#oneaday Day 788: Visco does what Nintencon't... or something

As a pleasant perk of my job, I get copies of all the Evercade cartridges ahead of when they actually release. Consequently, I have been enjoying the two upcoming Visco Arcade collections for a little while now, and, shush, come over here where no-one will overhear — I think they're my favourite carts this year.

Yes, I know we have some Big Names lined up for the rest of the year, one of which everyone already knows about (The Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack, which is releasing alongside Evercade Nexus in October) and another of which is pretty bloody obvious if you've been paying any sort of attention, even though it hasn't officially been announced as yet. And don't get me wrong, both of those carts are great. I am proud of the immense amount of work we put into them, and I think people are going to have some thoroughly pleasant surprises with them besides just rediscovering some old favourites. (There are also two more carts we haven't talked about at all yet, which are also going to be a fun time.)

But Visco Arcade 1 and 2? These carts reflect one of the main reasons I, personally, got into Evercade in the first place: the celebration and enjoyment of weird and wonderful stuff that I've never heard of before, and which has never seen official rereleases for one reason or another. (That's not quite true in the case of the Visco games, in that current rights holder PixelHeart sells NEOGEO cartridges, but the ability to enjoy those is dependent on you owning a working NEOGEO, which is… not something a lot of people have just lying around… although it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, the upcoming NEOGEO AES+ has on the market. But I digress.)

Anyway, yes. Visco Arcade 1 and 2 are both jam-packed full of games I'd mostly never heard of prior to working on the cartridges, and which are now titles I find myself playing and enjoying quite a lot. I'd previously come across the shoot 'em up Andro Dunos and the fighting game Breaker's (although we all learned recently about the apostrophe in the name, which is seemingly not common knowledge despite it being right there in the logo) and I also knew the Drift Out series by reputation (if only because everyone always mistakes Gaelco's excellent World Rally series, which is on Evercade too, for Neo Drift Out) but the others? Brand new to me.

Helicopter shoot 'em up action in Ashura Blaster! Time-travelling jet fighter shoot 'em up fun in Asuka & Asuka! Triple weapon space blasting in Galmedes! Driving a definitely-not-Volkswagen Beetle around mazes and hunting for treasure in Maze of Flott! Hacking and slashing Sengoku-style in Ganryu! Delightful, one and all.

Two of my favourite discoveries are Battle Flip Shot and Bang Bead, two games that are effectively evolutions of Pong, in which you control colourful anime-style characters and try to knock down targets behind your opponent. I partly like these because they're just simple, fun, well-presented arcade games — and I suspect they'd be great with a friend — but I mostly like them because they remind me of a Klik and Play project my friend Edd made once, which he dubbed Impact!

Impact! was a game in which two of the default, included sprites from Klik and Play — "Merlin" and "Street Puncher" — faced off against one another on a top-down representation of a tennis court. They then proceeded to knock an energy ball back and forth, each attempting to hit the item of fast food behind their rival in order to either score points or deplete the opponent's energy bar, I forget which. I believe Street Puncher guarded a hamburger, while Merlin guarded a pizza, though it may have been the other way around. There were lots of burping and farting noises, and it was an endearingly stupid, completely unbalanced but enormously fun way to while away an afternoon with a friend.

I couldn't stop myself from laughing when I booted up Battle Flip Shot for the first time and realised what the game was. "This is just Impact!" I said to myself, realising that there was absolutely no-one around who would have any idea whatsoever what I was talking about. That made me a bit sad, but mostly I smiled at the good memories, and consequently both Battle Flip Shot and its fairly similar (but notably different) successor Bang Bead suddenly became quite special to me, despite me only learning about them relatively recently.

In fact, if I think about the dates we were most likely fiddling with Klik and Play — between 1997 and 1999, during our time at sixth form, primarily — it's entirely possible that Impact! did, in fact, predate Battle Flip Shot, which came out in 1998. And certainly none of us were playing NEOGEO at that time; around then, the NEOGEO was a mythical beast, spoken of only in hushed tones in multiformat games magazines, and we didn't have any arcades anywhere near us to go play an MVS cabinet, either. So Edd's creation was all original do not steal.

I have idle thoughts of trying to get The Old Gang™ back together for some sort of Event that will likely involve drinking, cake and video games. I am also not entirely sure how to go about organising such a thing, as there are several members of said Old Gang I have not spoken to, let alone seen, for many years at this point. But that is, at least partly, why I think it would be fun to get everyone together and have a drunken Battle Flip Shot tournament. And see how long it takes Edd to notice that we're really just playing Impact! – Pro-Gear Spec Edition.

[Obligatory note, since I am talking about Work Stuff: the above is my opinion and my opinion alone, and does not reflect or represent the views of my employer and all that guff.]

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 768: Sketchin'

I've been meaning to get back to doing stupid little doodles on posts for ages, but have just never… well, to be honest, I just haven't really been bothered to. Best to be honest about these things, and it's been nice seeing the stock images that kind and talented people from around the world have made freely available on Pexels, which you can access right from WordPress. But today, I thought I might as well actually use the fancy S-Pen that is stuck in the bottom of my phone, and so I did a tiny bit of research, found an actually pretty good-seeming free drawing app for Android (no more leeching off ClipStudio Paint's free trial) and just doodled a very quick thing for today.

Yeah, I know. Hardly worth making a big song and dance about, is it. But I tried to analyse why I fell off doing doodles on this site in the first place, and it was because I think I was trying to do a bit too much too soon. I thought that if I got a fancy graphics tablet and started faffing around with a fancy piece of software, then some sort of latent artistic ability would suddenly emerge and I would be able to produce something truly amazing, immediately.

