What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Finally broke off of Starfield and started in on Cyberpunk. I actually bought it back on release and really enjoyed what I played, but ultimately decided to take up GoG on their refund offer, as my computer was barely enough to run it on the lowest settings at 30FPS, so I figured I may as well wait until both the game and my PC were better.

I have to say, I'm very much enjoying it and I love the design of the city, but I have probably two main complaints:

1. Everything is so fucking grim. Coming from Starfield, where everything feels bright and optimistic, Cyberpunk feels cynical, dirty and generally just dark. Much as the world feels more alive than Starfield (though each feel a little bit hollow, but that's the nature of the open world, I think), I find myself longing for the forward looking futurism of Starfield.

2. Sex. Sex everywhere. I like sex, I don't consider myself a prude, but literally everything is some allusion to sex or sex itself. Every Ad in the game is overtly sexual, walk into several buildings to find huge dildos lining the walls, many characters sport sexed-up clothing and I accidentally hired a prostitute at one point. It's all fine, but it feels a little much.

That said, I'm really having a good time with the story and wandering around the city is very fun. I often find myself just walking through the city rather than driving, because there's so much to take in it feels like.

Generally, when I have a big game like this, I also like to play something smaller, so I'm also splitting some time with Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3; been playing a little bit of 2 on my PS Vita via a port of fHeroes2 and firing-up 3 here and there between my Laptops and Steam Deck. I honestly can't decide which game I enjoy more. I really like the mod Succession Wars for Heroes 3, but alas, it's far from finished.

Lastly, I'm very eager to spend some time with the new Cultic map, Interlude. Cultic is my favorite new Boom Shoots from the last 6 years of the Boom Shoots revival and so I'm chomping at the bit for more; to see a new map drop out of nowhere has got me excited.

I played Breath of the Wild when it originally came out and rage quit on lightning ganon.

I recently started playing it earlier this year when my 4 year old son asked to play 'big zelda' (we've already completed Link's Awakening remake together several times).

He's really good at Links Awakening and can handle everything apart from a few bosses. I anticipated botw would be too hard and he'd just enjoy exploring the plateau. He's really taken to the concept of freeing the divine beasts and Hyrule.

We've been playing on and off for about 6 months and we're up to our last divine beast, the one that has lightning ganon at the end. In a way I feel a strange parallel with the champions in the story who fell 100 years ago. I too, failed last time, but this time I have to prevail!

I’ve been tooling around in Cyberush bomb funk on my Steam deck for the past few weeks, and it’s a worthy successor to JGR/JSRF, but with lots of little tweaks/additions to make it feel new and fresh. Movement feels great, especially with the addition of the boards/bikes and the off-board tricks. The stages are lots of fun to roam around, with tons of little secrets and self-made challenges (“I bet I could get up there by doubling back on the wall ride”).

@kfwyre will be happy to know there is another strong convert to the Steam deck among us. I have been using it with either an Xbox controller and the dock hooked up to my TV, or as a handheld (which may actually be better?). It’s solved the #1 issue I had with gaming which was “my computer is upstairs in my office, and I don’t wanna be on it after work”. Been loving it so far

I started playing Dragon Quest Builders 2 and damn I'm already addicted to just building stuff and not even doing quests haha, I am a big fan of Minecraft but games like this that actually give you quests to build stuff and have NPC's enjoy what you build just hit the right spot for me! Also weirdly reminds me of MySims Kingdom Wii

Still really just Starfield. I sail the space lanes, traveling the stars aboard my mighty vessel, the good ship, The Packrat. She's not the most agile ship, but if you strap big enough guns on a barn, even a barn can be a formidable weapon!

I still play Stardew Valley (for around 2 months now?). I'm close to the end of second year which is kinda a soft-ending of the game. I will probably stop actively playing the game after that (for extended time, say a year). I play on Stea Deck.

In the meantime I installed Black Mesa on my desktop and continued where I left around a year ago - office complex. Now I'm on a rail. So far it is really good remake of OG Half-Life. The original is still better for me, though :-)

I took a break from Baldur's Gate 3 at the conclusion of Act 2 to dip into Cyberpunk 2077 and give 2.0 a whirl. The update is fantastic, the new progression systems are very satisfying and there's a lot of really welcome QoL improvements to go with. Suffice to say, I'm now locked into my 3rd playthrough and expect to kick off Phantom Liberty on my next day off work.

Also, you can wield a frickin' sword while riding a bike now!

Lies of P, I can't sing this game's praises enough.

It took me by total surprise. I'm a huge Soulsborne fan and heard that it's similar in gameplay. It's a dark take on "Pinocchio Souls".

It's quite literally a Soulsborne game that's just as polished and expansive as a FromSoft title. It feels a lot like Bloodborne in its atmosphere and gameplay. It has a bit of Sekiro built in with perfect parries, but it's not the sole option in combat, just a tool in the toolkit. It's incredibly unique in that you can mix and match weapon blades and handles, so if you like the stats from a blade and the moveset from a handle, you can do that!

A minor thing that I appreciated as well, is that the story was somewhat straightforward. In comparison, I finish a Dark Souls game, and I barely understand what on Earth it is I just accomplished.

I'm heading into NG+ next and can't wait to play through it again.

I got Phantom Liberty and today got to the point of actually doing it. I think Cyberpunk in general feels a whole lot better to play, but the expansion thus far has been particularly fun.

I played on release and reviewed it as a seriously flawed project. At the time, I came away thinking there was a core of good work buried in a pile of junk. Now it's more like a core of good wrapped up in functional systems. Not the greatest I've ever seen but serviceable, which allows for what's good to get more of the attention. Pretty happy with it.

Along with that I ended up starting over in Armored Core VI, because a mod came out that changes the game in ways I ended up actually enjoying more than the base game. The changes made are pretty comprehensive and go at some of the most fundamental aspects of how the game works. The modder has been fast and thorough which is always nice to see. In general combat lasts longer, weapons are made more unique to each other, and the way it reworks en recharge means whole other considerations when building your mech. Small enemies are more durable, bosses are less of a spike because of that. To me it feels like iterating more directly on prior games' setups - VI did that, sorta, but created really a very different system from any of the others. The mod keeps what's new but changes where the emphasis goes - staggering is made less central to the experience, which personally I very much liked.

I just beat the main story of Cassette Beasts! It was a delightful turn-based monster collector that came out recently. Very excited for the DLC coming out in two days!

The monster designs are charming and the way the battle system works has been quite fun to tinker with. The post-game so far seems impressive - not as robust as Monster Sanctuary I think, but still with plenty to do. It’s much more geared towards the typical Pokemon-style postgame of hunting rare monsters and shinies (“bootlegs” in Cassette Beasts), but it does seem to have some fun post-game quests and secrets too that I’ve only just begun to uncover, including some extensive side quests! And I’m having fun just training up my monsters and collecting em all, of course!

I very much recommend it, speaking as a huge fan of turn-based rpgs and monster collectors. It and Monster Sanctuary are both standouts in the genre to me and the first games that felt like serious contenders to Pokemon, if not even even better than Pokemon! Super fun and charming experiences and extremely worth the asking price for each!

So this week I watched Majuulaar's video on the King's Field Series. Those who know me know that I hate soulslike games. The King's Field series is the grandfather of Dark Souls; they were the games that From Software first started working on and it was the primary inspiration for Demon's Souls. After watching more than two hours on the series, I decided to try it out by picking up an emulator and playing the last one, King's Field IV.

And much to my surprise, it kind of clicked. I kind of love how it doesn't hold your hands and just let's you explore the lands, how it makes exploration a risk because one of the worst things you can encounter is the unfamillar. I enjoyed it in spite of it being a game that will literally kill you instantly within a single step at the very beginning. Part of it, I think, is the simplicity of the game. Most of the buttons are used for simple movement; there's just one button for attacks, one for interaction, one for magic, and one for a menu. That's basically it. It does lose some points for the unintuitive controls for looking up and down, but that's something that was common for the time and every From Software first person game had those same controls.

But unfortunately that wasn't the full story. Watching that video actually made me want to play another From Software game that I've already owned, Evergrace. And so I did. But other than the music, the game ended up being everything I hated about soulsborne games. You've got the same suckerpunch combat, but there is no dodge so it feels dramatically worse. And of course, every enemy takes a ton of hits before they go down. Maybe the worst thing about the game is the elemental weakness system where your attacks are more likely to heal an enemy than to hurt them, so you'll be constantly switching weapons. There are no experience points, only equipment that largely must be purchased. This basically makes half of the gameplay looking through the inventory and solving inventory puzzles. You might fail or make things much more difficult for yourself if you miss a key item somewhere. The thing that bugs me the most about it is that most of the game can actually be easy if you know what you're doing, so figuring it out isn't really satisfying. The only thing keeping you going is to see what is coming up next, because the music and art and story is very unique and legitimately compelling, but the gameplay just holds it back hard. I know that King's Field is going to get like this the further I play but might be worse because the first person perspective will make things more easily missed.

