It's good to be back. I had a thoroughly pleasant time on my holiday and the subsequent visit to my family, but it's very nice to be back in my own house, using my own computer and my own television, and being harassed by my own cats. (Those who watch my YouTube work will probably be familiar with Patti by now; she's "helping" me as I write this.)

I'm glad I had the foresight to take tomorrow off work. It's a tired old gag to say that you need a holiday from your holiday when you take a break like this, but it's really true! It's good to have a bit of time to re-adjust, re-calibrate yourself to normality and get yourself back in the right mindset for the return to humdrum, mundane old everyday life.

Still, I've got lots of fun things to enjoy on my last Monday of freedom — besides Super Mario Maker 2, which I'll be writing about this week, my Kickstarter copy of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night came in, Super Neptunia RPG should be arriving tomorrow and MangaGamer kindly provided me with a review copy of The Expression: Amrilato, which will be the basis for the next Cover Game feature.

Now I think I need to go sleep in my own bed for a bit! Back to relative normality tomorrow, I guess!

The Switch has really been showing its value over the course of the last week or so. While we were away at Center Parcs, it provided the facility to both play games and watch YouTube videos on the television (albeit from behind Center Parcs' extremely strict "family-friendly" Internet filter, which forces Restricted Mode on YouTube and thus denies access to a good 95% of the content) and over the last couple of days with my family, it's provided a means for me to escape when the number of people around me gets a bit overwhelming, as well as a way for us to do something together with games like Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8.

"This'd be perfect for Switch" is something of a mantra for Chris and I on the MoeGamer Podcast, but there really are a ton of great games that absolutely are perfect for Switch: pick-up-and-play affairs that you can dip into or spend a more protracted amount of time with.

The recent release of Super Mario Maker 2 is a perfect example. There are a multitude of ways to play this game, including the single-player story mode (which I may have blitzed through, but which is nonetheless pretty substantial), the online "Course World" facility to search and download levels, the "Endless Challenge" mode where you get a stock of lives to see how many randomly selected online levels you can survive, the online multiplayer (which I haven't tried) and, of course, building your own stuff.

Each of these modes is suitable for different situations. The levels in Story Mode are pretty short and relatively easy to clear, making them great for a quick session. Course World can throw up whatever you want, from an impressive auto-playing level to a monstrously difficult challenge that will have you gnashing your teeth. Endless Challenge can stop and start as you please, and likewise online multiplayer, and building a course is something you can easily spend hours on if you want to.

And this is just one of many fantastic games you can enjoy wherever you want. There are a ton of things that wind me up about modern, always-connected, never-more-than-two-feet-from-a-screen life… but having easy access to great games (that aren't mobile games) isn't one of them.

Hello everyone! Sorry there wasn't a full-length article on MoeGamer today, but we spent a fair amount of today travelling (and stuck in traffic) and the remainder of the day has been spent being sociable with my family. Business will return to normal as of Monday, when we should be back at home with our cats, ready to face the trials and tribulations of life once again — hopefully refreshed from our time off!

I had the foresight to get my copy of Super Mario Maker 2 delivered to my parents' house instead of my own, so I've been able to give that a bit of a look today. Early impressions are very positive indeed — I've had a play with the course maker, the story mode and a couple of uploaded levels and had a lot of fun with each.

The course maker is mildly less intuitive than the original Wii U version simply by virtue of the fact that if you're playing it on a TV, you're no longer "drawing" things with the touchscreen, but I imagine that intuitive aspect returns if playing using the Switch in handheld mode — particularly if you have a stylus suitable for capacitive touchscreens. I did manage to knock up a quick course earlier and get it uploaded — I enjoyed the challenge of putting together one of the "objective-based" levels rather than the usual "get to the end", and this sort of thing will probably be my main focus with any levels I create.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the community takes to this new game. Despite being on such a niche platform, the original Super Mario Maker brought a community of people together to create some absolutely extraordinary things, so I have no doubt the same will be true of this game. I guess we'll have to wait and see!

There will, of course, be a proper writeup on MoeGamer next week when I get back onto a normal schedule. In the meantime, I hope you're all having a thoroughly pleasant weekend, and I will, as ever, speak to you soon!

Today's main activity was Adventure Golf, better known as crazy golf or miniature golf, depending on your preferred nomenclature.

This was good fun! I don't play minigolf very often, but I always enjoy it when I do, even though my putting skills leave something to be desired. It's difficult applying my knowledge of golf games to the real world! You don't have a handy grid with moving lines showing inclines in the real world, okay?

