I think that I write a similar introduction to every community award I receive. The introduction talks about how the blogging community is one big family that supports each other and to support each other we have these community awards. You can compare them to YouTubers doing shoutouts or collaborations to promote each other and help each other grow. One of these awards is the Sunshine Blogger Award. All of these awards work in a very similar way while thanking the blogger who gave you the award, you have to answer his or her questions, write up the same amount of questions that the bloggers have to reply to that you select to receive the award.
Thank you!
The blogger who gave me the 3rd Sunshine Blogger Award is AK from Sonatano1. It really makes my day when another blogger gives me an award like this, I feel recognized and it really makes my day. Now, AK writes articles on various game related subjects. From old to new games. If you enjoy my content, I’m quite sure you will enjoy his content. One of my favorite articles is one of the Windows Entertainment Packs. It just tickles the collector and retro gamer in me.
Now, I think it’s time that we get to answering the questions that were asked by AK. Let’s dive right into some interesting things and facts about myself.
The Questions
1) What’s your favorite or most-used medium for entertainment?
My favorite form of entertainment is gaming, followed by YouTube and anime. I also love theater and stand up comedy quite a lot. Here and there, I go to the movies.
Now, if you follow my blog you might know that I play games on a ton of systems. From my phone to my gaming desktop. From my Nintendo 3DS to my Sony PSP. I even play games on rip-off consoles. So, my favorite medium for entertainment are devices that can play games. My most-used platform is Switch and my computer at the moment of writing. But, because I got some new 3DS games, I think that might change in the future.
2) What character in a work of fiction would you inhabit and why? (Assuming you’re experiencing the entire storyline of the game/novel/film/whatever as this character.)
Oh dear lord, to answer this question I had to stop myself from cheating and counting one of the stories I wrote in the past. My biggest hobby, besides gaming and acting, is writing. Before I started writing this blog, I used to write a lot of fantasy stories on paper. I have a couple of binders full of story ideas and pitches for quite interesting stories.
Now, because I full control over those worlds, I think it would be too easy to pick one of those stories. On top of that, none of those stories are finished and aren’t even released to the public.
So, in which universe would I want to live? In that case, give me Indiana Jones in one of the Indiana Jones movies or games. The reason for that is quite simple. I’m in love with the Indiana Jones universe. My favorite game is Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which is released on Steam and GOG now. My favorite movie is the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. While I know that the 4th movie wasn’t one of the best Indiana Jones movies and was filled with various plot holes and things of that nature; truth to be told, I still enjoyed the movie quite a lot. But, I do agree that it’s one of the worst movies in the series. My love for the series is so big that I went dressed up as Indiana Jones three times to carnival as a child. I even own a replica of the hat Indiana wears in the movies and games. It felt so amazing when I was able to use it in a play last year. So, yeah. Indiana Jones would be my character, the adventures, and the mysteries… Do I even have to explain?
3) What work would you wipe all memories of from your brain if you could so that you could experience it all over again?
To be honest, I have a huge list of games and experiences that I would love to be able to re-experience without any memories. To name just a few: the Tomb Raider games, A Hat in Time, Time Hollow, all the Ace Attorney games, Fantasy Life, Stella Glow, Dream Chronicles and a ton more. I could be adding entries to this list all day.
Now, to be honest, I don’t think I’m open to the idea that my memories would be wiped from my brain from one or more experiences. Quite simply because all of these experiences shaped me into the person and gamer that I’m today. On top of that, this would always change since the older I get, the more works could go on this list.
So, I’m sorry, I don’t think I have one answer for this. Maybe I should play these two Gameboy Color games that I haven’t played yet from the Zelda series. One is called Oracle of Seasons and the other one is called Oracle of Ages. Maybe that might be a great answer to this question…
And for those who totally missed the punchline in the paragraph above, the Oracle games in the Zelda series are the games that introduced me to adventures you can take with you where ever you go. They taught me so many things in life and they were one of the reasons why I wanted to become a game collector. Since I got Oracle of Ages from a garage sale and after I finished the game and so the “To be continued” screen… I wanted to see the story continue so bad. But at the time, the Gameboy Advance SP was released, so it got quite tricky to find Gameboy Color games in garage sales. After a long time (2 years) I found myself a copy of the game and I played completely through it. Since then, I got quite hooked at collecting games.
