Ughhhhhhhhhh…
For your sake and mine, I’ll spare you ten paragraphs of intense screaming at everything that was wrong this year. This fucking year. 2026 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better, either. But god damn, 2025 was probably the worst year I’ve ever lived through. And look – for me, personally, years never go THAT badly. I keep my job, I am financially stable, I have decent relationships, the blog is doing well (in fact, it’s doing better than it’s ever been). But as someone with some empathy and who feels the need to keep track of news, these past twelve months were some of the most mentally and emotionally exhausting shit I’ve had to deal with.
I knew we were in for a bad time all the way back in January when-
CRAP! I said I wasn’t gonna do that! Okay, you know what? I’m going to focus on the blog. ‘Cause I really, REALLY don’t want to start on another tangent with all this. (And I’m holding back, ‘cause gaming, in general, has been a huge bearer of shitty news all year, from Nintendo’s attempt at patenting creature-battling to all the game development studios going mask-off with A.I. at the end of the year and – Dammit! Moving on!)
But it’s like I said. My year? On a purely personal standpoint? It was alright. Speaking strictly of employment and hobbies, that is. I think I mostly stayed true to my desire to keep this blog as a pure hobby, so that’s at least a net positive. I’ve written articles I had wanted to do for a while (the Sonic movies, Pokémon Sun/Moon and their rereleases), and I once again covered a decent number of games across the year. (If we count all the ones I covered in my itch.io and Nintendo Classics articles, then I technically covered more games this year than ever before, but… should those really count, with how short most of them were?) I'm just glad I started both of these, too, as they're two concepts I quite enjoy writing for.
I didn’t overshoot too badly with my Year Plans, but I think I could have done even more if I hadn’t landed myself a Balatro addiction. (Seriously. I’m 250+ hours in.) Perhaps the best blog-related achievement this year was the sheer number of views. It took me from 2013 to 2024 to reach a million views on the blog, then 2025 casually comes around and boosts those numbers by 450,000! For a short time around the last week of October and the first of November, I got over 9,000 views per day. Several days in a row. Ever since October, I’ve been getting over 55k views per month, blowing my previous record of views in a month (40k, back in May 2017) right out of the water. I still have no idea where this sudden spike came from, but hey, I’m not gonna complain!
Slowly but surely, I’m going through my collection – now, if only I wasn’t buying damn near as many games as I finish… Okay, enough chitchat, time for the yearly lists.