Hi folks. I've been thinking long and hard about this for some time, but I think it's probably time to hang up this Patreon account.

Frankly, it's just not really been working out for me the way it hoped; it's been near-impossible to attract new subscribers, even with regular mentions of it on socials, at the end of videos and in other such places, and in recent months I've been shedding subscribers. My income from Patreon this month is literally less than half of what it was last month.

My original intent for this account was to see if it was possible to turn MoeGamer (and, later, my video work) into something self-sustainable — particularly while I was struggling to find full-time employment. Now, I thankfully have full-time employment, so that "pressure" isn't there any more — and I just find myself responding to a lot of things about Patreon not with excitement, but with anxiety.

I don't like logging in to see people have left; it makes my heart sink and my mind feel like I've done something wrong. This isn't anyone's fault, I hasten to add; it's my own mental health talking. I know from my own experience of cancelling and moving pledges around that not everyone is able to stick around for all eternity, so of course it would be exactly the same for me, too. Still, it's hard not to feel like you've somehow "failed" when subscribers disappear.

And in some ways, I feel like I have failed to make good use of this account. I've never felt like I've been able to offer meaningful benefits to subscribers, and apparently "just supporting someone you enjoy the work of" isn't enough incentive to convince much of the Internet-going public into opening their wallets. It's hard enough to even get people to comment on stuff these days.

Fact is, though, I've never had the time or the resources to be able to plug into making Patron-exclusive stuff — had I managed to grow my membership beyond its peak (I never did quite crack $100 a month) I suspect I would have been able to make time for Patron-exclusive things, but as it stands it's never felt like something I could spend too much time on in good conscience.

And when you can't even get your own friends — either IRL or Internet — to chip in a dollar a month to help you out a bit… well, that's pretty demoralising.

So I'm going to hang it up and remove just one more stressor from my life. I may well do something like open up YouTube Memberships, as providing benefits like emojis and stickers are easy to do and actually meaningful to the platform on which the work people are supporting is hosted. But from today, I will be pausing Patreon memberships indefinitely, and likely not turning them back on again.

I would like to say a very, very sincere "thank you" to those of you who have supported me, whether you're a new member or someone who has stuck around for a very long time.

There are quite a few of you here in the members list who have stuck with me for literally years at this point, and believe me, your support has helped me survive some very tough times indeed — if not financially then most definitely through the knowledge that there are genuinely kind people out there. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the knowledge you were there helped keep me hanging on through some particularly difficult years.

Plus I'm legitimately grateful to those of you who have become friends as well as just Patreon supporters — I'd like to give a particular shout-out to Ken, who helped me get my hands on the Atari ST version of Rod Land that I so dearly wanted as a child, and to Digger Dan, whom hopefully many of you know the story of already! And, of course, my dear friend and podcasting partner-in-crime Chris.

So here's what's going to happen:

After I post this publicly, I'm going to pause all memberships, which means you will not be charged for any further months. Doing it this way rather than simply deleting my account means that you should still have access to any Patron-exclusive stuff you might care to look back on. Right now, I have no intention of unpausing, so don't feel you have to cancel; I may still post occasional things here, so remaining a paused member should mean you still get updates.

If you would like to continue to support me in some way after this Patreon gets paused, you can do so in a few ways:

Ko-Fi allows you to make one-time donations in a variety of ways. You can do that here. This is purely a "tip jar" if you want to flip me a couple of quid if you enjoyed something; I have no intention of posting anything exclusive there.

Alternatively, my YouTube channel now has access to Super Thanks, which appears in the form of a "Thanks" button in the same row of buttons as the Like/Dislike, Share and other buttons on a video. Using Super Thanks, you can flip me a one-off tip and leave a comment, which will be specially highlighted as a means of thanking you for your donation. Like Ko-Fi, there's no long-term commitment there and likewise no exclusive content; it is just, as the name suggests, a means of saying "thanks".

I will also look into YouTube Memberships, and if there's a means of implementing some sort of benefits that won't take too much time away from my actual work on the channel and the day job — like the aforementioned emoji and stickers — I'll turn those on as a means of offering recurring support. If I do this, there is of course no obligation to join up and there likely won't be any "members only" videos; it will simply be a means of showing your support directly on YouTube.

Once again, I'd like to say a very sincere thank you to all of you reading this who are both current or past supporters. It's been a fun journey, but I feel like it's ultimately for the best for my creative endeavours if I'm not feeling stressed over whether or not I'm providing for those kind enough to drop me some money each month!

Thank you for taking the time to read all this. If you'd like to follow me elsewhere online, you can find me on Twitter at @MoeGamer, and Discord at MoeGamerPete#2465. And don't forget to read my stuff every day over at Rice Digital! It's like MoeGamer, only I get paid for it and have a team of writers supporting me!

Hello! Gonna start posting a thing each weekend as a means of getting me off my arse to write something for you lovely people — and also to keep you up to date on what's going on.

You may have already read on the YouTube community tab, but I'm tweaking the monthly schedule a bit from this coming week. Retro Select is going to take a break for a bit, because although it provides a nice bit of flexibility, it's not being watched by as many people as I hoped it would — particularly the stuff that I hoped would do a bit better, like some of the overlooked/underappreciated more "recent retro" stuff.

So basically rather than worrying about that too much, I'm just going to give it a break for a while and prioritise the stuff that seems to be the main reason people are sticking around, which is the Atari, Commodore and Evercade stuff! I'll still keep Retro Select on the back burner for an occasional one-off when I feel like it, but it will no longer be a regular feature. As such, that means the new monthly schedule will look like this:

Week 1: Atari A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 2: C64 A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 3: Atari ST A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 4: Amiga A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)

The reason for bumping up the number of Evercade A to Z episodes and making them weekly is that there is now so much stuff available for that platform and I really want to get through it. I realise at this point I'm never going to "catch up" with the rate of cartridge releases (probably, anyway) but it would be nice to make some slightly quicker progress.

That and, in effect, the Evercade A to Z series will be fulfilling much of the same function as Retro Select: showing off assorted retro games from a variety of platforms, albeit with a hard cut-off at the PS1 era due to what the Evercade can comfortably handle.

With the C64 cart for Evercade launching later in the year, also, there will doubtless be some crossover between Evercade A to Z and C64 A to Z, but where there is overlap I'll be covering the games again; it's worth seeing how they play on Evercade without a keyboard vs. how they play using emulation on a computer or a clone system like the C64 Maxi.

Anyway, here's what you can expect for next week's videos:

Galactic Chase for Atari 8-bit: a Galaxian clone that a lot of people think is better than Atari's official port of Galaxian to ROM cartridge. I haven't played this game since I was a kid, but I remember my family being quite fond of it, so looking forward to revisiting it.

Hardcore 4×4 for Evercade from the Gremlin cart: an off-road racing game that was originally released on PS1. The Gremlin cart is quite interesting in that a lot of people's first reaction to it is kind of "meh", but when they get into the games on it, they find themselves having a lot of fun. I've not spent a lot of time with Hardcore 4×4 so far but I have enjoyed what I played so far — so making a vid seems like an ideal opportunity to dive a little deeper.

Anyway. Hope you're all having a good weekend and aren't melting too much in the heat. Ta-ta for now!

Hello everyone! Haven't written for a while so thought I'd check in. Hope you're all doing well and aren't melting too much in the summer heat. It's hot enough in our house for butter to melt onto bread without applying any additional heat, so that's nice. (No it isn't.)

Picked up an Anbernic Win600 device the other day. You can read my detailed impressions over on Rice Digital. So far I'm impressed with it; it seems like a nicely capable device, albeit not really up to anything too modern and/or intensive. I'm both disappointed and relieved that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition doesn't run well on it, otherwise I could potentially have a real problem on my hands. It's already bad enough that HoloCure works great on it.

The device is, of course, great for retro gaming, and as suggested by a few people I've installed Batocera (a retro gaming-centric OS) onto a USB stick, allowing me to dual-boot the device into either Windows or Batocera depending on what I want to do. Running Batocera essentially makes it run like a dedicated EmulationStation-based retro gaming handheld, while in Windows it's just a handheld PC.

I did try SteamOS for a bit and was reasonably impressed — particularly with how far WINE has come since I tried it 10+ years ago on Mac — but ultimately determined that, for what I want to use the device for (visual novels, among other things) it was just making work for myself, and sticking with Windows was probably the optimal solution.

I might upgrade the internal storage and/or RAM at some point, but at present I'm rocking the base model and it works absolutely fine for my purposes. I'm looking forward to spending some more time with it in the long term.

A revamp

I think I'm probably going to revamp this Patreon page completely to focus it more on my video work. While I do very much welcome the continued support of MoeGamer — particularly as, even while I'm not writing there much, it still has annual server costs — I do continually feel a little bad about not updating much over there any more.

