I've just finished editing the 10 videos I've put together this weekend, and I'm pleased with what I've put together. I haven't made any radical changes to format or anything, but I'm pleased with everything about these videos — the interesting subject matter, the things I talked about and the introduction of some new stuff.

I'm going to make an effort to put out as much stuff as possible at 60fps from now on. I started the oldest Atari A to Z videos at 60fps then switched to 30 because I was running into some disk space issues; that's not really a problem now, plus the beefed-up processor I got a while back makes rendering 60fps marginally less time-consuming than it was previously. And the results are worth it; 60fps retro gaming videos look lovely. I'm by no means a "frame rate person", but there is something inherently pleasant about seeing smooth, slick retro stuff looking as smooth and slick as it did on original hardware.

I have a slight bottleneck in this regard in that the Elgato Game Capture HD device I use for capturing console footage is incapable of capturing 1080p at 60fps. This isn't a problem for the new Evercade stuff I'm doing, since the Evercade outputs at 720p and thus can be captured at 60fps no problem, but for anything on, say, Switch or PS4, I'm capped at 30fps. This isn't a huge problem, but it would be nice to improve that at some point. Perhaps I'll set the acquisition of a new capture device as a donation goal or something.

I'm pleased with how the Evercade videos came out. Since the games in question are old anyway, upscaling the footage from 720p to 1080p 60fps has little to no impact on quality, which means lovely crisp, clear, smooth footage of Ninja Golf. And, err, some other games eventually, too. But mostly Ninja Golf and Star Luster for now.

I'm calling the Evercade series "Evercade A to Z" to fit in with the other retro-themed stuff I do, but I'm not going to be strictly following an A to Z format. Instead, I'm going to do something similar to how I'm handling the launch lineup on MoeGamer: take a game from each cart, cycle around, rinse, repeat. That means when the four new carts come out later this year I can easily slot them into the cycle without having to wait ages to make a video about any of the games on them.

Exciting times ahead, to be sure. But for now, it's back to the humdrum old day job tomorrow, so I should probably get some sleep to be… "fresh" for the morning. Sigh.

Oh well. At least I feel like I've achieved something worthwhile this weekend, even if the daytime of my weekdays is filled with a complete and utter sense of the meaninglessness of human existence.

Recorded a bunch of stuff today — a bit more left to do tomorrow, but it's nearly 1AM now so I should probably go to bed, as much as it is tempting to pull a late-nighter.

Got some really interesting stuff coming up soon on Atari A to Z, probably my favourite of which is Chris Crawford's unusual social simulation Gossip, which may or may not have been released back in the day. We had a version in our Big Box of Disks for the Atari 8-bit, but we had a lot of things we weren't supposed to have in our Big Box of Disks, so that doesn't necessarily mean it ever actually got released.

I'll spare you the details of Gossip for now — watch the video when it comes out in a couple of weeks! — but suffice to say it's the sort of overly ambitious nonsense that I feel really defined the Atari 8-bit era. It's fascinating to return to now — and I sure as hell understand what it's going for a lot more than I did back in the day. It also helps that the version I recorded from today was actually a completed version rather than a beta version which never quite worked properly.

I'm doing a couple of pilot Evercade episodes, too. Those will fit right in with what I'm already doing and can be produced in a similar amount of time. It'll also provide some variety to the retro stuff. For now, I'll keep the seventh generation underdogs in with short;Play since that's where they fit best for the minute, but perhaps that's worth spinning off into its own series at some point.

Ah, I enjoy creating. Oh for infinite time and money to do it to my heart's content rather than crushing my soul for five days a week… But oh well. Think of it as a reward. Just… keep thinking of it as a reward…!

Gotta be honest, watching a bunch of the Hololive gals' stream archives over the last few days has been inspiring me quite a bit. I mean, it's not as if I'm short of things to do right now between MoeGamer and my video series, but I'm feeling a certain amount of… I don't know, I guess "creative energy" is the best way to describe it.

I've been thinking about other things I might want to do with video, as with the way I work that would be the easiest side of things to add a bit to, especially now I've hit pause on the long playthroughs, which frees up a lot of time and energy.

I have several ideas brewing in this regard, and they're all in the similar "single episode showcase" format that currently seems to work well for me on my channel, which would keep things nice and consistent. I don't know if I'm going to do all of these as their own separate thing or fold them into other things, but here's a list of the ideas I've got bubbling away right now.

