I recently bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, with the main goal being to emulate GBA games on the go. It’s been working great, and I’ve replaced a lot of doom scrolling on my phone with picking up this guy instead and playing some Pokemon or other games.

In particular I’ve been playing Pokemon Emerald Seaglass, a ROM hack for Emerald which visually overhauls the game - it looks great! - and adds various QoL improvements, notably a party-wide EXP share available early and running shoes available immediately with an auto-run toggle. I haven’t really played much Pokemon since Gen 6, so it’s been very fun to re-discover the joy of catching Pokemon and collecting gym badges. The fighting gym was a bit rough however given that my two strongest Pokemon when I arrived were Marshtomp and Marill, who both got one-shot by the gym leader’s Heracross. Fair to say I had to do a bit of grinding to get some ‘mons with more favourable types up to a suitable power level.

I’m also playing Goodboy Galaxy, an indie metroidvania released for GBA and Steam in 2024. This game is really cool because it has a lot of modern design sensibilities, as a modern indie game, but runs on a GBA (or GBA emulator in my case). It looks fantastic for a GBA game, the platforming is satisfying, and has a bunch of cute characters! It seems that the main gimmick of the game is exploring the same area multiple times but with different abilities enabled (due to environmental obstacles which disable either your gun, shield, or jetpack). I guess this effectively triples the map size of the game - since the same area visited with different abilities must be explored differently - which seems like a very smart way to expand the game, given that the constraints on overall maps size are probably quite limited due to the GBA.

I’ve also been spending a bit of time with Apotris, which is a very polished Tetris clone. It’s available on many platforms, not just the GBA, but it seems to be a great way to play the classic brick-packing puzzle. As far as I know it supports a bunch of more advanced customisation features, which is probably important for the Tetris experts, but from my perspective it’s just a version of Tetris that feels great to play.

Marathon 2026

Love it. It’s smack dab in the right spot for me. Resources, gunplay, TTK, vibe, etc. I’m worried bungie will screw it up but so far I’m happy. The battle pass is dumb but it’s also just cosmetic.

Actual gameplay is great. Solo/teams/randoms/rook I love it

I've been playing a lottt of Slay the Spire 2! I put in about 25 hours this weekend according to Steam (including Thursday). Finished A10 with Silent and working on some of the new characters now.

I've been really enjoying the improvements they've done so far, it truly feels like a solid sequel to StS. Some of the nerfs on Silent's discard makes me sad, since Calculated Gamble was one of my favorite cards, but with the new Sly keyword, I feel like it was definitely necessary. Bringing back some of the familiar cards but adding more and taking away the broken ones or nerfing them makes a lot of sense. It feels like they've moved some synergies away from the other characters to give them to the new characters, but I think that's fine overall. Necrobinder is really weird to wrap my head around right now, but I've been working on Regent and really enjoying it!

The new relics are pretty fun, some of them seem kinda useless though (the snowflake one and the vambrace one come to mind and probably need buffs), but I've been really enjoying the fact that the boss relics don't really rely on giving energy per turn anymore. I think with the constrained design it makes a lot of the game more interesting revolving around 3 energy per turn.

Outside of StS2, since none of my friends picked it up I've been playing a lot of LoL: Mayhem with them. It's been really fun trying to find broken off meta synergies and I think it's taken over a lot of my league life. I probably won't play anything else since they "solved" arena.

So, around the time of release I picked up Baldur's Gate 3 and proceeded to dump about 80 hours into it, with 60ish on a main campaign and the other 20 spent dicking around rolling new characters and experimenting with classes. I burned out early in Act 3 and hadn't touched it until a month back. With most of the plot forgotten I decided to go fresh with a Dark Urge playthrough and was having fun living deliciously...until I reached Moonrise Towers again at the end of Act 2 and just got completely fed up with how tedious the battles were becoming. I honestly don't have the patience for spending an hour on a single goddamn fight. I'm at a standstill now and debating whether to mod the shit out of it and just infinite fireball my way through to the ending or else drop it for good.

Prior to this I had finished Clair Obscur and that was a truly exceptional experience. Any game that comes after will need to have mastered the Fosbury Flop to get over that bar...

