I'm pleased with the upcoming videos I've got on the way. The fact that I got so many done in a big batch felt good, and I feel like they cover some interesting subject matter, too — including both a few well-known titles and, of course, some lesser-known stuff too.

I enjoy what I do a great deal — and, more to the point, I actually feel like I do a pretty good job at it, both in terms of my written work and my video work.

The latter in particular is something i'm especially pleased with; a few years back I would never really have considered doing what I did when I started Atari A to Z– let alone showing my face on video rather than providing audio-only commentary. It's help me develop a certain degree of confidence in myself; as I've noted numerous times on these pages, I am not someone who is especially self-confident, and I have particular difficulty making small talk with people I don't know particularly well (or indeed at all) and, on top of that, I have all sorts of body image issues that cause me varying degrees of anxiety.

Making videos has helped with that to a certain degree. I still don't like what I see when I look in the mirror — and I know I need to make an effort to do something about that — but, for some reason, I'm not ashamed of seeing my face on video, nor am I ashamed of hearing my voice.

That last one is a big deal. I used to hate my voice. I didn't even like it all that much when I regularly appeared on the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, the old podcast I did 10+ years ago, but I especially hated it when I was a kid. There are various reasons for that, but I guess they were insecurities that it was possible to get past. That and having a good microphone helps more than you can possibly imagine; getting something that gives your voice a bit of "presence" (mostly through a bit of body to the bass end of things) makes a world of difference.

I'm just sort of rambling now, I'm aware. But I just wanted to say thanks for continuing to support what I do, and for believing in it. I'm muddling my way through all this without any real long-term plan, and I'm enjoying it along the way. I wish I could make enough money from doing this to make it my full-time job — but for now at least, it's a means of directing my energy, and my enthusiasm for the things that have always been important to me.

Knowing that there are some lovely people following along on this journey with me is a wonderful feeling, so thank you for being here. Tell your friends!

I learned this term the other day. It describes that state of mind where all you're doing is scrolling through social media, looking for something to get upset about. You're not necessarily consciously looking for something to get upset about — you might tell yourself that you're looking for something "interesting" to engage with — but, in practice, you are, nine times out of ten, looking for something to get upset or angry about.

Now I know there's a word for this, I feel increasingly conscious of it, and I've found myself deliberately wanting to avoid social media for the last few days. This is, of course, a double-edged sword — hanging back from social media makes it difficult to talk to people (particularly if you're also hanging back from Discord because the servers you've hung out on in the past are also proving to be prone to this) but it also means you'll almost certainly get a lot more done, and not waste hours of your life getting upset and angry about things that don't matter.

I often think it'd be nice to just close my Twitter account altogether, but the fact is it's an important source of people actually finding and sharing my work — as well as making new contacts, which often leads to interesting things. So I don't feel like I can abandon it altogether, which kind of sucks.

That said, what I can do is try and curtail my doomscrolling. Put my phone out of reach when I'm doing something else. Break the habit of just clicking through Twitter, Discord, Reddit when my mind is idling. Get more shit done. Perhaps even go so far as to set myself some specific "Twitter hours" when I sit down and "do my social media" for the day. That is, after all, how we used to handle email. Six o'clock and cheap rate phone calls would roll around, we'd log on to CompuServe, check our emails, respond to any that needed responding to, then hang up.

Ah, simpler times. Perhaps there's some value in trying to recapture that.

A mildly interesting thought occurred to me while I was buttering my bagel five minutes ago. (No, that's not a euphemism). And that is that sports games are not what they used to be.

This might sound blindingly obvious, but let me talk you through my thought process.

I've been revisiting quite a lot of sports games through the Atari A to Z Flashback series in particular, and I tend to dread the prospect of them, but actually end up quite enjoying a lot of them. In the case of 2600 games, this is often because the games in question only bear a passing resemblance to the sport they're supposedly simulating and are instead designed as "fun video games".

But that's not all. Recently on Atari ST A to Z, I covered Epyx's Winter Games, and I was reminded how much I liked that series of games back on the Atari 8-bit and ST. And this evening, on a whim I decided to boot up Vancouver 2010, the official video game of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I had a blast with it!

I even — don't tell anyone — had a good time with at least one installment of FIFA back in the day. Specifically, the World Cup '98 incarnation on the N64, which I picked up as part of my failed attempts to "get into football" and fit in a bit better with my peers. World Cup '98 was, again, just a fun video game — albeit one that bore rather more of a resemblance to the game of football than Championship Soccer on 2600 did.

In recent years, it feels like the sports games, particularly those that have become annualised, have lost sight of the things that made games like the NHL series on the Mega Drive great — they were fun video games first and foremost; the kind of thing you could throw on when you had friends over, and you'd have a great time trash-talking and competing against one another.

These days, the sports games are their publishers' cash cows. Not only do they release versions with marginally incremental improvements each year — along with the odious "Legacy Edition" practice they've been doing on Switch, which I won't get into now — but they riddle the damn things with microtransactions. FIFA has its Ultimate Team mode, for example, which is a fun idea in theory until you consider quite how much money you could end up investing in it if you decide to take it seriously. And one of the basketball games in recent years attracted a ton of controversy for featuring a casino mode. What happened to, y'know, basketball?

I dunno. These games don't feel like they're about getting a few friends over to have some fun any more; like so many other things, it feels like they're more about trying to assert your dominance online, brag about your "achievements" (when said achievements more than likely actually mostly came about from throwing your money at things) and then quietly buy the next, near-identical game the following year because no-one will play the old one online any more.

I really enjoyed my brief time with Vancouver 2010 this evening. It's a fun, simple, arcade-style winter sports game that I can see being immensely fun with multiple players involved. If hanging out in person ever becomes a thing again, I'm definitely going to give it a shot with some friends — along with some of the other Olympics games I've found myself collecting for 50p a pop in recent months!

You won't catch me buying any of the modern sports games, though. For me, they represent the very worst of the modern games industry — and they don't even look like fun video games that anyone can pick up any more!

Been super productive today! Got a whole bunch of videos recorded and ready to edit, and I'm pleased with the variety of stuff covered in them.

I'm already feeling that the decision to drop long playthroughs for now was very much the right one; working on the videos today without the "weight" of several hours of FFIII looming over me was very pleasant indeed. I could focus on each individual game without worrying about having to rush or anything like that, and it was nice.

As I noted in my video the other day, I'm not ruling out the idea of returning to long playthroughs in the future — some of my favourite videos are from previous long playthroughs, particularly in the Project Zero and Split/Second series. For now, though, I'm pretty convinced I've made the right decision.

Off to bed now. Gonna get all this stuff edited tomorrow, and then I'll be well ahead of schedule on things, which is a nice feeling. Hope the end of your respective weeks are good, and you have a pleasant weekend to look forward to!

I've had a pleasantly peaceful day today. I haven't given myself too much to do, made some free time for myself, and still got some stuff done. Notably, I got all my research done ready for another batch of Atari A to Z videos, so I can spend tomorrow getting well ahead of schedule on those, and perhaps putting some other things together, too.

Spent some more time with Magicami DX, too. Enjoying that a lot, actually, though it's a shame that the mobile version doesn't seem to work yet — I'd love to be able to play it on the toilet. They are aware of the issue, at least, so that should be all sorted soon. In the meantime, the browser version works perfectly fine and, more importantly, the gyaru character has now joined my party, so all is very well in the world of Magicami.

Getting nicely ahead of schedule on Atelier, too, which is nice after the last few PS2 installments ran a little longer than I expected! I've got a few more Atelier Rorona articles in me, and in the meantime I'm partway through Atelier Totori and doing much better than my first playthrough! I finished the first "half" of the game approximately two in-game years ahead of schedule, so at present I'm able to run around pretty freely working on relationships, events and crafting shiny pieces of equipment for as many of the characters as I can. Not sure if I'll get the True ending or not — the True ending requirements in Atelier Totori are very strict and challenging! — but so long as I haven't messed anything up beyond repair so far, and I don't think I have, I might have a shot at it. We'll see.

Continuing to enjoy Nurse Love Syndrome, too. I can't tell if I've ended up on a "route" or not as yet — or indeed if this VN even has discrete "routes", but I assume it does — but I'm finding it thoroughly compelling, with an extremely likeable cast of characters and an almost painful sense of relatability with regard to feeling somewhat "out of your depth" in the workplace. More on that when I've finished a single playthrough, though.

Tomorrow will be a day for making videos and writing, then I'll see how I feel over the weekend. Might be nice to just have a couple of days completely off, but we'll see how restless I'm feeling 🙂

It's the end of my working week now; I have the next couple of days off. I was hoping to take the whole week off, but something something important projects high priority blah blah blah. Oh well. Two days is better than no days.

As I contemplate the free time ahead of me, I'm suddenly overcome with a feeling akin to exhaustion. I don't think I'm necessarily physically exhausted, but I feel mentally exhausted. And I'm not 100% sure why; I wouldn't say I've been especially stressed or anything of late. My conjecture is that my dissatisfaction with my day job is, in itself, proving to be a bit stressful, and the prospect of being away from that for a few days is providing something of a release of tension that has been steadily building up over the course of the last few… weeks, months, whatever it is.

And so it is that I find myself at 8.30pm, strongly contemplating going to bed. It feels like a bit of a waste, though. Perhaps I need to neck a nice cup of coffee or something — there are lots of things I could be doing (that I actually want to do, more to the point), so I just need to shake off the mental fog that threatens to descend and actually get on with something I enjoy for now. Time for oneself is precious; no sense in wasting it worrying about literally nothing.

With that in mind, I'm off to get a coffee and, in all likelihood, play some Atelier Totori. Hope your week is going well!

This is set to come out as tomorrow's episode of short;Play, but I was excited to share it early with those of you following along on here. My parents are among you kind Patrons, and since my Dad was very interested in seeing the new Microsoft Flight Simulator in action, I thought I'd give him (and the rest of you) an early look.

Enjoy the flight… and don't worry, I do notice that I left my flaps extended eventually.

Bank holiday today, so I had a day off from the day job. Part of my day was taken up with ferrying the wife and her friends to the station ahead of their Final Fantasy XIV Free Company trip to Brighton, so I didn't get it entirely to myself, but I did manage to get a bunch of stuff recorded, including the next two weeks' worth of Atari A to Z videos, and one episode of short;Play. That leaves one episode of short;Play and two episodes of Final Fantasy Marathon to polish off by the end of the week (ideally, anyway) — and since I have Thursday and Friday off, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I must confess I'm actually considering retiring the Final Fantasy Marathon series. Although I feel like the complete marathon is a noble goal that I do want to accomplish, at the same time it's also the most time-consuming and tiring of all the video series that I do right now, at the current rate I'm going it's going to take literally years, and right now I'm not enjoying it all that much. I've always found Final Fantasy III a bit of a drag anyway, and at the moment I'm feeling more "obliged" to play it than that I "want" to play it. This is obviously a bit of a problem.

The other thing is that the series hasn't achieved what I hoped it would: I was hoping that recognisable names like the Final Fantasy games would bring more people to the channel, and then they'd discover the other stuff I do, but in practice it's actually ended up being the other way around — people come to my channel for the interesting and weird stuff, particularly the Atari games. I guess that makes sense; there are almost certainly thousands of Final Fantasy videos out there, however much I might put my own twist on them with stuff like my silly voice acting and whatnot, whereas explorations of Atari games are rarer by virtue of the fact that Atari systems (2600 aside) were always less popular than the machines that "won" their respective generations.

In other words, people are coming to my channel for something unique, rather than being attracted by something they could (in theory) see somewhere else. So with that in mind, it's starting to feel a bit like a waste of time and energy to continue with the Final Fantasy videos, when they take up so much time and energy in my recording sessions. I feel like I'd rather spend that being able to get further ahead of schedule, or doing some more ambitious short;Play episodes like the one I recorded earlier tonight.

I don't know. I'll mull it over throughout the week and decide soon. I know there are a couple of regular viewers of the Final Fantasy videos — and when I get relatively few views like I do, those individuals can be precious — but for the sake of my own energy levels it's something I definitely need to ponder. I'd much rather take the time to be doing stuff that I'm truly enthusiastic about than stuff that is starting to feel like a bit of a drag.

Anyway! That aside, hope you've had a pleasant Monday. Back to the day job for a couple of days for me tomorrow, then Thursday and Friday off to do things I want to do. Can't wait. For now, sleep (and possibly Nurse Love Syndrome) is calling.

As promised, I spent a significant proportion of today playing with Koikatsu to get a feel for the possibilities of the character creator, and a brief bit of time in the Studio. Both are very similar to Honey Select — the Studio app in particular is pretty much identical to Studio NEO from the Honey Select expansion — so it was fun to see what a difference the change in art style made from its more realistic counterpart.

The results of my day's work can be seen here:

I'm kicking around an idea in my head for a yuri VN based in an office, and figured out some preliminary character profiles earlier. Then I went into Koikatsu and tweaked things in the character creator until I felt like their respective "looks" went with the personalities and backgrounds I'd established for each of them. Then I plonked them into Studio and got them to pose. I'm pleased with the result, though I want to fiddle around a bit more with the myriad lighting options, since Koikatsu allows everything from the hard lines seen in this image to softer, more subtle transitions between light and shadow.

At some point in the very near future I'll experiment with making some actual character sprites using Koikatsu and seeing if they'll import into Visual Novel Maker. There's no reason why they shouldn't, of course — it's just a matter of if they look any good or not. And once I've got those basic assets in place, that's a brand new creative project I can throw myself into when I'm feeling at a loose end, as increasingly infrequent as that is these days.

Anyway, Koikatsu gets a hearty thumbs up from me right now. I haven't touched the main game mode at all and I'm already having a blast. This is what these pieces of software are really all about.

I picked up a copy of Koikatsu Party earlier. Well, more accurately I paid for a copy on Steam to assuage my conscience and then downloaded a pre-patched, modded version of the Japanese original, since there's more stuff in it.

If you're unfamiliar, Koikatsu is exactly as the title suggests: it is Honey Select Unlimited, but anime. In other words, it has the in-depth character creation and excellent Studio app from Honey Select, but eschews the more "realistic" art style in favour of anime cel-shading. And it looks lovely.

I haven't played with it enough to really have anything worth sharing yet, but I'm looking forward to fiddling with it some more. I haven't yet decided if Midori and Yumi will get an "upgrade" — I'm rather attached to their Custom Maid 3D 2 incarnations — but we'll have to see how things go. In the meantime, I'm interested to see if Koikatsu's output is sufficient to make convincing visual novel sprites, since I have a few ideas in that regard rattling around in my head, and a lack of art assets is always the thing I find the biggest roadblock in putting something together.

I have Monday off as a public holiday, so I'm going to spend the weekend chilling out, playing with Koikatsu (and doubtless some Flight Simulator as well) and just having fun, then I'll get the next couple of weeks' worth of videos done on Monday. I also have Thursday and Friday off from the day job that week, too, so that will be nice.

For now, after not sleeping too well last night, I think it's off to bed with me!