Previously on Logging The Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: March 2023

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Logging 2023

At the start of 2023, I made it a goal to make some major progress in clearing out my gaming backlog of over 500 games. And, as added motivation to do so, I started writing this blog series to force myself to make periodic check-ins on my progress. Knowing myself fairly well, I predictable fell off of writing about it and keeping this blog up to date. But I did keep clearing games off my backlog. In fact, as the year went on, in some what some call one of the best years for new game releases, and perhaps the worst for people making them (funny how that works), I found myself increasingly more interested in playing older games, and less so for the new releases. But I did finish 5 games that came out this year, an all-time low for me, and before I get to the actual backlog, I figured I'd give those games a quick shout-out.

2023's Games of the Year That Actually Came Out In 2023

5. MLB The Show 2023

The only part of this year's game that I actually touched was its historical showcase/documentary-type mode highlighting Negro League Baseball. It's a really cool look at a part of sports history that rarely sees much talk in mainstream sports media. Aside from the part where they reward you with cards to get you hooked into whatever their bullshit Ultimate Team mode equivalent is. Because even when big video games do something genuinely cool, they're still a nightmare.

4. Venba

A brief experience, but one that manages to pack in a whole lot of emotion, including through interactivity in the way that only video games can. Through cooking, it simultaneously tells the story of two generations of immigrants. Venba, who moves from India to Canada with her husband, and their struggle to start life there. And their son Kavin, born in Canada, who struggles with his heritage versus assimilating with life in Canada.

3. Cassette Beasts

With my interest in the Pokémon series being at an all-time low (more on that later), this game is a breath of fresh year. It has everything I want in a Pokémon game. A cool 2D pixely-sprite art style, a story, interesting characters, a party system of other trainers, 2v2 battles, monster fusing, pansexual romance options, great music.

2. Baldur's Gate 3

You don't need me to tell you about Baldur's Gate 3. It's on every other GOTY list out there. I didn't even finish it anyway. It's just an amazing piece of video game in the choices it provides. From character building, to story choices, to a fantastic cast of characters and pansexual romance options (weird how that keeps coming up on my list). It truly feels like there's always something interesting around every corner of that game, and it's impressive how a game that sticks pretty faithfully to D&D pulls all of it off.

1. Thirsty Suitors

As per usual, my game of the year is one I've seen on no one else's list, leaving me questioning if I'm just insane, playing games that aren't real and just a figment of my imagination. Thirsty Suitors follows Jala Jayaratne as she skates through town trying to fix her many pansexual relationship fuck-ups (weird how that keeps coming up on my list), and with her family through, of course, cooking minigames and RPG battles.

The Backlog

Now it's time to play some catch up, and recap some of the highlights and lowlights of what I cleared of my backlog since the last time I did one of these blogs. All the way back in April.

Games Left

482 486

What I Played

Tomb Raider (PS1) & Tomb Raider II - 3/5 - The problem with doing this 9 months late is that these games have kind of run together in my head now and I don't think I can pull much specifics out of which was which. But I rated them both a 3 out of 5, so let's just lump them together anyway. I do remember the second game involving more combat which, with this series insane idea of how they think a character should move in a video game, I was left feeling a bit more frustrated by. But there's also something weirdly satisfying about finally wrapping your head around these games' weirdo controls, as best as anyone possible can. Also, PS1 games just look cool.

R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 - 4/5 - My first experience with the Ridge Racer series, so I figured I would start with the one I'd heard the most about over the years. This one certainly has style. I don't feel like I ever fully got the hang of the game's brand of arcade-y physics to be particularly good at it, but I enjoyed it all the same. I really like the games visual novel-esque story mode. All the art looks great and it's neat to have some branching story scenes in a racing game.

Mighty Switch Force! - 3/5 - A neat little 2D puzzle-platformer that involves manipulating what boxes appear in the world when. Not a whole lot to say about it. It looks great. Wayfoward's stuff always does.

Mighty Switch Force! 2 - 4/5 - Better than the first game because you play as a firefighter instead of a cop.

Pokémon Violet - 2/5 - We're a few years into the open-world 3D era of Pokémon games now, and I feel like it's added absolutely nothing of value to the series. On top of the notorious performance issues, there's just absolutely nothing to do in these worlds. There's not even anything there to justify the bad performance. Nothing to point at to say "Yeah, it looks bad, but at least we have this cool new thing out of it." It hasn't up the spectacles of battles. There are still no characters of interest to interact with in the world, or interest quests to do, or items of value to find that weren't in previous games. Maybe a more powerful device will alleviate some of that. I don't know. But as of now, not interested in even checking out that DLC.

Doritos Crash Course - 2/5 - I don't why played all of this game. Over even any of it. Or how I even got a hold of it. Surely, this must've been a free game or something that just ended in my library. It's a very boring Wipeout style gameshow obstacle course game. Every course is made up of, like, the same 3 or 4 parts. No idea what any of it had to do with Doritos.

