Twitter's been rolling out its new "Fleets" thing over the last few days. I usually use Web Twitter, but earlier I decided to install the Twitter app on my phone and see if there was any value to Fleets whatsoever.

There is not. At least, not for me. I scrolled through all the "Fleets" that were currently available to me, and they were all, without fail, utterly vapid nonsense that served absolutely no purpose whatsoever. On top of that, the interface for them is such a blatant ripoff of Instagram's equally pointless "Stories" feature that I'm surprised there hasn't been any sort of legal shenanigans.

I uninstalled the Twitter app less than five minutes after I installed it. Web Twitter on mobile has not, thankfully, been infected by this nonsense yet.

This is grumpy old man moaning, I know, but one of the things I used to value about Twitter was how it was a fairly lightweight, simple, straightforward approach to social media. It was originally pitched as a "microblogging" site, after all — a place where people would post short, 140-character things about what they were up to. Fairly vapid in itself, one might argue, but as people started to use it, it became clear that it was possible to have conversations and even form friendship groups.

Now, if we look at Twitter today, people often argue that it's the worst possible platform on which to have a meaningful discussion, and I pretty much agree with that. Twitter was built as a platform to, basically, chat with people, and nothing more. You'd post a thing, someone might reply, that was that. Over time, we started to get "retweets" (which, if you're a relative newcomer to Twitter, were originally implemented by someone actually copy-pasting another tweet, writing "RT @username:" in front of it and having about 5 characters left to comment) that started to dilute the original point of the platform… and this was just the beginning of the colossal mess the whole platform is now, with its constant attempts to force a non-chronological timeline on you, the constant barrage of ads and the focus on "engagement metrics" and "amplification" rather than, you know, talking to people.

Fleets is just another sign that Twitter has completely lost sight of what it was originally for — and what a lot of people on the platform wish they could still use it for. Doubtless money was involved — I suspect it won't be long before we start seeing "Promoted Fleets" — and no real care or attention was given to the actual userbase.

But you know what they say… if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product. That, regrettably, feels more and more obvious every day!

S-Rank patrons: Don't forget to get your questions in for the November 2020 Q&A. Click here for details. You've got until November 28.

Those of you active on social media recently may have seen that all of USgamer's staff has been laid off, presumably with the intention of either closing the site altogether or leaving it as some sort of click farm in the long term. Either way, I'm not shedding any tears over it; while working at that place was literally a dream come true when I first started, the way I was treated by former editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish in particular — culminating with me being made redundant on my birthday so he could hire his friends instead of that British twat who liked anime games — has left me with a sour taste in my mouth ever since.

However, that's not to say that I achieved nothing of note at USgamer. I feel like my time there really helped me establish both my voice as a writer, and my specialist knowledge. It helped me understand the things I wanted to pursue and learn more about — and ultimately, although the circumstances were unpleasant, it led me to create MoeGamer, and that is why some of you are here reading this right now.

I looked over the archives of USgamer today (side note: their site navigation is completely broken and it appears no-one has noticed for the last six years) and discovered that I posted well over a thousand articles during my time there. Most of those were news stories and, as such, probably aren't worth preserving, but there were a significant number of reviews and feature articles that I had written. I spent a bit of time earlier today downloading and preserving all of these, because with the future of the site completely unknown, there's every chance that they will just disappear one day.

So I'm going to preserve some of them myself. Some things aren't particularly relevant any more, as they were written in response to particular happenings or periods in the games industry, but others are timeless — and it's those articles that I'm going to republish on MoeGamer over the course of the coming weeks and months.

There's a bunch of these articles that I'd completely forgotten I'd written. I'll leave some as a surprise for you for when I republish them, but one of the ones I was most pleased to discover was a detailed breakdown of my whole "find the good" philosophy that I've always adopted on MoeGamer. I had totally forgotten that this was actually based on an established theory of criticism — specifically, John Updike's personal rules of literary criticism, which he published in his 1975 collection of prose Picked-Up Pieces. They (still) make a lot of sense, and are broadly applicable to any form of creative media.

