I got a Bluetooth sleep mask recently — it's a nice comfy sleep mask that blocks out light very well and also has Bluetooth speakers nestled inside that you plonk on your ears. It works very well indeed, and I think it's been helping me sleep quite a bit better — I'm accustomed to having a certain amount of noise while trying to get to sleep (primarily because of Andie, who doesn't like being in a mostly-silent room) but I don't like excessive light, so I was never a big fan of attempting to fall asleep with the TV on.

Only trouble is, I have a mild problem with listening material. The only thing I have found myself reliably able to fall asleep to is… my own videos. Probably because I know them so well and because they have good memories attached to them; probably because I don't feel I need to "actively" listen to them.

But nope, it really is the case; anything else I try — including things that are explicitly supposed to be relaxing, such as ASMR videos, end up being things that engage my attention sufficiently to keep me awake. In the case of the video I tried last night, it also had the unwanted side effect of making me excessively horny, so I will be saving that particular VTuber's ASMR streams for… more appropriate times in future. (Ayamy Garubinu, if you're curious.)

I'm sure this probably says something uncomplimentary about either me or my videos — but oh well, it works for me, so I'll stick with it for now. At least it means I'm even more likely to remember obscure Atari facts than I already was…!

Microsoft bought Activision. What a colossal mess today's gaming industry has become. I can't pretend I'm not worried about this increasing tendency towards massive, multi-billion dollar takeovers — because while it's all been big triple-A publishers that I'm not at all interested in up until now, what happens when someone decided to start trying to get their hands on smaller companies that aren't balls-deep in crap like Game Pass and the like?

Thankfully, I feel like we're a way off that happening just yet. This is all "big business" stuff at the moment. Microsoft want Call of Duty day one on Game Pass so all the dudebros will sign up for Game Pass, so they just went and bought the people who make Call of Duty. I suspect Call of Duty will still come out on PlayStation — Microsoft likes money, after all, and they let Minecraft come out on non-Microsoft platforms even after buying it — but you can bet that it being on Game Pass is going to secure a mostly Microsoft future for its playerbase.

With this in mind, the one thing that I take a certain amount of comfort from is that most of the developers and publishers who put out things I'm interested in probably aren't even on Microsoft (or Sony's) radar. Out of all of them, Koei Tecmo is arguably the most "at risk", but I don't think they're big enough or that they have enough valuable properties for the suits to want to buy them up.

Square Enix is another matter, of course, but outside of Final Fantasy and Nier I'm not too bothered about a lot of the stuff they've been doing of late; to put it another way, I like Square Enix when they're being Square Enix, not when they're being Eidos. And at this point, I feel like Final Fantasy XIV is probably a big barrier to any sort of takeover attempt — although I guess Activision does still have World of Warcraft, as much as that game has been in decline for quite some time now.

Anyway, I feel like we're going to have to wait and see what the long-term consequences of this are. Hopefully at the very least Bobby Kotick ends up out on his arse — it sounds as if that will be the case once the deal is finalised — but you know he's probably going to have some sort of obscenely generous severance package lined up, even with all the vile shit he's been part of during his time at the top.

This is the one possible positive out of the whole situation, really; under the Microsoft umbrella, I suspect Activision is about to enjoy a severe case of cleaning house, since I don't see MS wanting to deal with the PR nightmare that Activision has been weathering for the last while.

Sigh. Anyway. I'm going to go and play retro games in bed, far away from all these shenanigans!

Sat down and made an effort to make some progress in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, and achieved a great deal. I believe I am now up to date on unlocking and completing everything it's possible to do at the beginning of "postgame" Stormblood, so now I need to actually get the main story rolling again, which is exciting! Stormblood postgame leads to Shadowbringers, which is supposed to be amazing — and then, of course, there's Endwalker after that, which I haven't heard anyone complain about at all.

I also actually remembered to finish off a Hildibrand quest I'd left half-finished from back in the Heavensward era, so that felt good to finally tick that off, too. I believe there's a Stormblood Hildibrand quest cycle too, but I haven't looked into if you can jump straight into that or if there's main story progress required first. I do know that unlike the Heavensward Hildibrand cycle, there's one of the "series"' iconic silly boss fights to do along the way, so looking forward to seeing that — particularly as it, like many other things in the Hildibrand cycle, is yet another piece of gratuitous series fanservice.

I was particularly entertained during the "Grand Sers" part of the Heavensward Hildibrand quest that there was a full-on note-for-note recreation of Final Fantasy VII's "Ultimate End" animation for Knights of the Round — despite Heavensward having you literally fighting Knights of the Round, the nature of combat in Final Fantasy XIV (particularly around vanilla Heavensward era) means that proper full-on Final Fantasy "cinematic special moves" were out of the question. That fight is still awesome, though; I just wish they'd gear sync it or something so it lasted a bit longer!

Anyway, that's been my evening. Not going to fall into the trap of playing it every night — I'm fully intending to get back to Atelier this week, but I also need to crack on with Full Metal Daemon Muramasa to continue writing about it — but I feel like I'm at a point where I can make some progress a bit at a time and feel like it's time well spent.

Now, though, time is best spent in bed. So I'm off to do just that! Hope your Monday has been bearable.

One habit I really wish I could rid myself of is that when I'm doing anything creative that involves something "audio-visual" in nature — i.e. something other than writing — I spend a lot of time while working on the thing just enjoying the half-finished thing I've created, rather than actually finishing it.

Making a video? I'll often catch myself just watching rather than getting on with editing. Making a piece of music? I'll listen to the 30 seconds I'm happy with over and over rather than thinking of how it might develop from there. Fiddling around with some sort of game making software? Dear Lord, will I ever play that first bit of game over and over and over again.

In some respects I guess this isn't a terrible habit to have; it's good to take pride in your work, and also to be willing to look critically at it on multiple "passes" through the creative process — but it wastes one hell of a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, and I really wish I could break the habit!

On the other hand, getting frustrated with this does mean that when I do actually complete something properly, I feel a certain amount of pride because I know I've overcome my own procrastination demons. Which is something, I guess. I think I'd probably rather improve my own productivity a little bit, though — at least I'm aware of the problem, which is a start!

As you'll have seen if you checked in on YouTube today, Evercade A to Z is back! I went back and forth on whether I should start something new such as Intellivision Lives! or Activision Anthology for a series, but I've been kind of champing at the bit to get back to Evercade stuff for quite some time, so I thought… well, now's the time.

The format will be the same as before — pick one game from one cart at a time from the library that exists as I reach that point — but footage will be captured from the VS as opposed to the handheld where possible. Not that it makes a huge difference with retro stuff, but this means that the original footage will be 1080p rather than 720p, which will be nice. The only exceptions to this will be the two Namco carts, which I'll have to continue capturing from the handheld due to Blaze's ongoing negotiations with Namco (and Namco's continued awkward bloody-mindedness) over licensing.

Part of the reason I was keen to return to Evercade A to Z is that it's such a varied library in its own right. Each cartridge has a real mix of different stuff in terms of both genre and platform (aside from platform-specific carts like the Intellivision Collection 1 cart) and thus the series should be quite different and varied from week to week, which will keep things interesting for viewers and motivation high for me. I'll even learn not to dread the Interplay Collection carts coming up — there's only a few games on each of them, after all, and very few of those games are completely irredeemable!

For this week, it was a delight to return to Tanzer, which I hadn't actually spent a huge amount of time with before, primarily because I really wanted to play it on the TV but the HDMI sound bugs it had on its original release precluded me from doing that. Now it works absolutely fine on both handheld and VS I can enjoy it to its fullest — and it turns out it's a really great game. Who'd have though one of the games that people were most excited for from the system's launch lineup would turn out to be great?

Anyway, that's the plan for Saturdays for the indefinite future. I've got a lot of games to get through from the current library — and with a number of new carts coming this year (some of which have been publicly announced, some of which I know about but can't talk about yet and some of which are still being planned) there'll be stuff to talk about for the next… long while yet, I'm sure. So I hope you enjoy!

While writing my CodeMasters article over on Retrounite earlier, I happened to stumble across some information about what their regular composer Allister Brimble was up to. Turns out he's been very active ever since those early days when he was writing music for various Codies games, and he's put out a number of intriguing albums in more recent years.

One of the more interesting (to me, anyway) is one called David Whittaker Amiga Works, in which Brimble re-arranges and re-imagines a number of famous David Whittaker tracks that previously appeared in Amiga (and, by extension, Atari ST) games. There's some really great stuff in there, including the themes to Shadow of the Beast, Menace, Speedball, Xenon and Obliterator (a personal favourite) — and Brimble's rearrangements are really good.

The nice thing about them is that he doesn't try and overdo them; their sound quality is obviously vastly superior to the original host platforms on which we heard them, but they still feel and sound very authentic in terms of instrumentation, texture and timbre. Essentially what Brimble has done is bring us an album of what Whittaker's music would probably sound like if it was released a few decades after it originally showed up. I don't know if I necessarily want to say today because there's a certain retro vibe to it all — though that may be more about the original compositions than Brimble's arrangements. Either way, they're good.

I haven't explored Brimble's other releases as yet but I see he also has albums of his own Amiga and Spectrum compositions — again rearranged "to modern standards" — along with a pair of remix albums based on his work on Driver. I will have to spend some more time with these for sure, and perhaps pen a review or two!

I've provided Bandcamp links in this post, but they're also on Spotify and doubtless some other places too. Enjoy!

I'm not entirely sure where this week has gone. We seem to be sitting at the end of Thursday at after 10pm and I've no idea where all the time has disappeared to. I wouldn't position it as either a particularly "fun" or "stressful" week, so I'm sort of surprised that things seem to have flown by as they have.

Was feeling a bit down with everything earlier… still am right now, to be honest. I feel like I'm "waiting" for something to happen — practically speaking, part of me is probably waiting for the current pandemic situation to be over, which looks increasingly unlikely to ever happen at this point. At the same time, though, I feel like there's something just sort of… indescribably frustrating that feels out of reach, and just to add to the frustration, I'm not even sure what the thing that is out of reach actually is.

I'm also, to be honest, getting a bit run down by the sheer pace of modern Internet life, and a little upset at how much I can see it burning out people that I like and care about — and they don't seem to want to admit it. Those who have taken to streaming in particular seem to be having a really rough time of late, and quite a few people I know almost sound like they're doing it out of "obligation" rather than anything else. There's no joy in what they say about their streams; it's all chasing Affiliate or Partner and counting Channel Points rather than expressing any sort of enthusiasm in what they're playing or the friends they've made in the process.

There are exceptions, of course — I know some of you who are kind enough to support me here are running your own streaming regimes, and I hope those are going well for you. I'm talking more about a few people I've seen on Twitter recently who seemingly got into it because they felt like they had no other option; a few years back I feel everyone had a much more realistic perception about the possibility of making money "playing video games online", but that seems to have dissipated in the last couple of years — at least partly thanks to the pandemic, I'm sure, since streaming doubtless appeals to those who don't feel comfortable leaving the house amid all this.

With all that in mind, I think I'm resolved to not establish any sort of regular streaming regime for myself, at least not for my own personal hobby side of things. Work might be another matter at some point — though the writing and occasional YouTube vids are more than enough right now — but for now, I'm happy with what I do; I feel like I'm contributing something meaningful and useful to the community while at the same time doing something I enjoy. The moment it starts feeling too much like work is the time to hang it up and just "reclaim" my hobbies for myself — something which I think some of the people I just mentioned could probably do with doing, even if it's just temporarily.

I'm not ruling out streaming for special occasions, mind. I'd like to do something for one of the charity stream marathons at some point, because the couple of occasions I did Extra Life it was great fun. I'd likely do something a bit more "local" next time, though, since although Child's Play and Extra Life are wonderful things, they're still quite America-centric. I believe the charity Special Effect do more EU/UK-centric events, so I will probably look into those. I have plans forming for something along the lines of an Evercade marathon; I think that'd be really fun.

Anyway, that went off on a bit of a tangent. It's half past ten now, so probably time to go sit upstairs and play retro games for a bit, far away from the Internet. Join me!

You know you're down the VTuber rabbit hole when you have dreams about them. To be fair, I've only had two VTuber dreams to date, but they were both oddly vivid and memorable as opposed to those dreams that sort of dissipate the moment you wake up, however much you enjoyed them at the time.

The first one I had was a good few months back, and it involved IRyS from Hololive. For one reason or another, I was hanging out in her bedroom while she was getting ready — she was sort of half-dressed (she didn't have any shoes on, but she did have most of her outfit on, and she hadn't "done her hair") and talking to me while she was wandering around getting ready. I sadly don't remember the specifics of the conversation she was having with me, but I do recall that it was some sort of helpful life advice.

In other words, there was nothing romantic or sexual about the encounter at all; I was just hanging out in her room as if she was a friend of mine, and she was advising me on something that had been bothering me. I wish I could remember what as it could have actually been important.

Regardless of any deeper meaning, it was interesting to see her in "3D" as a "real" person. And I don't mean I saw the performer behind the IRyS avatar, I mean IRyS was real, but still looked like IRyS. And it didn't feel weird. This is perhaps helped by the fact that IRyS is one of the Hololive VTubers who is designed with a little more realism to her facial proportions than some of the others, but still. It was interesting and nice.

The other VTuber dream I had was the other night, and it was absolutely baffling because it felt like several different unrelated scenes were overlapping and somehow interacting with one another.

