Hello again! First article of the year, and after a bit of a break since my marathon week of articles. I’ve worked a bit on some future reviews, and thus, I figured I’d just make an article detailing the reviews on deck for the month + Jan plans!
In focus for this month…
More reviews!
I’m going through Fuga 2 more and more, having played plenty of it to finish most of the review and place it on our lovely GOTY list, but this one is a big toughie, as I expected it might be when I took it in to cover. Times like this make me wish I didn’t care about scoring games, but the literal last thing I need to do for Fuga 2, is score the game! And whichever score I give it, it’ll still be a very good game for fans who liked the first one. But I’m in the “gonna beat the story to the very end and do NG+ stuff like the first game and see if I feel as good as I did with Fuga 1” mindset, which is how that first game squeaked a 10/10 score outta me back in 2021.
So yeah, I’ll chip away at this and I’m nearing the end, so I’m hoping to be able to get this done very soon. Likely this month barring any curveballs thrown at me (or my Steam Deck exploding). TSIOQUE was a keymailer game sent my way a few years ago, and since that was during my whole “redeem anything and I’ll cover it in depth”, that’s getting the full treatment right after Fuga. Should be a nice compliment to the Bertam Fiddle review I got out recently. And then, I’m caught up on Steam stuff! (IFI games buried in my inbox nonwithstanding, still gotta double check that to make sure)
PS4 is also getting some attention: Beholder is next, and I somehow managed to avoid knowing anything about it before I booted the game up despite getting this on a whim back in 2018/2019. It also has had two sequels since then. Uh-oh, the curse of a life derailment strikes again. Oh well, i’ve been figuring out the gameplay loop enough to offer my thoughts on it and it should be the first review out this week, though I’m unsure what day that’ll be. With this and the other indie game (Omensight) also being worked on, I’ll be exclusively at the whims of those long PS4 RPGs for the rest of that system’s queue.
Speaking of Omensight, I’m reminded thanks to the save file how in Dec 2021 I played enough of it for my original review, which was nearly done before the Feb 2022 Data crash completely nuked my written review and notes of the game, meaning that’s the final data loss queue game I need to play again, retake notes and re-review, before I’m out of that hole. Thankfully not too many reviews got lost in that data loss (and as seen here, reviews can be recreated, but the family photos I lost then never will be, and that still saddens me) and once Omensight is covered I’m all up to date there, but that event definitely made me back up my shit a lot more frequently than every six months. Don’t make the same mistakes I did with backing up important files, or even “non important” files that you’ll regret not having later if such a thing happens.
Being a time loop game, luckily I feel Omensight should be easy to refresh myself on and cover after I dive back into it, but I’m not giving an ETA on when the review will be done, so I don’t just overshoot it due to full time work for the bajillionth time.
But hey, what’s the first big PS4 RPG queued game I’m gonna tackle once those two are outta the way? Well, I decided to get started on my Spike Chunsoft US catalog with Crystar, a very underwhelming Action game that somehow got a spiritual sequel last year in the form of Crymachina. SC didn’t even publish that one, NISA took over for it, and even got Crystar ported to Switch. There’s a reason people generally don’t like this game, and even I was like “do I really want to review this like a snap judgement game because of how irritating it is so early on?” Alas, I do like to be in-depth and try to find the good in things, so I’ll be tackling that after Beholder and Omensight are dealt with.
So, Switch stuff! The bigger queue, but the one I’m more confident in tackling faster. RCG2 is still in the works and I see the light at the end of the tunnel for that. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to co-op it like I wanted to nor will I be able to get all the patches I hope it would get for the extra stuff the Switch port still suffers from, but hey, you’ll get to see thoughts on a “content complete” version this way.
RICO is also being worked on again, since I had done a co-op thing with it around the time it was handed to me, but I got distracted by other things and it slipped through the cracks, so now I’m gonna just tackle the solo play aspect of it while my co-op experience going off of memory. Those are the two “next to recent” Switch games I’ve be dabbling with recently, and am aiming to tackle something simpler in the form of Lost in Harmony and Neo Atlas afterward.
Yet again, anytime I work on a queue game and see the stupidly long and longer time it takes for me to tackle them: I sincerely and utterly apologize. 2019/2020 derailing me so hard could have honestly tanked the site as a whole and made it a career/hobby I didn’t feel comfortable continuing. But thanks to the help of my friends and readers like you, I’m able to get back at it and provide top notch reviews for you all, and seeing how some of my belated reviews have been getting surprising amount of hits lately, I feel that even a belated, well-done review on a game is better than nothing at all, and I will respond promptly to any PR person or company inquiring me about an ETA. 2023 felt like I started to throw the bowling ball, and 2024 is kicking off with that bowling ball speeding up. Here’s hoping I get a strike and clear the full queue sooner rather than later, as I’m trying with my current work/life balance.
On the whole “email publishers on those belated reviews when you finish them finally” side of things, I’m also definitely doing that, but decided to in batches depending on the company; for games I have a lot of old pending reviews for, i’m gonna send em in all at once and explain myself. If they want to still send me PR info (even though I’ll cut back on review copies as I’ve currently been doing) then that’s up to them, but I hope it’ll be satisfactory nevertheless. For companies I only have one game for, I’ll reply to the original email and do the same. I also plan to shortly email companies that got put on the Best of 2023 list, solely to shout them out and give em a nudge toward how cool I thought their stuff was this year. Lemme tell you, the loss of Twitter makes this aspect hurt the absolute most as beforehand it was the easiest way to alert a dev/pub on a review being completed. Speaking of which, though…
Twitter Reactivated
No, I am not coming back to Twitter or posting on it. The site has grown far too toxic, horrendous, and awful since you know who took over, and it feels like almost every week I hear from one of my peers who still stubbornly sticks around there that they saw something so horrible or racist it bewilders them at to why the report tool doesn’t work or why the FBI isn’t knocking down the door of the person uploading such vile stuff. Yeah, Twitter is that kind of cesspit now.
Still, I logged in for the first time in months to do some minor changes to the SFG Twitter, and took some interesting observations in the process. I had three follower requests, and 2 of them were from bots. One of them was from a cool guy who seems to have been a PMD fan, (the Tomie documentary is getting seen after all, despite the lack of comments/feedback…?) and I allowed him to follow me and blocked the other two bots. I then went through my private twitter account, deleted some rambles or out of date venting periods, and then re-enabled it for one main purpose, fixing embeds on SFG articles.
Yeah, so some articles people read a lot such as this one have a lot of Twitter embeds in them from me, and since my account was locked due to the state of the website/wanting to get off it, I wanted to try and get them somewhat working again. Key word being somewhat, as even discord won’t embed twitter properly now, so I can’t be certain this’ll even work. Oh well, hopefully the web archive captures those articles better than me and I’ll be able to do my own backups soon in case something were to make the site even worse.
Still, let me reiterate several things about my social media presence now. Very, very important things so if you’re a reader/dev/pub and wonder why I don’t answer, these will be the reasons.
–I’m not logging back in unless I absolutely have to. There are ways to see twitter posts logged out now, I can use those if someone wants me to see something a company posts or whatnot. Thus, no chance of me seeing a single DM or replying to any. Don’t bother DMing me. Contact me literally anywhere else. This even applies if you send me a review code or PR inquiry there, just don’t. I won’t see it and I won’t acknowledge it.
–I am not gonna engage with anyone that tweets at me anymore there. Common sense, but when you’re a writer that covers games, and some people do not like what you cover, (either due to concerns of it “tanking their collection’s value” or some other gripe they have) you’ll often get stupid shit or be typecast as someone who only covers that stuff, and then be begged to cover it again and again even when you openly refuse to do so. This is basically TLDR for “No limprint article raging or tagging me if Dispatch Games comes back on Twitter, I ain’t doin it, send a news tip to the certain Lifer website that avoided giving me credit instead.”
I’ll even apply this to PMD stuff too as much as I love the work I did on the Tomie stuff. I just won’t see any of it. Please comment on the video or article if you wanna get in touch with me about it. I am also on Cohost as my small social media of choice and will not be changing that. Do not send me BSky invite codes, I won’t use them. I won’t ever join Bluesky until it fully opens to the public and proves it can easily ban bigoted content, and be safe/helpful for Content Creators. If I even open up another social media account, I’ll announce it through this site. There are ways to contact me if you really want to, just don’t do it on Twitter as it’s nuked from my bookmarks and history and I never want to go back unless a miracle happens and all the bigots there are mass banned. (doubtful) The reactivation was solely to fix embeds on the website as I couldn’t find any other way.
QOL coming to old articles
And by “QOL” i mean, “no more font color nonsense that hurts people’s eyes on this website”. People who find my 3DSBlog interview noted this and it seems I had a habit of doing most of this on an old theme to make the interviews more “exciting”. Well, I don’t need to do that again, nor should I ever have tried to be cute like that to begin with, so as noted in other updates I’ve been planning to go through and slowly fix all that, and I’ll be trying to start on it this week. No promises and no ETA, but when I think it’s all done I’ll mention it in the next status update.
Hopefully that makes those older articles more appealing to newcomers and will also work well when I revamp the site with a new theme/logo this year. Sorry for the eyestrain.
“Non Queue” Teases?
I mentioned in prior updates that I was gonna do this, but reiterating: post the review queue being fully clear, I’m gonna focus more on fun stuff I nab such as Evercade cartridges, retro clone consoles/accessories, Project EGG stuff, and more obscure indie games, to try and go back to how I started the site up a decade ago with the main intent on focusing on things other sites often forget about. I like newer stuff and even a few AAA things! But I do not want to lose sight of the gems out there, lying in dormancy.
Thus I reactivated my Keymailer, but am very, very picky on what I’ll accept at the moment to not bloat my queue. You’re more likely to get accepted from me now if your game is either a retro compilation, very short, or very simple. I’ll expand and be a lot more open to requesting when the queue is fully clear, but I still won’t go overboard like I did in 2017/2018. Not taking a risk of getting in the swing of a ton of games at once if life decides to throw a brick at me again like it did in 19. Just putting this here for any devs who wonder why I keep rejecting their keymailer requests lately. (it’s because I wanna focus on older overdue stuff first)
While a few upcoming games (Tomb Raider Collection! Slave Zero X! Steel Empire?) do have my eye and I requested those, I’ve been very, very picky and careful about making sure to pick games I feel 100% confident on slipping in alongside queue stuff. Likewise, I’m not putting anything from the review queue that’s more than a year or two old on Opencritic, unless it’s literally a game almost nobody else has reviewed or was recently ported to something else and is topical again. So if you’re wondering why stuff like Bertam Fiddle isn’t on OC, that’s why.
Wrapup
Sorry for another ramble, after 4 articles of other rambles. Luckily we’ll be back to our normal reviews soonish. I needed that week long break to take notes and just relax after the most productive writing week I’ve had in ages. I’m hoping I can keep that energy going in 2024, and I don’t have much else to think of. I just hope you stick around, enjoy the reviews that come out, and maybe find some hidden gems along the way! (I still really like The Fall and wish Part 3 would happen…)