All right, let's make it three. #dosgaming "Summon the Heroes of Darkmoon" is surely one of the greatest main menu options ever put into a game. EOB3 was made by a different team from the first two games after Westwood left to do Lands of Lore instead, and was recoded on a new engine called Aesop. It's a bit of a shame that it starts off with quite such a "We couldn't afford any more artwork" feel, but it gets better.

All right, I suppose this is actually happening. #dosgaming - returning to Eye of the Beholder 2 after last fumbling with it in the early 90s. Will I finish it this time? A screen I've never seen before - EOB2 allows you to copy your EOB save into its folder and import characters! Dom has been ditched in favour of fighter Anya as apparently thieves in this game are pretty useless. The rest of the Rhapsody gang remain intact.

I've played approximately seven and a half Etrian Odyssey games - I'm going to try Eye of the Beholder again, surely it's got to start making some sort of sense by now I've mapped the first level! That wasn't too bad - the few enemies dotted around could be dodged and hit with a combination of physical attacks and offensive magic, and resting took care of the few wounds I had. The hit rate from physical attacks remains infuriatingly low.

The @EpicGames journey is complete! Part 10 is now finally public, covering the Age of Unreal (and Wonders) and a look at the couple of games Epic has released since their transformation into the people behind a fair amount of the game industry. Have just calculated that the entire series comes in at almost exactly four hours and 50,000 words!

The "cow tools" thing has given me a strong need to talk about "seed pie leave now". If you grew up in the UK in the 90s, you'll know the Teletext games magazine/outpouring of madness called Digitiser. Bizarre characters were hidden through its pages, including one called The Man's Daddy which told "jokes".

Day eight is Heroes by Sabaton!
After discovering the power metal genre by accident through Iron Savior, it was going to be unlikely that I would get that level of pleasant surprise again. But that surprise eventually came when a few friends and I had our own mini-convention in Ohio for a week, which included going to a Nightwish concert with support bands Delain and Sabaton.

I think this is number seven? Here's something that I found in the shared files on the network at university in 2005 or so, put up there by someone I knew as Steveo, who used to stay in the same residence as me and who is now the Earl of Cumbria or something. He was into stuff that was on the pretentious side, and alongside Stratovarius and Pink Floyd he had a fairly large collection of songs by a band I'd heard the name of called Dream Theater. Scenes from a Memory is the album that has stayed in my mind the longest.

I've got the rest of these planned out now, but this sixth entry took a long time to decide on - in the end I decided to represent something for a bit of a different reason. After discovering Noise Records I suddenly had access to a treasure trove of melodic metal, and one of the other ones that caught my ear was Stratovarius. I must have found their then-new release during one of the trips I used to take into Dundee.

What, yes, okay, I'll keep doing it. How are you gentlemen - formative album five is the soundtrack to Zero Wing! This might seem a bit of an absurd choice because people know and love this game mostly for its farcically poor translation, but I really wanted to include something that represented my roots in loving game music.

Formative albums day four!
On an objective level, Heavenly is an absolute bus crash. They named themselves an adjective. To date, they haven't been able to hold together a remotely consistent lineup from album to album (they only settled on a consistent logo after their fourth). Singer Ben Sotto pronounces English words in such bizarre and implausible ways that it might as well be Martian. And they're absolutely brilliant.

All right, so I did two days of this and then forgot about it, but that's the life of a parent. Formative albums day three! In the early 2000s the music industry was at war with the Internet. Peer to peer sharing programs like Napster were making redistribution of music (and viruses) easier than it ever had been before and the lost revenue was preventing Lars Ulrich from buying a fourth yacht.

Formative albums, day two! After becoming a massive fan of Iron Maiden, I had searched around for other metal bands to get into but nothing ever quite clicked in the same way - when I went off to university in 2002 and had an always-on broadband connection, the search sped up. When looking up something about Iron Maiden on Darklyrics, I got curious about the band immediately below them on the list - "Iron Savior" - at first thinking that they must be just cheaply imitating the name to get attention, but out of curiosity I took a listen...

Doing the ten albums thing from Facebook because it's something to do.

I wasn't into music for a long time, but Iron Maiden was the band that changed that (actually it might have been Crush 40's melodic rock as a stepping stone to this but that's a dorkier-sounding story). Their songs were so different, melodic and interesting - and were made even more fascinating when I found the fansite ironmaidencommentary.com with in-depth background on what every Iron Maiden song means.

Bandcamp is giving 100% of revenue to artists today! Here are a few to look at :) anemia.bandcamp.com/album/messiah-… Messiah by @FoxiFyer's Anemia - a metal opera based on Oneshot!

Forgive me, for I have made another platform engine. I'm trying to go for Prince of Persia-style climbing around and fixed jump lengths per action but without it being too ponderous - the danger is that it's easy to make it not feel right, because you don't have the air control and so on you'd expect from a fast platformer

Sincere congratulations to @Seagate for producing an external hard drive more difficult to get into than Fort Knox. I just needed an IDE-USB adapter and it took an hour with a hammer, chisel and several screwdrivers to eventually crack this thing apart. @Seagate After finally freeing the adapter from five inches of plastic and steel, and plugging the HDD I was trying to restore into it, it works! (By coincidence it uses exactly the same USB and power as my keyboard)

I just remembered a great story my dad once told me, about when he was working to recruit foreign students and faculty at an Aberdeen university. He was sent to pick someone up at the airport that he'd never seen before. He asked the one person in the university who'd met him what he looked like, and he just said "Oh, I'm not very good at describing people... he looks, you know, very Bohemian".