Films

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
[#74 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]

Comics

2000 AD
Prog 2401
Prog 2402

Prog 2450 was released this week, meaning I have exactly 50 issues to catch up on. Considering the Christmas one covers three weeks, I guess that means I've fallen a whole year behind. Oops. Well, it was a quality line-up at this point — I'm enjoying all five strips, which is certainly not always the case — so hopefully that will compel me to catch up faster.

Games

Balatro
I swear people talk about this as a quick “pick up and play a round” kind of game, but I played one run today and it took over half-an-hour, and I only made it about halfway before losing. Maybe it gets quicker when/if you know what you’re doing, I dunno…

Pilotwings Resort
This is my most recent acquisiton for the 3DS and, rather than add it to the bottom of the backlog, I've started it immediately. Kinda counterintuitive, but this was a launch title for the system, and is a relatively gentle experience designed to show off the system's stereoscopic capabilities. It's quite fun, though undermined by some daft decisions — why is Free Flight mode limited to 2 minutes?! It feels like it's enforced just to stop you flying around for a while and getting all the achievements (unlocking 75 locations) in one sitting. Apparently you can lengthen the flight time by completing challenges, etc, but it still maxes out at 5 minutes. Sucks.


Steam Deck
I was going to list this under the heading of the games involved, because I played a chunk of them to test things out... but I didn't really play them, because this was primarily about more fiddling with the tech. But for the last time (I think) — hurrah!

So, what happened was, today I finally got round to connecting my Steam Deck to my TV; and though that bit worked flawlessly, it annoyed me that one of my emulated GameCube games, 007: Everything or Nothing, was in 4:3 when it specifically has a widescreen mode. A bunch of Reddit-browsing later, I'd found the settings I needed to fiddle with to not only get widescreen working, but get the game running in 1080p HD. And it looks so much better for it! (But god knows how many times I've played through the first mission now as part of my testing. I've even completed it on the hardest difficulty with Platinum goals completed! Regular readers* will know how unlike me that is.)

And because I was fiddling with that, I also had a look into my other GC title, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. That was even more involved again, though I do now have it in HD and widescreen thanks to inputting a cheat code for the latter and installing a fan-made HD texture pack for the former — and now it looks so good too! And now, after many hours of faffing, these are finally nicely set up to play. Now I just need to actually play them...

* Don't worry, I know no one reads this.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

After all that stuff nipped in last week, there wasn't a sausage this week. Spending too much time (and money) on games instead recently. I'm sure there's some ordering I need to get caught up on, though.

Number of titles in collection: 3,608 [no change]
Of which DVDs: 986 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,622 [no change]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 461 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 8,672 [no change]
Number of films: 4,597 [no change]
Number of additional cuts: 466 [no change]
Number of TV episodes: 10,172 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,267 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

Critical Role Cooldown
Age of Umbra Episode 8
[Watch it (again) on Beacon.]

Films

Once Upon a Time in Uganda (2021)

Games

Control
Yep, here I go starting something else! But this one has intrigued me for a while, and is currently free* on Luna — though only for another 11 days, so there's every chance it'll follow in the footsteps of Dungeons of Hinterberg and I'll have to abandon it uncompleted (unless I spend a lot of time on it over the next week-and-a-half, that is), and then buy it and start over if I want to finish. Or give in and subscribe to Luna+... though Control goes for so little nowadays, it would be cheaper to just purchase it and play via my Steam Deck.

Anyway, I played for 2¼ hours this evening, part of which was because I couldn't work out a way forward on the map at one point, which turned out to be I just needed to go to a closed door on a side of a large room I'd missed. Having these big "open world"-style maps is all well and good, but sometimes I feel like good old fashioned level design was more straightforward. I mean, sure, there's loads of places I can wander back to, but I don't need to — they exist as a permanent distraction/confusion from where I need to head next on my most-recently-assigned mission.

That's also one of the reasons I wound up playing for so long: there's no levels like "when I was a kid"; games these days all seem to be rolling updated objectives, one never-ending experience. Which is more immersive and whatnot, but does make it slightly less clear when/if you should/can stop; especially in a game like this, where I found it unclear when it was saving, and if I'd actually resume at that save or back at a checkpoint.

On the bright side, it has an immortality setting (amongst several other personalisable difficulty bits and pieces), so I can just play and follow the story and kill bad guys without having to worry that I'll have to die and start over or get stuck on a tricky boss or something. As ever, I'm sure some "real gamers" find such things distasteful (heck, the game itself asks you to consider playing and see how you find it before you start adjusting the difficulty. I ignored it and just made stuff easier), but I don't care, this is how I like to play. (It's going to be annoying when I eventually dive back into something older and I can't just 'not die', isn't it?)

* "Free" with an Amazon Prime subscription, obv.

TV

Age of Umbra
1x08 The Tomb of the Heretic Saint [season finale; final hour]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

TV

Age of Umbra
1x08 The Tomb of the Heretic Saint [season finale; 2nd hour]

I'm not deliberately stretching this out, I'm just not finding the time between things like work and spending an hour-and-a-half playing card games.
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Games

Balatro
The top quote on Balatro’s Steam page declares this game is “the reason Valve should rename their handheld 'the Balatro machine’”, so when I got my Deck, naturally it was high on my interest list. Plus the fact I’d heard how good and/or addictive it was from other sources, such as PC Gamer’s top 100 lists, where it's placed 8th for the last two years (and it didn't exist before that). I didn’t think it would be the second game I (properly) played on my Deck, mainly because I hadn’t bought it yet and had plenty of other games to be going on with, but then I saw a good deal on it a couple of days ago and, well, here I am.

And after two playthroughs… I’m not sure I totally get it. By which I mean, there’s a lot going on and I didn’t quite get how it all worked. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m just getting started or because my brain just isn’t wired for it all. Nonetheless, I played for 81 minutes solid and mostly enjoyed it (even if I often felt like I was guessing what to do rather than having a genuine strategy) — and, like I said, that was only two runs, so I feel like something must have gone right if I wasn’t crashing out in five minutes. We’ll see if I find it addictive enough to keep consuming my time.

TV

Age of Umbra
1x08 The Tomb of the Heretic Saint [season finale; 1st hour]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Games

Aperture Desk Job
This free game is basically a half-hour "how to use your Steam Deck" demo. I'm sure it'll run just fine on other systems and work with other controllers, but it's literally laid out to teach you about the functionality of your Deck. It's almost crazy that it's not preinstalled and/or promoted at you when you get one, to be honest.

Anyway, because of its positioning as a "how to" guide, I was certain it was going to be the first thing I played on my Deck. Well, it was the first thing I played intentionally... if we just ignore all those various other games I played bits of to test if they worked. And all that time I spent fiddling and installing other stuff. And that "what I'll do Day One" ended up being "what I did Day 17". And that "Day 17" is actually "Day 21" because that "Day One" came almost a week after it arrived (as noted in the footnote at the time).

All of which said... for me, this still marks the end of "setting up my Steam Deck" and the beginning of "playing stuff on my Steam Deck", so it's The Start in that sense.


Samorost 1
Talking of short games... Longer is better in most gamers’ eyes, it seems. In fairness, when you’ve paid £50–£100 for a AAA title, of course you want your money’s worth. This partly depends on genre, but I’ve seen people complain about a game being short when it takes at least 8 hours to complete. Imagine complaining a movie was only 8 hours long…

Those people might have some kind of fit if they ever encountered Samorost, which has a HowLongToBeat time of 15 minutes. Yes, minutes. It is free, though (whether you get it on Steam, GOG, Epic, or the publisher's website), so how can you complain? I guess nowadays it serves as a kind of demo for the hour-long Samorost 2 (which is free on the Epic Games Store from Thursday, hence how I discovered this) and five-hour Samorost 3 (maybe that'll be free the week after?) It's a quirky little point-and-click puzzler, with no proper dialogue and none of the modern helpers like highlighting clickable items. Indeed, working out what's clickable, and when it needs to be clicked (and, in some cases, how many times), is the whole challenge. I enjoyed it, and am quite looking forward to picking up at least the next one.

TV

Age of Umbra
1x07 Escape from the Reach [remainder]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Critical Role Cooldown
Age of Umbra Episode 7
[Watch it (again) on Beacon.]

TV

Age of Umbra
1x07 Escape from the Reach [1st hour]
Any thoughts I had of finishing Critical Role Campaign 2 before Campaign 4 starts have long since vanished (there's less than three weeks to go, and I still have something like 30 episodes of C2 left), but there's really no reason I shouldn't be able to get through the remainder Age of Umbra before then (this is the penultimate episode, after all).
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Games

3D Sonic the Hedgehog

Played this for 26 minutes, my 3DS said — long enough to appreciate the 3D effect and remember why I don’t really enjoy platformers. I had a couple of goes at getting past the three acts of Stage 1 and failed; read some hints, ‘abused’ the save function (advantage of modern games is not having to start right back at the start when you die!), and finally beat the stage. Hurrah! Will I bother to keep doing that until the end of the game? Eh. Sonic 2 is supposed to be better, so I’m more likely to give that a shot instead.

And once I’ve appreciated all the 3D conversions of some of these old games that I didn’t really like when I was a kid and don’t seem to have grown into, maybe I’ll finally move on to stuff I actually want to play (not just appreciate the stereoscopic visuals).

Magazines

PC Gamer Top 100 2025

Because I still haven't been buying enough games lately...!

Similar to the retro games list I went through the other day, I came away from this one noting 13 titles I already own, but here there was only one I'd played before (well, only one I'd completed — the original Doom is on both lists, and while I've played it a bit, I've never been through it thoroughly). I did find 28 to keep in mind for future purchasing, and a further 16 that piqued my interest enough to look into more and decide whether to add to that 'wants' list or not — which means only 42% of the list made me think "nah".

