[blog] GCTuba's Gaming Adventures

July 13-19, 2025

That’s right, I had a surprise completion last week, and I wasn’t even documenting it! Just like the old days 😂 The emulation cataloging continued as well, of course. More on that in the conclusion section as always. But first, let’s talk about my self-control in resisting several game bundles this week!

Game Acquisitions



So every few months, Fanatical will put on what they call Bundlefest where they’ll reveal a new game bundle everyday for a week with different themes. Last week, they revealed bundles for RPGs, strategy games, shooters, arcade games, and roguelikes. The first bundle for RPGs looked pretty interesting, and it was only $10.15 for 7 games (like the rest). With how long this genre tends to be, this seems like an absolute steal. I was too busy to look into the games right away, so I saved the page for later so I could investigate further. The bundles kept accumulating and I finally found the time after a couple days. The game I was most interested in from the RPG bundle was removed at the request of the developer who claims there was a mistake and it should never have been included. I felt deflated after that, and I wasn’t sure if I would like any of the other games on offer enough to justify spending the money so I decided to resist. I like strategy games as well, but most of the ones on offer are real-time and/or 4X which I’m really not a fan of so I skipped those too. There were some decent shooters on offer, but a lot of them are shorter experiences that retail for less than $10 anyway so I didn’t quite feel like the value was there. Same with the other bundles, a couple decent games that looked interesting but nothing that I felt I had to get. All-in-all, a decent Bundlefest but not one that I decided to partake in. At least I won that Wanderer game in a Reddit giveaway! That should keep me occupied for a couple hours.

# of Games: 2

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps



This is going to be a weird one. This is a game that I played exclusively at a friend’s house casually and very sporadically over the course of a couple years. As such, I don’t have any recordings of it or know how long it took me to beat it. I also decided to keep it in my backlog (as well as marking the completion) since there are so many routes you can take and I’m curious how the game will feel when played in a normal period of time. My review is below so you can learn more about it. Long story short, it was a decent visual novel.

Game Reviews

Growing Up is essentially a visual novel where you play through 18 years of a character's life learning new skills, going to school, working, and making friends. Different skills have different attribute requirements you need to meet to unlock them. They all require spending knowledge points, but they also have their own requirement such as intelligence, charm, memory, and so on. The basic gameplay loop consists of increasing these attributes through something called a brain map, going to various areas around town and the school to participate in different activities, taking a test every few years, and rinse and repeat until high school graduation.

The brain map is laid out as interconnected nodes that are slowly revealed as you click through the few revealed ones. These nodes raise your attributes. Depending on the route you want to take in life, you can choose from many different activities like working to make money, playing video games (so meta), studying for exams, sports, and much more. There are two primary meters to keep track of from year to year that you need to keep in balance: happiness and parent satisfaction. The different activities can raise or lower these meters, but also have the benefits of increasing your attributes, making money in the case of jobs, and ultimately determining the path you take in life. I wanted to be a video game designer, so I made sure to visit the arcade often and talked to a couple game enthusiasts there whenever I got the chance.

The gameplay loop is broken up every so often with social interactions and exams. Every "run", you'll meet various characters picked seemingly at random that you can choose to befriend, potentially romance, or ignore completely. There is a high degree of replayability since there are many different people you can talk to and activities to participate in. Every few years, you'll take an exam which presents itself basically like Bejeweled (or I guess Candy Crush for a more modern example).

There are numerous grammatical errors which is unfortunate for a game that is mostly reading. They never detracted from my enjoyment, but it's worth mentioning. I playing this game sporadically over the course of a couple years so I wasn't able to time how long it took me, but I imagine a first run takes a few hours if you actually read everything. Subsequent runs can probably be completed in a couple hours if you know exactly what route to take and skip all the dialogue. The art style is alright but nothing groundbreaking, and the writing ranges from good to cringey. Despite the many different routes you can take, the moment-to-moment gameplay never really changes so you really have to like the characters to keep playing. Still, I had a good enough time and recommend this game to anyone looking for a simple visual novel experience.

Rating – 7/10

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episodes 15-22 (still watching, show ended)

· Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Ghost in the Shell continues to be an enjoyable anime. The visuals aren’t as impressive, but I think I like it more than the first two movies now. That tends to happen when you get more time to flesh out the characters. I also haven’t brought this up yet, but this show takes advantage of my surround sound system more than most. I love the sound design. I’ve seen this Harry Potter movie before so no surprises here, I still think it’s fine. Looks like a slower week for watching stuff.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Cool, I haven’t had a game review in a little while. It was nice getting back to that. On the emulation front, I mentioned last time that I only had Sega consoles left to go. More specifically, I have the Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, CD, and Dreamcast to get through. I had already gone through the Saturn earlier. I’ve finished up the Master System and Genesis. The Master System games could be rough given their age, or they could be great! The Genesis looks like it has a lot of a hidden gems as I expected. I guess these systems are known for their shoot-em-ups and beat-em-ups which are genres I’m not interested in so I didn’t add as many as people suggested I should. A lot of classic platformers such as Wonder Boy have since been remade and released on PC so I left those out as well. That’s been a common theme throughout this process. There seems to be a lot of cross releases between the Genesis and Game Gear so the Game Gear doesn’t have a big library of its own heavy hitters. I imagine that probably won’t take too long to get through. After that, I only have the CD and Dreamcast to go through, unless anyone here has any other console suggestions. The cataloging phase of my emulation project appears to be nearing its end. I’ll talk about what’s next when the time comes so stay tuned.

For this coming week, it’ll be more Ghost in the Shell watching. I’ll be finishing up season 1 of Stand Alone Complex and moving on to season 2. I’ll also be continuing my Harry Potter “marathon” with Prisoner of Azkaban. I’ve seen it once before but it’s been a while, so I don’t really remember anything about it. After that, all the Harry Potter movies will be new to me. No gaming planned this week, unless a surprise Tales of Phantasia session happens. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,323 (+2)

July 20-26, 2025

I’ve been at it for weeks now, but the finish line to (step one of) my emulation cataloging is finally in sight! Just ignore the part in parentheses and it looks like I’m actually making progress. More on that below. I also dodged a few more game bundles. It seems I’ve become adept at not spending money (or playing anything by the looks of it). Let’s get into it.

Game Acquisitions



The Sonic game is related to the emulation cataloging. Despite not enjoying the one Sonic game I beat a couple years ago (Generations), I have had Sonic Lost World in my backlog for a little while now due to getting it in a bundle with games I actually care about. I figured if I’m going to play one of the best games in the series along with one of the worst, I might as well see what I’m missing with some of the better in-between games. You can see which Sonic games I’m planning to play in my Sonic Play Order collection. I added some highly regarded fan mods of the first few games to patch in some quality of life improvements like widescreen support and infinite lives to make the experience a little less frustrating. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually enjoy one of these? Rounding out my acquisitions this week were a couple games purchased by a family member, so I have access to them through Steam Family Sharing. Score!

# of Games: 3

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episode 23-Season 2 Episode 10 (still watching, show ended)

· Family Guy Season 23 Episode 18 (all caught up, show ongoing)

· Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Ghost in the Shell is a good anime. You should watch it if you’re into anime, cyberpunk, and/or crime dramas. This also marks the end of the Harry Potter movies I’ve already seen. This week should start all new content!

Conclusion/Upcoming

In my last update, I mentioned that I only had the Sega Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, CD, and Dreamcast consoles left to catalog. I must’ve been on a roll, because I just wrapped up the Dreamcast which marks the end of the console game cataloging! Getting all these emulators set up made me remember that I skipped over any itch.io games from the many charity bundles that required emulators to play. I didn’t want to bother having to download an emulator just to get a game to work at the time. Now that I have tons of emulated games through basically every major retro console, I can go back through my itch.io bundle purchases and add any interesting ROMs from there to my backlog as well. I’m hoping that process won’t take too long. After that, step two is acquiring the games and making sure they work with my machine. That will take a good bit of time.

Aside from working on that, I will also continue my Ghost in the Shell marathon. I’m on the second and final season of Stand Alone Complex which I probably won’t get through this week. No personal gaming planned, but maybe a Tales of Phantasia session is in store? We gotta fight the big bad! That’s it for this week, thanks for reading! The next post will be the July recap. Crazy how quickly this year is going.

