After we did a proper tidy and deep clean on my study the other weekend, I've been spending a few evenings actually playing some stuff on real hardware. Most notably, I've been finding myself thoroughly drawn in by a game I used to really love when I was younger: Starflight from EA and Binary Systems.

Every time I revisit one of these older "space games" like Starflight, Star Control or Space Rogue, I find myself a little sad that we don't really get games like this any more. I mean, yes, we have stuff like the X series, but that's a little different; Starflight, if you're unfamiliar, is more a sim of "being a starship captain" rather than being a "starship simulator", if you see the difference. In other words, the interface is supposed to imply you giving orders to your crew and receiving the information from them rather than involving you literally doing everything by hand.

I had high hopes for Mass Effect being a (then) next-gen take on this kind of space sim back when we were first hearing rumblings about it — the stuff with the Mako in particular reminded me very much of the Terrain Vehicle sequences in Starflight and the similar lander sequences in Star Control II — but that ended up not being the case. And that's a shame; I feel like we could do a really good "space game" these days, with a vast universe to explore coupled with an approach to controlling things that is less about "flying a starship" and more about "sitting in the captain's chair".

I'm not sure I'm explaining that clearly. But I do know that Starflight for Atari ST is still a great game that I'm having a lot of fun playing right now — so I will be continuing to enjoy that in the absence of anything more modern that scratches quite the same itch!

Hello everyone! Bit of "business" for you today!

I'm going to change up the rewards for S-Rank (£5+) Patrons to better fit with what I'm doing these days, and I wanted to let you know what I was planning — as well as give you the opportunity to talk about what you might want to see! I know pretty much none of you are here just for the rewards — both tiers have always been "token" rewards as thanks for your support rather than anything particularly desirable or exclusive — but I do want to make sure I offer something reasonably meaningful for those of you who are generous enough to support at the higher tier.

With that in mind, I'll be replacing the previous wallpaper rewards (which, frankly, I was starting to run out of ideas for) with an exclusive, patrons-only monthly video. Said video won't have a set format and I am 100% open to requests from the S-Rank patrons as to what each month's video will include!

That means if you'd like to see some gameplay of a particular game, tell me. If you want a tour of my game shelves, tell me. If you want to see some real hardware in action, tell me. If you want me to try and play something on the piano for you, tell me! Nothing is off the table except, obviously, anything that will make YouTube-kun upset (or, y'know, getting my knob out and stuff) — so if there's something you want to see me try my hand at, just say so.

I experimented with doing some patrons-only videos a while back which were open to all patrons — you can find an archive of them here if you're curious — and enjoyed doing those a lot. I think it'll be fun to do some more freeform stuff like that — plus it's an opportunity for you kind people to let me know what you want to see, as well as something properly "exclusive" I can offer to S-Rank patrons.

Anyway, with that in mind, I'm going to make the first of these videos this coming weekend, so feel free to put requests/suggestions in the comments below. If I don't get any requests or suggestions I'm just going to do whatever I feel like — you'll get a video regardless. That sounds a bit like a threat, doesn't it? It's not. Promise. Probably.

That's about everything there is to say about that, but if you have any questions please feel free to ask!

Alongside this, I also think I'm probably going to shut down the Discord server. It doesn't get used very much and, to be honest, worrying about it (for no real reason, I just have anxiety) is something I can probably do without. If you're absolutely desperate to keep it, do let me know — but with it being pretty quiet on there for the longest time I think it's time to give it the boot. You can easily reach me privately on Discord via MoeGamerPete#2465, and I know that I share some more active servers with at least some of you reading this — so feel free to say hi via other means!

I won't shut down the Discord right away, but if I haven't heard any convincing arguments in its favour by… let's say next Friday (Feb 18), I'll be getting rid of it then.

Thank you for your time and attention! I'm off to play video games.

I haven't fully caught up on the Nintendo Direct as yet because I was playing Muramasa and got so wrapped up in it that I really didn't notice the time. I also got the bad ending, so now I need to figure out how to make that not happen, but that's a job for another day — I definitely played enough to write about it tomorrow!

I have, however, skimmed some of the headlines, and man, it sounds like that was a complete banger of a Direct. Chrono Cross! Front Mission! Live a Live! 48 new Mario Kart tracks! Xenoblade Chronicles 3! Fire Emblem Warriors! Doubtless plenty more things I haven't seen yet!

After the last Direct I paid attention to (I think it was the Metroid Dread one?) was a fairly moribund affair, they've absolutely come out swinging this time around. While both Sony and Microsoft continue to be really, really, really boring — woo, they each bought one of the companies behind some of the most uninteresting games on the market today — Nintendo continues to set an amazing example by proving that yes, for them, it is indeed all about the games and nothing else.

