A cautious return to blogging...

It’s been a while since my last blog post where I told you all not to expect too much more from me in the future due to having to accommodate a number of significant changes in my life. Right now, we’re coming up on New Year, and with New Year comes New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve got a number of them, but for now, I’m going to try and get my gaming blog going again.

A few things have changed since I last posted. I’ve still been playing the Xbox 360 and various games on my laptop, but also I’ve been playing Kirsty’s Playstation 4, and she was kind enough to buy me a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. We’ve been having a laugh with that! I’ve not been playing as many hobby games as I used to due to time allowances, but I always enjoy it on those occasions where I do, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have acquired some new games over the last few weeks!

So I’m looking forward to writing about it all again. I’ll try and get most of my regular series going, so Last Week’s Games should come out on Mondays. One thing I’m not going to be doing next year though is playing a new game every week, as I tried to do this year. It was a well-intentioned attempt to play at least some of the games I’ve been buying, but ultimately it meant that I wasn’t getting very far on the games I was playing and I enjoyed them a lot less than I could have done.

I therefore face a new challenge this year: Trying to write about more or less the same games each week and make it sound interesting. For example, while I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the PS4, Yakuza Zero is the only game into which I’ve put any significant amount of time. I currently own two games for the Switch, (Street Fighter and Rayman,) and as I tend to buy games on the cheap, I probably won’t own too many more for a while. And on those occasions where I’m alone with my laptop long enough to play a game on it, it tends to be the same one each time now (currently Regicide.) The same is true for my Kindle Fire; the only game I’ve played on that for months is 8-Ball Pool and I really enjoy that but there’s a certain amount of skill involved with it, rather than clicking things to make things happen until it starts demanding money. My 360 is always there but the only game I’ve played on that for a while is XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Some semblance of progression on at least one game a week should be enough for me to find something to write about, we’ll see how that pans out.

As for the Hobby games, it’s as and when I can find the time. I’ve had to drop the Black Country Role Playing Society indefinitely; we’ll see how things pan out but it will be a long time, if ever, before I will be able to return. I’ve still got the monthly RPG group; that tends to be pretty constant. I’m hopefully going to be having some games nights around my flat so I might get some board games in. The Wargames, have had a massive slowdown, as it’s a faff to make it happen; I’ve missed painting my models but requires a certain amount of planning and deliberation to find time to do it, which if I’m honest sucks a lot of the fun out of it. Doing it with two or more people in order to actually play a game is something I haven’t attempted in years (I just go down to the relevant shops and played a game with whoever is there.) You can be rest assured that on those occasions where I do manage to get a game in, I’ll be writing about it!

2019 will going to be an interesting year, whatever happens. I hopefully won’t buy too many more games in the future but I might at least get a better “Bought : Beaten” ratio than I’ve manged for the last few years!

Why My Gaming Blog Has Stopped - For Now...

It’s been quite a while since my last post, and I find myself making a new one to tell you all not to expect any more for the foreseeable future…

I’ve had some significant changes to my life occur over the last few years, and while most of them are positive, they’ve also affected the amount of time I can put on writing blogs like this. Most saliently, I finally moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time in nearly 33 years. That’s brought with it a lot of flexibility to do things I wasn’t able to do before – I won’t go into details – but also a lot of responsibility to look after my new home and be a lot more efficient in managing my time and my money.

What this means is that I don’t have time to write regular blogs any more. It’s a shame, as I had a number of things I wanted to write about. Access to Kirsty’s PS4 means that I can play a whole lot of games I couldn’t before. I was planning a retrospective look at some of the games I’d played in my past which was going to become a weekly post once I’d written enough of them. And after my experience at the UK Games Expo, it was my intention to enter some hobby gaming tournaments and write about my experiences with that. I was going to call it Tournaments and Tribulations. But I barely have time to play these games anymore, let alone write about them! I’m sure, to most of you reading this, taking the 45 minutes it generally takes me to write a 700 word summary of what I’ve been playing this week isn’t a huge imposition on me, but as I spend the vast majority of my time these days either working, supposed to be working or asleep, there just isn’t the time. Welcome to the real world, eh?

Also, blogging doesn’t make me any money. I know how that makes me sound, so let me clarify here that I never expected any substantial amount of money from this. I only ever did it for my own enjoyment, and it was great to see some other people enjoying my posts as well, a few of whom I know in person (mainly from the gigging circuit, and for similar reasons I don’t do anywhere near as many gigs anymore!) But with my schedule as packed as it is, a lot of other things to do (sometimes work, sometimes not,) and my own personal enjoyment my only real incentive to write the blog, it’s fallen by the wayside.

Will I ever do it again? Perhaps. There are things going on that are still quite “up in the air,” so to speak; a lot of situations are developing and I haven’t quite got settled into a routine yet. If such a time comes when I do, and I can find a regular amount of time in the week to put into playing games, I might be able to write about them in a regular blog again. But it’s not going to happen without a re-assessment of exactly when I can get everything out. In the past, I would put Last Week’s Games out on Mondays, Pick-ups and Trades out on the first Wednesday of every month (at least, that was the plan; it rarely worked out that way!) and on those occasions when I managed to beat a game, I’d write a Backlog Beatdown post about it for the next Friday if I could. If I manage to post anything out in a regular schedule again, it won’t be anywhere near as busy. There may be some changes to the content as well; I might find myself playing more handheld games as I’m out rather a lot these days! We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I thank you all for reading my blog. There were roughly 60-100 of you a week at its peak, and more would come along later to look at archived posts. I hope you know I appreciated each and every one of you, and I hope to be back some day!