I have sunk about 40 hours into Megabonk over the past few days. It is by far one of the most jank and poorly balanced roguelike survival games I've played. There are a lot of things I don't like about it, such as the absurd difficulty, the Big Rigs-like broken English the game taunts you with when you die, the fact that some of the minibosses have really stupid names like "Scorpionussy", the other fact that the game's leaderboards are filled with people pulling off Goldiloks runs where they get meta weapons, the four mandatory tomes which are XP (level gain), Luck (better Shrine upgrades), Cursed (increased enemy amount and stats upto 600%, a.k.a. also more XP gain) and Chaos (random stat gain per level), and optimal stat/item upgrades from chests, Luck being inconsistent and not working as a stat at times. The list goes on.

Megabonk is like a car crash of straight-up bad game design choices. The Forest stage alone has at least two cheap enemy types that pose run-killing threats, including zombies that are both tankier than your average mob and move absurdly fast, and an exploding bug mob resembling Banelings from SC2 which have an explosion radius that almost matches the range of base unupgraded melee weapons, making them a bastard to kite on any melee character like Ogre or Sir Oofie.

As much as I hate this game at times, it's strangely addicting.

On a different note, I have been playing a bit of Sonic Superstars and I don't yet understand why it gets so much hate. Arzest have done a good job so far. It plays like a classic Sonic game, has a decent roster and has even tried something new with the level designs and Chaos Emerald powers.

I finished Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero last week. Took over 100hrs, but still took me less than a year, which is very good for me and JRPGs.

Which means I started its direct sequel, Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure.

With LoH's "Trails" series, the first game in each arc is just the intro (each arc is at least two games long). It's a long-ass intro, being a full-length JRPG, but still an intro. So that means Azure should be the real meat of the story for this arc. So I'm excited to see how things develop and how they eventually resolve.

Friends and I tried out Marvel Rivals. I don't normally play hero shooters, but it was actually pretty fun. largely had no clue what I was doing, but did get some kills and assists. Prob not something I'll ever go hard on, but something I'd be willing to play here and there.

I paid maybe a buck for Heavy Rain as part of a two-for-one in a recent Fanatical Bundle, and I am over the moon with it. I just started it, but it is everything I love French developers for: aesthetic competence, minimal noise, and batshit crazy concepts. I love that the jankiest part of the game's setup is your human interaction, that the total control you have as a player gets translated in-game to spastic movements as your in-game avatar tries to wake up and take a shower. Yes, the game's controls are weird and awkward to use. I'm like everyone else and hate being inconvenienced by whatever new prompt shows up on the screen, and yet, it adds so much to the experience that it sweetens any saltiness that bothered you before.

I was a big fan of QD since Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, the game where you're the killer and you have to catch yourself as the cop. Brilliant roleplaying. Love the cops dressed with the yellow sash; if only all US police officers can be costumed by the haute couture-minded.

As said, I can not wait for the game to go balls-to-the-wall insane. Can't wait to continue my Quantic Dream lovefest with the other for-a-buck purchase with Beyond: Two Souls.

Speaking of Fanatical purchases, I have also been enamored with Gori: Cuddly Carnage that I paid maybe $2 for in another bundle. It's phenomenal in that it is everything a kid could want: challenging 3D combat rewarded by gratuitous ultraviolence, subversion of family-friendly branding, toy nostalgia from the last 4 decades, anthropomorphic pets, a heavy metal soundtrack with self-referential lyrics, and full-on F-bombs.

It's a delightful fulfillment of a strange vision by a small developer, and as well as the game delivers on performance and showmanship, its weirdness that blessed me with its touch will also ultimately doom it to obscurity.

Last year I decided I wanted to play through the original Half-Life again, as it's been awhile for me. So I played through it on my Steam Deck, loved it and then jumped into Black Mesa, which was pretty great, up until Xen where it falls off a cliff.

But I finished that back in March of 2025 and I've been flitting around to other things lately, until recently when I was bored and looking for something to play, so I thought to myself: Why not play Half-Life 2? It's been ages since I last played it and in spite of loving it, I never did play it as much as I played the original game, given it came out when I was a teenager and I was obsessed with it.

So I ended-up finishing Episode 2 this week having polished off the main game and the first Episode and man, what a fantastic series, though the ending of Episode 2 leaves me disappointed allover again, which sucks. So at this point, I'm going to try and motivate to see if I can finally play Half-Life: Alyx. I have the setup for it, it's just the motivation is lacking; I generally don't want to jump around and do VR in the evenings when I finally have time to game, once the kids are in bed. But I know my wife would like to watch, so that may help.

I'll probably also end-up playing through Portal again as well, since it's also been awhile for me there and it adds some to the story. I do feel a little guilty replaying old stuff I've already played, when there's so many games I really want to play, but just don't feel like.

The Resident Evil Series

For pretty much my entire life, I have always been way too scared to play the horror genre. The closest I can get is DOOM and mild psychological horror games. For some reason, I've been really itching to retry Resident Evil 2 Remake for the 5th time, and wow, I finally was able to beat Leons storyline. Even though it's only one out of four play throughs completed, this game is most likely in the top 10 for me already. I will definitely go back and play the other paths in very near future.

I then completed the Resident Evil 3 Remake afterwards, which was much less scary.

For some reason, I absolutely love the charm of pre-rendered backgrounds used in video games, it's essentially a dead game development method, but I very much want to go back and play the original Resident Evil 2 and 3 because of it. I have already started playing REmake, and I think this is already going to be my favorite game of the series (so far). It is outstanding that this game was released in 2002 and it still looks very visually impressive. I am sure the remastered version of the remake is helping a bit, but what they were able to do on GameCube hardware is very visually impressive, and probably holds up a lot better than the OG Resident Evil 4.

I have also been slowly trudging my way through Fable 1. Honestly, this game has some very impressive world interactions for its time, but the characters models are hideous, and I think the combat is pretty terrible too.

Finished Prison Escape Simulator yesterday. It was so much fun. I don't know what it is about these low budget, silly, simulator games but they have an addictive gameplay loop and this one was a lot of fun. Something about digging a big hole and getting loot and selling it to upgrade your tools/stats. It's simple and highly effective and entertaining.

The only part that sucked was I was doing one of the challenges where you have to do it in one shot and can't save, and had a bug where the guard came back earlier than the timer when I was 80% complete so I had to do the whole thing again. Which takes like 2-3 hours to do in one go

Finished Kindergarten 3. I enjoyed this. I really like this series. I thought 2 was better though. I didn't feel the need to collect all the Monstermon cards this time around. I just looked up the secret ending. Game still has that dark humor & storyline that I enjoy. I forgot this is all in the same week. This game was Wednesday and the next is Thursday. I suppose the final one is Friday. I have that to look forward too.

Started Kirby & the Forgotten Land. I got this because I got one last Nintendo Switch Game Voucher last year before they ended the program. Used it on Pokémon Legends Z-A and this. So far it's fun and chill. Not as high energy and chaotic as DK Banaza, but I'm liking it. Only a few levels in and it doesn't seem too difficult. I imagine I'll be able to 100% fairly easily. I don't mind that. It's Kirby, so the highlight is taking on all the different abilities. The large object transformation is fun too. This is on Switch 2 and the performance is great. Looking forward to the rest of the game

Just beat disk 1 of Sakura Wars. Had to figure out how to get the Sega Saturn emulator to load my save in disk 2, it's definitely not seamless like in PS2. It's a bit of a simple game with a simple story, but it's quite charming.

Have also been trying out the new Diablo 2 dlc, Reign of the Warlock. Man, I had forgotten how much I just absolutely love this game. Everything from the itemisation to the story and the way its presented. I'm kinda cheesing my way through it, as I let my two buff goatman kill the enemy while I loot their corpses. But getting a new class is Diablo 2 is absolutely wild. Conversely, Diablo 3 was absolutely unmemorable for me and I've had zero interest in Diablo 4. There's something specific about 2 that ticks all the boxes for me. And it must obviously still resonate, because 2 got a new class while 3 didn't.

I stumbled across the Hark the Ghoul demo during the Steam Next Fest, and I enjoyed it so much that it inspired me to boot up the PSX emulator on my Steam Deck and finally work my way through all of the King’s Field games I’ve been putting off. I’ve played through the first two so far, which is to say King’s Field (the Japan-only release) and King’s Field II (jp), aka King’s Field (everywhere else).

KF jp - it’s so very… slow. Not like boring, like literally physically a very slow game. I actually turned the emulation speed to 200% once I got the hang of combat lol. Way easier to time things.

The exploration and general unforgiving combat is very DS-coded. It definitely feels like a game with the same bones.

Separately, this game got so brutal at the end. I legitimately don’t know how I could have reasonably beat it without a proper meta endgame build. It feels like it almost forces you to 100% it to get through the final area, especially the last boss.

KF II (jp) / KF - Generally enjoyed it more. Really didn’t enjoy the navigation though, the map felt incredibly same-y, to the point where I still could not reliably find my way back to points in game that I had visited and revisited probably a dozen times. And these weren’t like little hidden dungeons or locked chests, I’m talking entire villages.

Gameplay itself felt fine, minor improvements from the first entry and, while the end game was still very tough, it felt considerably more reasonable.

These were both 3/5s for me, the rough edges of the first game and its ending were salvaged from a 2/5 by the fact that I really enjoyed the navigation and map structure (generally), and the miserable map layout of the second game stopped it from being a 4/5 in my book.

Haven't posted in a while, but I've been playing a lot of...

Survival: Fountain of Youth

This is a survival crafting game set on some made up Pacific Island as your part of a crew that goes off looking for the Fountain of Youth, but of course end up ship wrecked.

I'm one of those people who loves the idea of survival crafting games, but they are all way too grindy. This one, thankfully, is not.

In general, non spoiler, terms. The progression is really nice. There's very little actual gating you from progressing in this game, but there's a lot of stuff to build and craft to over prepare. It never really makes you grind to get all the gear either (except a little mining).

There's a huge complaint on the steam reviews about the number of menus in this game and I get it, the game is menu heavy. There's no animations for harvesting or building like the forest or something, everything is a menu. But it's all done with some reasonable thought put into it. For the early game to mid game you will be deciding how much time, tool durability and stamina you want to put into any action. I felt it was a fun mini game. It does become way less of a problem later when you have gear and food but the menus are definitely a preference thing.

The combat is completely fine, there's base building and a reasonably complicated disease system. I like the cooking and drinking mechanics. The maps are really well thought out and clearly everything is hand placed which is really great to see.

Overall I would recommend it if a. You like survival crafting and b. You can deal with the menus.

I just picked up Hades 2 this weekend on the Switch 2 and have been enjoying it.

I played the original a while ago (I think back when it released?) on PC with a controller and enjoyed it, and Hades 2 basically seems like more of the same, but with new characters, weapons, and story, and a few more mechanics.

I’ve been enjoying it so far, though I don’t think I’ve figured out really how best to do my builds. I haven’t been customizing my Arcana loadouts based on which weapon I’m using, and I only like 3 of the 5 weapons I have unlocked.

Finally fixed some Linux driver issues and got down to playing Resident Evil 9.
I'm just a massive fan of the series and playing this, it feels like finally getting what Capcom envisioned for RE6. This is probably the second worst game to jump into the series with and I'd recommend the remakes or RE7 if you're new. I think of it as Fast and Furious of video game series where anyone can easily jump in, except for when the series needs to wrap up plot lines.

Estimating that I'm about half way through and to sum up my non-spoiler feelings. From the first frame of gameplay, it is stunning and runs smoothly on my mid-level machine. Player movement is a little weird with walk/run speed. You can choose first or third person but I'd stick to the default switching for a first play. Body horror and gore is pretty gnarly and in your face, as well as death animations that are on par with Dead Space. There's two difficulty settings and I do not recommend "classic" if you don't want saving to be a resource (seriously, its easy to forget that there is no auto-save). Old Man Leon still does Leon things in Leon ways and its always a treat to get the one liners or some stupid acrobatics.

Another one from the backlog for me recently, The Walking Dead: The Final Season.
It felt like a good conclusion to the overall set of games having witnessed Clem's growth across them.

I reinstalled Lightyear Frontier because I was looking for something chill to play, remembered I had a great time with it back when played the first playable version back in 2024, so I mostly came back out of curiosity to see what had changed but then saw that it's going to abandon GamePass in less than a week.

The first thing that stood out to me is the world design. I haven't explored that much yet, but there are already way more places that look genuinely stunning. The art style itself feels the same, which is good because I already liked it, but the overall design of the world feels much stronger now. It gives the impression of being a much bigger and more interesting place, even from just the little I've seen so far.

In terms of game feel, it honestly feels very similar to what I remember, and I mean that in a positive way. What does make exploration more fun now is the addition of fuel materials for that extra boost. It adds a little more momentum to moving around the world and makes exploring feel more playful.

What I'm enjoying most right now is still the open world itself, because it's just really pretty to be in, but I also really like the new mission system. It gives the game a nicer sense of direction without ruining the relaxed vibe. I'm also really excited to get further in and start messing with automation. The building is another huge improvement for me. Back in 2024 we just had a few premade assets to place, while now you can actually make a base your own. Being able to build more freely and even paint each panel individually adds a lot.

The only small complaint I have so far is with the fuel items: as far as I can tell, if you have them in your inventory, you kind of just use them. It hasn't actually caused problems because materials seem pretty abundant, but I do feel like I'm wasting a ton by just moving around my base in the mech when I don't really need the boost.

What's interesting is that even back in 2024, I didn't think it felt especially "early access" apart from the limited amount of items and the online being a bit buggy. But now, after only a few hours, it already feels like I have as many options as I used to have near the end of my time with that older version, which is kind of amazing. I haven't tried multiplayer again yet, so I can't compare that part.

Overall, I'm having a really good time with it. I don't really have anything negative to say beyond that one small fuel annoyance. It's just a very pleasant game to come back to, and I'm having fun seeing how much more there is to do now. It still has the same chill feeling I liked before, but with way more depth and freedom.

I'm playing GTA 5 on my Steam Deck.

I played main GTA games since the first installment with exception of GTA 4. And with some experience under my belt, I feel like GTA 5 is lacking.

The game offers a lot, it seems you can kinda live in the city, there are various things to do etc. There isn't incentive to do them though. You pick up phone numbers for people and can pribably hang put with them or challenge them to sports events, but I don't feel like I should (want) to do that. I don't even look out for stunt jumps, I don't run on streets killing enemy gang members, I'm not endangered in the city by anything. The city seems full and empty at the same time. The whole game feels like that, actually.

I'm doing all missions and side kicks the game offers and they seem good, but I don't feel the need/want to play more than that.

I can't point a finger at what it is, but the game is lacking in some way for me.

GTA 1 and 2 vere different, let's not dig them up.

GTA 3 was on the way to success but not there (for me) as I felt like a guy doing stuff he is told in 10 second cutscene containing two sentences and disn't even answer - having others speak and main character being mute was bad choice.

Vice City had the great 80's vibe, it had great atmosphere you know from movies and TV shows.

San Andreas made me feel like being a part of Grove Street Families and brought some RPG stuff in, which was great.

I didn't play GTA 4.

And GTA 5 lacks the atmosphere, it is just a big city with big countryside and nothing to do (while also having means to do a lot of stuff). I don't know, maybe it became too realistic...? Too boring, for sure.

I know there will be many people disagreeing with me and I respect their opinion. I just tried to describe how the game feels for me.

On top of that - Rockstar launcher... This alone would be the reason to write negative review on Steam. There is no way to get rid of it. It wants to connect to Rockstar server every so often (like once every two days) and sometimes it does so while I resume my Steam Deck which freezes the game and I have to restart. If you disable.it using launch parameter, the game won't even turn on after two or three days.

Knowing how the game would feel for me and how the launcher works, I would have either pirated the game or didn't care about it at all. And I haven't pirated a game in like 20 years...

And one more nail to the coffin - anticheat. They added anticheat after 10 years since launch. Why? Why not much earlier? This made the game unsupported on Steam Deck (can be run without anticheat, actually, but probably no online play) and unplayable on Linux PCs as the anticheat is supposed to be turned off only on Steam Deck, not Linux as a whole - I can't confirm as I didn't try and I'm not even willing to try.

I've been thoroughly wrapped up in Enshrouded for weeks now. It's still in Early Access and that definitely shows in places, but I'm really enjoying it.

It's hard, though some of that is probably that I'm impatient and gleefully throw myself into the abyss (literally) and wind up in places with enemies way too tough for me. The towers give me delightfully old-school Prince of Persia vibes (traps and platforming galore).

Movement is pretty darn smooth - I adore the glider, and fast travel is, while tightly limited, still convenient enough. I appreciate enormously that it allows fast travel back to base at almost any time, and saving is easy and automatic, not time- or location-gated.

The building mechanics are the really big draw for me. They're enormous fun and rather Lego in style (both premade parts and teeny-tiny voxels, like building with single-dot Lego bits). I haven't gotten crazy with it yet, but it's clear that you can do almost anything you want. Picking random ruins and restoring them is probably going to become one of my hobbies.

It's also beautiful, gorgeous landscapes and stunning views (especially from the tops of the towers), and downright creepy in the fungal areas. (Caveat: This makes it a VERY HEAVY game - it heats up my rig more than anything else I play, so I have to take the Hot Game precautions. (Open case, extra fan.) Probably would be much better with the settings turned down, but it's so pretty....)

Cute collectible critters. NPCs that'll wander if you let them but can be locked into place (no bodily autonomy for you, silly craftsman!).

And while it is Early Access, I haven't personally run into anything I'd call a bug, it just has bits that are decidedly less-polished than I hope they'll be in the final game. Normally I skip EA until they're ready, but I was gifted this one by a friend, and until it stops feeling completely playable I expect I'll keep at it.

Definitely recommended.