I’ve been saying for years I want to get to doing game reviews on the website. As damn near archaic as the idea seems — reviews are quite “old hat” as they say that very fact that they are seen as so old fashioned and aren’t as common now as they used to be makes this an almost perfect time for me to finally have some fun writing such content.
I’d like to, for the start, focus on pre-NES era stuff — Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Intellivision, Colecovision, that type of stuff. While before my time, I have an incredible soft spot and genuine love for this most early period in gaming, and I feel it’s a time frame that’s truly neglected by the gaming scene; it’s not “cool” to like Atari, after all, and no matter what anyone may tell you the gaming scene has been homogenized and hierarchical for easily the past 15 years — if the trendwhores on YouTube don’t say it’s cool,. no one thinks it is. Well, except for me, and those who don’t play their game, but that’s another story… my point is it’s a very neglected subject to be given some genuine love in the more old fashioned way I do this site,and maybe it’d be a nice jumping off point.
From there, of course, the sky’s the limit. I’d prefer to focus on older software and hardware, but I don’t draw a hard line distinction like most of the community does, with their buzzwords and obsessions over if the only play certain games which meet some arbitrary criteria. It’s all fake — there are no hard lines beyond individual start and stop dates for consoles and game production — past that, it’s all a gradient of one system, one type of hardware, evolving into the next, and I look at it that way then, now, forever. A game is a game, a system is a system, they are what they are, that’s the end of the classifications – no “generations,” no ill defined “retro vs modern” idiocy, no random lines drawn in the sand — it’s just games. That’s all.
I consider this a chance to be critical where I need to be, but more of an opportunity to share software (and hardware) that I genuinely enjoy, either from my personal collection, things I’ve played in the past, or stuff I’ve tried out via other methods (like emulation) and enjoyed — it doesn’t quite matter how I enjoy them, the idea is that I like what I’ve seen and experienced and want to share it. If I didn’t like something, sure, I’ll go over it, but I’m not going to go out of my way to seek out bad games and make a career out of it. That’s a job for another certain person online whom I enjoy the creative works of. No, I simply want to share my nuanced and, if I may say, unique, perspective of the entertainment of yesteryear and today, for what value it is to the reader, and for the fun of writing.
As things begin to stabilize around here, even with the chaos going on in the world right now and me still working day in, day out, I hope I will find the time to make these reviews a somewhat regular reality, in conjunction with my other projects. Time will tell, but I’m really feeling these will “come to life” in the next month or so.
I hope I can keep to that plan, but we’ll see what happens.
More to come, as always.
