As I noted last time, the four years I spent at university are among some of my fondest memories, both for the time I spent with friends, and for the gaming I did at that time.

One especially fond memory was picking up a PlayStation 2. I honestly have no idea how I really managed to afford one as a student with zero income, but somehow I did, nonetheless. And while I'd spent some time exploring obscure RPGs in the PS1 era, the PS2 is when I really started getting into interesting and unusual games.

This started right from the moment I actually picked up a PS2. It wasn't that long after launch, as I recall, and most of the high-profile launch titles didn't appeal to me for one reason or another, which may lead you to ask why I decided to pick up a PS2. It's honestly hard to explain; it's just something that happens to me now and then. I decide that I really want something for no discernible reason, and it remains on my mind until I find a way to get it. Capitalism at work, I guess.

Anyway, the game I elected to pick up with my PS2 was a Konami title called Shadow of Memories. I knew absolutely nothing about this whatsoever and hadn't seen any reviews of it — this was also well before the age of smartphones so I couldn't just look it up while I was in the shop gazing longingly at it — but it was immediately striking and sounded interesting, so I chose it as the first PS2 title I would ever own.

I wasn't disappointed. I'd been into story-centric games ever since I'd first started playing Sierra and LucasArts games on Atari ST and PC, and here was a game that was almost entirely story. And it presented a distinct experience to the adventure games I'd previously enjoyed; it was much less puzzle-centric, and much more focused on providing an interactive movie-esque experience with a cool structure and a compelling "time travel" premise. You can read more about it on MoeGamer if you haven't come across it previously; it's a worthy addition to any PS2 collection.

From here, I would continue to explore a variety of weird and wonderful games whenever I had the opportunity (and the money) to grab some. And in my second year, I lived about three minutes away from the local Blockbuster, so I had the opportunity to rent a variety of different titles, too.

I also picked up an Xbox and a Gamecube at various points over the course of those four years. Again, no real idea how I actually managed to afford those, and I don't remember a lot about the circumstances of getting the Xbox, but the Gamecube once again provides a very vivid, fond — and, these days, slightly bittersweet – memory.

Our local gaming store was holding a midnight launch event for the Gamecube, and my friend Tim that I mentioned last time around was a pretty hardcore Nintendo fan at this point, so naturally he wanted one. Several of us went along with him to keep him company, including me; I had no real intention of actually getting a Gamecube that evening, but ended up doing so anyway. Peer pressure is a wonderful thing.

Anyway, the memorable part of that evening was not actually the acquisition of the Gamecubes; it was the drive back. Our friend Sam, who was one of the few people we knew with a car, had graciously agreed to drive us to and from the town centre that night. For some reason, we had more people than would normally fit in his car, too, so one guy was lying across the laps of the other three in the back seat.

Sam needed fuel on the way home, so he stopped at a late-night petrol station, tanked up, paid… and then turned right out of the petrol station to begin the journey home.

Unfortunately what he (and the rest of us) hadn't realised was that said petrol station was on a dual carriageway, so he was supposed to turn left; turning right meant that he was now driving the wrong way down the road. Thankfully, there were no other cars around, so we remained safe and there was no accident.

Well, that's not quite true, there was one car. A police car. Sam was hastily pulled over, and one of the policeman pulled him out, put him in the back of his car, jumped into Sam's car and rather aggressively drove us right back into the petrol station we'd just left. He then hopped back into his own car to go and give Sam and earful while we just sat in quiet bewilderment, somewhat astonished that he had apparently not noticed the four people in the back seats instead of the distinctly more legal three or fewer. Or perhaps Sam's apparent misdemeanour was higher priority.

Sam returned to his car a few minutes later having apparently straightened the situation out. To be fair, the petrol station had no clear signs on its exit indicating that you were going back onto a one-way street, and it was situated shortly after the dual carriageway began, so I can honestly see how it was an easy mistake to make. (I've also since attempted to remember exactly where this happened, since I still live in the same city… and I can't find it!)

Anyway, those are the stories of how I got a PS2 and a Gamecube. Evidently the memory of picking up an Xbox was somewhat less exciting and hasn't stuck with me in quite the same way… but these two proved to be very memorable for very different reasons!

Hi everyone! Hope you're doing well. I'd like to kick off with a "thank you" to everyone who has been good enough to pledge to MoeGamer here on Patreon — your donations are very much appreciated, and always put to good use.

Last month, I used your donations to upgrade MoeGamer to the "Premium" package on WordPress, which means no more ads (unless I specifically choose to put in some ads that benefit me rather than WordPress, which I'd prefer to avoid doing) as well as much more storage space for images and suchlike. The latter aspect was particularly important as I was getting very close to the limit, hence why I went for the upgrade before I reached the $100 a month "target" I'd arbitrarily set for myself.

On that note, I'd like to thank those new Patrons who have pushed the site's monthly income up over the $80 a month mark — I'd been hovering around $75-78 or so for the longest time, so it's really nice to see some actual growth, and even nicer to know that people feel the work I do is worth me getting a bit of pocket money for.

I'd like to remind you all that MoeGamer has a Discord server that is currently open only to Patrons and friends I've specifically invited, so do please stop by and say hi! We have bots dishing out the latest gaming news (with a focus on Japanese stuff), custom emoji, the obligatory NSFW channel and a small but thoroughly pleasant community of people to hang out with. It'd be great to see some more of you there.

If you haven't already, be sure to connect your Patreon account to Discord to get automatically invited to the Discord server. Full instructions on how to do that can be found here.

I'm also going to be around on the Discord a bit more than I have been because I'm taking another Twitter hiatus for a bit. Recent happenings have just been utterly draining; none of them involve me directly (apart from Bob Mackey's unprovoked attack on me a few weeks back) but it's just exhausting to be around all that noise, so I'm taking a break for a week or so (possibly more) for the sake of my mental health.

The MoeGamer Twitter will still be posting stuff, but I won't be monitoring notifications or mentions. I do still get DM notifications, though, so if that's your preferred way of getting in touch, I can still see those messages. More reliable means of getting in touch are the contact form on my site, comments on the site, comments here and Discord messages, though.

Do please continue to share links to the site and to the YouTube channel… I'm trying to find time whenever possible to make video versions of articles, though in the case of more complex things that require more footage it takes a bit longer! I have several Hyrule Warriors vids to complement the Cover Game articles in the pipeline, I just need to get around to making them.

Thanks again for your continued support, and I look forward to chatting with you on the Discord.

The prospect of leaving home to go to university was both exciting and terrifying to me.

Sure, there were aspects of living at home with my parents that I'd found somewhat frustrating, but on the whole I'd had a good life and been well taken care of. What stood ahead of me was a big challenge to my self-confidence… but a challenge I knew I'd have to take on sooner or later.

I had a certain amount of time to adjust to my new environment. Since I'm a musician, I'd signed up for the pre-term orchestral course, which involved staying in one of the university's halls of residence for a week, some hardcore orchestra rehearsal, concluding with a performance of two symphonies: Shostakovich's 5th and Beethoven's 7th.

I say I had time to adjust because this somewhat more "controlled" environment meant that I came into contact with people with whom I had at least something in common, even if that thing was music rather than gaming. I particularly hit it off with a young woman named Cat, who I got to know in the lift up to our respective rooms after deciding to myself that I was finally going to get over this perpetual anxiety and just talk to someone new. (I didn't get over it. But I still talked to her.)

Following the orchestra course, it transpired that Cat was living in the halls of residence one building over from where I eventually ended up, so we saw a fair amount of one another. She'd come and hang out in my room and was quite happy to watch me play PlayStation titles such as Final Fantasy VIII and Point Blank, and Dreamcast games like Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi.

Throughout the first week of our time at university, we all got to know a few people. Besides Cat, I established that the two other boys Chris and Sam in my mixed flat were also into games to varying degrees, as was the guy named Tim who lived in the flat underneath us. Tim spent a lot of time hanging out with us because the remainder of his flat was made up of foreign students who didn't talk to him. None of us were quite sure what to make of him to begin with — this "invader" in what had quickly become a private space we all felt rather protective of — and I found myself even more confused after determining I had feelings for Cat, only to witness her getting together with Tim at the Fresher's Ball at the conclusion of our first week.

Anyway, despite my initial difficulty in dealing with aspects of the situation — which I acknowledge was entirely my own fault for being too scared to do anything — both Cat and Tim became great, close friends of mine, and once we all moved out of halls in our second year and into shared houses instead, I spent a lot of time at their house — where, as it transpired, my flatmate Chris also ended up living.

Tim, like me, had a Nintendo 64, so it was a pretty regular occurrence for a number of us to bundle around to his place and play some multiplayer games. We spent a great deal of time playing Mario Kart 64 (which has always been my least favourite in the series, so I enjoyed this by far the least out of all the possibilities we had on offer), GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Diddy Kong Racing and Duke Nukem 64. And we always, always had a great time, particularly if alcohol was involved. Which it frequently was. I have especially fond memories of a four-player Perfect Dark deathmatch with the maximum number of "FistSims" bumping up the player count, causing pretty much the entire match to unfold with blurred vision thanks to that game's pathetic melee attacks.

