March 2022 Review – On the Up

So the February 2022 review wasn’t the best was it? It was a tad bit pessimistic but with some sprinkles of sarcasm in there to brighten it up. Luckily for all of us the March review is 100% going to be a better one and for one good reason:

I don’t have that damnable sales job in a Devil Corp anymore. For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I wrote this post at the start of this month about a job that had me in a pit of misery for the latter half of January and all of February; it was s kind of personal experience/expose article on these insidious companies that take advantage of people and have cult-like things about them. And I have to say I’m still riding the high, even now, from having left the place. I mean, I didn’t think I’d ever be happy to be without a job when I left, but there I was. Blimey. Short story: It’s safe to say I’m doing better.

Another good thing that happened this month is we finally finished the long-running Halloween review series! It’s about damn time because I genuinely was running out of patience. Okay, in truth I finished them in February but the final posts weren’t published until march for any of you readers, but whatever. It still didn’t feel like it was over to me until the final epilogue post was up. Rather fittingly, the Halloween Epilogue post was also my 100th post on this blog. So hurray for us hitting another milestone!

Keep your eyes peeled for more franchise reviews going forward, but it may not be for a while yet. There are some other films I’d like to review first – new and old – that simply didn’t fit into the schedule when I was reviewing Halloween.

One of those films is The Batman (2022). Obviously I don’t want to show my hand too early here, but suffice it to say that it’s an interesting film that I have a surprising amount to say about despite not being a huge Batman fan. As for what else I want to review, I’ll just give you a vague idea; there’s a trilogy or two of films I’d like to take a look at. I won’t be ranking them the same way as I do huge franchise films, but I’d like to do the complete trilogies because it just doesn’t feel right reviewing one film of what is meant to be a saga and then just leaving it.

You’ll also notice I wrote a smaller review of Spencer (2021) and Tremors (1990) this month prefaced “Cut Short”. These Cut Short reviews are a new thing I’m going to be doing for films I don’t have enough to say about to warrant a full-length review, but would still like to discuss. I watch more films than I review, can’t possibly fit them all into the schedule, and have a lot more to say about some than others. Cut Short, I hope, will be a way for me to talk about “the others”, while those I have more to say about will remain as my weekly Sunday reviews. Cut Short, however, will be immune to the Sunday at 6:00pm posts rule, which means I’ll probably just drop them whenever I feel the time is right.

Finally, I want to address the gaming side of the blog because it’s no secret it’s taken a backseat since the start of 2022. The reason for that is that over the past year I’ve been writing on this blog, I’ve mainly been writing about games I am deeply and intimately familiar with, with one or two exceptions. That meant it was much easier for me to write long game reviews without having to spend a lot of free time getting familiar with them again – of course, I did play them all for the reviews, but it required a lot less dedication because I already knew so much about them. Now that almost all the games I am most familiar with are used up, I’m moving on to games I am less familiar with. This means that I have to spend a lot more time playing them in order to give an accurate and honest review. Unfortunately I cannot spend every waking hour playing video games. I mean, I certainly would if it was a healthy and sustainable thing to do, but the truth is it isn’t and, like anyone else, I have other things that need doing too. This is why the gaming reviews have become less frequent. Well, that and the fact that 90% of the games I like are either 4X strategy games or RPG’s that require a lot of attention and time to learn.

Long story short, I’m going to try and keep the games to 1 review a month minimum, and fill in the blank areas with a double-dose of film reviews, or the occasional TV show review. Depending on how the schedule pans out there might be odd areas where we get the average 2 game reviews a month. We’ll see.

So that’s that for this month. I hope you have all had a decent March and have a decent April too. Finally, I’d like you all to take a shot for every time I said review in this post.