What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Sonic Adventure (PS3)

For more coverage of Sonic Adventure, read about my harrowing journey with the Steam port of DX here!

August 5th, 2023

I've already been to the local mall today, to pick up an online order from Hot Topic like the classy adult that I am, so I feel like today's post is much later than it really is. For a weekend, though, 11 am is actually fairly normal for me.

Last night, I had really awful post-work-week-burnout, so I turned on my PS3 to play a quick level of Sonic Adventure. I wouldn't say that I played for ages, really, maybe just an hour, but it had been so long since I'd played that I'd forgotten how pretty, weird, and easy to get caught up in this game is. I played from the casino stage to the first sky chase in the Tails section last night, with a lot of just wandering around between things. Since I was tired, I really appreciated that the Omega boss in the water hadn't been tweaked for Tails's abilities at all, meaning I could just kind of float above all the attacks and descend when it was my turn to hit. It was a nice, low stress time.

More pathetically, I also played Disney Tsum Tsum for a while because I wanted to play a game, but was too tired to get out of my chair and turn a console on.

I kind of doubt I'll play anything interesting today, even on the "games I abandoned for a few months" front that Sonic Adventure slotted into today. I'm still kind of sleepy and disinterested, and I mostly just want to eat pasta and read manga. I'm sure I'll feel better later, though, and I'll play something for sure.

February 19th, 2023

I didn't feel so great most of yesterday, and have nasty cramps today, so I'm not very peppy. Yesterday was nice, though. I did a lot of crafts and spent a lot of time chatting with a good friend, so even with a stomachache, my vibes were very pleasant.

Gaming-wise, I didn't do amazingly, though. I played a Tails level in Sonic Adventure, which got me excited about Sonic games in general. I might play something Sonic again today to bask in the bright colors.

I played another couple levels of Kururin Cafe, too, since it's an easy, pleasant, casual match-3 game, and the "wow, this was previously only for Japanese feature phones!" deal appeals greatly to my worst nerd impulses. I wonder if there's any upper limit to the levels in it?

November 16th, 2022

My mood is never good the day after non-voluntary overtime, and it doesn't help looking at my editor and knowing that it's been less than twelve hours since my last post. I have Friday off, though, so I only need to make it through two more days of this.

I ended up playing the start of Tails's story in Sonic Adventure last night because I accidentally turned my PS3 on when I went to play PS4. It was good enough. After the first boss battle and a small amount of wandering around the Mystic Ruins, I went to bed.

September 24th, 2022

I have to be helpful again today, so I am up early on a Saturday. I need to drive 4 hours total today, and usually sleep later because my work shift is later, so I tried to go to bed early and get an ok amount of sleep. I totally failed. Maybe an overpriced fast food breakfast will help.

Last night, I only played games for a few minutes to go to bed earlier, and I played Sonic Adventure. I cleared Twinkle Park in Sonic's story in my efforts to catch my PS3 file up to where I was on PC. I'd avoided playing for a while since I knew I was at that spot. The amusement park theme is cute, but it's not fun to play, the bumper car track makes my stomach drop, and the music from the boat ride in the last part of the level really bothers me playing over the standard stage music. Now that I'm past this, I'll probably go back to this game more often.

September 4th, 2022

Today is Sunday, the central day of a three-day weekend, and I don't have to do anything today! I didn't really have to do anything yesterday, either, but I built a really big shelf. It was an accomplishment.

Game-wise, I picked up Loud, an indie rhythm game I'd downloaded to my Switch right when it had a new release discount, while I was making dinner. It's pretty cute, using the story of a high school girl dreaming of being a rockstar as she moves up in her local scene to move things forward, but the controls are really bothersome

The key issue I'm having is that, if you hit a button unrelated to what's on screen, rather than just missing your timing, the game counts it as a miss, which is brutal, but fine. On a different system, I'm not sure this would be an issue. It's giving me trouble here, though, for two reasons. First, my download of it/my Switch/the gremlins in my system can't read a held note on the D-pad bottom arrow, which means getting a prompt for that on screen can end a stage if I don't react fast enough. It marks the hold note as "good" at first press, so if I remember that spot is broken for me and back off right away, I'm fine. If I don't remember, though, the "any wrong button is a miss" rule means that after that initial "good," holding the down arrow for a note that has already been registered as clear results in an instant, quick string of misses, racking up the strike meter at the top and resulting in a game over. The D-Pad bottom arrow doesn't give me issues in any other games, so I'm not sure what's up here.

Edit: As of about 10 hours later, the D-pad note holding glitch I was running into is no longer occurring. I'm adding this note because I don't want a bug that might have been a total fluke to put people off of this game!

Second, with the buttons on the Switch being so tiny, the missed note scoring means that you can lose a combo just by your thumbs being too big. This one was only an issue for me once or twice, again on the D-pad, but I have relatively small hands and am using Joycons bigger than the standard. It was irritating when it happened to me, but I think it has the potential to be a bigger problem for other players.

At any rate, I don't dislike this overall. I like the music, it's fun to see how an indie music game approaches both the genre and storytelling, and it is hard for me to be totally disappointed with a cheap game where I'm unlocking new outfits. I think I probably got about halfway through while making a pot of soup last night, so one of my goals for today is to finish it before bed.

Later on in the night, after watching a bad movie and doing some crafts, I played some more Sonic Adventure on my PS3. I was working on Amy's levels tonight, and her mouth movements are egregiously mismatched to what she actually says in the English dub! She seemed to have more glitches than the other characters, too. Her skirt turned totally inside out while she was petting a Chao; it was a really odd visual! Still, this game is pretty and fun, and I like it. The glitchiness was way more amusing than bothersome.

Lastly, I played My Sims a little before bed again. I caught some fish, but I can't figure out how to get them to become selectable items to hand them off to the fisherman who wants them for his "fish book." Since this is obviously a game made for kids, it feels like a small personal failing.

With all that said, though, I'm off to enjoy a nothing day! Truly, 'tis glorious.

August 21st, 2022

Today's post will be a little long, since a mix of good free time and dicey focus meant I played a lot of different things yesterday.

As the most important game of this post, I'm going to go slightly out of order and start with Lydia, a game I pulled from my Switch digital library figuring it would be a quick and easy clear. I got it through one of those weird "if you own this game, you can get 5 free!" promotions that Qubic Games used to do, which I think is against the Switch eShop rules now. I was right in that it was a quick game, at about 40 minutes. It was also an extremely heavy game about familial abuse and the cycle of alcoholism. Considering the other free stuff I'd gotten from Qubic Games, I was slightly blindsided. It was interesting, well made, and dovetailed surprisingly nicely with my reading for last week, though. I will never play this again, but I'm glad I played it once.

The reason why I was playing Lydia in the first place, though, was that I hit a point in Double Switch: 25th Anniversary Edition where I sat, silently stared at the game over screen, and decided that I did not need it in my life. By the time it had me figuring out where an opposing character has set other traps, which you must go disarm within a split second, it had become so frustrating that I could barely stand it. As far as things go, though, I like all the different display options this port gives you. I'd been using the "modern" layout before, but switching to the PC layout made it easier to play, with a better readout on what's going on with your armed traps, and it just looked cooler, too. If I pick this up again, I'll probably stick with this layout.

Later in the night, I went back to my PS3 and did a couple more arcade mode playthroughs on Sonic the Fighters. Sonic was a little too easy to play through as, though that is in part because I was being a cheap jerk to the AI, but Bark the "Polerbear" was slightly miserable to play as. I don't tend to like the slow but powerful characters in fighting games, though, so using Bark last night was kind of a "let's get this over with" move.

After that, I booted up Fighting Vipers and got absolutely destroyed, because it's a bad idea to pick up a game I haven't played for years and select a character I've never used after 1am.

I then closed out the night playing a level and a couple of boss fights in Sonic Adventure, where I'm still catching up to my progress in the PC version of the game. I feel like I'm making decent progress with it!

With that, I'm off to a lovely and peaceful Sunday! I don't know what I'll do today, but I'm sure it'll be a decent time.

August 6th, 2022

I got a much better "screenshot" in PriPara: Mezameyo! Megami no Dress Design, opting to do some coin and level grinding rather than hopping into story mode. I was too hot, tired, and lazy to try to read Japanese, so the easier path easily won out. After a few levels, though, including a kami idol time (kind of a bonus round) after one of them, I unlocked one singular coord part, a cowgirl style top. I did get my idol looking a little closer to how I'd like, too, which is something.

Perhaps with more relevance to this blog, however, I picked Sonic Adventure back up, this time on the PS3 port. I love avoiding PC gaming! For now, I'm trying to catch back up to where I was when the PC version of DX kind of fell apart for me. I had worried this would be tedious, but it was not because this game is weird and super-sparkly, and because the casino level is awesome and I kicked butt at pinball last night.

As far as game pages go, I ended up splitting the PS3 port of Sonic Adventure and the PC version of Sonic Adventure DX into seperate pages, both because they're slightly different games, and for "narrative" reasons. I don't know if that really makes sense, but it seemed like the thing to do.