Stuart Ashen—better known by his YouTube persona Ashens—grew up on a diet of 8-bit games on consoles like the Atari 2600 and the Spectrum. The earliest PC game he recalls playing was Syndicate Wars on his first home-built rig—a Pentium 200 MMX machine housed in a server tower case: “I loved Syndicate. Hated Syndicate Wars. Never got on with it at all,” he says. “Ended up giving it to a friend who loved it … I think I went on to Duke Nukem 3D or something.”

A YouTuber since 2006, Ashens is known primarily for his reviews of weird and (typically not) wonderful food products on his main channel, which to date has 1.67 million subscribers. But he’s also a regular critic and commentator on retro video games, both on his twice weekly Ashenscast Twitch stream (which also covers obscure TV and film), and in books like Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.

Alongside his video work, Ashens is currently making a folk horror film told in reverse. “Unfortunately, it’s far enough away from release that there’s no point plugging it,” he says. But he hit pause on production to guide me through the haunted arcade of his PC. We talked DOS fighting games, the problem with rangers in RPGs, and the worst retro game Ashens has ever played.

What game are you currently playing?

I’m currently playing Gloomhaven, the digital version of the board game, for the second time. I put about 150 hours into it, then sort of left it, and I’ve come back to it.

It’s kind of fantastic. I love board games, but Gloomhaven is one I didn’t think I would ever play, because I know it takes two hours to set up or something. When the computer is taking control of all the bits and bobs, you can play it on your own in the background while you’re doing other things and waiting for stuff. That’s going to get a lot of time from me.

It’s all team-based. It’s all your standard band of different [fantasy] archetypes together, and then after they reach a certain level, that’s not true. When they do a certain personal quest thing, which can be a pain in the arse for various reasons, they retire, and then you can replace them with other ones you’ve unlocked. So the team basically changes, and the whole dynamic changes over time, which is something that’s really kept me interested.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

The previous game would have been Baldur’s Gate 3, and it is still installed. I should uninstall it for two reasons. One, it takes up a lot of space, and two, I might start playing it and it will eat all my spare time again. Because, yeah, I got kind of obsessed.

To give you an idea, I’m now on 350 hours on Gloomhaven, but 927 on Baldur’s Gate. Probably a good 50 to 100 hours of that is just sitting in the background [but] it’s so far ahead of any other game I’ve played in terms of hours, it’s unbelievable.

I’ve never played a Larian game [before], and I didn’t like the early Baldur’s Gate games. I got the first one free with a graphics card. I remember opening the graphics card box and about 14 discs fell out. I was so excited to play it and I could not get on with the combat. It was that weird, sort of issue commands and pause and do things. It just didn’t do anything for me, and I thought, “Oh, that’s disappointing.” After a couple of hours, I never came back to it.

And then I saw something about Baldur’s Gate 3—because I wasn’t interested in it at all for obvious reasons, and it just had that spark to it of, “Hang on, there’s something special going on here, with the writing of that.” And then I saw they changed the combat to turn based, and I was like, “Right, sign me up.”

I bought it, installed it, started playing it, and that was the only thing I played probably for two and a half, three years.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

This isn’t one I played a lot—we have this because we were streaming it. But it’s Street Fighter for DOS from 1988.

It’s entirely different to the arcade version, I think it’s got more in common with the weird Commodore 64 version. But basically, we were going through, on stream, every single DOS fighting game, and it’s pretty bad. But weirdly, not as bad as a lot of them.

DOS fighting games are, like, for every good one, there’s five really bad ones and one that you can’t believe they’d charge money for. It barely works. I love fighting games, so it’s always interesting to see these obscure ones we haven’t heard of. But God, the DOS ones! It was like they saw Mortal Kombat but absolutely did not understand Mortal Kombat. So you’ve just got teenagers dancing around in front of a camcorder, badly digitised, and some Christ-awful game engine that just does not work fundamentally.

Then again, the arcade game is awful for the first Street Fighter. There’s just not really much of a game to it. Even in the arcade, it’s all about learning the special moves and repeating them over and over. Or trying to, because the controls are not quite there for Street Fighter 1. I think that’s got to be one of the biggest improvements in history, from Street Fighter 1 to Street Fighter 2.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

That is Baldur’s Gate 3, with 927 hours.

I think I [initially] did a Ranger. I’m always interested in Rangers in RPGs, because they’re never implemented very well. In EverQuest, it was the [class] that could dish a lot of damage and yet couldn’t take any. It was just noticeably inferior …. It felt better in Baldur’s Gate 3. It probably wasn’t the optimal build, but it did actually work. I do like the ranged bow combat, and I’m always interested in why they never get it right. Is it just nobody likes Rangers, but they feel they have to put them in anyway?

I didn’t go Dark Urge until the second playthrough, not really understanding what it was at the time, obviously. And then I was informed after, “Oh, you should try that.” And I’m like, “Oh, this is what the game was written for. OK, yes, it’s even better now.”

It’s absolutely incredible. Writing, performance, everything is a step above anything that had come before, I think. And the combat is so much fun, which obviously is super important because that’s a huge percentage of it.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

That is Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath. Because sometimes, if I’ve got 10 minutes spare, I’ll just quickly start up a skirmish map on it, just a simple 1v1, and see how quickly I can win, and that’s it. It’s almost a comfort thing. I only do it once maybe every couple of months, but I’ll always leave it installed for that reason. Plus, by today’s standards, it doesn’t take up much room.

I think I like the skirmish better in 3, due to the variety of all the bits and bobs in it. It’s probably not the tightest of the games in the series. But for me, that’s the one I always enjoyed the most.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

Everything.

There’s a little window, and you type in the name of any file on your PC, and it’s already indexed them, and it instantly appears with where they all are, and you can easily narrow things down. Life changing. The amount of files I’ve given stupid names to, or put in the wrong folder that I’ve just found immediately because of this. It’s fundamentally changed the way I work.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Oh dear. So I have icons turned off on the desktop. I’m going to turn them back on, if I can remember how.

Fuck! I’m turning that off. Oh no, that’s not good. That’s pretty bad. Oh God! How do I turn them off? Oh God, it’s horrible.

It’s just two 4k monitors entirely covered in icons and stuff. Because I don’t use the desktop at all, so I just let it auto install things there and forget about it. I’ve got a little program called RocketDock, which keeps the useful things on the side of one of the monitors, and that’s it. I’ve not looked at the actual desktop in years, and it is monstrous.

BONUS QUESTION: What’s the best retro game you’ve discovered, and what’s the worst retro game you’ve ever played?

One I only briefly played back in the day, and then something made me play it again on stream, and it was so much better than I remembered, [is] Moonstone for the Amiga. It’s like a hack ‘n’ slash-y, brawler type thing, but with a lot of RPG elements. It’s also beautifully designed, with really nice artwork and sound. But it’s a really interesting game. No other game quite has the vibe of it. Not to say it’s the best game ever or anything, but it’s still very bloody good.

What is the worst overall? Oh man, there’s so many bad ones. There’s one called, which we keep talking about [on stream], Graeme Souness Vector Soccer. This isn’t the worst. I’m just going to mention it because it’s great. It’s an Amiga game, and literally the characters are vectors. But of course, due to the way they didn’t really have the processing power back then, these vectors look like the Keep Britain Tidy logo. So they’re all weird things moving around and the frame rate is monstrous. It’s like three frames a second. It’s totally unplayable. Nobody seems to know if there’s a good game under the hood or not.

I think for absolute worst, it’s got to be SQIJ! And it’s for the Spectrum. There are versions for other computers that are perfectly competent. But the Spectrum one was written by a man, or a boy at the time, bless him, called Jason Creighton, who really didn’t want to fucking write it or work at that company again. So he just spat out something absolutely awful that basically is borderline unplayable, sent it to them, and they just didn’t bother looking at it. They just loaded it, went ‘Oh, that loads.’ Put it on tape, out it goes.

Powerhouse, the company that released it, released it twice—a standard release and then a release later on as a compilation. As released, it doesn’t work. Basically, Jason accidentally turned on the caps lock or something in the source code, and you can’t turn it off, and the keys actually don’t function if caps lock is on. So you load it up and you can’t move. That’s it. Fortunately, it’s so badly put together you can literally break into the program and turn the caps lock off through poking a memory access directly, if you know what I mean. And by the time you’ve hacked it to work, it’s just no fun whatsoever.