The Castlevania Anniversary Collection is out now. Of all the compilations Konami has been working on, this is the one I've been most interested in, as I don't know the Castlevania series that well but I've always had a good time with every one I've played.

I'll post some more detailed thoughts next week (likely as a new Delving Into series as I explore it as a whole) but so far my impressions of the bundle are very good.

The emulation appears to be exemplary — though I'd expect nothing less from M2 — and there's a good range of features, including the ability to watch and record replays, save progress, tweak the display, add graphic borders and suchlike. It would have perhaps been nice to have the option to play with the fancy sound chip from the JP version of Castlevania III, but I'll live.

I've been playing the first Castlevania a fair bit this evening but ran into a bit of a wall at the end of stage 12 so I've put it aside for now. Should probably get some sleep anyway! I'm looking forward to exploring this series in much more detail very soon… and I'm sure there's a Castlevania podcast somewhere in our future too!

As longstanding readers will know, I've been making an effort to try and lose some weight since before Christmas, primarily so I can get my hernia treated without the risk of it coming back.

It's been going… variably. The overall trend is downwards, which is good, but I've been struggling a bit with motivation over the last few weeks, which have made my results be a bit up and down.

There are two real reasons behind this. First is the fact that I quite simply get cravings for things that aren't at all healthy, and it's tough to ignore them when they come along. The second is boredom and other negative emotions.

I tend to eat when I'm bored, depressed or stressed. I've been feeling all three of those things at the day job recently — I hasten to add that there's nothing specifically wrong with the job itself or the people there, I'm just having a bit of a low ebb mentally — and that leads me to want to do stuff like buy the delicious flapjacks that the canteen offers. I fucking love flapjacks.

Andie and I did a "big shop" after Slimming World this evening, though, and stocked up on some stuff that should make for suitable snacks if I find myself feeling bleak during the day. Hopefully that will help matters somewhat!

Now I just need to break the mental funk that's been causing all this and try to get back on track. 

Representation in video games is a hot topic these days. It's absolutely great that more and more games are providing examples of different types of leading characters — different genders, races and sexualities are all getting increasing amounts of positive representation, particularly in the indie sphere and productions from smaller developers and publishers (including Japanese outfits) — though of course there's still further steps that could be taken.

However, one unfortunate side-effect of this growing trend for representation is the increasing likelihood that someone is going to get offended about something, and use the idea of representation as a crutch to prop up their argument. Today it is the turn of Chris Plante from Polygon, who is upset that the mutants in Rage 2 have cleft lips, suggesting that the game and its developers are indirectly calling him a freak because of this particular design choice.

I get the idea of his argument, but this feels like yet another example of just getting offended for the sake of being offended. He even notes in his article that Bethesda have been making a point of making one of these characters in particular something of a "mascot" character for Rage 2, even going so far as to include a figure of him in the special edition of the game. This is a bit of a confused message; are these mutants "freaks" (Plante's words) or fondly regarded mascots along the lines of Borderlands' Claptrap (also Plante's words)?

On a related note, Mike Fahey of Kotaku (a man who, let's not forget, has a tattoo of Etna from Disgaea) got upset about current Cover Game Our World is Ended recently because there's a middle school-age character in there who he thinks is unreasonably sexualised.

What he failed to point out in his pearl-clutching was that the character in question is a child genius, and thus much of the interesting humour and dialogue surrounding her comes from the juxtaposition between her maturity and intelligence in some regards, and her utter childishness in others, as well as the fact that prior to her first on-screen appearance — she's only heard through voice chat in the game's early hours — she deliberately misrepresents herself as someone that she isn't. The game's characters also make a point of repeatedly pointing out that if you find her in any way sexy or want to do anything obscene to her, you would get arrested, beaten up or worse.

And let's not even get into the "depiction is not endorsement" angle. That's so obvious it should go without saying at this point.

We've been through this before; there's one reason and one reason only that these outrage-bait articles get published: hateclicks. I don't even know (or really care) if these writers are actually offended over the things they're writing about; what I do know is that they're cynically using the Internet's habit of dogpiling anything vaguely "wrongthink" in order to secure clicks and advertising revenue for themselves. Even if they just attract someone to make an angry comment on these articles, they've already got your click; it doesn't matter if you agree with them or not.

Offense for the sake of offense hurts real representation, because it makes people more cynical and less likely to listen when something that actually needs drawing attention to or criticising comes up. It's "boy who cried 'wolf!'" syndrome, and it's getting to a point where it's really holding us back from meaningful and interesting conversations.

We had another game of Pandemic Legacy this evening. If you're planning to play this, don't read this post! Part of the fun of a Legacy game is not knowing what's coming next.

