I was annoyed and upset yesterday. Today I'm feeling a bit better, because I had a fiddle around with the audio I recorded with Woody and it was by no means unsalvageable.

Okay, it's still kind of shit quality, but rather than sulking about it, I thought I'd just embrace what I did have, and the result was… well, go have a listen.

Anyway. That's that. Now it's the last day of 2018 and indeed the final hours of said day, so I believe it's obligatory in blogging to do some sort of "roundup" post contemplating what went on in the last year. So let's do that.

In no particular order, here are Things That Happened in 2018:

MoeGamer turned four years old.

I'm pleased with this. MoeGamer has been a passion project since I was unceremoniously given the boot from USgamer, and I'm delighted with what I've been able to build it into. 2018 has been its best year yet, and things are only going to get better from hereon. I'm happy with the site's core format (with a few minor tweaks, which I've already talked about previously) and I'm really looking forward to the games I'll be covering in the new year.

I got back into podcasting.

My friend Chris and I had been knocking around the idea of a podcast for a while, and 2018 was the year we finally went through with it. I used to really enjoy podcasting, but regrettably, most of the friends I used to podcast with seem to no longer think I exist or am worth talking to. (At least one of them has become a complete asshole, too, so I think I'm better off without him, frankly.) Look forward to more episodes of the show in the new year!

I held down a job.

I started 2017 in a rather unsteady employment situation. The freelance work I'd been relying on since leaving USgamer (and nearly having a nervous breakdown after working for the horrendous, horrendous company that is energy company SSE) had dried up, so I was in a bit of a desperate situation. Thankfully, I managed to find a company willing to take a chance on me… and I've been there ever since. Even better, they seem to think I'm doing a good job, which is nice. This is a huge load off my mind… although it does take time away from the things I really want to do, like MoeGamer, Videopac Games and Atari A to Z! Still, I can't complain too much…

I re-established contact with some old friends.

Woody, with whom I did the most recent podcast episode, is someone I knew at school, and someone whose friendship I have always truly valued. He's someone with whom I feel at ease and with whom I can be myself, and I think that probably comes across in the podcast despite the shitty audio. I hadn't kept in contact with Woody much for a few years — at least partly due to his desire to stay well away from social media! — but WhatsApp Messenger allowed me to pick up where we left off in our friendship… accompanied by fart and poo videos from our mutual friend Matt.

I played Dragon Quest for the first time.

I figured out a way to cover lengthy series over the long term with the "Delving Into" series, and played through both Dragon Quest IV and most of Dragon Quest V. I've kind of fallen off the wagon a bit with how much I tried to pack into the end of the year, but I'll be getting back to the Delving Into series in the new year, finishing off Dragon Quest V and moving on to the subsequent installments over time.

I had to confront and accept the fact that time passes and things change.

I don't want to go into too much detail here, but, well, let's just say as we all get older, we all have to deal with certain realities. People — friends, family, loved ones — who you'd taken for granted as being a constant presence in your life… there might come a reminder that you can't always rely on that forever. Thankfully, the "scares" we encountered in this regard seemed to… if not get completely "resolved", then things are certainly moving in a good direction. And in the meantime, there was one of the aforementioned Delving Into articles linked above that helped me process some of the things I was feeling at the time. I'll leave you to determine which one.

We lost a beloved friend.

Ruby's passing hurt me deeply and I'm still feeling the effects today. There's not a lot more I can say about this aside from the fact that I miss her every day… and her not being here any more makes the time I get to spend both with Meg (my cat) and Andie (my wife) all the more precious. We all have to deal with loss at some point in our lives… but you shouldn't forget about the people (and cats) who are still there for you.

I established some solid formats for my YouTube channel.

My viewer figures may be low, but I enjoy what I do. The combination of podcasting and themed Let's Plays is working well for me, and I intend to support that further with some "readings" of articles in the new year. I'm going to set aside Saturdays for video production purposes and try to prepare a bunch of stuff in advance. A sense of organisation has really helped with MoeGamer in general, so it can only be a good thing for the YouTube channel too. Speaking of which…

I launched two more creative/historical projects.

I grew up with Atari computers and a Philips G7000 Videopac Computer (aka Magnavox Odyssey 2) and I've been wanting to find some means of celebrating these for some time now. I eventually settled on themed Let's Plays for the Atari games as a means of showing what both the 8- and 16-bit Atari computers had to offer, and a dedicated site for the Videopac games. I'm going to try and make much more of the latter in particular in the new year, and continue with the Atari A to Z videos as I'm really enjoying making them.

—

This almost certainly isn't everything of note, but as I sit here at 10pm on New Year's Eve, it's everything that occurs to me. Contemplating stuff like this at times like this is a good opportunity to take stock of what is really important. And thinking about it this way, it's easy to see that some of the things that have stressed me out the most this year are… completely irrelevant. So it would probably make sense to try and cut those stressors out of my life as much as possible in 2019, huh?

Anyway. I'll wish you all happy new year properly tomorrow… but for now I'll just say I hope you all have a pleasant New Year's Eve, whatever you happen to be doing (even if it's "nothing", like me) and that you are able to say either a fond farewell or a saucy "good riddance" to 2018, depending on how things have gone for you.

Happy new year, everyone. And thanks once again for your support.

I'm annoyed with myself.

I took the time to go and see my friend to record a special episode of the podcast today and… I kind of messed up a bit. Instead of recording our conversation with my nice mic that I normally use for the podcast and videos — and which I'd gone to the trouble to bring with me — it seems I inadvertently used my laptop's shitty inbuilt mic instead. As a result, the conversation is audible, but the quality is pretty crap.

Essentially, complacency is to blame; my computer at home is set up to use my nice mic by default, so changing the input device when recording in Audacity simply didn't occur to me during this session. Rookie, stupid mistake that I am kicking myself for. You can bet your ass that I won't make that mistake ever again, however!

This is a bummer, as we had an entertaining nostalgia-fest about growing up gaming, our changing attitudes towards gaming over the years, and all manner of other things. However, with the crappy sound, the whole thing simply isn't up to the standards I've set for myself on the MoeGamer Podcast and on my online media channels in general, and I don't think I'd be entirely happy putting it out as is.

Oh well. Nothing that can be done about it now, and it's not as if this is the last time I'll see that friend (I hope; please don't die, Woody) so if the worst comes to the worst we can always revisit the topics at a later time. And in the meantime, I'm at least going to see if there's anything I can do with the audio; if people are interested but I'm still not happy with the sound quality, I can always do a Patrons-exclusive "rough and ready" episode or something, just be aware of what I've described above!

Ah well. Mistakes happen, often at the worst of times. This ultimately isn't an especially important mistake in the grand scheme of things, but it's still upset and frustrated me a bit, given that I'd been looking forward to getting this done.

Well, like I say, I'll see what I can do with the audio when I get home. Something may be salvageable. We'll have to wait and see! Apologies to those of you who were looking forward to something interesting and unusual…

Andie bought me Breath of the Wild for Christmas, as I believe I've mentioned already, so I thought I'd fire it up and give it a bit of a shot today.

I came away very impressed with the experience.

I've spent the last couple of years thinking I don't really like open-world games all that much, when in fact a few hours with Breath of the Wild today made it pretty abundantly clear that I don't like Western open-world games all that much.

I've been over this on the podcast a few times, but the main problem I have with them — primarily if they unfold from a first-person perspective — is the sheer feeling of "weight" to movement. And I don't mean this in a "weighty, satisfying combat" sort of way — I mean it's a real chore simply to move around in a lot of cases.

Rockstar games are a prime offender in this. In many open world games, I really enjoy moving around on foot in preference to faster forms of travel — it enables you to seek out interesting viewpoints and perhaps find a few secrets here and there. But in Rockstar games the physics on the player character are so painfully exaggerated — or perhaps they're just "realistic", and that's the problem — that it's just a chore to get around sometimes.

In Breath of the Wild, the controls are delightfully responsive. Push a direction, Link goes that way. Walk into a wall, Link will try to climb it. And he can climb most walls. This gets around one of my main frustrations I had with games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3: knowing the place you want to get to is on the other side of the big-ass mountain that is right in front of you, but not having the ability to actually climb that mountain and get over it, necessitating a long and irritating orbit of the base, hoping to find a pathway. In Breath of the Wild, assuming you've got enough stamina or can find suitable ledges to rest on on the way up, you can simply climb up the cliff face and hop down the other side if necessary.

