2016 Update

Oh my gosh, it's like I forgot this thing! It's almost like nobody really cares about blogger or something. Whodda thunk?

Anywho, an update! As can be seen, I haven't quite updated everything given my 12+ month break on redoing those Semi-Retro Reviews. A few things've happened since, like getting a series ready in the background for its eventual time in the hopeful spotlight. I know many don't like to think any story, especially ambitious ones, don't plan out everything in advance to make sure many things click and aren't all retcons and can see how things were set up earlier in a story.

I obviously didn't get the memo!


The past few years, around three if I were to place a serious number on it, I finally got a ray of inspiration about some character designs with a friend. Originally meant to give me some OCs to draw at my whim as we made up stories for them, as all artists do, I suddenly had some of my older thoughts and ideas from around a decade ago pop in my head and they started slotting in nicely. What began as a simple "they're semi-superheroines living together!" from a theme started to mold into onw of my big "magnum opuses" I always thought about in my head.

Thanks to that, the last threeish years have had me mold these characters into more "real" people, as much as I think they can be real people in a fictional world, and started fleshing them out with some backstories. It started off super-simple and to be loosely done for fun, but I managed to rope them into a world that has recently started becoming more tangible in the last year, around the time I put this on hiatus and locked a bunch of older reviews.

Since then, I've wanted to figure out a better way to do a series-based review of video game franchises and in general games I've never played and have played. The obvious solution I came to was "YouTube! That way I can annoy people with my voice while showcasing my decent-ish video game playing prowess while reviewing and taking apart games from the past to present and seeing how they hold up to the time period they released. It would also have my personal commentary and thought about how they relate to their own series and the industry itself, especially 'the Internet', as a whole."

While I came to that conclusion, I also have gotten a Twitter to more easily type out thoughts on a random basis in general. I'd love to switch these up to a weekly sort of thing and to use things like Twitter to help decide what series and games I should play! Obviously I have a ton of franchises under my personal preferences belt, see most of anything in Super Smash Bros., but it also gives me a reason to try series I've never played before or have meant to play but never got around to it, such as the God of War series and most anything that's Xbox exclusive, since I've never owned the three consoles despite them holding the modern Rare hostage. Dodged a bullet there..?

That being said, I'd also need some sorta established fanbase for that idea to work, especially when I'm starting in the 80s, as the arcade/NES version of Donkey Kong is still the earliest form of a "franchise" I own in a series that was and is well-regarded. As much as I'd love it, I never owned a Game & Watch, which would technically predate Donkey Kong, but also things like Pong and any other Atari-based games were too early for me and many aren't grand series to begin with that are still around. Or perhaps there are and I haven't done my research for it; that's very possible, and hence why I'd love to expand this series!

By the time this was halted, I was just leaving the Fourth Generation and entering the Fifth according to Wikipedia, which means I was near the end of the Super NES/Genesis era and had just started a few PS1 and N64 games. Granted they were from games I already own and franchises I'm deeply familiar with, but it wouldn't've gotten a few I started to actually own and get into since in some capacity, such as Persona and Halo. I've borrowed friend and family's Xbox systems for such games, though I could actually begin to help boost my PC gaming stuff, since starting from the "ancient past" would make them slightly-easier if new series I never tried are on something easy like Steam and I'd be able to finally experience stuff like Undertale. Yeah, I know. I plan on getting on that eventually!

So that's basically what's held this up in a nutshell if anyone cared or even knew about this; I'm not dead! Just had different things take my attention away from this admittedly simple premise. I feel I could fill a void beyond being just another online video game reviewer.

Instead, I could be another online video game reviewer that compares a game to its time, generation, system, competitors, an own series for historical and practical purposes! I feel someone has to keep chronicling how a series begins, how it advances or regresses, the environment it was created/released in, if it affected anything, and how opinion of it was then and now.

That is hopefully a function many don't already do besides other gamers and fans of games and their series in general. I wanna give a voice to the past to inform the present for a better future! To do that, I'd need a bigger pool of people giving me series to try, and I can splice them in some nebulous timeline by series, developer, system, and generation. Really whatever can help people see how things have changed, and to give exposure to lesser-known games in a series or to remind some people of older games and how they affected their series, if any, and if I enjoyed them and think they deserve another shot or not.

Until I get the audience and equipment to properly record games from across multiple systems, this will be put on hold for a little while longer. I'll always keep this idea in mind as I finish up writing my first actual draft of my pet project as a book! I'd love to have it released this November/December, but we'll see how it actually goes. Self publishing for the win!

Wish me luck! Ciao!