I wasn't sure what to write about today. I'm still not entirely sure what to write about, and as I do at such times, I found myself hitting the "Random Post" button a few times on this site to look at things I've written about before. And I was mildly dismayed to discover that a number of things that I find frustrating about life in 2025 — both in a personal sense and in a broader, societal or cultural sense — have been An Issue for a lot longer than I'd realised.
For example, I've written a few times recently about how "analysis paralysis" can easily descend when you're preparing to enjoy some entertainment for the evening. I also wrote about this back in 2013 — though I do feel like it has only continued to get worse in the age of streaming, Game Pass and all that stuff, not that I subscribe to any of those things.
I also wrote about how frustrating I found websites' "guide content" used as clickbait back in 2016, though this was less of a surprise, since I was forced into the production of SEO-juicing crap like that when I was laid off from USgamer. That has definitely gotten worse — and the specific issue I complained about in that post, which was websites posting a "landing page" for a guide that didn't actually exist, is still a thing that happens.
I just don't feel like the world is significantly better in 2025 than it was in 2013 or 2016! In many ways, it's significantly worse! We reached something of a tipping point with tech in particular where new innovations stopped being about making life better for everyone, and instead became about cynically making money for people who really don't need any more money. Such is the way of capitalism, of course, but it feels like that side of things has been especially obnoxious over the course of the last 5 years or so.
Then, of course, there's the fact that intolerance of marginalised groups is way back up compared to what it was ten years ago. There was absolutely still work to be done back then, of course, but the mid-20-teens had shown a marked amount of progress in generally accepted progressive attitudes. Much of that progress feels like it has been spitefully torn up in the last year or so in particular — unsurprisingly, coinciding with the inauguration of the world's most embarrassing authoritarian.
But hey. At least you can use AI to generate revenge porn of people you don't like, completely without their consent, and then share it with the world, again, completely without the subject's consent. So that's nice!
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Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I absolutely love and respect greatly, but I have to be in the right mood to play it. Today I was very much in the mood to play it, so play it I did. I got to a point that proved to be a sticking point for me when I first played it on PlayStation — Golgollada Gallows, also known as Golgorand Execution Site in the original — and, indeed, it proved to be a bit of a sticking point for me this time around, also.
However! This time around, I was armed with the knowledge of how I beat it last time around, which was to spend several hours doing random battles to level up my core units to such a point that they could survive the challenge of Golgollada Gallows — notorious as one of the toughest fights in the relatively early game — and progress without too much trouble.
Y'see, the difficulty I had with this first time around is that Final Fantasy Tactics sort of positions itself as a game where you move from story beat to story beat without any interruptions. Because it's not a conventional RPG in which you directly control the protagonist as he wanders around towns and dungeons, it's easy to see the random engagements you can run into on the node-based world map as annoying inconveniences preventing you from seeing the next bit of story.
But they are there for a reason — and, indeed, The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game makes it even easier for you to take advantage of them by making them not random at all. Sure, sometimes as you move from node to node you'll get the distinctive "swoosh" that indicates a battle is incoming, but unlike the PlayStation original, you can choose not to engage if you don't want to. This prevents you from encountering a minor softlock if, for example, you're trying to get to a town to stock up on healing items or refresh your units' equipment.
However, it also goes the other way. If you pass through a non-story node and you don't have an encounter there, you can choose to "search for enemies" and manually trigger a battle. This means if you actually want to spend some time levelling your units or earning them some new abilities — which the game doesn't tell you to do, but which is very much a good idea — you can do that much more easily than in the PlayStation version. If you want to, you can just stand on one battlefield, do a fight, then immediately trigger another one — no running back and forth between nodes in the hope of getting the "swoosh", because you can trigger it at will, and you can ignore it if it's inconvenient.
While I'm not normally a fan of being able to turn off encounters in a regular RPG — it feels very much like cheating, plus it does you out of some progression that you probably need — in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where battles take 5-10 minutes or more rather than a few seconds, this was an important and very welcome tweak to the formula.
Anyway, upshot of all this is that I beat Golgollada Gallows on my second attempt rather than taking the many, many, many attempts I did back in the day. I was still relatively new to console RPGs when I first picked up Final Fantasy Tactics, after all, and it hadn't occurred to me to grind because I wasn't super-familiar with the concept. Once I spent that time levelling my units properly, though, everything fell into place, and the rest of the game was much more straightforward. As, indeed, I suspect it will be this time around, too.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is a wonderful remake of an already wonderful game. I have greatly enjoyed my time playing today, and, having got over that notorious difficulty spike, I suspect the remainder of the game (except maybe "that" Wiegraf fight) will be even more enjoyable.
