It's that time of year yet again! Now to copy over this post from ludist210...

Backlaugust: The Official Negative World Month for Decimating Backlogs!™ is back again for more action! So start looking through your backlog and get started! The idea is to finish games during the month of August.

Here are the "rules":

Games can be on any system, not just Nintendo systems. I know we're a Nintendo fan site, but most everyone here is a multi-console owner. So play a game on any system you want.

Let us know what you're playing. Mostly just so we can cheer each other on.

Play games you already own. A lot of people tend to buy a game then not play it, or play it for a significant amount of time and then put it down. This is what we're aiming for. Games that launch in August don't count.

Try to pick up games you aren't actively playing right now. Games you're currently playing can be allowed, but in the spirit of Backlaugust, let's try to make them games you aren't playing at the moment. Make it a game you haven't touched in a month or more if possible.

When is a game done? That's up to you! Mark a game off your backlog when you've seen the ending or end credits, or once you've seen enough of the game in a game without a "proper ending" (like an arcade-type game). You don't have to do or get everything unless you want to.

Finished games will be posted in the OP. Because everyone likes to see their accomplishments recognized. Just post when you're done and I'll try to update daily.

Last year, we finished a whopping 23 games. That might be a tough number to top, but if everyone pitches in, I think we can do it!

THE FINISHED PILE:
1. Katamari Damacy Reroll - Xbone - Mop it up
2. Mega Man X - SNES (NSwitch) - Mop it up
3. Banjo-Kazooie - N64 (Xbone) - TheBigG753
4. Mega Man X2 - SNES (NSwitch) - Mop it up
5. Mega Man X3 - SNES (NSwitch) - Mop it up
6. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - DS - Stan McStanly
7. NEO: The World Ends with You - NSwitch - Hero_Of_Hyrule
8. Castlevania: Bloodlines - Genesis (NSwitch) - TriforceBun
9. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe - NSwitch - nate38
10. Mega Man X4 - PSX (NSwitch) - Mop it up
11. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon - GBA (NSwitch) - TheBigG753
12. Mega Man X5 - PSX (NSwitch) - Mop it up
13. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles - NSwitch - Stan McStanly
14. Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition: Hop's Iconic Hat - PC - pokepal148
15. Mega Man X6 - PSX (NSwitch) - Mop it up
16. Super Metroid - SNES (NSwitch) - Stan McStanly
17. Mega Man X7 - PS2 (NSwitch) - Mop it up
18. Lost Judgment - Xbox S|X- PogueSquadron
19. Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance - GBA (NSwitch) - TheBigG753
20. Mega Man X8 - PS2 (NSwitch) - Mop it up
21. Banjo-Tooie - N64 (Xbone) - TheBigG753
22. Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance - 3DS (PS4) - PogueSquadron
23. Chex Quest HD - NSwitch - Mop it up
24. Super Bomberman R -NSwitch - Mop it up
25. Pokkén Tournament DX - NSwitch - Mop it up
26. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles - Wii - TriforceBun
27. Donkey Kong - Game Boy - GameDadGrant
28. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow - GBA (NSwitch) - TheBigG753
29. Halo 2 Anniversary - PC - Brick
30. Conker's Bad Fur Day - N64 (Xbone) - TheBigG753
31. Castlevania - NES (NSwitch) - Mop it up
32. Castlevania: The Adventure - Game Boy (NSwitch) - Mop it up
33. Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge - Game Boy (NSwitch) - Mop it up
34. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - NES (NSwitch) - Mop it up
35. Hades - Xbox S|X - Mop it up

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I was going to start MegaMan X after Super M but the jump key wasn't working so I might start with X2

Yup. my comp controller is broken so I'm using keyboard.

It's not nearly as bad as you'd think

@Mop it up

Hahaha, oh man, I was waiting for you to get to this one. Mega Man X6 is atrocious, a completely painful experience. I've played some outright broken games in my time, and this one isn't quite on that level...but it might be even worse in a way because it's built on such a strong, can't-miss foundation. Like, how do you screw this series up to such a colossal extent!? Really an unbelievable trainwreck.

I've never played X7 but it gets a similar amount of hatred online; I struggle to picture it being more poorly-designed than X6, but I'm curious to hear what you think.

I'm at roughly the midway point of Harmony of Dissonance (I have just discovered the overlapping Castle A and Castle B maps. I had a feeling that there would be something like that, although I figured they were just going to do the inverted castle from SotN again, which the title screen sorta implied with the upside-down reflection of the castle. MISDIRECTION! We'll see if what HoD does is as interesting of a concept, but I do like the twist that I've already been warping between two different castles without knowing it. That's pretty cool.

Banjo-Tooie - I'm around 2/3 of the way complete. Nothing really new to add, I think it's still pretty great.

Hopefully will be able to finish both over the weekend.

Woah. I am WAY further through Super m then i thought i was

I reckened i was like 1/2 complete yeatserday but turns out im like 4/5

Beat Ridley today.

@TriforceBun Yeah, that's the thing. An outright broken game can still potentially provide some amusement from its campiness, for example I've played Superman 64 and it's so unfinished and nonsensical that it's laughable. I couldn't find a way to derive any entertainment value out of Mega Man X6, it's just plain bad, and that's what makes it one of the worst in my eyes.

I could never picture what people meant when they said the later Mega Man X games are bad. How can a Mega Man game be bad? It's Mega Man!

Then I skimmed through a longplay of X6, and, aaah, that's how:

Mega Man X7
Here it is, the one and only. The supposed pinnacle of badness with the X series. Can things truly get worse than X6? Can it live up to the anti-hype? I've gotta say...

...I'm not sure I see what's supposed to be so bad about this one! For the first time in the series (and possibly in franchise history?) it transitions to 3D, and has a mix of side-scrolling "2.5D" sections and free-roam 3D areas usually with a fixed camera perspective. It results in a wide variety of stages with each one feeling pretty unique from each other, such as jumping across a fleet of jets to dashing up a spiral staircase with a huge mech in the middle. Most of the bosses take place in 3D arenas as well, allowing for some setups not possible before. Characters can now be swapped by the press of the button, providing more variety and making it easier to find the right tool for a job. The new playable character, Axl, can copy the form of some enemies, which is actually less useful than it sounds since most enemies pale in comparison to the normal player abilities, but it can still be amusing!

Then again, I s'pose I still can't argue that it is a good game, because it certainly has its fair share of issues. The biggest bummer for me is that the weakness weapons for most of the bosses don't deal more damage than a charge shot or Zero's sabre, though they can still stun the bosses to disrupt their attack. It's a shame the devs screwed up the iconic staple of the franchise. The fragile Reploids in distress are back, but don't feel as bad this time: there are a lot fewer of them who offer upgrades, and most of those ones appear to not be in harm's way. The upgrades are not shared between the three characters, which is particularly a problem with the health upgrades as they go to the character who picked it up in a stage, or defeated the boss. X is weirdly an unlockable character now who joined in about halfway through the normal stages, which also poses an issue with non-shared upgrades since he starts at square one. The voice acting is bad, though no more so than it was in X4, 5, and 6, but I guess the reason it's more infamous here is due to how some bosses constantly spam their lines like a runner on the nightly news who rushes up to the camera for 15 seconds of fame. I personally was a bit tickled by this, however!

With that said, it feels like the most unique game in the series and offered up some interesting ideas, which was enough to carry some enjoyment for me. I haven't come across very many games that feature 2D gameplay with a 3D world, particularly a Mega Man style of game, and I've always kinda wondered why that is. A lot of interesting things can be done with an environment that isn't so strictly 2D, there's some untapped potential there.

