I renewed my WordPress hosting today… it was the last day to take advantage of a 20% off coupon, so I renewed a few days earlier than I "needed" to, but the 20% off means that a month of Patreon contributions at their current level pretty much covers the entire expense!

With that in mind, I'd like to say a huge and sincere "thank you" to everyone who has supported this site, whether you're a new Patron or you've been around these parts for ages.

As I often note, I work on MoeGamer for the pure pleasure of writing about games (and as an excuse to experience a wide variety of games, too!) — but the fact that people are willing to support the site and help it continue to grow and improve is honestly rather humbling.

From the bottom of my heart, thanks for helping me continue to do what I love. People like you make the world a better place!

Hoo boy. Limited Run has a pair of games I'm extremely very interested in today… but I find myself umming and ahhing over whether or not I can justify spending that much. Although Limited Run's prices aren't altogether unreasonable, their shipping fees do sting quite a bit — I tend to have to pay a minimum of $15 on top of the price of the games in order to get them delivered. The perils of living in Europe.

The two games on offer are both visual novels, and both titles that I hoped would see some sort of hardcopy at one point or another.

The first is The House in Fata Morgana, which I don't know a ton about other than the fact that a lot of people seem to consider it as something of a modern classic. From what I understand, it concerns exploring the lives of a number of different people and then tying all the stories together in some way or other. It's got a deliciously dark, Gothic, brooding atmosphere about it, and everyone I know who has played it has said it's a fantastic experience. My main hesitation here is that I picked up the PC version from GOG a while back — though I believe this release actually has some extra content over the original.

The second is London Detective Mysteria, which is an otome game featuring bishounen versions of characters like Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries. This game was particularly noteworthy to me as the last major project Brittany "Hatsuu" Avery worked on at Xseed before she left, and it was clear that it was a title she felt passionately about. (Well, those who are familiar with Hatsuu will know that there weren't any of her previous projects she didn't feel passionate about, but this seemed to be a particular highlight!)

These are both games I've had my eye on with a mind to covering on MoeGamer at some point in the future, since they're both interesting and unusual visual novels that are fondly regarded by those who have played them. Thus I find myself very tempted by both of them… but… ooh… $105 is a lot of money… and I have hosting costs to pay this month!

I have six hours to decide as I type this. That will keep my mind occupied during a boring day at work, if nothing else! If you have any friends feeling generous (if you're reading this, you've done plenty already!), please feel free to point them in the direction of this page or my Ko-Fi :3

I'm having a bit of a tough time of it mental health-wise at the moment. I think it's a combination of factors — the intermittent pain I suffer from my hernia, the fact my weight loss goals are proving more challenging to achieve than on previous attempts, the fact that I'm kind of tired and bored at work… it's all sort of combining together to create a mental fog that is hard to lift.

Of course, as anyone who has dealt with mental health issues such as anxiety and depression will know, there doesn't necessarily need to be a particular "trigger" for these things to manifest themselves. Sometimes you just have a bad day; a bad week; a bad month; a bad year.

I'm doing my best to keep myself busy and to keep my mind occupied, as that usually seems to be the best way for me to deal with periods like this. I'm enjoying the things I'm writing about and the things I'm making videos for — as always, though, I just wish I had a bit more time (and money) to achieve everything that I'd like to achieve. Unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, and so I have to tolerate the other bits in order to be able to do the things I enjoy!

Ah well. Andie and I are going on holiday in just under a month's time, so that will be nice — an opportunity to get away from it all. I'm looking forward to it. Perhaps some time away from everything will provide a good opportunity to clear my head a bit!

What happened to progress bars? I miss them. Specifically, I miss having an idea of how long something is going to take. Instead, what we get is bullshit like this:

Or this:

Or this:

None of these are helpful. All they do is show that "something" is supposedly happening, but not how long it is taking or even if the "something" has frozen up along the way. I'm sure we've all encountered a situation where you're stuck looking at one of these, unsure if the process is actually stuck or bugged, or if it's just taking an inordinately long time.

These are a development of this type of progress bar, which today I learned is called a "marquee" progress bar:

Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's own documentation on this control, they do indeed intend for it to be used in a way that "shows activity, but does not indicate what proportion of the task is complete".

This is a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, I know, but when my office coffee machine is better at displaying its progress through a task than a powerful computer, I feel like there might be something a little bit wrong somewhere!

Further to the previous post, I thought I'd share a handy (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) guide to some common substitutions you can make in order to make your business emails sound like they are written by a human being rather than an algorithm. These are all based on personal experience.

