1590: Deluge

Why is it that the moment you know you're not going to have very much money on hand — like, say, when you lose your job — that all the awesome things suddenly come out and vie for your hard-earned?

Sod's law, I guess.

Considering a lot of people seem to consider gaming is going through a bit of a "dry spell" at the moment, there sure is one hell of a lot of things that I want to play that have either come out recently or are about to come out.

One of the chief games I'm interested in is Nintendo's Mario Kart 8, which is looking like a stonker, if you'll pardon the '90s parlance. I haven't loved the last few Mario Karts — though granted, I didn't play the 3DS one — and have instead preferred the company of games like Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, which is a truly excellent game filled with Sega fanservice. Mario Kart 8, meanwhile, is looking like it will be a return to form for the series — from my perspective, anyway — with some creative tracks, some astonishingly good music, all recorded with live instruments, and the usual array of multiplayer funtimes. I'm looking forward to getting together with friends and having an evening of throwing shells at one another.

Aside from that, though, there's a glut of great RPGs that are dropping around the same time. On Vita, there's Conception II, which I'd very much like to play at some point but haven't downloaded yet, plus Demon Gaze, which I've been loving. On PS3, there's Drakengard 3, which is next on the list after I finish with The Witch and the Hundred Knight and Demon Gaze, and which I'm rather excited about as it's from the same people who did Nier, one of my favourite games of all time. I already have a copy of that ready to go and it's taking all my willpower to not just shove it in the PlayStation right now and start playing. But I am waiting until it can have my full attention.

Then there's Monster Monpiece, the fun-looking card-battling game for Vita that features the notorious "rubbing" minigame in which you power up your monster girl cards by rubbing your Vita until… well, there's no two ways about it: some of their clothes fall off. Aside from the pervy aspect — which, to be perfectly and unabashedly blunt, has me intrigued — the card battling gameplay looks solid and interesting, and a friend of mine who played the Japanese version seemed to have a lot of fun with it, so I'm definitely interested in giving it some time.

I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of, and this isn't even considering the most recent big triple-A release Watch Dogs, which sounds like it has ended up slightly disappointing a few people. I probably wasn't going to pick it up anyway, but it's a bit of a shame to see a game that's been hyped to absolute buggery for the last fuck-knows-how-long turn out to be received in a rather more lukewarm manner than its developers and publishers intended.

Well, with all this gaming goodness dropping now, I know at least I won't be bored while I'm twiddling my thumbs in my house waiting to hear back from all the jobs I've applied for…

1589: The Digital Future

I was a bit surprised to read this piece from GamesRadar today. For those of you who can't be bothered to click the link, it's a piece decrying the fact that 73% of UK-based console gamers still exclusively buy boxed copies of games on disc, without ever purchasing any digital download titles. The article then goes on to pontificate as to how this can be "fixed".

My immediate response was "why does this need to be fixed"?

The piece does make some good points. Digital distribution cuts down on a considerable number of overheads and organisational considerations when compared with physical distribution — particularly on console platforms, where the platform holders still have very tight control over what can and cannot be released and sold in a box. Digital distribution allows smaller developers to release games to the public without having to worry about these overheads and organisational consideration — or even working with a publisher in some cases. It is ideally suited to the indie movement, in other words, though the article appears to espouse a philosophy of "all digital, all the time" being the way forward for interactive entertainment.

I'm not resistant to the idea of digitally distributed titles being available. The vast majority of my PC game collection is digital, and in fact I threw out a whole bunch of physical PC games when we moved this time — largely because they were old copies of games that no longer run on modern systems, and in most cases there are downloadable modernised versions that will happily run on newer hardware and operating systems. Similarly, if the only way to acquire a particular game on console or handheld is to download it, I will happily hand over my money and download it.

Here's the thing the article is missing, though: some people are collectors. I consider myself a collector of games, and I display my shelf of PC, PS1, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, PSP, Vita, DS and 3DS games with a great deal of pride. I like being able to look at that shelf, think "oh, I used to enjoy that game", pull it down, pop it into a console and be playing it again a moment later. With the increasing speed of broadband these days — particularly if you're lucky enough to have fibre-optic like us — it doesn't take very long to download an older game, but there's still something very pleasant about seeing that box art, holding the box in your hands and putting the disc into the device. And for newer games — particularly with the excruciatingly slow speeds the PS3 downloads from PSN — I'd much rather just put in a disc and play than wait for 10GB or more to download.

The other consideration, of course, is that console online stores are closed ecosystems that theoretically could close down at any time, denying you access to content you've purchased a license to. Note: purchased a license to, not purchased. That license can be revoked at any time, meaning that there's always the risk that, having deleted a game to make space on your hard drive at some point in the past, you might not be able to get it back ever again at some point in the future. This issue is hopefully a way off for now, but it will become a problem in a few years, I imagine.

The newer consoles, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, have another problem, and that is the size of the downloads for newer games. Many new "next-gen" games are weighing in at 40 or 50 GB each, and with both consoles only coming with a 500GB hard drive as standard, that's only ten games you can have installed before you have to start deleting things. Granted, most gamers will probably only have one or two games on the go at once, but then there's that old concern again: what if, for some reason, you're suddenly no longer able to download something you paid £40 for? That sucks, and it does happen, even well before the whole store closes — recently, Europe saw the removal of Persona 4 Arena from the PlayStation 3's PSN without explanation.

Ultimately what is needed in this regard is not someone slamming down a gavel and saying "The Digital Future begins now!" — what is needed is the acknowledgement that consumers like choice. Collectors like myself who value games as cultural artifacts to be displayed with as much pride as books should continue to have the opportunity to add to their collection, while those who prefer to declutter and have their digital entertainment on tap — or who perhaps see games as a more "disposable" form of entertainment — should also have the opportunity to enjoy their games without acquiring things to find a home for in their house. Small developers should continue to have the opportunity to release their games as digital-only releases, with the most successful ones — see titles like Journey and its ilk — eventually making it to a physical release if the demand is there.

In other words, so far as I can see, pretty much the ideal situation is what we've got now. So why is that a problem that needs "fixing"?

1578: Games Journalism is Broken

And I'm not going to fix it. I'm not sure anyone can.

I mention this amid the news that Future, one of the biggest publishing companies in the UK that has been around for as long as I can remember, is having severe difficulties. Difficulties that are serious enough to see it considering the closure of CVG (aka Computer and Video Games), one of the longest-running brands in the games press. Future's woes aren't solely to do with the games press side of its operation, of course — indeed, it is apparently intending to keep PC Gamer, Gamesradar and the new (somewhat redundant) Kotaku UK up and running regardless of what else happens — but the company's situation, particularly with regard to the games press, is not at all unusual. I was let go from my position at USgamer recently, as you'll know if you've been keeping up to date with this blog, and I believe Destructoid also lost some people recently, too.

It's getting beyond a joke now. The video games industry is one of the most lively, vibrant and exciting creative sectors right now; a business that nowadays regularly puts the amount of money thrown about in movies and music to shame. Over the course of the last 30+ years, it's grown from something that nerds do alone in their bedroom — an activity to be ashamed of — to something that absolutely anyone can engage with on one level or another. Thanks to the rise of smartphones and tablets, there are more "gamers" out there than ever before, but even not taking this rapidly growing market into account, computers, consoles and handhelds are providing more diverse, more interesting, more creative experiences than at any other time in the history of interactive entertainment.

So why is the games press a business that seemingly finds it impossible to remain stable for more than a year or two at a time? Why is the games press such a volatile sector that hard-working individuals (like me, the CVG lot whose jobs are at risk, and any number of other people who have lost their jobs recently) regularly have to effectively start their career over again time after time? How are people who have given up a lot to be a part of this business that they feel so strongly about supposed to build a career and progress?

