#oneaday Day 345: For the sake of fun

I recently picked up the Capcom Fighting Collection 2, primarily on the strength of it having Project Justice in there — one of a few games from the PS1-Dreamcast era that I seriously regret letting go of at some point in the past, considering the prices they command now. (The other is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1.) And, spending a bit of time mashing buttons through a brief attempt at Project Justice last night, it got me thinking: I should spend more time with games that are not just about getting from beginning to end, and then being done with them.

I've had this thought before, of course. But I'm feeling particularly conscious of it once again, particularly after rolling credits on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at the end of last week. Games that have a clear beginning, middle and end are great, and nothing will ever make me want to step away from experiencing games with particularly strong stories. But I'm also very aware of the fact that there are gaming experiences I specifically shy away from because they're not something you can start, work your way through, and finish.

I'm not really talking about what some people call "lifestyle games" like Fortnite and Minecraft. I'm talking about things like arcade games, fighting games, that sort of thing. But also the kinds of games that are friendly to just dipping into for a bit, having a good time and then setting them aside again for a while.

I think part of the problem I have is that so many games these days want to attach a story to the experience. It can feel like a somewhat overwhelming commitment to have multiple titles on the go at once, if you hope to keep all these narratives straight in your head. Of course, some might argue that the stories in some games aren't really worth thinking about too hard — but at the same time, I've played enough games over the years that have been less than favourably received critically, but which actually turned out to have meaningful and worthwhile things to say. I want to pay attention, but sometimes it feels difficult and overwhelming to.

Having finished Clair Obscur, I'm heading back into the Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition trenches as my "main" game. But perhaps I shouldn't think of it like that. If I think of something as a "main" game, that invites a sense of guilt when I play something that is not that. And, realistically speaking, I have zero obligations to anyone in terms of what I play. I never have done, except perhaps when I was working on gaming publications and was obliged to have played the things that I reviewed. (And quite right, too.)

This is definitely, as I think I've said before, a mindset that I have accidentally conditioned myself into. Back in earlier times — I think probably Xbox 360/PS3 and backwards — I had absolutely no problem jumping back and forth between all manner of different games according to mood. When I found something that gripped me, I'd stick with it; when I wasn't in the mood for something, I wouldn't play it, and I certainly wouldn't spend any time feeling a weirdly anxious sense of quasi-panic about whether I really should be playing it just because I'd started it.

Part of what got me into this mental mess is the desire to create things online: videos and articles. I've always loved creating things, and having the opportunity to just share all these things that I love with the world is great. But it also, at times, affects my brain in somewhat unwelcome ways. Should I play this game For Fun, or should I play it with a mind to Making Something About It? The correct answer is "it doesn't matter, it can be both, or it can be just one, just do what you feel like you want to do at any given time rather than agonising over it".

I don't think the answer is specifically scheduling my time. I tried that a while back for a feature on MoeGamer, and while the experiment was an interesting one, I think it's too inflexible, and it takes things too far in the other direction. What if I'm not in the mood to play a sim on Tuesdays? What then?

This hobby is supposed to be fun, and with the sheer amount of stimulation it offers these days, it's easy to get very overwhelmed. At times like that, you need to take a step back, think "yes, I actually do feel like playing Project Justice this evening, even though I still have Xenoblade on the go" and then go bloody well play Project Justice.

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

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#oneaday Day 342: Palette Cleanser

Yes, I know it's "palate cleanser", but I'm making a Clair Obscur pun, see. 'Cause I finished it last night, and boy, was that ever a good game. So much so that I'm sort of sitting in this weird afterglow right now where I don't quite feel ready to go back to Xenoblade Chronicles X, but also feel mildly dazed and confused about what, if anything, I might want to play next.

I won't go into specific details about how Clair Obscur ends right now — that's probably a job for either a podcast or an in-depth article on MoeGamer — but suffice to say that I think, or I hope, anyway, that people will be talking about this game for a very long time. For me, it's the first game that has felt like a notable step forward in the medium for quite some time. Yes, technology has advanced, graphics have got better and load times have got shorter, but I'm not sure the games have got any better.

Clair Obscur, though, is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. Sure, if we're getting technical about things, almost the exact same game could have probably been made (with somewhat worse visuals) one, two, maybe even three generations of console hardware ago. We had the fundamentals of its game design, the way it tells its story, its mechanics and aspects of its presentation back in the PlayStation 2 era, but somehow, all of those elements have never quite come together in this exact form until just now.

In fact, I think one of the best things about Clair Obscur is that it takes influences from a number of different "eras" of gaming. It has the "world map" structure of PS1 and even 16-bit RPGs. It has turn-based combat that, in some regards, feels like it owes something to Final Fantasy X. It has timing-based parry and dodge mechanics that owe a debt to FromSoftware's work. And, of course, it all looks bloody lovely thanks to Unreal Engine 5. I think that's the reason we haven't seen something quite as sumptuous as Clair Obscur for quite some time, because we've needed all those previous generations of influences for them to be able to merge together into this piece.

