Been playing Neptunia x Senran Kagura Ninja Wars for the last couple of days and really enjoying it — should have something up on Rice Digital for it tomorrow afternoon, as that's when the embargo lifts. So technically I shouldn't be saying anything about it here, but eh, we're all friends here and whatever.

They've had quite a few goes at "action Neptunia" to date, and all of them have been enjoyable games in one way or another — but up until now, Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online had been quite a way ahead of the other titles. Hyperdimension Neptunia U and MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune vs. Zombies both felt kind of like "Senran Neptunia" to a certain degree, while it was Cyberdimension Neptunia that really added some significant "action RPG" trappings to the arena combat of the earlier games.

Interestingly enough, the latest attempt at "action Neptunia" is even less like Senran Kagura, despite there being four Senran Kagura characters in it. If anything, there are elements of Phantasy Star Online, Final Fantasy VII Remake and a fair few other bits and pieces in there — I'll talk more about them in the article tomorrow, but suffice to say for now that it's really enjoyable and satisfying to play. I hesitate to say it's the best Nep game for a while — Megadimension Neptunia V-II still takes some beating, since that's just such a wonderfully complete package of enjoyable mechanics and excellent story — but it's certainly a high point for "action Neptunia", for sure.

Anyway, I've been playing it all evening and it's now 1am, so I should probably sleep. So I can play it some more tomorrow before I write about it! Ah, it's a hard life. Anyway, hope you all had a good weekend. We bought a bed!

I have missed a couple of days. Apologies for that. I was getting to the end of the day and just zonking out without really thinking about anything else other than getting to sleep, so I hope you coped with my absence. Anyway, I'm here now. It's still late and I still want to go to bed, but I am at least remembering to write something.

Took stock of the YouTube channel earlier, because we've reached an important milestone: there's only 8 games left to go on Atari A to Z Flashback. This might sound like an arbitrary milestone, but this image should make it clearer:

Yes, we're onto the last page of games, which means the end is literally in sight — and going out with Yars' Revenge? What a way to finish. Gonna have to plan something vaguely special for the grand finale, I feel.

In total, I've now made 465 videos just on Atari games of various descriptions, across the 8-bit, ST and all the platforms covered in Atari Flashback Classics. On top of that, there's a bunch of Evercade stuff (which I am planning to return to once the VS is all set to go with its final firmware, which should be around now since reviews are already happening!) plus Retro Select, short;Play and the longer Let's Play series I did a while back.

I do miss doing some of those long playthroughs — Project Zero and Split/Second were particular favourites — but they're just not practical, especially now I have stuff I need to play for the day job as well as stuff I want to write or make videos about for my own personal projects! Maybe when I retire or if I win the lottery or something.

As I'm typing this, Patreon has just popped up a message which claims "it looks like you might be promoting a raffle", and this is apparently a no-no. I would like to make it abundantly clear that I am not promoting a raffle, and the statement "if I win the lottery or something" is by no means any sort of promotion for a raffle. So suck it, Patreon bot.

Anyway, that's about that for now. Tomorrow we're going bed shopping, then I've got videos to make. Exciting stuff!

Been enjoying some of Hamster's Arcade Archives releases on Switch of late — particularly some older stuff like Irem's Moon Patrol and Namco's Rally-X. Those games work particularly well with the built-in "High Score Mode", which actually reminds me very much of Microsoft's old Game Room service (may it rest in peace).

The High Score modes challenge you to set as high a score as possible under set conditions: usually a single credit. (Most of them also have a timed "Caravan" mode, too, but this doesn't really work for quite a few games where you inevitably end up dying well before your five minutes are up!) At the side of the screen, there's a leaderboard showing your best score and the surrounding scores — sadly, this doesn't update in real time like the Game Room ones did (fond memories of gradually working my way to the top of the River Raid scoreboard) but it does give you an idea of how much you're improving with each go.

There are so many of those Arcade Archives releases now, and I want, like, all of them. I'm going to have to restrain myself, though; £6 a pop isn't super-expensive but it could mount up pretty quickly! Maybe one or two a month. Then I can gradually build up a delightful library of arcade classics to keep on my Switch at all times; that would be nice.

The other nice thing about the Arcade Archives releases is that they bring back quite a few titles we haven't seen for many years — stuff like Taito games that haven't been rereleased since the PS2 Taito Legends collections, or Jaleco's Rod-Land, one of my favourite games of all time. It's not just the "big name" stuff; there's lots of interesting, obscure titles in there too, making it a really cool collection to explore in detail. And I think I'll be doing a bit more of just that as time goes on!

For now, I'm kind of hooked on Moon Patrol in particular. Playing it with the triggers on the controller is oddly satisfying. I still suck, though; have never yet made it to the end of the Beginner course, though I am improving somewhat!

Ever get the feeling you "should" be doing something in particular, but you can't quite pin down what it is? It's frustrating — particularly when that feeling comes up during what should be your "own" time, the time where you do things that you want to do rather than things that you have to do.

