It's Christmas Eve! Well, it's not far off Christmas Day as I type this. I am in bed, and I have a bit of a stomachache that I've been suffering all evening, but I probably won't die.

I had to work today. I'd forgotten what a miserable experience it is to work over the festive period, so I'm going to book Christmas off for next year as soon as my holiday allowance renews, I think. Thankfully I don't have to go back until next Monday now, and we also have New Year's Day off, so there's at least a bit of time off to enjoy.

We're having a nice quiet Christmas at home this year, likely with some visits to the respective parental units in the near future. It will be nice to just be able to relax and not have to worry about anything; we've even got a pleasant keto-friendly Christmas dinner prepped and ready to go for tomorrow.

Anyway, I need to sleep and shake off this stomachache so I'll call that there for now. May your days be merry and bright or whatever, and I hope you all have a wonderful day tomorrow!

I happened to stumble across something interesting on the Switch eShop recently — and I really do mean stumble, because I hadn't read anything about it anywhere online.

It's a game called Saboteur!, and it's apparently an official remake of a supposedly classic ZX Spectrum game — so official, in fact, that the original creator Clive Townsend was responsible for it.

This is no straight remake, mind; while the opening section of the game is pretty much a note-for-note remake of the ZX Spectrum original, once you beat this part — which would have ended the game in its original incarnation — a whole other section opens up, complete with dialogue, puzzles, object manipulation and all sorts of new mechanics. But still presented like it's a Spectrum game.

This is a fascinating game. I'm about a third of the way through the new section on the lowest difficulty right now; there are nine difficulty levels, each of which make a fairly significant difference to the overall structure of things by adding a lot more locked doors and switches to manipulate as well as making the enemies stronger and time limits tighter. I'm definitely going to continue exploring it, as I'm having a lot of fun with it — and when I'm done, there's a sequel, too.

I'll save detailed thoughts for when I've played the game in more detail, but suffice to say if you're at all interested in one of the earliest examples of a Western-developed stealth game with elements of open-structure 2D platforming, you'll want to give Saboteur! a look.

Hello! I already shared this over on MoeGamer as part of the weekly Around the Network update, but thought I'd mention it here too: I'm trying to get back into the habit of doing more "scripted" videos as well as the weekly Let's Plays.

I really enjoy doing the Let's Plays and they provide me with a whole new way to appreciate the games that I'm playing, even if no-one is watching (which thankfully, they are!) but I've been meaning to do some more "readings" of articles from MoeGamer for a long time now. So with a bit of time to spare this weekend, I recorded a bunch of recent one-shot articles as audio, and I'm going to spend some time putting them together into videos to trickle out in the coming weeks. And from there, make it more of a regular thing, all being well.

I enjoy putting these together because it's a different kind of creative challenge. Let's Plays are a challenge in a sort of "improvisatory" nature, as you need to think of things to say while you're playing; they're very reactive. Meanwhile, doing something scripted means that you need to look at things from a whole new perspective. Instead of saying things to match what's happening on screen, you instead need to find material to put on the screen to match what's being said. Or at the very least to complement it.

This is something I've had a lot of fun with in the past and haven't made enough time for recently. So expect more "MoeGamerTV Features" videos such as the one above going forward, likely on Sundays or Mondays depending on how I can schedule things; I hope you enjoy them!

Something a little different for this week's patrons-only video: I thought I'd dig into my PS2 library and have a little fiddle around with something I've never tried before! Here's Bombastic, the follow-up to Devil Dice.

I like having ideas that make me feel like I'm "upgrading" the site somewhat. I've done this a couple of times previously.

"MoeGamer 2.0", which is the basis for the site as you see it today, launched in 2016 and brought with it the Cover Game format. I was frustrated with the state of modern games journalism — no change there, then — and wanted to try doing something a bit different. It inspired me greatly.

"MoeGamer 2.5", meanwhile, launched about a year later, and saw me adding the "All Games" pagealong with Hub Pages for each and every game I covered on the site that collect together all the articles I've written about them, Cover Game features in chronological order where applicable, plus other information such as gameplay videos, Let's Play series and screenshots. This is one of my favourite upgrades to the site, as it makes it super-easy to find articles about specific things. If you've never tried it, check out the All Games link in the header menu, go to https://moegamer.net/all-games or, if you're browsing on a computer, pick a game from the right-hand sidebar.

Just recently, I've been getting a bit of an itch to tweak a few things here and there, too. They're relatively minor changes this time around and some are only partially implemented so far, but I wanted to introduce them to you today as "MoeGamer 2.75"

First up is pretty simple: you may have noticed a short while back I added Index and Index By Date pages. These are fairly self-explanatory: Index is a straight alphabetical list of every post on the site, while Index by Date is the same, but chronologically, with the most recent at the top.

Second is also pretty simple: I had a little fiddle with the CSS and added a nice border around posts with a drop shadow to make them stand out a bit. I also made the box for the headline section semi-transparent so you can see the bottom bit of the featured image through it now, too; I did this primarily because under the old setup, the visual joke on the featured image for The Vanishing Point Award wasn't visible. Whoops.

