One of the most commonly cited reasons for enjoying video games is allowing oneself to realise fantasies of various descriptions.

Frequently, these fantasies are heroic in nature, casting us into a world that is not our own and throwing us into conflict against a powerful foe that is nonetheless possible to overcome with enough determination. Sometimes they’re emotional, allowing us to engage with characters who are very different from people we encounter in reality. They might even be sexual, giving us the opportunity to explore a side of ourselves we find difficult to bring up even with people we know and love.

Or sometimes they might just be wondering what it would be like if your childhood toy cars could actually power themselves and race around an improvised circuit constructed of whatever happened to be on hand at the time. Enter the extravagantly titled Table Top Racing World Tour Nitro Edition, a game that can most certainly help with that last one, even if it won’t assist with your throbbing libido in the slightest. Unless you’re really into tiny cars.

TTRWTNE (as we shall refer to it hereafter) has its origins as a mobile game. Originally released for iOS devices in 2013, then ported to Android and Vita in 2014, the original Table Top Racing was a well-regarded if not especially well-known portable racer that combined elements of Micro Machines and Mario Kart to provide a simple but addictive experience.

Part of the reason why Table Top Racing and its sequel are noteworthy is the pedigree of development talent behind it. Of particular note is Nick Burcombe, who was one of the co-creators of the original Wipeout series back in the Psygnosis days, and certainly a man who should, in theory, know his stuff about combat racers.

TTRWTNE was initially released (as Table Top Racing World Tour) via the PlayStation Plus “Instant Game Collection” programme and was subsequently ported to Xbox One and Steam. Most recently, the game has seen a Switch port, and it’s that version we’re primarily concerned with today.

If you’re already familiar with Table Top Racing World Tour, you may be wondering what that Nitro Edition suffix means. Simple: this version includes both of the premium downloadable content packs for the original Table Top Racing World Tour game, all the free updates and a new split-screen mode where you can compete against a friend offline on a single console, or bring them online with you. An all-in-one, definitive edition of Table Top Racing World Tour, if you will.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game, meanwhile, what we have here is essentially a kart racer with some interesting environments, some “adventure racing” elements, plenty of long-term progression and appeal, and a cool variety of different event types.

The main single-player game consists of a series of cups, each of which is subdivided into a number of individual events followed by a final championship; running parallel to that is a series of one-off special events with stringent entry requirements. The cups are split into three distinct tiers, and these tiers correspond to three types of car you can acquire over the course of the game. These tiers of car, in turn, correspond roughly to both overall performance level and difficulty — though in practice you’ll find yourself hopping back and forth between tiers quite a bit as you play through.

The arrangement of events is where the game’s mobile heritage is most apparent — but for once I don’t mean this as a pejorative. Rather, it makes the game inherently friendly to occasional, casual play over the long term; you can pick up the game and have a race done in a few minutes while still feeling like you’ve made some meaningful progress, or you can sit down and enjoy it for a bit longer to make some more rapid progression. Either way, there’s a lot to do here; most events have up to three stars to earn depending on your performance, and there are nearly 550 stars in total, making for somewhere in the region of 180 events for you to complete and, more than likely, repeat a few times.

The most frequently seen type of event is Combat Racing. Here, you face off against a pack of opponents and compete to see who is the first over the finish line after a set number of laps. Bubbles on the course yield power-ups when collected (accompanied by a delightfully satisfying sound I swear I last heard in dearly departed MMO City of Heroes), and collecting a second bubble while you’re already holding something upgrades the item to a more powerful version.

The items function as you’d expect from your average kart racer these days: there’s an unguided missile, a homing missle, a boost and a short-range “blast” centred around your car. There’s also an acid bath you can spew out behind your car as well as an icy projectile that pierces enemies in a straight line ahead of you, encasing them in ice cubes for a short period and causing them to completely lose control (and hopefully slide off the tabletop).

Other race types include survival races, where the racer at the back of the pack is eliminated after each lap; Hot Lap, where you have a set period of time to attain a specific lap time; Time Trial, where you’re graded based on your total time to complete a set number of laps; pure races with no weapons; drift score challenges; and Pursuit events where you and an opponent start halfway around the course from each other and you’re tasked with catching up and crashing into your nemesis.

The highlight here is, as you’d hope from a game set on a selection of tabletops, the environments in which you’re racing. There are eight in total, ranging from an attic filled with artfully arranged 1980s tat through an archaeological dig in the desert to popular conveyor belt Japanese restaurant Yo! Sushi. Each of these environments has four track layouts, making for a total of 32 different circuits to race on.

The level of detail in these tracks is really fun, and seeing them from a toy’s eye perspective is delightful. (It’s a shame there’s no first-person mode, but this isn’t unusual for kart-style racers.) While the ’80s-themed track does not feature any officially licensed toys, for example, most of the stuff on display is clearly recognisable. The garage-based track makes creative use of tools and containers. And the very nature of how a Yo! Sushi restaurant is designed makes for a surprisingly perilous place to race!

These tracks are dynamic, too; most of them are littered with physics objects, while specially marked objects that glow with a pink aura can be hit with a weapon to trigger some sort of effect. Sometimes this will open up a significant shortcut, while at others it will introduce new obstacles or provide access to hard-to-reach areas. And that latter aspect is important if you want to fully complete the game — or just progress quickly — since each track conceals a number of awkwardly positioned (and very valuable) coins to collect, most of which require some creative use of the environment to reach.

Thankfully, your collection of these coins still counts even if you lose the event in which you pursue them, meaning they’re a good way to quickly amass the money you need to upgrade your cars and purchase new ones.

You can upgrade the top speed, acceleration, handling and armour of each of your cars — the exact amount you can upgrade varies from car to car — and you can also purchase new paint jobs and “wheel weapons”. This latter aspect is one area where TTRWTNE distinguishes itself from most other kart racers: while equipped, they provide you with a permanent special ability that is either passive (such as making you more likely to drift) or cooldown-based (such as the ability to attack enemies by crashing into them). In some events you’ll need to be extra careful, as your opponents can also make use of these!

The handling of TTRWTNE is distinctly accessible in nature rather than realistic, though it’s not attempting to ape either regular kart racers or drift-heavy arcade racers. Instead, the handling can best be described as a smooth, almost gliding motion; there’s a strong sense of momentum and inertia, allowing you to take wide swings at corners, and you even have a certain amount of air control, meaning that you can pull off dramatic moves such as turning 90 degrees in the air then firing off a turbo boost when you land for a quick direction change. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but consider we’re driving toy cars here; it makes sense that they don’t handle like dump trucks.

To go with this handling, TTRWTNE has a slightly unusual but effective control scheme, making use of both analogue sticks on a dual-stick controller rather than the usual stick-and-triggers/buttons approach. This method of control makes it feel like you’re guiding a remote control car — entirely appropriate, given the setting — and leaves your index fingers free for pulling the triggers that fire pick-up or wheel weapons. While the analogue stick doesn’t have quite the same satisfyingly clunky “heft” to it as slamming down a button to powerslide around a corner, this control scheme does fit very well with the smooth-feeling handling.

TTRWTNE is very well-presented, too. It runs at a slick, stable 60fps even in handheld mode on Switch, and the action is accompanied by an excellent soundtrack by DJ and producer Wes Smith of Juice Recordings. There’s a strong ’90s vibe to a lot of Smith’s tracks, with a number of songs bringing artists such as The Prodigy and Basement Jaxx to mind; it very much fits the nostalgic, urban feel that the game as a whole seems to be going for.

The only area where I’d maybe pick a bit of fault with TTRWTNE’s presentation is with its interface; it’s bland and uninteresting, and during races it doesn’t make a big enough deal of important events such as running low on time, reaching the final lap or being at risk of elimination. Having a bit more extravagance with this aspect of the presentation to go with the in-your-face soundtrack would have helped this game feel even more arcadey; as it stands, it’s certainly not a game-breaking issue by any means, but it’s a bit of a shame when the rest of the experience is so polished.

I actually wasn’t sure I was going to like Table Top Racing World Tour Nitro Edition when I first started playing it. The fact there were only eight environments, the floaty handling, the drab interface, the distinctly “mobile” feel to the game structure with its three-star ratings and earning coins and experience points for everything you do… all of those things conspired to give me what felt like a less than positive immediate reaction.

But then I realised several hours had passed; despite my misgivings, I’d been having good, honest fun with this game and, rather than feeling limited and constrained by the few environments on offer, I started to feel attached to these different locales and the dinky little cars screeching around them. Repeatedly seeing these locations felt like I was going somewhere familiar and comforting armed with a box of toys to play with, and the variations on the different tracks presented interesting challenges by combining the familiar with the surprising.

And despite the game being structured around earning money to unlock new cars and upgrade your existing vehicles, at no point does it feel especially grindy — or indeed tuned with microtransactions in mind. This is a refreshing change to so many games that are around at the moment!

What we have here is a game that is honest about what it is and quite charmingly humble with it; it knows its limitations, and at the same time it makes the very best of what it’s got, providing a ton of content to dip into whenever you feel like it without demanding long-term commitment.

The whole experience has a pleasingly ’90s feel to it; this would have been a great PS1 game (yes, yes, I know, Re-Volt) and, in a world where Activision thinks it’s appropriate to add microtransactions to Crash Team Racing, a game originally released in 1999, Table Top Racing World Tour Nitro Edition is a welcome reminder of simpler, happier times.

More about Table Top Racing World Tour Nitro Edition

Thanks to Greenlight Games and Decibel-PR for the review copy.

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.

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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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Hello, dear reader. I feel like I’m stepping “out of character” a bit for this post, as it’s not the usual sort of thing I’d tend to post here. But I feel like I want… maybe even need to get a few things out of my head and onto the page.

Don’t worry, we’ll be back to something directly game-related later today, so if you’re just here for the games, feel free to skip this post and stop by this evening. But for those who are here as much for Pete the writer… no, Pete the person… as you are for MoeGamer the site about games, thank you in advance for indulging me and reading what I have to say.

Today I want to talk a bit about mental health, ambition, career and how, sometimes, it can feel like a struggle just existing in the modern world.

I have depression. I have anxiety. I have Asperger Syndrome. This is, as you can probably imagine, not a great combination of things to have in your head on a daily basis. And right now I’m not doing too well.

For me, depressive episodes feel like being inside an impenetrable bubble. I can see the things that are going on around me, but I feel like I can’t reach them. I can hear people talking around me, but I feel like their voices are muffled and echoey, and that they wouldn’t be able to hear me if I spoke. I feel helpless, cut off, isolated. I want help, but I don’t know how to call out for it; I want help, but I feel I can’t reach out for it.

The most frustrating thing about this is that, more often than not, I don’t know why this happens. There often isn’t a reason — at least, not a clearly defined one beyond “I have depression”. If I take stock of the things floating around inside my head, there’s a whole list of things contributing to this overall feeling, but not one specific one I can say particularly caused the present episode. And that frustration in turn, only makes things worse: it strengthens the bubble and makes it feel like there’s no way out — and worse, no way to prevent it from appearing again should I actually manage to find my way out of it.

It might even be the other way around; the things floating around in my head might only feel like they are problems for me because I’m currently inside the bubble; if I had the freedom to move, to breathe, to step away from them, they might seem more like things I can overcome. But as they’re trapped in here with me, their power over me grows and grows in intensity over time: feeding my depression, feeding my anxiety, feeding my frustration at the whole situation.

As you’ll know if you’ve spent any time talking to me, my creative projects are my lifeline. I am an artistic, creative person; expressing my creativity enriches, nourishes and fulfils me — and exploring other people’s creative works (often those that deal directly or indirectly with the themes and concepts floating around in my head) invigorates and inspires me.

My work on MoeGamer, my work on video, my daily blog posts for Patrons — I live for those. They are the things I look forward to every day; the things that give my life meaning; the things that make me feel like in my own small way, I have value — at the very least to myself, if not to others.

And I’m fortunate that there are wonderful, supportive people out there — people here on WordPress, people on Twitter, people in my private life outside of public social media — who help me understand and know that both my work and I do have value to others as well as to myself; that helps. That helps it feel more worthwhile; more like something that should be continually — always — be part of my life.

I know this. But still, sometimes, the bubble forms, and by the time I recognise it for what it is, it’s too late. I’m already engulfed. And those frustrations and anxieties, as always, are trapped in here with me.

Right now, I’m feeling depressed and anxious about my daily life outside of those things that bring me joy. I’m feeling depressed and anxious about my day job; I’m feeling bored and creatively unfulfilled, and frustrated that my perpetual social anxiety makes me feel like I come across as aloof or unapproachable; no-one goes out of their way to talk to me here, and under most circumstances I’m too scared to try and strike up conversations myself. I’m annoyed at the fact that some of those feelings are my fault, while others are things that I don’t feel like I have control over. In turn, knowing that I feel depressed and anxious about my work makes me further depressed and anxious about the fact that someone might notice, and that, in turn, would have negative consequences.

There’s precedent, you see. I was talking to a friend recently about my career history and, laying it all down on paper, I haven’t had a great track record when it comes to mental health and work. So it’s kind of no surprise that I’m in the position I am now.

I lost my first job as a music teacher in a secondary school because I was made redundant due to the institution’s financial issues; last in, first out. This, in turn, made me feel unvalued and depressed, but fortunately I managed to find a new job in the same field.

I left that second job two years later because the stress of it gave me a nervous breakdown; one day, the behaviour of the children — it was not a nice school — just made me absolutely panic and want to run. Under normal circumstances, I could fight off the flight reflex, but that day, I couldn’t. I ran. I hid. I cried. I didn’t go back.

My next job — a retail job that combined customer service with creativity, and one that I genuinely loved up until the last couple of months — came to an end because of bullying by management. It started with a friend and colleague being bullied out of his position; I stood up for him, and ended up receiving the same treatment. My confidence was shot, and my life was in tatters; around the time this was happening, my home life was also collapsing.

It continued further from here: leaving due to insurmountable stress and anxiety; being made redundant due to the publication I was working on closing; being made redundant again for exactly the same reason; being once again bullied out of a job I adored (and what I’d started thinking of as my first real “career” rather than “job” cut short) because I was the “odd one out”; being bullied out of a job I hated (but which was nonetheless paying the bills) because of the physical symptoms depression was leaving me with…

You can hopefully, at this point, understand why I feel a bit “on edge” when it comes to my daily life. Why, despite the fact I presently have what I can honestly describe as a good job with plenty of enviable perks and benefits and in which I am highly capable and skilled… I feel unhappy. I feel unfulfilled. I feel anxious that someone will notice, and that the rug will once again be pulled out from beneath me.

I’ve never really been an ambitious person, because my lack of self-confidence over the years has meant I’m never quite sure what I’m truly capable of, and consequently I tend to under-value myself as a result. And this, in turn, means that the jobs I have had over the years never really tended to “go” anywhere.

But I do have one ambition: one that feels, right now, like it’s unattainable — but one which, nonetheless, I always want to continue working towards, even if I never get there.

My ambition — my dream — is for the things I love to do to be more than just something I look forward to when the day is nearly done. I dream of them being the reason I get up in the morning.

I look at creators I love and respect who have managed to make a career out of what they do to varying degrees, and I’m inspired… but I’m also envious and anxious.

I look at someone like Octav1us, who has successfully achieved exactly what I want to do — to be able to stop having to live with the anxiety of having anxiety (and depression) at a day job and instead focus exclusively on their creative endeavours and collaborations with artists such as Paul “Mr Biffo” Rose and the Digitiser team — and I’m happy for them… but I also wish that I could do the same.

I look at someone like LGR, who has gone from a scrappy nerd with a camcorder attempting to ape the Angry Video Game Nerd style to a highly professional creator and one of the most beloved and respected retro tech commentators on YouTube, and I see what fruits hard work and commitment can bear… but I also feel like I could never get there.

And it may be controversial to say today, but I also look at someone like ProJared, who, for a long time prior to his fall from grace back in May, created the sort of content I greatly enjoy. I drew inspiration for a lot of my video work in particular from both his more “produced” videos and the Let’s Plays he settled into in his later years — but today, all I see are the terrifying consequences that today’s “cancel culture” can have on someone’s career after an (admittedly pretty major in Jared’s case) indiscretion. And that terrifies me, too, because it shows that even if you do “make it”, it can all be taken away in an instant after something as simple as an ill-advised social media post.

I’m not aware of any particular skeletons in my closet, I might add — the one perhaps fortunate side-effect of a life with low self-esteem is that you tend not to put yourself in too many situations either online or offline that might come back to bite you in the ass later — but today it seems that, regardless of evidence, if the Internet (or more specifically, Twitter) is determined to bring you down, you get brought down.

And so I’m in a position where I’m not sure what to do. I don’t really want to look for a new day job because, rationally speaking, outside-the-bubble Pete knows that his current job is a good one with plenty to be thankful for — and also there’s no guarantee that a new place won’t lead to the same feelings inside-the-bubble Pete is experiencing right now.

The other option is to attempt to go Octav1us’ route and try to become self-sufficient somehow. But I find it difficult and awkward to bring up my Patreon sometimes because I know a lot of people regard it as “e-begging”. I have it set to auto-tweet a link to my Patreon profile a few times a day and also provide links in various places here on MoeGamer, including at the end of every article, but beyond that I’m always a bit self-conscious about actively promoting it.

At the same time, though, I want to grow that Patreon. It’s been hovering around the same point for quite some time now, with Patrons coming and going at roughly the same rate each month. I certainly don’t resent anyone who is no longer able to subscribe, I hasten to add — heaven knows I juggle my own pledges around every so often so I can support a broader range of creators over the long term — but it would be nice to get to a point where more people are coming than going for a while, even if it’s just for a little bit.

I’m not quite sure how to achieve that, though, and that’s a little discouraging. There are a number of people who already believe that my work is worth me getting paid for, and I’m incredibly grateful to all of them, whether they’re current or past Patrons. You’ve helped make MoeGamer and my video projects feel like they have some worth and value to someone besides just me — though as I’ve said on numerous occasions, I’d still be doing them even if no-one was reading it.

I’d just love to attract more of you; as mercenary as it sounds, it’s sometimes hard not to look at, say, the 2,600 people who follow me on Twitter and think “if even half of them pledged $1, that would pay a lot of my bills each month and make me a lot less anxious about life in general because money sucks and is one of my biggest sources of worrying about things on a daily basis”. I feel dirty even typing that. Sorry. But it’s true. If you want to help, here’s my Patreon page.

The one questionable advantage of being inside the bubble, as you can see, is that it at least gives you a bit of peace and quiet and time to reflect on things; even if I’m feeling isolated, disconnected and depressed about life in general right now, at least I’m still functioning well enough to be able to express myself in various ways — be it through personal posts like this or, as you’ll be able to enjoy later today (and more typically here on MoeGamer), more directly gaming-related stuff.

I’m not sure what else I wanted to say, really. This has all been a bit stream-of-consciousness, I’m aware, and there’s no real conclusion to it all… so a particularly big “thank you” if you’ve stuck with it to the very end.

I’m not okay. But just expressing these thoughts and getting them out of my head, onto “paper” and knowing that at least someone out there will read them… that makes the walls of the bubble at least shimmer a little bit. And that, really, was all I hoped to achieve for now.

I’ll be back later with some more cheerful gaming funtimes. For now, though, thank you so much for listening.

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

After last week’s little… mishap, the fifth episode of our Final Fantasy playthrough sees the Warriors of Light taking full advantage of the mysterious Time Magic known as “Load”.

From thereon, we proceed to track down the wrongful owner of the Crown we found in the Marsh Cave, kick his head in, then set off in search of the mysterious, magical Matoya, who has been feeling a bit left in the dark recently.

We then proceed to spend considerably longer than I intended finding all the locks that the Mystic Key fits. Because treasure.

One of my favourite aspects of being Someone Who Writes About Games is that you occasionally have the opportunity to sit down with the people who created these experiences and pick their brains… or at least exchange some questions with them via email and interpreter!

For me, there’s always been a certain amount of mystique surrounding both game development and the art of bringing a commercial product to market. I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember — even to this day. It’s an aspect of what is, I guess, childish innocence that I’m keen to never let go of; video games, visual novels and creative works are exciting, and the people who create them are magicians, and I don’t ever want to forget that.

With all that in mind, I was delighted when MangaGamer, localiser and publisher of The Expression: Amrilato’s Western release, agreed to let me have a chat with the developer SukeraSparo and find out a bit more about where this unusual, fascinating title came from.

“As the scenario writer, I was first asked to compose something that incorporated two concepts,” explains the game’s author J-MENT when I enquire how the game came about in the first place. “1) a story of two girls falling in love in another world, and 2) that the girls would not understand each others’ language at first, but they would grow to understand each other over time.”

Amrilato’s basic concept is essentially a twist on the popular isekai format, as it sees its protagonist Rin being cast into a world other than our reality. Unlike most isekai, however, the world in which Rin finds herself is not a fantasy or video game-inspired world, but one which is remarkably similar to our own. It’s the same but different; it’s recognisable, but just enough of it is wrong to be unsettling. And a big part of that is the language.

Even with its obviously isekai-inspired elements, J-MENT acknowledges the popularity of both this genre and conventional romance stories, and was keen to do something a little different.

“I was asked to ensure both were equally established instead of favoring one or the other,” J-MENT notes, referring to the two distinct aspects of the game. “Since two girls falling in love and other-world stories are kind of clichéd, I decided to lean slightly more on the second concept [of the girls not being able to understand one another] and create something more original.”

The idea of making use of Esperanto as the “alien” language in The Expression: Amrilato came very early in development — even before SukeraSparo as a group had a name.

“I was asked to come up with the brand after the implementation of Esperanto had already been approved for this title,” J-MENT explains, “so I proposed using Esperanto and naming the brand ‘SukeraSparo’ (‘Sweet Tai’ or ‘Sweet Red Sea Bream’), and my idea was adopted.”

SukeraSparo, interestingly, can also be interpreted as a possible Esperanto translation of the Japanese snack taiyaki, which is a sweet, fish-shaped confection. “Sukera” in Esperanto means “sweet”, while “sparo” derives from “sparidae”, a species of fish. At the point where Rin is cast into the other world during the opening moments of the narrative, she is seen eating a taiyaki, so it was an eminently suitable choice for the brand name in a number of ways.

J-MENT notes that the game was always intended to have an educational element, since this idea fit well with the overall concept of having to learn a new language.

“I figured it wouldn’t leave much of an impression on players if I just wrote scenes about the character learning Esperanto”, they note. “So we integrated study mode stages into the game from the beginning as the story progressed. We chose to make them quiz-style to make it feel more like a game and lower the player’s resistance to learning.”

It’s important to note, though, that if you’re just in this for a touching love story (and perhaps a bit of girls kissing), the explicitly educational aspects are optional.

“In the end we decided to add the ‘homework mode’ function so those who weren’t interested in learning at all and those who just wanted to proceed with the story even faster could skip those segments,” J-MENT adds.

The language learning aspect of the game had me a little curious about something, so I had a question I wanted to ask. A favourite game of mine from years gone by that incorporated a character who didn’t understand anyone around him at the outset of the narrative was Aselia the Eternal. In that game, protagonist Yuuto finds himself sent to another world (see, this isn’t anything new; Aselia originally came out in Japan in 2003!) and confronted with people who speak an alien language.

In that game’s case, the language is fictional, but it handles things similarly to Amrilato; as Yuuto gradually comes to understand the people who are addressing him, the text begins to be represented as “partially translated” — and indeed on subsequent playthroughs, you have the option to see the full translation right from the beginning, which can put an interesting new twist on certain scenes. I wanted to know if J-MENT was familiar with this game, and if it had provided any inspiration for Amrilato.