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Not only does producing things that are genuinely amazing take time and effort, everyone also has their own distinct ways of working that they find most comfortable. For me, that has always been stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces. And so, I think for the immediate future at least, the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces are back for now.

The thing I've always liked about doing the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces in the past is that they make me think a little bit about what I've just written. I wouldn't go so far as to say sketching a companion doodle for a post makes me really reflect on things in any great depth, but it does at least make me think about how — and if — it would be possible to get the general vibe of the post across using a quick and dirty doodle.

Often that takes the form of a stupid joke. Back when I did three-panel comics on this blog — which I know at least one person enjoyed, but no-one else ever mentioned, so I stopped doing them just in case I was actually embarrassing myself with them — there were even some running storylines that went along with the blog posts, and sometimes the blog posts and the comic storylines would feed off one another in various ways. That was always pretty fun, actually, but like I say, outside of one once-regular commenter who I haven't seen for a long time (I hope you're well, Jud!) and my wife Andie, who bought me a large canvas print of one of my comics that still hangs above our bed, no-one ever really mentioned them, and I had no great designs of being "a webcomic" or anything anyway; it just seemed like a fun thing to do, and I had a copy of Comic Life on my Mac, so things just sort of went from there.

When you have your own site, though, I think it's important to make your own little mark on it somehow. I mean, obviously you already do that if you're writing things on it, but we are creatures that respond well to obvious visual stimuli, so if the overall look of the site helps get someone's personality across, so much the better, I say. I have tried to do this to a certain degree with the use of the Atari ST's system font for headlines — I tried putting the whole site in it once, but several commenters said it was difficult to read, and it probably was — but nothing beats a bit of scrappy artwork from someone who doesn't really do visual arts.

I've told the story of why I like drawing expressive stickmen many times before on this blog, but for the benefit of those disinclined to go searching through the archives, it stems from, as so many things do, my time at school.

I did pretty well for myself at secondary school. What eventually turned out to be an autistic spectrum condition (though I wouldn't know that until several decades later) meant that I kind of thrived in the structured environment where I was always learning things. But I wasn't, like, the school swot or anything. I had a mischievous streak, which was brought out of me by my friends — and particularly my good friend Edd, who I sat with in many different lessons.

Edd and I liked to doodle. We would doodle all sorts of things, all the time. It was one of our favourite activities — though we knew not to do it anywhere that we might get in vaguely "serious" trouble for. No drawing on desks, no defacing school property, and no doodling on our exercise books that the teacher would mark. (I must confess, however, that during one especially memorable Year 7 Humanities class, my other friend Daniel Blyth and I went through an entire History textbook and drew at least one dick on every single page. My favourite was the one that was poking out of a Roman water gourd, inexplicably shouting "I SCREAM!")

No, Edd and I would doodle on paper that we would specifically bring in for that purpose, or our "Rough Books", which I know I have talked about multiple times on this very site, so I won't tell that specific story again. But anyway. Given the opportunity to doodle, we would take it. And one of the things that we loved doodling was stickmen doing stupid things.

One of the earliest things we did with stickmen began in German lessons, which were so boring we eventually came to the conclusion that was some sort of temporal disruption around the Modern Languages department. (I successfully freaked several of my friends out by using the "countdown timer" feature on my snazzy Casio digital watch to make it look as if time was indeed running backwards.) We livened things up with "The German Stickmen", which was a four-panel comic in which two people would argue about something really stupid in German in the first frame, the second frame would devolve into them yelling "Nein!" "Ja!" at one another multiple times, the third frame would always be one of them shouting "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, see) and drawing some form of (usually explosive) weapon, and the final frame would inevitably involve some form of extreme violence or, most commonly, a mushroom cloud.

Over time, our ambitions for the stickmen became more elaborate. We'd already "created" (and I use the term loosely) the characters Edlock Holmes and Watson as a result of our shared enjoyment over the point-and-click adventure games The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and when we went on holiday to Gran Canaria together, we produced an epic-length stickman comic, drawn in extreme haste and with no real care, called Fate of Thingy. This thing took on a life of its own and was rewritten multiple times, and I still have it somewhere — though I think it's missing one or two pages. The intent, you see, was to do a "rough" version of the comic using stickmen, then when we got home we'd do a "proper" one. I did, indeed, start doing a "proper" version, at one point, but we both decided we liked the stickmen so much they would become the canonical versions of Edlock Holmes and Watson. As Fate of Thingy continued to expand across multiple parts, all further development was in stickman form — and continued to be on the bright yellow legal pad Edd had acquired from his mother's workplace, until we ran out of that and had to start using bog-standard notebook paper.

So yeah. Stickmen are important to me, as ridiculous as that might sound. I have an intense, nostalgic and emotional attachment to them. And thus I think they should continue to be an important part of this blog. I will, therefore, from hereon, endeavour to provide you with a stupid little doodle to accompany each post (except when I really can't be bothered). Is that enough of a commitment for you? Well, tough shit, because it's all you're getting.

Nein!
Ja!
Nein!
Ja!
ACHTUNG!

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#oneaday Day 766: Verify your age

There's a meme going around on Bluesky today where you write "verify your age" and then post something in text or image form that you remember from Times Past™. In the absence of anything particularly interesting happening today, I thought I would do a bumper crop of these in one post. So prepare to verify my age! With, apparently, a lot of things about the phone. That wasn't deliberate, but it just worked out that way.

a vintage telephone — Photo by fotokirisci on Pexels.com

Answering the phone by giving your phone number to the person who just dialled it. This is one of those things that, when I was young, my Mum gave the impression of it being really important. I always felt weird doing it, but we continued doing these even after phone numbers got longer. "Great Gransden [xxx]" became "[xxx][yyy]". (Numbers censored so you don't phone my parents, who are still at the same house and phone number.)

Answering the phone at home with a "script" to determine who is calling, please? If I felt awkward reciting digits to a mystery person before I knew who it was, I felt really awkward acting like a receptionist. I wonder how much feeling obliged to do this as a kid has contributed to my general distaste for using the telephone today.

Having a phone number that, excluding area code, was three digits long. Yep, really; we had an area code that was five digits long, and a phone number that was three. During my childhood, this changed to a different five-digit area code with a "1" as its second digit, and which covered a wider region, and a six-digit phone number.

Being able to accurately dial a full-length phone number using a rotary phone and not panicking halfway through that you're not sure if you pulled the "9" around far enough. The phone in our hall was a rotary one. While I never really liked having to use the phone, dialling it was pretty fun. If you like mechanical noises, I encourage you to go play with a rotary phone, as it makes some very good sounds.

Being able to remember at least five phone numbers that were not your own. At some point, I could remember my own phone number, my Nan B's phone number (but not my Nan D's), my friend Matthew's phone number, my friend Edd's phone number and the phone number for my school. And possibly some more. Now I can just about remember Andie's mobile number… plus my parents' phone number, which is the same as it's been for nearly 50 years (and used to be "mine" also) so that one's kind of cheating.

Having a phone that actually rang, like, with a bell, not an electronic beeper. Again, the hall phone had a proper ringer and dear Lord it was loud. Heaven help you if you were standing next to it when it rang. Interestingly, every so often I do think I hear a proper ringer phone somewhere — I believe they might use them in places like construction sites still, as that piercing ring can be heard from a mile off.

"Going on the computer" being a discrete activity rather than the default behaviour. Get home from school, do homework, have dinner. Then, if I had been "good", I could maybe "go on the computer", as long as my Dad wasn't using it for anything. I feel like we lost something when we plugged ourselves into our PCs semi-permanently — and definitely when we effectively started carrying around a tiny PC in our pocket.

Sweet treats costing less than a pound each. There was an ice-cream man who came to our school every lunchtime — I assume (hope) he had some sort of special arrangement with the school — and he sold cans of drink for 30p, and "2p sweets" for… well, you know. (You could buy a bag of 2p sweets, too. I don't think we got screwed over with those.) Nowadays you'll pay a quid or more for a can of Coke, and the same again for a basic bitch chocolate bar. Don't even get me started how a "quick trip to the shops for some snacks" can end up costing £40 or more these days.

Going to a newsagent and coming out with something paper that you can read. I'm not even sure we have a newsagent anywhere near us any more. There's a pathetic little "Magazines" section in our local Sainsbury's, but it's nothing compared to the glory days of my Mum getting pissed off at my Dad for standing around reading Computer Shopper in WHSmith rather than actually buying a copy. I internalised my Mum's objections and preferred to buy a magazine that I wanted to read; it was much more fun reading it at home at my own pace.

Going out of the house to be with people who shared an interest. While I'm eternally sorry that I'm just a little bit too young to have been able to enjoy the phenomenon of "Computer Clubs" and "User Groups" in the early days of the 8-bit micros, when I was a kid I did have things that I went to each week and enjoyed, along with my peers. Cub Scouts was probably the highlight of these; that was an interesting time where I learned a lot of things that I probably otherwise wouldn't have found out about, had the opportunity to go (extremely heavily supervised) camping, and just generally had a pretty good time. I know that "interest groups" for grown-ups do exist, but I don't really know where to begin looking for them these days — particularly with all the dogshit information that is out there on platforms like Facebook these days. I miss the simplicity of your parents just knowing that there's a Cub Scout pack in the next village over, and wouldn't you like to join it, your friends are going to join!

So there you are. That's my age. I hope you enjoy it.

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#oneaday Day 765: Role-playing

One thing I regret not really getting into when I was younger is role-playing games — of the tabletop variety. Actually, saying I didn't "get into" role-playing games isn't accurate at all; I've bought a whole bunch of sourcebooks over the years (I had a great collection of Vampire: The Masquerade books while at university!) but just, for one reason or another, never really had the chance to play them all that much.

figurines and dice on board game map — Photo by Stephen Hardy on Pexels.com

I have two particularly fond memories of times when I have been able to indulge in some role-playing, and interestingly enough, neither of them involve a well-established, rules-heavy system. In both cases, they were simple acts of collective creativity — and they were vast amounts of fun as a result.

The first time wasn't really an organised session as such. I was in my second year at university, living in a grotty old flat that had very large rooms. Some of my friends from my school days had come down to visit, and they were sleeping in the living room; rather than retiring to my own bedroom down the hall, I decided to sleep in the living room with them. And before long, rather than falling asleep, one of our number kicked off a completely improvised role-playing session where our probably drunk, definitely tired and increasingly delirious selves got our characters into increasingly ridiculous situations — inevitably with the worst possible outcomes constantly happening to one of our number, because that was the funniest way things could go.

I forget the details of the "adventure", such as it was, but I do recall that my friend Edd found himself under attack by a giant penis monster at one point. So, naturally, he decided to cast the spell he'd made up called "REMOVE COCK", and you can imagine what the actual result of that was. It was an utterly ridiculous evening that I will always remember immensely fondly — and not a single die rolled along the way.

The other occasion was when I was around at a friend's house, and one of said friend's friends with whom I had previously become casually acquainted said he was going to run a role-playing game session for us, using what he described as a "freeform system" that he'd devised himself. Said system had just three statistics: Attack, Defence and Power, and all three of those statistics fluctuated according to the things we were doing; you'd "spend" points from each on various actions, and could regain them in various ways, usually by making progress through the adventure.

