I beat Atelier Totori tonight, and did much better than my first time through! First time, I managed to just about scrape the Normal ending, but didn't even see the "final boss" of the game. This time I not only saw it, I beat it — and even got a character-specific ending. (Melvia's, in this case, which I'm happy with — I messed up Mimi's events along the way so would have gone for hers otherwise.)

I'll obviously be writing more about this in the near future, but Atelier Totori is a really interesting game in that structurally it almost resembles an old-school Western RPG as much as anything else. You're moving around a map, taking specific amounts of time to get places, and things happen at certain times. There are things around the world that will absolutely definitely beat the shit out of you if you don't go in properly prepared (aforementioned final boss being one of them, but he is the least of your worries if you want to see everything in the game!) and tons of interesting secrets to discover.

I mentioned in my recent features on Atelier Rorona how that game has a much more freeform, non-linear structure than its immediate predecessors, and this is even more true in the case of Atelier Totori, which essentially says "you have three years to achieve this one thing, get on with it" and then invites you to approach said task however you see fit.

Getting the "True" ending, which involves fulfilling the conditions for all the other endings simultaneously, seems like an enormous challenge, but one I'm keen to take on at some point. The nice thing about the Arland games is that a single playthrough is short enough that it doesn't feel like a huge effort to go through again, particularly since you can carry equipment and money over to your next playthrough.

I'm a little ahead of schedule now, so I'm going to have to take a little time away from Atelier to tackle a new Nintendo Life assignment in the coming days. It's a game I'm looking forward to exploring — and one I was going to play anyway at some point — but it's embargoed for the minute so that's all I can say for now!

Anyway, it's 2AM. Time to sleep, I think!

I was pondering my own mental health earlier, as I often do. And there are some things I need to try and do.

First, I need to figure out what has happened to my attention span with regard to things that I don't particularly want to do. I'm trying to determine whether my atrocious attention span right now is due to going stir crazy at home, if it's due to the medication I take for anxiety (which anecdotal reports seem to suggest can affect one's attention span at least temporarily) or if it's a combination of many and varied factors. I suspect the latter; I've been taking the meds for a while and thus I feel like I'd have probably noticed this a bit sooner if it was just them causing issues.

Secondly, I need to figure out how to just… cope with day to day life. Realistically, I need my day job for the moment, and however much I find myself not enjoying it, trying to "avoid" it, as I have been to a certain extent, is not going to help matters; in fact, it will probably create problems in the long term. This side of things is something I can at least do something reasonably concrete about.

One of the reasons my day job frustrates me is because it's boring and easy, which makes me not want to fart around with it. Which means I end up putting things off for hours and hours without really achieving anything productive or helpful in the meantime. So, clearly what I need to do is simply take the boring and easy things and bash them out as quickly as possible as one of the first things I do in the day. That way, they're done, and I potentially have the rest of the day to do whatever I want to do, since I'm working from home and there's no-one to check up on me.

When you're talking about the irrationality of mental health, all this is, of course, much easier said than done, but recognising an issue is an important first step in being able to deal with it. So I'm going to do my best to start looking at things… if not positively, then at least a bit more practically from tomorrow morning, and we'll see how things go.

There's always Magicami, Atelier and Olympic video games to distract me for a little while if it all gets a bit much, after all.

I'm almost certain we'll discuss this on the MoeGamer Podcast at some point, but the thoughts are fresh in my mind right now, so I thought I'd pop them down on paper with no real organisation.

I'm not excited for "next-gen". I've said this before, but this is the most not excited for "next-gen" I've been in the history of next-gens.

My reasoning behind this is that the things people seem to be getting excited about are the absolute antithesis to the things I like about gaming. The main case in point at the time of writing is the recent reveal of the Xbox Series S — a smaller, lighter, 1440p version of the next-generation Xbox with no disc drive and a 512GB SSD. Everyone seems super-hyped about this because 1) it's launching at $299, which seems eminently reasonable for a new console and 2) something about Xbox Game Pass.

I don't like Xbox Game Pass, and it kind of baffles me why so many people are so thoroughly on board with it. And I'm not just saying this to be contrary; I have fresh memories in my mind of how vociferous the resistance to "not actually owning your games" has been in the past when, for example, games have ended up delisted from various digital storefronts. Hell, in the last week we've had people chewing out Nintendo for the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection no longer being available after March of next year.

So what's different about Game Pass? I guess it's "cheaper" in that you pay less up front and have access to all the games you want from their catalogue rather than paying more, once, for a single game. But I'm not convinced that's necessarily a good thing, for several reasons. Firstly is the obvious one: stop paying, you no longer have access to any of the games.

