Ten years.

Ten years since I published my first, very rough and not-well-edited review of a cute platformer I saw on the eShop called Chubbins.

Ten years and a few days after I, a bored teenager in a Minnesota cabin near the Canadian Border, decided to stop waiting for gaming sites to review games I wasn’t sure about buying for my Wii U (the lineup was very slim pickings), and look into doing it myself. Especially as the pace of eShop releases grew more and more frequent.

I didn’t exactly know where to do it on though, but I had kinda done reviews in the past. GoNintendo had a user review section, back in the days when the site was thriving and active and did not take a hit from an unexplained, year long hiatus. These basically just amounted to me making up random numbers and just going “oh this game makes me feel things and I gotta say them!!!”, which led to weird cases such as a short ramble about Fire Emblem Awakening being a decent little writeup from a newcomer’s point of view.

…But also a featured review where I gave Picross e a 4/10 because I hated the lack of penalties akin to the Mario Picross game, not knowing real like pen and paper nonograms didn’t self-destruct if you filled in the wrong box. (I do find the e series a lot more dull and consisting of weaker puzzles than the newer Picross games, but that’s another story)

I also, considering where these reviews eventually ended up, made my own reviews for things even before the GoNintendo stuff, but never really followed a set routine or knew what I was doing. Thus I figured it may be time for a fun history lesson on what SFG was pre-it being named SFG, what I used to do, and how it led to the Chubbins review, on this ten year anniversary article

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The Forums that Started it All

So, did you know that when my first SFG reviews went live, it was part of a forum? I used freeforums dot org back when that existed, and made myself a small community. My third forum community.

What happened to the first two? Awful people who got unhappy with me from Animal Crossing Community (my first ever website) flooded them with violent and hateful messages (we’re talking slurs being thrown at a person who was at the time of the first forum being opened, 11 years old, because ACC didn’t seem to really care about COPPA that much back then), solely because, I kid you not, two grown men were very unhappy I refused to EV train my Pokemon when I tried joining their little multiplayer club. Thus, apparently that’s worth being called a douchebag over and over, and being told your grandma should die.

Seeing how the first two sites (Djmaryssuperpokemonplace) and (Thegoldenrodradiotower) were on webs dot com, (anyone remember webs? Those moderation tools sucked!) they pretty much got obliterated by the troll farm. You cannot find any trace of these two on the internet, (I tried for this article, but with how none of them stuck around for long, I wasn’t surprised to see them nonexistent), and I saved no photos or attempted an archive of these sites. I do know the people who acted that way to me though, and as far as I know, somehow none of them are active on the internet (One appears to have last commented in 2019), at least to an extent I can link them this article and go “Hey, remember that kid you cyberbullied because they didn’t want to beat up bidoof for hours on end? he made a website and interviewed the writer of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. What did you do with your stupid life since that day?” much to my dismay.

But oh well. A new day would begin when I did switch over to Freeforums for my third site, which had the wonderfully creative name of… Pokemonbattlezone. Yes, I really liked Pokemon. Yes, it was a serebii forum clone, how could you guess? For the first years my site was active, I had a few friends from my ACC spaces come by, join the place, and chat for a bit… But being it was a forum with many subforums about pokemon and almost nobody to talk about said pokemon stuff, it died remarkably fast. I pretty much wrote announcements and posts to myself and even through around a variety of ideas to try and make use of the site. One of these was those very rough reviews I mentioned earlier, and none of them are worth noting and weren’t made with any consistency.

The only exception was a little DSi game called Decathlon 2012. You may wonder why this random sports game had any meaning to my site, and why you cannot find the review here. Well, it was in a technicality, the first ever game I got a review code for, but the review circumstances were very, very silly. See, NintendoLife reviewed the game, and by 2012, I was mostly commenting (very very rudely, I guess those cyberbullies rubbed off on me too much) on the site and just being an edgy teenager in all the wrong ways; harsh takes about games, no idea how games got made to the point I’d insult indie devs for any sort of delay/bug in their game, and pretty much flame warring with other commenters on the site. Not so fun times.

But one day, I noticed the developer made some very, very unhappy comments in response to the review for the game (which really didn’t like it) and as a result, he openly offered commenters free copies to write their own reviews or impressions to basically prove the reviewer wrong about their score, in response to other people (including an ignorant teenage Connor) pretty much ripping into them for their game getting a 2/10.

Nowadays? Wow hahahaha holy shit you’re such a petty developer if your response to a low score is “wait your review sucks but hey we expected a 1/10 so it’s still a win, but uh uh uh let me ask random people to praise my game by giving it to them for free even though none of them are press”, but oh well, that’s what the folks behind Decathalon 2012 were. But I decided to write my review.. on the PBZ forum!

I did so, giving it way too high of a rating off the high of it being a free game, and was proud, thinking I giga epically pwned the game reviewer who was honestly just probably sick and tired of another damn DSi shovelware game flooding the 3DS eShop by that point. Considering how these pre-SFG reviews only live on a hand drive and shoddy Internet Archive links, I didn’t find that review before publication of this piece to link you guys to, and I’m not proud of my pre 2014 self enough to upload it as-is to this newer site.

