Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome to my gaming blog! I decided I wanted to start one to keep track of my backlog. Not only do I want to document my video game journey by talking about the games I’m playing, but I also want to figure out how exactly I accumulate all these games. While I won’t be able to go back and determine how I acquired every game I currently own, I do want to log every game I get going forward and how much money I spend on those games. I hear all the time about how people can spend thousands of dollars a year on their hobby and while I’ve consistently added hundreds of games to my backlog every year since I started keeping track in late 2019, I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hundred per year to get them. That’s what I aim to find out. I’ll also write about what I'm playing, game reviews, tech/gaming news, and anything else that interests me.

Before I lay out my current plan for how my blog will be structured, I think it’s best to give a little bit of background about myself. I am 33 years old and have lived my whole life in Ohio. Growing up, my parents wouldn’t let me and my siblings play video games. My mom, now a retired teacher, thought that playing games would cause us to suffer in our schoolwork. As a result, we didn’t have any traditional gaming consoles. My dad, however, was always into computers so even though I was born in the early 90s, I always had access to one. I started out with a Commodore 64 as well as a Windows 3.1 PC. We ended up going through every major Windows release as I got older. Most of the games we had access to were educational games. Does anyone remember Math Munchers or Word Rescue? Those were the kinds of games I played as a kid.

Math Munchers

Word Rescue

I played a ton of games like these growing up, and I remember them actually being fun, but there’s only so many times you can play them before you start getting bored and wanting to branch out. I remember seeing kids with Game Boys at school and I asked my parents if I could have one. They said no. One Christmas, my aunt wanted to give all the kids Game Boy Colors and asked my parents if that was OK. They said no again. That Christmas, all my cousins got their Game Boy Colors and my siblings and I were left out. I was jealous and admittedly a little resentful. Looking back on it now, I can understand where my parents were coming from with trying to keep us away from games and focusing on school. I don’t agree with the way they went about it though. Giving us access to games with some kind of parental control would’ve made more sense than banning them outright, but I digress. Eventually my parents bought us one of those cheap plug and play arcade joysticks that had some arcade games built in.

Truly the best gaming system of all time

It was fun for a while. I finally got to play games on a TV with my siblings! Of course, those started to get old too. I don’t remember the exact timeline but sometime around the turn of the century, we were finally given a Nintendo 64, and the rest is history. I was hooked. I spent so much time with my siblings playing Mario Kart, Mario Party, Super Smash Bros., you name it. When I look back on my childhood and think about the beginning of my gaming journey, the N64 was it. We would eventually move on to the Gamecube and then the Wii sometime in high school. To this day, the best gift I ever received was a Game Boy Advance with a bunch of games and accessories from my parents. This was a big deal because unlike the home consoles, this handheld was just mine. I took this thing everywhere I went and played it all the time. I was really into one game called ‘WarioWare: Twisted!’ which was basically a series of microgames (games that take 10 seconds or less to beat) that you had to play in rapid succession and get as far as you can. There was a gyroscope built into the game cartridge that allowed some fun mechanics like tilting the GBA to exit a maze or dump out just the right amount of water from a glass. Trust me, it was more fun than it sounds.

Maybe the most fun I had with a handheld

Shortly after we got the Wii, my older brother saved up enough money and bought an Xbox 360 and a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV. I think this is the moment I started seeing how much potential video games had. I didn’t really beat many games growing up. I would just keep jumping between them and if I got bored or stuck, I switched to something else. It’s not like we had Internet at the time for me to look up what I was supposed to do. I played GTAIV all the way through though and had a great time. It was around this time that I started beating games more regularly. It was also when I played through the original Halo trilogy with a friend and enjoyed those games as well. Some other notable completions off the top of my head at the time were the original Crysis, Bioshock, and Assassin’s Creed, all series I still enjoy to this day.

In 2010, I bought a gaming laptop for college. I was able to justify the cost to my mom since I was majoring in video game programming, and they had minimum spec requirements we had to follow. I signed up for a Steam account around this time too and still use the same one. I ended up switching majors after a year so didn’t need the laptop for its original purpose, but it was still helpful for school and was a great gaming machine. In the summer of 2013, I bought my own PS3 (never had a PlayStation before) and a bunch of games I had missed out on from that generation. A few months later I bought the Xbox One at release and was pretty much digital only from that point on. The Xbox One would be my primary gaming device for several years until I switched over to PC gaming. In 2016, my coworker at the time taught me about how to build my own PC which I finally saved up enough money to do. I couldn’t afford a graphics card yet so only played basic games on it until I upgraded to the AMD RX 570 4GB around 2019 and then the Nvidia RTX 3080 in 2020. I also bought a PS5 around this time because I skipped the PS4 but bought a bunch of games on sale assuming it would be backwards compatible. It’s gotten very little use though since most of my backlog is on PC. I built a new PC at the end of 2024 due to Windows 10 nearing end-of-life and my CPU being too old to upgrade. I plan on purchasing a VR headset as well once one comes out I'm happy with.

Now that you’ve read my gaming history, I can finally dive into my plans for the blog. I found a website called How Long to Beat in 2019. It had popped up before in Google searches a lot when googling the length of games, but I found out you could add all of your games to your account to organize them, so I signed up. You can sort games by different criteria such as rating or length and filter them by console or storefront. It’s very helpful to stay organized and make sure you don’t accidentally buy the same game twice. After keeping track of all my completions for a full year, I decided at the end of 2020 that I wanted to make a top 10 list of my favorite games I played that year. I finally had a way to catalog my completions to make this possible. It’s not exactly a unique concept but I enjoyed writing them up all the same. After making posts for my top 10 lists of 2020-2023, I started to wonder if maybe I should be writing more throughout the year. That’s when I got the idea to document my catalogs and completions to see how my backlog fluctuates and how much time and money I’m really spending on my hobby.

My current plan is to make blog posts weekly, monthly, and annually. The annual posts will generally be what I’ve been doing since 2020 with the top 10 games I played that year. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to add more detailed stats such as how much time I spent gaming, how many games I catalog/beat (the website already tracks this), and how much money I spent on games or hardware. The monthly posts will break it down to how many games I cataloged/beat that month, how much time and money was spent on them, and general highs and lows. The weekly posts will break it down even more as well as going into more detail on the games I played that week. I’ll sprinkle in general thoughts on major gaming news, hardware announcements, life events, and so on here and there. I hope you enjoy!

For anyone wanting to know how I pick which games I’m going to play next, I generally go from lowest rated to highest rated. You can see my backlog list here. Any game that doesn’t have a rating gets played first. I’ve purchased a few itch.io charity mega-bundles and added a bunch of unknown games to the backlog which is why so many are unrated. Any series generally gets played back-to-back with all their ratings being averaged and then played oldest to newest. I usually stick to only one single-player game and one co-op game per friend at a time. I find juggling multiple games makes it easy to get lost and not remember the story, how to play, or what you were doing. I may also mix it up a bit and decide I want to play through all the games on a specific storefront or all the games installed on my PC that I just want to get rid of.

I think that’s enough of a word dump for now. Besides my annual top 10 posts, the others won’t be quite so long. If you have any questions about me, my blog, or my gaming adventures, please feel free to leave a comment and we can talk! I would love to interact with anyone who happens to drop by. I wanted to start my blog at the end of the year so my first regular post would be the type I’m already familiar with, the top 10! That post will immediately follow this one. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

My Blog

My How Long to Beat profile to track my gaming progress

My Ko-Fi

My YouTube channels:

GCTuba 

GCTuba Games