#oneaday Day 212: Engage!

I've been playing Fire Emblem Engage since I finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and I've been having a lovely time. Fire Emblem is a series that has always passed me by despite it being, in theory kind of in my wheelhouse.

I say "kind of" rather than "completely", because while I absolutely love the high drama fantasy RPG side of the narrative, I've always had a bit of a rocky relationship with strategy games. I'm not good at them, see, and I've always had a hard time trying to determine how to get better at them. Because while there are plenty of guides out there for games like Fire Emblem, none of them simply sit you down and talk you through how to play them effectively. And that, for me, has always been a problem. It's why I bounced off Fire Emblem Awakening on 3DS, the last entry in the series that I tried, and why I have held off on playing the copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses that's been on my shelf for several years at this point.

Why am I playing Fire Emblem Engage when Three Houses, a game almost universally considered to be superior in every way, is right there on my shelf? Well, because I had somehow got it in my head that Engage was a little more "straightforward" — and, perhaps more importantly, shorter. Three Houses is an absolute beast of a game, particularly if you do all the narrative routes (which I'm assured you should), whereas Engage is a once-and-done sort of affair, with replay value coming from the harder difficulty levels.

Mechanically, I don't think Engage is any more straightforward than what I know of Three Houses. There are elements where it's arguably more complicated, in fact — most notably with regard to the Emblem Bond and Skill Inheritance systems — but I wasn't to know that going in, and I'm about 25 hours in now, so, well, I guess I've dealt with it successfully.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm playing on Normal difficulty and Casual mode — i.e. the one without permadeath. I was having enough difficulty with the initial missions in the game that adding the opportunity to completely gimp my playthrough via poor performance seemed like an unwise choice. I am new to the series, I am still finding my feet in how it all works and how to play effectively, and thus I want minimal barriers to just enjoying myself. The options are there, so I'm using them.

With that "guardrail" in place, Fire Emblem Engage is still quite challenging. If you lose a unit during a mission, you still have to do the rest of the mission without that unit, and that can really fuck you over. It took me a few early-game missions to figure out what I was doing wrong, but then something interesting happened: I figured out what I was doing wrong.

This is not something that normally happens with strategy games. I normally end up being trounced by whoever I'm playing against, then never wanting to play it again as a result — or, in the case of tabletop affairs, not getting much opportunity to "practice". But with Fire Emblem Engage, I've ploughed on, and I've started to get a real feel for how the strategy works, and what is effective. I still make mistakes now and then — and the game's generous "Draconic Time Crystal" mechanic that allows you to undo stupid moves has been very helpful here — but I am definitely getting better at How To Play Fire Emblem. And that's a good feeling.

Because Being Able To Play Fire Emblem means that you can Enjoy Fire Emblem. And there is a lot to enjoy. The story of Engage, while relatively clichéd RPG fare — dark dragon long thought safely sealed away has come back, heroic band must gather a bunch of rings to summon enough power to drive the bastard back to the abyss — has been really compelling so far, and the character-centric nature of modern Fire Emblem is exactly what I like in this sort of game. I'm getting a real feeling that I'm getting to know the individual characters, both through the protagonist character's interactions with them and their interactions with one another.

For the unfamiliar, modern Fire Emblem features a relationship mechanic whereby units can "support" one another by fighting alongside each other in combat and doing activities together between battles, and your reward for reaching a new milestone in two characters' relationship with one another is a "support conversation", which depicts the two of them getting to know one another. There's not a Support mechanic in play for every pairing of characters in the game, but plenty that make logical sense, and it's lovely to see everyone getting to know one another, having comedic misunderstandings and deepening their feelings of friendship.

Anyway. I'm not sure how far through the game I am — I reckon probably about halfway maybe? — but I've been playing it all weekend and having a great time. I should almost certainly have it finished ahead of Xenoblade Chronicles X coming out on Switch in March — because you better believe I'm revisiting that game thoroughly having adored it on Wii U — but in the meantime I think I'm a convert to the series. I'm sure longstanding fans will scoff at me playing on non-permadeath mode, but I bet all of them reload a save the second anyone dies anyway. Also it doesn't matter how someone else enjoys a video game.

So yeah. Fire Emblem, pretty good. Who knew?

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#oneaday Day 206: Impending reorganisation

The living room, which is wall-to-wall video games of all descriptions, is fast approaching a point where it needs a Big Reorganise. I'm conscious of this because 1) my wife keeps bugging me about it (which, to be fair, she's entirely justified in doing), 2) because my Switch shelves, by far the most "active" in my collection, are approaching capacity, and 3) because at some point in the not-too-distant future, there's going to be a Switch successor and, assuming all the reports about it being backwards compatible are true — that better include having a cartridge slot and not just be a digital affair — that part of the collection is only going to continue expanding.

