"Lucid Dream" is an Adventure game about a wheelchair bound girl Lucy finding her way through worlds which are a cross between C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" and paintings by Dali. The gameplay reaches heights of dream logic to solve some of the puzzles - at times I made progress without understanding how or why. The puzzles are not tortuously hard, but I did get a sense of accomplishment at times. There's no timed puzzles, or sound based challenges, or dexterity required. Lucy goes on flights of fancy as she tries to come to terms with, or escape into a surreal world from, her father no longer being there. Endings are important and this game does have a suitable ending. The game may not be VR or 3D, but that didn't matter to me playing or enjoying it. I would be happy to play more games like this. The game is episodic, and the environments for each puzzles are not huge. It's usually one puzzle at a time. There are hints in the game itself.

"Divinity: Original Sin 2" is a turn-based RPG set in the fantasy land of Rivellon. You play a Sourcerer (person able to manipulate the magic of Source) on your way to be 'cured' of this ability. You need to escape and discover the truth behind the crusade to rid Rivellon of undesirables like you. A very strong story, with plenty of meaty side quests. Unlike many RPGs the battles go hand in hand with puzzles that could grace an Adventure game. I didn't play the game on the hardest level, but to me it felt challenging and rewarding enough to beat the game. It also felt well balanced. I don't like to spend effort crafting for one thing. I won through the game playing in Lone Wolf mode which meant I had a squad of 2 game characters not 4. This did mean some quests were not available to me, but I preferred the sense of having stronger characters. I may well replay this with different character builds. It's a very good game.

I failed to resist temptation and ordered a new "Macbook Pro 13" from Apple shortly after Apple started using their own chips (Apple Silicon) rather than Intel chips. It took a few weeks to arrive, and has been an interesting experience. I like the fingerprint ID which works very well, the laptop performs well, but the Wi-Fi connection has been troublesome. The laptop kept disconnecting from the Wi-Fi as I was trying to download games from Steam. The laptop was tending to connect on the 2.4GHz band from our BT router rather than the more performant 5GHz band (5GHz however has a shorter range and the antenna in the laptop may work less well than other devices we have). Our router was set to use Channel 1 on 2.4GHz which was congested (improved by resetting that to Channel 11). There's a number of factors at play here, the number of devices we have which has just increased, what our neighbours are doing, how busy the network is. I did consider adding more access points but for simplicity for the moment I'll try using Ethernet from the router when there's big downloads involved. I have learnt something from all this if only how to check what Wi-Fi band a Mac system is on, and what the transfer rate is, and what the router can tell you. As an update to all this the laptop seems reluctant to connect on 5GHz even when it's inches from the router. I discovered late in the date that the BT router can be configured so the 2.6GHz and 5GHz bands appear in different networks. By doing that I can force the laptop to always use the 5GHz band.

The setting for "Death in Paradise" is lovely, the sun battered beaches of the Caribbean, topical rainforests, a different background. The chemistry of the cast (in the first seasons at least) worked very well, a nice mix of personalities with their differences. Each episode features a murder (or two or more) which the Saint Marie police force have to solve. There's enough suspects to make it interesting, and often the mysteries have a classic whodunit feel to them. So the episodes finish with a Poirot style reveal to those involved in the case. There often isn't enough evidence to really convict the murderer(s), particularly if they stay silent. There are locked room mysteries where murderers achieve the impossible. Time and truth cannot be relied on. A pleasant evening's watch.

Virginia and I like to dine out once a week - this not only saves on her cooking and us washing up, and varies the cuisine, but also gives us more quality time together. The Covid pandemic has interrupted this discipline. So instead we've resorted to having food delivered to us which was something we hadn't done before 2020. We've had quite a few deliveries from the Old Crown in Girton, a village next to Histon where we live. I tend to go for either their Crown burger or fish and chips, I do like their chips. There's also a halloumi burger which is very edible. It was slightly off-putting when they almost branded the burger buns with their logo. Getting food in a delivery to your door is different to having brought to your table on a plate. The pasta in the delivered pasta dishes comes as intimidating geometric mounds. We've also had pizzas from Pizza Hut. I do like pepperoni pizzas, and apologies for being boring but that is what I usually have. If pizza slices can't be consumed there and then they can serve as fodder for the following day. A delivery from Pizza Hut was the only delivery which had problems finding our house. This year we've also tried getting deliveries through Just Eat. This has worked quite well, we've ordered from "The Rose and Crown" in Histon. Virginia has appreciated how warm the food is when it reaches us, helped by how close they are. The gravy is rich and plentiful. There's a good range of dishes available, and we'll have to try their Sunday roasts. We've been surprised by the food coming early, even when we've been warned it would be late. We've also had Chinese food from the Golden Dragon again through Just Eat. This was as a stand in for our Valentine's Day meal out - we had a set menu including aromatic crispy duck and two chicken and sweetcorn soups. Pleasant and filling.

"And The Devil Will Drag You Under" (Jack Chalker 1979) is about an alcoholic demon's quest to save the world from collision with a large heavy object (in this case an asteroid.) The demon contrives to send two humans on missions to collect the magical orbs needed to persuade the large heavy object from continuing on its collision course. The missions are to different worlds with different rules and physics to our own, but each world has a reality and depth of its own. Chalker was skilled at world-building and each mission is memorable. The book is episodic, the two humans only combine forces at the end of the book. Common Chalker themes like transformation of the human body, magical science and scientific magic, and variation in the laws of physics, come into play. The book's tone is often humorous but there are important ethical choices - how far will the humans go to save our world? What will they compromise? And there aren't always nice answers. Chalker has a very satisfying ending to the book (not all of his books or series have great endings but this one does have.) This is a book I read every so often, not just once or twice.

I had been waiting for a few days for the letter to come. The letter to invite me for my very own vaccination. The NHS wrote to me last week, and I duly went to the webpage indicated, and entered data onto the forms. That worked fine - what wasn't so fine was the only vaccination centres the "NHS" offered me were not so easy to get to. The best was the centre of Cambridge, the others miles away and I mean miles. It was a big relief when my GP's surgery contacted me independently and the centres they were offering were very much closer and easier to get. So sorry NHS I booked up to go to the community centre in Milton this afternoon. Google Maps on the iPhone guided me to the centre which was well organised, a lot of helpful stewards directing people around. I had to wait to park as someone manoeuvred a large vehicle backwards, but I still had plenty of time to waste so I walked around a bit so as not to be too early. As it transpired while in theory I had a set time to be there in practice one could turn up within reason when one felt like. I guess a different day probably wouldn't work but an hour or two didn't matter. I was also lulled into a false sense of security by how short the queue was I could see. So I confirmed to one of the stewards I hadn't been abroad that morning and headed off for the end of the queue. And discovered it wasn't a short queue of a handful of people but a long queue which snaked around the side of the building and then a recreation ground! The queue did move quite quickly so it wasn't as bad as it seemed. A steward was processing the people in the queue, asking them questions which she wrote down on a bit of paper she gave them. Name date of birth and post code. It was a surprise when I saw her name tag as I recognised the name! She (Caroline) recognised my name too and we had a little chat. We didn't recognise each other by face as we were wearing masks. Not everyone was. A young guy who could have been Middle Eastern was eschewing any face covering, perhaps he had some condition which meant he couldn't wear a mask. I did raise my mask once or twice for some sips of water. While I was having my bit of paper filled in an elderly racecourse tout like individual sneaked into the queue in front of me. On being advised that he should join the end of the queue which was further along he went off in a huff, threatening he wasn't going to have a vaccination after all. One way of expressing outrage at not being allowed to queue jump. After not too long I reached the entrance room, where I handed over the piece of paper temporarily to a girl with a HP Thinkpad. She confirmed the first line of my address and handed the paper back. I also was told do some hand sanitisation and collect a leaflet about the AstraZeneca vaccine we were going to be injected. The entrance room held a second queue which involved standing on spots on the floor, and moving when the next spot was free. I did consider trying to do a standing jump from spot to spot but 2 metres is beyond my physical abilities. That didn't take long and I stood in the doorway of the main hall, where there were people who had been punctured sitting in chairs in the middle, and a number of booths for the puncturing round two walls. It was only seconds before I was directed to number 6 and the expert ministrations of Sue and Sara. They asked me if I was taking rat poison which I wasn't. I had a little difficulty getting my right arm limp enough for Sara to do the business (best was to just let the arm hang down). It didn't take long and I was given a card celebrating the event and a sticker too. I didn't sit with the others in the hall, but in my car so I could take my mask off. I had brought a crossword book to help pass the time. I did feel a little off, a little queasy perhaps, but still able to drive back from Milton to the homestead. The side effects didn't kick in until late at night. I started shivering as if I was in the arctic, trembling. Later on I felt hot like I was in the desert sun. Couldn't sleep at all. The day after I got a streaming cold.

