I'm Ruki, the content writer for Rukinations.

Rukinations is a sight where I post all my guides, resources, or major thoughts on topics that interest me, or my ruminations. I've spent a long time trying to figure out how to define this site under one niche, but that is honestly the best way to describe it: my ruminations. Humans are diverse and have a wide range of interests. My website here isn't to be a major news source or to track major Nintendo titles. Rukinations exists to be a place where I keep my thoughts and resources to share with the world. And to me, that's enough.

That's really it. I like finding information and sharing it with the world.

I guess if I had to pick a mission statement for this website, I would have to select three goals:

• Host and share information I find interesting.
• Host and share resources I have put together that others may find useful.
• Share my thoughts on a topic that I can send to people whenever they come up.

Who am I?

I'm Ruki. I like playing games. I like math. I like figuring out why things work the way they do, or how that impacts everything else.

I play a lot of RPGs, especially turn-based RPGs and tabletop RPGs. If you stick around longer than this index, I'm sure you'll hear plenty about both of those, and my thoughts on games in general.

My earliest game-related memory would be playing a copy of Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom for the PlayStation 2. I remember my siblings and I running into a side room to play "the new Spongebob game" while the adults in our family talked about more important topics in the world. Ironically I'm not sure I ever beat that game or I've touched it ever since. Oh, well. Not every memory needs deep lore and meaning lock behind them, after all. The sweetest memories are the ones where the only remnants years later are the positive vibes you feel from them, anyway.

I'm not particularly the type to pick favorites of things, a trait my family has loathed since I was young. I've found that plenty of things people "rank" tend to be different enough where, unless they are variants of each other, it's hard to properly compare them. How am I supposed to compare Tetris or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and pick one as my favorite video game? Those two games are DRASTICALLY differne in every way imaginable. I could not even ask "Which game do I like playing more?" because both serve different purposes: Tetris provides me with an opportunity to think on my feet in a real-time puzzle where I will not know if I made the right choice for a good twenty pieces, and Oblivion provides me with an opportunity to play pretend and trek across a nation willing to set aside their differences to save their world from armageddon. How can you feasibly compare those two in any meaningful way?

"But, Ruki, didn't you intentionally pick two very different games that don't even TRY to relate to each other?"

Then let's compare Pokémon titles. Any game that was remade anywhere from five years to a decade later is going to have a clear winner in terms of "which game was better designed" - and that's not even taking into account some generations of Pokémon games had soft remakes within two years. You could compare each generation on their own, but everyone's opinion is tinted by "Which game did I grow up playing" which tends to bias answers and lead to screaming matches instead of actual comparison. Even bigger, once you get to Generation VI's X and Y, every generation has a new gimmick made to explicitly make them stand out from the other games, to the point I would argue that they are not comparable anymore.

(I'm sure I'll dedicate a proper Rukination to this at some point...)

Back to the point.

I'm Ruki. I've been playing video games my entire life. My entire life, I have been looking into how games work and how to use them to their fullest. I've lived through how many years of gaming culture by this point and experienced how the medium has shifted throughout the years. I've written notes on a variety of gaming-related topics that I would love to share, both topics I am deeply invested in and topics that I hope to hlep others explore further.

If that sounds like something you're interested in, then welcome to Rukinations.