#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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#oneaday Day 436: RIP my sixth form

When I originally went to secondary school, my school was known for having a good sixth form. For those unfamiliar (i.e. not British, I suspect), a sixth form is where you go for "further education" (as opposed to "higher education", which is university) after your compulsory 11 years of school in the UK. It's called sixth form as a hangover from the old method of numbering school years, where primary education didn't really have a fixed method of distinguishing year groups beyond "infants" and "juniors", and then secondary education from 11 onwards started at "first form" all the way up to "fifth form". Today, primary education starts at Reception, then goes from Y1 to Y11 as one continuous run from primary to secondary, with most secondary schools starting with Y7. While some people do refer to sixth form as "Y12 and Y13", the term "sixth form" has, for one reason or another, stuck.

Anyway, none of that is the point. The point is, my school used to be known for having good sixth form provision. It's one of the reasons I went there, as I was a bright child and it was probably a given that I was always going to stay on into post-compulsory education, and indeed I did — two years of sixth form, then four years at university. I was fortunate enough to be in a year group that was the first to take advantage of a brand new sixth form centre built (well, adapted from the former upper school dining hall) on the premises, and it was a really lovely facility. I had a wonderful time there; I enjoyed my studies, I made and solidified a number of friendships, and, as I've remarked a number of times in this blog, I think I count those two years as possibly the happiest, most content of my life.

Every so often, I like to check in on my old school. No real reason, I'm always just curious how it's doing. It never was an amazing school, outside of the sixth form provision, and it's certainly had its challenges over the years. What I was rather surprised to see when I took a Google Street View down to the premises was this:

(Pixelations are mine; I just don't want randos looking up my old school for whatever reason.)

I saw those doors and thought, hang on. That doesn't look right. That building used to be the pride and joy of the school campus, so why haven't they painted the doors for what looks like several decades at this point?

It's because, it seems, the sixth form that was once one of the best things about that school is no more — and, in fact, it has not been a thing since 2015. (The photo above was taken in 2016, which just goes to show how frighteningly quickly a building can start looking dilapidated and shitty.) I found this out from looking at the school's Wikipedia page — I was surprised to discover it even had a Wikipedia page — but there it was, the cold, hard facts. I followed the links to see the news and yes, it seems it's true; the "Post-16 Centre" where I had such amazing, wonderful memories, is no more.

Now, I suspect the school today has made use of this building rather than just leaving it there; there's no way for me to know short of actually going to visit it, and I haven't been there in person for probably more than 30 years at this point. I see from its prospectus and willingness to book out its various large "venues" to the community — something the school had always done, making it a true "community school" — that it has a "performing arts space" that may or may not make use of that old space. Hard to tell, really.

Regardless, I feel a bit sad about this. That sixth form centre opened with such positivity and excitement for the future, and it was genuinely exciting to be part of it. The facilities were good, there were comfortable common areas to relax and socialise, and we felt proud to be part of something new and wonderful. I was surprised and saddened to see that the dream for that space apparently hadn't lasted; the school now has no sixth form provision of its own at all, instead collaborating with another local school (a longstanding "rival" back when I was there, but now part of the same "educational partnership", whatever that means) to provide sixth form provision for both schools' students.

I don't know if all this is because sixth form numbers were on the decline, or the building wasn't cost-effective, or whatever. All I do know is that it's a shame, and I feel a bit sad. You really can't go back, but at least you always have those precious memories, I guess.

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#oneaday Day 397: Cool Sites: where are they now?

Earlier today, prompted by some discussion online, I found myself pondering the concept of the Cool Website. You know the kind of thing: the places you used to point your browser at on a semi-regular basis before everyone collectively agreed (apparently) that the only websites worth a damn now are social media, "newsletters" and whatever "legacy media" rag people are angry at this hour.

I've been trying to think of some Cool Websites that I used to visit at various points in my long-term Internet history, and I thought it might be interesting to see what happened — if anything — to each of them that I can remember. Sound like fun? No? Well, I'm doing it anyway.

1up.com

I must confess familial bias here: since my brother helped launch it and was a key part of its team that helped to establish what we know today as The Gaming Podcast, 1up.com will always be special to me. But it will always be special for another reason, too: it's where I met a number of like-minded folks that I enjoy discussing video games in great depth and at great length with. Honestly, I always spent at least as much time on 1up.com with the community features as I did with the staff's writing, but it was just a damned good website all round, really.

Where it is now: 1up.com officially closed in July of 2013, but everything that had once made it special had disappeared long before that. I put it probably around 2008-2009 or so when most of us made a grand exodus off the site to try and find a new collective home; we never quite settled in one place since, more's the pity, though most of us had at least brief dalliances with Facebook, Twitter and even Google+. 1up.com itself though is long-gone, now, though; not even a holding page remains, and the nature of how the site was programmed means that archive.org can't even get particularly reliable snapshots to pull out of the ether. So this one is, sadly, long dead.

Persian Kitty's Adult Links

Picture, if you will, a land and a time before PornHub. Indeed, a time before YouTube. A time where watching a pornographic video meant a significant commitment in order to download a 10-second video that filled a quarter of your screen, because no-one was streaming filth over dial-up connections. In that environment, Persian Kitty's Adult Links became legendary for me and my friends after one of us saw it mentioned in a magazine. This was a site that updated daily with new links to free galleries of ladies with their kit off. Sometimes there were even videos. Most of these galleries were trying to get you to sign up for a pay site, but there was plenty of material available that was perfectly suitable for a wafty crank of an evening.

Where it is now: Astonishingly (or perhaps not, given the enduring nature of online pornography), Persian Kitty's Adult Links still exists as a website… though it is a shadow of its former self, consisting of little more than some banner ads for various adult livestreaming sites. Four, to be exact, two generic "sex/adult cam" sites, one BDSM-themed site and one MILF-themed site. I'm happy that the Persian Kitty flag still flies, but less thrilled at what the site has become. It always kind of was a big ad, but now it's not trying to hide that.

Kongregate

For quite a while, Kongregate was the place to go for online Web-based games. All the big Flash game makers posted their stuff there, and the site had a bunch of interesting features like achievements, real-time chat, online multiplayer and even a site-wide metagame where you could collect trading cards by playing individual games, then battle other players with those cards in its own self-contained area. While I never got as big into Flash games as some others did, there were some legit all-time classics on Kongregate, with Desktop Tower Defense being the one that springs most readily to mind.

Where it is now: The site still exists and still offers many of the features I mentioned above, but the distinctive Web-based nature of the old Flash games has disappeared with the retirement of Flash as a commonly used Web technology. What we have now are pretty much the same free-to-play games you'd see on your average storefront, including licensed junk and a bajillion Raid: Shadow Legends knockoffs. Of greater concern is the site's new tagline at the bottom, which states "Kongregate is an open platform for all web games and a pioneering game developer in the blockchain space." Yeah. Fuck that.

hairytongue.com

I don't even remember what the main point of this site was — I think it was just a general "Internet humour" site similar to b3ta.com (which still exists and I don't think has updated its design since about 2005, but which still appears to be quite active) — but I do recall there being an extensive gallery of photoshops based on the easily provable hypothesis that Jamie Oliver is a flabby tongued Mockney wanker.

Where it is now: It is nowhere, save for a GoDaddy holding page. Thankfully, archive.org just managed to grab its last wheezes of life on this Earth. I was surprised and saddened to discover that it was as long ago as 2003-2004 that this site apparently ceased to exist. Oh, and if you were wondering, it was a site about hangovers. But mostly about mocking Jamie Oliver.

Weebl's Stuff

This was, among other things, the home of badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom, and was a mainstay of popular Internet culture for many years. As with several of these other sites, the decline of Flash meant there's now a whole generation who (probably) haven't grown up with the adventures of Weebl and Bob, Magical Trevor and numerous other pieces of absolute nonsense.

Where it is now: It's still there! Not only that, but Weebl himself is still making videos, and from the sounds of some recent posts on Bluesky, has found himself a creatively fulfilling Actual Job involving writing.

I think that's probably a nice place to leave this, isn't it? Definitely a subject I might return to at some point, though… once I can remember what websites used to exist, that is…

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#oneaday Day 394: Motivation located

I finally got together the motivation and energy to make some videos, which you'll be seeing over the course of the next little while over on YouTube. I made four in total, which I'm pleased with, as that means I don't need to be in a rush to make any more for a little while. Not that I ever "need" to be in a rush, but I've felt in a bit of a rut with the channel recently, and have really struggled with motivation.

Not so today, though! I think it helped that it's rained a fair bit over the last few days, and that's cooled things down a bit, meaning it's not quite so unbearable to just exist. It's amazing quite how much energy a bit of heat can sap from you; I'm sure I could have probably mustered up some energy to do something vaguely productive if I really cared that much, but I think the "break" also did me a bit of good and revitalised my enthusiasm for some of the things I want to cover.

Today's videos see me returning to the Atari 8-bit for the first time in a while. Every time I come back to the humble 8-bit after spending a bit of time away, I'm reminded how much I love that system. Seeing its fonts is like coming home; it's a comforting, warm blanket that makes me feel thoroughly pleasant. I'm sure part of this is nostalgia talking, but I do genuinely mean it when I say I find it a comfort. I got to know the Atari 8-bit and its capabilities so well when I was a child fiddling around with Atari BASIC that just the sight of half-height, double-width Graphics 1 characters is enough to make me smile today. Throw in the games I grew up playing, and, well, that's a happy place I feel like I should probably spend some more time in, judging by how much I enjoyed today's recording session.

The games I covered today are Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mountain King and Stealth. There was no particular reason for picking these, aside from knowing that Donkey Kong Bananza is on the way for Nintendo Switch, so I thought it would be fun to look at the "Nintendo on Atari" games; Mountain King I chose because I happened to rewatch Classic Game Room's review of the 2600 version the other day, and Stealth… I can't quite remember what brought that to mind recently, but it's a game I've always loved. Or, perhaps more accurately, I always loved its prototype version, Landscape, which we had on one of our Big Box of Pirated Disks that everyone had back in the 8-bit era.

I haven't published any of the videos yet, but make sure you're subscribed over on YouTube if you want to see them when they go up. I'll likely put one up tomorrow, and the rest over the course of the next little while. I have my monthly trip to the office on Tuesday night to Wednesday this coming week, so that will be… fun, probably? I don't relish the long drive every time I have to do this visit, but it is always nice to see everyone. Unfortunately I don't get to stay in a hotel this time because the usual place I book was full up this time around, and the local Travelodge wanted £120. I'm not paying over a hundred quid to stay in a fucking Travelodge, particularly with how they've repeatedly fucked up bookings I've tried to make with them in recent months. So anyway. I will be staying with my parents and delivering my Dad his belated Father's Day gift, which I inadvertently delivered to myself instead. Whoops.

Anyway, videos are uploaded, eyelids are drooping and it's a school night so I guess I better get to bed. Enjoy the vids once they're up!

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#oneaday Day 339: Eras

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

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