Weighed myself this morning and I've apparently lost about 2.5kg since last week. I'm going to go ahead and attribute at least some of that to natural variation from day to day — along with the fact that you usually lose a decent chunk in your first week of dieting in earnest — but that's still something to be very happy about. I'm not counting on progress like that every week, but it's definitely a good start.

Counting the calories hasn't proven to be too difficult, particularly because both Andie and I are doing it, and we've managed to find a number of things that we actually like eating that are well within our respective calorie "limits" for the day. We've had some nicely varied lunches and dinners, we can still enjoy a sandwich (we both love a sandwich) and there are even nice treats that we can fit into our daily allowance, which means neither of us feel like we're really missing out on anything.

The key, as I've seen with all sorts of different diets I've tried over the last few years, is planning ahead and trying not to be too impulsive. Figure out what you're going to eat for your main meals each day, then you can plan the rest of your day around that. If you know what your dinner is going to take out of your allowance, you can figure out whether or not you can squeeze that chocolate bar or cake in. If you're sensible, you probably can, and given how much we both like chocolate bars and cakes, that's a good thing.

It's still early days but I'm feeling positive about this — and with my general mood improved thanks to the new job and all manner of other things, I'm feeling pretty good in general. It's a nice change. Here's hoping things continue that way for a long time to come.

Hello! I've really enjoyed doing the last couple of Q&A videos so I'd love to get some more questions from you all — particularly those of you I don't see in the comments all that much!

I'm planning to record the next Q&A video towards the end of the month — likely the weekend of the 30th — so get your questions in before then by leaving a comment on this post.

You can ask anything… within reason, obviously! If you'd like to see some specific parts of my game collection, just say so. If you'd like me to attempt to capture my cats on camera, I can probably make that happen. Or if you just want to ask my opinion on something that you haven't seen me cover on the channel or on MoeGamer, that's all good too.

Get your questions in before January 30th by leaving a comment on this post. I'll leave this as a Sticky post on the Patreon page so if you can't think of anything now and just want to come back later, just stop by https://patreon.com/petedavison and it should be right there for you.

Thanks for your support, and I'm looking forward to some great questions!

First week at the new gig done and dusted, and I've had a good time. Like, a properly good time, not just what you say when you start a new job in a tedious office and you really don't give a shit about your work or any of the people you find yourself in contact with on a daily basis. Nope, a proper good time. I've done some good work, I've had appreciation and compliments for my good work and I work with some great people. So thumbs up to that; here's hoping it all continues to be happy and lovely.

I'm ready for the weekend though! I feel like I've been more "actively engaged" in my work this week than I have been for most of last year, which makes for a satisfying feeling at the end of the day, but also a need for a nice rest! I'm still finding time to get MoeGamer and YouTube stuff done, though; although in the same field as the day job now, there's enough "different" about those two things to make them still feel like they're just "things I like doing" rather than "obligation". Which is nice. Hopefully that will continue; there's always that little voice in the back of my head saying "doing what you love for your job is a sure-fire way to start hating that thing", but I just slap that motherfucker down. He don't know shit about ass.

This weekend, I'm planning to do a bit of recording. It'll be a good opportunity for some further tests of my new living room setup, which is much more comfortable for both writing and making videos. I will also get a wallpaper and Q&A post done for S-Rank Patrons! In fact, I'll get that done first before I do anything else tomorrow morning. (Or more likely afternoon. I suspect we will be having a nice long lie-in tomorrow.)

Anyway. Time for bed, hot chocolate and Final Fantasy V. Hope you've all had a good week. And if you haven't? Well, now it's over. Enjoy your weekend!

Final Fantasy V is a lot harder than I remember! Granted, I haven't played it a ton in the past, but I have gotten a little further than the point I'm currently at in my bedtime playthroughs… and I'm sure I don't remember the bosses being as tough as they've been in this run!

"Tough" might not be quite the right word, because I've been managing to make it through the encounters by fiddling around with the Job system. This is certainly something that was absolutely necessary to do in Final Fantasy III but I was always under the impression that Final Fantasy V handled things a little more elegantly in this regard. Or perhaps I'm simply using an inelegant solution to a problem, and there's also an elegant one out there.

The best example is the boss I just beat: Liquid Fire. With the lineup I'd been playing with up until that point — Knight, Berserker, Sorcerer, Summoner — I'd been getting through random encounters just fine without any difficulty, but the boss absolutely obliterated everyone… except the Sorcerer, who took very little damage from the boss' fire attacks but was also completely incapable of hitting it in anything other than its "humanoid" form. This meant that once you got it into its "whirlwind" or "hand" forms, which seemingly require magic damage of some description to get it to morph back into "humanoid", the fight was impossible to win with just the Sorcerer left standing.

So my solution? Get in there with a party of four Sorcerers, one of which had previously spent some time as a Black Mage and another of which had previously spent some time as a Summoner. It worked; they took very little damage as Sorcerers, but were still able to dish out damage in the forms you apparently can't hit with physical attacks. It was satisfying when I finally beat the boss, but I couldn't help but wonder if what I'd just done counted as "cheesing" it somewhat.

I guess it doesn't really matter. If it works, it works, huh?

Settling in to the new job nicely now. Getting to know people and enjoying the fact that although the company as a whole is one of a reasonable size, there's none of the "big corporate" feel that frustrated me so much at the last place. We have meetings and conference calls, but they last for two or three minutes. No-one wastes their time reading out project management tools; it's just a quick and efficient "hello everyone, anyone got anything that everyone else needs to know?" before letting everyone go on their way.

Anyway. I shall refrain from talking further about that for now because that's not why any of you are here. Suffice to say for now that things are going well and — hopefully — this will be a good thing for me in the long term. Fingers crossed.

I posted a full playthrough of one of my all-time favourite adventure games over on YouTube today. Rise of the Dragon is one of the first DOS PC games I remember playing, and it's one that I'm pretty sure most of my family got involved with — I certainly remember playing it with my brother, and it would be unlike my mother not to get stuck in to an adventure game of some sort. I also remember playing it with my school friends.

I find it quite amusing how short it is. I remember us getting stuck for weeks at a time on it, though I do remember beating it — I have an oddly vivid memory of my friend Ed and I shouting "I AM BAHUMAT" [sic] at one another, in reference to the game's finale sequence. I do not, however, remember successfully beating the "arcade" sequences in the game before; I'd normally just die deliberately five times so you can skip them, but on the video I actually cleared them both legitimately.

I'll have to revisit Heart of China, the other game from the same people using the same engine, at some point. I definitely beat that one back in the day, too, though I don't remember it nearly as well as I do Rise of the Dragon for some reason. I do remember thinking Nurse Kate was hot though.

Anyway. It may not be late, but I think it is bedtime. Hope you've all had an acceptable Wednesday; now we're all halfway through the week, hooray! S-Rank Patrons, I haven't forgotten about you — I've been a little distracted getting settled in to the new day job though 🙂

Been enjoying Final Fantasy V as the bedtime game for the past few days. I've started this game lots of times but never really gotten further than a few hours into it, so I'm curious to see how things go. So far I'm enjoying it a lot; I particularly appreciate how the Job system is rewarding a willingness to go into a situation with perhaps an unconventional lineup of combatants — indeed, for a boss fight last night, I was really struggling with my "default" early-game lineup of Knight, Thief, White Mage and Black Mage, but then I changed everyone to Knight and absolutely obliterated said boss.

I suspect things will get easier and party lineups can be more flexible as the game progresses. The trouble in the early game is that you're so lacking in HP that mages can maybe take one or two hits before they're dead, making them a little impractical; however, I did spend enough time earning job levels on them that I can cast some fun spells while on other Jobs now, which is nice.

Thus far the world has been interesting to explore, and it gets you right in there with a selection of vehicles to fiddle around with and access various different areas. It suffers a little from NES-era Final Fantasy syndrome, where you're expected to pootle around the world you can access until you stumble across something potentially interesting — but one could argue that has always been an important part of early top-down RPGs. I know certainly since taking a look at the early Ultima games and their knockoffs such as Questron I've come to appreciate or at least understand the way some of the earlier Final Fantasy games and their ilk do things.

Mostly I'm looking forward to showing Andie things like Gilgamesh in their original context; as a Final Fantasy XIV devotee, she's been in contact with a lot of stuff from early Final Fantasy games through that title's numerous homage sequences, but not seen many of them in their original context. I have to confess there are a number of things I'm curious about, too; I've somehow managed to remain mostly unspoiled on the majority of Final Fantasy V's plot so I'm intrigued to see where it goes in the long term.

And on that note, it's time for a mug of hot chocolate and a bit more grinding. A pleasant evening to ya!

I'll say this again at the end, but please keep quiet about everything mentioned in this post until I've announced things publicly tomorrow. Thank you for your understanding!

All righty, here's the deal with my new job: starting today (well, likely with the first visible "result" tomorrow) I'm the Site Editor of Rice Digital — https://ricedigital.co.uk.

If you're not familiar with Rice Digital, this is a site that is focused on Asian video games and popular culture, emphasis on the games side of things. Rice has always had a store attached to it that typically sells limited editions of PQube's games, but the scope beyond that has varied somewhat over the years. Right now they've got preorders for the upcoming Gal*Gun Returns and Root Film; in the past, they've also done various bits of merchandise, figures and the like, and I believe the plan is to head back in that direction at some point.

Anyway. My role is on the editorial side of things. Aside from the store, Rice is a site with things to read on it! It's been largely "leaderless" for a few months but has been doing steady traffic thanks to a talented bunch of freelancers who have been keeping news stories and features flowing in the absence of anyone actually steering the ship. I will be taking charge of that rowdy bunch and writing a bunch of my own stuff, with a mind to carving out the site a nice, distinctive online identity as a place where people can go to find good-quality writing, news stories, interviews and other interesting stuff that relates to Japanese and Asian video games and broader popular culture.

I had several meetings today where we talked about various ways in which we can potentially achieve that, so I've now got to figure out ways to make those work and see how things go. As such, the overall "format" of the site is likely to be somewhat in flux while we get certain things established, but we already nailed down some interesting ideas in our initial meetings today, and I have plenty more brewing at the back of my mind. Long-term, hopefully I'll be expanding into doing some video work also — both fronting it and working with the freelancers to ensure we have some stuff to offer the audience.

This shouldn't affect MoeGamer and my work on YouTube, since the purpose of MoeGamer and the purpose of Rice Digital are both quite different from one another, despite sharing a subject area. The people in charge are well familiar with what I do — indeed, it's one of the main reasons they hired me — and have said that things should be absolutely fine to continue as they are; I'll just obviously have to ensure that things I'm doing in one place aren't cannibalising the other. I don't see that being a problem, however; if anything the two will support one another well. Obviously I will let you all know if anything is likely to change, but signs are positive right now. So thumbs up for that.

With all that in mind, I encourage you all to follow Rice Digital in your… reading things of choice, follow them on social media (which I won't be in charge of, as there's a Person For That) and check in every so often to see what the team and I have been up to. I should be starting to edit and post some things on the site from tomorrow, so watch out for my name — and be a good Internet citizen and like, comment, share and all that other gubbins so I get to make numbers go up and the people who pay me money like me more.

Last thing: I haven't publicly announced this yet — I'll likely do so tomorrow — so please don't say anything "out in the open" (on Twitter etc.) about this as yet. Once I've shared the news publicly on Twitter, it's all good, but until then, keep shtum if you please!

Once again, a big thank you for all your support; as I mentioned above, the work I've been doing on MoeGamer and YouTube has played a big role in getting me to this position — and your ongoing support of what I do in those places has been a big motivating factor in holding myself to a high standard and putting out work that I'm genuinely proud of. In a very real sense, you've all helped me get this potentially ideal day job — now I just have to jump in and seize this opportunity firmly so I can prove myself to the money men!

A sincere thanks; couldn't have done it without you all.

It's the end of another weekend, and tomorrow is a bit of a "new beginning" for me in a number of ways. Hopefully 2021 in general will mark a bunch of "new beginnings"; I've been saying I want to achieve fresh starts in a whole variety of areas for a long time, and so far I have a reasonably good feeling about this year being a good one in which to do just that.

So far the diet has been going smoothly. Carefully planning out calorie usage each day means I can enjoy myself while still being sensible, and the few areas where I've managed to shave off a few calories (the Tassimo coffees vs. Nespresso lattes, for example) are really helping. When I feel up to it, I'll incorporate some exercise in there, too, as I'm certain that will help, also. Other things on my mind first, though!

I'm pleased with the PlayStation Classic setup I've managed to achieve so far. I've got a wide selection of games from a ton of platforms on there, including Neo Geo, which the system appears to emulate beautifully. The Neo Geo ROM set I have seems to have a number of games that just don't work, unfortunately, but a lot of these games are notoriously temperamental, so it's not altogether surprising. I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out with the troublesome ones at some point — even if it means finding a more up-to-date set of ROM dumps.

Other stuff works perfectly. I did try Atari 8-bit and Philips G7000/Magnavox Odyssey 2 earlier, but I can't find a way of mapping keyboard commands to the joypads, so I think those are probably out of the question for the moment. I'm sure hooking up a USB keyboard will work, so I might investigate that at some point. For now, there's plenty of other stuff to be getting on with!

To put the thing through its paces, I've unofficially adopted Final Fantasy V as a bedtime game. It's a Final Fantasy I've never actually beaten but always been curious about, plus it's something Andie will be interested in, since there have been a bunch of FFV references in Final Fantasy XIV to date. When I'm done with that, I've got a whole host of RPG goodness stored on there just waiting to go — stretching right back to the NES, but with a fine selection of titles that I never got the opportunity to try on the original PlayStation back in the day taking pride of place. (Plus a few I loved playing back in the day, too — there's several I'm keen to revisit with more mature eyes.)

Feeling reasonably good right now, then. A bit nervous about tomorrow, but I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about! S-Rank Patrons, I'll have a new wallpaper and a Q&A prompt post up for you very soon — watch out for them in the next couple of days and/or when I remember to do them!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and stay safe as always.

Been fiddling around with the PlayStation Classic today and think I've got the whole "adding new stuff to it and customising things" pretty much sorted. I got an OTG adapter and a 128GB flash drive, and all seems to be working fine with those; 128GB is more than enough for most things I want to do with the system for now, since it is enough space to store complete(ish) libraries for most pre-PlayStation platforms, and plenty more room for PS1 games.

I've been sorting out disc images for a bunch of PS1 games this evening, including a variety of things that I always wanted to play back in the day but was never able to — primarily thanks to the fact that a lot of them didn't cross the pond from North America to Europe. Given how pricey some of these games are — and the fact that you're always rolling the dice a bit with preowned CD-based games — this seems like the best means of enjoying these games right now.

I've been impressed with how easy Project Eris, RetroArch and EmulationStation have been to use once the initial setup was done with. I had an initial hiccup with Project Eris being unable to add new PlayStation games — format your flash drive in exFAT format, not NTFS as the documentation says, to fix this — but now all seems to be working perfectly smoothly.

One thing I do want to experiment with is whether or not home computer emulation will also work on this thing. There's no reason why it shouldn't, but hooking up a USB keyboard would be a bit of a faff. I need to investigate whether it's possible to map controller buttons to keyboard inputs on home computer platforms — I'm sure it's possible to, but I just haven't tried it yet. Once I figure that out, there'll be some 8- and 16-bit micro goodness going on that flash drive, too, I'm sure.

The cool thing about this is that I'm effectively making an enormously portable little gizmo that is absolutely rammed to the rafters with every retro game you could think of. I've argued against this when talking about the Evercade and I do still believe curated collections are a much better means of celebrating retro games, but having one device with a huge library available at the touch of a button is certainly convenient, I won't lie. I'm picturing it being particularly useful if we're ever allowed to go and visit friends again; with just one device, we'll all be able to play a whole bunch of games that we used to love on a variety of platforms, without having to switch lots of cables around. That will be super-fun.

That and I'll be able to play all my dream RPGs in bed. Looking forward to that. Question now is: where to begin…?

In celebration of the last day of my (now previous) day job, the wife and I had a bit of a quiet evening tonight. We had a nice Marks & Spencers curry box and played some The Adventures of Willy Beamish, then we have a fairly relaxed weekend ahead of us.

Our desire for a quiet evening together meant that there was no Atelier Ayesha piece today, but instead I'll post one tomorrow, as aforementioned wife is busy doing Final Fantasy XIV things for most of the weekend so I have plenty of time to write and record. It'll be the first test of my new living room setup for recording, too, so that will be interesting.

I also spent a significant proportion of today installing "Project Eris" on the PlayStation Classic that my brother got us for Christmas. Normally I'm not big on modding these mini consoles and prefer to keep them stock, but the PlayStation Classic is renowned as being a great multi-purpose emulation platform, so I've loaded it up with a bunch of ROMs and now we have every retro game we could ever want easily accessible in the bedroom. Which is nice! I've got a bigger flash drive and an OTG cable coming tomorrow so I can use it to its full potential; the bigger flash drive will allow for more larger games (like actual PlayStation games) while the OTG cable allows you to run said flash drive off the USB power port rather than the controller port, meaning you can play two-player games again.

Anyway. More on that another time, I'm sure. I start my new job next week — a little more on that once I'm settled in and ready to talk about what I'm up to! For now, I hope you all have a pleasant weekend. I'm certainly planning to.