I've added a bunch of new Final Fantasy XI videos to the unlisted playlists if you're interested in following my adventures! I'd recorded a bunch of footage (12 episodes worth to be exact!) and had been putting off editing and uploading them, but it's finally done.

You can check out the playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqmqFDuRsOsfx1Hov1I6YS50_3WgFtLKQ — as before, please don't share this publicly just yet. 

Thus far, my playthrough takes us up into the mid level 40s, and we're almost done with the base game's main story. I've had a few diversions, though, most notably to go and unlock Dancer and find some of its special equipment — these quests come with some cool background lore, so they're worth doing.

Now I'm up to date on uploads, I can get playing and recording again. We're also not far off the end of Atelier Rorona on New Game Plus, so once that's done I can kick off the actual Final Fantasy marathon in earnest. Looking forward to it! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this "early access" look at my FFXI playthrough. 

I log in to Twitter maybe once or twice a week now just to see if anyone has tried to reach me via mentions or direct messages. (No-one ever has, leading me to question a bit why I even leave the account open at all.) Whenever I do so, I always happen to catch a quick glimpse of the main timeline, and it never looks like a place I want to be any more.

Whether it's the recent YouTuber drama or whatever sparked some arguments over lewd games this evening, I just don't care any more. It's not worth getting involved in these things, because it takes time away from the thing that is more important to me: enjoying my hobby.

I originally joined Twitter because it was a good place to meet like-minded people and talk about my hobby, but in the last couple of years that aspect has all but vanished. And it's not just from the anger and outrage mobs; also contributing to the overall "noise" level are the endless memes that take something that might have once been enjoyable before squeezing every possible drop of joy out of it by completely oversaturating the timeline with questionable attempts at humour.

A few examples I can think of offhand: I used to like Garfield, The Simpsons and Shrek. Now I never want to see any of them ever again, because the Internet has ruined all of them for me. And it never seems to be in the name of saying anything meaningful; these memes don't mean anything, they're not communicating a message. They're just… I don't know what they are. But they certainly don't add anything to my enjoyment of things.

Since stepping back from Twitter, I suspect permanently this time, I've been struck by how nice it is to be able to just enjoy things. There's no pressure to conform to a popular opinion, or to put people who say stupid things on blast. What, really, does that achieve? You're never going to meet that person and they're never going to change their mind based on what you say, so what, really, is the point?

I get quality interactions with people who are interested in the things I'm interested in through my blog comments, through private chats and through emails. I am in control of those things; I can "switch off" from any of them any time, it's not a looming, constantly present spectre like social media is.

And when I do "switch off" from them, which is frequently, I can just sit back and enjoy something at my own pace. It's lovely.

For me, one of the great pleasures of discovering a new creator that you enjoy is when you decide to look at their work a little more broadly and discover that they've been doing far more things that you like than you might have initially realised.

I mentioned the other day that I'd been enjoying the Game Grumps' work on YouTube, and I'd quickly become aware of the other projects the two presenters Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan had been working on — most notably the musical acts Starbomb and Ninja Sex Party. Today I've been checking both of these projects out, and really enjoying myself.

Ninja Sex Party is a comedic musical duo consisting of Avidan and his friend Brian Wecht, aka Danny Sexbang and Ninja Brian respectively. Avidan performs vocals, while Wecht is on keyboard. In the vein of other musical comedy acts, the pair are very much playing a role; "Sexbang" is, as you might expect, an oversexed guy who thinks he's better than everyone (and specifically better than Brian), while Brian is uncommunicative and occasionally homicidal.

Their songs consist of '80s-inspired rock and synthpop numbers, usually about sex or sexuality in some way, and typically involving jokes at Brian's expense. They're not just a gimmicky joke act, however; the songs themselves are incredibly catchy and entertaining as well as having humorous, often relatable lyrics. "No Reason Boner" from the duo's debut album "NSFW" will be a particular highlight for most men.

Starbomb, meanwhile, consists of Avidan and Wecht with the addition of Hanson. Their songs consist of video game and anime parodies, typically though not exclusively making use of hip-hop and modern rock sounds. Hanson and Avidan take the lead on the vocals this time around, with Hanson displaying his genuinely impressive rapping skills while Avidan provides the more melodic sections of each piece.

Once again, Starbomb's work consists of pieces that are genuinely enjoyable, listenable pieces of music first and foremost, entertaining parodies second. Particular highlights from what I've heard so far include "Filling in the Name Of", a Rage Against the Machine-inspired rant from the perspective of the long Tetris piece, who is fed up of people just using him, and Vegeta's Serenade, a spectacular Dragon Ball Z-inspired, Meat Loaf-style power ballad where Vegeta tries his best to sing a love song to his wife without mentioning Goku, and fails miserably.

If you need a bit of silly, nerdy humour in your life, I encourage you to check out both Ninja Sex Party and Starbomb. It's great to find some musical comedy that doesn't forget about the "musical" part.

One thing I often find myself contemplating when enjoying an older game is how it's "supposed" to be played. As a general rule, I avoid using save states in emulators for anything other than picking up where I left off in a game that allows infinite continues anyway (see: Castlevania) and I certainly won't use them to cheese my way past a difficult section of game.