Rumble Roses XX - 3/5 - A grossly oversexualized wrestling game, as was the style of both wrestling and gaming of the time. A bare bones set of game modes. My understanding is that it just stripped out the story mode of the last game. But, at its core there's a really good wrestling game engine there that is both technically competent and fun to play, which is not the case for most wrestling games.

Gris - 4/5 - An absolutely visually stunning game about grief and dealing with loss. I can't remember if this was an original thought of my own or something I heard someone else say about it, but it is the most "I want to frame this video game and put it on a wall" video game I've seen in a while.

AI: The Somnium Files - 3/5 - An odd game. A very sci-fi detective adventure game, that gets way up its own ass with its story of alternate realties and timelines in a way that I love. It just strikes a weird tone alternating between genuinely interesting sci-fi mystery and eye-rolling overbearing sexually innuendo around every line of dialogue. Every other word out of the main characters mouth is some non-joke about panties or big boobies that's rarely, if ever, actually amusing. Which is a shame because when it does lean away from that stuff there are a few genuinely amusing moments of writing and absurdist comedy. But 90% of its humor feels like its just yelling about big ol' tittes.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Dropped - My first experience with the Dragon Age series. I was playing this in the lead up to Baldur's Gate 3's release, looking for something similar in tone, and even before I got my hands on Baldur's Gate, but especially after, it is embarrassing how utterly boring I found this game to be. Between the auto-combat/wait for an ability timer to end gameplay and the nothing to do game world that follows the Ubisoft roadmap of just a bunch map barf with the same three or four tasks about collecting a number of something or clearing out an enemy base. I'm sure there must be good content in there somewhere, but I have no intention to dig in there in order to find it.

Final Fantasy V - 3/5 - As I've been slowly making my way through the Final Fantasy series, I'm really not finding a whole lot that sets any of these early games apart from one another. I really don't care for the visuals, some of the stories have their moments, like going to the moon, and I hate to say it, but none of the music has really blown my socks off so far. I do, however, like the job system and this is one of the ones that has it. Maxing out classes and mixing and matching different abilities is just fun.

Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix - Dropped - This was one of my favorite games growing up that I never actually finished. And the early parts of it were still fun to replay. I don't know if I'm just getting too old, or my eyes are just way worse now, but I found it impossible to play once the game requires you to have a certain speed of card. It's an open-world street racer, which means you are constantly having to doge cars and buildings, and turning corners, and once I got up to a certain speed, I just couldn't hang with this game's requirement of coming in 1st place for every race in order to progress.

Black Knight Sword - 3/5 - A charmingly odd little action platform from the mind of Suda 51, and the usual list of suspects from Grasshopper Manufacture from the early 2010s, including Akira Yamaoka. It can be tough at times, where running out of lives means losing all your power ups, and the games few bullet hell sections. But it's got a really cool papercraft/children's picture book look to it.

Stats Time

Now I'd like to take some look at some stats from throughout the year. The math on "Games Played" was always wishy-washy due to games being added to the list not really being accounted for. So, I'm going to take this time to do some more in-depth statistics.

2023's Backlog Games of the Year

And now, here's my list of the 10 best games I played this year from my backlog.

10. Thoth

9. R4 Ridge Racer Type 4

8. Gris

7. Later Alligator

6. Horizon Forbidden West

5. Subsurface Circular

4. Super Crush KO

3. The Shrouded Isle

2. Fuser

1. Lil Gator Game

Let's Wrap It Up

Well, that's been my year for 2023. Thanks for reading my inane musings and ramblings about having too many video games. See you next year. Or probably more accurately, 2025 when I feel like writing another one of these.

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Ranking The Log

Ranking the Log

Previously on Logging The Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: February 2023

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Finishing Up 2022: Part 2 - Lil Backlog Blog

Soooo... during last month's blog, I barely made any progress in clearing games off my backlog, having only finished one game in Horizon Forbidden West. And this month, with the rush to buy up games before the Wii U and 3DS eShops shut down for good, I've actually made negative progress. For the first time, I've added more games to my list than I was able to remove this month, making this already ridiculous task even more daunting. But hey, at least I finished more than one game this month.

Games Left

469 482

What I Played

Soul Hacker 2 - 3/5 - I wasn't super into this game when it was first announced. If I needed any further proof that I'm becoming a cranky old man, it's the incredibly petty complaints I had upon reveal. "Why are they taking the Shin Megami Tensei branding off the name? All these characters look boring. The characters in Soul Hackers 1 looked way cooler. Take me back to the 90s!". After getting my hands on it, I still kind of feel that way. It's just one of the more boring SMT games I've played. The story and the characters didn't really grab me. It's very much a "stop the humans who are trying to summon a god to end the world". There's not much going on outside of that, and the game doesn't really explore any of its themes too deeply. What is interesting is that it does seem to be a much shorter game if you just want to mainline the story and not invest 60 hours into an RPG. The game is sort of broken up into the main story dungeons and a separate side dungeon where you get some additional backstory for your party members and where you can do some level grinding. I don't know how viable just mainlining the game actually is though. I don't think the game scales the enemies to your level, so I wonder if you did just mainline the story dungeons, if you'd actually be strong enough to get through them.

