I spent a fair bit of time in Phantasy Star Online 2 today figuring out what's what. And I spent a pleasing amount of time just pissing about in the game as well as doing actual progression-related stuff.

There were a few notable things that happened. Firstly, I happened to be in the Shopping area when a "live concert" was set to go off, so I managed to catch space idol Quna doing a performance. This is actually really neat; while you're standing in the area, you can hit a button to get a properly directed "cutscene" version of her song, or you can just hang out and act like an idiot in front of the stage. Or, as most people did, a bit of both. There's also a physics-based ball game in front of the stage, so you can waste some time competing against a rando to knock this ball into one of the two nearby coloured goals for… no reward whatsoever besides your own personal satisfaction. Love it.

Staying for Quna's song provides you with a buff that lasts quite a while. Plus, when she's finished, you can actually type "ENCORE" and if enough people do that, she comes back out for another song. Very cool.

As her performance finished, I received a notification that an "Urgent Quest" was underway. These are quests that only show up at specific times of day for short periods of time, and it just so happened that it was one I needed to progress in the currently running "Wedding Event", so I jumped in.

It was a ton of fun, and the kind of multiplayer I actually enjoy — no obligation to do things directly with others or competitiveness, but a whole bunch of people in the same area all working towards a common goal. I think there was a full 12 of us in the quest at once, all doing our best to take down as many enemies as possible as quickly as we could — and making a beeline for the various special events any time they happened.

Of particular note in that regard was the occasional appearance of Nyau (presumably a distant relation of Myau from the original Phantasy Star) who goads you into a pointless fight then accidentally opens interdimensional portals to bring unspeakable horrors tumbling out while attempting to escape.

Really enjoying the game so far… aside from the horrendous lag on the lobby ship during peak hours. I'm sure that'll settle down with time, though, and the actual in-game action is smooth and slick as anything. So I feel like I'll be spending quite some time in this game!

Morning everyone! If you support a few people on Patreon, you've probably heard all this already, but for the benefit of those who haven't, I'll provide you a bit of information.

From June 1, Patreon is obliged by law to add sales tax to some Patron's pledges if you're from certain locations. For some of you, this won't affect you; for others, you may already be paying a form of sales tax (such as VAT in the UK), so nothing will change.

Patreon will be providing full details of the affected regions in an email to you all from June 1 onwards, but I wanted to give you all a heads-up that this is coming. If you're in one of the affected regions, this may result in a small increase to your pledge amount in line with your local sales tax rate.

Don't worry about this too much! Sales tax in the US ranges from 4% to 11%, so on a $5 pledge, this will mean about 20-55 cents in tax added at most — not much at all. Patreon estimates that less than half of all Patrons will be affected, and the amount involved will be very small. And if you live outside one of the affected regions — which Patreon will be providing further details of in their email to you on June 1 — nothing happens at all!

Not everything on Patreon is taxable, however, and thus creators have been encouraged to classify what each tier "means" in terms of value. "General support" is not taxable, for example, as nothing is actually being sold — it's effectively a donation — but things like exclusive content (these blog posts) and digital goods (monthly wallpapers) are in some circumstances. I've done my best to classify the benefits to minimise the impact to those of you in the affected areas.

Thanks in advance for your understanding. All this is a legal requirement (well, more accurately, a variety of international legal requirements) that Patreon are required to follow in line with local tax laws based on the "buyer's" location but, as I say, it shouldn't affect too many of you that much.

Have a pleasant Friday, and apologies to be the bearer of… fairly "meh" news 🙂

Well, after a very long wait, Phantasy Star Online 2 is finally here for English-speaking audiences — officially this time, none of that South-East Asia shenanigans — and I've spent a fair portion of today playing it.

I'll be writing something more substantial on the subject on MoeGamer soon (possibly tomorrow, taking a look at "my first day" and the history of the game) but suffice to say for now that I'm thoroughly enamoured with it.

It suffers a little from that "online game that has been up for a while" issue, whereby the moment you log on you are bombarded with about a zillion things you can do, but if you take the time to focus on what you're doing, work your way through what are clearly intended to be the introductory, tutorial quests and features, you'll soon figure out what's going on.