I'm not quite sure if saying I feel like I "should" be doing something is right, even; it's just a vaguely defined sense of dissatisfaction with all the things I've considered settling down to do this evening. One might think that the ideal solution in this situation would be to do something completely different altogether — but then that leads to the problem where the "new thing" you've added to your repertoire becomes one of the many things you think you "should" be doing when you pick something else.

This is vague waffle, I know, but it's (almost certainly) a symptom of anxiety. Rationally speaking, there is absolutely nothing I need to do right at this second. I could play something that I can write about tomorrow, but I don't need to. I could make some sort of video to get ahead of schedule on my own personal projects, but I don't need to. I could go and… you get the idea.

I think part of it relates to the fact that I know there are some exciting things happening a little down the road — with one of the main ones being the launch of the Evercade VS — that I'm feeling a bit impatient to get started with. But then that shouldn't stop me from doing things I actually want to do, like playing Atelier, or playing shoot 'em ups, or doing unrelated creative things, or reading something, or any of the myriad other things I could be doing right now.

Instead, I find myself staring into space thinking about how much fun I could be having if I just picked one of the options in my head. I should probably just actually pick one and go enjoy it for the rest of the evening, huh? So let's do that.

I've had a dodgy stomach all day; think I ate Something Bad last night and it's had me feeling by turns sick, farty and stomachachey all day today, so that's nice. As I type this, I'm still not feeling amazing, so I'm off to bed in a moment in the hope that this passes by tomorrow.

I played through an excellent horror game earlier — well, a horror game prologue, I should say. It's called Project Kat: Paper Lily Prologue, and it's available for free right now on Steam. It's a teaser for an upcoming full project (which it looks like might be released episodically) but it left a very strong impression on me over the course of the 45 minutes or so it took to play through. The kind of impression where it finishes and you immediately want to play it again, you know?

I'll do a full writeup on it over on Rice tomorrow, but suffice to say for now that it's a very good time if you enjoy Corpse Party-style top-down horror games with a bit more puzzling than usual. It's definitely got an intriguing premise, some great characters, fantastic music and lovely visuals, so I'll absolutely be supporting it when it eventually arrives in its completed form.

Aside from that, I've been playing a lot of shoot 'em ups for the past few days. Waifu Discovered 2, rRootage, Raiden IV x MIKADO Remix, Cotton… damn, we really are spoiled right now, which is impressive when you consider how "dead" the genre was considered to be not that long ago!

For now, though, I think it's time to fart myself to sleep in the hope that I'll feel better on the morrow. Hope your day has been more pleasant than mine!

I've been feeling for a while now like we're legitimately living in a cyberpunk dystopia, only without all the cool-looking neon-lit rainy streets and robotic prostitutes. (Although those are very much on the way.)

Right now, I feel like we're living through that chapter in the book where a mysterious and strange quasi-religious cult rises up as if from nowhere, singing praises to their all-powerful lord and master as they attempt to convert everyone to their bizarre way of life with what some of them earnestly believe to be love and tolerance.

In fact, of course, the "all-powerful lord and master" is not a deity at all, but rather someone who has mastered the art of manipulating stupid and/or gullible people into doing things that are bad for themselves, but good for the manipulator.

In this case, the cult — which is seemingly divided into multiple sects — is the NFT movement, who appear so utterly convinced that paying thousands of dollars for imaginary money with which to purchase imaginary pieces of paper to prove that they own an imaginary piece of artwork generated by an algorithm rather than an actual person is a sensible way to spend one's time and money in 2021.

The cult-like behaviour arises any time they are criticised. They pull together and talk about their "amazing community" while displaying no real evidence of actual meaningful human interaction. They offer up the name of their lord and master Ethereum as the one true solution to all life's ills. And they unironically believe that one day we are all going to live in a Metaverse of man's own creation, where the woes of the world will somehow simply cease to exist.

The latter part may well be true to a certain extent one day — I'm sure within the next century or two we will figure out something along the lines of "digital consciousness" — but even if it were to happen now, it's not going to magically solve the world's problems. Imagine if everyone hooked themselves into a "Metaverse" right this second — where's all the energy to power said Metaverse going to come from?

We're already having problems with energy and the impact that the generation thereof is having on the planet — something which NFTs aren't helping with, it should be added — so how is making humanity completely reliant on technology going to help? And who manages said technology? You saw The Matrix, right? It wasn't an aspirational movie.

The amusing and/or scary thing about everything I've outlined above is that none of it is an exaggeration. There are legitimately people out there who feel like investing thousands of dollars in a terrible pixel art picture is a good way to spend their time. Ethereum — which is, I believe, the name of an NFT or cryptocurrency trading platform or something — is genuinely invoked as the solution to all manner of problems by these people. And they do not see that they're being really weird.

Their usual argument is that this is "technological progress", but their suggestions are falling on deaf ears for the most part. And so, frankly, they just come across as batshit crazy and a little disturbing right now.

Still, at least it's nice to have a group of people that the entire rationally-minded part of the Internet can agree that it's okay to bully. Just as long as they don't end up with SHODAN on their side or something.