So your lesson for the day, then, if you're new to Final Fantasy Tactics, is don't be afraid to grind. Embrace it. Love it. You will come to appreciate it when all your units are suddenly orders of magnitude more effective with just four or five additional levels under their belts!
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I mentioned a couple of days ago that I have been making a concerted effort to get back into playing the piano more regularly, and as part of that process, I bought some new music books. One of them was another album of pieces by Ludovico Einaudi, a composer whose work I had enjoyed playing both for the way it sounded and for its relative "pick-up-and-play"-ability. While I was picking up this second book of Einaudi, I was also recommended a book by a Korean pianist named Yiruma, so I thought I'd take a chance, go in blind (deaf?) and see what he was all about.
I've played a few pieces from Yiruma's book today, and they are lovely. Moreover, they are pitched at a slightly higher ability level than most of the Einaudi stuff I have played to date, which is exactly what I wanted; I wanted something that pushed me just a little bit without being overwhelming, as that will help me in rebuilding my confidence, which is the main point of this overall exercise.
Yiruma, for the unfamiliar, is a South Korean pianist whose real name is Lee Ru-Ma. He studied in the UK at the Purcell and subsequently King's College London before later moving back to South Korea after his military service. Over the years, he has composed both standalone music and soundtracks to films and animation. Apparently his music saw particular popularity during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, although good ol' Wikipedia doesn't specifically cite a source (or reason) for this.
I can kind of get why, though. The 2020 lockdowns were an unsettling period where none of us really knew what was going to happen, and Yiruma's music is pleasant, relaxing, uplifting and emotional. Indeed, in the front of the book I bought there's a message from him saying:
I hope my music finds its way into your hands whenever you feel happiness, heaviness, or need light in your darkest times.
This was what I wished for, and this wish could come true through you. I sincerely hope that someday the music remains a part of your memory.
Aside from what I assume is a slightly clunky translation, the sentiment is nice. The guy wants to feel like there is a personal connection between him, his music, and the people who are enjoying it — presumably whether they are just listening to it or actually playing it for themselves. And the 2020 lockdowns were a time when we could have all done with a bit more in the way of personal connections — as much as I joked at the time about not having to go out being a real pleasure for an introvert, the last five years have been… difficult, so far as interpersonal relationships are concerned. While I don't think Yiruma is saying his music is going to "solve" anything, he does seem to sincerely hope that it will bring some form of comfort or distraction from potentially difficult times — and provide some nice memories too.
Ultimately that's what good music is about: feeling some form of emotional connection. The exact form that takes depends on the specifics of the music itself, but it's pretty much a constant across much of both the artistic and mainstream, popular side of things.
I'm looking forward to playing some more from the book, as I like what I've played so far. If I figure out a decent means of recording, I might even share some with you sometime. After a bit more practice, though…
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Like it or loathe it — and there's an increasing number of people in the latter camp in more recent years, for reasons I'll get onto — but TV Tropes is an Internet institution.
At least it was, until today, when they decided that enough was enough with all those pesky users who didn't want their privacy invaded and their data sold and thus were running adblockers. Now, when attempting to view a page on TV Tropes, you get this screen:
This will probably be familiar to anyone who has viewed any number of websites in recent years. It's a step back from being a complete paywall, in that they'll allow you in if you just disable your adblocker a little bit, pweeeze, we'll only share some of your data with unknown third parties. But it's still a shitty move — particularly for a site like TV Tropes, which has always been a community-driven site. In fact, without the community, TV Tropes wouldn't exist.
As writer Aidan Moher put it earlier on Bluesky:
That's right. Part of the reason why TV Tropes was so beloved, even with its problems — we're getting to those, I promise — was because it was built by the people. Much like Wikipedia, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, TV Tropes was absolutely dependent on its enthusiast, volunteer authors and editors. Without those people tirelessly cataloguing examples of tropes used in all manner of media to a frighteningly comprehensive degree, there would be no TV Tropes.
But… now what? People are not going to pay for TV Tropes, and an adblocker is pretty much essential for browsing the modern Internet if you want an experience that is in any way tolerable. So now someone who might otherwise have wanted to contribute to the community effort that is TV Tropes is now locked out from doing so, with their only choices being to pay up or open the floodgates to God knows whatever advertisers are doing these days. (No, I'm not opening up a non-adblocked browser just to see what it's like now.)
Not only that, but this is essentially TV Tropes saying that it wants to profit from the unpaid labour all those volunteer contributors and editors have put in over the years. Because you can bet your sweet bippy none of that $5 a month/$25 a year subscription fee is going anywhere near the pockets of the people who have really made the site what it is today.
This, obviously, sucks, and is just another example of enshittification. Specifically, it's almost a textbook example of what Cory Doctorow was referring to in one of his first pieces he wrote on the subject, The Enshittification of TikTok:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sites between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
In the case of TV Tropes, you have your "users", who are the people who browse the site for fun, entertainment or in the hope of learning something; then you have your "business customers", who are the volunteer contributors, without whom the site wouldn't exist; the abuse of those "business customers" through locking them out unless they subscribe or open the adblock gates is the stage we're at now. I'd argue in this instance we skipped the usual "abusing users" part and jumped straight to "abusing business customers and users".
As I say, this clearly sucks, and it seems like a sure-fire way for TV Tropes to almost immediately make itself completely irrelevant to the rest of the Internet.
But! That might not be the worst thing in the world. Hear me out.
This is not to put down the incredible amount of time and effort TV Tropes contributors have spent cataloguing myriad tropes and even more countless uses across many, many different forms of media. I absolutely do not have an issue with the people who have taken the time to do that, because those people are creatives; they have made something.
No, the problem with TV Tropes is that, over time, it became a resource for the lazy. This is not TV Tropes' fault itself, but rather it's an extension of a general sense of dwindling media literacy across society. Why think for yourself about something you've just seen, played or heard, when there's a 3 hour YouTube video essay waiting to "explain" it to you in what appears to be authoritative detail? Why ponder the specific way a movie, TV show, video game or book chose to present its narrative, when you can just look it up on TV Tropes and get a ready-made list of "discussion points" that you can "borrow" and use for yourself? (Certain members of the "3 hour YouTube video essay maker" group are definitely prone to this, with some pretty much quoting TV Tropes pages verbatim in the name of "analysis".)
I have had conversations with people who will not even consider starting to watch a new TV show if there isn't a "companion" podcast (official or otherwise) ready and waiting to explain each and every episode to them. This is both frightening and baffling to me! Particularly when it comes to media that is designed to be fairly undemanding, mainstream entertainment!
TV Tropes isn't solely to blame for this, of course — blame can also be laid at the feet of reactionary, short-form video content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts as well as the generally dwindling attention span of people online these days — but it is a symptom of a broader problem. And one of those sources of that problem going away might not be a terrible thing in the long term, as callous as that might sound to those who have poured hours of time and effort into researching things for that site.
Regardless of your feelings on TV Tropes — on the whole, I've always been fond of it, but then I've always used it more as entertainment than a source of "serious" research or analysis — this is an unfortunate day for an Internet institution, and I suspect it absolutely will not be the last longstanding website to take this direction.
Once Wikipedia and the Internet Archive go that way — and no, them occasionally badgering you for donations doesn't count — that's when you know we're really fucked. Let's hope that never happens.
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I have been doing my best to have a bit of self-discipline and play the piano more. I like playing the piano. I have always liked playing the piano, but I don't make nearly enough time to do so these days, and that absolutely needs to change.
I'm not planning on becoming a big famous concert pianist or anything, but it is nice to be able to just sit down at the piano, play something and it sound at least moderately tolerable. Preferably good.
Part of the issue I've had is because I have lacked that discipline for a frankly unhealthy number of years at this point, I haven't lost my skills as such, but I lack a lot of the confidence in my abilities that I perhaps once had when I was at my arguable peak of ability, around the age of 18-20 or so. I can still play quite a few of the pieces that I played back then, but there are also some pieces I once played that are far too terrifying to even contemplate trying again until I get myself back up to what I would imprecisely describe as "scratch".
As part of rebuilding confidence, it's always nice and helpful to have some pieces that are pretty much "pick up and play". Although sight-reading always used to be one of the most terrifying parts of music exams, I've always been very good at it, and all the more so if a piece of music is, and I don't wish to sound overly arrogant here, pitched a little lower than the peak of my actual abilities. After all, that is what the sight-reading section of music exams assessed: your ability to pick up and play a piece that was pitched a few "grades" below the exam you were taking.
