Blog: Games of July 2019

July was the first month in a long, loong time where I was able to just relax. I spent a lot of it with old childhood favourites and sprinting around being Mario. It was a nice month. Then I got hit by what might be the best Fire Emblem ever and I'm not quite sure what's happens to all the time since.

My top five games (by play time) for July were:

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Oh wow. So I picked this up on July 26. I played 30 hours. It's pretty great. I have a few nitpicks on pacing and story, but both the actual Fire Emblem grid-based combat and the interstitial Professorial team-building phase are really fun. Played the first pass on normal, casual difficulty (party because I'm tired of how hard Awakening would kick my butt) and I've found it a touch easy. Overall this game has taken over my life a bit and it's pretty glorious being able to revel in it for a while. That being said, my students may be a little confused come September when I try to teaching them by fishing a bunch.
   
   

   

   Ah. What a lovely place for a nap.

   
   


2. Super Mario Odyssey - The more I play of this the more I love it. There's so much diversity in things to do and the motion and control is a lot of fun. I think it could have a little more to it, and I'm sad there wasn't any DLC, but I've loved my time with Super Mario Odyssey.
   
   

   

   There is more in this game than has been dreamed of in any 8-bit philosophy.

   
   


3. Opus Magnum - Zachtronics gets me. I loved SpaceChem and Opus Magnum is the new, fancy, more accessible version of SpaceChem. The missions feel a lot more achievable than some of the early Zachtronics games, and once you've achieved a working result, it's extremely satisfying to go back in an optimize those results. I think having spent a lot of time thinking about algorithmic problem solving for novice computer scientists really put me in the right frame of my to enjoy this game.
   
   

   

   It's not efficient but it is pretty, which this game lets you do quite happily. 



4. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I think this my be my game-of-my-lifetime. I bought the Collection of Mana mostly for the other two games, but I've spent more time on Secret of Mana and been extremely happy playing it again. I love the way the story flows, I love the big bright sprites, I love the controls and the combat. Of course it has its flaws, but it still makes me so happy to play. Incidentally I noticed a few things this time around. One is that the UK version has different controls and a different translation to the US version. The second is just how well the game prepares you for things. Most locations are mentioned several steps ahead of the story from the time they actually become important and I find it helps the game hang together really well.
   
   

   

   Take that, Wasp!



5. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I've started to play Seiken Densetsu 3 several times of the years and I've always played the first few hours and then trailed off. Mostly because I wanted to recapture my joy of Secret of Mana and play properly sitting on the couch. Trials of Mana is letting me do that and I have to confess I'm a little disappointed. I think the story is great and well constructed, but the flow and combat from SoM is missing and the game feels a little detached from my input (the way Legend of Mana on the Playstation feels). I'm wondering if the game didn't get brought across back in the SNES area because they knew it wasn't quite up to the standard of SoM. I think as a kid I would have been pretty disappointed with it (although my capacity to play through crappy games was pretty high back then).
   
   

   

   What a time to be alive.

Here's my total play time chart for July:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month: