August 3-9, 2025
That’s right, I’m finally on the last step of my emulation setup journey. I’ve decided on all the old retro games I want to play, and I have the emulators set up to play them. Now “all” I have left to do is acquire them, add them to my Playnite library, make sure they run on my PC, and add them to my backlog when everything is good to go. Now that I’ve typed that all out, it still sounds like a lot, and it is. But at least I finally get to have a controller in my hand 😅 For the next several updates, you’ll see my backlog total shoot up even more than usual as I add the emulated games to it. I’m also going to have separate pictures in my game acquisitions section for my normal game purchases/giveaways and my emulated games. That way they won’t get jumbled up and you can see exactly what I deemed worthy of being played all these years later that I missed. Let’s get into it.
Game Acquisitions
I’m going to start off with my normal acquisitions first, then add my emulated games. Last week had me redeeming the Humble Choice once again, Humble has been on a roll lately with those. Persona 5 Royal was an especially big get as I had that on my wishlist to grab for $20 and it just about made it there. Now I can get it here with other good-looking games for even lower. There’s also some more free NSFW games on offer here to continue raising awareness about video game censorship. Go show your support and sign the petition!
# of Games: 12
Total Money Spent: $0
Price/Game: $0
You can see the fruits of my itch.io emulation perusing on display here. I was hoping for a few more games, but I still found six that I previously passed over due to needing emulators to play. I’ve also got my five N-Gage games I’m planning on playing ready to go. I’ve actually had those ready for a while now but forgot to add them to my backlog after they were set up. Moving on, you can see that I’ve added the entire Shining Force TRPG series to my list. I love tactics games even though I’m bad at them, and I’m ashamed to admit I’d never even heard of them before prior to my research. I even have one of the newer games in the series (Shining Resonance Refrain), although it is far removed from these and might as well be a separate thing altogether. It doesn’t help that I’ve never played a Sega console which most of these games are on.
You can see I also decided to play through the Wario Land series. This actually started while I was researching Mario games and wanted to add the Super Mario Land games to the list. I came across Super Mario Land 3 which is also secretly kind of the first Wario game and not really a Mario game at all. I fell through a lot of similar rabbit holes like that during this research. I’ve already played the WarioWare games years ago and loved them, otherwise they would absolutely be on this list also. I’ve even gotten my lone Virtual Boy game on here just to complete the series. Shoutout to gartho on HLTB for putting this collection together.
The EarthBound trilogy has made its way here as well. I initially wrote off the NES as being too old for me to get any enjoyment out of those games these days (I’m 33 for anyone wondering), but there’s a highly rated ROM hack of the first game called “Mother – 25th Anniversary Edition” which adds a lot of QOL improvements, so I thought why not. One thing worth noting is that some of these games are Japanese only but have well-done English fan translations. If a game doesn’t have English support, I won’t play it. Shining Force III Scenarios 2 and 3 as well as Mother 3 fall under that category. Why won’t Nintendo bring the conclusion of EarthBound to the West?
Next on the list is a super obscure TurboGrafx-16/SNES platformer series known as Bonk. I don’t really know anything about these games except they’re short and were considered competent back in the day. I remember seeing the TurboGrafx-16 logo and some games on the Wii Virtual Console back when I was in high school but never heard of the console before and never looked into it until now. It was a commercial failure in the U.S. which explains it. I’ve got a few other random emulated games backlogged this week but I’ve already rambled way longer than I was planning to, so I’ll let them speak for themselves.
Game Recaps
Surprise, it’s not Tales of Phantasia! I actually got to play a game with my other friend that I don’t get to talk to much these days. I was supposed to go to his kid’s birthday party last week, but I was dealing with a bit of a health crisis and sadly had to cancel. It sucks; I haven’t seen him since January. I felt bad about missing it, and he missed me being there enough that we were able to schedule a remote gaming session where we played a survival game called Stranded Deep. We had played this once before back in like September for an hour and a half so we were very rusty. I felt like I was just starting to get the hang of it when we wrapped up for the night. I don’t know when we’ll play again, our play sessions are very sporadic. It’s a fun survival game though if you’re into the genre! Even after five hours, we’ve made very little progress and are basically still on the first island. No footage here, just two old friends catching up.
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched this week:
· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season 2 Episodes 23-26 (complete)
· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_2045 Season 1 Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)
· Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society
· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 1: Ghost Pain
· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 2: Ghost Whispers
· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 3: Ghost Tears
· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 4: Ghost Stands Alone
· Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Border 5: Pyrophoric Cult
· Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie
Wow that’s a lot of Ghost in the Shell. The series gets a little hard to follow at this point. Stand Alone Complex and the sequel series 2045 are the only things considered TV shows here which is why I marked them as complete and still watching, respectively. Stand Alone Complex was a good anime, you should watch it. Not sure if I love how it ended, but I still enjoyed the journey. Solid State Society is a movie that takes place two years after the show, and I felt like it was a decent epilogue. Ghost in the Shell: Arise is a series of hour-long specials in a totally separate continuity to Stand Alone Complex. I feel like it was over too quickly for me to get particularly attached to any characters. Speaking of, most of the characters are the same ones from Stand Alone Complex but written just differently enough to be off-putting. Maybe they weren’t meant to be watched back-to-back with the original series and be given a few years to breathe like most people experienced it. The timing happened to work out where I watched Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie instead of Harry Potter this week. Like Solid State Society, it’s like an epilogue movie to Arise. It was fine, better than the show I think. I’m too early in 2045 to form a opinion on that yet so stay tuned.
Conclusion/Upcoming
Another productive week I’d say. It was way more productive than expected since I was dealing with health stuff and took Monday and Tuesday off work. I finished up the itch.io cataloging way sooner than expected and still had time to set up the rest of the emulators and start adding new games to them. I imagine most of my blog posts for the foreseeable future will be adding emulated games to my backlog with the occasional Tales of Phantasia session thrown in. I hope you find that exciting 😝 I’ve still got enough Ghost in the Shell left to occupy me this week as well, and will probably get to the next Harry Potter movie this weekend. Thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 3,407 (+62)