Although this brings up another interesting point: although I'm early in the game so far, at no point have I felt that is necessary, because simply navigating around the world "as intended" makes so much sense. There are plenty of landmarks and pieces of interesting scenery to navigate by — there's even a "Pro" mode where you remove the minimap and compass if you so desire — and the game's core gimmick, the "Sheikah Slate", allows you to easily set waypoints by line of sight, not just by dropping pins on a map. Delightful.

The game also nicely sidesteps the "map covered in dots" thing that Ubisoft games in particular tend to run afoul of, but is also evident in Rockstar games, titles like Horizon: Zero Dawn and even The Witcher 3. Rather than the game world feeling like a checklist of things to do, in Breath of the Wild you appear to discover things naturally and organically. Yes, there is a "main quest" to follow that takes you to various different places, but in the often long journeys between main story beats, there's plenty to see and do just by going "I wonder what that is" and discovering something interesting.

I also really like the special "Rune" abilities. You unlock several of these quite early on, allowing you to create climbable icy pillars in bodies of water, manipulate metallic objects using metallic fields, freeze something in time for a few seconds and build up kinetic energy ready to release it when its time unfreezes, and summon both spherical and cube-shaped bombs. Between these abilities — and there's a few more still to unlock, I believe — your options for getting around and manipulating the environment are considerably more interesting than in many other games of this type, and they allow for some creative solutions to problems.

In one situation, for example, I was coming up on a group of Bokoblins around a camp fire. Rather than rushing in with one of my rather fragile weapons swinging, I noticed a metallic crate nearby, grabbed it with the magnetic rune, then simply "swept" all the Bokoblins off the top of the cliff they were camping on, removing any need for me to actually fight them conventionally. While it is possible to get into situations like that in Skyrim with some creative use of magic items, in Breath of the Wild you have the capability to set up entertaining incidents like this pretty much from the outset.

I'll provide a more detailed write-up on MoeGamer when I've played a bit more (or, more likely, actually beaten it) — I doubt I'll do a full Cover Game feature on it as it's not exactly a game that "needs" any more attention than it's had to date, but I'm definitely having a real blast with it so far, and I approve of it heartily as my Christmas present.

Now, I better get some sleep. Fingers crossed my friend(s) will be available for podcasting tomorrow… we shall see!

Greetings from somewhere other than where these posts usually come from!

Yes, I'm bringing this to you live from my parents' place and my childhood home; having spent Christmas itself with my in-laws, we've come to see my family for the "post-Christmas" festivities. I say "festivities"; what I really mean is "a nice bit of peace and quiet".

Incidentally, the "away from home" nature of this post and the next few mean that I will be typing at least some of these on my phone. The Patreon phone app is a laggy piece of crap so I apologise in advance for any spelling or layout issues.

Anyway. As I was saying, I am away from home. Or back home, however you choose to interpret those words.

I've come to appreciate the peace and quiet of the country village I grew up in a lot more as I've got older. I'm not sure I'd actually want to live here again as it takes a long time for services we take for granted in towns to arrive here — I can't remember offhand if they have fibre optic Internet here yet, for example, and forget about lazy man's services such as Deliveroo — but it's definitely nice to spend a few days here now and again.

I appreciate the portability of the Switch on trips like this, too. Not only can I play it in handheld mode, it's a simple matter to bring the whole dock with me and play it on the TV, so I don't have to be away from the games I'm playing and that I want to cover once the New Year gets underway.

I've spent the evening eating good food and playing Atelier Totori, and I imagine much of tomorrow will be spent in a similar fashion. With any luck on Sunday I'll be meeting up with an old friend to record a special episode of the podcast, but this isn't a sure thing just yet. We'll see.

For now I better get some sleep in the eerie silence of the country, although at least I can count on my cat Meg to break the peace by having a noisy wash or scratch every so often.

Good night!

No-one has actually specifically asked me about this, but I know it's a popular subject that people like to find out more about, so I'd like to take the opportunity to outline the various boxes and wires I have under my TV for everyday gaming and video/screenshot capture.

At present, I have fourteen consoles around my living room TV:

• Nintendo Switch
  – Sega Dreamcast
  – Super Nintendo
  – Wii (softmodded)
  – SNES Classic Mini
  – Wii U
  – Xbox 360 (old-style casing, but the model that didn't RROD/had HDMI)
  – Two PS2s (one PAL, one US NTSC)
  – Nintendo 64
  – Sega Mega Drive
  – PlayStation 3
  – PlayStation 4 (with PSVR)
  – PSTV

I'm probably going to make some changes to this in the new year; most notably, I think the 16-bit consoles are going to move upstairs into my "retro room" which is currently dominated by Atari computers and the Philips G7000 Videopac. There's also an NES up there, and the TV monitor I use those on is small but works beautifully — it's an old-school Trinitron, so still pretty much the best of the best you can get in terms of CRT quality.

