#oneaday Day 262: Just a little bit worse

I'm aware that the following is going to make me sound painfully middle-class, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's important to the story.

When I was a kid, the ultimate treat for enduring a shopping trip with my parents was not a trip to McDonald's or a big bag of sweets. It was going to the Marks and Spencer food section, getting a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich and a can of Caribbean crush, and enjoying both of those in the car park before the drive home. I'm not exaggerating when I say those sandwiches were delicious, and I'd give anything to experience them again.

"So just go to Marks and Spencers and get one," you may well say. And to that I would simply say… they're not the same. Just as so many other things are not the same as they used to be; just as so many other things have been gradually, subtly, almost imperceptibly enshittified over the years, so too have Marks and Spencer prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches.

In fact, pre-packed sandwiches in general have been on a downward spiral for many years now. When I was a little old to be dragged around Cambridge shopping with my parents, my friend Plummer and I would often go out for a drive of an evening, perhaps stopping by a nearby "old man pub" that we enjoyed, then swinging by the 24-hour Tesco petrol station to enjoy some midnight sandwiches before going home. While those sandwiches were never quite of the same quality as the mythical Marks and Spencers prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches, they were still pretty good.

Nowadays, every time I stop by a shop and think "oh, I'll get a Meal Deal" I also accompany that thought with "maybe the sandwiches will be better this time". But they never are. The bread is always soggy and too cold, the fillings are always underseasoned, nigh-flavourless in many cases, and as someone who physically retches if he can taste raw onion, my options are often a bit limited, to boot.

The possibility had occurred to me that perhaps I was nostalgically romanticising the concept of pre-packed sandwiches, and particularly the Marks and Spencers prawn mayonnaise sandwich. But then I consider all the other things which are indisputably worse than they used to be, and it's hard not to feel like everything now costs more but is also considerably worse.

Take a Kellogg's Variety pack, for example. I used to love these, because it was a bunch of little cereal packets, one portion each, that meant you could have a varied breakfast each day. Some of them were "healthy" (and I use the term loosely with regard to breakfast cereal, I'm aware), such as Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, but there were always some "treats" in there too: Frosties, Ricicles, Coco Pops. I used to love getting a Variety pack when I went to go and visit my Nan; she'd always get them in for me because she knew I enjoyed them, and she'd always make me jelly and ice cream. I miss her and my Grandad.

A while back, Andie and I went for one of our occasional holidays at Center Parcs. While I was there, I thought "hey, I'll get a Variety pack! I haven't had one for ages." I was disappointed to discover that not only to Ricicles just flat-out not exist any more, but the balance in the Variety pack was now overwhelmingly in favour of Rice Krispies, one of the most boring cereals on the planet. Two packets of regular Rice Krispies and a packet of Rice Krispies Multigrain Shapes, whatever ungodly abomination of the breakfast table those might be. (They're not awful. But they're also not interesting.)

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, too, used to be my all-time favourite cereal, but the last box of them I've had has been immensely disappointing as has the box of Weetos I got alongside them. Neither of them are so bad as to make me want to throw them out completely, but they're also both considerably inferior than they once were. They just seem to lack a lot of the flavour that they once had.

I know the answer, of course: it's sugar. Everything has far less sugar in it these days, because sugar is the great sin that has made us all fat. And perhaps there's some truth to that — but then I also find myself thinking that numerous previous generations had full-sugar, full-fat diets and came through the experience without ballooning into an obesity epidemic. So what went wrong? How is it that our bland, flavourless, low-sugar, low-fat, joy-free food of today is still making us fatter than we've ever been in our lives?

Reflecting on things, I think part of the problem might be that the lack of sugar in "staples" such as the everyday breakfast cereal specifically makes me crave some actual sugar. And that's when I go out and get a chocolate bar or a cinnamon bun or whatever. And because I feel that so frequently, and so often indulge myself, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a fat fuck.

Would I feel differently if my everyday food had more sugar, more fat, more flavour to it? I don't know. I know that I have gradually gained weight over the course of the last 25-30 years or so, but the vast majority of that weight has been in the last five years, since COVID. In those last five years, I've felt far more cravings for things that are bad for me than ever before, and I think that's a big part of the problem. When your everyday foods are leaving you feeling unsatisfied and craving more, you're tempted to binge on the things you're craving just to try and feel a little more fulfilled.

It's a more complex situation than that, of course; as I've alluded to numerous times on this blog, my relationship with food is more akin to an addiction, and is tied closely to my mental wellbeing. But I do often find myself wondering that if our everyday food and drink was a bit less artificially bland, we might all paradoxically be a bit better off.

No way to know, really, I guess. All I'm left with is the absolute certainty that if I get a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich from Marks and Spencer today, I will be left disappointed thanks to soggy bread, flavourless prawns and reduced-fat mayo. Not a patch on the real thing from 30+ years ago. And I don't think we're ever getting that back.

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 261: Two for one

Two for the price of one today! Aren't I generous? Of course, I could have probably put what I'm going to say in this post into the previous post, but then I wouldn't have "caught up" having missed a day, and I (and, let's face it, no-one else) would feel bad.

So with that in mind, I'll do my best to try and talk about something completely different in this post.

I've spent my evening playing some Midnight Resistance on Evercade. I do like that game a great deal, and there is, in fact, a reason I've been playing it outside of just "because I want to", but I also just wanted to.

With the general size of modern-day games, it's easy to forget about the appeal of classic arcade-style games from earlier generations of hardware. It's easy to think of these games as being somehow "lesser" thanks to them not having in-depth storylines, not having hours upon hours of gameplay (assuming you can make it through them) and not having in-depth secrets and lore for theorycrafters to post six-hour video essays on YouTube about.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. When I sit down to play a game in the evening, I'm usually prioritising whatever my "big game" is at the moment — Xenoblade Chronicles at present, for example. But sometimes, as I alluded to the other day, I'm in the mood for something different. And that's generally when I bust out something that doesn't take as long to play, but which I often find is still incredibly rewarding, relaxing and enjoyable.

Take The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, which I played and wrote about recently. I decided to play this pretty much on a whim, but almost as soon as I started I knew that I would be devouring this game within a day or two. And, rather than coming away from the experience feeling like I hadn't had value for money from the game because it only lasted for 6 hours, I came away not only immensely satisfied with the experience I'd just had, but also inspired to write nearly 3,000 words about it.

It's the same any time I jump into something a bit shorter. I need to stop thinking of these as "filler" games, as it's easy to do, and actually settle down and spend some proper time with shorter experiences. Because there's a lot to appreciate in them, and it's valuable to consider the various different ways that interactive entertainment can engage our brain, excite us and distract us from the misery that is generally existing in 2025.

I'm feeling increasingly attracted to 16-bit games specifically, and with that in mind I've ordered an FX Pak Pro for my Super NES. This is a flash cart from the Everdrive maker Krikzz, based on an open source project known as SD2SNES, and it supports pretty much every SNES game you can think of, including the ones with the funny custom chips like the Super FX chip or DSP chips — and supposedly it even runs Game Boy games via the Super Game Boy 2 setup. I'm looking forward to loading it up with European SNES ROMs — the TV I run my SNES on doesn't like doing 60Hz — and spending some quality time with some excellent 16-bit games in the very near future.

And, once my wallet has recovered from the not-inconsiderable amount that the FX Pak Pro costs, I'm going to do the same for the Mega Drive and have an absolutely delightful selection of games to spend some time with when I just feel like kicking back and playing things that aren't too demanding of my time.

I do like collecting retro games, but realistically speaking, I have a few considerations: firstly, I don't have a lot of space for more games, and the priority on the remaining space is for current stuff; secondly, retro is getting very expensive, and not always worth the amount you need to pay to get stuff in reasonable condition; and thirdly, retro is also getting a bit unreliable at times. I bought the game Desert Strike three times from CEX and all three cartridges have an issue in the same way. It's not my SNES because that runs absolutely everything else just fine. Combine that with the fact that batteries in carts with save game functions are starting to fail and it's just easier to go the flash cart route. It's not as if buying a second-hand copy of a game from CEX is sending any money back to the original devs, after all — and as a general rule, if something I enjoy gets an official rerelease on a modern system, I will happily pay up for a physical copy of it. (Even better, often with Evercade I get to be part of making those physical releases!)

So yeah. 16-bit is where it's at for me at the moment. And with that in mind, I think a few more attempts at Midnight Resistance before bedtime.

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#oneaday Day 260: Catching up

Did I miss a day? I think I missed a day. With that in mind, I'll attempt to think of two posts' worth of things to say today. Well, even if I didn't write on here yesterday (which I don't think I did), I did at least write something about The Excavation of Hob's Barrow over on MoeGamer, which you can read by clicking on this link. Click it. Go on.

I actually often find myself wondering if it's even worth linking things any more, because I really don't know if people actually click on them any more. I feel like everything I was taught about the Web and supposedly "good" Web design back in the relatively early days has pretty much gone out of the window these days as everyone's collective attention span has declined and the whole Internet, in general, has kind of gone to pot.

I sort of think we've brought that on ourselves to a certain extent, though. I know at the day job I've often been asked to "make things shorter" or suchlike, based on the belief that people won't look at anything that takes more than six picoseconds to digest, and while I don't doubt that people will click away if they're not immediately blasted in the face with some sort of blaring short-form media designed to obliterate their attention span even more than it already has been, I feel like consistently pandering to that perceived audience is just making the problem worse.

When I write, I generally write with my own preferences in mind. When I read something online, I want to feel like I got something out of what I read. It doesn't necessarily have to be learning something completely new to me, but I do need to feel like I got some sort of "value" from the experience. Maybe I got to know the writer a bit better. Maybe I found out a new detail about something I was already familiar with. Maybe I learned to look at something from a new perspective. All of those things are what keeps me reading, not whether or not an article has a bullet-point summary before the text begins so I can decide whether or not to grace this page with the honour that is my attention.

I feel like if you constantly pander to people who have no attention span, all you're going to attract is people with no attention span. I don't think there's anything wrong with someone writing something online — whatever the purpose — and effectively saying "no, fuck you, I have things to say and you are damn well going to sit down and listen to them, or just piss off". This is why I respect writers such as Ed Zitron so much; Ed works with an editor on his blog, but each individual post is still thousands of words long — even longer than the longest posts I've written here or on MoeGamer. Sitting down to an Ed Zitron post is an event, and on no occasion have I come away from the time it takes to read one thinking "I wish I'd spent that time doing something else".

And yet everything about the modern Web seems to be discouraging that kind of in-depth, thoughtful writing. We have websites posting an estimated reading time at the top of their articles, along with the aforementioned bullet-point summaries. We have asides linking to completely different pages after just a couple of paragraphs, before anyone could have possibly read the whole article. We have unrelated videos inserted into the middle of articles, vapid polls whose results aren't used to inform anything whatsoever, and, of course, if you're still foolish to browse the web without ad protection, advertising.

We are constantly bombarded with things vying for our attention and seemingly, at every opportunity, discouraging us from diving deep into things. I was looking up information on a wiki earlier and while I was doing so, a sidebar popped up with "popular posts" that were being pulled from a completely different fucking wiki on a totally different subject.

It takes effort and mental fortitude to resist all this, and honestly I don't blame anyone who just doesn't feel like trying any more. It is a real effort to maintain your focus on something these days, but I would argue it is a worthwhile effort. And to that end, I would encourage everyone who feels like they have ever been struggling to take some time and unplug from the noisiest parts of the Internet — or the Internet altogether — and immerse yourself in something that demands focus. Whether that's a blog you want to catch up on, a book, a TV show you always meant to watch, doesn't matter. What's important is that you pick that thing, then you focus on it to the exclusion of all else. Put your phone down, close all your other browser tabs, just focus.

I can guarantee you'll feel a thousand times more relaxed and about a bajillion times more intelligent after doing this for a bit.

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#oneaday Day 259: Excavations

I successfully did what I planned yesterday — for two nights in a row, even. Last night I spent some time with Smashing the Battle on Nintendo Switch, which I'll write a bit more about once I've spent some more time with it, and tonight I have seemingly spent nearly six hours playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, a point-and-click adventure by Cloak & Dagger Games, published by modern adventure game specialists Wadjet Eye Games.

It always does my soul good to see how not-dead the point-and-click adventure genre has been for quite some time now, because there was definitely a period in the mid 2000s and early 2010s where it felt like there weren't any being made. 3D tech was getting better and everything was suddenly all about cinematic action games — something that certainly hasn't gone away in more recent years — but, looking back, it's clear that adventure games never really went anywhere. And these days, I'd say they're thriving more than they ever have done, even in their supposed golden age. Because not only can we enjoy the established classics from that golden age, there's a host of new ones seemingly being made all the time.

I'll write more specifics about The Excavation of Hob's Barrow when I've fully completed it — I've pressed pause on it for this evening as it's a quarter to one and I should probably sleep. Suffice to say for now that it's very good, though.

In The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, you take on the role of Thomasina Bateman, an antiquarian who has made it her mission to document the various ancient burial mounds scattered around the English countryside. We join the story as she arrives in a remote Northern village, supposedly the home of the titular Hob's Barrow, but she's immediately confronted with mysteries as her contact is nowhere to be seen and no-one seems to want to talk about Hob's Barrow.

That's all I'll say on the plot for now. The interface uses a pretty standard two-button system, with left-clicking "doing" things and right-clicking "looking" at things, but there's plenty of thinking required. Thus far there has been no real "moon logic" to speak of, just a sequence of tasks to complete that provide a sense of relative freedom without overwhelming you with possibilities. In fact, the game is quite cleverly designed in that the "freedom" you feel is not really present at all; there's quite a fixed sequence of things to do with a chain reaction of dependencies, but the fact you discover the beginnings of all these various threads before you start figuring out which order you need to solve them in is what makes this game really work.

It's beautifully presented in low-res pixel art combined with modern graphical techniques and greater colour depth, which gives it a wonderfully distinctive aesthetic. The voice acting is very good, too, seemingly making use of native Northerners in many cases.

I'm intrigued to see where it goes, but not quite enough to pull an all-nighter on it. After all, GOG Galaxy says I've already spent 5 hours and 28 minutes on it this evening and I've only completed two of the in-game "days". I don't know how many there are in total, but it does feel as if the third one is going to be somewhat climactic, so I estimate I'm maybe a little over halfway to two-thirds through? We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, if you're jonesing for a modern point-and-click adventure, I can definitely recommend this one. It's kept me pretty enraptured for the whole evening and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all concludes.

For now, though, sleep. Sleep!

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#oneaday Day 258: Mix it up

One thing I find myself having a bit of trouble with these days is feeling like I'm able to "mix things up" with regard to the things that are entertaining me. I feel a peculiar sense of "guilt" if I start on a new game, TV series or any other form of media before finishing one that I have already been working on for a while. And while in some respects that's not necessarily a bad thing — I estimate I finish more games and TV series than probably 95% of the average game-playing public out there — it's also a bit different from how I used to live.

When I think back to, say, the PS2 era, I had absolutely no problem chopping and changing between what games I was playing. Sure, if I found myself particularly compelled by an RPG or other narrative-based game, I'd probably make that a priority, but I also wouldn't feel any sort of "guilt" if I decided that no, that evening I really wanted to play Grand Theft Auto III. And I'm trying to figure out what, exactly, changed in my mind to create this, frankly, irrational feeling.

My initial reaction was that it might stem from the time where I was doing "Cover Game" features on MoeGamer, where I committed to playing a (usually long) game through from start to finish, penning at least four articles about it along the way. But then I remember while that was at its peak, I was also putting out pretty much daily articles about all manner of other games that I was playing. Granted, a lot of that came down to the fact that I was desperately bored at my day job and thus spent a lot of "work" time actually writing new articles for MoeGamer, but I still had to actually play the games in order to be able to write about them.

So whatever it is, it's happened since that time, so I estimate probably within the last 5 years or so.

Perhaps it's just generally feeling pretty run-down, and not wanting to have to think about too many things at once. That's a plausible suggestion, but inevitably I tend to find when I do have an evening where I just say "fuck it", put my current "big game" to one side and play something else for a bit, I have a good time. So it's not necessarily that I don't want to engage with something else; it's that I'm putting up a weird mental roadblock preventing me from doing so.

Part of it also may well be a false, completely unreal sense of "urgency" that is all in my own head. "I have all these games," I think, "so I have to get through all of them as soon as possible!" And this is nonsense. When I think back to that PS2 era and even earlier, I thought nothing of going back and replaying a favourite game multiple times, just because I enjoyed doing so. I thought nothing of playing a game with multiple endings repeatedly from start to finish without skipping anything. And those were good times!

I'd like to try and get back into that vibe I had when I was writing daily posts on MoeGamer. A while back, I experimented with the idea of "Gaming on a Schedule", and chronicled my thoughts on the process. I came away thinking that it was kind of a good idea, but that it was also possible to be too rigid about such things. The optimal balance is one where you still make time for your "big game" so you actually finish it, but also feel free to have an evening or two or three a week where you just… do something else instead.

