#oneaday Day 812: Research update

My efforts to catalogue all the noteworthy mentions of Atari home computer games and software (including type-in listings) that I might, one day, want to make a video about are proceeding apace. I have finished reviewing issue 50 of Page 6/New Atari User, and my spreadsheet is up to 1,179 lines. This may have been a mistake.

I joke, of course. This is actually proving to be a very valuable, helpful exercise for a variety of reasons: first of all is my originally stated, intended purpose for all this: to be able to easily track down press coverage for games I might want to do videos on for my Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series. But some other benefits are coming to light, too. For example, a number of these games have multiple entries on the list thanks to being featured in various types of articles — besides straight-up individual title reviews, there are also compilation reviews and broader topic roundups — which means I can see how (or if) various titles were responded to differently by different reviewers or in different contexts.

Sometimes a game might be a hard sell at full price, but a decent use of some pocket money if and when it comes to a budget label. Sometimes a game might not have resonated with one reviewer, but really hit home with another — or vice versa. Sometimes a game might be a good inclusion as part of a compilation, but not quite strong enough to stand on its own merits. It's interesting to see all these things, and to have the various issues that relate to the various mentions of all these titles at my fingertips.

The other main benefit is more personal. I originally stopped doing the regular Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series because I was worried I was running out of interesting things to talk about. This nearly 1,200 line spreadsheet — which is set to increase considerably in size as I continue to review Page 6/New Atari User issues up until the final Issue 85 from Autumn 1998 — has shown me that there is a veritable wealth of stuff I haven't even thought about tackling as yet. Whether or not I'll be able to stick to the original "A to Z" formula I haven't yet determined — as you might expect, there are some letters that just aren't all that commonly used to begin titles — but in terms of the sheer number of things, to have this amount just from one magazine's run is kind of incredible.

Once this process is finished, I would like to expand my efforts to other magazines. Initially I will likely cover the other early Atari magazines — Atari User, Antic and ANALOG being the main ones — but may well expand to some slightly later ones such as Atari ST User and ST Action, both of which I used to read back in the day. I'm already seeing with the choice of titles covered just in Page 6/New Atari User that they didn't even attempt to cover absolutely everything that was coming out in time for each issue, so it's very likely indeed that each magazine I look at will cover different things at different times. This, in turn, will make it interesting to compare reactions to titles between a European (Page 6 and New Atari User) and North American (Antic and ANALOG) audience, among other things.

Anyway, this is a substantial project, but it's going well and I'm getting a little bit done each day. I've already got more than enough to make use of when I start up the video production machine again, but it would be great to have enough material to last me a very long time indeed. (Honestly, I probably already have that, but the more the merrier, I say.)

I'm actually getting quite excited about rediscovering this focused approach. Checking the dismal viewing figures on my recent Terranigma video only convinced me further that this is probably the right thing to do for the sake of my own enjoyment. It may not necessarily lead to particularly impressive viewing figures, income, subscribers or anything like that — but honestly, I'm happy with how my channel has gradually grown over the course of the last few years. I have nearly 4,200 subscribers on YouTube now, and I would guess that a significant proportion of them are there for the Atari stuff that was my channel's main focus for quite some time. Switching over to something that I specialise in allows me to say "fuck The Algorithm, this is for me and anyone who happens to want to come along for the ride". And that's much more fun when the whole thing is supposed to be a hobby!

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 807: Atarimania got a new look

After many years of rocking the same distinctive and still-functional look, Atarimania, the massive Atari software database, has finally updated its visual style. And from a brief glance over, it looks great!

For the unfamiliar, Atarimania is a place where you can go to look up pretty much any piece of software that has ever been released on an Atari platform. It probably gets the most use for those who are interested in the 8-bit and ST ranges of home computers, but it also has substantial console sections for the 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar, though some of these are still under construction at the time of writing..

