Still no Microsoft Flight Simulator. The package is in Southampton, but has not yet arrived at my door. It has apparently been "on the way" from the Southampton mail centre to the delivery office about ten minutes away from here since 4am this morning, so I'm not sure what it's been doing in the meantime. Whatever the reason, looks like I'm waiting another day. Oh well!

In the meantime, I've been watching a bunch of videos of various different types, and thought I'd share a couple of interesting channels with you now. These two channels come at the "sim" thing from two completely different angles, but they're both highly entertaining in their own right. They're both pretty popular, so you may well already be familiar with them, but humour me; I'm a fairly recent convert to them both.

First up is Squirrel, whose channel you can find by clicking here. Squirrel bills his channel as "the home of simulation", and indeed he's a busy boy — not only does he do a lot with various incarnations of Flight Simulator (including the most recent one, which he's done some very impressive and helpful videos on) but he also explores other varieties of simulator, too, most notably trucking and train simulators.

Squirrel's videos are all rather long as the majority of them see him playing through a particular scenario in real time. In the case of flight simulators, this means flying from one place to another; likewise, in the case of train simulators, this means travelling a real-life route on the in-game train. His videos are relaxing and enjoyable to watch and listen to, and a good choice for if you're the sort of person who enjoys having something on "in the background" while you work, or if you're trying to fall asleep or something.

And in stark contrast to all that, there's Airforceproud95, whose channel you can find by clicking here. Airforceproud95's channel mainly focuses on amusing shenanigans that happen in Flight Simulator multiplayer, particularly session where players are attempting to play with "realistic" takeoff, landing and control tower procedures. Needless to say, given the nature of online gaming — even in something that is perceived to be pretty "serious", like Flight Simulator — things often do not go entirely to plan, and there are plenty of hilarious happenings.

It helps if you have at least a passing understanding of what takeoff and landing procedures are supposed to be before watching some of Airforceproud95's videos, but most people can probably appreciate the absurdity of dropping a Cessna with a failed engine from 200,000 feet just to see what happens, or seeing a valiant attempt to land a plane that is much too large on one of the smallest runways in the world.

I really appreciate there are so many people out there making so many different types of entertainment, regardless of what you're into. And while I wait for my copy of Flight Simulator to show up, these fine chaps are certainly making me feel a little less impatient to get into the air myself!

Microsoft Flight Simulator did not arrive today, but it is in the country, according to tracking, and it has also left Heathrow. I'm hoping that means it will be here tomorrow. In the meantime, I've installed my new SSD ready for that 150GB monster and am looking forward to a few pleasure flights.

In the meantime, I polished off Nurse Love Addiction tonight, and am very much feeling like I picked the "best" order for the routes. I mean, chances are I'd feel that way regardless of the order I picked them because you end up with the same total amount of information, but wrapping things up with the wholesome ending provided by Kaede, played by Asami Imai, very much felt like the best possible conclusion to everything that had come before. More on that… possibly on Thursday over on MoeGamer.

You may also have seen that I've set up a dedicated Visual Novels page on MoeGamer. Since I'm writing about my experiences with the things I'm reading, and these are ending up as multi-part features, I figured I might as well collect all the specifically visual novel-related features together in one place so people can easily access them. This includes both specific Cover Game features that happen to be on VNs, and stuff like my recent coverage of Nurse Love Addiction.

I like writing about visual novels, as it brings back fond memories of English studies in an earlier life. Yes, I was one of those weirdoes who actually enjoyed writing essays for the most part, both at school and onwards into university. I don't necessarily go into an article about a visual novel with a particular hypothesis or "title" in mind in the same way that one would with an academic essay, but my thought process while writing often ends up feeling the same way. Whatever the specifics of it, I enjoy it.

And while said articles may well "spoil" the story (in the same way an essay about a work of fiction "spoils" that narrative by necessity), I find that writing about what I've just experienced is a good way to process everything. I found Itsuki's route in Nurse Love Addiction a whole lot more striking after writing about it helped me figure out a few things, for example!

I think my VN articles are probably the clearest example of why I never regard what I'm doing on MoeGamer as "writing reviews". I'm not there to offer a buyer's guide or say whether or not something is "good"; I'm there to explore the things that I personally found interesting, and to analyse them in depth. Hopefully they're interesting to those who have no intention of or who are unable to experience the original media, and also provide some food for thought for those who have experienced the narratives themselves. And for those who don't worry about "spoilers" — such people do exist, I know a few — perhaps these writeups might also convince them to explore some of these narratives and experience the emotions therein firsthand, because doing so is very different to just reading about them.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Should probably hit the hay. Fingers crossed that I'll be able to take to the skies tomorrow evening!

