#oneaday Day 852: Rotting retro

You know, I have historically thought that out of all the subcommunities of computer and tech enthusiasts, the one which would have more respect for doing things "the hard way" than anyone else would be the retro fans. These are people who, in many cases, grew up seeing genius programmers making limited hardware do things far beyond its supposed capabilities, and, even if they never saw fit to take up programming themselves, could at least understand why it was impressive when, for example, someone made an Atari 8-bit display 256 colours on screen at the same time.

Sadly, it is increasingly looking as if the retro sphere, much like everyfuckingthing else, has been infiltrated, corrupted, poisoned and rotted by the scourge that is generative AI.

In just the last week, I have seen myriad vibe-coded "recompilation" projects, slop peddlers attempting to submit 50k lines of changes to an FPGA core that was already working just fine, the Oliver Twins making it abundantly clear what their odious stance is, web-based editors for the ZX Spectrum games Chaos and Target: Renegade slapped together using AI coding tools and someone making the bold claim that they have been "working on" (i.e. they prompted Claude to do it for them) multiplayer conversions of a variety of classic games for home computers and consoles, including Wizard of Wor, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. Oh, and someone who claimed to have decompiled Adobe's entire Creative Cloud suite of software and made a "clean room" version of it that doesn't work, like, at all, but that's not exactly retro. Still relevant, though.

The irritating thing is that a lot of these projects sound like they could be potentially interesting! 4-player Pac-Man on Atari 8-bit is a cool idea! Simultaneous co-op in Super Mario Bros. and Metroid are potentially intriguing twists on classic games! Tweaking retro games to play in different ways has been a proud tradition ever since everyone learned what the POKE command does!

And yet, I cannot, will not support any of these projects in good conscience. I just cannot. I cannot bring myself to give any sort of "reward" — and attention is a form of reward — to someone who thinks that throwing something into Claude Code and getting it to spit out something that looks convincing at first glance (but is probably deeply, deeply broken under the hood) is "working on something". I do not care that it looks impressive, at first glance, that you can click a button and some sort of functional-seeming, executable code pops out of the other end.

Because, really, what is the point? These projects are not put out into the wild with any attempt of aiding our collective understanding of things; they are put out in an attempt to accumulate clout, pure and simple. People want to be the first to do something, or the only person to do something, and the assumption, today, appears to be that the best way to do this is "just get AI to do it". Except then you haven't done anything yourself, have you? You have used a technology based on the stolen creativity and expertise of humanity, which consumes vast amounts of energy and water, which is unsustainably expensive to maintain beyond the next couple of years at most, which often gets things flat-out wrong, and which is responsible for making the Internet seven hundred thousand orders of magnitude worse than it has ever been, and you have got it to churn out something that, if you had to debug it yourself, you almost certainly wouldn't know where to start.

The standard counterargument to all this is "well, if this person hadn't done their little Claude Code project, it wouldn't have happened at all". And that, to me, is not a convincing case. It's a waste of time and money (but not effort) to produce something that, at first glance, appears to be "good enough" rather than something which has actually been crafted to work properly and perfectly — and in the meantime, it discourages people who are still doing this sort of thing properly to continue with their own projects, because that whole part of the scene has now been tainted with Claudeslop, and we've already seen with a variety of projects how disheartening that can be for some.

I think my biggest concern with all this is the long-term brain drain effect it will have. We're already seeing frightening numbers of people completely surrendering to the AI's "judgement" (which isn't a thing, but they believe it is) rather than thinking for themselves. And the end result, the longer all this goes on, is that actual skills and knowledge will atrophy. As the people who did this "the hard way" back in the day start to pass on — and many of them are passing on at this point, sadly — there will not be a generation of people who can take over. And when all this AI nonsense eventually collapses — which it will, as there is no way the world's economy can keep up this absolute insanity forever — it's going to leave a lot of people, projects and AI-corrupted enthusiast scenes in a real mess.

Now, you might think that doesn't matter for 40+ year old 8-bit home computers, but it absolutely does. Understanding how things work and how to recreate the conditions from back in the day is a crucial part of preserving the history of the medium, and the second you prompt Claude to just do it for you, you are wilfully saying that doesn't matter; you are wilfully disrespecting people who still know how to do all this stuff the old-fashioned way.