4) What’s the most annoying trend occurring in your favorite medium today?
I know for a fact that my answer to this question is going to have some people disagreeing with me but still, I find it very annoying. The decline of physical media is somewhat worrying to me. I talked about this before multiple times on my blog but the reasons I find it annoying are multiple.
First of all, as a game collector, I love having a physical copy on my shelf to look at and have nostalgic memories flood back. I don’t have that with digital releases too easily. Now, let me be clear, I’m not against digital releases but I find it worrying that even big titles don’t get a physical release. Take Shadow of the Tomb Raider for example. That game didn’t get a physical release on PC but it did get one on consoles.
The second reason I’m not that fond of going fully digital is the possibility of digital shops getting deleted or shut down. For example, the Wii Shop channel. There is no legal way anymore to buy WiiWare in 2019, which is disappointing. So, if you were saving up as a retro game collector to buy some Virtual Console games on your Wii, cross your fingers it’s on the Wii U. I watched a YouTube series by Scott the Woz that talks about my feelings quite well.
And a 3rd reason is game shops. I find it mind-boggling that the biggest entertainment industry is reduced to a few shelves in retail stores. In one of my local tech and multimedia shops, I see the amount of shelf space that is reserved for gaming and gaming merch decreasing by the year. Now, there are a lot of online stores but I feel that it’s less and less present in our day to day lives. I also love to go to game stores and chat with the people about games, tech and various other things. Of course, you can do that on the internet, sure. But, I enjoyed the non-virtual contact more.
A 4th reason is that it’s a nightmare for game collectors. Apart from having nothing physical for our gaming shelves, the whole move to the digital market space is killing the second-hand market. I need to keep a careful eye on the packaging when buying a game on garage sales or during flea markets. Some game cases come with a game code you can only activate once. Even when it has a disc inside, the game can’t be installed without the code.
There are a few other reasons, but I won’t get into those in this article. I’ll leave those for when I talk more in-depth on this topic.
5) What’s the most promising trend occurring in your favorite medium today?
The acceptance of the gaming hobby by today’s community. When I was a teenager walking around with my Nintendo DS, I get strange looks by adults. “Aren’t you too old to still be playing video games?” is a question I got asked.
But, nowadays, when I talk to people and say that one of my favorite hobbies is playing video games, I usually get one of these answers:
“Oh cool, it doesn’t interest me, to be honest, but my [child, family member, friend, coworker…] also plays games.”
OR
“On which platform do you play?”
I’m also under the impression that there is a growing part of non-gamers who understand why gaming is so appealing and that a lot of cliché things like: “violent video games make youngster violent.” is less easily believed.
The gaming community is also growing each and every day. Which I find amazing. But, like my answer to the previous question, I think I’ll go more in-depth on this topic in a later article.
6) How much or how little romance do you like in your games/films/novels/etc.?
It’s quite tricky to give this a proper answer. On one hand, it depends on the story and such. It also depends on what you understand under romance.
But what I find very important is consistency and proper use. What I mean by proper use is that romance isn’t used just because “all other games in the genre do that.”. If romance fits in the story, then I don’t mind. If I’m still making sense.
7) If you had to be the ruler of one country in any work of fiction, which one would you pick?
I have rewritten my answer to this question several times simply because I always wanted to choose one of the stories I wrote myself as a kid. But that wouldn’t be too much fun since I have full control over that world.
For the sake of this article, I think it’s more fun if I choose a world that already exists and people know the rules of. So, after a lot of thinking.. and trying to avoid me getting distracted by the stories I wrote in the past, I decided to choose the Hoenn region from Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald. Just because those games are my favorite Pokémon games and the nostalgic memories with those games are so big.
