Uh, so yeah. Only three writeups went up this month. None of them particularly big.
No excuses to give on that, since the real reason is easily to assume; the extreme mental health toll I noted at having last month got only worse this month, to the point it left me barely enough energy to get out of bed some parts of the weekend. I didn’t get sick sick thankfully (that’s pretty rare for me still), but to say my mood has been drained would be a massive understatement.
I can’t quite pinpoint the last time I felt this demotivated and scared of everything going on in the world. Not just IRL, political spaces, or spaces regarding the human rights of my minority friends, but also all kinds of assorted fears. The sort of fears where if your brain is left to think about something by itself, it comes up with the darkest, scariest future and makes you assume that will be your destiny no matter what. It’s vastly different than the grief I had when I lost my best friend Toony and caused the “Legacy Review Queue” to even become a thing, but rather more or less a big assortment of self doubt and fears for all my friends. After all if I can’t absolutely protect everyone I know what’s the point?
Well, I’ve started to slowly gain my mental confidence back. Scaling down some habits, starting some new, positive ones, and managing to get the hang of writing again. So let’s get into a breakdown of what I have in store, update wise.
No “Legacy Legacy Review Queue”
Despite some setbacks, there will not be a second Legacy Review Queue. You will not be waiting 2+ months for the few modern games I have lined up to get covered, don’t worry about it! The first big step I did upon getting out of my 2019 funk was ensuring I’d never request too many games at once and seldom request long games unless I planned a huge dedication to them. Not just to catch up on the gargantuan PS4 queue looming in the midst, but to ensure a repeat of that trend would never, ever happen again. So good news!
Thus, I’m starting to get back into the swing of things, and plan to put out an Evercade Review and one for Under Defeat in the near future. I can’t assure it’ll be this week but I wanna at least knock out one of em this week so Feb doesn’t end on a very, very weak note. Again, I sincerely apologize for the delay, but mental health and extreme depression spirals are no joke. Take the time to make sure you have a good support network to help as needed and cherish it.
For the other, very few games in the modern queue, I do plan to finally cover Clock Tower Rewind as well as the Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2; the latter even has a review halfway finished! So that’ll be an easy March lock, and for Clock Tower, well, do you think the state of the world makes a stressful game easier to play? Being that Clock Tower is one of my favorite Horror series, I wanted to give the review justice, so I hope to be outta a funk enough to play and cover it proper soon.
As for the Steam queue game of X-Out Resurfaced, that’s been a fun time. I haven’t dabbled in it as much as I’d like though, but I’m hoping in March to catch up and get that covered before returning back to the Legacy Queue. I really, really do want to finish that this year, but I say that every year before some project or IRL circumstance stops me. I do have an idea for one more Steam retro collection game I wanna cover, but it depends on what the circumstances for it end up being. If I end up being able to cover it though, you’ll see it very shortly into March.
Article Cancelations and more delays
OK, I’m gonna announce something that’ll disappoint all 2 of the people who wanted me to cover this. I am cancelling the article known as Limited Print Report Card 2, meant to spotlight Strictly Limited Games and First Press Games’ consumer dodging behaviors over the past few months.
Why am I canceling an article that could inform people more? Because quite blunty, I am still really sick of writing Limprint articles. My upcoming, big, final one is one I’m still worrying about getting just right and have to rewrite again (more on that in a bit), and looking into these other two companies is a thing I’ve barely done over the past few months. Poking in now before this update… There really isn’t much more I can say that I haven’t already pointed out in my prior articles.
Strictly Limited is still manufacturing games incredibly slowly on a shoestring budget, and barely a peep of Collector Edition talk, as they infinitely promote old stock they can’t ever sell. Their sister branch ININ opened their own store which seems to just be the SLG thing but done more reliably, but even that isn’t likely to last too long in terms of Collector Editions, I feel. Nothing new, just more signs of a company struggling from a popped Limprint bubble.
First Press Games continue to be refund dodging scammers which ain’t new, and while they finally got PS4 Chained Echoes out, the shipping process was so slow I could probably walk all over the United States in the time it will take for everyone to get their copy. I seriously think the guy in charge of FPG must be doing them all by hand, and I still doubt the other games will come; and none of this excuses the indefensible refund dodging and indie-screwing policies I’ve covered in depth before. As I’m making this, the dev of Goodboy Galaxy is still in a legal battle with FPG, who refuse to pull down the game from their storefront, so the whole situation is still messy, and they’re still planning more games. Absurdity in the face of incoming economic struggles and no enticing market for that stuff. So yeah, nothing new there either.
Thus, no Limited Print Report Card 2. This will reaffirm that yes, unless something outright insane happens, my Limited Run Part 3 article will be my final Limited Print Article. The amount of rewrites it had to go through has driven me mentally insane and while I’m thankful to my IRL friend for donating to get the idea over the line, i’m beginning to regret the dedication. Still, I want to get it right, and I have some sources that provided some decent info I feel confident in for the article. I am scaling some things back a bit and while I did plan a dedicated “end” point to the article to ensure I wouldn’t have to rewrite it again, unfortunately Limited Run decided to send out damaging NES cartridges and go through a similar QC struggle like they did time and time again.
Thus, a rewrite and tweak is needed, but I now know what my conclusion paragraph will be, which I’m pretty happy about as I feel it’ll be a big end to this wild, wild niche of writing I’ve done for the past few years, with my journey as a Limited Print megafan to someone who doesn’t even touch that space anymore and only collects retro games from old junk stores, I’ve definitely done OK at observing the limprint market, and it feels fitting to finally end these articles off as the console that kickstarted this insane boom comes to a close, as will a lot of the companies in general. Sorry, but when I know for a fact a limprint company I never talked about previously runs on unpaid labor, and how many of the limprint companies are cutting back their plans due to declining sales and market uncertainty, I really don’t see anyone besides maybe two limprint companies surviving the transition to Switch 2 with grace. Such as it is, I guess.
Either way, the article will be done when it’s done, so just sit tight.
Social Media Scaledown
To be 100000000% serious, I considered nuking my bluesky quietly and vanishing into the night. The site has been arguably a big drain on my mental health, due to curiosity with news turning into an outright obsession. And when you’re wanting a little bit of news only to get hit by a tidal wave, it does insane damage to one’s psyche. In fact, my experience with Bluesky just made me realize more that anyone who stays on Twitter at this point is doing similar, if not worse damage to themselves, especially with algorithms that push anger-inducing topics at you to rile you up and drive more clicks.
It legitimately scares me for the future of the world, even, considering how at one point this month my news addiction got so bad I considered admitting myself into a hospital to try and stop it. Seriously, take care of your mental health even if it’s really fucking hard to pull away from the screen or pop into bsky to see what your friends are saying about the latest wild shit in the world. Thankfully I didn’t need to go to a doctor to ask for how to stop a temptation to doomscrolling’s, since the power of appblocking/screen time apps came to my rescue! Now with my phone and computer both being able to tell me “no” when I want to impulsively look at something, I’ve had slight improvements in my mental stamina the past few days, which is how I’m able to write this article for you all.
This doesn’t mean I’ll never push for my friends to get equal rights again, far from it! I’m still in to support all my friends to the best I can and hoping one day SFG can be big-ish enough to run a charity event for many great causes I have in mind and have it be a success. Maybe building up my Twitch following could help with that? Either way, I just need to make sure I don’t drown in poison, and thus, that’s why I’m trying these changes.
And as one other change to my routine… Don’t expect me to directly post on Bluesky much more, if at all. I love the aid to my website it does, I love the many new friends I met there, and even love the people there who legitimately talked me off a ledge last November. Hopefully when things get less crazy in the world, I can go back to focusing strictly on gaming stuff without having to see stressful stuff in my timeline 24/7. But yeah, I need to limit my time on the website as much as possible, so outside of autoposts or maybe a funny photo I may do, I’m gonna really really try to cut back. I do appreciate all your support, and that support is what kept me from outright nuking my account and instead taking a much needed break.
The world of… a Microphone?
On the plus side, recent IRL actions I’ve done have made me more confident in speaking out on mic than ever before, even more so than the Eternal Memories Youtube era! I really had fun on the Retro Titans podcast last year, and I’m starting to feel even if I’m stepping back from Bluesky, I could maybe step up to be a guest on some podcasts. If you’re an Nintendo, Evercade, retro, RPG, Mystery Dungeon, Pokemon, or just general Video Gamey podcast, feel free to reach out and let me know about it! (My business email is on the SFG youtube, as always) I’d love to be on, and any place I can spread Shiren praise would be especially great.
I’m rather flexible with evenings too, so I’d be more than happy to join, provided you aren’t a bad actor or anything or want to put me on something I’m fully unfamiliar with like say, a Magic the Gathering Podcast (does Duel Masters count?)
Well, with all that out of the way, I think that sums up the rocky mental health struggles of this month. I can’t promise they’ll get better, but I’m trying, damn it. So here’s hoping I can just keep trying further as need be.
I’ll be back this week with some kind of review, but afterwards? Well, I’ll do my best! Thank you so much for the support, and I apologize for the everything going on right now. Please stay safe, and LGBTQ rights are human rights, my dear friends.