It matters. Your personal clout, on the other hand, does not, particularly if said clout has been accumulated by not really doing anything.

Maybe I should learn 6502 assembler just to spite these people.

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 850: Fuck the Oliver Twins

I don't say this lightly, as I am that rare breed who legitimately, genuinely enjoyed the Dizzy games and believe a lot of their other prior output is excellent — particularly Firehawk on NES, which is an excellent tactical helicopter shoot 'em up that actually predates Desert Strike! But after seeing their recent output, and particularly reading these comments over on Time Extension, I say a full-throated, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart fuck off to Philip and Andrew Oliver.

The Oliver Twins are the textbook examples of "bedroom programmers" from the classic British home computer scene. They made games at home using their own skills and creativity, and achieved quite deserved success with many of them. Yes, I know a lot of people denigrate the Dizzy series in particular these days — particularly people from North America — but the fact is, these games had a place, and they achieved what they set out to do: provide a fun, distinctive mascot character, and a varied selection of games in which he appeared.

As such, I've always had respect for them and what they achieved. They helped define the British home computer scene of the 1980s, which, as you know, is a sector of gaming that is of enormous personal interest and relevance to me — even if I only had a chance to come to their stuff once we were into the Atari ST era, since they didn't make anything for the Atari 8-bit. I have genuinely fond memories of playing their stuff from back then, even if some of it doesn't hold up brilliantly (hello, Panic Dizzy on ST) and I had a lot of fun discovering a variety of their games I'd never played with The Oliver Twins Collection from the first year of Evercade, prior to me joining the company.

But with their current stance on AI, they have absolutely lost the fucking plot and seem to be wilfully ignorant of the overall mood in the room.

Let's go through some of the things they said in response to the questions from John Szczepaniak of Time Extension, shall we?

"We believe that, as creatives, it is another creative tool."

Literally the first answer is parroting the inevitable, probably LLM-generated in the first place, copypasta about it being "just a tool". Try harder.

"…in the right hands, we can create some awesome stuff that would have been impossible to create any other way."

Bollocks. Citation fucking needed. How, exactly, would it have been "impossible" to churn out things any other way than using generative AI?

"I'm sorry, but as an experiment, to create Emerald City, and all the art that went into this, it would have been an over-a-year project with a couple of artists, probably a hundred thousand pounds, all said and done when you're looking at all the costs."

Motherfucker, you literally ran a Kickstarter to fund your AI slop project. Ask for that £100,000 then pay some fucking artists with it! The reason your £5,000 Kickstarter failed is not because it was a fundamentally bad project, but because the project page, all the promotional material and literally everything about the project was drenched in generative AI imagery. This meant that people, on the whole, did not want to fund it. Because what is the point in paying for something the creators clearly have so little respect for themselves? Why would anyone want to fund your token habit?

If you had been honest and open about needing money, time and specialists to pull something off, I'm pretty sure a name as well-known and once-respected as the Oliver Twins would have been able to run a successful £100,000 Kickstarter without a problem. And whining and complaining that a project would take over a year, oh boo-fucking-hoo, creative projects require work over a significant period of time? Who would have fucking thought it?

"Now, as for scraping IP and all of that kind of stuff, I believe there should be regulations about what AI is trained on. I, unfortunately, do not run OpenAI or any of these other big gigs. As humble little guys just making Dizzy games, we can't control that. We could completely ignore a very powerful creative tool and then decide to produce nothing because it's too difficult to produce the quality that we want. And so we could go quietly into our retirement, or we can go, this is exciting! We love tech. We are sci-fi guys. This is an incredible time to be alive for a creator."

I can't believe they actually said the "humble little guys" thing out loud. We're just humble little guys who deserve some crumbs of stolen creative material. Have some fucking principles. You may not run OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other shits destroying everything nice at the moment, but you can have the principles to not engage with the product that everyone hates and which is making everything worse. You can read the room and understand that people fucking hate this, and they hate shit that looks like your Emerald City garbage, but for the most part people are too polite to say that to your face or within potential earshot of you.

All it sounds like is that you wanted to be able to churn out something quickly, cheaply and with minimal effort, which does not sound like being a "creator". It sounds like two old men trying desperately to jump on a trend and cynically produce a product — worse, content — with no lasting value, and a morally bankrupt attitude towards the way it is produced.

