At the time of writing, Humble Bundle is hosting a cracking deal for a bunch of really cool audio and music production software — it's on for three and a bit more days as I type this.

The highlight of this package is, for me, ACID Pro 7, the not-quite latest version of a piece of software I used to absolutely love using. Originally published by Sonic Foundry, who was later absorbed into the Sony empire, the software is now published under the Magix brand alongside a number of other former Sony creative packages including the well-regarded Vegas video editor.

ACID, in its various incarnations, is what is known as a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation. That's a fancy term for a software package that facilitates the production of music using MIDI, recorded audio or a combination of both. A typical DAW incorporates the ability to both record and arrange MIDI and audio sequences, then output the resulting mix to a final file that can then be burnt to CD if you're stuck in the '90s like I am, or turned into a standalone audio file if you're a normal person.

ACID's strength has always been in its audio handling; the earlier versions of the software, if I remember correctly, didn't do anything with MIDI at all, meaning they were primarily useful if you were interested in sequencing samples. If you ever had a play with the eJay software that first appeared in the late '90s, the earliest versions of ACID provided a step up from that, with a much fuller suite of features for manipulating samples in various ways, including pitch-shifting, time-stretching, adding real-time effects and all manner of other exciting things.

Despite its added complexity over more "casual" solutions such as eJay, another real strength of ACID has always been its accessibility and flexibility. There is a lot that the software can do if you know your way around a DAW, but at the same time it's not so daunting that a beginner can't put something together remarkably quickly. At its heart, ACID is a drag-and-drop program — drag a sample from the bin at the bottom into the timeline, and voila, you're on your way to producing the next floor-filler at Kaos. Maybe not. (I'm not sure Kaos is even still there.)

Today, I acquired a new SSD for my computer intended primarily for media projects, so my video editing stuff will be on there rather than cluttering my main system SSD from now on. I picked up the ACID bundle from Humble, and have also found a good 30+ CD-ROMs filled with samples that I had from the early '00s, mostly published under the eJay branding, as it happens.

I haven't sat down for a fiddle with ACID Pro 7 as yet, but having copied most of those CDs (the ones that have survived, anyway — a few of them have become unreadable) to my current system, I'm looking forward to bashing out some new silliness. Making ridiculous tracks with ACID helped keep me sane in 2003 while I was training to be a teacher, and even earlier than that was a highlight of some time I spent with my school friends.

I'm looking forward to rekindling those feelings of creativity and joy that this software used to bring me — and to the fact that these sample CDs I have are now so old that they probably now qualify as being "cool" again. Sweet.

Will I share any of my creations? Hmm. We'll see! 🙂

"Do you remember when the Internet wasn't made up of six websites, each of which were made up of screenshots from the other five?"

That's a comment I saw someone leave a little while back — ironically on Twitter, which is the main prompt for this discussion today — and it kind of struck a chord with me. What happened?

Internet use has definitely changed over the years, and not just because of technology. When I was a teen, "using the Internet" was a special treat that you got to do when no-one needed to make a phone call, and when no-one else in the family needed to use the computer. I'd have half an hour or an hour to spend on CompuServe (and later, the Web) before being unceremoniously booted off to go and do something else. I made the most of that 30-60 minutes; I had some enjoyable interactions with people, downloaded some interesting files and even, on one memorable occasion, made $200 for some Wolfenstein 3-D levels.

When I was at university, it was still the tail-end of the dial-up days, and so my use of the Internet was pretty similar; it was something you had to make an effort to go and use when you wanted or needed to, not this constant, looming presence that pervaded everything else you did. Yes, some of that use was pretty asinine — fond memories of dumb old Flash animations and sites like Hamsterdance — but it was a form of entertainment like any other. Spend some time with it as your main activity, then turn it off, put it away and do something else. (Perhaps involving the things you had downloaded during your Internet session!)

Even the early "always on" broadband days still kind of worked like this; it was just a bit more convenient. Despite now having access to the Internet at the click of a button, it was still just a tool to be used as and when necessary or desired, not the be-all and end-all of existence. There were sites I would read when I felt like it, things I'd stumble across that people had told me about, interesting hyperlinks I'd follow. But it still wasn't the compulsion it is now; during idle moments, I wouldn't just "have a look" to see if anyone had sent me an email in the last five minutes.

