Today marks the three-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

In the last anniversary update I reflected on how it was a lean year for the blog and how I wanted to start making quicker progress. I’m proud to say that in the last twelve months I have made good on that promise. I’ll get into the details shortly, but this third year has been my most productive in terms of games completed. I could have pushed it even further if not for one trend and one decision I made. I’ve thought about this year as the year of the 9, meaning there were several 9/10 difficulty games that showed up. I didn’t anticipate them being clumped together like that, but that’s how it will go sometimes. Some of them were ones I’ve gotten to learn very well after struggling with them for years, while others were surprise titles that took some time to master. I even had another 10/10 game in Q*bert that I finished significantly faster than I estimated. The decision I made to start playing some of my deferred games also held me back somewhat. I knocked out about a dozen of these games this year and some of them took me longer than a week or two to complete. A week per game to me is an ideal pace that I’ll probably never be consistent enough to meet, but many of my deferred games are titles that I would expect to be on the upper end of the duration spectrum. With those extra challenges and my ever-wavering schedule, I am pleased with the pace of completions and I hope I can keep that going through Year 4 of the project.

So how productive have I been this past year? In the past twelve months I have completed 43 NES games. Over all three years I am now at 105 games completed with a nice 35 games/year average. My completion pace is now at 10.4 days per game completed, and the whole project is estimated to take 6,983 days to complete. The new end date estimate is January 5th, 2035, so I have a little more than 16 years to go on the project at my current pace. Maybe next year I’ll make a table of all this information from year to year. I feel better about the direction this is trending now versus what it was a year ago. I don’t see why I can’t beat the average over the next year and keep pushing this project ever closer to the finish line.

I also noticed I have gotten more verbose in my writing this year. I don’t have hard metrics on this on hand, but I know at one point I tended to write about 2000 words per post and I know I’m over that now most of the time. Posts are routinely in the vicinity of 2500-3000 words, with some getting closer to 4000 words. Maybe this has something to do with the complexity of games I played this year, especially the ones I had planned to save until the end. I think it also has to do with my post format. My writing is extremely formulaic, following the same template I set up for myself in the first few posts of the blog. I find it helps keep me on track and ensures I don’t miss anything. I really don’t like leaving details or observations out. I haven’t received any complaints about my structure or wordiness here, so I plan on doing more of what I do best.

I imagine if you are reading this post, you are one of my few dedicated readers that have either caught up or are catching up with the now hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written on NES games. Thank you. I’m excited to see what this next year will bring!