So now that Christmas is over and done with I can think about what I want to achieve between now and the end of the year, and perhaps into the start of the new year, too. Here's what I've got on my "To Do" list so far:

• Finish Atelier Ayesha. I'm nearly there; can probably get that polished off tomorrow.

• Record another two weeks' worth of all my regular series; I'll spread that through my week off so I don't have to rush. I already have two weeks in the can — it'll be nice to be a month ahead of schedule though.

• Record at least a couple "adventure game specials", one of which will be Rise of the Dragon, which I know how to zip through in less than two hours. I haven't decided on a good name for this occasional feature yet; maybe it doesn't need one and "adventure game special" is good enough. Tentative other episodes for that include the Brok prologue demo thing, and perhaps one or more of the old Legend games, though I haven't beaten any of them before.

• Play through and write about Nekopara vol. 4.

• Figure out how I want to handle Jaguar videos in the new year, now I've got the GameDrive all set up and ready for action.

Plenty to think about, for sure — and hopefully in the new year I'll have more time and be in a better frame of mind to think about a lot of these things. There's a lot I can get done in this week off though, particularly as our region entered "Tier 4" lockdown today, meaning we're not really supposed to go out at all if possible. Might as well make the most of government-mandated stay-at-home orders, huh?

Playing Brok yesterday got me in the mood for some adventure gaming, so after today's Christmas celebrations were over with (by which I mean "we ate our meal" — it was just me and Andie this year thanks to the whole pandemic thing) I had a rummage through my GOG.com library for some classics, and settled on a trilogy of games I haven't played through before: Steve Meretzky's Spellcasting series. These are three pretty racy illustrated text adventures from Legend Entertainment, which makes use of their hybrid point-and-click/text parser interface also found in Eric the Unready, which is a game I played a lot back in the day.

Spellcasting is a noteworthy series for its wry sense of humour — much of which still remains oddly pertinent today — and the ability to switch it between "Naughty" and "Nice" mode, with the former featuring some rather suggestive scenes plus the ability to bang your way through several members of the cast. (There's no explicit imagery, mind; most of it is implied or, at most, written in lurid prose.) This isn't just mindless smut, however; much like Meretzky's previous games Leather Goddesses of Phobos, there's a solid adventure to be had here, too; already I've seen both some interesting puzzles and a well-crafted, believable world that continues to go about its business as you stand in the middle of it all, somewhat bewildered.

I'm not far in yet, but I have been enjoying a bit of casual exploration this evening. Perhaps I'll make this a game I do an "Adventure Special" on at some point — as I mentioned previously, a few people have indicated interest in seeing some more adventure game videos on YouTube at some point after previous episodes on games like Uninvited and Jinxter. We'll see! If I'm going to do some, now's the time, after all!

Anyway, it's 2:30am. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and that you can have a suitably relaxing day tomorrow. Sleep off all that Christmas dinner, stuff yourself with terrible snack foods and prepare yourself for the arrival of a new year. We can do it!

Just a reminder to S-Rank folks that you can still submit your questions this evening. I'm going to record the next Q&A over the weekend so fire away with whatever you want! I'll take all the questions in comments on this post and from the last announcement post.

Remember, you can ask me absolutely anything! It can be about Atari, it can be about modern games, it can be about whatever you like. It doesn't even have to be about video games, it doesn't have to be about anything I've covered on the site or on YouTube — it can be whatever you want. I reserve the right to veto anything too overly personal or which might cause any sort of… "issue", but I'm pretty open to whatever you want to ask. If you want a look around my game shelves or at some limited editions, or to see an old computer or console in action, that can probably be arranged.

You can ask more than one question if you want, too. Just keep it reasonable! 🙂

Fire away! I'll put regular reminders in the daily posts if you don't have time to think of something now. I look forward to your Qs so I can A them good and proper!

S-RANK PATRONS: Get your questions in for December Q&A at https://www.patreon.com/posts/s-rank-patrons-q-45110887 or see the pinned post on https://patreon.com/petedavison/posts

Merry Christmas! I'll have a proper Christmas message for you all tomorrow as I technically haven't had my Christmas Eve sleep yet, so it's still Christmas Eve.

The reason I stayed up late is because I was investigating the recently released "Prologue" chapter to a game called Brok: The InvestiGator. I'll have a full writeup on this next week, but I did want to throw out a quick recommendation now.

