I've rearranged my living room setup somewhat. Gone is the coffee table which used to play host to my computer keyboard, mic stand and (when I'm recording) tripod holding the camera, replaced with a slightly smaller wheeled table that is about a thousand times more comfortable to sit at and use. I have actual legroom now, I can sit back on the sofa while recording, and the slightly raised height of the table over the coffee table feels way more ergonomic. I made a good choice.

It's nice when little things like this make you happy. This is a small change to my daily living situation, but with how much time I spend in the living room playing games, writing things and looking at the Internet, this is going to have a positive impact on me. I'll be giving it a go with recording a few videos over the weekend; the only thing I'm not totally convinced about at the moment is the fact that, by virtue of it being a wheeled table rather than something sitting on the floor, it's a bit more prone to "jiggling" around if I'm typing or using the mouse, and that could potentially be a pain with recording facecam for the videos. But camera stabilisation is a thing, so it's entirely possible it won't be a problem — that's partly why I want to record some stuff at the weekend.

There's also a nice little "tablet holder"-type thing at the back of it, which means I'll be able to make good use of my tablet, perhaps as a secondary display for the computer while recording or streaming. Plus the fact it's a bit smaller means I'm less likely to cover it with junk, which will make my wife happy. I call that a win all round, really; between my new pair of slippers and my new table, 2021 is getting off to a fine start so far!

Not really sure what to say after the chaos that apparently unfolded in the US earlier. These are strange and scary times we live in, for sure. I encourage everyone reading this to stay safe, and don't be afraid to just get the hell off the Internet if it all becomes a bit too much. Nobody would blame you right now.

It's peculiar to think that we're almost certainly living in a period of time that will be of historical significance in the future. Between the Coronavirus pandemic and the political upheaval in the US — not to mention all manner of other things going on all over the world — 2020 (and, judging by today, 2021) are going to be years that people study for years to come. It's fascinating, but also slightly horrifying.

Anyway. I'm not sure there's much I can say right now that won't sound flippant, so, as I say, I encourage all of you — American or not — to stay safe, stay sane and do whatever you need to do to put yourself in a good place mentally right now. If that means signing up for a Japanese eShop account and downloading Rod-Land, then so be it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find some Japanese eShop credit…

First couple of days of calorie-counting have gone just fine. I actually haven't found myself craving things anywhere near as much as I expected to coming off the Christmas binge — and I suspect at least some of that is down to making a few choices that might seem a bit counterintuitive when it comes to dieting. I guess it remains to be seen if they actually work.

One thing I did was deliberately swap out sugar-free Pepsi Max for full-sugar Pepsi. Now, they say that you shouldn't drink your calories, but I've actually felt… weirdly better after a couple of days of drinking these in moderation (and counting the calories) rather than just glugging through a bunch of sugar-free stuff each day. Ideally, I'd drink plenty of water — and I do intend to work on that — but I've suspected for a while that artificial sweeteners perhaps aren't the greatest thing for you, and that they perhaps don't entirely agree with me. Sugar isn't great for you either, of course — but if you have it in moderation and account for it in the rest of your diet it's arguably more "natural" than whatever the heck Aspartame really is.

One of the reasons I've done this is because I can often feel satisfied after a simple drink. I remember reading in a few places a while back that on many occasions where you think you're feeling "hungry", you're actually feeling thirsty. And if glugging a 140-calorie can of Pepsi means I don't scarf down 500 calories worth of cake or crisps, I call that an improvement.

We've also replaced our Nespresso machine with a Tassimo recently. Andie's wanted one of these for a while, so with some Christmas vouchers we finally picked one up, and it makes really nice coffees. Notably, because it uses some sort of "creamer pods" rather than requiring you to warm or froth milk manually, the amount of calories a Tassimo latte has is literally half what having one made with milk and a Nespresso pod is. And the Cadbury hot chocolate pods are both tasty and considerably less in calories than making "proper" hot chocolate, too. So those are all means of shaving off some calories, too.

On top of all that, we're going to try the odd meal replacement shake — not as a strict following of a meal replacement diet, but rather as another means of carefully controlling calories. Again, chugging a 200-calorie meal replacement shake is better than gorging on croissants — though the nice thing about doing things this way is that if I do fancy a croissant at some point, so long as I account for it in my daily countings, I can have one or two.

Anyway. Early days yet. We'll see how I feel in a week or two, but for now I'm feeling quite positive. Here's hoping it work in the long term!

I learned something today: that M2, the folks who have become so well-known for their excellent modernisations of classic retro games (particularly shooters) are also responsible for the excellent E-Mote animation system used in, among other things, Sayori's Nekopara and Love³ visual novels. (This also explains why it put in a surprise appearance in the Sega Ages Herzog Zwei release on Switch a while back.)

I'm not sure how I never knew this before, given that there's a press release on their site that dates back to 2013. But the credits of Nekopara vol. 4, which I finished off this evening, are the first time I remember seeing them directly credited for the engine — and yes, it's the same M2; their logo was right there in the credits.

If you're unfamiliar with E-Mote, it's a Live2D-esque engine that allows 2D art to be manipulated in a "3D-like" style. This allows for smooth animation of otherwise static artwork, allowing for transitions between gestures, movement beyond simply sliding the image around, and generally much more expressive characters without needing to switch to fully polygonal models. Sayori from Neko Works is the undisputed master of this engine, since the animation and movement in both the aforementioned Nekopara and Love³ is some of the most impressively natural I've ever seen in a visual novel, but a few other devs have made use of it, too — I've seen it used in visual novels from Qureate, for example, and M2 even used it themselves in the tutorial screens for Herzog Zwei, as noted above.

This may not be big news to you (or news at all — it's entirely possible that I simply just missed it over the years!) but it's something that makes me happy for reasons I can't quite pin down. I think it's the feeling of "coming together" that it represents; M2 make modern ports of retro games that I love, but they're also responsible for one of the most significant pieces of tech in modern visual novels — which I also love. How many other devs out there can boast quite such a diverse portfolio?

You may recall a while back I had an abortive attempt at counting calories for weight loss and all that. Then Christmas happened, so it all felt a bit pointless. But now it's the new year, which is the obligatory time to at least try and make things vaguely better for yourself, so from tomorrow I'm going to be trying the whole calorie-counting thing again. I'm also going to try and get some more regular exercise in because my back and knees are absolutely killing me and I suspect it's mostly from lack of activity during lockdown.

I'm going to start off exercising with Fitness Boxing I think, rather than Ring Fit Adventure. Ring Fit is good — and a genuinely fun game to boot — but I think the full-body thing is a bit much for me to jump right into with the state I'm in right now. Fitness Boxing, meanwhile, starts a bit more gently and also requires a lot less space, so in the early days of developing good habits that will help with motivation.

If anyone reading this has picked up Fitness Boxing 2 and knows if it has any worthwhile additions over the original, do please let me know; Misty already let me know that it's mostly an incremental upgrade that adds a very welcome ability to remove specific exercises from routines if you so desire, but if anyone has any detailed thoughts and experiences to share I'd love to hear them.

It's off to bed with me now. New podcast episode tomorrow — please look forward to it!

Podcast recording day today — Chris and I have a good chat about the games we're looking forward to playing in the new year. I was a little concerned I wouldn't have much to talk about because initially I wasn't sure I could even name that many games that were coming out in 2021 — but as it turns out, we had plenty to talk about, even without delving into our respective backlogs too much.

There are lots of exciting games coming up over the course of just the next few months, so I'm excited to explore them in detail, along with continuing to explore the wonderful world of retro gaming. And the concept of "retro" gaming is expanding more and more as we move onwards into yet another generation of consoles — so that's pretty exciting. It's certainly giving a whole bunch of stuff I have fond memories of from 20 years ago or so a whole new lease on life.

I'm also excited about starting Atelier Escha & Logy, and Nekopara vol. 4 has been as charming as you'd expect so far. Will try and polish that off over the course of the next couple of days so I can give it the write-up it deserves — then onwards to more Atelier and even more "Bizarre" lands. Good stuff. I'm feeling positive about this new year; it just remains to be seen whether I can keep up that energy, I guess!

Did I miss a day? I didn't think I had, but I think I had. Oh well. I'll figure it out. Either way, a very happy new year to you all!

Insert usual platitude about 2020 being a very tough year for us all here. It has, but it's also been a year of opportunities in some strange and interesting ways, too. I certainly won't be missing 2020, but I also achieved a whole bunch despite everything else that was going on, so I can't complain too much. I certainly wasn't hit hard by the whole pandemic thing in the same way that some people were, so I should be thankful for that.

Tomorrow will be a quiet day on the site; there'll be an Evercade A to Z video and a brief public Happy New Year message, then I'll post the next Atelier MegaFeature piece on Saturday again. Normal business should resume thereafter!

