#oneaday Day 530: My way is always better

The review embargo for the "Analogue 3D" FPGA-based N64 clone system came up yesterday, and as is usually the case with such things, about a bazillion reviews all dropped at the same time. The machine looks like a nifty bit of kit — although calling your brand "Analogue" and then not actually having any analogue outputs on your device is a bit weird — and has been reviewing well. As an owner of a MiSTer Multisystem 2, I have no real need for one — just as well, since ordering Analogue stuff is an absolute fucking nightmare — but I'm glad this thing exists and, moreover, appears to be pretty cool.

What has been less cool are the inevitable arguments that have been breaking out in the comments of pretty much every single video and article I have seen on this thing. It's utterly ridiculous to see grown men (and I would place good money on it being all men) of a certain age all getting pissy over how different people choose to experience retro games.

Here's my feelings on the subject: I don't care. Really! I do not give the slightest shit, so long as you're having a good time and you aren't causing anyone else any trouble.

If you want to set yourself up with a MiSTer stack you built yourself, fab. If you want to buy a MiSTer Multisystem 2 to take the hard work out of building an FPGA device, great. If you want to buy a SuperStation One, I hope you love it. If you're running Batocera on a mini PC, more power to you. If you do all your retro gaming on an Anbernic handheld running its stock OS, have fun. If you've spent several weeks finding the perfect alternative operating system for an Anbernic handheld, I hope you've had a fulfilling time doing so. If you're an original hardware junkie with a massive physical collection, can I come and visit? If you have your childhood console and nothing but an Everdrive, amazing! And I'm probably contractually obliged to mention that if your experience with retro gaming begins and ends with an Evercade or Super Pocket handheld, that is 100% fine, too.

Y'see, the important thing with enjoying retro games, to me, is, funnily enough, the games themselves. So long as you're able to experience the games you want to play in the way you enjoy experiencing them, it absolutely does not matter how anyone else wants to do it.

And yet you just have to look through any of these comment threads to see the FPGA nuts arguing with passionate advocates for RetroArch; Windows vs Mac OS vs various flavours of Linux; "download for free!" types against "I prefer to buy official rereleases" people. Basically, if there are two opposing viewpoints possible in this area — and there are quite a few of those — you can count on representatives of those viewpoints all yelling at one another.

Why? Why does it matter to you that some people think the Analogue 3D is a cool device, and you don't? Why does it matter to you that you use software emulation on your Mac and some people prefer to use an FPGA solution?

It's just another example of the Internet being constantly, unnecessarily adversarial, and it's really rather tiresome. As I say, so far as I'm concerned, I have no personal pressing need for an Analogue 3D, as I already have a suitable solution for enjoying N64 games in place — but I absolutely, definitely do not begrudge anyone their desire to add one to their collection! So if you happen to be one of the people lucky enough to have one coming your way soon, I sincerely, absolutely hope you enjoy it. And that you play Beetle Adventure Racing if you haven't already.

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 524: Steam powered

So Steam announced a bunch of new hardware, and some of it looks quite nice — though the fact that no prices have been mentioned as yet is a bit of a concern.

Of the items that have been announced, I find the "Steam Frame" probably the most interesting. This is a standalone VR headset that can either stream games from another computer, or run games installed on its own storage. It doesn't have to be VR games, either; you can play standard 2D games on a big "virtual screen" in VR.

There are a number of attractive things about this. Firstly is the fact that it looks like being a relatively lightweight, comfortable headset — certainly a far cry from the units of even just a few years ago. Secondly is, of course, the Steam compatibility; by running things from your Steam library just like a Steam Deck (or the newly announced Steam Machine), it has an immediate ready-made library of thousands of games to choose from without having to worry about whether the platform will be supported over the long term. Thirdly is the fact that it's a standalone headset that has nothing to do with Meta — since up until now, your only real option in that regard has been a Quest.

Now, of course, being tied to Valve and Steam has its own concerns. Steam's community features remain a rancid cesspit of the very worst examples of humanity, for example, as discussion forum after discussion forum is overrun by right-wing fuckheads crying about "DEI" and "woke" at the slightest hint of a female character in a leading role. That is something that the company probably should address, but it also feels like it's probably much too late for them to be able to do anything about at this point. We are very much in "lunatics running the asylum" territory at this point, since it's extremely rare anyone from Valve actually steps in to deal with a situation; mostly it's up to developer and publisher community managers to stem the tide of absolute sludge from the dickheads of the Internet — and I absolutely do not blame any of them who simply refuse to engage with a Steam discussion forum on principle.

Then, of course, there's the matter of several of Valve's games encouraging a form of gambling with their lootboxes and tradable items and whatnot. Add the exploitative (and easily exploited) trading card system to the mix and you have a whole mess of ethically questionable stuff going on, because this stuff probably makes Valve a lot of money.

And finally, of course, there's the fact that Steam is the one example of online-centric DRM that everyone has been sort of fine with for a long time. Sure, there are many games that can run without Steam being open, but it can be a bit of a pain to find out which games this applies to, and which require you to have a stable Internet connection. There's no good way to take your games "out" of Steam in the same way that GOG.com provides, either; no making your own physical copies or backups of Steam games.

There's also the fact that Steam was pretty much single-handedly responsible for completely destroying the collectible physical market for PC games — although I will be fair here: if you're going to be gaming on a standalone VR headset you probably don't want to be inserting discs into it while you're trying to get your game on.

I'll be interested to see what people think of these new machines once they're out in the wild. I have no particular need for a Steam Machine, as I have a perfectly competent "living room PC" that can run most games I'm interested in playing on PC rather than console — but, as I say, the Steam Frame is of at least moderate interest to me for gaming purposes. If I do end up getting one, I will almost certainly keep my living room PC up and running as it is, as I don't just game on it; it's also an entertainment centre, my video editing system and where I do just… general computery things. I'm not entirely ready to make the switch to Linux (which SteamOS is a flavour of) as yet, but I suspect that time will come at some point.

Anyway, I'm reserving judgement until I've seen prices and I've heard what people I trust think of these things. But there's definite potential for Valve to have something special here. I certainly think they're well-placed to fill the growing Xbox-shaped hole in the games industry with Microsoft's continual missteps in that regard.

We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 523: A deluge

There is a veritable deluge of good games that have come out recently, and this statement applies pretty much regardless of the specific types of game you are into. From my own personal perspective, I've been having a great time with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Absolum, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and Lumines Arise from recent releases, and a copy of Full Metal Schoolgirl arrived today, begging me to "just give it a quick try" this evening. Then alongside that, from varying degrees of "the past", I have Death end re;Quest: Code Z and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the go. And I'm playing Space Rogue and The Granstream Saga for video series.

Honestly, it's easy to get overwhelmed at times like this and get struck down with the dreaded analysis paralysis. But I've been trying hard to fight through that any time I feel it of late — and that, in part, is how I've ended up with quite this many games "on the go" at the same time.

You see, the way I figure it is that if you have just one "big game" on the go at a time, sometimes you're just not in the mood to play that one game, and thus it pays to have other things you can turn to. It's easy to start feeling "worried" that you won't get around to finishing any of the things you've started, though, but realistically, with the way today's games are designed, you can devote an evening to one thing, play something else another evening, play something else another evening, and so on.

It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get through something — and to some people, whether or not you get through it at all, though I don't fall into that category, as I do like to finish what I start. The important thing is just that you feel like you're spending your time in a way that is enjoyable and beneficial to you. So if you're in the mood to fest on a single game for multiple days straight, do that. If you're not in the mood for that one "big game" one evening, don't spend hours agonising over whether or not you're "allowed" to play something else — just go play something else. And, heaven forbid, if you're not in the mood to play anything at all of an evening? Stick the telly on and watch a few episodes of a favourite show. Yes, it can even be something you've watched myriad times previously if you really want.

Part of the "I must stick to one thing" mentality that I have been doing my best to shake off is down to my time working in the games press, when it was important to get reviews done in time for embargoes so you could have competitive coverage. And I even self-inflicted this somewhat with MoeGamer, too, in the name of being able to give single games or series more in-depth coverage. But none of that needs to happen. It's nice to be able to write stuff for MoeGamer or script videos, but it's not an absolute requirement of everything I play.

Honestly, I think part of the reason I worry over such things is because I want to feel like I have made a contribution to the world of video games through writing about stuff — particularly stuff that doesn't get a lot of love or attention from mainstream outlets. And I do still feel like I want to do that — but also I have to remember that I am also making a contribution to this world through my day job, and my work in that regard is probably getting seen by a lot more people than articles on my own personal websites. Probably, anyway.

All this is a long way to say that I think I'm going to play Full Metal Schoolgirl this evening, and I'm not going to feel the slightest bit bad about it.

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#oneaday Day 522: Bravo Eurogamer

Just recently, Eurogamer published a review of Arc Raiders, the latest multiplayer craze, and ruffled more than a few feathers when the reviewer, Rick Lane, dinged the game with a 2/5 star rating, primarily due to the game's apparent use of generative AI to create many of its voice lines. The developer, Embark Studios, has form in this area, with its previous title, The Finals, also featuring AI-generated voice lines.

The reviewer's justification for giving the game such a low score was not simply "AI bad" — it was because, from an artistic perspective, getting a soulless robot to voice the human characters in your game that is about robots who have taken over the world and forced humanity underground feels just a little too incongruous to be able to pass without comment.

And I agree. I also firmly, strongly and resolutely believe that the use of generative AI in video game development is an obnoxious, odious, wasteful, exploitative and ethically reprehensible practice — and I have a firm policy that I will absolutely not engage with a game that appears to have been tainted with generative AI garbage. It's why I didn't play The Alters, it's why I haven't played the latest Everybody's Golf, and it's why I won't touch Arc Raiders. (In the latter case, it's also because I suspect I won't like Arc Raiders, but that's beside the point right now.)

I've been disappointed at quite how many people I've seen handwaving away this aspect of Arc Raiders in particular. Indeed, the Eurogamer review has a comments section that is at least as much of a trash fire as you would expect, because Video Game Good, and you're not allowed to take a firm ethical stance about something in a review because then the Gamers™, the good little consumer piggies that they are, will get mad that you said their Favourite Forever Game This Week was perhaps not to your taste for a perfectly valid reason.

The unfortunate thing with Arc Raiders is that its use of AI and machine learning (which are different things) is a bit shrouded in uncertainty right now. Some folks say that its generated voice lines are fine because it's actually just a fancy text-to-speech system; some folks are taking this argument further in order to weaponise disabled people and accessibility features; some are saying that it's fine because the actors the voices were trained on were aware of what they were signing up for.

But regardless of whether or not Arc Raiders' voices were generated by supposedly consenting voice actors, or if they were the product of the more environmentally disastrous end of generative AI, the entire thing rubs me the wrong way. The really stupid thing is that the generated voices in Arc Raiders are for things that voice actors could have very reasonably just recorded — things like vendors, NPCs and suchlike — and Embark's justification for using generated voices is that it's "quicker". On top of that, the results are markedly, obviously inferior to using an actual voice actor recording the complete lines, so one has to question if cutting corners in this way is really worth it.

Embark's not a small, frugal indie company, either. They have the resources to be able to afford voice actors to do a proper job. They're just refusing to. And regardless of the tech that produces the not-very-good end result, it sets a poor precedent to do that.

The arguments in favour of generated voices aren't very convincing, either. The most common one that comes up is that "one day we'll have games where every NPC conversation will be AI-generated, and you'll be able to talk to them about anything!" And to that I say: I absolutely do not want that.

When I'm playing a game that has characters in it, a narrative, a setting, all that stuff — I want to experience the vision of the creators. I want to enjoy something that someone else has created, with a clear vision and purpose behind it. I want to be able to reflect on the way a writer composed a piece of dialogue; how a character's mannerisms tell us more about them; how the tone of the whole piece gives a feeling of coherence to the game as a complete creative work.

If you're AI-generating your dialogue, you get none of that. You get a hodgepodge, incoherent mess that is easily exploitable — and, indeed, we've already seen that numerous times already, whether it's Darth Vader saying fuck or a character in the latest HoyoVerse game apparently having no idea who they are, what their background is, what their personality is or what is around them.

I refuse to accept the "genie is out of the bottle" argument. We've been making video games for 50+ years at this point, and the reason the medium has continued to endure is because of human creativity. We have seen incredible advancements in storytelling, mechanics and the overall craft of making all manner of different games over the years — and the AI glazers seem to want nothing more than to just throw all that experience away in favour of some "vibe coded" garbage with AI-generated dialogue and synthesised speech.

Couple that with the fact that AI is insanely wasteful, growing increasingly likely to make the worldwide economy crash, disastrous for the environment and taking valuable resources away from doing things that might actually make life better for people who really need it to be better? Nah. Don't need it. Don't want it. And will not support anything made with it, no matter how much you argue "no no no, but this is a good use of it, actually."