I mean, I'm pretty certain this is just a "me" thing to worry about, but I also want to be transparent about the specific work people are supporting by signing up to this Patreon.

Yes, Patreon donations do go towards keeping MoeGamer up and running — and even if I'm not actively writing on there thanks to my day job at Rice Digital, I want to keep the site live as a resource that people can refer to at any time — but my primary active "passion project" work right now is on my retro gaming YouTube stuff.

So with that in mind, I think I'm going to rewrite my Patreon page to focus on that side of things. So if you see some major changes on that front in the next few days, that's why!

Obviously I'd prefer everyone who has supported me for a long time to stick around regardless of what I'm doing, but I also completely understand if you feel my focus has changed and it's something different to what you signed up to support. I am grateful for your support up until this point, and hope you'll consider continuing.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that this is coming. I've been agonising over it for a long time and I think it's probably for the best at this point!

That's all for now. Thanks as always for your support!

Been thinking a bit of late, and this is doubtless something anyone who enjoys writing, making videos or simply talking about their hobbies has run into: it's good to make time for yourself occasionally.

I say this as someone who, both when writing about games as a hobby and doing it professionally as I do now, often finds himself thinking about what he "should" be doing in terms of simply enjoying gaming, rather than what he feels like at any given moment. For example, I often wonder if I "should" spend my weekends working through some substantial visual novels and RPGs so that I can write about them or make videos on them.

The thing is, I actually want to engage with these works at some point, but it's the feeling of "obligation" that sometimes holds me back. Or perhaps more accurately, the feeling that I "should" spend my time doing something that is more immediately "useful". The silly thing is that with the way my brain works, I end up completely overthinking the whole situation and wasting a whole lot of time, when I could simply be enjoying a video game that I feel like playing at any given moment.

I'm going to try and break that habit a bit. While yes, I do still want to play things so that I can write about them over on Rice Digital and make videos about them, I'm going to try and let go of the feelings of "guilt" I sometimes feel if I decide I'm simply in the mood for something else. Today, for example, I just felt like playing some more nail'd, even though that's not in any way "useful" for either Rice Digital or YouTube — I just wanted to play it. So I did. And I enjoyed it.

These feelings don't come out of resentment or anything like that; quite the contrary, in fact. Those who have been following me for a while — which is most of you reading this — will know that one thing I love doing more than anything with both my written and video work is highlighting things that don't get nearly enough attention from the mainstream. Trouble is, by the very nature of these things, there are so many of them that it's hard to pick and choose what to cover when!

I have games in my collection that I want to play through from start to finish that extend right back to the 8-bit era. And "analysis paralysis" quite often prevents me from diving into things that I know I'll enjoy — plus the desire not to have too many things on the go at once, because leaving things unfinished is a personal bugbear of mine. That's probably a slightly different matter though!

Anyway, I guess the main point of all this is that it's important to give yourself permission to simply enjoy yourself — for no other reason than rest, relaxation and the enjoyment of your hobby. Not everything needs to end up as an article, an essay, a video or a podcast; sometimes it's okay to just have fun with something and that be that.

I need to keep reminding myself of this!

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't been around here much of late — I've been extremely busy at work with a variety of projects both public-facing and behind the scenes, and as such when the evening comes I've pretty much just wanted to switch off completely! I thought I'd make the effort to write this evening, though, what with it being the end of the week and a nice nap earlier meaning that I'm now wide awake at 11.30pm.

I'm enjoying working on the new video schedule for the moment. Two videos per week appears to be a nice sweet spot for me that doesn't overwhelm me, but also doesn't make me feel like I'm leaving the channel "barren" for long periods. I know no-one except me really cares about that with the size of my audience overall, but still. It's important to be satisfied with your own work, even if that means putting a bit more effort in.

I'm working on "cycles" at the moment where I plan out the next four weeks' worth of videos in advance, then record all of the intros in one go. I then record the actual game footage two vids at a time to go with what I'm planning to release: C64 and Atari 8-bit one week, Amiga and ST the next, two lots of Retro Select (which can be pretty much anything) the next and two lots of Evercade the next.

We've just passed the first week of a new "cycle" with Buggy Boy on C64 and Escape from Doomworld on Atari 8-bit, so over the course of the next three weeks, here's what you have to look forward to:

• World Games for Atari ST, a divisive multi-sports title from Epyx that eschews conventional Olympic-style competition in favour of a variety of events specific to particular regions in the world. Some are considerably more odd than others!

• Battle Squadron for Amiga, a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up which is very good, and which I have limited experience with so far outside of my friend Sam being obsessed with it in our first year at university.

• nail'd for Xbox 360, a favourite arcade racer that deserves some love. Also I had some requests for some more Xbox 360 stuff in Retro Select, so both episodes of that will be 360-themed this week.

• Ninja Blade for Xbox 360, which is an interesting one because it's by FromSoftware, but also from that weird period where Japanese devs tried to make games that appealed to the west. Seen very mixed opinions of this online so fascinated to give it a shot.

• Romeow and Julicat for Evercade, which is a thoroughly charming puzzle game that the actual developers have left precisely zero information about online, so the gameplay will mostly have to speak for itself!

• Night Stalker for Evercade, which is one of my all-time favourite Intellivision games. I only really learned about the Intellivision in more recent years, but if I'd had one back in the day this one would have been a fixture in my cartridge slot!

Next "cycle" I'm thinking about doing a Wii week for Retro Select; I've picked up an armful of 50p nonsense from CEX, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of those. I've also got copies of DJ Hero and its sequel on the way, but attempting to play those on YouTube may well be asking for copyright-related trouble, so that might just be a "me" thing!

Also with Retrounite not having found the audience we hoped it would, that frees up more time to do retro-related stuff elsewhere. To that end, you'll see some blog posts from me over on the official Evercade site in the coming weeks — you may have already seen a few about the Game of the Month releases on the VS! — and I'll be folding some regular retro coverage into Rice Digital, too, likely in the form of "here are some weird retro games no-one ever talks about but which are actually well worth exploring because they're cheap".

Times are good! I'm feeling creatively fulfilled both in my own personal projects and at work, and I'm really proud of the things I can say I've been involved with (I played an important role in a modern rerelease of frickin' Rod Land!!) — plus the things I can't yet say that I've been involved with. More on that in the coming weeks when they're actually announced. Tease, tease.

Anyway, thanks as always for your continued support. It really means a lot that you folks are willing to stick by me as I pootle around doing my various passion projects, and as those projects evolve over time.

I bought a laser printer this week. I had one specific purpose in mind for it: printing out manuals for old 8- and 16-bit home computer games that are impractical or unfeasibly expensive to acquire "real" copies of, and giving those games the time and attention they deserve.

You see, although many games on classic home computer platforms fall into the "simple arcadey fun" category, there are also lots that are enormously ambitious and which take full advantage of the fact their host platform is a computer, not a games console. This is great, because there are lots of really interesting experiences to be had on these platforms, particularly if you explore the genesis of a whole genre. However, the downside is that more often than not, you very much need to read the manuals for these more complex games before you'll have the slightest clue what you're doing.

For me, the Ultima series of role-playing games had always fallen into this category, even though a few brief forays into them on the Atari A to Z series had revealed them (and games like them, such as SSI's Questron) to be a lot more manageable and straightforward than I had previously assumed. And so I'd always been holding off exploring them in any great depth until I had a manual by my side that I could refer to easily — and by "refer to easily" I do not mean "call up a tiny PDF on my phone and squint at", because as technologically marvellous as that might be, it's not convenient, practical or indeed enjoyable.

So, with my recent acquisition of the A500 Mini and the C64 Maxi, I thought I'd print out some manuals. We already had an inkjet printer, but as anyone who has owned a cheap inkjet printer made within the last 20 years will be able to tell you, inkjet printers have several major flaws in them that make them less than desirable to use. Firstly is the fact that their ink cartridges inevitably have an absolutely miniscule supply available to you. Secondly is the fact that replacing said cartridges is unnecessarily expensive. Thirdly is how if you don't use said cartridges for a while, they dry up, meaning you need to replace them regardless of if you've been using them or not. Fourthly, they're a bit slow. And fifthly, most of them don't do double-sided printing.

So I did a little bit of research and came upon a Brother laser printer that was about £150. It was only mono, but we print colour stuff so rarely that we can just continue to sink money into the old inkjet any time we actually need colour. The Brother printer, meanwhile, offered double-sided printing, a speed of up to 30 pages per minute, wireless connectivity plus scanning and copying capabilities. All in all, it sounded pretty ideal.

And indeed, so far it appears to have been. I printed out a bunch of Commodore 64 manuals last night and put them nicely in a ring binder. I consumed the entire "starter" toner cartridge that came with the printer in the space of a single evening and replaced it with a £12.99 third party job today that seems to work just fine. And now I have the manuals for Ultima I-VI all nicely printed out and ready to refer to. And so, I have finally begun playing the Ultima series.

Yes, that means starting with the first Ultima — specifically, the Commodore 64 version, which I'm playing on the C64 Maxi. And I've been surprised what a genuinely good time I've been having with the game so far. It's very simple and quite different in structure compared to today's role-playing games — but I actually rather like this. There's an enjoyable "sandbox" feel to it where you explore an open world, poke at various things to see what happens and gradually beef yourself up. Then there's some sort of eventual objective that you need to accomplish, but there's no real rush to achieve that — right now I'm just enjoying wandering around this world.

Ultima's most peculiar element — and something which it doesn't really explain at all in the manual, after I went to the trouble of printing it out — is its progression system. You have experience points and an experience level, and apparently you need to be level 8 to beat the game. But aside from that, progression is handled in a variety of rather peculiar ways, with "levelling up" actually not appearing to be all that important in terms of actually powering yourself up.

Firstly, like many other early RPGs of this type, you have no maximum hit points. If you "heal", your HP keeps rising and rising and rising, so it's in your interest to get them as high as you possibly can. This can be achieved in two main ways: donating money to the Kings of the realm, or by dungeon-crawling. The latter is especially effective, as it also means you'll acquire money at a good rate, which you'll need to keep supplying yourself with provisions, and to equip yourself with good armour and weapons.

How does dungeon crawling help you gain rather than lose HP? Well, any time you leave a dungeon, you get a bunch of HP back according to the number and type of monsters you splattered during that particular delve. The more you kill in a single expedition — and the stronger those monsters are — the more HP you get back upon making it safely back to the surface. So a simple means of beefing yourself up a bit for more significant challenges is mapping out a few levels of dungeon (which are, apparently, randomly generated each time you start a new game) and doing a few "laps" while bashing monsters along the way. After your workout, you'll have a bunch more money, some more experience and, assuming you make it back to the surface alive, a chunk more HP to play with.

Aside from this, you can boost your stats in a couple of ways. Firstly, the Kings of the realm offer you quests to find or kill particular things, and upon completing them and reporting in, they'll give you a bonus to a stat (usually Strength, it seems). Secondly, there are landmarks around the world that simply boost your stats when you visit them — although you can't visit the same landmark twice in succession to just repeatedly get the stat bonuses, you can zip back and forth between two nearby ones, alternating their bonuses until you get your stats up to the desired level.

This is all exceedingly odd by modern standards, but it also feels like the game is rewarding you for just wandering around and taking it all in. Although the game, its world and the core mechanics are all pretty simple, the fact there are lots of different incentives to explore makes it very enjoyable to play; it feels like you're always making some sort of progress. And while death is a fairly major inconvenience — while there's no permadeath, dying causes you to lose your weapon, your gold and all but 99 of your HP and food while being teleported somewhere random — it's by no means impossible to recover from. Indeed, on my own adventures so far I've died multiple times, and it's only after this most recent death that I've found myself absolutely armed to the teeth and ready for pretty much anything the realm of Sosaria would care to throw at me from hereon!

And if all that wasn't peculiar enough, there's also space combat. But I haven't got that far yet. I'm certainly intrigued, though, and I'm planning to continue my adventures for sure!

I'm sick of feeling like absolute crap. I was already in a right state prior to COVID hitting, and the mounting up of both mental and physical health factors over the course of the last couple of years in particular have meant that I'm pretty much in the worst shape I've ever been in my life. I get easily exhausted, I ache all over and I just generally feel awful, both physically and mentally.

I joined the gym a while back in the hope that establishing a regular routine would motivate me to at the very least get my muscles moving again, but for one reason or another I never successfully managed to establish that routine. And once I got COVID, I became understandably hesitant to spend protracted amounts of time in tight spaces with other sweaty people emitting noxious disease-fumes everywhere. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but let's just say I didn't feel as "safe" as I might have done a few years back.

So, rather than wasting forty quid a month on a membership I'm not using, I decided to start going for a walk. I started yesterday, and successfully went again today. Two in a row is definitely the start of something, and I feel like this is something I can manage and deal with right now — particularly once my anti thigh-chafing goo arrives tomorrow.

