I emerge from my deathbed to bring you a nice chilled out bit of Temple of Apshai for your enjoyment! The treasure hunting is disastrous and I cough a lot, but I had a good time. I hope you do too!

No vlog today, I'm afraid, because I'm still not well. I am feeling a little better though, so I hope a good night's sleep will have me fighting fit by the morning, as I have lots of things I want to achieve this week.

All being well, I'm going to get a bunch of episodes for each of the YouTube series done, carry on with playing through LAMUNATION! ready to write about it, play more Atelier Iris ready for the MegaFeature kicking off, and get some more "scripted" videos done. I'm probably going to adapt the recent articles on the Fairune games into videos, because I really enjoyed those and I think they're games worth celebrating both in writing and in video.

The remodelling has been continuing today. You know when you sit in a room and you get a really strong vibe that you've been there before? We seem to have inadvertently done that with our spare room. I'm not exactly sure what room I'm strongly reminded of when I'm in there, but there is definitely somewhere I've been before that looks a lot like how we've laid it out now. Strange. Deja vu, I guess?

Anyway, I need some sleep; here's hoping I'm feeling better by the morning. Send me some Curagas or something!

What with feeling like I was coming down with something yesterday, it turns out I was correct to not attempt the 2.5-3 hour drive to go visit my parents as I had originally intended. Because I have indeed come down with something and it really sucks.

I think it's just a bad cold rather than anything more debilitating, but it's uncomfortable and unpleasant. Still, I've been fairly relaxed today and hopefully I'll feel a bit better in the morning if I get a decent night's sleep.

Andie has spent the majority of the day remodelling the spare room; I'm sleeping in there tonight so I 1) don't give her the plague if I haven't already 2) don't keep her awake with my old man cough and complaining and 3) can starfish in the bed as much as I want.

The remodelled room looks great, and it's fixed a couple of problems we've been trying to solve for ages: how we might be able to squeeze some more space for video games in the living room, since the existing shelves are getting a bit full, and what to do with the ample collection of board games I have that don't get played that often because my local IRL friends all had kids and became boring. Short version: the board games are now upstairs in the spare room, leaving a decent amount of wall space free to put more video game shelves in as and when we need to. Hooray!

We watched Metal Jesus' new game room tour video earlier, and we both liked the idea of a handheld display shelf — MJ has all his handhelds on special stands as "display" pieces, so we might try and do something like that. He also showed the genius idea that is putting individual cables in individual labelled ziplock bags… why the hell didn't I think of this before my Cable Box of Doom (you know what I mean, we all have one) got into quite such a state? Coulda woulda shoulda and all that.

Anyway. Haven't got much "productive" done today due to illness, but I have a whole week ahead of me to enjoy, so I don't feel bad. Hopefully I'll feel a bit better in the morning so I can get a bit more stuff done and perhaps a vlog if I feel up to it. In the meantime, though, I think it's probably time to hit the hay. Thanks for all your support this week, and I hope you enjoy the new feature on LAMUNATION!

I've got a week off from the day job now, so naturally I've come down with something. I'm full of snot, coughing like an old fart and feeling a bit headachey and dizzy. What fun!

Still, I guess it is, in some ways, better to get ill when you're in a position to actually get some rest rather than when you're supposed to be going to work. My day job has an irritatingly "corporate" approach to illness absence, where you have to do pointless "Return to Work" interviews and sign forms every time you're off, regardless of the reason, and if you're ill more than x times in y indeterminate period (I say this because the definitions of y in particular don't appear to have any rhyme or reason whatsoever) then you have to have a soul-crushing meeting with HR.

Trouble is, this sort of practice appears to be common in most corporate places these days; companies are more concerned with "managing absence" than the actual welfare of their employees. It's frustrating, it's demoralising and leads to the phenomenon known as "presenteeism", where people show up to work when they really shouldn't, do a bad job and infect half the office with plague in the process.

I don't know how to avoid this though. I feel like looking for a new job won't solve the issue because, as I say, this sort of thing appears to be pretty common, unfortunately. As such, I could potentially find myself in a new job with the exact same situation.

The stupid thing is I'm not even taking the piss with being ill; I only call in when I'm genuinely not up to going in, and yet I still feel I'm being punished for it. It actually makes me feel worse, because it makes me anxious, and anxiety can exacerbate physical ailments too.

Oh well. Probably best not to think about this bullshit while I have a week off. Perhaps one day I'll make enough from my writing and/or videos to pack in the day job altogether — that'd be nice, wouldn't it? I think we're a long way off that yet. But it's nice to imagine, anyway.

Better get some sleep. Here's hoping I don't feel quite so wretched in the morning.

With any luck, we'll kick off the LAMUNATION! Cover Game feature tomorrow, though this is dependent on me getting some answers to some interview questions back from Meru of Love Lab. If she hasn't got back to me tomorrow, we'll have to postpone that to next week, which isn't the end of the world, but I would like to get started on writing about it.

In the meantime, I've been starting to get "infrastructure" together ahead of the Atelier MegaFeature, and I can provide you, dear Patrons, with an exclusive early look at the all-new MegaFeature hub page. Check it out here: https://moegamer.net/megafeatures/atelier/

Obviously there's not a lot there yet, but that's roughly what it's going to look like, perhaps with the addition of a gallery or some videos down at the bottom, much like I do with the individual game pages now. I've slotted in the Atelier Arland Trilogy games already, since I covered those last year and Lulua is on the schedule for this time around, and spaces are prepped, ready and waiting for the various different subseries.

I'm going to handle the MegaFeature as if it's a series of Cover Game features for each subseries. That means there'll be a new banner and backdrop for each one, but all of them will be collected together on the MegaFeature page. The MegaFeature page itself is set to full-width by sacrificing the right-hand sidebar; this hopefully gives the whole thing a somewhat "grander" look and makes it clear that this is a Big Deal.

I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into this! I'm already playing the first Atelier Iris and absolutely loving it, so I can't wait to explore the rest of this series, however long it takes! And hopefully by the end of it all, we should have one of the most comprehensive looks at the (localised) Atelier series on the Internet. Won't that be a thing?

Anyway. In the meantime, fingers crossed Meru gets back to me overnight, 'cause I'm also champing at the bit to write about LAMUNATION! — but as I say, that may end up pushed to next week. It's coming, though!

I'm not well today, so you get an early entry, so to speak. I've been suffering with an annoying combination of stomach-related ailments since last night, which you probably don't need to know the details of but I'm going to give them anyway.

I have a hernia. It is uncomfortable most of the time and occasionally painful. When it gets painful, it also causes… well, there's no real nice way to say this, but a certain degree of gastric distress. That makes me more uncomfortable and annoyed and depressed, and basically the whole thing feeds into each other and gets inordinately frustrating.

After having an unpleasantly painful evening last night, I took today off. I feel a bit better now; I still feel like I might throw up, but at least it's not super-painful any more.

The annoying thing about all this is that I can't get it treated… yet. Because I'm a fat cunt, they won't fix the hernia because it would be very likely that it would just come back. So I needed to lose a lot of weight in order to even be considered for that treatment. And I mean a lot — we're talking in the region of about 8 stone or 50kg.

This has been going on for a while. Shortly before Christmas 2018, Andie and I started with Slimming World again; it was a programme we'd both had success with before, but for some reason this time we found it hard to maintain motivation. I think we just ended up getting bored of the things we had to eat, and how unlike "real" food Slimming World "versions" of classic dishes often ended up being. "Eat this, it's almost as good as bread!" …no it isn't.

So about a month back, the pair of us decided to give the keto diet a go. For the unfamiliar, this is a diet where you scale back your daily net carbohydrates to about 20g or less, and get the majority of your energy from fat. This puts your body in a condition called "ketosis", where instead of burning carbohydrates for energy, it burns fat instead — essentially, you're deliberately not putting carbs in there so your body has no choice but to burn fat for energy.

While, as with any kind of diet, there are limitations on what you can eat, I'm finding the restrictions places upon you during a keto diet to be fairly manageable in that I can still eat a lot of things that I like. Bacon: good. Oily fish: good. Nuts: good (hehe). Meat with fat on: good. I'm missing sugar a bit (stevia and erythritol are not great substitutes for various reasons) and occasionally I'd like nothing more than a big plate of chips, but for the most part, I'm doing fine — and presumably as a side-effect of all this, I've found my appetite has gone right down, too, which is a symptom I wasn't expecting to address, but it's effective nonetheless.

I weighed myself this morning, and in the month since we started, I've lost 10kg, which is about one and a half stone. I'm really pleased with this; at this rate, I might actually get where I "need" to be within six months… assuming progress continues like this, of course. There's always the risk of weight loss plateauing after a while, but the theory behind keto is sound, and I have a lot of fat to burn, so hopefully this will continue.

I'm not relishing my "reward" for all this, as I'm utterly terrified of hospitals and specifically surgery, but hopefully no longer having to live in daily discomfort will be worth it in the long term. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Do you like to write? Then you should be following Normal Happenings, who posts regular daily writing prompts called "Inklings". They always get me thinking, so I like to indulge every now and then. (Also I'm part of the site's year-long "The Characters That Define Us" collaboration, so follow along for that, too!)

Anyway, here's today's prompt:

 

“Twenty-Four Seven”

Write 24 talking points between current you and you from seven years ago. Consider teaching yourself something you’ve picked up since then.

This sounds like a challenge! Me from seven years ago would be me in January 2013… which was leading up to a fairly turbulent time in my life, to be honest, so this is probably gonna get a bit personal. But oh well. In for a penny and all that.

1. Don't take happiness for granted.

Okay, January 2013 Pete. Things are a bit… wobbly right now. In a few months, you're going to get what feels like the opportunity of a lifetime; your former boss Jaz Rignall is going to reach out to you and invite you to be part of the launch of USgamer, Eurogamer's American spinoff site. It will seem like a dream come true — and, for a while, it will be.

But don't take that for granted.

A year later, this opportunity will be taken from you, through no fault of your own. There will be nothing you can do about it. It will suck. But…

2. Dark times can be inspirational.

January 2013 Pete, you've already been through some dark times circa 2010, so you probably know this already, but it bears repeating: dark times can bring the greatest inspiration. What is going to happen next year will suck, there's no two ways about it, but it will also inspire you to create something that is entirely your own, and that you can be proud of.

3. Be true to yourself.

The situation that will arise next year could probably be avoided if you put your head down and parrot the corporate line rather than using your platform to represent an underappreciated viewpoint — since, although no-one has specifically said this at any point, it's fairly obvious from a 2020 perspective that you were pushed out because of your willingness to give time and attention to Japanese games that are treated poorly by the rest of the mainstream press.

But it won't feel good to deny yourself, and the audience that you build who respect you for being true to yourself won't appreciate that, either.

4. Some people just won't like you. They don't matter.

As much as you'd like to get along with everyone, there will be people out there who just don't get along with you. This is often through no fault of your own, and incidents can arise with no real provocation. It will suck to encounter these situations, but remember that people who barely know you and have no respect for you should not have any influence over your life whatsoever. They do not matter. Do not give them any attention.

5. Some people do like and respect you. They do matter.

It's easy to feel alone in this modern age, even when you have an active online social life. But know that the things you do — and the things that you're going to do — are going to touch the lives of others, and they are going to appreciate that. You're going to make some lifelong friends by being true to yourself, and that is something you need to focus on when times get challenging.

6. You have Asperger's.

You know how you've been struggling to understand how to deal with social situations for pretty much your whole life, forever getting trapped in your own head, overanalysing circumstances and often talking yourself out of taking social risks? Yeah, that's Asperger Syndrome, and a few years down the line you'll recognise this for what it is. It will explain a lot of things about yourself and make you feel a bit better about some parts of your personality you currently don't like all that much.

7. If you get a bad vibe from a situation, get out.

A while after your departure from USgamer, you're going to find yourself with a job at an energy company. You will get a very bad vibe from your initial impressions, and this bad vibe will prove to be entirely justified as you systematically get bullied out of your role by a manager that doesn't understand or respect mental health issues, and a corporate culture more concerned with following arbitrary, universally applied rules than the actual welfare of its employees. Get out before this happens.

8. Day jobs are boring, but this can be a blessing in disguise.

Most of the daily duties in the day jobs of this world could probably be accomplished with two- or three-hour workdays, making for a lot of tedious downtime that can easily weigh down on your mind. However, if you're discreet, you can also make use of this tedious downtime for things you actually want to do. Maybe not playing games or making videos, but writing stuff looks like work!

9. Engaging with the community will make people want to enjoy your work.

You can write and make videos all you want, but if you don't get your online "face" known around the community, no-one will have any real reason to check out any of your stuff. Follow some blogs and channels that you enjoy, leave some likes and some comments, make some friends. It'll really pay off over time.

10. YouTube is fun!

Save up a bit of money and grab yourself some capture hardware and a decent microphone. Making YouTube videos about games is a lot of fun.

11. Podcasting is fun!

And while you have that microphone, you might as well start doing some podcasting again, too. You don't need to hide behind other people; you are capable of leading a show.

12. Upgrading your motherboard and CPU will have a bigger effect on Final Fantasy XIV's framerate than upgrading your graphics card.

You're not playing it yet, but when you do, you'll thank me for this advice.

13. Friendships wax and wane.

There are people in your life right now who feel like they'll always be there. They, unfortunately, won't be — and you won't understand why. That is just sometimes how it is. Conversely, however, there are also people you haven't met yet who will become very important to you. These things have a way of balancing themselves out.

14. Don't have kids.

Your friends who have kids will become boring and never want to do anything. Do not have kids. Enjoy your life, because God knows you've struggled enough already.

15. Don't buy a zillion board games.

Related to the above: your friends who you play board games with will have kids and become boring, making a significant proportion of your large collection fairly pointless to keep around because they need a minimum of three players.

16. Sell board games on BoardGameGeek, not eBay.

It's much easier and quicker.

17. 2014 onwards is going to suck for certain parts of media discussion.

Certain happenings in 2014 will prove to be a tipping point for public trust in the mainstream media. Even if you do not get involved, you will still somehow get dragged into all this by association and proxy, and it's entirely possible you'll lose friends over it. It will suck, but remain true to yourself and prove yourself to be someone with integrity and honesty, and you'll get through it and probably make some new friends in the process.

18. Personal writing has much greater value than corporate media pieces.

Related to the above: you're already drifting away from the mainstream media having been extremely frustrated with their bad attitude over the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle, but I'll just confirm that you're doing the right thing here. You'll get much more out of reading personal accounts by individual bloggers than heavily edited, word-counted articles on corporate sites.

19. Be a force for positivity, not negativity.

I know I've said that a lot of things are going to suck — and they are. But the best way to battle negativity is positivity. There's going to be a lot of negativity around in the coming years; it's going to become fashionable, even. Do your part to stand out by focusing on the positive rather than the negative.

20. Twenty-four is a lot of things to put on a list.

When you think it sounds like a good idea to write a list consisting of 24 items, bear in mind that it will probably take a bit longer than you think it might.

21. Go to Digitiser Live.

You won't know what I'm talking about for a good few years yet, but when the opportunity arises, take it. You won't regret it, even though the prospect of it will be scary.

22. Buy that book of Nier: Automata piano scores before it gets expensive.

That's right, there's going to be a new Nier game — bet you never thought that would happen! When you see the piano score book become available, snatch it up before it becomes extremely expensive.

23. Get cats.

You already know this is a good idea, but just do it.

24. Keep writing.

It will bring you consistent happiness, relief, catharsis, entertainment, joy and the opportunity to make new friends. Never stop.

I like reading old magazines. Ideally I like reading their old paper-based incarnations, but archives such as the one found at Atarimania make an acceptable and discreet substitute. I thought I'd go through the January 1988 issue of Atari User (Vol. 3, No. 9) and see if there was anything interesting to comment on for today's post. Why? Because I'm a bit bored and this sounds like it might be fun.

We kick off with this bizarre story that Atari apparently got into trouble for recommending against trying to "enhance" the play experience of the Atari 2600 and XEGS by making use of "excess use of imaginary backgrounds or special effects". The ad also included a disclaimer that different children have different abilities to differentiate between fantasy and reality. I feel like this is a discussion we're still having today — somewhat futilely in my experience.

Right beneath that, we have a story about the Atari 8-bit games Nightmares and Little Devil by Red Rat Software being refused distribution in France and Italy as well as by what was, at the time, one of the biggest computer and gaming distributors in the UK. The reason? They have "occult connotations". You think we have problems today?

This ad is weirdly charming for its rather British refusal to refer to an established genre as "shoot 'em up". I say, Barrington, I would bally well love a go on that new "shoot them up" from Tynesoft, it looks jolly fun! Mirax Force was quite neat, as I recall, but pretty difficult. It had digitised speech, which was probably its main selling point.

Oh, what do you know? There's a review of Mirax Force in that very issue. It scores a perfect 10 for both graphics and "playability", with 9s for sound and value for money, providing an overall score of 9. The review itself actually isn't too bad compared to some others from the era — it does at least say what it's doing well, but the fact it's crammed into half a page makes the whole thing feel a bit "rushed". Such was the nature of magazine reviews, however… unlike modern online reviews, you really did have a finite amount of space!

This thing is something else. I actually had a go with one back in the day and it's as stupid as it looks. Billed as "a real alternative to the joystick", what this actually is is an arrangement of 17 clicky buttons, 8 of which equate to the 8 directions of a digital joystick, and the outer 8 of which are the same directions with the fire button pressed down. There's also a solo fire button in the middle. It's an interesting idea, but required both hands to use effectively and was not particularly practical for… well, anything, really. Only £18.85 though!

With the release of the XEGS (essentially a 65XE with a detachable keyboard, meaning it could be used as a "console") Atari re-issued a bunch of classic cartridge games. In this feature, Neil Fawcett looks back at what were already considered to be retro games in 1988. To be fair, all these games have stood the test of time very well — and the Atari ports of them are all great.

Another interesting advert and a relic of a bygone age; an advertisement for an "Owners Club", with regular magazines plus benefits such as pen pals, public domain software and all manner of other stuff. The age of the Internet has made this sort of thing all but redundant, but it always makes me smile to see ads like this in the old magazines.

Back in the day, if you had a bit of hardware that didn't work on your computer, did you moan and complain and leave one-star Amazon reviews? Did you fuck; you wrote your own drivers, such as this mouse driver for Atari 8-bit by Simon Miller, composed in machine code and usable in BASIC programs.

Talking of the XEGS, Atari User's resident techhead Andre Willey pulled one apart for you to admire. Look at all the chips and sockets and colour sub-carrier crystals!

One thing I find particularly fascinating about Atari User is that its cover feature each month tended not to be a commercial piece of software, but rather one of the BASIC or machine code listings you could type in to get yourself some free games or other software. This month, the top spot goes to Submarine Hunter by Nick Pearce, a simple "depth charge" shoot 'em up that I recall being pretty competent. You'll notice that the pages for this game are some of the only pages of the issue to appear in full colour, too! Game of the Month was serious business.

Here's another relic of a lost age: programming tutorials. Every microcomputer in the '80s shipped with BASIC either in ROM or on a cartridge, and thus learning to program was regarded as something that pretty much everyone would try their hand at at one point or another. This, of course, led to repeated "first steps"-style ongoing features at regular intervals, such as this one from Len Golding.

This was one of my favourite regular features in Atari User: complete, functional, useful programs that used just five lines of BASIC code. It was seriously impressive quite how much developers could get done in so little code.

This is an interesting section; rather than providing purely theoretical programming tutorials, the Computing in ACTION! section provides practical examples of how you might make use of BASIC programming techniques in "the real world", as it were. This month, it's a cocktail generator, which suggests ingredients for you to mix together — without mixing "the grape and the grain" — for various creative beverages.

I always thought this was cool; while Page 6 and Atari User were rivals — they were the only two Atari 8-bit magazines on the newsstands — they always advertised each other. Page 6 eventually took over Atari User in its latter years, rebranding itself as New Atari User.

And to close things off, here's the back cover advert for those two "banned" games from the news section; the cynical might argue that this is all a big publicity stunt, but remember the Satanic Panic very much was a thing with media that appealed to young people. You can't really blame Red Rat for making use of the stupidity of the situation as a marketing point!

I'm yet to polish off LAMUNATION! but that's going pretty well, so out of curiosity I made a start on the first Atelier Iris game for PlayStation 2.

I absolutely love it already, and this trilogy is definitely going to be part of the upcoming Atelier MegaFeature. At this point I may as well just go the whole hog and throw Mana Khemia in there as well… we'll see how things go!

I'm appreciating how much of the "modern Atelier" it feels like there is in Atelier Iris, though it simultaneously very much feels like its own thing. Unlike the Arland games onwards, which are as much strategic time management games as they are RPGs, Atelier Iris is a relatively traditional RPG at its heart — though with a few interesting twists here and there.

These twists mostly relate to its relatively small, "local" scale. There's a lot of action centring around a small community that the protagonist arrives at early in the game, and a bunch of optional mechanics involving providing shop owners with ingredients to synthesise new items to add to their menus. And like its (rough) contemporaries in the Ar Tonelico series, synthesis isn't a purely mechanical thing — there's some fun characterisation, particularly when it comes to the grumpy magic shop owner Veola.

It's good to see Pamela early on, too, and she's still very much the Pamela we've come to know and love in later installments.

So yeah. We're doing this. And I already have fun plans in mind for interesting ways to present the MegaFeature on the site. And conveniently, I have a week off the week after this coming one, so I can start getting some things ready! How about that?

Anyway. Before that happens, I do have a week at the day job, so I probably better get some sleep before the early starts to pay the bills and all that shit. Hope you all had a great weekend!

First vlog of the new year! Just some ramblings about what's coming up for MoeGamer, YouTube and Atari A to Z, plus my own hopes for the community and suchlike. Thanks, as always, for all your support — and for consistently being the side of online interactions that I always want to celebrate!