What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?
February 2026
February 28th, 2026
My post tonight is late because I'm right on top of things and started watching Cherynobyl. I'm not very good at watching TV.
I played several games yesterday, but only for ten or so minutes each. During my lunch break at work, I was in a shmup mood. I went and hid away from my desk, playing a couple of stages in Darius Burst: Chronicle Saviors. It was too fun, so I turned it off, worried I'd run out my 30 minutes.
Counter-intuitively, I played a credit in DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu from there, and was lucky to play badly enough to get back to my desk in time. It seems really cool, but tough, from the few minutes I played!
Much later, I finished cataloging my Evercade/Super Pocket games on a Backloggery page, and having only cleared one out of the 77 I have between my cartridges, I decided it was time to tackle that mess. I started with my Super Indie Heroes cartridge, as at least some of the 14 games on it seemed pretty breezy. I went through about ten minutes of Quest Arrest, a swearing-filled cop RPG built like a Pokemon game, but decided 1 in the morning wasn't the right time to be dealing with all of that.
I also played some of Doodle World, a super cute 8-bit platformer, but it was too late for even something so cheerful and breezy. I will come back to this another day.
February 27th, 2026
At the start of the month, I decided I was going to cross stitch every Pokemon, and this morning, they just went and announced new ones. My plan has many flaws. I'd like to get ten smaller Pokemon stitched this weekend, though, to at least hit 1% done. I might post some here, but am not sure how to best show them off.
Anyway, last night I played Killer Instinct Gold a little, because I planned to play Super Valis and forgot what I was doing when I turned my Switch on. It was a very ok gaming experience, even if I only played for ten minutes. Sometimes, my heart's just not in it.
February 26th, 2026
I played games quite a bit last night, but wasn't having a great time. I got an actual household going in Tiny Life, but I felt like I couldn't get anyone to do anything. Achievement hunting in this'll be a chore if I can't even get any of my tinies to drink a glass of water. At least one of my tinies is a chaotic party boy, though, so there's plenty of fun ahead.
Before bed, I felt kind of overwhelmed by all the stuff in front of me in Disney Speedstorm and just jumped into races at random. It did help me relax, but I felt so scattered as I played.
February 25th, 2026
I am trying to clear some of the games I already have to save money right now, so last night, I tried Tiny Life, a pixel art life sim that I got in a bundle a couple of years ago. I only played for ten minutes or so, so I don't have much of an impression so far. It seems ok, though. I'd kind of like to get all of the achievements in this, but if I do, it won't be on the little file I started last night.
Later, before bed, I played a few races in Disney Speedstorm. I was excited to have unlocked Megara as a driver not due to any great fondness for Hercules, but because I have held tight to a McDonalds plate with her on it since I was in grade school. It's an amazingly long lived plate! I had a decent time playing, but playing as a character from my dish cupboard was definitely the most interesting part of the session.
February 24th, 2026
Last night, despite last week's Tony Hawk connection failures making me think it wouldn't go well, I played the start of A Way Out with one of my friends from work. It's a co-op prison escape game, and it was really enjoyable! I was kind of a wandering dolt, but everything is well synced and orchestrated enough that even my dippiest moments didn't cause a ton of trouble. Our guys still aren't out of the prison, but I'm looking forward to playing more next week.
I played some more of Disney Speedstorm, too, during my lunch break and before bed. It was something nice and mindless to play before bed, and I unlocked a new racer I'm interested in trying tonight.
February 23rd, 2026
I didn't want to think at all yesterday, so I enjoyed some spacey driving with Disney Speedstorm. I didn't do well at all, but the game still chucked XP and prizes at me, which I appreciated. It made me want to play something non-gacha, though, which I have achieved and will have more about tomorrow. I don't hate that it does have free to play bits, but bouncing between events and online and offline just feels so unfocused.
February 22nd, 2026
I'm kind of down, tired, and overwhelmed tonight, but not feeling so bad that I'll skip posting! It will be a lazy post, though. I'll just try to catch up tomorrow.
I played a lot of games yesterday, finishing two Steam freebie hidden object games. Hidden Corgi Mansion had some actual challenge to it, but some of that was down to the game not including a zoom in and out feature. It was cool that it has multiple rooms, though, and two different things to find. It was a bit above the typical hidden cat game!
100 Funny Cats, on the other hand, was another low effort cat finder. The cat art was really cute, with big round cats hangin' out at the circus, but the game just didn't match up to its own art.
