As the title suggests, I have discovered something that is either dangerous or brilliant; I haven't quite decided which, really.

Well, okay, both are a bit of an exaggeration, but I have discovered that Switch games that aren't particularly heavy on the action — like, say, turn-based RPGs or visual novels, two of my favourite types of game — are absolutely ideal to play on the exercise bike at the gym. As such, my last couple of sessions have been accompanied by Pokémon Sword, which has been a fine way to take my mind off the inherently repetitive and boring activity of riding the exercise bike.

This is good. If you can make "time go faster", then you can get more done. I've been finding Pokémon so compelling that I didn't look at the clock on the bike at all until I was almost done today. I was starting to flag a bit by then (as were my Pokémon, who had been facing a fairly stiff series of challenges) but I pushed through to the end, and it felt good.

Now, if only I had a steady stream of turn-based RPGs and visual novels to play on Switch to keep me occupied at the gy– hold on a minute!

Hello, dear Patrons! Today I am using you as a guinea pig. I hope you don't mind! 🙂

Good evening! I was going to present you with a PATRONS ONLY! video tonight, but it's taking a while to render and I want to go to bed, so you can have it tomorrow instead.

I have been playing a lot of Pokémon. It is very good and I'm extremely gratified to see lots of my friends enjoying it too. It's especially great to see this after all the negativity and other bullshit that has surrounded the game in the run-up to its launch, and it's absolutely wonderful to see all the trolls well and truly put in their place by how much people are having a good time with it.

Lots, lots, lots more to say about it, but I'll save that for when we start looking into it in depth on MoeGamer after we're done with Bullet Girls Phantasia next week.

Now, it's very late and I would like to sleep, so I am going to sleep! Good night, and sweet Dynamax dreams.

I've mentioned previously that next up on MoeGamer after I've finished covering Bullet Girls Phantasia (which will probably be early next week because I want to do one more article about the narrative in general) I'll be moving on to Pokémon because I'm increasingly intrigued by this game, especially now that it's out and people appear to be having a blast with it as the haters gradually crumble into dust.

After that, I was going to jump into Atelier Ryza, but Meru from Love Lab Japan reached out this morning and offered me a review code for their latest localisation project: a visual novel called Lamunation!, which sounds thoroughly charming, adorable and silly, so I'm going to try and squeeze that in either alongside or immediately after Pokémon.

Lamunation! appears to be a comedy visual novel that incorporates commentary on aspects of the modern world such as social media, as well as including a thoroughly adorable cast of characters, all themed around popular Japanese carbonated beverages. I have no idea what to expect going in, to be perfectly honest, but I like the art, the concept sounds highly entertaining and it'll be nice to tackle a pure visual novel again.

Lamunation! is out on Steam on November 22, and Love Lab is working to bring it to various other platforms too. The Steam version is all-ages but there will be a free 18+ patch available; the off-Steam versions will be offered in full 18+ format by default from the sound of things.

Just wanted to give you a heads-up! It sounds like fun, so I'm looking forward to diving into it when I get the time.

There are never enough hours in the day, are there? It feels like something always needs to fall by the wayside in order for you to accomplish the things you'd actually like to accomplish. I guess someone wiser than me would probably say understanding and working your life around that concept is what being an adult is all about, but I'm childish and frustrated about such things.

This week I've been feeling it particularly keenly. I feel like I've had a lot to say in the writing I've done — I'm particularly pleased with today's piece on Bullet Girls Phantasia — but whenever I have a lot to say, it takes a while to research and write… which means by the time I've finished all that gubbins it is, as it is now, 11pm.

While I have no particular moral objections to continuing to do things this late — specifically, going to the gym, which is the thing that has been falling by the wayside a bit this week — my body does indeed object, since I have to be out of the door by 7am to go to work, and that means hauling my flabby carcass out of bed by 6.30 at the latest.

Oh well. It's not as if the gym will stop being there if I have a couple of days where I've had other priorities. I'll try and make it there tomorrow and over the weekend at the very least, and have a bit of a "fresh start" next week; I haven't been feeling my best physically this week anyway, so perhaps a rest and a reboot will do me a bit of good.

For now, bed is calling. Hope you enjoy the Bullet Girls Phantasia piece. Just, uh, maybe don't read it at work.

My mother in law bought us an air fryer the other day… well, technically she bought it for my wife as a birthday present, but we're both benefiting.

I haven't actually tried using it as yet, but I've been pretty impressed with the food that comes out of it so far. We've tried cooking bits of chicken (both on and off the bone) as well as "chips" (after a fashion) and they've all come out really well without the distinctive greasy sloppy oiliness of a regular old fryer.

I've been particularly impressed with the meat, actually. (That's what she said, I know, I know.) All of the cuts of chicken we've tried cooking in there have come out cooked perfectly through, and retaining plenty of juicy moisture. I generally find chicken a bit dull and bland, especially if it's been cooked to bone dryness, but the stuff the air fryer has produced so far has been very tasty.

I'm interested to see what else is possible using it, or how it can be incorporated into the preparation of more complex dishes. So far we've only done simple things, but I suppose there's no reason you can't use it to cook the meat that is going to go into a curry or something like that, then finish the sauce off on the hob. I don't know. I'm no cook. I chuck stuff in a pot that I think might taste nice and sometimes it does. (Sometimes it doesn't, too, but if I feel that might be likely to happen I'm usually just cooking for myself.

So, well, early impressions seem to indicate that if you've been hungry for another bulky gadget to take up what little worktop space you had left in your kitchen, an air fryer is a good choice. (A slow cooker is also an excellent investment, but that's another matter entirely.)

Well, you think of something interesting to write for 343 days then!

I both love and hate this time of year. I like the short days, because I'm a big fan of night-time in general, and I especially like night-time when it's cold and snowy; the kind of environment that makes everything outside look a bit like it's not quite real.

However, at the same time, I won't pretend it's not at least a little depressing to be leaving the house in the morning when it's dark, and returning home when it's also dark. Not that I spend a great deal of time out in the sunshine anyway, but just the bit of daylight you can get on a drive home can be invigorating after a day under the fluorescent lights of the office.

It's also a pain in the arse when you leave the house in the morning and have forgotten it often gets a bit cold in the night, necessitating a bit of scrapey-scrapey action on the windscreen of one's car before being able to go anywhere. Especially if you have left the house without anything warm. Ice is cold.

There's something oddly "festive" about it all though. I associate the early darkness with things from my childhood, like going out carol singing with my mother and the "main characters" of the village I grew up in. I remember wrapping up warm, walking through the village streets and feeling a profound sense of relief and gratitude when someone invited us inside for a mince pie — even though I never really liked mince pies all that much.

I guess on the whole I have slightly more positive feelings about it than negative ones, as I always quite look forward to this time of year rolling around for some reason. And now we're in November I consider it just about okay to start thinking of Christmas being "soon"!

Good morning! I forgot to write yesterday, apologies. I was playing Bullet Girls Phantasia and I was getting really into the story, so kind of lost track of time! I've still got a little way to go on that so there'll probably be a piece specifically about the sexy elements this week (because there's some interesting stuff to talk about there, relevant to some articles I've posted recently) followed by a bit about the story next week.

As I've noted previously, I'm also interested in resurrecting the New Game Plus video series to play through some postgame content because there's a lot to do there and I'm actually quite keen to do it — I just don't want to drag on the feature for too long.

There's a really satisfying sense of progression, and it's clear that playing through just Normal difficulty is only going to allow you to see a fraction of the power level you'll be able to attain by the end of the postgame. So watch out for that in the near future!

Next up, as I've said, will be Pokémon. I'm a relative newbie to Pokémon having only played a bit of Red and Gold back in the day, and all through the main story of Moon, so I'm interested to come at it from that perspective — and with Sword and Shield being something of a "fresh start" for the series in many ways, I think it's going to be cool to explore.

I'm also keen to do Pokémon for another reason: to counter the massive negativity that has been boiling over about it recently. I understand that longtime fans are upset over the lack of National Dex, but the behaviour of a lot of people who are disappointed in what they perceive Sword and Shield to be lacking has been absolutely disgusting. I've seen a lot of really unpleasant, abusive tweets being thrown around along with outright lies about the game (someone actually tried to convince the Internet that the game had no battle backgrounds yesterday… that went about as well as you can expect) — though I was heartened to see how much traction the #ThankYouGameFreak hashtag mustered in a very short space of time over the weekend.

The game is in urgent need of some quality analysis that looks at what the game is actually doing rather than what it is not doing or "how bad the trees look" or whatever. I'm looking forward to it and can't wait for Friday to give it an initial shakedown!

