Today, among other things, I beat Battleship for the Xbox 360. If you're unfamiliar, this was a 2012 release developed by Double Helix and published by Activision. And it was based on a movie, because the early 2010s featured a whole string of movies being made for things that didn't really need movies. Like, you know, long-time beloved pen-and-paper grid-reference guessing game Battleship.

As you might expect, Battleship was summarily panned on its original release for being what seemed like a monumentally stupid idea. However, given that it was super-cheap in my local CEX recently — as most seventh-generation games are right now — I decided to pick it up and give it a go.

I had a genuinely good time with it. It's not an amazing game by any means, but it's also certainly not "33 on Metacritic" bad. The first-person shooter segments are decent enough — though they lack somewhat in enemy variety — and the tactical ship combat is simplistic, but a nice addition to the overall gameplay. Given that the whole thing has just six levels and is over in about 4 hours (unless you replay on higher difficulty levels or attempt to track down the four hidden "pegs" in each level, because early 2010s games also needed pointless collectibles) I can understand why some people might have baulked at paying £40 for it.

Pay 50p for it, however? I'm there. And this raises something interesting about the game collecting phenomenon: as time goes on, the "value" of games changes significantly, both in terms of how much you can expect to pay for something, and how you might perceive its overall quality.

One of my biggest bugbears about modern online gaming discourse is how much mumbling there is about how x game "isn't worth $20" or y game is "more like a $5 game". These sorts of discussions say nothing interesting whatsoever about what the game is actually like to play, whether there's any value to the narrative, whether it does anything particularly interesting or, indeed, if it's actually worth picking up.

Take the money thing out of the equation altogether, which the ridiculous cheapness of second-hand seventh-generation games does right now, and you can enjoy pretty much any game on its own merits, without thinking about something silly like an "hours to dollars" ratio.

Battleship is a fun game. It brought to mind some pleasant memories of mid- to late-'90s PC games. And I don't regret spending a few hours on experiencing it.

I'll likely write something about it on MoeGamer tomorrow. It's way off my usual remit, I know, but as you've probably noticed over the course of the last six years or so said remit has expanded quite a bit from the early days. Because gaming is a fascinating and broad medium, and it's always interesting to explore things a little outside your usual wheelhouse now and again — you might just find yourself liking them!

It's so hot here right now. Insert the usual disclaimer about it almost certainly being more hot elsewhere in the world, but here in the UK we don't really know what air conditioning is and certainly don't have it as a standard fixture in our houses. (My wife and I did have the foresight to get a portable-ish unit for our bedroom last summer, though, and it was possibly the best appliance purchasing decision we've ever made.)

Andie's been up in the loft thinking about putting some boards down so we can use a bit more of it for storage, but it turns out the loft is like an absolute oven right now — hot enough to actually make the whole upper floor of the house significantly warmer if we leave the hatch open. So that plan is going to wait until it cools off a bit.

We had an attack of flies earlier. Apparently they really, really wanted the salmon we had for dinner. And not just a few, there were massive swarms in our kitchen. I've never seen them be like that for fish before. We managed to get them out of the house, however, and the cats ate at least a couple of them. We now have no more flies in the house than would be considered "normal" for a summer evening in Britain.

I mentioned yesterday that I'm going to be covering the Danmachi game for Nintendo Life, so I've been getting stuck into that today. It seems like a lot of fun so far — and a good entry point to the series — but I suspect the mechanical and structural depth will show itself a lot later, as it's fairly simple so far. From what I can tell, there's an "Extra" mode that unlocks after playing through the main story that I suspect is going to be a bit more freeform and feature dating sim elements rather than a linear narrative, but that remains to be seen. I am only a few hours in, and it's certainly been satisfying and enjoyable to play so far — just not super-complex. Which is fine.

Since I need to blast through that in a week, I'm going to head to bed and play it for a bit in our aforementioned air-conditioned bedroom. S-Rank Patrons, I hope you enjoy this month's wallpaper, and all of you — thank you, as always, for all your support, especially during these weird times.

Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy is finally down for the count, after nearly 80 hours. That was quite the ride, and a lesson to me never to assume that all games in a series will be "quite short" just because some of the later ones are!

With it being after midnight here, I'm going to save my writeup on the subject for tomorrow, so apologies for those who were hoping for a long read today. May I direct you in the direction of yesterday's 4,500 words on Nurse Love Addiction if you haven't enjoyed it already?

I have a busy weekend ahead of me. Nintendo Life have asked me to review Is It Wrong to Try and Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon: Familia Myth – Infinite Combate (Danmachi hereafter) so I'll need to get stuck into that for the majority of the weekend. Not that I'm complaining — I was interested to check this game out anyway, though I hadn't preordered it as other stuff was higher priority for me.

I decided to pass on today's Limited Run Games release of the Grandia HD Collection. While I would like a copy to have on my shelf, the price they have it up for plus their extortionate shipping to Europe means it's actually cheaper for me to buy copies of the original PS1 and Dreamcast games, even though the former in particular is relatively pricey. That does mean I miss out on the Japanese voice acting in Grandia, sadly, but I'll probably live. I can always play that patched ISO that's floating around the Internet if I really feel that strongly about it!

Anyway, with my heart full of that unique combination of joy and sadness that only finishing a really long character-centric RPG can provide you with, it is off to bed with me now. Watch out for the new Mana Khemia 2 article tomorrow, and S-Rank Patrons, I'll get your wallpaper done tomorrow, too.

Have a pleasant evening, and onwards into the weekend!

Hello everyone. Not a lot to report today; I'm nearing the end of Mana Khemia 2, but I may have to delay the next part of the feature just to polish it off before I write about it. I want to do this properly, after all!

S-rank Patrons, your new wallpaper will be coming in the next couple of days when I find some time to put it together, so please watch out for that!

And if you were wondering about the incident I talked about yesterday, I'm pleased to report that my friend went directly to their workplace and explained the situation, and the workplace supported them fully. They even promised to get their legal team involved if the offending tweets were not removed. Result! Just goes to show that for all we might complain about our day jobs, sometimes it does help to have Big Corporate on your side. Perhaps.

Anyway, that's about all I have to report for today, aside from the fact that I treated myself to some goodies from Play-Asia earlier — specifically the Switch version of Maitetsu: Pure Station (which only got a physical release in Asia) and the upcoming Switch release of Clannad spinoff Tomoyo After CS, which apparently has a whole RPG alongside the visual novel stuff.

I guess at some point I should probably get around to that lovely Kickstarter edition of Clannad I've been proudly displaying on my shelf for several years now, huh? I have a few more nurses to love before I can even think about that, though…

A friend of mine got "doxxed" today. If you're unfamiliar with the word, this means that trolls found his personal details and spread them around online with malicious intent. Specifically, they found out my friend's real name, the city in which they live and their workplace, and proceeded to tweet at said workplace with vile accusations of paedophilia.

Regrettably, I have been through something similar. It was back in 2011, I believe. One evening I logged on to Twitter only to discover a torrent of abuse in my mentions from people referring to me as a "paedophile". Over the course of the next couple of hours, I received several emails and phone calls from family members and friends informing me that someone had been in contact with them — usually by phone — making these vile accusations in person.

It was a frightening, horrifying experience at the time, but a bit of rational thinking after the fact uncovered the truth behind the whole attack: why it happened, how it happened, and how to avoid it happening again.

In my case, I was attacked because I had stated publicly that I enjoyed the then-new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic animated series. This, believe it or not, was enough to pick me out as a prospective target for the troll group in question, and their modus operandi was — and apparently still is, if it's the same group — to spread horrible accusations online. It has been the same case for my friend; the trolls in question don't actually believe they really are a paedophile — they just have a vendetta against people who are interested in anime, and some heated online debates my friend was involved in earlier today was enough to paint a target on his back. 

Accusations of paedophilia are one of the most potentially damaging things you can level at someone. I talked a bit about why that is the case in my article on Destructoid's review of Valkyrie Drive from a few years back — check out that piece here if you haven't read it before. Suffice to say that the choice of this particular accusation is very deliberate on the part of the troll groups — it's an accusation with a heavy emotive charge; one that makes people angry and irrational, and, regrettably, not all that likely to pursue the truth. Instead, with social media being the way it is, those angry people will then proceed to spread the lies further and further — assuming they gained any traction in the first place, which they sometimes don't.

In my case, my family and friends were located as a result of publicly available personal information I had online — specifically, in the WHOIS record of a domain I owned at the time. Working outwards from that information, the trolls tracked down my Facebook and Twitter accounts, my WordPress blog, the website and contact details of my brother, my parents' contact details, the website I was running at the time while I was between jobs and the contact details of the person who owned said website. I am fortunate in that I was unemployed at the time, otherwise I have little doubt they would have tracked down my workplace, too, as they have done with my friend today.

