There are lots of contributing factors to this, but the things that come immediately mind today both relate to Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the upcoming third and final part of the Final Fantasy Remake project. We have a release date for it at last — April 8, 2027 — but two things came to light today which pissed me right off: firstly, the fact that not one, but two pieces of DLC and an "expansion pass" have been announced for it more than half a year before the game has been released, and secondly, the physical editions on all platforms will require you to download the bulk of the game rather than installing it from disc, thereby making said physical editions almost completely worthless.

On the first point: you have spent three games telling this story which once took one 40-hour game to tell. Just include everything in this fucking final part.

Those who have embraced an "all-digital" future will doubtless not be bothered by the second point, but I am someone who has cultivated a collection of over a thousand physical releases across a variety of platforms, and a big part of the reason I have done that is as a sort of investment in my future entertainment: for the next significant number of years, I will be able to enjoy a whole variety of different video game experiences on a bunch of different consoles. And with this looking like it may well be the last generation of consoles I have any interest in whatsoever, thanks to Sony's plans to give up physical media and the adoption of the odious "Game-Key Cards" on Switch 2, it feels increasingly important to have all that stuff ready to play.

Now, for a lot of the stuff I've bought, I can just put it in a console and play it. It's one of the big reasons why I've bought a lot of limited-print stuff — I know a lot of people don't like those companies for various reasons, but one thoroughly admirable thing that pretty much all of them have committed to is only putting out a physical version when a game is finished. That means you buy it, you put it in, you play it. No downloading updates; no DLC (there have been a few exceptions to this, but for the most part anything that was once DLC is included in these physical versions) and no requirement to be connected to the Internet. You know, like physical media always was prior to everything we own being perpetually connected to the Internet, and gradually, slowly but surely, getting increasingly fucked-up over time?

This news for Final Fantasy VII Revelation fucks with this, though. I have copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth that I can install from disc and play right now, even if my Internet connection isn't working — or, in the years to come, if Sony were to decide to just switch off the servers that were delivering downloadable game files to people. Were I to buy a physical copy of Revelation, though, I would not be able to do that, because the whole game isn't on the damned disc. So what happens if, in 20 or 30 years, assuming I'm still around and capable of playing video games at that point, I decide I want to replay the entire Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy? I just… can't play the last bit if the servers are no longer online?

And you might think that's an extreme scenario, but there are games I have on my shelf that are 30+ years old that I am still pulling down and playing. And I will continue to play an original copy by choice if it is available. So it's entirely possible that multiple decades from now, I will want to play something that was released in the 2020s.

Of course, it's also possible that in the future, storage costs will continue to plummet, and it will be practical to have some form of storage device loaded up with a huge library of PS5 and Switch 2 games, just like I have a chunky SSD full of everything from Atari 2600 up to PlayStation and Saturn games hooked up to my MiSTer. At that point, physical copies may well have ceased to matter.

Couple all this with Sony's eagerness to fight the apparently mistaken assumption that we are "buying" games when we click the "buy" button in their "store", and it doesn't give one a lot of hope for the long-term preservation of what is still, at its core, an incredibly exciting creative, artistic medium.

At this rate, we're going to have everything up to about PlayStation 2 preserved perfectly, but after that things are going to start getting a lot more patchy. No pun intended, given the additional considerations that post-launch updates bring to the table.

I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't bother thinking about this stuff. It's entirely possible that by the time any of my concerns actually start to matter, I'll be long dead. I just don't like seeing something that I have cared deeply about for my whole life continually make itself worse and worse and worse, all in the name of the "perpetual growth" rot economy and the pursuit of never-ending, continually unsatisfied greed. I don't want to feel that future generations simply won't be able to enjoy gaming the way I've enjoyed it for the last 40+ years. And it's hard to flip the switch to the "I don't care, just enjoy it now" setting, after so long of actually caring!

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The post #oneaday Day 818: Gaming is doing everything it can to drive its oldest fans away appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the things Big Walk continually impresses on you is the importance of communication, whether that's communicating over short to moderate distances in order to collaborate on puzzles, taking the time to just have a chat, or finding a means to get one another's attention from a long distance apart if you happen to find yourself separated.

I suspect every group will find their own ways of dealing with this particular challenge — and every group will have its own members that, for one reason or another, present additional challenges to everyone, including themselves — but it's something you will likely settle into fairly quickly in collaboration with your walking partners. I'd be interested to try it with other people and see how different the dynamic is between group members and group sizes — though I'm also conscious that once you've solved a lot of these puzzles once, it's a lot easier to play through the game, so I don't know how inherently replayable the whole thing is.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because towards the end of the game, Big Walk takes away two very important things that you have likely been using for your communication up until this point: your visual identity — in other words, the colours you have chosen to represent your character, which you can "paint" onto each other in the introductory stage of the game — and your voice.

Yes, the finale sequence of Big Walk completely takes away the ability to voice chat with one another, meaning you will have to find ways of communicating not only each participant's part in a puzzle solution, but also determine between you what on Earth you are supposed to do in each puzzle.

Thankfully, Big Walk does have a fairly robust gesturing system that allows you a surprising amount of flexibility in terms of waggling your noodle arms around, but you still have to find a way to agree what each gesture means, having likely not had an opportunity to do so verbally beforehand — unless, of course, you had the foresight to do so "just in case" you were not able to communicate through voice. But why would you need to do that? Taking players' voices away in a game built around cooperative play and communication would just be mean, wouldn't it?

Well, yes, it would, but it also makes Big Walk's finale sequence incredibly memorable. There are, I think, seven puzzles you have to complete in the run up to the actual ending, and each challenges your group to think on their feet and find a way to get various messages across to one another without using words and without being able to visually identify who is whom. It really works extraordinarily well — I won't spoil the actual solutions for the puzzles here, for the sake of anyone who didn't heed my spoiler warning but is still intending to actually play Big Walk, but I'll just say that the "kettle puzzle" was my favourite for how gleefully silly it was.

Anyway, once you finish Big Walk, there is a "postgame" to play, too, which we're probably going to tackle in a subsequent session. There are a lot of puzzles on the map that we didn't solve in our various explorations, and we found a place where you have to put a whopping fifteen of the collectible thingies (we call them "Kongs" after their resemblance to a classic dog toy) in order to do… something? We don't know what yet ,though I have a suspicion. That's a job for another day though.

I'm impressed how substantial the game actually is. It took us three very long sessions to get through the entirety of the "main" game, and there's still a fair bit more for us to do. This is one of numerous reasons why I don't think it fits into the ill-defined "friendslop" category; to me, "friendslop" says games that you play with your friends that are over and done with in one session, and which "don't matter". Not in the sense that they're worthless, but in the sense that they don't have a long-term overarching goal; each session is self-contained, like an individual play of a board game, rather than part of a broader "campaign" in which you're working together to achieve something.

Anyway. I had fun! And aside from one of those finale puzzles, which I found very difficult to get my head around for some reason (as did everyone else, I think) I am relieved that Big Walk, despite whipping much of games media into a similar frenzy as we saw for Blue Prince last year, is a very different sort of experience. And for me, it's nice to actually be able to enjoy an indie darling for once, because on a significant number of past occasions, they have left me cold. This led me to doubt that Big Walk would actually be any good, but I'm glad I decided to give it a try. It was very much worth it.

Now it's nearly 1am and I need to sleep. But that was, indeed, a Big Walk.

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The post #oneaday Day 813: That sure was a big walk appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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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The post #oneaday Day 812: Research update appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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!

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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The post #oneaday Day 807: Atarimania got a new look appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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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The post #oneaday Day 805: Quarter-circle forward appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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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The post #oneaday Day 803: Write about an obscure game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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!

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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The post #oneaday Day 801: Eeeeeeees appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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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The post #oneaday Day 800: Some interesting games I've covered appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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).

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:

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

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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The post #oneaday Day 795: Titties - deal with them appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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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The post #oneaday Day 792: A goal, complete appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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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The post #oneaday Day 788: Visco does what Nintencon't... or something appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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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The post #oneaday Day 786: Lunchtime games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My first — and, prior to last night, last — encounter with Forza Horizon was with Forza Horizon 4, which I had extremely mixed feelings about. Sure, it was cool to have an open-world driving game set somewhere that looked and felt a bit like the UK, but the way it was structured to have all the hard edges completely smoothed off, lest some player somewhere felt any "friction", made the whole thing feel utterly meaningless. We're talking about a game where you can come last in every event you enter and still make progress. Not what I'm looking for in a driving game, so after getting frustrated with that, I pretty much swore off the subsequent entries in the series.

However, I was aware that earlier entries in the series were very well-regarded, and in the absence of owning an Xbox One or Series Whateverthefuck, the only one accessible to me was the first one for Xbox 360. This has apparently been delisted from everywhere for some time now, but you can still get second-hand physical copies, and indeed, that's what I did on a trip to CEX some time ago.

I booted it up last night for the first time and found it quite enjoyable. However, one thing became increasingly apparent the longer I played: the fact it, plus all its DLC and microtransactions, had been delisted from sale made it well and truly "dead" — to such a degree that there are certain functions in the game you just flat-out can't access any more, despite the menu options still being there.

This is apparent right from the game's title screen, where you have the option to play "Horizon Rally"… except you don't, because you need the Horizon Rally DLC for that, and you can't get that any more, leaving you with a completely useless menu option, plus a number of loading screen tips informing you that you can buy it from the Xbox Marketplace… which, as previously noted, you cannot.

I thought I was going to have a real problem when I opened the map screen and there were button prompts for "Treasure Map" and "Fast Travel Anywhere". Now, you see a button prompt in a game, and it's reasonable to think that it's a built-in function of the game, right? You press the button indicated, and the thing happens. That's how it usually works, right? Not in Forza Horizon land. Pressing either of these buttons gives you a pop-up informing you that you can buy those two pieces of functionality — which, respectively, allow you to immediately teleport anywhere on the map, and reveal the location of hidden items on the map — using "Tokens", which you can, of course, get from the Xbox Marketplace. Except you can't do that because everything about Forza Horizon has been delisted.

I was concerned in the former case that this meant the entire fast travel feature would be unusable because you couldn't buy a fucking microtransaction any more, but thankfully progressing a little further revealed that there is still a built-in fast travel facility — it's just a bit more inconvenient, since you can only fast travel to specific landmarks that you've previously visited and not, like, the various race events that appear across the map. I wasn't so concerned about the treasure map, meanwhile, since all it is, basically, is a cheat code that you have to pay for.

Little remnants of Forza Horizon really, really wanting you to pay up for microtransactions that no longer exist are riddled throughout the entire game. At least one load screen tip for every loading break will have some sort of exhortation to buy something. Those broken Fast Travel Anywhere and Treasure Map buttons don't go away. If you want to buy a new car in the game, you can do so with the credits you earn through gameplay or "Tokens" that you can no longer purchase with real money.

I guess I should be thankful that Forza Horizon is, at least, still playable, even with all its online functionality and purchasable bullshit inaccessible. If anything, I prefer the fact that there's now no means of simply paying money to not play the game, which is what at least some of these options amounted to. You'd just think they'd, you know, turn all that shit off in a patch if they knew it was no longer going to be available. I mean, presumably they added in the "Horizon Rally" option at some point when it was actually available — why not just remove it again in a final update when the servers and DLC went offline?

We're going to start running into this more and more as time goes on, and it's not always going to be optional DLC and microtransactions that are affected. Thankfully, we have not yet reached a point where patch servers are no longer available for console games that require them, but at some point we are going to have to reckon with the fact that a lot of today's physical releases ship either broken or incomplete, and I'm not sure the work has been adequately done to prepare for that time when the "official" patch servers are no longer available.

This, of course, is a big part of what the whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is about — and I know that certain parts of the gaming history and preservation communities are at least starting to have a think about the best way of handling all this. I'm just concerned that it's going to be too late by the time we find a solution; how many more games out there are technically functional, like Forza Horizon, but have elements that are now completely inaccessible?

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The post #oneaday Day 784: Playing a dead game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been feeling this a bit recently, particularly with regard to recent releases. There are exceptions, of course — I've picked up Star Fox, Rhythm Paradise Groove and Splatoon Raiders for Switch 2 over the course of the last month, and when I got home from CEX, I found myself ordering copies of the first four Saints Row games (original versions, not remasters, as I've heard mixed reports about the latter) as well as the newly announced EDITIONS from LostInCult for Sektori, Dread Delusion and Easy Delivery Co. So in actual fact I probably spent a lot more than I would have spent if I'd come out with an armful of 360, PS3 and PS4 games from that CEX.

But I don't know. I just wasn't feeling it in the store today. I had a couple of things in mind that I thought I might like to look out for (notably, the aforementioned Saints Row games, following a discussion with a pal earlier) and those did not appear to be in attendance, and there wasn't much else jumping out at me. I thought about trying to expand and/or complete my collection of Need for Speed games on Xbox 360, but the vaguely responsible part of my brain pointed out that I haven't played the parts of that collection I already own as yet, so it would probably be a little silly to get more. (Actually, it wouldn't have made much difference; they were like £1.50 each; I just couldn't be arsed.)

I don't want to say that I'm falling out of love with gaming, because that very obviously isn't true. But with all the recent, unwelcome moves in the current industry — Microsoft continually stepping on rakes, Sony putting an expiration date on physical media, Nintendo continuing to push Game Key Cards — it's hard not to feel a bit cynical about current things, and that my relationship with the hobby is changing. On top of that, stuff that is a few years old now is still good! Since I'm not someone who has ever got particularly sniffy about resolution and frame rate, I'm pretty sure I'll have just as good a time with those Xbox 360 versions of the Saints Row games as I would have done if I'd picked up the (pricier) PS4 or Switch versions.

I mean, hell, outside of Splatoon Raiders, the other "big game" I'm currently playing is on the SNES. And I'm glad that I have the ability to enjoy this broad range of stuff — ranging from late '70s/early '80s computer and console stuff right up to brand new releases. I know not everyone feels able to do that for one reason or another, and honestly I feel a bit sorry for those people who can't. Perhaps you just had to "be there" for it all to have those positive associations, and if I was 20-30 years younger I might feel differently about games that ran at sub-1080p resolutions and less than 60 frames per second.

But, as it happens, that is not the case, and thus I will continue to enjoy my Old Shit alongside very carefully selected and curated New Shit, and try not to spend too much time mourning an industry that, in its current state, seems determined to self-destruct.

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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The post #oneaday Day 782: Slow the rate appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the unfamiliar, Splatoon Raiders is a Nintendo Switch 2 game that, in contrast to the prior three Splatoon games, places the single-player experience at the forefront. Those of you who have never played a Splatoon game before may be surprised to note that there is, in fact, a single-player game in every Splatoon game, and even more surprised to hear that it has been consistently very good in the past — it's just very few people ever really talk about it, as the focus of the series has always been on its competitive multiplayer modes. And that's a pity, because although each game's single-player campaign is perhaps a little on the short side, they (and the DLC for the more recent ones) have been consistently excellent, featuring top-notch level design and some quality gameplay that blends action, platforming, puzzle solving and simple observation skills.

Splatoon Raiders is a little bit different. Although it unfolds in a series of self-contained levels, these are, for the most part, a tad more open than the rather linear, abstract levels of prior Splatoon campaigns. There are some stages that very much have the feel of classic single-player Splatoon — mostly the "Sample Dungeon" stages which challenge you to overcome a series of obstacles and encounters with a specific loadout — but on the whole, the focus is a bit different.

That's no bad thing, though, and one thing Splatoon Raiders does pretty well is keep things varied. On some levels you'll be fighting your way through a relatively linear path to an end point, where you receive a treasure. On others, you'll be in an arena, battling to defeat enough enemies to build up an energy bar before time expires. Some levels present you with a series of these arenas. Others still are more open, tasking you with building up energy by defeating enemies on a relatively large map until you are able to mine a large crystal and obtain its resources.

The very nature of the game means that there's not quite as much of the clever platforming and observation challenges of classic single-player Splatoon, but that's not to say it's completely absent. In fact, most of the non-arena stages have a series of hidden items on them, and tracking these down very much has the feel of the older Splatoon campaigns, because they will require you to go a bit off the beaten track, investigate interesting-looking areas and sometimes take a few risks. And the rewards are worthwhile; besides scrolls that contain lore, most of these stages also contain a compass, which unlocks access to a semi-secret level — one of the aforementioned "Sample Dungeons".

I'll doubtless have more to say about the game when I've played it a bit more, but so far I'm impressed. The "looter shooter" element provides plenty of interesting opportunities for progression — and incentive to try various different types of weapon — without being overly obnoxious or overloading you with pointless variants on the same equipment. A variety of simple and straightforward crafting systems allow you to unlock new abilities and features. And the ability to revisit past levels in "Spicy" mode provides alternatives for gathering materials and loot than simply grinding the same level over and over again.

The only thing I'm not entirely sure about is the music. I get why it is the way it is — it's an attempt to reflect the chaos of the battles in which you find yourself — but dear Lord, there are certain tracks that sound like a school orchestra tuning up and then immediately launching into a failed attempt to play the complete soundtrack to Darius. I would have much rather had music somewhat akin to what there was in the multiplayer matches of regular Splatoon, but you can't have everything I guess. It certainly creates an atmosphere of sorts, I'll give it that!

There will, of course, be a full write-up of Splatoon Raiders on MoeGamer when I'm satisfied that I've played enough of it to be able to speak with complete confidence about it. But for now, I'm happy to say that I'm having a good time, and I'm looking forward to playing some more!

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The post #oneaday Day 776: Splatting Salmonids appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To give another example — and the one that prompted me to write this today — I am currently playing Quintet's Illusion of Time (aka Illusion of Gaia to North Americans) and I have been thoroughly impressed by its visual design overall, but one of my favourite things is the fact that its parallax backdrops, when it uses them (it's a top-down game) accurately reflect the things that you're supposed to be "above". To put it another way, when you're high above something, the things you can see down below are accurate to what you would see if you were actually down there.

Looking back over my Soul Blazer video, I'm pretty sure Soul Blazer did this in a few places as well, but Illusion of Time seems to do it fairly consistently. And I'm impressed! They didn't have to go to that much effort, but they did!

The reason this impresses me is that a lot of games like this would have used a fairly generic parallax backdrop, and no-one would have minded too much. The illusion of depth would be there — which is what parallax is used for — and the fact that it wasn't "accurate" wouldn't have mattered, because it has no real impact on the actual gameplay.

For example, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past uses a very simple tiled parallax backdrop to show that there is something beneath you rather than it being a bottomless pit. You can use this information to recognise which pits it is safe to jump down — to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, for example — and which it is not. While an accurate reflection of the floor beneath's map might be helpful in this situation, Zelda has enough other features to allow you to calculate the place where you will end up without having to be able to see down the hole. And, indeed, with the limited area you can see through Zelda's holes (pardon me), it's probably more practical to just look at the map and recognise "this is a hole I can jump down" rather than try to figure out exactly where you'll land from the tiny bit of parallax background you can see through said hole.

In Illusion of Time, however, these parallax backgrounds are purely there to look cool. In one sequence where you're exploring a mine, for example, you initially see ropeways with hanging platforms "in front of" the screen, suggesting they're above where you currently are. Later in the stage, you get up to the level of the ropeways and ride one across a large gap. Since, so far as the game is concerned, you are in a different "room" while you're doing this, there probably didn't "need" to be a parallax background at all, but not only did Quintet include one, it was a full, accurate map of the floor beneath.

That, to me, is impressive! It is not impressive by today's standards, because today you would just build your entire level in 3D and be able to see through holes and chasms to the floor beneath naturally. I am impressed with this in Illusion of Gaia, however, because I know that it wouldn't have been that simple to do. Well, it might have been relatively simple — all it really needs to be is an image of the floor below's map used as the parallax background — but it's a level of effort I recognise as being outside of the norm for the time, and thus I appreciate it.

This is where having an understanding and an appreciation of a wide range of things within your hobby is helpful. Someone who had only ever played modern games would think nothing of this little feature. But having grown up with all these different "generations" of gaming hardware, developing a vague (if non-technical) understanding of their capabilities (and lack thereof) along the way, I can recognise when something is an impressive achievement for its original time of release.

I hope I never let go of this trait. It adds so much depth of enjoyment to my appreciation of older games — and I encourage you to try and develop it, too.

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The post #oneaday Day 771: Anachronistic wonderment appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Several people, as part of this process, pointed out that the term "retro" is not really all that helpful any more, and I'm inclined to agree. And yes, I'm aware I say this as part of a company that specifically markets itself as "retro gaming"-focused — and someone who has a "Retro Video Games" category on his blog — but what I'm about to talk about applies to all that, also.

My feelings are pretty simple: drop the "retro". They're just games. Zork? Game. Adventure for 2600? Game. The Last of Us? Game. The Witcher 3? Game. Gone Home? Game. (There, that should have covered everything that might piss at least one person off.)

The reason I say this is that as soon as you introduce the word "retro" into the mix, you also introduce a perceived barrier to entry. "Retro gaming" is perceived as a markedly different hobby to "gaming", whereas this doesn't really happen with any other medium. You might have people who are into different genres of books, movies, music, TV shows and suchlike, but you don't get people going "yeah, I'm a retro reader". Even people who make the majority of their reading time involve pre-20th century literature just "enjoy reading" — because most of them don't confine themselves to that one, single niche all of the time. Why? Because that's daft. Just because you like Jane Eyre doesn't mean you can't enjoy The Da Vinci Code or whatever. And you're not any less of a "reader" if you do.

The net effect of this when it comes to gaming is that you get people who will only ever play the latest and greatest games, and if it came out more than three weeks ago it might as well not exist, and you get people who will happily play a triple-A cinematic blockbuster one evening, an 8-bit home computer game another and a PlayStation RPG the next. You also get people who fall somewhere between those two extremes, which is a perfectly reasonable and healthy way to approach things. No-one is saying you have to enjoy everything from throughout the entirety of gaming history, but to draw a completely imaginary "hard cutoff" line between what is "modern" and what is "retro" based on, let's face it, nothing other than vibes is kind of ridiculous.

Case in point: currently, I am playing through Soul Blazer. This is a game originally released for Super NES in 1992 (1994 if you're PAL like me). There is absolutely nothing about this game that someone who has only ever played games released in the last three weeks would not be able to grasp. There's a common misconception that "retro games are complicated, you need to read the manual", but Soul Blazer is literally "move in four directions, hit things with your sword", and everything else is introduced either organically through gameplay, or explicitly told to you. You could release Soul Blazer today, completely unchanged — gorgeous pixel art has never gone out of fashion, thankfully — and it would be regarded as a good game, because it is a good game. It's not a good retro game, it's just a good game.

I think some of this likely originally stems from the crossover between the Mega Drive and SNES era to the age of PlayStation, Saturn and N64. Rumours abounded at the time that developers were specifically being discouraged from making 2D pixel art games on PlayStation, because polygonal 3D — even the relatively janky polygonal 3D of the PlayStation — was regarded as the One True Future. But I'm not sure quite how true that ever was, because one of the absolute most beloved games of that particular period — Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — was resolutely 2D, with only very occasional polygons used for special effects or parallax backgrounds. And there are countless other beautiful, wonderful and well-loved 2D games from that era — particularly on Saturn. Marginally less so on N64, but that was operating in a bit of a world of its own anyway. (Also, play Mischief Makers.)

That doesn't really explain how this sort of thinking appears to have persisted for this long, though. Yes, over the last 20 years or so there very much has been a rise in the sort of gamer who only ever buys that year's Call of Duty, FIFA/Madden or equivalent and leaves it at that, who doesn't really consider the history of the medium. But there seems to be the perception that there are plenty of people who have been gaming since the '80s — even earlier in some cases — who, for whatever reason, will not play anything released before a certain date — or, at the very least, will corral those experiences into a distinct "retro gaming" category, distinct from the implied "proper" modern gaming sector where they spend the majority of their time. I don't doubt people like that exist, but I wonder how widespread they really are.

Some of this is down to access; we're all familiar with that Video Game History Foundation report, or at least I hope we are at this point. But "not commercially available" is by no means the same as "inaccessible" these days. You don't even need original hardware; emulation of pretty much everything up to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era is in a good place, and after that (some would argue during that period) the newer games consoles were basically just PCs anyway, so outside of a dwindling number of genuine exclusives, you can play all that stuff pretty easily, too. At this point, everyone, everywhere, so long as you have some combination of an Internet connection, a computer and a monitor or TV, can enjoy pretty much any game released within the last 50 years without very much in the way of effort.

And modern rereleases of stuff that first came out many years ago are happening, too, if you don't want to delve into the proverbial high seas! There's Hamster's Arcade and Console Archives series on the current consoles. There are numerous bespoke releases of classic console, computer and arcade games on various platforms. Evercade, the platform I work on, has a huge number of cartridges at this point, covering more that 700 games between them, all of them officially licensed rereleases!

Any perceived barrier to entry that "retro gaming" might have had in the past — be that the technical knowhow required to get old finicky hardware up and running; the possession of vintage CRT TV hardware; an understanding of what "RGB" is; the ability to recap an Xbox or replace the battery in a Dreamcast — has not been there for a good long while, unless you want to enjoy a specific type of experience. (Snobbery over whether you're "doing retro gaming right" is a whole other discussion, mind, and it's hopefully already clear where my opinions fall on that side of things.)

If you enjoy games, you (hopefully) just enjoy games. There is absolutely no rule written down anywhere that places down a hard boundary of what you are allowed to enjoy, based on whatever combination of "year of release" and "age of player" people are using to calculate their completely arbitrary definition of "retro". Sure, some older stuff might take a little adjusting to if you're unfamiliar with it — much as reading Jane Eyre takes a bit of adjustment after reading The Da Vinci Code — but it's still the same basic form of entertainment at heart: push buttons, fun (or at least interesting) stuff happens.

Go on. Spoil yourself. Play something from a system you've never explored before. Revisit a game you haven't played since childhood. Fire up a copy of that one game you always saw in magazines and lusted over, but which you never got for Christmas or birthdays. And, with an appropriately receptive and open mind, I pretty much guarantee that you'll have an experience just as interesting, compelling and worthwhile as if you played something that released last week.

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The post #oneaday Day 764: Just games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Then I looked at what I had written and thought, "no, I should not give in to despair, even if it does seem like it has been a very long time since anything has happened which I can honestly say is to the betterment of humanity as a whole". So I deleted all of it, replaced the image of horseshit with a picture of Patti (above) and decided that a helpful thought exercise would be to ponder some Nice Things. Doesn't matter what they are, how big they are, how important they are — just that they are Nice Things that I thought were worth celebrating. So let's pick out… ooh, let's say, five, as that's a nice number to work with. And I'm going to focus on gaming because a lot of stuff in gaming sucks right now.

Mike Bithell's new game looks cool

Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame, has been teasing his new game for a while, and yesterday he finally revealed it. It's called Vampirium: 1997 and is set in an alternate near-history where Dracula is the king of England, and you are one of his retainers, with dark powers all your own.

Bithell describes the game as an "immersive sim", but if you're thinking of a first-person adventure-style affair — which is what the term "immersive sim" usually gets applied to — you might be surprised to discover that this is a rather more abstract affair that, from what we've seen so far, looks to take a lot of cues from tabletop gaming. The "immersive sim" aspect comes from how you have a lot of freedom to tackle situations as you see fit — supposedly you can "click and combine game tiles to access verbs and craft your own diabolical resolutions". Sounds pretty interesting to me!

The game doesn't have a release date as yet, but will be launching into Early Access in the near future, and having a bunch of stuff added to it as the community gets to grips with it. It will then have a "1.0" release when all that is done, and we should have another great vampire game on our hands.

Wadjet Eye Games is 20 years old

If you (yes, you!) have ever uttered the fateful words "adventure games are dead" at any point in recent history, you have not been paying attention, because one of the absolute best developer-publishers to ever Do That Thing turned 20 years old today. Yes! Wadjet Eye Games has been releasing excellent adventure games since 2006, and their work has been going from strength to strength year after year — both in terms of the stuff they've made themselves, and the titles they've published from other developers.

I honestly, genuinely believe that the point-and-click adventure game is in a better place today than it ever was back in the LucasArts and Sierra heyday; don't get me wrong, I adore the "golden age" games and always will, since they were formative experiences for me. But you cannot look at incredible recent(ish) releases like The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (developed by Cloak & Dagger and published by Wadjet Eye) and Old Skies (developed in-house at Wadjet Eye) and think "nah, it was way better back then".

It fills my heart with gladness to know that amid all the chaos in the games industry right now, a company dedicated to releasing games of the kind it believes in — not what shareholders want, not what passing trends say you "should" be making, not what is supposedly the most profitable — is able to not only survive, but thrive. I sincerely hope Wadjet Eye Games continues to stick around for many years to come.

Scott Pilgrim EX is fun

My limited edition copy of Scott Pilgrim EX, which comes in a lovely oversized NeoGeo-esque clamshell case, arrived yesterday, and I spent most of the evening playing it through. It's a lot of fun! It successfully manages to feel true to the prior game — which is an all-time favourite — while shaking things up a bit and keeping things interesting.

I'll have more to say about this over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future, but suffice it to say for now that I had a lot of fun with my first playthrough — and with a full run through the game only being about 2.5 hours in total, I can see plenty more in my future, particularly with the possibility of online multiplayer in the mix.

Soul Blazer is great

I already knew this, but my recent starting-a-new-playthrough-and-I'll-probably-definitely-finish-it-this-time go at Quintet's awesome SNES action RPG Soul Blazer has reminded me how much I like that game. Again, I will write more about this on MoeGamer when I've actually beaten the damn thing — I'm a little shy of halfway through so far, I believe — but I am happy to say, right now, that if you have never played this delightful little game (and it is pretty little — I reckon it'll take less than 10 hours to beat, which begs the question why I've never gotten around to doing so) then you are very much missing out on one of the most charming 16-bit games there ever was.

I have finished "The Best Bit" of Final Fantasy XI

A lot of people seem to agree that Chains of Promathia is the best bit of Final Fantasy XI and now, outside of the epilogue quests and the optional Bahamut fight (which I might wait to do until I'm level 99 for the sake of simplicity) I have finally beaten it! This has been a kind of "gaming ambition" for me pretty much ever since I played Final Fantasy XI for the first time, and I have finally made it a reality.

This is another thing I would like to write about on MoeGamer in the very near future, so I will simply say that I enjoyed myself, and I'm glad I finally took this journey. I think I need at least a short break before heading off to seek the Treasures of Aht Urhgan though…!

Anyway, those are Five Good Things of Varying Relevance in gaming right now. I post these not to diminish the impact or importance of the Bad Stuff happening at the moment, but instead to hopefully provide a little reprieve. I sincerely wish that everyone who is going through tough times right now — and there are a lot of people going through tough times in the industry right now — is able to at least find some joy in the day-to-day, and doesn't give in to despair; I also hope that many of these people will tell their stories, frankly and honestly, because they need to be told. And they need to be told by the people who have been affected, not by some random idiot on the Internet.

One day, I hope these terrible times will be behind us, and we will be able to look back on them and go "fucking hell, never do that again". Until then, take care of yourselves. Don't give up. And play Soul Blazer.

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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The post #oneaday Day 762: Some nice things appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Some of my fondest memories of playing games in the early (relatively speaking) days of PC gaming were of id Software titles. Commander Keen. Wolfenstein 3-D. Doom. Quake. All absolute legends of gaming history, each for their own reasons.

I didn't just love id's games for the games themselves — though that was a big part of it. I loved them for the way they brought my friends and I together over shared enjoyment of them. I loved them for helping me come out of my shell a bit and do some part-time work for a local shareware library. I loved them for how they allowed me to relate to the people I worked alongside during my Year 10 work experience in the PC Zone offices.

And, of course, I loved them for introducing me to shareware, providing me with hours of entertainment for absolutely no cost whatsoever. I played the shareware episodes of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom to absolute death, only coming to the full versions some time later — many years later in some cases. At the time I was playing these games, I was still a teenager, and not financially independent enough to do something as serious as mail-ordering the full version of a game from the States. I kind of wish I had at least ordered a copy of Doom; those original mail-order boxed versions are worth a fair bit now!

And there's all the surrounding culture, too. Wolfenstein 3-D introduced me to modding games. I'm not generally a huge fan of modding games these days, but back in the Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom days I found it fascinating, and highly enjoyable to make Wolfenstein 3-D maps in particular. (At the time, I found Doom editing to be a bit confusing and never really got on with it. Maybe I should try it again now I am old and, in theory, less stupid.) Hell, as I've told the story numerous times before, modding Wolfenstein 3-D once earned me $200 and a place in the official "Super Upgrades" expansion pack by Apogee — an oft-forgotten but nonetheless official addon to the original game.

Of course I'm aware that the id Software of today is very different from the id Software I grew up with — but I'm sure there were at least some people who have built a whole career and a life there. While the company isn't going away entirely, I am saddened to see it take such a devastating blow; the current state of the games industry is, frankly, really quite worrying, and I'm concerned a lot of well-established names aren't going to survive what is increasingly looking like a full-on crash.

I'm not going to be angry and yell about what has happened, for a variety of reasons. Most of all I just want to raise a glass to id Software, makers of some of the greatest games of all time, and celebrate the amazing times they have given me over the years — and continue to give me, as I so often return to their most famous works.

Who knows what the future holds? I certainly don't. I sincerely hope that, in the long term, it looks a lot brighter, especially for everyone who has been affected by Recent Happenings.

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The post #oneaday Day 761: The depths of the id appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

If you're reading this, you probably don't need me to tell you my feelings about old games, but I'm going to talk about them anyway — if only for the benefit of anyone who might be stumbling across this blog for the first time, or for anyone who, somehow, did not know the following about me.

I love old games! I always have done. For as long as I can remember, I have loved going back to earlier gaming systems and either rediscovering old favourites, or discovering brand new ones. I quite regularly boot up the MiSTer's Atari 8-bit, ST and Amiga cores to play the games of my childhood — and the games that I lusted after in my childhood. I also explore the libraries of consoles that I never had the opportunity to own, or which were prohibitively expensive, or which just passed me by for one reason or another. It's a constant delight, and I think, as the article linked states, it has done me a lot of good, too.

Probably the best thing that Being Into Old Games has taught me is not to give a rat's ass about performance, unless said performance is actively detrimental to the overall experience. I grew up gaming on systems that could barely manage simple flat-shaded 3D polygonal scenes at about 10 frames per second, and had a ton of fun on platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, both of which have graphical capabilities it would be very easy to find laughable today if you're a snobbish dickhead.

There really are people out there who will declare games from this era (and earlier) "unplayable" because they run at an inconsistent frame rate, or a low resolution, or have blurry textures, or use a "weird" controller. (Fun fact: the Nintendo 64 controller is absolutely fine when playing games that were designed for it! That said, if you really don't get along with it, I recommend either this for modern USB devices, or this for original hardware.)

There are people out there who completely fail to grasp the absolute phenomenon that was GoldenEye and Perfect Dark split-screen multiplayer. None of us cared that the frame rate was, by today's standards, bobbins! The games were fun! That was literally all that mattered! And you can still live your life that way! I bet if I hooked up a MiSTer with four controllers and ran Perfect Dark on it at a party, people would be fighting over it by the end of the evening. (This makes the mistaken assumption that I would 1) throw a party and 2) have anyone to invite to a party, mind, but I am speaking purely hypothetically here.)

Don't get me wrong, it is undoubtedly nice to play a modern, high-resolution game that runs super smoothly and slickly. Certain genres particularly benefit from absolutely rock-solid performance — but that doesn't magically make games from years gone by that didn't run at a constant 60+ fps suddenly completely unplayable or not worth bothering with. Ridge Racer Type 4, one of the greatest video games ever created, only just about cracks 30 and runs at a resolution of 320×240 pixels (on NTSC displays, anyway) during races! And yet I go back to Ridge Racer Type 4 more than pretty much any other racing game released since then… except maybe the Project Gotham games.

One of the nicest things about older games that I'm coming to appreciate a whole lot more as I get older is that they just respect your time more. Even in RPGs, there's a lot less endless grinding, a lot less "content" designed for "player retention" — and I know some people like them, but the complete absence of Achievements and/or Trophies is absolute bliss, because it means you can play and enjoy each and every game exactly how you want to, without feeling obliged to tick things off a checklist — including boring, tedious things you don't actually want to do — lest you feel you haven't "Platinumed" it properly.

I am a strong, strong advocate for expanding your gaming horizons and exploring the incredibly vast, diverse and vibrant history of the medium. And I mean all of the history! There are Atari 2600 (River Raid! H.E.R.O.! Seaquest! Keystone Kapers!) and Intellivision (Night Stalker! Tower of Doom! Cloudy Mountain!) games that still play great today — and which I, personally, frequently return to, by choice, for a gaming session of an evening. There are myriad Super NES, PlayStation and Saturn RPGs just waiting for me to play them — and I'm looking forward to doing so. And even though I played a lot of N64 back in the day, there's still a lot of games from that relatively slim library that I've never tried — and really want to!

If you're concerned for the future of gaming — and given all the recent happenings, I absolutely do not blame you for that — then don't just give up and assume it's all over. Even if there were to be no more games released ever after tomorrow — and we all know that's not going to happen, regardless of whether or not we're actually in the process of seeing a new Crash happen — there are enough games that have already been released, across all platforms, to keep all of us busy for the rest of our lives.

Something doesn't stop being relevant, worthwhile or interesting because it's 20, 30, 40 years old or more. In many cases, these games are all the more remarkable for remaining relevant, worthwhile and interesting after so long — and it's not just nostalgia. There's something there; something of great value. And I implore you to spend some time exploring it, particularly if you've never done so.

Now I'm off to play Soul Blazer for the rest of the evening.

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The post #oneaday Day 760: My own feelings on old games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The two games are very different experiences, but the one thing they have in common is that they respect your time in the way that titles from, say, the PlayStation 2 era did. You can do a complete playthrough of Star Fox in under an hour, and Rhythm Paradise Groove consists entirely of self-contained sequences that are no more than two or three minutes, tops. You can blast through all the "content" both games have in a relatively short space of time, but their longevity comes from their replay value: Star Fox for the pursuit of "medals" by attaining specific scores on each level while ensuring all your computer-controlled companions survive, and Rhythm Paradise Groove for attaining "Amazing" and "Perfect" ratings on each stage.

I'm growing increasingly fond of games that aren't a huge commitment to play; games that you can just pick up and enjoy whenever you feel like it, without feeling that strange sense of "guilt" many of us have if we already have a "big game" on the go and start something else that is likely to take more than 40 hours to get through. I'm not just talking about bite-sized arcade-style games, either; the other night I started playing Soul Blazer on Super NES, and I know that's relatively short in the grand scheme of RPGs, so I'm looking forward to finally making my way through the whole thing; something I've been meaning to do for ages.

I like a good long game to get my teeth into now and again, you know that — but I won't lie; there are times when I start something that I think is going to be relatively light and breezy, see it has an endless skill tree and various numbers to grind up very slowly in the name of increasing my poison damage by 0.1%, and just think "oh no, this is going to take ages, isn't it?" There are a significant number of games that have been released over the course of the last 10-15 years or so that would have really benefited from just scaling back, like, a lot, and providing a much more focused experience. They usually don't because they have to justify their massive budgets and thousands of people working on them — plus, unfortunately, there is a subculture among capital-G Gamers who complain any time something comes out with what they perceive as "not enough content".

It's unfortunate that so many developers have listened to the people who whine in Steam forums about games being "abandoned" because they haven't had an update in the last three weeks (protip: sometimes those games are finished) or that they need to see a "roadmap" of "new content" coming down the pipeline. I always feel the exact opposite to this; if I see a game that has a lengthy roadmap — particularly if that roadmap involves copious amounts of DLC — I lose a lot of interest in that game. Sometimes I will return to it later to see if there's some sort of "complete" edition available, but most of the time I will just shrug my shoulders and go and play a game that is actually finished instead, rather than spending valuable time playing something that I know is probably going to change and expand in the time it takes me to beat it.

I like both Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove because they are both finished games, and seeing everything they have to offer is within relatively easy reach. Both will require some practice and some actual playing skill to see all that stuff, but neither of them feel like they're going to be commitments with hour counts that number into the three digits just to see the credits roll.

I suspect Star Fox might see some updates to its multiplayer mode if it proves popular, but as a single-player experience, it is completely self-contained and does everything it needs to. Rhythm Paradise Groove I suspect will just stand as it is — it didn't even need an update when I put the cartridge in for the first time earlier, which is always a very welcome sight these days.

I hope we see more games like this. Nintendo seems to be quite keen on them right now, and I'm not complaining when they are as good as Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove are — and speaking of which, I'll have more to say about the latter over on MoeGamer when I've played a bit more of it. For now, I'll just say "cha, cha, cha, bom bom" and leave it at that…

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The post #oneaday Day 756: Video games like they used to be appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Anyway. Yes. What I wanted to talk about was the fact that once we got into sixth form, a lot of us started to enjoy our first real tastes of proper independence, despite, in most cases, still living with our parents. Learning to drive allowed us to go places without having to rely on getting our parents to give us a lift — and give them the full details of where we were going. We were trusted to take responsibility for our own education, meaning several of us went to one single General Studies lesson in two years and still managed to ace the exam. Taking part-time jobs of various descriptions allowed us to earn some money, giving us considerably more financial freedom than childish "pocket money" provided. (Although saying that, my grandparents were always very generous in that regard.)

That latter one is an important one, as it coincided with us being able to spend that money on things that we liked. For my friends and I, those things were video games. And it was an enormously exciting time to be interested in video games, with the PlayStation having hit the market a few years earlier, and the Nintendo 64 finally arriving in Europe as we were kicking off our period of post-compulsory education.

I have fond memories of sixth form not just because I enjoyed the academic side of things — that's something I've talked about elsewhere — but also because of what happened between those classes. For my friends and I, we spent the majority of our time hanging out in the Art department of the school rather than the main sixth form common room; the corner of the Art department had essentially been taken over as a semi-private secondary common room that was almost exclusively used by my friends and I. It was a comfortable place to hang out, and we had many pleasant free periods spent there enjoying a bacon and cheese baguette from the recreation centre on the school site, just chatting about all sorts of silly things.

Quite often, if we had several free periods in a row, or free time up to and including lunchtime, we would wander off the school site — as we were allowed to do now, because we were big, brave, responsible 16+ year olds — and walk into the town centre. This was a walk of about a mile in total — my 45 year old bones ache just thinking about that — but we did it on a pretty regular basis. When we got into town, we had a bit of a routine: we'd go to The Baker's Oven for a bacon and cheese puff and a Belgian bun (though not if we had recently consumed one of the aforementioned baguettes), then head to Barneys, the local record shop, and have a little look around. I would always feel mildly uneasy in there because it was still the age where one felt distinctly judged for one's taste in music, but after a while I learned to just own my self-described "eclectic" tastes in music.

Barneys wasn't the main attraction of our trips to town, though. We saved the best for last by heading to First Compute, a pokey little shop in the "Cross Keys" shopping mews that was initially little more than a cupboard with games for pretty much every platform you can think of festooning every wall (and a fair bit of the floor). By the time we were in sixth form, though, the owner, who we only knew as "Richie", had moved venue to a slightly larger establishment, but the distinct feeling that as much stuff as possible was being crammed in remained. There were big box PC games on some shelves on the left, and PlayStation and N64 games on the right.

At the time, I had had the good fortune to score a few freelance writing opportunities for outlets such as PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine. These at least partly came about because I did my Year 10 work experience on PC Zone when my brother was the editor, but my brother's the sort of person who wouldn't have recommended me to his successors if he didn't think I could have done a good job. And I did do a good job — and, more to the point, in those days, you got paid a hell of a lot more for cranking out an article than you do for many of today's websites. We're talking about £300-£500 per piece here.

As you can probably imagine, being in a situation where I had very little in the way of living expenses thanks to still living at home, this cash very quickly burned a sizeable hole in my pocket, and my friends knew this. I would often get a little "gentle encouragement" to pick up a new game for either PlayStation or Nintendo 64, and honestly, as much as peer pressure very much was involved, I didn't need much convincing. I found both systems to be a ton of fun, and I loved being able to share my enjoyment of them with my closest friends.

On the Nintendo 64 front, we quite often picked up games with a multiplayer focus, as we spent a lot of time around one another's houses, crowded around the television enjoying split-screen fun. We even tried some types of game that, in prior years, we would have never considered, like EA's World Cup 98 when the eponymous tournament was on.

On the PlayStation front, my preference was, as you can probably imagine if you know me even a little bit, for role-playing games, and dear Lord do I ever wish I'd held on to the vast majority of those games I bought all those years ago, because little was I to know that role-playing games in particular would become enormously expensive on the second-hand market.

Of all those times I was mildly peer-pressured into buying a new game, I only remember one solitary occasion when I was disappointed and regretful enough in my purchase to actually return the game in question. That game was a title for PlayStation called Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest, and it was a polygonal action RPG for up to four players. It looked like it might be cool from the box art, and there were some interesting ideas in it, but it was very much not what I was looking for from a game at the time. I'm actually quite curious to revisit this game through older, more mature eyes, as I suspect I may have treated it a bit harshly.

The pattern of go-to-town, buy-a-game continued once I got to university and fell in with friends who also enjoyed gaming. Since I was still getting some cash from freelancing, I still had a bit of disposable income, though living away from home meant I did actually have living expenses now. Still, I managed to pick up a bunch of interesting games, and reading the manuals while on the bus home was always a highlight of these times that I think back on fondly. It's a cliché to talk about reading the manual on the way home, but it really was a thing we did, and it really is something I have exceedingly happy memories of.

New games haven't come with manuals for a long time now, outside of a few special cases in limited-print editions, and situations like Evercade where the whole thing is built on the idea of "how it used to be" — and with the apparently impending death of physical releases, even the experience of going to a game shop, picking up a game and coming home with it will be lost. Of course, many people — including me — tend to order their games online these days anyway, so many of us haven't been doing that anyway — but it's still sad to think that there are generations of video game enthusiasts who will never be able to enjoy things in quite the same way we did around the end of the millennium and the turn of the century.

I'm mad at Sony for actively encouraging the death of that. They are deliberately trying to destroy what was once an important part of the overall culture surrounding video games. I suspect those who have never been deeply into them might not understand why this is a big deal — and I equally suspect the C-suite execs who mandated this are exactly the sort of people who have never actually given a shit about video games as a creative medium or form of expression — but it really was. Sony's announcement left a lot of people feeling like they really had lost something; feeling something akin to grief. It might sound silly to say that about something as simple as going into a shop and buying a box with a bit of plastic inside it, but it really is the case.

I sincerely hope the company does a hasty U-turn on this, but I very much doubt they will. If that's the case, that's the end of me and PlayStation. Once there's no more games to buy and proudly put on my shelf, that's it for me and new games. I've always said this. And in some respects, I don't mind, either — it'll mean I don't have to worry about running out of what little space I have left on my shelves, and that I will be able to focus on diving deep into my collection and discovering all the things I haven't gotten around to yet.

But still. I will be sad to have lived long enough to see a medium and a culture surrounding it grow, thrive and then wither. I am already sad that I have seen that happen, but every new week seems to bring a new horror in that regard.

We will always have the good times, though. That's the one thing they can never revoke the license for.

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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The post #oneaday Day 755: The lost art of going to buy a game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am quite a few episodes behind, but the nice thing about the show is that its very nature means that it is somewhat timeless, and each episode can be enjoyed at any time. Thus, yesterday and today I enjoyed some discussion of Next Generation magazine's "Are You a Hardcore Gamer?" quiz (circa 1998) and the pair's collaboration with Coury and Try from My Life in Gaming to discuss a "draft" of games from the 1995-1997 period covered by Fun Factor's first season.

Obviously I will take this opportunity to recommend you go give Fun Factor a listen (or even better, watch: the podcast's YouTube channel lets you look at the magazines as they're talking about them!) but today's post isn't specifically about the podcast. Rather, it's about how the discussions on the episodes I listened to, particularly the "draft" episode, have inspired me to make some time to play through a bunch of games I keep telling myself I've "always meant to get around to". By this I am primarily referring to retro games, particularly of the RPG variety, of which I have about a bazillion loaded up and ready to go almost immediately thanks to my MiSTer Multisystem 2 setup upstairs. And I can even play them on a CRT!

I hesitate to start new RPGs because I have it in my head that they're all massively long. And to be sure, your average RPG does tend to be on the longer side. But listening to the chaps enthusing about various titles like Chrono Trigger (which, to my shame, I've never finished), Final Fantasy IV (which I have finished and know is pretty short) and various others makes me think… I should just sit down and play some of these things that I've been "always meaning to". Including some that I've started and never got around to finishing, like Soul Blazer.

Soul Blazer is definitely one I want to tick off my list because it is an excellent game, and I've always felt like it wouldn't be quite right to tackle Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, both of which I want to play, before beating that one. They are considered an extremely loose "trilogy", after all, and I think it would be particularly interesting to play in succession.

Part of me says "no, don't start something new, you have Final Fantasy XI on the go". But Final Fantasy XI is very long indeed, and sometimes you just want a palate cleanser. Sometimes that's something really quick and breezy, like the new Star Fox, while at other times, it's another game with a bit more substance, but which is unlikely to end up with an hour count that is three or more digits in length.

So probably not tonight, because it's getting late and I still have a farty stomach full of regret from the pizza I had last night, but very soon, I'm going to set some time aside to enjoy some retro gaming. I have all the kit — I might as well make good use of it and enjoy myself, non?

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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The post #oneaday Day 753: Finding the Fun Factor appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Oh, and on top of that, the "physical" release of the game is a code-in-a-box. Fuck off with that.

I can't think of many series that have managed to so very thoroughly turn me off as Grand Theft Auto. I absolutely loved the original one, from the moment my underage self bought the original big-box PC version from "First Compute" one lunchtime at sixth form. ("Ol' Richie", the guy who ran the shop, knew I was lying about my birthdate, but he didn't really care. My friends and I spent too much money in his shop for him to make a fuss.) I likewise adored Grand Theft Auto III (I never played the second one to this day) and quite liked Vice City, particularly its soundtrack, which I had the box set of CDs for.

The series started to lose me around San Andreas. There's no way of saying this that doesn't sound a bit racist, so I'm just going to say it, acknowledge that is what it sounds like, and attempt to explain myself: I found that game's focus on strongly black-coded urban culture to not only be difficult to engage with, but outright indecipherable at times. To put it another way, I had found Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City to be a lot more accessible, simply because I was more familiar with the tropes of "mafia-style" gangsterism that they both leaned heavily on; by contrast, San Andreas' central culture felt jarringly different to me the moment I started playing, largely because I was so unfamiliar with it. I had never watched any movies or TV shows that dealt with inner-city black urban culture — I hadn't even really listened to much in the way of contemporary black urban music at the time I played San Andreas — and thus being thrown into the deep end of it right from the start of San Andreas was… an adjustment.

There is, of course, a very strong argument to be made for using video games to immerse yourself in a culture that is different from your own — hell, I do it all the time with Japanese games — and in many respects we should look at San Andreas as quite admirable for unashamedly putting black culture front and centre at a time there was not nearly as much truly inclusive, representative media as there is now.

But two things. One, I'm not sure Grand Theft Auto as a series is the one to tackle this in the most respectful manner; I don't know enough about real-world urban culture, particularly from the 1990s, to know how "authentic" San Andreas was — or if it was, in fact, just riddled with stereotypes. And two, I, personally, a middle-class white dude, with everything that entails, just found San Andreas, at least in its early hours, to be so far outside of what I was familiar with, both in my life and in the media I had previously engaged with, that I found myself thinking about the game as a whole much less fondly than I had done towards Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, even though there are a lot of ways in which San Andreas is, in theory at least, a "better game". I'm sorry, that's just how it is; I can't change my own reaction to a creative work!

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that after San Andreas, I was a lot more lukewarm on the series as a whole than I had been previously. When Grand Theft Auto IV came out, I didn't pick it up right away, and when I did pick it up, I found that I wasn't enjoying it nearly as much as I had done III and Vice City. Part of that was down to the different cultural context in which I was playing it, I feel; both III and Vice City were games I played while I was at university, so I also associate them with drunken nights out with friends that ended with collapsing back to my place to play either of those games until ugly o'clock in the morning. This is probably another reason San Andreas didn't resonate as hard, thinking about it; by the time that game came out, we'd all finished university, and thus we were no longer spending several nights a week around one other's houses playing video games together.

I never finished Grand Theft Auto IV, and never even tried its DLC. I thought about trying it again on more than one occasion, but I could just never really muster up the motivation for it. I don't know what it was; it just… didn't click with me at all, for some reason.

By the time Grand Theft Auto V first came out — which, let's not forget, was thirteen fucking years ago — I felt I was ready to try again, though. The new three-protagonist structure sounded interesting, and the online mode sounded intriguing, too. I gave it a go. I finished the single-player story. I had what I would describe as a moderately good time with that PS3 version, but it didn't have that magic for me. It felt too self-consciously edgy, like it was trying desperately to be taken seriously, but also wanted to combine that with the over-the-top satire that the previous entries had incorporated, and it just didn't really work for me. And all the fluff in it was… cool, I guess, but most of it felt like it was just there for the sake of it, rather than in an attempt to make a better game.

Online was even worse. Aside from the fact it just flat-out didn't work for quite a long time on console after release, the few times I tried later it on PC (I bought the PC version on deep discount later to play with friends more easily, as they didn't have consoles) were such overwhelmingly negative experiences that I had absolutely zero desire to spend any more time in it than I "had" to. And I didn't "have" to spend any time in it whatsoever.

What was so bad? Flagrant cheating, with nothing being done about it. Behaviour that went beyond the simple antagonism the game is built around, into malicious attempts to spoil other people's fun. Load times that were approximately sixteen years long. The complete inability to form a "party" with your friends, making it near-impossible to stay together between individual "events". And, woven into the very fabric of the experience, pay-to-win microtransactions.

Don't get me wrong, I had a few good times in Grand Theft Auto V's online mode, but those only really happened when we had a private friends-only session and just pissed about a bit. I won't deny that doing things like impromptu bicycle races across mountainous countryside, with one of us driving an enormous truck instead, were very enjoyable. Stepping into a public game, however, provided some of the most miserable online experiences I think I've ever had.

And then, of course, Grand Theft Auto V just would not fucking go away. It came to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Then it came again to PlayStation 5 and Xbox XBOX or whatever they're called now. More and more guff kept being added to the online mode, all in the name of getting people to pony up the cash for those odious "Shark Cards", because playing the game normally in order to earn your way to rewards was, very obviously, a chump's game.

I got to the point where I actively resented the sight of Grand Theft Auto V. It felt like it had become everything the series had once satirised, and worse. I had no desire to play it ever again.

I tried a few other Rockstar games along the way, too, and the only one of them that clicked with me was Bully, a post-San Andreas game that switched gears by placing you in the role of a teenager at a school in a small town, rather than a hardened criminal in a huge conurbation. I didn't enjoy Red Dead Redemption at all — at least partly because I've never found Westerns to be appealing as a genre — and have felt no inclination whatsoever to really explore the company's broader output since. (Max Payne was good, mind, though I've never really thought of those as "Rockstar games")

Grand Theft Auto VI is frustrating to me because it's being hyped up as some great Second Coming of Christ, to such a degree that game developers and publishers putting out games that are not Grand Theft Auto competitors in the slightest are terrified of releasing even vaguely near it. This, to me, just seems counter-productive; while I'm sure a lot of people are going to buy and play Grand Theft Auto VI on release day, there are plenty of people out there, I'm sure, who feel just like I do — sick to death of this goddamn series, and not looking forward to the inevitable flood of nothing but GTA VI articles we're going to get on the two and a half remaining video game journalism websites for months after it releases. Those people are going to want to play literally anything else on November 19th!

I'm pissed because not only am I sick of the sight of Grand Theft Auto, I'm also furious at how they're clearly exploiting the public with the pricing, garbage not-actually-a-physical-release and bullshit like locking in-game stores behind a $20 more expensive premium edition. I'm furious because people are still going to buy it and reward this nonsense, and no-one will learn a goddamn thing from it. It is the absolute worst example of the excesses of the top end of today's video game industry, and it's going to get away with it because it's "the most-anticipated video game ever".

And this, of course, is to say nothing of Rockstar's union-busting activities that they're currently fighting a legal battle over. But I'll leave that for people who understand such things better to discuss.

I'm aware that me having a little rant here is going to change nothing, and this odious game is going to sell gangbusters when it comes out. But I feel a bit better having said my piece now. And, outside of the game doing anything even more egregious than the shit that has been announced today, this is probably the last time I will mention it, or even think about it — and I'm certainly not going to try and stop anyone who has actually been looking forward to it from enjoying it.

I might silently judge you a bit, though.

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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The post #oneaday Day 747: Grand Theft Auto VI can eat my ass appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We have long since reached a point where it is not particularly cost-effective to start taking an interest in modern gaming if you are not already involved in the overall ecosystem and thus resigned to vast swathes of your monthly pay packet disappearing on your chosen hobby. Sure, you can get away with a somewhat lower-end mini PC if all you want to play is relatively small-scale indie games — but even those lower-end mini PCs are going up in price nowadays. Therefore, it is worthwhile looking at more cost-effective options for enjoying video games — even if the video games you will be enjoying are a few years old. Good games are still good years after they're released, you know! So here's my personal recommendations on that front.

Evercade

Of course I'm going to recommend Evercade because I work for them, but the reason I work for them is because I was all-in on the idea of the system from day one. A new, affordable system with a focus on retro gaming that provides officially licensed physical releases of classic games from home consoles, computers and arcade machines? Regardless of if I'd ever managed to secure employment with Blaze, makers of the Evercade, I would have been a "full setter" from day one — indeed, when the original handheld released, I immediately took advantage of the "All-In" bundle to get the first 10 cartridges included with the system.

Why recommend something like Evercade when emulation and other options exist — some of which we'll talk about in just a moment? Well, that "officially licensed" part is important. The current state of the games industry may appear to be teetering on the brink of unsustainability, but that doesn't mean people who enjoy video games want the whole thing to collapse. It would be rather nice if we could recover from this situation we're currently experiencing — and one way to help that come about is to support officially licensed rereleases of classic games, updated to play nice with modern audio-visual equipment, particularly televisions. On top of that, Evercade also plays host to physical releases of a lot of "modern retro" titles — games originally designed with vintage hardware in mind, but developed in recent years.

Many of the rights holders of these old games are also game companies that exist in the modern sector, and so throwing your support behind retro rereleases that don't require turbo nutter ninja bastard hardware to run is one way of helping ensure we still have a healthy video game economy whenever the AI bubble finally bursts and — hopefully — hardware prices start to settle back to what we have previously thought of as "normal".

Plus the physical nature of Evercade collecting allows you to rediscover the fun of having a shelf full of games to pick from, rather than a boring old list of downloads on your PC, many of which you scroll past without even noticing every single day.

MiSTer

Evercade is great, but there are some classic games that are never, ever going to get a rerelease for one reason or another — be it the rights holders being unwilling to put them out again, more complex licensing situations (such as video games based on movies, or which feature licensed music, vehicles or actors' likenesses) or some other reason entirely. For those situations, that's where what I would describe as more "community-focused" solutions come into play — as a general concept, this covers emulation, but I would specifically call out the MiSTer project as being a particularly worthwhile investment in these peculiar times.

For the unfamiliar, MiSTer is a platform based on "FPGA" (Field Programmable Gate Array), which is a technology I have absolutely no understanding of whatsoever, save for the fact that it effectively allows a device to recreate the way another piece of hardware would have worked in the past, not through simulation in software (which is how emulation works), but through a reconfigurable chip that basically "pretends" to be the old system. Some describe it as "hardware emulation"; all you really need to know is that, under most circumstances, it results in the most authentic recreation of a classic console, home computer or arcade cabinet possible, particularly if you happen to have an old CRT television hanging around that you can hook it up to. (Never fear if you don't, however; one of the core concepts of MiSTer from the outset was to provide a relatively straightforward means of enjoying classic "hardware" on modern displays, and the platform has a variety of built-in and fully customisable visual filters that allow you to recreate the CRT "look" if you so desire.)

MiSTer is a project you can build yourself, but it's actually probably more cost-effective these days to go for a pre-built solution such as Heber's Multisystem 2 (pictured above, which I use) and Taki Udon's SuperStation One. You will also need to add some form of storage to whatever setup you go for, which is likely to be the expensive bit these days; however, it's a one-off expense, and you can look at it as a lump sum you are spending on your own entertainment, rather than buying a bunch of individual things piecemeal. Tot up how much you've spent on individual games in the last year or so, and an SSD probably won't seem quite so expensive.

MiSTer requires a bit of setting up, including installing the actual software on the device to make it work, and then loading up your storage medium of choice with games — which, of course, you will have to "procure" yourself. For everything from the earliest games consoles right up to PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Saturn, however, a MiSTer is all you need for… honestly probably enough games to last you the rest of your life.

Why do I recommend this and not investing in some classic hardware? Several reasons. One, classic hardware is prone to failure. Two, the games for classic hardware are often ludicrously expensive these days thanks to all the arseholes who have bought them as "investments" rather than to enjoy them — and you paying £400 for a copy of Buggy Run on Sega Master System doesn't help anyone other than the person you're foolish enough to hand over those notes to; the original creators certainly don't see a penny of that money! And three, getting classic hardware working on modern displays can be a bit of a pain… or at least demand you invest further expenses in a decent scaler.

Sixth- and seventh-generation consoles

If you have the cash, I would recommend investing in, at the very least, an Xbox 360. This platform has a vast library of excellent games available, many of which can be bought for not very much money at all, and doesn't require any faffing around to get working on a modern TV. You may also wish to consider a PlayStation 3, as there are a number of exclusives on both platforms — plus a few cases where either the 360 or PS3 version is just plain better for one reason or another.

After that, a Nintendo Wii or Wii U is well worth considering. The Wii U, while mocked in its lifetime for its small library of games, has some absolute bangers, plus it is backwards compatible with the Wii, which has a vast library of excellent games, many of which can, again, be picked up for not very much money at all. Wii U is an HD console that can be connected to a modern TV, but the original Wii is a standard-definition console, though it can still be hooked up to a modern TV via component cables for a 480p "Enhanced Definition" picture. If you don't have component inputs on your TV, you will probably want to run an original Wii through a scaler, as composite or SCART inputs on modern HDTVs — if they even have them any more, which I'm sure some models don't — are complete cack.

Speaking of standard definition, this brings us onto the other worthwhile investment: a PlayStation 2. Again, you can actually run one of these through component cables — and even get an actual high-definition signal with a few very specific games — but you will probably want to also grab yourself a scaler if you take your PS2 gaming seriously. And you should take your PS2 gaming seriously, as the system plays host to one of the richest, most diverse libraries of any system ever released, with titles ranging from bargain bin puzzlers to sprawling epic, cinematic affairs — and some of the best RPGs ever created. While the latter can command high prices these days, many PS2 games — and good ones! — can be picked up for not very much money, making it easy to build a library of stuff that will keep you busy for a good long while.

If you're feeling flush, an original Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube are worthwhile investments, as both have some nice exclusives and in the case of multiplatform games, Xbox and/or Gamecube versions are often superior to their PS2 counterparts. Do note, however, that original Xboxes sometimes need a bit of maintenance, and Gamecube games tend to be significantly more expensive than equivalent games on other platforms from the same period. Also be aware that the earlier models of Wii also play Gamecube games, so you may not even need to buy a separate Gamecube if you're lucky enough to track down one of those. (You can tell if you have one of those by if it has a removable panel with Gamecube controller ports underneath.)

Let's price a starter setup as outlined above from a hardware perspective:

£ 89.99 - Evercade VS-R
£264.00 - MiSTer Multisystem 2 (analogue-compatible model)
£ 47.99 - 512GB microSD card (price from Amazon 22/6/2026)
£110.00 - Xbox 360 250GB "E" model (unboxed from CEX 22/6/2026)
£ 65.00 - Nintendo Wii (unboxed from CEX 22/6/2026)
=======
£576.98

About half the price of the top-end Steam Machine, and between that lot, you should have access to more than enough games to keep you busy for a very long time indeed — and no need to spend half your life complaining about derivative triple-A trend-chasing, microtransactions, mandatory 50GB updates, lengthy install processes and shoehorned-in multiplayer modes.

Plus if you have friends over, they'll think your setup is super cool. And if they don't, question whether they really were your friends in the first place.

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

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

The post #oneaday Day 745: Cost-effective gaming in 2026 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This will, in its own curious way, reflect what happened in 1983, where a significant portion of the game-playing world — the UK and Europe, notably — were blissfully unaware of the problems the broader games business were suffering, because they were enjoying the fruits of a thriving cottage games industry. Here in the UK, we had no idea a "crash" was happening across the pond because we were all cheerfully buying £1.99 Mastertronic tapes from our local corner shop.

Something's gotta give, though, because the relentless torrent of shit that is coming out from shareholder-beholden companies — particularly with regard to the odiousness that is generative AI — is completely unsustainable. And we've reached a point where all but the most ardent bootlickers are feeling more and more emboldened to criticise what's going on — though sadly this also coincides with a period where thousands of people are being laid off and games aren't actually getting any better.

Take this statement attributed to Sony, posted on Bluesky earlier today:

This is a complete nothing of a statement! It says nothing! It gives precisely no examples of how AI "improves productivity", "drives efficiency, personalisation and customer value at scale" and "unleashes the creativity of Sony Interactive Entertainment's studios"! It is five paragraphs that explain nothing and say nothing, but which exist purely to, supposedly, placate shareholders who, apparently, have absolutely no functioning brain cells between them and desire nothing more than every stupid fucking company to follow every stupid fucking trend in existence, even when they are demonstrably, actively harmful and just plain shit!

I am mildly heartened that a number of developers are starting to speak up a bit more about this. There's a good piece on Aftermath on the subject, and another on gamesindustry.biz. There are still the annoying sycophants in every single comments section who all parrot the exact same lines about "the genie being out of the bottle" and "get used to AI or get left behind", but there is, I feel, increasing resistance to that side of things. A lot of smaller-scale developers are also making a good name for themselves by saying, out loud, and prominently, that they do not use generative AI at any point in their development process. Good!

The utterly dumbshit thing about corpos like Sony sucking Sam Altman and Wario Amodei's robophalluses is that there is not a single documented instance of a project involving generative AI being well-received by either press or public. I'm not even convinced that it's actually what shareholders want to see. The otherwise excellent Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was soured for a lot of folks (including me) when it was found that they had used generative AI for "placeholder" (sure) assets, and likewise for the apparently also very good The Alters. New projects coming out that are revealed to be using generative AI are subject to mass shunnings and censure from press and public alike — and rightly so. It is starting to feel less and less desirable to have any involvement whatsoever in the top end of today's games industry — a once-exciting, vibrant place — and more and more understandable when people choose to focus their time and attention on both small, independent projects and retro titles.

On top of that, the very generative AI that all these shareholder-appeasing corpos are rushing to use for no real specified purpose is becoming increasingly responsible for pricing people out of games and tech! No good having "volume and diversity of content" (ugh) if no-one can fucking afford the devices to play it on, is there?

All this can easily be avoided! We have been making games for a very long time without the use of a glorified Autocorrect trained on stolen data! I find it near-impossible to believe that every game developer has suddenly completely forgotten how to do things the way we've been doing them for many years at this point, just because you can tell "Claude" to churn you out some spaghetti code using conversational English. And yet. And yet.

I don't know exactly what a "crash" is going to look like in this instance, but I feel like it's not going to be pretty — and the potential knock-on effects concern me somewhat. Like, if games consoles go away — and with the current tech pricing situation, that's a real risk — what does that then mean for people who like to collect games, and for the long-term archival of games using physical media? There are so many potentially terrible things that could happen that I don't feel like the world of video games has adequately prepared for, and it's really quite worrying.

Still, if the worst comes to the worst, I have shelves full of games, many of which are complete-on-disc or complete-on-cart, and a fully-loaded MiSTer. I could, at this point, duck out of "modern gaming" at any time — and with each passing month, it feels more and more like I might end up doing that.

To pre-empt the inevitable comments from weirdly aggressive generative AI-boosting corpo bootlickers: fuck off; you are not welcome here, if the above doesn't make that abundantly clear already, and your comments will just be deleted, so you may as well just not bother. Hope that helps!

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The post #oneaday Day 742: Crash and burn appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, inevitably, not particularly convenient or helpful, either for yourself or for people who are, for one reason or another, depending on you and your input into various aspects of their own lives, be it personal, professional or a bit of both. I unfortunately do not have a good answer for how to just "get over it" at times like this, since, as you have probably noticed from recent posts, I am slap bang in the middle of one such period right now. And I will doubtless continue to be so for quite some time. I apologise in advance to anyone I don't reply to, am rude to, have no patience for or for whom I am unable to complete a requested task. It's not you, it's very much me, but I do at least hope you have some understanding for what I am contending with.

One of the things I find most difficult about times like this is, as I talked about the other day, getting other people to understand the sheer depth of the things you are feeling, and how all-encompassing they can feel. I feel like not everyone's brain presses that big tempting "pause" button when something like this happens; some folks can, I suspect, handle things a lot better than I can. Or, no, that's perhaps not fair to myself. Some folks, I suspect, handle things differently to how I do. Regardless of self-deprecation, I envy them somewhat; the way in which they can allow their life to continue moving forward during times of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

Or perhaps they're just better at hiding it than I am. Perhaps they're feeling exactly the same as I do in private, but are better at "masking" the way they feel when they are around others. Putting on a brave face, stiff upper lip, that sort of thing — but breaking down in tears when they're off the clock, staring into space, feeling despair at simply not knowing what to do or how to feel.

At times like this, as I say, it can be difficult to engage with the things that would normally bring you joy, because sometimes it can feel like taking hold of a feeling of transient joy is somehow "wrong" or "disrespectful" to the thing you are uncertain, upset, sad or angry about — even if you know that it's a momentary distraction that you probably need for the sake of your own mental health. The other side of this is that when you're experiencing those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil, it can simply be difficult to focus on something that, under normal circumstances, would bring you joy, but requires a certain amount of concentration and engagement.

This is an exceedingly long-winded way of saying that I have not gone back to Final Fantasy XI since Oliver's disappearance, despite the fact that it was bringing me great joy, and would probably be an excellent distraction right now. But it just doesn't feel quite right to be going back to that just yet, which is what led me to reach for something from my shelf this evening that does not particularly require continuous concentration, focus and engagement — or, perhaps more accurately, demands a different kind of continuous concentration, focus and engagement; a kind that, when your brain is all a-churnin' with great uncertainty and emotional turmoil, you can still get along with.

For me, this is where video games that are entirely mechanics-focused come in. I am generally someone who prefers playing things with strong stories, but there are times when something that is pure mechanics is exactly what the doctor ordered. These types of experiences demand a different kind of focus to works that want you to concentrate on narrative, themes and characterisation, and they can make excellent distractions from periods of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

The absolute ideal form of this type of experience is something that, when you reach a "fail" state, you can jump right back into with minimal fuss, ad infinitum if necessary. In technical video game terms, the best implementation of this is a game where, when you hit a "Game Over" or equivalent, you can just press a button and be immediately playing again, ideally without any waiting around for load times or anything like that.

This evening, I have been playing some of the Atari Recharged games, which fit the bill perfectly for this sort of thing. I've had lovely boxed versions of these on my shelves for ages, but still haven't yet got around to exploring all of them fully. This evening, I have been playing Asteroids Recharged and Breakout Recharged, and they have very much been having the desired effect.

For the unfamiliar, the Atari Recharged games are modern reimaginings of classic Atari arcade games. The ones I have played all have the same structure: they have an infinite "arcade" mode, where you simply play to survive as long as possible and attain a high score, and a "challenge" mode, which consists of a large number of predefined, standalone, self-contained levels, each of which challenges you to accomplish a particular objective, often under difficult circumstances.

Both of these are excellent for calming the storm of a turbulent mind, as both function as I describe above: they demand concentration and focus without having to engage the part of your brain that deals with pesky things like words, subtext, narrative themes and characterisation, and they allow you to quickly and easily try again if you mess up. And you will mess up a lot more than you win — particularly in the arcade mode, where there is literally no way to win other than beating your own high scores, or those of people you have set your sights on from the online leaderboards.

In a way, they are "mindless", but I don't mean that in a denigratory way. There's something primal and instinctual that happens to you when you play games like this, and it leaves no room for abstract emotions. You'll feel enjoyment, satisfaction, frustration and even anger, but allow yourself to become one with the experience and you will, at least for an hour or two, forget about those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

It is important to give yourself an escape hatch; a lifeline. When your brain decides to put your life on pause, it often isn't healthy. It might cause you to not take as good care of yourself as you should. You might not eat properly. You might find yourself pushing away people who want to help — or at the very least want you to open up about what's wrong. It can be easy to immerse yourself in those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil; an all-encompassing, opaque black bubble of misery from which it can be very difficult to escape if you allow it to form completely.

So take those moments, as little and fleeting as they might be, and step out of that darkness for a moment. It's not a betrayal of the things you are upset about; it is allowing yourself a moment's peace, preventing you from being consumed completely, and perhaps giving you the strength to be able to pull yourself out of the mire, little by little.

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The post #oneaday Day 739: Occupying yourself while your life is on hold appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's been a lot of fun thus far. I'm about 80 hours deep into the game, and I haven't really felt particularly "roadblocked" at any point. There have been two separate occasions where I have had help from higher-level players — once to open the "Three Mage Gate" I mentioned a few posts back, and once to help me with the fight against Siren as part of the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel series of missions that run parallel to all the main stories — but for the most part, I have successfully beaten and bashed my way through the game as a solo player using the computer-controlled "Trust" party members.

I thought I had reached a roadblock towards the end of the Rise of the Zilart storyline where you are presented with a chain of five difficult boss battles, and I was having real difficulty with a couple of them. As I'm playing a Warrior, I have been working on the assumption that I should be the main "tank", you see, and thus trying my best to ensure all enemies fixate their attention on my while my Trusts repeatedly punch them in the buttocks. This is, after all, the way things are in Final Fantasy XIV, even though mechanically the two games are otherwise quite different.

However, what I discovered in these difficult fights (the "Ark Angels" fights, to any FFXI veterans) is that being the sole human player and the main tank is not always desirable. Y'see, some high-level enemies have the ability to Charm you, and when that happens all your Trusts get unsummoned and the fight effectively resets. It's an instant "kill", in other words, and I really thought this was going to roadblock me.

Then I thought about things a bit, and wondered what might happen if I let one of the Trusts handle the tanking instead. Wouldn't you know it, those fights suddenly went much more smoothly. I could keep dealing damage — which, besides tanking, is the other thing FFXI Warrior is good at — while Trust-y Valaineral the Paladin took the brunt of everything the boss threw at a single target, including that pesky Charm. And, because I also had Kupipi the White Mage and King Of Hearts the Red Mage in my party, they cleansed that status off him pretty quickly. I only really came close to failing in one of the fights, where everyone got Silenced and Valaineral got knocked down because no-one could heal him. Thankfully, this happened late enough in the fight that the remaining party members, including me, were able to finish the job.

By contrast, the actual final boss of Rise of the Zilart was very easy indeed. Granted, I was probably a few levels higher than "intended" for this encounter — Final Fantasy XI isn't particularly rigorous about locking stuff to particular level restrictions, particularly in the main story sequences — but it was still pretty straightforward. Fun, though; it was satisfying to finally bring down a "big bad" who had been taunting me for some time.

Now I'm on to the Chains of Promathia expansion, which a lot of longtime players seem to think is one of the best bits. It makes the curious decision to base the early hours of its story around the level 30 mark, rather than assuming you would be at the level you're probably at around the conclusion of Rise of the Zilart — 75+ — but I assume that things ramp up pretty quickly, as the official "content guide" on the Final Fantasy XI website recommends the expansion as an activity for level 75+ players.

I'm really glad I've done this! I'm going to write a big, detailed article about my experiences over on MoeGamer when I'm finally done with everything I want to do in the game, but for now, my feelings are that, in terms of gameplay, progression and a general sense of adventure, this is actually one of the very best Final Fantasy games. Yes, it is the very epitome of a "guide dang-it" game, in which you will almost certainly not get very far without looking some stuff up, but the moment-to-moment gameplay, the overall sense of progression and the fact that it feels like a Final Fantasy game, arguably a lot more so than XIV, has really left me with a big grin on my face. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the game has to offer.

I have played pretty much all day, though, so I should probably stop for now, though, right? Probably…

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The post #oneaday Day 717: Putting down the Zilart appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, I won't beat around the bush, disgusting. Tying pay to article performance is already a shitty thing to do, but to withhold pay completely based on view counts is outright exploitative. And it's not as if writers on Valnet sites are getting paid fairly anyway.

As several people replying to Luddy on that Bluesky thread pointed out, this has been a longstanding problem with online media in general. It should be the writers' responsibility to produce the material, and it should be the people running the website from a business perspective's responsibility to promote that material and ensure it gets read.

Unfortunately, for a long time now, writers have been forced into a position where they have to write provocative, baiting articles in the hope that they will get clicks, because the people running the sites seemingly just… don't do anything other than lay people off. And, of course, bring generative AI into the picture, because this type of Business Idiot has no understanding whatsoever of how the actual audience has zero desire to read AI-generated content, instead believing that because generative AI is fashionable and responsible for billions of dollars of imaginary money being thrown around, they might be able to get a piece of that pie by enshittifying their website.

And the really stupid thing is that you never can predict what is going to spread across the Web and "do well" if it's left up to the writers. There is no magic formula that says "IF you write an article like this, THEN it will always succeed". There are manipulative tactics — like clickbait and ragebait — that sometimes work, but more and more people are wise to them today, and refuse to share material that falls into that category. Video game enthusiasts are some of the most online-savvy people out there for the most part, so resorting to these tactics is declining in effectiveness as time goes on.

What does seem to work — to an extent, at least — is having someone who is responsible for making sure those articles get seen: advertising the website. Effective use of a dedicated social media manager is why longstanding sites like IGN and Eurogamer are still just about hanging in there, but they are the last few remaining holdouts of a once vibrant and thriving media sector — and they have their own issues. IGN, for example, is currently butting heads with its Creators' Guild union over fair pay rises in line with inflation, and Eurogamer cut its editorial staff considerably a while back.