Part of the reason is the very nature of the Web. People aren't accustomed to paying for content, so they won't pay for it. This means that sites have to rely on lowest-common-denominator ad-based revenue, which in turn leads to a decline in the overall quality of content as producing work that shows up high in the search engine rankings or which provides answers to the most vapid of questions becomes a priority for sites. There are rare exceptions — a well-written piece from an established writer can attract a goodly degree of traffic and, consequently, revenue, as can something controversial or which exploits the hot-button topics of the day — but they're just that: exceptions. For the most part, it's all about the daily churn: getting as much content as possible out as quickly as possible; a far cry, to be sure, from the magazine model of the pre-Internet days.

And you know what? I'm getting to the stage where I feel like I'm done. I love writing about games. Love it. But it doesn't feel like it's possible to make it into a career any more, and it certainly doesn't feel like it's possible to make a career out of writing about the most interesting niches of the industry. I've been doing the same thing in the business for four years now, largely because I've had to reboot my career and start over several times. I'm 33 years old; I can't keep doing that, and I can't go back to begging for scraps on a freelance basis, no disrespect intended to anyone who does successfully manage to draw a living wage through that way of working.

And so, I find myself increasingly wondering whether or not if, should a fantastic-sounding job offer for a video games site find itself in my inbox tonight or tomorrow, I would take it. At this exact moment — 22:42 on a Thursday night in May 2014 — I'm erring towards "no". It would be wonderful to have the guarantee of a new job in this sector that I love, but I'd constantly be wondering if, a year or two down the line, I'd be in the exact same position I am now: never advancing; never progressing; never learning anything new.

A career in video games sounds like a dream come true to most people who grew up with them. But I can tell you, it's not everything you might hope. In fact, there are a lot of times when it really, really sucks, and it seems like the spring of 2014 is one of those times.

My best wishes to everyone who, like me, is going through a tough time right now. May we all land on our feet and find ourselves doing something where our skills are truly valued and appropriately compensated.

1577: Resolutiongate

The absolute most tedious thing about the new generation of games consoles is the endless parade of news stories with the headline "[game name] runs at [resolution] and [frame rate] on [platform]".

This has happened before, of course, back when the PS3 and Xbox 360 first came out. Billed as "HD" consoles, people were quick to jump on any games that didn't run at the full, promised 1080p resolution — usually for performance reasons. It was tedious and pointless fanboy baiting back then; it is tedious and pointless fanboy baiting now. And yet still it goes on and on and on, because, well, it's fanboy baiting that attracts clicks and comments.

I do get the arguments why resolution and frame rate are important. 1080p resolution is noticeably crisper on a large screen, and particularly useful for games where you need to perceive fine details like first-person shooters where you do a lot of fighting from a long distance, or strategy games where you need to be able to parse a lot of information at once. Likewise, 60 frames per second looks lovely and slick — it's almost impossible to physically perceive anything higher than 60 — and is particularly suited to games in which precision timing is important like, say, manic shooters, music games and driving games.

These two things are not the most important or interesting things about games, though. There are any number of interesting things you could say about upcoming games for Xbox One and PlayStation, and yet it always comes down to this, with the most recent example being Ubisoft's upcoming Watch Dogs — a game which, embarrassingly, Sony bragged about running at 1080p and 60fps "only on PlayStation 4" only for Ubisoft to subsequently go "aaaaactually, it's 900p and 30fps…" As the team behind The Witcher commented the other day, these numbers are little more than marketing figures, as Sony's ill-advised use of them clearly demonstrates; I seriously doubt that Watch Dogs will be an inferior experience for running at a lower resolution and half the frame rate.

In fact, sometimes these things are almost irrelevant, or at least of significantly lesser importance than the universal "EVERYTHING MUST BE 1080p 60FPS" attitude that is starting to take hold these days. Take something like the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, for example, which I've been digging up screenshots for to post in articles over on MoeGamer. Katawa Shoujo runs at 800×600 — yes, the 4:3 resolution that your old 386 used to run Windows 3.1 in — and looks beautiful due to its gorgeous art style. Likewise, from a frame-rate perspective, heavily cinematic-inspired games such as Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls actually benefit from lower frame rates closer to the 30 mark because it makes them look more like — you guessed it — film, which has historically run at around 24fps. In these cases, bumping up to 60fps may look smooth and slick, but also looks very artificial and unnatural.

In other words, looking good is less a matter of technical proficiency and more a matter of art style and direction — picking the appropriate means of presenting your title, in other words. Like so much else in gaming, this isn't a "one size fits all" situation, and I look forward to the day where the industry collectively stops assigning such importance to arbitrary numbers and focuses on the important things.

1575: Crowdarchival

Since I finished both Steins;Gate and Saya no Uta recently (the latter was a whole lot shorter) I was pondering what visual novel I should read next this evening, and my thoughts were drawn to a disc I picked up from JAST a while back called the JAST Memorial Collection. This disc included several old JAST titles updated to run on modern machines, plus two additional games called May Club and Nocturnal Illusion. I recalled that a friend of mine had said that Nocturnal Illusion was particularly interesting and worth playing, so I decided I'd check it out.

Except it fell at the first hurdle. Being a super-old game, it does not like modern operating systems. It particularly doesn't like 64-bit Windows 7 and outright refused to start up at all.

It's been a while since I've encountered something that simply doesn't run at all, but my reaction to it is the same as it was back in the days of MS-DOS and EMM386.EXE: the insatiable feeling of "I MUST GET THIS GAME WORKING NOW IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO." It doesn't matter if it ends up being crap; the fact that my computer is actively preventing me from exploring something flips a switch in my brain and causes me to go into full-on research mode.

In attempting to determine whether there was any way of getting Nocturnal Illusion to run under 64-bit Windows 7, I came across a project designed to do just that, known as ViLE. This seemingly abandoned project was designed to be a "virtual machine" for older visual novel titles, and specifically supports Nocturnal Illusion and May Club as well as a third title called Dividead. A bit of tinkering around and ensuring various pieces of game content were in the right place, and I eventually had Nocturnal Illusion up and running on my TV; not only that, but with the enhanced graphics of the untranslated Japanese remake, too. Neat!

I can't speak much to the content of Nocturnal Illusion as yet as I only gave it a cursory look to see if it was actually working. What I did think was interesting, though, was how the community on the Internet is a lot more willing to archive the past of video games — even obscure, incredibly niche titles like Nocturnal Illusion — than the big companies who, you'd think, would have the resources to be able to do so.

And this is great, because as an art form, video games are, to a certain degree, more difficult to archive than other forms of media. They're a lot more tied to technology than other art forms; a piece of music is timeless regardless of the media it's stored on, whereas a video game is inherently tied to a piece of hardware. You can't cram a Mario Kart cartridge into a Wii, for example.

And this is where the archivists of the medium come in. In many cases continuing to (illegally) redistribute games long after they've gone out of print, the archivists of the Internet are dedicated to ensuring that even modern audiences can enjoy titles that are theoretically completely incompatible with modern systems, be it through emulators or clever pieces of software trickery like ViLE.

I hope this never changes. While the legality of a lot of it is somewhat questionable, in some cases delving into the seedy underbelly of the Internet is the only way to be able to rediscover (or perhaps even discover) certain titles, even with the best efforts of high-profile retro specialists like GOG.com and Night Dive Studios. I don't see companies like GOG rushing to bring titles like Nocturnal Illusion up to date to run on modern machines — largely because of their adult content — and thus it is up to these amateur archivists, these heroes of digital preservation, to ensure that we can always celebrate the history of this rich and diverse medium of artistic expression — and of play.

1573: Open Book

Finished Steins;Gate completely this evening (apart from one "Tip" which remains at large, but as far as the game is concerned, I have all the achievements and all the CG images, so I'm happy with that) so expect some more in-depth commentary on that next week over on MoeGamer.