Frogun - 3/5 - I kind of waffled back and forth about whether to score this a 2/5 instead. This game looks fantastic. It's super cute, and it's got that kind of sharp, high-fidelity version of "what you remember a PS1 era platformer looked like" to it, instead of just the mess of what a PS1 game actually looked like. Its core mechanic is that you have a frog shaped gun that doubles as a grappling hook used to platform through the levels. It's a fun time early on, but the game gets increasingly frustrating as you get further in. Your grappling hook only fires horizontally, straight ahead of you. As the game progresses it starts to require more use of your hook while you're in the air, and trying to line up your shot with a platform that's on a different vertical plane than you are becomes difficult. There are also these sort of zig-zag shots where you have to shot yourself in one direction, then very quickly jerk the camera 90 degrees in another direction to platform across other object midair. It all just requires a combination of platforming, aiming, shooting, and camera moving that just seems more than the game is capable of handling in a way that feels fair.

Dragon Caffi - 3/5 - Dragon Caffi kind of fills a similar spot that the Atelier series of game kind of filled for me. It's kind of monotonous, but in a cute and relaxing way that I kind of just like to chill out to. It's a game that is basically just all side quest. There's not really any plot to speak of. Your job is to collect 100 tokens from each of the game's NPCs. You do so by completing some sort of small quest for them, usually a fetch quest of some sort, and they reward you with a recipe for some sort of bake good. You then take that recipe back to your shop, gather the required ingredients needed and complete a simple rhythm game to bake it. You then return to the character that gave you that recipe, give them the bake good, and you get a token. Then you just do that 99 more times. The weirdest is thing though is the game kind of just doesn't have an ending. Once you get 100 tokens, you use them to ride this sky tram thing, to what I think is some sort of sky city, but you never see that part. When you turn in the tokens you get the whole "Are you sure you want to go? This is the end of the game" spiel, but after you say "yes", the game just goes "okay" and rolls straight into credits. No scene of you getting on the ship and taking off to wherever you're going or anything. The game just ends. It's really hard to recommended to any normal person, but the core loop and chill vibe is just something that makes my werido brain feel nice.

Lil Gator Game - 5/5 - Lil Gator Game just absolutely nails what it's going for. It's essentially Breath of the Wild, but from a smaller team, on a smaller scale. You play as a little alligator trying to set up a larp game for their older sister and are recruiting friends to try and help by completing quests for them. The writing is all very cute and silly, and none of it ever overstays it's welcome. Much like Frogun, it looks fantastic in that "if Breath of the Wild was an ideal image of a PS1 game". It's just a pure fun time that I didn't have a single complaint about playing.

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Next on Logging the Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: 2023 Year End Review

Ranking The Log

Ranking the Log

Previously on Logging the Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: January 2023

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Finishing Up 2022: Part 1 - Oops All Horizon

I had initially planned this past month to be my "catch up" month, where I would play the games on my backlog that came out in 2022 that I never got around to. I decided that I would start with Horizon: Forbidden West, not really putting any thought into how long that might take me. Unfortunately, it took me 90 hours which, when playing an average of about 3 hours a day, took up all my time last month. So, I guess this blog is going to be more or less just a review of Horizon: Forbidden West, one year late. Heads up: This will probably include more spoiler-y stuff on the Horizon series, since I'm focusing on a single game this time.

Games Left

470 469

What I Played

Horizon: Forbidden West - 4/5 - I guess I'll start with my thoughts on Horizon: Zero Dawn. To be honest, I don't have many. I've forgotten the vast majority of that game. I remember the main beats. Humans screwed up Earth. Aloy's a clone born to save it. Sylens a shifty dude. A vague recollection of Erand existing. But other than that, nothing. Completely forgot that Varl existed despite him probably being my favorite character in Forbidden West. I kind of remember Rost existed, but have no memory of what he did, and where Aloy's trauma comes from around him in the sequel. Things that were pretty key to the story apparently, and very little of it stuck with me. Suffice it to say, I didn't love the first game. I thought it was fine, but I wasn't blown away by any aspect of it.

So why did I enjoy the sequel? I think it just comes down to better vibes. A more interesting, diverse cast of characters. A story that could be built upon in more interesting ways than just it's typical sci-fi plot twist of "hero born to save the world" set up. More varied environments. I think the team behind the game improved just about every aspect of the game.

Combat remains largely the same. Melee combat gets a bit more of an upgrade than the ranged stuff. You get a variety of combo strings that all have different effects, such as area control, or building up your super attack faster. As for ranged, you get a few new weapon types and status effects, but the strategy remains largely the same of "scan the robot and shoot off its glowing bits".

