Finally finished Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood! As in, finished the main story through all the patches, plus Omega, Ivalice, the optional dungeons and the Hildibrand questline. I haven't delved into Eureka because there's no real "need" to right now, but I am curious to give it a look at some point. Another time, though.

That means Shadowbringers is up next! I've been very excited to get into this, but have also dragged my heels far too much in getting here. Still, I'm here now, and I can't wait to see what it's all about. The finale for Stormblood's postgame storyline was absolutely excellent, and that was quite a cliffhanger at the end, too. I imagine that must have been quite frustrating if you then had to wait for Shadowbringers to actually release!

Playing Final Fantasy XIV with all the story available from the outset has been a really fun experience. I like the gradual reveal of the main story when you're playing it "up to date", but it's hard to deny that everything is just… better when it all flows right into each other. I mean, you can still see when the patches were — one quest ends with a character basically saying "come back later" and the next starts with them saying "welcome back, it's been a while" even if you haven't moved from in front of them — but for the most part, it's a nicely coherent, flowing story.

Anyway. I'll write more about this on Rice at some point in the next couple of days, I'm sure, because as always, the game's done a great job of "uprooting" you before the next expansion — something which I've previously written about. And this time around, the "uprooting" is probably more drastic than ever before — but it remains to be seen exactly what that all means.

Somehow I've managed to remain completely unspoiled on some very exciting and genuinely shocking revelations, and I suspect there will be more to come. For the benefit of those even further behind than me, I won't share them for now — but suffice to say there are some great scenes the further you go.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to start Shadowbringers right now, I'll save it for another day; I was ready for bed at about 8pm this evening and now it's quarter past 11!

Well, the last few days just sort of flew by, apologies for the lack of posts once again! I can show you the reason why I kept forgetting though — we spent most of the weekend doing this!

This is my upstairs study, which most of you probably know as the place I sit to record intros for my videos. It's been a bit of a state for a while — most notably covered in dust since my wife's most recent DIY spree — so this weekend we took some time to give it a proper deep clean, put things away that didn't need to be out, and rearrange the storage space to make the whole thing be a lot more practical. The results are very pleasing indeed!

If you're wondering what the marks on the side of the chair are, they are the result of a certain cat discovering that a Gamer Chair is the ideal thing to use as a scratching post. The perils of living with such beasts.

Here's a closer look at the desk. I've got the 1MB Atari STE out on the left, and the 130XE Atari 8-bit on the right. Both can easily be connected to the 14 inch Trinitron monitor via RGB SCART, as can all the consoles on the shelves behind except for the N64, which doesn't have RGB output. It does have standard SCART output, at least.

Above the desk there's an NES, a SNES, an N64 and a Mega Drive. There's an Atari 2600 atop the TV, too. I still only have two games for that; I should look into grabbing some more.

A look at the shelves. On the left is all Atari ST stuff — mostly games, but there's also some educational, productivity and music software there, too. On the right is mostly PC games, with some boxed Atari 8-bit stuff towards the bottom and on the very top shelf above the consoles.

And finally another angle on the desk. You can just about see the display of Philips Videopac cartridges at the back. The Philips isn't out at the moment as it takes up a lot of space, but it's just inside a cupboard (out of shot to the right) so can be set up at a moment's notice if I fancy a game of Satellite Attack or Munchkin.

The flatscreen TV that's there has a Chromecast attached to it, and I'll likely use it as a sort of second monitor if I'm doing work up here — which I now have space to do, so that will be nice.

Anyway, that's the result of a very tiring weekend! Now I sleep, and hopefully with considerably fewer weird dreams than I had last night!

Sorry, missed a few days, didn't I? It's been crazy busy at work for the last couple of weeks, so I've kind of got to the end of each day and just sort of zonked out without really thinking about things! I think most of the major projects I've been working on are now pretty much done from my perspective, though, so hopefully things will calm down for a little bit until the next batch come along. And no, these are still things I can't talk about as yet, I'm afraid!

I probably can say that they are Evercade-related, though. As most of you reading probably know, I've been helping out the Evercade guys with editorial stuff for a while now, and at present I'm pretty much the lead on producing print and digital editorial for upcoming releases. I work closely with the art design lead on deciding how we're going to lay out the manual for each new cartridge and how we're going to present the information, and also help figure out some cool bonuses to throw in along with the manual — you should be seeing a lot more "feelies" and free gifts in the releases in the upcoming months!

It's been an interesting and challenging process, and I'm glad to have been part of it, because it means that Evercade's offerings will have even more consistency from hereon. Up until this point, the releases have been somewhat… experimental in terms of how information is presented from an editorial perspective, but I think we've got a "format" nailed down now, both for the information that will appear in the manual and the digital information that appears on the website and on the console itself. In the long term, we want to bring the digital material for the older cartridges in line with these new projects for complete consistency, but that's something to ponder at a later date!