Fuck the Oliver Twins, and fuck their stinking attitude. I once respected them as creators — and still do respect the work they both did when they were younger. But the men they are now, and the slop they are apparently desperate to produce as quickly and cheaply as possible? Completely and utterly dead to me.

Cunts.

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#oneaday Day 849: Do people really not finish games?

I've seen it often suggested that "no-one finishes games" these days. Is that really true? I don't know. I am certainly not a representative example here, because I tend to only start games that I know I am going to finish for the most part. It might take quite a while to finish some of these games, if they're epic-length RPGs, but I will generally make an effort to finish everything I start. I have a mostly positive success rate.

I'm interested in this perception that no-one finishes games any more, because it's one of those things that is an alien concept to me — particularly with story-based games. Can you really derive any sort of satisfaction from playing a narrative-focused game and just leaving it unresolved? I guess in some ways it's the same as watching part of a TV series and then dropping it partway through. But it's still kind of alien to me.

So I thought what I'd do today is go through some games I can think of off the top of my head that one might regard as "popular", then see what the Steam Achievement rate is for "finished the game" or equivalent achievements. I appreciate this is an imperfect metric, because it doesn't take into account other platforms (particularly those which don't have achievements, like Switch) but it'll do for a rough idea. All right, let's take a look.

Pragmata

42.3% of people who played Capcom's Pragmata on Steam finished it to the point of seeing the credits roll on a first playthrough. This is a reasonably respectable number so far as I'm concerned, and I'm unsurprised to see this so relatively high to kick us off. Pragmata was praised as one of the first genuinely excellent triple-A games for quite a long time, so it's encouraging to see this many people play it through to completion.

It is less than half of the people who started it, though.

We see a big drop-off when it comes to completing optional material, though. 13.4% completed the main objective in all the Training Simulator side activities, which I completely empathise with; the Training Simulator is by far the worst part of the game and I absolutely hated every second of it. I am, therefore, unsurprised that a similar number of people went through and completed the postgame scenario, "Unknown Signal", since that involves running through a series of Training Simulator-like missions — only without the annoying bits. However, if you weren't to know about the "without the annoying bits" part, I can completely understand you not wanting to bother with it. And the additional bit you get on the ending for completing Unknown Signal is absolutely not worth it, either.

Resident Evil Requiem

Would you look at that? Nearly 75% of people have beaten Resident Evil Requiem, one of the most well-regarded entries in the series for quite some time. Only 65% of them beat it on "Standard (Modern)" difficulty, though, suggesting that all the Difficulty Level Discourse we've been having for the last few years has had an effect; there's a small but statistically significant number of people who had no qualms about playing on the lowest difficulty level.

Interestingly there is a different percentage for "complete the game on at least Casual difficulty" and "complete the game" ("Hope and Requiem"). I wonder how that happened?

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

We look at a longer game now with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Here, just under 40% of people actually finished the game. I can sort of understand it in this case, because although Expedition 33's main narrative is thoroughly compelling and emotionally engaging, the gameplay is challenging enough that I can see a significant number of people falling off before the end. It's one of those instances where although the developers made a huge, beautiful world and obviously want as many people as possible to see it, they also weren't willing to compromise on the mechanical intricacies of the game. Respect to them for that, but it does mean that significantly less than half of the players who started the game finished it.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Pity poor Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, though, a game where only just over a quarter of people who started it played it through to completion. This is another one that is arguably understandable due to the vast size of the game, but the team behind the game have got to be looking at that figure and feeling a bit disheartened.

But at least it's not the original Final Fantasy VII, which only 8.7% people who played it on Steam have finished. It's a shorter game! But there's also the fact that a lot of the people who would be inclined to buy Final Fantasy VII on Steam have nostalgia for having played it on PlayStation back in the '90s, and as such they may have just fired it up for a session or two to indulge that nostalgia, then set it aside. Less than 10% kind of sucks, though, because I'm sure there's some people coming to it for the first time, starting it and then never seeing it through to its magnificent conclusion.

Blue Prince

Honestly I'm surprised that nearly 40% of people finished Blue Prince, because it's the kind of game that repels you hard if you're not into it. But then you might say that the sort of people inclined to pick up Blue Prince probably already know that it's a game they'll like, and thus there should be a respectable proportion of them who finish it.

I didn't stick with Blue Prince long enough to know if this trophy encompasses all the endgame bullshit you have to do other than playing the annoying house layout game, but either way, even getting as far as just finishing the annoying house layout game is worthy of respect so far as I'm concerned.

Fuckin' hate that game.

I think that'll do for now. I know that's probably far from a representative or statistically significant sample, but on the whole, it seems like, on average, less than half of the people who start a game on Steam finish it. The games that are more likely to get finishes are ones that are on the shorter side, like Resident Evil, while longer RPGs inevitably see a much more significant drop-off. More niche-interest titles likely enjoy a slightly higher completion percentage due to the people playing having a sort of "vested interest" in the game and the genre it occupies, but still.

Anyway, I'm not sure I have a point here. So long as games that you can complete continue to exist, I will continue completing them, one at a time, because that's how I enjoy playing. If you're someone who doesn't beat games, do make an effort to finish one or two. I can pretty much guarantee you'll find it to be a satisfying experience. Just be warned: once you start in earnest, you'll want to beat everything you play… and for some, that way lies madness!

At least you're not chasing platinum trophies. That really is a sure-fire way to ruin all enjoyment of video games.

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#oneaday Day 848: Initial impressions from St. Amelia

I've been playing Silent Hill Townfall! It is good. I think I am enjoying it more than Silent Hill f, but I do intend to go back and give that another go (and a shot at one or more of the other endings) for the sake of fairness, comparison and suchlike.

Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different sort of game, though. For starters, it's presented from a first-person perspective rather than Silent Hill f's third-person viewpoint, and it places a strong emphasis on stealth rather than combat. There is combat — and it's modern-day, weighty, get-hit-once-and-half-your-health-bar-is-gone combat — but for the most part, sneaking around pretty much always seems to be an option, and in some cases is outright essential. I am fine with this.

I know some people don't like stealth much, but when it's executed well, it can be a great part of a game — and it's especially fitting with the horror genre. It makes absolute thematic sense to be creeping around monsters who very much do not have your best interests at heart rather than attacking them, and it especially fits with Silent Hill's traditional idea of a relatively "normal" person being the protagonist.

Silent Hill Townfall also provides you with some excellent tools to help with the stealth part. The main one is a little portable CRT television which you can "tune in" to monsters' frequencies, and this allows you to "see" them, even through walls. At other times, you have a pager whose LCD display shows the direction that monsters are in, but not details. Most of the monsters move in clear patterns, so the stealth sequences tend to boil down to puzzles of sorts: how best to get across the area while avoiding ending up in their line of sight.

There's excellent use of sound, too. When you're visible and vulnerable to a monster, the background audio builds in a gradual crescendo before eventually giving a "boom" when they're actively pursuing you. Likewise, you can tell when you've reached safety, because the background audio chills out a bit. Very clever and subtle.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the narrative as yet, but that's par for the course with the series. There is a lot of… medical stuff going on, though. Medical stuff in general gives me the squick, so it's ideal horror fodder for me; when combined with some of the other stuff Silent Hill Townfall is doing, I'm very happy at the experience it has provided thus far.

Highlights for me in the seven or eight hours I've apparently played since yesterday include some puzzles that involve creatively interpreting video footage to determine a combination number subtly hidden within; an inordinately stressful sequence in which you are tasked with performing various medical procedures on a patient while a complete cunt of a doctor yells at you over an intercom for being incompetent; and a puzzle based around locating blood bags, pairing them up with the appropriate medical charts, and then combining them to crack a code that unlocks a door.

I'm not crazy about the "instant death" monster who showed up during the blood bag sequence (only during the hunting for the blood bags, not during the puzzly part, thankfully) but, as previously noted, the sneaky-sneaky nature of most of the game means that you're already well-trained at avoiding monsters by the time you run into it anyway.

I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes. There's already been some intriguing weirdness to it all, but I have no idea where it's going to end up just yet. We shall see, I guess — that is, if Ace Combat 8 doesn't distract me from it too much…

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#oneaday Day 844: Mechannative

These days, I feel like a lot of people determine that they're either into narrative-centric games or mechanics-centric games, and don't do much in the way of cross-pollination, even when the games themselves do so. I'm sure we all know at least one person who takes inexplicable pride in the fact that they skip all the cutscenes in games, for example.

Me, I've always been a "why not both?" kind of person. There are times when I'm in the mood for a game to tell me a good story, times when I'm in the mood to engage with some interesting mechanics — and times when I find a blend of the two to be most rewarding.

Actually, there are times where I feel like I'm enjoying mechanics-centric games a lot more now than I have done in the past — to such a degree that I've found myself wondering more than once if I actually prefer them. This was particularly fresh in my mind while I was feasting on Super Mario Galaxy while we were on holiday.

Then a game like Nighthawks comes along, and I'm reminded of how involving and immersive a game that places its narrative front and centre can really be. How it can feel like you're really inhabiting a world with a cast of characters, truly sharing your experiences with them.

The gameplay in Nighthawks isn't especially complex, but it is enough to distinguish itself from both visual novels and adventure games. I'll have a lot more to say about this when I write about the game in full once I've beaten it. I'm not sure how far off that is now, but I've been playing for 30 hours and things are definitely building to something. But suffice it to say for now that I am thoroughly enraptured by this dark little world and the colourful cast of misfits that populate it.

I think the simple answer is that I just like a wide variety of gaming experiences, both mechanics- and narrative-centric. I attribute this to growing up in an age where mechanics-centric was the norm and narrative-centric was relatively unusual to see, and then having several of my defining gaming experiences be with narrative-centric games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Final Fantasy VII. This state of affairs helped me see the benefit of all types of games.

Well, no. There are some games, like grand strategy affairs, that I still find largely indecipherable. But I guess one has to draw a line somewhere. As it stands, I don't think I'm ever going to be short of things to play!

For all the terrible things happening in the games industry, it is still a great time to be into games. And there are a bunch of things out in the imminent future that I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into. After Nighthawks, of course…

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#oneaday Day 843: Exploring the mundane

One of my favourite things in video games is when a game takes a very small, pretty mundane environment and renders it in a ridiculous level of detail. I'm not generally a "graphics person", but if you give me a game in which I can poke around a tiny, convincingly rendered house in extreme levels of detail I will be very happy indeed. Consequently, I am very excited to check out Silent Hill Townfall when it arrives.

I actually don't know very much about Silent Hill Townfall. I don't even really know how it plays. After not loving how Silent Hill f turned out — or more accurately, how it played — I haven't really been following the new one, but I have seen a few screenshots floating across my feed here and there. And I am finding myself oddly excited by them: specifically, by the fact that the game unfolds in a lovingly recreated depiction of working-class Britain (well, Scotland, but much of the characteristic visual identity is similar) and allows you to… well, poke around in tiny, convincingly rendered houses in extreme levels of detail.

I'm all for this. The idea of Silent Hill being more of an amorphous concept than an actual, physical place is a solid move for the series, I think; for all my grumbling at Silent Hill f's gameplay, its vibes and depiction of 1960s rural Japan was fantastic. The way the setting reflects the protagonist's mental state has always been an important part of the series, and setting it in places other than small-town America allows a lot more scope for this aspect of the storytelling.

I'm not even all that bothered about the inevitable "Otherworld" stuff that will almost certainly be part of Townfall. I don't need spooky scary monsters jumping out of closets at me. I just want a cool little world to wander around.

My attitude towards this sort of interactive experience goes some distance to explaining why, back on its original release, I enjoyed Gone Home so much. There are still people who get absolutely frothing mad about that game, but I was never one of them. For me, it perfectly captured the almost exact same feelings that I felt when I first returned to the place that had once been my home after my first wife left me. You might think that's not exactly something I'd care to be reminded of, but at the point I played Gone Home there was enough distance between that happening and me being able to look back on it and appreciate a piece of work that understood those feelings.

A similar thing for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a mostly forgotten PS4 game in which you walk very slowly through an English village and weird things happen with no real explanation or resolution. While I very much understand some people bouncing off that one in particular, I was thoroughly enamoured with just existing in that world.

I think all this goes back even further to Build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood, which at least made an effort to depict convincing, realistic environments and feature interactive elements you could fiddle around with. Of course, the tech was too limited to be able to create environments with the level of detail we expect from our big-budget entertainment today, but there was something oddly… real-feeling about these virtual locales that I never quite got from games that took a more fantastic or sci-fi approach.

So yeah. I'm mostly excited about Silent Hill Townfall to wander into houses that look a bit like where my Nan used to live. And I don't have a problem with that at all. If the game turns out to be good, so much the better. But I'm going to enjoy just exploring that world, I think.

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#oneaday Day 842: Quick catch-up

I forgot to write something on here yesterday! In my defence, I wrote nearly 4,000 words on Ys VIII over on MoeGamer so I think you can probably cut me a bit of slack. I'm still going to take this post to "catch up" though.

I really enjoyed Ys VIII overall. It still feels a bit odd to play an Ys game that is 50+ hours long, but the game didn't drag at any point. It consistently sends you to new and interesting locales, and the story develops in some thoroughly intriguing directions as you progress. I successfully got the "true" ending, which isn't all that difficult to get (you just need more than 198 reputation points, which are easily acquired through just normal gameplay) and everything wrapped up in a most satisfying manner.

After writing my piece on Ys, I went back to the excellent Nighthawks, which is a spectacularly good game. As you might expect, I will be writing a more substantial piece on this once I've finished it, but suffice to say for now that if you have enjoyed any of the relatively recent crop of what I like to call "storytelling RPGs" (Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb), then you will definitely get a kick out of Nighthawks.

I think one of the things that always impresses me the most about a good quality game like this is how it can truly create a sense of a world without having an actual 3D space you can freely wander around. For me, the primarily text-based world of Nighthawks is considerably more compelling than a fully 3D modelled but ultimately bland and personality-free "open world", particularly because of the colourful characters that inhabit that world. It's funny, because this is exactly what the capital-A "Adventure" snobs were talking about in the early days of the medium; if you have a suitably compatible brain, the imagery conjured up by your mind from reading text will always be more vivid than anything even a powerful video card can render. (Of course, the fact that Nighthawks has beautiful art and excellent voice acting also helps a lot.)

Once I've finished Nighthawks, I'm going to play Silent Hill Townfall, which looks like it's going to be thoroughly interesting. I'm oddly excited to play a game with such accurate-looking renditions of a British (well, Scottish) town, and I'm intrigued to see how the game differentiates itself from other Silent Hill games. I didn't love Silent Hill f, although I didn't hate it either; from what I understand, Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different beast anyway, so I'm excited to explore it.

After that, I think it's going to have to be Ace Combat 8. I love Ace Combat, and this new one has been getting excellent reviews. I'm happy about that. The series deserves to do well, and it's nice to have a game like this on modern hardware. I mean, the PS2 Ace Combat games still look surprisingly great, but it's even better to have something in full HD-o-vision.

There we go, all caught up. Now watch me forget to write something later today.

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#oneaday Day 840: The deluge has started

The deluge of amazing games coming out in the latter half of this year has started. I've already noted that I've been playing the excellent Nighthawks from Wadjet Eye Games, and that is very much occupying my immediate attention, but also on my radar for the immediate-ish future are Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8, both of which seem to be going down well with reviewers so far.

I also still need to finish Ys VIII, which I set aside while I started Nighthawks, but I think I'm going to devote tomorrow to. I was enjoying it a lot, and I think I'm getting near the end, so I would like to finish it properly. Ys VIII is not a recent release, though. It came out ten years ago and has had two sequels since then, both of which I would like to play at some point.

Not only that, but I've been having a steady stream of stuff I preordered months ago finally coming around — just this week I've had Chained Echoes and Trails in the Sky Second Chapter come in, Little Goody Two-Shoes is on the way and I'm sure there are others to look forward to.

Situations like we've got here are why I'm not immediately worried for the crash that the top end of the industry appears to be careening towards. I have enough unplayed (or "want to replay") games on my shelves to last me for many, many years at this point, so if there comes a day where, for one reason or another, I just can't buy any new games? I think I'm probably going to be fine.

It will be a sad day when it's no longer possible to buy boxed copies of games, of course — and I'm sure once Sony successfully pushes for this with their abandonment of discs in 2027, at the very least Microsoft will follow — but I'm well-stocked in my little bunker for such an eventuality. Only question is: will I actually be able to finish all these RPGs before I die? I reckon I can… assuming the world itself lasts that long, of course.

My wife often takes the piss out of me for the number of games I have that are still shrinkwrapped, but I've always bought stuff with this sort of eventuality in mind. I mean, I was hoping it would never actually come to a day where physical media would no longer be a thing — and I guess it still might not, as much can change even in the space of a year — but I've basically been investing in the future enjoyment of my hobby, and in the meantime, I've been wanting to just support the games that I would like to see more of. As frustrating as it is to know that "Day One" sales count for almost more than anything for a lot of developers and publishers, it is, unfortunately, a fact. And while I'm in a position where I'm comfortable enough to be able to support the stuff I like, I'm happy to do so — even if I don't get around to actually playing the games in question until, at times, a year or two (or ten) later.

Anyway, I'm not buying anything else until payday next week. But I will probably be picking up Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8. I do genuinely want to beat Ys VIII though! Really! I want to write about it and everything!

For this evening, though, Nighthawks is calling, so if you need me, I'll be stalking in the shadows of Cradlebridge.

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#oneaday Day 837: Nighthawks!

Yesterday's post was out of frustration, so it's only fair that I make today's post one of genuine enthusiasm. Today marks the release of Nighthawks, a new game from The Curiosity Engine and Wadjet Eye Games, and I think you should buy it because it is good. Positive enough for you?

I should probably add at this point that I have not yet played the full version of Nighthawks — it is presently sitting on my PC ready to be started for the first time. But I did play a demo several months back (EDIT: nearly a year ago!) that looked like it would be pretty representative of the full experience, and I came away from that demo thinking "cor blimey, that game was a bit of all right and no mistake, onto the wishlist it goes". I have no reason to believe that things have taken a devastatingly shit turn between that time and now, particularly because Nighthawks has been in development for so long.

Eight years, to be exact; the project began its public-facing life on Kickstarter in 2018. I must confess I only became aware of it a little more recently — I think the aforementioned demo was the first time I'd really stumbled across it in any meaningful way — but like I say, that initial contact was enough for me to get thoroughly interested in the project and want to pick it up immediately on release day. Well, release day is here, and I have made good on my promise: I have bought it, and intend to spend the evening playing it, even though I haven't quite yet finished Ys VIII as I hoped I would have by this point. But no matter. I'm sure I can find a way of juggling these two games without agonising over the decision of which to play each evening. I'm good at that.

(beat)

Anyway, some of you may still be wondering what the fuck this Nighthawks thing actually is. Well, it's a vampire RPG, based around a similar concept to White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, only in this instance there is no Masquerade; the existence of vampires is no longer a secret. Still, the fact that you play a vampire, with all the interesting powers that comes with both your new undeath and your overall background, is a common factor — and with the disappointment that Bloodlines 2 apparently ended up being, there is definitely scope for a good vampire RPG in 2026.

Don't come into this expecting something along the lines of Bloodlines, though; this is primarily a text and dialogue-based game rather than a game where you have a little vampire man that runs around a city, bites people and occasionally indulges in some of the worst first- and/or third-person action ever committed to a gold master. That means it's a very character-centric game, with interactions between your character and the various inhabitants of the city playing a crucial role in how things unfold. To put it another way, its overall approach has a fair amount in common with games like Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, where you are effectively working with the game, which acts as a virtual "game master", to build your story.

The game is written by Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer fame, whose other work actually on games includes titles such as Beyond a Steel Sky and Sunless Sea/Skies. It also features art by Ben Chandler, who has worked on some excellent adventure games in the last few years, and Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games has acted as producer. There are also some excellent voice actors in the game, including, among others, the inimitable Sally Beaumont (of Old Skies fame) in a "minor but memorable" role, apparently.

As I say, I'm yet to jump into the full game and see how things have turned out, as well as establish factors like how long the game is, but the demo version from a while back made me very excited about this game indeed. As such, I'm really looking forward to sinking my fangs into it after dinner, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it in the near future.

Right now, though, it's 7.30pm, I've had dinner, I've emptied and reloaded the dishwasher: it's time. The lights are down low. It's time to enter the nocturnal world of Nighthawks. Maybe you should, too.

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#oneaday Day 835: All night long

Remember how yesterday I said a group of friends and I were going to play Big Walk "this afternoon"? Yeah, well, we started in the afternoon, my time… and concluded twelve fucking hours later. I have never, ever had a multiplayer session so long that the batteries in my headset went flat. Until now! (It's also been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter on a video game, but those are usually solo.)

There are some mild Big Walk spoilers ahead. I will not be sharing complete puzzle solutions, but I may talk a bit about the thought process involved in some of them. You have been warned.

I don't think any of us expected the session to go on for so long, since we were in Big Walk's "postgame". We had partly (and correctly) assumed that the postgame would just involve going around and cleaning up any puzzles we didn't complete as part of the process you go through to "beat" the main game, but we were also aware that we'd discovered a place where there were fifteen empty slots for the "Kong" figurines that are your rewards for completing the various puzzles, and thus there was probably still a fair amount of work to do. We didn't know what the end result of doing said work would be, though.

We should have known, really; in our process of beating the main game, there weren't fifteen puzzles left over. And sure enough, once you get into the postgame, a selection of "purple Kong" puzzles unlock in a part of the map that was previously inaccessible. These mostly take the form of challenges similar to puzzles found elsewhere in the game, but made significantly more difficult and/or time-consuming somehow.

That said, there were also two puzzles from our "main game" leftovers which had left us reasonably stumped, so we had intended to come back to them. Both of those proved to be extremely time-consuming, too, so in retrospect it's no surprise that solving fifteen puzzles in total took twelve hours. We did make up for it with one of the other main game leftover puzzles taking us less than two minutes, though, because our team are now Big Walk pros, apparently.

Some of the most interesting challenges we encountered involved having to split up the party in various ways. One puzzle tasked us with looking through telescopes to find a series of four pedestals, and once there was at least one person at each pedestal, we then had to find a way to synchronise our button presses. Another challenged us to find a specific sound somewhere on the island. Another still involved locating things that we had used in various other puzzles and taking them to another location. In each of these situations, the challenge was communicating over a long distance: the game does have walkie-talkie items, but given you are limited in what you can carry — you can hold one thing in your hands, one on a belt loop (once you've found one) and one on a backpack (likewise), but you cannot access the belt or backpack items yourself — it's not always practical for everyone to carry one of these. And besides, you have to find them first anyway!

We found a way in each instance, though. And it wasn't just the long-distance puzzles that gave us these communication challenges, either. One of the "purple Kong" puzzles required us to figure out how to communicate complex information between two different rooms, when one room could use an intercom but the other could only respond by turning a light on or off. Another tasked us with communicating auditory information between rooms with a completely soundproof barrier between them. Another still tested the limits of how precisely we could verbally communicate visual information.

The one we left for last was a harder version of an earlier "golf" puzzle involving an extremely heavy ball that we had solved earlier in the game. The initial, main game implementation of this puzzle was fairly easy to solve, but the postgame variant involved getting the ball over a significantly longer distance, which required some creative thinking and teamwork. Among the many talents and skills that Big Walk tests, patience is one of the most significant of all of them. In this modern, attention-deficit world, I suspect there will be at least some groups who find the patience and endurance challenges to be some of the most taxing.

Still, the "true" ending was worth it, and I was grateful we didn't have to go through the immensely difficult "finale" of the main game again. That finale was a great experience, but having to do it again after twelve hours would have probably killed me.

One thing I really appreciated about Big Walk as a whole is that it's just an excellently designed game. It's a game which understands that when you're tasking people with confronting some significant, cooperative challenges together, it pays to have a clear, distinct visual language that everyone can learn to understand quickly and easily. Subtly, and without explicitly telling the player at any point, it introduces you to various concepts as you progress through the game — many of which are in the "starter area" — and coming to recognise those different elements of the game and what they mean is a key part of learning to play Big Walk effectively. Communicating your understanding of those elements to the rest of your group is important, too; if you know something but the others don't, it won't help the group as a whole if you keep it to yourself!

Anyway, we successfully completed all of the game — with the only thing (I think) we didn't find in our playthrough being the "shiny paint station". It was very much worth it, and if you have at least one good friend to play it with, I highly encourage you to do so — and to take the time to play it from start to finish. It takes a while, but it's very much a worthwhile activity to spend a few sessions on together. I certainly won't be forgetting our experiences in a hurry.

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