I did however find some of the climbing bits to be kind of janky. I don't remember how it was in the previous game, but it didn't always seem as easy as just pointing the stick to where I wanted to go. Mostly when climbing the sides of mountains. Climbing points seemed to typically be made up of just a jumbled mess of hand holds, and even when one was in reach, I found Aloy just simply refused to move to some of them.

While I have seen people around the internet comparing the story to Mass Effect, I think I'm far more interested in where Forbidden West is now with its main plot than anything going on in Mass Effect's. Sure, Mass Effect's companion characters and alien lore are probably more fleshed out, but I was never really interested in its story of "The humans are here to unite the galaxy and save the universe from evil invaders". I just prefer the themes of Horizon, which I also think is just more accurate to what would really happen, in that humans continue to screw everything up. We screwed up Earth, ran away to space, and screwed that up too. Humans suck, and I am here for that.

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Next on Logging the Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: March 2023

Ranking the Log

Ranking the Log

Previously on Logging the Backlog...

The "Fuser is Being Pulled from Sale" Special

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Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N Roll, Alligators and Cults

Before we get to what I've played over the last month, there have been some updates to the list resulting in more games needing to be played. First, with the new year, I've added any releases from 2022 that I didn't finish to the backlog. Resulting in nine new entries. I also went in and added about 10-15 games from Rare Replay that I previously hadn't added as separate entries, so now all of Rare Replay is either on the backlog or in the finished list. But with that out of the way, we move forward... to last month, I guess.

Games Left

481 470

What I Played

Agony - 1/5 - We begin the sex portion of the list with what has to be the worst game I've ever played. A game so bad that I'm not even sure what genre to put it in. Action? Adeventure? Puzzle? It does all of them so poorly that I just don't even know what it's going for. Whatever it is, I suppose I should say that I didn't finish it. It's set in hell, and I'm pretty sure it only exists to be shocking and scandalous. You walk around hell, which is just full of naked bodies, usually mutilated in some fashion. Sometimes there are monsters there, sometimes you hide from them. Sometimes you possess them to break a wall or something that is impeding your progress. The game looks terrible. It feels even worse to play. It's level design, if you can even call it that, is even worse than that. It mostly just feels like they just threw stuff into the game without any thought, or it was produced by the worst procedural generation of all time. I'm pretty sure the only thought that went into making this game was put into the naked demon lady's bare ass, who I think is the villain of the game. I have no idea what the story of this game was. I should also mention that I played this thing on Xbox One. Apparently, there's a version on PC that has some really, truly abhorrent shit in it that was cut from the console versions. How this game even made it onto consoles is a mystery to me.

Senran Kagura: Peach Ball - 2/5 - As we continue the sex section, for those unfamiliar with the Senran Kagura series, think Dynasty Warriors, but with ninja girls whose clothes come off when they take damage. The series has also branched out into different genres with spin-offs, this being one of those, and this time it's a pinball game. I'm no expert when it comes to pinball, but this seems like a bad pinball game. The premise is that the Senran Kagura girls have been turned into animal girls, and naturally, the only way to turn them back is to shrink them down into a pinball machine and pelt them with balls (I don't know. Maybe this game belongs in the drug section). There are two different tables in the game, each with three different variations. As far as I could tell, there's absolutely no difference between the variations. They might have different lighting, but that's all I noticed. The tables are almost entirely empty to make room for the scantily clad cg game model that sits at the top of the table for you to pelt with balls. Both tables are almost identical as well. They both have a basic ramp that goes behind the girl. One table has a secondary ramp that shoots the ball into some bumpers, and the other table doesn't have a secondary ramp at all, it just gets some bumpers next to the ramp it already has. The tables have a meter sectioned into three parts that fill up as you complete score goals or defeat enemies that'll spawn on the table. Once the meter is full you knock the ball into the girl and you get sucked into a "sexy challenge" minigame that involves knocking balls into something that'll strip the girl, none of which are even the least bit sexy. Once you do this three times, you whack the girls' ass or breasts with the flippers, and they're returned to normal, by which I mean naked, or as naked as you're allowed to get on Switch.

Judgement - 3/5 - On to drugs! Prescription drugs in this instance. I think the main plot is probably the most entertaining aspect of this Yakuza spin-off. You play as lawyer turned detective, Yagami, as he unravels a murder mystery tied up in the creation of a miracle drug that is to be the cure for Alzheimer's. Unfortunately, I think it's one of the weaker entries in terms of its side content, which can really make or break standout games in the franchise. I also don't think it brings much to the table in terms of gameplay. None of the detective mechanics are all that engaging, and the combat is just in line with the beat 'em standards of the franchise. Anything it does add is mostly a nuisance, like certain attacks you take doing permeant damage to your health bar until you pay a fairly expensive price to recover it, or the enemy encounter rate being increase at random times in the game.

Everything - 3/5 - This is a game I'd probably like better if I smoked drugs. Without drugs, it's just kind of a whacky little interactive screensaver type thing that you poke around at to see what happens. It even has a mode where the game will just play itself. The game's primary mechanic consists of taking control of any object in the game. You progress by taking control of either increasingly larger things or increasing smaller things. You can be a camel, talk to a bunch of other camels, have the camels dance in a circle, which makes more camels, then shrink down into a flower and do it again.