The minigolf course here at Elveden Forest is pretty neat — it's on an actual island in the middle of the lake we went boating on yesterday, and the island itself is heavily wooded, so the whole course is beneath a pleasantly shady canopy of trees. This is good, because today was a brightly sunny day — not overly hot and nicely breezy, but still the sort of weather that would probably burn and/or give you sunstroke if you spent too long out in it.

After the golf, we spent some time lounging in the pool again. There's a really nice little pool as part of the overall complex called the "Lagoon Pool", which appears to be salted water. It's thoroughly pleasant to relax in, and really good for floating aimlessly around in. It's also probably the closest I'll get to an anime-style "hot spring" over here in the UK.

Tomorrow we have to be out of our accommodation by 10am, so we're going to have some breakfast, pack up then spend a couple of hours enjoying the pool before we leave. Then it's off to my parents' place for a kind of "second holiday" — it'll be the first time pretty much the whole Davison clan has been in one place for quite some time, so it'll be good to see everyone, including my brother and his family.

S'pose I should probably get some sleep then!

Fun day today. Disappointingly, we discovered that the owls we were hoping to see are, for some reason, not available right now, so we decided that we'd do something else we'd been considering instead: taking an electric boat out on the lake for half an hour and having an enjoyable drift around.

I mentioned yesterday that I enjoy being in or on the water, so this boat trip was very enjoyable. Being an electric boat, there wasn't a lot to think about; all you had to do was use a joystick to steer left and right, press a button to choose between very slow and quite slow, and flip a little switch to choose between forwards and backwards.

Our half hour on the lake was thoroughly pleasant. The lake itself is fairly small, so half an hour was enough to do a good three laps of it, but each time we got to see some slightly different things — mostly various types of bird, to be honest, including Canada geese, mallard ducks and moorhens — as well as admiring the bravery of those people crazy enough to do the zipline over the lake. I did a zipline once when I was a Cub Scout, if I remember correctly, and it was fun; even if I wasn't too heavy for it as I am now, I'm not sure I'd do it today!

We followed up our little boat trip with a late lunch at The Pancake House, which appears to be a fixture in all the Center Parcs sites. Here, you can get Dutch or American-style pancakes with a variety of sweet and savoury toppings, and they're always delicious. Andie went for a Mexican-inspired one today, while I went for a "Dutch Apple" one with baked apple slices, sultanas, cinnamon sugar, whipped cream, ice cream and toffee sauce. Very, very good indeed.

Tomorrow we're probably going to go and play some minigolf and spend some time in the pool. And eat cake. This week is going by far too quickly for my liking, but I think we're making the most of the opportunity to relax!

I strongly believe that if you were to compare me to an "average" 38-year old man (if such a thing exists), I would have almost certainly spent a greater amount of time contemplating what my elemental resistances would be than most people.

It's still something that kind of fascinates me, though, along with applying RPG statistics to real-life situations in general. (A few years back, I pondered how much various amounts of HP would hurt, for example) So let me work through my theory with you all today!

First up, I'm weak against fire. There's no real question about that. I mean, obviously everyone burns up if exposed to too much fire, but I'm talking in more abstract terms. My least favourite weather and environmental conditions all involve being too hot, so I have a natural aversion to heat, which in turn leads me to believe I would probably be particularly weak against fire if I found myself in a magic-rich environment.

For strengths, I feel I have two. First up, from the more conventional spectrum of magical elements, I feel water would be a strength of mine. Time at the pool today reminded me that I feel totally at peace and relaxed when I'm in water. I just love floating around and being in water. I'm not a particularly strong swimmer or anything, but I just feel a certain affinity with water. On the many, many occasions where I've contemplated what magic spells I'd like to be able to cast, I often gravitate towards healing magic, which is typically associated with the water element.

My second elemental strength is from a wider spectrum of elements, as seen in some Japanese role-playing games: it's wood. I guess if you were to go with the conventional earth, wind, fire, water model, it would come under earth, but I've certainly played numerous games where wood was considered its own element, so wood it is. The reason for this is simple: once again, I feel an affinity for wooded areas. While I don't spend a great deal of time outside, if I do have to spend time outside, my natural choice for somewhere to hang out and just be among nature would be in a forest.

It's fortunate, then, that I'm spending a week in the depths of a forest with an excellent swimming pool then, huh?

Well, we're here in the blissful depths of Elveden Forest, sitting in our pleasant (if slightly warm) apartment that overlooks part of the nearby golf course. We've had a good dinner, seen three deer, a peacock and more squirrels than I can count, and things are generally pretty good.

We're now relaxing in aforementioned apartment with various items of electronic entertainment, enjoying the pleasant feel of unwinding without commitment.

Tomorrow will be time for, at the very least, some time in the excellent "Subtropical Swimming Paradise" they have going on here, and perhaps some of the other activities we had planned too. We'll see! We have no schedule, no itinerary, no commitments, and it's wonderful.

Here is a picture of a peacock.

Have a pleasant evening, everyone!

Can't believe I technically missed my 200th day of this daily blogging funtimes. I was busy playing Breath of the Wild, though, so hopefully you'll excuse my tardiness.

I'm really looking forward to this time away, even if I miss my cats terribly already. My mother-in-law is looking after them, but she's not been too well recently so we had to take them to her rather than her house-sit while we're away. She thinks she might actually come back down here and house-sit if she starts to feel a bit better, though; she's already much better than she was, apparently, so that's good.

We have nothing concrete planned for the holiday as yet. Center Parcs' main attraction is its  Plaza (the eponymous "Center" [sic]) which houses a bunch of shops and an awesome swimming pool. We will doubtless be spending a lot of time in said pool, and if the weather's nice there's a few outdoor activities we'd like to do too, including electric boats, minigolf and looking at owls. My mother-in-law has specifically provided us with some anniversary money for us to go and look at the owls, so we're going to go and look at the owls. The owls are really cool, to be fair.

Aside from that, there will be a lot of lazing around, not thinking about our respective day jobs, and playing of Nintendo Switch. Then when the week is over I get to go see my parents and my brother's family, all together for the first time in ages. So that will be nice!

Anyway, I'll still be "connected" while I'm away, so feel free to drop me a comment or a message if you want to say hi, and updates on MoeGamer and here will continue as normal-ish. I can't guarantee something every day on MoeGamer, but I have a few things lined up!

Time to get set and leave, then! See you on holiday!

I mentioned a few days ago that I've had a crazy amount of preorders all suddenly come to fruition at pretty much the same time (or at least the last couple of weeks) so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some new acquisitions with you all! Some of these I've mentioned or written about already; others are prepped and ready for future coverage on MoeGamer.

Here's the total "haul" that has arrived over the course of the last couple of weeks… and I have a few more outstanding that should be arriving soon, too! Here's what I've got so far, though: Lapis x Labyrinth by NIS, Dragon Star Varnir by Compile Heart, Death Mark by Experience and WorldEnd Syndrome by Arc System Works and TOYBOX.

Lapis x Labyrinth first. This comes in a lovely box with a nice slipcase for the outside. The only other NISA limited edition I've had to date is the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, but that was pretty nice too. I'd prefer a box with a lid rather than flaps, but I'm not so picky that this upsets me or anything!

And here's the complete goodness contained within: two lovely art prints (one of the mayor, one of the witch — conveniently both high up on my "favourite characters" lists), a poster of the key art, the game itself, an artbook presented in the style of a "photo album" and a soundtrack CD rather delightfully called "Dango Beats". (For the unfamiliar, a lot of Lapis x Labyrinth is themed around the visual motif of dango — most notably the "stack" of characters you take into each dungeon.)

The soundtrack is a single CD. I'm not sure offhand if it's a complete soundtrack — I think it might be — but the important thing is that the FEVER!! track is there, and that's all that really matters.

The artbook isn't super-long, but it is very nicely presented and charmingly written by the Mayor herself. I particularly like that the Witch's top unique selling point is that she has a cute hat. Because she does indeed have a cute hat. (And a nice ass.)

Next up is WorldEnd Syndrome, brought to Europe by PQube. This comes in a similar "Day One Edition" to Our World is Ended, featuring a glossy cardboard outer case that contains…

…the game and an artbook. This isn't supposed to be a super-fancy collector's edition or anything — it's the same price as just a normal game — so the artbook is a really nice bonus, especially considering it's quite thick.

This, along with Our World is Ended, seems to be a game that PQube very much believes in, so the heartfelt gratitude at the front of the artbook is nice to see. There's also the usual warning about spoilers, so I didn't explore the book too thoroughly.

I did have a quick skim through, though, and found the concept art section towards the back rather eye-catching. I love seeing sketches like this, even if it does make me feel woefully inferior.

Next up is Death Mark, which came out a while back in the US, but only released here recently. This is the first release from Aksys Games' new European store, which appears to be operated by the same company that runs both NISA Europe and Idea Factory International Europe's respective stores.