My former flatmate Sam had opted to live with some people from his course — Geography Becky and a few others — but spent a fair amount of time round at my house playing games. Rather than the multiplayer affairs we indulged in at Tim's house — which Sam was often a part of — when it was just the two of us we tended to play single-player titles with which it was easy to mess around. Grand Theft Auto III was a particular favourite at the time, as this was an absolutely ideal game to fire up after a boozy night at the student union, since there was just something magical about the experience of creating freeform carnage.

The drunkenness that preceded these sessions wasn't entirely without consequence, of course, and our love of Grand Theft Auto actually had a bit of an impact on our behaviour. It didn't make us violent or anything like that, I hasten to add, before you start raising your eyebrows; rather, being drunk often encouraged us to behave like the silent protagonist in that game just doing his basic actions — running with that slightly wooden PS2-era animation; awkwardly jumping without really getting any height; falling off things and rolling around on the floor.

On one particular occasion, Sam made a heroic leap onto my neighbour's fence as we approached my house, and unfortunately my neighbour was apparently looking out of the window at the time.

"Oi!" came the working-class council house voice from an upstairs window somewhere. "Geddown from there! I'll call th' police on you!" Sam got down, and we went inside laughing at the ridiculous situation as obnoxiously drunk students are wont to do.

"I'll call th' police on you" became a standard response to disagreements after this. On one particularly memorable occasion, I sent a drunken message to Sam, only I messed it up without realising it before I sent it. This was the pre-smartphone era, so it was all typed out using a keypad and thus easy to make such errors with. The eventual message read "THIS IS  POLICE. YOU ARE ARRESTED. TH" Evidently I had attempted to write "This is the police" but somehow had advanced the cursor to the end of the sentence while attempting to type "the" and consequently fucked up the rest of the message.

As you might expect, "YOU ARE ARRESTED" also became a private joke, and was often a standard response to, say, getting beaten in Mario Kart or suchlike.

My student days were probably the best opportunity I had to take part in some real "social" gaming with local multiplayer and shared experiences in single player games. I'm glad I had the chance to… and I'm a little sad that this sort of thing isn't a part of my life any more. But life moves on, I guess.

My monthly "Cover Game" format on MoeGamer has enabled me to do in-depth explorations of games as well as shining a spotlight on underappreciated titles… but I've still had something on my mind.

Specifically, how best to handle substantial series that would be difficult to cram into a single month, particularly when I actually have to play their component installments before I put pen to paper!

There are a number of series that I'd love to explore in detail at some point, but squeezing them into the monthly format would prove difficult or impossible. As such, I've decided to introduce a new (hopefully regular) feature that will enable me to explore these games more gradually alongside other titles — and perhaps compile everything into a Cover Game feature once I've explored them all to my satisfaction.

I present to you "Delving Into…"

While I present my Cover Game features from the perspective of someone who is thoroughly familiar with the game or series in question — while in many cases I'm still playing the game up until the last article I write in a month, I always insist on beating it before I write about things like the narrative — I intend Delving Into… to be a more "immediate" response to games that I'm playing; a sort of "gaming diary", if you will, only one specifically focusing on particular series.

In other words, a Delving Into… column will feature an outline of the progress I've made with a particular game or series, and what my thoughts on it are at that point. They aren't intended to be authoritative articles; instead, they're personal responses to my progress to date, perhaps with a more comprehensive wrap-up article (or a companion Essentials/One-Shot piece) once I've beaten an individual installment.

The series I particularly have in mind to cover in this way are Dragon Quest, Yakuza, Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel. All of these are impractical to rush through in the name of a monthly Cover Game feature, but I desperately want to write about all of them — and, in the case of both Dragon Quest and Trails of Cold Steel, actually try them for the first time!

I'm going to kick this off later this week with the first Delving Into Dragon Quest article looking at the progress I've made on playing Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen on Nintendo DS. This has been my "bedtime game" for the last couple of weeks and I've been enjoying it a lot. I've been meaning to educate myself about Dragon Quest for some time now, and this would seem like a good time to start writing some words about it — particularly with Dragon Quest XI just around the corner.

There are doubtless some other series that this format could work well with, too — the Warriors series springs to mind with the sheer number of games that involves! — but the titles mentioned above are likely the ones I will be focusing on to begin with.

Please let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy reading about my responses to these classic games I've been meaning to check out for some time now!