Backlog total: 3,329 (+6)

July 2025

I definitely didn’t forget to post this at the beginning of the month, nosiree. I definitely wasn’t sitting at work writing the date on something and realizing a new month had started and I didn’t write my monthly post. Better late than never, right? Anyway, not much gaming this month, but I basically completed my emulation cataloging, so that’s an accomplishment. More on that below.

Game Acquisitions



Not quite as many as last month but still a fair amount. I was dodging Fanatical bundles left and right to keep this down which I’m quite proud of. I did make three purchases here with Kaze for ~$1, Athenian Rhapsody, Terra Memoria, and Space Prison for ~$10, and CHAOS;HEAD NOAH and CHAOS;CHILD for ~$10. CHAOS;HEAD NOAH and CHAOS;CHILD had been on my wishlist for a little while now and with this purchase, I have completed the Science Adventure collection. Now I just need to play them! I redeemed the July Humble Choice as well; I’m especially looking forward to Rogue Trader. The others were giveaways and Steam Family purchases. Not a bad month!

# of Games: 32

Total Money Spent: $20.80

Price/Game: $0.65

Game Recaps

Very similar to last month, I only played games two separate days, and it was Tales of Phantasia both days. Thank God my friend agreed to play games with me, otherwise I would never get any gaming in it seems. I did beat Growing Up (you can see my review here, but I didn’t time or record it so left it off the recap. We got a lot accomplished in Tales of Phantasia across just two sessions though. We fought in the Valhalla War, fought Dhaos for the first time, and saved the source of the planet's magic. Next time I believe we’ll finally return to our own time. Check out our let’s play!

Tales of Phantasia playlist

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

· Tales from the Loop Season 1 Episodes 6-8 (complete)

· Family Guy Season 23 Episodes 16-18 (all caught up, show ongoing)

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episode 1-Season 2 Episode 20 (still watching, show ended)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 3 Episodes 1-3 (still watching, show ended)

· Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

· Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

· Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

· Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I was really on a roll with Ghost in the Shell and Harry Potter in July, wasn’t I? There will be more of that in August too. Tales from the Loop was a good show too, just odd. I’ve gotta give my best of the month to Stand Alone Complex. The setting, characters, animation, and story are all just really interesting to me. I had already seen these three Harry Potter movies before so nothing new there. Maybe when I get to the new stuff, it will take the lead for best of August. We’ll see!

Conclusion/Upcoming

Bit of an odd month July was. I mentioned in my June post that I was hoping to get the emulation cataloging done by the end of July and I managed to do so in the last week. I realized I didn’t have any Atari console games which feels like a big oversight due to how influential they were on the games industry, but I couldn’t really find anything I was interested in that hasn’t already been remade and/or available on PC. I almost added Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar, but decided against it due to some graphical glitches with the emulator I was using and As mentioned in my last weekly post, I still want to go through my itch.io purchases and pick out any games from there that I skipped over earlier due to needing emulators to run. I haven’t had much time to get to it yet, but I got through the A’s (going alphabetically). I’ll be finished in no time!

I’m going to spend most if not all of August continuing to watch Ghost in the Shell and Harry Potter. I’m nearing the end of Stand Alone Complex, but I still have Solid State Society, Arise, and Stand Alone Complex 2045 which will take some time to get through. I still have four Harry Potter movies to go as well (I just watched Goblet of Fire before writing this post). I’m still not planning on getting any personal gaming in as I wrap up step one of the emulation cataloging and begin step two where I actually get all the games and test them to make sure they work. I’ll probably get more co-op Tales of Phantasia in though! I feel like we’re getting closer to the end, not sure how much is left. The Dhaos fight sure was a doozy. I’ll see you all tomorrow for the weekly post assuming I don’t forget again. Thanks as always for reading!

Backlog total: 3,332 (+28)

July 27-August 2, 2025

It may not seem like it, but this felt like a productive week for me. I finished cataloging all the games I plan on playing on retro consoles which took literal months. Now I’m working on looking through my itch.io purchases for any hidden emulated games I overlooked. After that will come the arduous process of getting all the games and making sure they work on my machine. I’m looking forward to it though oddly enough, I love organizing my library. I also played more Tales of Phantasia! Overall a good week.

Game Acquisitions



Uhh, I can explain. So lately Steam and itch.io have been in the news for removing a bunch of adult games from their storefronts due to pressure from payment processors and conservative religious groups. It’s an ongoing issue still being worked through and many people are rightfully complaining about censorship. In an act of defiance/solidarity, GOG gave away a bundle containing a bunch of adult games to raise awareness. I would not normally purchase games like this, but I do want to show my support and the ones I added to my backlog actually have decent reviews. The only games I purchased on this list were CHAOS;HEAD NOAH and CHAOS;CHILD which completes my Science Adventure collection. I’m actually quite excited about that, it means I can finally start the series (eventually). The other games were Steam Family purchases or giveaways as usual. Keylocker from the Epic giveaway in particular looks really cool. I love turn-based strategy and cyberpunk aesthetics.

# of Games: 23

Total Money Spent: $9.70

Price/Game: $0.42

Game Recaps

Just one session of Tales of Phantasia this week, but what a hell of a session it was. We finally fought the big bad guy but he fled before we could finish the job. We also restored magic to the world which will help us out when we return to our own time. So exciting! Check it out:









TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 2 Episodes 11-22 (still watching, show ended)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 2 Episodes 2-3 (still watching, show ended)

· Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Decent week for movies and TV. Ghost in the Shell and My Little Pony continue being enjoyable enough. This is the first Harry Potter movie I watched that I haven’t seen before, and I liked it! We finally meet Voldemort in the flesh, which somehow took half the series to get to. Spoilers technically, but it is a 20 year old movie if you wanted to feel old today.

Conclusion/Upcoming

So yeah, I think this was a good week overall. I got more Tales of Phantasia time in and completed step one of my emulation project. Not much more to say there that I haven’t said for the past several updates. Next week will consist entirely of more Ghost in the Shell and the next Harry Potter movie. Depending on how much free time I have, I may be able to knock out the itch.io cataloging as well. I don’t think there are that many emulated games in the bundles I purchased. After that, I’ll start the acquiring and testing of all the games. There may even be another Tales of Phantasia session, we’ll see. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,345 (+16)

August 3-9, 2025

That’s right, I’m finally on the last step of my emulation setup journey. I’ve decided on all the old retro games I want to play, and I have the emulators set up to play them. Now “all” I have left to do is acquire them, add them to my Playnite library, make sure they run on my PC, and add them to my backlog when everything is good to go. Now that I’ve typed that all out, it still sounds like a lot, and it is. But at least I finally get to have a controller in my hand 😅 For the next several updates, you’ll see my backlog total shoot up even more than usual as I add the emulated games to it. I’m also going to have separate pictures in my game acquisitions section for my normal game purchases/giveaways and my emulated games. That way they won’t get jumbled up and you can see exactly what I deemed worthy of being played all these years later that I missed. Let’s get into it.

Game Acquisitions



I’m going to start off with my normal acquisitions first, then add my emulated games. Last week had me redeeming the Humble Choice once again, Humble has been on a roll lately with those. Persona 5 Royal was an especially big get as I had that on my wishlist to grab for $20 and it just about made it there. Now I can get it here with other good-looking games for even lower. There’s also some more free NSFW games on offer here to continue raising awareness about video game censorship. Go show your support and sign the petition!

# of Games: 12

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0



You can see the fruits of my itch.io emulation perusing on display here. I was hoping for a few more games, but I still found six that I previously passed over due to needing emulators to play. I’ve also got my five N-Gage games I’m planning on playing ready to go. I’ve actually had those ready for a while now but forgot to add them to my backlog after they were set up. Moving on, you can see that I’ve added the entire Shining Force TRPG series to my list. I love tactics games even though I’m bad at them, and I’m ashamed to admit I’d never even heard of them before prior to my research. I even have one of the newer games in the series (Shining Resonance Refrain), although it is far removed from these and might as well be a separate thing altogether. It doesn’t help that I’ve never played a Sega console which most of these games are on.