I say bravo to Rick Lane of Eurogamer for having the balls to stand up and say "no" to this garbage with a thoughtful and well-considered critique. If only we could see a bit more of that kind of thing, and less of this sort of rubbish.

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#oneaday Day 520: Roguing it up

After spending yesterday primarily playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I thought I'd make some time to do some recordings today, so I kicked off recording for my Space Rogue series on Atari ST.

I'm glad I did this. It was a lot of fun to record, as there's lots of nicely written text throughout, which makes for good things to say out loud, and I also maintain that this format, although long and cumbersome at times, is a great way of showing exactly why some games are worth sticking with in the long term.

One fun and/or slightly inconvenient thing that we've lost today is the fact that when you started playing a game like Space Rogue seriously back in the day, you had to make a commitment to it. And it was a physical commitment in the form of a save game disk — or, in the case of games like Space Rogue, which would save your position to the game disk itself, making a backup copy of said game disk to be the copy that you play from "just in case" something happens to the masters when saving.

These days, meanwhile, it's all too easy to pick up a game, play it for half an hour, then set it aside and never think about it ever again. This is all the more easy to do with services like Game Pass, which is one of several big reasons I find Game Pass in particular an absolutely odious development in the games industry. Once you'd made a save game disk, though, you were in. You'd set aside valuable magnetic media for the specific purpose of saving your progress through a video game. And you were damn well going to use it.

Of course, the version of Space Rogue I have installed on the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is installed to a virtual hard drive, so there's no worrying about disk swapping, and the load times are much faster, which is nice. This would have been an absolute luxury option back in the day — I've been reading some old Atari User magazines recently, and it's always funny to read about a 20 megabyte hard drive being "more storage space than you will ever need" and costing as much as the computer itself.

Anyway, I've been giving the Space Rogue videos a bit of "deluxe" treatment in terms of editing. Because the game is so quiet, I've added some background audio in the form of the CD soundtrack from the FM Towns version, and some gratuitous Star Trek ambience that fits in nicely with the setting. I think the end result videos are going to be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to publishing the first of these sometime this week.

Now, of course, my head is spinning with all the possibilities of old games from back in the day that I might want to give the long playthrough treatment. I'm definitely going to do at least some of the Ultima games, I'd like to do Times of Lore (though which version, I haven't decided, as the ST, Amiga and C64 versions are all significantly different from one another) and there are, of course, still plenty of adventure games I haven't covered.

But recording Space Rogue was a lot of fun today, and I'm looking forward to doing more. Maybe I might even finish it this time around. Or indeed actually get anywhere in it at all. We shall see, but the first two episodes bode well for what comes next!

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#oneaday Day 519: Hero of Hyrule

In my head, I've had a bit of a weird relationship with the Legend of Zelda series over the years. There have been large tracts of time when I haven't played any games in the series, and there are still a number of entries (primarily handheld) that I haven't tried at all. I've known Zelda obsessives over the years, and I've never counted myself among them; likewise, I don't think I've ever bought a Zelda game on launch… with the exception of the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, which I'm sure someone will argue isn't a Zelda game, but it actually is — just a different kind of Zelda game.

Anyway, I think I've come to the conclusion, many years too late, that yes, I, in fact, do like the Legend of Zelda series, and I always have done.

I think I know where my hesitancy over this came from, and it dates back to the late 1990s. I had just discovered console-style RPGs with Final Fantasy VII, and then Ocarina of Time came out, offering a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy VII, and… I felt like I didn't like it as much. At least, not in terms of story. Final Fantasy VII's narrative was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in gaming at that point, while Ocarina of Time was basically reading from the same script as A Link to the Past, which I had played (and enjoyed a lot) several years earlier.

Link didn't speak, either, which made the narrative immediately less interesting to me.

Of course, I know this is a silly comparison now, because Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time are so different from one another as to basically be completely different genres — and that's not getting into the interminably tedious arguments over whether Zelda is "an RPG" or not.

No; I can see very clearly now that the intent behind the two series, and those entries in them in particular, is very different. Final Fantasy VII was all about delivering a spectacular, emotionally engaging narrative; Ocarina of Time was about being a well-designed video game. And, although Zelda plots have become more and more elaborate over the years — not to mention the series' timeline becoming ever more convoluted — this distinction has, for the most part, remained.

This isn't to say that Final Fantasy has bad gameplay or that Zelda has a poor story, mind. It's simply that their focal points are different, and, as with anything, if you go in with the wrong things in mind, you're almost certainly not going to resonate with it as much as you would if you had more realistic expectations.

Anyway, I think back over the years and the many Zelda games I have played, and I don't think I've ever had a bad time with a Zelda game.

My first ever encounter with the series was with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on a family friend's NES. When I first played this, I didn't understand it at all, as I was very young and had never really encountered a game like it before. With how different Zelda II was from the rest of the series, I at least know I wasn't alone in feeling like that — although today I respect Zelda II immensely for having the balls to do something so drastically different from its predecessor.

I have a few oddly vivid memories of that first time I played Zelda II. The towns of Ruto and Rauru, both of which would lend their names to characters in the series many years later. The slightly wobbly melodic line on the music. The distinctive overworld map theme — which starts very similarly to the well-known Zelda theme before branching off in its own direction. The caves that are too dark to see until you get a candle. Link making a noise that sounds like he's going "whoops" every time he takes damage — a sound effect shared with Simon Belmont from Castlevania. The BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL noise and strobes when you lose a life. And the fact I always thought Link looks like a chef when he's doing his "damage" pose. I saw it once, I can't unsee it now.

A few years later, I got a Super NES, and one of the games I asked for one Christmas or birthday was A Link to the Past. I knew absolutely nothing about this game, save for the fact that magazines talked about it in tones of reverence, and I remembered quite liking my time with Zelda II.

I got it. And I was absolutely blown away by it — particularly the music. To this day, I'm still impressed that the game has full-on orchestral cymbal clashes in its music. Absolutely one of the best uses of the SNES' sound chip there ever was.

Anyway, I dutifully bought Ocarina of Time like every self-respecting N64 owner was supposed to back in the day, and I quite enjoyed it, with the caveats mentioned above. What I liked a whole lot more, though, was Majora's Mask, the direct sequel, which never seemed to resonate with the public in quite the same way despite getting good reviews — but which gets its dues much more frequently these days.

Majora's Mask basically corrected what I felt was lacking a bit from Ocarina of Time: the emotional engagement angle. Because it offered a story that wasn't just a retelling of the usual Link vs Ganon legend, it was immediately much more interesting — and its time-based mechanic allowed the narrative to go to some seriously interesting places. To this day, I'm yet to see anything quite like the conclusion of the "Anju and Kafei" questline, which resolves with literally seconds before the world ending.

I didn't get along with The Wind Waker when I first played it on Gamecube, but when I played the rebalanced Wii U version some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Likewise, I skipped Twilight Princess on its original release and played the Wii U version, enjoying it greatly.

I was late to the party with Breath of the Wild and it took me a long time between starting it and actually finishing it, but when I had done so, I was very glad I had taken that journey. I am having a similar experience with Tears of the Kingdom in that I have come to it very late, but playing it alongside the new Hyrule Warriors, which acts as a prequel and/or parallel storyline, is going to be very interesting indeed, I think.

I know some folks don't love the direction the series has taken with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and to an extent I get that — but then there has also been the excellent Link's Awakening remake and the equally good Echoes of Wisdom for those hungry for a more "traditional" Zelda experience.

All in all, it's a thoroughly interesting series, and one that very much deserves its long and proud history. And, at this point, I may as well admit that I think I'm a Zelda fan. Particularly as I've played 15 hours of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment since yesterday evening.

Now time for a bit of Tears of the Kingdom, I think…

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#oneaday Day 518: '80s Activision had the juice

I frigging love '80s Activision games, particularly on the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit. I grew up with the ones on Atari 8-bit, of course, and since I never had a 2600 back in the day, those are a (relatively) more recent discovery. But I adore every one of them, and I'm beyond thrilled that I've been part of bringing them back to a new audience on Evercade.

The first of our Activision cartridges isn't out yet, but I, of course, have a copy. Perks of the job and all that. It's already becoming one of my most-played Evercade cartridges, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We're actually doing three collections in total (this isn't Super Secret information, it was in our press release) and I've been largely responsible for the curation of said collections. All three of them are very strong indeed (you'll have to wait and see the lineup for the others, which are coming next year!) but this first collection comes out of the gate swinging with some of my absolute favourites.

My personal highlights are MegaMania, Enduro, Crackpots and River Raid, with honourable mentions to Beamrider and Demon Attack, games I've gotten to know a bit more recently.

MegaMania is one of the absolute best fixed shooters of the early '80s. Pitting you against waves of strange household objects, this "space nightmare" keeps things constantly interesting, as each wave has its own distinctive movement pattern — and then once you've cleared a complete loop of all of them, they go and change up their patterns a bit, just to keep you on your toes. It's a beautiful example of how utterly elegant some early games can be: it's simple to understand, has a brilliantly paced difficulty curve, a well-crafted scoring system and is endlessly replayable.

River Raid is, of course, a pioneering vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, whose noteworthy features include the ability to adjust your speed as you fly and the necessity to refuel your aircraft while negotiating obstacles and blasting enemies. The fact that this game was crammed into 4 kilobytes of ROM will never not be amazing to me. Carol Shaw was an actual wizard — not just for the game's technical accomplishments, but for the fact that, like MegaMania, it's an incredibly well-paced, considerately designed game that is likewise replayable until the end of time.

Enduro is the spiritual precursor to the home computer game The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a game which I played as a child many years before I ever encountered Enduro for the first time. Enduro is, partly by necessity of the more primitive hardware it's running on, a simpler game, but I think its simplicity is also a core part of its appeal. All you have to do is overtake a set number of cars as a full day-night-and-weather cycle of a set duration proceeds: overtake 200 cars on the first day, then 300 each day thereafter. Your final score is how many "miles" you successfully drove before failing to qualify for the next day, and the score is presented using a lovely rolling analogue counter effect. I would have loved that as a kid — hell, I love it now.

Crackpots is a relatively recent discovery, and a game I feel I would have probably been terrified of as a kid. Again, the concept is simple: bugs are climbing your building, and you must drop flower pots on them. With each wave of bugs cleared, a new colour appears, and each colour of bug has a distinctive movement pattern. When you've cleared one loop of all the bug types (black, blue, red, green) the cycle repeats, but faster. The bugs chew through a layer of your building every time you let too many past you, and this affects the pace of the game from thereon. After too many layers of your building have been eaten, the game is over. It's pure high score fodder, and once again, beautifully paced and designed, with a dynamic difficulty level that raises and lowers according to how well you're doing.

Beamrider is, in essence, another fixed shoot 'em up, but it probably has more in common with Atari's Tempest than anything else, in that rather than moving freely, you switch between distinct "lanes" that the enemies proceed down. Thus there's a much stronger element of precision and even strategy to Beamrider than some other games, and the presentation, considering the host platform, is very good indeed. It's another game I got to know quite recently — there is an Atari 8-bit version, I believe, but I never encountered it back in the day.

Demon Attack is a game that I became familiar with after watching Classic Game Room's Atari 2600 reviews many, many times. It's a very simple fixed shooter, in which all you have to do is blast demons in the sky above you. Only three demons appear at once, and only one of them fires at you. It should be primitive and stupid and dumb, but it's incredibly compelling, particularly once the pace of the game increases and the demons start splitting into smaller bits. This one actually wasn't an Activision game back in the day; it was by Imagic, but Activision got the rights to all the Imagic stuff at some indeterminate point in the past. So yes, the Evercade Activision cartridges will have some of the Imagic stuff, too.

I'm quite fond of Activision Anthology on the PlayStation 2, but the last time I played it, I spotted quite how poor the emulation is in that version. It's not altogether surprising — there have been 23 years of advancements in emulation since — but, given how accessible good quality emulation of these games is about to become with the Evercade cartridges (and, hell, how easy it is to get 2600 up and running on systems like MiSTer and cheapo Chinese handhelds) it's a little hard to go back to. The built-in "badge" challenges, weirdo visual effects and '80s soundtrack are fun, though. I feel like we'll never see a compilation quite like that ever again.

But anyway. I am banging on about this because I spent today making a video about the upcoming cartridge. Watch out for it on the Evercade YouTube channel soon!

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#oneaday Day 517: First impressions from Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment arrived today and, keen to see quite how wrong that awful review from the other day was, I booted it up right after work and have been enjoying it since. I'm not very far in yet, and there seem to be a lot of mechanics and structural elements that are still locked, but I like what I see so far.

It's going to be interesting playing this alongside Tears of the Kingdom because, as anyone who has played the latter will know, a plot point in that is Zelda being sent back in time to the founding of Hyrule, and through a sidequest, Link can get occasional visions of key events during her time in the past. What Age of Imprisonment provides is a complete story from Zelda's perspective, from the moment she arrived in the past and was discovered by King Rauru and Queen Sophia, up until… well, I don't know, yet, but I assume some form of "imprisonment" will be involved, likely with Ganon(dorf) at the middle of it.

Thus far the game feels like it's taking some elements from previous Hyrule Warriors games (I say this with the caveat that I've not actually played Age of Calamity as yet) and combining them with some fun new(?) elements. Of particular note is a counterattack system, where major enemies do heavily telegraphed attacks, and you can use your characters' cooldown-based special abilities to interrupt them. This is never not satisfying, particularly when combined with the "weak point" mechanic introduced in the first Hyrule Warriors, where after certain attacks, some enemies reveal a weak spot and, if you batter this down enough, you get to perform a fancy cinematic attack on them.

There are also giant enemies, much like in the original Hyrule Warriors, and these have their own ways of being dealt with. They're not quite so rigid in their "solutions" as the original Hyrule Warriors, though, which is nice. You can, in many cases, jump on them and wail on their weak points while standing on top of them, though, which is always a delight to do in any game that allows you to do so.

The characters seem like fun, too. Particular highlight so far has been Mineru, sister of King Rauru, who is a Zonai scientist lady who commands constructs to do her bidding. Her "run" animation is her riding a motorised unicycle type thing, and most of her attacks involve summoning giant mechanical things, cannons and all manner of other fun stuff to cause chaos over a wide area. I think she's going to be enjoyable to play with, though I'm also intrigued to see what other characters are on offer and how the game incentivises you to play as them.

Mecha-Link has made an appearance, too, and he's predictably fun to play as, handling much as he did in the older Hyrule Warriors. He did conclude his first appearance by literally turning into a spaceship and flying off into the sunset, though, so I am looking forward to the first of his apparent Star Fox-esque sequences, whenever that might arise.

My concern with Age of Imprisonment (and indeed Age of Calamity, when I eventually get around to it) is that neither of them will live up to the original Hyrule Warriors in terms of Stuff To Do. For the unfamiliar, the original Hyrule Warriors, particularly in its Definitive Edition incarnation on Switch, not only had a lengthy story mode to play through (multiple times if you want to get all the rewards), but also had a brilliant mode called Adventure in which you gradually unlocked cells on pixel-art recreations of classic Zelda maps and took part in various battles in each space. Some of these were full-scale battles similar to what you do in the story mode, while others were battles that had some sort of special conditions or rules in place. The sheer amount of stuff to do in the Adventure mode, across a variety of different maps, meant that the original Hyrule Warriors had near-infinite replayability, and with the way Age of Imprisonment seems to be structured, I suspect it doesn't have anything like that.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. It means that Age of Imprisonment might actually be completable. And if and when I'm done with it, I can always return to the original for more of that sweet Adventure mode action.

In the meantime, I'm having a lot of fun with it, and learning today that its soundtrack is by MONACA, best known for their work on the Nier series, has made this game all the more interesting to me. And so I'm off for another battle or two before bed, I think…

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#oneaday Day 516: Longform playthroughs

I originally stopped doing longform playthroughs on my channel because it was taking forever to get through a single game (and I was getting bored with Final Fantasy III, probably my least favourite Final Fantasy — yes, I'm a sicko who likes Final Fantasy II), but with my recent playthrough of The Granstream Saga on PS1 proving to be quite enjoyable (if not exactly a viewer magnet, but I don't care about that) I think I'm going to do some more of these.

I've been hesitant to do so for the aforementioned reason, but at the same time I've also wanted to do some more, because I feel like that does better justice to longer games that perhaps can't be finished in a single sitting. And, given that it's easy for me to set aside some "retro time" to record this stuff of a weekend, particularly now I have the MiSTer Multisystem set up, I feel I can probably devote some proper time to a number of games I've been meaning to explore properly for ages.

I think the first one I'm going to do, and I'm going to kick this off alongside the ongoing The Granstream Saga playthrough, is Origin's Space Rogue. This is a game I have adored ever since I first played it on Atari ST back in the day, but I've never beaten it, at least partly because, as a kid, I always assumed it was so dauntingly massive it was impossible to ever beat. However, looking back at it as an adult, it definitely looks like it will be a manageable size, and with my big brave adult brain, I can probably "solve" anything it wants to throw my way. And if not, it'll be a fun experiment anyway.

The other reason I want to do this is because I'm conscious I've done a lot of "later retro" stuff recently with the PlayStation games, and I have no intention of stopping that, but I've been struggling to think of a way to kind of refresh my enthusiasm for older home computer (particularly Atari) stuff. And I think this might be a good means of doing that.

With two longform series on the go, I'm not intending on leaving the single-episode formats behind. There are some games where you only really need a single episode to see what makes a game tick, and from there you can decide whether or not you want to spend any more time with it. There are many arcade-style games that I've played for half an hour on a video as my first encounter with them, and now go back to frequently because I enjoyed that initial session so much.

There's no need to make additional videos on those games, though, because in most of those cases, the game is sort of "the same" each time — it's just my skill and knowledge of it developing over time. And while I don't doubt there's at least some value in demonstrating my own improvement in a series of videos, I feel if I'm going to spend multiple videos on one thing, it's more interesting to tackle a longer game that evolves over time with a narrative, character progression or simply a long overall playtime.

Stuff that I've casually earmarked to look at in this regard At Some Point™ include the aforementioned Space Rogue, Times of Lore, the Ultima games, Dungeon Master, the Eye of the Beholder series, the Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games and Starflight. Some of these games I've covered before in a one-off format, and always felt like I probably should go back to them at some point.

So I'm going to, starting this weekend!

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#oneaday Day 514: Up to the Atic

For the last few days, I have not been playing any of the new games I have. I have, instead, been mildly hyperfixating on Atic Atac for Spectrum, which is part of the upcoming Rare Collection 1 cartridge that we're releasing for Evercade. I have ostensibly been doing this so I can better inform the Evercade community about how to get the best out of this game, but honestly I've just been having a lovely time, too.

Atic Atac is a game I have fond memories of, though not because I had it as a child — none of Rare predecessor Ultimate Play the Game's titles were on Atari computers. I don't actually remember where I played it for the first time, and it was only once I ever played it. I believe it was the BBC Micro version I played rather than the Spectrum version, which means I probably played it at my friend Matthew's house, but the details are hazy and unimportant.

What I do remember about Atic Atac is that I thought it was a really cool game for a few reasons: firstly, its top-down perspective, presented with bold, colourful, almost vector-esque lines; and secondly, its unusual health display, which was presented as a roast chicken gradually being stripped down to the bone. When all the "meat" was gone, you lost a life.

For years, I never actually knew what the point of Atic Atac was, though. When I played it as a child, neither I nor whoever it was who was proudly showing it off to me knew what you were supposed to do, so we just had a lovely time wandering back and forth through rooms, throwing axes at monsters. And, indeed, it is possible to enjoy Atic Atac like that if you so desire; there's even a score function based entirely on the enemies you defeat, so you can challenge yourself to get as high a score as possible before succumbing to inevitable death.

Spending some proper, protracted time with it now, though, I'm finding it very much my sort of game, in that it's something of a blend between the Atari 2600 classics Haunted House and Adventure, with a dash of early-format text adventures in there. Not in terms of how you interact with it — Atic Atac is out-and-out an action game — but rather in terms of its core structure of wandering a map, searching for specific "treasures" and your end goal being to return all of said treasures (three pieces of a key, in this case) to a specific location: the starting room.

What I often find with home computer games from this period — particularly those that originated on the Spectrum, for some reason — is that it's easy to assume they're a lot more complicated and confusing than they actually are. And such was the case with Atic Atac; at its core, it's a game about getting to know a map, unlocking doors and hunting for treasure, nothing more. Sure, there's a couple of additional wrinkles — most notably, a few special items counteracting a few "special" monsters that appear at various points — but the basics are simply explore maze, unlock doors, get treasure, escape.

One thing I have really enjoyed doing with Atic Atac is manually making a map, adventure game style. This is mostly fairly straightforward to do, though there are a couple of instances in the game where it defies its own laws of physics to squeeze rooms in where there "shouldn't" be any, which makes mapping those particular portions a little challenging, but for the most part it's easy enough to map. The tricky thing, then, is systematically searching all those rooms to find the keys and treasures that you need!

I haven't quite managed to beat the game just yet, but I've been really enjoying the attempts. And I think I know it well enough to be able to offer some solid advice to newcomers now, too — so watch out for that around the time of Rare Collection 1's release!

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