Category Archives: One-Shots

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

The lost art of “just enjoying something”

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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Goodbye, Meg

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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Helldivers II and the Battle Pass delusion

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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Is the desire to beat games a sunk cost fallacy?

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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Cataloguing the collection with Collectorz.com

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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Another Code: Recollection – the way remakes should be

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

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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The term “adventure game” no longer has any meaning

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed adventure games — mostly those of the point-and-click variety, but I’m certainly not averse to those with text parsers, or which are entirely text.

Trouble is, these days it’s actually surprisingly (and annoyingly) difficult to track down genuine examples of these without also being confronted with a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. I made the mistake of clicking on a GamesRadar piece about “the 25 best adventure games to get swept up in right now” earlier — obvious SEO-optimised clickbait, in retrospect — and literally three out of the 25 games were actual adventure games.

The rest? Far Cry. Hogwarts Legacy. Batman: Arkham Asylum. Fucking Skyrim. Not only did the list completely lack any established classics of the adventure game genre that are easily accessible today — such as any of the old Sierra and LucasArts titles that are on Steam and/or GOG.com — but it also seemingly completely misunderstood what the term “adventure game” actually means.

Continue reading The term “adventure game” no longer has any meaning

Class of ’09: of cynicism and sociopathy

I’ve been a little leery of western-developed visual novels for a while now. I know that there are some genuinely good ones out there — but there are also a lot that play up the obnoxiously ironic, self-referential angle to such a degree that they’re hard to take seriously.

I’m not sure what made me think that Class of ’09, which describes itself as “the anti-visual novel” would be any different, but nonetheless something attracted me to it and made me think it might actually be worth a look. The fact it was £3 on sale at GOG.com helped, too, I must admit — even if it turned out to be complete horseshit, I would have spent less than the price of a cup of coffee on it.

Thankfully, it did not turn out to be complete horseshit. Nor, I’d argue, did it turn out to really be that which it described itself as. But it did turn out to be an enjoyable, worthwhile experience that I’m glad I spent four hours playing through. So let’s take a closer look at exactly why.

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Centerfold Squares: naughty gaming, 1988-style

Dear reader, as I’m sure you’re aware from the vast number of games I’ve covered on this site to date, I am certainly not averse to a naughty game or two.

For a lot of the time these days, these are Japanese in origin (though the western-developed eroge and nukige scene has grown considerably since several large digital platforms opened themselves up to 18+ content), and people have become a lot more willing to openly talk about them. “Back in the day”, though, erotic games were a relatively unusual sight — and when they did come up, they often tended to be talked about in a rather dismissive way by the press of the period, particularly here in the UK. Some things never change, eh?

They did exist, though, and one that I’ve only recently got around to trying for the first time is Artworx’s Centerfold Squares (aka Centrefold Squares in Europe, because British English), a 1988 release for Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS PC. Because I am an Atari boy, today’s exploration will be focusing on the ST version, but all three versions are broadly pretty similar.

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