What I read, played, and bought over the course of April!
Honestly, April was quite the month to experience, all things considered, so my backlog really took a hit. Frankly, I’d rather not get into it, but it was just a lot dumb shit happening to me on like a back to back basis, which meant very little time to chill until the very end of the month.
But, April was also my birth month, so at the very least, I got to celebrate my birthday in relatively high spirits despite…well, everything.
This month also brought Tomodachi Life back into my life through Living the Dream, and I may have gotten horrifically obsessed with it. Let’s see how much it affected my backlogs, shall we?
Books I’ve Read
I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t read much in April. I know, I know! I should’ve just jumped from the 800-page book to the 700-page book without building up the dread of it all, but frankly, that sounded awful and I needed to read something else.
For all intents and purposes, my friend group was going to meet for a book club, but April is the last full month of classes, so they barely had the time to read, on top of me experiencing my own personal Horrors, so the book club didn’t really happen. I did get some of This is How You Lose the Time War read, but I didn’t really finish it.
Outside of that, I became horrifically obsessed with rereading an incredibly long fanfiction this month, and that’s like the extent of reading in April for me. It was a re-telling of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but what if it was Dimitri who experienced the horrors instead. That’s about as much as I can explain of the plot without actively spoiling FE3H, so if you’ve suffered through all of the routes of that game, I highly recommend reading “An Eagle Among Lions” by AMX004_Qubeley on AO3. It’s so very good, you can read a million words of FE3H fanfiction, I believe in you.
Upcoming Reading Plans
I’m intending on getting back on track in May for reading. Ideally, I’m gonna finish This is How You Lose the Time War for sure. That will probably take less than a week to do. From there, it’s a toss up of if I want to read Dark Age or start something else new.
I did return to my Libby list toward the end of the month, so I’ve got a couple of books on the docket for possible next reads, but I still have to read a chapter or two of them to know if I want to read them. Most likely, May will be dedicated to Dark Age, if I’m fully honest.
Games I’ve Played
To no one’s surprise, April was a weird month for gaming as well. I didn’t really do much gaming up until the second half of the month, and most of the gaming I did in the second half was Tomodachi Life.
Listen, they cooked with Tomodachi Life. It’s peak. They created the perfect game, a game that is peak straight out of the box, no updates or DLC required. You can make whatever you want. You can terraform your island from the get-go, and terraforming is free. There’s no inventory limit. You can make 70 silly little guys interact with each other in increasingly dumb ways. It’s perfect.
But, I digress; gaming and I didn’t really mesh well this month, so let’s get into what I did get to game.
Console Gaming
Again, with console gaming, all I really played was Metroid Prime 4, and I still have not finished the game. I didn’t really pick it up until toward the end of the month, so I only really put a couple of hours into it. But, May will be my Prime 4 month! I’m gonna try to play it at least every other day so I can get closer to being done with it, and hopefully finish it by the end of the month.
I also desperately want to play a PS3 game, so May will be a PS3 game month as well. I’m still debating between Borderlands and God of War, but considering I’m usually not an FPS gamer, it’s likely gonna be God of War. Also so that I’m not playing two FPS games at the same time; I think that’d make me go insane if that was the case.
I did slightly forget about this, but I also picked up Xenoblade Chronicles this month, so I will be dedicating some time in May to XBC1 as well. Since it’s on Switch, it might be both in the console and handheld gaming categories, depending on what I’m doing in game (e.g. missions versus main storyline). This will likely be my chill game of May, ideally between playing Animal Crossing and Tomodachi Life. But then again, this is all contingent on me having any amount of time to play games in May; I don’t think it’s gonna be much different than like March as a standard month. Hopefully.
Handheld Gaming
Shockingly, I did do quite a bit of handheld gaming. The first half of the month was dedicated to checking up on my Animal Crossing: New Leaf island, where I was consistently logging on once every day up until Tomodachi Life released. And then, well, you know what happened there.
