Stage Clear: September 2025
Here — landing a day late, as usual — is the rundown of the far-too-many projects I've been cooking over the last month.
Podcasts
I thought reconstructing RSS feeds for three old podcasts would be of niche interest; that it might scratch an itch for a handful of people as it did for me. I didn't expect it to be one of the most popular things I've ever done! Within a few hours, I was inundated with replies, seeing posts about it on ResetEra, and receiving generous offers of help. It was even mentioned on MinnMax... which came as a complete shock to me yesterday as I listened to that episode of the podcast on my way to work! (After Ben read it out on air, I'm really glad I gave the page a short URL.)
I built the podcasts page so I could add more feeds later, though I didn't have a schedule in mind. I was expecting I might update it a couple of times a year, perhaps. But seeing how much attention it's attracted, my plan now is to add 2–3 new feeds for old podcasts around the midpoint of each month. I've got this month's picked out already, but if you have fond memories of any long-dead gaming podcasts — the more obscure the better — please drop me a line at one of the social links in the sidebar.
Scanning
Last month I continued working my way down through a stack of early MCV issues with one from January 2000. In related news, Phil Salvador from the VGHF added the 157 digital issues of MCV I'd given them to their online archive! (These were PDFs I downloaded from their site years ago, which are long gone today; they're completely distinct from the scans I'm making of the same magazine, which are mostly early-run issues without official digital counterparts.)
As I mentioned last month, I've acquired four issues of an exceedingly rare PC strategy title. If I'm feeling bold enough to point the heat gun at them, I may try to debind and scan the first of these in October; I think that'll also merit a post on here describing the magazine's origins and history, since it's a title most people seem to be unaware of.
Magazine Indexing
Database stats at the end of September 2025 (delta from August):
Titles indexed: 49 (+3)
Distinct issues indexed: 4,217 (+79)
Pages indexed: 601,626 (+12,783)
Again, indexing took a back seat to other projects in September. I did manage to add:
- Public Domain (UK)
- ACE (UK)
- and Total Control (UK)
as well as a few newly scanned fills to other titles.
(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've spun up a new VPS wiki host. (Background: I need to move to the newest LTS release of MediaWiki, because the current one goes out of support soon, and that means a new server, because the old version of Ubuntu has the wrong version of PHP.)
The new server has double the cores, double the RAM and double the storage of the old one, yet the monthly invoice is only about 25% more. I wasn't really resource-constrained on the old server, but this will have a lot more headroom for future expansion (both pages and users) if needed.
I've done most of the setup now, including custom extensions. I just need to move over the data, which will involve locking both wikis while I switch over the DNS and get an SSL cert. Migration should be finished in the next week or two, and then I'd like to do a push for more volunteers, including showing what it's for, what it can be, and how to edit a page.
Playing
I'm still in the early stages of my all-gold playthrough of UFO 50. I've finished (but not cherried) Barbuta, and have moved on to the second game, Bug Hunter. This is the kind of game I might usually bounce off, so it's nice to have a goal with this playthrough; it's helping me push through the initial friction that is nowadays — with such a broad menu on offer — so often a discouragement to giving games a fair try.
Other games I've been playing:
- Continuing to play through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with my wife; we're now deep into Act II. What a story, what a setting
- We've also been playing some multiplayer Necesse, which is a fun mix of Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld
- Started a new save in Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and poured in a bunch more hours, arguably far too many
- Bounced around between a few deckbuilding roguelites including Luck be a Landlord, Loot Plot and the game of the moment Merge Maestro, which hasn't bitten with me yet
- Started the latest No Man's Sky expedition that showcases the new modular shipbuilding systems. Will they never stop?
- Continued the Spyro the Dragon RetroAchievements run on the Retroid and learned to hate flight levels
Acquisitions
Light month for frivolous spending. The exception was picking up my first Geeks-Line volume, Super Nintendo Anthology.
There are a bunch more of these for different systems, some (including the PlayStation one) sadly out of print, but I wanted to check this publisher's titles out and wasn't disappointed. The bulk of the pages are essentially an encyclopedia of every single game published on the SNES, not merely—as some other books limit their scope—in the West. There's a lot to be getting on with in this book, but I'd like to pick up more of these reference-style volumes in the future; hopefully the older ones come back into print.
That's it for another update. I've received some unfortunate life news in the last day that this isn't the place to talk about, except to say that it might make a relaunch of the Patreon by the end of the year — to embrace all of these things I'm working on, rather than very occasional videos — a bit more urgent. So October's hopefully going to be a busy month, as I try to set the stage for that. Until next time!
