Sadly, due to a combination of being home + visiting people + messing up the wordpress publishing thing, I missed a few of my year-end recap posts. I will post them over the course of today and catch up, however.

2008 was full of awesome things, videogame-related and non-videogame-related. I’ve attempted to put together five memories of the past year that’ve had some significance for me that fit into the former category, at least, a bit; while not all of these things are strictly related to video games (or, in one case, strictly related to me), I hope they’ll all fit the mold enough.

5. Starting this blog

It took me ages. Since I started writing a Livejournal 7 years ago, I’ve gone through probably a dozen different services, looking for the right one for me. What I realized, at some point, was that I wanted to have a webspace that’s all mine. Finally, when we were founding Cikro, I decided to buy my own domain, and the rest is… err… history? I bought an (admittedly expensive) .am domain, stuck a WordPress on it, and started writing. And a few people even started reading it. Then Gamesetwatch linked me and I got really confused (but flattered) and lots of people I respect started reading and linking and commenting. It’s been awesome so far!

4. Getting a PSP

I borrowed my brother’s PSP for a little while, and it was enough to get me to get one. While it’s not the most impressive console I’ve ever owned, setting it up for homebrew allowed me to start emulating old games. This has been really great, as I don’t think I’ve ever had a competent way to play SNES games portably; this has opened up the possibility for me to play a bunch of classics that I missed the first time around (like Earthbound). Plus, one of my top games of the year is on the PSP, so getting a chance to play that was awesome.

3. GTA IV Midnight Launch

This is the only time I’ve gone to a midnight launch, and it will probably be the last, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Well, maybe not “fun,” necessarily, but… interesting. It made me realize a lot about gamers that hadn’t really set in yet; gone are the bespectacled geeks of yesteryear, replaced by a new species of weed-smoking, cussing, novelty-shirt-donning jesters. Since I preordered, I got to skip the line, too, which was nice. That’s about it, I suppose.

2. Blipfest and NYC

Only second because the first is so unbeatable, my NYC trip was amazing. My friend Kelvin and I took an epic ten-hour bus down to that stupidly tall metropolis and met up with a bunch of the Destructoid community and saw a bunch of amazing music. I won’t talk too much about it, as I already talked about it at GREAT length, but getting to meet close internet friends like Tiff, Samit, and Zen Albatross, as well as some who I hadn’t had a chance to speak to much online like AnonymousNoob and Cataract, was an unforgettable experience that I’m insanely grateful for. I can’t wait until the next time I get to hang out with all of these kids because even though we were together for a weekend, we felt like old friends.

1. The Ottawa Exodus

This one is a bit roundabout, but hear me out. Two and a half years ago, I moved to Montreal. All of my friends were still in Ottawa. This meant that, while I was still close friends with many of these folks, I was also really isolated. This summer, however, two of my very closest friends also left Ottawa. About five of us always hung out and played games together, and now, I was in Montreal, Angus was in Fredricton, and Andy was in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Despite everyone’s moving away, this brought me closer to my friends, because it meant they could only play games with friends online now. Games like Left 4 Dead allowed me to feel a lot closer to some of my best friends than I had for the two years before.