Something’s gotta change.

When I booted up Brothership this week, I noticed my playtime was 35 hours. So I looked back at my comment history and I started playing the game 5 months ago. I know Monster Hunter absolutely justifies slowing down everything else for two months, but this is just unacceptable. I have no less than two new games installed and ready to go on the PC side but I am not going to play them. I need to get this back under control. I’ve been focusing on this game and I’ll probably beat it this weekend. I’m definitely in the home-stretch, but you never know what else opens up at the end of an RPG. I have the full world map visible and there are three isolated areas I can’t access, so there’s something the game is still hiding from me.

Tempered monsters are basically stronger versions of regular monsters. Arch Tempered is an even bigger leap, reserved for a select few as special events.

Finished up the last bit or currently released content in Monster Hunter Rise. I’m still playing it to not get rusty and get all that equipment I’m still missing, but it’s a secondary game from now on. The stories about High Rank Zoh Shia were highly exaggerated, it was way easier than Arch Tempered Rey Dau.

I should finally be able to focus more on Brothership now. The fourth ‘world’ has been kinda disappointing so far. Strong opening cutscene, but not much to talk about since.

I’ve started my third playthrough of Pokemon Infinite Fusion, my second Nuzlocke and first time playing Remix Mode. I barely made it past Brock without casualties, which taught me to be prepared for the worst.

I know what to follow up with on the Switch-side, since there’s really not much left for me there. My backlog on PC is much bigger and whatever I feel like playing now is probably not what I want in a week, so I try not to think about it. Monster Hunter has no real end in sight anyway. I’ll grind away slowly, a bit every other day to not grow rusty for whatever nightmare gets added next, so I probably won’t start anything with too much depth.

I’m nearing the end of current content in Monster Hunter Wilds. The current Arch-Tempered Rey Dau event kicked my butt quite badly. It was the first time I actually had to truly learn a monster’s patterns and tells, but now I can beat him without carting. I only have HR Zoh Shia left and I have heard enough tales to not rush into that one. I’m gonna fully upgrade my armor first.

Brothership is still happening. Every now and then. Not as much as I would like, but with Monster Hunter going into a pure grinding phase, I’ll have more time.

And when I only have a little time, I go back to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. I’ve had the main game beaten for a while, but there’s still plenty to do on the huge achievement list, which really adds to a game lime this. I even found myself hitting the difficult speedrun times. I wasn’t going to try those very hard, but at least for the first two levels, they were doable.

Occasionally, I’ve also been playing the 1994 CD-Rom version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a childhood game I have been trying to find for 30 years. It wasn’t hard to find per se, those old Carmen Sandiego games are all abandonedware at this point, but good luck getting a modern PC to understand a 90s CD-Rom! The best I could do in the past was a DOS version, which just wasn’t the same without music and voice acting. But I finally found the ‘VileBox’, which is a fan-compiled collection of all old Carmen Sandiego games that just works! That nostalgia hit pretty hard~