Load Last Save's 2nd Anniversary

Old man gets older somehow

Year Two-ah!

It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve been at this thing for two whole years now. Today, I’ll look back on what I’ve done this year, and some thoughts on posting stuff online.

Sophomore Year

The year started off with the Street Fighter 6 series, where I discussed each character in the game’s base roster and my experience getting them to Diamond rank. It was a lot of fun to make, even if it took me a while to get all the characters ranked. I saw a clear improvement in my gameplay from the start, where it took me days to get to diamond, to the end of the challenge, where I could do it in a few hours. I got some feedback on those that there was a friend of a friend who really liked this series. I might do one for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, but don’t expect it anytime soon. I need to get the DLC characters done, too, but I’m not about to spend $90 on them. Same with Granblue. Expect an angry article on fighting game monetization at some point.

Oh come on, it’s only $60 for all the characters… on top of the $60 for the game.

The thing I liked the most out of the Street Fighter series were the character illustrations. I had a lot of fun making them, and I think they turned out great. Using the Blanka chan dolls for The Creature came from an inside joke with a friend. Loved drawing those dumb goobers. Also managed to convince another friend of mine to help with the banners, and he did the ones for Ryu and Guile. He also did the header image for the Top 100 Games of All Time post, which is why it looks good for once.

This is more cursed than the Pharaoh’s treasure.

There were some more reviews. Uppers was fun. Reviewing it was fun, not the actual game. A terrible brawler where you collect panties. At some point I did 5 of the raddest 90s mascots, and I said I’d do another part, and I haven’t. I still plan on doing it. Sunset Overdrive was one I had in mind for a long time. I think that game’s underrated. It got a bad rap thanks to its admittedly awful marketing, but it’s definitely worth a try.

I reviewed Bioshock, and I didn’t like it. I thought I’d get more pushback for that one. I wasn’t baiting or expecting a reaction; I genuinely don’t like the game. It’s been something that has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and the review was a good opportunity to play it one last time and decide if I really do hate it, and I did, and managed to get all my thoughts down in writing. I held off on posting it because I thought it would be received poorly, but it went over okay. Mostly because no one reads this stuff, and the rest probably determined I was too stupid to engage with. Then I reviewed Bioshock Infinite, and was even more disappointed.

Later on in the year I started the “My Favorite Game from Every Year I’ve Been Alive” series. It was originally supposed to be a quick and easy way for me to hop on a social media trend, but like all my other reviews, it quickly got bloated and ran away from me, turning into an epic 8 part series.

It was an eye-opening experience. I remembered a lot of inconsequential games I played as a kid, and saw how many all-time classics I missed. A concerning number of them, actually. Genuinely embarrassing. I’ll be using that massive list as reference for stuff to play in the future.

At the end of the year I did the 12 days of Christmas, around the theme of “I Want Shorter Games With Worse Graphics”. Twelve games, all picked because they’re short and low budget. It was supposed to be a quick series of short reviews to have something for people to read during Christmas while I did other things, but again, it got out of hand and I ended up writing twelve articles with their own little illustration. It was a lot of fun to do, at least. I really like the illustrations. The one for Kill the Crows is a personal favorite.

Yee-haw, cowpokes!

In January I wrote about Highguard, the next big thing. I played the game and gave it a fair shot, but it was offensively boring. I wrote the whole review in past-tense, as a joke on how I thought the game would be shut down in a few months. It didn’t last that long. It lasted longer than Concord, at least. I went in and added an extra section to the article after Highguard shut down, re-stating how much I didn’t like the game. I said all I wanted to say there, but again, I want to say how bad the game was. It’s been a long time since I played something so devoid of fun and entertainment. I didn’t want to explore any of its puddle-deep systems. I didn’t want to engage with any of its mismatched, copy-pasted mechanics. It’s the most boardroom game ever made.

The last big review I want to mention is Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk. It’s the biggest review I’ve ever made, clocking in at 14,700 words. A mammoth manifesto on a game no one cares about. It’s a huge, convoluted Dungeon RPG with dozens of systems and a whole lot of bullshit. I spent over 70 hours playing the game, and then several days writing the review, and my conclusion was: I don’t know if I like this game. I liked it enough to beat it, and had fun with it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone because it kinda stinks, but some would find it interesting, but it’s also ass. Which some people would like. My Dungeon Crawler bias was in full effect here.

That wraps up the notable reviews from last year. It was just one year, but some of these reviews seem like they were from a lifetime ago. Even the Bioshock ones, which were huge and time-consuming, I feel like I wrote those back in the first year, or even earlier. Which doesn’t make sense since this blog isn’t that old, but that’s how time works. It simultaneously flies by and when you think about what you did, stuff from a few months ago seems like it’s in the distant past.

I thought about going back and reading through the year’s reviews, to see if I changed my mind on some things, but that didn’t work. For one, I’m stubborn and don’t change my mind easily, and two, I write my reviews when I’m at least 99.9% sure that’s how I feel about the game, and double-check while I’m writing, so I don’t change my opinion on a game much after I review it. Maybe I will in five or six years, but not right now.

I thought I could expand on some reviews, but I mentioned everything I wanted to mention. I would go back and think “maybe I didn’t talk about this part of the game”, but I did, and even the jokes I was planning to make were already in the review. So all I got from my revisits was that I agree with myself. Narcissistic, I know, but that’s what this once a year navel-gazing session is for.

