Calorie goal: 2000/2040 (-40)
Ring Fit?: Nope
Water consumption: Yuri Nation

So, I know it's only been three days since I started focusing on counting calories for (hopefully) some weight loss, but I'm feeling positive so far. I haven't found it too difficult to stick to the calorie goal — though I do tend to find myself getting a bit peckish by this time in the evening, so I should probably save some calories for an evening snack — and I don't feel like I've been having to "miss out" on anything, so long as I look carefully at what I'm about to eat.

That, essentially, is all any diet is, really: looking at the things you're about to stick in your mouth and determining whether or not it's actually a good idea to stick it in your mouth or not. That's what she said, I know, I know. But I'm keen to see whether what I've been doing for the last few days will have a noticeable result, because I know it really works for some people — YouTuber Larry Bundy Jr. is an incredibly inspirational example — and I'm curious to know if I need to make any further "adjustments" beyond simply spreading out those calories across the day.

It's when things get more complex, annoying and inconvenient that I find myself struggling with diets. When a diet requires you to make overly convoluted recipes just to avoid the things you're not "allowed" — or, worse, requires you to eat some sort of revolting astronaut food — then that's when I tend to find myself losing motivation, feeling frustrated and getting depressed by the whole thing.

Conversely, right now I've been enjoying pretty much what I want, just in a bit more moderation than I would do under "normal" circumstances. I've also been making a point of drinking a lot more water (both lightly flavoured and "plain") and I've found that drinking bottles of mineral water is a good way for me to manage that. Mineral water is also much better than the grotty, hard shit that comes out of our taps, too — and it's not even especially expensive. Plus it seems mineral water bottles are fully recyclable these days, too, so any objections one might have about it being a waste of plastic can be overcome with this information.

I dunno. It's early days yet, as I say, but at the moment I'm feeling reasonably positive. I haven't yet incorporated Ring Fit Adventure into my daily routine because both Andie and I are coming off the back of some illness (not COVID, we don't think) that knocked us both around a bit, so I haven't felt up to pushing myself while I've been spending significant parts of my morning feeling exhausted and dizzy. Once I put that in there, I'll have a few extra calories to enjoy, even — or just a bigger deficit.

Anyway. I'll report more on progress when I have a better idea as to whether or not there has been any progress. For now, I'm off to bed!

I watched a great video earlier. Here it is. Don't worry, it's safe for work/parents/children/whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI 

This video, by focusing on the music side of things, wonderfully sums up why corporate life drives me crackers. It's all so insincere and pointless. None of it matters. And yet the people involved seem to feel the need to role-play it being important. I seriously doubt any of them really give a shit though.

It's not just working corporate life that this stuff infests, though; it's everyday life. The stuff Tantacrul shows us in that video is just as true for advertising as it is for internal corporate videos. Mindless, soulless, pointless. Nonsensical. Irrelevant statement. That's why we believe something that is nothing to do with the irrelevant statement we just vomited out.

I appreciated that video, though. Modern corporate music had been bugging me for a while, but I had been struggling to express exactly what it was about it that bugged me. Tantacrul is an actual musician, so he was able to explain the musical clichés that go into making this nonsense. And now I'm in two minds as to whether or not this music is going to annoy me more or less now I know exactly what it's doing!

You have to laugh, really, don't you. The alternative doesn't seem to help.

EDIT: I had the info all ready and then forgot to add it!

Calories: 2020/2040 (-20)
Ring Fit?: No (give me time)
Water intake: Pissing like Niagara Falls

I was actually going to post this last night when I was somewhat lacking in inspiration, but here we are now. Before anything else, though:

Calorie goal: 2023/2040 (-17)
Ring Fit?: No
Water intake: About 2L

See? Told you I was going to keep myself honest. Anyway. Some favourite Atari Lynx games, some of which are on the way to the Evercade soon, and some of which I hope we see on there eventually! I used to have a Lynx and I regret selling it during a moment of fiscal tightness… though judging by the state of the Game Gear I own I doubt it would still be going strong without a bit of TLC.

Anyway!

Turbo Sub

I guess you'd call this a game vaguely akin to Space Harrier, but it unfolds from a first-person perspective. You're piloting a sub that can also, apparently, fly, and stages alternate between above-water blastathons and underwater avoidathons. In the latter stages, you can collect crystals that allow you to purchase powerups and extra lives between levels.

