Month: May 2014

1574: Oh, to Click One’s Fingers

In case you missed the news, Andie and I now own a house. This is exciting and etc. etc. but it’s also a big ol’ pain.

To give credit where credit is due, Andie has been working a whole lot harder on the house than I have been. This is at least partly because I am woefully incompetent at DIY and will normally end up hammering a nail into myself rather than a wall… and that’s when I’m supposed to be painting it. Oh ho ho ho.

No, but seriously, I suck balls at DIY. I wouldn’t want to put anything on a shelf that I put up, I’m afraid of climbing ladders beyond the second step, I don’t know how most tools work and I’m the sort of person that will stand in the paint tray, flip it over so it splatters all over the carpet, then fall on my arse, bringing the curtain rails down with it and smashing the TV in the process.

I hasten to add: thankfully, none of that has happened, and I successfully managed to apply a coat of paint to our new living room earlier without anyone dying. It is quite satisfying to know that I am at least capable of this.

Where the frustration comes from, though — and this isn’t by any means exclusive to residences — is when you walk in the front door and it doesn’t look like a habitable place to live. (Because it isn’t, usually.) The only things lying around are paint pots and various tools, the fridge is empty, there’s rubbish everywhere and regardless of where you try to get to in the property, you’ll trip over something. It’s demoralising to see, and it’s something that doesn’t really go away until you stop dicking around with paint and start putting furniture in there. Only then does it start to feel like a home; a process that really comes to a head once you get your TV installed. I sometimes just wish I could click my fingers and it all be done.

Things are going quite well, though. The painting is proceeding apace — since Andie has this week off work, she’ll undoubtedly be doing some more of that without me over the course of the week — and I’m starting to get a mental picture of what goes where. Of course, there still comes the part I’m really not looking forward to — packing up all the shit in the flat I’m writing this in and transferring it to our new house — but at least this time around we’re hiring professional removal people to do all the really hard work. We just have to stick it all in boxes.

I am excited about having a place to call our own, I really am; the trouble is that with the bad news I had regarding my job recently, it’s taken the edge off the excitement somewhat. It’s hard to be super-excited and positive about it all when you’re not sure where your next paycheque is going to be coming from after June.

But I have to remember that I have a few irons in the fire and it’s possible that any of them could come to something. The next few months may not end up being particularly easy, but they’re probably going to be interesting, if nothing else.

Oh, and did I mention how much I appreciate the hard work Andie’s putting in to the new house while I mope around being miserable? I do. A lot. And now the Internet knows it. So there. <3

1573: Open Book

Finished Steins;Gate completely this evening (apart from one “Tip” which remains at large, but as far as the game is concerned, I have all the achievements and all the CG images, so I’m happy with that) so expect some more in-depth commentary on that next week over on MoeGamer.

For now, I wanted to wax lyrical about the visual novel medium once again, since sitting down and “playing” Steins;Gate for most of today has been an enjoyable, enriching experience — and the majority of the time I’ve spent with it has been spent reading, unable to influence what’s happening on-screen.

Those of us who grew up with video games in the ’80s and ’90s had the mantra “gameplay is everything” drilled into us from an early age. As technology improved and the CD-ROM era dawned, we started to see more and more reviews pointing this out; more and more reviews highlighting the fact that beautiful presentation counts for jack shit if your game isn’t up to snuff.

And for a while, this was actually kind of true. The games that sacrificed “gameplay” in favour of impressive presentation — usually of the prerendered cutscenes or full-motion video variety — tended to suffer in two regards. Firstly, they weren’t very fun to play. Secondly, the only other potential redeeming feature they might have had — telling an interesting, enjoyable story — tended to crash and burn due to the low budgets of games at the time. It’s all very well having real, live actors in your game, but if they can’t act for shit then it doesn’t make for much of an interactive movie.

