September 14-20, 2025
Another pretty slow week for me. I got some more Tales of Phantasia time in, but minimal emulation testing due to discovering texture packs. More on that below.
Game Acquisitions
This is the least number of new games I’ve gotten in quite a while. No purchases and only a few giveaways. It’s nice that I have the whole FATE series through Prime freebies now. Hades is obviously the big standout here, I’m super excited to try that game out. I was thinking about buying it myself, but a Steam family member bought it instead.
# of Games: 5
Total Money Spent: $0
Price/Game: $0
Like I said, not a lot of testing got done this week. I discovered that there are passionate communities filled with people who mod games that run through emulators. I already knew ROM hacks were a thing, but I didn’t know that you could improve the graphics of emulated games through the use of texture packs. I spent several hours researching which emulators support them and downloaded a few. They take up so much space, I had to move some of my other files to an external drive. I finished retesting all the games I already tested after applying these packs, then started on new games where I’ll be able to test both them and their mod/texture packs simultaneously. As you can see, I didn’t make a ton of progress on that front. I decided to make testing any game I found a texture pack for a priority. I find it interesting how some console emulators support texture packs while others don’t. Why can the NES and N64 use them but not the SNES? Why can the Xbox 360 emulator support mods while the OG Xbox emulator can’t? So many questions.
Game Recaps
Another week, another Tales of Phantasia session in. It was shorter than the last one, but we still got a lot done. We made it to the end of the ice cave and fought the Fenrir Beast. A super tough fight and the only one so far to take us three attempts. We did it though, then managed to make our way to the Ninja Village to recruit the last party member Suzu. This involved going back to Euclid to fight in the arena again until we met Suzu’s parents and took them out since they’re being mind controlled by Dhaos. Check out our playthrough!
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched this week:
· Raised by Wolves Season 2 Episodes 2-8 (complete)
· Ghostbusters Frozen Empire
A slow week on the TV front too. Raised by Wolves was an interesting sci-fi show. VERY heavy religious undertones in the second season to complement the battle between the atheists and Sol worshippers. I think this is a show worth watching if you don’t mind the smaller scope and minimal worldbuilding. I feel like it could have benefitted from having its ideas fleshed out more, but I still enjoyed it. It felt like things were leading up to a third season and many questions were left unanswered, but the show was canceled so there’s minimal resolution unfortunately. Ghostbusters Frozen Empire was much better than the reviews led me to believe. I really liked it, even though it feels like Bill Murray really doesn’t want to be doing it anymore. The design for the big bad ghost was cool too, and I liked how one of the characters was a ghost that was just a normal person who conversed with one of the main cast. It was a refreshing change of pace from the over-the-top cartoony design of most of the ghosts.
Conclusion/Upcoming
Still no news on the Game Pass front. I’m still accumulating points daily and am very slowly assembling a spreadsheet of all the games I’m interested in from the catalog. After that’s done, I’m not sure how I want to tackle the list. Maybe I’ll go for third-party games in my wishlist first, then go from highest rated to lowest (the opposite of my usual approach) since there’s a chance the games will leave before I get to them. Microsoft published games are permanent on the service though so no rush there. That means Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is on the far back burner. I really want to play Expedition 33 so I may move that to the top of the list, who knows. So many possibilities!
For this week, I’m gonna watch a couple of new shows after finishing Raised by Wolves. Pokémon Concierge, Lego Star Wars Rebuild the Galaxy Season 2, and Futurama season 10 are on my shortlist which are all fairly quick watches. Alien: Earth is wrapping up this week as well so maybe it will finally be time to jump into that. On the gaming front, no plans other than Tales of Phantasia and emulation stuff. I had 399 lines left in my emulation text file and am at 382 now. I think we’re getting close to the end of Phantasia. We’re collecting the pieces needed to unlock the final dungeon, although there is still a ton of side content we haven’t done. Anyway, that’s enough for now. Thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 3,574 (+12)
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