[After-the-fact note: This was all before the Great 2019 ProJared Controversy.]

I finished watching ProJared's playthrough of Doki Doki Literature Club today. Even if you've experienced the game for yourself, I'd encourage you to give it a watch; it really reinforces what I said recently about him being an exemplary Let's Player.

The reason I say this is that Doki Doki Literature Club had the dubious honour of becoming something of a "meme game" shortly after its release, much like Undertale did. Jared, meanwhile, went in completely blind and refused to look up any information beforehand… And the series was all the better for it.

With anything that becomes a meme like DDLC did, there's inevitable backlash and cynicism after a while. And that's unfortunate, because watching it back, DDLC actually does a lot of interesting things really, really well, both in terms of its overall structure and the subject matter it explores.

This is one of several reasons I've been keen to step back from social media somewhat. The experience of so many things will be enhanced beyond measure by not having teenage edgelords memeing them into oblivion at every opportunity. Or at least not seeing those teenage edgelords memeing them into oblivion!

With this in mind, I'm excited to give Undertale a go in a year or two… 🙂

Stepping back from Twitter once again has been a good decision. And I feel like it might "stick" this time, because I'm feeling a whole bunch of interesting things that I haven't felt before on previous occasions when I've taken a Twitter break.

The most significant of these is probably the fact that the prospect of Twitter now causes me anxiety. Now, this is not a good thing in and of itself, but it is a sign that I recognise what a bad influence that site can be on one's life and mental wellbeing.

To explain what I mean, I have poked my head in on Twitter a couple of times on the last week, but only to see if I had any mentions or direct messages. I had a few, and no-one wanted to shout at me. Great. However, the moment I saw the main timeline, I felt an odd sensation somewhat akin to panic, weirdly, and I knew that I just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. The tab was closed and I didn't even look at anything anyone had posted. I didn't want to know.

The other thing is that stepping back from Twitter allows one to put things into perspective somewhat. On Twitter everything is a massive deal, the worst thing that ever happened, literally killing people or something along those lines. And it's easy to get swept up in that hysteria — and it is hysteria — every time something mildly inconvenient happens. However, take a step back and think about the things that you're considering getting angry about, and almost a perfect ten times out of ten I can guarantee that they're probably not worth getting angry about — because there's nothing you can do about them, because they don't really affect you all that much, because there are infinitely better, more productive and more fun things you could be doing with your time.

I watched a video on YouTube earlier by someone I occasionally enjoy commentary on recent happenings by, because although he's an active participant in social media, he recognises when people are being silly. His most recent video highlighted an excellent example of this, and he still had people in his comments saying how wrong he was, "well actually"-ing and all that good stuff. When I was fully engaged with Twitter, I might have been right there with them; having not actively engaged with the site for several weeks now, I understand what he's saying and why.

So outside of daily posts promoting my content, channel, book and that stuff, you won't be seeing me around Twitter for the discernible future. There are plenty of means to get in touch with me, though! You can leave a comment or use the contact form on MoeGamer, you can leave a comment here on Patreon, you can send me a message through Patreon, or you can hit me up on Discord if you have that.

Twitter has become a negative influence in my life, and I don't need it. So out the window it goes — as a means of social interaction, anyway.

Good morning! I was so excited to finally be free of the day job for two weeks last night that I forgot to post here. Apologies. Well, here I am now.

So what are my plans for this first weekend of freedom? Well, a few things to do today. I have an Atari A to Z Flashback video to get up (which might be a bit later than usual because it's a slightly fiddly one to record), a podcast to record with Chris that will hopefully be with you all on Monday, and, of course, some games to play. I'm closing in on the end of Death end re;Quest now, so hopefully I will have that finished in the next couple of days and be ready to write about the story.

Beyond that, anything goes! Well, not literally anything, obviously, there are of course societal and legal restrictions and obligations in place, but aside from those boring realities, I'm fully intending to take full advantage of this two weeks off to do plenty of fun and creative things around the website and YouTube channel. I hope you enjoy whatever I come up with!

One of the things I find most annoying about a lot of modern — particularly ad-supported — content on the Web is how keen it is to interrupt you while you're in the middle of something.

I was looking at a site for some instructions on something or other earlier — I forget exactly what, since the experience ended up being more about the annoying factors than the actual content — and I was immediately interrupted by a cookie popup, which took me to a separate page where I couldn't read the article when I attempted to close it rather than clicking "accept". Once I went back, accepted the cookies and started reading the article, a video started playing at the top of the page. Then, after I'd stopped this, halfway through me reading the actual text, the page faded out and a sign "boinged" into place inviting me to subscribe to the site's mailing list. I closed the tab and looked for the information elsewhere.

This is an extreme example, but it seems to happen quite a bit, particularly with "advice" blogs and tech support sites. Elsewhere, we have things like Wikia's (sorry, "Fandom's") autoplaying videos, which not only are not affiliated directly with the wikis they appear on, but often get information wrong. (Look at the page for Ann Takamaki from Persona 5, for example; the video calls her "Ann Tensei", which is not a mistake someone maintaining a Shin Megami Tensei wiki would make!) Or one particular, specific annoyance, which is articles interrupting the flow of their own text with "You May Also Like…" links, sometimes before the writer has even gotten to the point. News sites (even ones one might typically believe to be "reputable") appear particularly prone to this, but I've seen some game sites do it too.

With all this in mind, it's no wonder that the average Internet user is assumed to have the attention span of a particularly hyperactive house fly. To me, it speaks volumes as to the lack of faith a site has in its content if it's already trying to direct people elsewhere even before the reader has finished looking at the thing they're currently looking at.

Maybe I'm just being an old fart, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to settle down to read something without being interrupted now and again!

First up, I see we have a new Patron! Welcome! Pull up a chair, I'm delighted you're here; thank you for your support.

Now, onto today's largely unstructured ramblings that only you dear Patrons get to enjoy.

My brain has already checked out and is on vacation, even though there's still two full days of the day job ahead of me before my blissful two weeks of time off. While it's been wandering through happy places that don't involve fighting terrible pieces of proprietary software doing things they were never designed for, I've been pondering exactly what I'm going to be doing during those days off.

For those who haven't been following, I have two full weeks off starting on Monday. My wife Andie is off gallivanting with some Final Fantasy XIV friends for a significant proportion of that time, and I am house/catsitting. I actually rather enjoy a "staycation" like this, as it allows me to get on with things I want to do rather than things I have to do.

So far I've determined that, besides the usual daily posts on MoeGamer, I'm going to get well ahead of schedule on all my video series. It will be good to get Atari A to Z in particular prepped ahead of time, because I've already pencilled in a whole bunch of games I want to cover, and I'm kind of champing at the bit to get started on those, but it will be very helpful for me to get a few weeks' worth of my more time-consuming series in the bag, too.

I'm also going to do what I've said I'd get back to doing for quite some time now, which is making some videos that are "readings" of articles. These are surprisingly time-consuming to produce despite resulting in shorter videos — largely due to the necessity of capturing specific pieces of footage rather than just a single play session — but I always like the results I end up with.

I think I'm going to focus on making some video versions of the Cover Game features first, as I feel their particularly long-form nature will make for a nice "documentary-style" presentation, but if anyone has any particular past content from MoeGamer they'd like to see in video form, please do let me know. I'm currently casually planning these to go out on Mondays, as presently I don't have a regular video feature on that day — the podcast does typically go out on a Monday, but the schedule for that is irregular due to Chris and I being available (and not exhausted) at varying times!

I've also been really eager to do some more experimenting with Visual Novel Maker as I haven't really had a chance to touch it since my initial feature on it a while back. I really want to bring the "Gamecast" back in some form, but perhaps less in its original format and more as simply an ongoing opportunity for me to indulge in some creative writing with these characters I've created. After all, we have the actual podcast now, so the Gamecast can be free to be whatever it wants to be. I dunno. We'll see!

Then I'm sure there'll be some games to play somewhere in all that, too…!

Anyway. Two more day job days to survive first… wish me luck.

It's weird how certain things resonate in your memory, even if you haven't really thought about them for ages.

This happened to me most recently with the video I've prepared for Thursday's episode of Atari ST A to Z, which is on the subject of Microdeal's isometric adventure Airball, one of the earlier titles I remember owning and playing for the ST back in the day, and a monstrously difficult affair I never really got anywhere with.

