I made a new channel trailer, because the old one wasn't quite accurate any more, and I'd been wanting to do something a bit more "creative" with the channel trailer for a while.

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. I think it's pretty representative of what I do on YouTube these days! 🙂

Please feel free to share as you see fit. The video is unlisted, but shareable/embeddable etc.

Well, last night I heard that one of the services I make quite heavy use of — IFTTT, or If This Then That — has decided to switch to a subscription model, and, worse, rather than simply making it so that the subscription offers additional benefits, they've rather cheekily decided to completely gimp their "free forever" basic account.

For the unfamiliar, IFTTT is a service that allows you to set up various conditional statements to automate things. You say "If this thing happens, then that thing should happen too". Examples that I use include "If it's 12:00pm, then post a tweet promoting my Patreon" and "If there's a new feed item from [website X], then post a link to that article to my Discord". It's really incredibly useful, particularly if you're doing anything where a social media presence would be helpful.

Well, at least it was incredibly useful. As of October 7, IFTTT's "free forever" account will limit you to creating three "applets". Three. That means three "if this then that" statements, and no more. If you have any more than that, the rest will be "archived" and unable to be used until you archive one of your three active ones to make space. To put this in context, at present I have 31 applets running — a bunch of timed ones throughout the day to auto-tweet promotional and introductory messages linking to MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, plus a few of the aforementioned ones that integrate with Discord.

If I don't pay up, I'll lose all but three of those. Now, granted, IFTTT has generously offered a "pay what you want" subscription until October 7, allowing you to fix your monthly price — so long as it's at least $1.99 — but it still feels a bit like being extorted here. I'll probably end up paying $1.99 just because those applets — and the ability to make more as required — are useful, but the situation leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I understand why they're doing this, of course. IFTTT was one of those services where it seemed impossible to figure out how they were possibly making any money, since there didn't appear to be any ads on the site or any existing membership or donation options. And as the site has doubtless become more popular over the years, I imagine its overheads have gone up and up to deal with bandwidth requirements and suchlike. So I understand why they might want to ask some of their userbase to give something back.

And I'd be fine with it if they'd handled this differently. If they'd kept their "free forever" (their term, which is why I keep repeating it) account exactly as it was, then simply offered the new features for the Pro account — essentially a means of making applets much more complex and flexible, ideal for power users — then I would have been fine with it. Instead, they completely gimped the free account, making it next to worthless, then made the only option to "upgrade" provide a bunch of features that your average user probably won't need.

I've seen several services and pieces of software do this over the last few years. The PlayStation VR video player, Littlstar, started charging a subscription fee a while back, for example — and rather cheekily offered a limited-time one-off purchase option for an extortionate $40 as an alternative. The fact that this was coming was never made clear, and with the way console software updates work, there is no means of downgrading to a previous version. The video downloading software that I used to extract YouTube videos to include in the podcast quietly updated itself without telling me, so there is now a limit of 30 downloads per day without paying, too.

It's reasonable to ask people to pay for things, particularly things that have taken time and effort to create. But suddenly charging for something that used to be free, with little to no indication that such a requirement was coming, is pretty unreasonable. We're burdened with subscription after subscription these days, and it really makes me miss the days of buying a piece of software and just being able to get on with things!

A publisher approached me with some interesting news yesterday. It's embargoed until tomorrow morning at 5am BST (about five and a half hours from the time I'm typing this), so I can't tell you what it is right now, but it's something I'm very happy about. And I'm also very happy that said publisher trusted me with the information enough to give me the opportunity to have something ready for when the embargo dropped.

It's taken a few years to build up to a position where this sort of thing happens, but it's a sign that I've developed a solid reputation at least among certain quarters of the Internet. I'm never going to be a "big name" and I'm not trying to be — I know very well that the stuff I cover is primarily of interest to a specific audience (which I would primarily sum up as "people a bit like me") but it's still pretty neat when a publisher who very much aligns with my own values and my audience gets in touch like this.

There's always the potential for this to lead to interesting things in the future, too, whether that be access to preview or review copies, the opportunity to interview interesting people or simply being given an occasional shout-out.

Anyway. As I say, there's not much more I can say right at this second, but if you can wait five and a bit hours, keep an eye on MoeGamer for some news that should be of interest to at least some of you reading this, and I hope it makes your kokoro go doki-doki or something.

Have a lovely evening!

Annual appraisal day at work today, and it went fine. I complain about my day job a lot, but I'm good at it, and people still seem to think I'm good at it if I literally spend half the working day asleep and still get everything I need to do done. So who am I to argue?

I feel mildly guilty. Not enough to really want to push myself in the daily grind — there isn't really much to "push myself" with, which is part of the problem, really — but enough that I was stressing myself out a bit about this appraisal just in case anyone "noticed" (I don't know how they would have) that I had been tired, bored, disillusioned and prone to sleeping through entire conference calls. Then I thought, well, if they don't want me to sleep through conference calls, they shouldn't have so many of the fucking things, should they? And they shouldn't be so fucking boring.

I always feel the "self-appraisal" aspect of yearly appraisals is kind of pointless. Who in their right mind is going to rate themselves anything other than "satisfactory"? Give yourself top marks and you set yourself up for a fall — or just look like an arrogant asshole. Give yourself anything below the satisfactory mark and you're just asking for trouble. Unless, of course, you like the idea of increased scrutiny, in which case go nuts, I guess.

It reminds me of one of my least favourite bits of secondary school — the periods towards the end of term where we had to write our "profiles" that would end up in our reports. Inevitably, it would consist of an entire hour of a whole class bored to tears writing "This term, I have learned [all the things we have learned]" in our neatest handwriting and hoping it went through the carbon copy paper properly. That or hoping that no-one scratched an "invisible" cock on our top sheet when we weren't looking, only for it to become terrifyingly clear on both the teacher's and the parent's carbon copies beneath.

Okay, maybe there's no covert dick-drawing in the adult workplace — or if there is, I'm almost certainly working somewhere far too boring for any of that to go on — but the whole "insincere attempt to look like we're self-reflecting" thing remains the same, and I'm never sure what it actually achieves other than leaving a paper trail to say why everyone's salaries went up at a fraction of a percent of the rate of inflation this year. Or something.

Anyway. Nothing to worry about now for another year. I am, apparently, Doing a Good Job. I'll take it.

Got a new assignment for Nintendo Life, and it's a game I've had my eye on for a while since its various attempts at Kickstarter funding and eventually being picked up by Sekai Games: Undead Darlings. It's also not embargoed so I can blab a bit about my first impressions here, since I started playing it this evening!

For the uninitiated, Undead Darlings is a hybrid of dungeon crawler and dating sim, with the emphasis mostly on the dungeon crawling. It's a very different type of dungeon crawler to something like Moero Crystal H, though, in that it's not really about character progression and customisation, but rather about scavenging loot, making your way through interesting environments and figuring out when you reckon you're tough enough to take on the area's preset encounters.

The game's setting sees you waking up in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and your childhood friend from next door, Pearl, appears to have turned into a zombie. Well, she's partly turned into a zombie, anyway; she's undead, but she hasn't lost her humanity. As luck would have it, your father appears to be a completely batshit insane mad scientist who may or may not have been responsible for the whole zombie apocalypse in the first place, and he's left a trail of clues for you to go and find the cure he left somewhere for safekeeping.

This evening, I played through the first dungeon, which is set in a police station. Your task here is to meet up with Pearl's cousin Jordan (also a zombie), find some clues to the safe place where the cure had been left, and figure out the code to the place it is locked inside. This mostly involves scouring two floors of grid-based dungeon crawling, looking for events, grabbing loot and fighting off enemies.

There are a few twists on the usual formula, though. Firstly is a distinctly survival horror-inspired aspect where you only have very limited inventory space, and your weapons have a set amount of durability before they break and become scrap. This isn't the end of the world (no pun intended), because scrap can be used to repair other weapons or expand your inventory capacity, but you do need to be a little bit careful — there are no shops in a zombie apocalypse, so you're completely dependent on the loot you find in the dungeons. Fortunately, this all respawns and is randomised each expedition.

Secondly, the combat has a strong emphasis on exploiting weaknesses to build up a multiplier, and then using this multiplier to amplify the effectiveness of an action — be that an attack, a spell, an item or even the Defend command. In some cases, the elements that enemies are "weak" against (i.e. that build up the multiplier) are also the ones they take the least damage from, so you have to hit them a few times with the "correct" element, then use the multiplier built up to unleash a neutral-element attack against them. It adds an interesting layer of strategy, particularly when you consider the "Macro" system, where you can program preset sequences of commands for your party to perform, usually with the intention of setting off much more powerful Combo skills.

Limited inventory space can make healing a bit tricky, so to that end there are a few things to help you out: firstly, any time you find treasure, you get a small HP and SP heal, and secondly, if you find one of the optional events between the protagonist and the girls, those all conclude with a full heal — plus the opportunity to develop your affinity with them, of course, which not only affects endings but also their combat effectiveness.

So far outside of some truly atrocious voice acting (which thankfully you can mute in favour of a text-only presentation) and some occasionally questionable difficulty balancing on the "standard" level, I've been having a good time with this and am looking forward to sinking some more time into it. It's a stylish, distinctive game that I'm glad was finally able to see the light of day, and it seems like it's been designed with real care rather than simply slapping together a visual novel component with a half-assed dungeon crawler engine.

