I really love a game that is deliberate in its controls. That doesn’t try to make everything as smooth as possible. That has a sense of physicality and realness to it. System Shock’s modular, maximalist U.I., Metal Gear Solid 2’s intricate and deliberate controls, the process of discovering and operating your submersible walker in Nauticrawl. I love a game that feels like operating heavy machinery and there is no machinery heavier than Gllang.

Robot Alchemic Drive has such a wonderful conceit. You are piloting a giant robot—a meganite—against giant invading alien kaiju robots—the volgara. You must swap between controlling the pilot and the meganite, but the perspective and camera always stays with the pilot. You are watching from ground level, or from a rooftop, or from the shoulder of your robot, and it’s rarely a simple or smooth process. Judging the distance, the angle, how to aim or throw a punch from a distance. The controls aren’t simple either. Each analogue stick controls an arm, and each pair of shoulder buttons the legs. Just to walk forward you need to alternate L1 and R1 to take each individual step. I’ve wanted to play it ever since watching Videochess playing it a few years ago and the more recent surge in Nanao-posting finally pushed me to jump in myself.

And it’s just a blast to play. It can be a bit repetitive but you do get three meganites to play with if you want to shake it up. I did mostly stick with Thrones-class Gllang the Castlekeep, because if it’s it a game about being a big, stompy robot why would you not want to be the biggest, stompiest robot? Gllang is slow but loaded up with weapons and you can eventually unlock the ability to unload every gun it has at once, which makes for a very satisfying finishing move. He can also transform into fortress mode, a surprisingly fast and slippery tank the width of an entire motorway to compensate for how slow his walk is. On the fast and light side there’s Cherubim-class Airborne Dominator Laguiole who can turn into a V-TOL jet and Seraphim-class Vertical Fortress Vavel as the middle of the road bland main character robot who can’t transform into anything but has a super mode that gives you a time limit of three minutes to finish the mission within or else he’ll explode (though if you pick Gllang or Laguiole at the start they will also get a similar super mode late in the story).

The game is a bit repetitive, throwing you into fight after fight, but it tries to throw in different twists on the formula either as a once-off or in little mini-arcs that explore a particular idea for a few missions. You will have to deal with poison gas, putting out fires, various twists on the enemy units’ Phantom System teleporter that allows them to dodge all ranged attacks until they are on low health, and a various other things. None of these ever really get integrated back into the gameplay in a more systematic way. The meganites can pick things up but it’s only useful in one or two missions (though there is some fun to be had in experimenting with picking yourself up).

There are also missions that focus more on the protagonist’s relationships with various characters, most importantly Nanao, who is a perfect angel who no one is ever allowed to be mean to except for me when I keep “accidentally” blowing up the buildings she works in. Amusingly blowing up various buildings is one of the main drivers of character interactions. Masaru, the stuck-up heir to an arms manufacturing conglomerate, gets more and more character development the more you repeatedly blow up his company’s headquarters. The general campiness, which extends to the gameplay itself, is also enhanced by the localisation, which is charmingly low budget and aiming for the energy of old cheezy dubs of Gamera and Godzilla movies (though they could have left out the bad Japanese accent that they give to the news reporter and no one else). The story does go in some darker directions at times and it put my slightly in mind of Neon Genesis Evangelion but where Gendo died and they just put Shinji in charge (but still did not tell him anything).

It does feel like there was more ambition here than was able to be filled, with dramatic and especially the more dream-like sequences struggling to convey themselves with the game’s fairly simple cutscenes and descriptions of the situation in the city of Senjo and Earth in general getting worse and worse as the war wages on being undercut by every map being completely reset whenever the next mission starts.

There is also a multiplayer mode that is both a little barebones but shocklingly generous with how much it offers. You choose a map and then each player chooses a pilot and a robot to control and then it dumps you in a splitscreen match. First person to have the health par of either the robot or the pilot deplete loses. But it doesn’t just offer the three megatnites; every volgara that you defeat in the story mode gets added to the roster and every map from the story mode is there with all their moves from the story mode. Even the Rome map that only appears in the opening cutscene of the story is here and fully playable, modelled well beyond what was needed for the intro. And with no time limit, no scorekeeping and a match only ending when something dies it leaves it very open to different strategies or even just being a toybox to make up your own game. You can focus on the other player’s robot or their pilot. The robots are giant, slow, targets, but the pilots are small and have a hard time defending themselves directly. You can ride on your robot to not have two targets, but it’s quite easy to get knocked off and find yourself in a very vulnerable position. You can agree to have an honourable robot fight and not attack each other’s pilots or you can forego the robots entirely and just chase each other with grenades. Myself and Ruby had a blast just messing around with it in various ways. We had a match where we tried to pick up each other’s pilots with our robots, first person to get grabbed loses. After that was resolved we just both rode around on her Gllang together in tank mode blowing up Rome.

And it’s also just a game that sets me off imagining how I would tweak it. What would I try to make if I made something like this? Could contextual or once-off mechanics be made more systemically useful or interesting? I think some way to control the pilot and robot at once would be cool; maybe the D-pad can always control the pilot while the analogue sticks and shoulder buttons are reserved for the robot? Or a two-controller mode where one controls the pilot and the other the robot? I just want more of this, different iterations of it. I am already eyeing up the fan translations of Remote Control Dandy and Marionation Gear.

Miscellaneous observations:

• There is only one walkthrough for the game on Game F.A.Q.s and the author hates both Gllang and Nanao. They have not been vindicated by history.
• In the famous bread and water soup mission the protagonist complains that 7-Eleven charge too much for vegetables and it’s cheaper to get them at the greengrocer when the smallest unit of currency you work with while upgrading your giant fuck-off robots is ¥500,000,000.
• As well as the hammy acting often being funny there’s a few great deadpan bits that really got me. In an early missions one of the people in mission control tells you to explore the city and familiarise yourself with the area while you wait for the meganite to launch. When the call back a minute later to ask if you’ve gotten familiar with the city the protagonist just responds “Well, yes. I live here.”
• The cutscenes aren’t skipable but holding down the start button fast forwards them which is very funny to watch.
• It’s one of those games with a choice of protagonists where they do not change the script very much if you pick the female hero so her and the love interests just become lesbians, which is great.

girls night

I both ended and started the year madly in love with a new partner. It would be nice to pretend that the middle part didn’t happen.

I ended my post about 2024 saying that I need to recover and heal and I am so tired now reading over that again. My general health is maybe doing a bit better than it was then, or at least I have figured out how to manage things a bit more. I mentioned replacing my mattress there. I have now replaced the awful pull-down wall bed that I had then with a more stable one. I thought, moving into a small house, that I should be optimising for space but I ended up doing so at the expense of my own comfort and long-term health and even then I ended up not even optimising for space very well. I think I am going to go for an even firmer mattress too; going back to Ikea for one was a mistake. Caoimhe³ has a new, firm King Koil mattress sleeping on it I feel an immediate difference. It is expensive but I am probably going to get one for myself.

Early in the year I released that I was suffering from some sort of photosensitivity problem and had been since at least late 2024. Anti-migraine medication has not seemed to help with it but some prescription sunglasses have, as well as simply recognising when it is flaring up and turning down the lights. The cause remains mysterious. M.R.I.s have revealed some demyelinating lesions on my brain and spine, but my neurologist says that they are not on the visual cortex or any other area one would expect to be causing symptoms related to vision and, thankfully, they do not seem to be progressing (though another M.R.I. in April is going to be double-checking that). There is no known history of autoimmune disease in my family that would explain the lesions and apparently the damage not extensive enough to diagnose me with anything serious like M.S. I remain in that grey area of sick enough to have problems, not sick enough to have answers.

But, health issues and general burnout mounting, I did a spring clean this year and got a lof of things off plate. I stepped away from a local trans community organisation, some kink meetup stuff. I pushed myself to keep going with The the Ring Podcast until April because I had an April Fool’s bit that I really wanted to do but ended up putting it on hold after that and did not get around to returning to it for the rest of the year. Journey of the Monkey King has not had an episode for all of 2025, the second time it’s gone on a year-long hiatus. I do want to get back to them but I need to do it in a way that doesn’t just burn myself out again. I am definitely not going to try to stick to a schedule again. Episodes will get done and go out whenever we can manage. I also got formally diagnosed with A.D.H.D. this year and started taking methylphenidate which has been a big help and I felt that I getting my momentum back recently but I got suddenly quite sick again a few weeks ago and it knocked me on my arse. Thankfully, Caoimhe was here to take care of me, as she has been a lot this year¹, as Ellie was doing before she died.

The weeks after that were the worst in my life. I cannot describe the pain of it. But I had wonderful people helping me through it and I was fortunate enough to be able to take an extended period off work. My brother sent me a copy of Abiotic Factor as something to keep my occupied and I ended up playing it nearly every day with my friend Ruby for a while. Caoimhe was amazing as a shoulder to cry on and also just bringing me shepherd’s pies and the like to save me cooking. My other partner in Copenhagen was able to make it over a few times in the aftermath as well and I got to see her in Edinburgh in January and October in Copenhagen itself. I have a lot of wonderful people around me and it’s made it bearable.

I also flew out to a kink con for the first time in the autumn. It had been booked long before Ellie died and while I was not really emotionally up for doing anything with anyone I think it was still a very useful experience. I took a lot of notes that I have since brought back to Caoimhe and everyone was very lovely and understanding about me crying all the time. I did a lot of sexual exploration the past year and it has been a really positive and freeing experience. Not unrelatedly I have put in a request for bottom surgery through the public system. That will take a while but I think I do want to go through with it, scary as it is. I don’t think I’d be able to deal with the recovery period without a partner at this point, though. I have been living alone with just Easóg for a long time, but that has felt a lot lonelier since Ellie died.

But I still have people I love dearly, and we keep going. I got a few lines from a poem that Ellie would quote when she was struggling tattooed on my arms as a reminder of that and of her.

I love you, get up, we are going to keep going.

It could not kill me, I would not die.

Update: Caoimhe³ has also written a post about the race with a bit more narrative detail than my terse summary and statistics below.

The New Year’s Celeste race I do with friends happened today. When I sat down to practise this year I decided to just replay the game from the start, redoing all the main levels, getting all the strawberries and crystal hearts again, etc. I fully cleared¹ the A and B sides of chapters one through six and fully cleared the A side of chapter seven and then failed to find the time to do an actual practise runs for the race. Whoops. But I still managed to set a personal best for the race, which surprised me because I felt quite fatigued today during the race and didn’t feel that I was doing my best.

Even so, it was Ruby who came out on top again—managing to come in under the hour mark!—with Caoimhe³, joining for the first time, in second.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	0°59′30.986″	69	1
🥈Caoimhe³	1°02′14.985″	123	1
🥉Caoimhe′	1°07′39.175″	143	0

And of course we also did a pre-run warmup race of Pico-8 Celeste.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	4′50″	26	1
🥈Caoimhe′	5′28″	26	0
🥉Caoimhe³	7′42″	57	1

I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.

I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.

One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.

I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.

I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.

Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.

After reading yesterday’s post my friend Ruby reached out to me and told me that she was able to find the shortened Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes one hundred and two, one hundred and three, etc. by searching Nitter instances. Nitter doesn’t really work any more either due to Twitter’s A.P.I.s having been locked down significantly but there are still running instances with archives of a lot of accounts.

After finding some posts that way and then opening them in Twitter itself I could see that was blocked from viewing them due to the posts had been flagged as potentially containing adult material and Twitter wanted to verify my age before I could see them. Another system working well, then. And another way that the internet is being closed off. Presumably this is actually why they didn’t show up in searches for me.

I tried a couple of Nitter-scraping tools to see if I could mass download the videos but I couldn’t get them to work. I had also previously tried to use an Extreme Picture Finder template on the Twitter account too but it couldn’t go past the most recent thousand posts from the account. Not really having any luck with automating this I went to bed but while I was asleep Ruby painstakingly went and manually downloaded every episode she could that I was missing and sent them on to me. Thank you so much, Ruby!

There were a few that none of the Nitter instances she tried seemed to have and don’t seem to be findable on Twitter either. As such I am still missing episodes 121, 188, 215 and Capsule Monsters episodes 5 and 8, but I have most of it now at least.

The show is now living on my Jellyfin server with its own extremely high-effort cover art for it that you can see above.

Update: I managed to find episode 121 and Capsule Monsters episode 5 through Googling the exact phrasing of the posts and I was able to find the post for Capsule Monsters 8 via a Wayback Machine snapshot of Bing Bong’s Twitter profile, but episodes 188 and 215 don’t seem to be indexed on Google or Bing nor visible on any of the Wayback Machine snapshots. There are only a few snapshots on there from the period where he was uploading the episodes, unfortunately.

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon was a fascinating coda to Sonic Frontiers, a very experimental expansion to a game where Sonic Team was already going outside of their comfort zone to do new things with the series. The world map threw together Only Up!-esque climbing challenges, playable Tails, Amy and Knuckles very different movesets to how they have worked in past, an absurdly fast and powerful dropdash for Sonic in 3D and wildly more difficult combat than the base game. I streamed it to some friends when it came out and one of them remarked “this is the least designed game ever made.” I couldn’t really disagree with her. So much of this is janky and half-broken in various ways and it was incredibly fun. It made me hopeful that Sonic Team was happy to keep experimenting with what worked for the series and keep allowing more player freedom in future games¹.

In keeping with this, while the levels in the base Sonic Frontiers were almost entirely reused from previous games the ones in The Final Horizon were much more experimental, being very clearly thrown together with very basic assets rather than having their own sculpted level geometry but also with much fewer guardrails and much less guided than a normal Sonic level and with new, bespoke mechanics and side missions, some of which required more slow, careful exploration than high-speed platforming.

Early on, while playing one level, 4-D, I noticed an exclamation mark appearing over Sonic’s head in certain locations, accompanied by a beeping. You cans see it at about a 1′18″ in in this video. It would turn red and beep faster as I approached a certain spot. When I saw this the first thing that came to mind was Knuckles’ emerald-hunting missions from the Sonic Adventure games and thought it might be part of one of the level’s optional missions. I actually had a bit of trouble finding the source of the beeping but once I zeroed in on it and finally found it I was greeted to Sonic being blown up into the air by a mine, his hands held down protecting his singed arse. This was a very sudden gear-shift in my head and in my confusion, still processing what I was seeing, I screamed “I’M MARIO BURNT ASS?!”² into my microphone, which caused myself and my friend Ruby who was watching to double over laughing till we couldn’t breath and then Ruby set my display name on the Discord server to Mario Burnt Ass for a month. It was funny.

That’s the story.

Thanks.

talking about picking Saiyan names with friends and I am going with Choka, from artichoke

My friend Ruby said Tus, from lettuce.

happy Piccolo Day

Since New Year’s Eve 2021 some some friends and I have done an annual race of the game Celeste. We all start at the same time and then the first person to get to the summit wins. We track it using the in-game speedrun timer.

2021

I was very into Celeste at the time and won by a pretty wide margin. I don’t have a record of how everyone else did, but I completed the game in just under two hours, with three hundred and six deaths and six strawberries¹.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Caoimhe	1°54′55.047″	306	6

2022

After this two of my friends got into the game very hard. My friend Ruby ended up getting most of the golden berries², something I haven’t even attempted and another friend, who wished to be called The Shadowblade in this post, started getting into Celeste mods. So when the next race happpened on the 8th of January 2022 Ruby took the gold medal from me, beating my time by half an hour while I barely improved. The Shadowblade sadly did not finish and gave up four flags from the summit due to hand pain.

🏃	⏱️
🥇Ruby	1°22′10.918″
🥈Caoimhe	1°51′25.318″
🥉The Shadowblade	D.N.F.

2023:

On the same day the next year myself and Ruby both improved our times, with Ruby coming in first again, a newcomer who I will call D. in second and myself in third. The Shadowblade did not finish again.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	1°08′01.275″
🥈D.	1°21′03.071″
🥉Caoimhe	1°34′46.007″	245	0
🏅The Shadowblade	D.N.F.

2024:

The next race was on the 14th of January 2024 and I managed to take more than twenty minutes off of my time, which was not enough to beat Ruby’s best time, but Ruby did a worse race than the previous year and it was enough for me to win for the second time.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Caoimhe	1°12′40.296″	128	0
🥈Ruby	1°14′53.679″	144	3
🥉The Shadowblade	D.N.F.

We also decided to do a little race of the Pico-8 version of Celeste, which Ruby won.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	5′11″	29	4
🥈Caoimhe	7′50″	57	1

2025

Finally, this year’s one took place on New Year’s Day. Ruby had a clear lead from the start and has gotten very close to the one-hour mark, just three minutes short of it. I came in second, doing a bit worse than last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering an hour before the race I posted about how worn down, tired and sore I was. The Shadowblade finished this time, coming in at just over an hour and a half.

We were also joined by our friend Stella who had never played Celeste before but decided to join in on the race. After the rest of us had finished Ruby said if that Stella actually finished she would forfeit her victory to her and shockingly Stella actually did. She finished the game in one sitting in just over ten hours with closing in on four thousand deaths and nine strawberries.

Ruby insists that I should record Stella as the winner, but I am a petty bitch and I never said that I was going to forfeit. If she wants to fine but if I she does I’m saying that makes me the winner.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	1°03′38.846″	75	1
🥈Caoimhe	1°22′37.421″	190	0
🥉The Shadowblade	1°31′51.536″	275	0
🏅Stella	10°06′38.428″	3839	9

2026

Maybe next year we will come in under the one-hour mark?

They all suck shit and they’re all the same, basically.

My friend Ruby on the Friday the 13th movies, one of which she streams every Friday the 13th.

There are thirteen theatrical movies based off The Ring, you know, the one with the tape that kills you and the girl who crawls out of the television. Caoimhe and Ruby go deeper into the well into parts of the series that most people don’t know exist in this unofficial fan podcast.

There are thirteen theatrical movies based off The Ring, you know, the one with the tape that kills you and the girl who crawls out of the television. Caoimhe and Ruby go deeper into the well into parts of the series that most people don’t know exist in this unofficial fan podcast.