Woah. I only just experienced Path of Fire within the past year or 2, despite it being out for almost 9 years now. But it’s new to me and I played it, so that’s something. Yesterday’s post was a stark reminder to me that, yes, I’ve been blogging on this site now for 14 years. 14 years! Over that time I’ve had a ton of changes in my life from jobs to cars to kids to my hair turning grey and yet here I still am. Tapping away into the void. It’s pretty obvious I’ve become more jaded over the years, and yet simultaneously I’ve grown a lot more compassionate and understanding. But, being I started this as a gaming blog, have my gaming tastes changed? Almost a resounding ‘No’. It’s wild, really. When I started this blog back in 2012 it was part of MMO Gaming writer Syp’s “Newbie Blogger Initiative” (scary that Google’s AI called out his whole name when I tried to look it up, but that’s beside the point). Or, well, I think I started it a few weeks earlier in April and it just so happened he was launching the project the next month, so close enough really. The start of this blog and the NBI are tied in my brain, anyhow. But I started this blog focusing on two genres of gaming: MMOs and Retro/Classic games. What am I mostly still into 14 years later? MMOs and Retro/Classic games! The term “Retro”, though, has certainly changed over the years. Games that were new then are basically retro now. My personal definition I derived from the totally scientific method of categorizing all the games I owned into Retro/Not Retro and determining where the mental cutoff was — 15 years, as it turned out. So at 14 years, heck, this blog has only one more year to go until it turns Retro. Of course I’m still enamored with the look, feel, and handling of older games. Guess I’ve always been a curmudgeon against anything new. MMOs, though, although the sub-genres of MMOs have changed and the monetization has definitely changed, here I am still enamored with them, too. I’m trying to decide if how I play them has really changed, though, and I think it has. Since about 2017 when I came to the full realization I was just spinning my proverbial gaming wheels, not completing games and constantly restarting them, I took on the self-initiative of changing how I approached games and MMOs. Namely, to treat games as if this was the only time in my life I’d ever get to play them. And, really, how far is that from the truth? As I age I feel my time is more and more finite, reminded of it almost daily, but there are so many games still in my backlog that if I really want to make inroads into it I only have time to go through any game once. So I might as well make it worth it and explore every nook and cranny, getting as close to 100% as I reasonably can. So that’s how I play MMOs, too. I generally have one character, and I mostly play to complete the story and systematically 100% every zone as I go through it. Looking back over the past years of doing this, has it been effective? Yes and No. No because my backlog is still a mountain and, in a lot of MMOs, I’m so far behind the primary player curves that I’m being lapped by “classic servers”. Yes, however, because all the content I play is all new to me, even if it is years old to everyone else, and it’s still interesting and wonderful and beautiful. Just as interesting to hear me write about or watch me stream it? Well, that I guess is up to you. I’ll just try to make it more available. // Ocho