A New PEGBRJE: A Weekly Overview of the Bundle For Ukraine, or “WOBFU”

Time to start again.

Well, well, well, look who couldn’t stop writing about game bundles.

The past month has been strange, if I’m honest. The extra downtime that I haven’t had for two and a half years has made days feel weirdly empty, even though I knew I had to take a break. After some amount of time, it’s hard to get excited for new games when you’ve played a couple hundred similar titles the months before. Plus I got to go overseas for a week, so I can’t really complain.

Yet unfortunately, I cannot seem to shake the feeling that I need to write something, talk about something to the void that is the internet.

Enter the ‘Bundle For Ukraine’, created by Necrosoft Games due to the Russian ‘military exercise’ (read: invasion) last year. Collecting 34 pages and equally nearly 1000 entries, it raised over 6 million in its time frame for International Medical Corps and Voices of Children.

I can hear the many questions already, so let’s cover the obvious ones.

First things first; What’s up with the title of this blog? Simply put, I cannot do an explicit overview of every single game this time. Time just is not on my side, with another 34 pages easily setting me back another 1.5/2 years at my old pace, and slowing down could stretch this out to 3+ years which sounds depressing in scope. I’m not against the idea of explicitly playing every game in here, but I cannot pretend that I can always commit that level of time — the pandemic isn’t over, but life is moving on.

I also experienced some serious burnout by the end of the previous bundle, as indicative by my writing prose. I got much more efficient by the end, but that came at the cost of a lot of perceived emotional intrigue. I felt like I lost some of the magic of how I wrote early on in the bundle, even if it didn’t look like it.

To that end, I’ll be altering the style of how I write to be a bit more relaxed. Each week will contain an overview of an entire page, sorting out the games from the software as I’ve done before. Instead of diving deep in to each game, however, I’ll only be discussing the titles that left the largest impression on me, similarly to my ‘review of my overviews’ pages.

I’ll still be playing all of the games on each page to make sure I’m not missing any ‘hidden gems’ but I won’t be able to discuss them all at length without causing each page to balloon. This should allow me to still explore these games in fun and exciting ways, while not completely burning myself out or falling behind.

This format is going to take a bit of time to iron out — sorry in advance — but I think that with enough tweaking I can make it work quite well. Currently I’m viewing this like the retrospectives I did every 20 pages, with Games being discussed at the top and Software afterwards, but this will be altered as I go with feedback from The Ugly Monster and my peers.

I’ll also have an explicit timeframe to complete this since it is by page, meaning I’ll be done in 34 weeks. That’s much more manageable. I’ll still do an overview of the entire bundle at the end like I always do, so don’t worry about that one.

This leads cleanly into questions about the contents of the bundle, namely about ‘duplicate’ entries. As advertised, many of the items are already included in various other bundles (a relatively depressing factoid given the context of the bundles). Thanks to my database containing the first bundle to be created in this way, I can cross reference all of the previous entries that were seen in the largest bundle to date that itch.io has compiled.

This also means that some of the pages will feel much easier to compile since many of them have games I’ve already played, meaning that it isn’t always thirty entries that I’ll be looking at every week. These duplicates will be highlighted before diving into the games, with each game being linked to the blog I did on them before.

Do note that I don’t have every bundle, not even all the big ones that have appeared over the years, so I can’t cross reference them all. I’m slowly building databases of the other bundles that came out over the past few years, such as the Palestinian Aid bundle, but they are falling behind due to me not owning them (having to alter the code to utilize the front-facing version) or due to time.

Finally, I’ll be doing a similar database in Google Sheets just like last time. It will definitely have some tweaks to it to continue the streamlined process — there is no way I can confidently state or guess the length of a game in this format, so that will probably get axed. However I adored keeping a forward facing document, so I couldn’t abandoned that part of the project.

Hopefully after all that, there is only one question remaining: When does it start? If everything goes smoothly, we’ll be starting next Friday and will continue to update each Friday. The upload date can and will be subject to change, but I’ll make sure to update if that is the case.

I’m grateful for all who have read, and I’m excited to see how this new format will work. Hopefully it doesn’t explode in my face, but who knows? I don’t. That’s part of the fun.

So without further ado, I’ll see you on April 7th.