Hello! Sorry about yesterday. I was absolutely convinced I'd already written a post yesterday, but it turns out I was just remembering the previous day. Evidently all the days are melting into one another. Never mind eh.

Anyway, now seems like a good time to talk about Google Stadia, which revealed a bunch of new information yesterday. Remember, this is the thing that some people were arguing was going to be the "future of gaming".

Here are some facts and my thoughts.

It's launching in November of this year. Attempting to hit the Christmas rush is… theoretically a good idea, but I feel there's something inherently less exciting about something that doesn't actually have any real dedicated hardware. Also releasing in November means it's going up against Pokemon. Good luck with that!

There will be a "starter pack" available for £119, which includes a controller, a Chromecast Ultra and a three-month subscription to the "Stadia Pro" service, which allows 4K/60fps video… assuming you have the 35Mbps+ connection required to make this work. Again, this feels rather expensive for what it is… perhaps it's just me. The Chromecast is a nice device, but you can pick one of those up by itself for £30 or less; presumably the "Ultra" offers something extra (4K?) but given how cheap TV sticks are these days, this feels like a lot of money for not very much.

The controllers will be available separately for £59 in 2020. Hahahaha. Get real. I know controllers have been creeping up in price for the last couple of generations, but £60 is insane.

Stadia Pro will cost £8.99 a month, and will not include all the games in the library. This is, I think, the most hilarious thing. The biggest potential selling point of Stadia during the "conjecture" period was the possibility of a Netflix-style gaming library, where you could just click on a new release and immediately be playing it. But it seems that's not going to happen; while some games will be included as part of the subscription, new releases will have to be "bought" separately, meaning you're paying for something and ending up not owning either a physical or digital copy of it.

There will be a free option. You'll be limited to 1080p and 30fps using this free account, which removes two of the main selling points from the initial announcement. Presumably you also won't have access to any of the included "subscription" games, meaning you'll have to buy anything you want to play. Individual pricing for games hasn't been announced, but they better be cheaper than full download or packaged releases of games, since, to reiterate, you're paying to not own anything.

Some big names are on board. Games confirmed include Doom, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XV, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and The Division 2. Boooooring… and all games that have been out for a while, more to the point. Neither Activision (Overwatch) or Epic (Fortnite) have signed up to the platform, meaning that, at the time of writing, two of the most popular games in the world are not available on Stadia.

The system will have the ability to search YouTube for relevant content, and for you to see what your friends are doing while you're playing. No. I already get distracted by notification spam on modern consoles; I really don't need picture-in-picture of my friend playing a totally different game when I'm trying to concentrate on something. Searching for relevant YouTube content is potentially interesting… but it does also sort of encourage behaviour where people don't try to discover things for themselves, and instead go straight to YouTube to get the solutions. Also video guides suck; bring back text!

To summarise, there are some interesting ideas here, but I don't see it working, at all — and I sincerely hope that people don't support this. I'd perhaps be more receptive to the idea if the subscription offered a complete "Netflix of games" type situation, but asking people to buy games on top of a subscription fee is just laughable… not to mention it is one of the many reasons OnLive, an earlier attempt to do pretty much exactly all this, failed miserably.

As I've mentioned before, my biggest concern with Stadia is that if it takes off, it will normalise the non-ownership of games, and that's a serious concern for preservation and archival. I'd much rather the games of the world be distributed across a wide variety of collectors' libraries than centralised with one single corporation… plus a centralised streaming solution means that games can easily be removed from existence when, say, a licensing deal expires, or even a newer version of an existing game releases.

You know me, I don't normally like to be overly negative about things, but there is absolutely nothing desirable about Stadia for me, and I hope it is a miserable flop. If successful, it has the potential to do irreversible damage to the gaming medium, and I want no part of that. Thankfully, with all the bizarre and stupid decisions that seem to have been made during development, the likelihood of that happening seems to have gotten significantly less… and I have to say, I'm happy about that.

This is probably the last I'll say about Stadia, since so far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist from this point onwards. I will continue to support the things I believe in!

It's been true for a while now, but it bears repeating: Nintendo is absolutely killing it right now, from a variety of different perspectives.

We have an excellent console that plays well whether you have it hooked up to a TV or take it on the go with you; granted, it's not as powerful as its peers, but as someone who's never particularly cared about framerate and is more interested in cool design than fancy graphics, that doesn't bother me at all.

We have access to a growing library of retro titles, both as part of the online service subscription and as individually sold games on the eShop. If you ever wanted a portable Neo-Geo, the Switch is the place to be.

And we have some absolutely fabulous-looking games coming up.

The prompt for this post was today's Pokemon Nintendo Direct event, which showed a bunch of new footage from the upcoming games, due out on November 15 this year. (Methinks Nintendo will have a happy Christmas.) The game looks wonderful, with expansive Dragon Quest-style field exploration, giant Pokemon kaiju battles, four-player cooperative raids and some super-cute girls. I've not been a big Pokemon fan over the years, but I enjoyed Moon and I'm definitely on board with this one.

But that's not all. At the end of the month we have Super Mario Maker 2, which I'm starting to overflow with excitement for. I really, really enjoyed the Wii U original but didn't play it nearly as much as I perhaps should have; it will be great to see the format get another chance at success, and this time with a much broader, larger userbase to draw from. And if this one's a success, who knows — maybe we'll one day see my real dream: Zelda Maker.

It's such a wonderful time to be interested in video games. Sure, there are things you could complain about, but when the "good" is so good, why would you want to?

Tolerance for flaws is, so far as I'm concerned, an admirable trait — whether we're talking about tolerating flaws in actual people, or in "things" such as creative works or products. Tolerating imperfections makes you more accepting, kinder, more empathetic and just generally a nicer person, in my experience; the people I most enjoy talking about games with, for example, are the ones who tolerate the flaws in their favourite games, seeing past them to the enjoyable and wonderful things that lie beyond.

It seems like an increasingly rare trait these days, sadly; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a user review for a video game declare it "literally unplayable" because it dropped below 60fps at some point, or didn't support their sausage-like ultrawide monitor, or something like that. The reality of the situation is that yes, it's a shame that the game doesn't (insert complaint here), but when you notice an issue like this… take a step back and ponder whether it really impacts your experience and makes it impossible to enjoy. And if it does, consider whether or not you might not be setting unrealistic expectations for everything to be perfect.

Our World is Ended, the current Cover Game on MoeGamer, is a good example of this. The English text is full of typos and minor grammatical errors, which is a bummer for a text-centric game like a visual novel… but it hasn't affected my enjoyment at all, and it isn't relevant to the emotional engagement and investment I've felt in the whole experience. Thinking rationally about what a mammoth undertaking it must be to translate a visual novel of this size and complexity, I'm not surprised at all that the editing process must have been a nightmare — and maybe even cut some corners along the way, since localiser-publisher PQube isn't exactly a huge outfit.

I'm obviously not talking about tolerating things that actually are broken here. A game that doesn't work properly is worthy of complaining about. A situation like Fallout 76, where people were not provided with what they were promised, is worthy of complaining about. A situation like Diablo III's original launch, where the game actually was literally unplayable for a considerable amount of time — you couldn't log in or start the game! — is very worthy of complaining about! But something that is ultimately a minor hiccup to your overall enjoyment of something? Consider carefully whether you'd rather spend your time enjoying the thing you already spent your money on, or complaining about it.

In an ideal world, everything we buy would be absolutely perfect, with no problems and nothing to complain about. But we don't live in an ideal world; not even close. And so you can make a choice: you can be perpetually unhappy about the imperfections of literally everything, because nothing is perfect; or you can develop tolerance and acceptance, and perhaps even embrace those flaws and imperfections for their quirky charms.

I made my choice a long time ago!

Ever wonder if we're actually living on the darkest timeline? It's a bit of a common joke, I know, but each day it feels increasingly plausible.

I was watching some YouTube videos earlier and happened to come across one by "Wood", from the channel BeatEmUps. I'd never watched any of his own content before, but had come across Wood numerous times on The Game Chasers' channel. The video was named "I have depression. i need your help". YouTube recommended it to me today for some reason; I didn't notice until after the fact that it was actually from back in March.

In the video, Wood described how he had been living with anxiety and depression for most of his life — in his case, largely brought on by a childhood in which he suffered physical and emotional abuse by his parents. The video was primarily to announce a livestream during which he was hoping to raise money for a number of different mental health charities, but as part of his explanation to camera, he also talked a bit about the abuse both he and his girlfriend had been suffering, purely because some people out there didn't like him, and thus felt he didn't "deserve" to have a Patreon account, affiliate links, sponsorship deals and suchlike — you know, the means through which a content creator like Wood is able to actually make his passion into his job.

Hearing that this was happening, I found myself wondering how on Earth anyone could behave that way; how on Earth anyone could consider it in the slightest bit appropriate to decide someone wasn't worthy of making a living doing what they enjoy. Unfortunately, I must also confess that many instances of witnessing "boy who cried wolf" situations online led me to want to actually see some evidence of him suffering what he had described — but in this instance, it didn't take long to find some abuse in the comments.

I don't know Wood or his content, as I mentioned above, but he always comes across as a thoroughly pleasant person with a good sense of humour. The raw honesty of his video touched a nerve, and I found myself wondering just what is wrong with people to get him into the emotional state he was in during recording.

Between instances like this, abuse I've suffered myself online (including some from ex-colleagues as well as from organised troll groups) and the generally miserable state of the world in 2019, it's hard not to feel like we really are in that darkest timeline.

Question is, how do we escape it?

Whew. It's taken nearly 12 hours to edit this next episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, so I hope you all enjoy it! The reason it took so long is that I was recording a lot of my own footage for it rather than relying on YouTube. This was primarily because I absolutely love the games we were talking about, so it was a thinly-veiled excuse to play them some more and be productive at the same time.

I enjoy podcast editing and always have. I have a habit of setting pretty high expectations for myself and then realising quite a lot down the line that I've made a lot of work for myself, but I enjoy that work; it's fun and creative, and an opportunity to both develop and show off my skills.

In the case of the Squadron of Shame podcast that I was part of some time ago (quite a long time ago now, actually!) I made a point of providing both .mp3 and enhanced AAC podcasts with chapter markers and relevant artwork. Today, with The MoeGamer Podcast, I treat the show primarily as a video rather than a piece of audio, so that means including plenty of appropriate footage so it can be enjoyed visually as well as just listening to it. (I do, of course, also provide the Soundcloud version so those who, say, want to listen to it in their car can also enjoy it!)

I'm sure my workflow in Hitfilm Express (my weapon of choice) is woefully inefficient compared to some other people, and choosing to make the podcast a video experience rather than just pure audio makes it take a lot longer than just slapping some audio together… but I enjoy what I do and every time I finish an episode I feel like I've achieved something worthwhile and meaningful. I hope you enjoy it too!

And if you're yet to explore it for yourself… well, here's a handy playlist for you!  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqmqFDuRsOsekZU13NE6IDXVBFu__41MX 

Hello! Chris and I had a great discussion of puzzle games yesterday for The MoeGamer Podcast, and you can expect this episode to caress your lugholes sometime tomorrow, all being well.

I love me some puzzle games, as you may be able to tell from the Puzzler Essentials articles on my site. It always kind of bummed me out a bit that the puzzle game genre has become the fare of "disposable" mobile games, particularly those rammed with microtransactions, but there's still definitely a market for standalone puzzlers — even with packaged releases. Puyo Puyo Tetris, Soldam and Crystal Crisis (which I will probably pick up next month as I've already spent way too much on games this month!) definitely prove that for sure.

I'm really glad we had the discussion on the podcast, as it provided a good excuse to revisit some old favourites — and to discover some new ones, too. I'm particularly pleased that I discovered Taito's Landmaker, which is a largely unknown but seriously cool game that is absolutely worth exploring if you ever get the chance. The PS1 version has two completely separate game modes that have a very different look and feel to them, with only the core mechanics in common. I really like it and will definitely be revisiting it (and probably writing about it) sometime soon.

Anyway, I hope you've had a good weekend. I'll see you later today for Sunday's actual post; technically this is Saturday's, since I got distracted by all the puzzling! Occupational hazard, I guess…

I renewed my WordPress hosting today… it was the last day to take advantage of a 20% off coupon, so I renewed a few days earlier than I "needed" to, but the 20% off means that a month of Patreon contributions at their current level pretty much covers the entire expense!

With that in mind, I'd like to say a huge and sincere "thank you" to everyone who has supported this site, whether you're a new Patron or you've been around these parts for ages.

As I often note, I work on MoeGamer for the pure pleasure of writing about games (and as an excuse to experience a wide variety of games, too!) — but the fact that people are willing to support the site and help it continue to grow and improve is honestly rather humbling.

From the bottom of my heart, thanks for helping me continue to do what I love. People like you make the world a better place!

Hoo boy. Limited Run has a pair of games I'm extremely very interested in today… but I find myself umming and ahhing over whether or not I can justify spending that much. Although Limited Run's prices aren't altogether unreasonable, their shipping fees do sting quite a bit — I tend to have to pay a minimum of $15 on top of the price of the games in order to get them delivered. The perils of living in Europe.

The two games on offer are both visual novels, and both titles that I hoped would see some sort of hardcopy at one point or another.

The first is The House in Fata Morgana, which I don't know a ton about other than the fact that a lot of people seem to consider it as something of a modern classic. From what I understand, it concerns exploring the lives of a number of different people and then tying all the stories together in some way or other. It's got a deliciously dark, Gothic, brooding atmosphere about it, and everyone I know who has played it has said it's a fantastic experience. My main hesitation here is that I picked up the PC version from GOG a while back — though I believe this release actually has some extra content over the original.

The second is London Detective Mysteria, which is an otome game featuring bishounen versions of characters like Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries. This game was particularly noteworthy to me as the last major project Brittany "Hatsuu" Avery worked on at Xseed before she left, and it was clear that it was a title she felt passionately about. (Well, those who are familiar with Hatsuu will know that there weren't any of her previous projects she didn't feel passionate about, but this seemed to be a particular highlight!)

These are both games I've had my eye on with a mind to covering on MoeGamer at some point in the future, since they're both interesting and unusual visual novels that are fondly regarded by those who have played them. Thus I find myself very tempted by both of them… but… ooh… $105 is a lot of money… and I have hosting costs to pay this month!

I have six hours to decide as I type this. That will keep my mind occupied during a boring day at work, if nothing else! If you have any friends feeling generous (if you're reading this, you've done plenty already!), please feel free to point them in the direction of this page or my Ko-Fi :3

I'm having a bit of a tough time of it mental health-wise at the moment. I think it's a combination of factors — the intermittent pain I suffer from my hernia, the fact my weight loss goals are proving more challenging to achieve than on previous attempts, the fact that I'm kind of tired and bored at work… it's all sort of combining together to create a mental fog that is hard to lift.

Of course, as anyone who has dealt with mental health issues such as anxiety and depression will know, there doesn't necessarily need to be a particular "trigger" for these things to manifest themselves. Sometimes you just have a bad day; a bad week; a bad month; a bad year.

I'm doing my best to keep myself busy and to keep my mind occupied, as that usually seems to be the best way for me to deal with periods like this. I'm enjoying the things I'm writing about and the things I'm making videos for — as always, though, I just wish I had a bit more time (and money) to achieve everything that I'd like to achieve. Unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, and so I have to tolerate the other bits in order to be able to do the things I enjoy!

Ah well. Andie and I are going on holiday in just under a month's time, so that will be nice — an opportunity to get away from it all. I'm looking forward to it. Perhaps some time away from everything will provide a good opportunity to clear my head a bit!

What happened to progress bars? I miss them. Specifically, I miss having an idea of how long something is going to take. Instead, what we get is bullshit like this:

Or this:

Or this:

None of these are helpful. All they do is show that "something" is supposedly happening, but not how long it is taking or even if the "something" has frozen up along the way. I'm sure we've all encountered a situation where you're stuck looking at one of these, unsure if the process is actually stuck or bugged, or if it's just taking an inordinately long time.

These are a development of this type of progress bar, which today I learned is called a "marquee" progress bar:

Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's own documentation on this control, they do indeed intend for it to be used in a way that "shows activity, but does not indicate what proportion of the task is complete".

This is a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, I know, but when my office coffee machine is better at displaying its progress through a task than a powerful computer, I feel like there might be something a little bit wrong somewhere!