[blog] GCTuba's Gaming Adventures

Hello everyone, welcome to my gaming blog! I decided I wanted to start one to keep track of my backlog. Not only do I want to document my video game journey by talking about the games I’m playing, but I also want to figure out how exactly I accumulate all these games. While I won’t be able to go back and determine how I acquired every game I currently own, I do want to log every game I get going forward and how much money I spend on those games. I hear all the time about how people can spend thousands of dollars a year on their hobby and while I’ve consistently added hundreds of games to my backlog every year since I started keeping track in late 2019, I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hundred per year to get them. That’s what I aim to find out. I’ll also write about what I'm playing, game reviews, tech/gaming news, and anything else that interests me.

Before I lay out my current plan for how my blog will be structured, I think it’s best to give a little bit of background about myself. I am 33 years old and have lived my whole life in Ohio. Growing up, my parents wouldn’t let me and my siblings play video games. My mom, now a retired teacher, thought that playing games would cause us to suffer in our schoolwork. As a result, we didn’t have any traditional gaming consoles. My dad, however, was always into computers so even though I was born in the early 90s, I always had access to one. I started out with a Commodore 64 as well as a Windows 3.1 PC. We ended up going through every major Windows release as I got older. Most of the games we had access to were educational games. Does anyone remember Math Munchers or Word Rescue? Those were the kinds of games I played as a kid.


_____________Math Munchers_____________

______________Word Rescue_____________

I played a ton of games like these growing up, and I remember them actually being fun, but there’s only so many times you can play them before you start getting bored and wanting to branch out. I remember seeing kids with Game Boys at school and I asked my parents if I could have one. They said no. One Christmas, my aunt wanted to give all the kids Game Boy Colors and asked my parents if that was OK. They said no again. That Christmas, all my cousins got their Game Boy Colors and my siblings and I were left out. I was jealous and admittedly a little resentful. Looking back on it now, I can understand where my parents were coming from with trying to keep us away from games and focusing on school. I don’t agree with the way they went about it though. Giving us access to games with some kind of parental control would’ve made more sense than banning them outright, but I digress. Eventually my parents bought us one of those cheap plug and play arcade joysticks that had some arcade games built in.


____Truly the best gaming system of all time___

It was fun for a while. I finally got to play games on a TV with my siblings! Of course, those started to get old too. I don’t remember the exact timeline but sometime around the turn of the century, we were finally given a Nintendo 64, and the rest is history. I was hooked. I spent so much time with my siblings playing Mario Kart, Mario Party, Super Smash Bros., you name it. When I look back on my childhood and think about the beginning of my gaming journey, the N64 was it. We would eventually move on to the Gamecube and then the Wii sometime in high school. To this day, the best gift I ever received was a Game Boy Advance with a bunch of games and accessories from my parents. This was a big deal because unlike the home consoles, this handheld was just mine. I took this thing everywhere I went and played it all the time. I was really into one game called ‘WarioWare: Twisted!’ which was basically a series of microgames (games that take 10 seconds or less to beat) that you had to play in rapid succession and get as far as you can. There was a gyroscope built into the game cartridge that allowed some fun mechanics like tilting the GBA to exit a maze or dump out just the right amount of water from a glass. Trust me, it was more fun than it sounds.

Maybe the most fun I had with a handheld

Shortly after we got the Wii, my older brother saved up enough money and bought an Xbox 360 and a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV. I think this is the moment I started seeing how much potential video games had. I didn’t really beat many games growing up. I would just keep jumping between them and if I got bored or stuck, I switched to something else. It’s not like we had Internet at the time for me to look up what I was supposed to do. I played GTAIV all the way through though and had a great time. It was around this time that I started beating games more regularly. It was also when I played through the original Halo trilogy with a friend and enjoyed those games as well. Some other notable completions off the top of my head at the time were the original Crysis, Bioshock, and Assassin’s Creed, all series I still enjoy to this day.

In 2010, I bought a gaming laptop for college. I was able to justify the cost to my mom since I was majoring in video game programming, and they had minimum spec requirements we had to follow. I signed up for a Steam account around this time too and still use the same one. I ended up switching majors after a year so didn’t need the laptop for its original purpose, but it was still helpful for school and was a great gaming machine. In the summer of 2013, I bought my own PS3 (never had a PlayStation before) and a bunch of games I had missed out on from that generation. A few months later I bought the Xbox One at release and was pretty much digital only from that point on. The Xbox One would be my primary gaming device for several years until I switched over to PC gaming. In 2016, my coworker at the time taught me about how to build my own PC which I finally saved up enough money to do. I couldn’t afford a graphics card yet so only played basic games on it until I upgraded to the AMD RX 570 4GB around 2019 and then the Nvidia RTX 3080 in 2020. I also bought a PS5 around this time because I skipped the PS4 but bought a bunch of games on sale assuming it would be backwards compatible. It’s gotten very little use though since most of my backlog is on PC. I built a new PC at the end of 2024 due to Windows 10 nearing end-of-life and my CPU being too old to upgrade. I plan on purchasing a VR headset as well once one comes out I'm happy with.

Now that you’ve read my gaming history, I can finally dive into my plans for the blog. I found a website called How Long to Beat in 2019. It had popped up before in Google searches a lot when googling the length of games, but I found out you could add all of your games to your account to organize them, so I signed up. You can sort games by different criteria such as rating or length and filter them by console or storefront. It’s very helpful to stay organized and make sure you don’t accidentally buy the same game twice. After keeping track of all my completions for a full year, I decided at the end of 2020 that I wanted to make a top 10 list of my favorite games I played that year. I finally had a way to catalog my completions to make this possible. It’s not exactly a unique concept but I enjoyed writing them up all the same. After making posts for my top 10 lists of 2020-2023, I started to wonder if maybe I should be writing more throughout the year. That’s when I got the idea to document my catalogs and completions to see how my backlog fluctuates and how much time and money I’m really spending on my hobby.

My current plan is to make blog posts weekly, monthly, and annually. The annual posts will generally be what I’ve been doing since 2020 with the top 10 games I played that year. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to add more detailed stats such as how much time I spent gaming, how many games I catalog/beat (the website already tracks this), and how much money I spent on games or hardware. The monthly posts will break it down to how many games I cataloged/beat that month, how much time and money was spent on them, and general highs and lows. The weekly posts will break it down even more as well as going into more detail on the games I played that week. I’ll sprinkle in general thoughts on major gaming news, hardware announcements, life events, and so on here and there. I hope you enjoy!

For anyone wanting to know how I pick which games I’m going to play next, I generally go from lowest rated to highest rated. You can see my backlog list here. Any game that doesn’t have a rating gets played first. I’ve purchased a few itch.io charity mega-bundles and added a bunch of unknown games to the backlog which is why so many are unrated. Any series generally gets played back-to-back with all their ratings being averaged and then played oldest to newest. I usually stick to only one single-player game and one co-op game per friend at a time. I find juggling multiple games makes it easy to get lost and not remember the story, how to play, or what you were doing. I may also mix it up a bit and decide I want to play through all the games on a specific storefront or all the games installed on my PC that I just want to get rid of.

I think that’s enough of a word dump for now. Besides my annual top 10 posts, the others won’t be quite so long. If you have any questions about me, my blog, or my gaming adventures, please feel free to leave a comment and we can talk! I would love to interact with anyone who happens to drop by. I wanted to start my blog at the end of the year so my first regular post would be the type I’m already familiar with, the top 10! That post will immediately follow this one. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

My Blog

My How Long to Beat profile to track my gaming progress

My Ko-Fi

My YouTube channels:

GCTuba

GCTuba Games

Hello everyone! It’s that time of year again where I run down my top 10 favorite games I played. Before I get started, I just wanted everyone to know that I started my own gaming blog! Maybe a bit old-fashioned but if you’re interested, you can check it out here. If you’re reading this on my blog already, welcome! My blog will be an expansion of these annual top 10 posts. I’m hoping to have weekly and monthly posts as well where I go more in-depth on games I played throughout the year, games I purchased, and how much time/money went into them. For more details, and to read a little about my gaming background, please head over to my intro post here.

This year I “only” managed 56 completions. This continues another downward trend in the number of game completions for me since 2021. I had 448 completions in 2021, 191 in 2022, and 66 in 2023. Thankfully, just because the quantity of the games went down doesn’t mean the quality did! I won four months of PC Game Pass in giveaways this year, so I played Game Pass games almost exclusively from June to October. For those that don’t know, Game Pass is kind of like Netflix for video games. You pay a subscription fee every month and have access to hundreds of games that rotate in and out. It even includes day one releases sometimes. It’s actually crazy good value, I just haven’t subscribed to it because I own enough games to try justifying paying a subscription for even more. I also don’t like feeling rushed to complete games before a subscription runs out. Getting four months for free though allowed me to play a bunch of newer games I wouldn’t’ve played for several years otherwise, and I didn’t even have to buy them! Just like 2022 was the year of Humble Games Collection games (R.I.P.) making top 10, this year is absolutely the year of Game Pass games. So, at the risk of rambling too much longer, here are my top 10 games completed in 2024:


10. Vampires Dawn 3 - The Crimson Realm (62h:30m) - Vampires Dawn is a trilogy of old-school style German RPG Maker games. RPG Maker is a game engine that a lot of indie developers use to make games that typically look like old RPGs from the 90s like Final Fantasy. Since the engine is so widely used by indie devs, there are a ton of lesser-known games that use it and most of them that I’ve played are unfortunately pretty samey and not very good. The Vampires Dawn games are an exception, mostly. While not as good as Theia: The Crimson Eclipse (my third favorite game of last year that utilized the same engine), they’re still a cut above many others. The third game was released in 2021, way later than the first two which came out in the early 2000s and are considered cult classics. You play as a group of vampires who reluctantly team up to stop an evil vampire backed by a shadowy organization of magic users known as the Elras from remaking the world in their image. It is a very bloody game as you can probably imagine, much more violent than most RPG Maker games. One of the main characters Valnar was the protagonist of the first two games, and the other two main characters Alaine and Asgar who were also present in the original games and are now fully playable here. Asgar has always been a secondary antagonist in the series as he wants to wipe out humanity altogether and rule over the world as an all-powerful vampire. Valnar and Alaine’s “daughter” Jayna whom they transformed in the ending of a previous game is the evil vampire trying to take over the world that the main characters must stop. Valnar and Alaine feel responsible as her parents and Asgar sees her as an obstacle on his own quest for world domination. However, it turns out a secret organization known as the Elras were using her as a puppet to drain all the power from the vampires and use a stone tablet (also at the end of the previous game) which basically has the power to grant any wish. There are several endings to this game depending on the choices you make. The first two games are free on the developer’s website here. The sound quality and graphics of this game were leagues better than the first two due to how much newer it is. This game came out 16 years after the second one and it shows. I also enjoyed the combat in this one more than the previous games. It had a much more robust party system with many different spell types and combinations. The big letdown for me was the writing. While a lot of this can be boiled down to the game releasing in German and later translated to English, that can’t excuse everything. The writing was very amateurish, with insults and curse words every other sentence like a child using swears for the first time. It really didn’t do the story justice and had me facepalming through most cutscenes. In a long game like this one, the story must be really strong to motivate a player to overcome repetition enough to get to the end. If I wasn’t so stubborn and hadn’t played the original games, I may not have finished it myself. I still enjoyed my time with it, but not as much as the previous entry in the series. Speaking of which…


9. Vampires Dawn II: Ancient Blood (48h:45m) - Not much more can be said about this game that wasn’t covered by Vampires Dawn 3. This one came out all the way back in 2005. Despite the age, it still showed a significant graphical improvement over the first game released in 2002. It had a much more serious tone compared to the third game, and much improved gameplay mechanics over the first game. It struck just the right balance for me. You also had the ability to overlevel and absolutely destroy any enemies you come across which some people don’t like in RPGs, but I love it. I would say if you are interested in trying the series out but aren’t tolerant of some frankly outdated game design, watch a recap of the first game and try out the second. Again, they’re both free so it doesn’t hurt to try them out.


8. Life Is Strange: True Colors (16h:53m) – This is the fourth in the Life is Strange series of games with a heavy focus on story and mostly walking simulator gameplay. Every Life is Strange game I’ve played has always made my top 10 that year and this was no exception. The stories in these games are phenomenal, and even the graphics are becoming quite impressive compared to the roughness of the original. I will say I was skeptical of the main character’s powers after watching the trailer. Being an empath seemed like a much lamer power than time travel or telekinesis from the previous games. Over the course of the game though, her power set expands to include mind-reading and emotional manipulation which I felt was a great way to really open up the story. It was cool how she was able to see what other people were seeing when they experienced strong emotions, like when she was crawling across a log to save a frightened kid and saw the monsters he was imagining ready to pull him into the raging river below. The game stars Alex Chen, a 21-year-old woman who had been separated from her older brother for eight years after their mom died and dad abandoned them. The game starts with them reuniting after all this time and her brother showing her around the city he’s been living in. Unfortunately, her brother is killed in a supposed freak accident involving the mining company that operates nearby at the end of the first chapter, and she has to grapple with living in a new town after her only connection to the town died while also investigating the mining company for any potential wrongdoing. As with all the Life is Strange games, the story goes in an interesting direction and has a very exciting last chapter with a satisfying conclusion. As this series is mainly story focused, I don’t want to spoil any more than that so if this sounds interesting to you, definitely try it out. I still didn’t like it as much as the first game, but it was a big improvement on the second.


7. Lil Gator Game (6h:8m) – As you can see from my completion time, this was a much shorter game than the others on my list. That did not detract from my enjoyment of it. You play as a lil gator (all the characters are anthropomorphic animals) who goes to the park to play imaginary games with his friends. He tries to get his big sister to play with him like the old days but she’s too busy with college work. He thinks if he can make an island-wide role-playing game with his friends, his sister will see how much fun they’re having and join in. I won’t spoil any more the story, but it is fantastic. It’s mostly comedic showing how the kids play together but sprinkles in just the right amount of sad moments to be truly engaging. If you care at all about good stories in games, you owe it to yourself to pick this up.


6. The Messenger (25h:7m) – This was a great 2D platformer game that came out in 2018 but styled just like a game from the 8-bit era of the 80s and early 90s. You play as the titular Messenger, a ninja tasked with delivering a magic scroll across the island to save humanity from a demonic threat that has taken over most of the world. While the story itself is mostly serious, a lot of the writing is actually quite goofy. You come across an otherworldly shopkeeper early on that sells you upgrades but will be more than happy to talk your ear off if you let him. He also breaks the fourth wall a lot by saying things like he’s going to tell you a long story and won’t let you skip dialogue during it or gifting you a rope dart but lamenting that most players will just call it a grappling hook anyway. The platforming is satisfying (for the most part, some of the optional collectibles were a pain to get), the bosses are fun to fight, the music is catchy, and the story is great. I want to get into spoilers to properly express my opinion of this game so if you want to play it, you have my recommendation and can stop reading here. For everyone else who is curious about my full thoughts, keep reading. About halfway through the game, you deliver the magic scroll to the robed figures at the Tower of Time (of which the shopkeeper is a member). Some time travel shenanigans happen, and the robed figures send you 500 years into the future where the game goes from 8-bit to 16-bit (think NES to SNES) and transforms from a simple 2D platformer to a full on metroidvania experience with a large, interconnected map unlike the linear experience up to that point. While the initial reveal is REALLY cool, I felt that the metroidvania elements dragged on for far too long. It’s not helped that I get lost easily, but traveling back and forth across a huge map to find all the collectibles really got tedious by the end. I still overall really enjoyed my time with it, I just felt that the latter half of the game dragged on for far longer than it needed to. Also, the game may be connected to another game in my top 10 list 👀 Keep reading if you want to find out more…


5. Starfield (116h) – I’m going to state up front that my #4 and #5 games are going to be somewhat controversial in their placement. I really struggled on where to put them on this list so in the end I just had to go with how I felt overall while playing them. I don’t think most people will say that Starfield is a better game than The Messenger or Lil Gator Game, and it probably isn’t. I just remember Lil Gator Game being too short and simplistic to rank higher and getting lost having to look up guides all the time in the latter half of The Messenger to the point of frustration. I don’t have these complaints about Starfield. I don’t think there was a single moment where I was getting annoyed with the game. I was generally having a good time with it. Not as high highs or low lows if that makes sense. Starfield is another epic western FPS RPG from Bethesda, the same people who make Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I admit I have a soft spot for those games too, and Skyrim is among my favorite games of all time. As the name suggests, it’s a space-themed RPG where you get your own ship and can travel to different planets in different solar systems across the universe to explore. I’m a bit of a space/sci-fi nerd too which puts a bias in Starfield’s favor. The planets can feel samey after a while and the enemy variety was lacking by the end, but I genuinely enjoyed the story, some of the characters, and the hand-crafted cities you visited for some of the major questlines. I was also so insanely powerful by the end that I was just ripping through enemies no sweat with a minigun and didn’t even have to worry about healing. A lot of people will say that a game being this easy is a letdown and takes out the joy of overcoming a challenge, but as I wrote in my Vampires Dawn II review, overleveling to the point of absurdity to achieve that power fantasy at the end of a long RPG is so satisfying to me. Pick this up if the idea of Fallout in space intrigues you.


4. High on Life (17h:38m) – I can see the pitchforks already on this one. If this makes me lose all credibility and make you not trust my gaming opinions ever again, I understand. High on Life is a sci-fi comedy FPS from Justin Roiland’s former game development studio. Justin Roiland is the guy behind Rick and Morty, and that style of humor is present throughout the entire experience. As such, your enjoyment of this game is heavily dependent on how funny you think Rick and Morty is. If you’re not a fan, you will not like this game. I haven’t seen Rick and Morty yet, but I’ve seen enough clips to know his style of humor and I enjoyed them well enough. This game is not the most technically robust, graphically impressive, or have a deep story and characters. What it does have though is humor, and I could not stop laughing at all the jokes and the absurdity of it all. It’s hard to get comedy right, and I imagine it’s even harder to maintain that comedy for 17 hours, but I think they pulled it off. Like The Messenger, a lot of the characters also broke the fourth wall and commented on common game mechanics. One of the boss fights near the end even has the bad guy trying to pull a Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid moment by reading your hard drive and talking about games you’ve played, but then admits he can’t actually read your hard drive and just assumes you’ve played like 100 hours of Rocket League or something and gives you an embarrassing achievement so your friends laugh at you. As a Metal Gear Solid fan, this really got me and helped move this game up as high on the list as it is. If you’re a fan of Rick and Morty and don’t despise FPS games, you should pick this up. If you don’t like Rick and Morty because the humor doesn’t jive with you, stay far away.


3. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (25h:3m) – I am absolutely in love with my top three games this year. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big Star Wars fan. When I saw footage of this game for the first time, I was so excited that EA was finally making a proper story-based action-adventure game set in the Star Wars universe and not just another multiplayer Battlefront game. The only thing I was really worried about was the difficulty. This game is considered a soulslike which basically means “takes inspiration from Dark Souls gameplay”. This usually boils down to having more demanding, precise combat and dropping experience when you die that you must run back and get but disappears forever if you die again. I’ve never tried the Dark Souls games solely because they’re marketed as having high difficulty which is not something I typically gravitate towards. I have played a couple 2D soulslikes (Titan Souls and Moonscars) that I struggled with but eventually beat, but I know those are a different beast than 3D. Thankfully I was able to overcome the difficulty and ended up really liking the combat. There are also difficulty options to tone it down for a more standard gaming experience. I played on Jedi Master which is the second highest difficulty, and I felt it provided a satisfying challenge. For those with a least a little bit of Star Wars knowledge, this game take place between Episodes III and IV where most Jedi were wiped out, the Sith took over the government and transformed the republic into an empire, and any surviving Jedi have gone on the run or into hiding. One such person is the main character Cal Kestis who was just a young padawan when he lost his master to order 66 and spent several years lying low as a scrapper at an Empire staryard. One day his scrapper friend almost dies falling off a ledge and Cal uses his force powers to save him which draws the attention of the Empire thus forcing him to go on the run. Along the way he makes some unlikely allies, deals some key blows to the Empire, and learns what it takes to become a Jedi Knight. I thought everything about this game was great: the graphics, story, characters, combat, sound, everything. Perhaps even more exciting is that I can now officially say I’ve beaten a 3D soulslike and feel more confident that I can tackle some of the others in my backlog. If you like Star Wars and are at least somewhat competent with third-person action games, I can highly recommend this one.


2. Sea of Stars (53h:19m) – So how do you top a Star Wars game that has everything a Star Wars fan has been wanting for years? By having an even better story, even more interesting environments, even bigger cast of great characters, and a more unique art style. Having turn-based combat helped too. I love turn-based combat, and I feel like we don’t see that very often nowadays. This is a fantasy RPG that takes place in a land where magic can be wielded by solstice warriors which are people born on the day of a solstice. Our main characters are the lunar magic girl Valere born on the winter solstice, the solar magic guy Zale born on the summer solstice, and their best friend Garl who is fiercely loyal and a great cook but has no magic of his own. You’re tasked by the headmaster of the magic school to defeat the last Dweller (super powered creations of the big bad guy known as the Fleshmancer) which will finally bring about eternal peace. I don’t want to spoil the game too much because it is fantastic and everyone should play it, but something goes wrong, and a straightforward mission turns into an epic world-saving adventure full of twists and turns. Did I mention that this game is also a distant prequel to The Messenger? Because it is, and finding out the tragic backstory of some of the characters from that game in this one made the story of The Messenger even better. And if you play this game and care at all about the characters in it but don’t usually go for all the collectibles and side quests, I implore you to reconsider for this one. The True Ending is really something special. If there’s one criticism I can think of for this game, it’s that the combat can become simple and repetitive after a while. I did not die a single time in this game. Once you figure out what the strongest moves are and the best way to go about preventing enemies from attacking, it becomes relatively easy. Again, some people will say the lack of overcoming a challenge removes a lot of joy out of beating a game, but I didn’t mind it. Some of the bosses still required strategic thinking to overcome, especially in the endgame. Seriously, everyone who plays video games owes it to themselves to try this one.


1. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (54h:8m) – I flipflopped for a while on which game deserved my game of the year. I would almost say it’s a tie between Jedi: Survivor and Sea of Stars but one must come out on top so I awarded it to this one. This is a sequel to Fallen Order and it does the typical sequel thing of doing everything the first game did but bigger and better. Everything I said about Fallen Order is true here. What really sold me was the improved combat mechanics. It introduces two big changes that elevated it above the first game: expanded Force powers and lightsaber stances. The first time I “convinced” a Stormtrooper to attack his allies to draw their attention away from me, I was like “Wow, that was cool! I can’t believe this wasn’t in the first game!” Hindsight is 20/20 of course but seriously, it seemed so effortlessly intuitive and useful that I questioned why it wasn’t an option from the beginning. The biggest change however was the different lightsaber stances. In the first game, you mostly only had a single blade stance. In Jedi: Survivor, you had the normal stance but also a heavy stance, fast double-bladed stance, blaster stance, etc. Different stances could be useful depending on which enemies you were fighting, and you can designate two to switch between at any given time. I found the heavy stance to be the best for me for normal enemies after practicing with it, but then switched to the blaster stance to fight some of the optional bosses near the end when I wanted to keep my distance. It kept the combat fresh and engaging. I liked Cal’s character arc in this game too, and I can’t wait to see how they wrap it up in the third game. Maybe even have him show up in something live action? Please Disney, make it happen! If you played Fallen Order and want more of that but even better, or if you’re just a big Star Wars fan like me, I recommend this game. The biggest criticism I can give is that the performance was not great. I played on PC with the RTX 3080 and an admittedly aging i7-6700K and while it was fine for the most part, there were times when the game would stutter like in cutscenes or when loading in assets for a new area. A performance patch came out a few months ago that supposedly improved a lot of issues so your mileage may vary. The in-game map can also be confusing to navigate if you’re trying to find all the collectibles but that’s optional so I can’t knock the game too much for that. It was somewhat confusing to find all the collectibles in Sea of Stars too. As for which game is better between this and Sea of Stars, I think it comes down to what you’re looking for out of a game. If you’re a Star Wars/sci-fi fan, like super realistic AAA graphics, or prefer more challenging soulslike combat, you’ll probably like Jedi: Survivor more. If you prefer a fantasy setting with charming pixel art and turn-based combat, you’ll probably like Sea of Stars more. Either way, they’re both great games well worth picking up.

I also want to take the time to go over some honorable mentions as well, and there are quite a few here. These were games that I either enjoyed but didn’t quite make the top 10 or games that maybe weren’t for me, but I can acknowledge that they are well made and other will like them more. I tried to keep this section shorter but I played so many good games this year and just had to shout them out. I’ve sorted this list by completion date oldest to newest.

Frog Detective: The Entire Mystery (4h:30m) – This is a trilogy of super short but charming mystery games where you play a frog (again in a world full of anthropomorphic animals) who is sent out to solve ridiculous mysteries such as spooky ghost noises on an island or decorations that have been vandalized right before a parade. The games are kid friendly and there is very little challenge in them. The writing is hilarious, and I was always looking forward to every interaction with the locals. I deemed the games too short and simplistic to make a big enough impression to make my top 10 but I enjoyed them nonetheless. It also made me want to take this picture during my playthrough of an interaction with Frog Detective’s boss that I felt hit a little too close to home:


Amnesia: The Bunker (10h:16m) – The previous Amnesia game Rebirth made my #1 spot back in 2021, so it was disappointing that the new entry didn’t make the top 10 at all. It was also a very different game from its predecessor and one I wasn’t super fond of. This is the fourth in a series of loosely connected horror games. Unlike Rebirth, which was a more linear adventure horror game, The Bunker tried to go for one large map with a sort of metroidvania element where you unlocked different areas using different tools over the course of the game. Instead of a variety of monsters to contend with, there was only one monster chasing you which was a bit lackluster. It also doesn’t help that I get lost easily and it was very easy to get lost in this game. Still, I had some fun playing through it with a friend and can see that it’s a good game, just not the best game for me.

As Dusk Falls (7h:9m) – This is a story-driven game with many decisions creating branching paths similar to Quantic Dream games like Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human. It has a unique art style with 2D characters that looked hand-drawn in 3D environments. Characters can live or die based on your choices so there are several different endings to the story as a result. Unfortunately, I made a lot of poor choices that got characters I liked killed. At the end of each chapter, you can see every branching path the game could’ve taken with the decisions that lead there so you can replay certain chapters to get new endings. As a Game Pass game, I only had time to go through one path, so I had to live with the choices I made for better or worse. One of the coolest features was the ability for up to eight players to play simultaneously by voting on every decision and getting three vetoes per chapter if there was a decision you felt particularly strongly about. This was perfect for playing through with a friend, but with a dark story, I’m not sure how popular it would be at parties. Pick this up if you don’t mind a game that is all story and little gameplay.

Jusant (8h:41m) – This was a cool little climbing game from the original developers of Life is Strange. It is a completely voiceless game that utilizes environmental storytelling with some optional journal entries you can stumble across. You play as someone who has just crossed a large lifeless desert and spends the game climbing a huge mountain in search of where all the water in the world went. You find out over the course of the game that the desert used to be an ocean and some years ago it stopped raining, causing the ocean to gradually dry up. The many people that lived on the mountain decided to either climb up it to capture the sky whales that they believe stole the water for themselves or climb down to cross the desert to see if it rains elsewhere. The gameplay consists of utilizing different grapple points with your trusty rope and managing your stamina to climb higher and higher up the mountain. There was no way to die in this game, so it was all about piecing together how to accomplish each section of the climb while figuring out what happened to the world. I really liked this game and would probably put it at #11 on my list if I were to expand it. Bonus points, you also get to travel with a super cute blobby animal companion☺️


Scorn (6h:44m) – This is another horror game that wasn’t really for me but that I think was made well. It takes heavy inspiration from artist H.R. Giger’s works which are known for blending biology with machines in disturbing ways, and boy was this game disturbing. I’m squeamish so I found it difficult at times to play this, but it absolutely nailed what it was going for. You play another voiceless protagonist who is just another one of the abominations (albeit a more intelligent one) trudging through a bleak and empty world solving puzzles in an attempt to join the collective consciousness of all who managed to ascend and leave the physical world behind. The environments are quite detailed, the puzzles are fun to solve, and the combat introduced partway through is serviceable. If this sounds interesting to you, make sure to look up some screenshots to see if you’ll be able to stomach it before choosing to dive in.

Monument Valley 2 (2h:5m) – A short and sweet puzzle game I got for my phone years ago. I usually don’t vibe with puzzle games because I’m bad at them. The puzzles in this game though were fairly simple, and the art style is gorgeous. The game revolves around perspective and optical illusions. Imagine trying to navigate an M.C. Escher drawing with pretty colors and a bittersweet story and you’re most of the way there.

Katja’s Abyss: Tactics (5h:55m) – An interesting mash-up of Minesweeper and turn-based strategy. I’ve always loved Minesweeper so seeing it expanded into a tactics game with a story and everything was really cool. You can scan the environment to see the numbers that indicate how many mines (or Nodes in this case) are touching that space and mark them accordingly. You also control different units that each have two different forms they can take such as a drill to mine safe areas/dispose of Nodes or a fighter to fight back the alien bugs in the mines but can also turn into an artillery unit to shoot them from a distance. The campaign was only eight levels so it was pretty short but they were all fun. I’ve only seen a couple games using the Minesweeper formula so this one definitely stood out to me. I only hope other developers take the concept and run with it.

