I really dig Nibelsnarf. Such a cool design. It’s not super different or exciting or anything, but it works.

Honestly, I found many hundreds of hours of Monster Hunter to be absolutely no help when I played my first Soulslike. I tried to play it like I would MH and got destroyed constantly until I forced myself to forget what I thought I knew and let the game teach me its own way. I just got the new Steam Controller, so I’ve been playing a bunch of games to try to get used to it because I really loved the old model. I don’t know if it’s just a case of needing to get used to the camera movement or if I’m super rusty, but my most recent journey into Wilds was rough. I want to keep playing a little bit now and then to keep my skills up for the upcoming expansion, but I’m still a bit burned out on it. Always happens with this series.

I’ve been replaying Batman. I’m still plodding along with challenge maps for achievements alongside the story modes. Asylum is completely done, City has Robin and Nightwing to go plus most of NG+, Origins I’m partway through the story and it’s still my favourite, haven’t touched challenge maps yet, Knight I only need to do 4 more maps but they’re really tough ones, I’ll probably still be beating my head against them when I finish the Origins story and start this one. I’ve also started a separate replay of the series alongside my normal replay so that my GF can see it all and I can infodump on her the whole time (don’t worry, this arrangement goes both ways, she got me though about 9999 hours of Lord of the Rings movies and cartoons and books first).

We also got through Luca in Final Fantasy X. I won the tournament, she lost. We’re treating this the same way we watch TV series and overanalysing everything as we go, really digging into characterisation and whatnot. For such an old game with relatively primitive models and animations it’s still surprisingly in-depth, there’s a lot going on that I never picked up on in the past.

Replaying Metal Gear Solid V. It still rules.

Finally, the only new thing on this whole list, I am obsessed with janky, kind of shitty business sims because I love watching them grow and being able to interact with the devs, and it’s nice having a small community mostly free of anti-woke bullshit. I’m currently into Car Dealer Simulator. I don’t know if I could really recommend it to normal people, but I’m having a great time.

I have two email addresses that I use to sign up to everything, and they themselves are both over 18 years old. The only thing I’ve let verify my age is my Microsoft account, and they did that by looking up my email with their “age verification partner” or whatever, and they determined I was over 18.

Not that I was ever planning to give any websites my ID or do any selfie shit with anyone anyway, but now that I know it’s completely possible to be verified without all that I definitely won’t now. Discord never tried to lock me out, so I guess my account there is old enough? I signed up pretty early when they started. I’ll go completely offline before I play along with any of this.

I’m most of the way through Cat Mail Co, it’s a nice time waster. I’m also trying to get into Medieval Dynasty. We’ve got a tiny group of 4 people so far, there’s a lumberjack who collects like 1 log a day, a dude who allegedly gets buckets of water from the well, and a hunter I’ve literally never seen do anything. It’s uh… fun.

I might start another run of Elden Ring. It’s been about a year and a half since I last played, so a nice slow-paced game with a new weapon type might be a bit of fun. I didn’t like the expansion at all, but for the most part the main game is pretty chill.

I just took 2 wonderful weeks off and played about 160 hours combined of Transport Fever 2 (city builder but without the city-building that only focuses on logistics), FOUNDRY (voxel Satisfactory), Teddy’s Haven (cosy fantasy shop sim) and Bobo Bay (basically Chao garden from Sonic Adventure 2 that someone finally made into a standalone game).

Less than two hours into my first shift back I was already utterly miserable, and now 90 minutes after that I’m just… burned out. I guess it’ll be back to Pokémon after this because I won’t have the mental bandwidth for much else. Just gotta win the lotto!