GNOG - 3/5 - Very much in the same sort of "poke at things while on drugs and see what happens", except this one might be better on acid. Or worse depending. It's more of a traditional puzzle game, so maybe it's not the best thing to do while high. There were some puzzles I solved that I didn't even understand how they worked while I was solving them. The game features a handful of puzzle boxes for you to solve, usually by rotating the box, looking for switches to flip or levers to pull that effect some other part of the box. It's all very colorful and whimsical compared to other puzzle box stuff which is usually either very dry or very murder-y.

Guitar Hero Live - 3/5 - And now we rock. Sort of. Unfortunately, what I felt was the neatest part of Guitar Hero Live, is no longer accessible. That being its online mode that set up a live "MTV-esque" 24/7 music video channel for you to play along to. Without it, I think its offline mode is pretty sparse. Both in terms of genres of music or bands I'd like to play personally, and even the selection of songs from artists I would play don't seem to be the ones you would want. The FMV videos playing in the background are a goofy idea, but when you're playing a song, you're only catching glimpses of what's going on there because you're trying to watch the note highway. I go back and forth on the decision to change up the buttons on the control. On one hand I think it's neat that the buttons more accurately reflect the motions your hands would make playing a real guitar. On the other hand, I have stupid fingers and bringing the struggle I have to play real guitar to a video game isn't always fun.

Rare Replay - I continue to make my way through Rare's catalogue, chronologically, and have hit the point where we start to get into 3D video games.

Solar Jetman - 3/5 - Probably my favorite game in Rare Replay so far. It's like if Asteriods was a more fleshed out game. Each level tasks you with collecting fuel for your spacecraft to launch off of the current planet as well as collecting the part of a warship on each level. Every planet has its own unique gravity that you have to contest with and enemy types to fight as you navigate the level, with upgrades to your ship's boosters or combat abilities to help exploration.

R.C. Pro-Am II - 3/5 - While I wasn't big on R.C. Pro-Am and the top-down view making it impossible to see the track in front of you, I did enjoy this sequel slightly more. I don't think track visibility was any better here, but I did find the upgrade system they added to the game interesting. Also, I just think I like the look of it better.

Battletoads (Arcade) - 2/5 - I'm going to be honest here, I have already forgotten everything about this game in between the time I finished Battletoads and the time I'm writing this. So, I'll just say this, Battletoads sucks. Every version of it sucks. Despite the fact that I remember absolutely nothing from it, I say confidently that this is the best Battletoads game.

Killer Instinct Gold - 2/5 - I hate how this game looks. I'm normally a weirdo that kind of likes the look of early 3D graphics in games. But I hate looking at this thing. So much so that I could not be bothered to learn how to actually play KI. I made it to the final boss of the arcade mode, who apparently needs to be knocked off the stage to actually finish the fight after depleting all its health, couldn't be bothered to figure out how to do it, and ended my time with Killer Instinct Gold.

Blast Corps - 2/5 - Blast Corps is a good premise for a game. Drive construction vehicles threw buildings and break stuff. And it's fun enough in its first few levels. However, it becomes exceedingly more annoying and frustrating as you get into the harder levels, where the game's physiques and somewhat squirrely driving mechanics aren't quite up to do what is needed to be done, in the time it needs to be done.

100ft Robot Golf - 3/5 - A goofy little golf game that lives up to its name. Its big robots golfing. I don't know that the giant robot part adds much to the game. They're kind of just there to blow up obstacles in your way, which you can always just golf around anyway. It's got a silly story mode that parodies bad fan dubbed anime, which I don't think it necessarily nails the vibes of, but it all looks very nice, and it's got a fun voice cast that seems to be having fun with it including the likes of Mica Burton, the McElroys, Eric Pope, Brad Muir, and someone named... *checks notes* VoidBurger... in the credits.

Cook, Service, Delicious! - 3/5 - A very frantic time managing a restaurant. Just one of those games that is pure gameplay loop, that I can enjoy losing an hour of time too without even realizing it, even if I did tend to come out with a headache at the end of an hour more often than not.

Japanese School Life - 2/5 - A visual novel about a high school student named Brian who moves to Japan for a year and befriends two of his female classmates. I found the main character to be completely insufferable. He's just the biggest dorkiest weeb, who is constantly amazed by the most trivial of things that the two girls explain to him, purely because it's something in Japan. I don't know if this was done intentionally by the developers or not, but they nailed this character's cringeiness 100%. And yes, I realize the irony in all this, as I myself am a guy on the internet, named Brian, who has an anime avatar.

Punch-Out!! (NES) - 2/5 - I'm a 30-year-old man. I don't have the reflexes to play Punch-Out!! anymore, and I don't have the time or interest to put into memorizing every single fight pattern anymore. In a similar manner to Blast Corps, I think there's fun to be had in the early game, but none to be had in the later game, where simply blinking can ruin a fight at times. Some of the racial undertones, or overtones, don't really help it either.

Super Punch-Out!! - 2/5 - Slightly easier in some spots. Slightly harder in others. I think Super eases up on the hyper fast twitch reflexes is some spots but is made harder by having reads that are slightly less discernable as compared to the simple art and animations of the NES game. It also doesn't help that your character is visible in the foreground, covering much more of the opponent than the NES game. Racial undertones also slightly better in some spots, worse in others.

Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures - 2/5 - As ridiculous as it may seem, I think this was the first video game I ever saw. I played it at neighbor's house before I had any video games of my own, and apparently that neighbor's parents then convinced my parents to pick up a Genesis at a yard sale. So, thanks Pac-Man 2. You know how point and click adventures of the era could be obtuse and confusing? Well, what if you didn't have control over your character? Because you don't. Pac-man just walks constantly. He never stops. If he comes across an object, he'll interact with it, even if you don't want him to. You can tell him to walk the other way, and you are equipped with a slingshot you can shoot to try and knock some items away to avoid unwanted interactions. But this game just makes Pac-Man come off as a giant asshole. Not just because he's a pain in the ass to control, but he's also just constantly screwing with people. Kicking their stuff, popping balloons. You're a father now Pac-Man. Grow up.

The Shrouded Isle - 4/5 - While the game itself is fairly simple, I just really dig the vibes of this one. You're in charge of managing a town cult. The cult has five houses comprised of different family members that each have unique traits. You're essentially tasked with two meters to manage. The happiness of your cult god and the happiness of each family in the cult. At the end of each season, you are required to sacrifice a family member to please the god, but angers whatever family they belong to. The strategy becomes find out which family member has the most undesirable trait that's negatively effecting your god's happiness the most and sending them off to be sacrificed. All of this is easier said than done. I played a few runs, and only made it about halfway through the game. But that's less important to me. I just think the art in this game is rad.

Later Alligator - 4/5 - Another game where the art is rad. It's a cute and silly world of alligator people, with just really fantastic, old school cartoon animation vibes. The game itself is a point and click adventure, where you play as a detective trying to find information for a client that thinks someone is out to get them. You go around the city and interrogate people are usually only willing to hand out information if you do a favor for them in the form of some sort of wacky minigame. Something like exercising a haunted phone or playing a visual novel dating sim parody.

EDIT: Forgot to add Solar Jetman to the list. The website I use track what I've finished seems to get kind of wonky displaying stuff in the proper place. I'll have to remember to double check stuff in the future.

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Next on Logging The Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: February 2023

Ranking the Log

Ranking the Log

Previously on Logging the Backlog...

It's Time to Play 500 Games

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The "Fuser is Being Pulled from Sale" Special

I wasn't planning on doing another one of these so soon, but after learning that Fuser and all of its DLC is being pulled from sale on December 19th, I had to make sure I picked up a copy for myself, adding another game to my backlog. And after finishing the game, I figured I'd use this blog update to double as a PSA. Fuser is rad. If you haven't, go buy it before you can't.

Games Left

491 481

What I Played

Fuser - 4/5 - My favorite game on the list today. I love rhythm games, despite not having any rhythm myself. This is another great one from Harmonix. It's just really fun mixing and matching different songs, and the game is really good about making your weird mash-ups sound awesome.

Rare Replay - For the purposes of this list, I've included each individual game in Rare Replay as its own game, as well as Rare Replay itself. Which adds more weirdness to this considering I've only added about half of the games on Rare Replay to this list, making the current number of 481 games left to play inaccurate. But let's not pay attention to silly things like math. Let's talk about how bad early Rare games are!

Underwurdle - 2/5 - This is one of the weirder platformers I've played. It's like if Mario was a pinball in a pinball machine. Which sounds like it would be an interesting concept, but in reality, is just a giant vertical maze game that requires very specific jumps that knock you down to lower levels on misses.

Knight Lore - 2/5 - I think this one suffers from being too ambitious for the limitation of its time. Now, I don't think I technically finished it. I hit the game's 40-day time limit and was forced to start over, which I didn't want to do. So instead, I just told myself I got the bad ending. This game has a lot of systems. Inventory management, a day and night cycle. You're a man, cursed to be a werewolf, looking to break the curse by collecting items and throwing them in a cauldron. At night, you turn into the werewolf, which doesn't seem to add a whole lot to the game, except it makes the cauldron want to kill you, which means you just have to stand around and wait until day to put items in the cauldron. A lot of this game is just that type of pain-in-the-ass, waiting around for stuff and the 3-item inventory limit that makes it hard to finish the game in 40 days. You probably won't finish it on the first run and it's just not a fun enough game to play a second run.

Slalom -2/5 - A pretty simple NES era skiing game. Mostly just frustrating in that it throws stuff at you on the course faster than you can react to, and if you hit any one of those things you probably aren't going to finish the course in time. I made liberal use of the Rare Replay's rewind function for this one.

R.C. Pro-Am - 2/5 - Racing games where I can't see the track in front of me are bad. I don't want to have to stare at a map while I'm driving to figure out where the turns are. That's not fun.

Cobra Triangle - 2/5 - I want to like Cobra Triangle. There should be more boat games. But this one suffers from some of the same "I can't see what's in front of me" as R.C. Pro-Am does. Not as much but combined with some of the more frustrating boss fights in the game, I just didn't have as good of a time with it that I wish I had.

Snake Rattle 'n Roll - 2/5 - Again, I wish liked this one more than I did. It's a goofy little snake guy, eating stuff, getting longer, and making it through some platforming levels. But controlling the snake is just more frustrating than it is fun due to the game's tank controls and unfun final boss that just requires you to jam on the attack button at lunatic speeds in order to output enough damage before it heals.

Bury me, my Love - 3/5 - An interesting narrative choice game that takes place entirely in phone text conversations. The conversations take place between a guy and his girlfriend, who is trying to flee from Syria and migrate to Germany. Your choices effect how far away she gets before being caught, which is kind of a weird thing to gamify when thinking about it after getting to my ending, and the game is like "Hey! Play it again to see how far you get this time!". Especially considering this was apparently inspired by a true story.

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz - 2/5 - I'm no Monkey Ball expert. All of my previous knowledge of the series has come from Yakuza crane games. Rolling a monkey downhill seems like a fun concept to me, but I found this game to just oscillate between two difficulties. Its either boringly simple or frustratingly hard.

Frobisher Says! -3/5 - It's a goofy little Wario Ware-esque minigame game on the Vita. Not a whole lot to discuss on this one. It simply does what it sets out to do.

Lovely Planet - I didn't finish this one. I probably never will. It's too hard for me. But that's okay. It's a fast paced, level based, first person shooter that requires twitch reflexes that I just don't have. But it's got a very weird, goofy style to it. Sort of Katamari-esque, and that's cool.

Super Crush K.O. - 4/5 - This would have been my favorite game on this list if not for the emergency Fuser playthrough. It's my favorite type of 2D beat 'em up. Ones that are combo based and do launchers when you hit up and strong attack. It's very colorful, a lot of pastel pinks and blues, and there's a chunky kitty to save. The boss designs aren't very imaginative or varied, but other than that, what more could you want from a video game?

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Next on Logging the Backlog...

Logging The Backlog: January 2023

Ranking the Log

Ranking the Log

It's Time to Play 500 Games

I, as I'm sure a lot of people have, have built up quite a backlog of games over the last decade or so. New games are releasing all the time, going on sale all the time, being given away all the time, and put on new subscription services all the time. I myself have racked up over 500 games in my backlog according to my own cataloging of games I've accumulated over the years. I figured it's about time to get serious about playing some of these games, so as an extra incentive to actually do that, I made myself a spreadsheet of every game in my backlog with rough playtime estimates from How Long To Beat.

My intention with this blog is to report on some of the progress I've made from time to time. How many games I have left, what I've finished, and maybe a quick little thought on the game with an "out-of-5" rating. There's some weirdness to the list, as about 70 or so of these games are PS+ giveaways that I no longer have access to because I don't have PS+ right now. Maybe I'll resubscribe at some point, so I've decided to just leave them on the list for now. I've already made some progress, knocking the total down to 491, so I'll go over some of the games I finished to get there.

Games Left

500+ 491

What I Played

Tiny Echo - 3/5 - A cute little adventure game. Somewhat abstract in what exactly is going on, but you're helping a cute little mail carry deliver messages in order to help restore a world above an underground civilization. I'm always down for a mail delivery video game.

140 - 3/5 - A rhythm-based platformer that gets pretty tough near the end. Or I just have no sense of rhythm. Hard to tell.

Thoth - 4/5 - A pretty minimalist twin stick shooter. Level based. You're a circle shooting other shapes that chase you. Maybe my favorite on this list. I'm also always down for a twin stick shooter.

Sonic CD - 2/5 - I consider myself a "Sonic guy". The Genesis was my first console. I have nostalgia for the 2D Sonic games, but I also realize those games have their problems. I think those games are at their best when you're just holding right and getting into a flow of just going fast, killing an enemy every now and then, and avoiding pits and obstacles in the way. I think they're at their worst when you have to stop for any reason. I constantly found myself stopping trying to figure out what way I had to go or was being bounced the wrong. Worst of all, I think the music is boring.

Hard Drivin' - 3/5 - And as a Genesis kid who is approaching 30 years old, naturally I have recently acquired a Genesis in an attempt to rebuild my childhood gaming library. Hard Drivin' being of them that I never finished as a kid, never really knowing what the point of the game was other than trying to crash into the cow or fall off the loopty loop. Turns out there's not much to it as far as racing games go. There's only one track, but once you beat it, you do get to race against your ghost if you decide to play again, which I found pretty interesting to be in a game that old.

