#oneaday Day 511: Stop hitting me so hard

One of my biggest annoyances with a lot of modern games is enemies that hit like absolute dump trucks from the start of the game. Of recent games that I've played (and liked), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did this, Silent Hill f did this, and I've just started playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and that does it too. It's especially annoying in that, because you start with so little health, and having literally 95% of it gone if you get hit once in an early fight is very frustrating.

I'm pretty convinced that this aspect of game design is a side-effect of the popularity of FromSoftware's work, because in a Souls game, you expect all enemies to hit like dump trucks, even if they're absolute trash fodder, and the game is designed and built around that. To put it another way, Souls games are, in some respects, survival horror games, in which you play a vulnerable protagonist with limited resources facing overwhelming odds and unimaginable, often unexpected horrors.

I'm sure anyone who played Dungeons & Dragons games that started you off at level 1 are laughing at me right now, too. Believe me, I know all about old D&D.

Zelda, though? I don't want the game to patronise me or anything, but it would be nice if it took things a bit easier on you from the beginning. This is the exact same bugbear I had with Breath of the Wild, and it's probably a major contributing factor to how long it took me to actually beat that game.

See, I do like Breath of the Wild, and I like what I've played of Tears of the Kingdom so far. But when every single combat feels like you're a razor's edge away from frustrating death, it's kind of exhausting. Not only that, it's different to how past Zelda games did it, too. Earlier Zelda games still started you off with a pitiful amount of health, but to compensate for that somewhat, enemies you meet in the early hours do very little damage. And that works! Ease the player in gradually without smacking them in the face for making the slightest mistake, then as the game continues, escalate things gradually by increasing the power of the enemies at a roughly similar rate to the player gaining in power.

It's a very different sort of game, but this is something that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of nails. I say "sort of" because the game's story battles are pretty much at fixed levels, while the random encounters — which will likely form the majority of what you will be using to level up your characters most effectively — scale to your level. This means that you're always presented with a decent challenge when facing a random encounter; the flip side of that is that it's possible to charge into a story encounter either woefully underprepared and get your head shoved firmly up your anus, or extremely overprepared to such a degree that you trivialise supposedly dramatic encounters. Such has always been the way with role-playing games, of course, and there's a convincing argument to be made that part of the joy of Final Fantasy Tactics is seeing absolutely how much you can break it.

You can't do that with Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, though. You have to do the game's opening quests with the vitality of a wet paper bag, the lung capacity of a chaffinch and equipment so flimsy Chinese Amazon sellers would be embarrassed to put their nonsensical names on.

In some respects, you can look on this as the game saying "hey, you don't have to fight literally everything, and in fact it might be in your interests not to". But when you have situations like one I encountered this evening, where two particularly frustrating enemies were guarding a chest that wouldn't open until I beat them, you kind of feel like you do have to beat them. (Except the chest had nothing in it but a shiny rock. I was annoyed.)

I don't want to be too tough on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, though, because I did ultimately very much enjoy the former and, outside of the above-mentioned encounter, I've had a lovely time with the latter this evening. I just think it would be nice if we had a few modern games where taking a single glancing blow from an enemy didn't feel like someone had just dropped a piano on your head.

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 509: A new age of "talkies"

Back when the CD-ROM era first started, and game developers suddenly had a lot more storage capacity to play with, a revolution unfolded. Games became "talkie", with formerly text-based dialogue now being supported (or sometimes, in those less enlightened times, replaced) with voice acting of variable quality. This was, for the most part, seen as a significant step forwards in terms of games being able to tell interesting and convincing stories, though some genres benefited from it more than others, with probably the biggest beneficiary being point-and-click adventures.

These games already had pretensions of movie-style storytelling. Indeed, back when Ron Gilbert of LucasArts coined the term "cutscene" with Maniac Mansion, he defined them as "short, animated sequences — like scenes from a movie — which can provide clues and information about the characters" (emphasis mine). As such, it was only natural that as interactive entertainment and movies moved ever-closer together, we would start to hear game dialogue as much as read it.

That wasn't universally the case, mind; not every game that featured dialogue was fully voiced. In many cases this was because the storage capacity of a CD wouldn't have been sufficient to include the entire script for longer games such as RPGs, particularly on console, where they had been becoming more and more dialogue-heavy. In those cases, the extra storage space instead went to other purposes such as pre-rendered video sequences or even live action video.

