I decided to give myself a bit of a day "off" today, so I've had a nice day of just kicking back, relaxing and playing some stuff I felt like playing. As it happens, it's all stuff I'll end up writing about at some point anyway, but I mean I put aside immediate commitments today to enjoy it!

Specifically I've been enjoying two recent arrivals: 51 Worldwide Games for Nintendo Switch, which is exactly what I hoped it would be — with rather more sassiness from the plastic minifig "hosts" than I expected! — and the PC Engine Coregrafx Mini.

The latter is something I've been looking forward to for a while, because the PC Engine/Turbografx 16 is a big black spot in my gaming knowledge. The system wasn't especially well-known over here in the UK thanks to the fact it only got an extremely limited release after the platform's relative failure in North America, so it's always something I've sort of admired from afar; I remember reading about this mystical "PC Engine" and its CD-ROM add-on when I used to read the magazine Advanced Computer Entertainment (or ACE), and always wanted a go on one. But I've never really had the chance — outside of emulation — up until this adorable little gizmo.

As a result, I don't know a lot of PC Engine/Turbografx games at all. While once this would have been reason for me to go "well, why on Earth would I want one then?", these days that fills me with a great deal of excitement. What possibilities lie ahead of me? What can I look forward to? What have I been missing out on all these years?

Naturally, I spent a significant portion of time playing Ys Book I & II, which I'm already familiar with. Although in my defence, I haven't played the PC Engine version before, which means I haven't bathed in the majesty of the CD soundtrack, which sounds remarkably like a late '80s mixtape in the best possible way. Love it.

Anyway, there will be PC Engine coverage on MoeGamer in the very near future. Please look forward to it!

Hello Patrons! An important "thank you" to all of you today, because today is the day that the yearly bills have to be paid for MoeGamer, and you've all made doing that a whole lot easier. So thank you for that; you've helped keep the lights on for another year.

I'm going to have to think about expanding or rejigging the way I do things at some point, because on my current plan I'm starting to run out of storage space — I'm currently at 78% of capacity. The next plan up on WordPress is twice the price per year but offers more than ten times the storage space plus a bunch of additional features, so that would be nice. It's a bit out of my price range at present, however — even with your generous assistance! Maybe give your game-loving friends a nudge to help me out, eh? 🙂 (Joking. Mostly. Although I certainly wouldn't complain.)

The alternative, of course, is to migrate MoeGamer from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation. This is probably the most cost-effective approach in the long run, but it's a bit more of a challenge to stay on top of maintenance and updates if you do that. I've had a few dodgy experiences with self-hosted WordPress in the past — particularly with spammers compromising the site — so I'm a little hesitant to do that, especially as WordPress.com's general level of support and reliability is so good. And especially because migrating everything that is on MoeGamer.net today — posts, pages, media — will be a big ol' pain, too!

Anyway, that's all stuff for Future Pete — a much later Future Pete than the one that has been in the most recent Atari A to Z videos — to worry about. For now, I want to say once again, a big and hearty thank you for believing in what I do enough to want to support it. You're the best!

Lots of lovely things due to come through the post very soon indeed. There's the Evercade, of course, which I've mentioned a few times and am extremely eager to get hands-on with; there's the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini or whatever it's called over here, which Amazon now estimates will be here on Saturday, and, of course, there's Game of the Year, 51 Worldwide Games, aka Clubhouse Games.

The latter should be here tomorrow and I'm looking forward to it a great deal. I enjoy tabletop play, for sure, but with things as they are right now getting together with friends isn't an option — and with two (and possibly a third at some point soon) of my regular tabletop gaming friends rather inconsiderately having children, that's something of a rarity even when the world isn't being swept by a global pandemic and worldwide protests.