I dislike having to think about this because it involves making some tough choices. I'm disinclined to get rid of much stuff completely, largely because a lot of the stuff I own I either want to have on hand to be able to play, or wouldn't be worth that much were I to drag it all down the local CEX and trade it in. (The stuff that would be worth trading in from a financial perspective is all stuff I want to keep readily accessible.)

That leaves the main alternatives being seeking somewhere larger to live, which neither my wife nor I really want to do, or going through, being a bit "selective" about the stuff that is kept readily accessible, and squirrelling away the less "important" stuff up in the loft. This latter approach is looking like being the most practical and/or desirable thing to do right now.

So the big question is: what stays down here and readily accessible, and what goes in the loft?

Right now I'm thinking the following, from all the stuff that is currently on my shelves both in the living room and in my study upstairs:

Big box PC games, presently in the study, can go in the loft. I have nothing with which to read that original media, and any of those games I do want to play I almost certainly have on GOG.com, Steam or the eXoDOS archive.
Atari ST games, also presently in the study, I am a bit torn on. While putting them up in the loft would free up a lot of shelves for other uses, I like having them on display, because they're my childhood. Also, while I'm still making videos about Atari home computers, it's nice to have them on hand to be able to look at the documentation and packaging. So they're a "possibly stash away if I really need the space".
Atari hardware, currently filling up the closet in my study, can realistically go in the loft. As much as I adore the original machines, I do the majority of my Atari-related stuff on The400 Mini for Atari 8-bit, and Hatari running on my mini PC for ST. Freeing up some space in that cupboard would be a huge benefit.
Nintendo DS and 3DS games, presently on one shelf in the living room, can probably be organised and stacked a little differently to take up less space. This consideration is of increasing concern as the Evercade library, which is presently on the shelf above, expands, as it's nearly at the limit of the one shelf it's on.
PS1 games can stay down here. I don't have a lot of these and they don't take up much room.
PS2 games I think I can go through and strip out a big chunk of the collection I'm unlikely to spend a lot of time with any time soon. I have a lot of "interesting curiosities" in the PS2 library that I'm loathe to get rid of (and which, as outlined above, probably won't net much in a trade/sale) but which I'm unlikely to spend a lot of time playing in the immediate future. Once I've gone through and picked all these out, I can probably trim the fat of the PS2 library quite considerably and pack the rest away to get back out if we ever move, or if we figure out some form of alternative storage solution.
PS3 games can stay where they are. I don't have a lot of these.
Likewise PS4 and PS5. Of the three, I have the most PS4, and there are also a lot of games among the PS4 library that are on my "to-play" list for the near future.
Wii games can probably undergo a "trimming the fat" session like PS2. I don't have nearly as many Wii games as PS2, but still a good couple of shelves worth, some of which likewise falls into the "interesting curiosities I want to keep but am in no hurry to play" pile.
Wii U can definitely have the fat trimmed to those games that haven't been ported to Switch, and those games which have been ported to Switch that I haven't (yet) bought the Switch port of.
Original Xbox is slim pickings so can stay as-is.
Xbox 360 can undergo a PS2-style fat-trimming process, for exactly the same reasons.
Switch can stay as-is.
The Limited Editions I have on display, taking up quite a few shelves, can probably be organised a little differently or more tightly, freeing up a bit more room.

That sounds like a plan to me! I'm sure that was of very little interest to any of you reading, but I feel better having got a rough plan down on "paper". I'll be tackling this once the Christmas decorations come down, so not for a little while yet, but I'll be sure to share the results once the process is complete!

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#oneaday Day 202: Boxing clever

We're finally home. I say "finally"; we were only away for a couple of nights, but the cats are pleased to see us and they are already enjoying their presents. As I type this, Oliver is happily chewing and dragging his new toy around, and Patti is just sitting near me, happy that her favourite person is back where he should be.

The rest of today is going to be spent doing as little of value as possible. I'm going to veg out and play some more The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and… probably not much else. I would like to write something about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which I finished literally immediately before we left for our Christmas trip, but I think I'll save that for tomorrow.

I'm still very much in a Nintendo mood, so I'm currently forming a vague plan for something along the lines of a "Year of Nintendo" special feature over on MoeGamer. There's a lot of first-party Nintendo stuff on Switch that I haven't played, let alone written about yet, and this might be a good excuse to knuckle down and get on with that. Plus it's highly likely that the Switch itself is coming to the end of its lifespan; while the successor hasn't yet been revealed, now seems like a good time for some sort of retrospective exploration of all the "big name" games for the platform, all in one place.

Anyway, that's something to think about further tomorrow. I've also spent some of my Christmas money on filling a few first-party gaps in my Switch collection — Nintendo stuff rarely, if ever, drops in price, so I may as well pick it up when I have a bit of spare money to burn. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into some titles I've been putting off for a long time — like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which I'm pretty sure someone bought for me several Christmases ago — and potentially having a "big project" to work on over the course of the year. There's also Xenoblade Chronicles X in March, and I am very excited to revisit that game; it'll be particularly cool to check out its multiplayer features on a more popular platform than its original host of the Wii U.

That's about all my brain is capable of processing right now, so it's time for Zelda. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas, and here's to the end of another shitty year.

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#oneaday Day 199: Turns out Balatro is pretty good

People have been banging on about how good Balatro is for ages now, so the other day I decided to actually download it and give it a go. I had nothing in particular against it, but I am also inordinately wary any time something — particularly an indie darling — gets hyped up as much as Balatro has been.

In this case, I think the praise the game has received is very much deserved. Balatro is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, and all it does is achieve that goal. It doesn't have any pretensions of being high art, it's not doing that thing where "you think it's a card game but it's actually a horror game lololololololooool", it's not psychologically profiling you or gearing up for a singular jumpscare as your playtime hits exactly 256 minutes. It's just a game that has a clear, non-narrative premise, and executed brilliantly.

Balatro is ostensibly a card game "roguelike", but as with most games that bastardise that term these days, all that really means is that there are randomised elements to each game, and when you lose you have to start over from the beginning. There's also a persistent element where the more you play, the more potential "things" you unlock to appear in a run, so even if you beat a run in it quickly, the more you play, the more varied things should, in theory, get.

Balatro is based around poker — a fact which caused the European games rating board PEGI to shit itself and whack it with a completely undeserved 18+ rating well after it had already been released — but is not really a "gambling" game as such. The poker connection is simply the means through which you interact with the game, and it has rather more relaxed rules than "real" poker. In terms of poker variations, Balatro is probably closest to electronic video poker — a fact which it leans into with a nicely understated fake CRT look and some nice pixel art.

Your aim in Balatro is to sequentially defeat a series of "blinds" and "bosses" by scoring a particular number of points in a limited number of hands played. Each round allows you a certain number of discards, and each "hand" played can have between one and five cards.

Each of the common poker hands — high card, pair, two pair, three of a kind, full house, four of a kind, flush, straight, straight flush, royal flush, five of a kind — has a base value that is calculated as a number of "chips" multiplied by a value known as "mult". The base number of chips is then added to by the value of the cards played — with face cards being worth 10 and aces 11 — and the result is the number of points you attain for that hand. Naturally, the more complex poker hands are, at the outset of the game, worth more points.

One interesting thing about Balatro is that you don't have to play "legal" hands. If you just want to get rid of some cards but you have a pair, you can play the pair plus three more cards, and the three "extras" will just get discarded and redrawn. You can also just discard and redraw up to five cards at once a set number of times per round. So long as you meet the score target, you move onto the next round, which has a higher target — and, if it's a "boss" round, which occurs after "small blind" and "big blind" rounds, some special rule comes into play.

The boss rules vary quite considerably from run to run. Sometimes a single suit might be "debuffed", meaning any cards of that suit you play don't add any extra points to a hand during scoring — though they're still considered a valid part of the hand. Sometimes, some or all of your cards may be drawn face down, forcing you to either play blind or use up your discards. Sometimes you have to reach the target using just a single hand. And there are plenty more variations besides.

In order to keep up with the escalating score targets, between each round you can access a "shop", which allows you to purchase specific cards or randomised booster packs to help you out. Planet cards boost the base value of specific poker hands. Arcana cards have various special effects that often allow you to transform cards into more valuable versions of themselves. Spectral cards have particularly powerful effects and don't come up all that often. And standard booster packs simply allow you to supplement your standard 52-card deck with additional cards that may work out in your favour.

Probably the most significant thing you can buy at the shop is a Joker. Rather than simply acting as a "wild card", Jokers instead provide continual passive benefits, and there are many possible effects. Some simply provide a flat increase to chips or mult. Some have conditional bonuses, where you need to play particular cards, or hold particular cards in your hand. Some have special abilities that can be activated in various ways. They are always absolutely key to your success, and the Jokers you choose to hold onto will direct the way you play quite significantly.

For example, a torn Joker provides you with a big bonus if you play hands of 3 cards or fewer at a time. This obviously discourages you from playing things like Full House and Four of a Kind, so you will want to seek out planet cards that boost things like Pair, Three of a Kind and High Card.

Another Joker grows in power according to how many Arcana cards you play, so you will want to specifically seek out ways of acquiring as many of these as possible. Another still provides significant bonuses if you play 10s and 4s as part of your hand. And the list goes on.

The thing I think I like most about Balatro is that it takes something everyone can relate to — playing with cards — and implements it in such a way that would be largely impossible (or at least very impractical) to do in real life. It is exquisitely designed; very easy to pick up, but tricky to master, and each run is markedly different from the last.

Perhaps best of all is how it doesn't overcomplicate things. No needless dialogue, no plot, no explanation of why you're playing this curious twist on poker or attempt to tie it into a greater storyline. The game just is. It has no goal other than to provide a satisfying, enjoyable experience for the player — and it succeeds at this absolutely admirably.

I've always been someone who enjoys narrative in games — but sometimes you just want to play something without getting bogged down in story context. Balatro provides exactly that. And, given that Microsoft now charges a subscription fee to make Windows Solitaire ad-free, I feel like Balatro absolutely should take its place as the office timewaster of choice. It has the same appeal elements as Windows Solitaire, after all — and not a microtransaction or ad in sight. Bliss.

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#oneaday Day 198: MoeGamer year in review, 2024

Hey! You! Reader! Do you read my other site MoeGamer? If not, you're missing out! It's the site where I put a lot more care and attention into things rather than farting something out for daily posts, and it plays host to some of the games writing I've done that has made me most proud over the years.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share some highlights from this year, complete with links so you can go and enjoy them at your leisure. I'm not updating MoeGamer as regularly as I used to — the perils of having a job you actually like, and thus less time to spend writing during the workday! — but I've still written a fair few pieces this year, and I'd like to share some of them with you now.

A Re-Introduction

Click here to read!

In this post, I explained my decision to finally move MoeGamer off WordPress.com and onto self-hosted. This was partly down to my running out of disk space on my WordPress.com account and the absolutely extortionate price they wanted for an expansion, but I'd been thinking about doing so for a while anyway. At the start of this year, I finally took that step.

Famicom Detective Club

Click here to read part 1, The Missing Heir!
Click here to read part 2, The Girl Who Stands Behind!
Click here to read part 3, Emio, The Smiling Man!

Early in the year, I was in the mood for a bit of virtual detective work, so I finally stopped waiting for the physical release of the first two Famicom Detective Club games on Switch that was clearly never coming, and downloaded the double-pack. I absolutely adored them, but felt a bit sad that we probably wouldn't see any more of them. I was proven wrong later in the year with the surprise announcement and release of Emio, The Smiling Man, which took everything good about the first two entries and married it to a brand new story — which takes the honour as probably the darkest, bleakest Nintendo game ever released.

Another Code: Recollection – the way remakes should be

Click here to read!

I'd been thinking about picking up the DS and Wii duology of Another Code games for ages. With the Switch remake of both, I no longer needed to — but I'm glad I finally experienced these stories.

Helldivers II and the Battle Pass Delusion

Click here to read!

Helldivers II made me angry. Not because I begrudged the game's existence — I really enjoyed developer Arrowhead's previous work, such as the vastly underappreciated first Helldivers and its fantasy counterpart Magicka — but because of the amount of apologism for rancid modern business practices that came along with it. Battle Passes are shit, full stop, and a game being not quite as predatory as other games that use them still means it's predatory.

One Piece Mansion: the puzzle of stress management

Click here to read!

A kind YouTube viewer occasionally sends me goodies, one of which was this oft-overlooked PlayStation title from Capcom. I found it thoroughly interesting, so I wrote about it.

Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE could have gone deeper

Click here to read!

The headline says most of it: this exploratory platformer from Inti Creates was excellent while it lasted… but the limited amount of time it lasted is also my main criticism of it.

The lost art of "just enjoying something"

Click here to read!

This is a sentiment I've expressed here in the past, too, but I feel it's a problem when people seem incapable of just enjoying something on its own merits. This article was particularly spurred on by the explosion in "modern gaming is DEAD!" videos on YouTube in the last year or two.

The enshittification of the video games press

Click here to read!

The perpetual negativity of people online is, in part, driven by the enshittification of everything — including the games press. In this piece, I talk a bit about my personal experiences, and why seeing so many sites fall down the "endless guides" SEO juice drain is so saddening.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+

Click here to read part 1, Falcom's Forgotten Gem!
Click here to read part 2, musings on the "school RPG"!
Click here to read part 2, on Falcom's best-in-class worldbuilding!

This year I had several bouts of "this game has been on my shelf for literal years, let's actually play it". This was the result of one of those. Shortly after I beat the game, a new localisation (with 100% less "*chortle*" from what I understand) was announced for Switch. I am tempted to buy it again because it really was an excellent game. I am a silly person.

The growing important of media with a positive vibe

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A good pal of mine wrote a review of Atari's Lunar Lander Beyond, and bemoaned how cynical the game's script was. That got me thinking; there's a lot of bleak, dour media out there, making stuff with a positive vibe feeling like an increasing rarity. I decided to ponder why that was important.

The Good Life: SWERY's Lake District holiday

Click here to read!

