No-one has actually specifically asked me about this, but I know it's a popular subject that people like to find out more about, so I'd like to take the opportunity to outline the various boxes and wires I have under my TV for everyday gaming and video/screenshot capture.

At present, I have fourteen consoles around my living room TV:

• Nintendo Switch
  – Sega Dreamcast
  – Super Nintendo
  – Wii (softmodded)
  – SNES Classic Mini
  – Wii U
  – Xbox 360 (old-style casing, but the model that didn't RROD/had HDMI)
  – Two PS2s (one PAL, one US NTSC)
  – Nintendo 64
  – Sega Mega Drive
  – PlayStation 3
  – PlayStation 4 (with PSVR)
  – PSTV

I'm probably going to make some changes to this in the new year; most notably, I think the 16-bit consoles are going to move upstairs into my "retro room" which is currently dominated by Atari computers and the Philips G7000 Videopac. There's also an NES up there, and the TV monitor I use those on is small but works beautifully — it's an old-school Trinitron, so still pretty much the best of the best you can get in terms of CRT quality.

However, even with the Mega Drive and the SNES going upstairs, you'll still notice that there are a lot of systems there, and TVs only have so many HDMI ports. I also make a specific effort with my setup to avoid plugging SCART cables directly into the TV as much as possible as the quality is not very good.

Rather than having HDMI switchboxes, the core of my setup is my Elgato Game Capture HD (Amazon). This is the slightly older model that only does 30fps capture (and is compatible with older versions of Windows) but it works absolutely fine. It's powered by a USB cable that runs to my TV — my TV has two USB ports that carry power — and has an HDMI output (that runs to the TV) and an HDMI input (which I simply swap to the relevant cable according to what system I want to play or capture).

Pro-tip here: label your HDMI cables if you have a lot of them. You'll thank yourself later.

Anyway, so the basic idea is that I decide what I want to play or capture and simply plug in the appropriate HDMI cable, then I'm away. The Game Capture HD does HDMI passthrough as long as it is powered via USB, so there's no need to run the Game Capture software. As such, as well as allowing easy capturing from consoles that have no built-in capture facilities, it's also simply an easily accessible HDMI port.

With most HD consoles, that's all you need to get started. There are a few additional hookups required for certain specific cases, however, so let's look at those.

This bad lad is an HDMI splitter, and you'll need one of these if you want to capture footage from either a PlayStation 3 or a PSTV. You can also use it to capture from a PS4 without having to turn off the HDCP setting.

What this box actually does is take a single HDMI input and split it into two HDMI outputs. That's not what most people use it for, however: a side effect of the splitting process is that it strips out the pesky HDCP copy protection that is carried out from the PSTV and PS3, normally preventing you from capturing footage from these devices.

There are many different models of this available; I simply went for a cheap one with good reviews that you can find on Amazon here. It's powered by USB, so again my TV powers this, and it's simple and straightforward to use — just plug and play.

Next, if you, like me, wish to avoid using the SCART port on your TV (if indeed you even have one), you'll need some sort of upscaling device to connect older SD consoles to your shiny new TV. There are cables that can simply convert the signal, but to get the best possible picture you'll want to use some sort of upscaling device.

Many retro gamers swear by the Japanese FrameMeister devices, but these are extremely expensive, costing as much as a brand new console in many cases. They do output a fantastic picture, but they require a fair amount of setting up and fiddling with to get going in the first place.

The device pictured here is a cheap and cheerful upscaler I picked up, once again, from Amazon. It takes a SCART input and outputs to HDMI in a number of different resolutions up to and including 1080p. I've found it to work absolutely perfectly for my purposes, providing minimal input lag and an excellent quality picture. Some 50Hz PAL games can "judder" a little bit, but I think this is mostly down to shoddy programming in a lot of cases rather than a problem with the device. For PS2 in particular it outputs a beautiful quality image — here's an example.

There's an additional piece to the puzzle you'll want to include if you really want the best possible picture from SCART-capable consoles, and that's an RGB SCART cable. These provide the best possible quality output from the console, and thus upscaling this to 1080p gives you the best possible picture at the best possible resolution. I have RGB SCART cables for my PlayStation 2, Mega Drive and Super NES, and I got them all from Retro Gaming Cables. They're seemingly expensive for what they are, but they're well worth the outlay if you're serious about getting a good picture.

One additional thing you may want if you're using an original Wii is a device such as this, which simply plugs into the back of the Wii to provide an HDMI output instead of composite or component. It's by no means essential, but I found it a bit more convenient than running it through the upscaler.

Altogether, that's everything you might need to capture from both SD and HD consoles if all you want to do is capture gameplay and/or screenshots. If you want to record commentary, however, there are a few additional bits and pieces you might need. Most significant of these is a microphone.

You can use a microphone on a gaming headset if you want, but for the best possible quality you'll want some sort of dedicated microphone. I use the Marantz Pod Pack 1 setup (Amazon), which comes with a USB microphone and a boom arm. I also added a pop shield to put in front of the microphone to prevent plosive sounds from making loud bassy noises on recordings. These are all much of a muchness; you can even make one yourself by stretching some tights over a coat hanger if you're feeling really cheap.

The Pod Pack 1 setup is very cheap for what it provides. The microphone quality is excellent and the boom arm is nice and stable. My only slight objection is that the microphone is too heavy to stand "upright" on the end of the stand, but it works absolutely fine "upside down" so I just use it that way now instead.

One issue you may run into when recording some consoles with commentary is that they don't have the facility to connect a headset and listen to the game audio. This forces you to mute or turn down the audio on the TV while you are recording, meaning you can't fully enjoy the game. I needed a solution that would allow me to listen to games on systems such as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 while I was recording, and the simplest way to do that was to get a device that would let me connect headphones to my TV. Apparently TVs simply do not have headphone jacks any more.

Anyway, I came across this device on Amazon which takes an optical input and converts it to an analogue signal through either a 3.5mm headphone jack or red and white phono cables. There's no amplifier in the device, so the audio output on headphones isn't super loud, but it's definitely sufficient to let you get immersed in the game while recording.

And if you're lazy like me (or just don't like switching optical cables around because they're a pain in the arse) you may also want this thing:

This was yet another Amazon find, of course — by the way, none of the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links or anything, if you were wondering — and simply takes one optical input and splits it into three optical outputs. It needs powering via a 5V DC adapter, which is provided, so you'll need a spare electrical socket — you might be able to get away with powering it via USB, but I haven't tried that.

So there you have it. The reason I have so many cables under my TV, but this setup allows me to record anything with ease, switch between systems and enjoy them either through my speakers or on headphones. I hope this has been of some help and/or interest to those of you interested in optimising your gaming setup!

I got a bit of money for Christmas as well as a rather generous bonus from work, so I've treated myself to a few things that are now on the way.

First up is the Atari Flashback Classics pack for Switch, which is a compilation of the three separate Atari Flashback Classics releases for PS4 and Xbox One. The third volume of these was released alongside the Switch version and, I was excited to see, incorporated some Atari 5200 games for the first time… including the good version of Star Raiders! At last! No longer do I have to suffer the indignity of the 2600 version. (Not that the 2600 version is bad, I should probably add, but the 5200/Atari 8-bit version is infinitely superior.)

This package proved to be a bit of an ordeal to get, because for some inexplicable reason Atari doesn't appear to have arranged any sort of distribution in Europe. PQube handled the first two volumes of Atari Flashback Classics on PS4 and Xbox One, which I already own, but they had nothing to do with either volume 3 or the Switch release, so my only option was to import.

Easy enough these days, you might think — just pop on Amazon or something and get an American copy shipped over. Uh-uh. Amazon was out of stock and most other big American retailers wouldn't ship to the UK. I was beginning to think I was never going to get my hands on this — and, of course, with the decline in likelihood came an enormous increase in the amount that I really wanted it.

Thankfully, I found a copy on eBay, and the seller even promised to ship to the UK for free, which was extraordinarily generous of him. I won the auction and ended up paying a little more than the standard retail price of the package, but probably less than shipping fees to the UK from a US retailer, so I haven't really lost out. I just have to wait for it to arrive now. Looking forward to it.

NIS Europe had a Boxing Day sale, too, where a number of their slightly older titles (or games that, you get the impression, they wanted to shift a few more copies of) had some generous discounts, so I grabbed Fallen Legion and God Wars for Switch, both of which are games I'm interested in writing about on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. NIS Europe's online store also tends to ship super-fast, too, so I should have those within a day or two.

I grabbed a couple more Philips G7000 Videopac games, too, as I intend to knuckle down and get properly stuck into my Videopac Games project in the new year. I forget the exact names offhand, but one is a bit like Star Raiders (i.e. a first-person perspective space sim) and the other is a side-on shoot 'em up that is very well regarded. Looking forward to giving those a go.

And finally, I snagged Diablo III for Switch, as I've been wanting to try the console versions of this for some time now, and having Diablo III on the go is just too appealing a prospect to pass up on. I tried it out this evening with my podcasting partner Chris, and we had a wonderfully smooth experience with it. Looking forward to exploring that further in the coming weeks and months — Diablo III is very much one of those "evergreen games" like I wrote about on MoeGamer earlier today, so I'm sure this will be a regular part of my rotation, particularly with how easy it is to get multiplayer up and running.

Anyway. Schedule and posting regularity will still be a bit wobbly for the next few days as I'm off to go and see my parents this coming weekend, but things should be back to normal by the new year at the latest.

I hope you've enjoyed your leftovers, and those of you who have to go back to work between now and the new year… you have my sympathies!

Merry Christmas, once again, everyone.

Hello! This is being published late because I wrote it in a note on my phone and then forgot to actually copy it into this 'ere blog. Whoops.

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you've all had an excellent day. Mine was quiet and relatively uneventful, but fun enough. I had some nice presents (including Zelda for Switch, which I've had my eye on for ages but never got around to getting) and we ate good food in good company.

A Switch proved to be a popular Christmas present, as Andie bought herself one with some combined Christmas-birthday money a little while ago, and Andie's sister Michelle also got one for Christmas, too. That meant while we were at my mother-in-law's place for Christmas Day, there were four Switches in attendance, which was nice to see. What was even nicer to see was how easy it is to pair up Joy-Cons with another console — simply slide them on to the side of the console you want to pair them with, and it's all done. Wonderful stuff.

We played a bit of Jackbox Party Pack 2 on Switch, which is a perfect fit for the little machine — though I was a little disappointed it's not possible to use additional Switches as your "answer terminals". For the unfamiliar, the Jackbox Party Pack games display various quizzes and challenges on the TV (or Switch display) and everyone playing makes use of a phone or tablet to play the game by connecting to a special website and entering a short code the game generates. It's a really easy to set up and extremely effective means of getting a party game rolling, and certainly a damn sight preferable to Cards Against fucking Humanity.

I haven't tried Zelda yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Andie has indicated it's a game she'd be interested in watching, which is always a bonus as it means we can spend some time together — and now she has a Switch too she can still play some more substantial affairs while sitting on the sofa with me while I play on the TV. That's pretty cool. She picked up Valthirian Arc, which is a game I've been curious about; she seems to be enjoying it so far, which I'm pleased about.

Anyway, it's been a long day and [editor's note: at the time of writing] we have a long drive home ahead of us. Once again, I hope you had a lovely day, and that your festivities continue into the new year.

Hello everyone! It's the day before the big day. I hope you're all ready and haven't found yourselves having to brave the "last-minute" rush at the shops.

Andie and I will be heading over to her mother's place this evening to celebrate Christmas Day, then we'll be coming back tomorrow evening. We're having to leave Meg by herself, so we don't want to leave her on her own for too long. (We'll be leaving her plenty of food, and something that makes noise so she doesn't get too lonely though!)

We'll also be paying my parents a visit shortly after Christmas, and for that we'll actually be taking Meg with us, because it's for a few days rather than just overnight. We took Meg and Ruby with us to my parents' place last year and although they didn't think much of the car journey, they seemed to enjoy spending a bit of time somewhere different; Meg quickly found the comfiest spots in the house to go and hide if she didn't want company, and Ruby was pretty friendly with everyone.

I miss Ruby, particularly at this time of year. I know rationally speaking she didn't do anything particularly "special" at Christmas, being a cat, but Christmas is a time for your whole family to be together, and thus it's hard not to think about those who aren't with us any more. Especially as it wasn't really all that long ago that we lost her. I hope she knows we're thinking of her, wherever she is now.

I'm not anticipating any presents as hugely exciting as the Switch my parents were kind enough to get me last year, but it will be nice to just spend a bit of time with people somewhere else for a bit in that nice sort of "cosy" atmosphere a house on Christmas day provides. Andie's mum typically provides a log fire for extra cosiness, and she does a great Christmas dinner.

Anyway. I'm going to have a nice lazy day today, likely spent mostly in the company of Atelier Totori, and I hope you all have the opportunity to get some rest too. I'll write again tomorrow, of course, but in the meantime I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and enjoy good food, good company and great presents.

Love you all!

I finished Atelier Rorona DX today. I'll be covering the series in detail on MoeGamer in January.

I've been looking forward to revisiting this series for quite some time, as somehow I've only ever gotten to various incarnations of Rorona, never Totori and Meruru.

The upside of this is that I now have a pretty good understanding of how Rorona's mechanics and structure work, and as such I not only managed to bag the True ending in the main game (plus Cordelia's character ending), I also managed to successfully clear the Overtime mode that was added in Atelier Rorona Plus. (This is why this post is so late, to be frank; I was playing the game all day!)

Atelier Rorona has always been an extremely addictive game that tickles all of the pleasure centres of my brain. We have satisfying RPG combat with a strong focus on equipment. We have interesting dungeons to explore, each with their own unique lineup of enemies, items to gather and enemies to defeat. We have a time management element. And, of course, we have cute girls.

I didn't used to be a big fan of crafting systems in games, and I'm still not hugely enamoured with them in many games where it's not the main focus — while I appreciated the mechanical depth in Final Fantasy XIV's crafting, for example, I always felt like I'd rather be doing something else whenever I engaged with it. But in Atelier Rorona, I love it. There's a really satisfying cycle of gathering ingredients, making things with them and, as you progress, then making further things with the things you just made.

This is taken to an extreme in the Overtime mode, where Totori and Meruru from their respective games come to "visit" after some sort of temporal accident. The only way to get them back to their correct times is to build an item called a Dragon Hourglass; in a year, Rorona's master Astrid will successfully complete one of these and be able to call Totori and Meruru home, but Rorona sets it as a bit of a challenge for herself.

Constructing the Dragon Hourglass is a daunting task. It requires four ingredients, two of which have to be crafted, one of which is very rare indeed and one of which is a drop from probably the first powerful "boss" monster you encounter towards the end of the main game. Of the two crafted ingredients, one of these also requires another instance of the rare ingredient, so you better find a good source of them quick. (Thankfully, I discovered that one particular group of enemies on the first floor of one of the two "postgame" dungeons drops this item fairly consistently, so that saved me a lot of headaches.)

Then there's a snag when you come to construct the Dragon Hourglass: it requires 400 MP to craft. My Rorona only had 280 MP at this point, and if you attempt to craft something without enough MP, you have a base success chance of 0%. How to get around this?

Well, you have a few options. For one, you can carefully construct equipment specifically for crafting purposes that emphasises boosts to Rorona's MP, though you pretty much need to fill every available equipment slot with a suitable item if you take this approach, and it's not very efficient or economic.

The other alternative is to ensure you make ingredients that have a "Success" trait attached to them. Atelier Rorona is all about Traits; these are attached to ingredients, and when you craft something, you're able to pass down up to five Traits from the ingredients to the end product. If you're clever, you'll stack different levels of the same Trait to create an even more effective "super-Trait", but the "Cost" for these is significantly higher, meaning it can only be attached to more complex items.

The Success trait increases the base chance of success when crafting an item by a certain amount. You might well see where this is going! Yes, indeed, you basically forget all about the MP prerequisite and instead boost your chances of success as much as possible. By combining the Success lv 1 and lv 2 Traits, I formed the Beginner trait, which increased the base chance of success by 50. A 1 in 2 chance to make the correct item is better than a 0 in 1 chance… and you can, of course, always save and reload if you mess up, because those ingredients are hard and time-consuming to come by.

Unfortunately, the game trolls you a bit at this point by helpfully informing you that the Dragon Hourglass you made wasn't quite good enough. So you have to make another one, this time using an Ancient Dragon Horn instead of just a regular old Dragon Horn. And where, pray tell, is an Ancient Dragon? Right at the bottom of the big mysterious dungeon right outside of town, of course. And beyond one of the toughest superbosses in the game… although on my playthrough I somehow managed to skip past this fight without having to take him on.

Does the new "True Dragon Hourglass" work? Well, you'll have to finish the game for yourself to see… suffice to say, this whole quest was a lot of fun and kept me glued to the damn game for pretty much all of today. I adore Atelier Rorona and I'm looking forward to finally checking out Totori and Meruru for the first time after literally years of saying "I should really play those games sometime…"

Watch out for the full features on these games on MoeGamer in January. Now I'd better sleep!

Have you listened to The MoeGamer Podcast yet? If not, you can find all the episodes to date in video form on YouTube, or in audio form on Soundcloud. Please subscribe to either or both — it really helps us out!

I wanted to talk about this today because I've been doing podcasts off and on for quite a long time now, and I've always enjoyed it. This, to be honest, surprises me quite a bit — we'll get onto that a bit later.

The first podcast I did was called Gaming with Pedwood, and it was an experiment with some old school friends. You can actually still find this online in various places, such as here on Podchaser.

Gaming with Pedwood was inspired by our friend Ed's interest in Ricky Gervais' podcast at the time. He was rather taken with the casual, off-the-cuff format that Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington had with their podcast, and suggested that we try it for ourselves next time we got together. So we did, recording three episodes on one occasion, then three more a little while later after we'd decided that yes, we'd had a good time.

Gaming with Pedwood was a lot of fun to me because we managed to find a good balance between pissing about as old friends and saying something with some actual substance to it. I really enjoyed it when we reminisced about the games we played in school, and all of us had plenty of entertaining (if mundane) stories to tell. It was definitely a fond memory.

The next one I did was an offshoot of a community I was once part of called The Squadron of Shame. This began as a group of people on 1up.com's "Radio" forum, attempting to continue a challenge the site's podcast hosts had set for themselves and promptly abandoned after no more than a week. The concept was simple: it was effectively a "gaming book club", in which we'd all play the same thing at the same time, then share our thoughts with one another. The podcast was a natural extension of that after 1up's community imploded.

I enjoyed the Squadron of Shame podcasts for different reasons to Gaming with Pedwood — though they were a huge challenge to edit at times. We'd often have quite a few people involved with a single episode, and while this made for interesting and lively discussions, it also gave me huge headaches any time I had to, say, figure out where a weird noise was coming from, or try and at least make it appear that people weren't talking over one another.

Regrettably, the other members of the Squadron of Shame have mostly left me in the dust over the course of the last few years, and I don't really know the reason why. It's upsetting and frustrating given how close we all used to be — many of us visited each other on several different occasions despite being in completely different countries, for example — but I guess this sort of thing happens. We had good times while they lasted.

The Squadron of Shame's podcasts aren't online anywhere at the minute. I think I do still have the original mp3 files for them, so if I find a suitable place to put them you can hear what we got up to at some point in the future. They're an interesting and varied listen.

And so we come to my current podcasting project, The MoeGamer Podcast. This was something my co-host Chris and I had discussed a few times after striking up our friendship. Chris appeared on another podcast for a short while before, to put it politely, deciding he didn't quite "mesh" with how some of his co-hosts wanted to do things, so we decided that one weekend we'd give it a go for ourselves. Sixteen episodes later we have a show that I'm pretty consistently proud of.

The MoeGamer Podcast kind of blends elements from both of my past experiences with podcasting. It has the clear structure of the Squadron of Shame's podcasts, but the somewhat casual, laid-back style of Gaming with Pedwood. With just me and Chris, it's the smallest-scale podcast I've ever been involved with, and I think it works very well as a conversation between just two people. It's always a pleasure to record, it's fun (if time-consuming) to edit and I've learned a lot about a variety of different things since we started it.

And so on to why I find it strange that I enjoy podcasting so much: well, I've alluded to it before, but I'm riddled with social anxiety, and find the idea of "just talking to someone" quite a daunting prospect. I am extremely anxious about being placed in a social situation with someone, and particularly wary of voice-only communications over the phone or via Internet voice chat.