For now, I wanted to wax lyrical about the visual novel medium once again, since sitting down and "playing" Steins;Gate for most of today has been an enjoyable, enriching experience — and the majority of the time I've spent with it has been spent reading, unable to influence what's happening on-screen.

Those of us who grew up with video games in the '80s and '90s had the mantra "gameplay is everything" drilled into us from an early age. As technology improved and the CD-ROM era dawned, we started to see more and more reviews pointing this out; more and more reviews highlighting the fact that beautiful presentation counts for jack shit if your game isn't up to snuff.

And for a while, this was actually kind of true. The games that sacrificed "gameplay" in favour of impressive presentation — usually of the prerendered cutscenes or full-motion video variety — tended to suffer in two regards. Firstly, they weren't very fun to play. Secondly, the only other potential redeeming feature they might have had — telling an interesting, enjoyable story — tended to crash and burn due to the low budgets of games at the time. It's all very well having real, live actors in your game, but if they can't act for shit then it doesn't make for much of an interactive movie.

Here's where visual novels contrast with the early '90s interactive movie craze somewhat, even though they started to grow in popularity around the same time. Visual novels embrace the fact that they don't have any "gameplay" — and by that I mean moving a character around a screen, having perceived "freedom" to do what you want and so on — and present themselves as nothing more than interactive stories; effectively little more than multimedia takes on Choose Your Own Adventure books. In fact, in many cases, visual novels are even simpler than Choose Your Own Adventure books in that the vast majority of the narrative is prescribed for you, and you'll make only a few choices over the course of the complete story, rather than one at the end of every page.

And yet this doesn't matter. Not having to deal with the consequences for every possible tiny little thing the player might decide to do in a more "sandboxy" environment frees up visual novel authors to concentrate on the story and the characters who help to tell it. It's perhaps for this reason that so many visual novels tend to go down the romance route; because the virtual relationships you build with visual novel characters are much more intense and intimate than in most other types of game — character-driven RPGs excepted, perhaps — many authors allow the reader a degree of wish-fulfilment through virtual dating. (Of course, at present the vast majority of visual novels are designed to cater to male heterosexual players, but there is an established marked for other players in Japan that is gradually starting to make its way over here; Sweet Fuse on PSP and the Hakuoki series for 3DS and PS3 are good examples of "otome games" designed for heterosexual female players, for example — let's see a few more of these in the future.)

Not every visual novel necessarily revolves around love, though. At one end of the spectrum, we have the phenomenon of the nukige, which are games that deliberately focus on being sexually provocative or exciting, but which tend to still include considerably more characterisation and story (and better acting!) than you'd see in your average Western porn film; at the other, we have visual novels like Steins;Gate, where love might perhaps enter into the narrative at some points, but in which the main point is a different theme or piece of subject matter. (In the case of Steins;Gate it's several different interpretations of time travel and parallel worlds, for example.)

What I find most enjoyable about these games is that there's no "gatekeeping" based on skill or dexterity. You sit down to play a visual novel, you know you'll be able to "finish" it, assuming you set aside the time to do so. Reading a walkthrough doesn't feel like cheating, either, since all you're effectively doing is looking up how to explore the alternative narrative paths. Good visual novels make effective use of multiple endings and narrative paths to further flesh out the story, too; the best ones can even leverage their "bad" endings into a meaningful narrative context, as I touched on yesterday.

What I think I'm saying is that I'd actually be perfectly happy if, for whatever reason, the only games I was able to play were visual novels. There's diverse enough subject matter in them to keep them consistently interesting, and in most cases they're just "gamey" enough in terms of presentation to sate that hunger for multimedia content that most of us have in the modern age.

Am I only going to play visual novels from now on? Of course not; but as a means of enjoying an interactive story, they're hard to beat.

1570: Musou

I think I'm probably going to pick up the PC version of Dynasty Warriors 8 when it comes out, assuming it's a decent port. (I've been tempted by the Vita version but slightly put off by some people saying that it is not a particularly decent port… that said, Dynasty Warriors on the go sounds like a good time.)

I haven't played a Dynasty Warriors game since… 4, I think? It was certainly one of the PlayStation 2 titles. (I do actually own a PlayStation 3 installment in the series but have never booted it up; it was an acquisition in that dark period where it was looking like video game retail chain Game was likely to go under, so I managed to pick it up for something ridiculous like three quid or something.) Regardless of whenever it was or whichever installment it was, I recall having a lot of fun with these games, as ridiculous as they tended to be.

For those who have never delved into the pleasures of this series, they're perfect escapist fodder. Taking on the role of one of the legendary heroes from the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" period of Chinese history, it's your job to hack and slash your way across numerous battlefields, cutting a path through hordes of enemies and sending your foes flying off in all directions. Just to emphasise the ridiculously exaggerated nature of combat in the game, a handy counter in the bottom corner of the screen keeps track of how many "KOs" (no-one dies in Dynasty Warriors) you've scored in that session — a number that frequently finds itself well into the thousands.

And yet despite what initially appears to be little more than a button-mashy 3D brawler with an impressive number of rather stupid foes on screen at once, the Dynasty Warriors series has always had a surprising amount of depth to it. You'll need to manage your character's condition carefully, for example, for pushing too far into enemy territory without the support of your troops is a good way to get your ass kicked. You'll have to keep a close eye on your health bar, too, because — at least in the earlier games — restoring it was something you didn't get to go all that often, meaning you'd often end up limping to the finish line of a mission with but a sliver of health remaining.

What was always truly interesting about it, though, was that it felt like you were a unit in a real-time strategy game. Other stuff was going on around the battlefield independently of you, and you could have an impact on what was going on. Systematically work your way around the known locations of enemy generals, picking them off one at a time, and you'd be able to do some serious damage to the opposing force's morale, which would in turn make your life a bit easier when the time came to push forward. Alternatively, if you were feeling brave — or well-equipped — enough, you could simply charge forward from the outset and go straight for the main target. It was your choice.

The whole thing was wrapped in some totally anachronistic electric guitar cock-rock and some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard, but all this cheesiness simply added to the games' overall charm. I hope the newer games maintain this slight feel of being done on the cheap, because if I'm honest, it was a significant part of why I liked the older ones.

Anyway. The PC version isn't out for a few days yet, but I'm actually quite looking forward to jumping back into this series after a significant break, particularly if I can convince some of my friends to play with me — I used to really enjoy split-screen play on the PlayStation 2 versions. Even if I can't, though, a game in which I can hack and slash my way through thousands of enemies sounds like just the thing to relieve a bit of stress… something I desperately need right now.

1568: Prepare for To... no, I'm not making that joke

Towerfall! I'd heard good things about this indie-developed game, but had never tried it prior to this weekend. And blow me if the positivity wasn't justified.

Towerfall — not to be confused with Titanfall — is a game for up to four players, available on PC, PlayStation 4 and, oddly enough, Ouya, where it was originally intended to be a flagship title for the ill-conceived Android microconsole. I'm extremely thankful that the developers weren't stubborn about sticking with Ouya exclusivity; this way, a lot more people get to play their game, and no-one has to buy an Ouya.

Anyway. There are two ways to play Towerfall: Versus and Quest. I haven't tried Quest yet, but we played some Versus in between board games over the weekend. And it was a huge amount of fun. The concept is extremely simple: up to four players face off against one another armed with bows and a very limited number of arrows, and must defeat the other players. You can defeat a player by either shooting them or jumping on their head Mario-style, in which case you'll get a point — but if they end up killing themselves thanks to your actions, you won't get a point.

That is, basically, it. The simplicity of the game is what makes it work so well, and everything else that goes on simply builds on this extremely simple formula. Collectible treasures that pop up around the level might replenish your arrows, or might give you a new type of arrow to play with such as arrows that explode or arrows that drill through walls. Or they might just do something weird; particular favourites in this category include one that turns the lights out on the level, meaning it's a lot more difficult to see the platforms and hazards; one that causes the background to start swaying drunkenly and everything to start moving at half-speed; and one that causes the whole level to scroll one whole screen in any of the four cardinal directions. (Levels are wrap-around, so you can run off the left edge and reappear on the right; this scrolling trick really messes with your perception of how this works while it's going on.)

One thing I was particularly impressed with was the "variants" menu when setting up a new game. Rather than being confined to playing the game in just a single way, Towerfall features a huge variety of options for you to tweak the experience. If you want to play without arrows, knock yourself out (by having someone land on your head). If you want to start with the more powerful arrows, great. If you want to be able to come back as a ghost and continue harassing the other players rather than simply being eliminated from a round, that's an option too. There's a huge amount of flexibility, and a bit of experimentation will help make the experience into a game that hopefully everyone participating will be able to enjoy.

The only potential downside to the game is that it's only possible to enjoy its multiplayer delights with other people in the same room as you. Frankly, I greatly prefer this to playing online, but for those who have friends who are difficult to gather in the same place at the same time, this may be a problem. Still, I'm hopeful I'll have the opportunity to play it a whole lot more in the future; when we move into our new house — which is pretty soon now! — we'll have a lot more room for hosting, and even a spare bed. So late night Towerfall sessions are very much a go!

1567: Hunting Mr. X

We've played through a whole bunch of board games this weekend, and it's quite difficult to pick a specific highlight. This morning's Battlestar Galactica game was very enjoyable — it was the first time I'd been a Cylon player — but I think that it was our Scotland Yard game that made for some of my favourite moments.

We haven't played Scotland Yard for quite a long time. It's a fairly simple, straightforward game and thus it's the sort of thing that often gets overlooked in favour of more complicated and/or flashy-looking titles, but it's a hugely enjoyable game. Its simplicity really works in its favour, because it means you're not constantly looking up rules or checking you're "doing it right" — all you're basically doing is moving around the board.

For the unfamiliar, Scotland Yard is an asymmetrical game in which a team of up to four detective players attempt to track down the criminal mastermind and all-round bastard Mr. X by chasing him across London and apprehending him. The twist is that Mr. X moves around the board in secret, only revealing himself after making specified numbers of moves. At all other times, the detective players can see which forms of transport he has taken — each space on the board is connected to at least one other by any combination of taxi, bus and underground routes, and making use of a route requires discarding a ticket of the appropriate type — but not exactly where he has gone. Thus, the challenge is determining where Mr. X is, where he is going and how you can possibly stop him when you're all moving by the same rules.

Scotland Yard is a masterful game for the amount of tension it creates on both sides. Early in the game, it's easy for the detectives to stumble around blindly, not having a clue where their quarry might be; at the same time, though, Mr. X is trying to quietly slip away without being notices so he is, preferably, on the other side of the board by the time he has to reveal himself for the first time.

The real tension comes from the fact that no-one ever feels like they're "winning" until very late in the game, which is the only point at which it becomes clear that either Mr. X is probably going to escape, or the detectives are almost certainly going to catch him. Up until you reach that point — which doesn't come along until the last couple of turns in many cases — both sides are constantly on edge, thinking "shiiiit…" while trying to outwit the others. It's a particularly nerve-wracking experience for Mr. X, who has to make some tough decisions about whether or not he's going to risk moving within capture distance of the detectives — who might not know where he is at this point — or try and get as far away as possible. The game creates a good feeling of "closing the net" on the Mr. X player, even with the very limited number of pieces on the board. It's hugely atmospheric and a lot of fun.

Our game today went pretty well. I was Mr. X, which I was quite pleased about. For a lot of the game, I had the opportunity to sit back and chuckle to myself about how my opponents were making completely incorrect assumptions about which way I'd gone, but things gradually ramped up towards the end. I was within a couple of turns of winning — my opponents were down to their last few tickets, at which point it becomes more difficult for them to move around, particularly if they'd exhausted a particular type of transportation at that point — and I thought I'd outwitted them. Unfortunately, they managed to squeeze me into an unwinnable situation and I was eventually caught.

Scotland Yard is one of those experiences that is distinctive to board games. There are video games that involve hiding from one another and trying not to give your position away, but the implementation of the mechanics in Scotland Yard makes it a huge amount of fun to get together around a table for. I believe there's an iOS version available out there, but I frankly can't see it being quite as much fun. Part of the enjoyment is in listening in on your opponents' discussions and thinking "I hope they don't figure out what I've done", and that's something that's best enjoyed in the live company of one another.

Anyhow. This has been a pleasant weekend away from it all, and I should have a nice relaxing day off tomorrow for the Bank Holiday. Then it's back to shitting myself over whether or not I can find a new job. Yay.

But I'm not going to think about that right now. For now, bed.

1566: Project MoeGamer

After some umming and ahhing (and not being able to get to sleep again) I decided yesterday to flip the switch on my little side project. I haven't done a huge amount of promotion or anything for it yet — though I guess this post counts — because I knew I was going to be away for the weekend. But I did feel like I wanted to get it out in the wild and ready to start tinkering with over the next few weeks.

If you haven't already seen it, I present to you MoeGamer. It's a site inspired by my love of Japanese games — particularly those towards the more "anime-ish" end of the spectrum — and is intended to be a repository of articles I've written regarding games I've been playing. I've deliberately kept it free of any sort of "structure" for the moment — i.e. it's not intended to be a news, reviews and preview site — to allow for full creative freedom, and so far I've populated it with a selection of articles that have previously been seen on this site (with some minor edits) and one longer original article on the visual novel Kana Little Sister that I haven't published anywhere before.

My intention for the site in the short term is simply to use it as an outlet for writing about Japanese games in as much detail as I enjoy. Realistically, I know that I've been quite lucky to have the freedom I've had at USgamer to post my weekly JPgamer column, and I also know that despite the reputation I've built up as a result of both JPgamer and my reviews of various Japanese games, it will take a fair bit of fighting at any mainstream site to be able to do the same. In other words, as much as it would be an ideal situation for me to be hired by a site to be their resident Japanese games expert, I know that, given these games' distinctly "niche" status (i.e. they're not necessarily huge traffic magnets except when they're embroiled in some sort of controversy) I will almost certainly not be writing about them on a regular basis unless I really fall on my feet.

And so, MoeGamer.

What I do with the site in the long term will depend on response and whether I have the time and inclination to continue working on it. I have several ideas of things I'd like to do — I'd like to experiment with video for one thing, and if I manage to attract a reasonably sized audience I'll look at some form of making money from the blog, be it through ads, crowdfunding or something like Patreon — but whether or not any of these get implemented will depend on how much time I have to spend fiddling with the site going forward. The same is true for whether I spend any money on the site; at present, it's simply a free WordPress blog, but if it proves to be worthwhile I'll happily purchase a domain name and premium services to make it more customisable.

As it happens, in just under two months I'm going to have a whole lot of time to fiddle around with the site, for better or worse. While I'm not exactly relishing the prospect of finding a new job, I am enjoying that early buzz of getting a new website up and running and looking forward to seeing whether or not it's something that is viable to keep doing as a side project on the side. At the very least, I doubt I should have too many problems keeping it open as my go-to place for writing about games and archiving stuff that gets lost in all the OneADay posts here, but part of me is hoping I can grow it into something bigger, too.

We'll see. It's far too early to ponder right now, and I'm not in a position to do much with the site over the next couple of days — I'm in Kent with some friends playing board games and drinking cider. It should hopefully be a nice period of unwinding after a stressful week.

For now, then, there's a selection of articles on MoeGamer for your weekend reading — several of which, as I've said, longtime readers of this site will recognise — and from early next week onwards, you should hopefully see a whole bunch more there.

In the meantime, please take a look, leave a comment, click the Like button on stuff you're interested in and feel free to share anything you enjoy. And I can keep writing about the stuff I love.