What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

November 9th, 2025

I kept up with my quest to clean up some of my Switch games I'd started yesterday, starting by finishing off Purrfect Rescue. I didn't really love this, since the cats were too scribbly to easily identify as cats. I did like the idea of having one special cat per stage, having you find the items to catch them across different stages, but it needed something slighly more. This wasn't unplayable, but it wasn't my favorite cat finding experience.

I also went back to Roller Katz BF: Episode 1, which is the first few levels of one person's vision for a Dreamcast, or, more specifically, Sonic Adventure style platformer. It's very janky and difficult to control, and the story is never going to be finished, which is disappointing! I had a lot of fun with this regardless, though, and think it's cool that someone went for it and just put this out there. Plus, I got hit by a train a bunch of times and then shot a robot pirahna. I had fun!

Originally, I wanted to clear three games yesterday, but I wasn't feeling great last night and gave up. From there, I played a few rounds of Vampire Survivors and went to sleep.

November 8th, 2025

I had a weird gaming day yesterday. I played stuff way earlier in the day than normal, tackling the Retro Achievements on a game called Reels of Fortune. It seemed really funny to play another slot machine game, but it wasn't all that interesting overall. This was made for an open source console called Uzebox, though, and that does seem interesting. I might try to learn more about it later.

I tried a very simple, slippery feeling Atari 2600 Touhou homebrew, too. It wasn't awful, and I do want to achievement hunt in it a bit more, but it didn't have my attention for long yesterday.

I'm trying to be more responsible about game shopping and had some stuff I wanted on Switch, so I decided to try and clear off some games I had started on there and Switch 2 so I could do a spot of shopping. I finished off Snug Finder first, which I thought was a decent little hidden object game. I think it needed something a little more to make the time-based scoring work as more than "well, I know where all the stuff is so I'll just run it again right away," like moving objects between runs. That's basically my only complaint about it, though, especially for two dollars. It was cute.

I played some of Purrfect Rescue, a hidden cat game I'd bounced off of in seconds a few times before. The cats are really scribbly in this, so it's harder than usual to tell what is or isn't a cat, and they're extremely tiny, too. There's some simple adventure game elements going on here, too, but it wasn't enough to get me to play more than one stage of it last night.

November 7th, 2025

I started playing around with Retro Achievements in Retro Arch yesterday, which is allowing me to "finish" some strange old and homebrew games. I kicked off with Slot Machine for the Fairchild Channel F, which is actually what got me on this path. I started out wanting to play one of the weird Evangelion pachislot games for DS and just gradually got less and less ambitious until I was playing a very simple slot machine from 1980. It was a nice game to zone out with, even if there wasn't anything particularly innovative or interactive going on with it. Plus, now I've cleared a Fairchild Channel F game, thanks to the achievements, and that's kind of a neat step back into gaming history!

After that, I went through the achievements in an Atari 2600 version of Katamari, which was a blast! It focused more on being playable and fun for Atari than it did on recreating everything perfectly, looping between item collection levels and ones where you dodge the King of All Cosmos shooting lightning at you. It wasn't really like a normal Katamari game, but it was a small, cute and fun 2600 game that played to the system's strengths. I was glad I tried it.

My before bed game last night was Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!, because I clicked on the wrong icon on my desktop and just kind of rolled with it from there. I'm still so confused by all of these PG-13 anime girl games being super casual fluff, but this is Qix, and I like Qix. I'm sure these girls are from other games, but I would prefer to imagine that they're just mom game enthusiasts, popping up half dressed and heavily armed to cheer people on in old arcade games played at a leisurely pace and mahjong solitaire matches.

November 6th, 2025

Last night, I wasn't very focused on anything, so I played Sunseed Island for a bit before bed. I'm getting into the swing of the gameplay loop, and I don't feel like I can do much in an in-game day! It does let me fish infinitely, but I don't actually like the fishing in this, so that's not much of a plus. My cat's stamina keeps going up, though, so I think this is something that'll get better as I go. For now, I just want to be able to tend to my crops and cut down trees within the same game day.

November 5th, 2025

I got super sleepy last night, so I just played a few rounds of Meteora's Mystic Merge. I got a couple of Steam achievements, but was playing really badly. It was enjoyable, though! That's what counts.

November 4th, 2025

After work last night, I played N64 racers with one of my friends, on Switch Online. It was a good guide to games I need to unlock stuff in from here! Ridge Racer 64, Wave Race 64, F-Zero X and Iggy's Reckin' Balls are pictured below, but we played some Extreme G and Excitebike 64, too. It was a nice sampler platter! I'd never played most of these and was really impressed by the one track we played of Wave Race 64 and how fun it was to explode and die in F-Zero X. On the other end of that, Excitebike 64 was less fun than I remembered, and Iggy's Reckin' Balls was much more irritating than I could have possibly imagined.

Less pleasantly, I've been having trouble with my heart racing when I go to bed, making it tough to sleep, so I played Meteora's Mystic Merge to try to get 100% relaxed. It worked decently enough, and I could get to sleep without being haunted by the thought that I would imminently die from my heart exploding. I didn't get any new achievements, but that was the point.

November 3rd, 2025

Last night, I hit the end of KOF Sky Stage, a King of Fighters shmup, using the credit limits the game gave me starting off. This was one of the first shmups I played years ago, when I first got my PSP, and at that point I thought I wasn't having fun because I was bad at shmups. Now that I've played a few more and spent some more time with the genre, I just don't think this is a very fun game. There are a lot of shmups I want to clear as every characters, on a lot of difficulties, or with one credit. For this game, clearing it once is going to be enough. I am going to delete it off of my XBox and be free.

Earlier in the day, I saw a super casual hidden object game I wanted in the Switch eShop. I'm trying to be responsible, even about buying cheap games, so I decided to see if I could buzz through a similar game I already had first. I went with Snug Finder, which is kind of a speed based hidden object game. The first half of it was pretty fun, even though the time gimmick kind of falls apart as soon as you know where everything is. There's only 6 to 10 objects on every screen, so it's too easy to memorize after just one go. I'm still looking forward to going back for the rest of this, though. It's pleasant.