In the case of Gaming with Pedwood, this wasn't much of an issue, because we all knew each other very well and were in the same room with one another, drinking, farting and burping. In the case of the Squadron of Shame podcast, it took time and courage for me to step up to the plate and contribute, though the appreciation I got for being The Guy Who Knew How To Edit and Publish Podcasts helped give me confidence. And in the case of The MoeGamer Podcast, I'm now leading a show in collaboration with a close friend; I was extremely nervous the first time we recorded, since it was also (if I remember correctly) the first time Chris and I had ever voice chatted, but I was happy that things went so well — and they've only improved from there.

An interesting side-effect of all the podcasting and video work I've done over the course of the last year in particular is that it's caused me to feel a lot better about my voice. I used to absolutely hate hearing my voice — a side-effect of having to record my piano exam pieces for my grandparents as a kid and my parents insisting that I gave a spoken introduction to them, I feel — but now, I actually quite like it.

To be perfectly frank, and I'm aware how vain this sounds, I actually rather enjoy watching back my own videos and listening to our podcast episodes again and again. But then, I also enjoy reading my own articles, so I think that element of pride — or at least a desire to enjoy the things I've created myself — has always been in me to a certain degree. Given my self-esteem is rather low in other areas of my life, I think I might overcompensate a bit with the pride I take in the things I feel I'm actually quite good at!

Still. There it is. If you've not yet listened to our podcast, check the links above to enjoy it for yourself — and share it with your friends, too! I think we've got a great show going, and I'm always happy to know that more people are listening.

It's the last day of work before Christmas! It has been a long time since I've been in education, but it's still a nice feeling to know that "we break up, we break up, we don't care if school blows up".

I'm looking forward to some time off. For the first time in several years, I've actually got a reasonably substantial break — I'm taking all the time from the end of today onwards until the second of January as holiday, so I can enjoy the whole festive season without having to stress about work. Not that my day job is especially stressful in itself, but it's going to be nice not having to get up early and sit on conference calls I probably don't need to be on. It will also give me time to get some MoeGamer stuff done and go visit both our respective groups of parents.

I'm sure I'll revisit the idea of the year just gone by towards New Year's Eve/Day, but it feels like an appropriate enough time to ponder what has transpired this year right now. 2018 has been a year of ups and downs to be sure, but I feel like I'm leaving the year on a pretty good note.

I remain in gainful employment; in April, I will have been in this day job for two years, which equals my previous unbroken record of continuous employment in the same place. And, unlike the previous two examples where I reached the two year mark, I am neither beholden to the whims of retail, nor am I in an environment that causes daily damage to my mental (and probably physical) health. My day job may not be the most exciting (and I'm sticking to my unwritten rule of not mentioning exactly what it is or who it was for anywhere online, so please don't ask if you're curious!) but it pays the bills, I'm good at it and I don't see any reason to go anywhere else… particularly as I can just "switch off" from it at the end of the day and continue working on MoeGamer in my spare time.

MoeGamer itself has enjoyed some significant growth over last year; at the start of the month, I'd already exceeded last year's view counts. Numbers aren't everything of course, but it's nice to know more and more people are enjoying what I'm doing. It'd be nice to look at getting a few more YouTube viewers in the new year — and I have a few interesting plans for video in the coming months — but writing will always be my first priority and passion.

Health-wise, some frustration with what turned out to be a hernia has led me to finally get back on the weight loss wagon; both my wife Andie and I are, as I mentioned last week, back on the Slimming World programme, which worked extremely well for us last time around. So far I've lost a smidge over half a stone in the three weeks (four sessions) since I started, and I know from past experience that I can continue a slow but steady downward trend. I'm actually quite looking forward to being… a bit "smaller" again, as last time around I recall it did wonders for my self-esteem and also just caused me to feel physically a bit better in general.

There have been frustrations throughout the year, chief among which are, I feel, the somewhat turbulent nature of my friendships. My local friends who have had children in the last couple of years have become increasingly difficult to pin down and actually do things with, which can be upsetting and annoying at times, but they do still make the effort now and again; it's just hard not to take it personally sometimes. We had a thoroughly pleasant evening this Tuesday just gone, though; I hope there are more of those in the new year.

Online, I remain quite annoyed and upset at how many people who used to be close friends have pretty much abandoned me since I was let go from USgamer in 2014… but at this stage I kind of have to feel like if they weren't going to stand by me at a difficult time like that, they're not going to stand by me now, and thus perhaps weren't as good friends as I thought they were. It doesn't help that at least some of them have become well and truly entrenched in the culture of games journalism's "hatebait" trend, whereby they post ridiculous hot takes intended to draw in furious commenters, then take to Twitter to go "LOOK HOW AWFUL THESE GAMERRZ ARE".

I don't have the time, patience or energy for that shit, and if you've been following MoeGamer you'll know I am not about clickbait at all; I don't even like posting topical, time-sensitive editorial pieces (even though they get good viewing figures) as I'd rather the site be something anyone can enjoy any piece of content from at any time — the kind of thing you'd dip into like a coffee table book.

On the upside, since that regrettable aspect of my online friendships, I've been fortunate enough to cultivate some truly valuable relationships too. Chief among these is — and I apologise for singling you out here, sir — my good friend Chris Caskie, who co-hosts The MoeGamer Podcast with me after we'd been contemplating doing something along those lines for a while. Chris is a valued and deeply trusted friend who I speak to pretty much every day, and it's not an exaggeration to say he's helped me through some tough times as well as happily listened to me rave on about the latest games I've found particularly exciting or passion-stoking, even if he's not personally interested in them. I'm proud to call him a friend, and I'm even more proud of what we've created together with the podcast to date. Thanks, Chris.

As the hours tick down until hometime today, I find myself mulling over what I should perhaps set my sights on for the new year. But that sounds like a subject for a whole other post to me, so I'll save it for now!

Some days, I find myself wondering what life would be like without the Internet.

Obviously I wouldn't have the opportunity to do what I'm doing right now, and that would be a real shame… but there are other aspects of life where I feel it would actually be quite positive.

One such area is that of humour and comedy. The Internet can, at times, be a hilarious place — but the side effect of how quickly Internet humour (particularly in the form of memes) moves is that by the time more… for want of a better word, "normal" people come across a particularly entertaining joke or meme, it's already "old news" to those of us who primarily socialise online.

When I hear someone in reality quoting an Internet meme or referencing a joke I'd already got sick of seeing repeatedly retweeted on Twitter six weeks ago, it's hard to suppress a sort of "cringe" reflex, when in some cases this is actually a rather unreasonable response. Of course, in other cases — particularly when it's a "Brand" trying to make awkward use of a joke which heavily relied on context — that cringe factor is justified. But very often one might find that an individual not saturated in daily social media — a family member who only follows people online that they already know "in real life", for example — has no idea that the hilarious joke they saw on their Facebook feed that morning had already been well and truly through the online digestive system that is the 4chan > Reddit > Twitter > Facebook > email chains from your auntie cycle.

It's hard to suppress that cringe reflex at times. But I feel like in some cases life might be more pleasant and amusing if I did. Some of these jokes remain funny even long after their original time of telling, after all — and why should I not be able to mutually enjoy something entertaining with another person? I mean, come on, if I can still find farts hilarious after 37 years on this Earth, I can probably find it in me to laugh when my work colleagues recite a joke from the Internet out loud, right?

Much funny. So laugh. Wow. (Sorry.)

I feel like I scored a personal victory last night: I helped someone who previously disliked Super Smash Bros. to enjoy Ultimate.

I'm really happy about this, as it means that on the increasingly rare occasions when I'm able to get my local friends together, Smash Ultimate is now a reasonable option for us to suggest without any sort of "guilt". All it took was giving the person in question a brief instructional session in the controls and how they work, and he was away, suddenly coming to understand the appeal of the game after probably about a decade of not really liking it.

I've been absolutely delighted with Smash Ultimate's multiplayer offering so far — both online and offline. I know some esports types are getting pissy about the online for some reason that I frankly can't be arsed to look into, but for my needs — and those of my immediate friends, those who I will most likely be playing with — it works extremely well.

The only thing I'd say was definitely missing was some means of directly inviting a friend into your game, but I suspect this is more a feature of Nintendo's implementation of online services than anything else; there's no messaging feature at all, and voice chat is very much on a case-by-case basis. And while the lack of things that people consider to be "essential" to online services has drawn some criticism, I understand why Nintendo has omitted them: it's so they can keep the service as "safe" as possible, maintaining that good old family-friendly image. Without a messaging service, you can't have 12 year olds calling you a fag for not being good at Splatoon; without an invite system you can't have someone spamming you with game invites when all you want to do is play World of Light mode; without public voice chat, you don't have to listen to strangers talking unless you specifically want to opt-in to conversation.

Anyway, I'm not here to debate the pros and cons of Nintendo's online service; it is what it is. What I do want to talk about is the two multiplayer experiences I've had over the course of the last few nights: one online, one in person.

For our online matches, those of us who owned Switches agreed a time beforehand, and I set up a Battle Arena. This is Smash's main "custom" online mode, allowing the host to set the parameters beforehand, including whether battles are 1-on-1, free-for-all or team-based as well as the actual ruleset used in the match. Oddly, it doesn't appear that you can change these rules once the room is open, but this is presumably to prevent any sort of "griefing" in public rooms by drawing people in with a popular mode, then changing the ruleset at the last minute. We were in a private room, so that wasn't an issue; it might be nice to see the ability to change rulesets without having to start a new room in a subsequent update, but it's something you can work around easily enough.

For voice chat, on one occasion I tried the Nintendo Switch Online app for mobile, which makes use of a "speakerphone" system that works very well. For the other, we simply all used Discord, which is well-established as being a good choice for real-time online interactions. Obviously this depends on your computer being near your Switch (or I guess you could use mobile for that too), but this wasn't an issue for any of us.

The online experience was good. The "queueing" system works quite well — though the fact you have to leave the queue to change characters meant that a couple of us missed the opportunity to spectate a 1-on-1 match on a couple of occasions — and the actual in-game performance seemed to be very good both when I was playing someone in the States and my more local friends. There was the odd hiccup, but certainly no kind of unplayable lag — certainly a far cry from the "slow-motion" gameplay I've experienced in the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle and SNK Heroines on a couple of occasions.

As for the in-person experience, it, as you might expect as Smash's specialism, works wonderfully. It's easy to add and remove players, and having more than four participants for a basic Smash match is no longer considered a special case. The player profile system allows players to easily set up their preferred control settings and for these to be saved for future sessions, and the wide selection of characters, while potentially intimidating to new players, is full of recognisable faces.

The five-player three-stock match we had was extremely enjoyable. I was expecting absolute chaos to unfold, but it actually ended up having a rather nice flow to it. It helped that we were playing on a massive stage — the Mother 3 one, as I recall — as this allowed us to effectively break off into smaller "sub fights" before all bundling in together when we felt like we wanted a good and proper rumble.

Perhaps best of all, we found that "the guy who always wins at Smash" didn't win every fight he played. Yes, he did significantly better when playing as the characters he was "best" with (Link and Ganondorf) but he felt less "undefeatable" than he had been in previous installments in the series. As such, the whole thing felt much more balanced and enjoyable for everyone, which is exactly what you want from a party game.

Now, I just need to convince everyone involved to play a bit more often and we'll be well away…

I caught a tweet earlier that resonated with me somewhat, and I wanted to share with you both why it resonated with me and how I think being aware of this might help me going forward.

Here is the tweet:

This tweet resonated pretty strongly with me because I've been aware that this is exactly what I've been doing for a while, even with a sort of passing awareness that it's a harmful and unhelpful thing to do. So perhaps me putting this out here today — publicly acknowledging that this has been a thing for me, and that it's had an adverse effect on my mental health — will be at least the start of a process of growth and change in a more positive direction.

Or perhaps it will just provide you, dear reader, with the opportunity to empathise with me, mock me for my misfortune or just get a bit of "insider insight".

I try not to be someone who holds grudges. But there are a few people in this world who, for one reason or another, are individuals that I feel have "wronged" me, and that I do not feel able to forgive. And there are a few in particular that have led to the specific phenomenon Tim describes in his tweet above.

I have, regrettably, found myself on the receiving end of bullying on multiple occasions in my life — starting at primary school and continuing sporadically throughout the rest of my 37 years on this planet. And one of the things I've found over the course of my life is that being bullied is oddly… "addictive", I guess is the best word.

I'm not talking about masochism here. I don't mean that getting bullied is in some way gratifying for me… I don't think, anyway. What I'm referring to is the fact that the negative attention brought by bullying — something I do not enjoy — can sometimes lead on to more positive actions as people empathise and sympathise with you, standing beside you against the sources of that negative attention.

This might sound ridiculous, and I have no idea if it's a widespread phenomenon or particularly unique to me, but it's definitely something I've been aware of since I was a kid. There were times when I'd deliberately go and provoke one of the people who was bullying me at primary school just so I could get punched, start crying and get the attention I apparently craved. Unproductive, I'm sure you'll agree.

Now, the things I've encountered later in life aren't the same kind of "bullying" at all, but I've found that they feed into that same sort of addictive negative feedback loop. And part of that is that, thanks to social media, it becomes possible to "check up" on bullies to see what they're saying; to deliberately seek out their negative opinions of you and reshare them to people who will (hopefully) stand with you — even if you have them blocked, or if they have you blocked.

I'll give three specific examples here, of varying severity. And yes, I will be naming names. Edit: I have redacted names when republishing for sake of a quieter life.

The first is a guy named X. I don't remember how I initially came into contact with X; I think I was just on a following spree and saw that he was supposedly into anime, visual novels, gaming, all the same sorts of things as me. We didn't interact much directly, but things went along all right for a while.

Over time, I noticed X getting considerably more negative and rude towards others — and inconsistent in his opinions, too. He'd tweet at developers, publishers and localisers excited to announce their new projects about how shit he thought their work was, and hurl abuse at anyone who showed their support for said companies.

One day, I told him to put a sock in it. PQube were promoting their recently released Gal*Gun Double Peace, and this was both a game I was very excited for and looking forward to covering on MoeGamer. (Check it out!) X responded to PQube's promotional tweet with some whiny negativity, so I told him to just leave them alone if he wasn't interested in the game. Fair enough, surely.

From that point on, X started hurling abuse at me on a fairly regular basis. I'd find him in my comments section (from which he got blocked). I'd find him on Twitter, where he'd passive-aggressively mention me in regard to "political" things he thought I'd be in favour of (somewhere he got it in his mind that I am an "alt-righter" despite me leaning noticeably left of centre in any test I've done) — and where I ultimately blocked him after giving him an earful one day. And I even found him in other people's comment sections; on one occasion, I left a comment on onahole reviewer Infernal Monkey's emphatically NSFW blog, only to find a reply from X whinging about my taste in games — despite neither Infernal's post nor my comment having anything to do about gaming.

Enough was enough. I took every effort to block this hateful little troll… but still I found myself "checking up" on him every so often. And I'd always get a peculiar knot in my stomach any time I saw him badmouthing me — because it was always, always stupid, ridiculous lies. Now, speaking rationally, his tiny follower count and the fact that no-one ever replies, likes or RTs his posts on Twitter — probably because he's an insufferably Negative Nancy — means that his bitching probably won't have any impact on my audience. But it's still not a nice feeling to know someone harbours such irrational hatred for you — and for such a stupid reason.

X is utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But, regrettably, having anxiety means that you blow stupid things out of proportion. And as such, his comments would get to me — but still I'd seek them out. This is, of course, a stupid thing to do, but I've already talked about how weirdly "addictive" it was. This needs to stop now.

The other related cases involve my former employers and colleagues at USgamer, with the main culprits being Y and, to a lesser extent, Z.

Let me provide a bit of context here for those unaware of why I left USgamer. I wrote a variety of articles on the site. During its opening months, we were encouraged to "be ourselves" and write about our specialisms, so I wrote a lot about the Japanese games I was interested in. Over time, we received both audience feedback and an edict from on high that we should be focusing on more "ad-friendly" things, and it was around this point that Z got involved.

From this point on, any news stories I wrote had to be run past Z before I could post them — despite his working day not starting until mine was getting close to its conclusion. Z outright forbade me from writing about certain games, with Monster Monpiece being the main one that sticks in my mind, and would also berate me for "writing about boobs and panties" when in fact I had done nothing of the sort.

One occasion that remains particularly memorable for all the wrong reasons was while I was at the Eurogamer Expo (now "EGX") in London, covering the show single-handedly for the site. I got some time with the third Final Fantasy XIII game, Lightning Returns, and came away with quite favourable impressions of what I'd seen. Around that time, numerous other publications had been joking about the fact that the eponymous heroine apparently had considerably more pronounced "boob physics" than in previous installments, and I thought this was rather childish; as such, I wrote an article about all the interesting things Lightning Returns was doing from a mechanical perspective, with the title "Lightning's More Than Just Jiggle".

I thought nothing of it at the time; I just thought it was an entertaining retort about the general standard of coverage the game was receiving at the time, but Z yelled at me about it — clearly having not understood the context or actually read my article at the time. It was extremely upsetting, and it made it very clear at that point that Z had it in for me.

It was a few months later when I suddenly received an email from Q, then the head honcho of Gamer Network, the company that owns, among other things, USgamer and Eurogamer. He unceremoniously laid me off, saying that USgamer wanted an "all-American" staff instead of me as the lone Brit populating the site with interesting content "overnight"… and not long afterwards, two new writers were recruited onto the staff: Y and B, both of whom were close personal friends of Z.

It doesn't take a particular genius to figure that one out, does it?

Anyway, I'd worked with B previously so although I was upset at her for replacing me, I just kept my distance. Y, though, I clashed with almost immediately. The opportunity to review Atelier Rorona Plus came up during my notice period, and the editorial staff discussed it in an email thread. Y, supposedly an expert in Japanese games and RPGs, had never heard of the Atelier series and thus decided to "research" it by running a Google Images search. He noted, I quote, "it didn't take me long to find the creepiness".

I immediately took the opportunity to cover the title, politely requesting that we have "a little less of the 'creepiness' thing, please" — particularly as during my time as USgamer I had helped establish the site as a place that was a lot more friendly to Japanese "otaku games" than many other outlets, and myself as someone who both knew what he was talking about and was willing to give these games a chance.

From that point on, I've received sporadic abuse from Y (typically second-hand, delivered by people who think they're being helpful, so I can't really blame them) about the past things I've written. His favourite hobby horse is that I "promoted an incest porn game to people who liked The Walking Dead", which is a gross misrepresentation of the fact that I suggested a number of games with bleak, depressing themes to those who enjoyed Telltale's narrative-centric classic, and one of those games was Kana Little Sister. Anyone who has read Kana Little Sister (or indeed read my coverage) will know that, despite having explicit scenes in it, it is most certainly not "porn"… but you know how people get with this sort of thing. Sex is the great taboo in gaming, after all.

Like with X, I found myself "checking up" on Y every so often, and was frequently dismayed to discover that he obviously namesearches himself and screenshots people who talk about him, even if he's blocked by them. Not only that, he has followers who are more than happy to do this for him, too. I found myself publicly "shamed" in this way on a number of occasions, and it was always that weird, horrible combination of nausea and addiction that I felt when it happened. And there was nothing I could do about it, either; I tried reporting Y, but without any direct insults or slurs directed at me you can't get Twitter to do anything.

As for Z, I haven't looked at his feed at all, I'm pleased to say. I know he wrote something about me shortly after I left because MoeGamer got a bunch of referrals from his personal blog, but I never checked what it was — I was too scared, to be frank. I resent him, though, for treating me like shit while I worked under him, and for ultimately ruining my career in favour of recruiting his cronies to come and work for him. I feel he jumped at the chance to get rid of that disgusting Brit who didn't immediately scream blue murder any time a game with the slightest hint of sexualisation showed its face.

I need to let these incidents go. As I am now, I would almost certainly kick all three of these people square in the bollocks if I ever had the misfortune to meet them face to face, and I know that is not a productive or helpful use of my time. But I want — need — to get my frustration with them out of my system. I don't really know how.

I do know that an important step in that process is paying attention to Tim's tweet above. I don't need their approval. They are people whose opinions I do not value; people who I'd go so far as to say I legitimately despise. That's not a nice thing to say, but it's important to acknowledge, because why would you deliberately seek out the "approval" of someone you hate?

I feel if I can find an answer to that — or, well, no. I know the answer to that — it's "you shouldn't". I feel like if I can sear that answer into my brain sufficiently, I'll be able to move on and be much happier. MoeGamer has already made me happier and more proud than anything I ever did as part of the professional games press, because it's all mine. So that should stand by itself, and none of these other people should matter.

I need to keep telling myself that.