A little over a year into this project and I’ve gotten through less than half of my original list. That said, it’s been a complete success. It’s really expanded my horizons in terms of what games I’ll consider playing, and I’ve loved the amount of times I’ve gone “oh, that’s why people like this game, that’s why people won’t stop talking about this”. Going back and playing some older titles has raised my standards for quality - some older games flawlessly execute on certain features/concepts to the point that it’s like, why has no one been able to do this at least this well since? The newer, smaller, indie-er games on the list are fun too, they tend to push more boundaries and make wilder choices. I don’t always love the end result but there’s a much greater variety and level of passion put in than with AAA stuff from any year. The fact that I haven’t even gotten through half of this stuff is really a good thing - so much more to look forward to!
In the past year I’ve also been participating in a video game “book club” where we’ve been playing (mostly indie) games and discussing them after, which has kind of taken over the time and energy I intended to put into going through my backlog. I kind of still want to journal about the games I’m playing though, just for myself, so I think I’m going to expand the scope of Matt’s Video Game Backlog to just “micro-reviews of any game I happen to play”. I’d like to post these more quickly and regularly but I don’t want to bog the blog down with them, I want the main posts here to be other stuff, so I’m going to try and minimize the backlog posts visually on the front page.
Henceforth, the backlog table is going to live here and I’ll periodically add new stuff to it (I’ve added a bunch of stuff just now). Stay tuned if you happen to have been reading these.