• Atari A to Z Flashback-style series with the Activision Anthology on PS2. I plan to do this right after Atari A to Z Flashback is finished. There's still a fair way to go on that — we're at 87 out of 150 at the time of writing, with a couple more in the can and ready to go — but that's an all but certain happening, because those Activision 2600 games are super cool. (Also they really need a modern rerelease, but today's Activision doesn't seem to really give a shit any more.)

• Atari A to Z Flashback-style series with the Intellivision Lives! collection on PS2. I don't know the Intellivision at all well, having not grown up with it — I don't think I ever even saw one in the '80s, though apparently it did come out here — but I'm fascinated by the ambition of the games on it. While I'll run into a few of the same issues I've had with Atari A to Z Flashback — mostly two player-only games — I feel like I've kind of figured out the best and easiest way to handle that now, so this is something that could run pretty smoothly.

• A companion/complementary series to my Evercade writeups on MoeGamer, showing the games actually in action. My only slight hesitance with this is that a few of the games from the Evercade's launch lineup still have some peculiar issues with video capture — usually with the audio, so this isn't an insurmountable issue by any means — but I'm quite enthusiastic about this idea, as the Evercade is a platform I absolutely adore and want to continue showing my support for in various ways.

• Some sort of celebration of the underdog games of the seventh generation, as Chris and I have been talking about on the podcast recently. This would include both retail titles that sold and/or reviewed poorly (or were ignored, as is the case with the majority of the Wii's library that doesn't have Mario on the cover) as well as digital-only games from XBLA and PSN that are still accessible, and perhaps even some bigger names that are worth revisiting from a more "modern" perspective. In some ways, I feel this could probably be folded into short;Play, and I enjoy the "pot luck" nature of producing those episodes on a whim. But on the other hand I quite like the idea of having more "focused" series with a clear intent behind them.

I'm still also trying to get my head around the idea of streaming, but I'm not 100% sure how I might be able to make that work in a practical way at a time when the people who might be interested in watching me would be able to watch me. I'm still mulling it over, though, so thank you to those who kindly responded with some feedback to my survey a while back. If you haven't already, you can take a moment to do so here.

Anyway, those are the ideas I have rattling around in my head at the moment. I might try a few "pilots" this weekend, since Andie is away seeing her mother and I have plenty of free time to record some episodes. But we'll see! Keeping myself busy at least keeps my mind out of bleak places, which is important right now.

As always, thanks for all your support, and I hope you have a thoroughly pleasant weekend — or as much as is possible right now, anyway.

It's here! My Moero Crystal H review is live on Nintendo Life. Please go check it out! 

I'm excited about this review for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's simply a great game that I'm very happy I had the opportunity to write about. Secondly, and probably most significantly, it's a sign of a certain amount of… "progress", I guess you'd call it.

For those of you who don't know, I was one of the founding members of USgamer.net. When that site first launched, it was envisioned as a place where its writers would each focus on their particular specialisms, allowing the audience to come along and gravitate towards their favourite writers — the people who gave them what they wanted to read about. All was well for a while; I wrote about interesting Japanese arcade games, RPGs and visual novels, Jaz Rignall wrote about racing games, Mike Williams wrote about big stompy robots… and so on. All was good.

Unfortunately, as tends to be the case with writing intended to bring in the ad revenue, the suits decided that wasn't a sustainable model, so a couple of things happened. Firstly, the site shifted away from its more "article-based" model with personal specialisms to a traditional news-and-reviews site. Secondly, Jeremy Parish was brought on board to be the site's editor-in-chief.

Parish is a respected figure in the industry, but I found him exceedingly unpleasant to work with. He frequently belittled my opinions, insisted on having "approval" over every news article I wrote, and on more than one occasion tried to chew me out for things that I actually hadn't done — the most memorable of which was the time I mocked other sites' coverage of Lightning's "boob jiggle" in Lightning Returns, instead focusing on my actual hands-on impressions of the game I'd had from the Eurogamer Expo. He (wilfully?) misunderstood what I was doing as actually covering boob jiggle and nothing else, thereby making it clear he hadn't actually read the article he was so mad about. I had to have uncharacteristically stern words with him over that one.