Revisiting it recently, I discovered that 1) I'm still not very good at Airball and really have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to do in it and 2) Airball inexplicably "means" a lot to me.

I've been trying to pin down exactly why I feel that way. I don't believe I associate it with a particularly important moment in my life, or a specific event, or anything like that. There's just something… indescribable about it that really means something to me.

Perhaps it's the music? Airball has great music. The compositions throughout the game aren't especially complicated and use one of the most cliched chord progressions in the world, but those pieces of music have stuck with me ever since I played that game for the first time back in the '80s. There have been times when I've been doing things that vaguely remind me of Airball, and snippets of the music have come into my head, unbidden, even though the last time I played Airball before recording the game footage over the weekend was probably nearly thirty years ago.

Or perhaps it's the atmosphere? This is something I talk a bit about in the video, so please look forward to that. Suffice to say for now that Airball has a really interesting atmosphere about it. Its story is absolutely dumb as shit, but that doesn't stop it being an unusually atmospheric and emotionally engaging game for the Atari ST.

Or perhaps it's just a cool game that I've enjoyed revisiting. Whatever the reason, Airball means a lot to me, and you get to see me revisit it for the first time in a very long while on Thursday! I hope you enjoy.

(After-the-fact note: This was written before the Great ProJared Controversy of 2019. I stand by what I said here, because it's how I felt at the time, and however one might feel about his alleged behaviour, I can't deny that his professional work inspired me to create.)

This is a topic I will doubtless revisit fairly often, but today I wanted to talk about a creator that has inspired me, and who has had quite an influence on at least certain aspects of my work — specifically, the video side of things.

I'm referring to a chap called ProJared, who is a gaming YouTuber that both my wife Andie and I very much enjoy watching. He used to have a channel where he did more "scripted" videos and is apparently most well-known for his "one minute review" series. I actually thought the latter was among the weakest of his scripted content, but then I generally prefer longer stuff anyway — hence the fact my own videos tend to err on the longer side. (People often say that they put Let's Plays on as "background noise" — the wife and I certainly do while we're falling asleep — so long videos are great for that.)

Anyway, Jared's main channel has been largely defunct for quite some time now. I'm not sure of the reasons behind this, but from what I understand it is down to personal and mental health issues that are no-one's business but his own. He has, however, been ramping up both his streaming and Let's Play efforts on his second channel, ProJared Plays, and over time I've actually found myself enjoying this content more than his scripted stuff. This surprised me, because when I first stumbled across his channel, I thought I'd prefer his more "produced" content, but actually the opposite has ended up being true.

Jared is an exemplary Let's Player, so far as I'm concerned. He's passionate, he's friendly, he reacts like a human being rather than a screeching teenager, and he manages to pull off that incredibly difficult balancing act between being progressive and inclusive and not being an incredibly obnoxious twat about it. His Let's Plays include the audience in what he's doing (he refers to things that are going on by saying "we" rather than "I", a habit that I've subconsciously picked up while recording Let's Plays, but am quite happy to keep) and he has a great sense of humour about everything he does.

I also greatly respect him for taking on a variety of games that are a bit off the beaten track rather than just going for either the popular games or "streamer bait". Some of the first videos I saw of his were his explorations of the old Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons games for PC, as well as an almost entirely forgotten Westwood D&D production for Turbografx, of all things, called Order of the Griffon. But it's not all old stuff; he often tries out newer indies and visual novels, and is a particular fan of both narrative-centric stuff and scary games.

You're probably building up something of a picture of why I like him, huh.

Anyway, Jared has been a big inspiration for me. When I was pondering what to do with YouTube that would be something unique rather than just rehashing other content in a different medium, his Let's Plays were extremely influential in me developing a style that I was comfortable and confident in, and that you've hopefully seen me grow into over the course of the series that I've been experimenting with.

I've tried to follow suit with his friendly, audience-inclusive style of presentation and I've received a few kind comments saying that my videos remind the viewers in question of good old days sitting around playing games with friends, which was exactly the sort of vibe I was going for, so I'm really happy about that.

I'm not trying to ape ProJared by any means — I can only dream of his viewer counts! — but I wanted to acknowledge that he has been a great inspiration and a strong influence on me. And perhaps encourage you to check out his work if you haven't enjoyed it for yourself! His recent playthrough of a cooperative Super Mario World ROMhack with his "Miss Editor" (who is as much a personality-packed part of his videos as he is at this point, despite only ever appearing as disembodied text during videos) has been a particular highlight, but there's a whole lot of goodness to be found among his past work, too. If you want a really good giggle, check out his "Mario Go Fish" drinking game and the following two absolutely hammered Minecraft videos. (All three are collected in one convenient playlist here.)

You're not reading this, Jared, but thanks. Not just for giving me some great ideas, but for continually entertaining me, even when I've had difficult days, weeks, months. There have been times where your videos have really helped me out of a dark place. So I'm proud to count you among the growing list of people who have influenced and inspired my work.

Five days until a blissful two weeks of freedom!

Yes, after this next week is over I've got two whole weeks off from the day job, which will be blissful. I don't hate my day job or anything, but like most jobs, it is frequently exceedingly boring, and with my mood having been a bit low recently this boredom hasn't exactly been conducive to making me cheer up a bit.

I'm not doing anything particularly specific during the two weeks off. My wife Andie is going away for some of the time to go and meet up with some Final Fantasy XIV friends — one of whom is coming from abroad — and I'm on cat-sitting duty. Which is fine by me — to be honest, more often than not, a "holiday" at home is absolutely wonderful, because you can just do the things you want without having to worry about the things you have to do. Unless you booked holiday specifically to do something, obviously.

I'm going to use the time productively rather than sitting around in my pants (well, there will probably be a fair amount of sitting around in my pants, because the things I want to do are not necessarily incompatible with sitting around in one's pants) because there's lots of stuff I want to get done for the site and for YouTube. I may be bored in my day job, but I've been feeling super fired up about my various projects just recently, so this couple of weeks off will be an ideal opportunity to get a bunch of stuff prepared and ready to go.

Specifically, I'm hoping to prepare a whole bunch of videos for the coming weeks so the YouTube channel can pretty much take care of itself, and then alongside that I will, of course, be doing plenty of writing. I'm also going to assemble some more books, too; I'll be "announcing" Volume 1 officially tomorrow and I'm aiming to have Volume 2 ready for the end of next month. Then Volume 3 will follow, covering 2018, and after that I might have a few smaller collections to put together, too.

With regard to Volume 2, I will probably be leaving out the Grisaia feature, because I haven't yet played through The Eden of Grisaia and I would kind of like to collect all the Grisaia stuff together, perhaps into one single standalone book. This would make a certain amount of sense, as the Grisaia stuff is very long — the current article on Yuuji is 10,000 words by itself, for example! I have The Eden of Grisaia (and the various spinoff games) pencilled in to cover in the next few months, as it's high time I put that series to bed, but I've been waiting for the right opportunity to do it "properly".

Anyway. Before all that I have a week of work to survive, so wish me luck!

I went out to our local CEX earlier today — CEX is a nationwide chain of second-hand video game shops, for those unaware and/or American — in the hope that I might find a copy of Lost Sphear I had seen a few weeks back.

Chris (of podcast fame) had reminded me that Lost Sphear had only seen a very limited physical release direct from Square Enix, so a copy out in the wild was something worth nabbing — particularly as it was only £22, which is cheap as chips for a boxed Switch game.

I wasn't anticipating it still being there as the last time I went into that CEX must have been a month or two back, but as fortune would have it, it was still there! I guess it's a game that was just a little too obscure for your average CEX-goer to pick up and go "ooh, I'll 'ave that". Anyway. I now have a copy of Lost Sphear, which is nice.

I took the opportunity to grab a bunch of cheap stuff for older platforms too, and came away with an armful of goodies for just £30 in total. Besides Lost Sphear, I nabbed Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2, Dark Sector and The Club for Xbox 360, and International Cue Club 2, Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament, Primal, Pipe Mania, Tourist Trophy, Fighting Fury, Gottlieb Pinball Classics and Fantavision for PS2. Most of these were 50p. Bargain.

Can't do that with your fancy-pants Google Stadia now, can you?

