Forgot to post one of these yesterday, apologies! The reason for that was… well, no, the excuse I'm choosing to use is that my good friends Chris and Joe joined me for an epic-length recording session in which we explored our thoughts on the E3 that has just passed us by. Hopefully the episode will be available for you to watch and/or listen to tomorrow, so please look forward to it!

With the topic of the podcast in mind, I'll refrain from talking too much about my own personal E3, but suffice to say there are a lot of cool things that were announced or confirmed that I'm very excited about. Oddly enough, several of these announcements related to things I already own in one form or another, but there ain't no way I'm going to miss out on a physical copy of the excellent Freedom Planet or Blaster Master Zero for Switch.

I'm ecstatic about both the Trials of Mana remake and the Collection of Mana. I've preordered the limited physical release of the latter from Square Enix's store; if you have the slightest interest in this, I recommend getting in early, as this will likely be your only chance to own a copy of Seiken Densetsu 3 — that which is now known as Trials of Mana — in English, in packaged format.

There's plenty more to explore in the podcast itself, so please look forward to its release tomorrow! It's one of our best (and longest!) yet! 🙂

I read somewhere earlier — it might have been Penny Arcade? — that this time of year is sometimes referred to as "Gamer Christmas". Given the amount of preorders that have arrived on my doorstep in the last week alone — with a few more on the way in the coming weeks — I get it!

In just the last few days I've received my limited edition copy of Death Mark for Switch, fresh from Aksys Games' new UK store (which appears to be under the Reef Entertainment umbrella, same as NISA Europe and Idea Factory International), Lapis x Labyrinth for Switch, Worldend Syndrome for Switch, Dragon Star Varnir for PS4 and… probably some others I've forgotten! Before that, there was Kotodama from PQube for Switch, and at the end of the month there's Super Mario Maker 2.

It is, as they say, a Good Time to Be a Gamer.

Now I've got to figure out what I'm going to be covering next! Kotodama and Lapis x Labyrinth are both thoroughly interesting, and I'll definitely write something about them both, though whether or not it will be a full Cover Game feature is something I haven't decided yet. Worldend Syndrome looks like it'll be a really good time, and definitely Cover Game feature-worthy, and likewise for Dragon Star Varnir. I'm keen to jump on both of these relatively soon rather than leave them sitting on my shelf for too long.

After today's news surrounding MangaGamer's new release, I'm also going to make a point of writing about The Expression: Amrilato in the very near future. That will be a fascinating game to explore, since it aims to not only tell a touching yuri story, but also educate the reader in the real-life language of Esperanto, too. MangaGamer and the original developer seem very pleased with what they've produced, and it's certainly an extremely intriguing prospect.

Ah, it's good to have lots of choices! I don't think I'm ever going to run out of things to write about at this rate…

I finally finished recording my New Game Plus run of Atelier Rorona DX this evening! That's a weight off my mind, as it was taking a while to get through, but I finally made it. Did I get the ending I wanted? You'll have to wait and see when the video is released tomorrow!

Unfortunately, the camera I use to record my ugly mug inexplicably stopped recording after 59 seconds for some reason, so there's no facecam for this final episode. That's a bit of a bummer, as, not to spoil anything, but there were a few "firsts" for me in this finale that it would have been nice to be able to show my reactions for. Oh well. You'll have to settle for my voice! Hey, if it's good enough for channels with millions of subscribers like Game Grumps, then it's good enough for me. For now. 🙂

I mention this at the end of the video, but this brings New Game Plus as a video series to a close for the immediate future. I'm going on holiday at the end of the month, and I'm going to give myself some Fridays off from making videos in the meantime. When I get back, I'm going to kick off the Final Fantasy marathon, which I'm very excited about doing! In the meantime, Warriors Wednesday and the three Atari A to Z series will continue, as will all the usual stuff on MoeGamer.net, of course!

New Game Plus, as I think I noted previously, will probably return as a series of articles that give me the opportunity to explore new game plus and postgame content at a bit more of a leisurely pace than requiring weekly video uploads. I'm not ruling out a return to the videos at some point, but frankly I need a bit of a break from having to juggle too many things at once!

