#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…

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

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 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.

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

#oneaday Day 626: Restless

I'm having one of those frustratingly "restless" periods when it comes to my free time at the moment. I've got a few games on the go, but somehow none of them have quite "grabbed" me completely yet. I did at least manage to finish Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment a little while back, though, so that was nice to finally get that ticked off the list.

Let's ponder the other things I've got on the go, then.

First up is Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which, I don't know, just hasn't clicked with me in quite the same way as some of the other entries in the series. I feel like it's succumbed a little to the "bloat" that a lot of modern games end up with, boasting myriad collectables and optional little bits and pieces to make you feel like you haven't really beaten the game unless you've done all the optional stuff. And the optional stuff just… well, it isn't really very fun. I might just plough on with the story — which I am enjoying, at least — and leave it at that. I want to punch whoever decided that the documents you find around the levels are called "Readables", though. "Documents" or "Files" would have been perfectly fine.

Next up is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I actually haven't really touched since before Christmas, but I hadn't really got that far in the story with anyway. I was enjoying it a decent amount and had got a fair amount done; the thing I particularly like about that game is something I also appreciated in Breath of the Wild: at any given time, you can just start walking in a direction and you'll stumble across something interesting, with many of these things being unscripted. I like this! It works well for Zelda. But, like its predecessor, the sheer size of the game is a little overwhelming, and starting it gives one the feeling that one will never, ever finish it. But I did finish Breath of the Wild — not to 100% completion or anything, because that seems like a fool's game — and so I'm sure I can do the same with Tears of the Kingdom.

Next up is Lost Odyssey, which I've been meaning to get to for ages. I was having a real hankering for just a straightforward, conventional RPG, so I thought it was time to kick it off. I really like what I've seen so far, though the first two bosses are absolutely brutal, which gave me a certain amount of pause. I understand that these two bosses are notoriously difficult, and the game should be a bit of a smoother ride from hereon, so given that I've been enjoying what I've played so far, this is probably going to be the "priority" for the immediate future.

Then there's Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, which I started playing at the end of last year and was enjoying, but burnt myself out on a bit by getting a little obsessive over level grinding. I don't quite feel ready to go back to that one just yet.

At the same time as all this, I also kind of fancy playing a gridder dungeon crawler. But then I worry that having too many RPGs on the go will overload my brain. So that's probably not a good idea.

I think my immediate priorities are going to be Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus to get it ticked off the list so I can write about it, and Lost Odyssey, because that's probably the thing I'm enjoying the most at the moment. Tears of the Kingdom can be my "backup" game for when I don't fancy either of those things. And I shall repeatedly tell myself not to feel any guilt if there are evenings when I just feel like going and playing Sega Master System games all night.

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

#oneaday Day 625: It sucks to see someone defeated

I am, as I've mentioned a number of times in the past, a big fan of Mark Bussler's Classic Game Room video series. It's one of several things on YouTube that I found enormously inspirational in starting up my own channel, and his many, many videos on classic retro games are among my most-replayed YouTube videos.

I've known for a long time that Bussler was intensely dissatisfied with the way the online landscape had been going — and how it had meant that something he once clearly loved doing had become something that it felt like it was pointless to carry on with. After he stopped doing Classic Game Room as his main thing, he tried various other projects online, but has seemingly met with nothing but frustration with pretty much every one of them.

I still follow his Patreon for updates on what he's up to, and today he mentioned that people should have a look at his website, classicgameroom.com, to see what he's up to, since he doesn't really do social media any more. And his FAQs made me feel very sad indeed.

The question he gets more than anything else, I reckon, is "is Classic Game Room coming back?" and his answer is simple:

No. The Classic Game Room video game review series is permanently discontinued. There are no plans to bring the video series back in any way on any platform.

He expands on the reasons thus:

After the YouTube channel was largely demonetized, people stopped watching in favour of influencers and short-form videos. No other formats seemed to work. After a few different format changes, the show is now discontinued.

