Save Mass Effect!, Civilization Turns 35, Spooky DOOM, RIP Sir Patrick Stewart & More - Ramble 176

There’s A Rat In Mi Kitchen

Hello there, my cheesy little ramblers, and welcome to another instalment of Rees Rambles, my weekly podcast all about the latest comings and goings, movings and shakings, and indeed all the rest of it from the worlds of vintage and retro computing, gaming and technology. More, as I should say, because that is increasingly becoming the case, as you’ll probably know if you’re a regular here. Anyway, welcome to another weekend, another chilly, dark and rather autumnal weekend here in the UK. The leaves finally kind of turning yellow on the trees. Rather nice time of year. We also had a full moon as well, which is very apt, I think, for Halloween. And you will no doubt have also noticed, if you’re watching this on YouTube, that I’ve had a bit of a trim, a long overdue haircut. Very nice indeed. And I’ve also given myself a rather dapper beard trim as well for you all, for my audience. Don’t say I never do anything for you. And on that note, I’ve also been back at the gym over the past week or so. I ended up having about six weeks off.

First, I was really ill. And then I was just about ready to go back and I booked on to my next class the next day. I was doing some wiring and I somehow managed to slice the end of my finger open. I’m only showing you this because it is pretty much completely healed now. But yeah, nice deep scar there. Right next to, I will say, about five millimetres away from the very similar looking scar from the last time I did exactly the same thing because I never learn. I was stripping a wire with a Stanley knife, or a box cutter, I think it’s known as in some parts of the world.

Nice, shiny, brand new blade on there, super sharp and stripped the wire. And then I kind of held it up to admire my handiwork and noticed that there was blood running all the way down my hand and my arm dripping all over the floor. And that was the point when it started hurting a lot. It’s funny how, you know, it doesn’t actually hurt until you notice it, doesn’t it? It’s kind of weird how that happens.

Bled for absolutely ages. All over the place. Took a monumental effort to get it to stop. Probably should have gone to the doctors or the hospital because it was very deep and very wide. And it took, you know, a couple of weeks to heal to the point where I felt confident enough to go back to the gym, picking up barbells and dumbbells, kettlebells, pull-ups, push-ups, pretty much everything involves using your hands in the world of CrossFit. Now, the reason I mention this is because usually I’m there Monday, Wednesday and Friday. My alarm goes off at 6am and I’m there for the 7.30 class. But that wasn’t the case this morning. After getting my streak back on track, it was once again broken. Because when my alarm went off, I heard a bit of a strange rustling noise from downstairs. And it was kind of faint at first, but it started to kind of intensify and get louder.

So I ventured out cautiously onto the landing, as you do, and look down the stairs and there was a light on downstairs. Yeah. And as you can imagine, I thought that there was somebody in the house, which is not a nice thing to wake up to. Started looking around for something that I could use to defend myself, like, I don’t know, a hammer or a baseball bat or something. I don’t know, but couldn’t find anything and decided to cautiously creep down there. Now, it turns out the light had actually been left on the night before, which didn’t help and was unrelated to the noise. Because when I made it to the kitchen, that was when I found some stuff had been disturbed. A bag, like one of those paper M&S shopping bags, in the middle of the kitchen floor, which had some fruit and some chocolate and stuff in it, had been disturbed. Also some stuff under the sink, like some cleaning things, had been nibbled by something. Now, earlier on in the year, I think I talked about this. We had some squirrels up in the loft and evicted those, filled all of the holes. And thankfully, none of them returned. But after that, we decided to get hold of one of those Ring cameras and stick it up there. Just have it on motion activated mode. And thankfully, touch wood, nothing else has appeared in the months since then. So I went up there, as you do, at 6.30 this morning in my dressing gown, retrieved the camera and stuck it in the kitchen cupboard under the sink, pointing towards a hole in the wall, which seemed at the time like the only kind of viable candidate for any kind of critter to get into the house. And this is what it captured. About five minutes later, I got a notification on my phone that it had detected some motion. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see there’s a little twitchy nose there, just peeking out. And to cut a long story short, it’s a rat, a rat that has come through the wall cavity, sneaking off there behind the kitchen cupboards. And a bit later on, a few minutes later, you can actually see the rats running away somehow. Can’t remember where that is, but we’ll let that run. And maybe you will. Oh, there it goes. There you go. And the reason for that is because that camera also has a siren built in. So if you’re watching live on the phone app, you can press a button and it sets off a very loud and horrible noise. And that actually scared the rat away. There you go.

Top tip there. But I’m not here to advertise these cameras. I am here to talk about the trauma that I went through as a result of this, because when I looked a bit more closely, I decided to move my wine fridge out of the way. Yes, I do own a wine fridge. I am kind of bougie like that, as I’m sure you know by now. There was this Kinder chocolate wrapper, which looked immediately familiar to me because I bought these on my little shopping trip last weekend and I have been enjoying them at work, but no longer because the last two bars that were in there have gone. That’s just the plastic outer wrapper. And indeed, that was one of the things that was in that paper M&S bag. So I went to Screwfix, the national DIY chain. And there is one very close to me. And thankfully, they do open at 7am. Picked up some expanding foam, and to bring this story to its conclusion, here’s a photo of that hole before, and here is a photo of it now. So I filled pretty much the whole wall cavity with expanding foam, shoved a load of wire wool in there and then sealed it in with yet more expanding foam. Also went looking for some of the potential entries, potential orifices and filled all of those up as well. So hopefully that’s the end of that. And I won’t be having any more visitors stealing my beloved Kinder chocolate because good chocolate is getting increasingly hard to come by, isn’t it? You know, Cadbury’s, they’re always, you know, nothing special, but perfectly fine. Got taken over by Kraft a few years ago. And yeah, I think the quality has very much gone downhill since then. Hotel Chocolat, I know that’s very, very high-end, but you know, they were acquired by Mars as well. I think that was this year. We’re running out of options for good chocolate, good kind of mainstream chocolate. So yeah, please don’t take my Kinder away from me. And if anyone from Kinder is watching this and fancies, you know, perhaps offering me some kind of sponsorship, I’d be very much on board with that. Anyway, yeah, with that story out of the way, completely and utterly unrelated to anything else that I’m going to talk about this week, I guess we’ll get on with this week’s ramble, shall we?

PCBWay

But first, on the topic of sponsorship, let’s take a very brief diversion to say thank you to our long-term sponsor, PCBWay.com. Now, you may already be familiar with PCBWay thanks to their 12-plus years of experience in the PCB fabrication business, within which time they have built up quite the reputation for fast turnaround times, excellent quality control, and top-notch customer service. But today, as they have been doing in recent months, they have asked me to let you know about their additional services. Services including, but not limited to, CNC machining, 3D printing, injection moulding, and sheet metal fabrication, to name but a few. So if any of those are of interest to you for your next project, please do check out the link to PCBWay.com down in the description. And a big thank you once again to PCBWay for your long-running support for Rees Rambles and my main channel, ctrl-alt-rees.

Save Mass Effect!

So let’s kick things off for this week’s ramble with an update on the big story from last week. And indeed, this long-running, overarching, bigger story from the wider games industry at large over the past year or so. These restructurings, these historic studios being shuttered or coming under new management, all sorts of really important and well-loved games franchises falling by the wayside, getting the chop as well in the process. Not to mention, of course, the real people caught up in this, the very talented and hard-working developers, composers, artists, and all the other creative people involved in the process of producing these games. And whether the motivation be corporate overlords trying to maximise shareholder value or, you know, line the pockets of their executives with a few more millions like they don’t already make enough, or in this case, rather weirdly, EA being acquired by the Saudi royal family, who seem to have saddled it with a load of debt as part of that process. And now, of course, the company is obliged to try to repay that debt. And the studios owned by EA, of course, having to bear the brunt of that. It’s all very odd and very bad in the gaming world just lately.