Most likely, this is going to be what my handheld gaming will consist of until I get bored of Tomodachi Life or Animal Crossing. And/or, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow may join the mix, but honestly, since modding my 3DS, I highly prefer gaming on there to my phone, so we’ll see what happens. I’m not super far in Aria of Sorrow, so I might just figure out a way to play GBA games on my 3DS and get (a legal copy of) it downloaded on there.
Laptop Gaming
I continue to prove previous versions of me wrong by having my laptop gaming category be the longest category of the month, and frankly, I don’t know what changed to allow this. You could blame it on UNBEATABLE or of the Devil or Rabbit & Steel or Archipelago, but like 3/4 of these are because of my friends who play games on Steam more than console games. Cannot believe this, they’re turning me—me! a dedicated console game collector!—into a PC gamer…smh my head.
Anyway, I bought Super Battle Golf this month to play with my friends. It is such a stupid game, frankly the peak of friendslop gaming. I’m horrifically bad at golf, but at least I can prevent my friends from locking in by sending an orbital laser in their direction (in the game). It almost feels like mini golf, but the world is out to get you.
My brother got me a couple of games on Steam for my birthday this year, including Nine Sols, which I became instantly obsessed with. Nine Sols has a sauce to it in its early game that Hollow Knight lacks, making it an incredible game experience comparatively. And it’s literally all in the parrying mechanic. It’s like Metroid Dread, minus the literal dread.
Any Pick Ups This Month?
Despite the Horrors I experienced this month, I actually had a lot of pickups. Also, pretty much only games this time. It’s like an uneven split between digital and physical.
First up, I picked up Super Battle Golf, like I mentioned above. Since it’s pretty much exclusively a game to play with friends, it’s not going to go on the backlog to finish. My brother got me Nine Sols and Signalis for my birthday, which is incredibly hype of him. Nine Sols was a shock to me because I put it on my wishlist more recently and haven’t really looked into it much, but it also ended up being the object of my attention for a good chunk of the month. Absolute banger of a game. And Signalis will be my first survival horror game that I will be so brave about, and hopefully be able to finish because the story seems really cool. If I can do this, it’ll unlock a whole slew of games I’ve been too scared to attempt, which will be hella sick.
For physical pick ups, I got Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, which are both Switch games. Real ones would know that I had XBC1 on 3DS a while back, but it was such an awful game experience, I had to rent the Switch version at my library just to be certain it was the 3DS that made the game bad and not the game itself. Who would’ve though putting an RPG of such a caliber on such a limited device would be a bad idea?
And yes, the changes in my backlog this month through these purchases is NOT ideal, I don’t like gaining the ability to play so many new games in one go like this because it is very hard to split your very limited time between three games, let alone five.
And it sucks that when you finish one game, there’s always a replacement game to fill the missing slot, and that transition between games (or even books) is always the hardest in backlogging for me. Some part of me wants to sit with that world I left and appreciate it, and I should really listen to that part of me more often. But, ultimately, backlogging is meant to be fun, and that’s something that I have to remind myself frequently. I’m gonna play what I want to play, and it’s going to be impossible to finish the list in it’s entirety in any reasonable amount of time, so I might as well enjoy what I’m doing when I’m doing it, and spend as much time yapping about it as I want.
And that’s about it! I feel like I’ve gotten in the habit of not doing anything with my backlog for the majority of the month, only to sprint through a couple books or games at the very end. Not ideal, to say the least. My productivity also took a major hit this month, outside of Substack I struggled to write literally anything. Here’s to hoping May is at least a little better!
How was your April? Did you pick up anything sick this month? Did you also fumble to finish anything, or did you slam through a game/book or two? What was your favorite? Least favorite? Lemme know in the comments below!
May will bring a couple interesting posts I’ve held out on for a while, which is kinda exciting because I’ve had a lot of time to cook on them and they’re really shaping up to be quite fun reads, so stay tuned for that!
And as always, see you next time!
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