#oneaday Day 198: MoeGamer year in review, 2024

Hey! You! Reader! Do you read my other site MoeGamer? If not, you're missing out! It's the site where I put a lot more care and attention into things rather than farting something out for daily posts, and it plays host to some of the games writing I've done that has made me most proud over the years.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share some highlights from this year, complete with links so you can go and enjoy them at your leisure. I'm not updating MoeGamer as regularly as I used to — the perils of having a job you actually like, and thus less time to spend writing during the workday! — but I've still written a fair few pieces this year, and I'd like to share some of them with you now.

A Re-Introduction

Click here to read!

In this post, I explained my decision to finally move MoeGamer off WordPress.com and onto self-hosted. This was partly down to my running out of disk space on my WordPress.com account and the absolutely extortionate price they wanted for an expansion, but I'd been thinking about doing so for a while anyway. At the start of this year, I finally took that step.

Famicom Detective Club

Click here to read part 1, The Missing Heir!
Click here to read part 2, The Girl Who Stands Behind!
Click here to read part 3, Emio, The Smiling Man!

Early in the year, I was in the mood for a bit of virtual detective work, so I finally stopped waiting for the physical release of the first two Famicom Detective Club games on Switch that was clearly never coming, and downloaded the double-pack. I absolutely adored them, but felt a bit sad that we probably wouldn't see any more of them. I was proven wrong later in the year with the surprise announcement and release of Emio, The Smiling Man, which took everything good about the first two entries and married it to a brand new story — which takes the honour as probably the darkest, bleakest Nintendo game ever released.

Another Code: Recollection – the way remakes should be

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I'd been thinking about picking up the DS and Wii duology of Another Code games for ages. With the Switch remake of both, I no longer needed to — but I'm glad I finally experienced these stories.

Helldivers II and the Battle Pass Delusion

Click here to read!

Helldivers II made me angry. Not because I begrudged the game's existence — I really enjoyed developer Arrowhead's previous work, such as the vastly underappreciated first Helldivers and its fantasy counterpart Magicka — but because of the amount of apologism for rancid modern business practices that came along with it. Battle Passes are shit, full stop, and a game being not quite as predatory as other games that use them still means it's predatory.

One Piece Mansion: the puzzle of stress management

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A kind YouTube viewer occasionally sends me goodies, one of which was this oft-overlooked PlayStation title from Capcom. I found it thoroughly interesting, so I wrote about it.

Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE could have gone deeper

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The headline says most of it: this exploratory platformer from Inti Creates was excellent while it lasted… but the limited amount of time it lasted is also my main criticism of it.

The lost art of "just enjoying something"

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This is a sentiment I've expressed here in the past, too, but I feel it's a problem when people seem incapable of just enjoying something on its own merits. This article was particularly spurred on by the explosion in "modern gaming is DEAD!" videos on YouTube in the last year or two.

The enshittification of the video games press

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The perpetual negativity of people online is, in part, driven by the enshittification of everything — including the games press. In this piece, I talk a bit about my personal experiences, and why seeing so many sites fall down the "endless guides" SEO juice drain is so saddening.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+

Click here to read part 1, Falcom's Forgotten Gem!
Click here to read part 2, musings on the "school RPG"!
Click here to read part 2, on Falcom's best-in-class worldbuilding!

This year I had several bouts of "this game has been on my shelf for literal years, let's actually play it". This was the result of one of those. Shortly after I beat the game, a new localisation (with 100% less "*chortle*" from what I understand) was announced for Switch. I am tempted to buy it again because it really was an excellent game. I am a silly person.

The growing important of media with a positive vibe

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A good pal of mine wrote a review of Atari's Lunar Lander Beyond, and bemoaned how cynical the game's script was. That got me thinking; there's a lot of bleak, dour media out there, making stuff with a positive vibe feeling like an increasing rarity. I decided to ponder why that was important.

The Good Life: SWERY's Lake District holiday

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SWERY makes odd games that often have a lot to say, and The Good Life, an open-world game about being a grumpy American journalist stuck in the Lake District, was absolutely no exception to this.

The Missing: a violent, personal journey

Click here to read!

This game, also by SWERY, was an absolute masterwork in narrative through mechanics, telling a thoroughly compelling story about identity and self-acceptance.

Princess Peach Showtime: a short run on stage, destined to be forgotten

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Princess Peach Showtime! was a good game, but it's testament to the usual quality of Nintendo titles that it just being "good" meant that it was considerably less memorable than many of its stablemates.

Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution – satire through design?

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Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is, I think, the first game in the long-running Neptunia series that I haven't adored. And I got the impression by partway through that this might have actually been intentional.

Disco Elysium: modern-day interactive fiction

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Disco Elysium is amazing and everyone should play it. Here is why.

Sengoku Rance: deep yet accessible empire building

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Sengoku Rance is often held up as the absolute best entry in Alicesoft's storied eroge series, and I can understand why.

A new taxonomy of RPGs

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I decided to expand a shower thought into something more substantial.

Spirit Hunter

Click here to read part 1, Death Mark!
Click here to read part 2, NG!
Click here to read part 3, Death Mark II!

For once, I was between games when October rolled around, so I decided to finally tackle the whole Spirit Hunter series, which had been languishing on my shelf for a while. I came away incredibly impressed.

There's plenty more than just these, but the above are some of my favourite pieces from the year gone by. Stop by MoeGamer and have a browse, or check out the index to see everything I've posted this year.

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.

2318: Rebooting in Progress

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You may recall a while back I decided to reboot my "sister site" to this blog, MoeGamer. Having now spent two months with my new format, I thought I'd revisit the idea here for the benefit of those who haven't checked in on it recently.

Essentially, my thinking behind MoeGamer's new format was to forgo the scattershot approach that games journalism and criticism today typically follows, and instead have a laser-sharp focus each month: a single game, or perhaps a series of games. Over the course of that month, I'd post a series of in-depth articles, each of which focused on a specific aspect of the game or series. By the time the month was up, there'd be a complete, substantial amount of writing about the game in question for readers to enjoy at their leisure, with the content remaining relevant long after it was written.

This is part of the problem with modern games journalism and criticism, and part of the reason it's so trapped in the clickbait quagmire that ruins it so much. The ever-present need to produce timely content to meet embargoes and line up with release dates means that games that often deserve better don't get the attention they deserve, and some games, as we've seen in the past, get a writeup of no value whatsoever, consisting entirely of the writer in question doing nothing but mocking the game and the people who like it without demonstrating any real evidence that they've bothered to try and engage with it on anything more than the most superficial level.

As I noted in my previous piece, though, because MoeGamer is a personal site that I write as a passion project, I'm not beholden to the fickle whims of advertising revenue and I have no obligation to bait people in with provocative headlines and articles about the creator of Minecraft calling someone a cunt (which, for what it's worth, he was perfectly within his rights to do, as the person whingeing at him was being a cunt). Instead, I can explore games that have proven meaningful or interesting to me; games that are worthy of discussion. I can be positive about them, too, highlighting the things they do differently or particularly well and giving people reasons to check them out rather than, as so often happens with reviews today, reasons to avoid them.

The positivity thing in particular is something I feel strongly about. There seems to be a perception in a lot of modern criticism that you're not doing your job properly if you're not tearing something apart or telling it things it should do better. While there is value in this sort of criticism at times, it's very easy to start reaching for things that are of little relevance to the work as a whole. Polygon's infamous review of The Witcher 3 that complained about the lack of black people in a world inspired by Eastern European folklore is a good example, as is any writeup that bleats about sexism in an anime-style game without demonstrating any evidence of having explored the characters' backgrounds.

Personally speaking, the kind of writing about games that I like to read is positive in nature. Games that changed your life, games that had personal meaning, games that elicited emotional responses, games that people haven't heard of but should absolutely definitely positively check out. It is eminently possible to remain positive about things and still write interesting, compelling content, and it has the pleasant side-effect of creating a positive atmosphere around the articles, too, which encourages discussion and anecdotes of what the work in question means to other people. (There are exceptions, of course, as with most things on the Internet, but most people I know seem to respond far better to positive, enthusiastic writeups than ill-informed, poorly researched pieces that tear things apart unfairly.)

So that's what I'm doing with MoeGamer. So far I've covered Senran Kagura Estival Versus and Megadimension Neptunia V-II. Next month I'll be tackling Dungeon Travelers 2. Beyond that, I have a whole shelf full of games that I'm very interested in exploring in this level of depth, and I hope at least some of you enjoy reading my thoughts on them.

1561: End of Another Era (Or: Please Hire Me)

I was informed today that, owing to various circumstances that I won't go into right now — it would be unprofessional of me to do so, but suffice to say it's not anything to do with something I've done, nor is there any ill will there — my position on Eurogamer's US counterpart USgamer would be coming to an end within 4-8 weeks, depending on how long I want/need to stay on.

To be frank, I haven't quite processed this news yet. I fully expect that when I do I will burst into tears and be a dribbling, horrible mess for at least an hour or so but that hasn't happened just yet. It will come, though. In the meantime, while I'm still feeling reasonably rational, I wanted to compose a post explaining where I'm at in my career and where I'd like to head from here. Hopefully then anyone reading this as part of the traffic spike my blog is currently enjoying will have a better idea of who I am and what I can offer.

The biggest thing that has come out of my announcement that I would be leaving USgamer is the confirmation (via direct messages and mentions) that I have built up a solid reputation as someone who not only knows his stuff about Japanese games, but that I am also someone who treats them with respect. You might not think this is a particularly unusual characteristic for a games critic, given the importance of Japan to console gaming throughout video game history, but in recent years, Japan's turn towards the moe side of gaming has caused many Western commentators to take its output considerably less seriously — even going so far as outright derision at times.

Attitude and tone are, of course, the prerogative of the individual publication or writer in question, but I had been feeling for some time that there was a significant gap in the market for respectful, non-disparaging coverage of niche Japanese games such as RPGs and visual novels, and set out to provide that, first with my experimental columns over on Games Are Evil, where I served as Managing Editor for a short period, and later at USgamer, where I ran a weekly Japanese gaming column called JPgamer. This column attracted a regular audience who were both appreciative and vocal about my support for Japanese gaming, my positive attitude towards it and my willingness to look beyond the most superficial elements — an attitude perhaps best exemplified by my piece on "The Hidden Depths of Otaku Games" and my review of the widely derided Time and Eternity as well as JPgamer at large.

J-gaming isn't the only niche I attempted to fill, though. I'd recently also launched a board game column on USgamer called BOARDgamer, and past coverage of board and card games had proven somewhat successful. Alongside this, I made a point to cover interesting, unusual games rather than the same things other sites were looking at. I'd accept reviews of games that other sites would either ignore or pass off with a cursory quick look — titles like The Witch and the Hundred Knight and Demon Gaze — and I'd treat them with the same amount of respect afforded to the big triple-A titles. I hope I don't sound arrogant when I say I feel I was fulfilling an important role that helped me to stand out somewhat.

Which is why I'm so sad that my time with USgamer has to come to an end. Between us, Jaz Rignall, Jeremy Parish, Mike Williams, Cassandra Khaw and I — plus the various contributors who have come and gone over the months — were building USgamer into something distinctive and interesting; a site that celebrated long-form magazine-style articles as well as the usual daily grind of news. We each had our own interests and specialisms, and we were each afforded the opportunity and a platform to talk about those things as well as the latest hotness in gaming news and reviews. That's an immensely valuable thing not only for readers, but for writers, too. And, yes, I'm sad and upset that I will no longer be part of that once my time on the site comes to an end.

As previously noted, I have between 4 and 8 weeks left on the site depending on how quickly I can find a new position. I am happy to continue doing what I've been doing — writing about games, and hopefully letting some of my passion shine through — but I am also interested in getting involved on the editing side of things. I've been doing this a long time now; it would be nice to move on up and take a little more responsibility if the opportunity is available.

If you happen to hear of anything — or if you're hiring — then please reach out and get in touch. You can send me an email via the About Pete page on this site if you don't know my email address, or just leave a comment. You can also follow me on Twitter if you don't already, and check out my professional history via LinkedIn.

Here's hoping I have some good news to share sooner rather than later; 1) it's my birthday tomorrow and 2) Andie and I are buying a house. Also, you know, 3) I don't like being unemployed.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer in the job search.

#oneaday, Day 255: The Big Pixels are Here!

Ladies and gents, it's my great pleasure to reveal The Big Pixels to you.

You may recall some days ago that I was mourning the loss of Kombo. Kombo's still not dead yet—feel free to drop by and support the remaining writers—but, to be frank, it's probably only a matter of time. It's very sad to see the end of something which has clearly had love, care and attention poured into it over the last few years, and I'm happy that I was part of the experience for a short while.

But this post isn't about mourning the past; it's about celebrating the future. And that future begins with today's launch of The Big Pixels.

The Big Pixels are a group of friends first and foremost, video game writers second, and we decided to band together to produce something that we'd want to read ourselves. Intelligent, thought-provoking games writing. No flamebait. No traffic-whoring. Just the kind of thing that gets people stroking their chin and going "Hmmm", and hopefully provoking some discussion. Those of you who follow The Squadron of Shame will undoubtedly dig what we're doing. And those of you who are tired of the same old news stories posted everywhere day after day will surely enjoy our work, too. It's an N4G commenter-free zone!

We're there to have fun and build a community, not to chase page hits. So the important thing for you (yes, you!), the reader, is that you enjoy it. Read our work. Tell us what you think in the comments. Feel free to share any pieces you find particularly interesting or entertaining. And help us to build up our own unique little corner of the internet; a home away from home for those who are sick of "Top Ten Tuesdays" featuring boobies, guns or any combination thereof, or people who are sick of seeing the same picture of Michael Pachter on every article where he says something contentious and/or stupid.

Since you're reading my blog, I'm going to draw particular attention to my own posts, of course. I am nothing if not a whore, after all. So while you're over there, feel free to check out a "reprint" of my article on game development's gender divide (featuring much-appreciated assistance from the very lovely Mitu Khandaker and Lauren Wainwright), a companion article to the most recent SquadCast on video game music, and a discussion of adult gaming. I hope you like them; and be sure to check out my buddies' work while you're over there. And don't forget the Looney Bin, receptacle for all manner of game-related crap that we've encountered in our journeys around the web.

It's been an interesting journey over the last few days, and it's only just beginning, for sure. Stay tuned to The Big Pixels, as we'll all be pushing out a wide variety of articles on all manner of game-related subjects every week. Follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook for the latest and to make us look popular and awesome.

Also, our review scoring system has a rainbow unicorn pixel in it. And there is absolutely no way you can say that isn't the most amazing thing you've ever seen. Unless Maru is your cat.