#before the echo

Beloved demigod of gaming blogs RPS went through a full staff turnover, pretty much. It's weird, man. VR happened but remains a bit beyond my periphery, even if it gets brought up from time to time in the groupchat. Battle Royale games weren't a thing a few years ago, then they became everything, now they are still a big deal, the biggest deal, or maybe a large-medium deal, or just a large part of the background - I honestly don’t know how to quantify this. Steam's ubiquity has slipped markedly, through a mixture of managed negligence and increasingly aggressive competition. The inherent limitations of being bound to one commercial distribution system on one hardware platform have always been at the back of my mind, but I do increasingly wonder if my time would be better spent on a project that dug through other veins. The answer is, for now, that sometimes you've gotten keep doing the thing you said you were gonna do, if no other reason than because. 

Tumblr, our home since 2016, has gone through its own shifts and controversies in this time too. They no longer seem to allow unencoded links (so no-one ever knows what they’re clicking on), it became less friendly to adult content, and as of today apparently Tumblr has been sold on to wordpress. I don’t really know the implications of this last thing.

Some Maths

I played fifty one games beginning with B. Of the forty-eight that I'd deem to have some notional metric of completability, twenty-four of those I (often in the most flexible sense possible), "completed". 50%: Not as bad as I'd expected, TBH, especially as that includes a couple of painful six/seven game streaks where I didn't finish anything.

Ceremonious Award Giving for Games Starting with ‘B’

It is always hard to pick favourites, and from any given vantage point they tend to change. Nevertheless, an act of self-canonisation is in order, as is tradition. Given the nature of this project, I do put a lot of value in titles that surprise me in one way or another. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Bulletstorm were equal Best Goofy Action surprises (it pays having low expectations, sometimes), with an honourable mention to Brigador. The Banner Saga was the most surprisingly thought provoking. Davey Wreden’s autoficitive The Beginners Guide gets the Anodyne Prize for Most Enjoyably Difficult To Put In A Box. 

Botanicula was probably my Favourite (total) Revisit, or the best non-surprise. 

B was a letter characterised by a few high-budget action series (of which my favourite part was Bioshock 2 (Minerva's Den)), held up by substrate of modest indie things of varying impact. My attention span was all over the place, too. We had a lot of short forays with little to say, but there was there were also more than a few wordier attempts at thought. I'm bad at judging what makes "good" writing, particularly of my own, which I oscillate between accepting and loathing, but I can tell you which games/posts took the cake for length and effort: Baldur's Gate for longest playtime; Burnout: Paradise for highest word-count (and longest gestation period); Battleblock Theater for the most time-consuming method of putting a post together; The Beginners Guide for the most times played through a game in order to try and parse it; Braid for the most external reading and referencing.  

I think the most absurdly Expensive-at-purchase game here was Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which also gets the newly thought of I Can’t Believe It Still Has Functioning Online Multiplayer prize. I'm handing the Most Disappointing badge to Broken Age, despite (or because of) already having played it a bunch before attempting it for the list, though Before the Echo (fka Sequence) takes the Aquanox Award for game I inexplicably sunk the most time on trying to finish despite not really enjoying. I hold the Most Contempt for Breach & Clear. Black Mirror had the Worst Voice Acting, and it was also the Oldest Game here (2003), at least in terms of no-significant-alterations though depending on how you want to factor in remasters and remakes, you might alternatively give that prize to Broken Sword (1996) or Bionic Commando Rearmed (1988). Blueberry Garden was Purchased Most Long Ago, in 2009, though the Aquaria Trophy for Longest Unplayed Incumbent goes to Bob Came in Pieces, which I'd bought in 2010 then never installed (it's pretty good, it turns out!). However, the special Emotional Closure Award goes to Baldur's Gate, with which I already had nearly two decades of fond, scattered memories, before finally finishing for the first time during this project.

More Maths

When I started this letter I had 438 games in my steam library. Right now I have 1049 games, which is almost exactly three times the amount I had when I started this blog in October 2015 (~350). I've played 70 games total. A further 57 entered the list behind the marker, into the exempt scorched land of the already visited alphabet, which means we're at 127/1049 = 12.11% of the way through the list, which is a +7% increase on where we were at three years ago. That's not nothing. But at 2.5% per year, it's not a lot. Globally, the average human lifespan is 68 years.

Terrifying Implications For the Future

The maths says that the current terms aren't working, that I'm drowning in a heady mixture of my own relentless consumerism, hesitation, and procrastination from this task which is itself an avenue of procrastination - that at this rate I will probably die (or certainly give up) before even getting to the halfway point, and that we can't continue like this in good faith. 

So I'm going to get a bit reckless, even change the rules slightly, in order to try and breathe new life into this thing. All games must still be played for at least an hour - yes, that one stands. But. BUT. I'm setting a hard time limit of one week, from one game to the next, post to post. For now at least. No more lofty words about striving to "finish" games as a rule rather than exception. It's quantity over quality (pretending for a second that quality was ever a concern) from here on out, business over pleasure, irreverence over lengthy considerations, scrapbooking over essays.

On the bright side, this means I can have a weekly posting schedule. Let's say Tuesdays? Tuesdays seem like a good day for posting.

A couple of other things: 

List Oriented now has a ko-fi tip jar, just in case you, dear reader, enjoy this blog - or did before it went completely silent for the first half of this year - and feel like helping to pay for my caffeine addiction and/or encouraging me to keep going with this task. 

Another thing I want to do is compile a list of links to good places for games-writing and other things that I like, because a) I feel like such a page would be helpful for me to keep a record, even if for nobody else; b) my conception of the internet is permanently stuck in 2008 but also; c) it's hard to remember where to look for good things on the internet, sometimes, these days, given our habitual over-reliance on various platforms to direct us to CONTENT. But one thing I want to include is a list of other places where people are doing this kind of list-oriented project thing. I remember a bunch of them sprung up a couple of years back when we gained a brief and relative flash of notoriety, though I’m not sure how many stuck at it. If you yourself are doing one, or you’re aware of any others who are, Let Me Know! 

Anyway, looking ahead. C. An obtuse but interesting letter. Not so many of the big-hitters. A buuuuunch of city builders and management games, a few influential and/or janky platformers, more than a handful of puzzlers, some famed RTS series, a heap of question marks, a coupla interesting art things and a few uh *squints* Shooting Game. Happily for me, a lot of titles that I've not yet gotten round to giving a go, so this will be all...fresh.

I have a vague memory from when I got through A, of looking ahead to C and thinking at least it was a much more compact section than B, at the time, some light on the other side of what I'd already known would be a slog. But here we are three years later, and now there's fifty seven such games beginning with C, so there goes that thought. You'd think, having identified the consumerist-excess problem that catalysed this stupid thing, I would have stopped buying game bundles at some point, made this ridiculous project a bit easier for myself, a little more plausible for everyone else. 

But, we must continue. It's a new day. A new letter. A new schedule.

The way is long and it is littered with videogames.