Hey there folks. It's been a while. Almost a year, in fact. I know it's a bit played out to roll out the ol' "where does the time go?" line, but I'm not sure what else to say. I've thought about throwing something up here a couple of times these past few months, but now feels like the right time to knuckle down and actually do it. This is going to be pretty scattershot, but I think it's better that I just get the thoughts down instead of trying to make them flow in any fancy way. With that in mind, expect plenty of headers and subsections in the blog to follow.

Still Trying to Be the Very Best

If you're one of my regular readers (although, can one even have regular readers if one is no longer a regular writer?), you no doubt noticed me fall off my last blog project hard. That was an attempt to document an "ultimate playthrough" of the first generation Pokémon games, comprising a Nuzlocke challenge playthrough of Red Version, a nostalgia-fuelled playthrough of Blue Version, and an anime-inspired playthrough of Yellow Version, with the ultimate goal of catching all 150 Pokémon across all three games and completing the Kanto Pokédex. I'd intended to do this in phases, earning one badge per game, and then writing about each phase in its own lengthy blog post. I made it three badges into all three games, put out three parts of the blog series, then hit a major wall trying to push through to the Saffron City gym in Yellow Version in order to tackle Sabrina as the fourth gym leader, just as Ash did in the first season of the anime. As a consequence, I burned out, dropped all three games, and didn't come back to them for nearly a year. Last month, on Pokémon Day 2023, I decided to jump back into Kanto and give it another shot, starting from scratch with a whole new approach, this time focusing on one game at a time instead of trying to play all three simultaneously. At the time of writing I've almost completed my initial run through Blue Version, with all eight badges in my possession and a whopping 105 different species already registered in my Pokédex. I'm now at the stage where I need to settle on a team of six to get me through Victory Road and take on the Elite Four, something I'm hoping I can achieve by the end of this month. From there, it'll be on to Red Version for another attempt at that Nuzlocke playthrough.

Play Has No Limits

The start of this month also saw me become an opportunistic adopter of current generation hardware when I picked up a PlayStation 5. I'd been hoping to make the jump from PS4 at some point this year, given the upcoming scheduled releases of Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, but I'd expected it to come closer to the summer. As luck would have it though, I received a little more birthday money than I was anticipating last month, and happened to spot stock of PS5s available at my local Argos while browsing their website looking for other stuff. I seized the opportunity, purchased the console online and then hopped in my car to drive into town and pick it up.

My first observation was the size of the damned thing - something I realised before even unboxing the console, since I took the biggest shopping bag we own to collect it and the outer box wouldn't even fit inside it. It also takes up a lot more space on the media cabinet than my PS4 did, so I've resorted to standing it vertically for now. I'll probably end up dropping it to the horizontal position eventually though, since inserting game discs feels a bit awkward when the console is vertical on account of the protruding faceplates. I opted for the disc-drive model specifically so I could upgrade the handful of eligible disc-based PS4 games that I already own, including Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok (two games I plan to play later on this year), and also to ensure that my established library of disc-based PS4 games would still be playing on the new hardware through backwards compatibility. Speaking of which, I was monumentally relieved to discover that the PS5 is compatible with external hard drives for storing and playing PS4 games, so I was able to swap the 5TB drive I used with my PS4 over to the new console.

So far I've played Astro's Playroom (more on that below), and am presently revisiting Final Fantasy VII Remake for a second playthrough with the intention of sampling the Intermission DLC when I'm done with the main game. As someone who never upgraded from the base PS4 to a Pro model, seeing games I previously played capped at thirty frames per second now running at a silky-smooth sixty is glorious. Unfortunately I'm still limited to a 1080p TV screen, so 4k isn't an option at present, but that at least means I don't need to dither about picking between fidelity and performance modes for the foreseeable future, since the latter will always be the more sensible option. Three weeks in, the only negative I've really noticed is the disappointingly short battery life of the DualSense controller, which only seems to last about eight-to-ten hours - not a major issue when I typically only play for an hour or two at a time, but nonetheless still slightly frustrating when I have to remember to charge the controller twice as often as my old DualShock 4. Still, it's exciting to finally be on current-gen hardware, and I'm very excited to experience both old favourites and upcoming releases on it as the year progresses.