Here’s where visual novels contrast with the early ’90s interactive movie craze somewhat, even though they started to grow in popularity around the same time. Visual novels embrace the fact that they don’t have any “gameplay” — and by that I mean moving a character around a screen, having perceived “freedom” to do what you want and so on — and present themselves as nothing more than interactive stories; effectively little more than multimedia takes on Choose Your Own Adventure books. In fact, in many cases, visual novels are even simpler than Choose Your Own Adventure books in that the vast majority of the narrative is prescribed for you, and you’ll make only a few choices over the course of the complete story, rather than one at the end of every page.

And yet this doesn’t matter. Not having to deal with the consequences for every possible tiny little thing the player might decide to do in a more “sandboxy” environment frees up visual novel authors to concentrate on the story and the characters who help to tell it. It’s perhaps for this reason that so many visual novels tend to go down the romance route; because the virtual relationships you build with visual novel characters are much more intense and intimate than in most other types of game — character-driven RPGs excepted, perhaps — many authors allow the reader a degree of wish-fulfilment through virtual dating. (Of course, at present the vast majority of visual novels are designed to cater to male heterosexual players, but there is an established marked for other players in Japan that is gradually starting to make its way over here; Sweet Fuse on PSP and the Hakuoki series for 3DS and PS3 are good examples of “otome games” designed for heterosexual female players, for example — let’s see a few more of these in the future.)

Not every visual novel necessarily revolves around love, though. At one end of the spectrum, we have the phenomenon of the nukige, which are games that deliberately focus on being sexually provocative or exciting, but which tend to still include considerably more characterisation and story (and better acting!) than you’d see in your average Western porn film; at the other, we have visual novels like Steins;Gate, where love might perhaps enter into the narrative at some points, but in which the main point is a different theme or piece of subject matter. (In the case of Steins;Gate it’s several different interpretations of time travel and parallel worlds, for example.)

What I find most enjoyable about these games is that there’s no “gatekeeping” based on skill or dexterity. You sit down to play a visual novel, you know you’ll be able to “finish” it, assuming you set aside the time to do so. Reading a walkthrough doesn’t feel like cheating, either, since all you’re effectively doing is looking up how to explore the alternative narrative paths. Good visual novels make effective use of multiple endings and narrative paths to further flesh out the story, too; the best ones can even leverage their “bad” endings into a meaningful narrative context, as I touched on yesterday.

What I think I’m saying is that I’d actually be perfectly happy if, for whatever reason, the only games I was able to play were visual novels. There’s diverse enough subject matter in them to keep them consistently interesting, and in most cases they’re just “gamey” enough in terms of presentation to sate that hunger for multimedia content that most of us have in the modern age.

Am I only going to play visual novels from now on? Of course not; but as a means of enjoying an interactive story, they’re hard to beat.

1572: Bad End

Been feeling pretty low today (well, all week, really) so naturally, the best possible thing I could do in my mental state was to play Steins;Gate.

Steins;Gate isn’t an “utsuge” (“depression game”) or anything, but it certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the emotional side of things. And it’s also an apt demonstration of how the visual novel medium makes the process of seeking out “bad” endings a desirable process rather than an inconvenience.

I’ve pointed this out before when talking about other games, most notably Corpse Party, which only has one story-advancing true ending per chapter and then a wide selection of bad endings that inflict varying amounts of unpleasantness on the main cast. And yet even though you know these bad endings are going to be bad — the clue’s in the name, yo — it’s hard not to indulge a sort of morbid curiosity just to see what happens. And, to these games’ credit, your curiosity is usually rewarded through some deeper character insights or events you might not see normally — just before everything goes horribly wrong, of course.

Steins;Gate’s non-True endings aren’t depicted as “bad” endings as such, just alternate ends to the story. And yet each of the four I’ve seen so far — I still have two to go, including the True — have been traumatic and bleak to varying degrees.

