Here, you'll find up to 20 of the most recent posts from the people I follow. Only public results gleaned from the last 200 overall posts to HG Blogs will be displayed. If you see no results below, that means I'm not following a lot of people, or the people I'm following haven't been active in a long while, or they simply aren't sharing their posts.
| Hunting down that ring. |
Let's see. There was the attempt at Nioh which is on hiatus. I'd say potentially permanent hiatus, if not for the fact I've purchased its DLC and that means it's a bit too much money invested for me to just give up. I loved it initially, but as time went on, I found it to be repetitive with a lot of side quest missions that just weren't fun at all. I didn't like how, every time you went to a new land, you had to start collecting Kodama again in order to heal more that 3 times for free before needing to burn through your stock. The boss fights tended to annoy me -- I think the last handful I fought (Giant Toad, Ogress and Okatsu) were all road blocks for some time (at least the first two; Okatsu wasn't that bad) and whatshisname in the burning building level was no better. I love FRO
 | A new console enters the ring! |
I didn't finish anything this month. I wasn't sure I'd even continue this monthly write-up as my focus was more split than ever. I bought an Xbox Series X this month, with a subscription to Gamepass. I've been sampling some stuff here and there. Not going to feel pressured to finish anything on Gamepass unless it really does resonate with me though. I loaded up my 360 for one last time to put all my save files in the cloud so I could get them on the Series X. The Xbox 360 is now retired, back in its box. It might prompt me to finish off some of the old 360 games I abandoned back then. Maybe.
IN PROGRESS
Triangle Strategy (Switch)
| Visual Novels, Fire Emblem, and Ys - Oh my! |
FINISHED
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright (3DS)
This, I admit, took me a lot longer than it should've. And because this was marketed as three games, I get to mark my completion of one of the story paths as a game completion. I'll be back to play Conquest and Revelation in the future sometime. I don't have much to say on this. The story is pretty forgettable, but the combat is *chef kiss*
Ys: Oath in Felghana (Steam)
| Still doing this! |
This was a pretty good month for game progress. I had the first week off, and I'm getting used to my new job so I'm not coming home so tired as often.
FINISHED
Mass Effect 3 (PS4)
 | A few reasons why |
Just wanted to make a small, quick post about it in case anyone is confused.
Quick, short reasons why:
-I've had the name since the very, VERY early 00s on various sites, message boards, and online gaming accounts, but I just got tired of using it. Also, from my experience, it's very easy for people to make fun of the name when they see it for the first time. ("Hey, it's Pizza Hut!" "Oh, hey dickbutt!")
 | Or Games I'm Playing Right Now |
Asguaard
Not that long ago, I reviewed the Aldorlea-developed RPG 3 Stars of Destiny. It was nothing special. You would think I'd stay away from their stuff as a result, but instead I found myself loading up this one. I'll give this game credit: it's a cut above 3 Stars. Unfortunately, it's still nothing great...
 | Containing 50% more games you've actually heard of |
In 2020, I decided I was going to stop buying new games and declare war on the backlog. Much like the majority of gamers, I own more games than I can ever play in a lifetime but countless games I want to play get shuffled further and further to the back while the endless stream of new stuff gets stacked on top of them. It was a success! Aside from cashing in steam vouchers over Christmas that I had received as a gift, I purchased exactly zero new games, and the backlog was sufficiently injured. Any current year games I played were at the behest of constant backlog enemy Jason Venter, who even now is plotting ways to trick me into playing more visual novels. THE GOAL: Do the same thing in 2021. Block Venter. Profit.
| Managed to keep this up for a whole year! |
I've managed to keep this up for a year. I think this is about the extent I feel like writing about games these days. I have actually tried writing some reviews this year, and in an ideal world I would review every game I finished or played a lot of, but I guess that aspect of games writing doesn't interest me so much anymore. I end the year employed, and I feel lucky to have a good job particularly with this antiwork movement going on. I'm on leave right now from Christmas (back to work January 10th), so December saw a little more activity.
FINISHED
Imposter Factory (Steam)
| Lots of horror, as usual |
I don't know if it's just me, but this list feels short. I mean, in comparison to the total number of different games I played this year, this catalog feels like nothing. I blame Wild Arms 3 for soaking up so much of my time, but also my own lack of scrutiny for buying so many blah Steam titles. Thankfully, I still ran into a respectable handful of decent games, and that's gotta count for something...
Honorable Mentions: Games I Didn't Play Enough to Qualify
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark- A solid quasi-FFTactics that fell out of my favor because it just wasn't quite what I was looking for at the time I started it. I can see myself going more thoroughly through this one down the line...
| Animal Crossing: Newer Horizons |
Gaming progress has been pretty limited for what games I did play, and more stuff has slipped through the cracks. I keep it on my list to remind myself.
COMPLETED
Nothing.