In no particular order…

• I refer to… -> Remember when…

• I shall -> I'll

• myself -> me, I (depending on context)

• yourself -> you

• revert to -> get back to, reply to, undo

• loop in -> include, forward to

• email chain -> thread

• please do not hesitate to -> feel free to

• at the earliest opportunity -> soon

• gentle reminder -> reminder

• Kind regards -> thanks, cheers

• Good morning -> Hi, hello

• annual leave -> holiday, vacation, away

• communication, correspondence -> email

• feedback -> thoughts, feelings, opinions, ideas

• many thanks -> thanks, cheers

• enquiries, queries -> questions

• procure, purchase -> buy

• breakdown in communication -> (s)he didn't tell you/no-one told me

• somewhat surprised -> what the fuck are you doing

• a little concerned -> no, seriously, what the actual fuck

• meeting -> waste of everyone's time, possibility of food

• conference call -> waste of everyone's time over larger geographical area, BYO food

• colleague -> that person from Accounts I can't remember the name of

• resource -> person, people

• apologies -> sorry

• action -> do

• there has been an error -> I made a mistake

• there has been a small error -> I made a big mistake

• challenging -> awful, bad, crap, horrible

• (any acronym) -> just write the full thing out you lazy bastard

I'm sure there are plenty more I haven't thought of! What are some of your least favourites?

One of the most frustrating things about the modern world is how "work" works. I'm not sure how a lot of these conventions have come to be in place, but all of them seem counter-productive.

I have two bugbears in particular that I run into on a pretty much daily basis at my day job.

First is the matter of interminable meetings and conference calls. Thankfully, most of the time at my day job we have conference calls rather than meetings, but it's still tough to get anything useful done while someone is droning on in your ear about something you don't care about and/or which isn't relevant to you and your team. This morning I've been on Skype from 9.30am until now. It is now 11.30am. I haven't done any actual work yet.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the idea of getting together to discuss things that are important, but 90% of our conference calls involve someone just reading out the things in our project management tool, which is something we all look at on a daily basis anyway. There's really no need to waste everyone's time, energy and sanity on this nonsense, but it appears to be something that is assumed to be a "necessity" in the modern business world.

Which brings me on to my second point: business-speak. No-one writes emails like an actual human being any more (except me, apparently). It's never "Sure thing, I'll do that when I have a sec", it's always "Thank you for your email. I shall endeavour to action this at the earliest opportunity. Kind regards."

There's the argument for "politeness" here, but there's also a point where "politeness" becomes "painful insincerity". It generally crosses over with people who use the word "myself" instead of "me" or "I". I make a point of writing things in plain English, regardless of who I'm sending a message to. I'm not rude or inappropriately casual or anything, I'm just… human.

It'd be nice to be able to change these cultural things from the inside out, but I fear they're too ingrained into corporate culture these days to be able to make any sort of meaningful impact. Still, at the very least I can continue writing email messages like a human being rather than a robot.

Kind regards,
Peter J. E. Davison BA (Hons.) PGCE

I find myself a bit at a loss for words this evening. I'm not really sure why; I think it's a general feeling of winding down after a pretty pleasant long weekend, coupled with a certain amount of uneasiness over the recent political happenings over here in the UK. I won't pretend to understand the latter at all, because political stuff generally goes right over my head, but regardless… I feel somewhat uneasy.

But it's not really worth worrying about. It is what it is, and all we can do now is sit back and wait and see what happens, really. In the meantime, there are plenty of ways in which I can occupy my mind, and I'm taking full advantage of them. I've been greatly enjoying Team Sonic Racing, as you'll be able to tell from my writeup over on MoeGamer today, and of course I'm continuing to enjoy Final Fantasy XI.

I'm also thoroughly invested in Our World is Ended. The whole thing is shaping up to be a bit longer than I anticipated so I probably won't finish the Cover Game feature off this week, but I'm making good progress so far. It's been a really interesting visual novel so far, however, and I've reached that point where the ensemble cast is now so well-established in my mind that I'm going to be sorry to say goodbye to them when the end eventually comes. I'm intrigued to see where things end up and how the various endings are different, however.

The game "ranks" your choices as you play, and my current "top 3" are Tatiana, Asano and Girl A, making it look most likely I'll get one of their endings, but things can change quite significantly with just a single choice. It'll be interesting to investigate quite how different they be with a subsequent fast forward-powered playthrough, but that's a way off yet!

Anyway. I should probably go to bed and try not to think too hard about anything complicated. Back to work tomorrow… then only a few weeks until an actual proper holiday! Looking forward to it.

Hope you all had a pleasant weekend.

Hello! Sorry I'm late but as mentioned I was busy most of yesterday and pretty tired by the end of it all, but here's a summary of what happened, should you be interested.

