2025 Look Ahead
The end of the year has come again. This is the time where I look back on the progress that I’ve made and set goals for the coming year.
In 2023, I only managed to play and review a total of twelve games. Looking back at this tally surprised me. I certainly felt like I played more than that. But, to be fair, several of the games I completed this year were pretty hefty 100+ hour titles. However, now that the RPG project is complete, many of the upcoming games on my backlog list are considerably shorter. So, I feel like I’ll be able to cover a lot more ground this year.
I suppose this is a good time to reveal a little inside baseball regarding how I tackle my backlog. I typically play two games at a time. One from the chronological backlog and then something else. If I have a special project going, the “something else” usually comes from that project. Regarding the chronological backlog, yes, there is the large main list of games. The list I personally use if a bit a different than the one posted on this site. My personal list is broken down by era, and then by release date. I don’t always play games EXACTLY in the order they are released. Because I like to jump between systems for variety. Aside from this master backlog, I also have what I call my Shortlist. This is the list of games I plan to play in the next 30-60 days. For those that are curious, my current shortlist is as follows:
Golden Sun: Dark Age
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
Final Fantasy XVI Rising Tide DLC
Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred DLC
I’m actively playing all four of these titles now and I hope to have all of these completed by the end of February.
Once this Shortlist is tackled, I have to decide what I’m going to undertake for my next special project. Initially, I thought about going back and playing some fill-in-the-gap games (games from previous eras that I skipped). But, then inspiration hit me and I came up with a rather clever idea. What if I left the special project to chance…
Being an old school D&D player, I’m no stranger to random generation tables. What if I made a table of twenty games, or perhaps twenty game series, and then rolled a D20 to decide what was going to be featured next? Maybe I could even stream the rolling of the die and have a blind playthrough? That might be fun!
We’ll have to see how it all pans out. But for now, I’m going to focus hard to knocking out this four-game shortlist. Starting with FFVII: Rebirth (a game I’ve been grinding on since it came out – you’re going to love this review…), then finishing the new Diablo content, tearing through the XVI DLC, so I can focus all my energy on Dark Sun.
