Well here it is, my first post. This is something I've been trying to do in some form for over a year now, but after discovering Zonelets back in July and plenty of procrastination it is finally here. This past 5 years has made it quite clear to me that I have basically put absolutely nothing out into the world since I was a preteen presented with the wild west that was early Youtube and armed with a copy of Windows Movie Maker (the results of which have long since been scrubbed from the internet). This hasn't necessarily been through lack of trying, but prior attempts have either been dropped from procrastination followed by lack of interest, while others have fell apart due to events outside my control. For the majority of my late teens to early twenties I've basically been a shut-in.
That's not exactly changed now, but some things have progressed in a positive direction. Back in 2019 I took a plunge and joined and random furry group (something I had done multiple times prior to minamal success) and ended up meeting a bunch of peeps who I'm happy call friends. I also finally got art of my sona for the first time, who had pretty much been stuck inside my head since I first discovered furry back in 2009. Recently I have started streaming semi-regularly over on my Twitch channel. The audience has pretty much only consisted of my aformentioned friends at this point, but unlike previous attempts I've stuck with it long enough to actually finish a game on stream. And now there's this, all setup complete with a custom tagging system (I'm surprised I managed to get that working, since I've always found making websites kinda frustrating). The focus of this blog is going to be videogames, since that's where the majority of interest I can muster at this point, and there are two main subjects that I have plans to write about.
PlayStation 2
Out of all the home consoles ever released, the PlayStation 2 is definitely the one I'd conside my childhood system. It was the one I played on the most since I got it around 2003-2004 till I got a PS3 in I think 2010 (possibly 2009). Despite that though, my experience with that PS2 library was fairly limited. A lot of games generally looked back on as classics are games I have barely or never touched, and although I have amassed a decent amount of games for the system in the years after it was replaced by successive console generations, I haven't really dived deep into any particular one outside of old favourites. This I want to change.
Inspired by series such as Chrontendo, PlayStation Year One, and PandaMonium, I want to play through the PS2's vast library chronologically (mostly). This was the main reason for creating this blog, since I thought it would be a good outlet for this subject (and since I'm not remotely entertaining or interesting enough to listen to for a video series or a podcast). There are some limitations to what I will end up covering of course. I don't know a single bit of Japanese, so anything that wasn't localised (either officially or unnofficially) or can be played without that knowledge is unlikely to be featured here. Plus I don't doubt I will end up running into something that I just can't write much about. But hopefully I can at least make a start of this daunting task and hopefully write something that at least one person finds interesting.
Pre-Smartphone Mobile Games
This is something that has caught my interest over my years floating around various game preservation groups. The world of mobile games before the appstore boom is one that is largely ignored by the gaming community at large, and that always intrigues me. A wild west filled with thousands upon thousands of games that I and many others have never even seen before. My experience with these games when they were contemporary was very limited, the only phone I had prior to a smartphone was a Samsung flip phone which had 2 pre-installed games on it, a versus breakout style game with stages structured in a similar way to Street Fighter 2, and a 2D raster racer based on the Paris-Dakar rally.
Due to my interest in games preservation and related subjects, I have become a bit of a horder when it comes to downloads of games and stuff relating to games, and overtime a particular folder simply labelled "unsorted" where I dump stuff to deal with later has expanded exponentially. The "mobile games" sub-folder, which is filled almost exclusively with pre-smartphone games, alone takes up almost 900GB in space as a result of various dumps of wapsites created by various people including myself (note that a lot of J2ME games, which make up the bulk of these dumps, generally don't exceed 1MB each). So I want to start writing stuff about these games as a way of motivating me to pontentially sort through this mess. I'll probably cover multiple games per post, essentially a highlight of what I come across that I personally think is interesting.
If you're reading this then thank you for taking interest in my ramblings. These posts aren't gonna be released on any set schedule, and it will probably be a bit before the first one is added to the site, but if you are interested I should have a RSS feed setup and linked in the sites header.