The "TGB" Challenge Moves On To 1991 - Here Are My Plans

Hey everyone,

Mr. Kane here, checking in. I've just put my Steam Deck down for the last time for games released in 1990, as ACTRAISER signifies the end of our, checks notes, 159-hour journey through games released in 1990. 

There was plenty of bad and mediocre, plenty of good and even some all-timers included in this batch, and I'm looking forward to diving into that in another post soon. In that post, I will list my Top 5's for both Best and Worst Games I've played all year, plus give out a bunch of different Awards as well, which I hope to make a tradition whenever a year's worth of games is completed.

The challenge is now ongoing for over 3 months, and in this time I've learned plenty about how I want the challenge to proceed from here on out. I wanted to use this post now to go through what exactly I have learned and what I'm planning on doing with the start of 1991. 

• I had a hard time deciding how exactly to review the games. Do I go for a traditional review that is not divided into "chapters/segments" but rather tries to talk about each aspect of a game fluently? Do I try to do some quick "to the point" reviews so that people can quickly grasp whether I enjoyed the game and whether they themselves would enjoy it as well? Or do I want to talk about each category of mine individually in order to discuss each game as thoroughly as I can? I've tried out all of these methods for the 35 games I played and reviewed so far, but I think from here on out, I'm going to stick with talking about each category individually. You want to know about the story? Read the story part to get a deeper look into it. You want to know about the gameplay? Check the gameplay category. You get the idea. I think this will work well, especially if I attempt to be more detailed in each category I cover. 
• From July 1991 on out, I will have a feature that will appear once every 1-2 weeks, where I will go through 3 gaming magazines from that time and talk about games that are reviewed and topics that I find interesting. This way, those of you who are as clueless about gaming history as me (or were born after 1991, also like me) can enjoy finding out how the gaming landscape looked like at the time. And those who lived it can reminisce about the past. I think this will be a fun little feature. The three magazines I have selected for 1991 after Electronic Gaming Monthly (1), GamePro (2) and Video Games & Computer Entertainment (3). 
• There have been multiple weeks where pretty much all games I played were bad. These "runs of misery" as I'd like to call them didn't leave me burned out, yet, however I did realize that playing a lot of these games doesn't really offer me, you nor this whole challenge anything of substance. A bad game is a bad game, and it's the worst kind if it isn't at least hilariously bad at the same time. But many of these games I played during these "runs of misery" were just a slog to go through. For example, from October 7th to October 20th, I've played 7 games. None of these received a rating higher than 54 from me, and the only one that got the 54 was Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, a game that received this rating more for its presentation than its gameplay. And this run included some big time stinkers like The Amazing Spider-Man for GameBoy, The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout and Skate or Die 2. What I'm trying to say is, if games stink and they don't really try to move the needle in any way, then I don't have much reason to play them.
• Continuing on from my last point, I have therefore decided to narrow down the types of games I will play for this challenge. There will be plenty of bad games to rant about still, I'm sure, but if I stumble upon games in my spreadsheet or on the magazines that we will go through that barely have any views on YouTube, that barely have user reviews on sites like Grouvee or Backloggd, that simply do not look at all like a game I would enjoy or that look very much like games I've already played plenty of times ... well, then I will remove these games from the spreadsheet. Doing this, I have reduced the 1991 play-list from 107 games to just 50. This will still cover the year very well I think and also will allow us to move through the years quicker and get to those classics that I am so anxiously anticipating to experience.

As we go further into this challenge, I might start doing YouTube playthroughs or reviews of some of the games I play, but that is something I haven't decided upon yet. For now, I want to thank all of you have followed the challenge along so far and am looking forward to make this challenge bigger and better as we go through 1991.