End of the week update 10/10/26 - 17/10/26

Goals

• Play every game I won on steamgifts for atleast 30 min. in progress
• Update blaeo as I go along.

Thoughts
Enjoyed working on my blacklog again, makes me feel so productive haha
Bit off a little to much, but I have plenty off time.

progress

• 12 labours of herculus 9: Done and archived
• the sexy brutale- played, didn’t like it ( its a fun game, just not for me) archived.
• train station renovation.Didn’t manage to finish it, but it’s well on it’s way. Archived
• glass masqerade 2: illusions beaten and archived
• Started glass masqerade 3:Honeylines

Challenge me

• Made a seperate list consisting of my steamgifts
• played darkside detective ( in progress)

Next week
Work on my Challenge me games

I’ve been wanting to play this game for a long time, so I figured I’d make a post about it.

Platformer. Weirdly, jump is mapped to the R button, even though that’s what you’ll be doing most often by far; the A button performs your slightly-delayed melee attack that locks you in place until its animation is done, and the B button spends one of your limited magic points to perform your equipped spell. There isn’t a single enemy that can’t be damaged by jumping on it, and you don’t get a ranged attack until around 2/3rds through the game, so even from a combat standpoint, you’ll be doing more jumping than anything. It really should’ve been A jump, B attack, and R magic. The options menu has a window that tells you what each button does, but if you actually want to remap them, you’ll have to do that externally.

Early on, the game tells you that you can press the jump button in mid air to flutter for a bit before your fall resumes, and “if you time it right,” you can flutter multiple times in a single jump. What the game doesn’t tell you is that this mechanic is rather finicky: you’ll do a full flutter even if you just do a quick push of the jump button in midair, but in order to be allowed to flutter another time before landing, you have to hold the jump button throughout the flutter animation, then quickly let go and push+hold it again once you notice the flutter ended. Thankfully, this mechanic is never mandatory; the only time it’s ever really needed is for getting all the medals in the optional bonus stages, with everything else being possible to do with just regular jumps.

The start of the game is rather empty and boring. Sure, there’s lots of jumping over pits–and even jumping onto single-tile platforms–but hitboxes for platforms are rather generous and the 3D effect is very smooth and well done, so you’ll rarely miss any jumps. However, the platformer genre is about more than just jumping across pits and platforms; they live and die based on how well enemies (or other hazards) enhance the platforming, and in this game, they just…don’t. Enemy patterns feel like they were designed for a traditional top-down Zeldaclone and were hastily stitched onto this game at the last minute. SO many enemies just wander around in random directions like the ones in the first NES Zelda, and they’re often placed on platforms that are so large, you can simply go around them. There are isolated moments where you think the game is introducing stuff to build upon later, but then it just…doesn’t. Halfway through the first stage are giant bouncing fireballs that you have to jump over, and then they’re never used again. Stage 2 has a spot where you’re jumping on lilypads to cross a river when a Zora pops out onto one and starts shooting towards where you’re about to land, but that’s the only time something like that happens. I heard that Nintendo “went back and finished” the game before releasing it on NSO, but honestly, the game still feels unfinished regarding how little it realizes its potential.

The latter parts of the game get a bit better by having moving platforms and floating enemies that can chase you across multiple floors, but the last level gets rather annoying by having long paths you have to traverse before you reach the spot where you can jump to the next floor, so if you fall down, you’ll have to retraverse those long paths that you’ve already cleared of enemies, and it gets rather tedious. Falling into a regular pit just takes away a single hit point (1/3rd of one heart) and puts you back on the platform you jumped from, which is a surprisingly modern way to handle platformer pits, so if they changed the code to work that way, it would’ve been nice if they had also changed the tall towers to work similarly.

Stages themselves can also drag on for a while, but thankfully, the game doesn’t limit saving to after each level; it also lets you save and resume from the last star-teleporter you used…though this feature is hidden past the End Game option, so I didn’t know about it at first.

However, the biggest problem with the game is that it’s too zoomed in. If you look up footage, it will seem as if enemies move at a reasonable speed, but even at that speed, they can still go from “completely off-screen” to “actively dealing contact damage” in half a second. The worst example is the first boss: all it does is move off-screen and try to hit you, and its sound-effect-warning always plays on the exact frame the game respawns the boss just outside of your vision–often on the side where you’re not looking and thus are closer to the edge of the camera, giving you even less time to react.

