#oneaday Day 182: Unpopular gaming opinions

As a veritable old fart of video games, I am, of course, fairly set in my ways, as older folks are wont to be. And as such, I have come to hold certain opinions that appear to deviate from "the norm" among younger folks. You are not "wrong" to think differently to what I am about to describe below, but know that you are not going to convince me to change my viewpoint, because I have felt this way about all these things for years now.

So why am I writing this? I dunno. Something to write about, innit? Plus there might be some of you out there who actually agree with some of these. It doesn't really matter. Let's just start, shall we?

Games don't "need" updates for months or years after their release

Baldur's Gate 3 happened to drift across some form of feed that I was looking at the other day, and the thumbnail image that came with it proudly boasted something along the lines of "Community update 30".

Now, whether this was just the 30th blog post for the community or the 30th actual update for the game I don't actually know, but both are equally offputting to me. I haven't even considered touching Baldur's Gate 3 yet because it launched unfinished and apparently is still getting bits and pieces bolted onto it after the fact.

I hear it's very good. I believe that it's very good, as Larian has a good track record. But I have precisely zero desire to play it until it's finished, because when a game as big as this gets significant updates after I've already ploughed a significant number of hours into it, I feel a bit hard done by. Worse, if I've already finished it by the time a significant update shows up, I feel very hard done by, because I should just have waited to play it.

Unfortunately, regular updates to games are expected by a certain class of The Gamers™, particularly those on PC. Look at the Steam reviews for any game that hasn't had an update for a month or two and you'll see people complaining about "devs abandoning the game" and it being a "dead game".

No. Sometimes it's just finished, and sometimes the devs would like either 1) a break or 2) to go and work on something else. I am, sadly, in the minority on this, but few things make me lose interest in a game faster than if it launches with a "roadmap". Just delay the thing a few months and finish the fucking thing. Then I will play it.

DLC is worthless

As an extension to the above, if a game releases and then immediately announces that it is getting a bunch of DLC, I will also immediately lose interest. Not only does it make me feel like stuff has been cut out of the base game to make the DLC — and don't throw the "well actually it's developed at a different rate to the main game" argument at me, that is an easy problem to solve — but I am struggling to think of a piece of DLC that I have genuinely thought was actually worth the money.

I remember being particularly disappointed with the DLC chapters for stuff like Dragon Age and Mass Effect back in the day, and I haven't seen much to change my opinion ever since those days. And, at the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Stellaris, where there is now so much DLC that it's impossible to know what the "best" way to get started with the game is. So I just… don't.

Mods are vandalism

"You should play games on PC!" the PC gamers say. "Because of mods!"

Fuck mods. I hate mods. A significant portion of them are outright vandalism to both the artistic and mechanical design of the teams that worked on a game. I saw someone on Bluesky earlier sharing an image of someone who had installed a "QoL" ("Quality of Life") mod to STALKER 2 to remove all encumbrance mechanics from the game. STALKER 2 is a game about survival in difficult circumstances, and the encumbrance mechanics force you to determine whether you really need to carry various things around with you. By removing it, you're stripping out part of the game.

Likewise, graphical mods can get in the bin, too. Games are designed with both a particular artistic vision in mind and are a reflection of the era in which they were designed, and I don't really give a toss if you can add ray-tracing to something that didn't have it before, or if you can make a game look like Generic Photorealistic Open World Game #927.

And I'm sure I don't need to say anything about nude mods. I say this as someone who enjoys a good sexy game.

"But I need 357 mods to make Skyrim fun!" Then Skyrim isn't a very good game, is it? Maybe play something else.

My only begrudging exception to this is in the case of games where extensibility is designed to be part of the game — stuff like Doom/Quake/Duke/whatever levels are fine with me, because those games were designed to be extendible. Although I must confess, when I play any of those games, I tend to stick to their official campaigns. And in some cases, mods for a game specifically designed to be mod-friendly inevitably remain perpetually unfinished and not as good as the stuff built-in to the game: most stuff for the excellent driving sim BeamNG.drive falls into this category, to name just one example.

