#oneaday Day 600: My CD shelf

Every so often — and a lot more frequently just recently — I find myself thinking back to the collection of music CDs that I once had, and ponder whether or not I should attempt to rebuild that collection. After all, with streaming services generally agreed to be a net shitter for the music industry — and several of them starting to bring in AI slop, because I don't fucking know — it is becoming fashionable, once again, to have a physical collection of Stuff.

Now, you know me. I know this. I have a living room whose walls are at least 85% video games. But I got rid of my whole CD collection when we moved into this place, because… well, there wasn't really room for it anywhere, and at that point, the digital future of music seemed pretty certain. Also the few quid I got for the collection by sending it to musicMagpie certainly helped.

One of the things I find myself getting hung up on is exactly what was in that CD collection. It has literally just occurred to me that I can probably just look at my musicMagpie account and see what I traded in 11 years ago, but that's much too easy. (EDIT: also, apparently I did not create an account when I traded all this shit in.) So I'm going to attempt to do it from memory, with explanations where necessary.

In no particular order other than as they come to me:

Definitely Maybe (Oasis) – the first album I ever bought with my own money, after I learned about what modern music it was "cool" to like. Embarrassingly, I bought it literally the day before (What's the Story) Morning Glory? came out, which got me some ribbing, but not that much, because Definitely Maybe was still a decent album.
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (Oasis) – I actually don't think I bought this for myself, because I had it on cassette, not CD. I often considered buying it on CD but never quite got around to it because I always thought my money was probably better spent on something I didn't already have. I quite liked the tape version. It was easy to play in the car.
Be Here Now (Oasis) – People seem to hate this one now. I thought it was good.
Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette) – I'm actually not sure why I bought this, because I had heard its greatest hits so many times on the local radio station the school bus always had on, and was thoroughly sick of them. But for some reason I did buy it — and I'm glad I did, because I ended up liking pretty much all the songs on it, particularly after reading along with the lyrics while listening. Fun fact: I'm pretty sure this album taught everyone in my friendship group and surrounding acquaintances what the term "going down on" meant.
Blurring the Edges (Meredith Brooks) – After accepting that yes, I actually did quite like Alanis Morissette, I sought out some other "girls with guitars" albums. I became rather fond of this one. Not every track is a winner, but there are some great songs on here, with Bitch probably the most well-known of them.
Left of the Middle (Natalie Imbruglia) – Not quite "girls with guitars", but sort of adjacent. I wasn't really thinking about that, though. I primarily bought this because several of us really fancied Natalie Imbruglia.
Footprints (Holly Valance) – See above, with even more tenuous justification.
Spice (The Spice Girls) – I have told this story before.
Spiceworld (The Spice Girls) – I'm not sure that justifies this, though.
Travelling Without Moving (Jamiroquai) – My best friends at school were super into Jamiroquai. It didn't take long for me to join them, subsequently adding Emergency on Planet Earth and Return of the Space Cowboy to my collection also.
Essential Indie (Various) – A CD that came free with my Discman when I got one for Christmas or a birthday or something. My favourite track on it was Sick & Tired by The Cardigans, primarily for its unusual flute and bassoon backing.
Essential Acid Jazz (Various) – A double CD that I picked up not long after getting into Jamiroquai. This was a varied selection of acid jazz weirdness, with only really one track by the Brand New Heavies being familiar. My friends and I all enjoyed this album a lot though, and a copy hastily recorded to tape was a fixture in my mum's car (which I often borrowed of an evening) throughout most of my time at sixth form. Favourite track was, without a doubt, Big Kahuna by Jeremy Bun, a track which my friends and I parodied in our brief incarnation as the sonicfunkstars shortly after we learned to use Sony's ACID Music. (Fun fact: my Xbox Live Gamertag is still sonicfunkstars, because I am not paying Microsoft money to change my fucking name.)
The Lord of the Rings (Unknown) – The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies came out while I was at university, and we all enjoyed them. I bought this album because it had a cool box with a nearly naked lady on it and it said The Lord of the Rings on it. I didn't mistake it for the official soundtrack or anything (which I also bought) — if I'm honest I primarily bought it because of the titty lady. When I got it home and opened it up I discovered that titty lady actually got them out in the sleeve notes. When I put the CD in the player, I discovered that the whole album was literally just noise. I have no idea what it was supposed to be or why. I was so ashamed of the purchase I actually threw it out. To date I haven't been able to rediscover exactly what this fucking weird CD was — as I'm sure you can imagine, tracking down something just called The Lord of the Rings is not easy — nor am I sure I want to, because I think it might have been haunted.
Painkiller (Judas Priest) – My friend Owen, who I did teacher training with, introduced me to metal. A particular favourite of us both was this excellent album. On one memorable afternoon, in a chemically induced haze, we produced a spectacular Judas Priest remix using ACID Music. It helped distract from the horrors of the working day.

There's a bunch of compilations also — including Shine 7 and 8, which I talked about here — but those are most of the ones I can remember without taxing my memory too hard. I know there were a lot more than that. And now I really want to know what happened to that receipt for all the CDs I traded in 11 years ago. It must be somewhere!

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

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#oneaday Day 279: Criminal Records

I sort of miss the whole ritual of buying music from a shop. You know, going in there, agonising over whether or not you really want to spend twelve quid on a CD from a band you're not sure you like based on a song you've heard so much on the radio you basically Stockholm Syndromed yourself into convincing you were a fan of?

Back when we actually still did that sort of thing, I had a fairly shameless attitude towards buying music, even though I occasionally got the piss taken out of me when I was a teen. This attitude started pretty early on, when the first music album I purchased for myself with my own money was Oasis' Definitely Maybe… literally the day before (What's The Story) Morning Glory? came out. After earning the jeers of my peer group for that particular escapade, I pretty much decided to go "fuck it", and just buy stuff I felt like buying, without shame. Same approach I take with video games to this day, as it happens.

That's not quite the full story, mind. There were still CDs that I saw in the shops that I knew it would effectively be social suicide to purchase, if anyone ever found out I did so. Generally speaking, as a teenage boy, anything by a boy band was right out, as were any of the particularly cheesy pop acts like S Club 7 or Steps. And, of course, the Spice Girls.

I maintained this feeling of warding off potential musical shame for a while, but then I went along with my parents to a party at my "Aunty" Sue and "Uncle" Peter's house. (I put "Aunty" and "Uncle" in quotes because they're not actually related to me; they're the kind of "Aunty" and "Uncle" that means "friends of my parents") I forget the exact occasion, but it was definitely some sort of celebration. And Aunty Sue and Uncle Peter had a big house — it used to be a school, in fact, but they were also rather well off.

Anyway, I always thought Uncle Peter was kind of cool in that way you never, ever mention to your parents when you're an adolescent, because declaring someone who isn't a celebrity but is from a completely different generation to you is "cool" is absolutely unthinkable.

The reason I thought Uncle Peter was cool was because as part of furnishing their absolutely enormous house, he had an amazing hi-fi system, and an enormous collection of records on various media formats (including several ones that were "weird" by the early '90s, like reel-to-reel tapes and 8-tracks) that covered possibly the most eclectic selection of musical tastes I think I've ever seen.

While Aunty Sue and Uncle Peter were setting up for the party, I happened to wander into the room with the hi-fi, where Uncle Peter was browsing through a big pile of CDs. And, to my surprise, I saw several "criminal" records among them — most notably the Spice Girls' first album, Spice.

I don't know why I felt this way, but something in my brain changed at that point. The thought process was something along the lines of "well, if Uncle Peter can buy a Spice Girls album and not spontaneously combust, would it really be so bad if I did so, too?"

So, not long after that trip and the party, I went out and bought myself a copy of Spice for myself. And I listened to it. And I enjoyed it! I thought a couple of tracks were a bit poo (interestingly, the tracks I tended to like least were the ones that had become singles, like Wannabe, which I still don't like all that much) but I overall… didn't regret my purchase, and listened to it a good few times. And when Spiceworld came out the following year, I bought that, too, also without shame.

I still didn't tell anyone I was buying these albums, nor did I do it in front of them, of course — I still had a certain amount of pride. But I also didn't hide these albums when anyone came to visit, nor did I attempt to concoct any sort of stupid lie about not knowing how they got there, or someone sabotaging my CD collection, or whatever. It was just part of my musical tastes at the time — which grew to be rather eclectic as a direct result of my own willingness to buy "criminal" records.

I sort of miss that. I still like listening to music, particularly when I'm doing something dull, but the thought of just putting a CD on and listening to it as a self-contained activity now feels almost alien to me. There are times when I consider starting to collect CDs again in an attempt to rediscover that lost pleasure of just listening to music as an activity in and of itself… then I remember I have a house bursting at the seams with video games already, and thus not really anywhere to put CDs, so I have to content myself with streaming, like most of us do these days.

My one hangover from those days is that even while streaming music, I tend to prefer to have full control over what I'm listening to, and I will more often than not listen to a full album rather than just putting it on a "Shuffle" or "Radio" setting. I still like that musical journey you take through a good album, but I do miss the whole ritual of buying the CD, taking it home, looking at the artwork, reading the sleeve notes and the lyrics and listening to the music intently and attentively.

I wonder if we'll ever come back around to that? There's already growing unrest and dissatisfaction with streaming video services, with some (including me) actually preferring a return to physical media. But can we go back? Should we? I don't know. But I'm definitely still tempted to rebuild that CD collection. I bet second-hand music CDs are dirt cheap these days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2491: No, I Won't "Stop Buying Physical Video Games Already!"

This argument seems to crop up every so often as we move ever-onwards into the supposed "digital age", and this time around it was clumsily espoused by Damon Beres of The Huffington Post.

The thrust of Beres' argument is that because digital sales are up, we should all simply stop buying physical products. "[The rise] is pretty good news for one reason in particular," he argues. "Physical video games are basically obsolete wastes of space and resources."

I can see where he's coming from to an extent. Physical games take up space that not everyone has. If you're living in a particularly cramped apartment, for example, you may not want to devote lots of shelves to DVD-size cases when they could be better used for something else — or perhaps even abandoned entirely for those who have gone truly Spartan in their accommodation arrangements.

But Beres' argument is flawed thanks to a few factual inaccuracies, and one absolutely honking issue, the latter of which we'll come on to in a moment.

"You may not realise it," says Beres, "but if you're gaming on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the actual disc you buy at the store doesn't really do much. Games need to be installed on your system's hard drive because the consoles can't run games directly off the Blu-Ray discs."

False. Running games from disc is often a much more efficient use of the limited hard drive space both the PS4 and XB1 have available to them, since many games only install the most important files to the hard drive and then pull the data from the disc itself as required. There are exceptions to this rule — graphically intensive triple-A games tend to do full installs to quicken load times, for example — but the last few games I've played on my PS4 booted up straight away after putting the disc in, suggesting that the game perhaps only installed the main executable file and most frequently accessed data files and little else.

Beres continues his argument thus: "Gaming is also more convenient when you move to a digital library. Any games you want are stored on your hard drive and boot up the moment you select them — no getting off of the couch to switch discs out."

Also false… sort of. With entry-level PS4 and XB1 systems only having 500GB hard drives (and the Wii U having an even more pathetic 32GB straight out of the box), there is a hard limit to how many digital games you can have installed on your console at once, after which you will need to delete them and re-download them at a later date if you want to play them again. And with more substantial games weighing in around the 50GB mark, this is a long download, even on fibre-optic broadband; much longer than the time it takes to get a disc down from a shelf and put it in a slot.

This brings us neatly onto the humdinger of the point that Beres has failed to address at all in his article: the question of archiving. At present, we have access to digital console games at the whim of Sony and Microsoft. Sure, right now we can redownload our games as many times as we want if we need to shuffle the contents of our consoles' hard drives around, but what happens in another 5-10 years when a true next generation of consoles shows up? I certainly don't believe that Sony and Microsoft are going to keep the respective digital download stores for old platforms available forever; Sony has already shuttered the PSP's PlayStation Store access, for example, forcing those who hadn't already downloaded their purchases to upgrade to a Vita or PlayStation TV if they want to keep their content. I find myself wondering how long the PS3 PlayStation Store will survive… hopefully they'll at least wait until I've played my PlayStation Plus copy of Yakuza 5.

This is less of an issue on PC, where we're not locked into a specific storefront, despite a significant chunk of gamers choosing to make use of Valve's digital platform Steam as their default means of managing their gaming library — at least partly due to the regular deep discounts we get on even brand new titles on most digital platforms. If Steam were to shut down tomorrow, there are a wide variety of other places on the Internet where you can download the same games, be it alternative digital storefronts such as GOG.com, or even directly from developers' and publishers' websites. PC gamers are also free to back their games up onto physical media whenever they like, and PC gaming is also less subject to the "generational" issues that consoles have, since with each new iteration of the popular operating systems, there are talented developers — amateur and professional alike — dedicated to ensuring that old games continue to work on modern systems.

With consoles, however, we don't have those failsafes in place. If PSN or Xbox Live goes down, no digital games for you. If and when those storefronts close permanently, you'd better hope you'd already downloaded everything you want to keep, otherwise it's lost forever — a potent reminder of the oft-quoted condition in most software's licensing agreements that you are not buying the software itself, merely the right to use it.

Keep a library of discs and cartridges, however, and you can always play your games, regardless of whether you have an Internet connection or if the services in question are working correctly. Keep a library of discs and you get to archive these experiences for future generations — or indeed for yourself — to be able to enjoy ten, twenty, thirty years down the road.

This may not be a priority for every gameplayer — the sort of person who plays nothing but yearly Call of Duty or FIFA installments is unlikely to care, for example, since they tend to play with the mindset that games are disposable experiences — but for those who value gaming as a form of creative expression, as a crafted entertainment experience or even as art will almost certainly want to keep "the games shelf" around for many years to come.