This one's a nice "box set" that comes with the game, a lovely velvety hardback artbook (with removable "CAUTION SPOILERS" tag) and a soundtrack CD in a nice cardboard rather than plastic sleeve. Oh, and a temporary tattoo, if you yourself feel the need to brand yourself with what is presumably the Death Mark. (But only for a little while.)

The soundtrack CD has just 10 tracks. I haven't listened to it yet so I'm not sure what to expect from this! I do love this kind of sleeve, though; it really sets albums like this apart from those in conventional jewel cases.

And finally on to Dragon Star Varnir. Apparently IFI ran into issues with Sony a while back and had to start distributing their limited editions with the game packed separately from the rest of the goodies, so here's the game!

I'm really looking forward to this one. If Death end re;Quest was anything to go by, IFI is really getting a feel for darker fare, and this one sounds delightfully messed up. Also check out the amount of PEGI content descriptors there!

Inside the main box (which is lovely and glossy), we have a steelbook case to put the game in, an artbook, a soundtrack CD and a mysterious envelope…

The soundtrack CD lists its tracks inside the inlay rather than on the back. I wasn't aware that Motoi Sakuraba worked on the soundtrack for this one, but there he is! (For the unfamiliar, Sakuraba's work encompasses most of Camelot's Mario sports games and Golden Sun, along with much of tri-Ace's work and numerous arrangements for Super Smash Bros. Quite the pedigree — and proof that Idea Factory and Compile Heart have been consistently moving up in the world over the course of the last decade, if they can attract someone like this to their project. As someone who's been with them since the original Neptunia (and I own a copy of Trinity Universe, which I'm looking forward to trying one day!), this is delightful to see.

What of that mysterious envelope, though? While tempting to leave it sealed, I collect stuff to enjoy rather than just have, so you better believe I cracked it open. It contains these large, glossy, tarot-style cards depicting what I assume are the main characters of Dragon Star Varnir. Which means I can stare at them guiltily whenever I end up feeding them to a dragon or whatever you do in that game… eesh. I'm scared to start!

Anyway, that's that for now. I'm hoping my Kickstarter copy of Bloodstained will arrive before I leave, but it's not looking too likely. There'll also be a copy of Super Neptunia RPG in the near future, but I'm not sure exactly when that'll show up.

Good times are ahead, for sure… both for me, and for you, since you better believe all these are getting writeups on MoeGamer in the future!

YouTuber Metal Jesus Rocks has an interesting video today on the interesting case of the rarest, most expensive PS4 game there is: Poop Slinger, which sold just over 80 copies before promptly disappearing and shooting up in value to $500+ on eBay.

This case raises some interesting questions and considerations about modern collecting. When we talk about collecting for older platforms — particularly those with relatively small total libraries, such as the Nintendo 64 — people often say that they're taking aim for a "complete collection". And, with a bit of time, dedication and money, this is something that is possible to achieve. I don't know anyone personally who has completed a platform collection, but I've watched videos and read articles by people who have.

With our current generation of systems in particular, that dream of having a "complete collection" doesn't appear to be something that is going to be possible or practical any more. I mean, even leaving the matter of download-only games aside, there are now so many limited-run releases that I seriously doubt there will be anyone out there in the future who has a "complete" PS4 or Switch collection. (Xbox One remains to be seen; I don't see a lot of limited-run Xbox One releases, but that may just be because I don't really follow that platform because I don't own one!)

Is this a problem? If you're the sort of obsessive type who needs to have a "complete" collection to feel fulfilled, then perhaps… but take a look at the game MJR is showing off in this video and ponder whether it — currently a less-than-$5 downloadable title — is something you actually want in your collection. I know I certainly don't.

But then this is always a consideration, isn't it? When going for a complete collection for a platform, you're going to be deliberately seeking out some dross for the sake of collecting it. I'm sure there are plenty of SNES collectors out there who are proud to have a copy of Captain Novolin on their shelves, for example. Hell, I've bought a bunch of PS2 games that had poor reviews or sold poorly — though, of course, in many cases there I've actually found them to be surprisingly enjoyable in their own right when taken on their own merits.

The main reason I can think of that you might want a copy of Poop Slinger in your packaged game collection is because it's an interesting story. And one that some people think isn't quite over yet; there are all sorts of theories as to whether or not the whole thing was an elaborate publicity stunt by someone like Limited Run Games, or if the tale of the distributor going bankrupt was a lie just so they could artificially inflate the price of this "rare" game when selling it on eBay.

I can certainly live without a copy, though, that's for sure!