#oneaday Day 842: Quick catch-up

I forgot to write something on here yesterday! In my defence, I wrote nearly 4,000 words on Ys VIII over on MoeGamer so I think you can probably cut me a bit of slack. I'm still going to take this post to "catch up" though.

I really enjoyed Ys VIII overall. It still feels a bit odd to play an Ys game that is 50+ hours long, but the game didn't drag at any point. It consistently sends you to new and interesting locales, and the story develops in some thoroughly intriguing directions as you progress. I successfully got the "true" ending, which isn't all that difficult to get (you just need more than 198 reputation points, which are easily acquired through just normal gameplay) and everything wrapped up in a most satisfying manner.

After writing my piece on Ys, I went back to the excellent Nighthawks, which is a spectacularly good game. As you might expect, I will be writing a more substantial piece on this once I've finished it, but suffice to say for now that if you have enjoyed any of the relatively recent crop of what I like to call "storytelling RPGs" (Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb), then you will definitely get a kick out of Nighthawks.

I think one of the things that always impresses me the most about a good quality game like this is how it can truly create a sense of a world without having an actual 3D space you can freely wander around. For me, the primarily text-based world of Nighthawks is considerably more compelling than a fully 3D modelled but ultimately bland and personality-free "open world", particularly because of the colourful characters that inhabit that world. It's funny, because this is exactly what the capital-A "Adventure" snobs were talking about in the early days of the medium; if you have a suitably compatible brain, the imagery conjured up by your mind from reading text will always be more vivid than anything even a powerful video card can render. (Of course, the fact that Nighthawks has beautiful art and excellent voice acting also helps a lot.)

Once I've finished Nighthawks, I'm going to play Silent Hill Townfall, which looks like it's going to be thoroughly interesting. I'm oddly excited to play a game with such accurate-looking renditions of a British (well, Scottish) town, and I'm intrigued to see how the game differentiates itself from other Silent Hill games. I didn't love Silent Hill f, although I didn't hate it either; from what I understand, Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different beast anyway, so I'm excited to explore it.

After that, I think it's going to have to be Ace Combat 8. I love Ace Combat, and this new one has been getting excellent reviews. I'm happy about that. The series deserves to do well, and it's nice to have a game like this on modern hardware. I mean, the PS2 Ace Combat games still look surprisingly great, but it's even better to have something in full HD-o-vision.

There we go, all caught up. Now watch me forget to write something later today.

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 840: The deluge has started

The deluge of amazing games coming out in the latter half of this year has started. I've already noted that I've been playing the excellent Nighthawks from Wadjet Eye Games, and that is very much occupying my immediate attention, but also on my radar for the immediate-ish future are Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8, both of which seem to be going down well with reviewers so far.

I also still need to finish Ys VIII, which I set aside while I started Nighthawks, but I think I'm going to devote tomorrow to. I was enjoying it a lot, and I think I'm getting near the end, so I would like to finish it properly. Ys VIII is not a recent release, though. It came out ten years ago and has had two sequels since then, both of which I would like to play at some point.

Not only that, but I've been having a steady stream of stuff I preordered months ago finally coming around — just this week I've had Chained Echoes and Trails in the Sky Second Chapter come in, Little Goody Two-Shoes is on the way and I'm sure there are others to look forward to.

Situations like we've got here are why I'm not immediately worried for the crash that the top end of the industry appears to be careening towards. I have enough unplayed (or "want to replay") games on my shelves to last me for many, many years at this point, so if there comes a day where, for one reason or another, I just can't buy any new games? I think I'm probably going to be fine.

It will be a sad day when it's no longer possible to buy boxed copies of games, of course — and I'm sure once Sony successfully pushes for this with their abandonment of discs in 2027, at the very least Microsoft will follow — but I'm well-stocked in my little bunker for such an eventuality. Only question is: will I actually be able to finish all these RPGs before I die? I reckon I can… assuming the world itself lasts that long, of course.

My wife often takes the piss out of me for the number of games I have that are still shrinkwrapped, but I've always bought stuff with this sort of eventuality in mind. I mean, I was hoping it would never actually come to a day where physical media would no longer be a thing — and I guess it still might not, as much can change even in the space of a year — but I've basically been investing in the future enjoyment of my hobby, and in the meantime, I've been wanting to just support the games that I would like to see more of. As frustrating as it is to know that "Day One" sales count for almost more than anything for a lot of developers and publishers, it is, unfortunately, a fact. And while I'm in a position where I'm comfortable enough to be able to support the stuff I like, I'm happy to do so — even if I don't get around to actually playing the games in question until, at times, a year or two (or ten) later.

Anyway, I'm not buying anything else until payday next week. But I will probably be picking up Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8. I do genuinely want to beat Ys VIII though! Really! I want to write about it and everything!

For this evening, though, Nighthawks is calling, so if you need me, I'll be stalking in the shadows of Cradlebridge.

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#oneaday Day 837: Nighthawks!

Yesterday's post was out of frustration, so it's only fair that I make today's post one of genuine enthusiasm. Today marks the release of Nighthawks, a new game from The Curiosity Engine and Wadjet Eye Games, and I think you should buy it because it is good. Positive enough for you?

I should probably add at this point that I have not yet played the full version of Nighthawks — it is presently sitting on my PC ready to be started for the first time. But I did play a demo several months back (EDIT: nearly a year ago!) that looked like it would be pretty representative of the full experience, and I came away from that demo thinking "cor blimey, that game was a bit of all right and no mistake, onto the wishlist it goes". I have no reason to believe that things have taken a devastatingly shit turn between that time and now, particularly because Nighthawks has been in development for so long.

Eight years, to be exact; the project began its public-facing life on Kickstarter in 2018. I must confess I only became aware of it a little more recently — I think the aforementioned demo was the first time I'd really stumbled across it in any meaningful way — but like I say, that initial contact was enough for me to get thoroughly interested in the project and want to pick it up immediately on release day. Well, release day is here, and I have made good on my promise: I have bought it, and intend to spend the evening playing it, even though I haven't quite yet finished Ys VIII as I hoped I would have by this point. But no matter. I'm sure I can find a way of juggling these two games without agonising over the decision of which to play each evening. I'm good at that.

(beat)

Anyway, some of you may still be wondering what the fuck this Nighthawks thing actually is. Well, it's a vampire RPG, based around a similar concept to White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, only in this instance there is no Masquerade; the existence of vampires is no longer a secret. Still, the fact that you play a vampire, with all the interesting powers that comes with both your new undeath and your overall background, is a common factor — and with the disappointment that Bloodlines 2 apparently ended up being, there is definitely scope for a good vampire RPG in 2026.

Don't come into this expecting something along the lines of Bloodlines, though; this is primarily a text and dialogue-based game rather than a game where you have a little vampire man that runs around a city, bites people and occasionally indulges in some of the worst first- and/or third-person action ever committed to a gold master. That means it's a very character-centric game, with interactions between your character and the various inhabitants of the city playing a crucial role in how things unfold. To put it another way, its overall approach has a fair amount in common with games like Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, where you are effectively working with the game, which acts as a virtual "game master", to build your story.

The game is written by Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer fame, whose other work actually on games includes titles such as Beyond a Steel Sky and Sunless Sea/Skies. It also features art by Ben Chandler, who has worked on some excellent adventure games in the last few years, and Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games has acted as producer. There are also some excellent voice actors in the game, including, among others, the inimitable Sally Beaumont (of Old Skies fame) in a "minor but memorable" role, apparently.

As I say, I'm yet to jump into the full game and see how things have turned out, as well as establish factors like how long the game is, but the demo version from a while back made me very excited about this game indeed. As such, I'm really looking forward to sinking my fangs into it after dinner, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it in the near future.

Right now, though, it's 7.30pm, I've had dinner, I've emptied and reloaded the dishwasher: it's time. The lights are down low. It's time to enter the nocturnal world of Nighthawks. Maybe you should, too.

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#oneaday Day 835: All night long

Remember how yesterday I said a group of friends and I were going to play Big Walk "this afternoon"? Yeah, well, we started in the afternoon, my time… and concluded twelve fucking hours later. I have never, ever had a multiplayer session so long that the batteries in my headset went flat. Until now! (It's also been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter on a video game, but those are usually solo.)

There are some mild Big Walk spoilers ahead. I will not be sharing complete puzzle solutions, but I may talk a bit about the thought process involved in some of them. You have been warned.

I don't think any of us expected the session to go on for so long, since we were in Big Walk's "postgame". We had partly (and correctly) assumed that the postgame would just involve going around and cleaning up any puzzles we didn't complete as part of the process you go through to "beat" the main game, but we were also aware that we'd discovered a place where there were fifteen empty slots for the "Kong" figurines that are your rewards for completing the various puzzles, and thus there was probably still a fair amount of work to do. We didn't know what the end result of doing said work would be, though.

We should have known, really; in our process of beating the main game, there weren't fifteen puzzles left over. And sure enough, once you get into the postgame, a selection of "purple Kong" puzzles unlock in a part of the map that was previously inaccessible. These mostly take the form of challenges similar to puzzles found elsewhere in the game, but made significantly more difficult and/or time-consuming somehow.

That said, there were also two puzzles from our "main game" leftovers which had left us reasonably stumped, so we had intended to come back to them. Both of those proved to be extremely time-consuming, too, so in retrospect it's no surprise that solving fifteen puzzles in total took twelve hours. We did make up for it with one of the other main game leftover puzzles taking us less than two minutes, though, because our team are now Big Walk pros, apparently.

Some of the most interesting challenges we encountered involved having to split up the party in various ways. One puzzle tasked us with looking through telescopes to find a series of four pedestals, and once there was at least one person at each pedestal, we then had to find a way to synchronise our button presses. Another challenged us to find a specific sound somewhere on the island. Another still involved locating things that we had used in various other puzzles and taking them to another location. In each of these situations, the challenge was communicating over a long distance: the game does have walkie-talkie items, but given you are limited in what you can carry — you can hold one thing in your hands, one on a belt loop (once you've found one) and one on a backpack (likewise), but you cannot access the belt or backpack items yourself — it's not always practical for everyone to carry one of these. And besides, you have to find them first anyway!

We found a way in each instance, though. And it wasn't just the long-distance puzzles that gave us these communication challenges, either. One of the "purple Kong" puzzles required us to figure out how to communicate complex information between two different rooms, when one room could use an intercom but the other could only respond by turning a light on or off. Another tasked us with communicating auditory information between rooms with a completely soundproof barrier between them. Another still tested the limits of how precisely we could verbally communicate visual information.

The one we left for last was a harder version of an earlier "golf" puzzle involving an extremely heavy ball that we had solved earlier in the game. The initial, main game implementation of this puzzle was fairly easy to solve, but the postgame variant involved getting the ball over a significantly longer distance, which required some creative thinking and teamwork. Among the many talents and skills that Big Walk tests, patience is one of the most significant of all of them. In this modern, attention-deficit world, I suspect there will be at least some groups who find the patience and endurance challenges to be some of the most taxing.

Still, the "true" ending was worth it, and I was grateful we didn't have to go through the immensely difficult "finale" of the main game again. That finale was a great experience, but having to do it again after twelve hours would have probably killed me.

One thing I really appreciated about Big Walk as a whole is that it's just an excellently designed game. It's a game which understands that when you're tasking people with confronting some significant, cooperative challenges together, it pays to have a clear, distinct visual language that everyone can learn to understand quickly and easily. Subtly, and without explicitly telling the player at any point, it introduces you to various concepts as you progress through the game — many of which are in the "starter area" — and coming to recognise those different elements of the game and what they mean is a key part of learning to play Big Walk effectively. Communicating your understanding of those elements to the rest of your group is important, too; if you know something but the others don't, it won't help the group as a whole if you keep it to yourself!

Anyway, we successfully completed all of the game — with the only thing (I think) we didn't find in our playthrough being the "shiny paint station". It was very much worth it, and if you have at least one good friend to play it with, I highly encourage you to do so — and to take the time to play it from start to finish. It takes a while, but it's very much a worthwhile activity to spend a few sessions on together. I certainly won't be forgetting our experiences in a hurry.

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#oneaday Day 834: Gaming update

One of the things I was originally thinking about doing with MoeGamer was doing more regular "updates" on what I've been playing recently. I still haven't actually done that — at least partly because I haven't determined a good way to do it; perhaps a weekly "What I've Been Playing" column? — so for now, today, I am going to provide that update in the form of a blog post here. Strap yourself in!

I've had several games on the go recently. My Final Fantasy XI playthrough stalled when Oliver went missing and I haven't picked it up again since that; I've got to a point in that game where it feels quite demanding to play in terms of attention span and patience, and I haven't quite felt up to that yet. That's not a criticism — I think one of the best things about Final Fantasy XI is its depth and complexity — but I do very much have to be in the mood for it. I also have the issue that I finished the bit of the game that I was most interested in playing — the Chains of Promathia expansion — and thus I'm early in Treasures of Aht Urhgan and it hasn't quite "hooked" me in the same way just yet.

I have, however, started a few other games. Probably the "main" one of these I'm playing at the moment is Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, which I've been meaning to have a look at for pretty much the last ten years. I did start it one evening when we had some friends over, we all got a little tipsy and one of them wanted to see an RPG, but I set it aside after that because I was already playing some other things. This time around, I started over (again) and have been thoroughly enraptured by it; it's an excellent game, with speedy combat and progression, a real, genuine sense of adventure, and a compelling story. It's very long for an Ys game — I'm 40 hours in and only just getting hints that we might be getting towards an ending, but my map exploration rate is only about 75% — but I think it works. "What Ys is" has changed a great deal over the years, and it seems that this one is (quite rightly) regarded as one of the best of the "modern Ys" titles.

I've also been playing Suikoden as part of the HD Remaster collection, and I've been mostly enjoying that. It's another game that I feel like I have to be in the right mood for, although this is less to do with its complexity and more to do with its relatively sedate pace of proceedings. I need to get back to it and finish it, because I was enjoying it a lot (aside from the army battles, which suck) and I would like to see how it ends. I also believe it's quite short, and I'm a good way through it, so it would be nice to cross it off the list sooner rather than later. Perhaps I'll play some of that today.

The next "big game" I have on my radar to play is Wadjet Eye Games' Nighthawks, a text-based RPG which is heavily inspired by (but not licensed from) the White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade setting — with some notable differences, such as "no Masquerade". I played the demo of this a while back and it looks like being something incredibly special. Beautiful art, excellent voice acting, a well-crafted script with memorable characters — I'm looking forward to giving it a good amount of attention, and almost certainly writing something about it once I've spent some time with it.

I was hoping to get both Ys VIII and Suikoden finished before Nighthawks came out, but I don't think that's going to happen, given that Nighthawks is out early next week. I should be able to polish off at least one of them, though; at the rate I'm going, I think Ys VIII is likely to be down for the count first, but we'll see.

On the non-narrative game front, I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 after really enjoying (and completing) the first one while we were away on holiday. I've also been playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which is a game I like a lot, but for some reason find it difficult to focus on for long periods of time.

