Stage Clear: July 2026
Welcome to the dog days of summer! Dogs all over the place. (Running total of unpleasant heatwaves: 3.)
Website
There's a new resource on the site this month: a directory of all the chronogaming projects I could find (the definition I'm using is in there too). There are hundreds if not thousands of hours of quality material linked there. The list is certainly incomplete, so please let me know if I've missed anything obvious or obscure. I mean to keep it updated over time.
Videos
I'm keen to bring the YouTube channel back to life, starting with modest ambitions: videos a few minutes long. In the last few weeks I've worked on a short script, postponed it after a couple of weeks of work when I realised the same exact story had just been covered by a blog I read, and started work on a completely different script (about a well-known game that shipped with built-in malware) that will hopefully not end up with the same fate. I'm hoping to turn that video around in advance of the Patreon relaunch.
Because there's an eyewatering amount of AI slop on YouTube nowadays, I'm thinking about using an idea I heard from Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit: appearing on camera so the audience can tell for sure that this was made by a human. I don't know how well this'll work out; uncomfortably for all concerned, perhaps. But now I have some of the equipment I need to do it (more on that later) and I want to give it a shot.
Scanning
Scanned the last two outstanding issues of MCV from September 2005. These are the third and fourth issues of a contiguous 17-issue run that covers the last four months of the year and are as yet unpreserved. It's a brief but eventful span: the Euro releases of the PSP and Xbox 360 and the first demo of the Wiimote all fall into that four-month period. I'll continue to try to scan a couple of issues a month; I've sanded off most of the friction now, and unlike consumer magazines, each of these only takes a few hours.
Magazine Indexing
Database stats at the end of July 2026 (delta from June):
Titles indexed: 78 (+7)
Distinct issues indexed: 7,422 (+980)
Pages indexed: 995,899 (+115,627)
The index was again quite hungry this month, and ingested almost a thousand magazines, including full runs of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power. It's now just barely shy of a million pages.
(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a few queries, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)
Morgue File wiki
Each month I'm trying to put a few spare hours into seeding a new page on the wiki. The process involves a lot of reading, extracting pages from scanned magazines, and search-engine-fu, and the resulting page—which contains helpful links and a bunch of downloadable print media excerpts—will hopefully serve as a helpful resource for anyone looking to do some research for articles or YouTube videos.
July's page of the month was Star Fox 64. The result could stand to be more comprehensive; it's limited by my index, which doesn't currently include a lot of Nintendo stuff, and no Japanese material yet. But I need to remind myself that nothing is ever finished on a wiki, and that a page that didn't exist a month ago now contains over 30 downloadable resources as well as several useful offsite links, and that it's more useful to more people to seed a bunch of pages over the space of a year than to dwell on one until it meets some nebulous, unreachable 'finished' state. So I'll leave it there for now and I'll populate a different page in August.
Now Playing
At the start of the year, I set myself a goal to finish twelve single-player games this year. In retrospect, I wasn't ambitious enough by half. I finished five in July, bringing my total for the year so far to 18!
- A Highland Song
- Starship (PC port of Star Fox 64)
- Assassin's Creed: Unity (not including DLC)
- Rhythm Tengoku ('complete' according to RetroAchievements)
- Orb of Creation (first ascension)
Once I've finished up the Dead Kings DLC for AC: Unity, I'm diving in to Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter. That'll be my first Trails game, and I've played only a handful of JRPGs before, so I've genuinely no idea whether I'm going to bounce off it or be engulfed.
Acquisitions
I've invested in some new gear: first, a cheap tripod for my phone, and second, a not-so-cheap new mic setup.
My old microphone is a condenser on a stand, set up at standing height in the room where my clothes are hanging (i.e. the least echoey room). When I want to record something, I have to lug an old laptop in there, set it on the carpet, realise it has no charge, plug in the charger, plug in the mic, install a bunch of updates, open Audacity and then finally stand there and read. The result sounds pretty good, but it takes at least 20 minutes before I record the first second of audio.
So I've invested in a decent wireless mic/receiver package that should give acceptable audio quality anywhere, and will happily record untethered to a computer, making recording much easier. It won't replace the condenser, but it's a second, more video-friendly option. I recorded a thing on it the other day and was quite satisfied with the quality of the result.
Oh, and a new mini-bookshelf! Six years after losing every book I owned, I was again at the point of overflowing my existing bookcase. I took this to be a good sign and definitely not an indication that I buy too many books.
And with that, I'm just a month away from a Patreon relaunch, and another month closer to the inevitable end. I should probably focus my attention on the first one.
Thanks for reading. See you again in the past!
