Apparently it's a bank holiday tomorrow — likely still going to get some stuff done for both Rice and Retrounite as it's nice to put stuff up for people to read even on a holiday, but will be taking the opportunity to get caught up on a few things, too. Might record some more stuff and will definitely play some Atelier Firis — made some substantial progress on that over the weekend.

Got some fun videos coming up, including a few requests I've had in the comments. People seem to be "engaging" (ugh) a lot more with my videos of late, which is nice, particularly when they have meaningful things to say. I have a couple of crypto weirdoes sniffing around trying to find out about Atari Token, but I've just ignored them for the moment. Anything crypto-related can choke on a fat one so far as I'm concerned.

This coming week's Retro Select will be the Quake remaster, but rather than playing Vanilla Quake I took some time to delve into Scourge of Armagon, the first official expansion pack. It's hard! But it's really, really good. I owned a copy of this back in the day, but never really played it all that much. Now I've blasted through all of base Quake (which I'm not 100% convinced I ever did back in the day, either) I'm enjoying investigating these new expansions. Particularly intrigued by the two which have been developed by MachineGames, so may well return to Quake for another video at some point.

Aside from that, not much to note today, really. Foot still hurts. Cats still cute. Living room still needs hoovering. Time for bed, said Zebedee. Boing!

Been struggling a bit for a few days. The pain from my foot has been getting to me a bit, and it's either been triggering some fairly monstrous anxiety, or some monstrous anxiety just happens to have struck at the same time my body is suffering. Either way, it's been a pretty bad time.

I have spent the majority of today distracting myself with Atelier Firis, which I've made some good progress on today. As I noted the other day, I won't be writing about it this weekend, but I'll definitely have some more things to say come next weekend.

Played through Tormented Souls in the week to write about over on Rice — that's a fabulous classic-style survival horror that everyone who enjoys old-school Resident Evil and Silent Hill should absolutely, definitely play. Here's my writeup: https://ricedigital.co.uk/tormented-souls-classic-ps2-era-horror/

And a walkthrough for those who aren't used to actual puzzles! https://ricedigital.co.uk/tormented-souls-walkthrough-and-faq/

Having fun with the Secret Thing I'm Not Allowed To Talk About At the Moment. Got some projects relating to that coming up soon, too, so looking forward to those. You'll be seeing the first fruits of those labours around November time. What could they be?!

It's been nice to have a day that is mostly relaxation (random stress attacks aside) so tomorrow I'm going to be productive and get some videos done. For now, I think it's a good time to hit the sack and enjoy Calli teaching Haachama a selection of "bad words".

Hello! Quick update: there probably won't be an Atelier MegaFeature entry this week, as I've had my hands full with Tormented Souls for review and walkthrough writing, along with a bunch of other stuff. As such, I've had pretty much zero time to spend with Atelier, and I don't want to just waffle something out for the sake of it, so better to delay the next installment by a week or so.

Apologies that this is taking a bit longer than anticipated, but I'm determined to get it done and do it right — it's just proving quite challenging to do so alongside work commitments. I like my job, y'see, so it makes me want to do well at it — unfortunately that sometimes doesn't leave so much time for personal projects, however passionately we feel about them!

It will be completed, though. I've come too far to stop now — plus I'm enjoying Atelier Firis a lot. I just need a bit more time to actually get a bit further — so I'll be making sure I prioritise it in my free time for the next week (and onwards!)

Also my ankle has turned purple. Guess I did sprain it after all. Dammit. Oh well. Here's hoping it heals soon.

Feeling a little better today. Still not great — I'm in an annoying situation where putting any weight on my right leg causes my ankle to hurt, and bending my left leg at all causes the graze on my knee to be quite painful — but I think I'm mending. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'm properly back on my feet again; I do not like it being painful to do things like get out of bed or walk down stairs.

Still, as I've said, at least I don't need to be up and about too much right now. Writing by day, gaming by night. (Technically, the game playing this evening was "work", but I was going to play it anyway, so I don't mind.) With any luck I'll be back in the gym by the time next week rolls around, but we'll see — I don't want to get better only to fuck myself up again.

Getting into the new Hololive gals. Kronii is probably my favourite so far, but I watched Mumei play Journey for a couple of hours last night, and she is absolutely charming. Softly spoken, gentle, says things like "shoot" and "oh dear" instead of "shit" and "fuck", has a cute little whistle between her teeth that she makes any time she says an "s" syllable and is obviously quite intelligent. And forgetful. That aspect of her "character" doesn't appear to be something written for her; it wasn't at all uncommon for her to start talking about something, forget what she was saying halfway through and then return to it like an hour later.

Sana has some nicely infectious energy, Fauna is gentle in a different way to Mumei, and Baelz… well, I can see her being another Gura if she plays her cards right. She's a natural performer and entertainer, and I can't wait to see what she gets up to.

Exciting times for sure! But for now, I must a-bed, because it is 1:50am and I was going to get an early night tonight. Whoops. Oh well.

Still in a fair amount of pain, but on the mend. Foot has swollen up a bit but hasn't gone purple, so I don't think I've sprained it, at least I hope I haven't. I've only sprained my ankle once — back in my early days at university — but it was an exceedingly unpleasant experience I'm not particularly keen to repeat.

Thankfully, I haven't needed to move around too much today to get some work done. Presently playing through Tormented Souls to review on Friday, all being well — it's very good, you know. If you enjoy classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill, you'll definitely get a big kick out of this one. More details on Friday.

Other than that, not a ton to report other than the fact I just remembered I forgot to post Atari A to Z today, so I better do that now. There's 25 minutes until midnight before it's officially "late" 🙂

It was my own fault, really; I shouldn't have been vaguely psyched up to start a new week, because today has been an absolutely horrible day, and I sincerely hope yours has been better.

To be fair, it was only really one specific bad thing that happened, but said bad thing is something I'm going to have to deal with for a bit — and that's messed up some of the plans I'd made to be better to myself.

Here's what happened. I was planning to go see some local friends this evening, where we were going to play some games and generally have an enjoyable, social time. With that in mind, I figured I'd go to the gym at lunchtime rather than simply skipping it for the day — good intentions, getting into solid habits and all that.

So at lunchtime, I got ready, stepped out the door, headed from my front door to my car — and as I was rounding the back of my car to reach the driver's side, my ankle gave way and I fell to the ground, skinning both my knees in the process. Thankfully I wasn't seriously hurt — at this point I'm not sure if I've sprained or just twisted my ankle, and the knee wounds looked worse than they were — but it was embarrassing, extremely painful and not at all how I intended any part of today to go.

As such, I've been spending the rest of today limping around and occasionally howling in pain, cancelling my appointment for the evening and resigning myself to the fact that I'm probably not going to be able to go to the gym for at least a couple of days. Which is frustrating, because I actually wanted to go, and I don't want to fall back into bad habits so soon after having what feels like, at the very least, a slight breakthrough in that regard.

But oh well. Shit happens and all that. Just gotta roll with the punches and deal with whatever bullshit life throws you as it happens, I guess. At least nothing worse happened.

A nice quiet weekend — although I did get some stuff actually done, too. I prepped a couple of articles for Retrounite, which will save me some time in the week, and I did some testing on the thing I'm not allowed to talk about at the moment which was fun. I also played a lot of Quake and beat Flea! on the Indie Heroes collection for Evercade in a single sitting without using save states like a pussy.

I call that a successful weekend, really. Actually looking forward to getting some work done in the week, and getting back to the gym and swimming routine. May actually have an opportunity to see some local friends tomorrow evening for once if they don't come up with some last-minute excuse like they normally do. It's usually family-related. I have to say, even if both Andie and I weren't already so vehemently against having kids, I think my local friends' seemingly constant misery at being parents would be enough to put us both off.

Yes, yes, yes, I'm sure all the "ups" make all the "downs" eminently worth it, but I feel kind of bad for them, given that there seem to be a lot more "downs" than "ups". Or perhaps they just don't talk about the "ups". I don't know. Either way, they've only made my resolve not to procreate even stronger. Not that I needed much convincing, anyway; I would be a dreadful parent, and our house would be awful for a child. So there's that.

Well that, sure wandered off the point, didn't it? Anyway, I'm off to bed now. Tempted to watch some HoloEN Council debuts this evening, but will probably save it for tomorrow so I can write about them while watching. Maybe an ice-cream before bed. Ah, the childless life at 40… aside from the aches and pains, it's all right sometimes.

Been playing a bunch of Quake since Bethesda put out that new version and I'm really impressed. Going to write more about it over on Retrounite in the week, but suffice to say for now that if you've been considering picking it up but have been on the fence, don't hesitate; it really is absolutely excellent.

They've learned a lot from the Doom ports from a while back, clearly. Modern Vintage Gamer was involved with the port of this one, and much like his work on Shantae with WayForward and Limited Run Games, he's managed to create a version that is magnificently authentic to the original while providing plenty of "modern" options for those who desire them.

I'm particularly enamoured with the fact that this new version allows you to keep all the textures unfiltered, so you have lovely pixelated walls and enemies and whatnot — but this can be combined with modern effects like motion blur and interpolated animation and suchlike. It really does allow Quake to get the "modern retro" treatment, where it's recognisable as a classic game, but also plays like how you want to remember it, rather than how it actually was.

And then there's the game itself. I have a lot to say on this subject, but I'll save that for in the week…

Evening all. Sorry I didn't write yesterday, but I completely zonked out after work last night — I don't think I was too well, as I fell asleep almost immediately and felt like absolute crap. I feel a bit better today, though, thankfully, so I made it to the gym for a light session, and now I've got the weekend to enjoy ahead of me.

I think I'm starting to notice a slight improvement in my performance at the gym already. 20 minutes on the bike didn't feel like a big deal at all this evening, though granted I was well-distracted by Amelia Watson playing The Convenience Store. This is encouraging, though; I just need to not get complacent, and be willing to push myself a little bit when things start to feel like they're "easy". Going on past experience, it's easy to get into self-inflicted plateaus by not wanting to get out of your comfort zone.

No real plans for the weekend. I do have something super-secret from the day job to play with that I'm not allowed to talk about, so some of the time will be spent fiddling with that, and I've got a review copy of Tormented Souls to squeeze in, too. This unfortunately isn't leaving me with a ton of time to play Atelier, but I think I've got some stuff I can write about this weekend at least!

Anyway. Just wanted to catch up before I sat down for an enjoyable evening of video gaming. Hope you all have a lovely weekend — make sure you spend at least some of it enjoying yourselves!

I'm absolutely knackered; think I may have pushed myself harder than I thought at the gym last night as I've spent all day being pretty tired and this evening's swimming session was a bit of a struggle. I'm off to bed immediately after this — though looking at the clock that's not actually a particularly unreasonable time to hit the sack.

Played a bit of GG Aleste on the Aleste Collection for Switch a while back — that's a real good shoot 'em up that I like a lot, plus I have a lot of time for any shmup kind enough to let me 1CC it on the first runthrough. It may be pretty easy, but it was a ton of fun — very much looking forward to exploring the others, and this collection will provide plenty of fodder for the Blissful Death column over on Rice Digital!

Still working through the Chilla's Art games, too. Big fan of those, now. I think I have a couple of the short-form ones left to go, then there's a few more "survival horror-y" ones to look at as well, including a couple that go with a PS1 aesthetic rather than the PS2 look all the ones I've played so far went with. On the whole, I think they're doing great work — and they sure are churning 'em out, too! I guess that's the advantage of working on small-scale games with a small team — you can get stuff done a lot more efficiently than big, bloated development houses!

My brain is gradually shutting down and my cat is telling me it's time to go to bed, so I think it's time to hit the hay. Hope you've all had a good evening!