#oneaday Day 593: A meaningfully revised roadmap

Ubisoft has announced today that they are cancelling six games, delaying seven more, closing two studios and forcing everyone back to five days a week in the office. Their justification for this is the usual mealy-mouthed, weasel word-filled business-speak nonsense:

In the context of a persistently more selective market as illustrated by the last quarter, and as part of the finalization of the Group's new operating model, Ubisoft has conducted a thorough review of its content pipeline over December and January. This has led to the strategic decision to refocus its portfolio, reallocate resources and comprehensively revise its roadmap over the next three years. This will support the objective to return to exceptional levels of quality on the Open-World Adventure segment and step-change the Group's position in the GaaS-native experiences segment, as illustrated by the recently acquired project, March of Giants.

In other words, Ubisoft is going back to focusing almost exclusively on the type of game people have been taking the piss out of them for years for — there's a reason people refer to open-world games where you hoover up icons from a map as "Ubisoft Game #[bigNumber]". And, when they're not doing that, they're going to jump headfirst into the exceedingly volatile live service arena, where the last decade or so has clearly demonstrated that if your name isn't Fortnite or Roblox you are almost certainly going to release an enormously expensive colossal failure of a game that will be shuttered in less than a year.

To put it another way, for every Fortnite there are hundreds of Concords. And most of them don't get the coverage Concord did. They just release to zero excitement, zero acclaim and zero passion from anyone, then quietly die in obscurity, destined to be forgotten forever.

All of this seems extraordinarily stupid, particularly since one of the cancelled games was the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, whose original incarnation is one of the company's most well-regarded games from years gone by, and a title that would have doubtless reviewed and performed well among today's audience. But no; because it "does not meet the new enhanced quality as well as more selective portfolio prioritization criteria at Group level", it is kaputt. It is no more. It is an ex-game.

Ubisoft has, of course, been undergoing something of a turbulent time, so these "strategic decisions" to "refocus" (read: lay people off) are not a surprise to see. Business decisions like this are, at times, regrettably unavoidable.

However, what is eminently avoidable is charging headlong into sectors that the general public have clearly indicated that they're sick of. Not only "the Open-World Adventure segment" and "GaaS-native experiences", but also, unsurprisingly, they slipped this little bit into their "revised roadmap":

The new operating model will further empower the execution of the Group's strategy, centred on Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences, supported by targeted investments, deeper specialization, and cutting-edge technology, including accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI.

There it is! Of course there's fucking generative AI involved, because why wouldn't there be? The industry that is losing billions of dollars a year and is pretty much universally hated by anyone whose job isn't just "shareholder" is clearly the right thing for this ailing company to focus on! Surely the generator of what is commonly agreed to be called "slop" these days will help us make better games! Everyone loves AI! Don't they?

(silence)

(a quiet cough)

God fucking dammit. Living in this century is so fucking frustrating, like, all of the time. I haven't been much of a fan of Ubisoft stuff for numerous years at this point, but all this just makes it abundantly clear that they have zero respect for any of the actual creative work that goes into games. Look again at those quotes above, and count how many times artistry and creativity are mentioned.

That's right. Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

At least they're being honest about it, I guess.

I wonder how long they have left?

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 587: Why are you doing that?

One thing I find quite interesting when looking at games from over the years is contemplating how, as time has gone on, we have become a lot more preoccupied with the "why" of what we are doing in a game than in the past. And, as part of these contemplations, I've come to realise that games which don't really give you much of a "why" beyond "this is what the game is" actually have their own very distinct appeal.

As a case in point, I've been playing some Nintendo 64 "collectathon" platformers recently. This is a type of game that very much fell out of favour at some point between the PlayStation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era and the PlayStation 2/Xbox/Gamecube age. There are still some folks making games like that — most notably Nintendo — but they are by no means as common as they used to be. And a lot of it, I think, comes down to the apparent expectation that everything must have some sort of narrative context or justification.

Now, I'll hold my hands up here and say that, in the past, I have been guilty of thinking that pretty much every game would be better if it had some sort of narrative context. In the earliest days of this blog, back when the people behind WordPress gave a shit about their community rather than going all-in on AI or whatever shit they're up to at the minute, I even had a post featured for making this very argument specifically about racing games — blissfully unaware, as I was at that point, of Namco's PC Engine conversion of their arcade game Final Lap Twin and the fact they added a Pokémon-ass RPG to it. I do actually still think there's scope for racing games with stories, but I also don't think all racing games need stories — and those which do have stories had better have bloody good ones if they expect me to sit through them rather than skipping right to the racing.

Err, what was I saying? Oh, right. Games didn't always feel the need to justify the things you were doing in the game in terms of narrative. Collectathon platformers are, in many ways, the quintessential example of this: they have characters, a world and indeed a plot, but none of those get in the way of the core "point" of the game: solving puzzles and overcoming challenges to acquire shiny things that let you access more of the game. No-one ever gave a shit about why Mario was collecting Power Stars in Super Mario 64, they just knew that he had to collect Power Stars, and that was enough.

This is one of the things I found quite refreshing about Donkey Kong Bananza recently. That's a game that strikes a very good balance between having an unfolding story and just giving you a basic objective to complete before getting out of your way and letting you accomplish it. For the vast majority of your time in Donkey Kong Bananza, you are looking for Banandium Gems. It doesn't matter why. Donkey Kong wants them, and that means you want them. That's all that matters. That's all that needs to matter.

I'm not saying that games with plots have no place. Hell, you know me, I'll gladly bury my head in a 100+ hour RPG, particularly if it makes me cry at least once along the way. But sometimes it's nice to play a game that is less concerned with wanting to be taken seriously as a great work of art or a masterpiece of characterisation and worldbuilding, and more with being a fun toy that just feels good to fiddle with.

I could have probably phrased that better. But I'm leaving it like that now, deliberately. And I'm off to go and acquire some more shiny things.

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#oneaday Day 575: Independence

There was a good post that went around earlier by the VTuber, journalist and activist Ana Valens, reflecting on her time as part of the games media landscape, and how she was part of the sector's slow decline into almost total irrelevance as SEO-baiting and click-chasing became the norm. I strongly encourage you to give it a read — you can do so by clicking here. Go on, I'll be here when you get back.

One of Ana's points in her piece was that as games media slowly circled the drain, particularly as groups such as Valnet and GAMURS started hoovering up once-respectable brands and then systematically destroying them one by one, a new type of "media" stepped in to take its place. This, of course, is the oft-trumpeted advent of YouTubers and streamers, whom many claim to find more "trustworthy" than the traditional games media in many cases — despite the obnoxious rise of the term "influencer", and the clearly documented use of "influencer marketing" being far more egregious than any sort of "paid reviews" that, in my experience, never actually took place when the traditional games press was at its peak.

But I'm not here to rant about the rise of YouTubers and streamers. They have their place — hell, I do a lot of stuff on YouTube and I've dabbled with streaming — but for me, they've never been an adequate replacement for having a publication that was "yours". Back in the '80s and '90s, this would be your magazine of choice: the one you would dutifully buy a copy of every month, or subscribe to if you could convince your parents to do so. As the new millennium rolled around and this World Wide Web thing became the norm — particularly as high-speed always-on broadband Internet established itself as the rule rather than the exception — print gave way to online, and we had some wonderful websites like 1up.com that were as much community as they were professional publication.

Sites like that still exist to a certain degree — I believe IGN and Gamespot still have a certain amount of social features, and the relaunched Giant Bomb is more community-focused than ever — but no site has ever managed to quite recapture that wonderful time: an age of personalities, of brave new frontiers in writing about video games, of figuring out exactly what the "games media" really was.

YouTubers and streamers don't quite replace that for me. Sure, it's nice to find someone who aligns with your values and tastes — and sometimes challenges them — but it's not quite the same as finding an entire publication, put together by a team of people, that resonates with you for one reason or another. There are YouTubers I watch fairly regularly, but I don't think of them at all in the same way as I do 1up.com in the early aughts, or favourite magazines like ACE, N64 Magazine and Electronic Gaming Monthly from the late '90s.

Part of that is their individuality, but it's also a completely different medium with its own appeal elements — and there's not necessarily the crossover you might expect. I will gladly read a lengthy magazine article about something I am interested in, but present me with someone who has made a multi-hour YouTube video on the subject and I will immediately switch off. People keep recommending Noah Caldwell-Gervais to me, for example, and I'm sure his work is very good, but his video on the Resident Evil series is seven and a half hours long. I am not watching that when I could be spending those seven hours doing literally anything else — including beating multiple Resident Evil games in that timeframe.

I'm the same with streaming. I'm sure there are some streamers I'd enjoy watching, but I just can't be arsed to spend my time doing so. I'm not someone who can easily split my attention between a stream and Something Else, and I genuinely think it's disrespectful to the creators to engage with a creative work like a game while watching a video or listening to a podcast. (I also think the opposite, to be clear; if I'm watching a video or listening to a podcast, the absolute most I will be doing at the same time is a tedious, repetitive task at work, or driving somewhere.) And, given the choice between spending several hours watching someone else stream a game and sitting down to play a game myself, I'm always going to choose playing something myself.

Conversely, give me someone who writes well, is passionate about what they do and who tries to find the fun rather than get bogged down in negativity — all traits I try to follow in my own games writing — and I will follow that person's blog to the ends of the Earth. In fact, this year I'm going to make a specific effort to follow more individual blogs and independent gaming sites, because, for me, those are the nearest alternative to what I was describing earlier: a publication that speaks to you, and which you feel comfortable checking in on regularly.

But how is an individual writer different from a YouTube video essayist or streamer? I guess in some ways they aren't. But for me it's all down to how that person delivers their message. I see a seven and a half hour YouTube video and feel like that's not something I'm ever going to spend time watching, but I see a light novel-length article and will happily read it from start to finish. It's just inherently more digestible to me — I'm not in this to "consume content"; I actually want to read interesting things! And, honestly, fair or not, the first thing I think of when I see a YouTube video of a length that absurd is "content". I see a website with a bunch of interesting-looking headlines and I think "fantastic, something to read".

I don't know how much sense I'm making here, so I'll stop talking in circles. I guess the main point I want anyone who happens to stumble across this to take away from the whole situation is that we should continue to reject the click-hungry corporate interests of publications under demonstrably awful labels like Valnet and GAMURS, and instead focus our time and attention on individual, independent creators that we enjoy the work of, and that we feel represent our tastes and interests well.

