Monthly Update #2: An Epic Quest Begins

February 2025

I was SO CLOSE to beating two games last month. I beat Fall of Porcupine back on the 5^th, and I’m on the endgame grind after 56 hours in Final Profit. I really thought I could beat Final Profit last month but alas, it was not meant to be. I guess I got too busy with the return to office announcement and setting up my new recording stuff. No big deal though, I still enjoyed what I played.

Game Acquisitions

Exactly half the acquisitions as January. Unlike January though, everything in this picture was free. Not a single penny spent! A couple of these were gifts, but most were given away through various platforms like Epic or Amazon Prime. Little kid me would not believe the rate at which games are given away these days. I missed out on a fantastic Fanatical charity bundle that was gone in a matter of hours which was a bummer, but itch.io just released a new charity mega-bundle to support California Fire Relief for $10. I may pick that up soon, and we’ll see what the March Humble Choice offers when it drops on the 4^th.

# of Games: 28

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps

I had to do some wonky things with the size of this graph to get Fall of Porcupine to find in the circle. Sorry the text is smaller than usual! Only three games played last month, one for less than an hour. I finally started the Tales games, starting with the very first game in the long-running series. My friend and I are enjoying playing through it co-op so far and I’m excited to get back to it.

In Fall of Porcupine, we beat the game by uncovering the hospital conspiracy and watched helplessly as it burned to the ground. In Tales of Phantasia, we came home to find our village destroyed, our uncle betrayed us, our old master taught us some advanced techniques to avenge our loved ones, and were sent back in time to learn about magic. In Final Profit, I grabbed every collectible, unlocked every customer and upgrade, found every secret, and purchased every property except for one. Now it’s just me vs. the Bureau of Business. Like last month, instead of posting every little clip detailing my adventures, I’ll just link to the playlists of the games I played. 

 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this month:

·       Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episodes 2-8 (completed)

·       American Dad Season 21 Episodes 15-18 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Episodes 3-8 (completed)

·       Skull Island (completed)

·       Cowboy Bebop (completed)

·       Family Guy Season 23 Episodes 1-2 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Snowpiercer Season 1 Episodes 1-6 (still watching, show ended)

·       The Boy and the Heron

·       Stardust

·       The Fifth Element

Skull Island was an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise incredible month in movies and TV. Skeleton Crew brought a fun pirate vibe to Star Wars, Scott Pilgrim nailed reimagining the movie, Cowboy Bebop lived up to the hype of being one of the best anime ever made, Snowpiercer has had a strong start so far, The Boy and the Heron was yet another Studio Ghibli film that knocked it out of the park, Stardust was funny while also blurring the line between the real world and fantasy, and The Fifth Element was a delightfully dark but quirky 90s sci-fi flick. I hope future months are just as good as February.

Conclusion/Upcoming

I had a decent uptick in game time from January, which was nice. I finally got a completion too! I’m so happy my friend and I are vibing with Tales of Phantasia so far. Ever since I acquired Tales of Vesperia in a bundle a couple years ago, I told myself I would play through the whole series, and I’m glad my friend agreed to join me on this quest. I’m probably speaking prematurely; we’re only five hours into the first game. It is fun though. I put a lot of time into Final Profit, and I’ve almost wrapped up everything that game has to offer. What a great game, one of the best RPG Maker games I’ve played for sure. Look for that review sometime this month.

On the TV front, Snowpiercer will likely take me all month to watch. My friend and I finished Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, so we’ll likely finally be getting back to either My Little Pony or Doctor Who. My upcoming movies this month are Dark City, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Trainspotting 1 and 2.

I switched around my upcoming games collection once again after the news that the Nvidia RTX 50 series GPUs dropped support for 32-bit PhysX. UnsungGhost was kind enough to make a collection of his own showing every game that will be impacted by this change. I have a few games on this list, so I incorporated them into my own to see if I can get to them before I upgrade. I still haven’t managed to snag a new GPU yet, and with the way Nvidia has handled the stock, I may have time after all. I will beat Final Profit this month, then want to get Lunar Axe and Torment: Tides of Numenera out of the way so I can uninstall those launchers and hopefully never think of them again. Torment is 35+ hours long, so that will likely take up all of March.

I will be trying again to grab a new GPU at Microcenter on the third. After that, I’ll only have one or two more chances before I’m back in the office full time. If I can’t get a card by then, I’ll likely be stuck trying to snag one online like everyone else since taking partial days off from the office isn’t very feasible. My microphones should actually be arriving today finally after a delay, so hopefully all future gameplay videos will have some level of commentary to them. Look forward to that, my friend and I do enjoy adding voices to characters. Thanks for reading! My regularly scheduled weekly post should be out shortly.

Backlog total: 3,087 (+26)