The cynics would say that this was just Bussler failing to adapt to the changing media landscape online, and that's not an incorrect statement to make, but the thing that makes me so sad about all this is that there is demand for stuff that isn't influencer-led short-form content. Just not enough to be commercially viable, unfortunately; not enough for one of the OG online video creators to want to continue with the thing that made him famous — and which, I suspect, is at this point completely unknown to a couple of generations of people.

Bussler worked hard on Classic Game Room and his other projects, and it must have been so frustrating for him to continually feel his efforts knocked back — particularly when he tried all manner of different things after it seemed that Classic Game Room had, for one reason or another, fallen out of favour.

So I'm sad for him. I'm sad that he has felt the need to, in his words, "permanently retire from filmmaking, game journalism and animation". At the same time, I completely understand why he has taken that decision. Again, in his own words:

Mark spends his free time reading and biking instead of using garbage social media apps. He has no patience for algorithms and prefers looking at old-fashioned paper.

I completely understand why one would want to retire from the Internet in this age of relentless, pointless, disposable short-form content. I often feel like I want to do so, too. I've spent many years carving out a little corner of the Internet that I can feel proud of with places like this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, but sometimes it all feels incredibly pointless.

I'm sad to see someone whose work I enjoyed, and that I respected immensely, be so completely and utterly defeated by what passes for "culture" online today. I'm sad because I know how he feels. I understand why he's so frustrated. And I don't know how we fix this — or if it's even possible at this point.

Perhaps it's all part of getting old. You pass beyond a point of relevance, and the world feels like it isn't "yours" any more. Perhaps we all reach this point. But that seems like a bit of an inefficient way for everyone to live their lives. Surely there's a way for different types of "stuff" to coexist, without everything having to be dominated by whatever the latest "viral" bullshit is?

Apparently not. But oh well. I'm not going anywhere just yet. Even if no-one's reading, watching or listening, I still enjoy the act of creating something. It gives me some satisfaction — and it's perhaps for the best that I've never got to a point where I'd be tempted to try and use online content creation (ugh) as my main source of income.

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

#oneaday Day 624: Revisionist gaming history

A few weeks back, someone started an argument with me about Final Fantasy VIII. They asserted that everyone had always hated Final Fantasy VIII, and that I was somehow wrong for remembering that my friends and I were super-hyped for it, enjoyed it immensely when it came out, and that reviews of the time were also very kind to it. Review scores aren't the be-all and end-all, of course, but they do act as a pretty good barometer of roughly how positive the critical reception for a given title was.

I bowed out of the conversation early on because it was pretty clear from the outset that the person attempting to start this argument was not going to listen to any viewpoint other than their own, even when it was coming from someone who lived through the experience of that game coming out, and they just wanted to hate on something that had, in recent years, become fashionable to bash.

Now, I'm not going to attempt to convince you one way or the other about Final Fantasy VIII at this point. It's one of those games that you either "get" or you don't, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't "get" it. But to extend "I don't get this" out to "everyone everywhere always hated this" is ridiculous. It's absolute revisionist history, and it's something that drives me absolutely bonkers about online discourse over video games these days.

It happens with more recent games, too. Take Mario Kart World, a game which does some really interesting things with the Mario Kart formula, and one which is designed with so much polish that I really can't take anyone who says it is a "bad" game seriously. And yet to some folks it is "the worst Mario Kart there has ever been" and, again, "everyone hated it". No, no they did not.

Or another example: I saw a post just this evening that implied that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was a bad game, primarily due to the fact that none of the original team who worked on the first ever The Legend of Zelda game (which is celebrating an anniversary milestone right now) worked on it. I take two issues with this: one, that everyone who worked on the original The Legend of Zelda is probably either an old man or dead at this point, and thus should be left to get on with their life in peace, and two, Echoes of Wisdom wasn't a bad game! Not even a little bit!