Anyway, keep an eye out for these republished articles in the coming weeks; they'll likely be tagged in their own section of the site under the "From the Archives" heading, which also includes articles from MoeGamer's less focused "1.0" incarnation (2014-2016) as well as a number of columns I wrote for a defunct site known as Games Are Evil.

I may have been completely ghosted by all of USgamer's former staff — reviews editor Mike Williams, who helped launch the site alongside me back in 2013, name-checked literally everyone who had ever worked on the site except me in his farewell piece — but I'll be damned if the blood, sweat and tears I poured into that site over my time there is going to go to waste. Our creations in the digital realm are all too fragile, and all too easily lost to things that are nothing to do with you. So I can at least ensure that some of the work I'm proud of lives on!

S-Rank patrons: Don't forget to get your questions in for the November 2020 Q&A. Click here for details. You've got until November 28.

Atelier Lulua is down for the count — and I even managed to get all of the endings in a single run, too. The wonders of games without time limits. I was correct yesterday — all I needed to do was 1) make better armour and 2) make bigger bombs. Specifically, fire bombs. Last boss is weak to fire, and was actually kind of a pushover with the right party lineup and preparation. But I guess that's always what Atelier's been about, really!

Anyway, it's on to the Dusk series next. I'm not starting that tonight because it's getting a bit late already, but I'm excited to finally make it this far. I know the three Dusk games — and Escha & Logy in particular — are favourites of a lot of people, so I've been very curious to check them out for the longest time, and now I can do so with that lovely all-in-one cartridge that Play-Asia did a while back. I know nothing about the Dusk games besides some of the character designs, so I'm looking forward to exploring them.

Given that I'm a bit ahead of schedule (I've still got two Atelier Meruru articles in me), I might make some time to play through a couple of shorter things in the meantime, too. As I've noted recently, I've been playing both Dead Rising and Quantum Theory, and I think both are full of interesting things worth writing about. I'm also going to look into Capcom's Lost Planet series soonish (as soon as my 360 copy of Lost Planet Colonies arrives, specifically) as I know that's got a lot of cool things to investigate. Chris and I are also tentatively planning some sort of "seventh generation Capcom" or "Japanese shooters" episode of the podcast in the near future, too, so all of the above fit right in with all that.

Anyway. Andie and I seem to be coming down with something — not the dreaded 'rona, I don't think, but an annoying cold — so I'll leave that there for now and bid you good night. Have a pleasant evening!

I thought I was going to beat Atelier Lulua this evening but the final boss absolutely wiped the floor with me. Whoops. Guess I need to spend a little bit of time doing some endgame crafting, huh?

I'm in two minds about the final boss being the most difficult thing in a game. It all kind of depends on the overall structure of the game in question. If it's a linear thing where the final boss is literally the final thing you do in the game, then fine; in situations like RPGs, where there are often lots of optional things to do, it's sometimes nice to have a final boss that you can overpower relatively easily simply by virtue of having prepared properly.

I mean, I guess in this case I can probably still achieve that by crafting some better items/equipment, but still. It's a little frustrating to get wiped out repeatedly — particularly as in one instance it obliterated my team before I could do anything. But we can learn from this experience! I have learned that I need to increase the speed of my team to ensure they act first, bump up their resistances and preferably make them immune to having the item command sealed, because that absolutely gimps the alchemist characters in the party. Such as, you know, the protagonist.

I don't really have a point. It's after midnight, though, so I should probably stop trying for now and give it another shot tomorrow, huh?

S-Rank patrons: Don't forget to get your questions in for the November 2020 Q&A. Click here for details.

One thing I've always said about my work on MoeGamer is that I make a specific effort to "find the good" in pretty much everything I play. It's extremely rare that I come across a game with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever — and I tend to take the attitude that if it exists, it's probably important to someone, even if that someone is just the creator.

With this in mind, I came to Quantum Theory on Xbox 360, a third-person shooter from the director of Fatal Frame. This is a title that has a woeful Metascore, but which both Chris and I have always found intriguing for one reason or another. And, as you'll know very well if you've been following my work for a while, a low Metascore is often reason for me to check something out rather than avoid it like the plague — particularly now games like this can be picked up for pocket change.

I'm a few hours into the game now, and, as you might expect, I'm having a much better time than the reviews from when it first came out might suggest. Coming at it with an awareness of gaming history and a decent understanding of mechanics, too, I'm seeing things that it's doing that were ignored or written off back when it was first reviewed.

Most notably, I'm keenly aware of the fact that it is not, as many reviewers claimed, a Gears of War clone. Yes, the base mechanics are suspiciously similar to Epic's popular title — right down to including the "roadie run" and the sticky cover — but the structure is very different. In practice, it functions in an almost arcadey manner — you work your way from room to room, dispatching all the enemies there, before moving on. There's an almost "rail shooter" feel to it at times, in that enemies come from various places around the stage, and you need to use your observational skills to deal with them, prioritise your targets and keep yourself safe.

I finished for the evening just at the point where a new mechanic is introduced: a sidekick character called Filena, who you can basically "throw" at enemies for a melee attack, and use in combination attacks and suchlike. You get a very brief preview of how this will all work in the game's introductory mission, but from this point on it looks like it's going to be a standard part of gameplay.

I'm looking forward to exploring the game further — and the knowledge that it's the work of Makoto Shibata just makes it all the more interesting to me. It's very obviously one of those games from the period when a lot of Japanese devs and publishers were trying to "appeal to the West" — but it's also got plenty of interesting, unique things about it, and I think it got a pretty raw deal back in the day. So, when I've had time to plough through it, I will do my bit to rectify that situation!

Anyway, for now, it's bedtime. Should polish off Atelier Lulua tomorrow, all being well — I'm pretty sure I've got my save file primed for all the possible endings, so looking forward to seeing the various conclusions!

Hope you've all had a good weekend. Speak soon! Or not. You know what I mean. Just being conversational. Anyway. Bye.

S-Rank patrons: Don't forget to get your questions in for the November 2020 Q&A. Click here for details.

Been playing a bit of Dead Rising on and off recently, and I feel like, as with so many other games from that period, I'm appreciating it a lot more than I did back when it first came out. I think it's testament to how much I've learned about game design, mechanics and whatnot that I can go back to these games that, for one reason or another, I bounced off a bit "back in the day" and have a lot more fun with them.

As with most stuff along these lines, I'll write more about Dead Rising on MoeGamer when I've spent a bit more time with it, but so far I'm very much appreciating its curious take on New Game Plus. This was actually a common point of contention when it originally came out, and I don't recall any game handling its saving in quite the same way since. I guess there's an argument for roguelikes with persistent progression having an element of what Dead Rising did, but I certainly can't think of many games with fixed content that encourage you to New Game Plus it before you've even finished it once.

On the offchance you're unfamiliar, here's how it works. In Dead Rising, you earn "PP" (hehe) or "Prestige Points" for all sorts of things — small quantities through combat and much larger quantities for major achievements such as defeating bosses, discovering and rescuing survivors and reaching particular milestones in your kill count. PP is just another term for experience points; as you gain PP, you fill a meter, and when this fills, protagonist Frank goes up a level. Unlike an RPG, however, there isn't a flat increase to his stats with every level up; instead, with each level up you get a random improvement to one thing: attack power, run speed, throw distance, inventory space, maximum health or the skills you're able to use.

The intention behind the system is for you to see how far you can get through the game until you either fuck up the main story (which you can do by taking too long over its various objectives) or die, at which point you can either load your most recent (and only) save, or you can save Frank's current status — level, stats, available skills — and delete your progress through the story. At this point, you start the game again, only more powerful than first time around. And in theory, it gradually gets easier, both as Frank grows in power with each "reset", and as you learn important things about the game and its world.

For example, after my most recent fuck-up, I learned where the maintenance tunnels key is, which allows you to use a variety of shortcuts around the game's mall setting. Next time I start over (with my now level 20 Frank) I can make a beeline straight for that key as soon as I have the free time to do so, and start using those shortcuts right away. It's an interesting twist on the memorisation required for certain arcade-style games — and in fact, there's a fair bit of arcade DNA of various descriptions throughout Dead Rising. This shouldn't be surprising, given that it's from Capcom, but it's one of those things that I wouldn't have spotted back in 2006, but am very aware of now. Besides my own work, I have my conversations with Chris on the podcast to thank for my keen awareness of this sort of thing these days.

Anyway, I have plenty more playthroughs to do before I make it through the whole game, I suspect, so it'll be a little while before I write this one up. I'm certainly finding it to be an intriguing, experimental game, though, and am looking forward to picking it apart further.

Hope you're all having a good weekend so far. I'm going to get some recording done tomorrow, even though I still have a couple of episodes still ready to go from my week off a while back. Have a pleasant evening!

S-Rank patrons: Don't forget to get your questions in for the November 2020 Q&A. Click here for details.

I've found the launch of this new generation of games consoles quite interesting and a little disappointing to watch. With America getting both PS5 and Xbox Series X/S/whatever the other day and Europe catching up on things next week, these systems are finally getting into people's hands.

And… I've heard absolutely nothing about any games that people are playing. There's a few people on my Twitter timeline who have the new systems, but all I've seen from them is a few oohs and aahs about loading times and the like, but that's about it. Where's the excitement over the new games?

I think there are a couple of significant problems stopping there being any real game-related excitement. Firstly, these new consoles feel like a much more incremental update over the previous generations than pretty much any other "next-gen" launch. While both the new platforms can run stuff faster and smoother… there's not a ton of stuff that has that obvious "wow factor" any more. The "wow factor" had already worn off a bit by the PS3-PS4 transition, and it's really noticeably absent this time around. The jump from SD to HD was much more significant than the jump from 1080p to 4K… at least partly because it's already possible to get 4K out of some of the "last-gen" systems.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, is the absolutely moribund lineup of launch titles for both systems. While you all know my tastes aren't exactly "mainstream" when it comes to gaming, I find it difficult to see much among the current launch lineups for either platform that truly qualifies as a "must-have" — particularly as pretty much all of the big-names are cross-generation titles anyway. This latter situation will, I'm sure, resolve itself over the coming months when we start seeing more "B-tier" titles and some exclusives… but at the moment I am, to be perfectly honest, not seeing the appeal of either PS5 or Xbox at present.

That will all change when visual novel and RPG developers start jumping on board, of course… but I'm actually questioning if that will ever happen at this rate. Sony has destroyed the trust it had with Japanese developers over the course of the last couple of years, and Microsoft has consistently failed to make any impact whatsoever on the Japanese market with any of its consoles, outside of a few shmups and RPGs on the 360 (which, in the latter case, ended up with enhanced, expanded versions on PS3 some time later in most cases). With Switch being in such a strong position, I can see a lot of those developers and publishers happily staying with Nintendo for now… which I'm 100% fine with.

Anyway, we'll see. It's too early to write either of the consoles off, of course, but I'll be interested to see how long it takes for them to pick up any sort of momentum with anyone other than the "people who only play Call of Duty and sports games" crowds. I'm in no hurry to pick up either, though… and my wallet is thanking me for that!

As noted the other day, I'm going to kick off a monthly Q&A video thing as an experiment this month, and you fine folks in the S-Rank get to ask me stuff. Please leave your questions in the comments on this post. I'll put reminders on the usual blog posts each day so you don't forget if you can't think of anything now.

You can ask me absolutely anything (within reason) so feel free to drop me some questions about the games I'm playing, my collection, my cats, what I get up to other than gaming and writing, my life, my history — absolutely anything. (Naturally I reserve the right not to answer if something is on dodgy ground with regard to personal information etc, but otherwise pretty much anything goes.)

I'll aim to record the Q&A video on the weekend of the 28th of November and put it out by Monday the 30th at the latest. That means you've got a couple of weeks to come up with some fun things to ask!

Leave your questions in the comments on this post by November 28, 2020. Thank you, and I'm looking forward to (hopefully) getting some interesting things to talk about!

Hello everyone! Welcome to the two newcomers today, too; your presence is much appreciated!

Just wanted to let you know a few things I'm going to be experimenting with.

First up, I already talked about this on Twitter earlier, but for the benefit of those who aren't on there or didn't see my thread, I'm running a small-scale experiment with ads on MoeGamer. Don't panic; when I say "small-scale" I mean small-scale; I'm allowing them only on specific parts of the site that happen to be the pages that have the most traffic — usually people coming from Google looking for info on Magicami DX or Honey Select Unlimited. The way I look at it, the amount of traffic those pages get could potentially raise a bit of money for the site — which in turn can be invested back into the site in various ways. The more self-sufficient, the better.

I've made it a point of pride to highlight MoeGamer's ad-free nature in the past so I feel a little guilty doing this, but everyone I've spoken to already has been supportive of this idea so far. To clarify: ads will only be running on "Pages" right now rather than "Posts". That means you won't see ads on articles themselves, or on the front page, or anything like that. There may be ads appearing at the bottom of "hub pages" for games or features now, though. As I write this, they haven't showed up yet, but I don't know how long it takes for them to switch on.

I'm going to let this run for a week or so and see how things go. If I can get some meaningful data from it that will help me figure out potentially how much income they could bring in per month, I'll see if it's worth continuing them. If they suck or get in the way or too many people complain, I'll get rid of them. But I figure I'm potentially denying myself some valuable income that can be invested directly back into the site, so I want to see how true that is. Thanks for your understanding on this!

Secondly, I was looking back over the "Patrons Only" videos I did a while back (check the YouTube playlist if you missed out on these back when they were current) and remembered that I quite enjoyed doing them. Now that I've cut back a little on other video commitments (most notably long, ongoing playthroughs), I want to start doing something along those lines again, and I thought something that involved you good people would be enjoyable for everyone: a regular (probably monthly) Patrons Q&A!

My plan for this would be to provide a specific thank-you by name (or handle) to all the A-Rank Patrons for that month, and provide the S-Rank Patrons the opportunity to ask questions, make requests and the like. I've been wanting to provide an additional benefit for those kind enough to support at S-Rank tier for a while, and this seems like a good opportunity.

The way I'd do this is that I'd put up an S-Rank-exclusive post early in the month inviting you to post questions in the comments. I'm not sure if there's a way to "sticky" a post on Patreon, but I'd likely put a reminder on subsequent posts so people remember it's there. Then when the end of the month rolls around, I'll gather together all the questions and make a video that answers them. It gives me something interesting to do, and it provides you lovely lot the opportunity to engage a bit more directly with me. There's a lot of you lurking out there and it'd be nice to hear more from some of you! (Obviously no pressure if you don't want to.)

The video itself would then be public, so everyone would be able to hear the interesting questions you came up with, and the A-Rank patrons can be thanked publicly also. That, in turn, will hopefully bring a few more people in the direction of this Patreon and we can all be one big happy nerdy family together.

It's getting late now so I won't set this up today, but I'll probably put up the first post like this at the weekend, then aim to do the first video towards the end of November. Then if that goes well we can make it a monthly thing and have a bit of fun together. Watch this space!

This is my fault for saying something vaguely nice about Stadia yesterday, wasn't it? Fucking Google.

If you're not sure why I'm annoyed, check out this patronising PR-speak-filled thread from Google Photos' product lead: https://twitter.com/dflieb/status/1326586058289471491

Essentially, from June next year, Google Photos will no longer allow its users to back up their photos and videos on an unlimited basis for free; you'll be limited to 15GB of storage, or whatever you choose to upgrade your Google One storage account to. For the unfamiliar, at present if you allow Google Photos to upload "high quality (compressed)" versions of your images and videos, they don't count against any of your existing storage limit, making it a fantastic means of backing media up with only a tiny loss in quality.

This setup has been ideal for me as I've been working on various projects; I can take screenshots and videos without worrying about taking up too much space, because I know I can just back them up online and then pull them back down again if it turns out I need them. With this change, I'll have a hard cap on this — even if I pay up for the additional storage (which I actually already am — it's not much per month for 100GB, but that won't last long when videos are involved).

I understand that this would have probably happened sooner or later; the old adage about things being too good to be true is, unfortunately, one of the things that is always true. This is a real bummer, though; it's one of many instances where Google appears to be deliberately making one of their offerings significantly worse rather than better.

It does make me wonder about the future of other services, though. How long before we have a hard limit on how much you can upload to YouTube, for example…?