Stage Clear: Winter 2025/26
Happy new year! With record delay, here's the roundup of what I've been up to in December, January and February.
I've rolled these months up, because they've each been lighter than average. It wouldn't be appropriate to detail the weeks I've spent being ill with various crappy winter symptoms since I got back from the holiday break, but even without that setback, January and February in particular have always been months where I endure rather than thrive. It's both my least productive and least favourite time of the year, and reaching March is always cause for celebration.
Writing
In February I published an article summarising the known facts of two obscure British PC magazines, PC Strategy Games and Strategy Player, corresponding with the editor of the former, Martin Croft, to fill in some of the gaps. Even basic information on these magazines was tough to find; the objective here wasn't to write a comprehensive history, but to make the facts discoverable.
And also a month ago, I was able to go back to the first article I published here, Where was Ulala?, and add the one thing I'd always wanted it to end on: a video, newly found, of the full Ulala MTV VMAs ad spot! Given how I'd originally ended the piece with 'maybe the ad will show up someday and give closure after 25 years', it's an incredibly satisfying coda to that story.
YouTube
First off: a couple of guest appearances for one of my favourite game historians! I briefly showed up in voiceover in Kate Willaert's videos The History of the Word "Metroidvania" and How it Spread, as well as in the first episode of MetroidMania, a series of short videos about pre-Metroid games that are at least a little Metroidy. Jumpscared myself twice watching these since I'd genuinely forgotten that I'd recorded the lines, heh.
I also helped Kate with some video upscaling for the first video, using Topaz (which is now subscription-only and extortionately expensive, but I have the old version from when it was a straightforward purchase) to remove compression artifacts from a few seconds of low-resolution, low-bitrate G4TV; she mixed the upscale and the original to fine effect, offsetting some of the unnatural smoothness of the upscale but looking far superior to the original file. If any mutuals could use it, I'd like to do more of that kind of thing; while my channel's dormant I might as well put all this software to use helping others. Drop me a line.
Anyway. Here's the thing. Not an announcement; just a thing.
A few weeks ago I made the mistake of listening to Jeremy Parish on the Video Game History Hour podcast. He talked extensively about chronogaming—producing a series that comprehensively covers every release for a platform, like his own Works series—and how it would be far harder to give that treatment to a computer than a console.
That started something gestating that I haven't stopped thinking about since, despite recognising from the first moment that it's a terrible idea:
Coming up with any sort of chronological release list for the Beeb has to be done from scratch, and is an inherently speculative exercise; the dataset just doesn't exist. So I'm going through every British magazine I can find from 1981, 1982 and 1983 and creating a spreadsheet of every BBC Micro game reviewed, mentioned or advertised, sorted by the month of its first mention in print. This won't cover everything, and it'll be wrong in a bunch of other ways, but it's something.
I've also started breaking down the first few episodes, and begun to write several. It's very clear to me that I'd need to produce them in blocks, not one at a time, and that I would need to plan a long way ahead.
I want to be clear: despite putting quite a bit of thought into it, coming up with a name and a logo and a gameplan, I'll more than likely never produce this series. Everything I know tells me it would be an interminable slog... especially the first couple of years of uninspired releases, which would require over one thousand video segments before I even got to the good stuff. It's a challenging project on all levels, it'll absorb an almost unlimited amount of time, and the audience for it is practically nonexistent.
But I'm not yet willing to rule it out entirely...
Morgue File wiki
Not much to report here. A minor version upgrade, and an attempt to set some sort of a standard for a top-of-page 'resources' section on the Baldur's Gate page, but honestly, the wiki hasn't been getting the attention it deserves; it's the project in the list that continues to run largely unattended, so anything that requires effort to bring into existence usually takes priority. Would very much welcome more contributors, though, with wiki experience or not. Let me know.
Scanning
I'm a bit happier with this, though; rather than slowing down over the winter, I've gained momentum on scanning. In December I scanned three issues of MCV, including a Zelda 25th anniversary special with some fun and unique contents. With this, I hit my self-imposed goal of 12 magazines scanned in 2025, a pattern I'll endeavour to repeat this year.
Then I started the year attacking (finally) the small pile of PC Strategy Games I've had since last summer, scanning and uploading the first and second issues. These magazines are getting the works: a slow and careful debind, full two-sided scanning (with no document feeder), methodical deskew and spot healing, and uploads to archive.org (including raw unedited images), RetroMags (once they send me upload credentials) and OldGameMags. I didn't time it, but getting each of these issues online easily took a double-digit number of hours.
The most recent scan was also my first attempt to do the job end-to-end with no Adobe software, since my subscription has lapsed and I'm on the fence about renewing it. That involved a lot of problem-solving. I ended up using NAPS2 for scanning (been using this since the start, actually), XnConvert for batch processing (wonderful software), and Affinity (which is free now) for straightening and cleanup. This step took a lot longer than it would have in Photoshop, due to a one-step straightening process in Photoshop requiring five steps in Affinity. img2pdf and ocrmypdf were used for the final PDF generation.
I'm set on moving my PC from Windows to Linux this year, so it'll be useful to know in advance about the free options, though both Photoshop and Affinity have the same problem there: they're both Win/Mac only. (I also tried Gimp and Krita, but neither seemed to have a serviceable healing brush—essential for cleanup.)
I love how surprised people have been—even those familiar with most PC gaming mags—by the fact that PCSG exists. Can't wait to share the other two issues, and I'm looking out (so far without success) for more listings.
Magazine Indexing
Database stats at the end of February 2026 (delta from November 2025):
Titles indexed: 59 (+7)
Distinct issues indexed: 5,336 (+815)
Pages indexed: 751,839 (+98,236)
I threw every issue of Official Xbox Magazine (US) at the indexer (since I needed to inventory them all anyway to help out another archivist), followed by a smorgasbord of Acorn-centric magazines for the tentative chronogaming project: Acorn User, BEEBUG, The Beebon, Laserbug, Personal Computer World and Your Computer. Haven't got to The Micro User yet; it's next up.
(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)
Playing
Since the start of the year I've been tracking the games I've been playing, so I can now pull this section a lot easier than from memory.
Games I'm actively playing as of the time of writing:
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Dogpile
- Dead Island 2
- Escape Simulator 2
- Radiant Historia
- CiniCross
- Zelda: A Link to the Past
Yeah, I think that might be too many on the go.
Another thing I'm trying to do (it's on my bingo card) is to roll credits on more games, whether single-sitting, mid-length or long. (Ideally an even mixture of the three.)
How's that going? Pretty well!
- Strange Horticulture (beaten January 7th)
- Metroid: Zero Mission (beaten January 10th)
- Family (beaten January 13th)
- Tomb Raider (2013) (beaten January 14th)
- Lost in Translation (beaten January 19th)
- Dragonsweeper (beaten February 4th)
- Cyberpunk 2077 (base game beaten February 25th, Phantom Liberty still to play, but credits were rolled, so it counts)
Acquisitions
The sole eBay acquisition in the last three months: four more issues of Strategy Player. These date from after the acquisition and shutdown of PC Strategy Games, which I previously lacked any details of. But sure enough, they did carry both titles on the covers for at least six issues, and five writers moved from the closing publication to the other. So it seems like Paragon did merge the two publications for real, and I can now curb my skepticism in the article. (Will update it soon, as promised, with the new info and a link to the new scan.)
But the big purchase in the last quarter was the new graphics card—a 5070 Ti—I bought in mid-January, when it was strongly rumoured that no new cards would hit this year, and that that moment might be the best opportunity to buy one for a long while. I've no idea whether that will turn out to be true, as they do—six weeks later—still seem to be available for a price only a little higher than I paid. Even so, I needed a mid-cycle refresh of the old card; I bought it in 2020, it was low-midrange even then, and it had struggled with Cyberpunk and some other things. I don't anticipate buying any more PC components in 2026... and considering what's happening to prices, probably won't in 2027 either.
And finally, here's a thing I bought ages ago, but only began to use in January: a Hobonichi Techo five-year planner. (Hobonichi is Shigesato Itoi's stationery company.) This was a real treat: it's a premium product that's a pleasure to write in; sadly they aren't cheap to import. But it's also going to take five years to fill, so the cost works out to be a few pence a day. Two months later, I've successfully filled it in every day, which is the longest I've ever kept a journalling habit: it helps that there's not much space to fill, only really enough for two or three bullet points tracking the weather, media consumption and any interesting experiences that day. I'm looking forward to looping back round to the start and filling in entries next to the previous year's, which is when this five-year journal idea will start to pay dividends.
And that's the last three months in a nutshell. With spring on the way, things are back on the rails—expect monthly updates from here on out. The next one will be the site's one year anniversary post!
Thanks for reading. See you again in the past.