My End of 2022 Awards

I didn't write up any end-of-year awards at the end of 2022, and while I don't have the patience to scan back over 400-something old blog posts to confirm it, I'm pretty sure that's the first time in my history as a member of the Giant Bomb blogosphere that I didn't put down any meaningful thoughts on what I'd played over the previous twelve months. I only saw credits roll on sixteen games in that period of time, and most of those didn't really resonate with me in any meaningful way. All told, it's probably the weakest year of gaming I've done since I started documenting my play history on this website, and for that reason I don't think I'd be able to put together a top ten as I usually would. Instead, here's a quick bullet-point-y look at the handful of titles I played in 2022 that stood out:

• It Takes Two was a early highlight of 2022 for me. I played it through online co-op with my friend Matt (the same friend I chopped, boiled and extinguished my way through Overcooked! 2 with the year before), at a rate of roughly one chapter every weekend, and we had an absolute blast with it. The multitude of different gameplay styles and mechanics on offer through its campaign ensured it remained fresh throughout, but the core throughline of co-operative puzzle-solving and communication tied the whole thing together brilliantly. We both loved it to pieces and agree that Hazelight more than deserved the Game of the Year award it earned.
• Pokémon Legends: Arceus represents the biggest shake-up for the series in its entire quarter-century of existence, and I think it was a massive success. Shifting the focus away from battles and gym challenges and putting more flesh on the bones of the Pokédex completion aspect made the whole experience feel surprisingly fresh, and kept me exploring the Hisui region's different environments long after the credits rolled on the main story. I enjoyed my time with Pokémon Scarlet at the end of the year too, but after the strides made by Arceus only months previously, it was difficult not to view it as a regression for the franchise.
• Metroid Dread is an absolutely stellar action platformer that has confirmed my need to dig deeper into the genre. I cut my teeth on Super Metroid in 2021 and really enjoyed it despite finding it a little clunky and obtuse in spots, but Dread is slick, smooth and relentless by comparison. Exploring the depths of planet ZDR, uncovering its myriad secrets and doing battle with its inhabitants was a joy from start to finish, and the breadcrumb trail of story beats left me searching out more of the series' lore on YouTube when my playthrough was over. I enjoyed Dread so much, I'm genuinely considering an upgrade to the NSO Expansion Pass just so I can play Metroid Fusion - if that's not high praise, I don't know what is.
• Final Fantasy XV is a game that I think would have absolutely cracked my "favourite games of all time" list had I played it over the course of a lazy summer holiday when I was still in secondary school. It is undoubtedly at its strongest when it leans hard into the road trip aesthetic, exploring the open world of Eos at a leisurely pace and peeling back layers of the relationships between Noctis, Ignis, Gladiolus and Prompto. While its more linear back half didn't resonate with me anywhere near as strongly as the first twenty-five hours, I still had a positive experience with the game overall, and was happy to finally see Noct's journey unfold after putting it off for nearly six whole years.

Off to a Strong Start

We may only be three months into 2023, but I already feel like this year has served up more memorable gaming experiences in its first quarter than all of 2022. At the start of this year I sat down and made a list of thirty games I would love to try and get through before the end of December - a mixture of high-priority titles from my backlog, highly anticipated upcoming releases, old favourites worthy of a revisit, and bona fide classics from 2013 due a tenth anniversary celebration. While I don't realistically expect to play all thirty, at the time of writing, I've ticked five games off that list, and every single one has left me buzzing:

