Gold-Plated Games

It’s been one month since I opened up the website to the world, and I’ve been terribly busy in that month. Bear with me as I run down what’s been going on lately and then we’ll talk about some exciting stuff coming up soon.

• I’ve migrated just shy of 200 reviews from Steam to the site. Each of these has been tagged with applicable genres like ARPG and Trading, and I’ve assembled a growing list of those genres for you to peruse on this page. They’ve also been categorized by rating, a new thing that I’m doing that’ll help you sort out just how good or bad I think a game is. Read more about them here.
• Six of my famous review series have been reassembled here, from the most recent Summerventures to last year’s Summer of Sim. Games that were part of a series have been tagged accordingly, and the full list of series on the site can be found here.
• In the midst of all this, I’ve kept up with my foolhardy attempts to review the Weeklong Deal offerings. Brand new reviews of The Body Changer, Monster Loves You!, Skyward Collapse, Theatre of the Absurd, and Gun Metal have been offered for your consideration, and hopefully have entertained someone out there.
• I did my first developer-requested review for indie FPS Gorescript, an important step towards wider recognition and that deluge of free games I’ve been dreaming of for years.

That’s a lot of progress, and it hasn’t left a whole lot of time for anything else. Every night I spend around 2 hours formatting and reposting reviews, assembling old series, or working on the ones coming up in a couple months. I’ve been trying to play some new acquisitions like Pillars of Eternity and N++ but there’s just not enough time to really get into them yet.

On this point, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that I’m quickly running out of reviews to repost, which will free up a lot of time in the near future. The bad news is that it’s because I’m coming up on reviews so old they need to be re-written. I’ve nearly reached 2015 in my reposts, and honestly my writing style has changed a lot from two years ago. Pretty much everything older than the first Roguemas needs to be re-done, and that’s going to happen over a much longer span of time than just a month or two.

So that’s one thing on the horizon, remasters of my oldest reviews. But there’s something else coming up, much sooner in fact, that’s far more exciting. I’ve mentioned before that having a website allows me to branch out from just Steam reviews, and next week I’m going to start doing just that. I’ve got plans for two new kinds of content to share with you, with a third waiting in the wings. They’re things I’ve been wanting to make time for since the notion of a website first entered my head, so I’m really pleased I’ll finally be able to start in on it. It’s more work, but honestly this whole website deal has been really enjoyable and motivating since I started it.

That’s the roadmap for the next month or two, at least until October when you-know-what happens. The flood of old reviews will be ending soon, replaced with brand new kinds of content and entirely new reviews of games I covered years ago. My immediate goal is to drive more traffic to the site and start getting some regular visitors, which hopefully this change in direction will aid. If you’re inclined to help me grow the site, what I really need right now is more regular readers. Share reviews you like, link them to friends if you’re talking about a game I covered, or just let people know about this guy that likes Steam way more than anyone should.

As always, let me know what you think if you’ve got thoughts to share, and thanks for reading!