I bought a laser printer this week. I had one specific purpose in mind for it: printing out manuals for old 8- and 16-bit home computer games that are impractical or unfeasibly expensive to acquire "real" copies of, and giving those games the time and attention they deserve.

You see, although many games on classic home computer platforms fall into the "simple arcadey fun" category, there are also lots that are enormously ambitious and which take full advantage of the fact their host platform is a computer, not a games console. This is great, because there are lots of really interesting experiences to be had on these platforms, particularly if you explore the genesis of a whole genre. However, the downside is that more often than not, you very much need to read the manuals for these more complex games before you'll have the slightest clue what you're doing.

For me, the Ultima series of role-playing games had always fallen into this category, even though a few brief forays into them on the Atari A to Z series had revealed them (and games like them, such as SSI's Questron) to be a lot more manageable and straightforward than I had previously assumed. And so I'd always been holding off exploring them in any great depth until I had a manual by my side that I could refer to easily — and by "refer to easily" I do not mean "call up a tiny PDF on my phone and squint at", because as technologically marvellous as that might be, it's not convenient, practical or indeed enjoyable.

So, with my recent acquisition of the A500 Mini and the C64 Maxi, I thought I'd print out some manuals. We already had an inkjet printer, but as anyone who has owned a cheap inkjet printer made within the last 20 years will be able to tell you, inkjet printers have several major flaws in them that make them less than desirable to use. Firstly is the fact that their ink cartridges inevitably have an absolutely miniscule supply available to you. Secondly is the fact that replacing said cartridges is unnecessarily expensive. Thirdly is how if you don't use said cartridges for a while, they dry up, meaning you need to replace them regardless of if you've been using them or not. Fourthly, they're a bit slow. And fifthly, most of them don't do double-sided printing.

So I did a little bit of research and came upon a Brother laser printer that was about £150. It was only mono, but we print colour stuff so rarely that we can just continue to sink money into the old inkjet any time we actually need colour. The Brother printer, meanwhile, offered double-sided printing, a speed of up to 30 pages per minute, wireless connectivity plus scanning and copying capabilities. All in all, it sounded pretty ideal.

And indeed, so far it appears to have been. I printed out a bunch of Commodore 64 manuals last night and put them nicely in a ring binder. I consumed the entire "starter" toner cartridge that came with the printer in the space of a single evening and replaced it with a £12.99 third party job today that seems to work just fine. And now I have the manuals for Ultima I-VI all nicely printed out and ready to refer to. And so, I have finally begun playing the Ultima series.

Yes, that means starting with the first Ultima — specifically, the Commodore 64 version, which I'm playing on the C64 Maxi. And I've been surprised what a genuinely good time I've been having with the game so far. It's very simple and quite different in structure compared to today's role-playing games — but I actually rather like this. There's an enjoyable "sandbox" feel to it where you explore an open world, poke at various things to see what happens and gradually beef yourself up. Then there's some sort of eventual objective that you need to accomplish, but there's no real rush to achieve that — right now I'm just enjoying wandering around this world.

Ultima's most peculiar element — and something which it doesn't really explain at all in the manual, after I went to the trouble of printing it out — is its progression system. You have experience points and an experience level, and apparently you need to be level 8 to beat the game. But aside from that, progression is handled in a variety of rather peculiar ways, with "levelling up" actually not appearing to be all that important in terms of actually powering yourself up.

Firstly, like many other early RPGs of this type, you have no maximum hit points. If you "heal", your HP keeps rising and rising and rising, so it's in your interest to get them as high as you possibly can. This can be achieved in two main ways: donating money to the Kings of the realm, or by dungeon-crawling. The latter is especially effective, as it also means you'll acquire money at a good rate, which you'll need to keep supplying yourself with provisions, and to equip yourself with good armour and weapons.

How does dungeon crawling help you gain rather than lose HP? Well, any time you leave a dungeon, you get a bunch of HP back according to the number and type of monsters you splattered during that particular delve. The more you kill in a single expedition — and the stronger those monsters are — the more HP you get back upon making it safely back to the surface. So a simple means of beefing yourself up a bit for more significant challenges is mapping out a few levels of dungeon (which are, apparently, randomly generated each time you start a new game) and doing a few "laps" while bashing monsters along the way. After your workout, you'll have a bunch more money, some more experience and, assuming you make it back to the surface alive, a chunk more HP to play with.

Aside from this, you can boost your stats in a couple of ways. Firstly, the Kings of the realm offer you quests to find or kill particular things, and upon completing them and reporting in, they'll give you a bonus to a stat (usually Strength, it seems). Secondly, there are landmarks around the world that simply boost your stats when you visit them — although you can't visit the same landmark twice in succession to just repeatedly get the stat bonuses, you can zip back and forth between two nearby ones, alternating their bonuses until you get your stats up to the desired level.

This is all exceedingly odd by modern standards, but it also feels like the game is rewarding you for just wandering around and taking it all in. Although the game, its world and the core mechanics are all pretty simple, the fact there are lots of different incentives to explore makes it very enjoyable to play; it feels like you're always making some sort of progress. And while death is a fairly major inconvenience — while there's no permadeath, dying causes you to lose your weapon, your gold and all but 99 of your HP and food while being teleported somewhere random — it's by no means impossible to recover from. Indeed, on my own adventures so far I've died multiple times, and it's only after this most recent death that I've found myself absolutely armed to the teeth and ready for pretty much anything the realm of Sosaria would care to throw at me from hereon!

And if all that wasn't peculiar enough, there's also space combat. But I haven't got that far yet. I'm certainly intrigued, though, and I'm planning to continue my adventures for sure!

I'm sick of feeling like absolute crap. I was already in a right state prior to COVID hitting, and the mounting up of both mental and physical health factors over the course of the last couple of years in particular have meant that I'm pretty much in the worst shape I've ever been in my life. I get easily exhausted, I ache all over and I just generally feel awful, both physically and mentally.

I joined the gym a while back in the hope that establishing a regular routine would motivate me to at the very least get my muscles moving again, but for one reason or another I never successfully managed to establish that routine. And once I got COVID, I became understandably hesitant to spend protracted amounts of time in tight spaces with other sweaty people emitting noxious disease-fumes everywhere. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but let's just say I didn't feel as "safe" as I might have done a few years back.

So, rather than wasting forty quid a month on a membership I'm not using, I decided to start going for a walk. I started yesterday, and successfully went again today. Two in a row is definitely the start of something, and I feel like this is something I can manage and deal with right now — particularly once my anti thigh-chafing goo arrives tomorrow.

I actually rather like walking, but thigh chafing sucks, so being able to preemptively counteract that should help keep me motivated. Hopefully this stuff does a decent job — it had some good Amazon reviews but honestly that could mean anything these days. The alternative is wearing thigh bands (which I'm not against, but I worry about wasting money on the wrong size) or using anti-chafing shorts (which I own a pair of, but find quite uncomfortable at my current size and shape).

While going on my walks, I'm making a deliberate attempt to "disconnect" completely. I take my phone in case of emergencies, but it's in a backpack I carry along with my wallet and keys, so I can't easily just reach for it. I'm not logging or tracking my runs — though I have plotted the route I took for the last couple of days on Google Maps, just out of curiosity to see how far it actually was. (3km, if you were wondering.) And that allows me to just enjoy a bit of peace.

For my walks over the last couple of days, I've been heading to a nearby cemetery and just going through the middle of there, coming out the other side and then heading back up the main road that runs parallel to it. The time inside the cemetery is definitely the highlight; although it's a rather glum, melancholy place by its very nature, it's blissfully quiet and peaceful also, making it a good place to either be alone with your thoughts, or just to empty your mind a bit. I'll doubtless find some other good routes nearby in the coming days, but this is definitely a route I'll keep coming back to for the pleasurable peacefulness.

And I've actually already noticed a difference. I suspect it's mostly psychological, but today's 3km walk on the exact same route as yesterday felt significantly easier than yesterday's. I won't say it felt easy because, as previously established, I am very unfit. But when you're at rock bottom in a particular characteristic, there's nowhere to go but up, I guess.

We'll see how long I can stick with this — and if it actually helps at all!

Hi S-rank folks! Sorry for the long delay between these, but as noted in the video COVID kinda put paid to a lot of bold plans! Should be back on track now though, so expect at least one of these a month. We kick off today with a casual look around my new toy, TheC64.

Okay. So I know I said I was taking some pressure off myself by cutting the video schedule right back. But I'm sort of getting itchy feet a bit, and I feel like I'm not doing enough to satisfy myself right now. And this has been compounded somewhat by the addition of some new goodies to my collection: specifically, The A500 Mini, which I've previously mentioned, and The C64, which I decided to stop mulling over and grab today.

Fiddling with Amiga games on the A500 Mini makes me want to do a companion series to Atari ST A to Z, because there are some interesting comparisons to be made — and some interesting exclusives to explore, also.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised that in a lot of cases, the Atari ST version wasn't as far "behind" the Amiga as I thought it was; in fact, in some cases, I actually prefer the ST version by quite a margin. HeroQuest is the best example that springs immediately to mind; its atmospheric music works way better through the Atari ST's PSG sound chip than the Amiga's digital sound. But then, of course, you have the stuff that was properly designed for the Amiga, like Shadow of the Beast, and the machine really shines, pushing dedicated console-quality in a lot of instances.

And so I figured, if I'm going to an Amiga parallel series to Atari ST A to Z, why not do a C64 series parallel to Atari A to Z? You know it makes sense. Well, I think it makes sense, anyway, and I'm quite excited about the prospect.

I haven't yet decided on how I might "brand" these two series; going with the "A to Z" moniker would certainly be consistent, but I'm in two minds as to whether I actually want to keep the "alphabetical" gimmick. On the one hand, it's great that it forces me to hunt down and explore games that I might not otherwise have tried rather than simply going for the "obvious" choices; on the other, it can sometimes feel a little restrictive, and occasionally frustrating that it's a long time until I get to, say, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2.

Anyway, I'll have a ponder over the weekend (my C64 should be arriving on Saturday) and I'll see if two vids a week for the Atari A to Z and Atari ST weeks works for me. I suspect it will — in which case you have more to look forward to! Hurrah.

