Category Archives: One-Shots

One-off articles about games, cultural phenomena, anime and anything else that isn’t getting the Cover Game treatment.

One-Shots

The Good Life: SWERY’s Lake District holiday

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Hidetaka Suehiro, better known as SWERY or SWERY65, is one of the few people in game development that one can honestly call an “auteur”.

His work is immediately recognisable and well worth exploring — and like all good works of art, it doubtless has a different impact on different people, ranging from enthusiastic adoration to outright disgust. While his most famous work to date remains the wonderful Deadly Premonition, the title which made him a (sort of) household name in gaming, his other work is just as intriguing.

Which, of course, brings us to The Good Life, a 2021 release for Windows PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. It’s a game that actually has a fair bit in common with Deadly Premonition, so if you enjoyed that you may well dig this — but it’s also very much its own beast. So let’s delve right into this goddamn hellhole.

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One-Shots

The history of computing is told through video games

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A while back, I paid a visit to The Cave and Arcade Archive, a pair of wonderful interactive retro tech museums run by YouTubers Neil Thomas, Alex Crowley and a gaggle of volunteers and assistants.

Between the two museums, you can get your hands on a variety of old computers, consoles and arcade games, pretty much all of which are in full working order, and have a tinker with them, as well as browsing an extensive library of old magazines, admiring the ambience of a lovingly recreated retro game “shop” (where you can even scan the barcodes on the boxes and play the games on a MiSTer) and investigating some lovely rarities.

One thing struck me as I was wandering around: although The Cave specifically positions itself as a museum of classic computers and consoles, the focus is very much on games. And there’s a very good reason for that. Let’s ponder exactly why.

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One-Shots

The enshittification of the video games press

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This is, as many of you know, a subject near and dear to my heart, so it breaks my heart every time I have to write something like this. But it seems that what we think of as “the traditional video games press”, at least in the profitable, commercial sector, is circling the drain.

The latest site to “fall” is Kotaku, a publication which most certainly has had its ups and downs in terms of reputation with different groups over the years, and one which I’m definitely not surprised to see affected by the growing trend for enshittifying everything.

While I had very little time for Kotaku itself, particularly over the course of the last decade or so, it’s still saddening to see once-prominent institutions in the games press landscape gradually sinking into the mire of slop that a significant portion of the Web has been becoming for years now. Let’s ponder the reasons for that a little further.

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One-Shots

The lost art of “just enjoying something”

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The Internet has done many things to our collective consciousness, attention spans and numerous other aspects of our existence, but one thing that saddens me more with each passing year is how the art of just enjoying something for what it is — rather than mourning what it isn’t — seems to be slipping away from everyone.

What I mean by this is the way in which I can’t remember the last time I saw someone simply say “I like this” with genuine passion and enthusiasm. It’s far more common for people to pick fault with literally everything, often under the justification “it’s important to criticise the things you love”.

But is it? Is that not just setting oneself up to be perpetually unsatisfied? It certainly looks like it from here.

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One-Shots

Goodbye, Meg

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It’s time for a personal post today. Normally I would reserve this for my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, but since the last time I regrettably had to do this it was here on MoeGamer, it’s only fair to the departed that this time it’s here, too.

Today we lost our beloved Meg, our cat who joined our family back in 2016. She was just 12 years old, but sadly she was suffering with what looked like fairly severe liver cancer and had to leave us before what we all thought “her time” should be.

Much like when we lost her playmate Ruby — who we suspect may have been her daughter, though we have no real confirmation of this — I wanted to leave a permanent record of the mark Meg made on our family and lives, and celebrate how much she was loved.

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One-Shots

Helldivers II and the Battle Pass delusion

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A few years back, you may recall that the gaming world was seemingly united against the scourge of microtransactions in full-price games.

The most prominent event that demonstrated this was the case of Star Wars Battlefront II, where an EA representative managed to score the most-downvoted Reddit comment of all time for his bollocks about “a sense of pride and accomplishment” while defending the lootboxes that were part of the $80 game’s predatory monetisation system.

Fast forward to 2024, and we have an article on a high-profile gaming site actually praising a game for not being quite as bad as other games that do similar things. Is it time to wave the white flag? Hell no it isn’t.

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One-Shots

Is the desire to beat games a sunk cost fallacy?

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Full disclosure: I didn’t come up with this topic out of nowhere; it was inspired by seeing a recent Second Wind podcast which posed a similar question float across my YouTube feed.

I haven’t actually listened to the podcast in question as yet because I didn’t want to colour my own judgement on the topic; instead, I thought I’d just share my own personal feelings on the matter based on my own experiences and observations.

You probably already know what I’m going to say, given my track record here, but I think it might be an interesting discussion regardless. So let’s get into it!

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One-Shots

Cataloguing the collection with Collectorz.com

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Since I started this site nearly ten years ago, my video game collection has expanded by a considerable degree.

It wasn’t necessarily a deliberate choice like “I want to become a video game collector”, but it did come about at least partially through regret over past trade-ins of titles that have subsequently become inordinately expensive, such as the PS1 version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

We have reached a point, however, where my living room is an actual “games library”, and my wife has started suggesting that I might want to get the complete collection insured. Before I could look into that, though, I needed to catalogue the damn thing via some means…

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One-Shots, Switch

Another Code: Recollection – the way remakes should be

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The timing of Another Code: Recollection’s release — shortly after Sony’s hyped-up but completely superfluous and unnecessary The Last Of Us Part II Remastered — is kind of hilarious.

And this game starkly highlights the difference between (let’s not beat around the bush here) a cynical cash grab of a “remaster” and a full-on remake that brings an oft-forgotten game (or pair of games, in this case) to a whole new audience, divested of the less desirable aspects of the baggage that came with its original context.

Another Code: Recollection, in other words, is an excellent example of how to do a remake of a game. And whether or not you played the original Nintendo DS and Wii games in the series by the dearly departed developer Cing, it’s a very worthy use of your time to play the Switch version. So let’s take a closer look.

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One-Shots

The Yakuza games are not beat ’em ups, and never have been

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I’ve been playing a lot of Yakuza Zero recently. Having been a fan of the series since its original PS2 incarnations, but also being very, very behind on it, I figured it was time I started playing through the whole shebang — starting with one of its most well-liked installments.

And while I feel like people have a much better handle on what Yakuza really is these days thanks to it successfully moving into a more “mainstream” space than on its earlier releases, there are still some fundamental misunderstandings that seem to persist to this day.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon, the entry that bridged the gap between the western and eastern names of the series (and which marked the last time the Yakuza title would be used) certainly helped address some of these things through its fundamental changes to the core game formula, but looking back on reviews and other articles about Yakuza Zero, there are definitely some people labouring under some significant misapprehensions. Most notably, the assumption that Yakuza games are “beat ’em ups”.

Yakuza games are not beat ’em ups. And they never have been. Let’s look at why.

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