What about games where there are systems in place seemingly designed to allow you to cheese your way past difficult bits, though? I'm thinking specifically about old shareware games like Wolfenstein 3-D, Commander Keen and the like here.

Back when I first played these games when they were "current", I took full advantage of the save systems. In the process, though, I made the score and lives systems of the game completely irrelevant, because I'd never see a "Game Over" — I'd simply reload when I died so I didn't lose anything.

Just recently, however, I've discovered the appeal of playing these games in a more "arcade" style. That means starting the game and playing until you run out of lives, purely to see how far you can get. No saving, no quicksaving, no cheesing, no cheat codes — just a pure test of your skill and endurance.

And you know what? I'm finding it really fun. Old first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3-D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (an underappreciated classic that I really, really like) really have a new level of enjoyment when there's that additional pressure to perform and attempt to get a high score, and in playing like this you make things like the secret rooms and the collectible treasure much more relevant than they would be in a run where you're spamming the Quicksave button every few seconds.

Ultimately, it's kind of nice that these games have the option to play in both ways. Save-scumming means that anyone can eventually get to the end of the game, while the presence of old-school mechanics like score and lives mean that those who want to enjoy the game in a different way still can, too.

Give it a try sometime, you might enjoy it!

Topic.

No seriously. I mean, I always knew of the early Castlevania series being notoriously challenging (not always for entirely the right reasons) but having been spending quite a bit of time with the first game over the course of the last few days, I can confidently say that yes, indeed, Castlevania is hard.

Despite occasional bouts of flaming rage at it (the fourth block nearly killed me) I've been enjoying a bit of a challenge. It's a satisfying game to progress in, and one that it'd be cool to say that I've actually beaten eventually. I don't know if I'm ever going to get there, but I'm certainly going to keep trying! Into the fifth block now, so only a few levels left to go… but man, everything hits really hard in the late game! Also those jumpy hunchback fleamen bastards can go fuck themselves.

I'm coming for you, Dracula! Just, uh, just give me a bit of time, please…

The Castlevania Anniversary Collection is out now. Of all the compilations Konami has been working on, this is the one I've been most interested in, as I don't know the Castlevania series that well but I've always had a good time with every one I've played.

I'll post some more detailed thoughts next week (likely as a new Delving Into series as I explore it as a whole) but so far my impressions of the bundle are very good.

The emulation appears to be exemplary — though I'd expect nothing less from M2 — and there's a good range of features, including the ability to watch and record replays, save progress, tweak the display, add graphic borders and suchlike. It would have perhaps been nice to have the option to play with the fancy sound chip from the JP version of Castlevania III, but I'll live.

I've been playing the first Castlevania a fair bit this evening but ran into a bit of a wall at the end of stage 12 so I've put it aside for now. Should probably get some sleep anyway! I'm looking forward to exploring this series in much more detail very soon… and I'm sure there's a Castlevania podcast somewhere in our future too!

As longstanding readers will know, I've been making an effort to try and lose some weight since before Christmas, primarily so I can get my hernia treated without the risk of it coming back.

It's been going… variably. The overall trend is downwards, which is good, but I've been struggling a bit with motivation over the last few weeks, which have made my results be a bit up and down.

There are two real reasons behind this. First is the fact that I quite simply get cravings for things that aren't at all healthy, and it's tough to ignore them when they come along. The second is boredom and other negative emotions.

I tend to eat when I'm bored, depressed or stressed. I've been feeling all three of those things at the day job recently — I hasten to add that there's nothing specifically wrong with the job itself or the people there, I'm just having a bit of a low ebb mentally — and that leads me to want to do stuff like buy the delicious flapjacks that the canteen offers. I fucking love flapjacks.

Andie and I did a "big shop" after Slimming World this evening, though, and stocked up on some stuff that should make for suitable snacks if I find myself feeling bleak during the day. Hopefully that will help matters somewhat!

Now I just need to break the mental funk that's been causing all this and try to get back on track. 

Representation in video games is a hot topic these days. It's absolutely great that more and more games are providing examples of different types of leading characters — different genders, races and sexualities are all getting increasing amounts of positive representation, particularly in the indie sphere and productions from smaller developers and publishers (including Japanese outfits) — though of course there's still further steps that could be taken.

However, one unfortunate side-effect of this growing trend for representation is the increasing likelihood that someone is going to get offended about something, and use the idea of representation as a crutch to prop up their argument. Today it is the turn of Chris Plante from Polygon, who is upset that the mutants in Rage 2 have cleft lips, suggesting that the game and its developers are indirectly calling him a freak because of this particular design choice.

I get the idea of his argument, but this feels like yet another example of just getting offended for the sake of being offended. He even notes in his article that Bethesda have been making a point of making one of these characters in particular something of a "mascot" character for Rage 2, even going so far as to include a figure of him in the special edition of the game. This is a bit of a confused message; are these mutants "freaks" (Plante's words) or fondly regarded mascots along the lines of Borderlands' Claptrap (also Plante's words)?

On a related note, Mike Fahey of Kotaku (a man who, let's not forget, has a tattoo of Etna from Disgaea) got upset about current Cover Game Our World is Ended recently because there's a middle school-age character in there who he thinks is unreasonably sexualised.

What he failed to point out in his pearl-clutching was that the character in question is a child genius, and thus much of the interesting humour and dialogue surrounding her comes from the juxtaposition between her maturity and intelligence in some regards, and her utter childishness in others, as well as the fact that prior to her first on-screen appearance — she's only heard through voice chat in the game's early hours — she deliberately misrepresents herself as someone that she isn't. The game's characters also make a point of repeatedly pointing out that if you find her in any way sexy or want to do anything obscene to her, you would get arrested, beaten up or worse.

And let's not even get into the "depiction is not endorsement" angle. That's so obvious it should go without saying at this point.

We've been through this before; there's one reason and one reason only that these outrage-bait articles get published: hateclicks. I don't even know (or really care) if these writers are actually offended over the things they're writing about; what I do know is that they're cynically using the Internet's habit of dogpiling anything vaguely "wrongthink" in order to secure clicks and advertising revenue for themselves. Even if they just attract someone to make an angry comment on these articles, they've already got your click; it doesn't matter if you agree with them or not.

Offense for the sake of offense hurts real representation, because it makes people more cynical and less likely to listen when something that actually needs drawing attention to or criticising comes up. It's "boy who cried 'wolf!'" syndrome, and it's getting to a point where it's really holding us back from meaningful and interesting conversations.

We had another game of Pandemic Legacy this evening. If you're planning to play this, don't read this post! Part of the fun of a Legacy game is not knowing what's coming next.

Today we had our first full mission where the red disease "CodA" had been replaced by "The Faded" who are, let's face it, zombies. CodA was already incurable; its mutation into the obligatory zombie virus means that it's untreatable now, too, and any player character starting their turn in the same city as some zom… Faded will find themselves injured with a permanent scar. Take too many scars (usually taking a third when you already have two) and your character is permanently dead, out of the game. Lose all the characters with special abilities and you have to play as civilians, who have no abilities beyond the basic actions.

Today's mission was a challenging one. It looked like it was going well for a while, with the blue and yellow diseases eradicated particularly quickly thanks to the "positive" mutations we'd upgraded them with from previous victories. The black disease proved a bit more troublesome to deal with, however, and meanwhile Asia was building up with Faded until it pretty much reached breaking point; several locations burst their seams with outbreaks on multiple occasions, ultimately leading to our defeat.

There are ways to deal with the Faded, but they require a very different strategy to how you deal with the "normal" diseases in Pandemic. When the opportunity to build military bases and roadblocks first presented itself a few games ago, we didn't really see the point; now, however, both of those things are becoming very important for isolating the main "Faded" region — currently just East Asia — and ensuring the virus doesn't spread to the rest of the world. Despite our failure, we managed to keep it reasonably contained this time around, so we'll have another chance next time.

I really like how this game is building up. It's not necessarily making itself more complex from a rules perspective, but the addition of subtle new mechanics and ways of having to cope with situations means that it now "feels" quite different from the early hours of the campaign — but at the same time, it still feels authentically "Pandemic".

We're about halfway through the complete "season" now and I'm very intrigued to see how things develop from here. There are still lots of little boxes and windows to open… and I'm sure there's some surprises waiting somewhere, too!

After the recent… happenings, Andie and I were left wanting for some game-related YouTube content to enjoy, so I decided to check out quite a large, popular channel that I've heard the name of on a number of occasions, but never actually investigated: Game Grumps.

I'm not sure why I hadn't checked these guys out before. I think I probably had some assumptions and prejudices in my mind based on the fact that they were a large YouTube channel (several million subscribers), and also their attachment to the Dream Daddy visual novel project. I have nothing against Dream Daddy itself as I haven't actually played it, but I had built up a certain amount of mild resentment towards those people who were declaring it as something new and revolutionary when, as we all know, Japanese devs have been doing romance-centric visual novels (including ones featuring male-on-male relationships) for a very long time now. Game Grumps, having had something to do with the project (I forget the specifics), got caught in the crossfire of my ire.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that they're very entertaining. They're two dudes with an enjoyably irreverent attitude about everything, and a penchant for behaving in a distinctly childish manner thoroughly unbecoming of someone in their thirties. In other words, I very much approve.

Their content covers a pretty broad variety of things. They do Let's Plays as a pair — which is great fun, particularly when they're playing shovelware or highly competitive multiplayer games — and they're not afraid to cover weird stuff that no-one else would bother with. I've enjoyed their look at the Intellivision Lives! collection on PS2, for example — that's a compilation I'm fully intending to investigate in detail at some point in the future.

Besides the Let's Play stuff, they also do a show called the "Ten-Minute Power Hour", where they get in front of the camera and do… something. Something usually vaguely craft-related that has plenty of potential for visual humour. So far I've seen them do acrylic pouring, cheese sculpting and making cardboard robot suits, and the atmosphere in these videos is just so infectiously joyful and childish that I've very much fallen in love with their work already.

And best of all, since they've been doing this shit for years now, I have a whooooole ton of videos to enjoy!