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I streamed the first Kingdom Hearts game and really enjoyed it. I started streaming Re:Chain of Memories - I'm probably 3/4 of the way through and well, have bounced off it a bit. I'm at one of the more difficult fights and the idea of firing it up and starting off with that fight gives me the heebie-jeebies. Plus, it might be that 3 nights of streaming a week is too much for me right now. Unsure, still deciding.

I'm still streaming Final Fantasy XI (on Fridays) and FFXIV (on Saturdays). In FFXI, I've been mostly focused on the story, and we're on the fourth expansion now. I took a break from story this past Friday and did the last genkai (level break) fight. I won easily, which I wasn't sure I would, so hey! Then I had time to kill while waiting for next game day, so I went and leveled my WHM, getting it to the game's cap of 99. Whee!

Once Earthsday arrived, I tried to fight Ramuh as a level 20 summoner. I've done two other Trial-sized Trial fights and had no issues, so was cocky going into this one. Big mistake--I was beaten badly. Oops. We'll try again some other time.

In FFXIV I am slowly doing Arcadion raids (the story doesn't thrill me, so not urgent) but mostly leveling off jobs while farming paste for relics. Since one of the ways to farm paste is via FATEs, a favorite past-time of mine, I am a happy camper.

Oh, and I did enough FATE farming to get the Fallen Angel Wings. That completes the trifecta of "do a stupidly large amount of FATEs to receive an item".

One of my goals this year is to play some single-player games off stream, and thus I've been slowly picking at Epistory: Typing Chronicles. I am very much enjoying the feel of the game, though I still have problems with the movement controls. I'm also playing Sudocats. I think I have 8 puzzles left to complete it? Not sure.

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Watch me play games on Twitch!
Schedule:
Mondays: Kingdom Hearts
Fridays: Final Fantasy XI
Saturdays: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail Side Quests & Shenanigans

Continuing a playthrough of Rance Quest Magnum where I left off several months ago. Thankfully, after that break and making some progress, it's feeling fresh again. And hopefully I can finish it before too long, cuz I already have over 400 hours on it, and I still have a bunch of other games I wanna play on my backlog.

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Console RPG Cliches

Since my last post I've basically switched to a new computer which I run Linux on. It's now my operating system of choice.

I'll have to re-figure-out how to stream myself on here, especially since I needed to get a computer with a rather small hard drive for unrelated reasons. Or, I mean, a rather small solid state drive, since they don't make HDDs for laptops anymore, it seems. I know OBS is still a thing so it shouldn't be too hard, but I also need to figure out my gaming setup. At this point I have yet to even set up Retroarch.

I did set up Heroic Games Launcher, though, because it seems to be able to act as a replacement for GOG Galaxy on Linux. GOG did recently signal (by implication via a job listing) that they want to make an actual Linux version of GOG Galaxy, but for now, Heroic provides an integrated solution that can install games, both Linux and Windows versions of them, and also apply one's choice of Wine/Proton where desired. Now that I'm using it myself I'm learning the ins and outs of it, such as how it can creates a new virtual C drive (via the "Wine prefix") for every Windows game. Heroic can also provide continuity with GOG Galaxy playtimes and achievements through the Comet plugin (which is provided by default with Heroic).

So I started installing a few GOG games. Haven't really tried them that much, partly because I do want to be more selective to save disk space, but I did continue playing Ara Fell. However I also installed a non-GOG standalone game -- or, I guess, a visual novel, one that I bought from JAST USA.

I think I previously posted about reading through the first chapter of National Park Girls. It's a visual novel about, well, anime girl anthropomorphizations of U.S. national parks. You'll meet Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Zion in the first chapter. There are five chapters in total. There are also (definitely intentional) yuri undertones, in case you care. The story can get pretty dramatic and dark in later chapters.

And now I've read through all of them. Even did the trivia enough times to unlock all the (simulated) gacha prizes (i.e. the bonus art pieces). lol, a penny press.

I think it's considered relatively short as far as VNs go; the total time I spent with it open was just under 11 hours and that counts random AFK times and I'm usually a little slower than average; vndb says the average is under 8 hours.

In case you're wondering how well this works -- National Park Girls was built in Ren'py, which I think is an inherently multiplatform VN engine, but the release I had (specifically version 1.01) was specifically for Windows. I ran it using the latest Proton and Wine versions, and it generally ran fine. There were minor sound issues -- occasionally (seemingly sometimes when I did stuff that generated other sound effects) muting itself and needing a restart to get the sound back, but still not much of a problem.

Am thinking of reading Steins;Gate next. I've been punting watching the anime series because I bought the VN (specifically the JAST USA localization, rather than the one on Steam, because JAST offers theirs DRM-free and I trust them with the loc job anyway).

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 24th February 2026 18:09

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Well, for those of you who were nonplussed by my playing lots of random obscure games, you're in luck.

I recently bought Final Fantasy VII (and III and IV and VIII and IX) and started playing it.

I also decided to start reading the sci-fi visual novel Steins;Gate. You may know this from its anime series, but the visual novel predates it.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been playing these games on my Linux machine. For some reason, I had some audio trouble running them on Linux Mint using the Heroic launcher (using Wine/Proton). Sometimes the audio would cut out. But I have a second Linux distro, which I installed kinda for fun/experimentally, and it's based on Arch Linux, and it runs the games (again through Heroic with the help of Wine/Proton) with no audio issues. My friend speculates it's because Arch does rolling updates, which means I get updates much more frequently, and so my underlying software is probably just more up-to-date, and this is probably why stuff works without a hitch there.