I also played another game: Musashi Samurai Legend. It's another game I played in my youth. Sadly, it didn't take me long before I realized why I didn't get very far. In some ways it's much more charitable but in others it's a pain in the rear. Combat is fairly easy, but it's just plain bad; enemies take a ton of damage before they go down, you've only got one extremely simple combo, and they throw scores of the same enemies at you over and over again, often in groups which makes your blocks useless because you can only block attacks coming from one direction, but you'll probably be stuck in the same attack combo all the time anyways. There is also a heavy attack you can use, but it almost always misses, even on stationary targets. But the hardest enemy is actually the camera, because like pretty much every action game of the time it's too close and so you can't see when you're being attacked behind you.

I think at this point it's fair to say why I don't like soulslike games; they're just too similar to the terrible action games I played when I was young. To me those attacks with long windups will always be associated with badly designed games with tons of padding to them.

I also played Dawn of Mana, a game that I didn't get to play when I was young. I honestly don't remember any kind of advertising for it; it got overshadowed by a lot of other things. Square Enix was still fairly prolific in this timeframe so I guess it was easy to miss. But I'm pretty amazed at how good this game looks and sounds. The localization team went all-out because the English voice actors do a fantastic job. And the visuals and sound looks utterly fantastic; it's a beautiful game! The combat looks good so far, but I'm very early in the game, so I can't judge it just yet. I will say, though, that there's a ton of physics simulations, so it's a fairly technologically advanced game for it's time.

Playing through Drill Dozer and Final Fantasy VI. Drill Dozer has really surprised me, it's a ton of fun and a really unique game. I wish I had a rumble pack to experience that part of it (playing the ROM on my Analogue Pocket). Final Fantasy VI is great as well, love the art style, although I do find that it can be hard to see things (for example, caves blend into the tileset on the overworld very easily). The cool down meters are in the battles are interesting, not sure how I feel about them yet (I did see you can disable them).

Last Call BBS and Möbius Front '83. I buy Zach games for the main game but stay for the Solitaire. :-)

Anyway, Last Call BBS is fun. I mean, have you ever programmed a virtual factory floor to make authentic 20th century food for theme park visitors far in the future, using patch bay and cables inside a game you fetched from a virtual warez forum, inside a made up retro computer simulator?

Bought the Baten Kaitos remaster, I owned/borrowed the games at various points in the past but never sat down to play them for long, just got overwhelmed by the card game elements. This time I was already in a card game mood, so was down for all the mechanics this time. Combat is fun if not a little stressful to quickly place cards and build hands (you get bonus damage for laying down cards in pairs/3 of a kind, etc or in straights) also having your heal cards be able to affect the whole board, can't tell you how many times I accidentally healed an enemy.

As far as the story goes, it's kinda hilarious and refreshing having a protag who is just an irredeemable asshole the party has to deal with. Him taking one look at the allied castle being under siege and him just saying "yeah, nah, I'm going home" had me in a laughing fit.

I'm playing Outer Wilds.

I know it's Wednesday so I'm a little late, but thought that I would write this as I feel close to completing the game. I have learned a lot -- and am both excited and afraid to see what's coming next.

I expect my next post will be a reflection on the ending. Exciting times.

Finally finished ToTK. Put in ~235hrs and loved all of it. Didn't even 100% it either lol. I got all the shrines and light roots though. Did roughly 3/4 of the side quests and missed 3 side adventures. Upgraded full outfit sets really helped, especially in the final boss battle. This is probably the best game in the series.

Marvel Snap. Finally hit infinity season rank and beat infinity in conquest mode. Been playing since the beta period. So this was easily the best I've done in any season thus far.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales remastered on PC. Only played a bit, but enjoying it so far. There's a weird issue where you can't start challenges under certain conditions. It's pretty annoying, but it's nice to be back in this universe. It's been in my backlog for months now, but I've only had time for TotK and Snap. I don't have a PS5, so Spider-man 2 will have to wait for awhile :/

Been playing Dwarf Fortress a lot again lately. Bought the Steam version. There's just so much depth to the game. I guess that's the same for sandbox games. Gameplay aside just feeling in awe of someone who would only make one game their whole life's work. That's just plain crazy and admirable.

