Community Awards: The Real Neat Blog Award – December 2019

WordPress Community Awards are always amazing. It’s a great feeling to get various community awards since it feels like recognition of other bloggers for your work and it also allows you to create interesting articles. Today I have the pleasure to receive the Real Neat Blog award from Sanato1 over at his website. He writes amazing pieces on anime, music, games and many other things. Here is a fun fact, we both started blogging around the middle of 2013. Well, I was writing since 2010, but I only started to write in English a few months before he did. Something that’s quite cool is that he’s an attorney and writes about al those various subjects. It’s a really interesting read. Anyways, let’s get into the actual award and the Q&A that’s attached to it. 

The usual stuff

Here are the rules once again:

1. Display the logo
2. Thank the bloggers for the award.
3. Answer the questions from the one who nominated you.
4. Nominate 7 to 10 bloggers.
5. Ask them 7 questions.

The questions

1) Is there a game, book, or other work that you’d like to experience but that you can’t because it’s untranslated, not ported, or otherwise inaccessible?

That’s an interesting question. It would be extremely easy to look at various animes or games that didn’t get translated into English.

Of course, various works got subtitles but I’m too slow of a reader to follow subtitles and I honestly prefer works in a language I can understand since I feel that native jokes almost always get lost in translation. For example, if they use in a clever Japanese wordplay in an anime, they have to either translate it in the subtitles or let it slip by.

But, after some searching, I found something that you might not really suspect from me. There was this publisher in Belgium called Transposia. They used to localize games like Freddi Fish, Spyfox, Pyjama Sam, Putt-Putt amongst various other games to Belgium and the Netherlands. One of these series is Skipper & Skeeto which is originally called Magnus og Myggen in it’s native Danish language.

Sadly enough, Transposia wasn’t able to localize every game into Dutch. Various games only got realized in Danish.

Besides my native Flemish/Dutch language, I can speak French and English but I can’t speak Danish. While one of my blogging buddies is Danish, I think it would be a hassle to fully translate the whole game just to be able to play the game.

Surprisingly, some of these titles got translated into English, but those aren’t the adventure games. The translated titles are the edutainment games. But, they would be nice to add to my collection as well. But, that’s for when I have the budget to let them ship overseas from the UK.

2) What’s one work that really affected you or stuck with you in the last year, and why do you think it did?

If you mean 2018, well, to be honest… I have played so many amazing games, I can’t say one single game. Games like Death Mark or Shadow Of The Tomb Raider are two games that come to mind. Most games that stick with me have either an interesting story mechanic or have a really strong message.

Now, if you mean 2019, I honestly think you’ll have to wait until I reveal my top 10 games I played in 2019. But, if you have been reading my articles, I think I have given various hints about the games that are big contenders for the top spot.

If we are talking outside of games, that’s going to get tougher. Then I think I could say the Death Parade anime. Just the whole concept of the show is mindblowing and well written. The ending really touched my emotional strings. I also started watching it around the time that my pet cat Sparta passed away last year.

3) If you could revive one series of works that’s been abandoned or dropped by its creators for any reason, what series would it be and why?

That’s a tricky question and for several reasons. Sometimes it’s better left in the past to let the series or work end on a high note. Sometimes they ran out of ideas and it’s better to end it.

I could talk about animes like Log Horizon and No Game No Life. These animes have a lot of source material to create new season(s) but due to various reasons, haven’t gotten a new season. Now, I could also talk about my wishes for a new Indiana Jones game or a follow up to Time Hollow, Monster Tale, Stella Glow or Etrain Odyssey. But I’m not going to.

There are so many things that could be revived but they might never live up to expectations. I don’t want a sort of Duke Nukem Forever situation on my hands with the franchises I adore.

Besides, there are so many games, shows, music… out there, it’s getting insane. So, I’m the sort of guy the tries to experience as much as I can instead of trying to revive or keep a show alive. Yes, I vote with my wallet on what I want to see.

4) When it comes to music, do you prefer songs with vocals and lyrics or instrumental pieces, or do you have a preference at all?  If you prefer one type over the other, why do you think that is?

I don’t have a preference. But, I do notice that a lot of my favorite pieces of music have vocals and lyrics. Yet, I also have a lot of instrumental tracks that I adore as well. In most cases, these are tracks from shows or games that are quite nostalgic for me.

