The "Back" log Journey

You've done well, old header. Even though you were never centred properly.

Well hey there stranger.

I've been hemming around the idea of taking up the blogging business again while I finish up my last year of university. Part of me is for it, as I felt like I never really got to try my original premise of blogging a video game backlog what with all the bundles. Part of me is against it, because I stopped writing because it came with an absurd amount of stress that didn't exactly massage my delicately depressed brain chemicals.

So what's the plan? I miss blogging about video games, and so I'll blog about video games. Why not? I like joking around, I like reading far too deeply into the themes and I generally like the dialogue and discussion that ensues when I combine the two. I have far too many backlogged games, and you can definitely make a case that every game in this back catalogue deserves a certain amount of close analysis.

To be clear. I'm not doing bundle posts again but instead approaching things with my original intentions of a general purpose podium for me to ramble about things that I (and hopefully you) find interesting. Think of it as a big mess that borrows from reviews, impressions, let's plays, editorials, after action reports, rants, random nonsense and everything in between. It's hard to classify. Like before, I want to cover old and new, indie and blockbuster, no matter the genre. If I play it, it's fair game. I'm nothing if not foolishly overambitious.

And hey, maybe nuggets of insight will fall out of my head while I'm at it. To be honest, I'm probably not going to pay a lot of attention to professionalism (that can wait for when I get a real job again), but I'm firmly of the opinion that a) everything deserves to be studied and b) nothing says you can't have a bit of a laugh while studying it.

So here we go. Maybe I'm an “indie” games journalist or an amateur game critic or a something else entirely. Let's worry about that later. I'm feeling pretty good about the outlook here, and I'm looking forward to writing some off the cuff impressions, crack-pot theories and whatever else comes to mind.

Anyway, welcome back.

Oh, and let me know what you think of the new site layout. I'll be tweaking it over the next few days. I think it looks sharp, but I also thought a background with hearts puked all over it looked good, so I'm not exactly trusting myself.

One More Thing

Hello.

I'm not back. I don't mean to get your hopes up. Pretend you never saw me. I just couldn't stand leaving the site with an unhappy ending. Thanks to the kindness of strangers and friends, my outlook and future has become a lot more sunny. I'm on track to graduate again, which means a sweet sweet degree for me and a much better chance of proper employment in this silly industry I love so much. I've been graciously asked to continue reviewing at least one bundle regularly, which you can always read come Indie Royale time on IndieGames.com. I've gotten to continue to do reviews as a hobby over on New Gamer Nation, and I've pitched a few real winners in my humble opinion. And I've got even more cool stuff coming down my game critic pipe, which I'll always be sure to keep you updated about on Twitter.

Is the Backlog Journey still dead? Yep, and it's not going to be rezzed for the foreseeable future. But I'm not as gone as I thought and I've got a sweet gig coming up that I'm sure you will all enjoy. But shhhhhhhh, that's a secret.

Hugs and kisses,
Colin

The Journey Ends

It's hard to believe that little more than six months ago I had never even considered the possibility of writing about games. It's funny to see people coming along now assuming I'm some kind of old pro, but the reality is that I'm just thing guy who happened to have a lot of opinions and could string together a mean sentence. On a less funny note, I won't be stringing together sentences anymore, as I'm going to have to stop updating the site.

In theory, the concept behind the Backlog Journey was simple. Take some of the hundreds of games I unwisely bought on Steam, play them, and then write about them. The point was to build a portfolio, a sort of website resume that I could send potential employers towards as an example of my work. And it did work, albeit in a rather roundabout way. Bundle reviews were an afterthought, but quickly became the most dominant and popular work on the site. This was great in many ways, since it brought a lot of traffic to the site and allowed me to write for other websites, but also rather challenging due to the extreme time commitments enforced by the rapid ballooning of the bundle phenomenon.

It definitely took up a lot of my free time, which is basically what wound up capsizing my writing career. Despite my general upbeat demeanour, my home life is, for lack of a better word, completely fucked up. For nearly ten years I've been suffering from what's now been diagnosed as clinical depression, which flares up at the worst times. While on my best days I felt like I could really make this work, the rigours and stress loads of writing and managing a website, even a tiny blog, took a huge toll on me.

Without going into details, a rotten series of events has occurred which means I lost a huge chunk of my funding and can no longer finish school. The vast majority of websites require at least some kind of postsecondary education to be hired as a full time writer, so that is now impossible. The alternative would be to try to work on my own site with ad revenue, but I have made a grand total of six dollars and twenty one cents since the site began, and I haven't made a single cent for the last month. It's simply not possible to live off of freelance writing alone at this point, and I don't think it would be possible to continue doing it on the side since I'm likely going to have to start working two minimum wage retail jobs just to keep up with rent.

So the site is going away for a while. I'll certainly leave everything up, and I'm going to be renewing the domain name for the foreseeable future, but I'm giving up on writing for now. There's still a handful of reviews to go up on New Gamer Nation, but aside from that this is it. Maybe one day I can get back up and try again, or perhaps I'll find someone who can take my blog concept and run with it. For now, I'm off the grid.