So I think I just need to have a bit of a word with myself. If I have an evening such as I am having tonight, where I feel like "I don't really feel like playing Xenoblade Chronicles," there is no reason that I should feel guilt about that. I've already spent nearly 100 hours on that game, and I'll be spending at least that amount of time again on Xenoblade Chronicles X starting this time next month. So what does it matter if I have an evening "off" and play something else instead? It doesn't mean that I'm never going to finish Xenoblade Chronicles, which I think is where this whole roadblock stems from. Leaving aside the fact that I'm already very near the end, I have, after all, already beaten it once in my life, albeit on a different console.

So y'know what? This evening I'm going to play something else. Exactly what, I haven't quite got as far as deciding just yet. But I'm going to go with my gut rather than agonising over it for hours and then getting to bedtime having not actually done anything fun at all this evening.

So there. That's that. Here we go.

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#oneaday Day 257: When it's bollocks, say it's bollocks

I am an avid reader of Ed Zitron's blog (sorry, newsletter, because apparently that's just what we call blogs now) Where's Your Ed At? If you're at all interested in the tech space, I highly recommend you subscribe or at least check in on it regularly, because Zitron is one of the only people in the space who has the balls to say it like it is: that an awful lot of what is coming out of the mouths of tech companies right now is complete and utter bollocks.

Today, a story went round about a research project at Microsoft where they were using generative AI for "game ideation", and also noted that they thought they could use their generative AI models for "preservation". This was reported on by Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge, thus (screenshotted rather than embedded 'cause the coward deleted it after everyone dunked on it):

Now, if you know anything about video game preservation, you know that feeding an old game into a generative AI model and then hoping it will hallucinate at least a rough approximation of the original game experience is not "preservation". It's bastardisation at best, a completely useless endeavour at worst, and a massive waste of energy and money regardless of the result that comes out of the other end.

Game preservation is a problem that, for the most part, we have solved. We have excellent software emulation solutions, built over the course of decades of development. Hardware emulation via FPGA at an affordable cost for the general public has advanced hugely in just a few short years. Software libraries for pretty much any system you can think of are archived in their entirety at numerous places across the Internet, and strong strides have been made in providing commercial, legally relicensed versions of classic games for a modern audience, both on existing modern systems and on bespoke emulation-centric devices.

So why, then, why the fuck would we want a generative AI model to make a best guess at what a video game that already exists and has been preserved perfectly well might look like if you play it for longer than 10 frames?

That paragraph above is what tech journalists should be asking. And the reason I bring up Ed Zitron at the start of this post is because he's one of the only people to actually ask questions like this: to take a look at the utter garbage being spewed by today's tech companies and to say "this is complete horseshit, what the actual fuck are you on?"

And Zitron, being an outspoken type, is not afraid to call out today's tech journalism space for not doing this. And he's absolutely right to do so. It is the tech journalism sector's job to look at what it going on, to realise that it is complete horseshit and then have the confidence to say that it is complete horseshit.

But they won't do that, for a variety of reasons. Advertising deals. Exclusive access. PR partnerships. An inexplicable desire not to rock the boat, despite the fact the boat has a huge hole in it and has been steadily sinking for 15-20 years at this point.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that journalists are taking bribes for positive reviews in literally all circumstances — I have experience in the industry, remember, and the most I had to worry about in that regard was a mild admonishment from my editor for criticising a Mortal Kombat game's DLC plan when Mortal Kombat was the cover game for that issue of GamePro.

But come on now. Tech journos should be looking at this utter garbage that keeps getting flung our way, and instead of declaring it "interesting" and doing the stupid looky-eyes emoji that makes their post immediately look like a 14 year old girl wrote it, they should be going "hang on a minute, what does that actually mean?" then exploring it further, asking some probing questions (which inevitably won't get a response, but that in itself says something) and then confidently declaring the latest generative AI "innovation" to be what it is: complete and utter horseshit doused in the finest snake oil.

And people wonder why the entire journalism sector is floundering. Could it perhaps be because very little actual journalism seems to be getting done?

Shout-out at this point not only to Ed Zitron's aforementioned blog, but also the excellent coverage of the Elon Musk nonsense in the States by Wired's politics department, 404 Media being a rare example of tech journalism that actually asks those hard-hitting questions, and Aftermath for doing something similar with games journalism. There are still people doing good work out there. But the people on the big, well-known mastheads, like Warren above, need to step their game up, stop being so incredulous and start acting like actual journalists.

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#oneaday Day 256: I'm tired of collective hateboners

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that probably 75-80% of the games I've bought in the last… maybe 5 years or so, possibly more, have come from limited-press companies. My reasoning for this? I like owning physical copies of games, and most of the limited-press companies wait to put out a physical version of a game until it has all its updates applied and usually (though not always, these days) all its DLC.

Taking this approach to buying games has a few effects. Firstly, it makes me consider whether or not I really want something, or if, as often happens with digital releases, I'm likely to download it, play it maybe once or twice and then never think of it ever again.

I value physical releases more. I just do. This isn't a slight against those who can't afford to, don't want to or aren't able to do physical releases, it's just a fact about how I approach my video game collection. If it's not on a cart or a disc, I am very likely to forget about it.

One thing I'm growing increasingly tired of is the collective whingeing that goes on any time a limited-press company announces its involvement in a physical print run of something. It happened just today with Digital Eclipse's long-awaited announcement that it will be publishing physical versions of its "Gold Master" interactive documentary series on Karateka, the back catalogue of Jeff Minter and Tetris. Because Limited Run Games are involved, some people have already written the release off completely. One person in a Discord I frequent described it as the "worst birthday present ever".

And… I just don't see it. Limited Run used to have big problems back when they opened pre-orders for five minutes and then promptly had them all swallowed up by scalpers, but they don't do that any more; instead, they have an open preorder window, during which they establish who actually wants a copy, then they print those copies. Sometimes it takes a good few months from ordering a game to actually getting it, but the company has always been up-front about that being a thing, at least partly for the reasons I described above — wanting to ensure that the game is "complete on cart/disc" with all updates applied — and partly to give them the time needed to take all those preorders, pass those orders on to their manufacturing partners and then sort the whole shebang out.

The same is true for other limited-press houses. Probably the "worst" of the batch in terms of being kept waiting is Strictly Limited Games, who has been sitting on preorders for some games for (checks) three years at this point, but when their eminently affordable special editions do arrive, they are absolutely lovely in terms of quality, with tons of extras and just plain gorgeous packaging.

I guess I just… don't mind waiting. I am under no illusions as to when I will be getting a game when I order from one of these companies; more often than not, it's a nice surprise several months (or even years, in the case of Strictly Limited) down the line when I get a dispatch notification for something I'd all but forgotten I ordered.

To an extent, I get why this pisses people off. We live in an age where if you order from Amazon at the right time, you can get something on the same day you ordered it. We live in an age where you can click a button online and get food delivered to your door within half an hour or so. We live in an age of digital convenience, where if you want to watch something you just click the thing to watch it rather than having to search for somewhere that has it in stock, order it and wait for it to arrive.

To anyone who is used to those modern conveniences, paying up for something you won't get for months is unthinkable. But it's not that unusual. Many online shopping sites that aren't Amazon take a while to ship things. eBay sellers can be relied upon to not even think about shipping your item until a week after you paid. Things go out of stock and sometimes aren't back in stock for months. Granted, most of these situations doesn't see you waiting as long as you do for a limited-press video game, but after several years of hearing people constantly whining out non-specific complaints about Limited Run and its ilk, I just have to say… I don't care. Shut up.

In seven years of ordering from Limited Run, I've had precisely one mishap, and that was down to the courier in this country making a mess of things rather than anything Limited Run did — I ended up with a slightly crushed Switch case for the Contra collection from Konami. So y'know what I did? I got a new Switch case and replaced the damaged one. Job done.

In multiple years of ordering from other limited-press companies, I've had no issues. Yes, I have the aforementioned outstanding Strictly Limited orders, but I have faith that those are going to arrive. It doesn't really matter when they arrive, because I have over a thousand other games on my shelves all around me, and even more in my Steam library and downloaded to various consoles. It'll be nice to finally have those, but I'm not mad about them not being here yet, because there's really no point in being mad about it. I paid my money knowing that I'd be waiting for a while, and so that's exactly what I will continue to do.

I will also be ordering the Digital Eclipse Gold Master games when preorders open on February 25 — although as it happens, Digital Eclipse have sensibly partnered with a European distributor (Clear River Games, who also distributed their excellent remake of the first Wizardry game) as well as Limited Run for North America, which makes life quite a bit easier.

