hardware.)

There are people out there who completely fail to grasp the absolute phenomenon that was GoldenEye and Perfect Dark split-screen multiplayer. None of us cared that the frame rate was, by today's standards, bobbins! The games were fun! That was literally all that mattered! And you can still live your life that way! I bet if I hooked up a MiSTer with four controllers and ran Perfect Dark on it at a party, people would be fighting over it by the end of the evening. (This makes the mistaken assumption that I would 1) throw a party and 2) have anyone to invite to a party, mind, but I am speaking purely hypothetically here.)

Don't get me wrong, it is undoubtedly nice to play a modern, high-resolution game that runs super smoothly and slickly. Certain genres particularly benefit from absolutely rock-solid performance — but that doesn't magically make games from years gone by that didn't run at a constant 60+ fps suddenly completely unplayable or not worth bothering with. Ridge Racer Type 4, one of the greatest video games ever created, only just about cracks 30 and runs at a resolution of 320×240 pixels (on NTSC displays, anyway) during races! And yet I go back to Ridge Racer Type 4 more than pretty much any other racing game released since then… except maybe the Project Gotham games.

One of the nicest things about older games that I'm coming to appreciate a whole lot more as I get older is that they just respect your time more. Even in RPGs, there's a lot less endless grinding, a lot less "content" designed for "player retention" — and I know some people like them, but the complete absence of Achievements and/or Trophies is absolute bliss, because it means you can play and enjoy each and every game exactly how you want to, without feeling obliged to tick things off a checklist — including boring, tedious things you don't actually want to do — lest you feel you haven't "Platinumed" it properly.

I am a strong, strong advocate for expanding your gaming horizons and exploring the incredibly vast, diverse and vibrant history of the medium. And I mean all of the history! There are Atari 2600 (River Raid! H.E.R.O.! Seaquest! Keystone Kapers!) and Intellivision (Night Stalker! Tower of Doom! Cloudy Mountain!) games that still play great today — and which I, personally, frequently return to, by choice, for a gaming session of an evening. There are myriad Super NES, PlayStation and Saturn RPGs just waiting for me to play them — and I'm looking forward to doing so. And even though I played a lot of N64 back in the day, there's still a lot of games from that relatively slim library that I've never tried — and really want to!

If you're concerned for the future of gaming — and given all the recent happenings, I absolutely do not blame you for that — then don't just give up and assume it's all over. Even if there were to be no more games released ever after tomorrow — and we all know that's not going to happen, regardless of whether or not we're actually in the process of seeing a new Crash happen — there are enough games that have already been released, across all platforms, to keep all of us busy for the rest of our lives.

Something doesn't stop being relevant, worthwhile or interesting because it's 20, 30, 40 years old or more. In many cases, these games are all the more remarkable for remaining relevant, worthwhile and interesting after so long — and it's not just nostalgia. There's something there; something of great value. And I implore you to spend some time exploring it, particularly if you've never done so.

Now I'm off to play Soul Blazer for the rest of the evening.

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The post #oneaday Day 760: My own feelings on old games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I was working my way through the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi, one of the last dungeons in the Chains of Promathia expansion. This dungeon initially looks like something of a labyrinth, but there's actually a linear path through it; a lot of exits are blocked off, forcing you to go one particular direction, and certain doors can only be triggered by activating a "Quasilumin" entity at a special alcove, which will then proceed on patrol — while you have to protect them, naturally — and open various portals along the way.

This task is soloable, particularly with the computer-controlled "Trust" characters you can bring nearly everywhere with you in the game at this point, but it can be a slow process, what with you having to stop and start the Quasilumin in order to keep them out of trouble, clear a path through the enemies ahead and follow along to make sure they don't leave you behind. There's also a time limit on each patrol, so you can't hang around too long.

Partway through my explorations, I ran into another player who was seemingly doing the same thing as me. We didn't really say a lot to one another, but it was pretty clear we were working on the same objective. Since Final Fantasy XI's dungeons are not instanced — that means you can just randomly run into other players doing the same thing as you, rather than getting your own "private" version of a dungeon to clear at your leisure — it tends to pay off if you team up with people you randomly run into.

And sure enough, it did. We settled into a good rhythm where my companion would keep an eye on the Quasilumin, starting and stopping it as required, while I would go on ahead and clear out the enemies in the path it was about to take. Together, it still took a while, but we eventually successfully made it through the whole dungeon, and it was a really nice, warm moment that we shared together.

I'm generally not a big fan of playing with random other people, whether the game in question is competitive or cooperative. In competitive games, I don't like dealing with sweaties who take things far too seriously, and in cooperative games… well, I also don't like dealing with sweaties who take things far too seriously. You would think cooperative games would be a place where "nice" people hang out, but in my experience, no, that is absolutely not the case. In fact, some cooperative games feel way more toxic than anything competitive I have ever played.

All of the above is the case if you are playing structured activities, whether they are cooperative or competitive. When people jump into something like this, of course they want to win, and if they feel like someone is holding them back in some way — whether or not that is a fair assessment — they will, if they're a Certain Type of Person, kick off.

But if you're in an activity where the two (or more) of you have run into one another by complete chance, I tend to find that it's much more likely you will have a pleasant shared experience with one another. Last night's example in Final Fantasy XI is just the most recent example, but I also still have very fond memories of a time I was playing Test Drive Unlimited on Xbox 360, back when its servers were still active, and encountered someone on the high-speed freeway that runs across a lot of the map. This person was obviously just hooning it up and down the freeway in their Ferrari looking for trouble, and so I provided some trouble for them. We didn't even get into the game's organised one-on-one races by flashing our lights at one another; we just careened across most of the map, causing chaos along the way and having a thoroughly lovely time in the process.

Other people can be all right, sometimes. If you catch them when they're very much "at play" rather than taking their entertainment extremely super-seriously, it can even be super-fun to hang out with them and just dick around — no worrying about stats, progress or efficiency. Just pure, unbridled fun and joy; something we're all too short of these days, and thus I encourage you to cling onto it whenever you encounter it.

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The post #oneaday Day 759: Accidental multiplayer appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not entirely sure why this became such a common trope in role-playing games, particularly those of Asian origin. I assume there's some sort of inherent significance to hexagons — or perhaps someone once just thought they looked cool and futuristic, and everyone else copied that first person. Both explanations are entirely plausible.

A lot of people mock role-playing games that pull the "final boss is in space!" trope, but I love it. One of my favourite things in video games is getting the opportunity to explore and play in abstract environments. There's a definite appeal to realistic environments under the right circumstances, but for me, there's always something special about making that switch from "recognisable" to "completely alien". Doesn't matter what game it is; if you go from hanging out in "the real world" to running along platforms suspended in a starfield — or, indeed, as I have been doing in Chains of Promathia this evening, running across a seemingly solid "sea" that floats above the land far below me, leaving a trail of hexagons and the sound of musical notes with every step I take.

I think the reason I like it is the fact it drives home how video games give you the opportunity to "do" things that are outright impossible in real life. There is not actually anywhere that exists that consists of floating platforms in space or transparent hexagons suspended over a petrified natural environment, and thus having the opportunity to spend time in those places as a virtual world is appealing. It's fascinating. In some respects, it provides a window into the creators' imagination, allowing us a sense that we are sharing in something quite special.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that when you explore a realistic but nonetheless fictional world in a game, you're also stepping into the creators' imagination, but it never feels quite as exciting as getting the opportunity to go somewhere completely alien. It's a silly trope, probably one that is overused at this point — and definitely one that has been used inappropriately (Half-Life's finale says hello) — but it's one that I will always like and appreciate.

I am tempted to see if I can finish off Chains of Promathia this evening, but it is already midnight, so I feel like I should probably go to bed like a responsible adult. Probably.

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The post #oneaday Day 758: Hexagons and light appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Here is a list of tech-related things that, through no fault of my own, have occurred in the last week:

• My Windows 11 PC inexplicably took twenty minutes to start up. There does not appear to be anything actually wrong with it. It has had every scan, virus check, hardware tweak imaginable run, and has had Windows completely reinstalled multiple times. Once Windows starts, it is mostly fine, with the following exception:
• When browsing the Internet, occasionally both Firefox and Chrome will just… stop doing anything, to such a degree that they prevent the rest of Windows from doing anything. Checking logs indicates that nothing is particularly happening on the CPU, memory, storage or network front whenever this happens, it just… happens. Firefox does it marginally less than Chrome did, thus I have switched to Firefox.
• When using my computer to browse Nextdoor, which is a site that eventually paid off during our search for Oliver, scrolling down more than about a screen and a half will cause the entire website to completely shit the bed, moving its sidebar to the middle of the screen before snapping you back to the top of the feed you were attempting to scroll through.
• When using my phone to browse Nextdoor, a post where someone said the bin men had just been and not taken their bin remained at the top of my feed for the entire three weeks that Oliver was missing.
• My keyboard just told me it had "low battery" despite being plugged in. I unplugged it and replugged it in and now it claims to have 98% battery.
• My keyboard doesn't charge while plugged in if I don't have the Razer software running.
• My mouse can have its wireless signal blocked by a packet of crisps.
• My PC game controller sometimes requires turning on three times before it's actually turned on.
• The Bluetooth on my work PC refuses to turn on despite showing as being present and working.
• When listening to YouTube videos while falling asleep, at least 8 times out of 10, the app will randomly close itself for no apparent reason in the middle of a video.

It's frustrating that, when you're someone who takes good care of their tech — as I always have been — stuff just… fucks up after a while for no apparent reason. My woes with Windows on my living room PC are a longstanding issue that I am at my absolute wits' end with; I am getting perilously close to installing Bazzite and being done with Windows, particularly now I no longer need to work on this machine. Oddly enough, I have had zero Windows-related issues with my work mini PC, other than the Bluetooth problem, which may well be hardware-related.

I just miss the time when you bought something that was expensive and fancy, that it worked, and it continued to work for many years after you spent lots of money on it. Still, I knew that age was long past all those years ago when I updated my iPhone 3G to the latest iOS and it became completely unusable. I still went and upgraded to an iPhone 4 like a big mug, though, didn't I? Twat.

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The post #oneaday Day 757: Nothing works any more appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The two games are very different experiences, but the one thing they have in common is that they respect your time in the way that titles from, say, the PlayStation 2 era did. You can do a complete playthrough of Star Fox in under an hour, and Rhythm Paradise Groove consists entirely of self-contained sequences that are no more than two or three minutes, tops. You can blast through all the "content" both games have in a relatively short space of time, but their longevity comes from their replay value: Star Fox for the pursuit of "medals" by attaining specific scores on each level while ensuring all your computer-controlled companions survive, and Rhythm Paradise Groove for attaining "Amazing" and "Perfect" ratings on each stage.

I'm growing increasingly fond of games that aren't a huge commitment to play; games that you can just pick up and enjoy whenever you feel like it, without feeling that strange sense of "guilt" many of us have if we already have a "big game" on the go and start something else that is likely to take more than 40 hours to get through. I'm not just talking about bite-sized arcade-style games, either; the other night I started playing Soul Blazer on Super NES, and I know that's relatively short in the grand scheme of RPGs, so I'm looking forward to finally making my way through the whole thing; something I've been meaning to do for ages.

I like a good long game to get my teeth into now and again, you know that — but I won't lie; there are times when I start something that I think is going to be relatively light and breezy, see it has an endless skill tree and various numbers to grind up very slowly in the name of increasing my poison damage by 0.1%, and just think "oh no, this is going to take ages, isn't it?" There are a significant number of games that have been released over the course of the last 10-15 years or so that would have really benefited from just scaling back, like, a lot, and providing a much more focused experience. They usually don't because they have to justify their massive budgets and thousands of people working on them — plus, unfortunately, there is a subculture among capital-G Gamers who complain any time something comes out with what they perceive as "not enough content".

It's unfortunate that so many developers have listened to the people who whine in Steam forums about games being "abandoned" because they haven't had an update in the last three weeks (protip: sometimes those games are finished) or that they need to see a "roadmap" of "new content" coming down the pipeline. I always feel the exact opposite to this; if I see a game that has a lengthy roadmap — particularly if that roadmap involves copious amounts of DLC — I lose a lot of interest in that game. Sometimes I will return to it later to see if there's some sort of "complete" edition available, but most of the time I will just shrug my shoulders and go and play a game that is actually finished instead, rather than spending valuable time playing something that I know is probably going to change and expand in the time it takes me to beat it.

I like both Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove because they are both finished games, and seeing everything they have to offer is within relatively easy reach. Both will require some practice and some actual playing skill to see all that stuff, but neither of them feel like they're going to be commitments with hour counts that number into the three digits just to see the credits roll.

I suspect Star Fox might see some updates to its multiplayer mode if it proves popular, but as a single-player experience, it is completely self-contained and does everything it needs to. Rhythm Paradise Groove I suspect will just stand as it is — it didn't even need an update when I put the cartridge in for the first time earlier, which is always a very welcome sight these days.

I hope we see more games like this. Nintendo seems to be quite keen on them right now, and I'm not complaining when they are as good as Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove are — and speaking of which, I'll have more to say about the latter over on MoeGamer when I've played a bit more of it. For now, I'll just say "cha, cha, cha, bom bom" and leave it at that…

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The post #oneaday Day 756: Video games like they used to be appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Anyway. Yes. What I wanted to talk about was the fact that once we got into sixth form, a lot of us started to enjoy our first real tastes of proper independence, despite, in most cases, still living with our parents. Learning to drive allowed us to go places without having to rely on getting our parents to give us a lift — and give them the full details of where we were going. We were trusted to take responsibility for our own education, meaning several of us went to one single General Studies lesson in two years and still managed to ace the exam. Taking part-time jobs of various descriptions allowed us to earn some money, giving us considerably more financial freedom than childish "pocket money" provided. (Although saying that, my grandparents were always very generous in that regard.)

That latter one is an important one, as it coincided with us being able to spend that money on things that we liked. For my friends and I, those things were video games. And it was an enormously exciting time to be interested in video games, with the PlayStation having hit the market a few years earlier, and the Nintendo 64 finally arriving in Europe as we were kicking off our period of post-compulsory education.

I have fond memories of sixth form not just because I enjoyed the academic side of things — that's something I've talked about elsewhere — but also because of what happened between those classes. For my friends and I, we spent the majority of our time hanging out in the Art department of the school rather than the main sixth form common room; the corner of the Art department had essentially been taken over as a semi-private secondary common room that was almost exclusively used by my friends and I. It was a comfortable place to hang out, and we had many pleasant free periods spent there enjoying a bacon and cheese baguette from the recreation centre on the school site, just chatting about all sorts of silly things.

Quite often, if we had several free periods in a row, or free time up to and including lunchtime, we would wander off the school site — as we were allowed to do now, because we were big, brave, responsible 16+ year olds — and walk into the town centre. This was a walk of about a mile in total — my 45 year old bones ache just thinking about that — but we did it on a pretty regular basis. When we got into town, we had a bit of a routine: we'd go to The Baker's Oven for a bacon and cheese puff and a Belgian bun (though not if we had recently consumed one of the aforementioned baguettes), then head to Barneys, the local record shop, and have a little look around. I would always feel mildly uneasy in there because it was still the age where one felt distinctly judged for one's taste in music, but after a while I learned to just own my self-described "eclectic" tastes in music.

Barneys wasn't the main attraction of our trips to town, though. We saved the best for last by heading to First Compute, a pokey little shop in the "Cross Keys" shopping mews that was initially little more than a cupboard with games for pretty much every platform you can think of festooning every wall (and a fair bit of the floor). By the time we were in sixth form, though, the owner, who we only knew as "Richie", had moved venue to a slightly larger establishment, but the distinct feeling that as much stuff as possible was being crammed in remained. There were big box PC games on some shelves on the left, and PlayStation and N64 games on the right.

At the time, I had had the good fortune to score a few freelance writing opportunities for outlets such as PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine. These at least partly came about because I did my Year 10 work experience on PC Zone when my brother was the editor, but my brother's the sort of person who wouldn't have recommended me to his successors if he didn't think I could have done a good job. And I did do a good job — and, more to the point, in those days, you got paid a hell of a lot more for cranking out an article than you do for many of today's websites. We're talking about £300-£500 per piece here.

As you can probably imagine, being in a situation where I had very little in the way of living expenses thanks to still living at home, this cash very quickly burned a sizeable hole in my pocket, and my friends knew this. I would often get a little "gentle encouragement" to pick up a new game for either PlayStation or Nintendo 64, and honestly, as much as peer pressure very much was involved, I didn't need much convincing. I found both systems to be a ton of fun, and I loved being able to share my enjoyment of them with my closest friends.

On the Nintendo 64 front, we quite often picked up games with a multiplayer focus, as we spent a lot of time around one another's houses, crowded around the television enjoying split-screen fun. We even tried some types of game that, in prior years, we would have never considered, like EA's World Cup 98 when the eponymous tournament was on.

On the PlayStation front, my preference was, as you can probably imagine if you know me even a little bit, for role-playing games, and dear Lord do I ever wish I'd held on to the vast majority of those games I bought all those years ago, because little was I to know that role-playing games in particular would become enormously expensive on the second-hand market.

Of all those times I was mildly peer-pressured into buying a new game, I only remember one solitary occasion when I was disappointed and regretful enough in my purchase to actually return the game in question. That game was a title for PlayStation called Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest, and it was a polygonal action RPG for up to four players. It looked like it might be cool from the box art, and there were some interesting ideas in it, but it was very much not what I was looking for from a game at the time. I'm actually quite curious to revisit this game through older, more mature eyes, as I suspect I may have treated it a bit harshly.

The pattern of go-to-town, buy-a-game continued once I got to university and fell in with friends who also enjoyed gaming. Since I was still getting some cash from freelancing, I still had a bit of disposable income, though living away from home meant I did actually have living expenses now. Still, I managed to pick up a bunch of interesting games, and reading the manuals while on the bus home was always a highlight of these times that I think back on fondly. It's a cliché to talk about reading the manual on the way home, but it really was a thing we did, and it really is something I have exceedingly happy memories of.

New games haven't come with manuals for a long time now, outside of a few special cases in limited-print editions, and situations like Evercade where the whole thing is built on the idea of "how it used to be" — and with the apparently impending death of physical releases, even the experience of going to a game shop, picking up a game and coming home with it will be lost. Of course, many people — including me — tend to order their games online these days anyway, so many of us haven't been doing that anyway — but it's still sad to think that there are generations of video game enthusiasts who will never be able to enjoy things in quite the same way we did around the end of the millennium and the turn of the century.

I'm mad at Sony for actively encouraging the death of that. They are deliberately trying to destroy what was once an important part of the overall culture surrounding video games. I suspect those who have never been deeply into them might not understand why this is a big deal — and I equally suspect the C-suite execs who mandated this are exactly the sort of people who have never actually given a shit about video games as a creative medium or form of expression — but it really was. Sony's announcement left a lot of people feeling like they really had lost something; feeling something akin to grief. It might sound silly to say that about something as simple as going into a shop and buying a box with a bit of plastic inside it, but it really is the case.

I sincerely hope the company does a hasty U-turn on this, but I very much doubt they will. If that's the case, that's the end of me and PlayStation. Once there's no more games to buy and proudly put on my shelf, that's it for me and new games. I've always said this. And in some respects, I don't mind, either — it'll mean I don't have to worry about running out of what little space I have left on my shelves, and that I will be able to focus on diving deep into my collection and discovering all the things I haven't gotten around to yet.

But still. I will be sad to have lived long enough to see a medium and a culture surrounding it grow, thrive and then wither. I am already sad that I have seen that happen, but every new week seems to bring a new horror in that regard.

We will always have the good times, though. That's the one thing they can never revoke the license for.

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The post #oneaday Day 755: The lost art of going to buy a game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I remember my first encounter with PlayStation vividly. My brother had come home to visit, and, as he often did, he had brought some gaming hardware with him. On previous visits — and prior to me getting my own SNES — he had brought both a Super Famicom and Mega Drive back with him on various occasions, but this new PlayStation thing was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen.

We loaded up Ridge Racer and you could play Galaxian while it was loading. Supposedly you could unlock some stuff if you could win the Galaxian game before the game finished loading, but I didn't manage that right away. (I mastered it some time later.) Then, once Ridge Racer was loaded, it was another example of something we'd previously described the SNES as being: "like having an arcade machine hooked up to your TV".

This feeling didn't go away with Tekken, which my brother had a prerelease copy of. He also had Raiden Project, which, while less obviously "impressive" than both Ridge Racer and Tekken, I found myself enjoying a lot, and still consider one of my favourite PlayStation titles to this day.

Eventually, my brother left behind this Japanese-model PlayStation at my parents' house for me to have — he had got his own British model. I was thrilled, particularly once I learned the "pen-lid trick" — a means of circumventing the console's region and copy protection by propping the disc tray open and carefully timing the swapping of discs. It was a good way to wear out your laser before long, but until I got my own UK PlayStation, it was my main means of experiencing PAL releases.

My friends got PlayStations around a similar time, and we all really enjoyed them, each cultivating our own little collection of games.

Then came Final Fantasy VII. I first heard about this from my brother, and one thing made me want to pick it up immediately: he told me that it was the first game that had made him and various other people he knew cry. This might seem like a strange reason to be excited for a game, but having been enjoying point-and-click adventures on PC for a few years at this point, I was immensely excited by the possibilities that interactive storytelling offered, and I was curious exactly what this game actually was.

I started to play it and was initially confused. Why did the screen go all swirly and then I couldn't move, but I had to select things from a menu instead? Why did the characters look different when they were walking around to when they were in battle? Why were numbers popping out of things?

I'd encountered the RPG genre in a very early form back on the Atari 8-bit, but had always found those games to be difficult to understand as a child. Some years later, I got into HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest, and started to understand how numbers and turn-based combat worked together. And with Final Fantasy VII, I quickly learned how the computerised take on an RPG worked — and that I liked it a lot.

My friends loved it, too. We all swapped stories of our custom-named parties at school, arguing over who had given their characters the "best" names and who had recoloured the text window the most attractively garish combination of shades. We all agreed it was an incredible experience, and played it multiple times in succession — often in immediate succession. I estimate over the course of one particular summer, each of us must have played through the entirety of that game somewhere between six and ten times.

My parents went away for a few weeks and left me in charge of the house. I hosted an ill-advised party that I got into a lot of trouble for — I have to laugh in retrospect — but the best thing about that summer was having my friends over pretty much every day, and we would just play Final Fantasy VII together while eating Pot Noodles and getting steadily quite drunk. On one particularly memorable occasion, we challenged one another to play from the beginning and stay up as long as possible; we played through the night and into the next morning, hitting each other with sofa cushions to wake each other up if we looked like we were nodding off. It was a truly wonderful experience, and absolutely a treasured memory.

It all feels so far away now. I would love to have a summer like that which I just described again, but it feels like a far-off dream at this point.

Still, I mean I am still in touch with some of those friends, so perhaps, just perhaps, we could make something like that happen once again sometime. Maybe.

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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The post #oneaday Day 754: Late '90s promise appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am quite a few episodes behind, but the nice thing about the show is that its very nature means that it is somewhat timeless, and each episode can be enjoyed at any time. Thus, yesterday and today I enjoyed some discussion of Next Generation magazine's "Are You a Hardcore Gamer?" quiz (circa 1998) and the pair's collaboration with Coury and Try from My Life in Gaming to discuss a "draft" of games from the 1995-1997 period covered by Fun Factor's first season.

Obviously I will take this opportunity to recommend you go give Fun Factor a listen (or even better, watch: the podcast's YouTube channel lets you look at the magazines as they're talking about them!) but today's post isn't specifically about the podcast. Rather, it's about how the discussions on the episodes I listened to, particularly the "draft" episode, have inspired me to make some time to play through a bunch of games I keep telling myself I've "always meant to get around to". By this I am primarily referring to retro games, particularly of the RPG variety, of which I have about a bazillion loaded up and ready to go almost immediately thanks to my MiSTer Multisystem 2 setup upstairs. And I can even play them on a CRT!

I hesitate to start new RPGs because I have it in my head that they're all massively long. And to be sure, your average RPG does tend to be on the longer side. But listening to the chaps enthusing about various titles like Chrono Trigger (which, to my shame, I've never finished), Final Fantasy IV (which I have finished and know is pretty short) and various others makes me think… I should just sit down and play some of these things that I've been "always meaning to". Including some that I've started and never got around to finishing, like Soul Blazer.

Soul Blazer is definitely one I want to tick off my list because it is an excellent game, and I've always felt like it wouldn't be quite right to tackle Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, both of which I want to play, before beating that one. They are considered an extremely loose "trilogy", after all, and I think it would be particularly interesting to play in succession.

Part of me says "no, don't start something new, you have Final Fantasy XI on the go". But Final Fantasy XI is very long indeed, and sometimes you just want a palate cleanser. Sometimes that's something really quick and breezy, like the new Star Fox, while at other times, it's another game with a bit more substance, but which is unlikely to end up with an hour count that is three or more digits in length.

So probably not tonight, because it's getting late and I still have a farty stomach full of regret from the pizza I had last night, but very soon, I'm going to set some time aside to enjoy some retro gaming. I have all the kit — I might as well make good use of it and enjoy myself, non?

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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The post #oneaday Day 753: Finding the Fun Factor appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

However, in more recent years, I have come to somewhat lose faith in the police as a whole. I would go so far as to question what on Earth they are actually doing any more, having been in situations where a police presence would have obviously been quite helpful — mostly antisocial behaviour in the street, and particularly little scrots racing obviously stolen motorbikes around the area — and not seeing anything actually worthwhile happening.

I always used to enjoy watching shitty television like Police Interceptors, particularly when I am away from home, like I am this evening for the monthly trip to the office. But nowadays I just find them frustrating to watch, not because of the interesting things you see the cops in the show doing, but because of the inevitably disappointing follow-ups that inform you that despite all the hard work of the officers on the ground in a particular case, nothing of any actual note really happened to the people who deserved either some sort of consequences or some justice for what had happened.

Take the episode I caught part of this evening. A significant portion of the episode consisted of the police discovering a strange house that had seemingly been sitting empty, but which a local had seen some suspicious-looking individuals apparently breaking into. Upon arrival at the scene, the investigating officers found a machete case and what seemed to be some bloodstains on the floor. Once the armed police unit had been called in for backup, they investigated the house and discovered that it was not so empty at all; it, along with its next-door neighbour, which had had a hole punched through the wall to connect the two, was being used as a cannabis farm, with plants worth over half a million quid on site.

As part of this investigation, the plants were seized, as you might expect, and some fingerprints were found that you would think might lead to some further investigation. However, the programme made the disappointing announcement that after all that, "no further action was taken".

Look, I get sometimes that it's not possible to bring people to justice for their crimes — and that police dramas on the television, where the noble officers always get their man, are not at all reflective of reality. But quite often it feels like after a token "visible" effort has been made — while the cameras are on, in the case of a show like Police Interceptors — then something causes "the police", collectively, to just sort of shrug its shoulders and go "ah, well, probably wouldn't have caught them anyway" or something along these lines.

This must be inordinately frustrating for the officers on the ground who are pursuing these criminals with the hope of bringing them to justice. Can you imagine feeling pretty damn good about yourself for uncovering half a million quid's worth of drugs, and then discovering later that pretty much nothing was done about it? I can imagine that being exceedingly irritating — but unsurprising, given the amount of bureaucracy that goes into anything involving "local authorities" these days, be it teaching, policing or getting potholes fixed.

I also completely understand those who mistrust the very concept of the police on the grounds that the service continues to struggle with institutionalised discrimination, both within its own ranks and towards potential suspects. There has been outright violence and rioting in my city as a result of this sort of thing just recently — I don't really know all the details, but from what I understand, it has left a lot of people looking at our local police force in a somewhat less than complimentary light.

I'm pretty sure the residents in the area I live in are frustrated, too. There's a house just down the road from us that is very obviously one of the sources of the reckless teenagers racing around on obviously stolen motorcycles — because the obviously stolen motorcycles are parked outside the house. And it's obvious that they're stolen, because the lineup parked there seems to change on a pretty much daily basis. No-one buys and sells that many motorcycles in that short a space of time unless they are up to no good. And yet I know the police have been informed of this on multiple occasions by a variety of people, and yet nothing has been done.

So what even are they doing any more? I don't know. What I do know is that these days, I feel much less inclined to trust the police than I did in the past. And while in some ways that makes me feel a bit sad, in others I feel it's a sensible, healthy attitude to take, particularly as the world seems to be sliding inexorably towards global authoritarianism.

It's been said many times before, but we really are living in the absolute worst, most tedious cyberpunk dystopia that ever existed. We're getting pretty much all of the shit that sci-fi authors warned us about, with none of the fun stuff.

Oh well. Perhaps one day this will pass.

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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The post #oneaday Day 752: What do the police even do any more? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I mention this because I am seeing more and more reports of a "literacy crisis" that appears to be arising, primarily as a result of "BookTok" (i.e. people on the odious short-form video platform TikTok who supposedly talk about books) and "book influencers" (i.e. people on a broader range of primarily video-based social platforms who supposedly talk about books). Most recently, the thing that has come up is some of these people complaining to authors when they come across a word they do not understand — and rather than looking that word up for themselves, using it as an opportunity to learn, they instead throw their toys out of the pram and get very mardy, even going so far as to throw around terms like "ableist". (Fuck off. Your assumption that disabled people can't read is the ableist perspective here.)

This sort of behaviour is absolutely unthinkable and unfathomable to me. I have always loved it when I learn new words, concepts or ways to express myself from things that I've read. There are turns of phrase I picked up as a child that I still use to this day, and I relish the opportunity to make use of a word that I've recently learned.

I am also more than happy to look something up if I'm not sure of it. I actually tend to find this happens more often while I am writing than reading; I'll be tapping out a sentence, and for some reason a particular word that I'm not entirely certain of the definition of will pop into my head as maybe-possibly being appropriate for the situation. Rather than shying away from using that word for fear of appearing stupid by using it incorrectly, I will look it up, determine whether or not it is, in fact, appropriate for the situation in question, and then, if possible, make good use of it. It's not out of a desire to appear "clever" or to baffle the reader with my vast vocabulary; I just find it fun and satisfying to discover new ways in which one can play with language.

I've always been like this. I started reading books that were well ahead of where I was "supposed" to be as a kid, so by the time I got to primary school I was reading things several "Levels" ahead of my peers and taking on considerably more challenging reading comprehension exercises. By the top end of primary school, I was busting out words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" in the morning Daily Spellings session in Class Four, and being able to correctly use them in a sentence.

I apparently once also terrified my parents by, one day, aged maybe three or four, coming down the stairs and immediately quoting the beginning of Genesis to them. In this particular instance, it was not a "reading" thing — I hadn't been secretly ploughing through the Bible in between episodes of the Mr. Men — but rather a quotation from a cartoon I had recently watched on video. I guess it's connected, though; I had found the whole "In the beginning…" speech striking, so I wanted to deliver it in my own childish way. That's still a way of playing with language, just using the spoken word and listening instead of reading and writing.

The concept of "BookTok" makes me angry. It is completely beyond me exactly how anyone thought a community of people who make short-form attention-deficit videos online were ever going to come out with anything particularly worthwhile to say about a medium that rewards taking your time and drinking things in. And the very term "book influencer" makes me bristle. We never should have accepted the marketers' insistence than "influencer" is a valid job description. It's disgustingly dystopian, particularly since "influencer marketing" is now an established part of promoting any sort of product online.

I love language. I love reading, and I love writing. It makes me by turns sad and furious that, in the space of a generation or two, we appear to be losing all respect for the written word. Just the other day, I saw someone online earnestly recommending that anyone who wanted to spend their time talking about a favourite topic should "just become a TikToker" rather than starting a blog. I bit my tongue at the time because I couldn't be arsed to start a fight, but it just made me feel weary more than anything.

What are we doing? It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to siphon all the "culture" out of society, perhaps in an attempt to ensure that none of us step out of line or express any sorts of "dangerous" opinions.

Funny, I think there are a few books about that…

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The post #oneaday Day 751: Read/write access appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Andie has been spending some time putting up window screens, which will have the dual purpose of "cat-proofing" the windows and allowing us to cool the house down somewhat by actually having the windows open. Obviously we are not keen for any sort of repeat of the last three weeks, so we are hoping that this particular solution — some seemingly well-crafted screens for the windows, attached to the frames via Velcro — will prove adequate. Oliver has not yet attempted to escape through one of the open windows and the house is significantly cooler than it has been for the past few days, so it's looking like we might be on to a winner.

Of course, we're still both extremely worried that he will somehow find his way out again, particularly if he succeeds in figuring out how to remove the window screens — if, indeed, he figures out that is a thing that is possible. Thus far he has shown no interest in wanting to move or scratch them — indeed, both cats have mostly just seemed appreciative that they can enjoy a bit of fresh air coming into the house, particularly now that there is a bit of a breeze coming in from outside, rather than the oppressively still and humid air of the last few days.

It is good to be able to leave the air-conditioned bedroom and enjoy a relatively normal existence in the rest of the house. Today I have mostly been playing the new Star Fox, which you can read more about over on MoeGamer. It's also actually our wedding anniversary today, but we never make a particularly big deal out of that. We are grateful to our respective parents for their generous financial gifts, however; those are going a significant way towards us being able to have another holiday in September as a "do-over" of the one we just had — and hopefully this time without the anxiety of a missing little ginger twat.

Oliver himself appears to have pretty much made a full recovery. He is behaving just like he used to — right down to showing an unhealthy interest in batting my Senran Kagura collection off the shelves in the living room — and is jumping up to his favourite high places, including the top shelf in the catio and the top of our media cabinet. He hasn't yet been back up to the very top of his cat tree, however; he's been most of the way up, but not all of the way up. We think he's dealing with a combination of still being a bit weak in his back legs (something the vet mentioned) and potentially still having a bit of trauma over being stuck up an actual tree, and thus perhaps not wanting to climb too high. His back legs are a lot stronger than they were already, however; he's been jumping up onto things without issue, and playing with things like the silly little deeply, deeply loved kitten he is.

Patti has also mostly adjusted to Oliver's return. She is still hissing at him a bit if he gets too close, but one gets the impression her heart really isn't in it. Earlier today, Oliver went right up to her and rubbed his face on her, and she hissed quietly, but didn't attack him and didn't actually appear to be all that bothered. I think she just feels obliged to appear mad at him, because she absolutely definitely won't admit that she was missing him and pining for him while he was absent.

Anyway, all in all, it has been a pleasant Saturday, and in the knowledge that some of the most difficult, time-consuming and challenging projects at work are now pretty much done, I actually feel like I can properly relax for the first time in quite a while! I recommend it.

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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The post #oneaday Day 750: Cooling and cat-proofing appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Over the course of our discussion, I described a curious phenomenon that I've been sort of passively aware of for a while, and that is the fact that I don't really remember living through my thirties. Specifically, the period between about 2009 and (I estimate) about 2016, 2017 or so is a length of time that I feel just sort of… disappeared. And the disappearance of that period — and possibly a bit more either side of it — is what leads me to feel like things which were actually Quite A Long Time Ago are still relatively "recent" or at least fresh in my memory.

I hadn't really contemplated why this had happened, but it didn't take long to figure out: I had a rough time in that period. Let's ponder, shall we?

In 2009, when I was 28, I lost a job that I had previously thought would have me set for life; it was a job that I loved, that I was good at and which even paid reasonably well for the time. Unfortunately, it was snatched away from me by some true shithead managers who were on a real power trip at the time, and that kicked off a very long period of exceedingly uncertain employment.

In 2010, my first marriage fell apart for reasons that, in retrospect, I understand, but which, at the time, had me feeling the lowest I have ever felt. Having lost my job and, now, my partner, I was left alone in a flat I couldn't afford to keep living in, with no job, facing down the prospect of having to move back home with my parents. At the time, this felt mortifying; now, of course, I am exceedingly grateful to my parents for having supported me while I was at my lowest until I was able to pick myself back up and effectively start over.

In the following years, I will keep the details vague out of respect for the individual in question's privacy, but I found myself supporting someone with an addiction problem. I had no idea how to do this, and there is not really a "how-to" guide on doing this effectively. The person in question conquered their issues pretty much by themselves (and by that I mean "without professional psychiatric or medical assistance"), and I will be eternally impressed by and proud of them for this, but the experience of acting in a supporting role at the time left me with… some emotional scars, shall we say. I am not entirely sure I have fully processed everything that happened at this time, though I should also add that I lay no blame or ill-will at the feet of the affected person, and that's all I will say on the subject.

During these years, I was working regular freelance for various websites. I had a good gig working for GamePro, but we all got given the boot just before Christmas one year. Some time later, I worked for USgamer, but got laid off from that particular gig on my birthday. These were the most "regular" jobs I'd had since 2009, and it had not gotten any easier over the years to know what I was "supposed" to be doing. Every time I felt like I was getting somewhere, it felt like the rug would get pulled out from under me.

I took a job in a completely unrelated field — updating website content at energy company SSE — but found myself fundamentally incompatible with the incredibly patronising way that company does business, and got unfairly dismissed at the end of my probationary period. Some time later, I found myself doing a similar, equally tedious but mostly inoffensive job at sports tech maker Garmin, which was stable but absolutely mind-numbingly boring. I left that one voluntarily (and on good terms, which was a nice change) to take up what would eventually become the position I hold to this day.

All along the way, I was feeling a sense of near-constant instability, like I could never settle; like I had never reached an unknown destination I felt like I was constantly on the way towards. I faced setback after setback, challenge after challenge. At times it felt like I wanted to give up. But I eventually made it to where I am today, with a stable home life, a stable working life and stable financial security. It was realising that I had those three things that made me feel like I had, at last, been able to properly "start over", and that my life was no longer a thing of shame; a string of endless difficulties and non-achievements that just didn't appear to be going anywhere.

So in retrospect, I'm not really surprised that I don't really remember my thirties all that well, because a lot of things happened, and a significant, statistically significant proportion of them were Bad Things that I'd really rather not dwell on. I know those years happened — and there are probably blog posts covering a lot of them right here on this site — but, even knowing that they probably helped shape the person I am today and helped strengthen my own resolve as a "survivor", it's hard not to feel like it would be nice to have them all back.

Still, that's not a thing you can do, unfortunately, so here I am, at 2am in the morning, aged 45, pondering a lost decade of my life. Do I have a point to all this? You'd think I would, wouldn't you. But you know what? I don't think I do. And that's probably all right.

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The post #oneaday Day 749: The lost decade appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For some reason, certain people are bitching and moaning about other people — those from countries where air conditioning isn't a cultural norm (because it wasn't needed in the past) — expressing discomfort in the extreme heat we're dealing with. Specifically, there seem to be a lot of Americans mocking Brits for finding temperatures of nearly 40 degrees Celsius quite uncomfortable. And this, in turn, leads to a lot of stupid arguments. Just, y'know, stop it. Accept that this is a particularly unusual situation, and that this leads to people struggling.

I mean, clearly this is not a normal situation, or a sustainable one. It's been so hot today that most of our freezer appears to have spontaneously defrosted, despite the fact it's still on and seemingly working. It's been so hot today that if you put a bottle of frozen water in front of a fan in an attempt to cool the air a bit, the ice becomes water in the space of about five minutes.

I am grateful for the fact that, a few years back, we got a portable air conditioner for the bedroom, because without it I feel like it would be literally impossible to sleep right now. I have spent a significant portion of today in the bedroom — thankfully, I am in the middle of doing some QA testing, which I can do from the bedroom — because the rest of the house feels barely habitable right now.

I feel for the poor cats. They're clearly finding the heat quite difficult to deal with, and are both spending quite a lot of the day napping in areas they find to be nice and cool. They're getting plenty of water, and they're coming to spend time with us in the bedroom when the air conditioning is on, though; they both know the sound of it, now, and very much seem to enjoy sitting right in front of a nice blast of cold air.

The sun is going down, so hopefully things will cool off a bit from here. It's supposed to cool down a bit tomorrow, but what we really need is a great big thunderstorm. That would be lovely right now. But there doesn't appear to be one imminent just yet. Here's hoping one comes along soon, otherwise we'll be spending the whole weekend in the bedroom!

On that note, I'm going back to the air conditioning. Stay safe in the heat, all of you!

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The post #oneaday Day 748: It's really fuckin' hot appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Oh, and on top of that, the "physical" release of the game is a code-in-a-box. Fuck off with that.

I can't think of many series that have managed to so very thoroughly turn me off as Grand Theft Auto. I absolutely loved the original one, from the moment my underage self bought the original big-box PC version from "First Compute" one lunchtime at sixth form. ("Ol' Richie", the guy who ran the shop, knew I was lying about my birthdate, but he didn't really care. My friends and I spent too much money in his shop for him to make a fuss.) I likewise adored Grand Theft Auto III (I never played the second one to this day) and quite liked Vice City, particularly its soundtrack, which I had the box set of CDs for.