Mechanically and structurally, it's not super-complex or difficult to get into, but there is plenty of depth there — and in contrast to cooldown-based online RPGs, there's a strong emphasis on skill and timing. The combat is enormously satisfying, and feels very true to the original Dreamcast version; after hitting so many Perfect Attacks in the last six hours or so I feel like I'm going to be seeing that red circle in my sleep tonight!

If you happen to want to jump in and go on some space adventures with me, I'm on Ship 1 under the player ID "MoeGamer", so you should be able to find me that way. Alternatively, shoot me a DM via some means (here, Twitter, Discord) and we can arrange a time to meet up and hit Rappies in the head with pointy sticks.

I feel like I'm going to have to control myself with this game; it has the potential to be a real life-devourer, I can feel it now!

Today has been rather enjoyable. I made four videos — the four I hoped to make today — and spent a bit of time with Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis. My cat Patti is presently having a fight with a spider and almost winning, though the spider is doing a surprisingly good job of surviving some fairly solid beatdowns from Patti's paws. As I type this, it seems to have escaped into a box, and Patti doesn't quite know how to deal with this. I think she's just waiting for it to come out.

I'd mention the VG247 situation, but you don't really need me to tell you again how fundamentally broken modern games journalism is, do you? Particularly with a site like VG247, which has become the lowest of the low, tabloid-style clickbait bullshit over the course of the last few years. And to think I used to refer to that site as a reliable source of information when I did my daily "rounds" of gaming media.

Anyway. Tomorrow's plan is to record one Final Fantasy Marathon episode — two if I'm feeling energetic — and from there to put in some more Mana Khemia time. I'm well over halfway through the game now, I believe, which means I'm well ahead of schedule in terms of things to write about it; this is a good situation to be in, so I'm going to take full advantage of my time off this week to keep this "head start" going. And don't forget if you want to follow my playthrough, I've been uploading commentary-free recordings of my play sessions over on YouTube; scroll down to the front page of my channel to find the playlist if you're interested. Or, y'know, just click here.

I'm really enjoying Mana Khemia. It looked like it might be very similar to Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm when I started playing it, but over time it's really distinguished itself with plenty of unique mechanics and structural features. I continue to be pleasantly surprised and delighted by how continually creative and interesting the Atelier series is, even in its relatively early days. And I look forward to the day when I can say yes, I have the most comprehensive coverage of the series on the Internet. Hell, I probably have that now — for the PS2 era, at least!

Anyway. Time to hit the sack. Another fine day awaits tomorrow, and the drudgery of the day job seems far away right now, which is exactly what I was hoping for from this time off!

I'm enjoying putting together the new short;Play series, as it's opened up the opportunity for me to talk about… well, pretty much any game I feel like, to be perfectly honest, and without any commitment to do a full playthrough on camera or anything like that. I enjoyed Warriors Wednesday and I am still enjoying the Final Fantasy Marathon, don't get me wrong, but Atari A to Z has taught me that having a variety of things week on week is enjoyable — both for me and for the audience.

Coming up in the next few weeks on short;Play, I'll be bringing you a video on A Valley Without Wind, which I've been loving my recent revisit of, and also an all-time favourite of the "golden age of shareware" — Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Neither of these would have really fit into previous series formats, but the flexibility of short;Play means that they're both ideal for inclusion — interesting games, largely underappreciated, and which I feel passionately about. A natural extension of the written work I do on MoeGamer — and in many cases, I'll end up writing about the things I cover on short;Play over on MoeGamer too, since there are things I can say in writing that I can't "in the moment" while demonstrating a game on video… and things that will occur to me while recording a video that won't necessarily spring immediately to mind while I'm writing.

Anyway, continue to expect short;Play episodes on Wednesdays for the foreseeable future. I've been fairly productive on the first day of my week off, with two Atari A to Z episodes and two short;Play episodes recorded; tomorrow I'm going to take care of two Atari ST A to Z and two Atari A to Z Flashback episodes, then that leaves plenty of time later in the week to continue my slog through Final Fantasy II's challenging postgame scenario!