In what will be the biggest future problem for this blog, I started Disney Speedstorm, too. I'm not sure what to make of this yet. It seems to have some nasty gatcha leanings, which is a danger in free games, but the racing itself is really fun. I don't know how the balance will shake out, so I don't know if I'll play it for long.
I sat around and ran Card Storm Idle while Disney Speedstorm downloaded, which I hadn't touched for a while. I figured out that clicks are way more effective than actual damage per second idling is in this game, so I might make some headway in this when I'm bored.
I tried Sky Survivors on PS4, too, which seems to be a totally fine Survivors-like. I like that it's platform based with a lot of vertical momentum, but I also unlocked every character in one fairly short sitting. I'm not sure how much content there is.
I have done my post, so now I can completely let my brain melt.
February 21st, 2026
I spent last night being tired from work, cross stitching, and reading manga, so it wasn't a big gaming night. I did play a few more rounds of Crowd City, though. I've started using some of the new characters I've unlocked, and as my mass of elf girls stormed the screen, I noticed they ran at a different framerate than the rest of the game! It wasn't lagging or anything, so it was just a weird visual effect.
February 20th, 2026
I had some crafting trouble earlier, so my post tonight is really late. I just played Crowd City, a mobile-to-Switch port I got for 20 cents a while back. This seems to be the same game as Horses.io, but with more stages and less screaming horses. It's an improvement, and I'm kind of looking forward to playing through this. I'll talk about it more in a future post.
February 19th, 2026
I wasn't super interested in games last night, but I got myself to turn on Cozy Organizer for some low pressure before bed gaming. I had an item vanish on me in the level I was playing, though, and since it couldn't be placed, the game wouldn't count the level as cleared and let me move forward.
From there, I thought I was too frustrated to get to sleep, so I went to play a round of Buddy and Lucky Solitaire and got relaxed enough to sleep in a matter of seconds. It was nice.
February 18th, 2026
Yesterday, I got really fixated on a horror manga, Angels of Death and spent most of my potential game time reading between that and Hamnet. It wasn't a very uplifting evening. The true horror, however, is Disney Solitaire, the microtransaction scumming, cheating, manipulative mobile game I've been playing as of late. It's the first solitaire game I've ever played, though, so last night I wanted to play a solitaire game that would allow me to keep playing for more than 10 minutes without begging for cash. I landed on Buddy and Lucky Solitaire, which I'd gotten in a Steam bundle of cat games. It was cute, and though the ruleset, normal as it probably is for solitaire pros, threw me, it was a pleasant time. In the light of day, I realize I should have just popped on Windows Solitaire, but this was still fun.
February 17th, 2026
I got the cardboard Virtual Boy accessory I'd ordered ages ago yesterday and stayed up late to try the Nintendo Switch Online emulation. I really have a lot of nostalgia for Virtual Boy! My dad brought one home when they were super cheap at Best Buy, and my siblings and I played it until we had to keep it assembled with rubber bands and ponytail holders. I was genuinely very excited to hear Nintendo was throwing these games online.
Once I started actually playing these games, I was surprised how cool they still are! I settled on playing a 3D shooter, Red Alarm, which had a lot of neat, retrofuturistic charm. The 3D worlds made of monochrome pixels are not realistic or very immersive, but it's such a distinctive style. Also, while playing, I was reminded powerfully of how the Virtual Boy's display can make it feel like your eyes will never be able to water again from the damage it does with every frame of gameplay.
I liked Red Alarm, and'll say more about the game in and of itself later. Last night, I was simply wallowing in the nostagia, and that was enough.
I let Pincremental run for a few hours, too, still making decent progress. This isn't a bad idle game.
February 16th, 2026
Yesterday, I hung out and played games quite a bit, but the most interesting bit of that was starting Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. I played a bit of this back when it was on Game Boy Advance, and it's maybe even better than I remembered! Some of that might just be that it's easier to see what's going on playing on Switch than it was on a GBA, but it feels so good and satisfying to play. I'm very excited to continue this.
Other than that, I just played idle games. Push the Square is a very brief, but satisfying clicker from itch.io, and I enjoyed it. It was nice that I could play it on my phone, and a bit funny, too.
I also became obsessed with Pincremental, a free pinball idle game from Steam, while I was watching the Independent Spirit Awards. The basic pinball is a bit wonky, but I like the numbers-go-up parts of this quite a bit. This game will appear on this blog again, perhaps even tomorrow!
February 15th, 2026
Last night, I watched a few episodes of G Gundam, so after that I messed around with Simple Characters 2000 Series Vol. 12: Mobile Fighter G Gundam, a PS1 fighting game based on the anime. It was fun, if not a little slow because you're a big mech, but I shut it off and went to sleep pretty quickly.
February 14th, 2026
I've really been slacking with site upkeep lately, but I should have time to get new game pages built and added to the list page tomorrow. I'm kind of typing this here to remind myself that I need to do this.
Last night, I wanted to clear out some of the smaller games in my backlog, starting with Is This Potato?, a Switch game about finding stuff in piles of french fries. This is 100% exactly what I want to see from gaming, but I also wish it had been longer! There were only 10 minutes worth of potatoes to scrutinize. As a minigame in some larger "help, there's foreign objects in my food" themed casual game, this would have been fine, but sadly, this needed more potatoes.
I'm getting so close to the end of the less engaging Hidden Cats series that I knocked out another one last night, with Hidden Cats: Spring Festival. The Lunar New Year theme was lovely, and a couple of the cats qualified as hidden. This was fine.
I also started the game I had stashed in the more engaging Hidden Cats series, Hidden Cats: The Last of Cats. I only finished the shorter of the two stages last night, but I like the actual challenge in this. Plus, the cats vibing after humanity has disappeared theming is nice. It's a cozy view of the post-apocalypse, and I'm looking forward to finishing this.
February 13th, 2026
This has been a crummy week, but I'm glad it's over now! Yesterday, I was doing some super casual gaming, starting with Hidden Cats: Zoo on my lunch break. This was probably the best game in this series so far, with some cats actually being decently hidden. I'm still glad I'm getting close to the end of this series, though.
I made some headway in mobile-game-with-an-actual-end Thread Sort, too. I think this is actually in HTML5, but it came from the Samsung app store. It's just a standard mobile put-threads-on-spools game, but I'm writing about this one because it has an actual start and end. That doesn't make it exciting, but sometimes it's nice for a game to be finite, too.
Finally, I moved to the third stage in Monster Survivors, which was a small space with lots of objects to climb on. This has good stage variety so far, and I'm still surprised by how much I'm enjoying this.
February 12th, 2026
I got feeling really burned out last night, so I just played a few stages of 11 Islands Beginning on my tablet. Casual games are great for entire weeks when I am crashing.
February 11th, 2026
My attention span is totally broken, but since I didn't fall asleep after work tonight, I think I'm going to be able to sleep when I need to! I'm very hopeful right now.
Last night, I tried Let's Get Fit!, a fitness game I recently picked up on Switch. I really liked the session I played last night, and felt like it gave me a good variety of stuff to do. It also totally kicked my butt, which is fine! That probably means it actually did me some good.
I played a little of Pow2 again last night, which was still fun. I'm a big fan of 2048, but it's not a great game to write about.
February 10th, 2026
I'm sleeping poorly again, but have a lot I want to type about. I picked up the "No ICE In Minnesota" bundle on itch.io yesterday and am trying to decide how to tackle it. It maybe wasn't a great idea to add a big stack of games to my backlog while I was worried about my backlog, but it's for a good cause and also I wanted to.
I looked through the bundle and ended up playing a browser game called Poke Slots, where you capture Pokemon instead of getting jackpots. This felt more like it just handed you Pokemon when it wanted to more than it felt like a slot machine. The odds were way in my favor, so I did play until I caught every Pokemon in all four included regions. I'll probably go back if more regions get added, too! I wanted it to be a little meaner about luck, though, so I didn't go after shinies or any of the secrets yet.
Outside of the bundle, I tried a new Suika-like I really liked on XBox, called The Roofcats: Suika Style. Every cat on the board represents an instrument of the jazz or rock music that plays in the background, so the goal isn't just to merge up to the biggest game piece. It's also to get at least one of each cat musician on the board. It's a neat idea, and I thought it was fun and relaxing. Plus, it's a cat game, and I'm pro-cat games.
Right before bed, I also played Pow2, a version of 2048 that's included on a My Arcade Atari handheld. I was a little baffled by so many Famicom/NES games popping up on an Atari system, and it's even weirder that one is a homebrew of 2048. It's a good version, though! I cleared the novice level last night, getting to 1024, and plan to plug away at the normal and expert modes from here.
February 9th, 2026
Last night, I just played a few of the P-Switch challenges in Mario Kart World. It was only ten or so minutes, but I wasn't in the mood for gaming. That was okay.
February 8th, 2026
Tonight, I am feeling very panicked at my lack of productivity today because I had a normal, laid back Sunday. It was also a laid back Sunday where I finished two Dollar Tree diamond paintings and got quite a lot of cross stitching done, so I don't know what my dumb problem is.
Last night, I tried Army of Ruin, which is a polished, well made, and well balanced Survivors-like. It had no spark for me, though! I think I will keep playing, since I had an awful headache and that could have been affecting my mood, but I've had more fun with much worse games. Again, I don't know what my dumb problem is.
February 7th, 2026
I am continuing my tour of fine cinema tonight by watching an old bargain DVD of Spice World from Big Lots. It looks surprisingly good being played off a PS4, even if it is just a piece of fluff I like because I was 10 or 11 when I saw it. When it came out, my family had to drive to the next town to see it, and my mom said we were going to see Titanic. I really flipped when I realized we were seeing Spice World, though! I hadn't even known the Spice Girls were in a movie, and now I was going to see it? It was an extremely memorable burst of pure kid joy, and a very nice, extremely vivid memory!
Anyway, last night, I finished off Crazy Cats Survivors, which was fun, but way too short! The five minute runs kept things brisk, but I wish it had had more characters, or weapons, or anything to make it last more than 90 minutes. It's better that than wishing the game had never existed in hour ten of grinding for unlocks, but the balance is delicate.
After that, I slammed a strawberry flavored vodka cooler while doing a run in Ketsui: Deathtiny. It was the best run I'd ever had outside of super easy mode, with no need to continue until stage 4. It was fun, but not something I should make a habit of by any means.
February 6th, 2026
Yesterday, I remembered that playing shmups helps me feel more relaxed and cheerful, so I dug into Aleste, or Power Strike, for the US release, on my Switch. I have this in an M2 collection, so there's a "challenge" mode that automatically rewinds to try and get you through the games included without getting hit. It gives you 80 rewinds and I am ashamed to say that, with slowdown turned off, I only got to level 2 that way! It was really fun, though, and I plan to try over and over. It shall be nice to develop some small level of skill at Aleste.
February 5th, 2026
Today, I have a little more energy, but I used it to watch Frankenstein 1970. It was a duller movie than I expected for one where a descendent of Dr. Frankenstein rents his castle out to showbiz folks for the money to buy an atomic thingy for help building a dude in his basement. B-movies can be hit and miss, though.
Last night, I just kept going with Monster Survivors, still mostly enjoying it. I cleared the second stage and went to sleep, so that was two goals met.
February 4th, 2026
I am not very energetic tonight, but luckily for this post, I lacked the energy to play games last night. A "new" Tamagotchi came in the mail yesterday, and I'm not showing it off today because it needs repairs. It'll be a fun project in the end, but I wasted time scrambling to figure it out last night.
I did play a little more of Monster Survivors, which was a perfectly fine time. It gets about as chaotic as I'd like towards the end of a stage, which I didn't expect from such a mobile-seeming game. Still, I just went to sleep after two runs.
February 3rd, 2026
I've hit too many nights of bad sleep straight, so it's time for a lazy post. I played a Switch cheapie called Monster Survivors last night, which honestly wasn't bad. It has that cheap mobile yellow stick man look to it, but I like how it adds different elevations into the mix and don't mind the weapon-merging based upgrade system, either. This is better than I expected.
February 2nd, 2026
I still had a Survivors-like fixation yesterday, so I picked up a few of them cheap. One of them, Fury Roads Survivors for Switch, was just a normal twin stick shooter. I was mad for 30 seconds, then realized I could make my car explode everything in the wasteland and score an unlock every few minutes. From there, I played it for over an hour without moving from my chair.
I tried and enjoyed Crazy Cats Survivors even more. This one is a proper Survivors-like, and not one where the character builds have much complexity. The five-minute runs make everything fly by, though, and it seems like it'll be short enough not to overstay its welcome. I had a great time starting this one!
After that, though, I played a couple of rounds of Clover Pit because I couldn't sleep, then still couldn't sleep for several hours. That's hardly Clover Pit's fault, though.
February 1st, 2026
I've been wanting to play a lot of Survivors-likes lately, so I did a second play session in Kitty Survivors: Rogues of Catmere. I had some problems with it last night tht I didn't last time! I couldn't get the weapons forging mode to function, and I had a lot of lags during my run proper. I think Windows was trying to do some rubbish in the background, though, so I'm not inclined to blame the game itself for my bad run.
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