As far as my gaming and collecting goals go, I'm once again leaning way more into the gaming end of things this year. Still, I have some collecting goals in mind, although they are less of a priority for me. Speaking of priorities, the importance of the goals are listed in descending order, with #1 being the most important and #4 being the least important.
1. Complete the 52 Games Challenge again - I look forward to this every year. I'd even say I got a bit carried away with it this year (123 games beat at the time I'm writing this). For 2026 I have almost no doubt of reaching 52, and probably exceeding it by a decent amount. There are various things I semi-neglected in 2025 that I need to focus on a bit more next year, so this will eat up some of my gaming time, but I still wouldn't be surprised to see my final games beat tally end up around 80ish or so. I have doubts I'll reach triple digits again, but we'll see.
2. Continue to work on Game Preservation project - This is something I haven't really discussed on here before, but a couple years ago I decided that I pretty much wanted backup copies of every game I even have the tiniest amount of interest in going back to the NES and Master System and going all the way up to the 7th generation of consoles. The modern landscape of game preservation and support to play those games kinda scares me, and I want to ensure i always have a copy of every game I've ever wanted to play, even though I know I'll never even remotely come close to being able to play them all in my lifetime. I plan on building out a RAID array next year with several 16TB drives. I may go larger than this, but from my calculations, 16TB should do the trick. I just need to get the funds together to do this and also continue to track down all the games I want which is becoming harder and harder these days.
3. Add more Switch games to that collection - I've been really enjoying building my Switch collection as of late. Between the titles I know I want and the seemingly endless amount of games I never knew even existed on it until I find them in a store or stumble upon them online, there is so much I want to get on the console still. Let's say 20 new games on the Switch in 2026.
4. Buy my first Pinball machine (maybe) - Because of space, money, or it just not being a good time to do so, I've put off getting a pinball machine for a long time now. However, with me being on pace to pay off one of my cars in 2026, some funds will open up for me to finally get one. I really want to get a Stern Jurassic Park machine, but there are a few others on my short list as well. This goals is one I won't feel bad for not meeting, but it would still be amazing to finally get a pinball machine I can play whenever I want.
