2025-12-22 YouTube Retrospective Year 5

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future...

Games covered:

The year of "What if I just played good games?". Specifically was going for best games of all time. I haven't been able to cover nearly as many games as I would have liked to. Owing to the elephant in the room that is Fallout 4 taking 1000 years to complete. So I think it's very likely that this theme is gonna spill over into 2026. Oh darn. Truly we suffer.

The whole endeavor has made me truly exhausted by mediocrity. There was already a pretty strong barrier in place in terms of games I played. I pretty much never have played something on the channel that I wasn't already fairly certain I would enjoy. But this has really strengthened my opinions on not even bothering with mediocrity. There just isn't enough time for it. Why even bother? Play the greats! Play the critically acclaimed! Play the special little indies aimed right for your heart! Stop playing garbage. I can't say there's much I've played in the channel that I would say is garbage. There's one or two from years ago that I would say are "fine". But that's about the worst I have to say.

But on the other hand, I Iove the sheer cultural capital that I've gained. There was so much I was missing out on it by not knowing Resident Evil. Or Doom. System Shock as well. So I definitely intend on filling out some more cultural blindspots I've got. There was nothing I covered this year that was not great.

I think I'll talk more about my experiences with Total War next year since I'm not that far into it yet to have an informed opinion. I will say that I'm not having a terrible time. My general plan is to finish up Doom Eternal. When I do, I think I may go against the grain and do a double feature of Rome: Total War until I finish that series. Given as of this writing I seem to be getting nowhere fast. I started running the two series at once schedule several years ago. I did that for a couple reasons. The viewer tulpa in my head is a somewhat consistent viewer. Maybe they like me well enough, but I occasionally play something they don't like and so they'll skip a series every however often. So the idea of going between two series is that it adds a little variety. Both for the viewer as well as for myself. There are times where I'm really into one of the games I'm playing and the other not so much. Having two I can go back and forth on keeps things fresh. But in the interest of the Total War campaign not taking forever, it may be worth just doing some overtime with it.

I think once I'm done with Rome, I'll take a short break before beginning the next series (which I anticipate to be System Shock 2. Not yet sure what will be in the other slot. Likely another I had planned in the best of all time group of games. Deus Ex has been sitting there. There's also several shorter indies that have been on my radar, so may start opening up the borders again.) But the reason I want to take a break is I've been strongly considering redoing my computer setup as a Linux system. I've used Linux in some capacity for years. I briefly had it going on my main gaming PC. But there were enough times where it interfered with multiplayer stuff in some capacity that I just bit the bullet and moved to Windows 11. Microsoft has been pissing me off, however. I think their system is garbage and gets worse with every update. I'm tired of Copilot. I'm tired of the nagging. I'm tired of ads in my operating system (beyond unacceptable). I'm tired of them purposefully reverting changes I make to settings on updates. They're a disgusting and evil company that anyone working at should be ashamed to participate in. A tiger cannot change its stripes.

So I may be at the point where small difficulties with multiplayer are an "I don't really give a shit" sort of situation. Can't play a game others want to because the devs want to install a rootkit in my computer that I own? Sucks. Too bad. And Valve massively improving the overall Linux experience as it relates to steam games gives me a lot of reason to want to make the move and make it permanent. If I do end up making that move I'll need some room to get everything situated on the other side in terms of recording and video editing and all that. Gotta relearn some things and get programs set up and tested. So, easier to to just do a pause where no one's expecting a video instead of trying to record ahead and make it seamless if I do run into issues. This enterprise ain't that important. The trains don't need to run on time.

Planning on using Arch, btw.