September 2025
I can’t believe we’re already 3/4ths of the way through the year already. That means I’ve kept this weekly blog thing going for nine whole months! It also means I’ve got some more quarterly stats for you all. Fun times!
Game Acquisitions
About the average number of acquisitions for me, with my highest monthly spend as you’ll see in my YTD graphs below. This is also my first month where the amount of money spent exceeded the number of games acquired. I hope that doesn’t become a trend. My Steam family picked up quite a few games as well that I can now play for free. Alan Wake II and Star Wars Outlaws were the big purchases, but I’m super excited for Hades as well. Those are my highlights for September.
# of Games: 41
Total Money Spent: $59.71
Price/Game: $1.46
The emulation testing continues to churn. A lot of progress made here, but there are still hundreds more games to get through. If it weren’t for my co-op partner and my upcoming Game Pass subscription, I wouldn’t be getting any game time in. Still, there’s a ton of awesome games here, and I will finish up the testing eventually. I just might need a break from this for a while. Expedition 33 is calling my name.
Game Recaps
Only one game played in September with Tales of Phantasia. I haven’t played a single-player game since May. Hopefully I will fix that soon with Game Pass. We put several hours into Phantasia and made tons of progress. We finally made it out of the past and into the future, meeting up with our old companion from the beginning of the game along the way. We also now have flying machines that let us travel anywhere in the world and have managed to defeat the Fenrir Beast to get the first piece we need to unlock the final dungeon. Check out the playlist of our playthrough!
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched last month:
· Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld Season 1 Episodes 4-6 (complete)
· Raised by Wolves Season 1 Episode 1-Season 2 Episode 8 (complete)
· My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 4 Episodes 1-4 (complete)
· Pokémon Concierge Season 1 Episodes 1-8 (complete)
· LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 2 Episodes 1-4 (complete)
· Marvel’s Zombies Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (complete)
· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
· Jurassic World Rebirth
· Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
· Happy Gilmore
A lot of shows completed last month, and I didn’t dislike any of them. Going purely by enjoyment, Pokémon Concierge was absolutely my favorite watch. It was just so adorable! I haven’t watched a Pokémon show since I was a kid, and it was nice seeing them in a relaxing setting instead of battling. Just a nice slice-of-life anime, highly recommend. I can’t believe the Harry Potter finale was in September, it feels like forever ago.
YTD Stats
Back again with my year-to-date stats now that we’ve finished up the third quarter. Please note that the weekly graphs reflect the time period 12/29/24-09/27/25. Let’s start with the hours played per week and month graphs.
As you can see, I’m still having weeks where I don’t play anything (isn’t adulting fun!?), but at least my gaming in September was higher than the past few months. I’m up to 157 hours and 25 minutes of gaming this year, which is definitely on the low side if you check my HLTB completions. Next up are the money spent vs. games acquired graphs. Please note that my emulated games are not reflected here so the actual number of backlog additions is much higher.
September was another “big” spend month for me, with Alan Wake II Deluxe and Star Wars Outlaws making up 60% of that total. Still a paltry amount of money to spend on a hobby in my opinion. So far this year, I’ve now spent $194.79 on games and gotten 430 total games out of it. Crazy value there. I’m glad I’m able to see these stats now and convince myself that I’m not overspending on games. That was one of my primary goals of starting this blog and now I know! Now I can work on not sweating my game purchases too much.
Conclusion/Upcoming
Three quarters down, only one more to go to finish up the year. This blog has been quite a journey so far, and it is way more work than I was expecting. I’m not sure if I’m getting enough fulfillment and engagement to keep it going after my annual top 10 post at the end of the year, it’s just taking up a lot of time that could be spent gaming. Maybe I could reduce the frequency to just once a month and/or cutting back on some sections. Let me know what you think.
Coming up in October, I’m planning on watching Alien: Earth, Futurama, Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, and Gen V for TV shows. That should get me through the month. If not, I’ve got a couple shows on the backburner I can get to. I really hope Splinter Cell: Deathwatch leads to a new game at some point; it’s been 12 years since the last one. Get on it Ubisoft! For movies, I’ve got Happy Gilmore 2 and the Chronicles of Riddick series. I might sneak in a horror movie for Halloween too, we’ll see. Gaming wise, more Tales of Phantasia is coming up. We probably won’t beat the game in October so I’m not looking further ahead than that. If I decide to redeem Game Pass, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be my next single-player game. I want to play it so badly! That’s all for now, thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 3,612 (+107) <- That’s the emulation testing kicking in right there.
