Spindizzy arrives in 1986, the year of dominating maturity for the 8-bit micros in the UK. It’s a year of feverish explosion, of dizzying possibilities flooding the shelves on a weekly basis and of an industry rolling at optimum velocity. As such, it serves as a real emblem of the times: a steadfastly mature expression of particular 8-bit tropes and a bravura display of technical and design prowess. Its author, Paul Shirley, gains notability off the back of it, becoming one of the major names you’d see repeated in the videogame press of the day. If you’ve never heard of it, the premise is simple: explore and collect. You are an object in an environment. An environment you must navigate to collect items called jewels. Fully explore the environment and collect all the jewels and you’ve completed the game. However, working against you is a timed countdown, and any errors you make - falling off the environment, or falling from too great a height - will incur deductions from that time. At zero, it’s obviously going to be Game Over. Entering new rooms and picking up jewels add time to the countdown. It’s simple enough, but the magic is in the presentation and the kinetics, for it’s here that Paul lays out a style that’s both confident and familiar, yet worked with the right kind of precision to feel extremely correct.

Spindizzy is an isometric adventure, meaning it arranges its graphics with a projection view that can represent three dimensions on the two-dimensional surface of a TV screen. As is the common practice, it uses tiles of various shapes to build up environments screen-by-screen, connecting each single-screen layout together to form an expansive world. Stemming directly from the roots of all UK 8-bit isometry, Sandy White’s Ant Attack and the Stamper’s Knight Lore, Spindizzy takes this most beguilingly artificial of presentation modes to create a deliberately synthetic universe. Abstract in its geometry and visual style, it most obviously recalls Mark Cerny’s 1984 game, Marble Madness (yes, that Mark Cerny). Apparently, Paul Shirley denies ever seeing Marble Madness but I find that utterly preposterous given how close the aesthetics, geography and mechanics are.1 Marble Madness is a deliberately infuriating coin-guzzler that pits you as a marble navigating downwardly through pre-rendered racecourses. These come in a strikingly distinct abstract geometric aesthetic of square edges and hard-angled geography with stripes, grids and ellipses as surface textures. However the game has a cartoonish quality that softens its stark edges. The most obvious example being green meanies that flip-flop around with comedic menace and punitive outcomes should your marble fall foul their comically expandable mouths. Marble Madness is full of such touches, including marbles shattering if falling from too high, only for the resultant dust to be swept away by a conveniently-appearing dustpan and brush. The game is emphatically jovial. Spindizzy has none of that whimsy and instead pursues an austere sense of the minimal. As mentioned earlier, it has a focused purity and with the emphasis being on exploration and solving switch-based logic puzzles, the entire vibe of the piece is therefore much more cerebral and contemplative.

It’s in that vibe that Spindizzy is most magical. Somehow, Paul Shirley has created a starkly beautiful geometric universe where the aesthetic chimes in harmony with the mood of play, as if the realm of Marble Madness is some Disneyland theme park far off in the distance. Spindizzy has a textural richness that emerges from the game in action, of the component parts synthesising the synthetic, almost as if that’s the entire point of the exercise. As such, it carries a rare sense of the manufactured 80s as it lived and breathed in primary-coloured plastics and pastel artificial fibres. Spindizzy matches and evokes its era with its hard geometry and performative wireframing. The graphics are all bitmaps, but much like Marble Madness, it deliberately signals the grammar of the advanced computer imagery memeset: it demarks its occupiable space with grids and outlines, leaving monochromatic blankness for the void its structures exist within. That void changes colour arbitrarily as you switch from screen to screen, seemingly to allow shifting palettes to avoid visual monotony, but it only enhances this sense of the synthetic. The experience of exploring a deliberately abstract artifice feels extremely ‘80s, but also means the game can never fall short. Amidst a melee of compromised arcade conversions and vestigial attempts at reasonable animations, 1986 is a year of some virtuosity in the 8-bit bitmap art arena, but that sense of eternal inadequacy is ever present. The animation never quite matches the professional animated cartoon, the attempts at painterly representation only ever being vague gestures towards the photoreal. With Spindizzy’s deliberate artificiality we find something else - an aesthetic that perfectly fulfils. Even the invaders and the mobile cannon of Space Invaders are shorthands for things that are supposed to look professionally-drawn or even actually real, as showcased by repeated bits of supporting artwork and whatnot, and this applies to the vast majority of videogame graphics over the proceeding decade, but Spindizzy is not an approximation - it is absolutely being itself. Much like the holiest of sacred Affectionate Discourse texts, Mercenary, Spindizzy’s supporting artwork is an airbrushed representation of the game.2

When I played Spindizzy in period, I always felt immersed in its space first and foremost. The urge to explore was utterly instinctual, making it feel like the actual point of the game. It has an uncanny atmosphere of isolation in a perfected realm, which promotes an oddly calming sense of the zen. The idea of exploration without enemies, where the peril came from environmental navigation, feels just as fresh today as it did back in 1987, when I probably first played it. Interestingly, the game is mostly silent and this just adds to calmness. It feels oddly mature, a grown-up pursuit that violence-hungry children would bore of immediately, and which only the cultured and sophisticated would recognise as incredibly valuable. It’s fascinating that Paul Shirley felt that simply navigating the environment he constructed was sufficient challenge. Other ‘marble’ games - Bobby Bearing, Gyroscope etc - pitted the player against enemies. Ant Attack has its ants, even if its style of environment defines that vibe of the synthetic which Spindizzy excels at. To play it today would be to pick up a finely-wrought pocket universe of the past, and perhaps to prod at some of its easier areas to see what the fuss is about. Make no mistake - Spindizzy presents a formidable challenge to skill, bravery and patience, even by 1980s standards. It’s unforgiving, demanding hard sprints with certain death if you don’t brake at the right spot and plenty of seemingly insane blind leaps off the screen, with only your faith and wisdom to guide you to a safe landing on the next. The key benefit of isometric projection in videogames is the allowance of three dimensions of movement on a two-dimensional screen and despite arraying its world on a single level, there are plenty of screens that take full advantage of that extra dimension, with some arrangements bordering on artistic expression within its minimalist palette. Spindizzy exists almost as an example piece, a way of showing what the isometric projection brought to videogames beyond the shooting thrills of Zaxxon or the hopping antics of Q-Bert. Spindizzy doesn’t try to distract you from its space and its style of presenting it. Instead it draws your attention towards it, and focuses the mind on being in this unique place. Thinking now, Spindizzy feels more like an object than a game. A virtual sculpture, working as a celebration of its form. And in doing that so effortlessly, it absolutely earns its signature credential of being truly timeless.

[21]

Of course, Microsoft is the biggest villain here, with Sony plotting a sensibly devious path around Xbox’s fateful reckoning to deliver its own megatons, having meted out plenty of its own scything to Sony in-house development from 2024 onwards. Where Microsoft callously bludgeons the US game development community to death for the third year running, Sony instead merely kills the videogame disc.1 Rockstar announces a download-only launch for GTA VI. These three events, all coming in the middle of the year, mark out 2026 as particularly awful. Add to that the hitherto impossible prospect of videogame console hardware increasing in price as it ages and it genuinely feels like some bonkers inversion of reality has happened, as if some interdimensional asshole has fucked with the timeline and rewritten history. As we’re barely halfway through the year, I wonder what else could happen. Surely there’s enough commercial pressure for Future to consider shutting one - or more - of its three (3) print videogame magazines, or time for Nintendo to announce its end to physical carts while increasing digital prices on a daily basis because it enjoys a total monopoly over its platform, or maybe Rockstar will force a weekly dynamic-pricing surcharge to steal particular cars. Nothing is off the table, and nothing would seem to be beyond the pale.

I get a perverse thrill from wondering what the behemoths will fuck up next, or how craven their next predatory move will be. Like watching the US administration, the sense of individual powerlessness promotes a certain vibe of surrendering to the chaos of it all. I’m revelling in the laughable mess of outcomes that were entirely predictable, while taking a grimly dark pleasure at the exposure of gross incompetence that necessarily underlies acts like closing a multi-multi-multi-million-dollar game mere weeks after launch, or suddenly having to account for a fucking insane $75 billion gamble that didn’t pay off. 2026 seems to be the year that the results of a profit-obsessed, risk-averse kind of creative stasis born from flawed corporate strategies come home to roost. It’s the time when the churn feels its most churniest. I feel like an epoch is turning - especially with the closure of GAME earlier this year. That Sony announcement about the end of discs literally closes a circle, genuinely ends an era. The fragmentary dismantling of Microsoft’s greatest folly - buying a significant percentage of US game developers to drive Game Pass - feels like boardroom insanity of the true Ballmer vein and in itself, the end of a failed project that surely, run correctly, should have been a colossal success.

If there’s one twinkling star in the darkness to focus on, it’s the rise of audience-funded media and the cathartic thrill of watching truly independent critique going straight for the throat. In the past week, both Nathan Brown and Luke Plunkett have delivered entries ripe with the indignation of veterans watching the industry paying the price for executive hubris and goldrush trends. Nathan has simply had enough of this fucking bullshit and Luke expertly weaves the outrage around the supermassive blackhole of GTA VI’s mere presence as a grotesque figurehead for all of this - all the greed, the profligation, the casual dismissal of thousands of careers. Luke rages about GTA VI and the ire is simply delicious:

Note that I am not mourning this; if cowardice has been the defining trait of AAA gaming’s executive class for the past decade, then obscenity has come a close second. The fact Grand Theft Auto VI’s total spend will be over one billion dollars while everything else collapses around it is an embarrassment to Rockstar, publishers Take-Two and the entire medium of video games.

I get a smug sense of satisfaction out of this, having cast GTA VI as being of a decadent and corrupt billionaire class of its own, and Affectionate Discourse’s long history of attacking the AAA status quo doesn’t need repeating, but really it’s awesome to see my long-held sentiments explode across far more prominent media than my tawdry little rag. Nathan, who also enjoyed a comedically insane, incredibly American Reddit post for his labours, speaks directly to Microsoft, most pointedly landing on perhaps the most ludicrous line of Microsoft’s entire Xbox journey: the goal to have a billion daily players. To me, this line alone cements the ‘new management’ of Sharma et al as utterly ludicrous cartoons, very much in the post-Jobs, Muskian mould.2 The natural reaction to have to that is precisely what Nathan expresses:

What, then, are we to make of all this, beyond the rather self-evident fact that this bunch of sorry clowns are every bit as useless as their predecessors, and are if anything even worse? I genuinely do not get it.

The best bit of Nathan’s 385th newsletter is right at the end, and it would be unfair to spoil it here, so please go and read it, and don’t forget to subscribe. But yes, Nathan, I do not get it either. Personally I can only assume Asha isn’t stupid, so therefore I’m attributing all this to pure malice. I’ll happily subscribe to the idea that Jim Ryan went mental for service games and fucked it all up through the kind of incompetence that springs from unnecessary greed, and likewise I’ll happily believe Asha Sharma’s here as a smiling assassin to give Xbox one last chance to make trillions in profit (as soon as possible) before she quietly sets about euthanising the whole fucking thing within the next five years.

As I write, I’m recording bits for my next podcast episode which is - spoiler alert - all about videogame magazines. But I open up with the notion that when I was born, teenagers couldn’t walk into a shop and buy new games or videogame magazines off the shelf. When my kids are teenagers, there’s a decent chance they’ll be in exactly the same boat. It took half a century, but it’s a cycle that seems near to completion, with the last few years of failing AAA and Sony-Microsoft strategic rationalisations feeling like the slow-motion apocalypse for a particular kind of mainstream videogaming commerce. If the PlayStation 5 generation is to be defined by anything, it’s the sense that a once soaring arc has bent beyond the gentle plateau of the PlayStation 4 era and is curving inward and downward, on a trajectory filled with third-person slashers, HD remakes and exorbitant failed gambits to chase flash-in-the-pan successes. It’s the first generation where I think the consumer is worse off as it ends, and the first generation where things - genres, developers, game series, physical media - came to actually die. A time marked not by flourishing catalogues of exciting new horizons, but of vast corporate acquisitions followed by vast corporate cost-saving exercises caused by vast amounts of corporate meddling into games that would have presumably fared much better without said meddling. It’s what we get for paying these corporations so much money to reduce our choices for us, just because they offered convenience in return.

I felt a disturbance in the force when Sony announced the end of discs3 that, in combination with Nintendo’s relentless profiteering and Microsoft’s sociopathy towards an industry I once worked in (and have loved for half a century), made me consider a radical choice. I think it’s maybe time to abandon the console. I think it’s time to go PC and go PC indie. It’s time to explore and pay for the niche shit I’ve not explored for decades, while supporting the AA keepers of the true faith with every bit of DLC I can buy. As is said so often, but carried out so rarely, the only way to stop corporate brutality is to stop giving corporations your fucking money. Deep in a Reddit thread on the most recent cuts, I saw people making the argument for piracy as a weapon. Obviously I support it for preservation purposes, but it’s increasingly becoming a political tool when it comes to finding something, anything that will directly harm the multi-billion giants that have carved the console space into three hyper-controlled formats that, thanks to the total collapse of independent videogame retail, are now completely under platform holder control. Because of that, and with an the air of utterly contradictory moral superiority, I’ll happily pirate whatever AAA corporate, platform holder shit I fancy. So no, I probably won’t be buying a £1500 PlayStation 6 or a £1450 Xbox Neelix (or whatever godawful name they give it). I’ll be buying a three-year-old PC and having a wild old time, because my genuine feeling, right now, is fuck this shit.

[21]

Dangerous Golf was the fruit of Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry’s departure from Criterion, and is the crash mode reimagined with remarkable fun and vivacity, yet it’s also brutally wounded by the fearsome spectre of gross overcomplication. Play it today and the game forces you to watch a three-minute unskippable, voiced by the infuriatingly tiresome Ted Stryker, purely to explain the game’s unnecessarily overwrought mechanics to you. And here is probably the reason why Dangerous Golf sits at a lowly 56 on Metacritic. It’s a stupendous idea, ruined. And that’s precisely what happened with crash mode in Burnout 3. Even though Burnout 2’s crash junctions were functionally perfect, Burnout 3 couldn’t resist adding on a videogamey layer that the mode simply did not need. Instead of the chaos and serendipity of launching cars into collisions that could unfold in wildly divergent ways, Burnout 3 simply had to sprinkle a load of collectible icons into the mix and by adding giant score multipliers as pickups, the game effectively stops being an experimental sandbox and becomes a series of targets to hit. As with the racing’s shift towards violence, the crash mode shifts towards score-chasing abstraction and the core delight, watching the crash play out, becomes entirely secondary to getting the highest number. It wasn’t as if the score multipliers were strategically placed to allow for the best crashes either - Burnout 2 had some wildcard shit where you could get insane scores by trying the genuinely mental or stupid, and the spectacular results that sometimes arose had the air of genuine serendipity. In Burnout 3, it was hit the multiplier, avoid the heartbreaker, get the high score. Every. Single. Junction. The Ballardian romance of crashing metal and physics in action was merely the sideshow.

It’s fascinating that Dangerous Golf made precisely the same mistakes. Its initial premise - launch golf balls at stuff to create as much carnage as possible - is beautifully pure. Its audiovisual representation is superb. Criterion’s foundational work in graphics engines and integrating procedural physics is just as present in Dangerous Golf as it was in any Burnout, and the carry-over of destructables from Black feels like a natural exploration from the same technical root. Dangerous Golf as a techdemo for the sheer computational grunt of the platforms it runs on is a fine reason to exist. And it’s absolutely splendid at it! A riot, in fact. In that sense, the idea of hemming the chaos into a wholly arbitrary and fussy ruleset feels like a colossal mistake. I’ve been playing the game recently and yet, I can’t fully describe the rules. You line up a shot and the ball must end in the hole, as with normal golf. However, you must smash things along the way. If you smash enough of the right things, the ball catches fire and can bounce, but then it stops burning and bouncing and then you must putt it into the hole. Without a decent free-roaming camera to assist you in that, by the way. And you get one initial shot per round in the normal mode. Just one. Then it has to reload the entire dataset and reset the scene to start again. I think it’s obvious what the two big mistakes are here, and these can be answered by asking one question - what is fun about Dangerous Golf? Likewise, we can ask the same about Burnout’s crash mode. In crash mode, the fun comes from the crashes, and it’s not from making the biggest number according to an abstracted scoring system. It’s about the carnage. In Burnout 2, the biggest number comes from the biggest crashes. In 3, the biggest crash means nothing if you don’t hit the multiplier, or accidentally hit the heartbreaker. In Dangerous Golf, the biggest mess means nothing if you don’t putt the ball. And there we have mistake number 1 - why bother with the hole at all?

Mistake number 2 is the single ball, single putt. Mistake 3 is the camera, but that’s nowhere near as damaging as the first two. In a game about causing carnage, the idea that you’d only get a single golf ball to do it feels downright mean. Surely the fun here - the ball smashing stuff - is the sauce, so why would you restrict it so much to make sure players make the putt? When the point is so obviously to smash things up and make a mess, why ruin it by sticking so closely to the rules of golf when you really don’t have to? This seems entirely off to me - a real wrong step in the fork between fun from the sim and fun from the numbers. Because of this, Dangerous Golf’s stages become more and more tortuously aligned with finding a singular, optimal path to the putt. In some cases, the stages actively suffer from reduced mayhem opportunities because the designers would rather you work out some godawful sequence of hops, skips and warps to unlock the true scoring potential of the level - which is, in fact, a full-on betrayal of the initial concept. Oddly, the Gas Station stage is inspired (apparently) by Clerks of all movies, which may go some way to explaining the oddness in thinking on display. Alex Ward does a great line in film referencing; Burnout’s inspiriations were Remy Julienne’s supreme car chase in Ronin and the French cult classic C’était un rendez-vous, both indicators of extraordinary taste, but I seriously struggle to think how Clerks, rooftop hockey etc etc etc, relates much to the core premise of Dangerous Golf. And maybe that’s the point.

In the early 2000s, Gary Penn’s often illuminating column in Edge would make use of the word ‘toy’ in relation to videogames. I call it the systome, but ‘toy’ works just as well, particularly with respect to Dangerous Golf. Gary would often mention how the toy aspect of a videogame is more fun to play with than the structure the toy’s options are embedded in. Here, we find that structure working to suffocate the toy and thereby compromise the play. That need to putt, the need to run a maximalist scoring method, the need to layer levels of achievement behind inscrutable bonus relationships gets in the way of simply letting the player have fun with the simulation. The toy is absolutely superb! The physics are wonderful, with not just destructible materials but splattering liquids. The possibilities are dizzying. There’s so much to play with. Because of that, the single ball, single putt mantra means you lose out on the fun of whacking another ball into the mess you’ve already created. Or finding a rubberising powerup that makes the ball bounce everywhere, or one that ludicrously increases its mass transfer to objects, or makes it teleport through some materials and not others and so on, and so on, and so on. The thinking is so limited into the sense of competition, the idea of numerical score, that it fails to really explore everything it could and should about a modern game of domestic destruction. Much like the crash mode of Burnout 3 failing to really expand on Burnout 2 because it relied on scoring mechanics instead of really exploring the playful possibilities of a new and more powerful engine. The scoring system isn’t just shit - it’s actively harmful.

Returning to Dangerous Golf today, by downloading it on PlayStation 5 and seeing old, old friends in my competitive scoring tables, is definitely bittersweet. The engine is still fantastic despite being a decade old, and in some ways its capacity for procedural destruction hasn’t really been surpassed. But at the same time, there’s the legacy tendrils of lost glory days - of design sensibilities as trapped in PlayStation 2 era as the menu text in faux masking tape strips, laid out in distressed Impact bold, and stunt combo reports as black-on-white Dymo labels. It might be a tribute, but really they betray a style of videogame thinking that was already a decade out of date when the game was released. It’s a great shame that the rest of Three Fields Entertainment’s output has been similarly outdated or lacking in true excellence. Wallowing perhaps in the goodwill of being ex-Burnout svengalis, the Metacritic score for the company’s entire output of car-smashing games, at a middling 68, tells the whole story. Abandoning the promise of increasingly more dangerous golfing, Alex Ward and co returned to automotive mayhem and, it seems, has utterly failed to capture the same magic that made Burnout 2 so wonderful and Burnout 3 a popular smash. I’d say it’s easy to see why. They forgot about the toys, and should have stuck to improving the Dangerous Golf concept. Precedent guides the way; Katamari could assist ably, either as a sticky golfball or in the sense of escalation. Why only mess up a room when you could demolish the building? Perhaps we can hope that some unfortunate accident, perhaps a golf ball to the head, could knock some sense into Three Field’s sensibilities and kick out the inexplicable need to ruin the fun just to keep score. Until they see fit to sort out their shit and make the genuinely great sequel we know they are capable of, perhaps I should petition Sony to change the game’s name to Disappointing Golf.

[21]

Boulderdash is a game about collecting diamonds within a set time limit in order to open an exit in a reasonably expansive, scrolling arena. However, to make this far more interesting than a straight gem grab, Rockford must navigate boulders and enemies while digging through dirt. A rudimentary physics engine injects the spice - boulders will wobble and fall should you dig the dirt from underneath them and there are arcane rules to how boulders behave if they fall onto another boulder - they’ll roll to one side or the other and keep falling if there’s space to fall into. Obviously if they fall on Rockford, it doesn’t end well for Rockford. Diamonds behave in much the same manner unless Rockford picks them up but if they’re also falling, they’re as deadly as the boulders. That’s the basics. There’s other stuff to worry about that arrives as the stages progress; magic wall segments where boulders can turn into diamonds, wandering enemies that explode when squished, fungus that grows at alarming rates if uncontained, but the game’s real meat lies in the diamond-dirt-boulder triumvirate. Boulderdash pulls on the urge to acquire and the urge to explore. The stage space is pretty large, but not overwhelmingly so. Boulders are arranged specifically to set transit challenges as well as limiting access to the all-important diamonds, so there’s a wonderful balance between urgency and caution, instinct and consideration. And that’s certainly the hook that I remember being pulled in by. However I didn’t play true Boulderdash for many years after I first encountered the design. For that, I’ll have to switch platforms to the Commodore Plus/4.

Icicle Works was part of Commodore’s 10-tape pack-in set for the discounted Plus/4 that I got one fateful Christmas. Hilariously seasonal, Icicle Works stars none other than Santa Claus, tasked with collecting presents instead of diamonds and dodging giant snowballs instead of boulders. Enemies are swapped for reindeers and polar bears, with some of Boulderdash’s more esoteric features removed altogether. However, the rest is the same, although there’s perhaps more emphasis on puzzling across the game’s sixteen levels. It was a real delight to play on Christmas Day, to the point where it seems totally deliberate on Commodore’s part. I remember finishing it some months later, meaning it must be one of the very first games I ever completed. Soon to enter my life was yet another clone, Tim Tyler’s Repton, for the BBC Model B and Acorn Electron. Allegedly cloned from Boulderdash based on nothing more than text reviews and screenshots, this take on Rockford’s adventures has a distinctly different feel, despite maintaining many of the same characteristics. Naturally, I saw this running at school on BBCs and in the homes of the sorrowful few who ended up with Electrons. Nonetheless, Repton ended up getting a run of sequels, the third of which featured the jewel in the crown for any 8-bit series; a construction kit.1 This was, of course, because Boulderdash also got a run of sequels and its very own construction kit into the bargain. Being tru-Boulderdash it was an absolute delight to mess around with, whereas I remember outings in Repton 3 leaving us with extremely messy affairs. It left me with the enduring sense of Repton as a gloriously wonky interpretation of the Boulderdash concept with a garish three-colour visual style. Distinct, but not quite right. There was a clunk to the play that matched the starkness of Repton’s Teletext-like colour scheme. Boulderdash itself had a much smoother vibe and a more considered monochromatic look. In a way it was exquisitely pitched, but coming off an Atari 400/800 original, made good use of a single, rich palette of shades rather than an explosion of 8-bit colour. Initially rocking greys and browns, levels switch base hues to purples and the like, but the choice to stick with single colours pays off nicely. There’s even a nifty colour-cycling bar effect on the diamonds for that true 8-bit Atari swagger. This all gave an air of the metallic to the visuals, surely being an inspiration for Andrew Braybrook’s Bas Relief graphical style, as celebrated from Paradroid onwards. Less graphically alluring was the straight Boulderdash clone I got to play after Icicle Works, a Mastertronic budget title called Return of Rockman. Its predecessor, Rockman, was a borked single-screen affair that felt closer to a shit version of Repton than anything else. This sequel was far better, being a fully-featured recreation of the Boulderdash design for the lowly Commodore 16. It was here, at a much slower tick rate, that I finally got my head around the ins and outs of hardcore Boulderdashing. I think it might be the first game where I really played with the physics. Back in Icicle Works, there were tricks to be had with manoeuvring enemies into carefully-dug tunnel traps as if you’re the manager of Pikes Ibiza dealing with a Scottish man in a K-hole. However in Return of Rockman, the full featureset was open to all sorts of abuse once you’d POKEd in cheats to freeze the timer and grant infinite lives. And thus, in my little world at least, metagaming in the metagame was born.

Boulderdash was popular enough to enjoy a succession of clones well into the 1990s. Then came the retro-remakes, Java mobile versions and so on, right up to the anniversary releases in 2024. And yet Boulderdash remains something of an undersung hero of gaming’s golden age. The anniversary version seems to have reviewed rather well, all things considered. Seeing that I only found out about it a mere 30 mins before starting this piece, I’m actually tempted to buy it for the lols. I mean, it does contain every bit of official Boulderdash there ever was, as well as hundreds of new levels, so why not? Seems fitting to pay respects to a game that unwittingly introduced me to the idea of playing around within the game’s formal ruleset. I genuinely think it was the first - particularly in Icicle Works, where you found the space and time to really experiment in-level, and yet still complete the task. Other games felt much more rigid or systemically too sparse to offer much for experimental improv. You could maybe plot showboaty routes through a Manic Miner stage, but you couldn’t bait the enemies to their dooms with intricately dug tunnels. Funnily enough, I’d get plenty of that within a few months of getting my Plus/4 with Tutti Frutti, a clone-mashup of Mr Do! and Pengo, but the enemies would inevitably catch you and that put paid to the playful experimentation. Later, with my beloved Commodore 128, I got to play properly with the Boulderdash ruleset in that glorious construction kit, and that was all about setting up rock and diamond sequences and seeing what chains of events you could create. Could you contain the fungus? Could you deal with shitloads of marauding enemies? The construction kit added yet another level of playfulness, letting you explore the full boundary of possibility. It’s something I think we miss today - that combination of systems and settings open enough to let you play around with how things work, and a construction kit for piecing it all together for your personal delight. The last one I remember playing with was the feature that never made it into the retail release of Hotline Miami 2, much to my dismay. I’ll save the greatest I ever used in case I feel like writing thousands of words on construction kits in the future. But rest assured - Boulderdash was great before it got one, because it was playful by design. That alone makes it feel like a relic from a more noble age.

[21]

R-Type Final 3, for the most part

Back in mid-March, I went deep on R-Type Final 3, with a little bit of discussion of Gran Turismo 7 as a partner chill-out game (particularly if you’re deep into some post-apoc grimverse gritfest and need a break). I noodled around the game’s visual style, ship collection and its florid celebration of the fundamental R-Type principles. Most importantly, there’s a fair bit about the original R-Type Final and how unusually special it is. My cat interrupts at one point, which is probably the highlight of the episode. There’s some diffusion into Gradius chatter, with a savage diss of Darius for good measure.1 I mention Progear, because it’s brilliant, and end up doing a wildly offside rant on magazine purchasing, DVD collecting and all sorts. As part of my 2025 review series, the deeper focus here, in combination with wildly divergent tangents, is a terrifying harbinger of things to come.

The AI episode that features another human

Starting off with an Ultramagnetic MCs riff, this episode is a chat about post-LLM AI and videogames, from the standpoint that it’s a tool and its evilness is down to both its application in a capitalist context and the individuals that are in control of it. This alone may be enough to draw significant anger, but it’s kinda what I believe and I’m really sorry if it upsets you. At the very least, you’ll be getting two quite individual viewpoints on the whole shebang that are definitely not from either pole of the general discourse. There is, however, a nice little tidbit about professional games writing as my guest, Mark Sorrell, did that for longer than I did.

Obsidian’s last gasps at AAA? Cling to the memories.

Another 2025 review spectacular, this episode sees me talking about Obsidian’s twin open-worlders, both of which inexplicably launched in the same calendar year. Avowed gets the Coles Monologues treatment first, with Outer Worlds 2 bringing up the year. Expansive addendums suddenly appear, where I tangent off to expose my fetish for vintage CGI and, more importantly, celebrate Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; a true gem of the late-70s, space-disco Sci-fi melee and something The Outer Worlds 2 contrastingly borrows from, and yet refuses to fully understand. Given the current maelstrom that Xbox finds itself in, the idea of a studio with the talent of Obsidian getting to make another AAA open-world RPG seems less likely than ever, so why not wallow in a romantic waffle for two games you probably didn’t play and will never truly deserve.

The Star Wars Episode

This is how much I fucking hate Star Wars: Outlaws. Trying to bring balance to the force, I also talk at length about how much I fucking love Heat Signature. My chief tangent in this episode is for children’s sci-fi books of the late 1970s and early 1980s, cassette futurism and the idea that our Gen-X reinforcement repetition wasn’t vertical microvideos of media we love, but wonderful hand-painted sci-fi imagery that we thumbed through over and over again. This episode was surprisingly popular, mostly because of my incredibly aggressive Star Wars critique. I don’t actually believe that catharsis is real, or that it works, but fuck me, I really love indulging in it. And maybe that’s the point.

Starfield deserves your time. Listen to me justify that claim for over five hours

Like the entire Affectionate Discourse project, this episode is both a deeply earnest attempt to rigorously examine a significant artefact from a significant medium and a deeply immature and elitist private joke at your expense. And I made people sit through five hours of it. The big tangent for this episode is the history of CGI, expertly creating a secret arc with the previous two episodes, where I could snip out the tangents to construct a far more interesting episode for Gen-X nostalgia tragics. Shamefully, I realised during editing that I could have easily done another two hours, so many apols that I didn’t do an hour apiece on favourite POIs and the aesthetic style of Bethesda’s outrageously flawed Sci-fi RPG. Maybe I’ll do that when the next DLC appears in four years’ time. Somehow I have the faith that Starfield will outlive Bethesda itself and rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, to be really great (with shoddy 2009-era character anims).

But that’s not all! Still to come this year is:

• A bitter, unhinged assault against Forza Horizon 6

• A hardware episode!

• Getting someone to do the PlayStation 2 idea I spent most of the pilot episode explaining

Interestingly, it was in doing part of one of the above that I had an idea for something to write about. It’s funny how I immediately knew it should be written, not spoken. But that’s what going by the whims of your stomach gets you - utterly capricious decisions with no reasonable justification. With that said, I really hope you do listen to some of my podcast episodes and if you enjoy them, spread the links as far as you can. I’m almost thinking about turning on monetisation in some form or other so you would be helping me quite a bit if you did. And so, as I struggle to bring this edition to a close because all I can think about is Arkane maybe being on the Microsoft chopping block, I shall end with a hearty au revoir et merci beaucoup!

[21]

In a quieter moment, I snuck onto my PlayStation 2 to boot up Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution to see if I had any synaptic remnants from my glory days of VF scholarship. Dutifully, one of my kids sat next to me and we had a very jolly 20 minutes of me waking up the old combos while they struggled to get any kind of combo out of the button-mashing techniques that had given them entertaining bouts in Tekken. Having run many an after-school Retro Club session, all of my recent fighting game time has been battling juvenile Tekken button-mashers and while that presents a particular and admittedly enjoyable challenge all of its own, it’s hardly pushing my skill envelope. I felt much more guilty destroying my children with Kage Maru and Lau Chan as the imbalance is so much more pronounced. Once you have reached a certain proficiency with Virtua Fighter, the masher is pitifully easy to dismiss, and it seems I still had that proficiency, deep in the ganglia. And despite remorselessly defeating my own children, I fucking loved it. The pace, the rhythm, the opportunities for technical excellence. The gritty weight of the contact, the application of pressure. I could have played Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution for the rest of the day, because it always carries this studious air that the likes of Tekken or Soul Calibur can’t sustain. Every arena is a classroom, every input an opportunity to improve. The competition is almost irrelevant when mastery of the character is the nobler goal, and there’s some magic in the balance and the kineticism, in the complexity arising from 3-button purity, that sets Virtua Fighter so far apart from its peers that it feels like a different species.

Later on in the day, the adult-only session began and Goat Simulator was replaced with FC26, people got down to Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64 four-ways, and Tekken 4 remained on the PlayStation 2. One of the adults was battling a teenager with a suspiciously tasty Forrest Law. All it took was seeing a couple of different juggles and some tactical application of non-masher moves to know this guy was an opponent worth fighting. The teen gave up and I sat down to have some of the most enjoyable multiplayer I’ve had in the last decade. It’d been that long since I’d played a fighting game competitively, and it felt so wonderfully good to be back in a fight. It was like being freed from the shackles of calmly toying with button-mashers and having to actually think for once. Out went the conservatism of artificially carving out slim victories to let kids feel like they’re progressing without letting them think it’s all too easy. In came the old, old memories of how to fuck up an adult. This adult was rustier than me, but had the heart to fight hard and as my skills improved and the flow state picked up, our 50/50 wins started tipping in my direction. I started remembering the right times to deliver Kazuya’s brutal rising mid punches for momentum-stopping crumples, and started banging in godfists with increasing confidence and rapidity. Tekken 4’s stripped-down roster and close-up battling combines with the introduction of walls to add a richer psychological dimension to the power-play game. Kazuya has a small 4-hit combo that doesn’t deliver much health bar damage, but instead has a punishing psychological effect that’s far more valuable. Block one of Law’s grandiose somersaults when near a wall and you can often get a wall push > canned combo run that crushes the spirit and tips the momentum in a wonderfully dominating way. Then it’s godfists and hellsweeps all the way to the win. It’s in that kind of richness where Tekken 4 seemed to find a different calibre of play. I didn’t play much Tekken 5 as I’d switched to full-time Virtua Fighter by then, but it seemed floatier and less intimate, more concerned with whizzbangs and flashiness, more embracing of a cartoonish nonreality. Even though it seems the community sees Tekken 4 as a miss-step in the series, I’d argue it was the one that’s closest to the VF spirit. While it doesn’t have that same urge toward technical mastery that Virtua Fighter conjures so naturally, I took a real pride in opening up my opponent with riskier and trickier juggles than the straight-on maximal-damage orthodoxy. But then, once warmed up, I had the confidence to throw rounds in the pursuit of a brutal wall combo or landing a showboating move.

Taking on a challenging opponent in a fighting game and gaining the advantage carries a satisfaction and pleasure all of its own. It’s a joy that’s unique to fighting games, for it comes from that intimacy of the 1-on-1, but also from the push to domination. As mentioned previously, it’s in the rhythm and in the imposition of yours against theirs. It’s where standout characters like Akira Yuki gain their charisma - Akira infamously has such an odd and quixotic rhythm that imposing it feels like trying to mesh incompatible gears under duress, but once Akira’s force of will determines the cadence, it’s all over. And it’s in dissecting the clashing chaos of competing rhythms, to gallop out with punishing momentum to a dominating victory, that the intellectual umami of the great fighting game really flows. I cannot get that same sensation from FPS shoot-offs, or from virtual wheel-to-wheel racing. Only the fighting game gives you that sense of imposing your order on the chaos of two players clashing. There’s a special sort of clarity that emerges, like a bell ringing through to drown out a cacophony, that seems unique. And for my money, no bell rings any clearer than that of Virtua Fighter.

My VF history starts on the Sega Saturn and the original Virtua Fighter. It was here that I first tried mangled attempts to get Akira’s flow going, where I first tried Kage’s ninja theatrics and, fatefully, first voiced an audible “choo choo!” as I got the Lau train running. Our group dallied with VFs 1 and 2 as an alternative to our quotidian diet of Tekken 2, the stalwart fighter which first saw me print out an FAQ for the arcane arts of unbalanced forbidden techniques and undocumented juggle combos. I ended up getting a Saturn with Fighters Megamix and put a surprising amount of time into the full VF roster as smashing the gaudy Fighting Vipers characters through the walls with heavy finishers never got old. It was in Megamix that I found a real love for Akira, where the input windows felt more lenient and hence his more rapid-input combos became reasonably fluent. If you must know, I was indeed bashing out juggled DLCs into the wall like they were mere low jabs. I think it’s here that I got the bug for the VF scholarship. You could sense a technicality to its underpinnings that rewarded study and practice, and with those wall conditions I loved probing the moveset for the most fun, most spectacular combos. Virtua Fighter 3 TB passed me by on the Dreamcast, as my buddies only ever wanted to do Soul Calibur. Understandable, of course, and I maintain that the Dreamcast version is one of the closest things to perfection on that machine, but it had an oddly charitable imprecision that felt woolier than Tekken, let alone Virtua Fighter. It was only in the PlayStation 2 era, when a new friend group and a diktat to play Virtua Fighter 4 for its Kumite mode, that I really fell in love. After that came Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution, a game that I absolutely treasure. Later editions are superb, of course, but it’s VF4 Evo that’s the king for me. It has an uncanny magnificence to it, both in the fundamentals of its battling but also in its incredible RPG mode, which stands as the best example of how to expand the single-player fighting game I’ve ever seen. To recreate a Japanese metropolis with a string of arcades as an RPG overworld has a kind of simple genius where the end result is so perfect, so obviously right, that you can’t believe it took them a decade to come up with it.

