PWB August 2025 / bmb vanity month thread

August is my birthday month and so I will not see it tainted and having to sully itself in among the general thread of the riff raff!

Play - Donkey Kong Bonanza - my kid has now made it to the final boss of this and I am just about to hit 4 hours played…but have loved those 4 hours.

Empire Total War - Never got on with this originally as felt too different from what I liked about the Total War series, however I recently upgraded my ROG Ally SSD to 1tb when the deals were on, and decided to have a look how an older Total War would run on it, and the answer is pretty gloriously. Enjoying this much more now as barely played any Total War the last 10 or so years.

Player Manager 99 - Moved to this for my playthroughs, I get I could probably not mention this but it's nice to keep track of things here.

Professor Layton - I started playing one of these I got in a charity shop just over a year ago and liked it, but it made reference to their previous adventure and so I looked into it and spotted I had the 2nd game, I got the first and took it on holiday with us (to sunny Rhyl) and then played a few hours of it and promptly forgot about it until it came time to begin thinking of what to take for this years holiday. So am committed to properly working through it now. It's going well as my missus and kid now like hearing and seeing the puzzles and so that is helping my motivation.

Quake Wars Enemy Territory - Absolutely no one will have seen this coming. I spent two hours this week on Sky Webchat pretending to be my father-in-law (with permission) and was playing this in the background on the solo campaign (that is pretending to be the online game modes if that makes sense) - And have gotten oddly addicted to it. I can't be bothered to learn or play an online game anymore and commit to the grind of getting familiar and good at it. But this Ai/versus the bots mode was covering all my desires for an Online shooter surprisingly well.

Tony Hawk PS3/4 - Still dipping in and out of this for little blasts.

Minecraft Dungeons - We always seem to return to this when it's a significant holiday and it's just the 3 of us, after playing a bit this evening and doing the daily trails, I have purchased the DLC pack finally and so we are going to start playing through these together.

Want - Really into the idea of getting two copies of 'a pokemon' game and then me and my daughter playing them simultaneously. Not even sure where to start as seems that the main Switch one had significant performance issues that weren't fixed. Although would appreciate any suggestions or input here from others?

GoldenTee Arcade collection - Still not sorted out getting this yet. Tried to look into if anyone had gotten a trackball working with in on PC and not had any joy so held off.

DSiXL - Don't need one but now really want one as basically only that and the micro GBA that are the only Nintendo handheld form factors I have never owned.

Off to the Sheffield Games market on Sunday so will keep my eye out!

Bin

Having sorted my games collection out a tad this week I have discovered at least 25 duplicates of games that I have amassed due to error and poor memory. So I will begin checking through and collating the best box,disc and manuals and then will be offloading the rest.

Play

It's a big Switch 2 month for me.

Donkey Kong Bananza, obviously; it's every bit as fun as everyone says and constantly surprising in different ways.

I had a go at the demo for the worst-titled game of the year, The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales which was pretty good but I found some of the controls and menus clunkier than I'd like in an action RPG.

Want

Picked up Promise Mascot Agency in the sale, but so far have only made it as far as where the demo started. Looking forward to getting some time with it properly.

Bin

I've been feeling bone tired for the last few weeks, no matter how much sleep I get or at what time.

We could all have our own PWB threads. There's about 5 members left, so it's almost practical.

The ATB speed of FFIX even on max is ridiculously slow, as is the way characters deal with being queued up to do animations, if I didn't already buy this (it was like £3-£5 but whatever) I'd have probably played this modded/emulated because bruh.

We could all have our own PWB threads. There's about 5 members left, so it's almost practical.

DOK'S PWB THREAD: NOTHING NEWER THAN 1994!!!

Play.

Knights of the Old Republic. This joins the long list of games I can't quite remember playing, despite being sure I had. I know it has A Moment, but I can't remember more than that, so I'm going in relatively unspoiled. The combat feels ancient, and isn't remotely satisfying, but the plot is keeping me interested.

SWTOR. This is what made me pick up KOTOR. Still plugging through the Imperial Agent storyline, which is still great fun.

KOTOR comics. Again, as part of the Star Wars EU binge, I'm reading the Zayne (Zayde?) Carrick stuff. I've never really read any EU/Legends stuff before, but it's a shame that no-one is developing this world any more. The Disneyverse has had its moments, but for every Andor there's a Luke drinking green milk. The EU just seems so much more ambitious. Even though I'm sure lots of it is just cheap 80s sci-fi bollocks.

DK Bananza. Smashing stuff is fun.

I keep thinking about trying some of the Kotor comics as Sheffield's Forbidden planet has relocated and so we frequently go in the new store and spotted a load of stuff in there that looks interesting.

When I had a Marvel Unlimited subscription it included basically all of the Star Wars comics. I assume it still does.

I suggest this because if you are going to read a lot of bad comics you really don't want to be paying Forbidden Planet prices.

Cool. That looks perfect as has a free trial and then you can do monthly, so can cancel after the summer holidays. Will investigate later.

Last comic I bought was Daredevil: The Man Without Fear or one of the DD ones, it was okay but like, £15 and a short story where the second half of the book was just the script really burned me, I'll stick to manga I think.

Yeah Marvel Unlimited is great. I got my money's worth and I only ever read Star Wars stuff; if you're into superheroes too it must be the best deal of all time.

The only problem is reading a physical book is SO much better. The difference with comics is much more pronounced, too, being able to explore the artwork on a printed page is just a completely different experience. But yes, as mentioned, it's about 20x the price.

Ended up getting a nice DSiXL - The 25th Mario edition today from the games market with charger and in a really nice condition.

They also had a demo of the Gamie lightguns thing that is currently on Kickstarter, anyone seen that? Was very impressed with what I saw.

Well I'm surprised by this

https://x.com/KoeiTecmoUS/status/1952353835176870396?t=o3SLcd2ZrYlZIiCOpoHTSQ&s=19

I won't be getting this any time soon as I own all three and have beat two, but if you haven't played an Atelier game before and would like a comfy RPG with uber crafting this is THE best way to check out the series now