This game was a real showcase of the Lynx's hardware scaling capabilities, and is still a lot of fun today. Apparently there was an arcade version of this, too, with the Lynx port coming several years later; I never knew this back in the day. It was just "that kick-ass scaling game" for the Lynx!

Steel Talons

This isn't a particularly fondly regarded Lynx title, but I loved this back in the day. I was a big fan of the arcade machine, which had realistic helicopter controls (cyclic and collective pitch levers!) and was an early polygonal 3D blaster. The Lynx actually does a very valiant effort of recreating the arcade experience, albeit in low resolution. It's a fun, if fairly simple, game.

Electrocop

This game still wows me today by how it makes use of the Lynx's sprite scaling to create a convincing 3D environment where you can run left and right (with convincing parallaxing on the floor) and "in" and "out" of the screen. It's actually an interesting game, too, involving negotiating maze-like levels, blasting enemies and hacking computers to open locked doors. One of the platform's more ambitious efforts, for sure — and great music.

Checkered Flag

There weren't a ton of good racers on the Lynx. This one was probably the best of them — and it was a great one. While at the time I bemoaned the fact that it didn't have hills — those who have been watching Atari A to Z for a while will recall that young Pete had an obsession with Racing Games With Hills — I recognised it as a really solid, enjoyable and challenging Pole Position-alike. I bet this would have been great in multiplayer, but did you know anyone else with a Lynx?

Gates of Zendocon

Probably the best blaster on the Lynx, this game takes you through a wide variety of stages with some really interesting and unusual enemy and obstacle patterns. One level you might be fighting off predictable waves of enemies; in another, shooting your way through organic… "things"; in another still, blasting a path through abandoned scrap metal. Ton of fun, lots of variety — and, again, great music.

—

The latter of these three are coming to Evercade later in the year, which I'm super-excited about. The first two I'd love to see at some point but I don't know what the licensing situation is with them. Fingers crossed, though; a couple of companies seem to have been hoovering up rights for classic Lynx games, so hopefully these are among them. We'll see!

Anyway, with more that 2L of water inside me I really need a piss now, so I'll bid you farewell for the evening. Have a good night!

Morning all, a "business" post today — I've updated my Patreon account to be in GBP rather than USD. Fees have been going up for international transactions meaning that I haven't been seeing as much of your kind donations as I should have been, and hopefully switching to GBP will fix that.

This shouldn't affect anything for any of you existing Patrons — please let me know if you encounter any issues — but if you're in the UK, switching your pledge to my new tiers will save us both conversion fees. I've simply switched my tiers from $1 and $5 to £1 and £5, so that does mean any of you wishing to switch currency will pay a tiny bit more for equivalent tiers (£1 is about $1.30 right now, £5 is $6.47), but that should be counterbalanced by the saving in currency conversion fees, which is 2.5%.

You don't have to change if you don't want to, but if you do it allows me to take home a bit more of your kind donations each month rather than losing it to fees.

To avoid any additional conversion fees for the both of us, I suggest that those of you in the UK change to your local currency. For those of you who would like to switch your currency you can follow these steps:

1. On Patreon.com, hover over your avatar in the top right of your screen.

2. Click Manage memberships.

3. Find this page, and click Edit.

4. Under Currency, choose your preferred currency.

5. Click Update to save your settings.

Thanks for your understanding — I'll reiterate, you don't need to do anything, but if you wish to or are able to update your pledge to the new tiers that would be much appreciated!

Shout if you have any questions!

I've been trying for a little while to kickstart myself back into some sort of weight loss routine, but it hasn't really been working for me. I haven't put enough "pressure", for want of a better word, on myself, and as such I've just found myself thinking "ah, this won't hurt, I'll just get back on it soon".

No more! Probably. From Monday (I'm giving myself tomorrow to eat all the tasty things I bought yesterday, haha) I'm going to make an honest effort at this. And in order to ensure I keep said honest effort honest, I'm going to record relevant bits of information in this 'ere blog each day, even if they're not directly relevant to what I feel like talking about.

At the very least each day I'm going to record my calorie consumption; I'm using MyFitnessPal to record my calorie intake as well as a recommended number of calories per day. I'm also going to try and force myself into a habit of doing a bit of Ring Fit Adventure every day. It doesn't have to be a lot, but I can build that up over time, and doing just a little bit every day will surely help — as well as burning a few calories. Where I do remember to do Ring Fit Adventure, I'll record how long I did it for and the calories burned in that period.

I'll also record weight loss each week. I'm not going to provide exact weights because that's just a step too embarrassing at the moment, just the amount I've lost using Monday as a starting point. That should hopefully allow me to track things nicely over time using this blog as well as MyFitnessPal.

Doing something positive starts with good intentions. And I feel adding that little bit of extra "pressure" on myself to do this properly will help me out somewhat. So I hope you'll support me in this endeavour!

I'm pleased that so many people have been discovering the joy of Star Luster recently. It really is one of my favourite Evercade titles. And I'm pleased to say that I've managed to secure a copy of its PS1 sequel Star Ixiom — that should hopefully arrive in the next few days, so I'll be sure to do a short;Play episode on that at some point in the near future, as well as a writeup on MoeGamer.

I've been spending a bunch of time recording footage for the games we'll be talking about on the upcoming episode of The MoeGamer Podcast. As an EXCLUSIVE REVEAL, just for you, I can confirm that we will be talking about 3D arcade racers — a genre which, when you look at it in a bit more detail, is actually really several different genres that tend to get bundled together. I'll explain on the podcast.

Anyway, recording footage for the games I intend to talk about has led me to a few interesting conclusions:

• Burnout 2 is best Burnout
  – The people who made Microsoft Flight Simulator made some really cool games in the past
  – I like offroad games a lot more than I thought I did
  – Rockstar used to make games, not microtransactions

There's a few clues to some of the games I'll be educating Chris on in those conclusions, plus more to come, too. I'm looking forward to the discussion — it should be a fun one. For now, I'm still trying to shake off whatever lurgy I've got right now, so I should probably hit the hay for the evening. Have a lovely weekend!

I've been not well for the last few days. I can't really pin down what I'm not well "with" — it's not the global death plague, at least, I'm pretty sure — but it has left me feeling… not quite "present", if that makes any sense. The kind of feeling where you're just sort of drifting along, everything feels a bit "not quite real" and you feel perpetually woozy.

It's not especially pleasant, but at least it has coincided with a period of work where not a lot is going on so I have been able to sleep it off a bit without feeling particularly guilty. And in a couple of weeks I have a full week's holiday to look forward to — housebound, of course — so things aren't too bad on that front.

Still, even with my cotton wool-filled head I've managed to get some stuff done. I recorded some footage for some games we'll be talking about on The MoeGamer Podcast this weekend, and even managed to hammer out four thousand words on my first playthrough of Nurse Love Syndrome. So that's something, at least!

Anyway, I think it's time to get some more rest in the hope I feel a bit better in time for the weekend. We've got a fun show lined up for you all, so I hope you enjoy it — and I hope I'm not too zombified for the recording session!

Finally got a "good" ending in Nurse Love Syndrome (plus a "normal" and a "bad" on the same route) and whew, that was an emotional rollercoaster, for sure. If I have the energy, I'll be writing some words about it on MoeGamer tomorrow.

I've been really impressed with the two Nurse Love visual novels — particularly the fact that they are very different from one another. Nurse Love Addiction, which is actually the second of the two games, but the first to get localised if I remember rightly, started relatively sedately but got increasingly ridiculous (in a highly entertaining way) as it progressed, while Nurse Love Syndrome is rather more down-to-earth from what I've experienced so far.

One thing that both of them are absolutely masterful at is creating a feeling of dread and unease in the reader, though. This isn't dread and unease in the same way as horror, either; I'm talking about somewhat more mundane and relatively "everyday" feelings of mistrust, a lack of self-confidence, impostor syndrome and how all these things can escalate in your mind well beyond where they "should" be able to. Nurse Love Syndrome in particular is painfully relatable in terms of the severe impact struggling at work can have on one's mental health and even perception of reality — something that, unfortunately, I have all too much first-hand experience of.

I'm still pretty staggered by the calibre of voice actors in these two games, as well. In Nurse Love Syndrome, for example, we have Kana Asumi (best known to me as Blanc in the Neptunia series) in the leading role, plus Asami Imai (Noire in Neptunia, Ikaruga in Senran Kagura, Kurisu in Steins;Gate) as another one of the major characters, Yumi Hara (Yumi from Senran Kagura) as a character whose role got considerably expanded from the PSP original, and Eri Kitamura (Homura from Senran Kagura, Cordelia from Atelier Rorona and Totori) as another main heroine. All of these voiceover artists were already very well established by the game's original release in 2011, so it's impressive to see them all in a relatively niche interest visual novel.

Anyway. There's a lot more to talk about with regard to this fascinating visual novel, and having only really seen one set of endings now (plus the "Gatekeeper" ending I mentioned the other day) I've barely scratched the surface of the truths that are there to be discovered. And this is obviously one of those visual novels where you won't have the whole picture until you've seen everyone's storylines through to completion. So I'm looking forward to diving deeper!

I've received three separate Play-Asia packages over the course of the last two days. I guess everything all became ready for shipping at the same time or something, because these were all orders made at very different times!

Here are the goodies in question. From left to right, we have It's a Wonderful Life, the Clannad spinoff featuring Tomoyo (from what I remember of the anime, best girl); Maitetsu, the loli train girls game; Moero Crystal H, which hopefully you all know about already; and Murder by Numbers, a fun looking adventure game in which you solve puzzles through the medium of Picross.

All of these are going to get some coverage at some point, though obviously I don't know exactly when — especially as all of these are pretty substantial affairs. Recent Nintendo Life reviews have left me with more half-finished games than I care to have, so I'm going to try and polish those off first. Conveniently, both of those are also things I'd like to write about in more depth on MoeGamer, so expect some musings on Undead Darlings and Moero Crystal H in the coming weeks/months/whenever.

I finally reached an ending in Nurse Love Syndrome earlier. It is what is known as the "Gatekeeper" ending — in other words, an ending which basically goes "come back later". These are usually implemented in a visual novel when there are pieces of information that the author really wants you to know before seeing that specific ending — but they are, at least, endings in themselves.

There are a lot of endings in Nurse Love Syndrome. There are, I think, six main heroines who have distinct "routes" — though the narrative is structured that they crisscross a bit. Each heroine has at the very least three endings — Good, Bad and Normal — with several having multiple bad and at least one "Sudden" ending; the latter in particular is something I'm a little nervous about, as this VN has already put me through the emotional wringer more than anything else in recent memory. Love it.

Anyway, I'm on track for an actual ending now, so on either Thursday or early next week I'll have an initial writeup on what I've experienced so far plus, like with Nurse Love Addiction, some in-depth analysis on the other routes, too. I love writing about visual novels, but it's quite a time-consuming process that makes my brain work hard! Nothing like a good mental workout now and then though, eh?

Anyway, I'm not 100% well at the minute so I should probably try and get some decent sleep tonight. Watch out for short;Play and Waifu Wednesday tomorrow, and thanks as always for your continued support.

I've got a raging headache this evening, so I'm off for an early night shortly. Apologies if I am less than coherent!

Undead Darlings review was squared away earlier. It hasn't gone live today because I'm not in charge of the posting schedule, but suffice to say for now that if you enjoy zombie girls, dungeon crawling and interesting mechanics, you should definitely pick that one up. Unfortunately, this is one of those games where the deadline was too tight to be able to beat the whole game before I wrote a review, so I'm going to continue playing it in my own time and provide a more comprehensive writeup (or three) on MoeGamer once I'm 100% done.

Hopefully the game will get some sort of limited run release in the near future, as I'd love to have a copy of it on my shelf. The developers seem interested in such a prospect — particularly after what a long-term labour of love it's been — so hopefully we'll see that happen. The fact it's published by Sekai gives me hope in that regard, too.

In other news, Genshin Impact is out now and I mostly lost interest as soon as I learned it's an online free-to-play game with gacha elements. I'll probably still give it a look just because it's the New Hotness and I do like the look of it, but honestly, I don't really have a lot of space in my life for that kind of game right now. I'm still playing Magicami a bit, but as a mobile game that's something you can just check in on for a few minutes each day and grind a bit while you're doing something else, advancing the story when you feel like getting a bit more invested. Genshin Impact, meanwhile, is caught in that weird limbo between single-player game and online game, and that always ends up feeling like a rather hollow experience for me.

Ah well. Not as if I need anything else to be getting on with. I'm ploughing through Atelier Meruru to stay ahead of schedule, plus I have Moero Crystal H and Undead Darlings to polish off, and I think I'm finally near an ending for Nurse Love Syndrome too.

For now, though, I need to lie down and not have this headache. Have a lovely evening!