Most entries provide some helpful historical information about the piece of software in question, including the date of release (often just a year, as back in the day we apparently weren't quite as fastidious about recording the exact dates things released), the people who worked on it (with hyperlinks allowing you to quickly see what else they worked on) and various other bits and bobs of information. Many entries also allow you to download cartridge ROM files or disk images for the software in question, too, allowing you to quickly load it up in an emulator or even get it up and running on real hardware or an FPGA solution.

One of my favourite parts of Atarimania is the magazine section, which is full of PDF archives for a variety of publications. Some of these are specialist Atari 8-bit and ST magazines (including Page 6/New Atari User, which my Dad, my brother and I all wrote for at various points), but there are also things like Activision's Activisions newsletter, enthusiast user group zines and even some multi-format mags that happened to cover Atari, like Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE), which was a favourite magazine of mine back in the day. It's a wonderful source of authentic information from back when this stuff was current, and it's been a godsend for me when putting together videos.

Atarimania's redesign doesn't reinvent the site's functionality. So far as I am aware, the exact same information is being presented, just with a new look. Notably, it's mobile-friendly now, which it didn't used to be, which makes quickly accessing information on the fly much more convenient than it once was. I'll have to spend some time digging into it all, but from my brief look this evening, it all looks great.

Every time I look at Atarimania, I find myself wishing that a similar resource existed for other platforms. The C64 and Amiga have something similar in the form of Lemon64 and LemonAmiga respectively, the Spectrum has World of Spectrum and the other one I always forget the name of, and I'm sure others exist for other platforms. But for me, none of them quite match Atarimania for sheer comprehensiveness — and I also think that there's a real gap in the market for something similar, but for consoles. Like, I would absolutely love to see a SNESMania, a MasterSystemMania, a MegaDriveMania and suchlike. To my knowledge, nothing quite like that exists right now for console platforms — and I don't really know anything about creating a database-driven website like that, otherwise I would consider looking into it myself. If these sites do exist, they're not anywhere near as well-known as Atarimania is for Atari enthusiasts.

There's MobyGames, of course, and that is definitely a valuable, helpful resource, but it's not quite the same thing.

Anyway, eternal respect to anyone who builds and maintains this sort of thing. You help make the retro gaming hobby that much more enjoyable to participate in — and turbonerds like me happy when we need to research things. Please keep doing what you do forever!

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#oneaday Day 805: Quarter-circle forward

I have long been intimidated by fighting games. I'm not sure exactly when this started, and there are still some fighting games I do enjoy — most notably the Dead or Alive games, which I've always felt have been the closest I've come to genuinely "getting" one of these games. And I would love to change this situation — particularly with the number of excellent SNK fighters we have on Evercade now.

Like I say, it wasn't always like this, though. Back in the SNES era, I, like literally everyone else I knew, had a copy of Street Fighter II, and played it to absolute death. I remember chatting about it with friends at school, discussing the various characters' endings — back then, people still respected the single-player mode of fighting games rather than treating them as the afterthought they seem to be today — and bragging about how easy we found such-and-such a special move to perform. (My friend Andrew was the only one of us who, he claimed at least, could perform Zangief's Spinning Piledriver.)

Beyond that, I remember having a good time with the original Tekken and Soul Blade on PlayStation, Soulcalibur on Dreamcast, the aforementioned Dead or Alive… it all feels a world away right now.

The obvious answer to this is to just try and play a fighting game again. But the temptation, given the amount of information out there today, is to try and look something up; to try and find a guide to "getting good" at one of these games, before you even start actually just playing it.

The trouble is, most guides these days — even supposed beginners' guides — are filled with impenetrable jargon, and move on to complex concepts way too quickly, making the prospect of even thinking about trying a new game difficult to contemplate. I read a guide the other day that said when you are learning a new fighting game from scratch, one of the first things you should do is look at a wiki and learn the framedata for the character you want to play.

Not "play the game, see how you like it" or "pick a character that you find sexually attractive, consider an aspirational figure or think is amusing for some reason". Look at a wiki and learn the framedata.