Because the system was so freeform, we were invited to come up with any kind of character we wanted. Being big into Japanese role-playing games at the time — not like now, obviously — my character was somewhere between a vaguely imagined half-elf character I'd mentally doodled at various points over the prior months, and basically Dante from Devil May Cry. Lots of flashy moves, big sword, pyrotechnics, all that sort of thing. His name was Rush Hurin.

Alongside Rush we had The Luggage from Discworld, a sentient suit of armour named Arryth, a cloud of amorphous pink gas and the archangel Tyrael from Diablo. It was a motley crew to be sure, but we had some grand adventures — and the skill of our dungeon master was such that he was able to devise dungeons and scenarios on the fly that meant we all had an opportunity to shine along the way.

Okay, yes, he pulled puzzles from a straight-up Big Book of Puzzles that he brought along with him — and on more than one occasion we entered a room in a dungeon with an elaborate-looking mechanism that had a big sign on it saying "COME BACK LATER" — but even using that "source material" and occasional little "cheats" to keep things flowing along, we ended up with an enormously entertaining adventure that culminated, as I recall, with us fighting a skyscraper-sized flaming demon, each using our own unique abilities to bring it down in various ways — culminating with The Luggage swallowing it and sending it to an unknown other dimension, as most of our other encounters concluded.

Both of these were great fun, yes, but I also just kind of… hunger for an opportunity to play something as basic bitch as Dungeons & Dragons, even though I know that's not fashionable any more. I always thought Vampire: The Masquerade would be fascinating to play, too — hence why I had a bunch of sourcebooks for it back in my early 20s — but that, more than almost anything else, strikes me as something you very much Need The Right Group For.

Why am I talking about all this? Well, I watched an episode of Mythical Kitchen this evening where they had the cast of Critical Role on there, and it reminded me that I've never… watched, listened to, whatever you do with Critical Role, and I was thinking I should probably correct that at some point. Sure, it's not quite the same as being part of my own campaign, but I think I might enjoy it… maybe it's time to add it to the "bedtime listening" rotation.

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#oneaday Day 755: The lost art of going to buy a game

Yesterday, I talked generally about the impact PlayStation had on me and my friendship group thanks to stone-cold classics like Ridge Racer, Tekken and Final Fantasy VII. Today I want to talk about another aspect of that time which I have fond memories of — but which hasn't been a thing for some years now, and which will definitely no longer be a thing once Sony finally pulls the plug on production of physical PlayStation discs. (Incidentally, their announcement of this is now, at the time of writing, up to 135 pages of comments, with over 7,000 universally negative responses, and I suspect these numbers will continue to grow for some time as yet.)

The Cave museum, part of the Retro Collective, has an interactive recreation of what an old software shop would have looked like back in the day.

Anyway. Yes. What I wanted to talk about was the fact that once we got into sixth form, a lot of us started to enjoy our first real tastes of proper independence, despite, in most cases, still living with our parents. Learning to drive allowed us to go places without having to rely on getting our parents to give us a lift — and give them the full details of where we were going. We were trusted to take responsibility for our own education, meaning several of us went to one single General Studies lesson in two years and still managed to ace the exam. Taking part-time jobs of various descriptions allowed us to earn some money, giving us considerably more financial freedom than childish "pocket money" provided. (Although saying that, my grandparents were always very generous in that regard.)

That latter one is an important one, as it coincided with us being able to spend that money on things that we liked. For my friends and I, those things were video games. And it was an enormously exciting time to be interested in video games, with the PlayStation having hit the market a few years earlier, and the Nintendo 64 finally arriving in Europe as we were kicking off our period of post-compulsory education.

I have fond memories of sixth form not just because I enjoyed the academic side of things — that's something I've talked about elsewhere — but also because of what happened between those classes. For my friends and I, we spent the majority of our time hanging out in the Art department of the school rather than the main sixth form common room; the corner of the Art department had essentially been taken over as a semi-private secondary common room that was almost exclusively used by my friends and I. It was a comfortable place to hang out, and we had many pleasant free periods spent there enjoying a bacon and cheese baguette from the recreation centre on the school site, just chatting about all sorts of silly things.

Quite often, if we had several free periods in a row, or free time up to and including lunchtime, we would wander off the school site — as we were allowed to do now, because we were big, brave, responsible 16+ year olds — and walk into the town centre. This was a walk of about a mile in total — my 45 year old bones ache just thinking about that — but we did it on a pretty regular basis. When we got into town, we had a bit of a routine: we'd go to The Baker's Oven for a bacon and cheese puff and a Belgian bun (though not if we had recently consumed one of the aforementioned baguettes), then head to Barneys, the local record shop, and have a little look around. I would always feel mildly uneasy in there because it was still the age where one felt distinctly judged for one's taste in music, but after a while I learned to just own my self-described "eclectic" tastes in music.

Barneys wasn't the main attraction of our trips to town, though. We saved the best for last by heading to First Compute, a pokey little shop in the "Cross Keys" shopping mews that was initially little more than a cupboard with games for pretty much every platform you can think of festooning every wall (and a fair bit of the floor). By the time we were in sixth form, though, the owner, who we only knew as "Richie", had moved venue to a slightly larger establishment, but the distinct feeling that as much stuff as possible was being crammed in remained. There were big box PC games on some shelves on the left, and PlayStation and N64 games on the right.

At the time, I had had the good fortune to score a few freelance writing opportunities for outlets such as PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine. These at least partly came about because I did my Year 10 work experience on PC Zone when my brother was the editor, but my brother's the sort of person who wouldn't have recommended me to his successors if he didn't think I could have done a good job. And I did do a good job — and, more to the point, in those days, you got paid a hell of a lot more for cranking out an article than you do for many of today's websites. We're talking about £300-£500 per piece here.

As you can probably imagine, being in a situation where I had very little in the way of living expenses thanks to still living at home, this cash very quickly burned a sizeable hole in my pocket, and my friends knew this. I would often get a little "gentle encouragement" to pick up a new game for either PlayStation or Nintendo 64, and honestly, as much as peer pressure very much was involved, I didn't need much convincing. I found both systems to be a ton of fun, and I loved being able to share my enjoyment of them with my closest friends.

On the Nintendo 64 front, we quite often picked up games with a multiplayer focus, as we spent a lot of time around one another's houses, crowded around the television enjoying split-screen fun. We even tried some types of game that, in prior years, we would have never considered, like EA's World Cup 98 when the eponymous tournament was on.

On the PlayStation front, my preference was, as you can probably imagine if you know me even a little bit, for role-playing games, and dear Lord do I ever wish I'd held on to the vast majority of those games I bought all those years ago, because little was I to know that role-playing games in particular would become enormously expensive on the second-hand market.

Of all those times I was mildly peer-pressured into buying a new game, I only remember one solitary occasion when I was disappointed and regretful enough in my purchase to actually return the game in question. That game was a title for PlayStation called Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest, and it was a polygonal action RPG for up to four players. It looked like it might be cool from the box art, and there were some interesting ideas in it, but it was very much not what I was looking for from a game at the time. I'm actually quite curious to revisit this game through older, more mature eyes, as I suspect I may have treated it a bit harshly.

The pattern of go-to-town, buy-a-game continued once I got to university and fell in with friends who also enjoyed gaming. Since I was still getting some cash from freelancing, I still had a bit of disposable income, though living away from home meant I did actually have living expenses now. Still, I managed to pick up a bunch of interesting games, and reading the manuals while on the bus home was always a highlight of these times that I think back on fondly. It's a cliché to talk about reading the manual on the way home, but it really was a thing we did, and it really is something I have exceedingly happy memories of.

New games haven't come with manuals for a long time now, outside of a few special cases in limited-print editions, and situations like Evercade where the whole thing is built on the idea of "how it used to be" — and with the apparently impending death of physical releases, even the experience of going to a game shop, picking up a game and coming home with it will be lost. Of course, many people — including me — tend to order their games online these days anyway, so many of us haven't been doing that anyway — but it's still sad to think that there are generations of video game enthusiasts who will never be able to enjoy things in quite the same way we did around the end of the millennium and the turn of the century.

I'm mad at Sony for actively encouraging the death of that. They are deliberately trying to destroy what was once an important part of the overall culture surrounding video games. I suspect those who have never been deeply into them might not understand why this is a big deal — and I equally suspect the C-suite execs who mandated this are exactly the sort of people who have never actually given a shit about video games as a creative medium or form of expression — but it really was. Sony's announcement left a lot of people feeling like they really had lost something; feeling something akin to grief. It might sound silly to say that about something as simple as going into a shop and buying a box with a bit of plastic inside it, but it really is the case.

I sincerely hope the company does a hasty U-turn on this, but I very much doubt they will. If that's the case, that's the end of me and PlayStation. Once there's no more games to buy and proudly put on my shelf, that's it for me and new games. I've always said this. And in some respects, I don't mind, either — it'll mean I don't have to worry about running out of what little space I have left on my shelves, and that I will be able to focus on diving deep into my collection and discovering all the things I haven't gotten around to yet.

But still. I will be sad to have lived long enough to see a medium and a culture surrounding it grow, thrive and then wither. I am already sad that I have seen that happen, but every new week seems to bring a new horror in that regard.

We will always have the good times, though. That's the one thing they can never revoke the license for.

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#oneaday Day 754: Late '90s promise

As I absorb the news that Sony is giving up on physical releases of games — something I have had a good rant about at much more length over on MoeGamer, so please go read that — I can't help but think back to the time PlayStation hit the scene, and the incredible amount of promise that video games showed back then. This coincides with a period of time I often describe as the happiest of my life, and the video games were a big part of that, for a variety of reasons.

Photo by Simon Trappe on Pexels.com

I remember my first encounter with PlayStation vividly. My brother had come home to visit, and, as he often did, he had brought some gaming hardware with him. On previous visits — and prior to me getting my own SNES — he had brought both a Super Famicom and Mega Drive back with him on various occasions, but this new PlayStation thing was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen.

We loaded up Ridge Racer and you could play Galaxian while it was loading. Supposedly you could unlock some stuff if you could win the Galaxian game before the game finished loading, but I didn't manage that right away. (I mastered it some time later.) Then, once Ridge Racer was loaded, it was another example of something we'd previously described the SNES as being: "like having an arcade machine hooked up to your TV".

This feeling didn't go away with Tekken, which my brother had a prerelease copy of. He also had Raiden Project, which, while less obviously "impressive" than both Ridge Racer and Tekken, I found myself enjoying a lot, and still consider one of my favourite PlayStation titles to this day.

Eventually, my brother left behind this Japanese-model PlayStation at my parents' house for me to have — he had got his own British model. I was thrilled, particularly once I learned the "pen-lid trick" — a means of circumventing the console's region and copy protection by propping the disc tray open and carefully timing the swapping of discs. It was a good way to wear out your laser before long, but until I got my own UK PlayStation, it was my main means of experiencing PAL releases.