I looked at someone else's website and spotted that the word "correspondence" had been misspelt to end "dance". Having pointed that out I was embarrassed when I spotted on my own website that I couldn't spell "association" in places. It is difficult to spot spelling mistakes particularly in what we write ourselves. So I decided to add a step to spell check my personal website before it gets uploaded to the web. This was a challenge on several fronts. There's a lot of foreign words on my website thanks to the foreign films and TV I like. There's a lot of names on my website which weren't in the word list I started with (even ignoring made up names from SF books). The word list I started with didn't have month names in it. I also discovered that the markdown renderer I was using to convert markdown to HTML was replacing HTML entity codes with special characters. So é was ending up as é. I tried Redcarpet instead of commonmarker but this behaved the same way. There wasn't an option on them to disable this replacement. Googling revealed other people had hit the problem and been told to work around it themselves. So before applying the markdown rendering I replace the HTML entity codes with strings that won't be modified, then substitute the HTML entity codes back in afterwards. Sigh.

This isn't what I intended to produce but Let's write a story is a parody of Aesop's fable "The Fox and the Goat" which lets you choose elements of the story. I had intended to implement the game using Twine but ended up implementing directly in "HTML" and "Javascript". I still consider "Twine" good stuff. Writing the text for this 'game' took ages as there are a lot of paths through the game, and I doubt most players will try more than a handful of paths. Checking the resulting game for mistakes and also ensuring as far as possible the grammar made sense took a long time as well. There is a little seriousness underneath the nonsense drivel waffle of Let's write a story. I believe everyone can be creative and artistic, not just those who are labelled Artists. Managers never liked this but there is an artistry to writing computer software for instance. Also the tales we tell are almost all retellings reworkings of earlier tales.

Virginia has completed her Coronavirus project, a new woollen throw for the couch in the lounge! Waiting to see what Amelia makes of it.

We've been away for a few days with Virginia's sister Justine in Frinton, and a very restful time it was. Perhaps 'attractions' have tended to go to nearby Walton-on-the-Naze, or Clacton which isn't that far, and so left Frinton becalmed. Perhaps Frinton has a psychic balance of peace which repels those who ooze stress. It is very tranquil wandering along the sea front, admiring the beach huts (available for rent or purchase). Quite a few people are employed keeping the numerous beach huts in trim. We walked to Walton one day which is only a stone's throw away. The pier there was closed, as was the RNLI shop Virginia and I got cards in on Tufty Club outings. The Round Table fish and chip place that we normally frequent on Tufty Club outings was also shut, but we had sandwiches at a place along the seafront in Walton sadly exposed to cigarette smoke. Virginia did detect some delicious doughnuts for us to have on the way back. Mealwise much nicer was a visit to Parker's Garden Centre in Frinton, we ate inside a tent all having a welcome hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows. We strayed to Clacton one day, the pier there has quite a few attractions but the place felt down market.

"Gorogoa" is both an innovative puzzle game and Art with a capital A. When playing the game you see a 2x2 grid of up to 4 image tiles, by sliding the image tiles around you change things in the scenes in those image files, enable things to happen. There are a few sequences where you need to perform actions in quick succession but mostly there is no time pressure. Just the pressure of how on Earth do I solve this puzzle and move on? The artwork by Jason Roberts is beautiful and evocative. Even without the puzzles this would still be an enchanting experience. And there is a massive gallery of artwork to see. So this is a game that is well worth everyone playing once. My regret about playing "Gorogoa" is that however is that for me it was just a series of highly artistic puzzles. One could make up a story, with effort one could decide on a tale behind the scenes one sees, but I didn't feel motivated to do so. To me a game or art should be about something, and my sensation of "Gorogoa" was limited.

"Raining in the mountain" is a masterpiece by "King Hu". The plot of the film is about choosing a successor to the Abbot in a remote Buddhist monastery. A general and a rich merchant come nominally to help in the selection, but both bring less than holy retainers as they're secretly after a rare scroll by Tripitaka (the historical monk behind the "Journey to the West" Chinese tale). The film proceeds steadily and masterly to its turnabout climax. Slowly the would be thieves explore where the scroll is hidden, slowly they clash with each other apparently invisibly top the rest of the monastery. Slowly we explore the factions inside the monastery, how less than spiritual most of the monks are. The film is rooted in Chinese thought, the concept of "wu wei" or "effortless action" permeates what is going on. And permeates too the martial arts action where King Hu has his actors eluding gravity with leaps and bounds. The Abbot's successor is chosen to the consternation of many, but the thieves take the opportunity to fight over the treasured scroll. "Feng Hsu's" character (White Fox) is another of "King Hu's" strong women warriors, an enigmatic paradox. At the end of the film we learn the true value of the scroll, and everyone gets what they deserve. There are transcendental moments of great Art in this epic film.

"Gremlins" is a still very watchable comedy horror from when special effects didn't have anything to with computers. An inventor / salesman finds a strange pet in Chinatown as a Christmas present for his son. However there are rules for looking after this new pet, and unfortunately those rules are not kept. So a quiet American small town is overrun by small lunatic monsters film hellbent on having devilish fun. Though the accent is on the comedy there are some macabre touches here and there. There are also some moral touches - so the nasty Mrs Deagle gets her comeuppance, the xenophobic Mr Futterman is another victim, and at the end there is a message about us not being ready to look after certain things. The film starts with character comedy, setting the scene, painting the people involved. Then slowly things get out of control before the film shifts into high gear and it's all about how much destruction the gremlins can cause, and how entertainingly they can be eradicated. A classic film.

In "District 9" a vast alien ship sits in the skies over Johannesburg, the 'prawns' (the alien refugees on board) trapped in "District 9" a large shanty town. The authorities decide to clear "District 9" and relocate the unwanted immigrants. Unfortunately for Sharlto Copley's character delegated to lead the operation who gets exposed to an alien substance and starts turning into one of the aliens himself... This is a great film. It is a gritty realistic believable tale, helped by being shot in a documentary fashion. This is a story about refugees where telling it as Science Fiction enables us to look at refugees and refugee camps afresh. There is a range of people behaving as they really behave, from the government hoping to benefit from alien weaponry to the gangsters selling dubious food to the aliens. Some of its depth will speak more to those in South Africa with the racial tensions there. Sharlto Copley's character goes on a journey both physical and spiritual, as he changes from man to alien. We go on this painful journey with him, aligning us for the tremendous finale to the film. It would be a shame since there's all that alien weaponry around not to see some of it in action!

"Day by Night" (published 1980) is a young adult story by Tanith Lee. Set in a world which does not revolve, the heroine lives in the side in endless day, the hero on the side in endless night. To each the other is a fantasy. Yet their interleaved stories mirror each other, and their fates intertwine. Rich high fantasy, full of Tanith Lee's decadence and magic. This is science fiction but the technology is advanced unto magic.

In "High Kick Girl!" a schoolgirl who only thinks of Karate as being about winning fights gets involved with a criminal gang of fighters. She has to be rescued and reformed by her sensei (teacher) who leads her back onto the straight and narrow. This may not be an ambitious or profound piece of filmmaking but it is a great example of the genre. A film I don't mind rewatching. The actors (including the female lead Rina Takeda) genuinely know karate.

Buried underground safe from the nuclear war and its aftermath lies the "City of Ember". Its builders made it self-sufficient, capable of sustaining a large community. But the lights are going out, the machinery is falling apart. Did the builders leave a way out? Can two teenagers find it before darkness falls for ever? The star of this film is the City of Ember itself. A stunning portrayal not only of a working survivalist city, and and how people adapt as it stops working as it should, but also of the community that evolves underground. Worth viewing for that reason alone. Bill Murray comes over brilliantly as the slimeball mayor, content to gorge himself on his private haul while the city declines and falls.

A sequel to "Spy Kids" which unusually for a sequel is just as good as the first film! A rollercoaster film of visual gags and great silliness. Carmen and Juni Cortez are now part of the Spy Kids organisation but Juni gets blamed for a powerful device falling into the hands of bad guys with big red hats. They set off secretly to a mysterious island where they encounter genetically mutated creatures and feisty skeletons and other weirdness. Great fun!

In "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl" a young boy's imaginary friends "Sharkboy" and "Lavagirl" recruit him to help save their planet. The director's children are credited for the story which is child-like. However the colourful planet in need of saving, and the jokes like a realised stream of consciousness plus train of thought, make this fun to watch.

One activity I though I might do when I retired was learn a foreign language. So I've started trying to learn Japanese, for the moment using apps on my iPad rather than evening classes. Evening classes were out of course during the time of Covid. Japanese as a language presents some distinct challenges. Sensible languages have just one writing systems, which in good languages is phonetic so you can look at a word and know how it's said. So far I've encountered three different writing systems the Japanese use - "Hiragana" which is a phonetic system for native Japanese words, "Katakana" which is a parallel phonetic system for non-Japanese words, and "Kanji" which are Chinese characters ( "Kanji" comes from "Hanzi" which is literally Chinese characters) the Japanese use just to make life interesting. Even more interesting is that the "Kanji" characters can be pronounced in multiple ways, one way seemingly derived from the Chinese pronunciation, another way from the Japanese word that the Japanese borrowed the Chinese character to represent. There is a system of modifiers which can be applied to the "Hiragana" and "Katakana" to get different sounds. So far I've used the Hiragana Quest app to learn "Hiragana" and "Katakana". This app does a great job of suggesting stories to help one remember the "Hiragana" and "Katakana" symbols, and also giving a little background to the writing systems. However the app is limited to learning the writing system and the sounds, no further. I'm trying Drops to learn words. "Drops" has a great drilling system, and claims you can learn a language on 5 minutes a day. For Japanese at least there's no background given, or no explanation of the different sounds for a given "Kanji" character. So "Drops" is great for what it is, but on its own it's not enough.

"Hitchhiker: A Mystery Games" sees you hitchhiking 5 rides as you attempt to remember (yes you start as another amnesiac). Most of the game you are sitting in the passenger's seat looking out through the windscreen. The view is first person with effective simple 3D graphics. There is minimal gameplay, the few puzzles can be solved by perseverance. The game interface is clean and easy, I played using a mouse on a Mac. The writing in this game is great and twisty. Your journey takes you to strange places. While you do come to the end of the game what it all means is up to each player. To that extent the whole of the game is less than the sum of the parts. But that may be part of the fun of this imaginative title.

"Little Orpheus" is a brilliant platformer in which you run jump swing through nine fantastical worlds. You do need to time some of the jumps well, there are several chase sequences, and the last section has a tougher arcade like sequence. I managed with a number of retries, I count myself as action challenged, but you are warned. The plot has a hapless Soviet cosmonaut launched into the Earth on a rocket drill to see if there's subterranean regions suitable of Socialist colonisation. On his unsuccessful return he has to explain to an intimidating general what happened, and what happened to the general's atomic bomb ( "Little Orpheus" ) he was entrusted with. His response is to spin yarns worthy of Don Quixote and Baron Munchhausen about heroic odysseys deep inside the Earth. Including meeting up with space dog Laika. The worlds are stunning, there is a lot of humour, the production values are high.

I grew up watching the BBC programme Dr Who. Compared to modern American SF programmes with loads of resources thrown at them what I watched must seem amateurish and slipshod. But at the time it was the latest and greatest. Even now the storylines shine to me set against the poor writing in the big budget American offerings. On one of the forums I frequent a guy posted about attending a Dr Who day organized by "Who's At the Playhouse". This seemed like something I ought to do once so I started following the Facebook page Who's at the Playhouse. When a Dr Who event was announced celebrating the making of the Jon Pertwee "The Daemons" serial at Aldbourne I signed up. Due to Covid the day got postponed a little but it did arrive and I found myself there.

In "Free Guy" a bank teller who discovers he is actually a background player in an open-world video game, decides to become the hero of his own story…one he rewrites himself. Now in a world where there are no limits, he is determined to be the guy who saves his world his way… before it is too late. Similar to the great "The Truman Show" but not as profound. Mix in video games, a "Groundhog Day" kind of repeating, and lots of allusions to popular culture. The end result is a very enjoyable romp of a film, cleverer at the start where Ryan Reynold's character has a very blase acceptance at the boring sameness of his world - and at the high body count as players enjoy themselves wasting NPCs. Perhaps predictable towards the end, but like Guy's dash towards the hidden it does successfully reach its end.

In a secluded part of town there is a special restaurant. The food here is the best you've ever tasted. Eating this food will grant you your heartfelt wish but... there is a cost. For this is a witch's diner. Similar in feel to Mystic Pop-up Bar and Hotel del Luna but benefits by being shorter. The feeling falters less, and the plot works better. The story loops back on itself in a sweet way.

A sweet siesta in Salisbury

The "The Guilty Secret" is short and sweet, very sweet. The plot apparently is about a high school girl with a crush on her friend's boyfriend. She keeps this a secret, fearing it will spoil that friendship, but tells a girl she meets accidentally at a study academy as a kind of release from keeping that secret. One day the girl who knows this all important secret turns up in her classroom as a transfer student - will this secret be revealed? But it's much deeper than that, and what the series is about only becomes clear by the end. This is about secrets, the reasons we feel we need to keep them secret, about hiding pain and guilt and fear inside us. And sometimes what hurts others more is that we keep secrets rather than what we are keeping secret in the first place. The setting may be teenagers in a school (like many other TV series) but the subject matter applies to everyone. It's about assumptions we make, wrong assumptions and the damage they cause. The series is nicely paced and acted. I felt for the characters who seemed believable to me rather than the histrionics in some series. It ends on a positive note. There is hope.

The cake Virginia did for my retirement party.

I was going to have a retirement party last year but due to Covid many bigger events (like Football competitions) got delayed so I was in good company having my retirement party a year late. I got proper invitations done (too many of them) - in with the invitations themselves done by BananaPrint came a note from a Deanna thanking me for my order. If Deanna is a real person (which would be nice) I wonder how she felt about what the card said. If one's more cynical one could take Deanna as being the name of a printing and collating machine. Or even assume there's no Deanna at all, someone just thinks this is a good gimmick to encourage repeat orders. But I like to think there is a real Deanna who likes to some extent the job she does. Virginia prepared a splendid cake - a map of some of the world with a cruise ship on it. But it was huge - heavy and cumbersome to carry around. I got sticky stuff on me and my pullover carrying it into the Holiday Inn from the car. We didn't manage to finish the cake, I overdosed on sugar trying to finish one of the large chunks Virginia handed out. The "Holiday Inn" had set out the room very nicely, and provided a good buffet lunch. Once again I overdid things and there was too much food. It was very hard to know how much to order. Virginia and I decorated the room with balloons - I could blow them up but failed to tie them up so they didn't immediately deflate. The balloons hung downwards so the "Happy Retirement" legend was upside down on them. Helium's a rare gas we couldn't find any you see. It was worrying at first when Virginia and I were the only ones there, I had worried that I might have told the hotel the wrong date! People trickled in (everyone I thought might come in the end did come) which was a relief! I wasn't necessarily expecting cards and gifts but people did bring them - I didn't make notes of who brought what. I also didn't take pictures of the room with people in it which I should have done. I really enjoyed this day, and spending time with friends and family. I wish I could have spent more time and mixed with everyone who came. Terry Cath Alex Howie Robin Elizabeth Iain Yvonne Christine Jonathan Sandra Laura Phillip Pat Richard Ian Julie Keith Madeleine William Catherine Justine Meredith Carmen Jan - my sincere thanks for coming.

The Canaries: our first cruise in over two and a half years

"Fantasian" is a Japanese turn-based RPG set among the multiverses under threat from a rogue god. You start as Leo, an amnesiac hero, but gather a roster of characters three of whom can be active in the many battles you will fight. During battles you will be able (and need) to switch characters. The game is friendly to control, for instance though there are random enemy encounters typical of JPRGs you can batch up dealing with these random enemies using the 'dimengeon' you will acquire. The scenes in "Fantasian" are 3D modelled from handcrafted dioramas giving the game a distinctive look. Your odyssey will take you from volcanic caves to frozen tundras to sylvan forests to machine cities, each with their own musical background. I particularly liked the machine city. The boss battles can be very hard, seemingly impossible. During gameplay you will acquire a lot of different rings and choosing which ring to wear for each battle is indispensable. Levelling up I found necessary to win through, the recommended levels for key areas were underestimates I felt. Unlike some RPGs there were not different difficulty settings. In the second half of the game you can customise your party using the "growth tree". In practise towards the end of the game the characters have all grown pretty much as far as they can. You can also enhance your armour and weapons, I was a little random here in what I upgraded. The battles can last a long time. In particular the final battle and the credits and the post finale gameplay lasted at least an hour for me. I didn't complete all the gameplay, you can travel to 'Yim's Void' but having spent over 200 hours playing "Fantasian" I felt the need to move onto other games on my backlist.

Many of the ten plus post boxes around Histon where Virginia and I live have been decorated with woollen creations for Christmas. It adds a lovely touch to the season. I am impressed that these decorations have stayed there - in some places in the UK these decorations would have been nicked instantly. This is the second year this decoration has happened. A local group of knitters supported by local business worked for months on these installations. For more information see HI Hub. Let's celebrate this worthy contribution to the Christmas spirit.