As I type this, it's raining outside. I can hear the drops pattering on the roof of our "catio", the structure we have out the back of our house so our cats can go "outside" without actually going out into the big wide world where it's dangerous. (For those unaware, we lost a beloved companion on the road outside our house last November, so this was a direct response to that; neither Meg nor Patti seem to mind too much, even if Meg does enjoy sneaking out of the front door when it's open sometimes.)

I love the rain, or more specifically hearing the rain. It's a soothing, relaxing sound that always brings me a feeling of peace and deep relaxation. It reminds me of some fond memories, and also just provides me with something to listen to when things are otherwise silent. It's not a regular noise that you tune out after a while; it's a constantly interesting sound that is never quite the same from moment to moment. It rises and falls in its tempo, pitch and volume; sometimes it's gentle, sometimes it's aggressive, sometimes it's barely perceptible.

I'm not sure when, how or why I started feeling this way about the rain. One of the memories it brings back to me is of the few occasions I went camping as a child — a couple of times with the Cub Scouts, and once in my final year of primary school. (In the latter case, I didn't take a shit for a week because I was too afraid of getting bum AIDS from the public toilets on the campsite, so the subsequent constipation sullies an otherwise pleasant memory. But I digress.)

Yes, the sound of rain reminds me of being under canvas, trying desperately to get to sleep while my brain was rattling with excitement for the "It's a Knockout" competition that was to take place the following day, or annoyance with Christopher Smith for singing gibberish songs until well after midnight. "Doyget, doyget sannnds". Why do I remember this shit? I'm sure I could fit something useful in the memory space that is taking up.

But yes, anyway. Rain is good. Rain is relaxing. Rain is probably my favourite weather condition, assuming I am either inside or in possession of something to protect me from it. It's neither too hot nor too cold; it makes a pleasant noise; and it provides an altogether invigorating feeling of "new beginnings".

I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Been playing a couple of fun new games over the last couple of days: Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa and Lapis x Labyrinth. Both will be getting writeups on MoeGamer in the near future, but I thought I'd provide a few exclusive initial impressions right here for those curious!

Kotodama

This one intrigued me because it's the first game that PQube has actually developed (in collaboration with Japanese dev Art Co. Ltd, who previously worked on Gunpey and, err, Britney's Dance Beat). Consequently, I was keen to support it even if it turned out to be bobbins, but thankfully that is not the case; I'm really enjoying it so far.

Kotodama is a fusion of visual novel and puzzle game, with emphasis on the former. If you've played something like Purino Party, you'll have a rough idea of what to expect, though rather than being a comedic, ecchi affair like Purino Party was, the underlying story here is actually rather serious. I'll spare you the details for now in case you're interested in checking it out for yourself!

The puzzle sequences represent the main character making use of his power of kotodama — the power of words — to uncover the layers of lies within an individual's heart, and discover the truth within. This is accomplished through a tile-matching puzzler, though rather than following either the Bejeweled or Puzzle & Dragons mould, this time around it's an unusual system where clicking a tile sends it shooting up to the top of its column and subsequently shoving everything down into the gap it created.

It takes a little getting used to, but once you get into the rhythm of things, it's really satisfying. The whole "power of words" thing comes in via the visual novel segments; as you learn various key words by asking the right questions at the right times, you earn experience for the different "colours" (which roughly correspond to emotions and feelings such as love, "fire", tears, greed and the like) and, with enough experience in a particular colour, you level it up and make it more effective at filling the meter that determines your completion of the stage.

They also double as a means of determining whether or not you've actually managed to figure out the complete truth of a particular chapter; if you reach the end of a chapter and haven't found all the keywords, chances are you missed something!

The story is really cool and mysterious, with some surprisingly weighty themes. And both boys and girls get nearly naked in the puzzle sequences. A winning combination.

Lapis x Labyrinth

This is the new one from Nippon Ichi Software, and with the troubles they're having at the moment, I wanted to support it — particularly as I heard from at least two people I trust (both of whom are Patrons, I believe — thanks, guys!) that it's a good time.

Lapis x Labyrinth is a very odd game that positions itself as an RPG, but it's really more of an arcade game with a sense of persistent progression. In simple terms, you proceed through a series of 2D side-scrolling "dungeons" beating up enemies and collecting loot, but the focus is on generating combos and high scores rather than surviving particularly difficult challenges.

Score more points, get more gold. Get more gold, get more upgrades. Get more upgrades, score more points. Repeat. It's a deliciously addictive affair that I'm having a ton of fun with so far… and I absolutely adore the art style, combining adorable cutesy chubby chibis with an oddly strong feeling of sexiness. I am very into the Necromancer.

—

Anyway, as I say, I'll be doing detailed writeups of both of these on MoeGamer in the near future. I don't know if either of them will get the Cover Game treatment — it depends how much there is to talk about, I guess! — but they'll both definitely get some words of appreciation when I've spent a bit more time with them both.

And now it's nearly half past midnight, so I should probably go to bed rather than attempting to unravel the Mystery of the White Wolf… but Honoka's undies are so cute…

Hello folks! Hope you're all well. Just wanted to let you know that in the last week in June, I'm going on holiday for a week. The wife and I are off to Center Parcs, which, for those unfamiliar, is a thoroughly pleasant little holiday village in the depths of a forest with lots of nice (and expensive) things to do while you're there.

While tempting to continue "working" while I'm there, I'm going to allow myself a bit of time off from both MoeGamer and YouTube during the week. You lovely Patrons will still get your daily posts here on Patreon, but I'll be leaving the site and the channel to their own devices for the week.

I'm going to try and get some stuff done in advance so I can just schedule it for that week, so that shouldn't be a problem — I just wanted to let you all know in advance just in case I did suddenly appear to go a bit quiet and you wondered what happened!

With that in mind, I'm also not going to start a new Cover Game feature until I get back from the holiday. In the intervening weeks, I'm going to see if I can zip through and get the other endings in Our World is Ended and perhaps write one more piece on how all those characters' arcs truly conclude, but everything else will be one-offs or parts of the various Delving Into series.

$5 Patrons, I'm also aware I haven't done a wallpaper for you this month yet! I'll get cracking on that in the next day or two, so please watch out for that very soon.

I hope you're all having a thoroughly pleasant weekend! Mine has been pretty good so far. I have the joy of a trip to the tip tomorrow to get rid of some old chairs and a huge bag of grass cuttings, but other than that I intend to spend my time playing games, making videos, petting cats and maybe talking to my wife a bit if, you know, she deserves it or anything. (She'll be playing Final Fantasy or My Time at Portia if I ignore her anyway, so she'll be all right.)

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday!

[I recently decided to become a Patron of Normal Happenings, since Matthew there has been a consistently supportive and positive voice in the blogging community at large, and has always been very kind to me. This post is inspired by one of his regular "Daily Inklings" posts, which are simple writing prompts designed to provide the stimulus for the reader's own creative work.]

As a kid, I dreamed of the stars. I found the idea of outer space, alien planets and the exploration of things far beyond our humdrum everyday world to be fascinating.

I knew that this was just pure fantasy, however; I knew that space travel in the modern day and age was expensive, physically demanding, extremely dangerous and you didn't even end up going anywhere interesting. I never really had the childish ambition to "become an astronaut" because I knew from an early age that it was something that only a select few could do — and probably a select few Americans at that. As a nerdy, clumsy, physically inept young British boy, I knew that I was never going to get there.

It didn't stop me dreaming, however. I enjoyed reading non-fiction books about space and other planets. I loved science-fiction stories, whether they were TV shows, movies or novels. I remember being very proud that I read some of Isaac Asimov's novels as a kid, because they always looked and felt like "grown-up books"; they were the stuff my parents read.

And, of course, I loved using the computer to indulge this fantasy, whether it was through the structured play of an actual game set in space, or something more creative.

In the former instance, I particularly appreciated any game that allowed me to fly a spaceship from a first-person perspective or at the very least provided a convincing "simulation". I loved Star Raiders and its sequel on the Atari 8-bit; on the ST, meanwhile, I had a lot of time for titles like Starglider II, Enterprise, Starflight and Space Rogue, all of which gave me the feeling of being in command of my own ship and travelling to far-flung, exotic locales to… well, usually to pick up minerals rather than anything more interesting, but digging up rocks is infinitely more enjoyable on an alien planet than in the British countryside, as lovely as the latter can be sometimes.

In the latter case, I was strongly drawn to Jeff Minter's ColourSpace "light synthesiser" on the Atari ST. For the unfamiliar, this was a piece of software designed to allow you to play with light and colour. Moving the mouse around and clicking the button would create various coloured effects, and there were numerous controls you could fiddle with to change the patterns that were generated, the colours that were used and various increasingly psychedelic features.

