I might have been a bit hasty! I think Final Fantasy XI is going to take a bit longer to get through than I anticipated, so I'm going to postpone the Cover Game feature for a bit until I'm further through it and look like being a bit closer to the end. Apologies for jumping around all over the place, but I want to make sure I do the best job possible on this one, as it's such an interesting game — and one that is very special to me.

I'm still planning to do it this year, but it's on hold until I'm further through the main story. For context, I'm only about halfway through the base game's main story so far; after that there are the Rise of the Zilart, Chains of Promathia, Treasures of Aht Urhgan, Wings of the Goddess and Seekers of Adoulin expansion storylines to do, as well as Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, so I think I may have been a little ambitious in thinking I could plough through it all in a month — particularly as I'm recording most of my playthrough for future publishing on YouTube!

Instead, for the next feature, I'm going to pull something out of leftfield: a recent release from PQube called Our World is Ended. This is an interesting-sounding visual novel with more than a touch of Steins;Gate about it. I was immediately intrigued by the concept and I really like the art style, so I'm looking forward to exploring it a bit more. Plus it's on Switch, so I can get an hour or so of gameplay in every lunchtime at work as well as in the evenings, which is always an added bonus.

Once again, apologies for jumping around, but when it comes to my flagship features I want to make sure I can do the best job possible — and on the timeframe I rather hastily decided I would never be able to do justice to the sprawling behemoth that is Final Fantasy XI!

In the meantime, if you want to keep yourself occupied for a good few hours, put yourself to sleep or whatever, I've put a bunch of videos from my playthrough up in Unlisted mode in an Unlisted playlist, so you can check them out right now here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqmqFDuRsOsfx1Hov1I6YS50_3WgFtLKQ — please don't share these right now, but feel free to enjoy them at your leisure! There are 12 episodes of varying length up already, and four more being uploaded later tonight, so they should keep you busy and give you a good look at how Final Fantasy XI's early game unfolds. Bookmark the playlist if you want to follow my playthrough in semi-real time, and when I finally get towards the end of it all, I'll bring out the Cover Game feature.

Thanks for your understanding! 🙂

Feeling a bit run down at the moment, probably mostly due to not feeling all that well. As I noted a little while ago, my hernia has been giving me some grief over the last few days. Normally if I have a morning of agony, it goes away for a few weeks and doesn't bother me, but this time around it seems to be sticking around and providing a pretty consistent sense of discomfort — not really outright pain as such, but enough to be irritating and exhausting.

I'm thankful for the fact that there have been so many opportunities for long weekends recently via a combination of time off that I'd booked and public holidays. I am less thrilled about the fact that any time I am too much in pain to go in to the day job, I have to do a guilt-tripping "Return to Work" interview upon my return, which seems to serve pretty much no purpose other than for me to point out that yes, I have an ongoing condition that occasionally precludes me from doing anything; no, there isn't really anything I can do about it right now until I lose a bit of weight; and yes, I am losing weight.

I understand why it happens, of course; it's an attempt to nip "sickies" in the bud, and heaven knows I pulled a few sickies in my earlier years — particularly when I worked in teaching, and some days the stress and depression simply proved too much to confront — but when it's a situation like this, it just feels like you're being punished for something beyond your control. I absolutely hate this sort of injustice — well, okay, "injustice" might be a strong word, since they haven't actually done anything to me… but every time I have to be off, I'm concerned that I'll be given some sort of bollocking for not being well. One of many ways the modern world sucks, I guess, but it is a problem entirely of our own creation.

How I long for the ability to work for myself, setting my own hours and expectations, and not having to follow any sort of Policy and Procedure manual. Bit of a pipe dream for what I want to do right now, unfortunately, but those of you who are kind enough to be in a position to read this, you at least allow me to have a bit of pocket money with which I can enjoy myself each month — so a sincere thank you for that. (Also, tell your friends.)

I've got articles to write and videos to record, so hopefully a bit of productivity will make me feel a bit better. I hope you have a pleasant Monday!

Hey folks! Been thinking a bit today, and in the near future I'm going to make a few changes to video having been "experimenting" a bit with format over the last little while. The long and short of it is that I'm a little concerned I'm taking on just a tiny bit too much at one time, so I'm going to rethink how I do things somewhat. Here are my thoughts.