Time Bandit (9h:28m) – A politics-heavy idle/stealth game about the evils of the rich and big corporations. Your goal is to sneak time crystals out of your employers’ mining operation and into the hands of the resistance to take back power from the big wigs and stop their exploitation of the common worker. The interesting hook here is that the in-game time corresponds to real-world time so if you play the game at 9PM, the in-game time will also be 9PM and it will be dark out. Your “shift” hours change every day so if you play when you’re off shift, you’ll have to sneak around the heavier robot patrol presence. If you set up your forklift to move a box out of the way to clear a path, it will take 30 real-world minutes to complete. Your energy also drains slowly so you have to send your character to bed for several real-world hours to fully recharge. As a result, the game is only meant to be played for a few minutes at a time and then closed while your tasks complete. Some of the NPCs would make remarks about the time, day of the week, or the weather which made it feel more connected to real life. The game takes heavy inspiration from the first Metal Gear Solid game so if that sounds interesting to you, give it a shot. My biggest gripe was the ending which suddenly cut to a “To be continued” screen just as I felt it was ramping up. Hopefully the story is in fact continued at some point.

And that’s all for my honorable mentions. So many good games! As I said at the beginning, 2022 was the year of playing a ton of great games from the Humble Games collection. 2024 by comparison was the year of playing a ton of great games from Game Pass. #1, 2, 4, 5, and 7, as well as most of the honorable mentions were Game Pass games. Hard to believe how many I was able to beat in the four months I had it 😅 If you don’t have a lot of money to spend on games and have some free time, check out the catalog to see if there’s enough there to warrant trying it out for a bit.

On another note, I’ve been telling myself for years that I’m going to buy a VR headset. I’ve purchased quite a few VR games in anticipation but still haven’t gotten a headset. There still isn’t one out there that does everything I want it to do (wireless, high-res displays, and large FOV mainly). The Quest 3 comes close, and I almost bought one refurbished a couple months ago on sale, but it doesn’t quite have the large FOV and wireless technology I’m looking for. I’m willing to spend more for a better all-around headset but one still doesn’t seem to exist. A fan-made project known as Universal Unreal Engine VR Injector (or UEVR) released into beta at the end of last year. It allows you to turn hundreds if not thousands of flat games made in Unreal Engine 4 or 5 into VR games which is super exciting! As a result, the number of VR games in my backlog has ballooned to 472. This makes me want a VR headset even more now so I may end up settling on whatever the next major release is if it has good reviews. Time will tell…

I checked my top 10 post from last year and saw that my backlog was at 2,164. Don’t worry if you’re on my blog and confused about where my post from a year ago is. These top 10 posts used to be exclusively on my personal Facebook page before I decided to branch out. For obvious reasons, I wanted to put them somewhere else going forward. Anyway, I just checked my backlog and I’m now at 3,004. I still haven’t achieved beating more games than I acquired, and it’s possible I never will. One of the reasons I wanted to start up a blog was to see just how much time and money I put into this hobby to put things in perspective and hopefully actually reduce my backlog one day. If you read all of this, first of all, what’s wrong with you!? Second, thank you so much, I truly appreciate it. Once again, if you want to check out my blog and aren’t already there, please go to GCTuba's Gaming Adventures. If you want to see all the games in my backlog and the progress I make on them, please check out my How Long to Beat page. And if you want to see my current plan for which games I’m planning to play next, please check out my upcoming games collection. I’ll see you all next year week!

Happy new year!
Sea of Stars was one my most played games this year too especially since I played it twice hehe. I'm excited for the Throes of the Watchmaker DLC this spring. I wonder if the combat update has made it more challenging or not with the rebalanced abilities and mystery locks, or if it's about the same with the other changes like unlimited food and combo points carrying between fights... I only died once my first time to the Basic Basement Batch in the Arena.

Happy new year!
Sea of Stars was one my most played games this year too especially since I played it twice hehe. I'm excited for the Throes of the Watchmaker DLC this spring. I wonder if the combat update has made it more challenging or not with the rebalanced abilities and mystery locks, or if it's about the same with the other changes like unlimited food and combo points carrying between fights... I only died once my first time to the Basic Basement Batch in the Arena.

The DLC does look really good. I'm curious about how the combat changes will affect the difficulty too. I'd also be interested to see how co-op works. It'd be tough to find a friend to sit down and play a 50+ hour RPG with.

The DLC does look really good. I'm curious about how the combat changes will affect the difficulty too. I'd also be interested to see how co-op works. It'd be tough to find a friend to sit down and play a 50+ hour RPG with.

The co-op seems quite fun but yeah gotta have someone willing to do it... The high-fives or whatever they're called to get the little temporary speed boost, are so cute though. I plugged in an extra controller and used my keyboard for a third, just to see them all lol. They really went all in with the animations.

Woohoo, my first weekly update! Hopefully the first of many to come. I'm still trying to figure out how everything will be structured so please pardon the dust. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know! First off, let’s start with my game acquisitions:

Game Acquisitions


My very first week of blogging and I’ve already accumulated 22 new games 😅 I’m never going to get my backlog down at this rate! Thankfully, most of these are short and free which I suspect will be a common theme. I spent a total of $4.01 to get these which comes out to an average of $0.18/game. Not bad, although the Speedrunning with Awesome Games Done Quick Bundle at Humble Bundle is looking mighty tempting right now.



I already own BPM Bullets per Minute so that would go up for trade and I really don’t care for Sonic games but the value is still there for the rest. I’ll wait until Tuesday to see what games are offered for Humble Choice before making a purchase decision. For those unaware, Humble Choice is a subscription service offered by Humble Bundle where they offer a new bundle of games on the first Tuesday of every month. You can pay for a yearly subscription, often $100 for the year during Black Friday sales. I normally don’t like subscriptions but this one is different because not only do you get to keep the games you claim permanently, if the bundle offered doesn’t suit your tastes, you can pause your subscription for the month so there’s no rush to play everything. Essentially, a yearly subscription purchase gives you 12 credits to use whenever a bundle is offered that you’re interested in. I paid a total of $106.42 for my subscription during Black Friday which comes out to $8.87/month for a selection of usually eight games or $1.11/game. I do tend to pause most months because I either don’t care about the games offered or I already own them. The bundles usually offer a mix of one or two AA or AAA games and a bunch of indies and most of them have never been bundled before so they’re usually a good deal.

Anyway, enough rambling about Humble Choice. So I got 22 new games this week. Surely I put enough game time in to justify it, right? Let’s see my breakdown of what games I played and for how long.

Game Recaps

Huh, only four hours and eight minutes of gaming this week. That’s definitely on the low end for me. I’ve been so busy setting up my recording software, my blog, writing, and learning how to edit that I just have not had any time to actually game for my gaming blog. I’m hoping once everything is set up and I get into the swing of things, I’ll have more time to game. I’m thinking of posting my gameplay videos onto my channel I haven’t uploaded to in forever and link those here in my posts. It seemed weird to start that in the middle of my in-progress games though so I’ll try to start it when I start a new game. I do want to catch you all up to speed on the two games I’m actively playing right now, starting with:



This is an RPG Maker game where you play an exiled Elf queen who is trying to build up her businesses to earn enough money and take down the corrupt Bureau of Business. There is no combat in this game which is a rare departure from other RPG Maker games, but there is still health and mana that you can use for various things such as growing plants to sell and boosting customer rate for a short time.


Madama Biz

The gameplay loop mainly consists of going into town to buy materials, craft items to sell, upgrade your shop/clientele, and do various side quests. The end goal seems to be to automate as much as you can so the shops basically run themselves and you can just rake in the money. Here is a typical shop run so you can get an idea of how the game works:



OK, there’s a lot to break down from just that one clip. First, take a look at the eight items along the top of the screen. Those represent the different commodities you can sell. They are ordered from common and cheap to rare and expensive. You can even see me buying the item farthest from the left (VenDRANK!) from the vending machine in my store for one coin each. Why the customers don’t simply use the vending machine instead of letting me upcharge them I’ll never know.

The fermented tea can be purchased from the blue-haired guy who sits down on the couch 20 seconds in. You can also obtain it straight from the source, although you may not like how he makes it…


Mmm, toilet tea

Yeah, he brews it in the toilet. There’s a lot of interesting humor like that in this game. The craft bags are made by combining knick knacks and curios which can be purchased from the vendor in the bottom-right at the very start of the video. They used to be called loot bags but the city banned the use of the term because they felt it exploited people. Long story short, we were able to negotiate with the city to rename them craft bags so they could continue to be sold. Yay capitalism!

Envelopes can be purchased from these lovely ladies at the post office. Unfortunately, the Bureau is bleeding the post office dry so they’ve been forced to sell stocks as well to stay afloat.





The assorted fruit can be obtained by buying seeds from a fairy in town and then either growing them there or in the pots in your shop.



The art can be obtained by commissioning it from the artist who lives in the same building as the fairy. When you talk to her, you can take her to various places in the world for inspiration and she’ll get various amounts of inspiration depending on where she goes.



Because it’s a video game, everything boils down to numbers. One commission costs 200 gold and can lead to anywhere from four to 12 inspiration from what I’ve noticed. One inspiration and one mana will produce one art. Mana is restored slowly over time and can also be restored by drinking alcohol purchased from the barkeep in town. There’s also the option to pay my pixie friend hanging out on the second floor of the shop to automate all of this for a price. I’m not quite sure how this works yet as I haven’t used the option myself. I’ll need to look into this next time.


You can see the station for making craft bags at the bottom. The colored orbs are automation keys which I'll get to later

Moving on, upmarket coffee can be purchased from the kingly fellow sitting next to the red portal with his cat on the right side of the shop. The number above the portal represents the amount of coffee that can be purchased and this number will slowly go up over time.

So far, the only item I haven’t been able to make yet is the battlepass (more gaming meta humor). You can see the instructions for doing so using this clever John Wick reference:


I see what you did there

I know where the bees are but don’t remember how to get wax from them. The wicks are purchased from a dog running around town, simple enough. The fire is the hardest part. I know there’s a place in the sewers under the city where you can pay someone to let you into some sort of arena where you can run around trying to collect as much fire as possible within a certain time limit. I’ve only done this once because it was kind of expensive and I was not very good at it. I’ll need to look into this later.

So that’s how all the goods are acquired. Next, I want to go into detail on the safe. You’ll notice numbers for taxes, tax payment, loan payment, and loan debt. Here’s a picture so you don’t have to go back to the video:



As you sell goods, the taxes you owe goes up. Every few minutes, the tax man will come and collect what is owed from the safe. If you don’t have enough money in the safe when he goes to check it, you’ll get a strike. I don’t know what happens when you get three strikes but I imagine it can’t be good. He’ll drop the strike after enough successful payments. It’s a good idea to keep some excess money in the safe just in case. If you notice the tax man enter the store, you can actually block his movement if you need to run to the safe really fast to check that you have enough stored. You can also make loan payments at the safe, although I haven’t done this yet either and my loan amount keeps going up 😭 This needs to be one of my next objectives before it gets out of control.


The tax man

On the bottom-left of the screen you can see my health, mana, level, and level progress. Health and mana were discussed earlier. Levels are obtained by selling goods and completing quests. I’ve noticed sometimes that after a level up, when you exit the store, a cutscene plays that furthers the main story. More importantly, it plays this very satisfying jingle:



On the bottom-right you can see a little glowing bug counting the number of envelopes sold out of 18. These represent mini objectives that you can work towards for GG points. These points are used to earn money and unlock certain perks at the skill tree.



This all can be overwhelming at first, and trust me, I was lost for a while after taking a month long break from the game. Keep in mind that I’m now roughly 10 hours into the game. The beginning of the game was much simpler with a smaller town and a shop that only sold three items.


So much smaller and more peaceful


This is much more manageable

Each mechanic was explained as they were introduced and the difficulty didn’t ramp up significantly until the big town was unlocked. I’ve just been trying to explain everything up to this point in a single blog post so you aren’t totally lost on what I’m talking about in future posts.


The Bureau really did a number on this place

You can walk anywhere in the world you’ve explored so far on foot. There’s also little teleport orbs you can use to get to different places in the big town like the pink one above the knick knack vendor.



I’ve noticed these orbs appearing as I complete more and more of each commodity’s side quest. They’re very useful for getting around town but what about if you want to get back to the first town? After all, you can pay a visit to your first shop and collect earnings from an elf friend you left in charge there. There may be other quests that take you to that part of the world as well. Of course, you can walk there if you feel like it but it can take a couple minutes to get there which gets tedious. Another option is to use fast travel. In this game, you access fast travel by entering THE HORSE DIMENSION:



Yeah, this game is really weird sometimes. Speaking of weird, there’s also this owl you can go to to buy levels. The way he speaks always makes me chuckle.



Another weird aspect of the game is the collectibles. You can find apples in the world and when you collect enough apples, you can unlock certain chests that can provide items or upgrades. You can also use them to unlock upgrades in the apple maze.


Haven't figured out how to get to this one yet


This maze used to be filled with people starting at the entrance but I've cleared them out by collecting apples

As mentioned earlier, the ultimate goal of the game seems to be to upgrade your businesses so you can earn enough money to take down the Bureau. You can achieve this through automation as well as upgrading the shops and customers. In the big town, you can go through an interdimensional rift to buy all of these upgrades. The automation keys allow items to be placed automatically when they are sold.




These upgrades cause the automatic restocking to happen faster. I haven't purchased any yet


These upgrades cause the customers to spend more money. As you can see, these can get pricey

My money has been going towards the automation keys. They help ensure my items are in stock. After that, I want to pursue my next item side quest. At the end of my last session, the game informed me that I’ve sold 1,000 VenDRANK! and should go see the Queen Bee. Here’s how that went down:









I’m thinking of donating 10,000 to them since they said there are thousands of them and there are consequences for giving too little. It will take a little while to get enough money for that. After that, I want to buy the rest of the automation keys and then finally work on paying down my loan amount. We’ll see how that all pans out.

Oof, that was a lot of information thrown out there. Expect future posts to not go nearly as in-depth for this game. Now that you know the basics, I’m hoping I can just quickly recap what I did in the previous week and share any interesting pics and clips. Now, let me move on to the next game I played. There won’t be quite as much to get into here since the game is more story-focused and not a mechanically complex RPG.



In this game, you play a bird by the name of Finley who has just been hired as a junior doctor at St. Ursula’s Hospital. The game starts with you chasing a patient down the hall of the hospital and getting hit in the head. After a weird dream sequence, he wakes up at his apartment and you find out he had to take several weeks of medical leave from his new job to recover.


Finley!

You start the day waiting for a bus that never comes and you end up being late on your first day back. Here, you’re introduced to your stern boss who chastises you on your tardiness and gives you your assignments for the day.


Dr. Krokowski. She is not very nice



The gameplay loop involves completing the three tasks for your patients from prescribing medicine to listening to their breathing to giving them their shots. These tasks are presented in the form of minigames which are as difficult as the game gets. They don’t present much of a challenge as this isn’t that kind of game. They’re mostly there to break up all of the dialogue.




