Hope all of you are doing well in this new year so far! Now that the Oscars are around the corner, I’ve been running around attempting to see and review all of the nominations. As a result, when it comes to reviewing games, I had to make a lot of last-minute changes. I intend to complete everything I set out to do in short order, though.
Hope everyone enjoyed the holiday season! As the final month of the year, December proved to be quite a hectic month. In addition to the obligatory weekly game reviews, I ended up seeing a staggering 14 films (6 in theaters and 8 at home). The good news is that I’ve found a way to manage my time better and write the film reviews without disrupting my pattern. In fact, I used the spare time I had to write two editorials. For a majority of my readers, my piece on the highly unethical viral marketing campaign of Ex Machina was the first editorial of mine they read. Then, in the spirit of Christmas, I wrote an editorial about how gamers are ahead of the curve. They’ve gotten a bad rap over the decades, so I felt they needed something to boost their self-confidence.
Hope everyone who celebrates it enjoyed their Thanksgiving! This month saw me finally hit the 150 game review milestone. On top of that, I finally began formally reviewing films. Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me this long!
Hope you all enjoyed Halloween! I have to admit I didn’t do much, but watching these horror films at the last minute was a lot of fun. Too bad I didn’t think to review a survival horror game, huh?
September of 2018 ended up being quite a productive month for me. I managed to make up for that one week in which I didn’t post any reviews (due to my piece on Breath of the Wild going on for over 10,000 words) by posting my reviews of Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3 within the same week. Even better, thanks to having recently written two reviews rather quickly, I am now one week ahead. That is, during a given week, I will be working on next week’s review. This is helpful because it means I won’t feel the need to rush these reviews as long as I stay on schedule. I’m also proud to announce that I have now written over 200 posts on this site!
Well, it wasn’t easy, but I am now finished with the Zelda retrospective. To everyone who managed to stick with it from beginning to end, thank you very much.
Summer is usually my favorite time of the year, but for a litany of reasons, July ended up being quite a hassle. The long and short of it is that after finishing my BioShock 2 review at the end of June, I sought to get a head start on Wario Land. Through a set of very bizarre circumstances, I ended up taking longer than expected with the latter review. When I started on Spirit of Justice directly afterwards, similar to the situation with Prosecutor’s Path, I realized by Wednesday that I wouldn’t be able to finish by the weekend. I therefore spontaneously wrote a review of VVVVVV, as I knew it wouldn’t take too long to write about. Amazingly, even with the extra three days, my Spirit of Justice review ended up taking longer than expected. I was able to finish it by Sunday, but at that point, I had another problem: I only had only a week and a half to finish two reviews. I usually write these reviews during my break periods at work, attempting to get 1,000 words written per day. I knew I couldn’t finish both reviews if I stuck to my usual pattern, so I had to write my Spirit Tracks and BioShock Infinite reviews at the same time (meaning I wrote 1,000 words at home and 1,000 at work). Both reviews ended up being over 6,000 words long. And this was all on top of seeing fourteen films and writing about them. Ironically, despite being a difficult month, a majority of the reviews I wrote were positive.
It wasn’t easy, but despite of all these setbacks, I was able to pull through and get every single review I promised in the last update finished. Even better – my Ace Attorney retrospective is at last complete! The only downside is that I had to momentarily sacrifice a Reel Life feature. I saw quite a few films at the end of the month, and I intend to post the feature for that week this coming Wednesday. The feature after that shall include whichever films I end up seeing this weekend.
Well, we’ve all reached the year’s halfway point. I’m proud to say that I’ve already written twenty-eight reviews so far. With me having taken down my review of BioShock: Infinite earlier this year, the current count is 127. My goal by the end of the year is to reach 150, which I’m feeling good about because I’ve been able to write at least one review per week so far in 2018.
Well, I’ve done it. May 20th marks the four-year anniversary of my very first post on WordPress. I may have taken down my initial review of The Last of Us in favor rewriting it three years later, but I still remember that day. Considering how infrequently I would upload reviews back in 2014, I never would’ve imagined that A) I would find a way to post reviews on a weekly basis and B) an overwhelming majority of the reviews I post now eclipse my earliest reviews in terms of length. Thank you to all of my readers for your continued support!
It is said that “April showers bring May Flowers”. Yeah, that was a predictable opening, wasn’t it?
