Acknowledging When You Need Help, or At Least When You Need to Change

I'm going to share some stuff today that I'm a bit uncomfortable about sharing, but attempting to deal with it in private hasn't been going so well, so I'm hoping that making things a bit more "public" might help me somehow.

I'm not sure how yet — perhaps simply making people aware of what I'm dealing with might make me feel a bit better about it, or perhaps I need some sort of support. Exactly what form that support might take, I have no idea, but… anyway, enough preamble, let me just get into it before I talk myself out of sharing this.

As those who have known me for a while will know, I have struggled for a long time with my weight. It has been on a steadily upward spiral for pretty much my entire adult life and, barring an extremely successful stint with Slimming World a few years back, I have had great difficulty shedding weight and keeping it off. This has been a particular problem during the COVID years, since just general activity was pretty much a no-go for quite some time.

This is a fairly significant problem, not just for the obvious reasons, but also because I have been suffering with an extremely painful hernia for the past few years — and the doctors refuse to do anything about it unless I lose some weight, because apparently if I get it fixed in the state I'm in right now, it's very likely to just come back. It doesn't help, of course, that I am terrified of hospitals in general and surgery especially, but I'm kind of sort of coming to terms with the fact that at some point it will be necessary to confront that. But not yet.

This is extremely difficult and embarrassing to admit, but I hope that sharing it might help some people to understand why I find some things a bit of a struggle — things that "normal" folks would likely take in their stride on a daily basis. Things like, say, walking down to the shops in a group at lunchtime to get a sandwich; I just can't keep up with people.

I entirely accept that the situation I'm in is my own fault, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing. If anything, it makes it more embarrassing.

I currently weigh over 28 stone. I do not like admitting this because it's utterly shameful, but I'm putting it out there just so you understand where I'm coming from.

This is obviously extremely unhealthy and I am perfectly aware of that. It disgusts me to see myself in the mirror. None of my clothes fit properly. And any time someone in the street insults me for my weight (which has happened rather more often than I'd like) I have a hard time accepting that they're being unreasonable and unpleasant; part of me feels like I "deserve" the abuse.

I am taking measures to attempt to reduce that — specifically, my wife Andie and I are following the WeightWatchers (or "WW" as they prefer to call it now) plan. This means that we track our food intake daily according to various items' "points" values and, in doing so, both learn to think about what we're putting in our mouth and control what we're eating.

Trouble is, of late we (and particularly I) have been struggling with motivation to such a degree that it's tough to make it through a whole week staying "on plan". WW has a certain amount of flexibility built into it in that you can earn points "back" by eating vegetables and doing exercise, but that doesn't exactly cancel out a day when you eat way too much of the things you shouldn't be eating.

My trouble is, I have what I'd probably describe as an addiction, having been in a position to care for and be with people who have had other types of addiction. My addiction is not to alcohol or drugs, though; it's to food.

Food is my coping mechanism. If I'm sad, I want to eat. If I'm anxious, I want to eat. And when I want to eat, I don't want to "grab a handful of salad" or "enjoy this healthy treat packed with veggies" — I want chocolate, cake, bread, crisps, sugary drinks, that sort of thing. And I often find the urge to eat those things completely irresistible — even if we have none of them in the house. Living near a Tesco Express will do that to you.

Unfortunately, this leads to something of a vicious cycle. I am sad and anxious and angry because of my weight. Because I'm sad and anxious and angry, I eat, which makes my weight problem worse. I feel guilty about screwing my own body up, which makes me feel sad and anxious and angry, which… you get the idea. It is unhealthy coping mechanisms and an unhealthy relationship with food that has got me into this position, but I am having a real tough time breaking out of it.

The reason why I'm feeling particularly anxious about it right now is because in combination with the symptoms of "long COVID", I feel a complete wreck on a daily basis. All my joints ache. It hurts to sit down for too long. It hurts to stand up for too long. If I lie on my side for too long in the night, the knee on the bottom ends up in excruciating pain for a few minutes. I'm perpetually tired, and no amount of sleep seems to fix that.

I know very well that fixing all this is going to be a long and slow process — but that it is possible. The one light at the far-off end of an extremely long tunnel is that I know I've had success with this before. I've never felt so good in my adult life as when I was successful at Slimming World — but unfortunately a variety of both personal and professional stresses caused me to well and truly fall off the wagon, putting me in a worse situation than I've ever been in my life.

I don't want to hurt any more. I don't want to be sad any more. And I don't want to die before my time. I don't really know if or how anyone reading this is able to help, but I just want to put it out there that I could do with some help — even if it's simply a bit of consideration and understanding for the situation I'm in, and the knowledge that there are people out there not judging me negatively and harshly for ending up in such a horrible (albeit self-inflicted) situation, but who will be there to support and encourage me as I attempt to rescue myself from it.

Thanks for your time.

The Missing Years

I suspect your experience with what I'm about to describe will probably vary quite a bit according to your own age — but speaking as a forty-one year old man, I have to say, I find it mildly disconcerting that a number of years just sort of seem to have gone missing.

I don't mean that I've forgotten them or anything, or that I'm suffering some sort of debilitating brain injury (not to my knowledge, anyway, ayooo, etc.) but rather that there's a definite period of my life that feels like it just sort of passed by in a flurry without really very much to show for it.

Said period covers pretty much from the end of my time at university up until right now, which is a good twenty years or so. That's a not-insignificant amount of time to feel like you've just sort of "lost", which is why it occasionally weighs on my mind like this. Are there better ways I could have spent that last twenty years? Almost certainly, but at the same time that twenty years taught me a lot of helpful life lessons that have enabled me to just about survive to where I am now.

I think therein lies the core of why I feel like many of those years sort of "went missing" — the fact that I'm unconvinced of their value to my life as a whole.

Out of those twenty years, I spent several attempting to make a career out of teaching, before a nervous breakdown convinced me that probably wasn't a great idea.

Then I did some retail work with a mind to building up both my creative and technical skills in the computing field, which was going great until the management of the job I was working — and loving, up until that point, I should say — decided to ruin the lives and careers of several of us for no apparent reason.

Then terrible things happened in my personal life that I'm keen to forget and mostly have at this point. That took a good year or so, probably a little more, but as I was coming out of that I started developing what looked like a promising career in online games journalism. That eventually came to fruition… until the publication I was working on (and getting paid well for) closed down relatively without warning, leaving me adrift once again.

After that, I spent some time writing about mobile and social games, which was utterly soul-destroying but paid astronomically well for the amount of effort it took, so I wasn't going to complain too much about that. Then came USgamer, which was great until I was, once again, fucked over without any control of the situation. A brief stint working a "normal" job for energy company SSE, who — again — completely boned me to such a degree it had a severe impact on my mental health and, after a bit of a tense period… well, here we are.

So I guess that accounts for the last twenty years or so, just about. It's just strange how a lot of those years have just sort of all merged into one another; I can't remember a lot of specific details about many of them, at least partly because I probably don't want to. That would make sense.

It's just a little odd that I can still vividly remember, say, something like my mother happening to see me at playtime on the primary school field (aged about 7, probably) thinking that I was hitting a girl in my class with a stick when we were actually playing make-believe and having a thoroughly lovely time, and yet what should theoretically be more "important", defining periods in my life are becoming almost "lost" to me.

I guess you hold on to the memories that are actually important to you for one reason or another. And what your subconscious thinks is "important" doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it's not worth trying to understand it; just enjoy those memories that your mind has decided to hang on to!

The Ravages of Age

Andie and I are suffering from what appears to be colloquially known as "long COVID". That is to say, having had COVID earlier in the year, neither of our bodies have quite recovered from the experience, leaving us feeling way shittier than we really should be when we're otherwise "healthy". I use the term loosely because neither of us are exactly "healthy", but we're not actively afflicted with any illnesses, so far as I'm concerned.

According to the NHS, the symptoms of long COVID include being achey, tired all the time and generally feeling crap. I can confirm that all of those things are present and correct in my own body; the whole experience has left me feeling about thirty years older than I actually am, and I'm rather keen to leave this feeling behind now. I don't feel I should be feeling intense pain when sitting down for too long, or standing up for too long, or just generally existing at my age, but, well, I'm sure this is at least partly my own fault.

We're not doing nothing about it, mind; both of us are following WeightWatchers in an attempt to shed some excess baggage, because that will probably help the symptoms we're suffering. And while it's slow going — at least partly because with both OG COVID and long COVID we've found ourselves struggling with motivation, because the last thing you want to do when you feel like crap is diet — things are going relatively well. We just need to try and stick with it over the long term. Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly when you're feeling pretty exhausted and all you want to do is eat in the vain attempt that you might regain some energy and vigour.

After the last couple of years — and after the whole news over the "cost of living crisis" we're presently enduring here in the UK — it sort of feels like we need to resign ourselves to life being shitty in general, so what, really, is a bit of physical suffering to go along with feelings of existential crisis, a sense that you don't really belong in the modern world and a quite genuine feeling that the world is actually in the process of ending right now?

There's a cheery thought for your Thursday afternoon, now, isn't it? So I think I'm off to go and live my life in denial with either some Final Fantasy XIV, Tower of Fantasy or both. At least in those worlds I can do something about the things that are Wrong, both with myself and with the world at large!

Homecoming

A fine morning to you, everyone. I've decided to come back to this blog on an occasional basis, as writing here always used to provide good "therapy" when I really needed it — and after the last couple of years we've all had I don't think anyone in the world would deny the need for some sort of outlet for all the stresses we've been having to deal with.

I'm not going to make any bold commitments about posting every day or anything like that — largely because my day job over at Rice Digital means that I'm writing every day anyway, so the whole "keeping in practice" thing isn't really necessary. Instead, I'm just going to write here when I feel like it, just for the sake of expressing myself and perhaps sharing something of myself with those of you reading.

This might also be an opportunity to rekindle some friendships that kind of fell by the wayside when I moved away from posting regularly on this blog in favour of my other projects such as MoeGamer and my YouTube channel. So if you're seeing this in your inbox or feed reader for the first time in a while, be sure to say hi — it'd be lovely to hear from some of you.

I'm not going to go straight into babbling on too much about the living nightmare that is life in 2022; we'll save that for another day. For today, I just wanted to say hello, remind you all that I exist — and let you know that you'll once again be seeing a bit of me around here now and again. That'll probably do for now — but expect more soon!

Calling it a day on Patreon

Hi folks. I've been thinking long and hard about this for some time, but I think it's probably time to hang up this Patreon account.

Frankly, it's just not really been working out for me the way it hoped; it's been near-impossible to attract new subscribers, even with regular mentions of it on socials, at the end of videos and in other such places, and in recent months I've been shedding subscribers. My income from Patreon this month is literally less than half of what it was last month.

My original intent for this account was to see if it was possible to turn MoeGamer (and, later, my video work) into something self-sustainable — particularly while I was struggling to find full-time employment. Now, I thankfully have full-time employment, so that "pressure" isn't there any more — and I just find myself responding to a lot of things about Patreon not with excitement, but with anxiety.

I don't like logging in to see people have left; it makes my heart sink and my mind feel like I've done something wrong. This isn't anyone's fault, I hasten to add; it's my own mental health talking. I know from my own experience of cancelling and moving pledges around that not everyone is able to stick around for all eternity, so of course it would be exactly the same for me, too. Still, it's hard not to feel like you've somehow "failed" when subscribers disappear.

And in some ways, I feel like I have failed to make good use of this account. I've never felt like I've been able to offer meaningful benefits to subscribers, and apparently "just supporting someone you enjoy the work of" isn't enough incentive to convince much of the Internet-going public into opening their wallets. It's hard enough to even get people to comment on stuff these days.

Fact is, though, I've never had the time or the resources to be able to plug into making Patron-exclusive stuff — had I managed to grow my membership beyond its peak (I never did quite crack $100 a month) I suspect I would have been able to make time for Patron-exclusive things, but as it stands it's never felt like something I could spend too much time on in good conscience.

And when you can't even get your own friends — either IRL or Internet — to chip in a dollar a month to help you out a bit… well, that's pretty demoralising.

So I'm going to hang it up and remove just one more stressor from my life. I may well do something like open up YouTube Memberships, as providing benefits like emojis and stickers are easy to do and actually meaningful to the platform on which the work people are supporting is hosted. But from today, I will be pausing Patreon memberships indefinitely, and likely not turning them back on again.

I would like to say a very, very sincere "thank you" to those of you who have supported me, whether you're a new member or someone who has stuck around for a very long time.

There are quite a few of you here in the members list who have stuck with me for literally years at this point, and believe me, your support has helped me survive some very tough times indeed — if not financially then most definitely through the knowledge that there are genuinely kind people out there. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the knowledge you were there helped keep me hanging on through some particularly difficult years.

Plus I'm legitimately grateful to those of you who have become friends as well as just Patreon supporters — I'd like to give a particular shout-out to Ken, who helped me get my hands on the Atari ST version of Rod Land that I so dearly wanted as a child, and to Digger Dan, whom hopefully many of you know the story of already! And, of course, my dear friend and podcasting partner-in-crime Chris.

So here's what's going to happen:

After I post this publicly, I'm going to pause all memberships, which means you will not be charged for any further months. Doing it this way rather than simply deleting my account means that you should still have access to any Patron-exclusive stuff you might care to look back on. Right now, I have no intention of unpausing, so don't feel you have to cancel; I may still post occasional things here, so remaining a paused member should mean you still get updates.

If you would like to continue to support me in some way after this Patreon gets paused, you can do so in a few ways:

Ko-Fi allows you to make one-time donations in a variety of ways. You can do that here. This is purely a "tip jar" if you want to flip me a couple of quid if you enjoyed something; I have no intention of posting anything exclusive there.

Alternatively, my YouTube channel now has access to Super Thanks, which appears in the form of a "Thanks" button in the same row of buttons as the Like/Dislike, Share and other buttons on a video. Using Super Thanks, you can flip me a one-off tip and leave a comment, which will be specially highlighted as a means of thanking you for your donation. Like Ko-Fi, there's no long-term commitment there and likewise no exclusive content; it is just, as the name suggests, a means of saying "thanks".

I will also look into YouTube Memberships, and if there's a means of implementing some sort of benefits that won't take too much time away from my actual work on the channel and the day job — like the aforementioned emoji and stickers — I'll turn those on as a means of offering recurring support. If I do this, there is of course no obligation to join up and there likely won't be any "members only" videos; it will simply be a means of showing your support directly on YouTube.

Once again, I'd like to say a very sincere thank you to all of you reading this who are both current or past supporters. It's been a fun journey, but I feel like it's ultimately for the best for my creative endeavours if I'm not feeling stressed over whether or not I'm providing for those kind enough to drop me some money each month!

Thank you for taking the time to read all this. If you'd like to follow me elsewhere online, you can find me on Twitter at @MoeGamer, and Discord at MoeGamerPete#2465. And don't forget to read my stuff every day over at Rice Digital! It's like MoeGamer, only I get paid for it and have a team of writers supporting me!

Weekend update

Hello! Gonna start posting a thing each weekend as a means of getting me off my arse to write something for you lovely people — and also to keep you up to date on what's going on.

You may have already read on the YouTube community tab, but I'm tweaking the monthly schedule a bit from this coming week. Retro Select is going to take a break for a bit, because although it provides a nice bit of flexibility, it's not being watched by as many people as I hoped it would — particularly the stuff that I hoped would do a bit better, like some of the overlooked/underappreciated more "recent retro" stuff.

So basically rather than worrying about that too much, I'm just going to give it a break for a while and prioritise the stuff that seems to be the main reason people are sticking around, which is the Atari, Commodore and Evercade stuff! I'll still keep Retro Select on the back burner for an occasional one-off when I feel like it, but it will no longer be a regular feature. As such, that means the new monthly schedule will look like this:

Week 1: Atari A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 2: C64 A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 3: Atari ST A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 4: Amiga A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)

The reason for bumping up the number of Evercade A to Z episodes and making them weekly is that there is now so much stuff available for that platform and I really want to get through it. I realise at this point I'm never going to "catch up" with the rate of cartridge releases (probably, anyway) but it would be nice to make some slightly quicker progress.

That and, in effect, the Evercade A to Z series will be fulfilling much of the same function as Retro Select: showing off assorted retro games from a variety of platforms, albeit with a hard cut-off at the PS1 era due to what the Evercade can comfortably handle.

With the C64 cart for Evercade launching later in the year, also, there will doubtless be some crossover between Evercade A to Z and C64 A to Z, but where there is overlap I'll be covering the games again; it's worth seeing how they play on Evercade without a keyboard vs. how they play using emulation on a computer or a clone system like the C64 Maxi.

Anyway, here's what you can expect for next week's videos:

Galactic Chase for Atari 8-bit: a Galaxian clone that a lot of people think is better than Atari's official port of Galaxian to ROM cartridge. I haven't played this game since I was a kid, but I remember my family being quite fond of it, so looking forward to revisiting it.

Hardcore 4×4 for Evercade from the Gremlin cart: an off-road racing game that was originally released on PS1. The Gremlin cart is quite interesting in that a lot of people's first reaction to it is kind of "meh", but when they get into the games on it, they find themselves having a lot of fun. I've not spent a lot of time with Hardcore 4×4 so far but I have enjoyed what I played so far — so making a vid seems like an ideal opportunity to dive a little deeper.

Anyway. Hope you're all having a good weekend and aren't melting too much in the heat. Ta-ta for now!

Updating you all!

Hello everyone! Haven't written for a while so thought I'd check in. Hope you're all doing well and aren't melting too much in the summer heat. It's hot enough in our house for butter to melt onto bread without applying any additional heat, so that's nice. (No it isn't.)

Picked up an Anbernic Win600 device the other day. You can read my detailed impressions over on Rice Digital. So far I'm impressed with it; it seems like a nicely capable device, albeit not really up to anything too modern and/or intensive. I'm both disappointed and relieved that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition doesn't run well on it, otherwise I could potentially have a real problem on my hands. It's already bad enough that HoloCure works great on it.

The device is, of course, great for retro gaming, and as suggested by a few people I've installed Batocera (a retro gaming-centric OS) onto a USB stick, allowing me to dual-boot the device into either Windows or Batocera depending on what I want to do. Running Batocera essentially makes it run like a dedicated EmulationStation-based retro gaming handheld, while in Windows it's just a handheld PC.

I did try SteamOS for a bit and was reasonably impressed — particularly with how far WINE has come since I tried it 10+ years ago on Mac — but ultimately determined that, for what I want to use the device for (visual novels, among other things) it was just making work for myself, and sticking with Windows was probably the optimal solution.

I might upgrade the internal storage and/or RAM at some point, but at present I'm rocking the base model and it works absolutely fine for my purposes. I'm looking forward to spending some more time with it in the long term.

A revamp

I think I'm probably going to revamp this Patreon page completely to focus it more on my video work. While I do very much welcome the continued support of MoeGamer — particularly as, even while I'm not writing there much, it still has annual server costs — I do continually feel a little bad about not updating much over there any more.

I mean, I'm pretty certain this is just a "me" thing to worry about, but I also want to be transparent about the specific work people are supporting by signing up to this Patreon.

Yes, Patreon donations do go towards keeping MoeGamer up and running — and even if I'm not actively writing on there thanks to my day job at Rice Digital, I want to keep the site live as a resource that people can refer to at any time — but my primary active "passion project" work right now is on my retro gaming YouTube stuff.

So with that in mind, I think I'm going to rewrite my Patreon page to focus on that side of things. So if you see some major changes on that front in the next few days, that's why!

Obviously I'd prefer everyone who has supported me for a long time to stick around regardless of what I'm doing, but I also completely understand if you feel my focus has changed and it's something different to what you signed up to support. I am grateful for your support up until this point, and hope you'll consider continuing.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that this is coming. I've been agonising over it for a long time and I think it's probably for the best at this point!

That's all for now. Thanks as always for your support!

The creator's quandary

Been thinking a bit of late, and this is doubtless something anyone who enjoys writing, making videos or simply talking about their hobbies has run into: it's good to make time for yourself occasionally.

I say this as someone who, both when writing about games as a hobby and doing it professionally as I do now, often finds himself thinking about what he "should" be doing in terms of simply enjoying gaming, rather than what he feels like at any given moment. For example, I often wonder if I "should" spend my weekends working through some substantial visual novels and RPGs so that I can write about them or make videos on them.

The thing is, I actually want to engage with these works at some point, but it's the feeling of "obligation" that sometimes holds me back. Or perhaps more accurately, the feeling that I "should" spend my time doing something that is more immediately "useful". The silly thing is that with the way my brain works, I end up completely overthinking the whole situation and wasting a whole lot of time, when I could simply be enjoying a video game that I feel like playing at any given moment.

I'm going to try and break that habit a bit. While yes, I do still want to play things so that I can write about them over on Rice Digital and make videos about them, I'm going to try and let go of the feelings of "guilt" I sometimes feel if I decide I'm simply in the mood for something else. Today, for example, I just felt like playing some more nail'd, even though that's not in any way "useful" for either Rice Digital or YouTube — I just wanted to play it. So I did. And I enjoyed it.

These feelings don't come out of resentment or anything like that; quite the contrary, in fact. Those who have been following me for a while — which is most of you reading this — will know that one thing I love doing more than anything with both my written and video work is highlighting things that don't get nearly enough attention from the mainstream. Trouble is, by the very nature of these things, there are so many of them that it's hard to pick and choose what to cover when!

I have games in my collection that I want to play through from start to finish that extend right back to the 8-bit era. And "analysis paralysis" quite often prevents me from diving into things that I know I'll enjoy — plus the desire not to have too many things on the go at once, because leaving things unfinished is a personal bugbear of mine. That's probably a slightly different matter though!

Anyway, I guess the main point of all this is that it's important to give yourself permission to simply enjoy yourself — for no other reason than rest, relaxation and the enjoyment of your hobby. Not everything needs to end up as an article, an essay, a video or a podcast; sometimes it's okay to just have fun with something and that be that.

I need to keep reminding myself of this!

Still going!

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't been around here much of late — I've been extremely busy at work with a variety of projects both public-facing and behind the scenes, and as such when the evening comes I've pretty much just wanted to switch off completely! I thought I'd make the effort to write this evening, though, what with it being the end of the week and a nice nap earlier meaning that I'm now wide awake at 11.30pm.

I'm enjoying working on the new video schedule for the moment. Two videos per week appears to be a nice sweet spot for me that doesn't overwhelm me, but also doesn't make me feel like I'm leaving the channel "barren" for long periods. I know no-one except me really cares about that with the size of my audience overall, but still. It's important to be satisfied with your own work, even if that means putting a bit more effort in.

I'm working on "cycles" at the moment where I plan out the next four weeks' worth of videos in advance, then record all of the intros in one go. I then record the actual game footage two vids at a time to go with what I'm planning to release: C64 and Atari 8-bit one week, Amiga and ST the next, two lots of Retro Select (which can be pretty much anything) the next and two lots of Evercade the next.

We've just passed the first week of a new "cycle" with Buggy Boy on C64 and Escape from Doomworld on Atari 8-bit, so over the course of the next three weeks, here's what you have to look forward to:

World Games for Atari ST, a divisive multi-sports title from Epyx that eschews conventional Olympic-style competition in favour of a variety of events specific to particular regions in the world. Some are considerably more odd than others!
Battle Squadron for Amiga, a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up which is very good, and which I have limited experience with so far outside of my friend Sam being obsessed with it in our first year at university.
nail'd for Xbox 360, a favourite arcade racer that deserves some love. Also I had some requests for some more Xbox 360 stuff in Retro Select, so both episodes of that will be 360-themed this week.
Ninja Blade for Xbox 360, which is an interesting one because it's by FromSoftware, but also from that weird period where Japanese devs tried to make games that appealed to the west. Seen very mixed opinions of this online so fascinated to give it a shot.
Romeow and Julicat for Evercade, which is a thoroughly charming puzzle game that the actual developers have left precisely zero information about online, so the gameplay will mostly have to speak for itself!
Night Stalker for Evercade, which is one of my all-time favourite Intellivision games. I only really learned about the Intellivision in more recent years, but if I'd had one back in the day this one would have been a fixture in my cartridge slot!

Next "cycle" I'm thinking about doing a Wii week for Retro Select; I've picked up an armful of 50p nonsense from CEX, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of those. I've also got copies of DJ Hero and its sequel on the way, but attempting to play those on YouTube may well be asking for copyright-related trouble, so that might just be a "me" thing!

Also with Retrounite not having found the audience we hoped it would, that frees up more time to do retro-related stuff elsewhere. To that end, you'll see some blog posts from me over on the official Evercade site in the coming weeks — you may have already seen a few about the Game of the Month releases on the VS! — and I'll be folding some regular retro coverage into Rice Digital, too, likely in the form of "here are some weird retro games no-one ever talks about but which are actually well worth exploring because they're cheap".

Times are good! I'm feeling creatively fulfilled both in my own personal projects and at work, and I'm really proud of the things I can say I've been involved with (I played an important role in a modern rerelease of frickin' Rod Land!!) — plus the things I can't yet say that I've been involved with. More on that in the coming weeks when they're actually announced. Tease, tease.

Anyway, thanks as always for your continued support. It really means a lot that you folks are willing to stick by me as I pootle around doing my various passion projects, and as those projects evolve over time.

No half-measures for Ultima

I bought a laser printer this week. I had one specific purpose in mind for it: printing out manuals for old 8- and 16-bit home computer games that are impractical or unfeasibly expensive to acquire "real" copies of, and giving those games the time and attention they deserve.

You see, although many games on classic home computer platforms fall into the "simple arcadey fun" category, there are also lots that are enormously ambitious and which take full advantage of the fact their host platform is a computer, not a games console. This is great, because there are lots of really interesting experiences to be had on these platforms, particularly if you explore the genesis of a whole genre. However, the downside is that more often than not, you very much need to read the manuals for these more complex games before you'll have the slightest clue what you're doing.

For me, the Ultima series of role-playing games had always fallen into this category, even though a few brief forays into them on the Atari A to Z series had revealed them (and games like them, such as SSI's Questron) to be a lot more manageable and straightforward than I had previously assumed. And so I'd always been holding off exploring them in any great depth until I had a manual by my side that I could refer to easily — and by "refer to easily" I do not mean "call up a tiny PDF on my phone and squint at", because as technologically marvellous as that might be, it's not convenient, practical or indeed enjoyable.

So, with my recent acquisition of the A500 Mini and the C64 Maxi, I thought I'd print out some manuals. We already had an inkjet printer, but as anyone who has owned a cheap inkjet printer made within the last 20 years will be able to tell you, inkjet printers have several major flaws in them that make them less than desirable to use. Firstly is the fact that their ink cartridges inevitably have an absolutely miniscule supply available to you. Secondly is the fact that replacing said cartridges is unnecessarily expensive. Thirdly is how if you don't use said cartridges for a while, they dry up, meaning you need to replace them regardless of if you've been using them or not. Fourthly, they're a bit slow. And fifthly, most of them don't do double-sided printing.

So I did a little bit of research and came upon a Brother laser printer that was about £150. It was only mono, but we print colour stuff so rarely that we can just continue to sink money into the old inkjet any time we actually need colour. The Brother printer, meanwhile, offered double-sided printing, a speed of up to 30 pages per minute, wireless connectivity plus scanning and copying capabilities. All in all, it sounded pretty ideal.

And indeed, so far it appears to have been. I printed out a bunch of Commodore 64 manuals last night and put them nicely in a ring binder. I consumed the entire "starter" toner cartridge that came with the printer in the space of a single evening and replaced it with a £12.99 third party job today that seems to work just fine. And now I have the manuals for Ultima I-VI all nicely printed out and ready to refer to. And so, I have finally begun playing the Ultima series.

Yes, that means starting with the first Ultima — specifically, the Commodore 64 version, which I'm playing on the C64 Maxi. And I've been surprised what a genuinely good time I've been having with the game so far. It's very simple and quite different in structure compared to today's role-playing games — but I actually rather like this. There's an enjoyable "sandbox" feel to it where you explore an open world, poke at various things to see what happens and gradually beef yourself up. Then there's some sort of eventual objective that you need to accomplish, but there's no real rush to achieve that — right now I'm just enjoying wandering around this world.

Ultima's most peculiar element — and something which it doesn't really explain at all in the manual, after I went to the trouble of printing it out — is its progression system. You have experience points and an experience level, and apparently you need to be level 8 to beat the game. But aside from that, progression is handled in a variety of rather peculiar ways, with "levelling up" actually not appearing to be all that important in terms of actually powering yourself up.

Firstly, like many other early RPGs of this type, you have no maximum hit points. If you "heal", your HP keeps rising and rising and rising, so it's in your interest to get them as high as you possibly can. This can be achieved in two main ways: donating money to the Kings of the realm, or by dungeon-crawling. The latter is especially effective, as it also means you'll acquire money at a good rate, which you'll need to keep supplying yourself with provisions, and to equip yourself with good armour and weapons.

How does dungeon crawling help you gain rather than lose HP? Well, any time you leave a dungeon, you get a bunch of HP back according to the number and type of monsters you splattered during that particular delve. The more you kill in a single expedition — and the stronger those monsters are — the more HP you get back upon making it safely back to the surface. So a simple means of beefing yourself up a bit for more significant challenges is mapping out a few levels of dungeon (which are, apparently, randomly generated each time you start a new game) and doing a few "laps" while bashing monsters along the way. After your workout, you'll have a bunch more money, some more experience and, assuming you make it back to the surface alive, a chunk more HP to play with.

Aside from this, you can boost your stats in a couple of ways. Firstly, the Kings of the realm offer you quests to find or kill particular things, and upon completing them and reporting in, they'll give you a bonus to a stat (usually Strength, it seems). Secondly, there are landmarks around the world that simply boost your stats when you visit them — although you can't visit the same landmark twice in succession to just repeatedly get the stat bonuses, you can zip back and forth between two nearby ones, alternating their bonuses until you get your stats up to the desired level.

This is all exceedingly odd by modern standards, but it also feels like the game is rewarding you for just wandering around and taking it all in. Although the game, its world and the core mechanics are all pretty simple, the fact there are lots of different incentives to explore makes it very enjoyable to play; it feels like you're always making some sort of progress. And while death is a fairly major inconvenience — while there's no permadeath, dying causes you to lose your weapon, your gold and all but 99 of your HP and food while being teleported somewhere random — it's by no means impossible to recover from. Indeed, on my own adventures so far I've died multiple times, and it's only after this most recent death that I've found myself absolutely armed to the teeth and ready for pretty much anything the realm of Sosaria would care to throw at me from hereon!

And if all that wasn't peculiar enough, there's also space combat. But I haven't got that far yet. I'm certainly intrigued, though, and I'm planning to continue my adventures for sure!