The first of what will likely become a decent magazine collection over time arrived today — an issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment (better known as ACE) magazine from 1990.

ACE is a magazine I used to really enjoy reading, because it was a multi-format magazine that was always enthusiastic and interested in new developments in gaming technology. And it's only become more interesting to return to over time, as many of those exciting developments ended up never happening — or ended up being a bit poop. Stuff like the Konix Multisystem, which would have been amazing if it existed… or the Philips CDi, which, well, I'm sure you all know about that by now.

Mostly, though, it's been a pleasure to read an actual magazine again. Reading PDFs on a tiny phone screen — or even a tablet — absolutely is not the same experience at all, and thus I'm convinced that my plan to collect some of these magazines, particularly issues that were either important to me or which I've never read before, is a solid one. And this issue in particular has been interesting — there's an article about Pixar from before anyone knew who Pixar was, for example, talking about the rendering software they'd been working on.

All this is actually part of a broader plan I have to spend less time on the Internet in general, because the Internet is really stressing me out at the minute for various reasons. And it doesn't have to be that way; I don't have to engage with it at all. So if I provide myself with alternative things that I enjoy engaging with that aren't Internet-based, that will get me into the habit of not picking up by phone and doomscrolling, or whatever else might end up stressing me out.

And why magazines? Well, because they're great to read on the toilet, obviously. If I take a magazine into the toilet instead of my phone, I can read something enjoyable rather than the garbage of the Internet — and perhaps learn (or remind myself of) something from video game and computing history in the process. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I've been outbid on that collection of 37 magazines on eBay I was looking at, but there are still about 20 hours to go on it. I think I'll do myself a bit of last-minute sniping tomorrow… I would like to get my hands on those, as it'll be a nice kick-start to a collection! Just need to find somewhere to put them now… hmm.

Been having a fair bit of trouble sleeping lately — on top of the difficulty actually falling asleep in the first place, which I've suffered from for as long as I can remember, I've been troubled by particularly vivid, strange dreams of late, too. I'm not sure I'd describe them as "nightmares" as such, since none of them have been outright terrifying or anything, but they have all, at least, been rather odd.

Last night was one such example. The actual details of what was happening escape me somewhat, but I know that in the dream, I'd done something to piss off a powerful person. The powerful person was a criminal of some description, but he was one of those sorts of criminals who had somehow attained a certain amount of "legitimacy" through some means or other; I think he was a filmmaker or something.

Anyway, I'd done something wrong, and I'd been forced into having a "meeting" with this individual (and, by extension, his gang of cronies). I knew that attending this meeting would almost certainly result in me getting hurt or worse, but not attending would potentially lead to dire circumstances, too. So I was in the corridors of this pub where I was supposed to be meeting with the person in question, and I was with some people I know — their exact identities have been lost to my subconscious — and the appointed hour was approaching. Somehow we'd got lost, though, and it was looking increasingly unlikely that I'd make it to the meeting on time.

I eventually did, though, and the meeting was an uncomfortable experience. The individual I had supposedly "wronged" was reasonably polite, but also condescending, and I remember feeling absolute blind fury at him — as well as the knowledge that if I let that anger out, things wouldn't end well for me. I remember him showing me his latest film, and it was absolute garbage. It involved a Cessna aircraft that was on fire at one point.

Then I woke up, not having a clue what I'd supposedly done wrong or indeed how the whole situation resolved itself, if at all. And, going by past experience with my subconscious, I doubt I can expect a satisfying continuation any time soon.

Oh well!

I think I might start collecting old games magazines. I used to absolutely love reading games mags back in the day, and I have missed those days for many, many years. I've thought about doing this for quite a long time now, but the main thing that has put me off is the fact that you inevitably end up having to do things "piecemeal", and it can end up being a bit expensive.

But then two things got me thinking. Firstly, I found a job lot of 37 Page 6, Atari User and Monitor magazines on eBay, which I've placed a bid on. Secondly, collecting things piecemeal is actually rather desirable, because then you're more likely to enjoy each individual thing in its own right, rather than just acquiring bundles of stuff for the sake of having it.

Looking on eBay, the magazines I'm most interested in collecting — Page 6, Atari User, ACE, Zero, The One, PC Zone and PC Player — are mostly around the same price as buying a brand new magazine these days. Therefore you can look at the acquisition of these old publications as just being the same as going down the newsagents to get the latest month's issue back in the day. Look at it that way and it doesn't seem quite as daft a prospect.

The other thing is that having some magazines on hand provides the scope for some interesting videos. Classic Gaming Quarterly, one of the people who inspired me to start making videos in the first place, has often done "readalong" videos where he looks back over old magazines, and that's something I think would be fun to explore.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old games mags and you want to send them my way, do let me know. The ones mentioned above are my priorities, but I'm interested in pretty much anything from the '80s/'90s era in particular.

Had one of those days where the whole Internet felt like it was being negative today, so I've been mostly "offline", and deliberately stopping myself from doing shit like looking at my phone and whatever. It's good to do that now and then; it's a nice reminder that sometimes, it really is just okay to sit back and enjoy things without worrying what other people think.

I do find myself wondering how we can possibly get out of the "rut" that online discourse is in, though. Negativity is the default these days, it seems, and if you say that you like something you're much more likely to get a hundred people telling you how wrong and gay you are for liking that thing rather than anyone backing you up and saying "yeah, that thing was pretty all right".

Trouble is, from social media's perspective, negativity breeds "engagement" — and as we've established pretty firmly by this point, "engagement" doesn't have to be a positive thing, hence the existence of clickbait and hatebait. All that matters is that you got eyes on a page and fingers a-clickin' — how the owners of those eyes and fingers actually end up feeling is completely irrelevant so far as "engagement" metrics are concerned.

Normal people shouldn't care about this; it's something I wish that marketers didn't have to care about either, but certainly your average member of the public shouldn't be thinking about how they get more "engagement" on their "content". Trouble is, they are; that's why you get 12 year olds posting provocative nonsense on Twitter in the hopes that they'll be quote-tweeted by adults telling them to stop being twats; that's why there are endless "discussions" over matters like lolicon and the like that never actually discuss anything; that's why people argue in quote-tweets rather than replies (or the lost art of private messages). It's all about that precious engagement.

Today is a day where I have felt precisely no need for "engagement" whatsoever. So I took myself out of it all, ate some nice food and played Atelier. And it was nice. I might do the same again tomorrow! I can recommend it.

It's one of those "embarrassment of riches" periods right now so far as gaming is concerned. There's a bunch of great titles just around the corner, Persona 5 Strikers came in today, and I finally snagged a copy of Super Mario All-Stars for Switch before it's not available any more and the scalpers jack the price up to ridiculous proportions.

I'm planning on doing a bit of recording this weekend — sticking to the Atari A to Z schedule and nothing else for now is working well so far — but this evening I think I'm going to take some time to just chill and play some games without worrying about writing them, video capture, anything like that. And I think the games I will be playing are some Mario goodtimes; I haven't played Super Mario 64 for many, many years, I never played Super Mario Sunshine much back in the day and I've never played Super Mario Galaxy. So I wonder where I should begin…?

I'll probably also play some Persona 5 Strikers at bedtime, too; the wife watched me play all of the original Persona 5 (that's largely why it took me over a year to beat the damn thing!) so she'll probably appreciate the new game. And even if she doesn't (she will) I'm looking forward to seeing how Persona plus action RPG looks. Sounds like a winning combination to me.

I hope you've all had a good week and have a nice relaxing weekend ahead of you. Thanks as always for all your support; S-rank folks, I'll have a wallpaper done for you sometime this weekend!

I've been really enjoying revisiting the classic '90s era visual novels for the History of Lewd column over on Rice Digital. It's something I've been meaning to do for ages, and now I have a good reason/excuse to. And I'm discovering lots of interesting things.

Amy's Fantasies, which I covered today, turned out to be particularly interesting — a lot more so than I initially assumed it would be, too. And, looking around the Internet while I was doing a bit of research, I seem to be one of the few people who have actually written something about this game and attempted to do anything vaguely meaningful with it.

In fact, one of the only other pieces I found written about it I shall now quote in its entirety, verbatim. No, they did not use any paragraphs.

Amy's Fantasies is another one of the Japanese hentai games like Dangerous Toys which contains a lot of explicit sexual content but not a whole heap of actual gameplay. It's best suited to bottom crawlers who rarely venture outside into the real world so unless you consider yourself a creepy old man, then you easily skip this one and have a conversation with an actual woman. The story here is your typical Japanese nonsense, and follows Emi, a high school student who falls in love with her step brother. When she's about to tell him of her feelings, debt collectors show up and the step brother disappears. Now, Emi has to find him so she can tell him about her true feelings for him. However, along the way, Emi finds she has another person inside her, the rather more adventurous Amy who has all sorts of complex desires and who wants to explore them all. What follows is a sort of interactive graphic novel which is mostly concerned with telling a story as it lacks puzzles and with the player not really required to do much at all. If you are looking for a bit of cartoon smut to bring your own fantasies to life, then this will probably get your pulse racing. There are plenty of dodgy schoolboy fantasy scenes to encounter, along with enough cheap romance and cheesy characters to keep a soap opera going for years. The visuals are strange, with some amusingly bad designs for the characters but really there is little of interest here to anyone looking for anything other than cheap titillation, so walk on by this one and find yourself a real game.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that everything written in this piece can be found out from the game's marketing material, and nothing that is not written in that blurb is discussed. In fact, given that the game's marketing material is arguably inaccurate in reflecting what the game is actually about, it only makes pieces like this all the more transparent — they just wanted to get a cheap jab in at the expense of people interested in eroge.

I'm not going to stick my neck out and say Amy's Fantasies was any great masterpiece or anything like that, but it was certainly interesting, and definitely worthy of discussion — discussion better than whatever that is above. This era of eroge in particular is massively under-discussed online — so I'm doing my best to rectify that a little bit!

If you have any particular suggestions for things I should check out (preferably stuff on Asenheim, or which is easy to get running on modern machines!) then do let me know!

Finally finished the original A Realm Reborn storyline on my Final Fantasy XIV New Game+ run. Will likely write about it over on Rice Digital for the columns this week — but suffice to say for now that I enjoyed the experience, and Castrum/Praetorium were good fun solo. Not especially challenging — though I did actually take a bit of damage in some of the last fights — but enjoyable to battle through by oneself.

Final Fantasy XIV remains such an interesting game to me for a variety of reasons. I've just had a completely narrative-centric experience with it off and on for the last few weeks, and that's the complete opposite of what I was doing towards the end of my time with it first time around; the endgame grind was real back then, and while the social aspect of things helped keep you sane while it was going on, there was no getting away from the fact it was still a case of doing the same things over and over again.

I mean, that's still true to a certain extent, but there's also a lot more game to get through before you get to that point — and even then, the nice thing about Final Fantasy XIV is you can quite reasonably stop at any of the main narrative milestones — the end of a X.0 release and the end of an X.5 patch cycle, usually, though the latter tends to have a cliffhanger leading into the next expansion — and feel like you've had a "complete" experience.

But then there's the mixed blessing of the fact that everything in Final Fantasy XIV has some sort of narrative context, so you'll probably find yourself wanting to do more challenging things just so you can resolve some story threads. This was a particular issue back in the days of the original Binding Coil of Bahamut raid cycle, which features some of the best narrative in the 2.X cycle of Final Fantasy XIV, but also some of the most monstrously difficult fights imaginable, even with the gradual nerfing of them over time. I got largely carried through the grand finale of it shortly before Heavensward released, and it was still surprisingly challenging.