Microsoft Flight Simulator is out tomorrow, and hopefully I should have my 10-disc packaged copy in my hands if it makes it here from Germany in time. (I've also bought a new SSD, because the damn thing takes up 150GB and I need my existing two for system stuff, ROM collections and video editing!)

One thing I've seen from a few videos I've been watching is that this is pretty much the first iteration of Flight Simulator where you can literally go and find your actual house. In past installments, you might have been able to fly somewhere near it — or if you were proficient with scenery editors, perhaps even plonk your own custom house down somewhere — but in this one, you can actually go and find your real house and buzz it in the aircraft of your choice. Or, as most people seem to be doing, making use of the excellent "Drone Camera" in order to check things out in a bit more detail without the risk of crashing. Rather delightfully, you can pause the sim in the air, fling your drone out of the window and go look at things while your plane just hangs around up in the sky.

One of the first things I think I'm going to try in the sim is to take off from Southampton airport, find my house here in Southampton, then see if I can "VFR" it to my parents' house back in East Anglia. I'm interested to see if stuff like the road network is modelled in enough detail for me to be able to follow the route I would drive to go visit them — and conveniently, the village in which my parents live has an airstrip, so I can even go and land before buzzing their house with the drone camera. I just probably won't be taking an airliner on this trip, since I'm not sure the owners of aforementioned airstrip would appreciate a 747's presence.

But then that's the beauty of a simulation like this; if I wanted to do something ridiculous like attempt to land a 747 in the village where I grew up, I can do just that.

Hmm, now I'm tempted. Airliners look complicated, though; might just stick to the good ol' reliable Cessna to begin with!

One thing I've always found rather interesting and satisfying about visual novels is one of their most "game-like" features: the fact that as you proceed through them, you unlock things. Usually, it's nothing more than the images you've seen and the pieces of music you've heard over the course of the story, but it still provides a nice sense of satisfaction to "collect everything".

I like this because it's not something you really do with other forms of narrative media, outside of video games, obviously. Or, at least, the medium itself doesn't provide this sort of "permanent record" for you.

You can mark the pages in a book where your favourite scenes are, but the book doesn't do that for you. You can skip to your favourite line in a movie, but the Blu-Ray or streaming service doesn't do that for you. You can put your favourite song on loop, but the CD or music software doesn't do that for you.

You can, however, follow a favourite character's route through to completion in a visual novel and then be provided with a fine selection of event scenes that you can revisit at your leisure. In the case of eroge, you can typically re-experience erotic scenes by themselves. And you can often watch just the endings again.

It's this sense of gradually building up something of a "scrapbook" of your experiences that makes me feel a curious sense of attachment to every visual novel I've ever seen through to completion — and why I always find it remarkably difficult to delete them from my hard drive if I need to make space!

I know that I can just read the visual novel again to unlock all the stuff again — or just download a clear file — but there's something about that first time, that complete collection that you assembled yourself through your commitment to enjoying the story, that will always be special.

I'm feeling that with Nurse Love Addiction right now. Two more endings to go!

Evening all. Just a quick reminder — if you're yet to fill out my survey about Twitch streaming, I'd really appreciate it if you can take a couple of minutes to answer a few quick questions. Click here to do just that!

I've been recording most of today so I don't have much of note to share, I'm afraid. I did discover that the Atari 5200 version of Millipede is an absolutely fabulous version, however, so I'll be spending a lot more time on that in the Atari Flashback Classics collection in the not too distant future!

I also recorded an hour and a half of Carrier Command: Gaea Mission for an upcoming short;Play. I didn't intend it to be quite that long, but I wanted to demonstrate the entire "island capture" process, and it turns out I'm not very good at that game yet. I think I came away from the session with a better understanding of how to approach it, though!

I'm really looking forward to Microsoft Flight Simulator showing up on (hopefully) Tuesday. I found a channel on YouTube that specialises in sims, and has been showing off a bunch of stuff about Microsoft Flight Simulator, presumably either from a review copy or the alpha/beta builds that you could sign up to be a part of. The whole thing looks pretty gobsmacking, and those fond of past iterations' realism will be in absolute heaven with this one. Here's a particularly interesting video about how abusing the weather systems in the game can allow you to "take off" without actually moving. 

Tomorrow, my parents are dropping by to say hi, since you're allowed to do that in the quasi-lockdown state the country is presently in. We'll be having a nice roast dinner, and then I have some Final Fantasy III to record in the evening, so it should be a pleasant but busy Sunday.

Hope you all have a good weekend. Make sure you take some time to chill out and relax!

Hello everyone! Just a quickie today — can I please ask you to pop on over to this survey on MoeGamer about streaming possibilities and fill it out when you have a sec? Thank you.

I've been fiddling around a bit with OBS and Streamlabs today and figured out how to do things that people tend to expect from streams — most notably things like facecam and chat windows. I'd been holding off looking into this because I thought it was complicated, but it turns out it wasn't.

With that in mind, I'm interested in giving streaming a go at some point, but want to establish what it is that people might want to see, and what times might work for people. You lot, as my most generous, kindest, most lovely supporters, are the people whose opinions I value the most, so if you're the sort of person inclined to drop in on streams — or if you might drop in on a stream that I'm doing — then please take a couple of minutes to fill out the survey. It'll be really helpful for me to make some decisions.

Besides the time question, the other thing I'm interested in knowing is what people might want to see me stream. At the moment I have a sort of idle thought of two sessions a week — one Atari A to Z-themed, so looking through some classic (and not so classic) games on old Atari platforms (likely emulated for simplicity's sake); and one MoeGamer themed, covering more modern stuff or perhaps the things I'm playing to write about at any given time.

I was also toying with the idea of a "chillout and chat" sort of stream, where I play something that doesn't demand a ton of concentration on the viewer's part — Test Drive Unlimited and/or Microsoft Flight Simulator were the two main things I had in mind — where the main thing is to just hang out and talk about stuff rather than necessarily try to achieve anything specific in a game.

If you have any thoughts, please make them known, and I'll look further into getting this all set up and scheduled (well in advance — it'd be nice to have people actually turn up) once I've got a few responses from the survey.

Thank you in advance for your help!

The wife and I have really been struggling with anything even vaguely diet-related during lockdown. We were on keto just before everything went to shit, and that was going reasonably well for me (but not for my wife, who was hardly seeing any results); then we decided to try and take the Slimming World Approach, but without going to the meetings (because there weren't any at the time) but found motivation for that non-existent.

Now I've switched to simple calorie-counting, at least partly inspired by "Guru" Larry Bundy Jr. on YouTube, who has lost a frankly astronomical amount of weight over the course of the last year or so, purely by following a "CICO" (Calories In, Calories Out) model. In other words, the good, old-fashioned, proven "calorie deficit" thing, where you ensure that your daily intake of calories is below a particular baseline corresponding to your base metabolism, and doing so should ensure that the weight drops off naturally.

I'm only a few days into following this seriously so far so can't speak for the long-term commitment, but a few things are definitely working for me. Firstly, and probably most importantly, is the fact that I'm logging things using MyFitnessPal (which is a lot more annoying with "PLEASE UPGRADE TO PREMIUM!" ads than I remember it being, but I'll deal) and thinking carefully about what I want to eat or drink.

Secondly, following a simple calorie plan means that nothing is really off-limits, which is one of the main things I always found difficult about both Slimming World and keto in particular. In Slimming World, not much is off-limits, but there are still things you need to avoid where possible. And in keto, so much is off-limits thanks to the need to restrict your carbs.

Today, meanwhile, I had a Wispa earlier and a fried chicken burger for dinner and am still within my calorie goal for the day. I bought some cereal earlier, too, because my God I've missed cereal. I always used to think of cereal as "the boring breakfast", but since deliberately depriving myself of it for quite some time, I'm now craving it. Bring on the Choco Shreddies and the Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes — in carefully measured portions, of course.

So it remains to be seen if this will work in the long term, but recording my calorie intake daily and my weight fluctuations on a regular basis are, so far, proving to be good habits to get into. Now if it was just a little less damn hot here, I might be able to motivate myself to do some Ring Fit Adventure again without melting into a puddle of stale-smelling sweat. It did rain for a little while here earlier, but it's still pretty monstrously hot in the house.

Anyway, that's your life update for today. I'm off to sit in bed to enjoy the air conditioning and play some Atelier Rorona. Because after the emotional ordeal that was writing that Nurse Love Addiction piece on MoeGamer today, I think I need something with a bit of joy in it!

Howdy, all. Apologies for the overly personal post on MoeGamer today; that's normally something I'd just share here, but I felt it was important to share with those who aren't Patrons, as I want to get some of these feelings out there. Just stewing away isn't going to help anything; having a good old rant doesn't necessarily help anything easier, but at least it makes it clear to people that you're struggling a bit when they otherwise might not have noticed.

