With lockdown going ahead from next Thursday (for four weeks, supposedly… I'll believe that when I see it) I thought I'd take a trip down to CEX and bag a few bargains. I came back with an armful of Xbox 360 and PS2 games for less than twenty quid, and it turns out there was quite the interesting little number in there.

At £8, Red Ninja: End of Honor for PS2 was the most expensive game I picked up today, but I thought it looked interesting and I had a very vague memory of having read something about it at some point. I'd never played it, though, and knew absolutely nothing about it. I thought I'd give it a shot, though.

Looking it up online later, I discovered that this game was actually Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki's first game as designer, which naturally intrigued me a great deal. This actually wasn't the reason I vaguely knew Red Ninja, but I found it interesting what a small world the games industry can be sometimes.

I spent a couple of hours this evening playing through the game's first mission. Mechanically the game is rather clunky, particularly with regard to camera controls, but it's an intriguing stealth 'em up with some very cool ideas. The most notable of these is the game's use of a "tetsugen" wire as its main weapon; this can have either a blade or a heavy weight attached to the end of it before flinging it at an enemy, and you can then Libble Rabble any of their friends who show up before ripping it back out of them and slicing a few important bits off in the process.

It's actually been quite pleasant to play a game with a rigid, linear, level-based structure; it occurs to me that it feels like I haven't played something like that for quite some time, and it's nice to have a sense of "focus" rather than the constant fear that you might be "missing things". It's certainly not a perfect game by any means, but it's interesting to look at as Takaki's first game. And if you were wondering, yes, his love of the female posterior is very much present and correct in this game.

I'll likely record a short;Play video on Red Ninja at some point in the near future, so watch out for that, and if I feel inclined to play the whole thing through (I believe it's about 6-10 hours or so in total, which is certainly achievable) I'll give it a proper writeup on MoeGamer. Definitely a pleasing discovery, for sure!

It looks like we're heading for a second full "lockdown" here in the UK — if reports are to be believed, starting as soon as next Wednesday. This is a bit of a bummer for numerous reasons, though with how relatively infrequently I go out anyway it won't be a huge deal for me.

Mostly it's frustrating. The rise in COVID cases here and the need for this second lockdown goes to show that a significant number of people just aren't taking things seriously. And I'm not talking about the government here (although there's plenty to blame them for — the Times report claims their "Eat Out to Help Out" scheme contributed significantly to an increase in COVID cases, to name but one!) — I'm talking about Joe Public.

Throughout this entire pandemic situation, we've seen numerous people acting selfishly, clearly not believing that there's anything to worry about; that there's no need for them to follow the rules that most of us agree to abide by for the benefit of everyone. We've seen overflowing beaches, jam-packed shopping centres and mass "protests" in the name of batshit crazy conspiracy theories… and it all just adds to the risk and, ultimately, the mess we're in now.

At this point, it looks like until there's a reliable vaccine that can be given to everyone, this is just going to continue, because people don't seem to be able to be trusted. That's a dangerous line of thinking, of course, because that way lies extreme societal restrictions, and no-one wants that. But until there's a reliable method of making the population immune, it just feels like this is going to go on forever. And even when that vaccine does arrive, there are plenty of people out there who are going to refuse to take it because… I don't know, Bill Gates or some bullshit.

Oh well. As I say, it's not a vast adjustment to my lifestyle, though with this in mind I may actually take a trip out of the house this weekend to go have a look around the local CEX for some preowned goodness. It might be the last opportunity I get for a while, after all!

Ahhh. Someday we'll look back on this and laugh.

As you might have been able to tell, I have not done at all well on the whole calorie-counting thing of late. Unfortunately I tend to find myself heading for "comfort food" when I'm feeling depressed, and I've been feeling pretty dang depressed of late. I fully intend to "reboot" myself this weekend and kick things off in earnest again from Monday. Until then, I'm going to just take the pressure off myself for the end of the week and clear my head a bit.

Been pondering a few ideas recently. I've mentiond a few times that I want to do more "video articles" — i.e. readings of my MoeGamer articles, allowing me to bring them to the YouTube audience, who might not be aware of my site or interested in reading lots of words for one reason or another. I've been mulling over ways to do this of late, and I see a couple of options: a weekly "digest" (which I could call something like "Radio MoeGamer") that compiles all the week's articles into a single video with timestamps/chapter markers, or individual videos for each article.

Both have pros and cons, but both would probably end up being roughly the same amount of work in total. And since I record footage for the purposes of taking screenshots already, the only real addition to what I'm doing would be actually recording the audio of the article.

I've done individual videos for individual articles in the past, and that would probably make things easiest to find. But I do also quite like the idea of a (potentially) weekly "show" that talks about a variety of stuff. It would be an interesting and fun contrast to the other stuff on the channel.

With so many videos in the can from my week off from the day job, I might experiment a bit this weekend. Watch this space!

Just a quickie this evening as I'm tired. A bit of a request, actually, for those in the know about such things.

I'm interested in getting my stuff read, seen, watched, whatever by a few more people, and I figured the best way of going about that would be to join some relevant communities. The added benefit of that, of course, is that if I have dedicated communities to spend time in, I'll spend less time doomscrolling on social media, and that will be a net positive for everyone.

I'm primarily looking for communities interested in the retro side of things — Atari-specific if possible — and forums by preference. I'm not a huge fan of Discords as a discussion format, though that seems to be the direction most communities have gone in these days.

I'm already a member of AtariAge, so that's one biggie off the list. If any of you know any other good retro gaming communities — especially if they're UK-centric — that it might be good to get involved with, please let me know. Even if they're on Facebook. I can brave Facebook if there are nice people who like talking about old computers there.

Good morning. Apologies for the slightly late post, but our Internet went down at home last night right before I was going to post this, and I really didn't feel like writing on my phone as I was tired. So here we are!

I'm back at the day job. And rather than feeling refreshed after my week off, I'm feeling pretty terrible. That week of working on projects I actually wanted to work on really highlighted to me how incompatible I feel with the "corporate" life. Not that I didn't know this already, but it feels particularly profound this time around, and it's frustrating.

Yesterday, like every Tuesday, was a day almost completely filled with conference calls. I didn't say anything on any of them because I had nothing to say. I barely listened to any of them because they had nothing to do with me. And yet I was expected to be there. I guess I should count myself fortunate that my employer isn't one of those ones that expects you to pointlessly be on video chat for such situations, but it still wasted almost my entire day and left me feeling completely drained and unmotivated.

This was further compounded in the afternoon by our team's leader calling us to talk about a new "process" which was utterly pointless, could be better served with a simple fix that would take less than two minutes rather than the 45+ minutes she spent farting around with our piece of shit online tools and which no-one felt comfortable actually objecting to because we "must respect the process" otherwise it is "dangerous". (It is not dangerous.)

I need out. But right now it just doesn't feel possible to escape in a "safe" way. The only companies that appear to be hiring consistently are big corporations, and swapping one instance of corporate life for another isn't going to solve the issue. I need to work somewhere where I feel like I'm doing something worthwhile and something that I actually care about — or even better, doing my own thing completely and being able to make a living from it.

It could be far worse, I know. I've experienced far worse. I've been in situations where I've been bullied out of jobs and treated like crap by the people I worked for. None of that is happening here, thankfully. I should probably be grateful. But I can't ignore the toll that this is still taking on my mental health.

While being in the depths of depression isn't the best time to be productive about this, when I clear my head a bit I think it's time I started actively looking around for alternatives to my current situation, because I don't feel I can go on like this.

If you know anyone hiring, let me know? 🙂

Over the last three and half hours, an argument has been raging in the official Evercade Discord server over whether or not the latest firmware update "broke" a device that effectively allows you to use your own SD cards with the Evercade. There have been some extremely harsh and unpleasant words spewing forth from the people who had invested in this device, and a complete unwillingness to consider why a small company like Blaze might not want to make it easy for people to make use of such a device.

The standard go-to argument in favour of devices like the one in question is "because homebrew". But the fact is, these devices are also used for widespread piracy. And with a platform like Evercade, which is reliant on the support of the companies it manages to secure licenses with, that's a huge problem. Whether or not the device in question can be used for homebrew development is beside the point, really; the fact it indisputably also enables piracy is something that could potentially put future licensees off supporting the platform.

Mostly I've just sort of watched in bewilderment as a small number of people got really, really angry that the handheld console that has always been marketed as having fully licensed, official, curated collections of games rather than being a simple ROM machine does not, in fact, want to encourage the use of any device which might turn it into another ROM machine. We've had people yelling about "China" and "censorship" and all manner of other absolute nonsense, and it would be hilarious if it wasn't so very, very depressing.

On the one hand, I get it. A new device appears, it's cool to see what can be done with it. On the other, Evercade has been pretty clear about exactly what and who it's for from the outset, so I don't really understand the need for supposed "homebrew" developers to get their pants in a bunch over this. After all, becoming an official developer for the platform is a simple matter of emailing Blaze, or coding something for one of the emulated platforms on Evercade and then going via a group like Mega Cat Studios.

For the most part, the people yelling about this haven't been making themselves seem like the sort of "customer" anyone would be in a great hurry to support. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if, by tomorrow morning, they appear to have been quietly ejected from the Discord. I certainly wouldn't miss them.

People, eh? Why do they have to ruin everything?

I played through The Coma today. It's maybe about 5-6 hours in total, which I tend to feel is the optimum length for the type of game it is. It didn't feel like it outstayed its welcome at all, and I enjoyed the experience as a whole. Its sequel Vicious Sisters is a considerably more polished game in many ways, but it's super-interesting to see where it all started. While Vicious Sisters doesn't require knowledge of The Coma to appreciate — I played it first — it is a direct follow-up. I'll be interested to revisit it now I have the context of the first one.

I like horror games. I'm not particularly big on blood, gore, violence and that sort of thing, but I do very much appreciate that horror games these days tend to be the natural evolution of the adventure game genre for one reason or another. I guess the core "solving a mystery" aspect fits well with the horror theme — and if you get into supernatural horror, said mystery can be super weird and cool!

I especially like horror games that aren't about fighting. The Coma and its sequel are good examples, as is Corpse Party. For me, horror becomes immediately less scary if you can fight back. There are exceptions, of course — the violence is pretty core to the Silent Hill games, for example, particularly the second — but I tend to find "spooky scary things" and "I'm a badass with a rocket launcher" don't gel super-well together. Or, rather, that's not quite true; I've enjoyed many a Resident Evil in my day. But they don't feel like "horror" in the same way as something like The Coma or Corpse Party. Perhaps it's the distinction between "monster movie" and "horror" or something. I don't know. I haven't studied it in detail, but I like to think about such things.

Anyway, The Coma was a good time, and now I have something suitably spooky to write about for Halloween week. As I say, I might try and bang out a replay of Vicious Sisters this week too — particularly as I got the "bad" ending back when I reviewed it — but that'll all depend on time, motivation and… well, just those two things, really.

Hope you've all had a good weekend! Back to the grindstone tomorrow. Booooo!

Halloween is coming up, and I haven't played a spooky game yet this year. I think I'll probably try and bang out The Coma and a replay of its sequel over the course of the next few days, so I have something spooky to write about on MoeGamer for the week of Halloween. There's also the short;Play video of Mad Rat Dead coming up; that isn't really "horror" as such, but it's definitely got some… weirdness going on.

I haven't played the first The Coma game yet, but I enjoyed the second. Those who have been following along will recall that I reviewed it for Nintendo Life a while back — you can check it out here. It was an enjoyable, very stylish horror game that told an interesting story and managed to feel a bit different from your average horror game. Part of that was it being Korean rather than the more common Western or Japanese takes on the genre, but also things like the side-on perspective and the overall structure really worked well for it.

If you're interested in The Coma and its sequel, it's worth noting that Play-Asia have a double-pack of them available for Switch — you can grab 'em here. If you decide to grab it, do it through this link; that's my Play-Asia affiliate link for it. It won't cost you anything extra but if enough people do it it'll help the site out a bit.

I'm going to start making use of a few more of these around MoeGamer — likely on the game pages, to provide people an easy means of buying the games I write about — as that is something that seems to have worked out well for other people I know with minimal inconvenience, and without the obtrusiveness of banner or popup ads and the like. I'll also look into other sites that offer affiliate programmes such as Humble; it's an avenue I haven't really explored yet, but as I say, I know several people who have made good use of them.

Anyway. Expect something on The Coma hopefully in the next week or so, and the sequel if I manage to get through it again. I said a while back that I might do a video playthrough of one or both, but doing that considerably increases the time it takes to get through them, so I'm probably not going to have time to do that, unfortunately. Plus as short-form horror games, I'm kind of in favour of letting people discover some things for themselves, anyway 🙂

For now, though, time for bed, I think. The spookums begin tomorrow!

I got it all done, and before the weekend, too. That leaves a weekend free for just sitting back, relaxing and enjoying some video games. I haven't had a good Atelier Lulua session for a few nights, so I'm going to spend some time with that before I head off to sleep this evening, I think.

I have spent a little time with Mad Rat Dead over the last couple of days; there's a short;Play coming up on it soon, and I've played a bit more today. For some reason I got my copy a bit early from NISA's European store; the official release date isn't until the 30th, but I'm not complaining; the game works and this gives me the opportunity to get the aforementioned video ready in time for the week of release! Nice. Not often I get to be "timely".

For the uninitiated, Mad Rat Dead is a platformer from Nippon Ichi with a bit of a twist — it's all rhythm-based. If you think Crypt of the Necrodancer as a side-scrolling platformer, you'll be partway there, but as you might expect the shift in perspective means a shift in gameplay focus, too. Rather than strategically engaging foes in rhythmic combat, here you're rhythmically negotiating rather perilous environments that, in some cases, would be a pain to get across in a regular platform game, let alone one where you're expected to keep to the beat!

So far the story has provided hints of being pleasingly fucked up, which I was sort of hoping for. The guy behind this is the same dude who made the Yomawari games (which I haven't played, but know a little about) and so I was counting on there being a bit more than meets the eye to what is going on — and that most certainly seems to be the case so far. I can't really say too much more at this point as I'm only a short way into the narrative. But expect something about it all on MoeGamer on the near future — as well as a look at the opening stages on short;Play next week.

Aside from that, I've been enjoying the new Evercade cartridges. Tanglewood is a pleasantly chilled out time and Xeno Crisis is the complete opposite. Plus it's a genuine pleasure to be playing Dizzy games again — even if they're not exactly the versions I remember. Mind you, I still have copies of the versions I remember, so it's actually nice to see the NES versions and how they differ from the home computer versions.

Right then! Lulua is calling, so I will bid you farewell, and wish you all a lovely weekend.

Today was not quite as productive as I was hoping. I spent a significant proportion of the day waiting for a call back from someone, and not getting started on recording until pretty late in the day because I didn't want my phone going off in the middle of a session! Ah well. This simply reminds me of the many, many reasons I completely avoid interacting with people via the telephone whenever possible.

And while I've only finished recording two more videos (so far, I might try and squeeze one or two more in before bed) I have done the research and recorded the intros for eight more, so all I need to do is record the gameplay for those eight videos and I'm all good. And I have several days to do that!

Haven't found the time to look too much into the Intellivision stuff I was talking about a few days back as yet, but a bit of reflection on it told me that I don't necessarily have to hurry on this. The Amico itself isn't out until next April, after all, and while it would be nice to have something up and ready to go sooner rather than later — to be part of the whole pre-release "building excitement" thing, particularly as Intellivision itself is getting rolling on that now — there's no rush. On top of that, that's something I can gradually work on during/after my normal working days and release when there's something to show. Getting ahead of schedule on my planned videos, meanwhile, is the perfect thing to do during this week off from the day job. So that's the focus for now!

I'm mostly justifying this to myself. You don't care, I'm sure. Anyway, that's the situation! And with that update provided, it's time to go and enjoy a late-night bagel, a late-night (decaf) coffee and consider whether or not I can be arsed to record anything else this evening. Have a pleasant night!