This brings us to Virtua Fighter Crossroads. A game that I am almost feverish in anticipation of. We’ve been watching the peeks and previews that Sega has dripped out, right up to the more formal reveal last week. The step to merge the Virtua Fighter proposition with an RGG urban fable is certainly an interesting one, and I hold an unshakeable faith that a trad Virtua Fighter 6 will exist somewhere within its architecture. Certainly, the glimpses we’ve seen of 1-on-1 combat have a fluidity and realism that feels genuinely exhilarating as an advance for the form. The grander structure of a narrative-led, fixed-character story impresses me far less, but given the past history and my ability to stomach such a thing in its Yakuza guises, I’m not as upset as I could be. But really, as excited as I was about a new Virtua Fighter in any form, it was that battling at the retrogames day that’s ignited a burning excitement to get my hands on it. This is helped, of course, by the fact that my friends are equally thrilled. We’ll all be back in the studious game of practice for eternal battle, even if we’re more likely to meet online than on the couch. Virtua Fighter Crossroads’ title may be as literal as it sounds - a real crossroads for the fighting game in a single player context, but I have little doubts about RGG Studio as the developer to manage such a grand idea. Just the notion of trying to move the greatest 3D fighting game into the classic Yakuza mould feels like an idea that deserves applause, even if it might be ten years too early for some.

[21]

There’s a much-vaunted set-piece moment, a dash to upgrade yourself to the next tier of events, where you’re tasked with racing a mecha through the Japanese countryside. It’s everything that’s bad about Forza Horizon - cringe-inducing cool-baiting, stupid race physics, showy bombast that falls short of being actually spectacular and ultimately, a frustratingly trite waste of time and resources. As you wobble your supremely capable sports car along the designated route, this fucking mech is dashing left and right, jumping in water, flying over bridges and generally being little more than a massive nuisance, ruining what could have been a very enjoyable timed run. At no point whatsoever did I feel any sense of being in a race; everything was so obviously scripted that it felt like I was set up to ‘win’ no matter what I actually did. It beautifully sums up the vacuity at the heart of the Forza Horizon brand proposition, its slavish devotion to its inane festival concept, its hollow flopping between the hard realities of motoring and soft fantasy as it sees fit, and its oddly misfiring demographic focuses. Who the fuck asked to race a pretend mech? Who failed to get the actual RX-78-2 Gundam license for it?1 Who actually enjoys this shit? As with so much of Forza Horizon’s mediocre attempts to be edgy or wacky or excitingly gnarly, it feels like extremely uncool people trying very hard to be cool, in much the same manner as the industry leaders in that arena, Rockstar Games.

There’s an argument to be made that what Forza Horizon needs is to just grow the fuck up. There are lessons still to be learned from its increasingly forgotten forebears in the wonderful Project Gotham Racing series, where exquisite taste in cars blended with the right balance of realism and fantasy to create racing game magic. Horizon instead languishes in the savage borderlands between Fast and Furious as a foundational text, Top Gear’s tiresome petrolhead orthodoxy and Instagram Reels’ most asinine supercar poshboy content. Horizon even forces you to be friends with a virtual Instagram Reels2 asinine supercar poshboy as a permanent companion that, much to my regret and despite repeated attempts, I have not been able to permakill by ramming them off the road. This utterly infuriating sociology undermines the core of Forza Horizon’s essential goodness. It feels like a strange sideways escalation from Horizon 5, somehow managing to calm its demented enthusiasm somewhat and yet being even more infuriatingly insulting by the same token. It was so, so painful to have to drive Larry fucking Chen around as he stiltedly read his scripted lines in a photography challenge that was unnecessarily padded with driving peril and time-attack urgency, all to take a single image that, to my photomode-obssessed eyes, looked like absolute shit yet the game - and the virtual Larry - seemed to be thrilled with. But this is all part of the general AAA appeasement of ego that Forza Horizon readily indulges in, almost as a brand value.

At the beginning of the game you’re forced into penury as, err, a homeless, carless tourist who can drive fast (or something), and reliant on the completely inexplicable charity of the game’s central cheerleader, Mei. She gives you not one but two cars at the start, both of which are fairly modest. Then, after the tutorial and upon detecting my profile had played previous Horizons, I suddenly have two multi-million hypercars. The game couldn’t give me something as useful as a bunch of credits, of course, but two fucking insane cars that my character, as explicitly shown in the game’s own narrative, could never hope to own. I did decry previous Horizons for “glitter-cannoning cars in your face on a regular basis” and while Forza Horizon 6 seems to have toned down that largesse, suddenly getting these two cars in particular - an Aston Martin Vulcan and a fucking Mercedes AMG One - is so astonishingly discordant with what the game is saying you are that it feels like some wild hallucination rather than a just reward for series loyalty. There’s a weird immaturity to it, a childishness in how it doesn’t just give you nice cars, but two of the most extreme cars in the entire game. Yet, it symbolises Forza Horizon’s arbitrary flip-flopping between realism and cartoonery. It’s a maddening kind of lovebombing or something, coercive in its absurd and unwelcome generosity. Forcing a pair of ludicrous white elephants on you chimes directly with that godawful extremebro festival and its special shade of cringeworthy Colin Hunt-adjacent wackiness. The worst part of it all, of course, is how this foul miasma of dayglo and billionaire excess occludes the honourable and noble romance of the Forza Horizon concept - the open road, the cars, the competition. Forza Horizon’s posturing and grandiosity is all an impediment to accessing that core, and as such remains baffling to me in the extreme. Again, who actually asks for this shit? Is there some vital demographic that finds even a single shred of this performative nonsense anything more than a pitiful distraction from what they actually want to do? It seems that Microsoft and Playground have walled themselves into presenting Forza Horizon as an eternal forever-festival of glib mediocrity, and I wonder what answers they’d get back from the actual playerbase if they could magically get everyone to honourably fill in an honest questionnaire.

Forza Horizon 5 offended me manyfold, but perhaps the most annoying aspect was the map. The setting lent itself to extreme boredom and a constant sense of deja-vu after a few hours of explorative play. Much like the self-similar fractal nature of Horizon 4’s playground of bucolic British roads, where it seemed like each junction, each b-road, was a copy of one you’d been down ten minutes ago, Horizon 5’s movement between three biomes of repetitive blandness wasn’t helped by how quickly it felt like you’d reached the edges. With that rubbing along the boundaries, I realised how tightly I was hemmed into a world that only shrunk the more I drove around it. Thankfully, the enlargement that Horizon 6 brings pushes that back somewhat, and a more faithful replica of Japanese driving environments is definitely a vast improvement - if only for the mood of the place. And yet, its mini-Tokyo feels startlingly compact once you’ve skirted its edges. Go to the bottom and set your GPS for the top to find it’s only 30 or so kilometres. Bear in mind that Test Drive Unlimited, a game which is nearly TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OLD has a map area of 1,500+ square kilometres where this latest pinnacle product for the modern AAA driving experience has just 250 or so. And, hilariously, I made exactly the same complaint nearly 3 years ago in my Forza Horizon 5 review. In that sense, plaudits that Horizon 6 has doubled the area of Horizon 5 only goes to show how badly the game is falling short of the concept pioneer, and consequently a larger map of Japan that’s still woefully short of the full O’ahu means the ennui problem hasn’t been solved, but merely deferred until later.

Despite all of this, the fundamental stasis, the tiny world, the pocket Tokyo, the repetitive car roster, the fucking awful lifestyle shit, it turns out that Forza Horizon 6 is a spectacular success. As I mentioned earlier, I am massively enjoying it. But then its core is still really fucking good! Although weirdly, I’m finding the cars to all meld into one if you get into tuning and upgrading, as if they all hone into a singular sweet spot within the game’s handling model. But not to worry, they still sound different and it’s still plenty of fun to bomb along roads to the various soundtracks the engines create. Point-to-point racing, it seems, will never get old. And it does underline what a huge difference the right kind of environment can make. I’m still begging Playground to consider a full-size Sicily for the seventh entry, which could contain such marvels as a magnificent coastal drive and both Targa Florio courses. But the Targa Florio is real down-and-dirty grandad shit - and really, that’s my point. What I really want to see is Forza Horizon split into two demographic modes - the arcadey dayglo piss for youngsters with an austere, simulation-heavy mode for old bores like me. I’m tired of seeing these car brands and environments squandered on cheap thrills where the thought of running costs are the last thing anyone could imagine. But I would love a Forza Horizon where you need to keep an eye on the fuel meter, and where damage is permanent unless you pay real-world prices to fix them. A survival mode for the open-world racer, right? Surely that’s vogueish enough to warrant some attention? Can we please at least acknowledge that the drivers are humans who can actually exit cars to walk around car meets? Could we possibly construct an RPG for those drivers? Or are we so hemmed in by Playground and Microsoft’ s expectations of its audience that we’ll only make meagre additions to foundations laid 14 years ago, effectively making the entire series just a run of expansion pack DLCs instead of brave and inventive evolutions of the original idea? More than anything else, Forza Horizon feels like the epitome of AAA stasis. It’s good enough for an eternal now, perhaps, so just bury your head and plough on through the same old hoops! Although we all know that if it sells millions when it’s broken there’s even less incentive to fix it, I can’t be the only one that hopes Forza’s horizons will eventually broaden.

[21]

With this in mind, and in the absence of anything actually interesting to write about, I’ve decided to compile a short list. You can read this as inflammatory clickbait or the desperate attempt of a rank amateur to try and uphold a self-imposed posting schedule. The truth of it is I’ve been playing too much Starfield and can’t justify writing yet another piece about why everybody gets Starfield wrong, as well as recording far too many waffly monologues for the Oratorio Tangram podcast. I should warn you in advance that there isn’t some witty ending paragraph at the bottom. The list just ends, as it should do. And thus, we begin!

Pragmata

A gleaming beacon for Capcom’s new IPs and wonderful Japanese design sensibilities, Pragmata would seem to be an excellent choice for me to wallow around in, despite the fact that I once installed ReCore, did the tutorial, loved it, and unfortunately never played it again. Pragmata looked more exciting still, and yet I was unable to detach myself from Terran Armada, despite promises to myself that I’d wrap the DLC up in no time. Undoubtedly, my status as a fully indoctrinated GamePass cultist meant the idea of actually buying a game at full price had become so foreign to me that after buying a physical copy of Crimson Desert, I’d already exhausted my mental capacity for going to shops to buy new games. The concordant paralysis caused by the possibility of buying it digitally for the PS5 was down to the icons for Gran Turismo 7 and Crimson Desert leering at me from the dashboard before I could hop to the store, making the guilt so impossible to bear that I had to find some Crimson Fleet scum to eradicate in order to make myself feel human again. I’d guess the notion that Pragmata might be very pretty and mechanically sound wasn’t enough to get me over the hump of presumed tutorial stages that take too long and cutscenes I may not be able to skip, allied with the hope that it’ll arrive on GamePass at some point. That said, Pragmata does at least give me another reason to mooch around the PlayStation 5 shelves at CEX, so maybe it’s not all bad.

Routine

Actually sitting on my Series S, right now. Yep. I kinda love that it’s just there, waiting, being ominous. Seems fitting for ominous horror games where the ominousness is almost the point. Oddly, I got a strangely masochistic joy out of Routine’s opening tutorial and found the general aesthetic and environmental design to be genuinely the fucking good stuff. I loved everything aside from the creeping dread. The game cues you so heavily from the off that the anticipation becomes fatiguing in fairly short order, meaning I was expecting standard jump scare mechanic or movie-coded red herring to leap out at every turn, even though I hadn’t even crossed the threshold into genuine peril. Having found Still Wakes The Deep to be a profoundly flawed horror game that only works if you ignore its genericism and overlook its obvious shortcomings and arbitrary perils, I was in no mood to push deeper in Routine’s thick blanket of foreboding unpleasantness, lest I find the same shallow trope-flinging in the same abundance. Sad but true, but then I was also far too fatigued by the deliberate prodding of anxiety to enjoy Alien Isolation’s extraordinarily prolonged romp around similarly fabulous sci-fi installations, of which Routine seems to take an awful lot of inspiration. I’m almost happier to enjoy them from afar than to actually devote valuable Starfield time to playing them, but Routine has just enough mystique to stay installed as some totem of what I could be doing.

Romeo Is A Dead Man

There’s an alternate history where Suda 51 gets the reputation and recognition he absolutely deserves: mercilessly mocked and shamed for being an absolute charlatan. But thankfully, we live in a world where his clumsy, attitude-first work proves to be utterly confusing to the critical mainstream, which is more than enough to warrant a cult audience and a loyal fanbase. Less Russ Meyer or John Waters and more Roger Corman’s rejected work experience boy, Suda’s games always manage to have some intriguing element that makes me genuinely value them as interesting artefacts and yet when I play them, there’s some idiotic flaw or sloppy acquisition arc or senseless restriction that makes them joyless shells that seem to be just pretending to be fun. Just as he pretends to be a punk. Lollypop Chainsaw being a case in point, which was utterly shamed by the even more tasteless Onechanbara series, which presumably cost less to make and yet outdid Lollypop in every respect. I’d suspect if Suda’s other games had similar counterparts, my alternate history wouldn’t be quite so alternate. The obsession with tiresome Americana, the posturing, the faux-anarchy, all of it distilled into a vapid mishmash of whatever the fuck it is in No More Heroes confirmed to me that Killer 7 was a stopped-clock blip where Suda managed to nail a visual style that allied so well with the thematics and character design that you ignored how shit the actual game was, lending him a stylistic authority that he absolutely failed to properly exploit - all the way up to Romeo Is A Dead Man. I wondered - if this exercise in style has a super-easy mode, could I tolerate it? I haven’t been bothered to find out, but I suspect I’d quite enjoy the ride here, especially in the sense of its absolute earnestness in trying to be as wacky and cool as possible, as if Suda dropped the pretence of being a game designer to just focus on making shit that looks cool. I suppose you can always admire his games when they show a certain pace, a freneticism we’d associate more with 80s JAMMA. From the outside, Romeo Is A Dead Man looks like Suda’s Natural Born Killers and perhaps it’s that naked ambition to be as Suda 51 as he can be, that idea of the inept auteur stretching his ineptitude as far as it can go, that makes me want to play it. But not quite enough to actually commit. Maybe I should be playing Devil’s Third instead, seeing as Suda’s spiritual brother-in-cringe, Tomonobu Itagaki, is literally as much a dead man as Romeo, and I’ve left that one un-played for far too long (to insist it’s actually an underappreciated cult gem with a staggering level of dogmatism).

Warriors Abyss

Yes, I already played it. Quite a lot and yet not enough, but I had my momentum dislodged by Crimson Desert and now there’s so much to play that Warriors Abyss is on the back burner of the back burner. It still sizzles, though. This ultimate expression of the Musou template at peak intensities killed any desire I had for Dynasty Warriors Origins, but I’m not that worried. Musou is in your bones and like a wayward Ronin, I know my past will catch up with me and I’ll be chasing 10,000 KOs per second with Zhou Tai when the time is right. No sooner, no later. Warriors Abyss will simply come to me when our fates align. In a peach garden or something. And it’ll be fucking brilliant.

Saros

Fuck that.

I’m being flippant, of course. I greatly admired Returnal’s casting of the Housemarque arena twinstick into third-person formalism, but it was one of the first games where my fatigue with tutorials and slow difficulty ramps ‘to ease the player in’ had me lose interest far too early to really judge whether the game was worth my dedication or not. I suppose Returnal falling at such an early hurdle kinda answers the question all by itself. Saros is more of the same, it seems. Do I want danmaku in my boss fights? Sure. Do I want boss fights? No, not really. I think they’re boring. Yet another case of “I understand this is an excellent game, but I cannot conjure anywhere near enough fucks to play it”. In other words, the Breath Of The Wild paradox in third-person shooter roguelike form. Housemarque, have you ever considered a wildly over-ambitious sci-fi RPG that you cannot possibly hope to fulfil your promises for? Just a thought.

Gran Turismo 7 Power Pack

An oddly under-sung DLC that added a vast new mode to the Gran Turismo 7 proposition, my immediate encounter was filled with enthusiasm that rapidly dissipated. Despite huge rewards to be had, I couldn’t muster the necessary devotion to drive cars with professionalism, making me a colossal fraud who only really enjoys Turismo for the car collecting and t-boning AI cars at slow corners to gain extra unfair advantages on top of all the other unfair advantages I stacked against them. Yes, I am the sort of scum scrub that factors in an additional 38,000 credits for every car purchase because I am absolutely shoving race soft tyres on everything I drive. And the weight reduction. And the exhaust. I mean, if I’m not winning a 3-lap race by at least 30 seconds then my car is woefully under-specced. The idea of a close finish is anathema to me, so the prospect of an entire career of actually challenging races doesn’t spur me on to improve my driving. No. It sends me back to raiding Starfield POIs for crafting materials like the ruthlessly awful pervert I am. That said, I still turn up a few times a month for the weekly challenge easy money and a driving marathon. You gotta keep an eye on that second-hand dealership, for the car roster never sleeps and I might miss a cheap Mazda that I don’t have!

No Man’s Sky (As It Is In 2026)

The founding father of my eternal gaming waiting list. Saving this for one of several scenarios:

1. Severe back injury necessitating months in bed

2. Terminal illness diagnosis

3. Major global catastrophe that doesn’t affect electricity supply

4. Much-anticipated life-changing lottery win

Starfield’s Main Story

I’m never fucking going through the fucking Unity, OK?

[21]

Terran Armada does cost money, much like Shattered Space, but I can confidently say it’s worth it and particularly if you’re already a Starfield pervert. From what I’ve played, it’s actually better than Shattered Space in several ways. Where the first DLC was concerned with a new planet and fitting out the capital’s immediate locale with a denser map than anything seen in the base release, Terran Armada introduces a new enemy faction and a set of spawning procedural challenges. Some are trivial, some involve some of the most bitter and taxing combat seen so far. The latter comes from invading battleships that you’re tasked with boarding and clearing. These can throw out various layouts, with one set being a superbly tight collection of corridors and spaces filled with high-level enemies that will absolutely fuck you up. Once you’re confident in battle against this new faction, that class of ship becomes a thrilling breakneck chase through the vessel until you reach the bridge and kill the commanding officer, retrieve their codes and set the ship to self-destruct. You feel like an absolute badass slicing through battledroids and the aggro human crew with this singular focus in mind. The bridge also holds all the best loot, so it’s nearly always a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. It may lack the explicit sci-fi noodling of Shattered Space’s main quest and side content, but it feels so much meatier as a gameplay proposition that it almost fills a void that you could be forgiven for not noticing - challenging combat in tight spaces. It’s a nice standardisation of a previously optional side-activity. That of aggressive ship boarding. You needed a craft with EM weaponry to disable your victim, or to creep onboard a landed craft. But pound for pound, combat aboard Starfield’s spaceships is the most intense and unforgiving when the enemies are at suitable levels and in suitable numbers.

