State of the blog January 2020

Time to dust the mothballs off this...

With 2020 (and year 8 of the Secret Area) in full swing, I've been meaning to give more visible updates to the blog, and more of a peek to patrons on what I might be posting to the blog soon. This first post is public just so people can get an idea of what they might see.

Over the years I've amassed a bunch of games for various purposes. Usually for future blog posts. One thing I want to change is to stop hoarding and going "maybe I'll get around to this" and actually write something and publish it.

So here are a handful of games I've bought over the years (some I've mentioned on I Bought Stuff! posts in the past) that I've been thinking of writing about sometime this year. This is not a complete list, and these go all over the place from the standard shootybangs I'm somewhat known for, to more off-the-wall entries. Here goes.

- El Matador, a third person Max Payne clone made by a Czech Republic studio during that period when bullet time shooters were the in thing (released not long after F.E.A.R. and Max Payne 2)

- Pat Sajak's Lucky Letters, a puzzle/game show game hosted by the famous Wheel of Fortune host during his brief dip into trying to make "casual games."

- Wanted: Weapons of Fate, a third person shooter made to tie in with the movie of the same name. One part of the "GRIN death knell trio," the others being the Bionic Commando reboot and Terminator: Salvation.

- Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, a first-person shooter that asks "what if Germany won the war?" Made by the infamous Spark Unlimited (Call of Duty: Finest Hour, Legendary, Lost Planet 3, Yaiba Ninja Gaiden Z) and likely is a poor version of something MachineGames did better with Wolfenstein: The New Order several years later.

- Chronomaster, a '90s adventure game published by Capstone. Features Brent Spiner (Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy). Really not my kind of genre, but it's Capstone, the pinnacle of entertainment software, so it has to be gold.

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There are a handful of others, but those are ones I've considered playing for future article posts, alongside returning to a few other entries like "Game show themes vs. their NES counterparts (I wrote Part 2 back in October) and "Game composers recycling their own music" (of which I just published back on the 26th) a little later on in the year.

Anyway, that's what I got. These posts are TBA, as I'm not sure which sounds the most appealing at the moment. Hope these posts give you a better idea on what I might do with the blog.