#oneaday Day 521: Everyone got really old

It's almost certainly a turning point in your life when people in the public eye that you've always thought of as being a similar age to you, perhaps a few years your senior, start to look old. Or perhaps it should be more accurate to say, start being cast in the role of older characters.

It's happened to me twice in the last week, and both instances occurred while I was spending my lunchtime watching Beyond Paradise. For the unfamiliar, this is the Kris Marshall-fronted follow-up to Death in Paradise, where his Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman character returns to the UK with his fiancée and begins a new life in the fictional Devon town of Shipton Abbott (in reality a Cornish fishing village named Looe). It's a fun show, but the specifics are beside the point for today.

Much like Death in Paradise, Beyond Paradise is a show where you will often see relatively famous faces putting in a guest appearance for an episode. I'm not talking about tedious celebrities who are famous for the sake of being famous (or, God forbid, "influencers") — I'm talking well-known, well-established actors who you will have almost certainly seen in something from the last 20-30 years.

In two episodes I've watched this week, I was mildly dismayed to see how much Mark Heap (who I will always think of as Brian from Spaced) and Caroline Quentin (whom I suspect most people will always think of as either Dorothy from Men Behaving Badly or Maddie from Jonathan Creek) have apparently aged. I still think of both of them in terms of their most famous roles, which are kind of timeless in their own sort of way. And so, despite seeing them in the credits of the show, I had to double-check that the characters I thought they were playing were, in fact, the actors I thought they were.

It was Mark Heap's episode first. He was playing an affluent middle-aged widower who lived in an old house with a lot of history, and he was haunted by visions of his departed wife — helped along by a criminal element, of course. When I first saw him, I thought "I vaguely recognise that person, who is it…? Is it Mark Heap? No, it can't be, he looks too old…" — and then the credits rolled, and I realised that it was, in fact, Mark Heap. It became a bit more obvious once the episode proper started and he got a few more lines, as he still has his very characteristic delivery and mannerisms.

Caroline Quentin was almost unrecognisable when I saw her playing a middle-aged farmer matriarch. She had completely obscured what I think of as her particular characteristic mannerisms, so it took me a lot longer to clock it was her than I did for Mark Heap. But again, she seems to be doing a great job.

I know it sounds harsh to say that people "look old", but it's not really about the individuals themselves. Both Mark Heap and Caroline Quentin are excellent actors, and it's good that they are clearly still getting work and settling into roles that suit them well as their career continues. I can imagine the acting business becomes considerably more challenging once you hit a certain age, so I have all the respect in the world for people I was watching when I was in my teens still getting acting jobs to this day.

No, what it's really about is the growing sense of consciousness that time is passing, that you can't go back, and that things continue to change around you as you continue on life's journey. Some of those changes are for the best — even if they might not seem like it at the time — while others can be painful and lead to regrets. And seeing things like actors you recognise looking visibly much older than they were the last time you really noticed them? It brings all that into focus, and inevitably makes you wonder if you've done the right things, if there are still things you "need" to do, and quite how much time you might have left in which to do all of them.

It's a little maudlin, I know, but I suspect it's something that everyone, once they reach a certain age, has to start coming to terms with. Nothing stays the same for ever; nothing lasts forever. You just have to enjoy everything you love — people, places and things — while they are here with you in the moment, and to continue enjoying the memories you have of those things for as long as you are able.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 520: Roguing it up

After spending yesterday primarily playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I thought I'd make some time to do some recordings today, so I kicked off recording for my Space Rogue series on Atari ST.

I'm glad I did this. It was a lot of fun to record, as there's lots of nicely written text throughout, which makes for good things to say out loud, and I also maintain that this format, although long and cumbersome at times, is a great way of showing exactly why some games are worth sticking with in the long term.

One fun and/or slightly inconvenient thing that we've lost today is the fact that when you started playing a game like Space Rogue seriously back in the day, you had to make a commitment to it. And it was a physical commitment in the form of a save game disk — or, in the case of games like Space Rogue, which would save your position to the game disk itself, making a backup copy of said game disk to be the copy that you play from "just in case" something happens to the masters when saving.

These days, meanwhile, it's all too easy to pick up a game, play it for half an hour, then set it aside and never think about it ever again. This is all the more easy to do with services like Game Pass, which is one of several big reasons I find Game Pass in particular an absolutely odious development in the games industry. Once you'd made a save game disk, though, you were in. You'd set aside valuable magnetic media for the specific purpose of saving your progress through a video game. And you were damn well going to use it.

Of course, the version of Space Rogue I have installed on the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is installed to a virtual hard drive, so there's no worrying about disk swapping, and the load times are much faster, which is nice. This would have been an absolute luxury option back in the day — I've been reading some old Atari User magazines recently, and it's always funny to read about a 20 megabyte hard drive being "more storage space than you will ever need" and costing as much as the computer itself.

Anyway, I've been giving the Space Rogue videos a bit of "deluxe" treatment in terms of editing. Because the game is so quiet, I've added some background audio in the form of the CD soundtrack from the FM Towns version, and some gratuitous Star Trek ambience that fits in nicely with the setting. I think the end result videos are going to be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to publishing the first of these sometime this week.

Now, of course, my head is spinning with all the possibilities of old games from back in the day that I might want to give the long playthrough treatment. I'm definitely going to do at least some of the Ultima games, I'd like to do Times of Lore (though which version, I haven't decided, as the ST, Amiga and C64 versions are all significantly different from one another) and there are, of course, still plenty of adventure games I haven't covered.

But recording Space Rogue was a lot of fun today, and I'm looking forward to doing more. Maybe I might even finish it this time around. Or indeed actually get anywhere in it at all. We shall see, but the first two episodes bode well for what comes next!

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#oneaday Day 519: Hero of Hyrule

In my head, I've had a bit of a weird relationship with the Legend of Zelda series over the years. There have been large tracts of time when I haven't played any games in the series, and there are still a number of entries (primarily handheld) that I haven't tried at all. I've known Zelda obsessives over the years, and I've never counted myself among them; likewise, I don't think I've ever bought a Zelda game on launch… with the exception of the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, which I'm sure someone will argue isn't a Zelda game, but it actually is — just a different kind of Zelda game.

Anyway, I think I've come to the conclusion, many years too late, that yes, I, in fact, do like the Legend of Zelda series, and I always have done.

I think I know where my hesitancy over this came from, and it dates back to the late 1990s. I had just discovered console-style RPGs with Final Fantasy VII, and then Ocarina of Time came out, offering a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy VII, and… I felt like I didn't like it as much. At least, not in terms of story. Final Fantasy VII's narrative was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in gaming at that point, while Ocarina of Time was basically reading from the same script as A Link to the Past, which I had played (and enjoyed a lot) several years earlier.

Link didn't speak, either, which made the narrative immediately less interesting to me.

Of course, I know this is a silly comparison now, because Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time are so different from one another as to basically be completely different genres — and that's not getting into the interminably tedious arguments over whether Zelda is "an RPG" or not.

No; I can see very clearly now that the intent behind the two series, and those entries in them in particular, is very different. Final Fantasy VII was all about delivering a spectacular, emotionally engaging narrative; Ocarina of Time was about being a well-designed video game. And, although Zelda plots have become more and more elaborate over the years — not to mention the series' timeline becoming ever more convoluted — this distinction has, for the most part, remained.

This isn't to say that Final Fantasy has bad gameplay or that Zelda has a poor story, mind. It's simply that their focal points are different, and, as with anything, if you go in with the wrong things in mind, you're almost certainly not going to resonate with it as much as you would if you had more realistic expectations.

Anyway, I think back over the years and the many Zelda games I have played, and I don't think I've ever had a bad time with a Zelda game.

My first ever encounter with the series was with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on a family friend's NES. When I first played this, I didn't understand it at all, as I was very young and had never really encountered a game like it before. With how different Zelda II was from the rest of the series, I at least know I wasn't alone in feeling like that — although today I respect Zelda II immensely for having the balls to do something so drastically different from its predecessor.

I have a few oddly vivid memories of that first time I played Zelda II. The towns of Ruto and Rauru, both of which would lend their names to characters in the series many years later. The slightly wobbly melodic line on the music. The distinctive overworld map theme — which starts very similarly to the well-known Zelda theme before branching off in its own direction. The caves that are too dark to see until you get a candle. Link making a noise that sounds like he's going "whoops" every time he takes damage — a sound effect shared with Simon Belmont from Castlevania. The BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL noise and strobes when you lose a life. And the fact I always thought Link looks like a chef when he's doing his "damage" pose. I saw it once, I can't unsee it now.

A few years later, I got a Super NES, and one of the games I asked for one Christmas or birthday was A Link to the Past. I knew absolutely nothing about this game, save for the fact that magazines talked about it in tones of reverence, and I remembered quite liking my time with Zelda II.

I got it. And I was absolutely blown away by it — particularly the music. To this day, I'm still impressed that the game has full-on orchestral cymbal clashes in its music. Absolutely one of the best uses of the SNES' sound chip there ever was.

Anyway, I dutifully bought Ocarina of Time like every self-respecting N64 owner was supposed to back in the day, and I quite enjoyed it, with the caveats mentioned above. What I liked a whole lot more, though, was Majora's Mask, the direct sequel, which never seemed to resonate with the public in quite the same way despite getting good reviews — but which gets its dues much more frequently these days.

Majora's Mask basically corrected what I felt was lacking a bit from Ocarina of Time: the emotional engagement angle. Because it offered a story that wasn't just a retelling of the usual Link vs Ganon legend, it was immediately much more interesting — and its time-based mechanic allowed the narrative to go to some seriously interesting places. To this day, I'm yet to see anything quite like the conclusion of the "Anju and Kafei" questline, which resolves with literally seconds before the world ending.

I didn't get along with The Wind Waker when I first played it on Gamecube, but when I played the rebalanced Wii U version some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Likewise, I skipped Twilight Princess on its original release and played the Wii U version, enjoying it greatly.

I was late to the party with Breath of the Wild and it took me a long time between starting it and actually finishing it, but when I had done so, I was very glad I had taken that journey. I am having a similar experience with Tears of the Kingdom in that I have come to it very late, but playing it alongside the new Hyrule Warriors, which acts as a prequel and/or parallel storyline, is going to be very interesting indeed, I think.

I know some folks don't love the direction the series has taken with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and to an extent I get that — but then there has also been the excellent Link's Awakening remake and the equally good Echoes of Wisdom for those hungry for a more "traditional" Zelda experience.

All in all, it's a thoroughly interesting series, and one that very much deserves its long and proud history. And, at this point, I may as well admit that I think I'm a Zelda fan. Particularly as I've played 15 hours of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment since yesterday evening.

Now time for a bit of Tears of the Kingdom, I think…

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#oneaday Day 518: '80s Activision had the juice

I frigging love '80s Activision games, particularly on the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit. I grew up with the ones on Atari 8-bit, of course, and since I never had a 2600 back in the day, those are a (relatively) more recent discovery. But I adore every one of them, and I'm beyond thrilled that I've been part of bringing them back to a new audience on Evercade.

The first of our Activision cartridges isn't out yet, but I, of course, have a copy. Perks of the job and all that. It's already becoming one of my most-played Evercade cartridges, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We're actually doing three collections in total (this isn't Super Secret information, it was in our press release) and I've been largely responsible for the curation of said collections. All three of them are very strong indeed (you'll have to wait and see the lineup for the others, which are coming next year!) but this first collection comes out of the gate swinging with some of my absolute favourites.

My personal highlights are MegaMania, Enduro, Crackpots and River Raid, with honourable mentions to Beamrider and Demon Attack, games I've gotten to know a bit more recently.

MegaMania is one of the absolute best fixed shooters of the early '80s. Pitting you against waves of strange household objects, this "space nightmare" keeps things constantly interesting, as each wave has its own distinctive movement pattern — and then once you've cleared a complete loop of all of them, they go and change up their patterns a bit, just to keep you on your toes. It's a beautiful example of how utterly elegant some early games can be: it's simple to understand, has a brilliantly paced difficulty curve, a well-crafted scoring system and is endlessly replayable.

River Raid is, of course, a pioneering vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, whose noteworthy features include the ability to adjust your speed as you fly and the necessity to refuel your aircraft while negotiating obstacles and blasting enemies. The fact that this game was crammed into 4 kilobytes of ROM will never not be amazing to me. Carol Shaw was an actual wizard — not just for the game's technical accomplishments, but for the fact that, like MegaMania, it's an incredibly well-paced, considerately designed game that is likewise replayable until the end of time.

Enduro is the spiritual precursor to the home computer game The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a game which I played as a child many years before I ever encountered Enduro for the first time. Enduro is, partly by necessity of the more primitive hardware it's running on, a simpler game, but I think its simplicity is also a core part of its appeal. All you have to do is overtake a set number of cars as a full day-night-and-weather cycle of a set duration proceeds: overtake 200 cars on the first day, then 300 each day thereafter. Your final score is how many "miles" you successfully drove before failing to qualify for the next day, and the score is presented using a lovely rolling analogue counter effect. I would have loved that as a kid — hell, I love it now.

Crackpots is a relatively recent discovery, and a game I feel I would have probably been terrified of as a kid. Again, the concept is simple: bugs are climbing your building, and you must drop flower pots on them. With each wave of bugs cleared, a new colour appears, and each colour of bug has a distinctive movement pattern. When you've cleared one loop of all the bug types (black, blue, red, green) the cycle repeats, but faster. The bugs chew through a layer of your building every time you let too many past you, and this affects the pace of the game from thereon. After too many layers of your building have been eaten, the game is over. It's pure high score fodder, and once again, beautifully paced and designed, with a dynamic difficulty level that raises and lowers according to how well you're doing.

Beamrider is, in essence, another fixed shoot 'em up, but it probably has more in common with Atari's Tempest than anything else, in that rather than moving freely, you switch between distinct "lanes" that the enemies proceed down. Thus there's a much stronger element of precision and even strategy to Beamrider than some other games, and the presentation, considering the host platform, is very good indeed. It's another game I got to know quite recently — there is an Atari 8-bit version, I believe, but I never encountered it back in the day.

Demon Attack is a game that I became familiar with after watching Classic Game Room's Atari 2600 reviews many, many times. It's a very simple fixed shooter, in which all you have to do is blast demons in the sky above you. Only three demons appear at once, and only one of them fires at you. It should be primitive and stupid and dumb, but it's incredibly compelling, particularly once the pace of the game increases and the demons start splitting into smaller bits. This one actually wasn't an Activision game back in the day; it was by Imagic, but Activision got the rights to all the Imagic stuff at some indeterminate point in the past. So yes, the Evercade Activision cartridges will have some of the Imagic stuff, too.

I'm quite fond of Activision Anthology on the PlayStation 2, but the last time I played it, I spotted quite how poor the emulation is in that version. It's not altogether surprising — there have been 23 years of advancements in emulation since — but, given how accessible good quality emulation of these games is about to become with the Evercade cartridges (and, hell, how easy it is to get 2600 up and running on systems like MiSTer and cheapo Chinese handhelds) it's a little hard to go back to. The built-in "badge" challenges, weirdo visual effects and '80s soundtrack are fun, though. I feel like we'll never see a compilation quite like that ever again.

But anyway. I am banging on about this because I spent today making a video about the upcoming cartridge. Watch out for it on the Evercade YouTube channel soon!

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#oneaday Day 517: First impressions from Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment arrived today and, keen to see quite how wrong that awful review from the other day was, I booted it up right after work and have been enjoying it since. I'm not very far in yet, and there seem to be a lot of mechanics and structural elements that are still locked, but I like what I see so far.

It's going to be interesting playing this alongside Tears of the Kingdom because, as anyone who has played the latter will know, a plot point in that is Zelda being sent back in time to the founding of Hyrule, and through a sidequest, Link can get occasional visions of key events during her time in the past. What Age of Imprisonment provides is a complete story from Zelda's perspective, from the moment she arrived in the past and was discovered by King Rauru and Queen Sophia, up until… well, I don't know, yet, but I assume some form of "imprisonment" will be involved, likely with Ganon(dorf) at the middle of it.

Thus far the game feels like it's taking some elements from previous Hyrule Warriors games (I say this with the caveat that I've not actually played Age of Calamity as yet) and combining them with some fun new(?) elements. Of particular note is a counterattack system, where major enemies do heavily telegraphed attacks, and you can use your characters' cooldown-based special abilities to interrupt them. This is never not satisfying, particularly when combined with the "weak point" mechanic introduced in the first Hyrule Warriors, where after certain attacks, some enemies reveal a weak spot and, if you batter this down enough, you get to perform a fancy cinematic attack on them.

There are also giant enemies, much like in the original Hyrule Warriors, and these have their own ways of being dealt with. They're not quite so rigid in their "solutions" as the original Hyrule Warriors, though, which is nice. You can, in many cases, jump on them and wail on their weak points while standing on top of them, though, which is always a delight to do in any game that allows you to do so.

The characters seem like fun, too. Particular highlight so far has been Mineru, sister of King Rauru, who is a Zonai scientist lady who commands constructs to do her bidding. Her "run" animation is her riding a motorised unicycle type thing, and most of her attacks involve summoning giant mechanical things, cannons and all manner of other fun stuff to cause chaos over a wide area. I think she's going to be enjoyable to play with, though I'm also intrigued to see what other characters are on offer and how the game incentivises you to play as them.

Mecha-Link has made an appearance, too, and he's predictably fun to play as, handling much as he did in the older Hyrule Warriors. He did conclude his first appearance by literally turning into a spaceship and flying off into the sunset, though, so I am looking forward to the first of his apparent Star Fox-esque sequences, whenever that might arise.

My concern with Age of Imprisonment (and indeed Age of Calamity, when I eventually get around to it) is that neither of them will live up to the original Hyrule Warriors in terms of Stuff To Do. For the unfamiliar, the original Hyrule Warriors, particularly in its Definitive Edition incarnation on Switch, not only had a lengthy story mode to play through (multiple times if you want to get all the rewards), but also had a brilliant mode called Adventure in which you gradually unlocked cells on pixel-art recreations of classic Zelda maps and took part in various battles in each space. Some of these were full-scale battles similar to what you do in the story mode, while others were battles that had some sort of special conditions or rules in place. The sheer amount of stuff to do in the Adventure mode, across a variety of different maps, meant that the original Hyrule Warriors had near-infinite replayability, and with the way Age of Imprisonment seems to be structured, I suspect it doesn't have anything like that.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. It means that Age of Imprisonment might actually be completable. And if and when I'm done with it, I can always return to the original for more of that sweet Adventure mode action.

In the meantime, I'm having a lot of fun with it, and learning today that its soundtrack is by MONACA, best known for their work on the Nier series, has made this game all the more interesting to me. And so I'm off for another battle or two before bed, I think…

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#oneaday Day 516: Longform playthroughs

I originally stopped doing longform playthroughs on my channel because it was taking forever to get through a single game (and I was getting bored with Final Fantasy III, probably my least favourite Final Fantasy — yes, I'm a sicko who likes Final Fantasy II), but with my recent playthrough of The Granstream Saga on PS1 proving to be quite enjoyable (if not exactly a viewer magnet, but I don't care about that) I think I'm going to do some more of these.

I've been hesitant to do so for the aforementioned reason, but at the same time I've also wanted to do some more, because I feel like that does better justice to longer games that perhaps can't be finished in a single sitting. And, given that it's easy for me to set aside some "retro time" to record this stuff of a weekend, particularly now I have the MiSTer Multisystem set up, I feel I can probably devote some proper time to a number of games I've been meaning to explore properly for ages.

I think the first one I'm going to do, and I'm going to kick this off alongside the ongoing The Granstream Saga playthrough, is Origin's Space Rogue. This is a game I have adored ever since I first played it on Atari ST back in the day, but I've never beaten it, at least partly because, as a kid, I always assumed it was so dauntingly massive it was impossible to ever beat. However, looking back at it as an adult, it definitely looks like it will be a manageable size, and with my big brave adult brain, I can probably "solve" anything it wants to throw my way. And if not, it'll be a fun experiment anyway.

The other reason I want to do this is because I'm conscious I've done a lot of "later retro" stuff recently with the PlayStation games, and I have no intention of stopping that, but I've been struggling to think of a way to kind of refresh my enthusiasm for older home computer (particularly Atari) stuff. And I think this might be a good means of doing that.

With two longform series on the go, I'm not intending on leaving the single-episode formats behind. There are some games where you only really need a single episode to see what makes a game tick, and from there you can decide whether or not you want to spend any more time with it. There are many arcade-style games that I've played for half an hour on a video as my first encounter with them, and now go back to frequently because I enjoyed that initial session so much.

There's no need to make additional videos on those games, though, because in most of those cases, the game is sort of "the same" each time — it's just my skill and knowledge of it developing over time. And while I don't doubt there's at least some value in demonstrating my own improvement in a series of videos, I feel if I'm going to spend multiple videos on one thing, it's more interesting to tackle a longer game that evolves over time with a narrative, character progression or simply a long overall playtime.

Stuff that I've casually earmarked to look at in this regard At Some Point™ include the aforementioned Space Rogue, Times of Lore, the Ultima games, Dungeon Master, the Eye of the Beholder series, the Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games and Starflight. Some of these games I've covered before in a one-off format, and always felt like I probably should go back to them at some point.

So I'm going to, starting this weekend!

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#oneaday Day 515: Don't let people who openly don't like a genre review something in that genre

A new Warriors game is on the horizon — specifically, a new Hyrule Warriors on Switch 2, based on the background lore of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — and, sure as clockwork, a review has already emerged where the reviewer does little more than bemoan the fact that Warriors games have, to them, been nothing but the same exercise in "button-mashing" for the last 30 years.

As anyone who has ever spent a protracted amount of time with a Warriors game will know, this is absolute fucking nonsense, and I would say it blows my mind that we're still getting garbage reviews like this in 2025, but given how much the games media in general has been gutted over the course of the last few years, I'm really not even surprised any more.

The usual retort to something like this is "well, there's value in getting someone who doesn't know a series to review it". And yes. There is, sometimes. There are useful questions such a reviewer can answer, such as "is this a good jumping-on point for newbies, or does it assume knowledge from past installments?" and "does this game make you want to check out more games in a similar vein?"

It's absolutely fine for the answers to those questions to be "no" and for the reviewer in question to not get along with a game, but what is emphatically not okay, and never should have been okay, is getting someone who clearly has predefined negative opinions about what something is to spew vitriol about it, without providing any sort of meaningful criticism in the process.

What also should never happen these days is someone seeing a series or genre with a long history and then completely refuse to engage with that history. This awful review completely rejects the long history of the Warriors series and doesn't even bother trying to interrogate why this series has endured for so long and so very many games.

But that's nothing unusual. You see the same any time you're looking at something which has a long history, but which is somewhat outside the "mainstream". Hell, it even happens with RPGs, still, to this day, particularly if they have an anime-style aesthetic. And most of you reading know quite how fucking long I've been banging that particular drum.

You know what? Let's be fair. Let's go through the review in question (which you can suffer via this archive link if you really want to) and see what they have to say. I will note that the review is anonymous and uses the royal "We" throughout. Make of that what you will. Anyway:

Dynasty Warriors will be 30 years old in 2027, and we can't think of any franchise less deserving of having lasted that long. We don't want to put developers out of work, and clearly someone must like them, but despite innumerable sequels, spin-offs and crossovers, the games have barely seen any evolution in gameplay in all that time, which is a real problem when the core concept is so simplistic and repetitive.

Okay. First of all, this is bollocks. Warriors games have evolved considerably over time, even going so far as to spawn several sub-series — most notably the Empires games, which combine the hack-and-slash core Warriors action with grand strategy mechanics — and having markedly different "feels", both in gameplay terms and in thematic narrative content, between the various sub-franchises, including Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Warriors Orochi, Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors, Warriors All-Stars and several others.

The overall slickness and fluidity of the combat has improved between "generations" of the series, and different series have experimented with different focal points. The Warriors Orochi series, for example, places a strong emphasis on progression through fusing and customising weapons; the Samurai Warriors series has a focus on completing sub-missions during complete stages; the Hyrule Warriors series has a lot of area capture and territory control elements, and the list goes on.

The crossover games, such as Persona 5 Strikers, do tend to be the best ones (the mainline games are all set in Ancient China)…

And… is there something wrong with them being set in Ancient China? This is a really weird way of putting it. Bonus points for mentioning something related to Persona 5, though, the one and only Japanese franchise that it is OK for People Like This to admit to liking.

This is the third Hyrule Warriors, with the first one being a straight reuse of the Dynasty Warriors formula but with Zelda characters. It had very little in the way of story…

I'm going to stop you mid-sentence there. Not only did Hyrule Warriors have a very strong story (which I wrote about in great detail when the excellent Switch version came out), it also has one of the deepest, most satisfyingly complex overall metagames the series has ever seen (which I also wrote about in great detail).

As the kids say, "tell me you never played Hyrule Warriors without telling me you never played Hyrule Warriors".

One of the key problems is the lack of memorable characters. 90% of the characters in Age of Imprisonment are either completely new — but just bland exemplars of the various races — or sages that were seen in cutscenes from Tears of the Kingdom but never named. They're given personalities here, but inevitably they're all boring, selfless martyrs.

I really don't understand this paragraph. There aren't memorable characters, new characters being introduced is somehow a bad thing, they all have personalities, but those personalities are "bad"? Is that it? I haven't yet played the game myself so I can't comment with authority on this, but there's so much scope for some meaningful engagement with the game and actual criticism of the narrative, and absolutely none of it is realised.

The only exception is a garrulous korok and a mute construct (i.e. robot) that is used as a surrogate for Link.

Okay. Are we getting somewhere? Are you going to tell us what you mean by a "garrulous korok" (should be capital K, by the way)? No? Or exactly how robo-Link came to be — and how his artificial nature affects how Zelda responds to him?

No, none of that. That's all we get.

He's much more versatile than the other characters, and able to use different types of weapons and abilities, but it really doesn't matter because all the game's combat boils down to is mashing the X and Y buttons. Technically there are combos, depending on how many times you press X before ending with a Y attack, which creates a different special effect, but the difference this makes is so mild, and the difficulty level so low, it's effectively meaningless.

This is another sign that the reviewer has spent no real time engaging with the game. Those "combos" are core to good Warriors play, with different combos having different utility functions. Some are great for dealing with solo enemies; some are crowd-control room clearers. Often they vary wildly from character to character, necessitating the player get to know how each character's combo works and how best to use it.

The difficulty level comment makes me feel like the reviewer probably only played on the easiest difficulty level. Warriors games have always had an array of much more challenging difficulty levels, and provided incentive to play them with significantly better rewards. I find it difficult to believe that Age of Imprisonment wouldn't have anything of the sort, but we don't know because the reviewer doesn't tell us.

There are other special moves, either intrinsic to the character or obtained via Zonai weapons, but their primary purpose is countering enemy special attacks, so you tend to just keep them in reserve for that and never use them willingly.

You're… literally describing what they're for, and given that in the next paragraph you heap praise on Tears of the Kingdom for allowing you "so much freedom in how you approach encounters it never gets dull" I find it strange that you never thought to try experimenting with these abilities even a little bit in this game.

The only thing breaking up the ground battles are brief Star Fox-style sequences where you take control of the not-Link construct, which can transform into a jet.

This entire bit — which sounds fucking awesome, by the way — is given only a short paragraph, and then not discussed any further.

The key appeal of Dynasty Warriors has always been that there are hundreds of enemies on screen at once and you can attack dozens at a time with any weapon. That fleeting novelty is all there is to the games, except for a strategy element where most missions involve capturing and holding bases on a larger map.

"This is all there is to this game, apart from this other thing which I'm not going to spend any more time discussing".

If they were going to make a new Hyrule Warriors it needed to have either more involved gameplay or at least a more compelling story.

As we've previously established, this reviewer has apparently never even looked at things like the incredible Adventure Mode in the original Hyrule Warriors, let alone the in-depth progression mechanics. And, given that they say nothing of value about the story whatsoever — which I'll be charitable and say is down to Nintendo heavily embargoing story spoilers — I'm not inclined to take their comments on the narrative too seriously either.

Ultimately, this isn't a review really worth getting angry about — I know that's pretty rich after all the above — because fucking Metro is not anywhere someone goes for worthwhile gaming commentary. But still, for one of the few remaining supposedly professional games media outlets (albeit as part of a larger publication) one would think the editorial standards would be a little higher.

But oh well. This is business as usual for Warriors games, and folks who already know they enjoy Warriors games are probably going to enjoy this one also — I certainly intend to. It's just a shame that we're still hearing the same regurgitated opinions as we had back in the earliest days of the PS2 entries in the series; they were nonsense then, and they're even more nonsense now.

I'll leave you with this, which sums it up probably better than I have (with the small correction that Metro is a British publication, not an American one):

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#oneaday Day 514: Up to the Atic

For the last few days, I have not been playing any of the new games I have. I have, instead, been mildly hyperfixating on Atic Atac for Spectrum, which is part of the upcoming Rare Collection 1 cartridge that we're releasing for Evercade. I have ostensibly been doing this so I can better inform the Evercade community about how to get the best out of this game, but honestly I've just been having a lovely time, too.

Atic Atac is a game I have fond memories of, though not because I had it as a child — none of Rare predecessor Ultimate Play the Game's titles were on Atari computers. I don't actually remember where I played it for the first time, and it was only once I ever played it. I believe it was the BBC Micro version I played rather than the Spectrum version, which means I probably played it at my friend Matthew's house, but the details are hazy and unimportant.

What I do remember about Atic Atac is that I thought it was a really cool game for a few reasons: firstly, its top-down perspective, presented with bold, colourful, almost vector-esque lines; and secondly, its unusual health display, which was presented as a roast chicken gradually being stripped down to the bone. When all the "meat" was gone, you lost a life.

For years, I never actually knew what the point of Atic Atac was, though. When I played it as a child, neither I nor whoever it was who was proudly showing it off to me knew what you were supposed to do, so we just had a lovely time wandering back and forth through rooms, throwing axes at monsters. And, indeed, it is possible to enjoy Atic Atac like that if you so desire; there's even a score function based entirely on the enemies you defeat, so you can challenge yourself to get as high a score as possible before succumbing to inevitable death.

Spending some proper, protracted time with it now, though, I'm finding it very much my sort of game, in that it's something of a blend between the Atari 2600 classics Haunted House and Adventure, with a dash of early-format text adventures in there. Not in terms of how you interact with it — Atic Atac is out-and-out an action game — but rather in terms of its core structure of wandering a map, searching for specific "treasures" and your end goal being to return all of said treasures (three pieces of a key, in this case) to a specific location: the starting room.

What I often find with home computer games from this period — particularly those that originated on the Spectrum, for some reason — is that it's easy to assume they're a lot more complicated and confusing than they actually are. And such was the case with Atic Atac; at its core, it's a game about getting to know a map, unlocking doors and hunting for treasure, nothing more. Sure, there's a couple of additional wrinkles — most notably, a few special items counteracting a few "special" monsters that appear at various points — but the basics are simply explore maze, unlock doors, get treasure, escape.

One thing I have really enjoyed doing with Atic Atac is manually making a map, adventure game style. This is mostly fairly straightforward to do, though there are a couple of instances in the game where it defies its own laws of physics to squeeze rooms in where there "shouldn't" be any, which makes mapping those particular portions a little challenging, but for the most part it's easy enough to map. The tricky thing, then, is systematically searching all those rooms to find the keys and treasures that you need!

I haven't quite managed to beat the game just yet, but I've been really enjoying the attempts. And I think I know it well enough to be able to offer some solid advice to newcomers now, too — so watch out for that around the time of Rare Collection 1's release!

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#oneaday Day 513: Unnecessary replacements for things we already had a perfectly good name for

There's probably a more succinct way of putting that title, but in the interests of what I'm about to talk about, I thought I'd be perfectly clear. Today I would like to talk about the phenomenon, particularly in the "business" sphere, of completely unnecessary, arbitrary replacements for concepts and things we already had a perfectly fine, functional and clear name for.

My biggest bugbear in this regard is holiday. Time off work. Between these two terms, they cover pretty much everything anyone needs to know about you taking some time away from your job. "Holiday" tends to imply that you're going somewhere, while "time off" just suggests that you're not going to be working for a few days, for reasons that are, frankly, nobody's business but your own.

Both terms are, to me, interchangeable — I will use "holiday" for a single day off when all I want to do is bum around the house in my pants, and "time off" for a week away at Center Parcs. It doesn't matter. Both effectively mean the same thing, both are well-established words that we learn the meaning of at an early age, and there is no need for any other terminology to replace them.

So please explain to me why so many people insist on saying "Annual Leave" (or, worse, "AL"). Not only is this annoying business-speak, but it also feels inaccurate and dishonest. Because, to me, when you say something is "annual", you're suggesting it happens at the same time every year. So, instinctively, whenever someone says they're going on "annual leave", it suggests to me that they are going to do so at the exact same time every year. Which tends not to be the case. They are going on holiday, or having some time off work. There's nothing "annual" about it aside from the allowance they have for such periods of time off work.

Likewise, I also despite "Personal Time Off" or, more commonly, "PTO". "PTO" already has a meaning, and it is "Please Turn Over". In its fully spelled-out definition, it is unnecessarily specific. If you are having a holiday or some time off work, it is implied that is already "personal", because you have no obligation to share your reasons with your employer. As such, there is no need to state that you're taking "Personal Time Off". Just "Time Off" is fine.

It's all part of the obnoxiously insincere, obsequious way that people talk to one another in the workplace — the LinkedInification of language. It's the same concept that sees people starting the day or an email with "Good Morning Team" (or, worse, "Team,") rather than addressing you in a more sincere, personal sort of way. It's the same reason people say "Can you send me a full brief?" instead of saying "Please tell me exactly what it is you want."

If you know, trust and even like the people you work with, there is absolutely no need to communicate in this way. I would wager that office workers who address one another casually without resorting to business-speak at any point are, on average, significantly happier and less stressed at their job than those who speak like an AI-generated LinkedIn post. Because communicating clearly and in a way that expresses your personality is an inherently more honest way to be — and that, in turn, encourages you to be honest with your colleagues.

So fuck "Annual Leave". Go on holiday. Take some time off. Do whatever you want. Just be honest about it.

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#oneaday Day 512: Can't stop grinding

I have a problem, and its name is Final Fantasy Tactics. Specifically, it is Final Fantasy Tactics' progression system. It's not that it's bad. Oh, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

My problem is that I'm having too damn much fun beefing up my little guys. I have spent several entire play sessions doing nothing but fighting random battles and levelling up my guys, because the next thing that I think it would be cool to unlock is always just over the horizon, yet within reach. And so I keep going, and going, and going… and now my main team is pushing level 40 and is about 75% of the way through Chapter 3.

Part of the reason this has happened is due to the situation I described the other day, where the Golgollada Gallows fight proved to be something of a roadblock until I spent a bit of time grinding my way to be able to survive it convincingly. While I was engaging in that process, I found myself thinking "hey, this is actually kind of fun in and of itself", and so I have found myself drifting back towards just playing for level and job progression rather than advancing the story.

Oh, I'm not going so far as some particularly extreme examples of the genre, such as in Chris Person's excellent piece on Aftermath describing how he spends five hours at the start of every Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough absolutely breaking the game's progression system on the very first map, before the story even gets underway properly. No. That does sound like it might be fun to try sometime, but I'm not going that far for only my second full playthrough of this game in my life.

I'm just levelling everyone probably 10 levels higher than they need to be for the point in the story I'm at, and unlocking some of the seriously powerful jobs. Dragoon's fully upgraded Jump ability being able to hit almost any square on the map from any other point, after a small delay? Working on it. Ninja's frankly obscenely overpowered Dual Wield ability? Got it. Arithmetician's ability to nuke the entire map instantly and without using magic points? Definitely working on it.

As Chris says in his Aftermath piece, doing this is "funny and the game doesn't stop you". Nope; because the random encounters scale to your characters' levels, you'll always be presented with appropriately levelled opponents and be able to score some decent experience from them. As such, you can quite feasibly level all the way to 99 if you feel that way inclined — and in doing so, you'd likely unlock most, if not all, of the available jobs with some canny switching at appropriate moments.

I have set myself a milestone, though. When my "main five" hit level 40, I'm going to move on with the story.

Probably.

I mean, I want to make sure I can handle that Wiegraf fight, right? Maybe just a few more levels…

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