Secret Valentine: A Community Blogging Event!

On this, the most lovely of days, it is my pleasure to be participating in an innovative community event run by Ian from Adventure Rules, called Secret Valentine.

The premise is simple – all the bloggers who wanted to take part submitted their names to Ian and he randomly assigned each of us a Secret Valentine to write about and shower with praise. The blogging community is, as evidenced by the existence of events like this, a fantastic and supportive group, and this seems like an excellent way to give a bit of love back to the community by big-upping fellow bloggers.

So before the suspense kills us, I should introduce my Secret Valentine *drumroll please* – Ryan from Games With Coffee! I hope you have a lovely day, and that I can do your blog justice! Also, I apologise for all the link requests you’re going to get…

I’ve only very recently been introduced to Games with Coffee, but I was sold pretty much straight away. Why? The name! What could be better than having a cup of coffee and playing video games (apart from having several cups of coffee and playing video games)? Personally, doing this on a Sunday morning is one of my very favourite things in life, so a big thumbs up for that! Apart from the name, there is the tagline “A blog for the mature, distinguished gamer”. Yes! That says it all! It is for people like me! I am mature, distinguished and a gamer. Very distinguished. And refined. Oh yes. Erm…yeah. Anyway, I like that a lot, it made me giggle.

Getting on to the serious stuff though, there are a heap of great articles to discover in the Games with Coffee blog. Since I’ve only been a follower for a few weeks, I had a look back to see what kind of things Ryan has been writing about and what I’ll say first is that his blog is full of great content! Want to read about the games he’s been playing and reviewing? Check! Have a particular interest in game music instead? Yep, that’s got its own section. Fancy having a read of something a bit more ‘editorial’ in nature? That’s there too!

There’s a couple of articles that particularly caught my eye that you should really check out for yourself. Firstly, is his article from Dec 2017 – Final Fantasy VII: How the Game and its Protagonist Changed My Life Forever. The title really says it all, but this article contains not only the journey Ryan took with the game and how its protagonist effected him personally, but also a real insight back to the time in which it came out.

The second article I want to pick out is a different kind of thing: “The Quest”: Practicing Writing Through Fanfiction and Using NaNoWriMo as Motivation to Write”. Here he talks about the difficulty in finding motivation, not to just write stories, but to actually finish the stories you start. This is a point I find extremely relatable (*looks at tattered notebook full of half-finished Xenoblade fics*). Other than that though, you should check this out for the rather superbly researched and also very surprising comparisons he finds between Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy VII!

I’m sure I’ve got your attention by now, in fact hopefully you’ve skipped this last paragraph and have started reading through Games with Coffee’s articles instead, but if not, get your cafetière at the ready, maybe some kind of classy biscuit too, and sit down and enjoy some very fine blogging…and the world’s finest drink, of course!

Thanks for reading, and Happy Valentines to you all (whether you like it or not :-p)

Pix1001 ♥

Thanks to Internetmarketing-onlinetips for the banner image!