On briefly returning to Destructoid's community, and myself.

So, I randomly posted a quick thing here about my current blog back in September, which struck a nerve with some of y'all. I had honestly posted that and forgot about the site until just now. I probably was thinking it was gonna be a throwaway and nobody was going to care, yet Top People were on it and scuttled that away. That was rude of me, and I sincerely apologize.

To be honest, I logged back into Destructoid to see if the one person who I followed to here was still here posting. Elsa from the long-defunct Sony Gamer Advisory Panel. Elsa was kind of the reason I came here to the site all those years. There were other reasons, obviously (SEE: Sterling, Jim), but there were memories of messing around with late 2000s-early 2010s era Dtoid that I thought about one day while going through old pictures of PAX events.

Elsa hasn't really posted since 2018 on here or in other places like Twitter, and I hope she's doing okay. If she passed away, I'd be kinda sad. Being around people like Elsa did make me feel like I was in a cool community.

So why'd I come back? Well, after realizing how rude I was last time, I figured it would be nicer to write a more straightforward post, and see where it goes from here. Much like moving away from your hometown and coming back every once in a while during the holidays, you kinda wanna see if the old places are still there, still full of the memories you had. or worse, if the places were bulldozed and a Wal-Mart lives there now.

There were people on Destructoid during those late-2000s years that I do remember outside of Elsa and the editorial staff, but I don't remember them all that well. I remember PAX parties in Seattle bars where loud noises and booze reigned supreme as I sat awkwardly listening to people talk about games and junk. There was a guy who was frequently shown in a pink bathrobe, I don't know if he's still around. Short of the editorial staff, I don't remember the community here that well.

Yet I kept posting anyway. I think I'd get a comment or two from Elsa and folk, but that was about it. By 2013, I had spread myself too thin between so many sites, writing for communities where it felt like I was posting to an audience of zero. Thus I... quietly left. I didn't know many of the people here that well, and it felt like at times I was invading a clique I didn't really belong in.

Admittedly I don't keep up with current games that much. I don't buy a lot of current games, I still have a 360 and PS3, had a Wii U but sold it after playing two games on it, and I probably won't get the PS5 or Xbox Series consoles unless I win them in a lottery. Doom 64, an updated port of a 1996 game, is the only 2020 game I've played this year. I don't have much incentive to really play games these days for a myriad of reasons, mostly involving my mental health (which I won't get into here).

Oddly, one of my vices has been Quake Champions, a free-to-play first person arena shooter. It's a decent little romp, even if that's in a genre most people don't play these days. While the retro FPS revival is in full swing, the arena shooter hasn't really had the same impact. And to be honest, I'm not expecting it to.

Halo was slowly doing damage to it, and Call of Duty 4 was the final blow that basically killed that genre's popularity for a long while. But I still enjoy playing Quake Champions despite that. I'll probably stick with it until the inevitable shutdown, which seems to be the case for a lot of service games these days. (I'd go on a tangent about that, but I'm not Ross Scott from Accursed Farms.)

These days, if I write about the Video Games, it's on my blog (link in sidebar, updated to a more current address). Ever wanted to read about me reviewing a soundtrack to a game show based on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I got you covered.

I'm gonna be honest, it's really hard to put myself into a community that has a lot of people into it, even places like this, which is probably smaller potatoes compared to the IGNs and GameSpots of the world. They feel like they're rather tough and impenetrable to me, to make an impact and to write about things.

Hell, even being part of Sony's GAP took me a few years to foster some friendships with people, even if I don't talk with them much these days. Yet somehow one person at least brought me here to hang out in for a couple years, and I do have a few good memories of being here. Visiting this site once again to look back and see that there's still a community kicking around is nice, to say the least. I don't know if I'll stick around this time, but it did feel like I should at least explain myself better than I did back in September.

One last question though: Does one of y'all still have that prop robotic Dtoid head? I remember someone bringing that to PAX gatherings and it looked pretty neat. (My apologies for the blurry photo, I didn't have the hang of taking pictures with a phone in 2013. Still kinda don't.)

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TonicBH   

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CelicaCrazed   30

Destructoids Very Own Ein   30

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TheBlondeBass   20

EtosiGiR   15

DeadMoon   12

Morty   7

Roager   3