The Davison Cup is an event I've run for the last few years around my birthday as an excuse to get my local friends together to play a variety of video games they otherwise probably wouldn't explore. This isn't just the stuff I cover on MoeGamer — which is mostly single-player anyway, and thus not particularly suitable for an event like this — but also retro stuff, perhaps on obscure platforms, or perhaps part of collections such as Atari Flashback Classics.

It's a fairly relaxed affair, but we do keep score and I even had a prize for the winner this year: an "Ultimate Gin & Tonic" set. So here's how it all went down.

The competitors this year were me, who you hopefully already know; Sam, who was my housemate in my first year of university and who used to play a lot of games with me, but has since become a family man; Tom, who was also at university with me, but who I didn't really get to know a bit better until later; and James, who is slightly older than us, and a high-powered lawyer who was very much in need of a break from his 5.30am-10pm days he's been suffering for the past little while.

We all play games to varying degrees in our free time, but as a general rule we tend to assume Tom is the most skilful, I am the most experienced, Sam's performance varies according  to what he's playing, and James is typically the butt of all our jokes, despite the fact that he's pretty good at a few select games like Street Fighter II.

The day began with three games on the Philips G7000 Videopac Computer, including notorious Pac-Man clone Munchkin, inventive shoot 'em up Satellite Attack and the two-player deathmatch Gunfighter.

Sam performed the best in Munchkin with a strong attempt on his first of three, with everyone else unable to beat him. Tom, meanwhile, found an excellent strategy in Satellite Attack, which is to eschew shooting altogether and simply use your ship's shields to set off chain reactions. I, meanwhile, won the Gunfighter mini-tournament thanks to my understanding of the animation lock while firing.

After that, it was on to some retro Atari games courtesy of Atari Flashback Classics, beginning with Pong. Tom brought this one home, with me and James following close behind. We followed this up with RealSports Soccer, a ridiculous game that we always have a lot of fun with. Sam won this one, though despite the fact he is good at football in real life, this game demands… rather different skills.

Next up was 2600 classic Combat, where we played the "Invisible Tanks" variant. Despite some consternation over the fact that if you back someone into a corner it's easy to repeatedly shoot them over and over, I squeezed out a victory here. We followed this up with the simple but addictive arcade title Canyon Bomber, which proved to be a lot more popular with the group than I expected — considering it's a one-button game about nothing more than timing, I wasn't expecting it to be liked all that much, but everyone had a great time with it, and likewise with the similar but much more challenging Skydiver that we followed it up with.

Onward into the NES era for the next few games. We began with the classic Donkey Kong, which I attained the best score, followed by Pro Wrestling, which none of us understood in the slightest, but in which James managed to secure a convincing victory. Next up was Donkey Kong Jr., in which I had a terrible first showing and Sam went on to win.

After that, we played the original Mario Bros., which it was clear some people had never come across before, believing Super Mario Bros. to be the first Mario Bros. game. Everyone had a good time with this, though, with Sam squeaking out a victory.

Next up was Street Fighter II, which I expected Tom to win, but instead he lost to James in the final round of the mini-tournament. Tom did, however, win the Super Mario Kart mini-tournament, with James left out in the cold.

After that, it was onwards to the PS1 era with Super Puzzle Fighter, a game which I've always really enjoyed but never been all that good at. Tom came out on top here, while I was victorious in the losers' playoffs.

We followed this up with a longstanding favourite: Crash mode in Burnout 2 on PS2. I was victorious here thanks to a particularly spectacular final round, while Tom managed not to come last despite scoring precisely zero in the first round.

Next up was a bit more in-car action thanks to OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast's Heart Attack mode, in which you have to both race and perform the tasks your demanding girlfriend is presenting you with as you drive. James managed to come out on top here; being familiar with his wife, I'm not altogether surprised about this.

We followed this with State of Emergency on PS2, a chaotic "riot 'em up" with a hugely enjoyable "Chaos" mode in which you simply have to survive and score as many points as possible. Tom was victorious here thanks to his discovery of the endless points pinatas that were the Corporations' security forces, but I came a close second.

Next up was Crazy Taxi, where Sam managed to come in first despite all of us being extremely rusty when it came to things like Crazy Boost and Limit Cut. I attained a respectable second place, though none of our scores were anything like that which we could achieve back in the good old days.

We were starting to get a bit short on time by this point, having broken for a curry dinner, so unfortunately we didn't quite get through everything I wanted to, but some classics from the Wii U era were a good way to close out the evening, beginning with the coin pusher-esque game from Wii Party, in which Sam was victorious; Mario Chase in Nintendo Land, in which I embarrassed myself by being caught within 15 seconds; and finally the Fronks-flicking Islands game in Game & Wario in which I managed to eke out a victory after a turbulent scoreboard throughout the entire match.

