Stage Clear: August 2025

Oops! I inadvertently published an early draft of this entry—not much more than a to-do list—for a few days. That's one of the benefits of a small personal site like this: it's unlikely that anyone noticed my dumb old screw-up.

Here's what I've been up to this month. I've expanded the format a little this time, covering the games I've been playing and any pickups I've made. Hopefully it's interesting!

Scanning

From the scanning piles last month, I pulled and scanned the last issue of MCV of the 1990s.

While processing that issue, I spotted an intriguing article about a (then-upcoming) magazine I'd never heard of: PC Strategy Games. I checked every scanning site I knew, as well as the Internet Archive, and couldn't find any digitised issues, and thought it improbable that any gaming magazine from the UK could be entirely unpreserved. So I assumed the article was an overly optimistic announcement of something that, for whatever reason, never actually made it from idea to print.

But I was wrong: PC Strategy Games ran for at least seven issues. And I know this because I have issues 4–7 in front of me, picked up (at some cost) from eBay.

There's not much information online about this magazine, and no digitised issues, so the act of scanning and putting these online feels like it might have a genuine impact; I want to do it right. (For that reason, they probably won't be next in the scanning queue.) Maybe I'll try to research a little history to post alongside the scans, since very few people in the UK seem aware that this publication existed. And of course, I'm looking out for the issues I'm missing. redump.org, which has preserved about half of the cover discs, suggests there were at least 12 monthly issues published, and potentially 14. If you know of a source for any other issues of PC Strategy Games (or the publication it later merged with, Paragon's Strategy Player), hook a buddy up!

Back on the topic of MCV, I noticed that the digital issues I'd downloaded years ago (from defunct, but official, online sources) covered a broader time period than those in the Video Game History Foundation's online archives. 157 more issues, to be precise, not counting any overlaps with the 236 they already have. I talked to Phil, their library director, and sent those files over. Assuming no complications, they may show up sometime, bringing the number of issues in their MCV archive up to almost 400. Hoarding pays off!

YouTube

As I'm planning to return to making videos after a long dormancy, I'm thinking it might be the best time to do a channel rebrand.

I've never been that keen on the name Retrohistories, which ten years ago, was the best option of the bad bunch I hastily thought of, but renaming the channel never felt viable while I was uploading regularly. But after a prolonged break, with videos in production again, it makes a lot of sense to do some kind of a relaunch, both to refresh the channel and announce that new videos are on the way.

This could be interpreted as procrastination. It could even be rightly interpreted as procrastination. But I do genuinely think it's the right thing to do and the right moment to do it.

So I'm working on a little short where Retrohistories becomes Save State. Seems like the obvious name to go for. I'll hold that renaming video back until the next video's almost complete, then release it a week or so in advance.

I'll probably continue to be Retrohistories in URLs and on social media, though. Aside from the need to maintain old inbound links, the new name's already taken in most places.

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of August 2025 (delta from July):

Titles indexed: 46 (+3)
Distinct issues indexed: 4,138 (+224)
Pages indexed: 588,843 (+15,342)

Indexing took a back seat in August, but I did chuck a few more issues in.

• PC Power (UK)
• Computer Entertainer (US)
• some fills of PC Gamer (US), MCV (UK), Game Informer (US) and the first, free issue of Debug++ (UK)

I've got more PC Gamer (US) and multiplatform titles queued up.

(The index isn't (yet) public, but if you're a game history mutual, and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Video Game Morgue File wiki

I pledged last time that I'd try to update the version of MediaWiki installed on the server from 1.39 to the newest LTS release, 1.43. True to my word (surprisingly), I sat down a few days ago and started doing that... but there was a problem.

1.43 is incompatible with the version of Linux I installed years ago, which has a version of PHP that's too old and difficult to upgrade. I don't fancy doing two full OS upgrades in sequence, either. I had to roll back the changes, because I realised that doing it properly wouldn't involve an in-place upgrade; it'd necessitate the migration of the wiki to a whole new server.

There are a couple of advantages to this, though. Firstly, I can take my time making sure everything works properly before switching the DNS over to the new server; unlike an in-place upgrade, a long downtime can be avoided.

But also, if I'm spinning up a new VPS, the options available have more bang for the buck than they did four years ago. So I'll either be able to stay on a similar spec and save money, or stay at a rough price parity but with double the RAM and storage; useful for future proofing.

Playing

When I first picked up UFO 50 last year, I took a 'grazing' approach, putting a few hours in and jumping around between a couple of dozen games. This month I started afresh with the opposite approach. Play each game to completion. Dive deep.

I'm five and a half hours into the first game, Barbuta, and here's how it's going:

Other things I played this month:

• Started Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with my partner (we like to play story-heavy games together; this is one of the best we've played)
• Got in deep with the Isaac-like UnderMine
• Started a Spyro the Dragon RetroAchievements run on the Retroid and learned I'm not very good at 3D platformers
• Started a run of Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra, mapping it on the other screen using Gridmonger
• Became addicted to Satisfactory all over again, getting through more milestones
• Puzzled my way into Tametsi and Nurikabe World
• Completed the idle game (the) Gnorp Apologue

Also, I was generously gifted Cyberpunk 2077, which I'm going to greatly enjoy once I get to a place where I don't have five big games currently on the go.

Acquisitions

As well as those old magazines (see above), I treated myself to a birthday Bitmap Books order, as well as a copy of Andy Kelly's lovely Ridge Racer Type 4 zine. A couple of Amazon pickups rounded out the month.

But for the first time in years, my biggest investment was a piece of furniture.

For much of the year, I've been sitting on a badly broken office chair. It was originally liberated from the 'unused furniture' room in a family member's office space in 2020, not new but serviceable, but in the span of the last five years, broken casters and snapped springs had turned it to a rock-hard seat with a pronounced lean that couldn't move around. To say it did my spine no favours is an understatement.

After much tedious research (did you know there are huge YouTube channels dedicated to this?), I settled on a Colamy Atlas mesh chair. I've been using it for about a week now, and it's probably the best desk chair I've bought (several steps above the Ikea Markus I bought years ago and lost in the fire), and didn't break the bank. Hopefully it has a good few years of use ahead of it. It's certainly made working for prolonged periods more comfortable. Though now my attention's on it, I'm starting to wonder if this desk (actually, this old dining table) has the right ergonomics for me, and have turned my attention to adjustable sit-stand desks. This has the potential to become an expensive hyperobsession...

That's it for another month! Plans for September include more writing, more scanning, and several weeks of decision paralysis. Check in next month to see how I did.