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!

Been playing some Deep Rock Galactic with friends for the past couple of evenings — we finally found a game that all of us are actually interested in playing.

I'm impressed, but also a little surprised — this game is apparently three years old, and yet for some reason it only appears to have come to prominence relatively recently. I wonder if this is another case of Among Us, where something becomes popular well after its original release after an article or video in the right place at the right time.

Anyway, if you've not come across Deep Rock Galactic the concept is relatively straightforward. As a space dwarf with a completely unidentifiable accent, you are tasked with completing an endless string of dangerous subterranean missions of various types. Sometimes you might be retrieving alien eggs; others you might simply be mining for specific resources; others still you might be setting up pipelines between drilling equipment and an on-site refinery rocket.

There are four character classes to play, each with their own distinctive loadout that contains primary and secondary weapons, some sort of "traversal" device, and a special weapon of some description. In my case, I've been playing the Engineer class, for example, so in true Engineer tradition he has a shotgun, a grenade launcher and the ability to built gun turrets — plus his traversal ability allows him to create platforms.

The game features procedurally generated levels so even two of the same type of mission in succession don't play identically, and the fully deformable, destructible terrain means that you can often cut your own path to your objectives. One of the classes, the Driller, actually specialises in this.

The game doesn't present you with constant all-out action — at least not on the levels we've been playing on so far — but rather has a nice pace of allowing you to get stuff done, occasionally punctuated by "swarms" of enemies that you have to deal with. In traditional co-op first-person shooter tradition, completing certain objectives also brings on hordes of enemies before you can proceed — in the pipeline-building missions, for example, you have to hold off enemies and repair your pipes while you're pumping the resources back into your refinery rocket.

The whole thing has a nice vaguely low-poly look to its environments, coupled with nicely stylised characters and pleasant use of colour. The voice acting is beyond dreadful, but thankfully this is a game about mechanics rather than story, so you can get used to things pretty quickly! Most importantly for a game like this, it plays well — the first-person controls are responsive and work well, and some nice additions to the usual formula such as the ability to grab and climb ledges make getting around pretty straightforward in most instances.

Crucially for our particular group, who tend to play sporadically at best, there is progression in the game, but it's not the sort of progression where the longer you play the more ridiculously powerful you get. Rather, you unlock perks and can upgrade your weapons with a few additional benefits — but none of these are game-breakingly powerful. As such, if any of us decide that we want to play a bit on our own, we don't risk leaving the others behind in terms of progression; each mission is what it is on its own terms.

I'm impressed so far. I'll be interested to see if it holds our interest in the long term, but signs are good so far.

After complaining about Play-Asia's taxy shipping charges yesterday, I happened to have a look over there today and the "duty paid" options seem to have disappeared completely. This, of course, runs you the risk of being dinged for customs charges when they arrive (plus their obnoxiously expensive "administration fee" they inevitably charge when this happens) but at least it means you're not paying literally double the ticket price!

As such, I… may have ended up ordering a couple of things. Specifically, I ordered the upcoming Nintendo Switch version of the Atelier Mysterious Trilogy DX versions — I knew there'd be a DX release before I got to them, despite the fact I own them all on PS4 already — as well as the Switch packaged release of the first five Grisaia: Phantom Trigger visual novels. I have a nice boxed copy of the first two Phantom Triggers from Kickstarting them, but I was hoping there'd be a Switch release like this — this also suggests that the subsequent volumes will get a cartridge release, too, which makes me happy; having the entirety of Grisaia on physical media is something I'm excited about. (And at some point I absolutely, definitely will get around to The Eden of Grisaia!)

Asian English releases are great… assuming you don't mind paying a bit extra. Sometimes you get a few nice little bonuses like manuals or charms or whatever, but usually you're just paying for the fact you've got a packaged version. That's fine by me, to be honest; as I've talked about numerous times, I place considerably greater value on things that I have on my shelf than which are lost in my download lists, so I'm more than happy to pay a bit extra for the privilege. Plus hopefully it helps send a positive message to the developers and publishers who are doing these releases, of course.

It's a bit of a shame more of these don't make it to western markets, but at least the option exists for a packaged version of a game with English support, even if a western publisher or localiser doesn't pick something up. I suspect it also saves those western publishers a lot of hassle; I can't even begin to imagine what might have happened if Bullet Girls Phantasia had fallen into the hands of Polygon et al.

Anyway, my Switch shelves continue to get new additions, and I don't see that changing any time soon. I'm yet to see anything that makes me want to rush out and buy a PS5 — and outside of that Neptunia thing and Final Fantasy XVI I don't really see that situation changing much, because a lot of the devs I like are already pretty firmly entrenched in the Switch ecosystem.

