Video Games of June 2023

June was a relatively chill month. I mostly put in an hour or two on Tears of the Kingdom and also tried to get other stuff done. I felt pretty happy with the month. 

I've stopped recording mobile games. I've also mostly stopped playing them, but I picked up the full blown successor to "Seedship", "Beyond the Chiron Gate". It's a text-based game, where you make decisions about building a crew to investigate a wormhole network with the nifty little caveat that you can never go back to a system after you've found it. I've enjoyed it quite a bit, although the fact that some of the descriptions are repeated frequently enough that it makes it a little hard to get really invested in the lives of any of your little team flying through space. Certainly worth the price to play.

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

1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - ToTK has been really good. As I said in May, it a lot denser and more vibrant than Breath of the Wild. The ways they've expanded the core concepts in BoTW are really fun and there's usually at least "lne more thing" that I want to do every time I play. The story telling is also quite well done and they balanced the story with the messing around really well this time.
   
   


2. Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - I played the first few missions and had some fun with Advance Wars, but then ground to a halt when I hit a level I couldn't solve. If you've been reading for a while, you'll know that as much as I *like* tactics games, I'm often not very good at them, and games in the Advance Wars style really seem to stymie me. I find I'm often slow to solve puzzles in a lot of cases, and tactics games that don't give me an unreasonable breadth of actions tend to be a struggle. I may go back, I think they did some good work in the rerelease, but the core game play hasn't been my jam.
   
   


3. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - Vroom vroom, as always. Lately I've been looking for something that's easy to play but kind of interesting for those quick moments when I don't want to risk getting sucked into Tears of the Kingdom. Maybe time to look into reviving my gaming PC.
   
   


4. Donkey Kong Country (NSO - SNES) - Been watching Dan and Dan play through Donkey Kong Country 2 on PlayFrame. I figured I'd see how it felt to play again and how far I could get. SNES platformers from this era also kinda match for that easy to get into game I'm looking for. It's also intersting to look at how games from that era weren't good at really communicating with players how to do well (or even to play) which I think is a mix of a lot of business decissions (don't want those kids renting these games) and technical ones (we already have all the sprites we can have on screen). As a kid, DKC was really impressive, looking back on it from today it seems really limited.
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for June:

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