Anyway. Better do some work… or rather, prepare for an entire morning of pointless conference calls. More to come later today. Have a lovely day!

Bit of a serious one today. I'll leave the things I say in the video to hopefully speak for themselves!

Good evening everyone! Hope you've had a pleasant Saturday. I've been out all day so I haven't had a chance to record a PATRONS ONLY! vlog as yet, nor have I had time to do a wallpaper for $5+ Patrons. Those are jobs for tomorrow, though, so please look out for them!

What have I been up to today? Well, I've been visiting some local friends that I don't get nearly enough opportunities to hang out with these days, largely owing to two of them having children and our group collectively being quite disorganised with regard to this sort of thing. We usually manage to get together for at least a couple of our birthdays each year, though, and with two of the birthdays in question falling quite close to one another this time of year, now's the time!

Most of our day was spent playing Gloomhaven. I don't love this game, but I had a lot more fun with it than I usually do today by playing a different character class. I do find it quite exhausting to play, though; individual scenarios run quite long, and it also takes quite a long time to resolve individual rounds, but the mechanics themselves are neat, there's a lot of variety and the "legacy"-esque components are cool.

For the unfamiliar, Gloomhaven is a tabletop strategy game vaguely akin to classic dungeon crawlers such as Games Workshop's HeroQuest series and, perhaps more closer comparison, Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Players collectively choose from an initially limited selection of character classes and build a deck with which they can move and take actions throughout each scenario. The game can be played as one-shot scenarios, but the system is really built for a large, evolving campaign somewhat inspired by tabletop roleplaying.

The campaign is the thing I have mixed feelings about, and I can't quite make up my mind if it's the actual campaign itself that is inelegant, or if it's just the fact that we don't get together to play very often. Either way, I don't feel a lot of attachment to the characters I play, I don't care about the unfolding story and everything just seems a bit arbitrary, particularly as, taking the rules as written, there's nothing stopping you getting into a perilous, deadly cliffhanger at the end of a scenario and then just popping back to town to buy some new equipment before you resolve it in the next.

Within the scenarios, the game has some neat systems. Rather than using dice or flat stats, the deck you build consists of cards with "top" and "bottom" abilities. Each turn, you pick two cards, and can use the top of one and the bottom of another. Generally speaking, top abilities are attacks or other active abilities, while bottom abilities (heehee) are movement-related — though there are exceptions to both. There's also an initiative value on each card; when everyone reveals the actions that they are going to take, they also pick one of the two initiative values, then everyone goes in order — including the monsters that have inevitably appeared as part of the scenario.

There's no "dungeon master" or "evil wizard" player required for Gloomhaven; the monsters work using some rudimentary, fixed rules combined with a deck of cards for each type of creature that defines specific behaviours. This allows some variety in how they act as well as some unique abilities for different types of foes, which is neat; there are some really creative, thematically appropriate abilities in there, too, such as tentacly Lovecraftian "deep terrors" being unable to move, but having a huge range on their attacks, or crazed cultists occasionally exploding when you defeat them.

As I say above, the thing I find exhausting about Gloomhaven is that each round of play takes quite a long time, particularly if there are a lot of monsters. If you're playing with a large group of player characters, it can take quite a long time to do anything, and the general pace of play is quite slow anyway — the fact that you need to expend cards to simply move, even through empty rooms, means things can drag on a little bit. On the micro level, this means it can be a while before you get to do anything on any given turn, and on the macro level it means even just one scenario can take several hours to resolve.

It's a game I want to like very much as in theory it should be exactly my sort of thing. But the whole thing just feels a little too clunky for me, causing my mind to wander a bit while playing. Interestingly, there is a digital version in the works; it's currently in Early Access on Steam, so I wonder how much this might resolve the issues I have with the tabletop game. Although then we run into the issue I typically have with board game adaptations on computer — I often end up asking myself why I wouldn't just play something that had been specificially designed as a CRPG.

Ah well. We had a good day, and we got in some time with Mario Tennis Aces and Super Smash Bros at the end of the evening, too, so that was neat. Banjo and Kazooie are super fun!

Anyway. Bit of gaming now before bed, then, as I say, PATRONS ONLY! and wallpaper to follow tomorrow. Have a pleasant rest of your Saturday!