On that note, it's time to go play some games. Hope you've all had a fine weekend!

We're starting to see some of the effects of Brexit here and there — most notably for me in the case of ordering video games. Any of the shops run by Reef Entertainment — which means NISA Europe and Idea Factory International over here — are now quoting prices without tax, then sticking said tax on at the end of the transaction. Things are often ending up a bit more expensive than they used to be as a result.

Play-Asia has had intermittent issues, too. For a while, Play-Asia offered a helpful shipping service that took care of customs and duty fees, and it wasn't noticeably more expensive than just the regular shipping option until recently… when it starting adding an amount of "tax" that, in some cases, exceeded the actual value of the item being ordered! (I can only assume that tax was also being charged on the shipping or something.) I just ordered something from them and that didn't happen — but the "duty paid" option also wasn't available, so I don't know if they've sorted things out or if they've just quietly removed the "duty paid" option altogether.

I don't really understand the ins and outs of Brexit, but I do know a lot of companies — particularly those based in the UK — have been struggling quite a bit to continue catering to an international customer base. Reef had to outright stop shipping to the EU altogether for a while, and I know of at least a couple of other distributors who have been having similar issues.

I know "I have to pay a bit more for my video games" is the very height of first-world problems, but for me it is the first and most obvious sign I've seen of what Brexit is doing… and it doesn't fill me with confidence. What else is going to become (perhaps prohibitively) expensive in the near future? I guess we'll have to see. Brexit has just sort of quietly slipped through while the whole pandemic thing has been going on; I think people who haven't noticed will be in for a bit of a rude awakening when ol 'Rona is no longer occupying the majority of the collective consciousness!

It's another one of those weeks that feels like it's just flown by! Can't believe we're at the weekend again already. But here we are!

It's been a pretty good week, all told. I'm pleasantly tired and feel pretty satisfied with what I've accomplished this week. Going to record a few videos this weekend and hopefully finally knock out that first playthrough of Atelier Escha & Logy; it's taken me a while, not because I haven't been enjoying it — quite the contrary! — but simply because I've been keeping incredibly busy.

It's a good busy, though. I'm really enjoying what I'm doing over at Rice, and hopefully the readers are enjoying it too. I've got some interesting plans for articles in the coming weeks, though some of them will take a bit of… "coordination", for want of a better word.

The retro project I've teased a few times is coming closer to fruition, too, so I'm looking forward to kicking that off in earnest — it should be a good time, especially for those of you who follow me for retro stuff as opposed to Japanese stuff!

Anyway. Time to sink into bed, play a few video games and get some nice rest. Hope you've all had a decent week too!

I'm really loathing this particular cross-gen period, because I don't remember it ever being quite as frustrating in the past. I suspect that was, in most cases, because the jump in technology from one gen to the next was significant, meaning that each new gen would leap straight to brand-new, unique experiences rather than having the awkward mishmash we have now. But with the incremental upgrade that the new Xbox and PS5 are over their immediate predecessors, we're seeing more and more things that I most certainly don't want to see more of.

The latest example is today's announcement that Final Fantasy VII Remake is getting a PS5 version. Of course it is; it makes perfect sense — particularly as the next episodes (whenever they show up) will be "next-gen" games. What is obnoxious about this, however, is that they've also announced that there will be a new episode involving fan-favourite character Yuffie — and that this new stuff will not only be PS5-exclusive, but will also require a separate DLC purchase.

So once again we find ourselves in a situation where there is no "definitive" version of a game. This feels doubly egregious in the case of a game like Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is a remake of an existing game. A complete remake, mind, not just an HD upscale, but shoehorning in DLC like this feels a little… off — particularly as those who jumped on board with the game when it came out won't be able to access the new episode unless they've been lucky enough to upgrade to a PS5. And then only if they buy the new DLC.

It's good that there's a free upgrade programme from PS4 to PS5 — though the unavoidable fact that you upgrade from a disc copy on PS4 to a digital version on PS5's miniscule hard drive is a bit poop, however much of a "necessary evil" it may be — but realistically speaking, that new Yuffie stuff should be part of that new version from day one if it's going to be a thing at all.

It's easy to be cynical about the business-centric approach of modern gaming, particularly as Sony's State of Play today was preceded by some fairly convincing reports that they're going to be shuttering or at least "winding down" the widely beloved Japan Studio — and it always disappoints me to see stuff like this.

At the same time, I remain grateful that there are still plenty of developers and publishers out there doing great work — and that they care about not only games in the here and now, but the preservation of those games for the future, too. If we're not careful there's going to be multiple generations of games that we end up losing — while stuff from 30 or 40 years ago remains just as fresh and accessible as it was the day it was released.

A sobering thought. And a solid reminder of why I haven't bought a triple-A game for a very long time.

Feeling a bit better today. Some reasonable quality rest helped, as did the fact that the day was relatively uneventful. Got some stuff done, got some stuff ready to make my life easier tomorrow, had a chance to relax — job's a good 'un.

Tomorrow's The History of Lewd piece on Rice Digital should be a good one — I played through all of Three Sisters' Story today, a game I haven't played for a good 20+ years or so. I'd forgotten how genuinely good it was — particularly after revisiting Ring-Out!!, which was just as uncomfortable an experience as I remembered it being back in the day.

Three Sisters' Story represents a few things I'd love to see modern independent developers make a bit more of: firstly, homage to the PC-98 era of visuals, which is just gorgeous, and secondly, visual novels that play like adventure games. We do still get a few of these — with notable examples being Root Letter, the Ace Attorney series and the upcoming Root Film — but for the most part, visual novels these days tend to be mostly passive. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but the illusion of "gameplay" in adventure-style visual novels definitely adds something special to the mix.

I'll talk more about this tomorrow, but Three Sisters' Story also sticks in my mind for being an eroge that ends up punishing you if you blindly charge into too many erotic scenes. There are some you can get away with over the course of the narrative — and some that are mandatory — but there are also several along the way where if you think with your dick rather than your head and heart, you'll get yourself into trouble later. And I mean later; the consequences of careless sexual encounters don't become apparent until the very end of the game!

I remember really respecting Three Sisters' Story for this back in the day, and I still respect it greatly for it now. To be fair, the game provides you with plenty of clues as to what the "right" thing to do in terms of the story should be, so if you go "wrong" you really only have yourself to blame. But it's still cool to see a narrative-based title follow through so conclusively on the consequences of your actions like that.

Anyway, I'm getting into things I want to talk about tomorrow now, so stop by Rice Digital for another installment in The History of Lewd and I'll tell you a lot more!

Hello! Bit late with this one I know, but posting earlier in the month didn't seem to get a lot of response until I poked people so I thought I'd just post it late instead 🙂

It's Q&A time again! I'd like to record another Q&A video this weekend, so I need your questions! Post them in the comments below and I'll answer them in a video that will likely come out next Monday.

Questions can be on absolutely anything as always — doesn't have to be gaming related. So hit me with some stuff that will get me thinking and I look forward to coming up with some answers this weekend!

Sorry I forgot to write yesterday. Well, I didn't forget so much as didn't have the energy to; I've been sleeping like absolute crap of late, and so after I finished work yesterday I pretty much collapsed straight into bed and didn't do anything else for the rest of the evening. I'm feeling slightly better this evening, but not by a lot. At least I'm here, though!

I'm feeling mildly frustrated with some of my friends right now. For ages during lockdown we've been saying that we should play some stuff online, and lots of suggestions have been put forward, but none have come to fruition. The closest we've come to actual agreement is Minecraft, which we all enjoyed playing together a few years back, and I'd certainly be up for playing again.

The trouble is, the one who would be running the server is absolutely, stubbornly insistent that he won't play vanilla, unmodded Minecraft, and to make matters worse the modpack he insists on using features over 200 mods, requires more than 8GB of RAM to even load up and even then takes more than ten minutes to even load the game application from an SSD, then another five minutes to actually load from the menu screen into a world. And to make matters worse, some irritating bug somewhere in the whole hideous process means that you can't join a multiplayer game without first joining and then leaving a single-player game, which means a grand total of about 20-25 minutes just getting the game started.

The attraction for me with how we used to play Minecraft was the fact that you could boot it up in a matter of seconds, log into the server and just hang out, explore, see what everyone had been up to, and if nothing in particular was going on or you realised you weren't really in the mood, you hadn't really wasted any time.

With all this mod bullshit, it wastes nearly half an hour just getting the damn thing up and running — and when you're in there it's needlessly overcomplicated with all the stuff that's been added. I also strongly suspect that the member of our group who has the weakest PC specs — who is also one of the people most enthusiastic about playing Minecraft again — won't even be able to start the damn thing up at all due to a lack of available RAM.

I get that the friend who has been setting all this up has gone to a lot of effort to get the game running the way he wants it to run, but the fact he simply won't see how much frustration it's causing others — and how it fundamentally misses the point of what we actually want to get out of these play sessions — is winding me up something rotten at the minute. I don't care how he plays in his own free time, but when it comes to something we all do together, to be perfectly honest I'd much rather just have some sort of "lowest common denominator" arrangement.

