#oneaday Day 396: The purity of early gaming

I consider myself quite fortunate in that I'm able to enjoy a full spectrum of video gaming, ranging from the very earliest titles up to the most modern releases. The only part of gaming that really leaves me cold is multiplayer-centric titles — I just find they don't hold my interest in the long term.

I feel particularly blessed to be able to enjoy stuff from the early '80s, because I know the primitive presentation of stuff from this era can be a turnoff to some. But I absolutely love it; settle me down in front of a bunch of Atari 2600 or Intellivision games — or, indeed, home computer games from the era — and I can quite happily fill an evening just as well as I could playing a modern, complex title.

As I've grown older and spent a significant portion of my life writing about and making videos about games, particularly those from this early era, I feel like I have a solid appreciation for simple but solid design, and games that are inherently designed to be highly replayable. Sure, you can't "finish" a lot of these games in the same way as modern titles, and to some that's inherently less satisfying, but you have to look at them a bit differently.

Take one of my favourite games of all time, River Raid, for example. River Raid is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up that, in theory, goes on forever. You can't "beat" River Raid. But you can develop a sense of satisfaction from attaining a high score, or reaching a particular level when starting from the beginning, or overcoming a specific challenge that has given you grief for a while.

But it's not even about making progress sometimes. Sometimes it's just about engaging with an inherently pleasing experience. The best early '80s games feel good to play. They achieve this through good handling, effective presentation, a feeling of fairness, and plenty of other elements besides. I enjoy playing Night Stalker on Intellivision not in pursuit of high scores, but simply because it feels nice to play it.

So with that in mind, for this trip down to the office and the accompanying overnight stay — this time at my parents' house because my usual hotel was fully booked — I've brought nothing but early '80s fun to occupy myself. And before I head off to sleep, I think I'll enjoy a round or two of some all-time favourites. Maybe some Cloudy Mountain to start off…?

#oneaday Day 391: Step out of my Game Room

Every now and then, I like to hit the "Random Post" button on this site and see what I was writing about at some point in the past, be it a few weeks ago or, in some cases, years ago.

Today, the Random Post button threw up this post from early in my first run around the #oneaday track. For those too lazy to click (I know you are, everyone is these days), it was a post about the then-imminent arrival of Game Room on the Xbox 360, and some feelings of positivity towards the whole thing.

For the unfamiliar, Game Room was a piece of software for the Xbox 360 that allowed you to kit out a virtual arcade and populate it with not only virtual tat, but also real games. The software was free, but in order to get any real use out of it, you had to buy either individual games or bundles of games. These games could then be placed into your arcade as "machines" that you could go and play, and, in an attempt to get people to care about Xbox Avatars, you could sometimes see virtual representations of people from your friends list wandering around and playing the games.

What was rather interesting about Game Room for me at the time was the fact that it included not only arcade games — which we already had a few of in downloadable form via Xbox Live Arcade — but also Atari 2600 and Intellivision console games. I had a passing familiarity with some 2600 hits at the time, but Intellivision was completely alien to me, so I was fascinated by the prospect of discovering some new favourites from the dawn of gaming.

There were a lot of objections to Game Room prior to its release, though. Indeed, that post was partially in response to a post on the official Xbox forums (RIP), where an Xbox player called "A Patch of Blue" described the upcoming programme as "a shameless attempt to siphon off Microsoft Points by dumping regurgitated content into our laps with a pretty bow on it". Their primary objections were that the games cost an equivalent of $3 each (a bit tight, I feel) and also that "guests" in your arcade could only play a game once before having to pay-per-play to the tune of 40 Microsoft Points (approximately 50 cents) unless they went away and bought it themselves.

Here's part of my response:

The biggest concern people have with digital distribution is that one day, your content will be switched off and, despite having paid for it, you’ll no longer be able to use it. This is a fair concern, as no-one likes splashing the cash on things that they won’t be able to use at some point in the future – but when you think about it, in the world of tech, this is nothing unusual. Products come and go, specifications increase, chipsets change – and at some point it’s necessary to leave the old behind. Did people complain that the Amiga wasn’t backwards-compatible with the Commodore 64? Do music enthusiasts complain that it’s getting harder and harder to find a cassette deck to play those old albums that you only bought on cassette because they were cheaper?

Well, yes, they probably do, but that’s beside the point. What I guess I’m trying to say is this: isn’t the “built-in obsolescence” of digital distribution the same thing? I have a stack of PC games in a box here, some of which it isn’t possible to run any more. Okay, maybe with some tweaking and playing with software like DOSBox it’s possible to get it going – but to a (for want of a better word) “casual” user, they’re defunct and obsolete. The only difference with potentially expiring digitally distributed products is that there’s no workaround like DOSBox. Once the content’s gone, it’s gone. And yes, that’s not a great thing, but it’s not something to be surprised about.

Oh, dear 2010 Pete. How silly you were. How foolish. How you should have probably listened to A Patch of Blue. Because you can't play anything you bought for Game Room any more, can you? No, you can't, because they switched the servers off, and that means, for some reason, you can't play any of the stuff you paid for.

Actually, I do maintain that Game Room was a lot of fun while it lasted. In particular, I adored the real-time leaderboards, because it was a genuine game-changer in stuff like River Raid for 2600 to see yourself climbing the rankings as you played. No-one has done anything quite like it since; even Hamster's otherwise excellent Arcade Archives releases on modern platforms only update the leaderboards after you've completed a run and specifically told it to update your score.

That sort of stuff, being server-driven, obviously couldn't last forever. But completely switching off the entire application, meaning you could no longer play anything, even single-player stuff with no leaderboard functionality, was kind of shitty, and I'm still a tad bitter about it.

Game Room was a great idea for numerous reasons. As I point out in that post from 2010, Game Room was the first real attempt to put out a fully legal, officially licensed, console-based multiplatform "emulator for the common man" system out there. There was no faffing around with configuration, no diving into dodgy ROM sites looking for the games you wanted. You just fired it up, bought the stuff you wanted, played, and enjoyed the features it offered. It's unfortunate that it's no longer accessible, as there was no "end of life" plan beyond "just turn it off".

These days, we have other options for officially licensed ways to play classic games, including my place of work, the aforementioned Arcade Archives series, compilations for modern platforms and numerous other products. Most of these have been designed in such a way that they will continue to function indefinitely — assuming you have them downloaded, in the case of digital products like the Arcade Archives games — which is an improvement over Game Room's completely closed, proprietary and online-dependent ecosystem.

I still miss Game Room, though. I'd love to see someone take its really good ideas — chief among them that real-time leaderboard thing — and run with them in a way that's a bit more considerate to players over the long term, and compliant with things like the Stop Killing Games initiative.

Hell, this sort of thing is the exact situation Stop Killing Games is seeking to prevent happening again: it's not saying that Microsoft would have needed to run things like the leaderboard servers indefinitely, because obviously that's not practical or cost-effective. But in an ideal world, I'd still be able to open up Game Room today and still play all the games I bought to use with it. As it stands, the money I spent on it — and I seem to remember I spent a fair bit on it — now has absolutely nothing to show for it.

So yeah, 2010 Pete. I admire your optimism, but I'm sorry to say that it was misplaced. Still, I know you enjoyed it while it lasted, so it's not a complete loss. But I hope you learned your lesson.

I did.

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.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 350: What I'm doing this weekend

I think I pinned down what I want to do for some videos. As I've noted a couple of times recently, I've been feeling a bit short on inspiration and motivation of late, and I've been wondering how I might shake things up a bit for myself.

The answer is to do something a bit different to usual! So I'm going to do just that. Specifically, I've set myself the goal of doing two main things this weekend: one, a pre-scripted video on the subject of PS3 racer MotorStorm, which I've only just played for the first time and really like, and secondly, an "Exploring Together" Let's Play-type video on one of the Game Boy games that has just been added to Nintendo Switch Online: a Kemco title called The Sword of Hope.

I'm really interested in the latter. I've never heard of it before — although I must confess that's not hard with me and Game Boy games, since I only had a limited library when I was younger — but I saw someone describe it earlier as a cross between a conventional RPG and the Icom Simulations adventure games. You know, Deja Vu, Uninvited and Shadowgate.

I really like those games! And I really like the NES and Game Boy ports of them, even if they lack a fair old chunk of the text found in the computer originals. So the idea of playing something that appears to be inspired by them, but which adds some additional mechanics over the top rather than just killing you every five seconds, sounds very appealing to me indeed.

I'm going in as blind as possible because I want to include my immediate reactions to the game in the video. And I think, long-term, I'd like to cover some more Game Boy stuff — not just the stuff on Nintendo Switch Online, but in general, too. The Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance each have vast libraries, and there are some thoroughly interesting titles among them. Presumably because development for these platforms was so cheap — and because they didn't have nearly as much critical scrutiny on them as the TV-connected consoles — developers were, seemingly, quite keen to be very creative with their work on the system. So there's some wonderfully experimental Game Boy (Color/Advance) games out there, and I think there's plenty of scope to explore those through both Nintendo Switch Online and the MiSTer Multisystem 2.

So that's my plan for this weekend. Some of it, anyway. It's a long weekend here in the UK, so I can take my time and enjoy it, then it's back to the ol' grindstone from Tuesday. We've been enduring a particularly busy and stressful period at work for quite some time now, so it's nice to have an extra day off to decompress a bit. It'll all be worth it in the end, though.

Before that, though, bed. Sleep! Sleep is good.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 349: PlayStation Library

As I'm eagerly anticipating the MiSTer Multisystem 2 in a few months, I find myself pondering how to handle the "loading games onto it" situation. The temptation with devices like this is always to just load it up with absolutely everything and then you have a magic retro gaming box that can play anything you want at any time. And, to be fair, doing so is pretty easy these days, with how many systems have complete ROMsets archived online. The legality is, of course, questionable, but the reality is that these sets exist.

With disc-based systems, though, it pays to be a bit more selective. I mean, I've got a 1.5TB SD card to load stuff onto, so I could just load the full PS1, Saturn, Mega CD and PC Engine CD libraries on there. But is it a good idea to? I'm increasingly thinking not. After all, the disc-based consoles are where we really started to see a lot of shovelware starting to appear, since discs were a lot cheaper to produce than cartridges, and thus there are big old chunks of the PS1 library in particular that I think no-one would miss.

I also have the consideration that the CRT screen I intend on using with the MiSTer Multisystem prefers 50Hz PAL games. It'll run NTSC stuff, but sometimes not entirely right, meaning I will probably want to load the European versions of games onto the system by default. And, unsurprisingly, with the US-centric nature of much of the Internet, it's a lot harder to find a full PAL set of PlayStation games than it is to download the entire NTSC-U/NTSC-J library.

So I feel like I might be selective. I may well change my mind on this depending on if I manage to find a suitable archive of PAL games, but at the moment I'm thinking I might just load things on there that I know I want to play or that I had in the day, and then if anything else happens to come up, I can always find it later.

There are games I've played before and I'd like to revisit, like The Adventures of Alundra and the original release of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But there are also games that I never played back in the day but want to, like Azure Dreams, Tecmo's Deception and Legend of Kartia. I still have a modest PS1 collection here in the house, so I will recreate that digitally as a starting point, then fill out with the games I remember owning and playing back in the day. It's a shame I didn't have a blog back then, because before I got bitten by the "collector" bug I did a lot of trading and exchanging games to afford new ones, as I'm sure a lot of us did. (I also did a fair bit of buying games at least twice if I decided that I really liked them, which I'm sure at least a few of us did, too.)

When it comes to Saturn, Mega CD and PC Engine CD, though, I'm in the dark. But those libraries are also quite a bit smaller than the PS1 lineup, so I can probably just bung the whole lot on the card and explore a bit at a time.

Regardless of what the contents of that SD card end up looking like, I'm still really looking forward to the MiSTer Multisystem 2. Count on there being much more anticipation in the coming weeks and months, and hopefully gushing praise for the thing when it's finally in my filthy hands. Oh, I should probably add; if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check here.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 291: If you like old games mags, here's a podcast you might like

The other day, I was contacted relatively out of the blue (no pun intended) on Bluesky by a chap called Ty Schalter, who wanted to let me know he and a fellow writer, journalist and author, Aidan Moher, were launching a new podcast, and would I mind giving it a bit of a nudge on socials.

Firstly, I was flattered that Ty thought I had anywhere near enough reach online to make a difference these days, but I indeed shared it anyway, and am, in fact, doing so again right now. Secondly, I was 100% on board with the concept for the podcast, which was to take a fond look back at classic games magazines. Here's the first episode for you to enjoy:

Now, as I stated in no uncertain terms just the other day, I am a big fan of old computer and video games magazines, and am always up for some discussion of them. These days, it's a bit tempting for everyone to look at the worst of their output, go "ugh, cringe" and leave it at that, but Schalter and Moher are doing the subject justice, judging by their first episode; they're acknowledging that while there are often faults we can pick from a 2025 perspective, these magazines were a vitally important part of gaming culture, particularly in the days before we had always-online Internet and, later, mobile phones.

What you've gotta remember is that in the '90s, if you had an Internet connection at all, it was a dial-up one that you had to ration your time with so as not to leave yourself with an astronomical phone and/or usage bill; earlier than that, the only online services out there were self-contained bulletin board systems. There was also a curious "in-betweeny" phase in the early '90s where services like AOL and CompuServe came to prominence; these offered global online services somewhat akin to the modern Internet, but in their own curated walled gardens. Later, both services provided access to the broader Web, but initially, they were their own little communities.

Why is this important? Because it meant that it was nowhere near as easy to talk about games with people as it is today. There was no magic black slab in your pocket that connected you to the rest of the world, and there was no guarantee that when you "logged on" with your computer that you'd find someone you wanted to talk to. There certainly wasn't the opportunity for carving out your own little space online as there is today, and absolutely no social media. (Maybe it wasn't all bad.)

This meant that magazines played a crucial role for video game enthusiasts: they were the main way that people who enjoyed games found out about new releases, the latest news and in-depth information about stuff that was already out. They were a point of common contact that, when we met up with our "real-life" friends (remember them?), we could use as the basis for a discussion. They were a connection to the outside world — and for many of us, a lifeline that made us feel much less alone in our passion for what is, most of the time, a fairly solitary pastime.

Schalter and Moher get this. They understand that for many of us, magazines were "the gaming community". We came to the mags not just for the games, but in many cases, for the personalities involved and the opinions we trusted. We'd obsess over a 250-word review of a 40-hour RPG, reading it repeatedly and drinking in the screenshots, wondering what it would be like to actually play the thing. We'd base our purchasing decisions on the arbitrary numbers the reviewers thought up, for better or worse. And we'd get to know the studios behind our favourite games through special features, interviews and preview reports.

Many of these things can be argued to still be present in today's games press, to be sure. But the daily churn of gaming news online makes it somehow less special than it was to get a monthly magazine. What game would be on the cover? What games would get in-depth features? What games were getting walkthroughs, tips and cheats? Would there be any cool cover-mounted gifts or bonus booklets included?

While it can be funny to look back and laugh (or cringe) at The People We Were 20-30+ Years Ago, it's important to take a look at the full picture for an understanding of why things were the way they were — and why so many people are still nostalgic for an era long past.

That's what the Fun Factor podcast seemingly aims to explore, and judging by the first episode — which features lengthy reminiscences about Final Fantasy VII that I'm sure will be familiar to anyone Of A Certain Age — it's going to be a good listen over the long term.

So go give that first episode a listen now, and if you're so inclined, support the podcast on its official website. You can also follow the pod, Ty and Aidan over on Bluesky.

I'm excited to see where the show goes from here, as it's a subject near and dear to my own heart. And if you have any fond nostalgia for that supposed "golden age" of magazines, I recommend checking it out, too. 'Cause heaven knows we could all do with some fun, happy stuff to enjoy right now, I'm sure.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 275: The quantum shift in engagement with games

I have been rewatching a lot of some of my favourite YouTube videos recently: the back catalogue of Mark "Classic Game Room" Bussler, who was a big inspiration to me back when I started doing YouTube things. Throughout his various runs of his show Classic Game Room, Mark primarily focused on what we today describe as "retro games" — meaning, in his instance, pretty much anything from PS2 backwards, though primarily focusing on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles such as the NES, SNES and Mega Drive.

One thing that strikes me any time I either go back and explore games from this era either by myself or when I do it vicariously through a show like Classic Game Room is that the way we engage with video games has fundamentally changed at some point. I don't mean the way we interact with them — though control schemes have, of course, become more refined as time has gone on and "best practice" has become established — but rather what we consider to be a "worthwhile" experience.

For many years, the majority of my gaming has focused on long-form games like role-playing games and visual novels. This started back in the PlayStation era, where I discovered Final Fantasy VII for the first time and promptly started devouring pretty much every RPG I could get my hands on. But it wasn't always that way; when I think back to the time I spent playing games on the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and Super NES, the games were (typically by necessity, as a result of their technology) more short-form, immediate experiences. And, back then, I derived just as much value from those as I did the longer-form stuff I started playing with the PlayStation.

Okay, I do recall my sessions on the Atari 8-bit often involving booting up one game, playing for a bit, then loading something else up, playing that for a bit and so on — like most early home computer owners, we had a big disk box full of pirated games, so I wasn't exactly short on choices — but I also feel like it was a lot easier to become engaged and invested in something simpler, shorter and less narrative-focused. I'd spend a lot of time playing Super Mario World, Starwing and SimCity on my SNES, for example; while one might argue both Super Mario World and SimCity are each in their way "long form" games of a sort, they're a different breed to your average RPG, and neither focus on an unfolding story; they use nothing but their mechanics to keep you engaged, and SimCity in particular flat-out just doesn't have an end.

These days, I feel like I'm easily falling into… I don't know if I want to call it a "trap" as such, so let's call it a "routine" instead… where I tend to focus on one "big" game at a time, and that "big" game is something with a lengthy storyline. Over the last couple of months, I spent 120 hours playing through Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and its expansion Future Connected, for example. And that's the main thing I played during that period; I had the odd diversion for a few bits and bobs along the way, but for the most part, I was focused on that one game.

There's value in those shorter games, though, and finally fixing up my retro consoles with Everdrive units and equivalents (as well as all the stuff I work on for the day job with Evercade) is really helping me rediscover that, as there's a definite magic to playing on the classic hardware that emulation still just doesn't quite capture perfectly. (Mostly the scrolling. Real hardware scrolling is flawless; emulation still has just enough tiny hiccups, even on a powerful system, to remind you that it's not quite perfect.)

Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 was a real pleasure to finally explore, as previously discussed, and I've always had a very soft spot for Tetrisphere. I had a pretty limited library of SNES games back in the day — Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, Starwing, SimCity and Zelda — so there's a lot to discover on SNES. And when my Mega Everdrive Pro arrives for the Mega Drive hopefully later this week there's a whole other library of 16-bit goodness to play with, too.

The danger, of course, is giving yourself too much choice, which can lead to the dreaded Analysis Paralysis, which in turn leads to enjoying nothing at all. But I've got a nice expanse of time between having finished Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition coming out later this month. So I intend to make good use of that time to explore some short-form fun.

And finish Soul Blazer. I'm already halfway through that, and that's sort of a Big Game, but also kind of not. I'm enjoying it a lot, either way, so I will probably try and bash that out before Xenoblade X day on the 20th. That and I finished Tokyo Dark: Remembrance today, too. I'm doing well!

Anyway, for now, bed. Perhaps with a little bit of 16-bit action before that…

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 272: A productive day!

One of the troubles I am sure anyone with any sort of "online presence" will be familiar with is the feeling that you "should" be doing something "productive" with any free time you happen to have. Such is the case with me; I've been on holiday all week, and I've had the lingering sensation that I should make some videos for my YouTube channel, since it's something I enjoy doing, and having a bunch of free time available is, surely, the ideal time to do such a thing.

And yet. And yet. There's always a part of your brain at times like this that says "no, fuck that, you booked time off so you don't have to work, so just relax and enjoy yourself". Of course, making YouTube videos is a relaxing and enjoyable activity, but it also requires effort, so you can see the quandary.

Anyway, I made some time to get some stuff done today. I'd already scripted the intro sections for several vids yesterday, so all I had to do was set aside a few hours to record the intros and gameplay sections, and there we were.

I'd been meaning to do several of these videos for a while, but had put up a bit of a mental block towards a couple of them, because they involved games and a platform that are unfamiliar to me: specifically, two Spectrum games that had the potential to be rather challenging to cover.

And they were challenging to cover, but I found a solution. Mostly dogged determination, to be honest, though in the case of one of them, copious use of save states and rewind functions. And the result is, I hope, some videos where I demonstrate how a lot of Spectrum games can be something of a "slow burn", particularly if you didn't grow up with them, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort, there are potentially rewarding experiences that await you.

All in all, I got five videos done altogether today: three Spectrum vids and two Atari games as a palate-cleanser. Want specifics? Oh, all right then; on the Spectrum front, the two I was worried about were Ant Attack and Army Moves, the latter of which is where the majority of the save state/rewind "cheating" took place, because fuck that game's first four levels, plus Auf Wiedersehen Monty, which I knew probably wouldn't be an issue and, sure enough, wasn't. The two Atari games were Lode Runner's Rescue (which is a really interesting game I'd never heard of until very recently!) and Frogger II (which I just like).

That's pretty danged productive, so I should be pleased with myself. So I am! I'm looking forward to sharing these videos with you, as I think they're all a lot of fun. Watch out for them over the course of the next couple of weeks.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 269: It was my bloody SNES

In retrospect, when I had two game cartridges fail in the exact same way as one another, I should have probably considered the possibility that it was, in fact, the game console itself that was at fault rather than the cartridges. But, well, I was going to get an FX Pak Pro anyway, so all that's really happened is I spent £40 more than I thought I was going to, traded in the few loose N64 carts I had lying around (and which were now redundant thanks to the Everdrive 64 X7 I have) and now have two SNESes: one with (presumably) a fried chip that means anything involving "Mode 7" scaling and rotation (and adjacent graphical techniques) is borked, and my new acquisition which, so far, appears to work just fine.

I'm a little sad at the apparent death of my old SNES; that thing had followed me since childhood and has always been a treasured part of my collection, even at the times it wasn't getting much use. I suspect it probably is possible to fix somehow, but that would involve getting stuck into some electronics that I'm not confident enough to explore just yet, and my wife Andie, who is quite happy to get the soldering gun out, is in the middle of numerous other projects, so I don't want to bother her.

So anyway. Yes. CEX did not, in fact, sell me two consecutive faulty copies of Desert Strike, it was my bloody SNES after all. At least that's all resolved now, and with the FX Pak Pro safely in place, I can now just enjoy the thing without worrying about dead batteries, corroded connections and all that other good stuff that we never even thought would be a consideration back when these things were new.

I am looking forward to spending some quality time with the SNES library. As I've alluded to a few times in the past, despite owning that SNES since… probably '92 or so? I didn't have all that many games for it. I had Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario All-Stars, Starwing, SimCity and American copies of Street Fighter II and Chuck Rock. Plus two of those converter thingies that allowed you to play games from another region by plugging a "native" game into the back and the game you wanted to play into the top.

I played a few other SNES games through borrowing them from friends. I borrowed Super Star Wars from my friend Andrew on multiple occasions and liked that a lot; these days people seem to remember that as a ludicrously difficult game, but I don't remember it striking me as being unusually hard back in the day. Definitely one to revisit, and I was always curious to try Super Empire Strikes Back and Super Return of the Jedi, because I never even saw those running.

I'm also going to make some time to play through Soul Blazer, Illusion of Time (better known as Illusion of Gaia) and Terranigma, because I like Quintet's work (and their subsequent work as Shade) but have never settled down to spend a good amount of time with any of these games. I've played the start of all of them multiple times and enjoyed what I saw in all instances, but I definitely want to play them properly.

Then there's just the odd stuff. While loading up a flashcart or emulator with a bunch of ROMs is often a ticket to Analysis Paralysisville, one of the things I like about retro gaming is that you can pick something pretty much at random and probably be able to figure things out without too much difficulty. Sometimes when you do this you make wonderful discoveries of things you never would have thought to try otherwise; at others, you realise why these games aren't better known.