Anyway. Naturally I can't reveal what is coming up later in the year — though I do know most of it at this point now! — but I can say that there's a lot of really exciting stuff happening. Evercade's going to be a reliable and respectable name in retro gaming for quite some time to come yet — and I'm incredibly proud to be part of it.

I'm excited that old MicroProse sims are coming back to PC via Steam, via some sort of unholy alliance between New MicroProse and whatever the heck Atari is this week. Ultimately I don't really care too much about the circumstances — I do care that these are easy and convenient ways to get some classics up and running on modern machines, even if the default DOSBOX settings for Dogfight appear to be the equivalent of running the game on a modest 386. (At least you can bump the speed up easily!)

So far I've spent a bit of time with Solo Flight — you can read about my experience here —  which is one that we never played back in the day. Although we enjoyed MicroProse flight sims in general, my dad was an absolute Flight Simulator II loyalist and refused to believe that Solo Flight would come anywhere near Sublogic's classic. Trying Solo Flight for the first time recently, I can confirm that he was, of course, absolutely correct — but that's not to say that Solo Flight doesn't have its appeal.

Solo Flight is what I'd maybe describe as a civil aviation game rather than a true simulator. Between the third-person view, the massively condensed maps, the score-based Mail Pilot mode and the fairly forgiving flight model, it's not especially realistic — though it does present something rather different from MicroProse's jet fighter sims of the period, and it does at least make attempts to reflect at least a few elements of a realistic flight model.

It's exceedingly primitive by modern standards… but there's something undeniably fun about it, even in its putrid CGA incarnation. I can't quite pin down what it is; it just sort of feels nice to play. And I can't really chalk that up to nostalgia, either, having never played the thing until recently. Whatever it is, I certainly don't regret spending a fiver on this crusty old flight sim.

Looking forward to trying out Harrier Jump Jet, as that's from the interesting transitional period where MicroProse was leaving behind 16-bit all-in-one computers like the ST and Amiga in favour of devoting themselves to MS-DOS PCs. It's another game that I'm not familiar with from back in the day, though if it's anything like its rough contemporaries I have no doubt I'll enjoy it. I used to spend a lot of time fiddling with stuff like F-19 Stealth Fighter and F-15 Strike Eagle II and III back in the day.

I suspect articles on the subject will follow shortly over on Retrounite. Please stay tuned! In the meantime, the complete lineup of MicroProse classics on Steam includes the original F-15 Strike Eagle (in CGA, blergh), Solo Flight, Harrier Jump Jet, Dogfight, The Ancient Art of War in the Skies (actually a strategy game rather than a flight sim) plus Sid Meier's strategy games Decision in the Desert, Crusade in Europe and Conflict in Vietnam.

Had a real "up and down" day today in terms of mood and general mental health — and I only partly mean that as a pun on the Atari 8-bit game I recorded a video for today. Got up late and felt pretty miserable this morning, then had a coffee and a cake and felt a bit better, then felt a bit miserable partway through recording stuff, then felt a bit better again. Right now I'm sort of in that in-betweeny "meh" sort of stage, which I think is mostly tiredness. Better than crashing back down to "miserable" again, I guess.

On the plus side, got some really interesting vids coming up this week — don't forget to subscribe to Rice Digital's YouTube channel as well if you want to see everything I'm up to in terms of video. Rice's channel is pretty much the home for more "modern" stuff I do now, so check over there for regular quick looks at newer games, as well as ongoing Final Fantasy playthroughs. I'm making great progress through Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster; looking forward to moving on to the other ones.

In other news today, I was delighted to find a (sadly incomplete) archive of Maverick Magazines on archive.org today — for the unfamiliar, Maverick Magazines was the second place my brother worked after working on the first (and only?) weekly games magazine Games-X over at Europress, and it's where he had his first stints of being Editor of a magazine. At the same time, his then-girlfriend Allie was working on a different magazine under the Maverick banner, and between them they provided some of my favourite Mega Drive and Super NES-related reading material.

Looking back over Control, the Super NES magazine that Allie worked on in particular — I can sort of see initial hints today's outlook of perpetual cynicism and need for criticism, though. Control (particularly once it relaunched itself as Super Control) was distinctly scathing about a lot of games, particularly where it wasn't quite warranted — many of the games they gave a notably more tepid reception to than the community in general have gone on to be regarded as all-time classics.

Thinking about it, this may have been the birthplace of my own desire to explore things outside of the "critically approved" list. I remember looking at a lot of things in Control (and Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, which my brother worked on) and thinking "oh, that actually looks pretty cool and interesting" and wondering how it ended up with such a low score. Of course, these days I know that ratings are complete bollocks — however "mathematically" Control claimed to calculate theirs — and so I just try anything I think I might find interesting. And I'm yet to steer myself wrong.

