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Category: Every Game I’ve Finished

  • UFO 50 #8: Planet Zoldath (Perry, 2024)

    UFO 50 #8: Planet Zoldath (Perry, 2024)

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  • Titanium Court (Thomson, 2026)

    Titanium Court (Thomson, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: AP Thomson / Fellow Traveller
    Released: 23/04/2026
    Completed: 26/07/2026
    Completion: I left.

    In a weird sort of way, Titanium Court might be the most hyped game I’ve played in the last couple of years. Before AP Thomson even picked up his historic second Seumas McNally Grand Prize in a row I saw so many developers posting about an incredible game they couldn’t talk about, and then (once it was announced) posting that the incredible game that they previously couldn’t talk about was Titanium Court (and we should all be very jealous that they got to play it and/or be generally hype.) I was so intrigued that I decided to play Fortune-499, Thomson’s previous, visually similar game, and as a result of that was noticed and gifted a bunch of codes by Titanium Court publisher Fellow Traveller for the game’s demo to give away–which I’ll admit I thought might help exp. ride some of the wave of hype. Yep, I was pretty primed to play Titanium Court.

    Whelp!

    Do you know this feeling? You probably know this feeling. You’ve gone to see a movie, or maybe a play, that’s famously critically acclaimed. A piece of real art. Maybe it’s a satire, let’s say. You watch it, and, you know,  it’s good! You’re following it, and you see what it’s doing. You appreciate it. But the audience is acting… weird. Everyone around you is laughing uproariously at jokes that you get, but aren’t, you know… funny. There’s something so performative about everyone around you. Like they’re all shouting “I get it! I get it! I’m at the level of the work I am viewing!”

    When you leave, you wonder… wait, was that actually good? Or was it just something that made the audience feel good because it was “clever” and they understood it?

    Titanium Court invites this comparison because I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that’s more aggressively smug from the moment it opens, intentionally flowery in dialogue, and intentionally unclear on its game mechanics. It’s trying to confuse and bedazzle you so that once you get it, you feel sooo good for understanding it. 

    It’s a little patronising (at best) because Titanium Court is actually quite simple mechanically–the kind of idea that’s really “clever” if, I think, ultimately limited. 

    It’s a two-phase game.  In one phase, you’re playing a classic match-3. In the second phase, you’re playing a set-and-go tower defence/real-time strategy. As I said above, it’s poorly explained, because “that’s the joke” and there’s a fair amount of meta dressing around this simple one-two: the idea is that you’re trapped in a faerie court that is currently engaged in a war, and every day you must try and win the day’s battles across a shifting landscape (yep, it’s a roguelike-like.) You can choose your “career” which affects your court’s abilities and/or win conditions, and then you play a number of rounds before a boss.

    In each round, first you play the match-3. The aim of this segment is to make matches that gain you resources, remove enemy courts and, hopefully, place your court in an advantageous position, because the match-3 board is actually the map for the second phase. If you are surrounded by water or mountains, for example, no land enemies can reach you.

    The intended tension in this section is that, generally, the most powerful strategy is to defend your court via the terrain, but, because you have to complete a set number of matches to get to the next stage–and match chains give you more moves–you can find yourself in a perfect position, but if you want or need more resources you might make a match and ruin your own position without enough moves to fix it.

    In the second phase, you spend your resources to buy units that then spawn in a real-time battle. You can see the entire timeline, so your goal is to send out your harvester units (to get more resources) and then, if you need to engage in battle (and in almost all cases, you’re aiming to avoid it) send out enough units to defend your court or destroy the other courts. It’s not (especially) deep, being largely a numbers game as you can’t affect anything once things are in motion.

    Around all of this are the machinations of the court, which you play via a simple top-down exploration game (it’s not unlike Fortune-499.) You wander around, choose who to talk to, and gradually unravel the mystery of the court and what you actually have to do to escape it properly (or not.)

    Titanium Court is extremely, blatantly Shakespeare coded (A Midsummer Night’s Dream particularly) but even if there’s a character directly called Puck here it’s like if the play was populated by nothing but Pucks: annoying. If you go in blind, you wouldn’t grasp what I’ve explained about the game’s mechanics until you’ve been through several runs, and it’s not like the game is doing anything clever to “teach” you the mechanics as you go. It’s simply too in love with what it’s doing.

    In Titanium Court’s favour, however, I do think the mechanical core, once you get it, has something compelling about it. The base mechanics are not especially interesting–honestly, it’s quite repetitive–but there’s enough variety layered on via careers and bosses and quirky things to find or do on certain runs (or across several runs) that  there is–for a while–a reason to keep playing, even if every time you return to the court it’s like being at the world’s most irritating house party (wandering from room to room, getting involved in conversations with utter wanks.)

    But the design simply does not hold up for as long as you’re expected to play it. It’s simply too easy to “solve” even with the roguelike-like design intending to provide enough moment-to-moment spice. Realistically, with almost all the careers you can steamroller runs by simply getting your court into the right position in the match-3 phase and just wobbling it back and forth till you run out of moves, and depending on the career you choose you can also massively abuse the game’s trading economy (or just select the correct units that match an optimum strategy and walk it.)

    Titanium Court somewhat admits this (though I don’t think it’s as clever as the game thinks to do so) by allowing you to completely skip the actual “game” part of the game past a certain point, and from early on lets you skip the bosses to instead see AP Thomson perform his “We’ve got The Mountain Goats at home” shtick by playing entire songs, which is pleasant enough, but (honestly) it feels like you’re still at a horrible house party and someone’s pulled out a fucking acoustic guitar. Like, he’s good! But you still feel yourself cringing.

    So Titanium Court–I suppose much like Fortune-499–hits the limits of the core design quickly, but unlike Fortune-499 it doesn’t choose to be short and authored around that. Instead Titanium Court takes being annoyingly smug to a level beyond what you could imagine (and it is genuinely hard to imagine it being more annoying and smug than it is at the beginning.) The middle bit of the game–when you’ve understood the game’s mechanics, and you’re having a jolly enough time doing runs, ticking off tasks, removing the “curses” that you’ve been told afflict the court and collecting the keys that you’ve been told will allow you to leave Titanium Court and complete the game… well that was all just to get you to realise…

    Alright everyone, we’re going to spoiler town. If you think you might play Titanium Court and you don’t want to read on, my conclusion on the game is that it’s [rolls eyes, makes wanking motion with hand.] Do with that information what you will.

