2023 May
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Intro Back in around 1990-1991, I had just moved to a new school and apparently I was talking about NES/Famicom games all the time because one of my new classmates asked me how many actual NES/famicom games I had finished. So I sat down and made a list in one of my notebooks and I got a list of NES/Famicom games that I had finished at that time. That notebook is no longer around, but I found out that I merged into a later list of "List of Completed Console Games" that I had on my old website. So here
2023 April
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This game wasn't on my radar at all and I only found it while browsing through the PC Game Pass listings. It was surprisingly good. It's a nice little Zelda-like where you play a crow whose job is to reap the souls of the dead. The graphics style isn't too complicated but it works and there are some beautiful details in there. There is a decent amount of humor despite the grim storyline. The exploration gameplay is great; lots of places to explore and secrets to fight and items to find and areas unlocked by acquiring new tools. This sort -
I have some history with the Monkey Island franchise. I played through and loved the first two Monkey Island games back during the ancient days and even purchased them on the iTunes App Store (but never got around to really replaying them). I know I played the 3rd game, The Curse of Monkey Island back in the late 90s, but I don't think I ever finished it. I have no memory of ever playing the 4th and 5th games (Escape from Monkey Island and Tales of Monkey Island). When I found out creator Ron Gilbert was returning to the franchise
2023 March
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🔗 BASES LOADED by kindanice via web
This is the sort of small yet innovative and easy-to-implement game I wish I had the creativity to think of when doing game jams
2023 February
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Quick review: This was a great Metroidvania, I think practically all aspects have been improved over the original, the exploration is fun, the boss fights are pretty good, and the visuals are very pretty. I always tell people that while Hollow Knight has better combat, Ori has better platforming, and this game has excellent platforming. Ori controls really well, especially in midair and all the new moves mean you can do a lot of cool sequences without ever touching the ground. Also, for some reason I got waaaay less deaths in this game compared to the original (111 vs 900+
2023 January
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This is like GeoGuessr, except across time and not space. I am very bad at it.
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🔗 Cine2Nerdle via web
Haven't played any daily puzzle games in a while, but I enjoyed this one. Went through all the archives already. Try it if you're a movie buff!
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Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-focused RPG set in a distant cyberpunk future, set around the themes of poverty and evil corporations and such. Here's me playing through the first part of the game: Gameplay consists primarily of rolling dice at the start of each day, and using those dice to perform actions. It's primarily a menu-based narrative game more than anything else. It's kind of like one of those old choose-your-old-aventure-style books that also made you track stats and roll dice. Your cybernetic body is constantly decaying, and as it decays you have access to less and less dice. Obviously -
Vampire Survivors isn't the kind of game I usually play, but it got some buzz a while back and it was available on PC Game Pass, so I thought I'd try it out right after Christmas: If you're not familiar with Vampire Survivors, it's a pixel-art action roguelike where you walk around a stage and your weapons automatically fire and you are swarmed by enemies and you have to try to survive. Killing enemies drops gems which you pickup to gain experience, which lets you get new weapons, passives, or upgrades. Each run starts off a bit slow but towards
2022 December
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A game I picked up late in 2022 is Marvel Snap, because of course I need yet another card game that I'll be playing daily! It helped that I'm a big Marvel fan, of course. Marvel Snap isn't like the other card games I usually play though. Instead of trying to kill the other player, you're vying for control of three lanes, each of which has a location card with a special ability. Each turn you get an increasing amount of energy (like Hearthstone!) to play your cards into whichever lanes you like, and after a set number of turns -
This is only the second game I'm playing in the main Shin Megami Tensei series (the first one being SMT IV on the 3DS). If you're not familiar with the series, it's basically Pokemon except instead of adorable little monsters that magically fit in a small ball, you carry around a party of demons that fit in your... soul I guess? They aren't "demonic" demons, at least not all of them. They are mostly figures from various legends and mythologies; you got your Zeus and your Thor and your Vishnu, etc. And instead of going out to collect things or -
Over the past couple of years, I've been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I'd do reviews of them. Today's review is for Gloomhaven, the one we most played in 2022. Previously: Root, Blood Rage, Scythe, Sentinels of the Multiverse. Gloomhaven is a coop game for up to 4 players. It's an RPG where you form a party and tackle turn-based dungeons (with some lore/story tacked on). I can only imagine how much effort playing the physical version of this game takes, because there's a lot of stuff. There are many -
Tunic is a cute little Zelda-like with a unique twist: The game barely tells you anything and most text is written in an unknown runic script/language, but you can collect these pages that turn out to be from an in-game instruction manual (also mostly written in the unknown language), and as you find more pages, you figure out more stuff about the world and the game and how to do stuff in the game. The game was incredibly fun and I spent some late nights because I couldn't put the controller down. The exploration part was excellent, and the game -
A few weeks ago, I finally hit achievement completion in Street Fighter V! Quick review: Despite the game getting some poor reviews at the start, I think it has grown into a pretty good entry in the franchise. It's been a long and challenging road, mainly because despite my love of fighting games, I am so so bad at them, so I never thought I would be able to overcome the achievements that required me to rank up online, but somehow through perseverence I got there! A timeline! 2015: Played the SFV demo at EGX 2016: Played in open beta
2022 November
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Today I finished Paradise Killer, which is the first game I finished on PC Game Pass, which I subscribed to three months ago. That's not a great rate, but my first three months were free due to some promo, so whatever. Paradise Killer wasn't my first choice of game to play on Game Pass though, I had a few other games I had wanted to play first, but it turns out the XBox app needed to play PC Game Pass games is super wonky and gave me a lot of problems. As I mentioned in a previous weeknotes, I had
2022 August
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According to Steam achievements, I've been playing the same Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings game on and off since 2018. Finally decided to power through the remainder of the game this year to get it off my backlog. The game is okay, considering it came out in 2011. Graphics are from that era of course, but I'm not one to complain. The combat is challenging and can be a bit clunky. There are multiple boss battles that I had to redo countless times and most of the time you have to prep ahead of time by drinking potions and applying
2022 July
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🔗 Hexagonal Pipes Puzzle via web
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Finished my second big RPG for the year! Triangle Strategy by Squaresoft is a new "spiritual successor" to one of all-time favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics. This game was great! Although the name seriously lacked imagination. "Triangle" because there are three main factions and three conviction values in the game, and "Strategy" because it's a strategy game! I really liked the story, even though it was a "Oh we are a small group trapped between warring powers" plot that's typical for these kinds of games. There's decision points and branching paths along the way, and each of the major factions
2022 June
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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a pretty good metroidvania, heavily influenced by the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (I will confess that I have never played SOTN; I did play the successor games on GBA and NDS though.) The game is easy. It's not a hardcore platformer like Ori and the Blind Forest and it doesn't have the challenging combat of Hollow Knight. The lack of difficulty is mainly because there is no real limit on the number of restorative items you can bring into a boss fight. For this reason, the later boss fights (when you have
2022 May
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I started playing Tales of Vesperia in January, since I had just finished Tales of Symphonia a couple of weeks prior. Vesperia is that rare PS3 era RPG that never got an English-language release on that system, so I've actually been wanting to play this for more than a decade now, though I actually bought the game only during last year's end-of-year Steam sales. This game is a vast improvement over Symphonia; kind of a surprise considering the original games were released a mere 5 games apart. I'm not sure if it's just the Definitive Edition remaster, but the graphics