SWERY makes odd games that often have a lot to say, and The Good Life, an open-world game about being a grumpy American journalist stuck in the Lake District, was absolutely no exception to this.

The Missing: a violent, personal journey

Click here to read!

This game, also by SWERY, was an absolute masterwork in narrative through mechanics, telling a thoroughly compelling story about identity and self-acceptance.

Princess Peach Showtime: a short run on stage, destined to be forgotten

Click here to read!

Princess Peach Showtime! was a good game, but it's testament to the usual quality of Nintendo titles that it just being "good" meant that it was considerably less memorable than many of its stablemates.

Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution – satire through design?

Click here to read!

Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is, I think, the first game in the long-running Neptunia series that I haven't adored. And I got the impression by partway through that this might have actually been intentional.

Disco Elysium: modern-day interactive fiction

Click here to read!

Disco Elysium is amazing and everyone should play it. Here is why.

Sengoku Rance: deep yet accessible empire building

Click here to read!

Sengoku Rance is often held up as the absolute best entry in Alicesoft's storied eroge series, and I can understand why.

A new taxonomy of RPGs

Click here to read!

I decided to expand a shower thought into something more substantial.

Spirit Hunter

Click here to read part 1, Death Mark!
Click here to read part 2, NG!
Click here to read part 3, Death Mark II!

For once, I was between games when October rolled around, so I decided to finally tackle the whole Spirit Hunter series, which had been languishing on my shelf for a while. I came away incredibly impressed.

There's plenty more than just these, but the above are some of my favourite pieces from the year gone by. Stop by MoeGamer and have a browse, or check out the index to see everything I've posted this year.

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#oneaday Day 194: My Switch Year in Review

I'm a bit fed up of "year in review" things, since absolutely everyone is doing them now. Even my fucking online banking app wanted to give me a "year-end wrap-up" last time I logged it, which is a step too far, I feel.

But anyway, there are a couple of these things that I actually find mildly interesting, and one of them is the Nintendo Switch Year in Review. Out of all my games consoles, the Switch is the one that gets the most use by far, so in theory any such "reviews" should paint a fairly representative picture of my interests. Let's go through it together, then!

I apparently commenced my year with Final Fantasy II, which I'm sure some people will have strong opinions about, but I still rather like it, particularly in its Pixel Remaster format. I thought I'd miss the extra material from the PSP version, but I don't. Especially not the Soul of Rebirth postgame dungeon, in which you take all the underlevelled characters that died as part of the main story through a monstrously difficult challenge that requires a lot of grinding to get through.

345 hours feels a bit low, if anything, but it still works out to 14.375 days in total. I guess that averages a little under an hour every day, which sounds plausible, particularly considering some days have a lot more than others and some might have none at all.

No arguments with that. I replayed the first two Ace Attorney games and decided that this would be the year I finally beat Breath of the Wild. Silent Hope had also been hanging over my head for a while, so I knocked that out late this year, too.

See that start date? That's why I wanted to get Breath of the Wild off the backlog.

This honestly surprises me… a little. Not that "Adventure" is present at all, but that it's at the top. I would have thought RPG would be at the top, but nope; it's Adventure by a significant margin. And, given a bunch of the games I played this year, that makes a certain amount of sense: there's not only the Ace Attorney games I played, but also the three Spirit Hunter games, the Famicom Detective Club titles and doubtless some others I've forgotten.

Start as you mean to go on and all that.

Now this was quite surprising. Some of those months have surprisingly low figures, so I can only assume I was playing something else on a different platform at those times. Looking back, I see that I was playing Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail in July, so that would account for there being less than an hour of Switch time that month.

Now here's a toughie! I played a lot of great games this year, so it's very tricky to choose between them.

I mean, look. The bangers keep coming.

And coming! I was surprised to see the first two Famicom Detective Club games there, as I was sure I played those last year, but nope; I played them in February, meaning I played the whole series including new entry Emio, The Smiling Man this year. Neat!

And still they come! The Missing was a thoroughly interesting, deeply affecting experience. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the best 2D Super Mario I've played for a long time. And Theatrhythm Final Bar Line speaks for itself with its vast array of music to play.

Atari 50 is definitely worthy of note for introducing us all to Digital Eclipse's excellent "interactive timeline" approach to digital museum curation. We're starting to get into games that I just dipped into a little bit this year now, though, such as visual novel Little Busters! and Etrian Odyssey.

So what should I pick…?

I think I'm going to go with this one. I was genuinely excited to see this game get announced and released in fairly short order, and I'm delighted to see the Famicom Detective Club series continue long after it first launched. I just wish they'd do a physical release of the first two games in English.

And so that's that, I guess. It's been a good year for great games, both on the Switch and elsewhere. My backlog, of course, hasn't gotten that much smaller, but let's not worry about that. I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy for a long time into the future, and I look forward to sharing those experiences with you here, on YouTube, and on MoeGamer.

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#oneaday Day 192: The defeat of Culex 3D

I finished Super Mario RPG's postgame this evening, culminating with a rematch against the most difficult boss from the original game: Culex, who, in the postgame, finally gets his wish and becomes full 3D instead of being a piece of pixel art. To go along with his new look, he also gets a considerable buff in power, putting him into full-on "superboss" territory — though in keeping with the rest of Super Mario RPG, he's not overly difficult, he just needs you to pay attention and stay on top of things.

I really enjoyed Super Mario RPG, and I appreciate that "doing everything" in it took less than 20 hours. I have absolutely nothing against super-long RPGs — over the years, my favourite games have all been pretty lengthy affairs — but sometimes it's nice to play something breezy that knows when to stop. I'm sure Super Mario RPG could have dragged itself out to twice the length if it had really wanted to, but it didn't; the fact it didn't is testament to its good design. Nothing in the game feels like filler, and, outside of the Switch-exclusive postgame (i.e. it didn't exist in the original SNES version) there's really no need to grind at any point, either.

There are elements of the game where you can tell it has 16-bit roots, most notably in its overall storytelling; the narrative of the game is very lightweight, and you don't spend a lot of time getting to know the characters. I was particularly surprised to finally spend some time with Geno, a character that I've been hearing Super Smash Bros. fans bang on about for years, and find that, in terms of actual writing and characterisation, there's not really much to him.

But then this is a Mario game, not anything with pretensions of being high art or literature. To have Geno give overblown monologues at every opportunity would have almost certainly felt very out of place with the overall breezy feel of Super Mario RPG, and I suspect that during development, Nintendo probably had to rein in Squaresoft a bit in order to ensure that the whole thing didn't go too Final Fantasy. The inclusion of Culex may well have been some sort of "if you don't overdo the melodrama in the main story, we'll let you get super-ridiculous with the secret boss" deal.

Anyway, it's not that I feel Geno is a "bad" character as such, I was just a little surprised that he is so beloved when you don't really spend all that much time getting to know him beyond his basic concept. He does have some cool special moves, though, and in terms of power level he's one of the strongest characters in the party, so I suspect it's a bit more of an "all-round" thing as to why people like him, rather than him having a particularly strong story attached to him.

So yeah. That's that. Now to decide what I should play next! I still have Yakuza 5 on the go, and will get back to that some time soon, but I'm also still in a bit of a Nintendo mood. I have a few Nintendo titles on my shelf that I haven't gotten around to yet, so it's a matter of choosing between them — or maybe nabbing something from my wishlist that (I hope) no-one has grabbed me a copy of for Christmas yet. Do I move on to Paper Mario now I'm fresh from Super Mario RPG? Or do I finally bite the bullet and jump into the sprawling Fire Emblem: Three Houses… bearing in mind that I will definitely be wanting to revisit Xenoblade Chronicles X when it gets a Switch release in March?

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#oneaday Day 183: Plague day with Mario

Felt particularly rough this morning when I woke up with a raging headache and a cough that could wake the dead. I was hoping to get some The Dagger of Amon Ra recorded this weekend, but I rather wisely decided against doing any today; we'll have to see how I feel tomorrow.

Instead, I spent a significant chunk of today playing the Super Mario RPG remake for Switch. I've never played Super Mario RPG in any form, so I've been curious to try this for a long time, and something in my head makes an inextricable association between the holiday season and Nintendo games, so I thought I'd start it up and see how I got on with it. After all, what was originally a collaboration between Squaresoft and Nintendo was sure to be fun, right? And people always seem to be making references to both the game and some of its unique characters.

I've been very impressed so far. It's a lot of fun, and it moves at a brisk old pace, as RPGs that originated in the 16-bit era tend to, but that doesn't mean it feels like it's rushing things. Rather, it's paced well so that you're constantly moving forwards, exploring new areas, meeting new allies and discovering new items. And, pleasingly, the game is a lot more than just running from story trigger to story trigger; there are some actual puzzles along the way to solve, too, along with some light platforming. The only thing I'm not a super fan of is the Hidden Treasure system, where equipping a particular accessory just tells you that there is a Hidden Treasure somewhere in the room you're in, and then you just have to flail around hoping you headbutt it by chance.

As one would expect for a modern Nintendo title, the soundtrack is fantastic. I don't know the original Super Mario RPG soundtrack all that well — aside from a couple of MIDIs I downloaded in the late '90s to use in Klik and Play projects — but we have a fully reorchestrated version of the full soundtrack to go along with the updated visuals and the re-translated script. No speech, of course — it still doesn't feel quite right to have a talkie Nintendo game — but the writing so far has been concise and pretty witty. Perhaps not to the same degree as Paper Mario, which is a series that essentially built off the back of Super Mario RPG, but I wanted to play this one first before I jumped into the Paper Mario titles for the first time. Yes, believe it or not I've never played one; my wife Andie has played most of them, however.

