September 7-13, 2025
The title is a reference to Tales of Phantasia; I’m not trying to make some profound statement about the state of the world or anything. ANYWAY, typical week this week. I bought some more games, played a little Tales, and did some more emulation testing. Let’s get into it!
Game Acquisitions
Discounty Digimon World were Steam family purchases, Picklock and Reverse Crawl were Reddit trades, Subterrain was an Amazon freebie, and Fallout Equestria: Remains was a Steam freebie. The other 10 games were part of the Build Your Own Killer Bundle on Fanatical. Only $1 each, not bad! I’m especially looking forward to Chernobylite finally hitting this price point, but Aura of Worlds, Everholm, Soda Crisis, The Black Grimoire, and The Signifier could be hidden gems as well. The Black Grimoire is advertised as being like a single-player RuneScape, which is dangerous for someone who lost six years of their life to that game as a kid.
# of Games: 16
Total Money Spent: $9.99
Price/Game: $0.62
Like I mentioned last week, some of these are part of the Sega Genesis Classics Collection which has been delisted from sale. A pleasant surprise as that means I didn’t have to download and test them individually. I’m not sure how I’m feeling about Sin and Punishment. It’s a rail shooter which is not a genre I’m super familiar with, and the N64 game frankly controls like ass. I played through the tutorial and immediately set it to easy afterward when testing the first level. Here’s hoping that’ll be enough to get through it. Besides those, there’s a lot of classic RPGs here which I’m really looking forward to.
Another almost three-hour Phantasia session! We spent over half of it just talking to people in Alvanista and Freezekiel much to the dismay of my co-op partner. Look, sometimes RPGs have a lot of talking instead of a lot of combat, alright? We spent the other part of the session in the ice caves below Fenrir Church. We decided to do it the hard way by forgoing fire charms and just having Minty heal us every few seconds. We finally made it to a save point, which is hopefully near the end but man, this has been a rough dungeon so far. The enemies aren’t even that hard, it’s just the winding layout and cold damage. I’m not sure if we’re going to go to the volcanic place next or knock out some side stuff. We’ll see! I really want to get the secret party member in the ninja village. Check out our playthrough!
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched this week:
· Raised by Wolves Season 1 Episode 5-Season 2 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)
· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 4 Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)
· Jurassic World Rebirth
Raised by Wolves is pretty good, although I’m not totally loving the multitude of flashbacks and the direction some of the characters are going. The premise is cool, but everything seems so small in scale, and everything takes place in one little area. It opened up in season 2 so we’ll see if that improves it. I accidentally screwed up the My Little Pony viewing order last week. Generation 5 consisted of the movie which acts as the pilot, the 3D show Make Your Mark, and the 2D show Tell Your Tale. It’s all the same continuity and sometimes both shows play off of each other (more specifically Tell Your Tale seems to reference Make Your Mark at times). I accidentally watched the Tell Your Tale episode that recaps the Make Your Mark finale which I haven’t seen yet. Oh well, not like the show is too deep anyway. It’s a shame it got canceled so abruptly while they were still producing and airing the episodes. This didn’t get nearly the love Friendship is Magic got. Hopefully the generation premiering next year is more cohesive. I thought Jurassic World was done, but I guess they make too much money no matter how bad they are. I’ve seen all of them, so I felt obligated to watch this one. It was definitely one of the movies of all time. Entirely skippable, but not the worst thing in the world if you love dinosaurs.
Conclusion/Upcoming
Another update on the Game Pass front. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m earning enough points to keep the subscription going indefinitely assuming they don’t raise the redemption price again or reduce the number of points you can earn daily. As a result, I’m feeling more confident about getting to play everything in the catalog that I’m interested in unless it leaves the service. I’m very slowly cataloging all the games I’m interested in playing there, then will perhaps attempt redeeming when I’ve finished with that. Could be a couple weeks, could be a couple months. In the meantime, I’ll continue plugging away at the emulation project. Speaking of, I was at 399 lines left in my text file at my last update and am sitting at 388 now.
For this week, the plan is business as usual. I likely won’t finish Raised by Wolves so that will be my main TV focus. After the “masterpiece” that was Jurassic World Rebirth, I’m planning on watching another poorly reviewed sequel with Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. Another example of a series where I’ve watched all the other movies, so I feel obligated to watch this one. Wish me luck! On the gaming front, there might be more Tales of Phantasia but other than that, just more emulation testing. I’m getting close to the Pokémon series 👀 Thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 3,562 (+31)
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