Once again, I have to say that I am baffled by this. Video games, as a creative sector, are bigger than they have ever been, with a broader, more diverse range of releases than ever before. So why are we, collectively, apparently completely incapable of sustaining an enthusiast press?

Moreover, retro gaming is more accessible than ever before, too, meaning that there is a worthwhile place for some retro-centric sites to spring up and do a good job of covering classic gaming material — but so far, we've seen very few outlets even attempt to step into this space, with only Time Extension online and Retro Gamer in print coming to mind outside of the unpaid (or at least non-commercial) enthusiast blog sector.

The usual answer to this is "b-but YouTubers and streamers!" and I'm sorry, I don't buy it. YouTubers and streamers have a place in the modern media landscape, sure, but they fulfil a completely different function to a traditional press — and moreover, they demand a completely different sort of attention to written material. And if you've ever accused a traditional press outlet of "paid reviews", then I have some unfortunate news to tell you about a widespread concept known as "influencer marketing".

I am sad about all this! I spent a significant portion of my life looking at my brother with intense admiration for his role in helping to shape the games press in its prime, both in print and online, and hoping that I would one day be able to follow in his footsteps! And yet, by the time I did manage to get a meaningful foothold, things were already starting to collapse. I was, somehow, too late — and I am having great difficulty understanding why, because it's not as if video games have gone anywhere. One would think with the sheer number of the bloody things being released pretty much every day at this point, a functional games press would be a desirable thing to have. And by "functional", I mean "one with full-time employees who get paid a fair salary on which they can live, enjoy the medium that they have chosen to specialise in and be able to have a good work-life balance".

And yet here we are. I despair sometimes, I really do.

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The post #oneaday Day 715: Fuck Valnet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm enjoying the game a lot, though my desire to attempt it without a guide was a foolhardy endeavour. Final Fantasy XI was always designed with "community" in mind, and built on the assumption that said community would share information with one another and help each other out, and as such there are a lot of things it just doesn't tell you. It's a lot better in this regard than it used to be, primarily thanks to the "Records of Eminence" feature, which gives you a series of objectives to accomplish that can guide your progression, but you'll still often be given a mission that tells you to go to a particular zone and find something in that zone, with absolutely no indication whatsoever of exactly whereabouts in that zone the thing is to be found. There is no minimap and no quest marker feature in Final Fantasy XI, so you're either off to find a needle in a haystack yourself, or consult the community (which now, of course, also includes comprehensive wikis) and be able to focus your efforts a bit more.

There are still one or two roadblocks that require actual interaction with a human being. One of the missions for Windurst requires that you get through a door called the "Sealed Portal", which is colloquially known by the community as "Three Mage Gate". The reason for this is that the originally intended method of opening this door was to gather a party containing a white mage, a black mage and a red mage and get them to stand on the appropriate marks on the floor, which would open the door. This was subsequently updated to only require someone with the "Portal Charm" key item — which, naturally, you get just after the mission in which you would first need it — to make things marginally easier and less dependent on wrangling an entire group.

These aspects aside, though, the game has been eminently soloable so far, thanks to the Trust system. You're given some decent Trusts right from the get-go, and more are unlockable quite easily. There are some borderline overpowered ones available without too much difficulty, too, but with the number you get to add to your arsenal very quickly, you can pretty much build a party however you like to play, and use the characters you find most appealing. My only slight beef with the system is a narrative one; many of the Trusts you get early on are characters that you probably won't have met yet, and this makes it tricky to feel a sense of attachment to them. Because, in the context of Final Fantasy XI's story, Trust magic is dependent on you having a strong bond with a particular person, this feels a bit dissonant, but you soon learn to deal with it — and after a while, you'll be able to get together a party that feels like it consists entirely of "story" characters anyway.

It's definitely a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy XIV. It's not actually turn-based, but with its pacing it might as well be. It's not a game where you attacking requires you to be constantly pressing buttons to unleash combos, unlike its follow-up; instead, it's more about equipping your character well, ensuring they have good training in the skills they need to succeed at the challenges ahead of them, and approaching combat encounters carefully and thoughtfully. Sure, you "do less" on a moment-to-moment basis, but it's a different kind of satisfying to successfully clearing difficult encounters in Final Fantasy XIV; it's less about skill with the buttons and more about traditional RPG-style number crunching. I'm not saying either way is "better" — both games are very good at what they do — but it is interesting to note quite how different they are from one another now I'm deeper into XI than I've ever been.

My next big milestones for Final Fantasy XI will be breaking a couple of level cap barriers, and then completing the base story from the original game, which culminates in a big fight against the dreaded Shadow Lord. There's still a lot to do after that, though, and most folks seem to agree that things start getting really good story-wise after you've got through the base game's material. I'm looking forward to it — and at the rate I'm going, I should be getting through it at a decent pace, too.

I'm glad I finally decided to do this. Final Fantasy XI has kind of been a "white whale" for me in terms of completion, so I knew I just had to make the time to play it and do it properly. Now that I'm doing that, I'm having a really good time. I doubt I'll get too hardcore into its "endgame" stuff — my main priority is to beat the story, and after that I will probably return to XIV — but there is plenty to do just on the journey from 1 to 99. And that's absolutely fine with me!

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The post #oneaday Day 704: Vana'diel progress report appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am also reminded that Final Fantasy XI is not a game for everyone. Specifically, it is not a game for the impatient, because there is a lot to do, and it takes quite a long time to do pretty much anything… except level up, now, which goes at a significantly more brisk pace than it did the first time I played it all those years ago.

But we're talking about a game where the ability to run slightly faster than normal is dependent on someone completing a long and difficult quest, it rolling a random chance of the "Swift Shoes" effect coming up, and then you healing to full and having a nice sit down for a couple of minutes to "charge" the slightly-faster-than-normal movement speed — which, of course, immediately fades away the moment you either attack something or get attacked.

We're also talking about a game whose original implementation of "fast travel" required you to fight your way to a huge "crag" two zones away from your starting city and collect a crystal from it, all for the privilege of being able to teleport an inconveniently long distance away from any of the game's towns.

We're talking about a game where, when you want to cross the sea, you have to physically stand and wait for a ship, and when you're on the ship, you have to wait for the voyage to complete. (Sometimes monsters attack. A lot of the time you just have to enjoy the ride.)

If those descriptions make you smile, even a little bit, you are probably someone who will enjoy Final Fantasy XI.

The fact the game demands so much patience makes it feel very rewarding, though. When you achieve something, you feel like you've bloody well earned it. This is not a game where you are a super-special Warrior of Light pretty much from the get-go; this is a game where you are a relatively normal person — albeit one with, arguably, extraordinary combat abilities compared to your "peers" among the NPCs — just trying to make their way in the world. Make a bit of cash, get a bit of training in, visit some new places.

It's this rather open-ended feel that I really like about Final Fantasy XI. In many ways, it feels like a very pure reflection of what I call the old "world RPG" formula exemplified by titles like the early Ultima games. There is a long-term goal to go and complete, but the vast majority of your playtime will be spent doing rather freeform activities to build up your character in a way that you see fit.

Some of the best things that have been added to Final Fantasy XI since its original release are designed to make it more than just grinding monsters for hours at a time. The "Records of Eminence" quests do a great job of giving you things to do and acting as a sort of guide to what it is possible to do in the game, without having to spend half your playtime looking at a wiki. The "Field Guide" and "Grounds Tome" books at the entrances to field and dungeon areas respectively provide you with focused sets of monster targets to down in exchange for generous experience bonuses. And of course there's plenty of quests, the main storyline missions and, once you get later into the game, lots and lots of side activities. I don't yet know how "important" some of these things are — or indeed what 90% of them are at this point — but I'm intrigued to find out.

Thus far I'm up to level 25 on the job I started with — Warrior this time around — and I'm levelling Monk as a subjob for now. I'm on the "rank 2" missions for my home nation, and making good progress. I've also kicked off the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel storyline that was added much later than the other main stories, and acts as another kind of "guide" through what the game offers, with its own narrative to follow — and plenty of extremely helpful benefits as rewards along the way.

I'm enjoying myself a lot. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get through the various storylines, but levelling has been going at a brisk pace, and I'm feeling good about how things are going so far. I'm looking forward to finally doing things like taking down the Shadow Lord, which I've never done before, and particularly getting into the well-regarded Chains of Promathia expansion storyline, which longstanding FFXI players have been banging on about the quality of for years.

So yeah. It's a good time. You just need patience. And if there's one thing I have developed over the years, it is a very strong sense of patience.

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The post #oneaday Day 699: Final Fantasy XI and the art of patience appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I love Star Fox. It's probably one of my favourite Nintendo series. Specifically, I love the Super NES original, because while it's perhaps not the most technically impressive game when looking back on it retrospectively, it's still a great game that I enjoy a lot — and it has an amazing soundtrack. I rate the original Star Fox's soundtrack light years ahead of its 64-bit counterpart, because Star Fox 64 hailed from that age where Nintendo games had music that was beautifully composed, but played back on one of the worst MIDI synths a console has ever had. The new one takes what sounds like the music from Star Fox 64 and fully orchestrates it, which is just lovely.

The new game looks like it's going to be mostly keeping to Star Fox's roots as an arcade-style game with a level-based structure, and branching paths through the complete sequence of levels depending on the things you do and your overall performance. I'm interested to see how this will be received in the modern age, since the vast majority of big-budget games that come out today are designed to be huge, sprawling timesinks that take hundreds of hours for a single playthrough. Making a game that is short but highly replayable feels like it's a ballsy thing to do these days — and it really shouldn't, but it does.

It does look like the new Star Fox will be highly replayable, too. As well as the main story mode with its branching paths, it looks like there's a "Challenge" mode where you play a single level and attempt to complete specific objectives in it. This could either be great fun or extremely annoying, but I think it's the right decision to separate it out into its own mode rather than integrate it into the main story.

There's also what looks like a really fun multiplayer mode, too, with 4v4 battles between Star Fox and Star Wolf. It doesn't look like any of the three modes on offer are a simple deathmatch, either; there are different objectives to complete on each one, which will reward fancy flying as well as keeping the enemy off your back.

All in all, I'm excited and pleased to see Star Fox get yet another chance. Part of me wishes they'd let the story, such as it is, move on a bit instead of continually remaking the same one over and over again, but ultimately this is a gameplay-centric experience — at least previous installments have been — and so the reason you're blasting everything out of the sky doesn't matter too much. It does look like the whole thing is much more "cinematic" now thanks to the advances in technology we've seen over the last few console generations. It's nice to see Fox and company be able to chat with one another as fully modelled characters rather than just avatars chattering away during gameplay.

So I guess that's a Switch 2 game I'll be adding to my library when it arrives, although if it's on a Game Key Card, we are going to have words, Nintendo.

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The post #oneaday Day 698: Star Fox is back... again! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And then indulge me while I write two things today, because I feel like I "should". I'm just like that. Also I have just reinstalled Final Fantasy XI and it has to go through its whole many-hours patching process, so I may as well do something to fill the time.

I've decided to give Final Fantasy XI another honest go because I've always enjoyed it when I've played it in the past, I have been wanting to play through its story for more than 20 years (and there's a lot more of it now than when I first wanted to play it!) and I'm sort of "between games" right now. This time around, I want to make a proper effort to get through the main scenario. I know there's a lot of other stuff in Final Fantasy XI, but we'll see if I feel the need to jump into any of that as I work my way through; my priority is just seeing what the main storylines are.

The reason I say this is because I've pretty much made a decision: I'm going to head back into Final Fantasy XIV at some point before the new expansion drops — likely when the new "Beastmaster" job is added in the next main "part" of the Dawntrail finale patch, which is looking like July. Before that happens, I'd like to have had a good crack at Final Fantasy XI, so I'm going to treat it as my "main" game for the immediate future. I think it's going to be interesting — particularly as, for several years now, the game has been in a state where much of it is eminently soloable thanks to the fact you can bring recruitable NPC "Trusts" along with you for pretty much everything in the game, not just instanced dungeons like in Final Fantasy XIV.

As I say, I don't know how much into the weeds I'm going to get, because my main priorities are 1) getting to the level cap of 99 and 2) getting through the main storylines of the base game and all the expansions. The two will likely intertwine somewhat, and gearing up, particularly once at level 99, will likely involve dipping into some of the activities outside of the main story, but we'll see. I'm going to try and minimise guide usage as much as possible, too, because I think that will be much more interesting. I'm also curious to see if it's even possible to play that way — and if it isn't, well, there are 20+ years worth of FAQs, wikis and all manner of other resources out there to follow along with.

I'm excited! I'm also aware that I've fallen off Final Fantasy XI multiple times in the past, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because something else came along that occupied my attention. Hopefully that won't happen this time around — because I'm increasingly conscious that, because of the game's age, there is likely only so much more time I have to be able to actually do this quest.

So Vana'Diel awaits! In about two hours' time, according to the PlayOnline Viewer, anyway. So how should I occupy myself in the meantime… hmmm?

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The post #oneaday Day 696: The missing day appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

At this point, I'm not even surprised any more. The broad concept that is "the video games media" is almost completely gutted at this point, with only a few sites still holding on. IGN and Gamespot still exist; Polygon still (kind of) exists; smaller, platform-centric sites like Push Square and NintendoLife still exist; and Kotaku has come back from the "dead" more times than I can count at this point.

I find myself pondering a few things about the whole situation. First of all, given that gaming is bigger than ever, how on Earth are we unable to sustain a specialist media sector focusing on it? Someone on Bluesky suggested it was because a significant number of the people who "play games" are little more than "content consumers", just "consuming" the latest thing that comes along and then banishing it from their mind; not taking the medium seriously as an art form, in other words. There's certainly an element of that, but I don't buy that it's a satisfactory explanation for what has been going on with the media over the course of the last few years.

Perhaps it's some sites discovering that certain "types" of games journalism just don't work? Those of you of a certain age will probably remember discussions over "New Games Journalism" and the question of whether we would ever have a "Lester Bangs of Games Journalism". These discussions were happening back in the late '00s, and centred around the idea of games journalism and criticism in particular moving away from the bog-standard news, preview, review, guide format in favour of something that was more… experiential, I guess you'd call it. Treating games more akin to how literary and artistic criticism treats other, more well-established art forms. "Telling the stories of the people behind the games", all that sort of thing. Things that look like they might be admirable when you look at them as part of a mission statement.

Thing is, I'm not sure that's what the readers want. The one thing you might notice about all the sites that have managed to survive for decades at this point is that they are, for the most part, still beholden to the same old news, preview, review, guide cycle that has been in place since the days of print. And my theory is that this is, as stale as it might be, what people still want from games journalism. "The stories of the people behind your favourite games" can be interesting, but when all a lot of people want to know is whether or not Pragmata is any good, I feel like those articles — which often take a hell of a lot of research, networking and general access to their subjects — may not be entirely sustainable, particularly on a site that needs to keep the lights on through ad revenue.

I'm not saying this is a particularly desirable situation. The overreliance on ads has lead to the "guideslop" era we're in at the moment, where every game that looks even vaguely likely to attract a few clicks gets three thousand pieces of "guide content", each one focusing on a single hyper-specific thing about the game in question, rather than a single, quality, well-crafted walkthrough. This is a load of old shit; there are a lot of writers who could be doing much more interesting work stuck on the guides beat, and I'm very much willing to bet they are some of the hardest working but lowest paid people in the business.

But I think back to old games magazines and why I enjoy reading them, and it's because each of them captures a moment in time. Times when we were excited for games that we knew the name of, but very little else about besides a couple of tiny, fuzzy screenshots; I think some mags got pretty much a full year of news stories out of two "Zelda 64" screenshots back in the day. Times when we were excited for the new possibilities that seemingly mind-blowing new platforms would offer us — and then the crushing disappointment when they turned out to not be that good after all. (Philips CD-i and 3DO say hello.) Times when an amazing new game would be the cover star of a magazine and turn out to be even better than we had ever hoped for — or in some cases, catastrophically bad.

I'm not sure sites writing about labour conditions in the industry, unions and quarterly financial results are really what gaming enthusiasts want from the press that supposedly represents them. I know it's certainly not what I'm particularly interested in.

I don't really read any gaming sites any more, and I often ask myself why that is. There are still quite a few out there doing good work, and there's a decent amount of diversity in the types of coverage out there, still… at the moment, anyway. I'm just not sure some of it is sustainable in the long term, and I wonder if a desire to focus on that unsustainable stuff just because it seems like "the right thing to do" — which it very much is in many cases — is what has got the games media as a whole into the messy position it's in today.

So what's the answer? I have no idea, really. In my ideal world, we'd go back to reading magazines every month, but despite the fact some magazines do still exist in print — I recently resubscribed to Retro Gamer, for one — it seems that is perceived as even more unsustainable than everything I've described above.

As someone who, as a young 'un, wanted nothing more than to follow his brother's footsteps into video games media, it's extremely sad to see all this happen. But I'm also kind of glad that I'm no longer directly in that space, because it seems like a hell of a bad time to be a video game specialist writer right now.

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The post #oneaday Day 693: Another one bites the dust appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

However, the recent news that has come out about the upcoming expansion, Evercold, has me thinking that I might return. There are a few reasons for this.

First and foremost is the social angle. I like the people that I used to play with. It would be fun to be able to hang out with them again. There are also people I know who are vaguely interested in giving Final Fantasy XIV a go, and shortly the legendary Free Trial will be adding everything up to and including the Shadowbringers expansion, commonly agreed to be one of The Best Bits, which may make it easier to convince people to join in.

Secondly, I do miss the game a bit. I have had some special times in Final Fantasy XIV over the years, and I will always, always love the soundtrack. Soken has worked miracles with that game, and I feel almost like I'm letting him down to not be playing. He has no idea who I am, of course, but still. He is a wonderful person and a brilliant composer, and enjoying his stuff in context is great.

Thirdly, the changes that are coming to Evercold sound really interesting. I'm particularly intrigued by the "Evolved" battle system, which promises to reduce the number of actions you'll have to assign to your hotbars by having more of the dynamically changing buttons that were introduced with Dawntrail's new jobs. Supposedly most jobs will be able to function perfectly well with 16 action bar slots in Evolved mode, which means a lot less in the way of remembering some obtuse button combinations, particularly when returning to the game from a long break. (Of course, it means learning some new button combinations, but they will, at least, be simpler.)

I'm also interested in the move away from "endgame currency" as a progression system. I don't think we've really had it explained in much depth how exactly the new "seasons" system is going to work, but Yoshi-P seemed determined to emphasise the point that it's not a Battle Pass or free-to-play type "pay to win" situation. What it looks like is a flexible system where you earn points for doing… stuff. And rather than being forced into grinding the same old Roulettes and high-level stuff, it looks like you might have the opportunity to do a broader range of activities, which will be nice.

Perhaps I will hop back in once the new patch arrives tomorrow. There's the new Beastmaster job to explore, plus I didn't do much with Blue Mage, and of course I have plenty of other jobs still to level too — as well as just re-learning the game after so long away.

I think I probably will go back. I'm just not sure quite when yet, or how it will fit into my life more broadly. But we'll see. We'll see.

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The post #oneaday Day 689: Do I return...? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I will be peppering today's post with photos from today's trip.

The event today centred around a talk by Ian "h0ffman" Ford, a veteran of the Amiga demoscene who returned to coding and composing on classic computer hardware back in 2010, and has been spending much of his time since COVID fiddling around with disassembling and porting classic games from one platform to another. To date, he has ported the MSX2 version of Metal Gear to Amiga, the MSX game Knightmare (no relation to the TV show) to Amiga also, plus Shinobi and Golden Axe from Sega's System 16 arcade board to NEOGEO, plus the modern Unity game Cecconoid to Amiga. His talk explored how most of these projects came about because of repeatedly falling down rabbit holes while satisfying his own curiosity.

Outside of h0ffman's talk, which happened after lunch, all of us in attendance were free to explore The Cave, the Arcade Archive, and the organisation's newly renovated workshop space, known as the Pump House. (The entire operation is in an old mill, and the Pump House used to be part of the site's earlier purpose; it's not just a funny name they gave it.)

The Cave is up on the top floor of the mill, and is a large, open-plan room filled with old computers and consoles of various descriptions, including some fairly exotic machines from outside of the UK, Europe and North America, such as the beautiful Sharp X68000 from Japan. This is an absolutely gorgeous machine that, if money were no object, I would very much have in my collection. If you've never come across one, it's a 16-bit computer that has the audio-visual capabilities of its console contemporaries, meaning it plays host to a lot of excellent games, including some near-perfect arcade ports.

There's also lots of interesting console obscurities, too, such as NEC's ill-fated PC Engine spinoff, the Supergrafx, a console noteworthy for, outside of backwards compatibility with the aforementioned PC Engine, only having five titles in its library. And you thought the Wii U was a flop. Despite this, it's an exceedingly cool little system worth having a play with in an environment like The Cave!

Another nice thing about The Cave is that it acknowledges well-known, popular hardware in unusual configurations, such as this kiosk multi-game version of the NES that you would have found in electronics stores back in the '80s. All the stuff at the Cave is hooked up to great quality screens, too, with many of them being professional video or broadcast monitors, Sony Trinitrons and the like.

Here's another one: Sega's Mega-Tech arcade system, which was basically a Mega Drive you bought time on back in the day. Here, as with all the other arcade machines in The Cave and the Arcade Archive, it's set to free play, so you can enjoy a selection of 16-bit classics in the arcade form factor.

Nintendo had done something similar with the PlayChoice-10 machine, which provides you with a selection of NES games to play using arcade controls. It's a very strange feeling to play the original Super Mario Bros. with a stick and arcade buttons, but it works pretty well! Not surprising, really, since so many games from that era were at least inspired by arcade games if they weren't direct ports.

Here's a selection of obscure Japanese computers, including one from Sega. I don't know much about these, but they all look lovely, and it would be fun to have a fiddle around with them one day.

Here's some more obscure Japanese computers, just because. That Sharp X1 is a lovely looking thing. I actually didn't give the keys a clack, but it looks like they would feel nice to type on.

A little closer to home, here's a selection of lesser-known home computers, including the Oric-1, Tatung Einstein, Dragon 64 and Sam Coupé. A lot of these are lovely looking machines; they just failed to make the same impact as the bigger hitters of the era like the Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Here's a thing that I really wanted as a kid, but never managed to get hold of (i.e. convince my parents to get for me). It's an LCD game adaptation of Sega's After Burner, but with an elaborate control panel that makes the game feel a lot cooler than it actually is. The joystick is satisfying to grapple with the throttle control makes a pleasing "clunk" when you move it between speed settings, and a cool thing I've not seen before is that the LCD screen has an LED behind it so when you destroy enemy planes, there's a red "flash" where they're exploding. It's a pretty neat toy, but, given that we had computers at home that could play much more interesting and complex games, I'm not surprised that my parents never bought me one of these — and I'm not mad about that, I hasten to add!

There are lots of things to play at The Cave. This lovely setup has a selection of consoles hooked up and ready to play multiplayer just like we used to back in the day. The Gamecube and N64 were most readily accessible today, and they looked great on the Sony monitor.

One of my favourite parts of The Cave is the fake "software shop", set up to look like an old WHSmith upstairs. For any non-Brits reading, WHSmith was a shop that was mostly known as a newsagents where you'd buy magazines and newspapers, but also tended to carry stuff like stationery, art and craft supplies and, in the 1980s, computer and video games. There were a lot of shops like this in the '80s that performed what I would argue was their "primary function" downstairs, then they'd do computery stuff upstairs — one of my favourite examples in this regard is Boots, which is a pharmacy. Why would a pharmacy sell ZX Spectrum games on cassette? Same reason they'd process your photographs or sell you picture frames, presumably — to make a bit of extra cash from jumping in on popular hobbies and pastimes.

It's tricky to get good shots of them by the very nature of the environment, but on the ground floor of the mill is the Arcade Archive, a noisy room full of classic arcade machines, many of which have been lovingly restored to fully working condition by the Retro Collective folks, and some of which make use of modern solutions such as the MiSTer. These cabs — from left to right, Bubble Bobble, Galaga '88, BurgerTime and Double Dragon, all in the sort of generic cabinets you'd see in a fish and chip shop in a town centre circa 1989 — are, as far as I'm aware, restored originals.

Conversely, there's a NEOGEO MVS cabinet that I forgot to take a photo of that is running off the new MiSTer Multisystem 2's JAMMA arcade cabinet incarnation, which allows you to use plastic NFC cards to switch games as if you're swapping out cartridges. You get the enjoyment of playing with "four bright buttons and two joysticks" on a CRT, along with the modern conveniences of the MiSTer such as the ability to easily swap games, or play the console versions of games on the arcade cabinet.

Here's a lovely thing, showing up much better thanks to its position near the door to the outside: Atari's Star Wars arcade game. This is still a supremely playable 3D shoot 'em up with beautiful vector graphics and a wonderfully immersive, involving analogue yoke control system. Great fun to play — just a pity there's no sit-down version in the Archive, though I don't think there'd be room for one at the moment anyway!

Here's a few more machines in the Archive, including OutRun on the right, then Silkworm, Robotron 2084, Ghosts 'n' Goblins and, back in the corner, the original Space Invaders. I realised I'd never actually played Robotron in its original twin-stick arcade incarnation, so I took the opportunity to rectify this. It's a lot of fun!

More interesting and unusual things with this Tetris arcade machine. I'm not sure of the origin of this, but it was a nice looking machine, and Tetris' gameplay is, of course, a great fit for the arcade.

And that's pretty much that for now. It was a thoroughly lovely day that I enjoyed a lot. h0ffman's talk was interesting — even if some of the more techie stuff went over my head a bit! — and it was nice to see some people I haven't seen for a while. I even met someone who actually watches my YouTube videos! I guess I better make some more then, huh.

Right, on that note, I'm knackered, so I'm going to go and collapse into a puddle of goo for the remainder of the evening. Visit The Cave if you get the chance — it's a truly lovely day out that I can highly recommend.

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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The post #oneaday Day 688: Cave dweller appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

With that in mind, I'm probably going to have an early night tonight. I'd like to get back into Pragmata, which I'm enjoying a lot, but I'm also not sure my brain is up to playing anything too complex this evening. Perhaps this would be a good evening to do a bit of retro gaming, with an emphasis on something that isn't too challenging or complex to deal with.

I actually have the next two Evercade cartridges that haven't been released yet, which I'm kind of dying to talk about but can't because although I have them in my hands, we haven't even announced them yet. That will be happening soon, however, and when it does I will have plenty to enthuse about, believe me. They're not the biggest releases of the year, by any means, but they are some of my favourites.

No; I'm thinking this evening might be a good opportunity to settle down with something comfortably familiar, but which I perhaps haven't played for a while. I'm hoping in the process of typing this, something will come to mind that feels like it might be fun to spend my evening playing. Maybe Starwing? I haven't played that for a while. Last time I tried it, the MiSTer SNES core was having issues with the SuperFX chip, but I believe that's been resolved at this point, so that might be a good shout. I do love a bit of Starwing, and it is actually quite a long time since I've played it.

I'm going to get back into doing some videos soon, for those who have been wondering why it's been all quiet on that front for a while. I just haven't really felt an urge to do that for a little while, and forcing yourself to do something you're not really feeling is a sure-fire way to get yourself feeling burnt out. I won't have time to do any this coming weekend, as we're taking a trip to The Cave, but I have a few days off for my birthday at the start of next week, so I might take a day or two to record a few things over that period. Exactly what, I have no idea just yet; I have a few things in mind that I might like to explore, but haven't decided firmly on when or how to tackle them. This upcoming bit of free time might be the ideal opportunity to jump into them.

Anyway, I think I might have made a decision on what to do with my evening — although at the rate I'm going, I may well be asleep before I've got anywhere. If that's the way it goes, though, that's the way it goes!

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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The post #oneaday Day 685: Very tired appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Pragmata is very, very good.

I'll go into more detail about this over on MoeGamer once I've beaten it (because I most certainly am going to beat this) but I thought I'd post a few initial thoughts over here for now.

For the unfamiliar, Pragmata is a game that Capcom has apparently been working on for a very long time indeed, which might account for why so many people have been saying that it sounds like a game somewhat "out of time"; depending on who you talk to, you will almost certainly hear the opinion that it is "like a PS2 game" or "like an Xbox 360 game". (Of the two, I think the latter is probably more accurate, for what it's worth.)

The reason for this is that it thumbs its nose at a lot of today's gameplay conventions. It's not open world. It's not an RPG in disguise. Its controls are extremely simple and straightforward (move, aim, shoot, interact, plus moving the little cursor thingy during the hacking minigame). It's not belabouring how emotionally resonant it is through overwrought, manipulative writing. It's not trying to be all things to all people. It's just trying to be one thing, and to do that thing really, really well.

And it succeeds! If I had to pigeonhole it I'd say it's a third-person shooter, but it's not a constant, all-out action sort of affair. There's a lot of exploration, with plenty of hidden rewards for those willing to get curious — but those "hidden" areas are always possible to stumble across without relying on a guide. There's an element of survival horror, in that all weapons but your standard sidearm have severely limited ammo, and you only have limited healing opportunities per expedition.

Mostly it's just an extraordinarily well-designed game. You have a companion character who is actually useful — both in terms of her mechanical function, and in that her "barks" during combat are actually helpful audible cues for things like dodging attacks. The levels are beautifully designed to have a grandiose sense of scale at times, but never overwhelm you with possible ways you can go. It controls well. It looks great. It runs great. It's just great. Really, really great.

I think that's probably all I want to say about it for now, because honestly I'm just eager to get back to it. I've completely cleared out the first two levels (aside from two hidden chests in the second level that I will need to come back with a new ability for) and am just going into the third. I also suspect it's not going to be an obscenely long game, which, honestly, I'm 100% fine with.

Anyway. It's time to hop back into the Cradle and see what new horrors await me and Diana…

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The post #oneaday Day 681: Pragmatic appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is Nintendo at its most "software toy" I think I've ever seen them — although I say this with the caveat that I never played the 3DS version of Tomodachi Life. It's a delight. It's like playing The Sims without having to do the boring and annoying bits. It's like playing a citybuilder without having to worry about complicated management things. It's what mobile and social games might have been if they had never been corrupted by greed and predatory monetisation strategies.

Above all, though, it's a medium through which you can express and play with your creativity and imagination, and I love that. While the first couple of hours or so are deliberately constrained to introduce you to the basic features of the game and its interface, it doesn't take long to get to a point where you've unlocked most of the main "mechanics", such as they are, and can start using them to play with your creations in the little world you gradually build for them.

It's possibly the best use of the "Miis" that Nintendo have had on their consoles since the Wii days, and the delightfully lo-fi synthesised speech they talk in — no AI-generated voices here — is a pleasant reminder of a more innocent age.

That can be said about the whole experience, really. It's a reminder of when we all had the capacity to play imaginatively, only now our imaginations can be supported by interactivity. No longer do you have to pretend your dolls are talking to one another, because now they actually do talk to one another — although you're not always privy to the details of all their conversations. (Rather charmingly, you can catch the odd word here and there, and most of these are things that you've previously entered into the game as subjects for them to talk about with one another, meaning my little collection of Miis likes talking about flatulence, eating sausages, cats and F-15 Strike Eagles.

I'll have some more to say about this delightful little game over on MoeGamer when I've spent a bit more time with it. But for now I can say confidently that I'm glad I decided to take a punt on this silly little game. The kind of silliness it offers is precisely what the world needs right now — much as Animal Crossing came along at the exact right time when the pandemic hit. (Even if I didn't get along with Animal Crossing personally, I at least appreciate what it represented.)

Anyway, I've peppered this article with a few screenshots from this evening's session. As I say, I'll have much more to say in the near future, but for now, I should probably go to bed rather than checking in on everyone one last time this evening…

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The post #oneaday Day 678: Chillin' with my Tomodachi appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One that jumped out at me was someone saying that "everything Persona post-3 is abysmal" in response to the first Revelations: Persona game being on the list. And just… come on. Those games are some of the most well-regarded examples of their genre ever. Sure, you might not jive with them personally, particularly if you're not someone who gets on well with lengthy, primarily text-based story sequences, but to stretch that out into those games being "abysmal" is… well, it's an absolutely abysmal take, it has to be said.

The trouble is, this kind of shit is engagement bait. I'm engaging with it by talking about it, even if I'm not linking directly to it, when the sensible thing to do would have been to just go "huh", close the tab and then never think about other people with Bad Opinions ever again. Negativity is engagement — and, to paraphrase an excellent video I watched earlier today (thanks, Chris), it's actually one of the most potent forms of engagement there is. So it should probably be little surprise that we're constantly bombarded with takes about the "worst [x] ever" rather than enthusiasm about cool things.

I always make an effort not to do this with my own material — that which is on a specific subject, anyway. I know I can get a tad negative on this here blog at times, but that's part of the point of this place — for it to be a place where I can vent off some steam, express my frustrations and get things out of my head rather than letting them fester. On MoeGamer, my gaming website, and my YouTube channel, however, I make a point of always trying my very best to "find the fun" — even in stuff which is well-known as being "bad". My proudest achievement in that regard was successfully finding genuine enjoyment in the notorious Sonic the Hedgehog reboot from 2006, a game which, for a while, Wikipedia described (without citation) as "considered to be one of the worst in the entire video game medium". (That line isn't there any more.)

But what is the result of that? For the most part, probably a fraction of the visibility that I'd get if I just put out a video on how "bad" Amiga platform games are, or how "terrible" the graphics on Atari 2600 are, or how much of a waste of time existing in this miserable world is. I don't have any intention of changing, however; if I'm feeling like this, I'm sure at least a few other people are feeling like this, too. And if, through the things I do online, I can provide those people with an escape from the constant bombardment of negativity and "worst thing ever" content, I consider that a success, regardless of anything the numbers say.

Most of these people saying something is the "worst [X] ever" have no real frame of reference of what "the worst" really looks like. What they really mean is either "I, personally, did not like this" or, more commonly, "popular opinion suggests that this game is not very good and I am not going to argue against that". And I'm so very, very tired of it. I want to sit anyone who thinks something like Persona 4 or 5 are bad down with some long-defunct mobile game shit like Rage of Bahamut and show them what a really, genuinely, actually bad game is.

But I better not. I can see the thumbnails already. Although for some reason, gacha games have remained curiously immune to being branded "bad" games, despite a lot of them really, genuinely being not only absolutely terrible from a design and mechanical perspective, but actively hostile to their players. That's probably something to talk about another day, though.

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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The post #oneaday Day 675: The worst ever appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm installing Wipeout as we speak. I suspect this will be the most… challenging to deal with, shall we say, but I'm also looking forward to giving it a try. I love thrill rides, but as a fat person I cannot ride real ones, so I'm hoping that something like Wipeout will scratch that itch somewhat. And even if it doesn't, I've been meaning to try Wipeout Omega Collection for a long time anyway.

The others I know a bit less about. I know Battlezone was quite well-regarded when it first launched quite early in the PSVR's lifespan, No Man's Sky should hopefully be quite an experience — though I do wonder how its more complex gameplay elements will translate to VR — and Ultrawings I know nothing about, but it was three quid so even if it's rubbish I don't mind.

VR has its flaws, particularly with earlier implementations like the first PSVR. But I do like it. It's an interesting way of experiencing things, and it's kind of a shame that it has never quite taken off in the way anyone really hoped it would — largely due to those flaws, in many cases, and the expense in others. (That said, I bet you could probably grab yourself a PSVR relatively cheap now. PSVR2 is still pricey though.) I will be interested to see what the supposed "Steam Frame" does for VR, if anything; saying that, I will be interested to see whether it launches at all, given the, uh, "challenges" that tech is facing right now as a result of ongoing AI cuntishness and… various geopolitical events, shall we say.

Anyway, Wipeout has finished installing, so I'm off to give it a quick blast before my dinner and to see if my stomach contents remain intact. Wish me luck!

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The post #oneaday Day 672: Return to virtuality appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Following Path of Mystery: A Brush With Death, I've started a VN that's been on my shelf for a very long time, but which I've not yet got around to. It's called WorldEnd Syndrome, and it's by the same company as Path of Mystery: A Brush With Death. In fact, it supposedly unfolds in the same narrative "universe", though exactly what that means is so far not clear; the main setting and core cast are different, so I suspect it may just be a case of the two games having a similar overall vibe.

One of the things I really like about visual novels is the fact it feels like you're really getting to spend some quality time with a (hopefully) interesting cast of characters — characters who you will doubtless have an initial reaction to, and may well change your opinion of over the course of a complete story that involves them. This was certainly the case with Path of Mystery: A Brush With Death, which has an excellent ensemble cast who have a lot of chemistry with one another, and plenty of interesting things to learn about them. The only unfortunate thing is that the concluding hours of the story are very much setting up a sequel and possibly a larger series of multiple games, and so I was left rather wanting more at the end of proceedings!

As someone who has often suffered loneliness, and who has difficulties with self-esteem and confidence when even contemplating socialising with real people out in the real, three-dimensional world, visual novels have always provided a certain sense of comfort. By their very nature, they include you in a close-knit group of people, and give you a sense of "belonging" — even if the way their narrative is constructed makes it clear that you are not the protagonist yourself; you just happen to be riding along in their head, able to hear their innermost thoughts.

A lot of visual novel writers are clearly wise to this particular appeal element of the medium, too, as many of them are set up with characters designed to be varying degrees of relatable, dealing with real-life issues that anyone can understand — and that is comforting. Although the people involved are not real, knowing that someone is aware enough of feelings that you have had to be able to compose a story that involves and acknowledges those feelings — and perhaps even provides some suggestions on how to cope with them (or how not to cope with them) — is reassuring and, in its own way, helps counter some of the loneliness the modern age brings with it.

I'm looking forward to seeing how WorldEnd Syndrome unfolds. I'm only a short way into it so far — still in the introduction, very clearly — but it's already intriguing, and from what I understand, this one does some interesting things with narrative structure. So I might just go and read a bit before bed, now…

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The post #oneaday Day 664: Visual novels! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's a weird sort of culture a lot of people have about not talking about where they work. I understand it to an extent — if people know where you work, that can open you up to harassment as a result of something your workplace did or announced, plus people can (incorrectly) assume that anything you post on a personal account or site is you somehow acting as a "spokesperson" for that brand. In less enlightened workplaces, too, management can spy on the things you do in your free time and inevitably make the least charitable interpretation of the things you say possible so that they have ammunition to treat you like shit at work.

Thankfully I have not suffered the latter for a good few years now, and I am using this paragraph to make abundantly clear that although I work for Blaze on the Evercade project and related products, this post is my opinion only and does not, in any way, reflect the opinions, values and anything else about my employer. I am writing this post 'cause I love Evercade, and have done since I took a chance and splashed the cash on that "All-In" bundle back in 2020.

Anyway, what I want to do today is pick 10 Evercade cartridges I particularly like and share them with you. There may be some cartridges in this list that are no longer available due to the expiration of licensing agreements between Blaze and the license holders, or all manner of other circumstances, and I make no apologies for this; something good doesn't stop being good just because you can't buy it as easily any more.

With all that in mind then, let us begin:

Namco Museum Collection 1

Although both Namco Museum Collection cartridges for Evercade have not been available for a while due to Namco deciding to be extremely weird about releasing their stuff on physical media these days, they remain highlights of the Evercade's launch lineup — and since they formed the part of several launch bundles, there are a fair few copies out there to be found relatively easily.

I have a tough time picking a favourite out of the two, but on balance I think it has to be the first one, which features some all-time classics and favourites, plus some interesting curiosities. On the classics front, you have good versions of Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Xevious and Mappy, while on the lesser-known front you have the excellent (and surprisingly accessible) strategy game, Metal Marines, plus the awesome space sim Star Luster. And this is just my personal favourites from the cart; there's also Mappy Kids, Libble Rabble, Battle Cars and Quad Challenge, too, making it a well-rounded and fun collection.

Data East Collection 1

If there's one cartridge I feel like I plop in the Evercade more than any other, it has to be Data East Collection 1, for two main reasons: Burnin' Rubber and Midnight Resistance. Both are truly excellent games for very different reasons, but they do have one thing in common: great music.

That's not all that Data East Collection 1 offers, though. There's the beat 'em up action of Bad Dudes and its spiritual sequel Two Crude Dudes, a good version of BurgerTime, the excellent (if totally unrealistic) pool game Side Pocket, the manic puzzler Magical Drop 2, the colourful platformer Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics and the one-on-one fighters Karate Champ and Fighter's History. All of these games have something worthwhile to offer in 2026.

Jaleco Collection 1

Jaleco is one of those publishers I feel people often forget about, but when you look at their library of stuff you realise they've actually put out a lot of bangers over the years. Jaleco Collection 1 features some stars from their console lineup, including the beat 'em ups Brawl Brothers and Rival Turf!, the firefighting action-adventure The Ignition Factor, the sci-fi top-down run-and-gun Operation Logic Bomb and more.

I don't think I've ever loaded up Bases Loaded but I believe it's a relatively well-regarded baseball game from the 8-bit era, and likewise for soccer with Super Goal! 2. Super Earth Defense Force is a solid scrolling spaceship shooter, Astyanax and Totally Rad are decent 8-bit platformers, and City Connection is a really fun arcade-style game that only really suffers due to its excruciating music. There's not a bad game in this bunch, so I come back to this cart frequently.

Gaelco Arcade 1

The two Gaelco Arcade cartridges are some of my all-time favourites from the Evercade library, but I think the first one just about has the edge in terms of the number of games I keep coming back to. My personal standouts are the brilliant World Rally, which has possibly the best handling of any isometric racer of the era; the unusual gameplay of Glass; and the wonderfully silly run-and-gun action of Biomechanical Toy.

If you're unfamiliar with Gaelco — and I'd forgive you if you are, since I'd never heard of them prior to us putting this cart out — this is a great way to get to know them. Expect polished visuals, challenging gameplay and some truly excellent digitised guitar noodling.

Renovation Collection 1

This one won't come as a surprise to anyone, as it's an oft-cited favourite from many longstanding Evercade fans. Featuring an extremely cool range of 16-bit games, many of which have an awesome anime style about them, there's a ton of value on this cart. Highlights for most are Valis and Valis III, El Viento and Arcus Odyssey, but there's plenty more to enjoy here, too.

Gaiares and Sol-Deace are good (if very tough) shoot 'em ups. Granada and Final Zone are great multidirectional shooters. Dino Land is a fun and quirky take on pinball. Traysia is a solid RPG if you go into it with the appropriate expectations (it's channelling Ultima, hard). Beast Wrestler is the weak link for many, but I bet you can find some fun there if you try hard enough.

TheC64 Collection 1

In the absence of some good Atari 8-bit cartridges — we haven't yet got a commercially licensable Atari 8-bit emulator we're happy to work with just yet — I will have to satisfy myself with its great rival, the Commodore 64. Fortunately, the three C64 collections we've put out to date include some of my all-time favourite games, and while I will always prefer the Atari versions in most cases, the C64 versions are good, too.

My personal highlights in this collection are Lee (originally Bruce Lee but now not for hopefully obvious reasons), Jumpman and Gateway to Apshai. There's a really broad mix of games in here, including some real legends (Impossible Mission!) — plus the two "Games" games are great with friends. I know home computer games are a hard sell for some people who grew up with consoles, but honestly, the three C64 collections plus the Thalamus cartridge are a great in-road for the curious.

Duke Nukem Collection 1

It felt like we'd finally hit the big-time with this cartridge. Duke Nukem is a huge license to land, and the fact we got the excellent Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered as an exclusive was, for me, the moment we had really got a proper "killer app" for Evercade.

Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered is, of course, great, and probably the best way to play these shareware classics today. Duke Nukem 3D: Total Meltdown has its detractors, particularly as there are more recent ports of Duke3D that run more smoothly and control a bit more elegantly with a controller, but it's one of those things where if you take it on its own merits and consider that it was running on a platform that, despite having a 3D focus, was still just a little underpowered, is actually perfectly competent and enjoyable. The exclusive levels are a hoot, too — if extremely tough!

Sunsoft Collection 2

Sunsoft is one of those developers that, again, I suspect few people would count among their absolute favourites, but they have a really solid back catalogue of titles to draw upon. This second collection of their games is my personal favourite, primarily due to the presence of the excellent Ufouria: The Saga, which is a truly great exploration platformer.

I'm also a big fan of Pri Pri Primitive Princess!, which is an interesting puzzle game that very much feels like it may have been a home computer game at some point in the past. By this I mean that it's clunky but creative, and if you come at it with the right mindset you'll be well and truly hooked.

Toaplan Arcade 3

I knew I wanted — no, needed — to include a Toaplan Arcade cartridge in this list, and after much deliberation I settled on this third one, primarily for Batsugun and its variant, Batsugun Special Version. Out Zone and FixEight are a hoot, too, Truxton II is just as punishing as its predecessor (but fun once you get into its groove), Ghox is a weird but cool take on Breakout, and Vimana is probably the company's most accessible shoot 'em up.

Toaplan's arcade games are among some of my favourites in the Evercade library, and this is an excellent cartridge full of some of their best titles.

The Turrican Collection

Despite being a home computer gamer in the '80s and early '90s, Turrican is a series that completely passed me by. I always saw gushing praise for it in magazines of the era, but never actually got around to playing it myself. I don't think I ever even played a demo for it. This is a shame, because with The Turrican Collection I've discovered that I like Turrican a lot.

I've also discovered that, unsurprisingly, those who criticise it for having sprawling, meandering levels in which it's easy to get lost were exaggerating somewhat; there's always a clear path forwards, and whether or not you go exploring for goodies is up to you. Plus as the series goes on, it settles into a more "Japanese-style" linear formula, culminating in the technically gorgeous Super Turrican 2. Absolutely banging soundtrack, too.

And there we are. Ten of my favourite carts. Ten of my favourite carts. They might not be yours. But they are mine. And, honestly, if you asked me on another day, I could probably pick out ten more favourites, and repeat the process many times over. In fact, I can find something to love on every single Evercade cartridge — and I'm not just saying that 'cause I work on them. I really am thrilled to do what I do — and I hope that comes across in my contributions to the products in question!

Now after all that, I think I'll go boot one of these up and have a nice retro evening…

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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That announcement was for Evercade Nexus, a new Evercade handheld featuring a much bigger, brighter screen, significantly louder speakers, dual analogue sticks and a host of other cool features. You can see the trailer here:

Evercade has always been a platform that plays a wide variety of retro games — the library actually covers six different decades (from the 1970s up until today) — but Nexus has been designed with a bit of a '90s flavour, hence the somewhat different look and feel to the new trailer. The dual analogue sticks are designed to complement 3D games from the 32-bit era that we already have in the library (and have planned for the future), as well as our upcoming brand new native ports of 64-bit legends like Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, and these games all hail from the '90s, so it makes sense for the branding to reflect that.

You can still play classic Atari games on it as well, though, (plus, of course, all the other classic consoles the Evercade library covers!) and the bright colours found in your average old-school pixel art title will look lovely on that screen — plus with the all-new extra-loud speakers, you can subject everyone in the vicinity to the sound of Pitfall Harry and/or Lara Croft falling to their death for the umpteenth time.

I've said it before, but I'm super proud to work on Evercade. Ever since I first went for the "All-In" bundle of the original handheld back in 2020, which came with the first 10 cartridges released for the platform, I knew it was something special — and hoped that one day I would be able to be part of it. Well, now I am part of it — I have been for some time, and will hopefully continue to be for a long time yet — and it's a delight to be able to look at a product like the Nexus and think that I played a part in that, along with every cartridge release we do.

It's an interesting feeling to have lived long enough to remember these games from first time around vividly enough to still be excited about helping rerelease them on a new device. I never stopped loving games like (Bruce) Lee, MegaMania, Checkered Flag and myriad others — it's a genuine privilege to have been part of making official rereleases happen. Right now I'm working on the Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie double pack that is bundled in with Nexus, and it's hard work, but also immensely rewarding when I think about how good this release is going to be when it's finished.

And there are many more exciting games coming down the road — including a bunch more of my all-time favourites. I can't wait to share them with you all, and if you're new to Evercade, I hope you'll consider jumping on board with Nexus or one of our other devices! Preorders for Nexus open tomorrow — you can find out more here.

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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I don't know if I'm just in a bad mood right now or if there really has been a rise in clickbait headlines of late, but I feel like I'm noticing it a lot more of late. I'm talking about stuff like this:

That's a piece from Kotaku about LGR building himself a warehouse. I find it very difficult to believe that anyone reading Kotaku on a semi-regular basis does not know who LGR is, so to deliberately obfuscate his identity in the headline just feels like it's being annoying on purpose.

One could argue that this headline has been written appropriately, however; it gets the broader point across in a way that is accessible to all, regardless of whether or not they know who LGR is. So I will begrudgingly give it a pass.

I do not give the following (from GameSpot) a pass, particularly because they "spoil" it in the accompanying image:

Just say Hercules. We can see it's Hercules. Also I'm not 100% sure Hercules counts as one of Disney's more "iconic" movies. I guess it was in Kingdom Hearts.

GameSpot is very fond of this sort of shit right now:

Yeah, fuck off with that. Just tell me what it is.

Double fuck off for this being based on a "rumour", something which I was always discouraged from reporting on when I was working the news beat in the games press. If your headline has "could" in it, just stop.

But let's not pick exclusively on GameSpot.

Let's also pick on GameRant, which, to be fair, is part of the odious Valnet group. This headline can get right in the fucking bin. (It's Elder Scrolls Blades, if you gave a shit.)

This one can, too. (Horizon Chase Turbo in this case.)

Look, I get it. If you're on the endless churn and trying to juice your site's SEO results in order to maximise your KPIs for men in suits who don't know what video games actually are, it's easy to feel like it's necessary to pull this shit in order to "get people curious enough to click". But people are savvy to it now, to such a degree that it's a practice that gets routinely mocked.

Just say what the article is actually about rather than this bullshit playground teasing ("I know something you don't!") and if the story has any merit, people will click through to it anyway to find out more details. Those "more details" someone clicks through to find out more about should not, repeat, not be the name of the subject of the story.

This sort of thing is rarely the fault of the individual reporters — although I'm sure there are a few out there who love pulling this little stunt. No, it's inevitably an edict from on high for the reasons just stated. With the general health of video games media being deep within the "critical danger" territory, the suits want quick solutions that, in theory, get results.

Only I'm not convinced this sort of practice does get results any more. Like I say, people are wise to it now. I refuse to believe that I am the only one who simply won't click on an article whose headline is a deliberate cocktease.

Look at it this way: why should I give a shit that "a Switch game is being delisted on June 1"? There are thousands of the fucking things, many of which I don't care about. "The eShop is full of crap" is a meme for a reason. I do, however, own a copy of Horizon Chase Turbo, and thus would be interested in hearing why that specific game is being delisted. (It's stupid, by the way. And you can blame Epic for it.)

Anyway, that has been your nightly grump. Please write meaningful headlines, especially if you want the few remaining dregs of the video games press to be taken even a little bit seriously.

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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The post #oneaday Day 660: This one particular type of headline is very annoying appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I remember when mobile gaming first became a thing with the Java phones. Well, actually, technically it first became a thing with Snake and the other games no-one remembers on the Nokia 3210 and company. But expandable mobile gaming — by that I mean the ability to download new games onto your phone — really took off in the Java era.

At first, it was mildly exciting… at least until you downloaded a Java game and realised that a lot of them were Not Very Good. Often not for lack of trying, and there were some genuinely decent ones — I recall a good version of Lumines, for example — but for the most part, they were a pale imitation of even the dedicated handheld games consoles that were around at the time. The Game Boy and its successors ruled the roost in that regard for a good long while — and deservedly so.

The advent of iOS was a huge shift, though. Anyone who was around for the launch of the App Store will doubtless remember things like ngmoco's output (before they became free-to-play garbage peddlers), Epic's "Castle" tech demo that eventually became Infinity Blade, and doubtless many others that are lost to time. Quite literally in many cases, because these were digital-only games that were often exclusive to iOS — and while I'm sure some have been preserved, I bet there are plenty more that we'll never see again.

Things seemed… interesting for a while. The ambition of this new breed of mobile game was hard to fault, but many folks (including me) found that touchscreens were less than ideal for console-style experiences. The best games were ones that were built around the inherent limitations and inaccuracy of a finger-based touch interface — or which used other methods of control, such as tilt.

Then, one day, Apple announced that it would be introducing the concept of "in-app purchases". I knew immediately that this would be an awful idea, as the general gaming community had a collective bee in its bonnet about DLC at the time, and adding DLC to mobile games sounded like a really bad idea in that climate.

Unbelievably, though, I underestimated quite how awful things would end up becoming in the mobile space. While there are still a few "premium" games available for a one-off purchase these days, most of them are available on other platforms with actual controllers, leaving the vast majority of mobile-exclusive titles these days as free-to-play gacha crap.

I've done my time in the gacha mines. I've made the mistake of thinking I'd sling a game twenty quid to "support" it because I'd been playing it quite a bit and I liked the look of the current character banners. But in more recent years I've become hyper-aware of quite how much those games exploit horny young men in particular, with massively sexualised artwork designed not to add depth to the characters they depict, but purely to get said horny young men convinced to open their wallets in the hope of acquiring a JPG — or an animated GIF if you're lucky — of their favourite waifu in a skimpy outfit. And I say this as someone who likes sexy games!

No more. I swore off all mobile games quite some time ago now, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Now, at the times when I would typically want a mobile game — when I have a few minutes to spare, when I'm bored, when I just want something to do with my hands that I don't have to think about too much — I will quite happily reach for an Atari 2600 game, because those fit the bill perfectly.

Your average Atari 2600 game can be played for sessions of maybe 1-5 minutes at a time, and that feels like a satisfyingly self-contained play session. You can keep playing to beat your high scores, or to get a little further, or compete against a friend if you're playing together — or you can move on to something else, and have another 1-5 minutes of fun. And at no point in the entire process will these games attempt to monetise your erection.

On that note, may I remind you that Activision Collection 2 is coming to Evercade next month…?

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The post #oneaday Day 655: I would rather play Atari 2600 games than mobile games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The relevant quote is this (and I'm aware this is probably as good as linking to it, but whatever; statistically speaking, most people probably can't be arsed to search for it, and the rest think asking an AI will get them a meaningful answer. That latter group are wrong and cunts, by the way.):

I think we need to start acknowledging that too many adults are evaluating games like they're up for the Booker Prize when instead they're well-constructed children's books. We don't need to pretend. We'd be better off being real.

This argument primarily came about because some folks have been looking at the recent Pokémon game, Pokopia, as a reflection on life in a world without humans, and life in a world living with the results of climate change.

The thing with art is that it's a subjective thing. There's authorial intent, to be sure, but there is also the very specific, very personal reaction that someone has to something. And that comes from somewhere. And if multiple people are saying the same things, independently of one another, there's clearly something in the work that speaks to people who are on a particular wavelength.

With that in mind, I feel like it's the height of arrogance to describe something as being childish, which is the main core argument that annoys me not just about this piece, but about other thinkpieces along these lines. Sure, Pokopia is a game designed to be sweet and colourful and friendly to kids or inexperienced gamers, but that doesn't mean it's completely incapable of saying something.

I add to this: being aimed at children does not mean something has lesser value, either. There's a vast canon of "children's literature" out there that is well worth reading by adults today, because it stands up not as "books for kids", but simply as well-crafted stories. Another objection I have to the argument above is that by using a phrase like "well-constructed children's books" as a diminutive, reductive way of talking about things, you are, by extension, implying that nothing designed for kids can have any broader cultural value.

It's an ongoing thing that certain portions of Terminally Online people in particular like to bring up: that Games Have Bad Stories. And it's bollocks! Just as in any medium, there are games that do have bad stories, yes, but there are also many, many examples of those that have good stories. Great stories, even. The implication behind the sentence "too many adults are evaluating games like they're up for the Booker Prize when instead they're well-constructed children's books" is that "games, as a medium, will never have the same value as another medium that I consider inherently more valuable".

I haven't played Pokopia so I can't comment on the specifics of that case. But I can comment on a vast number of other games that very much are worthy of exploring with detailed critique and analysis. I write about many of them over on my other site, MoeGamer! The most recent thing I have written about over there at the time of writing is the incredible Esoteric Ebb, a game that is about as far from being a "well-constructed children's book" as it's possible to be. (And yes, I know I said I wouldn't pick on that article specifically; it just so happens that this particular quote is especially symptomatic of the issue I'm talking about.)

The core thesis of the piece in question is that "we all need to be more honest" when we're talking about games. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. There's a lot of criticism out there where people look at a game and complain about something that it isn't — and which, in many cases, it has never purported to be — rather than evaluating whether or not it was successful at what it was actually trying to do, whether that was implicit or explicit. (I wrote about this back in 2013 on USgamer, now archived on MoeGamer. If you want to know more, look up John Updike's rules for literary criticism.)

But "being honest" doesn't mean that you just go "ah, games are all just children's books, not like real literature and art" and be done with it. Critical, artistic and literary analysis has a place in writing about the medium, whether the subject under discussion is something as seemingly breezy and lightweight as Pokopia, or something as dense and philosophical as Esoteric Ebb.

Video games have been around for a very long time now — and, moreover, using the medium as a means of storytelling is now very well-established in its own right. At some point, the thing we need to "be honest" about is the fact that the medium as a whole is mature, and that there's absolutely no problem with treating it as such.

If you want to treat video games as nothing more than a throwaway bit of fluff that makes you feel better of an evening, I'm not stopping you. There is great value in having something you enjoy that you don't need to engage with on a level beyond "I like doing this because it makes me feel good". But don't throw around "we all need to" like it's some great unacknowledged, universal truth. If someone finds greater artistic, creative value in something and you just don't see it — perhaps just be honest, say you don't get it yourself, and move on. No need to tell everyone else that they're doing it wrong.

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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The post #oneaday Day 650: Games for Children appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I came back to this because Limited Run put up 9th Dawn Remake for preorder recently, and I was reminded that I had been enjoying 9th Dawn III up until the point I put it down in favour of something else. So I decided to go back. And, if you're wondering, no, you don't need to play 9th Dawn (Remake) and/or 9th Dawn II before III.

The simple elevator pitch for 9th Dawn III is that it's a large, open-world RPG presented from a top-down 2D perspective. It has real-time combat primarily driven through twin stick shooter-like mechanics, and when playing on gamepad it has a Final Fantasy XIV-esque hotbar system, whereby holding a trigger and pressing one of the face buttons or directional pad controls allows you to trigger various abilities.

It's more Diablo than Baldur's Gate for the most part — though the thing I'd probably compare it to more than anything is something like World of Warcraft. You can wander around the world as you see fit, step into dungeons as you discover them, and level up a wealth of different skills, including a number of crafting options. There are no character classes, so you can build your character according to the way you like to play — and this also means that you can change up how you're playing quite easily, too. Some items of equipment have certain skill requirements, but it's a simple matter to train up to a level where you can use them — and immensely satisfying when doing so allows you to use a weapon that increases your damage output by a good 10x or more.

One thing I particularly like about the game is the way it implements dungeons. Each dungeon is quite a substantial, self-contained challenge in its own right, and while they initially look quite "open", there's often a good route to take through them, and in taking that route you will gradually unlock a number of shortcuts back to earlier areas. The game tracks your percentage completion of each dungeon, measured by how many of the "ability coins" you have found and whether or not you have beaten the main "boss" enemy in each dungeon, allowing you a clear sense of when you've done everything "important" — but there's often a nice amount of random loot to be found outside of these core "objectives".

It's a game that has a lot of interesting, interlocking systems, but which is very easy to pick up and play, and quite enjoyable to just spend an evening with, hacking and slashing your way through all and sundry. Also, you can recruit monsters and summon up to 10 of them to fight alongside you, which is immensely satisfying.

I'm a long way off beating the game — it's a big 'un! — but I'm having a lot of fun with it right now, so I'm going to stick with it for the immediate future. I'm interested to see quite how powerful you can get by the conclusion to proceedings. I'm hoping for some Diablo III-style huge numbers — given that I'm level 20-something and already putting out four-figure damage, that's entirely within the realm of possibility. Fun times await!

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The post #oneaday Day 647: The third 9th Dawn appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm intrigued to see how the other characters' campaigns play. I am currently on the last chapter of Leon's campaign, and that has definitely been quite action-focused. Supposedly the other campaigns each have their own distinct gameplay focus, so I am intrigued to find out what that really means — or if, as I suspect, it is just marketing waffle that doesn't really mean anything.

The game clearly being designed for co-op play isn't nearly as bothersome as it was in Resident Evil 5, as your computer-controlled partner when playing solo isn't a complete idiot, and you don't have to worry about managing their inventory, health and ammunition. Plus the overall way the game controls feels much more up-to-date than Resident Evil 5's cumbersome control method did; Resident Evil 6 pretty much uses the conventions of modern third-person shooters, with the only real concession to survival horror tradition being the necessity to hold a button to draw your weapon and aim, rather than being able to fire "from the hip".

There have been some spectacular moments so far, and a few mildly annoying bits, but on the whole it's been a worthwhile journey so far, and I'm glad I've taken the time to play through all the games in the series up until this point. It's a series that has a thoroughly interesting history — and the recent remakes are rare examples of remakes making things significantly better than their predecessors. The PlayStation originals of the first three will always be special to me, mind, as I was playing them during what was probably the happiest period of my life.

I wonder if Code Veronica will ever get the remake treatment? It's certainly a prime candidate for it, but it also sometimes feels like an entry in the series Capcom would rather we all forgot about. It's the only entry in the series that there's no easy way to play on modern platforms today (either in "original" or "remake" form) and that's a bit of a shame; it was a significant moment for the series, being its first shift into full 3D, although my one enduring memory of it is not picking up enough grenade launcher ammunition to be able to beat the boss on the plane at the end of Claire's first section!

Anyway, Resident Evil 6 is fun. Some may well argue that it's not very "Resident Evil", but honestly, having played a big chunk of the series now, like many long-running series, it is not, and never has been, one simple thing. Resident Evil 6 is just an example of it going in one particular direction — and, from what I understand, the seventh goes a very different way after that, too. No bad thing! I'm looking forward to finally getting on to the most recent ones, as I've heard lots of good things about them, though have managed to remain mostly unspoiled on them, too.

There's four campaigns of gloriously silly action movie nonsense to survive first, though, so I better get on with it!

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The post #oneaday Day 644: Resident EEEEEVIL... SIX appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Slow Roads isn't really a "game". There's no objective, no win state, no fail state, no punishments for doing things "wrong" and indeed no "right" way to do things, save for the implied suggestion that you stay on the road. As you can see from the screenshot above, this is not mandatory.

Slow Roads plops you into a procedurally generated world based on either the rolling English countryside — the sort of undulating terrain you'd see if you were driving around the Peak District, say — and invites you to just drive. There's no other cars on the roads so you can drive as safely or unsafely as you like; this is a pure playground in which you can take your electric car, bus or futuristic motorcycle and just go. It's a pleasantly liberating, relaxing experience that I find myself turning to in quiet moments when I just want to do something, but I don't want to have to think about it too hard.

I forget who first pointed me in the direction of Slow Roads and even when it was. I've definitely had it on my bookmarks bar for several years at this point, and over the course of those years it has continued to evolve gradually. The first version I tried only had the car and the countryside terrain in the daytime. Over time, more features have been added, including the ability to adjust the countryside scene between four different seasons and four times of day and set the weather conditions, choose how winding (or not) you want the road to be, how wide you want it to be and a variety of characteristics about how the controls handle.

The game has somewhat sim-like tendencies in how it handles. You have to slow down for corners, and the three different vehicles have a very different feel to how they handle; the bus, for example, appropriately feels like a large, lumbering vehicle that it's probably not a good idea to throw into a corner at 80mph, while at the other end of the spectrum, the bike provides a frighteningly fast thrill ride, and could probably get you around the most twisty roads at high speed once you learn how to handle it.

That's it. That's all Slow Roads is. There's no point to it. And yet I love it. It's not trying to be anything that it's not. It's not being designed for "player retention" or "monetisation". It just is. It's a lovely little thing, and if you've never spent any time fiddling around with it, I highly recommend it.

The one long-term goal for Slow Roads appears to be for it to have a standalone Steam release, which looks set for April of this year (2026 if you're reading in The Future, assuming we're not all dead by then), with a demo towards the end of this month. It will be great to see this project finally come to some sort of "fruition", such as it is, and I have whiled away more than enough hours in the Web-based version to quite happily toss the developer a few quid when the full version finally arrives.

Now, maybe just a few miles before bed…

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The post #oneaday Day 637: Slow Roads appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Here's one of the screenshots that convinced me to buy and play this game:

If you're looking at that and thinking something along the lines of "cor blimey guvnor, that sure does look like Disco Elysium and no mistake", you'd be absolutely right. The game isn't trying to hide its inspiration. But the other thing you may well notice from this screenshot is that this is Disco Elysium, But Fantasy.

In Esoteric Ebb, you play the role of The Cleric, an ostensible agent of the government who has been sent in to investigate an explosion in a local teahouse. As befits a CRPG hero, whether or not you actually get stuck right in to this "main quest" is entirely up to you, because the small but well-crafted world of Esoteric Ebb certainly has lots of distractions. You do have a time limit, though; the setting is having its first ever democratic election in five days' time, and the current sitting government would really rather all this unpleasantness was quietly dealt with before that happens.

If you've never played Disco Elysium (or, indeed, games like it, since they appear to be Becoming a Thing right now) the simple pitch is this: they're a cross between classic "Infinity Engine" RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment and the like, with almost all of the combat removed, and a strong emphasis on the game responding to you a bit more like a human dungeon master during a tabletop gaming session would. That means all of your stats get a workout, with most sequences in the game involving either passive skill checks (which you will just automatically pass or fail based on your current stats) or active skill checks (where you roll a die and your stats can potentially boost or penalise the score).

Crucially, failure is not necessarily a bad thing, because it can lead to amusing situations or alternative solutions — much as real tabletop sessions are often at their best when things get a little improvisatory.

Skill checks are only half the story, though. The other defining feature of a game following the Disco Elysium mould is that your stats "talk" to you, reflecting your character's often conflicted inner monologues about the situations in which they find themselves. Exactly how helpful you will find these "Chimes", as Esoteric Ebb calls them, depends on those aforementioned passive skill checks; failure often means you misinterpret a situation, fail to notice something or do something clumsy, depending on the context, while success can mean anything positive: performing a complicated physical task correctly, finding just the right words to say in an awkward situation, feeling empathy for the person you're talking to.

Esoteric Ebb adds a few additional features atop this, too. One of the most notable is that you can examine any of the interactable characters, and a skill check of variable difficulty (with the exact stat being tested depending on the character you're examining) will determine how much information you can tell about them just from looking at them. Failing to pass the check at all means you just about notice their basic appearance; passing higher difficulty level checks will let you know their level, class, stats and even pieces of information they would rather remain hidden — you might recognise someone who is trying to conceal their identity, for example. These pieces of information can often be used in conversation.

Other interesting features are the interconnected web of quests in place of the usual quest journal; this indicates how various happenings around the city relate to one another, and upon successfully finishing one of the major quests, you then get to reflect on the situation and allow your stats to "debate" one another, with the eventual result being a nice chunk of experience and a new feat based on the eventual conclusion you came to. In this way, there's a real sense you're building your character just by playing the game; you do "level up" in a conventional RPG style, and you can increase one of your stats when you do so, but it's not just about gaining experience — and, indeed, given that it's a game where it's impossible to grind, you're best off just exploring the world and seeing what happens.

This can, of course, sometimes have fatal consequences in unusual ways. Thus far I have died from attempting to retrieve a shiny object that was stuck in a set of gears, which caused me to get crushed and then fall to my death just to make sure, and from being eaten by a "Roper" enemy hiding in the rocks. I also narrowly escaped death in the very first scene of the game, where I felt an uncontrollable urge to try and eat a path through a room-filling pile of apples, but thankfully my sense of self-preservation kicked in early enough to allow me to survive.

It's a really fun game, so long as you're on board with a slow pace. There are combat encounters in the game, but rather than being a matter of lining up and attacking or quasi-strategic combat, these instead unfold much like all the other encounters in the game: through skill checks, dialogue and choosing actions to take that are always more interesting than just pressing "attack".

I played for a good few hours this evening, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further. The full thing is apparently about 10-15 hours or so, so it's not a game that outstays its welcome. This, to me, is a selling point. It also means it's potentially replayable, and in a choice-heavy game like this, that's always a good thing.

So yeah. A confident thumbs-up from me on this one from my few hours with it this evening, then. Grab it on Steam (don't think there's any news of console or alternative PC storefront releases as yet) — it's 10% off until the 14th.

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The post #oneaday Day 636: Esoteric Ebb and Flow appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I say "finished" — I've beaten the four main episodes and seen both the "bad" and "good" endings. I haven't yet done the two extra episodes; it's getting late tonight, so I will likely save those for tomorrow.

I was initially dismayed that getting the "bad" ending is the result of making a choice halfway through the third episode that would seem to make narrative sense at the time, and a bit annoyed that correcting this "mistake" would involve having to replay half of the third episode and the finale half of the fourth episode — about 3 hours' gameplay in total. But then I figured that I was already invested in this story and game, so I might as well do it.

So I did it this evening — and I enjoyed it! It helped that for the finale chapter, I had unlocked one of the bonus weapons with infinite ammo, so this all but eliminated any worries over not having enough ammo for the final boss. You can only get a "C" rank for a chapter if you use a bonus weapon, but I was primarily in it for the story, so I wasn't particularly interested in getting a high rank. The additional "stuff" in the "good ending" was definitely worth the effort required.

For the unfamiliar, Resident Evil Revelations 2 determines which ending you will get based on which of the two playable characters finishes off a boss. This isn't a matter of simply fighting as the "correct" character, since there's a narrative consideration: throughout the relevant part of the game in question, only the "lead" character, recurring series heroine Claire Redfield, is able to use firearms, and her companion, Moira Burton, is traumatised from a past event and unable to even contemplate picking up a gun. During the sequence in question, Claire ends up pinned by the boss monster in its death throes, and you have the choice between either making her use her willpower to reach her dropped gun, or switching to Moira and giving her a nudge in the direction of overcoming her trauma.

Okay, yes, it's unrealistic and probably disrespectful to anyone suffering similar trauma, but it does make narrative sense for the more "dramatic" option — Moira overcoming her fear and blasting the shit out of the monster to save Claire — to be the "correct" choice that leads to the "good" ending. My initial frustration was down to the fact that I also felt it made sense for Claire to be the one to make the kill; as a generally nice human being, Claire would have respect for Moira's trauma and thus wouldn't want to make her pick up a gun if she didn't absolutely have to.

But part of Resident Evil Revelations 2's narrative concerns our responses to fear and trauma — the game's virus affects people differently according to how much fear they feel — and thus the concept of someone becoming stronger as a direct result of overcoming their fear, which is what is implied happens to Moira to allow her to survive being buried under a bunch of rubble, does make sense, in retrospect. And having to replay those two half-episodes didn't take that long altogether.

Anyway, I enjoyed Resident Evil Revelations 2 a whole lot! I think it's a very good Resident Evil game, and one I suspect often gets overlooked due to technically being a "spinoff". Its original release as a downloadable episodic game (remember that brief trend?) probably didn't help it either, but these days you can just buy the whole thing (including what used to be DLC) on a disc and enjoy it all in one go. And I recommend you do that, because it's a really great take on the series that strikes a good balance between the more action-oriented nature of post-4 Resident Evil games, and the traditional "survival horror" feel of the earlier titles.

Intrigued to try the extra episodes tomorrow, and then move on to Resident Evil 6. I understand people don't like Resident Evil 6 all that much, but as regular readers will know, I often take "people don't like this" as a challenge and do my best to find the good in it. Will I manage that with Resident Evil 6? I have no idea at this point — but if not, I can at least take solace from the fact that some of the series' most well-regarded recent entries await on the other side.

For now though, bed, and doubtless a few dreams about slobbering monsters.

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The post #oneaday Day 635: Revelated appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I forget why I pressed pause on Revelations 2, because returning to it now, I'm enjoying it a lot. I remember when Resident Evil 4 was first announced, I was skeptical about the series' apparent shift towards being more action-oriented, but the two Revelations games are underappreciated examples of this working really well, having shed the clunkiness from the original incarnations of Resident Evil 4 and 5 to behave a bit more like how we today understand a conventional third-person shooter to play.

That said, Revelations 2 doesn't feel like a relentless third-person shooter; it's nicely paced, with a nice ebb and flow between moments of quiet menace and dread, and moments of all-out action. It's still got enough "survival horror" in its DNA to make it so that if a zillion enemies are coming your way, the best thing to do is, in fact, to run rather than attempt to fight them all off, since standing your ground will almost certainly result in you running out of ammunition.

The two story threads, visiting many of the same locations six months apart, work well and are intriguing enough to keep things interesting, but the game never lets its narrative aspect overwhelm the gameplay side of things; this is a game where it feels like playing the game is the important bit, and a snippet of story is your reward for succeeding. Over the years, I've had changing thoughts about the relationship between story and narrative, and I'm still not sure I have one, single coherent position — it generally depends what mood I'm in — but at the moment, I'm very much enjoying the fact that in Resident Evil Revelations 2, you spend the majority of your time actually doing stuff.

Also the game fully embraces the cheese factor. One of the first lines in the game features an admirably excruciating pun about terrorism that part of me can't quite believe made it into the final script, and frequently throughout the rest of the game, characters reference some of the most notorious moments in the early games' terrible dialogue sequences. Yes, that includes "master of unlocking" and "Jill sandwich" — albeit it's "Claire sandwich" here.

Another nice thing about Resident Evil Revelations 2 is that, much like earlier entries in the series, the whole thing has no shame whatsoever about being a video game. Finish an episode and you unlock special "Countdown" and "Invisible" modes, challenging you to make it through the same scenarios with special conditions. The real long-term appeal comes from the "Raid" mode, though, which is a development of something introduced in the first Revelations. Here, you take control of a character in a series of completely narrative-free, arcade-style challenges and battle for high scores, power-ups and goodies. You can play it multiplayer, too, and I bet it's a ton of fun to do so — maybe one day I might actually get to try it with someone, although nailing anyone down for a multiplayer session of something these days is, much like anything else involving social interaction, like pulling teeth.

Anyway, regardless, I'm having a lot of fun with Revelations 2 right now. I'm just about to start the fourth and final episode this evening, then after that I'll have to decide if I want to fiddle around with some of the extra modes, or move right on to Resident Evil 6. I know people don't like Resident Evil 6 very much, but I am curious to play it — and if I'm doing the whole series, I might as well give the less popular entries a chance. (For the record, so far my least favourite by far has been Resident Evil 5, which does not surprise me, given its less than stellar reputation. But I was at least open to trying it, and I didn't hate it by any means.)

On that note, then, it's time to go… back to the mansion! Wait, no, that's something else.

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The post #oneaday Day 634: Revelations... too appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I just wanted to talk about the package generally this evening, and a little about Night Manor, the game that I've played through this evening. It's an adventure game in the mould of Icom Simulations' adventure games (Shadowgate, Uninvited, Deja Vu and the like) but, like most of UFO 50's other games, with a few subtle modernisations to make it a tad less frustrating — like not being able to die permanently.

The thing that impresses me about UFO 50 the most is not just the fact that it's a collection of 50 excellent games, it's that each and every one of these games, in its own way, pays absolutely perfect homage to a particular aspect of retro gaming. In the case of Night Manor, it's clear that the whole thing was an Icom Simulations homage from the moment the opening line began "The last thing you remember is…" — which is the opener for pretty much all of the old games it's paying tribute to.

The most astonishing thing about the package as a whole is that all the games feel fully fleshed out in their own right. Sure, some are fairly short, but so were real games from the '80s. I haven't played any of the RPGs from the collection as yet, so it will be interesting to see if those feel like they're "rushing" through, or if have a decent amount of substance to them. But definitely when it comes to things like arcade-style games and adventures, it absolutely was not at all unusual for a game to be over within a couple of hours — sometimes less.

Of course, real retro games — and, indeed, many of UFO 50's titles — are designed to be replayed and enjoyed over and over again, particularly where there is a skill-based element that rewards the player with score or something similar. Even Night Manor in UFO 50 has a certain amount of replay value — alternative endings for beating the game without suffering any unfortunate mishaps, an outright alternative solution, and even a secret mode accessible via a "terminal" command that presents you with "a more lighthearted version" of the game. And, indeed, there are several older retro games that I have played over and over again, simply because I enjoy them — see: various Sierra and LucasArts adventures, to name just a few.

UFO 50 really is an absolute masterclass in game design, because it demonstrates both an understanding of where video games were in the past, and how they've evolved over time. The result, a collection of fake retro-style games designed with subtle modern sensibilities baked into them, is a truly wonderful piece of interactive entertainment that I anticipate I'm going to be spending a lot of time with over the coming months.

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The post #oneaday Day 628: Return to UFO 50 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Let's ponder the other things I've got on the go, then.

First up is Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which, I don't know, just hasn't clicked with me in quite the same way as some of the other entries in the series. I feel like it's succumbed a little to the "bloat" that a lot of modern games end up with, boasting myriad collectables and optional little bits and pieces to make you feel like you haven't really beaten the game unless you've done all the optional stuff. And the optional stuff just… well, it isn't really very fun. I might just plough on with the story — which I am enjoying, at least — and leave it at that. I want to punch whoever decided that the documents you find around the levels are called "Readables", though. "Documents" or "Files" would have been perfectly fine.

Next up is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I actually haven't really touched since before Christmas, but I hadn't really got that far in the story with anyway. I was enjoying it a decent amount and had got a fair amount done; the thing I particularly like about that game is something I also appreciated in Breath of the Wild: at any given time, you can just start walking in a direction and you'll stumble across something interesting, with many of these things being unscripted. I like this! It works well for Zelda. But, like its predecessor, the sheer size of the game is a little overwhelming, and starting it gives one the feeling that one will never, ever finish it. But I did finish Breath of the Wild — not to 100% completion or anything, because that seems like a fool's game — and so I'm sure I can do the same with Tears of the Kingdom.

Next up is Lost Odyssey, which I've been meaning to get to for ages. I was having a real hankering for just a straightforward, conventional RPG, so I thought it was time to kick it off. I really like what I've seen so far, though the first two bosses are absolutely brutal, which gave me a certain amount of pause. I understand that these two bosses are notoriously difficult, and the game should be a bit of a smoother ride from hereon, so given that I've been enjoying what I've played so far, this is probably going to be the "priority" for the immediate future.

Then there's Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, which I started playing at the end of last year and was enjoying, but burnt myself out on a bit by getting a little obsessive over level grinding. I don't quite feel ready to go back to that one just yet.

At the same time as all this, I also kind of fancy playing a gridder dungeon crawler. But then I worry that having too many RPGs on the go will overload my brain. So that's probably not a good idea.

I think my immediate priorities are going to be Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus to get it ticked off the list so I can write about it, and Lost Odyssey, because that's probably the thing I'm enjoying the most at the moment. Tears of the Kingdom can be my "backup" game for when I don't fancy either of those things. And I shall repeatedly tell myself not to feel any guilt if there are evenings when I just feel like going and playing Sega Master System games all night.

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The post #oneaday Day 626: Restless appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've known for a long time that Bussler was intensely dissatisfied with the way the online landscape had been going — and how it had meant that something he once clearly loved doing had become something that it felt like it was pointless to carry on with. After he stopped doing Classic Game Room as his main thing, he tried various other projects online, but has seemingly met with nothing but frustration with pretty much every one of them.

I still follow his Patreon for updates on what he's up to, and today he mentioned that people should have a look at his website, classicgameroom.com, to see what he's up to, since he doesn't really do social media any more. And his FAQs made me feel very sad indeed.

The question he gets more than anything else, I reckon, is "is Classic Game Room coming back?" and his answer is simple:

No. The Classic Game Room video game review series is permanently discontinued. There are no plans to bring the video series back in any way on any platform.

He expands on the reasons thus:

After the YouTube channel was largely demonetized, people stopped watching in favour of influencers and short-form videos. No other formats seemed to work. After a few different format changes, the show is now discontinued.

The cynics would say that this was just Bussler failing to adapt to the changing media landscape online, and that's not an incorrect statement to make, but the thing that makes me so sad about all this is that there is demand for stuff that isn't influencer-led short-form content. Just not enough to be commercially viable, unfortunately; not enough for one of the OG online video creators to want to continue with the thing that made him famous — and which, I suspect, is at this point completely unknown to a couple of generations of people.

Bussler worked hard on Classic Game Room and his other projects, and it must have been so frustrating for him to continually feel his efforts knocked back — particularly when he tried all manner of different things after it seemed that Classic Game Room had, for one reason or another, fallen out of favour.

So I'm sad for him. I'm sad that he has felt the need to, in his words, "permanently retire from filmmaking, game journalism and animation". At the same time, I completely understand why he has taken that decision. Again, in his own words:

Mark spends his free time reading and biking instead of using garbage social media apps. He has no patience for algorithms and prefers looking at old-fashioned paper.

I completely understand why one would want to retire from the Internet in this age of relentless, pointless, disposable short-form content. I often feel like I want to do so, too. I've spent many years carving out a little corner of the Internet that I can feel proud of with places like this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, but sometimes it all feels incredibly pointless.

I'm sad to see someone whose work I enjoyed, and that I respected immensely, be so completely and utterly defeated by what passes for "culture" online today. I'm sad because I know how he feels. I understand why he's so frustrated. And I don't know how we fix this — or if it's even possible at this point.

Perhaps it's all part of getting old. You pass beyond a point of relevance, and the world feels like it isn't "yours" any more. Perhaps we all reach this point. But that seems like a bit of an inefficient way for everyone to live their lives. Surely there's a way for different types of "stuff" to coexist, without everything having to be dominated by whatever the latest "viral" bullshit is?

Apparently not. But oh well. I'm not going anywhere just yet. Even if no-one's reading, watching or listening, I still enjoy the act of creating something. It gives me some satisfaction — and it's perhaps for the best that I've never got to a point where I'd be tempted to try and use online content creation (ugh) as my main source of income.

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The post #oneaday Day 625: It sucks to see someone defeated appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I bowed out of the conversation early on because it was pretty clear from the outset that the person attempting to start this argument was not going to listen to any viewpoint other than their own, even when it was coming from someone who lived through the experience of that game coming out, and they just wanted to hate on something that had, in recent years, become fashionable to bash.

Now, I'm not going to attempt to convince you one way or the other about Final Fantasy VIII at this point. It's one of those games that you either "get" or you don't, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't "get" it. But to extend "I don't get this" out to "everyone everywhere always hated this" is ridiculous. It's absolute revisionist history, and it's something that drives me absolutely bonkers about online discourse over video games these days.

It happens with more recent games, too. Take Mario Kart World, a game which does some really interesting things with the Mario Kart formula, and one which is designed with so much polish that I really can't take anyone who says it is a "bad" game seriously. And yet to some folks it is "the worst Mario Kart there has ever been" and, again, "everyone hated it". No, no they did not.

Or another example: I saw a post just this evening that implied that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was a bad game, primarily due to the fact that none of the original team who worked on the first ever The Legend of Zelda game (which is celebrating an anniversary milestone right now) worked on it. I take two issues with this: one, that everyone who worked on the original The Legend of Zelda is probably either an old man or dead at this point, and thus should be left to get on with their life in peace, and two, Echoes of Wisdom wasn't a bad game! Not even a little bit!

EDIT: The account in question has since clarified that they meant it was "sad" that Echoes of Wisdom was the first game without any of the original team that was involved, not that they thought it was a "sad" game due to it not being any good. I have left the preceding paragraph as-is to take ownership of my own misunderstanding — and to acknowledge that I wasn't alone in it, hence the account's clarification of what they said.

And don't even get me started on Final Fantasy XIII.

There is one thing that all these examples have in common, though, and that is the fact that all of them do something different to what is expected as "the norm" in their respective series. For Final Fantasy VIII and XIII, this should be no surprise to anyone who has ever paid attention to the series and its core philosophy of "if it's not new, it's not Final Fantasy" (as I wrote about nearly ten years ago right here), but, to this day, people are confused by the fact that Final Fantasy VIII and XIII are very unconventional in a lot of ways. (Interestingly, very few people seem to have a problem with Final Fantasy XII these days, despite, in many ways, it being a way more significant disruption from the series "usual format" than many other entries.)

For Mario Kart World and Echoes of Wisdom, those two games were always in a bit of a no-win situation. Do something the same as previous games and they would be regarded as pointless and unambitious. Do something a bit different, as they both did, and people complain that they're not like all the other games in the series! Seriously daft.

The most annoying thing about this constant revisionist history is that it makes it impossible to have sensible discussions about these games. Pretty much as soon as it became clear someone was spoiling for a fight over having the "correct" opinion about Final Fantasy VIII (and what "everybody" thought of it, apparently), the entire thread derailed and became impossible to have a reasonable discussion in. Anyone who attempted to highlight the things that they, in fact, liked about it was shouted down, and it just became pointless to even try. I've seen enough threads like that in my time to know that it really wasn't worth trying in the first place, which is why I bowed out of it early.

When it comes to Final Fantasy VIII, I'll just leave you with one little story from my past. In the period between Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII coming out, our friendship group had a perpetually running joke with the local computer shop owner, in which literally every time we went in there (and we went in there a lot), we would ask him if he knew when Final Fantasy VIII was coming out, to which he would reply by mumbling something mostly incoherent about "stocks". This became such a notorious exchange among our friendship group that during our obsession with the Klik and Play games-making software, one of our number immortalised the discussion in his project Resident Evil EX, by incorporating a fully-voiced scene in which the protagonist, Agent Wesley Wilson, would walk into a computer store in the in-game mall, ask if the shopkeeper knew when Final Fantasy VIII was coming out, to which he would reply "asfhgblaskbkljblkl stocks".

That's how excited we were for Final Fantasy VIII to come out. And when it eventually did come out, I had people in my university room almost every night to come watch and see what would happen next.

So don't fuckin' tell me that "everyone always hated" something. Because, inevitably, it isn't true. In pretty much every instance like this, what the person saying that "everyone always hated" something means is "I didn't really like this" and "I'm unwilling to entertain the possibility that anyone else did".

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The post #oneaday Day 624: Revisionist gaming history appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the upcoming videos, there's a couple of Master System games involved. The Sega Master System is a platform that I'm very fond of that doesn't get nearly enough love — and which I haven't spent nearly enough time fiddling with, either. So these two games will likely be the first of many in total. I'm looking forward to exploring the library further, because as a Japanese console that was particularly popular in Europe and failed to make any sort of impact whatsoever in America, it's a thoroughly interesting platform.

It's one of those situations where I'm not entirely sure why it never broke America, either. In technical terms, it's quite a bit better than the NES, but as numerous generations of console hardware dominated by Nintendo have shown, it's not always the most powerful system that wins the race. You've gotta have the games, you've gotta have the cultural penetration, and you've gotta have a lot of luck.

I guess one could argue that the NES has more "iconic" games — there are three Super Mario Bros. games alone on it — but the Master System has some solid versions of Sega arcade classics, and some truly excellent Sonic the Hedgehog games. While not as fancy-looking and sounding as their 16-bit counterparts, many argue that the Master System Sonic games are, in fact, the better entries in the series. I haven't quite made my mind up in that regard — I do love a 16-bit Sonic — but I do know from covering a huge heap of Sonic games a few years back on MoeGamer that the 8-bit Sonic games are very good indeed. (Just avoid the Game Gear version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2.)

Anyway, the Master System games I covered today come from two extremes of the "spectrum", if you want to call it that. There's one game that I imagine is pretty readily available for not much money (although interestingly CEX doesn't appear to have it listed) and another that is notoriously rare and expensive. After beating it in half an hour today, I'm glad I haven't spent £400 on it. It was fun for that half an hour, at least.

So yeah. Those videos, along with an Atari 8-bit port of a true classic, are on the way for the coming week. Watch out for them and please enjoy them when they're live! Or don't, if you don't want to, particularly after what I said yesterday. But it'd be nice if you did. My channel's over here, if you've never paid it a visit.

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The post #oneaday Day 618: Triple threat appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The reason these games are so accessible is because they implement the sort of basic understanding of the rules that can be picked up very quickly and don't get bogged down in the intricacies. They don't assume knowledge beyond "man kick ball, score point" and don't throw you in at the deep end with a series of impenetrable-seeming options that, as a beginner, you have no idea what to do with.

I've felt like this about American football titles in particular for a very long time, ever since I first played the original John Madden Football on Sega Mega Drive all those years ago. Yes, the parallaxing, quasi-3D field was super-impressive, and back then that was reason enough to boot the game up, but as soon as those "play selection" screens popped up, I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to do with them.

And what's worse, the documentation for those games doesn't explain anything about it, either — meaning that, for someone who has only ever been vaguely aware of American football as a sport that exists, and who occasionally was allowed to stay up late with his Dad to watch it on Channel 4, there is seemingly no real route "in" to picking up and enjoying these games. And, rather than modern games getting more accessible and inclusive, they've just become more and more complex over time.

I feel the same about wrestling games. The last time I played a wrestling game was Smackdown 2 on the original PlayStation, and I didn't entirely understand what was going on there. Oh, sure, I knew what the buttons did, but not how you were actually supposed to use those buttons effectively to demonstrate your skill at the game.

I've tried wrestling games that came out both before and after it, and I have not found a single one where I felt comfortable that I could explain to anyone else "how to play". At least Smackdown 2 had that incredible character creator, and to be honest, that was where the majority of the appeal was — we had many a drunken night at university making digital recreations of people we knew, cartoon characters and, on one memorable occasion where my friend managed to get the sliders to go outside of their usual ranges, an absolutely horrific looking monster known as "The Freak", who would burst on stage with his iconic war cry, "Baggogh!", and stare his opponents down with a growled "Durgogh."

Every so often, I get a strange urge to want to learn how to play either American football and/or wrestling games. And every time I am hit with the same issue: there does not appear to be any good way to "learn" them. There do not appear to be any helpful guides online that don't assume you already know how to play the games (and have an in-depth knowledge of the sports themselves); the documentation for them is threadbare at best and non-existent at worst; and any "tutorial" or "training" modes in the games focus on telling you which button does what, rather than actually how to play effectively.

I feel like there would be a good article or two in learning how to play these games! I could even tell other people how to learn how to play them, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who has looked at these two genres (and other, related types of game like, say, baseball, or football management) and thought "I'd bet I'd like that if I understood it"!

Only trouble is, I don't understand them. And I don't even know where to begin doing something about that!

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The post #oneaday Day 613: The impenetrability of certain sports games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm not sure exactly what it is I like so much about these multi-disciplinary sports games. They are, in essence, just a collection of minigames, and some don't get more adventurous than asking you to tap a button or waggle a joystick very fast. But I have always enjoyed them a lot — at least in part because they tend to simulate sports that you don't otherwise get much of an opportunity to engage with in the video game space.

One of my favourite Olympics video games was Sega's official Tokyo 2020 game — released just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the "real" Tokyo Olympics were postponed. This was a huge amount of arcade-style fun, made all the better by the fact that you could create custom characters. Yes, multiple; while you spent most of the game playing as your one "main" athlete, you could also create a team of other athletes who would show up in events that required multiple participants, such a rugby sevens, soccer, judo and suchlike.

What made this even more fun is that Sega decided to err on the side of "silly" to a certain extent, so these characters were somewhat cartoonish in their proportions, and you could unlock and dress them up in all sorts of thoroughly silly outfits as well as vaguely plausible athletic gear. If you wanted someone to enter the swimming competitions dressed like a spaceman, you absolutely could do that.

These games were always great fun with friends, too. While it's been a very long time since I had the opportunity to play one of these games with other people, I have very fond memories of enjoying them together when I was younger.

One of my favourite memories in this regard was the first time I went up to the Edinburgh Festival with the university theatre group. On my first night there, I felt like I might have made a bit of a mistake coming along, because my social anxiety was making it enormously difficult to involve myself with the other members socialising. I actually ended up sitting up late, in tears, over the whole situation.

Yes, I know I said this was a "favourite" memory; I'm getting to that.

Two of the theatre group members found me in the corridor being thoroughly sorry for myself and took pity on me. They sat with me, helped reassure me that people did like me and appreciated my presence, and then they played some International Track and Field on PlayStation with me. I chose to play as Germany, and attempted to enter my name as "HELMUT" because I thought that was funny, but there were only enough letters to put "HELMU". My nickname within Theatre Group remained "Helmu" for several years, until it was replaced with "Beast Man". That's probably a story for another day.

Anyway, I will always be extremely grateful to those two lovely people from Theatre Group — known colloquially to everyone as Stiffy and Des — for taking the time to bring me under their wings. That night, I actually stayed in their room instead of the one I'd been assigned, and it was enormously comforting. It was definitely a turning point, and means that International Track and Field, as relatively a minor part as it had played in proceedings, will always be rather special to me.

That got well off the point, didn't it? But still. I like Olympics games, be they summer or winter-themed, and I think what we have there is definitive proof that they can bring people together — just like, in theory, the real Olympics.

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The post #oneaday Day 611: The sad loss of the Olympic video game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earth Must Die! casts you in the role of VValak Lizardtongue, third in line to the throne of the planet Tyryth and its empire, the Ascendancy. After tricking his two brothers into murdering one another, VValak ends up in charge, and inadvertently causes the Terranoid forces of Earth to invade. That's as far as I've got, but as the name suggests, one can expect that the remainder of the game will involve VValak finding a way to get revenge on the Terranoids and get his empire back. Or maybe not…?

It's an adventure game, but with a few interesting twists from the usual formula. You have direct control of your character's movement, and interacting with hotspots is done using a cursor that can be popped up. It's clearly designed to be played with a controller and works well like that, but can also be played with WSAD movement controls and a mouse cursor. I think I might have preferred a simple mouse-only interface for its non-controller implementation, but not enough to want to kick off about it or anything.

VValak, as an arrogant (wannabe) tyrant, refuses to touch anything himself because poor people might have touched it before him. Thus you have to solve all the situations in the game without VValak ever getting his own hands dirty. This sometimes involves using his companion robot and former nursemaid, Milky, to perform various actions, and sometimes involves convincing other characters in the scene that they should carry out your orders. It's an interesting mechanic that sidesteps the usual inventory puzzles.

Like I say, I'm not too far in the story as yet so I am hesitant to say too much more in that regard, but one thing I will highlight is the incredible voice cast, which includes numerous big names in British comedy such as Alex Horne, Tamsin Grieg, Matthew Holness, Alasdair Beckett-King, Don Warrington, Mike Wozniak and many more. Plus, of course, Ben Starr is in it, because Ben Starr is the Nolan North of the 2020s (complimentary). That cast might not mean much to anyone who isn't British, but you should know that this is a full-on celebrity cast of comedy royalty, and it's incredible to see them all coming together for a video game.

The net result is that the game sounds like a late-night Channel 4 comedy show (complimentary), and it has some really beautiful animated 2D art to go along with it. It's very much designed along the lines of games like Discworld II, with large, cartoonish sprites and plenty of close-up animations — and much of the humour will be familiar to those who enjoyed Terry Pratchett's work, too.

That's about all I want to say for now. It's an easy recommend if you enjoy silly games that will make you laugh, and is a seriously impressive project from Size Five in terms of scope. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in over the next few days, and, as I say, I will have a full report, likely on MoeGamer and YouTube, once I'm done with it!

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The post #oneaday Day 599: Earth Must Die! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's been a lot of grumbling over a new game called Highguard just recently. I don't really know what Highguard is, which is part of the problem — apparently it was initially shown off at The Game Awards last year, then just went pretty much radio silent until its… launch? Now? Something like that?

From what I can make out, Highguard is a live service multiplzzzzzzzzzzz — ah, so that's why I haven't really been following it. But that's not precisely what I want to talk about today. I, instead, want to talk about the discussions that have been happening over the last few days on the subject of coverage of Highguard.

It started with an op-ed over on IGN written by Senior Editor Simon Cardy, whose article Can We Stop Dunking on Highguard Before It's Even Out, Please? is fairly self-explanatory in terms of its core thesis. Cardy argues that it's annoying when a game is seemingly randomly picked as a whipping-boy and becomes the butt of jokes before anyone has actually gone hands-on with it and is thus in a position to comment on it from an informed, experienced perspective.

I get this. I kind-of-sort-of agree with it. It is annoying when there's something you're interested in, and all you can find in terms of coverage is How Bad Does This Game Look?! clickbait. And it is a bit daft for people to be pre-judging Highguard based on a single trailer and a remarkably quiet marketing department.

At the same time, as this piece by Autumn Wright argues, there's a strong argument to be made that the press covering a particular medium is under no obligation to remain what they describe as "poptimistic". It is not the press' job to go to bat for a particular game or company — especially not ahead of its release — and there are a lot of things about Highguard that do warrant discussion. Exactly why has its marketing been so non-existent? Does the world really need yet another live service multiplzzzzzzzzz? I'm so uninterested in the game as a whole I can't even think of a third possible question, but I'm sure there's something else that needs asking.

The problem, as ever, is in how different people see the role of the enthusiast press.

Some see it as an extension of marketing — and indeed, there are plenty of outlets that operate like this. There are plenty of outlets that have since gone under that operate like this, and there will be more in the future. It's a bit of an occupational hazard; by engaging with the standard news-preview-review cycle, you are part of a Marketing Plan, whether you want to be or not. And that's always been the norm for the games press, dating right back to magazines. It was never really questioned all that much until relatively recently; people wanted to know what was coming up, and they wanted to know if the thing they had thought looked cool for the last six months actually ended up being any good or not.

Others see it as fulfilling a critical role — critical in the sense of "administering criticism", not as in "really important", though the people who feel this way would probably argue that also. People who feel this way are interested in the stories behind the games and how games can fit into broader cultural commentary. They ask what particular games can tell us about society, and what the artistic meaning behind a work — both intended by the author and perceived by the audience — might be.

The challenge, of course, is access. The former group gets access to games because they tacitly agree to being part of the Marketing Plan. They get invited to press events to try out a new game; they get sent preview and review codes early; they agree to embargoes so the publisher of a game, not the press outlet, remains in control of the coverage. The latter group, meanwhile, tends to have to fend for itself to a certain degree. This gives them a lot more freedom in terms of what they cover and how, of course, but they can't rely on having access — whether that means "getting an early copy of a game" or "being able to pick the lead writer's brain without a PR person breathing down their neck".

I don't really know what the answer is, or even if there is a satisfactory one. I don't quite fall into either of the above categories with what I do over on MoeGamer, but then that's a site by an individual run as a passion project, not a commercial venture. As such, I have the freedom to pick and choose what I cover, and to exclusively concentrate on things that I, personally, feel have some worth and value — or, at the very least, are interesting enough to want to talk about. That means my site skews positive, which is anathema to some people, but I'm not there to do a PR company's bidding — nor am I there out of any obligation to criticise things just because they "need criticising". I simply choose to focus all my attention on games that I think are worthwhile, and that I think more people should check out.

I hate to sound like I'm "both sides-ing" the issue, but the reality is, there are valid points from all angles here. It is silly to pre-judge Highguard with little to no information — or perhaps it's more accurate to say it's silly to make assumptions about what Highguard will be with little to no information. At the same time, though, outlets have no obligation to hype up a new release — and especially, one would argue, when the marketing department doesn't appear to have been doing its job at all.

This is, I can guarantee, the only thing I am going to write about Highguard. Because the one thing I have managed to glean from the discussion over it is that I don't really give a shit about it. So I'll just say I hope it's as good/bad as you were anticipating, and leave it at that.

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The post #oneaday Day 598: Poptimism appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I think the most valuable thing about the way I've set mine up is that it is now effectively an interactive reference library of video games from the Atari 2600 right up until the PS1, N64 and Saturn. I invested in a large amount of external storage early on precisely so I could load it up with absolutely everything I might ever want (and quite a lot of things I will probably never want) and thus never have to worry about tracking down ROMs and disc/disk images ever again. (Until I discover a New Favourite Console, of course. Which has been known to happen.)

This is a useful resource both for my own curiosity and for my day job. We're working on something thoroughly interesting in the latter regard right now — no, you won't get any hints here — and an important part of that is ensuring that the project is accurate to the original version. Having the MiSTer Multisystem 2 up and running right next to me in my study means that, at a moment's notice, I can flip it on, check something and capture video for my colleagues to compare to. This is a good thing.

Having a storage device full to bursting with ROMs and disc/disk images, of course, runs the risk of the dreaded "analysis paralysis". But at the same time, if someone says something like "oh, I used to really like Enduro Racer on the Master System", I can pull that up and check it out immediately, knowing that the experience I'm having is authentic to the original hardware, and all without having to swap around cables, power adapters and controllers.

I have a lot of original hardware, which I like owning. But pretty much all of it is now primarily on display on the shelves rather than being used directly — because with very few exceptions, the MiSTer Multisystem 2 works just as well as the "real thing", with little in the way of compromise. And some improvements in some cases; it's absolutely no contest between a modern 8bitdo controller and the dreadful original Sega Master System joypad.

The one thing that is a compromise is the tactile nature of using original computers. Different computers had their own different case designs and keyboards, and thus a distinctive feel to using them. I have the 8bitdo mechanical C64-style keyboard as a suitably "retro" input device for computers, and it's great — but it does mean I miss out on little things like the distinctive shape of the Atari ST's function keys or the unique keys on certain systems' keyboards. (And documentation on exactly what these unique keys are mapped to on a modern keyboard is remarkably lacking, it has to be said!)

You also, of course, miss the fun tactile aspect of working with physical media. There's still something undeniably lovely about putting a cartridge in a slot or loading up a disk and listening to the whirr-snark of a floppy drive, and it will be a sad day when no-one remembers doing that. But with original hardware — particularly floppy disks — becoming more unreliable and prices for second-hand copies of retro games going through the absolute roof, at this point attempting to collect games for old computers and consoles feels like a complete waste of money.

Meanwhile, I have not regretted a single pound I have spent on my MiSTer setup. And, with any luck, given the lack of moving mechanical parts in it, it will last for a good long while, too.

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The post #oneaday Day 597: The MiSTer as reference library appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

LucasArts stuff was just better than Sierra stuff, at least in the early days. Early on, LucasArts' developers decided to take the things that annoyed people about Sierra games — chiefly the ability to die and get yourself into unwinnable situations — and throw them out of the window. Far from removing all challenge from the games as a result, this just made them much more fun to play — although it's interesting to note quite how short a lot of those games are by modern standards.

One thing to remember is that when we were playing stuff like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Internet access wasn't particularly widespread. Hell, GameFAQs wouldn't exist for another few years, even if you could get on the Internet; some resourceful folks were writing walkthroughs and posting them on places like CompuServe's GAMERS forum (a frequent online hangout for myself), but for the most part, when it came to solving a tricky game, you had two options: figure it out yourself, or wait for a magazine to print a walkthrough.

This meant that games that are maybe three or four hours long start to finish could actually take days, weeks or even months to complete. We had a lot more patience for that sort of thing back then — although I do recall finding it quite eye opening when I bought a brand new copy of Full Throttle, played it for two hours with my brother and we rolled credits on it.

Today, point and click adventures are still going strong. Press and public alike have enjoyed saying the genre is "dead" for many years, but in reality it's been nothing of the sort. What changed is the part of the market that point-and-click adventures occupied; while once a Sierra or LucasArts game would be considered a "big release" in a similar fashion to today's triple-A titles, after the turn of the millennium they became more niche interest affairs.

I'm not entirely sure why, either; they hadn't fundamentally changed what they were doing, or their core appeal elements. Although thinking about it, that's probably precisely why they became more niche interest affairs. From the late '90s onwards, the "upper" (for want of a better term) end of the market was going 3D, exclusively. And adventure games, up until this point, had been resolutely 2D affairs, tending to be showcases for beautiful rotoscoped or hand-drawn animation, painted backdrops and suchlike. In the age of PlayStation, that suddenly wasn't fashionable any more for a variety of reasons — and the few attempts to bring point-and-click adventures into the 3D realm had been met with a mixed response.

As with most niche interest things, an enthusiast community developed, with many of them rallying around a piece of software called Adventure Game Studio. Initially DOS-based, this was a tool that allowed anyone with a creative mind and the ability to produce basic graphics to put together a point-and-click adventure. It took effort, mind; this wasn't a "game generator", but a fully featured game engine, suitable for creating point-and-click games similar in style to Sierra, LucasArts and any number of other models.

Remarkably, Adventure Game Studio is still going to this day — and the enthusiast community is still using it. Only now, we see a lot more commercial releases from independent developers. And even more remarkably, the stuff being put out today by small outfits is pretty consistently better than anything from the genre's supposed "golden age" of the mid '90s.

There are more point-and-click adventure games that have been released in the last few years than there ever were back in the '90s. And they're really, really good. For just a few recommendations: the Kathy Rain series is an excellent series of investigative adventures; Old Skies by Wadjet Eye Games is an incredibly thoughtful narrative-centric game with a time travel hook; Lamplight City by Grundislav Games is what happens if you take Gabriel Knight and stick it in a steampunk setting; Brok the InvestiGator by CowCat Games is a brilliant, lengthy animated adventure with optional beat 'em up mechanics.

Even better, these games are a lot longer than their mid '90s counterparts. Old Skies took me a good 12 hours. The two Kathy Rain games are about 8 hours each. I'm 7 hours into Lamplight City so far and on the fourth chapter of five. I'm not sure how long Brok was but I have a feeling it was pushing 20 hours.

"Length of play" isn't the sole metric by which you should measure a game's worth, of course. But what a longer game means in the adventure game space is a more detailed, in-depth story to explore and enjoy. The difference between watching a movie and a whole season of a TV show. Both have their place, of course — I'm not averse to a short adventure game, still, and frequently go back to some '90s faves — but it's always nice when one of these modern games really gives you something to get your teeth into properly.

Best of all, though, is that there's loads of them. The ones I've mentioned above are just scratching the surface. As someone who has always loved this type of game, that excites me. And I've really been enjoying playing Lamplight City of late in particular. More on that over on MoeGamer when I've beaten it, though….

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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The post #oneaday Day 594: Point. Click. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Ubisoft has announced today that they are cancelling six games, delaying seven more, closing two studios and forcing everyone back to five days a week in the office. Their justification for this is the usual mealy-mouthed, weasel word-filled business-speak nonsense:

In the context of a persistently more selective market as illustrated by the last quarter, and as part of the finalization of the Group's new operating model, Ubisoft has conducted a thorough review of its content pipeline over December and January. This has led to the strategic decision to refocus its portfolio, reallocate resources and comprehensively revise its roadmap over the next three years. This will support the objective to return to exceptional levels of quality on the Open-World Adventure segment and step-change the Group's position in the GaaS-native experiences segment, as illustrated by the recently acquired project, March of Giants.

In other words, Ubisoft is going back to focusing almost exclusively on the type of game people have been taking the piss out of them for years for — there's a reason people refer to open-world games where you hoover up icons from a map as "Ubisoft Game #[bigNumber]". And, when they're not doing that, they're going to jump headfirst into the exceedingly volatile live service arena, where the last decade or so has clearly demonstrated that if your name isn't Fortnite or Roblox you are almost certainly going to release an enormously expensive colossal failure of a game that will be shuttered in less than a year.

To put it another way, for every Fortnite there are hundreds of Concords. And most of them don't get the coverage Concord did. They just release to zero excitement, zero acclaim and zero passion from anyone, then quietly die in obscurity, destined to be forgotten forever.

All of this seems extraordinarily stupid, particularly since one of the cancelled games was the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, whose original incarnation is one of the company's most well-regarded games from years gone by, and a title that would have doubtless reviewed and performed well among today's audience. But no; because it "does not meet the new enhanced quality as well as more selective portfolio prioritization criteria at Group level", it is kaputt. It is no more. It is an ex-game.

Ubisoft has, of course, been undergoing something of a turbulent time, so these "strategic decisions" to "refocus" (read: lay people off) are not a surprise to see. Business decisions like this are, at times, regrettably unavoidable.

However, what is eminently avoidable is charging headlong into sectors that the general public have clearly indicated that they're sick of. Not only "the Open-World Adventure segment" and "GaaS-native experiences", but also, unsurprisingly, they slipped this little bit into their "revised roadmap":

The new operating model will further empower the execution of the Group's strategy, centred on Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences, supported by targeted investments, deeper specialization, and cutting-edge technology, including accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI.

There it is! Of course there's fucking generative AI involved, because why wouldn't there be? The industry that is losing billions of dollars a year and is pretty much universally hated by anyone whose job isn't just "shareholder" is clearly the right thing for this ailing company to focus on! Surely the generator of what is commonly agreed to be called "slop" these days will help us make better games! Everyone loves AI! Don't they?

(silence)

(a quiet cough)

God fucking dammit. Living in this century is so fucking frustrating, like, all of the time. I haven't been much of a fan of Ubisoft stuff for numerous years at this point, but all this just makes it abundantly clear that they have zero respect for any of the actual creative work that goes into games. Look again at those quotes above, and count how many times artistry and creativity are mentioned.

That's right. Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

At least they're being honest about it, I guess.

I wonder how long they have left?

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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The post #oneaday Day 593: A meaningfully revised roadmap appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One thing I find quite interesting when looking at games from over the years is contemplating how, as time has gone on, we have become a lot more preoccupied with the "why" of what we are doing in a game than in the past. And, as part of these contemplations, I've come to realise that games which don't really give you much of a "why" beyond "this is what the game is" actually have their own very distinct appeal.

As a case in point, I've been playing some Nintendo 64 "collectathon" platformers recently. This is a type of game that very much fell out of favour at some point between the PlayStation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era and the PlayStation 2/Xbox/Gamecube age. There are still some folks making games like that — most notably Nintendo — but they are by no means as common as they used to be. And a lot of it, I think, comes down to the apparent expectation that everything must have some sort of narrative context or justification.

Now, I'll hold my hands up here and say that, in the past, I have been guilty of thinking that pretty much every game would be better if it had some sort of narrative context. In the earliest days of this blog, back when the people behind WordPress gave a shit about their community rather than going all-in on AI or whatever shit they're up to at the minute, I even had a post featured for making this very argument specifically about racing games — blissfully unaware, as I was at that point, of Namco's PC Engine conversion of their arcade game Final Lap Twin and the fact they added a Pokémon-ass RPG to it. I do actually still think there's scope for racing games with stories, but I also don't think all racing games need stories — and those which do have stories had better have bloody good ones if they expect me to sit through them rather than skipping right to the racing.

Err, what was I saying? Oh, right. Games didn't always feel the need to justify the things you were doing in the game in terms of narrative. Collectathon platformers are, in many ways, the quintessential example of this: they have characters, a world and indeed a plot, but none of those get in the way of the core "point" of the game: solving puzzles and overcoming challenges to acquire shiny things that let you access more of the game. No-one ever gave a shit about why Mario was collecting Power Stars in Super Mario 64, they just knew that he had to collect Power Stars, and that was enough.

This is one of the things I found quite refreshing about Donkey Kong Bananza recently. That's a game that strikes a very good balance between having an unfolding story and just giving you a basic objective to complete before getting out of your way and letting you accomplish it. For the vast majority of your time in Donkey Kong Bananza, you are looking for Banandium Gems. It doesn't matter why. Donkey Kong wants them, and that means you want them. That's all that matters. That's all that needs to matter.

I'm not saying that games with plots have no place. Hell, you know me, I'll gladly bury my head in a 100+ hour RPG, particularly if it makes me cry at least once along the way. But sometimes it's nice to play a game that is less concerned with wanting to be taken seriously as a great work of art or a masterpiece of characterisation and worldbuilding, and more with being a fun toy that just feels good to fiddle with.

I could have probably phrased that better. But I'm leaving it like that now, deliberately. And I'm off to go and acquire some more shiny things.

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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The post #oneaday Day 587: Why are you doing that? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There was a good post that went around earlier by the VTuber, journalist and activist Ana Valens, reflecting on her time as part of the games media landscape, and how she was part of the sector's slow decline into almost total irrelevance as SEO-baiting and click-chasing became the norm. I strongly encourage you to give it a read — you can do so by clicking here. Go on, I'll be here when you get back.

One of Ana's points in her piece was that as games media slowly circled the drain, particularly as groups such as Valnet and GAMURS started hoovering up once-respectable brands and then systematically destroying them one by one, a new type of "media" stepped in to take its place. This, of course, is the oft-trumpeted advent of YouTubers and streamers, whom many claim to find more "trustworthy" than the traditional games media in many cases — despite the obnoxious rise of the term "influencer", and the clearly documented use of "influencer marketing" being far more egregious than any sort of "paid reviews" that, in my experience, never actually took place when the traditional games press was at its peak.

But I'm not here to rant about the rise of YouTubers and streamers. They have their place — hell, I do a lot of stuff on YouTube and I've dabbled with streaming — but for me, they've never been an adequate replacement for having a publication that was "yours". Back in the '80s and '90s, this would be your magazine of choice: the one you would dutifully buy a copy of every month, or subscribe to if you could convince your parents to do so. As the new millennium rolled around and this World Wide Web thing became the norm — particularly as high-speed always-on broadband Internet established itself as the rule rather than the exception — print gave way to online, and we had some wonderful websites like 1up.com that were as much community as they were professional publication.

Sites like that still exist to a certain degree — I believe IGN and Gamespot still have a certain amount of social features, and the relaunched Giant Bomb is more community-focused than ever — but no site has ever managed to quite recapture that wonderful time: an age of personalities, of brave new frontiers in writing about video games, of figuring out exactly what the "games media" really was.

YouTubers and streamers don't quite replace that for me. Sure, it's nice to find someone who aligns with your values and tastes — and sometimes challenges them — but it's not quite the same as finding an entire publication, put together by a team of people, that resonates with you for one reason or another. There are YouTubers I watch fairly regularly, but I don't think of them at all in the same way as I do 1up.com in the early aughts, or favourite magazines like ACE, N64 Magazine and Electronic Gaming Monthly from the late '90s.

Part of that is their individuality, but it's also a completely different medium with its own appeal elements — and there's not necessarily the crossover you might expect. I will gladly read a lengthy magazine article about something I am interested in, but present me with someone who has made a multi-hour YouTube video on the subject and I will immediately switch off. People keep recommending Noah Caldwell-Gervais to me, for example, and I'm sure his work is very good, but his video on the Resident Evil series is seven and a half hours long. I am not watching that when I could be spending those seven hours doing literally anything else — including beating multiple Resident Evil games in that timeframe.

I'm the same with streaming. I'm sure there are some streamers I'd enjoy watching, but I just can't be arsed to spend my time doing so. I'm not someone who can easily split my attention between a stream and Something Else, and I genuinely think it's disrespectful to the creators to engage with a creative work like a game while watching a video or listening to a podcast. (I also think the opposite, to be clear; if I'm watching a video or listening to a podcast, the absolute most I will be doing at the same time is a tedious, repetitive task at work, or driving somewhere.) And, given the choice between spending several hours watching someone else stream a game and sitting down to play a game myself, I'm always going to choose playing something myself.

Conversely, give me someone who writes well, is passionate about what they do and who tries to find the fun rather than get bogged down in negativity — all traits I try to follow in my own games writing — and I will follow that person's blog to the ends of the Earth. In fact, this year I'm going to make a specific effort to follow more individual blogs and independent gaming sites, because, for me, those are the nearest alternative to what I was describing earlier: a publication that speaks to you, and which you feel comfortable checking in on regularly.

But how is an individual writer different from a YouTube video essayist or streamer? I guess in some ways they aren't. But for me it's all down to how that person delivers their message. I see a seven and a half hour YouTube video and feel like that's not something I'm ever going to spend time watching, but I see a light novel-length article and will happily read it from start to finish. It's just inherently more digestible to me — I'm not in this to "consume content"; I actually want to read interesting things! And, honestly, fair or not, the first thing I think of when I see a YouTube video of a length that absurd is "content". I see a website with a bunch of interesting-looking headlines and I think "fantastic, something to read".

I don't know how much sense I'm making here, so I'll stop talking in circles. I guess the main point I want anyone who happens to stumble across this to take away from the whole situation is that we should continue to reject the click-hungry corporate interests of publications under demonstrably awful labels like Valnet and GAMURS, and instead focus our time and attention on individual, independent creators that we enjoy the work of, and that we feel represent our tastes and interests well.

I aspire to be that for at least some people, and I know MoeGamer in particular has at least semi-regular readers. So I encourage you: if you find something that particularly resonates with you, be sure to tell the people behind it that you enjoyed it — and share it with your friends who you think might also enjoy it! Word of mouth is still an incredibly powerful thing on our increasingly broken Internet, and as the world continues to collapse all around us, it's going to be these little communities we can build away from corporate interests that will remain important lifelines for many.

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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The post #oneaday Day 575: Independence appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Continuing on from yesterday, let's continue recapping the stuff I posted over on MoeGamer this year, shall we? Yes, we shall.

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss – Ultima meets Lovecraft

In this piece, I explore a game that an independent developer sent me a copy of. Inspired heavily by both classic computer role-playing games such as the Ultima series and the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this is a lovely, atmospheric retro-style RPG that is easy to pick up and play, but tricky to master. The developer is currently working on a sequel.

Payment processors' control over the arts has to stop

A story broke this year that Visa and Mastercard are seemingly trying to prevent consenting adults from choosing what they spend their money on. Specifically, both companies have been making it very hard for anyone with the slightest connection to sexually explicit (or, in some cases, provocative) entertainment to make a living. It's crazy to think that I posted this back in July, and the situation is still ongoing, with seemingly no resolution in sight.

Old Skies: Wadjet Eye in top form

This is one of the best games I played this year, and the game that caused me to think that, once and for all, the point-and-click adventure sector is in an even better space today than it was back in its supposed LucasArts and Sierra-led "golden age" of the late '90s.

No Sleep for Kaname Date: A meeting of the minds

I adore the first two AI: The Somnium Files games, so I was excited that a third one was coming. I ended up not loving this one quite as much as the first two, but it's still pretty solid, and the new mechanical elements in the escape room sequences are a great addition to the overall formula. It just didn't come together quite as well as the prior two — perhaps because series creator Uchikoshi was a little more hands-off with this one.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore – more than just a mockery

I was immediately intrigued by Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore and the fact it was paying homage to two notoriously not-very-good games. I was even more surprised that it was actually a very good game in its own right. Poking gentle fun at its source material while correcting all their annoyances, this was a real pleasure to play through.

Ara Fell: elves vs vampires

I've had a double-pack of this game and its spiritual successor Rise of the Third Power on my shelf for ages, so I decided while we were away on holiday, I was finally going to play them. And I had a really lovely time! Ara Fell adopts an interesting quasi-open world approach and is an immensely rewarding, engaging experience.

Rise of the Third Power: like FFVI never left

Rise of the Third Power, spiritual successor (but not "sequel") to Ara Fell, is one of the best story-centric RPGs I've played for a long time. Brilliant characterisation, stirring music — all the more remarkable considering it was drawn from royalty-free libraries rather than specifically composed — and a wonderfully engaging story make this a highly memorable game that I highly, highly recommend.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code – what price justice?

Although it gets a little bogged down in itself over the course of its complete runtime, this murder mystery adventure from the Danganronpa creator was nonetheless a compelling, entertaining thrill ride, set in a thoroughly fascinating setting and, in true Danganronpa tradition, presenting some immensely stylish, abstracted takes on the "mechanics" of investigation and deduction.

Lumines Arise, the art of sincerity and creating meaning without explicit narrative

It's easy to assume that the only games with real "meaning" are those that tell an explicit story. But sit down with Lumines Arise, a new take on a classic puzzle game developed by the same folks who did the incredible Tetris Effect, and you will feel very differently. This is a game that is designed to make you feel things while you play. And it's enormously successful at doing that. A truly wonderful experience.

Zelda's organic adventures

I started playing Tears of the Kingdom a little while back, and I am reminded of one of the things I liked so much about Breath of the Wild: the fact that the whole game is a series of little mini-adventures that you stumble across pretty much at random as you explore the world. This is a markedly distinct approach from the "hoover all the icons up off the minimap" structure that many other open-world games take, and it makes for a much more enjoyable game.

HORSES: much ado about nothing?

Notoriously banned from release on Steam, HORSES from Italian developer Santa Ragione is really not worth all the fuss there's been over it. It was an interesting experience, for sure, but you'll see more upsetting material on late-night TV.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein and my history with Nazi-blastin'

As I've noted a few times recently, I love Wolfenstein 3-D and its follow-up Spear of Destiny, but I've never played any of the Wolfenstein games that followed. I am now in the process of correcting this, so I wrote this after beating Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War on original Xbox. I had fun, though the game shows its age in a few places — in both good and bad ways.

And that's your lot for now. Tomorrow I will review my Evercade blog posts for the year… and then it will be 2026! Hurrah. Possibly. Here's hoping the new year is better than the old one… but I'm not holding out much hope at the moment. At least I have plenty of things to distract me, apparently!

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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The post #oneaday Day 571: Some stuff I've written this year - MoeGamer edition (Part 2) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've written a lot of stuff this year! I write a lot of stuff every year, much of it absolute nonsense, but I thought with the end of the year coming up, I'd highlight some bits and pieces that you might have missed, and which I was rather pleased with for one reason or another. The following lists will not include anything from this specific blog — you can review the archives yourself, after all — but instead encompass pieces from both my gaming site, MoeGamer, and the official Evercade blog.

In rough chronological order, then, I present a chunk of my MoeGamer output for the year, with more to follow tomorrow. The following are presented as embedded article excerpts; simply click through on them to read the full thing.

Fire Emblem newbie plays Fire Emblem Engage

The excerpt says most of it: I am bad at strategy games, but I've always been interested in Fire Emblem, so I decided to give myself a gentle introduction by playing Fire Emblem Engage on Normal difficulty with permadeath turned off. And I had a lovely time, chronicled in this MoeGamer piece.

Revisiting Xenoblade Chronicles

With Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition releasing this year, I decided I wanted to refresh my memory on the very first game in the series, since the last time I played it was on Wii, and I was interested to try out the Switch-based Definitive Edition version. I wrote about my experiences and observations over the course of several pieces on MoeGamer, linked in the following extracts:

Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Single-player arcade racing isn't dead, and should never have been assumed to be

Hopefully self-explanatory. I am looking forward to the eventual full release of this game, as the Early Access version on Steam was delightful. I write a bit about that version in the above piece.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow: Gothic horror and tragedy done right

I finally got around to playing the well-regarded point-and-click adventure The Excavation of Hob's Barrow this year, and I was very taken with it. I was particularly enamoured with how it is an interactive take on the Gothic literature tradition, and an exploration of Classical tragedy in the video games space.

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance and the bleaker side of Japanese life

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance is a really interesting adventure game developed by a team with a western background that has been living in Japan for some time. As such, it's unmistakably "anime" in style, but also provides the sort of perspective only an outsider to the culture can provide. The story is not only a compelling horror narrative, it's also a scathing takedown of the seedier aspects of Japanese culture and nightlife — but simultaneously respectful to the country's overall culture and sensibilities.

Expelled! – Coming for to carry you home

Inkle's EXPELLED! is an excellent text adventure with beautiful presentation and a spectacular amount of player agency. Casting you in the role of a 1920s schoolgirl, the game challenges you to get out of trouble for a crime you may or may not have actually committed, using a quasi-roguelite structure that enables you to discover more information with each playthrough. Fiercely feminist, intensely thoughtful and immensely amusing throughout, EXPELLED! is one of the best games I played this year, and deserves your respect.

Homebody: the horror in one's own head

One of the most fascinating horror games I've ever played, Homebody is a combat-free, puzzle-centric game that sensitively explores matters of social anxiety, agoraphobia, isolation, obsessive-compulsive tendencies and lingering guilt. I played this as a "filler" game between big releases of the year, but it came out as one of my favourite things I played this year.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition

I'd been waiting for the return of this underappreciated, wonderful RPG for a very long time, and I was delighted by what the Switch Definitive Edition ended up being. Not only did it refine elements of the original that were a little tricky, it also added a new, more conclusive ending that, while divisive, worked well as a means of wrapping the whole thing up. I wrote several pieces about this game:

The Last Waltz showcases dancesport to educate and inspire

My pal Matt from Digitally Downloaded has been working on a visual novel for some time now, and has ploughed a lot of his own effort and money into making it as good as he wants it to be. I played through a demo version of the game's opening and penned some thoughts on the experience here. (You can wishlist the game on Steam here!)

I, Robot: Minter's still got it

If ever there was going to be someone to reimagine one of Atari's weirdest games, it would have to be Jeff Minter, and the man did us proud.

I'm not sure how I feel about Blue Prince

I wrote this while I was still playing Blue Prince. I don't abandon many games once I've started them, but this ended up being one of them. I am now sure how I feel about Blue Prince: I do not like it at all, for most of the reasons outlined in this piece. (This does not mean I think Blue Prince is bad! I am glad so many people got so much out of it. I just did not enjoy it at all.)

Initial thoughts on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from a devoted "JRPG" player

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is probably my personal Game of the Year, with the caveat that they get a big ol' slap on the wrist for using generative AI at any point in their creative process. "It was just a placeholder!" Yeah, sure. Long before this little kerfuffle, though, I was skeptical about whether this game that had come out of nowhere was actually a big deal, given that turn-based RPGs have been nowhere near as dead as some people think for quite a long time now.

The Sword of Hope: Adventure and RPG, together again

Nintendo added an obscure Game Boy game to the Nintendo Switch Online lineup this year, and I found it thoroughly interesting. So I wrote about it.

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer and the art of pacing an investigative adventure

I really enjoyed the first Kathy Rain, and the second one is even better.

I finally played Undertale

Well, I did. And I enjoyed it!

Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer – the new best way to enjoy a classic?

Hamster kicked off its new Arcade Archives 2 range with a port of the arcade version of Ridge Racer, marking the series' first "new"(ish) release for quite some time.

Raiden Nova: it's like the PS2 never left

(Complimentary.)

My thoughts on Switch 2 so far

My thoughts haven't changed a lot from here. 90% of the time, my Switch 2 is a slightly better Switch — but I have enjoyed the exclusives I've played on it this year, including Donkey Kong Bananza, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and Kirby Air Riders. It's perhaps telling that at the end of the system's first year on the market, I only have four physical games, though.

The Death end re;Quest Code Z limited edition is enormous

Well, it is.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – a delightful remake of a lovely game

One of my favourite Zelda games got a remake a couple of years back, and it turns out the remake is just as delightful as the original. (Plus it runs great on Switch 2!)

Whew, that's more than I thought it was. Let's pick up where we left off tomorrow — that lot should keep you busy for a while, after all!

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

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

The post #oneaday Day 570: Some stuff I've written this year - MoeGamer edition (Part 1) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have crossed something off my gaming To-Do list! Yes, I have beaten Return to Castle Wolfenstein, kicking off my exploration of The Bits of the Wolfenstein Series That Aren't Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. I wrote about my experiences over on MoeGamer if you'd care to check it out. I appreciate that doing one whole click is challenging and exhausting, so I will be very grateful if you successfully accomplish that.

Anyway, to summarise, I had a mostly good time with Return to Castle Wolfenstein. You can tell it's over 20 years old in numerous ways — both good and bad — but I had a mostly good time with it. I'm looking forward to investigating the rest of the series; I know the Machine Games stuff from more recent years is very well regarded for the most part, but I'm perhaps most intrigued by the Xbox 360 entry in the series, which doesn't seem to get talked about all that much. There may well be a reason for that — or it may just be that it sort of fell by the wayside a bit.

As you can see, I'm still enjoying my drawing tablet and Clip Studio Paint. Clip Studio Paint, I have discovered, has a strange quirk where it won't start unless you tell it to run in Windows 8 compatibility mode, but aside from that it seems to work great with my tablet, and it's a lot of fun to use. I've barely scratched the surface of it thus far, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with it a bit over the coming days, weeks, months, years. I can't promise an overly elaborate drawing every day, but there will be, at the very least, a stickman doodle drawn by hand rather than by mouse.

I have bought a copy of the new HeroQuest base set, First Light, and hopefully we're going to be putting that through its paces sometime soon. I'm interested to try this, as although it lacks some of the fancier features of the "big" base set (which is still available, and which I still might pick up a copy of) it has some notable new features, such as a double-sided board for variety in map layout, plus a unique series of 10 quests that are different from the standard ones included in the regular base set. For the unfamiliar, modern HeroQuest is a recreation of the MB Games version from the late '80s, but with all the Warhammer references removed, and with the Evil Wizard player being named "Zargon" instead of "Morcar". I believe this latter change is to bring the game in line worldwide, as the North American version of the late '80s version used "Zargon" as the Evil Wizard's name. He'll always be Morcar to me.

Modern HeroQuest has a whole bunch of expansions available, too, which is exciting. I'm going to resist splurging all my money on them immediately, but I'm hoping our prospective players will enjoy the game sufficiently to want to take on a reasonably lengthy campaign of quests — at the very least, the 10 from the base game, and hopefully onwards into an expansion or two. We shall see, though. As anyone who has attempted to run an ongoing game of something will know, these projects often start with good intentions but run out of steam unless someone steps up and keeps things running. I will likely be the one to do that in this instance, as I have been wanting people to play HeroQuest with regularly since… well, since the late '80s.

All right, that's about everything for today. It's been a nice quiet one at home for us today. We're out of food in the house and we've both been resisting going out in the cold to get something to eat, but we're going to have to do that eventually. In fact, I might go and do that now, because I'm getting a bit hungry and Andie is busily playing Final Fantasy XIV with her friends.

Food!

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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The post #oneaday Day 569: Returned to Castle Wolfenstein appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There are many things I mourn about Times Gone By, but I think the biggest thing I miss is being able to enjoy video games together with other people. Oh, sure, you can play online with anyone in the world, but getting someone in the same room as you to play something with you — or even just sit and watch while you play! — feels like a distant memory at this point. And yet it used to be such an important part of our daily lives!

When I was growing up, I used to spend a lot of time "going on the computer". This was primarily a solitary activity, though I do recall my Dad and brother getting involved in the very early years, giving me an introduction to programming in Atari BASIC and teaching me how to use both the Atari 8-bit and ST machines.

One of the things I loved doing when I either went to a friend's house or had them over to my place was "going on the computer" together. At my friend Matthew's house, we'd play on his BBC Micro when we were younger, and later on his Archimedes. His Dad worked for Acorn, so these were the computers in his house; although I was an Atari fan by virtue of the computers we had in our house, I enjoyed the unique experiences that both the Beeb and the Archie offered, since they were often completely distinct from what I could enjoy at home.

I believe I went to my sometimes-friend Dale's house on just one occasion, and I remember that was the one and only time I played on a Sega Master System as a kid, but I remember really liking the few games he had. My friend Mike, meanwhile, had an Amiga, and we had a lot of fun with that — not just playing games, but also fiddling with creative programs like Deluxe Paint and the like.

Once we got to secondary school, my closest friends went to one another's houses a lot, and we would play on both computers and consoles together. At my friend Edd's house, we'd play on his Amiga and Mega Drive; at my friend Andrew's house, we'd play on his MS-DOS PC and Super NES; later, we'd all get Nintendo 64s and PlayStations, and we'd play together on those.

At university, we spent a lot of time going to one another's houses to play Nintendo 64 in particular, as that console remains unmatched for the sheer breadth of multiplayer titles on offer. But a little later, when the next generation of consoles rolled around, I would have friends over and we'd play Grand Theft Auto III together, despite it not being multiplayer, and we'd play through entire cooperative campaigns of games like Halo and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. I have some truly wonderful memories of enjoying games like that.

Today, though, it is almost unimaginable to play through an entire game with a single co-op partner in the same room as me. Hell, at this point, it's unimaginable to even have a few friendly matches on a fighting game, first-person shooter or racing game.

And this sucks! I've got easy access to more games than we have ever had at any point in our lives, but getting anyone to actually want to come play them with me is like pulling teeth from a particularly bloodless stone. That makes me intensely, terribly sad, and I wish things could be different. But the world has, apparently, moved on from this sort of thing as a regular, normal thing to do; I just have to take whatever opportunities I can get — which very occasionally come up, but not often — to enjoy this long-lost art of having fun together.

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The post #oneaday Day 564: The lost art of playing together appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It is, of course, my job to love and appreciate everything we release for Evercade — and for sure, there is not one single game from the library that I have not been able to "find the fun" with to date.

But of course there are some that I like more than others. So in the spirit of all the "top 10" lists that are going around right now, I thought I would go through my 10 favourite Evercade games that we've released this year, drawn from all the cartridges we released in 2025: Indie Heroes Collection 4; Broken Sword Collection; Atari Arcade 2; Tomb Raider Collection 2; Gremlin Collection 2; Windjammers, Karnov & Friends; Roguecraft DX; NEOGEO Arcade 1; TAITO Arcade 1; TAITO Arcade 2; NEOGEO Arcade 2; NEOGEO Arcade 3; Activision Collection 1; Rare Collection 1 and The Llamasoft Collection.

DISCLAIMER: You are an intelligent person and I should not have to say this, but I am going to anyway. The following list represents my personal opinion and does not reflect any sort of professional judgement or the collective opinion of my employer. It should not be taken as any particular games or cartridges having received any sort of preferential treatment, either personally or professionally, nor that I have received any sort of incentive (financial or otherwise) from any of the license holders to feature their games on this personal blog that no-one reads. Also any cartridges that do not end up featured in this list does not mean I think those carts are shit, it means I have 10 slots and a lot more than 10 games to choose from.

Got that? All right, let's Top 10 this thing.

10. Twinkle Star Sprites

I think Twinkle Star Sprites was one of the first NEOGEO games I was ever introduced to, back when DotEmu did those absolutely terrible ports for PC a while back. I was sold on it by the promise of it being a blend of shoot 'em up and puzzle game — two genres I adore — and that is exactly what it provides: the frantic action of a shoot 'em up, combined with the competitive piece-matching, combo-building and garbage-throwing that is the competitive puzzle game genre.

It's a super-fun game, which I only put relatively low in these rankings due to the inevitable "arcade bullshit difficulty" that it pulls on the solo player from partway through proceedings. If you have the opportunity to challenge a friend, take it — there really is nothing quite like it.

9. Rohga: Armor Force

I'd never heard of this side-scrolling mech 'em up until we started work on the Windjammers, Karnov & Friends cartridge, but it quickly became a favourite with its gorgeous anime-inspired pixel art, its rocking soundtrack and its excellent gameplay.

Taking a strongly cinematic approach despite the relatively limited tech it's running on, Rohga: Armor Force is a thrill ride of a shoot 'em up that offers something just a little bit different from the norm. If you enjoy making things explode in a hail of bullets from a side-on perspective, this is definitely one you need to spend some time with.

8. Atic Atac

Atic Atac is a game that I played back in the day — I think on a friend's BBC Micro — and while I never understood what you were supposed to do in it back then, I found it immensely striking for a number of reasons: its top-down perspective; its personality-packed sprites; and the unusual "chicken" health bar, where your proximity to death is depicted by how picked clean of meat a chicken carcass is.

Now I know what you're actually supposed to do in Atic Atac, I like it even more. It's a nice evolution of the formula established in games like Atari's Adventure and Haunted House, and its randomised elements and multiple playable characters make it eminently replayable.

7. Murtop

I absolutely adore the minor trend there's been of modern developers making brand new games that look and feel like classic arcade games. Last year we had the incredible Donut Dodo, and this year we had Murtop, a blend of elements from Dig Dug and Bomberman. Best of all, the version for Evercade was specially redesigned to look great on a horizontally oriented display — it looks especially good on the 4:3 screen of Evercade Alpha.

Murtop is one of those games that is very easy to learn, but tricky to master. It's also a game where you will feel a sense of absolute exhilaration when you have "the perfect run" that just sees your score continuing to escalate. Also it has a brilliantly energetic soundtrack that has been stuck in my head ever since we featured it as a "Game of the Month" title in 2024.

6. Super Gridrunner

The Llamasoft Collection is a massive pile of woolly goodness from the one and only Jeff Minter, and there are a lot of games I really like in this collection — including some that I've only played for the first time between this cartridge and Digital Eclipse's interactive Llamasoft documentary.

If pushed, though, I'd have to pick an old favourite: Super Gridrunner, originally released on Atari ST. This frantic blastathon has beautiful, distinctive presentation, challenging gameplay and a wicked (occasionally sadistic) sense of humour. It's been a favourite of mine ever since we had the original ST version on floppy disk (I still have it!) and it's a delight to be able to play it on Evercade.

5. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

I'm not a Fighting Game Guy. I played and enjoyed Street Fighter II back in the day, and I've had some fun with the Dead or Alive ladies over the years, but most fighting games released post-Street Fighter II overwhelm me with their complexity. As such, I've never really found a good in-road to the genre, despite appreciating 2D fighting games in particular from afar thanks to their beautiful character art and animation.

For some reason, Garou: Mark of the Wolves clicked with me almost immediately. I think it's because it's specifically not overwhelming in any way: there's a relatively small cast of playable characters, making it easy to pick a character you want to get to know better; its mechanics are straightforward to understand; its special moves are relatively easy to perform; and it has an excellent "make the game easier for me" button any time you have to continue, meaning if you're primarily in it to see all the beautiful stages and the various endings, you can do that without too much frustration.

4. Tazz-Mania

This is another game I'd never heard of prior to our work on Atari Arcade 2, but it became an immediate favourite thanks to its simple but compelling gameplay. It's one of those games that you can feel yourself getting better at — and see yourself improving by climbing up the score rankings.

As an arena shooter, there's not a lot here that you haven't seen before, but its solid mechanics and little twists, such as the player character's rapid-fire machine gun and the walls closing in on you as you attempt to clear each stage, help elevate this well above being a simple Robotron clone.

3. MegaMania

Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for an official modern rerelease of Activision's Atari 2600 output? I absolutely adore these games, and it's always been a bit frustrating to me how dodgy the emulation of them is in their last official rerelease, Activision Anthology.

While our Activision Collection 1 cartridge may lack Tainted Love and its ilk on the soundtrack, it's a collection of 15 great games, all of which I absolutely love having easy access to again. I could have picked any number of these for my top 10, but going purely on the number of times I've played it since the Activision Collection 1 cartridge came in, I think MegaMania has to take the top spot.

2. Metal Slug

Metal Slug is a series that I've always meant to explore, but have somehow never gotten around to. Now I have no excuse — and as I could have predicted, I really like it. Now, I'm sure there are some of you out there with strong opinions as to which Metal Slug is best, but I'm going with the first one purely because, so far, it's the one I've played the most of and got the best at.

It's a brilliant example of why the NEOGEO is so beloved for its pixel-pushing capabilities — despite the series, collectively, being some of the worst-performing games on the platform in terms of slowdown — and just a great run-and-gun shooter that is easy to get into and incredibly satisfying to get better at, a little bit at a time.

1. Roguecraft DX

Finally, I have to put the wonderful Roguecraft DX at the top spot for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it's a really good game, taking the traditional roguelike formula and making it incredibly accessible while resisting the temptation to overwhelm players with mountains of persistent progression and unlocks. Secondly, it's a brilliant showcase of why the Amiga rocks. And thirdly, the folks at Badger Punch Games, whom we worked with closely to get this release out the door, are really lovely chaps.

Roguecraft DX is an endlessly replayable, delightfully fun game that is eminently suitable to both quick handheld sessions and longer session in front of the TV. It's my number one highlight from our releases of 2025, and I'm thrilled to have been part of making that release happen.

So there you go: my top picks for the year. It's been an incredible year to be part of the Evercade project, and next year promises to be even more exciting. But you'll just have to wait and see what we have planned for you, non?

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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The post #oneaday Day 563: My top 10 Evercade games for 2025 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We mock Donny Trump's obsession with "fake news" because he always busts that out whenever someone criticises him, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that we are living in a world that is riddled with misinformation right now — particularly if you're the sort of person who primarily gets their information from social media. And, distressingly, that is quite a lot of people these days.

Not all bits of misinformation are dangerous, of course, but they're no less frustrating to see. The other day, for example, I saw a post on Bluesky where someone commented that someone waxing nostalgic over the original Quake for being "from the days before you needed to spend thousands on graphics cards" or suchlike was "the funniest game they could have picked to comment this on". Funny! Except Quake didn't need a 3D accelerator card, as it ran entirely in software, meaning that while a decent non-3D graphics card would help in unlocking graphics modes, it was primarily dependent on how good your CPU was. Its 3D-accelerated version was never officially supported, despite being developed by id Software, and was primarily put out as a test for what they were planning to do with Quake II, which was 3D-accelerated by default.

Likewise, when a near-complete version of Resident Evil for Game Boy Color was unearthed and released to the public the other day, there were people talking about how it "included" the pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 version (it doesn't, they are low-resolution pixel art recreations) and how it "used the same isometric perspective" as the PS1 version (neither the PS1 nor the GBC versions are depicted from an isometric perspective).

I didn't comment on either of these at the time because that would have made me an "Um Actually" guy, and no-one wants to be one of those. But as someone who cares about this stuff — particularly about game history, and modern folks appreciating the many varied and wonderful things that classic games were doing — it was frustrating to see these statements go completely unchallenged.

The problem, as I've already alluded to, is people seeing someone saying something on social media and then immediately taking that as gospel truth without verifying it for themselves. In cases such as the above, perhaps younger people might not know what they would need to search for in order to verify those things — or indeed even if they needed verifying in the first place. Neither of those cases particularly matter in the grand scheme of things, but they're a microcosm of times when more serious misinformation — misinformation that could, say, seriously damage someone's reputation — has found itself spreading in one way or another.

They say "the Internet never forgets" — and with the sterling work the Internet Archive does, that's mostly true. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that the Internet never forgets something that was wrong in the first place. And once that misinformation takes root among enough people as being "the truth" — or, perhaps more accurately, "good enough" to sound like the truth — it's very hard to dig it out again to correct things, because not only does no-one like an "Um Actually" guy, even when they're correct, people are simply very resistant to having their assumptions challenged and corrected.

That feels like it might be a problem we should deal with sooner rather than later. But how…?

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The post #oneaday Day 561: A world of misinformation appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, the company ModRetro announced that it would be producing a special edition version of its "Chromatic" FPGA-based Nintendo Game Boy clone.

ModRetro is a company that is already on the shitlist of a lot of people thanks to its founder, Palmer Luckey, also being the cofounder of Anduril Industries, a company that makes autonomous weaponry. Drones, in other words.

Up until now, a lot of people have sort of begrudgingly been able to separate the two — the Chromatic is supposedly a very good FPGA Game Boy, and the fact that the company has been releasing new Game Boy-compatible cartridges for it, showcasing a variety of modern indie developers' work on the platform, would initially appear to be quite laudable.

At the same time, the brand has had vociferous critics, keen to point out at every opportunity that Luckey is a dangerous bellend who profits from atrocities. Indeed, the man himself makes no attempt to hide this fact on a blog post on the ModRetro website.

The more… outspoken of these critics have, in the past, engaged in behaviour that I personally found a tad distasteful — by which I mean borderline harassment of people who had written about the Chromatic as simply being a very good FPGA Game Boy, without spending their entire article waxing poetic about how much of a warmongering shitbag Luckey is. On the one hand, I understood these criticisms, but the way in which they were expressed, on more than one occasion, was not, to my eyes, particularly acceptable or productive.

Today, though… I get it. Because the new special edition Chromatic that ModRetro announced is explicitly Anduril-branded, and advertises itself as being "finished by hand in America with Cerakote, the same ultra-durable ceramic-polymer formulation that protects Ghost — Anduril's flagship autonomous air vehicle". Later in the product page description, it spells things out even more explicitly by noting "the body of Chromatic is made from the same magnesium aluminium alloy as Anduril's attack drones".

This is… weird, right? Why would you explicitly sell an FPGA Game Boy that, in your own words, is made from the same materials as devices that cause death and suffering, if not to thumb your nose at the people who have previously criticised the brand for its association with an arms dealer? Granted, the thing looks classy and sounds like it can stand up to a lot more punishment than most other handheld gaming devices in the world — but if you're going to make a really durable handheld, why bring up "attack drones" and "autonomous air vehicles" at all, if not to specifically provoke certain people out there?

Not only that, but you can bet that there are certain types of people out there who are going to buy this thing specifically to spite people who have, in the past, spoken out against Luckey for one reason or another — even if it does mean paying over four hundred dollars for a Game Boy.

This whole thing leaves a particularly foul taste in the mouth. It's very clearly not about giving retro gaming enthusiasts the best possible experience, and all about whitewashing what "Anduril" means in the modern world. Let's not even get into how many modern companies doing terrible things (like Anduril) have adopted nomenclature from J. R. R. Tolkien without even the slightest trace of irony or understanding of what Tolkien was actually saying in his works.

It's going to be interesting to see who has the balls to actually call this out for being as odious as it is — and then standing their moral ground to back up their criticisms — and who treats it as just another silly little gaming story.

I certainly won't be touching anything ModRetro-branded any time soon.

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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The post #oneaday Day 560: The weapons-grade Game Boy appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been thinking recently: with all the annoyance and frustration over CEO after CEO saying that their game development studios are using generative AI in their work, are we finally at a point where one could actually completely stop buying new stuff, and subsist entirely on titles developed and released prior to this AI bullshit getting everywhere?

I'm pretty sure we are. In fact, I'm pretty sure we've been there for a while. I still buy a fair few new games, but right now, given the size of my physical and digital libraries, I'm pretty sure I could just flat-out stop buying games altogether and still have enough to keep me occupied until my dying day.

I mean, hell, just on Evercade there is somewhere in the region of 700 games. There are over a thousand games in my Steam library. Another 540 in my GOG.com library. In my physical collection, I have 422 Nintendo Switch games, 169 PlayStation 4 games, 147 Xbox 360 games, 92 PlayStation 3 games, 282 PlayStation 2 games and plenty more besides. On the MiSTer Multisystem 2 I have every game from pretty much every platform I care about from the Atari 2600 up until the PlayStation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64. I really could stop buying games today and I would still be entertained until the end of time. Hell, I think I could probably get by on Doom and Final Fantasy VII replays.

Part of me wants to try doing this, but a certain degree of FOMO prevents me from committing to it entirely, because I know there are games in the pipeline that I definitely want: the third Final Fantasy VII reboot; Ace Combat 8; the Trails in the Sky: 2nd Chapter remake. The limited print publishing companies — which, honestly, is where I buy the majority of my games from these days anyway — have been doing a great run of physical versions of otherwise digital-only games that I want to play, and new versions of games I enjoyed back in the day, but which are a pain to get up and running on modern PCs.

I think we have reached a sort of "event horizon" similar to that found in other media, where enthusiasts of the medium can comfortably drift away from the mainstream, popular, current side of things and subsist entirely on niche interest material from the past that they find personally resonant. This absolutely happens in other forms of creative media — there are people who enjoy listening to music who never touch chart hits; there are people who love movies who have never seen a "blockbuster"; there are people who love reading who read nothing but classic literature.

So I think what I'm going to do is not necessarily commit to a complete purchasing blackout, for the reasons I've already outlined. I am still going to buy whatever the third Final Fantasy VII remake project game is; I am still going to buy Ace Combat 8; I am still going to buy any limited-print games that come up which I have been eagerly awaiting a physical copy of.

But what I am going to do is curtail impulse purchases. A significant portion of the physical library I own I picked up because I knew I wanted to play the games in question someday, and when that day rolled around I didn't want to find myself in a situation where it would cost three figures (or more) to be able to do so. I already feel a great sense of regret from the day I traded in my copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PlayStation, and I have no desire to feel that way again.

What I do find myself feeling to an increasing degree from modern video game publishers and developers, though, is… nothing. Honestly, I just looked through the list of everything announced at the recent The Game Awards, and the only thing that registered even a slight twinge of excitement for me was Ace Combat 8. Everything else just sort of drifted past me and I had no particularly strong feelings about it. And the recent behaviour of Larian Studios' head honcho has put me right off wanting to get caught up on the Divinity series.

So here's what I'm going to do.

• I'm going to finish all the "finishable" games I have on the go right now, which includes Yakuza 5, Death end re;Quest Code Z, an Ace Combat 7 replay, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Cyberpunk 2077. I'm already giving myself anxiety by having so many half-finished games on the go, some of which I haven't touched for months, so I want to check all these off my list because I've been enjoying all of them and want to see them all through to their respective conclusions.
• Throughout the year, I'm going to buy anything that I already know I want without guilt. That includes the stuff I've already mentioned, plus any surprise announcements in series that I follow and appreciate, or from companies that I consistently enjoy the work of.
• Throughout the year, I'm also going to buy any limited-print stuff that I already know I want. This primarily includes previously digital-only stuff that has been out for a while, and modern rereleases of titles I loved in the past like Heretic, Hexen and the System Shock games.
• I am not going to buy games just because I see them while browsing a shopping site and think "ooh, that looks interesting", because these are the things that end up on the shelf and don't get played for literally years at at a time.
• I am not going to buy games for previous-generation platforms unless I know they are games that I have already played and want to revisit, or games that I never got the chance to try back in the day.

I say all the above with the caveat that if something like this year's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 comes along and surprises everyone, I reserve the right to jump in and explore it for myself. While I was initially cynical about that game when it first appeared, it ended up being one of my top games of the year. (Conversely, I really didn't like Blue Prince at all.)

This might all sound a bit half-arsed and I freely admit that it is. But I wanted to acknowledge the feelings of… discontent that I have with the current direction of video games while still allowing myself the opportunity to enjoy the things that I am looking forward to.

I love video games, you see. Love them. And I always will.

I'm just not sure I love Video Games That Were Made In 2025 And Beyond, going by some of the recent happenings.

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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The post #oneaday Day 559: Event horizon appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I love Wolfenstein 3-D a great deal. In fact, I love it so much that ten levels that I made as a teenager are part of the official Wolfenstein 3-D Super Upgrades pack that was distributed by original publisher Apogee. I made $200 from that — who says random encounters with strange men on CompuServe forums never lead to anything good?

Anyway, despite the fact that I adore Wolfenstein 3-D and its quasi-sequel Spear of Destiny, I have never actually played any of the other Wolfenstein games. None of them! I have always meant to, over the years, but somehow never got around to it. I have decided to finally correct this oversight, prompted by some enthusing on the part of some friends who particularly enjoyed the recent Machine Games entries in the series.

From what I understand, the various Wolfenstein games over the years since Wolfenstein 3-D have rebooted the series continuity multiple times, but I still wanted to catch up on all the games I'd missed, so I decided to jump into Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Xbox first of all. I went for Xbox because the console versions of the game have an extra prologue chapter on top of what the PC version offers, plus there's no need to faff around with mods to make it run on modern machines. I have little to no patience for modding these days, so a plug-and-play console version is just what the doctor ordered.

Anyway, I didn't really know what to expect from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, other than what little I had read prior to playing it. I knew that it was the first of several "reimaginings" of the series, for starters, rather than an actual "sequel" (despite the implications of the name) and that it focused to a certain degree on the Nazis looking into black arts such as necromancy. For those unfamiliar with the Wolfenstein series, who had been labouring under the assumption that it was a Serious War Series, undead, monstrous enemies have been part of proceedings since Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. (They were not, to my knowledge, part of the original 8-bit home computer Castle Wolfenstein games, but those have little to do with the various different continuities of the rest of the series anyway.)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein casts you in the role of recurring series protagonist William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American soldier who is a bit of a one-man army. While Wolfenstein 3-D began with Blazkowicz captured and imprisoned in Castle Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein's console versions open with a mission where our hero is investigating what the Nazis are up to in Egypt. It seems they're in the business of raiding tombs for something that they seem to think is important, so it's up to Blazkowicz to discourage them from doing so with a variety of World War II-era weaponry.

Following this, Blazkowicz and his contact, Agent One, get captured and taken to Castle Wolfenstein. Whether or not Agent One survives depends on if you are playing the two-player co-op mode or not. Either way, Blazkowicz has to bust out of Castle Wolfenstein, make his escape, throw some further spanners into the Nazi plans to dig up the mysterious "Death Knights" and mystical artifacts, and then proceed onwards to a series of Nazi-thwarting missions.

Thus far I think I'm about halfway through the game — I'm on the fifth mission out of eight — and I've mostly been having a good time. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter from the early 2000s, and there are times where you really feel the 25 years between this game and now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though; it means that Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a game that focuses on making its gameplay solid and interesting rather than indulging in overly spectacular setpieces. It also means that its levels strike a good balance between providing a decent amount to explore and keeping you heading on a clear path forwards. More than anything, the further I go in the game, the more it reminds me of something like Rare's GoldenEye — levels have different routes you can take, and there are various objectives to accomplish, and the exact way things unfold will vary according to whether you decide to go all-guns blazing or at least make a cursory attempt at stealth.

Stealth isn't mandatory for the most part, thankfully. There's one level where you'll fail if the guards set the alarms off, but for quite a lot of that level the guards can spot you and aren't within reach of an alarm, so you don't have to spend too much time creeping around. In other levels, it sometimes pays to know what's coming up ahead of time so you can prepare a suitable "ambush" with an appropriate weapon — the game has some excellent rifle weapons (both with and without zoomable scopes) that make picking off enemies from a distance a pleasure, and when it comes time to switch to closer combat, there are plenty of options there, too.

The weapons perhaps lack some of the oomph of more recent takes on the genre, but there are plenty of them, and the further you go in the game, the more ridiculous they get. While the early stages will see you using fairly conventional pistols, rifles and machine guns, later stages will allow you to wield the chaingun-esque "Venom" weapon, the "Panzerfaust" rocket launcher and even a flame thrower. None of these are an "instant win" button, either; the game's levels and encounters are designed quite nicely to encourage picking the right weapon for the job.

The game features a beloved feature of early 2000s first-person shooters, which is enemy characters who have conversations while you approach them. Many of these are quite silly — though none quite match the classic No-One Lives Forever, trope codifier for this sort of thing — and although clearly a threat, the game also makes many of the Nazis appear cartoonishly incompetent.

There are a few minor annoyances, chief among which is the complete lack of subtitles for spoken audio. There's not a lot of critical in-mission speech, but it does sometimes get drowned out by everything else that is going on. The cutscenes are well-mixed, at least — and hearing Tony Jay in the role of the Director of the Office of Secret Actions, the organisation that Blazkowicz works for, is an absolute delight.

The game balance at times feels a little questionable, with enemies seemingly either spraying bullets everywhere but your location, or hitting you right in the middle of your head and knocking out most of your health bar with a single shot. There are a few enemies that have seemingly superhuman reflexes at times, which can lead to some frustrating sequences where you'll have to repeat things over and over and over until you master them, but there are usually some things you can try differently to tip the odds in your favour — and the ability to save at any time, as well as automatically at checkpoints, is very welcome indeed. I'm not sure how much of my difficulty with a few sequences stems from my playing on "Bring it On" difficulty, which I guess is technically "Hard" mode — but, well, I've come this far now, so I will continue as I have been doing!

I'm enjoying the game, then. I wish there were a few more homages to the original Wolfenstein 3-D — it would have been nice to hear some remixes of the classic music, for example — but I am led to believe that Wolfenstein 3-D itself unlocks as a bonus extra when you beat the main single-player campaign, so if that's the case then all will be forgiven. I suspect this is probably going to be the weakest of all the post-Wolfenstein 3-D entries in the series — or, at least, this is the most obviously aged of them all — so hopefully it'll only be improvements from hereon. I'm certainly looking forward to finally discovering how the series evolves.

Now I think I might go blast a few more Nazis before bedtime…

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The post #oneaday Day 558: Blast a Nazi today appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Today, Larian Studios, makers of the Divinity series and the universally acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3, found itself in the crosshairs of the Internet's ire due to comments made by its CEO, Swen Vincke during an interview with Bloomberg.

According to Vincke, Larian has been using generative AI behind the scenes to, in his words, "explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text". None of which are things you need generative AI for, and all of which are things that people have been perfectly capable of doing with their own human brains for decades. In fact, there are people who specialise in elements of what he described — most notably concept art, which is the area a lot of critics have been focusing on.

Vincke's comments are remarkably ill-considered given the number of times that generative AI use in video games has been subject to backlash from the general public and journalists alike over the course of just the last year — and for many of the same reasons that Vincke is arguing in favour of.

The otherwise well-regarded sci-fi game The Alters was irreversibly poisoned for a lot of people earlier this year when it became apparent that they had used ChatGPT to generate placeholder text for background textures and localised strings for non-English languages.

The umpteenth reboot of Everybody's Golf came under fire for non-specific use of generative AI that I'm not sure anyone ever quite got to the bottom of.

The new Let It Die game, which has no involvement from the previous game's original developers Suda51 or Grasshopper Manufacture, has been lambasted for extensive use of AI-generated material.

The promising "people sim that isn't called The Sims" inZOI turned huge swathes of prospective players away by its game's heavy reliance on generative AI, as well as its publisher Krafton's insistence that they are pivoting to becoming an "AI-first" company.

The latest hot "extraction shooter" (I still don't really know what that is, and no, I don't really care) ARC Raiders got dinged with a 2/5 review score for its use of AI-generated voices — not just because they were AI, but because using AI-generated voices is at artistic odds with the story the game is trying to tell.

Even the once-beloved Oliver Twins, former stars of the UK "bedroom programming" scene in the '80s, got a kicking from press and public alike for their absolutely terrible AI-generated "follow-up" (and I use the term loosely) to their old Spectrum game, Ghost Hunters.

People hate this shit — and with good reason. Generative AI is a lazy, soulless solution for feckless CEOs to foist on their creative teams because they think it will "add value" for shareholders, when in fact there is growing evidence by the day that the entire generative AI scene is financially, environmentally and societally ruinous.

On top of all that, it doesn't work well enough to be worth using! Every single AI "tool" currently available carries a prominent disclaimer that it "might" (read: "will") get things wrong from time to time, making them fundamentally useless for doing anything useful with — and their "fun" uses are causing the Internet to become overrun with even more meaningless, pointless slop than was already splattered everywhere in the first place, on top of boiling all our lakes. At least stupid things from a bygone age like Badger Badger Badger and Seepage (to name just two examples from what I believe to be the golden age of Internet nonsense) are the result of both genuine human creativity and skilful use of creative tools that don't involve typing "make me funny video garfield giant boobs mechahitler piss filter" into a chatbot.

Vincke's point was not that the new Divinity game will be riddled with AI-generated voice lines or visuals. In fact, he claims that the studio is "neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are [they] looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI", but that AI is "a toolset for creatives to use and see how it can make their day-to-day lives easier, which will let us make better games".

Vincke has, apparently, been receiving some pushback from within Larian about this — and he's certainly been getting some choice words from former employees today, too. The situation escalated to such a degree that he issued a statement in response to IGN earlier today. Unfortunately, said statement doesn't really say anything — and, worse, attempts to obfuscate his earlier statements by pointedly using the term "ML" (for "Machine Learning") rather than his earlier use of "AI" — today typically interpreted to mean "generative AI" when used in contexts such as this.

For me, the worst thing was his final paragraph:

While I understand [generative AI] is a subject that invokes a lot of emotion, it's something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone's working day better, not worse.

Here's the thing. You see that people are getting sniffy about generative AI, something which is well-established by this point to be A Thing The Public Fucking Hates. The sensible thing to do from a public relations perspective at this point, regardless of what you actually think, is to go "okay, you know what, we hear you, this sucks" or something along those lines, and then promise to "do better" or the like. A bunch of people won't believe you, of course, but this is better than going "no, well, I actually do think everyone at Larian should use this, and by 'discussing internally' I probably actually mean mandating that all employees have to use it at least a certain amount", which is how this is all coming across right now.

The particularly dumbass thing about this episode is, as I said above, none of the examples he gave are situations that need generative AI — or even where it is particularly beneficial. In fact, several creative types have commented today on how using "good enough", plausible-looking placeholders is actually detrimental to the entire creative process. Former Rocksteady employee Amy-Leigh Shaw commented thus on Bluesky earlier:

Placeholder text isn't supposed to be unique per line. It is supposed to be an instruction to the writer with a great big warning sign slapped on the top, so that it doesn't slip into the finished game. Unique sentences of bland writing are the least helpful thing to use for that purpose!

I also find that one of the more frustrating blockers to writing is when there's already a (bad) suggestion of what you should say. You are no longer able to organically find the idea because the suggestion in front of you knocks you off the track of your natural thought process.

Shaw is talking specifically about writing here, but several artists agreed that this is the case when dealing with concept art, too. The difference between a hastily scrawled Microsoft Paint doodle and the "this sort of looks right" thing that generative AI spits out is enormous — and in the latter case, it will absolutely colour an artist's interpretation of a scene or character, often unconsciously.

In other words, there's no defence of using generative AI as "placeholders" for text, concept art, voice acting, music — anything that a creative person is actually going to get involved with. The entire point of a placeholder is that it's something obviously shit and out of place so it can be easily spotted and subsequently replaced by a specialist at some point in the development process. Because generative AI produces something that is often "good enough" to the untrained eye or someone not looking closely, it's easy for it to get missed — as happened with The Alters earlier in the year.

Vincke's comments — and his subsequent follow-up statement — have torched a significant amount of goodwill that people had for Larian Studios in the space of just a single day. People fucking loved Baldur's Gate 3 and the previous Divinity: Original Sin games! It feels like it shouldn't have been a difficult job to maintain that goodwill while hyping up your new game — even if some found themselves a tad squicked out by a rather grim trailer at The Game Awards. But no. C-suite gonna C-suite, I guess — and it appears that this is true for companies people had, up until now, actually liked, as much as it is for companies people love to hate. And the net result of this for Larian is that people who were previously excited about a new Divinity game are now not going to touch it.

I know this has certainly given me a great degree of pause on wanting to check out any of Larian's work. I've been meaning to look at the Divinity: Original Sin games and Baldur's Gate 3 for a while — but now I'm in even less of a hurry to do so than I was already.

I'm so very tired of this. I, like many others, cannot wait for this fucking bubble to pop so we can get back to something approaching "normality", whatever that even means any more.

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The post #oneaday Day 557: How to torch universal goodwill with one simple interview appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

After my post the other day, concerning a mobile game developer complaining that mobile games aren't taken seriously because people (correctly) assume that the scene is a "world of predatory monetisation and low quality", I decided to be fair to the chap and actually give his game a try.

The game in question is called The Battle of Polytopia, and it's a lightweight 4X strategy game heavily (heavily) inspired by the classic Civilization series, swapping semi-realistic visuals (aside from the city-sized horses) for a distinctive, untextured, voxel-esque "low-poly" look.

In The Battle of Polytopia, your task is to be the civilisation that comes out on top. In the default "Perfection" game mode, this requires you to have scored the most points by the end of 30 turns; alternatively, you can play in "Domination" mode, which is a last-man-standing mode; there's also a "Creative" mode that allows you to set up a game however you please, with up to three computer-controlled opponents (or no opponents at all, if you prefer) and the ability to play in the previous "Perfection" or "Domination" modes, along with an "Infinity" mode that has no win state. You can also play multiplayer, and the official website seems to indicate there are regular tournaments going on.

There are a selection of civilisations to play as, but the only real differences between most of them are the tech that they start with, the number of "star" resources they begin with, and their aesthetics — however, there are some tribes available as one-time in-app purchases that add some unique mechanics to the mix, such as being able to live and build in the water, having the ability to use magic, or an emphasis on poisoning and corrupting the land.

Once into the game, you're presented with an isometric view of the land around your starting city, with the remainder of the map covered by fog of war. Tapping on resources in the tiles around your city allows you to harvest them in exchange for the generic "star" resource, and doing so will add population to your city. Once the city's population has reached a certain stage, it will advance a level, and this usually rewards you with a choice of two benefits. These vary from level to level; sometimes you'll be able to expand the borders of the area the city controls; at others you'll be able to build special one-time only buildings that provide additional benefits; at others still you'll have the opportunity to "scout", which uncovers part of the fog-obscured map.

Some resources can have buildings constructed on them, which allows them to provide an income of stars each turn. Some buildings can be boosted by having other buildings in close proximity. Many of them require you to have unlocked a particular technology in the tech tree, which, again, costs stars.

Cities can also construct troops, which can then be sent out into the world to explore, uncover more of the map and potentially attack other civilisations, and the exact troop types you can build are determined by your unlocked technologies. Some troops can move further, some can attack from range, others still are better suited for a defensive role.

Other civs aren't necessarily hostile when you encounter them, but the game feels balanced in such a way that conflict will become inevitable before long, particularly if you want to expand your territory beyond its starting area.

And that's basically it. The game is easy to pick up and play thanks to it being considerably less complicated than the games that inspired it, and I can see it being a reasonably fun little diversion to play on one's phone if you want to while away a few minutes and don't have any other gaming devices with you. It's not obnoxiously monetised and it doesn't blast ads at you every five minutes, which in itself is worthy of praise in today's mobile sector.

But, I don't know. I played it and I felt… nothing. I didn't really feel attached to my little civilisation, I never really felt like there was much threat from the rival CPU-controlled players — although, granted, I was playing the tutorial map, which is likely set to the easiest difficulty level — and I didn't feel like I was making a lot of meaningful choices along the way.

The area where this stood out the most was in the tech tree. Simply unlocking features with the currency you earn each turn makes the "discovery" of each new tech feel quite underwhelming, particularly as in the late game you can unlock a whole bunch at once without really feeling like you've had to work for them or prioritise what to concentrate on next. There's no real "weight" to the game, for want of a better word, and that leaves the whole experience just feeling a bit unsatisfying.

"Civilization Lite" can work, as anyone who ever played the excellent but largely forgotten Civilization Revolution on Xbox 360 will attest. The Battle of Polytopia plays it just a bit too "lite", though, leaving it feeling like pretty much every other mobile game for me — fun for a few minutes if there's literally nothing better to play, but ultimately rather forgettable, and not something I'm going to go out of my way to spend time on.

And definitely not Game of the Year material!

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The post #oneaday Day 554: The Battle of Polytopia appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been thinking it for a long while now, and finally making some time to go back to Yakuza 5, which I left half-finished a good few months back, I have cemented my feeling that the Yakuza (or Like A Dragon, as they're now known, to be more true to the original Japanese title Ryu ga Gotoku) games are, in fact, Peak Video Game.

By this I mean that if there is a single game you are going to invest a lot of time and effort into playing, a Yakuza game is an excellent choice. And there are a whole bunch of them now! Best of all, given that each one unfolds in a different time period, they all have a markedly different feel from one another — and, of course, as the series goes on, it expands beyond its original setting of Kamurocho to a much wider variety of locales.

Thus far in my journey through the series, Yakuza 5 is the series at its most broad. Like its immediate predecessor, the game is split into several distinct parts, each with a main protagonist taking the leading role. Unlike Yakuza 4, however, which was entirely set in Kamurocho, Yakuza 5 features several town centres for the various different protagonists to explore before they all meet up for the finale.

So far I'm on the third part out of four, which means I've finished the initial part with longstanding series lead Kiryu Kazuma living under an assumed name and working as a taxi driver in Fukuoka, the second part that involves Taiga Saejima breaking out of prison, living for a brief while in a mountainside hunter village, then hanging out in Sapporo for a bit, and I'm now on the first half of the third part, which concerns Kiryu's adoptive daughter, Haruka, and her quest to become an idol in Osaka.

Thus far, each main section of the game has been very different from the last in terms of tone. Kiryu's started with a bit of "everyday life in a small city district" feel before ratcheting up the yakuza angle once the story got underway. Saejima's was quite a personal story of this imposing, hulking brute of a man and the soft centre within. Haruka's, so far, has been deliberately a bit silly, but also with a hint of the sleaziness and darkness that underpins the real-life idol industry.

The nice thing about giving each protagonist their own areas to wander around is that it allows them to have different activities available to them. Yakuza 5 introduces the concept of each character having a "Side Story" as well as the series' iconic "Substories"; each "Side Story" is quite an involved plot that runs parallel to the main scenario, and generally concerns the main character developing their skills in an area that is somehow important to them. In Kiryu's case, we get to work his job as a taxi driver; as Saejima, we take him through learning how to hunt on the mountain; as Haruka, we follow her idol career from its humble beginnings and onwards into greater success.

In each instance, the Side Story is handled in a different way rather than just being a glorified way of marking your progress through a series of cutscenes. Kiryu's taxi driving Side Story, for example, involves a combination of driving people around Fukuoka and ensuring that they get good service, punctuated by some extremely silly arcade racing sequences as he investigates a racing gang. Saejima's hunting sequences involve unique mechanics surrounding avoiding detection by wildlife, shooting rifles in first-person, surviving in extremely inhospitable conditions, and setting traps. Haruka's Side Story sees her having Dance Battles in the street, building up her performance-related stats in various ways, and working through an ever-lengthening list of obligations her career places in front of her as she grows in prominence and fame.

If the Yakuza games were just about the main plot, these Side Stories and the Substories, they would already be extremely substantial. But then there's all the other stuff too. Eating at all the restaurants. Training with each character's "master" to learn new moves. Seeking out unusual happenings to have "Revelations" that, again, unlock new moves. Playing darts, pool, bowling. Playing real-life Virtua Fighter 2. Playing a fictional but nonetheless enjoyable shoot 'em up. Catching prizes in the crane game. Hitting some balls at the driving range and batting cages. The list goes on.

The great thing about Yakuza games is that you can engage with them as much or as little as you like. If you want to plough through the story and just see what happens, you can do that with no real penalty. You might not have levelled up as much as if you'd thoroughly completed all the Substories, but you can do it.

Alternatively, I suspect most players will find themselves unable to resist engaging with at least some of the optional activities — because each of them are handled with such thoroughness, and are so enjoyable in their own right, that they could quite feasibly have each been their own standalone games.

This is the genius of Yakuza. Back in the '80s, the software publisher Imagine got itself into a lot of trouble as it attempted to develop a series of "Mega Games" for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, but none of these projects ever came to fruition — though some had some successor projects.

Yakuza games, meanwhile, are "Mega Games". Each entry is a single game that you could quite feasibly play for a very long time indeed — possibly even forever, depending on how much you like mahjong and shogi — and there is absolutely nothing quite like them out there.

And they're a markedly different experience from western open world games that provide a huge, boring map littered with objective markers and expect you to hoover them up systematically while working through a tedious skill tree that gives you 0.1% poison resistance with every level up or something equally meaningless. No; although Yakuza games are full of things to do — and each comes with a handy "Completion List" marking how much of all its component Bits you have "completed" — not one of them feels like it has been designed with "player retention" in mind. Not one of them is designed for the explicit purpose of 1) being your "forever game" and 2) monetising the crap out of its user base.

No; Yakuza's wealth of things to do is all in service of creating one of the most detailed, compelling worlds in all of gaming. And although I'm very behind on the series at this point, I am well and truly determined to catch up and see where things go from here. Because after this many hours, this many games and this many in-game years having passed, I care what happens to these characters!

If you've never played a Yakuza game and are daunted by the prospect of there being (counts) 11 games set in the main series continuity, a further two spinoffs in the same setting but not directly connected, and a wealth of other, non-canonical spinoffs that range from historical adaptations to a Fist of the North Star-themed adventure, don't be afraid! Start with Yakuza Zero, play it, love it, see how you like it. And then you'll understand. And, several games later, you'll be about where I am now.

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The post #oneaday Day 549: The Yakuza games are the ultimate video games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I played HORSES this evening. I wrote about it in depth over on MoeGamer, so go read that if you want to find out a bit more about it. Short version: it was a decent Art Game, I'm not sure it'll be remembered in a couple of years' time, and the controversy surrounding it is, frankly, laughable.

That side of things is worth pondering a moment, because it's been an absolutely absurd game of telephone that has culminated in some people — including professional games journalists! — coming out absolutely convinced that the game was justified in being banned because at one point during its development it had something they considered to be child sexual abuse material.

For context, this is the scene as it ended up in the final game. The only change is that the woman atop the horse-masked individual is now in her twenties rather than being fourteen.

If you think that scene is in any way sexual, I really don't know what to tell you. There's nothing the slightest bit titillating about the whole scene, and for the majority of it, it looks like this:

That's "you" on the left, and the girl on the right is the daughter of a wealthy businessman considering purchasing one of the "horses" in the game (actually enslaved, naked humans) — during this scene even the dialogue isn't remotely sexual; instead, the woman delivers a lengthy diatribe about how people should know their place in society, how those with morals perceived to be "loose" tend to have "dangerous" ideas, and how those who live their lives "recklessly and indulgently" end up getting what they deserve.

HORSES is provocative — deliberately so — but honestly, having played through the whole thing this evening, it is so laughably tame compared to some other video games out there that the entire situation just feels bizarre. There are people thumping tables out there arguing that this game deserved to be banned while having absolutely zero knowledge of what the whole thing is actually about, but for once it seems like the majority opinion — even among games journalists — is that this game doesn't deserve the treatment it's gotten.

And that treatment is worth talking about. As Chris Person notes in his excellent piece on the game over on Aftermath, HORSES encountering such difficulty with getting a widespread release is a troubling sight for the industry. "If this is what's considered the limit for which games can and cannot be sold on mass marketplaces," he writes, "then we're all in trouble, and everyone involved in that decision should be thoroughly embarrassed."

The problem is that Valve holds a near-monopoly on the digital PC games market with their Steam platform, and thus a game from a small, independent team with a limited budget not being able to release their game their is very bad news for that team and their game. HORSES has probably sidestepped this particular issue thanks to the widespread press coverage it has had, but it's a solid case study in why the present situation is a bit of a problem.

"Well, just release it elsewhere!" some of you might say. And sure: you can buy the game on GOG.com and Humble. But for most PC gamers, neither of those storefronts are the first place they look to get new games. For most PC gamers, PC gaming begins and ends with Steam — particularly if they do their gaming on a device like a Steam Deck, which, as the name suggests, obviously prioritises Steam as its main source of material.

As I say: HORSES itself is probably going to be all right after all the coverage it's gotten. But will the next game to suffer this situation be as lucky? Probably not.

And besides, part of the reason the HORSES situation specifically is so absurd is the fact that there is much worse stuff already on Steam with zero issues. Not only do reasonably big-name recent releases like Silent Hill f feature more explicit, disturbing content than HORSES does, but you also have shovelware shit like the Sex With Hitler (yes, really) series happily existing with zero issue. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this is a rather major problem with consistency and transparency.

Transparency is, honestly, probably the biggest problem with all this. HORSES' developer Santa Ragione did their best to try and work with Valve on ensuring that it was compliant with all appropriate platform policies, and when its initial version was rejected, they changed everything that could have been remotely considered to be a bit dodgy — even if, as outlined above, it almost certainly wasn't dodgy. But they were given no chance to appeal, no second chance — it was just gone from the platform, and with it a significant opportunity at organic discovery.

The Epic Games Store situation is even more bizarre. It seems like Epic themselves re-submitted the game to IARC, an international body that issues local content certifications for digital games, and that caused the game to end up with an "Adults Only" rating from the ESRB, which isn't allowed on Epic (except for blockchain and NFT-based games, because Tim Sweeney is a cunt). This is unusual because it's not Epic's place to submit games to IARC or any ratings bodies — it's the responsibility of developers and publishers, and a storefront going out of their way to re-submit something that had already attained a rating is unheard of, and probably not actually allowed.

Anyway, it's all a shitshow, and with this coming amid payment processors continuing to cut off adult content creators and sex workers from their sources of online income, it's just generally a pretty dark, shitty time for various forms of self-expression.

I enjoyed my time with HORSES. I wasn't blown away, but I enjoyed it. It's definitely worth four quid and a couple of hours of your time if you're on board with narrative-centric games that have minimal mechanics. I wonder if it will be remembered in a few years for anything other than this whole situation with the platform holders.

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The post #oneaday Day 545: Couldn't drag me away appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been weirdly "restless" with regard to the games I feel like playing of late. I have a bunch of cool things on the go — Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Death end re;Quest: Code Z, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and probably some others I've forgotten about — but I'm having real trouble feeling settled of an evening. For the last few evenings, I've been playing nothing but Evercade games (hence yesterday's post) specifically, a combination of Spectrum classic Atic Atac (which I finished for the first time last night!), Activision 2600 games and various NEOGEO games.

And I've been having a lovely time doing so! Part of me, of course, feels like I "should" play at least one of those "big games" I have on the go, but honestly, just recently I've been feeling a tad run down, and thus some straightforward, right-to-the-point retro gaming has been pretty much what the figurative doctor ordered. Nothing to "commit" to, but something enjoyable and satisfying to engage with — and helping to broaden my experience with and appreciation of some games I might not have had the opportunity to spend a ton of time with previously.

The NEOGEO stuff is probably top of the heap in this regard. When I was young, the NEOGEO was the great legendary white whale that we only ever saw from afar (and occasionally on GamesMaster) and that no-one ever actually got to touch. Given that arcades were only really found on the seafront during my childhood and adolescence, I don't think I ever saw a NEOGEO MVS in the wild back in the day, so my sole point of reference for the machine was the fact that people talked about its cartridges costing a frankly remarkable three-figure sum each.

I always struggled to understand quite why NEOGEO games were so expensive back in the day, but I suppose a lot was riding on the fact that you were literally getting arcade-perfect games, due to the console model, the AES, having fundamentally the same guts as the MVS arcade machine. These days it seems especially absurd, given that pretty much all NEOGEO games are, as you might expect, short-form arcade-style affairs, and thus rather on the short side if you're counting "press start to end credits" as a game's "length". Can you imagine an entitled Steam reviewer pitching a fit over a game that cost £120 and lasted twenty minutes? I certainly can.

But then that's not the whole story, is it? As arcade games, NEOGEO titles were — are — inherently replayable: for high scores, for greater mastery, for competition with friends. Granted, there's probably a cap to how good you can get at something like Metal Slug or Shock Troopers, but fighters like Garou: Mark of the Wolves and the The King of Fighters series can potentially keep you busy forever if you have at least one other person to play with. When you consider it in those terms, that three-figure sum for a single game doesn't seem quite so unreasonable — particularly when you bear in mind that the three-figure sum gets you the whole damn game with no updates or DLC.

Yes, I know it's a cliché for old men like me to rail against modern games with DLC roadmaps and other such nonsense, but when you look at something like, say, The King of Fighters 2000, which has a whopping thirty-six characters in it, it's hard not to feel a bit nickel-and-dimed at modern fighting games with multiple "season passes". At the other end of the spectrum, the relatively limited playable cast of Garou: Mark of the Wolves makes it much easier to pick a single character you might want to get to know how to play a bit better, rather than overwhelming you with a huge amount of choice right from the get-go.

And then, of course, NEOGEO games don't cost three-figure sums any more, unless you're going for those original cartridges — in which case they are, as you might depressingly expect, at least three or four times their original asking price today. The NEOGEO carts for Evercade are twenty quid and have six games each — and I don't think it's a spoiler to say there's more coming next year.

So yeah. There's definitely value in these games, as "short" as they might seem to be. And apparently they're just what my brain is craving right about now. So I will continue to enjoy them for as long as my brain desires them.

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The post #oneaday Day 536: Restlessness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As you hopefully know, I do a lot of the blog posts on the Evercade website. I had a small flash of inspiration the other day for a recurring series of posts where I and the other chap who has started contributing to the site alternate between just doing a grab bag of our favourites from the library. No particular theme, just "here's five games I, personally, like, and think you should spend some time with".

We've already got this week's blog post covered, so I thought I would use today to shamelessly pinch my own formula — and I'm making no promises that I won't pick these exact five for the first time I do the new feature over on the Evercade site. If I do, I will probably talk about them marginally more professionally.

But for now, dear reader, with apologies to Rob of the excellent Beyond the Scanlines YouTube channel, here are Five Evercade Games I Just Think Are Neat. Note that these are not "the five best games on Evercade", they're just five arbitrarily chosen games that I particularly like. So if I missed your favourite, don't worry; I probably like it too.

Burnin' Rubber

Hailing from Data East Collection 1, one of the Evercade's launch lineup, Burnin' Rubber almost certainly holds the crown for the Evercade game I have, over the last five years since the system's launch, spent the most time in.

For the unfamiliar, Burnin' Rubber is a follow-up to Data East's arcade game Bump 'n' Jump. Indeed, in some locales this console version is just known as Bump 'n' Jump, but it's considerably enhanced and expanded over its arcade predecessor, making it more of a sequel — and a much better game. The concept is simple: drive your car up vertically scrolling stages, avoiding obstacles and smashing other cars out of the way either by ramming them into walls or leaping into the air and crashing down on them from above.

Burnin' Rubber is easy to learn but hard to master, and to date I haven't yet managed to beat it. But it's infectiously compelling thanks to its combination of straightforward controls, challenging but fair gameplay and inordinately catchy music. Ever since I first played it back on the original Evercade handheld, it's been a firm favourite of mine, and absolutely one of my top titles on the entire platform.

World Rally

Staying on the vehicular theme, World Rally from Gaelco Arcade 1 is next up. This high-speed isometric racer has absolutely sublime arcade-style handling, and is a real "in the zone" kind of game that probably makes you look like a superhuman to anyone watching over your shoulder.

Its genius lies in its brilliantly handled controls: rather than giving you complete freedom to turn your car in any direction, World Rally kind of "snaps" your car to the correct orientation as you exit a corner (assuming you remembered to actually steer around it) in a sort of "slot car" fashion. This prevents frustrating instances of oversteer and keeps the game pacy and accessible while still offering a gradually escalating challenge factor through increasingly complex courses.

Presentation is lovely, particularly with Gaelco's trademark low bit-rate digitised guitar noodling on the soundtrack. The sequel is lovely, too, and arguably looks nicer, but I think the original has the slight edge for me, personally.

Night Stalker

Possibly my favourite Intellivision game? It's definitely right up there with Tower of Doom and Cloudy Mountain. Anyway, Night Stalker is, for me, the best game on the Intellivision Collection 1 cartridge, and a game I come back to regularly.

The concept is straightforward: you're stuck in a maze, and robots are coming to get you. You must shoot the robots before they get you. The longer you survive, the more dangerous the robots get. You move slowly and have limited ammunition, so you need a certain amount of strategy to survive — and the ability to adapt as the situation changes.

Night Stalker is super-simple, atmospheric and enjoyable to play. We also mapped the Intellivision's somewhat idiosyncratic "disc and keypad" controls to the Evercade directional pad and buttons in an eminently sensible way, making it arguably more fun to play on Evercade than on original hardware. I'm sure there's some sicko out there who is all like "no, the Intellivision hand controller is the optimal way to play, actually", but for human beings with functional hands, you'll thank us for our control mappings on this one.

Tomb Raider

I enjoyed the original PC version of Tomb Raider back when it was current, and I remember not liking the PlayStation control scheme all that much — perhaps because I was so accustomed to the PC's keyboard controls. But returning to the series when we released Tomb Raider Collection 1 for Evercade gave me an all-new appreciation for this game's methodical puzzle-platforming.

Yes, the combat kind of sucks, but that's why I picked the first Tomb Raider: it's not a particular focus, whereas later games tried to play up the combat to varying degrees. You'll have the odd encounter with some nasties to deal with, but the majority of your time will be spent by yourself figuring out exactly how you're going to scale the enormous structure in front of you and probably breaking Lara's legs a few times in the process.

It's fashionable to bash the early Tomb Raider games today, but approach them with the appropriate mindset — i.e. that they're not Super Mario 64, nor are they trying to be — and there's a lot of fun to be had across the five games available on Evercade.

Shock Troopers

It's been a delight to get to know the NEOGEO a bit better with our NEOGEO cartridges for Evercade. Shock Troopers, which is on NEOGEO Arcade 1, is actually one of the games I did know reasonably well beforehand — in fact, it was one of the first NEOGEO games I ever played, with dotEmu's awful PC port from a few years back — but having it on Evercade is giving me a sense of rediscovered appreciation for it.

Shock Troopers isn't a remarkably original game — it's a top-down run-and-gun, Commando-style, albeit not scrolling exclusively vertically. Where it shines, though, is in how satisfying it is to play. Weapons have a real sense of oomph to them, ripping through enemies and blowing up vehicles and structures. The different characters all handle differently, catering to different play styles. And the game offers a stiff but fair challenge that allows you to make gradual progress if you stick with it and learn the enemy encounters. Plus multiple routes through it add replay value — along with a two-player mode.

It's one of the best-sounding NEOGEO games, too, with some excellent digital music and meaty sound effects. One day I might even be able to get beyond the second stage without having to credit-feed — but regardless of my own ineptitude at it, it's a game I always enjoy every time I fire it up.

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The post #oneaday Day 535: Five of my favourite Evercade games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In gaming today, it's tempting to always want to be making progress on your "big game" of the moment: a lengthy epic that goes on into the tens or even hundreds of hours in length. But one thing I find it helpful to remind myself of on a regular basis is that short-form games very much have their place and their appeal, too. And it's in this area that retro gaming in particular tends to excel.

In recent weeks, I've been having a lot of fun getting to know the NEOGEO games we've released on Evercade this year. Most notably, I've been spending some time with the ever-delightful Metal Slug, which I hadn't spent a ton of time with prior to the Evercade release, and I've even been dipping my toes into the notoriously obtuse fighting game genre a little with Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which first impressions would seem to indicate is one of the more accessible SNK/NEOGEO fighting games in existence.

These games are immediately rewarding and fun. You probably won't be able to beat them on your first go — although in most cases, you can credit-feed — but there's a definite appeal element in the form of gradual mastery. With each attempt from the beginning of Metal Slug, I get to know the game a bit better, I learn more about how to play it effectively, and, assuming I'm paying attention to what I'm doing, I get a little bit further. At this point, I can occasionally make it up to the start of Mission 3 without losing a life; with each new attempt, that "occasionally" becomes "more frequently", and that's a really satisfying, rewarding feeling.

My concern is what I feel like is an increasing number of people getting to a point where they're writing off these short-form experiences as having no real inherent value. Perhaps it's because these games aren't telling a deep, thought-provoking or emotionally engaging story. Perhaps it's simply because they're short. Perhaps it's down to assumptions that short-form or arcade games are inherently "lesser" than 100+ hour epics on computers and consoles today.

I don't know. But I know that I definitely derive value from them, and I continue to feel proud that I'm involved in helping to preserve these games and educate new generations in their appeal elements thanks to my day job.

One day I still want to write a book. Or, at this point, probably several books, given the sheer number of games that are on Evercade by now. I should probably just stop thinking about doing that and actually do it, no?

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The post #oneaday Day 534: An evening of arcade appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Kirby Air Riders is out today, and I've spent the evening playing it. Specifically, I've spent the evening playing the "Road Trip" mode that I didn't know anything about prior to starting the game. This is a single-player mode that is presumably intended to get you up to speed on everything you might be doing at any point in the other modes, but it also unlocks a bunch of stuff in a similar fashion to Smash Bros.' single-player modes from over the years.

The whole package is very Smash Bros., in fact, including the way you navigate the menus, the way you adjust your settings for a play session and the overall structure of the game. It's a very customisable game, from the look of things, so I'm looking forward to investigating the other aspects of it soon.

Road Trip, meanwhile, that I can talk about. In this mode, you pick a character and initial "machine" to ride on, and progress through a series of stages, each of which is split into a series of "encounters" on the road. Under most circumstances, you have a choice of three encounters to choose from at any point, with different rewards on offer for each. Successfully beating an encounter generally rewards you with some Road Trip-specific currency and a stat increase or two. Outside of the competitive events, you may also run into shops (where you can, of course, spend the aforementioned Road Trip-specific currency) and weird things that determine which of several branching paths you will take at the conclusion of the current stage.

The events you'll compete in on the Road Trip are generally pretty short in duration — races tend to be one or two laps at most, and the events which aren't races are all time-limited. It's enough to give you a look at the different things you can do in the game's other modes, but in a way that you never get particularly bogged down in anything. You rarely do the same type of event twice in a row, and the difficulty curve progresses nicely from "very easy" in the early stages to "genuinely quite challenging, but not annoyingly so" as you get closer to the conclusion.

As you progress through the Road Trip, you'll gain the opportunity to earn "memory shards", which tell the unfolding story. This is surprisingly dark, considering this is a Kirby game, involving a mechanical creature that has sat for aeons without being able to move because it requires someone's "strong will" to allow it to do anything, a terrifying orbital satellite that, among other things, constructs an army of robotic ants to rip this aforementioned creature to bits and rebuild it into a world-crushing weapon, and the implication that everyone's vehicles in the game are like Pokémon, if Pokémon were forms of sentient transporation rather than creatures that liked to fight. So maybe not all that much like Pokémon at all, other than the fact that they clearly have "personalities" of sorts, and partner up with the people of Kirby's world, Popstar, in a quasi-symbiotic relationship.

In the events, Kirby Air Riders is chaotic. For those concerned that it might be a bit too much like Mario Kart: it's nothing like Mario Kart. My wife saw me playing it briefly and said it looked like "Wipeout, but Kirby" and honestly she's not far from the truth there. There's a touch of F-Zero, a bit of Burnout, even a bit of Twisted Metal in there, depending on the type of event you're playing. I can see it easily being overwhelming for some players, but there is clearly method in the madness.

Probably the most clever thing it does is use an incredibly simple control scheme, much like Kirby platformers tend to. There are only two buttons to worry about: characters accelerate automatically, and the only time you need to press a button is when you want to slow down (which also charges up your boost) or use your character's "Special", which can only be used when a particular meter has charged.

The "Boost Charge" mechanic has a nicely tactile feel. You're effectively "pulling back" your character, winding them up and then letting them twang forward, though the exact implementation of this depends quite significantly on the machine you've chosen to ride. Some are built for drifting around corners; others stop dead when charging a boost and can thus immediately change direction when going around 90-degree bends; others still can't drift or boost at all, but make up for this with other strengths.

These differences between the machines, along with individual machines' special capabilities (such as the "Vampire Star" machine's ability to "bite" opponents, damaging and slowing them down and stealing their power-ups) and the stat growth throughout Road Trip mode mean that there's a surprising amount of depth considering how simple the game is to control. Different machines are eminently suitable to different types of event, so it pays to try and build up a collection — indeed, I believe to get the "true" ending for the game, you need to collect all of them prior to reaching the final encounter, though this is made more straightforward through a New Game+ option that lets you carry over the stuff you've already acquired.

There are some other interesting little things, too. A significant portion of the Road Trip mode involves the "Top Rider" mode, which is racing from a top-down perspective on simplified tracks. This is a lot of fun, though obviously less spectacular and chaotic than the 3D races — and it's nice that this is a whole mode you can play given equal weight to the "main" game mode. There are even different control options, depending on if you prefer "turn left and right" or "push the analogue stick in the direction you want to go" for these top-down sequences.

All in all, it seems like a really solid game given that distinctive Sora Ltd. polish. I'll be interested to see whether it has the juice to go for the long term on the multiplayer circuit; I can see this being a really solid multiplayer game, but, of course, it needs a community for that to work over the long term. I don't yet know if the broader community will take to it in the same way as something like Mario Kart — but then, Splatoon came out of nowhere on Wii U and managed to be a big enough hit (on the Wii U!) to spawn two sequels, so there's precedent for a Nintendo game not called Mario Kart or Smash Bros. to have a thriving online community.

More than anything, it's nice to see the Switch 2 finally picking up the pace with some solid releases — and on proper game cartridges, too. Now, if they'd just quit doing that dumbass Game Key Card thing completely I'd be very happy indeed…

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The post #oneaday Day 531: Riding the air appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The review embargo for the "Analogue 3D" FPGA-based N64 clone system came up yesterday, and as is usually the case with such things, about a bazillion reviews all dropped at the same time. The machine looks like a nifty bit of kit — although calling your brand "Analogue" and then not actually having any analogue outputs on your device is a bit weird — and has been reviewing well. As an owner of a MiSTer Multisystem 2, I have no real need for one — just as well, since ordering Analogue stuff is an absolute fucking nightmare — but I'm glad this thing exists and, moreover, appears to be pretty cool.

What has been less cool are the inevitable arguments that have been breaking out in the comments of pretty much every single video and article I have seen on this thing. It's utterly ridiculous to see grown men (and I would place good money on it being all men) of a certain age all getting pissy over how different people choose to experience retro games.

Here's my feelings on the subject: I don't care. Really! I do not give the slightest shit, so long as you're having a good time and you aren't causing anyone else any trouble.

If you want to set yourself up with a MiSTer stack you built yourself, fab. If you want to buy a MiSTer Multisystem 2 to take the hard work out of building an FPGA device, great. If you want to buy a SuperStation One, I hope you love it. If you're running Batocera on a mini PC, more power to you. If you do all your retro gaming on an Anbernic handheld running its stock OS, have fun. If you've spent several weeks finding the perfect alternative operating system for an Anbernic handheld, I hope you've had a fulfilling time doing so. If you're an original hardware junkie with a massive physical collection, can I come and visit? If you have your childhood console and nothing but an Everdrive, amazing! And I'm probably contractually obliged to mention that if your experience with retro gaming begins and ends with an Evercade or Super Pocket handheld, that is 100% fine, too.

Y'see, the important thing with enjoying retro games, to me, is, funnily enough, the games themselves. So long as you're able to experience the games you want to play in the way you enjoy experiencing them, it absolutely does not matter how anyone else wants to do it.

And yet you just have to look through any of these comment threads to see the FPGA nuts arguing with passionate advocates for RetroArch; Windows vs Mac OS vs various flavours of Linux; "download for free!" types against "I prefer to buy official rereleases" people. Basically, if there are two opposing viewpoints possible in this area — and there are quite a few of those — you can count on representatives of those viewpoints all yelling at one another.

Why? Why does it matter to you that some people think the Analogue 3D is a cool device, and you don't? Why does it matter to you that you use software emulation on your Mac and some people prefer to use an FPGA solution?

It's just another example of the Internet being constantly, unnecessarily adversarial, and it's really rather tiresome. As I say, so far as I'm concerned, I have no personal pressing need for an Analogue 3D, as I already have a suitable solution for enjoying N64 games in place — but I absolutely, definitely do not begrudge anyone their desire to add one to their collection! So if you happen to be one of the people lucky enough to have one coming your way soon, I sincerely, absolutely hope you enjoy it. And that you play Beetle Adventure Racing if you haven't already.

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The post #oneaday Day 530: My way is always better appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

So Steam announced a bunch of new hardware, and some of it looks quite nice — though the fact that no prices have been mentioned as yet is a bit of a concern.

Of the items that have been announced, I find the "Steam Frame" probably the most interesting. This is a standalone VR headset that can either stream games from another computer, or run games installed on its own storage. It doesn't have to be VR games, either; you can play standard 2D games on a big "virtual screen" in VR.

There are a number of attractive things about this. Firstly is the fact that it looks like being a relatively lightweight, comfortable headset — certainly a far cry from the units of even just a few years ago. Secondly is, of course, the Steam compatibility; by running things from your Steam library just like a Steam Deck (or the newly announced Steam Machine), it has an immediate ready-made library of thousands of games to choose from without having to worry about whether the platform will be supported over the long term. Thirdly is the fact that it's a standalone headset that has nothing to do with Meta — since up until now, your only real option in that regard has been a Quest.

Now, of course, being tied to Valve and Steam has its own concerns. Steam's community features remain a rancid cesspit of the very worst examples of humanity, for example, as discussion forum after discussion forum is overrun by right-wing fuckheads crying about "DEI" and "woke" at the slightest hint of a female character in a leading role. That is something that the company probably should address, but it also feels like it's probably much too late for them to be able to do anything about at this point. We are very much in "lunatics running the asylum" territory at this point, since it's extremely rare anyone from Valve actually steps in to deal with a situation; mostly it's up to developer and publisher community managers to stem the tide of absolute sludge from the dickheads of the Internet — and I absolutely do not blame any of them who simply refuse to engage with a Steam discussion forum on principle.

Then, of course, there's the matter of several of Valve's games encouraging a form of gambling with their lootboxes and tradable items and whatnot. Add the exploitative (and easily exploited) trading card system to the mix and you have a whole mess of ethically questionable stuff going on, because this stuff probably makes Valve a lot of money.

And finally, of course, there's the fact that Steam is the one example of online-centric DRM that everyone has been sort of fine with for a long time. Sure, there are many games that can run without Steam being open, but it can be a bit of a pain to find out which games this applies to, and which require you to have a stable Internet connection. There's no good way to take your games "out" of Steam in the same way that GOG.com provides, either; no making your own physical copies or backups of Steam games.

There's also the fact that Steam was pretty much single-handedly responsible for completely destroying the collectible physical market for PC games — although I will be fair here: if you're going to be gaming on a standalone VR headset you probably don't want to be inserting discs into it while you're trying to get your game on.

I'll be interested to see what people think of these new machines once they're out in the wild. I have no particular need for a Steam Machine, as I have a perfectly competent "living room PC" that can run most games I'm interested in playing on PC rather than console — but, as I say, the Steam Frame is of at least moderate interest to me for gaming purposes. If I do end up getting one, I will almost certainly keep my living room PC up and running as it is, as I don't just game on it; it's also an entertainment centre, my video editing system and where I do just… general computery things. I'm not entirely ready to make the switch to Linux (which SteamOS is a flavour of) as yet, but I suspect that time will come at some point.

Anyway, I'm reserving judgement until I've seen prices and I've heard what people I trust think of these things. But there's definite potential for Valve to have something special here. I certainly think they're well-placed to fill the growing Xbox-shaped hole in the games industry with Microsoft's continual missteps in that regard.

We shall see!

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The post #oneaday Day 524: Steam powered appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There is a veritable deluge of good games that have come out recently, and this statement applies pretty much regardless of the specific types of game you are into. From my own personal perspective, I've been having a great time with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Absolum, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and Lumines Arise from recent releases, and a copy of Full Metal Schoolgirl arrived today, begging me to "just give it a quick try" this evening. Then alongside that, from varying degrees of "the past", I have Death end re;Quest: Code Z and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the go. And I'm playing Space Rogue and The Granstream Saga for video series.

Honestly, it's easy to get overwhelmed at times like this and get struck down with the dreaded analysis paralysis. But I've been trying hard to fight through that any time I feel it of late — and that, in part, is how I've ended up with quite this many games "on the go" at the same time.

You see, the way I figure it is that if you have just one "big game" on the go at a time, sometimes you're just not in the mood to play that one game, and thus it pays to have other things you can turn to. It's easy to start feeling "worried" that you won't get around to finishing any of the things you've started, though, but realistically, with the way today's games are designed, you can devote an evening to one thing, play something else another evening, play something else another evening, and so on.

It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get through something — and to some people, whether or not you get through it at all, though I don't fall into that category, as I do like to finish what I start. The important thing is just that you feel like you're spending your time in a way that is enjoyable and beneficial to you. So if you're in the mood to fest on a single game for multiple days straight, do that. If you're not in the mood for that one "big game" one evening, don't spend hours agonising over whether or not you're "allowed" to play something else — just go play something else. And, heaven forbid, if you're not in the mood to play anything at all of an evening? Stick the telly on and watch a few episodes of a favourite show. Yes, it can even be something you've watched myriad times previously if you really want.

Part of the "I must stick to one thing" mentality that I have been doing my best to shake off is down to my time working in the games press, when it was important to get reviews done in time for embargoes so you could have competitive coverage. And I even self-inflicted this somewhat with MoeGamer, too, in the name of being able to give single games or series more in-depth coverage. But none of that needs to happen. It's nice to be able to write stuff for MoeGamer or script videos, but it's not an absolute requirement of everything I play.

Honestly, I think part of the reason I worry over such things is because I want to feel like I have made a contribution to the world of video games through writing about stuff — particularly stuff that doesn't get a lot of love or attention from mainstream outlets. And I do still feel like I want to do that — but also I have to remember that I am also making a contribution to this world through my day job, and my work in that regard is probably getting seen by a lot more people than articles on my own personal websites. Probably, anyway.

All this is a long way to say that I think I'm going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl this evening, and I'm not going to feel the slightest bit bad about it.

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The post #oneaday Day 523: A deluge appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Just recently, Eurogamer published a review of Arc Raiders, the latest multiplayer craze, and ruffled more than a few feathers when the reviewer, Rick Lane, dinged the game with a 2/5 star rating, primarily due to the game's apparent use of generative AI to create many of its voice lines. The developer, Embark Studios, has form in this area, with its previous title, The Finals, also featuring AI-generated voice lines.

The reviewer's justification for giving the game such a low score was not simply "AI bad" — it was because, from an artistic perspective, getting a soulless robot to voice the human characters in your game that is about robots who have taken over the world and forced humanity underground feels just a little too incongruous to be able to pass without comment.

And I agree. I also firmly, strongly and resolutely believe that the use of generative AI in video game development is an obnoxious, odious, wasteful, exploitative and ethically reprehensible practice — and I have a firm policy that I will absolutely not engage with a game that appears to have been tainted with generative AI garbage. It's why I didn't play The Alters, it's why I haven't played the latest Everybody's Golf, and it's why I won't touch Arc Raiders. (In the latter case, it's also because I suspect I won't like Arc Raiders, but that's beside the point right now.)

I've been disappointed at quite how many people I've seen handwaving away this aspect of Arc Raiders in particular. Indeed, the Eurogamer review has a comments section that is at least as much of a trash fire as you would expect, because Video Game Good, and you're not allowed to take a firm ethical stance about something in a review because then the Gamers, the good little consumer piggies that they are, will get mad that you said their Favourite Forever Game This Week was perhaps not to your taste for a perfectly valid reason.

The unfortunate thing with Arc Raiders is that its use of AI and machine learning (which are different things) is a bit shrouded in uncertainty right now. Some folks say that its generated voice lines are fine because it's actually just a fancy text-to-speech system; some folks are taking this argument further in order to weaponise disabled people and accessibility features; some are saying that it's fine because the actors the voices were trained on were aware of what they were signing up for.

But regardless of whether or not Arc Raiders' voices were generated by supposedly consenting voice actors, or if they were the product of the more environmentally disastrous end of generative AI, the entire thing rubs me the wrong way. The really stupid thing is that the generated voices in Arc Raiders are for things that voice actors could have very reasonably just recorded — things like vendors, NPCs and suchlike — and Embark's justification for using generated voices is that it's "quicker". On top of that, the results are markedly, obviously inferior to using an actual voice actor recording the complete lines, so one has to question if cutting corners in this way is really worth it.

Embark's not a small, frugal indie company, either. They have the resources to be able to afford voice actors to do a proper job. They're just refusing to. And regardless of the tech that produces the not-very-good end result, it sets a poor precedent to do that.

The arguments in favour of generated voices aren't very convincing, either. The most common one that comes up is that "one day we'll have games where every NPC conversation will be AI-generated, and you'll be able to talk to them about anything!" And to that I say: I absolutely do not want that.

When I'm playing a game that has characters in it, a narrative, a setting, all that stuff — I want to experience the vision of the creators. I want to enjoy something that someone else has created, with a clear vision and purpose behind it. I want to be able to reflect on the way a writer composed a piece of dialogue; how a character's mannerisms tell us more about them; how the tone of the whole piece gives a feeling of coherence to the game as a complete creative work.

If you're AI-generating your dialogue, you get none of that. You get a hodgepodge, incoherent mess that is easily exploitable — and, indeed, we've already seen that numerous times already, whether it's Darth Vader saying fuck or a character in the latest HoyoVerse game apparently having no idea who they are, what their background is, what their personality is or what is around them.

I refuse to accept the "genie is out of the bottle" argument. We've been making video games for 50+ years at this point, and the reason the medium has continued to endure is because of human creativity. We have seen incredible advancements in storytelling, mechanics and the overall craft of making all manner of different games over the years — and the AI glazers seem to want nothing more than to just throw all that experience away in favour of some "vibe coded" garbage with AI-generated dialogue and synthesised speech.

Couple that with the fact that AI is insanely wasteful, growing increasingly likely to make the worldwide economy crash, disastrous for the environment and taking valuable resources away from doing things that might actually make life better for people who really need it to be better? Nah. Don't need it. Don't want it. And will not support anything made with it, no matter how much you argue "no no no, but this is a good use of it, actually."

I say bravo to Rick Lane of Eurogamer for having the balls to stand up and say "no" to this garbage with a thoughtful and well-considered critique. If only we could see a bit more of that kind of thing, and less of this sort of rubbish.

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The post #oneaday Day 522: Bravo Eurogamer appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

After spending yesterday primarily playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I thought I'd make some time to do some recordings today, so I kicked off recording for my Space Rogue series on Atari ST.

I'm glad I did this. It was a lot of fun to record, as there's lots of nicely written text throughout, which makes for good things to say out loud, and I also maintain that this format, although long and cumbersome at times, is a great way of showing exactly why some games are worth sticking with in the long term.

One fun and/or slightly inconvenient thing that we've lost today is the fact that when you started playing a game like Space Rogue seriously back in the day, you had to make a commitment to it. And it was a physical commitment in the form of a save game disk — or, in the case of games like Space Rogue, which would save your position to the game disk itself, making a backup copy of said game disk to be the copy that you play from "just in case" something happens to the masters when saving.

These days, meanwhile, it's all too easy to pick up a game, play it for half an hour, then set it aside and never think about it ever again. This is all the more easy to do with services like Game Pass, which is one of several big reasons I find Game Pass in particular an absolutely odious development in the games industry. Once you'd made a save game disk, though, you were in. You'd set aside valuable magnetic media for the specific purpose of saving your progress through a video game. And you were damn well going to use it.

Of course, the version of Space Rogue I have installed on the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is installed to a virtual hard drive, so there's no worrying about disk swapping, and the load times are much faster, which is nice. This would have been an absolute luxury option back in the day — I've been reading some old Atari User magazines recently, and it's always funny to read about a 20 megabyte hard drive being "more storage space than you will ever need" and costing as much as the computer itself.

Anyway, I've been giving the Space Rogue videos a bit of "deluxe" treatment in terms of editing. Because the game is so quiet, I've added some background audio in the form of the CD soundtrack from the FM Towns version, and some gratuitous Star Trek ambience that fits in nicely with the setting. I think the end result videos are going to be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to publishing the first of these sometime this week.

Now, of course, my head is spinning with all the possibilities of old games from back in the day that I might want to give the long playthrough treatment. I'm definitely going to do at least some of the Ultima games, I'd like to do Times of Lore (though which version, I haven't decided, as the ST, Amiga and C64 versions are all significantly different from one another) and there are, of course, still plenty of adventure games I haven't covered.

But recording Space Rogue was a lot of fun today, and I'm looking forward to doing more. Maybe I might even finish it this time around. Or indeed actually get anywhere in it at all. We shall see, but the first two episodes bode well for what comes next!

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The post #oneaday Day 520: Roguing it up appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In my head, I've had a bit of a weird relationship with the Legend of Zelda series over the years. There have been large tracts of time when I haven't played any games in the series, and there are still a number of entries (primarily handheld) that I haven't tried at all. I've known Zelda obsessives over the years, and I've never counted myself among them; likewise, I don't think I've ever bought a Zelda game on launch… with the exception of the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, which I'm sure someone will argue isn't a Zelda game, but it actually is — just a different kind of Zelda game.

Anyway, I think I've come to the conclusion, many years too late, that yes, I, in fact, do like the Legend of Zelda series, and I always have done.

I think I know where my hesitancy over this came from, and it dates back to the late 1990s. I had just discovered console-style RPGs with Final Fantasy VII, and then Ocarina of Time came out, offering a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy VII, and… I felt like I didn't like it as much. At least, not in terms of story. Final Fantasy VII's narrative was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in gaming at that point, while Ocarina of Time was basically reading from the same script as A Link to the Past, which I had played (and enjoyed a lot) several years earlier.

Link didn't speak, either, which made the narrative immediately less interesting to me.

Of course, I know this is a silly comparison now, because Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time are so different from one another as to basically be completely different genres — and that's not getting into the interminably tedious arguments over whether Zelda is "an RPG" or not.

No; I can see very clearly now that the intent behind the two series, and those entries in them in particular, is very different. Final Fantasy VII was all about delivering a spectacular, emotionally engaging narrative; Ocarina of Time was about being a well-designed video game. And, although Zelda plots have become more and more elaborate over the years — not to mention the series' timeline becoming ever more convoluted — this distinction has, for the most part, remained.

This isn't to say that Final Fantasy has bad gameplay or that Zelda has a poor story, mind. It's simply that their focal points are different, and, as with anything, if you go in with the wrong things in mind, you're almost certainly not going to resonate with it as much as you would if you had more realistic expectations.

Anyway, I think back over the years and the many Zelda games I have played, and I don't think I've ever had a bad time with a Zelda game.

My first ever encounter with the series was with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on a family friend's NES. When I first played this, I didn't understand it at all, as I was very young and had never really encountered a game like it before. With how different Zelda II was from the rest of the series, I at least know I wasn't alone in feeling like that — although today I respect Zelda II immensely for having the balls to do something so drastically different from its predecessor.

I have a few oddly vivid memories of that first time I played Zelda II. The towns of Ruto and Rauru, both of which would lend their names to characters in the series many years later. The slightly wobbly melodic line on the music. The distinctive overworld map theme — which starts very similarly to the well-known Zelda theme before branching off in its own direction. The caves that are too dark to see until you get a candle. Link making a noise that sounds like he's going "whoops" every time he takes damage — a sound effect shared with Simon Belmont from Castlevania. The BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL noise and strobes when you lose a life. And the fact I always thought Link looks like a chef when he's doing his "damage" pose. I saw it once, I can't unsee it now.

A few years later, I got a Super NES, and one of the games I asked for one Christmas or birthday was A Link to the Past. I knew absolutely nothing about this game, save for the fact that magazines talked about it in tones of reverence, and I remembered quite liking my time with Zelda II.

I got it. And I was absolutely blown away by it — particularly the music. To this day, I'm still impressed that the game has full-on orchestral cymbal clashes in its music. Absolutely one of the best uses of the SNES' sound chip there ever was.

Anyway, I dutifully bought Ocarina of Time like every self-respecting N64 owner was supposed to back in the day, and I quite enjoyed it, with the caveats mentioned above. What I liked a whole lot more, though, was Majora's Mask, the direct sequel, which never seemed to resonate with the public in quite the same way despite getting good reviews — but which gets its dues much more frequently these days.

Majora's Mask basically corrected what I felt was lacking a bit from Ocarina of Time: the emotional engagement angle. Because it offered a story that wasn't just a retelling of the usual Link vs Ganon legend, it was immediately much more interesting — and its time-based mechanic allowed the narrative to go to some seriously interesting places. To this day, I'm yet to see anything quite like the conclusion of the "Anju and Kafei" questline, which resolves with literally seconds before the world ending.

I didn't get along with The Wind Waker when I first played it on Gamecube, but when I played the rebalanced Wii U version some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Likewise, I skipped Twilight Princess on its original release and played the Wii U version, enjoying it greatly.

I was late to the party with Breath of the Wild and it took me a long time between starting it and actually finishing it, but when I had done so, I was very glad I had taken that journey. I am having a similar experience with Tears of the Kingdom in that I have come to it very late, but playing it alongside the new Hyrule Warriors, which acts as a prequel and/or parallel storyline, is going to be very interesting indeed, I think.

I know some folks don't love the direction the series has taken with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and to an extent I get that — but then there has also been the excellent Link's Awakening remake and the equally good Echoes of Wisdom for those hungry for a more "traditional" Zelda experience.

All in all, it's a thoroughly interesting series, and one that very much deserves its long and proud history. And, at this point, I may as well admit that I think I'm a Zelda fan. Particularly as I've played 15 hours of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment since yesterday evening.

Now time for a bit of Tears of the Kingdom, I think…

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The post #oneaday Day 519: Hero of Hyrule appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I frigging love '80s Activision games, particularly on the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit. I grew up with the ones on Atari 8-bit, of course, and since I never had a 2600 back in the day, those are a (relatively) more recent discovery. But I adore every one of them, and I'm beyond thrilled that I've been part of bringing them back to a new audience on Evercade.

The first of our Activision cartridges isn't out yet, but I, of course, have a copy. Perks of the job and all that. It's already becoming one of my most-played Evercade cartridges, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We're actually doing three collections in total (this isn't Super Secret information, it was in our press release) and I've been largely responsible for the curation of said collections. All three of them are very strong indeed (you'll have to wait and see the lineup for the others, which are coming next year!) but this first collection comes out of the gate swinging with some of my absolute favourites.

My personal highlights are MegaMania, Enduro, Crackpots and River Raid, with honourable mentions to Beamrider and Demon Attack, games I've gotten to know a bit more recently.

MegaMania is one of the absolute best fixed shooters of the early '80s. Pitting you against waves of strange household objects, this "space nightmare" keeps things constantly interesting, as each wave has its own distinctive movement pattern — and then once you've cleared a complete loop of all of them, they go and change up their patterns a bit, just to keep you on your toes. It's a beautiful example of how utterly elegant some early games can be: it's simple to understand, has a brilliantly paced difficulty curve, a well-crafted scoring system and is endlessly replayable.

River Raid is, of course, a pioneering vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, whose noteworthy features include the ability to adjust your speed as you fly and the necessity to refuel your aircraft while negotiating obstacles and blasting enemies. The fact that this game was crammed into 4 kilobytes of ROM will never not be amazing to me. Carol Shaw was an actual wizard — not just for the game's technical accomplishments, but for the fact that, like MegaMania, it's an incredibly well-paced, considerately designed game that is likewise replayable until the end of time.

Enduro is the spiritual precursor to the home computer game The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a game which I played as a child many years before I ever encountered Enduro for the first time. Enduro is, partly by necessity of the more primitive hardware it's running on, a simpler game, but I think its simplicity is also a core part of its appeal. All you have to do is overtake a set number of cars as a full day-night-and-weather cycle of a set duration proceeds: overtake 200 cars on the first day, then 300 each day thereafter. Your final score is how many "miles" you successfully drove before failing to qualify for the next day, and the score is presented using a lovely rolling analogue counter effect. I would have loved that as a kid — hell, I love it now.

Crackpots is a relatively recent discovery, and a game I feel I would have probably been terrified of as a kid. Again, the concept is simple: bugs are climbing your building, and you must drop flower pots on them. With each wave of bugs cleared, a new colour appears, and each colour of bug has a distinctive movement pattern. When you've cleared one loop of all the bug types (black, blue, red, green) the cycle repeats, but faster. The bugs chew through a layer of your building every time you let too many past you, and this affects the pace of the game from thereon. After too many layers of your building have been eaten, the game is over. It's pure high score fodder, and once again, beautifully paced and designed, with a dynamic difficulty level that raises and lowers according to how well you're doing.

Beamrider is, in essence, another fixed shoot 'em up, but it probably has more in common with Atari's Tempest than anything else, in that rather than moving freely, you switch between distinct "lanes" that the enemies proceed down. Thus there's a much stronger element of precision and even strategy to Beamrider than some other games, and the presentation, considering the host platform, is very good indeed. It's another game I got to know quite recently — there is an Atari 8-bit version, I believe, but I never encountered it back in the day.

Demon Attack is a game that I became familiar with after watching Classic Game Room's Atari 2600 reviews many, many times. It's a very simple fixed shooter, in which all you have to do is blast demons in the sky above you. Only three demons appear at once, and only one of them fires at you. It should be primitive and stupid and dumb, but it's incredibly compelling, particularly once the pace of the game increases and the demons start splitting into smaller bits. This one actually wasn't an Activision game back in the day; it was by Imagic, but Activision got the rights to all the Imagic stuff at some indeterminate point in the past. So yes, the Evercade Activision cartridges will have some of the Imagic stuff, too.

I'm quite fond of Activision Anthology on the PlayStation 2, but the last time I played it, I spotted quite how poor the emulation is in that version. It's not altogether surprising — there have been 23 years of advancements in emulation since — but, given how accessible good quality emulation of these games is about to become with the Evercade cartridges (and, hell, how easy it is to get 2600 up and running on systems like MiSTer and cheapo Chinese handhelds) it's a little hard to go back to. The built-in "badge" challenges, weirdo visual effects and '80s soundtrack are fun, though. I feel like we'll never see a compilation quite like that ever again.

But anyway. I am banging on about this because I spent today making a video about the upcoming cartridge. Watch out for it on the Evercade YouTube channel soon!

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The post #oneaday Day 518: '80s Activision had the juice appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment arrived today and, keen to see quite how wrong that awful review from the other day was, I booted it up right after work and have been enjoying it since. I'm not very far in yet, and there seem to be a lot of mechanics and structural elements that are still locked, but I like what I see so far.

It's going to be interesting playing this alongside Tears of the Kingdom because, as anyone who has played the latter will know, a plot point in that is Zelda being sent back in time to the founding of Hyrule, and through a sidequest, Link can get occasional visions of key events during her time in the past. What Age of Imprisonment provides is a complete story from Zelda's perspective, from the moment she arrived in the past and was discovered by King Rauru and Queen Sophia, up until… well, I don't know, yet, but I assume some form of "imprisonment" will be involved, likely with Ganon(dorf) at the middle of it.

Thus far the game feels like it's taking some elements from previous Hyrule Warriors games (I say this with the caveat that I've not actually played Age of Calamity as yet) and combining them with some fun new(?) elements. Of particular note is a counterattack system, where major enemies do heavily telegraphed attacks, and you can use your characters' cooldown-based special abilities to interrupt them. This is never not satisfying, particularly when combined with the "weak point" mechanic introduced in the first Hyrule Warriors, where after certain attacks, some enemies reveal a weak spot and, if you batter this down enough, you get to perform a fancy cinematic attack on them.

There are also giant enemies, much like in the original Hyrule Warriors, and these have their own ways of being dealt with. They're not quite so rigid in their "solutions" as the original Hyrule Warriors, though, which is nice. You can, in many cases, jump on them and wail on their weak points while standing on top of them, though, which is always a delight to do in any game that allows you to do so.

The characters seem like fun, too. Particular highlight so far has been Mineru, sister of King Rauru, who is a Zonai scientist lady who commands constructs to do her bidding. Her "run" animation is her riding a motorised unicycle type thing, and most of her attacks involve summoning giant mechanical things, cannons and all manner of other fun stuff to cause chaos over a wide area. I think she's going to be enjoyable to play with, though I'm also intrigued to see what other characters are on offer and how the game incentivises you to play as them.

Mecha-Link has made an appearance, too, and he's predictably fun to play as, handling much as he did in the older Hyrule Warriors. He did conclude his first appearance by literally turning into a spaceship and flying off into the sunset, though, so I am looking forward to the first of his apparent Star Fox-esque sequences, whenever that might arise.

My concern with Age of Imprisonment (and indeed Age of Calamity, when I eventually get around to it) is that neither of them will live up to the original Hyrule Warriors in terms of Stuff To Do. For the unfamiliar, the original Hyrule Warriors, particularly in its Definitive Edition incarnation on Switch, not only had a lengthy story mode to play through (multiple times if you want to get all the rewards), but also had a brilliant mode called Adventure in which you gradually unlocked cells on pixel-art recreations of classic Zelda maps and took part in various battles in each space. Some of these were full-scale battles similar to what you do in the story mode, while others were battles that had some sort of special conditions or rules in place. The sheer amount of stuff to do in the Adventure mode, across a variety of different maps, meant that the original Hyrule Warriors had near-infinite replayability, and with the way Age of Imprisonment seems to be structured, I suspect it doesn't have anything like that.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. It means that Age of Imprisonment might actually be completable. And if and when I'm done with it, I can always return to the original for more of that sweet Adventure mode action.

In the meantime, I'm having a lot of fun with it, and learning today that its soundtrack is by MONACA, best known for their work on the Nier series, has made this game all the more interesting to me. And so I'm off for another battle or two before bed, I think…

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The post #oneaday Day 517: First impressions from Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I originally stopped doing longform playthroughs on my channel because it was taking forever to get through a single game (and I was getting bored with Final Fantasy III, probably my least favourite Final Fantasy — yes, I'm a sicko who likes Final Fantasy II), but with my recent playthrough of The Granstream Saga on PS1 proving to be quite enjoyable (if not exactly a viewer magnet, but I don't care about that) I think I'm going to do some more of these.

I've been hesitant to do so for the aforementioned reason, but at the same time I've also wanted to do some more, because I feel like that does better justice to longer games that perhaps can't be finished in a single sitting. And, given that it's easy for me to set aside some "retro time" to record this stuff of a weekend, particularly now I have the MiSTer Multisystem set up, I feel I can probably devote some proper time to a number of games I've been meaning to explore properly for ages.

I think the first one I'm going to do, and I'm going to kick this off alongside the ongoing The Granstream Saga playthrough, is Origin's Space Rogue. This is a game I have adored ever since I first played it on Atari ST back in the day, but I've never beaten it, at least partly because, as a kid, I always assumed it was so dauntingly massive it was impossible to ever beat. However, looking back at it as an adult, it definitely looks like it will be a manageable size, and with my big brave adult brain, I can probably "solve" anything it wants to throw my way. And if not, it'll be a fun experiment anyway.

The other reason I want to do this is because I'm conscious I've done a lot of "later retro" stuff recently with the PlayStation games, and I have no intention of stopping that, but I've been struggling to think of a way to kind of refresh my enthusiasm for older home computer (particularly Atari) stuff. And I think this might be a good means of doing that.

With two longform series on the go, I'm not intending on leaving the single-episode formats behind. There are some games where you only really need a single episode to see what makes a game tick, and from there you can decide whether or not you want to spend any more time with it. There are many arcade-style games that I've played for half an hour on a video as my first encounter with them, and now go back to frequently because I enjoyed that initial session so much.

There's no need to make additional videos on those games, though, because in most of those cases, the game is sort of "the same" each time — it's just my skill and knowledge of it developing over time. And while I don't doubt there's at least some value in demonstrating my own improvement in a series of videos, I feel if I'm going to spend multiple videos on one thing, it's more interesting to tackle a longer game that evolves over time with a narrative, character progression or simply a long overall playtime.

Stuff that I've casually earmarked to look at in this regard At Some Point include the aforementioned Space Rogue, Times of Lore, the Ultima games, Dungeon Master, the Eye of the Beholder series, the Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games and Starflight. Some of these games I've covered before in a one-off format, and always felt like I probably should go back to them at some point.

So I'm going to, starting this weekend!

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The post #oneaday Day 516: Longform playthroughs appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the last few days, I have not been playing any of the new games I have. I have, instead, been mildly hyperfixating on Atic Atac for Spectrum, which is part of the upcoming Rare Collection 1 cartridge that we're releasing for Evercade. I have ostensibly been doing this so I can better inform the Evercade community about how to get the best out of this game, but honestly I've just been having a lovely time, too.

Atic Atac is a game I have fond memories of, though not because I had it as a child — none of Rare predecessor Ultimate Play the Game's titles were on Atari computers. I don't actually remember where I played it for the first time, and it was only once I ever played it. I believe it was the BBC Micro version I played rather than the Spectrum version, which means I probably played it at my friend Matthew's house, but the details are hazy and unimportant.

What I do remember about Atic Atac is that I thought it was a really cool game for a few reasons: firstly, its top-down perspective, presented with bold, colourful, almost vector-esque lines; and secondly, its unusual health display, which was presented as a roast chicken gradually being stripped down to the bone. When all the "meat" was gone, you lost a life.

For years, I never actually knew what the point of Atic Atac was, though. When I played it as a child, neither I nor whoever it was who was proudly showing it off to me knew what you were supposed to do, so we just had a lovely time wandering back and forth through rooms, throwing axes at monsters. And, indeed, it is possible to enjoy Atic Atac like that if you so desire; there's even a score function based entirely on the enemies you defeat, so you can challenge yourself to get as high a score as possible before succumbing to inevitable death.

Spending some proper, protracted time with it now, though, I'm finding it very much my sort of game, in that it's something of a blend between the Atari 2600 classics Haunted House and Adventure, with a dash of early-format text adventures in there. Not in terms of how you interact with it — Atic Atac is out-and-out an action game — but rather in terms of its core structure of wandering a map, searching for specific "treasures" and your end goal being to return all of said treasures (three pieces of a key, in this case) to a specific location: the starting room.

What I often find with home computer games from this period — particularly those that originated on the Spectrum, for some reason — is that it's easy to assume they're a lot more complicated and confusing than they actually are. And such was the case with Atic Atac; at its core, it's a game about getting to know a map, unlocking doors and hunting for treasure, nothing more. Sure, there's a couple of additional wrinkles — most notably, a few special items counteracting a few "special" monsters that appear at various points — but the basics are simply explore maze, unlock doors, get treasure, escape.

One thing I have really enjoyed doing with Atic Atac is manually making a map, adventure game style. This is mostly fairly straightforward to do, though there are a couple of instances in the game where it defies its own laws of physics to squeeze rooms in where there "shouldn't" be any, which makes mapping those particular portions a little challenging, but for the most part it's easy enough to map. The tricky thing, then, is systematically searching all those rooms to find the keys and treasures that you need!

I haven't quite managed to beat the game just yet, but I've been really enjoying the attempts. And I think I know it well enough to be able to offer some solid advice to newcomers now, too — so watch out for that around the time of Rare Collection 1's release!

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The post #oneaday Day 514: Up to the Atic appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of my biggest annoyances with a lot of modern games is enemies that hit like absolute dump trucks from the start of the game. Of recent games that I've played (and liked), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did this, Silent Hill f did this, and I've just started playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and that does it too. It's especially annoying in that, because you start with so little health, and having literally 95% of it gone if you get hit once in an early fight is very frustrating.

I'm pretty convinced that this aspect of game design is a side-effect of the popularity of FromSoftware's work, because in a Souls game, you expect all enemies to hit like dump trucks, even if they're absolute trash fodder, and the game is designed and built around that. To put it another way, Souls games are, in some respects, survival horror games, in which you play a vulnerable protagonist with limited resources facing overwhelming odds and unimaginable, often unexpected horrors.

I'm sure anyone who played Dungeons & Dragons games that started you off at level 1 are laughing at me right now, too. Believe me, I know all about old D&D.

Zelda, though? I don't want the game to patronise me or anything, but it would be nice if it took things a bit easier on you from the beginning. This is the exact same bugbear I had with Breath of the Wild, and it's probably a major contributing factor to how long it took me to actually beat that game.

See, I do like Breath of the Wild, and I like what I've played of Tears of the Kingdom so far. But when every single combat feels like you're a razor's edge away from frustrating death, it's kind of exhausting. Not only that, it's different to how past Zelda games did it, too. Earlier Zelda games still started you off with a pitiful amount of health, but to compensate for that somewhat, enemies you meet in the early hours do very little damage. And that works! Ease the player in gradually without smacking them in the face for making the slightest mistake, then as the game continues, escalate things gradually by increasing the power of the enemies at a roughly similar rate to the player gaining in power.

It's a very different sort of game, but this is something that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of nails. I say "sort of" because the game's story battles are pretty much at fixed levels, while the random encounters — which will likely form the majority of what you will be using to level up your characters most effectively — scale to your level. This means that you're always presented with a decent challenge when facing a random encounter; the flip side of that is that it's possible to charge into a story encounter either woefully underprepared and get your head shoved firmly up your anus, or extremely overprepared to such a degree that you trivialise supposedly dramatic encounters. Such has always been the way with role-playing games, of course, and there's a convincing argument to be made that part of the joy of Final Fantasy Tactics is seeing absolutely how much you can break it.

You can't do that with Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, though. You have to do the game's opening quests with the vitality of a wet paper bag, the lung capacity of a chaffinch and equipment so flimsy Chinese Amazon sellers would be embarrassed to put their nonsensical names on.

In some respects, you can look on this as the game saying "hey, you don't have to fight literally everything, and in fact it might be in your interests not to". But when you have situations like one I encountered this evening, where two particularly frustrating enemies were guarding a chest that wouldn't open until I beat them, you kind of feel like you do have to beat them. (Except the chest had nothing in it but a shiny rock. I was annoyed.)

I don't want to be too tough on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, though, because I did ultimately very much enjoy the former and, outside of the above-mentioned encounter, I've had a lovely time with the latter this evening. I just think it would be nice if we had a few modern games where taking a single glancing blow from an enemy didn't feel like someone had just dropped a piano on your head.

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The post #oneaday Day 511: Stop hitting me so hard appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Back when the CD-ROM era first started, and game developers suddenly had a lot more storage capacity to play with, a revolution unfolded. Games became "talkie", with formerly text-based dialogue now being supported (or sometimes, in those less enlightened times, replaced) with voice acting of variable quality. This was, for the most part, seen as a significant step forwards in terms of games being able to tell interesting and convincing stories, though some genres benefited from it more than others, with probably the biggest beneficiary being point-and-click adventures.

These games already had pretensions of movie-style storytelling. Indeed, back when Ron Gilbert of LucasArts coined the term "cutscene" with Maniac Mansion, he defined them as "short, animated sequences — like scenes from a movie — which can provide clues and information about the characters" (emphasis mine). As such, it was only natural that as interactive entertainment and movies moved ever-closer together, we would start to hear game dialogue as much as read it.

That wasn't universally the case, mind; not every game that featured dialogue was fully voiced. In many cases this was because the storage capacity of a CD wouldn't have been sufficient to include the entire script for longer games such as RPGs, particularly on console, where they had been becoming more and more dialogue-heavy. In those cases, the extra storage space instead went to other purposes such as pre-rendered video sequences or even live action video.

The advent of DVD didn't lead to longer games suddenly becoming "talkie", either; while there was often a lot more speech in these games, they still often weren't fully voiced. Final Fantasy X is a good example — major story scenes in that game are fully voiced, but incidental interactions and random NPC conversations remain text-based. And this situation has continued right up until this day — even with the huge storage capacity of modern flash memory-based cartridges and Blu-Ray discs, there are still a fair number of RPGs that have unvoiced dialogue — although that number is dwindling a bit. Many Japanese games, even from relatively low-budget studios like Compile Heart, even have dual audio today.

We're in a position now where it's possible for another minor revolution in "talkie" terms, and one of the best examples I've seen is the recent Final Fantasy Tactics remake. This is one of those games where, as outlined above, there was far too much in the way of script for them ever to be able to make it fully voiced back in the PlayStation days. Not only that, but video game voice acting in the late '90s was generally… Not Good. There was the odd exception, yes, but going back and listening to some of those early "talkie" games sometimes makes you just want to turn the speech off and go back to fully text-based dialogue. King's Quest V says hello. (King's Quest VI, meanwhile, is excellent.)

Today, though, we have a wide and diverse variety of voice actors with plenty of video game experience, and pretty much all of them can be heard in Final Fantasy Tactics. And the result is simply smashing. By combining the revised (and considerably better) retranslation for the PlayStation Portable "War of the Lions" version of Final Fantasy Tactics with a cast of voice actors who can actually act, we have one of the most gloriously theatrical games I think I've ever played. It really is a thing of wonder, and it adds so much to the game.

It makes me want to see more games from the PS1 era tackled like this. I would love to see some remasters of games from that period where the basic gameplay isn't touched all that much aside from a few interface and balance tweaks, but a fully voiced script delivered by people who know what they're doing is added. There's a bunch of games that would really benefit from this treatment — though it remains to be seen if companies like Square Enix will feel inclined to do this any more.

By all accounts, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles appears to have been doing well both critically and commercially, though, so hopefully this is taken as a sign of something people would like to see (and hear) more often.

In the meantime, I'm off to go enjoy it a bit more.

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The post #oneaday Day 509: A new age of "talkies" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I absolutely love and respect greatly, but I have to be in the right mood to play it. Today I was very much in the mood to play it, so play it I did. I got to a point that proved to be a sticking point for me when I first played it on PlayStation — Golgollada Gallows, also known as Golgorand Execution Site in the original — and, indeed, it proved to be a bit of a sticking point for me this time around, also.

However! This time around, I was armed with the knowledge of how I beat it last time around, which was to spend several hours doing random battles to level up my core units to such a point that they could survive the challenge of Golgollada Gallows — notorious as one of the toughest fights in the relatively early game — and progress without too much trouble.

Y'see, the difficulty I had with this first time around is that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of positions itself as a game where you move from story beat to story beat without any interruptions. Because it's not a conventional RPG in which you directly control the protagonist as he wanders around towns and dungeons, it's easy to see the random engagements you can run into on the node-based world map as annoying inconveniences preventing you from seeing the next bit of story.

But they are there for a reason — and, indeed, The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game makes it even easier for you to take advantage of them by making them not random at all. Sure, sometimes as you move from node to node you'll get the distinctive "swoosh" that indicates a battle is incoming, but unlike the PlayStation original, you can choose not to engage if you don't want to. This prevents you from encountering a minor softlock if, for example, you're trying to get to a town to stock up on healing items or refresh your units' equipment.

However, it also goes the other way. If you pass through a non-story node and you don't have an encounter there, you can choose to "search for enemies" and manually trigger a battle. This means if you actually want to spend some time levelling your units or earning them some new abilities — which the game doesn't tell you to do, but which is very much a good idea — you can do that much more easily than in the PlayStation version. If you want to, you can just stand on one battlefield, do a fight, then immediately trigger another one — no running back and forth between nodes in the hope of getting the "swoosh", because you can trigger it at will, and you can ignore it if it's inconvenient.

While I'm not normally a fan of being able to turn off encounters in a regular RPG — it feels very much like cheating, plus it does you out of some progression that you probably need — in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where battles take 5-10 minutes or more rather than a few seconds, this was an important and very welcome tweak to the formula.

Anyway, upshot of all this is that I beat Golgollada Gallows on my second attempt rather than taking the many, many, many attempts I did back in the day. I was still relatively new to console RPGs when I first picked up Final Fantasy Tactics, after all, and it hadn't occurred to me to grind because I wasn't super-familiar with the concept. Once I spent that time levelling my units properly, though, everything fell into place, and the rest of the game was much more straightforward. As, indeed, I suspect it will be this time around, too.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is a wonderful remake of an already wonderful game. I have greatly enjoyed my time playing today, and, having got over that notorious difficulty spike, I suspect the remainder of the game (except maybe "that" Wiegraf fight) will be even more enjoyable.

So your lesson for the day, then, if you're new to Final Fantasy Tactics, is don't be afraid to grind. Embrace it. Love it. You will come to appreciate it when all your units are suddenly orders of magnitude more effective with just four or five additional levels under their belts!

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The post #oneaday Day 506: Tactical Sunday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.

I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)

Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.

Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.

This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermath sums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.

I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.

"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.

And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.

It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.

Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.

I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?

Those are rhetorical questions.

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.