My friends got PlayStations around a similar time, and we all really enjoyed them, each cultivating our own little collection of games.

Then came Final Fantasy VII. I first heard about this from my brother, and one thing made me want to pick it up immediately: he told me that it was the first game that had made him and various other people he knew cry. This might seem like a strange reason to be excited for a game, but having been enjoying point-and-click adventures on PC for a few years at this point, I was immensely excited by the possibilities that interactive storytelling offered, and I was curious exactly what this game actually was.

I started to play it and was initially confused. Why did the screen go all swirly and then I couldn't move, but I had to select things from a menu instead? Why did the characters look different when they were walking around to when they were in battle? Why were numbers popping out of things?

I'd encountered the RPG genre in a very early form back on the Atari 8-bit, but had always found those games to be difficult to understand as a child. Some years later, I got into HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest, and started to understand how numbers and turn-based combat worked together. And with Final Fantasy VII, I quickly learned how the computerised take on an RPG worked — and that I liked it a lot.

My friends loved it, too. We all swapped stories of our custom-named parties at school, arguing over who had given their characters the "best" names and who had recoloured the text window the most attractively garish combination of shades. We all agreed it was an incredible experience, and played it multiple times in succession — often in immediate succession. I estimate over the course of one particular summer, each of us must have played through the entirety of that game somewhere between six and ten times.

My parents went away for a few weeks and left me in charge of the house. I hosted an ill-advised party that I got into a lot of trouble for — I have to laugh in retrospect — but the best thing about that summer was having my friends over pretty much every day, and we would just play Final Fantasy VII together while eating Pot Noodles and getting steadily quite drunk. On one particularly memorable occasion, we challenged one another to play from the beginning and stay up as long as possible; we played through the night and into the next morning, hitting each other with sofa cushions to wake each other up if we looked like we were nodding off. It was a truly wonderful experience, and absolutely a treasured memory.

It all feels so far away now. I would love to have a summer like that which I just described again, but it feels like a far-off dream at this point.

Still, I mean I am still in touch with some of those friends, so perhaps, just perhaps, we could make something like that happen once again sometime. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 749: The lost decade

At therapy today, we got talking about how I think back extremely fondly on my time at sixth form — to such a degree that I would brand that period of time as probably the happiest of my life — and how I feel a curious… "closeness" to that time period, despite it being, at this point, quite a long time ago. It still feels weirdly recent to me!

pictures hanging on strings attached to trees in a garden — Photo by Pew Nguyen on Pexels.com. Not my photos, obviously.

Over the course of our discussion, I described a curious phenomenon that I've been sort of passively aware of for a while, and that is the fact that I don't really remember living through my thirties. Specifically, the period between about 2009 and (I estimate) about 2016, 2017 or so is a length of time that I feel just sort of… disappeared. And the disappearance of that period — and possibly a bit more either side of it — is what leads me to feel like things which were actually Quite A Long Time Ago are still relatively "recent" or at least fresh in my memory.

I hadn't really contemplated why this had happened, but it didn't take long to figure out: I had a rough time in that period. Let's ponder, shall we?

In 2009, when I was 28, I lost a job that I had previously thought would have me set for life; it was a job that I loved, that I was good at and which even paid reasonably well for the time. Unfortunately, it was snatched away from me by some true shithead managers who were on a real power trip at the time, and that kicked off a very long period of exceedingly uncertain employment.

In 2010, my first marriage fell apart for reasons that, in retrospect, I understand, but which, at the time, had me feeling the lowest I have ever felt. Having lost my job and, now, my partner, I was left alone in a flat I couldn't afford to keep living in, with no job, facing down the prospect of having to move back home with my parents. At the time, this felt mortifying; now, of course, I am exceedingly grateful to my parents for having supported me while I was at my lowest until I was able to pick myself back up and effectively start over.

In the following years, I will keep the details vague out of respect for the individual in question's privacy, but I found myself supporting someone with an addiction problem. I had no idea how to do this, and there is not really a "how-to" guide on doing this effectively. The person in question conquered their issues pretty much by themselves (and by that I mean "without professional psychiatric or medical assistance"), and I will be eternally impressed by and proud of them for this, but the experience of acting in a supporting role at the time left me with… some emotional scars, shall we say. I am not entirely sure I have fully processed everything that happened at this time, though I should also add that I lay no blame or ill-will at the feet of the affected person, and that's all I will say on the subject.

During these years, I was working regular freelance for various websites. I had a good gig working for GamePro, but we all got given the boot just before Christmas one year. Some time later, I worked for USgamer, but got laid off from that particular gig on my birthday. These were the most "regular" jobs I'd had since 2009, and it had not gotten any easier over the years to know what I was "supposed" to be doing. Every time I felt like I was getting somewhere, it felt like the rug would get pulled out from under me.

I took a job in a completely unrelated field — updating website content at energy company SSE — but found myself fundamentally incompatible with the incredibly patronising way that company does business, and got unfairly dismissed at the end of my probationary period. Some time later, I found myself doing a similar, equally tedious but mostly inoffensive job at sports tech maker Garmin, which was stable but absolutely mind-numbingly boring. I left that one voluntarily (and on good terms, which was a nice change) to take up what would eventually become the position I hold to this day.

All along the way, I was feeling a sense of near-constant instability, like I could never settle; like I had never reached an unknown destination I felt like I was constantly on the way towards. I faced setback after setback, challenge after challenge. At times it felt like I wanted to give up. But I eventually made it to where I am today, with a stable home life, a stable working life and stable financial security. It was realising that I had those three things that made me feel like I had, at last, been able to properly "start over", and that my life was no longer a thing of shame; a string of endless difficulties and non-achievements that just didn't appear to be going anywhere.

So in retrospect, I'm not really surprised that I don't really remember my thirties all that well, because a lot of things happened, and a significant, statistically significant proportion of them were Bad Things that I'd really rather not dwell on. I know those years happened — and there are probably blog posts covering a lot of them right here on this site — but, even knowing that they probably helped shape the person I am today and helped strengthen my own resolve as a "survivor", it's hard not to feel like it would be nice to have them all back.

Still, that's not a thing you can do, unfortunately, so here I am, at 2am in the morning, aged 45, pondering a lost decade of my life. Do I have a point to all this? You'd think I would, wouldn't you. But you know what? I don't think I do. And that's probably all right.

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#oneaday Day 676: Shuffle post

Every so often, I like to hit the "Random Post" button in my menu bar and see what the lack of "algorithm" on this site serves me up. At least, I don't think there's an algorithm beyond POST=INT(RND(0)*NUMBEROFPOSTS)+1 — although oddly enough, I do feel like certain posts do come up more often than others whenever I feel like browsing back through the archives.

Anyway, today I'm going to link you to some of these randomly selected posts and you can have a look at them. If you want to. I don't mind if you don't. I'm not your Dad or your teacher, just some loser on the Internet who does… this.

Anyway.

Cardinal Quest is out on iOS, and you should probably buy it (10/6/2012) – This was back in the days before mobile gaming completely lost the plot and became nothing but predatory gacha and free-to-play games. Cardinal Quest was a decent roguelike with a nice pixel art aesthetic, from what I recall, and it was a decent fit for mobile thanks to its relatively straightforward mechanics. It is, unfortunately, no longer available on iOS, and it seems its PC port is gone from the Internet, too; it was originally distributed by the short-lived "Steam for indies" service, Desura, and also by BMTMicro, whoever the fuck they are. Desura is now a sketchy-looking webgame portal, and BMTMicro says Cardinal Quest is "no longer available for purchase". There was also apparently a sequel in 2015 that is still available on a platform people actually use — Steam — and seems well-regarded by the 115 people who bothered to review it. Did you buy Cardinal Quest on iOS in 2012? I did. Unfortunately I no longer have anything to play it on and I bet I can't download it any more either.

So very very tired (17/6/2025) – A recent one! This one was me bemoaning the fact that Uncle Ben's instant noodle packets have an AI-generated picture of the noodles on the front of them. You know, the noodles in the packet. The ones they could have probably cooked up and photographed quite easily. Honestly, I cannot wait for the day when I no longer feel the need to write posts about how frustrating I find the AI fad, but that day has not come along just yet, unfortunately.

Glee – it's a feeling you get when your brain finally lets your heart get in its pants (30/1/2012) – I forget the exact origin of the quote in the headline, because sadly I did not come up with it myself. A brief Google reveals that it is from Community (specifically, a Christmas episode which is a Glee parody, and which also features the memorable scene of Alison Brie singing "boopy-doopy-doop-doop-SEX" while dressed in a Santa outfit) — but this post was not about that episode. No, it was actually about Glee, which I eventually watched after I saw the Community parody of it, and after I got over my curious resistance to it. I thought it was popular and thus probably wasn't any good, but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Can't remember anything about it now, mind, but it was a pleasant enough watch at the time, as this post suggests.

Hypnospace (8/7/2024) – I played Hypnospace Outlaw back in July of 2024, and enjoyed it enough to blog a bit about it. It's a memorable, worthwhile game that I recommend, so I'll just let this post do the talking.

No half-measures for Ultima (22/5/2022) – This post is about the fact I bought a laser printer because I had got sick of the expense of running modern inkjet printers, and I wanted a means of quickly and easily printing out documentation for retro games. In this case, the Ultima series, which I have been meaning to go through properly at some point, but have still not gotten around to beyond a few videos showing me trying them out for the first time. One day!

Type Zero (19/11/2016) – Final Fantasy Type-0 is a game that I feel is probably mostly forgotten about today, but it was an interesting spinoff in the Final Fantasy series that did some intriguing things with game structure, battle mechanics and all manner of other things. The PS4 version is a good way to experience it, as I talk about a bit in this post.

Defiant Destiny (27/3/2011) – A post about pondering the future as it appeared to be extending out in front of me as of 2011. At that time, I was still picking up the shattered pieces of my life somewhat after a tumultuous 2010, but I was starting to see the possibility that things might not end up being a complete disaster. I would still have plenty of challenges to face, and I don't think 2011 me would believe 2026 me if I went back and told him the state of the world right now, but it was nice to have at least a brief moment where there was kind of, sort of a feeling of hope to cling on to.

That seems like a nice place to leave things, no? Hope. Remember that?

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#oneaday Day 547: School books

I've been thinking about school again. I do that a lot for some reason. Nostalgia for happier days in the past, perhaps. A melancholy reflection on a failed career. Or an earnest desire to go back. It doesn't really matter. I do it a lot, regardless.

One of the things that my brain has decided to fixate on today is the concept of "school books" — specifically, exercise books. I don't know why, but I really liked having a book for each subject's work.

Obviously, from a practical, logistical perspective, it makes sense to have one book per subject, particularly in secondary school, because pupils tend to have different teachers for different subjects. But it also makes sense in primary school to a certain degree, as it allows the teacher to clearly demarcate different subjects' work — which is taught at different times in the week — and for the pupils to easily compartmentalise the various things they've been learning.

