#oneaday Day 355: Soothsayer

I've spent the evening playing Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. I played Kathy Rain: Director's Cut a few years back and apparently didn't write about it, but suffice to say I enjoyed it. As such, I was excited to see the sequel show up a few days back — one of several interesting-looking adventure games that have released recently.

I've played about 4 hours of it this evening and I'm not sure how far through I am — most estimates seem to place it around 7 hours in total — so I'm not going to give any conclusive thoughts just yet. I'll save those for MoeGamer and/or YouTube another time. I can give some first impressions, though, and those first impressions are very good indeed.

Like its predecessor, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer is a point-and-click adventure presented in deliberately low resolution pixel art, albeit making use of modern widescreen resolutions and colour depth to provide a level of detail that wouldn't quite have been possible back in the classic VGA age. It is, I believe, an Adventure Game Studio affair, which accounts for its interface being rather similar to The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, another excellent modern adventure I played a little while back. That's no bad thing, though; Adventure Game Studio is a well-respected engine, used by a lot of modern adventure developers with good reason.

As with most modern adventure games, interactions in Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer are kept nicely simple. Click on things to either look at them or do something with them, click on inventory items to examine them, drag inventory items onto items in the scene or other inventory items to use them on things. Conversations unfold using a Gabriel Knight-style keyword system, where Kathy accumulates (and erases) keywords over the course of her investigation and can ask interactive characters about them, along with also being able to ask them about things in the scene or her inventory. It's a simple but effective conversation system that works well, and there are occasional traditional dialogue options that appear when Kathy has multiple things to ask about a situation.

Kathy's case this time around is that of a serial killer known as the Soothsayer. This individual has committed five murders over the course of the last few months, with the most recent being a local celebrity writer. As a rather down-on-her-luck private investigator, Kathy sees the $200,000 reward money and decides she'd like a bit of that action, so she proceeds to go about her investigation in her own mildly anarchic style. I say "mildly" because while she flouts a few rules and laws over the course of her investigation, she does draw the line at doing anything likely to get her thrown in prison — or, indeed, lose the confidence of her contact in the police force, who, as you might expect, is a helpful resource to draw upon, particularly as he very much wants to get into Kathy's pants.

Thus far in the 4 hours of play, I haven't felt like I've got "stuck" at all, which is good — and the game has kept up a decent pace as a result. The puzzles, while not super-easy, won't take long to solve for experienced adventure game veterans, but they are nonetheless satisfying. There's no moon logic on display here; everything makes logical sense, and those who really struggle can check out Kathy's notebook to get some hints on the objectives she needs to accomplish. The presence of the notebook and a list of objectives in the first place is a helpful addition not normally present in this type of game; it helps keep you focused without spoiling the sense of player agency or working things out for yourself.

I remember the original Kathy Rain getting a bit weird towards the end — and I didn't have a problem with that, I hasten to add — and I have a suspicion something similar is probably going to happen in this one, too. The "weird bit" of the first Kathy Rain led to some eye-opening revelations about the character, so I will be very surprised if something similar doesn't occur this time around, too. But we'll have to see, I guess.

Thus far, then, I've been thoroughly absorbed by this new investigation. The game looks great, has a wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack and decent voice acting, and it plays very well, too. Plus at what looks like it will be 7-10 hours in total, it's a decent length for this type of game, too — particularly when you consider most of the "golden age" adventures from Sierra and LucasArts could be beaten within an hour or two (or even less, in some cases) if you knew what you were doing.

I'm looking forward to seeing how things end up. At this rate, it's looking like I might beat it tomorrow. I will definitely pen some more substantial thoughts for MoeGamer and/or my YouTube channel when I've finished the whole thing. For now, though, it's an easy recommend for adventure game enthusiasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday Day 348: This is how you do physical editions

There are a lot of "boutique" limited-print companies around at the moment, and people inevitably have mixed feelings about them. A lot of people feel particularly negatively about some of them — often without being able to say why, probably because they only hate [company] because some YouTuber told them to — but I enjoy what they do. They provide physical copies of games that, in many (though not all) circumstances otherwise wouldn't have had one. And, even better, most of the time those physical copies are archive-ready, in that in the vast majority of cases, the physical print runs don't get done until all the DLC and updates for the game in question are done and dusted. I like that.

There are some companies who take things a bit further, though, and one that I've found particularly worthy of note just recently is called Lost in Cult. They're kicking off a new programme called EDITIONS, where they're publishing games that, previously, were digital-only.

We'll get onto EDITIONS in a moment, but what is also worthy of note about Lost in Cult is that they're also doing standard retail editions of their games, and these don't appear to be limited in quantity beyond the usual business considerations — i.e. how many they think they'll sell, and how long their licensing agreement is with the games' developers and original publishers. What they're effectively doing with these standard editions is doing a non-limited (in principle) physical print run of games that, on release, were assumed to be digital-only. That's great!

But EDITIONS is what I really want to talk about. EDITIONS are their special, collectors' editions of games. Costing £60 a pop, they come in a custom slipcase that contains the game, a decent-size poster, some miscellaneous goodies to do with the game, and an art/commentary book that explores the history, creative process and impact of the game.

Here's an example covering The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, a point and click adventure I played recently and really rather enjoyed, as my article about it on MoeGamer will attest:

Looks pretty lovely, doesn't it? Simple, but effective, and sure to look very nice as part of a collection.

The other games that are available to preorder from the company now include Immortality, a fascinating-sounding FMV game that I remember one of my writers on Rice Digital having a lot of time for a year or two back. The EDITIONS package for that one looks like this:

And then there's the wonderfully hilarious Thank Goodness You're Here!, which the EDITIONS package for doesn't appear to have been revealed just yet.

As someone who is always banging on about collecting physical games, I felt duty and honour-bound to support these releases. I've played The Excavation of Hob's Barrow before, and I've seen Andie play Thank Goodness You're Here!, but I've never played Immortality, and I'm definitely open to returning to the other two.

Lost in Cult's long-term plan is to have a "book club"-like approach, where they do one of these releases a month after this initial batch of three are out the door. I am well up for that, let me tell you. It, of course, remains to be seen what games will get this wonderful treatment, but judging by the initial picks, I feel like the Lost in Cult folks have good taste.

So I guess that's £60 a month accounted for, then…!

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 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!

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

#oneaday Day 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…

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

#oneaday Day 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!

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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.