I know all I really need to do is just suck it up and get on with the day job, but it's been one of those times lately where it just feels like everything is piling up on top of me, trying its best to suffocate me. And when that happens, rational, sensible thinking tends to go out the window, at least in the moment.

I wish there was an easy answer. I've come inches away from scoring two jobs I would absolutely love in the last few months, only to have them snatched away at the last minute purely due to my geographical location. And that's not something I can really do anything about; my wife and I own our house here, and uprooting to go somewhere else would be a major hassle — not to mention the fact it would also require Andie to get a new job too.

It's a pity, though, because both of those jobs would have been an ideal fit for me. I won't go into full details for now just in case, but suffice to say they were both involved with games, and both with companies I have a lot of time for. Maybe something else will come of them in the future; the second opportunity at least led to a small bit of paid freelance writing, so that's better than nothing, at least.

I'll probably feel a bit better if and when this heatwave ever breaks. Right now, though, I'm just too hot to want to do anything, particularly if it's something that already bores the pants off me. At least I can go and sit in the aircon every so often if I need to, and there's usually at least one cat there enjoying it whenever I do so.

Normal business will resume tomorrow; I just needed to get all that out there today. Thanks for understanding.

I don't know what broke, where, when or how, but a significant proportion of the Internet appears to be inaccessible today. It happened right in the middle of me downloading a bunch of Atelier soundtracks, too, so I'm annoyed.

What's quite interesting about this is that it appears not to be a localised ISP issue as this sort of thing usually is. It's not affecting all websites, and judging by things I've seen people saying on Twitter, it appears to be affecting people all over the world, not just in a specific area.

But it's not affecting everyone or everything. Sites I was unable to access from our home Internet connection were working fine from my wife's VPN connection to her workplace, for example, so I can't really explain it, largely because I don't really have much understanding of the black magic that makes the Internet actually work on such a large scale. I'm still kind of impressed it works at all, especially considering the sort of people who hang out on it.

Oh well. I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow to continue downloading soundtracks. I did manage to acquire the official Atelier jazz arrangement album "Cadena", though, which is delightfully smooth. More on that another time, though.

Back to Atelier Rorona for me now!

I'm having real difficulty dealing with this heatwave. I don't like it when it's hot at the best of times, but right now it feels so incredibly airless and sweaty that it's actually making me feel quite anxious — like the world itself is trying its best to suffocate me.

I know that's nonsense, of course, but it's not making it any easier to deal with — nor is it particularly conducive to a productive day of work. I've spent most of today in our bedroom where our air conditioning unit is — but at least I've had the chance to start my Atelier Rorona DX playthrough, which I've been looking forward to.

That game is a pleasure to play at the best of times, but add in carried over New Game Plus equipment that successfully took down the Iron Giant last time I played and there's a delightfully enjoyable sense of romping through what the game has to offer, while being able to take aim at some of the more challenging long-term goals. I'm going for the Pie ending this time, since I've never done that before.

After beating Battleship, I also decided to give Carrier Command: Gaea Mission a go. This is a game whose existence I find absolutely fascinating, because it was a completely unexpected sequel to a game I used to play on the Atari ST. And so far it feels remarkably true to the original game — though since I'm playing the story-driven Campaign mode, it's a more directed experience that doesn't sacrifice mechanical depth. Which is good, because I was never any good at Carrier Command.

If you're unfamiliar with Carrier Command — rest assured, there'll be more on this in some form soon — then the concept is pretty simple. You have an aircraft carrier and so do your enemies. You need to get rid of the other aircraft carrier. In order to do this, you'll need to capture a series of islands and put them to use producing supplies and defending your territory. Rather than being a straight-up strategic game, however, Carrier Command allows you to take direct control of the "Manta" aircraft and "Walrus" amphibious vehicles your carrier plays host to, allowing you to take out the enemy units defending the islands as you see fit. And being by Bohemia Interactive (of Arma fame), this isn't a linear shooter; all the environments are completely open, allowing you to approach your targets as you see fit, including kamikazeing a Walrus off the top of a cliff into the middle of an enemy army in the valley below if you feel like it.

Gaea Mission adds a cool sci-fi aesthetic to the whole thing that was more implied than actually present in the original game, and the addition of a narrative to the campaign mode provides both incentive to progress and a good excuse for the game to teach you how all its various mechanics work. I'm already looking forward to playing more.

For now, though, I need to go and sit back in front of the cold air-blowing machine, lest I melt into this sofa. Be well, everyone!