I've been feeling crazy anxious for the last few days, so I've been deliberately stepping back from most forms of social media for a bit. It's one of those times where I feel like I'm not getting a ton from it, so all I'm doing is scheduling a bunch of posts for people to check out, and then not looking at it for the rest of the day. Seems to be working just fine to me.

I'm not sure what's triggered this latest bout of anxiety — but then as I've established over the years, there doesn't really need to be a "cause" as such. It's certainly not work, because I'm having a good time, people like me and I seem to be doing a job that pleases the people who are "above" me — I think it's just a general sense of stress about life in general, and things like Andie being ill recently. She thought she had COVID briefly, but thankfully a recent test came back negative, so we're in the clear.

I've not been sleeping well, which is part of the problem. Getting to sleep has always been difficult for me because I have a tendency to "ruminate", as the technical terminology has it. Lying in bed with your eyes shut trying not to think about anything, it turns out, is the absolute perfect time for your brain to think about absolutely everything at once and overwhelm you, rather than performing the desired shutdown sequence. I do tend to get to sleep eventually, but it often takes quite a long time — and as I think I've mentioned recently, I've been kind of beset by strange dreams in recent weeks. On the one hand, those dreams are quite interesting; on the other, they're not exactly conducive to good quality rest.

I'm hoping the whole "disconnecting" thing will help if I mantain it for a little while — presently I'm somewhat in the stage where I'm feeling a bit "lonely" for not looking at what everyone is up to, but hopefully that will pass. And people have various means of getting hold of me if they really need to.

On that note, it's time to attempt to get some rest again… tomorrow is Friday, so it's the end of another week, at least!

I didn't get the job lot of 37 games magazines in eBay because some fucker sniped me in the last ten seconds. To be fair, I was trying to do the same to them, too — I just blew my bid load far too early. My own fault. To make myself feel better, I spent the money I was going to spend on that one lot on some individual items — it's fewer in total, but it's still about 15 or so magazines, so should be plenty for me to enjoy.

Plus, as an added bonus, ten of those magazines are ones I've never actually read before, whereas the job lot of 37 was pretty much all stuff we owned back in the day — the job lot was all Page 6 and Atari User, whereas the ten I haven't seen before are all Monitor magazine, which I've never even seen before, let alone read in detail. I knew of its existence — they used to advertise in both Page 6 and Atari User — but I've never seen a real issue. Now I'll have ten of them to enjoy!

Some magazines that I'd love to add my collection are going to be real "holy grails", I think; I've been looking around for issues of PC Player, the short-lived but beautifully produced magazine my brother launched, but have seen no sign of them anywhere. It's kind of understandable; each issue of that magazine was a goddamn work of art, since my brother and his team approached it with the distinct idea that they wanted to create something more akin to a coffee table book than a conventional glossy periodical. It makes sense that people who still have copies probably want to hold on to them!

This is going to be a fun little "project" of sorts, I think; the nice thing about magazines is that it's clear and easy to accomplish collecting "goals" since unless you're collecting currently running publications, there's a definite end point. With games, however, since most platforms have absolutely massive libraries, it's difficult — and probably not desirable — to obtain a "complete" collection.

Anyway. Further reports when more of the mags have arrived — and I've been continuing to enjoy my one issue of ACE in the meantime.

The first of what will likely become a decent magazine collection over time arrived today — an issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment (better known as ACE) magazine from 1990.

ACE is a magazine I used to really enjoy reading, because it was a multi-format magazine that was always enthusiastic and interested in new developments in gaming technology. And it's only become more interesting to return to over time, as many of those exciting developments ended up never happening — or ended up being a bit poop. Stuff like the Konix Multisystem, which would have been amazing if it existed… or the Philips CDi, which, well, I'm sure you all know about that by now.

Mostly, though, it's been a pleasure to read an actual magazine again. Reading PDFs on a tiny phone screen — or even a tablet — absolutely is not the same experience at all, and thus I'm convinced that my plan to collect some of these magazines, particularly issues that were either important to me or which I've never read before, is a solid one. And this issue in particular has been interesting — there's an article about Pixar from before anyone knew who Pixar was, for example, talking about the rendering software they'd been working on.

All this is actually part of a broader plan I have to spend less time on the Internet in general, because the Internet is really stressing me out at the minute for various reasons. And it doesn't have to be that way; I don't have to engage with it at all. So if I provide myself with alternative things that I enjoy engaging with that aren't Internet-based, that will get me into the habit of not picking up by phone and doomscrolling, or whatever else might end up stressing me out.

