One Year Later

written by Blain Newport on Friday, January 8, 2010

One year ago I decided to update this blog every day. I missed a day here and there, but made up for it with a few days with two entries.

I also started doing videos and video talkthroughs. On one hand, that meant less writing because I let them take up every other post. On the other, I worked harder and longer on those than I did on many posts (especially keepalives).

It's been interesting because people have wandered by and stayed with the video talkthroughs. 48 people subscribed to them, whereas this blog gets a little over ten hits a day, over 90% of which are just random searches, mostly for pictures from particular games.

We also had the photo journals of my time in Gothic 3 and Fallout 3. I never finished them, but I never finished the games, so that's appropriate.

On the review front, I reviewed 26 games. Fallout 3 and Plants vs Zombies were my favorites. And The Red Star was my least favorite game I bothered to review. I played a number of games (mostly indie games) that I just wrote blurbs for.

Looking back at the articles I wrote, some hold up. My three part series on motion control still feels relevant. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 I did a lot of research for that one. It wasn't investigative journalism or anything, but I was proud of it. I'll be curious to see how my predictions pan out. There's a rumor that Natal won't have an additional CPU anymore, which means serious developers will ignore it in favor of game visuals. We'll see.

The PC ghetto analogy wasn't news, but it still feels like a strong way of expressing my feelings about the state of PC gaming.

And my feelings about my feelings were fairly well expressed in an article on ultraviolence.

It's not a huge amount to show for a year's dabbling. But it gave me about as much satisfaction as a year's work at most jobs I've had. I don't intend to stop writing, reading, or thinking about games any time soon.