Why did I add “The Last Day of June?” Was it because I timed it on purpose for the day, or really like that sad indie game? No to either: Friday got derailed a bit due to personal stuff and I can’t play that indie exactly because of the sadness it has. What I do have, are a bunch of updates and some fun stuff to discuss/ramble about!
Yahoo, the Interview is up!
Yes! Finally, the long-teased interview with M.Y is up and live! Read it here if you wanna know more about how games Telenet and other fun companies got programmed by this wonderful man. After many months of approvals and waiting, it finally got done and out there, and I’m pretty happy with the reception/views so far considering how niche of a subject this is. I’m hopeful this will be as inspirational to people as other Telenet interviews over time have been for others in the gaming industry (Including some who have started/finished work on their own indie games!)
Not much behind the scenes news on that to talk about now, besides how it came from a longshot question that got me to an interview I was very happy to pull off, and after understanding their preferences it went rather smoothly. Thanks again to Sushio o Neal and Shaun Musgrave for their help translating and proofreading, respectively. I’ve also been happy to see others respect M.Y’s preferences with their name, and I hope that keeps up. I’ll head around to share it more on the web later this week, and I’m pretty eager to try and nab something big like this in maybe 2 more years from now!
…Yeah JP translations aren’t cheap. I’ve debated doing a kofi tip jar for SFG to make up for the patreon being video/huge article focused, and well, since I retired from videos, I don’t use it much, but I really don’t want to come off as an ebeggar so I hesitate from that. Still, I don’t mind doing this outta my own pocket like I’ve been doing, but if you want me to do a tip jar that can go to reviewing expensive stuff/interviews, I will do so! My next goal for a “big” interview, are to find members of Renovation Products, the US division of Telenet. I really want to know more about Dream Probe!
Perhaps I’ll even dive into the NEC well to find the voice actors for the US Telenet Turbo CD games, like Last Alert or Valis II? That’s the sort of stuff I wanna find… if you have leads, the SFG site email is the same as it always has been, along with me being available to reach on Bluesky.
Queue slims slowing, but modern catchups
Last time it was a bit rough, and I had slowed on catching up on the review queue for long-overdue stuff in June, but one of those overdue games is almost covered now, and I can finally be free of how horrible it is.
Instead, June was a more modern, overdue queue month. The Tomb Raider trilogy really, really was something I underestimated reviewing by quite a lot, but I’m pretty proud with how that turned out. I should finally be able to add extra screens to that article shortly after this update goes live, too.
BitDungeon got reviewed, and as middling as it was, it did fully clear up the Xbox Series queue yet again: I think Steam Deck covers most of the things i’d use my xbox for these days, but you never know if a modern game fits better on XSX for me than Deck! especially if it happens to be one that’s pretty intensive, but then again, I seldom review intensive games to begin with… Maybe I can change that after the queue is fully done?
Speaking of fully done, Steam! That’s almost caught up again, though that had long become a “modern” queue last year, I was worried with Tomb Raider and Wizardry I’d get really behind on it. Luckily that wasn’t the case, and we nailed TR, and I’m midway through the Wizardry note taking! Quite an in-depth game, but one singular game vs several longer ones makes this remake a lot easier to get the gist of compared to a trilogy like Tomb Raider. Lord help me if this remake consisted of the many scenarios and sequels of the original Wizardry.
So yeah, that just leaves… Switch stuff. As I noted before, a lot of it was pretty packed and the remaining queue are all mostly long games: Caligula is a long game, but luckily being so bad means I don’t have to play it for many hours. But there are other games I barely dove into that will need a lot of time, and luckily I have that time for once in a week. Hopefully that leads to me catching up on notes, but I don’t know if I can hit my 3 a week goal this week since I’ll likely have Caligula tomorrow night, and maybe the next game Friday. Or Wizardry might be that friday game?
We’ll see! With the PS4 being the behemoth I’m mostly saving for last, that queue will be one I’m gonna really try to grind on when I finally get to it. Just me, and a PS4 slim that hopefully won’t explode on me.
New Logo…?
I’ve been teasing a new logo/site design for a while, but that’s probably a ways off: the artist I’m looking to commission one from has a lot on their IRL plate and that’ll have to clear up first… and I still have to make WIPs myself. But hopefully I can get that done soon, and then announce/tease it when we’re close to launching the new logo. I have so many ideas, but that makes it very hard to choose! Graphic Design is not my passion, but I’m hoping working with a great artist who does have it as a passion, will lead to a wonderful, exciting future for SFG.
And with that, we have a short but simple update! Not sure how much I’ll get done during this more freed up week, but I at least hope what I don’t get put on the site then, instead gets replaced by more note taking that’ll help in the coming weeks to catching up on that queue.
We’re almost seeing the end of the tunnel…