I'm probably just grumpy from lack of sleep. And I'm sure we'll have a good time once it's all up and running properly — if that ever happens. But it's frustrating me a ton right now — particularly as getting this group to do anything is like pulling teeth at the best of times, let alone in the middle of lockdown.

Anyway. Time to detach from the Internet and go play some Atelier, I think.

My wife watches a lot more "mainstream" YouTubers than I do — the most mainstream I go are LGR, ProJared and Game Grumps and with the possible exception of the latter, all of those are a fraction of the size of some of the channels she watches. And yet I like them all a lot better than the big, successful ones because they don't do things that drive me nuts.

I've been thinking about precisely why a lot of those bigger YouTubers drive me nuts and I've come to the conclusion that it essentially comes down to patterns. As someone with Asperger Syndrome, I am naturally predisposed to spot patterns, and sometimes they can be comforting, but at other times they can be absolutely infuriating.

For some reason, patterns that relate in any way to something "social" — be that the way people behave on social media, the way people interact with one another in reality or the way people put themselves across on video — are the things that consistently drive me the most nuts whereas, say, let me spot patterns in video games and I'll be happy until the end of time.

With that in mind, here is a non-comprehensive list of things that big YouTubers do consistently that drive me absolutely bonkers because I can spot the patterns of when they do them — and thus am able to predict with a near-100% success rate when they're going to use them.

• Kevin McCloud's "Local Forecast". The most overused piece of royalty-free music of all time. Any time a YouTuber wants to suggest that they are going shopping, or doing something mundane, or waiting for something to happen, they will use this piece. And I fucking hate it every time I hear it because it's just such a lazy shorthand.

• The X-Files theme. The X-Files was a genuinely awesome show in the '90s, but now its theme song is, once again, lazy YouTuber shorthand — this time for something "mysterious" or "unexplained" happening, even when that "mysterious" or "unexplained" happening is completely mundane and incredibly dull. Which it usually is.

• Spongebob timecards. The Internet's inexplicable obsession with Spongebob Squarepants is best exemplified by the sheer number of YouTubers who relentlessly use these — and nothing but these — to indicate the passage of time.

• The Metal Gear Solid "!" noise. You're surprised, or there's something surprising that you've just revealed. It doesn't need a sound effect. Or if it does, please pick another one. Please.

• Jumpcuts. Just breathe. It's okay. Everyone breathes. You don't need to cut out every time you take a breath. It feels more natural if you leave them in. If you take the scissors so ruthlessly to your own footage that you make your entire 20-minute video into one never-ending run-on sentence, that's a problem.

• Use of Nintendo sound effects to indicate "safe nerdiness". We get it, you're nerdy, geeky and lol so random, but in a completely non-threatening way. I don't need to hear a Mario coin sound every time you put something down on the table, or the Wii Shop theme every time you open your fridge. Also the Wii is two console generations old.

• White girls trying desperately to sound like black girls. One of the YouTubers my wife watches has a painful habit of yelling "IN THE TRAYUSH" like a stereotypical sassy black woman any time she doesn't like something, and it just makes me cringe every time. Particularly because said YouTuber is one of those ones who doesn't seem to like anything, so pretty much everything goes IN THE TRAYUSH.

• Pitch-shifting or fucking with audio levels to emphasise points or take the piss. This is pretty self-explanatory. There's one YouTuber in particular that my wife watches who deliberately clips the mic any time she's making some sort of "aside" and it always makes me want to take that microphone and jam it somewhere unpleasant. Double negative points if pitch-shifting and/or audio clipping is combined with a cheap, poor-quality "fisheye lens" video effect.

I mean… there must be a reason all these things (and plenty more that I've doubtless forgotten about) are used so consistently and relentlessly by not just one YouTuber, but so many of them. And, as noted above, I fully recognise the fact that the reason I find these things so upsetting and frustrating is likely because of my Asperger's. But at the same time, I can't help but feel these people with millions of subscribers should also really probably be showing a bit more in the way of creativity rather than using the same old stock music, sound effects and production trickery than everyone else.

Or perhaps those YouTubers' audiences genuinely like the predictable side of things; perhaps they're eagerly awaiting the next IN THE TRAYUSH, clipped mic moment or Spongebob timecard. In which case I should probably just acknowledge the fact that I'm not the target audience for most of these things, go on my way and continue doing things the way I like to do them.

It's just fun to complain sometimes, so long as you don't make too much of a habit of it!