This one is literally just Wordle



CONTENT WARNING: Cartoon depiction of a shot being administered



When you aren’t treating patients, you’re running around both the hospital and the town talking to friends, coworkers, and various townsfolk. There’s one patient in particular who loves to tell stories from when she was younger. I love the scene transitions at the beginning, it really shows how pretty the art style is.






Bestie



The activities you do in town varies. It always involves talking to people, but you also do things like talk to a shop owner who accidentally spills paint on you:



Or go to a bar with friends:



Or…whatever this is:



Treating patients and talking to people is the majority of what you do in this game so it’s nice that the town activities mix things up a bit. It helps that Finley has an interesting personality too. He’s always making up stories while depicting various objects in town, and his side-eye when he’s annoyed or suspicious is second to none.





When I last left the story, Finley and his friends went to the bar to have some drinks and talk after work. A couple patrons walk in and accuse his friend of killing one of their loved ones a year ago and starts berating them and demanding compensation. Eventually the friend has had enough and a fight breaks out between them.



At the hospital the next day, the chief physician calls Finley and his friends to his office, places the friend who started the fight on leave, and gives the other two written warnings. The hospital was already in hot water over leaky pipes dripping water on a patient’s bed and a storm damaging part of the roof so staff was instructed to keep a low profile. They said it will all blow over soon but tensions are high. Luckily the fall festival will be happening in my next session so that should lighten the mood a bit. But for now, it’s time for Finley to get some sleep.



I’m playing through this one with a friend and we’re voicing all the characters. More accurately, I’m voicing Finley and he’s voicing everyone else and doing a great job at it too. I enjoy playing through these story heavy games with him, and this one is extra special because he’s a healthcare worker so the game can hit close to home for him sometimes. He also provides some interesting insights tying Finley’s experience working in a hospital with his own. This game is on the shorter side and I think we’re past the halfway point so it shouldn’t take too much longer. We try to hang out every week and play for a couple hours so we’ll see.

And that’s the end of my game recaps! This took way more time and effort than I was expecting. I thought I would only post a couple blurbs about each game and show them in action and it turned into a whole thing. Future recaps should be shorter since I won’t have to explain every mechanic and the story up to that point. I did want to touch briefly on the movie and TV shows I watched.

TV/Movie Recaps

I watch a fair amount of TV shows throughout the week, and I usually have a movie night on Friday where I’ll watch one movie from my list. Here is everything I watched this week:

- Agatha All Along Episodes 7-9 (finished)
- American Dad Season 21 Episode 10 (all caught up, show ongoing)
- Marvel's What If...? Season 3 (finished)
- FLCL Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (currently watching, show finished)
- Barton Fink

I’m a big Marvel fan, and I enjoyed Agatha All Along and What If…? well enough. Agatha All Along never reached the highs of Wandavision but it was still pretty good. What If…? Season 3 was a big step up from Season 2 which I thought was a letdown. Season 1 was probably still the best but 3 was good too. I’m bummed the show was canceled. American Dad is what it is. It’s your standard Seth MacFarlane animated show so if you’re familiar with Family Guy, it’s like that. FLCL has been an interesting watch so far. I don’t fully understand what’s happening but the animation is unique and the scenarios are over the top so I’m enjoying the ride. I just finished the movie Barton Fink as I was writing this so I haven’t fully digested it yet. It started out simple enough at the beginning with a playwright hot off a successful play being hired by a Hollywood big shot to write a script for a motion picture. He’s struggling on how to start since it’s a wrestling film and he isn’t well acquainted with the sport. As he works his way through writer’s block, he meets some interesting characters who help him out (or hurt him, it depends). The ending was wild though, I need to think about it some more. I did enjoy the movie though.

Conclusion/Upcoming

These weekly updates were supposed to be my short posts! What happened? I’ll have to work on truncating my thoughts next time. What did you think? What can I improve on? Does having section headers help with readability or do they seem out of place? Please provide any feedback you may have. My plan for next week is to finish FLCL and start Firefly. FLCL is a short show so it shouldn’t take too long to get through. Firefly is also short with only one season and a movie so I should get through that quickly as well. The next movie on my list is Rushmore. For games, I will continue with the same two. I don’t usually jump around games and just stick with one single-player game and one co-op game per friend. Please look forward to my next post on Sunday. Thanks for reading!

January 5-11, 2025

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my blog for weekly update #2. So after the first weekly update, I realized just how time consuming it was to recap every single little thing that happened in the games I’m playing. In an effort to streamline my video editing and blog writing, I set up some shortcuts in OBS. I have a nice gaming mouse (Logitech G502X) with some extra buttons that I can program to do different things in the software. I set up one button to capture screenshots, one to save the last two minutes of recording, and one to mark the current time code for my editing software so I know to go there later and cut something out if need be. That last one will be important for when I start posting full gameplay videos on my YouTube channel. I’ve already seen how much more quickly I was able to put this together compared to last week. Hopefully this means no more pulling an all-nighter to get the blog post up in time. Anyway, let’s get into it starting with my game acquisitions.

Game Acquisitions



I got a lot more games this week. The January Humble Choice was revealed and it included a few games I’m interested in so I ended up claiming it. I’m excited to try out the Blasphemous series. I have the first one but haven’t played it yet. I heard the second one is even better so now I can play through both! I played a somewhat similar game called Moonscars back in 2022. It was really hard and I almost quit when I got stuck on the first boss. I persevered and ended up beating the game after many, many deaths. It was pretty good! I’m also interested in Jagged Alliance 3. I haven’t played the originals but I’m a sucker for turn-based strategy and this looks right up my alley. I also ended up buying the AGDQ Humble Bundle I mentioned in my last update so both bundles are included here. I’ve heard good things about Ori and now that I have the first game, I’ve wishlisted the second. Some people don’t add games to their backlog until they actually acquire them but I go ahead and add them right away. That’s why my backlog increased by more than what is in the picture above.

On top of the games listed above, Amazon Prime also announced all of their giveaways for the month. It started with Eastern Exorcist last week but now they have a blog post up for the other giveaways. I claimed Spirit Mancer as you can see but I’ll be adding five more throughout the month. They always announce everything at the beginning of the month but then space out the giveaways every Thursday which is why I can’t claim all of them yet.

# of Games: 15

Total Money Spent: $12

Price/Game: $0.80

Game Recaps


Alright, a decent increase from last week, almost 10 hours! I actually managed to game a bit during the work week instead of having to wait until the weekend. That’s always nice. Unfortunately, not everything was positive and upbeat in my games. Let’s get started with my shop management RPG.



So mere minutes after starting my next session, I was running the shop to get enough money to donate 10,000 VenDRANK! to the Queen Bee and the game informed me that my loan balance hit $100,000. It was followed by this ominous message from the tax collector:





Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good. OK, definitely need to stick to my plan laid out last week. Get the drinks for the Queen Bee, buy the last of the automation keys, then focus solely on paying down my loan amount. So after a few more minutes, I actually did get enough to buy the 10,000 VenDRANK! to donate. It didn’t take nearly as long as I was expecting. It turns out the vending machine that sells it close to the bees is two coins each whereas the vending machine in my shop is only one coin. After taking a few trips between the hive and my shop (you can only buy 999 at a time), I was able to donate enough and only spent half of what I was expecting. Here’s how that went down:



Wow, now I can sell the drinks for a 244% markup! This should help significantly. The bee behavior ended up being them buying a lot more of the drink every time they enter the shop. Nice! Alright, commodity side quest complete. Back to the shop to save enough for the automation keys. Just a few minutes later:



Oh wow, another side quest so soon. After the great rewards from the VenDRANK! one, I definitely need to see what this one is about. Let’s see:



A three-in-one special. Now I can choose for my assorted fruit plans to grow all the way to the seed stage or stop at the fruit stage. I actually never noticed that there were different stages the plants grew to, I just bought seeds from the fairy when I ran out 😅 I also got another new teleport orb outside my shop directly to the garden and I can sell the fruit for a 25% markup. Another successful commodity side quest. I also got a new spell that lets me turn plants at fruit stage to go to seed stage so that could come in handy.



At this point, I decided to focus solely on running the shop. I decide to check my vault when the tax man comes and much to my horror, my loan has ballooned to $150,000! How did that happen so quickly!? OK, kind of in panic mode at this point. I decide that it might finally be time to buy some speed and character upgrades. I need to make sure my items stock themselves faster than customers can buy them, and that customers spend more when they do come. I head out to buy what I need and head back with the only goal being to pay the debt. Unfortunately, I start noticing that no matter how much I put towards loan payments, the loan balance is slowly going up. I’m at the point now where the interest is outpacing my profits and things spiral out of control. That’s when it happens:




Oh no, an actual game over (but also technically an ending). I didn’t know you could lose in this game! I thought there would just be some special scenario that would play out once you hit $200,000 owed but nope. OK, this isn’t good. I go to check when my last save was and it was a few minutes earlier when my balance was around $140,000. I could also go back to the beginning of my session (losing two hours of progress) and start paying down my loan earlier. I really didn’t want to lose all my progress so I look up some possible solutions. Someone brought up that you can go back to work at the first shop without fear of the tax collector showing up and increasing your loan balance so that’s what I ended up doing. Wealth accumulation is much slower this way but at least I can accumulate in peace. I’m able to put some money towards my loan and it actually started going down! OK, this is working and I don’t have to lose progress. I guess it’s time to grind at the first shop for a few hours to get enough gold to wipe away the debt. I didn’t think there would be grinding in a non-combat RPG but here we are. I did get an alcoholic upgrade for buying so much gin during the grind to replenish my mana:



I also came across this puzzle that I didn’t even know was a puzzle while I was trying to figure out how to get the apple chest. Very mysterious, may need to come back to this later.



So it turns out the grinding for money at the small shop only took another hour, not nearly as bad as I was expecting. When I got my loan balance down to around 75,000 I was able to start paying it off slowly but surely through the main shop. While I was doing this, I got a couple commodity upgrades. First was one for fermented tea:





I didn’t know the option I picked was the bad one! He said there were no side effects! Oh well. At least now the tea sells for almost double and production has tripled. I’ve actually noticed that I’m now producing more tea than I can sell so I don’t even need to buy it anymore. I totally would’ve rejected this deal had I known 🫤 Anyway, I also got a second VenDRANK! upgrade. I didn’t even know there were multiple upgrade tiers.



Wow, almost a triple price markup. This is turning into quite the lucrative business. I’m working the counter for a while after this and then it finally happens. The moment I’ve been waiting for:



The loan has finally been paid off! I wish I could remember what the original amount was but it took me 400,000 gold to pay it off. Wow, that was a lot. Now I only have to worry about keeping up with taxes, and I’ve reached grand merchant rank! Right now the only thing I know about this is that I’ve unlocked the next tier of upgrades with the butterflies. They don’t seem to be game-changing but it’s nice to have another thing to work towards. Now that my money is all going to commodities and profit, I can finally afford some upgrades again. I start with this upgrade to the assorted fruit planters in my shop:







It seems this was premature because I’m not even close to having 999 fruit yet. Oh well, it’ll come in handy later I’m sure. I also took the time to buy all the customer upgrades I can and got all the speed upgrades to level two so the shop restocks itself. The only minor annoyance is that the red portal in the shop produces upmarket coffee at a slower pace than people are buying them so I’m always out of stock. Hopefully there will be a way to upgrade that in the future.

My next focus was on the battlepass commodity. This took some work because the ingredients to create them are expensive and I’m terrible at the minigame to get the fire necessary. I was finally able to get enough fire in one run to get the battlepass automation key. I was also able to find the customer willing to pay for them. Turns out there’s a chicken in town that will buy everything that I never talked to. Who’d’ve thought? After I sold my first battlepass and left the store, the quest for the last commodity started. I need to find a way to obtain some permits.



Further along the quest I was given some vintage VenDRANK! I need to figure out whom to give this to next time. This quest is becoming quite convoluted. I also did some side stuff like found a couple more apple collectables, got a +1 Health regen upgrade from the apple maze, purified a cursed relic, and unlocked a couple more areas in the mysterious cave close to my home city that were level gated. Next level unlock is at 50 and I ended my session at 47 so I’m close.

Alright, that was a lot of information. I’m glad I got more time in with this game and made some progress. On to my story driven co-op game, and there were definitely some ups and downs this week.



It’s the Hibernation Festival! This is a celebration of the beginning of winter in the town of Porcupine where everyone just gets together and has a good time. We run into Karl as soon as we get there. It looks like he already has a head start. I wonder if he has a drinking problem…



We found out that our best friend Mia entered the stew contest for the festival. I wonder how she’s handling it.



Alright, not doing so well. We give her a chance to collect herself and peruse the festival. Just a few stalls here and there and the big center stage. At least we found out where the music was coming from. Hopefully we’re not bothering him.



After talking to everyone we could, we go back to Mia to start the stew contest. Some stiff competition, except maybe for the pig on the right. He’s the hospital cook and thinks he’s all that but I suspect he’s not actually a very good cook.



We talk to Mia on stage and she realizes she forgot an ingredient than can only be obtained by another contestant. Long story short, he agrees as long as we win the bottle of liquor being given away at the festival by answering a riddle which we eventually do. After all is said and done, Mia wins the contest. Hooray! After celebrating, the festival officially begins.



We talk to everyone again and eventually have to part ways. We have to work the night shift at St. Ursula’s tonight. I got a kick out of Finley’s origin story for the vending machine near the entrance. He really is a character.



We receive our assignments and start with this owl. She is apparently a surgeon so thinks she already knows her diagnosis and is very dismissive and belittles us. Finley’s side eye makes a triumphant return.



Eventually we get to our old turtle friend with the stories and she isn’t doing too well. After telling us one last story, she asks for some tea so we run to the break room to brew some. That’s when we get to possibly the saddest conversation in the game with our boss, and one I’m sure a lot of healthcare workers have to have.





Poor guy. As a junior doctor, it seems this is his first time dealing with a patient dying on his watch. He brings her her tea, they have one last exchange, then she passes peacefully.



Finley spends the whole weekend depressed. He walks around town with his head down. When he goes up to an object that would normally start a hilarious imaginary conversation, he just says he doesn’t feel like it and moves on. He goes to work and after finishing up his patient assignments, his boss says he’s been invited to speak at her funeral and says he can take the rest of the day off. We end with him outside of Giuliano’s where it’s going to take place. Man, what a sad way to end the session. Hopefully next time he’ll be in better spirits.

TV/Movie Recaps

OK, let’s try to lighten the mood a little bit. Here is everything I watched this week:

- FLCL Season 1 Episode 4-Season 5 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)
- American Dad Season 21 Episode 11 (all caught up, show ongoing)
- Rushmore

Controversial opinion incoming: I enjoyed FLCL Season 3 more than Season 1. Everything I read online said Season 1 is the only good one and the others aren’t worth watching but I disagree. I think I just enjoyed the characters more, and I’m finally starting to understand the show. I was really lost on what was happening at the beginning. Season 4 was really off-putting with the 3D animation style and short length. I wasn’t a big fan. Season 2 was alright. Only two more episodes to go! I’ll finish it the day this post goes up and start Firefly. Rushmore was your typical Wes Anderson movie. Somewhat strange and off-putting, yet charming. I enjoyed it. Next movie coming up is 127 hours.