“I hadn’t heard of that title or what it was about until after Amrilato was on sale,” they note. “If I had known about it beforehand, perhaps it might have influenced me then.”

That answers that, then. Another thing I was curious to know was whether or not J-MENT — or indeed anyone else on the SukeraSparo team — had experience of being in Rin’s position: of being in a place where they were unable to communicate.

“The closest I’ve ever come to the essence of that experience was when I was riding on a train with three Esperantisto,” recalls J-MENT. “I was the odd one out with my Japanese, and for those ten minutes it felt like I really was in another world.”

Considering J-MENT hadn’t been in Rin’s predicament for longer than about ten minutes at a time and thus had to use their imagination to contemplate how someone might react if stuck in that situation, they did a remarkable job of drawing the reader in and really helping them to empathise with Rin.

One of the ways in which the game emphasises that you are really learning a new language is through its use of a special, custom alphabet for “Juliamo”, the game’s take on Esperanto. I was curious why the game adopted this heavily stylised alphabet rather than using the mostly Roman characters Esperanto typically uses.

“We first chose to use the Juliamo alphabet as a production effect to help convey the language barrier,” explains J-MENT. “But when the letters were too different from the originals it meant players couldn’t even guess at the lines they were reading, so we made many of the letters similar to the base alphabet and struck a balance by mixing in a few hard-to-read symbols.”

It works; Juliamo script is similar enough to the Roman alphabet to be mostly parsable without too much effort, but there are a few symbols in there (“f” and “g” being notable ones, as well as the letters with added diacritics) that give you a sense of satisfaction when you’re able to read them reliably. It’s not quite as drastic as learning a whole new alphabet — such as an English person learning Japanese — but it provides a similar feeling, with a much shorter timescale!

Another thing I was interested in was why the game uses the term “Juliamo” rather than “Esperanto”. As it happens, this is answered as part of the game’s narrative, so I won’t spoil that right now, but there’s another reason, too — the game opens with a prominent disclaimer that Juliamo is only based on Esperanto, and that there are a few differences. What could those be, I wondered.

“One example of something we changed is when Napa cabbage appears in the story,” J-MENT explains when I ask. “In Esperanto, this is ‘Cina brasiko’ (‘Chinese cabbage’), however the Napa that most Japanese know is actually a different strain cultivated in Japan. So in the story we chose to call it ‘Japana brasiko’ (‘Japanese cabbage’) so we could introduce the moment where Rin recognises the term for Japan.

“Also, our own brand name, SukeraSparo, is a manufactured term,” J-MENT adds. “So even true Esperantists might not understand the meaning!”

Clearly a lot of work went into the language-learning aspect of the game, which would already have been a challenge when only two languages — Japanese and Esperanto — were in the mix. I was curious as to whether the game had always been designed with a localisation to English in mind.

“During the early stages of development I remember hearing talk that we might produce an overseas version,” J-MENT recalls. “However, for me, as the writer, the greatest hurdle was the Esperanto, so I didn’t have any energy to spare worrying about additional languages. As a result, there are a few moments of wordplay that are dependent on Japanese — and I imagine those gave the translators some trouble!”

The translators actually handled it rather elegantly, as we’ve already seen; rather than completely replacing Japanese wordplay with more recognisably English puns that weren’t in the original script at all, MangaGamer instead opted to include inline translations for Japanese words that formed the basis of wordplay in the game — with one of the first we see being Rin and Ruka’s comedic confusion between two interpretations of the syllable “ni” (“two” in Japanese, “us” in Esperanto). When you’re dealing with the interplay between three languages instead of just two, your options for localising such things without completely rewriting the script are a little more limited!

Another consideration in this regard was that J-MENT and the SukeraSparo team were working with an external agency who wanted to make sure they got the Esperanto side of things right. I asked how the Japanese National Esperanto Association was involved with the game’s development.

“Fujimaki Kenichi-san from the Japanese Esperanto Institute provided supervision such as explaining how the grammar works and rewriting some of the dialogue in the game,” J-MENT explains. “We also had members of the JEI present during voice recording to help check everyone’s pronunciations.”

In other words, The Expression: Amrilato teaches you not only the written side of Esperanto (albeit with its stylised Juliamo alphabet — which can actually be switched off after a first playthrough) but also how to speak it properly, too — and if you concentrate on the audio rather than reading the text, it’d help with your listening skills too, making for a very well-rounded way of developing a basic familiarity with the language.

The alphabet isn’t the only heavily stylised aspect of The Expression: Amrilato; the world is, too. The sky is perpetually clad in pink rather than the usual blue (except for a few specific circumstances during the narrative), and Ruka is presented as wearing an outfit that looks distinctively “traditional Western” — perhaps from the early 20th century. I asked J-MENT if these stylistic aspects were inspired by anything in particular.

“When things feel too otherworldly it creates a world where anything goes,” they explain. “So I chose to change things that would be easily identifiable and have impact, like the writing and the colour of the sky. As for the design of the outfits and other minor objects, I left that entirely up to the senses of our main artist Naruse Chisato-san.”

The concept was as I suspected, then: to create a world that combined the familiar and the unfamiliar into something that was somehow more scary than something completely alien. This is one area where The Expression: Amrilato succeeds particularly admirably. With the success of this game in mind, then, I was curious as to whether or not J-MENT and SukeraSparo had any plans to put together any more experiences like this — aside from the as-yet unlocalised sequel Itsuka no Memoraĵo, that is.

“At the very least, I, the writer, do not [have any plans to make anything else like this],” J-MENT tells me; it’s immediately obvious that working on this game was a lot of exhausting work. “Even if I were to get an offer to write a script for a title focused on learning another language, my first thought would probably be ‘how can I turn this down?'”

J-MENT doesn’t elaborate, so I choose to conclude our conversation by asking if they had any thoughts on the initial trouble the localisation of The Expression: Amrilato had in getting a release on Valve’s Steam platform.

“With different nations and cultures come different circumstances… I imagine,” J-MENT says. “I’m satisfied that ultimately understanding was reached, even if our Expressions differ.”

That’s a rather nice way of looking at it, isn’t it? And just one of the many things we can all take away from this delightful game.

More about The Expression: Amrilato

A huge thank you to MangaGamer for the review copy of the game and for setting up this conversation, and to J-MENT of SukeraSparo for providing their commentary.

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Dave Theurer, creator of the beloved Missile Command, is back once again with another all-time classic: “tube shooter” Tempest.

Tempest featured Atari’s then-new multi-coloured Quadrascan vector graphics display, plus an interesting feature whereby you could start later in the game based on how far you (or the previous player) had managed to progress on the previous credit. This later became a standard fixture in many Atari Games releases.

I’ll level with you, Tempest is one of those games I’ve always respected greatly but never really liked all that much… can spending a bit of time with it this weekend change my mind?

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

It’s been… kind of a tough week, but I won’t talk too much about that here, because there was a post on that very subject a few days back.

I’m muddling through as always, with plenty of stuff for you to read and watch this week, and hopefully things will pick up for me in the ol’ mental health department soon. Although looking around the things people I know have been posting recently, it seems like it’s been a pretty crappy time for a lot of people, so my sympathies if you, too, have been Dealing with Things.

Anyway. Without getting too wrapped up in all that, let’s check out what you might have missed this week.

MoeGamer

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 26 – Vanishing Point – Chris and I settle down for some arcade racer talk. Specifically, we look at old-school horizon-chasing “vanishing point” racers. There’s a lot more than just OutRun out there, y’know!

Lapis x Labyrinth: Dango, Dango, Dango, Dango, Dango Daikazoku – With apologies to any Clannad fans out there for bringing up traumatic memories, Lapis x Labyrinth has been one of the most pleasant surprises of the whole year — and definitely a game set to be an all-time favourite. I love this game.

Warriors Wednesday: Chasing the Sun – The Wei campaign continues as Cao Pi appears to very much be Up to Something. Tasked with putting down a rebellion by Sun Ce, the Wei leader ends up letting his rival go. What could he be planning?

Custom Order Maid 3D 2: First Day at the Empire Club – Custom Order Maid 3D 2 is finally officially available in (almost) English! Here’s a runthrough of what you can expect from your first in-game day. Expect a lot more on this in the coming weeks!

Table Top Racing World Tour Nitro Edition: Less is More – I’ve been meaning to cover this for ages and finally got around to it. Developed by some of the key talent behind the Wipeout series on PlayStation, Table Top Racing World Tour Nitro Edition is a fun kart-style racing game, now available for Nintendo Switch in its definitive incarnation.

A Personal Post: Depression and Ambition – The title says it all really. If you have a moment to read this, I’d really appreciate it, as I’ve been struggling quite a bit this week.

Final Fantasy Marathon: The Mystic Key – After last week’s mishap we correct our mistakes and continue on our journey as the Warriors of Light as we attempt to track down the Mystic Key and its hidden treasures.

The Expression: Amrilato – Konversacio kun SukeraSparo – I had the great privilege to be able to speak with J-MENT, writer of The Expression: Amrilato and find out a bit more about where this unusual and fascinating visual novel came from. It was a very interesting conversation!

Atari A to Z

Endless blasting, gigantic skyscraper-sized laser-spitting camels and tube baddies? It can only be another week in the life of Atari A to Z!

Cool Stuff By People Who Aren’t Me

First up, Patreon goodness! Right now, I’m supporting chaotic “old men (and Octav1us Kitten, who I also support) 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.

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

As for the rest of the WordPress community? Let’s just have a look, then, shall we…?

Remembering the Sega Game Gear… because I have no idea where I put the thing… (Hundstrasse) – Luke from Hundstrasse has been nostalgic for Sega’s chunky 8-bit handheld and rival to the Atari Lynx. I know where my Game Gear is… unfortunately it’s in dire need of a bit of work to get it up and running again!

THE WASPS GO IN THE WASP NEST (Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster) – Anyone who follows Kimimi’s excellent blog will know that she has an enormous amount of patience for janky old games, but Resident Evil on the Nintendo DS brought her the closest to breaking point I’ve ever seen! Go and read this, and make sure her pain wasn’t for nothing!

Irina’s Pinterest Journeys (I drink and watch anime) – Irina tells us all about Pinterest. The biggest compliment I can pay Irina is that before reading this I really had no idea what Pinterest was for, and afterwards I very nearly found myself signing up for an account… before realising I really don’t need another means of procrastinating on the Internet.

“Demo Disk” – Forager (2019) [Switch] (The Well-Red Mage) – The Well-Red Mage’s new first impressions series gets off to a strong start with this intriguing, addictive-sounding little thing for Switch. Sounds dangerous!

Continue, Don’t Quit. (Raistlin0903) – A lot of people reached out to me and offered supportive words when I posted my piece about depression and ambition. Raistlin went out of his way to remind everyone that he is part of a wonderful initiative set up a while back, and that anyone who has been suffering should take a look at.

Irina and Matt Review ‘To Love-Ru’ Episode 5 (Anime QandA) – I love To Love-Ru, I love “dialogue”-style articles and I love Irina and Matt. A winning combination. Particularly when you throw in an ohohoho-ing ojou-sama.

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Right, that’s your lot this week. I’m not going to pretend I’m suddenly all right after posting what I did towards the end of the week, but talking to people and getting some things off my chest has certainly helped a bit. Here’s hoping the coming week sees something of an improvement in my mental wellbeing.

For now, though, thank you as always for your support — whether it’s through reading, liking, commenting, sharing or going so far as to pledge to me on Patreon — and I hope you enjoy the coming week of funtimes.

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

We’ve already seen numerous ways in which The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild distinguishes itself from its illustrious predecessors, but one of the more controversial changes for some was how it handled “dungeons”.

Rather than unfolding through a progression of discrete, large, self-contained dungeons that become more challenging as the game progresses, Breath of the Wild instead provides you with 120 shrines to discover and solve, with each taking just a few minutes at most to get through.

It’s a markedly different approach to classic Zelda — but it fits perfectly with the game’s non-linear, exploration-centric structure. Let’s take a closer look.

The shrines are core to the game’s character progression mechanics in that successfully completing them awards you with a Spirit Orb, and you can trade four Spirit Orbs in for either an extra heart container or an increase to your maximum amount of stamina. Both are useful, because at the outset of the game Link has about as much resilience as a wet paper bag and the lung capacity of a chaffinch, but it doesn’t take too long to become fighting fit.

There are three types of shrine. “Trial” shrines are essentially mini-dungeons in which there are one or more self-contained puzzles to solve, plus one or more treasure chests to open. “Test of Strength” shrines simply takes Link to an arena where he must face off against a single, powerful opponent. And “Blessing” shrines are typically either completely hidden or difficult to get to, with their main challenge being simply reaching them rather than accomplishing anything particularly complicated within.

The Trial shrines are probably the most interesting and varied, since there are lots of different types of puzzles to solve.

As we previously discussed, Breath of the Wild doesn’t progress in the same way as older Zelda games in that you don’t gradually unlock your abilities over the game’s duration — you instead acquire most of them within the first hour of gameplay, and then spend the rest of the game making use of them in various creative manners.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Trial shrines, which will have you doing all manner of things: hitting switches with arrows; freezing waterfalls to create platforms or direct the path of rolling objects; using the motion controls of the Switch to roll an object through a “labyrinth”; playing golf with a giant hammer; catapulting yourself across chasms; and all manner of other things besides.

The puzzles are often challenging, but because you know for a fact you’ll always be in a position where you can deal with whatever the game throws at you, you know there’s always a solution within reach. Well, usually, anyway; the one exception to this rule is if you get yourself into a position where you’ve broken all your weapons and/or don’t have any arrows left to fire, because at the very least you usually need something to hit things with. In this situation, you’ll probably need to step back outside and gather yourself a new arsenal before trying again, but at least you can fast travel back to the shrine’s entrance from the overworld at any time.

The best thing about the shrine puzzles is that there’s clearly a specific solution the creators had in mind, but because so many of them have an element of physics or randomisation about them, it often feels like you can get a bit “creative” with how you solve the problems you’re faced with. Much like gameplay out in the overworld, a lot of the fun in the shrines comes from asking yourself “I wonder if I can do this” and then trying things out to see if, indeed, you can do that. The difference is that in the shrines, you’re in a more constrained, tightly designed area, so it’s a little easier to predict the results of any little experiments you have planned.

The Test of Strength shrines, meanwhile, provide a good means of determining Link’s overall power level; although Breath of the Wild feels a lot more “RPG-like” than many previous Zelda games, Link still lacks things like an experience level, and the majority of his strength comes from the equipment he is wearing at any given time, so it can sometimes be tricky to judge whether or not you’re up to a significant challenge such as, say, facing down a fearsome Lynel.

Enter the Test of Strength shrines, then, which are all graded as Minor, Modest or Major in accordance with their difficulty. Beat the Guardian robot inside and you’ll have a good idea of what is safe to fight at your present power level — so long as you didn’t break your weapon in the process, of course.

What’s interesting about these is that, much like the Trial shrines, you’re pretty free to approach the battle as you see fit. While your opponent does have attack patterns that you can learn to recognise and counter, there’s nothing stopping you from challenging yourself to defeat them in unusual ways. Reckon you can take one down using only the Remote Bombs power? Go for it. Pilfered some elemental wands from the local Wizzrobe population? Get zappin’. Found a sword with an interesting name? Hack and slash away and see what — if anything — is special about it.

The other nice thing about the Test of Strength shrines is that, between them, they give you the opportunity to practice against a variety of different weapon types in close combat, and you can subsequently use that knowledge and experience when fighting similarly armed organic enemies in the overworld. One Guardian might have a sword and shield; another might have a spear; another still might wield a claymore. During combat, it’s a good idea to observe and learn the attack patterns that are distinct and unique to each weapon type and figure out the best times (and directions!) to dodge — successfully mastering dodging allows you to pull off the Flurry Rush manoeuvre, in which time slows down and allows you a bunch of “free” attacks on your opponent. This is a really helpful skill to master, regardless of what you’re fighting.

They’re also just fun, particularly in the later stages of the fight when the Guardian starts attacking from range and causing the pillars around the arena to shatter and crumble. These fights are enjoyably self-contained and dramatic — and thankfully they don’t overstay their welcome, either, unless you step into one woefully underprepared… in which case you’ll probably be beaten to a pulp in short order, anyway.

Finally, the Blessing shrines typically go hand-in-hand with the “Shrine Quests” that you uncover as you explore Hyrule. Sometimes these stem from rumours and local folklore; at other times there are little mini-plots to follow through to their conclusion; at others still you’ll have to use your abilities and items in creative ways. A particularly memorable one tasks you with firing an arrow at the sun at a particular time of day; another sees you leaping off a waterfall and plunging a specific trident into the ground before you land; another still is at the centre of a complex, high-walled labyrinth; and some are simply in remote, perilous-to-reach locations.

In these cases, the game has the good sense not to confront you with either a Trial or a Test of Strength after it’s been an ordeal just getting to the damn shrine; instead, inside the shrine you’ll typically find a single treasure chest and the finish point directly ahead of you; you’ve done enough just reaching this out of the way location, so you can enjoy your blessing without any further challenges.

With 120 in total to discover, for many Breath of the Wild players shrine hunting makes up the bulk of the overall game experience. It’s a great incentive to explore, since locating and completing shrines can ultimately translate directly into improving Link’s innate abilities, and in the case of the Trials in particular, the shrines play host to some of the game’s most interesting, unusual challenges.

They’re not the only challenges Link has to face, though… but more on what else our hero has to deal with another day!

More about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

It’s time to pay The Empire Club another visit after our initial look at what went down on its first day of business.

Today, we meet the other two maids who stayed on after our uncle decided to leave us with a crippling debt, start to get to know our staff a bit better and finally begin making a bit of money.

It seems at least one of them has an ambition, too… Let’s check in with them and see how things are going!

NSFW images ahead!

This is Mia Majima, the second of the maids to join the Empire Club, and a rather serious young woman. It seems she takes her role at the club seriously, and can often be found behind the scenes managing things a whole lot better than the rest of the staff. Or indeed me.

Before I have the chance to go and get to know Majima-san a bit better, Hi-chan drops by, but something’s wrong. She seems oddly… distant. Both literally and figuratively.

She seems a bit flustered when I try to determine what is wrong. She appears to be a little uncomfortable in my presence, despite — or perhaps because of — our intimate encounter on my first day at the club. But it seems she’s not quite willing to open up just yet.

Frustrated, I decide to remodel my office. I unpack the various items that I brought with me and admire my handiwork. Okay, a few books, a solitary pen and pencil and a stick of glue isn’t really going to impress any visitors to my office, but at least it looks a little more “lived-in” now.

The time comes to set up the daily schedule. The club’s technically open, but with no-one to staff the facilities, we’re not getting any visitors. As such, I decide to set both Hi-chan and Majima to training in the daytime, then ask them to set aside some time for an altogether different type of training in the evening.

I decide to pay Majima-san a visit while she’s practising the piano. She seems to be getting along with it well enough, though her analytical, mathematical mind finds itself wishing that music was a little more bound by rules and numbers rather than artistic expression. Music does, of course, have a certain mathematical element to it, but I choose to keep quiet about this; it’s important that Majima learns to express herself.

Night falls, and I ask Majima to demonstrate her dancing skills on the stage. I also try my hand at the rhythm game to see if using the keyboard is any easier than clicking the mouse to hit the notes.

It is! Marginally. In terms of feeling a “direct connection” with the music in a game like this, I always find tapping a key or a button on something like a keyboard or a joypad is much more conducive to immersing yourself in the music. And with the challenging note charts Custom Order Maid 3D 2 offers with its dance minigame, you need all the feeling of connection you can get!

I sit down with Majima for a bit of a chat before the evening’s activities. She appears nervous, but she also vehemently denies feeling that way. I decide not to press the issue too much.

Unfortunately, my choice to remain silent and allow her to speak her mind when she’s good and ready backfires a little, and she misinterprets this as me being angry with her. It seems she does have a softer side; despite seeming fairly formidable and responsible, she clearly wants to impress and be seen to be doing the “right” thing.

I try a different tack. Perhaps a yotogi session will loosen her up a bit. Or perhaps it’ll just make things even more painfully awkward. Either way, she agrees to the proposition.

She has some prior sexual experience, but lacks confidence. As such, I decide not to try and make her do anything too outlandish, and I’m keen to set her at ease, as that will surely make her relax a little more — and perhaps learn something.

I begin by asking her to pose. She appears mortified at the prospect, but agrees to perform for me. She vehemently denies enjoying the experience, but I see just a faint flicker of arousal about her.

From a more practical perspective, I also recall that you can “unpin” all the status windows from around the edge of the screen for a better view of what’s going on during yotogi sessions. Majima-san doesn’t appear to be all that interested.

I ask her to put on a bit of a show for me. She reluctantly obliges, but seems to get a fair amount from the experience. I discover that asking a maid to do something “hard” has a similar effect to asking them to do something normally multiple times, causing a rapid increase in stats, arousal and sensuality, and a big drop in the Mental points. In other words, if you’re purely in a yotogi session to develop your maids’ stats rather than enjoy yourself, using the “hard” functions can get you through the experience a bit quicker. But why not take the time to enjoy yourself?

I notice that the “Sensual” meter is getting quite high, along with Majima-san’s arousal. It seems that she is having something of a good time, despite her protestations.

By the time we get to “the main event”, as it were, her sensuality and arousal meters are high enough to enter “Arousal Mode”, which causes the sensuality meter, rather than the mental meter, to drain with each action taken. In other words, this allows for a number of “free” actions that, in turn, will allow your maid to enjoy greater growth.

By the time I’m spent, Majima-san is well and truly exhausted, but I make sure to blow my load before she’s completely done. Cumshots provide particularly potent increases to stats, you see, just like real life!

After we’re done, I review what Majima-san has learned from the experience. It seems that she’s become quite a lot more lusty and perverted, and has also figured out a number of new “moves”, mostly revolving around getting drunk. Was I that bad?

Not sure if I did what anyone would describe as the “right” thing, there, I leave Majima-san to clean up and go meet Hi-chan in the theatre. She seems cheerful enough when I greet her.

We get to talking, and I compliment her friendliness — although the distance between us earlier in the day is at the back of my mind. She ponders whether or not her friendliness makes her appear defenceless and vulnerable. I reassure her that she’s fine just the way she is.

One thing leads to another, and I’m back in the bedroom for the second yotogi session of the evening.

Having learned the fine art of Arousal Mode with Majima-san earlier, I take great pains to manage Hi-chan’s mental stamina and sensuality so we can make the most of our time together.

She seems pretty up for it, to be fair.

This time around, I notice something new: entering Arousal Mode drains the Mental bar considerably, and as always if this drains completely, the next “position” will begin with your partner only at half mental strength, meaning you can’t do as many things. As such, if you can only squeeze in one Arousal Mode — as will probably be the case in the early game — it’s best to save it for your last position.

Hi-chan appeared to develop quite a taste for masturbating during our session, together, so she indicates that next time she might be up for a bit of vibrator play. Who am I to say no?

The evening’s banging was a pretty big success, all told. Okay, so it didn’t bring the club any money in, but I think we all had a good time.

The following day, it’s time to meet the last of the three “surviving” maids at the Empire Club. The last one is a rindere; a mature, cool beauty. This calls for some careful design decisions… beginning with some sexy eyes.

And some sexy hair with a bit of an air of mystery about it. You know you’ve made a good maid when you find yourself getting a bit hot and bothered just looking at her.

I wanted our rindere girl to be nice and curvy to go with her “mature” nature, so I took a bit of time to experiment with a few poses and sliders until I had her looking irresistibly curvaceous.

Outfit-wise, I wanted something that conveyed her nature as a maid, but which also emphasised her maturity. I settled for this provocative “Mistress” top, combined with a traditional (albeit short) maid skirt and some sensible shoes.

