You can tell we still have a long ways to go when talking about replayability in games because people see Starfox 64 and $50 and just say "well it's like an hour long so not worth it" when there's the new cheevos, multiple routes, score attacking, secrets, and it's just fun to replay.

Lakeside Loneliness

I've been listening to a LOT of Spiritbox and South Arcade this week so if you've got something similar (female vocals preferred) I'm all ears

All right Vince, you outlived Ted Turner, you can go whenever

How did Shadowverse: Champion's Battle never get ported? How is that still a Switch exclusive? That's publishing malpractice. Also how are there so few card battle games with a fun anime story mode. Developer malpractice.

Idk if it's that we're in a particularly tumultuous time or I'm getting more sentimental as I get older or what but I get hit by this like a truck. And if you put a montage at the end of your game and I've been playing that series forever? Out come the waterworks. I can't help it, it's great

Nu metal is back on the menu for 2026, sorry

Spotify sucks and Rainwave likes to stop working for prolonged periods of time so I finally put a bit of time into finding an Android music player I actually like (Musicolet) so I guess now I'll be looking forward to Bandcamp Fridays.

Finished Life is Strange: Reunion this morning and man, I'm happy that the Max/Chloe games have an actual nice end (or at least, they can depending on choices obv). It was a little bumpy and weird getting there but Deck Nine did a great job with it.

Life is Strange is a weird series because yeah it's about lesbians messing with spacetime, but it feels like the impossible part these days is the sleepy Northeastern campus town vibe with hipster bars and small time bands playing

I really want a new desk, but I absolutely do not want to go through the process of taking everything out of this desk and putting a new one together

My Gaming Plan this week is to buckle down and finish Life is Strange: Reunion. It feels far less pandering than I was expecting honestly and the bigger moments have been really good so far. UE5 animation goes a long way, especially with eye movements. Started Saros, feels good, I'll get to it

The plus side of noise canceling headphones is that I can't hear all of the extremely loud diversions going on around me. The negative side of them is that people just make those diversions even louder until I can hear them because I'm not allowed to have time to myself

AEW needs to pick up a lot of people, even though they have too many. They could always make ROH a much stronger show too. Still, get New Day, MCMG, Kairi, Charlie, Killer Kelly, and Kay Lee Ray at all costs, and then save Safire Reed before WWE tries to put her in the AI machine

I certainly enjoy the resurgence of Faxanadu in recent years. Kinda goes hand in hand with the re-evaluation of Zelda 2 and realizing how good it is, especially for the time.

Work managed to mess this up before we even got there, so that's wonderful/incredible. Back to max stress until at least end of next week.

I think my issue with PC gaming is that because I'm at my monitor I am vastly more aware that there's other things going on beyond the game I'm playing so I always have this nagging feeling while I play, makes it hard to lock in. On my TV it's very easy for me to concentrate on just that.

The Gaming Plan this week is to pick up Saros. I've watched very little footage of it, I just trust Housemarque to put out a really good game. I finished People of Note (great game) and I have Life is Strange: Reunion to play. Nothing else until Forza Horizon 6.

I'm finishing up People of Note and it's the sort of indie rpg I love to see. There's a lot of FFX DNA (among other things) but it also has proper direction beyond hey we like these old games. Love the cast (Synthia!), love the music, lots of good jokes, strong battle system, love dungeon puzzles

WWE cutting Kairi is booking malpractice. Unless she just wants to go back to Japan. If she wants to stay in the US and wrestle, AEW has to just pay for her, whatever she wants. Same with MCMG. Absolutely baffling cuts this time, incredibly stupid for a company that's making more money than ever

I MIGHT be tempted to play FF14 since I'm pretty sure I can do all the stuff I care about solo but I'd need a pretty empty slate of new releases to really fit that in. Maybe next year it takes up several slots in my !10game, who knows

I'm rearranging my entire Steam library into Sony console aligned eras (2013-2019/2020-Current, that kind of thing) and it's already helping me actually think about what I own and remember my older games to try out on vastly better hardware

Really holding out hope that come June, once work has finally finished going through this absolute debacle of an "optimization" (you can guess what that means), things can just be steady, I can settle into my new schedule and my stress levels can go down for the first time since 2020

I finished everything in Pragmata except for Lunatic difficulty and I really can't get over the performances for Hugh and Diana, they're just the best father/daughter pair in a game. It's genuinely affecting. It's becoming more and more likely that my top 5 for 2026 has 4 Capcom games on it.

Pragmata really is an all-timer. An instant classic that I'll happily replay over the years. Man.

Dear game creators: they already made Dark Souls, you don't have to keep trying to make it yourself

I should be finishing Pragmata tomorrow and I know it's really really good because I'm absolutely stalling on finishing it because I don't want it to be over.

No new games to pick up this week so the plan is to finish Pragmata (which is turning out to be an easy top 3 for the year for me already), get 100% in that and then finish People of Note. I'm interested in Aphelion next week and Saros after that. Forza Horizon 6 on the...horizon...

WWE people are finding out that TKO doesn't care about any of the action or people in any capacity, they just want ad space. If they could book every match to be 3 minutes like it's a UFC card filled with KO's they absolutely would. I can only hope any fans they have left wake up and leave them

Diana (Pragmata) is probably the best child character in a game. But Hugh is also the best everyman character. Like, he's actually the most wholesome main character in game history, no one even comes close.

I haven't watched WWE in years but I'd usually be at least somewhat interested in Wrestlemania. This year everything I've read or heard about the build for it looks/sounds so bad that I can't imagine wanting to see any part of it. The whole company sounds like a disaster under TKO

I decided to re-register an account to enjoy the memes of our 1990s #MoonChild game. 😁👍 I designed Hoi and Moon Child. Reinier van Vliet coded it, and Ramon Braumuller made the soundtrack. Play Moon Child online: proofofconcept.nl/portfolio/mo... Moon Child Archive: archive.org/details/Moon...

The lesson of Moon Child should be pretty obvious. It's not haha funny music great meme, it's that hey I would actually play this probably terrible unfinished game because it has great music. Good music can overcome a LOT of mediocrity elsewhere

I started reading The Tainted Cup on a whim, didn't even know it was first in a series. Now I'm pretty hooked. Magical Holmes and Watson investigation in an interesting fantasy land that's well explained? Hell yeah. #BookSky

This is just a completely insane thing

The actually important meme chart

The most bad-ass rebuttal from Tite Kubo, the author of Bleach.

I actually have to do some speedrunning for at least a day or two because Spica Adventure is, incredibly, being released on modern consoles. Will I actually revive my SRC account to post my time there? Absolutely not. Will I get a sub 6? Sure. Nice to not need the Taito Type X emu stuff now though

Capcom is just seemingly operating at a higher level than everyone else these days, they're pretty much showcasing how the AAA space SHOULD be. Great new entries in old series, revivals, collections, new IPs, scope is kept in check, games allowed to be shorter than 20hrs, varied art styles, lovely

Finished up Octopath Traveler 0 today with everything. Still a great game, I just wish it had the more expressive job system/skills that Octopath 2 has. It also doesn't look quite as good as 2. Everything else is as good or better though. About as good as you could ever do converting a mobile game.

I watched the @evewrestling.bsky.social Bruised, Battered and Hungover show and man, that's some good wrestling. Love Safire Reed, Euro Smash, Anita Vaughan, Rhio. Martina looks the best I've ever seen her. Excellent stuff. Looking forward to that TJPW joint show too.

It's a big watching stuff weekend. Got a PW EVE show to watch, Project Hail Mary in IMAX, UFC with the boys, AEW Dynasty on Sunday. And then next weekend there's like 10+ hours of wrestling w/o even touching Wrestlemania (and all of it better than WWE)

Coming up on the end of Octopath Traveler 0 and my feeling is that the stories and overarching narrative are the best the series has had but the battle gameplay can't hide its mobile roots. Characters are too samey in battle and the job system's too simple. Octopath 3 will probably own though

I finished There Is No Antimemetics Division and I thought it was very good. However, a lot of it is very disjointed because of the way it was originally published so when I got to the part where it was actually sticking with things I didn't realize it until later in the book so it's kinda weird

I'm reading There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm and it's been a very fun quick read. It's kind of SCP adjacent or like what the FBC in Control might do pre that game. I like a quick sci-fi guy.

Turns out noise canceling headphones are really good for making you lock in while playing games and you forget to go to bed whoops

The Gaming Plan is to play Octopath 0 and Life is Strange: Reunion. I'm holding off on Damon & Baby until it gets a couple announced patches. I might grab People of Note right away but otherwise it's the first two and getting retro cheevos in Ghost Squad on the side. Pragmata in 2 weeks.

If I'd known Ghost Squad for Wii takes like 30 hours to unlock everything in the game I would have bought it when it was new. Arcade style short games always got short shrift at retail back in the day but lightgun especially were seen as so disposable. Real shame with how complete a package it is