Brok is the work of Fabrice Breton, aka COWCATgames, the person who did the console versions of the lovely pixel art games Riddled Corpses, Xenon Valkyrie and that other one from the same developer that I can't remember the name of. Demon's Tier?

When not doing great ports, Breton works on adventure games that are clearly passion projects. Brok has been in the works for a while, but its playable prologue (about 3 hours worth of gameplay!) released recently, so I was keen to check it out. Breton describes it as a fusion of point and click adventure and beat 'em up, and those are two of my favourite things.

And it really works. The adventure side is most prominent, as you might expect, but the beat 'em up side is solidly implemented and enjoyable. It occurs during times when you choose a more aggressive solution to a problem — but there's usually a "brains" approach you can take too.

Brok unfolds in a sci-fi vision of the future, but the twist is all the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The titular hero is an alligator, hence the pun in the title. The world is filled with pollution called the Haze, and societal inequality has escalated to where the "Drumers" of society live the high life in domed cities, while "Slumers" have to make the best of a decaying world.

There's plenty of interesting characterisation and a ton of emotional engagement. The case you work in the prologue is intriguing, and there are lots of optional things to discover. I won't spoil any of them for now, but if you enjoy the sort of investigative game where you have to gather clues and then effectively "show your working" in a final interrogation, you'll love this.

This game is going to be very special, though I know Breton has struggled to get the press to pay attention to it so far. I'll be doing my bit after the Christmas break, and I encourage you to check our the free prologue yourself in the meantime — it's really good. You can get it on GOG or Steam, I believe (I'm writing on my phone, otherwise I'd provide a more convenient link for you!)

Anyway. That was my Christmas Eve. Hope you all have a wonderful day tomorrow!

S-RANK PATRONS: Get your questions in for December Q&A at https://www.patreon.com/posts/s-rank-patrons-q-45110887 or see the pinned post on https://patreon.com/petedavison/posts

Having a peculiar issue with the new Xbox. It works fine for the most part, but there's one specific environment in Project Gotham Racing that it won't load: the New York – Central Park map. I went out and bought a second copy of the game today (it's 50p) in the hopes that would fix the issue, but nope — exact same problem in the exact same place. Very strange!

I'm hoping this doesn't indicate some sort of DVD drive issue. It seems the Xbox I have is equipped with one of the crappy Thomson drives the initial models came with, though it hasn't shown any indication of fault other than this issue in Project Gotham, so I'm hoping it's just a random little bug. I've bought a DVD lens cleaner for the first time in about twenty years to see if giving the laser a little scrub will help. Fingers crossed! Worst comes to worse, I should be able to replace the drive — though it seems Xbox drives have a few peculiarities about them that mean you can't just swap in a regular old drive that would normally go in a PC without a bit of extra effort. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Aside from that, it seems to be working fine. I ripped a bunch of CDs to it last night and that had no problems — if the drive was failing, it would likely display a "dirty disc" error at least once, based on my past experiences with the platform — and the other games I have seem to work fine, so I've ordered a few more. I'm eyeing up a complete library of Xbox-exclusive stuff in the long term — that's only about 90 games or so if Wikipedia is accurate, so it's well within reach. Plus then there's the multiplatform games that run better or look nicer on Xbox too; will likely pick some of them up as well.

All in all, aside from the aforementioned issue, I'm very happy with it. Been meaning to grab one for ages now, so it's nice to finally have it. Here's hoping it lives a long and happy life!

Rather remarkably, I ordered an Xbox Advanced SCART cable from eBay yesterday and it arrived today. Evidently the seller was feeling some Christmas spirit, because I did leave them a message asking if it was possible to get it sent out before Christmas and that I'd pay more for shipping if necessary, but they just did it, no questions asked. What a fine human being that person is.

Anyway, I'm now fully equipped with OG Xbox and I've spent a fair bit of this evening fiddling with it. I've been playing some Project Gotham and ripping a few CDs for the custom soundtrack feature — the latter was always one of my favourite things about the original Xbox and I was sad when the 360 didn't really latch onto the concept in the same way. There's something wonderful about playing games — mostly driving games, because it always felt faintly sacrilegious to do it with other types of game — with your own music, particularly if you pick tracks that are either completely inappropriate for the game in question, or at least are not the sort of thing you typically hear in that type of game. I was always a fan of playing driving games with dramatic orchestral soundtracks, for example; it made those races seem that much more important.