I think part of the issue with Kirby is that each level has a bunch of optional objectives to complete, and it doesn't reveal them until you've either already done them, made progress on one that has multiple steps, or just completed the level without achieving them. In the latter case, it only reveals one of the optional objectives at a time, so if you have absolutely no idea what they are, it takes up to four playthroughs of a single level to get all the Stuff. This feels a bit like padding, but the game as a whole is so charming (and the levels so relatively quick to play through) that I should probably just get over myself and get on with it. I've actually been doing just that at lunchtimes this week.

Finally, this afternoon a group of friends and I will be playing some Big Walk, which we've been working our way through at the weekends. We finished it a few weeks back, but we're going back in to try and clean up some of the puzzles we didn't complete prior to heading for the ending. It's been a really good time; I was worried that it would be another Blue Prince kind of situation, where a bunch of critics lost their shit over how "good" it supposedly was, but I'd end up hating it, but no; I've been really enjoying it.

Anyway, that's where I am. I think some Ys for a few hours, then Big Walk later. Then tomorrow I'll do some video recording. Sounds like a plan to me!

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#oneaday Day 818: Gaming is doing everything it can to drive its oldest fans away

I've been playing video games for as long as I can remember existing. I grew up playing games on the Atari 8-bit and ST home computers, and since then, I have followed along with the explosive growth and technological advancement of the medium every step of the way. And yet today, in 2026, I feel like I'm being specifically pushed away in so many ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 813: That sure was a big walk

We finished Big Walk this evening. It was excellent! I am going to share some spoilers after the image, so consider yourself warned. If you would like to read something not spoileriffic about Big Walk, may I direct you to the article I wrote about it here? Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#oneaday Day 812: Research update

My efforts to catalogue all the noteworthy mentions of Atari home computer games and software (including type-in listings) that I might, one day, want to make a video about are proceeding apace. I have finished reviewing issue 50 of Page 6/New Atari User, and my spreadsheet is up to 1,179 lines. This may have been a mistake.

I joke, of course. This is actually proving to be a very valuable, helpful exercise for a variety of reasons: first of all is my originally stated, intended purpose for all this: to be able to easily track down press coverage for games I might want to do videos on for my Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series. But some other benefits are coming to light, too. For example, a number of these games have multiple entries on the list thanks to being featured in various types of articles — besides straight-up individual title reviews, there are also compilation reviews and broader topic roundups — which means I can see how (or if) various titles were responded to differently by different reviewers or in different contexts.

Sometimes a game might be a hard sell at full price, but a decent use of some pocket money if and when it comes to a budget label. Sometimes a game might not have resonated with one reviewer, but really hit home with another — or vice versa. Sometimes a game might be a good inclusion as part of a compilation, but not quite strong enough to stand on its own merits. It's interesting to see all these things, and to have the various issues that relate to the various mentions of all these titles at my fingertips.

The other main benefit is more personal. I originally stopped doing the regular Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z series because I was worried I was running out of interesting things to talk about. This nearly 1,200 line spreadsheet — which is set to increase considerably in size as I continue to review Page 6/New Atari User issues up until the final Issue 85 from Autumn 1998 — has shown me that there is a veritable wealth of stuff I haven't even thought about tackling as yet. Whether or not I'll be able to stick to the original "A to Z" formula I haven't yet determined — as you might expect, there are some letters that just aren't all that commonly used to begin titles — but in terms of the sheer number of things, to have this amount just from one magazine's run is kind of incredible.

Once this process is finished, I would like to expand my efforts to other magazines. Initially I will likely cover the other early Atari magazines — Atari User, Antic and ANALOG being the main ones — but may well expand to some slightly later ones such as Atari ST User and ST Action, both of which I used to read back in the day. I'm already seeing with the choice of titles covered just in Page 6/New Atari User that they didn't even attempt to cover absolutely everything that was coming out in time for each issue, so it's very likely indeed that each magazine I look at will cover different things at different times. This, in turn, will make it interesting to compare reactions to titles between a European (Page 6 and New Atari User) and North American (Antic and ANALOG) audience, among other things.

Anyway, this is a substantial project, but it's going well and I'm getting a little bit done each day. I've already got more than enough to make use of when I start up the video production machine again, but it would be great to have enough material to last me a very long time indeed. (Honestly, I probably already have that, but the more the merrier, I say.)

I'm actually getting quite excited about rediscovering this focused approach. Checking the dismal viewing figures on my recent Terranigma video only convinced me further that this is probably the right thing to do for the sake of my own enjoyment. It may not necessarily lead to particularly impressive viewing figures, income, subscribers or anything like that — but honestly, I'm happy with how my channel has gradually grown over the course of the last few years. I have nearly 4,200 subscribers on YouTube now, and I would guess that a significant proportion of them are there for the Atari stuff that was my channel's main focus for quite some time. Switching over to something that I specialise in allows me to say "fuck The Algorithm, this is for me and anyone who happens to want to come along for the ride". And that's much more fun when the whole thing is supposed to be a hobby!

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#oneaday Day 807: Atarimania got a new look

After many years of rocking the same distinctive and still-functional look, Atarimania, the massive Atari software database, has finally updated its visual style. And from a brief glance over, it looks great!

For the unfamiliar, Atarimania is a place where you can go to look up pretty much any piece of software that has ever been released on an Atari platform. It probably gets the most use for those who are interested in the 8-bit and ST ranges of home computers, but it also has substantial console sections for the 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar, though some of these are still under construction at the time of writing..

Most entries provide some helpful historical information about the piece of software in question, including the date of release (often just a year, as back in the day we apparently weren't quite as fastidious about recording the exact dates things released), the people who worked on it (with hyperlinks allowing you to quickly see what else they worked on) and various other bits and bobs of information. Many entries also allow you to download cartridge ROM files or disk images for the software in question, too, allowing you to quickly load it up in an emulator or even get it up and running on real hardware or an FPGA solution.

One of my favourite parts of Atarimania is the magazine section, which is full of PDF archives for a variety of publications. Some of these are specialist Atari 8-bit and ST magazines (including Page 6/New Atari User, which my Dad, my brother and I all wrote for at various points), but there are also things like Activision's Activisions newsletter, enthusiast user group zines and even some multi-format mags that happened to cover Atari, like Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE), which was a favourite magazine of mine back in the day. It's a wonderful source of authentic information from back when this stuff was current, and it's been a godsend for me when putting together videos.

Atarimania's redesign doesn't reinvent the site's functionality. So far as I am aware, the exact same information is being presented, just with a new look. Notably, it's mobile-friendly now, which it didn't used to be, which makes quickly accessing information on the fly much more convenient than it once was. I'll have to spend some time digging into it all, but from my brief look this evening, it all looks great.

Every time I look at Atarimania, I find myself wishing that a similar resource existed for other platforms. The C64 and Amiga have something similar in the form of Lemon64 and LemonAmiga respectively, the Spectrum has World of Spectrum and the other one I always forget the name of, and I'm sure others exist for other platforms. But for me, none of them quite match Atarimania for sheer comprehensiveness — and I also think that there's a real gap in the market for something similar, but for consoles. Like, I would absolutely love to see a SNESMania, a MasterSystemMania, a MegaDriveMania and suchlike. To my knowledge, nothing quite like that exists right now for console platforms — and I don't really know anything about creating a database-driven website like that, otherwise I would consider looking into it myself. If these sites do exist, they're not anywhere near as well-known as Atarimania is for Atari enthusiasts.

There's MobyGames, of course, and that is definitely a valuable, helpful resource, but it's not quite the same thing.

Anyway, eternal respect to anyone who builds and maintains this sort of thing. You help make the retro gaming hobby that much more enjoyable to participate in — and turbonerds like me happy when we need to research things. Please keep doing what you do forever!

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#oneaday Day 805: Quarter-circle forward

I have long been intimidated by fighting games. I'm not sure exactly when this started, and there are still some fighting games I do enjoy — most notably the Dead or Alive games, which I've always felt have been the closest I've come to genuinely "getting" one of these games. And I would love to change this situation — particularly with the number of excellent SNK fighters we have on Evercade now.