The fact that 51 Worldwide Games incorporates a bunch of "classics" rather than anything modern and new is appealing, to be honest; while I do enjoy a lot of modern tabletop games, many of them play for an extremely long time and have a tendency to get overcomplicated, particularly from a components perspective. I think I've mentioned Gloomhaven on here before, which is a beautifully produced game, but has approximately six billion components, takes three hours to set up and even longer to play and consequently became exhausting and not fun as a result. Backgammon, meanwhile, you need a couple of dice, some tokens and a board and you're away.

I'm actually quite interested in getting to know how to play some classics a bit better, because getting the hang of some of these games with simple to learn, hard to master rules might help me out with the mental block I have concerning strategic thinking in more complex games. If I'm not having to think about tons of overlapping mechanics and referring back to the rulebook and can instead concentrate on some simple but broadly applicable mechanics, I feel like I'll probably be able to get a much better feel for things. But we'll see.

Either way, I'm genuinely looking forward to 51 Worldwide Games a great deal — so hopefully I'll be able to report back with some first impressions tomorrow!

After quite a while of it being unavailable through anyone other than price-inflating eBay scalpers, I managed to score a copy of Ring Fit Adventure for Switch. It arrived today, so I gave it a go for the first time.

Having not really done any exercise since the pandemic started, it was a bit of a challenge to get moving again, but it was satisfying to genuinely feel the game working different areas of my body — and as you progress more options open up.

I'm most intrigued by the "game" aspect of it, though, as this has a ton of potential to keep things interesting compared to the rather dry and clinical exercise games we've had in the past. Well, I mean, Wii Fit had some fun minigames, but everyone knew that the exercises that actually had an impact were the "boring" muscle and yoga exercises.

Ring Fit Adventure, though; it integrates actual exercises into a game-like scenario. So far it appears to follow a structure whereby you jog on the spot to proceed through a level, "squeezing" the ring controller to blast out an attack in the direction you're pointing it (mostly used for breaking targets and obstacles) or laying it "flat" in front of you and squeezing it to do a jetpack-type jump thing to clear gaps or reach aerial goodies.

The bulk of the muscle exercises then come when you encounter an enemy, at which point you engage in a turn-based battle against them. You pick a move from those you have available, each of which corresponds to an exercise, then perform a series of repetitions of that exercise to deal damage. After that, during the enemy's turn, you squeeze the ring controller against your abs to "brace yourself" and reduce the damage you take. You then repeat the process until either you or the enemy run out of life.

You can't just perform one single exercise over and over, either; each one has a "cooldown" (usually just a single turn, at least at the early stage I'm at) before you can use it again, so you'll need to alternate at least two different exercises in most fights. Thankfully, so far there has seemingly been no need to do all the exercises available, so if there are some you struggle with, you can leave them out of your routine until you're feeling a bit more confident, flexible or whatever.

Once you finish a fight or level, you're rewarded with experience points, which level up your attack and defense stats and I believe unlock new "moves" a little later. As you progress, your total time exercising is totted up and the game can even read your heart rate using the IR camera on the Joy-Con. Clever stuff.

I was sweaty and sore after my first routine today, but I'm going to stick with it. It's easy to set up and the "game" aspect makes it feel entertaining rather than just something you feel like you "should" do. Plus it's all drenched in that trademark Nintendo good humour, supportiveness and polish, which goes a long way towards making it something you'll want to engage with over the long term.

Anyway. Further reports on that as progress dictates, but I'd say we're off to a good start, sore knees aside!

I did something I thought I wouldn't do today — I took my mostly dormant Facebook account and decided to actually add some people I know as friends, with a mind to maybe starting to use it a little bit again. I've been pretty rigorous about who I've chosen to add, mind — just people who are actual, honest to goodness, real-life friends and family members.

The reason I did this is that after a number of years of being without a Facebook account, it's become all too apparent that a lot of people I know do not venture beyond those "walls" when hanging out with other people online. I take stuff like Twitter, Google Hangouts, Discord and the like for granted because I use them all as part of my daily routine, but not everyone is as "connected" as that — nor do they want to be, nor should they have to be.

So with that in mind, rather than mourning how I don't talk to some people any more or haven't heard from [x] for a while, I thought I'd take a proactive step and actually put myself in a position where I can be reached more easily for those people who don't venture outside of Facebook. And it's been extremely pleasant to have a lovely warm welcome back from a lot of people, many of whom I haven't spoken to for years at this point. It's like we can just pick back up where we left off.

I probably picked a bad time to come back to Facebook what with everything in the world being… as it is right now, but sometimes the desire for human contact overrides irrational thought.

Did you know I have a Steam Curator page? You can find it at http://store.steampowered.com/curator/26024701/ if you want to follow it or see what's there.

I actually could do with updating some stuff on it — I've tried to ensure that all the stuff I put on there are things that I've covered on MoeGamer at one point or another, but to be honest, I often forget about it for periods before getting around to updating it again.

It came to the forefront of my mind today because one of the nice things about having a Curator page is it makes it super-easy for developers and publishers to offer you games to cover. I picked up one that looked interesting today and played it through — turned out it was a great experience. You'll see the full writeup for that one on Tuesday; as a teaser, it's a new game from the folks who made Deep Space Waifu, but it's a rather different sort of game for them!

Stuff that gets offered to me through Steam Curator is either super interesting or complete garbage in my experience. Thankfully, I've had a lot more of the former than the latter come to my attention — and I tend to make a point of simply not accepting the stuff that is obviously Stolen Art Hentai Puzzle #357 and things like that. That means I can devote some time and attention to the intriguing-looking stuff — which in many cases doesn't get a lot of attention from the various forms of the media.

Always good to have things that make you "distinct" after all, isn't it?

Today I finally polished off Final Fantasy II's postgame scenario, Soul of Rebirth. The video for that will be up on Friday — it's rendering right now otherwise I'd share it with you all now!

Soul of Rebirth was a bit of an ordeal. I enjoyed it on the whole, but it was a stiff challenge that was very daunting at the outset thanks to the wildly varied position I'd left all the characters in.

For the unfamiliar, Soul of Rebirth takes the four characters that died as part of FFII's main story and gives them an adventure in the afterlife to complete. The state they were in when they died in the main game are the state they're at when you get them in Soul of Rebirth — and the enemies you're fighting are pretty much "end of the main game" standard, so you're going to take some beats to begin with.

In FFII, taking beats is one way to progress, of course, but you also need to make an effort to train all your peeps in an appropriate way. In the main game, every character is pretty much a blank slate from the outset; in Soul of Rebirth, however, you're basically taking "half-finished" characters and polishing them up to be able to take on some stuff challenges.

The whole thing very much has the feel of a dungeon crawler; it's light on story but big on carefully managing your resources to delve ever deeper into a lengthy dungeon, with powerful bosses along the way to test your skills — plus plenty of random encounters to gradually exhaust you too.

It won't be to everyone's taste — much as Final Fantasy II as a whole isn't — but I'm glad I stuck it out and made it to the end. I feel a real sense of achievement for having cleared that.

Onto FFIII next!

I spent a fair bit of time in Phantasy Star Online 2 today figuring out what's what. And I spent a pleasing amount of time just pissing about in the game as well as doing actual progression-related stuff.

There were a few notable things that happened. Firstly, I happened to be in the Shopping area when a "live concert" was set to go off, so I managed to catch space idol Quna doing a performance. This is actually really neat; while you're standing in the area, you can hit a button to get a properly directed "cutscene" version of her song, or you can just hang out and act like an idiot in front of the stage. Or, as most people did, a bit of both. There's also a physics-based ball game in front of the stage, so you can waste some time competing against a rando to knock this ball into one of the two nearby coloured goals for… no reward whatsoever besides your own personal satisfaction. Love it.

Staying for Quna's song provides you with a buff that lasts quite a while. Plus, when she's finished, you can actually type "ENCORE" and if enough people do that, she comes back out for another song. Very cool.

As her performance finished, I received a notification that an "Urgent Quest" was underway. These are quests that only show up at specific times of day for short periods of time, and it just so happened that it was one I needed to progress in the currently running "Wedding Event", so I jumped in.

It was a ton of fun, and the kind of multiplayer I actually enjoy — no obligation to do things directly with others or competitiveness, but a whole bunch of people in the same area all working towards a common goal. I think there was a full 12 of us in the quest at once, all doing our best to take down as many enemies as possible as quickly as we could — and making a beeline for the various special events any time they happened.

Of particular note in that regard was the occasional appearance of Nyau (presumably a distant relation of Myau from the original Phantasy Star) who goads you into a pointless fight then accidentally opens interdimensional portals to bring unspeakable horrors tumbling out while attempting to escape.

Really enjoying the game so far… aside from the horrendous lag on the lobby ship during peak hours. I'm sure that'll settle down with time, though, and the actual in-game action is smooth and slick as anything. So I feel like I'll be spending quite some time in this game!

Morning everyone! If you support a few people on Patreon, you've probably heard all this already, but for the benefit of those who haven't, I'll provide you a bit of information.

From June 1, Patreon is obliged by law to add sales tax to some Patron's pledges if you're from certain locations. For some of you, this won't affect you; for others, you may already be paying a form of sales tax (such as VAT in the UK), so nothing will change.

Patreon will be providing full details of the affected regions in an email to you all from June 1 onwards, but I wanted to give you all a heads-up that this is coming. If you're in one of the affected regions, this may result in a small increase to your pledge amount in line with your local sales tax rate.

Don't worry about this too much! Sales tax in the US ranges from 4% to 11%, so on a $5 pledge, this will mean about 20-55 cents in tax added at most — not much at all. Patreon estimates that less than half of all Patrons will be affected, and the amount involved will be very small. And if you live outside one of the affected regions — which Patreon will be providing further details of in their email to you on June 1 — nothing happens at all!

Not everything on Patreon is taxable, however, and thus creators have been encouraged to classify what each tier "means" in terms of value. "General support" is not taxable, for example, as nothing is actually being sold — it's effectively a donation — but things like exclusive content (these blog posts) and digital goods (monthly wallpapers) are in some circumstances. I've done my best to classify the benefits to minimise the impact to those of you in the affected areas.

Thanks in advance for your understanding. All this is a legal requirement (well, more accurately, a variety of international legal requirements) that Patreon are required to follow in line with local tax laws based on the "buyer's" location but, as I say, it shouldn't affect too many of you that much.

Have a pleasant Friday, and apologies to be the bearer of… fairly "meh" news 🙂

Well, after a very long wait, Phantasy Star Online 2 is finally here for English-speaking audiences — officially this time, none of that South-East Asia shenanigans — and I've spent a fair portion of today playing it.

I'll be writing something more substantial on the subject on MoeGamer soon (possibly tomorrow, taking a look at "my first day" and the history of the game) but suffice to say for now that I'm thoroughly enamoured with it.

It suffers a little from that "online game that has been up for a while" issue, whereby the moment you log on you are bombarded with about a zillion things you can do, but if you take the time to focus on what you're doing, work your way through what are clearly intended to be the introductory, tutorial quests and features, you'll soon figure out what's going on.

Mechanically and structurally, it's not super-complex or difficult to get into, but there is plenty of depth there — and in contrast to cooldown-based online RPGs, there's a strong emphasis on skill and timing. The combat is enormously satisfying, and feels very true to the original Dreamcast version; after hitting so many Perfect Attacks in the last six hours or so I feel like I'm going to be seeing that red circle in my sleep tonight!

If you happen to want to jump in and go on some space adventures with me, I'm on Ship 1 under the player ID "MoeGamer", so you should be able to find me that way. Alternatively, shoot me a DM via some means (here, Twitter, Discord) and we can arrange a time to meet up and hit Rappies in the head with pointy sticks.

I feel like I'm going to have to control myself with this game; it has the potential to be a real life-devourer, I can feel it now!