Rez Infinite - 4/5 - I don't know that I have much to say for Rez that hasn't already been said. It's cool weird cyber psychedelic nonsense at its finest.

Wheels of Aurelia - 3/5 - I think this one is an interesting game but doesn't necessarily come together in the end. It a narrative driving game focused on making dialogue choices as you drive. And to be fair I think this is a problem with all narrative choice games. Then endings don't always stick or just seem off or the pacing of it is weird as opposed to a game that only has to worry about getting to a singular point. It's got cool theme though. People all trying to get out of 70s fascist Italy for one reason or another.

Twinkle Star Sprites - 3/5 - This one's a pretty cool vertical shmup. It's a competitive shmup where you throw junk at the opponent à la Puyo Puyo, which is the first time I've seen that. Pretty horribly translated story mode dialogue too if you're into that.

Subsurface Circular - 4/5 - Cool sci-fi adventure game about a robot detective. It's hard to get into without too much spoiler-y stuff, but it's a cool take on issues facing a society of humans that now have to coexist with robots,

Manuel Samuel - 2/5 - Probably my least favorite game on the list. It's designed to be annoying as you are tasked with QWOPing your way through everyday life, but the final boss really soured me on the whole concept, frustrating me beyond anything in the rest of the game, which I thought was mostly fine until that point. Also, their idea for the character of Death is basically Uncle Death from Let It Die, but if he was a Jamie Kennedy character, which is... a choice. And the whole game says the word "feces" way too much. It's weird.

The Stanley Parable - I don't know how to rate this one. Soooo... I don't like this game. I don't like the whole "cheeky", 4th-wall breaking, "the video game is screwing with you" genre. It's just not my thing, and this one is no different. I got a handful of endings, but not all of them, which is why I hesitate to give it a score. But I've played all that I want to play of it, so I'll be marking it off the list all the same.

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Next on Logging the Backlog...

The "Fuser is Being Pulled From Sale" Special

Ranking the Log

Ranking the Log

I hate the cloud. Well, I hate the Xbox's complete lack of control of the cloud at least.

I've been playing Floppy Knights on Game Pass. It's on both PC and Xbox and I've been going back and forth between both version, which share a save in the cloud. Something happened to my PC save file when I tried to fire it up there. Some sort of error about not being able to sync properly, and it asked me if I wanted to use an older save instead. It told me nothing about what this older save was, and with no way to check what the hell it was, I just assumed it was some sort of alternate save made somewhere at some point by the almighty cloud god, or maybe a console save or something. Turns out, whatever the hell it pulled from was a completely fresh save. "Well.... Guess I'll fire up my console version and play it there instead.", not realizing in the moment that doing so was going to automatically pull in the new PC cloud save and overwrite my progress there too. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck".

It's a shame because I was really enjoying the game. In this, The Year of the Tile Game, 2022 I don't know if it's necessarily the deepest one of those, but it was pretty cute, and combined it with some deck building aspects, which I'm down for as something of a card fetishist. I could have seen it making my game of the year list this year, and now I just feel super bad that I probably won't be able to go back to it after being about 3/4 of the way done with it. But if you need to play another tile game this year, maybe check out Floppy Knights.

Here's some more pictures of some of my favorites of the 1000 games I've played, grouped by platform.

PlayStation Handhelds

PS1

PS2

PS3

Xbox 360

Nintendo Handhelds

Wii/Wii U

N64

GameCube

Now here are some of my least favorite games of all time:

As of this writing, I've just played my 1000th video game, according to my own loose cataloging of games I play in an attempt to manage my backlog. I've defined "played games" to mean one of a few things:

• Games I've finished
• Games with no definitive end that I've sunk a significant amount of time into
• Games I played years ago, but were left unfinished and I no longer own
• And finally, the rare few games that I've sunk enough time into to know that I never want to play ever again. This generally excludes stuff I've checked out on Game Pass and realized after only a few minutes that it's just not a game for me.

Of these games, I've managed to finish 701 of them with only 9 games ending up in the "I'm never going to play this again" pile. It also leaves 191 of these games as being "lost to time". Stuff I don't have anymore. Most of which were probably sold off to Gamestop in order to upgrade to a new console and games, or in a family garage sale. Some of which might be worth tracking down and finishing if not for my already unreasonable backlog of games I currently own, on top of all the new games to be played in the future.

With some of the numbers out of the way, I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to look at parts of the list, and some of the games that have made me the gamer that I am today. To find out what it says about me, and to be judged for my gamer crimes.

Here are some of the most recent games that I've finished:

Here are some of the first video games I can recall ever playing:

Here are the ones I've deemed unworthy of ever finishing:

And finally, here are some of the ones I've rated as my favorite games ever:

EDIT: I didn't want to make this thread just one giant string of images of my list, so I made a secondary blog with more pictures of it in order to get more of a clear picture of my history with games.

1000 Games Played. Supplemental "A Whole Lot of Pictures of a List".