Tales From The Backlog

Another month, another adventure.

In last month’s monthly report, I mentioned that I was potentially moving in the coming months. That plan has unfortunately come to a pause since renting or buying in the new area is freaking expensive. Our current mortgage is cheaper than most of the places available for rent in the area. The plan now is to wait and see if more affordable housing becomes available in the area, or I start looking for a new job that pays more. Either or, I like where we live currently, but we both wish there were more people our age around for us to make friends.

With the new roadmap ahead, my buying habits will be toned down exponentially. Unless it is something I really want to play on day one, my game purchases will have to wait until a good sale happens. I have already been doing this for a while now, but new restrictions on myself will limit me to deals that are too good to pass by. So far the only new releases that have my attention are Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy XVI, Street Fighter 6 (maybe), and The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie. Eventually I will acquire other games that I want, but this also means that more games on my backlog can start being completed.

Games Finished This Month

Metroid Prime Remastered

At one point I called this my favorite Metroid Prime out of the trilogy. After revisiting it, I’m not too sure. I do love the classic feeling of the Metroid game, but the constant backtracking wore me down after awhile. There were some abilities that I wish Samus had in this game like the Space Jump or Screw Attack just to make traversal move a bit faster. Overall though, I enjoyed my time revisiting this game in its shiny new coat. Hopefully this means that the other Prime games will release before the fourth game magically materializes.

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New Additions

Diablo III: Eternal Collection (PS4)

I have never played a Diablo game before. This caused the game store attendee to die of shock and then resurrect themselves to tell me that I am not a real gamer since I have never played Diablo. So with that I started the game with some resentment to it, but gradually understood why people like these games. You go around and destroy waves of monsters to find sweet loot to get stronger to fight other strong monsters. It is a good mind-numbing experience, but would be better with other people I guess. Until I get over how annoying it was to talk to that annoying store clerk, the game will remain as “It’s okay” from me.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner – Soul Hackers (3DS)

I didn’t technically buy this game. I requested it from my older brother since he long abandoned it and was just sitting on his shelf. I asked if I could have it in order to complete my 3DS SMT collection. He agreed, and now I have a complete collection! Another score for not paying scalper prices!

The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure (PS4)

I completely missed the release window of this game. The fortunately/unfortunately was a panic buy since most places didn’t have a physical copy of this game in stock. Thankfully my reliable source had them in stock, so I bought to ensure that I had a copy. I still need to sit down and finish Trails from Zero first and then try to get this done before Reverie comes out (it’s not going to happen).

Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection (NS)

I never got around to playing the Battle Network games on the GBA. I played and beat Network Transmission on the GameCube, but for some reason I never sought out to play these games. At one point I was going to choose between finding them all or purchasing them off the Wii U eshop, but then Capcom decided to make them all available in one (kinda) collection. This saves me hundreds of dollars finding the GBA originals and one less headache hooking up my Wii U just to play these games.

Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp (NS)

I love the redesign of these games. Haters can hate, but nothing about this series needs to be gritty or war-like (Days of Ruin is pretty good though). I hope that this series can return in some format and that this rerelease helps rekindle interest.

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Currently Playing

At the beginning of the month, I had planned to play through Atelier Ryza 1 and Diablo III. That all changed one day during my lunchbreak when I decided to try Romancing SaGa II again and got hooked. I was not expecting to have this game constantly on my mind. There is nothing special about this game much, but my imagination with building my own lore has made this one of my favorite “role playing” games in a while. I’ll talk more about it later.

My weekend Divinity II sessions has to go on hiatus for a few months. One of our players needs to take a break from gaming to focus on other things. I don’t blame them at all since life comes before pleasure. Kat and I still have our game going, but last time we played the connection kept dying on us and made us lose an hour’s worth of progress. Divinity will return at some point.

This month I also started one of my streaming challenges. The first challenge is to obtain the platinum trophy in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life Special Edition. I thought this was going to be easy and something I could easily stream. I forgot however that the game moves incredibly slow at the beginning since you don’t have much to do. After a few streams I decided that I would haste through some of the boring stuff offstream and stream the game during more of the interesting parts. The streams will resume once I get to the end of Chapter 1 since nothing exciting happens before you get married and more options become available. I have more challenges that I want to do in the meantime, so those may occur while I work on this.

I haven’t stopped playing Theatrhythm, and you can’t stop me.

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That is about all that I have for this month. If you are like me and think post on this blog have been dry then fear not! I have three post in the works with two of them practically done. These will be spaced out just so new content appears on the blog. In June I will have a fun post that will come out on my birthday. Other than that, I will try to stockpile more post that can be used throughout the year. Writing has become fun again!

Thanks for reading as always!

DaNamesX