I won an eBay auction for The Temple of Apshai Trilogy on Atari 8-bit today. Very soon I should be the proud owner of a boxed copy of this hard-to-find and often quite expensive game, and I only had to pay £8.50 for it.

The only catch? The fact that the seller isn't sure if the disk in the box is actually The Temple of Apshai Trilogy or not. But to be honest, that actually doesn't matter to me; the main thing I wanted from this transaction was the box and, more importantly, the documentation.

You see, the Dunjonquest series, of which The Temple of Apshai Trilogy is a part, is a fascinating one; it combines elements of tabletop roleplaying and computer gaming to produce something that was entirely unique to the technological limitations of the 8-bit era.

I'll talk more about this when I cover The Temple of Apshai Trilogy on Atari A to Z — because you better believe I'm covering it if I've got an actual copy of it! — but the gist is that the Dunjonquest engine is based on Dungeons & Dragons to such a degree that you can directly "port" characters from one to the other. In other words, you can manually enter your stats from a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaign into The Temple of Apshai Trilogy to play your character in that game, or you can play a bit of The Temple of Apshai Trilogy and then write down all your stats and use them in a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game.

The more fascinating part for me, though, is how the "role-playing" side of things is handled. The actual computer-based side of The Temple of Apshai Trilogy handles things like moving, exploring, fatigue, inventory management and combat, while the "Book of Apshai" included in the box supports what you do with things like treasure and room descriptions.

Essentially everything in The Temple of Apshai Trilogy is numbered, so when you enter room [x] or pick up treasure [y], you refer to the book and read that relevant passage. The room descriptions in particular provide you with valuable clues that will help you track down hidden treasures and secret doors, while the treasure descriptors help you discover exactly what it is that you found in that last chest you opened.

I remember liking The Temple of Apshai Trilogy as a kid, but not really understanding it, because I didn't really "get" RPGs until Final Fantasy VII. Also we only ever had a pirate copy, so we didn't have any of the documentation to go with it. As such, I'm really looking forward to finally playing the game as it was intended to be played — and to be able to have you fine folks along for the ride!

On today's vlog we talk about picking your battles and how you fight those battles, then take a look at a couple of recent pickups I'm excited to delve into.

As always, thank you for your kind support — and if there's anything you'd like me to explore in these videos in the future as a special Patrons Only exclusive — be it game, book, magazine, piece of software, whatever — please do feel free to let me know!

This video feels curiously relevant today.

I've noticed with increasing frequency that, rather than ignoring things that are wilfully stupid and very obviously, deliberately provocative, people are responding to them. The intention is presumably to show how intelligent the person is and how they wouldn't ever fall for anything so stupid, but in fact it tends to have the opposite effect; it just spreads the original stupidity further, and the cycle perpetuates.

As I type this, Twitter is currently a-boilin' at a YouTuber apparently notorious for such things having put out a particularly dumb video on the subject of Dragon Quest XI. Rather than just leaving this person be to fester in silence, however, the well-oiled outrage machine has fired itself up and is now — much to the YouTuber's delight, I'm sure — spreading the video far and wide, ostensibly so they can say how stupid it is.

This doesn't work. To people who are chasing clout, chasing numbers, it's that old "any publicity is good publicity" thing. And it's the same thing as the "hatebait" that commercial websites put out. If you can post something so inflammatory it makes everyone want to come to your site/profile/video and leave a comment, you've won — even if those comments are all swear words, exhortations for you to kill yourself and all the other joys of the modern Internet. If you got someone to click, you won; you got your ad revenue. It doesn't matter how. Moreover, the "engagement" you got from that inflammatory post moved you up a tier or two in "the algorithm", be it Twitter's or YouTube's.

The only winning move is not to play. Unfortunately, it seems that human nature makes it impossible to resist.

Today's post is inspired by a Daily Inkling from Normal Happenings, a thoroughly pleasant site about appreciating everyday life, a blog I support here on Patreon, and a place where I'll be taking part in a hugely ambitious collaborative project next year!

The prompt reads thus:

As a writer, is there a particular room where you live that inspires your best work?

I'm not sure I have a simple answer to that. I do most of my writing in my living room simply by virtue of the fact that that is where my computer is, but the living room is also probably the room I most readily associate with being "home". It's where I spend the majority of my time when I'm here: it's where we eat dinner, watch TV, movies and YouTube, and where I play games. My cats like to hang out here (both of them are asleep in here right now, both in extremely odd positions) and it is, as it should be, a focal point of the house.