Secondly is perhaps more of a concern when we think about how few people already bother to play their games all the way through. With a vast, ever-growing catalogue of new experiences to try on Game Pass, people are going to be even less likely to see things through to their respective conclusions, which means 1) said people are going to miss out on some fabulous finales, and 2) developers and publishers are going to do their best to implement "retention strategies" in order to keep people playing.

Because the business model for Game Pass pays out to developers and publishers according to play time, it's in companies' interests to put out one, continuously updated game that never ends, a la Fortnite or its ilk. Throw in some microtransactions on top of it and they have the potential to make even more money atop whatever they get out of Game Pass. EA signed up to make their EA Access catalogue part of Xbox Game Pass today, and you can be damn sure they'll be on the front line of implementing this bullshit with anything even vaguely online-centric.

Game Pass does have value in that it's a risk-free way to try things out without buying them… but that used to be what demos were for, and older demos often provided unique experiences to the full game. Plus how many people do you think are going to find something on Game Pass that they like and then buy it if they already have access to it? Not many, I'd wager.

On top of all that, the meagre 512GB SSD the Xbox Series S comes with means that deleting games to make room for new ones will be an absolute necessity. And I suspect not many people will bother to redownload something they consider themselves "done" with if something new and shiny is just a click away.

I don't like the direction things are going, and I don't like how bafflingly positive people have been about all this, given, as I say, past criticisms of digital distribution models. Sony has some work to do in order to convince me next-gen is worth jumping in on. And I suspect the various limited run companies are going to be very busy in the coming years, too.

I don't like to be negative about what should be an exciting time, but frankly, most of what I've seen about the new generation of consoles fills me with worry rather than anticipation. I hope I'm wrong.

Since covering Winter Games on Atari A to Z recently, I've been delving into the recent history of official Olympic games on various platforms — primarily the Xbox 360 at this point, but I have a copy of the currently Asia-only Tokyo 2020 Switch game on the way for tomorrow, too.

I'm finding myself reminded how much I enjoy these games, and how they have a definite appeal, particularly in this era of very long games. Each of these Olympic Games… err, games… provides a short, simple, self-contained collection of Things to Do that are fun. And while there's some overlap between versions, each package does offer its own distinct, unique twist on things to keep things interesting.

Currently, I'm playing Vancouver 2010 from Eurocom and Sega, and having a really nice time. They did a great job with the atmosphere on this one; there's some fantastic sound design on some events, with the ski jump being a particular highlight. The range of events is a little limited, but such is the nature of the Winter Olympics to a certain degree.

The game as a whole offers a bit of longevity, though; besides the "Training" mode (which is actually pretty much a "Compete in One Event" mode, given that it has leaderboards) there's the main Olympic mode, plus a Challenge mode that tasks you with taking on the various events with additional conditions to fulfil while you're doing your snowy, icy thing. On some of the skiing events, for example, you have to either avoid or crash into snowmen; some ski jump events have you attempting to land at specific distances; several events have "average speed" challenges to tackle. It's fun. And, despite this being a point of criticism for a lot of reviewers, I actually like the fact there's no long-term "career" mode. It's a pick up and play game. Sit down, play with some skis, snowboards and skates until you've had enough, then go do something else. No commitment, still fun. I like it.

I'm intrigued to check out the Tokyo 2020 game as it sounds like it has a fun character creator and makes some interesting decisions in the name of making it a better video game rather than an accurate simulation of The Olympics That Never Were. More on that in the near future, though — and perhaps some sort of "Olympic Supertest" in the slightly more distant future. I have a few more official Olympic games to collect first though!

I'm pleased with the upcoming videos I've got on the way. The fact that I got so many done in a big batch felt good, and I feel like they cover some interesting subject matter, too — including both a few well-known titles and, of course, some lesser-known stuff too.

I enjoy what I do a great deal — and, more to the point, I actually feel like I do a pretty good job at it, both in terms of my written work and my video work.

The latter in particular is something i'm especially pleased with; a few years back I would never really have considered doing what I did when I started Atari A to Z– let alone showing my face on video rather than providing audio-only commentary. It's help me develop a certain degree of confidence in myself; as I've noted numerous times on these pages, I am not someone who is especially self-confident, and I have particular difficulty making small talk with people I don't know particularly well (or indeed at all) and, on top of that, I have all sorts of body image issues that cause me varying degrees of anxiety.

Making videos has helped with that to a certain degree. I still don't like what I see when I look in the mirror — and I know I need to make an effort to do something about that — but, for some reason, I'm not ashamed of seeing my face on video, nor am I ashamed of hearing my voice.

That last one is a big deal. I used to hate my voice. I didn't even like it all that much when I regularly appeared on the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, the old podcast I did 10+ years ago, but I especially hated it when I was a kid. There are various reasons for that, but I guess they were insecurities that it was possible to get past. That and having a good microphone helps more than you can possibly imagine; getting something that gives your voice a bit of "presence" (mostly through a bit of body to the bass end of things) makes a world of difference.

I'm just sort of rambling now, I'm aware. But I just wanted to say thanks for continuing to support what I do, and for believing in it. I'm muddling my way through all this without any real long-term plan, and I'm enjoying it along the way. I wish I could make enough money from doing this to make it my full-time job — but for now at least, it's a means of directing my energy, and my enthusiasm for the things that have always been important to me.

Knowing that there are some lovely people following along on this journey with me is a wonderful feeling, so thank you for being here. Tell your friends!

I learned this term the other day. It describes that state of mind where all you're doing is scrolling through social media, looking for something to get upset about. You're not necessarily consciously looking for something to get upset about — you might tell yourself that you're looking for something "interesting" to engage with — but, in practice, you are, nine times out of ten, looking for something to get upset or angry about.

Now I know there's a word for this, I feel increasingly conscious of it, and I've found myself deliberately wanting to avoid social media for the last few days. This is, of course, a double-edged sword — hanging back from social media makes it difficult to talk to people (particularly if you're also hanging back from Discord because the servers you've hung out on in the past are also proving to be prone to this) but it also means you'll almost certainly get a lot more done, and not waste hours of your life getting upset and angry about things that don't matter.

I often think it'd be nice to just close my Twitter account altogether, but the fact is it's an important source of people actually finding and sharing my work — as well as making new contacts, which often leads to interesting things. So I don't feel like I can abandon it altogether, which kind of sucks.

That said, what I can do is try and curtail my doomscrolling. Put my phone out of reach when I'm doing something else. Break the habit of just clicking through Twitter, Discord, Reddit when my mind is idling. Get more shit done. Perhaps even go so far as to set myself some specific "Twitter hours" when I sit down and "do my social media" for the day. That is, after all, how we used to handle email. Six o'clock and cheap rate phone calls would roll around, we'd log on to CompuServe, check our emails, respond to any that needed responding to, then hang up.

Ah, simpler times. Perhaps there's some value in trying to recapture that.

A mildly interesting thought occurred to me while I was buttering my bagel five minutes ago. (No, that's not a euphemism). And that is that sports games are not what they used to be.

This might sound blindingly obvious, but let me talk you through my thought process.

I've been revisiting quite a lot of sports games through the Atari A to Z Flashback series in particular, and I tend to dread the prospect of them, but actually end up quite enjoying a lot of them. In the case of 2600 games, this is often because the games in question only bear a passing resemblance to the sport they're supposedly simulating and are instead designed as "fun video games".

But that's not all. Recently on Atari ST A to Z, I covered Epyx's Winter Games, and I was reminded how much I liked that series of games back on the Atari 8-bit and ST. And this evening, on a whim I decided to boot up Vancouver 2010, the official video game of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I had a blast with it!

I even — don't tell anyone — had a good time with at least one installment of FIFA back in the day. Specifically, the World Cup '98 incarnation on the N64, which I picked up as part of my failed attempts to "get into football" and fit in a bit better with my peers. World Cup '98 was, again, just a fun video game — albeit one that bore rather more of a resemblance to the game of football than Championship Soccer on 2600 did.

In recent years, it feels like the sports games, particularly those that have become annualised, have lost sight of the things that made games like the NHL series on the Mega Drive great — they were fun video games first and foremost; the kind of thing you could throw on when you had friends over, and you'd have a great time trash-talking and competing against one another.

These days, the sports games are their publishers' cash cows. Not only do they release versions with marginally incremental improvements each year — along with the odious "Legacy Edition" practice they've been doing on Switch, which I won't get into now — but they riddle the damn things with microtransactions. FIFA has its Ultimate Team mode, for example, which is a fun idea in theory until you consider quite how much money you could end up investing in it if you decide to take it seriously. And one of the basketball games in recent years attracted a ton of controversy for featuring a casino mode. What happened to, y'know, basketball?

