2-Week Report: May
Environmental Station Alpha 
Played this game before it had achievements; happy to have an excuse to play it again. Now, it's completed… Mega Sad.
Spirit City: Lofi Sessions 
I like to have something running while I'm reading, and this sets the mood nicely. All that's left is the 'grind' to level 50.
Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered 
Tomb Raider IV completed. Never replayed that one as much as I-III, but they polished it a lot and I quite like it now.
Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation (1999) 
I liked it so much, in fact, that I went back to the original to finish the RetroAchievements. I am now a master at losing Senet.
Pikmin (GameCube) 
Pikmin was also mastered on RetroAchievements. After the Distant Spring challenge mode, I might just be crazy enough to try the 'no blues' run.
Un-Progress
I’m actually playing games a lot more since joining the site, which is great—but 40 games were added to the library, and that doesn’t include the free ones. I have a bad habit of picking up dirt-cheap indie games on sale for a buck or two each. Anything with “overwhelmingly positive” reviews grabs my attention too, and tends to go straight to the wishlist to await a 50% sale. This is the first time I’ve really looked at how quickly the backlog expands, and trying to out-play that isn’t going to work. New games are gonna have to be a reward for finishing old ones.
BLAEO+ will provide some much-needed motivation with that “how long to beat” sorting feature. Most games are in the “one day to beat” or “one week to beat” bucket. Only 82 games met my personal criteria for “two weeks to beat,” “one month to beat” and “time sink,” the 100+ hour category which currently only includes Persona 5. It’s the one thing that makes this backlog seem remotely doable. I was also surprised to see the ProtonDB stats showing just how many of them should be playable on Linux, contrary to my assumptions that they’d be broken. I’ve noticed that Steam also has a “play next” reel now, and it’s recommending some real gems. I might use that to decide which “long” games I should play first, lest I resort to the “alphabetical order” method.
Congrats on fully completing Environmental Station Alpha. As someone who’s still fighting my way through the post-game, i know what an achievement that is
Thanks, and good luck with your own playthrough. Luckily I still had my muscle memory for “that part” years later and was able to do it again without much fuss, but I remember how bad it was the first time.
Congrats! You’ve been crushing your backlog. I still join many GA’s on SG but at least I’ve been able to stop buying new games no matter what, so that feels good. One small step for each one of us towards backlog obliteration :)
I have the site set to filter out any giveaways I can’t enter, and what I find is that most of the actual games available at level 0 are what’s dirt cheap on the current Steam sale or in the humble bundle. I can’t win anything to save my life (maybe that’s good), but it puts cheap games in front of me. I can, generally, pass on “good deals” for games I know I’d never play on the Steam store, but on SG I’m a little more lenient with the definition of “looks interesting,” since it’s “free.” I might have to stay away from there, and if my compulsive habit resonates with anyone, maybe they should too. It’s a bit early to judge though.
Yeah, the site is really good at the metagame, where it hits all of our addictive biases hehe I stopped entering those cheap games after I forced myself to play some of them I had won early in my SG history, such as Skull Bullets. Those things don’t provide even 5 minutes of fun, so it’s not worth anymore entering these GA’s for me, even if they cost 0 or 1P to enter. I’m still fortunate enough to win one or two wishlisted games per month thou, so the backlog is definitely taking a while to go down. But it’s getting smaller! Hahahah