I've been kicking around an idea for a new video series, and I was hoping I could get some input from you lovely people on what to call it.

Essentially, it would be a similar format to Atari A to Z, but for more recent/current games. It would consist of a bit of opening background to the game in question, where there is stuff to say, followed by a 20-30 minute "guided tour" of a typical play session, highlighting how the game plays and some interesting things about it.

It wouldn't be a pre-scripted video but it wouldn't quite be a Let's Play either, in that it won't be an ongoing walkthrough of the whole game; rather, it would be a slice of the game that would allow people to decide if it looks like something that might appeal to them. I'm not planning on making it a definitive "review" or anything like that, because 1) I tend not to do that anyway and 2) different people have different tastes; rather I want to provide a quick tour of what you can expect from the game, from the perspective of someone who has spent some time with it (but not necessarily beaten it).

I don't know what to call this series. I want to give the series as a whole some sort of distinctive title so it can tie all the episodes together. I don't want to call it "Quick Look" because people will assume that's ripping off Giant Bomb, and likewise I don't want to go with "WTF Is…" or anything too similar, because that was TotalBiscuit's thing, may he rest in peace.

Something along those lines would probably work, though. I'm just coming up short on title ideas right now. Once I figure out a name for the series — perhaps with your help! — I'll probably try and pop this series in the weekly Wednesday slot formerly occupied by Warriors Wednesday.

So fire away! No idea is too stupid at this point. Think about something you'd be happy sharing with friends; "oh, have you seen the episode of [title] by Pete Davison, he talks all about that game".

I await an empty comments section with eager enthusiasm! 🙂

I've been pleased to see ProJared very much getting back into the swing of things of late; he's been gradually starting to do more and more things ever since he put all the drama over him to bed last year, but it's mostly been Twitch streams; I'm not a huge fan of Twitch generally because I'm never around at the time the people I might want to watch are streaming, and I find stream archives to be full of obtrusive shout-outs, thank-yous and stuff like that.

Just recently, he's been starting to do traditional Let's Plays again, and I'm really happy about that. He's basically starting over from scratch, though, as he doesn't have an editor or indeed anyone working for him any more after the whole debacle — and fair play to him, he's doing his best to take it all on himself rather than relying on anyone else while he continues to "rebuild". Of course, there's no longer the magical text-based banter from "Miss Editor", but I'm sure once he feels comfortable with what he's doing there'll be some fun stuff in there — and in the meantime, of course, it's nice to just be able to enjoy some games with him again.

Why do I care? Well, mostly because ProJared is probably the reason I actually got into watching Let's Plays in the first place. I came to him via a rather convoluted route that started with Classic Gaming Quarterly, came via LGR and a few other people, and I eventually landed on his main channel. I decided to watch a few videos on his gameplay channel — and I found myself enjoying them a lot, particularly during quiet periods at the day job.

In fact, I found myself enjoying them so much that I decided I wanted to start trying to do them myself. ProJared's older work is a huge inspiration on what I've been doing with YouTube for the last couple of years; I found myself very much enjoying his chilled out, honest, open and conversational style — it was certainly a far cry from the stereotypical screaming Let's Players I'd had in mind before I started exploring YouTube in detail a while back.

Even in the midst of the nonsense that went on with him, I respected his work and how much it had inspired me, so I've always striven to adopt a similar — though not identical — style to what I do with my Let's Play-style stuff on YouTube. It does my heart good to see him back doing this sort of thing again, and I hope he's finally been able to leave all the unpleasantness behind him.

The hate mobs of the Internet are a scourge of the modern age. I sincerely hope no-one close to me ever has to suffer such abuse.

I'm playing a fair bit of Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl Gold when I'm not knee-deep in Atelier Iris 3 — it's a lovely palate-cleanser, and when I've spent some more time with it I'll write about it in more detail on MoeGamer for sure.

One thing that's come to mind though is how I have somewhat mixed feelings about multiplayer components. On the one hand, I love the idea of all the "community" stuff in Snack World: it has a lot in common with stuff like Animal Crossing in terms of customisation, chat and all that fun stuff, plus the ability to do quick chat and emotes without having to type things in.

On the other, it's a game that I feel is probably best experienced with friends, and a brief look at the online the other day didn't fill me with confidence that there would even be anyone to play with without making a specific date to get together and do something. That may just be the time I played; I haven't tried again since.

Thankfully, Snack World is plenty substantial in the single-player department, so if you never touch multiplayer you're not missing out on a huge amount — but there are still aspects you'll never see, such as the "Traveler" feature, where characters you've previously played with occasionally show up in your town and can even be hired as AI-controlled party members.

I'll have to look into whether or not there are any communities still going for this game; it'd be nice to enjoy it to the fullest, because it's a really fun game. At the very least, all being well, my podcasting partner in crime Chris and I will hopefully be giving it a go tomorrow evening, so we'll both at least get to try it!

The last of my grandparents — my father's mother, or "Nan D" as we tended to know her — passed away this evening. It sounds as if it was at least partly expected, though perhaps not quite so soon. We don't know the details as yet, but apparently she hadn't quite been herself for a little while, so it sounds like it probably wasn't related to the pandemic situation.

I'm not sure how to feel about it, really. A family member passing is always a sad event, to be sure, but I'd not had many opportunities to see her for quite a long time now. I guess in some regards this is a good thing, because it allows me to look back on my fond memories with her — mostly the time when she was living in her old house, next door but one to my mother's parents — rather than anything more negative or sad, but even so; with the world being the way it is right now we unfortunately can't really give her a proper send-off and say goodbye.

Well, I guess we can, really. I'm doing it right now. That's one of the nice things about the modern age; you can share the things you want to say — or indeed the fact that you're not quite sure what to say, as I'm feeling right now — regardless of the distance between you and the people you're sharing your thoughts with.

Goodbye, Nan. I think that's all I really want to say right at this exact moment. Rest well; you deserve the peace, and you will be missed.

One of the main tools I have to use in my day job is a flaming garbage fire of suck, but our team's procedures are so entrenched in the stupid pile of shit that there's no point in even attempting to talk about all the things that are wrong with it. So I thought in an attempt to provide myself with some sort of catharsis, I would list all the things that are wrong with it here instead. This probably won't mean anything to any of you, but it'll make me feel better, at least.

Okay. Here we go.

Hi [redacted], I just wanted to raise an important issue: the fact that [redacted] is a colossal pile of garbage and should be cast in the trash as soon as possible, along with its useless developers. Here are all the things that are wrong with it, and that will almost certainly never be fixed:

• The stupid pile of crap doesn't fit on any monitor I've ever used it with. Horizontal scrolling is a huge no-no in web design. This is amateur-level stuff. Add some — any — CSS to make it responsive, or at the very least fit on a normal-resolution monitor.

• The "Generation" page, which is supposed to export the content we work on, fits on the screen so badly that the labels for the options tickboxes at the side of the screen are actually underneath all of the tickboxes instead of next to them. As in, all the tickboxes are blank and unlabeled, then there's a list of labels.

• Talking of "Generation", if I export a project that amounts to one title field and a short piece of copy (about 20 words or so), the resulting file should not be thirty megabytes — so big that it doesn't fit through the dumbass "File Transformer" application to turn it into something actually usable.

• Also talking of "Generation", is it too much to ask that [redacted] can actually export things in the format we need it to? Having to export it, delete things from the resulting zip file to make it small enough, run it through "File Transformer" then finally import it to our CMS is the most cumbersome nonsense I've ever seen.

• You keep complaining that we don't respond to the comments from various locales on the projects. This is because 1) there are no notifications when new comments are added, 2) the button that indicates there are comments if you do happen to look at the right page at the right time is presented in bright yellow on white and 3) the specific comments are indicated by a small dot that is literally 4 pixels wide, which you will only see if you are looking at one of the 300 pieces of content that make up a single project.

• If my login times out due to it taking a while to complete a task, I would like to resume where I left off after logging in, rather than being informed that my "MySearch has expired" or that the "edition is not found".

• If I click a "generate email" button to send a message to people, I expect it to 1) actually generate an email, 2) actually send it to people and 3) actually include the correct information rather than requiring me to trawl through pages of pointless information looking for a GUID then copy and paste it manually into an Outlook message (having run it through the "Swapping Tool" to generate specific links for each locale, of course!)

• Putrid green, white and grey is not a nice colour scheme.

• Please read a book on UI and/or UX.

