Top 15 Vocaloid Songs of 2021

Aside from gaming, my next biggest passion is music with Vocaloid being a massive inspiration and key factor to one of my favourite sub-genres, Utaite. I like to include my favourite new songs each month at the end of my Monthly Summary posts, but considering how much I value music in my day-to-day life, I don’t give it that much attention on the blog. Since August 31st was Hatsune Miku’s 15th Anniversary, I decided to drag this post, featuring my favourite 15 Vocaloid songs of 2021, out of the drafts folder – 7 of which feature Hatsune Miku. I was unsure how best to organise these songs as choosing 15 favourites was difficult enough, never mind ranking them individually, so I decided to list them as a timeline progressing throughout the year. I’m still learning Japanese, so I’ve chosen these songs based on their musical qualities rather than for their lyrics. Now let’s get started!

Monthly Summary: August 2022

Welcome to another Monthly Summary here at gamergal.exe! I didn’t play or finish quite as many games as I did in July, but I did play some awesome games this month and I’m super pleased that I managed to concentrate on a few larger games from the backlog. Despite not publishing any posts on the blog for the entire month, I seem to have gained some inspiration over the past few days to write some new posts for next month, so I’m going to try my best to make September more active over here and hopefully on Twitter too. For now though, let’s take a look at some of the great games I played, and finished, during August:

Monthly Summary: July 2022

It’s Monthly Summary time once again! July was a much better month than June in terms of gaming and not only did I complete a generous handful of games, I also started quite a few more! I managed to get stuck into some recently purchased titles and ended up ticking the majority of them off my list, but I started a couple of games that I wasn’t expecting to play anytime soon too which was a nice surprise really, even for me. Before I go spoiling which games I’m into at the moment, let’s take a look at what I achieved throughout July:

Otome Announcements: 2023

It’s been an exciting week for otome fans! Aksys Games’ appearance at AX2022 at the beginning of July had otome lovers waiting in anticipation of a new otome game since they usually have something special to reveal. To everyone’s surprise, Aksys didn’t just have one otome annoumcement up their sleeve… they had four. Yes, you read that right! FOUR!!

Monthly Summary: June 2022

Welcome to another Monthly Summary! I recall saying at the end of May’s summary that I was looking forward to seeing the results of this post due to all the new releases June brought… Unfortunately, this has actually turned out to be one of the most uninspiring posts, ever. I went on holiday at the beginning of the month and left all my gaming gear at home to give myself a break and I’ve since taken a few long weekends off as well to go out and do some other stuff. I’m also frantically looking to buy a house, so I’ve been spending a lot of time searching online and going out to viewings too. This has taken up a lot of my time, so I’ve not had the interest to start any new games for now.

A lot of my minimal gaming time this month was actually dedicated Steam’s Next Fest which you can read all about here. I played 21 demos during the week-long festival and found some awesome new indie games to keep my eye on. Aside from that, I’ve only really been playing one game – but you’ll have to read on to find out which game completely captured my attention!

Steam Next Fest: June 2022

It doesn’t seem to have been long since Steam held their previous Next Fest back in February, but here we are again and this time it’s been bigger and better than ever! From Monday the 13th of June until Monday the 20th of June, Steam held another Next Fest featuring over 1000 demos available for anyone with a Steam account to download and play for free! For those of you that haven’t heard of Next Fest before, these week-long gaming festivals hosted by Steam periodically, feature demos for hundreds (going on thousands) of upcoming games specifically by indie developers. Next Fest seems to get bigger each time and it’s the perfect opportunity to try out some new games and show your support to indie devs at the same time!

Monthly Summary: May 2022

Welcome to another Monthly Summary! It seems like I’m writing these far too often – this month has completely flown by! May saw the continuation on a bunch of games I’ve had ongoing for a while and I also started a few new ones, but I’ve mainly been watching anime over the past few weeks. I feel a bit disappointed that I didn’t manage to finish a few more games and write a couple more posts that I had planned, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to do as much as I used to anymore and I’ve found myself getting far too excited about all the games scheduled for release next month. Before I get too carried away, let’s take a look at May’s results:

Top 10 Anime OP/ED Songs #AniMay 2022

May is all about anime over here at gamergal.exe and my favourite thing about AniMay is creating my yearly OP/ED post! Despite not watching as much anime over the past year as I have done previously, I’ve still managed to find some super new tracks from a bunch of different series, however, when compared to my previous posts for 2020 and 2021, I don’t feel like this line up is quite as strong. Overall, I feel like the quality for anime themes has dropped recently; but that doesn’t mean they’re all bad. Usually, I feature 10 themes per post, and since I struggled to narrow it down this time, we’ve ended up with 11. Please take a listen to my favourite themes from the anime I’ve watched over the past 12 months and let me know your favourites too!

Spring Anime Skirmish 2022: Round 1

May is the month where I dedicate my blog to the world of anime! I’ve done this in various ways over the past few years, but for 2022, I decided to do something I normally wouldn’t do and dive into the spring anime season while it’s still fresh. I’m the type of person who prefers to binge watch shows as my memory is pretty terrible for single episodes, but there were just so many shows that caught my interest this season that I couldn’t wait for them to finish airing. I decided to turn this endeavour into some sort of “anime battle” to find some new favourites, so I spent my long bank holiday weekend watching the introductory episodes of 16 different anime from the spring season.

Monthly Summary: April 2022

It’s the end of April already, which means it’s time for another Monthly Summary! I’m pleased with the progress I made this month by finishing 3 games and I also started some more great games that have been in the backlog for way too long. I’m trying my best to work through some of the longer games I’ve previously put aside in between new releases and I even hosted my first Twitter poll on which game I should play next. This was actually a lot of fun and I’ll probably end up doing this every time I need to start a new game as I waste so much time trying to decide when I could be putting that time into a game. Music releases have also been phenomenal this month which has encouraged me to play my guitar more in between gaming with hopes of someday releasing my own covers…

That’s a topic for another day, so let’s take a look at my month in gaming. Here’s what I got up to during April: