minecraft

While not my first blog, Tales of the Aggronaut was created back in 2009. This means that the decade of 2010 to 2019 is the first time I am really able to legitimately look back on the last decade of gaming from a blogging standpoint. I’ve gone back and forth over the last several weeks about what sort of form these posts would take. For awhile I contemplated doing one post per day covering 5 games per decade. However at the time I dreamed up this concept it would mean that more or less you would get nothing from me but these posts for the rest of the year. Instead I scaled things back to a single post per year, but even then I was uncertain of the number of games to talk about in each year. Being the unorganized person that I am, I could not really whittle things down to a clean number each year. So instead what you are getting is a compromise of a compromise, where I just write about the games in each year that were particularly important or noteworthy to me. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I am sure I will be completely blowing past titles that you my readers feel are super important. If that is the case feel free to leave me comments below with the game I should have included.

Minecraft

Technically Minecraft was available and playable in 2009, but I didn’t pay much attention until August of 2010 when I saw the above video from YouTuber DavidAngel64. The “X Series” as it came to be known was a series of videos where he explored various games, and in it he did a deep dive into those early days of Minecraft. I watched several of these and was hooked, and immediately went out and purchased the game and started doing my own explorations. It was a simple time when we were more or less figuring out the rules of the game and now to get to the sort of resources we wanted. For example the hunt for diamond because an overarching goal that pretty much dominated every waking moment of playing the game when I was not finding uses for the copious amounts of cobblestone that I was dredging from the earth.

The peak of my non-group gameplay was in October when I recorded a series of YouTube videos using Fraps and showing off some of the nonsense I had built. That channel is more or less abandoned and everything is on the “Belghast” channel that I dump our podcast on, and with no real great way or moving them, and no access to the original recordings… they more or less live out their life as they are… poorly done with crappy audio. I still have the original Minecraft files laying around in a zip, because I used to trade my files to other friends playing the game and they would zip up theirs and trade them to me so we could explore each others work in the days before an active Minecraft server. In 2011 the way we interacted with the game shifted significantly as we stood up our first server for the House Stalwart guild to all build together. That said 2010 was the renaissance of the game for me, and that blissful era when everything was new and magical.

Fallout New Vegas

I love the Fallout setting, and I can still remember saving up my pennies to buy the original game when it came out back during college. I’ve always been drawn to post apocalyptic settings, and Fallout is a world that is rich and textured and full of tantalizing bits of lore. While Fallout 3 pushed us into a brand new territory of exploring what happened to the Capitol Wasteland, Fallout New Vegas saw us returning to our roots of Southern California, the setting of the first two games. As a result what follows is a nostalgic ride seeing how the settings you were familiar with evolved in the time between the games. The game is also a return to being controlled by Obsidian games, which represented a significant portion of the folks from Black Isle Studios that worked on the original two games. Fallout New Vegas is known for a handful of things… but the first being that the game does not start you in a vault and instead gives you what feels like a much more weighty introduction in the form of an attempt on your life. The other thing it is known for, is just how freaking buggy the game was at launch. I personally managed to get around most of these and found myself enjoying it greatly. The game is also significant because it represents one of the first times I wrote a review for a site that was not my own. You can still find my original review up on Polygamerous, though due to shifts in hosting I no longer have an account there… but the byline is still at the bottom.

Mass Effect 2

We are travelling through a time period when I was not quite as rabid about keeping screenshots for eternity. As a result I don’t have a ready archive of images to draw upon for most of these games. Mass Effect 2 represents my first entry in the series, and I remember buying it digitally on the ill fated Direct2Drive, because some other subscription I had that I am drawing a blank on gave me a significant discount there. This is the game that shaped my view of the Mass Effect setting, and still to this day is probably my favorite game in the series. I loved the characters and the interactions and the “away team mission” nature of the gameplay. In the years between then and now I have played through this game I believe five times in total, often times as part of a full replay of the series. There are a lot of games out there that hope to be a narrative story that rivals that of Star Wars. Very few manage to pull this goal off, but Mass Effect absolutely did. I still stand by my stance that this series would make one of the absolute best Science Fiction/Fantasy television series out there. I keep hoping that Netflix options the rights, or shit even Disney Plus after seeing how amazing The Mandalorian has been. While I played through as Male Shepard, the canonical version based on all of my friends has to be the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard. I will admit I had a real hang up for a long time about playing female characters in video games. When I play a video game I am essentially playing me in whatever form takes place on screen, and I tried to always make each character as close to “Belghast” as I could. I seemingly have gotten past that… and at some point I need to break this game back out and play it through in the mode that so many people say is the best possible version.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2010

So those are the games that I was playing behind the scenes, but on this blog… you got a vastly different view of me. It was a time of deep irregularity in my posting schedule. I didn’t really start doing this regular posting thing until 2013, and each time I had a major lapse it was harder and harder to get back into posting again. There are so many sign posts in those early years like this one from April where I find myself apologizing for not feeling up to writing. I was not happy with the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and similarly not super happy with the beginning of Cataclysm. I was also super hung up on this blog being a World of Warcraft Tanking and Raid Leadership blog. That niche no longer really fit me, and as a result I was struggling trying to get the oomph to be writing about what I thought were the topics folks wanted me to write about. I’m glad I figured this whole thing out at some point, or at least have a working theory about how to progress forward with a blog. I am not sure how often I will be writing these pieces, but I figure I will probably do Monday and Friday or some semblance of that until I get through the years between 2010 and 2019. As I do this, I would love to hear in the comments about your own games of a specific year.