A big step up from Shattered Space’s wibbly-wobbly spacewarping and quasi-spiritual noodling, Terran Armada is much more grounded in the nuts and bolts of muscular combat, scary death robots and fascistic militaria. It fits Starfield’s cassette futurism aesthetic like a glove, where Shattered Space seemed more interested in laying out a thin and wooly exoticism to add a more twee, new age sensibility despite the specific codings of House Va’ruun as implants taken from Star Trek Romulans and Babylon 5 Centauris. Terran Armada even sounds like a mid-80s toy line or 2000ad faction, and it strongly recalls 2001, Alien, Outland and all those other movies where the enclosed environment and the tech-heavy corridor represents most of the liveable space. The actual story missions for the DLC are similarly brutish in construction and ally themselves well with Starfield’s love of the morbid vivisection of colonists, workers and scientists alike at the hands of interstellar criminality. The heavy repetition of locations and their identical interiors burns that grimdark sense of nothing being sacred into your soul, seen in the sci-fi walls splattered with blood and gleaming floors littered with bodies of the innocent. When you’ve put enough hours into Starfield and seen those scenes a hundred times, that sense of self-interested, materialist brutality mercilessly executing the idealism of a 70s techno-utopian future becomes existentially tangible and the Terran Armada content slots in perfectly alongside it. In a way, the unrelenting sense of unfair, cruel horror at the hands of humans being awful humans makes it all the more important to have an outpost on some serene, faraway paradise to give you a sense of sanctuary. After all, when you’ve just slaughtered 20 crew as you walked through their living quarters as if they were the cops and you were the Terminator, you probably need to cleanse your palate a little.

While the new content is exciting by virtue of being new content, it’s important to note that I’ve come back to Starfield nearly a year after deleting it. In that time, Bethesda has been quietly adding this and that. There’s a fairly constant stream to the Creations mod store, there have been incremental additions to the random location - or POI - catalogue. Between picking out content to play from the store and the wider abundance of buildings in the procedural planet maps, the Starfield of April 2026 is a subtly different creature to the Starfield of Shattered Space and offers quite a lot of shit to do. As such, I’m oddly delighted and found myself sinking back into my old ways and behavioural loops with remarkable enthusiasm. Old whims re-emerged as creaking synapses suddenly remembered which skills I desperately needed to grind XP for, which weapon mods I wanted to make and so on. Imagine the horror of realising that after all these years, you still haven’t maxed spacesuit crafting! On that subject, Free Lanes and Terran Armada introduce a new grinding currency called X-Tech, which unlocks another tier of improvements for gear and your spaceships. The fun part is that the X-Tech mods also cost shitloads of money, so Bethesda has craftily reinvigorated its grind economy for those of us acquisition pervs who absolutely must have the most optimal stuff in their inventories. Get the new shit and make money, motherfucker. Add to that some funky new clothes and spacesuits, a whole new set of faction guns and a new sniper rifle and you can probably guess that I have quite a lot of work to do. I couldn’t be happier - but I do lament all the other games I could (and should) be playing instead.

The oddity of course is that none of this changes the fundamental proposition at the heart of Starfield, nor does any of it atone for its sins. As with Shattered Space, there’s nothing transformative or redemptive in Terran Armada. It’s more of the same, but it’s good more of the same, and that counts as far as I’m concerned. It’s interesting to try and consider where Starfield actually sits these days. Is it better than Skyrim now? Unbelievably, I saw a claim that Starfield has more authored quests than any other Bethesda game. And despite my own scepticism, I can’t deny that the modern Starfield has a shitload of content to play and a shitload of stuff to collect. For me, it’s one of my favourites of the current generation but as I’ve pointed out many times, a lot of that is down to it coming close to fulfilling childhood wishes for the ultimate sci-fi videogame. In some ways, it surpasses my prepubescent expectations and I was still finding myself occasionally dumbstruck at the sublimity the worldsim can accidentally create. Emerging from an underground facility onto a rocky plain to be greeted by a ringed gas giant filling the sky, its rings so impossibly close that you can see the individual ice shards as they arc diagonally across your view. It stops you dead in your tracks and you gawp in wonder at the sheer scale of the thing. The creaking engine may be old and utterly inadequate when it comes to map sizes, but the lighting model works miracles when the variables align - and experiential joy is sometimes more profound and more satisfying than any metricised achievement or currency gain. And again, Starfield excels at nailing a particular sci-fi aesthetic style, and does so consistently. Some of the new POIs are superb works of environmental modelling, right up there with the industry’s very best, with the interiors having prop placements that convince with ease. Bethesda does seem particularly adept at evoking the messy workplace and the lived-in quarters. It’s just a shame that the repetition of them breeds such contempt because on first contact, they’re generally great. The same goes for the terrain and I’ll concede that often, it’s the starker and rockier environments where the renderer does its best work, but that work can be absolutely stunning in the right light and the right confluences of component parts. So I beg you to wade into Starfield’s waters if you haven’t already. The realisation I had after settling into my return might be the clincher - the flaws are always there and the glitches are just as bad and potentially game-breaking as ever. Save often. But the virtues are manifold and they are fucking great when they click. Terran Armada absolutely adds more to the happy pile, and Free Lanes helps plenty. More, please! Ultimately, the realisation I had is that the essential Bethesda magic is deep in Starfield’s bones and if you know how to access it, then you’ll realise that there isn’t anything out there that comes close to this. As I’ve said many times before, to love Bethesda open-worlders is to accept the jank is part of the journey. It’s hilarious that after nearly three years, that jank is as bad as ever, but then the good shit is better than it’s ever been.

[21]

Elite first entered my life in 1985, in a conversation with a friend at primary school. Wide eyed, he described seeing a friend’s older brother flying a spaceship he’d upgraded with special weapons, fighting off space pirates and salvaging goods from them. It seemed so outlandish a description that it couldn’t possibly be real. He was talking about the Spectrum version. Another friend was able to borrow a copy and after reaching a feverish level of excitement during loading, we were tragically betrayed by the misery of LensLok. Unable to pass the notoriously shit copy protection, Elite remained out of reach until the next year, when we reached secondary school and had lunchtime access to a room full of BBC Model Bs, with plenty a copy of Elite running alongside the other BBC mainstay, Repton.3 Here is where I probably first did the classic Elite dance of leaving the Coriolis station at Lave, turning around to shoot it, then watching police ships fly out and engaging in a futile dogfight. For Elite, this was as universal an 8-bit experience as the ‘print + goto’ BASIC jape to fill the screen with obscenities. It was only much later, when I had a Commodore 128, that I had my own tape copy, although thanks to a suspicious extra cassette in the box, I was able to leapfrog the notoriously steep learning curve thanks to a savegame from the previous owner that kitted me out with a fully-upgraded Cobra. This left me with a much more leisurely cruise around the first galaxy, free to trade and battle my way around the place. It can’t be overstated how absolutely magical it was to have relatively fluid real-time wireframe dogfights in this era. Managing lasers while firing off missiles and engaging your own ECM against incoming enemy projectiles, the sense of a complex, plausibly realistic space battle was tangible. It was thrilling to engage in, feeling a step beyond the gloriously slick and smooth vectors of Atari’s Star Wars arcade cabinet, where despite the fireworks and graphical splendour, the fighting wasn’t exactly fraught or complex. Elite brought a richer sense of genuine battle, out in the depths of space, with desperate choices being made whether to break away and limp for a friendly station or to battle on to the bitter end, potentially reaping rewards in the process.

It was in that complexity of experience that Elite really shone. Star Wars was ultimately a shooting gallery, but here it felt so much more real. You were a genuine spaceship commander, and the metagame surrounding the basic spaceflight simulation added more layers of complexity to the role. Your ship was yours to customise, to improve, to invest in. The reward for your work was the classic acquisition curve of modern levelling, where time spent equalled currency earned which equalled easier transit. The min/max, risk/reward estimations you’d have to make when looking for trade routes felt entirely new and perhaps more importantly, more adult than anything I’d played before. I’d never had to temper my lust for more money with the wisdom that Riedquat’s anarchy might bring huge profits for the right goods, but you’re definitely going to have to kill your way to the station in order to sell anything. Maybe it is best to stay on that old, reliable Lave-Diso thoroughfare, after all. These were choices I’d never had to make before, in a gaming culture increasingly dominated by arcade conversions or arcade-informed action games. Here, we’re closer to the logic puzzles of text adventures or the traversal considerations of embryonic RPGs like Ultima IV. In a wild quirk, I’d already exhausted my time with Mercenary before getting into Elite, but Mercenary was a game of exploration and escape instead of a full simulation of interstellar trading and piloting. Both had real-time wireframes, and both showed where the future of videogaming could go. But for all its critical acclaim and astonishing advancement, Mercenary remained a cult hit instead of a universally-renowned icon. That’s in part thanks to Elite arriving first, and in it transitioning to the 16-bits with flat-shaded polygons and much smoother framerates, despite making few changes to its fundamental gameplay. Elite Plus kept the brand present as more and more flat-poly sci-fi adventures joined it. Paul Woakes’ Mercenary sequel, Damocles introduced interplanetary flying, and games like Starglider 2 or Epic would carry a similar spacefaring torch, if forgetting that a critical part of Elite was the sense of ownership and improvement of your Cobra. Damocles remained distinct thanks to its startlingly complete proto-ImSim design, but Elite’s template couldn’t be bettered. Gremlin’s Federation of Free Traders seemed to be the first challenger to Elite’s crown, but was always destined to be a clone. It was only David Braben’s direct sequel, Frontier, that made Elite feel old.

I remember the first time I saw Frontier running on a friend’s dad’s PC as clear as day. There was something so timelessly foundational about Elite’s undocking sequence, a canned anim you’d see hundreds of times in those stark wireframes. The concentric shapes to denote an exit tunnel, referencing the ship-launching shots from Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, the emergence into space and the arcing curve of the planet before you. In the Frontier save I watched my friend play, there were suddenly attendant ships and cargo stores of a far richer polygonal complexity. Space was now blue for some reason, but the leap forward was tangible. You could sense it immediately - this game was so much more, such an expansion of what Elite had started. Braben had taken full command of the Elite proposition and his radical continuation was seemingly insane - a 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way, with a database of 30,000 real stars and procedurally-generated planetary systems. This was a fascinating development - Braben had made the choice to move closer to galactic simulation as well as hugely expanding the player’s scope. Players could purchase different ships with different capabilities and hence different focuses - some were bulk haulers, others combat-oriented piracy specials. You could land on planet surfaces, and Braben’s new engine went as far as modelling cities, terrain and clouds. He’d also populated our native solar system with every celestial body then known. As mentioned as far back as my Starfield pieces, I have an enduring memory of flying to Saturn, landing on a moon (Mimas, the Death Star one) and watching the distant sun rise though Saturn’s rings. That you could do this within a game like Frontier was stunning. And I think it’s that leap, that astonishing expansion of everything between Elite and Frontier, its leapfrogging of all the wannabes that sat in between them, that cements my belief in what a progressive sequel should be. And once again, here was proof that when properly harnessed, procedural content generation is far more powerful than we give it credit.

I absolutely commend David Braben for his steadfast dedication to Newtonian physics when it came to Frontier’s spaceflight simulation, but I have to admit that here, admirable rigour produced a less engaging and fun experience than Elite’s fantasy dogfighting. Frontier would let you play with gravitational slingshotting and all sorts, but that didn’t cast quite the same spell as those bitter fights for survival and frantic keyboard-prodding multi-tasked slices of fraught peril. Frontier’s battling was far more graceful, oddly, and I recall everything boiling down to oddly diagonal oppositions and straking beams chipping away at hulls and shields. Combat had become as balletic as Elite’s automated docking sequences. And yet, I really put the time in on the PC copy I played. I think because of the guilt from unearned ownership from hijacking that C64 Elite savegame. Ultimately the altered combat didn’t matter - I had X-Wing and Tie Fighter for that. Instead it was the sense of fulfilling sci-fi dreams of spacecraft ownership and flying amongst the stars. Frontier had so much to explore, so many juicy trade routes to find and plenty of ambitions to fulfil. A few well-upgraded craft and one giant hauler later, I was pretty much finished and suitably satisfied. The disastrous launch of the semi-sequel, First Contact seemed to taint Elite as the 90s wore on. I bought it nonetheless, but it would be the last space-trading sim I’d play for quite some time. It wouldn’t be until brief forays with X - Beyond The Frontier (surely a deliberate pun) and eventually Freelancer that I’d get that groove back on. Beautifully, both obviously owe so much to Elite that they serve as real tributes to the Braben and Bell pioneer. In the vacuum left after First Contact, it was no surprise that others would step in to fill Elite’s shoes.

In 2006, I was tasked with helping the Science Museum with PR for its run of Game On, the touring videogame history exhibition that had previously been at the Barbican. Part of this involved the press launch, wherein a bunch of UK games industry luminaries were invited to lend a sense of occasion and provide ample photo opportunities for the media. In the warm up to this, I was introduced to none other than David Braben himself, and got to chat to him in my own quixotic way about Elite. I asked him about what he was most proud of. For him, it was the NES version! But only because they’d managed to get all the controls onto the gamepad. I even asked him about Frontier’s blue void. He admitted he didn’t have a decent answer, and that it was probably because he was bored of black and blue was quite soothing on the eyes. Finally, I asked him if he’d ever do a sequel. I remember so clearly that he said he’d do that only when the technology was up to what he wanted to do. I was therefore delighted when Elite: Dangerous emerged, fully formed, as the contemporary answer to Elite’s original question, and doing it so well that the game thrives to this day. In Braben there’s a figure from the original 80s Britsoft years that seemed to have always done it right. Despite the publisher woes of First Contact, which were very much down to the publisher, Braben’s trajectory for Elite remains practically immaculate. The expansions, the complexifications, all fitting in line with a curve of progress we can only wish other games, other genres even, could follow. The tussles and legals between Braben and Bell over Elite’s ownership may hint at grubbier machinations under the surface,4 but the games themselves are shining examples of how to develop a systome and a concept over successive generations and build a series that all by itself, utterly defines the values of a genre while redefining the horizons of its possibilities.

Back in my childhood, Elite laid out a future of possible videogames to hope for. The total immersion in sci-fi imagery that we grew up in found its skeleton of sorts in Elite and with Elite: Dangerous, we find the modern realisation of those dreams. But Elite’s touch is far deeper than its sequels. No Man’s Sky and Starfield both share something of Elite’s bare fundamentals of interplanetary adventuring, be that in the structures to follow or in the gaps to fill in. It’s crazy to think that the realtime 3D space trading game is over 40 years old, and yet it seems few games can match Elite’s ambition or its success in fulfilling it, particularly in the way that ambition unfolded decade-by-decade, and how the sequels seemed to make the most of the technologies available to them. Elite: Dangerous of course enjoying the leap into modern VR with remarkable success. In the more surface appraisals of Elite’s place in history, we find it mentioned as inspiration for just about anything spacey or anything free-roaming touched by UK developer hands. Yes, that includes Grand Theft Auto, but as I constantly decry, that series doesn’t seem to have learned the deeper lessons from Elite’s sequels. Elite’s status is earned through that depth of exploring the form, and from that urge to embody progress for the sake of finding out what’s possible. And in its daringness to approximate the cosmos, to take on the unmakeable and fit it into 32 kilobytes while maintaining the cosmic grandeur. The boldness of that endeavour is something we miss in the modern context. As I wrote in the opening paragraph, the feat of Elite seems more miraculous today than it did 42 years ago, and with that I wonder where the modern miracles are, or if anything new that arrives today could ever hope to broaden our horizons to quite the same degree.

[21]

This brings us to one of the most fervently-salivated-over retrogaming objects for many years, the recently announced Neo Geo AES+. It may come as some surprise that I’m not a fan. This isn’t just for the thankfully well-publicised political issues surrounding the machine, which I have to say should be worth considering before anyone goes for the preorder, but actually due to something much more personal: it wouldn’t satisfy me. Even if I bought the full deluxe pack, I’d still want an original AES. Owning a modern replica would feel like living a lie of sorts. Like draping a Ferrari body around a rusty old Toyota. Many years ago I bought a C64DTV and that was the last thing I bought in this class of retro-rebodies.2 I don’t own any of the recent mini-consoles because emulation exists and is, generally speaking, a considerably cheaper and better experience overall - even if you have the original hardware, as I am lucky enough to own. Especially given the times when I really want to bang through some 8 or 16-bit classic. I have to say, it’s pretty rare, and certainly not worth £100+ a pop, per platform, to indulge in. Especially when my 6-year-old (£49.99) Anbernic handheld has all the fucking ROMs I could ever want and does perfectly fine emulation for everything before 1994. Consider that the SNES Mini still retails on Amazon for £119. I bought a real SNES for £60 and a multicart for £15. I got the real thing with way more games for less money. I mean, if you really must have the clunk of pushing an £70 cartridge into a £180 slot then I guess now you can, but given that the 10-game deluxe AES+ pack weighs in at £799.99, maybe it’s worth considering that a genuine AES and a 161-in-1 MVS cart with a MVS-AES converter comes to £578.08. And you still have room for a £140 RetroTINK-2X Pro. If you don’t care about the AES form factor, you can have Neo Geo on your telly with a £77 MVS motherboard, a £113 JAMMA supergun with USB controller input and the same 161-in-1 cart for a mere £255! Yah, less than £100 more than the base AES+ with no games at all. And you know what? You’d own the real thing.

