John Zeitler

Welcome to 2010, ladies and gentlemen. At least three hundred and sixty five posts from now, we’ll be counting down to 2011.

I realize that I’ve kept largely quiet since around the end of October. Whatever I got sick with knocked me right out of commission for the better part of November, and kept me from being terribly productive through into December. Only yesterday did I really feel I was ready with some of the projects I’m working on that were literally due today; the most prominent one (being the launch of Frangible Time over at Linguankery) was in essence a compromise, given that I still have yet to finish the story (but am planning on doing so– I just have until July now instead of a packed holiday season). I feel bad about it, but I have to let go of some of my perfectionist tendencies. Not all of them– I still have to take pride in my work– but I have to understand when I’ve reached a physical or mental limit.

The past two years, either on the old (now defunct) TFO.net or on this blog, I made promises at the beginning of the year to do daily posts, to reprise my fairly good run from 2007. Needless to say I didn’t live up to it. Still, I am again making that effort, and hopefully I can hold myself to it. The biggest hurdle will be preventing myself from posting “nothing new” or “I’ll have a big post tomorrow”, because having those kinds of posts being up just discourages me. What I should be doing is encouraging myself to post something creative every day. It’s not like I’m not a creative person. Just fantastically lazy.

I still intend to be pro-actively lazy, though; my challenge to finish fifty games in 2010 still stands and starts… oh, now. What’s got me a little more psyched for this is the fact that I really think I might even be able to pull off yet another Gamerscore Double-up. It’s a pretty nifty goal to shoot for, given that I’d need 24690 points by the end of the year, but it’s not my primary goal. I’m making a change to the Game Clear rules for the 2010/50 challenge, though: I can count games I’ve cleared before if and only if I haven’t cleared them within the past five years, and the clear time on the save file is over twenty hours. That list obviously includes anything I’ve already claimed a Clear for in the three years I’ve been tracking them, and on top of that I’ve got to account for everything beaten in ’05 and ’06 as well. Funny thing is, I think I managed to post about those when I did them, but didn’t formally track them. I’d wager that there’s roughly 120 games off-limits to me… which is fine because I probably have easily that number on my stack.

That’s another thing. The first quarter of this year is positively rank with games coming out, most of them having elected to skip a head-on confrontation with Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, and/or New Super Mario Wii. Thus, a bunch of games I was initially hyped up for are now being released in a period where I have to scale back my purchases, either for the sake of my shelving units or my wallet. I made up a list of what I consider my must-have games within the next three months, and came away with eight as a generous number and five as absolute will-not-misses (FF13, Pokemon SoulSilver, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Ace Attorney Miles Edgeworth, and Sakura Wars Special Edition, if you were wondering; just missing the cut, pending reviews, are White Knight Chronicles, Glory of Heracles, and Ragnarok DS).

I still have a Reclamation List, though that project’s revival is made both easier and harder based on the subject of the list: retro games! I’m planning on making 2010 the year I start reclaiming and re-collecting games I had for the pre-Playstation systems. For obvious reasons this is easier, because they’re less expensive and far easier to come by the vast majority of them (particularly because there happens to be a flea market right near my house, and a second game dealer has moved in there). Of course, it’s harder than the old one because not only are the games I had pretty damnably obscure, they’re obscure and old, meaning they’re going to be far harder to find at decent prices. 80% of them will likely run me a song. The remaining 20% will run me ragged; it already is, because my quest to find an Atari 7800 is fairly fruitless so far.

I’m also still going to write, code, and do the video podcasts here and there, so it’s not like I’m going to be sitting here on my thumbs all year. Once Frangible Time is done, I have a pretty hot idea for continuing the story set forth in A Civics Lesson; I have a zillion figures to assemble and paint before I have even the beginnings of one Warhammer 40K army; and then there’s the pesky business of mere survival.

Strap yourselves in, folks. 2010 is the year the accelerator makes contact with the alloy.