And why magazines? Well, because they're great to read on the toilet, obviously. If I take a magazine into the toilet instead of my phone, I can read something enjoyable rather than the garbage of the Internet — and perhaps learn (or remind myself of) something from video game and computing history in the process. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I've been outbid on that collection of 37 magazines on eBay I was looking at, but there are still about 20 hours to go on it. I think I'll do myself a bit of last-minute sniping tomorrow… I would like to get my hands on those, as it'll be a nice kick-start to a collection! Just need to find somewhere to put them now… hmm.

Been having a fair bit of trouble sleeping lately — on top of the difficulty actually falling asleep in the first place, which I've suffered from for as long as I can remember, I've been troubled by particularly vivid, strange dreams of late, too. I'm not sure I'd describe them as "nightmares" as such, since none of them have been outright terrifying or anything, but they have all, at least, been rather odd.

Last night was one such example. The actual details of what was happening escape me somewhat, but I know that in the dream, I'd done something to piss off a powerful person. The powerful person was a criminal of some description, but he was one of those sorts of criminals who had somehow attained a certain amount of "legitimacy" through some means or other; I think he was a filmmaker or something.

Anyway, I'd done something wrong, and I'd been forced into having a "meeting" with this individual (and, by extension, his gang of cronies). I knew that attending this meeting would almost certainly result in me getting hurt or worse, but not attending would potentially lead to dire circumstances, too. So I was in the corridors of this pub where I was supposed to be meeting with the person in question, and I was with some people I know — their exact identities have been lost to my subconscious — and the appointed hour was approaching. Somehow we'd got lost, though, and it was looking increasingly unlikely that I'd make it to the meeting on time.

I eventually did, though, and the meeting was an uncomfortable experience. The individual I had supposedly "wronged" was reasonably polite, but also condescending, and I remember feeling absolute blind fury at him — as well as the knowledge that if I let that anger out, things wouldn't end well for me. I remember him showing me his latest film, and it was absolute garbage. It involved a Cessna aircraft that was on fire at one point.

Then I woke up, not having a clue what I'd supposedly done wrong or indeed how the whole situation resolved itself, if at all. And, going by past experience with my subconscious, I doubt I can expect a satisfying continuation any time soon.

Oh well!

I think I might start collecting old games magazines. I used to absolutely love reading games mags back in the day, and I have missed those days for many, many years. I've thought about doing this for quite a long time now, but the main thing that has put me off is the fact that you inevitably end up having to do things "piecemeal", and it can end up being a bit expensive.

But then two things got me thinking. Firstly, I found a job lot of 37 Page 6, Atari User and Monitor magazines on eBay, which I've placed a bid on. Secondly, collecting things piecemeal is actually rather desirable, because then you're more likely to enjoy each individual thing in its own right, rather than just acquiring bundles of stuff for the sake of having it.

Looking on eBay, the magazines I'm most interested in collecting — Page 6, Atari User, ACE, Zero, The One, PC Zone and PC Player — are mostly around the same price as buying a brand new magazine these days. Therefore you can look at the acquisition of these old publications as just being the same as going down the newsagents to get the latest month's issue back in the day. Look at it that way and it doesn't seem quite as daft a prospect.

The other thing is that having some magazines on hand provides the scope for some interesting videos. Classic Gaming Quarterly, one of the people who inspired me to start making videos in the first place, has often done "readalong" videos where he looks back over old magazines, and that's something I think would be fun to explore.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old games mags and you want to send them my way, do let me know. The ones mentioned above are my priorities, but I'm interested in pretty much anything from the '80s/'90s era in particular.

Had one of those days where the whole Internet felt like it was being negative today, so I've been mostly "offline", and deliberately stopping myself from doing shit like looking at my phone and whatever. It's good to do that now and then; it's a nice reminder that sometimes, it really is just okay to sit back and enjoy things without worrying what other people think.

I do find myself wondering how we can possibly get out of the "rut" that online discourse is in, though. Negativity is the default these days, it seems, and if you say that you like something you're much more likely to get a hundred people telling you how wrong and gay you are for liking that thing rather than anyone backing you up and saying "yeah, that thing was pretty all right".

Trouble is, from social media's perspective, negativity breeds "engagement" — and as we've established pretty firmly by this point, "engagement" doesn't have to be a positive thing, hence the existence of clickbait and hatebait. All that matters is that you got eyes on a page and fingers a-clickin' — how the owners of those eyes and fingers actually end up feeling is completely irrelevant so far as "engagement" metrics are concerned.