I'm particularly impressed with the presentation of the dungeons themselves; rather that simply being fairly static tilesets, they've been designed like real places. The "walls" in the police station aren't just regular old walls — there are desks, piles of files, folding screens, plants and all manner of other things. It really makes a huge difference in making it feel like a believable environment, and has been a real highlight so far.

Anyway. That's out on the 28th, I think, so you may want to give that a look when it appears. Hopefully with the long road to release the developers will want to commemorate it with a proper packaged release at some point, but as always I'm sure we'll have to wait and see in that regard!

I'm sure things will go back to "normal", whatever that is, eventually, but today's been one of those days where it feels a long way off. And, to be honest, I sort of find myself going back and forth on whether or not a return to what we had before the whole COVID-19 pandemic is actually desirable.

Chief among this is, of course, the idea of working from home. My mental state is up and down a bit on this, because while I very much appreciate the increased flexibility and freedom it provides, it's also frustrating to feel like your professional life is "invading" your personal life. (This only really applies if you're not a particular fan of your job, of course; if you're legitimately doing something you enjoy, in my experience, you'll have no problem with this — see: any time I was working on a gaming website in the past!)

Out and about, I certainly don't have a particular problem with keeping a distance from people, and I don't even especially mind wearing a mask, although as a glasses-wearer I am yet to find a means of wearing a mask that doesn't steam said glasses up.

Obviously it would be great if we could go back to a world where there wasn't a great "unknown" hanging in the air all the time — something that may or may not kill us — but in other regards, I wonder what the world will actually look like after this is all over. Assuming it is ever all over, which presumably it will be at some point!

Ah well. At least I'm not short of reasons to stay indoors…

Hello everyone! Since this is all edited and published and ready to go, I thought I'd share it with you: it's the first episode of Evercade A to Z, which I'll be publishing on Friday. The series will, as the name suggests, explore the variety of games that are available for Blaze's wonderful little Evercade retro gaming platform that launched earlier this year.

Rather than following the A to Z format as with the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST series, I'm instead going to pick one game from each of the currently available cartridges (at the time of recording) and give it the showcase treatment. When the new cartridges come later in the year, I'll slot them into the existing cycle when they would come up as if they'd always been there. That way I get to play some Atari Lynx games on camera for you a bit sooner! 🙂

Hope you enjoy. Not a radical departure from the Atari A to Z format or anything, I know, but this seems to work for me and people seem to like it — plus I enjoy making them! — so who am I to complain?

I've just finished editing the 10 videos I've put together this weekend, and I'm pleased with what I've put together. I haven't made any radical changes to format or anything, but I'm pleased with everything about these videos — the interesting subject matter, the things I talked about and the introduction of some new stuff.

I'm going to make an effort to put out as much stuff as possible at 60fps from now on. I started the oldest Atari A to Z videos at 60fps then switched to 30 because I was running into some disk space issues; that's not really a problem now, plus the beefed-up processor I got a while back makes rendering 60fps marginally less time-consuming than it was previously. And the results are worth it; 60fps retro gaming videos look lovely. I'm by no means a "frame rate person", but there is something inherently pleasant about seeing smooth, slick retro stuff looking as smooth and slick as it did on original hardware.

I have a slight bottleneck in this regard in that the Elgato Game Capture HD device I use for capturing console footage is incapable of capturing 1080p at 60fps. This isn't a problem for the new Evercade stuff I'm doing, since the Evercade outputs at 720p and thus can be captured at 60fps no problem, but for anything on, say, Switch or PS4, I'm capped at 30fps. This isn't a huge problem, but it would be nice to improve that at some point. Perhaps I'll set the acquisition of a new capture device as a donation goal or something.

I'm pleased with how the Evercade videos came out. Since the games in question are old anyway, upscaling the footage from 720p to 1080p 60fps has little to no impact on quality, which means lovely crisp, clear, smooth footage of Ninja Golf. And, err, some other games eventually, too. But mostly Ninja Golf and Star Luster for now.

I'm calling the Evercade series "Evercade A to Z" to fit in with the other retro-themed stuff I do, but I'm not going to be strictly following an A to Z format. Instead, I'm going to do something similar to how I'm handling the launch lineup on MoeGamer: take a game from each cart, cycle around, rinse, repeat. That means when the four new carts come out later this year I can easily slot them into the cycle without having to wait ages to make a video about any of the games on them.

Exciting times ahead, to be sure. But for now, it's back to the humdrum old day job tomorrow, so I should probably get some sleep to be… "fresh" for the morning. Sigh.

Oh well. At least I feel like I've achieved something worthwhile this weekend, even if the daytime of my weekdays is filled with a complete and utter sense of the meaninglessness of human existence.

Recorded a bunch of stuff today — a bit more left to do tomorrow, but it's nearly 1AM now so I should probably go to bed, as much as it is tempting to pull a late-nighter.

Got some really interesting stuff coming up soon on Atari A to Z, probably my favourite of which is Chris Crawford's unusual social simulation Gossip, which may or may not have been released back in the day. We had a version in our Big Box of Disks for the Atari 8-bit, but we had a lot of things we weren't supposed to have in our Big Box of Disks, so that doesn't necessarily mean it ever actually got released.

I'll spare you the details of Gossip for now — watch the video when it comes out in a couple of weeks! — but suffice to say it's the sort of overly ambitious nonsense that I feel really defined the Atari 8-bit era. It's fascinating to return to now — and I sure as hell understand what it's going for a lot more than I did back in the day. It also helps that the version I recorded from today was actually a completed version rather than a beta version which never quite worked properly.

I'm doing a couple of pilot Evercade episodes, too. Those will fit right in with what I'm already doing and can be produced in a similar amount of time. It'll also provide some variety to the retro stuff. For now, I'll keep the seventh generation underdogs in with short;Play since that's where they fit best for the minute, but perhaps that's worth spinning off into its own series at some point.

Ah, I enjoy creating. Oh for infinite time and money to do it to my heart's content rather than crushing my soul for five days a week… But oh well. Think of it as a reward. Just… keep thinking of it as a reward…!

Gotta be honest, watching a bunch of the Hololive gals' stream archives over the last few days has been inspiring me quite a bit. I mean, it's not as if I'm short of things to do right now between MoeGamer and my video series, but I'm feeling a certain amount of… I don't know, I guess "creative energy" is the best way to describe it.

I've been thinking about other things I might want to do with video, as with the way I work that would be the easiest side of things to add a bit to, especially now I've hit pause on the long playthroughs, which frees up a lot of time and energy.

I have several ideas brewing in this regard, and they're all in the similar "single episode showcase" format that currently seems to work well for me on my channel, which would keep things nice and consistent. I don't know if I'm going to do all of these as their own separate thing or fold them into other things, but here's a list of the ideas I've got bubbling away right now.

• Atari A to Z Flashback-style series with the Activision Anthology on PS2. I plan to do this right after Atari A to Z Flashback is finished. There's still a fair way to go on that — we're at 87 out of 150 at the time of writing, with a couple more in the can and ready to go — but that's an all but certain happening, because those Activision 2600 games are super cool. (Also they really need a modern rerelease, but today's Activision doesn't seem to really give a shit any more.)

• Atari A to Z Flashback-style series with the Intellivision Lives! collection on PS2. I don't know the Intellivision at all well, having not grown up with it — I don't think I ever even saw one in the '80s, though apparently it did come out here — but I'm fascinated by the ambition of the games on it. While I'll run into a few of the same issues I've had with Atari A to Z Flashback — mostly two player-only games — I feel like I've kind of figured out the best and easiest way to handle that now, so this is something that could run pretty smoothly.

• A companion/complementary series to my Evercade writeups on MoeGamer, showing the games actually in action. My only slight hesitance with this is that a few of the games from the Evercade's launch lineup still have some peculiar issues with video capture — usually with the audio, so this isn't an insurmountable issue by any means — but I'm quite enthusiastic about this idea, as the Evercade is a platform I absolutely adore and want to continue showing my support for in various ways.

• Some sort of celebration of the underdog games of the seventh generation, as Chris and I have been talking about on the podcast recently. This would include both retail titles that sold and/or reviewed poorly (or were ignored, as is the case with the majority of the Wii's library that doesn't have Mario on the cover) as well as digital-only games from XBLA and PSN that are still accessible, and perhaps even some bigger names that are worth revisiting from a more "modern" perspective. In some ways, I feel this could probably be folded into short;Play, and I enjoy the "pot luck" nature of producing those episodes on a whim. But on the other hand I quite like the idea of having more "focused" series with a clear intent behind them.

I'm still also trying to get my head around the idea of streaming, but I'm not 100% sure how I might be able to make that work in a practical way at a time when the people who might be interested in watching me would be able to watch me. I'm still mulling it over, though, so thank you to those who kindly responded with some feedback to my survey a while back. If you haven't already, you can take a moment to do so here.

Anyway, those are the ideas I have rattling around in my head at the moment. I might try a few "pilots" this weekend, since Andie is away seeing her mother and I have plenty of free time to record some episodes. But we'll see! Keeping myself busy at least keeps my mind out of bleak places, which is important right now.

As always, thanks for all your support, and I hope you have a thoroughly pleasant weekend — or as much as is possible right now, anyway.