More Dollars Spent than Hours Played Εμεθ’s profile
I might have a problem with retro games too:
https://retroachievements.org/user/Emeth
End of Month Report: May
BAD END THEATER 
A cute premise with great presentation. Hard to say if 10 bucks is too much for the content when the game's menu system does everything it can to respect your time. A single playthrough can take less than a minute if you're a fast reader and skip ahead to the next branch of the story.
Virtual Cottage 
Another mood-setting idle app for my studies. This one's basically just a media player, and for the low low price of free, that's fine by me. Somehow it even managed to escape the Profile Features Limited hell most free indie games are stuck in forever.
Spirit City: Lofi Sessions
Because of the way this game's "EXP system" is designed, once there are no more spirits to discover it's most efficient to hop in for a short daily timer and checklist task every day, because it gives the equivalent of 5 hours of just idling. I kinda like this and kinda don't. ChillPulse had the whole drink bar mechanic to encourage you not to just AFK, which feels missing in this one, but that game had no daily bonus incentive rather than one that might be too big. Even though Spirit City's visuals are much more customizable, I found myself admiring the pixel art of ChillPulse a lot more too.
Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered 
Tomb Raider V complete. Cutscenes are skippable, the game feels a lot better to play, and I don't think those two things are unrelated.
Tomb Raider V: Chronicles (2000)
RetroAchievements complete. The first 9 levels of NLNMAS have to be done in sets of 3 each. That's a lot of cutscenes you're forced to re-watch if you die near the end. The last 3 levels are done individually but are notoriously difficult on account of RNG and lots of forced damage. More annoying than hard.
Pikmin Subset: 404 No Blues Found 
This is a very interesting and thoroughly irritating challenge. Impact Site, Forest of Hope and almost all of Forest Navel are done. I just need to get the breadbug to move the Anti-Dioxin Filter to the shore. I'm not worried about being able to do Distant Spring or Final Trial, but fishing for cooperative breadbug behavior is not my idea of fun. This one might take a while.
Less of the Same
Slightly less un-progress. In the last 2 weeks, 30 new games were added rather than 40. To my dubious credit, a lot less money was spent, and I do mean a lot. Most of these games were 80% off or more and cost a dollar or two. To my very real chagrin, I was right: hanging out on SteamGifts puts a lot of cheap and fun-looking games in front of me, so I will have to stop frequenting that site. It’s pretty much impossible for a level 0 member to win anything unless some developer is practically giving their game away for free anyway. This May, that game was Tsunagari Chess School. Who could have imagined that out of the 339 entrants, I’d be one of the 250 lucky winners. Go me, I guess. Now that I’ve won something—one game out of 700 attempts—hopefully the novelty has worn off. With that lesson learned and a cautious amount of optimism, I’ll consider this a baby step forward.
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.
| 872 | games |
| 87% | never played |
| 3% | unfinished |
| 5% | beaten |
| 5% | completed |
| 0% | won't play |