What I Got Up To This Month (January '25)

Time keeps moving forward. It feels like the year's only just begun and yet we're already a whole month into it. I started the year thinking I'd make some progress on some personal goals of mine, but if I'm being honest the past few weeks have drained a lot of the positive energy I had coming out of last year. I doubt this is the first you've heard of this but, uh, things in the US are not good. Things are very bad, in fact. The daily onslaught of illegal actions and the attacks against queer people are, frankly, exhausting. I am not a very strong-willed person and I'm honestly worried for how things are going to affect me, because at the rate things are going something's going to affect me personally pretty soon and I fear I'm not strong enough to handle whatever injustices they'll force me to deal with. Oh well, enough for the pity party, time for business as usual with these posts of mine.

I played a fair amount of Project Zomboid's new Build 42 this month. I played a lot of this game (and Build 41 specifically) back in 2023 but basically didn't touch it last year, so now that the new update is (sort of) out I thought I'd try to get back into the swing of things. I still adore this game. I haven't stuck with any characters long enough to get into the nitty-gritty of most of the new features, but even just the small UI and audio changes feel substantial, at least to someone who put over a hundred hours into it a year or two ago.  

I continued my Yakuza playthrough this month. I started (and finished) Yakuza 2 and I really enjoyed it. It's always excitng for me to watch a series evolve and grow into itself over time and I'm already seeing some of that with this first sequel. I wrote more about the game recently, but I think it might be a while before I get to the next Yakuza game. I want to pace myself and do other things between games because I really don't want to burn myself out on this franchise, but as a result I doubt I'll be getting through this as quickly as I could be.

As far as this blog's concerned, this month was largely devoted to my Game of the Year list(s). I published both my New Games and my Old Games lists and I also tried something new this year. I made a video that essentially compiles my Old and New lists into one easy-to-watch package and uploaded that to my YouTube channel. I still feel self-conscious about the way my voice sounds so this was a bit of a leap-of-faith for me, but I enjoyed the act of creating something like this (even if there are now things about the video I wish I'd done differently). Maybe I'll convert some of my other (longer) blog posts into videos in the future, I suppose we'll just have to see.

I'm still working on my third GOTY list, the one compiling the odds-and-ends of stuff that didn't make it on the other lists, but I had some things I wanted to do before I finalized that and I ultimately couldn't get that out before the end of the month. It's still coming, though! Probably!