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
2022 April
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I finished Metroid Dread today! The game came out for Nintendo Switch last October and my brother lent me his copy last month. This was only my second time finishing an actual Metroid game; the first one was the original Metroid all the way back on the NES! I loved the game, I devoured it in a bit over three weeks (which is a very quick pace for me already). It is an excellent side-scrolling Metroidvania (as you'd expect) and has a great gameplay loop where every time you beat a boss you unlock a new ability and you want
2022 March
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Yesterday I finished Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, a platformer released on Steam in 2019. I started playing this one in mid-February, mostly because I wanted a shorter non-RPG game to play alongside Tales of Vesperia, and I had this in the backlog for a while. Not a big fan of the aesthetic (it's obviously geared more towards kids), but the game itself is fun enough. The game consists of a top-down Zelda-like overworld where you unlock secrets and new chapters, and the chapters themselves are individual 2D platforming stages, in the modern Mario style: you just want to get
2022 February
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I've still been playing Wordle since the last time I wrote about it. Still 100% win rate, and currently on 24-day streak (would have been longer, except in early January, I decided to test what would happen if I set my system date to the future since the game uses the client's date). Aside from the OG Wordle, two variants have also made their way into my daily routine (technically four variants, depending on how you count them): Saltong, the Filipino version which I already mentioned in the last post. This one actually has three different variants: there's normal Saltong
2022 January
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🔗 Wiki History Game via web
Web game where you need to rearrange historical events chronologically. Best streak I got so far is 9.
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For a long time I had been waffling on buying Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for either the WiiU or Switch, since I did find myself enjoying the Captain Toad levels in Super Mario 3D World. Last week however for some reason, Nintendo decided to make the game free to play for one week. A strange decision, given the game takes less than 10 hours to complete! It incentivizes people with a lot of time (like me!) to just download the free trial and finish it in that period. So that's what I did! For the uninitiated, Captain Toad is a -
I first wrote about Wordle back in November. Back then I thought it was neat and played it a few times, but not with any regularity. The past couple of weeks, it's kind of gone viral. Seems like people everywhere of all shapes and sizes are playing it! I've also started playing it regularly, though I don't post the results on social media, a couple of my chat groups are active early in the morning when the new Wordle comes in. The game itself is simple and clever. Difficult enough so that solving it feels good yet not too complicated
2021 December
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Iris and the Giant is a short indie roguelike deckbuilding RPG that I played early in this year and forgot to write about. I got it from the February Humble Choice. The gameplay is simple and straightforward, a bit like Slay the Spire, you build a deck of cards to use in battle in against floors of monsters until you get to the end. The difference with StS is that in this game cards are removed from your deck as soon as you use them and it's game over when you run out, so you have to keep earning new -
I had already managed to finish the two single-player games I had targeted to finished before year's end (1 2), but I figured I can squeeze in one more shorter game in the last two weeks of the year, so the week before Christmas I started playing Blasphemous on Steam. It's a metroidvania I'd been meaning to play for a while, as I've seen it on a number of "top N metroidvanias" list, and apparently I had gotten it from Humble Bundle way back in December 2019. I'm a big fan of the exploration aspect of metroidvanias, and Blasphemous didn't -
I'm a big fan of the Tales series of games; I played the early games Phantasia (via emulation), Destiny and Eternia (both on PS1), but skipped out on the series a bit during the PS2 era when most of the games either did not have an English release or were not on a console I had. Tales of Symphonia belongs to the latter category; It originally came out for the Nintendo GameCube in 2003 and had a PS2 port which never saw an English release. This is the oldest Tales game that I haven't yet played before that had a
2021 November
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I finished The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles this week! A game I've been playing since August. If you're not familiar, it's a collection release of the two latest games in the Ace Attorney series, a series of story-driven visual novel-type games centered around defense lawyering. Both of the games in the collection have not had an English release before. I played and enjoyed the first four games of the series on the NDS back in the mid-00s, so I was looking forward to this release. The two games included are Great Ace Attorney Adventures and Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve.
2021 August
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I finished Horizon Zero Dawn a while back, after getting a free copy off PS+ in June. Then I spent a couple of weeks chasing the platinum trophy for the game. The PS+ copy also came with the Frozen Wilds DLC, so I spent another month or so playing through that expansion as well. I already finished all the Frozen Wilds quests and wanted to get all the Frozen Wilds trophies too. I already got most of the but the other day, one of them wouldn't pop, so I just gave up, so I can do this quick review +
2021 June
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Dan Fornace, creator of Rivals of Aether writes: After 8 years of working in fighting games, I’ve accepted the fact that no matter how “easy” you make your game, pros will absolutely demolish new players. Well-known fighting game Youtuber Maximillian talks about the casual appeal of Guilty Gear -STRIVE- and expands a bit on the above: I think there is definitely a serious learning curve when it comes to fighting games. They're typically difficult for the uncommitted casual gamer to get into. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be learned: inputs, commands, matchups, systems, etc. I mean, I've
2021 May
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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. This is my fourth such review, and this time I'm gonna talk about Root. This is a IRL boardgame by Leder Games with the Steam version published by Dire Wolf Digital. Root is a competitive game themed about multiple factions vying for supremacy in a forest area. Each faction vies for control of clearings, draws cards that provide special abilities or items, and generally tries to stop the others from winning the
2021 March
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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 Blood Rage: Digital Edition. This is a Norse mythology themed game based on a IRL boardgame. It's one of those "place your guys on the map" boardgame where each player vies for control of provinces. The game is divided into three ages, and at the end of each age one of the provinces is destroyed as part of ragnarok. The players place units in each of the provinces,
2021 February
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A while back, on a whim I purchased this indie game Knightin' on Steam. I forget how I came across it and why I decided to buy, but no regrets. It's a tightly-focused dungeon crawler in the style of original Legend of Zelda/Link to the Past dungeons. Each dungeon is a set of rooms you clear one at a time, until you get to the dungeon boss and beat him. Clearing rooms involves defeating enemies, solving puzzles, avoiding obstacles and opening chests. It's a short game, there are only four dungeons to clear each slightly more difficult than the last.