But is it conducive to writing? Perhaps. By virtue of the fact that it's the room where all my "toys" are (with the exception of those in my "retro room") there is plenty of inspiration to be had here, particularly when I'm writing material for MoeGamer or deciding on subjects for video projects. My only real bugbear with it is that it's not the most comfortable place to sit and write for long periods; I sit on a sofa and my keyboard is on a coffee table, which isn't ideal for good posture. (I've been considering investing in one of those "kneeling chair" things; anyone ever used one?)

I'd actually like to do a bit more writing in the aforementioned "retro room" upstairs, but it's not quite optimally set up to do so right now. I have a laptop up there, but I don't love typing on the laptop because its keyboard is a bit crap. I could always attach an external keyboard to it, I guess, but I haven't gotten around to sorting that out.

One thing I have found is that if I'm writing things "by hand" I like to do it in that room. A while back when I was having a course of therapy, one of the things my therapist suggested was to write things down when my head felt like it was getting "full" of negative thoughts and emotions that were causing me to ruminate. I found the process quite helpful and should probably get back into the habit of doing that, having been feeling a bit low recently; there's also just something quite pleasing about writing things just for yourself in a lovely notebook. I bought some really nice notebooks specifically for that purpose. No you can't read them.

So in answer to the question… no, I'm not sure if there is necessarily a specific room in which I produce my best work, but I do know there are ideal environments. I find it very difficult to concentrate if other people are in the room, for example; I become paranoid that they are watching me write and are judging my thoughts as they spill out of my mind onto the page. Somehow this is much more scary than actually finishing a post and spooging it out into the world in a "finished" state for people to read in its entirety; I'm not entirely sure why, but I certainly prefer solitude and privacy while I'm writing.

This doesn't necessarily have to mean a lack of people, though. When I had a long period of unemployment a few years back, I used to deliberately go to a local coffee shop with my laptop to write as I enjoyed the environment. I'd tend to have headphones on and "tune out" the other members of the public around me while doing so, and just enjoy relaxing somewhere other than my home, in my own little world, just me and the words.

Oh, fuck writing on phones though. That shit isn't good wherever you do it.

It's weird how stupid things tend to go in cycles.

Earlier today, it occurred to me that some of the pointless nonsense that happens on Twitter is essentially an evolution of the good old "chain letter" that was a thing back when people first started getting email addresses — and which was sent through the actual post before we all got electronic and hyper-connected.

If you're unfamiliar, a chain letter is simply something designed to be copied and shared as much as possible. In the "good old" days, it made use of emotionally manipulative tactics or superstition to guilt or scare the recipient into passing it on to other people; these days they tend to carry with them the promise of online social capital, colloquially referred to in the ever-evolving vernacular of the Internet as "clout" these days.

In the email days, chain letters typically involved some sort of urban myth "you won't believe this" story — the Buzzfeed bullshit of its day — followed by some sort of exhortation to pass this on to [x] number of friends or [y] unpleasant thing will happen to you. Today, on Twitter, the latter part tends to be missing, but instead the content itself is usually designed to be emotionally manipulative in some way, usually using completely arbitrary criteria to sort people into categories.

The most popular types right now are the "what does your birth month/star sign say about you" variety, where the composer of the tweet makes up some sort of arbitrary descriptor for every month/star sign, then encourages people to quote-tweet it and pass it around. The result is usually a timeline filled with people going "omg, I'm October I can't believe I'm bad in bed" or "yes, this is correct, I'm December, I don't like Sword Art Online".

There's an argument to be made that this sort of thing on Twitter is inherently less harmful than the email chain letters of yore in that they're obviously stupid and in most cases aren't attempting to spread misinformation; contrast with the endless "virus warning" emails most of us probably got back in the early 2000s, which were all, without fail, completely fabricated in an attempt to induce panic in those less computer-literate.

But there are also arguments to be made that this sort of thing is feeding Twitter's algorithms and causing it to consider certain types of content to be "higher quality" under its own opaque criteria, and thus more likely to be pushed into people's feeds or otherwise promoted. As it happens, this is the same argument as to why you shouldn't argue with people in quote tweets; rather than making yourself look like the heroic type standing up to the idiot with the wrong opinion, you're just providing said idiot with that all-important "engagement", which tells Twitter's bots behind the scenes that idiot's posts are "important" and should be promoted more.

Social media was much more fun before all this "algorithm" nonsense. Remember when Twitter and Facebook were simple chronological lists of things that people you actually knew had posted, and actual decent conversations happened?

Hmm, I'm not 100% sure that last bit ever happened… perhaps I imagined it all!

I've had a rough day mental health-wise. Nothing in particular has caused this; I just get like this every so often. It feels like everything is piling up on top of me, burying me, suffocating me, and because I'm buried, I feel like I can't be heard if I try and call out for help.

I've been hanging in there though. Some kind people did bother to talk to me earlier on social media, which I'm extremely grateful for (especially as some of you are here!) and I've been trying to focus on positive things. As such, I finally managed to polish off the last of the Senran Kagura feature this evening, which means after one last Senran-themed Waifu Wednesday tomorrow (let me know if you have any requests!) I can move on to other things.

As previously noted, I'm going to be looking at Shade's recent games Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia. I'm actually sort of half-tempted to throw Orphen for PS2 in there, too, because that's a Shade game, and also has the dubious honour of (I think) being the first ever game I played on (someone else's) PS2. I remember enjoying it, and I also remember reviews at the time not liking it very much… maybe I've been following my current habits longer than I realise!

Anyway. Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia are definitely on the docket, and I'll look in to how practical Orphen might be, or perhaps cover that another time since that has some interesting cultural context, what with it being based on a series of works across various forms of Japanese popular media.

Anyway, despite satisfaction at getting the Senran Kagura feature done, I'm still feeling a bit low so I think it's probably time to retire for the night. Here's hoping tomorrow is a brighter day. Thanks as always for your support, and good night!

I must confess something: I still don't really "get" streaming. More specifically, I really don't get why people would want to get into streaming.

This is, I feel, probably a generational thing — although it might not be, because I know several people around my age who are doing the streaming thing.

I get the idea of it — the fact that you are "performing live" for an audience that is watching at (roughly) the same time you are doing things means that you can interact directly with the people who support your work. And that's kind of cool when it comes to small communities of friends, or wanting to share a special event with someone. I've run streams on the occasions when I've done charity events such as Extra Life, and it's always been fun to be able to talk to different people I know who pop in at various different times — in some cases, that's the only time I've seen them "on the Internet", as it were, so it's a nice, novel new way to interact with them.

It's when people start to get hung up on the idea of trying to make a "career" out of it that I find myself scratching my head a bit. When you start out streaming, you're setting specific times to "perform", often without an existing fanbase who will show up for what you're doing. You're asking people to take time out of their day to come and watch you play a video game and listen to you talk about it. And it kind of baffles me how new streamers get anyone to show up at all, to be perfectly honest. The few times I've explored Twitch, I know I've been completely daunted by the sheer amount of stuff that is available to watch right now, and I have no idea where to start — or why I should bother hopping in a stream with very few or even no viewers! (I don't even consider viewing busy streams, because the chat function, at that point, becomes completely useless, so I might as well be watching a video on demand.)

I think one of the things I'm not a big fan of is how "disposable" a streaming session feels. It's a transient moment — something that can only be experienced while it is current — and after that, it is irrelevant. Even more permanent records of streaming sessions like archives and highlight reels don't fix this, because so much of a streamer's typical activity appears to be along the lines of "you had to be there" — watching the chat, hearing the reactions live and so on. Also I get very bored of donation fanfares, subscription jingles and shout-outs to people in the chat; if I'm watching someone else play a game, I just want to hear their commentary.

Personally speaking, I prefer to create things that are more timeless, that can be enjoyed by anyone at any time; pieces of work that have a "long tail". And I think I succeed at that; every day, I have people liking, commenting on and sharing articles and videos I wrote or posted months or years ago because none of them are designed to be time-sensitive — they're hopefully entertaining and/or informative, of course, but for me I try to specifically avoid something only being relevant for a particular period. It's why I don't like writing opinion pieces too often, despite them being consistent sources of massive traffic. Opinion pieces are inherently transient.

Couple all that with the increasingly Byzantine systems that Twitch seems to continually put in place and the never-ending hunt for subscribers and donors and whatever else you're supposed to bang on about all the time, and it all just seems like a lot of busywork — usually for little to no gain — leaving you little time to actually enjoy the games you're streaming. While it's cool to share games you like, sometimes you just want to enjoy them for yourself, by yourself, you know?

