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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by Khushrenada on September 06, 2026, 09:46:51 PM »

Broodwars suckered me in good when he told Mop it up that there were like 16 Sonic Game Gear games and he wouldn’t be able to match that total. Yet, now he had found a way to hit 22.

In my defense, when I said that I meant it. I did the mental math and saw that Mop was going to hit 18 games if she cleared all the games in the collection. I think at the time I was still around 9-10 and I wasn't seeing how I was going to top that and still play stuff I wanted to play like those games I listed as honorable mentions.

It's all good. I made mention before about Mop it up posting that she was going to play Peach and Zelda games and suddenly pivoted to all these Sonic games and needling her about that change. So, you are allowed to change your plans too. It was just something that was playing in my thoughts when I was making my plans and calculations to go for 20 after reaching 10 and thinking that would seal the deal based on what people had posted so I included it here in my thoughts.

Considering I was playing crap like Elea and the Jurassic Park collection after that just to try to catch up to where I thought Mop and you would end up, I would say I rather suckered myself. And I had to heavily de-tox from gaming with anime binging for several days when it was all over. 

Heh. Yeah, it's sort of been the same for me. Tuesday night I went and saw Coyote Vs Acme and have just watched some TV shows and movies the next few nights after along with doing some posts here. Only game I've been playing since Monday is Pokemon TCG Pocket and that hasn't been much. Today is the first day I got back into playing something more significant and that was going back to TOEM to complete that game. Turns out there was also some bonus content added and a whole new area to explore as a sort of free DLC so got the 100% from the original base game and am now completing this bonus area. Probably going to keep doing some finishing up on a few of these other games I played as I finally feel ready to tackle them some more at a slower pace.

As for your 2 last games, I have no issues counting them, though I'm surprised you only cleared Super Mario Bros. U when you had New Super Luigi U right there as well. I would have counted that game as well since it's individually select-able in that collection. 75 completed games is a nice round number for something like this.

Heck yeah! 75 is a great number. The diamond anniversary. We reached diamond rank. Just watch Insanolord show up now with a soccer game to make it 76 and ruin it all. As for Luigi U, I would also count it as a separate second game and I realized I need to add it to my Backloggery account of games as I only put in NSMBUD as a single game. However, while Luigi U is a shorter game that wants you go through levels quickly, I was still unsure if it would be short enough to do in time before the month ended particularly since NSMBUD took me longer than I was thinking to get from 1-1 to Bowser even with shortcuts. Luigi U uses the same map. I also wanted to save the game as I remember liking it a whole lot more than NSMBU and didn't want to play and cover a bunch of its content before finishing up the Mario U version. Based on what the Gunman Clive games were like, I banked on Onion Assault being a shorter experience than Luigi U. Perhaps if I save Luigi U for next year, I'll know if I was right or not but I do think I made the right choice there.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by broodwars on September 06, 2026, 07:59:17 PM »

Broodwars suckered me in good when he told Mop it up that there were like 16 Sonic Game Gear games and he wouldn’t be able to match that total. Yet, now he had found a way to hit 22.

In my defense, when I said that I meant it. I did the mental math and saw that Mop was going to hit 18 games if she cleared all the games in the collection. I think at the time I was still around 9-10 and I wasn't seeing how I was going to top that and still play stuff I wanted to play like those games I listed as honorable mentions.

And as it turned out, I didn't. I ended up falling into the rabbit hole of digging through my PSN and Switch libraries looking for stuff I could knock out quickly. I originally wasn't going to play Star Fox 2026 for this event, as I figured it would give people ideas that there was a recent game they probably all owned that they could "beat" in a half hour. 

Considering I was playing crap like Elea and the Jurassic Park collection after that just to try to catch up to where I thought Mop and you would end up, I would say I rather suckered myself. And I had to heavily de-tox from gaming with anime binging for several days when it was all over. 

As for your 2 last games, I have no issues counting them, though I'm surprised you only cleared Super Mario Bros. U when you had New Super Luigi U right there as well. I would have counted that game as well since it's individually select-able in that collection. 75 completed games is a nice round number for something like this.

Looking ahead, I think if we end up doing the RPG event in November (incidentally, I do plan to count Adventure games in that event), I think I'm going to forego the whole leaderboard thing unless people really want it. I don't seem to remember Shocktober using one. Seems to generate more stress than it does excitement, though it does look like we surpassed the views on 2024 and are making good progress on overtaking 2025's numbers.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by Khushrenada on September 06, 2026, 07:20:02 PM »

And that’s how my 2026 Backlaugust turned out. After two years of not finishing anything or hardly even playing anything during the event, it has been a bit of a wild ride this time and I’m pretty happy with what I was able to accomplish especially with just two thirds of the month to do it in. It seems to me, though, based on how all these events have gone is that for a person to top the leaderboard they pretty much have to start strong at the beginning. Once you have a lead, you can keep countering more easily with anyone that is starting to catch up because you potentially have more time to play more things to increase that lead while others then have to add more games in that narrowing window to do so. I thought this year might be the first time where a person might overtake the leader despite starting late but it was not to be. Of course, one could just not say how much they have played or beat and wait until the end to possible show up with the most games finished (like Mop it up in the 2021 event). Still, I think it is better when people keep a running update like happened this year as it does create a bit more excitement and motivation to keep playing stuff when there is that added element/challenge. Looking back, it seems that Mop it up topped the leaderboard in 2021 and 2022. I did it in 2023 and Broodwars had done it in 2024 and 2025. Perhaps it isn’t that surprising that the three of us would be putting up such an effort this year and we may not see a battle like this again in a future event. Although, who knows? I wasn’t expecting this year to set a new record in the total games beat after the last couple years and what forum participation is at. Maybe there will be more surprises if this keeps on going. 

As for those that may see these large totals of games done and think reporting 1 or 2 games isn't much, well, that's not true. Every game helps for the grand total record and these numbers are not usual. Half of the events in the past have had smaller numbers. 2021 had Mop it up at top with 10 games and I was second with 7 games. As mentioned, Broodwars was at the top with 8 games the past couple years so double digits aren't always reached by participants. Once more, I didn't even beat or complete anything the past couple years so those 1 or 2 games are better than anything I did in the past two Backlaugusts combined. The leaderboard race ultimately favors smaller games and a large majority of games will often take more than 3 hours to beat. There were a couple games that I realized I still haven't finished that I had thought about doing in this event. One was Zack and Wiki for the Wii. I think there's around 6 levels I might still have to get through to finish getting all the bones. If this year had been slower, I'd have probably tackled that game as I'd like to revisit and complete it but I didn't want to end up stumped on something for awhile and be unsure how much time it could take to finish so I put it off to focus on games that felt I could more easily beat and keep up the forward momentum. If those 1 or 2 games were games you really wanted to play and finish then that should be a win. I had to put that off to focus on stuff I wasn't always so eager to play and, in some cases, would have walked away from but I'd already put in some time and wanted that time to pay off and count for this leaderboard race. It's all good.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by Khushrenada on September 06, 2026, 07:07:09 PM »

It was 10:30 PM my time and I was now at 19 games done. One more game remained to hit the 20 mark. There was a game that had been on my mind when I was coming into the weekend as a possibility and it seemed to me my best chance now.

Onion Assault. Perhaps you may remember the Gunman Clive games back on the Wii U/3DS eShop. I had gotten both of them due to the positive reception they had back then. I’m not sure how much reviewers might care about those games had they just released for the first time, say, this year but back then on the eShop they were considered standouts albeit short and rather simple games. I got them for 3DS and may have even used one for an early Backlaugust. The games had a bit of charmed but they didn’t wow me or were something I ever bothered to return to after beating them. The next game that Horberg (the main person behind those games) made was Mechstermination Force. I’ve never picked that one up or tried it. From the description, it just felt like a Boss Rush mode and that didn’t seem too appealing. I didn’t even realize until just looking it up but he had another game between that and Onion Assault which is Super Punch Patrol. It was Onion Assault that stood out to me when it was released. I’d seen talk of how the game pulled from the idea of Super Mario Bros. 2 and being able to lift items from the ground to throw or enemies by standing on their heads plus some other surprises and that gameplay hook made me want to try it for myself. It’s not something that has been done or replicated much since SMB2 did it.

Now, this is only the third game I’ve played of the five that he and his production studio have made but out of those three I did feel this is his best work yet. Which is a little ironic considering MetaCritic shows this game as his most poorly reviewed/scored game to date. With this game, he played it more straight. Clive took some fanciful turns as the game went on. It felt like a bigger effort than those games and a maturing in the design and platforming elements. One other Mario element he seems to have borrowed for this game is the Star Coins in the NSMB series. There are 3 special Onion coins to be found in each level. Not sure if you get anything for unlocking them but they are the reason I’ll be going back to this game to complete it. Now perhaps you’ve read earlier that whenever I think of Backlaugust, I often think of games like this. How quickly could I blast through a 2D platformer to hit the credits? Here was my chance with a game that is just 16 levels long.

Again, maybe not as fast as I think. Once again, my completionist tendencies were starting to kick in at first about exploring levels to find the three special Onion coins and I had to tell myself to ignore those for now and just get through the level. At one point, I was hitting a failure loop around the 7th level in which I kept working my way to a certain section but was taking too much damage or repeatedly making mistakes on certain sections. I think this was the point where one had to jump across some narrow platforms while avoiding some falling icicles. I realized that I needed to better get a handle on how the character actually controlled as their movement was a bit different from Mario after playing NSMBUD and I kept hitting things like ZR to make him twirl like Mario did and the character did not have that ability. I got through the level and then I paused and stopped playing. I had put some food in the oven just before booting up this game and it was ready now. I also felt a break might be good as I was feeling a bit fatigued at this point.

Ate and watched a bit of TV and then I questioned if I wanted to keep going as it was right around midnight and decided I did. Got back into it and maybe around 1:30 AM I hit the credits. But wait you say, isn’t that past the deadline? Wasn’t it now September? Technically, that is true. However, in my mind, if I had realized that it was too late for the Bananza challenges then I wouldn’t have been playing DK Bananza first and would have completed both NSMBUD and Onion Assault before midnight my time. Also, time is a flexible thing. It would still be Aug. 31 in Hawaii, for instance. And it still felt like the night of Aug. 31 to me and waking up tomorrow morning would feel like September 1st then. In my heart, I feel I hit the 20 mark for this event but, as I’ve mentioned, we’ve always gone by the honor system so that is why I have mentioned this and will leave it up to this year’s host to decide if they will count it or not. Then we can all complain about whatever he chooses which is the real reason we all participate in this event, isn’t it?

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by Khushrenada on September 06, 2026, 07:02:41 PM »

So, now what? Well, since I couldn’t get the DK Challenges done in time and I couldn’t take the Backlaugust crown, I might as well try to at least accomplish the goal I’d set of 20 games done. We often talk about the leaderboard not being the important thing about Backlaugust and the goal is to just get through as many games as you can in your Backlog and use this as motivation to do so. 20 games would still be my own personal best and, in some ways, it would be kind of fitting with how these events have gone that I’d be the first person to hit the 20 games mark and still only get 2nd place with that amount.

First up, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. Just as I was about to start it, I got a text from my cousin who I’d been meaning to speak with to connect our Switch 2s and test the GameChat feature. And that’s what we did. I was trying to play the game while chatting and doing things but it was kind of hard to do both and I kept falling at the 8-1 level as, of course, I kept trying to collect a Star Coin along the way requiring a use of the Ice Flower power-up. Eventually I did and got to the Bowser fight. I think it was about 7 or 8 tries to finish that which I felt was 5 – 6 tries to many. Don’t recall it taking that long or that many tries the first and only time I did it back on the Wii U. At this point, we called it quits on the Gamechat.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by Khushrenada on September 06, 2026, 07:02:07 PM »

Alright. Let’s wrap up this reminiscing that no one asked for. Monday. Dawn of the Final Day.

As I thought about things at work, I reached an acceptance that while it would be great to still find a way to top the leaderboard or even just achieve a tie so that neither big effort by myself or Broodwars would be eclipsed, I felt I’d rather still keep some of the short games I had yet to play for a future Backlaugust. Broodwars suckered me in good when he told Mop it up that there were like 16 Sonic Game Gear games and he wouldn’t be able to match that total. Yet, now he had found a way to hit 22. And, when thinking about the games he played, he played a lot of harder games to hit the ending of. I had stuff like Catan and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Which didn’t require the most effort. Unlike the past couple years where he hit the top with little competition, it seemed like he really earned it this year so I was willing to take what was likely another 2nd place depending on what Mop it up finished with.

Plus, as mentioned, I had wanted to attempt to get through the Donkey Kong Bananza challenges before they ended. When I got home, I loaded up Bananza and played through the beginning for a bit until I progressed a bit into the second Lagoon area. I felt I likely had a good handle on how the controls worked so I went to the challenges. I was confused when trying to load the first one it took me back to the game’s main menu. I looked around for something in the menus that might have been added for these challenges but found nothing. Tried it again from the Challenge menu on the app and again got nowhere. Finally, loaded up the question mark that talked about the challenges and discovered that the challenges were completed as you played through the game. I thought it was like the classic side of the challenges where it would load up the necessary spot / moment needed and just have you play that bit to complete it. I now realized that there was no way I could complete these challenges as it would require me beating the whole game in a night which wasn’t going to happen. Now I felt like I was suffering double defeat. If I’d know that beating 18 games would still result in not finally topping the Backlaugust leaderboard for a 2nd time then I’d have just been playing DK Bananza. Now I won’t know what some of those challenges were like after Caterkiller had been talking them up. I guess I should have tried the challenges earlier to realize they worked differently than the classic side.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

« Last post by broodwars on September 05, 2026, 12:36:29 PM »

At this point, it was getting to be late and I'd only beat 3 games and with one game very close to the finish line. I'll admit Broodwars number of 22 had deflated my enthusiasm.

Yeah, that is pretty much the reason I held that collection in reserve for so long. Well, that and the games in the collection being bad. There were comments early on in the thread about people feeling deflated at the prospect of catching up on the leaderboard, and I didn't want to kill morale any further.

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TalkBack / Re: Bubsy 4D (Hands-on Preview) - Gamescom 2025

« Last post by hanmira on September 05, 2026, 12:16:57 AM »

I honestly didn’t expect Bubsy 4D to look this promising. The 3D cel-shaded style actually suits the character really well, and if the controls are as polished as the preview suggests, I might have to give it a chance. Definitely one of the more unexpected comebacks.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Field notes: what Japanese amiibo actually cost in 2026

« Last post by broodwars on September 04, 2026, 06:33:58 PM »

I'm glad that computer parts have soared in prices just so this thread could exist.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Field notes: what Japanese amiibo actually cost in 2026

« Last post by Evan_B on September 04, 2026, 11:11:26 AM »

Is that… a spambot replying to your call out of the first spambot?

I think buying amiibo is a questionable endeavor these days in general, so while I respect the potential effort of the OP write up, it’s not going to sway me to purchase them in any region.