Game Diary: Feeling the Pressure

Why hello there! Fancy seeing you here. Been a while hasn't it?

This week I want to go over some of the short and long term plans that I have for both the blog and the YouTube channel.  I do sometimes have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew when it comes to this sort of thing so it might turn out that some of this will take a long time to pan out, and some of it may never happen at all.  I hope that isn't the case though!

At the beginning of the year I made a long list of older games that I want to try and beat over the rest of 2016.  This list is so long that I almost certainly won't get around to everything, but I want to do my best and finish a nice healthy chunk of it.  In my "RMGB in 2016" post I already touched upon how I would like to get around to completing all the Zelda titles that I haven't got around to yet.  You can also add to that list some Resident Evil games.  I have struggled to complete any of the games that have come out after Resident Evil 4.  Part of that is definitely because there has been an overall dip in quality, but I have also drifted away from the survival horror genre in general for whatever reason.

The other thing I want to focus on over the coming year is adventure games.  My Monkey Island Mondays series is the starting point for this, and episode will hopefully be online in early March.  I would also like to play other well received games in the genre that I have skipped though:  Deponia, the Runaway series, the Dreamfall / Longest Journey games and stuff like the Black Mirror trilogy from the Adventure Company.  These point and click games all work really well with the Steam Controller and Link, so I will be playing through them gradually.

To begin with though, I thought I would focus on finishing some of the older Telltale Games series that have been in my collection for years, yet I have never got around to beating.  For starters, we have Sam & Max Season One on the Wii.  Because each episode only takes a few hours to complete, they are quite easy to fit into my schedule, and the jokes hold up pretty well today even if technically the Wii version has its fair share of problems. I just finished the final episode yesterday, so there will be both a written and a video review up sometime over the next week.

After that I will probably play something else on the Wii that won't take too long to finish, as a bit of a palate cleanser.  I was thinking that the Bit Trip Collection might be a good option.  Then I will move on to playing Back to the Future: The Game, followed by another palate cleanser, and then Sam and Max: Season Two.  I have been meaning to bring you some more Wii Hidden Gems for quite a while now, so playing these will both take care of my hankering for adventure games and allow me to address the lack of Wii content.

There are also two other things that I want to take care of as soon as possible - a review of Kameo: Elements of Power as part of the Rare Replay series, and episode three of the C64 review show.  So at the next opportunity I will be sitting down with my Xbox One for some extended play sessions in an attempt to get to the end of Kameo.  The C64 video is actually partly done - I have finished the section on Turrican. I have the three other sections left to complete: Bod Squad, Retrograde and Last Ninja Remix.  Finally, I have drawn up a list of twelve more games that I would like to cover for PS2 Tuesdays Season 4.  With everything else I'm already working on, I don't think that this will begin until the second half of the year, but I would like to start preparing for it now.  Covertape Chaos Season 2 will also start in the back half of the year.

So as you can see, I have given myself quite a bit of work to do, and to be honest it's all starting to feel a bit overwhelming.  As long as I take it slow and steady though, I should get there.  My original plan of releasing a new episode of Monkey Island Mondays was way to ambitious. Even a monthly schedule is quite tight, seeing how I like to play a variety of things at the same time, and still need to leave some room for brand new releases.  My new target is to get all five episodes out by the end of June.  I doubt I will be taking part in the Summer Backlog Challenge this year - my own personal backlog challenge will be going on all year long anyway!

At the moment I'm not really sure what order this content is going to appear in - if I had to guess, I would say that the Sam & Max Season One review will be next, followed by the C64 Review Show, Monkey Island Mondays #2 and then Kameo, but the reality may turn out to be slightly different!