It’s the end of June which marks the halfway point to Christmas. Yes, it’s nearly Christmas. Before Christmas is after Christmas – and after Christmas is before Christmas. Happy Crisis! Anyway,… today I wanted to give an update on the #JustOnePercent challenge and how it’s been going!
It has been a while since Krikket announced #JustOnePercent, a challenge of sorts where you play newly released Indie Games for a year and “try not to surrender in despair within a month”. Am I being petty for bringing that up now…? Anyway, as you may be able to tell by the big table at the bottom of this page here, we’re halfway there to completing this challenge. I’m sitting at 63/100 (63% done!) or 63/120 games (52.5%!), although I technically played more… but I’ve kinda made it a rule that I only count covered titles, meaning that I’ll review 100 to 120 games this year. We’ll see!
This is no longer about proving a point, to be fair. It wasn’t ever since we crossed the first month, honestly. That tweet was questionable and even after elaborating on it, nobody really cared anymore about the tweet that sparked this. Rather, it’s more of a fun challenge that Krikket made and I’m participating in it for the wrong reasons while everyone else is just having fun with it. I’m just petty. I don’t forget shit like this. I’m here to say that I didn’t “surrender in despair” at the end of the year… but again, I’m having fun, so that’s fine, probably. The other participants are also in it for the fun of it, so that’s pretty darn great.
Anyhow, I’ve been in a slump lately and I haven’t covered many games in a while. On top of my backlog of games, I also have a backlog of reviews. Isn’t that cool? So, I’ve been struggling and it’s not that I’m struggling because of the pressure of writing a review or because I’m stressed out when I write a review. Rather, I get stressed out when I play a game. I can’t seem to enjoy games as of late… not all that much, actually. It’s been odd as of late. I play games usually to wind down after studying a lot for exams but when I start a game now (review or not doesn’t matter for this), I get stressed out because my brain’s like “you gotta study!” – But then I wanna return to studying but I’m just drained and don’t wanna do it anymore.
I believe the main issue here is that I’m a bit burned out from games, so I will probably take a little bit longer before I return to reviewing titles again and I’ll see if I can do something else. This may be a combination of Roger’s and Jaedia’s advice. Roger from ContainsModeratePeril said that I should write about “cheese”. By that, he probably means that I should write about something else other than games… which is plausible. I’ve been enjoying Spice and Wolf as of late, which is a great show, and I may wanna write about that – or I may even cover Mushoku Tensei! After all, I’ve been wanting to review that anime for the longest time and I’m nearly done with the light novel, too! It could also just be a joke response or he literally wants me to talk about Cheese but I frankly have no clue about Cheese… Anyway, Jaedia from Dragons and Whimsy said that I should take a break and enjoy games for a bit without the pressure of reviewing them – which is probably a great idea and pretty darn reasonable. So, I’ll do that once I figure out how to enjoy games again. Edward Ray (who we interviewed a few days ago) suggested that I could take a game from the past that I already have an established/longstanding perspective/opinion on and that I could then write about that without the pressure of coming up with something fresh. Honestly, that’s a great idea as well. I love Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, for instance, and we played through the main story of that a while ago on my stream. Hence, it may be a good idea to write about that. Similarly, I could write about TFT again (although I wanted to do that anyway)… or maybe about games, I’m excited about like Witchmarsh, a game that I funded ages ago that still isn’t done developing. And well, Meghan from MeghanPlaysGames showed sympathy and also suggested that I could write about another aspect of a game, which is an amazing idea, IMO. I could talk about the music in Risk of Rain 2 and what track’s my favourite by Chris Christodolou… or I could write about how the Nightmare Sequence sucks in Life is Strange… or I could write that Commentary on the Game Design of “Choices” in Life is Strange that I wanted to tackle the other day. Also, Meghan suggested taking a break, so that may be a good idea as well.
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
So, great people up there (check them out) and I’ll see what I’ll do during this “break”. Hopefully, I’ll recover from it all until Blaugust as I would love to tackle 31 reviews in 31 days, although that sounds counterproductive after my current review slump.
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Both Roger and Jaedia’s suggestions are spot on. I found expanding my range to write about topics other than games to be extremely liberating. Playing games with no intent to write about them at all sounds amazing. I ought to try it.
The only drawback is that you may find writing about non-gaming topics so much more enjoyable than writing about games that writing about games becomes a duty, then a chore. And playing games without writing about them may be so much fun you never want to write about games again.
Still, every solution brings its own problems. And at least they’ll be different problems.
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