Spent a bit of time this afternoon playing with the new Logitech G29 racing wheel with Project Cars 2 on PC, a game which seemed to be quite highly recommended by a fair few people — and widely regarded as immensely superior to its sequel for one reason or another. Given that it was a fiver in the Steam sale, I was more than happy to take it for a spin.

I'm very much taken with it. Firstly because it simply handles wonderfully with the G29 — the force feedback feels uncannily realistic, and the simple response of the wheel feels very much like "real" driving — but also because it is pretty much what I want out of a driving sim.

I like games where there's a lot of things to do, but I tend to find with stuff like racing games in particular, if there's too much in the way of long-term progression, I never end up "finishing" the game in question. This is why I've never really gotten all that far in games like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport despite liking the "CaRPG" angle in principle; it's satisfying to build up a collection of cars and outfit them with all manner of upgrades and stuff, but it takes a while to get yourself into a position where you are 1) in possession of a vehicle that is suitably competitive and 2) skilled enough to actually handle it on the track.

Project Cars 2 certainly demands a certain amount of driving skill, but it mostly eliminates the need to "grind" for stuff. There's a structured single-player career mode which I've made a start on, which gradually takes you up through various "tiers" of motorsport starting with kart racing and the like and moving up to exotic supercars and Formula 1 — but I sense that a lot of the game's long-term fun will come from the simple custom race setup, which allows you to pick a car, track, conditions and opponents, and then just race. Everything available from the outset — just pick what you're in the mood for and go.

And there's plenty of stuff to choose from, too. As those who have heard me talk about sims before will know, I take a curious joy in taking crap cars in driving games and enjoying the ride, and Project Cars 2 is no exception; there's a horrible brown 1971 Ford Escort in the game that is an absolute pleasure to drive, and it's already my favourite car to drive along French and Californian freeways in the game's point-to-point races — my favourite type of race.

It's probably not a game I will take super-seriously — sim racers can get very serious! — but it is a game that I feel like I will get great value from with the wheel setup. For the longest time, I thought I didn't really like sim racers all that much. Turns out that if you play them with the proper control scheme, they're a whole lot of fun! Only trouble is, the price tag attached to that proper control scheme is more than a little prohibitive for some — indeed, without some generous Christmas money from both sides of parents this holiday season, I probably wouldn't have jumped into this.

But now I have, I'm very glad I did!

This evening I've had my first experience with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, a Gainax show specifically designed to either pay homage to or take the piss out of (I can't quite work it out) chaotic Western shows such as Powerpuff Girls and its ilk. With that in mind, it's a show I'd actually specifically recommend watching it with the dub, since its foul-mouthed, gleefully offensive nature works fantastically with English voices — though apparently the Engrish swearing in the Japanese version is also quite something to behold.

For the unfamiliar, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is a show about a pair of fallen angels (the Panty and Stocking in question) in Daten City, which occupies a place somewhere between heaven and hell, and consequently is somewhat prone to being invaded by ghosts born from intensely negative feelings.

Panty and Stocking wield divine weaponry which, when they're not using it, doubles as the item of underwear they are each named after. And in each episode, they're tasked with defeating evil while simultaneously overcoming their own obnoxious selfishness and obsession with their favourite vices — Panty likes nothing more than to sleep around, while Stocking is obsessed with sweet things to a frankly frightening degree.

The word "chaotic" is attached to a lot of shows these days, but Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt really earns that title. Often shifting art style dramatically from shot to shot — and featuring amazing "live action" ghost explosion scenes where a model of the previously animated ghost is literally blown to pieces — it's a show that absolutely never sits still. And it's wonderfully, wonderfully entertaining.

Foul-mouthed, disgusting and gross, yes — and thus probably not for everyone — but somehow the whole thing feels like it pulls things off better than your typical grossout American "adult animation" that you get today.

