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Blog thing! Here you can find occasional blog posts from me about whatever I feel like, although I can't imagine that they'll be all that frequent.
7th of May, 2026: That Fucking Star Fox Direct
Why do they look like that.
1st of May, 2026: The All-Consuming Phone
Been thinking about something quite interesting about those little hell rectangles recently. So, it's no secret that a large amount of people genuinely have no real hobbies in their lives aside from The Phone. Home from work or school? Time to scroll on The Phone. On the bus or train? Phone. Waiting at a restaurant? Phone. So many people just go through their entire lives doing nothing remotely interesting with their spare time and spending it all on The Phone, I really can't get my head around it. For clarity, I'm not someone with particularly interesting hobbies. I like to write and draw sometimes, and I like to think I'm pretty good at both of those things, but I really just spend most of my time playing video games or watching anime and don't have any hobbies that require me to go outside, I'm a very unimpressive person in this regard. And yet, I still feel a sense of superiority to these types. It's as if those unimpressive hobbies like gaming and anime, where you're not creating something yourself or really doing anything at all, have been power-crept into still feeling like relatively worthwhile uses of spare time in comparison to The Phone. At least if you're doing that you're engaging with a work of art created by someone else, it's still got to be better for your spirit than The Phone.
And, I don't think I'm alone in this impression. The people I described earlier as spending all their time exclusively on The Phone, who we'll refer to as "ghouls" for future reference as a nod to their hollowed-out souls, often like to go on social media and post photos of very normal people doing things other than The Phone in public, calling them "performative" and making fun of them with their fellow ghouls. Reading in public is performative, going to concerts without recording it on The Phone is performative, hell even playing a game on a 3DS or a PSP is performative. When you become a ghoul as these people have, the idea of being entertained by anything other than The Phone starts to seem increasingly impossible, absurd even, and so that's why they jump to the performative label. I find the specific word choice of "performative" genuinely fascinating, it's as if they believe everyone is secretly a ghoul like them, that nobody really has any real hobbies, mundane as those hobbies might be, and so surely they must be "putting on a show" by engaging with those hobbies in public rather than simply using The Phone to distract themselves as any humble and self-respecting ghoul would. The Ghoul fears the PSP chad for his enjoyment of a relatively unimpressive yet somehow still more meaningful hobby, fascinating stuff.
5th of April, 2026: UFO 50, and Games as Art
So, I've been playing UFO 50 recently! Great game, very fond, will definitely be reviewing for the Monthly Silly once I get the chance. Speaking of the Monthly Silly, I'm sure anyone who's read through a few issues of it will be aware I consider games a form of art (not that that means every game necessarily is art in practice), and I believe UFO 50 falls under the "art" category of games. To me, as I've said before, art is intrinsically motivated, it's anything that exists primarily because it's something its creator simply wanted to bring about into the world, as opposed to any external motives like mass profit or bringing about some sort of social or political change. That's not to say art can't seek to do well financially, or that it can't have political themes, just that these aspects must ultimately come second in favour of the artist's distinct creative vision and earnest, sincere belief in the quality of their creation. UFO 50, of course, fits this definition, and so I consider it a work of art. But, it's also worth looking at the type of game it is.
UFO 50 is a collection of 50 smaller games said in-universe to have been developed by a made-up development company called UFOSoft, each game given a fake release date ranging from 1982-1989. Given the fake release dates and pixel art style, UFO 50 is a clear homage to games of that era, with many taking very obvious inspiration from particular titles; Velgress is a much faster-paced Kid Icarus, Fist Hell is a side-scrolling beat-em-up with an art style remarkably similar to Double Dragon, and Mortol, although remarkably different in its gameplay, is clearly inspired by Lemmings. Beyond this, there's also games themed after very specific genres you don't really see that much anymore, like the handful of arcade-style shoot-em-ups or one of my personal favourites, the first-person dungeon crawler Valbrace, which foregoes the inclusion of any sort of in-game map in favour of forcing you to get the graph paper out and draw one yourself. The game also features the Campanella trilogy, the first and third being simple, arcade-y sorts of games where you fly a UFO, but the second being this bizarre roguelite with action platformer segments where you get out of the UFO and just start shooting people, presumably as a nod to how many NES games like Mario, Zelda and Castlevania had these really weird sequels that played remarkably differently from their originals, before the third game went back to the original formula and focused more on expanding on what made that work.
