#oneaday Day 426: Dear me, I was...

Having finished No Sleep for Kaname Date, which I will try and make some time to do a proper write-up of soon, I decided, this evening, to play through Dear me, I was… from Arc System Works, a Switch 2 wordless visual novel type thing that is less than an hour long, and which I was pretty certain was going to be an emotional gutpunch. Sometimes you need a good one of those, and Dear me, I was… certainly delivers on that front.

I shan't say too much about the details of the game because, as I say, it's very short, and it's the sort of thing best experienced for yourself — so long as you're open to the idea of what is basically a short animated film with occasional very minor (but nonetheless meaningful in the context of the story) interactions.

The concept is simple: the game follows the life of an unnamed woman, from her earliest childhood memories up to her old age. Each chapter represents a particular part of her life, with each opening with one of the few interactive sequences in the game: her eating breakfast. It's surprising quite how much meaning is layered into these simple sequences, whether it's the way her breakfast evolves as she ages, or little things like how her child self leaves the tomatoes on the side of her plate.

Dear me, I was… is one of those games that is probably going to mean different things to different people, but at its core it's a story about the protagonist's relationship with art, and how she uses it to help process her emotions, connect with other people and reflect on her past. A number of things happen to our leading lady over the course of her life, many of which are rather mundane, but nonetheless meaningful to her as an individual. Some things are left a little ambiguous and open to interpretation, which will doubtless help each individual player to connect with the complete work in their own way, and other things are obvious, indisputable truths, but aren't dwelled on.

I feel like part of the point of the game as a whole is to reflect on the idea that life passes you by before you know it; while, when you're young, you might feel like an eternity stretches ahead of you, as you get older, things definitely feel like they start to accelerate in some ways. Sometimes this makes difficult events from the past easier to let go of or at least reflect on; at others, it makes it all the harder to process things.

The game definitely got me feeling things, and absolutely tearing up at numerous points throughout. I'm not sure I could tell you exactly what was making me feel the various emotions I felt over the course of the game, but it's testament to the game's excellent use of visuals and music to tell its wordless story that I felt those things at all. Of particular note is its use of colour; events unfold in three distinct "styles" as a reflection of the emotion of what is happening at any given moment — or perhaps the protagonist's mental state and feelings — and it hits surprisingly hard when, say, the colour fades from the world, and everything starts to be represented in shades of grey, or even just line art. Likewise, it's almost a relief when you see the beautiful watercolours return; a reflection of how everyone's life is full of ups and downs, and the only person who can truly understand one's own feelings is oneself.

To say too much more would probably be getting into spoiler territory, so I'll leave that there for now. Suffice to say that if you're the slightest bit open to video games as a storytelling medium — don't expect any sort of "mechanics", puzzles or challenge here — this is an essential play. Absolutely one of the most beautiful things I've experienced for quite some time, and highly recommended to those who like this sort of thing.

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 408: Don't spoil yourself

One thing that I've become quite frustrated with in the last 10 years or so is the prevalence of "guide content" on video game websites. Guides and walkthroughs have always been a thing, of course, and I completely understand why sites feel the need to get guides up day-one when a big new video game comes out: they are freshly-squeezed, ready-mixed SEO juice just waiting to be taken advantage of, and if you're a site that makes the majority of its money from ad impressions, you would probably be foolish not to take advantage of the immediate thirst for knowledge that comes with the release of a new game.

Now, I won't be hypocritical and say I've never looked at a guide for a game. Some games, one feels, were designed in such a way that looking at a guide — particularly the Official Strategy Guide, back when those were still a thing — is near-essential if you want to see everything that the game has to offer. Take something like Final Fantasy VII's chocobo breeding, for example; while you probably could work all that out yourself, it would take a very long time to do so, and it would be hard not to end up resenting the time you'd spent on failed experiments.

