For no particular reason, I feel like going through some personal favourite Atari A to Z videos and sharing them with you all. Because Patreon is stupid and doesn't let you embed YouTube videos in the body of a post, click on the link in the text below the thumbnail to go to the video page on YouTube to watch it! And if you've never watched an Atari A to Z video before… why not make today your first time?

These are all from the first "season" of Atari A to Z, which is where I was still getting my bearings a bit, and before I'd figured out the current format and camera setup I have now. As such, these are all just gameplay footage with voiceover. I still have a soft spot for many of these videos, though, hence today's celebration.

Bruce Lee is one of my favourite Atari 8-bit games, and it still holds up really well today. It's an unusual combination of beat 'em up and platformer, with some tricky environmental traversal puzzles.

I played Juice long before I ever played QBert for the first time and thus have very fond memories of it! Of course, now I recognise it as a shameless QBert ripoff… but for my money, the more varied level layout still makes it a superior game.

I never, ever beat a level of Pharoah's Curse when I was a kid, but when revisiting it for the series, I finally did so! Life goal: achieved. Well, okay, maybe not, but I was still pleased.

Yoomp! is a great example of what the Atari 8-bit is capable of when in the hands of a talented modern programmer. Genuinely impressive stuff.

And finally… the creator of  Zeppelin, known today as Cathryn Mataga, followed me on Twitter after I posted this video. I don't understand half the shit she tweets about — she seems to be super-into ham radio or something — but I was still honoured!

How about you? What are some of your favourites from what I've covered to date?

So I mentioned the other day that I'm writing about Prison Princess for Nintendo Life… I thought for today's post (or perhaps one of two posts today — I still need to catch up some more) I'd share a few screenshots that will perhaps give you an idea why I, rather than Angry Scotsman, was recruited to cover this one.

The two princesses are pretty awesome. I believe each was designed by a different artist; they contrast nicely, and in more than just looks, too.

The game is a point-and-click adventure, which is actually quite unusual to see these days, particularly from Japan. Rather than having fully animated sprites, though, the girls simply "appear" in various locations around the room in various poses according to what they're doing or looking at.

If you like bums, you'll enjoy this game.

I mean, really enjoy this game. These timed puzzle sequences where the princesses are attempting to accomplish something are fully animated with the full glory of Live2D.

I love Live2D. Whoever invented it needs a knighthood or something.

Lewd bits aside, the game is actually pretty good. I'd say it's quite short, but it's a point-and-click adventure, so 4 hours is actually quite long when you consider you can blast through a King's Quest or equivalent in 90-120 minutes in most cases. Assuming you know what you're doing.

Anyway, I'll refrain from talking too much about the game now as I have to save something for the review! Thought you might want to see some screens, though.

Forgot to write yesterday, didn't I? Sorry about that. And sorry in advance for any misspellings and typos in this post; I'm away for the weekend and using a laptop I don't usually use, and it turns out the keyboard on it is absolutely atrocious. Lots of keys simply aren't responding unless you really give them a bit of a hammering — apparently this computer really doesn't like punctuation.

 In fact, you know what, fuck it, I'm typing the rest of this on my phone. And I hate typing on my phone, so you know it must be bad if I'm doing it in preference to using the dodgy keyboard on this laptop!

It's a shame, it was a freebie from the mother-in-law, who didn't need it any more, and specs wise it's a bit better than my now ageing laptop with its dodgy trackpad. I guess now we know why she wanted to get rid of it, huh.

I'll catch up on the "missing" day tomorrow; I know none of you reading this likely mind if I miss a day, and I believe we established a while back that I've buggered up the numbers at some point anyway… but you have to understand, it's a matter of pride at this point!

I'm actually quite impressed I made it to 420, haha, blaze it, etc… obviously this is a far cry from the 2141 days I did on my old public blog, but eh. I like to think this one has a truly select audience.

I'll go into a bit more detail soon, but some of you may be wondering what I'm covering for Nintendo Life. It's a recent eShop release for Switch called Prison Princess, and it's a point and click adventure with lovely art.

It's also a bit lewd, which is presumably why Nintendo Life didn't want to have to deal with another shitstorm by Captain Puritan calling everyone perverts or paedophiles or something. I fully intend to address this fact positively in the review I'm writing;   

Well, now, here's an interesting thing.