And I’m sorry to start this one with some bad news, but of course, there is perhaps a silver lining, perhaps, you know, a light at the end of the tunnel here regarding one of those studios that I talked about last week. And that studio is BioWare, and specifically one of their biggest and most loved game franchises, which I also kind of expressed surprise about last week, because it was very strange to hear that they would kill off this series. Anyway, I’m going to stop teasing you.

Here’s the story over on IGN.com about Mass Effect. Now, the headline here: “Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard Actors, Destiny Community Help #SaveMassEffect Petition Cross 200,000 Signatures.” And indeed, I’m going to be saying that mouthful, #SaveMassEffect, a few times over the course of this article. In fact, you know what, let’s make it a hashtag on the actual video itself as well. Anyway, a story here, as reported, IGN.com, by Michael Cripe. “The #SaveMassEffect movement has picked up even more steam after videos from both Commander Shepard actors – and even posts from the Destiny community – helped its petition reach 200,000 signatures.” Now, I am just going to take a brief diversion to show you this petition. And this will be linked down below as well, if you want to go and add your signature to this. These are verified signatures. So this is change.org, and you will need to verify that you are a real person as part of signing this, which is great. Of course, it lends the whole thing a lot more weight. And the petition here, I’m not going to read to you through the actual description here, but it just talks about the history of the series and the studio and how we’ve come to be in this position where, of course, the game needs to be saved. Anyway, we’ll go back to IGN.com.

“It’s been a whirlwind week for Mass Effect players and fans of the now-shuttered legendary RPG developer BioWare. After EA announced it would be closing the studio and cancelling development for Mass Effect 5, fans took action, and the result is something to behold. In the first weekend of the #SaveMassEffect movement and its accompanying petition, more than 200,000 verified users have offered their signature to the cause. That’s thanks in part to the wild amount of social media attention it’s garnered in just a few days. But two of its most prominent supporters have already been backing Mass Effect for decades.” So first, we have this tweet from Jennifer Hale, which just says, “I like this thought.” And then links to the petition. But Jennifer goes on to say, “You know what I like to think about?” “Actor Jennifer Hale, who famously played the female version of Commander Shepard for the first three Mass Effect games, said in a video over the weekend: ‘I like to think about a world where the fans come together to create a Kickstarter, and then a couple of investors join them, and then a really cool game company joins them. Then a collective is formed to bring Mass Effect back to life – for the community, for the creatives, for all of us. And it’s amazing. That’s what I like to think about.’” I love the way that’s phrased. It’s got a lot of impact to it, hasn’t it? It’s a fantastic statement. “It’s a scenario that fans have pushed for, and one Hale believes in. She had already spoken out about the sadness surrounding BioWare’s closure after a leaked trailer” – which we’ll take a look at in a second – “for its cancelled Mass Effect Universe project found its way online. At the time, she felt weirdly hopeful, and just a few days later she donned the #SaveMassEffect hashtag in a post. When Hale first shared her feelings about EA’s decision to lay off staff and bring the game side of the franchise to a halt, she wasn’t alone. Joining her during an Instagram livestream was male Shepard actor Mark Meer. He echoed her thoughts, saying that it was very sad news for BioWare’s home location in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and the industry as a whole. He returned to social media to share a similar video, #SaveMassEffect in tow.”

“I like it too. Hold the line,” says the tweet. “I just saw my friend Jennifer Hale post about an idea, and I think it’s a pretty good one,” Meer said. “Save Mass Effect. Hold the line. I should go. And you should go. Sign that petition.” That just reminds me of that Toto song, doesn’t it? “Hold the Line”. Is that the name of the song? Pretty sure it is. Anyway, the story goes on to talk about the petition itself and, of course, lets people know where they can find it and a bit more backstory and all of that, so you can go and read about that. And this has also led to a billboard appearing in Times Square in New York, as reported here by windowscentral.com.

So yeah, it talks about how this was coordinated by the We Are Mass Effect team, which is an account over on Twitter that you can go and follow. And content creator Kala Elizabeth: “The massive #SaveMassEffect billboard is now live in Times Square all day today,” and it is “prominently located at 1560 Broadway” – if you want to go and have a look at it – “situated directly above the Pelé store in Duffy Square.” It’s been a while since I’ve been to New York, so I can’t quite picture where that is. But anyway, it runs for 15 seconds at 35 minutes past every hour. So yeah, there is a picture there of the billboard. And a bit more coverage of this.

This story here, Rock Paper Shotgun have also picked up on this and talked about how… It’s funny that, you know, the original campaign and stuff behind this doesn’t talk about trying to bring back BioWare itself, just Mass Effect and how it could be picked up by a different studio, perhaps, which is quite an interesting angle on this, quite an interesting take on this, and kind of…

Who’s the author here? Edwin Evans-Thirlwell talks a bit about perhaps a wider campaign to save BioWare itself. Of course, the studio did put out some of the quite iconic franchises over the years, which I do think is a very good point. And this is quite the compelling read as well. So you can go and check that out if you like. And yeah, this is this leaked game that they were working on. So a story here again from Rock Paper Shotgun, this one by Mark Warren: “Mass Effect 5 was named Universe, partly because it let players generate alternate timelines based on their choices in previous entries,” the technical director says. “The system was part of BioWare’s effort to give the player absolute autonomy, according to Romain Toutain.” And there is a clip here from a live stream. This was posted over on Bluesky by a user called Lou. And this is a live stream. “My brother was watching Octobinz, Romain Toutain.” So yeah, this is the actual technical director on Mass Effect Universe, as it is now known to be called – Mass Effect 5. And Lou has very helpfully clipped the relevant part showing some of this footage, this in-development footage. I think some of this, I’m not sure if this is in-game footage or if it’s perhaps a concept footage, something taken from a trailer, it’s actually kind of credited as here. But of course, Romain is French and he does give some French commentary on this. And Lou has also very helpfully subtitled it as well. So yeah, this is kind of the most in-depth look that we’ve had at the game so far. And it does all look rather nice if you want to go and watch that. That’s seven minutes long. And as mentioned, that is available over on Bluesky, linked down below. Interesting, interesting when these games get cancelled that, of course, these people with these NDAs and things, they just don’t care anymore. You know, they’ve lost their jobs, their studio’s been shut down, the project they have poured their heart and soul into for months or even years is suddenly gone.

So what’s to stop them just putting it out there? And why not? I’m all for it. You know, great to show people what all of these people have been putting all of this hard work into. And finally, some of the kind of anger and stuff around this as well, very much worth reporting on. PCGamer.com: “None of these people have ever made a game,” BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk says of game industry executives. “They just don’t know how it works.” And this is an interview with Greg, the co-founder, one of the original co-founders of BioWare. And he really doesn’t hold back on his thoughts and his opinions on the executives that are, of course, shutting down these studios, as mentioned, restructuring and leading to all of these job losses and things. So fully on board with this and also wanted to shine a bit of a spotlight on this as well. And yeah, this talks in a lot of detail about this interview as well. So I will leave you to go and read that yourself. And of course, you can go and watch the interview as well, which is also linked from here. But yeah, interesting, interesting thoughts off the back of this. A campaign to save Mass Effect as a series led by the two Commander Shepard actors. We have a billboard in Times Square, which is really big news. And, you know, a bit of a discussion around trying to save BioWare as well, as a brand, as well as Mass Effect, of course, all those other game series as well. We’ve got some leaked footage from the game that has just been cancelled, Mass Effect 5, or Mass Effect Universe, as it is now known to have been called. And this interview with Greg Zeschuk, apologies if I am mispronouncing that, one of the original co-founders of BioWare, talking about how the company was acquired back in the day and the decline ever since as a result of these games industry executives. And he certainly has some strong thoughts on that, and quite rightly so. Yeah, exciting stuff. Just really, really unfortunate that real people are losing out as a result of this. And yeah, still very much shocking to see. And sadly, I don’t think this is the last we’re going to be hearing on this topic.

Civilization Turns 35

One thing that I have talked about at length in the past here on Rees Rambles is my love for my childhood machine. And I’m sure that’s something that’s shared by many of you out there as well. That sentiment, that feeling of nostalgia and also, you know, gratitude, I guess, for kind of setting us on this path which many of us follow today. In my case, working in software development and having a YouTube channel all about retro gaming and retro technology. And of course, this podcast as well. And yeah, I’m sure that’s similar for many of you out there. Now, in my case, that was the Atari STe back in 1991. The STe famously released as Atari’s answer to the Commodore Amiga. Of course, the ST was first in ‘85 and a wildly popular machine as well in its first couple of years. But then Commodore managed to squeeze all of that Amiga technology into a cut-price version called the Amiga 500. And that, I think, quite rightly ended up becoming massively successful off the strengths of its much improved graphics and sound. Atari did catch up with them with the STe, but famously, it was too little, too late. Now, getting around kind of to the point of this story, although, again, another bit of a convoluted link, one thing that they did compete on were their packs, their pack-in software. And Atari, I think, did kind of come up with some really interesting pack-in collections over the years. And that was certainly true in my case as well with the STe.

So we had the Discovery Xtra pack. Let’s just take a quick look at it here over on atarimania.com. There’s SimCity there, rather apt that we would flick over at that point in the slideshow, because I am going to talk about that game in a minute. But yeah, it came with NEOchrome and this BASIC programming… I can’t even remember what it was called, the Atari BASIC that came with it, the self-guided tour and some of the games. We’ve got 9 Lives here, which was a really fun platformer. We’ve got Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters, which was a bit of an obscure arcade game, I think. It didn’t really make it over to the UK as such, but I loved playing it as a kid. A bit of an isometric shooter with this comic book style and this very kind of unique sense of humour. Highly recommended if you haven’t checked it out. Final Fight, of course, a side-scrolling beat-‘em-up, very much in the same vein as Street Fighter and Streets of Rage and all of those kind of games. And back round to SimCity, there were a few others as well, but I want to talk about SimCity and how that’s kind of sparked a love for me for not only city building games, and SimCity is certainly a franchise that has stuck with me over the years with the original SimCity Classic and then 2000 and 3000 and unfortunately kind of falling a bit by the wayside.

But these city-building games, real-time strategy games and god games, if you can call them that, these civilisation-building games. And there have also, of course, been quite a few different series of those as well. But finally getting to the point, it is rather apt that I would use the word “civilisation” to describe those games, because the granddaddy of them all, the archetypal god game, of course, was Civilization, which was released 35 years ago. And Polygon have partnered with Firaxis Games, the actual development company of, of course, Sid Meier, the creator of the series, and have produced a rather nice in-depth article, an interview with loads of people involved with the series over the years, including the great man himself, and also a video, a documentary covering the history of the Civilization series to kind of mark this rather momentous occasion.

And I very much wanted to talk about this because I was quite late to Civilization. I know of a few people who discovered the original game back in the 90s, but I was distracted at the time, as mentioned by SimCity, but also by, you know, platformers and starting to get into first-person shooters and stuff. And it was only around Civilization 4 that I kind of started to get into this in a really big way. And it was Civilization 5, which, up until very recently, was my most played game on Steam by hours. It has now just been overtaken by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. And I have poured hundreds of hours into those games. I know there are people out there who’ve poured thousands of hours into games, and that’s their business. But yeah, Civilization. Civilization 4, Civilization 5. And it’s great to see that the series is still going strong, still a huge fan base around it, still owned and controlled by the original creator and original developers, which of course is very, very rare in this day and age. And that is all very much worth celebrating. So, a story over here on Polygon.com. And if this isn’t on your regular reading list, it really should be because it’s such a fantastic site with all of these great in-depth articles and things. It’s called “Civilization: The Oral History”. “Sid Meier’s name hangs over the franchise, but crafting the ultimate turn-based strategy franchise took a village.” Good pun there, like that. A story here by Matt Patches and Josh Broadwell. “44 years ago, Sid Meier, a computer programmer, and Bill Stealey, a military pilot, met in Las Vegas to discuss a potential partnership in the video game business. They tested their wits in a game of Atari’s flight simulator, Red Baron. And when Meier’s video game knowledge bested Stealey’s real-world flight experience, the two knew exactly what kind of game their nascent studio would specialise in. Several years and military simulator games later, however, Meier itched to do something new. He’d seen how players found joy in watching their decisions shape a simulation, and following the positive reception to Railroad Tycoon, had an instinct that history could capture people’s imaginations. Thus was born Civilization, and equally important, the creative pattern that shaped the genre-defining series over the next 35 years. Even as the series changed hands over the years, each successive game came into existence facing the same challenges: tumultuous changes in leadership and vision, tension between tradition and innovation, and no shortage of doubt from backers and consumers. And yet, Civilization has endured, shaped as much by the people who play it as the ones who create it, and etched into the video game landscape as one of the greats. To mark the 35th anniversary of Civilization, Polygon spoke with some of the people who created and stewarded the series over the decades. Below, they tell the story of how Civilization became the franchise we know today. Rome, it seems, was not built in a day.”

And we have this rather nice little slideshow here in the top corner, showing some of the people actually featured in this interview and this documentary. So we’ve got Sid Meier himself, of course, the founder and creative director of Firaxis Games. We have Brian Reynolds, the founding owner of Firaxis. We’ve got Soren Johnson, the design director of Mohawk Games. Ed Beach, the creative director of the Civilization franchise itself. Jon Shafer, who is the lead designer on Civilization 5. Dennis Shirk, the executive producer of the Civilization franchise. Matt Shembari, who is the creative director of Firaxis Games. And finally, Heather Hazen, who is the president and studio head of Firaxis Games. Now, I did mention earlier that Polygon produced this in partnership with Firaxis. It’s kind of a… I don’t want to say it’s like a promotional thing, because that does cheapen it somewhat. You know, it is a proper, very well researched and I think quite important historical kind of document on the history of these games.

