I’ve made little progress in Baten Kaitos’ New Game Minus. Skipping past all cutscenes and dialogues and still being able to oneshot every boss is just not particularly interesting. The game truly starts when enemy encounters start to outspeed me, I guess.

This week, I also got my new PC up and running. And so I do what anyone with a beefy new PC would do: Play an older game I could have played on my old PC whenever I wanted to! I’ve been playing Batman: Arkham Origins. I’ve played the game and its predecessors on console already, but for completion’s sake I’m doing them again on Steam before eventually playing Arkham Knight for the first time, which would not have run on my old PC, at least not well. I love this series. Origins isn’t very well received, but I think it’s underrated. It definitely has flaws, but it doesn’t deserve that much hate. But to be honest, all it takes to make me happy is a set of Predator Maps with a varied group of playable characters. It’s just a shame that, unlike the previous Arkham titles, I can’t really complete the game. Some achievements are linked to a long-defunct online mode. It’s been restored by the community, but I really don’t care about it.

I also want to eventually get into the Shantae series. I’ve played one of them on the Wii U (Pirate’s Curse, I believe?), so I’ve gone back to the very beginning and started Shantae on the Game Boy! The spritework and animations are quite impressive for Nintendo’s old handheld brick, though I’ve run into some issues differentiating between foreground and background objects. The number of times I’ve fallen through a platform that was actually in the background is too damn high! I’ve only made it to the second town because I stopped to grind the money necessary to get some expensive items that unlock new moves. I’m sure I would get the money eventually, but armed with just the hair whip alone I find the game difficult in a way that’s not fun.