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Making 'Eventually' Happen: Operation Backlog Obliteration.

I sort of use them for different things. Backlog is games I want to play soon for whatever reason. Maybe it has multiplayer and there's a timed event or something, it's a sequel and I want to know the next part of the story soon, I won't have access to a TV after a bit, etc.

Games can move out of the library and into the backlog and vice versa, but it's nice to have a short higher priority list of games. Maybe the equivalent of books on the nightstand versus in the library?
 
Oh, yeah, that makes a ton of sense, too. I have a smaller stack of games in my head that I want to get to very soon, so one could definitely consider that a backlog. I just don't apply it to my whole library, because, uh... let's just say I'd never even physically be able to finish it all in my lifetime. 😅
 
Nearly 2 months later, Witcher 3 is in the books. I've got the platinum trophy for the main game, but I don't necessarily feel compelled to play the DLC. I never got tired of it, but I am ready for what's next, I think.

And what's next is....Darksiders: Warmastered! I think I will have to re-learn some muscle memory jumping into this one so soon.
 
Platinum trophy achieved for Darksiders 1! I don't want to jump into 2 just quite yet, but luckily enough after skipping some things I know I won't enjoy a replay of (Heavy Rain) I did another playthrough of Inside, and now I'm going to play Until Dawn, because it's spooky season!
 
Until Dawn might get better the further you get into it and the actual scary stuff happens. I hope it does!
 
Until Dawn and all Supermassive Games that I've played are choose your own adventure games with some quick time events sprinkled in.

You kind of have to be there for the story and visuals because the game play is at best okay.

Heavy Rain is my favorite in the choose your own adventure genre but Until Dawn is probably a close second.

I didn't see all the endings but I managed to turn on the cabin lights in a cabin that was full of leaking gas and killed off some of my team (all of my team? It's been a while.) with one decision!
 
Maybe I wasn't being fair to Heavy Rain. I just remember the motion controls being annoying and the characters controlling like RC cars.
 
I love Heavy Rain. Its in my top 10 PS3 games.

I played Heavy Rain on PS3 and PS4. I put the quick time difficulty down to easy or close to easy. It allows you to do what you intend and not fail as often.

I really like the idea of solving a crime through different perspectives. I also think the rain rising the water level makes for a neat clock to the game.

Like I said, its my favorite of the modern choose your own adventure games (Quantic Dream and Supermassive Games).

**
I have not played any tell tale games; maybe I would like those as well. I'm interested in Syberia and Broken Sword. I have not pulled the trigger on either yet.

I have not played an adventure game in a while. Adventure games are really fun genre to play as a palette cleanser. Its nice to not worry about twitch skills or strategy and just focus on the story.
 
You'd probably enjoy Telltale's games. I'd recommend their Batman games or The Wolf Among Us.

Broken Sword is more akin to the old school point and click style if I remember correctly.

Now that the story has picked up I'm enjoying Until Dawn a bit more, enough to be motivated to complete it at least.
 
That's a wrap on Until Dawn, I don't think I liked it enough to play it again for other endings, and rummaging for collectibles isn't really fun, so I'm willing to say I've gotten my $5 worth out of it.

I'm also binning isometric shooter LA Cops, it's too mid for me to want to keep playing it. This mission is about going Marie Kondo on my backlog and playing games until either the fun or the game itself runs out.

Next up is Darksiders 2 Deathfinitive! I bought this at the same time as Darksiders 1, but haven't played it until now. I'll be playing on the highest difficulty level too, just like D1. That game's hard mode was not really that hard, in all honesty.
 
Darksiders 2 is a DNF from me. It has been a very long time since I've played a game that controlled this poorly, with a camera this awkward and unwieldy.

I think I'll bite the bullet and finally boot up Star Ocean 3, I recall the characters in this one being less obnoxious than the ones in 4.
 
Whew, okay, that one took a while! They really don't make them like that anymore. It was interesting to see the cutscenes have a lot more visually interesting framing and blocking than I'm used to seeing in RPGs, and the battle system was a lot of fun, with the capability of being completely breakable, in the grand Tri-Ace tradition.

I didn't even mind the late game twist, although it's not really explained well why the universe goes on existing after it's deleted.

This must be what it's like whenever Square-Enix decommissions one of their mobile RPGs.

But at any rate, that's Star Ocean 3 done! I could go on and try and grind out more battle trophies and achievements and post-game content, but after nearly two months I think I'm ready to move on to the next thing.

The next thing in this case being....Star Ocean 4! I'm in danger.
 
Finalized my 2026 Backlog Bingo Board;

HTR9epc.png
 
That's Star Ocean 4 done! My short review is that the characters tend to be grating at the onset, but by the end they're all pretty likeable. Yes, even Lymle, kay? Story-wise, it's a bit of an outlier in that you actually do some manner of planet-hopping in your space ship, but the story tends to get bogged down in anime cliches too much to meet its potential. All the performances were really well-done though, there's nothing quite on the level of Farleen in this one.

Compared to Star Ocean 3, you can tell that they wanted to take advantage of the increase in power provided by the 7th generation of consoles by making the places really BIG. Even the areas that are just interconnected halls and tunnels end up feeling really spacious.

It's also a really fun game to play. I could probably stand to go back and clean up some more of the loose achievements if I cared to, because this game has a LOT to do. But as it stands, it's got me feeling like I've spent too long at a theme park. Everything's still fun, but I am, once again, ready for something else.

Next time: Batman: Arkham Knight! I bounced off of this in short order the last time I tried it due to a mandatory Batmobile race. Let's see if I get any farther than the first time trial this go 'round!
 
So, Batman.

I was actually enjoying the game a lot more once I buckled down and tried to get good at it.

But I've hit a snag in that it's consistently crashing when driving around the last area that you can get the Batmobile to.

So, that's the end of it I think.

It stinks, because I was having a genuinely good time.

So, next up is the old HD port of Resident Evil 4!
 
My efforts have hit a major snag on account of my PS5 unhiding all the games from my library that I had hidden. But! I have persevered!

Resident Evil 4 was awesome. I'm so glad this project got me to actually play it.

After that, next in the lineup was the final season of Walking Dead. I loved this series when I first played it, but I think nowadays I want something with a bit more active gameplay. It was enjoyable, though! I had actually preordered this way back in the days when I first got my PS4, and there was some concern that it wasn't actually going to be finished because of Telltale shutting down. At least until the comic series overrides it, it felt like a fitting end for Clementine's story.

I haven't been keeping up with my log to fully chronicle the reject pile, but I have a bunch of these PC ports of western RPGs like Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and I just don't plain don't like playing them on my TV. I'm not averse to heavy amounts of reading in a game; the number of visual novels I've played through should prove that, but in this particular format, I just cannot get into it despite my best efforts. So that's going to end up being a bit of a waste of money, sadly, but I'm writing them off. I think I'll have a better time once I eventually reach Disco Elysium, at least.

So now the game I'm sinking my teeth in to is the single player campaign in Titanfall 2, and this game actually kicks ass?? It's a FPS with mechs and wallrunning and time travel and probably a bunch of other cool stuff I haven't gotten to yet.
 
I think they fixed the glitch with my hidden games! At least I hope so, having to manually hide several hundred junk games is tedious. And seeing all the junk I've spent time and money on definitely fills me with a slight regret. But that's why I'm doing this, to clean out my attic and help with my vow of no more junk games.

So! Since last time, I finished the Titanfall 2 campaign, which is a good time if not a long time. I also re-played the Year of Springs visual novel, which got me feeling a Certain Way about myself for a bit, in such a way that I think I need to process some more.

My next big meal of a game was the overlooked Pyre, aka the game Supergiant made before striking gold with Hades. It was fun, if somewhat repetitive. I had enough fun playing it to want to get the Platinum trophy, at least!

Next up on the docket is the Uncharted spin-off, Lost Legacy. I largely don't like what Naughty Dog got up to in the PS4 era, but I'm thinking this will be fun enough.
 
If you liked Uncharted 4, you'll probably like Lost Legacy. It's a shorter experience, which was probably my only real gripe with U4, which lasted a bit longer than I'd have preferred.
 
I don't know if I did like Uncharted 4. The fun ended with Lost Legacy before the game did, anyway.

Next up, let's see how far I get into South Park: The Stick of Truth.
 
South Park: Stick of Truth is a lot of fun. Great battle system, iirc. And a ton of references to old episodes, if you care about that. It's not hard, and rather short, which aren't bad qualities for a jrpg. At least the second one, the first one is debatable, I guess.
 
I enjoyed it very much! Seeing all the references to the early episodes was a fun bit of nostalgia.

After finishing that, I realized that thanks to cross-buy, I actually owned a PS5 copy of What Remains of Edith Finch! It's amazing, that even when I don't buy new games, my backlog finds ways to expand. This is a very short story-driven game, so I'm already finished with it.

And so I'm jumping right in to South Park: The Fractured But Whole, because at the time I bought it in a double pack with Stick of Truth!

So far I can tell this is more of an Ubisoft game; it even has crafting!
 
And that's a wrap on that game! It had its moments, I definitely preferred Stick of Truth.

Now, I dunno. Do I really want to play Mega Man 7? By my own rules the second Legacy Collection is next.
 
Mega Man 7 isn't bad. Honestly, it's actually pretty good. It just doesn't measure up to the rest of the mainline series.
 
I have loaded the following games on my Switch that I own but never got around to playing and plan to try to get through a few on our trip over the next couple weeks:

Short games:
- A Tiny Sticker Tale
- Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
- Horgihugh and Friends
- ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove

Middle length:
- Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
- Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos
- RPG Time: The Legend of Wright
- Tales of Kenzera: Zau

Longer:
- Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin
- Valkyria Chronicles
 
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"Do I really want to play Mega Man 7?" is the consistent mantra. I've come around on it over time but it ain't my favorite, for sure.
 
Violentvixen said:
I have loaded the following games on my Switch that I own but never got around to playing and plan to try to get through a few on our trip over the next couple weeks:

- Valkyria Chronicles
Click to expand...
Valkyria Chronicles is great because all the stages are, well, stages. So it's really easy to segmentalize progress.
 
I've done it! I've finished Mega Man 7 and 8! 9 and 10 are left in the legacy collection vol2. 9 immediately feels better to play.
 
Played 7-10, not a dud in the bunch although I definitely think 9 was the best one. I'm actually sad that I ran out of them, I will look forward to playing 11 and 12 eventually!

Now I'm revisiting Chroma Squad with the intent to get at least one of the endings.
 
Nice. I agree, no duds, and Mega Man 9 sits up there with MM2/3 at the top of the classic series. It's a fantastic game... even if it might be wired a little too difficult.
 
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