Of course, with the "undersized party" option, you can now run stuff at a much higher level than it would normally restrict you to, opening up the possibility of, say, soloing Coil as a level 80 character with top-notch gear. (I don't know if it's possible in my current level 70 state, but I might give it a go before I move on to Heavensward's main scenario in my New Game+ run.)

Anyway. This is all stuff to ponder in future installments of The Returner over on Rice Digital, so I'll refrain from saying too much more. Suffice to say I'm having a good time for the moment, though — and even doing the unsynced stuff I'm starting to get a decent feel for how Samurai plays properly once again. It's a very active DPS class that puts out lots of damage, so I'm looking forward to developing a bit more mastery over it now I'm through the relative cakewalks that was A Realm Reborn in New Game+!

Off to bed for me now, though; Castrum and Prae both took me nearly an hour each to solo, and I don't regret a thing — but I am, however, tired! So sleep claims me. Have a pleasant evening!

I played through Project Lux this evening. I've been meaning to do so for a while, so I thought I'd finally just sit down and take the hour and a bit needed to enjoy it in its entirety. I'm going to write more about the experience over on Rice Digital tomorrow, but for now I thought you might like some initial impressions.

For the unfamiliar, Project Lux is a virtual reality visual novel. The concept is that you are in a courtroom of the future as a member of the jury, and you are being given the opportunity to "relive" the memories of an individual who has been accused of murder.

Said individual was a government worker who had been tasked with approaching Lux, a young woman who lived by herself and worked as an artist. In the world of Project Lux, the vast majority of humanity has outfitted itself with electronic brains and remains almost perpetually plugged into "cyberspace", so Lux is seen as something of an anomaly — and potentially valuable for reasons that become apparent later in the narrative.

You witness the agent's attempts to get to know Lux, and his encouragement of her artistic talents in various ways. Lux, in turn, creates a number of works of art that are seemingly well-received by her adoring digital fans, and so things progress. To say much more would be a spoiler — as I say, the whole thing is only about an hour long, with two possible endings — so I'll leave it at that for now.

What's interesting about Project Lux is that it doesn't feel like any other kind of story-centric game I've played before. In fact, given that it's a largely passive experience, it's more akin to watching a theatrical production than anything else — except rather than sitting in the audience from afar, your viewpoint is from the perspective of one of the two participant characters.

Lux herself has been lovingly motion captured and is well acted (in Japanese), so it's not just a case of watching a mannequin flapping her lips at you. You're watching someone actually doing a genuine performance, and it's fascinating. And interestingly, the nature of the narrative addresses certain aspects of the limitations typically placed on oneself while enjoying a VR experience — particularly in one of the endings, which is very clever.

I'd like to see more stuff like this. It's probably expensive to produce and a lot of people baulk at paying over a few quid for something that's only an hour long, but I'd still love to see more. It's a potentially fascinating new medium of creative expression.

Now I'm intrigued to see how Tokyo Chronos, which I believe is a more substantial VR VN, handles things. Think I need to give my head a bit of a break from VR first though!

Been playing some Deep Rock Galactic with friends for the past couple of evenings — we finally found a game that all of us are actually interested in playing.

I'm impressed, but also a little surprised — this game is apparently three years old, and yet for some reason it only appears to have come to prominence relatively recently. I wonder if this is another case of Among Us, where something becomes popular well after its original release after an article or video in the right place at the right time.

Anyway, if you've not come across Deep Rock Galactic the concept is relatively straightforward. As a space dwarf with a completely unidentifiable accent, you are tasked with completing an endless string of dangerous subterranean missions of various types. Sometimes you might be retrieving alien eggs; others you might simply be mining for specific resources; others still you might be setting up pipelines between drilling equipment and an on-site refinery rocket.