You know, getting the kind of firsthand story from the people directly involved in the series. And it just kicks off here. I’ll read some of this, but it is very, very long and very in depth. And they have very kindly, as always, as you would expect from Polygon, released this as both a video and also as a kind of full-length… I don’t want to say transcript, because there’s a huge amount more to this. All sorts of interesting photos and historical bits and pieces as well. But it starts off with, of course, the great man himself, Sid Meier, the creator of Civilization and the co-founder of MicroProse and Firaxis. Of course, MicroProse as well. That’s a whole different story. So let’s not go off on that tangent. But yes, he had this to say: “I was always playing with toys as a child. I remember spreading my blocks and soldiers and ships over the living room floor until my mom said, ‘Somebody’s coming over. You gotta clean up.’ And I had an interest in history. I read about airplanes and ships. Pirates, for example. As I got a little older, I got into board games and strategy games. This was all before computers appeared. When computers appeared, my first computer was the Atari 800. Whoa, I can make my own games. That was super cool.” And you know, the rest is history. Literally. And it talks a bit here about MicroProse in the 1980s. Of course, they were in the business of making realistic military simulation games like F-19 Stealth Fighter and 1990’s Railroad Tycoon, which, of course, was the jumping-off point, if you like, the kind of seed of the Civilization games themselves. So a fantastic, fantastic… Look at the length of this article here. This is such a good read. And all these really lovely nostalgic screenshots and things of talks and, of course, the games themselves. And this is the old Civilization III website from back in the day. And first-hand stories, interviews with all of these people involved in the series and involved in the creation of those much-loved games as well.

So please do go and check that out over on Polygon and give it a read if you are in the mood for reading. But – and it is always good to… well, I was going to say take your eyes away from a screen for a while and, you know, give something a good read. But, of course, this is going to involve reading something. But you know what I mean. Reading. It’s reading. It’s the intellectual pursuit that it is. But if you’re not in the mood for said intellectual pursuit, you could also go and watch this in video form as well. And this is a fantastic video. I wanted to make this one of my videos of the week. And I will give this a mention during the videos of the week segment. But this stands alone as its own thing and as a story in its own right as well. So this is a 43-minute, 46-second-long documentary, all about the history of Civilization, about Sid Meier, about all these wonderful people involved in the creation of this series, with all of these first-hand interviews and things as mentioned. And just such a great documentary. It really, really is. And I love their offices as well. They’re very, very cool. I love these game studios with, you know, all these cool creative things going on in their offices. So perhaps that’s another incentive to watch the video rather than give it a read. But either way, however you choose to enjoy this, the important takeaway from this story is that – I’m going to pause that – the Civilization series is 35 years old, still going strong, still a much-loved series with a great community around it. And indeed, those original creators still very much involved in that as well. So well worth marking the occasion. And please do go and check it out in the links below.

NOT Rees’s Pieces

My goodness, there have been a lot of stories coming out of the retro and vintage computing, gaming and technology sphere over the past week or so. Not to mention the modern day stuff as well, which I do like to sprinkle in every so often just to keep things fresh. And of course, I can’t sit here and talk about each and every story in great detail for 10 minutes or so, like I have done for the past few, because we would be here all day. Now, you’d probably enjoy that. And to be fair, I’d probably enjoy that too. But I am already here all day on a Friday recording, editing all of this. Of course, I’ve got to do all my research in the morning, put together a document with the stories I want to cover, actually record it. Then I’ve got to edit it. Then I’ve got to upload it, do the title, the description, the subtitles and stuff. And don’t get me wrong, I really, really enjoy this. That’s why I sit down and do this every single Friday. But let’s not make it any more time consuming than it already is. However, after that little rant, of course, I do think that these stories are really interesting. And I also think that they’re quite important. So I do want to share them with you, because I know that a lot of you out there enjoy them too. Now, in the past, we have debated various names for this somewhat recurring segment. And a few of you out there have suggested Rees’s Pieces, thinking that it’s a wonderful pun, because, of course, that’s my name, Rees. And it’s also the name of a popular range of what I believe is known as candy over in the US.

But in the past, we have talked about the reasons why I haven’t gone down that route. I mean, I’m not a fan of said chocolatey, peanutty treats, unfortunately. And that does follow on from my rant earlier about the lack of good chocolate nowadays. But also because of the copyright situation, the trademark situation. I mean, I couldn’t possibly put something out under that name, because, well, I’d get sued, wouldn’t I? And finally, it’s not a very funny pun, is it? It is, actually. I really love it, and that’s why I keep going on about it. But anyway, that’s all by the by. Let’s just get on with these stories. And this first one actually follows on from the last thing that I was talking about. I was talking about civilization and about god games, about city building games, about that kind of thing. And here’s one that passed me by back in the day. But I can now enjoy it thanks to an open source project. This is a game called LEGO Loco. And the project off the back of this is Open Loco: “a faithful fan-made remake of the 1998 classic sandbox city builder, LEGO Loco.” And this is over on itch.io, geeze.itch.io. Not much information, really, on the game’s page itself. But it is in development, and it does also declare that no generative AI was used. So yeah, that is a refreshing story, you know, in light of some of the stuff that I have featured recently. But yeah, first up, let’s take a look at the video for this. And that seems to have veered off into something completely different there. But anyway, this is the development of this remake of LEGO Loco. Let’s just start at the beginning, because that does show some footage of the game in action. And as mentioned, I am not familiar with this game. So yeah, it’s… If you know the original SimCity, which hopefully you do… Where’s this footage? There we go. This will be very familiar to you. But of course, it is all LEGO-themed. LEGO releasing loads of really good games over the years. We had, you know, LEGO Island, and I have talked about that series in the past, of course, at length. Particularly MattKC’s efforts to bring that back and reverse engineer it and decompile and recompile it. And apparently, LEGO Loco was one of them. So this is kind of Transport Tycoon – just getting to the point – Railroad Tycoon, which, of course… I just talked about Sid Meier and Civilization. And this video does talk about this project, how it came to be, and how the open source re-implementation, re-imagining, re-creation of this, whatever word you want to use, came to be. And this is a video by the creator, geeze.

So again, this could have been one of my videos of the week, but I wanted to talk about the project itself. If you fondly remember LEGO Loco, please do go and check it out. There is a GitHub as well, which of course I will also link to. It is open source under the MIT licence. This is made in Unity, of course, that game engine, multi-platform game engine, which has been used for lots of rather wonderful games over the years. This was completely and utterly new to me. And as a fan of LEGO, and as a fan of these kind of games, open source stuff, it’s human-made. How could I not talk about it? So the next story that I have for you is something completely different. Again, as you may have come to expect from this segment, this is over on Rock Paper Shotgun. And it’s about the SideWinder gamepad, which should be very nostalgic for a lot of you out there. I had one back in the day. I think it had Midtown Madness 3. Well, one of the Midtown Madness games, anyway, bundled with it, along with some other Microsoft games. And these were, of course, Microsoft’s own gamepads for the PC. And Microsoft, to their credit, back in the 90s, and indeed, you know, certainly to some extent today as well, their hardware was very, very well regarded. Their game controllers and mice and keyboards and various other peripherals were very high quality. And the SideWinder gamepads were certainly no exception to that. They did flight controllers, flight sticks, and all of that kind of stuff. Did they do driving controllers, steering wheels and pedals and things? I’m not sure. But I certainly remember the gamepads. And the story here is: “Can the SideWinder gamepad, Microsoft’s first game controller, work on modern PCs? I bought three of them to find out.” “The past and fiddly present of the Xbox controller’s ancestor.” And here’s a story by Amity Gilmore, who is a contributor to Rock Paper Shotgun. And it’s a great little article in its own right, to be honest. It talks about the history of the SideWinder gamepads and the SideWinder brand, launched in 1995 with the 3D Pro and the standard joystick. And “the hardware family would eventually comprise gamepads, racing wheels” – and there you go – “a Game Voice device to talk with friends and vocally control your game, and a massive mouse with more buttons than my nana’s vest.” Do I remember the SideWinder mouse? I don’t know. I grew up as a PC gamer in the 90s and any talk of Microsoft hardware and the Microsoft SideWinder gamepads is very nostalgic indeed for me. And this was a rather nice little adventure in attempting to get these old gamepads up and running on modern hardware. So if that sounds like a fun little trip down memory lane to you, please do go and check that out in the usual places. Now, just speaking of Microsoft and their gaming efforts, this next story is from windowscentral.com and talks about Halo, which was of course a launch title on the original Xbox, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Although, of course, massively overshadowed by the Xbox division’s restructuring and all the unfortunate news coming out of that. But somebody here has recreated the original Halo in Roblox, “and I can’t believe how good it looks,” remarks Adam Hales here on Windows Central. “Halo: Combat Evolved has reportedly been ported to Roblox, and it’s not alone. Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and even PS4 emulation are joining the chaos.” And I do have a little story about PS5 emulation in a moment as well. And a bit of a warning, actually, quite an important warning around that. So yeah, do stay with me. But first up: “Halo on Roblox is impressive, but it raises some concerns.” And this is such a kind of accurate and faithful recreation of the original Halo that, of course, it does raise some copyright questions because these games have been remastered and re-released. You can buy them, the Master Chief Collection. And there was also another recent remastered release of Halo as well that I remember talking about. Of course, a much-loved series and a rather excellent series as well that I am somewhat of a personal fan of. But yeah, there’s not much information on how this came about. The author here does claim that perhaps Claude was involved, as you might expect with a lot of these modern porting projects. But what I can say is that it does look very, very accurate and very faithful to that original Halo game. And of course, a lot of kids these days are playing Roblox. I know my nephew, he asked for Robux for his birthday, which I bought for him. You’d think I’d be more kind of actively involved and more interested in the games and things that he’s playing. But hey, you know, whatever. I enjoyed my silly little things back in the day. And apparently that’s Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and stuff. But yeah, I’m going to have to mention this to him and steer him in the direction of the original Halo in Roblox.