I don't want to join your Discord

I use Discord when I absolutely have to, for work and for the few groups of friends who are only reachable there. But I do not want to join a fucking Discord for every single game I play, and I don't want to be bugged to join your Discord on the title screen for your game. Go away, leave me alone, and if I decide I want to engage in the official community for your game, I will seek out your Discord myself.

I absolutely do not want to have to join your Discord to read documentation or download helpful files. Host that shit on your website like a normal person.

I want your game to end

It's all very well offering "potentially limitless replayability", but I do actually want to be able to finish your game. If I can't finish your game, I almost certainly won't start it, because the way my brain works means that I will get annoyed by the fact I'm playing something that doesn't have a "point".

This is one of numerous reasons I think idle games and incremental games are dumb. Sure, numbers get big to a point that they become largely meaningless… but that's it. There's no sense of having achieved anything there. And I strongly suspect that a significant number of idle game fans have no idea that the genre largely stems from a pisstake at the expense of people who grind their way through mobile games with no conclusion.

Anyway, that'll do for now, because I'm sure I've pissed someone off with at least one of the above. As noted at the beginning, though, I don't care. I am an old man, I have things I like and things I dislike. And all of the above can get in the bin. A good evening to you!

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

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#oneaday Day 181: Hanging in there

I'm still ill. I have just about survived today, with only a little nap after finishing work, but I am feeling pretty rough now. It is not fun, because I have work to do, I have things I want to enjoy, and coughing and spluttering through the day does not make any of those processes more enjoyable.

Still, at least we had a reasonably fun thing to do at work today: tease something for next year! If you happened to miss it, here:

That's right! We're doing the Neo Geo! That's all I can say on the subject for the moment because we're not revealing the details of this deal with SNK beyond the fact that it involves Neo Geo stuff until early next year, but this is something people have been asking about for a while, so it's great to finally be able to say "yep, we doin' it".

Naturally, because no-one on the Internet is ever unconditionally happy any more, we had our fair share of people moaning about things we hadn't actually said, but for the most part, the response has been great. Neo Geo games are top-tier retro, and having a bunch of them in the pipeline is great.

Like I say, that's really all I can talk about on the subject for the moment, because Marketing. Looking more broadly, though, signing an agreement like this only shows how Evercade is going from strength to strength. We've got a couple of other big agreements waiting in the sidelines, too, but we're not even teasing them just yet (although I guess I just did) — you'll find out more about them next year. All I'll say on the subject is that between these deals, we should be making a fair ol' chunk of people happy, and that's always a nice feeling. As for the people who immediately assume the worst when receiving what should be a highly positive announcement? Balls to them, I say. It's really not my problem if someone is unable to find happiness in something specifically designed to bring people happiness.

Right. I'm off to bed to try and shake off this cold. I would like it gone by the weekend, as I have another Laura Bow mystery to play — and work Christmas do next week, too!

Shit, that reminds me, I probably better get my Secret Santa pressie sorted, I guess…

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#oneaday Day 180: Post-work lurgi

I think I'm getting a cold. I had one of those situations on the drive home from the office today (a 3+ hour trip) where I felt the "ill" hit. I got one of those annoying coughs where you cough and it doesn't shift whatever is making you cough, so then you cough more, but it doesn't move anything, and it's really annoying and ugh. I really do not want to be ill, but it is the time of year when I often get ill, so.

Also, being in contact with other human beings for once may have something to do with this, too. I don't normally get ill after a trip to the office — I'm not completely hermetically sealed in my house — but I think I recall one of my colleagues saying that they'd had a bit of a cold recently. If this is their fault then… I will have a good old grumble, but not blame them, because it's not their fault.

Anyway, with feeling like general dogshit after driving for more than three hours, I don't have a lot of energy left to write something for today, I'm afraid. So I hope you will indulge me in this particular occasion and just let me head to bed. I will try and be extra-interesting tomorrow — except we all know I'll just be my usual self. So I'm mostly just making a promise to myself to at least try and write a bit more tomorrow than I have written today.

That's it. That's the post. Good night!

