Welcome to my Nest, make yourself comfy

 Greetings everyone!

My name is Ishambard and welcome to my Nest!
Would you like a cup of tea and some cakes? I am sure I can rustle up something for you.

So, a little bit about me:

I'm a British Gamer, I have been playing video games as far back as I can remember, in fact some of my earliest memories were being sat in front of a Super Nintendo and playing Super Mario World. Besides Gaming I have a passion for anything that is vaguely creative, it's all good, creating things no matter what it is or what materials you use; paint, clay, fabric, wood, metal, code or words, it's all something you should be incredibly proud of.
For instance, my Wife has written a book and it has been published and being part of that, even if it was right at the end for the book launch, remains one of those moments I am super proud of, especially of her.

Other things about me, I studied Japanese language at University and have a... Grasp on it all still. Very rusty, but I know enough to convince the average person I know a lot. Japan as a whole is a weird thing for me, my Nan on my Mum's side was Japanese, she left the country after the 2nd World War, which must of been a challenging time to leave, let alone leaving it to marry a British Soldier. So besides my love for the media and culture of Japan, it all runs quite close to my heart. Though I have no idea what my Nan would have thought had I told her I was going to study Japanese at University!

So what is this blog all about?
Well that will probably evolve with time, but for the time being I want to use this as a platform to decompress my thoughts on games I have been playing, talking about things I liked and disliked, a commentary on it. It will be an extension of my posts on Mastodon, but a little more unfiltered and less condensed, which is somewhat of a concern as I am prone to the odd ramble. I wouldn't say it will be anything like a serious review, more of a reflection on the experience and a chance to showcase some of the things I have been playing.
A lot of what I have been playing have been Retro Games, games dating back to the NES era and up to Gamecube, basically anything that is supported by RetroAchievements.org as I will have to give them massive props for putting me on this journey.

I should clarify, what is RetroAchievements.org
It is a website where users can create achievements for Retro Games. These achievements can be obtained by creating an account and syncing said account with an Emulator that supports it. For myself, I use EmuDeck/RetroArch on my SteamDeck which has allowed me to start reliving these games with a twist. It has also giving me impetus to play some games from my Childhood I never finished, two examples of games I completed quite early on were Alien 3 for the SNES and the Sega Megadrive/Genesis version of RoboCop Vs Terminator. Since then it has been a bit of a ride of discovery and rediscovery and I wanted to share this with more people.

 My hope is that through this blog I can increase people's awareness to some games, whether they be Retro or Indie, as I have a tendency to play some of those too. In fact, I also record Let's Plays on my YouTube Channel where I just want to share in the gaming experience. Essentially what I want to do is share a passion with people, and you can feel free to disagree with my sentiments on things, as we are all entitled to our own opinion, my hope is that I might inspire people to either check out some of the games I have spoken about or even join me in dabbling RetroAchievements.org. It's a fun time, honest!

For anything that is an extension on the Mastodon toots, I will also drop relevant links to those as they do function quite well as a TL;DR on the games I have been playing.

Hope you enjoy your stay here!