Games and Stuff

Just a very casual blog about whatever games I might be playing. This is my way of working through my insane backlog. I have hundreds of games scattered among several systems - from the Nintendo DS/3DS to the XBox and Playstation and Steam among others.

[miguelonoahu]

One of my favorite games is still SimCity 4 but I’ve been trying out some other city builders to play for fun and also for nostalgia. I have a few in my queue so I decided to play some of them and clear it out if I can.

The first one on my list is SimCity 2000 which I bought on gog.com. When I first started the game I enjoyed the nostalgia brought on by the music, the icons in the game and the buildings.Seeing those old police and fire stations was fun.

However, as I continued playing the game I started seeing how tedious some things could be such as having to connect water pipes and electricity to every block in the city. I also had to deal with seemingly endless disasters - floods, pollution clouds, riots, etc.  I don’t recall so many disasters in the game when I played it many years ago.

Eventually, a random earthquake hit the city and the subsequent fire pretty much obliterated the town. I had to wait to continue playing the game while the fire burned itself out.

I actually managed to rebuild pretty quickly but then I got hit by a flood and that was enough for this game.  I’ll take it off my queue but I may came back to play it once in a while. Onto SimCity 3000 and  SimCity Societies!

[miguelonoahu]

I haven’t been posting much since I haven’t actually finished a game in a while. I’ve been bouncing around from game to game on different systems - PC, PS3, PS4 and Vita.

One of the games that I have been playing a lot recently is Logistical. I played it quite a bit last last year but I wanted to return and finish it off.

I finished the California map and that took possibly 40-50 hours. I’m about halfway through Australia and that’s probably taken me another 50 hours or so. Steam tells me I’ve played the game for 170 hours but Manic Time tells me it’s about 95 hours which is more accurate. That program only counts when the game is on screen and most of the time I leave the game in the background running.

However, I’m getting a little burnt out on the game after finishing more than a 1,000 towns in California and another 600 in Australia. I think it’s time to take a short break from the game and focus on others for a bit. I definitely want to come back and finish it.

I don’t think I’ll get all 9,000+ achievements for the main module but I definitely want to get the 1,000+ achievements for Japan. I like the game but I also wish it wasn’t such an Achievement spammer.

In the meantime, I will maybe start posting random screenshots for the games I’m currently playing the keep the blog a little more active.

[miguelonoahu]

I’m hoping to finally retire my WiiU this year. I was working through Pikmin 3 earlier last month when I took a sidetrip to Super Mario 3D World.  Once I started playing it, I wanted to keep on playing and playing it until I finished it.

I didn’t finish it over the course of one evening but over a course of a few days. I beat Bowser, unlocked Rosalina and did most of the levels in World 9 (World Star).

There were some really fun levels, some tense levels and some really frustrating levels. Grumblump Inferno in particular was really frustrating until I realized you didn’t have to jump over the edge of the blocks, you could just walk over them. 

My favorite level was Beep Block Skyway, just because I liked how the blocks changed in time with the music.

There’s still a few more worlds to unlock including World 10 (World Mushroom) , World 11 (World Flower) and World 12 (World Crown) but I’d need a lot more practice to do that. I’m already working on Tokyo Mirage Sessions and finishing up Pikmin 3.

Hopefully I can finish off my Wii U this year!

[miguelonoahu]

I really couldn’t get into the first Half Life but I was more than willing to give Half Life 2 a shot and I’m glad I did. I played it as part of the Orange Box collection on my Xbox One.

I mostly enjoyed the game but there were some tedious areas, especially in Episode 2. At times it felt that I was spending more time reloading the game that actually playing it. But that was only a small part of the experience.

Overall, I actually enjoyed the linearity of the game. There’s not much to think about except to play the game and continue to move forward. There were also a few physics puzzles but nothing too hard to figure out.

I do think this is one of the those games I’ll replay on my PC with much better graphics and better controls sometime in the future.

