Not too long after the first 1001 Video Games list was released came this updated edition, which replaced 21 entries with much better choices. Ridiculous decisions were still made regarding what to leave in, but that's just a personal opinion now, isn't it?
Over the course of playing, or trying to play, all these games, I've got an 8-page long list of titles that I've 'Actually gotta play/watch', be it because I wasn't able to play them first time around, or that I really wanted to play them fully when time allowed.
Some have already been crossed off. Company of Heroes, for example. Batman: Arkham Asylum. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. The highlight of this entire list of discoveries, perhaps, Yakuza 2. I'm currently going through Yakuza 5 and there's a Judgment sequel coming out soon, too, and I know I had a good time with the first one.
Some of the games are games I've completed in the past and want to see again. The Metal Gears and Grand Theft Autos, for example, but there are some brand new adventures that I really ought to sink my teeth into, in genres I wouldn't normally think about, but that this 1001 list has convinced me that I should.
But how to go about doing that?
I first thought that I'd go through them in order, oldest to newest, giving me a chance to have the updated edition of the list butt in to tell us what had been dropped by this point, and what had taken its place, but sometimes you're just not in the mood for a certain kind of game, and this should be fun, right?
Maybe I should just carry on retroactively updating the posts to tell readers what has changed in my opinion having been able to play more of the game. I don't make any attempt to indicate which old posts have changed, though, so you tend to just stumble across them.
I dabbled, for a week or two, with a post detailing what I had been playing that week, which was partly a way to say that outside of this 1001 list, I play other games, both video and tabletop, all of which are worth talking about to someone, somewhere, in some capacity. Perhaps I bring that back, and turn the Evergrowing Backlog into more of a journal and less of a journey.
In short, I don't know what I'm doing with this anymore, in a public facing way at least. Away from the blog, I'll just be doing whatever interests me. Currently playing Yakuza 5, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, and Neptune's Pride. Next week? Who knows.
What do I want to do, though?
This thing was only ever for my benefit. It gave me something to do that elicited strong reactions either way, and broadened my knowledge of video gaming, a hobby that, as time goes on, I grow distant towards.
I'm out of the loop, despite following along with interesting YouTubers and the like, but disposable income is effectively non-existent, so I'm left to enjoy what I actually have for as long as I can, or else pick something up so far down the line that it might as well be a different game to what it started life as, with players already having moved on to its sequel or more successful competitor.
There is still so much for me to get out of this project. I won't be bored by what I have left to explore. It's the telling anyone about it that starts to ask questions along the lines of "Why, though?"
A quick glance of the stats regarding traffic to this site reveals an awful lot of links coming from the seedier side of the internet, for reasons I can't even comprehend. Bots being bots, I guess? Page views came in from all across the world, though. How many were made by human eyeballs? I've no idea.
It's hard to stand out when video is more engaging, and even harder when the games you're writing about are older than most of the players are these days. As I said years ago, however, this was a personal project - anyone else looking in was a bonus.
Yeah, but answer the question. What do you want to do?
Right now, I've got lots of ideas in my head, most of them relating to board gaming, some of them relating to YouTube, but of the one idea that is related to video gaming and therefore related to this blog is the idea of writing a text adventure of some kind.
There are a whole bunch of tools to make the creation of a text adventure both easy, authentic to the old school adventures in style, or so radically different to what people think of when they see the words 'text adventure' that you can take them through a story like no other.
I'd love to make a text adventure. I just don't have a damn clue what it'd be about. But the pin is firmly in that idea for the future.
The actual future, I don't know. If the blog gets new posts, it gets new posts. It's my little corner of the Internet for as long as I want it, after all.
If it doesn't, know that I've found something to interest me elsewhere - that I'm doing whatever makes me happy that day.
Enjoy yourselves now. Game on.