There are four character classes to play, each with their own distinctive loadout that contains primary and secondary weapons, some sort of "traversal" device, and a special weapon of some description. In my case, I've been playing the Engineer class, for example, so in true Engineer tradition he has a shotgun, a grenade launcher and the ability to built gun turrets — plus his traversal ability allows him to create platforms.

The game features procedurally generated levels so even two of the same type of mission in succession don't play identically, and the fully deformable, destructible terrain means that you can often cut your own path to your objectives. One of the classes, the Driller, actually specialises in this.

The game doesn't present you with constant all-out action — at least not on the levels we've been playing on so far — but rather has a nice pace of allowing you to get stuff done, occasionally punctuated by "swarms" of enemies that you have to deal with. In traditional co-op first-person shooter tradition, completing certain objectives also brings on hordes of enemies before you can proceed — in the pipeline-building missions, for example, you have to hold off enemies and repair your pipes while you're pumping the resources back into your refinery rocket.

The whole thing has a nice vaguely low-poly look to its environments, coupled with nicely stylised characters and pleasant use of colour. The voice acting is beyond dreadful, but thankfully this is a game about mechanics rather than story, so you can get used to things pretty quickly! Most importantly for a game like this, it plays well — the first-person controls are responsive and work well, and some nice additions to the usual formula such as the ability to grab and climb ledges make getting around pretty straightforward in most instances.

Crucially for our particular group, who tend to play sporadically at best, there is progression in the game, but it's not the sort of progression where the longer you play the more ridiculously powerful you get. Rather, you unlock perks and can upgrade your weapons with a few additional benefits — but none of these are game-breakingly powerful. As such, if any of us decide that we want to play a bit on our own, we don't risk leaving the others behind in terms of progression; each mission is what it is on its own terms.

I'm impressed so far. I'll be interested to see if it holds our interest in the long term, but signs are good so far.

After complaining about Play-Asia's taxy shipping charges yesterday, I happened to have a look over there today and the "duty paid" options seem to have disappeared completely. This, of course, runs you the risk of being dinged for customs charges when they arrive (plus their obnoxiously expensive "administration fee" they inevitably charge when this happens) but at least it means you're not paying literally double the ticket price!

As such, I… may have ended up ordering a couple of things. Specifically, I ordered the upcoming Nintendo Switch version of the Atelier Mysterious Trilogy DX versions — I knew there'd be a DX release before I got to them, despite the fact I own them all on PS4 already — as well as the Switch packaged release of the first five Grisaia: Phantom Trigger visual novels. I have a nice boxed copy of the first two Phantom Triggers from Kickstarting them, but I was hoping there'd be a Switch release like this — this also suggests that the subsequent volumes will get a cartridge release, too, which makes me happy; having the entirety of Grisaia on physical media is something I'm excited about. (And at some point I absolutely, definitely will get around to The Eden of Grisaia!)

Asian English releases are great… assuming you don't mind paying a bit extra. Sometimes you get a few nice little bonuses like manuals or charms or whatever, but usually you're just paying for the fact you've got a packaged version. That's fine by me, to be honest; as I've talked about numerous times, I place considerably greater value on things that I have on my shelf than which are lost in my download lists, so I'm more than happy to pay a bit extra for the privilege. Plus hopefully it helps send a positive message to the developers and publishers who are doing these releases, of course.

It's a bit of a shame more of these don't make it to western markets, but at least the option exists for a packaged version of a game with English support, even if a western publisher or localiser doesn't pick something up. I suspect it also saves those western publishers a lot of hassle; I can't even begin to imagine what might have happened if Bullet Girls Phantasia had fallen into the hands of Polygon et al.

Anyway, my Switch shelves continue to get new additions, and I don't see that changing any time soon. I'm yet to see anything that makes me want to rush out and buy a PS5 — and outside of that Neptunia thing and Final Fantasy XVI I don't really see that situation changing much, because a lot of the devs I like are already pretty firmly entrenched in the Switch ecosystem.

On that note, it's time to go play some games. Hope you've all had a fine weekend!