What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Sonic Adventure DX (PC)

For more coverage of Sonic Adventure, read about my triumphant return to the game on PS3 here!

June 26th, 2022

I got Sonic Adventure back up and running yesterday! In order to get the sound back, I had to install the SADX Mod Installer, which is here if you need it, overwriting the failed audio with the audio files from the Dreamcast version of the game. (I also, practically, installed a mod to add the Japan only DLC for holidays.) The mod installer did a few other things, too, adding in the unlockable Game Gear stuff from Game Cube, and, in a less fun bonus, adding camera control.

The camera in Sonic Adventure is bad to be sure, but I'm really prone to motion sickness in older 3D games. For whatever reason, the awful camera in this game doesn't really tend to trigger it, but with the mod on, it's pretty bad. If I keep my laptop as far away from me as possible, I think I'll still be able to finish it off one level at a time, but it's a disappointing trade-off.

Anyway, with the game back up and running, I played one of the Knuckles levels and did a boss fight alongside it.

Even though I have Sonic Adventures going again, I kept going with Sonic Forces. I feel, somewhat bafflingly, that the game is getting less challenging as it goes, rather than my just getting better at it. In some levels, I feel like it would be harder to get killed than not. Dressing up the avatar character is very cute, though, so I'm in it for the outfit pieces.

Of course, I kept going with my mobile game, too. I am almost incidentally grinding away at the event in Ensemble Stars as I play normally. I'm looking to finish unlocking the story for the current gacha cards, and I want to level up and get money to drown the chibi idols in the office in a sea of garbage cans. The game says I can have up to 99 of them, and I'm goin' for it. The event progresses with normal gameplay, though, so there's no real reason not to do it. Also, as I predicted, I've been able to level up enough to start scoring decently within just a week of play, which is fine.

I might not play much today, since I'm enjoying an over-complicated crochet project and trying to finish a diamond painting of hauntingly low quality, but craft time is good, too. I'll at least check in on a couple of games.

June 21st, 2022

I still couldn't fix Sonic Adventure last night. I think I can fix it by modding it, but this is not a deal that is going to change my opinion that PC gaming is higher barrier than consoles. I really want to finish the game, though, so I'll keep tackling it.

On the actual gaming side of things, I went back to Ensemble Stars last night. For the event, it was asking me to unlock skills on character cards, which, of course, it lets you just pay to do if you don't want to grind for item drops in the actual game. It's very benevolent of the game, right? I am not at all opposed to completing an extremely repetitive task in exchange for getting my mind off the fact that I still have a job to show up to, so I'm not super bothered by this so much as it was an "oh, of course!" moment.

June 20th, 2022

Alas! Sonic Adventure has broken on my PC! The sound on it is totally gone. Browsing around for help, it seems like this is a semi-common issue for the Steam version, but none of the listed fixes helped me. I will keep trying to fix it, but I'm kind of disappointed. I want my games to be talkies!

Other than trying to get Sonic back up and running properly, I played Ensemble Stars for a while again, tackling the game's first event. It's a character levelling thing that serves as a pretty blatant system tutorial, but if the game wants to toss prizes at me, it can go for it. Plus, I like the PriPara style cyalume change coord it gives the idol- the more garish and shiny this nonense gets, the better. I finished the first round of the event and am into the additional levels of it now.

June 17th, 2022

I both worked mildly late and bought groceries last night, a tragic combination that could only end in my being rendered completely unable to play games with any sort of forward momentum. Therefore, I turned on Sonic Adventure and had peaceful game time in the Chao Garden. All games need to have fully featured pet raising modes, simply because I would like that very much.

June 16th, 2022

Yesterday was just more Sonic Adventure- it was way too hot, so I only got through one level before I got too motion sick to keep going. I respect that when you play as Gamma, one of the striking transit workers thinks you're a government thug sent to bust up their strike, though. The whole labor dispute subplot in this game is great.

June 15th, 2022

I got back to playing Sonic Adventure last night and it was very satisfying! Last night's play session, on the Sonic path, had all the things that kids love in a game! I got to go to an office building, and the transit workers' strike was peacefully resolved. It was delightful.

That's a bit snarky, but it was actually really fun. I got to this level last night where I was in a volcano for the second half, and it was really enjoyable to play, and the highway level was fun, too. This game has a lot of dramatic setpieces where you're basically unkillable, but they're cool and fun, which is as good as anything. The pointless parts of this game, like the linear level progression being over-explained away by daily life in the city, or the parts where you just run down the side of a building towards and can't die no matter how many walls you slam into, are the best parts of it. I hit a few of those last night, so I was happy.

June 12th, 2022

I got really set on getting my Japanese PS1 up and running last night, and am not sure why. It is not a machine that has any problems, and it was out and ready to go, so I am blaming a mix of allergies and antibiotics making me weird for the whole thing. Once it was set up, though, I got out the The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love game to try it out.

