Mr Party Hat

Re-completing the same game in the same year is just showing off. I think I've only finished 2 games in 2026.

This has been a mad couple of months for games, definitely need to add Galactic Racer to the list.

If you can separate the art from the arsehole, Order of the Sinking Star is great. I've hit a roadblock about a hundred puzzles in though, and my brain refuses to find a solution. Hopefully I'll figure it out tonight.

Annoyingly (and presumably by design) the levels don't have any numbers or names, so it's going to be difficult finding the solution online.

I'm always surprised that racing games don't have a 'one rewind' option. So you can't rely on it, but you also get one chance to undo a split-second error that would otherwise waste ten minutes of your time.

Play
007 First Light is just what I wanted. Great to look at, well acted, well written, and just a really enjoyable romp. I'm not sure how much replayability it'll have, but for now it's a lot of fun.

Diablo 4. I've bounced off this about 3 times, but I got the itch last week and, for some reason, I've stuck with it this time. The worldbuilding is second-to-none (Blizzard innit), and it's always satisfying crunching hundreds of enemies to death in one glorious AOE fireball. I just wish it let me play how I want to; slowly. It really betrays its live-service roots. It's desperate to get you to max level and CONSUMING CONTENT, rather than taking it slow and exploring this stunning(ly ugly) world they've created. I don't care about the latest 'season', I want to wander around the starting zone. I've already dodged two free max-level upgrades the game tried to present me with.

DQ 7 Reimagined. I played the demo (the first 3 hours) of this months ago, and had almost forgotten the plot, so figured it was time to pick up the full game. It's a very cosy game. The way the story is structured, with each zone being standalone little tales, makes it feel like playing a Sunday-morning cartoon. And for a top-down game, the graphics are frequently stunning, especially the character models in the cutscenes.

Want
WoW Forever. GTA 6. Ocarina of Time. November is going to be an all-time month.

I reckon we need a rewind, rather than a crash.

Imagine if all of gaming's resources, talent and money was being plowed into consoles from the Xbox 360 era. Modernised with SSDs, and a few quality of life tweaks, but fundamentally frozen in time.

Development times would plummet. Game releases would accelerate. AAA risks could be taken. And we'd never have to hear about ray-tracing again.