And perhaps we could have a bit of a shared experience over that. And, you know, I can introduce him to one of my favourite games of all time. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Through a platform that he’s very familiar with. Anyway, next story up is, speaking of old things and nostalgia, this is Toaplan. I’ve never been sure how to say the name of this company, but Toaplan… Toaplan. “The new Toaplan clothing range pays tribute to a truly iconic video game moment.” “How are you gentlemen!!” Of course, CATS from the game Zero Wing. And this was a huge meme back in the day. When was it? It must have been in the early… It says here: “Well over 25 years ago, I recall seeing the first example of what we now call a meme. The coverage appeared in a British newspaper and focused on the iconic ‘All Your Base’ meme, which started in the Genesis/Mega Drive port of Toaplan’s Zero Wing. The nonsensical translation was one of the first memes to enter mainstream culture. And even today, people know the phrase, but have no idea where it came from.” “All your base are belong…” “What happen?” “Take off every Zig” and all that stuff. There was like a techno remix that someone did of this as well with like computerised voices and stuff I remember coming out and listening to when I was in college. Goodness, that is nostalgic. Anyway, if you want to buy, you know, one of this range of Zero Wing and various other Toaplan-inspired clothing, you can find the links here on the timeextension.com story. And there is a $149 jacket resplendent with the skull smart bomb from Tatsujin and Truxton. Unfortunately, that’s currently on a waiting list and cannot be ordered at the moment. But it does look very cool. And all this talk of these classic memes did remind me of something else that I saw this week as well, which is this Firefox advert. It’s one minute long, and I use Firefox as my browser. You are actually looking at Firefox right here, as you are every week when I record these rambles. And these are a little bit later than that “All Your Base” meme, but certainly ones that I remember. YouTube stars, I guess. Some of the earliest huge YouTube memes. So we’ve got this Overly Attached Girlfriend here. We’ve got the Annoying Orange. We’ve got the Numa Numa guy. We’ve got Apparently Kid. And Tay Zonday steps away from the mic to breathe in with Chocolate Rain, of course. You remember that back in the day. And they’ve brought… Chuck Testa. Who else? They’ve brought all of these people back together to make this one-minute-long ad for Firefox, kind of celebrating the history of the internet. And also talking about quite an important message as well, which is Firefox kind of being the last of the independent browsers. It doesn’t use the rendering engine from Chrome like Safari and a lot of those other browsers out there. Firefox have their own rendering engine. They’ve got their own plugin architecture as well that still allows ad blockers and stuff, which of course are being phased out in the Chrome-based browsers. They’ve got all these privacy controls and things built in. It does have some AI stuff that’s been added, but that is optional. You actually have to opt to turn that on, which I think is very, very good of them. Built-in VPN and all sorts of stuff as well. I love Firefox as a browser. I use it as my main browser all day, every day. And seeing them reviving some of these classic internet memes for their advertising campaign warmed my heart. So I wanted to bring that to your attention as well. Anyway, very much back in the modern world, we have a warning, a prophecy, I guess, from SK Hynix, the RAM company, or at least best known as a RAM company. And they have said that memory shortages are going to persist until 2030.

“Good for its bottom line, not great news for yours, or for the PC and smartphone markets,” reports Simon Sharwood here over on theregister.com, one of my favourite websites and one of those proper OGs of internet culture and, of course, internet news reporting. “Korean memory maker SK Hynix has predicted memory shortages will persist until at least the year 2030, and says that will help it to boost its already exceptional revenue and profits to new levels.” Woo, go SK Hynix, great news for you.