I think it's precisely because it doesn't hold back on anything, whereas even with western shows like Family Guy and the like, they still sort of step back and nudge-nudge-wink-wink-teehee when it comes to anything slightly provocative, particularly from a sexual angle. Panty & Stocking, meanwhile, features an episode specifically about the frustrations felt by the ghosts of sperm continually spunked into tissues rather than allowed to fulfil their own natural function. And it's hilarious.

I'll likely write more about this show on Rice when I've watched a few more episodes, but suffice to say for now that it's become a firm favourite already, and I'm looking forward to seeing more!

Been very lax on this for the past few days, so apologies for that, but I'm sure you understand how the festive season is!

Before anything else then: a very Merry Christmas to every single one of you, and thank you for your continued support on here! I know MoeGamer has been pretty quiet for a little while due to other commitments, but the Atelier MegaFeature will be continuing in the new year once I'm back into the swing of things, and of course everything that I'm doing on YouTube has been happily continuing along, too. (On that note, one more reminder that this coming week there will be no videos!)

I may be tweaking this Patreon a little bit in the new year. Nothing major to worry about, I just think I might make a few little changes to my "rewards", such as they are. I know very few of you are here just to get your hands on what I laughably call my perks, but in the interests of variety and also something for me to throw myself into, I'm likely going to change the S-Rank tier perks from wallpapers to something else.

I haven't decided exactly what as yet, but one thing that I think would be good for my own personal… development, I guess you'd call it… yeah, that'll do — one thing that would be good for my own personal development would be making a monthly commitment to something that I might otherwise put off in favour of other things. So here's my thinking.

Those of you who know me well and a bit more personally will likely be aware that I'm a musician — specifically, a pianist. (I also play clarinet and saxophone, but I haven't done much with either of those for some time, and with the whole COVID thing making ensemble stuff impractical I don't see that happening any time soon) I enjoy playing the piano, but don't make enough time to do so right now.

So what I'm thinking — and I'm not committing to this yet, but definitely veering towards it — is changing up the S-rank perk to being a monthly patrons-only video/recording/somethingorother of me playing something from my increasingly vast collection of video game music piano arrangements. I have quite a few such books now — I got the Final Fantasy XV and Nier: Automata ones for Christmas — so plenty of material to work on, and if I have a "performance" scheduled for, say, the end of each month, then it's a good incentive to actually knuckle down and work on something specific.

If that's something you think you might be interested in, do say. It'll keep my mum happy if nothing else.

Anyway. Enough business. Time to go enjoy the rest of the day with some video games and cats and whatever else. Hope you've all had a thoroughly lovely day, and that you get a suitable opportunity to sleep in tomorrow morning. Merry Christmas!

Been playing with an early Christmas gift for the last couple of evenings — well, it was something bought with money from the parents on both sides, so I guess it's something I bought for myself. It's a Logitech G29 steering wheel and pedals set, plus a stand to use them with.

I've kind of hungered for a steering wheel for quite some time, but never quite taken the plunge. At least part of this is down to the fact that there's no single solution that works for absolutely every platform out there, but at least the G29 works with PS3, PS4 and PC, so that's a fair few bases covered. (There's a Wikipedia page that suggests it might even work with some PS2 games, but I have my doubts on that front — might have to give it a test.)

Mostly so far I've played Euro Truck Simulator 2 with it, and it's a delight. Aside from the fact that sitting in a driving position for the longer journeys in that game can be a bit hard on the back, it's a completely different experience controlling the truck in a more realistic manner — and the fact that the on-screen steering wheel precisely matches the movements of the G29 is something I feel far more impressed by than I probably should be.

The improvements the G29 brings are mostly noticeable when doing more low-speed manoeuvres. The fact it has a 900-degree range of motion — comparable to a real wheel — means that making 90-degree turns at junctions or reversing into a parking space is uncannily realistic — and, in the latter case, a hell of a lot easier than using a joypad.

I'm also impressed with the force-feedback functionality. I've only previously experienced this with arcade machines, so it's great to get a feel for how it works with home games. In Euro Truck Simulator 2 you can tweak the performance somewhat so it responds to the things you want it to respond to — I've got it set so the engine giving it some power causes some slight shaking, and you can somewhat feel the road surface through the wheel too — including the resistance of the tyres against the road when turning the wheel. Very impressive.

I anticipate I'm probably going to use this mostly for more sim-like experiences — I might even pick up something like Project Cars 2 in the Steam sale — but I'm also intrigued to try it with some more arcade-style games, too. I believe it works with Ridge Racer 7, so that will be an interesting one to try — particularly given how beautifully that game handles with a standard pad.

Anyway, after driving from the south of France to somewhere in the depths of Russia, I need to stand up for a bit now, so I'll leave that there. Short version: if you've been considering a steering wheel to have some fun with, the G29 seems to be a very good choice!

I thought I'd escaped it, but I feel distinctly beaten down by the vaccine booster shot from the other day today. Had to go and have a bit of a sleep after work, though I was revived from my slumber for a thoroughly pleasant pizza. I think after I've typed this up, though, I'm heading back to bed to play some Evercade/Intellivision — I'm pretty hooked on Night Stalker at the moment.

Wrote 5,000 words on Blue Reflection earlier today without even really trying — you can read that here. I need to knuckle down and do a second playthrough of that to get the "true" ending, but I'm hesitating for the stupidest reason — I like all those characters so much that I know I'll feel guilty skipping story scenes, dates and suchlike. (Also the dates are actually important to character progression, so you can't really just not do them.) I'll get to it, though — I'm too curious to see the true ending.

Aside from that, not a whole lot to report, really. Oh, I did get a new chair — one specifically aimed at the larger individual — and that seems to have been a good choice so far. I have already let out several monstrous farts in it, so it has most certainly been welcomed to the family. Patti has not yet clawed it, which is a bonus, but I suspect that situation won't last long.

I'm excited for my steering wheel setup. I believe the stand for it is arriving tomorrow, and the wheel itself on Wednesday, which is mildly frustrating, but it is what it is. I have a number of games that I'm looking forward to trying with it — and am mildly concerned by warnings in BeamNG.drive's documentation that on its default setting the force feedback for crashes can be alarmingly "authentic" — to such a degree that it recommends treating the wheel as you would one in a real car if you were actually having a crash.

Naturally I won't be crashing at all once I have the wheel, of course, because it will immediately make me a much better driver. Hah. No, I'm looking forward to giving it a go with BeamNG.drive probably most of all, but I bet Snowrunner and Euro Truck Simulator will also be a fun time. I've always loved driving games, but I've never owned a steering wheel controller for any platform, so this is pretty exciting. Full reports will, of course, follow.

Anyway, in my vaccine-blasted state as I am, I'm going to go sit in bed for a bit and play some old video games, perhaps while watching the new Nijisanji boys' debuts. Sounds like a plan, dunnit?

Well, that's the last episode of Atari A to Z Flashback recorded and edited! It's exporting now, and will be available to watch on Christmas Day. I genuinely didn't plan that, but it turned out rather nicely in the end.

This is an exciting and emotional moment, because it's a huge creative project finally coming to fruition, as I've mentioned a few times previously. Sitting and playing through 150 old Atari games might not sound super-"creative", but there's a lot of stuff that goes into making these videos — research, familiarisation with other stuff going on around the same time, getting to grips with the games and figuring out how to (hopefully) be vaguely entertaining while showing them all off to you.

I'm glad I've done this project, though, because it's meant that I've now been through absolutely everything in that whole collection, and I feel like I have a really solid understanding of what "Atari" really meant throughout the late '70s and early '80s. It's not the complete picture of what was going on in gaming, of course — for that, you also need to look at companies like Activision and Imagic, as well as the lesser known or less fondly regarded outfits — but it's a good foundation for familiarising yourself with what was going on in these early days of the medium.