I don't get it. And this isn't an attempt to put streamers down or anything — I know a lot of people who work hard on their Twitch channels — but I just don't get it.

Maybe I just haven't found the right streamer for me yet. I didn't used to like the Let's Play format until I found a few performers that "clicked" with me, either. I think in the case of streaming I'm just resistant to being beholden to someone else's schedule rather than being able to do what I want when I want! 🙂

I think my favourite games to write about are those that people have, for one reason or another, made assumptions about and decided not to explore in further depth. I'm not just talking about fanservicey games that make people go "oh no, boobs", but also games that people choose not to engage with because they believe them to be "bad" or suchlike.

Gun Gun Pixies is shaping up to be one of those games. I recognise and understand completely why some people will bounce off this one, because it's a really, really odd hybrid of different genres and its most mechanics-centric aspects are probably its weakest sections… but goddamn if it isn't a fascinating piece of experimental nonsense.

I've long taken the belief that there are very few truly irredeemably bad games in the world. There are games that a lot of people don't "get", games that a lot of people don't enjoy… but for the most part, I like to take the approach that if something exists, someone out there who played a role in its creation is probably proud of it, and, moreover, there is someone else out there who bought it and is very happy with it. With that in mind, it always feels a bit disrespectful to call something "bad"; by extension, you're calling both the work of the person who was proud of the thing "bad", and the tastes of the person who bought it and enjoyed it "bad", too.

Gun Gun Pixies isn't bad. It's bold, it's creative, it has rough edges and there are definitely things it could do better. But I am really, really, really looking forward to picking this apart and writing about it, because it's a goddamn fascinating experiment. And I'm delighted that Shade and Compile Heart got a chance to make it in the first place… and that PQube took a chance in localising it and bringing it West.

Coming up in the next week will be the Senran Kagura Peach Ball writeup to finish off that Cover Game feature, then we'll be launching into a Shade double-bill with Gun Gun Pixies and Bullet Girls Phantasia. The games aren't related directly at all, but they do have the developer in common — and that developer has an interesting history. I can't wait to dive in.

Hello everyone! Here's this week's vlog, featuring a look at the video editing software I make use of on a regular basis… plus a special guest appearance from Patti, who decided she wanted to help, too.

Have a lovely weekend!

Out of curiosity, I took a quick gander at Gun Gun Pixies over the course of the last couple of lunchtimes at work. I haven't got very far yet and, as I've mentioned a couple of times, I'm planning on covering it in detail alongside Bullet Girls Phantasia after Senran Kagura, but I thought I might as well give a few brief first impressions!

I had no real idea what to expect going in other than "tiny girls vs giant girls". That is indeed a part of things, but one thing I'm already quite enamoured with is the fact that the game appears to be as much an environmental puzzle as it is a third-person shooter. In fact, so far it's actually been more of an environmental puzzle than a third-person shooter, since so far the shooting has been extremely simple and largely simply a trigger to move the story on.

Where the puzzling stuff comes in is in how you traverse the various rooms in which you find yourself, and how you reach the "Picoins" that are scattered around the place. These are all clearly visible from a distance and there's a handy "free camera" that you can pan all around the room (and take screenshots with) to hunt down ones you're missing; this latter option also freezes the action so you can survey the environment at will without pressure.

Inevitably, the Picoins are hidden in awkward places like on top of high shelves or hidden behind and inside things. The Pixies are pretty agile so they can jump pretty high (and far if they get a dashing start) but they do have their limits, so you have to plan your routes carefully.

Alongside the Picoins, there is also "information" to find around the various rooms, largely in the form of objects you can walk up to and search, which triggers a discussion between Bee-tan and Kame-pon. These are all quite entertaining and give the game a slight "adventure game" feel — with the twist that you are in control of a tiny character exploring a normal-sized environment.

I've enjoyed what I've played so far, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further. The game has Compile Heart's trademark charm all over it, but the gameplay is a bit different from what one might usually expect from them — it's not an RPG, in other words!

More words to come on that soon — and $5+ Patrons, you're due a wallpaper, so I should be able to find some time for that this weekend.

Hope you all had a good week, and if you didn't… I hope you have a good weekend at least!