Also, who wouldn’t want to live in a real Pokémon world? There are so many possibilities in those worlds, it would be amazing.
8) Do you think virtual reality will improve anytime in the near future to the extent that it’s actually worth using? Or are we already at that point?
One of the biggest problems with virtual reality is the price. I know that there are a lot of cheap VR possibilities with smartphones. But for that, you need a pretty powerful phone and that doesn’t come cheap either. Also, the more popular VR-glasses like the Rift and the HTC Vive just got three years old.
While there are a lot of practical uses for VR, I’m not interested enough to invest in the technology yet. To be honest, I haven’t tried VR for myself for several reasons. From not having the equipment and budget and just because there isn’t a game out yet that I would love to play that’s exclusive to VR.
Personally, I think that VR will be one of the possible platforms we will be able to play games in the future. In the future, we will have consoles, handhelds, PC and VR. I don’t think that will go away.
To call VR a gimmick or a fad like the Wii would be wrong in my opinion. There are many practical applications for VR. I think it just needs to grow and evolve. At the moment, you need to be quite tech-savvy to set it up, just take a look at the sensors and the specs you need to run VR at a decent frame rate.
Actually, answering this question gave me an idea for a future article. So, I’ll go more in-depth about my opinions and thoughts on VR in the future.
9) I’ve heard people say that a novel is a dying form of art and that changes in attention span length and the constant multitasking our generation is involved in will make them obsolete. If you have an opinion on that matter, do you agree or disagree?
If the novel would be dying, please explain to me why companies like Audible and Scribd are so popular? Besides that, if novels would be a dying art form, why do people still write and read blogs? Now, this discussion is so popular that it has it’s own Wikipedia page about it.
As a kid, I read a lot of books. I enjoyed reading quite a lot. Nowadays, I barely read one book in a year. I don’t feel the need to actually read books. But, I still read blogs and my favorite gaming genre is visual novels like Death Mark or Trace Memory. I still “read” novels but in a totally different experience. Besides that, my sister enjoys reading books quite a lot. Granted, she has to read a lot of novels and books for her studies.
My two cents on the subject go as follows. I honestly think that the novels just lost some popularity. Because other hobbies like video gaming and watching content online grew, other art forms are losing terrain.
Yet, I still see a lot of people of all ages during my commute to and from work who are reading books. There is still a market for novels. Otherwise, products like the Amazon Kindle wouldn’t be created. Also, if big companies like Google still provide a service to read books like Google Play Books, I honestly think that novels aren’t dying, they are evolving with time.
10) Are you optimistic about the future of the human race?
My answer to this question depends on the mood you catch me in. There are things I’m quite optimistic about like the improved awareness about climate change and the willingness to do something about it but there are things that worry me quite a lot. Something like article 13 that might ruin the internet as we know it.
I think it’s something where we just have to wait and see. There is always going to be something that makes me optimistic and something that worries me. As long as we don’t plunge the world into chaos, I think we will be just fine.
11) Cake or pie? (There’s only one right answer.)
The fact I had to look up the difference between cake and pie explains quite a lot. Now, did you know that in my native language we have one word for cake and pie? In Dutch we use “taart” for both words.
To be honest, I like both. So, I don’t discriminate. 🙂 And if you want it, the pie cake is a lie, thanks Glad0s.
My questions and nominations
Now, for my eleven questions. Let’s go.
- Do you think that nowadays there are too many reboots and sequels to old games instead of new IPs?
- Can the big studio’s like Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft… make indie games?
- If one of the games you played in the past gets an HD remake, do you get excited? Would you play the remake?
- What do you do during a grinding session? Do you do something else while grinding for resources or characters or do you focus on the game?
- How do you take notes for your articles? Do you write them down on a piece of paper while playing the game? Do you record your gameplay and write down timestamps?
- What are your least favorite sections in gaming?
- What is something unique/fun/interesting about your hometown and/or community?
- What’s your advice to new bloggers or even, experienced bloggers looking for advice?
- Can you answer this question with the wrong answer?