The series started to lose me around San Andreas. There's no way of saying this that doesn't sound a bit racist, so I'm just going to say it, acknowledge that is what it sounds like, and attempt to explain myself: I found that game's focus on strongly black-coded urban culture to not only be difficult to engage with, but outright indecipherable at times. To put it another way, I had found Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City to be a lot more accessible, simply because I was more familiar with the tropes of "mafia-style" gangsterism that they both leaned heavily on; by contrast, San Andreas' central culture felt jarringly different to me the moment I started playing, largely because I was so unfamiliar with it. I had never watched any movies or TV shows that dealt with inner-city black urban culture — I hadn't even really listened to much in the way of contemporary black urban music at the time I played San Andreas — and thus being thrown into the deep end of it right from the start of San Andreas was… an adjustment.

There is, of course, a very strong argument to be made for using video games to immerse yourself in a culture that is different from your own — hell, I do it all the time with Japanese games — and in many respects we should look at San Andreas as quite admirable for unashamedly putting black culture front and centre at a time there was not nearly as much truly inclusive, representative media as there is now.

But two things. One, I'm not sure Grand Theft Auto as a series is the one to tackle this in the most respectful manner; I don't know enough about real-world urban culture, particularly from the 1990s, to know how "authentic" San Andreas was — or if it was, in fact, just riddled with stereotypes. And two, I, personally, a middle-class white dude, with everything that entails, just found San Andreas, at least in its early hours, to be so far outside of what I was familiar with, both in my life and in the media I had previously engaged with, that I found myself thinking about the game as a whole much less fondly than I had done towards Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, even though there are a lot of ways in which San Andreas is, in theory at least, a "better game". I'm sorry, that's just how it is; I can't change my own reaction to a creative work!

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that after San Andreas, I was a lot more lukewarm on the series as a whole than I had been previously. When Grand Theft Auto IV came out, I didn't pick it up right away, and when I did pick it up, I found that I wasn't enjoying it nearly as much as I had done III and Vice City. Part of that was down to the different cultural context in which I was playing it, I feel; both III and Vice City were games I played while I was at university, so I also associate them with drunken nights out with friends that ended with collapsing back to my place to play either of those games until ugly o'clock in the morning. This is probably another reason San Andreas didn't resonate as hard, thinking about it; by the time that game came out, we'd all finished university, and thus we were no longer spending several nights a week around one other's houses playing video games together.

I never finished Grand Theft Auto IV, and never even tried its DLC. I thought about trying it again on more than one occasion, but I could just never really muster up the motivation for it. I don't know what it was; it just… didn't click with me at all, for some reason.

By the time Grand Theft Auto V first came out — which, let's not forget, was thirteen fucking years ago — I felt I was ready to try again, though. The new three-protagonist structure sounded interesting, and the online mode sounded intriguing, too. I gave it a go. I finished the single-player story. I had what I would describe as a moderately good time with that PS3 version, but it didn't have that magic for me. It felt too self-consciously edgy, like it was trying desperately to be taken seriously, but also wanted to combine that with the over-the-top satire that the previous entries had incorporated, and it just didn't really work for me. And all the fluff in it was… cool, I guess, but most of it felt like it was just there for the sake of it, rather than in an attempt to make a better game.

Online was even worse. Aside from the fact it just flat-out didn't work for quite a long time on console after release, the few times I tried later it on PC (I bought the PC version on deep discount later to play with friends more easily, as they didn't have consoles) were such overwhelmingly negative experiences that I had absolutely zero desire to spend any more time in it than I "had" to. And I didn't "have" to spend any time in it whatsoever.

What was so bad? Flagrant cheating, with nothing being done about it. Behaviour that went beyond the simple antagonism the game is built around, into malicious attempts to spoil other people's fun. Load times that were approximately sixteen years long. The complete inability to form a "party" with your friends, making it near-impossible to stay together between individual "events". And, woven into the very fabric of the experience, pay-to-win microtransactions.

Don't get me wrong, I had a few good times in Grand Theft Auto V's online mode, but those only really happened when we had a private friends-only session and just pissed about a bit. I won't deny that doing things like impromptu bicycle races across mountainous countryside, with one of us driving an enormous truck instead, were very enjoyable. Stepping into a public game, however, provided some of the most miserable online experiences I think I've ever had.

And then, of course, Grand Theft Auto V just would not fucking go away. It came to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Then it came again to PlayStation 5 and Xbox XBOX or whatever they're called now. More and more guff kept being added to the online mode, all in the name of getting people to pony up the cash for those odious "Shark Cards", because playing the game normally in order to earn your way to rewards was, very obviously, a chump's game.

I got to the point where I actively resented the sight of Grand Theft Auto V. It felt like it had become everything the series had once satirised, and worse. I had no desire to play it ever again.

I tried a few other Rockstar games along the way, too, and the only one of them that clicked with me was Bully, a post-San Andreas game that switched gears by placing you in the role of a teenager at a school in a small town, rather than a hardened criminal in a huge conurbation. I didn't enjoy Red Dead Redemption at all — at least partly because I've never found Westerns to be appealing as a genre — and have felt no inclination whatsoever to really explore the company's broader output since. (Max Payne was good, mind, though I've never really thought of those as "Rockstar games")

Grand Theft Auto VI is frustrating to me because it's being hyped up as some great Second Coming of Christ, to such a degree that game developers and publishers putting out games that are not Grand Theft Auto competitors in the slightest are terrified of releasing even vaguely near it. This, to me, just seems counter-productive; while I'm sure a lot of people are going to buy and play Grand Theft Auto VI on release day, there are plenty of people out there, I'm sure, who feel just like I do — sick to death of this goddamn series, and not looking forward to the inevitable flood of nothing but GTA VI articles we're going to get on the two and a half remaining video game journalism websites for months after it releases. Those people are going to want to play literally anything else on November 19th!

I'm pissed because not only am I sick of the sight of Grand Theft Auto, I'm also furious at how they're clearly exploiting the public with the pricing, garbage not-actually-a-physical-release and bullshit like locking in-game stores behind a $20 more expensive premium edition. I'm furious because people are still going to buy it and reward this nonsense, and no-one will learn a goddamn thing from it. It is the absolute worst example of the excesses of the top end of today's video game industry, and it's going to get away with it because it's "the most-anticipated video game ever".

And this, of course, is to say nothing of Rockstar's union-busting activities that they're currently fighting a legal battle over. But I'll leave that for people who understand such things better to discuss.

I'm aware that me having a little rant here is going to change nothing, and this odious game is going to sell gangbusters when it comes out. But I feel a bit better having said my piece now. And, outside of the game doing anything even more egregious than the shit that has been announced today, this is probably the last time I will mention it, or even think about it — and I'm certainly not going to try and stop anyone who has actually been looking forward to it from enjoying it.

I might silently judge you a bit, though.

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The post #oneaday Day 747: Grand Theft Auto VI can eat my ass appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's hard to believe that this whole saga is over — and over in a way that is about the best possible way it could have resolved itself, outside of him coming home a little bit earlier. We took him to the vet today to get checked over, and outside of him having lost a bit of weight and muscle definition on his legs — unsurprising given his three weeks living rough — he has been given a completely clean bill of health. This is our last remaining worry put to rest: he is back, he is alive, he is safe, and he is healthy. Evidently he was a very lucky boy — and a clever boy for taking care of himself for so long; things could have been much worse, and I am grateful to anything that will listen that things did not end up that way.

Patti has not yet adjusted to his presence. She was very clearly missing him, because we caught her looking for him, she was acting incredibly clingy and occasionally letting out the most heartbreaking plaintive howls of an evening. But as soon as he came back, she was puffing up, growling and hissing, and she's spent all of today in the wardrobe. The wardrobe is a safe place. She is fine in there, she's just not quite ready to come out again yet. But she will get there.

As for Oliver himself, he is doing just fine. He's clearly very tired by his whole ordeal — and who can blame him? — but he's already settling back into his usual routines and behaviour. The one and only thing that has really changed about the way he behaves is that he is a lot more vocal now than he was before he escaped; he is spending a lot of time shouting at us, which is probably an aftereffect of him calling for us up the tree last night. He wants to know that we are nearby, and that he is safe.

The one thing we'll probably never know is where he went for most of those three weeks. Given that we found him a couple of hundred yards down the road, he probably didn't go all that far, but aside from him being stuck up a tree last night, we have no insight as to where he might have been. Was he locked in somewhere? Quite possibly. Was he taken in by somebody? Probably not, as otherwise he'd probably be a bit more well-fed than he is now. Did he just get lost? Entirely possible, as he's never been outside in this neighbourhood before, and thus even though we left him plenty of familiar scents outside, he was unable to find his way home by himself, even though he was so close. So very close.

The hardest thing about the whole situation was contemplating the possibility that we might never see him again. There are things everywhere in the house that remind us of him. There's some cat plushies on the shelves in the living room: a black one and a ginger one, for Patti and him. There's a little stained glass thing depicting a black cat and a ginger cat hanging out together on the shed. The wallpaper on my living room PC was Oliver. The avatar I used on Facebook and Nextdoor was Oliver. Days before he went away, I set my blog to automatically set a "Featured Image" on every single post that didn't already have one, and for the image in question to be one that showed Oliver and Patti napping together. I couldn't even contemplate booting up Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream for Switch, because I made anthropomorphised versions of Oliver and Patti in that game, and playing it while we didn't even know if Oliver was still alive or not would have absolutely broken my heart even more than it was already.

For me, one of the worst parts of dealing with some sort of loss is seeing all the remnants that are left behind, and deciding what you are going to do with them. Just little things that remind you of who or what you have lost; sometimes even the simplest, silliest little thing can bring you to tears. Back during a particularly bleak period in my life circa 2010 — the time I split from my first wife and was faced with essentially having to completely "reset" my post-graduate life and start over — I described these things as "crystallised memories", and it's a description I stand by. There they sit: a solid, tangible reminder of something that was once in your life and now is not. It can be difficult to let go of them, but sometimes that is the healthiest thing to do.

Thankfully, none of that was necessary this time around. And while there most certainly was a great deal of grief while Oliver was away from home, we can now thankfully set that grief aside and appreciate how lucky we are to have someone we love so much and that we feared we'd lost forever return to our lives, safe and well. Sometimes amazing things really do happen, seemingly against all odds.

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The post #oneaday Day 746: Decompression appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Oh my God. I am an emotional wreck, and so is Andie, but our brave little boy managed to survive for three weeks out in the wilds of Lordswood, and we found him this evening thanks to a tip from a kind neighbour on Nextdoor. I had a feeling that either Facebook or Nextdoor, for all those platforms' many, many faults, would be the main way in which we tracked down our precious boy — but it certainly didn't hurt to advertise him on all manner of different services, even if it cost money to do so in some cases.

Our neighbour, Sam, reported that they had seen a ginger cat on his security cameras recently, and that they'd also been hearing a cat crying from the property over the road from them for a little while. We went out to go and check the area on the offchance that we would find at least a clue — and we heard a yowling from up in the tree. I knew immediately that it was Oliver. Oliver has never been a particularly vocal cat except under quite specific circumstances — usually rolling on the patio in the sunshine — but I recognised his voice straight away, and as soon as I saw him up there, I knew.

We couldn't work out how to get to him, though. The tree he was up was on private property — a children's home, I believe? — and initially we couldn't work out how to get in touch with them. When we did manage to run into a staff member leaving the property, they basically said they couldn't (or wouldn't) help us and said we'd have to wait until the morning, even though we made it clear Oliver has been missing for three weeks, and this was the first time we'd seen him.

So from there we tried to work out what to do next. Do you actually call the fire brigade when a cat is stuck up a tree? Apparently Hampshire Fire Service has a specialised animal rescue unit, but they are somewhere not in Southampton, and they weren't answering their phones. I called 101 and asked the police what we should do, and they said to phone the fire brigade. I phoned the fire brigade and they said that no, they don't do that, it's an urban legend.

So then what? I tried the 24-hour RSPCA hotline for animal welfare, but it turns out that it is not, in fact, a 24-hour service. I tried calling a local tree surgeon who had a 24-hour hotline for animal rescues, but again, it turns out that it is not, in fact, a 24-hour service either. Seemingly no-one was willing to help, at all. No-one that you would think to try calling in a situation like this was going to help us. Panic started to set in.

On the off-chance, I posted an update on both Facebook and Nextdoor that we had found Oliver, but we needed help. I honestly wasn't expecting anyone to come — but three very kind people showed up at various points, all very kind, considerate and understanding of our situation and our emotional state. Eventually a chap who was clearly some sort of tradesman in possession of an absolutely massive ladder — and who had clearly done this many times before — showed up, shot up his ladder and was back down with our precious boy in less than five minutes. Amazing.

Anyway. Fuck me, that was an awful three weeks. On the plus side, I can get back to writing about other things on here now, which I'm sure you'll all be delighted to hear. Thank you all for your patience — and for the kind words you have had to share during this absolutely, mindblowingly traumatic three weeks! I'm just glad it all ended well — though we're taking Oliver to the vet for a checkup tomorrow just in case.

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The post #oneaday Day 745b: Oliver's return, the kindness of strangers, and the unkindness of the people you might need in a crisis appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We have long since reached a point where it is not particularly cost-effective to start taking an interest in modern gaming if you are not already involved in the overall ecosystem and thus resigned to vast swathes of your monthly pay packet disappearing on your chosen hobby. Sure, you can get away with a somewhat lower-end mini PC if all you want to play is relatively small-scale indie games — but even those lower-end mini PCs are going up in price nowadays. Therefore, it is worthwhile looking at more cost-effective options for enjoying video games — even if the video games you will be enjoying are a few years old. Good games are still good years after they're released, you know! So here's my personal recommendations on that front.

Evercade

Of course I'm going to recommend Evercade because I work for them, but the reason I work for them is because I was all-in on the idea of the system from day one. A new, affordable system with a focus on retro gaming that provides officially licensed physical releases of classic games from home consoles, computers and arcade machines? Regardless of if I'd ever managed to secure employment with Blaze, makers of the Evercade, I would have been a "full setter" from day one — indeed, when the original handheld released, I immediately took advantage of the "All-In" bundle to get the first 10 cartridges included with the system.

Why recommend something like Evercade when emulation and other options exist — some of which we'll talk about in just a moment? Well, that "officially licensed" part is important. The current state of the games industry may appear to be teetering on the brink of unsustainability, but that doesn't mean people who enjoy video games want the whole thing to collapse. It would be rather nice if we could recover from this situation we're currently experiencing — and one way to help that come about is to support officially licensed rereleases of classic games, updated to play nice with modern audio-visual equipment, particularly televisions. On top of that, Evercade also plays host to physical releases of a lot of "modern retro" titles — games originally designed with vintage hardware in mind, but developed in recent years.

Many of the rights holders of these old games are also game companies that exist in the modern sector, and so throwing your support behind retro rereleases that don't require turbo nutter ninja bastard hardware to run is one way of helping ensure we still have a healthy video game economy whenever the AI bubble finally bursts and — hopefully — hardware prices start to settle back to what we have previously thought of as "normal".

Plus the physical nature of Evercade collecting allows you to rediscover the fun of having a shelf full of games to pick from, rather than a boring old list of downloads on your PC, many of which you scroll past without even noticing every single day.

MiSTer

Evercade is great, but there are some classic games that are never, ever going to get a rerelease for one reason or another — be it the rights holders being unwilling to put them out again, more complex licensing situations (such as video games based on movies, or which feature licensed music, vehicles or actors' likenesses) or some other reason entirely. For those situations, that's where what I would describe as more "community-focused" solutions come into play — as a general concept, this covers emulation, but I would specifically call out the MiSTer project as being a particularly worthwhile investment in these peculiar times.

For the unfamiliar, MiSTer is a platform based on "FPGA" (Field Programmable Gate Array), which is a technology I have absolutely no understanding of whatsoever, save for the fact that it effectively allows a device to recreate the way another piece of hardware would have worked in the past, not through simulation in software (which is how emulation works), but through a reconfigurable chip that basically "pretends" to be the old system. Some describe it as "hardware emulation"; all you really need to know is that, under most circumstances, it results in the most authentic recreation of a classic console, home computer or arcade cabinet possible, particularly if you happen to have an old CRT television hanging around that you can hook it up to. (Never fear if you don't, however; one of the core concepts of MiSTer from the outset was to provide a relatively straightforward means of enjoying classic "hardware" on modern displays, and the platform has a variety of built-in and fully customisable visual filters that allow you to recreate the CRT "look" if you so desire.)

MiSTer is a project you can build yourself, but it's actually probably more cost-effective these days to go for a pre-built solution such as Heber's Multisystem 2 (pictured above, which I use) and Taki Udon's SuperStation One. You will also need to add some form of storage to whatever setup you go for, which is likely to be the expensive bit these days; however, it's a one-off expense, and you can look at it as a lump sum you are spending on your own entertainment, rather than buying a bunch of individual things piecemeal. Tot up how much you've spent on individual games in the last year or so, and an SSD probably won't seem quite so expensive.

MiSTer requires a bit of setting up, including installing the actual software on the device to make it work, and then loading up your storage medium of choice with games — which, of course, you will have to "procure" yourself. For everything from the earliest games consoles right up to PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Saturn, however, a MiSTer is all you need for… honestly probably enough games to last you the rest of your life.

Why do I recommend this and not investing in some classic hardware? Several reasons. One, classic hardware is prone to failure. Two, the games for classic hardware are often ludicrously expensive these days thanks to all the arseholes who have bought them as "investments" rather than to enjoy them — and you paying £400 for a copy of Buggy Run on Sega Master System doesn't help anyone other than the person you're foolish enough to hand over those notes to; the original creators certainly don't see a penny of that money! And three, getting classic hardware working on modern displays can be a bit of a pain… or at least demand you invest further expenses in a decent scaler.

Sixth- and seventh-generation consoles

If you have the cash, I would recommend investing in, at the very least, an Xbox 360. This platform has a vast library of excellent games available, many of which can be bought for not very much money at all, and doesn't require any faffing around to get working on a modern TV. You may also wish to consider a PlayStation 3, as there are a number of exclusives on both platforms — plus a few cases where either the 360 or PS3 version is just plain better for one reason or another.

After that, a Nintendo Wii or Wii U is well worth considering. The Wii U, while mocked in its lifetime for its small library of games, has some absolute bangers, plus it is backwards compatible with the Wii, which has a vast library of excellent games, many of which can, again, be picked up for not very much money at all. Wii U is an HD console that can be connected to a modern TV, but the original Wii is a standard-definition console, though it can still be hooked up to a modern TV via component cables for a 480p "Enhanced Definition" picture. If you don't have component inputs on your TV, you will probably want to run an original Wii through a scaler, as composite or SCART inputs on modern HDTVs — if they even have them any more, which I'm sure some models don't — are complete cack.

Speaking of standard definition, this brings us onto the other worthwhile investment: a PlayStation 2. Again, you can actually run one of these through component cables — and even get an actual high-definition signal with a few very specific games — but you will probably want to also grab yourself a scaler if you take your PS2 gaming seriously. And you should take your PS2 gaming seriously, as the system plays host to one of the richest, most diverse libraries of any system ever released, with titles ranging from bargain bin puzzlers to sprawling epic, cinematic affairs — and some of the best RPGs ever created. While the latter can command high prices these days, many PS2 games — and good ones! — can be picked up for not very much money, making it easy to build a library of stuff that will keep you busy for a good long while.

If you're feeling flush, an original Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube are worthwhile investments, as both have some nice exclusives and in the case of multiplatform games, Xbox and/or Gamecube versions are often superior to their PS2 counterparts. Do note, however, that original Xboxes sometimes need a bit of maintenance, and Gamecube games tend to be significantly more expensive than equivalent games on other platforms from the same period. Also be aware that the earlier models of Wii also play Gamecube games, so you may not even need to buy a separate Gamecube if you're lucky enough to track down one of those. (You can tell if you have one of those by if it has a removable panel with Gamecube controller ports underneath.)

Let's price a starter setup as outlined above from a hardware perspective:

£ 89.99 - Evercade VS-R
£264.00 - MiSTer Multisystem 2 (analogue-compatible model)
£ 47.99 - 512GB microSD card (price from Amazon 22/6/2026)
£110.00 - Xbox 360 250GB "E" model (unboxed from CEX 22/6/2026)
£ 65.00 - Nintendo Wii (unboxed from CEX 22/6/2026)
=======
£576.98

About half the price of the top-end Steam Machine, and between that lot, you should have access to more than enough games to keep you busy for a very long time indeed — and no need to spend half your life complaining about derivative triple-A trend-chasing, microtransactions, mandatory 50GB updates, lengthy install processes and shoehorned-in multiplayer modes.

