What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Barbie: Ocean Explorer (Miyoo Mini+)

March 6th, 2026

After work last night, I decided I wanted to finish Barbie: Ocean Explorer without accidentally triggering any major bugs. To avoid that, I just played each minigame once, not even thinking about getting 100%, and buzzed to the end in 19 minutes. It was anti-climactic, especially since a lot of the minigames are pretty tedious. There's one where you catch bubbles in rings that's so boring it would have stopped my 100% run dead if I'd gotten there without breaking things, and another where you very slowly drop cannonballs into a very slowly moving barrel that was also very dull. The background art is pretty, though, so I'm not sorry I played this. It's a chill little game with some sparkly stuff and a dolphin. I would have loved this as a kid.

After that, though, I was in shmup mode and got to doing some runs of Gunbird. The Steam port of this I've got has a hard three continue limit, which I don't mind unless it's late at night and I just got a game over one hit from killing the final boss. It's a fun challenge, though, and I ended up flitting around between characters and difficulties last night. It was a nice time.

I finally tried Earthion, too, pictured below with a very overbearing CRT filter that I was relieved I could turn off. This isn't really a style of shooter I'm used to, but it was cool enough that I'll give it more tries! It's fascinating to see what people can wring out of the Sega Genesis with a new, 2025 game, and it's handy to have it on Steam, too.

March 5th, 2026

I caught something wild, I think, because I'm still feeling crummy today. I'm a little more functional today, though, so I can post.

The day before yesterday, I got my Miyoo Mini+ out to play Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire. I then played Download for the PC Engine. It is a horizontal shmup with cool cutscenes and swearing on the game over screen. It also has reasonable checkpoints and infinite continues, so it doesn't feel so daunting to tackle.

I then played an unlicensed version of Solitaire for the NES, which was a lot of fun as a game on an emulation machine! As a cartridge, maybe it would have been dicey, but I enjoyed it as a modern scofflaw. I cleared both the standard and three-draw variants and called it good, which was nice.

Last night, I was zoned out and played Barbie: Ocean Explorer for the Game Boy Color because I thought it might have sparkling dolphins in it. It had some lovely, colorful pixel art, but by trying to 100% the game as I went, I bugged it out, leaving me unable to move to the last area while the game gave me passwords that assumed I'd cleared everything. It was a prime example of high quality licensed mini-game collection business.