I've been not well for the last few days. I can't really pin down what I'm not well "with" — it's not the global death plague, at least, I'm pretty sure — but it has left me feeling… not quite "present", if that makes any sense. The kind of feeling where you're just sort of drifting along, everything feels a bit "not quite real" and you feel perpetually woozy.

It's not especially pleasant, but at least it has coincided with a period of work where not a lot is going on so I have been able to sleep it off a bit without feeling particularly guilty. And in a couple of weeks I have a full week's holiday to look forward to — housebound, of course — so things aren't too bad on that front.

Still, even with my cotton wool-filled head I've managed to get some stuff done. I recorded some footage for some games we'll be talking about on The MoeGamer Podcast this weekend, and even managed to hammer out four thousand words on my first playthrough of Nurse Love Syndrome. So that's something, at least!

Anyway, I think it's time to get some more rest in the hope I feel a bit better in time for the weekend. We've got a fun show lined up for you all, so I hope you enjoy it — and I hope I'm not too zombified for the recording session!

Finally got a "good" ending in Nurse Love Syndrome (plus a "normal" and a "bad" on the same route) and whew, that was an emotional rollercoaster, for sure. If I have the energy, I'll be writing some words about it on MoeGamer tomorrow.

I've been really impressed with the two Nurse Love visual novels — particularly the fact that they are very different from one another. Nurse Love Addiction, which is actually the second of the two games, but the first to get localised if I remember rightly, started relatively sedately but got increasingly ridiculous (in a highly entertaining way) as it progressed, while Nurse Love Syndrome is rather more down-to-earth from what I've experienced so far.

One thing that both of them are absolutely masterful at is creating a feeling of dread and unease in the reader, though. This isn't dread and unease in the same way as horror, either; I'm talking about somewhat more mundane and relatively "everyday" feelings of mistrust, a lack of self-confidence, impostor syndrome and how all these things can escalate in your mind well beyond where they "should" be able to. Nurse Love Syndrome in particular is painfully relatable in terms of the severe impact struggling at work can have on one's mental health and even perception of reality — something that, unfortunately, I have all too much first-hand experience of.

I'm still pretty staggered by the calibre of voice actors in these two games, as well. In Nurse Love Syndrome, for example, we have Kana Asumi (best known to me as Blanc in the Neptunia series) in the leading role, plus Asami Imai (Noire in Neptunia, Ikaruga in Senran Kagura, Kurisu in Steins;Gate) as another one of the major characters, Yumi Hara (Yumi from Senran Kagura) as a character whose role got considerably expanded from the PSP original, and Eri Kitamura (Homura from Senran Kagura, Cordelia from Atelier Rorona and Totori) as another main heroine. All of these voiceover artists were already very well established by the game's original release in 2011, so it's impressive to see them all in a relatively niche interest visual novel.

Anyway. There's a lot more to talk about with regard to this fascinating visual novel, and having only really seen one set of endings now (plus the "Gatekeeper" ending I mentioned the other day) I've barely scratched the surface of the truths that are there to be discovered. And this is obviously one of those visual novels where you won't have the whole picture until you've seen everyone's storylines through to completion. So I'm looking forward to diving deeper!

I've received three separate Play-Asia packages over the course of the last two days. I guess everything all became ready for shipping at the same time or something, because these were all orders made at very different times!

Here are the goodies in question. From left to right, we have It's a Wonderful Life, the Clannad spinoff featuring Tomoyo (from what I remember of the anime, best girl); Maitetsu, the loli train girls game; Moero Crystal H, which hopefully you all know about already; and Murder by Numbers, a fun looking adventure game in which you solve puzzles through the medium of Picross.

All of these are going to get some coverage at some point, though obviously I don't know exactly when — especially as all of these are pretty substantial affairs. Recent Nintendo Life reviews have left me with more half-finished games than I care to have, so I'm going to try and polish those off first. Conveniently, both of those are also things I'd like to write about in more depth on MoeGamer, so expect some musings on Undead Darlings and Moero Crystal H in the coming weeks/months/whenever.

I finally reached an ending in Nurse Love Syndrome earlier. It is what is known as the "Gatekeeper" ending — in other words, an ending which basically goes "come back later". These are usually implemented in a visual novel when there are pieces of information that the author really wants you to know before seeing that specific ending — but they are, at least, endings in themselves.

There are a lot of endings in Nurse Love Syndrome. There are, I think, six main heroines who have distinct "routes" — though the narrative is structured that they crisscross a bit. Each heroine has at the very least three endings — Good, Bad and Normal — with several having multiple bad and at least one "Sudden" ending; the latter in particular is something I'm a little nervous about, as this VN has already put me through the emotional wringer more than anything else in recent memory. Love it.

Anyway, I'm on track for an actual ending now, so on either Thursday or early next week I'll have an initial writeup on what I've experienced so far plus, like with Nurse Love Addiction, some in-depth analysis on the other routes, too. I love writing about visual novels, but it's quite a time-consuming process that makes my brain work hard! Nothing like a good mental workout now and then though, eh?

Anyway, I'm not 100% well at the minute so I should probably try and get some decent sleep tonight. Watch out for short;Play and Waifu Wednesday tomorrow, and thanks as always for your continued support.

I've got a raging headache this evening, so I'm off for an early night shortly. Apologies if I am less than coherent!

Undead Darlings review was squared away earlier. It hasn't gone live today because I'm not in charge of the posting schedule, but suffice to say for now that if you enjoy zombie girls, dungeon crawling and interesting mechanics, you should definitely pick that one up. Unfortunately, this is one of those games where the deadline was too tight to be able to beat the whole game before I wrote a review, so I'm going to continue playing it in my own time and provide a more comprehensive writeup (or three) on MoeGamer once I'm 100% done.

Hopefully the game will get some sort of limited run release in the near future, as I'd love to have a copy of it on my shelf. The developers seem interested in such a prospect — particularly after what a long-term labour of love it's been — so hopefully we'll see that happen. The fact it's published by Sekai gives me hope in that regard, too.

In other news, Genshin Impact is out now and I mostly lost interest as soon as I learned it's an online free-to-play game with gacha elements. I'll probably still give it a look just because it's the New Hotness and I do like the look of it, but honestly, I don't really have a lot of space in my life for that kind of game right now. I'm still playing Magicami a bit, but as a mobile game that's something you can just check in on for a few minutes each day and grind a bit while you're doing something else, advancing the story when you feel like getting a bit more invested. Genshin Impact, meanwhile, is caught in that weird limbo between single-player game and online game, and that always ends up feeling like a rather hollow experience for me.

Ah well. Not as if I need anything else to be getting on with. I'm ploughing through Atelier Meruru to stay ahead of schedule, plus I have Moero Crystal H and Undead Darlings to polish off, and I think I'm finally near an ending for Nurse Love Syndrome too.

For now, though, I need to lie down and not have this headache. Have a lovely evening!

I made a new channel trailer, because the old one wasn't quite accurate any more, and I'd been wanting to do something a bit more "creative" with the channel trailer for a while.

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. I think it's pretty representative of what I do on YouTube these days! 🙂

Please feel free to share as you see fit. The video is unlisted, but shareable/embeddable etc.

Well, last night I heard that one of the services I make quite heavy use of — IFTTT, or If This Then That — has decided to switch to a subscription model, and, worse, rather than simply making it so that the subscription offers additional benefits, they've rather cheekily decided to completely gimp their "free forever" basic account.

For the unfamiliar, IFTTT is a service that allows you to set up various conditional statements to automate things. You say "If this thing happens, then that thing should happen too". Examples that I use include "If it's 12:00pm, then post a tweet promoting my Patreon" and "If there's a new feed item from [website X], then post a link to that article to my Discord". It's really incredibly useful, particularly if you're doing anything where a social media presence would be helpful.

Well, at least it was incredibly useful. As of October 7, IFTTT's "free forever" account will limit you to creating three "applets". Three. That means three "if this then that" statements, and no more. If you have any more than that, the rest will be "archived" and unable to be used until you archive one of your three active ones to make space. To put this in context, at present I have 31 applets running — a bunch of timed ones throughout the day to auto-tweet promotional and introductory messages linking to MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, plus a few of the aforementioned ones that integrate with Discord.

If I don't pay up, I'll lose all but three of those. Now, granted, IFTTT has generously offered a "pay what you want" subscription until October 7, allowing you to fix your monthly price — so long as it's at least $1.99 — but it still feels a bit like being extorted here. I'll probably end up paying $1.99 just because those applets — and the ability to make more as required — are useful, but the situation leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I understand why they're doing this, of course. IFTTT was one of those services where it seemed impossible to figure out how they were possibly making any money, since there didn't appear to be any ads on the site or any existing membership or donation options. And as the site has doubtless become more popular over the years, I imagine its overheads have gone up and up to deal with bandwidth requirements and suchlike. So I understand why they might want to ask some of their userbase to give something back.

