I have to talk about reviewing PC games again on this blog.

For a while I have tried different kinds of posts about the PC games I play. First I tried barely describing the game and then only have personal notes in a spoiler section. At first I had five reviews in a post, but I really wanted most games to have their own post. But when I tried that, the format felt too confined.

Then I changed to a format I used a few years ago, before I started doing the balanced reviews. A little more text and pictures, and sometimes a spoiler section with my observations. It was better, but I was still not satisfied. It felt like rolling back to an obsolete format.

I started reading my balanced reviews again, and it hit me how much I liked writing the pros and cons in the end. Not only was it fun coming up with those, I also felt I could often write more interesting pros and cons than many professional review sites. Typically other reviews just mention that the graphics is good and the gameplay is great. I usually tried to go into the finer details there.

A line about unique game features, things that might annoy certain kinds of gamers, balancing issues, about devices and mini-games, you name it. This is not the place to just jot down a few bland lines so the review can be published. This is the valuable stuff that I like to read at the end of game reviews.

I’d like to think you feel the same way too about these pros and cons?

This is my third post in a series about blogging and playing PC games.

My first blog saw the light of day in 2011. I had developed my own crude WordPress theme and had some moderate success blogging mostly about MMORPG. I actually had a few visitors and even some comments to begin with. Then it fizzled out – and half a year later, I finally killed my blog.

Four years later, I had another look at my old blog posts. I thought they were written well enough for me to revive the blog and continue. I spent half a year developing the WordPress theme you see here. I wanted it to not only look good, but also have a lot of features – many of which I don’t even use myself.

But as I relaunched in 2015, I also made a vow to myself. Don’t ever give up on the blog again.

During the years since 2015, the audience for this blog has been so limited that I would probably have killed it several times over, had I not made that vow. And it wasn’t for lack of trying to keep it going. I have written tons of impressions post about PC games, a little bit about Commodore 64 music, and some science stuff too. I also announced some of the blogs posts in various social media.

You would think that kind of persistence would have garnered an audience over time.

I was reading a blog post I wrote two years and decided it’s time for an update.

So I didn’t dial down on playing PC games, eventually giving it up as I was pondering. As you can see in the latest couple of pages in this blog, I’ve actually played quite a lot in my recent Christmas vacation.

There has been a few changes for the better.

First, and probably most important, I’m getting better at making my writings shorter. Cutting to the chase and leaving out the fat. It’s a difficult art to master and I certainly overdid it for many years. I think I’m finally starting to find a balance that works. But it’s still work in progress, and probably always will be.

Another thing I’ve really learned is to leave games behind and not have this intense desire to complete it at all costs. This was exactly my biggest problem back when I was obsessed with PC games about twenty years ago. No matter how bad, how difficult or how amateurish, I absolutely needed to complete it. It was so important to me that I gained another tick in my spreadsheet of conquests.

Luckily, I’ve managed to shake that obsession today. It helps that many games I play are already very short, often less than 3-4 hours. But no matter the length, it really has to grab me before I decide to see it to the end. Another reason is that it helps reducing my backlog a lot. As most everyone else with a backlog, I also have a desire to eliminate it. I want to see what I paid for, even if on sale.

Today I thought, why not let the first blog post of 2021 be sort of a rambling post. Some personal opinions, things going on in my life – you know, the purpose blogs actually served in the first place. In fact, I’ve been thinking about letting it become a regular series to take over the diminishing posts about PC games.

And then, what better place to start than with that – PC games.

Oh no, you might be thinking. This is going to be one of those blog posts where he denounces playing video games ever again. Well, not quite. Maybe. Sort of. It’s complicated.

The thing is, the past few couple of years it’s actually been a struggle for me to write these blog posts about PC games. Having to take abundant notes while playing, lots of screenshots, writing the blog post, inserting the right images. It’s not just playing a game as relaxation like watching a movie for me. I need to have this on the side to make PC games mean something special to me.

Recently, I’ve been asking myself a question. Have you actually enjoyed playing the latest five or ten games you played? I thought about that for a few days. At first I took a look at the blog posts I wrote about those games and admitted to myself that, why yes, I did get at least a little bit of joy out of playing these games. So, maybe it is still worth doing? Well, the problem is exactly the amount of work I just described in the previous paragraph. So what I needed to do was to ask myself the right question:

Does the joy I get out of a PC game match the work I have to prepare for its blog post?