#oneaday Day 30: A Milestone?

Is 30 days a milestone? I guess you can look at it that way, depending on if you consider nice round numbers a milestone. You can also look at 30 days as “about a month”, too, so I guess it’s significant from that respect. It’s a long way off the 2,541 daily posts from last time around, of course, but that all started with baby steps, too. And then it just kept going.

Now and again I like to hit the “Random Post” button on this site to jump to one of the myriad posts in the archives. I often find myself surprised how often it throws up the same things, given how many of them there are, but computerised randomisation is, as we hopefully all know by now, imperfect.

That gives me an idea for today’s post. I’ll hit Random a few times and see what I think of what shows up. Are you ready? Then let’s begin.

First up, Day 693 from first time around, and a post named Endings. In it, I contemplated the fact that I had just finished L.A. Noire, a game that I enjoyed a lot at the time but which I have forgotten almost everything about since. I pontificated on particularly effective endings that had stuck with me over the years — particularly downer endings. And Conker’s Bad Fur Day was one that stuck with me, due to it coming after all the foul-mouthed ridiculousness that had come before.

I still agree with this. Conker’s Bad Fur Day ends absolutely perfectly. It’s a huge bummer in a lot of ways, of course, what with our hero losing his true love, but it also provides something of a sense of “reality catching up with him”. The strange journey that Conker goes on over the course of Conker’s Bad Fur Day starts silly and cartoonish, but gets darker and darker as you progress through things. By the last few sequences in the game, things are still silly, but there’s a definite sobering undercurrent. The World War II-inspired sequence may have you fighting against teddy bears, but it’s still World War II, and a lot of people get hurt and die.

The ending of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is as much a signal to the player as it is to Conker. “Wake up,” it says. “The time for play is over. Now it’s time to get back to the grim reality of life.” Sobering, to be sure.

Next up, post 850 from first time around, entitled Diablolical [sic]. In it, I lay out how I’d been having a good time with the then-newly released Diablo III, and that I didn’t have as much of a problem with it being “always online” as the rest of the Internet seemed to. And that’s because I recognised that Diablo III, far more than its predecessors, was actually an MMO. A well-disguised one, yes, but still an MMO.

I actually stand by this assessment, though my opinion on Diablo III itself has soured somewhat for a variety of reasons. Firstly, after playing it a bunch, I realised that its setting and unrelenting grimness was just plain boring to me. The world of Diablo is a world in which there is no hope; one in which you defeat the Big Bad of the hour and there’s inevitably an even bigger bad lurking just around the corner. And once you’ve beaten all the Big Bads, they all come back, because that’s what Big Bads do in Diablo-land.

Secondly, it’s hard to get the various revelations about working conditions at Blizzard Entertainment out of my head. I’m not about to go on a big crusade about it or anything, but given that the Diablo series is already one I’d been feeling a bit “ehhh” about since the very beginning, knowing that some of the staff at the developer are shitheads makes it a lot easier to just go “fuck it” and never play anything from them again… particularly as all of their last few releases have some combination of loot boxes, battle passes or predatory “free-to-play” monetisation. So yeah, fuck Blizzard and fuck Diablo. Diablo III is still an MMO, though.

Next up, an earlier post: number 303, from 2010, in which I ponder the nature of Panic Stations. Specifically, through some exceedingly heavy-handed masking, I outline the things that cause me a sense of irrational anxiety, even when I know they’re not anything really worth getting het up about. 2010 was before I’d really sought any sort of help for mental health, and well before I’d been diagnosed with either anxiety or Asperger’s, but I still recognised anxious feelings in myself — and my brain’s tendency to blow things out of proportion.

This post is one I should probably return to now and again to remind myself not to get so wound up about stupid things.

Finally for today, an even earlier post from 2010: number 57, Look into the Eyes, in which I talk about the Derren Brown show my ex-wife (who was, at that point, just my wife) and I had been to see at the Mayflower theatre in Southampton. I really enjoyed that show, and both of us had a lot of time for Derren Brown. I feel like we don’t see much of him these days; I wonder what happened to him? Looking on Wikipedia, it seems he’s still active, but I guess the changing nature of how we look at media these days makes him less visible — I don’t watch “TV” any more, for example, and that tended to be where I saw him the most.

