You know, I thought I already did a status update for April, but it turns out I did one at the very end of March, which felt like April. Now I did one at the last day of April, which feels like May. Oh well, a lot to discuss here, with some exciting things, some downer things and some “please be patient a bit more” things.
The Event Blog in Progress
I thought i mentioned it here, but I think I mentioned it on Bluesky moreso instead. But yeah I went to a fun gaming event this month and am currently in the middle of working on a big, long travel blog detailing the nature of my trip, the event, and the cool stuff I did there. I intended to have it done a week or two after I went, but sadly I got super busy with other things and a dumb experiment that ended up backfiring. I still took lots of photos and there’s enough of a good memory there to make for an interesting writeup, but I wanna try and get it done before my detailed memory of the day’s events slips away. I think it’ll be worth the wait though, even though I had some difficulties when going that I’m not gonna be proud to mention in public. But yeah, that was my big article for the month, and that slipped, which sucks because…
BIG ARTICLE Slippage
I didn’t lie when I said I had a huge article for the month, and I didn’t mean for it to not come out this month. Many factors happened and at this point I don’t now when I can safely promise it.
Basically, a big interview I was hoping to do for a long while was in the works. I had to do a pause on it as when translating it from Japanese to English, my translator had something come up. I had to wait a bit longer than I’d have liked, but it finally got done recently and it’s in the editing phases now. The problem is, I’m too damn busy to fully edit it at the moment, and this is the interview that requires several approvals before it can even be public on the site. I’ll try to edit it when I can, but I want it to be super polished, and I really hope when I do pull it off, it gets approved in a timely manner to launch soon…
So no more ETA. It’ll show up when it shows up and if I’m allowed to tease it beforehand I shall. Sincere apologies.
A very big mistake
I’m gonna say something that may seem rather stupid to say.
I wrote too much this month. Yes, that’s laughable. I’m trying to catch up on a review queue and got a whopping one game reviewed from the 2018-2020 era, leading me with a bigger queue this month than I had coming into it. (granted, said new games are ones I deliberately chose due to their short length so that I could have weeks with something rather than nothing)
But then on the high of an unusually good week compared to normal, I decided that with four seemingly shortish games near completion for the queue… I’d cram reviews for them all into one week! I usually aim to get 2-3 things out a week, but being a full time worker as I said time and time again, I can’t even promise having much time to write; my limited time after work on weekdays is usually to relax or chip away at a queue game as I watch friends who stream, then take notes for the review.
Weekends are when the bulk of my big writing takes place, and even now I’m starting to lose a bit of that valuable time due to very irritating IRL factors I thought I got rid of. I’m gonna try and push back against this factor so I don’t have to lose every other weekend I could spend on writing to silly nonsense, but I cannot promise anything at this rate since life is just stressful as hell right now.
But yeah, on that good week, I got FIVE reviews out, just like the old days. A pretty lengthy one for Hebereke Enjoy Edition, then three for the rest of the Bitwave Toaplan games, then in the midst of all that, I knocked out Lost in Harmony.
I hated it. I really, really hated cramming every weekday after an 8 hour shift into writing a lot, since I was already tired and exhausted. But I did it, since I wanted to make up for lack of content the week before, and I wanted to get a lot out to see if I could reproduce old habits and… Nothing. I was drained by the end of that five day marathon. Then at the end of that week I had to do that silly outside factor on a day I wanted to just relax (basically meaning I was very, very busy with six days of a seven day week!), and I was pretty much sick of the entire week. But it was either do the reviews during the weekdays, or somehow find time on a weekend where I was wasting a day of it on stuff I no longer should be doing anymore. I crunched on all those reviews. I worked my ass off. And none of them really did better than normal.
That’s good in a way! It means unlike Youtube or whatnot which forces my content to be stuck to a suppressive algorithm , I can pretty much do my own thing at my own pace here and stuff generally does very well when people are searching for those niche games I like to cover, and I won’t be punished by SEO if I go on a short break to sleep early on a day. Pretty handy!
But on the other hand, it means I can’t and shouldn’t push out lots of reviews in a week at the expense of proofreading those reviews, (not that anyone cares to comment on my grammar anyhow, despite me asking others to do so, I never seem to get anything indicating I’m doing anything bad despite me feeling like I am…) and at my own health. After that five day marathon, I got two reviews out the rest of the month. I barely got anything else done and I was drained just doing those. I seriously cannot overstate how much this attempt at going back to my old ways really, really is not compatible with my current full time life style.
Which pisses me off since as a full time worker, that job should be my main focus as I make money from that while I make no money from SFG (and I refuse to be an ebeggar, so don’t expect me to change that anytime soon until my queue is clear and it wouldn’t make me feel guilty.) I love this website though, and I refuse to just abandon games I accepted a review responsibility for all those years ago just because life decided to collapse at the worst possible moment for me a year before the worst worldwide mental health crisis of a generation.
I enjoy going back to these older games and doing my best to give a good take at them even if people seldom view those overdue reviews. But the truth of the matter is I have to shake the site up with newer stuff in the meantime as well, so I’m not just making the site a place for reviews of old shit. Hence, why I alternate between queue games from years ago and shorter, newer stuff. In fact, you’ll see a few shorter newer games reviewed next week.
So why am I beating myself up over this? Well, because I foolishly assumed last fall I can get all my queue caught up before the new year. Then the new year came and I barely made progress on Switch/PS4. Then we’re nearing the 10 year SFG anniversary in june, and while I may be able to finish or almost finish switch by then, PS4 is an absolute no shot in hell. The other systems (XSX/Steam) should remain caught up by then luckily.