However, even with the Mega Drive and the SNES going upstairs, you'll still notice that there are a lot of systems there, and TVs only have so many HDMI ports. I also make a specific effort with my setup to avoid plugging SCART cables directly into the TV as much as possible as the quality is not very good.

Rather than having HDMI switchboxes, the core of my setup is my Elgato Game Capture HD (Amazon). This is the slightly older model that only does 30fps capture (and is compatible with older versions of Windows) but it works absolutely fine. It's powered by a USB cable that runs to my TV — my TV has two USB ports that carry power — and has an HDMI output (that runs to the TV) and an HDMI input (which I simply swap to the relevant cable according to what system I want to play or capture).

Pro-tip here: label your HDMI cables if you have a lot of them. You'll thank yourself later.

Anyway, so the basic idea is that I decide what I want to play or capture and simply plug in the appropriate HDMI cable, then I'm away. The Game Capture HD does HDMI passthrough as long as it is powered via USB, so there's no need to run the Game Capture software. As such, as well as allowing easy capturing from consoles that have no built-in capture facilities, it's also simply an easily accessible HDMI port.

With most HD consoles, that's all you need to get started. There are a few additional hookups required for certain specific cases, however, so let's look at those.

This bad lad is an HDMI splitter, and you'll need one of these if you want to capture footage from either a PlayStation 3 or a PSTV. You can also use it to capture from a PS4 without having to turn off the HDCP setting.

What this box actually does is take a single HDMI input and split it into two HDMI outputs. That's not what most people use it for, however: a side effect of the splitting process is that it strips out the pesky HDCP copy protection that is carried out from the PSTV and PS3, normally preventing you from capturing footage from these devices.

There are many different models of this available; I simply went for a cheap one with good reviews that you can find on Amazon here. It's powered by USB, so again my TV powers this, and it's simple and straightforward to use — just plug and play.

Next, if you, like me, wish to avoid using the SCART port on your TV (if indeed you even have one), you'll need some sort of upscaling device to connect older SD consoles to your shiny new TV. There are cables that can simply convert the signal, but to get the best possible picture you'll want to use some sort of upscaling device.

Many retro gamers swear by the Japanese FrameMeister devices, but these are extremely expensive, costing as much as a brand new console in many cases. They do output a fantastic picture, but they require a fair amount of setting up and fiddling with to get going in the first place.

The device pictured here is a cheap and cheerful upscaler I picked up, once again, from Amazon. It takes a SCART input and outputs to HDMI in a number of different resolutions up to and including 1080p. I've found it to work absolutely perfectly for my purposes, providing minimal input lag and an excellent quality picture. Some 50Hz PAL games can "judder" a little bit, but I think this is mostly down to shoddy programming in a lot of cases rather than a problem with the device. For PS2 in particular it outputs a beautiful quality image — here's an example.

There's an additional piece to the puzzle you'll want to include if you really want the best possible picture from SCART-capable consoles, and that's an RGB SCART cable. These provide the best possible quality output from the console, and thus upscaling this to 1080p gives you the best possible picture at the best possible resolution. I have RGB SCART cables for my PlayStation 2, Mega Drive and Super NES, and I got them all from Retro Gaming Cables. They're seemingly expensive for what they are, but they're well worth the outlay if you're serious about getting a good picture.

One additional thing you may want if you're using an original Wii is a device such as this, which simply plugs into the back of the Wii to provide an HDMI output instead of composite or component. It's by no means essential, but I found it a bit more convenient than running it through the upscaler.

Altogether, that's everything you might need to capture from both SD and HD consoles if all you want to do is capture gameplay and/or screenshots. If you want to record commentary, however, there are a few additional bits and pieces you might need. Most significant of these is a microphone.

You can use a microphone on a gaming headset if you want, but for the best possible quality you'll want some sort of dedicated microphone. I use the Marantz Pod Pack 1 setup (Amazon), which comes with a USB microphone and a boom arm. I also added a pop shield to put in front of the microphone to prevent plosive sounds from making loud bassy noises on recordings. These are all much of a muchness; you can even make one yourself by stretching some tights over a coat hanger if you're feeling really cheap.