The advent of DVD didn't lead to longer games suddenly becoming "talkie", either; while there was often a lot more speech in these games, they still often weren't fully voiced. Final Fantasy X is a good example — major story scenes in that game are fully voiced, but incidental interactions and random NPC conversations remain text-based. And this situation has continued right up until this day — even with the huge storage capacity of modern flash memory-based cartridges and Blu-Ray discs, there are still a fair number of RPGs that have unvoiced dialogue — although that number is dwindling a bit. Many Japanese games, even from relatively low-budget studios like Compile Heart, even have dual audio today.

We're in a position now where it's possible for another minor revolution in "talkie" terms, and one of the best examples I've seen is the recent Final Fantasy Tactics remake. This is one of those games where, as outlined above, there was far too much in the way of script for them ever to be able to make it fully voiced back in the PlayStation days. Not only that, but video game voice acting in the late '90s was generally… Not Good. There was the odd exception, yes, but going back and listening to some of those early "talkie" games sometimes makes you just want to turn the speech off and go back to fully text-based dialogue. King's Quest V says hello. (King's Quest VI, meanwhile, is excellent.)

Today, though, we have a wide and diverse variety of voice actors with plenty of video game experience, and pretty much all of them can be heard in Final Fantasy Tactics. And the result is simply smashing. By combining the revised (and considerably better) retranslation for the PlayStation Portable "War of the Lions" version of Final Fantasy Tactics with a cast of voice actors who can actually act, we have one of the most gloriously theatrical games I think I've ever played. It really is a thing of wonder, and it adds so much to the game.

It makes me want to see more games from the PS1 era tackled like this. I would love to see some remasters of games from that period where the basic gameplay isn't touched all that much aside from a few interface and balance tweaks, but a fully voiced script delivered by people who know what they're doing is added. There's a bunch of games that would really benefit from this treatment — though it remains to be seen if companies like Square Enix will feel inclined to do this any more.

By all accounts, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles appears to have been doing well both critically and commercially, though, so hopefully this is taken as a sign of something people would like to see (and hear) more often.

In the meantime, I'm off to go enjoy it a bit more.

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#oneaday Day 506: Tactical Sunday

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I absolutely love and respect greatly, but I have to be in the right mood to play it. Today I was very much in the mood to play it, so play it I did. I got to a point that proved to be a sticking point for me when I first played it on PlayStation — Golgollada Gallows, also known as Golgorand Execution Site in the original — and, indeed, it proved to be a bit of a sticking point for me this time around, also.

However! This time around, I was armed with the knowledge of how I beat it last time around, which was to spend several hours doing random battles to level up my core units to such a point that they could survive the challenge of Golgollada Gallows — notorious as one of the toughest fights in the relatively early game — and progress without too much trouble.

Y'see, the difficulty I had with this first time around is that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of positions itself as a game where you move from story beat to story beat without any interruptions. Because it's not a conventional RPG in which you directly control the protagonist as he wanders around towns and dungeons, it's easy to see the random engagements you can run into on the node-based world map as annoying inconveniences preventing you from seeing the next bit of story.

But they are there for a reason — and, indeed, The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game makes it even easier for you to take advantage of them by making them not random at all. Sure, sometimes as you move from node to node you'll get the distinctive "swoosh" that indicates a battle is incoming, but unlike the PlayStation original, you can choose not to engage if you don't want to. This prevents you from encountering a minor softlock if, for example, you're trying to get to a town to stock up on healing items or refresh your units' equipment.

However, it also goes the other way. If you pass through a non-story node and you don't have an encounter there, you can choose to "search for enemies" and manually trigger a battle. This means if you actually want to spend some time levelling your units or earning them some new abilities — which the game doesn't tell you to do, but which is very much a good idea — you can do that much more easily than in the PlayStation version. If you want to, you can just stand on one battlefield, do a fight, then immediately trigger another one — no running back and forth between nodes in the hope of getting the "swoosh", because you can trigger it at will, and you can ignore it if it's inconvenient.

While I'm not normally a fan of being able to turn off encounters in a regular RPG — it feels very much like cheating, plus it does you out of some progression that you probably need — in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where battles take 5-10 minutes or more rather than a few seconds, this was an important and very welcome tweak to the formula.