I was resistant to social media for quite some time. I recall all my friends getting very excited about Facebook, but I didn't join until a good year or two after it had started to get fashionable. I was away in the States visiting my brother, and setting up a Facebook account seemed like a good way to share the photographs I'd been taking while I was over there. I was just getting to grips with a new camera, so it was nice to be able to show everyone the cool things I'd been taking pictures of and the photography techniques I'd been experimenting with.

I was likewise resistant to Twitter; I couldn't see the point. I didn't jump on Twitter until 1up.com, a place where I'd previously found a number of like-minded gamers, pretty much collapsed in on itself and our "squad" was left without a home. At the time, Twitter seemed like as good a place as any.

What I didn't notice until it was too late was how much Twitter in particular comes to monopolise your Internet time, with many people now seemingly seeing it as the whole Internet. (I don't use Facebook any more, but from what I understand, this is a widespread feeling there, too, particularly among the older generation.) People would spend all day on Twitter waiting to jump on things they disagreed with, and the art of "public shaming" began. I was immediately uncomfortable with this and had a number of disagreements with friends over it, but I was seemingly in the minority.

Now I feel like we're at a point where Twitter isn't even especially useful for one of the main things that people claim you "need" to use it for. In terms of my own work, a relative minority of views come from Twitter, because my attempts to promote it get so lost in the other noise that, more often than not, other people simply don't notice it — or don't want to click away from the latest Internet slapfight they're involved with. Instead, I've seen a number of people I know, like and respect resorting to posting images and memes simply because those inevitably generate more "engagement" such as likes and retweets — but what's the point? It's the digital equivalent of holding up a picture of a girl in a swimsuit and everyone applauding.

I want to break this habit; it's unhealthy. I hate myself a little bit every time my hands are idle and they immediately grab my phone as an unconscious, automatic response. I know there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on the Internet still, and getting bogged down in the depressing, infuriating mire that is social media prevents you from enjoying all that fascinating stuff. So aside from my usual scheduled shares of MoeGamer and Atari A to Z content, I'm taking another step back from Twitter for a bit. I feel good every time I do this, and I feel like I should try and stick with it. Perhaps then I can rediscover the things that are cool about the Internet rather than despairing for the state of humanity every time I log on.

Or maybe things really are that bad and Twitter is just the perfect microcosm of Internet culture at large. In which case the temptation to just pull the plug is enormous!

I've been trying to figure out a good way to get a "hardcopy" of some of the writing I've worked on for some time, and the most convenient, usable service I've found to date is Blurb.

Blurb isn't necessarily the cheapest or the best solution for self-publishing, but they have a good set of tools and previous proofs I've ordered from them have looked nice. What I haven't really been able to figure out was a particularly cost-effective way of archiving stuff in bulk. I'm quite wordy, you see, and that tends to fill quite a few pages.

Probably the main issue is that in previous attempts I've been trying to create a "coffee table" type of book with lots of images and colour, when in fact the long-form nature of my writing is better suited to a more… "normal" book. So I've done an experiment and formatted all the 2016 Cover Game feature articles into one of these more "normal" books, with a splash of colour here and there for interest. It came out at 394 pages, and that was skipping the RPG Maker MV feature, which was very image-heavy and not really appropriate for a text-centric book.

I'm interested to see how this will come out. Blurb take quite a while to print and send out proofs, so I should hopefully have something to share by about the 26th or so. After that, if there's interest, I can put hardcopies and ebook versions up for sale, just in case you want me on your shelf! (If you don't, that's fine, too; I'm mostly doing this so I have a more "permanent" copy of some of the things I've written.)

Anyway, just wanted to share that, and I'll let you know how it comes out when I receive my proof.

Well, here we are, a hundred consecutive days of my personal ramblings for your entertainment. Kind of, anyway. I know I had a few "accidents" along the way, but I do believe we're fully up to date right now.

It's been a… contemplative few days, to say the least, partly prompted by Biffo's post from yesterday and a subsequent video that he and his Digitiser compatriots put out today (Patron-exclusive for now, but it'll be public on Friday) on the subject of why they all do what they do.

I shan't spoil the entire contents of Biffo's video as I'd very much like it if you watched it on Friday, but a key point in the discussion was the use of creativity as a "coping mechanism". Specifically, creativity as a means of staving off mental health issues. Everyone involved in Digitiser had been touched by mental illness of one form or another to varying degrees, and every one of them had found solace in doing something that they love.

Needless to say, I can relate. And I've always been that way; I recognise that now, even though I only really became aware of what depression and anxiety even were when I went to university, and only got a formal diagnosis of Asperger's a couple of years back. I've always used creativity of one form or another as a means of staving off the darkness, be it writing game reviews and stories as a kid (some things never change), writing a diary, making music (both with real instruments and electronically), podcasting, blogging and, most recently, working on MoeGamer and YouTube.

However tiresome a day might be, however difficult it might be to deal with stresses and anxieties that the brain of someone like me amplifies about a thousand times from what they actually are… I always have that to look forward to. I always have things that I can do that I can look forward to. I always have something to write about, a video to publish. And that is something I think I will always have, regardless of whether or not anyone is reading it; regardless of whether or not anyone is supporting it via various means. (I am, of course, extremely grateful to those of you reading this, since it means that you do support it — so thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart!)

I don't really have a point to make. I think I just wanted to reiterate to myself why I do what I do, and how it's quite nice to feel like I'm not the only person who works that way. Numbers can give a nice stroke to the old ego, but ultimately personal fulfilment is much more important.

Mr Biffo of Digitiser (who I am a Patron of here on Patreon) posted an interesting (and slightly sad) article earlier, on the subject of creating things for people to enjoy.

Biffo was concerned, among other things, that he was spreading himself too thin between his Digitiser 2000 website, which was originally intended as an attempt to recapture the magic of Digitiser on Teletext, and his new YouTube channel, where he has been greatly enjoying putting together both his full-length "Digitiser: The Show" episodes and his more recent short-form content.

Biffo's concerns stem from something all content creators tend to bang their heads on at some point, which is whether or not you're doing something "for the numbers", or if you're doing it "for the love". At some point you need to contemplate whether what you're doing is a business or a hobby, because increasingly in this oversaturated modern world of free expression, it seems impossible to do both.

Treat something as a hobby and you run the risk of stagnating in terms of "growth"; yes, you may well get a loyal core audience and be incredibly grateful for them, but there often seems to be something of a "glass ceiling", as Biffo describes it. I sometimes feel a bit like this with what I do — my projects are much smaller scale than the various forms of modern Digitiser are, but I still find myself struggling to reach simple milestones like, say, breaking $100 a month here on Patreon.

Treat something as a business, however, and you risk sucking all the joy out of it, making it become "just a job", and in the worst case scenario something you absolutely hate. This is something we regrettably see every day with professional games journalists, who increasingly seem to churn stuff out with absolute resentment for their audience (who, in turn, become defensive, and thus the whole cycle continues to worsen) and professional YouTubers, who it seems we're increasingly seeing suffering from complete burnout and exhaustion.

"It gives me respite from what I do for a living, it's a place where I have creative freedom, and I probably wouldn't want to rely on it for the entirety of my income," writes Biffo of his various Digitiser projects. "I think that would place too much pressure on it, and mean I'd end up tailoring my content for views. And I've never really been one for watering down my own voice."

I feel exactly the same way. The reason I enjoy doing what I do so much at the moment is the creative freedom I have, and the fact that I'm not beholden to things like embargoes, publication schedules and the whims of a prissy, stick-up-the-arse editor-in-chief who won't allow me to cover certain games that there's a proven hunger for fair coverage of because they offend his delicate little sensibilities and might make him look bad to his super-rad hyper-woke little friends.

Ahem, sorry, got a bit off the point there. Anyway, yes. I do what I do because I enjoy it. My day job isn't unpleasant, but it is boring, totally bereft of creativity and fairly soulless, and as such the time I get to work on MoeGamer, YouTube and Atari A to Z is precious to me. I know that if I was in a position where I needed to tailor all those projects' content to clickbait views, I wouldn't be nearly as happy, and thus I'm thankful for the freedom I have.

Of course, that doesn't mean I wouldn't immediately jack in my day job if I won the lottery. Were I to suddenly find myself with "fuck you" money, I would most certainly quit the day job, and devote more time to these creative projects. With the money to be self-sufficient, however, I'd be free to continue doing what I do now, the way I do now; I'd just have the time to do it more, and better.

Ah well. It's nice to dream sometimes, isn't it. Go tell a favourite creator (it doesn't have to be me!) that you appreciate what they do today, because sometimes it's just nice to hear a simple "I enjoyed that, thank you".

Good morning. Here is a non-comprehensive list of minor annoyances. #relatable

• People who won't write emails like normal human beings

• People who ask you if you're doing the thing you've been doing for the last two hours

• The fact that the Internet has conditioned me to mentally add "…and so have I" any time I see the words "The time has come", regardless of context

• Masterchef

• YouTube jumpcuts

• That thing where you're carrying a cup of coffee and you don't bang it on anything, but it still goes "bloop" and splashes out of the top of it, seemingly in defiance of normal physics

• Needing a poo but having a sore bum

• Software tools that have been built for a specific purpose, but are infinitely worse than off-the-peg more general solutions that do the same thing

• Twitter

• Verification emails that don't come through immediately

• Notifications

• Notifications on sites that really don't need a notification system (hello, Netflix)

• That particular breed of pop-up ad that only appears when you've scrolled halfway down an article

• Wikia changing its name to "Fandom" and trying to make out it's some sort of legitimate journalistic source when in fact, aside from the fan-made content, it's just clickbait garbage

• Buzzfeed's continued existence

• Having an itch that won't go away

• Dry skin

• The fact that the PS4's "wake up from sleep" sequence takes longer than a cold boot of the Nintendo Switch

• Monday

• Tuesday

• Wednesday

• Thursday

• Friday

• Sunday evening

• The fact that however much you tidy up, it will always get untidy again within a matter of minutes, particularly if you're depressed

• Not knowing how to end lists

Really enjoying Death end re;Quest so far; it's got a nice blend of plot and gameplay that is keeping me thoroughly invested in what's going on so far.

The challenge factor is starting to ramp up a bit, too, and overall the game is feeling a lot more balanced than some of Compile Heart's previous work, which would often tend to get to a point where you were immensely overpowered quite easily — that or you got completely flattened by an enemy way higher level than you. Thus far in this, there seems to have been a nice gradual incline in difficulty, easing you into making better use of the game's various mechanics as you progress without bombarding you with tutorials.

This is quite an interesting aspect, actually; there are a few mechanical elements that the game doesn't tell you a lot about, simply that they exist, and what you do with that information is up to you. Probably of chief importance among these is the element system, which works in a sort of "triangle" fashion. Moon beats Sun, Sun beats Star, Star beats Moon. And by "beats" I mean "does significantly more damage, to the degree of several thousand more points of damage per hit".

There's another aspect to that part, too, though, which is the fact that some enemies can counter actions by characters of an element they're strong against. Not every enemy does this, because it would get exceedingly annoying if they did, but once you spot it happening, you need to do something about it. This is a much better implementation of a sort of "reaction" system from the enemies than the Order Break system in Omega Quintet — or at least, I should say, a little more understandable. After a while you sort of instinctively understood when you'd suffer an Order Break in Omega Quintet, even if you couldn't describe exactly how. Here, the conditions are a bit more clear.

The story is ramping up now, too. The horror aspects are increasing, and the Bad Ends are getting more… bad. Some are relatively short text sequences that effectively say "you fucked up, that was a stupid thing to do", but in those instances it was usually pretty obvious which one the "right" option was. But there have been a couple where the Bad End route actually led to a surprisingly substantial block of narrative — albeit one that ended with violence, death and Game Over.

Anyway. Lots more to write on this in the coming weeks, and I'm looking forward to it. For now, that game has kept me up until 1AM, so I should probably sleep. It is a school night, after all…

I'll be writing more on this in the coming weeks, but I've been really enjoying the games in the SNK Anniversary Collection so far.

As I noted in my piece on MoeGamer on Friday, it's been a real pleasure to discover some SNK games that aren't Neo Geo games and that aren't fighting games. As good as SNK fighting games are, fighting games are one of my least favourite genres — with a few notable exceptions — and thus I'd rather see other stuff from a company with such a long history.

I've been especially intrigued by some of SNK's early shoot 'em ups, of which there are several in the collection. Thus far I've been particularly enjoying Bermuda Triangle and its sequel World Wars. Both of these have an interesting power-up system where you build up a bar, and at various points on the bar all your weapons increase in power. You also have the ability to aim your air to air guns in 8 directions, though your air to ground bombs always drop in front of you.

Athena and Alpha Mission supposedly drew inspiration from RPGs for their power-up systems, and it's clear that games like Bermuda Triangle and World Wars followed suit. Following these conventions in disparate genres is starting to give me a feel for a very distinctive sense of identity that SNK's pre-Neo Geo games have, and I like it!

