What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Zaccaria Pinball (Switch)

July 16th, 2025

I'm late posting tonight because I don't actually want to post tonight. It's not so bad, though! I got a lot of sleep catch up last night, and I'll do well tonight, too.

Last night, I thought I'd stay up too long if I played Deathsmiles, so I played Image Striker instead. I really like this game, but the difficulty spike at stage 5 is crazy! Dodging the wall is harder than it sounds. This game also crashes every time I get a game over, which is a bit discouraging.

I played a little bit of the retro tables in Zaccaria Pinball, but only for a few rounds.

After that, I pulled out the "time to go to sleep" big guns, played three rounds of Vampire Survivors on quick play, and slept for 8 hours straight. It was great and I am absolutely starting here tonight.

July 14th, 2025

Yesterday, I kind of vegged out, so my screenshots for today's post are rubbish. I watched a documentary about pinball on Saturday, so I ended up re-downloading Zaccaria Pinball on my Legion Go. I thought that it being heftier than my Switch might make it feel better to play, but hadn't really taken into account how good the rumble would be, or that it just flat out runs smoother. Plus, it has over 4900 achievements on Steam for some God-knows-why reason, so I redownloaded the cheap retro tables and dug in. I didn't focus in on any one table yesterday, but when I get to the score challenges, I'll be a little more specific here. Video pinball is so cool!

I'm trying to play some shmups every day, just to relax and clear my brain out, so I played the PC version of Deathsmiles a little. It has enough different from the Switch version that I'll keep it on its own page. This version has achievements, and the Switch version has some mysterious extra characters, so I'll just keep a different focus for each.

I also started Rusty's Retirement yesterday, a cute bottom-of-the-screen farming game with robots, but I forgot to take a screenshot! I had it on for hours while I did chores and crafts, so I'm kind of frustrated with myself here. I's okay, though. I'll come back to this.

November 3rd, 2024

Yesterday was a sleepy day overall, not just a sleepy morning, so I didn't manage to play much. Before bed, though, I did play four or five rounds of the Time Traveler retro table in Zaccaria Pinball. I didn't do well at all, but it was relaxing.

October 22nd, 2024

I couldn't get it together this morning, so my post today is really late! I did office work, had dinner with family, and then spent 40 minutes browsing a Humble Bundle of Disney cookbooks like a sophisticated adult, and am finally here. Luckily for me, I don't have a ton to write about tonight. I mostly played digital pinball last night, and finished up the achievements for the retro Farfalla table in Zaccaria Pinball. It was fun, and satisfying to see my high scores fall into place as I figured out how to play well!

After that, though, I tried a much lower scoring retro table, Time Traveler, that I think I'll struggle a bit with from last night's attempts. That's not a bad thing, but it feels super easy to not even hit 1,000 points, let alone 20,000.

I kept Merge Pixel running as I tried to get some stuff done last night, too. I made decent progress dragging and dropping this game's little guys, moving ever further away from the halfway point and closer to the end.

October 21st, 2024

Last night, I did some stockpiling and exploration in Metro Quester, clearing the boss I was having trouble with and running into some issues with the next, possibly optional one. I'm pretty steadily able to beat the random battle monsters that gave me issues my last play session, though, so levelling up my party and their weapons does help. This is maybe just a matter of patience.

I tried another pinball table launcher last night, too, going with Zaccaria Pinball on Switch. It had a deal where you could get 40 "retro" tables, which seem very simplified, for 2 dollars, so I picked that up and proceeded to waste tons of time on one called Farfalla. These tables aren't super exciting, but they actually seem like they could be great for before-bed gaming. I'll see how it goes!