Earlier today, I tried the Infogrames Asterix game. I was a big fan of Asterix as a kid and am still rather fond of it; I still have all my old Asterix books, and the Konami arcade game is, I maintain, one of their best belt-scrollers. I was always frustrated that there was no home version of that arcade game, though, and for one reason or another never came into contact with any of the console games. This particular one isn't anything particularly remarkable, but it does have some of the Asterix wit and charm about it, and Roman soldiers go "PAF!" when you punch them, which is nice.

Another nice thing about the FX Pak Pro is that it functions as a Super Game Boy 2, meaning you can load up Game Boy ROMs as well as SNES ROMs. I found a couple of games that don't seem to work with it — The Smurfs, sadly, which is a shame, as the soundtrack for that game is way better than you would think it would be — but Rod Land does, which is all that really matters.

So mixed feelings today, then. Sadness at the apparent death of my childhood SNES, but joy at the world the FX Pak Pro is about to open up to me. And when the Mega Everdrive Pro gets here in a few days… well, I'll be in 16-bit heaven for quite some time, I feel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 261: Two for one

Two for the price of one today! Aren't I generous? Of course, I could have probably put what I'm going to say in this post into the previous post, but then I wouldn't have "caught up" having missed a day, and I (and, let's face it, no-one else) would feel bad.

So with that in mind, I'll do my best to try and talk about something completely different in this post.

I've spent my evening playing some Midnight Resistance on Evercade. I do like that game a great deal, and there is, in fact, a reason I've been playing it outside of just "because I want to", but I also just wanted to.

With the general size of modern-day games, it's easy to forget about the appeal of classic arcade-style games from earlier generations of hardware. It's easy to think of these games as being somehow "lesser" thanks to them not having in-depth storylines, not having hours upon hours of gameplay (assuming you can make it through them) and not having in-depth secrets and lore for theorycrafters to post six-hour video essays on YouTube about.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. When I sit down to play a game in the evening, I'm usually prioritising whatever my "big game" is at the moment — Xenoblade Chronicles at present, for example. But sometimes, as I alluded to the other day, I'm in the mood for something different. And that's generally when I bust out something that doesn't take as long to play, but which I often find is still incredibly rewarding, relaxing and enjoyable.

Take The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, which I played and wrote about recently. I decided to play this pretty much on a whim, but almost as soon as I started I knew that I would be devouring this game within a day or two. And, rather than coming away from the experience feeling like I hadn't had value for money from the game because it only lasted for 6 hours, I came away not only immensely satisfied with the experience I'd just had, but also inspired to write nearly 3,000 words about it.

It's the same any time I jump into something a bit shorter. I need to stop thinking of these as "filler" games, as it's easy to do, and actually settle down and spend some proper time with shorter experiences. Because there's a lot to appreciate in them, and it's valuable to consider the various different ways that interactive entertainment can engage our brain, excite us and distract us from the misery that is generally existing in 2025.

I'm feeling increasingly attracted to 16-bit games specifically, and with that in mind I've ordered an FX Pak Pro for my Super NES. This is a flash cart from the Everdrive maker Krikzz, based on an open source project known as SD2SNES, and it supports pretty much every SNES game you can think of, including the ones with the funny custom chips like the Super FX chip or DSP chips — and supposedly it even runs Game Boy games via the Super Game Boy 2 setup. I'm looking forward to loading it up with European SNES ROMs — the TV I run my SNES on doesn't like doing 60Hz — and spending some quality time with some excellent 16-bit games in the very near future.

And, once my wallet has recovered from the not-inconsiderable amount that the FX Pak Pro costs, I'm going to do the same for the Mega Drive and have an absolutely delightful selection of games to spend some time with when I just feel like kicking back and playing things that aren't too demanding of my time.