One thing that definitely intrigued me was how changeable this list can be. I get that they publish it every year so don't want it to be basically the same with a few tweaks (otherwise who would care?), but, having only recently looked at their 2024 list, some changes were so big they were immediately obvious.

For example, the top ten is 60% the same, and some of that is due to the kinds of small shifts you'd expect: Doom drops out by falling from #10 to #11; Red Dead Redemption II rises from #15 to #10, which is a relatively minor reevaluation (and it's been in the top ten previously, so hardly revelatory). Except it's not just those kinds of small moves, nor new titles entering: last year's #5, Persona 5 Royal, plummets to #49; while a game that was released 20 years ago, Dwarf Fortress, suddenly jumps from #16 to #3. I'm not sure such a reappraisal was prompted by anything, either (although it has also previously been in the top ten, so this is closer to RDR2 in scale).

I guess it's just changing voters and/or adjusted final-total calculations. And there is certainly consistency in places (the top two are identical, for instance). It's just kinda wild that things can fall so far, or (higher up the list) drop out entirely, while old games where nothing's changed fly up, or even enter the list. Keeps it lively though, I guess.

(I also have physical copies of the 2021 and 2022 lists, and after I thought of this I tracked down the 2023 version too, which tempted me to work out a ranking-of-rankings for the last five years. Is it worth the time and effort, though? I don't know... but once I had the idea, it became almost inevitable, so now I'm doing it.)

Games

007: Blood Stone
After some more — alright, a lot more — fiddling and tweaking the controls, I got this playing pretty well; to the point where I actually completed the first section (the driving controls really needed a lot of work, and I'd failed on a section like that multiple times before). The best hint I got from somewhere online: because the game has onscreen prompts about what button to press (at least during the training-like first level; maybe throughout, I don't know), ignore what would be sensible keyboard controls and set things up for the controller — i.e. map the controller's A button to keyboard-A, X to keyboard-X, and so on. It would be a rubbish control scheme on a PC (the keys are all over the place, and using A for the A button messes up WASD movement, for one), but it means you don't get "the game says press E, so that's X... or is it Y?" all the time.

Anyway, now that's all sorted, I need to decide what game(s) I'm actually playing — I mean, I've been through tutorials/first levels for three Bond games now! Speaking of which...


007: Everything or Nothing
I got an adapter that allows you to use original GameCube controllers with the WiiU, Switch, and PC — which also works with Steam Deck. Tested it on this a couple of times, plus a quick go on Zelda: Wind Waker, and got it working nicely (the D-pad doesn't work on menus for some reason, but does in game; but I did get the rumble working, so that's good). Also, hopefully this adapter will work with the Switch 2 when/if I get one (still leaning towards when, but when? I don't know).


3D Out Run
I've bought or downloaded a total of 33 games for my 3DS already, but this is first one I've actually played (beyond a minute or two to test carts work). This is a 3D port of a classic Sega arcade game (not to be confused with its original sequel, OutRun 3-D — the Wikipedia entry makes that mistake, in fact). There were a load of these conversions of Sega games made for the 3DS, and many of them are pretty well regarded — not always for the quality of the original game, but certainly for the effort and success of the emulation and 3D conversion. Out Run (aka OutRun) is one of the most recommended for its visuals.

Well, I agree that it's got a very effective use of 3D. It's almost hard to imagine playing it in 2D, so striking is the effect of the road and scenery rushing towards you. It doesn't feel like a particularly deep or long-lasting game, though — I mean, there's literally one circuit. Okay, that has different routes, adding up to 16 variations, but still. The only other customisation options are the difficulty (one to five stars) and a set of four unlockable modifiers for your vehicle, which you can mix and match. So, sure, there are ways to mix it up; and if this had been made in the era of achievements, I'm sure there'd be one for every possible combination of track, difficulty, and mods — that's 400 variants by my estimation. I didn't dislike it, but I'm not going to play this 400 times. But it was free, so that's fine.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Seven new additions this week, including two BD-to-4K upgrades amid a bunch of brand-new acquisitions. On top of that, there's the running time update I had to put off from last week.

Number of titles in collection: 3,608 [up 5]
Of which DVDs: 986 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,622 [up 5]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 461 [up 4]

Number of discs in collection: 8,672 [up 12]
Number of films: 4,597 [up 12]
Number of additional cuts: 466 [no change]
Number of TV episodes: 10,172 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,267 [no change]

Total running time of collection (approx.):
607 days, 10 hours, and 43 minutes.
(Up 2 days, 7 hours, and 23 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.

Magazines

The Greatest Retro Games of All Time

Because I haven't been buying enough games lately as it is...!

Well, I came away from this list of 100 noting 15 titles I already own (or, er, have acquired), on top of 10 I've already played sufficiently that I don't necessarily want/need to play them again — so that's a quarter of the list off the bat. Mind you, another 25 were of enough interest for me to note down...

Films

7 Women and a Murder (2021)
[2nd watch]
[#73 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]