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#oneaday Day 179: Your occasional reminder that AI can fuck off

I saw a TV ad for "Apple Intelligence" yesterday. The concept of the ad is that someone is angry someone at their workplace keeps stealing their pudding — hahaha, so hilarious and cosy and relatable — and writes them a furious email. They then click the "Friendly" button on Apple Intelligence and the email is rewritten to be the most milquetoast, handwringy, insincere thing you've ever seen. And this is supposed to be a selling point.

Elsewhere, a YouTuber I know had someone in their comments getting pissy about how they pronounced "ZX81", and, presumably in an attempt to further their argument, the commenter in question then copy-pasted a ChatGPT conversation — without editing out the "ChatGPT says:" bits — that didn't even particularly help their cause.

I keep seeing YouTube thumbnails made with AI art-stealing machines. Coca-Cola made a Christmas ad with AI. The memorial lunch for beloved broadcaster Steve Wright had an invitation that was made with AI. Entire websites are made of AI slop. And even here in fucking WordPress, I can't escape the sodding "Generate with AI" button.

I fucking hate it. I want it to go away. I want people who say "but it's good for summarising things" to drown in the sea. I want people who say "but it's better than doctors at diagnosing problems!" to be the victims of the worst malpractice the medical industry has ever seen. I wish eternal loneliness and desolation on those who use it to write emails. And I want it out of the pieces of software I use on a daily basis.

We're even starting to get accounts on BlueSky that pretend to be real people, but simply respond with ChatGPT answers that are tuned to be deliberately argumentative. What is the fucking point of all this shit? How is it benefiting humanity and productivity in any way whatsoever?

It isn't. All it's doing is continuing to make tech worse, year on year, while keeping oblivious shareholders — who aren't interested in anything but seeing "growth" — happy that companies are providing supposed "new innovations" that actually don't provide any sort of useful functionality whatsoever.

I'm aware I'm ranting incoherently, but honestly right now it feels like it's pointless to even try and come up with a cogent argument. This shit is infesting everything, and it's becoming impossible to escape from. And I legitimately do not understand how anyone can possibly think this shit is in any way better than what we had before.

I guess the one upside is that with how much AI is being used pointlessly to provide "summaries" of Google Searches, YouTube videos and other such shite, the planet will burn down all the sooner, so eventually we won't have to worry about it at all. Then the Great Thinkers of the day — assuming anyone survives — can stroke their chins for two hundred years about "where it all went wrong".

Here. Here is where it all went wrong.

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#oneaday Day 178: Acceptable mediocrity

My Bold Proclamation of the Day is that I feel like it would probably behoove us, as a society, to be more comfortable with mediocrity than we are.

This evening, Andie and I went out for dinner, because we both just wanted to get out of the house for a bit. We went to a local chain pub that we've been to a few times before and always liked, and the food was fine. It was perfectly acceptable. If we were living in a world where star ratings were used properly, I would rate it three out of five stars. It was not the sort of meal that I will remember for the rest of my life (or indeed the rest of the week, probably) but it also wasn't so terrible that I wanted to throw it in the face of the chef who microwaved it.

Thing is, I don't feel hard done-by to have a three-out-of-five meal at a place like this. In fact, that's pretty much what I expect. But I feel like the way we live life today, a three-out-of-five meal would be seen as somehow "unacceptable", and my commentary on how it was perfectly fine and exactly what you want sometimes, would be ignored completely, with nothing but the star rating being seen as a sort of "inverse recommendation".

Back when I worked at the Apple Store in the late '00s, the company introduced a scheme called NetPromoter. Initially I thought this was an Apple initiative, but I have learned in the years that followed that it is quite a common thing in the service and retail sectors generally.

If you're not familiar with NetPromoter, it goes like this. You engage with a customer and provide them your service or sell them something. Then, after they have departed your premises/website/whatever, they get emailed a short survey in which they are asked to rate their experience out of 10. Higher scores are, of course, good, and are regarded as "Promoters" — people who are actively likely to recommend (or "promote") your store or service to family, friends and colleagues. Conversely, low scores are, naturally, bad, and are regarded as "Detractors" — people who will recommend against your services.

All sounds reasonable enough, right? What if I told you that only scores of 8 and above were regarded as "Promoters", and anything below that was considered a "Detractor"? Because that's how it fucking works. There's no option for "this was fine, I had no complaints, but it also wasn't anything particularly special that I feel like shouting about" either. If we assume someone who felt that way believed that was worth a 5 or 6 out of 10, the poor old employee responsible for that perfectly acceptable service would probably find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of disciplinary action. Because yes, of course, systems like NetPromoter are inevitably used to browbeat employees into submission, rather than to actually improve things for the customer.

The same is true of online reviews for pretty much anything. Have you ever noticed how when an app on your phone bugs you to rate it, it's never "Leave us a review!", it's always "Leave us a 5-star review!"? That's because to most folks online these days, there are only really two ratings: 5-star (good) and everything else (bad). The video game sector has, of course, also been guilty of this for as long as the games press has been a thing; "70%" is seen as a barely average passing grade, and anything below that will almost certainly be ignored or considered "bad" by a significant portion of the games-purchasing public.

I've spoken numerous times about how I've had the absolute best times with games that, on average, net scores of 65% and below, and it's often for very similar reasons that I find mediocrity in other areas of life perfectly acceptable: sometimes that's precisely what you're in the mood for. This evening, we were in the mood for some average pub food, and by golly, that's most certainly what we got. When I'm in the mood to play a Neptunia game, I also know exactly what I'm getting and am in the correct mindset to appreciate it, too.

It's time we embraced perfectly acceptable mediocrity. Perfection is the enemy of good, as the aphorism says, and I absolutely agree with that. If you spend all your time looking for something that is really worth that 5-star rating, you're never going to be satisfied with anything.

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#oneaday Day 177: A quiet day

I didn't play The Dagger of Amon Ra today after all. I figured there's no rush — my The Colonel's Bequest video is in three parts, so I can spread those out across this week and perhaps a bit of next week, and set aside a bit of time in the week or next weekend to play The Dagger of Amon Ra without feeling like I need to race through it. I have a trip into the office this coming week, too, so that will put Tuesday and Wednesday evening out of action, so no sense rushing things.

I will, however, be coming home from this office trip with a veritable armload of goodies that I'm very much looking forward to having a proper play with. Chief among these are the two Evercade Alpha units, which are the bartop arcade form factor Evercade devices that we've just launched. These are lovely things indeed, and the fact they work with the full library of Evercade carts (including the Namco ones, which won't work on the TV-connected VS system) mean that they might just become my preferred way to enjoy Evercade games. I'm especially looking forward to playing Star Luster on them; I feel like the cockpit-view space sim will feel nicely immersive when played with arcade controls!

It's a little late for Thanksgiving, but I'm immensely grateful that I was given the opportunity to work on the Evercade project. From the moment it was announced, I knew that it was going to be something thoroughly interesting and special, and now that I've been a full-time part of it all for quite a while now, I'm still thrilled to be involved. It's a platform that offers something genuinely unique in this day and age — and it's a system that, in one form or another, be it the dinky handheld Super Pockets or the behemoth that is the Alpha, I would recommend without hesitation to anyone who complains that they "don't have time" to play modern video games. If that's the case… play some old ones! They're still damned fun. Plus there are lots of folks making brand new games for old platforms (and in the style of old platforms), too, meaning you don't have to miss out on playing "new" stuff just because you've decided to play with a retro-focused system.

Next year we've got some immensely exciting stuff planned that, of course, I can't talk about just yet, but I'm super thrilled we have them in the pipeline. It's going to be a super-cool year for Evercade, and I hope that now we've stuck around for four years (having successfully launched right in the middle of the 2020 pandemic!) people will see that this is absolutely a platform well worth taking seriously.

Christmas is coming up, y'know. Super Pockets make excellent gifts. Evercade EXP-R, VS-R and Alpha make even better gifts. Particularly if you pair them with an armful of cartridges!

Anyway, enough selling while I'm off the clock. I'm off to go play a round or two of Donut Dodo before bed.

