Blog Update #4 - At the Station
Greetings and holiday wishes and ho-ho-ho and all that jazz. Hope everyone's havin' a jolly good time.
This update has been timed to December 23rd for a specific reason: I thought now would be a good time to mention that I'm going to be taking a little bit of break for the holidays, as I've gotten a little burned out on talking about video games and doing all the associated prep work. This time of year, for me, entails a lot of travel and unnecessary stresses, and trying to be creative under those conditions would only result in lesser-quality posts. You know--because everything I've written in the last nine months (has it really been that long?) has been knocking at the door of true brilliance. Surely you enjoyed my Renegade "hooker" story.
Also, I'm sure Christmas will bring with it some new games to play, and it'll be nice to focus solely on them. So I'm just going to relax, recharge the ol' batteries, and come out swinging sometime in the first-third of January.
As for what's coming up:
By this point, I was hoping to have produced my first "Examination," best described as my take on game reviews. Though, I didn't like how my test pieces were turning out. These Examinations are supposed to be supplementary to the "Memory Bank" posts, but I found myself repeating a lot of the same points and essentially producing redundant pieces merely rearranged. So I'm going to take a few months to rethink my approach and tweak the formula a bit before going full bore, since I intend for these pieces to be unique and informative. Truly, they're going to be an important part of the site going forward.
The only possible change I might make is to space out some of the "Quick Hit" pieces over two or three days rather than pump them out in a five-day blitz, since they're turning out to be more work than I originally thought (I expected such games to inspire maybe four or five paragraphs worth of memories, but most of them wound up approaching feature-length). It all depends on the crop of games being covered, really. I'm also going to be introducing a third type of memory log called "Bite-Sized Memories," reserved for games that were important to me but only inspired maybe two or three notable experiences or funny stories.
Looking farther into the future: As I inevitably hit the point where my "Memory Bank" list nears exhaustion, the tone of site will begin shifting more towards discovery and wading into unfamiliar waters, as I stressed in my mission statement. That is, you'll be seeing more in the way of pieces like "Rediscovered Classics," "Unearthed Treasures," "New Classics," and whatever categories of game I can invent on the spot. I plan to cover a lot of arcade games (like Avenging Spirit, for which I added a piece yesterday), but the overall goal is to cover a broad range of software from arcades, consoles, PCs, and handheld devices of all kind.
The point is that I eventually want to move on from always talking about my past, since it's become somewhat of an anchor. There's too much going on out there in the gaming world to resign strictly to introversion. After all--part of the reason I created this blog was to put my finely tempered memories to print, since they've been floating around in my head for so many years, occupying so much space, that their recurrence, though comforting, had grown kind of stale; I decided it was time to push them out and make room for some new memories, which so far has worked as intended.
So that's where the tracks are headed, and I hope you'll all continue being passengers on this whacky train as it heads deeper into the heart of Video Land. For now, have some fun, enjoy your time with family, and please don't forget to take notes.
The station will reopen in a few weeks time, whence our bumpity journey will resume on schedule. Until then, take care.
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