But I feel like the deliberate, immediate posting of Guide Content the second a new game releases is destroying the sense of wonderment and discovery we should have with a brand new game. Hell, game developers themselves are absolutely spoiling their own games — one can't help but feel that Pauline's reveal in Donkey Kong Bananza would be a thousand times more impactful if we hadn't had it completely spoiled weeks in advance by Nintendo's own trailers — but all Guide Content does, for me, is instil a sense of FOMO, and that one should be playing the game as "efficiently" as possible. Consume content until next product, then get excited for new product, or whatever the quote was.

I've been deliberately trying to avoid looking at guides for Donkey Kong Bananza while I'm playing it, and I'm having a good time doing so. Of course, the game featuring a "checklist" of all the things you have and haven't found also instils that same sense of FOMO, even though you absolutely do not need to "find everything" in order to 1) have a good time with or 2) beat Donkey Kong Bananza. As such, I've found it very hard to resist just sneaking a peek at a guide or two just to fill in the few frustrating spaces I have left in my list. But that stops here and now! I'm going to get through the rest of the game at my own pace, and then use the game's own built-in features — you can buy maps with the in-game gold to show you where the collectibles are, but you still have to determine how to get there yourself — to finish the game to my own satisfaction.

Games shouldn't feel like work, and the risk you run when having a guide by your side at all times is turning them into a chore. Games like Donkey Kong Bananza, Zelda and suchlike are made to be enjoyed, savoured, experienced at the player's own pace; you absolutely lose something if all you do is immediately look up where everything is.

I will add at this point that none of this is to take away from the sterling work good guide creators do. IGN's guides are particularly impressive, featuring interactive maps and checklists so those who do want to play the game in that way can not only read the guide, but also mark off their progress. I just wish there weren't so many of them, and that looking up information for a game around launch didn't immediately bombard you with the temptation to spoil the shit out of it for yourself.

I guess it's all about self-control. GameFAQs has been a thing almost as long as the Internet has, after all; all that's happened now is that commercial sites are using guides to juice their own SEO. Which makes commercial sense, but also, speaking as someone who was laid off from a publication and immediately plonked on "Guide Content" duty to keep him out of trouble during his notice period, is immensely demoralising and frustrating to see.

There are amazing writers out there crying out for opportunities to do good criticism and analysis. And yet it feels like nine opportunities out of every ten posted online in the games biz these days are to be a "guides editor" — a job that, in most cases, is underpaid, utterly thankless and easy to blame if the site's traffic figures aren't where they should be.

Anyway, back to Donkey Kong Bananza. Without a guide.

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#oneaday Day 406: Kong for me

My copy of Donkey Kong Bananza arrived today, and I've spent most of the evening playing it. It's really good! As with most things video game-related, I'll likely do a full write-up on MoeGamer once I've beaten it, but for now I wanted to give a few immediate impressions based on a few hours' play this evening.

The first thing I'll note is that in exploratory games, I am almost certainly absolutely insufferable to watch, because I will never go straight for where I'm "supposed" to go. You drop me into a discrete level, the first thing I will do will be turn around and see if there's anything behind the starting point. I will deliberately run off in the opposite direction to any objective markers, and in many cases find myself running into obstacles well before the game considers that I'm "supposed" to encounter them, often resulting in me having to work out how to use controls that haven't been explained to me yet — or in some cases, finding creative exploits to overcome obstacles without the player's full toolset available.

The reason I note this is because Super Mario Odyssey, the spiritual precursor to Donkey Kong Bananza (they're by the same people), was absolutely built for me. At every point I went climbing around the levels into places I wasn't "supposed" to be going, I'd find a Moon waiting for me, rewarding my curiosity. It felt like the game's designers had anticipated players like me exploring the game to the fullest, and they had ensured that there were plenty of rewarding things available if you did choose to play that way.

