[img width=640 height=429]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4908/32113228248_53567e34a5_z.jpg[/img]2017 was a very weird year for me. I was in a funk for much of the year and not really enjoying any of the things that I used to love so much. I wasn't happy running my game store, I didn't want to air guitar to my favorite bands, I wasn't exercising or eating healthy like I typically do, I wasn't watching cool sci-fi movies or TV shows, I wasn't reading any new comics, I wasn't socializing much if at all most months, and for the first time I can ever remember I didn't really have a desire to play games when I had the chance. It was a lame year and 2018 started off just as depressing. Early in 2018 though I was able to get control of my mind once again and make some important changes in my life that made me start to appreciate things again and see the joy in all the things I used to love so very much.
Although I was already starting to feel excited about life again it really became apparent after the sale of my store was finalized, because that also meant that I had a lot more free time available once again. I started playing some games once more. I dug into the backlog of CDs and Vinyl that I had purchased that had been stacking up over the last year that I had ignored. And I dug deep into the fresh new Batman stories that I had been neglecting in recent years.
I've jumped in and out of the Playcast games from time to time, but started to participate more regularly lately. Sometime around the month they ran
Die Hard Trilogy &
Dynamite Cop my love of gaming just re-exploded back in a big way. I had so much fun literally dusting off my Saturn and Dreamcast to play a couple of games that I have been sitting on for years and was curious to try out. Not only that but I found myself really craving those forum interactions discussing the games. To keep the SEGA trend going I pulled out my CDX shortly after and tried to leap a hurdle that my 10 year-old self was never able to achieve... beat
X-Men for the SEGA Genesis. It actually took a fair amount of effort and time, but I was finally able to take down Magneto after a few days of making incremental progress. It felt amazing. So I kept digging into my Sega backlog over the next couple weeks.
In September the Playcast choose
Batman: The Telltale Game, which combines two of the things I love most about earth into one delightful package and I not only had the pleasure of playing and discussing it on the forums with them, but Shawn and Rich so graciously invited me to join the podcast recording session which re-ignited yet another dormant passion of mine: video game discussions with friends. I need to apologize to them both once more because I didn't realize how much I wanted to do this until it was happening and it ended up being one of their longest episodes to date as I let loose years of pent up podcasting energy.
Skip ahead one more month, a few more games under my belt by this time, and both RFGeneration Community Playthrough groups: Playcast and Shump Club happened to choose an NES game for their respective playthroughs AND they both chose an NES game that I had yet to complete when I was pushing myself to complete as many NES games as possible a few years prior. Back before I opened my store I had beaten nearly 350 unique licensed NES games and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. Back in those days I was helping a community effort on Nintendoage.com to see if the entire community could collectively beat the entire library in one calendar year. In 2012 it was the first year this was actually achieved and I was a huge part of helping that happen at the time. After taking down
Monster Party and
1942 for the RFGeneration threads, I jumped back on the Nintendoage.com beat every game thread to see how it was fairing these days and it seemed like other than a couple people, interest had died off. So I started plugging away at new NES games again and even though some of the games are not great, I'm having a blast beating NES games again and I've recently got my NES game completion rate up to 358 games beaten, which started off with
Monster Party and
1942 and have since included:
1943,
Deadly Towers,
Solomon's Key,
X-Men,
Mission Impossible (another childhood game that was never finished),
Robo Warrior,
Metal Mech,
Motor City Patrol,
T&C II Trilla's Surfari and
The Last Ninja. Most of those games are more known for being bad or difficult rather than fun. But taking down a bad difficult game can be part of the fun
Beyond that I've been playing some modern games like
Spider-Man (PS4),
Nioh,
Rocket League,
Beat Saber,
Nex Machina,
Octopath Traveler,
Mega Man 11, and re-playing some classic NES games via the Switch Online service. Over the last year I had a
Super Mario Bros project I was working on with a friend kind of fall to the wayside. After how much fun I had talking about games with the Playcast gents I reached out to my old Collectorcast buddies to see if they wanted to reunite to help me with this project and they both agreed to try it out. It was so great to talk with WildBil52 and Duke.Togo once again on Skype like no time had ever passed at all and I'm very excited about what we are working on and hope to start sharing it with you guys soon.
[img width=640 height=467]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4904/32113227408_e77133d47a_z.jpg[/img]I really just want to thank everyone here on RFGen no matter how often you post or add items to the database for the part you had in getting me through some rough patches over the years, but specifically this last year. We all start here because we love video games, but at some point these relationships evolve beyond that. There are so many of you I consider close friends at this point and I'm just so fortunate to have a place full of people like you in my life. If you haven't checked out the Playcast or Shmup Club podcasts or joined in one of their monthly playthroughs I strongly urge you to give it a go. Very welcoming and great gaming discussions are always had.
RFGeneration Community PlaythroughsNintendoage.comCrabmaster2000 Youtube Channel
