2026-03-06

Sometime a go I decided to delete my retro achievements account. It got too annoying and was starting to affect how and what I was playing. It was fun until it wasn't I guess.

I was mostly using it as a game's log but I have Backloggd for that.

Still a bit on the play short games thing, I decided to play through Pax Corpus. I'd heard it's bad but how bad could it be?

It was really bad.

I never thought much about it but now I can see that the problem with playing terrible games is that those games are terrible and I don't want to actually play them.

My favorite thing about it is that I could never land all three hits of the basic punch-punch-kick attack combo. Seems the enemies are invulnerable during the hit animation and no matter how many times I tried, the last kick never hits them.

My second favorite thing is that it uses passwords instead of save files for progress. In 1997. On the PlayStation.

To be fair, it wasn't all bad. The third stage has a neat ambient track that I liked a lot.

But that was it really.

You should not play Pax Corpus.

The thing about it, though, is that it took me a month to go through that game. And at that point I may as well play something longer. So I decided to replay Final Fantasy VIII.

FF8 is not among the most liked in the series but I think it's a neat game. I know people talk about the Junction system being complicated but I disagree. I have to admit I didn't understand it the first time I played it but I didn't understand any English back then.

That's my excuse. I think it's a valid excuse.

Now, though, I get how fun it can be to junction Drain magic to Status Attack and heal after every physical attack.

I'm currently half-way through disc 2, at the point where I get a little bit of freedom to explore the world map so I'm trying to find the cards and items to upgrade weapons and get the cool magic. The map feels a bit boring, specially compared to the FF7 and 9. It's very flat.

One thing that annoyed me was how I remembered just enough to know the areas with secrets but couldn't quite find the right spots. So I spent the first part of my play through hitting X everywhere on the screen trying to find hidden draw points.

But I'm having fun and it's been a very nostalgic experience. I mentioned it was my first Final Fantasy but at some point it also became a sort of christmas game for me. I'd go spend the holidays at my grandma's and I remember multiple years where I'd play some of it while there. To this day I still associate the Blue Fields or Balamb Garden songs to christmas at my grandmother's house.

Now, something that happened recently.

Someone gave me a notebook.

I don't do much hand writing. Maybe because I haven't had a notebook in some time.

Speaking of paper material. I redid the paper stuff page here. Does not look quite right yet. Looks a bit darker than I intended, I'm thinking it needs tool tips to help identify what's what and only after scanning and updating here realized I should have done the whole header part of the page too.

But I got a new notebook now so next update I'll try again and see if I can get the index to look better.

2026-01-19

Last year I spent last half of December playing through Hollow Knight. Was great. I liked the atmosphere it has and the feel of some of the areas towards the edge of the map.

There are some things I didn't do, like the last Colosseum fights, but I was starting to feel tired of it. I wasn't bored, but I got to that point were I had already seen most of the map and was just hunting little bits and passageways and I just wanted the game to be over.

Still, 26 hours and around 176 deaths later (40 or so of those were against the Watcher Knights) I finished the game and was left with a thought.

The player character looks like a character that ducks. It took me way too long to stop pressing down while trying to avoid incoming projectiles.

So, after that I decided to play some shorter games. Like Dino Crisis 2!

I first played it many years ago and hated it. But this time it kind of clicked with me.

Immediately after starting it the game feels more fast paced than the previous one. I really liked the movement here, very fast and satisfying. It's also a great looking game. It has cool backgrounds. Certainly didn't remember this looking as good as it does.

The story is a very special kind of nonsense that everyone should experience. Something about time travel. I'm not sure I understood why things happen but I don't think it matters much here. Just an excuse to shoot dinosaurs.

The weapons are fun. I specially enjoyed using the dual machine guns. Didn't get to try some of the latter ones. I feel like I wasted a lot of credits upgrading the cartridges size a few too many times. It kind of felt unnecessary. In hindsight, I'm not sure I was ever close to running out of ammo.

At some point there's an underwater level with some platforming. Underwater stuff was a bit annoying. Mostly because it took me too long to realize I had to use the water spraying thing to stun the very fast dinosaurs there. That area also has this door screen.

There's nothing particular there but it's quite ominous looking.

This screen also looked great. Some Comedy's Inferno vibes here.

So yeah, I've changed my mind about this game. Liked it a lot.

2026-01-05

A new year started!

Yeah.

I had a new year's eve dinner with my family. It was eye opening.

Started alright, though. Talked for a bit, had a nice dinner, dessert. Talked a bit more. And then when we were cleaning and getting up somebody mentioned how the Arabs are trying to take over the world and the racism started.

See, apparently they couldn't do it by force so now they're sending people over there to ideologically convert Europe and the United States and move them closer to Islam. I was quite shocked. There's usually an inappropriate comment here or there but this time it was long hateful rants about Arabs, Muslims, Gaza and what not.

At that point I left.

It sucked. Felt genuinely bad about the situation and at this point I don't plan on going to any other family reunion.

Haven't done much else this year so far. Well, there is this new blog page that I'll be using now. Old stuff is available over there on the left.

I also played some stuff but I'll write about that another time.