Conclusion/Upcoming

A productive week this week, and I barely lost any sleep when putting this together! I still feel like it’s too long, maybe I just need to stick to summaries instead of play-by-plays because writing these is seriously cutting into my gaming time. My work also announced that they want us back in the office every week starting this week and staying for the whole shift instead of leaving early and working the rest of the shift at home which really sucks. My free time is only getting lower.

In other news, Nvidia announced the RTX 50 series GPUs at CES. The 5080 and 5090 will be released on January 30th. I took off a couple hours that day and I’m going to try to get to Microcenter early to snag a card for my new build. Then I can finally transition everything over and soft retire my current one. I spent the better part of December setting up what I could on the new PC without a GPU so hopefully most of the heavy lifting is done. It will still take a while to get Playnite and all my new recording stuff set up so game time in early February may be limited but that’s a future me problem. I’m going to start putting my total number of games at the end of my posts to keep a running tally. It should be interesting to see how much the number goes up from week to week. Thanks for reading, and see you all next week!

Backlog total: 3,039

January 12-18, 2025

In case you don’t get the pun in the title, I finally made some story progress in Final Profit. It’s nice not having to grind for coin and just unlocking stuff. There’s gonna be a lot of clips here, just a heads up. So without further ado…

Game Acquisitions


I bought both the Fanatical Slayer Bundle and Explosive Bundle. I was so close to resisting too 😩 No free games this week so the price per game went up too. Hopefully this doesn’t become a trend.

# of Games: 12

Total Money Spent: $18.06

Price/Game: $1.51

Game Recaps


Significantly reduced playtime this week unfortunately, and I didn’t get to play Fall of Porcupine with my friend. I also recorded a lot of footage for Final Profit because there was a lot of story stuff happening so it took a while to get it all edited down. I also just started up in-office work on Tuesdays and had hangouts with friends Thursday-Saturday so I was super busy. Anyway, let’s get to all the story stuff.



Continuing right where I left off, I found the customer who would take the Vintage VenDRANK! Of course it was the crazy purple lady.



Alright, she wants me to deliver some tarot cards to the witch in the apartment buildings. No problem. Before leaving the shop, I’m notified about my next commodity upgrade. Looks like craft bags are up next. Let’s go see what that entails.





The craft bag production fee is only 1 coin so still a decent uplift in profit. I want to make sure I’m only picking generous dialog options instead of ruthless ones. I want to be a good person! I still feel bad about drugging the tea. Anyway, let’s get back to delivering the tarot cards.



She wants me to deliver heart medicine to the old lady from the first town. I’m sensing a pattern here. Still, it seems important so I’m off.



An old coupon to the electronics store huh. Sounds interesting, let’s head back there. Thank God for the horse dimension.



I decided to go ahead and upgrade it since I’m already there and have the money. Will that be important later? Who knows! With all the deliveries out of the way it’s time to head back to the castle. Let’s see what the queen has to say.



The prince is dead. NOOOOOOO! I hardly knew ye. Luckily I just happened to be looking at a guide for a different part of the game and came across a way to save him. Let’s reload and try again.



There we go, that’s much better. I saved someone’s life and got a new customer. All in a day’s work. It’s still unfortunate about what happened to the real prince though. Taking down the Bureau is now a personal matter for the queen. She bestows some kind of incriminating evidence that will allow me to sell permits, the last commodity to unlock in the city. Let’s go pay the Bureau a little visit.



We have met the Lord of Business, Mrs. Fives. We show her the incriminating evidence and she allows us to buy permits. However, she warns that we aren’t allowed to sell them at our shop or there will be consequences. How ominous, I’m sure that won’t come back to bite me later. I go into my store to put the permits on sale and a lot happens at once.



So not only did I get the prompt to go back to the castle to talk about the next stage of the plan to lure Mrs. Fives into a trap, I also got the notifications for upmarket coffee and art upgrades. Since the king that sells me the coffee stays in my shop, his quest is super quick. I was just complaining in my last post about how slow coffee production was so this was well-timed, and it comes with a 20% price increase too! Nice. I decide to take a break from the main story and see what the artist is up to.



This was a neat little side quest. I got to meet the Owl Lich again who takes some of my life energy. I wonder what he’s using it for, hopefully nothing nefarious. The art now sells for roughly double what it used to and the amount of inspiration per trip can go up. Another very good upgrade. With those two side quests out of the way, I head back to my shop. The quest took long enough that I kinda forgot what I was doing and accidentally left the permits on the counter. None other than the Bureau representative who collects my taxes decided to buy the permit and I’m met with an untimely demise.



Another ending unlocked! I’m trying to find the silver lining here. The game was very gracious to remind me that it autosaves every time I enter the shop so I’m able to quickly remedy my error. After reloading the save, I place the permits on the counter and quickly leave the shop. I head over to the castle to carry out the devious plan to take down Mrs. Fives. This is where all the story stuff happens. Be prepared for an eight-minute clip with nothing but story progress.



The plan worked! Not only did I take down Mrs. Fives, I’m now usurping her to become the new Lord of Business. It’s not official yet though, I need to have a swearing in at the Capital. My home town of Faeona has been made available as well. I think these were the last two areas to unlock so I’ll have a lot to do next time.

A couple more minor events occurred before I ended my session. Right after taking down Fives, I got an interesting little snippet of backstory with Biz and her fae friend Refrain.



So they both felt neglected by the previous queen during their training which led to some resentment for each other. An interesting little story tidbit there. I also unlocked the rest of the Bureau building in the city and found records of what the Bureau has been up to in other towns. A lot of interesting worldbuilding here.



So even though I only played for an hour and 17 minutes this week, it was chock full of story progression. I should have a lot to do and talk about next time. Let’s move on to what I’ve been watching.

TV Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

- FLCL Season 5 Episodes 2-3 (finished, show complete)
- Firefly Episodes 1-6 (still watching, show complete)
- American Dad Season 21 Episode 12 (all caught up, show ongoing)

You might notice I don’t have a movie listed here. Because of the plans I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t able to squeeze in a movie night. I am off work tomorrow for Martin Luther King Jr. Day though so maybe I’ll squeeze the movie 127 Hours in tonight. As for my shows, I finished up FLCL. I still think Season 3 was the best season. I did like how Season 5 was a sequel to Season 3 taking place like 10 years later but it was also only three episodes like Season 4 so I felt like there wasn’t enough there. I also wasn’t fond of what they did for Kana’s character or how the only constant character up to that point (Haruko) wasn’t even in it. Bit of a dud ending, but still an interesting show nonetheless. I started Firefly and I’m enjoying it so far. I’m already over halfway through 🙁 Unfortunately it’s a very short show with only one season so I’ll finish it up quickly.

Conclusion/Upcoming

It was a shorter post this week since I didn’t play Fall of Porcupine. That’s probably a blessing in disguise though, putting these posts together is still time-consuming. It might be impossible to play even less this week than last week unless I don’t play anything at all. Would I have enough to write about!? Let’s hope that never comes to pass. For this week, I’m planning on finishing up Firefly and want to watch Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and Gun Gale Online season 2. I didn’t even know they were making more Gun Gale Online, the first season came out years ago as a spinoff to Sword Art Online which ended back in 2020. For games, I’m planning to explore the new areas in Final Profit. I’m curious if the shops become even more complex. I feel like the Battlepass commodity in the city shop took forever to get and sell, I don’t even want to think about commodities that are even more difficult to get. I’m also hanging out with my friend on MLK day so we should get some Fall of Porcupine time in. I’m officially T-minus 11 days until I wait outside Microcenter in hopes of snagging a 5090 and retiring this PC. Fingers crossed. I’ll see you all next week!

Backlog total: 3,051 (+12)

January 19-25, 2025


Truer words have never been spoken

Another productive week of exploring new cities and uncovering conspiracies. Let’s get into it.

Game Acquisitions


Before you ask, the game you’re thinking of was free I swear 😭 It’s not the kind of game I would pay for normally but I hear it’s actually not bad. I did get a few free games this week which is nice. I bought Fanatical’s Build your own Elite VR (New Year Edition) since VR bundles are usually really expensive but this one was as cheap as flatscreen game bundles. I hear Tea for God is really good, can’t wait to buy a VR headset to try it out 😝

# of Games: 11

Total Money Spent: $8.03

Price/Game: $0.73

Game Recaps

Anything would’ve been an improvement over last week. I’m still not happy with my content creation to gaming ratio. If it doesn’t improve when I start new games, I’ll have to figure something out. For now, let’s recap my Final Profit progress.



I entered my hometown of Faeona for the first time since getting exiled at the beginning of the game. It seems like a peaceful place, definitely a far cry from the hustle and bustle of the city. It’s far from perfect though. There is a slum district, rich folk who see themselves as better than everyone else, and some people who aren’t too happy to see us. I stumbled into the library and came across some music tiles that played notes when I ran across them. I was able to brute force the solution and was greeted with this:



I don’t know if the Minstrel’s Harp is an important quest item or just a trophy but the puzzle was fun to solve regardless. After exploring Faeona for a bit, I received some quests and headed back to the city. After entering my store, Biz mentioned how she needed someone to run the Enterpriston store just like the small store from the first town for some passive income. After exiting the store, I got this cutscene from the Bureau council members.



Sounds like they’re willing to work with me when I do meet them. I imagine we’ll be stabbing each other in the back soon enough. I ended up spending a lot of time back in the city running the shop and completing quests and got quite a few upgrades. I’ll see if I can rapid fire some of them.





A bit of a weird scripting sequence break there with the guy suggesting where to find a fire extinguisher before I knew I needed one. The upgrade to put down more fire at a time when crafting battlepasses is pointless but the 18% price increase is nice.





Holy crap, a 4,433% price increase! By far the largest jump in price for a commodity upgrade.





A modest 17% increase on the price of upmarket coffee. Still picking the generous dialogue choices!





I received this mana crystal from my totally not evil friend Odina. I poured a metric ton of my mana into it and was awarded with passive mana regen+1. That should come in handy later. And I have a cute crystal dog to boot!



A very impressive 265% markup on fermented tea.





Unlocked the ability to sell fruit seeds which I see as another useless upgrade since I’m always out of them. I’ll take the 25% price increase for the fruit though. I wasted enough time in the city, time to confront my daughter the queen in Faeona.



There was a lot to unpack there. Biz misses her daughter very much and hopes to reconnect with her. She seems to be thinking the same. The fae council has now tipped into Biz’s favor, but a unanimous vote is required to get her back on the council herself. The next story quest is to secure the votes of all the council members to achieve this. Also, Divina’s child is a Lord of Business!? I wonder if that was “Mx. Two” from the Bureau council cutscene given the supposed use of gender neutral pronouns and fae background. Biz and Divina also apparently dated a very long time ago, I wonder what happened between them. Let’s head back to the city to secure the votes, starting with Pixa.



He decided he wanted me to play hide and seek with him to get his vote. A little annoying but after three times finding him, he agreed. I actually ran into Boat (the fairy selling seeds) while I was trying to find Pixa and she revealed that there are young creatures who look like her that are attracted to cities with plant life and she feels the need to protect them. She asked me to gather the three that are somewhere around the city to get her vote. Basically, more hide and seek.



The next vote on the list is Jot who runs the interdimensional upgrade shop. His quest is very simple.



Just a quick 25,000 coins to bribe secure his vote. I actually meant to go back to Faeona at this point and talk to more of the locals but accidentally started the quest to head to the capital so I guess I’m doing that next.



Immediately upon setting off for the capital, I’m greeted by a cutscene showing that the Legislator and the Representative from the Bureau are going to try and stop me from becoming a Lord of Business by sabotaging the train I’m using to get there.



Cutting back to Biz, we walk through the cemetery we were at earlier where we discovered the prince had been killed. Among the tombstones was a maze that led to an apple chest and another ending!



After reloading the save, we walk to the train and are greeted by the train captain, the ticket master, and a rich passenger known as Lady Plenty. On board the train we discover that the Representative is also hitching a ride, as well as King Bean, an orphan boy he’s looking after, and various train staff. What transpires is a plot to replace Biz with an imposter to make sure she doesn’t rise to power.



We do eventually catch the imposter and save Biz. We also learn Odina’s backstory. She was evil after all, she worked for the Bureau! Was is the operative word here though, she seems to have turned over a new leaf so I’m still trusting her for now.



The rich passenger we met before we boarded the train turned out to be a mechanic specializing in gems which could be very useful for us moving forward. Biz added her to her team. With all that craziness out of the way, we’ve finally arrived at the capital.



So neon! Seriously, I like the blue color here, it’s a nice contrast from previous environments. I spared the Biz imposter, she didn’t seem terribly malicious and was only in it for the money. Gotta stick with those generous decisions. Hopefully that doesn’t come back to bite me later. I head a little farther into town and run into none other than Mr. Four, one of the Lords of Business.





Oh boy, information overload here. This is exactly what I was afraid of. This is gonna be a whole new game now it looks like. As if the game wasn’t confusing enough as it is, now we’re adding real estate to our portfolio. Who knows what other profit-making schemes we can get up to here. I’m just about to sign off for the day when I run into a familiar face outside my new place.



I’m continuing to choose generous decisions over ruthless ones, but I definitely don’t feel good about this decision. I don’t trust the Representative at all. I guess we’ll have to see how it all plays out. Anyway, let’s move on to my other game.



We arrived at the funeral and Giuliano informed us that another hospital employee stopped by, but then ran out back. He asked us to check on him so we did and it turned out to be the janitor Gregor.



He feels guilty about Irma’s death and feels that the water leak was at least partially responsible for her demise. We assure him that wasn’t the case and that he should join everyone inside for the service. Unfortunately, the instigator that Karl picked a fight with earlier overheard the conversation and decided to start something.



The song that Giuliano played was the same song that played when his mother would tell us one of her stories. I thought that was a nice touch. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to enjoy it for long before we’re asked to leave to avoid further disruptions. That really sucks, Finley already feels guilty as it is. Mia invites us to watch her play rehearsal to get our mind off things and of course we end up getting roped into it. It was interesting but kind of long and didn’t further the plot so I won’t post a clip here. We head home for the night and wake up to find out an angry mob is descending on the hospital. On our way there, we pass by Giuliano’s and decide to stop by real quick to ask how the rest of the service went.



We missed placing the statue in the woods 😔 Huge bummer. We get to the hospital and sure enough there’s an angry mob calling for the place to be torn down. I’ll give you three guesses on who is running it.



Even one of the nurses is in the crowd! After a quick chat with Ingrid, she informs us that our boss’ boss the chief physician wants to speak with us. Let’s see what that’s about.