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#oneaday Day 176: Take a Bow

Today, I played through all of the first Laura Bow game, The Colonel's Bequest. I enjoyed it a lot! You can read more about my thoughts on the subject right here, and a full Let's Play of the game will kick off on my YouTube channel from tomorrow. It's just three (long) episodes rather than a lot of 30-minute episodes like I did with The Case of the Serrated Scalpel last year, as I felt that fit the format of the game a bit better, and the overall structure of The Colonel's Bequest is… well, quite different from pretty much any adventure game I've played.

But enough of that. What's next? The Dagger of Amon Ra, of course! This is the follow-up to The Colonel's Bequest, and I'm going to do my best to play it through and record it tomorrow. I don't know if it's longer, shorter, easier, harder… the only thing I do know is that it uses point-and-click controls instead of The Colonel's Bequest's text parser, and it quizzes you on what happened at the end, so you need to make notes, just like Laura herself.

Then after that, I'll start having a look at The Crimson Diamond. Plus alongside all this, I might do something similar to what I did last year ("3 interesting DOS discoveries", "5 DOS games I always wanted to play" and "5 of the best early FPSes") if I can figure out what I might want to cover for videos in that style. I haven't started looking yet. Racing games is a possibility — a good excuse to bust out the Screamer series, perhaps? — or flight sims. Space combat sims? I don't know. I haven't decided yet. Looking at shareware stuff I used to like is also a distinct possibility, perhaps from the perspective of "shareware games I always wanted to try the Registered version of", since the only Registered shareware game I had back in the day was Wolfenstein 3-D, which I got for free after making some levels that were included in the official "Super Upgrades" expansion pack.

I've probably told this story at least once on this blog before, right? Well, regardless, I'll tell it again, 'cause you might be new around here. It's a story of delightfully happy coincidence.

Back at the time I was playing Wolfenstein 3-D on the family PC, I was involved with a local shareware library. I did a bit of part time work helping them out at local computer fairs, writing their catalogues and that sort of thing. I don't remember getting paid for this, but it was decent experience and I got lots of freebies from the shareware library, which was nice.

Among those disks that I got for free were numerous Wolfenstein 3-D editors, and they worked with the shareware version. So I made a bunch of levels.

I forget the exact circumstances of how the next bit came about, but I was browsing the GAMERS forum on CompuServe one day, when I found myself in contact with a gentleman called, as I recall, Carlton somethingorother. He was a representative from Apogee, and he was looking for new Wolfenstein 3-D levels to include in the upcoming data disk for the game. There was money on offer for anyone whose levels were included. After consulting with my parents — online safety and all that — I submitted my pack of ten levels to him, expecting never to hear from him ever again.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later, I got a package from the United States containing a cheque for $200, plus a registered copy of Wolfenstein 3-D and the new Super Upgrades pack, which included my levels, along with a bunch of other community contributions. So technically I'm a professional game designer.

But anyway. Yeah. That copy of Wolfenstein 3-D was the only Registered shareware game I had, because it was the early days of the Internet (in fact, via CompuServe, our "ISP" at the time, you couldn't even access the Web, and had to append "INTERNET:" to any email addresses you were sending messages to outside of the CompuServe service) and my parents weren't super-into the idea of sending $40 overseas in the hope of getting a video game back, and they absolutely weren't going to share their credit card information online. As such, I became intimately familiar with a lot of "Episode 1s" and not a lot else… so exploring the "Episode 2s" and beyond for some games I liked back in the day might be interesting, for sure.

I'll think of something. For now, I think it's time to just play something fun for a bit without thinking about how to turn it into an article or video. Come to me, Donut Dodo…!

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#oneaday Day 175: I picked what to play for #DOScember

As you will know if you've been reading for the past few days, I've been mulling over what to do for "DOScember" this year on my YouTube channel. I was fairly firmly set on doing another full adventure game playthrough, but hadn't quite settled on what.

Well, after being recommended the excellent looking The Crimson Diamond, I'm… not going to play that right away. Instead, I'm going to play at least one of the games it cribs extensively from, and a series of adventure games I've always wanted to check out but never got around to: the Laura Bow mysteries from Sierra.

