Weekly Update #27: Still More Emulation Cataloging

June 29 - July 5, 2025

Slower week than I expected given the three-day weekend. My friend and I hung out this week but didn’t get around to Phantasia. I’ve been too tired from work with the beginning of the fiscal year and all to get much done afterwards so I only managed to get a couple consoles cataloged. More on that in the conclusion section below.

Game Acquisitions

A small selection right now, but I am currently eyeing the July Humble Choice mainly for Rogue Trader and Cat Quest III. I’m also currently looking at Fanatical’s Platinum Collection - Build your own Bundle (July 2025). I’m waiting for a Reddit trade confirmation before jumping in so stay tuned on that. I did pay a dollar for Kaze and the Wild Masks in another Fanatical bundle which seems like a good price for that game. The others were freebies as usual.

# of Games: 4

Total Money Spent: $1.06

Price/Game: $0.27

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

·       Tales from the Loop Season 1 Episodes 4-8 (complete)

·       Family Guy Season 23 Episode 16 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episodes 1-6 (still watching, show ended)

·       Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

I enjoyed Tales from the Loop all the way through. A few plots throughout the season were incorporated into the finale which was nice. It never really dove into what the Loop is or does which was a bummer. I suppose that wasn’t really the point of it all though and just a maguffin for all the weird goings-on for the show. I guess that’s good enough for me. I also watched the second Ghost in the Shell movie and started diving into the show. I’m still very early in the show so I can’t really say anything there yet. The movie was very good. The visuals were even better than the first one. They really went over the top here; I think it rivals any anime that comes out today. This is high praise considering the movie is OVER 20 YEARS OLD. Crazy. It did do the establishing shot thing from the first movie again. I know it was probably just to show off how beautiful the movie is, but it just felt like padding to me. There was an air of pretentiousness with the characters quoting philosophical sayings at each other, and the main character from the first movie didn’t show up until the very end which was disappointing. Other than those minor gripes though, I still had a very good time.

Conclusion/Upcoming

So yeah, not a lot going on this week unfortunately. I was looking forward to Tales of Phantasia, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve played anything. That’s OK though, it gave me that much more time to continue the emulation cataloging. I mentioned in my last post that I had the Sega Saturn, original Game Boy, the NES, and the 3DO coming up. I managed to finish up the Saturn and it seems I was correct. There do appear to be quite a few hidden gems on that system. I finished up the Game Boy too. I added more games from there than I expected. I’m working on the NES now which I thought I was going to have finished already. Slowly but surely. Along with diving into Ghost in the Shell, cataloging will continue to be my main focus for this week. Sorry for the short update, one of these days I’ll get back to gaming for something more substantial. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,308 (+4)

Monthly Update #6: Halfway Already?

June 2025

Another month has come and gone already. And we’re halfway through 2025 already! Where is the time going? I’ve got a mix of June, Q2, and YTD stats in this one so buckle up!

Game Acquisitions

Interesting mix of acquisitions this month, from old delisted PC games to Steam family purchases to Humble Choice and everything in-between. I got all of these for next to nothing too. I’m convinced gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies you can get into. The amount of time I can get out of these versus how much I spent on them is just insane.

# of Games: 38

Total Money Spent: $4.23

Price/Game: $0.11

Game Recaps

Only played Tales of Phantasia this month so only one playlist to link to. The last of these videos from June will be going up through July 4^th as I’m finally almost caught up from my Game Pass binge back in May. No solo gaming this month but that’s OK, everything is better with friends! In the game this month, among other things, we made pacts with the Four Great Spirits and their leader, met the racist elves, and witnessed the beginning of a great war whose conclusion is no longer set in stone due to altering past events. Exciting stuff! 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

·       Star Wars: Andor Season 2 Episodes 11-12 (complete)

·       My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 2 Episodes 5-7 (still watching, show ended)

