I’m honestly in disbelief, and overjoyed with myself. For over five years now, I’ve been working on reviews for this very site, to cover indie games from a wide variety of publishers/developers.

Initially, it was to help out the smaller guys who didn’t get much say in things/attention, but as the Switch came about and bigger indies pushed aside smaller ones, I ended up having to shift only to the big-medium ones due to the fact that the eShop was flooded with way too many games. I still check out smaller games now and then, however, and this month I even plan on interviewing a few small indies myself, along with inspiration people from over the years. Even if the duty I started with is harder, I’m gonna push forward. Besides, even big companies have smaller releases! For example, The ACA series hardly gets any reviews out for it, so I decided to use my own pocket money to review whatever I can myself, even if things get tight at points… Still, my patrons help a bit to let me afford at least one of those a month, so I’m thankful to them, too!

Anyhow, the reason for this big happy post is because Seafoam Gaming is now OpenCritic approved! That means the website will show up on Opencritic whenever a game launches and I get a review out. This doesn’t change my review scale at all, I might add: I still give solid numbers only, up to 10, and you can still read my own personal scale for what the numbers mean. At the end of the day, reviews are meant to be opinions to help people on the fence, and the score is just one aspect of it, so I implore you to read my full thoughts regardless!

To think that the kid who made a Pokemon forum in 2009 for fun, only to get it wrecked twice and having to restart a third time in 2010 would end up being a reviewer that’s helped a lot of indies and consumers get feedback for their products… I’m kinda shocked at how my journey this decade has been, to be quite frank. For those who don’t watch my Eternal Memories retrospectives, My 2010 journey has basically been:

2010: Make PokemonBattleZone forums, a year after joining the internet via AnimalCrossingCommunity

2011: Follow a bunch of Nintendo sites and blogs due to 3DS hype, but is too shy to reach out to join any of them as a member.

2012: A big, rough one. Unsure what to do in life, I do a bunch of pretty weird and silly things: I write fanfictions about Looney Tunes, even make a crossover with Ys at one point (!!!!!), and build a Deviantart fanbase that I slowly regret having. Writing became a passion for me at this point, but I needed to do something more comfortable for me. I slowly join a few Nintendo sites at this time and enter in forums, but I become very edgy and not so nice in my teen years.

2013: Become a bit more mellowed out, join the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fanbase as a good part of my DeviantArt journey, met a ton of great online friends, joined more Nintendo sites, and debate becoming an author to publish an autobiography about my life and rough times. Attempts at making PBZ themed videos on youtube fail and I go back to personal gaming ones.

2014: Openly realize what’s my own quirks, how I deal with trauma/other things, and open up to people about rough events in my past. I end up being an open furry and meet tons of fantastic people in my local community. Ended up writing a review of a certain game on PBZ as an experiment when I see a game I want, but nobody else is talking about it… So I took up the task myself. Rough beginnings, but I quickly establish contact with a lot of devs, publishers, and make the rounds. I also join a bunch more Nintendo sites and get very active. I also nuke my Deviantart to leave it forever buried until the day I wanna riff on some stupid things I made for the channel.

2015: Continue to build up SFG, and launched the Seafoam Gaming youtube channel. Eternal Memories kicks off with my old ancient iMac and a very old version of iMovie. Moderate success for what I hoped. Continue to do well with reviews and meet more friends!

2016: Shift to WordPress due to the advice of my friend Eric Warpjump, (wherever you are, thank you!!!) and painstakingly manually transfer all but one review over to the new host. The one review I wrote is the one I regretted the most due to an early mistake writers should never do. Work for the entire year on part 3 of my PMD retrospective on youtube, only to suffer from a bad video launch and enter a state of demotivation. Somehow this is the most popular year for the site yet due to some theories about AM2R that ended up being bunk due to my snap judgement. I don’t know if I really even feel proud of those articles still.

2017: Crippling anxiety affects me, but I move on and continue to work hard on the site. Reviewing tons of switch games, continuing to meet up and make new friends, and I even meet some fellow small YTers to help out!

2018: More of the same from 2017, but a lot more confident as I get into a comfortable work flow, and things go good! Stable, but good.

2019: Very, very rough year. Tons of delays due to the loss of my online bestie in April, and then another due to the loss of my grandfather in August (mentioned in a prior status update). These cause my queue to shift so out of sync from what I wanted that I outright avoided asking for many review copies to focus on what I have left todo. I still aim to review Shenmue I and II and other games from 2018 I got stuck on, but only when I get the time to properly review them instead of just rushing something unsatisfactory out. Slowly get back in gear as of October 2019, and am now working on my backlog. But now we’re here!

So yeah. This blogpost is a bit weird, and stuff’s still being ironed out, so I hope this suffices for those guys, but I’m just proud of all the readers and friends I’ve met over the past five years. Thank you! And to those I knew before then, a double thank you. And to those I met in 2009, if anyone from ACC remembers me… You’re the most special of all, even if I had a lot to learn. Those experiences with being an asshole taught me how to be courteous and improve my behavior greatly, and I still have a lot to learn, but I now hope I can be the inspiration for another writer out there. If you want to get into games writing and have the passion, go and do it! We could use some more Arcade Archives reviewers on the internet. 🙂