    It’s all there to make you realise… to complete the game you just have to stop playing it.

    This is, in my opinion, complete fucking drivel. I’m not the first person to say this (Willa Rowe’s piece, The Player’s The Thing talks about the mistaken nature of this twist in, frankly, a far more educated fashion than I’m going to) but the extent to which Titanium Court gets things backwards is, I think, remarkable.

    I absolutely get the concept. Titanium Court’s core “idea” is based on the experience of playing old RPGs. You know when you visit a town, and characters have a few things they can say, and then when you exhaust what they have to say, they just repeat the last thing they said, forever? 

    Well, in Titanium Court, this is called “going stale” and it’s an affliction that affects the faeries of the court. As you (the player) exhaust them, they are trapped in this state, and to the other faeries, it’s a tragedy. Ultimately, their aim is to get rid of you as quickly as possible. Just Walk Out. You Can Leave!!!

    Except, of course, you can’t. You have to collect keys to leave. And Titanium Court is an authored work. It’s not, like… a real place you’re visiting. Titanium Court is not like… like imagine you went to, uh… that Star Wars Disney hotel, right? When it was running. And everyone was given an exact script to say to you. And when you exhausted the script, they hauled off the actor and shot them in the head.

    But you could leave at any point.

    Now that’s a dilemma!

    I mean, it’s not. You’d just leave, but the point is: these fairies aren’t real, and AP Thomson wrote them, and he’s created something where the tension, I guess, is supposed to be that we want to complete games and see the content he’s created versus not wanting a bunch of imaginary fairies to die, but he created the situation! He wrote all the beats!!!

    The player isn’t causing any of this, they’re just playing their role. Now, I get that Thomson lampshades this by setting the game on a stage and actively telling the player they are playing a role, but then we face the idea that he’s expecting the player to engage with the story as told while also having an ironic detachment. This is a really advanced attempt to have his cake and eat it, and I guess I salute the chutzpah, but it’s ridiculous. It feels like he’s really trying to get you to just turn off the game, stop playing without resolution to make his point, because otherwise Titanium Court plays tricks to keep you playing: as soon as I collected my keys, I went to leave, but the script said something along the lines of “you feel there are things unresolved” so I thought “oh, I guess I’m not supposed to leave right away?” played a few more days, got increasingly bored, and then went to leave and… had all the keys stolen and had to re-earn them, practically doubling the amount of time I had to play [“You didn’t have to…”–AP Thomson] to actually leave and finish the game.

    I haven’t been as fucked off with a game in years the way I was fucked off with this when all the keys got stolen, considering the plot is literally telling you “you are hurting these people with your presence.” I suspect there are more ways around to play this game–maybe you can just leave in the first place, maybe there are other ways to leave, maybe there’s something interesting that happens if you see the game to the very end and let everyone go stale–but Titanium Court also, intentionally, doesn’t let you play it again1 with the idea that you’re just supposed to share with others what happened to you and compare. I don’t hate that kind of thing–at least, I like games that try and offer a “this was your experience, others may have experienced something different” possibility space. But this aspect feels like another couched in an attempt to just be very, very clever.

    I simply cannot see what people see in this game other than something that offers them just enough resistance that they feel big and clever for getting it. But “getting it” isn’t enough: what you’re getting has to offer you something meaningful. Titanium Court doesn’t. I don’t think its point even makes sense! I left and I didn’t look back; I only caused a few faeries to go stale. But the other ones? There’s no one there to hear what they have to say, no one there to prompt them. Isn’t that worse? To have something left to say and go unheard?

    Will I ever play it again? I’m glad I can’t.

    Final Thought: You know what? What they had to say was probably fucking annoying.

    1. Well, I assume you can easily on a full reinstall or whatever. ↩︎
  • Steel Worker (Taito, 1980)

    Steel Worker (Taito, 1980)

    Developed/Published by: Taito
    Released: March 1980
    Completed: 08/08/2026
    Completion: 3100 points, but if I wanted to stick with it I could do way better.

    Steel Worker is the third Taito game (chronologically) available via the Egret II Mini system, though they chose to skip over two balloon-based arcade games (Balloon Bomber and Crazy Balloon) that supposedly came out of the same month as this, both of which have seen modern re-releases. I’m not sure what the bigger mystery is: why Taito was so into balloons in 1980 or why they’re against them now–maybe someone on the Egret II Mini team is scared of balloons? Based on my viewings of Taskmaster, more people are scared of them than you’d think?

    Steel Worker is a really interesting one, because it’s another example of someone inventing a game idea before it can really be implemented well enough for it to become a huge success (or they just get some basic assumptions wrong.) I’ve seen this a few times–the Atari 2600 is really good for this one; Air Sea Battle is almost Space Invaders, Human Cannonball is almost Scorched Earth1–but Steel Worker is interesting because it’s almost Lemmings, but pre-figures it by almost ten years!

    In Steel Worker, a tiny man is attempting to cross from one side of the screen to the other, and the player must select a variety of girders and stairs selected from a menu to ensure that he does so (said tiny man is the steel worker of the title, and as he approaches the end of one placed piece, he places the next if prompted in time.) You must ensure the girders he places connect with the central platform–which is set at different heights on each attempt/level–and time the crossing so the steel worker doesn’t get bonked by the pulley system that’s (seemingly pointlessly) just raising some containers up and down endlessly. To do that, you’ve got nine opportunities to reverse the direction of the worker, who speeds up his moment occasionally (and suicidally.)

    Obviously, this sounds incredibly similar to Lemmings, like a simplified version where you’ve really only got builders. But it’s not quite so direct, because the interface and timing is so different, undoubtedly affected by the early hardware Steel Worker is running on. 

    For one, the game is fast–and the input is very strict. Once you have selected a piece for the steel worker to place, you can no longer move the cursor. From a modern perspective, you want to be able to selecting the pieces in quick succession, but the game is not about planning the route–it’s about the seconds between the last girder being placed and the race to select the next correct one from the menu in time, praying that the steel worker hasn’t sped up for some reason (because when he does, you’ve got no chance.)

    So when you start playing Steel Worker, you’re going to wonder what all of the pieces are really for–because you’ll work out the quickest route using simple stairs fairly quickly and feel some success apart from the levels where the steel worker throws himself off the edge about one second after the level loads. But Steel Worker isn’t actually about getting to the other side of the screen as quickly as possible–it’s a high score game after all. You get 50 points for every girder you place up to fifteen times, so your goal is actually to place as many girders as possible while still being able to navigate to the end of the level. The idea is to end with a quite circuitous route to the end where tiny vertical stair shafts are your multiplier, playing chicken with the steel worker’s urge to kill himself at random (well, we all have intrusive thoughts, I guess.)

    Steel Worker isn’t great. It’s a bit too random, and with only one obstacle on screen, it quickly gets boring. It might feel surprising there aren’t more obstacles to be avoided, but I suspect they simply couldn’t guarantee a safe route through a screen if they did so without designing multiple screens, and there probably wasn’t enough memory–I’m sure they thought randomly placing the central platform was enough variety. 

    It’s not, sadly, but I think anyone playing Steel Worker now would go “there’s something here to work with” which makes it all the odder that no one did at the time. The only design I can find that’s close to Steel Worker is the NES’s not-especially beloved Gumshoe, which was released over five years later (and not in Japan, weirdly) and that’s more of a lightgun auto-runner. Games such as Guttang Gottong–probably the earliest other “autonomous character” game I can find–are more of a sliding puzzle. Steel Worker really does stand alone as the first example of this kind of thing (well, at least as far as my research has taken me, anyway.)

    I’d rather play Lemmings, though…

    Will I ever play it again? Mmm.  No. Though I did realise I technically own Balloon Bomber and Crazy Balloon because I’ve got a Taito Legends kicking about here somewhere. So I guess I have to look at those…

    Final Thought: Lemmings has come up before, actually. In my writing about UFO 50 I’ve pointed out the collection’s anachronistic designs–which I don’t think is a criticism as such, but I’m do think it’s interesting where they’ve allowed more modern quality of life features and where they haven’t–and I definitely noted that Mortol fit more into the early 90s era than early 80s era. Nothing about Steel Worker changes that–they feature very different aspects of the Lemmings design–but Steel Worker does at least prove that these kinds of ideas were floating about in the ether in that era, just waiting to be implemented well!

    1. Read about them in exp. 2600 and 2602! ↩︎
  • Heiankyo Alien (Theoretical Science Group, 1979) / Heiankyo Alien 3671 (Mindware, 2017)

    Heiankyo Alien (Theoretical Science Group, 1979) / Heiankyo Alien 3671 (Mindware, 2017)

    Developed/Published by: University of Tokyo Theoretical Science Group / Mindware
    Released: November 1979/Early 19801 / 13/10/2017
    Completed: 23/07/2026
    Completion: Played them both a bunch of times!

    Well, it felt like it was time–certainly chronologically, having recently played Lunar Rescue and Ozma Wars–to finally play the other game in the unofficial trifecta of Japanese video games that get referenced all the time along with Xevious and The Tower of Druaga.

    Xevious and The Tower of Druaga are, of course, the creation of Masanobu Endō, probably the most glaring person to have never received a GDC Pioneer award considering basically every single shooter and action RPG was inspired by his work. But Heiankyo Alien has quite a different story: not the creation of one genius but instead spawned from the same kind of studenty collaboration and free thought that–if we’re really honest–begat the industry as a whole.

    Heiankyo Alien is the creation of The University of Tokyo’s Theoretical Science Group, a student club that was actually about research into physics, chemistry, and mathematics and that. The story goes that when a journalist from the newspaper Asahi Weekly came to the university to interview the members of the microcomputer club he found the games “a bit lacking” and so the Theoretical Science Group sprang into action, brainstormed a game, explained the idea, and the rest is history.

    The article in which Heiankyo Alien first existed. Sort of.

    Of course, I’m going to go on and explain a bit more of that history, because the game really was only an idea at this point. It wasn’t even like a type-in or anything. Just a loose concept (lord knows how unimpressive whatever the computer club had to be for TSG to get away with this.) TSG, however, went ahead and created a version of the game for Apple II in Basic which received interest from Namco and Sega, but the team decided to go with Denki Onkyo2 a now defunct company that seems to only exist now within the context of Heiankyo Alien, although it seems they’d previously knocked out a clone of Sega’s Head On and would (at least) subsequently develop a game called Dancing Queen that is similarly undumped and forgotten (outside of a tiny thumbnail of the arcade flyer?)

    Anyway. The game was released, was a huge success, and would not just help create the maze chase genre beside Head On–and therefore lead to Pac-Man–but also inspire Space Panic and Lode Runner, essentially creating the entire platformer genre. Not that it’s especially obvious when you play it.

    In Heiankyo Alien, you play a kebiishi, the equivalent of a police officer in Japan’s Heian era (thankfully, AKAB still scans) who must defend Japan’s capital Heiankyo3 from invading aliens by… burying them alive. It’s a bit weird, but it’s (apparently) inspired by the head priest of Todaiji Temple Kukai’s civil engineering skills (aka his hole-digging powers) rather than the TSG being particularly interested in what must be an exceptionally unpleasant way to die.

    The Heiankyo setting is also particularly important, because the game’s strict grid-like layout is inspired by the city’s own grid–the game was localised for North America by Sega/Gremlin as Digger, but they could have picked any number of cities if they’d felt like it. I feel like Chicago Alien would have been a more alluring title, but I suppose people would ask why the cops are digging holes to trap aliens rather than shooting them (and digging the holes later, I guess.)

    Here’s the bad news: Heiankyo Alien is not fun. The original version–or rather, the original Denki Onkyo version–is slow and random. The aliens aren’t seeking you out, which means that you can dig holes that they’re never going to touch, and the game gets increasingly annoying as you pick aliens off, as you end up having to chase the final alien about, trying to dig holes that you hope they’re going to fall into, usually without much success. 

    The game isn’t completely without incident; you still have to be careful when digging holes, because if you get trapped on the wrong side of one, you’ll die, and if an alien bumps another alien while it’s in a hole, it’ll rescue it, meaning that if you’re in that moment trying to bury them again, you’ll die as well. There are a lot of tactics that players discovered for Heiankyo Alien because it was so popular, given names such as “Akihabara Digging” and “Heart Digging” but what’s interesting is how quickly you’ll probably pick up on them as a modern gamer–most notably you’ll probably learn to do “Ito Digging” after the first time you get caught out by an alien popping out of a hole that you didn’t get to quick enough–just digging a hole next to them to catch them rather than risk anything.

    Heiankyo Alien was almost certainly fascinatingly new at the time of its release, and I think it’s really amazing that it’s so accessible thanks to the rights owners, but it really doesn’t cut it now. So it’s lucky then that Mindware have created Heiankyo Alien 3671, ironically deeply inspired by Pac-Man Championship Edition, a derivative of the game derivative of it!

    Heiankyo Alien 3671 redesigns Heiankyo Alien as a five minute score attack that’s far faster than the original and also far more complex, where the player’s aim is to build up multipliers and bonuses via collecting powerups and skilful play rather than simply concentrate on burying aliens alive.

    Here’s what I’ll say about Heiankyo Alien 3671: unlike Pac Man Championship Edition, where it feels like you can “max out” what’s possible, here there’s so much going on I’m not sure you could. First, you need to be gaining levels: for every two enemies killed, you gain a level, which spawns a power up. Meanwhile, you need to be fortifying the map. Every block on the map you walk around you draw a line around, which increases your bonus: but green aliens destroy your fortifications, so you have to be seeking them out as quickly as possible.

    There’s a lot more complexity than that, not all of which, I must admit, I’ve fully grasped. The changes are savvy; they stop players from attempting any of the defensive tactics of the original game, meaning players have to be constantly moving, performing risky digs, and absolutely trying to maximise their time.

    My issue, really, is just that… I don’t like Heiankyo Alien’s main interaction! As in the later Lode Runner, stopping to dig a hole might be tense, but it’s also awkward and unrewarding when it doesn’t work. I do understand how much it’s meant to be a risk, a gamble, but it makes even this fast, exciting version of the game stop-start and frustrating if you end up just making a lot of wrong moves in a row, and I just could not gel with Heiankyo Alien 3671 at all. I still didn’t want to play it.

    Heiankyo Alien is an important, and interesting, part of gaming history, but there’s definitely a reason why people remember Pac-Man better.

    Will I ever play it again? Well, there’s a well regarded Game Boy version by Meldac, so… why not!

    Final Thought: Mindware have an entire range of punched-up re-releases of early, largely forgotten Japanese games–indeed, Japanese type-ins such as Cosmic Cavern 3671 and Space Mouse 35th Anniversary Edition. It’s extremely cool, and I hope some of them are more fun than Heiankyo Alien!

    1. The official site says “was announced at the Amusement Machine Show in Harumi, Tokyo on October 19, 1979, and released early the following year” while Masumi Akagi’s Arcade Game TV List Domestic/Overseas (1971-2005) claims November 1979. I am more inclined to believe the official site, but cowardly I’m going to continue to refer to Heiankyo Alien as a 1979 game. ↩︎
    2. This seems to be a different company from Onkyo, which was founded as Osaka Denki Onkyo K.K.. Confusing! ↩︎
    3. Which ultimately became Kyoto, fact fans! ↩︎
  • Find Your Words (Capy, 2026)

    Find Your Words (Capy, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Capy
    Released: 08/04/2026
    Completed: 10/07/2026
    Completion: Made all the friends!

    Feel like I’ve been going pretty hard on articles recently so let’s have a nice easy one this week, eh? I’m a fan and acquaintance of Capy–I think I’ve played everything they’ve released, I worked in their offices while working on Sound Shapes–so I’m not going to argue from any position of objectivity (though if you’re new here, I never do) but I think Find Your Words is adorable, worthy, and worth anyone’s time considering it’s free. 

    To be honest, it being free is almost an… issue? While it doesn’t quite grind my gears like Evil Egg–the freeness of which still seems completely wrong–that it’s free makes it feel a bit churlish to complain about Find Your Words. But the problem is that I think there’s just so much more they could do!

    Inspired by designers Jon Maur and Vic Ngyuen’s experience as the parents of non-verbal children, Find Your Words casts you as a non-verbal child going to summer camp for the first time, and takes you through the experience of making friends via AAC, or “augmentative and alternative communication.” 

    The fun thing here–and it must have at least partially been the genesis of the project–is that communication books, a form of AAC, are perfect as a communication tool in a video game. With a communication book, you have a limited number of symbols and can combine them to make simple sentences: you could select “where” and “beach” let’s say, show it to someone, and they’d know quite simply that you’re asking where the beach is. 

    When trying to create a “natural” form of communication for a video game, this so… elegant. There’s none of the problems of having the full freedom of text input, and there’s similarly none of the strict, “that isn’t quite what I wish I could say” of pre-selected statements. 

    Yes, the more options you have, the more difficult it is to ensure that you hit a sensible answer for each possibility–meaning you have to keep your context small. I do think that’s why Find Your Words is limited to a single day at a summer camp (and there are still situations where combinations that you think would work lead to unsatisfyingly generic answers.)

    However… I think it’s ripe for further exploration. I know systems like this have existed before–even something like Ultima’s original “Name, job, bye” system has similarities–but I think I like it particularly here because I feel like we’ve gotten so stuck in the mindset of strict dialogue trees. Playing Find Your Words I could see, like, a detective game starring a non-verbal hero (a silent protagonist, as it were…) using this quite easily.

    Honestly, it’s my main criticism of Find Your Words. It’s delightful, and I think meaningful. But I wish they’d got a little bit more… designery with the actual game. The communication tool isn’t particularly important to the game’s puzzles: you mostly make friends by finding them and saying the same simple things in different locations. I suppose for that reason it’d be a great game for a kid, or to play with a kid–though I did struggle to find all the birds, I guess because it doesn’t really use the game’s main mechanic.

    That said, it doesn’t take that long and you can be done with this game in an hour and change; possibly why they chose to make it free (better to sell a supporter pack to fewer people than face many a steam refund from jerks?) and I certainly didn’t feel like I wasted my time. I just… do more with this! Please!!!

    Will I ever play it again? There really isn’t any reason to, sadly–there’s no branching or anything as far as I can tell. It’s sweet, but it is simple.

    Final Thought: At the very least, if they’re not going to do any more with this concept they should make some plushies of the bird designs. I love them!!! (Even if they were annoying to actually find in the game.)

  • UFO 50 #7: Velgress (Yu, 2024)

    UFO 50 #7: Velgress (Yu, 2024)

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  • Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (Atari, 1984)

    Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (Atari, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Atari
    Released: 09/1984
    Completed: 05/05/2026
    Completion: Destroyed the Death Star once, but on a later return trip Lando Calrissian and Nien Numb [“No! Not Nien Numb!”–Ed.] sadly died after destroying the reactor.

    Uh… July the 28th… be with you? It had been a while since I played a Star Wars game, so May the 4th, despite being an annoying pun, did actually put me in mind to finally sit down and play Atari’s take on Return Of The Jedi seriously, a game that I’d say my entire of experience up to this point had been dying close to instantly because I found the fast isometric scrolling so difficult to look at, and the game so hard to control.

    Here’s what I’ll say: even if you really put your head down, try and get used to what Return of the Jedi is serving up… it’s hard to look at and impossible to comfortably control (and before you ask: I did get some time with an actual machine1 with the yoke controller, and if anything that might have been worse.)

    Atari’s take on Return Of The Jedi is sort of the black sheep of Atari’s Star Wars output. As it was released to capitalise on the film in a more timely manner than Atari’s Star Wars, it awkwardly precedes Atari’s arcade take on The Empire Strikes Back, and it’s the only game in the trilogy that doesn’t use vector graphics. In conversation with Retro Gamer, developer Dennis Harper recounted:

    “Lyle Rains, our chief technical guy, gave me the assignment and he said that Atari had developed some innovative hardware that could store an enormous amount of playfield graphics using relatively little storage. Return Of The Jedi was to be the flagship game to show off this technology.”

    Therefore–and inspired by Zaxxon–they decided to go for an isometric viewpoint, and create levels based on the climax of the film much the same way Atari’s take on Star Wars had: the speeder bike chase, the space ambush/attack on the shield generator, and the flight through the Death Star in the Millennium Falcon to destroy the reactor core.

    In some respects, it’s a classic Atari arcade game of the era. It loops, you can choose to start on later levels for a score bonus, there’s as much digitised speech as they can jam in. But there’s something very unusual in it. 

    You won’t notice it if you start on the first level and don’t make it into the second, and so I imagine most people never saw it, because Return Of The Jedi is, as I said, extremely challenging to survive any length of time in. On the first level, you only get the speeder bike chase and the Death Star reactor core attack/escape. On the second, you experience the space ambush/shield generator attack level between them, and the game cuts between the action.

    The only other example I can give of a game doing something like this, this early, is Karateka, which came out over a year later (I have no sense if Mechner had ever seen a Return Of The Jedi arcade machine) and which, arguably, is doing something a lot simpler with its cuts–simply letting you know there’s a dude running towards you. A closer comparison, really, would be something like Thirty Flights Of Loving in terms of cuts between action you’re still in control of, but that’s years later and, really, doing something different with its cinematic cuts. 

    In Return Of The Jedi, at one point you’re the Millennium Falcon with an X-Wing escort, fighting off TIE Fighters, then suddenly, you’re Chewbacca in a AT-ST, trying to dodge logs… then back again! Surprisingly, it’s not discombobulating at all (or at least, no more discombobulating than the game already is) and it does make me wonder, as Thirty Flights Of Loving did, if we haven’t missed something with the form by not engaging with cinematic cutting during play more. Harper believes he was the first to do this kind of cutting (I can’t find anything earlier, and I’ve annoyed the Gaming Alexandria discord enough as it is) and it came from a genuine attempt to recreate the parallel action from the film. The arcade flyer, interestingly, touts it as the “new ‘Split Wave’ movie technique.” Thanks to all that digitised speech, you get the sense of a battle across two fronts and the connection between them, with the level-ending cut-scene making clear that as you got the shield generator down on the ground, the Millennium Falcon can now get to the Death Star.

    To be honest, I’m sure in a noisy arcade it just felt sort of random, and it really does require knowledge of the film to truly work, so it’s not exactly perfect, but I appreciate the attempt.

    I’d probably appreciate it more, however, if Return Of The Jedi was just a little more… playable in the first place. The game is way, way way too fast when you’re actually playing it because the aspect ratio and isometric view mean you have almost no way to anticipate what’s coming. I didn’t get far–at all–and what I managed was pure grim memorisation. The isometric viewpoint plays strange little tricks, too. Flying into the Death Star? Fine. Flying out? Almost impossible. I’m certain for many people this game was just about surviving an escape from the Death Star even once–it certainly was for me.

    Return Of The Jedi isn’t terrible, it just requires such a white-knuckle intensity that it’s never actually fun. If Star Wars gave you this great sense of “playing the movie” Return Of The Jedi keeps you at more of a distance and gives you a sense of “failing at recreating the movie.”

    But hey. It’s still better than Death Star Battle.

    Will I ever play it again? I’ll always hop on a Star Wars machine. But this? It’s just not fun!

    Final Thought: One thing I particularly like about this game, however, is the strange interpretation of Star Destroyers that have a real “what if Klasky Csupo designed Star Wars?” feel to them. It’s not quite enough, but it’s something!

    1. An Arcade1Up, but close enough.  ↩︎
  • Vampire Survivors (poncle, 2022)

    Vampire Survivors (poncle, 2022)

    Developed/Published by: poncle
    Released: 20/10/2022
    Completed: 05/05/2026
    Completion: Beat the final boss, saw the credits.

    Vampire Survivors completely passed me by originally. But the genre it spawned–now apparently named “Bullet Heaven” by Valve, although I’m not sure if people have decided to accept it–is everywhere and it feels like I should probably know about it.

    Off the back of Vampire Survivors, my feeling is that it’s… something I know about now.

    In fact, it’s something that I was quite prepared to be done with very quickly once I understood it. If you’re unfamiliar with Vampire Survivors–and it’s not impossible, I really didn’t know anything about it until I played it–it’s a game in which your chosen hero is placed in the middle of an essentially infinite map and enemies spawn off screen in increasing amounts and make a beeline for them. The chosen hero attacks automatically, and really, there are only a few ways you affect their survival. First, by moving them around: not just to avoid enemies, but to collect the experience gems they drop. Secondly, by selecting the upgrades they receive by levelling up: new weapons, passive items, or simply upgrading the weapons and items you already have.

    The pleasure of Vampire Survivors is the ramping up of your abilities versus the ramping up of enemies. The very first time you play, you think “how on earth am I going to survive this” as you walk around slowly with a whip that fires, occasionally, horizontally the direction you’re facing. It’s awkward, and not even really fun. You’ll probably pick weapons and abilities at random and die a few times, but then you’ll grasp you want to pick weapons or abilities that synergise [“well, obviously”–Ed.] and before long you’re playing a game where your hero basically stands still while a whirling tornado of attacks spin around them, energy gems are absorbed into them from a distance, and literally thousands of enemies die by the second in huge, incomprehensible mosh-pit.

    What’s odd about Vampire Survivors is how quickly that occurs. At least, it did for me. Once you learn or luck into the realisation that if you pick the correct synergies of weapons and passives weapons evolve into ridiculously powerful new forms, the game reveals itself to be about… doing that. Each level-up, pick the thing that matches the thing you have. Simple.

    In my recent(-ish) piece on Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, I wrote about the “machine zone” described by Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Designers in the gambling industry are engaged in an ever increasing arms race to create perfect, friction-free sensation and the absolute absorption of players in their games until, ideally, they never stop playing. Not that they couldn’t, that they’d never want to. A perfect skinner box.

    Have you noticed how gambling is everywhere now? You can’t seem to escape it. If you watch any form of TV (remember when streaming didn’t have ads?) every ad break seems to be for an online casino or sports betting. Prediction markets are being shoehorned into awards shows and god knows what else.

    It feels like as everything gets slightly worse in people’s lives, as all the money, all the resources get held by an ever smaller amount of people, as our high streets and third spaces get hollowed out, the offer being made is “well, gamble. Maybe you’ll hit it big, and join us.” Or at least, that’s the offer initially being made. The real offer being made is “Gamble, and lose yourself. Lose the outside world. The longest you’ll ever have to live is the moment between spins, and the best thing is the spins never have to stop.”

    It is a persuasive, efficient, powerful form of design. I doubt the people on the ground, the ones engaged in user experience, recognising when an animation is too long or a particular button press unnecessary, are evil as such. I think we’re all able of abstracting far more horrific things away if our own comfort demands it. And you know, they’re designers in the gambling industry. It’s hard to be disappointed.

    So is it unfair that I’m disappointed in the waves of game designers that delve into the dark patterns? It’s getting disturbingly transparent to see the slot machines and scratch cards; like a promise, “come join us in the machine zone. This one doesn’t even need you to spend all your money. Your time is good enough for us, here.”

    I play a game like Vampire Survivors, and I think… where is the “play”? where is the joy, the creativity, hell, the “series of interesting decisions”? The time between level ups is just the time the reels spend spinning. After the first few, every level up is as automatic as pushing “spin again.” And after a certain point, you don’t even have to. Like an addict in the machine zone, you watch the machine play itself. If there is a vampire here, it is one that drains us of our time, our life, our joy.

    I’m sure you probably think I’m being sort of histrionic here. I’ve complained about this before, honestly; when I wrote about Blue Prince. The idea that these games–which I admit unlike slot machines you can “win”–ask you to spend time on failing runs, waste your time, but feed you the incremental success (directly analogous to slot machine’s carefully spaced payouts, I feel) to keep you playing.

    But it’s… shit. It’s games as commerce, not art. And I can hear the complaints, but I guess I’m at the point where they don’t wash. The spate of gambling themed games makes it clear that any distinction over the fact that games’ dark patterns were a parallel evolution is utterly meaningless. And sure, the games are fun, in many cases do require more thought–so then remove the dark patterns!

    You’re creating games that you want people to play, right? Not setting traps for people to fall into?

    As I said above: I don’t even think gambling designers are evil. I don’t think most game designers are thinking deeply about the value of design, actually; so much is genre convention already that I don’t think it’s interrogated.

    The problem for me is when playing Vampire Survivors, there’s just so little to interrogate. I was done with it after my first half hour win, but–and it speaks of the insidious nature of it, and my own completionist tendencies–I realised there were a few things I could do to “complete” it properly, surmised it wouldn’t take much time or attention to do so, and saw the credits.1 But I felt nothing. No joy. No pleasure. No excitement or interest or… anything. Really. I just lived in the moments between spins.

    Will I ever play it again? There are a lot of DLC with IP people love for this game now, but look… it’s like getting excited that they made a slot machine with the Golden Girls on it or something.

    Final Thought: So I suppose the big question is: do I play Vampire Crawlers? Well, the problem is I fucking love dungeon crawlers and deckbuilders. 

    After all that… what am I like!

    1. I probably wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s really hard to look at the screen during about… what, twenty, thirty percent of an episode of The Pitt? ↩︎
  • Goal! (Tose, 1988)

    Goal! (Tose, 1988)

    Developed/Published by: Tose / Jaleco
    Released: 23/12/1988
    Completed: 22/06/2026
    SCompletion: Won the “Championship” (it’s obviously the World Cup, there’s a picture of the World Cup at the end) with Italy Scotland (look, they play in blue, ok?)

    After the terrible experience of Match Day’s bare-bones port and antique play, I was definitely looking for something better to play to get my arcadey footy fix–but of course, the siren call of more retro beckoned. Steam, surprisingly, has a sort of burgeoning collection of retro games, I think because there are a lot of companies throwing games up in the hope they’ll make a buck or two. I learned my lesson well enough with Match Day to not bother with Microprose Soccer, even though I’d genuinely like to play that predecessor to Sensible Soccer–the version on Steam apparently doesn’t include the proper C64 game and doesn’t work on Steam Deck anyway.

    However, I spotted Jaleco Sports: Goal! and it looked like it had a little more oomph to it, including two versions of Goal!, CRT filters, saving and rewind, and manuals. What I’d consider the bare minimum–but after Match Day, a welcome sight.

    I usually don’t love tube-style CRT frames but it helps here to cover up a lot of the flickering/garbage at the edge of the screen…

    It’s not even exactly the bare minimum. I appreciate that Sickhead Games/Rock It Games made sure to include all the different regional versions of Goal!–so you can, if you wish, play the original Moero! Pro Soccer version, or the PAL version (for some reason)1. And that even includes all the different manuals. Pretty good!

    I suppose it’s hard to ask for more from a re-release of an late-80s footy game, because what are you really going to dredge up that’s that illuminating? So at best, you’ve got to hope that by 1988 we’ve reached “football as a video game” rather than “we tried to represent football as best we could ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

    After Match Day, or I suppose more contextually, Soccer, Goal! for NES feels like a huge step up in that it’s much more accurately representing the sport–full differentiated teams, tournaments, and all the rules including offside (although I never saw this play out… actually come to think of it I never even saw a foul given, but the manual does say they’re there!)