Anyway. I hope you enjoy the Atelier Rorona finale when it releases tomorrow, and beyond that the Final Fantasy Marathon when it kicks off in early July. In the meantime, thanks as always for your continued support, and please continue to enjoy my other work on YouTuber and MoeGamer 🙂

Those of you who have been following a while may recall that I had some therapy a while back. While I have mixed feelings about its effectiveness — primarily due to it being delivered via text chat online rather than face-to-face appointments — there are a few things that I learned, reinforced or otherwise made a point of trying to remember over the course of the period I spent undertaking the program.

Probably chief among those things was the idea of setting up some sort of mental checkpoint before allowing things to "get to me" too much. This is an important means of controlling incoming thoughts and feelings — particularly "negative" ones such as sadness and anger — so that they don't overwhelm you all at once, and it's something that I've often struggled with. Hell, I still do, to be perfectly honest, and it requires often exhausting mental effort to keep it up even bearing the strategy in mind… but it's an effort worth making.

The checkpoint asks a simple question before allowing the incoming thoughts into the depths of my brain: "does this matter?" If the answer is yes — and the incoming thought can provide a convincing reason why it matters to me, here and now — then I allow the thought through. If the answer is no, I turn it away, remaining aware that it might try to "cross the border" again at another time in the near future, perhaps in disguise.

When you make a point of being rigorous with your incoming thoughts like this, it's surprising how many of them you can turn away. There are a lot of things that don't matter. There are a lot of things that it isn't worth getting sad or angry over. Sometimes they still manage to sneak through, of course, but if you recognise those feelings and know what to look out for if they return at a later date, you can better equip yourself to send them packing the next time they come around.

I feel like life probably shouldn't be such an ongoing, constant mental battle with oneself, but unfortunately with the way we all live our lives today, it's hard to avoid — short of disconnecting entirely from the Internet and the media. Which is not really an option for most people.

Still, you can make that battle easier by closing doors that don't need to be open and restricting the potential flow of incoming thoughts and feelings. It's your life, your mind and your own sanity, and it's worth taking assertive control over now and again.

Every Tuesday and Friday at my work, we have a "Good Morning Call". Sounds pleasant, doesn't it? A nice way to get remote teams together and have a nice chat over a coffee and croissant or something.

No. The Good Morning Call is possibly the ultimate example of a plague on modern workplaces: endless, needless, pointless meetings.

Ostensibly, the Good Morning Call is intended for our team and our overseas colleagues to catch up on the various projects that we're working on, but in practice what it tends to turn into is an hour or more of us listening to one person drone on and on as they simply read out what our online project management tool says. Anything that does get discussed tends to be a conversation between our overseas colleagues, who are all in the same office anyway.

I get that organisation is important, but so much time is wasted in meetings and conference calls these days — not just at my place of work, but pretty much everywhere. And it's one of those things I don't really understand; how did this happen? I don't know anyone who likes, enjoys or finds these meetings and conference calls valuable. I don't know anyone who would be sorry if they stopped being a thing. Even the people in charge of them seem bored shitless… so why are we doing them again?

Still, at least it's not as bad as the meetings I had to suffer while working at energy company SSE. Company policy dictated that each of those must begin with a "Safety Moment", which was where someone in the meeting explained something that made them "think about safety". (This usually ended up being someone whingeing about drivers on the road on the way to work.) SSE was obsessed with health and safety to a fault; you actually got reprimanded if you didn't hold the handrail going up stairs, so it's unsurprising their meetings would incorporate such mandatory asininity.

Oh, that and colouring in. On one particularly memorable occasion at SSE, we had a residential weekend that was ostensibly a conference, but at which we spent a significant portion of the time colouring in a poster about, you guessed it, safety.

I guess things could be worse.

As I type this, it's raining outside. I can hear the drops pattering on the roof of our "catio", the structure we have out the back of our house so our cats can go "outside" without actually going out into the big wide world where it's dangerous. (For those unaware, we lost a beloved companion on the road outside our house last November, so this was a direct response to that; neither Meg nor Patti seem to mind too much, even if Meg does enjoy sneaking out of the front door when it's open sometimes.)

I love the rain, or more specifically hearing the rain. It's a soothing, relaxing sound that always brings me a feeling of peace and deep relaxation. It reminds me of some fond memories, and also just provides me with something to listen to when things are otherwise silent. It's not a regular noise that you tune out after a while; it's a constantly interesting sound that is never quite the same from moment to moment. It rises and falls in its tempo, pitch and volume; sometimes it's gentle, sometimes it's aggressive, sometimes it's barely perceptible.