Anyway, upshot of all this is that I beat Golgollada Gallows on my second attempt rather than taking the many, many, many attempts I did back in the day. I was still relatively new to console RPGs when I first picked up Final Fantasy Tactics, after all, and it hadn't occurred to me to grind because I wasn't super-familiar with the concept. Once I spent that time levelling my units properly, though, everything fell into place, and the rest of the game was much more straightforward. As, indeed, I suspect it will be this time around, too.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is a wonderful remake of an already wonderful game. I have greatly enjoyed my time playing today, and, having got over that notorious difficulty spike, I suspect the remainder of the game (except maybe "that" Wiegraf fight) will be even more enjoyable.

So your lesson for the day, then, if you're new to Final Fantasy Tactics, is don't be afraid to grind. Embrace it. Love it. You will come to appreciate it when all your units are suddenly orders of magnitude more effective with just four or five additional levels under their belts!

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#oneaday Day 502: Another reminder that traditional games journalism is all but dead

It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.

I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)

Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.

Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.

This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermath sums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.

I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.

"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.

And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.

It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.

Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.

I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?

Those are rhetorical questions.

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#oneaday Day 491: Some first impressions from Death end re;Quest Code Z

I am a big fan of Compile Heart's Death end re;Quest series. For the unfamiliar, it's a series of three (to date… with it looking like there's more on the way) narrative-centric console RPGs with strong horror themes, and involvement from some maestros of the genre like Makoto "Corpse Party" Kedouin on scenario duties and Kei "Mary Skelter" Nanameda on the art.

What I've found very interesting about Death end re;Quest to date is that all the games in the series have been very different from one another. Mechanically, the first two were quite similar, but tonally and thematically they were very different. The first game primarily involved an "if you die in the game you die for real" kind of MMO-gone-mad situation, while the second was based around horrible goings-on in a tiny European town that doesn't appear on any maps. As Compile Heart games, both of them also involved more than a touch of yuri to them — particularly in the case of the second one.

Death end re;Quest Code Z, meanwhile, changes up both the narrative setting and the game's core mechanical conceits. Narratively, I'm not far enough into the game to know exactly what the situation is, but it involves characters from both of the previous two games, many of whom didn't interact with one another directly in their original games — and, moreover, some characters who were very much dead in previous games, such as the father of the second game's protagonist, Mai — are alive in this one. I can't comment on that further as yet, but I'm interested to know more.

The most obvious difference between Death end re;Quest Code Z and its predecessors is that it's now a Mystery Dungeon-like. For those not familiar with such things, this is a Japanese take on the roguelike genre that typically (though not always) favours cutesy visuals; grid-based, turn-based movement and combat; a heavy degree of resource management; limited inventory space; and, of course, a series of increasingly deep, procedurally generated dungeons in which to hack, slash, explore, level up and loot.

Death end re;Quest Code Z mostly plays things relatively straight in this regard, with the exception of one thing: rather than an "energy" or "hunger" bar, the protagonist, Sayaka, has a sanity rating. This gradually declines as you explore, with various "milestones" on the gauge corresponding to her field of view contracting, the background audio becoming more distorted (or completely replaced) and, in the case of extremely low sanity, interface elements like the minimap being unusable and the likelihood of her harming herself going up considerably.

This is very much in keeping with the horror tone the series has always had, but it also means that the game has quite a "survival horror" feel to it as well. Since you're juggling your health, sanity and available items as you progress through each dungeon, you have to make some tough and interesting choices as you play — particularly if you're playing on the "Expert" mode (which I actually recommend in this case), where Sayaka's level is reset every time she leaves a dungeon, and she suffers notable losses in terms of inventory items and weapon power-ups if she's actually killed.

The other interesting thing relates to the series' titular "Death Ends". In prior games, Death Ends came about if you made bad choices during the storytelling sequences, and usually resulted in the protagonist and/or members of the core cast suffering a horrifying, gory death, described in excruciating detail. Towards the end of the first game — mild spoilers, I guess — one of the characters becomes aware of you, the player, and starts addressing you as "God of Death" in recognition of the number of times you have led the cast to a sticky end, and Death end re;Quest Code Z builds on this further by having the main protagonist, Sayaka, constantly aware of and communicating with you — even putting her trust in you.

