52 IN 52 (As well as Bastion) CLEARED

Proper review's supposed to start at the beginning. Ain't so simple with this one.

Now here's a game that's been sitting unloved on a shelf, half a decade. Kid decides one day, he's gonna conquer it. It's been tauntin' him long enough. Problem is, he tried once before. Didn't get that long, that time. This time, though, the kid swears, is gonna be different.

Kid hadn't decided to do somethin' like this right away, when he was clearin' out those indie games. But he turned his head, saw it sittin' there like always, mockin' his failures... and the kid decides, why not. He's got a full head of steam, plenty of momentum built up in that downhill spiral.

Those first few steps are just like he remembers them. Smoother, maybe - kid's had a lot of practice. Not afraid t' patch up after a rough spot, or admit his weak points. He still has a lot of problems, though, especially in lettin' go. Used t'be, he'd clear somethin' like this in an afternoon, move on bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next day to greener pastures. Not so, now. He's slowed down a bit, got more botherin' him.

Maybe his aim's not as good as it once was. That's fine... kid knows now that there's no rush on things, that you don't gotta do things right the first time. You can walk away, come back to it later. That's the biggest hurdle that stopped him last time - tryin' to do everything the minute he could. Instead, he's doin' it in stages... a little bit here, a little bit there. Writin' down these thoughts as he gets 'em, so that he doesn't have to think 'em all in one go. He's gotten twice as far as he got last time, though he already knows how the story ends.

The story was never the important part to this kid. The journey's just as big.

That's what it's all about, isn't it? The journey. A quest to make yourself better, to go through hell and come back out... not better, but stronger. You can't finish a journey without accomplishin' somethin', even if you just go right back t'where it all started. Even when all the books fit perfectly between the ends of the bookcase, you still learn more by findin' out what those books are.


And th' kid... he's learned a lot. Maybe it wasn't all fun and games, maybe he won't be aimin' to do somethin' of quite this magnitude again... but he broadened his horizons. He learned. He grew. He achieved. Takes a game like this to pull that out of a kid.

And maybe that's why I'm here, tellin' this to you now. Because at some point, th'kid decided that just tellin' you what he learned wasn't good enough. He wanted t'show you.

But I don't need to tell you what happened, do I? You already know. Or someone else is rarin' to tell ya.

52 IN 52: A YEAR IN A SWARD...ER I MEAN AWARD

So here we have it. The culmination of 52 games in 5244 weeks. (Oops, I started two months late but still pushed through 52 games of varying length and quality before the calendar reset to 2018!) For those following at home who didn't have a handy-dandy notebook on hand because of some guy named Steve, I flat out just copy-pasted my own tracking .txt file so you can look back and follow along with the path I took. Some were questionable clears (Pokemon TCG is ultimately an online multiplayer game that I cleared the single-player "tutorial" on, Saturday Morning RPG was only 2/3rds completed, Loot Hero DX is hardly a game) and others maybe took less credit than they should have (All five episodes of Strong Bad CG4AP are technically stand-alone), but I stand by my decisions on such things. Amongst other decisions I stand by: the fact that this was at the very least an adequate way to distract myself from reality being ablaze, though it did its fair share of stressing me out, too.

Further decisions yet that I will stand by: these awards. For those who remember my nomination post, you might realize I did three nominees per award. This wasn't just for simplicity - instead, it means all of these games get awarded for their efforts if they reached the final goal of being in this post. Honorable mentions got their day in the limelight, now it's time for the more-than-honorable. Gold, Silver, and Bronze will be awarded in all the following categories.

So without further ado, your results.


( GET BLUE SPHERES )

( WHAT, ME WORRY? )

( AURAL SEX )

( NOT FUCKING THIS )

( FUNY-MATION )

( MEGA MAN UNLIMITED )

( RAINING INDOORS )

( CRUNCHY PIXELS )

( APPLE iMBROKE )

( MOOSE AND SQUIRREL )

( IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM )

( INSERT COIN )

( CONGLATURATION )

( THE BIG ONE )

You guys did it. Both the games, for being amazing (or, occasionally, amazingly bad), and the people reading this, for being encouragement for me to keep going through this clusterfuck of a task even when life proceeded to treat me like a chew toy.

So what am I doing next year? Well, first of all, I'm not gonna focus on game clearing any more. If I'm motivated to clear, I'll definitely try my hardest. Thing is, my Steam library has a lot of abject trash in it, trash I don't even want to TOUCH. And... hey. Let's look at what my Backloggery page says for a minute, shall we?

Trying to at least get rid of my backlog of ENTIRELY untouched games [...] I may not complete them but I'll at least try them out.

So that's that. Next year, at least once a week, I am either going to choose a game or leave it up to the whims of Backloggery's Fortune Cookie, and I am going to try that game out. I am going to blog my thoughts about it. And if I want to not beat the games? That's fine. If I want to play other games at the same time? That's fine, too. I just want to try out the new things.

I feel like I should end this on a "like comment and subscribe" joke, but those of you that actually can read this deserve more class out of me than that.

Yes, even though I just wrote a paragraph about wanting to mack on a blue fuzzy axe-man.