The Pod Pack 1 setup is very cheap for what it provides. The microphone quality is excellent and the boom arm is nice and stable. My only slight objection is that the microphone is too heavy to stand "upright" on the end of the stand, but it works absolutely fine "upside down" so I just use it that way now instead.

One issue you may run into when recording some consoles with commentary is that they don't have the facility to connect a headset and listen to the game audio. This forces you to mute or turn down the audio on the TV while you are recording, meaning you can't fully enjoy the game. I needed a solution that would allow me to listen to games on systems such as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 while I was recording, and the simplest way to do that was to get a device that would let me connect headphones to my TV. Apparently TVs simply do not have headphone jacks any more.

Anyway, I came across this device on Amazon which takes an optical input and converts it to an analogue signal through either a 3.5mm headphone jack or red and white phono cables. There's no amplifier in the device, so the audio output on headphones isn't super loud, but it's definitely sufficient to let you get immersed in the game while recording.

And if you're lazy like me (or just don't like switching optical cables around because they're a pain in the arse) you may also want this thing:

This was yet another Amazon find, of course — by the way, none of the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links or anything, if you were wondering — and simply takes one optical input and splits it into three optical outputs. It needs powering via a 5V DC adapter, which is provided, so you'll need a spare electrical socket — you might be able to get away with powering it via USB, but I haven't tried that.

So there you have it. The reason I have so many cables under my TV, but this setup allows me to record anything with ease, switch between systems and enjoy them either through my speakers or on headphones. I hope this has been of some help and/or interest to those of you interested in optimising your gaming setup!

I got a bit of money for Christmas as well as a rather generous bonus from work, so I've treated myself to a few things that are now on the way.

First up is the Atari Flashback Classics pack for Switch, which is a compilation of the three separate Atari Flashback Classics releases for PS4 and Xbox One. The third volume of these was released alongside the Switch version and, I was excited to see, incorporated some Atari 5200 games for the first time… including the good version of Star Raiders! At last! No longer do I have to suffer the indignity of the 2600 version. (Not that the 2600 version is bad, I should probably add, but the 5200/Atari 8-bit version is infinitely superior.)

This package proved to be a bit of an ordeal to get, because for some inexplicable reason Atari doesn't appear to have arranged any sort of distribution in Europe. PQube handled the first two volumes of Atari Flashback Classics on PS4 and Xbox One, which I already own, but they had nothing to do with either volume 3 or the Switch release, so my only option was to import.

Easy enough these days, you might think — just pop on Amazon or something and get an American copy shipped over. Uh-uh. Amazon was out of stock and most other big American retailers wouldn't ship to the UK. I was beginning to think I was never going to get my hands on this — and, of course, with the decline in likelihood came an enormous increase in the amount that I really wanted it.

Thankfully, I found a copy on eBay, and the seller even promised to ship to the UK for free, which was extraordinarily generous of him. I won the auction and ended up paying a little more than the standard retail price of the package, but probably less than shipping fees to the UK from a US retailer, so I haven't really lost out. I just have to wait for it to arrive now. Looking forward to it.

NIS Europe had a Boxing Day sale, too, where a number of their slightly older titles (or games that, you get the impression, they wanted to shift a few more copies of) had some generous discounts, so I grabbed Fallen Legion and God Wars for Switch, both of which are games I'm interested in writing about on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. NIS Europe's online store also tends to ship super-fast, too, so I should have those within a day or two.

I grabbed a couple more Philips G7000 Videopac games, too, as I intend to knuckle down and get properly stuck into my Videopac Games project in the new year. I forget the exact names offhand, but one is a bit like Star Raiders (i.e. a first-person perspective space sim) and the other is a side-on shoot 'em up that is very well regarded. Looking forward to giving those a go.

And finally, I snagged Diablo III for Switch, as I've been wanting to try the console versions of this for some time now, and having Diablo III on the go is just too appealing a prospect to pass up on. I tried it out this evening with my podcasting partner Chris, and we had a wonderfully smooth experience with it. Looking forward to exploring that further in the coming weeks and months — Diablo III is very much one of those "evergreen games" like I wrote about on MoeGamer earlier today, so I'm sure this will be a regular part of my rotation, particularly with how easy it is to get multiplayer up and running.

Anyway. Schedule and posting regularity will still be a bit wobbly for the next few days as I'm off to go and see my parents this coming weekend, but things should be back to normal by the new year at the latest.

I hope you've enjoyed your leftovers, and those of you who have to go back to work between now and the new year… you have my sympathies!

Merry Christmas, once again, everyone.

Hello! This is being published late because I wrote it in a note on my phone and then forgot to actually copy it into this 'ere blog. Whoops.

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you've all had an excellent day. Mine was quiet and relatively uneventful, but fun enough. I had some nice presents (including Zelda for Switch, which I've had my eye on for ages but never got around to getting) and we ate good food in good company.

A Switch proved to be a popular Christmas present, as Andie bought herself one with some combined Christmas-birthday money a little while ago, and Andie's sister Michelle also got one for Christmas, too. That meant while we were at my mother-in-law's place for Christmas Day, there were four Switches in attendance, which was nice to see. What was even nicer to see was how easy it is to pair up Joy-Cons with another console — simply slide them on to the side of the console you want to pair them with, and it's all done. Wonderful stuff.

We played a bit of Jackbox Party Pack 2 on Switch, which is a perfect fit for the little machine — though I was a little disappointed it's not possible to use additional Switches as your "answer terminals". For the unfamiliar, the Jackbox Party Pack games display various quizzes and challenges on the TV (or Switch display) and everyone playing makes use of a phone or tablet to play the game by connecting to a special website and entering a short code the game generates. It's a really easy to set up and extremely effective means of getting a party game rolling, and certainly a damn sight preferable to Cards Against fucking Humanity.

I haven't tried Zelda yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Andie has indicated it's a game she'd be interested in watching, which is always a bonus as it means we can spend some time together — and now she has a Switch too she can still play some more substantial affairs while sitting on the sofa with me while I play on the TV. That's pretty cool. She picked up Valthirian Arc, which is a game I've been curious about; she seems to be enjoying it so far, which I'm pleased about.

Anyway, it's been a long day and [editor's note: at the time of writing] we have a long drive home ahead of us. Once again, I hope you had a lovely day, and that your festivities continue into the new year.

Hello everyone! It's the day before the big day. I hope you're all ready and haven't found yourselves having to brave the "last-minute" rush at the shops.

Andie and I will be heading over to her mother's place this evening to celebrate Christmas Day, then we'll be coming back tomorrow evening. We're having to leave Meg by herself, so we don't want to leave her on her own for too long. (We'll be leaving her plenty of food, and something that makes noise so she doesn't get too lonely though!)

We'll also be paying my parents a visit shortly after Christmas, and for that we'll actually be taking Meg with us, because it's for a few days rather than just overnight. We took Meg and Ruby with us to my parents' place last year and although they didn't think much of the car journey, they seemed to enjoy spending a bit of time somewhere different; Meg quickly found the comfiest spots in the house to go and hide if she didn't want company, and Ruby was pretty friendly with everyone.

I miss Ruby, particularly at this time of year. I know rationally speaking she didn't do anything particularly "special" at Christmas, being a cat, but Christmas is a time for your whole family to be together, and thus it's hard not to think about those who aren't with us any more. Especially as it wasn't really all that long ago that we lost her. I hope she knows we're thinking of her, wherever she is now.

I'm not anticipating any presents as hugely exciting as the Switch my parents were kind enough to get me last year, but it will be nice to just spend a bit of time with people somewhere else for a bit in that nice sort of "cosy" atmosphere a house on Christmas day provides. Andie's mum typically provides a log fire for extra cosiness, and she does a great Christmas dinner.

Anyway. I'm going to have a nice lazy day today, likely spent mostly in the company of Atelier Totori, and I hope you all have the opportunity to get some rest too. I'll write again tomorrow, of course, but in the meantime I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and enjoy good food, good company and great presents.

Love you all!

I finished Atelier Rorona DX today. I'll be covering the series in detail on MoeGamer in January.

I've been looking forward to revisiting this series for quite some time, as somehow I've only ever gotten to various incarnations of Rorona, never Totori and Meruru.

The upside of this is that I now have a pretty good understanding of how Rorona's mechanics and structure work, and as such I not only managed to bag the True ending in the main game (plus Cordelia's character ending), I also managed to successfully clear the Overtime mode that was added in Atelier Rorona Plus. (This is why this post is so late, to be frank; I was playing the game all day!)

Atelier Rorona has always been an extremely addictive game that tickles all of the pleasure centres of my brain. We have satisfying RPG combat with a strong focus on equipment. We have interesting dungeons to explore, each with their own unique lineup of enemies, items to gather and enemies to defeat. We have a time management element. And, of course, we have cute girls.

I didn't used to be a big fan of crafting systems in games, and I'm still not hugely enamoured with them in many games where it's not the main focus — while I appreciated the mechanical depth in Final Fantasy XIV's crafting, for example, I always felt like I'd rather be doing something else whenever I engaged with it. But in Atelier Rorona, I love it. There's a really satisfying cycle of gathering ingredients, making things with them and, as you progress, then making further things with the things you just made.

This is taken to an extreme in the Overtime mode, where Totori and Meruru from their respective games come to "visit" after some sort of temporal accident. The only way to get them back to their correct times is to build an item called a Dragon Hourglass; in a year, Rorona's master Astrid will successfully complete one of these and be able to call Totori and Meruru home, but Rorona sets it as a bit of a challenge for herself.

Constructing the Dragon Hourglass is a daunting task. It requires four ingredients, two of which have to be crafted, one of which is very rare indeed and one of which is a drop from probably the first powerful "boss" monster you encounter towards the end of the main game. Of the two crafted ingredients, one of these also requires another instance of the rare ingredient, so you better find a good source of them quick. (Thankfully, I discovered that one particular group of enemies on the first floor of one of the two "postgame" dungeons drops this item fairly consistently, so that saved me a lot of headaches.)

Then there's a snag when you come to construct the Dragon Hourglass: it requires 400 MP to craft. My Rorona only had 280 MP at this point, and if you attempt to craft something without enough MP, you have a base success chance of 0%. How to get around this?

Well, you have a few options. For one, you can carefully construct equipment specifically for crafting purposes that emphasises boosts to Rorona's MP, though you pretty much need to fill every available equipment slot with a suitable item if you take this approach, and it's not very efficient or economic.

The other alternative is to ensure you make ingredients that have a "Success" trait attached to them. Atelier Rorona is all about Traits; these are attached to ingredients, and when you craft something, you're able to pass down up to five Traits from the ingredients to the end product. If you're clever, you'll stack different levels of the same Trait to create an even more effective "super-Trait", but the "Cost" for these is significantly higher, meaning it can only be attached to more complex items.

The Success trait increases the base chance of success when crafting an item by a certain amount. You might well see where this is going! Yes, indeed, you basically forget all about the MP prerequisite and instead boost your chances of success as much as possible. By combining the Success lv 1 and lv 2 Traits, I formed the Beginner trait, which increased the base chance of success by 50. A 1 in 2 chance to make the correct item is better than a 0 in 1 chance… and you can, of course, always save and reload if you mess up, because those ingredients are hard and time-consuming to come by.

Unfortunately, the game trolls you a bit at this point by helpfully informing you that the Dragon Hourglass you made wasn't quite good enough. So you have to make another one, this time using an Ancient Dragon Horn instead of just a regular old Dragon Horn. And where, pray tell, is an Ancient Dragon? Right at the bottom of the big mysterious dungeon right outside of town, of course. And beyond one of the toughest superbosses in the game… although on my playthrough I somehow managed to skip past this fight without having to take him on.

Does the new "True Dragon Hourglass" work? Well, you'll have to finish the game for yourself to see… suffice to say, this whole quest was a lot of fun and kept me glued to the damn game for pretty much all of today. I adore Atelier Rorona and I'm looking forward to finally checking out Totori and Meruru for the first time after literally years of saying "I should really play those games sometime…"

Watch out for the full features on these games on MoeGamer in January. Now I'd better sleep!

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I wanted to talk about this today because I've been doing podcasts off and on for quite a long time now, and I've always enjoyed it. This, to be honest, surprises me quite a bit — we'll get onto that a bit later.

The first podcast I did was called Gaming with Pedwood, and it was an experiment with some old school friends. You can actually still find this online in various places, such as here on Podchaser.

Gaming with Pedwood was inspired by our friend Ed's interest in Ricky Gervais' podcast at the time. He was rather taken with the casual, off-the-cuff format that Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington had with their podcast, and suggested that we try it for ourselves next time we got together. So we did, recording three episodes on one occasion, then three more a little while later after we'd decided that yes, we'd had a good time.