“In remarks published on Wednesday alongside its quarterly results, the company offered its belief that a virtuous cycle has taken hold in which AI-driven productivity gains and new revenue generation in areas such as software development, customer service, and search led to greater AI adoption, which in turn drives increased investment in infrastructure.” I don’t want to read any more of that, but essentially, yeah, what they’re predicting is that RAM prices will be very high until 2030. That’s, what, another three and a bit years? I’ve reported quite a lot, of course, on these rambles in recent months about DDR4, DDR5 prices, people even going back to DDR3. I had quite a big story about that last week. And it seems like there’s no end to this. Stuff like the Steam Machine being affected and laptop prices, even desktop memory prices, everything that contains any kind of RAM, or indeed a GPU. And that brings me on to the next story here on Tom’s Hardware, which is about the GeForce RTX 5080, which has hit $2,000. It cost more than the 5090 did at launch. And yeah, the original $999 MSRP is long forgotten, with prices now two to three times higher. So the story here, by Ben Stockton, tomshardware.com, basically talks about how it is impossible to pick up an RTX 5080 for less than $2,000 in this day and age. And yeah, no end in sight to the hardware shortages affecting the entire industry at the moment. But if you want to remember happier times, and to be fair, that is what we are all about here at Rees Rambles, there is some good news updates from the world of GPUs this week. And this involves one of my favourite projects, the GXVK, DXVK, D7VK, all of these Vulkan-based compatibility layers for these old GPUs. And of course, integrated with Linux gaming, Proton, Bazzite, all of that stuff. I think by far the best, and by far the easiest way to enjoy these old games, I was going to say outside of original hardware, but much easier than original hardware as well. As we know from experience, original hardware can be a pain. So, gamingonlinux.com reports on the release of D7VK 2.4, which has released alongside GXVK for Vulkan-based 3dfx Glide. Getting to the point. Of course, I talked about the Voodoo card’s 30th anniversary recently, and pointed you in the direction of a really good article about that, which was featured in a previous ramble. I think that was last week, or maybe the week before. But now, you can actually enjoy those old 3dfx Glide games, thanks to this compatibility layer that makes it compatible with modern Vulkan GPUs. Of course, there are already various emulators and things for those old 3dfx Glide games, but this one is no less very welcome. So, story here by Liam Squires-Hand over on gamingonlinux.com: “A nice surprise for more retro gaming! Along with the release of D7VK 2.4 for older Direct3D, we also now have GXVK for Vulkan-based 3dfx Glide.” I’ve talked about what it says here. “While D7VK was forked from DXVK to focus on 3dfx Glide for Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. We’re really going into retro territory now, but it’s nice to see a modern, properly open source project attempt it for Wine and Proton on Linux. Still in the early prototype stage, so don’t expect a good experience with it yet, but certain games like Diablo II do already run with it,” and we have a screenshot showing it running here. “Once again, I say Linux is the true platform for preservation with open source,” and I certainly agree with that statement. So, yeah, these DXVK, D7VK wrappers, all DirectX compatibility wrappers for modern-day Vulkan video cards. They plug straight into the likes of Proton and Wine on Linux. All sorts of really useful streamlined tools to allow you to get those set up, and I really should make a video about that at some point once my main channel’s back up and running. And yeah, now 3dfx Glide games have joined the fray, those original Voodoo games, and it looks like things are off to a fantastic start, which is great to see. Next up, the GameMaker engine series, which was used to create such huge, huge indie titles as Undertale, Hotline Miami and Spelunky, is going to be free for commercial use on PC. So if you’ve ever fancied making your own game, GameMaker is a great way to go about it, and some hugely, hugely successful games built on that platform over the past few years as well. So very much a viable option and very much one which I would recommend that you check out. So this is rockpapershotgun.com and Edwin Evans-Thirlwell again reporting that as of January 2027, you will be able to develop your own commercial games on GameMaker and release those for, well, not release them for free, but you can use GameMaker for free. So yeah, game developers have needed a professional licence to sell or monetise GameMaker creations. That changes on the 1st of January 2027. You’ll still need a paid licence if you plan to release a GameMaker game on console, but pish posh, those things are going extinct anyway. And the story talks about, of course, some of those games that I just mentioned, and this really nice and very welcome announcement. So yeah, GameMaker going free for commercial use on PC. Responsible for such huge indie titles as Undertale, Hotline Miami, and Spelunky. Great news. Next up, and we are getting to the end of this, I promise, a bit of a warning for you from tomshardware.com. And these PS5 emulators, now PS5 emulation, it’s not something I’ve really talked about a great deal. Emulating modern platforms, I mean, it’s technically quite interesting. And of course we have all these AI assisted tools that have really helped out with that process. And the PS5 is one in particular that has seemingly been busted wide open in recent weeks and recent months, getting, you know, its system software and its games running on a few different platforms, thanks to these emulators. And of course the console itself, due to these hardware prices that I was just talking about, just becoming increasingly unaffordable for many people. So a lot of people are going down the route of checking out PS5 emulators. However, there are fake ones out there. And of course you fire up the emulator, you enter your very real login details for a PSN or whatever, and they just get stolen and, you know, I don’t know where they end up. Anyway: “Fake PS5 emulators are being used to steal gamers’ passwords. Two well-known GitHub repos, including the popular AnyPS5, get hit, infecting gamers’ computers with password-scraping malware.” “Emulators downloaded via GitHub may be stealing your passwords, with two well-known projects being exploited,” reports Oliver Haslam over on tomshardware.com. Ah, so yes, they’re actually stealing passwords from people’s computers as well, using self-signed certificates and this automated malware campaign. “Just two minutes after infection, a cleanup script scrubs the affected computer of the malware’s files, leaving no trace that it was ever present,” according to a report shared with Tom’s Hardware by NordVPN’s threat intelligence research team. So yes, be very careful if you are interested in checking out these recent PS5 emulators. My next and penultimate story marks the 30th anniversary of Tomb Raider, and I probably should have made this a bigger story in its own right, but unlike the Civilization games that I talked about earlier, I don’t have a huge amount of personal experience with Tomb Raider. I know I talked a bit – was it a year or so ago? – when the remasters came out. I was kind of enjoying checking those out for the first time, and I have kind of started to dabble a bit with the original PlayStation and, of course, check out the original Tomb Raider on there. But no less an important series and a groundbreaking series as well, you know, a real kind of system seller and a killer app on the original PlayStation. And yeah, that was 30 years ago. So, to mark the occasion, and I quite like this, this has been reported over on timeextension.com. Well, let’s just let Kris Moyse tell you in his own words: “Start your day with this official Tomb Raider lo-fi playlist, celebrating 30 years of Lara Croft adventures.” Yeah, I’m sure you are probably familiar. I’m not sure if you’ve actually listened to them. I don’t think I ever have, but these lo-fi live channels on YouTube that play this kind of chilled-out background music for studying or working or whatever.

Of course, it’s all royalty-free music, and then I guess they have ads on the channels, and that’s how they make their money. They are hugely popular, and, you know, fair enough. But yeah, the official Tomb Raider YouTube channel has released their own version of this, and it is supposedly Tomb Raider-inspired, and includes reimaginings of tracks from the classic games, the Legend and Anniversary series, and the Underworld trilogy. So yeah, if you enjoy the music of Tomb Raider, and why not, and you want some chill lo-fi beats to have on in the background while you work, check it out over on the official Tomb Raider YouTube channel, the Tomb Raider 30th Anniversary Lo-Fi Collection. And finally, and finally, I told you I had a lot of stories for this segment this week, an update on one of my favourite creators, and he has yet again teased another wonderful, wonderful, MiSTer FPGA-based bit of hardware. This is Taki Udon. I have reported extensively on his SuperStation console and various other spin-off bits of hardware recently. And he has now teased the Pocket FPGA handheld, which plays Game Boy cartridges, original Game Boy cartridges. So there are other FPGA-based Game Boy offerings out there. Of course, the Analogue Pocket being one of them does quite a bit more. There’s the FPGBC. I was actually checking mine out again quite recently. The FPGA Game Boy Color recreation, which is, you know, a really nice bit of kit. I actually did a video about that here on my second channel a couple of years ago when it was first released, where I built one. And I still play with mine to this day. Like I say, I was fiddling with it just the other day. And now Taki Udon has also entered the fray with his own FPGA Game Boy interpretation. So there’s not much to go on here. It is just a teaser at the moment, but Taki has announced that he has been working on this for an entire year, and it will play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges, just like the Analogue Pocket. And the FPGA allows you to play cores up to PS1 and N64 with 4K output, thanks to an affordable dock. And it will also be open source from launch. Taki Udon! And the teaser here is that it’s going to be a three-figure price, starting with a one, in dollars. I’m not explaining that very well. Basically in the $100 to $200 range when it is first launched, I guess just for the basic handheld itself. And yeah, this supports everything up to PlayStation and N64 games with 4K output as well, in a handheld unit and supporting original cartridges. I mean, it’s Taki Udon. Taki Udon has always delivered in the past, so I have no doubt at all that this is going to be fantastic and it’s going to come right in at that announced price range. I’m very, very excited to see where this goes, but just a teaser for now. So no need for a kind of a bigger feature on this new bit of hardware just yet. Lots and lots of delicious little pieces for you there to get your teeth into. And of course, as per all of the other stories and things that I talk about every week here on Rees Rambles, you can find the links to all of those down in the description below, or if you’re listening to this on your podcast app in the show notes, if such a thing is supported on your podcast app of choice.

The (Spooky) DOOM Shrine

It may not have escaped your attention that something very noteworthy is going on at the moment. Something that I haven’t actually acknowledged at all so far in this week’s ramble. And that is Halloween. Of course, it is Friday the 30th of October as I sit and record this. And no doubt a lot of you will be listening to this on the 31st, the first day essentially that it goes out to the public. Now, I could have made an effort. I could have found some of those rubbery fangs and, you know, maybe worn a vampire cape or something, carved a pumpkin and sat it here on the desk next to me. I could have hung some fake cobwebs up on the shelves behind me. I could have gone out and found a load of particularly spooky stories to report on, but I think I predict that pretty much all of your favourite podcasts are going to be doing that this week. So I decided to stick with the normal format. I have a lot of very normal stories that I wanted to report on for this week’s ramble, but I didn’t want to let the occasion pass me by. So this felt like the perfect moment to talk about this. And then I came across a story on one of my favourite websites that pretty much sealed the deal. So this is our weekly visit to the DOOM Shrine, my collection of releases and paraphernalia celebrating id Software’s 1993 first-person shooter, DOOM, and indeed the series of fantastic sequels and spin-offs that it has spawned over the years.

Starting with the original shareware release, which was my introduction to DOOM that came with our first PC all the way back in 1994, working its way through the official mail order boxed copy, which I’m very fortunate to own. Console releases, Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM, DOOM 3, the modern DOOM games, 2016, Eternal, The Dark Ages, all the bits and pieces I’ve collected over the years. Some bits of tat from John Romero himself signed by him and the rest of the development team and everything in between. And of course it’s still not here, but it will be at some point in the near future. So we’re just going to have to imagine it until then. But yeah, this story brings together the seasonal happening that is Halloween and also my favourite game of all time. So I’m going to make this my DOOM story of the week, and next week normal DOOM Shrine service shall resume. So pcgamer.com talks about one of the most interesting mods for DOOM. And I am going to call it a mod. I know it’s a WAD – a total conversion, I guess people used to call them back in the day. It’s so much more than just a level or even a level pack or an episode for DOOM. It’s… I think it’s unique, and it’s an experience. This is MyHouse.wad. So: “In 2023, an anonymous modder released one of the best horror games of the decade, and they still haven’t broken character,” reports Samuel Roberts over on pcgamer.com. “MyHouse.wad barrages players with horrible things that they’ve never experienced in a game before. For a lot of people, the appeal of horror is being surprised and disturbed by something they’ve never seen before. In recent years, I’ve sourced this rare feeling from movies like Obsession, where the gender dynamics of that story made it feel a bit dangerous. Or Speak No Evil, which has one of the most shocking and nihilistic endings that I can recall. I even find that freshness in a modern classic like Pearl, which isn’t really scary, but contrasts a Technicolor old Hollywood style with a singularly unsettling Mia Goth performance to great effect. Fear of the unknown is more valuable to me as a viewer than seeing a really good version of something I’ve experienced before. In games, it’s largely the same. I crave new places and themes above all else. It’s why Silent Hill: Townfall, Mouthwashing, Dredge, Silent Hill f, and Still Wakes the Deep all succeeded for me. They’re all set in locations or timeframes I’ve never seen anywhere else in games. I step into those worlds not knowing exactly what I’m going to find, and come out the other side feeling exhilarated in a profoundly nasty way. That’s horror, baby. From this decade, however, nothing in the horror genre has upended my expectations like MyHouse.wad. Everyone who plays this DOOM 2 map seems to have the same experience. They know there’s something weird about this mod, set in a seemingly normal suburban home, but they spiral once they start playing it and realise how many secrets are impossibly embedded within its walls. They then become obsessed with trying to understand exactly how the house works. I consider it a modern horror classic because it’s able to take players on this ride.”

Anyway, the story here, which you can go and read, there’s quite a bit more to it, and I don’t want to do them a disservice by reading the entire thing to you here, so please do go and check it out over on PC Gamer, talks about the release of this one. I remember it being released and it was a very low-key kind of drop, to borrow a phrase from Gen Z, when this map was released. So the author basically said that they’d lost a dear childhood friend of theirs and that they’d modelled their childhood home as kind of a bit of an homage to this friend, you know, kind of done it in their honour. And people didn’t really find that all that appealing, but a few people checked it out and realised that something very, very odd was going on. And it spawned a whole series of Let’s Play videos. I remember watching Jacksepticeye playing through it, always been a big fan of his stuff. It’s not usually my kind of stuff, but I do really like him as a creator. I do find him very entertaining. And yeah, this level, this whatever you want to call it, has kind of spawned this whole lore around it as well. And the way that it pushes the DOOM engine, of course it is a modern DOOM engine, to its limits and beyond, is very impressive indeed, the way it kind of seamlessly springs all of these weird elements on people. And it’s still surprising people even to this day. So please do go and check out MyHouse.wad if you haven’t already. It will genuinely surprise and delight and possibly even scare you a bit. And there are quite a few, as I mentioned, Let’s Plays over on YouTube. There’s Power Pak, which I think was the original one. Like I say, there’s Jacksepticeye. I remember watching his. Quite a few other channels have covered this with their own playthroughs. But it was when it reached the attention of John Romero himself. And he actually knew nothing about it going in. Lots of people had sent it to him and said, “Oh, you’ve got to check this out.” But he hadn’t read up on it or seen any of the kind of discussion around it online and kind of experienced the whole thing fresh for the first time as one of the original creators of DOOM. And it absolutely blew him away. His reaction to this is really lovely. It’s quite a long series. I mean, we’ve got part one here, which is an hour and 14 minutes. It is just a whole uncut kind of live playthrough. But yeah, I can recommend that one or one of the many other videos about this. There are also some kind of shorter documentary type videos telling the story of it as well. But yeah, that is my offering, my one and only offering for the DOOM Shrine for Halloween 2026. This is MyHouse.wad, the horror-themed DOOM level expansion, whatever you want to call it from 2023. And a rather interesting story on pcgamer.com all about how it came to be. The story around its release and its kind of reception since then. And also the creator, what little we know about the original creator of this rather wonderful experience.

Videos Of The Week

And that, my dearest ramblers, brings us around rather neatly to our regular Videos of the Week feature, wherein I feature a video or indeed multiple videos that I have seen here on the old YouTubes in the past week that have entertained, educated, enlightened or otherwise just improved my life in some small way. Or indeed videos that have been sent to me that I have added to my watch later list, but not actually quite gotten around to watching yet. Either way, I thought they looked interesting and I wanted to share them with you. And share them I will indeed do right now. And you can find all of these linked in the usual places. So the first video that I have for you is from a channel called Wave Design. Let’s just hit play on this.

And this is all about VCF Southwest 2026, which of course was that fantastic computer show a few weeks back that I have talked about a little bit. But this has been recorded and edited on 90s Silicon Graphics hardware in the 90s TV style. So yeah, we’ve got some wonderful IBM machines here. I spotted an Atari Mega ST. Look at that. We’ve got an Altair there and a lovely old robot arm. All these wonderful exhibits and things from the VCF show. But I really enjoyed this take on it. So this has been recorded on a 90s Sony camcorder and I call it a camcorder, but this thing is a really substantial-looking thing. Let’s just take a look at that if we can. A wonderful kind of broadcast quality camera from back in the day. Look at that thing. Oh, lusting after that particular piece of hardware and indeed the rest of the hardware involved with this. Some 90s CG on-screen graphics and things going on here and very much 90s TV show feel to the whole thing as well. I thought it was a really interesting take on the show. It’s a really entertaining and informative and well put together video as well. And I do think that it is very worthy of your attention. So if you want to learn a little bit about 90s TV video production on actual real hardware from the time, there is no better place to learn about it, at least this week, than this wonderful video from Wave Design: “VCF Southwest 2026, But Edited on Silicon Graphics for ’90s TV”. That’s 27 minutes and 46 seconds long. And it’s my first video of the week for this week. Now my second video for you is an update on the Sonic port to the Amiga. I’ve pretty much reported on all of these videos because I do think this is a very impressive project. And it does finally have sound, as reported in this latest update from Reassembler: “Can I squeeze nine channels of music and SFX into four? Will this all fit in two megabytes of Chip RAM?” Well, I think the title of the video is somewhat of a giveaway, but that doesn’t make it any less of an impressive technical feat. So yeah, 90 minutes, 55 seconds if you’ve been following along with this series, and it’s all about how the sound has been implemented in this very, very impressive port of the original Sonic the Hedgehog to the Commodore Amiga. Next up, my third video for you is DF Retro, the Digital Foundry series, checking out the Embracer Games Archive. So this is not only a bit of a first-hand look at the archive, this incredibly, incredibly impressive collection of games, but also the story of their mission and how all of this came to be and their kind of future plans and stuff. Now, I knew nothing at all about the Embracer Games Archive when I came across this video, but I am very pleased that I watched it. I always love Digital Foundry. I think they put out some excellent, excellent quality videos, and this certainly is no exception to that rule. So yeah, if you’re not familiar with the Embracer Games Archive, as I certainly wasn’t, this is your opportunity to learn all about it. And look at it, it’s absolutely fantastic. So, the mission, it describes a bit in the description here: “The mission is to build a complete physical game collection encompassing every system while acquiring and preserving legacy gaming hardware too. It’s about honouring and celebrating the history of gaming while offering access to the collection to developers, historians, and more. And if you want to take a peek inside, DF Retro has you covered.” So yeah, 14 minutes, 35 seconds, and go and check out this incredibly impressive collection of games covering all the systems from all the years and all the countries, and yeah, in this rather nicely well put together video. 14 minutes, 35 seconds: “DF Retro: Inside the Embracer Games Archive – The Collection, The Mission, Dev Collaborations and More”. Now, the next two videos you have also already seen this week, but I’m just going to give them another brief mention. The first one is this Firefox ad with all of the original people from these early internet video memes. I’m not sure, I think some of them even predate YouTube, but it made me smile and it’s a celebration of the good old days of the internet before the horrible bot-driven cynicism and the division that we see on social media nowadays. I’m old, you know, I don’t want to go on a bit of a boomer rant about this, but it’s nice to reminisce about the good old days. And that’s one of the reasons, as mentioned, why I use Firefox as my day-to-day browser, and it’s nice to see them celebrating this wonderful era of the internet with this wonderful coming together of all of these early meme icons, the actual original people involved. I haven’t seen some of these people for a very long time, so glad to see that they are all doing well as well. And finally, my fifth and final video, again, is this documentary about the history of the Civilization game series, produced by Polygon in cooperation with Firaxis Games, of course the people behind Civilization. Sid Meier quite heavily involved in this, and indeed interviewed in the video, along with a lot of the other people involved with the series. 35 years of Civilization, as told by Sid Meier and more – the full documentary – 43 minutes, 46 seconds long, by Polygon. It’s fantastic, it’s incredibly well produced, and as mentioned earlier, there is also a really nice full-length document to go along with this, an article over on their website, if you would rather go and read all of this information instead. So there you go, they are my five videos of the week for this week.

If you want to check any of those out, you’ll find them linked down below in the description, if you are watching this on my second YouTube channel, or indeed in the show notes, if such a thing is supported by your podcast platform of choice. Oh, and also on my website as well, ctrl-alt-rees.com.

RIP Sir Patrick Stewart

And so, sadly, as is the case every single week here on Rees Rambles, that means that our time must now draw to a close. So thank you ever so much for joining me again. These go out every week on a Friday night at two minutes to midnight UK time on both my second YouTube channel, youtube.com/reesrambles, and also on the podcast platforms as well. And if any of the stories from this ramble have taken your interest, hopefully I don’t need to remind you where you can find those. But one thing that I do think is certainly worthy of a mention each and every week is my Discord community. Now, as I mentioned every week, some or all or even none of the stories from these rambles are taken from those fantastic people over there. A really, really great bunch of people. And there is, of course, a dedicated ramble submissions channel, but also channels where people chat about boating, gardening, pets, their projects, software development stuff, and pretty much anything else. Anything goes over there. And of course, you would be more than welcome to come and join us.

There is a link down along with all the other links for the stories this week to allow you to pop in and say hello. And on that note, I just want to say a thank you to some people who have been involved in submitting or discussing stories from this week. Can’t guarantee that this is a definitive list because my note keeping is absolutely terrible. But yeah, just a big thank you to Mike C, Analogue Sheep, AmigaPete, TechNick, Mx Autumn (PhotoGabble), Wintermute of CoF, who I recently learned isn’t a member of Cradle of Filth. So that was a little bit disappointing, but nice to get to know you a bit better anyway. And thank you, you know, genuinely thank you for joining us. LifeSizeTeddyBear, Catriona, Pillock, and of course, the triumphant return of mnemo. Glad to have you back this week.

That’s my Discord community, among many, many others, of course. Finally, a rather sad story, a notification that popped up on my phone last night that really took me by surprise. And yeah, completely and utterly unexpected, along with some of the other people I’ve spoken to about this today. So this is the very sad passing of one of the greats, Patrick Stewart, who was 86 years old. I had no idea. He was still so, so active and still looking so well, even, you know, in recent years and such an incredibly talented and, you know, a genuinely nice and kind of fun guy as well. A real loss. And of course, someone who will be much loved by this community, his appearances in X-Men, but also, I think perhaps more importantly to me, Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

I remember my grandparents used to pick me up from school on a reasonably regular basis when I was very young and we used to go back to their house and The Next Generation always seemed to be on TV at their house those weekday afternoons. I think because I was kind of quite a nerdy kid and interested in sci-fi and stuff, they always put it on for my benefit. And that’s certainly one of my fondest childhood memories, actually, watching Star Trek. Featuring the late, great Sir Patrick Stewart. Again, I can’t believe he was 86 years old. But yeah, tributes led, of course, by Sir Ian McKellen, who was a very close real-life friend of his and fellow acting legend. And also, nice to see a really nice kind of heartfelt tribute here as well from William Shatner, who of course was his predecessor, Captain Kirk, on the original series of Star Trek back in the day. I mean, yes, Patrick Stewart depicted Picard in more than 170 episodes of the hit sci-fi TV series between 1987 and 1994, as well as in four feature films. And he returned to the role for Star Trek: Picard in 2020.

Not wanting to, of course, diminish any of his other numerous great acting achievements as well. But that’s certainly what I remember him for. And not to mention, of course, all of his stage work as well. He was a very highly regarded Shakespearean actor as well. And yeah, a Sir – had been knighted as well. So yeah, the very sad passing this week, and very unexpected, of Sir Patrick Stewart at the age of 86. But that’s all I have for you for this week’s ramble. So thank you ever so much once more for joining me. And I will hopefully see you again, same time and place, next week. Bye!