Hi everyone! Hope you're doing well. I'd like to kick off with a "thank you" to everyone who has been good enough to pledge to MoeGamer here on Patreon — your donations are very much appreciated, and always put to good use.

Last month, I used your donations to upgrade MoeGamer to the "Premium" package on WordPress, which means no more ads (unless I specifically choose to put in some ads that benefit me rather than WordPress, which I'd prefer to avoid doing) as well as much more storage space for images and suchlike. The latter aspect was particularly important as I was getting very close to the limit, hence why I went for the upgrade before I reached the $100 a month "target" I'd arbitrarily set for myself.

On that note, I'd like to thank those new Patrons who have pushed the site's monthly income up over the $80 a month mark — I'd been hovering around $75-78 or so for the longest time, so it's really nice to see some actual growth, and even nicer to know that people feel the work I do is worth me getting a bit of pocket money for.

I'd like to remind you all that MoeGamer has a Discord server that is currently open only to Patrons and friends I've specifically invited, so do please stop by and say hi! We have bots dishing out the latest gaming news (with a focus on Japanese stuff), custom emoji, the obligatory NSFW channel and a small but thoroughly pleasant community of people to hang out with. It'd be great to see some more of you there.

If you haven't already, be sure to connect your Patreon account to Discord to get automatically invited to the Discord server. Full instructions on how to do that can be found here.

I'm also going to be around on the Discord a bit more than I have been because I'm taking another Twitter hiatus for a bit. Recent happenings have just been utterly draining; none of them involve me directly (apart from Bob Mackey's unprovoked attack on me a few weeks back) but it's just exhausting to be around all that noise, so I'm taking a break for a week or so (possibly more) for the sake of my mental health.

The MoeGamer Twitter will still be posting stuff, but I won't be monitoring notifications or mentions. I do still get DM notifications, though, so if that's your preferred way of getting in touch, I can still see those messages. More reliable means of getting in touch are the contact form on my site, comments on the site, comments here and Discord messages, though.

Do please continue to share links to the site and to the YouTube channel… I'm trying to find time whenever possible to make video versions of articles, though in the case of more complex things that require more footage it takes a bit longer! I have several Hyrule Warriors vids to complement the Cover Game articles in the pipeline, I just need to get around to making them.

Thanks again for your continued support, and I look forward to chatting with you on the Discord.

The prospect of leaving home to go to university was both exciting and terrifying to me.

Sure, there were aspects of living at home with my parents that I'd found somewhat frustrating, but on the whole I'd had a good life and been well taken care of. What stood ahead of me was a big challenge to my self-confidence… but a challenge I knew I'd have to take on sooner or later.

I had a certain amount of time to adjust to my new environment. Since I'm a musician, I'd signed up for the pre-term orchestral course, which involved staying in one of the university's halls of residence for a week, some hardcore orchestra rehearsal, concluding with a performance of two symphonies: Shostakovich's 5th and Beethoven's 7th.

I say I had time to adjust because this somewhat more "controlled" environment meant that I came into contact with people with whom I had at least something in common, even if that thing was music rather than gaming. I particularly hit it off with a young woman named Cat, who I got to know in the lift up to our respective rooms after deciding to myself that I was finally going to get over this perpetual anxiety and just talk to someone new. (I didn't get over it. But I still talked to her.)

Following the orchestra course, it transpired that Cat was living in the halls of residence one building over from where I eventually ended up, so we saw a fair amount of one another. She'd come and hang out in my room and was quite happy to watch me play PlayStation titles such as Final Fantasy VIII and Point Blank, and Dreamcast games like Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi.

Throughout the first week of our time at university, we all got to know a few people. Besides Cat, I established that the two other boys Chris and Sam in my mixed flat were also into games to varying degrees, as was the guy named Tim who lived in the flat underneath us. Tim spent a lot of time hanging out with us because the remainder of his flat was made up of foreign students who didn't talk to him. None of us were quite sure what to make of him to begin with — this "invader" in what had quickly become a private space we all felt rather protective of — and I found myself even more confused after determining I had feelings for Cat, only to witness her getting together with Tim at the Fresher's Ball at the conclusion of our first week.

Anyway, despite my initial difficulty in dealing with aspects of the situation — which I acknowledge was entirely my own fault for being too scared to do anything — both Cat and Tim became great, close friends of mine, and once we all moved out of halls in our second year and into shared houses instead, I spent a lot of time at their house — where, as it transpired, my flatmate Chris also ended up living.

Tim, like me, had a Nintendo 64, so it was a pretty regular occurrence for a number of us to bundle around to his place and play some multiplayer games. We spent a great deal of time playing Mario Kart 64 (which has always been my least favourite in the series, so I enjoyed this by far the least out of all the possibilities we had on offer), GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Diddy Kong Racing and Duke Nukem 64. And we always, always had a great time, particularly if alcohol was involved. Which it frequently was. I have especially fond memories of a four-player Perfect Dark deathmatch with the maximum number of "FistSims" bumping up the player count, causing pretty much the entire match to unfold with blurred vision thanks to that game's pathetic melee attacks.

My former flatmate Sam had opted to live with some people from his course — Geography Becky and a few others — but spent a fair amount of time round at my house playing games. Rather than the multiplayer affairs we indulged in at Tim's house — which Sam was often a part of — when it was just the two of us we tended to play single-player titles with which it was easy to mess around. Grand Theft Auto III was a particular favourite at the time, as this was an absolutely ideal game to fire up after a boozy night at the student union, since there was just something magical about the experience of creating freeform carnage.

The drunkenness that preceded these sessions wasn't entirely without consequence, of course, and our love of Grand Theft Auto actually had a bit of an impact on our behaviour. It didn't make us violent or anything like that, I hasten to add, before you start raising your eyebrows; rather, being drunk often encouraged us to behave like the silent protagonist in that game just doing his basic actions — running with that slightly wooden PS2-era animation; awkwardly jumping without really getting any height; falling off things and rolling around on the floor.

On one particular occasion, Sam made a heroic leap onto my neighbour's fence as we approached my house, and unfortunately my neighbour was apparently looking out of the window at the time.

"Oi!" came the working-class council house voice from an upstairs window somewhere. "Geddown from there! I'll call th' police on you!" Sam got down, and we went inside laughing at the ridiculous situation as obnoxiously drunk students are wont to do.

"I'll call th' police on you" became a standard response to disagreements after this. On one particularly memorable occasion, I sent a drunken message to Sam, only I messed it up without realising it before I sent it. This was the pre-smartphone era, so it was all typed out using a keypad and thus easy to make such errors with. The eventual message read "THIS IS  POLICE. YOU ARE ARRESTED. TH" Evidently I had attempted to write "This is the police" but somehow had advanced the cursor to the end of the sentence while attempting to type "the" and consequently fucked up the rest of the message.

As you might expect, "YOU ARE ARRESTED" also became a private joke, and was often a standard response to, say, getting beaten in Mario Kart or suchlike.

My student days were probably the best opportunity I had to take part in some real "social" gaming with local multiplayer and shared experiences in single player games. I'm glad I had the chance to… and I'm a little sad that this sort of thing isn't a part of my life any more. But life moves on, I guess.

My monthly "Cover Game" format on MoeGamer has enabled me to do in-depth explorations of games as well as shining a spotlight on underappreciated titles… but I've still had something on my mind.

Specifically, how best to handle substantial series that would be difficult to cram into a single month, particularly when I actually have to play their component installments before I put pen to paper!

There are a number of series that I'd love to explore in detail at some point, but squeezing them into the monthly format would prove difficult or impossible. As such, I've decided to introduce a new (hopefully regular) feature that will enable me to explore these games more gradually alongside other titles — and perhaps compile everything into a Cover Game feature once I've explored them all to my satisfaction.

I present to you "Delving Into…"

While I present my Cover Game features from the perspective of someone who is thoroughly familiar with the game or series in question — while in many cases I'm still playing the game up until the last article I write in a month, I always insist on beating it before I write about things like the narrative — I intend Delving Into… to be a more "immediate" response to games that I'm playing; a sort of "gaming diary", if you will, only one specifically focusing on particular series.

In other words, a Delving Into… column will feature an outline of the progress I've made with a particular game or series, and what my thoughts on it are at that point. They aren't intended to be authoritative articles; instead, they're personal responses to my progress to date, perhaps with a more comprehensive wrap-up article (or a companion Essentials/One-Shot piece) once I've beaten an individual installment.

The series I particularly have in mind to cover in this way are Dragon Quest, Yakuza, Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel. All of these are impractical to rush through in the name of a monthly Cover Game feature, but I desperately want to write about all of them — and, in the case of both Dragon Quest and Trails of Cold Steel, actually try them for the first time!

I'm going to kick this off later this week with the first Delving Into Dragon Quest article looking at the progress I've made on playing Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen on Nintendo DS. This has been my "bedtime game" for the last couple of weeks and I've been enjoying it a lot. I've been meaning to educate myself about Dragon Quest for some time now, and this would seem like a good time to start writing some words about it — particularly with Dragon Quest XI just around the corner.

There are doubtless some other series that this format could work well with, too — the Warriors series springs to mind with the sheer number of games that involves! — but the titles mentioned above are likely the ones I will be focusing on to begin with.

Please let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy reading about my responses to these classic games I've been meaning to check out for some time now!

I had something of an altercation earlier this week with a former colleague: one Bob Mackey, formerly of USgamer, current co-host of Retronauts and host of a Simpsons podcast.

I will freely admit that I had taken an immediate dislike to Mackey due to the circumstances under which we had "met": I had been laid off from USgamer (not "fired" as some people suggest, I might add) on the grounds that, in Gamer Network head honcho Rupert Loman's words, "the site wanted to move forward with an all-American staff", and Mackey was one of the two people who replaced me. There was a short crossover period where I was relegated to mostly "reposting guide" duty, the lowest of the low in terms of clickbait shit. (I am, just to remind you, a Brit; my role on USgamer had been, like my time on GamePro, to ensure there was a bunch of content on the site by the time North America woke up in my afternoon.)

I did not know Mackey when he first arrived, though it became very apparent quickly that he and his fellow new hire Kat Bailey were close personal friends of Jeremy Parish, who by this point had taken over the editor in chief position of USgamer, shoving industry veteran Jaz Rignall completely into the background and turning the site from its original incarnation of "1up 2.0" into just another games site in the process.

By this point, I had firmly established my reputation on USgamer as someone who gave a fair chance to a wide variety of games that didn't typically get much attention from the games press — especially Japanese games. USgamer had developed a reputation, as a result, as one of the few places that was actually friendly to otaku gamers, rather than shaming them for their interests using the sort of quasi-Feminism 101-tier arguments other sites were just starting to make use of around the same time.

For me, I knew there was going to be a problem when the opportunity to review Atelier Rorona Plus came up. Atelier, as anyone who has played it will know, is a delightfully wholesome, comfy series that provides consistently nice experiences… yet Mackey, deciding whether or not he wanted to take it on but being unfamiliar with the series as a whole, noted that he ran a Google Image Search and found it "creepy". I immediately seized the opportunity to review the game before he did any damage to the reputation the site had built up thanks to my efforts.

Unfortunately, after my time was up, it seems I was right to do this, as not long after I left he posted an absolutely atrocious review of Fairy Fencer F on PlayStation 3, in which the majority of his time was spent saying how much he disliked Idea Factory as a company, and the rest was filled with simply inaccurate facts about the game itself.

Now, I don't wish to dwell too much on Mackey as he's not worth any more of my time (that and, as a Twitter follower described him the other day, "he's a hateful little fuckgoblin"), but I felt it was important to establish some context here. Because the other important thing is that Mackey is a bully. He stalks the Twitter feeds of people he doesn't like, he screenshots the things they say, he posts mocking pictures of them… even years after the fact in some cases.

I've seen him do this with Colin Moriarty, formerly of IGN and subsequently Kinda Funny, and I discovered quite by accident that he's apparently been doing this with me, too. My sin in this most recent incident? Suggesting that someone who enjoyed the emotional, tragic experience that explored our varying attitudes to death that was The Walking Dead — a hot topic at the time I wrote the article in question — might also enjoy the emotional, tragic experience that explored our varying attitudes to death that was Kana Little Sister. The latter is, as any visual novel aficionado will know, a genuine all-time classic — but no, to Mackey it was something worthy of derision; an "underage tidy game" [sic].

The reason I bring up this whole situation at all is not to dwell on it — well, all right, there's a bit of that, because it's been on my mind since it happened — but rather to reaffirm something that I strongly believe, and a core philosophy on which MoeGamer is designed: one should never be ashamed of the things one is emotionally invested in or entertained by. (Insert the usual "so long as they are not hurting anyone" disclaimer here.)

MoeGamer — and, before that, my regular USgamer column JPgamer — was set up as a middle finger to people who hurled irrational hatred at Japanese games and those who enjoyed them. The original stimulus for JPgamer in the first place was a freelance reviewer for USgamer calling fans of Hatsune Miku "degenerates" and "creeps" — and it's only developed from there.

It's super-important to believe and understand that there are people out there who are like you, who enjoy the same things as you, who can talk to you about why you find these things important. Standing up to the sort of bullying and shaming people like Mackey do is very important, because they're not trying to make anything better; all they're trying to do is ruin something you enjoy in order to make themselves feel superior.

I have made a point, ever since I immersed myself primarily in games somewhat off the beaten track, to not judge those who are into the latest and greatest triple-A games, because that's just as silly as calling Japanese gaming fans paedophiles. Different people enjoy different things, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in that regard; the best way to stand up to bullying is not necessarily to confront it directly (though I must confess I did have some rude words to hurl at Mackey before I blocked him) but to provide substantial examples as to why the bullies are wrong — and why the people they are attempting to shame or hurt aren't alone.

MoeGamer will always be a place of love and support for those who enjoy Japanese and Japanese-inspired games, as well as retro games, visual novels, anime, hentai, doujinshi and any related media. I'd like to make it abundantly clear that anyone who harbours any sort of hatred towards people for preconceived (and incorrect) notions about what they enjoy is not welcome.

Bullies are the worst people. I have, regrettably, understood this for the vast majority of my life. At least now I have a bit more of an opportunity to do something about them. And if you've ever felt like you've been on the receiving end of this crap… I'd love to hear from you. Not because I want to feel like I'm right, but because I'm sure we'd get along based on our shared interests! Let's make something positive out of today's unfortunately fashionable negativity and cynicism.

Thank you for your continued support.

I forget the exact circumstances under which I obtained my first PlayStation, but I remember that I didn't actually buy it.

Rather, it was originally my brother's console — a Japanese unit that had been hard-modded with a non-removable SCART output for use on PAL TVs, and a huge, bulky power transformer to compensate for the difference in voltage between Japan and the UK.

When I first came into possession of it, I had three games: Ridge Racer, Tekken and Raiden Project. Tekken was a pre-release copy on an unmarked CD and had a few bugs in it, but the other two were Japanese releases in their standard packaging. I loved all three games — and I very much miss Raiden Project, I must say, since in retrospect I feel that game was probably the birth of my love affair with modern shmups, despite my incompetence at playing them — but after a while I found myself hungry for more.

My friends at school — yes, those same ones with whom I'd discussed Street Fighter II and its ilk at length back in the 16-bit days — all had PlayStations, too, though in their case they had official PAL models. One of my friends had heard of a technique called the "pen lid trick", however, and suggested I should try it. My Japanese PlayStation was region-locked, see, and this meant that even if I were to buy a new UK PlayStation game, I wouldn't be able to play it. Unless I either modded my console — which was a brave new world none of us would dive into until a little later — or made use of this supposed magic trick.

For the unfamiliar, the "pen lid trick" involved getting the lid of a Bic biro or similar and using it to hold down the button at the back of the PlayStation's disc tray to trick it into thinking the lid was closed, even when it was open. Once you had set this up appropriately — a process that often involved Blu-Tac to hold it in place — you could then boot the PlayStation with a disc from its native region, watch it spin up to read the regional protection information, then, when its spinning slowed down again, quickly whip out the disc and replace it with the game you actually wanted to play.

It actually worked, too. Okay, over time it would knacker the laser in your PlayStation's disc drive, but in the early days this was the number one method of getting both "import" (or, in my case, domestic) and pirated games to work. And as such I started to pick up some UK games.

One of the first ones I bought was Final Fantasy VII, a game I knew very little about, but which had piqued my interest when my brother had told me about it. Supposedly it was the first game he and several of his colleagues had played that had actually elicited an emotional response… they had cried over it. A video game! Surely not. Despite my skepticism, I wanted to see for myself, so I grabbed it, booted it up and tried it.

A good four or five hours later, I finally understood what an RPG was and why people might want to play them. I raved about it to my friends, who subsequently ended up buying their own copies. And, over the course of that summer, we each ended up playing and beating the game over and over again, such was the impact it left on us. (Yes, it made all of us cry, too.)

My fondest memory of Final Fantasy VII comes from a period of time where my parents had gone on holiday to the States and left the teenage me home alone for the first time ever. During that period, I had an ill-advised party that I'd rather forget (it involved, among other things, blowing my Dad's speakers, leaving a large scratch on our five-figure value grand piano due to people dancing on it, breaking a rather charming cat statue and spectacularly failing to Get Off With Stacy Redman, a fact that my friend Woody took great delight in reminding me of at every opportunity for the next few months… who am I kidding, that was an awesome party) but the thing I enjoyed the most from that time was the period I spent with my friends getting quietly drunk, smoking weed, eating Pot Noodles and playing Final Fantasy VII for 36 hours straight.

By the time this particular incident rolled around, my aforementioned friend Woody and I had both beaten Final Fantasy VII several times over, and were well familiar with things like chocobo breeding, natural materia and all that good stuff. Our friend Edd was there, too; he had also enjoyed the game but was a little less enthused about it than we were, so after an evening of playing drunken Frogger fueled by tequila (which we all discovered we didn't like very much) he went to bed, while Woody and I decided to boot up our favourite game for yet another playthrough to see how far we could get.

We reached an agreement that we would keep one another awake and see how long we could play for without stopping, and we both remained true to our word, bashing one another over the head with sofa cushions every time our comrade appeared to be flagging. "WAKE UP!"

I don't think we made it through the whole game in that one sitting, but we certainly had a good crack at it. I recall finally succumbing to slumber in the forest where you get the Apocalypse sword, since the music there was so hypnotic it was almost impossible to resist. Woody also passed out momentarily during the G-Bike sequence at the conclusion of the Midgar chapter, and woke up with a start demanding to know "What's an X-Walker?!" To this date, we have no idea whatsoever; we feel it may have been some sort of confused, drunken, weed-addled brain's attempt to combine the Weapon enemies, X-potions and W-item materia, though over the years we've come up with a few more outlandish theories here and there.

I wouldn't attribute my love of JRPGs entirely to this particular incident — remember, Woody and I had already played the game through four or five times by this point — but it definitely played a part. And Final Fantasy VII in general is certainly the main reason I'm into what I'm into today, so I will be forever grateful to it for that.

I hope the remake turns out to be good, but even if it doesn't, it won't be able to take away the magic the original still holds for me.

Throughout primary school, I always felt like a bit of an outsider being someone who was "into computers".

I didn't enjoy a lot of things my peers were into — well, mostly playing football, though I did try a bit — and so I found myself spending a lot of time at home enjoying my hobbies and interests by myself. Besides computing, this included music, but that's a whole other discussion.

When I got to secondary school, after an initial bout of social anxiety (which I now recognise as being related to the Asperger Syndrome I've likely been dealing with for most of my time on Earth) I made some new friends. And I was delighted to discover that they liked games just as much as I did.

This would have been around the time the Mega Drive and Super NES were becoming popular, as I recall some friendly fanboy rivalry between several of my friends — particularly once Street Fighter II came out and started playing tennis between the two platforms in terms of features getting added and expanded. (The Super NES pretty much won the whole battle so far as we were concerned primarily by virtue of its default controller having enough buttons to enjoy the game.)

As for me, I was fascinated by everything that played games. I had a Super NES myself — though in retrospect, I never built up much of a collection for it — but I absolutely loved any time I got to go to my friend Edd's house and play on his Mega Drive, and loved it even more when my brother came home from his jobs on gaming magazines at the time with gaming hardware and import games in tow. As such, I never really became a "fanboy" of a particular platform; much like I do today, I went where the games were, and always had a good time.

It would have been around this time that I also started getting into PC gaming. As you'll recall, prior to this point my computer gaming had been on the Atari ST and Atari 8-Bit, so switching to PC was interesting. By this point, the advent of 256-colour VGA graphics and dedicated sound cards meant that the PC was finally a superior gaming platform to its predecessors, and a wide variety of games were more than happy to show off what the maturing platform was capable of.

I had a fair few commercial PC games, though the majority of my fondest memories from that period actually come from shareware games. Wolfenstein 3-D, Commander Keen, Doom, The Catacomb Abyss, Duke Nukem and numerous others — they're as much a part of my gaming background as anything else.

The great thing about shareware was… well, you could share it without feeling guilty. Copies of the aforementioned games all did the rounds among my friends and I, and we'd frequently spend whole lunchtimes talking about them and attempting to get our heads around the various modding tools available for them.

I never got on with Doom modding and anything beyond, but I absolutely loved playing with Wolfenstein 3-D's map editors. Interestingly enough, our family had signed up to CompuServe around that time for our first real online experience that wasn't a direct-dial BBS, and one day while browsing the "GAMERS" forum on the service, I was contacted by someone who was looking for new Wolfenstein levels made by fans, and apparently offering money for them.

It sounded too good to be true but, with my parents' approval, I provided my details and sent him the ten-level episode I'd created. To my great surprise, a few months later a package arrived containing a cheque for $200 and three floppy disks, containing a full registered copy of the latest version of Wolfenstein 3-D as well as its brand new Super Upgrades expansion pack. The latter included my levels, so technically I'm a professional game designer.

Other great memories from the time include the Lucasfilm and Sierra adventures, which I'd actually often play with my mother as a bonding activity. And because we both liked them. My mother wasn't a particularly big gamer, but she'd always enjoyed adventure games since their text-only days, and she got on well with graphic adventures. Particular favourites included the first Gabriel Knight game as well as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the latter of which my aforementioned friend Edd and I adapted into a veritable epic of a clumsily-drawn comic strip featuring self-insert characters in the leading roles.

This period in the early '90s remains one of my most fondly regarded eras in gaming history. I'll always have a soft spot for the games from that period — particularly on PC, but it's been great fun catching up on the 16-bit console games from the era, too.

The wife and I braved the sweltering heat over the weekend to go get Taco Bell (hey, it's still a novelty over here in the UK, don't judge us) and have a wander around town.

As always when I go to town, I dropped by our local used game emporium, CEX, to see what they had on offer. And as always when I go to CEX, I came away with a bunch of games.

I've been after a few of these for a while — most notably R-Type Final, Auto Modellista and Burnout 2 — while the others are ones I picked up primarily because they looked interesting and were cheap enough to make an impulse purchase. Link's Crossbow Training didn't come with the Zapper accessory, but I've heard from some people that it's preferable to play with just the remote and Nunchuk anyway, so we'll see how that goes. If not, I'm sure someone on eBay has one.

Burnout 2 is a game I have very fond memories of; I think it might be my favourite installment in the series, and for the longest time I've only had the first and third games on my shelf. I always particularly liked its feeling of "coherence" — it was designed in such a way that you did a bunch of events in an area of the overall map, then had a point-to-point race to move on to the next set of events and so on. It wasn't an open-world game like the later Burnout Paradise, but this aspect of the game made it feel very much like it was taking place in a fully realised world rather than separate tracks.

And I didn't pay more than £4 for any of them! As I've said before, PS2, Wii and PSP are all systems that are great to collect for right now, as the games are still readily available and haven't shot up in value — but they're old enough for places like CEX to want to offload them quickly.

The Wii in particular is a system that has a bunch of really cool games on it, many of which get forgotten about amid the system's reputation as a shovelware machine. Okay, it did have a ton of shovelware, but so did the PS2. And hell, sometimes there's even some value to supposed shovelware…

Hey folks! Here's what I've provisionally planned for Cover Game features up to the end of the year, though these are subject to change according to progress, timings and release dates in some cases!

As usual, these will be complemented by daily articles on smaller games and visual novels, retro games and cultural phenomena as well as the bi-weekly podcast on YouTube.

June: The Shantae series
July: Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition
August: The Sonic the Hedgehog series
September: Evenicle
October: The Fatal Frame/Project Zero series
November: Muv-Luv

I enjoyed doing the MoeGamer Awards last December so I'm planning on doing something similar this year, too. That will also give me time to get a bit ahead of schedule for 2019, too! There are still lots of games I really want to cover in detail — it's just a case of finding time for them!

Just off the top of my head, games I definitely want to give the Cover Game feature to in the future include the various Atelier subseries, Mary Skelter Nightmares, Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash (and/or Burst Re:Newal), Yumina the Ethereal, Nights of Azure 2, Seinarukana, Eiyu*Senki and plenty more besides. I don't think I'll be short of things to write about for a long time yet — and the games still keep coming on a host of platforms!

I'm also keen to do more videos, including some Let's Plays, which are somewhat more straightforward to produce than more scripted videos. With the recent release of Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God on Steam, I'm considering giving that a playthrough (albeit on the Vita version I already own) as games with roguelike components make for good Let's Plays/streaming. I'm thinking the Let's Play format is probably more practical for me as my time zone differs a lot from most of the people who follow me online, making streaming less practical.

On the subject of the above, If there are any games you'd be interested in watching me play through, let me know and if I have them in my collection I'll definitely consider them! I'd tend to prefer using more mechanics-centric games for this rather than narrative-heavy games or visual novels, but I'm definitely open to suggestions.

As always, thank you for your continued support, and I'm very much looking forward to what the future holds!

When most people talk about "the 16-bit era" these days, they tend to be referring to the 16-bit console era — the glorious golden age that brought us the Super NES and the Sega Mega Drive.

But to me, "16-bit" will always be synonymous with a slightly earlier period in gaming history: that of the 16-bit computer era, where, at least in the UK, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga battled for dominance. IBM-compatible PCs were a thing, of course, but these didn't really set themselves apart for gaming in particular until the advent of 256-colour VGA graphics; up until that happened, the PC was a poor (but expensive!) choice for gaming.

As you might expect from a family of Atari enthusiasts, we plumped for the Atari ST rather than the Amiga, beginning with a 520ST and eventually upgrading to a 520STE with an upgrade to a mighty 1MB of RAM.

The Atari ST and the Amiga offered distinct experiences, and it wasn't necessarily a matter of one being "better" than the other — they simply specialised in different things. Unfortunately for a gaming fan, ST versions of games tended to be somewhat inferior to Amiga versions, particularly in terms of frame rate and music — in the latter case, the ST had a PSG sound chip similar to that found in earlier hardware such as the Sega Master System, while the Amiga benefited from a custom chipset known as OCS (Original Chip Set) that provided it with its formidable graphical capabilities, as well as the four-channel 8-bit PCM sampled sound functionality that defined the distinctive audio profile of Amiga soundtracks throughout the late '80s and early '90s.

I had a friend with an Amiga, so any time I wanted to experience the joys of its enhanced capabilities, I would go and visit him. At home, meanwhile, we had the Atari ST. Make no mistake, I certainly didn't resent our family's decision to go with this particular platform, as despite its comparative weaknesses in comparison to its main rival, it had a number of interesting benefits, including built-in hardware support for MIDI, making the ST one of the earliest examples of a "studio computer" — indeed, many popular pieces of digital audio workstation software got their start on the ST, including Emagic's "Notator" (which subsequently became Logic, now an Apple-exclusive DAW) and the well-regarded Cubase series.

But I digress. Gaming! We got our hands on a lot of commercial Atari ST software thanks to the fact that by this point, my brother and father were both contributing to the magazine Page 6 that I talked about last time. My Dad tended to focus on productivity and education software (the latter of which I tended to be the guinea-pig for, being of about the right age for much of it at the time) as well as flight simulators, while my then-teenage brother looked at games. When I was a little older, I got in on the action, too.

Page 6 was published on a bi-monthly basis, so every couple of months we tended to receive a huge box full of exciting things for our elite team of reviewers to tackle. I'm not sure if my brother and father knew what was coming in advance, but for me it was certainly always a thrilling surprise to crack it open and see what was on offer this time around. It was always a delight to see something like a Psygnosis game — and the sight of something from companies like U.S. Gold or Ocean tended to fill us with trepidation, since their output, particularly on the ST, was… variable. Very variable!

I learned what gaming was in the 8-bit computer era, but it was with these 16-bit computers that I really started to understand the things I enjoyed and how to tackle a wide variety of different genres. I found myself particularly drawn to military flight simulators such as those churned out by MicroProse; while they weren't as realistic as subLOGIC's Flight Simulator II (that which later became Microsoft Flight Simulator from its PC-only third incarnation onwards), which my father was absolutely obsessed with, I adored the thrill of flinging an expensive piece of hardware around the sky, and the sense of satisfaction completing a mission successfully brought. I even went so far as to "cosplay" a fighter pilot while I played sometimes, donning a bomber jacket, a balaclava (the closest thing I had to a helmet) and a home-made "oxygen mask" made from some paper, rubber bands and a vacuum cleaner hose. I have no regrets.

The 16-bit era was an exciting time for gaming technology, too. While we still had a lot of 2D games with beautiful sprite and background work — the Bitmap Brothers' Gods and Ocean's Elf spring immediately to mind in this regard — we were also starting to enter the age of 3D, with developers coming to terms with filled, shaded 3D polygons. Games like Argonaut Software's Starglider II, Incentive's Freescape Engine games Dark Side and Total Eclipse, and Paul Woakes' Mercenary series were all particular standouts in this regard.

The Mercenary series was a particular highlight, in fact. Over the course of three games (and a few expansion packs), these presented some of the first examples of "open world" gameplay, with both second game Damocles and Mercenary III going so far as to provide a whole solar system to explore on foot, in the air and on four wheels. These are still great games today that are well worth exploring — particularly if you enjoy a distinctly British sense of humour.

During this era, I also experimented with programming a little more. I'd done some simple BASIC programming on the Atari 8-bit, but during my time with the ST I became fascinated with a package named STOS (short for "ST Operating System") which, effectively, was a fancy version of BASIC with built-in support for things like sprites, backgrounds, memory-resident accessories and all manner of cool things like that. I only ever finished one game — the imaginatively titled and rather shit Zapp — but it was always satisfying to just get something happening on screen.

STOS also went on to spawn a range of PC-based software creation tools that is still going on today — more on those another time, though.

The magazine business around this time was something that got me very interested in writing. Besides the aforementioned Page 6, the 16-bit era saw the rise of a broad range of publications that tackled not only games, but the variety of things you could do with your home computers. Publications like ST Action focused exclusively on games, while ST Format and Atari ST User looked more broadly at productivity, music and education applications as well as pure entertainment. These magazines were all beautifully produced, glossy affairs that looked great, were bursting at the seams with interesting things to read and, in most cases, came with a cover-mounted floppy disk featuring playable demos.

In many ways, I think of this as the beginning of a "golden age" for magazines. Publishers had developed a better idea of what the audience wanted to read in these publications, and catered directly to specific segments of that audience such as gamers, musicians, artists and suchlike. Publications had a distinctive "voice", too — you knew if you bought a copy of Zero, for example, that you'd get highly entertaining, irreverent prose, while Atari ST User took itself quite seriously.

One favourite publication around this era was one called Advanced Computer Entertainment, or ACE for short. This was a multi-format magazine that tended to focus for the most part on cutting-edge technology, and was one of the only places I'd hear about what felt like "exotic" machines (or at least those from overseas) like the MSX, FM Towns, PC Engine and suchlike. While the magazine did have reviews, making use of a unique 1,000-point scale for their scores as well as their gimmicky "Predicted Interest Curve" graph suggesting how long the game might hold your attention for, in many cases its most fascinating content came in the form of its cover features.

I loved reading ACE because it provided information about things I didn't hear about anywhere else — and which in some cases never came to fruition. I learned about the doomed Konix Multisystem platform through ACE, for example — one of the earliest examples of psychedelic developer Jeff Minter enthusiastically supporting a console that would never see the light of day or mainstream success — as well as ambitious plans for Philips' similarly cursed CD-i platform. On a less fun note, I also remember the magazine running a print ad for the surgical simulator Life & Death traumatising me so much that I'm still rather afraid of hospitals to this day.

The 16-bit computer era gave us some great games, and some of the earliest examples of developers experimenting with mechanics and presentation. This was still an immature, niche industry learning what worked well and what didn't, and it was fascinating to be a part of. I still enjoy booting up my ST to play many of its games today, and proudly devote a room in my house to old Atari hardware.

