A few weeks ago, Ian over at Adventure Rules has graced the blogging world with his next great event – Secret Valentine! The rules are not unlike that of Secret Santa, but each blogger who entered is paired with another fellow blogger at random, and to write an appreciation post about them, highlighting some of your favorite posts. I loved the idea, and so I quickly entered.

It’s hard for me to believe in this seemingly close-knit games-blogging community that there could be a blog with such great content that I hadn’t at least heard of, particularly one that’s networked with so many bloggers I follow, yet when Ian contacted me with my Secret Valentine person and I checked out their blog, I realized I had never read anything by them before! And more embarrassingly, they had been following me for months! A quick glance over some of the article titles and I realized I had been missing out, and hey, the positive side to this was that I now had a plethora of articles to read through.

Through doing this, I now consider myself lucky to have been accidentally introduced to a new blog! It’s also been a trip “rapid-fire” reading through months of awesome content to understand the character. It’s definitely been an interesting couple days. Come to think of it, I hope I didn’t spoil this whole thing by Liking and commenting on old posts out of nowhere.. ah crap. Well, anyway! Just forget you saw those notifications, Gaming Diaries!

The Gaming Diaries is a relatively new addition to the WordPress community, and as it started in August of 2017 around my crazy wedding time, it’s not particularly surprising that it evaded me all this time. However, I quickly realized that we have a lot in common.

The central theme of The Gaming Diaries is, as the name implies, writing about gaming experiences, but more specifically, being played through the busy reality of adult life. Hey, it’s something we all have to face at some point – when there’s more things to do, the time spent with games is rarer, yet in a way, it becomes more special and appreciated when consumed in that manner. The other problem with less time is that you inevitably build up a backlog, particularly when your partner also plays games and has a collection of their own. In fact, this year, we both had New Year’s Resolutions to take on a good chunk of our backlogs!

Speaking of backlogged games, The Gaming Diaries have written about the merits of physical and digital games. There definitely seems to be an appreciation in our age group (guesstimating on age here based on what I’ve read!) for physical games, as nostalgia is heavily tied to it, and the feeling of having a physical product to display can’t be matched with a digital copy. Of course, there’s no denying that it’s a very convenient medium and way to attain games, but at the end of the day, all that matters is that you still get enjoyment out of it.

In addition to writing thought pieces on games currently being played, The Gaming Diaries is also very keen on the Nintendo franchises, like myself. I played Pokemon Moon last year and loved it, and it also seems to be going over splendidly with TGD, additionally jumping into Ultra Sun following Sun. They’re also enjoying Super Mario Odyssey which I agree was a terrific game!

While reading through the months of posts from The Gaming Diary, one category stood out to me that I thought was terrific – Overheard in a Game Shop. In these posts (at this point, there are three), overheard conversations are recanted, and for some reason they just fascinate me. While I’m in a game store, I don’t normally talk a whole lot, and generally I keep to myself in stores and in life in general. But there have been times when I wanted to say something, or at least thought about it for a little while. I think these posts are fantastic because they are written in such a way that the story seems to have been written for the writer, from internal monologue, as opposed to a writer putting together an article for an audience.

Did you ever see the movie Howard Stern’s Private Parts? There’s a scene where Howard is asking his wife what her favorite skit was from his talk show earlier on in the day. Her answer, however, is when he was playing himself and not playing a character, reading an advertisement and ad-libbing the words because the second page of the script was missing.

There hasn’t been an OIAGS entry since last October, but I hope we get more soon. Get over to that game shop!

More recently, there have been great write-ups that hit close to home, not just for me but for a lot of bloggers out there who do this for fun. In particular, a topic that I feel extremely passionate about – gaming as a hobby. This caught my attention and was an immediate favorite of mine! At the end of the day, we all need something to relax with, and age is a downright silly indicator of when we should “give up” things we enjoy doing.

I urge you all to pay a visit and follow The Gaming Diaries as the content has become increasingly well-written since it’s inception, and there’s already a great backlog of stuff to read. I’ve had a great time catching up. It’s no wonder it recently received the Unique Blogger Award!

And finally, a big heartfelt Happy Valentine’s from all of us (so, me) at Nostalgia Trigger!