And you know what, I’ve loved every minute of them, even in (or perhaps because of) as dark a mood as I’ve been this week. Each of them has provided an interesting twist on and conclusion to the narrative, bringing the story to a convincing close without giving that dissatisfying feeling of “you fucked up, game over, try again”. Each of them has been enormously emotionally engaging, and the fact each one of them focuses on one of the main cast members provides deeper insights into these individuals that, by the time you reach one of the endings of the game, you’ve spent at least 30 hours or so with.

What’s been interesting about a lot of them is that they tie in nicely with the themes of the game. The central concept of Steins;Gate revolves around two different plausible implementations of time travel: manipulating the past by sending email messages to the past, and sending your memories back through time to an earlier incarnation of yourself, thereby being able to act accordingly to ensure something happens — or prevent it from happening. Among this, there’s lots of discussion of worldlines, parallel worlds, attractor fields and all manner of other well fleshed-out scientific and pseudoscientific theories. As you might expect, tinkering around with worldlines, parallel worlds and past incarnations has all manner of potential to become royally screwed up, and the various non-True endings tend to revolve around dealing with the consequences of this tinkering.

One ending, for example, explores what would happen if the only means of preventing something awful happening would be to voluntarily create a time loop and repeat the same events over and over again. Another explores what would happen if your changes to the worldline meant you’d never met your friends. Another still questions the consequences of making a decision where you know one person will get hurt — or worse — even as you choose to make someone else happy.

They’re all fascinating “what if” questions, but they’re all tinged with sadness to one degree or another. Even the “Mayuri” ending, which forms the non-negotiable endpoint of the game if you’ve failed to trigger enough “True Ending” flags by a certain point in the narrative, is pretty heartbreaking — and by that point there are no more choices to make, so you have to live with them, at least until you start the game again and make sure you trigger all the True Ending flags this time!

I’m interested to see what the last two endings have in store. Without wanting to give anything away, I’m guessing that the one remaining non-True ending will effectively be the opposite of one of the endings I’ve already seen — said ending involved a seemingly binary choice — but as for the true ending? I genuinely have no idea how that’s going to play out. But I’m excited to find out.

1571: Fork in the Road

I’m at one of those points in my life where I feel I’ve reached a definite “fork in the road” where I need to decide if I’m going to continue on my current path, or branch off in a different direction. Going backwards is not an option, but both paths ahead are fraught with trials and difficulties.

The road to the left is a continuation of the road I’ve been taking. It’s the road that proceeds merrily through the land of Gamindustri, looping and wending its way past anthropomorphised hillocks and clouds before taking occasional detours into explosive-devastated warzones, alien landscapes and racetracks. It’s a fun road, but you never know what’s coming next; over the next hill could be a pot of gold, or there could be a pit of spikes.

The road on the right I don’t know much about. Not long after the fork there’s a tunnel, and the lights inside seem to have failed. It’s difficult to tell how far the tunnel goes, too; there’s no way of seeing the light at the other end of it. But there are people coming and going, and they look if not actually happy then certainly at least vaguely satisfied with what is going on. None of them look as if they’re afraid about what’s happening either now or in the future, and it’s then that I notice that posted along the side of the road are a number of uniformed officers. They’re not armed and they carry kindly expressions on their face; I get the impression they’re there to keep everyone safe and protect them from the unknown. There is no such detail on the road to the left.

All of this is a rather pretentious way of saying that I think I’m going to have to make a decision soon: whether to continue pursuing life in the games industry, or whether to try and branch off in another direction. As I alluded to above, both roads carry their own fair share of potential pitfalls.

Were I to take the left road, it’s doing so on the understanding that I can’t relax. Even if I work my hardest, there’s no guarantee that I won’t simply wake up one day to discover an email politely informing me that I will soon be out of a job through no fault of my own. And when that happens, there’s no guarantee of being able to immediately score a new job; more often than not, it means a return to either begging for scraps as a freelancer or, were the unlikely to happen and I find myself with a new position straight away, having to work my way back up from the bottom, effectively starting my career over again. This has happened to me a couple of times now and it is already starting to get a bit old.

