Ah, I didn’t see your edit to say you’d played it too. I’m not sure if it will appeal to a more hardcore player (I hadn’t played any for at least a year prior), but yeah, I think it’s pretty nice for newbies and more casual players. Some people will like just opening packs and might not bother with the battles.

One thing about PTCGL was that the app/PC client were really bloated, slow, and ran hot on my devices. The app for Pocket has great performance.

I’ve still been playing Fire Emblem Engage in bursts, but don’t think I played it this week - however, I think I’m on the last chapter now, so might finish it this weekend. Although there’s still DLC chapters to do that I haven’t looked at yet.

What I’ve actually been playing is Pokemon TCG Pocket. I played PTCG Online a bit just before it transitioned to PTCG Live, and then continued with PTCGL a bit after that, so I was already familiar with how battles work. So far, I’m pretty happy with PTCGP. It’s a simplified version of the normal PTCG rules with custom cards without real-world equivalents. It is definitely more straightforwards, which is nice for doing quick battles but limits the types of interesting plays you can make. What I really appreciate is some kind of single-player mode (which they had in PTCGO but scrapped in PTCGL) with interesting challenges to do.

I’m not sure if a meta has emerged, but I feel that the online battles I’ve done are farily diverse it terms of the decks people use - I think there are more viable decks to use. In PTCGL, there were like 3 or 4 decks that everyone used, so that battles were really repetitive.

It’s still early days for PTCGP, but I think it’s a very well made game. Not something I’ll play all year round, but might dip in every now and then.

To be fair, it’s only the countries in dark blue on that map that have it. The light blue countries have something like one of your parents has to be a citizen/settled, which is what the previous commenter was suggesting as an alternative.

Not most, technically - wiki says 0-14 make 44% of population. But this article breaks down the 70% further by saying 44% killed were 14 or under, so it’s pretty much bang on for indicating that they’re killing Palestinians at random.

The huge list of echoes that you have to scroll through in a single line looking for the right one is pretty annoying. It was same kind of problem when you wanted to attach something to an arrow in TotK.

I’ve been doing a bit of Fire Emblem Engage every evening, and it’s really grown on me. The battles are challenging in a way that you really have to think about how you set everyone up at the start, consider most moves carefully, and respond when the enemy does something you don’t expect. It all leads to a very satisfying result when you execute it well. I haven’t played a FE game since Awakening, so I can’t really compare it with more recent games and maybe I’ve forgotten what FE is like, but it does feel like a really well-balanced game in terms of the battle difficulty.

Slowly carrying on with Fire Emblem Engage. It’s picking up a bit and it’s pretty fun now. I’m playing on the easiest settings (no permadeath and unlimited use of the time crystal to rewind when you make mistakes). I’m slightly conflicted about that now, because I did enjoy the old challenge of getting through without anyone ever dying. In Engage I’m mainly using the time crystal when I make a button press when I don’t mean it or immediately seeing a better placement for a unit, but every chapter or two I have a character die and I rewind to save them (where in the past I would have restarted the chapter). On one chapter, I didn’t bother rewinding and just let someone die because I knew they’d come back. It is a huge (real) time saver, but it’s a very different feel from older FE games. I know I could play with harder settings, but now the option is there, I’m not sure I have the patience and time to go back to the old way. Not sure what the point of this ramble was - still a fun game, and I’m definitely going to play through to the end.

I felt like Scarlet/Violet were maybe the worst mainline pokemon games I’ve played. The performance issues and glitches can be annoying, but it’s not a dealbreaker. It’s more the overall feel of it. The gyms didn’t have the same sense as older games, and the battling aspect didn’t seem to have as much importance in the game.

Yeah, a few of the puzzles are really hard if you just don’t see it. I think I was trying for half an hour on both those tricky ones before getting it or giving up.

I’m still really early on in Engage, so I can’t really comment on it, but between battles I’m just watching the cutscenes and going through the dialogue, not doing any of the optional support conversations or even going back to the base to check the shops etc. so it’s quite a fast pace. The story so far feels a bit meh, though - not very epic.

I thought I might try Three Houses after this and just skip/auto as much of the monastery stuff as I could, but if I actually have to do that stuff to recruit people, it’s going to get annoying.

I have come across my favorite boss from Oracle of Ages

It’s not the only returning boss - I’m not sure if there’s a plot reason for it or they just felt like recycling

I gave up on FFVII because it stopped being fun. The Midgar parts were fun, but at a certain stage it just started feeling like a bunch of random events strung together with only a loose connection to the plot. I got up to doing the mandatory chocobo race.

I’ve been watching my son play some Echoes of Wisdom and got called upon to solve some dungeon puzzles he couldn’t get past. The hardest ones were figuring out that you could place echoes far away by holding down the button (presumably that was in a tutorial, but I missed it). Then there was trying to get past a water flow that was pushing in the wrong direction.

Last, in the ice temple, there was a room with a fan and ice and fire vents on either side where I couldn’t reach the doorway. To my shame, I had to look up how to do it

For myself, I started playing Fire Emblem Engage. I could have chosen Three Houses, and its story looks more interesting, but I’m not that into social sim stuff and they say the Engage battles are better.

There’s just enough time to rerelease the old f-zero games in between Mario Party releases; not quite enough to make a successor to GX.

This is a statement from North Korea, so I’m not sure they’d agree

I’ve helped him out with just a couple of things, like a cloud boss battle, but he’s mainly tackling it by himself, which I’m happy with.

FFIX seems to be regarded as a beter game in some ways, but I think FFVII is more iconic. I think I only ever tried out VI before (not for long, I couldn’t get into it). I’m not sure whether I’ll try out any others after this - I know there’s IX and X at least also on the eshop

I’m stepping away from Super Smash Bros because now I’m literally just grinding gold extremely slowly to buy the last ~60 odd spirits I’m missing, which are all just DLC spirits. It’s not fun that way.

Bought Echoes of Wisdom, but my son’s been playing it and I probably won’t tackle it myself any time soon.

Instead I bought FFVII since it was on discount and I’d never played it before. I’m slightly disappointed after hearing it being hyped for 20 years - but it’s still enjoyable enough to carry on with.

The fast pass has been a thing for years, but are you saying the last three chapters are permanently locked? That’s terrible.

I bought nintendo online so that I could try out the online mode mode in super smash bros, and it’s really discouraging. I thought I was alright at it because I’ve basically completed the game and done the hardest challenges, but on online I’m riduclously outclassed. I think I played like 30 games last night and won only 2. I know it has a ranking system to match you up with similar players - I don’t know if it starts you out pretty high at first or something, because I feel like I’m a level 1 CPU right now.

In Smash Ultimate, do you mean the playable characters or the spirits? I’ve been grinding away at the spirits still, and I’ve got about 175 still to go. The spirit board is almost clear I think, so I’m guessing there’s loads (like most of the DLC ones) that I still have to buy using gold.

The 3D on the 3DS was a harmless gimmick because it could be turned off, and that’s what I always did, but I would have liked a cheaper version without it. I think they eventually did that with the 2DS XL.

I have passed 1000, so a few hundred left. A lot of those are summons and enhanceable ones, so I’ll have to grind SP. And there’s a few 4-star legends that I can’t get past, it’s Super Sonic and Evil Ryu at the moment that I’ve been beaten by multiple times.