On a random note, I had thought that the yellow thing on Zero's back was some kinda cape, but seeing him in 3D, it's actually long hair?! Wwwooooooaaaaahhhh

You went through

6 megaman x games

Before you realized it was hair?

i knew it was hair when i was 8 lol

But anyway, add super m to the done list

So, we’re almost finished Lost Judgement. We started it in July, but haven’t played it since July 20. If it’s okay, I think I want to count that as a Backlog game. I didn’t know if I had let enough time pass, but we’ve been wanting to play it for ages, so it’ll be good to finally get off the list.

I’m also hoping to finish Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy before the end of the month. I started that like a year ago and need to finally finish it. It will be a sad day, for sure. (To be honest, I dropped it because I wasn’t too thrilled with it. Dare I say I think it’s far and away the worst Layton game by quite a large margin. That being said, it’s still good…just not up to my standards of the others)

Grunty Industries is a bonkers level! Spent hours exploring for all of its secrets...

@PogueSquadron Of course it can count, glad to see you participating! On which system did you play Lost Judgment? Was it Xbox?

@TheBigG753 It's kinda funny, when I first played Grunty Industries, I didn't really like it. So many different floors and rooms and events to keep track of, I never felt like I knew what to do or where I was going, and there was a lot of back-and-forth particularly with using the transformation. It wasn't until I replayed the game and was going through the world a second time that I realized it's actually rather brilliant. I ended up remembering more of it than I thought I did, so once I was familiar with it, I found it has a pretty good flow to it with the order of actions making more sense and recognizing better where I was in the level, plus knowing that the transformation should be saved until after the world is fully explored and activated helps save some time as well.

Stan McStanly said:

i knew it was hair when i was 8 lol

And when was this, last year?

Stan McStanly said:

But anyway, add super m to the done list

Say "please."

Don't worry, I didn't miss your first message. I tend to update the list in intervals rather than constantly.

@Mop it up

It was definitely impenetrable for a while, because I assumed that using batteries was part of a new ability I would get and not something I could already use (I initially tried bagging one up without stunning it first and just figured I couldn't do anything with them yet). So I was definitely running around for a while with like only 2 jiggies found wondering "What the hell am I missing?!" But I kept slowly uncovering more and more stuff in the world and it was really satisfying to do, despite being pretty time-consuming. With so many abilities new and old at this point, though, the experimentation involved with trying to figure out how to reach a certain area was a lot of fun. There were so many "a ha!" moments where the solution was something I hadn't considered before, generally involving the character-switching. And then I'll immediately want to go back to one of the earlier worlds and collect an item that had me completely stumped before.

These levels can all feel a bit overwhelming at first, and Grunty Industries is probably the most intricately-designed and complex of them so far, but once you've unlocked all of the different paths and see how everything fits together, it really is pretty friggin' impressive. And the entire world of Banjo-Tooie is doing essentially the same thing, just on a much larger scale. Barring the remaining worlds being bad - which I don't expect considering I've liked them all so far - I think this is the better of the two games.

@Mop it up
Even if it was last year thats still doing better then you bro

"Please"

@TheBigG753 Um, well, since you've mentioned it, I feel I should offer a word of warning to temper your expectations... Personally, I felt that the final world (which is Cloud Cuckoo Land if you haven't yet seen is one of the weakest in the game, worse than most worlds before it. I get the feeling that they were running out of dev time at this point, as this world feels like a hodgepodge of random elements that were haphazardly tossed together in haste. This title was such a large and ambitious project that I get the feeling they didn't quite have enough time for every single thing they wanted to include; I suspect this is also why the game doesn't open with an elaborate musical number like Banjo-Kazooie.

@Stan McStanly Now now, if you're going to continue being rude to me, I'm not going to further include you in this.

Sorry I'll stop.




My backlog is pretty much emptied of games i can finish within the month. Anybody got any ideas?

At this point any good/classic game i should play but haven't touched yet has been put off for too long.

I thought you were going to play Mega Man X/X2?!