I'm not sure when, how or why I started feeling this way about the rain. One of the memories it brings back to me is of the few occasions I went camping as a child — a couple of times with the Cub Scouts, and once in my final year of primary school. (In the latter case, I didn't take a shit for a week because I was too afraid of getting bum AIDS from the public toilets on the campsite, so the subsequent constipation sullies an otherwise pleasant memory. But I digress.)

Yes, the sound of rain reminds me of being under canvas, trying desperately to get to sleep while my brain was rattling with excitement for the "It's a Knockout" competition that was to take place the following day, or annoyance with Christopher Smith for singing gibberish songs until well after midnight. "Doyget, doyget sannnds". Why do I remember this shit? I'm sure I could fit something useful in the memory space that is taking up.

But yes, anyway. Rain is good. Rain is relaxing. Rain is probably my favourite weather condition, assuming I am either inside or in possession of something to protect me from it. It's neither too hot nor too cold; it makes a pleasant noise; and it provides an altogether invigorating feeling of "new beginnings".

I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Been playing a couple of fun new games over the last couple of days: Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa and Lapis x Labyrinth. Both will be getting writeups on MoeGamer in the near future, but I thought I'd provide a few exclusive initial impressions right here for those curious!

Kotodama

This one intrigued me because it's the first game that PQube has actually developed (in collaboration with Japanese dev Art Co. Ltd, who previously worked on Gunpey and, err, Britney's Dance Beat). Consequently, I was keen to support it even if it turned out to be bobbins, but thankfully that is not the case; I'm really enjoying it so far.

Kotodama is a fusion of visual novel and puzzle game, with emphasis on the former. If you've played something like Purino Party, you'll have a rough idea of what to expect, though rather than being a comedic, ecchi affair like Purino Party was, the underlying story here is actually rather serious. I'll spare you the details for now in case you're interested in checking it out for yourself!

The puzzle sequences represent the main character making use of his power of kotodama — the power of words — to uncover the layers of lies within an individual's heart, and discover the truth within. This is accomplished through a tile-matching puzzler, though rather than following either the Bejeweled or Puzzle & Dragons mould, this time around it's an unusual system where clicking a tile sends it shooting up to the top of its column and subsequently shoving everything down into the gap it created.

It takes a little getting used to, but once you get into the rhythm of things, it's really satisfying. The whole "power of words" thing comes in via the visual novel segments; as you learn various key words by asking the right questions at the right times, you earn experience for the different "colours" (which roughly correspond to emotions and feelings such as love, "fire", tears, greed and the like) and, with enough experience in a particular colour, you level it up and make it more effective at filling the meter that determines your completion of the stage.

They also double as a means of determining whether or not you've actually managed to figure out the complete truth of a particular chapter; if you reach the end of a chapter and haven't found all the keywords, chances are you missed something!

The story is really cool and mysterious, with some surprisingly weighty themes. And both boys and girls get nearly naked in the puzzle sequences. A winning combination.

Lapis x Labyrinth

This is the new one from Nippon Ichi Software, and with the troubles they're having at the moment, I wanted to support it — particularly as I heard from at least two people I trust (both of whom are Patrons, I believe — thanks, guys!) that it's a good time.

Lapis x Labyrinth is a very odd game that positions itself as an RPG, but it's really more of an arcade game with a sense of persistent progression. In simple terms, you proceed through a series of 2D side-scrolling "dungeons" beating up enemies and collecting loot, but the focus is on generating combos and high scores rather than surviving particularly difficult challenges.

Score more points, get more gold. Get more gold, get more upgrades. Get more upgrades, score more points. Repeat. It's a deliciously addictive affair that I'm having a ton of fun with so far… and I absolutely adore the art style, combining adorable cutesy chubby chibis with an oddly strong feeling of sexiness. I am very into the Necromancer.

—

Anyway, as I say, I'll be doing detailed writeups of both of these on MoeGamer in the near future. I don't know if either of them will get the Cover Game treatment — it depends how much there is to talk about, I guess! — but they'll both definitely get some words of appreciation when I've spent a bit more time with them both.

And now it's nearly half past midnight, so I should probably go to bed rather than attempting to unravel the Mystery of the White Wolf… but Honoka's undies are so cute…

Hello folks! Hope you're all well. Just wanted to let you know that in the last week in June, I'm going on holiday for a week. The wife and I are off to Center Parcs, which, for those unfamiliar, is a thoroughly pleasant little holiday village in the depths of a forest with lots of nice (and expensive) things to do while you're there.

While tempting to continue "working" while I'm there, I'm going to allow myself a bit of time off from both MoeGamer and YouTube during the week. You lovely Patrons will still get your daily posts here on Patreon, but I'll be leaving the site and the channel to their own devices for the week.

I'm going to try and get some stuff done in advance so I can just schedule it for that week, so that shouldn't be a problem — I just wanted to let you all know in advance just in case I did suddenly appear to go a bit quiet and you wondered what happened!

With that in mind, I'm also not going to start a new Cover Game feature until I get back from the holiday. In the intervening weeks, I'm going to see if I can zip through and get the other endings in Our World is Ended and perhaps write one more piece on how all those characters' arcs truly conclude, but everything else will be one-offs or parts of the various Delving Into series.

$5 Patrons, I'm also aware I haven't done a wallpaper for you this month yet! I'll get cracking on that in the next day or two, so please watch out for that very soon.

I hope you're all having a thoroughly pleasant weekend! Mine has been pretty good so far. I have the joy of a trip to the tip tomorrow to get rid of some old chairs and a huge bag of grass cuttings, but other than that I intend to spend my time playing games, making videos, petting cats and maybe talking to my wife a bit if, you know, she deserves it or anything. (She'll be playing Final Fantasy or My Time at Portia if I ignore her anyway, so she'll be all right.)

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday!

[I recently decided to become a Patron of Normal Happenings, since Matthew there has been a consistently supportive and positive voice in the blogging community at large, and has always been very kind to me. This post is inspired by one of his regular "Daily Inklings" posts, which are simple writing prompts designed to provide the stimulus for the reader's own creative work.]

As a kid, I dreamed of the stars. I found the idea of outer space, alien planets and the exploration of things far beyond our humdrum everyday world to be fascinating.

I knew that this was just pure fantasy, however; I knew that space travel in the modern day and age was expensive, physically demanding, extremely dangerous and you didn't even end up going anywhere interesting. I never really had the childish ambition to "become an astronaut" because I knew from an early age that it was something that only a select few could do — and probably a select few Americans at that. As a nerdy, clumsy, physically inept young British boy, I knew that I was never going to get there.

It didn't stop me dreaming, however. I enjoyed reading non-fiction books about space and other planets. I loved science-fiction stories, whether they were TV shows, movies or novels. I remember being very proud that I read some of Isaac Asimov's novels as a kid, because they always looked and felt like "grown-up books"; they were the stuff my parents read.

And, of course, I loved using the computer to indulge this fantasy, whether it was through the structured play of an actual game set in space, or something more creative.

In the former instance, I particularly appreciated any game that allowed me to fly a spaceship from a first-person perspective or at the very least provided a convincing "simulation". I loved Star Raiders and its sequel on the Atari 8-bit; on the ST, meanwhile, I had a lot of time for titles like Starglider II, Enterprise, Starflight and Space Rogue, all of which gave me the feeling of being in command of my own ship and travelling to far-flung, exotic locales to… well, usually to pick up minerals rather than anything more interesting, but digging up rocks is infinitely more enjoyable on an alien planet than in the British countryside, as lovely as the latter can be sometimes.

In the latter case, I was strongly drawn to Jeff Minter's ColourSpace "light synthesiser" on the Atari ST. For the unfamiliar, this was a piece of software designed to allow you to play with light and colour. Moving the mouse around and clicking the button would create various coloured effects, and there were numerous controls you could fiddle with to change the patterns that were generated, the colours that were used and various increasingly psychedelic features.

One of the things I loved about ColourSpace was that it included not only the ability to simulate a starfield, but also a background image that resembled a starship cockpit. I would spend hours at a time playing with this combination of things coupled with the various light-synthesis options, playing out a narrative in my head that usually ended with the catastrophic destruction of my spacecraft. (The various colour-cycling options that ColourSpace provided were eminently suitable for simulating the cockpit flashing with hundreds of warning lights!)

There was no "objective" here, no end goal and, looking back on it, the fact it usually ended with my "death" was a bit bleak, but I loved it. I loved this means of expressing myself, and I feel like the fact it was specifically in space rather than just against a black backdrop was a key part of the whole experience.

Hmm. May have to dig out that ColourSpace disk this evening and see if it still has the same magic…

Hello! Sorry about yesterday. I was absolutely convinced I'd already written a post yesterday, but it turns out I was just remembering the previous day. Evidently all the days are melting into one another. Never mind eh.

Anyway, now seems like a good time to talk about Google Stadia, which revealed a bunch of new information yesterday. Remember, this is the thing that some people were arguing was going to be the "future of gaming".

Here are some facts and my thoughts.

It's launching in November of this year. Attempting to hit the Christmas rush is… theoretically a good idea, but I feel there's something inherently less exciting about something that doesn't actually have any real dedicated hardware. Also releasing in November means it's going up against Pokemon. Good luck with that!

There will be a "starter pack" available for £119, which includes a controller, a Chromecast Ultra and a three-month subscription to the "Stadia Pro" service, which allows 4K/60fps video… assuming you have the 35Mbps+ connection required to make this work. Again, this feels rather expensive for what it is… perhaps it's just me. The Chromecast is a nice device, but you can pick one of those up by itself for £30 or less; presumably the "Ultra" offers something extra (4K?) but given how cheap TV sticks are these days, this feels like a lot of money for not very much.

The controllers will be available separately for £59 in 2020. Hahahaha. Get real. I know controllers have been creeping up in price for the last couple of generations, but £60 is insane.

Stadia Pro will cost £8.99 a month, and will not include all the games in the library. This is, I think, the most hilarious thing. The biggest potential selling point of Stadia during the "conjecture" period was the possibility of a Netflix-style gaming library, where you could just click on a new release and immediately be playing it. But it seems that's not going to happen; while some games will be included as part of the subscription, new releases will have to be "bought" separately, meaning you're paying for something and ending up not owning either a physical or digital copy of it.

There will be a free option. You'll be limited to 1080p and 30fps using this free account, which removes two of the main selling points from the initial announcement. Presumably you also won't have access to any of the included "subscription" games, meaning you'll have to buy anything you want to play. Individual pricing for games hasn't been announced, but they better be cheaper than full download or packaged releases of games, since, to reiterate, you're paying to not own anything.

Some big names are on board. Games confirmed include Doom, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XV, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and The Division 2. Boooooring… and all games that have been out for a while, more to the point. Neither Activision (Overwatch) or Epic (Fortnite) have signed up to the platform, meaning that, at the time of writing, two of the most popular games in the world are not available on Stadia.

The system will have the ability to search YouTube for relevant content, and for you to see what your friends are doing while you're playing. No. I already get distracted by notification spam on modern consoles; I really don't need picture-in-picture of my friend playing a totally different game when I'm trying to concentrate on something. Searching for relevant YouTube content is potentially interesting… but it does also sort of encourage behaviour where people don't try to discover things for themselves, and instead go straight to YouTube to get the solutions. Also video guides suck; bring back text!

To summarise, there are some interesting ideas here, but I don't see it working, at all — and I sincerely hope that people don't support this. I'd perhaps be more receptive to the idea if the subscription offered a complete "Netflix of games" type situation, but asking people to buy games on top of a subscription fee is just laughable… not to mention it is one of the many reasons OnLive, an earlier attempt to do pretty much exactly all this, failed miserably.

As I've mentioned before, my biggest concern with Stadia is that if it takes off, it will normalise the non-ownership of games, and that's a serious concern for preservation and archival. I'd much rather the games of the world be distributed across a wide variety of collectors' libraries than centralised with one single corporation… plus a centralised streaming solution means that games can easily be removed from existence when, say, a licensing deal expires, or even a newer version of an existing game releases.

You know me, I don't normally like to be overly negative about things, but there is absolutely nothing desirable about Stadia for me, and I hope it is a miserable flop. If successful, it has the potential to do irreversible damage to the gaming medium, and I want no part of that. Thankfully, with all the bizarre and stupid decisions that seem to have been made during development, the likelihood of that happening seems to have gotten significantly less… and I have to say, I'm happy about that.

This is probably the last I'll say about Stadia, since so far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist from this point onwards. I will continue to support the things I believe in!