First up, Atari A to Z is staying right where it is, in all three of its incarnations. That is, by far, my favourite video project and also the one that gets the most views and responses. You know me, I'm not super-big on metrics or anything, but it's clear that of the people who are stumbling across my channel, a significant majority of them are interested in the Atari content. Which is great! I'm always happy to share the good word of Atari with everyone.

Warriors Wednesday is also something I'm going to continue with primarily as a "vanity" project; I enjoy the Warriors games a ton, and having a suitable excuse to spend time with them each week means that I'm inclined to… well, spend some time with them. I'm having a blast with Warriors Orochi, and I'm excited to explore the other installments once I'm done with that.

New Game Plus hasn't worked quite as well as I hoped. I enjoyed the Project Zero series, but the Rorona playthrough has been a bit of a slog to record rather than just play. As such, I'm going to finish the Rorona playthrough and then give New Game Plus a rest for a bit… at least in video form.

What I am going to do, however, is launch an occasional New Game Plus series of articles, where I either talk specifically about postgame content in games I've previously played, or make an effort to go back and explore postgame content in games I've seen the end credits of but not taken things any further. That seems like a more practical way of doing this — though I'm not ruling out some video playthroughs of the other Project Zero games at some point, since I know Ken will enjoy those if no-one else! 🙂

Likewise Sunday Driving and Sunday Shooting are a little redundant given that I have the "Essentials" series on MoeGamer. From this week, I'm going to retire these series for now and perhaps do video versions of some of the Essentials articles — you may have noticed some readings of the Death end re;Quest Cover Game feature on the channel recently, and I really enjoy recording and editing those, so I'd like to do more of them.

Finally, as I've mentioned previously, I'm going to do a Final Fantasy marathon on video, because there are still some Final Fantasies I've never played, several I want to revisit and some that I want to draw particular attention to. This will kick off when the Rorona series finishes.

At present, I'm planning on doing all the mainline FF games (including X-2, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns as well as XI and XIV's main storylines) but I'm contemplating making this a truly comprehensive marathon by attempting to incorporate spinoffs as well. There are a few titles for which this probably won't be practical — DS and 3DS games specifically, although there are emulation solutions out there, I just haven't explored them yet — as well as some that are tough to track down. Even if I'm emulating, I like to own the games I'm playing. I haven't decided if I'll go through with this yet, but it would be an interesting prospect, for sure.

With regard to the earlier games, I'll likely play the PSP remakes over the NES originals simply because I like them better; for IV I'll likely play the PSP version (with The After Years, which I've never tried). For V, I'm not sure; I have the PSone version but the load times are a bit poo. VI is easy; I have a SNES mini, so I can just play the version on there. And I still have original copies of all the others and/or remakes for modern systems — I'd play FFXHD over FFX, for example, because the PAL version of the PS2 version was arse, and I'd play FFXIITZA over original FFXII because… well, it's just better.

There you go! Shop talk. As I say, New Game Plus will continue until I beat Rorona as I don't like leaving things unfinished, but after that things will change a little bit. Please look forward to it!

It's Friday night and I'm tired, so here are some pictures of cats. The Internet still likes cats, right?

This is Meg being smug.

This is Patti, not remembering what shape a cat is supposed to be.

This is Meg in a box.

This is Patti next to a different box.

This is Meg deciding the box is a good place to have a nap.

This is Patti being a lion. Or possibly yawning.

This is Meg on her "shelf" in the catio.

And up top there is Ruby, who sadly departed this world last November. There isn't a day goes by that I don't miss her, but I'm pretty sure she was happy while she was with us, especially if this picture is anything to go by. I hope she's sleeping peacefully and knows how much love I still feel for her.

Sorry there was no full article today on MoeGamer; I've had a pretty miserable day, all told. I woke up feeling a bit crappy, and just as I was leaving for work I felt the unfortunately familiar sensation of my hernia being particularly… aggressive. I turned back, went home and went back to bed to ride out the pain as usual.

Normally it goes away after about an hour or so, but there's been a bit of a dull ache all day today, which hasn't been especially conducive to either happiness or productivity. Now I'm back in bed again, hoping I wake up to a more pleasant day tomorrow.

Getting older (and consequently more prone to shit like this) sucks! I recommend against it. If you have the opportunity to remain forever young, take it! 

With how much I'm enjoying getting the videos recorded for FFXI as I've mentioned recently, I think I'm going to go ahead and do a full written feature on FFXI as the next Cover Game on MoeGamer. I know I said I wanted to finish off Grisaia, but since I'm playing FFXI right now for the purposes of recording videos, this seems like an ideal time to post some immediate reactions.

FFXI is an interesting game to cover because it is a mainline Final Fantasy game, but also an MMORPG. This sounds obvious, but the latter aspect has doubtless put a lot of people off trying it — particularly with how notoriously time-consuming and grind-heavy it was back in its early days. What I'd like to do with the Cover Game feature is highlight how the game is in 2019 as someone interested in playing a Final Fantasy game, rather than an MMORPG. I'll cover the game's history and interesting multiplayer-centric features where I can, of course, but the feature will primarily be written from the perspective of someone who just wants to enjoy what is supposedly one of the best Final Fantasy stories out there.

In other words, this is in line with what I'm recording the videos for, anyway. I don't have any real intention of getting into endgame stuff, maxing all jobs or whatever — I just want to get through the main story, and get a decent understanding of the game along the way. While the FFXI purists out there will doubtless be more than happy to inform me that I'm doing something "wrong" or whatever, the fact is that you can essentially play pretty much all of the game as a solo player today, and as such there's a lot more of a feel of being able to "play your way" — particularly when compared to FFXIV, in which there is very obviously a "right" way to do most things.

Hopefully the feature will provide an interesting read — and perhaps even inspire some of you to give the game a shot for yourself if you've never tried it!

I briefly logged into Twitter earlier to see if I'd had any messages or mentions — I still get a few, so it's worth poking my head in occasionally — and the first thing I saw on my timeline (which, naturally, had reverted to the stupid "Top Tweets" view since I hadn't logged on for a while) was someone I follow having to defend herself against accusations of racism because of a YouTube video she made about one of Mortal Kombat 11's endings.

Needless to say, I haven't missed this. I have not missed the feeling of anxiety that Twitter brought (past tense) me; I have not missed the feeling of walking on eggshells any time you express an opinion; I have not missed the thought police patrolling for wrongthink; and I have definitely not missed the memes.

Memes are an important part of Internet culture and can often be amusing, but Twitter ends up being the place where they all go to die. One person posts something that is vaguely funny, then everyone has to get a piece of the action, posting their own variation on it. And after not very long at all (my patience and tolerance had worn down to a matter of minutes by the time I decided to take an extended break) they become extremely tiresome, because after a while you realise that it's just a bunch of people not actually saying anything worthwhile, just copying one another in an attempt to say the "right" things to get noticed, shared, liked, whatever.

The same is true for the outrage crowd, too. Those crying "racist" at the person I mentioned above were all following the exact same playbook. Their replies were indistinguishable from one another; there was no individuality there, no personality. Someone being willing to engage, discuss and debate was a rarity worthy of note and gratitude; but for the most part, it was all about the snarky comments, the passive-aggressive quote tweets and, again, trying to be seen to be saying the "right" thing to get noticed, shared, liked, whatever.

As I say, I don't miss it. So I don't see myself coming back "properly" any time soon. I'll leave the MoeGamer account open to share my stuff and check messages very occasionally, but Twitter is no longer a social tool I have any desire to make use of whatsoever — nor do I "need" it, seemingly. My traffic stats for MoeGamer and my videos have been no different regardless of whether or not I'm actively engaging with Twitter. And more importantly, my life and mental health have been considerably better since I decided to step away.

There are plenty of other ways to reach me if you do want to talk, after all! You're looking at one of them right now. 🙂

It was my birthday today! I'm 38. That's nearly 40, which I presume is an age by which you are supposed to have "grown up" somewhat, but I'm in no particular rush, nor do I feel any particular need to.

"Grown ups" are boring. Several of my local friends are "grown ups". They're always complaining about having to deal with their children, or their perpetually packed schedules and the fifteen holidays a year they seem to go on. And they rarely seem to have any fun. I say "rarely" rather than "never" because we do at least manage to get them to do things occasionally, but it's becoming an increasingly infrequent occurrence. In fact, one of these friends ducking out at the last minute made the difference between the weekend just gone being a quiet one and its originally intended purpose of lots of enjoyable group-based gaming. Oh well, at least Chris and I got a great podcast recorded instead!

So yeah. I may be a year older, but as with most recent years, I really don't feel it. Honestly I feel like mostly the same person I was at university, and that was nearly twenty years ago at this point. That is, I think, the most surreal part of the ageing process — things that feel like they are still in the recent past are now half your life or more away. I think this is why I struggle a bit with my friends being "grown ups" — the friends in question were the people I hung out with at university, so it remains difficult to adjust to a life in which we can't just do fun things on a whim at the drop of a hat. Well, I usually can, but I appear to be the exception.

I can't be too upset with getting older. Being a bit older has put me in a position where I am reasonably financially secure, and able to enjoy the things I love without guilt over spending money on them. This, in turn, allows me to enjoy those things in new and varied ways. MoeGamer and YouTube are two prime examples; besides technology and Internet speeds not being what they are now back when I was at university, I simply wouldn't have had the resources to be able to do what I do now. The fact I am able to is something I am grateful for.

And of course, I am grateful for your support and friendship. As I noted over on MoeGamer earlier today, this marks the fifth anniversary since the site's first post, and it's become an important part of my life ever since that day five years ago. And while I do still feel some bitterness and resentment from how my past career in games journalism was snatched from me without provocation or warning, had I remained part of the commercial press I would not have had anywhere near the freedom I have now to do what I do.

So here's to being a little bit older, not even a tiny bit wiser… and as independent as ever. Thanks for your support, and here's to many more years. 

It's nearly 3AM as I've been editing the new episode of the podcast all day and then playing some Dragon Marked for Death with Chris this evening, so you'll forgive me if I don't have a lot of words left in me!

I thought now might be a good time to give you a sneak peek at the Final Fantasy XI funtimes we have ahead of us at some indefinite point in the future. Note that this is an MMO, and as such it will almost certainly end up being a long series, with long individual episodes!

Still, over the course of these nearly two hours (I know, I know… I totally lost track of time while playing, I was enjoying myself so much!) you should be able to get a basic feel for what the game is all about, and eventually there are all sorts of exciting adventures to be had!

But every journey begins with a single step and all that… 

How great video games are. What a wonderful medium it is, and how much pleasure it brings me to have been present for so much of its evolution, development and advancement.

I say this as I'm riding the emotional high from beating Sonic Forces, which I'll be writing up on MoeGamer next week. Taking this journey through the complete Sonic series has also been a journey through a significant part of gaming history, stretching right back to the 16-bit era all the way to the present and beyond. Along that journey, even though it was with just one series focusing on one main character (and his friends), it's a real pleasure to see how creators have done their best to experiment, try new things, make things better.

Your opinion may, of course, vary on whether things have really gotten "better" over time — there are certainly a lot of ways in which they can be argued to have lost their way a bit, and this excellent, long video by Accursed Farms details just one way in which certain parts of the business have definitely gotten worse — but, on the whole, I find myself thinking "gosh, I'm really glad I got into video games" more often than I think "I wish I'd never got into video games". (I don't actually think I've ever thought the latter, to be honest, though I have said out loud that an all-streaming future will be the point at which I jump off the bleeding edge and become a purely "retro" gamer.)

Games have consistently brought me joy over the years. They've kept me company when I was lonely, sad or anxious; they've helped bring me together with new people and give me something to talk about. They've provided an outlet for my creativity and a hobby that extends far beyond just playing the games; I do what I do on MoeGamer and YouTube because I love it.

This was all rather gushing, wasn't it? But Sonic Forces' ending was pretty great, and I just came away from the whole thing thinking "I love video games". So I thought that might be a fine thing to write about!

Now it's time for bed. I have a podcast to edit tomorrow!