While this is a great idea on paper, I had no idea how long and time consuming the process would be. Like I said, I started this in February of 2022. I thought I'd be done with this by the time my July birthday rolled around. Oh, you silly Dan, you. This projection would not even be close. Here we are in May of 2023 (MAY!) and I am finally just now wrapping this bad boy up. That's 15 months it took me to do this, if you are playing along at home.
Part of this is my own fault. I did stray from Mop Up Duty from time to time. You'll notice that I played through and reviewed games like Horizon Forbidden West, Resident Evil Village, Guardians of the Galaxy, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Quake Remastered, Alan Wake Remastered, Deep Fear, Live A Live, Landstalker, and many other games in conjunction with Mop Up Duty. If I had set those other games aside and solely focused on the task at hand, I could have likely finished Mop Up Duty a long time ago. But I didn't.
If you've been following along, you'll see that as Mop Up Duty progressed, I started reviewing fewer and fewer games each calendar year. For example, for 1982 I played and reviewed three different games. By the time the 2000s rolled around, I was down to one or two games per calendar year. 2004 was the last year I reviewed two games. Everything after that, from 2005 through 2022, I only reviewed one. The reasoning for this is simple: games were a lot quicker and shorter in the 80s and 90s. Games like Pitfall and Satan's Hollow - you play them for an hour or two and then you are done with them. Games like Far Cry 2 and The Evil Within took me weeks to complete. It made sense that I'd cut down on the amount of games I played per calendar year - if only to speed things up a bit.
Now that I'm done, I'd like to go back and post some highlights and lowlights from this little project of mine. I'll start by saying that I played through a whopping 78 games for Mop Up Duty. 78 games I had never played before, from all different years of my life. That is a significant number. Chances are, I still would not have played most of these games if I didn't use Mop Up Duty as motivation. In total in my life, I've played through 969 video games (yes, I am keeping track!). 78 games is exactly 8% of that total. 8% of all the games I've played in all the 40 years of my life, and this number came within the last year and a half. I really hope this motivates anyone reading to play through their backlogs!
The five best games I discovered are as follows:
The Evil Within 2
Half-Life
Metroid: Zero Mission
Jet Grind Radio
The Adventures of Batman and Robin (SNES)
I haven't gone back and looked at any of my grades for these games, but just scanning over my list - these are the games that jump out at me as games that I just can't believe I missed out on growing up, and have joined the ranks of games that I would consider classics.
Five honorable mentions are:
Half-Life 2
The Evil Within
Bionic Commando
Axiom Verge
Bonk's Revenge
I'm sure there are other great games I played too (like Revenge of Shinobi), but I can't just give everything I played a shout out, can I?
When it comes to the five worst games I played during Mop Up Duty, they have to be:
Kool-Aid Man
Dragon's Lair (sorry!)
Frogger II: Threedeep
Black Panther
Blaster Master Boy
I'm not going to do honorable mentions for worst games, but you get my basic drift. There were a lot of clunkers I played through, particularly in the earlier years of gaming.
That said, this was really an amazing journey, seeing games in their infantile stages back in the early 80s, and how they've progressed throughout the years. Personally, I was born in the perfect year to follow the progression of video games from little beeps and bloops on the screen to full fledged cinematic masterpieces (at least visually speaking) such as the Callisto Protocol. Mop Up Duty is a perfect encapsulation of that. If I'm alive in another 40 years, I'm going to do this again, and that is a promise. 1982 to 2062. Why not?
To be honest, though, I am a little glad Mop Up Duty is over. Sometimes I get the urge to play through a game (I'll use The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as an example) but the year won't align with where I am in Mop Up Duty - or it will be a game I've already played before. So even though I would really want to play the game, I'd pass on it to focus on Mop Up Duty. This could be a little restrictive at times, and I am glad this restriction can finally be lifted. Twilight Princess, here I come!
What's next for your favorite game reviewer named Dan? I do have something fun planned for when I reach 1000 total games played (as I said, I'm up to 969 now, so I am close). I am thinking as a love letter to gaming and my lifetime experience with video games, I will rank these 1000 games from least favorite to most favorite. It'll either be on this blog - or I am thinking of starting a podcast to do this. I guess we'll see. But I am really excited to reach that milestone in my life. It will be a huge project, but something I've been looking forward to for a long time.
In the meantime, I am going enjoy the bonds of Mop Up Duty being lifted from my shoulders, and I am going to play whatever the heck I want to play and review whatever the heck I want to review.
If you've been reading and following along with Mop Up Duty, I want to give you a thank you for giving me someone to share my gaming obsession with. If you're just hearing about Mop Up Duty now, I'm going to post links to each and every one of my Mop Up Duty reviews below. Check 'em out!
40th Birthday Mop Up Duty Celebration Tour:
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And for a complete index of all my past posts and game reviews, click
>HERE<
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