I've been playing a lot of F-Zero 99. Before the game launched I hadn't touched my Switch in years, and I've been having a blast since returning. I'm a big fan of the first three games, so of course I had to go back to play an updated version of the original except with online and against 98 other humans.

Starfield. Again. I finished most of the main story, just need to do ng+, which I will do when the jump is my last achievement, or three, there are some that will just take time.

There was a thread on /r/starfield that was asking how we rate the game and I've been thinking about it. My first run was easily 10/10. I dodged sooo many bugs, and generally forgive inconsequential ones like characters floating through walls/chairs.

Then I did a new save and took longer. The game has a decay issue akin to Skyrim where it seems like bigger saves are a bit more unstable. It isn't any more crashy than other games I've played, where you just get something weird, but I just got crash #4 and an infinite loading screen. The vault in the Crimson Fleet quest required me to clear my memory via reboot and read three tapes to fix the quest (they're relevant). The game is falling apart in important Bethesda ways. Nothinf as bad as a distant deer spawning in the sky every time, but things take longer to load it seems.

I think for a Bethesda game it's a 10/10. They perfected their goals of procedural quests, spacial exploration, and creating a pretty great sandbox. I love this game.

Generally, it's an 8. Excellent content, great sandbox, nice visuals, but unoptimized as shit, and has more than Bethesda's typical bugs in ways that break important parts of the game, like major quests and events.

I have mostly been playing games with my kids.

Kid2 likes Stardew Valley, and we're just about through the first season on our farm together. I've been going to the mine and swinging swords; she has been creating a lovely field of veggies and fishing. It feels like there is a fair amount of depth to the game; I only just realized you can give gifts to people to make them like you more. It has been an enjoyable experience so far.

Kid3 likes Satisfactory (and is playing a copy gifted by @kfwyre, thanks again!) and has built the most delightful spaghetti factory that I have seen. There is almost no rhyme or reason to the placement of anything - all the machines in the main factory areas are just sitting out in a field, with the wildest array of conveyer belts I've ever seen. Things cross and recross and go through each other and helping him to do anything is hilarious. He has started building a huge indoor factory to start housing some of the new items; his bauxite -> aluminum factory is completely different from everything else. We are currently building a train around the whole map so he can take people on tours of his whole world. He has also asked me to show him how to work out the math for his factory using a spreadsheet, so I'm definitely looking at this as a learning opportunity.

My PS Plus Essentials subscription is running out and I don't plan on renewing it since Sony raised its price by $20. I'm currently playing Sackboy: A Big Adventure since I'm a sucker for 2D and 3D platformers. Enjoying it quite a bit.

After it, I plan on starting God Of War.

I've been rotating through Hollow Knight and Slay the Spire for single player games and CS2 for multiplayer!

CS2 is a blast, I haven't played CSGO in ~5 years but CS2 fits like a glove.

Something over a month ago I asked a friend to give me a piece of media to get into, and on her recommendation started playing Genshin Impact, which she enjoys a lot but has almost no one to talk to about it. I knew nothing about it other than that it’s a gacha game with pretty characters. My only previous experience with gacha games being that Kingdom Hearts mobile game, I went in with very low expectations and got pretty blown away. Turns out it’s an open world 3D exploration game with a pretty good story, loveable characters, incredible music and a very enjoyable combat system – very much scratching that same itch that BotW/TotK did. I am definitely noticing some issues with the game now (main things: domains are in this weird spot where they’re challenging enough that I need to pay attention but at the same time get boring quite quickly, and the gacha system itself means getting the characters you enjoy might require waiting months) but over-all I’m having a great time so far. In terms of progress, I hit AR45 a few days ago and just finished the main quest in Inazuma, but I have a lot of stuff still left to clear in the first three regions.

Working on my backlog;

Recently finished Yakuza 0 with its buggy mess, but it was a fun ride - I’m tempted to get the entire series (also have 4 in my backlog) but looking at the total # of games I already have, in good.

I am absolutely horrible at it, but Tekken 7 has its claws in me (again). Just one more round!

Also playing Titanfall 2 single player, it’s a fun ride!

And also trying out Tooth and Tail; i don’t get the gameplay loop yet, but it’s a fun little game so far!

Taking a break from Baldur's Gate 3 to play through Sea of Stars and Cocoon on Game Pass

I'm not in love with the pace and aesthetic of Cocoon but the puzzles are so damn good. The whole gimmick are these orbs that you can carry but also that you can enter and explore the worlds within them. It is so expertly crafted that a very overwhelming thing becomes very intuitive

I loved The Messenger so I had to check out Sea of Stars and so far, so good! I don't have a lot of nostalgia for this sort of Chrono Trigger-y type of game but I like the characters and world!