• Please ditch this atrocious software and hire someone who knows what they are doing to develop something that is actually designed for what we are doing with it.

• [REDACTED] IS SHIT

Thank you for indulging me there. I feel slightly better. Until tomorrow, anyway. Back to the grindstone, I guess.

Thought I'd steal a meme from Twitter as a prompt for today's post. You can find the original here.

HyperX, whoever they are, wanted to know the first games people played in various genres. I thought I'd list them and elaborate a bit. Feel free to share your lists in the comments!

🥇 First/Third Person-Shooter: Wolfenstein 3D

I'd played 3D games prior to this — most notably the Mercenary series on Atari 8-bit and ST platforms — but so far as actual first-person shooters go, I was there pretty much from the beginning. Wolfenstein 3D was the first I played; I also played the Catacomb games quite early on, too.

So far as my personal tastes go, I love '90s style single-player first-person shooters — stuff like Doom and the Build engine games. I also very much like the modern Shadow Warrior games. Call of Duty can suck a fat one, though.

⚔️ MOBA: League of Legends

I played this for a few minutes and knew I was not going to get along with it. I tried Dota 2 and felt the same, but even more strongly. I tried Heroes of the Storm with friends, and fared a little better, but didn't like it enough to want to pursue it further. MOBA is not a genre for me. Multiplayer in general isn't, in fact. I get frustrated when people are mean. And people are mean a lot in competitive multiplayer. And in cooperative multiplayer. You'd think being mean was antithetical to the concept of cooperative multiplayer, but no. That's another story though.

🛡️ RPG: The Temple of Apshai Trilogy

I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on in this game when I played it as a kid. The concept of RPGs was completely alien to me. The first RPG I played and understood was Final Fantasy VII, many years later! Now I'm a diehard fan of the genre.

🔮 MMO: Everquest

I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of Everquest, though I found that the actual expectation didn't live up to my expectations. I had no idea what to expect when I finally got the damn thing working on my old clunker of a PC and a dial-up connection, so I played it completely "wrong".

I'd roleplay my character making grunts and noises in /say chat while I was fighting, much to the amusement of people around me; I didn't understand the whole "level-stratified" structure of the world, so took it as a personal challenge to make it to the next town over without dying (and succeeded) rather than stabbing rats outside the city gates for 16 hours; and I had no idea what I was "supposed" to be doing without a central narrative to follow.

Later dives into the genre (World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV) went much better, largely thanks to having people who knew what they were doing showing me the ropes!

🎶 Rhythm: Bust-a-Groove

Amazing game. Well, amazing music; gameplay-wise it doesn't quite hold up as the central competitive mechanic is fairly flawed, but I'll always have a soft spot for this game.

This game also taught me that Japanese and PAL PlayStations run at different speeds, even when both playing a PAL game. I was playing against my friend Woody, who was making a real hash of things, and insisted it was "my PlayStation" that was the problem. He was so convinced of this that he cycled seven miles back to his house to get his PlayStation (and then seven miles back again) to prove it. He was right.

 

♟ Strategy: Legionnaire

Another game I fired up for the first time as a kid and had absolutely no idea what was going on. This was a very early strategy game for Atari 8-bit by (I think) the legendary Chris Crawford, and I did not know how to play it at all. I did, however, like the scrolling map and the thumping sound effects.

First strategy game I played and vaguely understood was the original Command & Conquer. I've never been good at strategy games, but I did manage to beat Command & Conquer on the GDI side, as well as nuke my friend Ed a few times on networked PlayStation games.

🥊 Fighting: International Karate

This game is evidence of how differently fighting games were back in the very early days of home computer gaming. There were no life bars, no special moves, just you against a friend with an eight-directional joystick and a single fire button, with every direction (and every direction with the fire button pressed) doing something different.

To this day, I don't really understand how the mechanics of this work — i.e. how it determines who "wins" — but I always liked the graphics and the animations in this one at least.

So what are your "firsts"?

The whole coronavirus thing basically put paid to our dieting plans that we were following a while back, since we weren't able to reliably get hold of the things we needed to follow it properly. But after a few weeks of going "ah, fuck it", I think we're going to try and make a new start from next week onwards — i.e. eating all the crap we have left in the house before getting back "on track", as it were.