Of course the value proposition is that of image and convenience. It looks like the real thing and will be much more convenient to use. But given the background of the companies involved, I find it difficult to justify a purchase based on those two criteria. Yes, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism but there are degrees to that - and murderous, repressive regimes and the Fucking Embracer Group3 should colour the degree to which this purchase could be considered unethical. But everyone has their price, so what would make me bend my morals to buy such an object? The answer lies in the underlying hardware. The press release proudly touts the use of ASICs to recreate the original SNK chipset, but the details are non-existent. I think we can safely bet that if the machine carried real legacy chips, the 68000 and Z80 CPUs, the Yamaha sound chip etc, then they’d be heavily referenced in the promo text. Yet they’re not. This is the first indication that we’re not getting transistor-level replication of the Neo Geo board. Given that the only people with any insider knowledge that are commenting on the hardware are people closely involved with emulators or the MiSTer core, it does seem that the AES+ could have a modified version of the logic rather than the circuitry. What that would mean is the ASICs are only relevant to the AES+, and that these new chips couldn’t be used to resurrect dead AES and MVS machines. Minor bummer perhaps, but to be fair, nothing has been confirmed or denied around what the ASICs contain. It’s not beyond the realms of imagination to assume the AES+ engineers had access to SNK’s schematics for the Neo Geo’s graphics chips - the most critical and exotic part of the chipset, but to recreate late-80s chip-fab processes with modern fabricators isn’t a likely proposition. The old stuff is etched at a totally different and much larger scale than today’s chips, so unless they’ve found some old chip foundry that can do the late-80s processes, we have to assume the ASIC is made at the modern scales. That doesn’t preclude a direct circuit copy but again, given the existence of really good emulation and MiSTer cores, it would seem an extraordinarily expensive endeavour when you could conceivably split existing solutions into a CPU ASIC and a graphics one. But why should you even give a shit?

The answer is utility. If the ASICs really are enhanced replications of the FPGA cores, we’re being ripped off. For one thing, as many have already pointed out, the config is set in stone with an ASIC. Any bugs or other shortcomings are there forever. With FPGA, it can be updated. Imagine if instead of just being a pretend AES, the AES+ could also be a Neo Geo Pocket or any of SNK’s arcade boards. Wouldn’t that be an even better proposition? Better still, what if it was switchable into a fully-fledged MiSTer? Now that is a fucking product I’d be interested in. Hell, I’d be more interested in an ornament that looks like a real AES to sit under my telly than a pretend one. Again, the specific choice to make this a single game per-cart console turns me off. I think anyone paying £70 to own a modern reprint of an old game is suffering from a certain lack of judgement. I just do not see the point in cosplaying original AES and paying that much money for it on a per-game basis. I mean, I find the Evercade to be just as ludicrous a proposition as the AES+, but at least that has the decency to offer multiple games per card. Here you’re playing seventy fucking quid to play a single game that you can download, extremely easily, for free. You can buy a really good retro handheld with that fucking game on it for that price. You can even buy two averagely decent handhelds! And the reality it that with those handhelds, you’re much more likely to actually play them. The fact that the revenue from the AES+ range is going to really fucking dubious people should be the kicker, too. It’s not as if Plaion or the Saudi-owned SNK is going to track down the original Nazca team and hand them royalty cheques for all the new Metal Slug carts, after all. But hey, consumerist lust is insatiable with the right kind of shit, and the Neo Geo was always that impossible dream for so many. I can absolutely understand the fervour, but please do hold fire. At least until we see the machine in action and have an idea of how the internals are working. And also, because it’s giving money to bad people that you don’t have to give. But I have to say, and after hearing reports from casual retronauts who bought the mini-consoles on release, there’s a fair amount of buyer regret once the unboxing is done and you’ve banged through the faves. These machines are ultimately novelty toys, not profound re-centerings of gaming habits. I should imagine the AES+ won’t be much different. I certainly don’t see them doing much more than gathering dust after the first couple of weeks, meaning a mocked-up shell for a fraction of the price might be just as good in the long-term. Yes, you might get the theatrics of AES ownership to please you for a day or two, but I’m pretty sure it’ll always feel more than a little bit hollow. Just buy a fucking handheld.

[21]

What makes Crimson Desert feel like an embodiment of the age is its fundamentally contradictory nature. Its mixture of ambition and appropriation is maddening on the one hand, delightful on the other. It’s a game that shamelessly lays out its influences, and in doing so shows how it directly copies them - but crucially, it does so because it’s fun. Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom are immediate and obvious, then suddenly you’re thrust into Cyberpunk 2077’s Braindances without any warning whatsoever. Other sections recall the tutorial bits of Control and the void space of Dishonored. There’s a sense of directly sampling videogame culture of the last 20 years and re-arranging them in a grandiose facsimile of Sicily. I can’t escape the bone-white ruins in the hyper-green countryside evoking deep memories of Oblivion, or the weapon combos feeling like they’re pure Platinum Games or Musou lifts. The sheer vibe of the thing is almost the point; that to enjoy it to the fullest, surrender must be total. You acquiesce to the vibe-based thinking that seems to underpin its general structure and find a wanderer’s delight. In its opening hours, it’s a game of idle discovery, of uncovering multitudes of under-explained micro-features that would be ruined if they had an exhaustive tutorial for them. Their existence works almost like ludological pokemon, randomly appearing in the wild to challenge you as to which button sequence you must now add to the list of sequences you’re already failing to adequately memorise. That is the befuddling yet delightful path that Crimson Desert lays before you and being part of the social media ARG to figure out what the fuck all these systems do has been surprisingly entertaining.

The thing that amuses me the most about Crimson Desert is the reaction to it. Again, seemingly by accident, it directly spears the complacency and laziness of the stereotypical AAA gamerbro. Bereft of a strongly-corridored narrative, they’re left having to resort to the horror of using their imagination to decide what to do. And when they want to do it they find, appallingly, that the beloved context-sensitive ‘press X for everything’ button doesn’t work, and are instead faced with control combinations that haven’t been seen for over 20 years.1 There’s a complexity of interface that matches the complexity of the systome, and that matches the visual complexity of the environment. It was fascinating to watch this play out across TikTok and Reddit, as players discovered that this is a sandbox-first game, where exploration and acquisition has primacy over any character or plot arc. In the modern AAA context, this is practically iconoclastic, if not seditiously subversive. As such, it fuels the kind of divisiveness that separates out the gamer factions into those fools who really should be reading more books from those who should be playing more games. I like to think Crimson Desert throws down a gauntlet of sorts for the open-worlder, and raises a particular bar that hasn’t been challenged since the likes of Skyrim or Fallout 4. With GTA VI looking to carry on the same 20-year-old interactive design of its predecessors, the arrival of a gameplay-first, greatest-hits open-worlder feels markedly important.

Of course for me, Crimson Desert is a real gift from the heavens. A vast place full to the brim with stuff and things and activities. The dress-up alone is dizzying in scope, and that’s before I consider an army of pets and customising my house. Going in fully aware that jankiness is a core feature, it was only a couple of hours before the vibes-based vibes had me utterly convinced of the game’s greatness. It’s powerfully seductive in that sense, and has a unique charisma that comes from the complexity of that systome; there’s so much to find, so much to learn, so much to explore. For me, it’s incredibly heartening and the evolution of user scoring ratifies my unreasonable credo that main stories are shit and worldsim complexity is everything. Crimson Desert accidentally proves my point for me. When it works, the games that a systems-and-exploration-centred philosophy creates are deeply and richly rewarding because of what narratives they allow you to create, and not because of what narrative they tell you. In essence, the greatest story they can tell is your own personal one of discovery and development, which can be a far richer tale than any authored yarn. And of all the modern vogues it deploys, perhaps the most pastorally valuable is its walking-sim sense of place. The opening region is absolutely lovely - I went off for an hour looking for rosemary plants and had the most delightful bucolic dander since Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. Only instead of well-disguised corridors masquerading as English countryside, Crimson Desert lays out an entire land. Foreboding peaks in the distance make all the difference when you know you could walk there if you wanted, only with the wisdom to know that you need a good 20 hours of experience and acquisition to have fun when you get there. It’s in those conventions, which Crimson Desert is happy to uphold, that I find the security to know I can plot out my own little arcs of business. And this is where that transcendent joy is to be found. I’ll do some exploring to find more fast travel bits, maybe do a mission or two, think about going to a new town to see if I can find some new weapons or clothes, try and win over some more cats etc etc etc. Being so nicely decoupled from any sense of narrative urgency happily promotes the sense of leisure to be had - the game really is ideal in that respect. Especially with the idea that it’s fucking enormous, so there’s an awful lot of player-directed activity on the menu. Fuck. Yes.

Crimson Desert’s status as a near-figurehead for an as-yet undetermined phase of videogame culture might sound incredibly nebulous thanks to my lack of articulation, but I can’t shake the feeling of Asian developers and global AAA debuts being something of a theme for the current generation. Sitting alongside the creative stasis of Western AAA, the arrivals of Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade and more pointedly, Palworld shows a contradictory compliance with and defiance against the AAA status quo. They obey particular entry requirements, but then go beyond the boundaries of acceptability or quality or sensibility and as such, mark themselves out as different by some indefinable metric. I really don’t want to claim it’s a simple difference of cultural background, for there’s something in the fundamental madness at the heart of Crimson Desert that seems to chime with the deeper spirit of the age in general. It feels like an AI hallucination at times, and the game’s ability to utterly confound and confuse you with weird information or oblique controls only serves to make it feel alien, as much due to its non-compliance with the frictionless AAA standards for such things. It also feels incredibly vibes-based, in the sense that the vast cohort of humans that worked on it came to act as some kind of gestalt wet-ware LLM, and just as we recoil in horror at genAI video of some imagined fantasy open-worlder, we can also be utterly transfixed and beguiled by it. Crimson Desert can genuinely feel like that for real; that its entire shape and form was spewed out by AI in a 30-sec Reel and humans simply reconstructed an entire game from it. But this is the oddness and madness that fuels the whole thing, what makes it so deliciously exciting. There is a whistleblower post claiming that the game is shit because of Pearl Abyss’s internal culture, only the whistleblowing doesn’t ring true at all - the game is fucking amazing. I’d love to think that’s by accident, as it would suggest a guiding hand of the online culture zeitgeist just spirited the magic out of AAA games and social media trends. A kind of Gibsonian Wintermute going self-aware and leaving Crimson Desert as the sole piece of evidence for that happening, as it really does feel substantially different from those other Asian titles. Wukong and Stellar Blade were firmly traditionalist, but Palworld was decidedly iconoclastic, being both a celebration and a perversion of the Pokemon template.2 And of course, Palworld had its own gen-AI palaver, much as Crimson Desert has (for the crime of having an AI-generated painting in it or something?). We should take that as the clarion call for the new flesh that Crimson Desert exemplifies - it ain’t even modern if ain’t had an AI scandal. This is the hallmark of the new modernity, and I kinda embrace the mess of it, the chaos underneath. There’s a bubbling vivacity here that feels so much more valuable and interesting than a by-the-numbers committee AAA. And I just love that it always feels accidental.

As a nice footnote, it’s worth mentioning that Crimson Desert is currently the final disc-based release I bought on day one. I’m absolutely proud of that fact, as it feels almost ridiculous to say it, but nonetheless in the short time I’ve been playing, I feel like I’ve had value for money. Having done so much Game Passing over the last four years or so, to come in with a game that feels so startlingly modern by buying it in the most traditional way is yet another contradiction that upends any sense of dull equilibrium around Crimson Desert. In a grander view, it feels like the 30-year tradition of the MMO being crystalised back into single player with a triumphant array of content and systems re-tooled for solo, and perhaps its air of freshness is down to my lack of MMO play. But to compare it to another new release, Bungie’s Marathon, we find that after a week, Crimson Desert looks to have double the sales. Marathon’s beautifully bold visual style and infographic design sings to me like the fawning Designers Republic fanboy I really am, but its multiplayer focus kills any enthusiasm dead. And that’s the tragedy of Marathon as the service game’s potential terminus; gimme a service game for single player and I might put years into that shit too. Crimson Desert works as an illustration of sorts for how that might look after a couple of years. Those piles of systems feel like an MMO after a shitload of content updates, with the crowded control methods betraying how they had to be crowbarred into a gamepad setup. But at the same time, it suggests what could be possible. The world is the star here, and you can always add characters to the world if you’re not hell-bent on changing it forever with some terribly impactful and important story. Instead, consider my creaky desires for Cyberpunk - to be a container of biographies, not narratives. No AAA game has come closer to fulfilling that dream than Crimson Desert, for it would seem so easy to make new playable characters and drop them, literally from the heavens, into its world of bonkers-grade environment and systems. And what a world it is! I sincerely hope the content updates don’t spoil the magic by shackling the player back into main-story orthodoxy, as suggested by comments from a shareholder call. I hope the game is simply too wild to be constrained by such a thing, but if that does ever happen, at least we had that time where Crimson Desert felt as wild and as free as the world it gave you.

[21]

Commercial Breaks: The Battle For Santa’s Software is a true gem. It’s so good that it forms the basis for just about any YouTuber look at the era, including Kim Justice’s thoroughly decent overview. What it accidentally captures is the genuine spirit of the age; an industry in transition to professionalism, but one filled with genuine characters and a healthy dose of arrogance and hubris to compliment its diligence and worthiness. This was the UK videogames industry of the mid-80s, and what’s of particular interest is the geography. Aside from shots of a computer show presumably in London, the entire documentary takes place in the upper half of England. It goes no further south than Birmingham, lending a curiously class-free picture of a dazzling new industry. One cast in the Thatcherite dream of independent commerce, but showcasing the North’s ability to leap from the smoke and dust of post-industrial collapse, as it was happening, by harnessing new consumer technologies. With the description out of the way, I will now lazily devolve into listing bullet points about things I really love in the documentary.

Everyone’s Northern

The preponderance of regional accents in Commercial Breaks tells its own story about the curious democracy that home microcomputers brought to the industries that grew around them. With only Ocean’s David Ward and Chris Hedges voicing anything approaching middle-class RP, we get a vocal celebration of Liverpool and Manchester as focal hubs for the UK videogame industry, a status which to some extent they maintained well into the 21st Century. Of course the youth of many of the people on the development side is a given, but less expected are John ‘grandad’ Gibson and Steve Cain,4 who seem far older than the bedroom whizzkid Joffa Smith or the (sadly not featured) Eugene Evans who, along with Matthew Manic Miner Smith, were used to forge the millionaire teenage coder mythos upon which Imagine leaned. Special award goes to Tony Pomfret's outstanding lancs (?)5 accent, which is as broad as it gets - particularly when saying “Quasimohdoh”.

Mark Butler’s Extraordinary Claims

A pivotal segment in the show is Mark Butler explaining why Imagine must commit vast sums of money and resources to making ‘megagames’. Mark claims that in just two years, they have reached the limit of what is possible on current hardware and, incredibly, selling games with a hardware add-on to boost capabilities is the only viable step forward. Even better are further claims that this add-on will make characters you can do ‘literally anything’ with. This is such an extraordinary claim that in the modern age, you’d suspect cocaine addiction or mental illness was necessary to allow yourself to be filmed saying such a thing. I watch this documentary a lot and his segment still makes my jaw drop. I would have loved to see a contemporary coder’s perspective on his comments but even by the standards of the day, it would have been obvious that Butler was absolutely full of shit. However I suspect the documentarians had likely seen this kind of brash hucksterism before and gleefully included his monologue early in the episode to give Imagine all the rope it needed to hang itself.

Legit Red-Hot 8-Bit Dev Team Action

Butler’s ludicrous sales pitch segues into office life on the development side of Imagine, showing us John Gibson struggling with a movement bug as we get an actual glimpse of Bandersnatch in action. The fact it looks exactly like any normal ZX Spectrum game is one of the greatest comedic contrasts possible against Butler’s monologue, but rather than pressing the point we get a look at the developers toiling away. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, we’re actually looking at key members of Denton Designs, one of the most innovative and interesting development teams of the 8-bit era. Read more here. Denton were responsible for all-time standouts like The Great Escape and genuinely radical experiments like Shadowfire, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Mutants. What this proved was Imagine’s downfall wasn’t due to any lack of development talent, meaning the suits were fucking the creatives before the industry was even five years old.

Sylvia Gets Combative With Chris

Sales supremo Sylvia Jones meets with Imagine’s distributor in Birmingham. Pulling up in an immaculate Ford Escort (XR3i?) with iconic alloys, she sits down with Chris Hedges to try and convince him that Bandersnatch is the greatest thing ever to happen in the history of videogames. From a monologue in her car just before arriving, it doesn’t sound like Sylvia is in the most positive mood, and her meeting with Chris presumably does little to alleviate that. It’s unclear if Sylvia is giving Chris genuine information or if she’s making it up on the spot, as she makes claims that the game will be launching 6 weeks from their meeting. Considering there is absolutely nothing of substance to show of the game, this would be alarming on its own, so we can imagine Chris’s incredulity when Sylvia announces that the game will also come with as many as 25 items in the box, “That sounds complicated”, Chris replies. Sylvia replies “it isn’t, really”, in a manner which seems defensive, to say the least. It’s at this point that Chris discovers the game will come with a hardware add-on, an audio tape soundtrack and a follow-up LP vinyl record with ‘famous names’ on it.6 Oh, and it will cost more than seven times the average retail price - £40 instead of £5.95. While you could blame Sylvia for handling this disclosure badly, as it could seem like she’s just made it all up in blind panic, but it has echoes of Mark Butler’s grandiosity that betray its likely source. Chris’s closing remark that “You’ve now taken the product, in my mind, beyond understanding” is one of the most sensible observations made in the entire documentary.

David Ward Doesn’t Mind Home Piracy

Upon finding a commercially-pirated copy of Hunchback at a market, Ocean founder David Ward talks frankly about the threat to his bottom line that comes from the commercial knock-off industry, while absolving the home copyist. It’s a fascinating stance to take and perhaps underlies the sensibilities and professionalism of him and his business. Wonderfully, David chalks up the bedroom pirate to being part of the hacker culture, which no doubt plenty of his coders have come from. As we will read shortly, piracy was a common bogeyman for the flailing-fortunes software house in the 1980s, attributing all sorts of financial shortcomings to the spectre of lost sales. When I worked in PR in the mid-late 2000s, a lot of the senior staff I met were from the 1980s and many had opinions of the leading lights of the era, but none had a bad word to say about David. And he comes across in Commercial Breaks as a sensible and professional business man. My boss back then told me that David had actually made his fortune in property during the 1970s, so Ocean was a kind of playful, exciting venture for him, running it for the challenge. It’s probably that spirit that led to him contributing to Anne and Geoff Brown’s publisher, US Gold, who in turn part-funded smaller studios and publishers like Sheffield’s Gremlin Graphics, and the consolidation of UK games distribution with Centresoft.7 The interesting thing here is with pivotal figures like David Ward taking such a prominent role, Commercial Breaks works as a superb introduction to the UK videogames industry of the mid-late 80s and early-mid 90s, for so many of the major players in that era can draw connections to the people interviewed in it.