Normal people shouldn't care about this; it's something I wish that marketers didn't have to care about either, but certainly your average member of the public shouldn't be thinking about how they get more "engagement" on their "content". Trouble is, they are; that's why you get 12 year olds posting provocative nonsense on Twitter in the hopes that they'll be quote-tweeted by adults telling them to stop being twats; that's why there are endless "discussions" over matters like lolicon and the like that never actually discuss anything; that's why people argue in quote-tweets rather than replies (or the lost art of private messages). It's all about that precious engagement.

Today is a day where I have felt precisely no need for "engagement" whatsoever. So I took myself out of it all, ate some nice food and played Atelier. And it was nice. I might do the same again tomorrow! I can recommend it.

It's one of those "embarrassment of riches" periods right now so far as gaming is concerned. There's a bunch of great titles just around the corner, Persona 5 Strikers came in today, and I finally snagged a copy of Super Mario All-Stars for Switch before it's not available any more and the scalpers jack the price up to ridiculous proportions.

I'm planning on doing a bit of recording this weekend — sticking to the Atari A to Z schedule and nothing else for now is working well so far — but this evening I think I'm going to take some time to just chill and play some games without worrying about writing them, video capture, anything like that. And I think the games I will be playing are some Mario goodtimes; I haven't played Super Mario 64 for many, many years, I never played Super Mario Sunshine much back in the day and I've never played Super Mario Galaxy. So I wonder where I should begin…?

I'll probably also play some Persona 5 Strikers at bedtime, too; the wife watched me play all of the original Persona 5 (that's largely why it took me over a year to beat the damn thing!) so she'll probably appreciate the new game. And even if she doesn't (she will) I'm looking forward to seeing how Persona plus action RPG looks. Sounds like a winning combination to me.

I hope you've all had a good week and have a nice relaxing weekend ahead of you. Thanks as always for all your support; S-rank folks, I'll have a wallpaper done for you sometime this weekend!

I've been really enjoying revisiting the classic '90s era visual novels for the History of Lewd column over on Rice Digital. It's something I've been meaning to do for ages, and now I have a good reason/excuse to. And I'm discovering lots of interesting things.

Amy's Fantasies, which I covered today, turned out to be particularly interesting — a lot more so than I initially assumed it would be, too. And, looking around the Internet while I was doing a bit of research, I seem to be one of the few people who have actually written something about this game and attempted to do anything vaguely meaningful with it.

In fact, one of the only other pieces I found written about it I shall now quote in its entirety, verbatim. No, they did not use any paragraphs.

Amy's Fantasies is another one of the Japanese hentai games like Dangerous Toys which contains a lot of explicit sexual content but not a whole heap of actual gameplay. It's best suited to bottom crawlers who rarely venture outside into the real world so unless you consider yourself a creepy old man, then you easily skip this one and have a conversation with an actual woman. The story here is your typical Japanese nonsense, and follows Emi, a high school student who falls in love with her step brother. When she's about to tell him of her feelings, debt collectors show up and the step brother disappears. Now, Emi has to find him so she can tell him about her true feelings for him. However, along the way, Emi finds she has another person inside her, the rather more adventurous Amy who has all sorts of complex desires and who wants to explore them all. What follows is a sort of interactive graphic novel which is mostly concerned with telling a story as it lacks puzzles and with the player not really required to do much at all. If you are looking for a bit of cartoon smut to bring your own fantasies to life, then this will probably get your pulse racing. There are plenty of dodgy schoolboy fantasy scenes to encounter, along with enough cheap romance and cheesy characters to keep a soap opera going for years. The visuals are strange, with some amusingly bad designs for the characters but really there is little of interest here to anyone looking for anything other than cheap titillation, so walk on by this one and find yourself a real game.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that everything written in this piece can be found out from the game's marketing material, and nothing that is not written in that blurb is discussed. In fact, given that the game's marketing material is arguably inaccurate in reflecting what the game is actually about, it only makes pieces like this all the more transparent — they just wanted to get a cheap jab in at the expense of people interested in eroge.

I'm not going to stick my neck out and say Amy's Fantasies was any great masterpiece or anything like that, but it was certainly interesting, and definitely worthy of discussion — discussion better than whatever that is above. This era of eroge in particular is massively under-discussed online — so I'm doing my best to rectify that a little bit!

If you have any particular suggestions for things I should check out (preferably stuff on Asenheim, or which is easy to get running on modern machines!) then do let me know!

Finally finished the original A Realm Reborn storyline on my Final Fantasy XIV New Game+ run. Will likely write about it over on Rice Digital for the columns this week — but suffice to say for now that I enjoyed the experience, and Castrum/Praetorium were good fun solo. Not especially challenging — though I did actually take a bit of damage in some of the last fights — but enjoyable to battle through by oneself.

Final Fantasy XIV remains such an interesting game to me for a variety of reasons. I've just had a completely narrative-centric experience with it off and on for the last few weeks, and that's the complete opposite of what I was doing towards the end of my time with it first time around; the endgame grind was real back then, and while the social aspect of things helped keep you sane while it was going on, there was no getting away from the fact it was still a case of doing the same things over and over again.

I mean, that's still true to a certain extent, but there's also a lot more game to get through before you get to that point — and even then, the nice thing about Final Fantasy XIV is you can quite reasonably stop at any of the main narrative milestones — the end of a X.0 release and the end of an X.5 patch cycle, usually, though the latter tends to have a cliffhanger leading into the next expansion — and feel like you've had a "complete" experience.

But then there's the mixed blessing of the fact that everything in Final Fantasy XIV has some sort of narrative context, so you'll probably find yourself wanting to do more challenging things just so you can resolve some story threads. This was a particular issue back in the days of the original Binding Coil of Bahamut raid cycle, which features some of the best narrative in the 2.X cycle of Final Fantasy XIV, but also some of the most monstrously difficult fights imaginable, even with the gradual nerfing of them over time. I got largely carried through the grand finale of it shortly before Heavensward released, and it was still surprisingly challenging.

Of course, with the "undersized party" option, you can now run stuff at a much higher level than it would normally restrict you to, opening up the possibility of, say, soloing Coil as a level 80 character with top-notch gear. (I don't know if it's possible in my current level 70 state, but I might give it a go before I move on to Heavensward's main scenario in my New Game+ run.)

Anyway. This is all stuff to ponder in future installments of The Returner over on Rice Digital, so I'll refrain from saying too much more. Suffice to say I'm having a good time for the moment, though — and even doing the unsynced stuff I'm starting to get a decent feel for how Samurai plays properly once again. It's a very active DPS class that puts out lots of damage, so I'm looking forward to developing a bit more mastery over it now I'm through the relative cakewalks that was A Realm Reborn in New Game+!

Off to bed for me now, though; Castrum and Prae both took me nearly an hour each to solo, and I don't regret a thing — but I am, however, tired! So sleep claims me. Have a pleasant evening!

I played through Project Lux this evening. I've been meaning to do so for a while, so I thought I'd finally just sit down and take the hour and a bit needed to enjoy it in its entirety. I'm going to write more about the experience over on Rice Digital tomorrow, but for now I thought you might like some initial impressions.

For the unfamiliar, Project Lux is a virtual reality visual novel. The concept is that you are in a courtroom of the future as a member of the jury, and you are being given the opportunity to "relive" the memories of an individual who has been accused of murder.

Said individual was a government worker who had been tasked with approaching Lux, a young woman who lived by herself and worked as an artist. In the world of Project Lux, the vast majority of humanity has outfitted itself with electronic brains and remains almost perpetually plugged into "cyberspace", so Lux is seen as something of an anomaly — and potentially valuable for reasons that become apparent later in the narrative.

You witness the agent's attempts to get to know Lux, and his encouragement of her artistic talents in various ways. Lux, in turn, creates a number of works of art that are seemingly well-received by her adoring digital fans, and so things progress. To say much more would be a spoiler — as I say, the whole thing is only about an hour long, with two possible endings — so I'll leave it at that for now.

What's interesting about Project Lux is that it doesn't feel like any other kind of story-centric game I've played before. In fact, given that it's a largely passive experience, it's more akin to watching a theatrical production than anything else — except rather than sitting in the audience from afar, your viewpoint is from the perspective of one of the two participant characters.

Lux herself has been lovingly motion captured and is well acted (in Japanese), so it's not just a case of watching a mannequin flapping her lips at you. You're watching someone actually doing a genuine performance, and it's fascinating. And interestingly, the nature of the narrative addresses certain aspects of the limitations typically placed on oneself while enjoying a VR experience — particularly in one of the endings, which is very clever.

I'd like to see more stuff like this. It's probably expensive to produce and a lot of people baulk at paying over a few quid for something that's only an hour long, but I'd still love to see more. It's a potentially fascinating new medium of creative expression.

Now I'm intrigued to see how Tokyo Chronos, which I believe is a more substantial VR VN, handles things. Think I need to give my head a bit of a break from VR first though!