#oneaday Day 660: This one particular type of headline is very annoying

Did you click on this article? Probably not, because statistically speaking most of you read posts from the site's front page (where the full posts are published) or in your email inbox. (The really cool ones read via RSS, of course.) I don't feel the need to clickbait on this site largely because 1) it's my personal site and I don't really care if anyone reads it (though it is nice) and 2) I have always found clickbait incredibly annoying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let's not pick exclusively on GameSpot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 655: I would rather play Atari 2600 games than mobile games

I probably don't need to say anything more than the headline, but I will expand on it for the sake of having actually written something today. I mean what I say, though! I would genuinely rather play literally anything on the Atari 2600 than a modern mobile game. And with the 2600 being so easy to emulate these days — not to mention the fact I have worked on both devices and game cartridges featuring Atari 2600 games — you can even take the experience on the go with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 650: Games for Children

I read an article earlier that annoyed me a bit. I'm not going to link to it partly because I don't want to send any particular ire in the author's direction, and partly because it wasn't this specific article that annoyed me, but rather a common talking point that it used as its central thesis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 647: The third 9th Dawn

Just recently, I have returned to a game I really enjoyed when I first tried, but never got around to finishing. That game is 9th Dawn III: Shadow of Erthil from Valorware, which is a delightfully rough-round-the-edges but made-with-heart game that feels like a classic PC game from days of yore, but has enough modern aspects to it to make it feel right at home on console (Switch, specifically, where I am playing.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 644: Resident EEEEEVIL... SIX

I'm playing Resident Evil 6 right now, in my ongoing attempts to Finally Catch Up on the series as a whole. I had been led to believe that this one was Not Very Good, but I've been enjoying it so far. It's definitely leaning hard on the action angle rather than feeling like "traditional" survival horror, and it's very setpiece-led and linear, but it's been enjoyable so far. It's definitely the most "big budget action movie" the series has been up until this point, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing; we are, after all, talking about a series that has always involved rocket launchers, cartoonishly evil villains and giant slobbering monsters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 637: Slow Roads

I'm very fond of weird little software toys that don't really have a point, but which have obviously had some love, care and attention devoted to them. One of my favourites in this regard is a Web-based driving "sim" of sorts known as Slow Roads. You can fiddle around with it here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, maybe just a few miles before bed…

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#oneaday Day 636: Esoteric Ebb and Flow

Well, my original plan was to play at least one of the bonus episodes of Resident Evil Revelations this evening, but then I was distracted by some screenshots of a game that apparently came out recently, and which I hadn't previously heard of: Esoteric Ebb by Christoffer Bodegård, published by the "indie publisher to watch" of the moment, Raw Fury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 635: Revelated

I finished Resident Evil Revelations 2 this evening. I've got what I think will be an interesting article in the tank for some point in the not too distant future, so I want to save that for MoeGamer. I do want to talk a bit about the game, though, so here I am!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 634: Revelations... too

With all the talk over Resident Evil Requiem recently, I thought it about time I resumed my efforts to catch up on the series. When I last left off, I had played all of the mainline games (in the form of their most recent incarnations/remakes) up to and including the first "episode" of Resident Evil Revelations 2, which means after that I still have Resident Evil 6, 7, Village and now Requiem still to go also.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 628: Return to UFO 50

I played a lot of UFO 50 when it first released back in September of 2024, but I decided to hold fire on further exploration when I learned that there was a physical release of the Switch version on the way. Not only that, but it would have a rather cool limited edition that came with a bunch of extra "feelies" to help sell the fantasy that you were exploring a "lost" games console. You can read all about that special edition over on MoeGamer, and I'll be returning to commentary on each of the individual games shortly.

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

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

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

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

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

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