Podcast editing is all done! I started a little later than usual but still managed to get everything wrapped up before the end of the day, so that's great. I hope you enjoy tomorrow's episode — it's a fun roundup of the stuff that caught our eyes at E3, and I think we had some really interesting discussions along the way.
For me, now begins the countdown to holiday time! The wife Andie and I have just one full week of work to survive until we have some blissful time off — I have a week and a day, while she has a couple of weeks. We're going away to foresty holiday park Center Parcs for the first week, then visiting my parents over the weekend — my brother and the rest of his family are also visiting for the first time all together in… I don't know, actually, a very long time! (My brother, for those unaware, lives in California, which is on a whole other continent to where both my parents and I live, so we don't get to see him as often as we'd like.)
I took the following Monday off just so I have a day to myself after the holiday and the visit and everything else. Recovery time! Some time off from being "on holiday", if you like. Andie, meanwhile, has most of the following week off to enjoy the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion Shadowbringers, which I'm going to try very hard to remain unspoiled on, as I intend on playing through all of Final Fantasy XIV's main story as part of my upcoming Final Fantasy Marathon series of videos. That is a long way off yet, so there will certainly be even more story than exists at the launch of Shadowbringers by the time I get there, so when I do finally get to that point I'll be able to offer some honest, hopefully unspoiled reactions to what happens.
As I've mentioned before, I'll be posting on MoeGamer as normal this week and probably queueing some stuff up for while we're away rather than posting "live", but I won't kick off a new Cover Game feature until after I'm back from the trip. That way, I can give it my full attention.
I'm pondering what should come next. I've shared with you the things that I'm very interested in covering — that in many cases I've had in the queue for a long while — but there are also some interesting things that have come up recently that I think are worthy of multi-part deep-dive coverage.
Chief among these is not a particularly "big" game or anything, but I think it's something that there's potentially a lot to explore in: The Expression: Amrilato, which eagle-eyed readers will note is the game that MangaGamer have had trouble with bringing to Steam recently. The VN as a whole is, according to the chap from MangaGamer I spoke with recently, "between 10-30 hours depending on how much you engage with the 'study' side of things" — so I thought it might be interesting to err on the upper side of that and see if I can actually learn some Esperanto from a video game. I think that'd be pretty cool.
The reason I think The Expression: Amrilato is an interesting case for a Cover Game feature is precisely because it's not particularly well-known, but it has the potential to be very valuable for more reasons than one. There are a number of ways in which it can be explored, too: there's the narrative, themes and characterisation of the overall experience to explore, but on top of that there's how it treats the use of Esperanto as part of its narrative, and its distinct component that aims to actually educate the player in how this language works.
Either way, Cover Game feature or not, I'll be writing about The Expression: Amrilato in the very near future, so please watch out for that.
Right. I've had a long day, so I should probably sleep so I can be vaguely bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for this "last" week of work. Who am I kidding, I feel like walking garbage of a morning even if I go to sleep at 9pm. All-night Lapis x Labyrinth session, anyone…?
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