FGC #400.1 State of the Website Address

I have an announcement to make regarding the site and its future:

The FGC will be ending with entry #555.

And now I shall explain myself.

This is not my first website. This is not my first website intended for “global” consumption. This isn’t even my first website that is primarily based on talking about videogames. Like many millennials (apparently I am one), I tried my hand at a few other personal “web projects” over the years, and all of them crashed and burned. Actually, that’s overly dramatic, in this case “crashed and burned” means “I lost interest”. It’s true! After a while, I just sort of gave up, and proceeded to field a bunch of emails about “when are you updating again?” or “please come back, Goggle Bob, we need you.” Ha ha, that was another lie, that never happened. Best I ever saw was a random friend saying, “hey, didn’t you used to have a website?” And that was it. End of story, end of website.

And I don’t say this to be self-effacing, I say it because it is simply what happened. And it’s what I expected to happen again with the FGC. I built this website for the express purpose of having somewhere to stick my Kingdom Hearts nonsense, and the FGC was more or less an excuse to generate new content. My initial plan was to start with a “three articles a week” schedule, see how that goes, and then either add or subtract updates as I realized my own time constraints. The Kingdom Hearts articles would trickle in (after some editing and screen caps) on weekends, and that would be that. I’d probably get bored by article #50, and then I’d give up the ghost (posting). At least the site would be “there” anytime someone wanted to learn about the horrors of Fester’s Quest.

But two things happened that I didn’t expect.

And both of them happened around FGC #10.

I was just sitting on my couch, trying frantically to wrench some kind of meaning out of Ice Climber, a game predominately about clubbing seals until you can club a bird. In a fit of desperation, I just kind of figured I’d try to “see from Popo’s perspective” in a sort of stream of consciousness exercise. Maybe that would give me a few ideas. And then, about 1,200 words later, I had apparently written a short story containing “Ice Climber Fanfiction”. And… that was kind of amazing. This was absolutely not something I had ever intended to do, and was certainly not my “plan” when I started the website. I thought I might do a few “weird” articles here and there, but Ice Climber Fanfic was not ever on the menu. So, when it just kind of happened, and it was actually decent, I was fairly ecstatic. If that could come from Ice Climber, then just imagine what could happen when “reviewing” a good game?

And the second thing that happened is that people actually liked the article. I’m not saying anyone threw me a parade (there’s still time, guys!), but people were actively stating out loud how much they enjoyed reading this gibberish about Nana and Popo. As someone who is naturally slow to grant a “like” or simple “good job”, I took this as nothing but the highest praise. I was getting positive feedback! For something I wrote! That didn’t happen before!

So, before I go any further, I want to thank all of my fans. If you just read one article, or have been here from the beginning, thank you very much. There literally would not be this site without you. Metal Man Master? You’re the best, even if I rarely reply to your comments (because I am lazy). JP Friction? I remembered you exist this time, and please see that as a good thing. BEAT, always a pleasure any time you have participated. And, for that matter, anyone that has ever contributed to an article, whether through something I carelessly failed to acknowledge, or if you’re arguably responsible for the article itself, thank you. Again, can’t stress this enough, I wouldn’t have ever gotten this far without you. All of you.

That said, all things must come to an end.

Even if it is currently a pretty far off end.

As you may recall, I’ve only been pulling from my own gargantuan collection of videogames for this project. And, since I have a tendency to buy a videogame for damn near any reason (“Oh! Look! That game comes with a sticker!”), I have way too many games. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I consider it a “library of games” and not a monument to my OCD. With that in mind, there are a number of games in my collection that are just crap, and, more importantly, they are games that I have always identified as crap. And that’s not good for the site, because, while I might be able to pull an interesting story out of Mighty Bomb Jack, I’m actively afraid of missing a forest for the trees. Basically, if I’m not very familiar with a videogame, and I play it under the time constraints of “I need to write something about this game and two other games this week,” I’m afraid I’m going to miss something important that I might have discovered if more time was available. What I am saying is that, basically, I want to be fair to Bubsy. If every game is worthy of an article, but I do not play that game for longer than a half hour, then is that article really the best that could come out of that game? Do I really want to play a subpar game to produce a subpar article? Bah! You deserve better!

So I decided to look at my inventory, sit down, and really consider which games I would actually be interested in writing about. My criteria were simply that:

1. They be games I haven’t already written about in one way or another (there are certainly some games that kind of… muscled into other articles)
2. Games that aren’t already basically covered by their sequels. Aka I don’t need to talk about every Darkstalkers.
3. Games that I’ve played a bunch, or at least I could return to to play a bunch.
4. Games that are inspirational in at least some way. So basically no “arcade” style titles that are little more than one screen.
5. Not every SNES game ever, because somehow the previous criteria fit about 80% of the titles on that system.

And, after applying this kind of thinking to the entire collection, I came up with a remaining… approximately 125 games. Geez. I thought it was going to be like thirty.

So, from now on, Random ROB is only going to pick from that list of a little over 125 games. While that isn’t going to get me all the way to 555, I figure there will be some new releases or other “featured” games in the meanwhile to pick up the slack. After all, if you look at the last fifty entries, you see a quite a few that literally didn’t exist fifty entries before that, left alone back when the site started. And even if that doesn’t happen, I can probably squeeze an extra thirty out of the ol’ inventory.

And why exactly 555? Well, my original plan was, assuming I didn’t lose interest first, to end at 255. After all, why would I bother to talk about more than 255 games? But, as I got closer to that number, I realized there were still plenty of games I wanted to cover… so maybe I’ll hit a few more… maybe just a little bit…

And an extra three hundred over my original goal? That doesn’t sound so bad.

So here’s to the next/last 155 FGC articles!

Let’s hope the random robot can hold out that long…