It’s that time of year again where content creators across the globe make some type of retrospective of the previous year - and boy was 2020 filled with stuff to talk about. But I don’t want to focus too much on the negative stuff since you can get that practically everywhere; so I decided to do my best to give you my personal take on why 2020 wasn’t as bad for me. Before going on however, I want to make it clear that 2020 was not a good year by any metric, but I certainly didn’t experience the extreme downsides of it as others did. I’m an older guy, and If I created a hypothetical list of my top 10 years and worst 10 years of my life - 2020 wouldn’t make either. I’ll just leave it at that and explain a bit of my reasoning.
Let’s start off with the obvious numbers and where I reside. I currently live in California, one of the worst places to be if you’re someone extremely paranoid about COVID-19. I also want to disclose that my wife contracted the virus this year as well and I was considered asymptomatic (even though I tested negative) due to my proximity to her. It is (and was) not a death sentence as you can clearly see from this blog update, nor am I permanently disabled or traumatized. It sucked when it happened to my wife and it sucked taking care of her and seeing her sick; but that is the case with all major illnesses. We got over it, and now we’re back to our routine. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the general perception of the virus makes it to be pretty nasty if you get it. I can tell you that from our personal experience actually having and dealing with it; it wasn’t as bad for us. I just wanted to throw out some reassuring sentiment for those who might be on the fringes of absolute paranoia.
One of the recurring themes of people in 2020 was that they were shopping like crazy since they had nothing else to do. Yet a lot of folks are reporting they actually saved quite a bit of money after everything was said and done regardless of their shopping habits. I can confirm that this year has actually been quite easy on the wallet even though my Amazon packages have tripled to my doorstep. This is coming from someone who operates this website at a complete loss ($200 a year to be exact - $600 in total since 2017) just for the love of it and you visiting and reading this blog right now. I still pride myself that not a single ad has been shown since its birth (the site) as well. Once again, I’m trying to highlight that 2020 (at least for me) was not as horrible as the general consensus appears to be. I think there’s a fair amount of crap the year dished out, but there’s also a lot of drama queens who want their 15 seconds.
Gaming in 2020 has been a mixed bag for me. Primarily as someone who has a heavy interest in mobile gaming and talking about it on YouTube - there hasn’t been a lot of heavy hitters this year. I was able to partake in a lot of “side game” recommendations, but nothing to topple my 2 day to day games which still remain to be Destiny Child and Last Origin. The lovely lady you see above this paragraph is named Mammon and she is a part of the franchise The Seven Mortal Sins. There was recently a mobile game made in Taiwan for the series which I really hoped was going to be the next best thing considering all the material to work with from the original IP. Alas it was not meant to be as the game was not what I expected and is quite heavy on the paywall while being light on the content. Something worth mentioning is that the game suffers from a surprising amount of restraint in terms of its art direction - ironic considering the source material is anything but timid and there’s a lot of great stuff to draw upon. If you’re interested in the game, I did a very short video on it that you can see here. At least it’s been confirmed that Last Origin Global is being released in 2021 and the new games from S H I F T U P (developers of Destiny Child) may be releasing a new title in the same year. Trailer is below for NiKKE.
Let’s close out the year’s retrospective with some retro chip tunes… except they’re not exclusively retro songs. If you ever wondered what a lot the music you grew up with would sound like on some “older” hardware, then this YouTube channel is a nice rabbit hole to go down if you’ve got the time to spare. It’s called Chiptune Planet and has a lot of popular songs past and present made in 8-bit or 16-bit renditions. My personal favorite is linked below to give you a taste of the work you’ll find there.