Three months is a weird amount of time. It somehow manages to be a long time and a short time simultaneously. Case in point - it's been three months since my last proper blog entry. On the one hand, that's a hell of a long time to leave a blog dormant. On the other, I can remember writing that blog post just like it was yesterday. A lot has happened in those three months, but ultimately not a great deal has changed. And, although I haven't written one of these for fourteen weeks, you can bet that the possibility has never been far from my thoughts.

I've been actively trying to find the right angle at which to return to the blogosphere for a few weeks now. 'The Backlogbook', my attempt to consolidate my gaming patterns into weekly morsels of bloggery, went off the boil just three months into the year, curiously seeing its final instalment go live on April Fool's Day. As a project I felt like it had run its course - it was slipping from its weekly schedule and starting to feel like a chore to write, so I decided to step away from it for a while and rethink my approach. Since then I've assumed blogger's mantle twice, both times to promote my livestream of a Pokémon Gold Randomizer Nuzlocke as part of Giant Bomb's seventh Community Endurance Run (for those of you who didn't watch, I lost at the Champion - so near, and yet so far).

On reflection, I think the biggest problem with the Backlogbook was its scope. It tried to do too many things at once, acting as a platform for both a "the week in games"-style breakdown and a concerted effort to whittle down my backlog with unforgiving ruthlessness. This latter section, dubbed 'The Lost Pages', was conceived with the best intentions - my well-documented Pile of Shame had exceeded three-hundred titles, and an indiscriminate cull seemed like the best way to address that worrying statistic. In practice though, I very quickly reached a stage where I was axing titles without any legitimate reason. That fact was what ultimately led to me stepping away from The Lost Pages, and the Backlogbook as a whole.

That brings me more or less up to the present moment, which sees me returning with a new feature titled 'An Hour With...'. It's an exciting new spin on The Lost Pages - one that preserves the core idea of whittling down the backlog, but in a much more proactive way. Where the old formula failed was in its disregard for hands-on experience with the games I was getting rid of. As its name suggests, An Hour With... addresses this issue by adding an extra step to the process - a sixty-minute session spent with every game up for consideration. I'm hoping that by spending some time with these games, my formative opinions will put me in a better position to decide their fate. Once I've played for an hour and decided whether to scrap or save a game, I'll then write a short blog entry about the experience. To make sure they stay short, I'm going to limit myself to just an hour of writing time to get the first draft down for each entry.

I was initially planning to make An Hour With... a weekly feature, but since I have a lot of commitments on at the moment, I've decided to treat it as an "as-and-when" thing for the time being. I'll try to aim for around one a week, but if I don't hit that target then I'm not going to beat myself up about it. As for the Backlogbook, I'm quite keen to pick it up again, but minus The Lost Pages and written on a per-game basis rather than forcing an entry out every week. It's just easier to save everything up for a single entry than it is to scratch around for little things to write about each week, especially when the games in question are lengthy RPGs (here's looking at you, Grandia).

So yeah, that's what you can expect from this blog going forward. I'm hoping to get the inaugural instalment of An Hour With... up on the site within the next few days, with the Backlogbook making its return whenever I next finish playing something. Heck, I may even try and throw something together documenting everything I've played in the last three months (my list of games beaten this year puts the total number of titles I've seen the end of since April 1st at fourteen, so it would either be a really long post or an exercise in bullet points). As for what I'm playing right now, I'm shifting my attention between The Witcher on Steam, and The Walking Dead: A New Frontier on PS4, so expect those to feature in future entries.

Thanks for reading folks. I know this is all over the place because I've thrown it together in an hour and haven't done anything like this for three months. I promise the next one will be better. Until then, take care and I'll see you around.

Daniel

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Currently playing - The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (PC)