The reason MoeGamer exists relates to all this. Those of you who have been following me for a while may recall a notorious review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 written by a freelancer, in which said reviewer referred to the game (which, as anyone who has played it will know, is incredibly wholesome and pleasant) as "bringing the creep factor overseas" and described its audience as "degenerates". My colleague Cassandra and I took great umbrage at this, and the result was the launch of MoeGamer's spiritual predecessor: my column JPgamer, which afforded me a weekly opportunity to once again talk about the games that, in the early days of the site, I had helped build a solid reputation for.

That Miku review hurt a significant part of the audience, because my previous work had shown that USgamer was a lot more friendly to the otaku audience than pretty much any other site around at the time — this was when ragebaiting audiences by insulting them and the games they liked was just starting to get popular — and said otaku audience, quite rightly, felt somewhat betrayed by this. So the first installment of my JPgamer column provided an opportunity to show that no, this wasn't what USgamer was all about, and that yes, there absolutely was a place for the otaku audience to call home here. Because I wanted it too.

The reason why I bring all this up is that while I managed to cover most of the things I wanted to in JPgamer, Parish specifically forbade me from covering the first installment in the Genkai Tokki series, Monster Monpiece. He didn't like the ecchi artwork, so no-one else was allowed to talk about it either. When I say I was forbidden from talking about it, I absolutely mean it; I couldn't even post news stories talking about its release date, or about how it was a pleasant surprise such a niche-interest sort of game — it is, at heart, a collectible card game with really solid mechanics, if you never played it — had ended up localised.

I stuck to Parish's rules to the letter for a quiet life, but I can't help but feel my eventually being laid off from USgamer "so that the site could have an all-American team" (the reason I was actually given… on my birthday, no less) was at least partly a result of him seeing me somehow as a "risk". I mean, we couldn't possibly have "his" site sullied with games he didn't like now, could we? Better to get the perverted Englishman with his dangerous, perverted audience out the door and bring on board some sycophants who will never question his judgement.

Sigh. But anyway.

Now we fast forward to today and here I am posting a review of the official English localisation of the third Genkai Tokki game, Moero Crystal. And giving it a glowing review, too. While I do genuinely feel that it's an absolutely excellent game and would encourage those of you who enjoy good dungeon crawlers (and don't mind a healthy dose of ecchi) to check it out, I also can't help but see the publication of this review as something of a victory over a frustrating aspect of my professional past.

I'm still upset and bitter about the way I was treated at USgamer; I feel I had a promising career (with said promise backed up by site stats and audience engagement) cut short because of all this nonsense. I suspect that if I ever meet Parish in person, I will probably at the very least want to punch him right in the dick for his role in quite literally ruining a significant part of my life, and playing a huge part in the mental health issues I deal with on a daily basis today.

But at least I can enjoy this small victory for now. Which, in these troubled times, is something to celebrate, at least.

Review safely squirrelled away; the embargo is up tomorrow, so with any luck it will actually go live tomorrow. It's not a "big" game as such, but I'm not sure offhand what other major releases are around right now, so it might actually go live on time for once.

I mentioned this recently, but I definitely think it's time to take a Twitter break for a bit again. While, as I mentioned, the weekend of HololiveEN's launch was thoroughly lovely, the last few days have been a torrent of negativity and whataboutery and all manner of other stuff I really don't have the patience or indeed the mental wellbeing to deal with at the moment. And, thinking about it, most of the positivity surrounding Hololive was actually on YouTube rather than Twitter — although seeing people sharing fanart on Twitter has been nice; I picked up some nice Amelia pics for today's post.

I'm not going to make a big deal about not being around, and indeed there will still be posts going up on the MoeGamer account — the daily promotional posts will continue and I'm going to be better about remembering to "Buffer" a random selection of posts to show up throughout the day, as those always get a nice number of eyes on them, but I've deleted the Twitter app from my phone and am going to make a distinct effort to avoid using it on the computer. It's just not being good for me right now.

Different people have different experiences with the platform, I know, but I've tried numerous strategies to escape the sides of it that I don't like — including both the "drown it out with art" approach that a lot of people advocate, along with mass unfollowing sprees — and it's still a source of considerable anxiety for me. It's silly to keep doing that to myself, so for now at least, balls to it; there are plenty of other means of getting in touch with me.

A few people I know say the Instagram community is nice, but I never really know what to post on there, since it has no link handling and its obvious emphasis on images or short videos. Plus the seeming necessity to load up every post with a zillion hashtags for any chance of getting seen just seems enormously tiresome, particularly on mobile.

I suspect I'm just not built for today's Internet. We had a good run, but these days I just want to get on with writing my words and making my videos; arguing with strangers or seeing the stupidest of stupid takes thrust into my face is not (and never has been) a desirable part of my life.

Anyway! Hope you're doing well. Have a pleasant evening, and look out for my review on Nintendo Life tomorrow… hopefully! 🙂

I'll level with you, reader, I'm not 100% sure what to write about today, so I'm going to do one of those stream of consciousness posts where I just start typing and see what happens. My Switch controller ran out of battery, y'see, so I couldn't keep on doing what I was doing, so I thought I might as well do this while I thought about it.

There's been a lot of very silly takes on social media today, mostly attempting to ride the tails of the English Hololivers' sudden explosion in popularity. This is kind of frustrating because, as I said the other day, the whole debut day for the Hololive English girls was remarkable in that it was a rare instance of everyone involved being happy, filled with joy and appreciating something all together. The "hot take" machines weren't paying any attention to it, what with it being a relatively niche interest thing, and so everyone was just free to enjoy things as they saw fit.

Today? We've had people trying to connect Western vTuber fandoms to bigotry and Nazism, paedophilia, sexual assault, groomers and all manner of other disgusting shit. This is really getting extremely tiresome, because it's a seemingly endless cycle; something new and exciting that people are genuinely happy for comes along, and the miserable bastard brigade have to come along and declare how it's "problematic" for everyone and you should probably feel ashamed for some reason because they said so.

Well, balls to all that. Once again, I find myself drifting noticeably away from any meaningful discourse on Twitter, and the temptation to just abandon it entirely raises its head once again. I might take another self-enforced break from the platform temporarily, because once again I can feel the never-ending negativity causing obvious cracks in my mental state. It's not healthy, and I hate it — particularly at a time like now, when there are people who want to be unconditionally enthusiastic and happy about something they're enjoying.

Anyway, that ended up being more of a rant than I intended it to be, but there you go. Have a lovely evening!

Ahhhh. Kind of champing at the bit to talk about the game I'm playing for my current Nintendo Life assignment, but embargoes. I know there's no real way of the people who enforce such things knowing that I'm talking about it (unless they happen to be Patrons, which I'm pretty sure they aren't) but still. I like to be careful.

The reason I want to talk about this game is because it's fantastic. I was planning on playing it anyway, but I've been absolutely glued to it since I got my review code the other day — and not just because the embargo is up on Thursday and I want to get as far through as possible before actually writing something about it.

Suffice to say that besides my Nintendo Life review on it, there will also be some substantial words written about it on MoeGamer in the very near future, likely as a multi-part feature running alongside the continuing Atelier MegaFeature. (I don't feel too bad having not started my replay of Atelier Meruru yet, since I'm a little ahead of schedule on the articles, making it an ideal time to get stuck right in to [REDACTED].)

Anyway. Those of you who might have spoken to me privately will already know what it is I am talking about, and others of you might be able to figure it out anyway, but suffice to say… it's good. Real good. Real good. And I look forward to my review almost certainly ending up at the top of the Metacritic list for the game, haha.

Anyway. Sorry for the gratuitous tease, but I wanted to let out a bit of that frustration and you were nearby. Apologies for that. I'm off to bed now. Have a lovely evening!

I stayed up until after 3AM watching the HololiveEN girls' debuts last night, and I don't regret a thing. It was really interesting to immerse myself in a side of online culture that I haven't explored before, and I have to say, I rather liked it.

I mentioned yesterday how the whole experience was just pleasantly positive, with no-one complaining or whining or trying to one-up one another; it was just a bunch of people who had turned out to watch animated 2D women do things. And everyone was having a thoroughly lovely time, even during Amelia Watson's acid trip of a debut stream, which was one of the most bizarre things I think I've ever sat through in my life.

Today, the girls were getting started on some of their "real" streams, and I caught a couple. Calli and Kiara had a joint stream (hosted by Calli) where they were talking about her music, her inspirations and suchlike, and Kiara was driving the shippers wild. Those two have an excellent dynamic together that I hope we see more of; Kiara in particular is a natural entertainer, and Calli, while clearly still suffering some nerves — at least partly as a result of her potato PC meaning the visual side of her performance could have been a little smoother — most certainly has considerable talents to share with us. Not least of which are her rapping skills, which I encourage you to check out in this shockingly catchy number here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y3xh8gs24c

Ina then did an art stream which was wonderfully chilled out and relaxing. She has an incredibly soothing voice and manner about her, and she's become a real favourite of a lot of people thanks to this thoroughly lovely personality. She's also a hell of an artist too, cranking out some decent quality sketches of four of the HololiveEN girls in less than an hour.