We meet for the first time in the theatre. Aya (for that is her name) is pondering the nature of existence, and why she’s still sticking around.

I attempt to offer her some encouragement and hope for the future. She seems surprised but grateful at my words.

With that, our initial lineup of maids is complete. Something for everyone! As long as you’re into these three.

Now we’re truly into the game “proper”, various events start happening based on conditions such as stats and affection levels. These can be triggered at any time — and you can also change the “management policy” to switch the “NTR Block” from the game’s opening on or off if you change your mind about it.

I catch Hi-chan out in the corridor meeting with the secretary maid, who it seems has baked her some cookies.

I follow Hi-chan and observe how she interacts with the customers. Today we appear to be serving some local sports team mascots. She seems comfortable enough when dealing with female guests, but rather wary around men. I’m a man. Hmm, could this be why she was so distant the other day?

Evidently there’s a bit of a difference between our relationship and that which she feels towards the male clientele, however, because she takes a moment to share her cookies with me, getting rather close in the process.

Satisfied that Hi-chan is getting on with things to the best of her ability, I decide to drop in on Majima-san. She is cleaning up, looking as serious as ever. She also doesn’t seem to be up for much of a chat.

She’s really not up for a chat while she’s working, and indicates that she would rather not be bothered while she is trying to get things done. I take the hint and leave.

I head back to the office and look at the day’s schedule. Both Hi-chan and Majima-san seem to have been getting on well with their respective training in flower arranging and piano, so I leave them to it for the whole day. I decide to see how Aya gets on with the role of a sommelier… and also ask her to set a bit of time aside for me this evening.

Aya, it seems, is quite the natural at handling a wine bottle, although I can’t stop watching the vaguely provocative way that she’s fondling the neck of that bottle while she’s talking to me. I can’t even tell if she’s doing it deliberately, but I feel that right now it’s probably for the best that there’s a counter between us.

Majima has a particularly good day of training after I leave her alone as requested, and both Hi-chan and Aya get on well with their respective activities.

I sit down with Aya for a chat in the evening. She seems noticeably calmer than the other two, so I ask her directly if she, too is feeling nervous; it’d be an understandable reaction, given the upheaval the three of them are currently experiencing after my no-good uncle left us lumbered with this place and its debt.

Aya reveals that she’s rather good at acting, and demonstrates her skills by playing down her own nervousness, ever the cool beauty. At least she feels comfortable enough to be honest with me.

I attempt to lighten the mood a bit with a joke but end up fearing for my life. She never raises her voice or gets angry, but when someone like Aya mentions you “digging your own grave”, you can’t help but shiver a bit.

Thankfully, I discover that Aya’s dere side is vulnerable in the way that all good anime girls are vulnerable: by calling her cute unexpectedly.

We retire to the bedroom. Unlike the other two, Aya looks pretty confident and ready for whatever the evening holds for her. She’s had some past experience, but isn’t exactly what I’d call a pro. Yet!

In fact, she’s kind of adorable “during”, constantly seeking my approval and wanting to know if she’s doing things “right”. She also seems rather taken with the idea of being lovers, but, well, we’ll have to see where that goes in the future. This is all business. Mostly.

The evening is a success for lone wolf Majima-san, and Aya and I both have a good time. Hi-chan does less well, however, making a right mess of the flower arrangements I left her with. Perhaps the day’s stresses left her a bit cack-handed.

The following day, I decide it’s high time we actually open this damn club for business and start making money. I task Hi-chan and Majima-san with running the theatre for the day, since it’s a task that requires at least two people, and ask Aya to continue her sommelier training.

Aya, it seems is a natural with wine. She knows all the right words and how to recommend them to people and everything. I’m impressed.

Later that day, Aya is taking care of some business in the office, but I find myself feeling a slightly uncomfortable atmosphere between us.

I offer her a drink, but she quickly refuses on the grounds that it’s her job to serve me, not the other way around.

Little did I know that Aya was also feeling similarly awkward. Despite her imposing exterior, she’s still a human being inside, too.

Filled with resolve, she decides to try to lighten the mood herself a bit.

…by threatening to poison my coffee. I laugh weakly at what I can only assume — hope — is a joke from my scariest maid.

Because no, she most certainly did not tell me that she was joking.

A little later, Aya comes to me again, feeling a bit guilty about what happened. Rather adorably, she finds herself asking me for advice about how she should handle “someone she feels kind of awkward around”. I mean, it’s obviously me, but I feign ignorance to make her feel better.

I offer her some words of encouragement, too. I know she’s a good person at heart… it just seems she has a few social skills that she needs to work on a bit, too. And I’m more than happy to help her out with that.

…in more ways than one.

It’s a good day for everyone. Hi-chan and Majima do a great job running the theatre, bringing in some very welcome money, and Aya and I settle our differences by bumping uglies a bit more.

The next day, Majima-san confides in me that she has some difficulty having conversations with guests. This is not surprising news to me, but I lend a sympathetic ear nonetheless.

She suggests that trying to play a “character” by putting on an accent might be one way to handle this. She then lets rip with the worst Kansai accent I’ve ever heard.

I attempt to reassure her that she’s fine just the way she is, but she seems unconvinced.

Later that day, Majima-san and Hi-chan pay me a visit to discuss the fact that the club is not yet pulling in the numbers it should be. We’re too exclusive, it seems, so we need to think about how we might advertise ourselves to a broader range of clients.

I recall hearing somewhere that some other Empire Clubs had their own “Idol Maids” who put on shows and had their own unique fanbases. Hi-chan appears particularly taken with the idea, so I decide to take her along to the next local event that involves them.

She’s awestruck by the glitz and glamour of the event, but it’s clear she’s fascinated by it all. I have a bad feeling about this.

Before I can process my feelings too much, though, I run into one of the idols performing that evening. She encourages us to enjoy the show. I might be in love.

The show is, predictably, fabulous, and Hi-chan announces upon our return to the Empire Club that she would very much like to try her hand at becoming an idol. It’s a ridiculous, stupid idea that can’t possibly work. Naturally, I agree to it immediately.

The next day, a strange fox-eared girl bursts into my office demanding a job interview. She introduces herself as Kyuko, and has a rather strange way of speaking.

She also insists that her fox ears are fashion accessories, because “good fashion begins from the head”, but refuses to allow me to touch them until we know each other a little better. Naturally, I welcome her aboard, and she gratefully accepts my offer, particularly as it is accompanied by sushi rolls. The poor thing is starving.

Kyuko, it seems, specialises in running the theatre, so I make sure she has someone to help her out in both the daytime and the evening.

She does an amazing job, bringing in a nice chunk of money alongside Hi-chan. Meanwhile, Majima-san makes a right mess of her piano practice, while Aya continues to develop her sommelier skills.

I get a bit of an idea about why Majima-san wasn’t on her A-game when I witness her with a client that evening. The client is rather… up-front about how he feels about Majima, and she’s not altogether comfortable with that. I decide to step in.

Majima is apologetic. She knows what her job involves, but she still hasn’t quite developed the confidence she needs just yet. It’ll come with time. I offer her some encouragement.

Hi-chan, it seems, has been having some similar issues, being unaccustomed to random strangers wanting to touch her up. I understand her concerns, but also remind her that she’s been intimate with me without issue several times by this point. It is only around this point that she apparently realises what a peculiar working relationship we have with one another.

The next day, renewed with vim and vigour, Hi-chan comes to me eager to start her idol training. I determine that the best way for us to approach this is for her to enter the “Hot Start” event. But unfortunately, this requires prospective idols to enter as a group. But hold on, haven’t we already got…

Majima-san shoots us down almost immediately, believing herself to be completely inappropriate for an idol position. She probably has a point. Although having “the serious one” in the mix certainly worked for the girls in Love Live!

When I suggest we look for other band members, Hi-chan insists that it “must” be both Majima-san and Aya. She seems pretty determined.

Why? Because the three of them chose to stay behind even after everyone else abandoned them. For whatever reason, the Empire Club is important to them… and they want to do anything to see it be successful again.

I guess we have some work to do in the coming weeks…

More about Custom Order Maid 3D 2

Thanks to Nutaku for the review copy.

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.

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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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Before we leave The Expression: Amrilato behind, I wanted to show a particular bit of appreciation for its protagonist Rin.

Rin is the player’s eyes and ears over the course of the narrative, and as the game progresses you develop something of a mutually beneficial relationship with her as a player; she, more often than not, acts as the face of the game’s “study sessions” and as such becomes someone you associate with the act of learning the language of Esperanto… sorry, “Juliamo”.

But she’s a pretty great character in her own right, too. Let’s take a closer look at why she’s such a great central character.

Rin is someone who likes to put up the appearance of being “okay”. She prides herself on her seemingly relentless optimism, and tries her best not to let negative situations get her down. Of course, since we’re riding along inside her head throughout The Expression: Amrilato, it’s not long before we learn all too well that much of this is a front; Rin is actually wracked with a certain amount of self-doubt, and the situation in which she finds herself certainly doesn’t help her confidence.

Early in the game, she tries her best not to rely on heroine Ruka, and ends up spending all night away from Ruka’s apartment. This, naturally, upsets and worries Ruka immensely, and Rin feels immensely guilty for putting her new friend through such an ordeal. It’s at this point she perhaps starts to accept the fact that in order to get through a situation like this, she’s probably going to need at least a bit of help.

We’ve previously explored how in some respects Rin acts as a representative of the player on their journey to understand Esperanto, but it’s worth emphasising again. Rin’s reactions to the new language she finds herself having to learn are plausible and convincing — and they mirror how most players who were previously unfamiliar with Esperanto will probably react when suddenly bombarded with complicated-looking information.

This has another side to it, however; over the course of the story’s runtime, we see Rin gradually get to know the language a bit better and even develop a bit of confidence with it. We also learn that it’s okay to make mistakes, because as scary as it is to be around people who don’t speak the same language as you, a lot of them will be more than happy to help you out if you look like you’re struggling. As such, we can empathise with Rin; much as she doesn’t have to go through her experience alone, so too do we always have her always by our side as we explore our own language learning journey.

Rin’s gender identity and sexuality is an interesting aspect of The Expression: Amrilato’s narrative; it’s sensitively handled and subtle, but it’s an aspect of the story that is worth exploring somewhat.

Firstly, it’s pretty apparent from the get-go that Rin is gay. She’s immediately taken with Ruka’s beauty, and she gets extremely flustered by a feature about lingerie-clad models in a magazine she buys. When left alone — or attempting to procrastinate — she also frequently descends into flights of fancy about… well, about Ruka, mostly.

In contrast to a lot of yuri visual novels, this side of Rin is not something that is new to her, nor is the story about her discovering and accepting this aspect of herself. Instead it’s something that we, the audience, are introduced naturally to over the course of the game, and Rin already seems pretty at ease with it for the most part — though she does have occasional moments when she worries about the impropriety of her feelings and actions, particularly when she discovers the age difference between herself and Ruka.

Her gender identity, however, is something a little more complex. It’s apparent from the way she dresses in particular that she considers herself to be female — although notably, her bottom half is typically seen clad in androgynous shorts rather than female-coded skirts and dresses — but there’s also a scene partway through the narrative where she really starts to question herself.

“If I were as thin as Ruka, I could wear more girlish clothes, and might even try out a small fashion accessory or two,” she muses. “But since that wasn’t possible… I was the way I was now. People had called me ‘boyish’ and ‘a boy at heart’ in the past, but if I could become more feminine overnight… it would make me smile. But that thought scared me… it meant giving up on the person I’d been all this time.”

This is an interesting perspective on things with a number of layers. Rin accepts she is female, as we can tell from certain aspects of her fashion sense — most notably her sailor top and the tights she wears under her shorts when wearing her “outside” costume. But at the same time, she’s been told so often that she is “boyish” that she’s come to believe it — or, rather, accept this as an important part of herself.