I'm going to start trying to get a bit of exercise done again. I was hoping to bag a copy of Ring Fit Adventure for Switch, but it seems to be sold out absolutely everywhere except price-gouging scalpers on eBay and Amazon Marketplace, so balls to that for now. I have Fitness Boxing for Switch, and that was good fun, if a little limited.

I feel I need it. While I've said numerous times I don't have a problem being stuck in the house, I can feel myself getting pretty lethargic, and I sometimes wake up with a bad back in the morning. I know at least part of this is becoming an old fart (I'm 39 at the end of the month!) but I could probably make life a bit easier on my poor, creaking, suffering body.

Anyway. That's the plan. Next week, draw a line, get started on some degree of… well, I don't know if you'd call it "normality", but back on track with the things we wanted to achieve, anyway.

For now, maybe a crisp sandwich… 🙂

It's been a good long weekend. I've got most of the way through Final Fantasy VII Remake, so I can get right back on the Atelier Iris 3 train once I'm done there, and I also got a bunch of videos edited and ready to publish over the course of the next couple of weeks.

Plus, today, I got to play a shoot 'em up about blasting the clothes off cute girls. I'd say that's been a pretty productive few days, all told — and I didn't even have to leave the house.

Tomorrow it's back to the day job (from home) and it's my beloved Tuesday morning full of conference calls, so I'll be taking most of those from my bed as usual. I am very much not in a "work" state of mind right now, but perhaps I'll feel a bit more productive in the morning. I'm not counting on it, particularly with the soul-sapping nature of the aforementioned calls!

I have a couple more days off towards the end of the month — my day job gives us "free" days off for both our birthdays and our work anniversary, and it just so happens that both of those fall within April for me, so I get a nice couple of days to myself on the 28th and the 29th. Yes, I did indeed deliberately pick a Tuesday to take off, the reasons for which should be abundantly clear by now…!

It's 1.15 am again and I'm now 23 hours deep into Final Fantasy VII Remake. I am loving it. Having been imagining what a "remake" of this game would look like pretty much ever since the original was current, I can say with confidence that this isn't what I expected — but I am very glad they did what they did.

It kind of baffles me a bit that some people are getting genuinely furious about Square Enix "not respecting the source material" due to the changes and additions to the story, but I can't get on board with that argument. What we have here is a considerably more fleshed out exploration of what was an interesting but rather brief part of the original. It has some nice foreshadowing for what is to come — which, of course, people who knew the original will be ready for — as well as some unexpected elements.

I particularly like how you feel a much better sense of "context" of Midgar itself in terms of how things connect together. It would have been cool to spend a bit more time topside, but FFVII's story was always about the slums and the fact that those living atop the plates were the great untouchables, living a life of luxury while everyone beneath struggled to get by.

The Wall Market sequence was a particular highlight. I was delighted to see that they very much did everything you expect from Wall Market in Final Fantasy VII a wonderful amount of justice, and the additional characters who helped push things along were fantastic. The Honey Bee Inn sequence is a bit different from what it once was, but the new one is a lot of fun and entirely in keeping with the tone of things.

As I said before: this is a new game that just happens to hit a bunch of the same story beats as Final Fantasy VII. It is not the original Final Fantasy VII. And thus it should be enjoyed and experienced on its own merits… which are considerable.

Anyway. Enough blabbering on, I need to get some sleep. Hope you've all had a good Easter weekend!

Quite a few people seem to be going a bit stir crazy with the quarantine, lockdown, whatever you want to call it. I'm finding it a little hard to understand, since I'm having a thoroughly pleasant time — particularly on workdays!

I appreciate that some people have a much harder time doing their job from home, and some people thrive on social interactions… but the way I've always looked at it, home should be a place where you are comfortable and content and where you want to spend time when you have no other commitments.

Some people aren't lucky enough to have a home like that, I know. I've had a couple of occasions in my life when the place I called "home" was not a happy place for one reason or another, and it would absolutely suck to be caught in such a situation. Thankfully, I'm not in a place like that any more, and I'm very much appreciating the time I get to spend with my wife, my cats, my writing and my hobbies.

I wonder how many of the people complaining right now will be right back to complaining that they "never have any time to do anything" when the nation's doors open up once again?

Me, I played Final Fantasy VII Remake for over 5 hours today, as well as getting a couple of videos recorded. I'm quite happy right now, thanks!