The Accidental Formation of Psygnosis Without Bruce Everiss

The knockout moment of documentarian reportage in Commercial Breaks is the board meeting when the news comes that the bank will not lend Imagine any more money. Unfortunately, this turns out to be absolutely catastrophic. The meeting starts with cutthroat razor enthusiast and general oddity Bruce Everiss8 explaining that they’ve fatally overhyped Bandersnatch to the media, and desperately need something of substance to stop the hype train from derailing. Ian Hetherington then gets the deadly call and the company grinds to a halt, just as Paul Anderson’s team are filming. Ian soon resigns, as do most of the other directors, leaving a lone Bruce Everiss to hold the fort. Bruce cuts a semi-tragic figure in Commercial Breaks, seeming to be both the voice of reason and ‘the one who got left behind’. Ian Hetherington would form a company with David Lawson and Jonathan Ellis that fought a reasonably petty battle with various parties to obtain various IPs and assets of Imagine. That company eventually became Pysgnosis, the company that defined the British 16-bit computer game, including packaging and branding, with Shadow Of The Beast, Hired Guns, Lemmings etc. Psygnosis was in turn acquired by Sony to become SCEE Liverpool, famed for Wipeout et al, which itself was eventually closed in 2012. It’s absolutely wild to me that the moment that Ian Hetherington decided he was finally ‘out’ was probably captured on film. It’s impossible to understate how important Psygnosis was in creating a premium tier of high-end games on the 16-bit Amiga and ST, and in helping the UK industry transition into 16-bit and through to 32-bit modernity. As the previously-linked Crash article reveals, it seems that Hetherington and co-conspirators may have been making moves behind the scenes prior to Imagine’s formal collapse, but I still reckon the pivot is right there, in the boardroom, when he answers the phone to a big ‘No’ from the bank. That leads to Lemmings and Lemmings leads to Grand Theft Auto, motherfuckers.

The PCW Show, September 1984

Immediately after the infamous bailiff scene, where, spoiler alert, Imagine staff come back from lunch to find the office closed and everything inside seized, we leap into the PCW Show 1984. This really serves to showcase both the commercial calendar that the professional breed of games publishers work to, but also underlines the contrast between Ocean and Imagine. David Ward is there, selling products and selling them well. Imagine is not, and its directors - delusional or otherwise - are equally absent. The footage here is invaluable to my own nostalgia, as I have incredibly warm memories of visiting those shows. They were absolute wonderlands that I feel are sorely missed in the modern age.

The Rest Of The Documentary Is Cool But Not That Important If I’m Honest

The bailiff scene happens at 18 minutes, and with 10 left in the show, it leaves a whole third to Ocean’s professional path to seasonal sales success. This charts the development and release of Hunchback 2, showing the surprisingly progressive idea of using a school computer club for QA and focus testing, as well as documenting the nuts and bolts of tape duplication and distribution. It’s procedural stuff, but you can’t begrudge the makers for letting the fireworks go off right in the middle. Ocean has a particularly natty line in blue Ford Transit vans emblazoned with the Ocean logo. Imagine had leased Ferraris and Porsches. I’ve read testimony that the bailiff scene shows some of the altercations at the front entrance that allegedly distracted the bailiffs enough that Imagine staff were able to sneak dev hardware down the back stairs, though how much of that is true is up to you to decide. As for me, it's always going to be print the fucking legend.

Commercial Breaks: The Battle For Santa’s Software is absolutely the greatest single document of the era. As I’ve mentioned, googling the people featured will lead you all over the history of UK videogame publishers and developers, right up to the current day. As such it’s completely invaluable as a piece of history and we should be praising the uploaders for those early copies and the BBC for adding such a magnificent capture to their permanent YouTube archive. I like to imagine that the show only came to light in the 21st century thanks to the scans of Crash and other magazines of the era finding their widest audiences. Those issues that directly mentioned the show were somehow bringing it to the right person’s attention. And that by some luck, VHS archives were scoured in search of it. Perhaps someone’s memory was jogged that they had it, or maybe it just randomly came to light. But that is the delight and serendipity of lost media, that hardly any of us even knew was lost, being suddenly found and made available to all. We have all the magazines and games of the era to hand, but video footage from the time is incredibly rare. If you haven’t watched it, you really should. It does accompany the standards like Making The Most Of The Micro and The Computer Programme and Micro Live, but it conveys so much more density of the culture compared to those drier in-studio magazine shows, and that’s the most important preservation of all. It's the sheer fucking vibes of the thing.

[21]

It’s obviously a joke, as the name gives that away immediately, but it’s a very serious one. JFK Reloaded is cut from the same cloth as British satire’s long history and as such, is perhaps the first videogame to do satire successfully with such a specific focus. This is the Brass Eye Paedogeddon Special of gaming and perhaps just as important in pricking pomposity, especially given the similar howls of incandescent outrage from the establishments that claim victimhood from its attack, an act just as audacious as the game itself. JFK Reloaded is principally, and is repeatedly stated as such by its creator Kirk Ewing, about the truth. Or rather, it’s about disarming an attack upon it. Kirk states in many interviews that the project was about dismantling JFK conspiracy theories by giving the player the opportunity to recreate Oswald’s shots. It does this with a surprisingly rigorous simulation of Dealey Plaza, the presidential motorcade and Lee Harvey’s Mannlicher-Carcano. And surprisingly, players found it was entirely possible to precisely recreate the Warren Commission’s account of the assassination. In fact, the game’s analysis and scoring debrief is just as rigorous as the ballistics simulation, going as far as punishing the player for firing the wrong number of bullets and hitting the wrong people, while rewarding trajectorial accuracy and even shot timings. The specificity and accuracy of the simulation is part of the joke - and wonderfully so - but it’s also the core virtue upon which the game’s validity hangs. Without that soberness, its absurdity becomes too acute. And yet, upon seeing the trajectories1 in the post-game analysis, you gain an understanding in how videogames repeatedly lie about what firearms do to humans. This constantly-missed fact is one reason why this game is incredibly important - it teaches you that bullets can indeed enter forearms and exit via buttocks to cause life-changing injuries to people behind. It teaches you the real consequences of your actions.2

JFK Reloaded has an option to turn up the motorcade behaviour to ‘chaos’, which adjusts the simulation to make NPCs react more wildly, which in turn can force the whole affair into slapstick carnage. I wonder why this was included as it breaks the kayfabe, so to speak. Maybe it’s there to defuse the sombre seriousness of the piece, or simply to add more value to the commercial proposition by allowing it to become a mayhem simulator.3 Perhaps it’s just acknowledging the cosmic joke. Or perhaps it’s actually deeper and more textural; a means of allowing the satire to explode into parody, particularly given the JFK assassination’s place in popular culture and how it validates the perverse psychology of conspiracism. It’s worth remembering that JFK Reloaded is from 2004, just a year after Operation Iraqi Freedom, a fallaciously-justified invasion of Iraq that leant heavily on conspiratorial thinking to promote its validity. It’s also a year before the release of Loose Change, which gathered together 9/11 conspiracies in a package palatable to wider audiences than the forums and blogs where such theories were coalescing. 2004 is also the year of Adam Curtis’s The Power Of Nightmares and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The fact that both documentaries are about perversions of the truth means we can draw a tentative circle around JFK Reloaded as a way of non-extreme creators establishing a sanctuary of sorts from politically-motivated attacks on the truth from all sides of the political spectrum. It’s interesting to note that Kirk’s previous game, State Of Emergency, was accused of drawing on the 1999 WTO protests which were organised, in part, by conspiracy-theorising anarchists.4 Again, this sociological context places JFK Reloaded into a unique position, one that only becomes clear if you understand the evolution of the paranoid style in American politics.

Initially a lecture from 1959, The Paranoid Style’s publication in 1964 posits how the right leverages conspiracy theories as a means of obtaining and maintaining power by conjuring imagined, evil forces working against the good. Whether this is done with belief or not in said theories is largely irrelevant - what matters is the destruction of the singular truthful narrative in pursuit of malleable, politically-utile misrepresentations, of which the JFK assassination is a canonical root. Consider that in the neoconservative melee of post-9/11 US politics, paranoid conspiracies flourished in part due to the deregulation of media brought about by the most recent idol for Neocon authoritarianism, Ronald Reagan’s administration.5 The lack of consequence for lying in broadcast media undoubtedly fuelled the conspiratorial 90s, a decade hallmarked by the rise of the conspiracy theory to pop-culture phenomenon, thanks in a large part to The X-Files, which happily mixed and matched real and imagined conspiracies as if they were all true. In a series where a character called Deep Throat sits alongside a trio called The Lone Gunmen, we see the consolidation of JFK and his assassination as a conspiracy as a standard feature in global pop culture. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie may have ushered it into the decade specifically as a conspiracy, but it was The X-Files that atomised it, and conspiracism itself, as a pop culture phenomenon.

In 2004, this was no doubt still fresh. In a way, 9/11 was so unavoidably a giant shock to the global psyche that previous atrocities, like the conspiracy-led Oklahoma City bombing, would fade in comparison. That conspiracy theories thrived in its wake is hardly surprising. In this sense, Kirk Ewing’s attempt to take us back to the very root of the modern US conspiracy theory and attempt to establish a viable truth, or a faith in the objective analysis carried out by the state, makes JFK Reloaded something far more significant than it would first seem. It’s interesting that in researching for this piece, I googled to see when the last article was published about it, only to find that JFK Reloaded gets talked about quite a bit. Vice interviewed Kirk about it as recently as 2022, and you find it popping up all over the place. And yet, it’s not lauded at all. This is mostly because the majority of the commentary is on the reaction to it, rather than what the game itself is actually saying. Perhaps the truth of that is too difficult to parse, or too complex to easily relay in the modern age, or too boring in comparison to the emotions it stirs by simply existing. For it to be a Scottish game is particularly acute - it sits in quiet opposition to another Scottish game about America, and almost silently shames it with its rigour and purpose. But this makes JFK Reloaded all the more important, and we really need to consider how subtle the joke is, how great the idea actually is, and how well it was executed. The fact it’s now legitimate freeware is fascinating. Much like Jason Rohrer, making it freely available is an important part of the statement. That said, the fact it was originally a commercial product, and offered a prize for nailing the ‘full Oswald’ based on revenue, is an almost genius act of deliberate cultural vandalism. It’s a pity Kirk Ewing didn’t keep it up and do more games with as fierce a purpose and humour, as I’d say this places it easily alongside the most biting of Chris Morris’s work. Given the amount of shit piled upon him by the US media, it’s understandable why he didn’t go further.

Naturally, JFK Reloaded failed miserably - JFK conspiracies are just as alive as ever, but in the modern age just making the fucking gesture is an act of defiance that we must absolutely support. Its heroic mission is all the more important with contemporary US politics the way it is. Where originally it baited arch-assholes like Ted Kennedy and Jack Thompson, now it serves as the slimmest of weapons against the psychology of RFK, an absolute monstrous creation of the conspiratorial, paranoid right. As he sets about tearing down the institutions of American health with Ivermectin and antivax supremacism, we find the links back through the monsters created by the 90s; Alex Jones and the supplement-selling model for lying fucks grifting the vulnerable and under-educated. The way shock jocks on independent talk radio were freed of consequence for their dishonest conspiratorial rage-baiting in the 80s lead to the politics of Fox News’s alternative facts and the dominance of MAGA, all of which shows how badly and tragically the odds are stacked against those that just want the objective truth to be shared by all. What we really needed in the post-Reloaded melee was a sequel of equal rigour to show how crashing a passenger plane into the WTC Towers could bring them down, and not the pleas for a Diana crash-sim in Paris. What we need now is a Pandemic with research-grade accuracy, one that lets you choose between MRNA vaccines or worming tablets to compare the death rates. The precedent that JFK Reloaded set was all too easily lost in the furore about the reaction it caused, perhaps because the point it really makes is too hard to swallow. When a game condenses the core of the modern FPS into a tight simulation of a real event, the truth is perhaps too uncomfortable to contemplate in that hyperfactual context. The ugliness of our glee in killing too naked for us to bear, it’s easy to understand why we’d only remember the fuss it caused.

[21]

I have very urgent and committed plans to do another episode really soon, as well as actually interviewing people. You can interpret that as a promise or a threat, depending on how you feel about a) my ability to monologue and b) my inability to schedule recording times with other people.

So yes, please listen, please comment, please share. If only so I can get over 1K listens and apply for adverts. Such is the joy of the modern age!

[21]

My love of the Orochi titles was unconditional. I bought them all, even Warriors All-stars and went full max-grind on most of them. My one and only 1000g was in Warriors Orochi 2. Yet there was always a sense that Orochi was still a bit too trapped by the architecture of the mainline Dynasty Warriors orthodoxy to really explore the limits of what it could do, or how hard it could push the player. They relied on the same map styles and scales for the action, which felt both restrictive in terms of laying out enemies for combat and as a means of differentiating Orochi from the Musou mainstream - a massive issue in terms of the series’ PR1. For me, far too much time was spent running between the mobs and as each sequel arrived, this never seemed to change. It was something you simply had to accept, even if I went full bonkers and developed an elite-level RSI-inducing jump-dash technique to eliminate the excruciating 2-second anims for getting on and off horses. Such are the demands of the true Musou flow. And as far as Musou goes, Orochi is where the flow state is finest. Of course, that’s when you’ve maxed the difficulty to get the biggest, toughest mobs and have the characters and equipment to tear through them, but when the game is humming along at its peak, there’s a kind of supreme gaming umami from its relatively simplistic combat system that’s wonderfully addictive. That joy of repetition in pursuit of clearing the battlefield has the primal delight of chomping on some joyously flavoured and textured mouthful, or in scything away a vast thicket of tall stingy nettles.2 If only, I wished, there was a Musou game that did away with all the running around and let you just get on with the killing.

Imagine my surprise and delight when it turns out that Warriors: Abyss is precisely that! It’s nothing but the killing, and it’s absolutely superb as a result. Well, it is for this old Musou fan, but with Abyss, Omega Force has almost defined the ultimate correct Valhalla for its suite of heroes to find eternal battle. Thanks to a fixed isometric projection camera and compact arenas for each stage, the game has been labelled as a Hades-alike in some quarters, but that feels a little lazy. It actually takes the edge of the old Gauntlet mode and modernises it into the most tightly-focused Musou title to date, and it does this by learning the best lessons from Hades and its contemporaries. Gone are the re-tellings of ancient legend and attendant fan-fic melodramas of the Dynasty and Samurai Warriors mainstream, and even the more off-kilter and playful Orochi narratives are flung to the wayside. Warriors: Abyss is freebase Musou, as if it needed Hades to give it a camera angle and a vaguely similar superstructure to contain its naked wildness. It’s weirdly generous too. The full traditional rosters are all here, with a set of Dead Or Alive/Ninja Gaiden characters backing them up as well as three explicitly manga ladies from the Atelier series. Imagine Hades with 100+ characters to try and you’re almost there. Only it gets to a fizzing, savage intensity pretty quickly. The game’s structure is cleanly straightforward. There are regions and there are rounds in each region. Rounds are governed by a KO count to reach and sometimes, additional mission objectives. Once a round is complete there’s a rest phase where you pick randomly-offered characters to make alliances with, in order to bolster your mega team musou attack. These alliances also increase your battle rating, which does something very important but I have no idea what that actually is. You just want to make the number as big as possible. After a bunch of rounds there’s a boss, and after that you hop to the next region which comes with a step up in challenge. Then at the end of the fourth region, there’s a big boss. Then you’re done for that run. After this there are additional tiers of the same run to complete which obviously get harder with each successive traversal, rounding off with a set of additional modes that offer Disgaea-like depths to plumb. It’s all beautifully neat compared to the sprawling story arcs of previous Musou titles and, once again, a nice development of the barebones structure of the original Gauntlet mode.

Character progression comes from a trad levelling system, but one that only offers permanent increments to base stats every 50 levels. However, outside the main game there’s an entire screen dedicated to unlocking characters with one of the game’s internal currencies. There aren’t any arcane story-derived unlock conditions here, just a big web of warriors with a range of prices to unlock them. Beautifully, once you’ve unlocked the entire roster, the currency can be spent levelling them up. Even more beautiful is that each character unlock comes with a permanent stat upgrade for all characters, so by the time you’ve reached the far ends of the warrior web, your base stats are improved to a surprisingly decent standard. In battle, you can level up traditionally3 but each run’s dynamic, roguelike nature is built from picking up attributes as you play. Certain enemies drop attribute orbs, and on collection you’re given choices of which attributes to pick, so you can direct your development along particular lines. This is fucking great. You also get nifty rewards from the boss fight treasure chests that persist through that run as well as the occasional offer of buffs and bonuses in between stages. There’s a great deal of variability offered to the player throughout the game and hence a real sense of choice in the style of your character’s development. You can specialise in speed and elemental damage, or tank up with defence and lethality attributes. Or you can expedite charging the team attack and your own Musou special. It’s all delightfully free and plentiful, lending the whole affair a real sense of playfulness. My only gripe, particularly as an Orochi head, is the lack of character swapping. I’d love to pay some in-game currency to switch lead characters, and given the game’s roots in Orochi, it seems a bit mean that you can’t.

In general, the game starts that fizzing hum around the third region. Then it really steps up the enemy densities and it’s here that the game’s biggest mechanical change comes into play. It has a dash, only it’s a cooldowned dash. This is a source of quite venomous criticism for some, but I absolutely love it. Abyss has a very polite system of painting the floor with purple wherever an enemy’s AOE can damage you. Initially, it’s easy to thread your way around them and in boss fights, they’re extremely obvious for sorting out attack windows and whatnot. However as the intensity increases, the amount of purple does too. This makes your battle traversal all the harder, and places more strain on your observation skills whilst slogging through mobs. With the dash having a cooldown, it means you can sometimes dash into danger with no way of dashing out again, although I’ve found that kicking off a combo string can get you out of peril fairly reliably. Some characters on my runs have been configured in such a way that dashing is barely required. A particularly monstrous Ayane build saw her absolutely tearing through mobs with frightening leaps of speed and savagery and as such, she was well away from any charging-up attacks before they could hit, and in fact comboing the very same motherfuckers up the ass before anything landed. It’s this kind of primal command of the mob, while under real pressure, where Abyss really shines; the umami is strong, the sense of power is tangible and the core Musou delight is flowing in abundance. It’s deliriously gleeful shit, as the need to keep moving is absolutely paramount. The tempo is therefore as ferocious as your combos. In that heat, the game becomes the absolute peak of Musou play. I fucking love it.

It’s interesting that its fans fucking love it too. Community comments are full of people discovering Warriors: Abyss and professing their adoration. It’s a solid 7/10 with 10/10 heart. A spectacularly harmonious focusing of the entire Musou proposition, with all the fat trimmed away. A real joy of the old Orochi titles was building up weapons with attributes to suit your playstyle, but here there’s none of that. There’s just one extra weapon to unlock or buy, but I don’t feel cheated by that at all. There are no fucking horses, there are no bullshit vulnerable officers to defend. There’s just fighting, and it’s some of the best fighting to be had, full stop. I always had a suspicion that I don’t like Soulsbournes because they are, in a sense, the diametric opposite of Musou. With Abyss, the entire Musou proposition finds a kind of ascendancy, a novel respectability. It would take quite some effort and investment to refine a Orochi run to the point where you can feel the grandeur of taking out mobs on Chaos difficulty, but with Abyss, you’ll get there in 45 minutes. A straight run through one traversal is under an hour and, deliciously, the game autosaves between stages, meaning you can put down and pick up runs at your leisure. And again, there’s such a generous abundance of choice. I have a list of characters unlocked, which I want to take for runs, that’s so long I could be here for months. Considering I bought the game from the Xbox Store for £11.99, that’s fucking good going. It’s always baffled me as to why I haven’t been clamouring for Dynasty Warriors Origins. I do scour the preowned shelves for it whenever I’m in a CEX, but I’ve not felt the tug. Little did I know that was because my destiny lay with Warriors: Abyss. It was there the whole time, just waiting to make my Musou dreams come true. Fucking yes.

[21]

Deathloop’s ‘problem’ is nothing of the sort. I’ll link it yet again, but the 2022 Develop Conference making-of chat tells you why; it was specifically made for a very specialised audience. What makes it interesting is its AAA status in spite of that intent. Scratching my head, I can’t think of many AAA-budgeted titles that can claim a similar spirit of strident elitism. I suppose you can say that Kojima’s Death Stranding is a similarly contradictory example, a game that seems to be fuelled by elitist thinking that nonetheless finds popular appeal. Perhaps mystifyingly so in comparison to Deathloop, although much like Kubrick, Kojima’s reputation engenders a more diplomatic approach from the general audience. There’s a recognition perhaps that ‘genius’ labelling makes the hoi-palloi more receptive to wilder ideas. Yet Deathloop’s ideas aren’t at all wild, nor are they coloured with the trademark strands of profound obsession that Kojima proudly stamps into his work. Deathloop, as I contended, was much more of a celebration of the mature Arkane mode. In the post-Redfall era, I believe with increasing fervency that the French studio felt everything could be at stake, so went all-in on making Deathloop the ultimate statement of what Arkane could do mechanically and environmentally. It was an act of supreme focus in that regard. I also think it has some of Arkane’s most fascinating characterisation, but the narrative - beyond the framing conceits for the gameplay and world - is a disappointment. But then, I don’t think the story was really the point anyway. Something which the Reddit thread missed was how Deathloop is resolutely about resolving a multitude of threads into a single path. This is the point of the game - players weaving their own yarns to thread a universally constant needle. Commenters suggesting the game was forgotten because there was only one solution baffle me when the game’s intent is so obviously about building the one golden run.

I recently realised that Deathloop’s singular path can be seen as an expression of the classical stealth triumvirate: observe, plan and execute. Much like the donor of its skeleton, Dishonored, the game is most satisfyingly played as a stealth title so for me at least, there’s something profoundly rewarding in finding the game’s overall path is in symmetry with its fundamental gameplay. Interestingly, we’d normally consider such thinking as part of the arthouse Indie sensibility, or something closer to other videogaming esoterica. The process of rehearsal and final performance has more kinship with the Shmup, but also has a passing familiarity with the speedrun in general, and Deathloop’s rewards for exploring every corner of environment and systome definitely align with the totality of knowledge that the speedrun demands. Hence, you fly through your ultimate run at speeds that were unthinkable in your early hours. Naturally, there is no definitive reading here, the point is that Deathloop’s conceptual depth allows it to dance across multitude strands of the culture it operates within. And it does that in a uniquely playful way that its stablemates do not. Prey is a celebratory continuation of a gametype that was criminally left in the 1990s, but is so wedded to that task that it’s culturally confined by it. Dishonored is a distillation of various imsim mechanics into a peerless setting, but from that setting comes a grit that absolutely serves the game’s tangible mood, but restricts its spirit from soaring beyond the envelope. Deathloop is a distillation again, of the culture and of both its predecessors, but with a broader license for anarchy that comes from an island gone mad, leaving a game that’s deadly serious about its nonseriousness. That is how it’s able to push beyond its confines with real charisma.

I think that to really dig Deathloop, you need to have been through the hoops of its stablemates but also done plenty of its ancestral history. The tweaking and exploration for alternative routes of entry from Deus Ex, the distinct references to extremely specific bits of Half Life, the exploration of environmental mechanics and looping schedules of a Hitman and of course, the wide variety of problems and solutions from the Arkane catalogue. The proportion of the playerbase that has done all those things, or more importantly exhausted all of those things, is likely to be pretty small. It maybe explains why critical acclaim was so high, why it deserves a 10 from some, when the public at large seems to greet it with a bemused shrug. There’s a definite invitation in Deathloop to soak it all up if you like what you find and, perhaps more crucially, there’s an invitation to solve all the mysteries. Only, the game isn’t going to hand you any of that on a plate. So many moments of delight in my playthrough came from making sense of the oddities by working through them. A lab full of lasers with a crazy weapon in a corner is utterly confounding at first, but once you get the timings and the loadout right, you gain knowledge and power and solve a mystery. Given the modern vogues at the high end of the market, it’s almost an act of iconoclasm to deliberately confuse and frustrate the player before breadcrumbing them to enlightenment, and Deathloop pulls off that trick several times. Perhaps it’s this pricking of the player’s ego, along with its constant dangling of metroidvania-esque doors to who-knows-what that only open if you make the right kinds of progress, born of the right kind of curiosity, that nudge Deathloop into glorious failure territory. Of course, all this is part of Arkane’s grand plan as explained eloquently by Dinga in that Develop Conference chat. The kind of high-minded obstinacy that you can easily associate with the stereotyped national spirit of its country of origin.

When Dinga Bakaba described Deathloop as cuisine, he’s absolutely implying that many of his contemporaries are merely making food. And by and large, they are. They make smashburgers. Loads of them. Deathloop in that analogy is on some rarified level in comparison. I was insanely privileged enough to enjoy a 3-star Michelin meal last year. Prior to that, I couldn’t imagine that food could be so exceptional that it deserves a new term to describe it. And yet, I’d never tasted bread like that before - or since. And that was just the bread. I won’t bore you with the details, but it was like encountering a new dimension of food, a grand explosion of my horizon for flavour, but also for the theatre of the restaurant setting, for how a course of food unfolds on the plate. It was all extraordinarily pretentious and precious, but it was fucking glorious. And it absolutely ratified all the acclaim you can be forgiven for thinking is excessive or unfounded around haute cuisine at the highest level. The personal experience was so spectacular that the elitism earned both its validity and its value. A common theme on Affectionate Discourse is my disdain for the homogeny and safety of the modern AAA, and the deliberate elitism of Deathloop is the antidote. I reject the idea of elitism as gatekeeping, for the practice of opening all the gates to the widest audience is what leads, in the commercial context, to the kind of stagnation I can smell across videogaming’s contemporary high end. As I said earlier this year, I am bored by it all, as I am bored by all the smashburger outlets. And I fucking love a smashburger! Only the few weirdos can pierce the ennui and these are the elite few of which Deathloop is a spectacular member. Last year, I’d say Atomfall came closest and I found so many traces of Deathloop in its ambition and structure that it can’t be coincidental. And there were plenty of critics and players alike that found some beguiling charisma in Atomfall, even if it was mechanically bereft compared to Deathloop. I felt lucky and privileged to have Atomfall unfold accidentally in the way it did for me, and for its systome to be just enough to keep my acquisitional appetite engaged. I feel even more privileged to have found the same, in quite some excess, with Deathloop. Perhaps that is the game’s greatest tragedy - that not enough people will access it in the way I did. Joyously, eagerly. But at least it failed on its own terms, and with plenty of glory. For we lucky few,1 it’ll always shine so much brighter than anything you’ve got left.2

[21]

Thus the story of GAME and its final, whimpering demise closes a particular circle, one which the Boomers and Gen-X can claim full experience of. But for me, the nostalgia of 80s game retail is absolutely about the romance of that era and the coalescence of a social phenomenon, whereas the death of GAME feels more like a slow-motion tragedy with grave implications for the future of that very same culture. The dissolution of high-street videogame retail reminds me of the morbidity of the physical videogame itself, for surely its death is closer than we’d perhaps like to imagine. And yet, we allowed single brands to monopolise the high street2 in much the same manner as platform holders have steadily monopolised the supply of content for their own domains. Looking ahead, particularly at Microsoft’s thawing of relations with Sony, I find a distinct and almost cruel comedy in deciding to buy Forza Horizon 6 for the PlayStation 5 instead of getting it ‘for free’ on my Series S, but I utterly despise the naked profiteering on digital, seeing prices go up even though costs to distribute have almost disappeared, relatively speaking. Likewise, pointing out the absolute madness of paying top-whack for five-year-old games3 because they’re suddenly on Switch 2 feels like screaming into the void as a mad old man, surrounded by happy consumers consuming things they’ve already consumed, just because it’s on a smaller, newer screen. It highlights the idea that videogame retail coming under the total and complete control of the platform holders is building virtual Palaces of Versailles, a testament to the decadence of the wealthy providers and the fealty of the sycophants blindly and deferently supporting them with day-one purchases at maximum cost for maximum convenience. In essence, a near-perfect capitalist machine. If the platform holders could just AI-generate the games, it’d be game over, so to speak. In this sense, the lone corridor of legal retail resistance is to only buy pre-owned, an act of defiance that itself faces the same erasure should physical media cease to exist.4 There’s something of an absurdist joke in CeX becoming the sole videogame retailer on the highstreet, and entirely thanks to it being a reseller. There’s what, Argos? Currys? Places where you, yes you, have the honour and privilege to pay just £90 to preorder yet another fucking set of fucking Resident Evil remakes.

There’s a CeX that I visit weekly and as with most, it’s a place haunted by the implicit misery of the pawn shop and the challenges of the financially-deprived. You have to wonder how much of the stock is there because of lifestyle choices and co-morbidities that represent grand failings of society, of a welfare state retooled into a silent hand of oppression to force the weak, abused and under-supported into zero-hours purgatories, perpetually failing side-hustles and petty crime. The retail palaces of old had none of this, but there’s a flat honesty in CeX that can’t be ignored or denied. You can divine the state of the market by what’s on the shelves. The games that people keep, the games they dump after a week. It’s all there, and in a kind of stark objectivity that no industry news site or retail association report can improve upon. Current-gen Xbox games in the single digits, shelf after shelf of PlayStation 5 tells the stark story of this generation. Switch 2 games in a cabinet, Breath of The Wild still over £35 for Switch 1. The history of the 21st Century is there: the blocks and blocks of PlayStation 2 crowding out the single shelf shared by GameCube and XBox. The dizzying shovelware of the Wii section, the almost 1:1 parity of X360 and PlayStation 3, and the obvious dominance of PlayStation 4 over Xbox One. And also the DVDs, which persist as much the same call to resistance over digital distribution and its hegemonic monopolies in the post-Netflix era. CeX is perhaps the endpoint of retail when platform holders jettison their obligations to long-standing bricks and mortar. Once the discs and carts stop, CeX will still remain, precisely because it relies on the old and discounted instead of the current and premium.

As I mentioned earlier, the almost comedic nature of UK videogames retail being dominated by a newsagent and a chemist in the 1980s5 conjures nostalgia of extraordinary romance for me, but it’s not what the death of GAME signifies. It instead reminds me of a second golden age when living in London, single and carefree. Working in the centre, I had a glorious hunting ground that could be covered in a lunchbreak or a brief sojourn on Friday evenings. This is between 2004-2012, from the end of PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox, through to the era of 360 and PlayStation 3. GAME was a bastion of the videogamer’s life, a regular haunt. Earlier in the 2000s, GAME had become the place to go for those Friday releases, to inspect the shelves, look at the newly discounted stuff, then flick through the preowned bins. I’ll forever associate the 90s with Electronics Boutique and our local Software Plus quasi-indie, but the 21st Century was GAME, HMV and Gamestation. From my office in Covent Garden, it was a quick hop to Oxford Street to tour the giant Zavvi and HMV megastores with a reasonably-sized GAME in between them. You could then nip up a sidestreet to one of the original CeX shops, and then off to Game Focus on Goodge Street for imports and even more preowned. This circuit could be bolstered with trips to Piccadilly for the GAME in the basement of Hamley’s and a quick tour of the Trocadero’s arcade, or running the gauntlet of street-hawking Scientologists to reach the basement of Casino, where I spent many a quid being spanked by uprights of Muchi Muchi Pork!, Ibara and Mushihimesama, all to the soundtrack of teenagers trash-talking through Streetfighter Third Strike and Guilty Gear X battles. The death of GAME is the grim end of that glorious era. There’s no Casino anymore, there are no Virtua Fighter cabs at the Trocadero. There are no 2-for-£30 videogame deals in the modern HMV.6 7And now I’ve done my latest pre-owned trawl at GAME without ever realising it was actually my last. But then, I don’t recall my final lunchtime purchase of the latest X360 release I wanted, or my eager dash home to marathon the fuck out of it over the proceeding weekend.

If you haven’t noticed, it’s about videogames being part of the outside world, of participating in offline society, and of them having a geographical location that wasn’t your machine’s storage or an anonymous data centre, and the fact that you could find out about them, see them even, without a screen or an internet connection. This was a time when videogames felt integrated into your life just as food was, or clothes, or books and movies. It was about how browsing for videogames was part of the overall experience of leisurely wandering around the shops, which in itself could be a lovely social pursuit with like-minded friends. And it was in that kind of experience where the eternal golden braid back to the 80s held its link. There were times with the 8-bits where I’d do just the same on occasional Saturday mornings when I’d saved up the pocket money, bussing into town to pick up a new arcade conversion, or a Last Ninja, or some grand compilation, to blow the whole weekend playing. That cycle, that specific ramp of anticipation, acquisition, access was the behavioural loop I enjoyed for decades, and one that now seems to be gone without any of us really noticing. In its extinction lies an inevitable change in the culture itself, much like how the death of the videogame magazine and more recently, the videogame website, has fundamentally altered the culture of anticipation, confirmation, reflection and critique. There was an interplay between media and retail that mutually funded and supported each other, and for the consumer, it provided the skeleton upon which a culture could thrive. None of this is to paint GAME as some kind of heroic good in the machine of the videogames industry. It was as nakedly capitalist and exploitational as the platform holders, but by virtue of its existence it at least held particular balances in place. There are plenty of stories of greed, weirdness,8 stupidity9 and incompetence to contrast the passionate ambassadorial assistants that introduced naïve kids to superb games, or informed parents wisely, or kept some pre-owned gem under the counter for you. But all in all, the mere existence of GAME as a place for people to go to because of games contributes to the culture in ways we’ll only be able to estimate once the full repercussions of its loss can be felt. Already in this post-retail, post-print wasteland, we have morally-questionable, affluence-baiting boutiques like Limited Run Games. Concerns whose largesse and ostentation matches the coffee-table journals that while delightful and meaningful, are nonetheless luxury items for those privileged enough to afford them. Great and valuable as the output may be, they can never redress the social loss the culture has already had to bear.

The populist democratisation of videogaming, which high street retail fostered for 40 years, seems under a new kind of threat as physical sinks into a luxury pursuit for those who have enough disposable income to participate. That failed Service Game push by Sony and the likes of Ubisoft et cetera was the harbinger of what corporate wants for the masses, and perhaps will rise again - F2P platforms that can be microtransacted for decades are actually what the profit motive would prefer. Under the constraints of late-late-stage capitalism and fascistic governments serving billionaire oligarchies, perhaps a mild investment in some Service Game or other will be all that the populace at large may be able to afford. As such, our last line of resistance is to abandon the day-one digital download and just frequent CeX until what you want emerges on its shelves. But, of course, the size of the modern AAA biggies often outstrips BluRay capacities, and that’s not a trend that’s likely to reverse. Even though flash storage is demonstrably cheap enough to be economically viable at scale for physical console games, the fact that the PlayStation 5 generation was still on disc shows how much Sony is milking the last drops of its investment in BluRay plants, rather than how eager it is to transition to solid-state storage for individual releases. With the next generation’s storage options still unclear,10 we can perhaps begin to prepare for CeX’s grand unified catalogue of possible purchases to move closer to the finite, closed list. The fact that of the approximately 62 available titles from this list of the Switch 2 catalogue, only 19 - a third - have the full game on the cart should be a sobering realisation, particularly as it unfolds in cohort with collapses of videogame retail and media. Even though it laboured too long as a comatose brand under the Mike Ashley zombie universe umbrella, the final nail hits with real resonance. The death of GAME is an omen of a fundamental change in terms of consumer freedom, just as much as it marks the death of a long-beloved part of our videogaming culture.

[21]

There’s a reason why Eugene Jarvis’s first game carries a cachet that precedes most people’s experience of playing it. It’s not just Martin Amis proclaiming it a masterpiece, as I doubt there are that many gamers who know that even fucking happened. As a game, Defender is notoriously difficult and ruthlessly unforgiving. Can we say the strict demands of Danmaku actually start with Defender? It’s also wildly intense. The challenge, the explosions, the booming audio. In many ways, it encapsulates a stereotypical notion of the dangerous videogame with genuine aplomb - it’s a savage assault on the senses, not to mention your ability to compute, to react. And it’s like that from the off. It’s the kind of game that concerned parents would think emanated a miasma of digital neurotoxicity, that its ferocity could damage the minds of those playing it. Of the ‘golden age’ arcades, it’s the one game I most wish I could master, for its flow state is uncannily thrilling. Riding Defender is like being strapped to a missile you can barely control; a kind of sublime union with the custom control scheme and the demands of the rapid, demanding systome that sees your best prospect as that of temporary survival. The goal isn’t to overcome, but to fend away for as long as you can until you’re inevitably killed. This remains the case for the most high-end of players on the game’s highest difficulty. You may be able to rack up enough extra lives to go to the loo lower down the scale, but at 99-99 you will never be free to own the gamespace as yours alone; the enemies will get you even if you’re the best in the world.1

Being roughly aligned with 1978’s Space Invaders and 1979’s Galaxian, as games where a lone ‘hero’ destroys alien invaders, Defender has a unique position temporally. It’s straddling the vogues of late-70s videogame designs, and the culture’s notable lack of convention, with the brighter aspect of a far-horizoned future and capabilities of improving hardware as a herald of the decade ahead. It counterparts beautifully with Battlezone as harbingers of what’s to come. The 1980s brought standardisation to the Arcades and was where the shooter transitioned from the static screens of the Space Invaders mould and out into the defence of lesser and lesser abstracted places, or in Defender’s case, initiating the sense of the shmup as a geographical journey as much as a battle against the odds. In a sense, Defender is the game that breaks the Space Invaders dogma and asserts, for a short while at least, the idea that the American arcade game is every bit the equal of its Japanese equivalents. Williams might not have enjoyed the same riotous catalogue of diverse splendour that Atari2 delivers throughout the decade, but in some ways its biggest hits are all the more iconic considering how few duds Williams had compared to its bigger, far more corporate rival. So much of that is down to the staff, and Jarvis/DeMar in partnership would prove themselves capable of defining two of the American golden age icons with an almost effortless grace.