But I’m also currently in the process of moving and have decided to pack away my Xbox One. It will stay packed until I finish the remaining games on my WiiU. It’s time to retire that one this year.

But for now that’s three games off my queue! It’s a good start to 2019.

[miguelonoahu]

It’s been a pretty good year, I managed to clear almost 500 title from the Backlog. A lot of the games are ones with mixed reviews, games that I tried for a bit and didn’t like and games that just don’t work anymore.

I don’t expect to clear another 500 games in 2019, although that’d be awesome. I’d have to be playing video games 24/7 for that to happen and that ain’t happening.

A lot of the remaining games are ones that I actually want to play so it’s going to be a slow grind to finish them. However, I stop playing them as soon as they start being tedious or stop being fun.

There’s a few interesting tidbits in the graph:

The PS3 list got cut dramatically since a lot of the games I had for that systems were not-so-great PSPlus games. There’s also a lot of remakes available for the PS4 too.

I put away my Xbox360 since the remaining games on my list are available on the Xbox One.

I used to play old NES and SNES games on Emulators but I’ve put those on hold while I finish other games.

My PSP died but the remaining games that I had on my list are available on the PSVita.

And finally, I’m completely done with serious gaming on my iPad/iPhone. OS updates have broken a lot of games I liked playing and I can’t count on a game being functional next year. In addition, there’s a few online games that shut down and don’t work anymore. Plus, it can be pretty awkward to play games without a controller. So while I do have games I play on my IPad occasionally, I won’t count them on my backlog.

Now let’s see what 2019 brings!

[miguelonoahu]

It’s been a couple of months since my last post. It’s been pretty busy! I went to Japan over Thanksgiving break and managed to bring back a few souvenirs!

I got the Eevee version of Let’s go Pokemon at the Kyoto Pokemon Center and the Pikachu version in the Osaka Pokemon Center. That place was a madhouse!! The other two games looked interesting to play and don’t require a ton of Japanese to play.

I’ve actually been “testing” a lot of games in the last couple of months - playing them for 20 minutes or so and determining whether to keep playing or not. I got a lot of games off my queue doing that but not enough.

The flights to and back to Japan definitely helped out in testing a bunch of my PS Vita games. And while I liked my iPad to watch movies, I’m finding it pretty irrelevant now for serious gaming. It’s awkward to use and I would rather play actual games on my 3DS/Vita/Switch than mobile games.

I’ll have an update on my queue at the beginning of the year. The goal for 2019 is to start finishing all my old PS3 games and the few games I have on my WiiU.

[miguelonoahu]

I’m still working through my WiiU games and I hope to be finished in the next few months. The last game I’ve completed on it was The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. It was a pretty fun game and it took me about 30 hours. I enjoyed the dungeons even though I needed to look at a guide for a couple of them. The bosses were also pretty fun to fight.

I also enjoyed exploring the wide open sea at first but by the end of the game, when I was going through the triforce shard quest, I was burned out with all the sailing. I can’t imagine how terrible it was in the original GameCube version.

I don’t think I would replay the game again like I have with Ocarina of Time but I still had a good time. I’m also glad I finished another entry in the Zelda series. I still have Twilight Princess to finish on the Wii U and I’m planning to start that one soon.

[miguelonoahu]

You Must Build a Boat is another casual game that I played here and there. It’s a match-3 game with quick rounds and lots of things to upgrade. This is one of those games that I could pick up play in just 5 minutes. Quick and easy.

I didn’t have too much trouble with the game and it only took about 6 hours to finish the game. It was fun and I enjoyed it a little more than 10000000, which I’ve previously posted about.

I really don’t want to play the game over and over again just to finish up some achievements so it’s done for now and off my backlog!

[miguelonoahu]

Only one picture for Spacechem. This was the last puzzle that I was able to do myself without any help. This game had been sitting in my queue, unfinished, for five(!) years now. The last time I posted about the game was roughly 2 years ago.