I'm tired of not feeling like I can be excited or pleased that something I hoped would get a physical release is actually getting a physical release, because The Internet can't get over its collective hateboners. And I can almost guarantee that a significant proportion of the people whingeing about it being Limited Run don't have any specific complaints other than they don't like them, or because someone involved in the company said something dumb on Twitter.

If you don't like them, you have no obligation to give them money. You have no obligation to buy anything if, for whatever reason, you don't want to give the people making it any money. I happen to like what they do, and I'm getting real tired of people pissing over my excitement for things like the Digital Eclipse releases because they can't get over the publishing partner.

Anyway, that was a useless rant. No-one's reading this anyway. But I feel a bit better. Time to go watch Angel in bed.

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#oneaday Day 255: I need a Hero(Quest)

Through various combinations of circumstances, I found myself looking at the information about Hasbro's recent(ish) reboot of HeroQuest earlier, and I actually found my finger hovering over the "Buy" button (it was £30 off on Amazon, putting it down to a much more reasonable £70 from its usual £100 price tag) before the rational part of my brain kicked in, reminded me that I haven't seen another human being other than my wife in my house for a very long time indeed, and found myself feeling a bit sad that I, seemingly, would be forever deprived of playing something that I think would actually be rather fun.

Of course, this is nothing new. Growing up, I had a copy of Advanced HeroQuest (still do, in fact) that I played with other people precisely… twice, I think. Space Crusade (which I no longer have) hit the table a couple of times, and a couple of more recent successors like Descent: Journeys in the Dark also had a couple of plays, but I have never yet managed to play through a complete campaign of any game like this. And this makes me sad, because I have wanted to ever since my brother's teenage girlfriend (as in, girlfriend when they were both teens, to be clear) Allie introduced child me to the original MB release of HeroQuest many, many years ago.

Part of me is just saying "fuck it, buy it anyway" and maybe convince my wife to play, or perhaps convince my few remaining in-person friends to come play it for a day when I manage to pry them away from their oh-so-busy personal lives for the one occasion a year they'll actually leave their houses around my birthday. But that rational part of me keeps saying "you'll never get anyone to play it, you'll have wasted your money".

And perhaps I will have. But part of me still wants it.

There's something about the original HeroQuest that I've always liked. I know there's elements of it that are stupid (like the roll-to-move mechanic, which is at least phrased as "you may move up to that many spaces" rather than "you must move that many spaces", and the fact every monster in the base game only ever had 1 body point, meaning it was nearly as easy to kill a lumbering Gargoyle as it was a pathetic Goblin) and that other, later games did what it's doing a lot better. But I also think there's still a distinct appeal to HeroQuest that those "better" games lack.

Take Descent: Journeys in the Dark, for example. Ostensibly this is the same kind of game: you have 1-4 hero players competing against an antagonistic player who is in control of all the monsters. But each scenario is much more of a tactical strategy game challenge rather than a dungeon crawl. There are elements of exploration, sure, but the whole thing feels less about delving into dank dungeons, and instead more like a wargame. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I just think I prefer the dungeon crawling aspect.

Then there are games like Gloomhaven, which, although critically acclaimed, make me feel like they overcomplicate things massively — and again, each scenario often ends up feeling more like a wargame than a dungeon crawl. I wanted to like Gloomhaven, particularly after a friend spent a lot of money on the fancy Kickstarter edition, but I just… didn't. It really didn't grab me, for some reason, and its potentially interesting "Legacy" elements, predictably, went mostly unused because we only played a couple of sessions of it.

I think the place for something like HeroQuest is firmly in what often gets described as "beer and pretzels" territory: a game that everyone around the table can enjoy, but which no-one really needs to concentrate on too hard. A game you can play while gradually getting more and more intoxicated and still have a good time. A game that you can easily introduce newcomers to without having to spend an hour discussing the rules — and a game that a group can easily return to several weeks or months after their last session and still remember how to actually play.

So I dunno. I feel like buying a copy of HeroQuest would be silly. But I still kind of want to. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to. But I'm certainly considering it.

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#oneaday Day 254: Nothing Much

I've had a nice quiet weekend that has been almost entirely occupied with Xenoblade Chronicles. I thought about making some videos, but decided that I didn't really have the mental fortitude to sort that out, so I have just had a completely relaxing weekend where I thought about nothing of any importance whatsoever, and just enjoyed myself.