Next time, I finally enter the console age… and the PC age, too.

Hello lovely Patrons! I've been keen to provide you all with some exclusive content for a while now but been struggling to think of exactly what to do.

It occurred to me last night that some of you may find an account of my history with gaming in general to be interesting, particularly as I've been involved with computer and video games since almost the beginning. I wasn't quite around for the birth of video arcades and the Atari 2600 (or at least not old enough to appreciate the latter) but I was around for some of the earliest home computers.

In the UK, there were a number of competitors in the 8-bit home computer market, including Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad and doubtless a few others that have been lost in the mists of time. By the time I was old enough to understand the concept of computers and computer gaming, my family was thoroughly entrenched in the Atari camp, so that was where my loyalties lay in these early years.

Being an Atari fan was interesting and sometimes frustrating. The Atari 8-Bit range was technically superior to most of its competitors in a number of ways, but, particularly later in its life, it often missed out on versions of popular and successful games that would come to platforms like the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I'm not 100% sure of the reasons for this, but I imagine it was down to the size of the market; despite its early success with the 2600, Atari never seemed to be particularly good at marketing itself, and thus the C64 and Spectrum seemingly hoovered up the majority of the market share, while platforms from companies such as Amstrad, Atari and Acorn all languished in relative obscurity. Perhaps the letter "A" was cursed.

I'm not entirely sure what led my family to pick Atari in the first place, but I do know they were loyal readers of a magazine called Page 6, which began as little more than a well-produced newsletter for a Birmingham-based Atari user group, grew into a newsstand magazine and actually somehow managed to survive into the mid-'90s in various increasingly sad-looking formats, long after even the 16-bit ST range had ceased to be relevant.

Page 6 is a relic of a lost age — and in some ways was a defining influence for my general proficiency with computers. For those who didn't grow up with home computers in the 1980s, computer magazines were rather different from the games press of today. For starters, many of them didn't cover just games — though games-specific magazines did exist, including the medium-defining and long-lived but now sadly defunct Computer and Video Games — and instead explored computing culture in general. This included everything from new ways to use your computer — many of which we take for granted today, but which were new and exciting back then — to electronic projects, programming tutorials and, most importantly for me, type-in listings.

Type-in listings, for the unfamiliar, were full programs that were printed in the magazine, usually written in BASIC, that you could copy into your own computer, save to disk or tape, then have a "free" piece of software to enjoy. And when I say "copy", I mean painstakingly type out each and every line one at a time, exactly as it appeared in the magazine.

Type-in software ran the gamut from useful applications to games, and as you might expect my primary interest was in the latter. It wasn't at all unusual for publications such as Page 6 and its newsstand rival Atari User (with whom it eventually merged) to feature the "main" game program listing for the month on the front cover of their magazine, in some cases even referring to it rather presumptuously as "Game of the Year". Some of these games were excellent, some less so, but I have fond memories of all of them — and copying out those complicated listings from the magazines' tiny print did wonders for my touch-typing skills!

Piracy was rife in the '80s. We actually had relatively few legitimate copies of games and applications, and we were by no means in an unusual situation. The majority of our software library came from a local "computer club" my father and brother attended regularly, at which, so far as I can make out, people would hang out and exchange copied disks absolutely heaving with software, often making use of then-impressive compression systems to fit multiple full titles on a single floppy disk.

In some respects, this side of things was almost essential to the British Atari 8-bit scene in the '80s, since a lot of big-name games from Atari's native United States, where the systems were much more well-supported, simply didn't make it across the pond. This was partly due to the technical difficulties of converting 60Hz NTSC American games to the PAL 50Hz signal we used in the UK, and also simply down to the fact that the games business was not the international behemoth it is today, so it wasn't cost-effective for some companies to make their games international.

I have incredibly fond memories of the Atari 8-Bit era, despite the fact that I've probably made it sound like a rather bleak time to be a computer nerd! I discovered some all-time favourite games that I still return to regularly today — off the top of my head, Gateway to Apshai, Necromancer, Star Raiders and literally anything from Activision are all still pure gold — and learned a lot about working with computers, even going so far as to write my own programs in BASIC at times. Okay, none of them were great, but let me off the hook a bit; I wasn't even ten years old!

Recently, I was absolutely delighted that my parents were willing to part with our complete collection of Atari goodies that had been languishing in their loft for a good few years now, so I am once again in possession of pretty much everything that made my childhood magical. Sadly the 1050 disk drive appears to have given up the ghost, meaning there are a number of disks I can't load, but where there's a will, there's a way, as they say — devices such as the Atarimax provide modern means of loading software onto retro hardware without having to rely on fading mechanical devices and magnetic media.

The Atari 8-bit era is what got me into computers and gaming in general — but it was the 16-bit computer era that followed that got me into writing about games. But more on that next time!