Plus if you have friends over, they'll think your setup is super cool. And if they don't, question whether they really were your friends in the first place.

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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The post #oneaday Day 745: Cost-effective gaming in 2026 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

That's not to say we're giving up on him — we had a single possible but completely unconfirmed sighting of a cat that may or may not have been him in the woods some distance from our house (but within a plausible radius of where he might have roamed over the course of three weeks) and thus have spent several sessions combing that section of woods at various times of day to no avail; I went yesterday afternoon after we got the comment; we got up early and went at dawn this morning; and I walked all the way from our house to this part of the woods this evening. There was no sign of him at any point.

I don't even know if we're looking in the right place. There are so many potential places he could have gone. The thing with the area we live in, known as Lordswood, is that there's a fucking great wood covering a lot of it, and thus if he found his way into there, which is entirely possible, heaven only knows how we're ever going to track him down and bring him home.

The one thing I am trying to tell myself is that when I make an excursion like this evening, I am hopefully leaving some sort of scent trail that might help him to find his way home. Lord knows I was sweating enough to leave a stink trail by the time I finished my wanderings this evening, but who knows if that's enough? I certainly don't, because as I've said, we've seen absolutely no sign of him anywhere for the last three weeks, meaning we have no idea if we're looking in even the right direction. That said, given how we believe he escaped and the fact he did not appear on the cameras mounted on the front of our house when he did so, we have an instinctive feeling as to which way he went, but no actual proof.

I haven't ruled out the possibility that he has been taken in by someone, either. And if that has happened, I have no idea how we'll find him, because if the people who take him in never take him to the vet or a shelter or get his microchip scanned by a volunteer, he won't get flagged up as his home being here, and the fact he is away from a family who love and miss him very much. If this is what has happened, I just hope that they will do the decent thing.

If that is not what has happened, I am at something of a loss as to what else I can do at this point.

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The post #oneaday Day 744: Trying to maintain hope appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, the answer to the last one was easy; at some point in the last couple of years, I feel like I've got to a point where I'm in a relatively comfortable position in terms of finances — after many years of finding money an absolutely panic-inducing but unavoidable aspect of life, this is good — and thus I didn't feel that making what is a fairly substantial financial commitment to my own wellbeing was something that would be inadvisable.

Technically, you can get talk therapy on the NHS, of course, but my past experiences with that haven't been great — because yes, I've tried. In practice, what happened was that I got referred to a scheme by my GP, but left to my own devices to follow it up — something which I found very difficult to do — and when I finally mustered the courage to join said scheme, I found it absolutely, definitely did not fit my needs at all, as it was a group therapy session, and that was not a situation where I felt, in any way, comfortable.

I'd stumbled across a local organisation known as The Empathy Project a few times during past sessions of research, so this time around I decided to actually be proactive and contact them directly. Their therapists aren't the cheapest around — though they do have a scheme where those on more limited incomes can take advantage of semi-subsidised sessions — but they seemed like a legitimate organisation, and as good a place as any to actually see if Getting Some Professional Help was actually, well, helpful.

I will add that I started attending therapy sessions well before my current situation with Oliver, so thankfully I was in a somewhat more coherent, clear-headed place than I am right now — and I am glad that I already had everything sorted out well before I, as you might look at it, really needed this kind of support.

Anyway, to those of you considering starting some sort of talk therapy: I recommend it. It is Very Good to have a place where you feel like you can say the things that perhaps on a day-to-day basis you don't feel you get the opportunity to say under normal circumstances — or which, for one reason or another, you don't feel comfortable expressing. It is Very Good to have a place you can go where someone will listen to whatever you have to say, however much difficulty you might have explaining it, or however worried you might be about people not taking it seriously. It is Very Good to have a place where, if necessary, you can burst into tears and the only other person present there knows how to handle that.

Therapy is not a magic bullet solution to all the things that ail your mind. Mental health is complicated, and many of the things you struggle with are likely to be ingrained over the course of years, even decades. You will have times where you feel like you make progress, and times where you feel like things have gone a bit backwards. But it is a place where there are no wrong answers to difficult, abstract questions, and where, if you allow yourself to let go of many of the usual social restraints you might place upon yourself when around family and friends, you can freely express things that have been bothering you — and perhaps come to realise quite how much some of them have actually been affecting you. At the other end of the spectrum, it is also sometimes the case that things which have felt like they have taken over your entire life for a certain period sometimes just need you to be able to talk about them in a safe, non-confrontational and non-judgemental environment.

All this is to say that in the time I've spent in therapy so far, I've found it very helpful. I still have a lot of work to do on a lot of things about my life and my mental health, but already I have found myself able to acknowledge a bunch of things that are perhaps difficult to contemplate independently, to say the least — and I'm sure I will continue to discover things in subsequent sessions. I just need to get through this current particularly bleak episode in the saga of my life to be able to move forwards.

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The post #oneaday Day 743: Talk therapy appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This will, in its own curious way, reflect what happened in 1983, where a significant portion of the game-playing world — the UK and Europe, notably — were blissfully unaware of the problems the broader games business were suffering, because they were enjoying the fruits of a thriving cottage games industry. Here in the UK, we had no idea a "crash" was happening across the pond because we were all cheerfully buying £1.99 Mastertronic tapes from our local corner shop.

Something's gotta give, though, because the relentless torrent of shit that is coming out from shareholder-beholden companies — particularly with regard to the odiousness that is generative AI — is completely unsustainable. And we've reached a point where all but the most ardent bootlickers are feeling more and more emboldened to criticise what's going on — though sadly this also coincides with a period where thousands of people are being laid off and games aren't actually getting any better.

Take this statement attributed to Sony, posted on Bluesky earlier today:

This is a complete nothing of a statement! It says nothing! It gives precisely no examples of how AI "improves productivity", "drives efficiency, personalisation and customer value at scale" and "unleashes the creativity of Sony Interactive Entertainment's studios"! It is five paragraphs that explain nothing and say nothing, but which exist purely to, supposedly, placate shareholders who, apparently, have absolutely no functioning brain cells between them and desire nothing more than every stupid fucking company to follow every stupid fucking trend in existence, even when they are demonstrably, actively harmful and just plain shit!

I am mildly heartened that a number of developers are starting to speak up a bit more about this. There's a good piece on Aftermath on the subject, and another on gamesindustry.biz. There are still the annoying sycophants in every single comments section who all parrot the exact same lines about "the genie being out of the bottle" and "get used to AI or get left behind", but there is, I feel, increasing resistance to that side of things. A lot of smaller-scale developers are also making a good name for themselves by saying, out loud, and prominently, that they do not use generative AI at any point in their development process. Good!

The utterly dumbshit thing about corpos like Sony sucking Sam Altman and Wario Amodei's robophalluses is that there is not a single documented instance of a project involving generative AI being well-received by either press or public. I'm not even convinced that it's actually what shareholders want to see. The otherwise excellent Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was soured for a lot of folks (including me) when it was found that they had used generative AI for "placeholder" (sure) assets, and likewise for the apparently also very good The Alters. New projects coming out that are revealed to be using generative AI are subject to mass shunnings and censure from press and public alike — and rightly so. It is starting to feel less and less desirable to have any involvement whatsoever in the top end of today's games industry — a once-exciting, vibrant place — and more and more understandable when people choose to focus their time and attention on both small, independent projects and retro titles.

On top of that, the very generative AI that all these shareholder-appeasing corpos are rushing to use for no real specified purpose is becoming increasingly responsible for pricing people out of games and tech! No good having "volume and diversity of content" (ugh) if no-one can fucking afford the devices to play it on, is there?

All this can easily be avoided! We have been making games for a very long time without the use of a glorified Autocorrect trained on stolen data! I find it near-impossible to believe that every game developer has suddenly completely forgotten how to do things the way we've been doing them for many years at this point, just because you can tell "Claude" to churn you out some spaghetti code using conversational English. And yet. And yet.

I don't know exactly what a "crash" is going to look like in this instance, but I feel like it's not going to be pretty — and the potential knock-on effects concern me somewhat. Like, if games consoles go away — and with the current tech pricing situation, that's a real risk — what does that then mean for people who like to collect games, and for the long-term archival of games using physical media? There are so many potentially terrible things that could happen that I don't feel like the world of video games has adequately prepared for, and it's really quite worrying.

Still, if the worst comes to the worst, I have shelves full of games, many of which are complete-on-disc or complete-on-cart, and a fully-loaded MiSTer. I could, at this point, duck out of "modern gaming" at any time — and with each passing month, it feels more and more like I might end up doing that.

To pre-empt the inevitable comments from weirdly aggressive generative AI-boosting corpo bootlickers: fuck off; you are not welcome here, if the above doesn't make that abundantly clear already, and your comments will just be deleted, so you may as well just not bother. Hope that helps!

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The post #oneaday Day 742: Crash and burn appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For me, it's like being inside a bubble of sorts. I can see the world going on around me; I can hear it; I can even interact with it. But I feel an almost total disconnect from it. It's like I'm on a slightly different plane of existence; reality kept at arm's length. Close enough to be familiar and still just about within reach, under most circumstances, but far enough away to making going about normal, everyday things varying degrees of "challenging", ranging from "begrudging reluctance" all the way up to "this feels like a completely insurmountable task that I will never be capable of". And the challenge factor doesn't necessarily relate directly to how difficult the actual task is; as an example, the simple act of talking to people I know and like right now feels very much like it's up around the "insurmountable" end of the scale. Not quite there, because I can just about carry on a conversation right now, but not something I am deliberately seeking out if I absolutely do not have to.

It can be disconcerting, and the description of it as a "bubble" is perhaps not the best one; bubbles, after all, are fragile, delicate things that can be popped at a moment's notice, while whatever encloses my mind at times like this is much more… solid-seeming. And it weighs you down; it drains the energy and vitality from your mind and body, and makes, as I say, just going about your regular, everyday business feel like an enormous effort; a toil that never ends.

And the worst thing is that being in this state is weirdly addictive. I recognise this about myself. I recognise that when I get into a state like this, something in my brain almost wants to remain this way, even though another little voice in my brain knows that it's unproductive and unhelpful, both to myself and to the people around me. It becomes a battle between different aspects of my consciousness, I guess; the more primal, emotional part of myself wants to continue to wallow in the darkness because there's a strange sort of comfort there, while what I would probably describe as the more high-functioning, pragmatic part of myself wants to tell me to… just do something, whether that's a simple thing like doing something enjoyable that might take my mind off things, or something more complex and long-term that might lead to some sort of solution (or at least resolution) to the problem I'm experiencing.

At the moment, the primal part is winning. I am right in the depths of that bubble, and normality feels a very long way away. I don't know if it's slipping further away or getting closer, either; the feeling changes from moment to moment. Sometimes I feel like I am just going to have to accept that Something Bad has happened and try to move on from it; at others, I feel like I described the other day, like everything has come to a screeching halt until this particular "episode" of my life has concluded in some fashion.

This is all very abstract I know, and I'm almost certainly mixing metaphors and whatnot. But this also just happens to be the sort of musings that dribble forth from my brain at times like this, as particularly longstanding readers of this blog will be well aware, I'm sure.

I have little doubt that I will eventually manage to make it through this particularly bleak period of my life one way or another; I have survived plenty of other episodes like this in the past, and I'm sure there are plenty more to come in the future. But right now, if I seem a bit off, or if I don't really want to talk, or you get the distinct impression I just want to be left alone… well, as I said the other day, it's probably not you, and it is most definitely me.

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The post #oneaday Day 741: The bubble appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is one of those times where I feel like I need to have a word with my inner self, and say that it's okay to look after me. Oliver is important, and we desperately want to find him, but if the process of searching for him, worrying about him and generally running ourselves completely ragged is having an impact on our physical wellbeing, it's probably time to take a little break, at least for one evening. Patti is also sad, upset and clearly worried about us.

We have done everything that the people who copy-paste the exact same comments onto every single "missing pet" Facebook post suggest. We have put things that he likes and things that smell of him outside, we have put food outside (which, on separate occasions, got eaten by another neighbourhood cat, and attracted a fox), we have left open the window that we believe he escaped through, we have been out calling softly for him, we have sat out in the garden having a normal conversation so he can hear us, we have motion sensors on our security cameras set to notify us the moment they see an animal.

At this point my only real possible conclusions are that he is locked in somewhere and hasn't been found yet — which, with every passing day, makes me very concerned for his wellbeing; that he has been taken by someone, either because they saw a lovely cat looking lost and thought they'd take care of it, or because of more nefarious purposes, which I don't like to think about (but also feel is probably quite unlikely); or that he is no longer with us, in which case I feel like he probably would have been found by now.

I know I keep repeating myself, but hopefully my post yesterday makes it clear why. I do not feel like I can "continue" with my life while I don't know what has happened to my precious boy. And I'm worried that I am going to be left feeling like this for a long time. What if we just… don't hear anything at all? What then? Are we stuck in a perpetual limbo of hoping that he'll just make it home somehow, seemingly against all odds? Or do we attempt to make our peace with the situation, try and say as best a goodbye as we can in his absence, and try to move on?

I can't bring myself to do the last one. Not yet, anyway. I still feel like one evening, we're just going to see him saunter around the corner as if nothing happened. It does sometimes end up like this, and I am hoping that this is one of those situations. But with every passing day, it's harder to hold on to that hope.

I'm off to try and distract myself. Tonight I will be having a go at Adventure of Samsara, Atari's exploratory platformer that apparently has some connections to the 2600 version of Adventure. Hopefully it takes my mind off things for a bit at least.

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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The post #oneaday Day 740: Exhaustion appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, inevitably, not particularly convenient or helpful, either for yourself or for people who are, for one reason or another, depending on you and your input into various aspects of their own lives, be it personal, professional or a bit of both. I unfortunately do not have a good answer for how to just "get over it" at times like this, since, as you have probably noticed from recent posts, I am slap bang in the middle of one such period right now. And I will doubtless continue to be so for quite some time. I apologise in advance to anyone I don't reply to, am rude to, have no patience for or for whom I am unable to complete a requested task. It's not you, it's very much me, but I do at least hope you have some understanding for what I am contending with.

One of the things I find most difficult about times like this is, as I talked about the other day, getting other people to understand the sheer depth of the things you are feeling, and how all-encompassing they can feel. I feel like not everyone's brain presses that big tempting "pause" button when something like this happens; some folks can, I suspect, handle things a lot better than I can. Or, no, that's perhaps not fair to myself. Some folks, I suspect, handle things differently to how I do. Regardless of self-deprecation, I envy them somewhat; the way in which they can allow their life to continue moving forward during times of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

Or perhaps they're just better at hiding it than I am. Perhaps they're feeling exactly the same as I do in private, but are better at "masking" the way they feel when they are around others. Putting on a brave face, stiff upper lip, that sort of thing — but breaking down in tears when they're off the clock, staring into space, feeling despair at simply not knowing what to do or how to feel.

At times like this, as I say, it can be difficult to engage with the things that would normally bring you joy, because sometimes it can feel like taking hold of a feeling of transient joy is somehow "wrong" or "disrespectful" to the thing you are uncertain, upset, sad or angry about — even if you know that it's a momentary distraction that you probably need for the sake of your own mental health. The other side of this is that when you're experiencing those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil, it can simply be difficult to focus on something that, under normal circumstances, would bring you joy, but requires a certain amount of concentration and engagement.

This is an exceedingly long-winded way of saying that I have not gone back to Final Fantasy XI since Oliver's disappearance, despite the fact that it was bringing me great joy, and would probably be an excellent distraction right now. But it just doesn't feel quite right to be going back to that just yet, which is what led me to reach for something from my shelf this evening that does not particularly require continuous concentration, focus and engagement — or, perhaps more accurately, demands a different kind of continuous concentration, focus and engagement; a kind that, when your brain is all a-churnin' with great uncertainty and emotional turmoil, you can still get along with.

For me, this is where video games that are entirely mechanics-focused come in. I am generally someone who prefers playing things with strong stories, but there are times when something that is pure mechanics is exactly what the doctor ordered. These types of experiences demand a different kind of focus to works that want you to concentrate on narrative, themes and characterisation, and they can make excellent distractions from periods of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

The absolute ideal form of this type of experience is something that, when you reach a "fail" state, you can jump right back into with minimal fuss, ad infinitum if necessary. In technical video game terms, the best implementation of this is a game where, when you hit a "Game Over" or equivalent, you can just press a button and be immediately playing again, ideally without any waiting around for load times or anything like that.

This evening, I have been playing some of the Atari Recharged games, which fit the bill perfectly for this sort of thing. I've had lovely boxed versions of these on my shelves for ages, but still haven't yet got around to exploring all of them fully. This evening, I have been playing Asteroids Recharged and Breakout Recharged, and they have very much been having the desired effect.

For the unfamiliar, the Atari Recharged games are modern reimaginings of classic Atari arcade games. The ones I have played all have the same structure: they have an infinite "arcade" mode, where you simply play to survive as long as possible and attain a high score, and a "challenge" mode, which consists of a large number of predefined, standalone, self-contained levels, each of which challenges you to accomplish a particular objective, often under difficult circumstances.

Both of these are excellent for calming the storm of a turbulent mind, as both function as I describe above: they demand concentration and focus without having to engage the part of your brain that deals with pesky things like words, subtext, narrative themes and characterisation, and they allow you to quickly and easily try again if you mess up. And you will mess up a lot more than you win — particularly in the arcade mode, where there is literally no way to win other than beating your own high scores, or those of people you have set your sights on from the online leaderboards.

In a way, they are "mindless", but I don't mean that in a denigratory way. There's something primal and instinctual that happens to you when you play games like this, and it leaves no room for abstract emotions. You'll feel enjoyment, satisfaction, frustration and even anger, but allow yourself to become one with the experience and you will, at least for an hour or two, forget about those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

It is important to give yourself an escape hatch; a lifeline. When your brain decides to put your life on pause, it often isn't healthy. It might cause you to not take as good care of yourself as you should. You might not eat properly. You might find yourself pushing away people who want to help — or at the very least want you to open up about what's wrong. It can be easy to immerse yourself in those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil; an all-encompassing, opaque black bubble of misery from which it can be very difficult to escape if you allow it to form completely.

So take those moments, as little and fleeting as they might be, and step out of that darkness for a moment. It's not a betrayal of the things you are upset about; it is allowing yourself a moment's peace, preventing you from being consumed completely, and perhaps giving you the strength to be able to pull yourself out of the mire, little by little.

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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The post #oneaday Day 739: Occupying yourself while your life is on hold appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Thankfully, as discovered by my mother-in-law, Agnes, who was looking after her while we were away (as well as looking out for Oliver on the chance he would return of his own accord), it is possible to establish a new Routine with Patti quite easily. It takes her a few days to become accustomed to the presence of Agnes — a process which always leads to initially begrudging and eventually enthusiastic acceptance of her as the temporary primary cat-caregiver — but by the time we come back they are always the best of friends.

This time around, Agnes was delighted to describe that she and Patti had established a new Routine for each day: Patti would spend each day either sitting on our bed or the windowsill, while Agnes would potter around in the garden and do all the tidying up we told her not to do while we were away, because she should be taking it easy. Then, when the evening came, Agnes would sit in my customary spot on the sofa in the living room, Patti would jump up, and Agnes would brush Patti. This became such an established Routine over the course of the last week that apparently on the one evening where Agnes did not follow this Routine, Patti went and fetched her from the other room until she got her nightly brushing to her satisfaction.

Patti is spoiled. She has been ever since we got her. She didn't have the best start in life, as she was apparently abandoned by her previous owners, and this led to her being a somewhat nervous, timid girl, especially around strangers. This, of course, led to us wanting to create the happiest, most safe-feeling home she could possibly have. She deserves it, we figured. Our hearts melted the moment we met her, and she has been the most wonderful companion ever since.

She will habitually run and hide whenever someone unfamiliar (or someone who simply hasn't been here for a while) comes into the house, but she is loving, tactile and very vocal with the pair of us. When we first met her at the local shelter, she was described as a "lovely girl" but "shy". What they didn't tell us — or they didn't know — was that those two things were not simple descriptors of her personality, but rather her two different, distinct modes. She is a lovely girl sometimes (with us), but she is shy at others (around strangers). I see the fact that her lovely girl side has only flourished over the years she has been with us as reflecting well on us as her caregivers — something which we would probably both do well to remember while we keep blaming ourselves for Oliver's disappearance.