- Do you sometimes look back at your old(er) articles and think, if I write another article about that today, it would be totally different?
So, here are the people I tag. And yes, these are all worth your time and you should seriously take a visit to their blog. For your convenience, I have linked to their latest article. I invite all these people to answer one or all the questions and share the love with the community.
And that will do it. While there are a ton of other bloggers around, I don’t want the end of this article to end up as a long extensive list of amazing people. Now, I think I’ll end off this article here. Thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I’m looking forward to the possible replies to this post. I also hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!
NekoJonez's Gaming Blog 
Indiana Jones is near the top for that “which character would you be” question. I think I’d go for a different Harrison Ford character: Han Solo. Even though I grew up during a relatively dry period for Star Wars (before the prequels came along) the original movies are a big part of my childhood, and Harrison Ford is always cool no matter what role he’s playing.
I’m totally with you on the decline of physical media in gaming. I also have a library of books and CD, and I’d own more anime/game artbooks if those imports from Japan weren’t so expensive.
The increased awareness of gaming in mainstream culture is interesting. I still remember the Columbine shooting and the role Doom played in the media take on the whole disaster. Instead of addressing mental health or gun control concerns, it was all about kids playing Doom, listening to Marilyn Manson and wearing trench coats. Things are thankfully a bit different now. I am a bit afraid that the intrusion of the mainstream into gaming might be driving some of the censorship we’re seeing now from Sony and other companies, but the series I’m most into are weird and niche enough that they hopefully will not be affected.
The whole novel issue is a bit weird. I think podcasts are taking some ground away from novels just because people are multitasking so much now and want free entertainment when they’re stuck in traffic, but audiobooks are also a booming business. I don’t think long-form fiction will ever die out, though as you say, it will probably adapt to modern times and change somewhat.
I’d like to be more optimistic about the future. Climate change is a big issue for me. I get the impression that people in Belgium and Europe in general have a more urgent attitude about it than we Americans do, but climate change is becoming a critical political issue here in the US as well. I think we’re too short-sighted and self-interested not to destroy ourselves through the misuse of technology, but we’ve come this far, at least.
And I didn’t know you had the same word for cake and pie. We have pastries we call “tarts” over here, maybe Dutch in origin, but our tarts are much more like pies than cakes. I’m a fan of cake, myself, but I’m trying to eat a bit healthier now.
These are interesting answers to my questions. Thanks for the kind words as well!
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Shame on me on replying so late here. Well, don’t shoot me (first) but I haven’t watched Star Wars… So, I dunno much about the Han Solo character.
And with the rest of your comment I can totally see where you are coming from. Thanks for your reply, it was great to read your views on things 🙂
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Thank you very much!
Indiana Jones though! So many bugs and spiders!
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Thank you for the reply mate. 🙂
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You are welcome mate.
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Thanks very much for the nomination, Jonez! There’ll be a response post coming for you in early April. 😀
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Can’t wait to see them.
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I loved the questions you both had and gave and your answers to the former. I love that gaming is becoming mainstream, and even if people don’t game, it’s not seen a frivolous. It’s similar to how comic books were seen. They used to be “kids stuff,” but with Marvel and DC making blockbuster movies, they’re now seen as acceptable. I have…feelings about that insofar as it takes something making money to be seen as valuable, but I’m still glad it is.
Novels dying out? LOL. No, the way we make and consume novels is changing, but there’s no way they’re dying out. They’re becoming easier to obtain and more accessible, which is fantastic. As a writer it gives me more options in publishing, even though I’d rather go the traditional route. I read quite a few indie authors. The internet gives you a much bigger platform (if you can get peoples’ attention).
Thank you so much for the nomination! I can’t wait to answer these questions 😀
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Thanks! I’m sorry I got back so late at you. And I agree, novels aren’t dying out at all. And you are welcome, I’m so looking forward to your replies.
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No worries! I check and answer my comments once a week so I didn’t even notice lol.
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Thank you for the nomination!
Had good fun reading this! Your answers are so thorough.
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Thanks! And you are more than welcome for the nomination.
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