We made it, everyone. Rest well tonight, and face the new year full of piss and vinegar or something. Having drank a large bottle of raspberry lemonade Hooch this evening (I'm a classy chick, me) I certainly have the "piss" part covered.

Happy new year — and thank you, as always, for all your support throughout 2020 and beyond.

I've got plans for another big feature coming soon. I'll likely put it under the "MegaFeatures" section of the site, but it won't take as long to get through as the Atelier one, and the nature of the games involved mean I can run it alongside the Atelier stuff easily. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, and I'm finally in a decent position to do it.

I love Bizarre Creations' work, and my recent acquisition of (and subsequent loss of) an original Xbox reminded me quite how much. So I think it's high time I gave them some love — going right back to their earliest days as Powerslave Developments and Raising Hell Software, onwards through their surprisingly arcadey Formula One games for PlayStation 1 and into their most well-known work: the Metropolis Street Racer/Project Gotham series.

There are plenty of interesting games to talk about along the way, and not just driving games, either; the team's first few games were action games for various 8- and 16-bit platforms — including a couple of memorable titles for Psygnosis — and they also put together the rather fun third-person shooter The Club, and even a James Bond game shortly before their demise at the hands of Activision.

I'm going to kick this off in the new year because it feels odd to start something like this right before we roll over into a new year, but expect some ongoing pieces on the subject in the very near future, beginning with Combat Crazy on the Commodore 64, and eventually ending up with James Bond: Blood Stone for PS3 and Xbox 360. I think it's going to be a lot of fun!

Now I finished Atelier Ayesha. I like the fact that it keeps going after you beat the "main" story; it allows you to use all of your remaining time to try and hoover up as many events as you want, and pursue the character-specific endings. I managed to get two of them knocked out — Regina and Wilbell — so I'm pleased with that; there are at least three others, to my knowledge, some of which require some tough fights, so which may be best saved for a New Game Plus run.

I really enjoyed that game. Obviously there will be a lot more words on it on MoeGamer very soon, but I'm already starting to see why the Dusk trilogy is so well-regarded. Its atmosphere is altogether unique, and the juxtaposition of its core melancholy with the typical positivity of Atelier is very effective.

It's on to Escha & Logy next, which I know is an absolute favourite of many diehard Atelier fans, so I'm very curious to see what it has to offer. Soundtrack-wise, Ayesha's final boss theme "MARIA", which I shared yesterday, is going to take some beating, but I'm really looking forward to exploring it.

Other stuff to do in the meantime, though! Now Ayesha's out of the way, I think I'm going to plough through Nekopara vol. 4 before starting Escha & Logy, because I'm keen to get that done and written about. And with the New Year imminent, I should probably think about some sort of "game of the year" arrangement too, huh? Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it!

Finished Atelier Ayesha this evening. Well, I finished the main story, anyway; the game keeps going until its time limit is up, allowing you the opportunity to try and clear up as many outstanding tasks as possible in order to unlock as many endings as you can. I've done the "hard" bit now though; the main scenario is fully resolved.

And whew. What a journey. While the Atelier series — particularly in its more recent incarnations — is known as being wholesome and pleasant, I was expecting the Dusk series to start piling on the emotion a bit. In contrast with the Arland series, which is all colourful and nice throughout, the Dusk series — or, more specifically, Ayesha, which is the only one I've played so far — has this wonderfully melancholic feeling throughout where you know something is just… wrong. The world is "wrong" somehow. And there doesn't seem to be anything that anyone can do about it; there's just some sort of tragedy around the corner, waiting to happen.

Said tragedy for humanity doesn't happen during Atelier Ayesha, but Ayesha does have her own personal tragedy to deal with: the disappearance of her sister, and the worry that if she's too long about her investigations, she really will never see her again. There are some wonderful scenes throughout the game where Ayesha catches a brief glimpse of her sister's "astral form" but has it snatched away before she's really able to process anything, and for the entire duration you can tell that, as positive as Ayesha is, she's keeping herself busy so that she doesn't have a complete breakdown from the emotional trauma.

Those emotions, those feelings, all of that — they all come out in the final boss theme. I won't spoil the details of the encounter for those who haven't yet played the game or who don't know the narrative, but I will share a link to the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVcc16o0SaY 

Absolutely incredible stuff. This wonderfully moving theme is now second only to Blue Reflection's incredible finale, which still brings me to full-on tears every time I hear even the first few notes of it. Gust's sound team are something else, man.