I haven’t done a solid week of blogging here in… a very long time. I suppose I still haven’t, since I missed yesterday. Oh well! Even so, it was nice to get back to the old grind, although it requires a lot more effort than it used to. Does writing get harder as you get older? Is my brain getting as flabby and out of shape as the rest of me? What a depressing thought.

Eh, I guess the problem is more to do with all the other things going on for me. Real life stuff. I haven’t made a big deal of it, but this month I took over as editor-in-chief of USgamer — something that’s been brewing behind the scenes since GDC in March. It’s a lot of stress and late nights already, but I can’t say no to the opportunity to head up a really great website and try to refine it into something even better. They basically told me, “Make the site you wanted to create at 1UP, except this time it won’t be abandoned to wither on the vine and starved of essential resources.” So that’s nice.

I’ve been really happy with the articles that we’ve run over the past two weeks. We’re still figuring out optimal schedules and the ideal content mix and all, but there’s some great material over there right now, and I’m confident it’s only going to get better. Go read it! And check back again in a week, when the slick new version two redesign goes live.

As for my own crap this week:

My weekly video project tackled my top 15… er, 14 3DS Virtual Console picks. As usual, I left out something. I had originally put Wario Land II on there, but somehow I must have deleted the entry and didn’t even notice. I also need to have a chat with someone about aspect ratios… but even so, I’m pretty happy with the outcome of this one.

Also:

• Can Destiny Define Itself? I have a lot of fond feelings for Bungie games, and I want Destiny to be great. I hope it is.
• Mario’s Orphans: A look at Nintendo’s bad habit of producing peripherals and often failing to support them.
• Klonoa Empire of Dreams: Not really a review, per se. Damnable new games journalism!
• How Far Will a Fresh Coat of Paint Go? The Order: 1886 and The Evil Within feel very, very familiar. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but both games need to find a way to distinguish themselves.
• Why Sly 2 is Still the Greatest Video Game Heist: I still can’t believe they made a Thief sequel without even a slight nod to the heist structure.

Over on Anatomy of Games, I kicked off a series on Mega Man 2 — but you knew that already.

And on Game Boy World… well, I haven’t posted any new articles in a couple of weeks. I haven’t abandoned the site, though. Far from it. I’ve been putting in an hour or so with GBW every evening to build up the index of game titles. It’s slow and time-consuming, but I’m about halfway through 1995 already, which gets us most of the way through the classic Game Boy’s life and almost halfway through the combined Game Boy/Game Boy Color libraries. Once those indices are built, I plan to add in Lynx, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket/Color, and WonderSwan/Color: Basically, every 8-bit handheld. Or rather, every pre-GBA handheld.

I’m taking Game Boy World pretty seriously, even if I can only give it a few hours a week, and even if the work I’ve invested may not be immediately apparent. I’m in it for the long haul (though admittedly the sheer number of horse racing gambling simulators in my future chills my soul). In fact, I’ve sunk about a thousand dollars into the venture already. On that note, I’ll be launching a small Patreon page to help offset the cost of materials and supplies for Game Boy World. I’m also rolling Anatomy of Games and Metroidvania.com into the Patreon as well. The latter site in particular I’ve been wanting to develop for ages but have been held back by the expenses involved in sourcing the wide array hardware for the games in question, so if I can offset those costs through Patreon, it can finally happen.

I’m not looking to get rich or even make a living off this, simply to drum up enough support to pay for the games and hardware I need for recording those fancy videos and writing those fancy articles. And at the end of it all, we’ll have constructed a mostly complete Game Boy library that I can donate to a video game history museum. This is why I said I wouldn’t be getting involved in any more fundraisers — I’m still dealing with my Talking Time campaign commitments and Retronauts commitments, and never again. Much more sensible to take a small, per-piece approach to soliciting support, one with more modest needs and more modest obligations. Anyway, that’ll probably be launching after E3, I guess, if you want to help out.