The whole process has also, I feel, developed my own "tolerance" (for want of a better word) for really retro retro stuff. I mean, I already had a pretty good tolerance for stuff that looked old and crusty, but going through this lot has given me a real appreciation of how, sometimes, it's all about how you use the 2K or 4K you have available to you, rather than spreading yourself out over several gigabytes.

As I mentioned previously, after the videos going out this week I'll be taking a week's break from YouTube for Christmas and new year, then new videos will start up again in January. I don't know if I'm going to think of an immediate replacement for Atari A to Z Flashback, but as I discussed the other day, I'm open to ideas if anyone wants to see something specific. Otherwise I'll just take a little while to ponder further!

Anyway, I think I've earned a comfy sit in bed with some Intellivision games on the Evercade VS now. Hope your weekend has been suitably relaxing!

Apparently I'm good at online definitely-not-Pictionary. It's a fixture in work-related online "social" events, and on the vast majority of occasions we've played it, I have won by a considerable margin. Tonight was no exception.

This pleases me, even if my success is more down to my ability to type quickly than necessarily being especially "smart". It's fun to be good at something — though of course I don't mind on the occasions when I do get beaten.

I feel a tad less awkward on online meetings than I used to. This is probably partly down to how normalised they've become over the last couple of years, but it's also a product of the fact that I like both my job and the people I work with. That really does make such a huge difference.

When I think back to my previous job, where I would frequently just go to bed and nap while attending conference calls on my phone, it seems a world away. It's not that I necessarily disliked my previous job or the people I worked with there — I just didn't care, and I had no reason to care. I didn't feel particularly important or valued, and  I was becoming increasingly frustrated by certain colleagues' tendency to introduce complete wastes of time into our "procedures".

Generally speaking, in my experience if your job involves following "procedures" there are almost certainly a zillion ways you can do it more efficiently. But for so many positions, "procedure" seeks to form a sort of backbone for the authority structure that's in place. And I guess it might have some value in an organisation that works in that way, with people who work well that way.

I'm pretty convinced at this point that I do not, in fact, work well that way. The people I work with on a daily basis now treat one another as equals, and everyone knows how to contribute to keep things ticking along. I like this. It works well, it keeps stress minimal, and it makes interpersonal relationships feel less stilted and awkward. We can be human, not drones.

Anyway, you'd think this meandering had some sort of point to it, but not really. I've just had a bottle of VK and felt like pondering some things. Now I'm going to play some Evercade in bed and get a good night's sleep. Hope your Thursday has been fine!

Yet another NFT controversy erupted today, this time with the announcement that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a game that has been hotly anticipated by its incredibly loyal (until today) fanbase, will be inexplicably making use of NFTs to allow "lucky" people to be "in the game" as "MetaHumans". In other words, paying exorbitant amounts of space money on an unnecessary blockchain to get themselves in the game as an NPC.

You know, the sort of thing Kickstarters offer as a reward. (Although Kickstarter perhaps isn't the best example, what with them wanting to move to the blockchain, too.)

I don't understand this. After Ubisoft's announcement of NFTs got such a negative reception — even with YouTube's Dislike count being removed — that they had to Private their announcement video; after the Twitter account for the late Stan Lee was bombarded with negative comments after the current operators started shilling NFTs; after Peter Molyneux's new game was mocked for the stupid idea it is… why are people still pushing for this "play to earn" crap?

Well, at least part of it is, of course, down to money. Peter Molyneux's new game may well be a fucking stupid idea, but it's sold $40 million of NFTs so far. This does not, however, mean that the game will be a success; it means that cryptobros have jumped on the game believing it to be the next big "opportunity" and have "invested" in it in the hope of offloading their badly rendered low-poly take on London will net them a profit when some gullible fuckwit buys it off them.

