2018 in Retrospect & Resolutions for 2019

Some of you may already know, that I deleted my SG account back in October. It was 3 years 8 months old and level 9 at the time of deletion, with over 5k comments & 18k items filtered out. Do I regret it? No. Actually I haven’t thought about it in a long while (until now that is, since I had it in my notes for New Year’s post). Right after deletion, a compulsion to check it constantly still lingered, but it passed quicker than I expected, and I just moved on with my life. Why am I mentioning it? Well because it definitely affects my gaming strategy, as whole 2017 was centered around playing SG wins almost exclusively, and 2018 was also heavily focused on SG wins. And I indeed made substantial progress. While I still have the BLAEO SG Wins list (but hidden) to sooner or later fully do it justice, I’ve stopped dividing my games into wins and non wins, and mentally consolidated my library into just “my games”, all of them. Actually, it’s one of the resolutions that I had for 2018 that influenced my approach to gaming at most, and will be something I’ll use as a basis to my strategy from now on. Let’s review them:

@1. Succeeded. I’ve played all my 2018 wins, 20 of them. I’ve beaten+completed 17 of them, the remaining 3 were played extensively, but one is still in early access and even though it was supposed to release in 2018, it didn’t (I’ve exhausted all the e/a content, intend to beat the game once it’s released as I liked it), another one turned out to be a bit too hard for me and I hit a brick wall (but as I also liked it, I’ll try to get back to it again and get better at some point), and the last one I just dropped after 31 hours (I wasn’t having any fun with it). Overall most of them turned out to be engaging and fun to play.

The most vital part of that resolution turned out to be “to play stuff asap”, and quite early on I decided to loosely broaden it to games I acquire myself (but without strict obligation to do so). Playing games as soon as I obtained them turned out to be great. I was hyped about something, and I could immediately jump in and enjoy it. This contrasted with playing games I got 3-4-5 years ago made it even more clear, that prioritizing older games would be way less fun. While I might have wanted to play something 3-4-5 years ago, it often turned out that either I wasn’t hyped about it anymore after such a long time, or the game didn’t stand the test of time, or I managed to play similar but better games in between and it wasn’t as good in comparison (might have been great if I played it when I got it), or my tastes simply changed, my interests shifted and I didn’t care about it as much.

So “playing games asap” will be incorporated into my general gaming rules from now on (instead of just copy-pasting it into each year’s resolutions). The moment I obtain something new, be it my own purchase, a trade, or a gift, it shall be played. This will curb my purchases, because if I won’t have time to play something asap, I won’t buy it. SG wins won’t be an issue anymore, as I’m not a member anymore. This will also apply to other platforms, not only Steam. And thus no new backlog shall grow, and I hopefully will enjoy games much more that way. :)

@2. Succeeded. I’ve beaten+completed 78 games in 2018. 75 on that list + 3 “Steam is learning about this game” that BLAEO wasn’t able to sync. 41 were SG wins minus all 20 of the 2018 ones (that I’ve played), makes it 21 surplus. The negative difference between 2017 won and 2017 finished was 21. So I barely made it, but still :) I thought I would beat more, but in December some serious real life stuff happened (that I don’t really want to talk about) and gaming was the last thing on my mind. I even thought I would fail this one, so I was quite surprised after I calculated the numbers properly for this post.

@3 I guess this one is a fail (although not by much), because with 41+6 wins+gifts beaten the proportions just don’t match, but after October, I just started playing whatever regardless win or not. I guess if I calculated the ratio till October = till I was still SG memeber, it would check out (real close though), but I’m not very concerned by this one anymore, so it’s fine :)

My 2019 resolutions are much simpler I guess, considering “play new games asap” becomes my permanent rule:

I could add a BLAEO specific mini-resolution, to write explanation on my profile as to what my super complicated ;) scoring system of smiley faces mean, but I expect to be done with it in few days tops, maybe even today if I feel like it, so I’m not adding it to the box above (which also goes into my profile description). Around April I think, I stopped writing lengthy posts containing my impression of games. In fact I stopped writing anything really. I managed to post several Steam reviews at the beginning of the year, but once I’ve stopped writing about games, I just stopped writing everywhere.

I still do post diligently every month here, but only colorful strips of data on the games I’ve beaten/completed (so only about finished and closed cases), with links to store page, screenshots & achievements, and info of how long it took me to finish a playthrough. And because there is no text in them, I don’t include them in global activity feed (but if you check my profile, you’ll find my recent gaming history in this “strip” format). Not to mention, I usually create a post at the beginning of a month, then as the time passes I just edit it and add new completion data, every time I beat a game. While it’s posted at the beginning of the month, it doesn’t contain full info till the end of the month, so posting it globally that way wouldn’t make much sense either. So unless I find my muse again, you’ll hear from me in a year’s time, when I’ll be writing a 2019 summary ;) Or if you talk to me on steam or in comments of course, I do reply to those :)

Happy New Year everyone! :D

PS. If you’d like to check out my top 10 recommended of the games I played in 2018, go to my post in the January theme. But if I could recommend more, there would be a whole page long list, cause honestly I had fun with most of the games I finished in 2018.