What Did We Play Yesterday?

Each night, I watch TV with my family. They've recently become obsessed with this god-awful realty show about an asshole collectible auctioneer guy (Gold something) and the crass materialism makes my head explode, but I like hanging out with my family, so my compromise is to play on my handheld while I half-absorb information about a sports jersey some boring-ass millionaire collector paid 12 lifetime salaries for because boring-ass millionaires are like that. Sports memorabilia collectors truly are the worst. The guy who has a 20,000-title retro games collection gets a pass. The dude who bought cloth an athlete touched once? Loser, uncool. Get bent. Delete your account and donate to charity.

Anyway, that's how I started playing a old favorite, Illusion of Gaia. I was inspired by Gaia Lab's recent re-translation of the game but it looks like they're actively working on it so I snagged the sprint romhack for now.

I enjoyed this game many years ago (still have the complete box, though I can't imagine playing these games on original hardware again), and it's crazy how much I remember of the weird localization and red gem locations. This game will always have a special place in my heart, if only for Hamlet the pig, who is a true hero. The game grapples tough subjects, like starvation and slavery, and it feels very unique to similar games of the time.

I also continued plugging away at Illusion of Gaia. The translation is definitely eccentric but I'm enjoying it. I reached the first boss, but got killed, so that was a good stopping point. There were a few sound-based puzzles and for some reason the sound wasn't coming through on my emulator, so I'm grateful to the Heroes at GameFAQs for explaining what section of the wall I needed to bash.