As for Ubisoft and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s use of NFTs, it's just baffling, since they offer no real case for how the use of the tech is in any way beneficial or desirable. The cosmetics that Ubisoft are distributing as NFTs are the same sort of thing you've been able to get for Counter-Strike and Team Fortress on Steam for years — and those games have never needed to fuck around with cryptocurrency. (In fact, Valve won't allow games with crypto/NFT components on the platform — a rare instance of them actually being clear about something in their guidelines.)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s astroturfing "metaverse" account even claims that they agree that NFTs shoehorned into games are dumb, and that the sole reason they're doing this is to build a firm foundation for modders to work on. This is, of course, bollocks, since modding games dates back to the metaphorical Dark Ages and has never required any sort of "decentralisation" or other such buzzwords in order to work. All you need is some modding tools — either provided by the developer themselves or developed by the community — and you're away. How do NFTs fit into all that? S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s PR people don't seem to be able to explain.

This is a fad, make no mistake, and I'm sure it will eventually die, just like shit like "Online Pass" did — remember that? Unfortunately, while we're in the middle of all this nonsense it's rather discouraging — but take heart from the fact that the only people who seem to think this is a good idea are the people who were already making stupid decisions at the upper levels of triple-A publishing corporations.

We'll get through this. And if gaming does decide to become one big crypto blockchain party… well, there's plenty of retro platforms still waiting for you to explore their libraries!

Blue Reflection: Second Light is done! Excellent stuff. Sayonara still holds the "final boss music" trophy, but aside from that, the whole finale was excellent. And that's the last I'm going to say about that for the sake of those who haven't seen that far yet.

This does mean that I'm free to get back to the Atelier MegaFeature as soon as I want, so I've made the executive decision to hold fire on it until the new year. That gives me a bit of time to just chill, do some stuff for Rice, perhaps get ahead of schedule on actually playing Atelier and the opportunity to just… y'know, exist for a bit.

Likewise, Atari A to Z Flashback's last episode will be next week (as in not this coming Saturday, but the one after), and rather than immediately replacing it with something new (that I haven't decided yet — I have a few options waiting in the wings) I'm going to just let that end and start the new thing in the new year. Clean break and all that.

In fact, you might be able to offer some thoughts on the replacement for Atari A to Z Flashback. Again, I'm keen to ensure I don't take on too much at once, so I'm limiting it to just one of these — but there's always the possibility of doing things in "seasons": several weeks of one thing, switch to another thing, switch to another thing and so on. Atari A to Z and Atari ST A to Z will continue for now because I don't think I'll ever run out of stuff for those!

Anyway, these are the things I've been kicking around as possibilities:

• Atari A to Z Anthology (all the 2600 games in the Activision Anthology collection for PS2)

• Intellivision Lives (or some sort of witty name) — the games in the Intellivision Lives compilation for PS2

• Atari Jaguar A to Z (a project with a definite, finite and reachable end)

• Evercade A to Z (definitely something I want to return to)

Feasibly I could incorporate all of the first three into Retro Select, since that covers multiple platforms, but I sort of wanted to make each of those into their own distinct series as I think they sort of "deserve" it. I guess the plus side is that all of them except Evercade A to Z are smaller in scale than Atari A to Z Flashback, so there's no reason I couldn't do each of them in turn.

If you have any particular preferences for what you'd like to see, let me know — otherwise I'll just inevitably make some sort of hasty decision in the New Year and ponder if I made the right choice for a few months 🙂

Blue Reflection: Second Light is almost done, I think. It's certainly all sounding very "finale-ish", many of the major plotlines have been resolved and there have been multiple scenes that are all "oh, this might be the last time we see each other, let's say all the super-sweet things we've been storing up in our hearts to each other before going to kick the snot out of the final boss".

I refrained from actually following through into the finale this evening because it's already half midnight, and tradition dictates that if I start an RPG finale at an already late hour, it will be three or four o' clock in the morning before it actually concludes. And while I'm not necessarily averse to that, I do have to work tomorrow and would like to be awake at a vaguely sociable hour.

So I think I'll save it for tomorrow. Am definitely hyped up for the finale, though. I can't help but wonder if the final boss theme is going to match up to Sayonara from the original Blue Reflection, though… man, that tearjerker takes some beating. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway. Bed for me!