As I don't have many CDs left these days — a few years back Andie and I both got rid of most of our CDs by sending them to Music Magpie — the discs I'm ripping are all game soundtracks, but that's still going to be fun, I think. I'm picturing racing in Project Gotham to the Corpse Party soundtrack and it's a very appealing prospect. Still a little while to go yet, though!

I've also been making a wishlist of Xbox exclusives (and "better on Xbox" games) to pick up, so there are likely going to be a lot of new acquisitions in the very near future. Some of these exclusives I've never heard of, so I'm looking forward to finding out more about them — particularly if they were things that never got much love back in the day. I've already spotted a fair few intriguing titles like that.

Anyway, I've got a few more CDs to rip before bed, so I'll wish you all a good night. Not long until Christmas now — I hope you all have the opportunity for at least a bit of time off. We all need it!

S-RANK PATRONS: Get your questions in for December Q&A at https://www.patreon.com/posts/s-rank-patrons-q-45110887 or see the pinned post on https://patreon.com/petedavison/posts

My OG Xbox arrived today. Unfortunately I didn't notice with the dispatch note that CEX were unable to ship an Advanced SCART cable with it, so at the moment it looks like ass on the big TV. Composite is not pretty; I've officially been spoiled by RGB. Still, I think I've managed to track down a suitable replacement from elsewhere — the only question now is whether or not it will arrive before Christmas chaos. I hope it does; I'm keen to play some stuff like Dead Or Alive 2 Ultimate and its ilk over the holidays.

At the same time, I happened to be online when a retailer indicated that they were putting the Jaguar GameDrive up for sale. This, if you're unfamiliar, is a cart that you can slap a microSD card in, load up with Jaguar ROMs and enjoy to your heart's content. With the price of Jaguar games seemingly rising quite a bit, this is the most practical way to enjoy the system right now — particularly since most of the games that were commercially released have been effectively "abandoned" and placed on archive.org, and modern homebrew stuff can easily be distributed as downloadable ROMs. The GameDrive itself is pricey, but it pays for itself when you look how much individual carts go for. There's even talk of supporting images of Jaguar CD games at some point.

So far as the Jaguar goes, I intend to use the GameDrive as a means of exploring the Jaguar's library, then anything I find myself particularly enjoying I'll look into acquiring an actual copy of. I will do a Jaguar series at some point; not sure how that's going to work right now, since the end of Atari A to Z Flashback is still a fair way off and I don't really want to add anything extra on top of what I'm doing right now. Perhaps either the 8-bit or ST series can take a break for a bit, since there's no real "end" to either of those — or perhaps I can do some sort of alternating or rotating schedule. We'll see. I haven't got the thing yet and I don't know how long it'll take to get here! I do have some spare microSD cards, though — I'm glad I kept them now!

Anyway. Fingers crossed all these fun times arrive in the next day or two, because it'd be nice to have a holiday filled with retro gaming goodness. I have time off from the day job from Thursday until the new year, so here's hoping they're here by then at least!

I've been enjoying watching ProJared struggle through Rise of the Dragon on Sega CD recently (which I learned was ported by Game Arts, of all people) so I thought I'd download my GOG copy and see how much I remembered.

Two hours later, I'd finished it, and the only bits I didn't remember were the parts where you literally just have to sit around waiting for something to happen. It's so strange how gaming has evolved over time; back when this game first came out, I remember it taking us weeks to beat for one reason or another, but yep… this evening I ploughed through the whole thing in two hours, done and dusted. I might have to do a video of it soon, since I know a few people have been requesting some adventure game playthroughs!

Anyway, regardless of its extremely short length, I'll always have fond memories of Rise of the Dragon. It's one of the first games I remember playing on an MS-DOS PC instead of the Atari STs we'd been using up until that point, and the Ad-Lib FM synthesis soundtrack is particularly iconic to me. Specifically, the Ad-Lib FM synthesis soundtrack being piped through a couple of tiny, unpowered speakers that came with our MS-DOS PC. I believe it was a 386 of some description, if I remember correctly, though my Dad, who worked for IBM for many years, had previously made use of an old XT (I think?) for a few things. Either way, the jump to 386 power, 256-colour VGA graphics and Sound Blaster Pro-compatible music and sound was a huge leap over what previous computers had given us.

But I also remember the game being rather striking, too. There had been adventure games on the Atari ST — including some of LucasArts' earlier work — so I was familiar with games that made an effort with storytelling by this point. But I'd never seen something that felt quite so "grown up" as Rise of the Dragon did. It was gritty, it was violent, it was gory and it had (implied) sexytimes. (Said implied sexytimes were, sadly, removed from the Sega CD version.) But it also had character and personality; the people in the game felt like actual characters rather than game mechanics, and you found yourself rooting for protagonist William "Blade" Hunter and his girlfriend Karyn.

