#25 Monthly Status Update (July 2020)
Yay, it’s finally summer!!! I haven’t done a proper update in a really long time, so we need to catch up ;)
This semester I was studying remotely, which has a lot of both pros and cons, but overall it actually required more time to accomplish the same results as if everything was “as usual”, which obviously means less time for backlog fighting…
But this doesn’t mean that nothing at all was happening in my gaming life! Oh no! Over the last couple of years I’ve slowly started to grow more and more fond of playing old and retro games for the sake of “experiencing the evolution of video game genres or the medium as a whole”. I’ve always enjoyed playing all of the games in a series in the release order (even if it’s something like Assasin’s Creed or Final Fantasy) or playing older games that might have had an influence on a particular title, before playing that title itself (eg. playing the Myst series before playing The Witness, Dark Souls series before playing other souls-likes, LucasArts point&clicks before modern ones, etc.), but lately that attitude of mine actually intesified. That’s one of the reasons why half a year ago I’ve bought myself a New 2DS XL - besides DS and 3DS games, I use it a lot for playing NES and SNES games - so far I’ve finished the first 2 Super Mario games and the first 4 Zelda titles :). And besides that, I also just got (it’s literally sitting in a package next to me) an used Wii U - maybe it doesn’t have that many exclusives, but I want to play a bunch of N64 and Wii games on it. Also this month I tried to do a lot of trading to start “clearing” my wishlist off of pre-2010 games (as you can see I managed to snag some really nice classic titles such as “Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines” or two Monkey Island games ^_^) and now only 18 of them remain on my wishlist. So in general, I’m actually starting to tackle my “cross-platform virtual backlog” roughly by playing games based on their release dates (older first). This doesn’t mean I’m currently only stuck in the 80s and 90s, but in the foreseeable future I’ll most likely be playing more older titles than newer ones. Some of those will be on Nintendo consoles, some will be DRM-Free PC games (like the absolutely genius, but also devilishly difficult puzzle game I’ve been slowly playing for the past year - Fish Fillets from 1998) and some on Steam - I’ll definitely sometimes try to mention some of the stuff I’m playing elsewhere, but you obviously won’t see as much of it here as the Steam stuff, even if I was playing more of the former games ;)
So yeah, maybe my backlog is not happy with the 28 games I’ve added to it this month (which is actually a record for me :O), but I certainly didn’t forget about it and I’m pretty positive that sooner or later, I’ll get to tackling it “more properly” ;)
New games: 28
16 from trades, 5 from SG, 4 bought on sale, 2 from bundles, 1 for free
- My Memory of Us
0 minutes playtime
0 of 23 achievements
- Overlord
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Incredipede
0 minutes playtime
0 of 6 achievements
- Grab the Bottle
0 minutes playtime
0 of 15 achievements
- AntVentor
0 minutes playtime
0 of 13 achievements
- Robbie Swifthand and the Orb of Mysteries
0 minutes playtime
0 of 19 achievements
- Anodyne
0 minutes playtime
0 of 6 achievements
- The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Blocks That Matter
0 minutes playtime
0 of 32 achievements
- The Samaritan Paradox
0 minutes playtime
0 of 17 achievements
- Full Bore
0 minutes playtime
0 of 15 achievements
- Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE
0 minutes playtime
0 of 14 achievements
- ibb & obb
0 minutes playtime
0 of 10 achievements
- The Curse of Monkey Island
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened - Remastered
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Torchlight
0 minutes playtime
0 of 66 achievements
- Crash Drive 2
0 minutes playtime
0 of 32 achievements
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Loom
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- The Dig
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Kick Ass Commandos
0 minutes playtime
0 of 67 achievements
- iO
0 minutes playtime
0 of 39 achievements
- Broken Age
0 minutes playtime
0 of 45 achievements
- Guns, Gore & Cannoli
0 minutes playtime
0 of 21 achievements
Beaten/completed games: 0 :<
Other games with progress: 1
1 continued
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
6 hours playtime
7 of 10 achievements
Won on SteamGifts progress
Changed since last month:
Never played: 60% (+1%)
Completed: 29% (-1%)
All games progress
Changed since last month:
Never played: 75% (+1%)
Completed: 17% (-1%)
Other than steam backlog is still progress, so congrats (especially for the 4 Zelda games, that must have taken a chunk of your time!) on the progress, and the great additions to your backlog.
Cumulatively, it’s 73h spread throughout 7 months for the 4 Zelda games, so yeah, pretty substantial amount of time. But it was really fun! Especially A Link to the Past! Just after a couple of initial hours my jaw was on the floor, because I couldn’t believe that such an amazing game existed in 1991. Imho with some very minor tweaks and uplifting it could release today as an indie game and get 8.5/10 review scores :O
A link to the past is still probably my favourite Zelda (but i haven’t played them all, I don’t have a switch). I also quite liked Link’s Awakening as a kid (the gameboy version, no idea what the remake is worth) and later on the minish cap, which had a specific gimmick but was enjoyable to play on its own. Are you continuing on your Zelda journey? The 3DS remakes were pretty well made.
Yup, that’s the plan! Eventually I’d love to play all Zelda (and Super Mario) games. But since I’m not a huge fan of remakes, I’ll play the original versions of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask on my newly purchased Wii U and maybe check out the 3DS remakes after some longer break from those.
Those 2 remakes were more ports than remakes tbh, and unless the Wii U is reading N64 cartridges (or are you running an emulator on it?) it’s probably as original as the 3DS version, unlike the recent Link’s awakening switch
I’ve actually already read about the “3DS vs original” versions and while I still might consider playing the remake of Ocarina of Time instead of the original, the 3DS version of Majora’s Mask is a bit controversial since it changed quite a lot of things like lighting and colors (which weakens the dark tone of the game), Zora swimming is completely different, the whole game is made much easier by reworking boss fights, etc. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=653wuaP0wzs).
All of the NES, SNES, Gameboy (Color/Advance), N64 games I play on 3DS and Wii U are games emulated using the official Virtual Console service (that Nintendo sadly dropped on Switch, which 3 years after the release of the console still has close to zero games from those retro consoles - I considered buying a Switch instead of the 3DS, but since currently I’m mostly interested in the older titles, it was a deal breaker for me).