Donkey Kong Bananza is, it will doubtless not surprise you to learn, exactly the same. Only this time, you have the option of pummelling a significant portion of the level geometry into oblivion while hunting for hidden secrets. While bashing a tunnel through a mountain often isn't the best way to get somewhere — and the game does have enough "indestructible" materials to mean you can't just dig your way around the whole map — it is often an option. If you have a general idea of where to go but are struggling to find the route you're "supposed" to take… just make your own. Nine times out of ten, you can do that.

Another Nintendo series that I'm very fond of due to it catering to my very worst, most obsessive tendencies in this regard, is Splatoon. While the various single-player campaigns in the Splatoon games and their DLC were all discrete, relatively small levels, they again rewarded player curiosity and willingness to diverge considerably from the critical path. There's some of that DNA in Donkey Kong Bananza, too, because as well as the large, quasi-open world "layers" you explore for the majority of the game, there are also a variety of special challenge missions that you access through special doorways and hatches around the place.

While the combat-centric challenges are usually pretty straightforward — and there's usually a "trick" to each one to complete it efficiently — the more "platformy" challenges typically have three Banandium Gems, the game's main doohickey, to find. Two of these will usually be straightforward: there's usually one at about the halfway point of the challenge and one at the end, the other one is typically concealed a little more deviously. You'll need to peer over the edge of levels, look under things and get creative with your exploration, just like tracking down the optional objectives in Splatoon campaign levels. And it's great.

So yeah. I'm having a lovely time so far. Down to the second "layer" now — didn't quite get all the bananas in the Lagoon layer, but I think I was only missing about four or five in total, so I'll go back for them at some point. That's my weekend sorted, I guess!

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#oneaday Day 405: No Kong for me

I was hoping to have been playing Donkey Kong Bananza for several hours by this point in my life, but sadly, it seems the Royal Mail have let me down. Despite my copy having been shipped from Nintendo HQ on Monday, it is currently milling around the North West Midlands mail centre, and has been since yesterday. Joy!

Still, no biggie. As my wife said earlier, at no point will I look back on my life and wish I'd had the chance to play Donkey Kong Bananza a day earlier than I actually got to. Assuming I don't die or lose the use of my hands tomorrow, obviously.

Anyway, I spent much of the evening playing Scar-Lead Salvation, a third-person shooter roguelike-esque thing from Compile Heart. This arrived along with Death end re;Quest Code Z a few weeks back and I gave it a quick go one evening when I fancied playing something a bit different. Honestly I wasn't super taken with it from that first session, but playing it this evening feels like it's "clicked" somewhat.

I'll write in more depth about it over on MoeGamer when I've beaten the main story mode — it looks as if that involves two runs through the game, but since there are only three main "areas" to progress through, that shouldn't be too bad, assuming the difficulty level doesn't ramp up too drastically. Which it's entirely possible that it might, what with this being a game with somewhat vaguely roguelike tendencies.

What Scar-Lead Salvation is at heart is a game about spotting enemy patterns and then successfully dealing with them, sometimes with several going off at the same time. Each enemy type has a very distinctive silhouette that you will come to associate with its distinctive attack pattern, and success in the game involves knowing what each enemy is going to do — and how to handle it. This involves a bit of target prioritisation, a bit of careful aiming and a bit of nimble dodging. It's not a particularly out-of-the-ordinary combination of elements, but it works well, the controls are tight and responsive and the encounters are satisfying.

Where the game falls down a tad is in its environments, which are drab and boring, albeit thematically appropriate for the narrative, which I won't get into right now. This isn't a game where "exploring" is particularly fun — largely because, so far, each level has been a completely linear path, and I don't yet know if that changes — but, to be fair to it, it sets expectations pretty clearly up front that the main focus here is going to be the combat and the progression, and both of those aspects are pretty good.

Anyway, like I say, I'll have more to say on that once I've actually beaten it — though if Donkey Kong Bananza arrives tomorrow, that will delay any completion efforts significantly — so please look forward to that. In the meantime, if you like third-person shooting with shoot 'em up-style bullet patterns to deal with, consider giving Scar-Lead Salvation a look. It won't knock your socks off or anything — it is a Compile Heart game, after all — but it is pretty solid at its core.

Now, since I spent much longer than I intended playing it this evening — told you it "clicked" — I should probably go to bed. I will almost certainly feel like death in the morning, given that it's nearly 1am, but I feel like death every morning, so I guess it doesn't matter all that much. Either way, I'm off to bed now, so there.

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#oneaday Day 401: Kountdown to Kong

I'm looking forward to playing Donkey Kong Bananza. I say this as someone who has always found Donkey Kong himself to be one of Nintendo's least appealing characters, and who has never played any Donkey Kong games past Donkey Kong 3. Yes, that's right; I am a bad enough person to have never played any Donkey Kong Country games, nor did I ever play Donkey Kong 64 back in the day — although there are, I'm sure, some who would say that, DK Rap notwithstanding, I dodged a bullet on that one.

But I'm finding a lot appealing about Donkey Kong Bananza. Chief among this is the fact that it's the Super Mario Odyssey team working on it, and Super Mario Odyssey was superb. Not only was it simply an excellent Super Mario game, but it also remains one of the most technically impressive, visually stunning Switch games. Given how good that game looked on the original Switch's underpowered hardware, I'm confident that Donkey Kong Bananza is going to be particularly pleasant to look at.

It also looks like it's going to be really fun. The super-destructive nature of the gameplay and the fact that you can seemingly smash the absolute shit out of each level is very appealing to me, but it seems like there's going to be plenty of depth and exploration, too. With the various special abilities and collectibles on offer, the game looks almost like it's going to hew closer to a Zelda than a Super Mario game — or perhaps it will be its own distinct thing, which I'm suspecting will be the most likely outcome.

The trailers so far have been pretty spectacular, too, and it sounds as if the music is going to be outstanding. Since the game features a teenage Pauline, whose song Jump Up Super Star! from Super Mario Odyssey was a real highlight of that game's soundtrack, I'm anticipating that there will be at least a few vocal numbers, and indeed the trailers would appear to back that up. In fact, and this feels like a very strange thing to say about Donkey Kong, it looks like this game might actually be quite emotionally engaging.

To be clear, Nintendo is absolutely capable of making a game that can grab you in the feels and make you cry. It's just the absolute last place I would expect to encounter such a game would be in the Donkey Kong series — but you watch the most recent trailers and listen to the soundtrack revealed so far and you tell me that there won't be at least a couple of tearjerker moments throughout.

On top of all that, if the Nintendo eShop is to be believed, the whole thing fits into just 10GB, which is dinky wee tiny by modern game standards, particularly on a 4K-capable console. (For context, Super Mario Odyssey is 5.7GB, so if Donkey Kong Bananza is a project on a similar scale, being roughly twice the file size would track considering the jump in hardware generations. For further comparison's sake, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is about 15GB, as is Xenoblade Chronicles X.)

Given modern triple-A games typically break the 70-100GB boundary these days — and even smaller-scale affairs such as the Tony Hawk remakes are pushing 40GB — it's impressive to see what Nintendo is apparently capable of with a fraction of that file size. Because I'm willing to bet that 10GB will have plenty of substance to it.

Having finished the Switch version of Link's Awakening today, I now have a few days to burn prior to Donkey Kong Bananza arriving. Perhaps it's high time I actually tried some of those older Kong games…?

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#oneaday Day 398: I just want to buy the game

Yesterday, I happened to watch the Giant Bomb folks playing through the new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, and thought it looked like fun, so I thought I might actually buy it.

So I looked on Amazon to track down physical copies, and every single version available was marked with a bit "INTERNET REQUIRED. CONTENT DOWNLOAD NEEDED". The Nintendo Switch 2 version didn't even have a game cartridge — yes, they eschewed even the odious Game-Key Card system in favour of the even more pointless Code in a Box format.