I decided that it was now time to finish the game, once and for all, and move on to other games. However I was having some significant difficulty with that last few levels and I had to turn to YouTube to look for ideas.

It was a little bit disappointing that the last few levels were so hard that I needed help but I would rather move on than spend weeks trying to figure them out. There’s literally hundreds of other games to play, plus I’d already spent over 70 hours in the game.  

I hope that if there is a Spacechem 2, there are more puzzles with the difficulty Atropos Station which is the third to last station/planet in the game. That was really the sweet spot for me.

For now, I’m looking forward to other Zachtronics games. I’ve already started Infinifactory!

[miguelonoahu]

Now that I’ve practically given up on IOS gaming, it’s time to get back to my 3DS.  I started playing Disney Magical World a long time ago (years ago!)  because I heard it was like Animal Crossing. It’s only tangentially like Animal Crossing. There’s a lot more dungeon crawling and crafting in this game.

I had a lot of fun during the middle part of the game, completing episodes, getting new clothes, unlocking new cafe recipes, etc.  However, after 30 hours the game started to slow down a bit as materials became harder to find. And many things in the game require rare materials - furniture for your cafe, outfits for your workers, outfits for battle, wands, fishing rods, etc.  

Eventually, I started to get sick of the grind. There’s only so many times I can do the same dungeon over and over again before it gets boring.

One of the overarching goals in the game is to gather 100 stickers. However, I realized that I wasn’t going to get 100 stickers because I completely sucked at one of the rhythm games. Fortunately, the end credits unlock when 77 stickers are gathered. I had no problem getting up to 70 stickers but the last few were a slog. I finally managed it, though, and I put the game away. It’s done for now.

However, I feel like this is one of the games I may come back to in a couple of years to finish some extra items but for now I’m moving on.

[miguelonoahu]

So I said in one my last posts that I was kind of tired of Kairosoft’s games but I decided to try Pocket Academy since it seemed like a fun game. I actually had some fun on my first playthrough learning the ins and outs of the game.

I was really looking forward to the Fast Mode which is unlocked when the game is completed for the first time. However, once I started playing the second time I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I wanted.

I think I have grown tired of this gameplay. I need something a little more active instead mostly looking at a screen waiting for points to accumulate.  So I’m going to archive my remaining Kairosoft games. I’ll probably play them here and there later on but for now I don’t feel an obligation to finish them all.

That’s several games off my iPhone backlog which keeps getting smaller and smaller. I’m almost done with IOS gaming. 

[miguelonoahu]

I’m still going through my Wii U game list. The latest game I can cross off my backlog is New Super Mario Bros Wii U!  I was definitely in a mood for platforming games a while back so I played through a few worlds in a couple of hours.

I came back to play it after a hiatus and I surprised that I managed to beat the game in another few hours! I even managed to beat Bowser on the first try. It was a close call but I did it. There’s still a lot of stuff to do in the game but I have no plans on replaying the game over and over the get all the gold coins and unlock the star road. There’s a lot more games out there to play.

I could’ve gotten the Super Luigi Bros U DLC as well but I decided to pass on it as I’m ready to play other Mario games like Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario 3d World and Paper Mario Color Splash.

[miguelonoahu]

For at least a year, the Lego Dimensions box has been sitting in my closet. My interest in beating this game was really due to wanting to clear out the closet. Before I even played the game I looked up how hard it was going to be to get the platinum trophy and I bought a couple of characters packs just to make it easier. These included the Wicked Witch and Wonder Woman, both characters who could fly.  They came in really handy during the game!

Halfway through beating the game, I also got The Goonies level pack as I could use it’s X4 multiplier to acquire a ton of cash to rent characters and find more minikits.

Overall, I had fun with the game and enjoyed exploring the worlds that I could. However, I was bit disappointed by how many treasures and minikits were locked in areas that required the abilities of other characters which needed to be bought or rented.  In many cases, you can’t even rent the characters to acquire the item so you can’t 100% the main quest with just the default characters.

I don’t expect to get any of the other level packs for the game. They’re all a bit pricey and discontinued so the prices are probably not going to get lower. I kind of hope they eventually put out a deluxe version of the game with everything unlocked sort of like Disney Infinity did on Steam.

For now, I’m putting all my figures in a box and storing them in the closet. Maybe a year from now, I’ll decide to toss them all or use them for decoration.

[miguelonoahu]

Going through my Steam backlog and I noticed this interesting game - Waking Mars. Basically you explore the caves underneath Mars, seed life and awaken more life. It took me about 8-9 hours to completely finish the game.

I had fun going through all the caves and making sure there was enough life in them to unlock the maximum power in each. However, I probably should’ve waited to start doing that until I found the cave where I can get almost all the seeds in the game. That made it a lot easier.

I did have a glitch on one achievement and figuring how to get any of the endings is a bit fuzzy. I thought the game would end once the main character arrived at the base. I didn’t expect it would the good ending but an ending. However, I had to go back in the caves and look up a guide to figure out what to do to get an ending. 

Regardless it was an enjoyable experience and I managed to unlock all the achievements. Another game off the backlog!

[miguelonoahu]

I used to play The Sims 1 a lot when it first came out (18 years ago!). I bought all the expansion packs the day they came out at Comp USA. I even upgraded my computer from 64MB to 192MB of RAM so I play the game with better performance. It was a really fun game.

I also played The Sims 2 a bit but not as much as the first one. I really enjoyed the generational aspect of the game and keeping track of families as babies were born, siblings moved out and elders died. I had a spreadsheet to make sure all the families were roughly the same age.

I bought The Sims 3 when it was on sale on Steam but I played it minimally. I ended up getting all the expansions when they were really cheap but something about the game just didn’t grab me. I think the performance issues hindered my enjoyment of the game. Even now on my good gaming computer, it still takes about 4-5 minutes from the time I press play to the time I can control my Sim.

Lately, however, I’ve been playing The Sims 4 and I’ve been loving it. I splurged earlier this year on some of the expansion packs and have been exploring all the new things. Instead of rotating households, I’ve been focusing on just one household and letting everyone else auto-age. It’s more fun for me that way, I can fully concentrate on just a couple of Sims and then check-in with others once in a while and see what new surprises are there.

I has included the first three Sims in backlog list. I expected that I would go back and “finish” playing them. However, I just don’t think that’s going to happen. I’ve been playing The Sims 4 and just don’t want to go back, especially when I still have so many other games to play.  It’s time to take those off my backlog and focus on The Sims 4.

[miguelonoahu]

After more than 100 hours on Streetpass games, I think it’s finally time to close the book on them. There’s a number of games that I still have unfinished but the frequency of Streetpasses has greatly diminished since the Switch came out. It would literally take me years to complete them with just Play Coins.

I did finish Mii Trek last weekend and that’s pretty much when I decided I was done. After finishing the game once, it turns out that’s just half the quest and I have replay it again! I really would rather move on to other games.

I have dozens of other games waiting to played on the 3DS and I’ve found that playing the Streetpass games is kind of a barrier to them. I usually played them first and by the time I was finished catching up, I didn’t feel like playing other games.

Currently, I’m looking forward to finishing the Professor Layton Series.

[miguelonoahu]

This was a game I started on my last trip to Japan two months ago. I have been playing it off and on for the last few weeks and it’s finally finished. I liked it better than Cafeteria Nipponica but like that one, it also felt a little long. I really wish there was a way to unlock Fast Mode without playing the entire game first.

I didn’t unlock all the clothes and fixtures on my first playthrough but I feel that I unlocked most of what the game has to offer. I don’t think I really need to play it again.  

After two Kairosoft games in a row, each about 10-12 hours long, I think I will take a breather from them. I started playing a couple of different ones but they felt very similar to the other Kairsoft games I’ve played.