Gaming with Pedwood was a lot of fun to me because we managed to find a good balance between pissing about as old friends and saying something with some actual substance to it. I really enjoyed it when we reminisced about the games we played in school, and all of us had plenty of entertaining (if mundane) stories to tell. It was definitely a fond memory.

The next one I did was an offshoot of a community I was once part of called The Squadron of Shame. This began as a group of people on 1up.com's "Radio" forum, attempting to continue a challenge the site's podcast hosts had set for themselves and promptly abandoned after no more than a week. The concept was simple: it was effectively a "gaming book club", in which we'd all play the same thing at the same time, then share our thoughts with one another. The podcast was a natural extension of that after 1up's community imploded.

I enjoyed the Squadron of Shame podcasts for different reasons to Gaming with Pedwood — though they were a huge challenge to edit at times. We'd often have quite a few people involved with a single episode, and while this made for interesting and lively discussions, it also gave me huge headaches any time I had to, say, figure out where a weird noise was coming from, or try and at least make it appear that people weren't talking over one another.

Regrettably, the other members of the Squadron of Shame have mostly left me in the dust over the course of the last few years, and I don't really know the reason why. It's upsetting and frustrating given how close we all used to be — many of us visited each other on several different occasions despite being in completely different countries, for example — but I guess this sort of thing happens. We had good times while they lasted.

The Squadron of Shame's podcasts aren't online anywhere at the minute. I think I do still have the original mp3 files for them, so if I find a suitable place to put them you can hear what we got up to at some point in the future. They're an interesting and varied listen.

And so we come to my current podcasting project, The MoeGamer Podcast. This was something my co-host Chris and I had discussed a few times after striking up our friendship. Chris appeared on another podcast for a short while before, to put it politely, deciding he didn't quite "mesh" with how some of his co-hosts wanted to do things, so we decided that one weekend we'd give it a go for ourselves. Sixteen episodes later we have a show that I'm pretty consistently proud of.

The MoeGamer Podcast kind of blends elements from both of my past experiences with podcasting. It has the clear structure of the Squadron of Shame's podcasts, but the somewhat casual, laid-back style of Gaming with Pedwood. With just me and Chris, it's the smallest-scale podcast I've ever been involved with, and I think it works very well as a conversation between just two people. It's always a pleasure to record, it's fun (if time-consuming) to edit and I've learned a lot about a variety of different things since we started it.

And so on to why I find it strange that I enjoy podcasting so much: well, I've alluded to it before, but I'm riddled with social anxiety, and find the idea of "just talking to someone" quite a daunting prospect. I am extremely anxious about being placed in a social situation with someone, and particularly wary of voice-only communications over the phone or via Internet voice chat.

In the case of Gaming with Pedwood, this wasn't much of an issue, because we all knew each other very well and were in the same room with one another, drinking, farting and burping. In the case of the Squadron of Shame podcast, it took time and courage for me to step up to the plate and contribute, though the appreciation I got for being The Guy Who Knew How To Edit and Publish Podcasts helped give me confidence. And in the case of The MoeGamer Podcast, I'm now leading a show in collaboration with a close friend; I was extremely nervous the first time we recorded, since it was also (if I remember correctly) the first time Chris and I had ever voice chatted, but I was happy that things went so well — and they've only improved from there.

An interesting side-effect of all the podcasting and video work I've done over the course of the last year in particular is that it's caused me to feel a lot better about my voice. I used to absolutely hate hearing my voice — a side-effect of having to record my piano exam pieces for my grandparents as a kid and my parents insisting that I gave a spoken introduction to them, I feel — but now, I actually quite like it.

To be perfectly frank, and I'm aware how vain this sounds, I actually rather enjoy watching back my own videos and listening to our podcast episodes again and again. But then, I also enjoy reading my own articles, so I think that element of pride — or at least a desire to enjoy the things I've created myself — has always been in me to a certain degree. Given my self-esteem is rather low in other areas of my life, I think I might overcompensate a bit with the pride I take in the things I feel I'm actually quite good at!

Still. There it is. If you've not yet listened to our podcast, check the links above to enjoy it for yourself — and share it with your friends, too! I think we've got a great show going, and I'm always happy to know that more people are listening.