• Bloodborne might just be my favourite of the four Souls-styled FromSoft games I've played so far, with the original Dark Souls running it mighty close. I loved the Gothic Victorian aesthetic, the visceral and relentless action and the way it demands aggression rather than caution from the player. Its gradual shift towards cosmic horror inspired me not only to trawl the internet for dissections of its wider lore, but also to look into the works of H.P. Lovecraft for the first time - an experience that has been its own reward. Elden Ring is one of the other games on the shortlist of thirty, but The Lands Between have a lot to prove if they want to compete with Yharnam.
• Horizon Zero Dawn is perhaps my favourite game of the last generation, and I knew I wanted to revisit Aloy's first adventure before preparing to explore the Forbidden West later in the year. That revisit turned into a 100% playthrough of both the base game and its Frozen Wilds DLC expansion, an experience that felt every bit as fresh, exciting and captivating as it did back in 2017. The story, already the best to be found in an open-world action game in my opinion, resonated even more strongly with me the second time around in light of the growing severity of our own impending climate emergency. A second go-round has confirmed that Zero Dawn easily remains one of my personal "all-timers", up there with the likes of Final Fantasy VII and Grand Theft Auto IV.
• What Remains of Edith Finch has been on my radar for half a decade now, first brought to my attention by the praise showered upon it by Rob Pearson of the PlayStation Access YouTube channel. The type of game that some might derisively dismiss as a "walking simulator", Edith Finch goes to places in its two-and-a-half hour runtime that games twenty times its length could only dream of. It's a captivating journey through the unusual history of its eponymous family, and caps off with one of the most memorable conclusions to any game I've ever played.
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages was one of the few titles in the Zelda franchise I hadn't taken the time to play through before this year, and now that I have I wish I'd got round to it sooner. Not least because I'd originally hoped to use my completion code from Oracle of Seasons to unlock the "second quest" playthrough of Ages, but I must have wiped my Seasons save at some point since I played it all the way back in 2015. As a result I played through Ages with a clean save, earning a completion code which I plan to use when I revisit Seasons later in the year in order to get the full Oracle experience.
• Astro's Playroom is the perfect introduction to PlayStation 5. Not only is it an excellent showcase for the new hardware and its host of features, it's also a love letter to Sony's twenty-five year history in the video game space. As someone who can trace their history with PlayStation all the way back to the original console, unlocking the game's various artifacts and poring over them in incredible detail was a major nostalgia hit for me. Not only that, but the game itself is probably the most charming thing I've played since Mario Odyssey - I must have easily spent half of my six-hour playthrough just exploring the game's worlds trying to identify all the PlayStation franchise-related Easter eggs buried in there by Team Asobi.

The Extra Life

Round about this time last year, I shared a short blog post announcing my marriage to my girlfriend of six years, Alice. In that blog I spent some time waxing lyrical about the slightly surreal notion of being able to map out the most important events from the last fifteen years of my life through my writings on this here website. It therefore feels only right that I close this blog with an announcement of the next exciting development in this funny old game we call life.

Just before Christmas, Alice and I found out she was pregnant. The next few weeks were an incredibly stressful time of inconclusive scans and heightened emotions, making it all but impossible to enjoy the festive season as we waited to find out whether or not the pregnancy was viable. In early January we returned to the hospital expecting to be told the worst, and were both surprised and elated to witness a heartbeat on the ultrasound scan. We went back in February for a dating scan that put the baby at just under twelve weeks, giving us an expected due date around the middle of August. Two weeks ago we attended a private scan hoping to identify the sex of the baby, and found out that we're expecting a boy.

It is a weird feeling, knowing I'm going to be a father. The pit of my stomach is permanently occupied by a nauseating ball of excitement and terror. We have a little under five months to go, which sounds like a long time, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it's that a "long time" is always far shorter than one expects it to be. It's also put me in a very philosophical mindset about what I'm doing with my life and how I choose to spend my finite time on this planet. Over the past few years I've turned into a very work-oriented person, probably in no small part due to the Covid pandemic and the stress it put on my work-life balance as a frontline NHS worker. The prospect of having a son and increasing the size of my family unit has got me thinking about that balance and how I probably need to find a way to focus less on the "work" side and more on the "life" side. Hopefully that's something I can find a way to start addressing in the coming months as we prepare to welcome our new arrival in the summer.

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I think that's about everything I wanted to say. It's been nice getting my thoughts down in blog form again. Hopefully it won't be the best part of a year before the next time I do it. If you've read this, I thank you for your time, and I hope you're keeping well. Until the next one, take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel