End of Month Report: August
Birds Organized Neatly 
At last, all the animals have been organized neatly. There aren't as many big and awkwardly-shaped birds as there were dogs, but there are some small and awkwardly-shaped ones. I'd place the difficulty of this one between dogs and cats. Not much more to say other than Birds has a daily puzzle that's randomly generated.
Spirit City: Lofi Sessions
Finally done with this one. They've partnered with Lofi Gaming now, so congrats to them on the dream. As for me, I'll be moving along and checking out some of the other chill-vibe productivity apps.
Jak II: Renegade 
This set sucked. Platinum trophy hunters lucked out with this one, having a debug mode that makes it free. RetroAchievements requires a patch that removes it, meaning that you do actually have to do the gold race times. Yup, they're horrendous. As soon as you leave the ground, you lose all air control, which I guess is fine, but you can get air from the tiniest speed bump, so the controls feel unresponsive until you have someone explain it to you. People talk about the drill platform turret section on hero mode, but I beat it first try once I read that those flying enemies die instantly if you just headshot them. Nowhere else in the game does this matter, and at no point is this explained to you, so I suppose it's not surprising that everyone struggles. And that's my issue with Jak II. It's unreasonably hard, until you have someone else outside the game world explain hidden mechanics to you, and then the difficulty spikes smooth out and everything is great, and you get to be one of the snobs telling other people to "get good." Haven City still sucks too. I'm glad this one is over.
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
A cheeky 5 achievements were added to this set after the fact, so there was some cleanup to do. A fun excuse to replay the first two warp rooms without having to do anything annoying. Overall, this set was obnoxious purely on account of having to do the dark levels blind. Given the revision hasn't removed them, I suppose the devs doubled down on keeping them despite a large number of complaints that they aren't fun. Ah well.
-14 Backlog
Games Completed: 1
Games Purchased: 2
Free Games Deleted: 16
Free Games Added: 1
Jak 2 was one of my childhood games, great one, but really hard as a children …
It’s not so bad now, except for the races. Just beating Erol was hard when I was younger, and the gold times are still ridiculous today. I missed out on Jak X back then because the last thing I wanted to do after Jak 2 was race in a Naughty Dog game that isn’t CTR. A shame because I’ve heard it’s really good.
Congratulations on Organizing all your Birds Neatly! ᓚᘏᗢ
I really need to pick up that Lofi game, it seems like I could probably have it on in the background while playing another game?
Steam doesn’t stop anyone from playing multiple games at once, so you totally could. For what it’s worth, Spirit City doesn’t really encourage leaving it on all the time. You do get XP for idling, but it’s very minimal, something like 1 each minute, while a daily login, timer and task gives 300. Discovering spirits gives a lot too, which just involves putting on the right settings and waiting, but there are a limited amount of those. It would take a looong time to complete Spirit City’s level 50 achievement by just leaving it open 24/7.
Oh there are birds too in the serie ! :o
I had hesitated a lot on Spirit city, did it help you really to focus ?
Is there an adblocker in the integrated youtube browser of the game ?
It’s nice to have music, background ambiance, a timer, and a to-do list in one app. If getting started is the hardest part for you as it is for many people, making all of that available in one click is nice. Fewer apps, fewer tabs, less chaotic and less fuss. Whether or not it “helps you focus” will depend on the user. There are lots of customization options to get lost in if you’re looking to procrastinate. A lot of people struggle, I think, because they study, play games, and procrastinate all in the same space, even the same chair. If you can’t get away to a different physical space to study, or don’t want to, an app like this can create a mental space to escape to, but you would have to commit to being productive while using it, and make that mental association of “this is my study game.” There is also something to be said for the ability to look up and see someone else studying, even if they’re not a real person. It can be a good reminder not to be distracted. I think that’s why Lofi Girl is so effective.
The in-game browser doesn’t have an adblocker, no, and if you use a VPN, it’s even more unusable, because you’ll be doing 12 captchas just to then watch unskippable ads between every song, and personally speaking, ads are the most distracting things in the universe, and I wouldn’t give my login info to any in-game web browser just to skip the captchas.
Thanks a lot ! No youtube adblocker looks like a no-go for me as i don’t like too much the game soundtrack, but your comment really helped me understand what’s the effective use of this game.
Valid. There are other games competing for this niche too, like Virtual Cottage, ChillPulse, Ithya and gogh that are worth looking at too.