Anyway, Super Mario RPG helped make an otherwise fairly unpleasant day — the weather has been awful here today, too — fairly tolerable. And I even made some time to get all my Christmas shopping done earlier, too. So that's good. But now it's probably a good idea for me to go back to bed, and here's hoping I feel a tad better in the morning. Not only do I want to record that The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but I have the work Christmas do in the week, and I'd rather not still be coughing my guts up and feeling like a roasted dog turd by the time that rolls around.

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#oneaday Day 182: Unpopular gaming opinions

As a veritable old fart of video games, I am, of course, fairly set in my ways, as older folks are wont to be. And as such, I have come to hold certain opinions that appear to deviate from "the norm" among younger folks. You are not "wrong" to think differently to what I am about to describe below, but know that you are not going to convince me to change my viewpoint, because I have felt this way about all these things for years now.

So why am I writing this? I dunno. Something to write about, innit? Plus there might be some of you out there who actually agree with some of these. It doesn't really matter. Let's just start, shall we?

Games don't "need" updates for months or years after their release

Baldur's Gate 3 happened to drift across some form of feed that I was looking at the other day, and the thumbnail image that came with it proudly boasted something along the lines of "Community update 30".

Now, whether this was just the 30th blog post for the community or the 30th actual update for the game I don't actually know, but both are equally offputting to me. I haven't even considered touching Baldur's Gate 3 yet because it launched unfinished and apparently is still getting bits and pieces bolted onto it after the fact.

I hear it's very good. I believe that it's very good, as Larian has a good track record. But I have precisely zero desire to play it until it's finished, because when a game as big as this gets significant updates after I've already ploughed a significant number of hours into it, I feel a bit hard done by. Worse, if I've already finished it by the time a significant update shows up, I feel very hard done by, because I should just have waited to play it.

Unfortunately, regular updates to games are expected by a certain class of The Gamers™, particularly those on PC. Look at the Steam reviews for any game that hasn't had an update for a month or two and you'll see people complaining about "devs abandoning the game" and it being a "dead game".

No. Sometimes it's just finished, and sometimes the devs would like either 1) a break or 2) to go and work on something else. I am, sadly, in the minority on this, but few things make me lose interest in a game faster than if it launches with a "roadmap". Just delay the thing a few months and finish the fucking thing. Then I will play it.

DLC is worthless

As an extension to the above, if a game releases and then immediately announces that it is getting a bunch of DLC, I will also immediately lose interest. Not only does it make me feel like stuff has been cut out of the base game to make the DLC — and don't throw the "well actually it's developed at a different rate to the main game" argument at me, that is an easy problem to solve — but I am struggling to think of a piece of DLC that I have genuinely thought was actually worth the money.

I remember being particularly disappointed with the DLC chapters for stuff like Dragon Age and Mass Effect back in the day, and I haven't seen much to change my opinion ever since those days. And, at the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Stellaris, where there is now so much DLC that it's impossible to know what the "best" way to get started with the game is. So I just… don't.

Mods are vandalism

"You should play games on PC!" the PC gamers say. "Because of mods!"

Fuck mods. I hate mods. A significant portion of them are outright vandalism to both the artistic and mechanical design of the teams that worked on a game. I saw someone on Bluesky earlier sharing an image of someone who had installed a "QoL" ("Quality of Life") mod to STALKER 2 to remove all encumbrance mechanics from the game. STALKER 2 is a game about survival in difficult circumstances, and the encumbrance mechanics force you to determine whether you really need to carry various things around with you. By removing it, you're stripping out part of the game.

Likewise, graphical mods can get in the bin, too. Games are designed with both a particular artistic vision in mind and are a reflection of the era in which they were designed, and I don't really give a toss if you can add ray-tracing to something that didn't have it before, or if you can make a game look like Generic Photorealistic Open World Game #927.

And I'm sure I don't need to say anything about nude mods. I say this as someone who enjoys a good sexy game.

"But I need 357 mods to make Skyrim fun!" Then Skyrim isn't a very good game, is it? Maybe play something else.

My only begrudging exception to this is in the case of games where extensibility is designed to be part of the game — stuff like Doom/Quake/Duke/whatever levels are fine with me, because those games were designed to be extendible. Although I must confess, when I play any of those games, I tend to stick to their official campaigns. And in some cases, mods for a game specifically designed to be mod-friendly inevitably remain perpetually unfinished and not as good as the stuff built-in to the game: most stuff for the excellent driving sim BeamNG.drive falls into this category, to name just one example.

