Around the Network

Good morning! Apologies this is a day late, but I got distracted making a bunch of videos and then playing Freedom Planet until midnight last night.

Freedom Planet is amazing if you’ve never experienced it before. I’ll do a full writeup this week, but suffice to say that… yeah. It’s amazing. I’ve known this for a long time, but I’d been holding off playing it all the way through until I got a packaged release of it, which I now do thanks to Limited Run Games.

But anyway. That’s a story for later. For now, let’s take a look back on what you might have missed in the last week…

MoeGamer

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 30 – Midnight Magic – Chris and I reconvene for a discussion of video pinball, from its earliest roots on home computers up until more modern incarnations such as Flipnic and Senran Kagura Peach Ball.

10 Ways to Enjoy Video Games More as a 21st Century Grown-Ass Adult – Found your attention span waning lately? Wish you could fully engage with the 100-hour epics that everyone raves about? Check out these tips that have worked for me.

Warriors Wednesday: Furry Politics – Arnice and friends begin their quest in earnest, beginning with a first skirmish against Setsuna’s rivals for the throne.

Waifu Wednesday: Amayo Sato – Amayo from Gun Gun Pixies is the ideal older sister. Comfy jumpers, a caring nature and a willingness to engage with her friends’ activities, even if she doesn’t quite understand them? Winner all round, I say.

My Time With Dee Dee: Learn Through, Uh, Doing – Friend of the site Matt from Digitally Downloaded has made a visual novel featuring his site’s mascot. I take a look at the first episode, which aims to offer an immersive exploration of the erotic thriller genre.

Final Fantasy Marathon: The Fourth Fiend – The Warriors of Light see their quest coming to a close as they assault the Flying Fortress in an attempt to take down the last of the Four Fiends.

Splatterhouse: Elements of Horror – A day late for Halloween, we take a look at Namco’s classic gory horror arcade game, and how it successfully channels some truly classic horror tropes into the interactive entertainment format.

Atari A to Z

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This week we’ve got an underappreciated (and imaginatively named) single-screen platformer featuring a boxing kangaroo, bouncy bouncy shiny balls and an unusual puzzle game from the early days of gaming.

Patreon

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Don’t forget that over on Patreon I post a daily behind-the scenes personal blog that is, effectively, a resurrection of my old #oneaday blog I used to host over at angryjedi.wordpress.com. At the present time, this also includes exclusive patrons-only weekly vlogs on Saturdays! If you’d like to get to know me a bit better, be sure to sign up; just $1 a month (about 80p) can get you in the club, and it also provides you with access to the MoeGamer Discord as well as helping to fund and support the things I do here on the site.

Find out more and sign up here!

Cool Stuff By People Who Aren’t Me

First up, Patreon goodness! Right now, I’m supporting chaotic “old men attempt to talk about games, usually fail” collective Digitiser 2000, the ever-grumpy (and always hilarious) Cheap Show Podcast, the wonderfully supportive Normal Happenings, independent games writing collective The Well-Red Mage and fountain of retro computer gaming knowledge Rob “Hellfire64” Caporetto, all of whom you can find out a bit more about by clicking through to their profiles. I also support Octav1us Kitten, and thankfully her copyright woes have been resolved, so her videos are back online. She’ll be back making videos after some much-needed rest!

Here’s a selection of YouTube and podcast goodness from several of this lot:

And, as always, here are some highlights from around the WordPress network this week:

Spooktober Finale: What Scares Me? (Lumi Reviews Things) – Lumi examines the things he finds most scary across a variety of media and genres.

The Anime Tiddy (Shallow Dives in Anime) – Dewbond provides an impassioned and thought-provoking discussion regarding recent discourse over the good old anime tiddy.

Finding a Home in DDLC (The Alchemist of Blogging) – Eschewing the popular meme-tastic takes, Alice provides a compelling, honest and deeply personal exploration of how she responded to Doki Doki Literature Club, and what it means to her.

Atelier Meruru Plus Review (kresnik258gaming) – Kresnik explores arguably the best in the Atelier Arland subseries: Atelier Meruru.

Scary-not-scary gaming moments (Later Levels) – Kim delves into those moments in games that perhaps weren’t intended to be scary, but which often end up freaking people out anyway!

And that’s your lot for now. Coming up this week, we’ve got the aforementioned Freedom Planet, the first of what will probably be several articles on Bullet Girls Phantasia — that game is a lot more substantial than I anticipated! — plus plenty of the other usual funtimes.

As always, thank you so much for all your support, be it through simply reading my stuff, or going the extra mile to share it on social media or even donate via Patreon or Ko-Fi. It means so much to know that people enjoy what I do; I’d be doing this even if no-one was reading or watching because I simply enjoy it, but it’s a really wonderful feeling to know others are getting something out of it too.

Have a great week!


The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.

If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi or PayPal.

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2 thoughts on “Around the Network”

  1. I liked that article from the Shallow Dives in Anime site. I do have my doubts about whether fanservice is here to stay. The author is right to point out it’s not only that concerted pressure is being applied from some quarters to get rid of it, but there’s also the impact of generational changes to think about.

    What will ultimately determine the direction the industry heads in? Will it be led by the lure of cultural capital, by op-eds and twitter threads? It seems more likely that capital capital would win out, and decisions determined by merch sales and audience numbers. But here my concern is that some decisions might be difficult to reverse, even if the economic benefit is obvious.

    If we look at Western comics we might find and example to serve as a canary in the coalmine. As I understand it, the recent push to tone down the sexy hasn’t done wonders for circulation figures. Turns out that was something the people who actually buy comics bought comics for.

    But can you imagine what would happen if publishers tried to walk things back? It would be a brave executive who were willing to face down all the outpouring of woke fury that would follow, even the reward were healthier sales. Or staying in business at all – this might be overstating, but I suspect the threat of a public shaming might really be more persuasive than the prospect of keeping your staff in their jobs.

    So I guess my concern is, even if the economic case for fanservice is sound, and even if there’s more people among the actual audience in favour of it than against, the tides of cultural change are hard to resist and even harder to reverse.

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