It's a shame the Evercade didn't turn up this week — it sounds like units will be shipping for us here in the UK starting next week, or perhaps the very tail end of this week at the earliest — but I'll definitely find a way to cover it and its launch lineup in depth even if I'm back on the clock at the day job, don't you worry!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new videos when they drop; they're rendering right now, so I'll probably share them as "early access" for you lovely Patrons in the next couple of days or so if you'd like to see them a bit early! For now, I'm off to play a bit of Phantasy Star in bed.

Took a quick look at the stats earlier today, and rather pleasingly it looks like if things continue at the current rate, MoeGamer will have had continual growth ever since its launch in 2014.

To put it another way, we're less than halfway through the year and 2020 has already exceeded half of last year's numbers. This is awesome, and I'm really happy that people are continuing to stop by to see what I'm up to and what I'm writing about.

Of course, there are reliable traffic magnets in there — my articles on the pornographic games Honey Select Unlimited and Hilzartov Fairy have been drawing people in daily ever since I posted them, probably largely because I'm one of the few sites out there to have actually covered them — but there are people stopping by every day for one reason or another. And that's really nice to see.

I often mention that I don't do this for the numbers or anything like that and, since MoeGamer isn't ad-supported in any way, the actual numbers don't really matter beyond raising awareness of what I'm actually doing. But, as a writer, it's definitely satisfying to see more and more people coming by year-on-year to read my thoughts on various games — and it makes me feel like I'm doing something right.

I've never made a particular effort to search engine-optimise MoeGamer because I strongly believe that does horrible things to the readability of writing — and besides, the way Google ranks things nowadays isn't that simple anyway. I promote my stuff on Twitter and Facebook, but I don't do any huge marketing pushes or anything. I believe this is what people in the business call "organic" somethingorother. And, honestly, it's the type of people I'd rather have hanging around — people who came by because they were interested or intrigued by something, and found some articles, videos and/or podcasts to lose themselves in for a while.

I've never been about clickbait — even though the few occasions I've written response pieces to hot-button issues of the hour have brought in goodly amounts of people — and I absolutely 100% refuse to participate in the odious practice of hatebaiting. While it may bring people to your door in droves, they're all angry. And that's not fun at all.

I'd much rather have a few cool people stopping by to say hi, talk about some unusual games and have some fun. And that's what I have right now! And it's good.

Those of you who have listened to the most recent episode of The MoeGamer Podcast will know that chez MoeGamer has been undergoing some renovations recently. My wife Andie, dissatisfied with the (admittedly horrible) carpet in our hallway and the (not actually that bad) wallpaper she put up in the same hallway decided to completely obliterate… well, almost everything. She bought an angle grinder and everything. I don't really know what that is aside from the fact it looks and sounds terrifying.

Anyway, it started off like this:

She wanted to see if there was a banister underneath the dividing wall in our hallway. There wasn't. But then there was a big hole in the wall, so of course she had to remove it entirely. (Emphasis on "she" — I've been staying well out of the way, as I am a total liability with anything vaguely DIY-related.)

Patti did not know what to make of all this nonsense going on. She seems to like having the "hole" to look through, though.

Then the carpet came up and the sanding started. Sanding is noisy. Very noisy. I had the door shut and it still gave me a headache. Patti hid under the bed while this was going on. Meg didn't give a shit.

And finally, today it was all finished! Well, the stairs, anyway. We're going to run a "runner" carpet down the middle to cover up that different-coloured bit (it looks like that's what used to be there, anyway) and Andie's going to paint the walls to replace the wallpaper (that she chose) that she's decided she hated.

It'll look really nice when it's done, so thumbs up for all her hard work — I know I certainly couldn't do all that without going absolutely insane. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product!

Hello folks! Just realised I forgot yesterday — apologies. I think the relief of finally getting some annoying projects from the day job done just in time for me week off got to me; I kind of flopped down with some video games and just sort of zoned out for the evening. Nothing wrong with that!