All right, that’s enough looking back for one day. My cat has just been sick and the other cat is eating it. I think that’s as good a cue as any to just go to bed.

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

#oneaday Day 4: Upward Slope

Been feeling mildly better today. Had a small boost in mood from this week’s Slimming World visit; although I haven’t undone all the “damage” from last week I have lost some weight, and thus I count that as a success. It is important to celebrate the small victories, as they add up; I’m still down quite a bit on what I started, even though I still have a long way to go.

Today has been a pretty uneventful day all round. Work was quiet, as it’s likely to be for a little while, and I spent a bit of time this evening playing some Steam Next Fest demos. That’s a subject for MoeGamer though, so check over there in the next few days for some thoughts.

I’ve been spending my late evenings before bed watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which my brother kindly bought me a box set of for my birthday. I’ve never watched this right through to the end, so I’m looking forward to finally doing that. While it was tempting to try and watch all the Star Trek series chronologically, that’s a mammoth undertaking that I’m not entirely sure is desirable anyway. I do want to at least see Deep Space Nine and Voyager all the way through, though, so I’m going to tackle those one at a time.

No header image today as I’ve left the Kindle Scribe downstairs and I’m typing this from bed. The post editor in the Jetpack app is actually surprisingly good, though I still prefer typing on a proper keyboard. Good to know I can do some decent posting from mobile, though; the WordPress app used to be kind of pump.

Anyway, that’ll probably do for now. It’s quarter past midnight and I am tired. Tomorrow is another day, and there is work to be done, so to sleep I go.

#oneaday Day 1: Blogging Therapy

Good evening. If the header looks familiar, you’ve doubtless been following this blog for quite some time and will remember that time, starting in January of 2010, where I decided to participate in a loosely organised blogging project. Dubbed “One A Day” or, more commonly, “#oneaday” due to its origins on Twitter, it was a collective effort by all the participants to write something — anything — every single day for a year.

I joined the project a little late, but ended up going the distance considerably more than some of the other people who started alongside me — including the original organisers, several of whom gave up after less than a month. I eventually managed 2,541 posts, eventually calling it a day on December 31, 2016.

Sometimes I think about that project and the value it had for me. Ultimately, I don’t think I really got a great deal out of the “community” side of things — on the contrary, when I decided to step forward and encourage a group of bloggers to do a year of #oneaday in aid of charity, I got a fair chunk of abuse from the original organisers, who still felt some weird sense of “ownership” over the concept of daily blogging, despite having dropped out of the whole process very early. But what I did get out of it was a sense of… I guess “therapy” is probably the best word for it.

My starting #oneaday first time around coincided with one of the absolute worst times of my life, during which I suffered bullying at work, culminating in me being dismissed from a job I loved because I stood up for a colleague who was also being bullied; a period during which my first marriage broke down irreparably and left me alone, without an income and staring down what I saw back then as the humiliating possibility of having to return home to stay with my parents; a time when my anxiety and depression were enjoying a particular “peak” (or is that a trough?), to say the least.

One of the things that got me through that period mostly intact was making the time each evening to sit down and write something. It didn’t necessarily have to be about what had happened that day or even how I was feeling at that point; just the act of being creative was somehow comforting. It seems that the human mind is often at its most creative when it is suffering, and I was most definitely suffering around that time. And indeed on several other occasions during those 2,541 posts.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging helped get me through that time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging is a significant part of why I am still here to write this right now. Because believe me, things inside my head were bleak for quite some time on several separate occasions.

Today, on the 8th of June, 2024, I’m not in anywhere near as bad a situation as any of those previous instances, but my mental health most certainly has been dipping down into a bit of a trough for quite some time. So I thought it was time to kick the tyres on this here ol’ blog, which is still humming away, and make a commitment to writing something every day in the hopes that it might help, even a little.

