What I've been playing [July 2026]
So, I've been trying to write more because I suck at it and a good way to improve is to do, right? That has led to me trying to write some kind of review of every game I have played over on Backloggd. Some of them are long ranty messes and some are shorter and pointless, that's how it goes.
But also, what if I threw some words on this blog I made a while ago too? huh?!
LUNACY
Sega Saturn - 1997
Fred has a cool face tattoo and no memory, a fair trade I think.
I recently got a MiSTER, a FPGA based emulation box thingy. There's a whole spiel about how MiSTER is more accurate because it's emulating hardware blah blah whatever I got a SuperStation One because it looks cool and I like having my gaming devices be separate from my PC for completely arbitrary reasons, so it's nicer than just emulating for me.
Anyway, I've been jumping around a lot of old games on that thing, often on stream. I was playing a bunch of random Saturn games when a friend suggested something called LUNACY and my interest was piqued. I wasn't ready for what it was though. Lunacy is sort of first person adventure game, sort of a proto-walking sim, sort of a FMV game? FMV in the pre-rendered video sense not specifically in the live action video way that it's often thrown around these days. It is full of cutscenes of bizarro characters acting in the most weird ways, while your protagonist Fred tries to figure out why he has lost his memories and how to get to a mysterious mythical city that's I guess somehow connected to the town he has woken up in. It's really cool and weird and I'm going to have the protagonist saying "Oh, it's useless" stuck in my head forever.
It's also pretty short, definitely either play or watch it.
FLASH GAMES
My Chemical Romance Stuff - ~2005...ish?
I went to see My Chemical Romance live at the weekend, a thing I've wanted to do since I was a teenager and never had the chance to. It was great, it was part of their whole reunion thing where they played the entirety of The Black Parade and they haven't missed a step in the 20 years (???!!) since The Black Parade came out. It got me nostalgic though, so I went diving into some Flash history.
As a society we've been making faux 8-bit games basically since 8-bit games stopped being the norm.
There's a great project called Flashpoint that has archived as many of the flash games and animations from the old internet as people could find and of course there's some fun My Chem things in there. Like this incredibly basic little Helena promo game they had on their website back in the day. You run around activating Pall Bearers and shooting people for a few levels, then there's a terrible car chase, then a terrible maze and that's where I kinda gave up. It wasn't very good but I'm very happy it exists.
The band's headshots have SKULLS over them if you hover over them. Spooky!
Also their old Flash based website is in that archive and that's sick. Such a neat little time capsule.
DON'T SHIT YOUR PANTS - 2009
Who needs flashy graphics anyway?
Don't Shit Your Pants is one of the greatest Flash games ever made as far as I'm concerned. A text based adventure game in the ye olde style, the goal of the game is simple. Do not. I cannot emphasise that enough, DO NOT. SHIT. YOUR. PANTS. They must remain unshitted.
It's an incredibly simple little game with 9 different achievements to unlock for shitting or not shitting your pants in various ways. It's great, I'm pretty sure it's still online now too so just go play it, go kill 10 minutes on it. You won't regret it.
Also the devs went on to make the Rogue Legacy games, what a cool thing.
RHYTHM HEAVEN GROOVE - 2026
Oh hey an actual new game not from a billion years ago in the past, crazy.
I love rhythm games. I'm also not very good at them because I have the rhythm of a dead snail but that doesn't stop me playing them. Rhythm Heaven (or Rhythm Paradise here for whatever reason) has always been a high point for me in the genre. They're effectively rhythm based minigame collections, with such perfectly crafted little musical games that are designed so that you not only could play them with your eyes closed, sometimes it's probably better to do so.
I own a tiny red car, so this minigame speaks to me.
I've not played a HUGE amount of Groove yet but so far it seems like it's every bit as perfect as the previous entries in the series. Also I'm not sure if I've just gotten better or if it's a bit more forgiving than I remember the previous games being. You can bumble your way through this one if you're like me, and you should!
I'd love to say I ordered this in release date order but I legitimately was just spewing words out of my brain into this post and it ended up that way.