Ruka accepting her “boyishness” doesn’t mean she has any desire to transition, however, but it does give her a certain amount of pause, as we can tell from her thoughts. She puts herself in the curious position of being a girl who is like a boy who wishes he was more like a girl; someone who was born female who wishes she was “more female”.

When in a situation like that, it’s important to have people who accept you for who you are, even if you don’t necessarily conform to the norms and expectations of society. Rin isn’t exactly a massive deviation from the norm, of course, but it’s something that she’s built up to be a fairly big deal in her head — helped along by the comments that people have apparently made to her over the years, it seems.

A key theme of The Expression: Amrilato is understanding. And Rin personifies this theme in so many ways; as her adventure progresses, she learns to understand the language of the people around her; she learns to understand the girl with whom she has become so close; she learns to understand the circumstances which brought her to this strange other world… and perhaps most importantly, she learns to understand herself.

More about The Expression: Amrilato

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.

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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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Yahtman is a game that hails from simpler times; a time when a video game about rolling a few dice a few times was enough to keep people occupied for… ooh, a good few minutes, at least.

It was also a time where there were plenty of people making software based around popular board and tabletop games — some licensed adaptations, others… less so.

Yahtman skirts the usual copyright-infringing tendencies of the era by providing us a game of “dice poker” or “yacht”, and absolutely, positively not Yahtzee, you hear me?

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

The futuristic racer subgenre tends to mostly be attributed to Nintendo’s F-Zero series these days, but there were a number of other companies experimenting with the formula too.

One such company was Atari Games, who put out the arcade version of S.T.U.N. Runner in 1989, a good year before F-Zero hit the Super NES. Running on a variation of the Hard Drivin’ hardware, its polygonal graphics and blistering speed impressed anyone who was lucky to come across a machine.

Its home ports… well, they did their best, and despite the ST version being what can politely be called “barely passable” I had a surprising amount of fun with it…

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Cao Pi and friends have a tough battle ahead of them today: they’re up against Nene and her ninjutsu!

It seems our “hero” is still biding his time before unleashing his inevitable betrayal of Da Ji and Orochi, however, but we get closer and closer with every mission. It’s not a case of if, it’s a case of when.

Oh, and if you ever were wondering what I thought of Japanese denpa group PASSPO, you can find out, exclusively in this, the forty-ninth episode of Warriors Wednesday. Don’t say I never give you anything.

I have a major soft spot for single-screen “kill everything” platformers. Every day I mourn that Rod-Land isn’t more readily available to play on modern platforms… and it’s not just because I have a thing for Rit.

No, I’ve always been a fan of this kind of game, ever since Bubble Bobble, and if anyone was the absolute master of this subgenre, it was Taito. As such, the two Taito Legends collections on PlayStation 2 make frequent appearances in my game rotation, just so I can enjoy games like the aforementioned Bubble Bobble and its sequel Rainbow Islands at any time.

What if someone were to make a new game like this, though? How might that turn out? Well, wonder no longer!

Whip! Whip! is a game by Japanese developer Alpha-Unit. You probably haven’t heard of them, thanks to most of their prior releases having been exclusives to the land of the rising sun, but they’ve been around for a long time now, with their back catalogue including licensed games based around Macross, Time Bokan and Bleach as well as a few original titles. They should, in theory, know their stuff, then.

In Whip! Whip!, you take on the role of Tira, an adorable young foxgirl pastry chef who is searching for a legendary recipe. During her adventures, she stumbles across a glove-shaped golem called Minton, whom she revives from slumber through the judicious application of sweet treats. Minton agrees to join Tira on her quest — mostly motivated by the prospect of more honey — and thus the pair set off to find the mystic dessert.

It’s a beautifully presented game, absolutely nailing the retro look with its limited colour palette, low-resolution pixel art — though it is a bit of a shame that dialogue sequences use a slightly out of place-looking high definition font — and longstanding Taito fans will be pleased to hear that the music was composed by a former member of Taito’s in-house sound team ZUNTATA. Hirokazu Koshio, better known by his alias COSIO, contributed to a variety of Taito games between 2005 and 2015, and his infectiously cheerful score for Whip! Whip! is just one of many ways the game really captures an authentic late ’80s/early ’90s feel.

Gameplay unfolds a screen at a time, much like the games which Whip! Whip! draws inspiration from. You (and an optional second player who can drop in at any time) are plonked in the corner of an arrangement of platforms and tasked with defeating all the enemies which, naturally, turn into various point-yielding tasty treats when you have dispatched them.

The main way in which Whip! Whip! distinguishes itself from its source material — and its sole concession to modern game design through its use of analogue control rather than the more traditional 8-way digital — is in the way Tira and Minton can attack enemies. By pushing the stick in any direction and pressing the attack button, Tira can shoot out Minton on a chain and grab hold of an enemy or collectible item; releasing the attack button causes Minton to pull Tira to his position, causing her to unleash a powerful flying kick in the process. While Tira is playing her kick animation, any enemies she hits will be defeated, and, as ever in games like this, the big points come from timing your attacks carefully so you can kill as many foes as possible at the same time.

This is an interesting mechanic because it is so core to the game as a whole — not just for defeating enemies, but for simple mobility, too. Tira is fairly sluggish to control otherwise, ambling sedately along the floor in response to your commands, so getting around quickly is dependent on making effective use of Minton. She’s also unable to jump down through platforms, so the only way to get down from the top of the screen in some cases is to grapple your way to an enemy or item below your position.

In some stages, you’ll find power-ups that have various effects. One increases Tira’s walk speed, making her a bit less of a liability when on foot; another increases the distance you can fire out Minton to; another still freezes time. And very occasionally you’ll stumble across an item that allows you to skip ahead a number of levels.

Defeating three or more enemies at once yields balloons that slowly rise from the bottom of the screen, each sporting a randomly selected letter of the word “EXPAND”. Collect all the letters of EXPAND and Tira is rewarded with three extra lives; this is harder than it sounds, because there’s no guarantee summoning more balloons will yield the letters you actually want — more often than not you get numerous duplicates of letters you already have!

Every ten levels, there’s a boss fight. These are fairly straightforward, but distinguish themselves from the main levels by being more dependent on timing to avoid damage rather than to score maximum points. Each boss makes use of the simple core mechanics in a different, interesting way, so by the end of the game you’ll have a good grasp of the various ways you can swing and swoop around the screen.

The main game allows you to start from any level you’ve previously reached and gradually brute-force your way to the end, but after completing it in this way, the Challenge Mode unlocks. Here, you’re tasked with playing through the whole game without running out of lives, and timed, too. This provides plenty of longevity once you’ve mastered the base game — though for experienced players it’s a shame this isn’t unlocked as an option from the outset.

Whip! Whip! isn’t a complex or deep game, but it’s not trying to be; it’s trying to recapture the magic of old arcade games, and old Taito games specifically. It’s hopefully clear by now that it succeeds admirably in this noble goal, so if you’ve had a hankering for some adorable enemy-bashing that modern games just haven’t been able to satisfy, I can highly recommend saving up those quarters and grabbing yourself a copy of Whip! Whip! for Steam or PC.

More about Whip! Whip!

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

In this sixth episode of the Final Fantasy Marathon, we take our legitimately gotten gains (courtesy of the Mystic Key) and take a trip to go and visit the dwarves.

Dwarves are another example of an aspect of Final Fantasy that was lifted from Dungeons & Dragons, though few can deny that the Japanese series puts its own unique twist on the dumpy delvers. Their catchphrase of “lali-ho!” (or variations thereof depending on who was on localisation duty at Squaresoft that week) became a recurring feature for a number of installments… and indeed at the time of writing the dwarves have most recently made a comeback in fanservice festival Final Fantasy XIV as part of the Shadowbringers expansion.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’ve got some Nitro Powder burning a hole in my pocket (quite literally) and I can’t think of anyone better equipped to make good use of it than a dwarf.

After checking out the not-very-good-but-I-still-like-it Atari ST version on Atari A to Z earlier this week, I thought it was worth taking a closer look at the arcade original.

It’s an interesting game, for sure; although Sega is widely credited with popularising the polygonal racer in arcades thanks to its excellent Virtua Racing, Atari Games had actually been experimenting with filled 3D racers for some years previously.

Probably the most well-known of these is Hard Drivin’, a game that took itself a little too seriously — to date it’s still the only arcade racer I know of with a clutch pedal — but the futuristic bobsled run that is S.T.U.N. Runner was also innovative in its own way.

First released in 1989, S.T.U.N. Runner casts you in the role of a racer in the Spread Tunnel Underground Network (S.T.U.N, you see?). Your goal is nothing less than The Ultimate Challenge — a lengthy (well, three-minute) course that tests every ounce of your S.T.U.N. running skill.

Yes, S.T.U.N. Runner is a futuristic racer — and one that came out a full year before Nintendo’s F-Zero, the game that many people cite as the genesis of the subgenre. It set many of the expectations for the genre that we’ve come to expect today, too: a combination of racing and combat; undulating, roller coaster-style tracks; extreme speeds; and a unique sense of atmosphere.

S.T.U.N. Runner distinguishes itself from later takes on the futuristic racing subgenre through its control scheme. And there are two distinct styles of control you need to get used to during play.

Firstly, when racing on the flat sections of track, the game handles like a “vanishing point” racer, with left and right movements actually sliding you from side to side rather than making you turn. In this way, there’s no means of getting turned around or into a position where it is difficult to recover; the most that happens even if you suffer a terrible pile-up is that you lose a bit of speed.

The big adjustment when coming from more modern takes on the genre comes when you enter a tunnel. Here, turning left and right causes you to slide up the respective side of the tunnel, and in order to keep your speed up you do not steer around the corners; rather, bobsled-style, you ride the outer wall of the tunnel.

The original arcade machine used a futuristic set of handlebars that concealed a variation on Atari’s classic paddle controller, making for extremely quick and responsive handling. This has a bit of a side-effect when played on a home system via an emulator or as part of the third Midway Arcade Treasures compilation, however; while paddle controls tend to port quite well to analogue joypads in theory, they can often seem extremely “twitchy” and oversensitive. This is certainly the case here, but a bit of practice will allow you to adjust.

Normally, the advice I’d give is to slide around the circular perimeter of the analogue stick rather than simply moving left and right, as this provides a more close approximation of a paddle controller’s “dial”. However, in S.T.U.N. Runner there’s an additional wrinkle: you can aim your guns up and down by pulling the stick backwards and forwards, and in later levels this is essential to deal with airborne enemies. Consequently, you’ll need to make sure that trying to smooth out your steering doesn’t mess with your aiming.

Combat in S.T.U.N. Runner is a fairly major element, though you’re not directly racing against opponents in this. Rather, the enemies you encounter along the way are obstacles, each with their own unique type of behaviour, and in order to make it to the finish line on time, you’ll need to skilfully avoid or destroy them.

Most enemies can be taken down with a well-aimed laser blast or two, but armoured drones require the special “Shockwave” weapon that can only be unlocked by collecting a special symbol or collecting a requisite number of stars on the previous course. This blasts forwards in a satisfying late-’80s burst of polygonal lightning, wiping out everything in its path and shattering them into a shower of triangles.

As you progress through the game you’ll start to encounter more and more course elements, beginning with boost pads that accelerate you considerably and make you temporarily invincible, and continuing on through branching pathways, sections of tunnel that are under construction, jump ramps, narrow flats and plenty of different types of foe to blast out of your way.

The game is rather well-paced in this way; the early levels introduce each new concept to you one at a time until you have the basics down, then the rest of the game continues a drip-feed of new features that build on the things you’ve already learned.

Every few levels, there is a Challenge stage. Each of these tasks you with doing something specific: on the first, for example, you have to hit as many boost pads as possible; on another you have to collect as many stars as you can; on a third you have to destroy as many enemies as possible. You don’t have to actually complete the challenge stage; just try and set a high score. And interestingly, each Challenge stage has its own unique high score table based on its specific objective; this is a really nice feature that allows even those who aren’t able to make it to The Ultimate Challenge to feel like they can be competitive in at least part of the overall experience.