I finished The 7th Guest earlier; been a long time since I played that all the way through. And I really enjoyed it! It's one of those games that, oddly, I think is better experienced today than it was back in the day; its oddly stylised elements work particularly well in the context of today's gaming landscape, while I recall it coming in for a fair amount of criticism back when it was originally released for being all style and no substance.

I mean, to a certain extent that is true — it was always designed to be a showcase of CD-ROM technology — but the idea of a "game where you're not constantly actively doing things" is much more palatable to today's audience than it was in the '90s. The 7th Guest's surreal nature is intriguing and enjoyable to engage with — one might argue the narrative doesn't really make a ton of sense if you stop to analyse it, but that's all part of the charm.

And the acting. Oh the acting! We can be quick to mock early FMV games for their acting, but in The 7th Guest, there's a strong feeling that everyone involved in the production had a background in acting on stage. The whole thing is very theatrical, meaning lots of deliberately overblown acting — but it works. My wife, overhearing the game from the other room, thought it sounded like "musical theatre" — particularly with the awesome closing number Skeletons in my Closet.

Part of this side of things would have been out of necessity; none of the actors in The 7th Guest were doing things on a "real" set, and thus what they were doing would doubtless have been very much like the abstract nature of performing on stage. But as I say, it works; it makes The 7th Guest into less an interactive movie and more an interactive play. And that's not only super-interesting, it's something I'd genuinely like to see a lot more of.

Anyway. Play The 7th Guest. It's very old. But I think I love it more now than I did back when I originally played it!

Today has been one of those days when I really love our hobby. I've written about and played so many different things today that I can't help but be slightly taken aback by how incredible this medium really is.

The main trigger for this feeling today was writing this feature over on Retrounite, which really highlighted just how broad even the horror genre is, but I've also spent two hours playing A Robot Named Fight this evening, which is just a magnificent game that I'm going to be writing about tomorrow. Then I educated myself on Sentimental Shooting, the reason that Deep Space Waifu exists… and yeah, it's been a fun day.

Only trouble is, there are so many wonderful things to play and not nearly enough time with which to enjoy them all! Still, if nothing else today has caused me to push a few things up the priority pile for things like making videos and suchlike. Expect something on Waxworks for PC very soon, for example; I had a blast capturing screenshots for it earlier and I'm hungry to play some more!

Atelier still going apace, I hasten to add. Should have an introductory piece on Lydie & Suelle going up this weekend — though as I noted a little while back, I'm not necessarily going to pin myself down to writing something on it every week, just because there's no point putting unnecessary pressure on myself for something I'm doing in my free time! Instead, I shall write as the muse takes me… or, more accurately, as I find myself in a suitable position to be able to write about the various aspects of the game with confidence!

For now, though, bed. Nearly the end of another weekend — and as much as I've enjoyed today, I'm very tired and ready for that weekend to come!

I've apparently been rewarded with the Community tab for my YouTube channel, which I thought only happened when you had a thousand subscribers. To be fair, I'm getting fairly close to that now, but it was a pleasant surprise to see it show up anyway.

I'm actually going to make some use of it, because it seems like a good way to share some stuff that people who watch the channel might be interested in — notably some photos and perhaps some additional info about the things I've covered that didn't fit into a video. So please keep an eye out for that!

I'm looking forward to experimenting with it in the coming weeks — comments on the videos in general have been a lot more lively and frequent in the last couple of months or so and the channel's been growing nicely, so this should be a good means of building a nice little community. Please be sure to come along and take part if you feel like it!

Anyway, that's about it for now. Atari ST A to Z coming tomorrow with a look at the ST version of After Burner — it may be far, far from arcade-perfect, but dammit, it's what we had back in the day, particularly 'cuz my nearest arcade was about a hundred miles away!

Been having some weird-ass dreams for the last few weeks, and I'm not 100% sure what's brought them about, because I haven't changed any bedtime habits in a particularly major way. Nor am I eating or drinking anything particularly weird before going to sleep. All I know is that my subconscious apparently has a lot to say.

Sadly, I can't remember many details of said dreams, which is a shame as I'm sure they'd be interesting to talk about and try and interpret. But I do know that they are both weird and vivid at the time they're happening. I'm not sure I'd necessarily call them "nightmares" because they're not really… scary as such, but they are somewhat unsettling at times, and the kind of thing where you wake up in the morning feeling like something just isn't quite right.

I do know that last night I woke up at some ungodly hour in the morning thinking there was someone banging on our front door, and it kind of freaked me out a bit. Quite a lot, actually; I wasn't sure whether or not I should go and check downstairs for a good while beforehand, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I went to have a look. Nothing was out of the ordinary downstairs and there weren't even any cat shenanigans going on — the one cat was sleeping on our bed at the time (in a fairly inconvenient position, yes, but that is nothing unusual for her) while the other was asleep on "her" bed in the spare room.

On the one hand, I do enjoy interesting and strange dreams; there are times when I even deliberately want to go back to sleep just to explore them some more. That's not especially productive, however, particularly when there's work to be done, so I should probably wish for a peaceful night's sleep or something. Either way, I'm going to get an early night tonight; we'll see if that makes any difference!