So yes, although Agnes has gone home this evening, Patti has had her brush on the sofa. She knows something is wrong — how could she not, with Oliver's sudden absence, because Oliver absolutely adores Patti to a degree that she would sometimes rather he tone down a bit — but she has seemingly already come to the understanding that we are doing our very best to return things to normality as much as we can. I hope and pray that means we can return Oliver to her as soon as we can — but regardless of what happens, she is going to get even more love, care and attention than she already does. She is our little princess, and she deserves all the happiness in the world. I just want, more than anything, to reunite her with her annoying little brother, and for our family to be whole again.

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The post #oneaday Day 738: Spoiling Patti appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am, of course, still absolutely sick with worry. It has been two weeks today that he went missing, and whatever happens, I am always, always going to be wondering if there was more we could have done — more we should have done. There are zillions of online resources out there saying what you "should" do when a cat goes missing, but a significant proportion of them appear to be AI-generated drivel and pseudoscience.

I am not willing to give up on him, though. At this point, it feels like it will be unlikely that he will come home by himself for whatever reason, but I still want to go looking for him and will be doing so when we return home tomorrow. I don't know if I will be able to achieve anything — over the course of two weeks, it's entirely possible he could have gone a long way, although most supposed "experts" (with the caveat above) seem to believe that cats who spend the majority of their time indoors, as Oliver did, won't have actually ventured very far, and are probably hiding silently somewhere they feel is "safe". This, unfortunately, makes them extremely difficult to track down; the most supposedly reliable advice appears to be to bring things that are "familiar" to them — things that they recognise the smell or sound of.

Part of me is concerned that he has simply been taken by someone. Not necessarily stolen as such, but perhaps he was seen somewhere, the owner didn't think to get his microchip checked, and now thinks that they have a wonderful new cat in their family. If that has happened, I have absolutely no idea how we would go about finding him — although if this has happened, his status will be flagged up if and when he is taken to the vets or a shelter or something, and that, in turn, would allow us to be reunited. But that, of course, depends on the person in question thinking to take him to a vet or shelter — if indeed this is the situation in which he has found himself.

As I've said repeatedly over the course of the last two weeks, though, the absolutely impossible thing throughout all this is just not knowing anything. What made him jump out of the window? Which way did he go? Was he just exploring, or was he running from something? Is he hurt? Is he hungry? Has he been taking care of himself for the last two weeks? Has someone else been taking care of him for the last two weeks? I don't have any answers, and these myriad questions swirling around my brain are driving me absolutely spare.

I'm supposed to be going back to work on Tuesday, and it'll be right back into a difficult, stressful time, too. Honestly I'm not sure I'm going to be able to cope. I am wracked with pain, sadness, guilt, anger, frustration and all manner of other emotions, and I still don't really know how to process any of them, or how to direct any of them in a vaguely productive direction — either for getting some work done, or for tracking down our precious boy.

As with any difficult time, I guess it's just going to have to be a "one step at a time" sort of situation. I want to think this is all going to end happily and become a funny story to share in the years to come, but I am also fearing the worst. I don't want to lose him. He is so, so precious to me.

There is nothing I can do from where I am right now, though. Tomorrow is a new day, and we can decide what we need to do from there. So the best thing I can probably do at the moment is get some rest and try to come to tomorrow as alert and refreshed as is possible under the circumstances.

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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The post #oneaday Day 737: Returning to reality appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Both of them suffer from pretty much the same problems, and both are a result of the now well-documented phenomenon that is enshittification. In fact, it's almost uncanny how similar the two platforms' problems are — with the only real difference being that Nextdoor isn't trying to push AI-generated softcore porn "Reels" at me every five posts.

One of the main problems with both of these sites — and with a lot of other social media sites in general — is their insistence on providing a non-chronological feed of Stuff. Instead, they decide to surface relentless parades of absolute sewage that their mysterious "algorithms" believe are "Relevant" to you. In practice, what this means is that you get bombarded with a bunch of stuff that you don't give a shit about — often repeatedly. And the stuff in question is, more often than not, spam or outright scams.

On Nextdoor, for example, there's a post that is supposedly from an alcoholic person that keeps showing up in my feed despite my having shown no indication of any interest in it. I don't know what the point of the post is and I don't really want to know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's some form of advertising. Likewise, on Facebook, I'm continually confronted with "Suggested" posts that are very clearly adverts, but positioned in a way that is clearly designed to be incredibly deceptive towards those who aren't particularly Internet-savvy.

Then there's the notifications. Oh, God the notifications. Nextdoor is the worst for this by a significant margin. Given that the only thing I have posted on there is the request for people to look out for Oliver, one might naturally assume that the only notifications I might be interested in would be responses to that post. But no! Here's what my notifications look like as of this evening:

You will notice that none of these posts are anything to do with Oliver. You may also know that none of these posts are from people that I know. I'm not even convinced that they're all from people in the same area as me.

I get the intent behind this shit: the idea of Nextdoor is that it is supposed to build a community of neighbours, and one way of getting neighbours to recognise one another is to stuff them into each others' notifications, whether you want them or not. But this is not useful! The very point of notifications is so that you can get notified when something happens that you have been waiting to hear about! When you're dealing with a stressful situation like losing a pet, the last fucking thing you want is to see a notification pop up, think that someone might have a lead on your precious companion, only to find that it's someone who doesn't know which "there" to use whingeing about bin men or complaining about parking or some other such crap.

I don't have a great deal of faith that either of these sites are going to help us find Oliver. The one vaguely positive thing I can say in Facebook's favour specifically is that members of "lost pet" groups are proactive in resharing people's posts to other groups that you might not have joined yourself. That increases the visibility of your original post and, in theory, makes it more likely that it might cross the path of someone who might be able to help — although that, unfortunately, has not happened as yet.

Still, it's something, at least, and posting on these places is something that I can at least monitor while we're away from the house. It hasn't come to anything as yet, but it only has to come to something once for it to have been worthwhile. So I guess we'll have to wait and see — but I suspect once we get home, it will be back to searching for him ourselves and hoping, wishing, praying for his eventual safe return.

It's our last full day away tomorrow, and that will also mark two weeks since Oliver went missing. I still don't know how to feel, other than sad, upset and frustrated. But in a couple of days' time, we're going to have to at least attempt to move on with our lives as best we can in the meantime, and whatever happens from thereon, happens.

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The post #oneaday Day 736: The sewage of social media appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This began with our customary trip to the one restaurant we always pay a visit when we come to Center Parcs: The Pancake House, an establishment that, I believe, is fairly self-explanatory. They offer an excellent range of both sweet and savoury pancakes, and you can have each dish made with a large Dutch pancake, a stack of American pancakes, or an omelette if you're some sort of crazy person.

We both went for our usual orders: Andie had the apple and cinnamon crumble pancakes on Dutch, and I had the "New Yorker" (pictured), which is listed under "sweet" pancakes but is actually just a stack of American pancakes with bacon and (optionally) a fried egg, plus maple syrup. Very good.

After that, we weren't quite ready to return to the lodge and potential intrusive thoughts, so we went to go and play pool for a bit. I haven't played pool for a long time and have always sucked at it, but thankfully Andie also sucks at it too, so we had a fairly even best-of-three session. Andie ended up beating me 2-1, and it was deserved. I played well in my first game (which I won) and got pretty consistently worse with each subsequent game. My excuse is that it was hot and sweaty and humid in the pool hall, and I'm sticking to it.

Following that, we came back to the lodge to sit for a bit; I played a bit of Ace Attorney and Andie stared at a knitting project she's had trouble starting. Then we thought going for a swim would be a nice distraction; turns out that it was. A bit of time in the outdoor Sprudel pool and bubbly jacuzzi was nice and relaxing, then we went down one of the water slides, played in the wave machine for a bit, and then we were ready to head back and have some dinner.

All in all, although we're both still very sad and anxious, today ended up being about as nice a day as it's possible to have under the circumstances, and a demonstration of something that is always worth remembering during your bleakest moments: sometimes it pays to just get up, get out and go do something rather than staring into the middle distance being miserable about something which, at that exact moment, you cannot really do anything about.

Tomorrow we will still feel sad and anxious, I am sure. There will be many more tears before we get any sort of closure on this whole horrible situation, I am equally sure. But I will keep telling myself: it is important to continue to take care of yourself, as well as worrying about the wellbeing of those who are precious to you.

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The post #oneaday Day 735: Many distractions appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I will, of course, grant you that the reason the wildlife is so very tame is because it has been so thoroughly spoiled by the humans in this space — and I won't pretend that we are immune to such temptations. Not only that, I will not deny that it is probably bad for wildlife to become dependent on food provided by humans. But I prefer to look at it as these animals coming to live in harmony with the people who visit here; it's abundantly clear that they're all more than capable of taking care of themselves in the wild, they just enjoy getting a treat or two from the suckers who inhabit the various lodges.

Discovering that the site here plays host to wild cats was one of the strangest things. I don't think I had ever seen a wild cat prior to coming here a few years back, but apparently there are so many on the site that it's a bit of a problem at times, as you can probably imagine. Non-domesticated cats have a tendency to breed, after all, and cats are pretty good predators at the best of times, so one can imagine that it's easy to throw a delicate natural balance out of whack if the population explodes too much.

Thus, it's unsurprising to see that at least some of the wild cats here show signs of if not having been "domesticated" as such, then at least kept under control somewhat. A particularly persistent (and seemingly well-fed) one that kept paying us a visit today had a clipped ear, for example, which suggests at the very least that she exists on someone's records somewhere, and likely has been neutered in an attempt to keep the population under control.

Is that really "natural balance" if humanity has to intervene in that way? Perhaps not, but the very nature of the site has already thrown the natural balance out of things somewhat out of whack anyway, so I suspect the most sensible thing to do is at least attempt to compensate for such things as best we know how. I do not know a thing about how one goes about such things, but I'm sure there are men with graphs and flipcharts who have calculated things very effectively at some point in the management process of this whole place.

Anyway, my point is: it is nice to be able to open your curtains and see a deer, or a squirrel, or a jay, or a cat. They all seem to be having a thoroughly lovely time, and I'm not about to stop them doing so.

Meanwhile, we're hanging in here, just about. The animal friends are helping a bit.

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The post #oneaday Day 734: Wildlife appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The distractions have been good and welcome, but it's still tough, I don't think either of us will deny that. But we are at least managing to have a reasonably good time while we're away, which is the important thing. In some respects it might even be a good thing that we don't hear anything while we're away, as it means that the worst hasn't happened — or if it has, no-one has found him as yet. That means, I like to think, that he's still out there somewhere, waiting to be found — or perhaps just waiting to wander his way back one day and saunter in as if nothing had happened.

Stranger things have happened, as I've said a few times before; cats are well-known for their independence, after all, and even my beloved family pet from when I was a child disappeared for six whole weeks once, apparently. I don't remember this at all; I guess I must have been too young to remember when it happened. I do remember the time she got hit by a car and fled into a bush in a nearby field; we managed to track her down, get her to the vet, and she eventually made a full recovery, going on to live a very long, full and happy 17 years of life.

But still. As I keep saying, it almost doesn't bear thinking about right now, as far away from the situation as we are in physical terms. And I think we are slowly coming to terms with various unfortunate truths… or at least possibilities. None of them are particularly nice possibilities to contemplate, and thinking about them too much still upsets the both of us… but we are, gradually, bit by bit, able to get through each day without becoming completely non-functional.

It remains to be seen how we'll be when we get back, of course, depending on what — if anything — has transpired in the meantime. I feel like the best case scenario at this point is that he's found wandering around somewhere, taken to a vet, gets his microchipped scanned (which will immediately flag him both as missing and as living with us) and will thus be able to return to us safe and sound. But that is, I am aware, a very optimistic hope for how this will all end up.

I guess there's no point wondering "what if". The human brain doesn't work that way, however; the human brain, it seems, is uniquely designed to wonder "what if" as much as possible, as often as possible. And it's a function that, at least in my brain, it's near-impossible to turn off.

Still. It's the end of another day and, as always, we continue. Tomorrow is yet another day, and it remains to be seen what it will bring.

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The post #oneaday Day 733: Distractions appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is a problem that both Andie and I have; if we find ourselves in a silent (or near-silent) atmosphere, both our respective minds tend to go into overdrive and focus on things that are… shall we say "unproductive", or perhaps unconducive to good mental health is perhaps a better way of putting it.

To put it another way, while the Aqua Sana has plenty of absolutely lovely facilities for just lying back, relaxing and even falling asleep, the quiet, calm atmosphere of the whole place — even our fellow guests tended to speak quietly — meant that we'd often end up thinking about our dear, precious lost boy. And, as harsh as it might sound, that's not really what we wanted out of the experience; we wanted an escape for a little while, because both our respective hearts and souls are so battered, bruised and broken after all the worry and uncertainty of the last week.

Our thinking behind still coming away on our holiday was that we'd be able to draw a temporary line, enjoy ourselves as much as we could while we were away, then, if it was still necessary, continue the search upon our return; meanwhile, we knew that Andie's mum would be taking care of our house and Patti, and would be ready to welcome Oliver home if he were to find his way back by himself.

So far that has not happened, and with each passing day I find myself worrying more. Where is he? How far has he gone? Has he been able to look after himself while he is missing? Has someone taken him? Or is he in distress somewhere, alone and scared? And if that is the case, how on Earth do we find him?

I know, deep in my heart, that there is no real way that I can guarantee I will be able to find him, and I also know, deep down, that we might never see him again, or be able to say a proper goodbye if he is no longer with us. That doesn't stop it hurting, though.

Everything will be all right in the end. It always is. As my therapist says, I am a survivor. I will get through this, just like I have got through all the other challenges life has thrown my way over the years. I just never thought dear, sweet, innocent, playful little Oliver would ever present one of those challenges — at least, not for many, long, happy years of companionship, anyway.

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The post #oneaday Day 732: Quiet contemplation is not always ideal appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Regardless, we are some distance away from, practically speaking, being able to do anything about his disappearance right now, so all we can do is attempt to enjoy ourselves. We are safely ensconced in our villa, the weather is nice, and this is the view out of the back door:

Green. Green everywhere. It is nice. I feel a certain affinity for foresty settings. I have always liked coming to Center Parcs precisely because they're all slap bang in the middle of a forest, and when I was a youngster, I always used to like trips to Waresley Wood, a nearby small woods that also, as I recall, played host to a sewage works, which was nice. You could tell which way you were going from the smell in certain areas.

I always feel somewhat mixed feelings about being out in nature. I certainly, on the whole, enjoy the experience of being in natural surroundings, and find the general environment to be rather relaxing. At the same time, though, I am always very conscious of the number of things that live in Nature that are more than willing to sting me, bite me or just generally make me very itchy. And these things are not always immediately apparent — though I do tend to tread specifically carefully when I'm in an unfamiliar and somewhat "untamed" environment; memories of enduring the irritation of a brush with some stinging nettles as a kid remain surprisingly vibrant, and I'm not keen to repeat them as a grown adult.

I am hoping the time away will help us. We have been so worried for the last week that it's just completely exhausted the pair of us. As I type this, Andie has just climbed into bed and gone to sleep. It is not even 6.30pm, but I do not blame her one bit. We have been fretting so much over our silly little man, and both of us are still worrying over him, even though we've both agreed that to just go ahead with our time away is the best possible thing we can do with regard to our own self-care.

And like I've said before: Andie's mum is looking after our house and Patti while we are away, so if Oliver does happen to show his face — or if we hear from someone who has seen him — she can take any sort of action that might be needed. Hopefully, that action will just be "shut the little bugger in and seal up all the windows for the rest of eternity" but… well, as I've said numerous times over the last week, we just don't know.

Anyway, I am going to make a specific effort to try and enjoy my holiday now. We miss you, Oliver, and we would love it if we would be able to come home to your smiling face on our return next week. For now, please be safe, take care of yourself… and go make a lot of noise at a sympathetic-looking person who will help you be reunited with us.

We have no particular plans for the rest of the day. I'm off to see if Andie actually wants to wake up at all today, or if we might as well start our holiday properly from tomorrow!

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The post #oneaday Day 731: Temporary escape appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's not giving up. It's an acknowledgement that we have made an effort to try and find him, and thus far those efforts have been unsuccessful. This could mean any of a number of things: that he's no longer with us; that he doesn't want to be found; that he's gone far enough afield that we haven't been able to run into him as yet; that he's lost and doesn't know how to find his way home; that he's ended up locked in somewhere he shouldn't be; or that someone has taken him in, perhaps even thinking "ooh, I always wanted a cat, I'll keep this one".

Since we don't know the exact reason we have been unsuccessful as yet, it seems like the most sensible thing to do is just to wait and see if any of the seeds we have planted — by which I mean the social media posts, the leaflets, the informing of various local organisations — will bear fruit. This may end in tragedy — I hope it won't, but it might — or it may end in joyous reunion (and a very, very grounded cat). At this point, we just don't know, and as I've said numerous times over the course of the last week, that is one of the most difficult things about the entire situation.

Because we don't know what has happened, we're left in a strange sort of emotional limbo, where all the things we want to feel are both correct and incorrect at the same time. For me, the things that I am holding onto the most are 1) that he hasn't been found, having been hit by a car, on the side of the road somewhere, and thus is hopefully still out there somewhere, and that 2) there are many, many stories of cats who go missing for weeks at a time, who then subsequently come home safe and sound. Apparently my childhood cat, Penny, disappeared for six full weeks at one point, because she had "moved in" with another family. My only concern about this latter potential situation is how to find him if this has happened, and if the people he is with are honest enough to get his microchip scanned and return him to us.

But here, at nearly 7pm on Sunday night, the day before we're going away on holiday, I think I have to draw a line and say "that's everything I can do… for now". Andie's mum is holding the fort while we are away, so if he does turn up he will have a welcoming face ready to spoil him rotten, and if he still hasn't shown up by the time we return, we can continue our efforts to search for him then.

As I say, it's not giving up. It's giving ourselves permission to take a step away from what has been a horrible, stressful week, and to give ourselves some very much needed self-care. I sincerely hope this story has a happy ending, but for now, I guess it is on a hiatus of sorts.

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The post #oneaday Day 730: Having to draw a line appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's not as if I haven't tried to do so. But I feel like any time I have attempted to — with the exception of my therapist yesterday, who is trained in such matters, and my family members, who have been through situations like this and thus understand — I have simply got a response that is, at best, a cursory "oh, Pete, I'm so sorry" and then nothing much after that.

I'm not really sure what I'm expecting or wanting from other people, to be honest. But something about it just doesn't quite feel… "enough", you know? I am here, devastated at the potential loss of a family member — because make no mistake, Oliver is a family member — and I feel like a lot of people I've expressed this to have pretty much forgotten this fact almost as soon as they have given the appropriate response as defined by the unwritten social contract we all agree to.

To be clear, I'm not angry at anyone who has responded this way and I'm not annoyed that very few people have reached out to see how I'm doing as the week goes on. I know that everyone has their own things going on in their lives, and their own priorities of things to care about. I cannot reasonably expect people who are not directly involved in this situation to care about it as much as I do. I know that.

But I think what the problem is, is that this is putting my overall loneliness somewhat into perspective. There simply are not very many people left in my life that I feel like I can express these things to, and that they will give a shit. It is at times like this where you really feel like you need people in your life to support you, to uplift you, to distract you from the dark thoughts swirling around inside your head, and when you simply don't really have that outside of your immediate family members, it can feel a tad difficult to deal with.

I think about how I might feel if someone close to me was dealing with such mental anguish, and how I would want to be there to support them. I think about how I have been with people who were once close to me who have been through similarly challenging periods of intense, sustained emotion. Perhaps I am the one who overdid it? Perhaps I was overbearing, smothering? I don't know. It felt like the right thing for me to do at the time, and the people in question seemed to appreciate it, too.

It's just so difficult. Like I say, I really don't know what emotion I am really "supposed" to be feeling right now, because the fact is I simply still do not know what the situation actually is. All I know is that Oliver is missing, and his condition is unknown. And until we learn something more about what has actually happened, that uncertainty is going to be probably the leading cause of the intense sadness and frustration that both Andie and I are feeling right now.

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The post #oneaday Day 729: The struggle for your emotions to be heard appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. Suffering a loss, regardless of the circumstances, is a difficult thing to contend with, and each of us approach the situation differently. Some of us prefer to completely, wilfully enrobe ourselves in the darkness for a time, then come out of the other side if not necessarily feeling "better", then at least feeling some form of closure and acceptance. Others of us take a more long-term approach, finding ourselves spending a portion of each day in quiet (or not-so-quiet) reflection on our loss, but trying to get on with things. Others still push all that grief and hurt down for as long as possible, then end up exploding in a passionate, emotional outburst once the pressure becomes too much for a mind, heart and soul to bear.

There is no one right way to grieve, and there is no wrong way to grieve, either. But it is easy to find yourself in a situation where you feel like you should be grieving all the time, and by extension end up feeling a curious sort of guilt if you are not actively grieving. To put it another way, one can feel like one is not "allowed" to do anything fun or joyful during a period of grief; it can feel something along the lines of "inappropriate" or "disrespectful" or maybe even "lazy" to not be actively grieving, even if that process is not particularly achieving anything. It can feel wrong to do something that you know will make yourself feel better, because some part of you wants to say that you don't deserve to feel better for one reason or another.

I know I am particularly prone to this. It happens any time I go through a grieving process. I find it very difficult to do regular, everyday things while I am going through such a process; there's a little voice in my head that repeatedly says that I should continue to feel bad about the bad thing that happened, that I should continue to be sad, that I should feel guilt over it, to the exclusion of being able to derive joy from things that, on a less unusual day, would be my go-to way of relaxing and unwinding.

I talked about this with my therapist today, and I already knew the answer, but talking about it made it easier to process. The answer is that you have to actively and explicitly give yourself permission to smile. It might feel difficult to smile, it might feel difficult to find something to smile about, but one sure-fire way of doing your own mental health a serious mischief is refusing yourself the permission to process something that is not miserable altogether. No-one can live in complete darkness in perpetuity; it's why it's a form of torture. And if there's one thing you really shouldn't do, it's torture yourself, particularly if the situation is one for which there is no real sense of culpability, and thus grounds for "punishment".

Thus, while we continue to feel all manner of emotions while we grieve for the uneasy, unknown, unresolved situation in which we find ourselves with Oliver, we must allow ourselves the permission to smile. We must allow ourselves the permission to take care of our own wellbeing. We must allow ourselves the permission to step back from the darkness and take a break to breathe, regroup, refocus and perhaps even reframe how we look at things.

This is, as you might expect, weighing very much on my mind given that we are supposed to be going on holiday on Monday. Without allowing ourselves the permission to relax while we are away, we will never be able to use that time away to rest, recover and recuperate from what has been a very trying time — and, if need be, to continue to face that trying time with renewed strength and fortitude on our return.

And thus I, here and now, give myself permission to smile. It does not mean I love Oliver any less, nor does it mean that I want him to return any less. It means that I am at least attempting to take care of myself, and the people closest to me. It's all I can do at a time where we simply do not know what will happen next.

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The post #oneaday Day 728: Giving yourself permission to smile appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Apparently mostly indoor cats are inclined to head for home after around 5-7 days of being away, and indeed in the various Facebook and Nextdoor groups I've been dropping into over the course of the last few days, there are a lot of reports of cats that just turned up again after roughly this long — a lot more reports in that regard than those that remained missing for longer, or which… I don't even want to say it, even though I know it is a distinct possibility, especially the longer he is absent.

I guess the one thing I can vaguely take heart from is that because Oliver is microchipped (as is the law now, I believe), if he was to be found, we would have heard something. And we have not heard anything, which means that he is still out there somewhere. What state he's in, I have no idea, but he is still out there somewhere. And I just have to try and cling on to that for now.

Every time Patti looks out of the window, I am hoping that I'll just see his cheeky face looking back up at us, as if to say "what?" Every time our cameras report that there is movement outside, I hope that I'll see him sauntering around the corner as if nothing had happened. Every noise I hear outside, I hope I'll see his little golden eyes shining back at me.

I guess we just have to keep looking, keep hoping and keep waiting. Andie's mum is coming down on Saturday to help us keep looking if we haven't already been able to find him (or if he hasn't already found us). She was coming down anyway to look after the cats while we go away, so we are just going to try and enjoy our holiday as best we can under the circumstances, since it is too late for us to cancel and get a refund, otherwise we would have done that. That means someone is here while we are away, and will be able to keep an eye out for him, be here if he suddenly decides or manages to come home, and be able to go pick him up or whatever is needed if someone finds him and calls him in.

My heart is broken and my mood is pitch black. I don't know what to do. No-one prepares you for something like this, because there is no way you can prepare someone for something like this. All I can really do is refuse to give up completely. Our little man must have some street smarts; our little man must be able to find his way home. He must. He must.

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The post #oneaday Day 727: The longest days appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We were extremely torn when we came across him last night, as the darkness made it difficult to see him clearly, and obviously, looking out, as we are, for a young ginger cat and then suddenly seeing one… well, you want to hope for the best, don't you? Both of us were feeling such desperation to see Oliver again that we were both having serious doubts about whether or not this cat, standing in front of us, was our special little man. Regretfully, we left him to it, as it looked like his home was somewhere near where we were looking — and when I ran into him earlier today, in the daytime, when it was much easier to see, I confirmed that it wasn't him. It didn't stop me involuntarily gasping when I first saw him come around the corner… but that hope was quickly dashed.

All this, of course, doesn't mean that he's not still out there somewhere, but it does mean that our one promising-seeming lead turned out to be unhelpful, and that is immensely demoralising. Andie is near-inconsolable right now, and I'm pretty sure if I stop Doing Things I will get into a similar state. That's why I went out on the trip where I ran into our ginger friend earlier; I can't just sit here and do nothing.

I'm gradually spreading the word online. Turns out there are quite a few places online where you can report missing pets, and not just Facebook. Some of these places want you to pay a bit, but the cost is primarily for them making a social media ad and then "boosting" it on your behalf. Don't worry, I researched all these places thoroughly before giving them any details. Naturally they want to try and reassure you that they have a solid success rate at this sort of thing, but we're both finding it very difficult right now.

Why hasn't he come home? Where has he gone? Is he hurt? Is he — and this is, of course, the one that hurts the most to consider — even still alive? The absolute worst thing about all this is not knowing. The one faint hope I cling to is that there are so many reports of cats that wandered off one evening and came back about 5-7 days later as if nothing had happened. I am hoping beyond hope that this is what will happen with Oliver — though it would be nice if he'd consider doing this a bit sooner.

As I say, the worst thing is not knowing, because it means I don't know how I should be feeling. Should I be hopeful? Should I be worried? Should I be sad? Should I be angry? Should I give up? Or should I keep believing that it'll all work out, somehow.

Unfortunately, bitter life experience has taught me that it does not, in fact, always work out, somehow. And thus, once again, we continue. Because that's all we can do.

I'm sorry this is all I'm talking about at the moment. But this is all I can think about at the moment.

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The post #oneaday Day 726: False hope appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We've previously posted Oliver's picture and details on some local Facebook pages — the one thing Facebook is actually still vaguely useful for — and earlier today we took around a bunch of flyers to the houses and flats in the nearby vicinity. In the mid-afternoon I got a call from someone down the road; they weren't sure it was Oliver, but they had definitely seen a ginger cat on their back wall recently, and thought that he was "a very friendly chap".

Now, we're trying not to get our hopes up too much, because we know there is another ginger cat in the neighbourhood. The lady who called sounded like she hadn't seen the cat she saw before, however, which leads me to believe that it might, just might have been Oliver. There's also the fact that Andie has apparently encountered "the other ginger cat" and said that it was rather skittish as opposed to friendly; Oliver, meanwhile, has always got along with absolutely everyone he meets, and the personality of the cat our caller described very much sounded like him.

So we have not given up. We cannot give up. I refuse to give up. My heart is battered and bruised and broken from the last few days, and it is difficult to derive any joy from anything. But I cannot give up. I will not give up. He must be out there somewhere, and all we need to do is bring him home.

I do not yet know how we are going to do that, or indeed where he is. But this one little happening today helped me feel just one little spark of hope about the whole situation, and that is something that has been sorely needed since late on Sunday night.

I, of course, do not know how this particular episode of our lives is going to turn out. There is always the possibility that it will end in tragedy, and that is something I don't think I am prepared for. But, as my therapist has said to me on multiple occasions now, I am a survivor, and while I have faced many hardships on life's journey to date, I have made it through all of them so far.

I don't want to have to keep being a survivor, though. I want things to be nice, and happy, and free of worry, and neat. Life, however, is far from neat; simple existence is one of the messiest things imaginable, and I have not yet figured out how — or even if it's possible — to tidy it up.

And so, we continue. For now, we continue, not knowing. Tonight we will walk the streets once again in search of our beloved little man. And tomorrow is another day, whatever that might bring.

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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The post #oneaday Day 725: A spark of hope appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I became worried when I couldn't find him as quickly as I normally do, and he wasn't responding to me calling him. And thus our only conclusion is that somehow, he managed to escape, quite possibly through one of the windows we had open for ventilation. We obviously don't like to think he'd be dumb enough to fling himself out of an upstairs window, but he is a very curious boy and we have caught him sticking his head out for a look on more than one occasion.

We searched the house, including all the hiding spots we knew of. Our other cat, Patti, very much is a hider, and thus we have a pretty good understanding of the various nooks and crannies a cat can potentially get into in our house. He didn't appear to be in any of them — and he's the sort of cat who, if he got stuck somewhere, I feel would probably make some noise, particularly if we were calling for him and shaking a packet of treats.

We also checked our home security cameras, and saw that he went upstairs at just before 10.30PM. The cameras did not appear to record him coming down again, leading us to believe that he is either upstairs (seemingly unlikely, as our search would suggest) or he went out one of the upstairs windows that a cat could squeeze through with a bit of effort. The cameras could have just missed him, of course, but they're generally pretty good at catching both him and Patti.

So we did what cat owners do in this situation, and we didn't go to bed for a long time, taking a couple of wanders around the neighbourhood in the hope that we might either find him or be able to coax him out. We eventually called it a night at well after 2AM, as we both had to work in the morning and we thought we should probably at least try and get some sleep. (That didn't really happen.)

We got up again about 5AM for another look around — again, no sign of him. Or at 9AM, either. In some ways, this is mildly reassuring; we hadn't found him injured (or worse) anywhere, which leads me to the optimistic conclusion — I have to be optimistic, I have to be — that he's gone and got himself locked in someone's shed, garage, greenhouse or whatever. We've done another few "rounds" throughout the day, reported his microchip number as missing (so if someone turns him in to a vet or cat shelter or something, they can get him back to us) and posted on a few local Facebook groups. Nothing as yet, and we are both despairing.

Oliver is such a precious little boy. He is everything to us. (Apart from the bit of everything that belongs to Patti, who is also everything to us.) I feel sick to my stomach (quite literally; I've barely eaten anything all day) not knowing where he is, whether he's hurt, whether he's scared, whether he's trapped or anything really. As I say, I have to remain optimistic; I have to just tell myself that this is something that sometimes happens when you have cats — I've spoken to a lot of people who have been through this experience today, with some being left not knowing what to think for months — and I cannot, will not give up hope on my precious little boy.

It's just the absolute worst that this has happened during both a stressful time at work, and just before Andie and I are going away on holiday. The last thing we want while we're supposed to be away relaxing is not knowing what has happened to one of our beloved pets — members of our family.

If you happen to be in the Southampton area, particularly around Lordswood, here's a flyer we're going to put through some doors tomorrow. If, by some fortuitous combination of circumstances, you happen to see him, please get in touch.

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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The post #oneaday Day 724: Our cat is missing appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I think I'm probably going to make a video along these lines sometime soon — although my prior video on the announcement of The400 Mini a while back covers a lot of the points I'd want to cover — but it's on my mind today, so that's what we're talking about today.

One of the reasons I want to talk about Atari 8-bit computers is because I don't feel they get nearly enough respect. No, they were by no means as popular as the Commodore 64 and Spectrum — the former of which is the subject of a cover feature in Retro Gamer magazine this month — but I also feel like they had a significantly stronger foothold in the market than other "failed" micros from the era. Not only that, but they are historically very significant for a number of reasons, some of which I'll try and outline today.

This is going to be a bit of a stream-of-consciousness sort of probably autistic infodump, because I'm just banging this out as I feel like it. If and when I do decide to make a video about all this, there will probably be a bit more structure, research, that sort of thing. Like I say, this was just rattling around in my head today, though, so I wanted to at least get some thoughts down on paper. So here it is.

For the unfamiliar, the Atari 8-bit range consists of several models:

• The Atari 400, which released in 1978, and initially features 8 kilobytes of RAM, though later revisions bumped this up a bit. This was marketed in some areas as a games machine, as it was the cheaper of the two models to release in 1978, had four joystick ports and sported a flat, supposedly spill-proof membrane keyboard to make it suitable for "family" use.
• The Atari 800, which released alongside the 400 in 1978, and was positioned as a more "serious" machine. It had a "normal" keyboard, user-upgradable RAM (up to a maximum of 48 kilobytes) and two cartridge slots instead of one (though there were very few releases that took advantage of this) — and it cost considerably more.
• The Atari 1200XL was the first step in a refresh of the Atari 8-bit line in 1983, intended to replace the 800. It came with 64 kilobytes of RAM, a completely redesigned case, built-in self-test features and a rather nice keyboard. It was also much too expensive and had a number of issues, causing Atari to pull it from sale before long, and to not release it in PAL territories at all.
• The Atari 800XL (pictured above) was a do-over of the 1200XL project. It also had 64 kilobytes of RAM, the newly designed case (now not quite so deep), built-in self-test features and lovely keyboard, but also added built-in BASIC to the mix along with revisions to the operating system. It was Atari's best-selling 8-bit home computer.
• The Atari 600XL was a cost-reduced version of the 800XL, which had an even slimmer case and only 16 kilobytes of RAM. With the 800XL replacing the 800, this was effectively the replacement for the 400, but it did not sell very well compared to its big brother.
• The Atari 130XE was launched in 1985, after Jack Tramiel took over Atari, and was designed to look like a "little brother" to the 16-bit Atari ST. It featured 128 kilobytes of RAM, new revisions of the operating system and BASIC and a new case design, but otherwise didn't bring anything significantly new to the table. It is a nice machine, though, and my Atari 8-bit of choice.
• The Atari 65XE was essentially identical to the 130XE, only with 64 kilobytes of RAM instead of 128.
• The Atari XEGS was a 65XE in a console-style case with a detachable keyboard. It was positioned primarily as a games console, even more explicitly than the 400 back in 1978, but was a fully functional computer that would work with all Atari 8-bit peripherals.

Broadly speaking, these models are all cross-compatible with one another, aside from obvious exceptions such as programs that need a particular amount of RAM to run properly. There are a few compatibility issues between very early pieces of software that were designed for the 400 and 800 and the later XL/XE models, but these can usually be got around by using a "translator" program to temporarily load in an older version of the operating system, and the Atari community at large has also been hard at work patching many games to work universally on all Atari 8-bit systems.

Like most other 8-bit computers, the Atari 8-bit had three means of loading software: ROM cartridge, cassette tape or 5.25" floppy disk. ROM cartridges are incredibly simple: plug them in, turn on the machine and the software is there, ready to go. These were primarily used for games, particularly in the early days of the platform, but there are some pieces of utility or productivity software that run from cartridge, too. Notably, using a cartridge effectively allows the ROM within to "extend" the Atari's capabilities; a good example of this is the SpartaDOS X package, which adds an MS-DOS style command line for manipulating files on floppy disks.

Cassette tapes were certainly used by Atari enthusiasts, but not to the same extent as on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The reason for this is that the tape loading system in the Atari 8-bit was significantly slower than on its main rivals, resulting in load times of half an hour or more for games that would take just a few minutes on other platforms. That said, the Atari 8-bit could make innovative use of the tape medium by playing back audio during a program — a good example of this is the Conversational Language series of packages, which teach French, German, Italian and Spanish through interactive lessons, with recorded speech coming straight off the tape and being played back through the TV speakers at the appropriate moments.

Instead, disk drive use was very popular. There were two main disk drives in the prime of the Atari 8-bit's lifespan: the original Atari 810, which followed the design language of the 400 and 800, and the Atari 1050, which was designed to fit in alongside a 600XL or 800XL setup. There was an even later XF551 drive, but this didn't really catch on for various reasons, and these drives are a lot harder to find today.

You connected a tape deck or disk drive to the Atari via its proprietary Serial Input/Output (SIO) port, and this brings us to one of the most historically significant things about the range: SIO was designed as a universal connector for all manner of different peripherals, not just media storage devices. Sound familiar? That's right; it's very much a precursor to modern USB; Joe Decuir, who created this architecture, holds patents on USB.

SIO had a few differences to modern USB, most notably the fact that devices could be daisy-chained together. This means that even though the system only had one SIO port, you could connect multiple devices simply by linking them together. Obviously this was dependent on the device in question having a suitable port — and not every device did — but in theory you could keep on linking as required, making it easy to have, for example, setups that used multiple disk drives, and even cassette and disk simultaneously if you so desired.

Using a disk drive with the Atari 8-bits required one extra step: the use of a Disk Operating System, or DOS. Atari made its own DOS that underwent several revisions over the lifespan of the Atari 8-bit models, and although closed source and distributed under a proprietary license agreement, it could be redistributed. Good job, too, because in order to actually boot something from disk, DOS needed to be loaded first. If you wanted to be able to save BASIC programs to disk, you also needed to boot DOS from disk before starting to write your program.

The most commonly seen versions of Atari's DOS from back in the day used a menu-driven interface that allowed various disk functions such as copying and deleting files as well as locking/protecting them, loading executable files that were not set up to automatically boot when turning the computer on, formatting disks and creating new DOS disks.

Programming on the Atari used, like most of its contemporaries, a dialect of BASIC. Unlike many other BASICs at the time, it is not a version of the popular Microsoft BASIC (although this was available) and thus had a number of its own unique Atari-specific commands. Carrying out many functions, particularly relating to graphics, that would require POKEs on other platforms could be done with dedicated commands on the Atari, but conversely Atari BASIC lacked the ability to create arrays in string variables. It was, on the whole, a well-liked language, and the two main Atari magazines of the era, Page 6 and Atari User (which later merged to become New Atari User), typically printed type-in listings for all manner of programs in every issue. Not just games, either; both magazines were keen to position the Atari computers as capable, multi-function devices that were far more than just sources of entertainment.

Other programming languages were, of course, available. Those keen to get their hands dirty could write programs using 6502 assembler, while as the years went by, speedy languages such as Action! and Turbo BASIC XL came along and offered compelling alternatives to the built-in or cartridge-based BASIC that was, for many, the foundation of programming on the Atari range. These languages could be compiled into executable binaries, too, meaning that an end user would not need a copy of the language to run a program written in it.

The Atari's audio-visual capabilities were very solid. The dual ANTIC and GTIA graphics chips offered hardware scrolling, built-in "player-missile" sprites, and a wealth of different graphics modes allowing various balances between memory usage, resolution and colour depth. The POKEY chip offered four-channel audio with a good amount of customisation — although not quite as flexible as the SID chip found in the Commodore 64. It also handled a lot of the Atari 8-bit's input/output, meaning the system has the charming feature of making blippity bloop sounds when loading and saving from/to disk or tape rather than the horrific screeching heard on other platforms.

And then we come to the games. While some of the high-profile software houses — notably outfits like Ocean, Imagine, Ultimate and suchlike — refused to support the Atari 8-bit, others, like Electronic Arts and Activision, did, at least in the early days, and the budget companies like Mastertronic, Atlantis, Zeppelin and Alternative had a good presence on the platform, too. The end result of this from a 2026 perspective is that the Atari 8-bit library is largely unique, with many titles not being found on any other platforms — and in the case of multiplatform affairs, the Atari release often being a particularly good version. (There are exceptions, of course; the Atari 8-bit versions of Action Biker and The Last V8 are woeful compared to the C64 releases.)

There's also the fact that a lot of games which went on to worldwide success on a variety of platforms often originated on Atari 8-bit. All-time classics like Boulder Dash, M.U.L.E., Miner 2049'er and Spelunker debuted on Atari before spreading to other platforms, and esteemed creators like Archer Maclean were really able to make the system sing with games like Dropzone.

The only thing the library is lacking compared to its more successful 8-bit counterparts is a library of solid arcade conversions from the years following the initial early '80s "golden age"; those early '80s titles are well-covered, however, with excellent versions of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Qix and plenty more — and a wealth of "unofficial" clones, too.

So why doesn't this system get anywhere near the love and attention that the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum do? I honestly don't really know, because although the platform undoubtedly sold considerably less than both of its main rivals, I don't think one can in any respect call it a "failure". Its longest-lasting magazine published its final issue in 1998, for heaven's sake — and said magazine was including material for the Atari 8-bit right up until that very final issue. Not only that, the modern "homebrew" scene is incredibly active and vibrant to this day, with some truly amazing new games being released for the platform on a regular basis, along with some excellent ports of C64 and Spectrum games that never made it to Atari back in the day.

I would love to see the Atari 8-bit get more acknowledgement. There are some YouTubers who do give it its dues — Kim Justice is a good example — but I do wish the field of "gaming history" would, more broadly, pay attention to the Atari 8-bit: a platform that still has a lot to offer, which is a hell of a lot of fun to have been involved with since its original inception, and which is dead easy to explore today with solutions like Altirra for software emulation, and the excellent Atari800 core for MiSTer if you're an FPGA person.

Still, that's a big reason my YouTube channel exists. So I will continue to champion the system how I can — and at least then I know that I have done my part in remembering this wonderful platform and the many amazing journeys it has taken me on over the years.

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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The post #oneaday Day 723: The Atari 8-bit doesn't get its dues appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I talked a bit about social media with my therapist yesterday. I discussed how conflicted I feel about existing online right now, what with the emphasis on short-form video and vapid content rather than longer-form, more meaningful material. I'm not saying that the stuff I post here isn't vapid nonsense, of course, but I have always said that I would far rather read someone's vapid nonsense than be delivered it as shouty-face-at-camera content, so this blog continues with that in mind. And if no-one is interested in my vapid nonsense, then at least I still have somewhere to bang out some words and express myself, which is what this has always been about.

Anyway, the kind-of-sort-of conclusion I came to was that at least a minimal presence on social media is somewhat desirable for me, because otherwise I just end up feeling completely isolated. While I enjoyed the total break from all social media, including Bluesky, that I took last year while I was on holiday, I found that I didn't want to maintain it afterwards, as it just left me feeling even more lonely than I already was. And I'm already feeling pretty damn lonely.

Still, the other thing that came to light in yesterday's session is that although I have always kind of feared social interactions and find myself overthinking conversations before I have them — sometimes to the extent that I never actually start the conversation in reality for the fear of coming across as boring or annoying — I am, in many respects, feeling kind of ready to challenge myself in at least attempting to make some new friends, to have some people that I can connect with and, basically, to stop feeling so danged lonely.

The challenge that I have found along the way is not so much initiating those interactions when the opportunity arises — although that is still a somewhat scary prospect for me — but rather finding those opportunities in the first place. I cited an example of when I first went to university and attended a pre-term music course, and I took the uncharacteristically bold step (for me) of introducing myself to someone I was in a lift with while we were transporting ourselves to our respective floors in the tower block where we were staying. That resulted in a longstanding friendship (albeit one that I will hold my hands up and say that I have been very poor at maintaining) and was proof that, as little as I think of myself at times, I can come across as someone that people actually do want to know and are not, in fact, actively repulsed by.

Those opportunities of being "trapped" in a lift with a stranger and the choice being either awkward silence or attempting to clunkily start a conversation just don't really seem to arise these days, though, because I'm never in that sort of situation. I work from home, I don't go out a great deal, I'm not a member of any "groups" or anything (and don't really know how one would go about finding a "group") and I do not have a publicly accessible elevator in my house.

What I am going to at least attempt to do a bit more, though, is to attend some in-person events where I know some people with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance will be attending. My trip to The Cave a few weeks back was a good example, and last year I went to the RetroFest show in Swindon — that is actually happening again this year, but I left it a bit late to organise a trip there. I mean, I could probably snag a ticket and go along tomorrow (today's tickets are sold out), but can I be bothered to do that?

Hmm, can I be bothered to do that…? I might have a think about that throughout the course of today. Swindon is a fairly long way to go, but it might actually be nice to go along and see some interesting things and clever people.

Hmmmmm.

Anyway, today we are going food shopping, so that's fun. Thank you for participating in this experiment of whether or not this thing actually posts correctly to Bluesky via the ATmosphere plugin. If it does, I'll likely hook up MoeGamer proper in the same way. Tatty-bye for now then.

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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The post #oneaday Day 722: Entering the ATmosphere appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As such, I ordered myself a YETI Rambler Straw Mug, Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Mug with Stronghold Lid, Rescue Red, 42 oz (1.2 l). You will notice that mine is considerably larger than hers. I thought I might as well get a big 'un because the fewer times you have to fill it up, the more likely you are to drink all of it and, by extension, have what is supposedly "enough fluids" for the day — something which a bit of casual research last night (not using AI) suggested there is actually no real scientific or medical consensus on.

£45 felt like a lot to spend on a mug, but then I figured everything is fucking expensive right now, so I might as well buy a nice thing that I'll get some use out of. I went to the shop the other evening to get some drinks and snacks and it somehow came out to more than £70. By those standards, video games seem like quite a bargain right now.

I like the mug! It's big and hefty and satisfying to use, the reusable straw seems to work just fine, and it is indeed nice and convenient to be able to carry around over a litre of drink in a receptacle that keeps it nice and cool. Or indeed to just have it on my desk, to be consumed bit by bit over the course of several hours.

The whole meme about "staying hydrated" honestly annoys me quite a bit, because it seems to be just one of those things that people say without really thinking about it. And yes, it is a meme. Because the population of the Internet is completely incapable of doing anything with any sort of sincerity and seriousness, the whole thing started as a big joke. Sure, over the long term, it may well have got people drinking more fluids throughout the day — and thus can we really call it a bad thing? — but to me, the people who always bang on about "staying hydrated" always come across as performative, like they want to appear superior to everyone else because they drink a bit more water than you do.

I realise it's a bit of a silly thing to get annoyed about — why get annoyed at good advice? — but like I say, it's the whole insincerity of it that grates somewhat. Because some people do just say it, not out of a desire to see their friends be healthy, but just because it's a funny haha meme that they've seen their favourite streamers say. Hell, there's even a bot on Twitch designed to "remind" people to drink water.

I also think it comes across as somewhat infantilising, and that's a real problem that the younger generations in particular appear to be suffering with right now. Just yesterday, some of us were chatting on Discord about an encounter one of us had had where a 21-year old was proving very difficult to deal with because they seemingly wanted to be treated like an incompetent child. (It was to get out of financial obligations.) Any time some streamer tells their audience to "stay hydrated", I get that same energy.

But anyway. There are worse things that people could be saying — and, of course, do elsewhere on the Internet. So I probably shouldn't let myself get too wound up by this sort of thing. After all, since I, too, now have a big-ass sippy cup, I am officially equipped to be smug about Being Hydrated.

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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The post #oneaday Day 721: Sippy cup appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I could be wrong, of course. It could just be Windows 11 being shit (although in that regard, my work PC also runs Windows 11 and seems fine performance-wise, despite being a meagre mini-PC) and it could also just be my PC being shit (the living room PC, much as I love it, has had a litany of problems over the years that has necessitated multiple reformats and reinstalls) — but for now, I'm taking Chrome out of the equation down here.

I've been putting off doing this, because changing Web browsers feels like a massive pain in the arse. You have your previous one all set up the way you like it with extensions, saved passwords and everything already logged in, and then you switch over and have to set everything up again, log into everything again and it's… man, it just feels like work, y'know, and all I want to do is look something up online.

That said, despite the mental block I've historically felt towards doing this, the process of switching over to Firefox has been mostly painless so far. The export-import procedure seems to have gone fairly smoothly (though it did import duplicates of all my bookmarks which it has apparently previously imported from Chrome) and thus far Firefox has neither crashed nor frozen my entire system for minutes at a time, which is more than I can say for the current state of Chrome.

I even managed to export my passwords from Google Password Manager to Firefox's autofill feature, so logging in to most websites hopefully won't be a huge pain in the arse, aside from those that insist on two-factor authentication and I have, inevitably, left my phone in a location that I am not in.

Firefox isn't perfect, I know, but I do have a modicum of respect for it for allowing you to set a blanket "fuck off with all this AI shit" switch. It unfortunately doesn't prevent Google from serving you up stupid AI Overviews or stop the Internet in general from obsessing over this loathsome technology, but I like being able to ensure the software I am running locally on my computer — at least while it's still possible to do that — is working the way I want it to and not, say, downloading 4GB local LLMs in the background.

Talking about one's Web browser is the height of tedium, I know, but it's been very hot today, I'm very tired and stressed out, and I just wanted to write something before my chicken wings arrive. This was the first thing that came to mind, so that's what you get. Hey, I never promised that every day's posts would be interesting, all right?

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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The post #oneaday Day 720: Finally ditching Chrome appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've already written at length about how the modern concept of "streaks" is inherently unhealthy and encourages people to just game the system rather than actually properly developing good habits, but this is a whole new level of stupid. I was curious as to exactly what a "streak freeze" entailed, so I clicked through on the notification and found the following explanation:

So let me get this straight: WordPress (or Jetpack, I think, specifically) has a "streak" mechanic built in to encourage you to engage with… something every day. (Note that the explanation above counts "liking, commenting or following" as "activity", not just "posting something on your site".) But after 7 days, you can just go "ah, fuck this" for a day and still keep your "streak" intact?

Now, I've hopefully already made my feelings on "streaks" clear (and yes, I know it might seem a tad hypocritical given that I'm posting daily, counting how many days I have done that for and have even done extra posts some days to "catch up" on days I missed but… shut up) but to me the concept of a "streak freeze" just feels like… cheating? And, more to the point, it's a completely pointless form of cheating in which the only person you are actually cheating is yourself. (Yes, I am familiar with the copypasta.)

It's not just me seeing this, right? Given that your "streak" in WordPress or Jetpack or whatever is visible to no-one but you — there are no "Share" buttons on these stupid "achievements" it has apparently started giving you — there is absolutely no point whatsoever in cheating the system for any reason other than to deny to yourself, and no-one else, that you failed to do something as simple as click "Like" on a thing every day for [x] days.

As I say, I acknowledge completely that all of the above might be a bit rich coming from someone who has occasionally missed a day on his "daily" blog and then "caught up" the following day, but I do always acknowledge when I've done that, and I'm not giving myself any "awards" or anything besides counting how many days have elapsed between June 8, 2024 and today. (And yes, I did just use the opportunity to check that my post numbering is correct. It is.)

The way this is implemented as platform "achievements" just feels like they wanted to completely gamify the posting experience, then got cold feet partway through and thought but what about all the people who care about their streak and just don't have time to click Like on something every day?! — as if they were afraid that they would get complaints from people who thought it was "unfair" that they broke their streak just for not… maintaining that streak.

I dunno. I am very aware that this is all a completely pointless thing to get riled up about, but it is very hot, I am very tired and stressed, and just wanted something easy to write about today. So that's what you're getting. Now I'm off to go and swallow an entire iceberg or something. And not the kind that freezes streaks.

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The post #oneaday Day 719: Get out of here with your "streak freeze" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Naturally, all the usual arguments are taking place over whether or not people from the UK really have a right to complain about it being hot, given that certain parts of the world are far hotter than it gets here, and they get by perfectly well without air conditioning, what happened to that stiff upper lip and all that, eh what? To anyone having thoughts of that nature, I say a hearty fuck off, it is boiling here and we, as a people, are very much Not Built For That.

We are a people built for overcast days, where the weather just sort of exists in the background without doing anything. We don't mind an occasional rainstorm, because that means we can complain about it. But when it gets hot — and for a good few years now, the summers have been getting real hot — it is actively unpleasant, and quite possibly dangerous for some people. One of the people I work with said that the temperature was almost 40 degrees C in his office today. That is not any sort of condition that a human being should even be attempting to exist in!

But still. At least it's a good opportunity to get the ice out, have some cold drinks, enjoy an ice cream or ten and occasionally sit in the garden if you think you can get away with doing so without irradiating yourself beyond repair. Maybe even have a barbecue! Some people in the nearby vicinity have been having barbecues over the past couple of days and they have smelled delicious. We have not, as yet, planned to do one, because neither of us fancy standing over a hot thing on a hot day, and with only a couple of weeks left until we go away on holiday, the opportunities for socialising before we head off are limited. Maybe when we get back.

Anyway, aside from the heat, today has been relatively unremarkable. I have done some work, I have played some Final Fantasy XI, I enjoyed a chicken sandwich with some Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. The cats have been yelling at us, and all is, it seems, mostly well.

It's just too bloody hot, is what it is!

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The post #oneaday Day 718: Melting appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's been a lot of fun thus far. I'm about 80 hours deep into the game, and I haven't really felt particularly "roadblocked" at any point. There have been two separate occasions where I have had help from higher-level players — once to open the "Three Mage Gate" I mentioned a few posts back, and once to help me with the fight against Siren as part of the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel series of missions that run parallel to all the main stories — but for the most part, I have successfully beaten and bashed my way through the game as a solo player using the computer-controlled "Trust" party members.

I thought I had reached a roadblock towards the end of the Rise of the Zilart storyline where you are presented with a chain of five difficult boss battles, and I was having real difficulty with a couple of them. As I'm playing a Warrior, I have been working on the assumption that I should be the main "tank", you see, and thus trying my best to ensure all enemies fixate their attention on my while my Trusts repeatedly punch them in the buttocks. This is, after all, the way things are in Final Fantasy XIV, even though mechanically the two games are otherwise quite different.

However, what I discovered in these difficult fights (the "Ark Angels" fights, to any FFXI veterans) is that being the sole human player and the main tank is not always desirable. Y'see, some high-level enemies have the ability to Charm you, and when that happens all your Trusts get unsummoned and the fight effectively resets. It's an instant "kill", in other words, and I really thought this was going to roadblock me.

Then I thought about things a bit, and wondered what might happen if I let one of the Trusts handle the tanking instead. Wouldn't you know it, those fights suddenly went much more smoothly. I could keep dealing damage — which, besides tanking, is the other thing FFXI Warrior is good at — while Trust-y Valaineral the Paladin took the brunt of everything the boss threw at a single target, including that pesky Charm. And, because I also had Kupipi the White Mage and King Of Hearts the Red Mage in my party, they cleansed that status off him pretty quickly. I only really came close to failing in one of the fights, where everyone got Silenced and Valaineral got knocked down because no-one could heal him. Thankfully, this happened late enough in the fight that the remaining party members, including me, were able to finish the job.

By contrast, the actual final boss of Rise of the Zilart was very easy indeed. Granted, I was probably a few levels higher than "intended" for this encounter — Final Fantasy XI isn't particularly rigorous about locking stuff to particular level restrictions, particularly in the main story sequences — but it was still pretty straightforward. Fun, though; it was satisfying to finally bring down a "big bad" who had been taunting me for some time.

Now I'm on to the Chains of Promathia expansion, which a lot of longtime players seem to think is one of the best bits. It makes the curious decision to base the early hours of its story around the level 30 mark, rather than assuming you would be at the level you're probably at around the conclusion of Rise of the Zilart — 75+ — but I assume that things ramp up pretty quickly, as the official "content guide" on the Final Fantasy XI website recommends the expansion as an activity for level 75+ players.

I'm really glad I've done this! I'm going to write a big, detailed article about my experiences over on MoeGamer when I'm finally done with everything I want to do in the game, but for now, my feelings are that, in terms of gameplay, progression and a general sense of adventure, this is actually one of the very best Final Fantasy games. Yes, it is the very epitome of a "guide dang-it" game, in which you will almost certainly not get very far without looking some stuff up, but the moment-to-moment gameplay, the overall sense of progression and the fact that it feels like a Final Fantasy game, arguably a lot more so than XIV, has really left me with a big grin on my face. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the game has to offer.

I have played pretty much all day, though, so I should probably stop for now, though, right? Probably…

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The post #oneaday Day 717: Putting down the Zilart appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For anyone unfamiliar with a Feast, the original incarnation of them was a chocolate ice lolly with crunchy biscuit pieces embedded in the chocolate, and inside the chocolate shell was chocolate ice cream, which surrounded a hard chocolate core. Much like a Cadbury's Creme Egg, I'm sure people had their own ways of eating a Feast, but I always liked to flake the chocolate outer off, then eat the ice cream, then have the hard chocolate core as the grand finale.

Now, though, they have changed. Now you still have the chocolate outer with the crunchy bits embedded, but the chocolate ice cream has been replaced with vanilla, and the hard chocolate core has been replaced with a chocolate hazelnut core that appears to occupy a curious state somewhere between liquid and solid. It sticks to the lolly stick and retains its shape, but it doesn't have the satisfying "snap" that the old hard chocolate core did; it's more chewy and sticky.

Taken on its own terms, the new Feast is not an unpleasant experience to eat. Chocolate, vanilla and hazelnut is a good combination, and they work together. But I'm not sure they should have replaced the basic Feast model with it. The original Feast was a classic, and one of my favourite ice creams, and now it appears that it's just Not A Thing any more, because this "new recipe" has seemingly replaced the old one. At least they haven't had the gall to keep calling it "Feast Original", because, well, it's not original any more.

Apparently there is also a Feast Caramel now, which replaces the new hazelnut core with a caramel sauce centre, and I can see that being pretty good. But, again, I feel like it's not really a Feast as we once new it; the hard chocolate core was a central (no pun intended) part of the Feast's identity, and I'm not entirely sure why it has been taken away, rather than being positioned as a new variant called "Feast Hazelnut" or something. Did we have to lose the classic "Feast Original" for this?

There are, as you might expect, some people online who are absolutely furious about this. I wouldn't put myself in that category, as I found the new Feasts perfectly tasty — they're just not what I expected from a Feast, and it seems strange and confusing that they would make this change now, after so long of them being the same thing.

The common assumption, of course, is that this is an instance of enshittification, but I'm not sure that is the case; perhaps the vanilla ice cream is cheaper than the chocolate ice cream, and perhaps the chocolate hazelnut half-sauce-half-solid otherworldly substance in the middle is cheaper than a hard lump of chocolate, but I have no real way of knowing that. I'm just a bit sad to see something I've enjoyed since childhood feel the need to change fairly drastically for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Oh well. These things happen, I guess. This is, it seems, what a Feast is now. Although apparently Aldi do a good clone of the original Feast, known as Fiesta. Might have to track some of those down…

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The post #oneaday Day 716: They changed Feasts and I'm not sure how I feel about it appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, I won't beat around the bush, disgusting. Tying pay to article performance is already a shitty thing to do, but to withhold pay completely based on view counts is outright exploitative. And it's not as if writers on Valnet sites are getting paid fairly anyway.

As several people replying to Luddy on that Bluesky thread pointed out, this has been a longstanding problem with online media in general. It should be the writers' responsibility to produce the material, and it should be the people running the website from a business perspective's responsibility to promote that material and ensure it gets read.

Unfortunately, for a long time now, writers have been forced into a position where they have to write provocative, baiting articles in the hope that they will get clicks, because the people running the sites seemingly just… don't do anything other than lay people off. And, of course, bring generative AI into the picture, because this type of Business Idiot has no understanding whatsoever of how the actual audience has zero desire to read AI-generated content, instead believing that because generative AI is fashionable and responsible for billions of dollars of imaginary money being thrown around, they might be able to get a piece of that pie by enshittifying their website.

And the really stupid thing is that you never can predict what is going to spread across the Web and "do well" if it's left up to the writers. There is no magic formula that says "IF you write an article like this, THEN it will always succeed". There are manipulative tactics — like clickbait and ragebait — that sometimes work, but more and more people are wise to them today, and refuse to share material that falls into that category. Video game enthusiasts are some of the most online-savvy people out there for the most part, so resorting to these tactics is declining in effectiveness as time goes on.

What does seem to work — to an extent, at least — is having someone who is responsible for making sure those articles get seen: advertising the website. Effective use of a dedicated social media manager is why longstanding sites like IGN and Eurogamer are still just about hanging in there, but they are the last few remaining holdouts of a once vibrant and thriving media sector — and they have their own issues. IGN, for example, is currently butting heads with its Creators' Guild union over fair pay rises in line with inflation, and Eurogamer cut its editorial staff considerably a while back.

Once again, I have to say that I am baffled by this. Video games, as a creative sector, are bigger than they have ever been, with a broader, more diverse range of releases than ever before. So why are we, collectively, apparently completely incapable of sustaining an enthusiast press?

Moreover, retro gaming is more accessible than ever before, too, meaning that there is a worthwhile place for some retro-centric sites to spring up and do a good job of covering classic gaming material — but so far, we've seen very few outlets even attempt to step into this space, with only Time Extension online and Retro Gamer in print coming to mind outside of the unpaid (or at least non-commercial) enthusiast blog sector.

The usual answer to this is "b-but YouTubers and streamers!" and I'm sorry, I don't buy it. YouTubers and streamers have a place in the modern media landscape, sure, but they fulfil a completely different function to a traditional press — and moreover, they demand a completely different sort of attention to written material. And if you've ever accused a traditional press outlet of "paid reviews", then I have some unfortunate news to tell you about a widespread concept known as "influencer marketing".

I am sad about all this! I spent a significant portion of my life looking at my brother with intense admiration for his role in helping to shape the games press in its prime, both in print and online, and hoping that I would one day be able to follow in his footsteps! And yet, by the time I did manage to get a meaningful foothold, things were already starting to collapse. I was, somehow, too late — and I am having great difficulty understanding why, because it's not as if video games have gone anywhere. One would think with the sheer number of the bloody things being released pretty much every day at this point, a functional games press would be a desirable thing to have. And by "functional", I mean "one with full-time employees who get paid a fair salary on which they can live, enjoy the medium that they have chosen to specialise in and be able to have a good work-life balance".

And yet here we are. I despair sometimes, I really do.

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The post #oneaday Day 715: Fuck Valnet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am tired. Very tired. I'm also worried that we have not-very-long to get a hell of a lot done, but no-one else seems to be panicking about it, so I'm trying not to panic. Trying. I am mostly succeeding, but there are times when I do feel a bit "OH GOD OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL". I can usually get through those times, though.

This is something I was talking about at therapy this week. One of the things that has sort of… emerged in our conversations is the fact that I do have what my therapist describes as a "wise" side, which, at times of great difficulty, anxiety or stress, can usually break through the noise of poor mental health and set me if not completely "right", then certainly on a somewhat more productive path than staring at a wall wishing the entire world would go away for a bit.

It is a challenge, sometimes, to allow that apparently "wise" part of myself to speak, but one thing I am learning to acknowledge about myself is that this part of myself does exist, and that when I do allow it to speak, it usually has something eminently sensible to say. It's not a part of me that admonishes me for making mistakes or doing things inefficiently; it just calmly, gently says to me something along the lines of "look, here are the facts, here is what you can do about it, here is what you probably should do about it" and then, barring a complete breakdown of mental health, I can usually then get on with the thing.

Of course, in the past I have experienced times where that voice can't get through. I have experienced times where things really were bad, and I knew there was no way of really avoiding the "bad". I endured, though, and I like to think my experiences have made me stronger as a result. After all, as much of a state as I consider myself to be in at times, I am still here. I am still going. I am still fighting. I haven't given up.

And oh, there have been times when it would have been easy to give up. At least one of those occasions has been immortalised on this blog, although at the time I sort of danced around the subject in the things I was writing, because I think on some level I was conscious of the fact that although I was having thoughts of giving up on everything at times, I didn't really want to follow through on them in any sort of way that would have had permanent consequences. Hell, I'm doing it now, because part of me doesn't believe that I was ever really willing to give up.

And I guess maybe I wasn't. Because, like I say, I am still here. There are things I would like to change. Things I would like to improve. Things that I wish were different. But I know all of those are things that I can, potentially, do something about. I am not helpless. I am not useless or worthless. There is reason and value to my existence.

That got a tad deeper than I perhaps intended, but it was one of those occasions when the thoughts just sort of started flowing, so I thought I'd run with it. Anyway, I'm off to go and eat ice cream and play some video games now. Have a lovely long weekend, everyone.

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The post #oneaday Day 714: End of a long week appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, obviously, garbage news, and anyone with any sense will already be looking for a new search engine to set as default on every device they own — even though I don't think there's a single one of them that has no AI whatsoever at this point — but there are interesting possibilities that present themselves as a result of this stupidity.

Firstly, if there's no Google search, that might finally mean we'll be free of search engine optimisation, which by extension means we might also end up free of clickbait and ragebait. Of course, the latter two options are driven as much by social media than search results — probably more so, if we're honest — but honestly, I can't say I'd be sorry to see the back of SEO. Ten Blue Links are no fun if all of them are jostling for position with articles titled "what time is Eurovision on?" or whatever.

Of course, another ugly possibility then presents itself: search engine optimisation will become chatbot optimisation, and I suspect that will be even worse. SEO can already be manipulated by bad actors to present confidently incorrect information as gospel — sometimes with nefarious intent — and chatbots are already renowned for picking up people saying obvious falsehoods as a throwaway comment in a Reddit thread, and then reporting those things as the truth. Remember glue on pizza? Yeah. Incidents like that are chatbot optimisation in its earliest incarnation.

So that brings us to the second point: what if this is what gets us to admit that the "World Wide" part of the "Web" has, in fact, been something of a failure. I think we can probably all agree that the US has dominated the Web for a significant portion of its lifespan, and it's US-based companies that are trying to reshape it in a fashion that will, they reckon, make billions for US-based billionaires who already have too many billions.

Of course, all of the businesses attempting to do this are failing miserably at that. Despite billions of imaginary dollars being thrown around on a seemingly daily basis, profitability appears to be something that continues to elude the generative AI space, and it only appears to be getting worse, with many providers switching to considerably more expensive token-based billing options for users who have, up until now, been costing these companies astronomical amounts of money.

But even if the entire generative AI space were to go tits-up tomorrow — and oh, gosh, I would love it if it did — I think a lot of damage has already been done to the original plan of the World Wide Web. The Internet is no longer a cool and exciting place to hang out and explore. It's become a sleazy, shitty inner city area where you shouldn't walk around after dark, and where you certainly shouldn't get your phone out on the street. So much of it is just there to if not outright scam you, then at least extract money from you in increasingly ridiculous ways.

I see it a lot, running a blog. I'll install a plugin that sounds like it performs a function that I would find helpful, only to find that the exact function I want to use is "only available in Premium", and of course you can't just buy Premium because it's 2026, you have to sign up for a subscription. And you can't pay monthly for that subscription because it's 2026, you can only pay for a year at a time, despite them quoting a "monthly" price on their order page. The Web in general is full of shitty, dark patterns like this designed to trick people into spending money they didn't need to spend. I have no objection to paying people for good, useful pieces of software, but not when the process of doing so is a minefield of potentially getting locked into having to shell out several hundred quid a year because you didn't see the tiny "*billed annually" at the bottom of the "BEST OFFER!" thrust in your face.

Anyway, I got a bit off the point. The main point was: the current implementation of "the World Wide Web" is shit, so what if this meant that we go back to the concept of "portals"? Portals, if you're unfamiliar, are how sites like Yahoo got started: they were designed to act as the first page you saw when you logged on to the Internet, and thus provided quick, categorised, curated sets of links that helped you to 1) find stuff that you were looking for and 2) discover interesting new stuff. Search engines developed out of portals; indeed, many former portal sites became search engines; Google itself was a bit of an outlier in this regard in that it launched as nothing more than a search engine; its intention to do one thing, really well.

I often think back to our early days of "going online" back home. After the BBS days, which we occasionally indulged in on both the Atari 8-bit and ST, we had a CompuServe subscription. And CompuServe was a ton of fun! It was a complete walled garden to begin with, and took a while to catch on to this whole "broader Internet" thing, but in many ways, retrospectively, I think that its curated way of doing things was very good. People rag on AOL for the bajillion free trial coaste… sorry, CDs that made their way around the world in the late '90s and early '00s, but they had a similar idea: present information in an interesting, clear, curated way for people to enjoy and engage with as they see fit.

Of course, this approach brings with it its own considerations: who is responsible for the curation? How does one get "noticed" with a personal project like a blog? Are these portal providers obliged to be "neutral" in terms of things like politics and suchlike? If not, how does one distinguish between a portal provider that places an emphasis on curating information that is actively harmful, and one that aligns with your own values? Probably the same way you pick a news source today, I guess.

Anyway, I don't really have an answer, but if Google is insistent on going the way of the chatbot, this is probably something we're going to have to grapple with in the next few years. The way the Internet is today just… isn't really working, at least not with the original intent of the technology in mind, so we should probably start thinking about how we can do something a bit different… a bit better.

Or we could just continue to moan on social media and never actually get anything done, I guess.

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The post #oneaday Day 713: Portal charm appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Sometimes I don't know how to feel about something because my moral superiors have not yet made a super long video. They don't always make a video about the thing I need, though. Like, I don't know if someone is still bad or if they've been exonerated. Since we don't trust any structure that would provide exoneration, and objectivity is illusory, since the law is merely another arena to sift power dynamics anyway, my guess is that their good opinion, once lost, is lost forever. Speaking of power dynamics, It must be neat to have the reins of a parallel legal system whose norms kaleidoscopically shift at a rate of one million shibboleths per second. The main issue is that it's not clear which games I'm allowed to buy. All I can do – all anyone can do – is spin very quickly in place while refreshing YouTube for the next sermon. I'm currently ablur.

Tycho is specifically referring to the hoohah over Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the recent new game from ZA/UM, the company behind the exceedingly brilliant Disco Elysium, and a company mired in controversy for the way it subsequently treated the actual people who made Disco Elysium. I don't really know much more about it than that, and to be perfectly honest, I don't really give enough of a shit to look into it further. I'm sorry, I just don't.

You see, as you might expect in such a situation, moral grandstanding over the way ZA/UM has behaved in the past has been overshadowing any meaningful discussion of Zero Parades itself, with the reviewers who took it on its own terms and gave it a positive assessment — apparently it's very good! — getting lambasted by people who think they are The Most Correct Person in the Room.

The phenomenon Tycho is talking about is the disconnect one eventually starts to feel when constantly confronted by this: the situation where you want to talk about how much you like something that you have taken on its own terms, divorced from "context" — regardless of whether this was a deliberate move, or just because your particular life and social circumstances meant you had never come into contact with any "controversy" — but find yourself having to bite your tongue, because you know it's not "acceptable" to like the thing for one reason or another.

I'm not even talking about particularly controversial material here — like, even the most perverted hentai connoisseur knows when not to bring up his collection of Rias Gremory boob bouncing gifs — but rather, situations like we have here, where an entity that is tangentially connected to the thing in question is deemed to have done something so unconscionably unacceptable that it taints anything and everything associated with itself, regardless of whether the thing itself is any good or not, and regardless of whether the people who actually made the thing had anything to do with the controversy.

A lot of this stuff spreads via social media and, as Tycho says, via video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. A lot of people look to "influencers" (ugh) as opinion leaders, and wait to learn whether it's "acceptable" in the eyes of someone they believe in before even considering engaging with it. Essentially it's a form of cognitive surrender; they willingly give up their own ability to make their mind up about something in favour of blindly following everything their opinion leader of choice says and does. And this sort of person tends to hold a grudge for a very long time indeed; as Tycho says, it's exceedingly rare for anyone branded with a scarlet letter to be exonerated, while the reverse is also true: someone who has been a beloved figure for years can be quickly turned on, torn to shreds and then left to rot, never to be forgiven and never to regain their former regard, regardless of whether or not they clearly make an effort to make amends for past wrongs.

Honestly, at this point it's exceedingly tiresome. There are certain people on Bluesky I've had to mute just because their constant response to people Just Enjoying The Thing is to bring up the controversy du jour and, in many cases, cast exceedingly unflattering and negative aspersions on the people who continue to Just Enjoy The Thing. In just the last week it's happened not only with Zero Parades, but also with Forza Horizon 6, and I'm sure there will be plenty more. There have certainly been plenty of prior examples, including numerous instances of the "we will never forgive them" situation.

Look, I get it. In this revolting, shitty world we live in, it's nice to think that you have some principles and that you're willing to stand up for them. Everyone should have at least a few issues that they're willing to stand up and be counted on. But there comes a point where you're just being a tedious scold at people who are simply trying to derive some joy out of existence, and who really do not have the time or energy to give a shit about every single little issue in the world, particularly when the issues that you supposedly care about are in the extreme periphery of the thing they are trying to enjoy — and seemingly not even directly connected at all, to the average person who is not huffing Internet fumes 25 hours a day.

I'm sorry, but it is just like that. If you do try and give a shit about every single little issue in the world, you will quickly end up driving yourself insane, driving everyone who might have once been your friend away, and never, ever experiencing a day of happiness in your life ever again.

On top of that, if your idea of Being A Good Person is scolding random strangers on Bluesky rather than actually getting out into the world and making some sort of meaningful difference to the lives of people who need it, then you might not actually be A Good Person. You just want people to believe that you are.

Life is too short for that. So if you want to play Zero Parades, I don't care. If you want to play Forza Horizon 6, I don't care. If you want to boycott everything ZA/UM and Microsoft ever put out, I don't really care, either. But if you start actively getting in the way of people who simply want an escape from the shittiness of life in 2026 — or to build a warm, kind community of people who want a collective escape from the shittiness of life in 2026 — then I'm sorry, but I don't really want to know you.

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The post #oneaday Day 712: Cognitive surrender appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The funny thing is, I'm sure we've washed one of those jars in the dishwasher before (Andie likes to keep jars to put things in) and not had this problem. But oh Lordy, this time did we ever have a problem. And I was left to deal with it, as Andie was away on a course or something today.

I thought just running the dishwasher again might help. It did not. So I went out to Sainsbury's with the intention of buying some dishwasher cleaner, not entirely convinced that I had ever seen dishwasher cleaner for sale there, but their website assured me that it was a common thing that was usually in stock, so I took their word for it, hoping that the fact I couldn't actually check stock in a specific store wouldn't mean a wasted journey.

Thankfully, they do indeed sell dishwasher cleaner, so I picked some up, along with one of those hanging stinky things that are a bit like the things you put in your toilet, but for the dishwasher. I ran the dishwasher with the cleaner in it. Better, but still not quite right. I contemplated using the second dishwasher cleaner that had come in the double-pack I had bought, but instead thought I'd try an alternative solution. The Internet recommended putting a glass with vinegar in there, as well as spreading vinegar around inside rather liberally. So I did so, using apple cider vinegar, as that appeared to be the most commonly recommended remedy.

Now the stench has mostly gone. It now smells of dishwasher cleaner, and the hanging stinky thing, and perhaps just slightly of old garlic. It's not an entirely pleasant smell, but it's better than the stench that hit you in the face as soon as you walked in the front door that we had before.

Still, at least I feel like the dishwasher will actually wash things, now, rather than infuse them with that particularly rancid odour. So that's something, I guess.

So lesson learned: 1) do not wash stinky garlic jars in the dishwasher, because you will regret it, and 2) if you failed to take 1) to heart, some combination of dishwasher cleaner, hanging stinky thing and apple cider vinegar might get rid of the worst of the pong. And if it doesn't, I don't know… try pissing in it or something?

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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The post #oneaday Day 711: What to do if you inadvertently garlic your dishwasher appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Since I enjoyed making this video — and one of my work colleagues is always referencing my delayed response to the Haunted House-branded sauce — I thought I'd order a selection of the Street Fighter II-themed sauces that the company had put out. This was back in February.

I remembered that the Atari sauces took a while to get to me, but were worth the wait, but this is getting a little ridiculous at this point. Then I happened to see this story shared — the company has apparently been hit with a "winding-up" petition from a client who paid them a substantial amount of money and never got what they ordered… and they weren't the only ones, either. So it looks as if the company may be in trouble, and I probably am not going to get my Street Fighter II hot sauce. This is both a shame, and £45 down the drain that I probably won't get back — but I have sent an enquiry, at least, to see if they'll provide a refund. I'm not holding my breath.

All this is a real shame, because the Atari sauces were really delicious. They covered a wide range of different sauce types, but there wasn't a single one among them that I thought was unpleasant. Some, like the Yars' Revenge hot sauce, I wish I had ordered more bottles of while I had the chance, because that one was really nice, blending the sharp kick of a hot sauce with a pleasantly fruity afterglow. Sauce Shed aren't going under because they were bad at making sauce. It does, however, appear that they may have been bad at business.

I'm not angry at them. Shit happens, particularly in the volatile world in which we live today, and I can't imagine it's easy running a niche business like a hot sauce manufacturer that specialises in custom branding deals. I just wish that they had bothered to communicate, like, at all. Maybe take down the websites that allow you to purchase things if they knew they weren't going to be able to fulfil orders — or at the very least, mark the products as "unavailable" so people don't pay up for them and then end up disappointed.

Because that's what I am, more than anything. Like I say, I'm not mad. £45 is not chump change, but it's whatever — particularly these days, when a trip to Tesco to get a few snacks can easily end up costing more than a brand new video game. I'm mostly just disappointed that I don't get to try a new selection of delicious hot sauces that are tenuously linked to some sort of video game.

But oh well. Another day will come, and there will be more hot sauce. Not just yet, though, it appears.

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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The post #oneaday Day 710: Less than hot stuff appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am looking forward to it, but I'm also mildly stressed, because just before we go away, we have two big, challenging projects at work to finish off. And they kind of need to be finished by that time. I am semi-confident that we will make it, but it is cutting things a bit fine, and I probably won't feel better about things until they are over the line, out the door and various other metaphors that mean "finished and not my problem any more".

The challenging thing is that in my new role, which partially involves QA, I am not in a position to be able to "fix" things myself — I have to just report the issues as clearly as I can, and then hope that they end up fixed. Usually they do, but sometimes it takes a few attempts at explaining something before they are finally resolved.

The projects are in a reasonable place at the moment, but not ready to go out of the door by any means. And so I suspect we're in for a busy couple of weeks; the end result will definitely be worth all the stress and hassle, but dear Lord, I will be well and truly ready for our holiday when time's up.

I'm trying not to stress about them too much. I'm not the only one working on these things, and the other people working on them are smart, talented people who know what they are doing. I am just part of a process, so I just need to ensure that my part of the process is completely successful, and with communication that is as clear as possible. Everything outside of that is outside of my control and responsibility, so that is just what I need to continue focusing on.

But yeah. I am really looking forward to our holiday. Center Parcs is such a nice environment to escape to for a little while; it really does feel like getting away from the rest of the world into your own, pleasant little bubble. I am going to enjoy just hanging out in the forest, perhaps going for a few walks around the place, spending some time in the pool and, of course, having a blissful few hours in the spa. We don't have any particular activities planned as yet — we'll probably do a few things here and there, but for the most part, it is just nice to get away from everything. The world in 2026 is a noisy, chaotic and rather unpleasant place to be, so being able to go somewhere that just feels like you're far away from all that stuff is something that I'm very much looking forward to.

From tomorrow, there's three full weeks of work to survive before I can enjoy this. It's going to be three challenging weeks, I'm sure, but as I say, the end result will be well worth it — and the opportunity to go and have some well-earned relaxation afterwards will also be well worth it.

After all, if you're going to have a holiday, you might as well have one when it will be particularly beneficial to your mental health, right?

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 709: Countdown to holiday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

You get a quest, it will inevitably involve finding some object that is a relatively low-chance drop from a very specific monster that is deep in part of a dungeon that is exceedingly inconvenient to get to.

You reach the level cap, you have to complete one of these quests every five levels until you reach 99 — though thankfully you only have to do this once per character, not once per job.

You get your "subjob", to add abilities from a second job to your main one, you have to level that as well as your main job — though only half as much, since it caps at half the level of your main job.

There are times when all this feels a bit wearisome, particularly when compared to Final Fantasy XIV, which at times feels like it's keen to take as much "friction" out of the entire process as possible. But if you think about Final Fantasy XI in different terms — not as a "theme park"-style MMO, but simply as a more traditional RPG — it makes a lot more sense, particularly now you don't have to be dependent on other people for a lot of the "main scenario" side of things.

Dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV are spectacular affairs, but they are theme park rides — completely linear, the same every time. Dungeons in Final Fantasy XI are much more elaborate: maze-like structures filled with dead ends, hidden secrets and varied encounters with monsters. The complete lack of signposting for quest-critical items — usually this involves finding something marked "???" when you target it — means that you have to actually explore these places thoroughly… or look at a guide, of course. But the longer I play, the more interesting the prospect of just exploring becomes. And the more I feel like the game has been designed around this.

If you look at a lot of Final Fantasy XI guides online, you will inevitably see a focus on levelling as fast as possible, then steamrollering your way through all the content. But the way I've been playing, it feels a lot more natural and a lot more like it's the way it was intended to be played. I've had a couple of instances where I've had to sneak around monsters much tougher than me to find a useful item, but for the most part I've found that if I treat the game like a regular, offline RPG — that is to say, fighting my way through monsters as I proceed through a field area or dungeon rather than avoiding as many as possible — it means that progress comes naturally and without you feeling like you're having to make an inordinate amount of effort to achieve that progress. As a result, the game is fun rather than a chore.

There are still points where it feels like you are "roadblocked" in certain ways — right now I'm dealing with a particularly complicated main scenario mission that involves finding specific items in three specific dungeons, along with a level cap quest that is demanding much the same sort of thing — but only in terms of the ongoing narrative. In terms of actually playing the game and engaging with its mechanics, I feel like I'm constantly doing interesting stuff and seeing new places rather than just going through the motions.