Today we had our first full mission where the red disease "CodA" had been replaced by "The Faded" who are, let's face it, zombies. CodA was already incurable; its mutation into the obligatory zombie virus means that it's untreatable now, too, and any player character starting their turn in the same city as some zom… Faded will find themselves injured with a permanent scar. Take too many scars (usually taking a third when you already have two) and your character is permanently dead, out of the game. Lose all the characters with special abilities and you have to play as civilians, who have no abilities beyond the basic actions.

Today's mission was a challenging one. It looked like it was going well for a while, with the blue and yellow diseases eradicated particularly quickly thanks to the "positive" mutations we'd upgraded them with from previous victories. The black disease proved a bit more troublesome to deal with, however, and meanwhile Asia was building up with Faded until it pretty much reached breaking point; several locations burst their seams with outbreaks on multiple occasions, ultimately leading to our defeat.

There are ways to deal with the Faded, but they require a very different strategy to how you deal with the "normal" diseases in Pandemic. When the opportunity to build military bases and roadblocks first presented itself a few games ago, we didn't really see the point; now, however, both of those things are becoming very important for isolating the main "Faded" region — currently just East Asia — and ensuring the virus doesn't spread to the rest of the world. Despite our failure, we managed to keep it reasonably contained this time around, so we'll have another chance next time.

I really like how this game is building up. It's not necessarily making itself more complex from a rules perspective, but the addition of subtle new mechanics and ways of having to cope with situations means that it now "feels" quite different from the early hours of the campaign — but at the same time, it still feels authentically "Pandemic".

We're about halfway through the complete "season" now and I'm very intrigued to see how things develop from here. There are still lots of little boxes and windows to open… and I'm sure there's some surprises waiting somewhere, too!

After the recent… happenings, Andie and I were left wanting for some game-related YouTube content to enjoy, so I decided to check out quite a large, popular channel that I've heard the name of on a number of occasions, but never actually investigated: Game Grumps.

I'm not sure why I hadn't checked these guys out before. I think I probably had some assumptions and prejudices in my mind based on the fact that they were a large YouTube channel (several million subscribers), and also their attachment to the Dream Daddy visual novel project. I have nothing against Dream Daddy itself as I haven't actually played it, but I had built up a certain amount of mild resentment towards those people who were declaring it as something new and revolutionary when, as we all know, Japanese devs have been doing romance-centric visual novels (including ones featuring male-on-male relationships) for a very long time now. Game Grumps, having had something to do with the project (I forget the specifics), got caught in the crossfire of my ire.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that they're very entertaining. They're two dudes with an enjoyably irreverent attitude about everything, and a penchant for behaving in a distinctly childish manner thoroughly unbecoming of someone in their thirties. In other words, I very much approve.

Their content covers a pretty broad variety of things. They do Let's Plays as a pair — which is great fun, particularly when they're playing shovelware or highly competitive multiplayer games — and they're not afraid to cover weird stuff that no-one else would bother with. I've enjoyed their look at the Intellivision Lives! collection on PS2, for example — that's a compilation I'm fully intending to investigate in detail at some point in the future.

Besides the Let's Play stuff, they also do a show called the "Ten-Minute Power Hour", where they get in front of the camera and do… something. Something usually vaguely craft-related that has plenty of potential for visual humour. So far I've seen them do acrylic pouring, cheese sculpting and making cardboard robot suits, and the atmosphere in these videos is just so infectiously joyful and childish that I've very much fallen in love with their work already.

And best of all, since they've been doing this shit for years now, I have a whooooole ton of videos to enjoy!

We recorded another episode of The MoeGamer Podcast this weekend, and all being well it should be with you all to enjoy tomorrow sometime, depending on how long it takes to render and upload!

I've been really enjoying doing this podcast. It reminds me of the "good old days" back before the Internet turned to complete garbage, when my friends and I from the "Squadron of Shame" would convene semi-regularly for our discussions of various topics and specific games.

For the uninitiated, the Squadron of Shame was essentially a "gaming book club" of sorts. It span off from a discussion on a 1up Yours podcast from 1up.com and eventually became its own, surprisingly popular thing. We started a podcast towards the end of 1up.com's "first phase" of life — before it became a hollow shell of what it used to be, rather than before it closed altogether — and it was a highlight of my online "social calendar".

Sadly, for various reasons, all the members of the Squad have drifted apart over the course of the last ten years or so — which kinda bums me out a bit, because what I do with MoeGamer is exactly the sort of thing most of the Squad would have been into — but I'm left with both some fond memories, and some skills and experience that I've been able to carry forward into the new podcast.

