Gaming Goals 2025

New Year resolutions aside and all, I’ve always found it best to put things into writing when you want to accomplish specific things. It’s always given me credence in times to do things like this to motivate myself to achieve new and greater heights in certain areas of life.

So here are some Gaming Goals for 2025 and why I want to achieve them:

1. Roll credits on 25 NEW games. What will undoubtedly be my hardest goal. I struggle spending too much time in games I like or even doing a second playthrough while my backlog gathers new games. It’s important to play as many games possible to completion so when game awards come around I can give an educated opinion on such.

2. 100% 3 games that I then video essay. This is something I’ve always wanted to do in like a deep dive way. The problem is some games are hyper specific or have some tediously long achievements you have to get. That’s why I’m going to choose games I love or feel strongly about so that I don’t get frustrated. Some games I’ve considered for this have been; Cyberpunk 2077, Mass Effect 2, along with Final Fantasy VII Remake.

3. Have either a weekly roundup of news or have an article a week about gaming news as it breaks with my own thoughts. This one is for my more journalistic side, I need to be able to keep up with the gaming news cycle while also inserting any info I maybe able to cobble together from varying sources to better get back into the swing of the news reporting cycle.

4. Achieve Grandmaster in Marvel Rivals every season moving forward. Missing out on the first one hurt just cause I didn’t really catch the vibe early enough in comp to play with others and figure the game out better.

5. Continue to diversify my game tastes and thinking by having an opinion piece or video with or in collaboration with others. I think its always important to get someone else’s thoughts and experiences in video games because often times just like movies, tv show, books, or other forms of art, someone’s experience could be drastically different from my own. I also just love hearing what people with similar interest have to geek out about so hopefully there will be lots of these types of projects!

That’s all for now. I may update this article with progress or added goals at a later date!

Who is Justin as a Journalist?

When I had my first pieces of writing published in 2020, I did not expect to become addicted to the idea of writing more. Growing up I hated reading and writing classes, especially having summer readings with book reports due. That being said, writing has been an avenue for me to express a critical lens on some topics while also being able to enjoy the levity of things in pop culture, especially video games.

Attending The Ohio State University, I had the opportunity to publish pieces of writing for a couple of pop culture-related articles. Most specifically were my video game reviews however, that’s not what I started with. Video games in 2020 were just about to take off thanks to COVID-19. At the time though in January while we were still on Campus I petitioned my Editor to allow me to do video game reviews. He was skeptical and told me to do a write-up for one that was released semi-recently. That game happened to be Dragon Ball Z Kakarot. Let’s just say that never saw the light of day, but it did lead to me getting a go-ahead on writing something similar in the vein of pop culture, a movie review. The movie though was of my choosing and at the time there was no better choice than to write about the one and only blue-haired hedgehog making his live-action debut on the big screen.

Yup, my first ever published article was a movie review of Sonic the Hedgehog, tagline: Fast, Fun, and Simple. God those were stressful times. Yet I kept wanting to publish more. With the Sonic article being received well, I was allowed to move forward with video game reviews. This just confirmed my passion for video games with pieces on The Last Of Us Part 2, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon XD, and the one that really made me feel the most was of course my final article on Final Fantasy VII Remake.

That’s all to say those were some of my first, and last articles I ever published. I graduated in 2021 so its been about four years since I’ve written or published so 2025 might be a dust off the rust type year for me, but its also a big year in general so I have big expectations for myself and this site (lord knows I don’t know half what I’m doing on the website end of things) so there is that!

You made it this far? Thanks, I’m looking forward to engaging with those of you interested in what I have to cover!

Best,

Justin