2025.01.25
Another year of no real progress. All I play are the same old games (Starcraft, etc.) to kill time; nothing new (or even just old games new to me). I used to blame my old hardware, but there are many games on my bucket list that would run just fine on what I have. Now I can get new hardware, but that will still take some time to research, buy, build, and set up.
What is my bucket list; maybe I should start there. Some things are obvious, like RDR2, but there are long forgotten games like KOTOR that I could probably play now. Games like Arcanum and Vampire:TM I could have played years ago, even on my previous computer.
I'm also stuck on this notion of playing them all in chronological order. I thought maybe it could be something as simple as not wanting to go from modern graphics back to older graphics, but its not that; some of my favorite games are not even in 3D, or even just text. I think its more a sense of completionism, perfectionism, FOMO, and other negative traits.
I still want some kind of list. I have so many games on Steam and GoG, archived on disk, and on old media in the attic. It would be nice to know where which games are, what order they were release in, the ability to sort them by various criteria... of course, this all leads to a spreadsheet.
Exporting from Steam... not so easy. Same with GoG. There are scripts, but I don't want to run them (this old machine, with outdated OS and browsers, security concerns, etc.) I guess I could try building it from my blog updates from right here. After all, this is the other main video game I play: buying games on sale and listing them.
This a good time to reflect: I don't own any of these products. These are not things I possess, so much as have access to. Some things are more accessible than others. If I lose my Steam account, that leaves a huge hole. I stopped buying physical media years ago, and then they stopped making it. This is why I have a GoG account, to download offline copies of things. But hardware fades, operating systems fade.
Best to play and enjoy these things while I can.
Gathering up annual status blog posts, going back in time those get less useful.
Of course there's the Big List page - that's going to be completely replaced by the spreadsheet. It was getting unwieldy years ago.
how i'm making the list:
working dir: Z:\Z\personal\text\game\inventory\spreadsheet\
to do:
copy blog text into ss (done)
check ss against steam:
have (done) [https://steamcommunity.com/id/$NAME/games?tab=all&sort=name]
MOVED the spreadsheet from local to google drive {2025.05.08}
add new games since blog dump, copy from blog (working) {2025.05}
release date (!)
wishlist (!)
pub, dev (!)
check ss against gog (as above)
have (!)
release date (!)
wishlist (!)
pub, dev (!)
check ss against physical inventory (in attic)
add franchise field (so can sort by that)
so far the only system fields that matter currently are Steam, GoG, and physical. maybe add other field, to list games that started on older systems ('classic'), and to differentiate original vs emulate, list different dates, etc. or maybe 'most significant' field. For example, June's Journey runs on a windows system, but the most significant field would be iPadOS. but something like Asteroids or Space Invaders are significant as arcade and Atari 2600 (at least to me). maybe they should have separate listings, especially made more relevant if they came out in different years.
list sets (so it searchable) add note about what games it contains
finally, sort by fields want to play rating, and release date. that should be my to do list.
meanwhile, SC2 and GTA5O.
