I've spent a bit of time finally (bare) knuckling down to playing some Streets of Rage 4 over the last few days since recording some footage for the podcast, and I'm super-impressed with it. It's one of the most immaculately designed games I've ever played — clearly put together with absolute love, tested thoroughly and paced absolutely perfectly.

It feels like Streets of Rage, but it looks beautifully modern. It offers a challenge so perfectly tuned I found myself progressing through the game and finding health items exactly when I needed them. It provides varied and interesting encounters through clever use of stage gimmicks and enemy combinations. In all, it's the love letter to the series everyone wanted it to be, and mature Blaze is super-hot.

I'm seriously impressed. As Chris noted on the recent podcast, it manages to pull all this off without feeling the need to artificially pad itself out with RPG elements and other such bits and bobs — there are unlockables, some of which are tied to your total lifetime score, but there's no "grinding" required to just be able to get through the game. In fact, the default mode focusing on a single stage at a time rather than a full arcade-style run from start to finish is a masterstroke; it allows you to just take your time enjoying the game, then later you can return to favourite stages or indeed tackle the whole thing in old-school arcade style.

I'll write something in more depth about it on MoeGamer when I've spent a bit more time with it — I haven't finished one playthrough just yet — but if you're a 16-bit beat 'em up fan and you haven't played this yet, I urge you to jump on it at the earliest opportunity!

As predicted, I was not particularly well today. Thankfully I didn't have a lot of stuff I needed to do — on the day job side of things, everything was pretty quiet aside from a couple of tasks I managed to knock out pretty quickly, and on podcast days such as today all I do is upload and publish the podcast so it gets an appropriate amount of attention. (If you haven't checked out the new episode yet, be sure to do so — we had a blast recording this one!)

A day of mostly rest has helped a bit, as has overconsumption of Mr Kipling apple pies (which we accidentally discovered our cat Meg likes after she attacked a foil case with great enthusiasm after we'd finished) and chilling out with Atelier Ayesha. Hopefully I'll feel a bit better tomorrow, but I'm not too worried, really; everything feels like it's winding down ahead of Christmas right now, so I don't anticipate there being much to worry about with the day job for the next few weeks. I've also managed to book off Christmas Eve until the new year to have some free time, so that will be nice — even if Christmas this year will be something of a humble, quiet affair at home rather than an opportunity to see family.

Right, on that note, I'm going to go sit in bed and try to figure out how to get good at Xeno Crisis. I don't anticipate much success with my fuzzy ill head, but it's worth a try!

Busy weekend this weekend due to it being a podcast weekend, but everything got done on time and the episode should be with you all tomorrow.

S-Rank Patrons, watch out for the next monthly Q&A post and your new wallpaper in the next couple of days — I haven't had time to get those set up as yet.

For now, I think I'm probably just going to go to bed. I have one of those horrible "fuzzy head" instances that isn't quite a headache, but which leaves you feeling just a bit dazed and dopey. Probably a cold coming on or something. It is nearly half ten, after all, which is a perfectly respectable time for a 39-year old man to go to bed, isn't it? Even if he likes video games?

I don't have a lot else to report from the weekend, I'm afraid, since as I say, the vast majority of the time has been taken up with podcast recording and editing! It's a monster of an episode, though, and both Chris and I had a lot of fun putting it together. We hope you enjoy it!

For now, though, I bid you good night, and I wish you better health than I apparently have right now.

I, err, may have bought myself an Atari Jaguar. I found a good deal on eBay that came with the console, RGB SCART cable, power adapter and three games (one of them boxed) for just a little over what CEX charges for a "discounted" unit by itself.

I'm not necessarily going to collect for Jaguar — the games are quite expensive, but not prohibitively so — but I am initially going to pick up a "GameDrive" for it when it becomes available again from AtariAge. This is your standard "SD card in a cart" solution for the Jaguar, and most of the ROMs from the commercially available games for the Jag back in the day are readily available via either archive.org or Atarimania, so I can load that up with pretty much the full library, then decide if I actually want to collect boxed copies of the games I find myself particularly enjoying.

