August 10-16, 2025
That’s right, I got more Tales of Phantasia time last week. I also continued adding emulated games to my backlog as you’ll see below.
Game Acquisitions
Starting with the normal games, you can see that I didn’t add a whole lot. These were all giveaways through Stove, Epic, and Amazon. I don’t really have any big standouts here, but these all look like they could be fun in one way or another.
# of Games: 7
Total Money Spent: $0
Price/Game: $0
You can very clearly see the series on display here. I added Kirby, Fire Emblem, and Mario & Luigi to my backlog. A lot of Nintendo last week! I’ve actually beaten a couple Kirby games before (one through the Wii Virtual Console and one on my GBA). It’s a fun series; I’m excited to dive into it. I’ve heard of Fire Emblem before, but I’ve never played one. I love strategy RPGs though so I would be remiss if I didn’t give it a shot. I’m worried it might be above my skill level (especially the older games which tend to be less forgiving), but I’ll try my best! I never really heard of Mario & Luigi until Brothership was announced, but I went back to research the other games, and they look like something I’d be into. Here's every emulated game I've added since starting the emulation cataloging project. This only includes two weeks so far so not bad progress. I don't how long I'll be able to show a running total though, I'll probably have too many games to be able to get a legible picture from them soon enough. I still think it looks cool in the meantime though.
Game Recaps
Not a lot of time, but I did get some Tales of Phantasia in. Even in this short amount of time, we managed to go to the future and defeat Dhaos for the second time. Check it out!
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched this week:
· Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Season 1 Episode 3-Season 2 Episode 2 (still watching, show ended)
· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 3 Episodes 4-5 (still watching, show ended)
· Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Oh no, SAC_2045 is a lot shorter than I was expecting ☹ It’s only 24 22-minute episodes so I’m breezing through it. It has a bad reputation, and a lot of fans say you should just skip it, but I’m kinda loving it. The 3D animation works way better for it than I expected it to. The only thing that’s throwing me off is that the art style looks similar to something you’d see on Disney XD like Star Wars Rebels, but it still has very adult scenes like people getting their heads blown off. It’s very jarring the first few times you see it happen. Aside from that though, it’s a good time. They even got a lot of voice actors from the original series back! Sure, it’s not as good as the original series, but it’s still very much worth watching. My Little Pony continues to be fine, and Harry Potter is still enjoyable. I don’t know how I managed to miss out on most of the movies for like 20 years.
Conclusion/Upcoming
It took me way longer than expected to test out all the Fire Emblem and Kirby games, so I didn’t get quite as many emulated games added to my list as I expected last week. The way I’m testing the games to make sure they work is by going through the first level to test that the mechanics work and there are no crashes. Shining Force in particular was bad about crashing near the end of fights which is why I want to test an entire level as well as an interlude/transition into a second level just to make sure. I think it was Genealogy of the Holy War that took me like an hour and a half to get through the first battle which is crazy. I noticed a few times in Fire Emblem that seizing castles would sometimes just not show up as an option and I would have to keep moving different characters in front of the door until one decided to work. It made ending battles very confusing and I hope that doesn’t become a regular thing. There was also an incident in the latest Fire Emblem game Engage where the cutscene that played at the end of the first battle completely tanked my framerate and I had to sit through a slideshow and reset the emulator to get it working again. It’s going to be very unfortunate if I have to do that for every cutscene as the story is one of the main reasons I’m interested in the series.
When testing the Kirby games, I was having a little bit of trouble getting the N64 emulator to work how I wanted. There would a thick black border around the whole thing (a remnant of overscan as the games were originally made to be played on a CRT) and a constant message at the bottom of the screen that wouldn’t go away. I ended up ditching Project 64 and moving my N64 games under Retroarch. Thankfully, I decided to come to this conclusion now when I only had two games set up under Project 64 (Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and Paper Mario), so it didn’t take too long to adjust them.
There weren’t too many hiccups with the other games, and I was able to get through all of Mario & Luigi on Saturday since a lot of the emulator kinks are slowly being ironed out. For this week, there’s a chance I might get through all of SAC_2045 and officially be caught up on everything Ghost in the Shell until the new show airs next year. If that’s the case, I have Ironheart, Raised by Wolves, and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld ready to go. Those shows will be my focus for the rest of the month. On the gaming front, unless another Tales of Phantasia session rolls around, it’s going to be more emulation testing. To give a sort of progress update on that, I have a text file I’m working off of that currently has 423 lines on it. Most of those lines are individual games, but some of them have entire series on them like the aforementioned Kirby or Paper Mario. As I test the games and add them to the backlog, I remove them from the text file so you kind of have an idea of how many I have left to do (spoiler alert: it’s a lot). I think I’ll update this number every week, that seems like a good progress report. I’ll be back with another update next week. Thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 3,452 (+45)
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