A great day was had by all, and everyone thought it was a good selection of games. There was only one duffer we gave up on — Maze Action on PS2, which I don't hate as much as everyone else did, but I can certainly understand why people found it a bit challenging to engage with! — and everything else proved very popular.

Another successful Davison Cup, I'd say, and a well-deserved victory for Tom in the end.

It's a long weekend here in the UK thanks to the second of our two public holidays throughout May. I'm looking forward to it, both to take a rest from the mental noise of daily life, and for the event taking place tomorrow!

Tomorrow I'm having a (month-late) birthday celebration in the way that I've marked the occasion for the last few years: The Davison Cup. This is a(n increasingly rare) opportunity to get my local friends together to play some video games, eat some snacks, drink some beer and just have some fun.

I typically like to make The Davison Cup an opportunity to expose these guys to some games that they may not have tried, or may not have felt the inclination to explore over the years. To that end, the games that will form part of the overall "tournament" run the gamut from Atari 2600 games (courtesy of Atari Flashback Classics on Switch) to more recent titles. There are, of course, some established classics in there too — Mario Kart 8, Nintendo Land, Street Fighter 2 — but there's also some games that I've been itching to get them to try for ages, like Boom Street (aka Fortune Street).

I'm looking forward to the event tomorrow, and I'm just hoping none of them lame out and suddenly have to go home in the middle of the day, as unfortunately happened last year. This is a rare opportunity for all of us to recapture a part of our (increasingly distant) youths, and I don't want anything to spoil that!

Anyway. Off to bed now. I need to be on my A-game tomorrow. Or I might let my friends win. We'll see. 🙂

A little while back, I noted that since the whole ProJared fiasco recently (which seems to still be unfolding with layer after layer of pointless drama that really does not need to be in the public eye at this point) I'd been seeking alternative gaming-related YouTube entertainment, and had settled on GameGrumps.

After watching a bunch of their videos, I think I've nailed down one of the main reasons why their work appeals to me — aside from the by turns childish, absurdist and completely surreal humour, hurled good-natured insults that remind me of gaming sessions with my friends and frequent bursting into song, obviously. That is that they give games a chance, honestly and genuinely. At least that's the impression I've had to date, anyway.

Look over their list of past games and you'll see a bunch of stuff that is commonly considered shovelware, particularly on Nintendo platforms such as Wii and Switch. But these guys make an honest go of playing these games, engaging with them properly rather than writing them off immediately — and the results can be enormously entertaining, particularly in the case of things like quiz show and board game adaptations.

This kind of puts a whole new spin on a lot of these games. While playing something like Ultimate Board Game Collection on Wii by yourself would be a fairly saddening thing to do (not that this would stop me, since I picked up a copy for 50p after watching the Grumps' videos!) it becomes an entirely different experience when it's a "spectator sport". Same for the various digital adaptations of shows such as Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! and their ilk.

This sort of game is best enjoyed with others. But GameGrumps' videos demonstrate that this doesn't necessarily mean actually having someone on hand to play it with you in the same room — though that would obviously be ideal. Rather, you can enjoy the experience of observing people playing it together and interacting with one another, and it can be a whole lot of fun, even when it's two "real" people and an AI.

Alongside this, I really appreciate them giving stuff that doesn't often get a fair look a chance. Just recently I've been watching their playthrough of House Party, a notorious release from a while back that, if you believe the things the mainstream press wrote about it, was entirely about getting your dick out and harassing women. Turns out that while you can indeed get your dick out and harass women in it, that is a quick route to a "game over". Rather, the game is actually a pretty interesting first-person adventure game, complete with plenty of "moon logic" puzzles.

Is it "good"? Matter of opinion; I actually rather like the look of it. Is it horrific, misogynistic filth that will destroy society? No; it's a dumbass game that involves varying degrees of deviousness to convince the characters (including the dudes) to get (fairly explicitly) sexy with you. I would not have known what this game was about if I had gone entirely by what the mainstream press had said; instead, I appreciate that the Grumps bothered to engage with it so comprehensively and honestly, offering their own critique on various questionable situations they find themselves in throughout the game where appropriate, and quite genuinely having a good time at others.

It's easy to be a YouTuber (or writer!) who plays "bad" games and takes the piss out of them. It takes much more effort, honesty, intelligence, charisma and chemistry to honestly engage with them and provide an entertaining experience both for yourselves and your audience. GameGrumps absolutely nail that formula, and I guess that's why they have millions of subscribers. I'm glad I finally joined them.