I was actually talking about "the good old days" of pre-social media Internet communities before I got distracted, wasn't I? Let's revisit that.

I've already talked about my earliest experiences with the "gaming community" as being on CompuServe's GO GAMERS forum. I guess my next encounter with them would have been 1up.com, a site which my brother was in charge of from its launch onwards and for several years afterwards.

1up.com is defunct now, but it was very ahead of its time in a lot of ways. Besides the articles from the staff, it allowed each and every user their own personal homepage to set up how they saw fit, and as part of this homepage every user had the opportunity to post a blog. This was, I think, my earliest encounter with blogging, and although I'd previously done some professional writing work for PC Zone and Official Nintendo Magazine at this point, this was probably the first time I'd written purely for pleasure about games since firing up AtariWriter on the 130XE and printing out my own "reviews" of games I'd been playing on our Epson-compatible Star dot-matrix printer, the noise of which used to mildly terrify me.

User homepages were just part of the 1up.com puzzle though. The site also played a leading role in establishing the format of gaming podcasts thanks to its long-running 1up Yours show, which I even appeared on a couple of times. And as a companion to the podcast, there was a forum specifically for discussing matters relating to "1up Radio" — the podcast and surrounding projects, such as the later video-based 1up Show.

The 1up Radio boards became a spiritual home for me. The people there were intelligent, articulate and wordy. People liked to discuss things in depth and detail, with a respectful tone even when there were disagreements, and at one point the community here even collectively established a project to continue an aborted features on the podcast: the exploration of our collective Piles of Shame, the games we'd bought but had never gotten around to finishing or even playing in some cases.

A loose collective quickly became a more organised group known as The Squadron of Shame, and we took on "missions" in a sort of "book club" format; we'd pick a game together, then play it through at the same time, posting our thoughts in a dedicated thread on the 1up Radio forums. We often got a shout-out on the podcast for continuing the work the podcast hosts hadn't been able to find the time for, and in the process each of us discovered some interesting games. Among other things, my early time with The Squadron of Shame was my first encounter with the Project Zero/Fatal Frame series.

One of the best things about the Squad and, more broadly, the Radio boards, was that we had a little corner of the Internet to call our own. The platform-specific boards on 1up.com were full of the usual fanboy arguments, but the Radio boards were different. The population was, on the whole, older and more mature in attitude; people liked to talk and discuss rather than make drive-by statements. It was an eminently pleasant place to hang out.

Then one day, everything changed. Someone behind the scenes decided that it would be a good idea to merge all the 1up.com boards — of which there were probably 15-20 or so? — into just two: "Games" and "Not Games". I'm sure you can imagine what happened next, as the 12-year old fanboys were suddenly thrown into the pit with intelligent people in their 20s and 30s. Chaos. Absolute chaos.

The first Squad mission we attempted after this great "merge" was Psi-Ops on PS2. The person who posted the initial "briefing" post on the forum, as always, went into detail about the game, why it had been chosen and some bits and pieces about its history. The first response? Some moron complaining about a "massive fucking wall of text". We knew then that this was no longer a good place to host our discussions; throwing everyone into the same pool forces the lowest common denominator to become default.

The story of the Squad continues further from there, but the important thing here is that our best years were during the period where we were part of a clearly "gated" community. We had our own space in which we felt safe and able to discuss things in the manner that we found interesting and enjoyable. When that was taken away from us, that was, in many ways, the beginning of the end — though we struggled on for a number of years across various platforms beyond this.

It's increasingly difficult to find spaces like that these days. Forums like NeoGAF and Resetera still follow the "Games/Not Games" formula rather than making more sensible subdivisions, and the overzealous, draconian moderation on the latter in particular makes it an undesirable place to go and hang out anyway.

For me, setting up MoeGamer was an important means of me being able to express myself about the things that are important to me in a way that I am comfortable and confident with. I'm extremely happy to welcome people into that space, and I've made some good friends in the process. But I'm still aware that it's not quite the same as those pleasant days of our nice, quiet "gated community" away from the noise and chaos of the broader gaming public. I don't think those days are ever coming back while social media continues to be a thing, and that makes me a bit sad — but at least I still have those fond memories!