I've spent a little time familiarising myself with the first game The Colonel's Bequest this evening, and I think I've got a feel for what to expect now. This was a highly experimental game for creator Roberta Williams, and modern commentators tend to agree that it doesn't quite succeed at what it's trying to do, but it's a thoroughly interesting game nonetheless. That sounds like ideal fodder to play, talk about and discuss. Plus, like I say, I've wanted to play both Laura Bow games for ages and never made the time to do so.

For the unfamiliar, The Colonel's Bequest is a mystery-themed adventure game in which you play the 1920s journalism student Laura Bow, who has come along to provide moral support for her friend Lillian while she attends a family reunion of sorts. Said reunion is taking place on the plantation of Colonel Henri Dijon, a former war hero, and is, for maximum creepiness, in the very depths of a bayou in the southern United States.

Upon arriving at the mansion, Laura notes that despite the Colonel announcing that he has left an equal share of his fortune to everyone present (except Laura, obviously), all the family members immediately start being absolute dickheads to one another, and it's clear that mischief is about to be afoot. What then follows is a curious twist on the usual adventure game formula, where you, as Laura, must wander through the mansion and its grounds, attempting to gather pieces of evidence and knowledge that will allow you to leave the situation 1) alive and 2) with a full understanding of what happened.

The Colonel's Bequest mostly lacks conventional puzzles, aside from a couple of instances. Instead, the game is mostly about being in the right place at the right time to witness or discover things; the game is split into hour-long Acts, which in turn are split into 15-minute time blocks, and discovering something significant causes time to advance. It's possible to advance time before gathering important items or speaking with certain characters; indeed, it's possible to "finish" the game with almost complete obliviousness to what happened around Laura, and you are not penalised for doing so, other than receiving a low "Sleuth" rating in the finale.

What this effectively means is that The Colonel's Bequest is a game in which taking notes of what happens when, where, how and why is quite important, particularly if you plan to replay the whole thing. Having pieces of evidence or knowledge to ask or tell people about can lead to learning more about what's going on, and you'll need to follow all these threads to their various conclusions as much as possible to get the best rating.

I stopped playing for this evening because I don't want to spoil too much for myself. I suspect my playthrough won't conclude with me getting the elusive "Super Sleuth" rating at the conclusion of the playthrough, but I'm looking forward to giving it a go anyway. In typical Sierra style, there are some delightful characters involved, along with some fun narration, and this is what I'm really looking forward to: having an excuse to do some silly voices.

Anyway, yeah. So that's the plan. The Colonel's Bequest, at the very least. And if I get through that fairly quickly, on to The Dagger of Amon Ra. And if I beat that before December is through, then I'll look at The Crimson Diamond. After all, I felt like I should probably familiarise myself with the "source material" before jumping into something that is a direct and unashamed homage to it, right?

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#oneaday Day 174: Why am I still doing this?

Why am I still doing this? Or, perhaps to the point, why did I start doing this again? This article from Aftermath does a good job of explaining why.

Since the rise of social media, I feel like it's significantly less likely for someone to have a "personal website", because everyone is concerned about their "reach" and "engagement", and if you want both of those things, you want to be on a well-established social media site.

But if you're more concerned with self-expression and having a space to truly call your own, having your own website is hard to beat. And I think as people become more and more disillusioned with social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — I think personal websites are going to become more and more important to a wider range of people.

Times have changed a bit, though. The word "blog" seems to have fallen out of wide usage, to be replaced with "newsletter", this being a result of the assumption that people will sign up to get your posts delivered to them via email, rather than going out of their way to visit your site. However, most of the "newsletters" out there are actually just blogs: people having a space to call their own, writing whatever they feel like at any given moment.

The best blogs… sorry, newsletters… of course have a distinct focus. One of my favourites is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is one of the few sites out there continually taking the garbage of the AI industry and other enshittified parts of the Internet to account for their making life worse for everyone.