You can see I also decided to play through the Wario Land series. This actually started while I was researching Mario games and wanted to add the Super Mario Land games to the list. I came across Super Mario Land 3 which is also secretly kind of the first Wario game and not really a Mario game at all. I fell through a lot of similar rabbit holes like that during this research. I’ve already played the WarioWare games years ago and loved them, otherwise they would absolutely be on this list also. I’ve even gotten my lone Virtual Boy game on here just to complete the series. Shoutout to gartho on HLTB for putting this collection together.

The EarthBound trilogy has made its way here as well. I initially wrote off the NES as being too old for me to get any enjoyment out of those games these days (I’m 33 for anyone wondering), but there’s a highly rated ROM hack of the first game called “Mother – 25th Anniversary Edition” which adds a lot of QOL improvements, so I thought why not. One thing worth noting is that some of these games are Japanese only but have well-done English fan translations. If a game doesn’t have English support, I won’t play it. Shining Force III Scenarios 2 and 3 as well as Mother 3 fall under that category. Why won’t Nintendo bring the conclusion of EarthBound to the West?

Next on the list is a super obscure TurboGrafx-16/SNES platformer series known as Bonk. I don’t really know anything about these games except they’re short and were considered competent back in the day. I remember seeing the TurboGrafx-16 logo and some games on the Wii Virtual Console back when I was in high school but never heard of the console before and never looked into it until now. It was a commercial failure in the U.S. which explains it. I’ve got a few other random emulated games backlogged this week but I’ve already rambled way longer than I was planning to, so I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Game Recaps

Surprise, it’s not Tales of Phantasia! I actually got to play a game with my other friend that I don’t get to talk to much these days. I was supposed to go to his kid’s birthday party last week, but I was dealing with a bit of a health crisis and sadly had to cancel. It sucks; I haven’t seen him since January. I felt bad about missing it, and he missed me being there enough that we were able to schedule a remote gaming session where we played a survival game called Stranded Deep. We had played this once before back in like September for an hour and a half so we were very rusty. I felt like I was just starting to get the hang of it when we wrapped up for the night. I don’t know when we’ll play again, our play sessions are very sporadic. It’s a fun survival game though if you’re into the genre! Even after five hours, we’ve made very little progress and are basically still on the first island. No footage here, just two old friends catching up.

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 2 Episodes 23-26 (complete)

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_2045 Season 1 Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 1: Ghost Pain

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 2: Ghost Whispers

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 3: Ghost Tears

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 4: Ghost Stands Alone

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 5: Pyrophoric Cult

· Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie

Wow that’s a lot of Ghost in the Shell. The series gets a little hard to follow at this point. Stand Alone Complex and the sequel series 2045 are the only things considered TV shows here which is why I marked them as complete and still watching, respectively. Stand Alone Complex was a good anime, you should watch it. Not sure if I love how it ended, but I still enjoyed the journey. Solid State Society is a movie that takes place two years after the show, and I felt like it was a decent epilogue. Ghost in the Shell: Arise is a series of hour-long specials in a totally separate continuity to Stand Alone Complex. I feel like it was over too quickly for me to get particularly attached to any characters. Speaking of, most of the characters are the same ones from Stand Alone Complex but written just differently enough to be off-putting. Maybe they weren’t meant to be watched back-to-back with the original series and be given a few years to breathe like most people experienced it. The timing happened to work out where I watched Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie instead of Harry Potter this week. Like Solid State Society, it’s like an epilogue movie to Arise. It was fine, better than the show I think. I’m too early in 2045 to form a opinion on that yet so stay tuned.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Another productive week I’d say. It was way more productive than expected since I was dealing with health stuff and took Monday and Tuesday off work. I finished up the itch.io cataloging way sooner than expected and still had time to set up the rest of the emulators and start adding new games to them. I imagine most of my blog posts for the foreseeable future will be adding emulated games to my backlog with the occasional Tales of Phantasia session thrown in. I hope you find that exciting 😝 I’ve still got enough Ghost in the Shell left to occupy me this week as well, and will probably get to the next Harry Potter movie this weekend. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,407 (+62)

August 10-16, 2025

That’s right, I got more Tales of Phantasia time last week. I also continued adding emulated games to my backlog as you’ll see below.

Game Acquisitions



Starting with the normal games, you can see that I didn’t add a whole lot. These were all giveaways through Stove, Epic, and Amazon. I don’t really have any big standouts here, but these all look like they could be fun in one way or another.

# of Games: 7

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0



You can very clearly see the series on display here. I added Kirby, Fire Emblem, and Mario & Luigi to my backlog. A lot of Nintendo last week! I’ve actually beaten a couple Kirby games before (one through the Wii Virtual Console and one on my GBA). It’s a fun series; I’m excited to dive into it. I’ve heard of Fire Emblem before, but I’ve never played one. I love strategy RPGs though so I would be remiss if I didn’t give it a shot. I’m worried it might be above my skill level (especially the older games which tend to be less forgiving), but I’ll try my best! I never really heard of Mario & Luigi until Brothership was announced, but I went back to research the other games, and they look like something I’d be into. Here's every emulated game I've added since starting the emulation cataloging project. This only includes two weeks so far so not bad progress. I don't how long I'll be able to show a running total though, I'll probably have too many games to be able to get a legible picture from them soon enough. I still think it looks cool in the meantime though.



Game Recaps

Not a lot of time, but I did get some Tales of Phantasia in. Even in this short amount of time, we managed to go to the future and defeat Dhaos for the second time. Check it out!





TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Season 1 Episode 3-Season 2 Episode 2 (still watching, show ended)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 3 Episodes 4-5 (still watching, show ended)

· Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Oh no, SAC_2045 is a lot shorter than I was expecting ☹ It’s only 24 22-minute episodes so I’m breezing through it. It has a bad reputation, and a lot of fans say you should just skip it, but I’m kinda loving it. The 3D animation works way better for it than I expected it to. The only thing that’s throwing me off is that the art style looks similar to something you’d see on Disney XD like Star Wars Rebels, but it still has very adult scenes like people getting their heads blown off. It’s very jarring the first few times you see it happen. Aside from that though, it’s a good time. They even got a lot of voice actors from the original series back! Sure, it’s not as good as the original series, but it’s still very much worth watching. My Little Pony continues to be fine, and Harry Potter is still enjoyable. I don’t know how I managed to miss out on most of the movies for like 20 years.

Conclusion/Upcoming

It took me way longer than expected to test out all the Fire Emblem and Kirby games, so I didn’t get quite as many emulated games added to my list as I expected last week. The way I’m testing the games to make sure they work is by going through the first level to test that the mechanics work and there are no crashes. Shining Force in particular was bad about crashing near the end of fights which is why I want to test an entire level as well as an interlude/transition into a second level just to make sure. I think it was Genealogy of the Holy War that took me like an hour and a half to get through the first battle which is crazy. I noticed a few times in Fire Emblem that seizing castles would sometimes just not show up as an option and I would have to keep moving different characters in front of the door until one decided to work. It made ending battles very confusing and I hope that doesn’t become a regular thing. There was also an incident in the latest Fire Emblem game Engage where the cutscene that played at the end of the first battle completely tanked my framerate and I had to sit through a slideshow and reset the emulator to get it working again. It’s going to be very unfortunate if I have to do that for every cutscene as the story is one of the main reasons I’m interested in the series.

When testing the Kirby games, I was having a little bit of trouble getting the N64 emulator to work how I wanted. There would a thick black border around the whole thing (a remnant of overscan as the games were originally made to be played on a CRT) and a constant message at the bottom of the screen that wouldn’t go away. I ended up ditching Project 64 and moving my N64 games under Retroarch. Thankfully, I decided to come to this conclusion now when I only had two games set up under Project 64 (Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and Paper Mario), so it didn’t take too long to adjust them.

There weren’t too many hiccups with the other games, and I was able to get through all of Mario & Luigi on Saturday since a lot of the emulator kinks are slowly being ironed out. For this week, there’s a chance I might get through all of SAC_2045 and officially be caught up on everything Ghost in the Shell until the new show airs next year. If that’s the case, I have Ironheart, Raised by Wolves, and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld ready to go. Those shows will be my focus for the rest of the month. On the gaming front, unless another Tales of Phantasia session rolls around, it’s going to be more emulation testing. To give a sort of progress update on that, I have a text file I’m working off of that currently has 423 lines on it. Most of those lines are individual games, but some of them have entire series on them like the aforementioned Kirby or Paper Mario. As I test the games and add them to the backlog, I remove them from the text file so you kind of have an idea of how many I have left to do (spoiler alert: it’s a lot). I think I’ll update this number every week, that seems like a good progress report. I’ll be back with another update next week. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,452 (+45)

Pretty cool project you got going there. As someone who got into retro gaming just a couple years ago, I'm recognizing a bunch of even the more obscure stuff like Bonk. Hope you have fun with emulating these once you get to start playing some of them.