We’re not in trouble or anything. He just wanted to tell us that these things happen and to just keep doing our job to the best of our ability. He assures us he’ll take care of the mob outside which is a relief. After some patient checkups, we start heading out the hospital and run into some actual trouble.



Alright, angry mob is still doing their thing at the front entrance and the chief physician is nowhere to be found. Let’s try to find him.



An alternate universe where pizza cures cancer huh? I can get behind that. With Dr. Theobald nowhere to be found, we head back up to our ward to find Mia having a talk with the patient we were chasing at the beginning of the game when we hit our head.



A conspiracy regarding the hospital seems to be unfolding. The patient confirms that he saw the same files we saw in the unused ward. What were they doing there? Who was looking at them? Finley and Mia head out the back entrance to talk to Karl about our findings.



Our plan is to steal the keys to the hospital archive room and see what we can find. The plan is long, unnecessarily complicated, and just downright silly.



Goofy. I don’t think Finley is having as much fun executing the plan as Karl is concocting it.



We finally have the keys, meet outside the archive to plan our next move, and then…



Welp, the door was unlocked the whole time. The plan was for nothing! It was funny seeing the perspective shift from overexaggerated planning mode to reality where everyone was just in their normal clothes. We go inside to see what we can find.



There’s definitely missing files alright. But more importantly, the hospital is filling up and they’re short-staffed. I guess we’re picking up some overtime. After pulling an extra shift, we try to leave when we discover that the mob has infiltrated the hospital!



We’re definitely in illegal territory at this point. I wonder if the cops will finally do something about them. One of the protestors has collapsed so we help them to a room to begin treatment. Our boss Dr. Krokowski says she’ll do what she can but to treat the other patients in the meantime. Triple shift time baby! After yet another set of rounds we’re alerted that the collapsed protestor isn’t doing well and Dr. Krokowski needs our help right away.



Oh no. This definitely isn’t going to help our image about the hospital killing patients. Things are quickly spiraling out of control, but our boss insists that we need to go home to rest and I agree. What a crazy day. I feel like we may be nearing the end of the game. Is my first completion of the year right around the corner?

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· 127 Hours

· Barefoot Gen

· Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Episodes 1-2 (currently watching, show ended)

· American Dad Season 21 Episode 13 (all caught up, show ongoing)

· Firefly Episodes 7-14 (all done!)

I was able to squeeze in a movie Sunday night since I didn’t work on Monday. 127 Hours is a movie about a thrill seeker (played by James Franco) who falls down a ravine and gets his hand pinned to the wall by a rock and has to figure out how to free himself. It was difficult to watch at times since it gets quite bloody. It mostly took place at one location and used some found footage style filming which I thought was interesting. Barefoot Gen is an anime film that came out in the 80s about the atomic bomb dropped on Japan during World War 2. This is probably one of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen. It's very good but do not watch this if you aren’t in the right headspace for it.

On the TV side, I finished up Firefly and started watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off with a friend. I enjoyed the space western vibes of Firefly, I just wish it was longer. It felt like it wasn’t long enough to have satisfying character arcs or an overarching plotline. I still need to watch the Serenity movie which I’ll do today so maybe that will have a more satisfying conclusion. I’m a huge fan of the Scott Pilgrim movie so I’m super excited to get into the anime. I’m really digging it so far, although I’ve only watched the beginning. It’s another one season show so my friend and I should get through it pretty quick.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Overall a pretty good week I think. I unlocked what I assume are the last areas of Final Profit and I believe I’m about to reach the climax of Fall of Porcupine. I probably won’t be able to play more of the latter. My friend and I are planning to watch some live music for our next hangout. The big Nvidia RTX 50 launch is happening on Thursday and he said he might join me for that too to keep me company. I’m hoping to get there around 6-6:30 to increase my chances of snagging a 5090. I know some people will be camping out the night before but I can’t do that. Hopefully the demand isn’t as high as I’m expecting it to be. I’m excited to retire this PC and move on to the new one.

On the game front, it’ll likely just be Final Profit this week. I don’t feel like I’m close to the end since I just unlocked the capital so that will likely take some time. Once I finish Fall of Porcupine, I can post my first game review! I plan to incorporate game reviews into whatever post comes after I complete the game. I haven’t actually reviewed games in the past since I feel like my opinion is constantly changing as I compare it to other games I play later but I’ll give it a shot. For movies and TV, I plan on watching Barefoot Gen 2 (more depression I’m sure), Serenity, and starting Gun Gale Online Season 2. I’m not sure what the plan is when the new PC build is put together. I want to finish Final Profit before I fully switch over but I also want to make sure everything is working as it should on the new build. There’s also going to be a lot of setup involved with moving my stuff over, incorporating my emulators into Playnite, and getting my recording stuff automated. It may be a slow week next week but we’ll see. My first monthly post should also be coming this week. I’m not sure how those will be formatted yet, maybe just some graphs for playtime and purchases or something. I look forward to figuring it out. Until next time!

Backlog total: 3,059 (+8)

A quick note on how the backlog total change is calculated. You may have noticed that my backlog only increased by eight games this week despite acquiring 11 new ones. The reason for that is because I add games to my backlog as soon as I know I’m planning on playing them, whether I’ve acquired it or not. In this case, Amazon Prime revealed their free games for January a couple weeks ago which are released in batches every week. There are three games that were released for free this week that I claimed, but I added them to my backlog a couple weeks ago when they were revealed. That’s the reason for the supposed discrepancy. My hope is that there will come a time when the total change is negative because that means I finally had some backlog progress. We’ll see if that ever comes to pass.

January 2025

Hey guys, welcome to my first monthly update! I’m not entirely sure how these are going to be structured, I’m just kind of winging this one. I expect it’ll be more of a recap with fun stats and less nitty-gritty game details. Let’s get started as usual with my game acquisitions.

Game Acquisitions


A total of 56 games were added to my backlog last month. I’m curious to see how this fluctuates from month-to-month. I’m especially curious to see how my spending fluctuates from month-to-month as well. I wanted to figure out a way to graph my acquisitions and spending week-to-week for the month, but it wouldn’t be a fair comparison since months aren’t divisible by an equal number of weeks. Darn you Gregorian calendar! If anyone has any fun graph ideas, please let me know. As far as hobbies go, I think spending $38 is on the extreme low end. I spent more than that on dinner and a show! I really think gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies you can get into, but I’ll hold off on saying that until I have more data.

# of Games: 56

Total Money Spent: $38.09

Price/Game: $0.68

Game Recaps

As expected, my single-player game took up way more of my time than my co-op game. I am bummed that I didn’t beat anything last month. It’s been two months now since I’ve had a game completion. I really want to start incorporating reviews into my posts but I can’t do that until I actually beat something. I think this chart will also be interesting with more than two games. I expect this to be on the low end for game time for a whole month as well, hopefully that picks up this month.

I’m not sure how to succinctly recap everything I did in my games for the entire month. Read my weekly posts for in-depth coverage. In Fall of Porcupine, I’ve moved into a new town, started my job as a junior doctor at the local hospital, made some friends both at the hospital and in town, grieved, and started uncovering a hospital conspiracy. In Final Profit, I built up my shop in the city, met my early demise in quite a few premature endings, uncursed a few trinkets, cemented my position as a Lord of Business, was welcomed back on the council in my hometown of Faeona where I took on the role of treasurer, and entered the capital for the first time. A very productive list of events if I do say so myself. In lieu of just posting all the clips again, please enjoy these playlists of all the clips I’ve made in these games so far.

Fall of Porcupine

Final Profit: A Shop RPG

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

· Marvel’s What If…? Season 3 Episodes 3-8 (complete)
· FLCL (complete)
· American Dad Season 21 Episodes 11-14
· Firefly (complete)
· Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)
· Gun Gale Online Season 2 (complete)
· Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)
· Barton Fink
· Rushmore
· 127 Hours
· Barefoot Gen
· Barefoot Gen 2
· Serenity

I finished four shows last month, including two full series completions with FLCL and Firefly. Not bad! I finished six movies as well. I usually go for one movie a week, but I tend to link TV tie-in movies with their respective shows and watch them together, so Serenity upped my average here. I think I enjoyed everything I watched this month to some extent, although I definitely liked some more than others. Will lowlights and highlights be an interesting thing to add here? Is lowlights even a word? It is now! Let’s give it a shot. I won’t be counting anything I haven’t finished yet. This goes for games as well, which is why I didn’t bring it up in that section. For lowlights, I’ll unfortunately have to give it to Firefly for shows and Barefoot Gen 2 for movies. I still really liked Firefly though, don’t get me wrong. I think that speaks to how great my TV shows for the month were. Barefoot Gen 2 wasn’t bad, it just felt like an unnecessary sequel to a very powerful movie. The studio itself may have felt the same way because unlike the first film, this one never received an English dub. My highlights are probably What If…? for shows and Serenity for movies. I’m still a big Marvel fan, even though I understand the quality has dipped since the Infinity Saga ended. What If…? Season 1 was great, with a lot of in-jokes for die-hard fans. I felt that Season 2 fell flat on its face and wasn’t very good. Season 3 brought it back somewhat and had a satisfying conclusion, so I’m happy with it. Too bad it was the last season. In a weird turn of events, my favorite movie was probably the tie-in for my “least” favorite show. Again, Firefly was still very good, and I felt that Serenity had a satisfying conclusion to it. I can only imagine how Firefly would’ve evolved if it was given a few more seasons.

Conclusion/Upcoming

As a stats nerd, I find it interesting to put into words everything I played, bought, and watched for a whole month. It was also much easier to put together than the weeklies since I didn’t have to separately go through game footage, edit it all together, upload it, and incorporate it throughout the post. Future monthlies will incorporate month-to-month charts that compare game time and monthly spending. If I can think of anything else that would make an interesting chart, I’ll add those too.

For upcoming games, I expect I’ll beat Fall of Porcupine this month, although as a co-op playthrough that’s harder to predict. It’s a relatively short game though and we’re 14 hours in. HLTB suggests a Main+Sides run takes 11 hours and a Completionist run takes 16 hours. Since I started tracking my game time in 2023, I’ve noticed my completions tend to be on the slower end of the site stats. I likely won’t go for a full Completionist run since that would require replaying sections of the story (or maybe the whole thing, not sure) for achievements which I don’t really feel like doing. I doubt this game has chapter select to quickly grab any achievements I missed. I expect one or two more sessions to beat the game. Then I can write my first review! I don’t think I’ll beat Final Profit this month. I’m 27 hours in and HLTB suggests 46.5 hours for a Main+Sides run. Who knows, maybe my game time will really pick up and I’ll breeze through it. I’m really liking it though, I don’t want to rush things.

For TV shows, I expect to get through Skeleton Crew, Skull Island, Cowboy Bebop, and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. After that, I’ll need to pick out a completed series or two from my backlog. Maybe Snowpiercer? For movies, I’ve got The Boy and The Heron, Stardust, The Fifth Element, and Dark City coming up. I know a little bit about The Boy and The Heron but know nothing about the others. How exciting!

I’m hoping at some point this month, I’ll get a new graphics card and switch over to my new PC. It should be a substantial upgrade. I’ll definitely keep you guys updated when that happens. Thank you for reading my first of many monthly posts! Look out for my regularly scheduled weekly post tomorrow!

Backlog total: 3,061

January 26 - February 1, 2025

So no new graphics card for me unfortunately. I got in line at 6:15am but everyone rushed the entrance at 7:30 so the line was meaningless. There weren’t enough cards to go around anyway so it is what it is. I’ve signed up for a couple Discord stock alerts and I’ll try my luck at Microcenter this week when there are hopefully more cards in and less people trying to buy them. Oh well, my current PC will have to do for a while longer. Hopefully I’m able to make the upgrade before the tariffs hit.

On a positive note, I went to a live music bar to support my musician friend and it was a really good time. The vibes were super chill and the pizza I had delivered was delicious. 10/10, would do again. It was nice to get out of the house and just hang out with friends. Anyway, let’s get back to the games.

Game Acquisitions



A comparatively light week this week, and every game was free! Can’t beat that. It’d be nice if every week was like this.

# of Games: 5

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps


Unfortunately, the light week also extended into my game time as well. I only had one two-hour session on Monday and a few hours on Saturday. On top of the music bar and failed GPU launch mentioned earlier, I also spent some time experimenting with a mic setup for future let’s play recordings. Long story short, I only have an old Guitar Hero mic from the Wii back in high school propped up in the middle of the couch not very close to me, so the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve been trying to use Nvidia Broadcast + OBS settings to get it to sound passable and it’s kinda there but I guess we’ll see. Also, no Fall of Porcupine this week as mentioned last week. You’re stuck with just the Final Profit recap. Speaking of…



After the information dump that was the intro to the capital, it was time to start exploring. Immediately after choosing to keep the Representative on my payroll, I talked to the first person I saw and had this odd interaction.





OK, interesting start. I see the people in the capital are rich and self-absorbed. Normally this is a terrible combination, but as a successful business owner, Biz can exploit this for profit I’m sure. After wandering around for a little while, I stumbled into a bar where I ran into a familiar face, as well as a business proposition.



So the offer is to substitute my mana regen for ale. I didn’t see the need for ale at the time, so I rejected the offer. I did run into an NPC later who will trade +2 passive income for every 100 ale provided so maybe it’ll be worth it after all. I’ll have to find the bar again to accept the deal. In the same bar, I also came across this guy who needs to repair the oil pipeline to get the goods flowing again.



I had no idea how to obtain rare metal at the time I talked to this guy, so I wasn’t able to help him. I found out shortly after that the market buys and sells rare metals for a fairly high price. Speaking of the market:



Yay, more responsibility! I’m still not entirely sure how the market works yet. I definitely need to spend some time there figuring it out. I know you can buy limited goods and sell back for a much lower price but I’m not sure why I would do that. There’s probably something I’m missing. After wandering around the capital for a bit longer and solving the floor puzzle in the museum, I got the notification that my post stock dividends were full, so I found the horse dimension portal to get back to the other parts of the world. I discovered that I could buy almost any property I’ve come across in the game now for some passive income, so I bought some of the smaller places to start out. I wanted to head back to Faeona to continue the quests there before diving into the capital stuff. I came across the mysterious cave that is blocked by level requirements and realized I haven’t been there for a while and have leveled up quite a bit. I went inside and unlocked the level 60 area and was treated to some story bits and a decent accessory.



I’ll take any passive income I can get at this point. With that out of the way, I entered the forest outside Faeona, got my first seed bag upgrade, and finally confronted the police officer that’s been hanging out there.



Mr. Four has some explaining to do when I see him again. With the police officer out of the way, I head into the area he was blocking and find none other than the bar tender who runs every bar in the world apparently. He says he’s mapping out the area for historical purposes and Biz lets him be. I’m not sure if that will come up later or if it’s just worldbuilding. Close to him though is a new type of Pix creature with an interesting ability.