One album of music that I've been enjoying playing recently is one that my mother bought for me a good few years back, but which I haven't spent a lot of time exploring. And that is Ludovico Einaudi's The Piano Collection, Volume 1. Interestingly enough, there does not appear to be a Volume 2 (I have looked this evening) but there are quite a few other Einaudi books out there, one of which I've ordered, along with a book by a Korean pianist named Yiruma who appears to be in a similar vein.
Einaudi's music is… uncomplicated, minimalist, often predictable, even repetitive. As acclaimed a pianist as he is, the complexity of his compositions is a far cry from the Bachs and Beethovens of the world. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. He composes pieces of music that just sound nice, and which have plenty of scope for expression and interpretation. I must confess I've never actually listened to him actually playing the pieces in the book — although in some respects, that might also be a good thing, as it means I can put my own interpretation on them, play them how I feel they should be played, which is as important a part of performance as anything. (That said, I have put one of his albums on in the background while I type this.)
One thing I do find quite interesting about Einaudi is that he uses a lot of compositional techniques that I used when I had to compose pieces for GCSE and A-level music. As such, I guess I feel a sort of vaguely "personal" connection to several of his pieces, because they feel quite like something that I could have written at some point. That's an oddly… comforting feeling, I guess I'd describe it as? To have a tenuous sort of creative connection with an Italian pianist-composer that I know pretty much nothing about. It's… nice.
So yeah. I have been playing a fair bit of these Einaudi tracks of late, and enjoying them enough to grab another book of his stuff to explore. So hopefully doing this a bit more often will help me rebuild my confidence and perhaps tackle some more ambitious pieces in the medium- to long-term.
And now, having written this, I probably better go play a bit, hadn't I?
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It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.
I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)
Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.
Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.
This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermathsums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.
I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.
"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.
And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.
It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.
Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.
I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?
Those are rhetorical questions.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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I had my annual appraisal at work today. Honestly I always dread this because of just… everything going on inside my head most of the time, not least of which is ever-present impostor syndrome, but I was especially dreading it this time because I knew I would have to have a Difficult Conversation about aspects of my job that I was struggling a bit with. The details are not important, but nothing you need to worry about — my career is fine and I have not murdered anyone!
Why should this make me feel dread, rather than hope about having an open conversation that both I and my colleagues can move forward from? Because on multiple occasions in the past, attempting to have a Difficult Conversation like this has resulted in a less-than-supportive atmosphere from my immediate superiors and employers. On multiple occasions it has led to me leaving a role altogether. And, as I'm sure you're aware from my general enthusiasm for what I do now, I did not want that to happen this time around.
I had no reason to believe that speaking my mind and being frank about my mental health would result in disastrous consequences for my job and career in this particular instance, of course — I get along very well with my colleagues, immediate superiors and even senior management. That's the advantage of working for a relatively small company: you can get to know everyone, and they can get to know you.
But still I felt it: that dread. What if it was misinterpreted as me being lazy, or not wanting to do my job, or something like that? Impostor syndrome is a terrible thing, as it means you live in constant fear of being "found out". Exactly what you fear being "found out" is often not entirely clear, but the end result is often that familiar feeling of dread when you're in a situation where the right thing to do is to confront something that's been worrying you, and seek support if needed.
As should hopefully already be clear from the title of this post, the Difficult Conversation went well, and I now feel a lot more confident and hopeful about the future. I won't go into details because you don't really need to know — it's nothing any of you need to worry about, I should add, however — but suffice to say that we have a Plan for the immediate and mid-to-long-term future that will hopefully result in me feeling a lot better about a lot of things, and feeling a lot less in the way of the burnout I have been suffering a bit over the course of the last while.
It's all about thinking about where your particular strengths and skills are, and considering how you can best use those as part of your overall team. Go into a situation like this thinking "I don't want to do this any more" and the whole thing is probably going to end sub-optimally. Go into this thinking "these are the things I'm good at, and I don't think my current responsibilities make the best use of those skills", however, and you can look to the future with hope and positivity. This is, it should not have to be said, a good thing.
Because ultimately, we have to work. That's the way society is. In the absence of any sort of universal basic income scheme — which is a whole other topic of discussion — we all have to work. And if you have the opportunity to make a change for the better and not find your mental health ebbing away at least partly as a result of daily responsibilities that aren't a good fit for you, it pays to take that bold step, say "I'm not entirely happy right now", and try to figure out a good solution for yourself.
I am painfully aware that not everyone has the luxury of being able to do this. I have been in situations where I have not had the luxury of being able to do this in the past, and it really sucks. So I was beyond pleased when the end result of the discussions today was positive, helpful and hopeful, and I'm glad I had the courage to stand up and admit that I had been struggling a bit. I am incredibly thankful for the opportunities I've been given, and the position in which I find myself. It took me a very long time to get here, so I am keen to make it work as well as I can.
So that's what I'm doing. And I'm grateful that I can do that.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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It's post 500 of my second time around on this nonsense! Hooray! We should celebrate, probably!
500 posts, of course, doesn't really mean anything, because it's not a year (it's more than that) and it's not two years (it's less than that). Although "500" is a nice round number, time's frustrating need to use non-round numbers means that doing something 500 days in a row (give or take a couple of missteps here and there, which have always been corrected and accounted for) doesn't mean anything other than the fact you reached an arbitrary milestone.
But a milestone it is, nonetheless, and so celebrate we shall.
I have been enjoying getting back to this daily blogging malarkey. Blogs are all but dead these days, of course, but as I've frequently noted on here, I don't write this for any sort of Internet approval or to watch numbers go up. I write this because I find it valuable and helpful to do so. It's a means of expressing myself that has only let me down on one occasion in the last 17 years, and that was the fault of the platform holder at the time rather than the medium itself. It's a means of, at times, processing complicated thoughts that I'm not sure how to talk to people about. It's a means of me helping to understand myself, I guess.
It took me a little while to get back into the rhythm of things, I'll admit. When I kicked things off again on June 8th last year, I wasn't in a great place mentally. It hadn't been long since we had lost our beloved Meg, and I was still reeling from that somewhat. I had just had a day of fun with some friends, though, and that had energised me somewhat, inspiring me to put "pen" to paper once more. I note with a grim expression that I have not heard a peep from any of those people since I got exceedingly frustrated and upset with them in May of this year, which is something I am not going to get into right now. Sigh. I digress.
Anyway, yes. I was not in an amazing place mentally, but I was also conscious of not wanting every single post on here to be moaning about something, or to keep retreading the same subject matter over and over again. On my past time in the #oneaday mines, I managed to put out some of my most creative blog posts — and often during some of the bleakest periods of my life, too. Hardship breeds creativity or something. That's not a saying, but you know what I mean.
Over time, I think I've settled back nicely into a reasonably good rhythm of being able to write about personal things, write about things I enjoy like books, games and music, and write complete and utter nonsense. Some may say that a blog needs to have a "specialism" if you want readers, and to that I say two things.
One: I've already said that I don't particularly care about readers. No, that sounds too harsh; it's not that I don't care, but it's more that… this place is primarily for me, and anyone who happens to stumble across it, read it and enjoy or get something out of it is a happy bonus. I'm not going to actively discourage anyone from reading, but I'm also not going out of my way to promote it or try and get people to read, either. I don't even share most of these posts on what little social media I still have remaining.
Two: I have a blog with a specialism. It's called MoeGamer. You might already follow it. If you do, thank you, and that's great! This blog is, and always has been, unfiltered Pete. It's my online scrapbook of sorts, where I can just write whatever nonsense is in my head on any given day, and then perhaps look back on it in a few years time and recall some things that I might have otherwise forgotten. That is actually something I do quite often.
So anyway. After 500 days on this second trip around the block, I'm happy with where this blog is and what I'm doing with it. It's a shame that we'll likely never see the same sort of blogging community as we once had in the early days of the #oneaday project first time around — there are some people I met from that period in time that I really miss, and have no idea where to find them any more! — but this place is fulfilling the purpose that, more than anything, it was always designed for.
So here's to 500 days of this rubbish, and maybe another 500 more after that, and maybe many more 500s after that. Meaningless milestone it may be, but it is still a milestone. So happy 500 to me!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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The MiSTer Multisystem 2 has been everything I hoped it would be: an all-in-one retro gaming device that I can very easily use to both enjoy classic games on a CRT television, with all the benefits that offers, and be able to capture footage from said games to make videos about them. The dual outputs on the Analogue model of the Multisystem 2 means I can do both at the same time, and it's a real delight. So I made a grand total of five (count 'em!) videos today, and I feel like this is going to help me broaden my whole remit on my YouTube channel considerably.
I've built a small following with Atari-focused stuff, and I by no means intend to leave that behind completely. But there's so much fascinating retro stuff out there that I'd love to explore on video that it just seems daft not to… do that.
My aim for the channel has always been simply, to quote my own description, "make you feel like you're sitting down with an old friend to enjoy some great (and occasionally not-so-great!) games." The Atari focus just sort of happened with my own personal interest in the platforms, but it was never intended to be an Atari-exclusive thing, otherwise I would have branded the whole channel that way. Indeed, I'm having a lot of fun exploring weird and wonderful console titles right now — and some of my most successful, popular videos have been in that area.
I think the easiest way to put it is that my YouTube channel reflects how I like to enjoy games when I'm not on camera — I'm fascinated to explore the overlooked and underappreciated titles from both today and yesterday, and there's nothing I like more than being able to share my experiences with people, and those people find a new favourite as a result. As such, with a few exceptions — I'm almost certainly going to do some Ridge Racer at some point — you probably won't see "big name" or "triple-A" stuff on my channel, but you will see some lesser-known stuff that I either enjoyed a lot back in the day and think not enough people know about, or things that I've discovered more recently.
They draw minimal numbers, but I'm also pleased to be back into doing some long, episodic playthroughs. I'm really enjoying revisiting The Granstream Saga right now, and doing video series like this is a good reason to finally settle down and play some older RPGs that, for one reason or another, I have never gotten around to. I have a very long list of stuff that I'd like to play, and ideally I'd love to play them on the channel!
One thing at a time, though. The Granstream Saga is ongoing, but if I remember rightly that isn't super long overall. And then I guess I will have to spin a wheel or something to pick what comes next!
Anyway, if you're not subscribed and want to join me exploring some fun games, head on over to the channel and hit the subscribe button, maybe check out a few videos. It'll be like the good old days when we went over to each other's houses to play games together. Remember that? It's feeling like an increasingly dim and distant memory, but gosh, I miss it. That channel is the nearest thing I've got right now, so I hope at least a few of you derive the same value from it that I do.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
Ooh, I forgot to write something yesterday, again. To be honest, yesterday just sort of went by in a haze. I don't feel like I really "achieved" anything. We went food shopping, which was something, but aside from that, not a lot happened. I didn't even really feel like I had much time to spend doing things I enjoy — before I knew it, the day was just over.
I did play the demo for the upcoming Nighthawkson Steam, though. I'll likely write something more substantial about this soon, but my first impressions on this short-but-sweet demo were very encouraging.
For the unfamiliar, Nighthawks is an adventure game/visual novel/RPG type thing published by adventure game maestros Wadjet Eye Games and developed by The Curiosity Engine. It's a vampire-themed game that obviously takes some heavy cues from Vampire: The Masquerade without actually using the World of Darkness license. Which is good, because it sounds as if the long-awaited Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has turned out to be… not so good. As if anyone is surprised at that after its cursed development cycle.
Nighthawks, though — that gets the whole World of Darkness vibe, with a few interesting twists. For starters, in the world of Nighthawks, humanity is aware of the existence of vampires, so no need for the "Masquerade". That said, making use of your vampiric powers somewhere that you can be noticed is still frowned upon, so you still have to be a bit careful.
The game starts with you creating a character by establishing some elements of your background: where you came from, who your sire was, what your specialisms are. From there, you're thrown into the plot proper, where you arrive in town in search of a former contact who has absconded with something precious to you. As a pretty new vampire, you have no money to your name, no contacts and no reputation, so it's up to you to establish all these things — and I believe the full game ends up with you owning the eponymous nightclub and having to run it.
I really like what I've seen so far, and I'm going to try playing the demo again with a different character archetype to see what — if anything — changes. It looks as if it's going to be one of those games where you can very much "role-play" your character and have a markedly different experience depending on your choices, both during character creation and once the game proper is underway.
The demo is still up at the time of writing as part of Steam Next Fest, so be sure to download it and give it a go if it sounds like your sort of thing. In the absence of a good Vampire: The Masquerade game (though I must confess I never played those visual novels from a while back) it's looking like it has the potential to be a very good substitute.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