This is frustrating, because we're seeing this happening more and more, and it concerns me greatly. While I've bought a fair amount of digital stuff on PC largely because it's the only option to buy pretty much anything now, I'm still very wary of consoles going digital-only or at least digital-centric, because it, of course, raises the question of how long those games are actually going to last.

I'm not talking about online servers remaining up so people can play multiplayer or check their rankings on leaderboards. I'm talking about the game just being straight-up playable. Like, if I were to buy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 on PS5 or Switch 2 digitally, sure, I could keep it on my storage device theoretically indefinitely, but at some point with the size of today's games, I'd likely need to uninstall it to make room for something else. If, then, I decide maybe 10 or 20 years down the line that I'd actually quite like to play it again… will I still be able to download it and reinstall it?

You may think that sounds silly, but considering that there are 40+ year old games that I still play on a regular basis, I don't think that's especially ridiculous.

Thus far, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have kept digital downloads available for "dead" platforms, even when they've closed the actual storefronts. You can still download things you bought on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii, Wii U, 3DS and Xbox 360 — you just can't buy things any more. (Though there is a kind of sort of loophole with PS3 and Vita — if you add credit via the Web, you can actually still buy things; you just can't pay on your console any more.)

This is vaguely encouraging, but how long will it really last? At some point, presumably, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are going to want to turn off the servers that maybe double- or triple-digit numbers of people are using each year, and that'll be that; those games will just be gone. At that point, one would hope, the pirates will have likely "preserved" them in an unofficial capacity, but when it comes to that, you start getting into a territory where games aren't exactly "plug and play" any more. I can still pop in anything from the Atari 2600 to PlayStation 2 era and, assuming the media itself is still in working order, play the game contained therein. For the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era onwards, things start to get a little more dicey; from the PS4/Xbox One era they get a lot dicey.

I guess there comes a point where one has to consider whether they are buying games to enjoy now — in which case whether or not they're still playable in 10, 20 or more years doesn't really matter all that much — or if they're building a library that can continue to be enjoyed for many years to come. I have, up until now, very much fallen into the latter category, and old habits die hard. But from the moment I preordered the Switch 2 I found myself wondering if I'm going to be forced into changing the way I think about things.

I don't know if I'm going to buy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 as yet. If I do, it'll be a digital version, because there's absolutely no point purchasing a physical version which doesn't actually contain the game. I guess the only question I need to reconcile in my head is if I care enough about this to take a principled stand and "vote with my wallet", as it were, or just to suck it up and enjoy the game while I can.

Oh well, Donkey Kong Bananza is out in a week, and that is on a proper physical cart, so that's something, at least.

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#oneaday Day 396: The purity of early gaming

I consider myself quite fortunate in that I'm able to enjoy a full spectrum of video gaming, ranging from the very earliest titles up to the most modern releases. The only part of gaming that really leaves me cold is multiplayer-centric titles — I just find they don't hold my interest in the long term.

I feel particularly blessed to be able to enjoy stuff from the early '80s, because I know the primitive presentation of stuff from this era can be a turnoff to some. But I absolutely love it; settle me down in front of a bunch of Atari 2600 or Intellivision games — or, indeed, home computer games from the era — and I can quite happily fill an evening just as well as I could playing a modern, complex title.

As I've grown older and spent a significant portion of my life writing about and making videos about games, particularly those from this early era, I feel like I have a solid appreciation for simple but solid design, and games that are inherently designed to be highly replayable. Sure, you can't "finish" a lot of these games in the same way as modern titles, and to some that's inherently less satisfying, but you have to look at them a bit differently.

Take one of my favourite games of all time, River Raid, for example. River Raid is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up that, in theory, goes on forever. You can't "beat" River Raid. But you can develop a sense of satisfaction from attaining a high score, or reaching a particular level when starting from the beginning, or overcoming a specific challenge that has given you grief for a while.

But it's not even about making progress sometimes. Sometimes it's just about engaging with an inherently pleasing experience. The best early '80s games feel good to play. They achieve this through good handling, effective presentation, a feeling of fairness, and plenty of other elements besides. I enjoy playing Night Stalker on Intellivision not in pursuit of high scores, but simply because it feels nice to play it.

