The Ambivalist: The Foreseeable Future

What's in store for the coming weeks on The Ambivalist? Have some ideas? Some recommendations? This is a great time to speak up.

By Tony Walter | Feb 20, 2013

As I said when I first started this thing, this is going to be an evolving process. Some ideas will die, some with thrive, and what this blog actually is will sort of happen naturally. Over the course of the first week I found The Ambivalist take a hard focus on indie games, while I do love the more intimate interactions with independent developers, it was never my intention to focus exclusively on that. I would like for The Ambivalist to become a place where I appreciate all games, from the massive releases to the independent ones. 

Having said that, I've come up with a few idea that I will be pursuing over the next few weeks, and I'd like to share them here. As always, I'm open for suggestions. If you think one of these ideas could be better, leave a comment and let me know. If you have an idea of your own that you would like me to try, leave a comment. I read all comments, and try to reply as much as I can.

Indie Cred

The first idea is one that you've already seen come into existence with my interview with Sparsevector. Indie Cred would be a feature where I would interview independent developers. Hopefully this would come after some amount of coverage of their game on The Ambivalist. Right now my means are limited, but eventually I would like to see this evolve into a small podcast of sorts. As The Ambivalist grows, and I'm able to invest more - both monetarily and with my time - features like this should become more well-produced than text logs of a conversation. 

Games 101

This might be my favorite idea so far. Despite having been playing games for roughly the entirety of the post-NES world, there are still a lot of important games that I have missed. What can I say? As a kid I didn't care what people said about games, I played whatever I wanted to. This usually would end up with me owning lots of really bad games, I also ended up with some pretty weird stuff nobody had heard of. The big problem though, is that I missed out on some of the classics. There is a long list of games that everybody has on their 'best games ever' lists that I have never played. This feature is me fixing that. The first game is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And, I have a few ideas for what games are next in this feature.

Gameographing

An idea I got from my friend and fellow blogger over at Cinema Beans, sort of. In this feature I will pick a developer, play every game they've released (at least what I can feasibly get my hands on), and write about the experience. Sure, my friend took a break from his version of the feature because it was eating up too much time that he needed for other features, and the prospect of trying to buy and play all of, say, PlatinumGames' releases, is more than a little intimidating. But, I'm going to try. We'll see.

Beyond these three features, which if all goes according to plan, will become regulars parts of The Ambivalist, I will be filling the space with regular impressions, editorials, and more retrospectives. I can't reiterate enough how open I am to suggestions here. Even if it is something as simple as a game you think I'd like, or just one you think I should play for some reason. Seriously, if you say "you should play _____" and put a game in that blank, I'll probably try to find and play it.

I also want to thank everybody for helping get me through the first week with my head attached. This goes to those that have read my pieces, as well as developers like Sparsevector and the Anodyne team, Sean and Jonathan. Without this help I'd be talking to myself right now.