Looking over the totality of 2023 and what I published I’m taken aback by how much I was able to do. I can be too hard on myself over not accomplishing anything even when I’ve been pretty consistent this past year. The only low points being that my video output stopped halfway through, and I never finished my Vagrant Story playthrough as intended. I hope to pick that up though I’m not sure when exactly for the latter goal. Currently I’m occupied with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom which is a very long game and I am curious what will come first: the end credits or my interest waning. Currently there are enough unknown spaces I’m curious to see and the spaces themselves are varied, from the depths to the changed overworld and the sky islands, all available to swap between whenever the current one I’m in is growing monotonous. I do want to do a response to the Jared Pressgrove article about Tears of the Kingdom that got shared on the Superculture Discord sometime last year as part of the critical conversations push I started with a response to “Live Service Ruined Gaming” by NovemberHotel on YouTube. I’m not sure if I should be sending these articles directly to the person I’m responding to or not yet. I’m a nobody online and have no relationship to them, which I think will make the article sound hostile, especially if I’m not really a fan of their content. NovemberHotel was just a completely random YouTube home screen recommendation I decided to click on as background noise at work and then decided to respond to as an exercise later. Anyway, I want to dissect and respond to Pressgrove’s writing on Zelda now that I have played enough of it to be confident in my own feelings regarding the various things it does and does not.
Other current ideas are to make a video version of my Homefront piece from last year. I want to be more consistent with videos but they just take so long to record and edit. I want to continue my Games Media in Review series. Perhaps do a year wrap up once I reach the anniversary of the first one for IGN with a revisit in the summer. I also want to continue the game difficulty videos, namely on Demon’s Souls and God of War III and Resistance 2. Mostly keeping it to the PlayStation 3 for that as its set up in the desk area for recording/playing (as is my PS4 but that thing is rarely ever turned on nowadays). Now that I have a typewriter I want to do something on the Alan Wake series, though that will require replaying both. I began doing so last year and rotated between the two as I reached the end of each chapter. The first game has six chapters while the sequel has nineteen or so which means it would eventually just be all sequel unless I add in the DLC and American Nightmare and Control AWE expansion which I might but also means it would take a very long time to actually accomplish. I want the end result to be a scan of my typewritten work but am not sure how to best display that for easy reading online yet.
There are lots of ideas I try to keep track of on an online document, one that would be a natural follow up to the Bodies We Leave Behind piece would be Who We Kill, not sure if I want it to be a brief or lengthy survey of the people and types of enemies we pick to be the ones we kill in shooters and the like. Some other similar shooting game ideas are hitscan versus projectile enemies in games (think Call of Duty and DOOM) and also weapon wheel versus limited carry games (think Halo v Half Life 2). I would like to do something on movies as well. I tried a test video last year on The Return of the Living Dead but that got a copyright strike immediately which will make it hard to do videos without clips and the like from the movie I’m talking about. Now though as I’m binging Sneak Preview with Siskel and Ebert I’ve been film-pilled and also think it would be fun trying to composite myself on both sides of the couch having a conversation with myself over a film or two in their style. I think it would be a fun and interesting writing, filming, editing, and performing exercise.
I hope to keep up the same attitude I had in 2023, to pursue what I’m interested in the moment and not to try and force myself to reach a quota. I do hope to make more videos though, even if they’re lightly edited and simple fare. As always, thank you for your time and consideration, I hope you all are doing well.
What I did in 2023:
In January I published the following:
In February I published the following:
In April I published the following:
You're About to Watch a Video Review in 2009 Among Other Shows
[Test] The Ranking of Film: The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
In May I published the following:
In June I published the following:
Homefront: Invasion Media, Justified Violence, Images with no Substance
Comparing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Difficulty Levels and Investigating the Headshot Problem
In July I published the following:
In August I published the following:
In September I published the following:
In October I published the following:
In November I published the following:
In December I published the following: