I had a day of doing absolutely nothing useful whatsoever today — I finished off Warriors Orochi 2 on Xbox 360 and made a start on Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate on PlayStation 4. I enjoyed the former a lot, but the latter is on a whole other level. I'll doubtless write some things about both in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that Warriors Orochi 3 is one of those games that provides enough stuff to do to fill a lifetime.

The first two Warriors Orochi games had a fun progression system that encouraged you to use a variety of characters, but the third looks like it rewards sticking with particular characters for a while, as there are a lot of things you can build up on an individual character. Experience level, a "promotion" system whereby you reset your character's level from 100 to 1 and get a bonus, weapon compatibility, skill proficiency, weapon abilities, items, bonds with allies… bliss. This is DRPG level of character and party progression, only in a hack-and-slash. Exactly what I want from a Warriors game — and I'd argue that this game specifically is pretty close to my ideal Warriors game in terms of progression and structure. At least that's my first impression.

The narrative aspect is interesting, too. After Warriors Orochi and its sequel followed directly on from one another, Warriors Orochi 3 unfolds after the cataclysmic arrival of the gigantic Hydra, which kills pretty much everyone (save for three plucky heroes, conveniently) and obliterates the parallel world that the Warriors Orochi series has been unfolding in so far. What then transpires is a time-travelling tale where the surviving three heroes go back to key events after the Hydra's arrival and change history. They then take the people they save back to the "present", with the ultimate aim being to assemble an enormous army of badasses from the world of Warriors Orochi and be able to take down the Hydra once and for all.

This is a really neat structure that provides a clear long-term goal to aim for; the "prologue" mission to the game is basically the final boss, except you have absolutely no chance of winning whatsoever. Any time you return to your camp, the final boss is just outside the gates, so technically you can go back and get your ass kicked any time you want, but the majority of the game involves figuring out the tangled timelines and ensuring everything is in place to ensure the survival of important characters.

Anyway. Early days so far, but I'm really enjoying it so far. It's 2AM and I could happily play a lot more, but it would probably be unwise to. Also Patreon seems to think that this post is "promoting a raffle" using some sort of auto-detection routine that is clearly broken. I don't know what it took from the above to make it think that I was promoting a raffle, but, dear Patreon robots, I most certainly am not. Thank you.

Hope you've had a pleasant Saturday. Onwards to an equally useless Sunday!

I was wandering around in the kitchen just before sitting down to write this, and thinking about what I might write, when the post I wrote called "Weekendend" popped into my head. It felt like I wrote that post yesterday, when in fact I wrote it at the beginning of the week — indeed, as the weekend was ending. This whole week has just disappeared into a void, and I don't really know why!

Perhaps it's the excitement and nervousness over the new position. I'm looking forward to that, but as with any change of job there's plenty of worrying to go with it! Current day job is aware that I'm leaving now, though, so that's a weight off my mind — it was all very cordial and nice, so I intend to keep it that way before I depart. It'll be nice to leave a job under circumstances under my own control for once — thinking back over my past career, I've regrettably not had the opportunity to do that all that often for one reason or another, which perhaps accounts for my general uneasiness regarding anything to do with employment.

Perhaps it's just been a fairly unremarkable but relatively enjoyable week. I've been having fun with Pinball FX 3 over the course of the last few days, and my new Atari Jaguar showed up today, so I've been having a bit of a play with that, too. Cybermorph is more fun than I remember. I'm definitely looking forward to the GameDrive becoming available as a practical means of expanding my library a bit, though — Jaguar games are a bit pricey, so sticking a bunch of them on a GameDrive would appear to be the way forward. That said, there are a few I definitely want to own "legit" copies of — it'll likely have to be a case of picking those up gradually over several months rather than in a big armful from CEX, though!

This weekend I'm going to have a nice quiet one. As I mentioned previously, I have several weeks' worth of videos ready to go, so I can afford to take a weekend completely for myself. (Aside from the stuff for $5+ Patrons I've promised!) Not that I resent recording the videos or anything — on the contrary, I love it — but sometimes it's just nice to have a weekend where you can think "I have absolutely nothing I have to do today".

Anyway, that weekend starts with a good night's sleep. So I will bid you farewell for now, thank you for your support, and wish you a pleasant weekend also. Have a good one!

I'm going to be a bit vague here for the moment, but I wanted to share some good news with you all: I've got a new job! I'm starting in mid-January, so I've already put my notice in at my current day job. At present I'm not going to share any more information than that, but I did want you kind people to be among the first to know, since you've listened to me complaining often enough. Thank you for that.

It's all been a bit of a whirlwind that happened over the course of the last couple of days, so I'm still reeling a bit from the reality of it. I'm looking forward to having a nice quiet weekend to process all of it — I have enough videos in the bag at the moment that I don't "need" to do anything this weekend, so I'm going to take some time to unwind, enjoy myself and figure things out! $5 Patrons, I'll get the wallpaper I owe you done at that time, too, so watch out for that. I'll also put up the post for this month's Q&A video over the weekend, too, so keep an eye out for that as well.

This is a nice way to finish the year. Well, something good had to happen in 2020, didn't it? Fitting that it would be at the very last moment. Here's hoping that things continue to get better for all of us; we could all use a bit of a "lift", I suspect.

Anyway, this seems like a good time to thank you all once again for your support, and I hope you're all able to enjoy some sort of pleasant news in the latter days of this accursed year too.

I had a bit of a hankering to play some pinball this evening for some reason, so I downloaded Zen Studios' Pinball FX 3 for Switch. I used to like the original Pinball FX on Xbox 360, but haven't really followed it since, so I was intrigued to check it out. Right now you get two tables for free: the ever present Sorcerer's Lair and Fish Tales by Midway.

Pinball FX has always been an interesting series in that it kind of straddles the line between "pinball sim" and "video game pinball". Most of Zen's original tables have features that wouldn't be possible — or would be very expensive to implement — on a real table, while the licensed tables they have in there are loving recreations of classic tables. Apparently they've even tweaked the physics specifically for the "real" tables to give them a more authentic feel, while the "video game" tables remain with their classic physics for an arcadey feel.

It seems like an interesting package so far, and there are a lot of different tables to choose from. It can potentially get a bit pricey if you shell out for all of them, but in practice you'll probably want to pick up a pack or two to begin with and see how well you get on with those tables, rather than filling out your entire collection right away. Analysis paralysis is a thing, after all.

I haven't bought any extra tables yet; if any of you reading this are familiar and have any table recommendations I'd love to hear them! In the meantime, I'm going to go try the game in vertical mode with the Flip Grip in bed… that sounds like it would be a fun time!

I've spent a bit of time finally (bare) knuckling down to playing some Streets of Rage 4 over the last few days since recording some footage for the podcast, and I'm super-impressed with it. It's one of the most immaculately designed games I've ever played — clearly put together with absolute love, tested thoroughly and paced absolutely perfectly.

It feels like Streets of Rage, but it looks beautifully modern. It offers a challenge so perfectly tuned I found myself progressing through the game and finding health items exactly when I needed them. It provides varied and interesting encounters through clever use of stage gimmicks and enemy combinations. In all, it's the love letter to the series everyone wanted it to be, and mature Blaze is super-hot.

I'm seriously impressed. As Chris noted on the recent podcast, it manages to pull all this off without feeling the need to artificially pad itself out with RPG elements and other such bits and bobs — there are unlockables, some of which are tied to your total lifetime score, but there's no "grinding" required to just be able to get through the game. In fact, the default mode focusing on a single stage at a time rather than a full arcade-style run from start to finish is a masterstroke; it allows you to just take your time enjoying the game, then later you can return to favourite stages or indeed tackle the whole thing in old-school arcade style.

I'll write something in more depth about it on MoeGamer when I've spent a bit more time with it — I haven't finished one playthrough just yet — but if you're a 16-bit beat 'em up fan and you haven't played this yet, I urge you to jump on it at the earliest opportunity!

As predicted, I was not particularly well today. Thankfully I didn't have a lot of stuff I needed to do — on the day job side of things, everything was pretty quiet aside from a couple of tasks I managed to knock out pretty quickly, and on podcast days such as today all I do is upload and publish the podcast so it gets an appropriate amount of attention. (If you haven't checked out the new episode yet, be sure to do so — we had a blast recording this one!)

A day of mostly rest has helped a bit, as has overconsumption of Mr Kipling apple pies (which we accidentally discovered our cat Meg likes after she attacked a foil case with great enthusiasm after we'd finished) and chilling out with Atelier Ayesha. Hopefully I'll feel a bit better tomorrow, but I'm not too worried, really; everything feels like it's winding down ahead of Christmas right now, so I don't anticipate there being much to worry about with the day job for the next few weeks. I've also managed to book off Christmas Eve until the new year to have some free time, so that will be nice — even if Christmas this year will be something of a humble, quiet affair at home rather than an opportunity to see family.

Right, on that note, I'm going to go sit in bed and try to figure out how to get good at Xeno Crisis. I don't anticipate much success with my fuzzy ill head, but it's worth a try!

Busy weekend this weekend due to it being a podcast weekend, but everything got done on time and the episode should be with you all tomorrow.

S-Rank Patrons, watch out for the next monthly Q&A post and your new wallpaper in the next couple of days — I haven't had time to get those set up as yet.

For now, I think I'm probably just going to go to bed. I have one of those horrible "fuzzy head" instances that isn't quite a headache, but which leaves you feeling just a bit dazed and dopey. Probably a cold coming on or something. It is nearly half ten, after all, which is a perfectly respectable time for a 39-year old man to go to bed, isn't it? Even if he likes video games?

I don't have a lot else to report from the weekend, I'm afraid, since as I say, the vast majority of the time has been taken up with podcast recording and editing! It's a monster of an episode, though, and both Chris and I had a lot of fun putting it together. We hope you enjoy it!

For now, though, I bid you good night, and I wish you better health than I apparently have right now.

I, err, may have bought myself an Atari Jaguar. I found a good deal on eBay that came with the console, RGB SCART cable, power adapter and three games (one of them boxed) for just a little over what CEX charges for a "discounted" unit by itself.

I'm not necessarily going to collect for Jaguar — the games are quite expensive, but not prohibitively so — but I am initially going to pick up a "GameDrive" for it when it becomes available again from AtariAge. This is your standard "SD card in a cart" solution for the Jaguar, and most of the ROMs from the commercially available games for the Jag back in the day are readily available via either archive.org or Atarimania, so I can load that up with pretty much the full library, then decide if I actually want to collect boxed copies of the games I find myself particularly enjoying.

The reason I went for the Jaguar is because although I know it's an absolute disaster of a system, it's an interesting one. It was Atari's last-ditch attempt to see success in the console market after enjoying repeated failures with everything other than the 2600, so it's intriguing to see exactly what they were trying at the time. Plus there's a bunch of cool games on it — some of which are like "big brothers" to a number of Lynx games, which I'm excited to explore.

The other reason is that Jaguar emulation doesn't appear to have really gone anywhere from the sound of things, so a lot of these games are potentially at risk of being "lost" for anyone who doesn't have real hardware. I think it'll be interesting to give them another chance via video and/or written stuff — I feel an Atari Jaguar A to Z series somewhere in my future. Then I can see how bad Kasumi Ninja really is — and how good Alien vs. Predator is, too. And, of course, whatever the fuck Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy is.

That should hopefully arrive before Christmas, but the GameDrive units are currently unavailable, so I'm going to have to wait on that. Probably just as well, since they're a bit pricey, but at about $180 (£130ish) for access to the Jaguar's complete library, that feels like money well spent when the games are still going for £30+ each.

Expect more Thoughts when I have my mitts on this dumbass system. I'm looking forward to playing with it!

We made it to the end of another week, everybody. And I'm pleased to report that today seemed to remain mostly free of mishaps after they apparently all decided to visit me yesterday. I have been feeling a bit under the weather today, but I think that can probably mostly be attributed to the fact I'm feeling pretty stressed out and fed up.

At least Christmas is pretty much sorted. With the whole virus situation, we're not really in a position to be able to go anywhere, so it'll be a quiet one here at home. Presents have been ordered and sent to their relevant locations, and my parents have kindly provided us with some money to spend on presents "from them", so I'm currently contemplating what to do with my half of the money. A little voice that I probably shouldn't listen to is telling me to buy an Atari Lynx or Jaguar on eBay. I have not yet decided if I am going to pay any attention to it.

Anyway, Chris and I will be recording a podcast this week. It'll be a sort of "roundup of the year"-style affair like we've done in previous years, so we'll be talking about the stuff we've played this year that we found particularly striking. In the absence of a month of MoeGamer Awards on the site this year, this will be a good opportunity to celebrate some of the games I've been particularly enjoying, both within and outside the Atelier series. It should be a fun discussion, so watch out for it on Monday, all being well.

In the meantime, I've been enjoying Atelier Ayesha this evening. It's got a noticeably different vibe to the Arland games that I'm really appreciating, plus a fun battle system, fun progression and plenty of cute girls. Exactly what I need, like all the time. For now, though, I think it's time to head to bed with a sandwich and a glass of milk, attempt to figure out BMX on California Games on the Evercade while watching Classic Game Room, then sleep until midday tomorrow. That sounds nice.

Hope you've all had a week that has been at the very least tolerable. Not long to go until the symbolic moment that we can kick 2020 out the door for good — even if it doesn't change anything immediately in practice, it'll feel good to have made it through.

Ever have a day that feels like it's the inverse of yesterday?

I thought yesterday was a reasonably good day, all told. I was satisfied with my work on the site and YouTube; my annoying day job boss actually thanked me for doing something (which is cause for celebration); I paid off my car; I went to the gym; I got my new capture card up and running; I got a new tyre for my newly paid-off car, which I've been meaning to do for ages. Generally speaking, it felt like a decent, if relatively unremarkable day.

This morning, when coming down stairs, I trod on a staple, which embedded itself quite deeply into my foot. Then Microsoft Teams decided that "my organisation has removed this device" (some may not see this as a bad thing, including me) so I rebooted my work computer to see if that resolved the issue, only to discover I was unable to log into the entire computer at all. I then spent most of the rest of the day trying to fix said issue, during which time I developed both a headache and a stomachache that were significant enough to make me not want to do anything for a while. Ultimately, it wasn't a terrible day or anything, but the amount of things went wrong just felt like some sort of "payback" for yesterday being a vaguely tolerable day.

Ah well. It's nearly over now, I've done all my Christmas shopping and I'm about to go and sit in bed to play Atelier Ayesha. Things could be worse.