Robotron is, of course, the little brother to Defender that’s wildly more popular, leading to a game template that survives today. The twin-stick shooter begins at Robotron, although its immediately-accessible control scheme must be a reaction to the hyper-quixotic technicality of Defender’s. And therein lies the rub - Defender is difficult in play, yes, but it’s also difficult to play. Well, as long as you’re the kind of try-hard heathen that was indoctrinated on 8-way joysticks and single-button interfaces. Worse are still the filthy masses that expect twin analogues, shoulders, triggers and a multitude of face buttons, who would recoil in horror at what I’m about to describe. A massive part of Defender’s beguiling uniqueness is its now-bonkers control method. Shoot, thrust, reverse, hyperspace, bomb. Five buttons. And a lever! That moves the Defender up and down on the screen, meaning all horizontal movement is via thrust and reverse. It’s astonishingly counter-intuitive for anyone used to the post-JAMMA, post-8-bit standards for controls, and yet it’s a scheme specifically designed to fit the game and perhaps more importantly, vice versa. There’s a symmetry there, as with a lot of the early golden age titles, where the interface and the design are in a kind of creative harmony that isn’t quite the same when everything must adhere to the 8-way stick and a bunch of buttons. Defender is from the era of Missile Command’s trackball, of Tempest’s spinner, Pacman’s sole joystick. It raises the question: was the ‘golden age’ golden because game and controls were designed together, to work together?

Defender’s controls meant anyone who learnt to battle the systome on home hardware, from the Atari 2600 to the home 8-bit computers, would be useless when faced with the real thing. From this, it’s understandable how the cachet grew. To compete at arcade Defender meant doing time on arcade Defender, which meant doing *a lot* of time on Defender. With that in mind, you can understand how the game gets its cool points by means of its barrier to entry, and how those who can wrangle the machine can command kudos and respect from those who tried, but couldn’t. Having never attempted the game in the arcade, I struggled enormously when I got Williams Arcade Classics on CD-ROM for a bargain price in the mid-90s. PC keyboards are no substitute for a real panel.3 Various attempts at configuring something passable via M.A.M.E. fared no better. However, it was when I was unbelievably lucky enough to get a Vectrex for £50 that I finally got some sense of mastering the beast. There was a beautifully calibrated homebrew version4 for the vector wonder that transposed the buttons-and-lever scheme onto the Vectrex stick-and-four-buttons controller. The real core of the Defender controls lies in the thrust and reverse options. Thrust propels you with a bit of inertia on button lift. Reverse swaps your horizontal direction but also displaces your vertical position, moving you towards the opposite end of the screen as you flip. An intuitive grasp of the distance and speed of that displacement is utterly critical to survival, and where the real mastery lies. Deployed correctly, the reverse is amazingly powerful in tight dodging situations as a stacked swapping of positions to avoid player-targeted bullets - or precisely the kind of play that Defender will rapidly escalate to if you make any progress. You can move up and down during the displacement and, naturally, you’re completely vulnerable to bullets or enemy collisions the entire time. What’s interesting is that it’s digital control in both senses - an on/off switch pressed by a finger. It’s not a directional move, and that abstraction seems to define the entire manner by which the player can deal with the game’s more extreme enemies. This was the stumbling block I had to triumph over to get to the game’s heart and with enough grinding on the Vectrex, I had managed to acquire a reasonably passable flowstate wherein I could play with the tiniest dash of confidence.

I love games that subvert your initial expectations, and I was suitably delighted to realise Defender isn’t about systematically clearing the stage of baddies but instead making sure you’re in the right place at the right time. The game’s central play, which is killing the cannon fodder Lander enemies to prevent them from kidnapping humanoids and turning into much more erratic and shooty Mutants, is more about patrolling with a seek-and-destroy mentality until you get the audio alert that a Lander is making a grab for a humanoid. You then need to get to wherever that is happening and make sure the kidnapping isn’t completed, for Mutants are much more of a handful than Landers. Achieving this without overshooting, crashing into enemies, being shot etc, is the chief thrill of the game. The destruction borne of the game’s amazingly-represented laser cannon is merely a component of that sense of dashing around. It’s the importance placed on position and movement that separates Defender from the Space Invaders lineage. Throw into that the spawning Baiters, which actively hunt you down, and you get a second dimension of distinction from the general thrust of ‘kill the flocking alien baddies’ arcade games. This is the key divergence: Defender expresses a real, tangible sense of machine malevolence.

In this clip from the 1982 mini-documentary, Arcade Attack, a youthful Defender player expresses his disdain for both the limitations of the Space Invader’s mechanistic march of descent and the ‘snidey’ behaviour of Defender’s Mutants. For him, he isn’t playing a game as much as he’s battling another mind - the game is operating on that intellectual level as far as he’s concerned. It’s a fairly baroque anthropromorphisation for the humble Motorola 6809 at Defender’s heart, but it underlines the impact the game had in presenting itself as an opponent actively working against you. Even the likes of Galaxian had the sense of automatons going through the motions in their balletic swoops towards the player, and Pacman’s ghosts seemed to be mindlessly homing in on you, not working in cohort. Berzerk’s Evil Otto comes closest perhaps, but Defender’s active enemies carried that extra magical weight of perceived malign intent. With that notion, Defender aligns more with the murderous HAL 9000 and the T-800 that’d arrive three years later than the processional baddies of Space Invaders and its offspring. Many people would cite Defender’s horizontal scrolling as the key innovation it brought, but I think its ability to make you feel as if you were being played as hard as you’re playing the game that makes Defender so uniquely valuable. It was interesting that Defender’s conjuring of malevolence would carry over to Robotron with considerable ease in translation, only to emerge as a literal personification with 1983’s Sinistar.5 Williams, it seems, went the whole hog and the legendary status is rightly deserved.

Defender now exists in the culture almost purely as an icon. A symbol of the best of a lost age rather than a peer to the contemporary melee. And yet its challenge remains just as daunting now as it did in 1981. The game isn’t any easier despite the inherited wisdoms of forty-five years hence. But sadly, it faces a kind of erasure. It exists as an occasional logo on some merch here or there, and lives more in the shadow of Robotron thanks to Geometry Wars’ singled-handed revival of the twin-stick shooter. It remains, however, a vital touchstone in the Gen-X experience as a game that only needed to live by virtue of its reputation as one of the very best, only to be mastered by the very best, even if so few ever got to appreciate its true majesty. And majestic it is - the bitterness of the battle, when your fingers actually know how to fight it, is more fraught than skirmishing a legendary Elite in Halo, or whatever example you’d use for human vs computer battling in the modern videogame context. The sense of valiance in shooting a Lander just before it converts to a Mutant and catching the falling humanoid while killing the enemies that surround you is supreme, every bit as thrilling as the best that contemporary games can offer. I love the game so much, I tried to pitch a retrospective to Eurogamer once, only to be told, off the record of course, that one Christian Donlan wanted to do it because he had the best fucking interview with Eugene Jarvis that you’ve ever fucking heard. Respectfully I re-tooled my retrospective into something else, but I’d still love to read that Defender retrospective, Christian!

To compare to other media, Defender is not quite Train Pulling Into A Station, as for movies the most contemporary exponent of the best of cinematic craft doesn’t go that much further than the very first action sequence. Rather, Defender is more akin to ancient cave paintings, being in possession of a necessary form that’s required for the true experience. You have to go into the cave and feel the rock where 250,000-year old hands put pigment to surface by torchlight to truly experience those images. To experience Defender you might not need the CRT or the classic arcade speaker for the audio-visual glee, but you absolutely need the controls. In my lottery-win dream arcade, Defender is absolutely the first cabinet I’m buying, and if it was the only one I owned, I’d be more than satisfied. I admire the game that much, and I’d be honoured to keep one alive. And it’s a wonderful thing to encounter for real. I had a chance to do that at Arcade Club in Bury, happily communing with a real machine in its own cave of sorts. I wondered if I could fire up those old Protector neurons and get my Defender control schema up and running again. And you know exactly what happened? It fucking kicked my fucking ass.

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At the time of writing, Ubisoft has just announced a seismic restructure that closed studios entirely and cancelled several popular and much-anticipated projects. Coming off the back of convictions for its former Chief Creative Officer (psychological abuse, complicity in sexual harassment), the Vice President of its in-house creative direction enforcement department (sexual harassment, psychological abuse, attempted sexual assault) and one senior Game Director (just old-fashioned nasty bullying) in July 2025, it’s perhaps best to see Star Wars Outlaws as a product of the company’s internal turmoil and the negligent incompetence of its upper echelons.2 As the case played out during 2024, Far Cry 6 floundered and drew accusations that the format was tired, Assassin’s Creed’s next entry gets delayed as its fortunes become an existential threat to the company, and Outlaws unwittingly becomes the company’s key Q3/4 saviour to maintain Ubisoft’s position as a AAA publisher.3 And yet, it was doomed to fail because of its fundamental disposition to the player’s relationship with the license; its broken application of the IP perhaps serving the egos of its creators rather than the audience.

Given the outline, ostensibly the closest you could get to a Star Wars GTA, the final product is both a grievous disappointment and an embarrassing squandering of perhaps one of the most dead-cert licenses to print money in the entire entertainment sector. Here is Ubisoft’s chance to lay out how its stock-in-trade machinery of action-oriented open-world third-person games could be conformed to any entertainment IP. It’s not just the branching trees of possible Star Wars spin-off sequels the template can accommodate, but the opportunity to prove that this kind of omni-game can adopt any IP dressing, and to do so profitably, while satisfying loyal fanbases. Given this ticket to fortune, Ubisoft fails partly by virtue of its conservatism, but also by a kind of egotistical overconfidence. A mistaken belief that its creative stasis represents a perpetual constant it can always extract revenue growth from, combined with a misjudgement of the quality of its creative vision.

It’s not hard to see why. The staff at the top include the directors of archly-misanthropic and cruelly mercenary lootershooters The Divisions and the narrative genius behind the archly-insulting Far Cries 5 and 6,4 joined by a head writer for the archly-mediocre Watch Dogs: Legion, aka How To Fuck Up A Pretty Good Idea By Clint Hocking.5 Given the weight of the license in hand, it would seem to be an act of corporate negligence to have given this lot the reins of a Star Wars game with the kind of budget that Outlaws must have enjoyed. What’s actually infuriating isn’t the trust in the above people, who are certainly capable, but the lack of excitement in the design. My early hours were filled with groaning at what I was being forced to do. There felt like a flimsy spell of false choice being cast over the player, presenting a game that on the surface looked more complex than it actually is. There’s a particularly galling smell of creative bankruptcy that emanates from the first map. The assets are great, the layout fine if unexceptional, but the content bland and lightweight. Much-vaunted features like a magic and invulnerable pet that can do things for you are relied upon as one as very, very few strategic options from the beginning to the end. Much like the mandate of one ship, one bike, there’s one style of play for the most part. This singularity, and the dogmatic commitment to it, is the fundamental flaw in Star Wars Outlaws.

There’s a real irony in the title being a plural when the game is so blinkered into one linear playstyle for the single, canned character you’re allowed to inhabit. This thinness is what gave me that sense of the creators being so utterly lacking in generosity. They won’t let you define a character in this universe, even though that would be amazing. They won’t even let you whip about on a speederbike, even though it would be trivial to implement. It highlights the maddening combination of creative arrogance and cowardice, or hubris and ignorance, that’s become my general sense of the Ubisoft AAA proposition in its darkening, post-reckoning years. As mentioned in my Splinter Cell lament, that series’ descent from principled espionage to sociopathic murdersim was emblematic of Ubisoft’s internal culture, and Outlaws is, hopefully, a terminal exclamation point.

Reviews and community commentary at the time tried to draw parallels with Uncharted, but I sense something far more basic as the core inspiration. Even though segments feel like a serving of Ubisoft’s least-popular challenges, such as enforced and utterly joyless clambering sections recalling the worst padding excesses of Assassin’s Creeds, the general impression I got was that Star Wars Outlaws is Ubisoft doing its best to pressgang Traveller’s Tales’ Lego Star Wars into the Ubisoft template. It’s playing it that fucking safe. Only, Lego Star Wars lets you be lots of characters and drive lots of things! This is because Lego Star Wars is fundamentally a parody. It is not a vanity project from a team of fairly average videogame writers with the chance to assert themselves upon the Star Wars canon. I do suspect this is why the game is so obsessed with telling this one story about one person, but in combination with the risk-averse, meanly thin interactive design, actually creates a videogame that just feels old. And not old in the ‘reliably serviceable’ sense.

The game actually plays fine. For a stealth game, it’s laughably limited but with enough patience you can work through its challenges with the meagre tools provided. The game looks lovely, the Star Warsiness is very Star Wars, and is cod-Macquarrie to a suitably acceptable degree. However, artifice abounds. Your one, singular upgradeable pistol can shoot lethal bolts infinitely, but overheats. Yet the stun shot, which traditionally is less powerful than lethal, has a single shot that takes ages to recharge. This is fucking stupid, but it’s there to protect the overly-minimal stealth design. Otherwise there’d be no challenge, you’d never use Nix etc, but rather than feeling like sensible balancing, it just feels mean. Old. Unimaginative. Amateurish. Likewise the secondary weapons, which you collect from dead enemies. These last until the magazine is exhausted, so Kay just drops them! No recharging like the magic pistol. No opportunity to own or upgrade. Then there’s the upgrades for equipment and skills which are all tied to finding materials.6 Once again, fucking stupid in terms of the world logic we already know of Star Wars, which never once mentioned anyone needing to find 5 materials to become better at crouching. Further on, having Nix doing his thing on an Imperial space station and not being immediately exterminated as soon as he’s seen is, again, fucking stupid. Sure, when planetbound you could believe a little animal just wandered into your massively-defended high security camp, but on a space station it stretches credulity, even by Star Wars world logic. Do the Imperials assume he flew himself there in a little ship? Darker still, and far more damning, is the artificiality of the player’s impact on the environment. As early as the very first tutorial missions, I stealthed through a section with perfect takedowns on all the guards, reached a checkpoint save. Next bit, triggered the alarm. Load the checkpoint, yeah? Well, all those immaculately KOed guards were suddenly back up and patrolling again. The game had literally done an enemy reset! In the context of a modern stealth game, this is completely unacceptable. An insulting blunder of idiotic proportions, and proof for me that the fundamentals of the interactive design, of how the player is going to engage with the world and its content, has been lamentably under-developed.

To put the degree of failure that Star Wars Outlaws represents into context, consider that its peak on Steam is just 3,797 players. This is better than the AAAA colossus Skull and Bones, but disastrous compared to Rainbow Six Seige X’s peak - that game enjoyed 60k players in the last 24 hours. But that is multiplayer only, so how about another grand 7/10 luminary, like Assassin’s Creed Mirage? Well, that peaks at 7,837. And what of my much-maligned beloved forevergame, Ghost Recon Breakpoint? 14,335. That’s nearly four times as many players. Breakpoint peaked at 3,713 in the last 24 hours! Of course, Outlaws wasn’t on Steam for launch day, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. Games that have value build persistent reputations that drive long tails of engagement, and Outlaws is no old dog on the platform. It only arrived on Steam in November 2024! This was the game to command the biggest ever marketing spend from Ubisoft and yet, by any objective metric, it absolutely flopped. In typically wise fashion, Yves put this down to Star Wars being less popular than it once was. Because of course, it’s never his fault. Much like the culture of sexual and psychological abuse three of his senior staff were convicted for. Yes, I am going to keep mentioning that because it was a persistent culture of sexual and psychological abuse by senior staff and Ubisoft needs to remember that on a daily basis, even if its CEO considers the matter closed.

There is a perspective that can be taken where Star Wars Outlaws is perfectly fitting for the modern Star Wars mode. That being mostly vapid, mediocre entertainment leaning so heavily on the goodwill of its IP that the only thing of real value is the basic audiovisual experience and the presentation of the IP itself - as found in the Kennedy/Abrams sequels and the lesser-loved TV series. Outlaws finds a certain kinship perhaps with the sloppier and badly-conceived peers like Obi Wan or The Book Of Boba Fett. And of course, as with so many other Star Wars videogames, it only serves to degrade and cheapen the Star Wars universe. What’s interesting to note is in terms of both movies and TV, the entries that gained the most praise from critics and viewers alike weren’t those conservatively gunning for universal audiences and broad appeal, but the riskier, tightly-focused Rogue One and Andor properties. The ones that chased the adult enthusiast. I mean, I’ve heard people who weren’t even Star Wars fans proclaim Andor as one of the best TV series they’ve ever seen. Thinking of how a Ubisoft open-worlder could support a Rebel spy concept flies so much closer to the things Ubisoft used to be really good at that it makes you question why the hell it went for an interstellar scoundrel idea in the first place. Especially when that interstellar scoundrel is functionally Han Solo without ever admitting it’s just trying to be Han Solo, as if Han Solo is the only kind of interstellar scoundrel the Star Wars universe could support. I have legitimately read that as a defence of Outlaw’s lack of charity; Han Solo only had one pistol, so that’s why Kay does. You can probably guess my reaction to that kind of logic.

Given Ubisoft’s current fortunes, we can safely assume that for now at least, Star Wars Outlaws will be the only Ubisoft open-worlder to draw on that IP. Given Ubisoft’s current output, we can safely assume that’s actually a good thing. I don’t have much experience of EA’s recent games, because I don’t do multiplayer (apols to the Battlefronts) and I fucking hate Jedis. This means that the pinnacle of Star Wars videogaming remains, for me, the X-Wing series. I’ll grimly plug away at Outlaws, but I already know I probably won’t finish it. It’s just too shit. A friend of mine, who was reviewing across three or four mags at his peak, remarked that he could tell a bad game from how quickly he stopped seeing the assets as the developers wanted the player to see them, and instead was just seeing the matrix underneath. Polygons intersecting polygons to change numerical values. I have to say that this idea haunts me as a kind of videogaming dementia from playing too much mediocrity. Worryingly, I found the matrix pushing through Star Wars Outlaws at a very early stage. I’ll grant it some charity, though, and persist until I bore of this slop,7 despite the constant reminders of how little charity its creators offer me.

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