I'm particularly grateful to my podcasting partner in crime, Chris, who has been consistently enthusiastic and dedicated to the cause of the podcast ever since we thought we'd just "try it out" more than a year ago now. I think we've got a pretty neat show, and I hope you enjoy it too!

Think I forgot one of these yesterday, apologies. The reason is Final Fantasy XI. It is not an excuse, it is a simple explanation!

I'm glad I chose to delay my coverage of Final Fantasy XI until I'd made further progress through it, because I'm having an absolute blast working through the story and levelling content so far. From around level 30 or so, things really start to accelerate — you start gaining access to a variety of new areas and some of the expansion stories kick off, so there's a very strong feeling of the world really opening up and providing you the opportunity to go in lots of different directions.

It's addictive. But what I'm finding is not that it's addictive in the same sense as other MMOs, whose addictive nature is often at least partially tied to their social nature. No, in FFXI, because I'm soloing everything, the addictive quality is the same as that I get from… a regular old RPG. It's really quite wonderful.

People often claim FFXI is "outdated" in many ways, citing the fact that its original incarnation very much followed the Everquest mould as evidence that it is borderline obsolete at this point. But having now spent a good quantity of hours on it, I can emphatically disagree with that; Final Fantasy XI in 2019 is simply a great Final Fantasy game that can be enjoyed yourself. It just so happens that you have to play it online, and that there are other people around.

I'll talk more about this when we do the full Cover Game feature, but the fact that the game was specifically designed as a spiritual successor to the NES/Famicom-era Final Fantasy games — particularly III — becomes more and more evident as you progress. We have the relatively vague "figure out exactly what is expected of you" instructions and dialogue of those games. We have non-linear dungeons in which navigating your way through is as much a challenge as fighting off their fearsome denizens. And we have all manner of delightful and charming sidequests that can reward you with access to significant new game features, content and all manner of other goodies.

I've reached a significant moment in my own playthrough now: the city of Jeuno, which is the "neutral" city outside of the main "three nations" that provide the initial setup for the game. From here, the Chains of Promathia storyline kicks off, which is supposedly one of the best in the game, and we start getting more and more significant challenges for our missions. There's also a number of the advanced jobs that can be unlocked once you get to Jeuno, too; I currently have my eye on Dancer, but it seems that achieving that might involve an itsy-witsy bit of time travel. Because Final Fantasy.

Anyway, I'm still having a great time, and don't forget that as Patrons, you can exclusively enjoy my playthrough so far with this playlist:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqmqFDuRsOsfx1Hov1I6YS50_3WgFtLKQ — a reminder, please don't share this link with anyone!

I'll release this to the public "in context" as part of the Final Fantasy Marathon video playthrough project I'm intending to kick off after Atelier Rorona is done, but for now, you can feel free to enjoy what I've been getting up to in semi real-time! 🙂

I thought I should follow up on yesterday's post given what's been going down.

For those unaware, there was some Internet drama yesterday concerning YouTuber ProJared, someone whose content I have always enjoyed greatly — and someone who I have cited as an inspiration for my own video work on more than one occasion. I have no connection with him — I just like his work, enjoyed his style and have followed what I thought was the good role model he exemplified in terms of content creation.

Let's not get into the specific details because I'm not a tabloid and I don't have first-hand knowledge of the situation, but suffice to say that some pretty unpleasant allegations have come out about Jared, supposedly with a lot of evidence. As a result, Jared hasn't been seen on social media since yesterday, his channels haven't updated with the usual schedule of videos and the former creative collective of which he was a part, NormalBoots, has severed ties with him. NormalBoots supposedly knew about these allegations since the beginning of April due to an unsolicited email they received, but they have only made a public statement now since the whole thing blew up.

Jared's actions, if true, are stupid and inexcusable, and assuming the evidence that has been presented is actually real, it looks disappointingly likely that the allegations are true. This is all a big "if", though; I'm immediately skeptical of anything the Internet immediately proclaims to be an unequivocal, unarguable truth, particularly when it results in an immediate dogpile on someone that a lot of people have clearly held a grudge against for a long time now.

The reason this is hitting a bit close to home for me right now is that I've been on the receiving end of exactly the sort of harassment campaign I've seen Jared suffering since yesterday… and I know for 100% fact that I didn't do anything.

Back in 2013, I suddenly received a message on Twitter accusing me of being a paedophile. This subsequently escalated to increasing numbers of people filling my Twitter mentions, Facebook comments and blog comments with accusations; I even ended up with an Encylopedia Dramatica entry about me.

