I've decided to keep track of games I've finished in 2026. I find I'm having to be more thoughtful about my gaming with a small child. It changes what I can play and when.

Dispatch

I picked Dispatch up for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was a small, narrative game I could play on a handheld as and when the opportunity arose. Secondly was the involvement of Critical Role talent which I took as a bit of a seal of quality.

The game isn't perfect by any stretch but I found it entertaining and engaging. Sadly, in terms of the game play, the voice cast is the standout feature of the game.

Clair Obscur Expedition 33

From a small narrative game to a big narrative game. Expedition 33 is, simply, very French. Which is not an insult, I promise. It is simply not the product of American, British or Japanese game studios that are so very common. And, admittedly, mines, striped black and white turtlenecks and the Eiffel Tower push the Frenchness just a liiitle towards the realm of self parody but why not?

I clocked a lot of what this game was doing very early when I turned to my partner and said "Well this one's going to be entirely about grief, then." I laid out my expectations for who The Paintress, the villain literally looming over so much of the game, would turn out to be. Her motives. The surprise reveal of her non-villainous intent... and I was maybe 70% right.

The characters here are captivating. I mean not just the human members of your party, but stranger and more interesting companions like Esquie and Monoco really stand out. Especially when it's finally revealed why they are the way they are.

This was a big commitment with the kind of gaming hours I have available to me now and I probably wouldn't have made it through if I hadn't been able to break the back of it on a business trip with my Steam Deck in my luggage.

Pokemon Emerald

The tonal shifts aren't stopping, I'm afraid.

Last year I rolled credits on a Kanto region Pokemon game for the first time in my life with FireRed. Emerald was the obvious next step.

I started out with the GBA games because going back to actual GameBoy graphics was not something I wanted to do but... well, more on that later.

It's Pokemon. Not a lot more to say on that. I'm currently working through Diamond as my next Pokemon adventure and I do intend to work through them all and catch up on the games in the franchise I bounced off of or missed over the years.

Super Mario Land

So remember that thing I said about not wanting to go back to GameBoy graphics?

That changed.

So much so that I picked up a TimUI Brick to have something closer to the GameBoy experience and am currently playing Pokemon Yellow and Link's Awakening DX on it.

This thing is far from my most powerful gaming device but it really, really brings back that GameBoy vibe and it's small enough to just live in my pocket.

I expect more GameBoy / GameBoy Color era games to go on this list.

As for Super Mario Land itself, well, I have played this game literally countless times. When you're young and you own a console you don't own every game. You own a few games. And you play those games into the ground. I never beat it though. I got to the final boss a handful of times but I never beat it.

Now I have.

I am free.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

More so than my TrimUI Brick and more so even than my PC the majority of this year's gaming has been done on an AYN Thor.

I love this thing. It's a dual screen device running Android 13. As such it supports a broad range of emulators and frontend software that gives it a real console-like feel and gives me access to high quality emulation of platforms up to and beyond the Playstation 2. It can even do some decent emulation of the forbidden console. And light PC gaming too (some of my Dispatch gameplay was played on this thing).

But, mostly, it has two goddamn screens! I owned a DS and a 3DS and they may be my favourite handhelds ever made. True, the Thor doesn't have the 3d display of the 3DS or a camera, which limits what you can play ever so slightly, but it still lets you experience dual screen emulation the way it's meant to be played. That's why Ace Attorney was the NDS version. And I'm about to finish Justice For All very, very soon. Professor Layton and the Curious Village will be on this list shortly as well. And Pokemon Diamond as I already mentioned. Yeah, I'm having a dual screen renaissance and it's great.

As for Ace Attorney? I missed these games the first time around and osmosed everything I know about them through memes. So many memes.

Now I'm playing them I have to admit they're really fun. The two biggest flaws are almost cardinal opposites of each other.

1. You have already figured out the twist but don't have the precise sequence of bits and pieces to present to put together the story you have worked out in your head.
2. You have no idea what is going on and are reduced to LucasArts levels of combine X with Y until problem goes away.

Both kind of to be expected with the mechanics of the game, sadly and neither is enough to actually kill the fun. I knew the characters were over the top but what I didn't know was how little of the meme culture was exaggerating. It really do be like that, huh?

