Weekly Update #36: Spending Money Again

August 31 - September 6, 2025

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

Game Acquisitions

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

# of Games: 9

Total Money Spent: $28.90

Price/Game: $3.21

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

 

Game Recaps

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

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

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

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

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

·       Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

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

Conclusion/Upcoming

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

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

Backlog total: 3,531 (+30)

Monthly Update #8: Finally Beginning Emulation Testing

August 2025

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

Game Acquisitions

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

# of Games: 49

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps

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

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

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

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

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

·       Ironheart Season 1 Episodes 1-6 (completed)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

·       Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie

·       Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

·       Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

·       Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

·       Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

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

Conclusion/Upcoming

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

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

Backlog total: 3,505 (+173!)