Now, while I won't deny that once you're taking a game seriously to a particularly sweaty degree, looking at a wiki and learning the framedata probably is helpful — but man! When you're someone who doesn't really know how to play a fighting game, like at all, but is interested in learning at the very least the basics, and then you're hit with something that sounds like the exact opposite of fun as one of the first things you're suggested to do… well, that doesn't feel like much of an incentive to play!

This is the trouble with having too much information available and the baggage that a large and active "community" brings. Back in the SNES era — and even onwards into the Dreamcast and early PS2/Xbox ages — none of us knew what the "FGC" was, and we didn't need to know. If we were lucky, we still had the original manual for Street Fighter II and knew that a fireball move was down, diagonal, forward and punch, and that was, somehow, enough. The way we played would have probably been considered "button mashing" by someone who knew the game extremely well, but again, it didn't matter! We were having fun with the game, we were enjoying playing it — and we were able to play it well enough to (after a lot of continues, in most cases) actually beat the single-player mode.

Like I say, though, the single-player mode of fighting games is seemingly barely given any thought whatsoever these days. The assumption from most of the "guides" out there appears to be that you must always be looking to get ready for competitive action, to be on top of your versus game, and to be able to perform every move absolutely flawlessly, exactly when you need to perform it. Playing against a computer? Ugh, literally disgusting. Get online and get wrecked, because that's the only way you'll learn.

That may be true, but I wonder how many other people out there are like me: having once enjoyed something like Street Fighter II before all this "advice" was everywhere, but now feel completely and utterly intimidated and demoralised any time they even contemplate picking up a new fighter — to such a degree that they just never even try a game that could potentially become an all-time favourite?

As I say above, I think the answer, honestly, is to simply ignore all this and just have a go. If you're only fighting against the computer, it doesn't matter if you suck. If the only skills you develop are "how to beat the computer" — and you do so enough to be able to see a favourite character's ending on a handful of credits? I think that can be enough.

I think you can make it enough. So y'know what? I think I'm going to make an effort to have a go at some of these absolutely beautiful NEOGEO games we have on Evercade. Sure, I'll likely be turning the difficulty level down to the minimum, at least to begin with — but that sounds a lot more fun than looking at charts full of numbers, abbreviations and terms like "Greco-Roman cancel". At least for now. Maybe I'll find myself wanting to do that at some point down the line — but for now, just playing the game sounds like a good idea.

Now the only question is which game to pick…?

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#oneaday Day 803: Write about an obscure game

It is Michael "Virtual Moose" Klamerus' birthday today, and for their birthday they have set a blog challenge, because that is a thing you are allowed to do on your birthday. The challenge is simple: write a blog post about an obscure game. Challenge accepted!

Being someone who is "into" classic home computers — and particularly less popular classic home computers like the Atari 8-bit line — I have plenty of possible answers to this challenge, and even more that stem from my modern tastes of games that are a bit off the beaten track and often ignored by the mainstream press. So what to pick?

Well, I think it has to be a home computer game, as I saw yet another example of people who have probably never even seen an Amiga making jokes about European computer games earlier, and it annoyed me. It annoyed me enough to want to write about a home computer game that is genuinely good, but which doesn't get talked about that much.

I eventually settled on Jupiter's Masterdrive, a 1991 game for Atari ST and Amiga that was developed by "POF Corporation" (who, to my knowledge, never made anything else under that name) and published by a very early incarnation of Ubisoft, back when they spelled it "Ubi Soft". If you want to see it in action, I played it on my YouTube channel five years ago:

Although I have shelves filled to the brim with Atari ST games up in my study, Jupiter's Masterdrive is actually a game that I have never owned a full boxed copy of. My sole encounter with it Back In The Day was on a cover-mounted disk from ST Action, a magazine I used to enjoy, and this was, as you might expect, only a playable demo.

I remember finding it quite striking when I played that demo, though — even though it was obviously unfinished. (If I am remembering correctly, the demo had no sound whatsoever!) It was a top-down racer, but with an unusual sci-fi theme: not only were you racing on moons, other planets and satellites, you also had access to weaponry with which to upset your opponents. Races were as much about survival as they were about coming out in front.

The game moved smoothly, which was never a given on the ST, which lacked the hardware scrolling facilities of its great rival, the Amiga. The play area was deliberately constrained to a relatively small window on the screen, presumably to keep the frame rate up a bit — but it was also possible to play the whole thing in a split-screen two-player mode, and to my recollection, performance didn't really suffer when doing so. My experience with the game — particularly the full version I played in the video above — was almost exclusively with the single-player mode, but I suspect I would have at least tried the two-player mode with a school friend once or twice.

Demo disks of the era were great for this sort of thing. Despite the fact the demos in question had to be squeezed onto a single floppy disk — and often a single side of a floppy disk in order to cater to those who only had a single-sided drive, with bonus demos on offer for those lucky enough to have a double-sided setup — they were often quite generous in terms of how much they would let you play; certainly enough to give you a good idea of what to expect from the finished product, and often a lot of fun in their own right.

In the case of Jupiter's Masterdrive, that playable demo with no sound lodged itself firmly in some dust-covered recess in the corner of my mind for years — no, decades — after I originally played it, so when I was doing my Atari ST A to Z video series and got to "J" one time, the memory leapt out and bellowed "Jupiter's Masterdrive!" at me. "Oh yeah," I thought. "I liked that demo. I wonder what the full game is like?"

Really good, as it happens. The additional time that POF Corporation worked on the game between the release of the demo and the final game coming out over a year later was evidently well-spent, as the result was a well-crafted, polished, slick game that ran extremely well, even on the humble ST, and was a lot of fun to play.

It had some fun and interesting twists, too. From the demo, I had assumed the whole game would be circuit-based racing, but the full version also shakes things up with some arena-based events in which your aim is to collect a certain number of special objects before an opponent. The small play area isn't a hindrance in these events, either, thanks to a well-implemented radar display that allows you to see at a glance where you, your opponent and the target objects are.

Between races, you can spend the credits you earn and win on various upgrades for your car, including enhancements to your car's performance as well as weaponry and armour to help you survive a bit longer in the tougher events.

It's a game I don't think I have seen anyone else ever talk about online, but for one reason or another it's one that, as I say, got into my mind as a youngster and never really went away. I was really pleased to discover (when I finally tried it) that the full game ended up being as good as it is — and encourage you to give it a look, particularly if you've ever said anything disparaging about home computer games.

This is a quality title that holds up very well indeed, and is a great example of why there's a ton of value in exploring this area of gaming history rather than just laughing at those silly Europeans for "making do" with their stupid old STs and Amigas back in the '80s and '90s. We had a perfectly fulfilling, satisfying time, I think you'll find, as games up to the standard of Jupiter's Masterdrive were by no means an uncommon sight — and if you take the time to explore a bit, you'll find some wonderful games that deserve to be talked about a whole lot more.

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#oneaday Day 801: Eeeeeeees

After getting what I thought was "caught up" on the series a few years back (correction: a decade ago. Fucking hell), I am now very behind on Falcom's excellent Ys series. And, despite already having two "big games" on the go — Suikoden and Yakuza 6 — I am severely tempted to start correcting that.

Ys is not the only series I am very behind on, of course. I am also very behind on Yakuza, which is at least partly why I started Yakuza 6 on a whim the other day. Technically I'm not "behind" on Suikoden because I never started it prior to this — though I am enjoying it a lot — but I do want to play, at the very least, the first two in the HD Remaster collection.

Then, of course, there is Trails, that which has apparently become Falcom's flagship series. To date, I have played the first Trails in the Sky… twice. I also made a start on Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, but almost immediately after I started playing that game, Falcom announced the remake of the first Trails in the Sky (and its subsequent follow-up), so I figured that I would delay starting a proper, honest to goodness attempt to "do" that series until all of these remakes were out. And in the meantime, the far end of the series continues to extend further and further into the distance; I am several games behind in terms of actually buying the games at this point, so hopefully by the time I do actually start playing Trails properly, they will still be reasonably available.

Does it all matter? No, of course not. So long as these games continue to be available and the hardware to play them on remains in working order, I can play them at any time. That said, I do feel considerably more "pressure" of sorts to play current stuff sooner rather than later, given how many of them have downloadable updates. I do tend to make a habit of primarily purchasing limited-print stuff, which tends to be fully up to date on cart or disc, but in the case of stuff that gets a broader retail release — like the Trails games now do — there are often updates of varying degrees of necessity from the moment you put the disc in.

And don't even get me started on Game Key Cards, still officially the worst thing about Nintendo Switch 2.

Anyway, at some point, then, I think I will probably be jumping into Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. I did actually make a start on this ages ago, during a time when we had some friends over, they got a bit drunk and wanted to see some sort of RPG. I haven't touched it for ages, though, so if and when I do start again, it will be going from the beginning once more. I'm also quite tempted to revisit Ys Origin, purely for its finale music. And then there's the Switch versions of Oath in Felghana and Memories in Celceta, both of which I've played, but which it would be fun to have another look at.

And then after that there's Ys IX and Ys X to play, too. Ahh, an embarrassment of riches, truly. And yet how long do you think I'm going to stare at a wall, wondering if I really should start something new when I already have two big games on the go?

No. Fuck it. You know what, I'm just going to do it. I need some howling Falcom guitars in my life right now, and I'm damn well going to go and get them. You see if I don't!

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#oneaday Day 800: Some interesting games I've covered

One of the things I've always been fond of doing over on my other website, MoeGamer, is covering games that don't get much (or any) attention elsewhere — be they brand new or old and crusty. So today, in celebration of 800 daily posts, I thought I would point you at a selection of games that you might not have heard of, and the things I have written about them. Doesn't that sound nice? Doesn't that sound like it'll give you a nice range of things to read on the toilet? I know you're reading this on the toilet!

In no particular order…

First up, here's my writeup on Lapis x Labyrinth, a thoroughly unusual game from Nippon Ichi that blends elements of platformer, action RPG, arena combat game, shoot 'em up and pachinko. (Don't worry, there's no actual gambling or microtransactions.) It's an incredibly compulsive game that knows how very appealing it is when you do something in a game and things explode into a shower of shiny things. Narrative-wise it's almost completely forgettable, but in terms of presentation and particularly gameplay, it's a wonderful thing indeed, and highly recommended if you want to play something quite unlike anything else you have experienced.

Next up, here's a look at Root Letter, a visual novel/adventure game hybrid that I once described as "Ace Attorney for the over-30s", and very much stand by that description. It's a thoroughly compelling mystery story with some spooky elements, and does a great job at juxtaposing the energy and optimism of youth with the glum reality of early middle age. I still have not yet played the expanded version of this which adds the option to replace the hand-drawn artwork with photographic stills; I think probably enough time has elapsed between me playing the original version and now that I can (and should!) give it a go, given that it's on my shelf, and has been for quite some time.

Dragon Quest V is not what I'd exactly call an "unknown" game, but this piece which I wrote on the game's treatment of fatherhood — specifically, as experienced by a child, and how I related it to my own life experiences and memories of family life as a child — remains something that I'm very pleased with. I was emotionally invested in the subject matter, and I think that came across in what I wrote. I'm sure the things I describe will be familiar to at least some of you.

Here's a piece on Criminal Girls, a thoroughly interesting — and oft-misrepresented — role-playing game in which you take on the role of a jailer in Hell, tasked with leading a group of "delinquent" girls on the path to getting a second chance at life and a chance of "redemption" from their "sins". The game explores matters of trust both in its narrative and, quite remarkably, through its mechanics, making it a thoroughly interesting example of how a game's thematic elements are woven throughout the entire fabric of the game rather than simply used as set dressing.

Here's a piece on Namco's Star Ixiom, a game from the company's PlayStation era that never, ever gets talked about — but which is actually really, really good! It's the follow-up to the company's Famicom Star Raiders-like, Star Luster, and is absolutely packed with both depth and a variety of things to do, with multiple ways to play according to whether you prefer a linear, mission-based structure or a more freeform, strategic game. Vastly underappreciated game that I'm bummed I never even heard of back when the PS1 was current — but thankfully, I can enjoy at my leisure today.

Finally, let's close off today with a look at SWERY's The Good Life, a game from this unusual and widely beloved creator's back catalogue that, once again, I never see anyone talking about. It is a thoroughly interesting game that combines elements of cosy life sim, murder mystery and open world adventure, allows you to turn into both a dog and a cat, and you can also ride sheep. It is somehow less "wacky" than it sounds, and has some real heart and soul to it — as well as a thoroughly convincing interpretation of the Lake District landscape to explore.

There are many other games I've covered on MoeGamer to date, so if you want more than the above links, stop by the All Games page on MoeGamer and check out an index of every game I've covered to one degree or another. Or you can hit up the article index (also available organised by date) and browse that way instead, if you prefer. Either way, if you've never paid MoeGamer a visit and you like the things I write about games, stop by and have a look around! It's my favourite thing that I've created on the Internet, and I intend to keep it standing for many years to come, so please enjoy what I've put there to date.

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#oneaday Day 795: Titties - deal with them

There's been Discourse happening today! Specifically on that strange intersection between the "cosy" and "wholesome" spaces, and weird misogynistic, sexphobic, neo-Puritanical behaviour.

Much has been written by people much smarter than me about how the "cosy" and "wholesome" spaces are actually not all that wholesome at all — and in fact can harbour some of the truly most odious, harmful outlooks on life it's possible to have. Fairly high on this list is the complete unwillingness to be challenged by fiction in any way whatsoever — and I don't even mean "avoids material with complicated and difficult themes that even the most strong-stomached would find uncomfortable"; I mean absolutely completely and utterly unwilling to deal with something perfectly normal on the grounds that it isn't "wholesome" by the exceedingly narrow definition they have inscribed inside their own head.

Here's the post that kicked off the whole discussion today. It apparently hails from a mod for the recently full-released Fields of Mistria that makes a character "SFW" (safe for work).

Screenshot from a "SFW" mod for Fields of Mistria, unattributed, which reads: "YES dude. pls pls pls make a SFW mod for Juniper too. i love this game so much but my autism makes me feel so uncomfortable about her sprites, and they don't really make sense with the otherwise wholesome tone of the game. seems like i'm in the minority for thinking that, but would be awesome if the devs made a "sex sexualized sprites" toggle, or if there was a mod that did that."

To be clear: Fields of Mistria is not a porn game. It is not even an ecchi game — one with mild lewdity that stops short of full-on, explicit nudity or sexual content. These are some characters from Fields of Mistria:

A screenshot from Fields of Mistria showing three pixel art anime-style women, including a tanned woman with pink hair and a low-cut top showing her cleavage, a conservatively dressed blonde, white woman, and a black woman with medium length hair dressed in a somewhat autumnal style.

And this is the specific character the commenter above is getting upset about:

Juniper, a sorceress with dark purple hair. She stands with a hand on her hip and is wearing a cropped top that reveals her cleavage and a sarong-like skirt.

Juniper, a sorceress with dark purple hair. She stands with a hand on her hip and is wearing an elaborate bikini that reveals -- gasp! -- sideboob.

Juniper, a sorceress with dark purple hair. She stands with a hand on her hip and is wearing a black bodysuit with a sheer, partially transparent underlayer. Her cleavage is visible in the plunging neckline of the bodysuit.

Busty? Moderately, but not excessively so. Provocatively dressed? Mildly, but I think we can infer from her facial expression, pose and general demeanour that this is a character that is supposed to be sexy — and moreover, one who is very comfortable with that. This is emphatically not the same as her sprites being "sexual". I know nothing about Fields of Mistria but I can immediately infer the intent behind this character just from looking at these three sprites. And, indeed, her official description backs up pretty much everything I suspected about her — and none of it involves her sexual proclivities:

Juniper is a mysterious sorceress drawn to Mistria when she learns that magical mists and monsters of legend have begun appearing in the area after the recent earthquake. She then starts up a bath house. The bath house is largely a cover for testing her newly empowered potions and spells on the player and other unsuspecting townsfolk, usually resulting in buffs (and occasionally funny accidents)

The crucial thing though? This is not porn. This is not even ecchi levels of provocativeness. (Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things in an appropriate context, anyway!)

This is a character in a fantasy game, dressed in a style that fits with the personality and aesthetic the writers decided that she should have, in the context of the fantasy world. There is nothing offensive about this character unless you specifically choose to make it offensive.

And that is precisely what the commenter above has chosen to do. Not only that — and this really pisses me off — but they have chosen to weaponise autism as their justification for this.

No! You do not get to do that! I am autistic and fuckin' love titties! Your autism has nothing to do with you feeling "uncomfortable about her sprites". And, furthermore, it is the height of fucking disrespect to an artist (and the writers behind that character) to request that a third party deface their artwork so you don't have to confront your inability to process a non-sexual image of a female character that happens to dress in a way that shows a bit of skin.

Go outside! There are people who dress like this! (Maybe not the last one, unless it's a special occasion.) There are people whose bodies look like this! If you go to a swimming pool or beach — shock, horror! — you may even see someone dressed like the image in the middle! If your brain's first response to seeing someone dressed like any of the women above — but particularly the ones with visible cleavage, who may or may not have above-average sized breasts — is to immediately start shouting "I AM THINKING ABOUT SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH YOU" and emitting the "awooga" sound from old Tex Avery cartoons via some unknown part of your body, you have a problem!

And, I hate to break this to you, but it is not autism. It is, at its core, an unwillingness to see a woman as anything other than a sexual object for your own potential gratification. You can try and make yourself out to be "wholesome" by very publicly shouting and screaming about how you don't approve of this and how it makes you so uncomfortable and how this lascivious temptation must be removed from your sight, lest you know not what you might do… but in reality you simply have a problem with a woman dressing the way she wants to dress, expressing herself the way she wants to express herself, and, highly likely, not having sex with you.

I will close with a quote on the matter from the Japanese translator, Thomas James:

Shit like this is why I give wholesome games as a movement a constant stink-eye because what that audience often wants isn't relaxed, low stakes fare. They want content with zero intellectual calories that won't challenge them for being emotionally stunted. What a miserably boring way to consume art.

Quite.

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#oneaday Day 792: A goal, complete

Well, I've done it. I've finally gone and played through all three of Quintet's "Heaven and Earth" games on Super NES: Soul Blazer, Illusion of Time and Terranigma. (I've also played through The Granstream Saga twice in my life, as well as Actraiser once, as both of those games can be argued to be tangentially linked to the core "trilogy" as much as they're linked to one another directly.)

This is a small thing and some might argue "beating three video games" as not being something particularly worth crowing about, but I am seeing this as a victory for several reasons.

Firstly, it's something I've been "meaning to get around to" for literally years at this point, and have never just, y'know, made the time to do it. But with my lovely MiSTer Multisystem setup on my childhood CRT, it felt like the right time to give these games the time and attention they deserve. Because they're all really, really good! Even with Illusion of Time's absolutely dogshit English translation!

Secondly, one of the reasons I've been putting it off for so long is because I knew I wanted to write about each of these games as I played them, and I wanted to do each of them justice while I did so. Now I've written an article about each of them (with the exception of The Granstream Saga and Actraiser, which I will… contemplate doing in the near future) of about 3-4,000 words each, I am satisfied. I think I have done them justice. And I am glad I have finally taken the time to experience something that I was inadvertently keeping just out of arm's reach by myself. There was nothing stopping me playing these games at any time. I just didn't.

I suppose you can look on it as a sort of mental health issue. When you build something up in your brain to be somehow "important", it can start to seem further and further out of reach — particularly if, in your life generally, you are also pursuing far-off goals that will take a long time to accomplish. As such, you start thinking that you'll never get around to The Thing, because it has taken on such a scary amount of "importance" in your brain that you subconsciously start avoiding it so you don't have to face it directly.

I'm aware that this sounds stupid! We're talking about some video games that are commonly agreed to be very good, so why should I find myself not wanting to "face them"?

Well, that's the thing about mental health. It doesn't always make sense. It doesn't always make you behave rationally, or see things for what they really are. And that's why, at times like this, you need to celebrate the victories that you have achieved. Because if you can achieve victory over something that seemed like it was far off, but was actually relatively straightforward to accomplish when you get down to it, you can also achieve victory over those longer-term goals, as your brain has been treating them in almost the exact same way.

Since, as I've said, I have a bunch of my own long-term goals to accomplish — primarily with regard to my health, fitness and weight — thinking about things in these terms is immensely valuable. You wouldn't think that completing a 30 year old SNES game would provide motivation to better your life in general, would you? But that's what I'm feeling right now, and I'm not sure I've explained it 100% effectively. Regardless, that is what I'm feeling right now — and I'm going to do my best to ride that wave of motivation as far as I can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 786: Lunchtime games

I apparently completely forgot to write anything yesterday. To be fair, I was mildly hungover and thus didn't really want to do much other than play Terranigma, which I made some excellent progress on. I think I'm coming towards the end of that game, so I'll have more to write about it over on MoeGamer when that's done and dusted.

As I'm typing this, it's lunchtime, and this makes me think about what games are suitable for lunch break play. Really, you can play anything over your lunch — and indeed I have done in the past — but there are certain types of games that are eminently more suitable than others.

Long RPGs, for example, are probably not optimal for lunch break play — unless they're designed with a sort of "bite-sized" structure. Good examples of this that I've enjoyed in the past include the Neptunia series, which has small dungeons you can delve into, beat up some enemies, get some crafting materials and maybe complete some quests, and be done in less than an hour. The inverse of this is the grid-based dungeon crawler, where you really need to sit down and concentrate on what you're doing, lest you completely lose the thread of your explorations.

I found Splatoon Raiders to be an ideal lunch break game, because each of its stages are no more than about five minutes, tops. That means you can dip in and play a good few levels in just a short space of time, and feel like you've had a worthwhile experience. Recommended.

Driving games can also be good for this — in fact, after I'm done here, I might just boot up Forza Horizon and drive around a bit. Again, the bite-sized nature of most events in driving games make them eminently suitable for short sessions, such as playing over lunch.

Then, of course, there are arcade games, which are the very definition of this sort of thing. Arcade machines were designed for you to pass by, think "ooh, that looks fun, I'll have a quick go" and while away a few minutes. In most cases, the games are challenging enough, or designed with a built-in maximum play time, that you can enjoy one game multiple times during a short break — or you can sample multiple for a varied bit of fun.

This is why handhelds used to be brilliant to take to the office pre-COVID. Back in those Before Times, I had an office job that was about a 15 minute drive away, so in theory I could come back home and play something at home — indeed, on several occasions I even managed to get a full YouTube video recorded over lunch, which I'm not sure how I achieved in retrospect — but it was much more practical to pop the Vita or 3DS in my bag, stick on my headphones and just blot everything out while I sat on the sofa near the coffee machine, eating sandwiches and playing Neptunia.

I kind of miss that! I mean, I don't miss having to go out to work every day, but having a reason for handhelds to exist was fun. These days, of course, it would probably be the Switch 2 and/or the Evercade EXP-R coming out with me, and both of those are amply stocked with plenty of good "lunchtime games".

But now I work from home, I have a lot more choice. That can sometimes be overwhelming, but it's also nice. It means I can enjoy a wide variety of different things over my lunch break, and then easily get back to work at a suitable stopping point.

So that's what I'm going to go and do right now…

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