On top of that, the setting was compelling. I don't know if I'd quite describe it as "cyberpunk", since there's not the usual aspect of body modification and transhumanism in there, but it was definitely an interesting, cynical — and, in 2020, depressingly convincing — depiction of what the mid-21st century might look like. Some things never change; some things change a great deal. Some things they got right — the subtle touch of literally every foodstuff in the game being manufactured by the same company is an even more cutting piece of satire today than it was in 1990 — and a few things they got hilariously wrong. In one scene, you're provided some evidence on a VHS tape, your VidPhone has a rotary dial and a typewriter keyboard, and upon examining it, the narrator proudly proclaims that it can broadcast a black-and-white image at "approximately eight frames per second".

The only weak point of the game is the atrocious "arcade" sequences that crop up in more action-packed parts of the story, but I suspect that developer Dynamix knew these were bobbins, since they allow you to skip them after you fail them five times. (Unfortunately this is not the case on the Sega CD version; you've got to tough it out until you beat them!)

All in all it was a thoroughly pleasant evening. And you can insert some sort of joke about a 30-year old MS-DOS game running better than Cyberpunk 2077 here if you really want to.

Recorded a bunch of videos today, including one on Dreamcast golf game Tee Off. This is one of my all-time favourite games, but I haven't had a copy in my collection for many years. For whatever reason, I haven't really made Dreamcast collecting a priority over the last few years, but I think that might have to change.

If you're unfamiliar, Tee Off is a game developed by a company known as Bottom Up, and published by Acclaim in the West. It's quite similar in execution to Sony's Everybody's Golf series, but I always felt it had a much stronger arcade-style feel. It feels very "Sega" thanks to big on-screen numbers, slick, smooth presentation and a colourful sense of fun.

My absolute favourite thing about it, though, is the soundtrack; it sounds like something out of Sonic Adventure. That's something I found striking back in the day, and I still absolutely adore it today. No arcade-style golf game has quite matched it in this regard since.

Interestingly, it also features a full separate mode based on Japanese croquet. In cyberspace. I love it. Watch out for a short;Play video coming soon!

S-RANK PATRONS: Get your questions in for December Q&A at https://www.patreon.com/posts/s-rank-patrons-q-45110887 or see the pinned post on https://patreon.com/petedavison/posts

We've made it to another weekend, folks — the last one before Christmas, in fact, which feels like something of an achievement this year. 2020 is nearly over! Not that 2021 is immediately going to be magically better or anything, but at least things seem to be moving in the right direction as time goes on. We shall have to wait and see what happens with… everything.

This weekend I'm going to be doing some recording. I had a bunch of stuff all planned out, but I happened to see a tweet announcing that Fractalus, a remake of Atari 8-bit classic Rescue on Fractalus, has finally reached its 1.0 release, so I'm going to squeeze that in for a short;Play video. I freaking love Rescue on Fractalus, and this ambitious remake, which has been ten years in the making, was put together with input from several of the original developers. I had a quick go earlier and was very impressed; it provides an experience remarkably close to what the cover art of the original 8-bit release promised!

There'll be some Dreamcast stuff in the coming weeks, too, now that I'm getting a few games for it. Had a couple of attempts at Sega Rally 2 earlier, but something about the disc keeps causing the console to reset. Perhaps a minor scratch or nick somewhere; I'll give it a  (careful) clean and try it again over the weekend. Both Tee Off and Tokyo Highway Challenge seem to work fine, so it appears to be a Sega Rally 2 think, not a Dreamcast thing. Hopefully. That poor old Dreamcast is a temperamental little beast, but I do love it so.

I'm hoping my original Xbox will arrive over the weekend, too, as I'm getting a bit of a hankering to play some of the games I've picked up recently, and to see how they look through RGB SCART and upscaled. I think I've figured out where I can squeeze the damn thing into the increasingly crowded space around my TV, too, so that's something.

The day job is starting to wrap up some projects now, too. I have an irritating bit of Photoshopping to do before I have my Christmas holidays from Thursday next week, but other than that, most things are in hand, and I can enjoy my time off without guilt. And then, not long after that, I get to start my new gig, too. Exciting times.

Anyway, hope you've all had a bearable week. Take care of yourselves and have a pleasant weekend.