Progress report: July ‘22 (a.k.a. Finally, the holidays!)
Yep, you heard me right! It’s summertime and I plan on contributing nothing useful to society for as long as I can! I’m going to work as hard as possible on assassinating my backlog instead, thank you very much :3
A super important thing for this month - I made a new friend! He loves gaming just as much as I do, if not more, and I got to play through some games with him while he was still home. Small dreams coming true ☆
And then, if that wasn’t enough, he brought my attention to Discord giving away free Xbox Game Pass trial codes! Expect a splash of that until halfway through September~
So, here’s what I’ve been doing instead of being like any sane person:
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100 hidden cupcakes
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A Memoir Blue
3.0 hours playtime
15 of 15 achievements
GAME
PASS -
All You Can Eat
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Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!
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Cat&rooms
0.3 hours playtime
no achievements
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Come with Me
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Drowning
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DYO
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EMMA The Story
0.3 hours playtime
no achievements
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Escape Academy
6.5 hours playtime
27 of 27 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Escape From School
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Escape Room - The Sick Colleague
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Femboy Besties
0.1 hours playtime
no achievements
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Hide and Secret Treasure of the Ages
0.5 hours playtime
no achievements
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it's always monday
0.3 hours playtime
no achievements
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Mini Words: Top Games
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My Friend Peppa Pig
2.3 hours playtime
11 of 11 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Omno
9.0 hours playtime
21 of 21 achievements
GAME
PASS -
PAW Patrol: Mighty Pups Save Adventure Bay
3.1 hours playtime
30 of 30 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Pupperazzi
4.8 hours playtime
23 of 23 achievements
GAME
PASS -
SLG Remix
0.3 hours playtime
no achievements
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Starting the Game
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The Artful Escape
6.4 hours playtime
12 of 12 achievements
GAME
PASS -
THE CORRIDOR
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The Shapeshifting Detective
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The Timeless Child
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The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season
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Townscaper
0.8 hours playtime
10 of 10 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
3.8 hours playtime
37 of 37 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Unpacking
3.0 hours playtime
25 of 25 achievements
GAME
PASS -
We should talk.
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We Were Here
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With You
0.4 hours playtime
no achievements
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夏花的轨迹——A summer promise to forever
100 hidden cupcakes - I told myself I wouldn’t actually spend money on any of these… and then I caved in anyway. This one’s… the same as all the other ones, I assume, just that you’re looking for something else. Funnily enough, 0.5% of people straight up gave up before finding the last cupcake (which, fair enough, hardly looked like all the other cupcakes), but I’m not one of them! Bonus virtual cupcake for me for… willing to spend three more minutes to look closer before consulting the guide…
A Memoir Blue - I’m tired of all these media that think they’re being impactful by not saying anything. For the love of god, speak to me. I know you have a voice, but for some unearthly reason you’re choosing not to have it! Sigh… This was my first experience with Xbox Cloud Gaming, and with how weak my internet connection is, the results were… serviceable. I’d still be better off making download space when needed.
All You Can Eat - I’ve had this one on my wishlist for a while now, but only when I looked at it again before buying, I noticed… “when the player ends the game, he is given the option to print out his gameplay in a comic book format”… that sounds like vApe Escape! Indeed, it’s from the same devs. Much like vApe Escape, it’s a comic-style point-and-click, which you can later export as a PDF and print out, if you want, which is… cool on paper, again, but useless if you struggled to finish the game in the first place. This game even has a developer commentary, which I always enjoy, but I still don’t think it’s worth its asking price. I got my key from someone who was selling it for just a little bit less than the biggest discount possible for it and that’s the price I felt comfortable paying.
Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic! - Another Zoo Corporation game, another Qix reskin, another Rick G. Earth (?) feature; really don’t know what to say about this one, except that I’m iffy about how easy it was for me, ‘cause I feel like if I had to play the original Qix, it would kick my ass brutally.
Cat&rooms - Barely a nukige about a guy who picks up a magic stray cat that foresees sex in his future. Three different endings, a horrible English translation, generic moaning and a clear preference for a certain type of female body. Porn is free, so… avoid.
Come With Me - This one might have been just the perfect difficulty for us. I was poking fun at how I’d probably end up being the purple character at the start, and then I actually did… luckily, they had more agency in the whole thing. It’s a nice school project, recommended if you’ve got a friend and an hour to kill.
Drowning - Easily the simplest walking simulator I’ve ever played, Drowning relays the story of a subject (presumably the developer themselves) and its struggle with depression. The story can last for up to five years and has four different endings. The problem with this game, however… is that it’s bland. Besides a few random objects you can pick up for achievements and the fact that three of the endings are considered “secret”, there’s really not much variety or spice; you’re walking on and on, pretty much on rails, as the story is told to you every so often. It only got more excruciating when I realized that for some reason the Steam version of the game doesn’t have an option to skip chapters, unlike the console version, therefore extending the play time for no reason. I empathize with the game likely being raw and personal, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to even the biggest walking sim lovers.
DYO - A mind-bending platformer with a cool concept that proved too disorienting for both me and my friend way too soon… so I just skipped through the rest of the game to get all the achievements. I’m just glad I got this for free and not $10, which is what it supposedly was in the past. Recommended only if you’re not the type whose brain melts…?
EMMA The Story - A short, somewhat existential story about space and the future. It’s not bad, but due to the length alone, pick it up on sale.
Escape Academy - Easily the best game I got to co-op in with my new friend, and we both think so. Escape Academy is, as the title suggests, a game about a school that tests its students based on their escape room escape skills… that… makes sense, trust me. The visuals are eye-catching, the soundtrack is great, the riddles are a great balance between “did they seriously think this was hard?” and “uh… what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”… if you have a friend, a family member, a partner, anyone willing to play games with you, this is the next hot thing for you to play. I myself can’t wait to replay it on another platform in the future.
Escape From School - A simple “escape room” kind of game… is all I can say, because me and my friend did not have a single clue about how the heck to solve any of the riddles. We cheesed it, fooled around for what felt like an eternity before we got to the end (twice!), and we still somehow fit within the brackets of how long the game is supposed to take, according to the dev. Verdict: …good?
Escape Room - The Sick Colleague - There was a new multiplayer room added, so naturally, I jumped at the chance of completing that too. If I had to judge the difficulty of this one, the first part was sufficiently complicated, but as we went on, it got even more so and we lost the proverbial thread, so to speak. The voice-activated thing was nonsense, figuring out the dates on the SD cards wasn’t even necessary, and just about all the other stuff was purely for the achievements at that point… not to mention the in-game clue system leaves a lot to desire. Doing the Stairway to heaven achievement was fun though; I’m happy I have it now, but it’s probably going to forever be superseded in rarity by the latest Coloring Pixels packs…
Femboy Besties - Said it many times before, will say it again; it’s a shame that stuff this short is asking to be paid for, while there are some real gems out in the free-to-play world. And yes, like most the reviews say, the balls are on backwards.
Hide and Secret Treasure of the Ages - This was bad. I knew it was going to be bad, but I bought that cheap key anyway. It’s one of those HOGs where nothing really matters anyway, so the HOG scenes are just random blurred stock images of libraries and whatnot, while instead of hand-drawn items that fit within the place, you’re looking for the same clown plush or elephant statue five times over. The story of this one is told through comic-style cutscenes with terrible pre-rendered 3D art and not much better voice acting. The characters’ accents are all over the place; if anything, I feel like Toadie’s VA stood out as the best, even if his voice didn’t match what the character looks like at all. If anyone knows where I can find the names of the voice cast (assuming they weren’t all just picked up off the street), I’d like to see if he’s been anywhere else. As for the game, though, avoid it at all costs.
it’s always monday - Is it, though? I’ve seen a playthrough of this game ages ago, so now that I remembered nothing about it and it finally went 75% off (which, judging by the price, might be the lowest it even can go), I figured I might as well go for it. It’s a game about the mundane, but like so many others before it, it’s hard to talk about without just giving everything away. One thing I must say though is that it was supposedly free to play before, which makes sense considering it’s only about 20 minutes long… but now it’s paid? That alone makes it hard to recommend; there are longer and more enjoyable experiences to be found in free to play games…
Mini Words: Top Games - Last month was movies, now came the time for the top 100 highest-grossing games (as of this month). Again, much easier than the first (main?) game and just as short as Top Movies.
My Friend Peppa Pig - I like me a good children’s game, and this was pretty good. You can customize your own character, meet Peppa and her family, and go on an adventure around Peppa’s world. I’ve long since grown out of watching Peppa the Pig, but the little bits and pieces that I’ve committed to memory were portrayed accurately. I’d say the bar for children’s games isn’t high, yet Outright Games seems to meet/pass it (whichever really works) every time, considering they’ve been on a roll putting out games based on popular IPs.
Omno - This was going to get removed from Game Pass at the end of the month, so after looking it up and seeing that it’s an estimated 3-4 hour completion and “a relaxing adventure”, I decided to try it out. God, was I wrong. Not only was the presentation something I don’t jive with at all (think games like Journey or Abzu, in that they’re “no story, just vibes”), but the gameplay absolutely broke me. “But why?”, you might ask. “It’s just a platformer, isn’t it?” Yeah, it is… except it fucking sucks. All contentment I could have gained from watching all the creatures prance around and getting through the game at a reasonable pace was trumped by how godawful the platforming was. I’ve noticed that the dev was doing his best, coming up with more and more new ways to get to the collectibles and that’s great, but it stops being admirable when you have to zoom around the spot twenty times over because you keep failing the jumps. If there was a jump I couldn’t make, it was because most of my tries ended up with the character bashing their head against the platform and falling. I’m honestly glad I didn’t get vertigo from all that zipping around. Not to mention the handful of times where I looked at the next jump and thought “hmm, that looks far enough to use the dash ability”, which I did, and again, bashed my head, and fell down, then went back up to try that same jump and do it without using the dash, only to succeed. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s downright unacceptable. At the very least I can say, I’m done with it now. It was a frustrating experience from start to finish and I will gladly purge all memories of it from my mind.
PAW Patrol: Mighty Pups Save Adventure Bay - When Paw Patrol first appeared, I was long past the age at which I’d watch it for fun, so I’ve simply been curious about its popularity. Now that I’ve gotten introduced to the basic idea, I think the general message behind the cast of pups saving their hometown is pretty good. However, this game was… kind of atrocious. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun collect-a-thon, between the main missions and the minigames, and obviously the difficulty is way below what I could do, but… everything is bogged down by the voice acting. Even though I haven’t seen a single episode of the show, I could swear that the dogs can speak, but here, they don’t speak, or, at the very least, bark… all the talking is done by Ryder, and boy, does he have a terrible voice (in Polish, at the very least). I would hope that’s not the same voice actor as in the show; he just sounds so disinterested and like he doesn’t want to be there most of the time. That, and nearly all the time the things he’s saying don’t match up with what’s written on the screen, which tired me out even further. Seriously, you don’t know how distracting that kind of thing is until you see it happen.
Pupperazzi - You’re… uh… a somewhat human-sized camera… on legs… and you get yourself into the business of taking dog photos. …probably because they occupy most of the world? Anyway, questioning the setting aside, this was a pretty fun game. If you ever feel the need to relax, wind down and pet some good puppers before giving them a photoshoot, this is the game for you. However, I’m glad I got to play it as part of Xbox Game Pass, cause good lord, with that price it ain’t worth it. I wouldn’t mind replaying it some time in the future, but not for that price.
SLG Remix - I’m not exactly sure what this is supposed to be… it’s a visual novel, sure, but the 20 minutes that it took me to read felt like they were cut out of a bigger story. I went in, aware of the less than favorable reviews and I was not surprised. Do yourself a favor, assuming you even knew about this game, and skip it.
Starting the Game - I feel lied to. I don’t think I started any game, maybe besides this one. It was short, looked crappy and its humor was pure nonsense to me. The “subscribe to PewDiePie” thing at the start was really cringy too, there are reasons I’ve unsubscribed a good few years back.
The Artful Escape - I’ve been really looking forward to playing this game. The “Music” tag and a mention of Jason Schwartzman being on the cast got me, I admit. And now, with my Game Pass trial, I got to try it out. It… wasn’t great. Don’t get me wrong, the art is fantastic, the voice acting is great and the overarching message of being your own person is important… but it’s just not a good game. All of the musicality is brought down to pressing/holding X to let out sound, with the sections where you need to “prove yourself” being presented as a glorified Simon Says. In the end, this is another one of those games that I suppose I wouldn’t mind replaying, but not for its base price. Heck, looking at this one makes me think - “wouldn’t this have worked better as an animated feature?”
THE CORRIDOR - This game seems to be getting bashed for simply being Stanley-esque, but I don’t necessarily think that’s bad. The other way out people take to try and convey things like these is usually by keeping silent; I much prefer bad writing than no writing at all, and this wasn’t necessarily bad… The gimmick was a tad annoying, but in the end, it was a fun experience.
The Shapeshifting Detective - Streamed this for my friend after he showed an interest. It’s a damn engaging FMV where a mystery is afoot. As the title suggests, you’re a shapeshifter - it’s unclear who (or what) you originally are, but after coming in contact with a potential suspect, you can use their likeness to get info out of other suspects. We stayed up a few long nights to see the mystery through; he’s even more interested in FMVs now than he was before, I just wish all the plot twists that were introduced had some sort of an explanation.
The Timeless Child - This game is just great. Maybe it’s because I know how to solve all the riddles by now that I say that, but the riddles in this game are genuinely fun to figure out and execute. The “Prologue” in the name only gets me excited - I wonder what more will come out of this. Definitely recommend this one if you’re itching to play with someone online.
The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season - Hell yeah! Thank you, Xbox, for giving me an excuse to replay most of the TWD series! Especially the first game; man, it’s been four years, I’ve forgotten tons of stuff that went down. …you only ever remember the major beats…
Townscaper - One heck of a creative sandbox. I’m not a creative type, however, so it’s safe to say I played this one just for the achievements.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion - This game, ah… it looks good. It’s cute, it has a nice soundtrack and, uh… that’s about where the praise ends. Seriously, I could hardly stomach the writing. Who on earth thought stuffing a game with memes would automatically make it funny? I guess it’s whoever called that one guy in the credits “the meme encyclopedia” or whatever. There’s an old lady who uses uwuspeak, a random JoJo reference just for the sake of it, and another character who appears out of nowhere to contribute nothing other than tell you an edited version of the Navy Seal copypasta. So, should you play this game? If you can handle this kind of “humor”, by all means. I’ve pretty much quit Twitter at this point for a reason.
Unpacking - A downright adorable pixel art game, telling the story of a certain woman through all the times she moved house. It’s one of those rare examples where I didn’t need a written-out story, there’s just so much you can tell based on what kind of stuff people take with them when moving. Naturally, a tad of a gripe is the game forbidding me from putting some stuff where I might have put it in real life, but with enough playing around, everything’s to be worked out. I already can’t wait to replay this one someday.
We should talk. - Your relationship’s falling apart, but still, you go out drinking. This is a simulation of how 8 out of 9 times you’re going to break up, and the lucky ninth time is when you get to keep up the relationship. The other characters of the story don’t matter one bit. The vibe of the game is pretty nice, everything else not so much. Every time you get to the title screen, even if you just finished a playthrough without exiting the game, you’re going to have to readjust the options, if you did that before, which is hardly acceptable. Even the fastest message speed isn’t nearly fast enough to get through the game at a reasonable pace, considering the ending count and how repetitive most of the game is. If this were a standard visual novel, you could shave off a bunch of time just by skipping the wait for the messages you’ve seen ten times before. We should talk. wasn’t bad per se, but… very meh.