EDIT: The account in question has since clarified that they meant it was "sad" that Echoes of Wisdom was the first game without any of the original team that was involved, not that they thought it was a "sad" game due to it not being any good. I have left the preceding paragraph as-is to take ownership of my own misunderstanding — and to acknowledge that I wasn't alone in it, hence the account's clarification of what they said.

And don't even get me started on Final Fantasy XIII.

There is one thing that all these examples have in common, though, and that is the fact that all of them do something different to what is expected as "the norm" in their respective series. For Final Fantasy VIII and XIII, this should be no surprise to anyone who has ever paid attention to the series and its core philosophy of "if it's not new, it's not Final Fantasy" (as I wrote about nearly ten years ago right here), but, to this day, people are confused by the fact that Final Fantasy VIII and XIII are very unconventional in a lot of ways. (Interestingly, very few people seem to have a problem with Final Fantasy XII these days, despite, in many ways, it being a way more significant disruption from the series "usual format" than many other entries.)

For Mario Kart World and Echoes of Wisdom, those two games were always in a bit of a no-win situation. Do something the same as previous games and they would be regarded as pointless and unambitious. Do something a bit different, as they both did, and people complain that they're not like all the other games in the series! Seriously daft.

The most annoying thing about this constant revisionist history is that it makes it impossible to have sensible discussions about these games. Pretty much as soon as it became clear someone was spoiling for a fight over having the "correct" opinion about Final Fantasy VIII (and what "everybody" thought of it, apparently), the entire thread derailed and became impossible to have a reasonable discussion in. Anyone who attempted to highlight the things that they, in fact, liked about it was shouted down, and it just became pointless to even try. I've seen enough threads like that in my time to know that it really wasn't worth trying in the first place, which is why I bowed out of it early.

When it comes to Final Fantasy VIII, I'll just leave you with one little story from my past. In the period between Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII coming out, our friendship group had a perpetually running joke with the local computer shop owner, in which literally every time we went in there (and we went in there a lot), we would ask him if he knew when Final Fantasy VIII was coming out, to which he would reply by mumbling something mostly incoherent about "stocks". This became such a notorious exchange among our friendship group that during our obsession with the Klik and Play games-making software, one of our number immortalised the discussion in his project Resident Evil EX, by incorporating a fully-voiced scene in which the protagonist, Agent Wesley Wilson, would walk into a computer store in the in-game mall, ask if the shopkeeper knew when Final Fantasy VIII was coming out, to which he would reply "asfhgblaskbkljblkl stocks".

That's how excited we were for Final Fantasy VIII to come out. And when it eventually did come out, I had people in my university room almost every night to come watch and see what would happen next.

So don't fuckin' tell me that "everyone always hated" something. Because, inevitably, it isn't true. In pretty much every instance like this, what the person saying that "everyone always hated" something means is "I didn't really like this" and "I'm unwilling to entertain the possibility that anyone else did".

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

#oneaday Day 618: Triple threat

Had a productive weekend of making some videos. There are three new ones on the way soon, and I've got another Wolfenstein one with its voiceover recorded that just needs assembling into some sort of shape.

For the upcoming videos, there's a couple of Master System games involved. The Sega Master System is a platform that I'm very fond of that doesn't get nearly enough love — and which I haven't spent nearly enough time fiddling with, either. So these two games will likely be the first of many in total. I'm looking forward to exploring the library further, because as a Japanese console that was particularly popular in Europe and failed to make any sort of impact whatsoever in America, it's a thoroughly interesting platform.

It's one of those situations where I'm not entirely sure why it never broke America, either. In technical terms, it's quite a bit better than the NES, but as numerous generations of console hardware dominated by Nintendo have shown, it's not always the most powerful system that wins the race. You've gotta have the games, you've gotta have the cultural penetration, and you've gotta have a lot of luck.

