5/4/24 - Craig Plays Games: The 3 Month Review

It’s been 3 months give or take since I replaced my old website TheNerdRock with this site, a way for me to continue talking about games but with a better designed website and renewed vigour and motivation. In a sentence, I think it’s going pretty well.

Before I touch on anything else, I need to shoutout my wonderful girlfriend Jade who has come along with me on this project and hit the ground running. Her enthusiasm for the project as well as her consistency in writing articles has been a massive help. If you’ve seen anything from the Instagram account, 90% of it has been Jade. Something I didn’t have with TheNerdRock was any kind of social media presence so again Jade’s initiative has been invaluable.

In that opening paragraph I mentioned website design. While the swap from Wordpress to Squarespace has been wonderful (actually having pages for one), it also means there’s more aspects of the site that need modified to look… well, better. The front page of the site is just a giant purple block and I’ve not updated any of the social links at the bottom. Less important for a site that only gets viewed when I badger friends with a link, but if I want to make anything of it then these things will need work.

Splitting game reviews into Current Year and All previous years is a good idea conceptually, but I should have known it was going to make things look a little skewed. Suppose it doesn’t help that a lot of 2024 games have been ones I haven’t finished compared to games from previous years, but it does mean that the Reviews tab is looking a little bare. Other sections of the site are looking good; “Features and Opinions” and “For the Love of the Game” have a decent amount of content each in them, including some good stuff like Designing the Suicide Squad game and Side Quest – a series I didn’t even have planned but has slotted nicely in.

I used the word Series there, when I was in the planning phases of the website I had plans to split certain articles into series for easier browsing and instant recognition – like a YouTube video. I later decided that games could be many different things, making this seem redundant. Instead there’s a little note within the article, for example Titanfall 2 had a “Finally Playing” note within.

I’m proud of my output for January and February, both in terms of the content put out as well as the pace of it. It came to a crashing halt this last month thanks to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth taking up nearly my entire life. At the time of writing this, I am 96 hours into the game and should hopefully have it done before too long. Either way, regular content should return to the site soon.

Thanks to everybody who has been reading and who will go on to read future articles, the support means the world to us at CraigPlaysGames. Here’s to a successful first year!