There's some interesting conflict here, because Sayaka trusts you to lead her through the challenges ahead of her, and you need to successfully do so in order to progress through the story. But! And this is a big but: if you let her die, you can make her stronger. Because every time you see a unique Death End in Death end re;Quest Code Z, Sayaka gets a skill point that you can invest in passive boosts to her basic abilities and resistances, and even complete immunity to certain status effects. The more she dies, the stronger she gets and, presumably in theory, the easier the game gets.

But that places you, as her "Partner" (she very pointedly keeps referring to you as such) in a difficult position. Because in keeping with series tradition, every time Sayaka carks it, there's a lengthy narration of exactly how she dies, often delivered in something of a mocking tone. This is coupled with a gory (and often somewhat sexualised) event image depicting her dying yet again. Thus you are faced with a quandary: do you kill Sayaka a bunch in order to power her up? Do you deliberately lead her to her death multiple times in succession to score some easy skill points at the outset of the game? Or do you actually try and take care of her somewhat, knowing that in doing so you are leaving her as a somewhat sub-optimal character?

Death end re;Quest Code Z forces the player to interrogate their relationship with the death of their on-screen avatar — particularly one that is supposedly aware of them. Sayaka never remembers any of her deaths, but you know you caused them, and there's a helpful checklist of all 104 possible ways to die and the skill tree itself to remind you quite how many times you've seen her devoured, eviscerated, beaten to a bloody pulp, disintegrated, decapitated and any number of other nasty words you might care to mention. Undoubtedly the most "efficient" way to play is to repeatedly let Sayaka die in the first dungeon, but doing so is tedious — and thinking that should give you pause. You are repeatedly murdering someone, and it's boring. Are you that desensitised to violence that you can bring yourself to do that?

Some of you will be absolutely fine with it, I'm sure, and I'm not judging you for it. But after a few initial deaths in that first dungeon, I really started to hesitate and think "hang on a minute, this doesn't feel right at all". And I can't remember the last time a game made me feel quite like that about the protagonist, through my actions, being killed off.

This has made me determined to see how far it's possible to progress without killing Sayaka repeatedly. I've reached a point where I don't give a toss about PlayStation trophies any more, so I don't have the "pressure" from the two that related to getting all the Death Ends and unlocking all the skills weighing on me — and thus it really is up to my own feelings of morality about whether I want to buff up Sayaka by murdering her over and over again, or if I genuinely want to see her succeed, taking her shortcomings into account.

Thus far this is turning out to be one of Compile Heart's most interesting games. I'd expect nothing less from a series whose other two entries were also thoroughly fascinating. I'm intrigued to play more — and it certainly is the season for a bit of horror.

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#oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

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#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor

I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

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#oneaday Day 488: Home ports deserve remembering too

I feel like I've talked about this before, but whatever. I feel like talking about it today, so talk about it I will.

In this age of being able to easily emulate the original arcade versions of games, I feel like one thing gets easily lost from the "preservation" aspect of retro rereleases on today's systems: home ports that are notably different from simple attempts to recreate the original arcade games.

I was reminded of this when watching the YouTuber Classic Gaming Quarterly playing Gauntlet for NES earlier. I legitimately had no idea that Gauntlet for NES is not, in fact, a straight port of the arcade game and is, instead, a completely different game. I did know that Gauntlet IV for the Mega Drive also pulls this stunt, but I did not know that this extended back to the NES version. And for my money, pretty much all the home ports of Gauntlet are much more fun than the quarter-munching arcade version — particularly if you're playing on emulation and thus have infinite credits and therefore infinite health.

There are others, too. The Mega Drive port of Toaplan's Slap Fight features an entirely new game mode. The NES versions of the Double Dragon games are completely different to their arcade counterparts. And I'm sure there are countless others — to say nothing of the "home-exclusive sequels" we saw to numerous arcade games, often put together by western developers who didn't quite get what made the Japanese originals so good. (That said, I will happily go to bat for OutRun 2019.)

A few publishers are cottoning on to the fact that there is value in preserving multiple versions of classic games, including both the arcade originals and popular home ports, but it's by no means the norm. The reasons are likely due to licensing complications — in many cases, while the rights to the original arcade game remain with the original creators (or a company that has succeeded the original creators and/or bought the rights), home ports were developed by different teams, meaning that the rights would, I assume (IANAL), be split between the original creators of the arcade game and whoever made the port. This is not a problem when those are one and the same — like the Double Dragon games, for example — but there are plenty of situations where the home versions of a game were made by a completely different company, or even an individual at times.

The takeaway I have from all this is something that I've thought for a while: in many cases, I actually prefer playing the home conversions of games to the original arcade versions, even when the arcade version is obviously technologically superior. There are several reasons for this: firstly, those home conversions are often a good example of what their host platforms are (and are not) capable of. Secondly, since home ports are not obliged to keep people feeding coins into a machine, they are often balanced much better than their arcade counterparts. And this, in turn, makes them considerably more enjoyable to play.

Because there absolutely are arcade games out there that take "quarter-munching" way too far. I adore the beat 'em up genre, for example, but I'd much rather play Streets of Rage 2 than the arcade version of Final Fight, simply because Streets of Rage 2 is balanced much more fairly — and the beat 'em up genre appears particularly prone to this issue. The same is true for any sort of competitive game with a "1P vs COM" mode, be it a fighting game or a puzzle game. In their arcade incarnations, these tend to become absolutely impossible after just one or two levels, whereas in their home incarnations, they tend to save their biggest bullshit for their final challenges. Still annoying at times, yes — particularly in puzzle games, where final bosses tend to have superhuman capabilities as well as, more often than not, ways to "cheat" — but a little less galling than only being able to get through two or three stages before having to wipe your score and "Continue?"

Thankfully, while official licensors are seemingly hesitant to let those often flawed ports back out into the wild when one can just emulate the arcade version on a veritable toaster of a machine these days, one can make use of alternative means to enjoy them through software emulation or FPGA solutions. And I would encourage everyone to do so, because while everyone will inevitably have a preference as to which version of something is "best", it's worth exploring those versions rather than simply assuming the most technologically advanced version is automatically the most enjoyable.

Now, I think I might give Gauntlet on the NES a bit of a go for myself!

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#oneaday Day 486: Investing in retro the right way

I've talked about this once or twice before, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. I firmly believe that we've reached a point in time where collecting retro games is impractical, undesirable and inconvenient.

Don't get me wrong; there will always be an appeal to having original hardware and original media, and I don't begrudge anyone their choice to build up a substantial retro collection. I also think it's a bit sad that we've reached the stage we're at now. But with the absurd, exploitative prices that are being charged for both systems and media today — coupled with the fact that there's no real guarantee either of those things will actually work when you get them — I am very much a convert to the school of thought that says you're better off spending the money you would have spent on one copy of Rule of Rose for the PlayStation 2 on ways to get a "modern retro" setup up and running.

There are many ways you can do this. The absolute simplest way is to buy retro rereleases, either on modern platforms that you happen to own, or with specialist devices such as mini consoles or, of course, the Evercade. There are many benefits to these modern rereleases, such as bugfixes of games that shipped in a dodgy state back in the day, modern convenience features such as save states, rewind functions and in-game reference material, plus the fact they're generally a whole lot cheaper than buying the original releases and still fun to collect. If you were to buy all the games on the recently released NEOGEO Arcade 1 cartridge for Evercade in their original format, you'd be talking four figures. The cart is twenty quid. Do, as Atari once said, the math.

The only downside to officially licensed rereleases is that those licenses are sometimes hard to come by — or even completely impossible. Don't expect to see too many rereleases of racing games with licensed cars or licensed soundtracks, for example. Don't expect to see movie licenses making a return, either. But you might be surprised what licensors are still willing to play ball with, as the Evercade library to date shows.

Another relatively straightforward way is to devote a PC or similar device (like a Raspberry Pi, Steam Deck or Chinese gaming handheld) to it and install a suitable suite of emulators and organisation tools.

For Windows PCs that you also want to do other things, I would recommend Launchbox (even if they took to using odious AI images in their promotional emails of late), as this is not only a good means of organising all the games you might want to play, it also automatically retrieves additional information like box art, descriptions and even PDF copies of manuals where possible. The paid version also has a "Big Box" mode where the interface is designed to be used with a controller on a TV.

For other devices that are going to be dedicated to retro gaming, I highly recommend Batocera, which is a Linux distribution, but don't run away scared. It's all preconfigured to work in a similar fashion to something like Launchbox, and is pretty straightforward to get games up and running in. It's also highly customisable, so you can make the whole thing look and feel how you want it to.

The relative "luxury option", particularly if you still have a CRT knocking around that you want to use for the authentic look and feel, is MiSTer. As I've alluded to in a few posts recently, the absolute easiest way to get started with this is with a prebuilt device like the Multisystem 2 (my device of choice) or the upcoming SuperStation One. Alternatively, you can built your own — that's nowhere near as scary as it sounds, and it allows you a tad more customisability, though with the pricing of the Multisystem 2 and SuperStation One it's actually cheaper to buy one of those prebuilt options in a lot of cases — though note you will still need to provide accessories and storage.

If you're lucky enough to still have working classic hardware around, the first thing I recommend you do is investing in a modern power supply for them. My Mega Drive was prone to rolling noise on the screen with its original power supply, but replacing it gave a completely stable, flicker-free picture.

Once you've done that, invest in an EverDrive. Cheaper flashcart options exist, but EverDrives are premium products that support pretty much everything you might want to play on a piece of classic hardware. Not only that, in the case of systems that had add-ons, they can simulate the presence of the add-on, too — for example, the Mega EverDrive Pro can run Mega CD games.

For classic home computers, flashcarts are also available, or there are also plenty of media emulators you can use to "trick" the computer into believing it's using a real floppy drive or tape deck. For the Atari 8-bit, for example, I enjoyed using the SDrive-MAX device, which allows you to load executable files, disk images and tape images from an SD card. Similar devices are available for most classic computer platforms.

I won't lie; it's easy to spend a few hundred quid on this stuff — possibly even over a thousand. But once you're done, you have a great setup for what is, after all, the important bit of being interested in retro games: actually playing the games. And the kit you have will play pretty much anything without you having to pay some rando on eBay a three-figure sum just to play one game.

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#oneaday Day 485: Forgetful

Missed yesterday. I have no excuse, I just forgot. You can blame Final Fantasy Tactics or God. I did make some videos and write about Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, though. You can read that here.

Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm really impressed with the new The Ivalice Chronicles version. I wasn't initially sold on the new look of the "remastered" mode, but seeing it in action makes it make a lot more sense than still screenshots might suggest. There's a nice almost "fabric"-like texture to everything, which makes the game sort of look like it's unfolding on a tapestry, which is entirely appropriate for the nature of the narrative it's telling.

The biggest upgrade by far is the full voice acting. I remember back in the PlayStation 1 era thinking that it was a bit sad, if understandable, that big games like RPGs didn't have full voice acting. The reality is that the voice data for a game as big as Final Fantasy Tactics probably wouldn't fit on a CD! We have no such constraints today, however, so a fully voiced Final Fantasy Tactics is a thing of wonder, and there's an incredible voice cast doing their thing with the excellent War of the Lions script from the PSP version — definitely an upgrade from the borderline nonsensical PS1 original.

The game is still just as hard as it ever was, though. It will absolutely kick your ass if you don't take a bit of time to buff up your characters — and you still need to use a solid strategy during the missions themselves, even if you've levelled up a bit and got good equipment. The computer-controlled "Guest" characters are still as dimwitted as ever, unfortunately, which can lead to some annoying situations, but you can just look at it as these characters being true to their personalities. I can't say I was sorry any time Argath got knocked out.

One of the little things I like the most is the fact that all your "cannon fodder" party members — i.e. the ones who aren't directly relevant to the story — have their own voices, too. And rather than having just one male voice and one female voice, there are actually several, so your individual, "unimportant" characters each have their own personality, which helps you become attached to them. And, given that Final Fantasy Tactics has permadeath (albeit a somewhat forgiving take on it, where you have a few turns to resurrect them before they're gone forever) that's an important part of the experience.

I'm not far into the game as yet, but I'm enjoying it a lot, and I suspect I will get a lot more out of it now than when I played it back in the day. It's a truly great game, and I'm thrilled that it's got a new release — and a release in Europe, which it never had back in the day!

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