It’s February, which means it’s too late to wish you a Happy New Year, and also too late to make a comment about not knowing when it’s too late to wish someone a Happy New Year. So we’ll just call this a mid-Q1 check-in instead, shall we? [No, that sounds simply dreadful – a reader].

As you may have noticed, 2024 was the first year for quite some time in which we failed to hit our KPIs and SLAs, modest as they are. From my point of view, a steady trickle of content has somehow endured through numerous ups and downs over the years, including some fairly major life events, but in the second half of last year it almost dried up completely.

On the more self-inflicted end of the available excuses, I have to admit that my refusal to upgrade my old desktop PC crossed over from territory that could be described as cheerful eccentricity into an area clearly marked on the map as ‘full-on madness’.

As the amount of time between turning the machine on and actually being able to use it increased on a daily basis, I continued to use it to play through Dragon Age: Origins – a long process in itself, made longer by the extra hour or so required for an ancient HD to stop spinning before I dared to click on anything.

When I eventually replaced it, the new machine didn’t work at all and I had to send it back. Then, with replacement #2 in place, something Quite Bad happened in real life and I found myself abandoning all plans to do anything productive, electing to process events by purchasing and downloading a modern-ish tennis game, creating a female player with an approximation of my own name, and hammering through the early training modes and low-level tournaments with a vacant expression on my face.

As it turns out, guiding a female alter-ego through some clay court tournament in the arse-end of nowhere was just what I needed, but plans for #retro #content were kind of derailed slightly.

(I didn’t really make it far enough through the career grind to vouch for the qualities of Tennis World Tour: it had some fairly smelly reviews, and though I quite enjoyed the generic player and tournament names and mid-level production vibes of an earlier and more innocent age, on court the lower-tier AI opponents seemed rather prone to throwing matches away through an inexplicable number of unforced errors).

And so, with nothing in the pipeline for the end of the year and the usual dilemma about whether to accept our hosts’ latest pricing hike approaching, we took the decision to move and reserve our energies for getting the site back up and running again. Which it (hopefully) now is – thanks mainly, of course, to Stoo.

So, we go again for 2025, and hope for better. I just wanted to pop a note up to say hello, in case anyone thought that playing through Daikatana had sapped all my retro gaming enthusiasm and made me too depressed to continue.

Thanks, as always, for reading!