I'm sick of feeling like absolute crap. I was already in a right state prior to COVID hitting, and the mounting up of both mental and physical health factors over the course of the last couple of years in particular have meant that I'm pretty much in the worst shape I've ever been in my life. I get easily exhausted, I ache all over and I just generally feel awful, both physically and mentally.

I joined the gym a while back in the hope that establishing a regular routine would motivate me to at the very least get my muscles moving again, but for one reason or another I never successfully managed to establish that routine. And once I got COVID, I became understandably hesitant to spend protracted amounts of time in tight spaces with other sweaty people emitting noxious disease-fumes everywhere. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but let's just say I didn't feel as "safe" as I might have done a few years back.

So, rather than wasting forty quid a month on a membership I'm not using, I decided to start going for a walk. I started yesterday, and successfully went again today. Two in a row is definitely the start of something, and I feel like this is something I can manage and deal with right now — particularly once my anti thigh-chafing goo arrives tomorrow.

I actually rather like walking, but thigh chafing sucks, so being able to preemptively counteract that should help keep me motivated. Hopefully this stuff does a decent job — it had some good Amazon reviews but honestly that could mean anything these days. The alternative is wearing thigh bands (which I'm not against, but I worry about wasting money on the wrong size) or using anti-chafing shorts (which I own a pair of, but find quite uncomfortable at my current size and shape).

While going on my walks, I'm making a deliberate attempt to "disconnect" completely. I take my phone in case of emergencies, but it's in a backpack I carry along with my wallet and keys, so I can't easily just reach for it. I'm not logging or tracking my runs — though I have plotted the route I took for the last couple of days on Google Maps, just out of curiosity to see how far it actually was. (3km, if you were wondering.) And that allows me to just enjoy a bit of peace.

For my walks over the last couple of days, I've been heading to a nearby cemetery and just going through the middle of there, coming out the other side and then heading back up the main road that runs parallel to it. The time inside the cemetery is definitely the highlight; although it's a rather glum, melancholy place by its very nature, it's blissfully quiet and peaceful also, making it a good place to either be alone with your thoughts, or just to empty your mind a bit. I'll doubtless find some other good routes nearby in the coming days, but this is definitely a route I'll keep coming back to for the pleasurable peacefulness.

And I've actually already noticed a difference. I suspect it's mostly psychological, but today's 3km walk on the exact same route as yesterday felt significantly easier than yesterday's. I won't say it felt easy because, as previously established, I am very unfit. But when you're at rock bottom in a particular characteristic, there's nowhere to go but up, I guess.

We'll see how long I can stick with this — and if it actually helps at all!

Hi S-rank folks! Sorry for the long delay between these, but as noted in the video COVID kinda put paid to a lot of bold plans! Should be back on track now though, so expect at least one of these a month. We kick off today with a casual look around my new toy, TheC64.

Okay. So I know I said I was taking some pressure off myself by cutting the video schedule right back. But I'm sort of getting itchy feet a bit, and I feel like I'm not doing enough to satisfy myself right now. And this has been compounded somewhat by the addition of some new goodies to my collection: specifically, The A500 Mini, which I've previously mentioned, and The C64, which I decided to stop mulling over and grab today.

Fiddling with Amiga games on the A500 Mini makes me want to do a companion series to Atari ST A to Z, because there are some interesting comparisons to be made — and some interesting exclusives to explore, also.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised that in a lot of cases, the Atari ST version wasn't as far "behind" the Amiga as I thought it was; in fact, in some cases, I actually prefer the ST version by quite a margin. HeroQuest is the best example that springs immediately to mind; its atmospheric music works way better through the Atari ST's PSG sound chip than the Amiga's digital sound. But then, of course, you have the stuff that was properly designed for the Amiga, like Shadow of the Beast, and the machine really shines, pushing dedicated console-quality in a lot of instances.

And so I figured, if I'm going to an Amiga parallel series to Atari ST A to Z, why not do a C64 series parallel to Atari A to Z? You know it makes sense. Well, I think it makes sense, anyway, and I'm quite excited about the prospect.

I haven't yet decided on how I might "brand" these two series; going with the "A to Z" moniker would certainly be consistent, but I'm in two minds as to whether I actually want to keep the "alphabetical" gimmick. On the one hand, it's great that it forces me to hunt down and explore games that I might not otherwise have tried rather than simply going for the "obvious" choices; on the other, it can sometimes feel a little restrictive, and occasionally frustrating that it's a long time until I get to, say, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2.

Anyway, I'll have a ponder over the weekend (my C64 should be arriving on Saturday) and I'll see if two vids a week for the Atari A to Z and Atari ST weeks works for me. I suspect it will — in which case you have more to look forward to! Hurrah.

Anyway. Dinner time. Ta-ta!

Regular readers will know that for my birthday for the last few years, I've been hosting a gaming event for my local friends known as "The Davison Cup". It's a day-long event in which we play through a series of video games — and I get the opportunity to educate my friends about some games outside their usual, fairly narrow experiences.

This year, I decided to make the games exclusively Evercade VS-based, since there are hundreds of games available on that delightful platform now, many of which are eminently suitable for multiplayer. I also thought it would be a great chance to actually try some of these games in multiplayer for once, since I'm usually playing solo. This turned out to be a good decision, as there are some absolutely excellent multiplayer games on Evercade now.

The day kicked off with a round of Atari games, including Asteroids for the Atari 7800, Adventure, Sprintmaster, Ninja Golf, Warlords, Canyon Bomber and Skydiver. The old Atari games usually go down well at these events and this year was no exception; probably the least favourite was Sprintmaster, which was a surprise, as we've previously all enjoyed Super Sprint. The somewhat rough-around-the-edges gameplay of this 2600 title proved frustrating for some, though; it wasn't hated by any means — indeed, some of the "final" races were very intense and enjoyable! — but it was definitely the least favourite of the Atari games today.

Ninja Golf went down well, despite it taking up a little more time than intended. As is usually the case with newcomers to that game, the absurd premise attracts people in, then the simple but solid gameplay keeps them hooked. It really is an Atari 7800 classic, and a true essential to play if you haven't already.

Meanwhile the three arcade games Warlords, Canyon Bomber and Skydiver were probably the biggest hits from this set, simply because they're set up to be highly competitive multiplayer games — with four-player simultaneous action in the case of Warlords. Canyon Bomber and Skydiver also have the benefit of being extremely simple to pick up and play, so they always go down well.

Between "rounds", I attempted to nullify my host's advantage by providing "Pub Quiz" rounds, featuring nostalgia-themed questions. And by "nostalgia-themed", I mean "very specifically nostalgic for our friendship group" — including questions themed on scanned photos from our time at university, in-jokes that some have remembered for 20+ years and more. Each of these were a big hit and I'm glad I included them.

Second round was all Data East games, including Karate Champ, Side Pocket, Fighters History, Burnin' Rubber and Magical Drop 2. Of these, Side Pocket and Fighters History were probably the two that seemed to elicit the most genuine enjoyment from everyone, but the primitive gameplay of Karate Champ was enjoyable for everyone, the arcade action of Burnin' Rubber is always a good time and you can't go wrong with Magical Drop 2. It was nice to play some games of that which ended up decided on the quota rather than one player's screen getting filled!

Third round was a "Best of Bri'ish" round, featuring Sensible Software, CodeMasters and Bitmap Brothers games — specifically, Sensible Soccer, Super Skidmarks, Psycho Pinball and Speedball 2. All of these went down well — our resident sport-hater (the one who isn't me, I mean) even enjoyed Sensible Soccer, though interestingly he also hated Speedball 2, which is the opposite situation to what I expected. Psycho Pinball proved itself to be a highly enjoyable multiplayer game, though, even though it's just a turn-based score competition.

Fourth round was an "Indie Games are Weird" round, featuring the Joust-like Justice Duel, the axe-throwing Log Jammers, the four-player Super Homebrew War and Micro Mages from the upcoming Morphcat Games Collection 1 cart for Evercade. All of these were enjoyed by everyone, though it felt like none of us really found a good rhythm with Log Jammers. Micro Mages was as riotously fun as I expected it to be in four-player, so when that cart's release I highly recommend getting some buddies over to enjoy that — but the big surprise for me was Super Homebrew War, which proved to be absolutely brilliant in multiplayer. Not only that, but it has a very different dynamic according to whether you're playing in two, three or four-player mode. Very much recommended!

Fifth round was Intellivision games. SNAFU went down well because it's hard to go wrong with Tron light cycles, though Shark! Shark! proved itself to be less of an enjoyable two-player game than I thought it would be; the fact that when one player dies, the other player can keep playing until they die means that there's a lot of downtime for one player or another, and that spoils the experience somewhat. By contrast, Word Rockets proved to be a surprisingly competitive game in two-player mode, and Night Stalker is always a good time — though we played "best score on a single life" rather than a full session, since games of that can run quite long.

Sixth and final round was Gaelco arcade games, featuring World Rally, Alligator Hunt and Glass from the current Gaelco arcade cart, plus Squash and Maniac Square from the upcoming Gaelco 2 cart. Each and every one of these games impressed with their high-quality music and graphics; Alligator Hunt was particularly appreciated by everyone, and so too was the frighteningly fast yet oddly intuitive gameplay of World Rally. Squash also proved to be a really fun two-player game, and Maniac Square, although not involving a lot of direct interaction with one another, also proved to be enjoyable.

All in all, it was a great day, and my planning meant we were actually able to get through the whole thing before anyone felt like they had to leave this time around. I'm pleased with the outcome, and also very pleased that the Evercade VS was absolutely up to the challenge of hosting a day of gaming fun for everyone.

It's my birthday tomorrow! As such, I've been receiving a trickle of presents over the last few days, one of which was an A500 Mini from my brother, which I'm very happy about indeed. The Amiga in general has always been a sort of "far off, unreachable" thing for as long as I can remember — which I know is silly, because you've been able to emulate it for years — and thus this lovely new gizmo is as good an excuse as any for me to start exploring it.

Back in the day, the Amiga was "the great enemy" to Atari ST owners, because the two machines were rivals. Everyone knew deep down that the two machines had their specialisms and things that they were good at, but a bit of rivalry was fun.

More often than not, Amiga versions of games were significantly better in some way — particularly if they were 2D games — but the Atari ST came out on top in 3D games quite often, from what I understand. The Amiga also had impressive digital stereo audio hardware, which sounded amazing back at the time of original release, but has a distinctly "'90s techno" sound to it today; the ST's PSG chip, meanwhile, while technologically primitive in comparison, has aged quite gracefully, particularly when in the hands of someone who knew how to make it sing. Also the ST had built-in MIDI, which it is a contractual obligation for every ST owner to work into conversation as often as possible.

I had a couple of friends who had Amigas, so I wasn't particularly militant about my representation of the Atari ST crowd. I always enjoyed playing games on their systems, as well as making use of their unique applications such as Deluxe Paint and whatnot. But, for one reason or another, up until now, I've not really explored the Amiga platform in any great detail. That is about to change!

The A500 Mini comes with 25 games preloaded and preconfigured, but also has support for the "WHDLoad" system, which effectively allows games to be neatly packaged up into a single file and run a bit like a ROM in a console emulator. Consequently, over the course of the last couple of evenings, I've been loading up a USB stick with about 3,000 pieces of Amiga software in preparation to explore a bunch of them.

I was initially confronted with a strange challenge, which was that some of the WHDLoad games seemed to run much too fast, but I've found a way around that. (Let me know if you need details — they're a bit beyond the scope of what I'm writing here, but I'm happy to share.) So now I have an A500 Mini loaded up with what I can only assume is pretty much every Amiga game ever, and it's just waiting for me to dive in and fiddle around with it.

You doubtless know what's coming here: I think this is ripe for exploring in some videos, don't you? And there are two distinct perspectives that I think would be fun to consider: firstly, comparing the Amiga and Atari ST versions of games — and secondly, simply exploring some beloved "Amiga showcase" games, particularly those which were exclusive to the platform.

I haven't yet determined how I'll fit this in with my new schedule as yet, but I'm excited to start digging in. This Friday will be a Retro Select video because I've already recorded and edited that, then the following will be an Evercade one… beyond that, I'll figure out where and how to squeeze in some Amiga funtimes, because I sense I'm about to have a whole lot of fun exploring this system's library.

Good evening everyone! It's been a while since I last wrote — actually quite a bit longer than I realised, in fact, so apologies for that. But that's something I wanted to talk about today, as part of my ongoing efforts to continue enjoying my own private creative projects while simultaneously taking a bit of unnecessary pressure off myself.

More recent arrivals on this page may be wondering what the whole #oneaday thing was about on previous blog posts, so I thought I'd explain — because I'm ditching it from today.

#oneaday originally started back in 2010 as a community blogging project initiated by a few UK games journalists. I was never really part of the UK games journalism clique at any point, despite being a professional games journalist — the fact I typically worked for American websites probably didn't help there — but I was keen to participate in this project, because it sounded interesting.

Essentially, the idea was to post one thing on your own personal blog a day, every day, for a whole year. Each individual post didn't need to be good, it just needed to be something that you'd written. It was a means of keeping in practice, as it were, making it especially valuable for freelancers who might not have been constantly working on writing things.

Interestingly, the people who "founded" #oneaday all dropped out within the first month of starting, but I found the concept intriguing and enjoyable enough to continue going for two thousand, five hundred and forty-one days. You can read every one of those posts at my old, defunct personal blog here.

I enjoyed #oneaday, so when I started this Patreon page and was focusing more on MoeGamer than anything else, I decided that it might be fun to take up the challenge again. The daily posts would make a good opportunity for people to get to know me, and it would keep me writing stuff, even when I was working jobs that didn't exactly provide a lot of opportunity for creativity.

It didn't quite feel the same, though. Patreon lacks the sense of community that WordPress has — largely because it's a gated community with an admission fee, of course — and, moreover, the blog editor here just kind of sucks, particularly on mobile.

On top of that, there's no easy way to export stuff from Patreon somewhere else — or at least there wasn't when I started; there seems to be a WordPress plugin that does that now, though you need the ability to install plugins on your site to take advantage of it — meaning that if I wrote anything here that I was particularly pleased with, it was pretty much trapped here outside of manually, painstakingly copy-and-pasting into something else.

And on top of that, now that I'm writing every day over on Rice Digital… well, the original intention of #oneaday is a bit surplus to requirements. So rather than fretting over "missing days" and just churning out something quickly at the end of the day if I forgot or couldn't think of anything better to write, I'm instead ditching the #oneaday commitment and instead simply committing to writing to you all on a "fairly regular" basis — at least once a week, but more if I have something particularly interesting to share.

The result of this should be that my posts here should be a bit more interesting and substantial, and I take a bit more of that unwanted pressure off myself. I won't lie: on a number of occasions over the past few years I've considered shutting down Patreon entirely out of some weirdly misplaced sense of "guilt" for one reason or another — this particularly hits me when a patron leaves, though I emphasise that it's absolutely, definitely not their responsibility! — but I also really, really appreciate your support. Plus said support actually helps me out in my professional life by allowing me to acquire hardware, software and other goodies that I can use or write about in my actual job.

So basically, I want this to be less of a stress for me, but still provide you lovely people with something of worth in exchange for your valued contributions and generosity. So that's the plan. No more #oneaday, no more numbered posts, just some hopefully insightful and interesting things for you to enjoy on a semi-regular basis — plus the monthly Patrons Only! S videos for the S-rank patrons, which will be resuming this week now that I've shaken off COVID.

I suspect I've been overthinking all this considerably more than I needed to, but I wanted to give all of you a full and candid update on what's been going through my mind. My enforced "break" through COVID gave me plenty of opportunity to reflect on things, and I think this is going to work better going forward.

Thank you for your time, attention and understanding, and please look forward to some new posts soon!

I've been feeling really bad today. I don't feel too bad now, but for most of today it's been very unpleasant just being alive. Hopefully I'm over the worst — my wife, who is "one day ahead" of me in terms of COVID funtimes, has been a bit better today, so with any luck I should rally a bit tomorrow — but I certainly won't be sorry to see the back of this stupid disease.

Still being forced to take it easy for the weekend meant that I could just settle down and, when I wasn't coughing, spluttering, sneezing, having horrible headachey dizzy spells or wanting to sleep for three months, just play some games. I even finished two games — Tapeworm Disco Puzzle, which is the new Game of the Month on Evercade VS, and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, which concluded pretty much exactly how I hoped it would.

The latter was especially enjoyable, and yet another nail in the coffin for my appreciation of modern "Internet culture". The whole narrative was very cleverly handled in the context of the original Final Fantasy I, and actually rather sensibly made the effort to clear up at least some of the myriad plotholes in that game's back-of-a-napkin lore. It works excellently as a prequel to Final Fantasy I, and as a Final Fantasy fanservice game in general.

But what does the Internet want to talk about? Repeating the phrase "I'm going to kill Chaos", because saying something over and over again without any sort of context or commentary is funny, apparently. Main character Jack doesn't even actually say it that much in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, so it's just infuriating to see the lowest common denominator "everyone's a comedian" fuckwits latch on to the latest "meme" and parrot it without any thought whatsoever, rather than actually seeing what it's all about.

Oh well. That does leave space for some actually intelligent commentary on the subject at some point then. I guess that's one article for next week prepped and ready to go at least…

Tested positive this morning, not that I expected to escape unscathed when Andie's already got it. But yeah. That more than likely means I'll be spending most of my weekend in bed not even thinking about doing anything vaguely "productive", be that making videos for my own personal projects or fiddling around with anything for the day job.

Just wanted to let you know! Right after I got back from a break, too. Blech. Anyway, I don't feel too bad while I'm up and about at the moment so I'm going to make the most of it while I can before it gets too bad.

Stay safe! Wash your hands and all that shit.

Sorry haven't been around much for the last few days — we've both been a bit ill. Andie tested positive for COVID this morning; I'm still negative, but I'm feeling a lot of the same symptoms so I suspect I will also test positive within the next day or two. I'm all right for the moment, save for an annoying cough and a general sense of "bleh" about me, but we'll have to see how things go, I guess. If I'm too ill I guess I won't be recording a new video this weekend!

It's frustrating that catching COVID seems to be more of an inevitability than anything else right now. I know that getting COVID now isn't anywhere near as serious as it was back when the pandemic first started, but I can't help but feel that the whole switch in attitude from "do everything possible to contain this potentially deadly disease" to "eh, you're probably going to get it anyway" is a tad lackadaisical, to be polite about it.

To put things in a certain amount of admittedly biased perspective, I don't personally know anyone who had COVID at the height of the restrictions. None of my friends got it, none of my work colleagues got it, none of my family members got it. I think I might have had it right back at the start of the whole thing before anyone really knew it was a worldwide pandemic — the cough I had back then is very much like the cough I have right now — but aside from that, my world, including the "extended" aspect of it, was COVID free.

Now, in just the last few weeks, my Dad's had it, two of my local friends have had it, my wife's got it, several of my work colleagues have had it and I might have it. To me that suggests going back to being a bit more careful might not be a terrible idea… but apparently we're past that. The pandemic's over, don't you know. Everything's fine. Just don't look at the numbers.

Anyway, that's that. I'll keep you posted on my status but if I go quiet for a bit it's because I'm suffering in bed. If I go quiet for a long time, I'm probably dead, but hopefully it won't come to that.

Stay safe, wash your hands and stock up on the good cough medicine!

Greetings! As I noted the other day, my new, somewhat more relaxed schedule means that I can now provide you with legitimate Early Access to the upcoming videos, which will be published to the public on Fridays — so most of the time you'll get nearly a week of advance watch time!

This week it's time for Atari A to Z, and we're covering all-time classic platformer Chuckie Egg — a game I'm honestly surprised I haven't gotten around to before this!