Like I say, it wasn't always like this, though. Back in the SNES era, I, like literally everyone else I knew, had a copy of Street Fighter II, and played it to absolute death. I remember chatting about it with friends at school, discussing the various characters' endings — back then, people still respected the single-player mode of fighting games rather than treating them as the afterthought they seem to be today — and bragging about how easy we found such-and-such a special move to perform. (My friend Andrew was the only one of us who, he claimed at least, could perform Zangief's Spinning Piledriver.)

Beyond that, I remember having a good time with the original Tekken and Soul Blade on PlayStation, Soulcalibur on Dreamcast, the aforementioned Dead or Alive… it all feels a world away right now.

The obvious answer to this is to just try and play a fighting game again. But the temptation, given the amount of information out there today, is to try and look something up; to try and find a guide to "getting good" at one of these games, before you even start actually just playing it.

The trouble is, most guides these days — even supposed beginners' guides — are filled with impenetrable jargon, and move on to complex concepts way too quickly, making the prospect of even thinking about trying a new game difficult to contemplate. I read a guide the other day that said when you are learning a new fighting game from scratch, one of the first things you should do is look at a wiki and learn the framedata for the character you want to play.

Not "play the game, see how you like it" or "pick a character that you find sexually attractive, consider an aspirational figure or think is amusing for some reason". Look at a wiki and learn the framedata.

Now, while I won't deny that once you're taking a game seriously to a particularly sweaty degree, looking at a wiki and learning the framedata probably is helpful — but man! When you're someone who doesn't really know how to play a fighting game, like at all, but is interested in learning at the very least the basics, and then you're hit with something that sounds like the exact opposite of fun as one of the first things you're suggested to do… well, that doesn't feel like much of an incentive to play!

This is the trouble with having too much information available and the baggage that a large and active "community" brings. Back in the SNES era — and even onwards into the Dreamcast and early PS2/Xbox ages — none of us knew what the "FGC" was, and we didn't need to know. If we were lucky, we still had the original manual for Street Fighter II and knew that a fireball move was down, diagonal, forward and punch, and that was, somehow, enough. The way we played would have probably been considered "button mashing" by someone who knew the game extremely well, but again, it didn't matter! We were having fun with the game, we were enjoying playing it — and we were able to play it well enough to (after a lot of continues, in most cases) actually beat the single-player mode.

Like I say, though, the single-player mode of fighting games is seemingly barely given any thought whatsoever these days. The assumption from most of the "guides" out there appears to be that you must always be looking to get ready for competitive action, to be on top of your versus game, and to be able to perform every move absolutely flawlessly, exactly when you need to perform it. Playing against a computer? Ugh, literally disgusting. Get online and get wrecked, because that's the only way you'll learn.

That may be true, but I wonder how many other people out there are like me: having once enjoyed something like Street Fighter II before all this "advice" was everywhere, but now feel completely and utterly intimidated and demoralised any time they even contemplate picking up a new fighter — to such a degree that they just never even try a game that could potentially become an all-time favourite?

As I say above, I think the answer, honestly, is to simply ignore all this and just have a go. If you're only fighting against the computer, it doesn't matter if you suck. If the only skills you develop are "how to beat the computer" — and you do so enough to be able to see a favourite character's ending on a handful of credits? I think that can be enough.

I think you can make it enough. So y'know what? I think I'm going to make an effort to have a go at some of these absolutely beautiful NEOGEO games we have on Evercade. Sure, I'll likely be turning the difficulty level down to the minimum, at least to begin with — but that sounds a lot more fun than looking at charts full of numbers, abbreviations and terms like "Greco-Roman cancel". At least for now. Maybe I'll find myself wanting to do that at some point down the line — but for now, just playing the game sounds like a good idea.

Now the only question is which game to pick…?

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