I also have to give mad props to the games that make early use of digitised or synthesised speech. Fantasy's opening dialogue of "How are you?" "I'm fine, thank you! AAAIIIIEEEEEE!!" is right up there with "ON THE GLEEN!" from Neo Turf Masters for me now.

Anyway. I'll be exploring each of these games in a series of articles in the coming weeks, and possibly in some videos too. Please look forward to it!

There's been a bit of consternation today over what appears to be an Octopath Traveller prequel… because it's only being released on mobile.

While some people — as always — have been getting irrationally, over-the-top angry about this, I can understand the discontent to a certain degree. It's not because I blindly dislike mobile games per se — longtime readers of MoeGamer will recall a fair amount of coverage on Granblue Fantasy, Fate/Grand Order, Girls' Frontline and Dragalia Lost — but instead it's primarily down to the "impermanence" of these games: the fact they can't be archived and enjoyed in the years to come.

Okay, we haven't yet come to a point where a big, high-profile game like Granblue Fantasy has reached its "end" and closed down, and it's entirely possible that Cygames and co will figure out some sort of solution for people to still be able to enjoy the games offline once the servers go down. It's not without precedent; I think it was Konami who, a few months back, took one of their mobile games offline but allowed its players to download all the data and continue enjoying it at their leisure. We talked about it on the podcast.

One potential issue with this, of course, is that with the way mobile games are structured and monetised, an "offline" version would need rebalancing somewhat to be more friendly to offline play. The successful games like the aforementioned are all successful because they're pretty friendly to free-to-play players, but there's still little denying that you can get yourself a significant advantage (or at least the chance at a significant advantage) if you pay up. How would that work if there's no means of paying any more? The game would have to be more generous with its "premium" currency, or simply provide alternative means of acquiring characters and other content that would typically be part of the gacha system.

And then you have the question of how that game is actually archived for future generations. Let's say some sort of disaster hits Apple and/or Google and their respective app stores are no longer available. On Android, this isn't so much of a problem because you can just sideload .apk files to install anything, but on iOS, as far as I'm aware, it's impossible without jailbreaking. Who will be responsible for maintaining these archives? Will the original creators allow their games to be distributed in this manner long after they've washed their hands of them? These are questions we don't yet know the answers to.

I think the reason why this is a big deal this time around is that it's a direct prequel to a commercially available game for which there is an archivable physical release on a non-mobile platform. This means that 20-30 years from now, someone will (hopefully) still be able to play Octopath Traveller, but might not be able to enjoy its prequel. That'd be a real shame; it's like putting an expiry date on art, and it's something I feel is happening more and more in gaming these days between post-launch updates, patches, DLC and all manner of other stuff.

And I don't see it getting better; people seem invested in going further in this direction rather than resisting it, all because of "convenience". I really hope this doesn't end up biting us in the ass in the future.

Chatting with my dear friend and podcasting buddy Chris the other day, it became all too apparent that we are most certainly living in the sort of futuristic dystopia all manner of fiction has been trying to warn us about for decades at this point.

Next month, the UK is supposedly introducing measures to prevent under-18s from accessing adult content online, with the "solution" in place apparently taking the form of an ISP-level block for sites that don't conform to the rules, and the rules in question involving consumers having to "prove" their age in some form or another — possibly through having to purchase a £5 "pass" from an actual physical store. I'm sure that's a conversation everyone is looking forward to.

Of course, like so many "doom and gloom" stories, I question whether or not this is going to happen — I'm still skeptical as to whether the dreaded "Brexit" is actually going to happen at all, on that note — but it's depressingly plausible in this age we live in. We live in an age of surveillance that would make George Orwell blush; an age where people get arrested and prosecuted for stupid YouTube videos, an age where beat cops will seize everything from butter knives to legitimate tools "just in case" they are used as weapons, and where "liking" an innocuous-seeming limerick that someone else wrote on social media will bring the police to your doorstep.

We also live in an age where advertisements on bus stops encourage you to "use your phone to interact!"; where every TV programme starts with an official hashtag; where the Twitter account of a deceased comic book legend is used to promote a mediocre superhero movie; where everything must be "shared", otherwise you're doing your life wrong.

Some of these things have been fun in the past, but over time it's hard not to become cynical about them, particularly when you start to recognise the true intentions behind some of them. But there doesn't seem to be a whole lot we can do about them; that is just the direction that society appears to have chosen to move in, and all those of us who don't like it can really do is either fall in line, or choose not to engage. I tend to choose the latter under most circumstances.