I don't know how much time I'll find myself spending watching these girls in the long term, but I feel like if they ever end up streaming in the daytime while I'm working the day job, they'll prove a rather pleasant distraction from the ever-present tedium. The thing I find with streamers in general is that I usually don't want to spend time just watching them — ideally, they'd be on while I'm doing something else that doesn't require much brainpower.

Unfortunately, with the way my Aspie brain works, this means that gaming is usually out, because dividing my attention between two things that I enjoy engaging with actually makes me extremely anxious. So it's probably going to be restricted to times when I actually have the freedom to sit down and watch without "guilt", or those times when I'm doing something utterly mindless. Or perhaps trying to sleep.

We'll see. For now, I'm very much impressed with the girls' first steps, and I wish them every success.

It was the official debut of the English-speaking Hololive crew today, also known as "HoloMyth" thanks to the fact that they're all based loosely on mythological creatures, figures or concepts. At the time of writing, I'm eagerly awaiting Amelia Watson's stream at midnight my time, and have really enjoyed what I've caught of Mori Calliope (Death), Takanashi Kiara (chic… I mean PHOENIX), Ninomae Ina'nis (priestess of the Ancients… plus tentacles) and Gawr Gura (SHARK).

All of them had a relatively formulaic, structured stream, but this worked well, as it gave them an opportunity to talk a bit about themselves (or their characters, at least) as well as show off their Live2D models, their ability to speak multiple languages, their own personal creative projects and their musical talents. By the end of each girl's hour-long stream, everyone had a pretty decent idea of what to expect from each of them, along with an idea as to what their upcoming streams would involve.

I don't watch a lot of streams as a general rule, as I've noted here before, but the Hololive girls are filled with such infectious personality that I feel like I'm probably going to spend at least some time checking their stuff out. I am, obviously, probably most interested in their gaming streams, but Ina'nis is doing a drawing stream tomorrow that I think will be interesting to check out — she's done some of the promo art for the group and has already proven herself to be rather talented in that regard.

I'm still not 100% sure I "get it", but I certainly like these girls a great deal already, and am interested to see if they can keep my attention over time. Hololive is a huge phenomenon out East, and I'm interested to see quite how much it catches on in English-speaking territories.

If nothing else, these streams have been a wonderful escape from the negativity, doomsaying, cynicism and outright nastiness of the rest of the Internet for an hour at a time. Each one has been an injection of pure happiness, which is exactly what we all need right now. And that alone makes what these girls are doing worthwhile.

I beat Atelier Totori tonight, and did much better than my first time through! First time, I managed to just about scrape the Normal ending, but didn't even see the "final boss" of the game. This time I not only saw it, I beat it — and even got a character-specific ending. (Melvia's, in this case, which I'm happy with — I messed up Mimi's events along the way so would have gone for hers otherwise.)

I'll obviously be writing more about this in the near future, but Atelier Totori is a really interesting game in that structurally it almost resembles an old-school Western RPG as much as anything else. You're moving around a map, taking specific amounts of time to get places, and things happen at certain times. There are things around the world that will absolutely definitely beat the shit out of you if you don't go in properly prepared (aforementioned final boss being one of them, but he is the least of your worries if you want to see everything in the game!) and tons of interesting secrets to discover.

I mentioned in my recent features on Atelier Rorona how that game has a much more freeform, non-linear structure than its immediate predecessors, and this is even more true in the case of Atelier Totori, which essentially says "you have three years to achieve this one thing, get on with it" and then invites you to approach said task however you see fit.

Getting the "True" ending, which involves fulfilling the conditions for all the other endings simultaneously, seems like an enormous challenge, but one I'm keen to take on at some point. The nice thing about the Arland games is that a single playthrough is short enough that it doesn't feel like a huge effort to go through again, particularly since you can carry equipment and money over to your next playthrough.

I'm a little ahead of schedule now, so I'm going to have to take a little time away from Atelier to tackle a new Nintendo Life assignment in the coming days. It's a game I'm looking forward to exploring — and one I was going to play anyway at some point — but it's embargoed for the minute so that's all I can say for now!

Anyway, it's 2AM. Time to sleep, I think!