This is a valuable thing to do now and again, particularly if you are feeling any sort of burnout or stress, which I most certainly have been of late. Honestly, I feel like I am starting to come out of the other side of the funk I've been in for the last while. I'm not completely out of it by any means just yet — and I'm sure the first time I look at social media for work on Monday I will suffer a mental health setback — but I am feeling a bit better, partly for having spent some time just relaxing, partly for having got some things off my chest with the post the other day, and partly… well, these things just pass eventually, usually.

That, honestly, is one of the things that's kept me holding on through difficult times — the knowledge that "this, too, shall pass". It always has done. Sometimes there have had to be difficult decisions made in order to encourage this, too, to indeed pass, but for the most part, just gritting your teeth and hanging on in there generally allows one to pass any number of this, toos, that might find themselves coming your way. And thankfully this most recent bout of the blues appears to have fallen into that category.

One thing I try to do when I'm feeling low is to ponder the things I do have that I should be — and am — grateful for. I'm not saying that just because you have things to be grateful for that you shouldn't be sad, of course — processing one's emotions is important and healthy — but rather, I think I'm saying that when things get hopeless I find it helpful to remember that I do not, in fact, have nothing, and that as difficult as it can be to appreciate that when you're down the bottom of a depression hole, those things you do have are a welcome sight when you eventually clamber back out.

That was a tortured metaphor, I know, but I'm just bashing things out on fumes here. Early night tonight and an attempt to get back into a routine of feeling like a vaguely normal human being. I don't know if I'm quite ready to return to the super-early mornings and going for a walk down to the shop, but I can at least look to tomorrow with good intentions if nothing else.

I hope you've had a pleasant and appropriately relaxing weekend, and that your week ahead isn't looking too stressful or chaotic. I am very much ready for a break, but I have a couple of weeks to get through before I can enjoy that break. That's feeling eminently doable at this point, though, so here's to Getting Back Into Things.

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#oneaday Day 253: Why do I need software to make my keyboard charge

I've been having an issue with my fancy, expensive Razer keyboard for a while. I've had it plugged in to USB, but as soon as I take the USB cable out, it seems to completely forget that it's been on charge and just die. This meant that I couldn't use it wirelessly, which was one of the keyboard's main selling points: it was a rare example of a mechanical keyboard that was also wireless. It didn't used to do this.

For a while, I just thought the battery was dead. Then I remembered that I'd uninstalled the Razer software a while back, because a shonky update process had made it cause my computer to pitch a shitfit and completely lock up for ages. So, out of curiosity, today I reinstalled the Razer software, plugged in the keyboard to charge and went off to play Xenoblade Chronicles for a couple of hours.

I am now typing this with the keyboard's USB cable unplugged, and the battery reading 100%. So it was the fucking software. My keyboard officially will not charge its battery unless you have Razer's stupid software installed.

Thankfully, they seem to have fixed whatever the locking-up issue was when I uninstalled it, so it's not a huge inconvenience to have it installed again. But it's pretty annoying to have spent several months thinking that my keyboard was broken in some way, or that it needed a new battery, only to discover that a completely arbitrary piece of software was preventing my keyboard from doing something that, you'd think, it should be able to do without any software intervention whatsoever. I mean, USB charging is a fundamental part of most of our tech these days, and most pieces of tech can charge without a piece of software running. You just plug them into a wall, the device goes "ooh, there's power coming in, I should route that to the battery" and that's that.

But no. Not for Razer, apparently, and I suspect there's other manufacturers who do the same thing, too. Logitech, for example, pissed people off when they tried to install some weird AI software into people's mouse drivers a while back, and the general enshittification of tech is, at this point, extremely well documented — though the number of people actually doing something about it, or even acknowledging that it's a problem, is rather slimmer than it perhaps should be.

Now, I'm not saying that my £150 keyboard not charging when its software isn't installed is really making my life significantly worse in the same way that Facebook and Instagram's abusive practices are systematically destroying the mental wellbeing of individuals in the name of perpetual corporate growth, but it's still symptomatic of the age we're living in. 20 years ago, if I had a wireless thing with a rechargeable battery, I could just plug it in and be safe in the knowledge that it would, y'know, charge. Today, apparently, that is not the case. And that seems stupid. Really stupid.

But I guess that's the world we live in now. So, for now at least, we just have to live with the stupidity.

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