On top of the camera’s issue with enemies, if the next platform you need to jump on is above you and not overlapping the platform you’re currently on, it can still end up being off-screen, even if you’re standing on the edge of your current platform beside where the next platform is. It’s not until you jump in that spot when the platform suddenly scales into view. I found myself frequently jumping around everywhere just to get a reasonable view of my surroundings, to make sure I wasn’t missing any branching paths or upcoming enemies. It doesn’t help that some levels have worse draw-distance than others; there were a couple times where I was trying to jump on a platform on the floor below, when halfway through my jump, the platform popped out of existence and I just kinda had to hope I was lined up correctly when I started falling.

One last thing I’ll bring up is the magic. Throughout the game are branching paths that can contain health pickups, magic refills, or coins, and near the end of each level is a shop that lets you spend those coins on a new spell. Thing is, all the spell cards are face-down, so you don’t know which one you’ll get until after you buy it. That’s fine, though; I’ve never been a huge fan of randomness, but spells are optional and the game could theoretically be beaten without using them at all. However, when I made it to the last shop, I thought I’d see what all of my options were before I headed to the final boss; problem is…

…yup, the spell you get is pre-determined before the game ever loads the card-selection screen. Eat your heart out, Telltale Games, because Dragon Hopper was doing secretly-meaningless choices back in 1996!

Oh, and to make things extra annoying, card-selection is done with an emulated mouse cursor (the fairy) instead of snapping the cursor to the next card when you push the D-pad.

Overall, this game feels like it was designed as a technical showpiece first and a game second. It’s not bad, but I doubt it would be as well-remembered if it had been made for a more popular system than the Virtual Boy. Even by that system’s standards, it pales in comparison to other titles like Vertical Force and Jack Bros. I’d only recommend buying it if you can get it for around five dollars (maybe ten, but that’s pushing it).

P.S. Almost forgot to mention: all cutscenes wait until you push a button before advancing the text…EXCEPT the ending, so there’s one last little annoying thing you’ll have to deal with. The ending also drops the bombshell that, this whole time, the game had a points system. What gives you points? How many points do you get from doing those things? Who knows, but you got 533 of them!!

Some notes on Q3 2026:

In Q3, I finished 15 games and 4 of them.
3 of them, One Finger Death Punch, Back to Bed, and Dwelvers are games I had started but never finished many years ago so I’m happy to finally get back to them. This was once again encouraged by PAGYWOSG, which is still a lot of fun.

Trombone Champ

6.1 hours, 25 of 25 achievements

Click to expand

Teardown

20.4 hours, 24 of 27 achievements

Click to expand

Settlement Survival

18.5 hours, 51 of 51 achievements

Click to expand

ONE PIECE World Seeker

8.4 hours, 29 of 63 achievements

Click to expand

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

58.4 hours, 45 of 74 achievements

Click to expand

half of the week update

goals
Order my library on blaeo. Done
Play every game I won on steamgifts for atleast 30 min. in progress
Update blaeo as I go along.

thoughts
Feels good to be working on my backlog again, I kind of forgot the amazing gems I have.

progress so far
10/10/26 - 17/10/26

• 12 labours of herculus 9: Done and archived
• the sexy brutale- played, didn’t like it ( its a fun game, just not for me) archived. Picked celestial tales of the old north to replace it
• train station renovation. In progress
• started glass masqerade 2: illusions

participating in Challenge me
playing the darkside detective, enjoying it!

NieR:Automata™

6.75/10

29.2 hours

30 of 47 achievements (64%)

#443
#53 of 2026
October 11, 2026

PoP October-December

1/7

3.1 hours

13/16

Hey hey, I’m back to tackle my backlog of games again!

UPDATE

goals

• Order my library on blaeo. in progres
• Play every game I won on steamgifts for atleast 30 min. in progress
• Update blaeo as I go along.

thoughts
Excited to tackle my never ending backlog again. I really got to stop buying games, I don’t think I will finish the backlog I have in my lifetime

playing this week
10/10/26 - 17/10/26

• 12 labours of herculus 9
• the sexy brutale
• train station renovation

Hello somehow my steam gift wins are not synced till “The Elder Scrolls Online” which was not my last win but SGwins list stops at it anyway
im reporting such thing here If post would reach out to BLAEO mods
if no response within a month ill post a comment on SG thread then

Hello everyone! I’m new here. For now, I’ll slowly start sorting games by status. A little later, I’ll write about my plans for the month and my more long-term plans.