Have no fear, nothing to worry about, and although not much is changing either, a few things have changed for me recently so I wanted to let you know about a few tweaks I do now need to make to what’s appearing at Retro Arcadia every week, and as we’re around the mid-year point, it seemed like a good time to do it… Hopefully you’ll get to know me, Steve, a bit better as we go too! When I started this back in 2017, it was on a free WordPress site, and what very little plan I had involved documenting my favourite video games in a kind of part-diary and part-mini-review format – a bit about the game itself, then what I was up to when I first played it, and what I thought of it now, and so on. Which actually is still pretty much the case today, but since then, new features have come (and sometimes gone), and more significantly, the way I cover games has evolved a lot. We’re now talking deep-dives, in as much as someone who’s just liked playing video games for a long time is qualified to call them that, although there are quite a few now that involve more words written about individual games than has ever been written about them anywhere else before!

And believe it or not, the majority of those words have been strung together whilst sitting in my car! Our son was lucky enough to be an academy footballer. For a long time, this involved training three nights a week plus Saturday mornings, then matches on Sundays, which could be all over the country. As he got older, training went behind closed doors, and he always had to arrive for games ninety minutes before, so I had a lot of time to kill! He’s now eighteen and has his own car, so demand for me taxiing him around gradually dwindled over the past few months, but in parallel, over the past couple of years, moves have been afoot for him to go and play in America, which is something he’s always wanted to do, so as I write, he’s preparing to relocate to Seattle for pre-season training with his new “soccer” team in just a couple of weeks. 

While I’m sure anyone else who’s married will appreciate that this change in circumstances hasn’t magically translated into loads more gaming time for me, I cant lay all the blame on ‘er indoors! We live in a 400-year old, Grade II listed farmhouse, between Bedford and Cambridge (in the UK), and have spent the past four years (and an obscene amount of money) trying to get planning permission to convert a dilapidated old barn and stable attached to it. You would not believe the hoops we’ve had to jump through but we finally got the last of the building conditions confirmed a couple of months ago so that’s now going ahead, and given it’s on a similar scale to the rest of the house, is going to keep us from having too much spare time on our hands for a while, and probably too knackered to do much else in the unlikely event we do have any! 

All of the above has coincided with a few time-zone-related changes at work, where I’m a senior manager at one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, so I’ve decided I need to back off a bit, and make sure creating this stuff for Retro Arcadia remains a hobby I love rather than another source of stress. Something else has been playing on my mind a bit too recently, and I’m sorry for the morbid aside, but a friend of mine died a couple of months ago – a very fit 53-years old, who I first encountered in the year above me at school, although we properly got to know each other playing football together in the mid-nineties, when we also used to hang-out at at the same pub, nightclub and live music venue in Bedford (and that’s me singing there above at one of my band’s first gigs circa 1995). Now, writing a deep-dive on a game is a time-sink in itself, but actually playing (or even replaying) the thing to the extent you can actually get into that level of detail is something else entirely, and these thoughts of mortality then got me thinking… I’ve got a huge games backlog just like everyone else, and I’d quite like to play through it while I still can! And yes, I might decide to write about some of those games in future, but now, for example, I’m more or less all the way through the Metal Gear series for the first time (yeah, I know!) and these are mostly big, big games that I want to take my time with and enjoy, and not even consider writing about… Even if the first Solid is on the way, and maybe a top ten too! 

As said at the start though, I’m not planning on changing too much, but I do need to relax the frequency for a while, so here’s the plan. Weekly Spotlights, where I cover the other games I’ve been playing each week, continue every Sunday as normal. Same for Retro Rewinds, where, at the start of every month, we flick through the pages of an exactly 40-year old copy of Computer & Video Games magazine together. And the same for all the Christmas and end of year stuff, and the handful of other calendared features, like pickup recaps or Halloween specials that turn up throughout the course of the year, as well as the odd review when something new comes along I fancy covering. In-between though, what I’m going to do is alternate between a deep-dive and one of my top-ten countdowns every month, so effectively, it’s Retro Rewind, then big monthly main feature two weeks later, as well as Weekly Spotlights plus any regular periodic or annual features slotted in as and when they arrive. And looking at the resulting schedule for the rest of this year, isn’t actually making a huge difference to anything once you factor that time-locked stuff back in. It will likely only be for a few months anyway, but I hope that’s alright with you all the same because it’s going to make a huge difference for me! Finally, I’m going to take this opportunity to thank you for your time reading this, and for your support for this little project of mine, which I also hope you’ll continue to enjoy!

As always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense, and also on Bluesky, which is under my real name but most it ends up there too if you prefer!