Banjo-Kazooie is one of those games I played as a kid but never owned. By the time the Nintendo 64 was released, more of my friends had started playing games, one in particular would turn into a rival of sorts. There was very little crossover in terms of the games we owned so we would often end up swapping games for a time. Banjo-Kazooie was one of those games and from the first time I played it I fell in love with the world it depicted.
The first game I ever played was Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Sega Master System II, which was also the first console I ever had. At the time I didn't know anyone else with a games console, I was born in 1988 and grew up in the 90s. The aftermath of the Video Game crash of the 1980s had left gaming the pursuit of a minority, partly due to the wider impact of the economic troubles of the 1980s that left a lot of people in the 90s broke to put it bluntly.
Throughout the month of April I will be publishing 30 posts as I complete the 30 Days of Gaming Challenge. The prompts I will be using are outlined below, at the end of the month I'll come back and edit this post to make each one a link, but for now if you want to play along these are the titles.
Years ago I wrote a blog post on the nature of names and how we like to think we are unique as people, but searching our name on Google or any other search engine reveals how many people out there have the same name as us; sometimes their lives often resemble our own, because people's lives in general aren't as unique as we like to think.
When I first started writing fiction I needed a name to publish it under, my actual legal name wasn't an option at the time for a number of reasons, mainly that the nature of the content I wanted to write about would have conflicted with my career at the time. The name I chose was S J Doran, short for Steven James Doran, the rationale being that Steven was the name my parents were going to call me before I was born, which they eventually decided against, whilst James Doran was the name of my grandfather, whose side of the family I believe is where most of my creativity stems from. The diplomacy and sometimes a tendency to engage in confrontation stems from the other side of the family.
Alan Turing was a trailblazer in many regards, there are a few technology related terms that he lends his name to, the most pertinent of our time is the Turing Test - specifically the Imitation Game whereby a human uses a computer to engage with two entities at once, one being an actual human and the other being a machine, with no indication which is which. The machine is said to pass the test if you as a human can't tell which is the human and which is the machine.
This is perhaps the most pertinent of our time because of the rise of AI, or to be more precise, the rise of the Large Language Model [LLM] which is a complex algorithm that uses machine learning to process a large dataset consisting of natural language and then mimic that language. The reason this is distinct from AI is because of the lack of reasoning, something which the newer variants of most of these models are now incorporating and developing at pace. The term "AI" in its purest definition has mostly been abandoned, held onto by Computer Scientists with the same pedantry as the distinction between "The Internet" and "The World Wide Web" which are not the same thing but for all intents and purposes now most people use the terms synonymously and any effort to hold onto that distinction seems pointless at this stage - AI has gone the same way, whether it is "technically" AI or not is now irrelevant.
As part of my 52 goals for 2025 one of the goals I set myself was to clear the backlog of games in my Steam account. There were 153 games unplayed at the start of the year and it now stands at 122 so 31 have been played in the last 8 days, some for a lot longer than others. I thought about writing reviews for each of the games but many of them are not remarkable, if I find anything of particular note I will make a post about them.
Ori And The Blind Forest is a game that I played many moons ago, where exactly I can't recall because according to Steam it was unplayed in my library - some posts on Reddit mentioned that it was available on the Epic Games Store but was removed so that's probably where I first played it. Regardless, for the sake of certainty I decided to play again from scratch and I was disappointed.
I've decided for 2025 to do a different take on New Year's Resolutions. In years gone by I used to make a few realistic goals for myself, things which I thought I could actually achieve in a year, and inevitably I failed to achieve those resolutions - I'm not even sure how many I have kept over the years. Then for a while I became vehemently opposed to the entire concept deciding that it was a tradition that set people up for failure, and only amplified misery and feelings of worthlessness.