Still, that review, as dumb as the circumstances behind it were, arguably set me on the path to sorta knowing what to do when it came to the more “professional” kind. I didn’t review much else after that, besides the aforementioned GoNintendo stuff, and my site went back to being dormant; a close friend of mine named Luna1997/Amanda S would post off and on and we’d chat on the forums, and she was one of my first internet friends period from that time of ACC. I’ve long lost touch with them and do not remember further info about them, but I’d really hope they’re doing OK now. Closest I have is that I could add her on Switch via a link to our 3DS friend codes, but on Switch you can’t even message people, so good luck considering that a “reunion”…

Same for the other people I had join my site, most of which I completely forgotten outside of some like a nice guy named Greg, who I think had a name along the lines of PokeFan2010 or something like that. I also remember another nice guy named JKmadu619, and I have no idea where they went. Either way, the site was basically just something I’d post on every few months to avoid autodeletion by Freeforums, and I pretty much focused on the cringe world of Deviantart and Fanfiction dot net for experimenting with my writing habits. I don’t need to sugar coat anything and made some rough but decent enough video retrospectives on that arc of the internet years ago, in a PG-13 friendly way.

Being 14 and all, both of the sites were pretty usable with me being the honest guy I was, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t always behave, which I still find to be a bad part of those sites! I think Fanfiction got a bit better though (even if the days of Fanfiction in general is far gone compared to the peak of the 2000s/early 2010s), but DA is by far the worst kind of website now due to all the AI bullshit they keep pumping out, but at least that means all the weirdos who’d request the wildest stories from me are also gone, too.

Anyhow, back to the present of 2014; I had weaned off Fanfiction, and had even gone to the horrifying trouble of making an entire Looney Tunes X Ys crossover fanfiction for DA I still have backed up to this day. I was still wanting to write though, and not just whatever dumb idea hit my DA notes that I probably didn’t really want to do. So, looking on the Wii U eShop after getting up to the vacation cabin that summer… I decided hey, why not check this “Chubbins” game out? It’s probably something that’ll be a good timesink, and there must be an earlier way to access games if these reviewers get them out so early before launch. It was only launching in a week or so after all, so it should be doable!

Figuring out that I could repurpose my old forum, Pokemon name aside, into a review platform where I could make every topic the game review, I decided to make a review template, a very light (but consistent) score explanation, and dig around for tips on how to write reviews for products. Eventually, I would make sample reviews with simple Arcade games and the like, and when I felt satisfied with the format, I would email the publisher Dahku for more info. Maybe they could tell me how this review thing worked; or maybe they’d see the freeforums in my site’s name and go “Ew gross” and just ignore the email. I was sending it from my personal email account, after all (which I still do for SFG emails to this day, though I have a forwarding address that uses the site’s domain for devs/readers to reach out to me.)

Shockingly, they replied. Happy to hear someone interested in their small little platformer, and sent a review code over. I finally had something to put to my review template and give a crack at it. And well… I dug it! It had some difficulty balance issues and odd bugs, but it was a fun little platformer, and later got a remake on Switch as Rotund Takeoff; that game is seriously underrated and a must own if you like precision platforming, and is easily the game my teenage self was actually wanting deep inside.

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Ten Years Later! + Writing Structure Thoughts

So, all this time later, I’m pleased to announce we have hit the ten year anniversary of the Seafoam Gaming review. Though the Seafoam Gaming naming aspect comes a bit later (2015) and the wordpress site you see right now first kicked off even further after that point (2016), that Chubbins review was the first proper SFG review that carries a lot of the same core ideas I do even in my more modern reviews.

You got a breakdown of presentation and the story, a focus on gameplay, and a conclusion to wrap it all up. This isn’t an original idea by any means, and I see other websites doing a similar form of a segmented review; Mega Man Home Page, of all places, was the site in the front of my mind when coming up with the categories during that Chubbins review, but in the years since I’ve refined my template enough to have the current review structure comfortably my own, I feel.

I will admit that a lot of my freeze points when writing a review come from the Presentation and Gameplay categories. It is very easy to give a prelude or story summary. It is very easy to write general, wild thoughts on what you thought of a game overall. But covering beat to beat gameplay beats can be very tricky depending on the game, especially if the game has little to it or not much variety in the action. The presentations are also a bit of a sore spot for me, as while it can be very easy to gush on creative art styles and wonderful soundtracks when they are really, really good, getting the millionth NES-styled retro platformer makes writing about how a game looks incredibly boring. Yeah Alwa’s Awakening and Prison City both use NES inspired pixel art, but just how do they incorporate it? Is it pleasing to the eye? Are the HUDs well made? Is there impressive scrolling effects or fancy specialties added?

There’s all that to account for when reviewing a game, and I hate to admit most of the time when I’m behind on a queue review, it’s usually because after I take my notes and am ready to review, I struggle describing the presentation. I eventually pull through in the end, but I will admit there have been some days I wanted to drop the category entirely or just change it to covering a game’s music score. Still, I wanted to be as consistent as possible, at least for gaming software, so the categories have mostly remained consistent over the years.

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Why all the Pokemon-like names anyway?

Of course, one question I’m surprised nobody has actually asked me, but I always asked myself, was why on earth did I give every website I ever created a Pokemon themed name? Of all the ones I’ve made, Seafoam Gaming is the least Pokemon of the bunch, but I’m not gonna lie and say it wasn’t inspired by something within Pokemon; the current, soon-to-be-retired logo is a shadowy bird meant to envoke Articuno, for crying out loud! That’s the pokemon of the Seafoam Islands, which is… Seafoam. The first half of the site name. And Gaming is just self explanatory.

And well, yeah, I like Pokemon a lot, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon a really, really heck of a whole lot. All three of my fursona I’ve had over the years, are pokemon, two of them being the same species, Braixen! (which is… definitely not Seafoam related, since they’d die if they so much as come in contact with seafoam or water. Irony, I know) I guess I wanted to really just invoke some sort of proof that I am a big gaming fanatic and love RPGs, but in all honesty, since even around the time the first SFG review dropped, I have been leaning more and more into being a bigger fan of scorechasers than any other genre, so I had other names for consideration before I settled on Seafoam Gaming in 2015. Here are a few I still remember as ones I planned to rebrand PokemonBattleZone into before I settled on SFG, just for fun.

The Shivering Isle (No Elder Scrolls Relation, just meant to be Seafoam Islands without being obvious, but that former series would give the wrong impression given my unfamiliarity with it)

Seafoam Engine (PC Engine inspired, due to my PC Engine obsession I still have to this very day)

The Mystery Zone (A mix of the PMD name, the old forum name, and kinda inspired by the weird glitch zone from older Pokemon generations, sorta to invoke that I could review stuff you’d least expect, with all the obscurities I like to play!)

Yeah, I wouldn’t call any of those alternate names winners by any means. Generic as an inspiration as SFG has, I do like the name Seafoam Gaming the most. My friend Eric Warpjump came up with the old tagline of “Gaming Content to Tide You Over”, when helping me set the site up in wordpress and migrating every review over, and that tagline is one I’m still very fond of! Unfortunately, he too is another person I lost contact with over the years, but if he’s still out there, I’d like to chat again sometime.

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Your Review Queue… Will it ever be conquered?

The biggest obstacle to the growth of SFG, at least in my eyes, comes from the Review Queue sporting a good amount of games from 2018/2019/2020. I have made it no secret why 2019 was the worst year of my life and slowed everything down, and 2020 should be obvious to everyone. I’ve said for a year or more now I’d finish the queue any day now, and I’ve still only been able to wittle away at it slowly, due to stubborness with quality and wanting to ensure a healthy work/life balance on top of stuff I do for the site. I also want to keep covering new games along with the queue oldies, rather than SFG just reviewing stuff that came out years and years ago. Thus, the balance is hard.

Still, I say I did good strides in the past year! My Xbox Series X/Steam queues got all caught up, and have newer games I work through as I speak to keep those relatively light. I mix up newer Switch indies with the old queue stuff for a nice variety, and PS4 is a system frozen in time, since after I finish my reviews of every game there, I’m not going to be publishing any more PS4 reviews for the near future. One of the systems had to go, and it might as well be the one I never liked as much and had too many games that placed an anchor around my neck. I’m still confident in the Switch queue getting slimmed down more over time, but juggling all those PS4 RPGs with full time work… We’ll see. I hope to keep putting out at enough of a pace to catch up by the end of the year, but i said that last year before the scope of the RPGs caught up with me, so… I’ll just do my best.

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Future Teasing? + Conclusion

Well I did have a surprise for you today, but due to life stuff and again, that full time job, I didnt have time to prep anything just yet. But SFG is gonna get a brand new logo soon and i’m gonna outfit the site with a newer wordpress design that’s hopefully a lot cleaner looking on people’s eyes. I have lots of WIP ideas and while i planned to share one today, I’m not fully comfortable with doing that yet. Still, when it’s set to go, I’ll announce it here pronto.

As much as I loved the old bird logo, it didn’t really fit me much anymore, since I’m neither shadowy, mysterious, or all that hidden anymore. I kinda am more open about just being me and being the retro gaming fox goofball I am, so I’m hoping the new logo will better explore how I bring to you waves of obscure game coverage, whenever I get around to having it commissioned.

Ultimately, thank you all. Whether you came because of a rambly opinion article I made, a review I liked, my groundbreaking interview with the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon writer, or just because you somehow like my writing style in general, I aim to do my best to continue being a good solo writer for another 10 years to come. Barring WordPress dying beyond repair or myself ceasing to exist, I plan to keep SFG 100% solo, 100% independent and 100% active for as long as possible, no matter how bumpy the gaming industry gets.

Here’s to more years of covering cool indies and retro games!