Back when I was reading Control, of course, I was, what, 11 or 12 years old, I think? (In fact, there's a feature in one issue of Control where Allie returns to her old school — which would have been my school at the time — and I recognise a lot of my classmates!) As such, I wouldn't say I had a lot in the way of disposable income, and with Super NES games being £50 or so even back then, they were (relatively speaking) actually a lot pricier than games are now. As such, I didn't really have a lot of opportunity to spend my own money on new SNES games, which would account for why despite owning and loving a SNES, I never had all that many games for it.

Anyway, that was a tangent and a half, and I'm not even sure there was a point here in the first place. If you're curious, do check out the link above and see what Maverick Magazines' stuff was like — cynicism aside in Control's writeups (I haven't revisited Mega Drive Advanced Gaming as yet; I'll be interested to see if the tone there is the same) they're still an entertaining read, even if a lot of things rather casually said in their pages would probably get them in trouble with the fun police on Twitter these days.

Time for bed and Top Racer!

I spent pretty much all day playing Final Fantasy XIV today. I haven't done that for a long time, and I had a thoroughly lovely time. Basically when I got up this morning I considered agonising over what I "should" do, with all the options basically conflicting with a burning desire to play FFXIV — so rather than agonising further I simply indulged that desire and played FFXIV. I do not regret the time spent, even if it could have been spent more "productively" — sometimes you just gotta do something for yourself.

Anyway, I'm making good progress through the "postgame" Stormblood stuff, though there's a lot more of it than I thought there was! Over the last few days I've been doing the Hildibrand quest, which culminates in an excellent Trial, and finally advancing the main story.

The main story in particular has been very impressive; there's an absolutely superb single-player instanced battle towards the end of one of the main 4.x narrative threads that I can only describe as a "Missile Command" boss fight. It really is fascinating to see how inventive and adventurous they get with the game's base mechanics as you get deeper into the various expansions; this is far from being a game where you stand still and press 1, 2, 3 with perfect timing.

I've also reached a point in the main story where I can do the "Four Lords" storyline. I've only done the Byakko fight from that so far, but that was also absolutely excellent; I very much appreciated the "bullet hell" influences seen in that one, though those fearful of twitch gaming need not worry — the pace is much slower than an actual shoot 'em up!

Needless to say, for whatever reason, FFXIV is exciting and inspiring me again. I know that I need not to let it take over everything — I have things to do for work and I have things I want to do for myself — but I am definitely very much enjoying my time with it so far. And I haven't even started Shadowbringers yet.

Anyway, I've called it a night for now, but that's what I've been up to today. Tomorrow is about videos, so I better get some sleep! Ta-ta.

I'm tired. It's my own fault for deliberately working late; I was enjoying working on the thing I was working on, so I was enthusiastic about getting it done. (Also I'd set myself a deadline of getting it finished by the end of the day tomorrow, and I figured I might as well get it done this evening.)

Sadly it's not a thing I can share with you right now, because it's not something for any of the websites or YouTube channels I work on. It is, instead, something that will likely be announced… within the next month or two, I think? It's cool though. I'm looking forward to sharing it with people. The astute will possibly know at least vaguely what I'm alluding to, but I really can't say any more than that for the moment, other than the fact that working on it has kept me up late and now I'm tired!

It's been a bit of a weird day, all told. Atari and MicroProse announced that they're bringing back a random handful of classic flight sims, Twitter announced that by signing up to their pointless Twitter Blue bullshit you can have an NFT profile pic and immediately make yourself a target for completely justified cyberbullying, and my copy of "The History of Hentai Manga" finally arrived after literally about six months of being continually delayed by Amazon.

Excited to finally delve into the book; it looks super-interesting and it's possibly the only book I'll ever read with a full history of how breasts have been depicted over the years, with a particular specific section on the history of how nipples are blurred to indicate movement. There is also a chapter primarily themed around the history of the onomatopoeia used to indicate the opening of a vagina, so that should make for some intriguing reading.

Those are actual chapters and sections in the book, by the way; I'm not making things up. The guy behind the book takes the subject enjoyably seriously, on the grounds that no-one has ever really done a vaguely academic study on erotic manga — regular old manga yes, eromanga, no.

His justification for his in-depth exploration of some very specific topics is that many of the trends in eromanga end up getting filtered down into non-explicit manga in various ways — and thus any analysis of manga in general as a medium is worth taking the erotic side of things into account. But no-one does, because oooh, porn scary.

Anyway, I've only read a bit of the first chapter so far but it's definitely intriguing. I will likely write more about the book as a whole over on Rice when I've read the whole thing.

For now, though, I feel the need for some retro games I can tune out and chill out to, so that's what I'm off to go and do. Have a pleasant evening!

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.