The reason I went for the Jaguar is because although I know it's an absolute disaster of a system, it's an interesting one. It was Atari's last-ditch attempt to see success in the console market after enjoying repeated failures with everything other than the 2600, so it's intriguing to see exactly what they were trying at the time. Plus there's a bunch of cool games on it — some of which are like "big brothers" to a number of Lynx games, which I'm excited to explore.

The other reason is that Jaguar emulation doesn't appear to have really gone anywhere from the sound of things, so a lot of these games are potentially at risk of being "lost" for anyone who doesn't have real hardware. I think it'll be interesting to give them another chance via video and/or written stuff — I feel an Atari Jaguar A to Z series somewhere in my future. Then I can see how bad Kasumi Ninja really is — and how good Alien vs. Predator is, too. And, of course, whatever the fuck Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy is.

That should hopefully arrive before Christmas, but the GameDrive units are currently unavailable, so I'm going to have to wait on that. Probably just as well, since they're a bit pricey, but at about $180 (£130ish) for access to the Jaguar's complete library, that feels like money well spent when the games are still going for £30+ each.

Expect more Thoughts when I have my mitts on this dumbass system. I'm looking forward to playing with it!

We made it to the end of another week, everybody. And I'm pleased to report that today seemed to remain mostly free of mishaps after they apparently all decided to visit me yesterday. I have been feeling a bit under the weather today, but I think that can probably mostly be attributed to the fact I'm feeling pretty stressed out and fed up.

At least Christmas is pretty much sorted. With the whole virus situation, we're not really in a position to be able to go anywhere, so it'll be a quiet one here at home. Presents have been ordered and sent to their relevant locations, and my parents have kindly provided us with some money to spend on presents "from them", so I'm currently contemplating what to do with my half of the money. A little voice that I probably shouldn't listen to is telling me to buy an Atari Lynx or Jaguar on eBay. I have not yet decided if I am going to pay any attention to it.

Anyway, Chris and I will be recording a podcast this week. It'll be a sort of "roundup of the year"-style affair like we've done in previous years, so we'll be talking about the stuff we've played this year that we found particularly striking. In the absence of a month of MoeGamer Awards on the site this year, this will be a good opportunity to celebrate some of the games I've been particularly enjoying, both within and outside the Atelier series. It should be a fun discussion, so watch out for it on Monday, all being well.

In the meantime, I've been enjoying Atelier Ayesha this evening. It's got a noticeably different vibe to the Arland games that I'm really appreciating, plus a fun battle system, fun progression and plenty of cute girls. Exactly what I need, like all the time. For now, though, I think it's time to head to bed with a sandwich and a glass of milk, attempt to figure out BMX on California Games on the Evercade while watching Classic Game Room, then sleep until midday tomorrow. That sounds nice.

Hope you've all had a week that has been at the very least tolerable. Not long to go until the symbolic moment that we can kick 2020 out the door for good — even if it doesn't change anything immediately in practice, it'll feel good to have made it through.

Ever have a day that feels like it's the inverse of yesterday?

I thought yesterday was a reasonably good day, all told. I was satisfied with my work on the site and YouTube; my annoying day job boss actually thanked me for doing something (which is cause for celebration); I paid off my car; I went to the gym; I got my new capture card up and running; I got a new tyre for my newly paid-off car, which I've been meaning to do for ages. Generally speaking, it felt like a decent, if relatively unremarkable day.

This morning, when coming down stairs, I trod on a staple, which embedded itself quite deeply into my foot. Then Microsoft Teams decided that "my organisation has removed this device" (some may not see this as a bad thing, including me) so I rebooted my work computer to see if that resolved the issue, only to discover I was unable to log into the entire computer at all. I then spent most of the rest of the day trying to fix said issue, during which time I developed both a headache and a stomachache that were significant enough to make me not want to do anything for a while. Ultimately, it wasn't a terrible day or anything, but the amount of things went wrong just felt like some sort of "payback" for yesterday being a vaguely tolerable day.

Ah well. It's nearly over now, I've done all my Christmas shopping and I'm about to go and sit in bed to play Atelier Ayesha. Things could be worse.

Every so often, I like to remind myself how much I've managed to achieve over the course of the last six-and-a-bit years since my unceremonious departure from the professional games press. The easiest way to do this is with numbers.

For example, I can look at MoeGamer and see that I've posted 1,851 things on the site. Not all of these are full articles — 593 are video showcases — but I'm pleased with that number, particularly bearing in mind that I started taking the site more seriously in 2016. Those 1,200-ish posts cover over 500 different games in varying degrees of detail. I'm definitely pleased with that.

The numbers that occasionally cause me to step back and feel quite satisfied with myself are on YouTube, though. While I still have a small number of subscribers and a small view count per video, there are now over 900 videos on my channel. Not all of those have been published — there's some stuff I started and never got around to making into something properly — but if you'd told me a couple of years back when I was idly thinking "I should do something with my YouTube channel" that by the end of 2020 I'd have made nearly a thousand videos, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

I love what I do, and it's valuable to me. Doing creative things every day nourishes my soul and helps prevent me from falling into the bleak feelings that this accursed year is doing its best to inflict on everyone. And I'm enormously grateful that so many of you are along for the ride. Thank you!

As this wretched year draws to a close, I'm feeling absolutely drained, for a variety of reasons — and I'm sure most of you reading this are, too. I'd like to thank you all once again for your support of what I do here; it's very much appreciated, especially during times like this. And especially during times when, say, my capture card decides to go kaputt, like it did yesterday.

I thought WordPress had gone kaputt today, too, when the backend wp-admin interface seemed to be forcing me into using their dreadful "Calypso" interface, but thankfully it seems this was an unintentional bug that has since been fixed. Being denied access to the excellent behind-the-scenes tools in wp-admin would probably push me over the edge into moving to self-hosted WordPress instead of the convenience of WordPress.com. They may live for now, however.

It's probably time to start thinking about getting Christmas presents for people soon. I have no idea what to get anyone this year. Not that I generally have much in the way of inspiration any year — I'm often one of those people who takes the "oh, they like [x], I'll get them something tangentially related to [x]" approach to gift-giving — but this year it seems particularly tricky to think of what anyone might actually want. A normal life, probably, but unfortunately there's not a great deal I can do about that!

Ah well. Only a month until 2020 is out of the door, and then, of course, the arrival of 2021 will mark an immediate return to complete normality and a generally wonderful existence for everyone, won't it? That'll be nice. Something to look forward to!

I know, I know. At least we get presents in the meantime.

My Elgato Game Capture HD died today. It was working fine yesterday, but the mini-USB port seems to have given up the ghost. It's still picking up enough power for the HDMI passthrough to work, meaning I can still use my consoles, but it's not talking to my computer at all. Lucky I just finished recording a month's worth of new videos, then, huh? Though this does mean I won't be able to take screenshots for a few days.

I do have another device on the way. The fact that my Game Capture HD used a mini-USB port should tell you that it was a fairly dated piece of tech that was already end-of-line when I bought it (for relatively cheap) so I think it's had a good run, particularly given the heavy use it gets. I've bought a new HD 60 S+ model from Amazon, since they're currently doing a "pay it off in bits with no interest" plan, meaning I can get it by Thursday for £35 (for the next 5 months) instead of nearly £200. So that's all good — though as with any unexpected expense of this kind, it's something I could have done without, particularly at this time of year.

Still, it'll be an upgrade. The HD 60 S+ model does 4K passthrough, so if and when I ever upgrade to something that actually supports 4K, I'll be able to enjoy it at full resolution. It also captures at 1080p and 60 frames per second rather than the 1080p and 30 frames per second the dearly departed one did, so that will mean better video quality for console stuff as well as anything I capture on my PC. That will be nice.

Ah well. These things happen. I guess you know where your kind contributions are going this month, then! 🙂

I've got a few things I want to get on with this evening, so I thought I'd give you all an early look at the new Q&A video that will be going live tomorrow as today's post! Thank you to all the S-Rank patrons who submitted questions, and I'll be putting up a new post inviting you to send me some more questions once we're actually into December.

It's been a fun month — not necessarily out there in the big wide world, but certainly in terms of getting stuff done. I enjoyed making this video, so I hope you'll join me in helping to make some more in the coming months!

Thank you as always for all your support. <3