I aspire to be that for at least some people, and I know MoeGamer in particular has at least semi-regular readers. So I encourage you: if you find something that particularly resonates with you, be sure to tell the people behind it that you enjoyed it — and share it with your friends who you think might also enjoy it! Word of mouth is still an incredibly powerful thing on our increasingly broken Internet, and as the world continues to collapse all around us, it's going to be these little communities we can build away from corporate interests that will remain important lifelines for many.

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#oneaday Day 571: Some stuff I've written this year - MoeGamer edition (Part 2)

Continuing on from yesterday, let's continue recapping the stuff I posted over on MoeGamer this year, shall we? Yes, we shall.

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss – Ultima meets Lovecraft

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss – Ultima meets Lovecraft

In this piece, I explore a game that an independent developer sent me a copy of. Inspired heavily by both classic computer role-playing games such as the Ultima series and the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this is a lovely, atmospheric retro-style RPG that is easy to pick up and play, but tricky to master. The developer is currently working on a sequel.

Payment processors' control over the arts has to stop

Payment processors' control over the arts has to stop

A story broke this year that Visa and Mastercard are seemingly trying to prevent consenting adults from choosing what they spend their money on. Specifically, both companies have been making it very hard for anyone with the slightest connection to sexually explicit (or, in some cases, provocative) entertainment to make a living. It's crazy to think that I posted this back in July, and the situation is still ongoing, with seemingly no resolution in sight.

Old Skies: Wadjet Eye in top form

Old Skies: Wadjet Eye on top form

This is one of the best games I played this year, and the game that caused me to think that, once and for all, the point-and-click adventure sector is in an even better space today than it was back in its supposed LucasArts and Sierra-led "golden age" of the late '90s.

No Sleep for Kaname Date: A meeting of the minds

No Sleep for Kaname Date: a meeting of the minds

I adore the first two AI: The Somnium Files games, so I was excited that a third one was coming. I ended up not loving this one quite as much as the first two, but it's still pretty solid, and the new mechanical elements in the escape room sequences are a great addition to the overall formula. It just didn't come together quite as well as the prior two — perhaps because series creator Uchikoshi was a little more hands-off with this one.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore – more than just a mockery

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore – more than just a mockery

I was immediately intrigued by Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore and the fact it was paying homage to two notoriously not-very-good games. I was even more surprised that it was actually a very good game in its own right. Poking gentle fun at its source material while correcting all their annoyances, this was a real pleasure to play through.

Ara Fell: elves vs vampires

Ara Fell: elves vs vampires

I've had a double-pack of this game and its spiritual successor Rise of the Third Power on my shelf for ages, so I decided while we were away on holiday, I was finally going to play them. And I had a really lovely time! Ara Fell adopts an interesting quasi-open world approach and is an immensely rewarding, engaging experience.

Rise of the Third Power: like FFVI never left

Rise of the Third Power: like FFVI never left

Rise of the Third Power, spiritual successor (but not "sequel") to Ara Fell, is one of the best story-centric RPGs I've played for a long time. Brilliant characterisation, stirring music — all the more remarkable considering it was drawn from royalty-free libraries rather than specifically composed — and a wonderfully engaging story make this a highly memorable game that I highly, highly recommend.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code – what price justice?

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code – what price justice?

Although it gets a little bogged down in itself over the course of its complete runtime, this murder mystery adventure from the Danganronpa creator was nonetheless a compelling, entertaining thrill ride, set in a thoroughly fascinating setting and, in true Danganronpa tradition, presenting some immensely stylish, abstracted takes on the "mechanics" of investigation and deduction.

Lumines Arise, the art of sincerity and creating meaning without explicit narrative

Lumines Arise, the art of sincerity and creating meaning without explicit narrative

It's easy to assume that the only games with real "meaning" are those that tell an explicit story. But sit down with Lumines Arise, a new take on a classic puzzle game developed by the same folks who did the incredible Tetris Effect, and you will feel very differently. This is a game that is designed to make you feel things while you play. And it's enormously successful at doing that. A truly wonderful experience.

Zelda's organic adventures

Zelda's organic adventures

I started playing Tears of the Kingdom a little while back, and I am reminded of one of the things I liked so much about Breath of the Wild: the fact that the whole game is a series of little mini-adventures that you stumble across pretty much at random as you explore the world. This is a markedly distinct approach from the "hoover all the icons up off the minimap" structure that many other open-world games take, and it makes for a much more enjoyable game.

HORSES: much ado about nothing?

HORSES: much ado about nothing?

Notoriously banned from release on Steam, HORSES from Italian developer Santa Ragione is really not worth all the fuss there's been over it. It was an interesting experience, for sure, but you'll see more upsetting material on late-night TV.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein and my history with Nazi-blastin'

Return to Castle Wolfenstein and my history with Nazi-blastin'

As I've noted a few times recently, I love Wolfenstein 3-D and its follow-up Spear of Destiny, but I've never played any of the Wolfenstein games that followed. I am now in the process of correcting this, so I wrote this after beating Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War on original Xbox. I had fun, though the game shows its age in a few places — in both good and bad ways.

