Seems I missed another day. I honestly don't really know where this week has gone — it seems to have absolutely flown by for some reason. I guess it's a side-effect of keeping particularly busy on a daily basis — you kind of stop noticing the passage of time quite so much because you're not clockwatching! Either way, apologies.

I've mostly been blasting through GalGun Returns this week so I could write some guides for Rice Digital, and I'm mostly done with that now — I haven't collected all the girls' profiles or unlocked Underwater mode yet, but that's probably going to be a project for my personal time. I still have stuff in GalGun Double Peace and 2 to go back and get at some point, too!

Now that's done and dusted I should have a bit more time to devote to stuff like Atelier again. I've been kind of falling behind a bit on Atelier Escha & Logy in the last couple of weeks, but I should hopefully be able to bang out at least one playthrough within the next few days. Whether or not I'll manage a second runthrough with Logy remains to be seen, but I would like to do that if possible!

Damien from Nintendo Life actually reached out and asked me if I was still free to do reviews. I politely declined. I didn't say why, but after seeing their travesty of a Gal*Gun Returns review — and the hostility from certain parts of their community in the comments — I'm in no particular hurry to have anything else published there. Not that I'd have time to play anything for review there right now anyway — as noted above, I am managing to keep myself crazy busy during the day!

And I'm enjoying it. That's the important thing. This is my job now, and I hope it stays that way. I'd be happy just doing this until further notice — but there's also always the potential that it can lead on to certain other things I'd also be interested in, too. I'm still in that slight phase of unease where I'm worrying that it all might be pulled out from under me at a moment's notice, but hopefully that won't happen… this time. Without going into details, let's just say that the situation is, in theory at least, less "volatile" than previous places I've worked.

Anyway, it doesn't do to worry about such things at half past nine in the evening. I'm going to go and have a chicken sandwich, an Oreo hot chocolate (made in the Tassimo machine, and delicious) and probably get an early night. I might even beat Final Fantasy V this evening if I remember to equip Ribbons on everyone before I fight Stupid Giant Space Tree this time.

Anyway. Hope you've had a good day and are looking forward to the weekend. The days and weeks all seem to blend into each other right now, but we're all slowly but surely making progress towards… something or other. Hang in there in the meantime!

Title. I really don't — it just sort of came and went and it appears to have completely obliterated itself from my memory, hence the fact I forgot to write something for you all yesterday! Oh well. It happens.

Anyway, this evening I've posted the update vid on YouTube to say there's no other videos this week, and on MoeGamer I need to give myself a bit of time with Fur Fighters before I write about Fur Fighters for the Bizarre Creations MegaFeature. I might spend a couple of articles on this one as it appears to be quite a substantial game, but expect something tomorrow or Thursday at the earliest, as I've barely had time to sit down with anything for the last few days, let alone things I want to write about!

Nothing especially exciting happened today aside from me keeping myself busy. Besides work stuff over at Rice, I descaled the Tassimo machine and unclogged the bathtub. Now I'm going to play some Fur Fighters and then collapse into bed!

Hope you've had a pleasant Tuesday!

I was a little disappointed to discover today that a site I had previously been freelancing for — one where the editor-in-chief had specifically given me assignments because they wanted to get away from non-specialists writing about games and offending their audience — has gone back to its old ways.

Specifically, they published a review of Gal*Gun Returns written by the guy who kicked off this whole issue in the first place — and neither he, nor the editor in chief, have apparently learned a thing from the experience. I am beyond disappointed in them.

In fact, you know what, fuck it, I'm not going to pussy-foot around this in a private blog for patrons, because I probably shouldn't speak about it in "public": Nintendo Life published a Gal*Gun Returns review by PJ O'Reilly, the guy who did such a terrible job reviewing Gun Gun Pixies a while back, and who prompted this extremely well-received post on MoeGamer. And it's like the whole of the last year, where I received a ton of supportive and grateful comments from Nintendo Life readers after I reviewed Japanese games with a level head, never happened at all.

I'm pretty disgusted with the Nintendo Life crew for this, but unfortunately not all that surprised. I guess hatebaiting the "disgusting weebs" gets more clicks than actually providing inclusive, friendly and well-informed coverage. Just gives me more incentive to do good work in a place that actually welcomes people who are interested in this kind of thing.

Chris and I recorded a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast today and it is, without a doubt, our most packed show yet. This is down to the fact that we had a lot to talk about — not just because we haven't had the chance to catch up for a while, but also because today's topic is something deeply, deeply near and dear to our hearts.

The new episode is on the subject of "first level music", also covering things like the music that plays in the first area of a more "open" game, or the first battle theme you hear in an RPG, that sort of thing. We each had ten great examples to bring to the table, and it just didn't feel right to cut our discussion short. So we went on for a long, long time!

There's a real mix of games from the east and the west, new and old; game music is a real area where both Chris and I can flaunt our own specialist, specific knowledge and tastes, and I think you'll really enjoy the show when it comes out on Monday.

Of course, I have the enormous job of editing this damn thing first, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I hope you'll all give the show a listen when we get it published on Monday; I think there's something for everyone in there — and we had an absolute blast putting it together.

The wife and I are both absolutely knackered. I think we've both either got or had "something" over the course of the last week — it's obviously not the 'rona (largely because we haven't been anywhere or seen anyone, also it's not the right symptoms) but it's knocked us both around a bit for a few days.

Still, the working week is over now and the only commitment I have this weekend is recording and editing an episode of The MoeGamer Podcast with my good friend Chris, and that isn't a "work" commitment at all — particularly with the subject matter we've got lined up.

Don't forget I'll be taking next week off from posting videos aside from an update video announcing that I'll be taking next week off from posting videos (aside from an… you get it) — I'll be back with, at the very least, Atari A to Z, Atari ST A to Z and Atari A to Z Flashback the following week. Still undecided on Evercade right now. We'll see how I feel next weekend.

Aside from podcasting, this weekend will be spent in the company of GalGun Returns and Atelier Escha & Logy, which I need to beat a playthrough of sharpish! (I think I'm nearly there, I just haven't quite managed it yet.) GalGun Returns is definitely a worthy investment of your time if you've been considering it, as is HuniePop 2, which I mentioned the other day.

All in all, while it's been a tiring week, it's been a satisfying and enjoyable week, too. I'm going to sleep well tonight, I'm sure. Assuming I don't have a cat on my face for 80% of the night like sometimes happens.

Anyway, hope your respective weeks have been at the very least acceptable, and that you have a nice weekend to look forward to. Take care of yourselves as always!

I'm having an evening of anxiety. As is often the case, it stems from a small error of judgement that absolutely is not a big deal when thinking about it rationally. But the thing about anxiety is that it's not rational. It tends to blow things massively out of proportion, even when they absolutely do not matter.

I won't go into details on said mistake — largely because it's already been resolved with no ill-effects, which should give you an idea of how minor it was — but I detest that my brain works this way. I go into full-on "fight or flight" mode over something that I can neither attack physically nor run away from, and it's exhausting — particularly because the anxiety is inevitably at its worst as the day comes to an end and I would want to get to sleep.

I'm now somewhat hesitant to go to bed because I know I'll just lie awake thinking about what has already been fixed and panicking about "what if?" scenarios. But it's probably best to just go do it, sleep it off, and tomorrow is another day and all that.

Have a nice evening!

I've been absolutely exhausted all day today. I don't think I'm sleeping particularly well at the minute. It's not due to any particular sort of "stress", I don't think — though I think I had been giving the things I talked about yesterday more thought and brainspace than I might have initially thought — but I'm just knackered. After work today I just went upstairs and lay down for a few hours. It was both nice and a huge waste of time, because I don't think I actually managed to get to sleep.

Still, at least in the current situation it doesn't matter too much if I wake up a little bit late, since I have precisely zero commute to worry about. That was always one of the things that stressed me out the most with the previous day job; the commute was short, but a huge pain in the arse, and the company was the sort of place that would complain if you walked in the door at the start of your scheduled work hours, rather than being already sat at your desk ready for a busy day of pointless conference calls.

My current working day starts at 9am, and that's nice and comfortable. I typically wake up around 8-8.30am anyway (earlier if Patti the cat is hungry and tapping me in the face to inform me of this fact) so that gives me a nice little while to get some breakfast, have a coffee, take my pills and at least attempt to wake up a little bit before I have to start actually using my brain for things.