Those were the most notable reviews... that I posted on Load Last Save, at least. The biggest ones were just at the end of year two.

Clash of Clowns

I collaborated with fellow videogame funny man Big Picture Mode++ on The Clash of Clowns, the biggest collaboration on gaming Substack. Three weeks, six terrible games from the seventh generation going head-to-head. It had jokes, audience participation and too many chest-high walls to count.

It was the most fun I had writing all year. I got to work with Big Picture Mode, a fantastic writer, and we spent time remembering games that were probably best left forgotten. I had to really lock in to make sure I put out something good, and not disappoint BPM’s readers.

Go read the whole thing here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I got the privilege to play classics such as Kane & Lynch and Quantum Theory. You see, this is why I haven’t played a lot of classic games. I could be playing Shadow of the Colossus, or Persona, but instead I’m over here playing Red Faction: Armageddon… for the second time.

It was well worth it. The way I see it, I had to suffer through three crappy games, but the end reward was three new BPM++ articles. If that’s what it takes, I’ll gladly play through some slop.

It goes without saying, you should also subscribe to Big Picture Mode++.

Go read the collaboration. We got Quantum Theory in there.

Thoughts on writing and blog stuff

This year was good in terms of growth. Got a lot more subscribers than last year, articles got four views instead of zero, got a few more comments. Lines went up, and that gives me dopamine.

I think I could get more readers if I could advertise somehow, but like I said in last year’s roundup, I don’t know of any way to do that. Reddit is full of ads, but if only for the corporate overlords. If you try to advertise your tiny, hand-crafted works, you’ll get shot. I hate Reddit with a burning passion, but that’s a topic for another time. Twitter isn’t any better. It’s full of bots and people who might as well be bots. You can’t get any reach there. You can’t advertise on the Internet unless you’re some multinational conglomerate. Then you can shove your stinking ads in every visible corner of a user’s screen.

What are my options? Hope the Substack algorithm picks me up, but that ain’t happening. Alex Stasenko has been asking Substack to make a gaming section for ages now, and they haven’t listened. If they’re ignoring gaming’s most persistent advocate, that means they won’t add a gaming section any time soon, so the gaming writers will have to awkwardly shuffle around in the technology section, overshadowed by the thousands of AI tech bro speculation blogs on here.

We don’t have a gaming section, but at least he got prediction market integration! Can I get a Hell yeah for that? No? Not even a pity cheer? Nah. This stinks.

What’s that? You want more prediction markets? Sure thing!

Even with all that lack of advertising, I still love writing. I like writing reviews on the games I play. It helps me think about them more critically, and get more enjoyment out of them. I like the process of writing, too. Getting my thoughts down in writing, arranging them so it makes sense to others, adding dumb jokes to keep it from being too dry. I also like re-reading them from time to time. It’s a hobby, which is why I’ll keep doing it despite clickthrough rates and other buzzwords. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to get more, though. Writing gives me dopamine, but when the line goes up it adds a little on top.

Shoutouts

In last year’s anniversary post, I spent a long time talking about my influences and other content creators I like. I’ll do a very quick summary of the ones you already know, and add some new ones.

• The Electric Underground: A great youtuber that talks about games, focusing on their gameplay and mechanics.

• Gaming Brit Show: Great in-depth reviews, similar to Electric Underground. Mechanics-first.

• Seer: Funny videogame man. I like his lightning fast delivery and dumb dick jokes.

Now for some gaming substacks you should read.

I already mentioned Big Picture Mode++, but I’ll repeat myself. Go read BPM++. The Homie Big Picture Mode has great articles, hilarious jokes, clever turns of phrase, all that good stuff. II found him through his article on how Skate is for posers. His post on why you shouldn’t talk about gaming when you visit your family during the holidays. That second one reads like something you’d find on Cracked.com back in the day, when it was still good.

You should also read Jim Mander blog I Play Games So You Don’t Have To. I first heard of it from his article on games he can’t get anyone else to play. He has a skill for finding the crustiest games, ones with less than 10 Steam reviews, and gets you interested in them. His Next Fest posts are great for finding these kinds of games. Every game gets a punchy, concise explanation that hooks you in with a few sentences, while still being detailed. If you think the games I review here, like Uppers or Labyrinth of Refrain, are too mainstream, go check him out.

This last one is both a recommendation and a missing person report: Pixel Fix. A videogame funny man with well-written articles that tell some interesting stories. Love their stuff, but they haven’t posted since August of 2025. RIP.

I talked about Learn to Counter in my first anniversary, but the blog doesn’t exist anymore. It’s completely gone. Two RIPs in one article. Damn.

Conclusion

That was a quick overview of what I’ve written over the past year. Good times, fun stuff, even if substack’s algorithm doesn’t want to shove me in people’s faces. It doesn’t do a good job of showing me other writers, either, unless they’re celebrities. I don’t want to read their posts, substack. Stop recommending me Charlie XCX. I only know her as the annoying one from the song Fancy, and that had Iggy Azalea on it. I’m sure she has something to say, but I don’t want to read it. I’m here to read about videogames, hopefully with dick jokes.

I’m extremely grateful to all my readers. It brings me great joy to know there are people out there who like my ramblings. I try to make every article I post better than the last to keep giving you all a great reading experience. Thanks for sticking with me, and here’s to more terrible gaming takes, and unfunny jokes.

Also that Tencent merger didn’t pan-out. I got fired, and I’m back as an independent (AKA: Broke).