Anyway, I said I wasn't going to talk a lot about Clair Obscur and then I went and did. What I'm mulling over as I type this is exactly what I might want to play next. And the reason I made the increasingly regrettable pun in the title of this post is that I'm feeling like I might want to play something fairly short as a palate-cleanser before I return to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Or perhaps to play alongside Xenoblade Chronicles X, because I feel like I should probably try and get out of the habit of only feeling "able" to play one game at once, particularly given how many of the bloody things line my walls.

I'm leaning towards something platformer-y. Maybe a Castlevania, or something like it. I have the Castlevania Advance and Dominus collections that I haven't explored yet, so that might be something. Or there's always a racing game. I like racing games. Fuel is currently in my PlayStation 3 because I've been playing that a bit recently, but I also think I maybe might want to play something different. Or maybe I do want to play Fuel. Fuel is good, after all.

In fact, yes. Decision made. I will play some Fuel. I like Fuel. It is a comfort game, and that is what I feel like I need right now. So let's go be comfortable!

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#oneaday Day 336: The new old

I am presently awaiting two new games consoles with "2s" in their names: the Nintendo Switch 2, and the MiSTer Multisystem 2. And I think I might be more excited about the latter.

I've never used anything FPGA, but I'm led to understand that it's a marvellous thing. And the sheer number of different things that the MiSTer supports is exciting me. With the setup I intend to slot it into, I'm looking forward to being able to use it as a retro computer as well as every games console ever up until the PlayStation, Saturn and N64.

Now, the one difference between the Nintendo Switch 2 and the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is that the latter is going to require a lot more setting up and fiddling around with than the Switch 2 will. But I am hoping that any tinkering will be a one-time process, and that once it is done, the MiSTer will be able to just sit there and do whatever I want it to. Within reason, obviously.

I'm going to hook up a keyboard and mouse to the system as well as a controller, so it can be used for actual computing as well as just playing games. I'll probably get another one of the 8bitdo retro-styled keyboards for this purpose — the C64 one would certainly be thematically appropriate, in the absence of an Atari ST or Atari 800XL one, though the one that looks a bit like an IBM Model M is also quite nice.

I'm also probably going to invest in some nice speakers rather than relying on the single mono speaker of my trusty Trinitron CRT. That built-in speaker is surprisingly decent considering its size and placement, but it would be nice to be able to give console games in particular a bit of oomph.

So all told, I think the setup will probably look something like this, but with less wobbly freehand mouse-drawn lines.

With that, I should be sorted for some retro gaming and computing fun for quite some time. At some point I might consider looking into the various solutions available for using real classic controllers on the Multisystem 2, but I don't think I'll make that a priority to begin with. Let's get it up and running and working — and doing what I want it to do — and then we can talk customisation. Because there's a lot of customising you can do with a MiSTer, I'm led to understand!

It's an exciting new world that I can't wait to get involved in. I have a bit of a wait before that happens — the Multisystem 2 is coming out in August — but I guess I can occupy myself with the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World in the meantime…

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#oneaday Day 322: The Expedition

Hello. It's after 1am and I haven't written anything, I need a bath (that can wait until tomorrow) and I'm quite tired. So this will probably be a short one. I did want to acknowledge something, though, which is that I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this evening, and it's real good.

I was a little skeptical about it after feeling a bit burnt by the Blue Prince situation, but this time around it's just flat-out a good game, not "a good game if you have the right kind of brain and 150 hours to plough into it".

I will write more about it on MoeGamer anon, but I did want to acknowledge that my first impressions are very good indeed, and that it has a very distinctive atmosphere about it. I'm getting quite strong Nier vibes from it in terms of its rather melancholy atmosphere — indeed, my wife walked in at one point and asked if it was another Taro Yoko joint. I explained that no, it's French, but I can completely see why she would think that just from overhearing the music.

Oh man, the music. One of the most important things to get right in a dramatic RPG, and boy did they get it bang on in this game. Sweeping orchestral pieces, triumphant choirs, lonely soloists, tinkling pianos, it's all there, and it all hits one right in the Feels.

I was a little concerned about coming to a "J-style" RPG that everyone was saying was the best thing ever when chances are the last "JRPG" they played was Persona 5; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has been consistently engaging with this type of game for the last 20 years, while many other folks haven't for various reasons. And I think it's still going to be interesting, but so far my impressions are that no, this isn't just "good if you haven't played an RPG in the last 20 years", it's a good RPG.

There's Nier, there's Final Fantasy, there's even bits of Souls in Expedition 33's DNA, and it all works together in a thoroughly interesting fashion. But, like I say, it's after 1am and I really should probably go to bed. I will write more about this game — much more — over on MoeGamer very soon. But for now, I bid you good night!

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#oneaday Day 320: Attempting to list one turn-based RPG a year for every year between Final Fantasy X and now

The recent release of Obscure Claire or whatever it's called has spawned some frankly toxic discourse about turn-based vs. real-time RPGs and the perceived accessibility of the RPG genre, so I thought I would take a moment and see if it was possible to name at least one turn-based RPG that had come out every year between Final Fantasy X, which a frightening number of people think was The Last Great Turn-Based RPG, and now.

I'm taking English language releases as gospel here, not Japanese release dates in the case of games that originated there. Because we're talking about English people and their weird selective memory. I'm also going to try not to include more than one entry from a series, and I'm not restricting the list to just "JRPGs". Anything where you take turns to make numbers pop out of monsters is fair game.

Are you ready? Here we go! (Ya ya ya ya… wait, no, wrong genre.)

2001: Final Fantasy X
2002: Suikoden III
2003: Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (yes, they count)
2004: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (aka Final Fantasy Tolkien)
2005: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
2006: Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
2007: Eternal Sonata
2008: Etrian Odyssey II
2009: The Last Remnant
2010: Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland
2011: Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2
2012: Fire Emblem: Awakening (strategy RPGs are still turn-based RPGs!)
2013: Bravely Default
2014: South Park: The Stick of Truth
2015: Shadowrun: Hong Kong
2016: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
2017: Blue Reflection
2018: Octopath Traveller
2019: Death end re;Quest
2020: Trails of Cold Steel IV
2021: Mary Skelter Finale
2022: Dungeon Travelers 2-2
2023: Sea of Stars
2024: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Cor. Some crackers among that lot, for sure, many of which I'm still yet to play.

And, it should probably go without saying, these were far from the only turn-based RPGs released each year, to say nothing of RPGs that don't specifically use turn-based mechanics but are nonetheless particularly noteworthy, such as the Xenoblade Chronicles X rerelease this year.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: turn-based RPGs have never, ever gone anywhere. The only difference with Clair Obscur is that all eyes are on it thanks to it using fancy new Unreal Engine 5 tech — which some are already saying is a bit of a hindrance rather than a benefit.

The fact that a lot of the above games don't get much attention outside of niche-interest circles is, more often than not, down to a refusal to engage with anything that might be on the lower budget side of things, or particularly if it involves an anime art style. I know people who have missed out on some absolutely fantastic games just because they refuse to engage with anything that looks a bit anime, regardless of subject matter. And that's their loss.

Getting people to "read" a bit more widely is, I'm sure, a problem with every medium. But dear Lord is it ever frustrating when you've spent years of your life screaming about games you find fascinating, only for people to shrug and make it very clear that they haven't paid any attention whatsoever.

Oh well. As I say, their loss. I know what I like, and I have plenty of the stuff that I like on my shelves. And I guess that's all that really matters at this point.

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#oneaday Day 316: Mario Kart World looks like fun!

You will doubtless be aware of the impending release of the Nintendo Switch 2, and its launch title Mario Kart World. You may also be aware of the fact that people are complaining about the price (not unjustifiably). And you may even have sat down and watched the Mario Kart World-centric presentation the other day.

Some people seem to be a bit down on Mario Kart World. I had to banish a video from my YouTube recommendations earlier for it claiming to offer "the unfortunate truth" about the new game, when said "truth" was just that the video maker, who hadn't played the game, didn't think it going open world was a good idea.

I'm not going to get into whether he's right or wrong (he's definitely wrong, though), but instead I want to talk about my own personal response to what I've seen of Mario Kart World so far, with the caveats that I haven't played it, I haven't been to any of the "Nintendo Switch 2 Experience" events, and that have preordered the Switch 2 bundle that comes with a digital copy of Mario Kart World, so I am perhaps predisposed to like the thing I've spent money on.

Basically, I'm well up for what Mario Kart World has to offer. I like common-or-garden Mario Kart to a decent degree, and it usually comes off the shelf any time friends are over. But despite the improving tech, visuals and course design with each new installment, the overall structure of the game hasn't really changed all that much since the SNES original. Mario Kart has always had a bit of a problem with its single-player modes being a bit bare-bones, and this is something that has never really been fixed over the course of 8 mainline installments. It was particularly apparent in the Nintendo 64 era, where Rare's Diddy Kong Racing offered an impressively substantial single-player "Adventure" mode that really made Mario Kart 64's paltry grand prix offerings look a tad weedy.

Granted, today the enduring appeal of modern Mario Kart games is in playing online, where you get the performance and visuals of single-player but the thrill of competing against real opponents. But that's not something that everyone enjoys — particularly since, as a popular game, it's filled with people who have no-lifed their way into mastering the most important "skills" (and/or exploits) in order to win every time. Playing Mario Kart online as a casual player is a great way of testing whether or not you really believe that "it's not the winning that counts, it's the taking part". Because after myriad sessions of seeing the frontrunners scream off over the horizon, never to be seen again, and not really knowing why or how they did that, it gets a bit old.

Mario Kart World, now, though, that's different. Online is still going to be an important part of the experience, and with the Nintendo Switch 2's GameChat feature, it looks like a potential return to the early days of Xbox Live, when it's easy to get folks together to shoot the shit while you're playing games — and not necessarily the same games. The key difference, this being Nintendo, is that GameChat is restricted to your friends, so no jumping into public lobbies and immediately being screamed at or called a racial epithet, unless that's what your friends are like. In which case you should find new friends.

But perhaps more importantly, judging by what we've seen so far, is that Mario Kart World offers a substantial single-player experience, and it's all down to that open world. Driving games are one type of game where it makes perfect sense to have an open-world map, and theming the game around rough-and-ready vehicles such as go-karts and motorcycles makes it feel less weird to go off-road exploring. One of my favourite games in this regard is Codemasters and Asobo Studio's Fuel, which has an absolutely vast open world filled with events to participate in and things to find. Plus it's just plain fun to drive around and see how a variety of different vehicles handle the various terrains.

Fuel is a semi-realistic game, though; Mario Kart World, meanwhile, is not beholden to the laws of reality, being a game set in a cartoonish fantasy world. That means we can have a map with incredible geographic diversity, weird and wonderful things to discover and a real sense that you might find anything around the corner. For all I love Fuel, its overriding colours are dull green, grey and brown, and any changes in the map you encounter as you pass from region to region are gradual rather than drastic. Not so in Mario Kart World, and I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

One of the things I really like the sound of is how the races link together, with circuit races leading to point-to-point races that take you to the next course in the sequence. I absolutely love point-to-point races — a side-effect of growing up with games like OutRun and Lotus Turbo Challenge — and Mario Kart World sounds like it's going to implement them not only as interstitial races in the main Grand Prix events, but also as non-stop "knockout" rally competitions that unfold as one long race taking you between multiple areas, with the bottom [x] participants being knocked out at every checkpoint.

But then the open world is filled with collectibles to find — the exact function of which we don't know just yet — and "P-switch challenges", which task you with completing various missions that test your driving skills. It's this exploration aspect that I think I find most exciting, particularly as you can not only play it solo, but you can bring friends along, too. Burnout Paradise was excellent fun in its multiplayer free-roam mode — sadly, I only ever really got to play it with friends once — and I can see this being very enjoyable; a great way to virtually hang out with friends over GameChat while having a meaningful, but relaxing and not-too-demanding, gaming experience.

Whether or not all this is really "worth" £75 for its physical RRP remains to be seen, and "game worth" is a completely subjective thing anyway. But I know that after seeing the announcement and the subsequent Direct, I'm very much on board with Mario Kart World, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it when June finally rolls around.

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#oneaday Day 314: The news churn

There was a good piece over on Aftermath today titled "Video game blogs from the 2000s were fast, reckless and very bad at news". The gist of the piece was that video game websites that adopted a continuously updating "blog" format, in contrast to the "magazine" approach many earlier gaming sites had used, inadvertently set in place a format for games journalism that isn't particularly helpful for readers, and is definitely not good for the writers.

The piece goes on to note that the pressure to have [x] number of articles per day, or the fact that many writers were paid (a pittance) by the article placed a great deal of pressure on the site's writers to make even the most mundane, pointless bullshit somehow "newsworthy". It is this, among other things, that led numerous websites to continuously and uncritically quote Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter whenever he spouted off something that was either immensely obvious (the new Grand Theft Auto will probably sell well!) or so utterly vague as to be completely useless.

I wasn't involved in the biz at the start of this, but I definitely felt its effects. When I joined GamePro in 2011, the site was just starting to experiment with a new format for its news coverage. At the start of my shift each day, I was to dig up a bunch of stories and post them as just headlines and a brief summary on a front-page forum as a sort of "news briefing". Then, later in my shift, after the stories had all had a bit of time to percolate, I would write one or two up in further detail based on which of the posts had seemingly been the most popular, judged primarily by comments.

GamePro's readers initially fucking hated it, because the way it was implemented cluttered up the front page of the site's main forums, and I wasn't a huge fan of it, either, because it felt like the time I spent digging up those initial stories — which, more often than not, took the form of either another site having reported on something first, or a press release we'd received that morning — could have almost certainly been better used finding bigger stories to explore, or writing features, or reviews, or anything other than desperately, vainly scrabbling for just a scrap of news, please, guvnor.

That said, over time it did seem to settle down a bit, I broke a few genuine exclusives and provided some good editorial commentary on other stories that were happening, and I was told on multiple occasions that the work I was doing was playing a big role in giving the site a nice uptick in traffic.

Of course, even that uptick was all for naught when IDG Media unceremoniously closed the site and the magazine just before Christmas that year, meaning I woke up one morning all set to do work, only to find that not only was there no job to work any more, all the stuff I had written was about to become absolutely impossible to find due to the inexplicable decision to fold some (not all) of GamePro's material into the unrelated publication PC World. Good stuff. (If you dig deep enough into PC World's atrocious search function, you can still find the odd bit of my stuff, but it's not easy to find, which was great for building a portfolio, I can tell you.)

Something similar happened at USgamer, also. When we started the site, the intention was for the whole thing to be a return to something like the 1up.com days: a primarily personality-driven site, where each of the writers would have their own specialisms, and they would be free to write about whatever they wanted, developing their own little sub-communities in the process.

That went great for a while! I wrote about anime RPGs and visual novels, another chap wrote about racing sims, and all the other people on staff each had their own Things, too. Comments from the community were positive; I can't speak specifics to the other folks' work as I didn't tend to delve into their comment sections, but on my pieces, there was always a great deal of appreciation for my work making USgamer a site that was welcoming and inclusive to a portion of gaming that didn't always get a lot of love and respect from the mainstream sites. This was all pre-Gamergate, I'll add, so there was no culture war bullshit going on; it was just folks who liked anime-style games, including those with mildly provocative content (as there was a fair amount of in the mid-2010s) having an appreciation for a site that didn't just write their favourite games off as being for perverts or whatever.

That lasted for a few months, but then an edict came down from On High (in this case, USgamer's parent company Gamer Network) that we needed to juice the numbers. In other words, abandon everything we'd done to make the site unique and start the daily churn of news and guides that is so painfully familiar to this day. I went from being able to post whatever I wanted to having to get manual approval for each and every news story I wanted to post, and I was outright forbidden from covering certain games.

Eventually, when I was laid off from the site — again, through waking up one morning only to discover I didn't have a job any more — I was forced into spending the majority of my days rejigging and reposting "guide content" from Prima Games, which was also under the Gamer Network umbrella at the time. Out of spite, I stuck with several of my regular weekly columns even with this SEO-juicing bullshit I had been lumbered with, and it was that degree of spite for what the site had become that eventually led me to create MoeGamer: a site where I could play by my rule and cover whatever the fuck I wanted, and fuck traffic numbers.

MoeGamer itself has had a few evolutions over the years. Initially, it was an occasional blog where I basically continued writing my JPgamer column from USgamer — I'd just write about things that interested me, or which I'd happened to play recently, or which had been on my mind. Eventually, when I was working a series of very boring office jobs that had nothing to do with the games press, I launched my "Cover Game" feature, with a mind to giving underappreciated, oft-overlooked titles the level of detailed coverage that your average traffic-baiting triple-A title did. At the height of my boredom in the office, I was posting stuff on MoeGamer daily, including episodes in each multi-part Cover Game feature, plus shorter one-off articles about things that I found interesting, or had happened to collect back when CEX did free shipping (ahh, those heady days), or that I had always loved but never written about.

Today, I actually like my day job, so MoeGamer has had to take a bit of a back seat, but I'm still writing over there sporadically. It's nice to have a space that is for a specific subject, and a contrast from this general-purpose thought-dumping ground that is this blog. I don't have any intention of making MoeGamer "big" or "famous" or trying to make money from it; it's just my site about games I like, and over the last 10+ years I've filled it with a lot of work I'm very proud of. Today, I think I'm more proud of what I've built with MoeGamer than my all-too-brief time as part of the professional games press.

I've pretty much taken the MoeGamer approach with YouTube, too, albeit with more of a focus on retro games than RPGs and visual novels. And y'know what? While my channel hasn't exploded in terms of growth since I launched it (or since I started using it a bit more actively around 2018 or so), it has seen steady growth without me putting any effort whatsoever into either algorithm-baiting or SEO juicing. I have over three and a half thousand subscribers over there right now, and while that's a drop in the ocean compared to the Mr Beasts of this world, I feel creatively fulfilled and proud of what I've done, and am not an awful human being.

So much about the modern Internet sucks, and as Ed Zitron frequently notes, so much of it is about the growth-at-all-costs mindset. It's not just business that this "rot economy" infests; it's creative pursuits, hobbies, specialist fields. So many people are desperate to monetise everything they put online that the actual value for the people looking at the articles, videos and suchlike is diminishing — and the conditions for those producing the work are becoming increasingly intolerable. Throw AI garbage into the mix — and the fuckers who are now flooding YouTube and social media apps with AI-generated bilge that they pump out all day every day — and you have a real melting pot of absolutely rancid filth.

It's definitely a good idea for people who are Into Things to retreat into their own little specialised corners of the Internet, rather than the whole Internet being treated as some great Marketplace of Shit. This is happening to a certain degree, with many communities forming on Discord these days — though Discord itself isn't immune to enshittification, and I suspect we'll all have to find a new home before long — but I do miss the glory days of forums. I really do. I know a few forums still exist, but the 1up.com Radio Boards days are long gone, and every day I miss them a little more.

This has been quite the ramble, and I'm not sure I made a specific point along the way, but hopefully you understand what I was waffling on about. I am grateful to Past Me for setting up spaces like this blog and MoeGamer for me to continue to express myself, and as time goes on I feel personal spaces like these are going to once again become an important part of life online. Because the alternative is wading out into the mires of advertising-laden shit that is the rest of the Internet, and that gets less appealing day after day.

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#oneaday Day 309: The most enduring game genres are the ones we used to think were too prolific

I settled down this evening to play some PC Engine games on my Coregrafx Mini, a delightful little mini system that I'm very fond of, but which I realised contains a number of games that I haven't explored at all as yet. The pull of Soldier Blade is, I'm afraid, often far too much to resist, as it was once again this evening — though I did at least spend some time with Lords of Thunder, which I've not got around to trying before. (It is hard.)

One thing occurred to me while I was playing, and that is the title of today's post: the fact that game genres we used to think were overdoing it a bit have ended up being the most enduring; the ones that have "aged the best".

What I mean by this is that back in the 16-bit console era in particular — I'm talking Mega Drive, Super NES and PC Engine to an extent (yes, I know the PC Engine isn't actually 16-bit, but its capabilities put it pretty much up there with the Mega Drive, so shut up) — reviewers were often a bit jaded and cynical any time certain types of game showed up. There was a near-constant cry of "where's the originality?" among critics of the period, and this, to an extent, filtered down to members of the public who, at the time, only really had the word of the folks who wrote for the magazines to go on, since the Internet wasn't yet a thing.

There are several game genres that spring immediately to mind when I think about this: shoot 'em ups, fighting games and beat 'em ups. Yes, the latter two are different, despite the term "beat 'em up" being used interchangeably to describe both in the UK in the late '80s and early '90s. (If you're wondering, fighting games refer to competitive games where combatants — either human or computer-controlled — fight in closed arenas one-on-one, or perhaps in tag team battles, while beat 'em ups typically involve one or more players cooperating against a stream of enemy characters, often, though not always, going on a journey as they do so.)

Shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games reached a point where they elicited little more than groans from the jaded reviewers of the period. This led to situations that are laughable in retrospect, such as the TV show GamesMaster rating the UK release of the absolutely classic and genre-defining NES beat 'em up River City Ransom (known as Street Gangs over here) just 32%. In the show's defence (slightly), the game didn't show up over here until 1992, three years after its original release and well into the next generation of games consoles. Still, 32% is an embarrassing rating for a game that is quite rightly regarded as incredibly important to gaming development and history. But I digress.

The point is, members of the games press were — perhaps understandably — jaded at the number of shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games that were coming out, particularly from 1991 onwards, post-Street Fighter II. I say "perhaps understandably" because gaming back then didn't have quite the same breadth it does today; technology precluded certain types of game that we take for granted today from being made back then. Consequently, for someone whose job it was to look at the games coming out each month and then write about them, one could understand why it might get a bit tiresome if there didn't appear to be much variety — or originality, as was the constant refrain back then — in each new crop of new stuff.

But, as it turns out, there were a lot of shoot 'em ups, beat 'em ups and fighting games made for a very good reason: these are three very flexible genres that you can do a lot with, and all three of them have also scaled well with advancing technology.

Let's focus on shoot 'em ups, because that's what I've been playing this evening. You can go back to a shoot 'em up from 30-40 years ago (Xevious is 42 years old, fact fans, and Space Invaders is just shy of 50) and still have a good time with it today, even if you weren't there for it first time around. The genre has evolved over time, yes, in terms of both presentation and mechanics. But there's a timeless quality to it that means, outside of games that really didn't get it even when they were originally released — and there are plenty of those — the 30-40 year old games are just as playable and accessible today as they ever were. Likewise, if it were possible to take a game like, say, Eschatos back to the past, a Raiden fan would be immediately at home.

The same is true for both fighting games and beat 'em ups, too. I probably don't need to tell you that fighting games remain one of the most popular forms of competitive video game out there; while they have grown in complexity over the years, the fundamentals are still pretty much just as they were in 1991 with Street Fighter II. In fact, some fighting game pros even specifically recommend beginners should start with Street Fighter II to get accustomed to the genre without added complications like special meters and peculiarly named mechanics found in later titles.

The beat 'em up has had a slightly rougher ride over the years — at least it seems that way to begin with. It found favour until the early '90s due to it being a great means of showcasing beautiful character and background pixel art. It reached a particular high with Konami's excellent licensed arcade games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons and Asterix (kudos if you played the last one, it remains my fave of those games), but then sort of fell off the map a bit for a while.

At least, it seemed to. What actually happened is that it became the basis for a whole bunch of other, brand new genres that were suddenly made possible thanks to the advent of the 3D age: action-strategy games like the Dynasty Warriors series; arena combat games like the Senran Kagura titles; character action games like the God of War, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta series. All are definitely their own discrete types of game these days, but they can all be traced directly back to beat 'em ups. And, in more recent years, the traditional belt-scrolling beat 'em up has made a triumphant comeback with excellent titles like Streets of Rage 4, Fight 'n' Rage and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge.

I think the difference people would point to today, as outlined above, is that these days, we have a lot more choice. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of new games come out each week, and they cover all manner of interactive experiences, ranging from the comfortably familiar to the gleefully experimental. Shoot 'em ups, fighting games and beat 'em ups are no longer seen as passé and unoriginal because they get more lost in the noise these days — and, with the possible exception of fighting games, they have somewhat declined in importance to the overall market. If a company wants to make money these days, they do a big open world game or a cinematic action game about a middle-aged white dude being sad. Shoot 'em ups and beat 'em ups in particular have become niche interest, and fighting games, although popular and doubtless very important to the bottom line of companies like Capcom, have a considerably higher barrier to entry than they used to.

But none of them have gone away. None of them have declined in importance so much as to be completely unviable as a commercial prospect today, or completely unknown to those who came to gaming in more recent years. And many of those games that were decried as unoriginal, boring takes on crowded genres back in the early '90s are judged much more generously and accurately today.

And that's good. When the day comes when there's a gaming system with no good shoot 'em ups or beat 'em ups (I can personally take or leave fighting games, to be honest, but I do respect them), that's the day I don't buy that gaming system. Thankfully I don't think that day's coming any time soon — and even if it did, there is a vast library of stuff from the years that have led us up until this point to explore, both through emulation and official rereleases for modern platforms. I think I'll probably be OK.

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#oneaday Day 307: Blueprints to my brain

After seeing the glowing praise it's been getting recently, I decided to give the new indie darling Blue Prince a go. I've been suspicious of sudden indie darlings ever since I absolutely detested my time with Jonathan Blow's Braid, but everything I was hearing about this one made it sound thoroughly interesting. As such, I was more than happy to forego my usual suspicion and give it a go.

For the unfamiliar, Blue Prince positions you in the role of an heir to a rather curious mansion. Said mansion supposedly has 45 rooms… except it doesn't, and there's actually a super-secret hidden 46th room somewhere. Your dead uncle has challenged you from beyond the grave to find said 46th room. Succeed, and you inherit all his stuff; fail, and you're doomed to perpetual roguelike hell.

Yes, Blue Prince is a roguelike of sorts in that it's based around repeated runs of the same thing with a heavily randomised element. But it's not a combat-based game, nor a role-playing game; instead, its focus is purely on exploration. While the roguelike descriptor is apt, Blue Prince is perhaps better thought of as being akin to tabletop games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill.

The way it works is like this: each in-game day, you begin a new run with 50 "steps" of stamina available to you. Each time you cross the threshold from one room to another, whether you're making progress or backtracking, you use up a step. Your initial aim is to make it from the entrance hall in "rank 1" of the mansion to the antechamber in "rank 9"; things get a little more complex later, but I haven't got that far yet, so I can't talk about that side of things with any great authority as yet.

Each time you open a door in the mansion, you pull three room "cards" from the deck you have available and can pick one to draft. This room then attaches to the door you just opened, and you gradually build out the mansion map from there. Rooms are automatically oriented based on the direction the door you opened is facing, and in this way you can plan out your route to a certain extent; as time goes on, you'll familiarise yourself with the "deck" of room cards and know which ones work better where. For example, you might want to find a means of safely ditching "dead end" rooms as soon as possible so they don't come up later in your run, but various rooms have special effects (both positive and negative), too, so you'll need to bear those in mind.

As you progress through the mansion, you'll acquire various resources. Keys are used to open locked doors. Gems are used to draft certain particularly powerful or helpful rooms. Coins are used to purchase items in special "shop" rooms. Dice allow you to redraw three room cards if none of the ones you initially drew tickle your fancy. And then there are a variety of items that show up along the way, too; for example, the metal detector makes it easier for you to locate keys and coins, while the shovel allows you to dig in patches of dirt to find additional resources and items.

You'll run into puzzles of various types in the mansion. These appear to take two basic forms: firstly, there are self-contained puzzles that always show up in specific rooms, and these usually reward you with resources or items if you solve them correctly. Secondly, there's the overall meta-progression puzzles, which involve you figuring out the somewhat convoluted means through which you can actually move forward and, once you reach it, get into the Antechamber.

Blue Prince does have a few things that carry over from run to run, but the main thing is knowledge. Information you learn in one run can be used in the next; there's no not being able to do something because your character hasn't seen a particular piece of info in this particular run. As such, it pays to take notes and/or screenshots as you play, because as you discover new pieces of information, you'll eventually find a use for it. It might not be right away, but you'll get there in the end.

The game also isn't completely randomised. As previously noted, you can learn the deck so you can have a good idea of what rooms you should burn early on in order to draw more helpful ones as you get deeper into the mansion. Certain rooms will only show up in certain positions on the map, or display particular scenery elements if positioned in the right place. A "coat check" room allows you to stash an item in one run and pick it up in the next; under normal circumstances, you lose everything at the start of each new day, aside from the knowledge you, the player, have accumulated.

I've played for about three or four hours tonight and I'm starting to get a feel for it. It's a really interesting game. Some folks claim to have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing this and this intrigues me; the central gameplay mechanic is intriguing and enjoyable, but I am very much under the impression that "winning" the central challenge is just the beginning of what makes Blue Prince so interesting. Right now, everyone is being deliberately obtuse about things — partly at the developer's request, and partly just not to spoil it for everyone else — but I am definitely intrigued to see where things go.

My only concern is that I fear I may be too stupid to figure this game out by myself. But that's what talking about it with friends online is for, right?

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#oneaday Day 300: Paying the tax

I make no apologies for admitting that I preordered a Switch 2 today, even after everything I said yesterday. I thought about it a bit, and I basically came to the conclusion that I was almost certainly going to get one regardless of how much I complained about certain elements of it — and that in doing so I may well be Part of the Problem — and so I might as well just get it out of the way and do it.

So I did. Someone I know happened to spot that Argos had preorders go live today, so I snagged one. I went for the one with Mario Kart World pre-installed, so I basically get that game for £30 instead of £75. Not having a physical copy sucks a bit, but at the same time, Mario Kart World is one of those games that is going to get lots of updates and DLC, making a physical version arguably useless in the long term. That's a thing that happens these days, and that's not going away, so I may as well just enjoy the things while they are current, and I may well be dead by the time it's no longer possible to access the online elements. (Not that I'm planning on being dead any time soon, but you know what I mean.)

There's enough about Switch 2 that I like to make it worthwhile. The "Switch 2 Versions" of original Switch games are compelling, for one; I haven't yet played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and now it will be nice to be able to do so at higher resolutions and frame rates. I'm by no means a frame rate and resolution snob — I was eminently satisfied with how Breath of the Wild looked and performed — but if the option is there to make it better officially without getting into hacking, modding and piracy territory, I'm all for it.

There's also some of the multi-format "big" games that are quite appealing. I might finally play Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2, for example, or Hitman: World of Assassination. The nice thing about Switch 2 versions of these coming so late is that they should be "complete" versions with all their additional DLC, updates and what have you baked into the Switch 2 version from day one. And hopefully with a physical release.

One thing I'm not super enamoured with is this "game key card" business. If you haven't seen it yet, it's the replacement for the "code in a box" system, whereby you could buy a Switch case that contained nothing more than a download code. This new version actually has a Switch cart in it, but the cart doesn't have the game on it; instead, it lets you download the game and play it while the cart is in. I initially thought this was utterly stupid, but if you read the fine print on the Japanese website (which a pal graciously translated for me earlier) it became clear that this is not the same as redeeming a game on your account from a code; it is transferable, so you can lend it to others, take it round to a friend's house, all that sort of thing. It's still a bit of a weird way of doing things, but I don't hate it as much as code-in-a-box.

(And look, I get why code-in-a-box is a thing; it lets people buy digital games as gifts and give the person something physical to open on their special occasion. But it's still a pisser to find what you think is a physical release of a game only to discover it's… not that.)

I can sort of understand why the game key card thing is being used for stuff like Street Fighter 6, which is a game that gets updated regularly with balance patches, DLC and suchlike, and which has a massive filesize. I'm a bit pissed the Bravely Default remaster is using this system, though; there's no way that game wouldn't fit on a low-capacity cartridge. But oh well.

Like I say, though, there's enough about Switch 2 that I do like to make it, I think, worthwhile. It will be interesting and fun to use the social features if (and that's a big if right now, particularly with the chaos ensuing from Trump's dumbshit tariffs in the States) my friends happen to pick a Switch 2 up; it would be nice to get some sort of regular "game night" going, and the built-in chat features could even be a decent means of recording a podcast or streaming something in collaboration with another person.

Plus Mario Kart World does look good. I'm still not convinced it's £75 good, but I'm sure I can get £30 value out of it.

It's certainly going to be interesting to spend some time with Switch 2 when it arrives in a couple of months. I'm looking forward to it. Yes, I'd love it to be cheaper. Yes, I'd love it if we had a 100% guarantee that original Switch games will work on it (which we don't, yet, but they are supposedly working on it.) Yes, I wish I didn't have to buy a new format of memory card for it.

But I also understand why all these things are the case, and moaning and complaining about them almost certainly isn't going to change anything about them this close to release. So I may as well suck it up, pay the money and enjoy the thing I knew I was always going to enjoy anyway. And so that's exactly what I'm doing!

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