So with that in mind, for this trip down to the office and the accompanying overnight stay — this time at my parents' house because my usual hotel was fully booked — I've brought nothing but early '80s fun to occupy myself. And before I head off to sleep, I think I'll enjoy a round or two of some all-time favourites. Maybe some Cloudy Mountain to start off…?

#oneaday Day 394: Motivation located

I finally got together the motivation and energy to make some videos, which you'll be seeing over the course of the next little while over on YouTube. I made four in total, which I'm pleased with, as that means I don't need to be in a rush to make any more for a little while. Not that I ever "need" to be in a rush, but I've felt in a bit of a rut with the channel recently, and have really struggled with motivation.

Not so today, though! I think it helped that it's rained a fair bit over the last few days, and that's cooled things down a bit, meaning it's not quite so unbearable to just exist. It's amazing quite how much energy a bit of heat can sap from you; I'm sure I could have probably mustered up some energy to do something vaguely productive if I really cared that much, but I think the "break" also did me a bit of good and revitalised my enthusiasm for some of the things I want to cover.

Today's videos see me returning to the Atari 8-bit for the first time in a while. Every time I come back to the humble 8-bit after spending a bit of time away, I'm reminded how much I love that system. Seeing its fonts is like coming home; it's a comforting, warm blanket that makes me feel thoroughly pleasant. I'm sure part of this is nostalgia talking, but I do genuinely mean it when I say I find it a comfort. I got to know the Atari 8-bit and its capabilities so well when I was a child fiddling around with Atari BASIC that just the sight of half-height, double-width Graphics 1 characters is enough to make me smile today. Throw in the games I grew up playing, and, well, that's a happy place I feel like I should probably spend some more time in, judging by how much I enjoyed today's recording session.

The games I covered today are Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mountain King and Stealth. There was no particular reason for picking these, aside from knowing that Donkey Kong Bananza is on the way for Nintendo Switch, so I thought it would be fun to look at the "Nintendo on Atari" games; Mountain King I chose because I happened to rewatch Classic Game Room's review of the 2600 version the other day, and Stealth… I can't quite remember what brought that to mind recently, but it's a game I've always loved. Or, perhaps more accurately, I always loved its prototype version, Landscape, which we had on one of our Big Box of Pirated Disks that everyone had back in the 8-bit era.

I haven't published any of the videos yet, but make sure you're subscribed over on YouTube if you want to see them when they go up. I'll likely put one up tomorrow, and the rest over the course of the next little while. I have my monthly trip to the office on Tuesday night to Wednesday this coming week, so that will be… fun, probably? I don't relish the long drive every time I have to do this visit, but it is always nice to see everyone. Unfortunately I don't get to stay in a hotel this time because the usual place I book was full up this time around, and the local Travelodge wanted £120. I'm not paying over a hundred quid to stay in a fucking Travelodge, particularly with how they've repeatedly fucked up bookings I've tried to make with them in recent months. So anyway. I will be staying with my parents and delivering my Dad his belated Father's Day gift, which I inadvertently delivered to myself instead. Whoops.

Anyway, videos are uploaded, eyelids are drooping and it's a school night so I guess I better get to bed. Enjoy the vids once they're up!

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#oneaday Day 391: Step out of my Game Room

Every now and then, I like to hit the "Random Post" button on this site and see what I was writing about at some point in the past, be it a few weeks ago or, in some cases, years ago.

Today, the Random Post button threw up this post from early in my first run around the #oneaday track. For those too lazy to click (I know you are, everyone is these days), it was a post about the then-imminent arrival of Game Room on the Xbox 360, and some feelings of positivity towards the whole thing.

For the unfamiliar, Game Room was a piece of software for the Xbox 360 that allowed you to kit out a virtual arcade and populate it with not only virtual tat, but also real games. The software was free, but in order to get any real use out of it, you had to buy either individual games or bundles of games. These games could then be placed into your arcade as "machines" that you could go and play, and, in an attempt to get people to care about Xbox Avatars, you could sometimes see virtual representations of people from your friends list wandering around and playing the games.

What was rather interesting about Game Room for me at the time was the fact that it included not only arcade games — which we already had a few of in downloadable form via Xbox Live Arcade — but also Atari 2600 and Intellivision console games. I had a passing familiarity with some 2600 hits at the time, but Intellivision was completely alien to me, so I was fascinated by the prospect of discovering some new favourites from the dawn of gaming.

There were a lot of objections to Game Room prior to its release, though. Indeed, that post was partially in response to a post on the official Xbox forums (RIP), where an Xbox player called "A Patch of Blue" described the upcoming programme as "a shameless attempt to siphon off Microsoft Points by dumping regurgitated content into our laps with a pretty bow on it". Their primary objections were that the games cost an equivalent of $3 each (a bit tight, I feel) and also that "guests" in your arcade could only play a game once before having to pay-per-play to the tune of 40 Microsoft Points (approximately 50 cents) unless they went away and bought it themselves.

Here's part of my response:

The biggest concern people have with digital distribution is that one day, your content will be switched off and, despite having paid for it, you’ll no longer be able to use it. This is a fair concern, as no-one likes splashing the cash on things that they won’t be able to use at some point in the future – but when you think about it, in the world of tech, this is nothing unusual. Products come and go, specifications increase, chipsets change – and at some point it’s necessary to leave the old behind. Did people complain that the Amiga wasn’t backwards-compatible with the Commodore 64? Do music enthusiasts complain that it’s getting harder and harder to find a cassette deck to play those old albums that you only bought on cassette because they were cheaper?

Well, yes, they probably do, but that’s beside the point. What I guess I’m trying to say is this: isn’t the “built-in obsolescence” of digital distribution the same thing? I have a stack of PC games in a box here, some of which it isn’t possible to run any more. Okay, maybe with some tweaking and playing with software like DOSBox it’s possible to get it going – but to a (for want of a better word) “casual” user, they’re defunct and obsolete. The only difference with potentially expiring digitally distributed products is that there’s no workaround like DOSBox. Once the content’s gone, it’s gone. And yes, that’s not a great thing, but it’s not something to be surprised about.

Oh, dear 2010 Pete. How silly you were. How foolish. How you should have probably listened to A Patch of Blue. Because you can't play anything you bought for Game Room any more, can you? No, you can't, because they switched the servers off, and that means, for some reason, you can't play any of the stuff you paid for.

Actually, I do maintain that Game Room was a lot of fun while it lasted. In particular, I adored the real-time leaderboards, because it was a genuine game-changer in stuff like River Raid for 2600 to see yourself climbing the rankings as you played. No-one has done anything quite like it since; even Hamster's otherwise excellent Arcade Archives releases on modern platforms only update the leaderboards after you've completed a run and specifically told it to update your score.

That sort of stuff, being server-driven, obviously couldn't last forever. But completely switching off the entire application, meaning you could no longer play anything, even single-player stuff with no leaderboard functionality, was kind of shitty, and I'm still a tad bitter about it.

Game Room was a great idea for numerous reasons. As I point out in that post from 2010, Game Room was the first real attempt to put out a fully legal, officially licensed, console-based multiplatform "emulator for the common man" system out there. There was no faffing around with configuration, no diving into dodgy ROM sites looking for the games you wanted. You just fired it up, bought the stuff you wanted, played, and enjoyed the features it offered. It's unfortunate that it's no longer accessible, as there was no "end of life" plan beyond "just turn it off".

These days, we have other options for officially licensed ways to play classic games, including my place of work, the aforementioned Arcade Archives series, compilations for modern platforms and numerous other products. Most of these have been designed in such a way that they will continue to function indefinitely — assuming you have them downloaded, in the case of digital products like the Arcade Archives games — which is an improvement over Game Room's completely closed, proprietary and online-dependent ecosystem.