Third is something it's going to take a little longer to fully implement, but I think it'll work well: it's the addition of a banner and navigation to the top of Cover Game articles. This not only makes them stand out more, it also makes it easier for people coming in partway through to navigate forwards and backwards between the "chapters" without having to go back to the Hub Page. It also gives a better idea of what a Cover Game feature is, for those unfamiliar… plus I simply think it looks quite nice:

I have a lot of posts to go through to add that to, but I plan on working on that a bit at a time as well as making this standard practice going forward. It may not be the most whizzbang and exciting new feature, but I'm pleased with it! 🙂

Anyway. Weekend. Time to go and melt into bed for about 12 hours. Have a good one!

Hello there! Let's get interactive!

I've got a few plans for next year already: I'll be doing LAMUNATION! in January, followed by the Atelier Dusk series and Atelier Ryza, but for after those are done with I want to know some of the things you'd particularly like to see some in-depth coverage on in the coming year.

I have a lot of games on the ol' backlog just queueing up to be covered, so I've selected a bunch that I'm probably most interested in covering sooner rather than later. These are mostly games that I've had on my shelf for a while and have been meaning to get around to for a long time… with a few more recent titles that I feel inclined to have reasonably high priority.

Please vote for the ones you're most interested to learn more about — you can pick more than one if you like.

If there's something you think I might be interested in that I haven't mentioned here, be sure to leave a comment below with your suggestions; I have a substantial collection at this point, so I may already have a copy! Likewise, if you're not sure what any of these are but are intrigued by the title, feel free to ask questions in the comments, too.

And rest assured that there'll be plenty of smaller stuff explored in and around the major projects of the year as always!

In no particular order… well, okay, in the order they occurred to me:

Not long until the holiday season is well and truly upon us. I just have this week of work to survive (two more days of which are long days, boo), followed by a day and a half next week… and then a bit of peace and quiet.

Andie and I are having Christmas here this year. It will be nice to just be able to relax without all the usual familial obligations. Not that there's anything wrong with those — I think I probably wrote last year about how I actually still rather enjoy Christmas with the family out of nostalgia's sake more than anything — but sometimes it is also nice to just be able to chill out, safe in the knowledge that you have absolutely no commitments whatsoever.

It will be a nice break. The end of this year has been… tumultuous. Not for any real specific reason from a personal perspective, though as I noted in the vlog at the weekend, my mental health has taken a bit of a hit over the last few months in particular. I'm talking more broadly; I know quite a few people who have been suffering for various reasons, and the political state of the country has a lot of people very uneasy, too. Me, I still don't really understand it all and suspect that despite all the chest-beating and roaring that things will probably just muddle along the way they always do.

I'm planning on just having a nice time over the holidays, doing as little as possible. I've got games to play, things to write, videos to make, and I will probably continue with all of those things over the festive period, since I'm here. It's a shame I don't have more time off — I used all my holiday earlier in the year, but it resets in January — but I'll take what I have and I intend to make the most of it!

In the meantime, I'm secure in the knowledge that I've got all the Christmas shopping done, it's payday on Friday and we've got a nice little Christmas bonus in that pay packet. Of course, January will bring with it the return to the grindstone, but for now that seems a long way off and thus not worth worrying about too much.

That and I'm playing Lamunation! ready for coverage in the new year. And dear lord that VN is a fever dream and a half. Really looking forward to writing about it… though getting something coherent out of my head about it is going to be a challenge, I feel! 🙂

Been idly following this whole Gematsu-Niche Gamer spat today and I'm super-glad I'm out of this side of things in the business.

For the unfamiliar, earlier on today, Gematsu's Sal Romano questioned where Niche Gamer was sourcing some of their stories from, when he knew full well that he had broken the stories in question. Although many of Gematsu's news stories consist of maybe a paragraph of introductory text followed by a copy of a press release, it's important to note that Romano (who runs Gematsu pretty much solo, I believe) puts in a lot of work sourcing and translating Japanese press releases as well as the stuff that typically makes the rounds to Western journos.

Further investigation revealed that this had been going on since at least 2015 or so, and Niche Gamer's bossman blamed it on a "ghost writer" who had since been terminated rather than actually owning up to the situation. It was a no-win situation, of course, with Niche's reputation taking a hit either way, but at least an honest apology and acknowledgement of the problem would have scored a few brownie points with people.

Looking back on my time on the news shift, this sort of thing unfortunately isn't all that uncommon; very little "games journalism" on the news side of things involves actual journalism. A lot of it is rewording press releases and a lot of it is putting your own spin on stories from other places. The key thing is that you need to provide something actually unique rather than just changing a few words around: some editorialisation, some commentary, some context, some history.

I used to be pretty good at this, even on the slowest of slow news days, and indeed during my time at GamePro I was specifically complimented for my stories (quite a few of which were interesting things I spotted via social media that other sites hadn't picked up on) being a strong source of traffic for the site; sadly not enough to prevent parent company IDG closing the bloody place down, of course, but at least the site's failure wasn't my "fault"!