IN PROGRESS
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch)
| So many horror games. So little time. |
The post Halloween update means there’s a lot more activity than other updates because gotta play all the horror games and fill out the month. It’s also been the breaking of an unwritten rule to try and not have more than one main game in progress at once, so I have to actually finish the bloody things so I can move on to the next. I started playing a few horror-y games that I could have rushed through and got a review out to, but it turned out I didn;t need them, mso I pumped the brakes on them. I’ll talk about them anyway
| Returned to the world of gainful employment. Money and Time have switched places, as they do. |
Started my new job this month. Gaming time predictably took a dive.
FINISHED
I finished nothing! I think partly because I wrapped up so many games in September, most of the below are new starts. And also the whole lack of time and being tired, thing. I was also planning to not have too many games going at once, but I got a bit carried away. Heh.
IN PROGRESS
Dragon Quest XI S (Switch)
| The end of my mid career retirement |
I'll probably never have another month of gaming like this. I'm starting a new job in early October, and lockdown is hopefully ending here not long after. So this month, I really went for it. Once I'm back at work, I hope to have far fewer games in progress at one time, since that approach led to me barely completing anything until early 2020 when unemployment stuck and I went on this wonderful journey (or Trails) of games. I knocked out so many RPGs, with a few other genres getting represented.
FINISHED
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)
| To the surprise of no one, I play some pretentious video games. |
To the surprise of no one, I play some pretentious video games.
Hellblade is something I’ve been meaning to play for a long, long time now. It’s living up to my expectations thus far; the game is purposefully designed to stress the player out at almost all times. Deconstruct it as a video game, and it’s a corridor of uninteresting puzzles and lacklustre combat burdened by enemies who take too long to kill. But as a complete package, it’s fascinating. The most anti-fun I’ve had with a game since Spec Ops.
| Let's see if I can remember! |
To open with thrilling emulation-related stuff. Let's see. My Mac upgraded its OS a ways back and that meant all my old emulators no longer worked. So I dusted off an old laptop with an older OS and that worked well until that one crapped out. So, I looked up what was available on the newer Mac and found OpenEmu. Which works great. And gives me access to some stuff that I previously couldn't via other emulators, such as the Turbo CD. Which means I'll likely be running through the shooters on that system at some point.
| What else does a coming of age story need except ghostly possession, interdimensional travel, and cosmic horror? |
12. The Music Machine
Haley is possessed by Quintin, Quintin wants to kill Haley, and maybe they're going to bond? Who knows, because they're stranded on an abandoned resort island where a weird devices takes them to other worlds full of strangeness and suffering.
The Steam Marketplace Massacre
1. Mad Father Remake
2. A Wolf in Autumn
3. Apartment 666
4. Kio's Adventure
5. You Deserve
6. SIMULACRA
7. God's Basement
8. Oakwood
9. Locked-in syndrome
10. Tamashii
11. Gridberd
12. The Music Machine
| I don't know what's worse: the villain or the inability to walk beyond a snail's pace |
11. Gridberd
Escape a mansion owned by a masked, axe-wielding maniac bent on revenge. And by "escape," I mean "walk at such an insufferably slow speed that you want to bore-quit after ten minutes."
The Steam Marketplace Massacre
1. Mad Father Remake
2. A Wolf in Autumn
3. Apartment 666
4. Kio's Adventure
5. You Deserve
6. SIMULACRA
7. God's Basement
8. Oakwood
9. Locked-in syndrome
10. Tamashii
11. Gridberd
| AlphaMurderthon is still happening, just not this year |
"Joe, you haven't written much this year."
Correction. I haven't posted much this year, but I have at least 17 unposted reviews. I had one project I was working on that wasn't specifically intended to be an OctJOEber one, but just happened to see its completion right this month. Since we're this close, I may as well unveil it as such.
THE STEAM MARKETPLACE MASSACRE
Because I have enough horror in my library to do several October projects
1. Mad Father Remake
RPG Maker fare featuring a girl who discovers that her father is a mad scientist, and must find him somewhere in their mansion that's crawling with zombies and killer dolls.
2. A Wolf in Autumn
| Another month of lockdown gaming |
Finished three games this month, all Falcom.
FINISHED
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV (PS4)
I finished this in the first couple of days of August. It feels like a long time ago now, oddly. It has been a long month of lockdown. So, yeah, the first ending was kinda meh. But once you've seen that ending you can load up the game again and go into the "true ending" which was very satisfying in an end of a saga sort of way. I spent close to a year playing through the nine games in this series, and it was some of the best JRPG experiences I've ever had. It does mean I'm taking a break from the series until the next game is out in English, which is sometime in 2023.
Ys II (Steam)
| In no particular order... |
-Get ROTW done. No, I haven't forgotten about this.
-Finish Shotgun Legend and review it.
-Post my Astro Aqua Kitty review.
-Finish Wild Arms: Alter Code F and review it as well.
-Sit in the dark and laugh ominously for a few hours.
|
© 1998-2022 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors. |