As so often happens after I have a day of feeling a bit maudlin, today I had a day where I got a lot done. Six videos, to be exact, including both Atari 8-bit and Atari ST videos. It's good to be getting back into the rhythm of these, and I really enjoyed the games I played for these vids — hopefully that comes across in the final products, which will be released over the course of the next few weeks!
I've definitely made the right decision to refocus my YouTube effort back on what I was having the most fun with in the first place. I am never going to "make it big" on YouTube and I have no intention of making it into a second job in an attempt to do so; I already keep more than busy enough for the day job, and I want YouTube to be fun. But I also want it to reflect the things that are important to me — hence the refocus on Atari stuff.
I think part of the reason I pressed pause on the A to Z series a while back was because I was worried I was going to start running out of things to cover. But going through the spreadsheet of reviews I put together a while back, it's clear that isn't going to happen for a long time, on either Atari 8-bit or Atari ST. There may be some individual letters that are a little short on things to cover — as I recall, I was running out of games that began with "Y" on ST, unless I wanted to cover various iterations on Yahtzee over and over again! — but I can just skip those if necessary. Or, indeed, I can play a multitude of Yahtzees, since I'm sure at least some of them do something vaguely interesting with the concept!
Anyway, as a preview of what's to come, I will be covering Desmond's Dungeon, Eastern Front (1941) and Firefleet on Atari 8-bit, and Archipelagos, Blasteroids and Cards on Atari ST. Most of these are new to me, which is exciting; I'd played Eastern Front and Blasteroids before, but I was a bit young to understand Eastern Front when I was a kid, so it's been interesting to return to that now I know what a wargame is. I'm not convinced I know how to play effectively, but it was fun giving it a go, regardless.
I think the biggest pleasant surprise of the day for me was Archipelagos. I remember seeing this back when it originally released and thinking it looked thoroughly interesting, and it really, really is. The version I was playing had a strange bug where every fifth level kills you instantly, but since you can just skip levels at will — and there are 9,999 of them — you shouldn't feel too bad about just skipping those ones that don't work. The version I was playing was the hard disk converted version by Pera Putnik, so it's entirely possible that the conversion process just made something go a bit skew-whiff somewhere; I haven't yet tried a disk-only version of it. Either way, it's a thoroughly interesting game, and you'll get to see exactly why quite soon!
So yeah. It's been a good day. Okay, I didn't get up until noon because I was having strange dreams and they put me in a bit of a funk at the start of the day, but I began my day with the intention of making some videos, and by jingo I've gone and done it: recorded, edited and exported, all in a day. Not bad, eh?
Now I think I've earned an hour or two of Ace Combat to celebrate. And maybe some ice cream.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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