Still for PS4, I shouldn’t have accepted so many fucking RPGs. Lord. But they’ll get done… Eventually. I hoped if I could do a five-review week on a consistent basis, I could barrel through the rest of the queue. Hell, if I reviewed them like a certain site reviewed a recent retro compilation and just made the full review like four paragraphs long, we’d be done by now.
But I don’t compromise on quality. Never intentionally anyway. Thus, the effort continues, and I sincerely apologize for that ramble. Still, while I’d be proud of five reviews getting done in a week… I never want to do that ever again. I’m sorry to say, but my health comes first. I’ll try to work as best of a pace as I can for the near future, and get 1-2 reviews out a week and prep those bigger articles long in advance so I don’t crunch on em too.
Speaking of Queue
Oh yeah, Queue updates.
Full Quiet got reviewed, clearing the Xbox queue once again. That’s fun to finally deal with. I went ahead and took up a short indie (Bit Dungeon) for XSX to cover in the next week so that the XSX queue wouldn’t be dormant for so long, but afterward I should be done with Xbox unless I decide to take up the Wizardry Remake for it. But I may likely go steam deck for that game, or just do it after launch if Digital Eclipse is OK with that, since I really dont want another huge RPG to bog me down… But it’s a huge retro one, so it’s kinda an important one I wanna write a perspective on.
PS4 remains frozen as always. Have to use my tight funds to buy a PS+ sub so my cloud saves don’t get deleted. Yay. Otherwise plans are still the same; binge omensight enough to redo my notes i lost for it, then go to Crystar when Switch is wrapped.
Switch is now at THE MISSING as the next Old Shit queue game, as Rain World is way, way too damn huge and hard for me to tackle that first. The cons to having a game you cover take off and get very, very big with free updates. I have two newer short games to get reviews soon so you don’t wait forever for a switch review. If I still get codes of other stuff that’s short, I may hold em off until the queue is caught up more. I might also bump Jake Hunter ahead of Rain World so that I can get another older game covered before diving into the huge, bigger stuff that remains. Caligula Effect is the next old one I plan to cover right before or after rain world.
When I’m busy 6/7 days a week some weeks and have to use 10 hrs of time in the day on weekdays to do these, I hope you understand I’m really trying hard to multitask. But I also have two big articles for May to do still, so reviews might get a bit sidetracked early in the month to finally finish them…
That Patreon exists doesn’t it
I have to mention this even though I sour on the idea of having a Patreon due to seeing how some other people handle theirs. But yeah, I do still have one, and it’s always been a patreon where I only charge if I write something I deem huge/big enough to be expensive (or make a retrospective video on YT in general, though the YT is retired so that’s no longer a concern) and thus an expense I’d be fine people pledging to me as a tip jar of sorts. In response, I write behind the scenes articles for most of my retrospectives, but slowed on em because of This Website and the fact barely anyone pledged to begin with.
Well all of a sudden for some weird reason, I got new pledges over the month of April (These are the first patrons in YEARS). For a site that barely does anything relevant to begin with. For a YT channel that’s retired. Still, I mentioned planning to resume the BTS articles for a while now and since I’m making a bigger article that was very expensive to write, I may do a singular charge on the patreon soon.
So uh, yeah, I may make some behind the scenes posts for patrons to read. $1 and above is fine and gets you everything, I need to slim down the tiers anyhow. I barely can do the higher benefits with my videos retired anyway. You won’t get charged much if at all, because I only charge if I deem it’s worthy. You can trust me not to milk you dry so you can support the creators who actually make content worthy of the dollar. One of the BTSes is to be of the Tomie interview from two years ago, and that will be free for everyone since it’s my biggest project ever; paywalling that would be a dick move. But consider that a preview of my usual BTS writeups when it’s live. Either way I have a few more videos to write behind the scenes writeups about for $1+ patrons so that’ll be a thing to do for them later. Then after the next charge when my big article drops, I plan to not charge again for a long long time.
Someone IRL asked me about a Ko-fi or tip jar for the site for direct donations. I refuse to do so still, because I do not believe anything that could be mistaken as eBegging is a good idea. I’m well off and do not need help to live. I can pay the site expenses fine and my article qualities aren’t worth much money at all. (I plan to possibly freelance a bit after the queue is clear, since I may be able to make $10 for 1K words every now and then if I do so, but that’s undecided)
I did make a Ko-Fi user page to pledge to other creators who deserve the stuff better than me, ala the Patreon, and I already bought a plush from one of said creators who I enjoy a lot, but I do not plan to make a creator page of my own. If I keep getting nagged IRL about it or online I might make one, hide it on the side of the website, and just not mention it outside of letting people know it’s the real me. No paywalled articles, no sudden begging for money so I can buy expensive games and shit, no sob stories. Just pure genuine writing from me, and if you wanna support me still, then I encourage you to continue following, sharing, and reading my content; just that means a lot to me! The Patreon exclusive BTS writeups already make me feel like I’m doing something dirty by limiting them to only $1 folk, but almost nobody asks about them so I think keeping those exclusive is fine.
Conclusion
Well that was a bit of a depressing site update compared to normal, wasn’t it? Well, I had to be honest instead of pretending everything was fine, but yeah, after the five a week experiment was bad for my productivity, I’m going back to my usual method; this way if more than 3 articles show up in a week, it was because I scheduled them out a week ahead instead of writing five articles in the same calendar week and having my soul crunched out of my body.
The site still does well, people enjoy my writings and I’m still happy to make content for SFG! One more month until the 10 year anniversary of reviews… God, I can’t believe it.
Hopefully I didn’t make a fatal mistake when I jumped on the Wii U eShop and decided to start doing this.