Where it got really scary was when I started getting messages from friends, colleagues and family telling me that they had been receiving phone calls making accusations and threats about me. My parents and brother received such calls, and so did the owner of a site named Games Are Evil that I was running at the time. The harassers had tracked down people connected to me via a combination of the WHOIS data for websites I owned, and social media posts.

There was, of course, no evidence, because I hadn't actually done anything wrong. You want to know where these accusations came from in the first place? Because I had publicly stated that I was an adult-age man who enjoyed the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. That was it. That was literally it. Someone explained to me that the group responsible for the harassment, known as the GNAA (don't look that up), had a habit of picking out random people interested in that show and attempting to smear them as a paedophile. Why? For the lulz.

I went to the police with a mountain of evidence. They told me they couldn't do anything. So all I could do was ride out the storm, close what social media accounts I could and lay low until things blew over. They eventually did, but it made the Internet a traumatic and scary place to be for a while, and I'm not sure I ever quite recovered from the experience, which is why I'm rather uneasy interacting directly with strangers online today.

The reason why the ProJared situation makes me so uncomfortable is because it seems to be unfolding in a very similar manner. There are people flooding his comments sections and mounting organised campaigns to deplatform him, and it seems pretty apparent that someone at Twitter has a beef with him, since he quickly lost his "Verified" badge (supposed to be nothing more than an indicator that the Twitter account for a public figure is who they say they are — but which appears to be treated more as an "Endorsement" badge by Twitter these days) and on top of that, there was a Twitter Moment highlighting the whole horrible situation, which I found incredibly distasteful.

The difference in Jared's case is that there appears to actually be evidence that he has engaged in wrongdoing… though ultimately that evidence is still just a bunch of pictures on the Internet. If the accusations are true, this "trial" should be going through legal channels, not through the kangaroo court of public opinion… but as ever, people would much rather start tearing the flesh from someone the moment they smell blood than follow appropriate, fair procedures to ascertain innocence or guilt… and to get actual justice for those wronged.

To clarify: if Jared has done the things that he is accused of having done, I am heartbroken, upset and disgusted, and hope the victims see justice done. I am steering clear of his content until (if?) the full truth comes out. But I cannot and will not be part of any kind of torches-and-pitchforks attempt to destroy both a man's livelihood and his very life based on some social media posts.

To be frank, given what I know of Jared's mental health, I'm somewhat concerned he might not actually survive this. I'm not talking about his career, which is almost certainly over at this point. I'm talking about his literal life. I really hope I'm wrong about that.

I stopped in on Twitter earlier to post a quick update and check messages, and was quickly confronted with some unpleasant news that has left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It's pure Internet drama and I don't really want anything to do with it, but I also feel like working through some thoughts on "paper" might help my addled brain process it all somewhat.

You may recall that a while back I cited a YouTuber named ProJared (aka Jared Knabenbauer) as something of an inspiration for my video work in particular. Today he released a statement indicating that he and his wife Heidi would be divorcing. I had no idea that there were problems there, and indeed just recently my wife Andie and I watched through their "couple" playthrough of visual novel Asagao Academy; it was a delightfully wholesome watch that I enjoyed a great deal.

Everything I've seen on the subject so far is hearsay and Internet gossip, but there are several recurring accusations: Heidi claims that Jared was abusive and adulterous; supposedly Jared cheated on Heidi with another YouTuber named "Commander Holly" (who either was or is married to someone Jared knows, and has clearly been a friend of Jared for many years, as he often names RPG characters after her); and allegedly Jared sent inappropriate pictures of himself to fans via Snapchat.

At this point, I don't know how much of this is true — or indeed if any of it is true. The one fact of the matter is that Jared and Heidi are divorcing. The information regarding Heidi and Holly appears to be very much he-said-she-said right now, and frankly that stuff is no-one's business but their own. And as for the inappropriate images, the few that I've seen shared could be anyone. It wouldn't be the first time that someone has had fake images circulated in order to discredit them… but equally, it is also possible that they are real. (EDIT: I've since seen a couple more that look very much like him, lending some credence to this particular accusation, which is really unfortunate.)

I'm struggling to know whether or not I actually care or if I should care. One thing I do know is that I feel extremely uncomfortable seeing the "witch hunt" play out right now, with Jared suffering a torrent of abuse via all forms of social media, including the comments on his videos. Having been on the receiving end of cheating on more than one occasion, I don't like to feel that someone I like and respect might have been involved in that sort of behaviour… but I also know how much the Internet likes to jump on people the moment they smell blood. Particularly if there are past grievances involved.