Were I to take the right road, I have to deal with the true unknown, and there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find my way to safety and security. My particular combination of qualifications and experience opens up a relatively narrow number of potential career paths to me, and looking at job site listings it can be challenging to determine exactly what type of job I should be looking for, or if it’s even worth applying to things that sound like they might fit the bill. There’s also the feeling that I’m walking away from something that, when it goes well, I do genuinely enjoy doing.

I love writing about games. But I hate — hate — how volatile the games journalism business is. I understand the reasons for it — and it’s a risk we all acknowledge when we enter into it — but that doesn’t make it suck any less when promising careers are cut short for reasons that aren’t any fault of the people in question.

Which is why, to be perfectly frank, I’m leaning towards the right road. I’ve already put in some applications to jobs that are nothing to do with games, with the intention of, if I successfully secure a position, continuing doing games writing purely for myself and those who wish to follow me through projects such as MoeGamer. Given that Andie and I have recently purchased a house — we get the keys tomorrow, in fact — I am getting to the stage where financial security and not having to continually worry on a week-by-week basis about whether I still have a job is worth far more than being able to say that my hobbies and passions are also my career.

That’s a sad and disappointing way of looking at the world, and I’m annoyed that I’m even thinking that way. But unless there’s a significant change in the way the games journalism business works, I’m not sure I can take going through this whole process again.

1570: Musou

I think I’m probably going to pick up the PC version of Dynasty Warriors 8 when it comes out, assuming it’s a decent port. (I’ve been tempted by the Vita version but slightly put off by some people saying that it is not a particularly decent port… that said, Dynasty Warriors on the go sounds like a good time.)

I haven’t played a Dynasty Warriors game since… 4, I think? It was certainly one of the PlayStation 2 titles. (I do actually own a PlayStation 3 installment in the series but have never booted it up; it was an acquisition in that dark period where it was looking like video game retail chain Game was likely to go under, so I managed to pick it up for something ridiculous like three quid or something.) Regardless of whenever it was or whichever installment it was, I recall having a lot of fun with these games, as ridiculous as they tended to be.

For those who have never delved into the pleasures of this series, they’re perfect escapist fodder. Taking on the role of one of the legendary heroes from the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” period of Chinese history, it’s your job to hack and slash your way across numerous battlefields, cutting a path through hordes of enemies and sending your foes flying off in all directions. Just to emphasise the ridiculously exaggerated nature of combat in the game, a handy counter in the bottom corner of the screen keeps track of how many “KOs” (no-one dies in Dynasty Warriors) you’ve scored in that session — a number that frequently finds itself well into the thousands.

And yet despite what initially appears to be little more than a button-mashy 3D brawler with an impressive number of rather stupid foes on screen at once, the Dynasty Warriors series has always had a surprising amount of depth to it. You’ll need to manage your character’s condition carefully, for example, for pushing too far into enemy territory without the support of your troops is a good way to get your ass kicked. You’ll have to keep a close eye on your health bar, too, because — at least in the earlier games — restoring it was something you didn’t get to go all that often, meaning you’d often end up limping to the finish line of a mission with but a sliver of health remaining.

What was always truly interesting about it, though, was that it felt like you were a unit in a real-time strategy game. Other stuff was going on around the battlefield independently of you, and you could have an impact on what was going on. Systematically work your way around the known locations of enemy generals, picking them off one at a time, and you’d be able to do some serious damage to the opposing force’s morale, which would in turn make your life a bit easier when the time came to push forward. Alternatively, if you were feeling brave — or well-equipped — enough, you could simply charge forward from the outset and go straight for the main target. It was your choice.

The whole thing was wrapped in some totally anachronistic electric guitar cock-rock and some of the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard, but all this cheesiness simply added to the games’ overall charm. I hope the newer games maintain this slight feel of being done on the cheap, because if I’m honest, it was a significant part of why I liked the older ones.

Anyway. The PC version isn’t out for a few days yet, but I’m actually quite looking forward to jumping back into this series after a significant break, particularly if I can convince some of my friends to play with me — I used to really enjoy split-screen play on the PlayStation 2 versions. Even if I can’t, though, a game in which I can hack and slash my way through thousands of enemies sounds like just the thing to relieve a bit of stress… something I desperately need right now.

1569: Life Gets In the Way

I was chatting with my friend Lynette earlier about various things, and the subject turned, as it often does, to anime. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a lengthy spiel on how emotional the ending of Angel Beats! was — though I did watch the last episode today, so expect some thoughts on that shortly. No, instead, it’s going to be about the frustrating feeling of discovering things that you really like when it feels like it’s almost “too late”.

I don’t mean that I’m too old for anime or related media, of course — I really hope the day never comes when I feel like I’ve “grown out” of the things I love today — but rather I feel like the opportunity to enjoy and share these things with friends has been, to a large degree, mostly lost.

I mention this because of my aforementioned conversation with Lynette. Aside from this blog — where, as we all know, I’m pissing in the wind — Lynette is one of the few people I have the opportunity to enthuse about anime with on a fairly regular basis. And it’s somewhat frustrating to both of us that we’re several thousand miles apart and consequently unable to get together regularly for cocktails, popcorn and a few episodes of some favourite anime series, perhaps educating one another on recent discoveries that we want to share. It’s something we’d both really like to be able to do — indeed, we have done it before, on the occasions when I’ve had the opportunity to visit her and her husband Mark (also a close personal friend, and also someone with whom I can enthuse about anime) in Toronto.

This is one unfortunate side-effect of the whole “global village” (hah, bet you haven’t heard that term since a ’90s issue of PC Format) thing the Internet has brought about. It’s never been easier to find like-minded friends who share the same interests and passions as you, but the thing people don’t mention about that seemingly great development in socialisation is how frustrating it is to not be able to get together with those friends on at least a semi-regular basis. (Unless you’re loaded enough to be able to simply hop on a trans-Atlantic flight at a moment’s notice whenever you fancy it, in which case I think I hate you a little bit.) I have friends literally all over the world — America, Canada, the Middle East, Japan, Australia — who I would love to hang out with and do all sorts of mutually enjoyable things with (no, not that sort of thing, pervert) but am unable to do so. I’m fortunate enough to have these friends in the first place, of course, but by gosh, I sometimes wish they were just around the corner so I could drop them a text, invite them over for an anime evening and subsequently have an enjoyable time.

Why not ask your local friends, you might wonder. Because my local friends all have their own passions and interests — and, with us being the age we are (we’re not in university any more!) a lot of them are doing distinctly “grown-up” things like grouting their bathrooms (whatever that means) or having children. I certainly don’t begrudge them any of those things, but it can be sad and frustrating when it’s difficult to get people together for anything more than the most cursory of social occasions. Life gets in the way, in other words.

So, uh, anyone local want to hang out and watch some anime? We have popcorn.

1568: Prepare for To… no, I’m not making that joke

Towerfall! I’d heard good things about this indie-developed game, but had never tried it prior to this weekend. And blow me if the positivity wasn’t justified.

Towerfall — not to be confused with Titanfall — is a game for up to four players, available on PC, PlayStation 4 and, oddly enough, Ouya, where it was originally intended to be a flagship title for the ill-conceived Android microconsole. I’m extremely thankful that the developers weren’t stubborn about sticking with Ouya exclusivity; this way, a lot more people get to play their game, and no-one has to buy an Ouya.

Anyway. There are two ways to play Towerfall: Versus and Quest. I haven’t tried Quest yet, but we played some Versus in between board games over the weekend. And it was a huge amount of fun. The concept is extremely simple: up to four players face off against one another armed with bows and a very limited number of arrows, and must defeat the other players. You can defeat a player by either shooting them or jumping on their head Mario-style, in which case you’ll get a point — but if they end up killing themselves thanks to your actions, you won’t get a point.

That is, basically, it. The simplicity of the game is what makes it work so well, and everything else that goes on simply builds on this extremely simple formula. Collectible treasures that pop up around the level might replenish your arrows, or might give you a new type of arrow to play with such as arrows that explode or arrows that drill through walls. Or they might just do something weird; particular favourites in this category include one that turns the lights out on the level, meaning it’s a lot more difficult to see the platforms and hazards; one that causes the background to start swaying drunkenly and everything to start moving at half-speed; and one that causes the whole level to scroll one whole screen in any of the four cardinal directions. (Levels are wrap-around, so you can run off the left edge and reappear on the right; this scrolling trick really messes with your perception of how this works while it’s going on.)

One thing I was particularly impressed with was the “variants” menu when setting up a new game. Rather than being confined to playing the game in just a single way, Towerfall features a huge variety of options for you to tweak the experience. If you want to play without arrows, knock yourself out (by having someone land on your head). If you want to start with the more powerful arrows, great. If you want to be able to come back as a ghost and continue harassing the other players rather than simply being eliminated from a round, that’s an option too. There’s a huge amount of flexibility, and a bit of experimentation will help make the experience into a game that hopefully everyone participating will be able to enjoy.

The only potential downside to the game is that it’s only possible to enjoy its multiplayer delights with other people in the same room as you. Frankly, I greatly prefer this to playing online, but for those who have friends who are difficult to gather in the same place at the same time, this may be a problem. Still, I’m hopeful I’ll have the opportunity to play it a whole lot more in the future; when we move into our new house — which is pretty soon now! — we’ll have a lot more room for hosting, and even a spare bed. So late night Towerfall sessions are very much a go!

1567: Hunting Mr. X

We’ve played through a whole bunch of board games this weekend, and it’s quite difficult to pick a specific highlight. This morning’s Battlestar Galactica game was very enjoyable — it was the first time I’d been a Cylon player — but I think that it was our Scotland Yard game that made for some of my favourite moments.

We haven’t played Scotland Yard for quite a long time. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward game and thus it’s the sort of thing that often gets overlooked in favour of more complicated and/or flashy-looking titles, but it’s a hugely enjoyable game. Its simplicity really works in its favour, because it means you’re not constantly looking up rules or checking you’re “doing it right” — all you’re basically doing is moving around the board.

For the unfamiliar, Scotland Yard is an asymmetrical game in which a team of up to four detective players attempt to track down the criminal mastermind and all-round bastard Mr. X by chasing him across London and apprehending him. The twist is that Mr. X moves around the board in secret, only revealing himself after making specified numbers of moves. At all other times, the detective players can see which forms of transport he has taken — each space on the board is connected to at least one other by any combination of taxi, bus and underground routes, and making use of a route requires discarding a ticket of the appropriate type — but not exactly where he has gone. Thus, the challenge is determining where Mr. X is, where he is going and how you can possibly stop him when you’re all moving by the same rules.

Scotland Yard is a masterful game for the amount of tension it creates on both sides. Early in the game, it’s easy for the detectives to stumble around blindly, not having a clue where their quarry might be; at the same time, though, Mr. X is trying to quietly slip away without being notices so he is, preferably, on the other side of the board by the time he has to reveal himself for the first time.

The real tension comes from the fact that no-one ever feels like they’re “winning” until very late in the game, which is the only point at which it becomes clear that either Mr. X is probably going to escape, or the detectives are almost certainly going to catch him. Up until you reach that point — which doesn’t come along until the last couple of turns in many cases — both sides are constantly on edge, thinking “shiiiit…” while trying to outwit the others. It’s a particularly nerve-wracking experience for Mr. X, who has to make some tough decisions about whether or not he’s going to risk moving within capture distance of the detectives — who might not know where he is at this point — or try and get as far away as possible. The game creates a good feeling of “closing the net” on the Mr. X player, even with the very limited number of pieces on the board. It’s hugely atmospheric and a lot of fun.

Our game today went pretty well. I was Mr. X, which I was quite pleased about. For a lot of the game, I had the opportunity to sit back and chuckle to myself about how my opponents were making completely incorrect assumptions about which way I’d gone, but things gradually ramped up towards the end. I was within a couple of turns of winning — my opponents were down to their last few tickets, at which point it becomes more difficult for them to move around, particularly if they’d exhausted a particular type of transportation at that point — and I thought I’d outwitted them. Unfortunately, they managed to squeeze me into an unwinnable situation and I was eventually caught.

Scotland Yard is one of those experiences that is distinctive to board games. There are video games that involve hiding from one another and trying not to give your position away, but the implementation of the mechanics in Scotland Yard makes it a huge amount of fun to get together around a table for. I believe there’s an iOS version available out there, but I frankly can’t see it being quite as much fun. Part of the enjoyment is in listening in on your opponents’ discussions and thinking “I hope they don’t figure out what I’ve done”, and that’s something that’s best enjoyed in the live company of one another.

Anyhow. This has been a pleasant weekend away from it all, and I should have a nice relaxing day off tomorrow for the Bank Holiday. Then it’s back to shitting myself over whether or not I can find a new job. Yay.

But I’m not going to think about that right now. For now, bed.

1566: Project MoeGamer

After some umming and ahhing (and not being able to get to sleep again) I decided yesterday to flip the switch on my little side project. I haven’t done a huge amount of promotion or anything for it yet — though I guess this post counts — because I knew I was going to be away for the weekend. But I did feel like I wanted to get it out in the wild and ready to start tinkering with over the next few weeks.

If you haven’t already seen it, I present to you MoeGamer. It’s a site inspired by my love of Japanese games — particularly those towards the more “anime-ish” end of the spectrum — and is intended to be a repository of articles I’ve written regarding games I’ve been playing. I’ve deliberately kept it free of any sort of “structure” for the moment — i.e. it’s not intended to be a news, reviews and preview site — to allow for full creative freedom, and so far I’ve populated it with a selection of articles that have previously been seen on this site (with some minor edits) and one longer original article on the visual novel Kana Little Sister that I haven’t published anywhere before.

My intention for the site in the short term is simply to use it as an outlet for writing about Japanese games in as much detail as I enjoy. Realistically, I know that I’ve been quite lucky to have the freedom I’ve had at USgamer to post my weekly JPgamer column, and I also know that despite the reputation I’ve built up as a result of both JPgamer and my reviews of various Japanese games, it will take a fair bit of fighting at any mainstream site to be able to do the same. In other words, as much as it would be an ideal situation for me to be hired by a site to be their resident Japanese games expert, I know that, given these games’ distinctly “niche” status (i.e. they’re not necessarily huge traffic magnets except when they’re embroiled in some sort of controversy) I will almost certainly not be writing about them on a regular basis unless I really fall on my feet.

And so, MoeGamer.

What I do with the site in the long term will depend on response and whether I have the time and inclination to continue working on it. I have several ideas of things I’d like to do — I’d like to experiment with video for one thing, and if I manage to attract a reasonably sized audience I’ll look at some form of making money from the blog, be it through ads, crowdfunding or something like Patreon — but whether or not any of these get implemented will depend on how much time I have to spend fiddling with the site going forward. The same is true for whether I spend any money on the site; at present, it’s simply a free WordPress blog, but if it proves to be worthwhile I’ll happily purchase a domain name and premium services to make it more customisable.

As it happens, in just under two months I’m going to have a whole lot of time to fiddle around with the site, for better or worse. While I’m not exactly relishing the prospect of finding a new job, I am enjoying that early buzz of getting a new website up and running and looking forward to seeing whether or not it’s something that is viable to keep doing as a side project on the side. At the very least, I doubt I should have too many problems keeping it open as my go-to place for writing about games and archiving stuff that gets lost in all the OneADay posts here, but part of me is hoping I can grow it into something bigger, too.