·       The Last of Us Season 2 Episodes 1-7 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Family Guy Season 23 Episode 15 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 Episodes 1-9 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Tales from the Loop Season 1 Episodes 1-5 (still watching, show ended)

·       Mickey 17

·       The Boondock Saints

·       11:14

·       Ghost in the Shell

This was a solid month for TV shows. Of course, it helps that I’m a big fan of Star Wars, Marvel, The Last of Us, and sci-fi in general. I’d say the movies were a slight step down in quality from the TV shows but still enjoyable nonetheless. As much as I enjoyed season 2 of The Last of Us and am enjoying Tales from the Loop, I think I have to give my favorite to Daredevil this month. Like I mentioned in my weekly post a couple days ago, it really feels like a seamless continuation of the Netflix show. I can’t wait to see how it develops in season 2.

YTD Stats

I can’t believe we’re halfway through the year already. But that means more fun stats! At first I was just going to include quarter 2 but decided seeing year-to-date would be more interesting. Once again, since I wanted the weeks to run Sunday-Saturday, the weekly graphs will encompass 12/29/24-6/28/25.

Q2

YTD

  

  

Starting with the Q2 pie chart, I see that Tales of Phantasia makes up the biggest slice by far. This isn’t to surprising to me because I haven’t been doing a lot of single-player gaming lately. If it weren’t for my two-week Game Pass trial, it would’ve been the only thing on there. That means like 60% of my total gaming time for the quarter took place over two weeks! I really need to finish up this Playnite and emulation setup business and get back to gaming on a more regular basis. Expanding out to the whole year, Tales of Phantasia is still really big but doesn’t even come close to Final Profit. I spent A TON of time on that game, and loved it a lot. Definitely my favorite game of the year so far. Torment: Tides of Numenera, my “current” single-player game that I haven’t touched since March, still manages to hold third longest playthrough of the year. I really need to get back to that.

Moving on to the hours played graphs, I see June is my lightest month to date which is not surprising. Besides some Tales of Phantasia co-op, I didn’t get around to playing anything else. You can once again see the huge playtime bump Game Pass gave me in May which helped rocket it up to my busiest month so far. Now if only I could get back to something like February on a regular basis. You can see that same bump in the line chart too. Those really were my busiest weeks of the year by far. All the 0 hour weeks don’t feel great though.

Last but not least, my money spent to games acquired graphs. How much have I set myself back so far? Surprisingly, not that much at all. Halfway through the year and I’ve spent $114.28 on games so far. If I was buying full priced titles, this would be less than two AAA games purchased. Thanks to a combination of a ton of free games and indie bundles, I was able to get 301 games for this much. That’s a crazy amount of games, probably too much if I’m being honest. My backlog will never go down. There’s a slight correlation between how much I spend and how many games I get but it’s not that strong. You can see in week 10 that I spent very little money but got a ton of games (thanks to an itch.io charity bundle) and conversely in week 20 I spent a decent chunk of money and didn’t get as many games for it (thanks to a couple mid-tier Fanatical bundles). Very interesting! At least I think so.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Woo, that was a lot of stats. So many stats! Am I the only person who enjoys this stuff? Probably. Anyway, I don’t want to dive too deep into the emulation stuff here since I put that in the weekly posts. Just know that it’s been going slow and steady. July will hopefully see the end of all the research of games I want to play. After that, I’ll work on acquiring them and setting up all the emulators in Playnite to make sure they work. It’s sad to say that there’s once again a good chance I don’t get any solo gaming in again this month which is a shame. Maybe in August I’ll finally have everything set up? We’ll see. Expect more Tales of Phantasia though! I’ll also be dedicating almost all my watch time to Ghost in the Shell. Between the various films and anime series’, it will take more than the month to get through. Just need to finish up a couple shows first. Thanks for reading GCTuba’s stats corner 🤪 Catch you all next time!

Backlog total: 3,304 (+37)

Weekly Update #26: No Gaming, Only Emulation Cataloging!

June 22-28, 2025

No gaming again. Maybe I picked a bad time to catalog a bunch of old games instead of actually playing something? I did make good progress on cataloging though! More on that in the conclusion again. I may get some gaming time next week, I’ve already got a friend hangout penciled in. Isn’t adult life great?

Game Acquisitions

So, this is a bit of an odd one. My emulation research has caused me to stumble upon some older delisted PC games. I couldn’t really add them to my emulation library since they’re native PC games, so I decided to go ahead and add them to my regular acquisitions. Prince of Persia 2 is technically being emulated through MS-DOS which is an old Microsoft operating system, but I didn’t see a separate platform entry for it on HLTB, so PC it is! The first Prince of Persia will be played through SNES emulation which is why I haven’t listed it here, but I do plan on playing them in order. The other games were giveaways as usual.

# of Games: 8

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

·       Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 Episodes 8-9 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Tales from the Loop Season 1 Episodes 1-3 (still watching, show ended)

·       Ghost in the Shell (finally!)

Daredevil and Tales from the Loop are very good shows. Daredevil really does feel like Season 4 of the original show, I love it. I’m curious to see the army Daredevil recruits. I’m only about halfway through Tales from the Loop but it is very compelling so far. I like that there’s a different sci-fi mystery that’s solved in each episode, as well as the overall mystery of what “the Loop” actually is. It’s also cool that a minor character from the previous episode becomes the main character of the next. It’s like the cast changes but all the characters stay the same. I don’t think I’ve seen that done before. I can’t wait to see how it all ties together. And finally, I have watched the original Ghost in the Shell anime film. The atmosphere and animation were top notch as I expected. The action scenes were really cool too. There was a lot of exposition though, and some environmental shots felt like they dragged on a little long. The ending was left pretty ambiguous too. In other words, it felt like the first movie in a franchise. I’m curious to see if they build on this movie in future installments or if each piece of media is its own thing. Overall, definitely worth watching.

Conclusion/Upcoming

On the emulation front, I mentioned last time that I was going to look into Game Boy Color and Advance games, then Xbox and Sega as well as a couple of niche platforms. I managed to get through with cataloging both Game Boys, original Xbox, Xbox 360, and the short-lived Sega 32X. I actually managed to get a couple of games out of that one. The Xbox 360 emulator is highly experimental, so most games aren’t fully playable. Hopefully it will be in a better state by the time I get around to playing them. I also went down a rabbit hole with a forgotten Korean RPG series known as Magna Carta. Magna Carta 2 is an Xbox 360 exclusive which is how I came across it, but it’s actually the third game in the series. The original game never released outside South Korea and was pulled from sale shortly after release for being a buggy mess. Someone managed to get a copy and fully translate it into English. I tried to play it during testing, but the gameplay systems were too complex and never explained and I quickly dropped it. The second game released on PS2 but didn’t have good reviews either, so I guess I’m only playing the Xbox game. Oh well! There’s my fun emulation fact for the week.

For the upcoming week, I plan on watching the second Ghost in the Shell film and finishing up Tales from the Loop. I suspect I’ll get through it before Ghost in the Shell, so I’ll need a small holdover before I dive into the Ghost in the Shell anime series’. I’ll either knock out Star Wars Tales of the Underworld which is basically just two episodes or Raised by Wolves. Then it’s headfirst into everything Ghost in the Shell has to offer! My friend is coming over so hopefully we’ll get more Tales of Phantasia in. Other than that, the emulation cataloging continues. The next platforms on my list are the Sega Saturn, original Game Boy, the NES, and the 3DO. I have no idea what to expect from those. The Saturn might have some hidden gems, but I don’t have faith in the others. My next post will be the monthly for June, and there will be some fun Q2 graphs to go along with that. Thanks as always for reading! I’ll be back in a couple days.

Backlog total: 3,304 (+8)