All this to outline two things: one, UFO 50 is very clearly an expression of genuine love and passion for gaming as a medium, for the titles that shaped what it is today and for where it is now. You can feel from playing it that its developers are very clearly people who love video games, and that passion bleeds into everything the game does. But, more importantly for this blog post, the games... don't really have plots? Not in the conventional sense, anyway. There's a handful here and there, like Grimstone or Cyber Owls, that make more of an attempt at a structured narrative, but most really don't bother beyond a brief bit of context here and there. That's not to say they don't have stories, the sketchy betting houses of Quibble Race or the guest management of Party House certainly tell stories through their environments and the events that occur through gameplay, but "plot", a narrative with characters, story beats and a coherent beginning, middle and end, is almost entirely absent from UFO 50's collection. Even the broader meta-narrative around UFOSoft and the history of the company and their developers isn't really focused on much, taking a back seat in favour of letting the games stand on their own. And yet, if you share the same love of games as the developers, it's all bound to resonate on some level.
Whenever you see arguments about if games are a "real" art form, the narrative elements something like UFO 50 lacks are almost always the main focus. It makes sense, games as a storytelling medium have a lot of unique potential, but the hierarchy of what makes a game "real art" basically goes, "story first, then visuals and soundtrack, then the actual game bit at the very bottom". All too often, gameplay is treated as an obstacle, something that either gets in the way of the "real art", or at best, something which is deservedly de-emphasized, as it should be in any "serious art game". UFO 50 stands in stark contrast to this, putting gameplay first, having a handful of oddities like Mooncat and Seaside Drive that are primarily aesthetic experiences, and leaving barely any room in the middle of it all for the gripping narrative tales we've been told are what "really" make games art all this time. And in spite of all this, I think you'd be a fool to try and claim it's "not real art", or even that it has less artistic value than a 60-hour JRPG or one of those Last of Us-esque movie games the big American publishers love so much. You can just feel the passion and soul that permeates every corner of every game in the collection, it's such an obvious communication of what its developers love about gaming, and the kind of games they want to bring into the world. And, really, isn't that indirect sense of connection, that understanding born from putting your heart and soul into something you really believe in, the whole point of any piece of art?
12th of March, 2026: Monthly Silly #12, And The Series' Future
Monthly Silly #12 is finished! I usually like to release these on the 22nd of each month, though, so it'll still be a while, but I can say for a fact that there'll be a new one this month. Next month? No idea. These were meant to be monthly originally, but as it turns out, I don't actually play and complete 5 or 6 new games every month, my favourites often being very long RPGs that take a good few months to get through, so a new issue every month was always going to stop being feasible after a while. Sure, there's plenty of games I played before I started writing the Monthly Silly I could review, but those can't have been more than a few years ago before I realize I don't remember their precise details well enough to talk about them in depth. I can remember loving the Mario Galaxy games when I was 10, but could I really write an adequate review of either one today? Of course not, that's absurd. So, the Monthly Silly probably won't ever come out 3 or 4 months in a row without any breaks anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy writing for it anymore, just that I want to make sure the issues I do release are of sufficient quality.
2nd of March, 2026: First Post
First blog post! Writing this just as I've finished making everything else, seemed reasonable that it'd be the last thing to make before putting the site online. As I've said, this site was at first meant to just be for the Monthly Silly and nothing else, but I actually had a lot of fun making that part, so I decided to do something more with it. Really glad I did too, I'm very pleased with how the site has turned out. Hope you enjoy! God this part of the site looks weird with just one post.