As some of you may know, I’m a bit of a James Bond fan. I’ve been one ever since I was a little kid, giving a show and tell to the rest of my class on the names of all the villains and henchmen, movie titles and Bond girls. (The thought of a nine-year-old talking about Pussy Galore must have given my teacher a chuckle.)

Last November I stepped foot inside Disneyland Paris for the very first time and if I’m being completely honest, I’ve thought about that trip near enough daily ever since. It wasn’t a very long holiday, just three days spent racking up thousands of steps wandering around the most magical place on Earth™. But as corny as that sounds I really did have an incredible time in that bizarre little bubble of a world at Marne-la-Vallée, located just outside Paris.

Well would you look at that, it’s only gone and turned 2019!

With that being the case, I think it’s long overdue I revive this dusty ol’ blog and actually use it. As mentioned in my 8 Year Anniversary Special (yes, it’s really been that long), I dropped the ball so hard with my original plan to blog that said ball burrowed through the Earth’s layers and popped up somewhere in Australia instead.

So the plan to write blog posts semi-regularly fell through completely. Clearly I was just too happy with my previous Simpsons game essay to bother writing anymore. Sure, I was pleased with it and I hope some others enjoyed reading but…it’s hardly worth purchasing an entire WordPress site for, is it?

To kick things off I thought I’d write up a bit about my thought process when it came to the new look of the channel – the ‘rebrand’ so to speak. And with that comes a look back at my older designs too, and the realisation of just how horrible some of them were. But before all that, maybe it’s time I quickly addressed a question I get quite often…

Over its 28 year history, spanning 29 seasons and 600+ episodes, The Simpsons has racked up its fair share of video games. Not content with its breakout success on the Fox network, the show entered into the console world just 2 years after its debut with Bart vs. the Space Mutants in 1991. Business execs were keen to ride the wave of Bartmania sweeping across the nation and fans were equally as eager to play as the “underachiever and proud of it.” It’s no wonder then why 6 more Bart-centric games were released between 1991 and 1992 alone, all to varying degrees of success. Quantity over quality was the driving factor but as the decade progressed, the video games broadened away from Bart’s adventurous exploits and into new territory.