But, I think I’m going to talk a bit more in-depth in a future music article on this subject.

5) When was the last time you bought a magazine, newspaper, or another form of print media?

Now, if we also include physical copies of games; then I have to say the day of writing this article. I ordered two retro games for quite cheap online. If we are talking about things print on paper, then I have to say; past summer. When I bought an art book of a Wii U game and a strategy guide on a garage sale.

I used to buy gaming magazines often but my budget doesn’t allow that lately. So, I decided to save some money by not buying them anymore. It’s a shame since now that they are dying out, I might not be helping the cause by not supporting them.

6) Is there a holiday you don’t get to celebrate/take off because of family or work reasons but that you wish you could?

Luckily, I don’t have that issue. Since I work in schools, most of the holidays fall either on weekends or during school holidays.

And my family is rather small so we are able to celebrate almost every holiday together. And since this year, I can celebrate Valentine’s Day due to my meeting my soulmate this year.

7) If you had to create a new holiday, when would it be and what would it involve?

I would have a holiday to celebrate godfathers/godmothers and their godchildren. As a godfather myself, I find it a shame that a holiday doesn’t exist for that. Since I find the tradition and relationship extremely beautiful. Because it’s a sort of 3rd parent to the child.

Now, what would it involve? Something similar to Mothers or Fathersday? Where godchildren could make a small present for their godparents? And that the godparents could create/buy a present for them?

I tag and ask:

Now, as the rules state. I have to tag 7 to 10 other bloggers.

So, here we go:

1. LaterLevels
2. TriformTrinity
3. Well-Red Mage
4. NormalHappenings
5. BearedGamer82
6. LividLighting aka Lighting Ellen
7. KillerRobotics
8. VideoGamesNebula

And the 7 questions I want to ask you:

1. Did your view or look at games change since you started writing a blog?
2. Is there something you miss in the current gaming industry?
3. What’s your favorite part about writing a blog?
4. What’s something you wish you owned?
5. What’s something unique about your hometown?
6. Do you think that these kinds of tag questions should be themed?
7. How much time do you put into your blog daily, weekly, monthly, yearly?

I’m also looking forward to the answers of the other bloggers! While I could nominate a ton more of them, I think I’m going to leave it at those eight. Each of these blogs is an amazing read and I highly recommend them!

So, thank you so much for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

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Creative Christmas #11 – I Promise That …

It’s the final day of the year. So, it’s time to make promises what we shall try to accomplish next year. If we do this collab with LaterLevels again next year, I might be able to come up with an overall theme, but for now, I’ll stick with the theme I have been using. A random introduction where I talked about not having a theme and getting distracted by the question asked. Oh, I shouldn’t have revealed this until the end of the series? So, tomorrow will be the final question in this collab? Oh. Well, let’s first answer today’s question.

Midnight rolls around and it’s time to pick a New Year gaming resolution to see you through the next 12 months. What’s your choice for 2018?

If I’m allowed to make promises with myself of what I want to accomplish in 2018 in terms of gaming, I think I’m going to repeat something I said in my “10 games I look forward to playing in 2018” list.

I want to play a lot of games in my backlog. I do have a long backlog of games that I still want to play and/or beat. Thankfully, a few of those games get a port or a remake of a system that I own, or about to own. If you want to know more about that, read my previous article.

Will this mean that I stop collecting for a year? Not at all! I’m actually going to try and find copies of games I’m missing in a series. For example, I recently bought Skipper And Skeeto 3, since I didn’t own that game yet.

If you don’t know Skipper & Skeeto, I wouldn’t blame you. Since it’s a Danish edutainment title made by Ivanoff. The Belgian company Transposia brought this series to Belgium and the Netherlands. I live in Belgium, by the way.

So, in 2018 I’m going to continue to try and complete my Transposia collection. I have around 36 games already, but that’s far from complete. Since they brought so many games here to Belgium and the Netherlands, I can’t count them all.

Besides that, I’m going to try and finish the index I was working on. The last index I made from my collection dates back to three years ago. And since then, my collection has grown quite a lot. Besides that, it’s just a simple word document listing all the titles I own. I want to create something bigger, a sort of Excel sheet I can use to quickly filter if I own the game already or not.