It seems a lot of people interested in jumping on Jared right now are fans of the YouTuber JonTron, who was once part of the "NormalBoots" collective alongside Jared and a number of others. JonTron left the group (supposedly voluntarily) shortly after a high-profile incident in which he made some ill-advised comments regarding race on a debate stream, and since Jared tends to err on the "progressive" side of things (albeit without being the sort of perpetually offended outrage machine typically associated with that ideology) it seems he was at least partly blamed for JonTron being driven out.

Frankly, I don't really care about that side of the drama, because that's all it is: drama; the sort of "celebrity" gossip you'd find in a bottom-tier tabloid rag, only involving Internet personalities rather than people more broadly recognised in popular culture. What I do care about is someone I like and respect perhaps not being the person I thought they were — but at the same time feeling bad for the hailstorm of abuse they're enduring right now.

Suffice to say, my feelings on the matter are somewhat complicated, particularly as I'm aware that Jared has struggled with numerous mental health and self-esteem issues that I could very much relate to… and I find myself once again feeling quite grateful that 1) I'm a relative "nobody" in terms of broader Internet culture, and 2) I've never done anything that anyone might want to dig up and destroy me with.

TL;DR – feels bad, man

I'm not generally a big fan of modern-day PC Gamer, but there was an interesting article over there today that I think is worth discussing. The gist of it was that the expectation modern games have set is that there will be a continual drip-feed of new content beyond launch, and that when players don't get this they get pissy and companies' precious bottom lines suffer.

I don't deny that this is an issue, but where I take slight issue with the article is the implication that it is a universal problem. Once again, we have an example of a publication considering that the big-budget, triple-A side of things is representative of the entire industry, both from a development/publisher perspective and a player/consumer's perspective.

I'm not a fan of live service games (with the possible exception of MMOs, which are something of a special case); I'm of the belief that you buy a game, you play it, you set it aside when you're done, you move on, you perhaps revisit it another time if you feel like it for one reason or another. When I see the end credits roll and/or complete everything a game has to offer (the two are not necessarily the same thing, as any good RPG fan will tell you!) I have zero further expectations. I don't need or want anything else. I'm done. Finished. Time to move on.

And for the vast majority of games I play these days, that's exactly what I get. Sometimes there is some DLC available, but it tends to be cosmetic content, "cheat" items or perhaps an additional dungeon or two. Very rarely is it anything meaningful; much of Death end re;Quest's DLC was free, and I don't feel it added anything particularly worthwhile to the game. I mean, I didn't hate the new dungeons or anything, but it felt like stuff that had been slotted in after the fact, and didn't develop the main point of the game beyond what you got on the disc. I wouldn't have missed it if it wasn't there, meaning that if I want to revisit Death end re;Quest in [x] years' time when the PSN servers are no longer serving up PS4 content, I won't miss it then either.

In the triple-A space, though, we have games that you outright can't play if you're not connected to the Internet. We have games that "expire". We have games that are unrecognisable from their original forms. We have games that, in their packaged versions, are all but unusable without substantial patches. This absolutely is a problem, but it's not the fault of the players.

No-one asked for this. Gaming enthusiasts showed resistance to this sort of thing when EA first tried its "Online Pass" nonsense in the mid-360/PS3 era, and continued to criticise exploitative DLC practices, microtransactions and the seeping in of free-to-play and mobile-style retention and monetisation models into full-price packaged releases. Even the Fortnite kiddies didn't ask for this, either; they simply grew up in a world where this shit had, somehow, become normalised, and thus didn't know things could be any different.

The solution to all this seems simple — release a game and be done with it — but it involves greedy companies cutting off a significant source of revenue; the PC Gamer article cites the example of EA, who are now making more money per annum from fewer released games when compared to half a decade ago. Why would they give that up to make people happy? Making people happy doesn't make the cash money. Not directly, anyway.

And besides, if Steam reviews are anything to go by, being "done" with a game won't necessarily make people happy, anyway; at this point, there are countless user reviews of games that developers have decided they're done with that claim the game is "abandoned" or "dead". This is the end result of these expectations that have apparently been set; of the Fortnite kiddies being confronted by something with a definitive "end". An oddly alien concept to some, but one we really need to recapture.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: live services and continual updates represent a real crisis for game preservation and archival. What good is a packaged hardcopy of something if it has gigabytes of additional or modified content over and above what is on the disc in order to work as intended or expected?

Thankfully, as I say, the vast majority of games that I enjoy seem to be relatively immune to this side of things, but I can't pretend I don't worry about this sort of thing seeping down from the "big boys" to the smaller developers and publishers. Something's gotta give sooner or later.