I dunno. These games don't feel like they're about getting a few friends over to have some fun any more; like so many other things, it feels like they're more about trying to assert your dominance online, brag about your "achievements" (when said achievements more than likely actually mostly came about from throwing your money at things) and then quietly buy the next, near-identical game the following year because no-one will play the old one online any more.

I really enjoyed my brief time with Vancouver 2010 this evening. It's a fun, simple, arcade-style winter sports game that I can see being immensely fun with multiple players involved. If hanging out in person ever becomes a thing again, I'm definitely going to give it a shot with some friends — along with some of the other Olympics games I've found myself collecting for 50p a pop in recent months!

You won't catch me buying any of the modern sports games, though. For me, they represent the very worst of the modern games industry — and they don't even look like fun video games that anyone can pick up any more!

Been super productive today! Got a whole bunch of videos recorded and ready to edit, and I'm pleased with the variety of stuff covered in them.

I'm already feeling that the decision to drop long playthroughs for now was very much the right one; working on the videos today without the "weight" of several hours of FFIII looming over me was very pleasant indeed. I could focus on each individual game without worrying about having to rush or anything like that, and it was nice.

As I noted in my video the other day, I'm not ruling out the idea of returning to long playthroughs in the future — some of my favourite videos are from previous long playthroughs, particularly in the Project Zero and Split/Second series. For now, though, I'm pretty convinced I've made the right decision.

Off to bed now. Gonna get all this stuff edited tomorrow, and then I'll be well ahead of schedule on things, which is a nice feeling. Hope the end of your respective weeks are good, and you have a pleasant weekend to look forward to!

I've had a pleasantly peaceful day today. I haven't given myself too much to do, made some free time for myself, and still got some stuff done. Notably, I got all my research done ready for another batch of Atari A to Z videos, so I can spend tomorrow getting well ahead of schedule on those, and perhaps putting some other things together, too.

Spent some more time with Magicami DX, too. Enjoying that a lot, actually, though it's a shame that the mobile version doesn't seem to work yet — I'd love to be able to play it on the toilet. They are aware of the issue, at least, so that should be all sorted soon. In the meantime, the browser version works perfectly fine and, more importantly, the gyaru character has now joined my party, so all is very well in the world of Magicami.

Getting nicely ahead of schedule on Atelier, too, which is nice after the last few PS2 installments ran a little longer than I expected! I've got a few more Atelier Rorona articles in me, and in the meantime I'm partway through Atelier Totori and doing much better than my first playthrough! I finished the first "half" of the game approximately two in-game years ahead of schedule, so at present I'm able to run around pretty freely working on relationships, events and crafting shiny pieces of equipment for as many of the characters as I can. Not sure if I'll get the True ending or not — the True ending requirements in Atelier Totori are very strict and challenging! — but so long as I haven't messed anything up beyond repair so far, and I don't think I have, I might have a shot at it. We'll see.

Continuing to enjoy Nurse Love Syndrome, too. I can't tell if I've ended up on a "route" or not as yet — or indeed if this VN even has discrete "routes", but I assume it does — but I'm finding it thoroughly compelling, with an extremely likeable cast of characters and an almost painful sense of relatability with regard to feeling somewhat "out of your depth" in the workplace. More on that when I've finished a single playthrough, though.

Tomorrow will be a day for making videos and writing, then I'll see how I feel over the weekend. Might be nice to just have a couple of days completely off, but we'll see how restless I'm feeling 🙂

It's the end of my working week now; I have the next couple of days off. I was hoping to take the whole week off, but something something important projects high priority blah blah blah. Oh well. Two days is better than no days.

As I contemplate the free time ahead of me, I'm suddenly overcome with a feeling akin to exhaustion. I don't think I'm necessarily physically exhausted, but I feel mentally exhausted. And I'm not 100% sure why; I wouldn't say I've been especially stressed or anything of late. My conjecture is that my dissatisfaction with my day job is, in itself, proving to be a bit stressful, and the prospect of being away from that for a few days is providing something of a release of tension that has been steadily building up over the course of the last few… weeks, months, whatever it is.

And so it is that I find myself at 8.30pm, strongly contemplating going to bed. It feels like a bit of a waste, though. Perhaps I need to neck a nice cup of coffee or something — there are lots of things I could be doing (that I actually want to do, more to the point), so I just need to shake off the mental fog that threatens to descend and actually get on with something I enjoy for now. Time for oneself is precious; no sense in wasting it worrying about literally nothing.

With that in mind, I'm off to get a coffee and, in all likelihood, play some Atelier Totori. Hope your week is going well!