Sharing games I've played on my blog

Over the past year I’ve started adding different ‘collections’ to my blog, so that I could share stuff in new ways.

I added short-form notes, in the form of Post-It notes. I added lists of things – like this list of books I want to get around to reading. I added photos, styled like classic Polaroids. Most recently I created a facsimile of the 6th generation iPod Nano to share music.

Now it’s time for a new collection: games.

Going retro

Continuing my theme of creating digital representations of physical stuff, I’ve been thinking about how to represent a game in object form.

The obvious choice would be to recreate the jewel cases that most games have come in since the advent of CDs and Blu-ray. But that felt a bit bland. Jewel cases are just rectangles.

So instead, I’ve gone retro. Back to the 1990s¹, in fact, to the original Dot-matrix Game Boy.

I’ve recreated a Game Boy Game Pak.

The Game Pak is redrawn in scalable vector graphics format².

My first attempt was to draw the classic, gray, plastic cartridge is drawn in a 2D top-down perspective.

This 2D Game Pak is drawn roughly to scale (with some minor tweaks to be visually pleasing to me!) and rendered as a background-image. For the box art, I applied the image-rendering: pixelated; and filter: contrast(150%); effects to a standard img element to create a deliberately lo-fi, crunchy effect. The image is then positioned on top of the background cartridge image, using CSS grid. On top of that a gradient is applied to a rounded rectangle in CSS to create a faux-holographic sticker effect.

This was fine, but I wanted something even better. So for a second version, I drew the Game Pak in isometric 3D perspective.

Instead of rendering this with a combination of SVG, CSS and HTML, this 3D Game Pak is entirely achieved through inline SVG code. The image is then dynamically generated for each page, with the correct box art and label text.

But these aren’t Game Boy games?!

Currently, this new collection showcases games I’ve played on PlayStation. Quite clearly none of those games were released on the Game Boy (although in the case of Elden Ring, someone has done a bang-up job of a demake).

Why Game Paks then? Because it’s fun!

Platinums. Platinums everywhere.

The only games in the collection today are ones that I’ve achieved a PlayStation Platinum trophy for too.

I’ll probably add others for different purposes in the future (I am fortunate enough to have more than one console, and not all of them have trophies!).

For now, take a look at the games I’ve enjoyed playing enough to sink many hours into and judge me.

View my games collection