And I'd be fine with it if they'd handled this differently. If they'd kept their "free forever" (their term, which is why I keep repeating it) account exactly as it was, then simply offered the new features for the Pro account — essentially a means of making applets much more complex and flexible, ideal for power users — then I would have been fine with it. Instead, they completely gimped the free account, making it next to worthless, then made the only option to "upgrade" provide a bunch of features that your average user probably won't need.

I've seen several services and pieces of software do this over the last few years. The PlayStation VR video player, Littlstar, started charging a subscription fee a while back, for example — and rather cheekily offered a limited-time one-off purchase option for an extortionate $40 as an alternative. The fact that this was coming was never made clear, and with the way console software updates work, there is no means of downgrading to a previous version. The video downloading software that I used to extract YouTube videos to include in the podcast quietly updated itself without telling me, so there is now a limit of 30 downloads per day without paying, too.

It's reasonable to ask people to pay for things, particularly things that have taken time and effort to create. But suddenly charging for something that used to be free, with little to no indication that such a requirement was coming, is pretty unreasonable. We're burdened with subscription after subscription these days, and it really makes me miss the days of buying a piece of software and just being able to get on with things!

A publisher approached me with some interesting news yesterday. It's embargoed until tomorrow morning at 5am BST (about five and a half hours from the time I'm typing this), so I can't tell you what it is right now, but it's something I'm very happy about. And I'm also very happy that said publisher trusted me with the information enough to give me the opportunity to have something ready for when the embargo dropped.

It's taken a few years to build up to a position where this sort of thing happens, but it's a sign that I've developed a solid reputation at least among certain quarters of the Internet. I'm never going to be a "big name" and I'm not trying to be — I know very well that the stuff I cover is primarily of interest to a specific audience (which I would primarily sum up as "people a bit like me") but it's still pretty neat when a publisher who very much aligns with my own values and my audience gets in touch like this.

There's always the potential for this to lead to interesting things in the future, too, whether that be access to preview or review copies, the opportunity to interview interesting people or simply being given an occasional shout-out.

Anyway. As I say, there's not much more I can say right at this second, but if you can wait five and a bit hours, keep an eye on MoeGamer for some news that should be of interest to at least some of you reading this, and I hope it makes your kokoro go doki-doki or something.

Have a lovely evening!

Annual appraisal day at work today, and it went fine. I complain about my day job a lot, but I'm good at it, and people still seem to think I'm good at it if I literally spend half the working day asleep and still get everything I need to do done. So who am I to argue?

I feel mildly guilty. Not enough to really want to push myself in the daily grind — there isn't really much to "push myself" with, which is part of the problem, really — but enough that I was stressing myself out a bit about this appraisal just in case anyone "noticed" (I don't know how they would have) that I had been tired, bored, disillusioned and prone to sleeping through entire conference calls. Then I thought, well, if they don't want me to sleep through conference calls, they shouldn't have so many of the fucking things, should they? And they shouldn't be so fucking boring.

I always feel the "self-appraisal" aspect of yearly appraisals is kind of pointless. Who in their right mind is going to rate themselves anything other than "satisfactory"? Give yourself top marks and you set yourself up for a fall — or just look like an arrogant asshole. Give yourself anything below the satisfactory mark and you're just asking for trouble. Unless, of course, you like the idea of increased scrutiny, in which case go nuts, I guess.

It reminds me of one of my least favourite bits of secondary school — the periods towards the end of term where we had to write our "profiles" that would end up in our reports. Inevitably, it would consist of an entire hour of a whole class bored to tears writing "This term, I have learned [all the things we have learned]" in our neatest handwriting and hoping it went through the carbon copy paper properly. That or hoping that no-one scratched an "invisible" cock on our top sheet when we weren't looking, only for it to become terrifyingly clear on both the teacher's and the parent's carbon copies beneath.

Okay, maybe there's no covert dick-drawing in the adult workplace — or if there is, I'm almost certainly working somewhere far too boring for any of that to go on — but the whole "insincere attempt to look like we're self-reflecting" thing remains the same, and I'm never sure what it actually achieves other than leaving a paper trail to say why everyone's salaries went up at a fraction of a percent of the rate of inflation this year. Or something.

Anyway. Nothing to worry about now for another year. I am, apparently, Doing a Good Job. I'll take it.

Got a new assignment for Nintendo Life, and it's a game I've had my eye on for a while since its various attempts at Kickstarter funding and eventually being picked up by Sekai Games: Undead Darlings. It's also not embargoed so I can blab a bit about my first impressions here, since I started playing it this evening!

For the uninitiated, Undead Darlings is a hybrid of dungeon crawler and dating sim, with the emphasis mostly on the dungeon crawling. It's a very different type of dungeon crawler to something like Moero Crystal H, though, in that it's not really about character progression and customisation, but rather about scavenging loot, making your way through interesting environments and figuring out when you reckon you're tough enough to take on the area's preset encounters.

The game's setting sees you waking up in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and your childhood friend from next door, Pearl, appears to have turned into a zombie. Well, she's partly turned into a zombie, anyway; she's undead, but she hasn't lost her humanity. As luck would have it, your father appears to be a completely batshit insane mad scientist who may or may not have been responsible for the whole zombie apocalypse in the first place, and he's left a trail of clues for you to go and find the cure he left somewhere for safekeeping.

This evening, I played through the first dungeon, which is set in a police station. Your task here is to meet up with Pearl's cousin Jordan (also a zombie), find some clues to the safe place where the cure had been left, and figure out the code to the place it is locked inside. This mostly involves scouring two floors of grid-based dungeon crawling, looking for events, grabbing loot and fighting off enemies.

There are a few twists on the usual formula, though. Firstly is a distinctly survival horror-inspired aspect where you only have very limited inventory space, and your weapons have a set amount of durability before they break and become scrap. This isn't the end of the world (no pun intended), because scrap can be used to repair other weapons or expand your inventory capacity, but you do need to be a little bit careful — there are no shops in a zombie apocalypse, so you're completely dependent on the loot you find in the dungeons. Fortunately, this all respawns and is randomised each expedition.

Secondly, the combat has a strong emphasis on exploiting weaknesses to build up a multiplier, and then using this multiplier to amplify the effectiveness of an action — be that an attack, a spell, an item or even the Defend command. In some cases, the elements that enemies are "weak" against (i.e. that build up the multiplier) are also the ones they take the least damage from, so you have to hit them a few times with the "correct" element, then use the multiplier built up to unleash a neutral-element attack against them. It adds an interesting layer of strategy, particularly when you consider the "Macro" system, where you can program preset sequences of commands for your party to perform, usually with the intention of setting off much more powerful Combo skills.

Limited inventory space can make healing a bit tricky, so to that end there are a few things to help you out: firstly, any time you find treasure, you get a small HP and SP heal, and secondly, if you find one of the optional events between the protagonist and the girls, those all conclude with a full heal — plus the opportunity to develop your affinity with them, of course, which not only affects endings but also their combat effectiveness.

So far outside of some truly atrocious voice acting (which thankfully you can mute in favour of a text-only presentation) and some occasionally questionable difficulty balancing on the "standard" level, I've been having a good time with this and am looking forward to sinking some more time into it. It's a stylish, distinctive game that I'm glad was finally able to see the light of day, and it seems like it's been designed with real care rather than simply slapping together a visual novel component with a half-assed dungeon crawler engine.

I'm particularly impressed with the presentation of the dungeons themselves; rather that simply being fairly static tilesets, they've been designed like real places. The "walls" in the police station aren't just regular old walls — there are desks, piles of files, folding screens, plants and all manner of other things. It really makes a huge difference in making it feel like a believable environment, and has been a real highlight so far.

Anyway. That's out on the 28th, I think, so you may want to give that a look when it appears. Hopefully with the long road to release the developers will want to commemorate it with a proper packaged release at some point, but as always I'm sure we'll have to wait and see in that regard!

I'm sure things will go back to "normal", whatever that is, eventually, but today's been one of those days where it feels a long way off. And, to be honest, I sort of find myself going back and forth on whether or not a return to what we had before the whole COVID-19 pandemic is actually desirable.

Chief among this is, of course, the idea of working from home. My mental state is up and down a bit on this, because while I very much appreciate the increased flexibility and freedom it provides, it's also frustrating to feel like your professional life is "invading" your personal life. (This only really applies if you're not a particular fan of your job, of course; if you're legitimately doing something you enjoy, in my experience, you'll have no problem with this — see: any time I was working on a gaming website in the past!)

Out and about, I certainly don't have a particular problem with keeping a distance from people, and I don't even especially mind wearing a mask, although as a glasses-wearer I am yet to find a means of wearing a mask that doesn't steam said glasses up.

Obviously it would be great if we could go back to a world where there wasn't a great "unknown" hanging in the air all the time — something that may or may not kill us — but in other regards, I wonder what the world will actually look like after this is all over. Assuming it is ever all over, which presumably it will be at some point!

Ah well. At least I'm not short of reasons to stay indoors…