I've had a few days… possibly weeks, even months… where I've been feeling frustrated at all manner of things about the world in general. It's not one specific thing, it's just a general sense of annoyance at life in general in 2021. And I'm sure it's something that everyone goes through, particularly when they reach the point in life that I'm at — but I've just been feeling it in a particularly pronounced manner of late.

I'm frustrated with the way people communicate online. While once I remember online being a wonderful place where people really felt like they could be themselves and let their true personalities shine — even if they were shy and awkward in real life, like I am — these days it doesn't feel like that's the case any more. Everyone is "performing"; everyone is trying to make sure they say the right things, look the most beautiful, get the most viral posts. Very little feels like actual, honest, genuine conversation any more.

I saw someone — I can't find the original tweet, unfortunately — describe Twitter as a place where there are no real friendships, only combatants. I'm not sure I'd quite go that far — though I have seen plenty of situations where people who were supposedly friends with one another end up at each other's throats over the most stupid things. Hell, I've experienced it myself in more than one instance — quite recently even. I won't bother you with details, but needless to say I was extremely disappointed that someone I'd previously had a lot of respect for (supported on Patreon, even) had apparently drunk too deeply of minor social media victories and become an insufferable git in the process.

There's definitely endless attempts for one-upmanship going on. Everyone is streaming, so everyone has a schedule and no-one is actually watching one another. Everyone has a humorous take on the latest news, except it's actually the same joke several thousand other people have made in the last five minutes. Everyone has a library of predictable gifs and reaction images to post in lieu of actual conversation. Disagreements are marked by nothing more than the word "ratio" rather than actual discussion. And the worst thing is, the world seems to be latching on to its own increasing insufferability and catering directly to the most annoying elements of itself.

I read a post earlier about how Netflix makes its thumbnails, and the whole thing frustrated me. Not because it was a boring post — it was actually quite interesting — but because the whole algorithmic bullshit that is actually going on in pretty much everything you do online these days feels like it's insulting my intelligence. Except apparently it's not insulting anyone's intelligence, because supposedly people really do make a decision on whether or not to, say, watch a TV show or movie in the space of about 3.8 seconds or whatever it was — and thus a specific, tailor-made, robotically produced, algorithm-friendly thumbnail is needed. One that is colourful, one that has an individual person (preferably a villain) on it looking at the camera with a distinctive facial expression. Because that's what we're conditioned to respond to.

Like I say, I can't really pin down why all this stuff bothers me when it's just the reality of life in 2021. I guess the way I'd sum it up is by saying that it feels increasingly like we're living in a real-life cyberpunk dystopia despite the myriad warnings we've had against such things from fiction over the course of the last half-century or more… and when you can sort of see things for what they are, you can't help but wonder why more people can't… or won't.

I guess the thing to do is just grit your teeth and try to remove as many sources of frustration as possible. But it seems like every time you do that, something else becomes massively irritating or gets "redesigned" into something infinitely worse, too. Such is the endless cycle of things, I guess.

Anyway. I'm off to go and play Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire, eat a sandwich and cry myself to sleep or something. Hope you all have a pleasant weekend!

So, uh, about that Premium module I was playing for Neverwinter Nights… it's not finished. It was never finished, and it seems there is no hope of it ever being finished. And yet it was sold as an official mini-expansion for Neverwinter Nights.

Seriously. The plot just starts getting going — you finally join the titular ShadowGuard and set off on a sea voyage to track down the evil Crimson Prophet, who has murdered your father and stolen a deadly artifact of unimaginable power… and then it just stops. Roll credits.

I mean, I knew going in that it was only going to be a two or three hour adventure in total but I was sort of expecting it to, you know, actually conclude. In a way I guess it does reach a conclusion of sorts; the "ending", such as it is, is the sort of event that would move you on to the next main chapter and a new hub location in the main game. But it's still hard to believe that this was sold as a "Premium Module" for the game.

Non-ending aside, the module itself was pretty good for the most part. It had some interesting and intriguing characters, some dramatic moments and some cool puzzles, as well as a few situations where there were multiple possible solutions to a given problem.

Less good were the numerous textual errors, outright errors in game logic (a character accuses you of giving him up to the guards even when you let him go free earlier in the story) and quite a few instances where possible "sequence breaking" wasn't trapped properly. Given that Neverwinter Nights-era BioWare were involved with this, I would have expected more rigorous QA — but it is what it is, I suppose. With the versions of Neverwinter Nights that are readily available today, at least you don't have to pay for it.

I hear tell that some of the other Premium modules for Neverwinter Nights are also unfinished in some way, despite doing a good job of setting things up for future development. This is really unfortunate to see, since several of them start really strong; it's a pity to go into some of them knowing that they end with a wet fart and no real closure. The worst kind of wet fart, I'm sure you'll agree.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom; the "big" Neverwinter Nights expansions are still good — I've still never actually played Hordes of the Underdark through, so I might have to do that at some point — and there are plenty of interesting community modules out there, some of which are "featured" in the Enhanced Edition version of the game's interface. I'm particularly intrigued by an apparent remake of Westwood classic Eye of the Beholder in Neverwinter Nights' engine — though having never actually played Eye of the Beholder through in its original incarnation, I kind of feel I should probably get a little experience with that first.

Anyway, I stand by my recommendation of Neverwinter Nights, particularly when it's on sale — just don't go into those Premium modules expecting something of the same quality as the "official" campaigns, I guess is what we can all learn from this!

I recorded a video on Neverwinter Nights for Retro Select this week. I just fancied revisiting it — or more accurately, giving the Enhanced Edition from a couple of years back a go. And I've been enjoying it a lot — particularly exploring some of the including Premium modules.

I'm currently working my way through one called ShadowGuard, which seems to be an interesting tale of treachery and ancient mysteries, and the nice thing is that it's all nicely self-contained, promising to wrap up in just a few hours.

This is an oft-forgotten thing about Neverwinter Nights; the very nature of it means that it's possible to play and enjoy a full adventure in a matter of hours rather than having to commit every waking moment to it over the long term. This makes it that rare thing: the RPG that is eminently suitable for the busy person. I bet even the most boring of my child-rearing friends could probably be convinced to play through a module or two if it's only a couple of hours' commitment.

Anyway. Neverwinter Nights provides, among other things, a fond reminder of when BioWare were actually good. It's also nice to play a classic D&D game once again — it's been a while, other than my recent Dungeon Hack video. And whatever you might think about D&D as a ruleset, it sure played host to some absolutely cracking video games over the years, for sure.

So yeah. Neverwinter Nights. It's a good. If you don't already own it, you just missed out on a nice sale price over on GOG.com — but even at "full" price it's only fifteen quid, which is an absolute bargain for how much game you get. Give it a shot if you've never tried it for yourself — if nothing else, it plays host to probably Jeremy Soule's finest work of all time.

Been playing some Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (or just "Castlevania", as it was known in Europe) in the Castlevania Advance Collection, and I'm having a great time. I owned a copy of this for GBA back in the day — I actually might still have it somewhere — but for one reason or another never got that far with it.

Now I can play it on the big screen, however, I'm really enjoying it. The GBA may have been low resolution, but man, it could push sprites around the screen and scroll incredibly smoothly, so the whole thing looks absolutely great blown up.

The few little additions M2 have made to the game are excellent, too; much like they added "Gadgets" to the Aleste collection, so too have they added additional info here — most notably a little popup that shows whether the enemy you just hit is one that drops a card for the game's magic system, and whether or not you've got that card already.

There's also a helpful in-game encyclopaedia that includes info on all the enemies, the card combinations and the items. You don't have to use any of this info if you don't want to, but its inclusion definitely saves a trip or ten to GameFAQs!

Like most games from this era that I'm returning to now, I'm really appreciating the excellent design of the game in a way I probably wouldn't have noticed back then. I'm particularly appreciating the boss battles — these are well-designed encounters that are challenging but always based on clear patterns; you just need to spot 'em.

I also started watching the Castlevania series on Netflix, but I feel that's probably a discussion for another day when I've watched a few more episodes!

Supposedly Facebook is down for as-yet undetermined reasons. It's something to do with their DNS, or something to do with their servers… but something interesting appears to be going on.

Apparently employees can't get into the building to sort stuff out either, suggesting some sort of coordinated attack might be going on — but at the same time, things like this have happened before and turned out to not be anything worthwhile. And the Internet is, of course, rife with speculation, "my uncle works at Facebook" stories, clickbait and, of course, outright lies, so the only people who can really say what is actually happening right now are the people who are actively involved.

What's interesting is how many people are seemingly happy to say what a negative influence Facebook has been on society at large. While there are undoubtedly good things about Facebook as a means of communication, the way it has grown and expanded well beyond its original remit has, I agree, not been a great thing. And the other social media sites under its umbrella are no better; Instagram in particular is a gross haven of "influencers" who think fame and fortune will come to them if they pout at the camera enough and shill whatever makeup brand they have in their inbox this week.

I must confess, I don't doubt that the actual obliteration of Facebook, however, unlikely, would be very interesting to watch happen. It would cause a certain amount of chaos, I'm sure — but I think it would also open a lot of people's eyes as to the risks of being too free and easy with your information online. At this point I have to wonder that if Facebook did go up in flames… would something come in to take its place, or would people have had enough? I suspect the former; today's society is literally addicted to social media, and you never can really predict what the "next big thing" will be.

More realistically, though, I suspect this will be all over by tomorrow morning, we'll get absolutely no explanation whatsoever as to what happened, and xXLiLShInYGal69Xx will go back to shooting selfies of herself on Instagram in the hope of securing a brand deal so lucrative, she'll never have to find an actual job.

We'll see, I guess. Interesting times!

Andie and I both joined Weight Watchers today. We both already needed to lose some weight before the pandemic hit, and we've both not taken great care of ourselves, so we needed to do something a bit more "drastic". Previous attempts were proving hard to stick to or not particularly effective, so we wanted to go with something that was a bit more likely to work.

Neither of us have done Weight Watchers before, but we both had success with Slimming World, so we figured we'd likely have similar success here over the long term. We've both made a 9-month commitment to the program, so we're in it for the long haul — and we figured that with Weight Watchers, we're probably more likely to be able to stick with it, even if we feel like being lazy about it.

Weight Watchers, you see, is a lot more widely supported than Slimming World is. You can get Weight Watchers ready meals, desserts and all manner of other stuff in regular supermarkets, whereas Slimming World ready meals, sauces and the like were Iceland exclusives. Likewise, you're seemingly a lot more likely to be able to find out how many Weight Watchers SmartPoints something is worth than figure out its Syn value on Slimming World, so tracking everything should hopefully be a bit easier.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that Slimming World is the Linux of weight loss programs — it works very well, but you have to put in a bit more effort and it's not nearly as widely supported. Weight Watchers, meanwhile, is Windows; it's widely supported, does the job and is relied upon by a lot of people. Hopefully it's not as prone to whatever the dietary equivalent of crashing and performance issues are.

Anyway, that's the plan. We're starting in earnest from tomorrow, and I'll be interested to see how things go. The first time I did Slimming World, I had an amazing amount of success and I'm keen to repeat that. It'll take time to get there, and that part of things is frustrating — but, well, none of us are exactly pressed for time these days, are we?

I've been watching a Channel 4 show recently that I'd meant to check out for a while, but never gotten around to: Man Down, by Greg Davies.

The basic premise is that Davies plays a drama teacher who hates his job and life, and things systematically start falling apart for him when his longstanding girlfriend leaves him. With his friends Jo and Brian (played by Roisin Conaty and Mike Wozniak respectively), he gets involved in all manner of ridiculous scrapes, and never quite manages to completely recover from that initial instance of being knocked down.

In the early series, there's a lot of thoroughly silly, exaggerated comedy, much of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen Davies' stand-up shows. But as we move into the later series, we start getting into some serious pathos, and it's hard not to feel bad for the poor bugger as he increasingly feels like life has completely left him behind.

In many ways, it's a similar sort of idea to Bojack Horseman, which was similarly comedic and pathetic by turns, only here there's a distinctly low-key British bent to it all. There's no overdramatic drug overdoses or anything here; just an overweight middle-aged man breaking down and crying in a bank when he discovers his mother and aunt have used his inheritance to set up a trust fund for his as-yet unborn son, born out of a night of passion with the woman he truly loves, but who knows exactly what a hopeless case he is.

That might not sound very funny — I've been through a lot of very similar feelings to what Davies' character expresses in the third and fourth series in particular, especially about 10 years ago when my first wife departed. But there are times when you can't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all — and how much of a bastard other people can be at times, especially to someone who is already down on their luck.

There's an incredible cast in it; Rik Mayall played the father of Davies' character in the first series before he was tragically taken from us, Mike Wozniak is absolutely incredible as the strait-laced Brian, Tony Robinson does an amazing stint as a horrible old man "romancing" Davies' character's mother, and even Mark Hamill has a wonderful guest appearance in one episode.

It's doubtless not a show everyone will enjoy because a lot of the comedy is very much on the "cringe" side of things — Andie can't watch it, as she really can't deal with that kind of humour — but if you're up for that sort of thing I can highly recommend giving it a watch.

Curious to see how it ends, and if there's a conclusive finale at all. It ran for four series before being cancelled, but shows like this have a habit of just sort of fizzling out when that happens. We'll have to wait and see, I guess — I'm only a few episodes away from the end now!

I'm absolutely baffled by the current  situation with Genshin Impact. From what I can make out, players are angry that developer MiHoYo hasn't made a bigger deal of the game's anniversary, and hasn't showered them with free gifts. And as a result, they've been review bombing not only Genshin itself, but also a variety of completely unrelated apps.

I cannot fathom how one gets into such an entitled mindset that you would think that sort of behaviour is any way justifiable — particularly as Genshin Impact is a free to play game and, as such, doesn't really "owe" its players anything. Yes, it's an exploitative shitty gacha game at its core, but you get a lot more "game" here for free when compared to mobile-only gacha titles.

The implication that these crazy people are presumably trying to suggest is that Genshin Impact would be nothing without its players, which is, of course, true to a certain extent in the case of free to play games. Except most free to play games make the majority of their money from just a few players with deep pockets (odiously described as "whales", originally just by people in the industry, but this has filtered into culture at large). Somehow I suspect the people misbehaving in this instance aren't the ones spending huge amounts of money on the game. Or at least, not huge amounts of their own money on the game.

I have never once felt that I am owed free shit for the anniversary of a game, regardless of if it's an online or offline title. FFXIV always does cool stuff for its anniversary and that's always fun to see, but I don't need or expect it; the game itself is the reward, and if I'm no longer enjoying it, I can just stop.

I assume it's some sort of young person thing where the people who say things like "oomfie" and talk about "comfort characters" are mostly responsible for this. More than anything, however, it cements by complete lack of desire to go anywhere near Genshin ever. Regardless of how nice Mona's tights-clad arse is.

I say this is "Day 1000" but apparently I've missed a whole load of days this week without realising, so for that I can only apologise. In my defence… no, I have no defence, really, so I'll just apologise and admit that it was nearly another day I forgot to write today because I've been playing Actraiser Renaissance all afternoon.

It's good. Oh, it's good. I wasn't 100% sold on the art style when they showed it at the Nintendo Direct recently, but I'm completely on board with it now. It looks and feels very much like a Saturn game; Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack even sounds like the sort of thing you would have had as Redbook audio on a CD back then. By that I mean it's brilliant, but one would expect nothing less of Koshiro, of course.

The character art is beautiful, too, and they've gone to the effort to make each settlement's NPCs look completely different from one another. This might sound like an obvious thing to do, but given that the original SNES version just had "generic man and woman" addressing you most of the time, it's just one of many significant steps forward that Actraiser Renaissance takes while still feeling very authentic to the original.

As you progress through the games, the additions to the formula become more and more apparent. The real-time strategy/tower defence element becomes much more pronounced, particularly once you start dealing with enemies that only particular types of tower or unit can take down. I ran into my first real roadblock towards the end of the Bloodpool sequence this evening; a real-time strategy sequence with a flying boss who was troublesome to take down, to say the least — particularly as one of the defeat conditions for the battle was my mage unit being incapacitated.

Thankfully, Actraiser Renaissance takes a very "modern game" approach to progression in that if you fuck up, you can just try again — or indeed you can even back out of a strategic battle in order to rejig your settlement's defences before you give it another go. This is friendly game design that keeps the challenge in place, and I very much appreciate it.

Now I'm just hoping the "Heaven and Earth" games end up getting the same treatment. It'd be fantastic to see Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma Renaissance alongside this one — and I feel it's not beyond the realm of possibility, either. We will have to wait and see, I guess!

Anyway, that's my "thousandth" day of writing this nonsense for you all. Thank you for hanging out with me while I do this, and for supporting my work, of course! I hope you continue to enjoy what I do — still plenty more where all the existing stuff came from!

Nearly finished Police Quest: Open Season, and have only encountered a couple of "adventure game bullshit" moments — one where I forgot to do some paperwork (this is a Police Quest game, after all) and one where I forgot to pick up a handful of pretzels from a bar. Both were essential in order to progress the story, of course.

As I noted yesterday, I've been enjoying this one a lot more than people had led me to believe. There's a nice cast of characters, some of whom don't take themselves too seriously, and there's a nice feeling of escalating stress on the part of the main character as the story progresses. On the whole, he's relatively flat and obviously intended to be a bit of a self-insert for the player, but there are the odd moments when you feel for him, which is good.

Mostly, though, it's a fun investigation game. Adventure games and crime stories go very well together, and Police Quest: Open Season is a great example of that. Yes, it goes a little harder on the realism than most — real police investigations are a matter of teamwork, not the result of one multi-talented badass cop taking care of everything — but that just means that there are some interesting and unconventional solutions to puzzles. Can't figure out what to do with that evidence you found? There's probably someone back at the Parker Centre who can help you out.

Not sure what score I'm going to end up with by the conclusion or what the maximum is — I suspect I've missed a fair few opportunities to use the notebook over the course of the game — but I think I'm closing in on the end, anyway. I've called it a night for now because Andie was enjoying watching and she's headed off to bed, so I'll leave the finale for tomorrow evening. Then I'll have something to write about for Retrounite this week! Winner.

Anyway, that was that for the weekend. Hope you all had a good one — mine was pretty uneventful, but I can't complain about that really. Enjoy your last moments of rest before another week begins — and kick some bottom this week or something. I don't know.