Editorial: December 2018

Holidays are coming, holidays are coming

Welcome to December’s editorial, where we’re gearing up for Christmas – and I’m starting to panic slightly as I haven’t yet bought a single present. Let’s take a look back at what happened last month as well as find out what’s coming up over the next few weeks.

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Digital life lessons
Office politics: a follow-up
Video game series: NOT dealing with the Fallout

Personal backstory

As mentioned above, I haven’t yet done any Christmas shopping and the day is now less than four weeks away. I realise how ill-prepared that sounds, but life has been kind of crazy over the past month so I haven’t had much opportunity to think about it. There are a few big things coming up in December and January – more news about those very soon – so most of my spare time has been taken up with planning and making arrangements. The rest of the day will have to be spent on Amazon once I’m done with this post!

Although life has been busy, I’ve still managed to fit in a few video games. My other-half and I are finally done with the Myst series – well, I say ‘done’ but we didn’t actually finish the final instalment thanks to a rogue Bahro. After he caused our game to crash halfway through and reloading from the last save would have meant repeating the entire Age, we gave up and watched the rest on YouTube. On a more positive note, I finally got to start Night in the Woods and have really been enjoying it so far.

The highlight of the month was volunteering for SpecialEffect at the Twitch LDN meetup, where I got to meet a whole bunch of lovely people who are doing their bit to support the charity. Many are going to be taking part in GameBlast19 in February and I’m pleased to announce that Later Levels has now officially registered for the event. If you have a spare five minutes, why not take a look at this poll and help us out by voting for the games you’d like to see us play during our 24-hour stream.

The grind

I really need to make up for the lack of games recently and devote more time to gaming in December. No purchases were made in the recent Steam sale but that’s probably for the best; it’ll give me a chance to work off part of my backlog rather than adding to it.

The community

I’d like give a shout-out to Matt from Normal Happenings and everyone else involved, for all the hard work that went into The Games That Define Us collaboration throughout November. You guys are simply awesome and it was an amazing project to be a part of! If you’re already worrying about what you’re now going to fill your time with, have no fear: the gorgeous Athena from AmbiGaming has something festive up the sleeve of her Christmas jumper and will be sharing more details soon.

I also want to shout-out to the anonymous person who very kindly nominated Later Levels for a UK Blog Award, and whoever it was who decided to put us through to the second stage recently with ten other sites in the ‘Gaming’ category. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want you to vote for my little place, but it doesn’t matter who you choose as long as you do vote. These awards are a celebration of blogging, the community that surrounds it and the whole lot of good we can do with the power of our words, and we can all take pride in that.

Critical hits

The following are some great articles I came across in November. That festive feeling is starting to come across is everybody’s posts and I’ve loved seeing how you’re all preparing for the holidays!

The next level