And the localisation, setting the game in a weird version of America that also has the Japanese legal system, a preponderance of Samurai TV shows, noodles everywhere and shrine villages is ... a lot to deal with? But it feels like they know how ridiculous what they're doing is and lean in to it so I'm just going to go with it.

Phoenix Wright: Justice For All

So funny thing, I genuinely expected Persona 3 to be the next up on this list but it turns out I'm not quite as close to the finish line on that one as I'd thought and closer to the finish on Justice For All than I'd anticipated.

I have to admit I'm really enjoying the Phoenix Wright games and this one just took everything I said about the first game above an amplifies it. The last case especially really goes some places huh?

Oh and speaking of that last case the shipping between Nick and Miles went from 'sure, that makes sense' to 'oooohhhhh. yeah. for sure. 100%'

Pokemon Yellow

Told you there'd be more old school gameboy (color) games on the list.

Man, I'm not sure which was the better quality of life upgrade in The Pokémon franchise, running shoes or a town map with a cursor you can actually move in a direction of your choice, but the absence of both hurt.

Luckily having beaten Fire Red not so long ago I was able to mostly speed run Yellow.

I enjoyed that this was clearly Pokemon: Fan Service Edition. Between Pikachu, Jesse and James getting Koffing, Meowth and Ekans and the gym leader Pokemon lineups all being a bit more anime friendly.

1000xResist

Somehow in 2024 I overlooked the release of 1000xResist. It wasn't until the forthcoming Prove You're Human was described as from the creators of 1000xResist that I went and looked at it again. I'm glad I did! It turns out that this is very much up my alley. Before I say why though let me just drop this:

Worse graphics is not intended to be disparaging here, the graphics fondly remind me of the PS2 or OG Xbox era but in a modern resolution and they more than do the job demanded of them.

Everything is readable and stylised. In some ways the graphics lend themselves to the sterile enclosed environment the game is set in. They certainly don't detract from the experience.

To be clear I can spend 50+ hours playing a new GTA game and come away thinking 'yup that sure was another GTA game' but I play 7 hours of 1000xResist and I come away thinking about intergenerational trauma, how we define ourselves against internal vs external sources of both validation and criticism, how human beings create systems of power and consistently embed oppression into governance, especially how a successful revolution is likely to create an extremist regime that will engender another revolution, about isolation with specific reference to the quarantine period of COVID19, about social isolation outside of an external factor like COVID19, about racial stereotyping and treating people as an indistinguishable mass of similar entities, about identity and role, how someone determines worth in society, about the nature of memory and its reliability, and with a burning desire to learn more about the 1999 Hong Kong protests.

So... yeah. Definitely spoke to me.

Gameplay wise it's a walking simulator (complimentary) with extremely mild puzzle elements. I didn't feel challenged (by the gameplay) at any point. Which is why I think seven hours is a perfect amount of time to not overstay its welcome.

Persona 3

Spoilers for a 20 year old game will follow.

So this was a big one, I've been making my way through Persona 3 for a good long time now. Nearly a year! Parenting a child has definitely interrupted the amount of time I have to sit and play a game that has as much going on as this one but I finally finished.

And found out that apparently there are people who were surprised or disappointed that the protagonist dies at the end? Uhm... were we playing the same game? So Persona 3 is all about time. Immediately it's apparent that it's time management. You have to build multiple friendships while also working on yourself while also paying attention to your studies while also clearing Tartarus all juggled around a schedule of school trips and exams that eat away at that available time.

Then it becomes increasingly clear it isn't just time management it's making the most of the time you have left. That theme of finite time is clear over and over again in Persona 3. From the fact that every day ends in a literal timeline progressing in front of your eyes making you endlessly aware of the irrevocable passage of time to the recurrent themes of running out of time.

We have to make the most use of our time left because...

• Exams are coming
• The season will change soon
• This school trip / holiday will be over soon
• The seniors will graduate and move on with their lives
• We risk our lives daily and never know when the end is coming
• Oh shit we DO know when the end is coming!

And as the story progresses and you find out that the child that visits you in the dark hour is literally death and that death lives inside you because Aigis used you as a vessel to contain him a decade ago...

Really? There are people who are surprised you die at the end of this game? This game where you feel like you're on borrowed time from moment one and there is so much focus on the importance of the social bonds you form with people around you?

OK.

Anyway...

The cast of characters are, for the most part, great. A little on-the-nose anime but that is hardly surprising. It has a lot more in common with Neon Genesis Evangelion than I was expecting.

What I knew (or thought I knew) about Persona 3 going in: Social sim and dungeon crawler, so edgy it'll cut you, fan-service.

What I discovered as I played: Not as edgy as I thought, but still edgy. Not as fan-servicey as I thought (though it looks like that gets increasingly true in later games). Parallels NGE in: child soldiers forced to fight against a sequence of progressively more challenging supernatural invaders, the corruption of the organisation forcing the children to fight, parent issues, especially daddy issues, one of the supernatural invaders being a friend that pops up and hangs out with the children towards the end, the threat of the end of everything and everyone, spiritual imagery, weird-ass enemy designs, weird sexualisation of fragile girls in hospital beds, hormones.

Having played it I do totally get why this franchise is as popular as it is but it is so grindy. Re-running Tartarus over and over again for supplies and XP gets tedious quickly. Thank god the designers were so liberal with the range of enemy and persona designs so at least what you're fighting and your skill set change often enough to keep things at least a little fresh.

So grinding is one of my complaints. My other and much larger complaint is that the game dares force me to wait so long to romance Mitsuru?

Baldur's Gate 3

Not a lot to say about this one. It wasn't my first time playing the game. It won't be my last.

This run was playing as the Karlach origin, because that was the only way I could think of to do something other than romance Karlach again. She's a lot of fun as an origin character and it makes the Gortash fight really cathartic.

So that's my finished games so far. More to come on this one as I have a lot of games in progress and quite a few of them are very, very close to the finish line.

First, to quote myself on BlueSky...

So a little 'I'm old' revelation I recently had. I used to love handheld gaming but had gone off it in recent years. The other day I got my first pair of varifocal glasses. Turns out now I can see my handhelds, I have learned to love them again.

— wryterra (@wryterra.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 6:12 PM

This has had a knock on effect I could never have predicted.

So something bizarre seems to be happening. In my old age I am finding that my distaste for JRPG as a genre has waned. So anyway, Persona 3 is kind of great so far.

— wryterra (@wryterra.bsky.social) June 17, 2025 at 8:37 AM

Some people reading this (mostly the people who know I used to do a podcast and have listened to it, or who know me personally) will know I've long held the opinion that Final Fantasy VII is most likely a great game, given its cultural impact and reputation but 'not for me'.

I've tried to play it several times and bounced off. I maintain to this day that the pre-rendered backgrounds do a very poor job of imparting information about the depth of the scene and that can make navigation obtuse, frustrating and confusing.

That's why I've never got past the second reactor mission. Yes, I've bounced off that quickly.

Until now...

Something about the handheld format makes the game more... I don't know, digestible? Whatever the reason I'm actually even further along than when this was taken. I've just arrived at Fort Condor for the first time. Which, well, it's not far into the game but it's a lot further than the second reactor mission. I might actually stick it through this time!

I went out with the intent to do a little street photography on Victoria Road in Glasgow.

I am extremely smart.

That is why I took a camera that had no battery in it.

But I own a phone and they say the best camera is the one you have with you. I didn't spend as long as I'd planned, given that I didn't have my camera with me, but I used it as a practice run and tried to get my eye in with a few shots.

Continuing my adventures with lowfi photography I have a new camera.

I was inspired by Karin Majoka and her YouTube video How a TOY CAMERA Made Me Fall in Love with Photography (again). Watching it had me almost convinced. What did it was the fact the algorithm then threw another four or five videos about the same toy at me, all from professional or highly capable photographers.

It's also dirt cheap.

Now this isn't some wonder-camera. The lens is a tiny plastic lens, the quality is... dire.

This is, in theory, a 20MP image. The details are soft, the colours are definitely wrong. So why is this such a good camera? Well it comes with a printer built in. And not an Instax style printer. It's a thermal printer like the ones used to print your receipts when you go shopping. The quality is... dire.

But the print is almost instant and it costs next to nothing. Something about this quality of producing a tangible product, feeling like an old instant camera, while being eminently affordable makes it a joy to use.

Also it gives me this nostalgic feeling like I'm using a GameBoy camera all over again.

And in case you're wondering whether I can load up a quality photograph shot in a studio on a real SLR then print it on the same garbage printer? I've got good news...

It's the photographic equivalent of an 8-Bit demake video game. Or deliberately adding scanlines to emulated ROMs.

I love it.