For Bonk, I can tell you that it's a platformer series where the unique mechanic is that you *bonk* your big-ass, weaponized head at enemies. It's not a great game per se but I enjoyed finding games with weird little twists like that during my retro gaming craze. Hope you make similar discoveries :)

Pretty cool project you got going there. As someone who got into retro gaming just a couple years ago, I'm recognizing a bunch of even the more obscure stuff like Bonk. Hope you have fun with emulating these once you get to start playing some of them.

For Bonk, I can tell you that it's a platformer series where the unique mechanic is that you *bonk* your big-ass, weaponized head at enemies. It's not a great game per se but I enjoyed finding games with weird little twists like that during my retro gaming craze. Hope you make similar discoveries :)

I tested out all the Bonk games and the headbutting does seem like a fun mechanic, although the multitude of powers you can collect in the later games seemed like they could be a bit much. Luckily the games are pretty short so even if they aren't great, it should still be a worthwhile experience.

I've made so many little discoveries over the course of this retro project, you have no idea. I did something similar, albeit much less time-consuming, with movies several years ago. I realized there were a bunch of iconic movies that I just have never seen, so I went through a bunch of top movies lists and added them to my watch later so I don't have such a large gap in my movie knowledge. It was just a few months ago that I came to the realization that I could be doing the same thing for games. Now that I think about it, it's weird I didn't think about doing it with games first since they're my biggest hobby. It has admittedly derailed my blog a bit since I'm not really gaming much and just setting up games to play later. Only a few hundred more games to go and then I can get back into it 😅

August 17-23, 2025

Not a lot happened last week. I was pretty busy, so I didn’t get to gaming or cataloging very much. This’ll probably be a shorter update as a result.

Game Acquisitions



So, this is kind of interesting. I have a decent chunk of Google Play credit from taking rewards surveys. I normally just spend it on in-game purchases on Pokémon Go, but this time I decided I wanted to get some actual games. After looking through some top-rated games available on Android and tracking app sales, I decided to make two “purchases” with the credit. The first was Slay the Spire, a game I’ve heard amazing things about but somehow haven’t acquired yet. I normally will buy everything on PC if it’s available there, but I made an exception since the experience for this particular game probably doesn’t change much between platforms. It was also on sale for $6.99 from $9.99 which seems like a good deal to me. I had over $30 of credit so I still have money left over.

My second “purchase” was for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. This one would play better on PC, but the mobile version does support a controller so the control scheme should be the same at least. It was discounted from $14.99 to $9.99, and Google gave me another $2 coupon bringing the total down to $7.99. This is much lower than the PC version has gotten so I figured this was a good deal as well. I’m not counting these as spending money since the Google Play credit has no monetary value and would just go towards Pokémon Go otherwise. It’s been a long time since I’ve purchased a mobile game and thought I never would again after some early purchases of mine have been deprecated so couldn’t be played on the phone I have now. Hopefully I will get to these soon enough for them to still be supported.

The other games I got this week were giveaways and Reddit trades. I traded away Say No! More and Lil Gator Game for both Fault visual novels. I’ve never heard of them before, but they have very good reviews on Steam so I’m looking forward to experiencing them! I also traded Descenders for Wolfstride which looks like another cool visual novel. I actually didn’t realize all my trades last week were for visual novels until I started writing this. Interesting! I’m more mixed on the giveaway games since they aren’t genres I’m typically into, but they were free, and the reviews are positive so hopefully I get some enjoyment out of them.

# of Games: 9

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0



Like I said, I was pretty busy last week so I didn’t get around to cataloging nearly as many games as I was hoping for. Even so, I managed to add a few series to my list, including the rest of the Paper Mario games. I only planned to play the first three, but I was told the others are worth experiencing (at least Color Splash and Origami King anyway). I also decided that since I already own Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4 on Steam, I might as well emulate 2 and 3 while I’m at it. For some reason, they’re both exclusive to the PSP, and 3 never released outside Japan. What an odd decision by the publisher. The last series I got around to cataloging this week was the Xeno games. This includes Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Xenoblade Chronicles. They aren’t TECHNICALLY the same series, but I read they share similar themes and there are fan theories that they’re all connected through the multiverse or something so that’s good enough for me. I’ve heard great things about these games, I hope I can get into them.



TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Season 2 Episodes 3-12 (complete)

· Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

It’s hard to believe I got through the entirety of the Ghost in the Shell catalog in less than two months. There were some stumbles, but overall, I really enjoyed my time with it! I said this before, but I still recommend it to any anime fans that are into military action and/or cyberpunk aesthetics. Even 2045 is worth watching, I liked it more than the first two movies and Arise honestly. Maybe that’s a controversial take. I told my sister who’s a huge Harry Potter fan that I was going through all the movies when I just finished up Order of the Phoenix and she told me it’s all downhill from there 😭 Hopefully that’s just an exaggeration, or only something people who read the books think. Half-Blood Prince was alright I thought, and I only have the two-parter finale left.

Conclusion/Upcoming

So yeah, no gaming last week which was unfortunate. I wrote a lot more than I expected to in the game acquisitions section though which kinda makes up for it as far as the blog is concerned. I gotta say, I only played through act one in Slay the Spire for testing, but I was really enjoying it. I can see why it’s so highly regarded. It made me wanna keep going, but I must resist. I have my priorities! Now that Ghost in the Shell is done and dusted, I’m going to go through Ironheart next. It’s only six episodes so it’ll be a quick watch. Assuming I get through all of that, I have Raised by Wolves and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld on the backburner. As I just mentioned, I’m planning on watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 as my movie this week. Nothing on the gaming front unless another Tales of Phantasia session happens. Speaking of, Tales of Xillia Remastered was announced last week. I had recently tested the PS3 original through the RPCS3 emulator, so I removed it and added the new one to my backlog and play order collection instead. It’s a shame it won’t include both games though, I feel like that’s a missed opportunity. Still, it will be nice to play it on PC natively, and it won’t be taking up SSD space in the meantime. I mentioned last week that I would provide a status update for roughly how many emulated games/series I have left to add by stating how many lines are left on my “Emulated Games to Add to Backlog” text file. I was at 423 lines on the last blog post. Now I’m at 418. Not much progress, but to be fair, I was adding whole series to my backlog which takes a much longer time. That’s unlikely to change next week either as I see that I have my Castlevania and Metroid series coming up for testing. My work is never done it seems. Back in the testing mines for me. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,474 (+22)

August 24-30, 2025

As you may be able to tell from the title, I tested out a bunch of Castlevania and Metroid games this week. I’ll get into that in the emulation section of game acquisitions.

Game Acquisitions



Mostly giveaways and Steam Family purchases as usual, but I did decide to spend some Steam wallet funds on Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. I already own Max Payne 1-3, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control (with Alan Wake II in my wishlist), so I figured I might as well complete the set. It was only 96 cents after tax, and I have over $30 of Steam credit from selling trading cards, so I figured it was probably worth it. Afterplace looks like an interesting experience as well, I’m curious to see how that one plays.

# of Games: 8

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0



I’ve played a few metroidvania games over the years, and I’ve enjoyed most of them. I came to the realization that I’ve never actually played the origin of the genre, that being Metroid and Castlevania. I was already planning on playing the Metroid Prime trilogy, and Epic gave away the Castlevania Anniversary Collection a while back. I decided to broaden my horizons and add all the major games from both franchises to my list to really experience them. I’m really excited about the Metroid games, but I’m more hesitant about Castlevania. The 3D games I tested out seemed fine, but the 2D ones were proving to be quite challenging. The Dracula X Chronicles in particular was proving to be a hassle. There are a couple games included in this package, and I found out that you have to play through a couple stages of Rondo of Blood and do a specific thing in Stage 2 to unlock a special Stage 3, then get a certain powerup in that stage to find a secret collectible to unlock Symphony of the Night. I was having a hell of a time getting through Stage 2 and 3’ to unlock the other game and made liberal use of save states to do so. I imagine this will be a common experience for me as I make my way through this series.

Apart from exploring the origins of metroidvanias, you can see that I also added the Breath of Fire JRPG quintology. I went back and forth on which ones from this series I should include. A lot of people say to skip 1, 2, and Dragon Quarter, remarking that 3 and 4 are the only ones worth playing. I was also debating if I should add Breath of Fire IV since it’s technically available on PC and my general rule is to not emulate anything where the best version can be purchased and played natively on PC. I decided to add 1 and II since I found some fan-made QOL improvements which should allow me to experience the origins of the series for myself. I ended up adding IV when I found out that the version available on GOG is censored, so I wouldn’t get the full experience if I purchased it through there. Dragon Quarter has a mixed reception, but some people love it, and the roguelike nature of the game seems like it could be interesting. As a result, I decided to add the whole series.

I’ve got a couple other random standalone games tested and added to my backlog as well. I’ve heard great things about 13 Sentinels and was surprised to hear it never got a PC release. Conversely, I’ve literally never heard of Heavenly Sword before, but it looks like an OK PS3 launch title if nothing else.



TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Ironheart Season 1 Episodes 1-6 (completed)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 3 Episode 6 (still watching, show ended)

· Eyes of Wakanda Season 1 Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)

· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Not much to say about this week. Ironheart was a mediocre Marvel TV show, an increasingly common occurrence unfortunately. My Little Pony was alright, but this episode was just setup for the final season. Eyes of Wakanda seems like a neat miniseries that I’ll probably forget about shortly after finishing it. Harry Potter, as the name implies, was only part one of a two-part finale. Was this the movie that kickstarted a bunch of franchises splitting their final part in two for no reason? I hate it when companies do that nowadays. The movie itself was fine, but it very much felt like half a story.

Conclusion/Upcoming

This was a bit of an odd week. I was hoping to get some Tales of Phantasia in, but no dice. That’s two hangouts in a row without playing ☹ We were just too busy with other stuff I guess. For some reason, I feel like I didn’t get a lot of emulation testing in either, but that might be because most of it was spent on just three franchises. There’s a lot of games in those franchises though, so I still got a lot done. Metroid: Other M in particular took forever to get working, since I had to figure out how to emulate a bunch of motion controls with my Xbox controller. That’s always a pain to pull off. The emulation list is very slowly going down. I was at 418 with my previous update and am sitting at 413 now. Like I mentioned in the last update, it didn’t go down much since a lot of series were being tested instead of individual games. That might change this week though. I have quite a few individual games or short series to get through before my next big series, that being the colossal Pokémon franchise. That will probably take at least a whole week just on its own, I have 26 games in my play order collection for that one 😅

My plan for this week will be similar to most recent weeks. I’ve got the other two episodes of Eyes of Wakanda to watch, which will likely be done the day I post this. After that, I can finally get to Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld which will be another quick watch at six third-length episodes. After that will be Raised by Wolves while I wait for Alien: Earth and Futurama Season 10 to finish airing next month. Once Eyes of Wakanda is done, I don’t really have any pressing shows I’m looking forward to in the near term. Raised by Wolves will get me through the week though, so I’ll cross that bridge in the next update maybe. I’ll also be watching the final Harry Potter movie on Friday so that I can finally cross that franchise off my list. Will I get to any Tales of Phantasia this week? Only time will tell. I do have an exciting update for gaming though that I haven’t alluded to yet. I’ll bring it up in my monthly post for August which should be up tomorrow. Have I piqued your interest 👀? See you all tomorrow!

Backlog total: 3,501 (+27)

August 2025

After countless weeks (or months) of scouring best of lists for all retro games worth playing, August was finally the month where I started adding those games to my backlog. I have a long way to go, but I think this was a good start. You’ll see this reflected in the huge increase to my backlog total. My time spent actually gaming, however, really took a hit as a result.

Game Acquisitions



This is about average for how many games I get per month (for this year, anyway). What’s nice though is that I didn’t spend a dime on them! They weren’t technically all free though, I did use Google Play credit and Steam wallet credit for a couple of them, but it wasn’t money out of my pocket that could’ve been spent on something outside of games so I’ll still take it! I forgot all the NSFW games were given away this month for the protest, just ignore those 😅 There were a lot of good games acquired this month, I don’t even know how to narrow it down for highlights. Banishers and Persona 5 Royal are up there, but I’m also really looking forward to Born of Bread, Elypse, Fault, Nocturnal, Prince of Persia, and Slay the Spire. So many great picks!

# of Games: 49

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps

Once again didn’t get any single-player gaming in due to the emulation stuff. I only had two gaming sessions in August, making this the least gaming I’ve gotten in for a month so far this year. It was nice playing Stranded Deep with my other friend though. It’s a fun survival game, which is a genre I’m not super familiar with. We barely left the first island, so we’re still very early. I wish we were able to play games together more often. Then of course I got more Tales of Phantasia time in. We’ve just made it to the future so I think we’re at the beginning of the end? Not sure, there’s a whole 'nother world to explore after all. I feel like we’re making progress though. No gameplay footage of Stranded Deep as it was just a chill catching up with each other session, but here’s my playlist of Tales of Phantasia so far:

Tales of Phantasia playlist

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 2 Episodes 21-26 (completed)

· Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Season 1 Episode 1-Season 2 Episode 12 (completed)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 3 Episodes 4-6 (still watching, show ended)

· Ironheart Season 1 Episodes 1-6 (completed)

· Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (completed)

· Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld Season 1 Episodes 1-3 (still watching, show ended)

· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 1: Ghost Pain

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 2: Ghost Whispers

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 3: Ghost Tears

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 4: Ghost Stands Alone

· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 5: Pyrophoric Cult

· Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie

· Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

· Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

· Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

This looks like more than I usually watch, but I think that’s just because all the Ghost in the Shell made-for-TV movies were classified as movies and separated out as movies instead of listed as episodes of a TV show. There were a lot of ups and downs in August. Ironheart and Ghost in the Shell: Arise were…not great. I’ll give the highlight to the show that surprised me with how much I enjoyed it which was Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Every review I read said it wasn’t good and you should just skip it and rewatch Stand Alone Complex instead, but I personally loved it. The 3D animation worked way better than it had any right to, and bringing back the original voice actors from Stand Alone Complex gave the performances a high level of quality. I’m excited for the new project coming next year, I know nothing about it. Harry Potter is also here! I don’t really know what to say about that property that hasn’t already been said by now. I definitely could see myself really getting into these as a teenager, maybe not so much in my 30s.

Conclusion/Upcoming

An interesting month August turned out to be. A lot of Ghost in the Shell, a lot of Harry Potter, a lot of emulation testing, not so much actual gaming though. Not great for a gaming blog 😖 It’s OK though, I’ve got a lot of gaming coming up in a few weeks though. Why is that you might be asking? Well, I’ve been doing a lot of Bing stuff lately to rack up some Microsoft rewards points and I’m very close to redeeming another three months of PC Game Pass. Game Pass is what caused the spike in my game time in May of this year and contributed to several top 10 games of both this year and last year. I looked through my wishlist and found that there are three games from there that are part of Game Pass: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. They’re all long games so I won’t be able to beat all three of them in three months, unfortunately. I might be able to get through Indiana Jones and Metaphor though. I wasn’t planning on playing Metaphor until I got through the Persona series since it’s kind of a culmination of all their work on those games, but it’s not technically connected and is very highly rated, so I think it will be OK to go ahead and play it. Even getting through those two games will be a tall order in three months, I’ll have to manage my time more effectively. Maybe I forgo the video recording and editing for these games? Let me know what you think.

Since I’ll be focusing on playing these two games, my emulation project will be put on hold. At the current pace I’m earning rewards points, I’ll probably be starting up Indiana Jones in a couple weeks or so. That means I won’t be getting back to emulation stuff until Christmastime! That’s OK though, my blog and I could probably use the break even if I don’t want to admit it. I’m looking forward to actually playing some video games again, I hope you’re excited to read about them. Thanks for sticking with me, I’ll see you guys next week!