I don't want to join your Discord

I use Discord when I absolutely have to, for work and for the few groups of friends who are only reachable there. But I do not want to join a fucking Discord for every single game I play, and I don't want to be bugged to join your Discord on the title screen for your game. Go away, leave me alone, and if I decide I want to engage in the official community for your game, I will seek out your Discord myself.

I absolutely do not want to have to join your Discord to read documentation or download helpful files. Host that shit on your website like a normal person.

I want your game to end

It's all very well offering "potentially limitless replayability", but I do actually want to be able to finish your game. If I can't finish your game, I almost certainly won't start it, because the way my brain works means that I will get annoyed by the fact I'm playing something that doesn't have a "point".

This is one of numerous reasons I think idle games and incremental games are dumb. Sure, numbers get big to a point that they become largely meaningless… but that's it. There's no sense of having achieved anything there. And I strongly suspect that a significant number of idle game fans have no idea that the genre largely stems from a pisstake at the expense of people who grind their way through mobile games with no conclusion.

Anyway, that'll do for now, because I'm sure I've pissed someone off with at least one of the above. As noted at the beginning, though, I don't care. I am an old man, I have things I like and things I dislike. And all of the above can get in the bin. A good evening to you!

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#oneaday Day 176: Take a Bow

Today, I played through all of the first Laura Bow game, The Colonel's Bequest. I enjoyed it a lot! You can read more about my thoughts on the subject right here, and a full Let's Play of the game will kick off on my YouTube channel from tomorrow. It's just three (long) episodes rather than a lot of 30-minute episodes like I did with The Case of the Serrated Scalpel last year, as I felt that fit the format of the game a bit better, and the overall structure of The Colonel's Bequest is… well, quite different from pretty much any adventure game I've played.

But enough of that. What's next? The Dagger of Amon Ra, of course! This is the follow-up to The Colonel's Bequest, and I'm going to do my best to play it through and record it tomorrow. I don't know if it's longer, shorter, easier, harder… the only thing I do know is that it uses point-and-click controls instead of The Colonel's Bequest's text parser, and it quizzes you on what happened at the end, so you need to make notes, just like Laura herself.

Then after that, I'll start having a look at The Crimson Diamond. Plus alongside all this, I might do something similar to what I did last year ("3 interesting DOS discoveries", "5 DOS games I always wanted to play" and "5 of the best early FPSes") if I can figure out what I might want to cover for videos in that style. I haven't started looking yet. Racing games is a possibility — a good excuse to bust out the Screamer series, perhaps? — or flight sims. Space combat sims? I don't know. I haven't decided yet. Looking at shareware stuff I used to like is also a distinct possibility, perhaps from the perspective of "shareware games I always wanted to try the Registered version of", since the only Registered shareware game I had back in the day was Wolfenstein 3-D, which I got for free after making some levels that were included in the official "Super Upgrades" expansion pack.

I've probably told this story at least once on this blog before, right? Well, regardless, I'll tell it again, 'cause you might be new around here. It's a story of delightfully happy coincidence.

Back at the time I was playing Wolfenstein 3-D on the family PC, I was involved with a local shareware library. I did a bit of part time work helping them out at local computer fairs, writing their catalogues and that sort of thing. I don't remember getting paid for this, but it was decent experience and I got lots of freebies from the shareware library, which was nice.

Among those disks that I got for free were numerous Wolfenstein 3-D editors, and they worked with the shareware version. So I made a bunch of levels.

I forget the exact circumstances of how the next bit came about, but I was browsing the GAMERS forum on CompuServe one day, when I found myself in contact with a gentleman called, as I recall, Carlton somethingorother. He was a representative from Apogee, and he was looking for new Wolfenstein 3-D levels to include in the upcoming data disk for the game. There was money on offer for anyone whose levels were included. After consulting with my parents — online safety and all that — I submitted my pack of ten levels to him, expecting never to hear from him ever again.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later, I got a package from the United States containing a cheque for $200, plus a registered copy of Wolfenstein 3-D and the new Super Upgrades pack, which included my levels, along with a bunch of other community contributions. So technically I'm a professional game designer.

But anyway. Yeah. That copy of Wolfenstein 3-D was the only Registered shareware game I had, because it was the early days of the Internet (in fact, via CompuServe, our "ISP" at the time, you couldn't even access the Web, and had to append "INTERNET:" to any email addresses you were sending messages to outside of the CompuServe service) and my parents weren't super-into the idea of sending $40 overseas in the hope of getting a video game back, and they absolutely weren't going to share their credit card information online. As such, I became intimately familiar with a lot of "Episode 1s" and not a lot else… so exploring the "Episode 2s" and beyond for some games I liked back in the day might be interesting, for sure.

I'll think of something. For now, I think it's time to just play something fun for a bit without thinking about how to turn it into an article or video. Come to me, Donut Dodo…!

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