You remember a while back when Nintendo Life reviewed Gun Gun Pixies and wrote an offensive, insulting article that belittled anyone who might be interested in the game? Remember how I stood up against that, and got a decent amount of support for it — as well as a few insults and a Twitter block from the writer of the article?

Today I received this DM from Damien McFerran, the director of Nintendo Life. I've cut off the last bit because it talks about specific details I'm not going to share right now… but you can get the gist:

"We're looking to change our approach with Japanese/anime games on Nintendo Life."

I've… got to applaud this, really. I mean, it's quite a long time since the whole Gun Gun Pixies incident, but for whatever reason Damien here has been reflecting and has evidently thought their past way of doing things hasn't been working for one reason or another.

I haven't been back to Nintendo Life since said Gun Gun Pixies incident, so I don't know if there have been any more situations like that — though I would have thought I'd see them blow up on social media if they had — but there must be some reason for this.

I'm not so arrogant as to assume I'm the sole reason for this… but I suspect what happened back then is at least something to do with this — and the fact that Damien has reached out to me to cover something with his new philosophy in mind says quite a bit, I think.

Well then. I just wanted to share that, because I think it's pretty cool. And, assuming all goes to plan, you'll see my name at least once on Nintendo Life in the near future! (Don't worry, though, MoeGamer's not going anywhere!)

EDIT: Sorry, correct link this time — I had to reupload to fix an audio issue! If the video doesn't appear for you immediately, check back in a few minutes — it's still processing as I type this.

Today's Coffee Talk video was primarily an experiment for myself to see how quickly I could turn around an article into a "feature"-style video — i.e. a reading of an article with appropriately accompanying footage. Turns out I can do it pretty quickly — I could have probably actually done this the same day I wrote the article if I'd been that way inclined.

I'm not going to make any promises that I'll be doing this for every article going forward, but I'd like to do it more often, as it's a means for my more "structured" stuff to get seen by people who prefer to watch and/or listen than read. Getting it done efficiently is reliant on one simple thing that I've changed recently: the fact that when I'm sitting down to play something I know I'm going to write about, I record it. All of it. Then I immediately back it up to Google Photos, which saves a good (albeit compressed) 1080p copy of it that I can retrieve if and when I need it, and then I can delete the raw recording files off my SSD if I need the space.

I take the Google Photos step because if you allow them to compress your footage (which is roughly equivalent to what YouTube does to it, so not ideal for very "busy" modern games, but fine for older stuff or things with less movement) you literally have unlimited online storage. This means that I can keep a complete archive of footage from the things I play, so that when I want to talk about it on, say, a podcast, or a video about a more general topic, I can search for relevant footage in my backup and reuse it as necessary.

I wish I'd thought of this sooner; besides allowing me to make videos more easily, it's also great for taking screenshots. Rather than having to carefully time pressing the screenshot button for when something cool happens — literally impossible to do on PS4, if you've ever tried it, but fine on PC and Switch in most cases — I can simply record a bunch of footage and then pick out the exact frame that something cool happens to use as a screenshot.

This is going to be my default method of working going forward, and hopefully it means you'll see a wider variety of videos as time goes on — assuming I make time to produce them. Like I say, I'm making no promises for the moment… but let's just say I have some "infrastructure" in place now! 🙂

Seems to be some sort of meme going around on Twitter right now where you make two avatars using a particular Picrew creator, one of which is your "persona", and one of which is your "person". Well, far be it from me not to join on a pointless trend that provides the opportunity to dress up an avatar… remember the mobile game I wrote about last week?

All right then, here we go:

Persona:

Not a bad approximation of Midori, considering the parts available! Very happy with that.

And person:

Yes, I had to MS Paint a beard on because there weren't any beard parts. Also I'm much fatter than that. I do have a black vest, though. It's very comfortable.

If you want to have a play for yourself, check out the Picrew creator in question at  https://picrew.me/image_maker/186583  — I will not be held responsible for how much time you waste on Picrew as a whole, however! That shit be addictive…

Made a minor little addition to MoeGamer's menus today: under Articles > Features there's now a "Mini-Features" section to collect together loosely related sets of articles that aren't a full-on Cover Game feature, but do belong together for some reason. So far I've collected together my articles on Skipmore and Stranga Games' titles, since people might want to read about all that stuff at the same time.

I'm pleased at the response to the Fairune videos so far; people seem to have liked them. Good, because there's a couple more on the way — and after that I'll probably do video versions of the Stranga Games articles, too. I think I've mentioned this before, but I've also got voiceovers recorded for video versions of the Shade feature from a while back — I just need to actually record some footage to go with the talking now!

I'm still coughing like an old man but I think I'm over the worst now. Going to drug myself up again this evening and hope I feel a bit better in the morning. I am very tired of this shit now. I have things to do, and wanting to go to bed at 9pm is not helping me get them done!

Ah well. I suppose it could be worse. Probably. Anyway. Time for bed, I think.

I've spent the day today playing a game called Coffee Talk. I can't talk much about it right now as it's under embargo until (checks) Tuesday, but there'll be something about it on MoeGamer then. I will say for now that if you liked VA-11 HALL-A for both its unusual method of interaction and storytelling and its glorious '90s-style pixel art, you'll definitely like this too.

I've done very little else this weekend because of frequent painful coughing fits making me, you know, not want to do anything other than sit on the couch and play video games. I'm not relishing going back to work tomorrow — though if I spend the day coughing like I've been coughing today, maybe I'll get sent home. That would be a desirable outcome were it not for the dumbass corporate bureaucracy I'd have to deal with upon my return. But whatever.

Coming up this week, we've got more LAMUNATION!, the aforementioned Coffee Talk, a shoot 'em up that is a spiritual successor to Castle of Shikigami and… and… some other stuff, too. Plus, of course, plenty of Atari funtimes and goodness for those of you who are hanging around for that! We've got an Atari ST game that is particularly special to me coming up this week, so please look forward to that.

Anyway, I'm going to attempt to get some sleep if I can lie down without my throat doing a weird rattly tickly annoying thing that makes me cough. Here's hoping I can shake this off soon and/or I don't have Coronavirus.

Morning folks. Don't think there's going to be a PATRONS ONLY! video this weekend, I'm afraid; I've had a bit of a relapse on the whole "being ill" front and feel like absolute garbage. I spent most of yesterday either howling in pain or crying with frustration, which is a lot of fun, so that's why you didn't hear from me then.

I'll be okay eventually. Today I feel… I don't know if "better" is the right word, but it feels like progress towards being better at least. The trouble I've been having is an unfortunate interaction between several things that are wrong with me; I won't bore you with the details right now, but let's just say that it's not been happy funtimes at all.

I'm going to have a nice relaxing day today. I have no commitments whatsoever and I'm ahead of schedule on video production, so I can just chill out with some nice games and do very little. So that's exactly what I plan to do. And here's hoping that the amount of Lemsip I'm filling my system with will eventually shake off the most irritating part of this sickness!

Well, it's that or I have the Chinese death virus. Hopefully it's not that, though.

Having now played through all three of Stranga Games' short-form horror adventures Just Ignore Them, My Big Sister and Red Bow (writeup on the former coming next week) — I have to say I feel quite inspired. These are clearly one-man passion projects where Stranga (or "Nathan", apparently) had a vision for what he wanted to achieve, didn't let his ambitions run away with him, and successfully accomplished what he wanted.

There's a clear progression from Just Ignore Them to My Big Sister and onwards to Red Bow; of the three, I think My Big Sister is probably my personal favourite, but it's obvious that he spent time refining his craft and taking on board feedback between each of the three games.

I'll talk more about Just Ignore Them in my full write-up next week, but oddly enough, this is probably the most inspiring of the three in that Stranga freely admits he was mostly "winging it" when writing it — something I know I certainly do a whole lot with both fiction and non-fiction pieces! It's the most clunky, cumbersome and full of holes of the three, but in some respects that makes it feel like the most charming and soulful of them all; a guy decided he wanted to make a horror game that paid homage to some of his favourite games of all time, and he successfully did that.

And these games may be short, but the dude made them by himself — and they're available on pretty much every modern platform now. That's pretty cool, and proof that if you really set your mind to something, you can achieve pretty sweet things.

He's never going to make a million from any of these games — but I bet he can sit back, look at them and feel a great sense of satisfaction with what he's achieved. And I have to respect that.