Weekly Update #14: Klarthh is Finally Useful!

March 30^th – April 5^th, 2025

PC setup is still in progress, but I managed to get one gaming session in, and in Tales of Phantasia no less! Haven’t played that one for a few weeks so it was nice to get back into it.

Game Acquisitions

I actually paid for one of these games! 1000XRESIST was on my wishlist and it showed up in the April Humble Choice. I wasn’t super interested in anything else from the bundle, but I managed to buy it off someone on Reddit for a good price.

# of Games: 5

Total Money Spent: $3.47

Price/Game: $0.58

Game Recaps

Like I said in the intro, only one session this week. It was a long one though! I managed to squeeze four parts out of it. I feel like we’re starting to get the hang of this game, we relearned the controls pretty quickly. We start off by visiting the port city of Venezia (although it turns out we weren’t supposed to go there yet). Then we remembered the objective and headed back to the super windy area to find Arche and ended up giving Klarthh his first summon instead . After that, we head back to the Forest of Spirits to commune with Yggdrasill and its guardian Martel. Then we finally finish up by heading back to Venezia to catch a boat to Alvanista. We got so much done!  

 

 

 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

·       Shadow and Bone Season 1 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)

·       Family Guy Season 23 Episode 7 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 4 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)

·       Moana

Like my gaming time, my show watching took a dip too. I did manage to start Shadow and Bone, and my friend and I finally got back to My Little Pony for the first time in months. It was nice to get back to it, even though I don’t remember what’s going on. I also watched Moana in preparation for the sequel. It’s still as good as I remember it. I heard the sequel isn’t as good but I think that’s to be expected. I’m still looking forward to it.

Conclusion/Upcoming

I don’t see myself getting back into Torment for a while, sorry about that! I’m gonna be working on more PC setup stuff. I also won another week of Game Pass that I have to redeem by April 29^th so I want to take advantage of that as much as possible. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is on the service right now and I have the first game in my backlog already so I’ll be moving that up. It’s only like three hours long so it should be a quick completion. That likely won’t be coming this week though. There’s a distinct possibility that I won’t be playing anything for the next week or two which is unfortunate. It’ll make these posts nice and short at least. I’ll be watching Shadow and Bone all week, and probably Moana 2 Saturday night. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,183 (+11)

Monthly Update #3: Q1 Complete!

March 2025

I’m gonna start this post out as usual, then expand with a few interesting graphs recapping the first quarter. I played a wider variety of games compared to the previous months due to two whole completions! And this was the month I finally completed my PC build that I started in November 2024 so not a bad month overall.

Game Acquisitions

A ton of acquisitions last month, mainly due to the huge itch.io charity bundle. Unlike last month, I did actually spend money on some of these but I think it’ll be well worth it. I’m still not spending nearly as much money as I thought I did on video games.

# of Games: 89

Total Money Spent: $22.44

Price/Game: $0.25

Game Recaps

My lowest month so far this year, but also the widest variety. Interesting how that works. It’s cool seeing how I put more time into Torment than all the other games combined. I finally beat Final Profit by becoming the CEO of the Bureau of Business and I had a blast with it. I didn’t have much time in Tales of Phantasia, but I did finally meet my first new companion in the past . I also started and quickly beat a short point-and-click game Lunar Axe by acquiring the titular axe and taking down the giant serpent. Didn’t have as much fun with this one, but it was mercifully short. Then I started my latest game Torment: Tides of Numenera. I’m already almost 10 hours in and still feels like I haven’t done much. I’m still exploring the first town! I’m going to be on this one for a while. Enjoy playlists of my endeavors below, complete with some commentary!

 

 

 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

·        Snowpiercer Season 1 Episode 7-Season 4 Episode 10 (completed)

·        Family Guy Season 23 Episodes 3-6 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·        American Dad Season 21 Episodes 19-22 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·        Dark City

·        Close Encounters of the Third Kind

·        Trainspotting

·        T2: Trainspotting

·        The Wild Robot

Mostly Snowpiercer, which was a pretty good show. It had a strong start and an OK end, but the journey was interesting throughout. The movies were just OK except for The Wild Robot which was phenomenal. Not much else to say here, read my weekly posts for slightly more in-depth reviews.

Quarterly Stats

I thought including some quarterly stats to see how I’m doing with my backlog so far this year would be fun. Let me know if you find any of these interesting or have any ideas for other graphs you’d want to see. Since I wanted the weeks to be equal length and run Sunday-Saturday, the weekly graphs reflect the time period from December 29^th, 2024 through March 29^th, 2025.

Hopefully the dropoff at the end doesn't continue.

Really not that different from January now that I'm looking at it. Maybe February was just a particularly good month.

Turns out money spent doesn't directly correlate to games acquired. Now I know!

I tried to make this a stacked bar graph but couldn't get the second axis to work properly that way without the money spent bar completely covering the games acquired bar. Oh well.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Coming up with those charts was fun. Despite being my slowest month so far this year, I still feel like it was pretty good. I finally beat a game I started way back in November and I loved it. I also crammed almost an entire four-season show in for good measure. Perhaps the biggest highlight was finally upgrading to a new top-of-the-line gaming PC that I also started on in November. Now I just need a VR headset and I’ll be able to play anything in my backlog. Maybe when I finish getting everything set up I can finally go back to actually playing something again 😅

The return to office on top of getting a new PC has hampered my gaming and TV time as expected. I’m still working my way through it and hopefully I can get everything back to normal soon. Over the next month, I hope to start and finish Shadow and Bone and then get to either Arcane or Ghost in the Shell. I never played League of Legends so I never planned on watching Arcane but everyone says it’s great and worth watching regardless. I have Moana 1 and 2 coming up for movies, followed by Ghost in the Shell 1 and 2. Once I finish Ghost in the Shell 2, that’s when I plan on watching all the shows. The end of April (and likely all of May) will be very anime focused. I can’t wait! For games, I don’t plan on beating anything since I’m still near the beginning of two long RPGs. That means April (and, again, likely all of May) will be spent on Torment: Tides of Numenera and Tales of Phantasia. I hope you enjoyed my deep dive into random gaming stats. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,172 (+85)