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)
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