    You can also feel it trying to be a video game. It’s trying to do what you want a video game version of a sport to do: create something that gives you the same feeling of the experience without being a slavish recreation. In Goal! You can feel the flow of a football game and those big moments: When you scored the goal needed to win the game with a header off a keeper deflection. When you had to desperately defend against an opponent that just keeps knocking on your door in the dying minutes of the game. All of those sorts of things.

    It’s a shame that Goal!.. is not very good. Credited to Tose, I genuinely think they set out to make a good football game–and I think they did nearly succeed. But there are a lot of baffling decisions.

    First up: that viewing angle. It’s not… what is that angle? It’s not isometric projection. I think it’s an attempt at military projection? But there’s something so off about it. It feels like you’re a giant with a crick in his neck, and it doesn’t even look like the players are drawn correctly for the angle anyway. Why did they do this? It’s not a viewpoint football is ever seen by (perhaps in the modern era by a failing drone, I don’t know.) Old footy matches were often shown at a bit more of an angle, but this is just ridiculous.

    It’s what probably causes one of the most major issues with Goal!. It’s bloody impossible to line up your shots correctly. Blessedly the game has a pass and a shoot button (though the I feel layout is backwards) but by putting everything at an angle, and the cross of a d-pad famously not at an angle, it’s a nightmare. It doesn’t even feel like you can really line up your shot with the angle of the pitch! 

    But there are plenty of other glaring errors. The AI is atrocious. As much as you can still weave a story in your matches, the story sometimes features beats like “when the midfielder that wasn’t under your control suddenly stopped chasing the ball to run in the opposite direction.” I said jumpers for goalposts when talking about Match Day, but a lot of the time Goal! looks like children playing: literally everyone on the pitch just chasing the one person with the ball. And despite already having a low framerate with jerky players, when things like that happen the game’s speed craters. It’s Double Dragon level, though arguably worse because Goal! (thanks to the stupid angle) requires such precision. 

    The bad framerate is especially damaging because it makes Goal! so unresponsive. The game features a sliding tackle, but it literally took me several games to successfully pull off, even though the command is just “push a direction and press the tackle button.” It just doesn’t let you do it nine times out of ten. And if you’re trying to switch players to get closer to the opponent with the ball? Good luck. The game seems to have absolutely no system in place for selecting the closest player–you’ll often find it selecting someone miles away. Just for fun, I guess.

    It’s not all bad, though. Goal! Does have one of the best things in a football game: aftertouch. After shooting, you can hold B and push a direction to bend your shot, and it’s one of the things you’ll need to do to beat the keepers, who are weirdly close to perfect if you get them on screen head on but useless if you try and bend it in around them before you even see them (another side effect of the weird angle is how close you have to get to even see the goals.) 

    Maybe it’s just that the game chugs along, is unresponsive, and awkward–you really do have to have a death grip on your controller to try and hit those angles–but scoring goals does feel really satisfying, so that’s nice. There’s a real dopamine hit that keeps you playing longer than you probably should.

    And, honestly, I bet at the time it did keep a lot of footy-loving NES owners playing. Goal! Got some terrible reviews–39% in TOTAL!–and while it’s not exactly that I’d say they’re wrong (it’s not good) with so few footy games on the NES I understand why you’d make do when playing this–somehow I did just keep playing it until I won the World Cup. It was probably better in multiplayer, too, with both players struggling with the controls and tackling–I don’t know if the championship mode gets more difficult as you go, but it can be pretty frustrating playing against the better teams who are able to tackle at will.

    In an attempt to offer value for money, there’s a weird extra mode in Goal! too. The “shoot competition.” This is a mode where you’re trying to quickly score a goal from a set piece against a couple of defenders, but… it’s got completely different graphics and plays differently.

    Why would Tose do this? It’s not even very good. It’s easy, over quickly (score five times, you’re done) and doesn’t reward you with anything. I wonder if this was what the game was originally supposed to be, and when it turned out the graphics wouldn’t fit into memory with two full teams, they just jammed it in as a wee extra.

    The weirdest thing about it is that you can play as one of three “stars”: Hansen, Roko or Juarez.

    Hansen?

    As in… Alan Hansen???

    He was a defender!

    And Scotland isn’t even properly in this game. Which, by the way, immediately halves the scores I don’t give out. Meaning I’d be rating this more harshly than TOTAL did. So they’re lucky I don’t.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but as I said above: I would understand why people would. This is so nearly there, just let down by weird decisions and technical limitations/ineptitude.

    Final Thought: Another odd decision: in adapting Moero! Pro Soccer as Goal!, I guess Jaleco felt they had to try and attract the US market, and so Goal! even in its European release has a Championship mode (World Cup, international teams) and a “Tournament” mode, but the tournament mode features American teams2, like literally anyone would care. It’s a shame as well because only the tournament mode features the “proper” knockouts of the World Cup, with the Championship mode instead featuring a strange double group stage. Really not sure what they were thinking with that. Anyway. Alan Hansen!!!

    1. Sorry, I’ve let the side down here and didn’t actually boot this version up to see if it’s any different. The main way it should be different is it should be slower, at 50hz, and I imagine they didn’t go that far. Also, why would you want to play that! ↩︎
    2. Something I like about this: Tose obviously didn’t have the memory to fit in stats for more teams (or couldn’t be arsed to make them up) and so they just made the American teams rebadged versions of international teams, and the manual happily admits this. ↩︎
  • NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Sumo Digital, Sumo Digital Academy / Secret Mode
    Released: 26/03/2026
    Completed: 06/07/2026
    Completion: Won the Egg Cup with Carlisle!

    The World Cup grinding on finally gave me a reason to give my time to this, Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” because I was, at least in the group stages, going to have a lot of games on that I didn’t exactly feel I needed to give my full attention (but I still wanted to see the goals and that.)

    Now, I’m not someone who really bothers with football manager games, but I like deckbuilders and I really loved the theming of this, chock-full of the kind of maximalist skeuomorphism that hasn’t really been seen in games since the likes of Yes, Prime Minister (and which does really feel like a very “British games” kind of thing.) It was definitely enough to make me get over the main issue I have: that I love football, but I just don’t care about club football at all.

    Love a game that gives you a desk: Yes, Prime Minister (Oxford Digital, 1987) vs. Nutmeg!

    I suspect that’s an unbelievably unusual opinion, but if you’re going to feel that way, growing up in Scotland is probably what’s going to do it. Which I suppose makes it somewhat ironic that probably the most major issue I have with Nutmeg! is that it’s limited to the English leagues, which I care about even less. I get it: they’re recreating 20 years of football history right down to the real transfers happening at the right time, and that’s a lot of data entry (I suspect Sumo Digital Academy had to take on quite a bit of grunt work) and it’s probably the most famous and popular league in the world, but I hope that they’ll be able to add the Scottish leagues in future, so players can try and desperately make the top flight of Scottish football in the era even slightly interesting (sorry.)

    But still, don’t say I don’t persevere. I simply picked the most northern teams I could get–first York, which I got to the second division–and then Carlisle, the most northern English football team you can get.1

    In general, however, one of the nice things about Nutmeg! is that I don’t think you have to be a locked-in  football fan to enjoy it. Thanks to setting itself to an era and going for a more abstracted take on the sport, Nutmeg! does manage to split the difference between being a “themed video game” and a “football manager” and that makes it worth playing even if you just think it looks interesting but you only know the barest about football.

    Despite that, I do think the tutorial doesn’t explain the game as well as it should, which is why I’ve written an entire guide for it. However, in short, the thing that needs to be understood about Nutmeg! is that it’s not a deckbuilder about building a “perfect engine” that you use across the game, but instead a game about percentages. Nutmeg! is more like a streamlined, card-based XCOM than it is a football-themed Slay The Spire. 

    The majority of your time is spent actually being a football manager: you’re trying to build the best team of players you can, and to do that you’ll need to make money–selling merch and improving your stadium to sell more tickets–and hire the best staff to train and support them. The loop, really, boils down to acquiring the best players you can to win matches which allows you to make more money to buy even better players. Unless you chose to play in marathon mode, you aren’t going to play every game–meaning that you mostly go into games with a straight percentage chance of winning or drawing, and only a little leeway to affect that by choosing your team’s tactics and formation.

    So quickly you learn: you can’t win every game, unless you want to engage in brutal, repetitive save scumming.2 You have to pick your battles–and the trick here is that’s where the deckbuilding game kicks in, with card-based matches.

    I really love the matches. The system isn’t entirely elegant, but it does a great job of representing the highs and lows of a football match. Football matches are 90+ minutes and they tell stories that boil down easily into highlights, and this is how Nutmeg! works. Again, you can’t expect to simply build a perfect deck and win. First of all, any cards you use in a match get burned off, so your deck is constantly changing. Secondly, every action is that XCOM-like battle of percentages that you try to bend in your favour with your hand of cards. Want to score a goal? Well, if the goalie is incredible and your striker… not, you’ll have to spend the best attacking card you have and still not guarantee the goal.

    Everything in Nutmeg! is a gamble, and that simply feels right for what they’re trying to do. Strong teams are better than weak teams, but absolutely unlikely things can happen… about as often as unlikely things happen. You won’t get a division 5 team beating a first division team, but underdogs can still win the day with the right cards, and there’s a real thrill in having saved a powerful card until you absolutely need it, like in a cup knockout game, knowing that if you lose it, you’re probably out till next year. 

    But there’s always next year.

    Nutmeg! is a really nice “casual” take on football and management sims. How good players are is very clear–you really don’t have to pour over the stats–and the matches you play matter. But it’s not perfect. There are no issues that ruin it, exactly, but there’s definitely a culmination of niggles that could turn you off.

    First, that UI. It’s charming, and I love that it evolves across the years, but it’s also really busy, overcomplicated, and slow to navigate. It feel like they’ve created a lot of redundancy to try and make it simpler to do more things, but it’s confusing, and made worse by the fact that the way they highlight what you’re selecting is far too subtle. And then when you actually switch screens there are animations, zooms… I’m aware that if they cut this down the game would feel very static, but especially as the game settles into a loop where you’re doing the same things flicking between screens over and over, you’re going to get very tired of it (and a bit dizzy, frankly.)

    Then there are the weak points of the game’s loop. Ensuring players keep their skills trained up is just tedious busywork; I get the idea (you can’t keep all your players at their full potential) but couldn’t the game just… switch players at max out for me? They already ensure players change which skill they’re training when they max them out, so it’s not totally out of pocket to ask.

    There are some subtler issues, too. Early in the game as you’re building up your team, the cards you’ll be getting usually work with the recipes you have. But with a well trained team, you might be getting only the top-tier “basic” cards, meaning that the recipes you want, which often use lower-ranked basics, you can’t make! I want the 50% goal card, not the 60% goal card that might fail, but if I never see a 20% attack card I can’t make it. It’s a strange–and probably not easily solved–design issue. Maybe give players the ability to split cards?

    And ultimately, there’s a limit to how long you’re going to want to play Nutmeg! as there’s only the four divisions and the Egg Cup. The game offers twenty years of seasons and having played it for not quite half that, there’s a feeling of diminishing returns as the game starts to feel like it boils down to just waiting to make enough money to snipe the best players from other teams even if they cost millions and millions of pounds. There aren’t quite enough events or stories to be told once you’re topping the league unless you just want to start over with a different club. You know, adding the Scottish leagues would give players new things to aim for…

    All that said, I had a blast in my time with this, as it somehow scratches the football itch, the deckbuilder itch, and even the XCOM itch. It’s not perfect, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and you really can’t say fairer than that.

    Will I ever play it again? Although I led my team to a win in the Egg Cup, they haven’t lifted the first division trophy. I could be convinced to attempt such a feat if there are any future updates to the game. Like if they added Scottish leagues. Just worth mentioning. Again.

    Final Thought: Of course, Nutmeg! Isn’t the only football manager to explore the XCOM concept, there’s also Football, Tactics & Glory, which also recently put out a World Cup update. I’m eager to compare and contrast at some point in the future, but I am a bit footballed out now–I played this for like 30 hours!

    1. I could, if I was absolutely dedicated, have attempted to stuff my teams with Scottish players, but they don’t include nationality in the stats and the ones I recognised instantly were all knocking on a bit, even if it would have been pretty funny to field Frank “Wherza Burds?” McAvennie (sorry, I know this post is getting extremely regional.) ↩︎
    2. You can choose to play the game seeded so you can make it impossible to save scum. I recommend this–but you’ll regret it every time you lose a match or fail to attract a new player, so be warned. ↩︎