Ahh, that’s what the “Publish” button is for!
I’m back.
In hindsight, starting off the latest post on the website with “We have not been idle” is kind of ironic after a hiatus lasting much of the year. C’est la vie!
Continue reading “Delfeir vs The Backlog General Update (Oct 2023)”Because the least I can do for my website is write stuff for it
Given that I’ve spent much of the year not updating this website, I figured I should rectify that.
Hi! I’m alive!
It’s been another one of those years that — while mercifully not spent in lockdown — has seen very little headway in any of the things I’d like to do or the projects I’ve begun. In addition to a status update on some of those, there’s a few games in particular I’ve played this year that I would like to write about, so I’ll put a spotlight on those in a mini-Backlog Report.
IGN Review of Galactic Civilizations IV
Let’s start off with the major positive news from the year: I got hired by IGN as a freelancer to review a game! If there was any doubt to myself (or others) that I’m not any good at what I do, that helped me dispel it significantly. Paid review work for one of the biggest games media sites on the internet? Regardless of your opinion of the website, that’s a big deal, and I was certainly thrilled. It was a good little opportunity to work with some very skilled, friendly, and communicative editors over there.
The only negatives about the experience were that the game in question (Galactic Civilizations IV) itself was not particularly good, but writing about it was nonetheless interesting. If you’ve not seen it yet, you can read the review over on IGN. I also wrote the script for the video version, which is slightly different and a lot more condensed due to word limits.
There’s more I’d like to write about GalCivs 4 that I didn’t touch on in the review, honestly. But the reason I elected to omit it from the review is that it’s a heavily political deep-dive into some of the systems and writing there, both as a political reading and as a kind of “eureka!” moment on why I always felt the series failed to meet my expectations. I think there’s plenty to say there, but it’s not what IGN is really about or particularly pertinent to the rest of the overall review. Hopefully I’ll get to put it up here at some point.
Continue reading “Delfeir vs The Backlog General Update (Sept 2022)”This is not a critique of Endwalker, this is just a tribute.
This is a fairly unstructured and unfiltered blog post, like some of the earlier pieces on this site. I’ve mostly used it to sort through my mental processes and just touch on a few things to whoever cares to listen. As such, it’s not been closely edited and I’ve not put the usual formatting into it. In short, there’s a wall of text ahead.
Allow me to assuage this by providing a soundtrack for your reading, courtesy of the actual best thing to come out of Endwalker.
You’re welcome.
As I said repeatedly in covering the games I liked of 2021, Endwalker was not among them. While the gameplay and mechanical changes remain as solid and enjoyable to play as ever, the core of Final Fantasy 14’s appeal has long been its quality story. As such, even the strengths of its latest expansion were increasingly hard to just simply enjoy for me, built as they are on a foundation of sand and rot. There are better games that I’ll just play for the sake of play; what makes Final Fantasy 14 (and particularly the Shadowbringers expansion) one of my all time favourites is that it transcends the sum of its parts. I fully intend to go through and do a thorough breakdown of Endwalker’s narrative flaws in an article.
This is not that article. This is an article that I am largely using to get my thoughts in order and put a voice to why this process has been such a struggle for me.
Continue reading “The Trouble With Critiquing Endwalker”Because sometimes I play a lot of games but don’t have a lot to say.
Yep, I’m doing this again.
I won’t be operating to any set schedule of releases, but I’m aspiring to at least have an editorial style post up here every week. If I’m falling short, I might revert to the more blog-esque Battle Reports that I did previously and just talk about everything I played this week in brief.
Delfeir, February 27th 2021
There’s at least two articles that I’ve started but haven’t been able to get to a place I’m happy with since the Gnosia review. I can largely attribute this to terrible sleep for the last week and change. Even so, I want to at least try and write something (even if it’s rambling and low quality). The rate at which I’m able to play games now is exceeding the pace at which I’m writing, so they’re starting to queue up. As such, I’m going to just write really short impressions and comments on some of the highlight games I’ve played from the last two months. Two to three paragraphs on each, tops.
Vs. The Backlog is supposed to refer to my gaming backlog, not my editorial writing backlog. Having one is eternal enough. So let’s go.
Continue reading “Backlog Battle Report (March/April 2021)”And here’s where I’d mention a Squarespace sponsorship… if I HAD ONE!
Since the last post, I dabbled in trying to get a website going for a new tangential writing project. The intention was to make Vs. The Backlog its own thing rather than just building off this old WordPress blog, with avenues to expand into more than just me. Unfortunately, after screwing around with the tools on Squarespace and trying to get myself a crash course in web design, I ultimately ended up nowhere. There’s a few reasons, but what really sealed it was that there was never a point I could say “This isn’t something I could just do on the old blog.”
Actually tweaking this WordPress after the fact solidified that feeling further. Multiple times I would have to really fight the tools needed to get something to look or feel just right, but here it’s been effortless and intuitive. So why bother compounding stress by adding hassles to the design and writing process? This blog will do for my purposes for now. All I really want at the moment is a platform to write on that people can read, and the rest will unfold from that.
Continue reading “No New Website, Just New Life to This One”Been a while since I dusted off Delfeir vs the Backlog, but this blog is as good a place as any for the time being.
Most people reading this will probably know that I’ve been writing exclusively for the website DualShockers for a bit over a year. I mentioned as much in the Yakuza-flavoured epic that was the previous post here, but that’s at the bottom of 10k words so I don’t begrudge anyone for missing that detail. Originally I had considered adding posts here alongside it, but there wasn’t really anything I intended to write that wouldn’t also work over at DualShockers. So I let this place lapse.
But now I’m back here, so the astute among you should easily put the pieces together: I’m no longer writing for DualShockers. I handed my resignation in on Friday, effective immediately. The full explanation for why could take a while, so I’ll just keep it brief. DualShockers was purchased by a media company, and despite assurances of a relatively hands off trial period while we all get acclimatised, it only took four days before our entire process had been gutted.
Any article that wasn’t chasing trends and analytics while aimed at big views was to be scrapped. Long-form content like reviews and editorials — y’know, the thing I do pretty much exclusively — was dramatically reduced if not outright axed. The writing was on the wall, and I no longer had a place there, so I bowed out. Still, best of luck and all the best to the many writers there who are staying on. I bear none of them any ill will, you guys are great and I enjoyed writing alongside you.
Continue reading “Well, Here We Are Again”Back on Christmas Day (which was almost a month ago already, where does the time go?), I spent a couple of hours in the evening being somewhat… manic. I don’t recall precisely what initiated this, but for whatever reason I had pictured a specific kind of game in my head, and I was now tearing apart my collection or the internet in a frenzy to find and play it. It cascaded into me playing a handful of games since that point, trying to find something that would absolutely meet the requirements I was searching for.
From this, I ended up discarding or putting aside most of these games when they failed to achieve success, or else playing the ones I did stick with for incomplete or else different reasons. Most of these games I’ll speak about at length in the future (probably their own articles), but by now I feel like I should address the kind of game I was looking for.
In short, I was looking for quite possibly the nerdiest thing I could: a game of resource management, production chains, and logistics. And while I’m sure a few people could see that and immediately list off a few examples — just as I could, did, and started with in my search — I was looking for something more expansive. I don’t just want the end result of the chains, but the acquisition of the resources used, and the utilisation of these to allow me to expand or further my goals.
See, the first title I gravitated towards during my thought process and subsequent search was Black Desert Online. Besides the flashy and graphically striking action combat that the game sells as its main feature, it has a variety of “life skills” to complement this. You can set up farms, buy and sell trade resources in various markets that you can either manually carry or transport via wagons and boats (which you can build, and even breed better horses for), acquire property in towns that can be converted into production centres, and hire workers to work these centres or even gather the resources themselves from some areas if you didn’t feel like doing it yourself.
This was the part of the game that kept me playing for a lot longer than I expected previously. I would frequently go from place to place in order to figure out what resources were available, do smaller quests in order to open them up or else just farm contribution points that let me expand my sphere of influence, or just run trade routes back and forth in the background while doing other things. And it was this model that the manic searching for more games like this was based around.
So why didn’t I just play Black Desert Online when this mood struck me? Well… a few reasons.
Continue reading “Fantastic Resources and Where to Find Them: Delf’s Search for a Strategy Game”
For the games I liked from the first half, here’s a link to the post. Assuming you don’t want to scroll down a screen’s length, anyway. Don’t say I don’t look out for you~
Just as I am somehow delivering another (hopefully) great post within a week of the last one, so too did it seem that the second half of 2018 was dropping an intriguing title in our laps at much the same pace. This breakneck schedule seemed to continue pretty much until the first week of December, whereupon it took a quite breather for the holiday season and then is slated to get right back to it in just a few days.
Looking at you, Tales of Vesperia. Can’t even give me time to fully digest the FF14 patch updating as I write, can you?
So let’s get right back to it then. First, a couple of footnotes of sorts that I could have included from the first half, then right back to the second half of 2018, culminating in a quick talk about my favourite game of the year at the end. I’ll have plenty more to say about Yakuza Kiwami 2 than what’s here, but keeping to the 2-3 paragraphs trend for this article seems to suit me well.
Continue reading “Some Games I Liked From 2018’s Second Half”
Figures… the day I end the hiatus and aspire to push on with my video game related writing and journalism is the day that the video game journalism world loses a hugely influential and important figure.
I have no personal story here. I’ve never met or chatted with Total Biscuit, though it was always kind of a dream of mine to be able to join that “inner circle” of sorts and show up on the Co-optional podcast or play on a stream with them… something like that. I’m not one of those that will be mourning the loss of a dear friend and family member. All the same, I’ll still be mourning.
This guy is immensely important to the work that so many people do in the video game writing and content scenes. He’s one of the key figures that people can look to on as having proved the viability of being a “content creator”. Whether that’s on podcasts, streams, YouTube videos, shoutcasting… he’s had a hand in all of it, and so many who now partake in this do so because of the ground work he laid down.
He had standards that he was rarely if ever willing to compromise in, both in his own work and in the video games that he looked over and reported on. At the same time, he was fair in covering the strengths and weaknesses of what he played, being honest about his feelings and experiences on them. More than that, he often covered indie games or lesser known titles that may have never gotten any kind of coverage or attention had he not.
It’s honestly crazy to look back and see how much has been influenced by his work. Hell, I first encountered him and Jesse Cox alike when they were covering the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta stuff. That would have been in 2010. Even by that point he was decently well known and established through WoW Radio stuff.
Throughout all of these years, the biggest lesson and message that Total Biscuit pushed to aspiring content creators was a simple one: be consistent. Set a schedule and keep up with it. Put your content out without fail, as much as you can, and stick with it. It’s a simple lesson, but an extremely important one… and one that the last update shows is one I sometimes struggle to take to heart, personally.
And it’s not just the writing and content creation part that TB is influential with, too. It’s been no secret that he’s been fighting a losing battle with cancer for years now, yet he never made it seem like a losing battle. The first diagnosis was terminal, but he chose to keep on fighting anyway like a goddamn rockstar. From the very outset he was determined to beat the odds, and his longevity means he very much did.
There’s been interviews and discussions that have talked about his battle with cancer that have honestly, legitimately saved lives through the information offered. All throughout, he’s been adamant on the notion of “It is the enemy, so I must fight it.” And so he did. He kept on with his content wherever possible, as unflinchingly as possible, and even in the final months when it was clear that he was in pain and suffering… still he pushed on. That’s probably why the news that he was finally retiring earlier this month, and this morning’s announcement that his fight was finally over really hit home.
You never knew me, John, but I — and many others — knew you. And we’ll carry on your work and legacy as best as we can. May you rest in peace.
Yes, I’m still alive. Sadly the blog has not been, but I’m hoping to correct this in the coming days. Details below the cut, but to keep it brief…
tl;dr: Remaining Delfies entries to be released at once in abridged form ASAP, scheduled articles going away, various labelled articles becoming less important. Attempting at least a post once a week on no particular schedule or theme, as if this was a blog or something strange like that.
Delfeir vs. the Backlog 