#oneaday Day 322: The Expedition

Hello. It's after 1am and I haven't written anything, I need a bath (that can wait until tomorrow) and I'm quite tired. So this will probably be a short one. I did want to acknowledge something, though, which is that I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this evening, and it's real good.

I was a little skeptical about it after feeling a bit burnt by the Blue Prince situation, but this time around it's just flat-out a good game, not "a good game if you have the right kind of brain and 150 hours to plough into it".

I will write more about it on MoeGamer anon, but I did want to acknowledge that my first impressions are very good indeed, and that it has a very distinctive atmosphere about it. I'm getting quite strong Nier vibes from it in terms of its rather melancholy atmosphere — indeed, my wife walked in at one point and asked if it was another Taro Yoko joint. I explained that no, it's French, but I can completely see why she would think that just from overhearing the music.

Oh man, the music. One of the most important things to get right in a dramatic RPG, and boy did they get it bang on in this game. Sweeping orchestral pieces, triumphant choirs, lonely soloists, tinkling pianos, it's all there, and it all hits one right in the Feels.

I was a little concerned about coming to a "J-style" RPG that everyone was saying was the best thing ever when chances are the last "JRPG" they played was Persona 5; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has been consistently engaging with this type of game for the last 20 years, while many other folks haven't for various reasons. And I think it's still going to be interesting, but so far my impressions are that no, this isn't just "good if you haven't played an RPG in the last 20 years", it's a good RPG.

There's Nier, there's Final Fantasy, there's even bits of Souls in Expedition 33's DNA, and it all works together in a thoroughly interesting fashion. But, like I say, it's after 1am and I really should probably go to bed. I will write more about this game — much more — over on MoeGamer very soon. But for now, I bid you good night!

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.

#oneaday Day 321: My Switch 2 concerns

I still have my preorder in for a Nintendo Switch 2 and I'm looking forward to having a play with it. But I am quite concerned about some things that seem to be cropping up in these initial pre-launch months.

Chief among these is the "Game Key Card" thing. For the unfamiliar, this is effectively a replacement for the "code-in-a-box" nonsense some publishers pulled with Switch games, where you'd buy a "physical release" and get nothing more than a box with a voucher for the digital version of the game in it. The box was then completely useless because there was nothing to put in it. The sole justification for this, one might argue, is that it allows "digital" games to be given as gifts. But only the ones that have actually had this treatment, of course.

Game Key Cards is… possibly a step forwards from this, but still not in any way desirable. Effectively how they work is that they're a cartridge you put in your Switch 2, and this then automatically causes the digital version of the game to download from the eShop. There are a few justifications for this: it keeps costs down while still allowing for a boxed release of sorts, which in turn can be given as a gift just like code-in-a-box.

Unlike code-in-a-box, however, Game Key Cards are transferable. They need to be in the Switch 2 to play the game even once it's downloaded, and they can be loaned, traded or sold to others. This is arguably an improvement in that they make digital purchases more portable — you can take a game over to a friend's house, for example, although one might argue the inherently portable nature of the Switch 2 makes this a moot point anyway — but one suspects it is going to be used by a lot of companies as an excuse for cost-cutting.

We're already starting to see a number of games that have announced their "physical" release will be on one of these Game Key Cards, with no other option than the digital-only version. As a collector of physical media, neither of these options are desirable.

Some have conjectured that this situation has arisen because Switch 2 carts are, supposedly, expensive — like, $16 a unit expensive. That means once companies have paid their cut to Nintendo, paid manufacturing costs, paid marketing expenses and everything else that goes into making a game, there potentially won't be much left for games sold around the £30-40 mark. This is, apparently — and remember this is mostly hearsay at the moment — the reason that physical releases like Mario Kart World are £70 or more.

Thing is, I'm not sure I understand why they're so expensive. They're essentially flash carts. Admittedly, in the case of Switch 2, they're high-speed flash carts, which are slightly newer (and thus more pricey) tech. But $16 a unit for something that supposedly only goes up to 64GB seems… high. (Oh yes, that's seemingly the other reason some are going for the Game Key Card approach — games such as Street Fighter 6 flat-out won't fit on one.)

I've long said that if a console generation arose that was digital-only, I would probably bow out and stick to my existing library of games — which, as most of you probably know, is pretty enormous. Nintendo, whose consoles have long been a champion of physical media — Switch 1 carts are the only releases of the current(ish) generation that don't require lengthy installs before you can play — seem to be pushing towards that all-digital future that I'm not sure anyone really wants, particularly those involved in a hobby that has always been, to some degree, about collecting.

I'm willing to give Switch 2 a chance. I'm even getting the bundle with the digital version of Mario Kart World included — I figure as a game with an online component, it's probably going to have regular updates and/or DLC, making the physical edition useless after a while anyway — but I'm still a bit concerned.

I guess one thing worth waiting to see is what the limited-press physical houses do — if anything — with Nintendo Switch 2. A significant portion of my Switch 1 library consists of limited-print physical releases of games that would have otherwise been digital-only. If that situation continues, then I think I'll be all right. I know some folks hate the limited-print stuff, but I suspect it's going to become an increasing reality of video game collecting in the coming years. We'll have to see, I guess.

I wish we could just be excited for New Thing. It feels like a long time since we've been able to be unreservedly excited for New Thing. The last few New Things we've had — particularly in gaming — seem to have had particularly big caveats involved, and Switch 2 is no exception.

Think back to the run-up to the PlayStation 2's launch. Nothing but excitement. A new system that could produce incredible visuals, could take full advantage of the new DVD format for storage, and which was fully (almost) backwards-compatible with the previous PlayStation? Sure, the price was a sticking point for some, but that came down. And the PS2 went on to be one of the most beloved systems of all time, with good reason.

I wonder if the last couple of generations of console hardware are even going to have a legacy to leave behind once their digital services are turned off.

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.

#oneaday Day 320: Attempting to list one turn-based RPG a year for every year between Final Fantasy X and now

The recent release of Obscure Claire or whatever it's called has spawned some frankly toxic discourse about turn-based vs. real-time RPGs and the perceived accessibility of the RPG genre, so I thought I would take a moment and see if it was possible to name at least one turn-based RPG that had come out every year between Final Fantasy X, which a frightening number of people think was The Last Great Turn-Based RPG, and now.

I'm taking English language releases as gospel here, not Japanese release dates in the case of games that originated there. Because we're talking about English people and their weird selective memory. I'm also going to try not to include more than one entry from a series, and I'm not restricting the list to just "JRPGs". Anything where you take turns to make numbers pop out of monsters is fair game.

Are you ready? Here we go! (Ya ya ya ya… wait, no, wrong genre.)

2001: Final Fantasy X
2002: Suikoden III
2003: Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (yes, they count)
2004: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (aka Final Fantasy Tolkien)
2005: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
2006: Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
2007: Eternal Sonata
2008: Etrian Odyssey II
2009: The Last Remnant
2010: Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland
2011: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2
2012: Fire Emblem: Awakening (strategy RPGs are still turn-based RPGs!)
2013: Bravely Default
2014: South Park: The Stick of Truth
2015: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
2016: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
2017: Blue Reflection
2018: Octopath Traveller
2019: Death end re;Quest
2020: Trails of Cold Steel IV
2021: Mary Skelter Finale
2022: Dungeon Travelers 2-2
2023: Sea of Stars
2024: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Cor. Some crackers among that lot, for sure, many of which I'm still yet to play.

And, it should probably go without saying, these were far from the only turn-based RPGs released each year, to say nothing of RPGs that don't specifically use turn-based mechanics but are nonetheless particularly noteworthy, such as the Xenoblade Chronicles X rerelease this year.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: turn-based RPGs have never, ever gone anywhere. The only difference with Clair Obscur is that all eyes are on it thanks to it using fancy new Unreal Engine 5 tech — which some are already saying is a bit of a hindrance rather than a benefit.

The fact that a lot of the above games don't get much attention outside of niche-interest circles is, more often than not, down to a refusal to engage with anything that might be on the lower budget side of things, or particularly if it involves an anime art style. I know people who have missed out on some absolutely fantastic games just because they refuse to engage with anything that looks a bit anime, regardless of subject matter. And that's their loss.

Getting people to "read" a bit more widely is, I'm sure, a problem with every medium. But dear Lord is it ever frustrating when you've spent years of your life screaming about games you find fascinating, only for people to shrug and make it very clear that they haven't paid any attention whatsoever.

Oh well. As I say, their loss. I know what I like, and I have plenty of the stuff that I like on my shelves. And I guess that's all that really matters at this point.

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.

#oneaday Day 319: Construction complete

You wanted to see photos of the finished study/office/retro gaming room, right? No? Well tough titty, you're seeing them anyway, because my wife worked her arse off on this all week, then I did a bit of work putting stuff back where it's supposed to be. The results are, I hope you'll agree, striking and pleasing.

First, a slightly out-of-date "before" shot, if it please you:

The whole thing was getting a bit cluttered, so we had a bit of a clear-out a while back. With a heavy heart, I packed away the "real hardware" Atari computers, since the vast majority of stuff I do with them for video is via emulation anyway, and those went in the loft. A bunch of the software that didn't really need to be on display — mostly stuff like productivity software for the Atari ST, and big box PC games I didn't have a means of installing (and which, in most cases, I had digital copies of anyway) — also went in the loft.

Over on the desk on the right, I also upgraded to a two-monitor setup to use with the mini PC I bought a while back, so I could make the room dual purpose: retro gaming space and home office. Aside from those changes, this is pretty much the state of the room before. Note the grotty horrible carpet that came with the house and the unnecessary wall-mounted TV. (We put that in with the intention of using it for Chromecasting YouTube videos and suchlike, but I never used it, so my wife has reclaimed it to put in her shed.)

Behold, then, the glorious transformation that has unfolded over the last week!

Would ya look at that? A few simple changes and it looks like there's much more space. Plus you will hopefully notice the subtle change in overall design, colour scheme and theming. My wife wanted to go loud with the decor in here, to fit with the "retro" vibe. I wasn't entirely convinced on her colour choices to begin with, particularly the yellow, but I had also made a moderate deal out of not really caring what colours she picked, because, frankly, I didn't.

Y'see, I grew up in a house where the default was to paint the walls white. This isn't a criticism of my parents; it made for a nice, consistent, clean look throughout the whole house that could then be supplemented with additional wall decorations such as pictures, bookshelves, ornaments and suchlike. It works for them, and with the house having looked that way for so long now, I wouldn't have it any other way, even if as a kid I sometimes wished they wouldn't be so boring every time they painted a room.

To be fair, I don't remember them redecorating any rooms very often, which is the one benefit of painting them something plain: you don't really need to redo them unless you damage them significantly, which never happened in my time living in that house. The one major change they've made since I moved out is expanding the downstairs toilet into a full-on shower room, replacing a little weird closety alcove thing that used to be at one end of the entrance hallway.

But I digress. Fact is, I grew up in a house that was predominantly painted white, and thus I never really developed any particularly strong preferences about decor. Walls were just walls.

Andie had a plan, though, so I trusted in her sense of style (which has done the rest of our house proud, to be fair) and allowed her to do her thing, painting the coving, skirting boards, doors, frames and radiator bright yellow, with a contrasting deep turquoise for the walls and ceiling. Two walls would be a sort of "feature" with that incredibly loud wallpaper.

One of the main reasons Andie wanted to do up this room was not to change its design and colour scheme, but to replace that horrible carpet. And, she figured, since we'd have to rip everything out to do the floor, we may as well change up the design a bit also.

We've replaced nearly all our carpets across the whole house with laminate flooring now; at this point, only the spare bedroom still has carpet; all of the rest save for the toilet (tiles) and bathroom (vinyl flooring) is laminate floor. It's a change for the better; much easier to keep clean (particularly with cats) and it just looks plain nice. It gives rooms a nice feeling of space that grotty old carpet just doesn't quite provide. I might feel differently if we had had nice carpets in here originally, but we emphatically did not.

We took the opportunity to tidy up my setup a bit, also. Rather than having everything connected all at once, I decided to put just the main console units on display on the shelves, and keep the SCART cables and power adapters in an easily accessible set of drawers beneath one of the desks. That way, if I want to play on a particular console, I can just bring it down off the shelf, pick out the appropriate cables, hook it up and play.

To better facilitate this, we also invested in some desktop plug sockets, which are a brilliant thing. No more ferreting around behind the desk to plug and unplug things, which was always a nightmare even when I wasn't as fabulously fat and unfit as I am now. Now I just plug and unplug from the desktop itself. Sorted.

Here's Patti checking out the Atari ST games. Yes, I know the spine for Hostages is the other way around to all the other games. For some reason, a significant number of French games insisted on printing their spines the opposite way around to literally everything else on the ST. Ah, the French, and all that.

And here's Patti offering her thoughts following her inspection of the entire room. I think she approves. I certainly do.

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.

#oneaday Day 318: Renovations, again

My wife has very kindly spent the last week renovating my study, and we spent the vast majority of today putting stuff back into it. She's replaced the horrible carpet with laminate flooring to match (most of) the rest of the house, painted a couple of walls and put some exceedingly 80s-inspired wallpaper up on two of the walls. We're not quite finished putting everything back in there yet, but I'll be sure to share some photos when everything is where it should be.

Like most projects like this, it's been an opportunity to take stock of what I have, what I want to keep out and readily accessible, and what can safely go in the loft or bin. We already had a fairly ruthless clearout of stuff into the loft a few weeks back, but these renovations have been the next step. While it is nice to have all one's Stuff out and accessible, there comes a point where you have to consider if you're really ever going to use Timeworks DTP for Atari ST, or if it was just out on the shelves because it looked nice on the shelves.

The basic summary of what we've done is thus: I've kept out all the Atari ST games and the few Atari 8-bit games I have non-pirated copies of. These are both a nice backdrop for my videos and handy to refer to when making said videos, even though I actually make the videos using emulation of various descriptions rather than real hardware. The real Atari 8-bits and STs have, regrettably, made their home in the loft for the moment, as although I love using them both and will never fully get rid of them, emulation for both is in such a good place now that there's really little benefit to having the real things out, particularly as video capture from emulation is about a zillion times easier than capturing from real hardware.

I've also rethought my previous setup of having all the consoles hooked up and ready to go, with just a SCART cable needing changing to switch between them. Instead, I have just the consoles out on display on the shelves, and the power bricks and SCART/aerial cables are in a set of drawers under the desk, easily accessible. This means I don't have to worry about the horrific tangle of wires that was down the back of the desk, particularly as we've fitted some desktop plug sockets to make plugging in and unplugging stuff super-easy. It also leaves me with a lot more desk space, and means that I can play with the console a bit closer to me when I do want to use the real hardware — very helpful for easily changing cartridges or just hitting "reset" to go back to the various Everdrive menus.

The one thing we haven't quite had the energy to do today is move my home office back to where it should be. I'm going to continue working from the downstairs living room for tomorrow, and we're going to take care of putting the office stuff back in its appropriate place tomorrow evening. Then it will all be done, and I will share photographs and you will be in awe. Or at least you'll think "that looks like quite a nice room", I hope.

Anyway, we're both very tired, so it's time for a nice sit down and then a big sleep. Or, at least, a regular-sized sleep until we both have to get up for work tomorrow. Boo!

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.

#oneaday Day 317: Kitchen essentials

I'm not a particularly amazing cook or anything, but I do make a decent chilli and curry. Over the years, my wife and I haven't been super-extravagant in the things we've bought for our kitchen, but in the last couple of years or so in particular, we've come across a few things that are pretty much essentials, and which I recommend anyone who spend any amount of time in the kitchen, regardless of ability level, should invest in.

The first is simple: non-stick pans that are actually non-stick. We'd been working with the same pans for a long time, but a few trips to Lidl ago, my wife picked up a couple of new frying pans that she thought looked both decent and reasonably priced. Reader, they are a marvel. I do wonder how long they will remain this way, but certainly right now, frying anything in them is an absolute pleasure.

Absolutely nothing gets stuck to the bottom, even with my typically rather aggressive approach to heat management (somewhat unavoidable with induction hobs, in my experience) and this, in turn, means that they're very easy to clean. And as we all know, chipping burnt-on crap off the bottom of pans is no fun at all. So save yourself the hassle; spend the money and get some decent non-stick pans.

The second is an air fryer. I know it's a haha funny meme (for some reason) to enthuse about air fryers, but seriously, if you don't have one, get one. Not only is it good for "frying" stuff without immersing it completely in oil, it also makes an excellent substitute for your oven if you're cooking small stuff, like, say, a portion of chips or some breaded chicken breasts.

It will take you a little experimentation to convert "oven" times to "air fryer" times (you generally need quite a bit less time — in my experience, anywhere between 50-75% of the stated oven time) but once you've nailed that, it's so much more convenient. And, like the non-stick pan approach, air fryer trays are a lot easier to clean than a whole-ass oven.

You can get cheap air fryers, but I would recommend you splash the cash a bit and go for a good one, preferably one that has multiple baskets. We have a Ninja one and it's great. The two baskets can be set up independently, and even "synced" with one another so the second one comes on after the first one has been cooking for a certain amount of time. No more bunging everything in the oven for the same amount of time and hoping for the best!

I will also note that an air fryer makes a surprisingly good toasted cheese sandwich. It's not quite up to Breville standards, but it's a whole lot less messy to clean up afterwards. If all you care about is that your cheese sandwich goes "crunch" a bit, then air frying a cheese sandwich is a great thing.

The third thing is a rice cooker. These come in all manner of levels of complexity, but ours is a super-simple one: you just pop in the amount of rice you want, add an appropriate amount of water (in my experience, roughly twice as many cups of water as you have rice) then turn it on and leave it. Pretty much perfect rice every time, though ours does have a tendency to stick a bit to the bottom. It's easy enough to clean, though, because the main pain is removable and can even be stuck in the dishwasher if you're super lazy.

Between these three things that I've outlined above, we cook almost everything we eat. They are, without a doubt, the best kitchen investments we've ever made — and if you're lacking any or all of them, I highly recommend adding them to your kitchen, too.

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.

#oneaday Day 316: Mario Kart World looks like fun!

You will doubtless be aware of the impending release of the Nintendo Switch 2, and its launch title Mario Kart World. You may also be aware of the fact that people are complaining about the price (not unjustifiably). And you may even have sat down and watched the Mario Kart World-centric presentation the other day.

Some people seem to be a bit down on Mario Kart World. I had to banish a video from my YouTube recommendations earlier for it claiming to offer "the unfortunate truth" about the new game, when said "truth" was just that the video maker, who hadn't played the game, didn't think it going open world was a good idea.

I'm not going to get into whether he's right or wrong (he's definitely wrong, though), but instead I want to talk about my own personal response to what I've seen of Mario Kart World so far, with the caveats that I haven't played it, I haven't been to any of the "Nintendo Switch 2 Experience" events, and that have preordered the Switch 2 bundle that comes with a digital copy of Mario Kart World, so I am perhaps predisposed to like the thing I've spent money on.

Basically, I'm well up for what Mario Kart World has to offer. I like common-or-garden Mario Kart to a decent degree, and it usually comes off the shelf any time friends are over. But despite the improving tech, visuals and course design with each new installment, the overall structure of the game hasn't really changed all that much since the SNES original. Mario Kart has always had a bit of a problem with its single-player modes being a bit bare-bones, and this is something that has never really been fixed over the course of 8 mainline installments. It was particularly apparent in the Nintendo 64 era, where Rare's Diddy Kong Racing offered an impressively substantial single-player "Adventure" mode that really made Mario Kart 64's paltry grand prix offerings look a tad weedy.

Granted, today the enduring appeal of modern Mario Kart games is in playing online, where you get the performance and visuals of single-player but the thrill of competing against real opponents. But that's not something that everyone enjoys — particularly since, as a popular game, it's filled with people who have no-lifed their way into mastering the most important "skills" (and/or exploits) in order to win every time. Playing Mario Kart online as a casual player is a great way of testing whether or not you really believe that "it's not the winning that counts, it's the taking part". Because after myriad sessions of seeing the frontrunners scream off over the horizon, never to be seen again, and not really knowing why or how they did that, it gets a bit old.

Mario Kart World, now, though, that's different. Online is still going to be an important part of the experience, and with the Nintendo Switch 2's GameChat feature, it looks like a potential return to the early days of Xbox Live, when it's easy to get folks together to shoot the shit while you're playing games — and not necessarily the same games. The key difference, this being Nintendo, is that GameChat is restricted to your friends, so no jumping into public lobbies and immediately being screamed at or called a racial epithet, unless that's what your friends are like. In which case you should find new friends.

But perhaps more importantly, judging by what we've seen so far, is that Mario Kart World offers a substantial single-player experience, and it's all down to that open world. Driving games are one type of game where it makes perfect sense to have an open-world map, and theming the game around rough-and-ready vehicles such as go-karts and motorcycles makes it feel less weird to go off-road exploring. One of my favourite games in this regard is Codemasters and Asobo Studio's Fuel, which has an absolutely vast open world filled with events to participate in and things to find. Plus it's just plain fun to drive around and see how a variety of different vehicles handle the various terrains.

Fuel is a semi-realistic game, though; Mario Kart World, meanwhile, is not beholden to the laws of reality, being a game set in a cartoonish fantasy world. That means we can have a map with incredible geographic diversity, weird and wonderful things to discover and a real sense that you might find anything around the corner. For all I love Fuel, its overriding colours are dull green, grey and brown, and any changes in the map you encounter as you pass from region to region are gradual rather than drastic. Not so in Mario Kart World, and I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

One of the things I really like the sound of is how the races link together, with circuit races leading to point-to-point races that take you to the next course in the sequence. I absolutely love point-to-point races — a side-effect of growing up with games like OutRun and Lotus Turbo Challenge — and Mario Kart World sounds like it's going to implement them not only as interstitial races in the main Grand Prix events, but also as non-stop "knockout" rally competitions that unfold as one long race taking you between multiple areas, with the bottom [x] participants being knocked out at every checkpoint.

But then the open world is filled with collectibles to find — the exact function of which we don't know just yet — and "P-switch challenges", which task you with completing various missions that test your driving skills. It's this exploration aspect that I think I find most exciting, particularly as you can not only play it solo, but you can bring friends along, too. Burnout Paradise was excellent fun in its multiplayer free-roam mode — sadly, I only ever really got to play it with friends once — and I can see this being very enjoyable; a great way to virtually hang out with friends over GameChat while having a meaningful, but relaxing and not-too-demanding, gaming experience.

Whether or not all this is really "worth" £75 for its physical RRP remains to be seen, and "game worth" is a completely subjective thing anyway. But I know that after seeing the announcement and the subsequent Direct, I'm very much on board with Mario Kart World, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it when June finally rolls around.

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.

#oneaday Day 315: Short-form shite

I am once again inspired to write something by a piece over on Aftermath, this time on the subject of short-form videos such as Instagram/Facebook Reels and TikTok. The thrust of the piece is that the author decided to completely give up looking at this type of video online for the 40 days of Lent, and has felt considerably better as a result.

I am not surprised. I have noted on numerous other occasions how much I detest the push for short-form vertical-format "content" happening all over the Internet, and how frustrating I find it when I see people mindlessly scrolling through video after video without really taking anything in, just scrolling, over and over, for hour after hour.

I have never been sucked into this corner of the Internet. I've done the social media quasi-addiction thing, and it's not nice. I recognised short-form video as being kind of bullshit when it first started to be a thing — I still remember the now-deleted Glove and Boots video about how shooting vertical video makes you a terrible person — and I feel vindicated any time I see a piece like Riley's article on Aftermath concluding that yes, short-form video is a big pile of shit. I'm firmly of the belief that the format has done potentially irreversible harm to people's mental wellbeing in general, and specifically their attention span.

Do you know what the most depressing statistic on YouTube is? I've probably asked this before, but it's my blog, so I will ask the same rhetorical questions again if I feel like it. Anyway, the most depressing statistic on YouTube is the watch time or "retention" factor for your videos. This tracks how long people actually watch your videos for — in other words, if they sit down, click "Play" and watch the whole thing, or if they just tap onto it on their phone, watch ten seconds and then click on the next thing that catches their attention, without taking anything in whatsoever.

The stat makes for grim reading on longer videos, as you might expect, but I find it especially frustrating and upsetting when I see it being in the toilet on videos that are a couple of minutes long at most, like a trailer or something. And I suspect the "pivot" to short-form video on multiple social media platforms has played a significant role in this situation, because none of the platforms that host short-form video encourage their users to show any sort of respect for the creators of those videos. All they want you to do is keep scrolling through the never-ending feed, helping them build their algorithmic picture of Who You Really Are, all so they can better advertise to you.

This isn't to say the short-form video creators are entirely blameless in this, either. I never "got" Vine when it was a thing, either, and every time I'm inadvertently subjected to a short-form vertical video with sped-up footage of someone ranting and raving about something to the camera, I find myself never wanting to see anything from that creator ever again.

This might be a "me" thing, it might be an "autistic" thing, but I find so much short-form video to be incredibly aggressive and confrontational. Whether it's someone bellowing at the top of their lungs about the terrible customer service experience they had in B&Q last Wednesday or someone giving an impassioned plea to support a cause that actually matters, all I feel when I see a thumbnail or a video of someone's face right up against their phone camera is the same sort of discomfort I would feel if that person was invading my personal space, getting right in my face and shouting so close I could smell their breath.

I genuinely do not understand. I do not see the appeal. I do not find the supposed "jokes" funny. I do not find the "skits" funny. And anyone who thinks TikTok is a good place to go to get recipes or DIY guides is fucking delusional. How, in any way, is a looping video in any way an optimal means of learning how to cook something or build something? We've had these things sorted for years at this point.

And don't get me started on all the YouTube videos who make their entire content strategy "I saw this thing on TikTok and now I'm going to do something with it". Testing "viral" TikTok recipes. Trying "viral" TikTok AliExpress plastic landfill. Attempting to perform a "viral" TikTok dance. At least by not being on TikTok I can avoid all this shit at the source, but when it starts spilling over into other forms of media that I do still engage with, like YouTube, it's very annoying.

I am glad I never stuck my head into TikTok and found anything even the slightest bit worthwhile. On my one foray into the service just to see what the retro gaming scene looked like on there, I found an American guy gurning at the camera and explaining that "back in the day we had to plug our consoles into the TV and the wall!", immediately closed the app and deleted it. There was nothing there for me. I am better than that. You are better than that. And, as with everyfuckingthing else in the world at this point, the AI garbage that is starting to fill these platforms is just making them even worse than they already are.

"Oh, it's harmless," people say. "It's just a bit of fun. I like to watch the girls dancing. Sometimes there are really good recipes on there."

No. Stop it. You do not need that shit in your life. All of those things you just described can be accessed via other means that aren't destroying your attention span and your ability to focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time. And there are even ways to do all of them that don't involve feeding advertising algorithms.

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.

#oneaday Day 314: The news churn

There was a good piece over on Aftermath today titled "Video game blogs from the 2000s were fast, reckless and very bad at news". The gist of the piece was that video game websites that adopted a continuously updating "blog" format, in contrast to the "magazine" approach many earlier gaming sites had used, inadvertently set in place a format for games journalism that isn't particularly helpful for readers, and is definitely not good for the writers.

The piece goes on to note that the pressure to have [x] number of articles per day, or the fact that many writers were paid (a pittance) by the article placed a great deal of pressure on the site's writers to make even the most mundane, pointless bullshit somehow "newsworthy". It is this, among other things, that led numerous websites to continuously and uncritically quote Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter whenever he spouted off something that was either immensely obvious (the new Grand Theft Auto will probably sell well!) or so utterly vague as to be completely useless.

I wasn't involved in the biz at the start of this, but I definitely felt its effects. When I joined GamePro in 2011, the site was just starting to experiment with a new format for its news coverage. At the start of my shift each day, I was to dig up a bunch of stories and post them as just headlines and a brief summary on a front-page forum as a sort of "news briefing". Then, later in my shift, after the stories had all had a bit of time to percolate, I would write one or two up in further detail based on which of the posts had seemingly been the most popular, judged primarily by comments.

GamePro's readers initially fucking hated it, because the way it was implemented cluttered up the front page of the site's main forums, and I wasn't a huge fan of it, either, because it felt like the time I spent digging up those initial stories — which, more often than not, took the form of either another site having reported on something first, or a press release we'd received that morning — could have almost certainly been better used finding bigger stories to explore, or writing features, or reviews, or anything other than desperately, vainly scrabbling for just a scrap of news, please, guvnor.

That said, over time it did seem to settle down a bit, I broke a few genuine exclusives and provided some good editorial commentary on other stories that were happening, and I was told on multiple occasions that the work I was doing was playing a big role in giving the site a nice uptick in traffic.

Of course, even that uptick was all for naught when IDG Media unceremoniously closed the site and the magazine just before Christmas that year, meaning I woke up one morning all set to do work, only to find that not only was there no job to work any more, all the stuff I had written was about to become absolutely impossible to find due to the inexplicable decision to fold some (not all) of GamePro's material into the unrelated publication PC World. Good stuff. (If you dig deep enough into PC World's atrocious search function, you can still find the odd bit of my stuff, but it's not easy to find, which was great for building a portfolio, I can tell you.)

Something similar happened at USgamer, also. When we started the site, the intention was for the whole thing to be a return to something like the 1up.com days: a primarily personality-driven site, where each of the writers would have their own specialisms, and they would be free to write about whatever they wanted, developing their own little sub-communities in the process.

That went great for a while! I wrote about anime RPGs and visual novels, another chap wrote about racing sims, and all the other people on staff each had their own Things, too. Comments from the community were positive; I can't speak specifics to the other folks' work as I didn't tend to delve into their comment sections, but on my pieces, there was always a great deal of appreciation for my work making USgamer a site that was welcoming and inclusive to a portion of gaming that didn't always get a lot of love and respect from the mainstream sites. This was all pre-Gamergate, I'll add, so there was no culture war bullshit going on; it was just folks who liked anime-style games, including those with mildly provocative content (as there was a fair amount of in the mid-2010s) having an appreciation for a site that didn't just write their favourite games off as being for perverts or whatever.

That lasted for a few months, but then an edict came down from On High (in this case, USgamer's parent company Gamer Network) that we needed to juice the numbers. In other words, abandon everything we'd done to make the site unique and start the daily churn of news and guides that is so painfully familiar to this day. I went from being able to post whatever I wanted to having to get manual approval for each and every news story I wanted to post, and I was outright forbidden from covering certain games.

Eventually, when I was laid off from the site — again, through waking up one morning only to discover I didn't have a job any more — I was forced into spending the majority of my days rejigging and reposting "guide content" from Prima Games, which was also under the Gamer Network umbrella at the time. Out of spite, I stuck with several of my regular weekly columns even with this SEO-juicing bullshit I had been lumbered with, and it was that degree of spite for what the site had become that eventually led me to create MoeGamer: a site where I could play by my rule and cover whatever the fuck I wanted, and fuck traffic numbers.

MoeGamer itself has had a few evolutions over the years. Initially, it was an occasional blog where I basically continued writing my JPgamer column from USgamer — I'd just write about things that interested me, or which I'd happened to play recently, or which had been on my mind. Eventually, when I was working a series of very boring office jobs that had nothing to do with the games press, I launched my "Cover Game" feature, with a mind to giving underappreciated, oft-overlooked titles the level of detailed coverage that your average traffic-baiting triple-A title did. At the height of my boredom in the office, I was posting stuff on MoeGamer daily, including episodes in each multi-part Cover Game feature, plus shorter one-off articles about things that I found interesting, or had happened to collect back when CEX did free shipping (ahh, those heady days), or that I had always loved but never written about.

Today, I actually like my day job, so MoeGamer has had to take a bit of a back seat, but I'm still writing over there sporadically. It's nice to have a space that is for a specific subject, and a contrast from this general-purpose thought-dumping ground that is this blog. I don't have any intention of making MoeGamer "big" or "famous" or trying to make money from it; it's just my site about games I like, and over the last 10+ years I've filled it with a lot of work I'm very proud of. Today, I think I'm more proud of what I've built with MoeGamer than my all-too-brief time as part of the professional games press.

I've pretty much taken the MoeGamer approach with YouTube, too, albeit with more of a focus on retro games than RPGs and visual novels. And y'know what? While my channel hasn't exploded in terms of growth since I launched it (or since I started using it a bit more actively around 2018 or so), it has seen steady growth without me putting any effort whatsoever into either algorithm-baiting or SEO juicing. I have over three and a half thousand subscribers over there right now, and while that's a drop in the ocean compared to the Mr Beasts of this world, I feel creatively fulfilled and proud of what I've done, and am not an awful human being.

So much about the modern Internet sucks, and as Ed Zitron frequently notes, so much of it is about the growth-at-all-costs mindset. It's not just business that this "rot economy" infests; it's creative pursuits, hobbies, specialist fields. So many people are desperate to monetise everything they put online that the actual value for the people looking at the articles, videos and suchlike is diminishing — and the conditions for those producing the work are becoming increasingly intolerable. Throw AI garbage into the mix — and the fuckers who are now flooding YouTube and social media apps with AI-generated bilge that they pump out all day every day — and you have a real melting pot of absolutely rancid filth.

It's definitely a good idea for people who are Into Things to retreat into their own little specialised corners of the Internet, rather than the whole Internet being treated as some great Marketplace of Shit. This is happening to a certain degree, with many communities forming on Discord these days — though Discord itself isn't immune to enshittification, and I suspect we'll all have to find a new home before long — but I do miss the glory days of forums. I really do. I know a few forums still exist, but the 1up.com Radio Boards days are long gone, and every day I miss them a little more.

This has been quite the ramble, and I'm not sure I made a specific point along the way, but hopefully you understand what I was waffling on about. I am grateful to Past Me for setting up spaces like this blog and MoeGamer for me to continue to express myself, and as time goes on I feel personal spaces like these are going to once again become an important part of life online. Because the alternative is wading out into the mires of advertising-laden shit that is the rest of the Internet, and that gets less appealing day after day.

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.

#oneaday Day 313: Memories of Me: the curious intimacy of school concerts

As a Kid Who Could Do Music, I was involved in performances of various kinds from a pretty early age. I have fairly vivid memories of, as a primary school-age kid, participating in the Bedford Music Festival, at which I would play piano duets and trios with other equally young pianists from my local area who were studying under the same teacher. I remember taking the Yamaha YS-200 keyboard to my Nan and Grandad's house to put on "concerts" for them, complete with synthesised applause when I finished a piece. And, of course, when we had visitors, I was often asked to play for them on my piano at home.

It wasn't until secondary school that I really started doing a lot of public performance, though. I joined a number of the musical groups at my school, including the concert band, jazz band (known as Dance Band), orchestra and choir, and through being a member of those groups (as well as my solo performance abilities), I participated in, I think, pretty much every school concert that happened between me joining the school in Year 7 and my leaving it after Year 13.

I absolutely loved school concert night, for a whole host of reasons. Firstly, it was simply fun to perform: to take all the hard work we'd done in each group's weekly rehearsals and finally show off what we'd accomplished. I don't remember any major disasters happening at any time, either; the leaders of the various groups (also the school's main music teachers) were all pretty fastidious about ensuring we could perform things to the best of our ability, and they also seemed to make good choices of pieces that were appropriate to the overall ability level of the group as a whole.

For those who have never performed as part of a large ensemble, it's quite something. Your part might not stand out as the most important or recognisable, but every instrument playing something plays an important role in the overall texture and timbre of the piece being played. If you're playing it right, people might not notice you as an individual performer — though this does, of course, have the side effect that if you play it wrong, people will definitely notice.

For me, it was satisfying to be part of something bigger than myself. It was fascinating to see a rather tedious 3rd Clarinet part actually having some importance to a greater whole. And it was wonderful to feel a connection with the people around you, all of whom were there for a common purpose: to make music, to entertain people, and to express themselves.

I think this is a big part of the reason that I always found school concerts to be immensely romantic occasions. I've talked before about how, throughout secondary school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, and many of these flights of what were ultimately passing fancy started on the evening of a school concert. There was something curiously intimate about sitting next to someone in the middle of a large ensemble, performing with them, supporting one another. That feeling of connection was even stronger with the other members of your section, and particularly with your partner on your specific part.

And so it was that I inevitably came away from each school concert feeling like I was on cloud nine, not just for a satisfying performance that had gone down well with the supportive audience of parents and teachers; not just for the feeling that there was something in this world that I was good at, that gave me value; not just for the praise I got from my teachers, my peers and other parents, particularly when I performed solo; but because I had, through the music, enjoyed what I felt was an incredibly intimate moment of connection with another person.

I'm almost certain that my fellow 3rd Clarinet partners at various points didn't feel the same way, which is why I never attempted to "make a move" on anyone — not that I had the confidence to do that, anyway. But for that evening, that wonderful, romantic, evening when the school concert took place, I felt genuine happiness and closeness with other people, quite unlike at any other time in my life.

I kind of miss it. I haven't been a member of a musical ensemble for a very long time and my clarinets and saxophones haven't been out of their cases for many years, either. But I still have those pleasant memories; the recollection of the feelings that I felt at the time. It didn't matter that they were one-way or unrequited; to have just been there in the moment was enough, and that's what makes those memories intensely, deeply precious to me.

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.