And that's your lot for now. Tomorrow I will review my Evercade blog posts for the year… and then it will be 2026! Hurrah. Possibly. Here's hoping the new year is better than the old one… but I'm not holding out much hope at the moment. At least I have plenty of things to distract me, apparently!

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#oneaday Day 570: Some stuff I've written this year - MoeGamer edition (Part 1)

I've written a lot of stuff this year! I write a lot of stuff every year, much of it absolute nonsense, but I thought with the end of the year coming up, I'd highlight some bits and pieces that you might have missed, and which I was rather pleased with for one reason or another. The following lists will not include anything from this specific blog — you can review the archives yourself, after all — but instead encompass pieces from both my gaming site, MoeGamer, and the official Evercade blog.

In rough chronological order, then, I present a chunk of my MoeGamer output for the year, with more to follow tomorrow. The following are presented as embedded article excerpts; simply click through on them to read the full thing.

Fire Emblem newbie plays Fire Emblem Engage

Fire Emblem newbie plays Fire Emblem Engage

The excerpt says most of it: I am bad at strategy games, but I've always been interested in Fire Emblem, so I decided to give myself a gentle introduction by playing Fire Emblem Engage on Normal difficulty with permadeath turned off. And I had a lovely time, chronicled in this MoeGamer piece.

Revisiting Xenoblade Chronicles

With Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition releasing this year, I decided I wanted to refresh my memory on the very first game in the series, since the last time I played it was on Wii, and I was interested to try out the Switch-based Definitive Edition version. I wrote about my experiences and observations over the course of several pieces on MoeGamer, linked in the following extracts:

Revisiting Xenoblade Chronicles: the balance of X and Y

Xenoblade Chronicles as the successor to the classic "world RPG" format

Xenoblade Chronicles and the fear of the Other

Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Single-player arcade racing isn't dead, and should never have been assumed to be

Tokyo Xtreme Racer: single-player arcade racing isn't dead, and should never have been assumed to be

Hopefully self-explanatory. I am looking forward to the eventual full release of this game, as the Early Access version on Steam was delightful. I write a bit about that version in the above piece.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow: Gothic horror and tragedy done right

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow: Gothic horror and tragedy done right

I finally got around to playing the well-regarded point-and-click adventure The Excavation of Hob's Barrow this year, and I was very taken with it. I was particularly enamoured with how it is an interactive take on the Gothic literature tradition, and an exploration of Classical tragedy in the video games space.

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance and the bleaker side of Japanese life

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance and the bleaker side of Japanese life

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance is a really interesting adventure game developed by a team with a western background that has been living in Japan for some time. As such, it's unmistakably "anime" in style, but also provides the sort of perspective only an outsider to the culture can provide. The story is not only a compelling horror narrative, it's also a scathing takedown of the seedier aspects of Japanese culture and nightlife — but simultaneously respectful to the country's overall culture and sensibilities.

Expelled! – Coming for to carry you home

EXPELLED! – coming for to carry you home

Inkle's EXPELLED! is an excellent text adventure with beautiful presentation and a spectacular amount of player agency. Casting you in the role of a 1920s schoolgirl, the game challenges you to get out of trouble for a crime you may or may not have actually committed, using a quasi-roguelite structure that enables you to discover more information with each playthrough. Fiercely feminist, intensely thoughtful and immensely amusing throughout, EXPELLED! is one of the best games I played this year, and deserves your respect.

Homebody: the horror in one's own head

Homebody: the horror in one's own head

One of the most fascinating horror games I've ever played, Homebody is a combat-free, puzzle-centric game that sensitively explores matters of social anxiety, agoraphobia, isolation, obsessive-compulsive tendencies and lingering guilt. I played this as a "filler" game between big releases of the year, but it came out as one of my favourite things I played this year.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition

I'd been waiting for the return of this underappreciated, wonderful RPG for a very long time, and I was delighted by what the Switch Definitive Edition ended up being. Not only did it refine elements of the original that were a little tricky, it also added a new, more conclusive ending that, while divisive, worked well as a means of wrapping the whole thing up. I wrote several pieces about this game:

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Introduction

Xenoblade Chronicles X: the right way to do an open world game

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Battling for a new home

The Last Waltz showcases dancesport to educate and inspire

The Last Waltz showcases dancesport to educate and inspire

My pal Matt from Digitally Downloaded has been working on a visual novel for some time now, and has ploughed a lot of his own effort and money into making it as good as he wants it to be. I played through a demo version of the game's opening and penned some thoughts on the experience here. (You can wishlist the game on Steam here!)

I, Robot: Minter's still got it

I, Robot: Minter's still got it

If ever there was going to be someone to reimagine one of Atari's weirdest games, it would have to be Jeff Minter, and the man did us proud.

I'm not sure how I feel about Blue Prince

I'm not sure how I feel about Blue Prince

I wrote this while I was still playing Blue Prince. I don't abandon many games once I've started them, but this ended up being one of them. I am now sure how I feel about Blue Prince: I do not like it at all, for most of the reasons outlined in this piece. (This does not mean I think Blue Prince is bad! I am glad so many people got so much out of it. I just did not enjoy it at all.)

Initial thoughts on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from a devoted "JRPG" player

Initial thoughts on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from a devoted "JRPG" player

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is probably my personal Game of the Year, with the caveat that they get a big ol' slap on the wrist for using generative AI at any point in their creative process. "It was just a placeholder!" Yeah, sure. Long before this little kerfuffle, though, I was skeptical about whether this game that had come out of nowhere was actually a big deal, given that turn-based RPGs have been nowhere near as dead as some people think for quite a long time now.

The Sword of Hope: Adventure and RPG, together again

The Sword of Hope: Adventure and RPG, together again

Nintendo added an obscure Game Boy game to the Nintendo Switch Online lineup this year, and I found it thoroughly interesting. So I wrote about it.

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer and the art of pacing an investigative adventure

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer and the art of pacing an investigative adventure

I really enjoyed the first Kathy Rain, and the second one is even better.

I finally played Undertale

I finally played Undertale

Well, I did. And I enjoyed it!

Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer – the new best way to enjoy a classic?

Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer – the new best way to play a classic?

Hamster kicked off its new Arcade Archives 2 range with a port of the arcade version of Ridge Racer, marking the series' first "new"(ish) release for quite some time.

Raiden Nova: it's like the PS2 never left

Raiden Nova: it's like the PS2 never left

(Complimentary.)

My thoughts on Switch 2 so far

My thoughts on Switch 2 so far

My thoughts haven't changed a lot from here. 90% of the time, my Switch 2 is a slightly better Switch — but I have enjoyed the exclusives I've played on it this year, including Donkey Kong Bananza, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and Kirby Air Riders. It's perhaps telling that at the end of the system's first year on the market, I only have four physical games, though.

The Death end re;Quest Code Z limited edition is enormous

The Death end re;Quest Code Z limited edition is enormous

Well, it is.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – a delightful remake of a lovely game

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – a delightful remake of a lovely game

One of my favourite Zelda games got a remake a couple of years back, and it turns out the remake is just as delightful as the original. (Plus it runs great on Switch 2!)

Whew, that's more than I thought it was. Let's pick up where we left off tomorrow — that lot should keep you busy for a while, after all!

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#oneaday Day 569: Returned to Castle Wolfenstein

I have crossed something off my gaming To-Do list! Yes, I have beaten Return to Castle Wolfenstein, kicking off my exploration of The Bits of the Wolfenstein Series That Aren't Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. I wrote about my experiences over on MoeGamer if you'd care to check it out. I appreciate that doing one whole click is challenging and exhausting, so I will be very grateful if you successfully accomplish that.

Anyway, to summarise, I had a mostly good time with Return to Castle Wolfenstein. You can tell it's over 20 years old in numerous ways — both good and bad — but I had a mostly good time with it. I'm looking forward to investigating the rest of the series; I know the Machine Games stuff from more recent years is very well regarded for the most part, but I'm perhaps most intrigued by the Xbox 360 entry in the series, which doesn't seem to get talked about all that much. There may well be a reason for that — or it may just be that it sort of fell by the wayside a bit.

As you can see, I'm still enjoying my drawing tablet and Clip Studio Paint. Clip Studio Paint, I have discovered, has a strange quirk where it won't start unless you tell it to run in Windows 8 compatibility mode, but aside from that it seems to work great with my tablet, and it's a lot of fun to use. I've barely scratched the surface of it thus far, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with it a bit over the coming days, weeks, months, years. I can't promise an overly elaborate drawing every day, but there will be, at the very least, a stickman doodle drawn by hand rather than by mouse.

I have bought a copy of the new HeroQuest base set, First Light, and hopefully we're going to be putting that through its paces sometime soon. I'm interested to try this, as although it lacks some of the fancier features of the "big" base set (which is still available, and which I still might pick up a copy of) it has some notable new features, such as a double-sided board for variety in map layout, plus a unique series of 10 quests that are different from the standard ones included in the regular base set. For the unfamiliar, modern HeroQuest is a recreation of the MB Games version from the late '80s, but with all the Warhammer references removed, and with the Evil Wizard player being named "Zargon" instead of "Morcar". I believe this latter change is to bring the game in line worldwide, as the North American version of the late '80s version used "Zargon" as the Evil Wizard's name. He'll always be Morcar to me.

Modern HeroQuest has a whole bunch of expansions available, too, which is exciting. I'm going to resist splurging all my money on them immediately, but I'm hoping our prospective players will enjoy the game sufficiently to want to take on a reasonably lengthy campaign of quests — at the very least, the 10 from the base game, and hopefully onwards into an expansion or two. We shall see, though. As anyone who has attempted to run an ongoing game of something will know, these projects often start with good intentions but run out of steam unless someone steps up and keeps things running. I will likely be the one to do that in this instance, as I have been wanting people to play HeroQuest with regularly since… well, since the late '80s.

All right, that's about everything for today. It's been a nice quiet one at home for us today. We're out of food in the house and we've both been resisting going out in the cold to get something to eat, but we're going to have to do that eventually. In fact, I might go and do that now, because I'm getting a bit hungry and Andie is busily playing Final Fantasy XIV with her friends.

Food!

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#oneaday Day 564: The lost art of playing together

There are many things I mourn about Times Gone By, but I think the biggest thing I miss is being able to enjoy video games together with other people. Oh, sure, you can play online with anyone in the world, but getting someone in the same room as you to play something with you — or even just sit and watch while you play! — feels like a distant memory at this point. And yet it used to be such an important part of our daily lives!

When I was growing up, I used to spend a lot of time "going on the computer". This was primarily a solitary activity, though I do recall my Dad and brother getting involved in the very early years, giving me an introduction to programming in Atari BASIC and teaching me how to use both the Atari 8-bit and ST machines.

One of the things I loved doing when I either went to a friend's house or had them over to my place was "going on the computer" together. At my friend Matthew's house, we'd play on his BBC Micro when we were younger, and later on his Archimedes. His Dad worked for Acorn, so these were the computers in his house; although I was an Atari fan by virtue of the computers we had in our house, I enjoyed the unique experiences that both the Beeb and the Archie offered, since they were often completely distinct from what I could enjoy at home.

I believe I went to my sometimes-friend Dale's house on just one occasion, and I remember that was the one and only time I played on a Sega Master System as a kid, but I remember really liking the few games he had. My friend Mike, meanwhile, had an Amiga, and we had a lot of fun with that — not just playing games, but also fiddling with creative programs like Deluxe Paint and the like.

Once we got to secondary school, my closest friends went to one another's houses a lot, and we would play on both computers and consoles together. At my friend Edd's house, we'd play on his Amiga and Mega Drive; at my friend Andrew's house, we'd play on his MS-DOS PC and Super NES; later, we'd all get Nintendo 64s and PlayStations, and we'd play together on those.

At university, we spent a lot of time going to one another's houses to play Nintendo 64 in particular, as that console remains unmatched for the sheer breadth of multiplayer titles on offer. But a little later, when the next generation of consoles rolled around, I would have friends over and we'd play Grand Theft Auto III together, despite it not being multiplayer, and we'd play through entire cooperative campaigns of games like Halo and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. I have some truly wonderful memories of enjoying games like that.

Today, though, it is almost unimaginable to play through an entire game with a single co-op partner in the same room as me. Hell, at this point, it's unimaginable to even have a few friendly matches on a fighting game, first-person shooter or racing game.

And this sucks! I've got easy access to more games than we have ever had at any point in our lives, but getting anyone to actually want to come play them with me is like pulling teeth from a particularly bloodless stone. That makes me intensely, terribly sad, and I wish things could be different. But the world has, apparently, moved on from this sort of thing as a regular, normal thing to do; I just have to take whatever opportunities I can get — which very occasionally come up, but not often — to enjoy this long-lost art of having fun together.

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#oneaday Day 563: My top 10 Evercade games for 2025

It is, of course, my job to love and appreciate everything we release for Evercade — and for sure, there is not one single game from the library that I have not been able to "find the fun" with to date.

But of course there are some that I like more than others. So in the spirit of all the "top 10" lists that are going around right now, I thought I would go through my 10 favourite Evercade games that we've released this year, drawn from all the cartridges we released in 2025: Indie Heroes Collection 4; Broken Sword Collection; Atari Arcade 2; Tomb Raider Collection 2; Gremlin Collection 2; Windjammers, Karnov & Friends; Roguecraft DX; NEOGEO Arcade 1; TAITO Arcade 1; TAITO Arcade 2; NEOGEO Arcade 2; NEOGEO Arcade 3; Activision Collection 1; Rare Collection 1 and The Llamasoft Collection.

DISCLAIMER: You are an intelligent person and I should not have to say this, but I am going to anyway. The following list represents my personal opinion and does not reflect any sort of professional judgement or the collective opinion of my employer. It should not be taken as any particular games or cartridges having received any sort of preferential treatment, either personally or professionally, nor that I have received any sort of incentive (financial or otherwise) from any of the license holders to feature their games on this personal blog that no-one reads. Also any cartridges that do not end up featured in this list does not mean I think those carts are shit, it means I have 10 slots and a lot more than 10 games to choose from.

Got that? All right, let's Top 10 this thing.

10. Twinkle Star Sprites

I think Twinkle Star Sprites was one of the first NEOGEO games I was ever introduced to, back when DotEmu did those absolutely terrible ports for PC a while back. I was sold on it by the promise of it being a blend of shoot 'em up and puzzle game — two genres I adore — and that is exactly what it provides: the frantic action of a shoot 'em up, combined with the competitive piece-matching, combo-building and garbage-throwing that is the competitive puzzle game genre.

It's a super-fun game, which I only put relatively low in these rankings due to the inevitable "arcade bullshit difficulty" that it pulls on the solo player from partway through proceedings. If you have the opportunity to challenge a friend, take it — there really is nothing quite like it.

9. Rohga: Armor Force

I'd never heard of this side-scrolling mech 'em up until we started work on the Windjammers, Karnov & Friends cartridge, but it quickly became a favourite with its gorgeous anime-inspired pixel art, its rocking soundtrack and its excellent gameplay.

Taking a strongly cinematic approach despite the relatively limited tech it's running on, Rohga: Armor Force is a thrill ride of a shoot 'em up that offers something just a little bit different from the norm. If you enjoy making things explode in a hail of bullets from a side-on perspective, this is definitely one you need to spend some time with.

8. Atic Atac

Atic Atac is a game that I played back in the day — I think on a friend's BBC Micro — and while I never understood what you were supposed to do in it back then, I found it immensely striking for a number of reasons: its top-down perspective; its personality-packed sprites; and the unusual "chicken" health bar, where your proximity to death is depicted by how picked clean of meat a chicken carcass is.

Now I know what you're actually supposed to do in Atic Atac, I like it even more. It's a nice evolution of the formula established in games like Atari's Adventure and Haunted House, and its randomised elements and multiple playable characters make it eminently replayable.

7. Murtop

I absolutely adore the minor trend there's been of modern developers making brand new games that look and feel like classic arcade games. Last year we had the incredible Donut Dodo, and this year we had Murtop, a blend of elements from Dig Dug and Bomberman. Best of all, the version for Evercade was specially redesigned to look great on a horizontally oriented display — it looks especially good on the 4:3 screen of Evercade Alpha.

Murtop is one of those games that is very easy to learn, but tricky to master. It's also a game where you will feel a sense of absolute exhilaration when you have "the perfect run" that just sees your score continuing to escalate. Also it has a brilliantly energetic soundtrack that has been stuck in my head ever since we featured it as a "Game of the Month" title in 2024.

6. Super Gridrunner

The Llamasoft Collection is a massive pile of woolly goodness from the one and only Jeff Minter, and there are a lot of games I really like in this collection — including some that I've only played for the first time between this cartridge and Digital Eclipse's interactive Llamasoft documentary.

If pushed, though, I'd have to pick an old favourite: Super Gridrunner, originally released on Atari ST. This frantic blastathon has beautiful, distinctive presentation, challenging gameplay and a wicked (occasionally sadistic) sense of humour. It's been a favourite of mine ever since we had the original ST version on floppy disk (I still have it!) and it's a delight to be able to play it on Evercade.

5. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

I'm not a Fighting Game Guy. I played and enjoyed Street Fighter II back in the day, and I've had some fun with the Dead or Alive ladies over the years, but most fighting games released post-Street Fighter II overwhelm me with their complexity. As such, I've never really found a good in-road to the genre, despite appreciating 2D fighting games in particular from afar thanks to their beautiful character art and animation.

For some reason, Garou: Mark of the Wolves clicked with me almost immediately. I think it's because it's specifically not overwhelming in any way: there's a relatively small cast of playable characters, making it easy to pick a character you want to get to know better; its mechanics are straightforward to understand; its special moves are relatively easy to perform; and it has an excellent "make the game easier for me" button any time you have to continue, meaning if you're primarily in it to see all the beautiful stages and the various endings, you can do that without too much frustration.

4. Tazz-Mania

This is another game I'd never heard of prior to our work on Atari Arcade 2, but it became an immediate favourite thanks to its simple but compelling gameplay. It's one of those games that you can feel yourself getting better at — and see yourself improving by climbing up the score rankings.

As an arena shooter, there's not a lot here that you haven't seen before, but its solid mechanics and little twists, such as the player character's rapid-fire machine gun and the walls closing in on you as you attempt to clear each stage, help elevate this well above being a simple Robotron clone.

3. MegaMania

Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for an official modern rerelease of Activision's Atari 2600 output? I absolutely adore these games, and it's always been a bit frustrating to me how dodgy the emulation of them is in their last official rerelease, Activision Anthology.

While our Activision Collection 1 cartridge may lack Tainted Love and its ilk on the soundtrack, it's a collection of 15 great games, all of which I absolutely love having easy access to again. I could have picked any number of these for my top 10, but going purely on the number of times I've played it since the Activision Collection 1 cartridge came in, I think MegaMania has to take the top spot.

2. Metal Slug

Metal Slug is a series that I've always meant to explore, but have somehow never gotten around to. Now I have no excuse — and as I could have predicted, I really like it. Now, I'm sure there are some of you out there with strong opinions as to which Metal Slug is best, but I'm going with the first one purely because, so far, it's the one I've played the most of and got the best at.

It's a brilliant example of why the NEOGEO is so beloved for its pixel-pushing capabilities — despite the series, collectively, being some of the worst-performing games on the platform in terms of slowdown — and just a great run-and-gun shooter that is easy to get into and incredibly satisfying to get better at, a little bit at a time.

1. Roguecraft DX

Finally, I have to put the wonderful Roguecraft DX at the top spot for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it's a really good game, taking the traditional roguelike formula and making it incredibly accessible while resisting the temptation to overwhelm players with mountains of persistent progression and unlocks. Secondly, it's a brilliant showcase of why the Amiga rocks. And thirdly, the folks at Badger Punch Games, whom we worked with closely to get this release out the door, are really lovely chaps.

Roguecraft DX is an endlessly replayable, delightfully fun game that is eminently suitable to both quick handheld sessions and longer session in front of the TV. It's my number one highlight from our releases of 2025, and I'm thrilled to have been part of making that release happen.

So there you go: my top picks for the year. It's been an incredible year to be part of the Evercade project, and next year promises to be even more exciting. But you'll just have to wait and see what we have planned for you, non?

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#oneaday Day 561: A world of misinformation

We mock Donny Trump's obsession with "fake news" because he always busts that out whenever someone criticises him, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that we are living in a world that is riddled with misinformation right now — particularly if you're the sort of person who primarily gets their information from social media. And, distressingly, that is quite a lot of people these days.

Not all bits of misinformation are dangerous, of course, but they're no less frustrating to see. The other day, for example, I saw a post on Bluesky where someone commented that someone waxing nostalgic over the original Quake for being "from the days before you needed to spend thousands on graphics cards" or suchlike was "the funniest game they could have picked to comment this on". Funny! Except Quake didn't need a 3D accelerator card, as it ran entirely in software, meaning that while a decent non-3D graphics card would help in unlocking graphics modes, it was primarily dependent on how good your CPU was. Its 3D-accelerated version was never officially supported, despite being developed by id Software, and was primarily put out as a test for what they were planning to do with Quake II, which was 3D-accelerated by default.

Likewise, when a near-complete version of Resident Evil for Game Boy Color was unearthed and released to the public the other day, there were people talking about how it "included" the pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 version (it doesn't, they are low-resolution pixel art recreations) and how it "used the same isometric perspective" as the PS1 version (neither the PS1 nor the GBC versions are depicted from an isometric perspective).

I didn't comment on either of these at the time because that would have made me an "Um Actually" guy, and no-one wants to be one of those. But as someone who cares about this stuff — particularly about game history, and modern folks appreciating the many varied and wonderful things that classic games were doing — it was frustrating to see these statements go completely unchallenged.

The problem, as I've already alluded to, is people seeing someone saying something on social media and then immediately taking that as gospel truth without verifying it for themselves. In cases such as the above, perhaps younger people might not know what they would need to search for in order to verify those things — or indeed even if they needed verifying in the first place. Neither of those cases particularly matter in the grand scheme of things, but they're a microcosm of times when more serious misinformation — misinformation that could, say, seriously damage someone's reputation — has found itself spreading in one way or another.

They say "the Internet never forgets" — and with the sterling work the Internet Archive does, that's mostly true. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that the Internet never forgets something that was wrong in the first place. And once that misinformation takes root among enough people as being "the truth" — or, perhaps more accurately, "good enough" to sound like the truth — it's very hard to dig it out again to correct things, because not only does no-one like an "Um Actually" guy, even when they're correct, people are simply very resistant to having their assumptions challenged and corrected.

That feels like it might be a problem we should deal with sooner rather than later. But how…?

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#oneaday Day 560: The weapons-grade Game Boy

Earlier today, the company ModRetro announced that it would be producing a special edition version of its "Chromatic" FPGA-based Nintendo Game Boy clone.

ModRetro is a company that is already on the shitlist of a lot of people thanks to its founder, Palmer Luckey, also being the cofounder of Anduril Industries, a company that makes autonomous weaponry. Drones, in other words.

Up until now, a lot of people have sort of begrudgingly been able to separate the two — the Chromatic is supposedly a very good FPGA Game Boy, and the fact that the company has been releasing new Game Boy-compatible cartridges for it, showcasing a variety of modern indie developers' work on the platform, would initially appear to be quite laudable.

At the same time, the brand has had vociferous critics, keen to point out at every opportunity that Luckey is a dangerous bellend who profits from atrocities. Indeed, the man himself makes no attempt to hide this fact on a blog post on the ModRetro website.

The more… outspoken of these critics have, in the past, engaged in behaviour that I personally found a tad distasteful — by which I mean borderline harassment of people who had written about the Chromatic as simply being a very good FPGA Game Boy, without spending their entire article waxing poetic about how much of a warmongering shitbag Luckey is. On the one hand, I understood these criticisms, but the way in which they were expressed, on more than one occasion, was not, to my eyes, particularly acceptable or productive.

Today, though… I get it. Because the new special edition Chromatic that ModRetro announced is explicitly Anduril-branded, and advertises itself as being "finished by hand in America with Cerakote, the same ultra-durable ceramic-polymer formulation that protects Ghost — Anduril's flagship autonomous air vehicle". Later in the product page description, it spells things out even more explicitly by noting "the body of Chromatic is made from the same magnesium aluminium alloy as Anduril's attack drones".

This is… weird, right? Why would you explicitly sell an FPGA Game Boy that, in your own words, is made from the same materials as devices that cause death and suffering, if not to thumb your nose at the people who have previously criticised the brand for its association with an arms dealer? Granted, the thing looks classy and sounds like it can stand up to a lot more punishment than most other handheld gaming devices in the world — but if you're going to make a really durable handheld, why bring up "attack drones" and "autonomous air vehicles" at all, if not to specifically provoke certain people out there?

Not only that, but you can bet that there are certain types of people out there who are going to buy this thing specifically to spite people who have, in the past, spoken out against Luckey for one reason or another — even if it does mean paying over four hundred dollars for a Game Boy.

This whole thing leaves a particularly foul taste in the mouth. It's very clearly not about giving retro gaming enthusiasts the best possible experience, and all about whitewashing what "Anduril" means in the modern world. Let's not even get into how many modern companies doing terrible things (like Anduril) have adopted nomenclature from J. R. R. Tolkien without even the slightest trace of irony or understanding of what Tolkien was actually saying in his works.

It's going to be interesting to see who has the balls to actually call this out for being as odious as it is — and then standing their moral ground to back up their criticisms — and who treats it as just another silly little gaming story.

I certainly won't be touching anything ModRetro-branded any time soon.

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