I do like collecting retro games, but realistically speaking, I have a few considerations: firstly, I don't have a lot of space for more games, and the priority on the remaining space is for current stuff; secondly, retro is getting very expensive, and not always worth the amount you need to pay to get stuff in reasonable condition; and thirdly, retro is also getting a bit unreliable at times. I bought the game Desert Strike three times from CEX and all three cartridges have an issue in the same way. It's not my SNES because that runs absolutely everything else just fine. Combine that with the fact that batteries in carts with save game functions are starting to fail and it's just easier to go the flash cart route. It's not as if buying a second-hand copy of a game from CEX is sending any money back to the original devs, after all — and as a general rule, if something I enjoy gets an official rerelease on a modern system, I will happily pay up for a physical copy of it. (Even better, often with Evercade I get to be part of making those physical releases!)

So yeah. 16-bit is where it's at for me at the moment. And with that in mind, I think a few more attempts at Midnight Resistance before bedtime.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 238: The Sims is still good

The rumours were true! Just ahead of the series' 25th anniversary, EA dropped rereleases of The Sims and The Sims 2 on their own storefront and Steam earlier today, for the eminently reasonable price of £34.99 for the both of them. Considering they both come with all the expansions (well, I think The Sims 2 might be missing the IKEA "stuff" pack, but that's about it), I'm perfectly happy to pay up for them both, particularly considering The Sims has never had a digital release, and The Sims 2 has been unavailable for a long time.

"But you can get them both for free!" the entitled corners of the Internet shout. "They're abandonware, and that means you can legally download them for free!" Well, firstly, one, no it doesn't, because abandonware isn't actually a thing, legally speaking, and two, it is important to support official rereleases of stuff like this, because it gives a thumbs up to companies making a commitment to actually preserving their history and making it available to everyone, even those who weren't there for it first time around. It's no good carrying on about "preservation" if you don't support actual attempts to do that. Piracy is all well and good if there is no other way, but official preservation efforts should be supported. Yes, even if they're by EA.

Both rereleases have been updated so that they work just peachy on Windows 10 and 11, and The Sims is able to run in much higher resolutions than it ever has before, and in widescreen. Okay, the game could arguably do with a UI scale option when playing at 1080p or higher, but it's not unplayable by any means, particularly if you're playing on a big TV as I have been.

I've spent a few hours revisiting The Sims this evening by making a rough recreation of my original "Hartley Family" save file, which featured me and the other members of my hall of residence flat at university struggling to survive. I am reminded that the original The Sims is actually surprisingly challenging compared to some of its follow-ups; thus far, keeping on top of six people's needs has been quite difficult, particularly with a lack of substantial income. Things will get easier once some of them start getting promoted and bring in a bit more money each day, but for the moment it's very much in "scraping by" territory.

Also one of them has died already after burning down the kitchen, but I managed to "Plead" with the Grim Reaper quickly enough for him to be able to return as a zombie. I have made a promise to myself that I'm not going to save scum at all, I'm just going to deal with the consequences of everything that goes on as it happens. Emergent narrative and all that.

I'm interested to spend a bit more time with the original The Sims, as back when it was current, I had a lot of the expansion packs, but not all of them. I don't think I had Superstar, Unleashed or Makin' Magic, and those are three that have some substantial additions to the gameplay — the pursuit of fame, pets and the ability to cast spells using appropriate components respectively.

At present, I've got one of the six Hartley family members equipped with a magic wand and (thus far) the ability to turn someone into a toad, and another who keeps slipping off to the "Studio Town" area to go and sing karaoke badly (earning a whopping 5 Simoleons per performance at present) but so far, it's a struggle to keep their mood high enough to be able to truly take advantage of those features. Much as with real life, getting a solid and stable income stream is important if you want to start doing anything out of the ordinary.

So that's that. The Sims and The Sims 2 are both available on Steam and EA's own storefront right now, either separately or in a bundle together. You also get a "free" copy of The Sims 4 with them, but since that went free-to-play a while back anyway it's probably best ignored unless you want to get into DLC hell. The rereleases of both The Sims and The Sims 2 are complete, meanwhile (aside from the aforementioned Ikea pack for The Sims 2) and should keep you busy for a very long time indeed.

I'll probably write more about one or the other or both at some point, but for now, I'm happy. It's been a nice bit of nostalgia to revisit The Sims — and a reminder that as cynical as people got about the series over the years (not without good reason), it's still just a damned fine game at heart, too.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.