I don't know. There was something inherently pleasing about every subject having its own colour, and I bet a lot of schools around the country used a similar colour scheme. We had red for English Language, green for English Literature, grey for Maths, orange for Science, blue for Languages, a different green for the subjects grouped under "Humanities" at our school (Geography, History, R.E.), and your Journal would be a different colour according to what year you were in.

That Journal was a handy little thing, too. It was essentially a weekly planner where we could record any homework we got from our subjects and the date it was due; it was then, of course, up to us to check it regularly and ensure we actually did that homework. This was before any sort of handheld electronic devices with reminders on them — pre-"smart" mobile phones didn't become particularly widespread among me and my peers until we were into sixth form. It was a good and healthy thing to do, I think; it helped teach us matters of personal responsibility — and also occasional bullshitting on the inevitable occasions when we had forgotten to check it properly.

The Journal was treated like some sort of holy book, though. Every single week, we had to get it signed by our parents to prove that they had seen we had been recording our homework, and every week, our form tutor had to sign it to confirm that our parents had signed it. A space on each week's spread was also set aside for any communications between our form tutor and parents — for more serious infractions, of course, you got a Letter Home from the school office, but for minor things (and not necessarily problems!) there was this space in the Journal.

Heaven help you if you doodled anywhere on your Journal, though. Defacing it in any way was an immediate ticket to having to buy — yes, buy — a new one. As you might expect, the end of term rolling around was an immediate signal to many of us to immediately deface the crap out of the Journal for the term just gone. These defaced Journals became companions to "The Rough Book" among me and my friends — there was something about the neatly laid out tables in the Journal that made it ripe for customising with ridiculous doodles. My favourites were ones where we absolutely covered the page with tiny stick figures, all standing on the various lines of the table, flinging themselves off the edge and getting up to no good. I kind of wish I still had some of those.

It was the same for your subject exercise books, of course. Some teachers insisted that, as our inaugural piece of homework for a new term, we should cover our exercise book as a means of discouraging and/or preventing any doodling on the cover. Most people went the "wrapping paper" route, but there was a fun degree of self-expression among us all, and there was always some posh git who would laminate the cover of their book at their Dad's office or whatever.

I realise, of course, that the relative strictness with which we were taught to treat our school equipment can be looked on, from some perspectives, as being stifling to creativity and borderline authoritarian. School in general has always been designed as a means of, among other things, socialising us into becoming "good citizens" — and part of that, at least when I was at school, involved treating things with respect — whether they were the things that had been given to you by the school, the things you had brought in from home, or the things your peers were using.

It didn't always happen, of course, but there was a certain degree of pride that pretty much everyone had in their school possessions. Outside of covering books, one of the best ways to express one's individuality was through the stationery you brought to school — and the pencil case in which you kept that stationery. Some folks had cool, branded, zippered pencil cases; others had little tins. I remember my proudest pencil case at school was a Nintendo-branded tin with Super Mario Bros. pixel art on the front; it was also one of my least practical pencil cases due to its size, but I loved it nonetheless.

Anyway, you'd think I'd have a point about all this but I really don't. Something just got me thinking about the colour of school books, so that's what I've talked about today. Hey! They can't all be winners. Or perhaps you found this absolutely fascinating, in which case I am happy to have served.

Either way, at 20 past midnight I think it's probably time to go to bed.

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#oneaday Day 470: Time travel

I like reading old magazines. I always have done, ever since I was a child — and in fact, the "old magazines" I read today are pretty much the same old magazines I read when I was a child: that is to say, old issues of Page 6 and Atari User, with an occasional PC Zone or Official Nintendo Magazine from the mid to late '90s.

Part of this is down to the family connection: my Dad, my brother and I all contributed to Page 6, so it will always be important to me. None of us wrote for Atari User, but as the only other magazine devoted to Atari 8-bits around at the time, we bought pretty much every issue. Likewise, my brother worked on PC Zone for quite some time in the mid to late '90s — I even went and did my Year 10 work experience with him — and I did a few freelance gigs for the Official Nintendo Magazine during my latter days of Sixth Form and early days of university.

I don't just re-read these magazines because I'm proud of the people involved, mind. I read them because while I'm reading them, for a brief moment, I have escaped 2025, and I have travelled back in time to when they were current. I've caught myself numerous times genuinely thinking that I wanted to order something from one of the companies advertising in the magazines, before remembering that they almost certainly do not exist any more, particularly in the case of those supporting the Atari 8-bit computers.

But it's nice. While I was a bit young to be involved in things like user groups, computer clubs and (let's be honest here) piracy exchanges back when these magazines were current, reading them, even now, makes me almost feel like I'm there. It almost makes me feel like I can reach out and touch the past — and find great happiness there.

This is the root of nostalgia, of course, and some would argue it's not necessarily a healthy thing to fall into the habit of. But to that I say pish, pfaugh and all manner of other Victorian expectorations, because 2025 sucks balls, and any escape from it is welcome — particularly if it can be achieved through a means as simple as opening an old magazine and reading Garry Francis ranting about Scott Adams adventures, or Patrick McCarthy writing an entire preview in "Franglais", or even the odious "street talk" house style that was used at the Official Nintendo Magazine at the time I was doing occasional freelance work for them.

Many of the people involved in these things have moved on to better things in later years. In the case of the early Atari magazines, some of them may not even be with us any more. I wonder how many of them, penning their lines for the latest print deadline, would know that their words would carry great comfort and meaning for someone — even if it's just me, and no-one else gives a shit any more — so many years later?

A few articles in some magazines might seem like a small legacy to leave, but it is a legacy nonetheless. I wonder if, many years from now, someone might find something I've written and draw some comfort from it? If that's you, I pre-emptively appreciate your time and attention, and I hope the future doesn't suck quite as bad as our current present.

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