More Dollars Spent than Hours Played Εμεθ’s profile
I might have a problem with retro games too:
https://retroachievements.org/user/Emeth
Two-Week Report: July
The premise of the game is in the title, and it seemed contrived, but Overwhelmingly Positive always catches my eye so I decided to give it a chance. I regret nothing. This was really good. Of the four main routes, two of them go deep into the relevant lore regarding the curse, so you might miss it if you pick the "wrong" route, but the NPCs will helpfully nudge you toward those and the early choices seem designed to funnel a first-time player into one. My only real criticism was that one of the bad endings (I won't say which) is almost impossible to get without a guide, which I found a bit odd.
Meh. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. The very first scene of the intro was apparently one of the last scenes written for the game, and it shows. The quality of the writing never quite lives up to the initial impressions. Several antagonist characters are set up and done relatively well at first, if a little cliche, but their story threads are abruptly dropped before they can cause any real problems for the protagonists, because the protagonists couldn't realistically do anything against them in their social class. The ending is convenient, predictable, and comes rather abruptly. The character designs and general tone of the romantic scenes were clearly designed with a male audience in mind (that's not a value judgment, it simply is the case and it's worth mentioning). Some aspects I did enjoy were the unabashedly flawed protagonist, the banter between the female leads, and its unexpected but tasteful portrayal of religion, of all things. It's not a major feature of the story, but when it was there it was relevant and well done. All told, it held my attention until the end, and left me hopeful for better from ebi-hime's later works.
Ah, another old classic 3D mascot platformer collectathon that I couldn't resist playing again. Why is this so? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. Perhaps it's because the game is unabashedly enthusiastic to be exactly what it is. Ty is very pleased with itself. The game doesn't seem to care if the audience it was made for has already grown up and might think that the "90s cool" protagonist is actually kind of a dork. The characters are absurd parodies of themselves. The voice actor for your designated tutorial NPC laughs at their own lines after reading them with disregard for the subtitles, and the "bloopers" are left in the audio. During the credits, the antagonist is so ready to be done with the game that he tells the player to "go read a book or something." Honestly though? I forgot about all that stuff a long time ago. I played it again because I remember enjoying it despite not remembering why. It's just a vibe. I've never played the sequels, so it'll be interesting to find out if they kept that vibe or followed the Jak and Daxter example and turned edgy. The Steam version adds a hardcore mode, which feels kinda unnecessary. If you're even a little bit careful, you won't die in this mode. There are no instant deaths that I know of, and there's no situation you can't escape by simply exiting the level. It doesn't change the game in any way that I know of other than replacing the extra lives with full health items, which makes the game easier, and forbidding you from saving. That might've been nice to know in advance.
Still chipping away at this one as the devs continue to put out updates. I'm at level 41/50 now.
I Survived the Steam Sale and All I Got Was This Lousy Badge
I add free games from my discovery queue to the library all the time, so the number of them that appear in said queue is always going up. They’re guilt-free adds that basically serve as bookmarks for me. I may or may not get around to actually playing them. Looks like I added around a dozen of them this time. I’ve begun a habit of throwing away one thing I’m comfortable getting rid of per day (actual garbage doesn’t count) and an additional two for every new thing I buy, in an attempt to de-clutter my living space. I might start something similar with these free games cluttering my library. I’ve been working on reading, audio book and other backlogs as well in addition to Steam. Another small win is that ever since the sale ended, I haven’t bought any new games. I hope to keep a completion pace similar to this—at least 4 Steam games a month, higher if the games I choose are especially short. I’ve been playing long ones lately. Overall, the vibe this update is that I might finally be getting something together.
End of Month Report: June
It's Gex, so I wasn't exactly expecting N. Sane/Reignited Trilogy levels of effort, but this was truly the bare minimum. Easy Steam achievements are an excuse for fans to re-play the games and finally beat Gex 1/Planet X if they haven't done so before, but there's nothing here to justify a $30 price tag or excite/expand the base enough for a sequel to be worth it. "I'm thinkin' I'm back?" I'd like that, but I sincerely doubt it.
This game has always been free, so I was convinced to try it back when it was still pretty new as my first visual novel. When it came to Steam I knew I'd have to play it again, and I was not disappointed. It still hits me the same way it did when I first played it over 10 years ago. If you're going to play the Steam version though, save often, because it can crash sometimes.
A cute game with some rather serious pacing issues, if you ask me. After each main story arc, you'll unlock some new scenes, and about half of them will be the same scenes from other characters' perspectives, which is fine—but you'll be required to play through those before moving on to the next part of the main story, leading to a lot of redundant dialogue immediately being required reading, and you'll have a basic idea of what happened in the other scenes because another NPC already talked about it and spoiled it for you. There were also 78 extra post-game scenes, most of which was more of the same, and didn't unlock in a chronologically coherent fashion either. It's not the kind of game that you'd want to binge-play on the weekend. Like any manga with a lot of filler, it's probably best enjoyed as a drip-feed.
I think a Steam sale happened or something
About 30 new games picked up over the last 2 weeks. I hoped to get more games finished, but I’m happy with the hours spent this time around.
2-Week Report: June
No actual games played in the last two weeks, just some free idle achievements.
Non-Progress
The real report this time around is that I only bought one game in the last two weeks—Deltarune! So, while no real progress was made on the backlog, it didn’t get bigger, either, and that’s a bigger win than last time.
End of Month Report: May
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.
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.
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.
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
Played this game before it had achievements; happy to have an excuse to play it again. Now, it's completed… Mega Sad.
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 completed. Never replayed that one as much as I-III, but they polished it a lot and I quite like it now.
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 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.
944 | games |
87% | never played |
3% | unfinished |
4% | beaten |
6% | completed |
0% | won't play |