The main thrust of what was going on was that I was exploring some sort of dungeon or castle in the Neverwinter Nights engine, and just engaging in combat with a group of foes. The battle began, and things weren't going all that well — our healer went down fast. At the same time, sort of overlaid on top of proceedings (so I could see through and still see "Neverwinter Nights") was a sort of… I'm not sure how to describe it. Like a party, I guess? Specifically, like the kind of party you see at big awards ceremonies: lots of people sitting around round tables, mingling with one another. Except all the people at the party were VTubers. I think. Most of them sort of blended into the background as ill-defined grey figures.

I called out to the party for a healer, and, without acknowledging me directly, Finana Ryugu from Nijisanji stood up from her table and wandered over to the next table over, where Uruha Rushia from Hololive was sitting. Without saying a word, Rushia stood up and — there's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to say it — took out her erect penis. Finana promptly grasped hold of Rushia's implement and began manipulating it, at which point it took on an oddly unnatural sort of… gleam, I guess you'd call it, almost like a polished orb. And as this happened, light began to emanate from their… uh… union, and those of us involved in the battle felt healing energy flowing into us, and we were able to fight on.

I awoke just as Finana and Rushia completed their ritual, relieved to discover that I had not inadvertently had my own ritual in my sleep in the process. But that certainly was a weird one — possibly second only to the dream where I was unable to have sex with someone on the London Underground because I didn't have the sheet music.

The subconscious is a funny place.

Been back to the gym for the last couple of days, just gently to try and get things moving again. It has, for the most part, felt reasonably good to do so — though I made the mistake of going this evening when I was already reasonably hungry and thus by the time I returned I was actually feeling a bit queasy with hunger. That'll learn me.

Having spent so long away from the gym after injuring myself late last year, I've obviously got a lot to do to build myself back up again — not that I was particularly "built up" previously, but I was at least able to manage a 30-minute moderate pace session on the bikes without too much trouble. For these initial sessions, I've tried not to put too much pressure on myself — I just wanted to get moving in any way to begin with, as that's the initial barrier that needs breaking. Now that's successfully broken, I can start looking at making gradual improvements.

To begin with, I'm thinking I might separate cardio and strength training days completely rather than trying to cram them both into a single session. This means that a single session can be a bit shorter and more manageable, and also isn't quite as daunting a prospect going into it while I'm still readjusting. I can always switch back to a sort of "circuit" routine once I get back into the swing of things, but I think this is how I'm going to handle things for now — perhaps punctuated with a day or two of swimming here and there.

I think I'm going to take tomorrow off, though; this evening's strength training left me a bit achey, and I want to try and establish a routine of going first thing in the morning. I successfully managed this on Monday, but failed today, hence the evening session.

Still, as small a step as this might be, it is, at least, progress, I guess.

I feel like I've been playing Evercade more than any other platform of late. I've just been super in the mood for a lot of the sort of things that system offers — and that system offers a lot of different possibilities across all the cartridges that are available now. (Plus there are several in the works that are very exciting… two of which have already been announced and a couple more I already know about!)

Just lately, I've actually been enjoying the CodeMasters lineup quite a bit. CodeMasters' NES games are rather interesting to me, because I always knew them as home computer games — so playing them on a console is an interesting novelty. I also find them quite intriguing because they don't "feel" like NES games — at least partly due to their music. I don't know offhand if they were using custom sound chips or just making use of the NES' sound chip in a different way to many other developers at the time, but folks like Allister Brimble made the NES' sound chip sing like a Commodore 64, with some astonishingly well put together tunes across various Codies titles.

At the same time, I recognise that a fair bit of CodeMasters stuff might not be for everyone because there's a distinct feeling of "Euro jank" about a lot of it — or at least there is at first glance. Take the time to get to know some of the games, though, and there really is a lot to like about even the most obscure ones.

I'm a particular fan of F-16 Renegade and MiG-29 Soviet Fighter, for example, which are basically two variations on a theme: games that combine vertically scrolling shoot 'em up segments with After Burner-style quasi-3D sections. One interesting thing is that between the two of them, they each have the opposite balance — F-16 Renegade favours the vertically scrolling stages with occasional 3D sequences, while MiG-29 favours the 3D gameplay, occasionally switching to top-down. MiG-29 was also obviously developed a little later, as it's overall rather more polished, featuring in-game music and surprisingly impressive "transitions" between scenes and perspectives.

The other reason I find MiG-29 specifically rather interesting is that I have the Atari ST version on my shelf, and that game is absolute hot garbage. With that in mind, I wasn't expecting much from the NES version, but it turns out it's much, much better. I'd be embarrassed for the poor old ST if this wasn't a fairly common pattern when it came to games that were originally developed for 8-bit platforms and ported to 16-bit ones!

Anyway. Enough talking, time to get in a few rounds for Uncle Ivan before sleep time. Hope you've all had a pleasant day!