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I've been playing Food Girls recently because I want to write something about it for Rice, MoeGamer or both. It's been an interesting experience so far — and surprisingly compelling despite the extremely simplistic gameplay. It's very much a stat-building visual novel/dating sim type thing rather than an actual management sim, but there are enough interesting decisions to make so that it doesn't feel entirely like you're just going through the motions.

Back up a sec. If you're not sure what Food Girls is, it's a Taiwanese game where you play the role of a business consultant who agrees to help out a struggling street market. You work with three particular business owners — who all happen to be cute girls — in an attempt to make their shops more profitable and popular, and are tasked with ensuring they make rent each week, pass the business evaluations and, as the story progresses, successfully fend off some more sinister influences that are attempting to mess things up.

I haven't finished my first playthrough as yet — the game unfolds over three months of game time, and I'm two months in — but I'm already quite attached to the characters. The three main girls are a lot of fun, but the supporting cast are all rather lovely, too. Their personalities are helped along a great deal by some excellent use of Live2D to animate their sprites, and while the whole thing is only partially voice acted (in Japanese) the performers do a good job of reflecting these girls' personalities.

The whole thing is a bit rough round the edges and was obviously developed on the cheap, but it's one of those games where you can feel like there's real passion involved. The people behind this might not have had the budget or resources to be able to fully realise what they wanted to do, but they had a damn good go at it and put out something they could be proud of. Interestingly enough, this is something of a recurring theme in Food Girls' narrative. Write what you know and all that.

Anyway, as I say, there'll be something about this somewhere very soon, so keep an eye out for it! It's definitely worth talking about, but I want to at least finish a playthrough before I pen something properly. Likely in the next day or two!

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I may have re-subbed to Final Fantasy XIV. I've actually been considering doing it for a while — more as a social thing than anything, given the current situation — but I also had the bright idea of using it as a source for a regular column over on Rice Digital. Said column can combine the latest news about the game along with my experiences as a "Returner" (FFVI reference fully intended) who has been away from the game for a few years at this point.

I'm particularly interested to check out a few of the things geared towards people like me, such as the "New Game Plus" mode that was added a while back. I haven't seen a lot of discussion about this, but from what I understand it provides a means of replaying main scenario quests from Heavensward onwards — they're apparently revamping A Realm Reborn considerably before adding it, since there was a noticeable jump in production values and overall quality of pacing once Heavensward arrived.

There's also a fair few things I'd be up for trying again; I always enjoyed attempting to solo Palace of the Dead, for example, so I'll likely try that again, plus that's a good source of experience for levelling. I also quit before Heaven-on-High, the second Deep Dungeon, was added, so that will be all new to me.

And while I'm not in a hurry to come into contact with MMO elitists again, I think I just have to accept that they're part and parcel of the territory with this sort of game, and deal with it. I can at least be a decent person and hopefully set a better example — plus, hey, it makes for some fun "war stories" sometimes, anyway.

I'm going to limit my time on the game to maybe one or two "scheduled" sessions per week, though. I don't want it taking away from other things I want to do, so I'm going to treat it as if it were, say, a regular gaming session with friends on a weekly basis rather than something to consume my life with. We'll just have to see how that goes!

I don't know how many other "content creators" (ugh) do this, but I'm quite fond of watching my own videos back, and in particular I find them quite good to fall asleep to.

I realise this may sound like I'm boring myself to sleep, but actually it's more about the… familiarity, I guess? I remember the experience of playing the game and of recording the video, but not necessarily the details, so playing one of them back gives me the feeling that I don't need to actually watch it, but I can just listen to what I was talking about, accompanied by the sounds of the game. I've been told by others I have a fairly soothing voice, so I guess I'm just experiencing that for myself!

It's kind of strange to think about, though. I used to despise my own voice. When I was a kid, my parents used to get me to record my piano exam pieces onto cassette for my grandparents, which I didn't have a problem with, but I always loathed having to record the introductions for them… and I hated listening back to them even more.

I think it was mostly my accent I didn't like… or perhaps what I felt was something of a lack of an accent. I thought I sounded weird when I was talking, and listening to myself now, that side of my voice which I disliked — which I'm struggling to truly define — has definitely softened a great deal. Or perhaps I'm simply more tolerant of myself. I'm not conscious of having deliberately changed anything about the way I talk since childhood, but I'm certainly a lot happier to listen to myself now than I once was!

Anyway, having uploaded ten new videos to YouTube today, now I have just the thing to fall asleep to this week, and I can do it in the name of checking them over, too! Watch out for them over the course of the next couple of weeks.

Getting really into Groove Coaster Wai Wai Party!!!! now, ever since I discovered the trick to playing rhythm games on the television and getting the same "I'm playing an instrument!" feeling as I do when playing them on handhelds.

It's weirdly simple, really: simply put the controller down on a flat surface and play it more like a keyboard instrument rather than relying on your thumbs. If you're anything like me, your fingers are more responsive and reactive than your thumbs are, so it's easier to hit things in time.

You will also want to learn how to play according to the sound of the music rather than the on-screen markers, and also learn how to tune out the sound of your own fingers banging on the controller. The latter in particular is weirdly distracting, so you absolutely must maintain some Zen-like focus in listening to the music and not the noises that are happening in the room.

I'm surprised I hadn't discovered this little trick sooner, as I've tended to eschew a lot of rhythm games on the big screen precisely because none of them quite recreated the same feeling Project Diva F on the Vita gave me. But now… now, with Groove Coaster I am well and truly feeling it. I have also discovered that Hard mode on Groove Coaster is absolutely "my level" — I can S-rank a couple of songs, but I have room for improvement on a lot of them.

In most cases, it's simply a case of learning the songs a bit better, since most of them are relatively new to me — though there are a couple that have very fast note patterns that I need to figure out a reliable means of hitting. At least with Groove Coaster's flexible control scheme, you have the scope to do them with both hands rather than expecting one hand or finger to move at a ridiculous velocity.

I can perform pretty reliably on the Kemono Friends theme and Kizuna Ai's performance of AiAiAi, though, so that's an important milestone already. I sense the tracks from Darius are going to give me a bit of grief for a while though!

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Another week over and done with! And I concluded it with a victory at the weekly team "social hour" on Teams, where we were playing the Pictionary-esque Drawasaurus, but with video game names. Here are a few highlights from the session. The first two are my excellent work.

I think we all nailed the essence of the things we were supposed to be referencing!

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Definitely "feeling it" now; I'm feeling pretty zonked out this evening, so I'm looking forward to the upcoming weekend. I think I might have to make it a nice quiet one with little to no commitments — I have a couple of Evercade vids I didn't manage to get recorded last weekend, but they won't take too long, so I'll get them out of the way and then spend the rest of the time chilling out, I think.

I don't want to describe it as "stress" because I've had stress and this doesn't feel that way. Although I guess it may just be a different sort of stress — a feeling of being kind of overwhelmed and not sure what to make of the situation in which you find yourself. I've spoken before about the worry that something might be "too good to be true" and that is, of course, hard to shake — but more than anything I think it's just a feeling that I need to adjust, get into the groove of things and realise that yes, what I've been hoping would happen really is genuinely happening!

I don't mean to be vague but that really is the best way of describing how I'm feeling right now! It's all a bit overwhelming and tiring, but it's not upsetting me because I know the reasons for it are all positive. It's quite an odd feeling in many ways, and I'm sure it will pass — but if I seem a bit "absent" at any point, there's your explanation!

I'm off to play some PlayStation in bed and drink hot chocolate. Pretty sure those things will help.

The overall company where I'm working now has been going through a bit of a hiring spree lately from the sound of things, and I had a chat with the latest person to join the team earlier. He was genuinely hyped up to be a part of everything, and it was just a delight to see; while I tend to be the sort of person who finds getting visibly excited to be rather difficult, his externally presented feelings are what I've been feeling on the inside for the last week or so.

Things have been going well so far, and there are a lot of interesting and exciting projects for me to work on in the pipeline besides just keeping the site ticking along. I'm especially looking forward to getting involved with some retro gaming-related work, and hopefully there will be something to talk about in that regard very soon; you folks will likely be among the first to know about it once we get things up and running!

It all still doesn't quite feel real just yet, and there's a little bit in the back of my mind that worries about all this being suddenly snatched away from me at the worst possible moment. It's happened to me before, after all — hello USgamer — so I can't help but worry a bit. But I should stay positive; I'm having a good time at the moment, I actually genuinely like the people I work with rather than simply tolerating their presence, and what I've been doing so far seems to be appreciated by the people who matter. So hopefully there's nothing I should be worrying about!

Fingers crossed, eh. It'd be nice to finally feel settled before I turn 40!

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The last week and a bit is starting to catch up with me a bit! It's been a whirlwind of new activity and new people and I'm just starting to feel it a bit, I think. Not in a bad or stressful way — it's just I'm feeling a tad tired this evening and the temptation to go zonk out in bed is significant.

To be far, it's already 10pm so there'd be nothing wrong with going to do that right now. There's nothing in particular I want to achieve for the rest of this evening, so I think it'd be perfectly acceptable to go sit in bed, play Final Fantasy V for an hour or so and then go to sleep.

I have to say, it's a pleasant novelty to feel this sort of satisfied tiredness after the working day. I feel like over the years I've had a lot more in the way of "I can't wait for this to be over" sort of situations, but right now I'm actually looking forward to each new day and what it brings — and there are even more exciting things ahead that I haven't had the opportunity to start on yet.

I suspect in the long term I'm going to have to carefully find a good "balance" between the different aspects of my life in order to remain sane and satisfied with everything! But for now, things seem to be going quite nicely indeed, thank you very much. And I'm very grateful for that; I know not everyone is in such a fortunate position, least of all as the world is going through what it's been going through for some time now.

I don't really have anything more coherent to say right now, I'm afraid; I think my brain may have already preceded me up the stairs and gone to bed already!

Working at home for so long has given me more of an appreciation for my cats than ever before. The both of them are absolutely magnificent creatures, and I love them to bits.

Meg, the older of the two — and possibly the mother or sister of our dearly departed Ruby — has been doing well recently; the vet had been nagging us to put her on a diet as she'd been putting on a fair amount of weight, so we've been trying carefully controlled portions of a specific diet food… and it's been working for her. She's lost a lost of weight and seems much happier and healthier now. She's a lot more playful than she was; it's a good job I overcame my fear of being bitten and/or scratched by cats some time ago!

The reason for overcoming that fear is Patti, the younger of the two, who we picked up from the local shelter when Meg was pining for Ruby after we lost her. Patti was a tiny little thing when we first got her but she's grown to be enormous. She doesn't pig out on food like Meg does if we let her, so she's just big rather than fat; I think she might actually be slightly bigger than Meg down. She's definitely at least five times the idiot, and very fond of flying, biting leaps to demonstrate affection. I learned quite quickly after we got her that these are nothing to be afraid of.

The pair of them are wonderful companions, excellent listeners and an enormous source of comfort. Occasionally the thought crosses my mind that we won't be together forever, and that makes me a bit sad, but the important thing is to enjoy the love and companionship we share right now. I cannot imagine life without these little buggers now, and I hope — no, I'm pretty sure I know — we make them as happy as they make us.

Get off my desk, Patti, I need to click a thing with the mouse and you are in the way.

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Got a fair bit done today. Have been kind of feeling a bit dazed and confused for the last couple of days what with all the chaos of settling in to the new job. Doesn't quite feel real yet, but I'm sure that feeling will pass! I do know that I'm looking forward to getting stuck in this week — having spent a significant proportion of last week meeting the other people I'm working with (via video chat) this week I can really knuckle down and focus on things. And I've got some great ideas ready to go — plus some stuff to get my team working on too.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, MoeGamer and YouTube will not be going anywhere! MoeGamer will continue (and probably emphasise) its focus on stuff that has passed people by, been out for a while or is outright retro, while my work at Rice Digital will focus a lot more on slightly more "current" stuff — though that isn't to say there's no scope for looking at some "classics" along the way. Either way, each site will have its own distinct feeling about it, and I hope you'll follow along with both!

In other news, I finished reading through the three Atari books by Jamie Lendino, focusing on the 2600, the Atari 8-bit range and the ST range. Of the three, I think the ST one was probably the most comprehensive, but all three were pretty good. I do have to admit, by the end of the 2600 one I was thinking to myself "I could have written this and probably picked a more interesting selection of games", but all three books were enjoyable nonetheless. It's a slight shame that they were all written from an American perspective, as the Atari experience in Europe had some notable differences — plus that's what I grew up with — but I guess that's something there's always scope for me to explore at some point in the future!

Aside from that, not much to report. I've left the house approximately once over the course of the last seven days, not that this is anything unusual in the current situation. I have set up my living room nicely for both work and recording things, though; today I spent several hours making use of said setup to record videos and it works well, so I'm pleased about that. I have a few more ideas to tidy things up a bit — most notably the rats' nest of HDMI cables that are crying out for some switchboxes — but for now I'm happy with how things are laid out for both my professional and my personal life!

Anyway. My brain's kind of fried so I'll sign off there. S-Rank Patrons don't forget to leave your questions on the post I linked at the top, and everyone have a lovely evening!