I went to the local police with all the evidence of harassment I had, and reported the matter to Twitter. The police listened to my concerns, but ultimately weren't able (or willing?) to do anything, and the most Twitter did was suspend my old username, because the trolls had hijacked it to post vile shit in my name when I had attempted to "hide" from them while panicking.

Ultimately it all blew over with no permanent damage — though I believe there's still a page out there somewhere that highlights nothing more than just how stupid the whole thing was. But it was terrifying at the time, and I completely understand how my friend feels when they say they are fearing for their life and livelihood right now.

As a "survivor" of this sort of attack, I have a few recommendations for those who think they might need them. This shouldn't be something anyone has to worry about, but unfortunately the Internet is an untamed wasteland of festering sewage rather than the brave new frontier of knowledge that was promised back in the late '90s. Anyway:

• Don't list your workplace online unless you absolutely have to for some reason. Even then, question if you really have to. I have not mentioned my place of work anywhere online, I closed down my LinkedIn account without updating it when I got my current job, and have not even mentioned it to close friends online in any sort of context that could find its way out into public.

• If you have a domain name or website, pay that little extra to hide your details. My entire incident stemmed from me cheaping out on my web hosting. Pay the couple of extra quid a month to hide your details and replace them with some generic company name and address.

• Do not engage or respond to the trolls. They are trying to get a reaction and hoping that your stress, frustration, anger and fear will get the better of you, leading to you doing or saying something they can take further advantage of. Shut down all possible avenues of communication as much as possible. Report and block the instigators. Explain the situation to your friends in a private environment such as email or Discord. Private or deactivate your social media accounts if you need to. But do not engage.

• Explain the situation to family and friends. It can be embarrassing to talk about given the nature of the accusations, but explain the situation to anyone you think they might go after. Your family and friends know you much better than some random idiot on the Internet. Who do you think they are going to believe?

• Remember that the situation is inevitably less serious than it appears. In the heat of the moment, this can be easy to forget. But in the case of my friend's incident earlier today, the "evidence" the doxxers compiled and shared was nothing more than an archive of their Facebook page, their spouse's Facebook page, and two Steam accounts. None of these "proved" anything whatsoever.

I hope none of you reading this ever have to go through this experience, as it's a really unpleasant thing to deal with. It is an unfortunate reality of certain parts of the Internet, however, so I hope the above advice and support proves helpful should you find yourself needing it.

Stay safe out there!

I've mentioned a few times recently about how great it is that the outgoing seventh generation of consoles has entered "games for 50p" territory. You can pick up an armful of Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii games for pocket change these days, and it's a great opportunity to try out some things that you didn't want to spend £40-50 on back in the day.

One thing that I've been really enjoying doing is picking up games that reviewed especially poorly and giving them a go. These are the games that are really cheap now — and if my experiences with some of the supposed garbage from the PS2 era is anything to go by, there are some surprisingly enjoyable experiences to be had among them.

Over the last couple of days, I've been enjoying Double Helix and Activision's Battleship, based on the movie of the pen-and-paper game. Yes, that was a thing that happened, though I suspect most people have probably forgotten by now. The Xbox 360/PS3 game got absolutely panned back in the day for being, on paper, a stupid idea that is nothing to do with the essence of Battleship. (Interestingly, there was also a companion Wii and 3DS game that was more of a turn-based strategy-affair; this ended up being much more well-received, but by virtue of its host platforms wasn't talked about nearly as much.)

If you've never come across Battleship, here's the gist. Aliens have emerged from… somewhere under the sea, and are causing trouble in the Hawaiian archipelago. As silent-but-named protagonist Cole Mathis, it's your job to play a leading role in the obliteration of said enemy forces from the archipelago before they're able to solidify their position and set their sights on the wider world.

The plot doesn't really matter. I assume it ties in with the movie (which I haven't seen), but it really doesn't matter, because this is a game about, well, gameplay. You control Mathis from a first-person perspective and are able to do all the things you'd expect to be able to do in a console first-person shooter from 2012: you can walk, sprint, crouch, jump and look down your iron sights. You can carry two guns at once, plus up to four grenades. Different guns are more or less effective against different enemy types. And yes, since your foes are aliens, you can loot their bodies and use their own weapons against them — the most commonly seen is an enormously satisfying chaingun-like affair.

The big mechanical twist in Battleship is that you're on an island, and the ships of your fleet are all around you. With a tap of the left bumper, you can call up a strategic map to move your ships around. If you put them in marked strategic spots, you become able to call in bombardments from the sea, which can help even the odds in tricky encounters. But you also need to make sure that those ships stay safe — because the aliens have ships, too. As such, you'll need to move your ships around to engage the enemy fleet and keep it under control while also achieving your objectives on the ground.

This actually works really well. While you're in the first-person part of the game, there are constant readouts of your ships' status on screen, as well as an activity feed of what they're up to. Audible radio chatter also keeps you up to date on the situation, so you know when you need to switch to the strategic view and take action. Coolest of all, though, is the fact that you can actually look out to sea from the island you're on, and see the ships moving around and fighting.

Some interesting depth is added by the fact that defeated enemies in the first-person segment drop "wild cards", which can be used in the strategic view. Some of these apply upgrades to your ships, such as increased attack or defensive power or wider radar range. Some of them provide an immediate benefit, such as an instant repair. And the most fun is the "Ship Control!" (with an exclamation mark) card, which allows you to take direct control of a specific ship's guns and fling everything you have at their current target, with a hefty damage boost to help you sink your enemy's battleship.

None of this is super-complex — the "ship control" sequences are especially simplistic, but enjoyable enough regardless — but the combination of everything is enough to keep things interesting and varied, and as a result I've been having a genuinely good time with the game.

I understand the whole thing is only about four hours long, but then I paid a couple of quid for it, so that doesn't really bother me in the slightest. Full writeup (and possibly a short;Play video) coming up soon on MoeGamer.

Okay, I've been carrying this around all day and haven't been able to actually talk about it with anyone, so I'm just going to splurge it out here. Spoilers for Nurse Love Addiction ahead — stop reading here if you plan on playing it yourself! Skip ahead to after the "block quote" section to avoid spoilers.

All right. So, as you know, I've been reading Nurse Love Addiction at bedtime lately. I figured it'd be a good choice — cute, pink, pastel-coloured romantic visual novel about a bunch of gay nursing students. And indeed so far it has been. Well, it was until partway through my reading session last night.

For a bit of context, the lead character Asuka is a bit of an airhead, as female VN protagonists often tend to be. The early hours of the story see her affections flitting around somewhat between her sister and the two girls she finds herself grouped up with during her nursing training. There's Itsuki the rather forthright, overly honest young woman (who is also a not-particularly-secret otaku and doujin game developer) and Sakuya, the "princess"-like character, who is calm and refined, but is dealing with a sickly parent who keeps demanding her attention and dragging her away from her studies.

Itsuki and Sakuya are in a relationship with one another. Early in the visual novel, Asuka witnesses an intimate kiss between the pair of them when they think no-one is watching, and starts to Feel Things as a result. A little later, when Itsuki and Sakuya have a serious falling out with one another — to such a degree that Itsuki moves out of the dormitory room she was living in with Sakuya — Asuka starts to find herself even more confused about what is going on. On the one hand, she wants things to go back to normal. On the other, she can't deny that she definitely has feelings for Sakuya.

Eventually, the school festival rolls around. At Teito Nursing Academy, the first-years are responsible for running the whole thing, because the second- and third-years are all busy with their studies. Asuka and Sakuya have some disagreements over what their group should put on as an attraction, but eventually reach a compromise by running a "nurse cafe", whose gimmick is that they take their patrons' blood pressure along with their order, and provide those with high blood pressure with a low-sugar menu.

Anyway, this is all besides the point. After the festival day is over, Asuka heads up to the school rooftop because she received a note from Sakuya to meet her there. Sakuya follows along a little while after, and, long story short, she kisses Asuka. Asuka has no idea what to do with this information, particularly as Sakuya departs shortly afterwards having left some cryptic words with her.

Asuka also doesn't get much time to think it over, because a moment later, she is stabbed in the stomach by an unknown assailant apparently wearing a nurse uniform. And we, the audience, get to witness and experience this in excruciating detail, with a gory event image and some very graphic descriptions of what Asuka is thinking and feeling as she feels her life slipping away.

She wakes up what feels like a moment later, only to discover that her sister found her collapsed on the rooftop and she has since been asleep for a full day. There is also no trace of any stab wound anywhere on her body, leaving her understandably confused as to what actually happened and what was a delusion, a dream… or something else altogether.

I was kind of floored by this bizarre but undeniably effective and emotionally devastating curveball the game threw me. I was not expecting this sort of thing at all — largely because I'd not read anything about the game beforehand, and the most I'd heard is that some bits of it were "a bit weird".

And I won't lie, it kind of left me a bit freaked out — but in a way that I enjoy. I haven't played a visual novel that did this to me for quite some time — Grisaia was probably the last to deliver such an effective gutpunch — but I'm excited to be experiencing something like this again. Even if it's making me a bit hesitant to read the next chapters!

Spoilers end!

Anyway, yeah, Nurse Love Addiction is quite a ride. I can't wait to read more. In fact, I think that's what I'm going to go and do right now. Wish me… luck?

It's been a pretty productive weekend, even though I had to cram pretty much everything I wanted to do into today rather than spread it across the whole weekend. I've got another two episodes of all the Atari A to Z series in the can, along with two more short;Play features and two more Final Fantasy Marathon episodes. I haven't managed to squeeze in an Around the Network post on MoeGamer, but I'll do one of those tomorrow during the inevitable downtime from the day job.

I'm going to try and get into the habit of doing Ring Fit Adventure each day, too. It doesn't have to be a lot each day, but I feel like in the long term that would be a healthy habit to get into. I've determined that there's enough space in my bedroom to do it — we have a Switch dock up there thanks to my wife also having a Switch — so that means I can work out with the air conditioning on, and without having to move furniture around. Now it's just a case of actually motivating myself to do it. And, as with so many things, that's just a case of forming a healthy habit and sticking to it.

Ring Fit Adventure is fun, which helps. The core gameplay of the "Adventure" mode works really well, and I love the idea of your "hotbar" of combat skills consisting entirely of exercise moves, with their "elements" corresponding to what kind of move they are. What was the last RPG you played where enemies could be weak to yoga?

To make this work, I need to establish a time of day that I try and do it at, every day. I'm a bit torn on this. Common sense says that first thing in the morning after getting up would be a sensible choice, but I already find it quite difficult to haul myself out of bed in the morning anyway, and I doubt knowing a workout is waiting for me would help inspire that. On the other hand, an invigorating workout might be just the thing I need to get me going first thing in the morning, so perhaps that's worth a try.

Last thing at night is also a possibility, but I don't think that's a good idea, as it's all too easy to just go "ah, it's too late" or "I'm too tired" by that point and skip it. Or perhaps lunchtime? But then I don't want to end up resenting it for eating into my "free" time in the middle of the day.

I'll have to try some different approaches. Tomorrow seems like as good a time as any to give it a go, so let's see how this unfolds!

I'm really tired. It is 1am, so that's partly understandable, but part of it stems from the fact that I had the first alcoholic drinks I've had for… probably several years this evening. Andie had some friends over for a barbecue, so I thought I'd indulge and have a couple. All it seems to have achieved, though, is making me tired and a bit depressed, so I'm not in any great hurry to guzzle down the leftovers.

It's strange how your attitude changes towards things like this over the years. At university, I drank a lot because it was the thing to do, and because it (usually) ended up creating funny stories in one way or another.

My favourite is still the time my friend went running off at high (drunken) speed ahead of me and disappeared completely… then ten minutes later I got a call from his phone. I answered. It was not my friend's voice.

"Can you come and pick your friend up?" the girl on the other end of the phone asked, slightly slurring herself, too. "We're in the Charcoal Grill. We found him in a bush."

Completely unsurprised to hear that the reason I couldn't find my friend was because he'd leapt into a bush outside Safeway and then couldn't get back up again without assistance, I agreed to go and pick him up. I was going to get a chicken burger for the walk home from the Charcoal Grill anyway.

These days, though, I have no desire to have an evening like that. I've got better things to do — and perhaps more importantly, better things to spend my money on. We all must have spent an obscene amount of money on alcohol at university, and that was twenty years ago. It must be even worse now.

Anyway, yeah. No more drinking for me, I think. Sorry this isn't more of a misspelled mess of a drunken blog post, but 1) I don't feel drunk and 2) I'm just melancholy and tired more than anything else.

Off to bed, then. Videos to make tomorrow, and I'd like to be at least vaguely awake to do all that! Hope your Saturday has been pleasant.