Even the most hardened of anti-Nintendo fanboys would be hard-pressed to claim that tonight's Direct wasn't full of genuinely amazing stuff — including things that people have been asking for for ages, and things that people have been certain were probably going to happen, but unsure when. And a significant number of them are Switch exclusives, too — all without needing to buy anyone.

I think one of the most interesting things is the number of remakes of PS1-era classics that were showed off in this Direct. That demonstrates pretty clearly that Nintendo has a very good awareness of the people who make up a significant proportion of its audience — and while they're still of course keen to court the family-friendly image they've always had, providing a solid string of rereleased or remade classics for Switch is going to very much endear them to gamers of my age or thereabouts.

Anyway, I'll likely do some more analysis over on Rice tomorrow once I've had a chance to watch the presentation properly, but for now… a hearty, enthusiastic thumbs up. Just the thing to cheer me up after the bleakness of tonight's Muramasa session!

The one thing I dislike quite a bit about the whole "working from home" thing is how video calls have become the go-to means for people to, in their eyes, solve a problem quickly.

"Can we call?" No we cannot, because I have crippling anxiety in one-on-one social situations at the best of times, magnified a thousandfold if it's an audio or video chat.

I don't really get why people think it's a quicker, more efficient means of communicating, though I suspect that may just be years of my own habits talking. I am, after all, someone who has always felt more comfortable communicating via the written word, be it in a real-time chat or via email, and thus my perspective may be skewed. But in all seriousness, I do struggle to think of a time when a video call has been more efficient than a quick text message.

I guess it's down to different ways of communicating. Some people prefer to literally speak their minds, while others (like me) prefer to take their time over a written response. Ideally everyone would be able to find some sort of sensible middle ground, but with two such "extremes" in play it feels like it can be tricky to do so sometimes.

So yeah. You want my attention? Send me a message. I'm not jumping on a video or voice call unless I absolutely positively have to!

I have noted a few times in these very pages that I love reading old magazines, even when they're no longer "relevant". Which is why when, a while back, my Dad decided it was time I took over the collection of Page 6/New Atari User magazines he'd been holding onto for years, I was thrilled. This was an opportunity to revisit a variety of memories — some of which were still clear as day, others of which had mostly vanished into the mists of "the past" until I was prompted by something I'd read.

Today I happened to be reading one of my Dad's old "Making Music with Your Atari" columns. In it, he described the process he and my old clarinet teacher (also My Brother's Girlfriend's Father, as referenced a few times in Atari ST A to Z videos) were taking in using Emagic's "Notator" software to produce professional-quality printed musical scores.

The pair of them had taken on a project to produce proper scores for a piece of music that an acquaintance of MBGF had written. If I remember correctly, she was getting on a bit in years, and the piece of music in question had never been properly published, unlike many of her other pieces; my Dad and MBGF decided that they wanted to do this nice thing for her — and learn a great deal about using Notator in the process.

I hadn't thought about this whole project for years. I don't know that I'd say I'd forgotten it, because I ended up inheriting a lot of the said composer's pieces of music after she passed away (for some reason — I never met her, so I can only assume they came via MBGF) and thus I get an occasional reminder that she existed. But what I hadn't thought about for a very long time was what a major part of our life at home this whole Notator project was.

My Dad worked insanely hard on it, and after reading the article I remembered it being something that was part of our lives for a surprisingly long time. I had forgotten that my Dad and MBGF had the intention of setting up a small music publishing company named after the piece of music they had worked so hard on, and that they weren't expecting to make a profit, but hoped at least they broke even. (I have no idea if they did in the end or not, but I suspect my Dad and MBGF at least found it a valuable learning experience if nothing else.)

It's fascinating to have so many of these almost-forgotten memories written down on paper to stumble across every now and then. As a general rule, I have the kind of mind that has absurdly good long-term memory for the most mundane and stupid things — little social interactions that have been forgotten by everyone else who was involved in, usually — but as this experience attests, there are things that get pushed into the back of even a long-term memory like mine.

(I should probably also add at this point that my short-term memory is atrocious; my wife can tell me she's going out later and I will have forgotten by later in the day.)

Anyway. That's my story for today. Read old magazines. You never know what you might end up remembering!

Been playing a bunch of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers over the weekend… and without spoiling things for the sake of those who are yet to play it themselves, I am happy to report that I completely and utterly understand the hype and love that people have for this expansion. Technically I'm only still doing level 71 quests, but already some huge, major, emotional events have happened — so I shudder to think what will occur as the main story continues!

I've been very impressed with the side stories, too. I'm someone who, upon playing a new expansion in FFXIV, will tend to clear out every area of sidequests completely the moment said sidequests are available, and while in Shadowbringers few of these sidequests relate directly to the main scenario — understandable, since you can do them at any time — they do really flesh out the world wonderfully and have their own little arcs that are fascinating to follow through on. Again, I'll resist the spoilers for now.

I've just done the first dungeon of Shadowbringers, which is also the first where you can use the "Trust" system to fight alongside the story characters. I really like this, as it means you can jump straight into a story-critical dungeon immediately without having to queue — but the various comments the characters make as you proceed through the dungeon also provide their own nice bit of flavour. In particular, there was a boss fight in said dungeon that kind of follows on from an earlier bit of story you experienced alongside a particular character, and seeing that come to fruition alongside said character is a pretty awesome moment.

Mostly I'm really taken with the atmosphere, though. Wonderful use of sound, light and colour makes for a genuinely unsettling experience; there's this absolutely constant "rumbling" noise in the background that serves as a reminder of what's at stake, and the characters are all written in such a way to be varying degrees of "weird" — ranging from "slightly unsettling" to "absolutely batshit crazy". There's a particular section that carries a distinct "Wonderland" flavour, and I absolutely love it; that part of the narrative hasn't "resolved" just yet, but I'm looking forward to inevitably returning there at some point.

I'll write more about this on Rice this week, but thought I'd acknowledge here and now that yes, it is a very good thing, and I'm glad that I have managed to remain unspoiled up until this point! More to come.

I wrote an article over on Rice Digital today about DEMONDICE's new EP Shut Up, Get Happy. I've probably said most things that need to be said or that I want to say about that set of four tracks already — but I think some of those messages are worth reiterating.

For the unfamiliar, Shut Up, Get Happy is DEMONDICE's first work for quite some time; while she's been working her "other job" she put this personal project on hold. But now is absolutely the right time for her to bring back DEMONDICE as an outlet for the things she needs and wants to say.

Although her connections to said "other job" are pretty obvious if you know what to pay attention to (and, moreover, she has no problem with people knowing said connections, as she said in a livestream yesterday), there are no direct, obvious links between the two of them, and thus there will be things she feels able to say as "DEMONDICE Karen" that she can't say in her other capacity.

But her other capacity has had a pretty tough time recently — through no fault of her own. Okay, that's not entirely true; she did lash out at some of the people who had been starting shit with her, but this really is the point of the whole situation. She had been taking unwarranted abuse from people without provocation, and she should be able to speak her mind in such situations. She should be able to point to those people, tell them to well and truly fuck off out of her life, and for them to respect that.

Unfortunately, the world we live in today does not work that way, and thus for a short period it looked like there was going to be some troublesome drama. Thankfully, it didn't last for long and seemed to blow over pretty quickly — but our Karen was clearly still left with a fair amount of bitterness about the fact it had happened in the first place.

Hence, Shut Up, Get Happy: four tracks in which she explores the anger, frustration and depression she felt at her powerlessness in that situation — and in which she looks forward with renewed hope for the future. This is no angsty cry for help and call for attention: it's an honest, raw expression of emotion, followed by an acknowledgement that she can do something about this situation if no-one else is.

I have to hella respect her for that. As I've mentioned quite a few times before, there's an unpleasantly "adversarial" feel to the Internet a lot of the time these days, with people far too keen to start fights over things that don't matter. The only real solution is to rise above such petty squabbles and do the things that you find helpful, productive and healthy. It's a struggle, but sometimes it's a challenge worth following through on if it helps to establish you in a position of strength; to make it clear that you're not going to be beaten down by people with nothing better to do than to hurl abuse at strangers online.

It's all very well to give the traditional teacher-to-student advice of "just ignore it!" or "say no!" to bullying — but these days those things don't work. A lot of people seem to have lost the ability to empathise with others — particularly when they're not communicating face-to-face with them — and sometimes they need a sharp shock, for it to be made absolutely clear that their behaviour is not acceptable, and that people aren't going to stand for it.

I dealt with something similar last year with that pesky commenter on Rice Digital. He was an absolute shit to pretty much everyone else in the comments section, to such a degree that it actively discouraged others from commenting. When we banned him he, of course, kicked up a shitfit — but when we put our respective feet down and told him that he was being a cunt and wouldn't be welcome around here any more, he eventually departed, and to my knowledge he hasn't been back since.

It was the idea of "just ignore him" that had allowed him to run rampant for so long — and he had done a lot of damage in the process. But thankfully he's a thing of the past — and proof positive that an assertive, strong and consistent approach can work against the most annoying people online.

Anyway, that got a bit off the point, but go read my article, listen to Shut Up, Get Happy and pay particular attention to the lyrics. Girl's got a lot to say — and it's all very worthwhile.

I own a book called Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? It was published in 2005, and actually got a follow-up a little later. It's basically a humorous A to Z guide of things that are shit about life in the modern day… well, 2005, anyway. I read a bit on the toilet earlier, and I was not at all surprised to determine that things are indeed still shit — and quite possibly worse than they were in 2005.

The only real difference is that at the time Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? was published, the Labour party were in power and Gordon Brown was just starting to slobber over the possibility of becoming Prime Minister, whereas now… I just don't want to talk about it, really.

Actually, no, that's not quite true. Looking back on these books after a few years is quite an interesting and sobering experience when you consider the context of things. Back in 2005, many of the things we take for granted today were just getting started and in some cases didn't even exist yet. Twitter wasn't a thing, for example, so it does not put in an appearance — and besides, it was a good few years between Twitter launching and it becoming the absolute cesspit it is today. Ah, for the good old days — manual retweets and all. Better than cancellation by quote-tweet, anyway.

I suspect a new version of this book written today would look quite similar in some ways, but there are plenty of new and annoying things to add to it — many of them simply from the world of technology. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, DLC, "live service" games, in-app purchases… very few of those things (if any) existed back at the time Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? was first published, and yet they would be an important part of it today. And that's to say nothing of COVID.

I guess this is part of getting older: assuming that things are getting worse rather than better. But, y'know, things really are pretty shit.

Finally finished Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood! As in, finished the main story through all the patches, plus Omega, Ivalice, the optional dungeons and the Hildibrand questline. I haven't delved into Eureka because there's no real "need" to right now, but I am curious to give it a look at some point. Another time, though.

That means Shadowbringers is up next! I've been very excited to get into this, but have also dragged my heels far too much in getting here. Still, I'm here now, and I can't wait to see what it's all about. The finale for Stormblood's postgame storyline was absolutely excellent, and that was quite a cliffhanger at the end, too. I imagine that must have been quite frustrating if you then had to wait for Shadowbringers to actually release!

Playing Final Fantasy XIV with all the story available from the outset has been a really fun experience. I like the gradual reveal of the main story when you're playing it "up to date", but it's hard to deny that everything is just… better when it all flows right into each other. I mean, you can still see when the patches were — one quest ends with a character basically saying "come back later" and the next starts with them saying "welcome back, it's been a while" even if you haven't moved from in front of them — but for the most part, it's a nicely coherent, flowing story.

Anyway. I'll write more about this on Rice at some point in the next couple of days, I'm sure, because as always, the game's done a great job of "uprooting" you before the next expansion — something which I've previously written about. And this time around, the "uprooting" is probably more drastic than ever before — but it remains to be seen exactly what that all means.

Somehow I've managed to remain completely unspoiled on some very exciting and genuinely shocking revelations, and I suspect there will be more to come. For the benefit of those even further behind than me, I won't share them for now — but suffice to say there are some great scenes the further you go.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to start Shadowbringers right now, I'll save it for another day; I was ready for bed at about 8pm this evening and now it's quarter past 11!

Well, the last few days just sort of flew by, apologies for the lack of posts once again! I can show you the reason why I kept forgetting though — we spent most of the weekend doing this!

This is my upstairs study, which most of you probably know as the place I sit to record intros for my videos. It's been a bit of a state for a while — most notably covered in dust since my wife's most recent DIY spree — so this weekend we took some time to give it a proper deep clean, put things away that didn't need to be out, and rearrange the storage space to make the whole thing be a lot more practical. The results are very pleasing indeed!

If you're wondering what the marks on the side of the chair are, they are the result of a certain cat discovering that a Gamer Chair is the ideal thing to use as a scratching post. The perils of living with such beasts.

Here's a closer look at the desk. I've got the 1MB Atari STE out on the left, and the 130XE Atari 8-bit on the right. Both can easily be connected to the 14 inch Trinitron monitor via RGB SCART, as can all the consoles on the shelves behind except for the N64, which doesn't have RGB output. It does have standard SCART output, at least.

Above the desk there's an NES, a SNES, an N64 and a Mega Drive. There's an Atari 2600 atop the TV, too. I still only have two games for that; I should look into grabbing some more.

A look at the shelves. On the left is all Atari ST stuff — mostly games, but there's also some educational, productivity and music software there, too. On the right is mostly PC games, with some boxed Atari 8-bit stuff towards the bottom and on the very top shelf above the consoles.

And finally another angle on the desk. You can just about see the display of Philips Videopac cartridges at the back. The Philips isn't out at the moment as it takes up a lot of space, but it's just inside a cupboard (out of shot to the right) so can be set up at a moment's notice if I fancy a game of Satellite Attack or Munchkin.

The flatscreen TV that's there has a Chromecast attached to it, and I'll likely use it as a sort of second monitor if I'm doing work up here — which I now have space to do, so that will be nice.

Anyway, that's the result of a very tiring weekend! Now I sleep, and hopefully with considerably fewer weird dreams than I had last night!