I will hasten to add that my sudden inclination to write something on here is nothing to do with the events of today specifically, which were actually rather pleasant; some friends who I haven’t seen for some time were all finally available to come and have a day of playing video games and chatting. We haven’t done this for a long time — I’ve tried to make it an annual tradition of sorts, since our respective lives make it difficult to do anything more regularly — and it was nice. But some of the conversations we had got me thinking, and that indirectly led me back here to the “Compose” page.

So anyway. That’s what this is. I’ve rambled on for long enough for today, so perhaps we’ll talk a little bit more about my present situation and what I really hope to get out of all this another time. For now, let’s just say it’s good to be back, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.

2541: Farewell

This is my last daily post on this blog, to coincide with the last hour of the last day of 2016. I’m not going to rule out posting on here again when I feel like it, but this is the last of my daily entries. I feel that the exercise has run its course, and I’m definitely satisfied with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2,541 days.

Why am I stopping now? Well, it’s part of a broader plan I outlined a few days ago. I want to unplug and get away from the constant noise of online culture in 2016. It stopped being fun a good while ago — roughly coinciding with the rise of the outrage brigade who love nothing more than using their social media clout to shame people for enjoying “problematic” material — but it’s also been becoming increasingly apparent that the reasons I’ve been keeping my social media accounts active for as long as I have simply don’t seem to be the reasons other people keep them active.

On previous occasions when I’ve considered deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts — Facebook in particular — the thing that has always stopped me is the thought that “oh, people won’t be able to get hold of me easily, since everyone uses Facebook nowadays rather than anything else.” But over time it’s become apparent that while everyone does indeed use Facebook, pretty much the last thing they use it for is keeping in touch with other people. Rather, the inherent encouragement of narcissism in modern social media encourages people to post everything about their lives — or rather, everything in a heavily edited, idealised version of their lives — in an attempt to make other people feel like they should be having more fun/sex/babies/delicious meals/strong opinions about Donald Trump. And while that occasionally leads to heated debates in comment sections, it very rarely seems to lead to good conversations.

Twitter comes at it from a different angle. I’ve heard Twitter described as being like going to a party where everyone is shouting things at the room in general hoping other people will come and join the conversation, and that’s a fairly apt description. The particular trouble with Twitter is that its original selling point — its 140-character limit, intended to encourage people to “microblog” rather than post walls of text — isn’t conducive to nuanced discussion and debate, which leads to particularly obnoxious behaviour when people of differing ideologies and/or opinions about which anime girl is hottest come into contact with one another.

In short, I’ve been finding social media to be more trouble than it’s worth, so I’m unplugging from the noise in the hope that those people who do value my friendship will make use of other, more private and personal means of contacting me rather than everything being aired in public. And this blog comes under that header, too.

This blog has been valuable “therapy” for me over the course of the last few years, which have been, to say the least, rather challenging and difficult for a variety of reasons. I’ve faced many obstacles — some of my own creation, some by other people being colossal jackasses and my not really having any power to do anything about that — and, while I wouldn’t say my life is where I want it to be in the slightest, I feel that I’ve grown stronger as a person as a result.

But I feel like I need to start a new chapter. Leave behind the past, and look forward to a hopefully brighter future. It’s not easy to shed emotional baggage — not to mention the physical baggage that mental stress can leave you with — but severing my ties with the past, be they social media accounts or indeed this blog, feels like the right thing to do right now.

I’m not disappearing entirely, mind you; as I mentioned in my previous post, I still intend to keep writing weekly on MoeGamer, which will become my main place to write about games I’ve found particularly interesting or exciting, so I encourage you to subscribe over there if you like what I’m doing. And for more general writing, I’m starting up a weekly TinyLetter — effectively a small-scale mailing list — for personal notes to those of you who have been kind enough to show me friendship and support over the last few years. If you’re interested, you can sign up for that here. (Those of you for whom I have email addresses already, I’ll be taking the liberty of signing you up automatically at some point on New Year’s Day; I hope you don’t mind, and if you do, please rest assured that if you decide you don’t want to receive my notes, you can unsubscribe easily.)

Aside from that, though, at this point in my life I feel like broader Internet culture just doesn’t hold the value it once did for me, so out the window the unnecessary crap goes for 2017. I’m not encouraging any of you to follow my lead and I’m certainly not casting any judgement on those of you who still find value in social media and Internet culture at large; I’m simply saying it’s not for me, and explaining where I’ll be going if you do want to find me.

If you’d like to stay in touch more privately, please either subscribe to my TinyLetter — which you can reply to just like a normal email — or drop me a message via my Get In Touch page with your email address and/or any other contact details you’d care to share.

For those who have supported this blog for any period of time — be you lurker or regular commenter — thank you, good night, and I wish you a happy, healthy and hearty New Year. Here’s to 2017 being a better year for everyone.

2540: Royalty Free

I was surprised to discover that a device exists purely for the purpose of streaming shit music into shops.

Actually, let me correct that: a device exists purely for streaming royalty-free music into shops. There’s a good reason for this, of course: music in the background generally makes for a livelier, more pleasant atmosphere, but not all businesses find it practical or desirable to pay up for PRS and suchlike in order to use copyright-protected music, and as such we have the rise of the royalty-free artist and their music to fill this apparent gap in the market.

The aforementioned device isn’t, shall we say, a perfect bit of kit; the available music on offer is relatively limited, and its shuffle algorithm is so unsophisticated that it’s not at all unusual to hear the same song five or more times over the course of a single hour, but it does at least perform its basic function reasonably effectively. And more to the point, through a bit of the old Stockholm Syndrome, finding yourself in an environment where this nonsense is all you are able to listen to means that after a while you might actually start liking some of these songs.

Songs like Kady Z’s Game Over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCKEoC9GRDA

Or indeed Kady Z’s Beautiful Disaster — apparently Kady Z, whom I had never heard of prior to actually investigating the dreadful but catchy lyrics to Game Over, is pretty much the queen of royalty-free music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYFMDfQgASU

Interestingly, of all the musical monstrosities that belch forth from the aformentioned streaming box, Kady Z’s are the only ones that I seem to be able to find easily on the Internet. I’m sure the others are out there somewhere, but Game Over is the only song I’ve so far managed to find by Googling the one line of the lyrics I can actually remember. (“Game over, you and me, game over, finally free.”)

All this is perhaps because in particular the two songs I’ve mentioned above I actually don’t mind all that much. As I say, that may well be the Stockholm Syndrome talking, but from a bit of additional cursory research this evening, Kady Z appears to be 1) quite attractive and 2) actually not a terrible pop artist either, seemingly drawing influences from a number of other artists including Ke$ha (most apparent in Game Over), Katy Perry and numerous other “upbeat white chick” kind of affairs.

I wouldn’t say she’s a particular artist I’m going to rush out and buy all the albums of, but sometimes it’s kind of nice to accidentally stumble across some reasonably inoffensive new music that’s a bit outside the mainstream pop charts, which remain mostly dominated by bullshit these days — yes, I am getting old, and I’m not at all ashamed of it.

So there you have it. Make an hour-long playlist with Game Over in it at least five times punctuated by other stuff and you, too, can experience roughly what my day has been like.

2539: Hipster Coffee

I was a little early going into town for work this morning, so I stopped for a coffee. The Starbucks I usually stop at was pretty heaving, so I went over the road to a place that has relatively recently opened but which I hadn’t tried before: an apparent chain (I’ve seen at least two in various parts of Southampton) called Coffee #1. And I think it’s the most hipster place I’ve ever been in.

If I were to say the words “hipster coffee shop” to you, picture what you think I mean for a moment. Chances are you’re imagining a place with wooden floors, eclectic art lining the walls and overly familiar, jocular writing on the menu. And, of course, lots of 20-year old mean with beards and overly elaborate moustaches browsing Instagram on their iPads. And blue-haired, slightly overweight women staring morosely at their mobile phones, flipping idly through social media rather than actually talking to the person sitting across the table from them.

Coffee #1 was exactly like this, and then some. The art on the walls seemed to have no coherent theme whatsoever, running the gamut from an enlarged diagram of how to correctly hitch a horse to a post to framed covers of Tintin comics and Tolkien novels. The furniture wasn’t much better; I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a single matching chair in the entire place. And this wasn’t the case that you find in some coffee shops where maybe a chair breaks so they have to bring out an “emergency chair” from the back room to fill a gap; no, this seemed like a distinct effort to make everything mismatched. It was sort of impressive in a faintly insufferable sort of way.

Coffee #1 wasn’t a bad place to go for coffee by any means; the coffee itself was nice and at least came in proper mugs rather than artisanal blown glass jars or something, but the whole experience I had while I was there was just one of the place itself trying far too hard. “Look at me!” it seemed to say. “I’m quirky and kooky and wacky!” It felt like whoever had designed the chaotic aesthetic of the whole place was desperately trying to ensnare to coerce the millennial market into coming for a cup of overpriced, overly complicated coffee while taking selfies with their insufferable friends to plaster all over an Instagram feed that no-one in their right mind would give a shit about, regardless of how many cat GIFs and screenshots of the Notes page on their iPhone featuring supposedly profound “showerthoughts” they interspersed their irrepressible narcissism with.

Entertainingly, I got the distinct impression that the staff at Coffee #1 were a little weary of the whole thing, too. The woman serving me wandered off to take a piss (in the toilet, thankfully, at least I assume that’s where she went) halfway through taking my order, and the guy who appeared to be in charge looked a little flustered, to say the least. I’m not sure whether this was simply a side-effect of the Christmas rush (which I can attest to as being exhausting) or if working in an environment that practically screams “ME! ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK HOW QUIRKY I AM!” simply fatigues the mind after a while.

Either way, I’m not averse to going back to Coffee #1 again in the future, since the important part of its service — y’know, the coffee — was nice enough and no more obnoxiously priced than its peers. The mismatched, chaotic decor didn’t even really bother me that much, despite the words I’ve expended describing it above — it was simply rather striking, since it was my first visit. It all just seemed like rather a lot of wasted effort — and believe me, to ensure that every single chair in your establishment doesn’t match any other chair in your establishment has to take a certain amount of effort — when I can’t help but feeling most people would be happy with comfy chairs, muted and relaxing decor, and perhaps some light, calming music playing in the background.

And good coffee, of course.

2537: Treasure Tracker

I started playing a game I’ve been meaning to check out for a while today: Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, a spin-off title from one of the Wii U’s best games, Super Mario 3D World, and a fantastic game in its own right.

For the unfamiliar, Captain Toad is based on the occasional levels in Super Mario 3D World where instead of controlling Mario, Luigi, Toad and/or Princess Peach, you take on the role of Captain Toad, an intrepid explorer from the Toad race who is carrying so much crap in his backpack he can’t jump. Consequently, his means of navigating levels is very different from the relatively conventional platforming of Super Mario 3D World’s regular levels, and his stages tended to be rather more puzzly in nature.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker takes the idea of these stages and builds a whole game out of them. With each stage being formed as a three-dimensional diorama, usually in a cube shape, you need to carefully navigate Captain Toad around and rotate the camera in all directions to find hidden items and passageways as well as determine the best way to proceed.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker features a great deal more variety in its stages than the Captain Toad stages in Super Mario 3D World, and in true Mario game tradition there are a wide variety of unique mechanics and gimmicks that are introduced and explored in a couple of stages before being set aside before they wear out their welcome. Powerups from Super Mario 3D World put in an appearance, too, most notably the cherries which spawn a clone of your current character, which you then control simultaneously with your original one. You’ll then be tasked with navigating these characters together in such a way that you do things like simultaneously press switches or proceed down two separate routes at the same time.

In true Nintendo tradition, there are several degrees of depth that you can play the game in. At its simplest level, you can make your way through Captain Toad by simply determining the path to the star that completes the stage. Then there are three hidden gems in each stage, and finally a hidden bonus objective. Not all of these objectives need to be completed at the same time or even in a single playthrough, but they add a great deal of depth and replayability to the levels.

Most of all, though, Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is simply an utterly charming game that doesn’t have a drop of maliciousness or cynicism about it whatsoever. It’s endearing, cheerful, colourful and relaxing to play, and already, after just 11 stages (out of a reported 70+) it’s becoming one of my favourite Wii U games that I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck further into.

2536: NES Remix and the Art of Good Game Design

Still on a Nintendo kick at the moment. I’ve been playing a fair amount of NES Remix on Wii U, a rather peculiar package that consists of an enormous number of bite-size challenges based on a variety of Nintendo’s old 8-bit NES games.

Structurally, it’s rather like a mobile game in that each level tends to take less than a minute to complete, and upon completion you’re graded between one and three stars, which are subsequently collected and used to unlock further challenges.

The rating system isn’t needlessly complicated, however; you get one star just for clearing the challenge, even if you ran out of lives and had to continue partway through a multi-stage task; you get two stars for clearing the challenge without using a continue; and you get three stars for clearing the challenge without using a continue and within a (hidden) par time. (You can also attain “rainbow stars” for each challenge by beating an even tighter par time, but these are purely for your own satisfaction; they don’t count as extra stars as far as the game is concerned.)

The genius of NES Remix is that it teaches you to play all of these old games as you go, and it does so without using any hand-holding tutorials whatsoever. Rather, with each of the games in the package, it starts you off with simple tasks and gradually advances you to more complex, multi-stage challenges. And once you’re done with all that, the “Remix” and “Bonus” stages provide their own twists on the classic NES games in all manner of ways, perhaps by mashing up characters from one game into the levels of another, or by doing weird things with the visuals, or by making you play the game upside down or back to front.

What NES Remix successfully does is revitalise every game it incorporates — even those which, when played in their original forms, would look a little tired and primitive now. By trimming the experience down to less than a minute rather than expecting someone to play, say, an entire round in Golf, or a complete game in Baseball, you get a feel for the solid base mechanics of these games without having to invest a lot of time in them and risk them outstaying their welcome. NES Remix instead tasks you with, to use the same examples, simply getting on the green in less than 2 hits from a variety of situations, or winning a game from its final innings.

NES Remix is also interesting from a historical perspective to see how far we’ve come in certain genres. As you may have surmised from the examples I’ve given so far, this is particularly apparent in the sports games. Tennis, for example, requires far more split-second timing than its more modern counterparts. And while Golf features an early version of the classic “two tap” power-and-accuracy meter that many modern equivalents still use today, the lack of features such as the ability to put spin on the ball or estimate the maximum distance a given club will hit makes you realise how much we take for granted today.

It’s not just true for sports games, either. Ice Climber makes me incredibly grateful that Nintendo finally got the hang of jumping controls with the Mario series, because they certainly didn’t in Ice Climber. The Legend of Zelda will make you miss the ability to move diagonally. And Donkey Kong will make you glad that modern platform game heroes have significantly stronger knee joints and don’t die if they fall more than the length of their own shins.

As infuriating as some of these old games can be, NES Remix embraces their foibles and quirks and turns them into simple but compelling and addictive challenges that have kept me very much entertained over the last few days. And when you’re done with Nintendo’s oldest games, NES Remix 2 then moves onto later titles such as Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3, Metroid and Zelda II as we see a company getting more adventurous and attempting to refine their craft further.

For some, there will be no substitute for playing the original games — perhaps even on original hardware — but NES Remix is a great way of revisiting a wide variety of Nintendo classics and having a bit of fun with them. Plus I can’t help thinking it would make a hell of a great basis for group competitive play.

2535: A Very Nintendo Christmas

Familial duties for Christmas Day are all done and dusted, and the wife and I are back home. After giving a bit of fuss to the cats — who got an impressively large haul of gifts, because everyone likes to buy presents for cats, and cats are easy to buy gifts for — my main plan for this evening is to sit down in front of the Wii U for a whole bunch of Nintendo gaming.

I’m not entirely sure why my brain has made an unbreakable association between Nintendo games and the festive season, but I get this feeling and this desire to binge on Nintendo games every Christmas.

I suspect it’s a combination of factors, beginning with the fact that one of the most exciting Christmas presents I ever received as a child was a Super NES — the first console I’d ever owned, as up until that point we’d previously been a computer game-only household thanks to our collection of 8- and 16-bit Atari computers.

During that Christmas, I spent a great amount of time between the three games I had at the time: Super Mario World, Street Fighter II and Chuck Rock. (The latter two were American imports for some reason, necessitating the use of one of those enormous and unwieldy “converter” cartridges in which you had to plug the game you wanted to play in the top, and an English game in the back.) Consequently, I have very fond memories of that Christmas, and notably, the original Street Fighter II is one of the only fighting games I’ve ever felt like I actually “got”.

I think it’s more than that, though. I wrote yesterday about how I have generally positive associations with Christmas thanks to generally pleasant family gatherings growing up, and Nintendo as a whole prides itself on its family-friendly output. Now, to be honest, my parents were never particularly ones for playing two-player games with me — though my brother would join in when he was present — but the association is still there. First-party Nintendo games in particular are wrapped in a wonderful feeling of warmth and friendliness — a feeling that they’re designed for families to gather round and enjoy themselves with, even if it’s only one person playing at a time while others look on and enjoy the cartoonish silliness.

Then there’s also the fact that Nintendo games are generally very “pure” experiences that often — not always — forego ambitious, thought-provoking storytelling in favour of extremely solid gameplay, and as such are the perfect fodder for those times of year when you don’t want or need to think too hard about things, such as, say, when you’ve eaten several tons of turkey.

Whatever the reasoning behind it, I can’t break the association between Nintendo games and the holiday season, and nor do I want to. So the remainder of my Christmas day is going to be spent in the company of Mario and all his friends.

2534: Christmas Cheer

While I’ve somewhat lost enthusiasm for Christmas over the last ten years or so — I used to absolutely love it as a child — one thing I am pretty grateful for is the fact that I don’t recall ever having a “bad” Christmas.

I mention this simply because one of the most popular stereotypes used when describing the Christmas period is that of “the inevitable family arguments” that apparently occur in many households. While I feel that the descriptions of these are often somewhat overblown and exaggerated for comedic effect in most cases, these stereotypes presumably came about for a reason.

My Christmases growing up were fairly formulaic and predictable, but that brought them a certain sense of comfort about them. I’d wake up to find a selection of small gifts that had been snuck into a “Santa’s sack” at the foot of my bed, then go downstairs for a bacon sandwich and, once I was a little older, a Bucks Fizz. After breakfast, we’d go up to the lounge and open presents — my mother usually being the one who was most enthusiastic about this part of the day, and my father urging a certain degree of restraint — before relaxing with our new acquisitions for a little while.

After that, lunch preparations would get underway, with my mother taking the lead on things — we were a household of traditional gender roles, and also my mother is an excellent cook — and the rest of us alternating between staying well out of the way and occasionally fetching and carrying things as requested.

Lunchtime would come, and sprouts would always be on everyone’s plate, regardless of protestations, though those of us who really objected to them (such as me) would typically only have one of them, drowned in gravy to make it as inoffensive as possible. This would be followed by Christmas pudding, which would always be set aflame, and which I’d never quite work out if I actually liked or not — after 35 years of contemplation, I don’t think I do — and perhaps a cheeseboard to finish.

At some point during the day, the whole family would troop down to a local family friends’ place for wine and conversation for an hour or two; this was never a formal affair, but was always pleasant, particularly if the circumstances of the rest of the year had meant that we hadn’t had the time to catch up as frequently as we all might have liked to do. Then we’d return home, flop into our respective chairs and go back to enjoying our presents, mountains of snack foods and a generally relaxed, calm atmosphere.

I don’t remember a single Christmas that was blighted with arguments or troublesome political discussions, and I’m grateful for that. Perhaps these things did happen and I just don’t remember them, but they couldn’t have been especially traumatic for me if I can’t recall them at all.

These days, a Christmas exactly as I describe above is something that only happens once every couple of years now, since being married, we have the “one family, other family, quiet Christmas by ourselves” cycle going on. This year, we’re with my in-laws, who have routines of their own very similar to those that my family have enjoyed over the years, albeit with their own little twists.

And after a turbulent year — not to mention the chaos of working retail over the holiday period — I’m looking forward to a day where everyone, everywhere can just take some time to relax and enjoy themselves for once. At least, I hope that’s what everyone, everywhere is at least going to make an effort to try and do.

Merry Christmas.