I actually rather like walking, but thigh chafing sucks, so being able to preemptively counteract that should help keep me motivated. Hopefully this stuff does a decent job — it had some good Amazon reviews but honestly that could mean anything these days. The alternative is wearing thigh bands (which I'm not against, but I worry about wasting money on the wrong size) or using anti-chafing shorts (which I own a pair of, but find quite uncomfortable at my current size and shape).

While going on my walks, I'm making a deliberate attempt to "disconnect" completely. I take my phone in case of emergencies, but it's in a backpack I carry along with my wallet and keys, so I can't easily just reach for it. I'm not logging or tracking my runs — though I have plotted the route I took for the last couple of days on Google Maps, just out of curiosity to see how far it actually was. (3km, if you were wondering.) And that allows me to just enjoy a bit of peace.

For my walks over the last couple of days, I've been heading to a nearby cemetery and just going through the middle of there, coming out the other side and then heading back up the main road that runs parallel to it. The time inside the cemetery is definitely the highlight; although it's a rather glum, melancholy place by its very nature, it's blissfully quiet and peaceful also, making it a good place to either be alone with your thoughts, or just to empty your mind a bit. I'll doubtless find some other good routes nearby in the coming days, but this is definitely a route I'll keep coming back to for the pleasurable peacefulness.

And I've actually already noticed a difference. I suspect it's mostly psychological, but today's 3km walk on the exact same route as yesterday felt significantly easier than yesterday's. I won't say it felt easy because, as previously established, I am very unfit. But when you're at rock bottom in a particular characteristic, there's nowhere to go but up, I guess.

We'll see how long I can stick with this — and if it actually helps at all!

Hi S-rank folks! Sorry for the long delay between these, but as noted in the video COVID kinda put paid to a lot of bold plans! Should be back on track now though, so expect at least one of these a month. We kick off today with a casual look around my new toy, TheC64.

Okay. So I know I said I was taking some pressure off myself by cutting the video schedule right back. But I'm sort of getting itchy feet a bit, and I feel like I'm not doing enough to satisfy myself right now. And this has been compounded somewhat by the addition of some new goodies to my collection: specifically, The A500 Mini, which I've previously mentioned, and The C64, which I decided to stop mulling over and grab today.

Fiddling with Amiga games on the A500 Mini makes me want to do a companion series to Atari ST A to Z, because there are some interesting comparisons to be made — and some interesting exclusives to explore, also.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised that in a lot of cases, the Atari ST version wasn't as far "behind" the Amiga as I thought it was; in fact, in some cases, I actually prefer the ST version by quite a margin. HeroQuest is the best example that springs immediately to mind; its atmospheric music works way better through the Atari ST's PSG sound chip than the Amiga's digital sound. But then, of course, you have the stuff that was properly designed for the Amiga, like Shadow of the Beast, and the machine really shines, pushing dedicated console-quality in a lot of instances.

And so I figured, if I'm going to an Amiga parallel series to Atari ST A to Z, why not do a C64 series parallel to Atari A to Z? You know it makes sense. Well, I think it makes sense, anyway, and I'm quite excited about the prospect.

I haven't yet decided on how I might "brand" these two series; going with the "A to Z" moniker would certainly be consistent, but I'm in two minds as to whether I actually want to keep the "alphabetical" gimmick. On the one hand, it's great that it forces me to hunt down and explore games that I might not otherwise have tried rather than simply going for the "obvious" choices; on the other, it can sometimes feel a little restrictive, and occasionally frustrating that it's a long time until I get to, say, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2.

Anyway, I'll have a ponder over the weekend (my C64 should be arriving on Saturday) and I'll see if two vids a week for the Atari A to Z and Atari ST weeks works for me. I suspect it will — in which case you have more to look forward to! Hurrah.

Anyway. Dinner time. Ta-ta!

Regular readers will know that for my birthday for the last few years, I've been hosting a gaming event for my local friends known as "The Davison Cup". It's a day-long event in which we play through a series of video games — and I get the opportunity to educate my friends about some games outside their usual, fairly narrow experiences.

This year, I decided to make the games exclusively Evercade VS-based, since there are hundreds of games available on that delightful platform now, many of which are eminently suitable for multiplayer. I also thought it would be a great chance to actually try some of these games in multiplayer for once, since I'm usually playing solo. This turned out to be a good decision, as there are some absolutely excellent multiplayer games on Evercade now.

The day kicked off with a round of Atari games, including Asteroids for the Atari 7800, Adventure, Sprintmaster, Ninja Golf, Warlords, Canyon Bomber and Skydiver. The old Atari games usually go down well at these events and this year was no exception; probably the least favourite was Sprintmaster, which was a surprise, as we've previously all enjoyed Super Sprint. The somewhat rough-around-the-edges gameplay of this 2600 title proved frustrating for some, though; it wasn't hated by any means — indeed, some of the "final" races were very intense and enjoyable! — but it was definitely the least favourite of the Atari games today.

Ninja Golf went down well, despite it taking up a little more time than intended. As is usually the case with newcomers to that game, the absurd premise attracts people in, then the simple but solid gameplay keeps them hooked. It really is an Atari 7800 classic, and a true essential to play if you haven't already.

Meanwhile the three arcade games Warlords, Canyon Bomber and Skydiver were probably the biggest hits from this set, simply because they're set up to be highly competitive multiplayer games — with four-player simultaneous action in the case of Warlords. Canyon Bomber and Skydiver also have the benefit of being extremely simple to pick up and play, so they always go down well.

Between "rounds", I attempted to nullify my host's advantage by providing "Pub Quiz" rounds, featuring nostalgia-themed questions. And by "nostalgia-themed", I mean "very specifically nostalgic for our friendship group" — including questions themed on scanned photos from our time at university, in-jokes that some have remembered for 20+ years and more. Each of these were a big hit and I'm glad I included them.

Second round was all Data East games, including Karate Champ, Side Pocket, Fighters History, Burnin' Rubber and Magical Drop 2. Of these, Side Pocket and Fighters History were probably the two that seemed to elicit the most genuine enjoyment from everyone, but the primitive gameplay of Karate Champ was enjoyable for everyone, the arcade action of Burnin' Rubber is always a good time and you can't go wrong with Magical Drop 2. It was nice to play some games of that which ended up decided on the quota rather than one player's screen getting filled!

Third round was a "Best of Bri'ish" round, featuring Sensible Software, CodeMasters and Bitmap Brothers games — specifically, Sensible Soccer, Super Skidmarks, Psycho Pinball and Speedball 2. All of these went down well — our resident sport-hater (the one who isn't me, I mean) even enjoyed Sensible Soccer, though interestingly he also hated Speedball 2, which is the opposite situation to what I expected. Psycho Pinball proved itself to be a highly enjoyable multiplayer game, though, even though it's just a turn-based score competition.

Fourth round was an "Indie Games are Weird" round, featuring the Joust-like Justice Duel, the axe-throwing Log Jammers, the four-player Super Homebrew War and Micro Mages from the upcoming Morphcat Games Collection 1 cart for Evercade. All of these were enjoyed by everyone, though it felt like none of us really found a good rhythm with Log Jammers. Micro Mages was as riotously fun as I expected it to be in four-player, so when that cart's release I highly recommend getting some buddies over to enjoy that — but the big surprise for me was Super Homebrew War, which proved to be absolutely brilliant in multiplayer. Not only that, but it has a very different dynamic according to whether you're playing in two, three or four-player mode. Very much recommended!

Fifth round was Intellivision games. SNAFU went down well because it's hard to go wrong with Tron light cycles, though Shark! Shark! proved itself to be less of an enjoyable two-player game than I thought it would be; the fact that when one player dies, the other player can keep playing until they die means that there's a lot of downtime for one player or another, and that spoils the experience somewhat. By contrast, Word Rockets proved to be a surprisingly competitive game in two-player mode, and Night Stalker is always a good time — though we played "best score on a single life" rather than a full session, since games of that can run quite long.

Sixth and final round was Gaelco arcade games, featuring World Rally, Alligator Hunt and Glass from the current Gaelco arcade cart, plus Squash and Maniac Square from the upcoming Gaelco 2 cart. Each and every one of these games impressed with their high-quality music and graphics; Alligator Hunt was particularly appreciated by everyone, and so too was the frighteningly fast yet oddly intuitive gameplay of World Rally. Squash also proved to be a really fun two-player game, and Maniac Square, although not involving a lot of direct interaction with one another, also proved to be enjoyable.

All in all, it was a great day, and my planning meant we were actually able to get through the whole thing before anyone felt like they had to leave this time around. I'm pleased with the outcome, and also very pleased that the Evercade VS was absolutely up to the challenge of hosting a day of gaming fun for everyone.