We’ll see. It’s far too early to ponder right now, and I’m not in a position to do much with the site over the next couple of days — I’m in Kent with some friends playing board games and drinking cider. It should hopefully be a nice period of unwinding after a stressful week.

For now, then, there’s a selection of articles on MoeGamer for your weekend reading — several of which, as I’ve said, longtime readers of this site will recognise — and from early next week onwards, you should hopefully see a whole bunch more there.

In the meantime, please take a look, leave a comment, click the Like button on stuff you’re interested in and feel free to share anything you enjoy. And I can keep writing about the stuff I love.

1565: Pressure Valve

If you’ll pardon me, I need to vent some pressure in my head. I don’t know whether or not it will make me feel better, but I feel like I need to do it anyway.

I feel like shit today with regard to the situation in which I find myself. I can’t, in good conscience, say that I know everything is going to be okay because I don’t know that everything is going to be okay, and that’s frankly kind of scary. Andie and I have bought a house; that is not something you can just abandon if things get a bit difficult. If you mess things up with regard to money, that’s a shitload of cash down the drain with nothing to show for it. While I doubt it will get to that stage — I at least have a little cash saved, though I had hoped I’d be able to hold on to it for a bit longer — it is still a concern.

I don’t feel like shit in the sense that I want to just break down and cry, though. I mean, I sort of do, but it’s not coming right now. Instead, I’m in that sort of bleak, nothingness phase of depression; that phase where all you really want to do is stare into space, but the things going on around you are irritating. It took a considerable amount of mental strength to haul myself up off the bed and come to write this post, and I’m not entirely sure that doing so is helping matters any. But we’ll see. I’ve started, so I’ll finish and all that.

I hate being laid off. I mean, I seriously doubt there’s anyone out there who loves it, but it’s shit, and I’ve been through it several times in my life. I at least have a little under two months to find myself something new to do this time around rather than waking up one morning to discover the site I write for is immediately closing (alas, poor GamePro), but the immediate reaction is one of being upset and disappointed. It is, in effect, being told that you’re not needed or useful any more, so kindly off you go, on your way, off you pop. This is a fact of life and business, of course, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to deal with. Being told that you’re suddenly surplus to requirements doesn’t do a great deal for the self-esteem, after all; it makes you question whether you’ve been useful for the time you were employed.

This isn’t fishing for compliments, by the way; I know that the exaggerated emotions in my mind are just that — exaggerated — and that I was useful throughout my time at USgamer; I also hope I will continue to be so for my remaining weeks there. It just feels extremely weird to still be part of a team and yet not; I don’t feel like I belong any more, and that, too, is a horrible feeling.

Still, I haven’t been resting on my laurels. I have been gradually putting together a side project to tinker with while I look for new work. I’m not quite sure it’s ready to reveal to the world just yet — perhaps over the weekend or early next week, depending on how much time I have to work on it, or perhaps I’ll just say “fuck it” and flip the switch later tonight. We’ll see.

Said project is not something that’s going to make me any money in the short term, but it might be a useful means of gauging interest for something I might be able to do in the future, whether on the side or even — stranger things have happened — full-time. While I’m not expecting overnight (or even overmonth) success with it, it’s something that I personally am pleased with so far, and am enthusiastic about developing further. As I say, we shall see if it actually goes anywhere. (In the meantime, if any of you reading this have any success or horror stories about Patreon as a funding platform, I’d be interested to hear them.)

For now, though, we have reached the weekend, and here in the UK it is, thankfully, another three-day weekend. Tomorrow morning I’m heading off to Kent to get away from things for a few days; some friends and I are going to hang out, play a ton of board games, play some Street Fighter, play some TrackMania, drink, eat and fart. I will be blogging over the weekend, Internet signal permitting, and will be back on Monday.

Here’s hoping things look up a little next week; I made the mistake a short while ago of feeling like things were going along quite nicely. Now I’m back to sleepless nights filled with anxiety again. Fuck that shit.