I'm still knackered though. Feels like it should be the weekend again already, but nope! Few more days to go yet. Hang in there with me!

I've come to a decision, and announced it publicly over on MoeGamer. For your convenience, I will also add it here for your information.

TLDR: Scaling back on everything that isn't the day job. Not stopping anything completely. For the immediate future, expect two "big" articles on MoeGamer per week (covering the two currently running MegaFeatures) and three videos on YouTube (Atari A to Z, Atari ST A to Z, Atari A to Z Flashback). Much of the stuff I would have been doing on MoeGamer each week I'm now doing at Rice Digital, so please be sure to check in there every day! Thank you!

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Hello everyone, just a relatively quick one today, as I wanted to update you on a few things.

As you'll know if you've been paying attention recently, I have a new day job working over at Rice Digital as the editor. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a dream job. I spend my days getting paid to write things, make videos and go through other people's work with a virtual red pen. I hope those of you who have stopped by have enjoyed what I've been doing over there — there's plenty more to come!

Taking on that role has led me to think carefully about a few things, though, so I wanted to outline exactly what I've been pondering recently — and let you know what that means for my "passion projects" around the Internet.

The short version is, quite simply, that I don't intend to stop doing what I'm doing, but I do intend to scale things back a bit. Initially I thought just scaling back YouTube would be enough — indeed, I mentioned as much to Patrons the other day — but with the amount of stuff I'm doing for Rice each day I think I need to dial it back slightly on MoeGamer as well.

The main reason for this is that I don't want my passion projects to feel like a chore or an obligation on top of my work throughout the day. I love writing, and I especially love writing about games. I'm absolutely thrilled to have taken on a position where I get paid to do what I love — it's been a long time coming — and thus I don't want to put myself in a situation where I end up resenting something that I enjoy by giving myself too much to do at a time.

This is only becoming an issue now because of that job change. In my previous day job, where I was bored out of my mind for at least 85% of each working day, I could make the time to work on MoeGamer and even YouTube during the frequent moments of "downtime" every day. And I did! Now, however, I'm working a job I'm genuinely enthusiastic and excited about — and that means I'm keeping myself busy for the entire working day… and sometimes a little beyond, I must confess!

With that in mind, since MoeGamer and my own YouTube channel are the things I do in my free time, those are the things that need to scale back somewhat. There won't be any substantial changes to the way I do things — I still intend to focus on deep dives into overlooked and underappreciated games — but there'll just be a little less of it; specifically, here on MoeGamer there won't be daily "big articles" for the moment. Instead, I'm going to focus on the larger projects I have underway. Right now, that means the Atelier MegaFeature and Fatal Rewind: A Bizarre Creations Retrospective.

Focusing on these larger projects means I can take the pressure off myself to find something new to write about every day — something which I already have to do over at Rice! — and instead focus on doing what I think I do best: multi-part, in-depth analysis of things that deserve more attention, perhaps peppered with other occasional bits and pieces as I have the time and energy.

Alongside this, I've been looking at YouTube and determining what best to do over there. While I enjoy everything I do over there, there are some clear "winners", and that's the three Atari A to Z series. short;Play in particular doesn't pull particularly big numbers unless I play something with tits in it — or something which has crossover interest with the Atari A to Z viewers, such as the recent Rescue on Fractalus remake. And while Evercade A to Z is a good way to showcase the games on the various platforms, it's essentially duplicating some of the stuff I've done here on MoeGamer in a different format.

As such, short;Play is going to take a break for an indefinite amount of time — perhaps with occasional one-off episodes as I find things I particularly want to show on video — while Evercade A to Z… I haven't quite decided yet. I will either press pause on Evercade A to Z or the Evercade articles here on MoeGamer… or perhaps both.

As I think about this right now as I type, it occurs to me that it might make a bit more sense to pause the articles and continue with the videos, since the Evercade A to Z series, again, has some crossover with the Atari audience who make up the bulk of the visitors to my channel. But at the same time I am trying to reduce my own workload somewhat.

Anyway. Here's the plan. There are several steps.

• Next week all video series will take a one-week break, except for The MoeGamer Podcast, which we're recording a new episode of over the weekend. I will post a video announcing this break over on YouTube just so no-one wonders why I've suddenly disappeared.

• From right now I will commit to a Monday and a Friday article on MoeGamer — Monday for Fatal Rewind and Friday for Atelier. (Depending on how busy my working Friday is I reserve the right to push the week's Atelier article to the weekend!)

• From the week after next YouTube will feature Atari A to Z, Atari ST A to Z and Atari A to Z Flashback, plus possibly Evercade A to Z if I have the time and/or energy. short;Play will be taking a break. At some point in the near future, one of the Atari A to Z series will take a break and be replaced with an Atari Jaguar-centric series.

• From right now you can find my daily writing about Japanese games and popular culture over at Rice Digital, and on Rice Digital's YouTube channel. Please subscribe, follow and all that good stuff! I'll be sharing Rice Digital stuff via Twitter each day, too, so if you have the time to give me a few clicks (and reads and views!) that would be much appreciated.

• From an indeterminate point in the future that is yet to be agreed I'll be beginning work on a brand-new retro-centric project as part of the day job, so the retro stuff I'm no longer posting here will end up there instead, where I get paid to do it!

This is a lot of words to say "I think I'm overworking myself" and I apologise if any of it sounds like I'm making excuses. I'm super-proud of what I've achieved both on MoeGamer and on YouTube — and now on Rice, too — and I'm forever grateful to all the people who stop by every single day and have helped to make my pet projects a big success, at least in my eyes. But sometimes you just need to say "whoa, chill out a bit".

So that's what I'm going to do! Thank you for your time and understanding — and thank you for all your support over the years MoeGamer has been running. It's that support that has helped keep me going — and me keeping going is what allowed me to finally end up in this dream job.

In short, this is not the end, by any means — my stuff will just be a bit more spread out between a few different places now. But you'll likely find there's at the very least the same amount of stuff to read and videos to watch each week — and probably even more! That sounds like a win for you; it's definitely a win for me.

Once again, thanks for your understanding — and I hope you continue to enjoy my work for a long time to come.

Pete Davison

Both HuniePop 2 and GalGun Returns are out this week! It's a good week for fans of saucy games. I intend to do something with both of them, but I haven't quite decided what and when as yet. GalGun is out on Friday so I will likely time something to coincide with that, while HuniePop 2 was out today, so I'll probably do something tomorrow.

There will likely be both writing and video involved! I'm very excited to play both because they've both been a long time coming, and they will both offer delightfully distinct experiences from one another. HuniePop 2's brash humour will be fun to return to, while Gal*Gun's light-hearted lewd is always a pleasure. And, going on past experience with both series, both are very mechanically solid, too.

Truly, it is one of those "embarrassment of riches" periods of time, and I'm 100% here for it. Let's have some happy lewd fun!

Been pondering over the weekend what I might do with the Rice Digital YouTube channel. As with most things to do with the site, I'm being largely left to my own devices, which is nice, but I do want to try and make good use of it.

The channel has a decent number of subscribers but view counts have been very low for a long time — primarily because of the fact that the channel hasn't posted anything regularly for ages. I don't really pay a lot of attention to YouTube "trends" in terms of viewing figures and suchlike, so I would assume it will take a little while to build up momentum again. While that's going on, I guess it's a decent time to experiment.

I enjoyed putting together the "readings" of articles that I did for the last few days last week, and they're not too much work; generally speaking, I was capturing footage to take screenshots from anyway, so I didn't have to set a lot of time aside to record new stuff aside from the voiceover. Editing for them is a relatively simple case of slapping some footage together with the ol' creative eye for what fits with what is being talked about, plus some nice transitions and titles. I can bang one of them out in a couple of hours, not including writing the article in the first place.

I'm wondering if some gameplay/let's play stuff would be enjoyable for the community, though. And if so, what would be good to showcase? GalGun would make a lot of sense for obvious reasons, but I've also done a fair bit of GalGun-related stuff recently so I don't want to overdo it. I'm thinking perhaps experimenting with some fun weird stuff — Hakoniwa Explorer Plus on Switch springs to mind, since I think that will likely appeal to the audience. Then once Root Film, Kowloon High-School Chronicle and Gal*Gun release later, I can do stuff around those, too.

Don't mind me, I'm just thinking out loud — but if there's any particular type of thing you'd like to see over at Rice Digital's YouTube channel, do let me know! I am exceedingly open to bright ideas right now.