Anyway, I did still get around to some lesser-known stuff. Probably the least known is Secret Agent HD, a reimplementation of the old DOS game Secret Agent (a.k.a. Secret Agent Man). This is an action platformer where you play a spy, I guess. You're infiltrating the villain's island, and in every level you have to destroy the satellite dish, find the dynamite, and bust open the exit. Kinda similar to Duke Nukem 1 except your bullets are limited and you only have 3 HP, so you're playing more deliberately rather than just running around. The original game was a DOS game but it got a remake in Unity.

Speaking of Duke Nukem 1, I didn't play that but I also played all of Dave Gnukem, which is a free-and-open-source game that's basically a DN1 clone. You still have the same run-and-jump-and-shoot-everything-that-moves action, and the game mechanics and enemy types and goodies are almost all readily recognizable if you've played DN1. You just have 10 HP rather than 8, and you need to collect "GNUKEM" (rather than just "DUKE") in order to get the big bonus. And there's a bug in the game where if you have to restart a level due to a death, you lose the hi-jump boots functionality for some reason, but you can get around this by just restoring the game from your save (like you'd normally do to start a play session). (And I think there's only one save slot.)

Among the other freeware games in my software repository (each Linux distro basically has its own "app store" of sorts, except everything is free and most things are open-source) was Dopewars, one of the many clones of the DOS game Drug Wars. This particular version has some options, where you can adjust game parameters (e.g. which things go super cheap or super expensive) and even change all the theming elements (which are just text anyway), so you could make this an entirely drug-free experience if you wanted. Friend of mine also happened to show me his BBS where he has a different Drug Wars clone, but that one let you jet up to three times a day! -- and I stopped playing it after one in-game week because it got a little too tedious, lol.

Speaking of remotely connecting to things, someone made a massively multiplayer implementation of Snake. If you want to play it, you can SSH into snakes.run (I forgot how to do this on Windows but I can just type "ssh snakes.run" into my terminal on Linux and it works). Did you know that SSH stands for "Secure Snake Home"?

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Glenn Magus Harvey: a friend posted this elsenet and I thought of you: https://www.zdnet.com/article/wine-11-linux...windows-switch/

Okay, that's pretty much my post. I haven't been playing many games lately myself. Just some messing around in FFXI and FFXIV.

Several weeks ago, I had planned to start training myself to heal in FFXIV, but then Life happened, and I couldn't play for a bit and now I don't have the desire to follow up on those plans.

In FFXI, I've started playing on my old main character. I want to fix her merits, at least, and start grinding gil on her.

I did also play 40 minutes of FFXII:TZA for a randomized job run. I should go back to that.



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Watch me play games on Twitch!
Schedule:
Mondays: Kingdom Hearts
Fridays: Final Fantasy XI
Saturdays: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail Side Quests & Shenanigans

> Glenn Magus Harvey: a friend posted this elsenet and I thought of you: https://www.zdnet.com/article/wine-11-linux...windows-switch/

Whoa, that's really cool. Thanks for sharing that!

Looks like I do have the latest Wine 11 (which released in January) for Wine itself; I presume that this got passed onto Heroic Games Launcher pretty promptly and likely before I even got around to installing Heroic.

I don't actually know that much about the technical details, I'll be honest. I'm just a dumb end-user lol.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 30th March 2026 04:04

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

I've now finished the storyline for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. If you are a fan of either Indiana Jones or Machinegames, and haven't played it yet, you really should. You can feel the underpinnings of the recent Wolfenstein games under the mechanics here, and it's really well put-together. I didn't think I would like playing an Indy game in first-person but it works very well in practice. Also, it's a pretty decent Indiana Jones story, too. Not as well polished as the best movies, but it really feels like it fits right in. Troy Baker does extremely well at capturing Harrison Ford in the 80s, too; at times, you can forget that it's not actually Ford doing the voice.

Like most similar games nowadays, it drags some if you're going for trying to 100% it, and I suspect I won't bother getting all the way there; but if you wanted to focus solely on the main plot, I suspect it would feel very much like one of the original movies, which I mean as significant praise.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN? Or perhaps buying a really good looking shirt?

Watching someone play a Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow romhack made me want to play it, but I couldn't find that hack, so I found another hack.

Actually, I found a few more. I was looking for hacks that have a custom map, and I found a few, but the one that stands out is this one: Aria of Sorrow Alter.

Here's the patch for it: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4449/

This is basically like, a genuine CvAoS experience, but with a fresh map. Some of the areas will feel familiar but their placement has still been modified. And this hack also introduces some new weapons. But the coolest thing about this hack, in my opinion, is that it actually introduces some new mechanics in various parts of the map. For example, there's a new way to get into the Forbidden Area, and there's another place that clearly references Circle of the Moon (without being quite as annoying). And that's not all!

Here are some somewhat spoilery hints:

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

The Arena takes design inspiration from Circle's Battle Arena.
There are now multiple rooms that can change what they contain depending on how you enter them. (One of them is in an unexpected location...pay attention to the Hint Cards!)
Explore thoroughly for switches. There are many and they can open up new areas as well as shortcuts!

Do keep your savestates handy as I ran into an occasional problem with the game freezing on me. But putting the game to sleep seemed to solve this.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 5th April 2026 19:46

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )