#oneaday Day 157: A happy ending (not in a sex way)

I’m pleased to report that all of us kicking up a stink over RoseTintedSpectrum’s YouTube channel being wrongfully terminated yesterday has proven successful: our lad managed to finally get through to a human being at YouTube, and his channel has been reinstated, with just an obviously insincere, automated “apology” of sorts from YouTube attached.

This is obviously a good resolution to what was a stressful and upsetting situation for Rosie, and it should bring a few things into sharp focus for everyone. Corporations are not your friends. Corporations can and will take things that you have created away from you at a moment’s notice. Corporations do not care, particularly when they rely on automation and “AI” to do their work for them.

Human beings are your friends. Individuals that you make a personal connection with are how you get by in this increasingly horrible world that we live in. Friendship groups and communities can get things done — the last 24 hours has clearly proven that, with Rosie’s story not only spreading across Twitter and temporarily drowning out at least some of the white supremacy thanks to the few creators with a decent following who are still there, but also making some noise on BlueSky and even getting a writeup on the retro gaming website from the NintendoLife folks, Time Extension.

I find it kind of hilarious, tragic and frustrating that there are some folks who took glee in this whole situation. People such as the odious George “FunkySpectrum” Cropper, who has made his entire online life about spreading hatred of people he doesn’t like. And people like one anonymous stroppy twat who goes by “GlamorousAlpaca” in Time Extension’s comments, who just made shit up about Rosie for no apparent reason. But as frustrating as the sad, pathetic existence of these people is, they will never know the joy that Rosie is undoubtedly feeling right now: the understanding that there are people out there who like him, care about him and will fight for him when he has been wronged.

I’m glad that all this has been successfully resolved, but I’m concerned that this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot more of late. The cynic in me blames the rise in the use of “AI” in big corporations like Google; despite these systems being demonstrably fallible and prone to hallucinations, it seems big business is willing to trust its judgement, even going so far as to give it the power to completely remove someone’s hard work from the Internet for a perceived (and, I reiterate, non-existent) infraction. It happened to me with WordPress.com, it happened to Rosie on YouTube and I’m sure we’ll hear about it happening to other people, too.

The Internet continues to enshittify itself, but we can still find havens of sanity amid groups of like-minded, sensible, supportive and caring people. If you have been fortunate enough to find a group like that online, be sure to hold on to them with everything you have. I feel like they will only become more valuable to you as time goes on.

Oh, while you’re here, go pop RoseTintedSpectrum a subscribe if you haven’t already. Watch a few vids and leave a couple of nice comments, too. The lad could do with a smile after the last 24 hours.

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.

#oneaday Day 156: A reminder that automated moderation solutions suck

Hello. Bit of a serious one today. Many of you reading this will likely be familiar with the YouTube channel RoseTintedSpectrum. He has suffered an extremely unfortunate happening today in that YouTube has seen fit to completely obliterate his entire channel. Their reasoning? He supposedly violated their policies about “spam, scams and deceptive practices”. Needless to say, he did not.

For the unfamiliar, RoseTintedSpectrum is someone who’s been doing YouTube for a few years now. As the name of his channel suggests, he started out doing videos about old Spectrum games, and his dry humour and cynical wit won him a small but dedicated following of folks who enjoyed what he put out. Over time, he branched out into a niche that is somewhat underserved: providing commentary on “classic” TV shows, beginning with ITV’s show about video games and computer culture, Bad Influence. Most recently, he has been doing huge retrospectives on the legendary GamesMaster, and these videos caused his channel to have a huge and well-deserved surge in popularity.

Well, they did, anyway. For reasons known only to YouTube’s automated moderation algorithm, his channel has now been banished to the shadow realm, and he is unable to get a human response out of anyone. He attempted to appeal the “decision” and got a negative response back within 5 minutes, suggesting that no human being has been involved at any step in this process. And they have the gall to say on Twitter that “these decisions are made very carefully” and “thoughtfully”. Are they fuck.

If all this sounds a little familiar, it’s very similar to what happened with me and WordPress.com a while back — the reason this blog is now self-hosted rather than hosted with WordPress.com. That was almost the exact same situation: my hard work of many years (nearly 20 in my case!) was accidentally and incorrectly branded as “spam”, and immediately removed from circulation without warning or any attempt to contact me. Thankfully, my repeated badgering and yelling at WordPress.com meant that it was back up and running again the next day, but the whole situation spurred me on to move my blog off-site.

There’s a key difference there, though; while I could do that with my blog, YouTubers do not have that luxury. People who make videos are pretty much locked in to YouTube for life, because self-hosting videos is completely unworkable from both a storage space and bandwidth perspective. There are other video-hosting solutions out there, but they all have issues — no-one gives a shit about Vimeo (particularly now it’s branded itself as “AI-powered”) and Rumble is full of the absolute worst shitheads on the planet. So for most folks, it’s YouTube or nothing.

I want to emphasise this key point: it is completely unacceptable for automated moderation tools to have the power to take a creator’s hard work offline without even attempting to contact them. It is completely unacceptable that this occurs without any human input whatsoever. And it is completely unacceptable for YouTube’s support team, when contacted about this issue, to say there is “nothing more they can do” because the automated appeal response to the automated channel deletion decided within less than five minutes that no mistakes had been made at any point in the automation process.

If a channel is flagged as being in violation of some sort of policy, that should be an immediate signal for an actual human to look at it. It should have taken anyone human less than five minutes to determine that there was nothing on RoseTintedSpectrum’s channel even remotely related to “spam, scams or deceptive practices”, and this whole situation should have never happened in the first place.

But no. Because big corpos like Google are all-in on AI and automation, they trust the clearly and demonstrably fallible machines to handle it all themselves — including any attempts to appeal the decisions. And the result is situations like we have now, where a dedicated and hard-working creative type is left with absolutely nothing to show for years of hard graft.

RoseTintedSpectrum puts an unbelievable amount of effort into each and every video he has ever made, and that should be abundantly clear to any human being looking at his channel.

But sadly, because no human being at YouTube has looked at his channel, we’re left with the situation we’re in now. Which is completely unacceptable.

If you’re still clinging on to your Twitter account in the vain hope that the last week or so has all been a bad dream, I urge you to contact @TeamYouTube and @YouTubeLiaison over there to let them know they have made a huge mistake — RoseTintedSpectrum’s YouTube account, if you want to copy that in, also, is @SpectrumTinted. With any luck, this will all be resolved sooner rather than later.

And if you’re reading this and happen to be in any sort of position to make big decisions at your place of work: automated moderation solutions are fucking bad and should always have human oversight. So don’t fucking delete people’s hard work before you even attempt to contact them.

Sort it out, YouTube.

#oneaday Day 155: Four things you probably shouldn’t put on a sandwich (but you actually should at least once)

The British tendency to make crap food is well-documented. But a lot of it comes from an honest place: the desire to eat something which is both delicious and absolutely terrible for you. Therefore, today I present you with an exclusive lineup of four sandwich recipes that you should probably try late at night without telling anyone, lest they think less of you for even contemplating trying one of these.

Me, meanwhile, my self-esteem can’t really get much lower, so I don’t mind admitting that I have tried and loved all of these at various points in time. So take it from me, an absolute complete and utter loser, that these are just the thing for when you fancy a cheeky supper but you 1) don’t want to order from the kebab shop for the fifth time that week and 2) don’t have very much in the cupboards.

The sauce sandwich

This tangy little number is just the thing for when you want a little bit of a kick — or a lot, if you elect to use some form of hot or chilli sauce. My personal preference is for HP sauce, as its somewhat “sweet and sour” nature complements the savoury nature of the buttered bread nicely, but you can use any condiment sauce you happen to have knocking around in your cupboard. I do not recommend attempting this with non-condiment sauces such as fish sauce.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
Bottle of sauce

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread on a plate side by side.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. Apply a liberal helping of the sauce of your choice. The pattern in which you apply the sauce is up to you, but I personally favour a sort of spiral pattern.

4. (Optional) Spread the sauce across the bread with a knife for even coverage.

5. Close the sandwich and enjoy.

The crisp sandwich

This delightful recipe is all about texture and juxtaposition. The softness of the bread and the smoothness of the spread gives way to the jagged, brittle crisps contained within — and the same happens with the flavour. The simple, uncomplicated, savoury bread opens each bite, which then concludes with an explosion of taste from the crisps. For the best possible crisp sandwiches, use that kind of crisps that clearly has too much flavouring powder on them; the kind that makes your tongue numb. I recommend Seabrook’s prawn cocktail flavour.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
Bag of crisps

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread on a plate side by side.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. Empty the entire bag of crisps onto one of the slices of bread. Make sure you don’t lose any.

4. Close the sandwich and apply pressure to crush the crisps slightly. Enjoy!

The pie sandwich

This truly indulgent feast is ideal for when you just can’t get enough carbs. The exact nature of the pie isn’t super-important, though something like a meat pie, Ginsters steak bake or something along those lines tends to work the best. The important thing is that you are damn well putting an entire pie in a sandwich, and you are going to love it.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
A pie

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread on a plate side by side.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. (Optional) Warm the pie according to its instructions, ideally in the oven, but the microwave will suffice if you can’t wait.

4. Lay the pie on one of the slices of bread.

5. Close the sandwich. If the pie is tall, apply pressure to flatten it down to better fit in the sandwich. A steak bake is already the ideal size and shape for a sandwich.

6. Enjoy. If you warmed the pie, be careful, as the filling will be hot!

The sugar sandwich

Time for dessert with this sweet treat! You don’t have to wait until after your main meal to enjoy this one, as it makes an excellent snack at any time of day, particularly 1am, and especially after you’ve been drinking.

Ingredients:
White bread (2 slices)
Butter or similar spread
Sugar to taste (golden or brown sugar is best)

Method:
1. Arrange two slices of bread side by side on a plate.

2. Butter both slices of bread with the spread of your choice.

3. Apply sugar liberally across one of the slices. Then add a bit more just for good measure.

4. Close the sandwich and enjoy your sweet treat.

Disclaimer

If you die or suffer any sort of mishap as a result of consuming any one of these sandwiches, it absolutely wasn’t my fault. I also take no responsibility for anyone judging you if they happen to walk in on you making or consuming one of these. If you have even contemplated making any of these, you already know what you’re getting yourself into, so you can get yourself out of it, too.

#oneaday Day 154: If you can’t create without AI, you shouldn’t be creating

YouTube recommended me a video earlier. I’m not going to share it because it’s shit. But I will tell you about it. It was a video supposedly “reimagining” the video game series Streets of Rage as a “movie”. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last year or so, you already know what’s coming: yes, it’s entirely AI-generated drivel, and the complete content of the “movie” consists of nothing but people staring moodily at the camera while there’s a slight pan around them, and people walking towards the camera in slow motion.

The video has a quarter of a million views, and a comments section full of people gushing effusive praise over the “creator”. This is not the first video that this channel has put out like this; to date, over the last year they have spaffed out 215 videos that are all like this. And not only that, their About section on their channel is very transparently written by ChatGPT.

I hope you don’t think it controversial of me to say that if you can’t create without using AI, you shouldn’t be creating at all. I will, under extreme duress, concede that there are certain uses of AI tools which might be useful as part of the creative process. AI music tools, for example, can be quite effective if you feed them some lyrics you’ve written yourself. (Getting AI to write lyrics results in extreme garbage.)

But if all you do is put shit into an AI video generator and then spaff it out on YouTube — and you can’t even be arsed to write your own bio — you are not a creative person.

The standard argument that insufferable AI types like to trot out at this point is that generative AI “democratises” creativity by allowing anyone to “create”. Except it doesn’t, because the output is not your own work; you haven’t created anything. The result is a pile of plagiarised crap that is immediately identifiable as the product of generative AI.

And anyway, creativity is already democratised. There is tons of free software out there that anyone can download and use, for computers, phones and tablets. YouTube is full of video tutorials on how to get started, improve your techniques and take on some advanced challenges. There are several decades’ worth of text tutorials archived across various websites from over the years.

There is no excuse for taking the lazy option and just feeding a prompt into the lake-boiling plagiarism machine. If you want to be creative, be creative. But know that it takes work. And that work is worthwhile, because people will be able to tell when you have put that work in. Those who follow you will see your work improve, adapt and change over time. You’ll find your own unique “voice”. And there really is nothing quite like being able to express yourself in your own distinctive way; being able to sit back and look at something you made and think, with a slight smile on your lips, “I made that”.

With generative AI, there is none of that. You get derivative, immediately identifiable slop that all looks the same and all contains the same basic errors. You never have the experience of refining and improving your own work, because you haven’t done any work. You never find your own unique voice, because you are beholden to the algorithms and training data that the LLM you’re using has stolen from all over the Internet. And you never, really, truly, express yourself.

In the meantime, until you come to the realisation that all you’re doing is spaffing out hollow, soulless pieces of crap that look like creative works but are actually anything but, you are poisoning the entire Internet with your garbage… and, judging by the comments section on the video in question, poisoning the minds of people who aren’t familiar with just how fucking easy it is to tell the magic art-stealing machine to steal some art to your specifications.

The planet is doomed. And no-one gives a shit. Sleep well!

#oneaday Day 153: Sharing stuff

Hello. If you follow me here, it’s relatively likely that you follow me in other places, too. But I realise that there is the possibility you don’t. As such, I would like to devote today’s post to sharing a few things I’ve done over on YouTube. If you would like to follow my YouTube channel, here’s the link. Over there, I make videos on video games, primarily retro stuff but with occasional dalliances into more recent stuff I feel like talking about. And also related topics, which brings me to the first video I would like to share.

Exactly what does Yars’ Revenge taste like? I decided to find out. Yes, I am someone who is foolish enough to see a range of 10 sauces with “Atari” written on them, and then to spend £70 on purchasing all of them. I partly did this because I like Atari, partly because I like a good sauce, and partly because I thought it might make a fun video. I am pleased to report that these ten sauces have fulfilled all of their obligations, and you can see my first reactions to them in the video above.

You probably know this, but for my day job I work for Blaze Entertainment, makers of the Evercade range of consoles and the HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket devices, which are also Evercade compatible. When I learned we would be doing an Atari handheld, I was, of course, delighted — even more so when I learned we would be doing a special edition woodgrain model. In this video, I give a quick overview of all 50 games on the system. I was not paid to do this by either my employer or Atari — I just wanted to, because there’s some cool stuff on there, and I’m an Atari nerd.

Atari attracted some raised eyebrows when they announced Yars Rising, a follow-up to the famous 1982 Atari 2600 title. I played the demo one Steam Next Fest and was very taken with it — helped enormously by the fact I’m very fond of the other games developer WayForward have previously worked on. I bought the full game and really enjoyed it, so I made a video about it, based on my write-up over on MoeGamer. It did quite well by the standards of my channel, too, which was nice.

This video didn’t do very well, at least initially, and it’s still sitting on the low side of the view count compared to some of my other stuff. But I wanted to share it because it’s about a thoroughly interesting game: The Missing by SWERY65. This is a platformer in which you play a woman who can’t die; she can survive being decapitated and dismembered and, indeed, it’s necessary to endure both of those things in order to solve the game’s various puzzles.

Far from being a weirdly violent horror game, though, The Missing is actually a thoroughly fascinating, deeply personal story about gender identity and finding acceptance — both in yourself, and from those around you. The game was so striking to me I really wanted to talk about it, so I’m glad I made this video, even if not that many people watched it.

Let’s close with this one. I went into this thinking that doing a video on a text adventure would be a silly idea, but ended up really enjoying the whole thing. Narrating the whole thing makes for (in my humble opinion, anyway) a relaxing, pleasant video, and I don’t mind admitting that I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of my own voice in this video on multiple occasions. Plus I think Moonmist is a thoroughly interesting game from Infocom that rarely gets talked about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy those. Please do feel free to subscribe over on YouTube if you want to see more. My wife Andie is away for a couple of days from tomorrow lunchtime, so I’m going to use the time to record a bunch of stuff, I think, and probably do some streaming, too. Join me!

#oneaday Day 152: Two things

Two things.

1. America, you fucked it up. After I specifically told you not to.

2. I did the thing. I hope reading it brings you some distraction.

I’m not sure what else there is to say, really, aside from that I really feel for my poor pals in the States right now. Knowing that a vile shitstain of a human being is going to be sitting in the big chair for one of the most powerful nations on Earth doesn’t feel good from here, let alone what it must feel like for actual residents of that country.

And it’s for the second time. It wasn’t a fluke accident, this has happened for a second time.

I think it’s long past time that the supposedly “civilised” world admits that we have a problem. A big one.

We’re regressing. You and I may not be, but collectively, as a society, we are regressing. After a lot of good work to improve tolerance and inclusion for those who aren’t straight cis white men, it feels like in the last few years we’ve taken more steps backward than we have done forwards. And Trump’s election to the White House would just seem to confirm that.

Because, like it or not, the fact he achieved this means that there is a significant portion of people who think that he “Has a Point” about at least some of the vile, odious rhetoric he has been spouting in the run-up to this election. It’s almost certainly the same people who think that projects having women or people who aren’t white in a leading role is a sign of “wokeness”.

Those people, for whatever reason, are furious about the world. And they see intolerance, abusiveness and voting for someone as transparently awful as Trump as a means of assuaging that anger. They hope he deports “all the immigrants”. They hope he takes rights away from people who have had to fight to be recognised. They hope he sends things spiralling backwards into attitudes even the mid-20th century would be ashamed to express.

And, honestly, sitting here observing from a distance, it’s frightening. It’s horrible to know we live in a world where such intolerance still exists; the appalling treatment of minority groups is supposed to be something we read about in history books, then think all smugly about how much better we are than “back then”.

But we’re not. We may not be putting black people on their own buses or denying women the vote, but the intolerance the supposedly “civilised” world is exhibiting right now — and the fact it goes unchallenged — is still painful to witness, and I’m not the one experiencing that intolerance first-hand. It’s not enough to “be a good person”, to “be the change you want to see in the world”, because no-one gives a shit.

What is it that one can do, though? It’s honestly hard to say at this point. But the world we live in today is a frightening one. And I’m afraid I have few words of comfort to share for those who are most likely to end up suffering because of all this.

#oneaday Day 151: Scribbling down an idea

Hello. Indulge me this evening, if you please, because I want to make a note of an idea I have for a longer article that I’ll likely publish on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. It stems from a discussion I’ve previously had with my friend Chris (my MoeGamer Podcast co-star) about how RPGs are “categorised”, and how “western RPG” and “Japanese RPG” are woefully inadequate terms to talk about the RPG as it exists today.

I’m not going to go too into it today but I wanted to jot down the ideas that were rattling around my head while I was playing Silent Hope this evening. And that is to devise some sort of “taxonomy” for RPGs as they exist today. I’m thinking at the top level, you can split them into two distinct categories: narrative-centric RPGs, where the core of the experience is on enjoying the unfolding story; and mechanics-centric RPGs, where the main point of the game is fiddling with its various systems, optimising your characters and suchlike.

There are some games that straddle that line, of course, but for the most part, it’s pretty easy to split them down the middle like that based on what is clearly the main priority. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, is a narrative-centric RPG. Demon Gaze is a mechanics-centric RPG. Where things get quite interesting is that long-running series often go back and forth between being narrative- and mechanics-centric — Final Fantasy is a prime example of this.

You can then divide each half into further subcategories. Narrative-centric RPGs, for example, could be divided into cinematic RPGs, sandbox RPGs, visual novel RPGs and storytelling RPGs, while mechanics-centric RPGs could be split into first-person dungeon crawlers, isometric action RPGs, massively multiplayer games, roguelikes and various other categories, some of which intertwine and cross over with one another.

I haven’t thought about the idea in a lot of depth yet, as you can probably tell from the vagueness, but I think there’s an interesting concept to write about there. The reason I’m not writing about it in detail right now is because it’s 1am and I, as ever, have forgotten to write anything on here sooner. It is not beyond my capabilities to bash out a 3,000+ word epic at 1 in the morning, but I do have to work tomorrow and would rather do so having had something approaching a decent night’s sleep.

So that’s that. I will flesh out the concept in the very near future and post it on MoeGamer. Might even turn into a fun video. We shall see. Anyway, I have recorded the idea here now. Next job is to completely forget that I wrote it down here and revisit the idea in roughly 36 months.

Good night!

#oneaday Day 150: Don’t fuck it up

Dear America,

We, the Rest of the World, are given to understand that you are holding an election for your next president tomorrow. To all of us, looking from the outside, the choice appears to be between a bright orange cunt who has done more than enough things to be locked up in prison for a very long time, and a likable woman who, along with her running mate, has not only done a surprising amount to reach out to “the young”, typically some of the most apathetic when it comes to politics, but has also relentlessly — and completely correctly — highlighted her opponent’s shortcomings.

This would, to us, appear to be an easy choice. We know that both candidates have things that you’re not altogether happy about for one reason or another. We know that for certain groups of you living in the States, either choice is a difficult or uncomfortable one. But come on now. Seriously. If you vote for the orange cunt, you are an idiot. There is no other way to put it. You are a fucking idiot.

I’m not going to go off on one like some people do online and start talking about “Nazis” and “fascism”, but the orange cunt is a cunt. The orange cunt is a criminal. The orange cunt has already proven that he makes a hash of things if given even the slightest hint of power, so how it even got to a situation where the choice is between the orange cunt and literally anyone else is completely beyond the ken of those of us observing from the outside. This race should not be happening. The orange cunt should not even be in consideration for the big chair in one of the most powerful nations on the planet.

And yet, somehow, he is. Which is what worries me. Because if the orange cunt can get into a position where he’s an election away from sitting in that big chair — for the second time, let’s not forget — it concerns me that he might actually win. And, besides that making your entire democratic process a laughingstock — not that ours is much better, mind — it looks like that is going to be outright dangerous for a lot of people.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the orange cunt losing will be dangerous, too. We’ve seen on multiple occasions that he doesn’t take losing very well at all. We’re just all consoling ourselves with the fact that if he does lose, there is hopefully enough out there now to lock him away where he can do no further harm. Although we very much doubt that this will actually happen. He’s rich, you see, and rich people don’t go to jail. “If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes,” and all that.

So come on, America. There is very obviously only one sensible choice here, but we, collectively, don’t quite have 100% faith that you’ll make that sensible choice as a nation. You have voted the orange cunt into office once before, after all.

We’d very much like to be wrong. And so, in the words of Ru Paul: good luck, and don’t fuck it up.

#oneaday Day 149: Late night ravings

Hello. It is nearly 2am and I have forgotten to write a post. Because my brain works the way it does, I will now be unable to sleep until I write something, so here I am. I am writing on my phone and without my glasses on so please excuse any typos.

I finished Spirit Hunter NG this evening. That’s the sequel to Death Mark, and an excellent horror adventure in its own right. I’m looking forward to playing the final game in the series; will likely start that tomorrow.

One thing these games have reminded me is my fondness for games that attempt to imply things are “mechanics” when they’re really not anything remarkable. In both Death Mark and NG the best example of this is probably the “time limit that is not a time limit”.

In both games, narrative pressure is placed on the protagonists to solve the various cases before the ghostly curse that has been placed upon them brings their lives to an unfortunate end. This is positioned to the player as it becoming increasingly urgent to solve things, but it’s a purely narrative thing. There is no time limit and actually no means of dying from the curse expiring.

NG has another example in the form of its “Survival Escape” sequences. These are where you confront a ghost and must use the right items on the right objects in the scene to survive and fend off the spirit. Mechanically you’re not doing anything different from the point and click investigation sequences, but the game’s positioning of these sequences as being urgent — and the fact you die if you take the wrong action — sets them apart.

There’s probably a more substantial article in this somewhere — I vaguely recall Final Famtasy XIII-2 having an overdramatic name for what was essentially conversation trees, for example — but right now I’m very tired and I must sleep. So I’m going to sleep.

#oneaday Day 148: Stream Success

I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:

As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I’ve been playing recently.

I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It’s really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.

There’s also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a “rank” which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.

There’s also a really great “rapid battle” system, where if you know what you’re doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.

Anyway, it’s half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!