I still miss Game Room, though. I'd love to see someone take its really good ideas — chief among them that real-time leaderboard thing — and run with them in a way that's a bit more considerate to players over the long term, and compliant with things like the Stop Killing Games initiative.

Hell, this sort of thing is the exact situation Stop Killing Games is seeking to prevent happening again: it's not saying that Microsoft would have needed to run things like the leaderboard servers indefinitely, because obviously that's not practical or cost-effective. But in an ideal world, I'd still be able to open up Game Room today and still play all the games I bought to use with it. As it stands, the money I spent on it — and I seem to remember I spent a fair bit on it — now has absolutely nothing to show for it.

So yeah, 2010 Pete. I admire your optimism, but I'm sorry to say that it was misplaced. Still, I know you enjoyed it while it lasted, so it's not a complete loss. But I hope you learned your lesson.

I did.

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#oneaday Day 382: Time for another stream of consciousness

I have, as is my habit, left this far too late as usual, and I have been unable to come up with a decent topic to write about, so as normal for situations like this, I am just going to start typing and see where things go from there.

I say that; I've written and deleted some paragraphs several times prior to typing this one. The reason is that this evening I've been engaging with a creative work that a number of people I know have been hyping up for a while and… I'm just sort of not feeling it. I could go into depth about why, but honestly I just don't think I want to; I don't want to upset anyone, and I know how I feel when people make negative remarks about something that is important to me. So I think this might just be something that I shake my head, decide it wasn't for me, and set aside quietly without making a big deal about.

As I say this, I'm conscious of someone I saw on Bluesky earlier saying that people shouldn't be afraid to say negative things, because we "need critics". This person's justification for saying such things was that he was one of the few people who gave Death Stranding 2: On the Beach a negative review, whereas it has been garnering near-universal praise otherwise.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Criticism can be helpful, yes, but it can — and often is — hurtful, particularly in games media, where a lot of writers simply don't have a background in an academic approach to criticism and analysis. We've all had a good giggle at a terrible game getting an absolute panning from a reviewer, I'm sure, but as the years have gone by, I've started to find this less and less amusing. All too often I've seen a game that has worthwhile things to talk about boiled down to "hurr bad game funny", and all that does is drive the people who did enjoy that game into their own little bunkers, unable to have a meaningful discussion about it with others because "Metacritic says it's bad".

Hell, I've encountered this numerous times with people I know personally. On multiple occasions I have made a personal recommendation of something that I have enjoyed, bearing in mind the tastes of the person in question, only to be hit back with "well, but this review on [website] said it's not very good". At that point, the conversation was over. Joe Random writing a review on the Internet carried greater weight for this person than a recommendation from someone with whom they had an actual, personal connection.

Honestly, this kind of blows, and it's a big part of why if I find myself not liking something, I just don't really want to talk about it much. The most recent game for which this happened to me was Blue Prince; a critical darling by all accounts, and one which I did manage to successfully recommend to some "real" friends, but also a game that the more I tried to engage with, the more I became frustrated with. I penned one piece on the subject over on MoeGamer when I was still trying to make my mind up 100%, and left it at that. I'm glad others enjoyed Blue Prince, though, and I wasn't about to shit all over their enjoyment of it by charging in and saying how much I didn't like it.

So yeah. The thing I've been engaging with this evening I'm not going to name, and I'm not going to say any more about for the moment. I'm going to give it a bit more of a chance and then come to my own private conclusions. If those conclusions skew negative, I'll probably never speak of it again, but there's always the chance I'll learn to love it. Stranger things have happened.

Now, I'm off to bed. I was going to try and get an early night this evening after accidentally staying up until 1.30am playing Xenoblade Chronicles X last night, but I think I've missed the boat on "early". I can still settle for "timely" if I act now, though, so I bid you all good night!

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