Andie's been doing noisy DIY today so I wasn't able to record any videos or anything. I did, you'll hopefully have seen already, get the next part of the Atelier MegaFeature out the door, and also did a bit of site tinkering for my own personal gratification, and got two things done that I've been meaning to get sorted for a while.

Firstly, I did a minor tweak to the All Games page which means each game now has a super-short blurb attached to it, too. Some of these are serious, others are written in the style of a late '90s British gaming magazine's front cover subheadings. You'll be able to tell which are which. This was more work than it sounds, because it involved going through every single game page in the database (of which there's over 400 or so now) and adding a short Excerpt. But it's done now, and I'm already in the habit of adding one for new titles, too. So that's good!

Secondly, I set up the "infrastructure" ready for covering the Evercade once I have it in my hands. I fully intend on covering every single game that is available for that device — I have the "All-In" bundle plus the Technos Collection 1 cartridge on preorder — so I wanted to get things set up ahead of time. You can get a sneak peek at https://moegamer.net/evercade but obviously there's nothing there apart from the pages for the individual cartridges as yet. The intention is to turn all those game titles into links as I write something about each of them, so ultimately I should end up with probably the most comprehensive coverage of the Evercade and its games on the Internet.

Anyway, all that taken care of, I think I'm going to get some sleep and have a nice lie-in tomorrow. Take care of yourselves and have a lovely weekend!

Andie got me A Hat in Time for Switch for my birthday, and I've been playing it in bits recently. I really like it so far — even if the Switch port is, as expected for an Unreal Engine game, a little janky. Since the game is supposed to be an homage to collectathon platformers, I just chalk up any performance issues (which have not, I should say, made gameplay a problem at any point) to an attempt to pay tribute to the N64 with more than just the design and gameplay.

I'll write more about the game on MoeGamer when I've beaten it, but I'm really impressed with it so far. Hat Girl's movements are so fluid and natural throughout the game; you never, ever feel like you're fighting against animations, but everything she does flows absolutely beautifully into each other, regardless of what you're doing, and that gives the game a delightful, free-flowing feeling as a result. Just exploring the levels is a joy; it's not at all unusual to find yourself completely ignoring the objective you're supposed to be pursuing in favour of just leaping around like a crazy person.

I really dig the weird vibe it's got going on, too. Hat Girl is completely shrouded in mystery and never says a word, but the way she gets embroiled in all manner of stupidity around the various worlds of the game has a very "childish" feel — in a good way. By that, I mean that the game as a whole feels like an exploration of the concept of childish curiosity, and how children tend not to be inherently "good" or "evil", because they're still shaping the way they look at the world. Hat Girl does some obviously good things throughout her adventures — but she's also a little shit at times, too, and I really appreciate that.

I'm looking forward to playing more of the game over time. The objective-based nature of the game — think Super Mario 64's stars — means it's fun and easy to just dip in for a level or two, or sit down for a more protracted session if you have some more time on your hands. Since Andie will be doing some noisy DIY tomorrow that will preclude me from recording some videos, I have no doubt that I'll spent at least some of my Friday in the company of this adorable little hat brat.

I can feel my mental health drifting towards breaking point. I'm not specifically upset with the lockdown situation, but I am completely fed up with how futile my day job feels right now. I've reached a point where I'm regretting not volunteering for furlough at 80% pay when it was offered, but I'm too late to do that now.

The last couple of days online have been… unpleasant, too. The "discussion" that I alluded to yesterday has been continuing today, and I've seen some extremely unpleasant behaviour from people who really should know better. And, of course, no-one is listening to one another on the matter; everyone is just bellowing into the void, absolutely convinced that they are "right", and that everyone who disagrees are varying degrees of awfulness.

I'm really tired of this. I enjoy interacting with people via social media and Discord a lot of the time, but it's exhausting when things become overwhelmingly negative. I write what I do and I make the videos I do because I want to share the enjoyment and value I get from gaming with other people; others, it seems, want nothing more than to tear down anything they don't "like", usually for ill-informed reasons.

I hasten to add nothing bad has happened as a result of anything I've specifically posted anywhere; I'm just tired of seeing people I care about having to defend themselves from online assholes. I feel empathy for them, and I swear more often than not I end up feeling worse than they do!

Anyway, I've requested a week off at the end of the month. A week "off" during this lockdown may not seem smart, but, well, I'm unlikely to be going anywhere on an actual holiday at this rate, and I just need a break to relax, rest and recharge a bit. Plus, all being well, I'll have the Evercade in my hands by then, so I'll be able to use that week to prepare a whole host of good stuff about that device and the games available for it, which I'm looking forward to a great deal.

Just gotta make it there first…

I considered writing something about the whole localisation drama today, but realistically only one thing needs to be said: if the original writer says "yeah, that's cool" with regard to a localisation, then that should be the end of the discussion. Don't be a dick. Especially not to people who work their asses off to bring international entertainment to our living rooms. (I'm pretty sure no-one reading this would be a dick about such things, I hasten to add; this is more of a general comment.)

Anyway. I thought I'd talk about something a bit more positive: how I'm looking forward to the upcoming deluge of retro and retro-inspired stuff coming our way!

Streets of Rage 4 is out now and appears to have been mostly well-received by people. I have a Limited Run copy on the way at… some point, so I won't be playing it until I have my copy, but I'm glad it sounds like everything went well with it. That's very exciting to see a classic series resurrected like this — particularly with the talent involved, and the inclusion of the knowing nods to longtime enthusiasts.

Secondly, the Evercade's release date creeps ever closer. I know there was a bit of a kerfuffle recently over Joe from Game Sack giving the device a bit of a negative review when everyone else had been very positive — including the notoriously picky tech-heads at Digital Foundry — but I'm not particularly concerned. I will judge the device for myself when it finally arrives — and I also feel like Joe has been quite negative about quite a few things recently, ever since Dave left Game Sack. At least he puts across that impression on Twitter; I must confess I haven't really felt inclined to watch any Game Sack vids since Dave departed, even though Dave often said things I disagreed with!

Thirdly, I picked up a copy of the Mega Drive Classics collection for Switch with some birthday money. I already had this on PS4, but had been contemplating grabbing it on Switch for a while — the prospect of Mega Drive classics on the go is too much to pass up on. Even though, you know, we're not actually going anywhere right now. I can play Streets of Rage 2 in bed if I so desire, which is all that matters.

There's so much cool stuff happening in gaming, both in terms of brand new stuff and resurrections of old stuff. It saddens me to see so many people who claim to be gaming enthusiasts wasting so much of their time complaining and hurling abuse at people on Twitter when they could be enjoying any one of what is, at this point, probably hundreds of thousands of different possible experiences.

Well, I've certainly got better things to do. Like Mana Khemia, which I'm enjoying a lot! New gameplay vid for that tomorrow, along with a new episode of short;Play. Please enjoy, and take good care of yourselves as always.

Started Mana Khemia this evening, and man if this game doesn't want to be anime Harry Potter. I'm not complaining, mind — it's just amusing how blatant it is in places. We have the leading man with a mysterious past. We have a female companion who's quite bright, albeit a bit lacking in common sense. We have another companion who's dim but charming. And within the first few minutes of Harr… err, Vayne's time at Al-Revis, the "evil" students are trying to recruit him.

Of course, this is all just the setup and I have no doubt things will continue in a different direction from hereon. Thus far I've played through the first three "weeks" of the game and have enjoyed what I've seen so far. It's taken a lot from Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm and put it in a game with a different structure and a very interesting progression mechanic. But more on that when we actually get to it for the Cover Game feature.

I'm going to start archiving my gameplay sessions with this on YouTube, so if you want to "watch along" as I play (commentary-free, unedited) then you'll be able to do that from… tomorrow, probably, whenever this initial video finishes rendering and uploading. I'll a section and a playlist to the channel front page so you can easily find it.

For now, after yesterday's late night, which I've been suffering for a bit today, I think it's time to head to bed. Hope your Monday was tolerable.

Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm is down for the count. That was a 50-hour Atelier game; I wasn't quite expecting that, but I'm still ahead of schedule so all good! The ending was supremely satisfying and I'm very happy with it.

Next up is Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis, a game that I actually didn't know was part of the mainline Atelier series until relatively recently. I've been looking forward to this one for some reason; I don't know a lot about it, but I do know it's quite well-regarded, and I like the art and character designs.

Been pondering something this evening while I was polishing off the Atelier Iris 3 finale. At the moment, I'm recording my full playthroughs and backing them up to Google Drive so I can easily retrieve both footage and/or screenshots any time I might need to make use of them in the future. I'm thinking that starting with Mana Khemia (and perhaps retroactively with the three Atelier Iris games that I recorded in their entirety) I might back these up and publish them on YouTube. I don't plan on making a big deal of them, editing them (other than aspect ratio correcting 4:3 footage to its correct proportions, since my capture card records in 16:9 regardless) announcing them or anything, but I thought having a "gameplay archive" on the channel might be nice.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, previous gameplay videos I've posted have had decent views over time, so doing this might bring some new people to the channel and encourage them to check out my more produced stuff. Secondly, those reading the Cover Game/MegaFeature articles will be able to have a look at how the game plays. Thirdly, it's a bit easier to keep YouTube organised with playlists and suchlike, so if I need to return to some footage, I can find it easily.

As I say, I'm not planning on doing any real editing on these, so that means in some footage there might be long breaks while I go and help my wife with something, have a poo or look something up on GameFAQs. I'm in two minds as to whether to try and catch these and cut them out; my first inclination is to not bother, since that would just be making more work for myself, but we'll see.

Like I said, I'm planning on starting to do this with Mana Khemia, but if you would like me to try and make some sense of my Atelier Iris 1, 2 and 3 footage, do let me know!

Now I'm off to bed. I just played Atelier Iris 3 for four hours straight without realising. Well, you gotta finish the job when you're on the home straight, right?

I'm pretty stoked about short;Play. I've recorded a few more episodes recently, and I can feel my energy being high through them. It's really enjoyable to be able to play something I love and talk about it as I give the grand tour. I think this is going to end up being one of my favourite series to produce; now it just remains to be seen if I can convince people to watch it!

I've not done a great job of interacting with other YouTubers as yet, because I've been taking some time to build up my subscriptions list a bit. I had a chat with Marc from The Joy of Sticks (an ST YouTuber) the other day and he gave some good recommendations, so I'll be trying to hang out in their comment sections a bit more. Hopefully that will lead to some good "networking" or whatever.

Obviously I'll continue doing stuff whatever, but I've had a number of people come to me and say that it's a shame I don't get more views/subscribers from what I do… so, well, I evidently need to be more proactive in making that happen! I'm going to have to start setting aside a bit of time each day to hang out with bloggers and YouTubers, I think; as MoeGamer's growth over the last few years has shown, it really is all about getting other people involved.

It's 1:45am on a Friday night/Saturday morning in the middle of a global pandemic, so of course I'm revamping my website's navigation.

I've been meaning to update the top menu on MoeGamer for a while now; it's been getting a bit busy and cluttered for my liking, and this is especially apparent on mobile, where it's a pop-open menu that expands to astronomical proportions.

So I've ditched most of it, and instead replaced it with https://moegamer.net/explore/, which provides easy access to all the site's regular features, columns and various bits and bobs I've done over the years.

There's still a bit I want to do to tidy up. I might remove all the individual Cover Game entries from the top menu, since you can quickly access all the Cover Game features from https://moegamer.net/cover-games/ and there are banners in the sidebar anyway, and I might try and find a way to clean up the Videos menu a bit, though it's probably helpful to be able to navigate right to the videos of a specific game. I might set up some pages and just have a single "Videos" link in the top menu similar to how Explore works for articles right now.

I'll decide on all that tomorrow, though; I think I've done enough work for this evening! For now, bed; tomorrow, video-making, website tinkering and video games!

Hope you've all had a good week. Stay safe!

Hello! It's late and I'm tired, and I just happened to have this video ready, so please enjoy some Early Access to next Wednesday's short;Play video! This time around, we're looking at the action-arcade-puzzler Cyber Protocol for Wii U, a gorgeous little game with some interesting mechanics and a strong emphasis on forward planning.

If you have a moment to watch, like and/or share this week's short;Play video on Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl Gold (don't share the above vid yet, please), that would be lovely! I'm enjoying adopting this format for more recent, non-Atari games, so it'd be great to see some more people watching. These things take time, I know, but if you have the opportunity to help me out a bit, I'll… I don't know, send you non-infectious virtual hugs and kisses or something.

Anyway. Hope you're all doing well. It's nearly the weekend! Just Friday to survive. We can do this!

It was my birthday today! I think, all things considered, I had probably the best day I could have possibly had under the circumstances. I had a day off work, I got some great presents from my wife (A Hat in Time for Switch, and a book of official piano arrangements of various Super Mario tunes), lots of money and vouchers from various friends and family members… and a ton of extremely kind, supportive messages from people who enjoy my work.

I'm feeling pretty humbled by that latter aspect in particular. I often say that I do what I do with MoeGamer and YouTube primarily because I simply love doing it, and that remains absolutely true — I take satisfaction from and pride in my work, and would do even if no-one at all was reading or watching it. But today the incredibly kind messages of gratitude and support, the even kinder gifts from a few people and the generally pleasant atmosphere that just surrounded my whole day… Well, I don't think I could ask for anything more, really.

It's back to work tomorrow… well, working from home, anyway. It's nice to be approaching a return to the inevitable grindstone with a pleasant feeling in my brain; the sensation that what I do matters not just to me, but to others too. I'd like to thank all of you reading this in particular for having enough faith in me and what I do to show your support in a direct, concrete fashion — and as MoeGamer starts another year on the Internet, I hope I will continue to inform, entertain and intrigue you!

Thank you.