I can trigger all my passive abilities at once in exchange for some XP and 50,000 coin. This seems like a huge price to pay, and I don’t see the benefits of this yet, so I’ll leave it alone for now. I head back into town and secure the rest of the votes to be reinstated on the Fae council.







Biz decides that her daughter should remain queen but accepts the role of treasurer. This seems like a natural next step for her. Let’s see what being a treasurer is all about.



Faeona is 10 million coin in debt to the Bureau 😭 As if my original debt wasn’t bad enough. There’s 200,000 coin in the treasury, and I can add my own coin too if I want, but I’m not ready to take such drastic measures yet. This will need to wait until later. I found the skeleton that has been pawning cursed accessories off on me and got stuck with something that removed my passive income. I need to get that fixed ASAP but the witch wants 640,000 coin to remove it! This will be by far my most expensive purchase, but it has to be done. I return to my shop in the city and run it for a while to get the coin needed. Along the way, I received another upgrade for the art commodity.





Ohhh, so that’s why there was that mysterious shot of the prince outside the apartment building at the end of the last art upgrade. It wasn’t for something nefarious; he was in love! How cute. I’ll take the price increase on art too. When I left the store to meet the artist, I also got this cutscene about the museum I mentioned earlier:



It seems innocent enough, but I don’t like the sound of Bureau experiments. I don’t trust them. Anyway, I work at my shop long enough to raise the money and head over to the witch to get the curse removed.



So now I’m totally broke, and I don’t even have a cool accessory to show for it 😭 I know the mug is needed for endgame stuff, but I was hoping for something more useful now. Oh well, time to head back to the capital and continue the main quest. I start by going to the power plant and having a little chat with Mr. Four about the kidnapped fae.



He agrees to let them go if I can double their mana generation. I’m happy to do so and free all the ones I can see before moving on. I can’t help but notice the number on the board is only halfway through, I wonder what that means. I meet up with Odina and explore Dr. Three’s gem lab.



Odina and Dr. Three clearly don’t get along. On my way out, I ran into Mx. Two.



They don’t seem too happy about bringing up the past. I fill in Odina on the plan to get rid of the Lords of Business by stripping them of their wealth. Afterwards, Mr. Four stops by to reveal his own plans to usurp Dr. Three.



It’ll be nice having a clerk around. After being super confused by how stocks work in the capital, I decide to stop by Mr. Tony’s HQ to see about getting the ability to buy franchises. What follows is a convoluted series of quests to get the items they ask for.



With those side quests out of the way, I head to the train to check on Lady Plenty’s progress on getting the train operational.



I’m not running a charity, but don’t want to seem greedy either. I set the ticket price to generate a small profit. Next on Lady Plenty’s list is cleansing the water supply.



I side with her obviously, but it’s going to take a while to raise enough coin to certify the deal. I’ll have to come back to that later. Stumbling around the capital some more, I found out how to start buying and selling one of the stocks in a rather humorous way.



Oh Biz, you troll. After some more stumbling around, I decide to head back to another city when I run into a random quest in the horse dimension.



I was hoping it would be super simple and the little boy in the village was hiding the horse. But alas, that didn’t seem to be the case. After even more stumbling around, I remember that I’ve found quite a few apples since my last trip to the apple labyrinth, so I decide to head back there. What’s that creature that’s known in mythology to guard labyrinths?



This was probably the most action-heavy sequence so far in this game. I’m not sure how the Mat of Tribute works since I couldn’t find it in the inventory, but it sounds useful. Heading out of the first town, I finally found a path to the cave below and ran into none other than the Owl Lich again. It needs more life energy to help hatch its eggs.



I spent a good amount of time and health here. The health required kept increasing, but the rewards got progressively better as well. I got a few decorations, a good chunk of max health increases, and a few hundred thousand coin. Not bad! I was also able to solve the Plant Pix’s puzzle and obtain the apple chest with the seed bag upgrade. Now I’m up to 3,000 carrying capacity on those, even though I rarely go over 100. Now that my max health is over 80, I can head to the big tree in the restaurant in the city.



A bit underwhelming of a reward. Oh well. With all of these distractions out of the way and a ton of money given to me by the Owl Lich, I finally have enough to buy Dr. Three’s properties to continue the plan. Prepare for yet again the longest clip I’ve made so far. There was a ton of story here.



Wow, two birds with one stone! I ran Dr. Three out of town and One killed Mr. Four. Crazy stuff. Heading back to the power plant, I’m tasked with bringing the capital’s energy crisis to the fae council to figure out next steps. I also find out that all the fae I rescued earlier contribute to my passive income. It almost doubled! Next time, I’ll head to the council. The story in this game has really picked up!

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Serenity

· American Dad Season 21 Episode 14 (all caught up, show ongoing)

· Gun Gale Online Season 2 (completed)

· Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episode 1

· Barefoot Gen 2

It looks like I watched quite a bit this week. I ended up watching Serenity hours after my last post went up. It had a much higher production value than Firefly and answered some lingering questions I had from the show. The explanations were still a tad disappointing, but I felt it was a better finale than the actual finale and I enjoyed both the show and the movie quite a bit. I also watched all of Gun Gale Online Season 2, the spinoff anime of Sword Art Online. I didn’t expect a Season 2 since Season 1 premiered way back in 2021. I figured it would just be a one-off show and I’m happy to be wrong. There wasn’t really much in the way of story here, but it was fun nonetheless. Barefoot Gen 2 was good but didn’t get close to the first movie in my opinion. I’m still early in Skeleton Crew but I’m liking it so far. It definitely has a more down-to-earth vibe than anything else Star Wars related I’ve seen. It’s a weird change of pace from The Acolyte which is the last Star Wars thing I watched. It looks like there won’t be any more Star Wars until Andor Season 2 in April, so I’ve got a little bit of a wait. I know people are tired of how much Disney is milking the Star Wars property but I’m still mostly enjoying what I’m seeing. Episode IX was definitely not good though. Now I’m rambling. ANYWAY…

Conclusion/Upcoming

As always, I plan on playing more Final Profit this week. I really want to wrap my head around all the monetization opportunities in the capital, as well as get into my new treasurer role in Faeona. I’m hoping my hangout schedule normalizes this week and my friend and I can get back into Fall of Porcupine. We’ve gotta be getting close to the end of that game, right? The next movie on my watchlist is The Boy and the Heron, the latest anime film from Studio Ghibli. I’m really looking forward to that one. I suspect I’ll finish Skeleton Crew this week and start the Skull Island animated series from a few years ago. I plan on stopping by Microcenter again on Thursday in hopes of getting my graphics card, but I expect to be disappointed. I may just have to wait it out until supply picks up. I hope everyone here has a wonderful week, thank you for enduring two back-to-back posts of mine 😅 Happy gaming!

Backlog total: 3,061 (+2)

February 2-8, 2025

You may have noticed that this post went up on Monday instead of Sunday. I’m thinking of doing this going forward, so I have the full weekend to write my weeklies instead of staying up late on Saturdays to get it done. I actually got sleep Saturday night, so it seems to be working so far. On another note, the inevitable finally came to pass. My employer has ordered everyone back to the office full-time no later than March 17th. This is a huge blow to my way of living and will likely affect my blog as well. They’re still working out the specifics on how it will be implemented but just know that changes are coming. Game time will probably go down as well. Why the government seems hell-bent on making everyone’s life miserable I’ll never know.

I waited in line at Microcenter again on Thursday and still came away empty-handed. No GPU for me for at least another week. I won’t be able to drive up there before my workday once office work starts so if I don’t get one by March, I suspect it’ll be quite some time until I can get my hands on one. The old PC lives for a while longer. Sorry for the downer mood, life has been rough the past week. Let’s get on with game acquisitions.

Game Acquisitions


Once again, all of these titles were free, so I spent nothing 😊 Two weeks in a row without spending money! A welcome streak. I did try to buy the Safe In Our World Charity Bundle 2025 from Fanatical because it had a ton of great games for $15 but it only lasted for a few hours so I missed it 😩 Not like I need more games but I’m bummed to miss out on games like A Space for the Unbound or Little Kitty, Big City for cheap. Maybe they’ll pop up in future bundles. Oh well, more money saved, and still some interesting looking indies here.

# of Games: 13

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps

What’s this, a third game!? 👀 Does this mean what you think it means? If you read the title, I think you know the answer to that question. I had a decent uptick in game time compared to last week as well. Let’s start off as usual with…



As soon as I left the power plant at the end of the last session, Mx. Two was waiting for me. They said One doesn’t trust us and they were coming with us to the negotiations with Faeona. Honestly, that’s fair.



Wow, that is some serious falling out between Two and their mother. The deal went through but tensions are high. Now I need to raise 6,000,000(!) coin to get enough large power gems to meet demand, and that’s on top of the 5,000,000+ I need to remove my cursed accessory. This game is getting expensive. After the meeting, I meet up with Queen Biremue in the abandoned castle and fill her in on the details.



She’s got even more Bureau blackmail for me, very nice. I wonder how that will come into play. I met up with One to be briefed on the threat that supposedly only the Bureau can eliminate.



The threat sounds serious, but I still don’t trust One. At least now I’m holding four of the five business cards of the Lords of Business. That happened way quicker than I expected. Maybe I’m close-ish to meeting the fabled CEO? I’ll need to raise quite a bit of money before I get there though. In the meantime, now that I’m back in the capital, it’s time to run a few errands. I fulfilled the various marketplace quests, although I still don’t really understand how the marketplace works and probably won’t spend much time there. I also gave Lady Plenty the money necessary to clean the water system and Refrain the tokens necessary to purify the gem outside the museum.







Biz and Refrain finally tell each other how they feel about how the previous queen treated them, although it looks like that hasn’t eased the tension between them yet. With the errands out of the way, I headed back to the gem lab to see what Odina wanted to show me.



Yikes, I burned that thing up immediately. Removing free will is a big no-no for me. We’ll need to use other tactics to deal with the Bureau. I explored for a while and ran the shops to raise coin and while doing this, I found the green horse! He’s just hanging out in the first shop.



He wants me to wear three specific accessories at once, but I can only wear two right now and one of them is cursed! I’ll have to come back to him later, but at least I know where he is now. After running the shop for a while, I got a message that I sold 100 permits and to go the Bureau office in Enterpriston. I head over there and run into the Representative.



He has now usurped the Legislator and become the new Legislator of Enterpriston. I also set him to visit the store twice as often to buy even more permits. They get a nice 25% price increase too! I also got enough levels to unlock the next area with the ghosts to continue that storyline.



Biz’s grandmother’s fancy axe is in there, but I still don’t know how to move the black spheres. This will unfortunately also have to wait until later. While grinding away at the shop for more coin, I finally finished up Tinto the Dragon’s hoard and unlocked a new area.



I can wear three accessories now! And I can sell Tinto even more things to earn money even more quickly. Now I just need to remove the cursed accessory so I can reunite the green foal with his father. I’ll need to grind for some coin. In the meantime, I decided to pay the Owl Lich a visit since I have enough health to continue his quest.



I completed the quest, got a ton of money, and learned the whereabouts of the Owl Lich’s friend. I headed to Enterpriston to find her. While searching, I ran into the skeleton looking for accessories and completed her quest too!



I probably should’ve completed this quest sooner but oh well. I found Rebertha and had a chat with her in the café.



She won’t hurt the Lords of Business directly, but she will let me use her power as a demonstration when the time comes. It’ll have to do for now. With that out of the way, I head to my shop to grind for a while and raise the coin necessary to decurse my accessory.



Alright, I can earn quadruple XP from sales now. Not sure how useful that’ll be since I’m past level 80 at this point, but we’ll see. Now that I’m curse-free, I can wear all the accessories the green foal wants me to wear. Let’s pay him a visit.



I completed the quest and unlocked the ability to…bake bread. I can trade it to other horses, but I’m not sure if it’s worth spending the time to do that. I’ll have to look into it. With my levels up, I decided to unlock the last areas of the mysterious cave and talk to the ghost some more.



That record keeper was infuriating! It was a funny bit though. And with that out of the way, I’ve completed the ghost storyline. I also have a new customer for my shop! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that entity though. Next, I head back to Faeona and have a chat with Divina about her murderous plot.



I’ve learned how to exploit the shield gems, and Divina learned some self-reflection. Continuing across the treetops, I found the area where the game began, and Biz has some reflection of her own.



With that tough talk out of the way, I head back to the horse dimension to pick up the final cursed accessory.



It costs a whopping 40 MILLION coin to remove the curse 😭 It better be worth it. At this point, I decided to look around for some apples because I’ve been close to clearing out the labyrinth. I finally found a couple more and unlocked the next area with a little surprise.



I finally learned how to lift those black orbs! That should open up some new areas, if I can remember all the places I’ve seen them. I decided to head back to the mysterious cave because I know there was an orb blocking an apple chest there.



That was a funny conversation. Just north of the chest is the gauntlet to get grandmother’s axe. I have a Life Insurance Policy now, and a decent amount of money. Let’s give it a shot.



Oof, that was a million-coin endeavor right there. The axe doesn’t seem to do anything so not sure if it’s important beyond 100%ing the game. At this point, I finally decided to head back to my shop to earn some money. I got a few commodity upgrades in the process.









Those are some nice upgrades. As you can see from that last pic, I headed back to the capital. I decided on a whim to buy the VenDRANK! factory because I had just enough coin. Turns out there’s a whole money-making venture in there regarding vending machines.



It looks like the next thing on my agenda will be raising the money to install these things. Another successful bout of capitalism! Let’s move on to my next game.



When we last left off, Finley finally went home after a very long and exhausting double (triple?) shift at the hospital. After finally getting the sleep he needed, he heads back to work to find that it’s still just as busy.



Looks like it’s going to be another long day. Let’s head to the break room to see what Dr. Krokowski has to say.



So, the cause of everyone’s illness is being narrowed down, but the hospital is reaching capacity and staff are starting to get sick. Karl has the idea to open up the ward on the fifth floor to let in more patients. Finley tags along to help out.



With the cleaning all done, Finley heads down to the basement to turn the power back on.



Well well well, look who finally decided to show up. Dr. Theobald, the chief physician, has finally come back and explains his absence to Dr. Krokowski. The hospital conspiracy was revealed to be the building manager pulling money out of the hospital for personal reasons and blackmailing Dr. Theobald to keep quiet about it or risk losing his job and taking the blame. Dr. Krokowski isn’t taking any of his shit though and demands he shut up and helps out. The power goes out and Finley heads up to his ward to check up on Mia.



The hospital caught fire! It must’ve had something to do with turning the power back on. Everyone needs to work together to evacuate all the patients. Finley heads back up to the fifth floor to check up on Karl.



With that out of the way, Finley heads down to the ground floor to help push patients out the door. He stops to talk to the doctors of the other wards on the way down.



After the last patient is wheeled out, Finley heads back in to check that the rooms are empty. He runs into Dr. Theobald before he can make it very far.



I have a bad feeling that Dr. Theobald isn’t going to make it. Finley does as he’s told and takes the next ambulance to the school.



He’s having a rough day, poor guy. Finley arrives at the school and receives orders from Dr. Krokowski.



The mini-games to treat patients are fast and loose now. Something interesting happens in one of them.



The mini-game petered out because the patient died. That never happened before. Finley rushes to the front to help out Dr. Krokowski as the screen fades to black. On fade in, Finley heads out of the school.





Finley, Karl, and Mia look up at the smoldering hospital as the game fades to black. I wanted to write something here about how exciting it is that I finally beat my first game since starting my blog, but then the ending was all somber, so I don’t want to ruin the mood. A few pictures pop up during the credits depicting what happened after. I picked out two notable ones.





The hospital building manager was arrested for his crimes, and Giuliano is seen visiting his mother’s doll in the forest. There’s a post-credits scene too.



So, it’s confirmed that Dr. Theobald didn't survive the fire, but he died a hero. It looks like the lab tech that works in the basement may not have made it out either if the other doll is any indication. A sad ending to be sure. With my first game completion here, I can finally add my first game review section. But first, let’s quickly recap the third game I played this week.



After beating Fall of Porcupine, I pitched my friend the idea of playing through the Tales of series together. As a completionist, I wanted to play all the main games in the series with an English translation after I got Tales of Vesperia in a bundle back in 2023. He foolishly agreed, so now we get to play through the very first game in the series 😈 First impressions are actually pretty positive so far!

So, my plan for the blog was to use shorter clips with explanations between them for Final Profit and Fall of Porcupine because I started those games before I started the blog and so didn’t have any footage for them. Going forward, I planned to post full plays on my YouTube channel and embed them on my blog with a brief overview of what I did. This might increase my editing time, but it should severely decrease my writing time so I’m not spending my week writing instead of playing. This will be especially important now that I’ll have to be in the office so my free time will be limited.

Notice in my previous paragraph that I said planned past tense. This will still be my plan mostly, but I hit a snag with my OBS recording when we played this week. I’ll put the details in the Conclusion/Upcoming section at the bottom of the post. I can post the recording I have too but as I said, it’s just the beginning with no commentary.

The game starts with two boys (teenagers?), a swordsman named Cless and his friend Chester the archer, who leave their village to go hunting and bring back food. We renamed Chester to Festerr because both main characters’ names starting with C was confusing when voicing the dialogue 😋 We successfully caught a boar but when we came back to the village, it was burned to the ground, and everyone was killed! This included Cless’ parents and Festerr’s little sister. Cless finds a knights’ sword in his fireplace and tells Festerr he’s going to go to the town nearby to ask for help. Festerr says he’ll be along in a bit after he’s done paying respects.

Cless gets to the town and runs into his aunt and uncle and tells them about the situation. His uncle says he can stay there that night but then stabs us in the back by telling the knights where he is. The uncle is killed, and Cless is thrown in the dungeon, stripped of the equipment he had on him. In there, he meets a woman prisoner that helps him escape. Unfortunately, she’s killed before he can return the favor, but he does find her daughter Mint and teams up with her to escape. We renamed her Minty just for funsies. I continue controlling Cless while my friend controls Minty. We fought through the dungeon, defeated the Clay Demon prison guard, and escaped, but then Cless collapsed. Minty carries him to the house of a man named Trinicus Morrison to recover. Festerr shows back up here too. Morrison runs off to find the special amulet that Cless was wearing when he was captured but tells the kids to stay behind. Cless’ old master from the village shows up and tells them to meet him at a cave nearby. This is where we ended our session. Here’s the footage of the gameplay I captured.



Game Review

Fall of Porcupine

Ooh boy, my first review. I’m so nervous! Fall of Porcupine is a story-driven game starring Finley, a bird who has just moved to a new town to work at the hospital as a junior doctor. The gameplay consists of talking to other anthropomorphic animals at the hospital and around town as well as little mini-games when treating patients at the hospital. It is a very simple gameplay loop. There’s a setting to make the mini-games even easier but considering that how well you do at them doesn’t seem to affect the story, I’m not sure it matters.

I thought the story in this game was just OK. It starts off fairly strong as you meet all the characters and explore the town, but it doesn’t really expand beyond that. There’s a turn-based bar fight as well as a festival partway through where you can talk to people in a certain order to get a special item which mixes things up a little bit. It also escalates at the end, but then just abruptly ends with little resolution.

The gameplay is about as simple as it gets. Anyone looking for a game that’s mechanically engaging should look elsewhere; this is definitely story-driven first and everything else second. Technically speaking, there was a minor bug with the phone where when you tried to scroll up to read the latest text message, it would jump to the bottom making it nearly impossible to select it. The text messages are very few and far between though, so this did not really affect the game.

I played this one with a friend who works in healthcare, and we voiced the characters. I felt that this escalated my experience of the game over if I had just played it by myself. I likely would have been pretty bored by the end if this was a solo experience. Still, if you’re looking for a story-based game with some heavy themes mixed with light-hearted humor and simple gameplay, give this one a shot.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 14h:41m

Rating – 7/10

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episodes 2-6 (still watching, show ended)

· American Dad Season 21 Episode 15 (all caught up, show ongoing)

· Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Episodes 3-4 (still watching, show ended)

· The Boy and the Heron

Not as much watched this week. Skeleton Crew has been much better than I expected it to be. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is an interesting twist from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I like it, I just find it weird how little Scott has actually shown up so far. Ramona tracking down and reconciling with her exes instead of Scott fighting them gives some much-appreciated characterization. The Boy and the Heron is the latest Studio Ghibli film and the third one I’ve seen. I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service and Ponyo before this. So far, I love all of these movies. I’m glad too because I have many more on my list to watch in the future.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Going back to my OBS troubles earlier, I found out after the fact that the save state button in Duckstation (the PS1 emulator) was the same button I programmed to stop recording in OBS before I automated everything. That means the first time I used a save state, my recording stopped, and I didn’t notice 😭 I had the first half hour of the game recorded, but when I went to check the footage, I found out that my mic wasn’t working either! That means it’s just straight gameplay with none of our fantastic voiceover work ☹ We had a lot of fun with those voices too. I really wanted to see how well my mic performs with two people too.

These hiccups made me realize that my recording setup is less than ideal. I already knew my microphone situation was bad since I started using it a couple weeks ago, but now I realize how important it is to see that OBS is working while playing. There’s no easy way to do this because I only have a single TV that I use as a PC monitor so I can’t have it up on a second screen. Right now, I’m thinking about buying a second monitor and a small desk to put next to my couch in the living room and running a 25ft cable from my PC to it. I’m also looking into getting a couple dynamic mics to cut background noise and improve voice quality. Let me know if this is a good idea or not.

As for what’s coming up this week, I plan to finish Skeleton Crew (spoiler alert, I already have but not by the end of last week) and start Skull Island. The next movie on my list is Stardust. I have no idea what that is but I’m looking forward to it! I plan to get more game time in with Final Profit and continue Tales of Phantasia if my friend and I get to it. Thanks for reading this extra long post that includes my first completion and review! See you next week!

Backlog total: 3,080 (+19)

February 9-15, 2025

Not much to talk about this week. After beating Fall of Porcupine, I didn’t play anything for a week and a half because I was so busy. I did manage to get some gaming time in Friday night and Saturday. Still no GPU which I expected at this point, but I did finally buy some stuff to upgrade my recording equipment. I’ve got a new table, second monitor, and a couple of mics to record co-op games with my friend. It should be fun! Hopefully that will stop the disaster that was the beginning of our Tales of Phantasia playthrough from happening again. Let’s get on with the games!

Game Acquisitions



Once again, these games were all free. Two weeks in a row with no purchases! This should help offset the cost of all that recording equipment I just bought 😅 Shoutout to ScarletKitsune for Bionic Heart! Looks like an interesting short-form visual novel. I still haven’t played Smurfs 1 yet (or seen literally any Smurfs media) but now I have both games for free. There were a couple bundles released last week that look kind of interesting (namely Fanatical’s Build your own Bento Deluxe Bundle and Prestige Collection - Build your own Bundle (Bundlefest 2025) and Humble Bundle’s Deckbuilder Bonanza), but I couldn’t justify the price for them. The Bento Deluxe bundle actually has a wishlisted game in it for less than I’m looking to pay (Persona 4 Arena Ultimax), but I figure it’ll be in a cheaper bundle or cheaper on its own before too long.

# of Games: 5

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps

As I said, I only got some game time in Friday night and Saturday so not too much here. I feel like I’m nearing the end-game in Final Profit now. I’m mostly just running the shop to make money to buy upgrades and progress the story at this point. I didn’t get to play Tales of Phantasia with my friend either. We did hang out but ended up going out for a while and then I was stressing about the new recording setup too much to actually record something. My bad!



My current goal in the main story is to raise 1 million coins each for six power gems from Faeona to power the Capital. They were previously siphoning mana from fae but obviously Biz wouldn’t allow that to continue. At the end of my last session, I bought the VenDRANK! factory and found out I can place vending machines around the world to make more money. I spent a good chunk of Friday night running the shop to raise the money to buy and upgrade all the vending machines. In the process, I got another commodity upgrade for art.



I also unlocked the ability to craft compressed VenDRANK! by throwing 999 of them into a portal on the second floor of my shop. This will be useful to quickly replenish the machines.





I got into a cycle of raising some money in the shop, buying the building, raising more money, placing the vending machine, raising more money, upgrading the vending machine, and so forth. While I was buying upgrades, I came across a new customer who is quite peculiar.



The VenDRANK! has come to life! He only wants to drink it though and is willing to pay so I don’t mind. More customers! After a while longer, I raised enough money to buy all the vending machines and their upgrades and was greeted with a handy perk.



Now I can give compressed VenDRANK! to the driver outside my shop to keep the machines stocked. I still have to go to every machine to collect the profits so it’s not quite as helpful as I would’ve liked. While running the shop some more, I got more commodity upgrades for fruit and battlepass candles.







Hooray for paying people a living wage! At this point, I’m focusing solely on raising the money for the power gems. With the amount of money I’m making from the vending machines, I get enough in no time. I get five of the six I need and place them in their spots and am greeted with this cutscene:



Oh shit! That “gather all my resources and call in all my favours” line sounds a lot like a point of no return to me. I don’t know if I’m close to the end of the main story, but I don’t want to risk continuing it if that means I can’t wrap up all the side stuff. The main story will be put on hold for now. I continued by going back to Faeona and buying the sixth and final power gem I thought I needed to solve the energy crisis.



I also remembered the black orb outside the castle, so I had a quick chat with the old scholar outside about the nature of royalty then blew his mind by lifting the sphere.



I unlocked something down there, but I don’t see a way to continue. I’ll have to come back to that later. Now I’m focusing on raising money to buy properties to increase my passive income. After buying Magnolia the chicken’s house in Enterpriston, I get a surprise side quest.



So, she’s from the same region as the Owl Lich, which makes her quest to hatch her eggs very similar. While I’m in town, I also decided to buy the auction house too.





So, the auction house offers a way to buy tax evasion credits for a cool million each. My tax bill has never been that high so I don’t know how useful that would be. I’ll take the passive income though. Next, I pop back to the Capital and purchase the hotel. Haytch isn’t too happy about it.



Since I don’t really care about the stock market anymore, the premium offering means nothing to me. Again, I’ll still take the passive income though. I also found the skeleton who made my utility pouch, and she offered to make me a new tool with some boots of haste. They cost five million coin, and she wants another two million to craft it so I have to go back to my shop and make money for a while. After an hour or so of that, I give her the money for the tool.



The walking speed is significantly faster which will be handy with all the running around I’m doing. I went back to buying properties and decided to go for the apartment complex in Enterpriston which requires buying all the units inside first. Once I did that, I ran into the weird purple grandma who’s obsessed with VenDRANK! She asks about the electrical situation. I wondered why it was always so dark in there.



I’m more than happy to continue making the morally good choices, and the place looks so much nicer too! At this point, I’ve raised enough money to pay off Faeona’s debt to the Bureau.



I’ve never had so much money at once in this game, it feels good! I ended my session in the petition hall, so I’ll start next week’s post by paying off the debt. Hopefully the petition hall mechanic expands after that because I haven’t gotten to use it yet. After that, I only have a few more goals that I’m aware of:

· Raise 40 million coin to decurse the last accessory

· Raise 50 million coin to buy the boots of f****** haste to get the last apple

· Figure out what the deal is with the mysterious underground area outside Faeona castle

· Figure out what the deal is with the giant black orb in the other dimension and the weird orange salesmen

· Buy the rest of the properties

· Continue the main storyline

OK, it actually does still look like a lot when I write it out like that. Will I beat the game this week? It certainly feels like I’m getting close to the end, but we’ll see.

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

· Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episodes 7-8 (completed)

· Skull Island (completed)

· American Dad Season 21 Episode 16 (all caught up, show ongoing)

· Cowboy Bebop Episodes 1-6 (still watching, show ended)

· Stardust

Skeleton Crew was a fun watch, I enjoyed it. I knew it wouldn’t be as gritty as The Acolyte since the main characters are children, but Jude Law’s character still had some shockingly dark moments. I’m bummed this one once again only got one season, I thought it had an interesting premise. Speaking of shows with only one season, I watched all of the Skull Island cartoon from 2023. It was…not very good. The writing was weird, some of the voice acting sounded off, King Kong only showed up near the end, and it ends on a cliffhanger that doesn’t resolve any of the plot threads. It was clear that this was abruptly canceled which is a shame. Only watch this if you’re a diehard Monsterverse fan. On a more positive note, I started the legendary anime Cowboy Bebop and it’s definitely living up to the hype so far. I am thoroughly enjoying it. 90s anime just seems to hit different than anything else. The Stardust movie was also really good. I can’t believe how young Charlie Cox was in it! I didn’t even recognize Henry Cavill in his role. I felt the humor was just right, and I loved the fantasy setting too.

Conclusion/Upcoming

It’ll take me a little bit of time to set up the new recording equipment so once again, game time might be reduced this week. I’m hoping once everything is set up (including the new computer which could still take some time), everything will be smooth sailing and I can game some more. I’m hoping to make good progress on Final Profit, and I suspect I’m nearing the end. I hit max level 99 (nothing happened after 90) and I’ve explored all the areas. Now it’s just a matter of finishing up all the goals I listed earlier. If I do beat the game this week, the next game on my list is something called Lunar Axe. I think it’s one of those super short hidden object games I got for free a while ago. Hidden object is not a genre I’m into but reviews said this one is a little more in-depth so maybe I’ll like it. Assuming I get all the recording stuff set up, a new session of Tales of Phantasia with my friend is possible as well. I’ll be watching Cowboy Bebop all week, and maybe a couple episodes of Scott Pilgrim too. The next movie on my list is The Fifth Element. I don’t know anything about it but it sounds sci-fi so I’ll probably like it. The name Stardust sounded like sci-fi too but ended up being fantasy, which I also like. Anyway, that’s my plan for the week. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,082 (+2)