Anyway. Dinner time. Ta-ta!

Regular readers will know that for my birthday for the last few years, I've been hosting a gaming event for my local friends known as "The Davison Cup". It's a day-long event in which we play through a series of video games — and I get the opportunity to educate my friends about some games outside their usual, fairly narrow experiences.

This year, I decided to make the games exclusively Evercade VS-based, since there are hundreds of games available on that delightful platform now, many of which are eminently suitable for multiplayer. I also thought it would be a great chance to actually try some of these games in multiplayer for once, since I'm usually playing solo. This turned out to be a good decision, as there are some absolutely excellent multiplayer games on Evercade now.

The day kicked off with a round of Atari games, including Asteroids for the Atari 7800, Adventure, Sprintmaster, Ninja Golf, Warlords, Canyon Bomber and Skydiver. The old Atari games usually go down well at these events and this year was no exception; probably the least favourite was Sprintmaster, which was a surprise, as we've previously all enjoyed Super Sprint. The somewhat rough-around-the-edges gameplay of this 2600 title proved frustrating for some, though; it wasn't hated by any means — indeed, some of the "final" races were very intense and enjoyable! — but it was definitely the least favourite of the Atari games today.

Ninja Golf went down well, despite it taking up a little more time than intended. As is usually the case with newcomers to that game, the absurd premise attracts people in, then the simple but solid gameplay keeps them hooked. It really is an Atari 7800 classic, and a true essential to play if you haven't already.

Meanwhile the three arcade games Warlords, Canyon Bomber and Skydiver were probably the biggest hits from this set, simply because they're set up to be highly competitive multiplayer games — with four-player simultaneous action in the case of Warlords. Canyon Bomber and Skydiver also have the benefit of being extremely simple to pick up and play, so they always go down well.

Between "rounds", I attempted to nullify my host's advantage by providing "Pub Quiz" rounds, featuring nostalgia-themed questions. And by "nostalgia-themed", I mean "very specifically nostalgic for our friendship group" — including questions themed on scanned photos from our time at university, in-jokes that some have remembered for 20+ years and more. Each of these were a big hit and I'm glad I included them.

Second round was all Data East games, including Karate Champ, Side Pocket, Fighters History, Burnin' Rubber and Magical Drop 2. Of these, Side Pocket and Fighters History were probably the two that seemed to elicit the most genuine enjoyment from everyone, but the primitive gameplay of Karate Champ was enjoyable for everyone, the arcade action of Burnin' Rubber is always a good time and you can't go wrong with Magical Drop 2. It was nice to play some games of that which ended up decided on the quota rather than one player's screen getting filled!

Third round was a "Best of Bri'ish" round, featuring Sensible Software, CodeMasters and Bitmap Brothers games — specifically, Sensible Soccer, Super Skidmarks, Psycho Pinball and Speedball 2. All of these went down well — our resident sport-hater (the one who isn't me, I mean) even enjoyed Sensible Soccer, though interestingly he also hated Speedball 2, which is the opposite situation to what I expected. Psycho Pinball proved itself to be a highly enjoyable multiplayer game, though, even though it's just a turn-based score competition.

Fourth round was an "Indie Games are Weird" round, featuring the Joust-like Justice Duel, the axe-throwing Log Jammers, the four-player Super Homebrew War and Micro Mages from the upcoming Morphcat Games Collection 1 cart for Evercade. All of these were enjoyed by everyone, though it felt like none of us really found a good rhythm with Log Jammers. Micro Mages was as riotously fun as I expected it to be in four-player, so when that cart's release I highly recommend getting some buddies over to enjoy that — but the big surprise for me was Super Homebrew War, which proved to be absolutely brilliant in multiplayer. Not only that, but it has a very different dynamic according to whether you're playing in two, three or four-player mode. Very much recommended!

Fifth round was Intellivision games. SNAFU went down well because it's hard to go wrong with Tron light cycles, though Shark! Shark! proved itself to be less of an enjoyable two-player game than I thought it would be; the fact that when one player dies, the other player can keep playing until they die means that there's a lot of downtime for one player or another, and that spoils the experience somewhat. By contrast, Word Rockets proved to be a surprisingly competitive game in two-player mode, and Night Stalker is always a good time — though we played "best score on a single life" rather than a full session, since games of that can run quite long.

Sixth and final round was Gaelco arcade games, featuring World Rally, Alligator Hunt and Glass from the current Gaelco arcade cart, plus Squash and Maniac Square from the upcoming Gaelco 2 cart. Each and every one of these games impressed with their high-quality music and graphics; Alligator Hunt was particularly appreciated by everyone, and so too was the frighteningly fast yet oddly intuitive gameplay of World Rally. Squash also proved to be a really fun two-player game, and Maniac Square, although not involving a lot of direct interaction with one another, also proved to be enjoyable.

All in all, it was a great day, and my planning meant we were actually able to get through the whole thing before anyone felt like they had to leave this time around. I'm pleased with the outcome, and also very pleased that the Evercade VS was absolutely up to the challenge of hosting a day of gaming fun for everyone.