By modern standards, it’s easy to see that S.T.U.N. Runner had the unenviable task of trying to establish a new subgenre, and consequently it had a few teething problems along the way. It’s twitchy and difficult to control; it’s arguably a bit too fast when its rather technical, twisting courses are taken into account; its time limits are very harsh, even on the easiest difficulty setting; and the boost pads make one of the most horrendous noises I’ve ever heard come out of an FM synthesiser chip.

It’s still really fun, though, and well worth revisiting today, for numerous reasons. Not only did it help to define what would become a popular subgenre of racers, it’s a game that often gets forgotten about today in favour of later, more well-known titles. It’s also an surprisingly attractive game considering its age; its early, low-poly 3D combined with multicoloured shading to simulate light-sourcing and some truly lovely pixel art backdrops make for a very distinctive look, and the harsh FM sound typical of Atari Games releases throughout the mid to late ’80s makes for an intense, almost oppressive and sinister atmosphere at times that really works to give the game a strong sense of character.

Is it an F-Zero beater? No, of course it isn’t, but it is, regardless, a good use of your time if you fancy a bit of classic white-knuckle racing.

More about S.T.U.N. Runner

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Yes, yes, yes, I know the “A to Z” angle in this series is already questionable and this one following Tempest makes it even more so, but we only just managed to find time to have a two-player match!

Indeed, today’s game is Atari Soccer, an arcade title which can only be played with two or four people simultaneously, so bad luck if you have either no friends or two friends. As a follow-up to Atari Football, it again had a cocktail cabinet form factor and exhausting trackball controls to blister your palms with.

Thankfully, the port in Atari Flashback Classics can be enjoyed with nothing more than a couple of analogue controllers, and even for those who aren’t big soccer fans, the game makes for an entertaining, competitive pastime for a few minutes every so often.

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Evening all! It’s time for another weekly roundup and an update.

You may have noticed I haven’t yet kicked off a new Cover Game feature having finished the one on The Expression: Amrilato. This is mostly down to the fact I’ve been a bit busy, tired and, frankly, depressed and anxious lately, and that’s put me a bit behind “schedule”, as it were. Hopefully this week, though, I’ll at least get the introduction to the next feature up, however — but I do want to finish the visual novel I’m currently enjoying first.

Anyway. Enough shop talk, let’s catch up on what you might have missed this week…

MoeGamer

The Zelda Diaries: Part 5 – Indoor Play – My adventures in the world of Breath of the Wild continue as I reflect on the game’s wildly different approach to “dungeons”.

Custom Order Maid 3D 2: Sex, Sommeliers and Song – Since a YouTube-based Let’s Play of this delight wouldn’t be practical (not with the fun bits intact, anyway) I thought I’d do a text based one for your enjoyment. Here’s the latest installment.

Warriors Wednesday: Mystical Ninja – Cao Pi and friends come up against Nene (who is cute) and her ninja magic (which is not).

Waifu Wednesday: Rin Takato – An in-depth exploration of The Expression: Amrilato’s protagonist, and how her character explores matters of sexuality and gender identity in an interesting and unusual way.

Whip! Whip!: Smells Like Taito – Like Taito’s old-school single-screen “kill ’em all” platformers? Then you’ll want to check this new title out. It has music from a former member of ZUNTATA and everything.

Final Fantasy Marathon: Lali-Ho! – The sixth episode of our adventures in the first Final Fantasy sees us paying the dwarves a visit and finding a convenient use for that Nitro Powder that’s been burning a hole in our pocket.

Racer Essentials: S.T.U.N. Runner – If you look down a bit, you’ll notice that I also covered this game as this week’s Atari ST A to Z title. It reminded me that it’s actually a rather interesting game that plays an important — though often unsung — role in racing game history.

Atari A to Z

This week we have some non-copyright infringing “dice poker” (plus cat), the aforementioned S.T.U.N. Runner on Atari ST, and some oft-delayed two-player arcade soccer action!

Cool Stuff By People Who Aren’t Me

First up, Patreon goodness! Right now, I’m supporting chaotic “old men (and Octav1us Kitten, who I also support) 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.

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

Super Lucky’s Tale (2017) [PC] (The Well-Red Mage) – If you’re not following The Well-Red Mage and you’ve ever complained about the state of modern games journalism and specifically modern games criticism, then check it out. He’s gathered a crack team of people with a variety of backgrounds and interests to produce some well-crafted, interesting, long-form critiques of all manner of games. Here’s just one great example.

An Antidote to Violence and Vitriol (Shoot the Rookie) – pix1001 decides to take aim for the “video games cause violence” argument, but instead of blasting it down with a simple “no they don’t”, what we have here is an excellent rebuttal that points out all the good that games are capable of.

A case of gamers’ block (Later Levels) – Ever found yourself in a position where you have over a thousand games lining your living room walls, yet no desire to play any of them? N-no, me neither, but Kim offers some interesting thoughts on the much-loathed feeling of “gamers’ block”.

Waifu of the Week (#9) – Hibiki Sakura (Ecchi Hunter) – If you’re not watching How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? yet, get your credit card out and prepare to join your local gym, because Lynn is here to tell you all about one of that anime’s most formidable assets.

Pescatore Frog (MrGilderPixels) – My good buddy Chris Caskie shares another of his painted wooden pixel art creations, this time featuring a bemused-looking frog from Sunsoft’s unreleased puzzler Pescatore.

Ikkitousen Season 1 Review (Umai Yomu Anime Blog) – Yomu takes some time to lay down why Ikkitousen is much more than just silly fanservice — particularly if you’re interested in the story of the Three Kingdoms.

There’s mystery in the air and I’m feelies fine (Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster) – Kimimi explores the Murder Club series on X68000 and laments the death of “feelies”: those immersive bits of tat that you got with your games way back when, that were often very helpful in their own way!

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All right, a bumper crop today, so that should keep you busy for a while. Be sure to follow all the creators above and give ’em a like and/or a comment to show your appreciation if you enjoy their work. And, as always, thank you for your support of MoeGamer, be it through reading, liking, commenting, sharing or taking that massively appreciated next step and helping the site out with a Patreon pledge or one-off Ko-Fi donation.

This week, expect an in-depth look at a visual novel I frankly wasn’t expecting to be as good as it ended up being, and the first part of the all-new Cover Game feature. Please look forward to it, and thank you once again for taking the time to stop by and read!

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

Last time, we talked about how Breath of the Wild makes use of its shrines as a short-form, handheld-friendly take on the Zelda series’ dungeoneering.

There’s another major part of the game that provides an interesting twist on this traditional aspect of the franchise, however, and that’s the Divine Beasts.

Providing significant, dramatic, story-critical challenges for Link to overcome, the Divine Beasts may, once again, be a bit of a deviation from Zelda’s previously established norms, but they’re still very cool.

From a narrative perspective, the four Divine Beasts are giant, mechanical monstrosities that were originally built as weapons to be used against Ganon. Since pretty much everything else has gone wrong in the ruined Hyrule of Breath of the Wild, however, it will not surprise you to learn that the Divine Beasts have been running somewhat wild, in each case causing considerable trouble for the very people they’re supposed to be protecting.

From a progression standpoint, the Divine Beasts represent major objectives that you should probably accomplish in order to beat the game. Note that I don’t say “have to” accomplish; it is indeed possible to beat Breath of the Wild without doing any of the Divine Beasts, and some skilled players have even made a beeline straight for Ganon as soon as they get off the Great Plateau in the early hours of the game.

I am neither a skilled player nor someone with a particular desire to speedrun or “sequence break” the game, however, so I’ve been gradually working my way through its various challenges a bit at a time. At the time of writing, I’ve beaten two of the Divine Beasts: Vah Ruta, which had been terrorising Zora’s Domain with a never-ending downpour of “rain” (actually water from the nearby reservoir); and Vah Medoh, which has been figuratively clipping the birdlike Rito people’s wings by unleashing aerial attacks on them.

Each of the Divine Beast encounters consists of a number of sections. Typically, you’ll begin a quest to approach a Divine Beast in cooperation with a major character from the locale they’re causing trouble in, and this quest will involve some sort of preparation. In the case of Vah Ruta, for example, you’re tasked with acquiring some shock arrows, which in Vah Medoh’s case you need to prove your accuracy with airborne archery to a Rito warrior who will provide your means of actually getting up to the giant mechanical eagle.

This is then followed by a giant boss fight of sorts, usually with a certain cinematic element. During this battle, you are tasked with destroying certain key targets on the Divine Beast’s body using the arrows you’ve collected (or been supplied with), but you’ll also need to fend off the Beast’s attacks, too. Much like in the rest of the game, there are typically multiple ways to do this, and experimentation with your abilities is key to find the most effective means of defending yourself. While you can fend off Vah Ruta’s ice block attacks with arrows or well-timed melee hits, for example, it’s much better to use your Cryonis ability to shatter them before they get anywhere close to you.

Once you destroy all the relevant targets, you’re able to approach the Divine Beast directly, at which point you enter its “dungeon” proper. The objective in each of these is the same: find and activate all the terminals which will allow you to wrest control of the Beast back from Ganon, and turn its power on Hyrule’s oppressor.

This, naturally, is easier said than done, with each Beast having its own unique internal layout and its terminals typically being scattered in some of the most inconvenient places imaginable. You’ll need to demonstrate a good understanding of your abilities as well as the game’s solid physics engine to progress, more often than not, but as is the pattern for the rest of the game, there tends not to be a single set solution to the problems you encounter.

One of the most interesting things about the Divine Beasts is that once you unlock the (not especially useful or readable) 3D map of them via a special terminal, you are able to take control of a particular aspect of their mechanisms from the map screen. You’re able to move the trunk of the elephantine Vah Ruta, for example, which can both allow access to previously unreachable areas and spray water in various places, and in the case of Vah Medoh you’re able to “bank” it in either direction, making previously flat hallways into uphill or downhill slopes.

Manipulation of the Divine Beast itself is probably the main mechanic you’ll need to master while attempting to overcome these challenges, and as always, experimentation is key. A bit of fiddling around will reveal that the exact position you put Vah Ruta’s trunk at will cause a waterwheel to rotate in one direction or another, for example, while those who have spent as much time leaping down mountains and hillocks out in the overworld as I have will doubtless realise that tilting Vah Medoh to an angle where a corridor slopes down and away from you will allow you to paraglide your way to a high-up ledge you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach on the flat.

It’s this sort of “organic” gameplay that makes Breath of the Wild so interesting to play, whether you’re exploring the overworld or attempting to complete a Divine Beast. At no point do you feel like you’re stepping into a discrete, self-contained “puzzle room”; the Divine Beasts as a whole are effectively giant puzzles themselves, but the exact means through which you approach their challenges is up to you. Compare and contrast with a more traditional Zelda dungeon, meanwhile, where progression is much more scripted and linear, and you’ll see the difference.

It’s been a point of contention for some players who have been following the series for a long time, but as someone who was originally skeptical about Breath of the Wild when I first heard how different it was going to be from past Zelda games, I can say with confidence that I’ve been really enjoying this way of doing things. You feel like you’re overcoming problems with your own initiative and creativity rather than attempting to find the “correct” solution that the designers intended.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the latter approach, mind — I still love me an old-school Zelda puzzle — but it’s just nice to have a bit of a change now and then. And Breath of the Wild certainly provides that.

More about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.

We’ve made it to Z again, folks! And today’s a real stonker of a game that I used to really love playing back in the day. And still do today, in fact.

Zone Ranger was released in 1984 by Activision, back when they still made good games, and was the work of one Dan Thompson. Drawing loose inspiration from Asteroids and Sinistar, two favourite games of Thompson, Zone Ranger tasks you with shooting down a bunch of space junk because… why not?

It’s the quintessential mid-’80s arcade blaster in many ways: easy to learn, hard to master and very, very addictive.

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

It’s Tuesday! That doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, other than the fact that I’ve arbitrarily decided it’s time to pay the Empire Club of Custom Order Maid 3D 2 another visit. And that has nothing to do with it being Tuesday.