Today I wanted to share with you a piece that I wrote a while back, and which has finally been published over on the lovely Normal Happenings blog. Matthew, who runs the blog, has taken a bit of a step back from active blogging to focus on his other creative passions, but is making a point of publishing every single post from the ambitious "The Characters That Define Us" collaborative project that he helped put together.

There have been some great posts up until now — go check out https://normalhappenings.com and browse through the front page to see what's been going on. And then check out my own post at  https://normalhappenings.com/2020/05/23/nepgear-the-character-that-defines-pete-from-moegamer/ to round off your visit!

The piece is themed around Nepgear, but it's actually a fairly comprehensive history of how I got to where I am now, for better or worse. Nepgear is a super-important character to me specifically, but it's important to acknowledge the massive impact that the things I'm into now have had on me — on my personal wellbeing, my mental health and my creativity.

While there are many days where I get frustrated with all sorts of things, one thing I can rely on is that my hobbies, my interests and my passions will always be there for me — and that's an enormous comfort. I'm grateful for everyone who has come along for the ride with me over the years — and yep, I'm talking about you, dear reader.

I hope you enjoy the piece. It's a long, personal commentary, but it felt good to write — and I hope it helps you get to know me a bit better!

Nearly time for a week off! Unfortunately, it looks like with shipping the way it is right now, my Evercade probably isn't going to arrive in time for me to do some uninterrupted coverage next week — but rest assured, there'll be plenty of that when it finally does arrive! I've already caught "evercade" being one of my key search terms on MoeGamer, so hopefully I'll be able to provide some comprehensive information for those who are looking for this.

In the meantime, I'm planning what to do with my time off. Mana Khemia will, of course, feature heavily — I actually haven't played it for a couple of days as I was thoroughly engrossed in A Hat in Time — and, of course, all the usual videos. For an upcoming short;Play I'm going to look at a game I recently booted up for the first time in probably about eight or nine years: A Valley Without Wind.

If you've never come across this game, it's a fascinating experimental piece that combines action RPG, procedurally generated open-structure 2D platforming and strategic citybuilding. In many ways, it's a glorious mess; it's also incredibly compelling and very addictive, and I've been really enjoying refreshing my memory on how to play it. (It also has a sequel, which is also very good and maintains the first game's experimental weirdness with something of a different mechanical focus, so count on that showing up in a few weeks, too.)

As I mentioned on Twitter a few days back for those who follow me there, I've decided that as part of the Atelier MegaFeature I'm going to revisit the Arland games and give them the same treatment — the Arland feature I did last year spent just one article on each game, and with the context I have now having played the Atelier Iris games and, by the time I get back to Arland, the Mana Khemia games, I have a lot more to talk about in terms of how the series has evolved.

That's going to be a while off yet — and obviously it's going to make the overall MegaFeature a bit longer — but it's going to be worth it in the long term. I already have something in the region of 35,000 words about Atelier on my site, making my coverage probably some of the most comprehensive online. If you have any Atelier fan friends, feel free to send them my direction!

Anyway. One more day of work to get through, then a nice weekend followed by a lovely week off. I can do this!

Probably the strangest sight I saw today was a guy getting really angry about the fact the Atari Lynx had an option to flip its screen over and play "left-handed" — a feature that the Evercade team have been experimenting with implementing in their upcoming Lynx collections.

I'm not entirely sure why the guy got so furious as English was not his first language and thus his explanation was not the clearest. But from what I made out, he was, for some reason, upset that Atari had included this entirely optional feature when every other console ever had had the D-pad on the left and the buttons on the right. Left-handed people had always played like that, he reasoned, so why should the Lynx be different?

Well, the Lynx isn't different, it just has the option to flip it around, so I remain baffled as to why this chap got into such a rage with everyone on the Evercade Discord, who were all politely trying to explain why this feature was present, and how it being completely optional meant that there was absolutely no need to get angry about it.

I guess this is another side of things you see elsewhere that defy reason — people who object to the presence of Easy modes in video games, for example. Sometimes these options can be a huge benefit from an accessibility perspective, and the presence of said options doesn't mean you have to use them. That is, after all, what the word "option" implies.

Oh well. Every day people find strange and unusual ways to confuse and disappoint me!