I've spent probably the best part of the last couple of decades looking for a red chicken tikka masala.

This might sound like a strange thing to be searching for but it, like so many bizarre and pointless quests, stems from nostalgia. Specifically, in this case, nostalgia for my university days, when getting together with friends for a curry and some video games on the N64 was a frequent occurrence. I used to have red chicken tikka masalas on those occasions, and in recent years I simply haven't been able to find one.

I don't really know what's different about a red chicken tikka masala, but I know it's better than the low-rent butter chicken knockoffs that most local curry houses seem to fob people off with. They don't taste right. And they're yellow. Chicken tikka masala should be red.

I'm not sure how, why and when this started to be a thing. I remember red chicken tikka masala being the default chicken tikka masala back when I was at university, regardless of where we ordered from. Or perhaps all the places on the "student street" that housed all the takeaways we frequented just all happened to do it in the same way, and they're the ones who are all wrong.

Anyway. Tonight I successfully found a red chicken tikka masala, and thus I am very happy. For bonus points and added nostalgia, it is from the takeaway that my friend Sam and I once serenaded at about 2 o' clock in the morning after a night on the piss (and of failing to have any courage whatsoever at Going On The Pull) to the tune of S Club Party.

"Maaaaanziiiiiiilssss… Indian takeawaaaaaay! Maaaaaanziiiiilllls, gonna buuurn your arrssse!"

So how's your lockdown going, everyone? My brain isn't unravelling at all!

I don't know why I do this to myself… but sometimes when I cover an older game, I like to look back on reviews from the time when it was originally released, just to kind of take the temperature of how it was received by the more "mainstream" side of things. I inevitably end up wanting to throw something through my screen in frustration at the terrible articles I find myself reading, but looking at some Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis reviews today got me thinking.

We give today's games press a lot of shit — and rightfully so, in many cases. But, looking back on some of this crap, it's hard to deny that, generally speaking, and sociopolitical grandstanding aside… things are generally quite a bit better than they were a decade or two ago, at least in terms of some reviewers (not all, sadly) actually putting in a bit of effort to 1) spend some time with the game and 2) do some research.

Look outside of the commercial mainstream press, of course, and you're much more likely to find some genuinely good quality writing about games. I follow and hang out online with a lot of people who are very good at what they do, and none of them are "professionals".

Here's 1up.com's review of Mana Khemia from 2008, for example. Just over 500 words for a 40+ hour game. The actual content of the review speaks about nothing beyond what you see within the first couple of hours of the game. It does not address the game's context as part of the Atelier series. It goes into no detail about either the combat or alchemy mechanics. It describes the plot as "familiar" and "easy to swallow" without examining any of it or describing any details whatsoever. And it refers to the characters as "generic" without elaborating on whatever the hell that means — and after teasing the fact that your initial companions are "a quiet bookworm with pink hair and a feisty half-girl/half-cat monstrosity", which makes them sound pretty interesting to me.

(Also, Jess is absolutely, positively neither quiet nor a bookworm, leading me to believe that the reviewer's assessment of her is based entirely on her appearance in the opening credits, where she says nothing because there is no dialogue in the opening credits — because they're opening credits — and where she happens to be sitting at a desk reading a book. But then I probably shouldn't expect anything more from someone who admits in the first paragraph to "mashing the X button to speed up the text" rather than paying attention to the narrative.)

Oh, and they also moan about the English voice acting, apparently completely unaware that the very good original Japanese voice track is right there on the disc for anyone's enjoyment — something that PS2-era NIS America was actually very good about including in most of their releases.

This is far from the only review of Mana Khemia that has issues like this, and… I dunno, it feels weird. I used to look up to these websites and the people who wrote for them, but then back when I was reading them, I tended not to be looking up information on weird late-era PS2 RPGs that came out two years after the Xbox 360 launched. I was looking up information on whatever the prettiest new brown game featuring bald space marines was. Ahh, good times.

As I often argue on MoeGamer and my video series, though, a good or otherwise interesting game is timeless, and just because Mana Khemia was slapped with some mediocre, low-effort reviews back in the day doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed now. In fact, I'd argue it's easier to enjoy it now, because you divorce it entirely from the context in which it was released and examine it purely on its own terms — and as an installment in the series it forms part of.