And, of course, if you've been following me for a while, you'll know about my own MoeGamer, which is my main video game blog. MoeGamer has now outlived all of the professional, commercial sites I have ever written for, which is a nice feeling. Sure, I don't update it every day or indeed regularly, but there's a ton of stuff to read on there, and I've made sure all of it is hopefully relevant and interesting, regardless of when you come to it. No racing to get "news" out the door; no rushing games to meet embargoes; just in-depth articles about games that, for one reason or another, I have found it worthwhile to spend some time, effort and words talking about.

This site, though, this is mostly for me. This site is my virtual replacement for the personal diaries I used to write as a teenager, only at no point have I become embarrassed enough about something I've written to want to throw the whole thing in the outside bin so it would never be found by anyone, except maybe the dustmen, who I hope had a good laugh about how much I fancied Nikki Rose before flinging the book into landfill. This site is my reminder of at least part of my time on this planet which, for sure, has had some hefty ups and downs over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

Does it have many people reading it? No. But I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it for myself — and if anyone happens to stumble across this little corner of the Internet and gets something out of something I've written, that's just a happy bonus.

If you've never given this sort of thing a try and you find yourself frustrated at social media, I can highly recommend giving it a go. It's dead easy to get started with a platform like WordPress or its numerous imitators; in many cases, you can get up and running for free, too.

However you choose to do it, I can assure you of one thing: having a space to truly call your own, in which you can express yourself completely freely, is something that I've started to find increasingly important with each passing year. It's a good thing to have an outlet, for both the good feelings and the bad, and banging out 500-1000 words every so often just about whatever's on your mind is a healthy habit to get into.

That's why I'm still doing this. Not to be famous, not to make money, not to get engagement and followers. But because it's just something I want to do, and which I find is of great benefit to my overall wellbeing. Give it a try!

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#oneaday Day 173: Staring down the barrel of #DOScember

#DOScember is the annual celebration of DOS gaming and computing on YouTube and surrounding environments (not to be confused with #DOSember, which is a Twitch thing) and, even though many of the original participants and organisers have become somewhat disillusioned with the whole thing for various reasons, it's still a fun excuse to bust out some classic MS-DOS games and remind yourself of how good early '90s PC gaming was.

I did a few videos last #DOScember that I not only enjoyed making, they also performed rather well on my channel. So I'm likely going to spend this December doing primarily DOS gaming stuff on my YouTube channel.

I'm thinking a few things at this point. Firstly, I'm quite keen to do another full adventure game playthrough similar to my The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel runthrough from last year. (This wasn't a #DOScember thing, it was just something I felt like doing at the time.) I haven't yet decided what I should do as yet; on the one hand, playing something I'm already familiar with should mean that I can get through it without getting stuck, but on the other, this might be a prime opportunity to explore a game I've never tried for the first time.

The temptation when thinking "I want to play an adventure game" is to jump straight to Sierra and LucasArts, and for sure, they are all solid choices. But there were other folks making adventures at the time, too, and I think the stuff from them is worth celebrating, too. At present, I'm leaning towards something from Access Software, as these are games I've never tried, and I know at least some of them (the Tex Murphy games and Countdown spring immediately to mind) are fondly regarded.

When considering that I probably want to play these games as a Let's Play, I'd also prefer a game that isn't "talkie", so I can narrate and do the voices myself. It's a silly little thing, but I do very much enjoy doing this, so it's something I'm particularly looking for.

The other thing that I'll probably do is at least a few "pre-scripted" videos like I did last year. Last time around, I looked at early first-person shooters, games I'd always wanted to try but never had the chance to, and interesting discoveries I'd stumbled across by chance. Those are solid formats, and all of those videos performed well; I'm thinking I might do something other than first-person shooters for the first bit though. Perhaps space sims or flight sims? Those are ripe for exploration, and they're both genres I used to absolutely love.

Anyway, that's the plan for #DOScember on the YouTube channel. If you have any good DOS adventure game suggestions (preferably of the point-and-click variety, and preferably not "talkie", as outlined above) then I'd love to hear 'em. Otherwise, I'll see you on the channel!

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