Ramblings Archive
Ramblings are articles that cover far less specific criteria than the other categories. Ranging from thoughts regarding the gaming industry as a whole, music, or my personal life, Ramblings is perhaps the most versatile and vague collection of essays put together.
If you were to pick a list of games to go into a beginner's "starter kit" for games criticism, would you pick any at all?
It figures that the first concept to break me of my writer’s block is one that I cannot chance to scamper away like that annoyingly quick insect that flees beneath the couch never to be seen again. As I begin this it is 11:11p.m., time for me to go to sleep so that I might have some semblance of conscious thought reserved for my day job, and yet I fear that if I do so I shall never tap and tack these thoughts into a document.
GoodGamesWriting.com is a Twitter account intended to cultivate and share exemplary pieces of video games journalism and analysis. It is a project run completely by volunteers that has suffered the misfortune of more ups and downs than a broken carnival ride. Today they have sought to kickstart a new weekly conversation starter in the Twitter community, beginning with “what games would you include for a beginning game critic’s ‘starter kit’?”
“Which games,” the Twitter account ponders, “demand closer examination to sharpen your skills?” The common go-to’s of Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line are mentioned, as well as recent hit The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
I wonder what my response would have been had the #GamesStruck4 hashtag not trended those past twenty-four hours? It had already driven me to consider the four greatest games to not only stand as the cornerstone for my tastes, but drove me to appreciate and study design to begin with. The games that had given me the all too common dream of being a game developer only to be crushed by dreadful reality of College programming courses and my inability to speak the language of mathematics. While each of these games is cherished by me, I’m not sure any of them save Final Fantasy Tactics begs the “starter kit” status.
All this energy and no clue where to expend it.
My greatest current frustration is having a buffet of things I wish to do and having no idea what it is I actually want to do. Every evening once I’ve signed off of work I feel myself struck by a sort of paralysis, uncertain how it is I wish to spend my time.
Why not watch something? An anime or a film? I do, after all, need to make sure I have a Silver Screenings column lined up on Monday. If I am spending all of my time watching things, however, I will fail to have sufficient material for GameLog on Fridays. Perhaps I should play a game then instead? Only everything I wish to play I’d also like to record footage of so that I might make a video of it, and my hard drive is low on space until I’ve completed my analysis of Metroid Prime: Echoes. Speaking of, shouldn’t I be editing that?
So I sit down to edit the video, and I feel as if I am letting the blog down.
The desire to play everything is the antithesis to what it should mean to be a critic
It was a little more than five years ago that a blog I had written was promoted to Destructoid’s front page. After two years with an abundance of professional-grade income I found myself capable of purchasing any game that twitched the richter-scale of my mind, no matter how small the tremor of interest in my heart. This resulted in an abundance of games and a need to keep playing the next thing, and if I ever retread old ground I’d feel guilty.
Despite having “penned” the promoted blog myself, it is as if the lessons came to be forgotten as time had passed on. I’m rediscovering them as if they are new, finally allowing myself the pleasure to revisit old titles last year. As can be seen in my monthly report, I’ve only recently begun to apply these revelations to my approach to making videos.
Which, perhaps, keys in to part of the problem. I fancy myself a games critic, and a games critic must play games! Every game must be played, and each game must be critiqued. This is the nature of it, is it not?
A quick look into two separate entries of Boss Fight Books.
One of my goals of 2018 had begun as a Christmas wishlist in 2017. I wanted to begin reading more books focused on video games and their criticism. It is one thing to read interviews and articles online, but there’s a real difference between absorbing my own info and sitting down with a solid book in hand. A book is often more carefully considered, forced to go through more editors and more time. A lot of research has already been done for you as well, collecting a lot of data into a single work. It’s about time I stop hearing people tell me about what was in Masters of Doom and read the book for myself.
This quest started with Boss Fight Books Presents: EarthBound and Final Fantasy V. I don’t know why these precise books caught my attention. Perhaps because a variety of beloved titles had been written about by the various authors? Regardless, I decided to begin with these two titles, each of which proved to be a rather swift read.
Hopes and goals for the year 2018
The SNES Classic has nothing to do with the contents of this post. I just needed an image to start things off.
I suppose I should begin with the fact that I got blind-sided this year with an e-mail from a reader I have never met before. They had asked me a few questions based on my thoughts in Idol Fantasy and similar discussions on Japan and Otaku culture.
It blind-sided me because I assume the only people that read this are personal friends or maybe – maybe – some folks from GamersWithJobs. Otherwise I figure this is mostly self-indulgent. Reading the analytics I’m driven to assume only bots check this thing out. Were it not for the (albeit small) number of downloads I’d assume no one is listening to the podcast, either.
Even small numbers can be intimidating, though.