One of the things I loved about ColourSpace was that it included not only the ability to simulate a starfield, but also a background image that resembled a starship cockpit. I would spend hours at a time playing with this combination of things coupled with the various light-synthesis options, playing out a narrative in my head that usually ended with the catastrophic destruction of my spacecraft. (The various colour-cycling options that ColourSpace provided were eminently suitable for simulating the cockpit flashing with hundreds of warning lights!)

There was no "objective" here, no end goal and, looking back on it, the fact it usually ended with my "death" was a bit bleak, but I loved it. I loved this means of expressing myself, and I feel like the fact it was specifically in space rather than just against a black backdrop was a key part of the whole experience.

Hmm. May have to dig out that ColourSpace disk this evening and see if it still has the same magic…

Hello! Sorry about yesterday. I was absolutely convinced I'd already written a post yesterday, but it turns out I was just remembering the previous day. Evidently all the days are melting into one another. Never mind eh.

Anyway, now seems like a good time to talk about Google Stadia, which revealed a bunch of new information yesterday. Remember, this is the thing that some people were arguing was going to be the "future of gaming".

Here are some facts and my thoughts.

It's launching in November of this year. Attempting to hit the Christmas rush is… theoretically a good idea, but I feel there's something inherently less exciting about something that doesn't actually have any real dedicated hardware. Also releasing in November means it's going up against Pokemon. Good luck with that!

There will be a "starter pack" available for £119, which includes a controller, a Chromecast Ultra and a three-month subscription to the "Stadia Pro" service, which allows 4K/60fps video… assuming you have the 35Mbps+ connection required to make this work. Again, this feels rather expensive for what it is… perhaps it's just me. The Chromecast is a nice device, but you can pick one of those up by itself for £30 or less; presumably the "Ultra" offers something extra (4K?) but given how cheap TV sticks are these days, this feels like a lot of money for not very much.

The controllers will be available separately for £59 in 2020. Hahahaha. Get real. I know controllers have been creeping up in price for the last couple of generations, but £60 is insane.

Stadia Pro will cost £8.99 a month, and will not include all the games in the library. This is, I think, the most hilarious thing. The biggest potential selling point of Stadia during the "conjecture" period was the possibility of a Netflix-style gaming library, where you could just click on a new release and immediately be playing it. But it seems that's not going to happen; while some games will be included as part of the subscription, new releases will have to be "bought" separately, meaning you're paying for something and ending up not owning either a physical or digital copy of it.

There will be a free option. You'll be limited to 1080p and 30fps using this free account, which removes two of the main selling points from the initial announcement. Presumably you also won't have access to any of the included "subscription" games, meaning you'll have to buy anything you want to play. Individual pricing for games hasn't been announced, but they better be cheaper than full download or packaged releases of games, since, to reiterate, you're paying to not own anything.

Some big names are on board. Games confirmed include Doom, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XV, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and The Division 2. Boooooring… and all games that have been out for a while, more to the point. Neither Activision (Overwatch) or Epic (Fortnite) have signed up to the platform, meaning that, at the time of writing, two of the most popular games in the world are not available on Stadia.

The system will have the ability to search YouTube for relevant content, and for you to see what your friends are doing while you're playing. No. I already get distracted by notification spam on modern consoles; I really don't need picture-in-picture of my friend playing a totally different game when I'm trying to concentrate on something. Searching for relevant YouTube content is potentially interesting… but it does also sort of encourage behaviour where people don't try to discover things for themselves, and instead go straight to YouTube to get the solutions. Also video guides suck; bring back text!

To summarise, there are some interesting ideas here, but I don't see it working, at all — and I sincerely hope that people don't support this. I'd perhaps be more receptive to the idea if the subscription offered a complete "Netflix of games" type situation, but asking people to buy games on top of a subscription fee is just laughable… not to mention it is one of the many reasons OnLive, an earlier attempt to do pretty much exactly all this, failed miserably.

As I've mentioned before, my biggest concern with Stadia is that if it takes off, it will normalise the non-ownership of games, and that's a serious concern for preservation and archival. I'd much rather the games of the world be distributed across a wide variety of collectors' libraries than centralised with one single corporation… plus a centralised streaming solution means that games can easily be removed from existence when, say, a licensing deal expires, or even a newer version of an existing game releases.

You know me, I don't normally like to be overly negative about things, but there is absolutely nothing desirable about Stadia for me, and I hope it is a miserable flop. If successful, it has the potential to do irreversible damage to the gaming medium, and I want no part of that. Thankfully, with all the bizarre and stupid decisions that seem to have been made during development, the likelihood of that happening seems to have gotten significantly less… and I have to say, I'm happy about that.

This is probably the last I'll say about Stadia, since so far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist from this point onwards. I will continue to support the things I believe in!

It's been true for a while now, but it bears repeating: Nintendo is absolutely killing it right now, from a variety of different perspectives.

We have an excellent console that plays well whether you have it hooked up to a TV or take it on the go with you; granted, it's not as powerful as its peers, but as someone who's never particularly cared about framerate and is more interested in cool design than fancy graphics, that doesn't bother me at all.

We have access to a growing library of retro titles, both as part of the online service subscription and as individually sold games on the eShop. If you ever wanted a portable Neo-Geo, the Switch is the place to be.

And we have some absolutely fabulous-looking games coming up.

The prompt for this post was today's Pokemon Nintendo Direct event, which showed a bunch of new footage from the upcoming games, due out on November 15 this year. (Methinks Nintendo will have a happy Christmas.) The game looks wonderful, with expansive Dragon Quest-style field exploration, giant Pokemon kaiju battles, four-player cooperative raids and some super-cute girls. I've not been a big Pokemon fan over the years, but I enjoyed Moon and I'm definitely on board with this one.

But that's not all. At the end of the month we have Super Mario Maker 2, which I'm starting to overflow with excitement for. I really, really enjoyed the Wii U original but didn't play it nearly as much as I perhaps should have; it will be great to see the format get another chance at success, and this time with a much broader, larger userbase to draw from. And if this one's a success, who knows — maybe we'll one day see my real dream: Zelda Maker.

It's such a wonderful time to be interested in video games. Sure, there are things you could complain about, but when the "good" is so good, why would you want to?

Tolerance for flaws is, so far as I'm concerned, an admirable trait — whether we're talking about tolerating flaws in actual people, or in "things" such as creative works or products. Tolerating imperfections makes you more accepting, kinder, more empathetic and just generally a nicer person, in my experience; the people I most enjoy talking about games with, for example, are the ones who tolerate the flaws in their favourite games, seeing past them to the enjoyable and wonderful things that lie beyond.

It seems like an increasingly rare trait these days, sadly; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a user review for a video game declare it "literally unplayable" because it dropped below 60fps at some point, or didn't support their sausage-like ultrawide monitor, or something like that. The reality of the situation is that yes, it's a shame that the game doesn't (insert complaint here), but when you notice an issue like this… take a step back and ponder whether it really impacts your experience and makes it impossible to enjoy. And if it does, consider whether or not you might not be setting unrealistic expectations for everything to be perfect.

Our World is Ended, the current Cover Game on MoeGamer, is a good example of this. The English text is full of typos and minor grammatical errors, which is a bummer for a text-centric game like a visual novel… but it hasn't affected my enjoyment at all, and it isn't relevant to the emotional engagement and investment I've felt in the whole experience. Thinking rationally about what a mammoth undertaking it must be to translate a visual novel of this size and complexity, I'm not surprised at all that the editing process must have been a nightmare — and maybe even cut some corners along the way, since localiser-publisher PQube isn't exactly a huge outfit.

I'm obviously not talking about tolerating things that actually are broken here. A game that doesn't work properly is worthy of complaining about. A situation like Fallout 76, where people were not provided with what they were promised, is worthy of complaining about. A situation like Diablo III's original launch, where the game actually was literally unplayable for a considerable amount of time — you couldn't log in or start the game! — is very worthy of complaining about! But something that is ultimately a minor hiccup to your overall enjoyment of something? Consider carefully whether you'd rather spend your time enjoying the thing you already spent your money on, or complaining about it.

In an ideal world, everything we buy would be absolutely perfect, with no problems and nothing to complain about. But we don't live in an ideal world; not even close. And so you can make a choice: you can be perpetually unhappy about the imperfections of literally everything, because nothing is perfect; or you can develop tolerance and acceptance, and perhaps even embrace those flaws and imperfections for their quirky charms.

I made my choice a long time ago!

Ever wonder if we're actually living on the darkest timeline? It's a bit of a common joke, I know, but each day it feels increasingly plausible.

I was watching some YouTube videos earlier and happened to come across one by "Wood", from the channel BeatEmUps. I'd never watched any of his own content before, but had come across Wood numerous times on The Game Chasers' channel. The video was named "I have depression. i need your help". YouTube recommended it to me today for some reason; I didn't notice until after the fact that it was actually from back in March.

In the video, Wood described how he had been living with anxiety and depression for most of his life — in his case, largely brought on by a childhood in which he suffered physical and emotional abuse by his parents. The video was primarily to announce a livestream during which he was hoping to raise money for a number of different mental health charities, but as part of his explanation to camera, he also talked a bit about the abuse both he and his girlfriend had been suffering, purely because some people out there didn't like him, and thus felt he didn't "deserve" to have a Patreon account, affiliate links, sponsorship deals and suchlike — you know, the means through which a content creator like Wood is able to actually make his passion into his job.

Hearing that this was happening, I found myself wondering how on Earth anyone could behave that way; how on Earth anyone could consider it in the slightest bit appropriate to decide someone wasn't worthy of making a living doing what they enjoy. Unfortunately, I must also confess that many instances of witnessing "boy who cried wolf" situations online led me to want to actually see some evidence of him suffering what he had described — but in this instance, it didn't take long to find some abuse in the comments.

I don't know Wood or his content, as I mentioned above, but he always comes across as a thoroughly pleasant person with a good sense of humour. The raw honesty of his video touched a nerve, and I found myself wondering just what is wrong with people to get him into the emotional state he was in during recording.

Between instances like this, abuse I've suffered myself online (including some from ex-colleagues as well as from organised troll groups) and the generally miserable state of the world in 2019, it's hard not to feel like we really are in that darkest timeline.

Question is, how do we escape it?

Whew. It's taken nearly 12 hours to edit this next episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, so I hope you all enjoy it! The reason it took so long is that I was recording a lot of my own footage for it rather than relying on YouTube. This was primarily because I absolutely love the games we were talking about, so it was a thinly-veiled excuse to play them some more and be productive at the same time.

I enjoy podcast editing and always have. I have a habit of setting pretty high expectations for myself and then realising quite a lot down the line that I've made a lot of work for myself, but I enjoy that work; it's fun and creative, and an opportunity to both develop and show off my skills.

In the case of the Squadron of Shame podcast that I was part of some time ago (quite a long time ago now, actually!) I made a point of providing both .mp3 and enhanced AAC podcasts with chapter markers and relevant artwork. Today, with The MoeGamer Podcast, I treat the show primarily as a video rather than a piece of audio, so that means including plenty of appropriate footage so it can be enjoyed visually as well as just listening to it. (I do, of course, also provide the Soundcloud version so those who, say, want to listen to it in their car can also enjoy it!)

I'm sure my workflow in Hitfilm Express (my weapon of choice) is woefully inefficient compared to some other people, and choosing to make the podcast a video experience rather than just pure audio makes it take a lot longer than just slapping some audio together… but I enjoy what I do and every time I finish an episode I feel like I've achieved something worthwhile and meaningful. I hope you enjoy it too!

And if you're yet to explore it for yourself… well, here's a handy playlist for you!  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqmqFDuRsOsekZU13NE6IDXVBFu__41MX 

Hello! Chris and I had a great discussion of puzzle games yesterday for The MoeGamer Podcast, and you can expect this episode to caress your lugholes sometime tomorrow, all being well.

I love me some puzzle games, as you may be able to tell from the Puzzler Essentials articles on my site. It always kind of bummed me out a bit that the puzzle game genre has become the fare of "disposable" mobile games, particularly those rammed with microtransactions, but there's still definitely a market for standalone puzzlers — even with packaged releases. Puyo Puyo Tetris, Soldam and Crystal Crisis (which I will probably pick up next month as I've already spent way too much on games this month!) definitely prove that for sure.

I'm really glad we had the discussion on the podcast, as it provided a good excuse to revisit some old favourites — and to discover some new ones, too. I'm particularly pleased that I discovered Taito's Landmaker, which is a largely unknown but seriously cool game that is absolutely worth exploring if you ever get the chance. The PS1 version has two completely separate game modes that have a very different look and feel to them, with only the core mechanics in common. I really like it and will definitely be revisiting it (and probably writing about it) sometime soon.

Anyway, I hope you've had a good weekend. I'll see you later today for Sunday's actual post; technically this is Saturday's, since I got distracted by all the puzzling! Occupational hazard, I guess…