I guess one could argue that the NES has more "iconic" games — there are three Super Mario Bros. games alone on it — but the Master System has some solid versions of Sega arcade classics, and some truly excellent Sonic the Hedgehog games. While not as fancy-looking and sounding as their 16-bit counterparts, many argue that the Master System Sonic games are, in fact, the better entries in the series. I haven't quite made my mind up in that regard — I do love a 16-bit Sonic — but I do know from covering a huge heap of Sonic games a few years back on MoeGamer that the 8-bit Sonic games are very good indeed. (Just avoid the Game Gear version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2.)

Anyway, the Master System games I covered today come from two extremes of the "spectrum", if you want to call it that. There's one game that I imagine is pretty readily available for not much money (although interestingly CEX doesn't appear to have it listed) and another that is notoriously rare and expensive. After beating it in half an hour today, I'm glad I haven't spent £400 on it. It was fun for that half an hour, at least.

So yeah. Those videos, along with an Atari 8-bit port of a true classic, are on the way for the coming week. Watch out for them and please enjoy them when they're live! Or don't, if you don't want to, particularly after what I said yesterday. But it'd be nice if you did. My channel's over here, if you've never paid it a visit.

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

#oneaday Day 613: The impenetrability of certain sports games

One thing I found while doing my Atari A to Z Flashback series a few years back was that I actually rather enjoyed a lot of Atari 2600 sports games — because they put "being a fun video game" first, a realistic simulation of the sport a distant second. Likewise, I rather enjoy Irem's 10 Yard Fight, as it is by far the most accessible take on American football I think I've ever seen — with Doug Neubauer's Super Football for Atari 2600 close behind.

The reason these games are so accessible is because they implement the sort of basic understanding of the rules that can be picked up very quickly and don't get bogged down in the intricacies. They don't assume knowledge beyond "man kick ball, score point" and don't throw you in at the deep end with a series of impenetrable-seeming options that, as a beginner, you have no idea what to do with.

I've felt like this about American football titles in particular for a very long time, ever since I first played the original John Madden Football on Sega Mega Drive all those years ago. Yes, the parallaxing, quasi-3D field was super-impressive, and back then that was reason enough to boot the game up, but as soon as those "play selection" screens popped up, I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to do with them.

And what's worse, the documentation for those games doesn't explain anything about it, either — meaning that, for someone who has only ever been vaguely aware of American football as a sport that exists, and who occasionally was allowed to stay up late with his Dad to watch it on Channel 4, there is seemingly no real route "in" to picking up and enjoying these games. And, rather than modern games getting more accessible and inclusive, they've just become more and more complex over time.

I feel the same about wrestling games. The last time I played a wrestling game was Smackdown 2 on the original PlayStation, and I didn't entirely understand what was going on there. Oh, sure, I knew what the buttons did, but not how you were actually supposed to use those buttons effectively to demonstrate your skill at the game.

I've tried wrestling games that came out both before and after it, and I have not found a single one where I felt comfortable that I could explain to anyone else "how to play". At least Smackdown 2 had that incredible character creator, and to be honest, that was where the majority of the appeal was — we had many a drunken night at university making digital recreations of people we knew, cartoon characters and, on one memorable occasion where my friend managed to get the sliders to go outside of their usual ranges, an absolutely horrific looking monster known as "The Freak", who would burst on stage with his iconic war cry, "Baggogh!", and stare his opponents down with a growled "Durgogh."

Every so often, I get a strange urge to want to learn how to play either American football and/or wrestling games. And every time I am hit with the same issue: there does not appear to be any good way to "learn" them. There do not appear to be any helpful guides online that don't assume you already know how to play the games (and have an in-depth knowledge of the sports themselves); the documentation for them is threadbare at best and non-existent at worst; and any "tutorial" or "training" modes in the games focus on telling you which button does what, rather than actually how to play effectively.

I feel like there would be a good article or two in learning how to play these games! I could even tell other people how to learn how to play them, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who has looked at these two genres (and other, related types of game like, say, baseball, or football management) and thought "I'd bet I'd like that if I understood it"!

Only trouble is, I don't understand them. And I don't even know where to begin doing something about that!

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