Documenting Retro Adventures the Hard Way
I've decided to start another new blog. Because you know, I've done so great at maintaining the old ones. Ahem.
I've been a gamer my whole life. Starting with the Commodore 64 at my grandparents' house, to when we got our Nintendo [1], to the years of PC Master Race BS [2], to today, where I spend most of my gaming hours curating lists of old games and updating things on the Xbox.
Wait, what?
You're familiar with this. I know you. You bought every Humble Bundle that ever looked somewhat interesting, dumped every game you ever owned [3] into Retroarch. You pay for the Xbox Game Passes, the Playstation Onlines, the Nintendo Onlines. You have all the games you can possibly want. All the games you ever wanted. Late stage Capitalism has been a mixed bag [4], but easily the best part is that you, as a gamer, have access to pretty much anything you've ever wanted to play, and it's dirt cheap. Look, you can play the PlayStation's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for free on The Internet Archive straight from your browser.
And yet, when you find those little, thirty-minute chunks, one of a couple things happens:
- Your emulator doesn't work, because you haven't touched it for longer than a week and we all know that Retroarch gets jealous.
- The cool new game you've been meaning to play [5] needs a required update which weighs in at an astonishing 27GB before you can play it. Download time: 4 hours.
- You boot up a game. Play it for a few minutes. Realize it's just not what you were yearning for. You scroll through an interminable list of games. You select nothing, and then sigh and put your controller away when you realize you're going to be late for that thing.
- You pull out your pocket super computer, which has more power than every game console you ever owned as a kid, and start doomscrolling.
I'm not going to sit here and judge you because all I did was describe my weekend. Every weekend. Every evening. It was never this difficult as a kid, yadda yadda, we've all had this thought.
The Backlog
There's a lot of discourse around “the backlog”. And while some view the backlog as an existential failure of us as gamers, there are very real psychological phenomena around these behaviors. Everything from analysis paralysis to commitment avoidance to false progress.
But we're not going to talk about any of that. We know that the problem is that we just have too many games, and back when we were kid we had, like, one game. No, instead we're going to talk about what I intend to do for myself about it.
I have a lot of hobbies that I actually spend quite a bit of time on [6], where I don't have this issue. Crochet is a good one; generally, I will sit down and crochet something if I want to crochet something. Ham radio is another one. If I want to do something with a radio, it's usually a specific thing I do, like packet radio or chatting on the repeater or whatever.
But when it comes to the simple act of playing a game? Why is it that, even though I definitely want to play something, I never want to play anything?
Because I'm not invested.
Becoming Invested.
No, Brandon, go away, not that one
In crochet, I have to work on whatever project I'm working on; I only have one project bag, and it can only hold so many projects [7]. Similarly, while ham radio is a varied hobby, it really requires you to use specific pieces of kit that you can only have a few of.
With games, the only thing I've ever invested time into is. . .well, curating my games collection. I have lists of games I want to play [8], I have multiple systems with games installed on them [9].
There is so much around gaming, in particular retro gaming, that it is trivial to waste literally hours doing things that suspiciously feel like work without ever picking up a game. And hey look, if I pick up a game, and waste time on it because I didn't like it, well, that's just a waste of time. But obviously if I'm spending my time figuring out which games are the good ones to play, that'll lead to more “playing good games” in the nebulous future, right?!
Wrong.
So here's how I'm going to solve this problem, for me:
I'm going to blog about it.
b4ux1t3, b4ux1t3, you sneakily linked a paper about how sharing that you're doing things leads to a decreased likelihood that you will actually do them.
Aha! Caught that, did you? Well, I'll put it this way: Telling you about the thing is the thing.
I'm going to write up. . .reviews? Thoughts? Walkthroughs? for retro video games, right here on this blog. This won't actually have a prescribed format, at first anyway. I was just struck while [10] sitting down to play Legend of Mana on the PS1 just how great the pixel work was. Like, the Playstation is known for chunky 3D characters and FMV cutscenes, but I think a lot of folks would be surprised by the sheer non-playstation-one-ness of the 2D titles for that console. I was running around through a bar in the game and was struck by just how hand-drawn it felt.
I do this for all of my hobbies. I keep extensive notes on TTRPG campaigns and crochet projects I'm working on. And I even used to do it for games back when that was a thing you needed to do [11].
So I want to talk about things like that. Not reviews, necessarily, not “game design showcases” or whatever. Just. . .the stuff that occurs to me while playing these games. The only way to do that is to. . .oh, right, play games.
There will be typoes, there will be run-on sentences. There will be a dearth of em-dashes. But there will be real, genuine reactions to games that you've probably played of, or at least, like, wanted to play. Or have heard of.
What this is not
This will not be a hidden gems playlist. I am not going to schlep through three thousand GameBoy Advance games to find ones you might have missed. I have a job, and kids, and stuff.
This is not a New Years Resolution. It's just a thing I think I wanna do.
This is not a big deal. Lots of people do this, in their head, as they just play video games, and don't even suffer from the issues I've described. I'm just a little bit special and my aged, ADHD brain needs a little accessibility aid to keep the focus.
I'm just going to pick a game, play it through to completion [12], and write about it along the way.
Sound good?
Good.
In case you couldn't tell, the first game will be Legend of Mana for the PlayStation. :)
Footnotes
[1] That was all you called the NES, because there wasn't anything else at the time; it was just “A Nintendo” ↩
[2] so very much World of Warcraft ↩
[3] which is somehow all of them? ↩
[4] to put it. . .mildly ↩
[5] which made the game awards this year and you now realize has been in your library, untouched, for a year ↩
[6] I mean, accounting for “being a parent” and “having a full time job” ↩
[7] it's a large bag ↩
[8] hey look, making a list about games makes me feel like I did something, neat, now I an do something not game-related ↩
[9] ah, yes, Xbox Game Pass, what an excellent abstract investment that will allow me to view and download every game I've ever wanted to play from the last few years ↩
[10] finally ↩
[11] Gosh, Morrowind feels a lot smaller now that I can just look up where that quest giver is on the wiki ↩
[12] let's say we'll use the “any% glitchless-ish” rules of completion ↩