Cheers to everyone for making this a fantastic experience, even during the bad times, and I really do appreciate all the positive feedback and really wonderful comments from readers. You all helped make an unhappy fellow into a very happy game reviewer, at least for a little while. Thanks for playing along with the backlog.

The Steamy Summer Stream

So unless our old friends at Valve are just trollin' again, all odds point to the Steam Summer sale beginning in just a few short hours. Excellent.

During Christmas I tried an experiment in which I covered the sales happening with quick little blurbs and thoughts about each of the games. It was a fantastic idea if I was a superhuman, or could afford to spend eight hours every day cropping screenshots and editing links. Obviously it was way too much work, so I ditched the format and spent the rest of my Christmas alone and sloshed on eggnog.

But my Yuletide traditions aren't important. What is important is that the idea of helping people make smart buys during Steam sales have become my white whale, and I may have finally crafted a harpoon. As many of you know from either screaming along at home with Amnesia or peer pressuring me into peeing on everything in Postal, I've been working on doing livestreams more regularly. The reasons are two or threefold or so. It's a lot less time consuming than the written word, which means I can do more, or cover games I wouldn't normally have the chance to write about. It's also less time consuming than something like Youtube, where I have to edit things and talk to myself, plus I like the live interaction with people in the chat. It's also really fun, because I get to play games and hang out with cool people who think I'm cool and validate me as a human being and a game reviewing guy.

Being just a bit too crazy and overambitious, I decided to swing these two great tastes together. Every day during the Steam sale, I'll hop on to the Backlog Journey Twitch.tv page and broadcast some of the discounted games for an hour or two. During the broadcast, I'll be taking requests from the community for what I should play, so you can get a taste. Want to know if Recettear is a thing you should pick up? Curious about how A Valley Without Wind plays? Can't decide between Magicka and Gemini Rue?

After each daily sale begins, either leave a comment here, tweet a request at me, or just show up during the show and heckle me about a game you want to see. So long as I own the game (or it's inexpensive enough to justify), I'll pop it in, play it a bit and discuss how awesome or not awesome it is. Can't make it? Leave a comment anyway, because all of the videos will be saved over on Twitch to look at later.

Right now I'm going to shoot for a daily stream beginning at 7PM EDT (that's 11PM GMT for those not all up with the 'Mercian timezones). This is all very loose though, as my full time job and very spotty internet track record could mean I have to shuffle the time around. The best place to know what's up is either via my Twitter feed, or possibly by following me on Twitch.

So yes. Good idea? Bad? We'll find out. But it does rely on you folks too, so make me proud and make some requests. Let's see if the wallet can handle this.

Game Dev Bundle Dev'd Some Games For You

The long in development Game Dev Bundle, put together by some enterprising Redditors, has made its debut. Unlike some of the bigger players, this truly does feature like an indie effort; featuring indie games submitted and curated by select members of the community, it features a lot of offbeat and relatively unknown titles that none the less are still worth checking out.

Luckily for those worried about the rapidly expanding bundle shaped hole in your wallet, the Game Dev Bundle is strictly pay what you want; paying over six dollars unlocks a stellar bonus games and some additional treats, but the basic bundle is designed to fit budgets of all sizes. Still though, try to be generous; the profits are split evenly by the developers, hosting costs and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Unsurprisingly there's no Steam keys here, but on the other hand you do get direct downloads and Desura unlocks across the board, which is a fairly impressive coup for such a grassroots effort.

So how about those games? Well, there's a lot of new to me stuff here, plus a couple of old favourites. Skip past the break for more.

Economics Downturns Can't Stop the Recession Bundle

Indie Game Bundles is a site designed to round up news about bundles all in one convenient place, but it seemed inevitable that they would get into the bundle game themselves with the Recession Bundle. Fortunately, they've found a niche that's not often used by other bundles: freeware. Most of the games you can pick up form absolutely nothing, with donations accepted and rewarded with two commercial games (including Desura keys, which are being worked on now). Everyone gets ten percent of whatever is earned: the site, each of the developers and a charity; in this case, SOS Children's Village Croatia.

It seems a bit redundant to review freeware, but maybe you need a bit of convincing that downloading these games is worth spending your very busy time on. That's where I step in, with reviews of every free and paid game in the bundle. Skip past the break for the freebies first, followed by the bonuses.

Stay Inside and Beat the Heat with the Summer Indie Royale Round-up

Indie Royale just keeps getting bigger and bigger. To celebrate the wretchedly humid weather, they're bringing nine indie games to the beach party. This includes an award winner, a neoclassic adventure, an eccentric shooter, three very eccentric shooters, an even more eccentric shooter fighting game and a revamped Flash game classic.

Included among the nine is a beta key for the Transformersrsque MOBA AirMech, which you can find my thoughts on in the last Royale round-up. Paying above eight dollars will snag you a music album, Pixeljams Vol. 1, while the minimum price constantly fluctuates, as always. If you plan to pick one up, the sooner the better.

Of course, the question is should you pick one up? Skip past the break to see my thoughts.