When I knew that I was going to have to depart USgamer thanks to being laid off, I started MoeGamer with a clear vision and intention in mind: I was not ever going to be a "news site". I'd seen all too many hobbyist bloggers trying to copy the Kotaku-style news churn and just not get anywhere; there was absolutely no point in it. And, as we can see with today's situation, when complacency creeps in, mistakes can be made that can cause significant problems.

That's why MoeGamer has never been about "timely", short-form, reactive content; it's always been about "timeless", in-depth, long-form articles. A good game is a good game forever, so it doesn't matter about when I write about it. I'm not chasing traffic, I'm not breaking stories; I'm writing about games that interest me or that are significant in some way or another. Sometimes these are brand new games — such as the current feature on Pokémon — and sometimes they're years, even decades old. This ties in with the Atari A to Z project, too; those games are twenty to thirty years old in many cases, but they're still just as interesting and relevant today.

The other advantage of this is that it forces me to be original and unique. I can't fake what I do. I can't plagiarise what I do, because it relies on personal experiences and individual research. I'm super proud of that side of what I do, and on days like today it really makes me feel pretty good about the work that I do. I don't wish that to sound arrogant or anything, but… yeah. After seeing the ongoing arguments today I'm happy that I'm well out of it doing my own thing in my own distinctive way.

I hope Romano gets some sort of "justice" out of this; I'm not talking necessarily in a legal sense, but he works his ass off breaking a variety of Japanese gaming-related news, so I hope his hard work is appropriately acknowledged. And while I don't wish ill on Niche Gamer — Brandon over there has had kind words to say to me in the past, so I know there's at least some good in there! — I hope this situation causes them to take a very thoughtful look at how they do things from hereon.

It's time for another vlog, in which I talk about talking therapies, yet more manga… and the value I've been getting out of recording these, even if only a few of you watch them!

Remember when the original Phantasy Star Online wouldn't allow you to type the word "Saturday" because it had "turd" in the middle of it? Well, that pretty much sums up how today started. I woke up late, in a terrible mood, not really feeling I could cope like anything even vaguely strenuous to my mental wellbeing.

Thankfully, not long after I awoke, it was time to record a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, and that cheered me up considerably. I always have a wonderful time talking about games with my good buddy and podcasting partner Chris Caskie, so I'm forever thankful to him for keeping me sane on a pretty regular basis. I hope I occasionally do the same for him.

The rest of the day consisted of playing some Horizon Chase Turbo (which we'll be talking about at length on the podcast) and finishing off Pokémon Sword and Shield's postgame story (which we'll also be talking about at length on the podcast) followed by reading a bit of the How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? manga, which released this week and arrived on my doorstep yesterday. (Literally, the Amazon delivery person didn't bother to put it through the letterbox or leave a calling card; I only happened to find it because I'd received a notification that it had been "handed to resident" when in fact it had just been left behind a flower pot. But oh well.)

So far the Dumbbell manga appears to be remarkably close to the anime… or I guess technically it's the other way around, since despite the English manga coming out now, it preceded the anime in its original Japanese incarnation. Even a lot of the weird stylistic stuff the anime did, such as randomly switching to what I tend to think of as "exaggerated shounen style" during moments of particularly exaggerated reactions to something, are present in the manga — though Machio doesn't appear to be quite as ridiculously huge on paper as he was on screen.

I've been up and down a bit on this new keto diet. It's definitely working — I've lost a decent amount of weight already, and we haven't been doing it long — but I'm feeling days when I'm a bit lacking in energy. We picked up some vitamin and mineral supplements this week which will hopefully help alleviate those issues in the short term, then apparently over the longer period your body just "adjusts" naturally to all this, so it gets easier. Which is good.

One positive thing I've noticed about it so far is that my appetite is considerably decreased from what it has been in the past — and that appetite, combined with a tendency to "stress eat" or "comfort eat" during periods of anxiety and depression (which are quite frequent) is one of the main contributing factors to the mess my body is in. Not long after starting this diet, however, I found that having a chia seed pudding (not as disgusting as it sounds) in the morning followed by some sausage and eggs at work keeps me pretty topped up until mid-to-late afternoon in terms of food, and even then I'm not super-hungry for the most part. I don't find myself desperate for dinner or anything — I am, to be honest, happy with a nice pack of almonds or something until a little later in the evening.

So that's all going well. I look forward to seeing the appropriate numbers continue to go down, particularly once I manage to get myself back to the gym. I meant to do it this week, but I was feeling a little too exhausted both emotionally and physically, so I figured it best to continue adjusting to this new diet and how my body processes it. I'm definitely going to give it a go on Monday, though, and I'm hoping the combination of Dumbbell and Plus-Sized Elf, both of which are health-conscious manga with helpful advice within, will provide me with some much-needed motivation. I also bought myself some noise-cancelling headphones so hopefully I can blot out the obnoxious music the gym pipes in at all times and listen to something actually enjoyable while doing whatever I do!

As you might have surmised, I didn't quite feel up to vlogging today, but I'll make some time to do it tomorrow, probably before I get cracking on editing the new podcast episode.

Hope you're having a good weekend! Take care out there.