I've had the game for a while, but I'm so bad at horizontal shooters that I'd been almost too worried about sucking at the game to actually try playing it. From the little I played last night, though, it was really cool! It had some really nifty effects to recreate some of the movie's space battle animation in sprite form- the missile trails in particular looked pretty impressive- and as well as I like Macross, I was really taken in by all of the music and voice clips. Plus, I liked how fuzzy and low res the anime clips looked on the PS1 disc.

It might be a while before I fully tackle this game, since it got played last night just to make sure my console was still running, but I'll look forward to really playing it! It made me, as a dork, very happy.

Later in the night, I got back to Sonic Adventure. I'm still not totally back to my normal energy level, so I just did the first level for Big the Cat. It was fine. It's maybe a little much that you lose a life when the fishing line breaks, but I don't know how giant talking cats feel about this stuff. Maybe it's really a lot for him to deal with.

June 5th, 2022

Like I said I was going to, I went in yesterday afternoon and beat the final boss for the Tails route in Sonic Adventure. After struggling with it playing late, it took a grand total of 6 minutes to take care of when I was wide awake. I was very surprised how short the side story was, though! This game might not be as long as I though it was going to be.

When it got late, I dug through some of my itch.io bundles and pulled out a game called Adventure for a Bit that you can download here. It seems like a very nice and charming game so far, where you help an AI get confidence while it makes you pretty and pastel procedurally generated landscapes. I've had some trouble getting stuck in pits and corners in the worlds the game makes you, but the little scenes between each world are so cute! It's very relaxing, too. I don't know how much is left, but I'm looking forward to finishing it.

After that, I went back to Sonic Adventure for a few minutes, but Twinkle Park sucks and I went to bed.

June 4th, 2022

First and foremost, I got a lot of updates made to the site today! I finally added a background, which I think makes it look a lot nicer, and got some navigation set up to view older posts more easily. I still have a lot of stuff I want to implement, but I'll play with it as I go. Part of why I'm doing this is to remember what I learned of HTML in high school and pick up CSS, too, so there's nothing wrong with learning as I go.

On the game front, last night was more Sonic Adventure. I wasn't sure how progress was gated in this game, so I thought maybe none of the side characters could go past where Sonic was in the story. That turned out to not be the case at all, so I buzzed through the Tails levels until I hit what I think is the final boss of that section. After that, I kind of quit for the night. Even an easy final boss is a challenge when you're half asleep. I'll try it again today, though!

June 2nd, 2022

Last night was more Sonic Adventure. I didn't get very far, aside from doing a mildly irritating rail shooter level in the biplane and replaying a couple levels to get some of the B grade emblems. The casino level kept dumping me in the garbage and I got a little frustrated, but that left me with plenty of innocent wildlife to use as feed in the Chao Garden. The pinball tables are fun, though. It was hard to be too salty about it.

June 1st, 2022

Sitting down to do this today, I feel like my concept of time has been destroyed. I feel like it's been so much longer than two days ago that I was playing The Last Blade! That's okay, though. It's June now! I'll have to get an archive page for May's posts set up this weekend

Anyway, last night I played more Sonic Adventure. It was fantastic. I carried a statue of an NPC around and caused traffic problems, and then I dropped Knuckles in a glitch void trying to turn a corner in Station Square and he died. I really enjoyed myself.

It was fun to start the Knuckles levels, though. I've never been this far in this game before, and going around and finding the emeralds is relaxing.

May 31st, 2022

It was two games again yesterday, with the first up being the Neo Geo Pocket Color version of The Last Blade. I never played this on the real NGPC, but the Switch ports of these games hold up pretty well. The gallery, where you unlock and buy scrolls with story information, seems like it could be a good time sink, too. Yesterday, though, I was most impressed with how much of the look and atmosphere of the "normal" version of the game carried over to the cutesy portable. These stage intros are really nice!

I played some more before bed Sonic Adventure, too. I went back to Sonic's levels and did the snowboarding stage, which was really striking in that it makes it clear that Sonic is well able to slam into piles of debris head-on at high speed and survive, but dies if he touches a spike for a millisecond. It's an unfair life that a hedgehog leads.

May 30th, 2022

I played two games yesterday, with Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight being up first, mostly because I did not feel like washing the dishes. I played three songs. Since it had been a few weeks since I last played, I played them very badly, too! It was fun, though. Sega makes solid music games.

After that, before bed, I played Sonic Adventure again. I only played one level because Tails was giving me motion sickness, but I'll stay further back from the computer screen for my next round.

May 29th, 2022

Yesterday, I played Sonic Adventure. I've been having trouble focusing on games and TV lately, but this one has nice colors and controls like grease in a frying pan. It's good stuff.