As the weeks pass by, I find myself feeling more and more keen to start making Evercade A to Z videos again — but at the same time, I don't want to overload myself by committing to too many things each week. As I've noted before, having a job I actually like now means that I have a lot less "downtime" to be able to work on personal projects, and thus taking on too much is a sure-fire route to burnout.

I do want to pick up on the Evercade videos, though, so I've decided: at the very latest, I will kick off the series again once I have my Evercade VS. Since that will have a permanent place hooked up to my TV rather than having to faff around with HDMI cables (and sometimes charging cables, depending on whether I remembered to charge the handheld beforehand) it will be a lot easier to just slap in a cartridge and record, whereas at the minute the slight faffing required to set things up for recording makes it feel like a lot more effort than it actually is.

I mean, I know that it's not actually any real effort to hook the Evercade up to the TV — I've even already attached the mini-HDMI cable to my HDMI switchbox setup, so it's literally just a case of plugging it in. That's why I say at the very latest I'll continue the Evercade A to Z series when the VS arrives. Right now I'm just… I don't know, in a sort of funny mood about things. It's probably the heat or something and the general sense of tiredness and lethargy which comes with all that; it makes the slightest inconvenience (like, say, having to untangle the HDMI cord) feel like a massive issue.

I'm rambling. Blame that on the heat as well. But anyway, if there's one thing to take away from this post, it's that Evercade A to Z will be back… at some point. By November at the latest. Possibly sooner.

Headache seems to have pretty much subsided today, which means I probably don't have brain cancer or anything, which is nice. I really do think it's just the heat; it's been extremely hot and sunny for the last few days — unpleasantly so. In fact, driving back from my friend's house this evening, I was struck by the feeling that in the summer months, we'd probably all be a lot more productive if we slept through the day and worked in the cool breeze of a summer evening.

But anyway.

Yes, I went to a friend's house this evening, what with us being allowed to for the moment. With all the scaremongering in the media about crazy new virus variants, I suspect we'll probably end up in another lockdown sooner or later, so we decided to take the opportunity to see each other for the first time since… last September, I think we worked out it was.

We played a tabletop game called "The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine", which proved to be a big hit with everyone. Thematically, it's a game about performing missions in space to track down a legendary mystery planet, but mechanically it's bollocks all to do with that; it's a trick-taking game where each "mission" tasks players around the table with accomplishing particular things — usually taking a trick containing a particular specific card.

The interesting twist is that some of the "tasks" you have to complete require you to take low-numbered cards, which means you need to win a trick but also ensure that the "bad" card is in there. Thankfully, the game is a cooperative affair with strict rules on limited communication with one another, so it's all about working together to ensure that everyone is able to play the optimal cards for any given situation.

As the game progresses, additional mechanics are layered atop the basic formula, such as having to complete the tasks in a particular order, with prerequisites or with limitations on who is allowed to do what. In all, there's a "campaign" of 50 missions of increasing complexity — but the game is highly replayable by virtue of the fact its simple card-based nature means it's different every time you play.

I enjoyed it a lot! It was just the sort of reasonably lightweight yet also a bit thinky game that is perfect for a summer's evening. Hopefully we'll get the chance to try it again at some point in the near future… assuming we're still allowed to see other human beings by the Tuesday after next!

Headache hasn't completely gone away, which is frustrating. I've managed to sort of dull it with regular doses of drugs throughout the day, but it hasn't gone away yet. Hopefully a good night's sleep (if that happens tonight — it didn't last night!) will sort me out by the morning.

I think it's probably a combination of dehydration and just the heat in general. It's suddenly got really hot and sunny here after a period of weather best described as "extremely variable" — we're talking ice storms one minute, blazing sunshine the next, followed by gale-force winds. For the last few days, it's just been really hot and airless, though, and I think I've been hit fairly hard by it; I do not do well with hot weather at the best of times.

Still, I haven't been completely incapacitated, at least. Managed to play a bunch of Atelier Sophie today, as well as a couple of other things I fancied fiddling around with and will likely do "something" with very soon — be that videos on my channel or some form of writing. We'll see.

For now, I prescribe myself a nice cold glass of milk, an air-conditioned bedroom and the soothing voice of a relaxing VTuber to fall asleep to — I'm thinking maybe Finana Ryugu from Nijisanji EN today, since she has distinctly Hololive Ina-esque comfy vibes, only with a greater obsession with custom computer keyboards.

Anyway, hope your weekend and/or Monday has been less of a headache (literally) than mine; back to normal tomorrow, so watch out for Atari A to Z on YouTube and the usual fun stuff on Rice Digital! Good night!

I have an absolutely raging headache this evening for some reason. I feel like I have sunstroke despite not having really been outside all day and it is exceedingly painful, so this may not be the most coherent and/or long post I've ever written — just to warn you!

My parents came to visit today, which was nice — we've not had the opportunity to see one another for a long time what with all the lockdown shenanigans. My mum managed to convince my dad to hand over his complete collection of Page 6/New Atari User magazines, so I've got all those to go through at some point — looking forward to it!

Made the mistake of looking on Twitter a little while ago only to find not one but two separate toxic gaming arguments raging on for no real reason whatsoever. I closed the tab and didn't look any further — I'm really not in the mood for that shit today. I swear, if all the people who spent all their time being mad about something tangentially video game related spent that time actually playing video games instead, everyone would be a whole lot happier.

As for me, I got through one of my favourite bits of Final Fantasy XIV in my New Game Plus run earlier — The Final Steps of Faith, home to one (well, three) of the most spectacular pieces of music Soken has ever given us. That's still an incredible "final" battle that brings that particular chapter of the story to a close, and it was good to experience it in context once again. Just a little more and I can get into Stormblood again — and once I clear the base Stormblood story I'll be into stuff that is all-new to me! Looking forward to that.

Trying to work out if this headache is particularly conducive to any sort of gaming this evening. I have already popped some paracetamol and the temptation to just go lie in bed is enormous, but it's only 9pm. Maybe something nice to eat will help.

Anyway, hope you've had a good weekend — and for those of you who have tomorrow off too (like me!) I hope you have a good holiday Monday!

Played through Sumire today; this is a game that caught my attention back during the Steam Game Festival a while back, and I was looking forward to trying the full thing. Turns out my first impressions were correct — this is a very wonderful, very sad game.

I'll write a more detailed article on the subject over on Rice in the week, but suffice to say for now that if you enjoy story-centric games that pretty consistently tug on the heartstrings throughout, Sumire is a must-play. Beautiful visuals, understated but emotional music and an excellent script — it really is absolutely wonderful.

The basic concept is that you play the eponymous heroine, who is a young girl struggling with her current life situation. Her parents seem to be splitting up, she's lost the person she thought was her best friend, and she's in love with someone she feels to be far beyond her reach. More than anything, though, she misses her grandmother, and is haunted by constant dreams of said grandmother wanting to tell her something, but never finding out what.

What follows is a side-scrolling adventure game in which Sumire attempts to have "the perfect day", in conjunction with a mysterious flower she meets early in the story. The flower encourages her to do all the things that she has wanted to do for a while, but has been too afraid to or felt like she wouldn't be able to — these range from reaching some sort of resolution with the former best friend to getting one last chance to see her grandmother.

As you progress through the story, you're presented with a number of opportunities to make choices and perhaps help others out. Sumire's "karma" is tracked as you do so, and the combination of this karma value and the people she's helped out at the end of the game determines the ending. What's interesting is that the karma thing isn't always entirely straightforward; you know that you need to lie to help someone, but is it right to do so?

The whole thing is absolutely dripping in this wonderful sense of melancholy, which might not sound like something you'd want to immerse yourself in for three hours — but as anyone who has played a good "nakige" will attest, sometimes it's healthy and even desirable to play something that you know is going to make you cry. And indeed, for a good half of my Sumire playthrough — possibly more — there were genuine tears rolling down my cheeks.

Anyway, as I say, more on this over on Rice in the week. In the meantime, if this is the sort of experience you're up for in your games — I know it's not everyone's cup of tea — then I strongly recommend Sumire. Just make sure you're prepared to deal with the consequences.

I don't play console games on PC — even if the PC versions are supposedly "superior" (and by that, people usually mean "run at a better frame rate" and little else). There are a number of reasons for this — the lack of physical versions being a major one, and the fact that games designed for consoles first often end up being buggy messes when ported to PC.

For me, the PC has the same value it had back in the late '90s — the fact that it plays host to a number of experiences that you can't get anywhere else. Back in the '90s, those experiences were things like strategy games and simulations… and the same is actually true today, too — though more and more popular titles are starting to show up on other platforms, these days, particularly the Switch.

Where the PC, for me, truly shines is in the more experimental side of things. I spent a bit of time playing BeamNG.drive this evening, since it was on sale on Steam — and while I've barely scratched the surface of it, I can see it being something highly entertaining over the long term through a combination of its developers continually working on it, and the community contributing too. It's the kind of thing that just wouldn't really work on console — and that, for me, is what PC gaming is all about.

The lines are a lot blurrier these days than they once were, what with the plateau in overall "power" today's computers and gaming systems are reaching. But those lines are still there to a certain extent; there are some experiences that just feel more "right" on the PC — and those are the games I keep a gaming-capable PC up and running for.

Well, that and 18+ visual novels… but those tend not to be too taxing on the ol' hardware!

The Evercade VS Founder Edition went up for preorder today, and did very well, by all accounts. By virtue of having a certain degree of "behind the scenes" access, I am privy to a certain amount of more specific information which I won't be sharing for now — but suffice to say it's been a very happy day at Evercade HQ, and I suspect once preorders go live for the regular editions of the console tomorrow they'll be even happier.

I've said multiple times that the Evercade's launch last year was, in many ways, considerably more successful than the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series launches. Sure, PS5 and Xbox may well have done better numbers-wise, but in terms of goodwill and community-building, Evercade has been hard to beat.

And if we look at what each platform is primarily known for, the picture's even clearer; PS5 is known for being The Console You Can't Buy; Xbox Series is known as The Game Pass Machine; Evercade is known for having a passionate team of people working hard on it and doing their best to preserve some games that we haven't seen for 30 or more years in some cases.

It's no surprise that the Founder Edition did so well today — and it doesn't seem like a scalper situation, either, even with the Founder Edition being a limited-run affair.

And while the Evercade is an emulation-based device rather than a fancy-pants FPGA affair, after an exceedingly negative experience attempting to preorder the Analog Pocket a while back, I absolutely know where my loyalties lie. Particularly as collecting for the Evercade involves buying a couple of £15 cartridges every few months rather than attempting to track down working original carts for obsolete systems… or just loading up an Everdrive, but where's the fun in that?

Anyway. If you're at all interested in what the Evercade has to offer, Funstock still has a few Founder Edition bundles available — and these are very good value, since they come with two controllers, the link cable required to connect the handheld to the console and use it as a controller, and six game cartridges. Check it out here.

Having one of those evenings where depression threatens to set in and brings with it that most frustrating of things: analysis paralysis. The fear that if you start doing something, it will somehow be the "wrong" thing and you'll regret it. Even if the things you are contemplating doing are all, without fail, things you will enjoy.

This is such a weird thing when you think about it. Why on Earth would you deliberately make the choice to do nothing when given the choice between multiple things, all of which you know you'd like? Of course, making the choice to do nothing under these circumstances is rarely deliberate, which is the problem, really; if we could all just easily discard the stupid options without giving them a moment's thought, we'd probably all be doing a whole lot better.

Still, as the cliche goes, admitting there's a problem is an important first step, so I'm hoping by writing this down out of sheer frustration it will spur me on to actually go and do something enjoyable. It's starting to get a bit late, so maybe I'll go play some retro games in bed on the Evercade. In fact, yes, that sounds like a smashing idea. Decision made! Easy.

I don't know if there's something in the air, or if it's just "one of those times of year", or if the shitty weather is doing something, but I've been feeling kinda crappy both mentally and physically of late. I feel stressed out and tired — neither of which are due to work, thankfully, which is a nice change — and I keep feel like I'm waiting for something to be "over" or "finished".

I guess I could be thinking about the whole pandemic situation, of course, but honestly that hasn't been bothering me too much up until this point, so I don't think it's that. I feel like it's just one of those natural ebbs and flows that one's life seems to undergo as time passes; biorhythms or some other such (possible) nonsense.

Trouble is, given that these feelings of vague dissatisfaction and occasional panic are so ill-defined, it's difficult to feel like there's anything I can really do about them other than just sort of ride it out, and minimise contact with things that might make things worse. Like, you know, the Internet.

Time to go get some sleep, I think; didn't get to sleep until quite late last night, so I suspect that's part of why I'm feeling a bit crap today. Here's hoping things improve!

Was in a bit of pain and feeling a bit miserable this evening, so decided to play something I didn't need to think about too much. Final Fantasy XIV may not be the first thing that springs to mind for some people when I talk about games that you don't need to think about too much, but I'm still playing through my New Game Plus run ahead of getting into stuff that is all-new to me — post-launch Stormblood stuff, followed by the entirety of Shadowbringers.

I'd been sort of holding Final Fantasy XIV at arm's length because I know how easy it is to get wrapped up in it, and how good Heavensward's story is in its final hours certainly isn't helping matters. I managed to beat the base Heavensward story this evening, however; I'd forgotten quite how excellent that whole "finale" (I use the term loosely) sequence was — and how much it's teasing things that will, I guess, only come to fruition come Endwalker.

This is clearly a game that's had its narrative thought about over the long term given how much stuff was teased even back in A Realm Reborn. I'm intrigued to see how the whole story arc wraps up with Endwalker, because supposedly after the base game of that is done and dusted, we'll be into an all new "main story". At this point I'm wondering what form that might take, but not having any Shadowbringers context means I'm very much in the dark when it comes to possibilities.

Anyway, I enjoyed my evening and found finishing off the base Heavensward game in my New Game Plus run to be relaxing and enjoyable, which is exactly what I was hoping to get out of the experience. Now to head to bed and hopefully feel a bit better in the morning. Hope you've had a pleasant evening!