We Were Here - Finally! At last, I made a friend to play this game with! It’s a cool concept, a librarian and an explorer getting lost in a castle filled with traps and riddles. Shame that the “no death” achievement isn’t described better, as there are multiple different ways to die during the game (the spikes fail just looks like a simple respawn, but it actually counts as a “death”?). However - and I can believe I would speak for the majority of the players when I say this - the ending sucked! What’s with that?! I can only hope the sequels get better, but I’m not in a hurry to buy them, I’m just going to look out for when they might go on sale or something.
With You - Going from DYO to this, it was a perfect dial-back on the difficulty. I reckon we’d have been done with this one in 15 minutes, had I not gotten a nosebleed while playing. I don’t suppose it’s as much of a relationship-exploring/testing/what have you game as it might want to be, but it is a nice student project, and I love me some of those.
夏花的轨迹——A summer promise to forever - This has been another one of my rare encounters with Chinese VNs and… it was okay. The art is pretty, the voice acting seems good enough and the English translation is serviceable (apparently it was revised in the past, too, so that’s good), but the story is just really meh. You play as Lin Jiajun, a high schooler sent by his dad to scope out a school in a remote village called Tangxia. Naturally, he meets a few new people there, but the standouts are the heroines - Wu Wanxue, who’s quiet and devoted to working out in the field and Chen Yinlin, who seems to remind him of the distant past… Anyway, it all reads like a bad fanfiction; both heroines have their problems, ones that should be seen as serious, but then the main character, who is, as usual, just your average guy, swoops in and solves everything like it hadn’t been going on for much longer than he’s known any of those people. There’s also a secret sex scene that you can patch into the game, but it’s not voiced or available in English, so if anything, just open it for the related achievement. I’m glad I finally finished this, as it’s been cramping my completion % for the last three (!) years and… let’s see what this studio’s going to do next, I suppose. According to VNDB, they’re in the process of making another VN set in the same universe.
Bonus:
BROK the InvestiGator - I decided it was only fair to finish the demo, so I did. The UI wasn’t as problematic as I might have thought at first. I enjoyed how much stuff there is to collect and explore, it really does look like it’s going to be a long, solid point-and-click adventure game when it comes out, considering it’s now the longest demo of the ones I played for Next Fest. The hints, the deaths, the choices, I’m excited!
See you next month! :)
I actually kinda liked DYO when I played it; most of the puzzles are tricky without relying on new gimmicks or unexplained mechanics like adventure games are notorious for doing. It’s not like Unpacking where you just have to keep trying different locations until the game decides it’s okay for you to put the item there; you can literally see how the screens will line up before you hit the scroll-locking button(s).
[Omno’s] presentation something I don’t jive with at all (think games like Journey or Abzu, in that they’re “no story, just vibes”)
You didn’t get that from the trailer? I was actually hesitant to play Omno at first because the trailer made me think “oh, it’s just gonna be another walking sim like Journey or Abzu and not have any actual platforming.”
If there was a jump I couldn’t make, it was because most of my tries ended up with the character bashing their head against the platform and falling.
Funny, I had the opposite problem: I’d go to dash on a platform and end up overshooting it, unable to turn around and correct myself due to the momentum.
The only time I had something like what you experienced was at the very beginning of the 5th area (right after you get the float ability), and I tried to float onto the next platforms only for the float to cut off before I could reach them; turns out I was supposed to dash onto them instead. :P
It’s not like Unpacking where you just have to keep trying different locations until the game decides it’s okay for you to put the item there; you can literally see how the screens will line up before you hit the scroll-locking button(s).
Except DYO is nothing like Unpacking… we just kept working ourselves into a corner and it was no fun. It’s surprisingly hard to find online co-op games for just two players, but I’m glad we still managed to complete about six and a half of them.
You didn’t get that from the trailer?
I don’t watch trailers… I just saw the estimated completion time and figured I might as well try out something new. I should have played Katamari Damacy REROLL instead (as it was one of the other titles leaving the Game Pass library), but oh well. I can now feel proud in myself for completing it and knowing that I will never play it again.
I tried to float onto the next platforms only for the float to cut off before I could reach them; turns out I was supposed to dash onto them instead.
So that’s another marvelous example of why that game sucks. Sorry not sorry, but punishing players for trying to be cautious is just not it for me. I didn’t like the float ability at all; if you needed to go in a straight line, that was fine, but there were multiple places where you needed to twirl around (most notably the collectible that requires you to float right after zipping to a portal that’s high up in the air) and… ffs, it felt like all those mobile games that only give you a second to try and make sense of what you need to do before they kill you off. Sure, I know that it’s all about where the character is facing (with no regards for if the camera follows or not), but it just made playing the game a living hell for me. I wouldn’t get anything done most tries and I honestly still don’t know how I 100%ed that game; it all just feels like an extreme case of dumb luck.
They might be short games but well done on beating so many games. Yeah that femboy bestie is certainly interesting, still not as bad as the phalanx game in my mind though
Oh I see we actually a mix of steam and game pass nice
Hey, thanks! Every time I have such a productive month, I’m worried the owners of the site are going to come after me for not finding a way to make my posts shorter ^^;; Oh well, as far as I’m aware, the code doesn’t offer the kind of spoiler I’m looking for, so we’re gonna have to deal with this.
Oh, how bad does it get then? I got that code from a third-party site at a discount, and I still feel like I paid too much…
Yep! Can’t believe I never tried using Game Pass sooner! With everything I’ve played so far, the consensus seems to be: I’m glad Game Pass exists, cause holy heck, I would not pay that much for a single one of these games. It’s definitely the effect of Steam and bundle sites’ conditioning, but still…
I just don’t personally like the phalanx game, it goes on way to long for me and it seems like something that was stopped half way through. Its a bunch of repeated images and the least fem to me. It is the longest though at over 10 minutes so it is worth the money more then others, but yh I don’t like it so thats why the length is way to much even though others I would happily have that long
If it had all the gears of wars and fable 2 I would happily go for the game pass but sadly they don’t. Its handy for the 1st gears but I pretty much know the 1st game by heart
idk whether to laugh or cry at that, honestly… that’s not how long a game should be >.> a few months ago I was obsessed with the idea of making my own game, and I could bet the ideas alone would have been longer than that… sigh. I feel like it’s a sign of disconnect between someone who can program a game, but not write a script etc.
Oh? Huh, I didn’t really look at Gears of War; I know there are a few Fable games, but I’m still not sure whether I should try them out or not… oh well, looking at everything I’ve bookmarked, there’s still over 70 games, so that should be more than enough for the month and a half I’ve still got left.
I did look they only brought the 1st game to pc for game pass
Yeah a paid game really should be over 10 minutes but in terms of what games they have made, it is pretty much the longest along with violet girl. I have played all of them btw apart from the pet sitter and trainer. They actually got a new femboy coming out, looks and sounds better then the other femboys but wouldn’t surprise me if less then 5 minutes. Sad thing is that not only do you have to pay, but they don’t go on sale for a new release either
Okay, you made me look and, uh… that’s weird, I’m seeing the first game, the fourth and the fifth one, and then Tactics, whatever that is. Curiouser and curiouser.
Agh, that’s the worst. As if it wasn’t enough that they never seem to get the maximum discount possible…
Oh damn maybe I did see number 4 but completely ignored it as again they don’t have 2 3 or judgement. It also the game I haven’t played sadly but probably still not something I would go for. As soon as I saw no sequels I just ignored it from then on and looked for the other ones. Having put gears of war I don’t see tactics but thats on steam along with gears 5 so idc