It's just a bit of a shame that games like this are forever branded with low ratings on Metacritic, and thus rarely talked about, analysed or otherwise celebrated. Oh well, only one thing to do then, huh…?

Preorders for the new Shantae game open tomorrow. Of course I'm there. After regretting not jumping on the original Limited Run releases of Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse, I've made a point of picking up anything Shantae-related immediately.

That's not all that's on the horizon though. I'm currently awaiting my Limited Run order of Streets of Rage 4, for one, and in late May/early June I should be receiving copies of Dungeon of the Endless and 51 Worldwide Classics for Switch. Looking forward to the latter in particular; 42 All-Time Classics was legitimately one of my favourite Nintendo DS games.

Oh, I got turned down for a review code for the first time in ages today. I'm not mad or anything, devs and pubs have the right to choose who they give freebies to, but I did find the phrasing of their response rather odd — "after reviewing your content, we have determined not to issue a review code at this time". It sounded like a frigging job application response.

Oh well. The game was SuperMash, if you're curious, so don't expect any coverage of that any time soon. I like the idea of the game, but not to the tune of £15 at my own expense. I'll give it another look sometime if it's in an eShop sale or something.

Anyway, aside from that, as you know, I'm still eagerly awaiting my Evercade. There's going to be a ton of interesting things to talk about with that; I can't wait!

Better sleep now. One more day until the weekend. Hopefully we'll be recording a podcast this weekend, so please look forward to that! For now, farewell.

Ah, man. I'm really enjoying Mana Khemia, and a big part of that is the ensemble cast. There's a really "tight-knit" feeling to the central group of characters that is thoroughly in keeping with the school setting; it really does feel like you're hanging out together at this school for alchemy wizards, getting to know everyone.

A big part of this is actually through non-verbal stuff. In Mana Khemia's alchemy system, for example, while you (as protagonist Vayne) are crafting things, various characters can be seen getting up to all sorts of mischief around the workshop while you try and concentrate. This is partly a mechanical thing — Mana Khemia's alchemy system features a timed button press mechanic, and these animations are designed to distract you from it — but the ways the different characters behave are all so well and truly in keeping with their personalities that I can't help but just enjoy them charging around, doing handstands and taking ill-advised "tastes" from the alchemy cauldron.

It's an interesting change of pace after the three Atelier Iris games, too. While all three Atelier Iris games featured some sort of potentially world-ending threat by the end of them — and this threat became clear by partway through the narrative — Mana Khemia, so far, feels rather more mundane. I suspect this may well change by the end of the story and I'm fully prepared for that, but at the moment it's just about schoolkids who happen to be good at making stuff in cauldrons. And the most inappropriate school nurse that has ever been seen in a piece of Japanese popular media.

I'm into the game's second "year" now, and its fifth chapter; I believe there are something like twelve chapters altogether, and multiple endings. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to cheese the multiple endings by being careful about the order in which I'm doing things and making a tactical save… that would be the sensible thing to do in terms of getting the game done efficiently, of course, but I also just kind of want to play the game and enjoy focusing on whoever becomes my favourite character.

I also don't really know who will end up being my favourite character yet, because they all have their own very different charms. We shall have to see!

If it wasn't already clear, I'm very much looking forward to the Evercade device from Blaze. For the unfamiliar, this is a new handheld that runs on its own proprietary cartridges, each of which contains a collection of games. It's a system designed specifically for those who enjoy collecting packaged games, as each cartridge is numbers and the intention is clearly to allow owners to build up a complete "library" of titles for the platform.

It remains to be seen whether the thing will be enough of a hit to go the distance — but the nice thing about it is that even if it doesn't, the launch lineup of 10 cartridges includes 123 games (if I counted correctly) and that is an astonishing range of games to come out of the gates with. Then on top of that, later in the year we'll have a cartridge collecting "new old games" Xeno Crisis and Tanglewood plus, excitingly, two Atari Lynx collections.

I'm super excited about the latter two. I have exceedingly fond memories of the Atari Lynx and very much regret selling the one I had during a moment of weakness, mental instability and/or desire to please my ex-wife. (I forget which. Probably all of the above.) Between the two cartridges already announced, almost all of my favourite games from the system are already coming to Evercade — and judging by the number of people who are hyped up about these releases in general, hopefully there will be some more. Lynx games have never been rereleased on any platform, you see, unlike Super NES, Sega Mega Drive and Atari 2600 games, which we've seen many times over in many console generations at this point!

I'm also intrigued to try some Atari 7800 games, of which there are a few on the two Atari Collection cartridges. I've never had a chance to give an Atari 7800 a go and have always been intrigued by this strange device with reasonably nice graphical capabilities (for an 8-bit Atari console) and horrendous sound.

But then there's all the other cool stuff, too; the Mega Cat Studios cartridge, which features a variety of modern indie games, and the Piko Interactive cartridge, which includes a variety of retro classics that haven't seen many (or any) rereleases over the years — and some that never got released in the first place. It's all very exciting.

All being well, I should have one in my hands by the end of next week, and I intend to write a bit about each and every game for the thing on MoeGamer over time. So please look forward to that!

As you'll have seen if you've been keeping an eye on my YouTube channel, I'm getting a reasonable distance into Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis now. I'm really enjoying it; it's got a lot of Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm about it — which is good, because I liked that game a lot — but it's also got its own distinct feel.

And the cast is brilliant. I jokingly referred to this as "anime Harry Potter" the other day and I kind of stand by that — even with its narrative going off in its own direction and its focus being distinct. The reason I feel like this is because of the character dynamics going on; we've got a gradually expanding central cast of loveable idiots (who are all idiots for different reasons) and a thoroughly loathsome villain.

Or perhaps I should say "antagonist"; Tony's role in Mana Khemia very much feels like that of Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter. He's one of the most unpleasant people you'll ever encounter and he does some absolutely reprehensible things, but he feels just slightly too incompetent to ever really be a "big bad". We'll see where that goes. Either way, it felt really good to kick the snot out of him at the end of Chapter 4.

And, as you'll see when I post my Gameplay Archive video tomorrow, I was having enough fun this evening to play it for nearly 4 hours non-stop without realising. Gotta love it when that happens!

We're taking it mostly easy today. Andie's done a bit of plastering and sanding, but I think she's pretty much spent, so the rest of the day is going to be chilling out and enjoying ourselves. I'm going to play some more Mana Khemia — which, if you weren't aware, I've been archiving my play sessions for over on my YouTube channel.

Check down the bottom of the front page for commentary-free gameplay videos — and if you're doing any video projects that need some footage from any of the games I've recorded gameplay for, feel free to use some of mine. A brief credit or a link back to MoeGamer.net or my YouTube channel would be appreciated, but I'm not going to insist on it or anything 🙂

I joined the official Evercade Discord server yesterday. It's refreshing to see an online space filled with people who seem to be honestly enthusiastic rather than keen to pick fault with everything. It's just people who are honestly excited for a highly intriguing new retro gaming system that I can't wait to get my hands on. Here's hoping I get mine towards the start of the "release window" — I'm thinking it should be fairly likely, since the change from a "release date" to a "release window" was largely down to potential issues getting the systems out to distributors, and FunStock (from whom I ordered) are Evercade, so that should be fine. Hopefully.

I really hope so, in fact, since I've booked the week after release off from the day job so I can spend some serious time with the system to write about it and perhaps make some videos. I figure that the games on those various collections are all worth exploring not just from the perspective of being games available for Evercade, but simply as retro titles in their own right. As such, my aim is to cover all of the games on all of the carts in their own individual articles over time; we'll see how plausible that is!

Andie's been doing noisy DIY today so I wasn't able to record any videos or anything. I did, you'll hopefully have seen already, get the next part of the Atelier MegaFeature out the door, and also did a bit of site tinkering for my own personal gratification, and got two things done that I've been meaning to get sorted for a while.

Firstly, I did a minor tweak to the All Games page which means each game now has a super-short blurb attached to it, too. Some of these are serious, others are written in the style of a late '90s British gaming magazine's front cover subheadings. You'll be able to tell which are which. This was more work than it sounds, because it involved going through every single game page in the database (of which there's over 400 or so now) and adding a short Excerpt. But it's done now, and I'm already in the habit of adding one for new titles, too. So that's good!

Secondly, I set up the "infrastructure" ready for covering the Evercade once I have it in my hands. I fully intend on covering every single game that is available for that device — I have the "All-In" bundle plus the Technos Collection 1 cartridge on preorder — so I wanted to get things set up ahead of time. You can get a sneak peek at https://moegamer.net/evercade but obviously there's nothing there apart from the pages for the individual cartridges as yet. The intention is to turn all those game titles into links as I write something about each of them, so ultimately I should end up with probably the most comprehensive coverage of the Evercade and its games on the Internet.

Anyway, all that taken care of, I think I'm going to get some sleep and have a nice lie-in tomorrow. Take care of yourselves and have a lovely weekend!

Andie got me A Hat in Time for Switch for my birthday, and I've been playing it in bits recently. I really like it so far — even if the Switch port is, as expected for an Unreal Engine game, a little janky. Since the game is supposed to be an homage to collectathon platformers, I just chalk up any performance issues (which have not, I should say, made gameplay a problem at any point) to an attempt to pay tribute to the N64 with more than just the design and gameplay.

I'll write more about the game on MoeGamer when I've beaten it, but I'm really impressed with it so far. Hat Girl's movements are so fluid and natural throughout the game; you never, ever feel like you're fighting against animations, but everything she does flows absolutely beautifully into each other, regardless of what you're doing, and that gives the game a delightful, free-flowing feeling as a result. Just exploring the levels is a joy; it's not at all unusual to find yourself completely ignoring the objective you're supposed to be pursuing in favour of just leaping around like a crazy person.

I really dig the weird vibe it's got going on, too. Hat Girl is completely shrouded in mystery and never says a word, but the way she gets embroiled in all manner of stupidity around the various worlds of the game has a very "childish" feel — in a good way. By that, I mean that the game as a whole feels like an exploration of the concept of childish curiosity, and how children tend not to be inherently "good" or "evil", because they're still shaping the way they look at the world. Hat Girl does some obviously good things throughout her adventures — but she's also a little shit at times, too, and I really appreciate that.

I'm looking forward to playing more of the game over time. The objective-based nature of the game — think Super Mario 64's stars — means it's fun and easy to just dip in for a level or two, or sit down for a more protracted session if you have some more time on your hands. Since Andie will be doing some noisy DIY tomorrow that will preclude me from recording some videos, I have no doubt that I'll spent at least some of my Friday in the company of this adorable little hat brat.

I can feel my mental health drifting towards breaking point. I'm not specifically upset with the lockdown situation, but I am completely fed up with how futile my day job feels right now. I've reached a point where I'm regretting not volunteering for furlough at 80% pay when it was offered, but I'm too late to do that now.

The last couple of days online have been… unpleasant, too. The "discussion" that I alluded to yesterday has been continuing today, and I've seen some extremely unpleasant behaviour from people who really should know better. And, of course, no-one is listening to one another on the matter; everyone is just bellowing into the void, absolutely convinced that they are "right", and that everyone who disagrees are varying degrees of awfulness.

I'm really tired of this. I enjoy interacting with people via social media and Discord a lot of the time, but it's exhausting when things become overwhelmingly negative. I write what I do and I make the videos I do because I want to share the enjoyment and value I get from gaming with other people; others, it seems, want nothing more than to tear down anything they don't "like", usually for ill-informed reasons.

I hasten to add nothing bad has happened as a result of anything I've specifically posted anywhere; I'm just tired of seeing people I care about having to defend themselves from online assholes. I feel empathy for them, and I swear more often than not I end up feeling worse than they do!

Anyway, I've requested a week off at the end of the month. A week "off" during this lockdown may not seem smart, but, well, I'm unlikely to be going anywhere on an actual holiday at this rate, and I just need a break to relax, rest and recharge a bit. Plus, all being well, I'll have the Evercade in my hands by then, so I'll be able to use that week to prepare a whole host of good stuff about that device and the games available for it, which I'm looking forward to a great deal.

Just gotta make it there first…