But, that’s a project for when I find the time for it. If I would finish that, it would take quite a long time to produce and develop. Since I want to be able to also draw numbers out of that file and that means I need to set it up quite well or otherwise it will have wrong numbers.

Besides that, I’m planning to buy a Nintendo Switch in March 2018. While I’m a huge Nintendo fan, I wanted to wait a year to buy the Nintendo Switch.

The reason for that is, I wanted to see the system first build up a library of games I’m interested in before I went out and bought the system.

Now, I have a lot of titles I’m looking forward to being playing DooM and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’m actually tempted by buying The Legend Of Zelda – Breath of the Wild again for the Switch, to be able to take the game with me. But, on the other hand, I think my money would be the best spent elsewhere since the library of games for the Switch is large and other games deserve my attention.

You know, this is the curse of being a game blogger and (retro) game collector. I keep finding new games to play and enjoy, and I rarely finish them. Including some developer requests, I keep enjoying myself with those games quite a lot, but I don’t finish the games.

In conclusion, I want to create a database/index of my collection that I’m happy with. I’m also planning to buy a Switch in March of next year. Besides that, I’m planning to try and finish a lot of the games on my backlog that I still want to play or beat games that I haven’t finished yet.

So, I’m quite curious if I’ll be able to do all these things in 2018. Since I’m quite a busy fellow and I don’t always have the time to finish every game I started. Maybe I should try and do something about me being so curious to buy new games.

In any case, you will be able to continue to read my adventures through the land of video games by simply reading my blog and/or my twitter feed. So, thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, take care and have a great rest of your day.

Gaming Nostalgia: Skipper and Skeeto 1 – Tales from Paradise Park

Wikipedia entry

As a kid, I played a lot of children’s and educative games. Well, not all the time of course, but I have a lot of fond memories of it. When I went to MiseryLC’s place the other day, he was actually so kind to lend me his copy of “Skipper en Skeeto 1 – Pretpark” which translates to “Skipper and Skeeto 1 – Funfair”. It’s a very nostalgic game for us both, and I decided to write an article about it. So yeah, here we go! And as usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the game and or the content of this article. 

Rare game

If you are from America and you haven’t heard from this game, I won’t blame you. The creator of this game is actually from Denmark. While there is an English version, I grew up with a version in my mother tongue. I actually only just found out what the name of the game is in English.

I have fond memories of actually acting out this game with my sister. We hid objects to solve puzzles around the house and we played out the story with our own characters and objects.

Sadly enough, my copy got lost one day and I forgot about the game. After a couple of years, I started to play another game from my childhood again: Freddy Fish. Then, I wanted to play this game again. So, I went on a search on the internet to find a copy of this game. Then I learned how much this game went under the radar. I found various versions of this game in the original language, but I wasn’t able to find it in a language I could understand.

New copy

It’s a shame to admit that I haven’t played my “new” copy yet. I really should do that and write a sort of (quick) review of this game.

While the boxed version is extremely hard to find, the more common version you would find in Belgium is actually a version that was given away for free with a Dutch magazine for females. It still exists to this day. It’s called Libelle, and it’s full of topics ladies would read from the age of 18 and up.

It came in a jewel case with a little booklet telling you about how to install and the warranty. The usual stuff. Thankfully, the magazine hasn’t placed their logo all over the jewel case or disc (or in-game even.) The logo of the magazine is just in the top left corner once, and that’s it. Nicely done.

There are 11 mini-games in this game. All these games are optional and you don’t need to play them. But all the games are educational, for example, if you would click on the globe that you see in the screenshot (in-game of course), you would play a geographical quiz where you needed to guess where certain countries are. I actually remember some of them vaguely while writing this article. This is quite mindblowing if you realize that you haven’t played this game around for over 15 years.

Wrapping up

While I have memories of the sequel of this game, I think I said most everything I wanted to talk about this game. It’s always difficult to write these articles since you want to write a quite in-depth look about a childhood game you remember, but there isn’t enough content for that.

While I could talk about the animation, voice-acting and other things, I think I will save that for the review I’m going to write when I have replayed this game.

 I wish I played more entries in the series or even bought more of them since they are now quite rare and unrated. They are quite well done in educational games. I even dare say that they rival the quality of Humongous Entertainment! So yeah. I hope you enjoyed reading this short article about Skipper and Skeeto. I also hope I can welcome you in another article on my blog, but until then game on and take care~