Finished Starfield last week. It was good and well worth the money spent with 200 hours logged. Though experience soured a bit towards the end due to increasingly unstable save and wrapping up a story that I didn't care for.

Started on Cyberpunk 2.0 with a new save. I never finished the last save 3 years ago, opting to wait until the game was more stable. So far it has been really fun and Cyberpunk continues to amaze me of the world that CDPR was put together. Unfortunately I really don't like bullet sponge shooters, and Cyberpunk is even worse than Starfield, so I am eagerly awaiting the mod HARDCORE22 to be updated which makes combat much more realistic.

Just finished Dead Island 2 and I enjoyed it a lot . There was a moment where I felt like is was going a little too long and then it wrapped up. I kinda wish the ending wasn't so open ended because I'm afraid we won't get a good conclusion since they had so many problems with development. It felt really good after playing Dying Light 2 and being disappointed. I'm not saying it's great but it is pretty fun .

I was gifted a copy of Starfield and I feel it is one of the worst games I have played this year. I think that may be a bigger issue since I think that all Bethesda games have the ability to take you out of the moment with such trivial things. I wish it was as flowing and as intuitive as other games.

Edit: I accidentally said Dying Light 2 instead of Dead Island 2

Just reached Malenia, Blade of Miquella. I'm dreading the fight against her. The whole Haligtree sucks; I had an easier time against the first boss than the enemies.

The Fire Giant can go get bent. Hate that thing.

Just beat Sonic Adventure 2 and currently playing Sonic Adventure DX. Thinking of replying the whole 3D Sonic series, but don't know if I want to commit that time.

SA2 remains one of my favourite games of all time. And now my 3 year old loves Shadow, to my wife's chagrin.

Currently playing FS2020, RS3 and a MUD called Legends of the Jedi.

These are all chill games that leave me free to explore and just do what I want.
It's the chillness that I need at the moment after a long day of work :)

Darksiders 2 on Steam deck after playing through half the game on the Switch. Its just so comfortable to hold and running at 45fps feels like night and day in comparison.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been great through remote play, easy to pick up and play a few rounds with minimal commitment

Picked up my Vita again this week to play Hotline Miami. Wasn’t expecting to get hyper-focused on the game and finish it this week but here we are. Left off on Chapter 4 and then just stayed until the final chapter haha. Great story, great graphics, great soundtrack and alright controls. Hotline Miami is definitely best enjoyed on a PC with a keyboard and mouse but I think Dennaton Games did their best translating the PC controls to the Vita. Some levels were more difficult on the Vita since you don’t have a mouse with which you can look beyond your normal POV and continue interacting with the world but you can make do. Definitely recommend people try this out!

Besides that, I’ve been playing some CS 2. Used to play CS:GO a lot in the mid-2010s and then just sorta stopped when I went to uni. I’d occasionally play Arms Race and Deathmatch but never a casual or competitive match. I’m pretty disappointed by the lack of Arms Race in CS 2 but pleasantly surprised by the native Linux version. Performance is good (though the Vulkan renderer could be better) and it hasn’t performed any worse than CS:GO did under Linux. Still haven’t played a casual or competitive match, just been playing Deathmatch as well as a few Wingman games. Really hope they add Arms Race back, or gun games in general. Made it super easy to just pick up and hop onto a game without having to dedicate time for a competitive match.

Rail of Möbius

The cost of shouldering a burden by yourself, being able to rely on others, and having the acceptance to let go; these are the themes I came away with from this timeloop visual novel that circles between highschool manhua levity and the horror of continuously enduring the death that comes from each loop. The time travel in this is perception-based, but internally consistent within those limits and the story as a whole runs on the emotional side. Something done here that I haven't seen before is the main couple being a pair of childhood friends who are so in sync that they have zero romantic interest in each other, but they would without question spend the rest of their lives together. I would also like to give extra points for having a rich ice queen tsundere that is actually believable.

I stayed up until 4 in the morning to wrap up this 7-ish hour VN, so I think it's quite gripping for the price of admission. The translation does run into grammar and spelling issues, but the story and characters are quite understandable. There's a demo for it, so give it a go if you're interested.

Itorah

Another Fanatical bundle grab. This is a nice looking but otherwise mediocre 2D platformer for just so many reasons:

• Enemies drop a pittance of money. Once this is understood, there's no reason not to just run past everything which makes the 5 hour speedrun achievement easily gained.
• Anytime you attack, there's a chance for a random crit that deals the power of 2 hits which roots you in place for the length of 2 hits anyways. So besides the fact that this "crit" makes you vulnerable and whiff, it also triggers when just interacting with puzzles and other random environmental items to pointlessly waste time.
• The map doesn't mark anything, there's no fast travel, and frankly the world is just empty. The only collectibles are for HP upgrades (HP Bar, Flask amount, Flask power) or Stamina (next bullet point)
• There's a stamina meter for 4 things which is pretty pointless besides making the experience a pain in the ass inconvenience: Sprinting (easily circumvented by sprint jumping), Rolling (should only need one to dodge), Aerial plunge attack (which makes a little sense because it's the safest attack, but you're forced to wait for the stamina to recover during platforming segments), and the Aerial uppercut attack (really just pointless to restrict with stamina).

Really, I think the only fun I got out of this was carrying the slope sliding momentum into a double jump uppercut air dash. Most of that is unlocked later in the game, so even that isn't worth playing for.

I've been playing the Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3 Insane Difficulty mod. As the name suggests, the mod ramps the difficulty up significantly to the point that veterans of the original PSX game will have a hard time in even the earliest encounters. Storyline encounters now also scale with your party's level so grinding for experience and job points won't help you clear a tough battle. The only way to succeed is to pay attention to every aspect of the game's deep combat system and carefully plan out your party's growth. Although I consider myself pretty good at the original, I've had to play a much more defensive style, methodically picking off enemies who can revive or heal their teammates while avoiding or incapacitating the ones who can knock my party members out in one hit (which is most of them).

Jobs have been overhauled with new skills and stat growth for each class. I haven't gotten very far yet, but aside from some minor changes (apparently there's another 1v1 duel against a powerful opponent), the story is mostly untouched.

I don't play fan-made difficulty mods of games very often, but I'm enjoying myself so far. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the original to the point that replaying it has become trivially easy.

Reading all the factorio friday facts has gotten me back into satisfactory. I'm really pumped for the factorio expansion but in the meanwhile it had been a while since I check out satisfactory. I haven't yet played with blueprints and I feel like that's addressing why I used to bail in satisfactory around aluminum. Just rebuilding the same factory with different inputs was getting tiring. but is not so bad with the couple blueprints.

Playing with a friend on the desert start, which we haven't done yet either and has a different feel with how spread out the resource nodes are. We're currently on the experimental update 8 because we wanted to try some of the new stuff, but it really feels like early access when we started well before with numerous bugs/crashes. Nothing game breaking, we had to a few times bring the save into the save editor and move equipment chests/vehicles out from under the world, but that is all. Seems vehicles give the most crashes, they often get stuck with the wheels/engine on the game's ground but the upper part of the vehicle on the platforms in the correct place on server load. We haven't done trains yet but are just about there, so hopefully they are working well.

Overal still really fun and am enjoying blueprint building and just getting everything rolling again.

Decided to load up my Virtual Console copy of Pokémon Crystal, and do the color challenge (only use Pokémon with the color blue in their design). Best Falkner (first gym) last night, and... Oh my gosh I didn't realize just how rough Gen 2 was.

Fun fact: Zubat only learned a flying type move (Wing Attack) at Level 27, and it evolves at 22. And until it learns Bite at Level 12, its only offensive move is Leech Life. So uh. Grinding that is going to be fun? Meanwhile, Phanpy only appears in the morning, which for some reason is 4 am to 10 am?? So had to reset the clock to get that. Meanwhile, Hoppip is useless until it learns Tackle at Level 10. So I'm just... Gonna put that one in the daycare to get a Jumpluff if I decide I want a Jumpluff.

But the discovery that made me stop for the night last night: Crystal doesn't have Mareep. That is pure BS in my opinion. I am seriously tempted to use PKSM to hack in two Mareep to breed at the Daycare, but that might just be my frustration at the fact Caterpie/Metapod was my only option for battling Bellsprout that isn't super tedious. 4/6 team members are weak to grass. But now that it's a beautiful Butterfree, maybe it won't be as painful and the urge will fade.

Still, looking forward to seeing what other discoveries I'll make about the unnoticed horrors of Gen 2! (Seriously, why the heck do Zubat need to wait so long to learn Wing Attack?? Why did it take until like Gen 7 to learn it at a more reasonable level like 13!?)