Today, we continue getting to know our “main three” maids a little better as Hi-chan tries her best to convince Majima-san to join her on her quest to become an idol maid. Aya, meanwhile, has numerous things to practice. And who knows what that mysterious little fox girl is up to?

Dust off your membership card and come on in, and be aware that there are NSFW images and themes ahead!

Well, here we are again. A million credits in the bank, four maids in the… maid-recharging chambers and a club rating of one blue blob. Time to get to work.

First, shopping! This isn’t just for fun… there’s a bunch of materials here you’ll need to buy if you want to upgrade your Empire Club’s facilities. So I purchase some basic materials to get started on tooling up the theatre.

I have a bunch of money left over, though, so I blow it all on a bunny girl outfit. We’ll save that for a special occasion.

I decide to set new girl Kyuko to work on doing up the theatre. She seems like a handy type, and doesn’t complain when I ask her to get on with it. You need two people to actually man the theatre, anyway, and I’d rather Hi-chan get on with a bit of training.

The initial upgrade to the theatre adds some music facilities, and increases the experience gain rate. Given how relatively cheap it was to acquire the materials for this, I have no reason not to do this right now.

Both Hi-can and Majima-san have a bad morning, but they learn a bit from their mistakes, at least. I drop in on Aya’s sommelier training, and she seems to be doing just fine.

I decide to sit down with Kyuko for a chat as she works in the theatre that evening. There’s something not quite right about her… I suspect kitsune shenanigans, but she seems harmless enough for now. Plus she’s cute. And good with DIY, apparently.

Boopy-doopy-boop-boop SEX

During tonight’s session, Aya masters the art of missionary position sex, meaning we can try some more adventurous stuff next time. The astute among you may notice that I’ve only been doing the dirty with Aya. This is because 1) she’s my favourite and 2) I want to see how maids get on without any of the sex training side of things. In theory, they should be fine, given the existence of the all-ages version of the game, but I’m still curious to see if it affects anything.

A good evening for everyone. The three girls I’m not having sex with all bring in a nice amount of money for the club, and everyone seems happy.

Aya addresses me the following day. It seems she’s a little hesitant about the “customer service” aspect of her job; she worries that she’s not interesting enough or able to have a “normal” conversation with guests.

She wonders what could possibly be enjoyable about “just” talking to her. Trying my best not to ogle her breasts when she’s sitting like that, I inform her that it’s her job to figure out how to make a conversation entertaining. Tough love and all that. She seems satisfied with this explanation.

Meanwhile, Majima-san is busy looking at dirty websites on her smartphone. Purely to check whether or not they’ve been deleted yet, obviously.

Unfortunately for her doubtlessly throbbing genitals, Hi-chan bursts in without knocking before she gets a chance to do anything too shameful. It seems the youngster wants some “girl talk”.

Or rather, she wants to try and convince Majima-san that it really would be nice if she’d reconsider the whole “becoming an idol” thing. She resorts to a flagrantly transparent bit of emotional manipulation, but she has a point: you shouldn’t deprive yourself of doing something you’re interested in because someone who isn’t you says that you “can’t”.

It seems Hi-chan and Majima-san are getting along rather well. Majima-san’s tough outer shell is showing some cracks, and Hi-chan is clearly a lot smarter than how she likes to portray herself.

The following day, I’m looking over the schedule when I discover a book of sex tips. Feeling a bit sore from the previous evening’s ministrations — and suspecting Aya might be feeling the same — I invite her to spend the evening studying.

During the day, I observe Hi-chan working in the theatre. It seems she’s not altogether comfortable with drunken customers erring on the side of sexual harassment. I encourage her to take a firm but fair stance when such things occur, and reassure her that I will step in if necessary.

The dear girl understands completely, and puts the randy old fart well and truly in his place.

A good morning for most of the crew, aside from Aya, who makes a right old mess in the bar. Perhaps she was missing my constant supervision?

Later that day, Majima-san comes to deliver a report on the club’s comings and goings. She’s so reliable, and I’m lucky to have her on the staff.

For a moment, I feel like there’s something more she wants to tell me, but she claims it’s nothing and heads off to do Majima things.

I take a moment to review my maids’ performance. They’re all doing pretty well and developing clear specialisms. Aya likes me the most right now, largely due to a combination of my having spent most time supervising her work and having spent most evenings up until this point banging her.

I also check what our facilities need for some further upgrades. It seems that we can get the training room waxed without any particularly special materials required, so I decide to set Kyuko on that task in the near future.

I find Majima-san practising her piano later that morning. She seems satisfied with her technical abilities, but is concerned she doesn’t really understand the expressive side of things. This is not a surprise to me, but I choose to keep quiet. She’ll get there.

Kyuko gets to work on the training room. The improvements are minor but will help: the maids training there will get more experience.

The morning goes well for everyone except Hi-chan, who knocks over a vase and inadvertently pulls the heads off an entire bunch of flowers while trying to save it. Well, again, as long as she learned something, it’s all fine.

I rendezvous with Aya that evening, interested to see what she learned from her study session. Quite a bit, it seems; we decide to try a few things we’ve never done before.

Nice

She seems rather fond of doggy style, worrying that she’ll get “addicted”. I’m okay with this. You may also notice that I now have an actual penis instead of a semi-transparent blur; you can thank this excellent guide on Steam, which provides links to an “All-in-One” mod that uncensors the game and adds a number of other helpful bits and pieces. Despite the guide being on Steam, it also works for the Nutaku and S-court releases of the game — you just don’t need to buy the 18+ DLC in those cases because those are already 18+ versions.

Back in character. Aya levels up her doggy style immediately; evidently it is to her liking. She’s so close to mastering the art of blowjob, too, but just needs a little extra push. She’s learned a few new tricks in the meantime, as well.

Hi-chan performs badly in the theatre that evening, and doesn’t make that much money. I’m not too mad, though, because Majima and Kyuko both do well, putting me back well above the 1 million credits mark.

Later that night, Hi-chan and Majima-san are talking outside.

Majima-san confides in Hi-chan that she doesn’t really like herself — not from a perspective of self-hatred or anything, but because the way her mind works frustrates her.

She is cursed with an overly logical nature that means if things won’t be perfect the first time she tries something, she simply won’t try it at all. It seems that this is the main thing that’s been holding her back from joining Hi-chan on the Idol Express.

Majima-san admits that the reason she stuck around at the Empire Club is because she wanted to try and break those habits and get out of her rut. She wanted to challenge herself to try new things… and she’s starting to see a potential opportunity to do so.

Having not been privy to this conversation, I’m surprised when Majima-san bursts in my office and starts talking about how dumb idols are and how there are much better ways to promote the Empire Club.

I’m even more surprised when she says that she wants to try singing a song I commissioned for Hi-chan and her as-yet nonexistent group.

To celebrate the occasion, I decide to take the girls into the photo studio for a commemorative photo shoot.

I begin with the selection of an appropriate background. Backstage seems like a good one. You can choose from facilities you haven’t yet unlocked in the main game, or you can turn the background scenery off altogether and have a coloured backdrop instead. You can use this in conjunction with image editing software for “chroma key” effects — cutting out the maids and putting them in various other circumstances not possible in the game itself.

Hi-chan first. I summon her and place her in front of the stairs, pondering what we should do for the photo.

I sit her down on the stairs and position her for maximum cuteness.

We need to do something about that weird face she’s pulling, though. A gentle smile should do the trick for now. Veterans of Custom Maid 3D 2 will be interested in the “Expression Detail” panel, which is new to Custom Order Maid 3D 2: this allows you much finer control over facial expressions by providing sliders for various eye, brow and mouth movements and shapes.

Custom Maid 3D 2 veterans will doubtless be well familiar with the Pose Edit tool, however, which allows you to move the characters’ various joints around to create custom poses. This uses a system called Inverse Kinematics, where you move an endpoint (such as a knee or foot) and the bits that are attached to it are taken care of for you.

This means two things: firstly, you can’t stretch arms and legs beyond anything that looks natural, and secondly, you don’t need to painstakingly adjust every single joint just to get someone sitting in a particular way. Just position the endpoint (and perhaps midpoint) and then you can worry about making fine adjustments if necessary.

Here I’ve positioned Hi-chan so she’s put one foot up on a step, and has a hand resting on that knee. It’s a nice casual pose that looks different from the default sitting animation. The “body” panel you can see on the left allows you to select specific joints and rotate them independently of the Inverse Kinematics movement, allowing for much finer control over your pose.

I position her other hand on her thigh so she at least looks reasonably natural. It takes practice and experimentation to create natural-looking poses, but it’s great fun to play with. You can use any of the existing animations as a starting point, and study their arrangement of joints and endpoints to get an idea of how things work.

Time to bring in Majima-san. She doesn’t seem like the sort of maid who would be sitting on some cold metal stairs, so I opt to have her standing to one side. I think it’d be nice to have her leaning on the handrail, though, so out comes the Pose Edit window again.

A bit of moving her hand and elbow and some minor rotation on her wrist joint, and we have something that works quite nicely.

Pose Edit goes into so much detail that you can customise the joints on individual hands and feet if you so desire. Alternatively, you can take a simpler approach and simply control how spread the character’s fingers are, and how much they’re curled up into a fist. I tweak these settings to get Majima-san’s hand looking reasonably natural.

For her other arm, I feel like a defiant hand-on-hip is very Majima, so I arrange that. I also move one of her legs outwards a little bit so it looks a bit more like she’s leaning her weight on the handrail. It’s the little things.

Time to bring in Aya and unleash some headpats! Aya seems like the sort of big sister type who would headpat Hi-chan, so I  set to work making that happen.

Once again, a bit of careful joint and endpoint manipulation gets Aya’s hand into a position where it’s not seeping into poor Hi-chan’s head.

By default, the maids all face the camera, but you can turn this behaviour off in the Expression menu. Once you’ve done this, you can use Pose Edit to rotate the neck joint and get them facing any way you want. You can even go full Exorcist if you want to, but please do not do that. Treat your maids with respect!

Now for Kyuko. As the scene starts to take shape, I feel like I want her peeking in cheekily from somewhere. Just behind Majima-san, peeping through the bars of the handrails, seems good. I move her into position.

There we go. But that composition is all wrong. She looks a bit unnatural there.

No matter, a bit of fiddling with her spinal joints allows me to get her leaning forwards to peer at us. There are several spinal joints in total, so by manipulating them you can make all sorts of interesting poses, not just standing and sitting.

I then use the Pose Edit tool to get her draping her hands around the bars in a casual, child-like manner. I know she’s going to turn out to be like 900 years old or something, but this works for now.

After that, I turn the lights out. Then I accidentally fling Kyuko up in the air because I wasn’t paying attention to what was selected. I put her back into position.

This lighting panel is another new addition over Custom Maid 3D 2, which only allowed you to control global light settings. Here, you can create up to four additional light sources in the scene, which can either be point lights (light emanates in all directions from the point, like a lamp) or spotlights (light emanates and spreads out from a single point, like a… well, like a spotlight). Here I’ve set up a spotlight and positioned it above the girls’ heads.

To improve the composition further, I set to work on using the camera settings for some depth blur. Here, you can set the focal distance, the focus field size, camera aperture and variance. With a bit of fiddling, you can really make your stars “pop” while your background is suitably muted.

And as a finishing touch for some atmosphere, I add a bit of fog to the scene, primarily behind the girls, rising up from the floor and refracting the light to create some spooky silhouettes. Good stuff.

If you want to make screenshots with dialogue, there’s a Message Box tool you can use. I will not be held responsible for any misuse. Please remember the golden rule of Be Good To Your Maids.

Once you’ve set up a scene, you can easily save it for later recall, then use it as a basis for something else or take some shots from other angles.

And here’s our final result, also seen in the header to this article! Good work, maids, we’ve had a fine week. Keep up the great work and your goshujin-sama will remain a very happy man.

More about Custom Order Maid 3D 2

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. Click here or on the button below to find out more.