Backlog total: 3,505 (+173!)

August 31 - September 6, 2025

It’s been a while since I spent money out of pocket for games (over a month actually), but I finally broke down with a couple good deals this week. I also finally got some more Phantasia time in and continued plugging away at the emulation testing.

Game Acquisitions



Doing almost a complete 180, besides Baladins, none of these were freebies and I paid money for all of them. Quite unusual, but the September Humble Choice was lackluster, and the Epic and Amazon giveaways were repeats or games I already own. There were a couple good deals though, the first being the Humble Indie Likes & Lites Bundle. Even though I already own Going Under and Luck Be A Landlord, for $10, it still seemed like a great deal for everything else. I feel like it’s been even longer since I purchased a Humble Bundle, they tend to be niche or on the expensive side. I can’t argue with this one though. The other purchase was for a single game, an even greater rarity. I’ve had Alan Wake II Deluxe Edition in my wishlist since it came out and it finally hit a new low of $18.45 on GreenManGaming. I’d consider this an expensive purchase, but it’s normally $70 and I own all the other Remedy games, so I felt it necessary to complete the collection. I really need to get into this universe at some point.

# of Games: 9

Total Money Spent: $28.90

Price/Game: $3.21



And as always, here’s the games I tested and added to my backlog last week. There’s a bit of a mish mash here. ActRaiser is a SNES city-builder/platformer hybrid that got a remake a couple of years ago, but I decided to play the original instead. I’m not into city-builder games, but it’s very light here and the platforming stages are the main focus. I played through the first chapter for testing, and I was really enjoying it! I’ll once again be abusing save states for this one. Fantasy Life got a sequel recently and I was surprised to hear that the first game never came to PC, so I’ll be immersing myself in that world too. I ended up playing the first two levels of Black and it took me over an hour. The second level is so long, and I uncharacteristically run-and-gunned my way through it. My friend loved this game growing up, so this was a recommendation from him. Luminous Arc is another unknown SRPG series, and you guys know what Mario Golf is. I played the N64 and GameCube games in the series but never touched the handheld releases. I think it’s time to change that, I really enjoyed Toadstool Tour when I played it back in the day. One interesting tidbit is that during my research, I read that one of the best modern versions of Phantasy Star IV is as part of the SEGA Genesis Classics Collection. Since the collection is now delisted, I decided to emulate the Switch version. I found out that there are other games included in the collection that are on my list, so I can knock out a few games through one rom. It’s a really cool collection too, it has a 90s themed bedroom, CRT TV, rewind, fast forward, and save states! I wonder why they delisted it. Alien Soldier is the first game from there on my list, and I’ll be working on testing the other ones this week.



Game Recaps

Finally got another session of Tales of Phantasia in after another month-long gaming break. How does that keep happening!? When my friend came over, after just a few minutes, he was like “we can start our game anytime.” He’s not usually that eager to play video games, I was pleasantly surprised. He was missing it too, which bodes well for the future of the series. In this session, we tried out and failed miserably at the arena, made a pact with the spirit of lightning, and got the ability to fly anywhere in the world. Not too bad for three hours! Check out our playthrough below:







TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Eyes of Wakanda Season 1 Episodes 3-4 (complete)

· Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld Season 1 Episodes 1-6 (complete)

· Raised by Wolves Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (still watching, show ended)

· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Got a couple miniseries knocked out and finally finished up the Harry Potter series. The miniseries were underwhelming to say the least. While I continue to enjoy the Marvel Animation style, Eyes of Wakanda didn’t hold a candle to What If…? for me. Tales of the Underworld similarly wasn’t nearly as good as Tales of the Jedi or Tales of the Sith. Very forgettable unfortunately. I felt that Harry Potter had an appropriately epic finale, even if the final duel was a bit anticlimactic. The epilogue was pretty goofy too, but I’m just gonna forget about that. Now I’m working on Raised by Wolves which has an interesting premise, but I’m not sure how it’ll be expanded on yet. I’m still early, so I’ll withhold judgement for now.

Conclusion/Upcoming

So yeah, I finally got a little more gaming in, sprinkled in some more emulation stuff, and spent a good chunk of money on “new” games. It was a solid week I’d say. I do want to give an update on the Game Pass thing I mentioned in my monthly post. I set up auto-redeem for three months of PC Game Pass, but when I hit the redemption threshold on Wednesday, it declined. I don’t know how an auto-redemption using Microsoft Rewards points for a Microsoft product can fail but here we are. I’ve been too scared to try and redeem it manually in case my account was flagged or something so that is on hold for now. I was looking forward to getting back into gaming again, but I am enjoying working on the emulation stuff as well. Who knows, maybe I’ll try to redeem it soon, or maybe hold onto my points so I can stack multiple redemptions together and not feel rushed to play games with a looming deadline.

My plan for this week is going to be to continue watching Raised by Wolves. I won’t finish that up for a little while so that’s the only TV I plan on watching. Now with Harry Potter out of the way, the next movie on my list is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I was originally planning on skipping it because it didn’t review very well, but I figured I already saw all the others (minus the reboot) so I might as well. Tales of Phantasia may happen but if not, it’s gonna be more emulation testing. I was at 413 lines left on my notes last update and am sitting at 399 now. I may have cheated a bit by resizing the text file but don’t tell anyone! I still made decent progress. Anyway, that’s all I got for now, I’ll see you all next week. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,531 (+30)

September 7-13, 2025

The title is a reference to Tales of Phantasia; I’m not trying to make some profound statement about the state of the world or anything. ANYWAY, typical week this week. I bought some more games, played a little Tales, and did some more emulation testing. Let’s get into it!

Game Acquisitions



Discounty Digimon World were Steam family purchases, Picklock and Reverse Crawl were Reddit trades, Subterrain was an Amazon freebie, and Fallout Equestria: Remains was a Steam freebie. The other 10 games were part of the Build Your Own Killer Bundle on Fanatical. Only $1 each, not bad! I’m especially looking forward to Chernobylite finally hitting this price point, but Aura of Worlds, Everholm, Soda Crisis, The Black Grimoire, and The Signifier could be hidden gems as well. The Black Grimoire is advertised as being like a single-player RuneScape, which is dangerous for someone who lost six years of their life to that game as a kid.

# of Games: 16

Total Money Spent: $9.99

Price/Game: $0.62



Like I mentioned last week, some of these are part of the Sega Genesis Classics Collection which has been delisted from sale. A pleasant surprise as that means I didn’t have to download and test them individually. I’m not sure how I’m feeling about Sin and Punishment. It’s a rail shooter which is not a genre I’m super familiar with, and the N64 game frankly controls like ass. I played through the tutorial and immediately set it to easy afterward when testing the first level. Here’s hoping that’ll be enough to get through it. Besides those, there’s a lot of classic RPGs here which I’m really looking forward to.



Game Recaps

Another almost three-hour Phantasia session! We spent over half of it just talking to people in Alvanista and Freezekiel much to the dismay of my co-op partner. Look, sometimes RPGs have a lot of talking instead of a lot of combat, alright? We spent the other part of the session in the ice caves below Fenrir Church. We decided to do it the hard way by forgoing fire charms and just having Minty heal us every few seconds. We finally made it to a save point, which is hopefully near the end but man, this has been a rough dungeon so far. The enemies aren’t even that hard, it’s just the winding layout and cold damage. I’m not sure if we’re going to go to the volcanic place next or knock out some side stuff. We’ll see! I really want to get the secret party member in the ninja village. Check out our playthrough!







TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Raised by Wolves Season 1 Episode 5-Season 2 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 4 Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)

· Jurassic World Rebirth

Raised by Wolves is pretty good, although I’m not totally loving the multitude of flashbacks and the direction some of the characters are going. The premise is cool, but everything seems so small in scale, and everything takes place in one little area. It opened up in season 2 so we’ll see if that improves it. I accidentally screwed up the My Little Pony viewing order last week. Generation 5 consisted of the movie which acts as the pilot, the 3D show Make Your Mark, and the 2D show Tell Your Tale. It’s all the same continuity and sometimes both shows play off of each other (more specifically Tell Your Tale seems to reference Make Your Mark at times). I accidentally watched the Tell Your Tale episode that recaps the Make Your Mark finale which I haven’t seen yet. Oh well, not like the show is too deep anyway. It’s a shame it got canceled so abruptly while they were still producing and airing the episodes. This didn’t get nearly the love Friendship is Magic got. Hopefully the generation premiering next year is more cohesive. I thought Jurassic World was done, but I guess they make too much money no matter how bad they are. I’ve seen all of them, so I felt obligated to watch this one. It was definitely one of the movies of all time. Entirely skippable, but not the worst thing in the world if you love dinosaurs.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Another update on the Game Pass front. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m earning enough points to keep the subscription going indefinitely assuming they don’t raise the redemption price again or reduce the number of points you can earn daily. As a result, I’m feeling more confident about getting to play everything in the catalog that I’m interested in unless it leaves the service. I’m very slowly cataloging all the games I’m interested in playing there, then will perhaps attempt redeeming when I’ve finished with that. Could be a couple weeks, could be a couple months. In the meantime, I’ll continue plugging away at the emulation project. Speaking of, I was at 399 lines left in my text file at my last update and am sitting at 388 now.

For this week, the plan is business as usual. I likely won’t finish Raised by Wolves so that will be my main TV focus. After the “masterpiece” that was Jurassic World Rebirth, I’m planning on watching another poorly reviewed sequel with Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. Another example of a series where I’ve watched all the other movies, so I feel obligated to watch this one. Wish me luck! On the gaming front, there might be more Tales of Phantasia but other than that, just more emulation testing. I’m getting close to the Pokémon series 👀 Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,562 (+31)

September 14-20, 2025

Another pretty slow week for me. I got some more Tales of Phantasia time in, but minimal emulation testing due to discovering texture packs. More on that below.

Game Acquisitions


This is the least number of new games I’ve gotten in quite a while. No purchases and only a few giveaways. It’s nice that I have the whole FATE series through Prime freebies now. Hades is obviously the big standout here, I’m super excited to try that game out. I was thinking about buying it myself, but a Steam family member bought it instead.

# of Games: 5

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0



Like I said, not a lot of testing got done this week. I discovered that there are passionate communities filled with people who mod games that run through emulators. I already knew ROM hacks were a thing, but I didn’t know that you could improve the graphics of emulated games through the use of texture packs. I spent several hours researching which emulators support them and downloaded a few. They take up so much space, I had to move some of my other files to an external drive. I finished retesting all the games I already tested after applying these packs, then started on new games where I’ll be able to test both them and their mod/texture packs simultaneously. As you can see, I didn’t make a ton of progress on that front. I decided to make testing any game I found a texture pack for a priority. I find it interesting how some console emulators support texture packs while others don’t. Why can the NES and N64 use them but not the SNES? Why can the Xbox 360 emulator support mods while the OG Xbox emulator can’t? So many questions.



Game Recaps

Another week, another Tales of Phantasia session in. It was shorter than the last one, but we still got a lot done. We made it to the end of the ice cave and fought the Fenrir Beast. A super tough fight and the only one so far to take us three attempts. We did it though, then managed to make our way to the Ninja Village to recruit the last party member Suzu. This involved going back to Euclid to fight in the arena again until we met Suzu's parents and took them out since they were being mind controlled by Dhaos. Check out our playthrough!





TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Raised by Wolves Season 2 Episodes 2-8 (complete)

· Ghostbusters Frozen Empire

A slow week on the TV front too. Raised by Wolves was an interesting sci-fi show. VERY heavy religious undertones in the second season to complement the battle between the atheists and Sol worshippers. I think this is a show worth watching if you don’t mind the smaller scope and minimal worldbuilding. I feel like it could have benefitted from having its ideas fleshed out more, but I still enjoyed it. It felt like things were leading up to a third season and many questions were left unanswered, but the show was canceled so there’s minimal resolution unfortunately. Ghostbusters Frozen Empire was much better than the reviews led me to believe. I really liked it, even though it feels like Bill Murray really doesn’t want to be doing it anymore. The design for the big bad ghost was cool too, and I liked how one of the characters was a ghost that was just a normal person who conversed with one of the main cast. It was a refreshing change of pace from the over-the-top cartoony design of most of the ghosts.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Still no news on the Game Pass front. I’m still accumulating points daily and am very slowly assembling a spreadsheet of all the games I’m interested in from the catalog. After that’s done, I’m not sure how I want to tackle the list. Maybe I’ll go for third-party games in my wishlist first, then go from highest rated to lowest (the opposite of my usual approach) since there’s a chance the games will leave before I get to them. Microsoft published games are permanent on the service though so no rush there. That means Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is on the far back burner. I really want to play Expedition 33 so I may move that to the top of the list, who knows. So many possibilities!

For this week, I’m gonna watch a couple of new shows after finishing Raised by Wolves. Pokémon Concierge, Lego Star Wars Rebuild the Galaxy Season 2, and Futurama season 10 are on my shortlist which are all fairly quick watches. Alien: Earth is wrapping up this week as well so maybe it will finally be time to jump into that. On the gaming front, no plans other than Tales of Phantasia and emulation stuff. I had 399 lines left in my emulation text file and am at 382 now. I think we’re getting close to the end of Phantasia. We’re collecting the pieces needed to unlock the final dungeon, although there is still a ton of side content we haven’t done. Anyway, that’s enough for now. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,574 (+12)

September 21-27, 2025

Didn’t get to Tales of Phantasia this week but made a decent amount of progress with emulation testing. This will be a shorter update as a result.

Game Acquisitions



I made another purchase this week, it was Fanatical’s cheapest bundle offering of 5/$3. I technically got six games since one of them was a dual pack so a really good value overall. Little Witch in the Woods was yet another Steam family purchase along with Arcade Spirits (they’ve been buying a lot lately!) and it looks super cute. The rest were giveaways as usual.

# of Games: 10

Total Money Spent: $3

Price/Game: $0.30



I had a very productive testing weekend. A lot of JRPG series here. Before my emulation research I had never heard of any of these except Dark Cloud and Parasite Eve and now I’m really looking forward to games like Arc the Lad and Jeanne d’Arc. I was enjoying Jade Cocoon 2 also while testing, may have gotten carried away by putting over an hour into it 😅



This is officially the furthest zoom level in Playnite. I may need to start stitching pictures together soon. Almost at 200 games tested!

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Pokémon Concierge Season 1 Episodes 1-8 (complete)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 3 Episodes 3-4 (complete)

· LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 2 Episodes 1-4 (complete)

· Marvel’s Zombies Season 1 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)

· Happy Gilmore

A lot of short series this week, and a movie rewatch with Happy Gilmore. I don’t think I’ve seen that movie since I was a teenager though, so it’s been quite a while. Pokémon Concierge was absolutely adorable, and I encourage any Pokémon fan to go out and watch it. LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 2 was basically more “Fun Cameos: The Show” which was fine but not a lot of substance there. Still funny at times so a mild recommendation for Star Wars fans. My Little Pony: Make Your Mark officially marks (😜) the end of the 3D portion of the show, now I only have the 2D portion Tell Your Tale left. It was abruptly canceled but the fans dug up the rest of the episodes ranging from mostly done to animatics only, so it’ll be a weird ending. The “finale” (episode 3) was alright, although it still doesn’t hold a candle to Friendship is Magic. The “Christmas special” (episode 4) introduced a new setting and villain which I happen to know will be a reoccurring character in Tell Your Tale. We’ll see if she ends up being more compelling than an evil alicorn.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Another slow week this week, just slowly whittling away at this emulation thing. I was at 382 lines and am sitting at 369 now. I did end up redeeming four months of PC Game Pass, but they came as codes that don’t expire until a year from now or later so no rush there. There are rumors that the ability to redeem Game Pass directly with Microsoft Rewards points is going away at the end of the month in favor of just buying Xbox gift cards which will make everything more expensive. As a result, I decided to cash in the points I accumulated just in case. Hopefully this doesn’t derail my plans just as I started getting in the groove of earning points. I think Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be my first game on the platform; I really don’t want to miss that before it leaves the service.

Plans for next week will include more short shows and the Happy Gilmore sequel. I’ve got Alien: Earth, Futurama, and Marvel’s Zombies coming up next which will probably take more than a week to get through. On the gaming front, it’s probably going to be the usual with possible Phantasia and more emulation stuff. Now that I’ve got the Game Pass codes ready to go, it is making me want to actually start playing games again. I might bite the bullet sometime soon. Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,606 (+32)

September 2025

I can’t believe we’re already 3/4ths of the way through the year already. That means I’ve kept this weekly blog thing going for nine whole months! It also means I’ve got some more quarterly stats for you all. Fun times!

Game Acquisitions



About the average number of acquisitions for me, with my highest monthly spend as you’ll see in my YTD graphs below. This is also my first month where the amount of money spent exceeded the number of games acquired. I hope that doesn’t become a trend. My Steam family picked up quite a few games as well that I can now play for free. Alan Wake II and Star Wars Outlaws were the big purchases, but I’m super excited for Hades as well. Those are my highlights for September.

# of Games: 41

Total Money Spent: $59.71

Price/Game: $1.46



The emulation testing continues to churn. A lot of progress made here, but there are still hundreds more games to get through. If it weren’t for my co-op partner and my upcoming Game Pass subscription, I wouldn’t be getting any game time in. Still, there’s a ton of awesome games here, and I will finish up the testing eventually. I just might need a break from this for a while. Expedition 33 is calling my name.

Game Recaps

Only one game played in September with Tales of Phantasia. I haven’t played a single-player game since May. Hopefully I will fix that soon with Game Pass. We put several hours into Phantasia and made tons of progress. We finally made it out of the past and into the future, meeting up with our old companion from the beginning of the game along the way. We also now have flying machines that let us travel anywhere in the world and have managed to defeat the Fenrir Beast to get the first piece we need to unlock the final dungeon. Check out the playlist of our playthrough!

Tales of Phantasia Playlist

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

· Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld Season 1 Episodes 4-6 (complete)

· Raised by Wolves Season 1 Episode 1-Season 2 Episode 8 (complete)

· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 4 Episodes 1-4 (complete)

· Pokémon Concierge Season 1 Episodes 1-8 (complete)

· LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 2 Episodes 1-4 (complete)

· Marvel’s Zombies Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (complete)

· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

· Jurassic World Rebirth

· Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

· Happy Gilmore

A lot of shows completed last month, and I didn’t dislike any of them. Going purely by enjoyment, Pokémon Concierge was absolutely my favorite watch. It was just so adorable! I haven’t watched a Pokémon show since I was a kid, and it was nice seeing them in a relaxing setting instead of battling. Just a nice slice-of-life anime, highly recommend. I can’t believe the Harry Potter finale was in September, it feels like forever ago.

YTD Stats

Back again with my year-to-date stats now that we’ve finished up the third quarter. Please note that the weekly graphs reflect the time period 12/29/24-09/27/25. Let’s start with the hours played per week and month graphs.





As you can see, I’m still having weeks where I don’t play anything (isn’t adulting fun!?), but at least my gaming in September was higher than the past few months. I’m up to 157 hours and 25 minutes of gaming this year, which is definitely on the low side if you check my HLTB completions. Next up are the money spent vs. games acquired graphs. Please note that my emulated games are not reflected here so the actual number of backlog additions is much higher.





September was another “big” spend month for me, with Alan Wake II Deluxe and Star Wars Outlaws making up 60% of that total. Still a paltry amount of money to spend on a hobby in my opinion. So far this year, I’ve now spent $194.79 on games and gotten 430 total games out of it. Crazy value there. I’m glad I’m able to see these stats now and convince myself that I’m not overspending on games. That was one of my primary goals of starting this blog and now I know! Now I can work on not sweating my game purchases too much.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Three quarters down, only one more to go to finish up the year. This blog has been quite a journey so far, and it is way more work than I was expecting. I’m not sure if I’m getting enough fulfillment and engagement to keep it going after my annual top 10 post at the end of the year, it’s just taking up a lot of time that could be spent gaming. Maybe I could reduce the frequency to just once a month and/or cutting back on some sections. Let me know what you think.

Coming up in October, I’m planning on watching Alien: Earth, Futurama, Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, and Gen V for TV shows. That should get me through the month. If not, I’ve got a couple shows on the backburner I can get to. I really hope Splinter Cell: Deathwatch leads to a new game at some point; it’s been 12 years since the last one. Get on it Ubisoft! For movies, I’ve got Happy Gilmore 2 and the Chronicles of Riddick series. I might sneak in a horror movie for Halloween too, we’ll see. Gaming wise, more Tales of Phantasia is coming up. We probably won’t beat the game in October so I’m not looking further ahead than that. If I decide to redeem Game Pass, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be my next single-player game. I want to play it so badly! That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,612 (+107) <- That’s the emulation testing kicking in right there.

September 28-October 4, 2025

No, no, not trading in the game, trading IN the game. Glad I could clear that up for you.

Game Acquisitions



Another big purchase here with Star Wars: Outlaws as mentioned in my September monthly post. I know it didn’t have a very warm reception, but I’m a diehard Star Wars fan and it looks fun to me. Very light week otherwise for acquisitions.

# of Games: 4

Total Money Spent: $17.82

Price/Game: $4.46



I might be the only person who looked at Rygar: The Legendary Adventure for the PS2 and went “that looks cool, but I’ll have to play the original game for the NES first.” My series completion mindset knows no bounds it seems. It actually seemed like it wasn’t a bad game, just notoriously difficult as games tended to be back then. It’s OK, I have save states and rewind to help me through it. I’ve also got the entirety of the Shadow Hearts and Valkyrie Profile games tested and ready to go. I’ve never heard of Shadow Hearts before, but Valkyrie Profile has a solid reputation. I also got all the Pokémon games downloaded for the upcoming testing for that series. I’m planning on playing all the games from my play order collection for that one, and it’ll be a doozy for sure. I’ve never actually played a mainline Pokémon game before. I only dabbled in Stadium minigames and am still an avid Pokémon Go player. I’m excited to see what the actual series is all about.



It's official, I had to stitch two pictures from Playnite to get them all to fit. That marks over 200 games tested so far! And I'm only just getting started it seems 😅

Game Recaps

I actually got two Phantasia sessions in, one co-op and one solo. This won’t be a habit though; I just wanted to clean up some shopping stuff without my co-op partner sitting there doing nothing. Despite the increased play time, we didn’t accomplish too much. It was mostly exploring the couple of towns we hadn’t been to yet (namely Early, the Twilit Town) that we probably weren’t supposed to go to. We also got lost in the Treant Forest for a while, but at least now we know where we’re supposed to go next after we finish up the volcano area. Check out the playthrough!







TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Marvel Zombies Season 1 Episodes 3-4 (complete)

· Alien: Earth Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (still watching, show ongoing)

· Happy Gilmore 2

A light week for acquisitions and a light week for TV too it seems. What did I even do last week? Anyway, shows and movies were just OK this week, not bad but not great. Zombies ended on a cliffhanger which may never be resolved, Alien: Earth seems alright so far but nothing outstanding (how dare they kill a cat though, that's always unforgivable), and Happy Gilmore 2 was so filled with references that it didn’t feel like it wanted to be its own movie. Hopefully this week is better.

Conclusion/Upcoming

As I feared, Game Pass and Microsoft Rewards went through a total revamp last week. Now you can’t redeem for Game Pass directly and the exchange rate is way worse because not only did the price go up but now you can only redeem for Xbox gift cards which has a way worse exchange rate. I don’t think it’s possible to earn enough points to keep the subscription going indefinitely anymore, it seems they closed as many loopholes as they possibly could. I did manage to redeem four months’ worth before the switch though. Still haven’t gotten around to redeeming it though, just continuing the emulation testing in the meantime. I was at 369 lines left in my file last week and am sitting at 361 now. Next up is the Pokémon collection though which is only one line and will likely take over a week to test on its own, so it won’t look like I’ve made any progress. I am planning on toiling around in the background though.

This week will consist of finishing up Alien: Earth and at least starting Futurama. If I manage to finish both of those, I’ll move on to one of my obscure anime I’ve had sitting on my PC for a while. The next movie coming up is Pitch Black, the start of the Chronicles of Riddick franchise. I watched it like a decade ago, but it’ll be nice to get a refresher before diving into the series proper. Dunno if I’m getting more Tales of Phantasia time in, I certainly hope so. If not this week, then definitely next week while I’m off for the holiday. That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,629 (+23)