Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Haven’t had a whole lot of time to practice, but I’m working on charge partitioning. Managed to get double ball a few times in a match.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - After getting demoted to Expert I went on an even worse losing streak for a bit, but I seem to be clawing my way back now. It’s just sample size, or so I keep telling myself.

Splatoon 3 - Grand Festival was rad. Not the Turf War part, Turf still sucks, but it was the second best concert I saw all week.

Conscript requires a lot of time set aside to play it in order to make any progress, so instead, lately I’ve been playing Divinity: Original Sin. I had put it down toward the end of act 2, and it took a good deal of looking at a walkthrough to figure out how to progress from where I left off, since the quest log only helps so much, but I wrapped up act 2 and got to act 3. As combat-heavy as this game is, I do really enjoy the cut of Larian’s jib, even when it’s not as good as Baldur’s Gate 3.

I also picked up Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, or the MvC Collection for short. I never had a Dreamcast back in the day, and I had probably only played a couple of hours of these games in arcades or via emulators in my entire life, so I never got to dig into these games before. I put together a ratio team using Justin Wong’s 2024 ratio list of Dhalsim/Juggernaut/Thanos and even won some matches online with it, so that felt good. For a high-tier team, I do want to avoid as many of the mainstay characters as possible, not just because I’m not a rushdown player but also because it’s more interesting to see anyone other than Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel on screen, so I might run Dhalsim/Dr. Doom/Cable. I don’t imagine I’ll stick with MvC2 for too long, since Skullgirls is, in my opinion, just a better MvC2, but it’s fun seeing what I might have been playing if I had a Dreamcast in the early 00s instead of a Gamecube, especially with the next fighting collection on the way too. I also tried out X-Men: Children of the Atom in this collection, and boy can I not figure out how to stop the CPU-controlled Colossus. That dude expertly dodges my ice beams, seemingly can’t be stopped once his armor is up, and will air grab me the second I try to super jump out of the corner.

I just got into death duel VR wich is a PVP VR physics based sword fighting game where if you get hit on the arm it gets disabled or legs or spine… it’s been pretty fun. I also got back in skyrim VR with my conjuration build that just revives my last strongest enemies as undead thralls so i have 3 companions fighting for me. :)

War Within

Yakuza 3 Remastered

I’m about halfway through it, so I probably won’t finish this week, but I’m really enjoying it. I’m hoping to finish it before the new Zelda game releases, which is what I plan to dive into next.

I also plan to play a few indies as well, so please reply with any you think are worth checking out. I have a list, but I’m always up for recs.

Space Marine 2. By the Emperor, what a blast!

Morrowind via OpenMW and the IHeartVanilla mod list (minus the texture pack and lighting fix).

What a fascinating game. If you can get past the fact that every action is a background dice roll, the game is so intriguing. Everybody has paragraphs of things to talk about, and can clue you in to small happenings around the world that aren’t necessarily quests

The couple of dungeons I have been in have been pretty large, and are not linear in the way that Skyrim was. I haven’t been far, but there has already been plenty of enemy and environment variation. Not the prettiest game I’ve played, but the world is enthralling

I will say, this game is hard. The fights have been quite challenging so far. I’m having to take completely different approaches to things than I would normally, but I appreciate that

I also play a round of Crazy Taxi here and there for something a little more mindless. Honestly I don’t think I’ve played anything in 2 or 3 days. Haven’t been feeling so hot

Still on Touhou 8 (Imperishable Night), and then, vivid/statis, of which its latest tournament quarterfinals tiebreaker just came out and I was far no less impressed with how I managed to almost teeter on gaining any Fails on the Middle Chart, just a few Goods, due to my laptop sometimes overloading on RAM while the application’s running.

As for the former, I’ve been taking small steps on figuring out routes for Keine’s second spell card attack on Normal Difficulty; on Easy, my new run-ender’s on Reisen’s second spell card attack, where shotgun bullets fade in and out whenever those blood red eyes periodically flash.