1 Year Anniversary

It's been a year since my first post on here, so I thought I'd do a retrospective post.

So, compared with my original back-of-the-envelope estimate of progress, which was 1 a week, I'm behind. Rather than the 52 I should have done, I'm only at 34 (with Fire Emblem well underway). At this pace it will take me 7.5 years to complete the challenge. This is mainly due to getting stuck on a few long games for weeks or months at a time. Here's a nice graph that illustrates this:

Note the historical data for this is using the blog post times, which lags a bit behind reality. Now I've modified my randomiser script to record when I run it to pull the next game. This is usually right after I finish the last one.

The long pauses were me starting off a game, losing interest for a while, and then finally dragging myself back to playing. The total play time wasn't that long, but with a long hiatus in the middle. I've gotten better about this since Final Fantasy V, the low point/longest break (I did have the further excuse of starting a new job for that one).

Now to look at the critical ratings brackets. First a summary of games played in each category:

Bracket	Whole List	Played So far	Whole List(%)	Played So far(%)
90-100	14	3	5.5%	8.8%
80-89	75	8	29.4%	23.5%
70-79	166	23	65.1%	67.6%
Total	255	34

So we can see that the 80-89 bracket is a little underrepresented so far. We're fairly on target though. As for how my ratings compare with the critics, here's another graph:

This shows my ratings are weakly correlated with the critics ratings, but there are some outliers like Final Fantasy VI (very highly rated by critics, average from me). There's also my total ratings so far:

More or less on an expected bell curve shape, but it looks like I'm a bit hard on games in general.

Next, the rules. I've ended up giving up on games a little more than I originally planned, but I think the approach I've taken is best for my sanity. I've also used save states a fair bit to smooth out difficulty on games with annoying death systems. Other than that I've stuck to it pretty well. My randomiser script has evolved a bit and now captures data to help make analysis like this article happen.

So, in general I'm on track and have learned some lessons about going about the challenge. Fire Emblem should be done soon and I'll try and get through at least 52 games in the coming year.