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 17 games. That might be a tough number to top, but if everyone pitches in, I think we can do it!

THE FINISHED PILE:
1. Axiom Verge - PC - Pokefreak911
2. Pokémon Violet - NSwitch - r_hjort
3. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - NSwitch - Mop it up
4. Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster - PC - PogueSquadron
5. Tomb Raider - PS5 - TheBigG753
6. SteamWorld Build - XSX - Mop it up
7. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - GCN - Pokefreak911
8. Princess Peach Showtime! - NSwitch - DrFinkelstein
9. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania - NSwitch - DrFinkelstein
10. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - Wii - Pokefreak911
11. Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Happy Home Paradise - NSwitch - DrFinkelstein
12. Death's Door - XSX - Mop it up
13. Monster Hunter Stories - NSwitch - ludist210

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Whoops! I've been so busy lately that this totally slipped my mind. Sorry everyone! Hopefully it isn't too late for some people to join...

@Mop it up

There's a handful of games that I do need to tackle. I could try to do what I can this month in the nature of the theme. So put me down right now for trying for the following...

Princess Peach Showtime
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania!
Cereza and the Lost Demon

This will be made more challenging because once steam World Heist 2 comes out it is getting my full attention. But I'll see what I can do since these other games are relatively short. The Lost demon is the longest I think at 14 hours and I'm actually already almost halfway through the monkey ball game.

Hi again I am still alive.

Started playing Axiom Verge just as August began and just finished it. Got 100% in game but not all the achievements, don't think I will go for all achievements however.

Good game. I don't think it is the best of the modern metroidvanias, or in the top 5, but I did enjoy my time. It has some pretty unique abilities and the guns tended to all be pretty fun. I found the story interesting as well, although it chucked a lot of names at me all the time and I couldn't always keep track of them.

I recommend. If you are looking for a solid modern metroidvania then this is a pretty good choice.

In the spirit of the Olympics, I think I'll try playing Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2020. Apparently it has a story mode that's decently short, so I'll complete this as a means of "beating" the game. It looks like the series is done, so this one's likely the final entry in it.

@Pokefreak911 Always nice to hear from you! On which system did you play Axiom Verge?

@Mop it up
PC! And yes I have missed everyone. I actually can't believe it's been over 10 years since I found Nintemple and NegativeWorld

Thanks for making a thread again @Mop it up!

I picked up the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered (PS5) collection last week and plan on continuing to play through those this month. It's been over 25 years since I played through TR1 and TR2, though I did play the Tomb Raider Anniversary about 10 years back so I haven't forgotten quite as much about the first Tomb Raider game. Revisiting TR2 after all this time will be a lot of fun. And I never played TR3. We'll see how far I get this month, but ideally I'd like to get through all three.

I am about halfway through Tomb Raider 1 right now. Still an awesome game all these years later. Nostalgia overload!

Haven't been around, but I did start my own personal backlaugust as I always do.

Beat Pokémon Violet like a week ago. There's a ton more stuff to do in the game, and I may come back for some of that and maybe even some DLC in the future, but I beat all the main quests and saw the credits, so I consider it beaten.

The only other mainline Pokémon game I've played is Red, so maybe I'm blind to how small and incremental the series evolution has been over the years, and maybe that makes me judge the game more leniently, but I had a pretty dang good time with it, even if the towns were fairly dead and the visuals janky.

Will have to see how many, if any, other games I have time to beat this august, but I've got a bunch I might pick back up.

I made good progress in Princess Peach Showtime before SteamWorld Heist II took over this weekend. We'll see how things go with it the rest of the month. I'm two floors through. I like PPS as it does feel like a Good Feel game for all it's plusses and minuses. My biggest gripe is that it's pretty easy to miss a sparkle gem in a level with no way to go back without redoing the whole thing. I'm not going to replay these stages more than once or twice considering a couple of gems are quite hidden.

Otherwise the outfits and powers are pretty cool and I love Peach being her own protagonist!

I'm coming up on the last level in Tomb Raider. Should finish in the next day or two.

A little later than the closing ceremonies of the real Olympics I s'pose, but I've wrapped up Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. And I've gotta say...

...I probably shoulda just watched the Olympics instead. The story mode contains way too much blabbering for how little interesting it has to say. I get that I should know what I'm getting myself into with a "story mode" of a game, but the ratio of cutscenes-to-gameplay here is extremely out of whack. It probably averages 15-20 minutes of inane dialogue just to be thrown into a minigame that typically lasts 1-2 minutes. It sort of feels like playing a visual novel that gets interrupted by a random minigame now and then.

This is probably because it was developed by Sega, but I felt like there was a bit of a disparity in how the story treated the two main protagonists of Luigi and Tails. Tails gets to do the fun stuff like scale Tokyo Tower; snipe Eggbots with a bow; punch Shy Guys in the face; etc., while Luigi is getting absolutely bodied in events like Karate, Boxing, Rugby, etc. Poor guy can just never catch a break...

The game doesn't have much else to offer either, as the only other option is to just play single events individually. No competition modes or anything to tie stuff together, and no extras like a shop. This series has always been a little questionable, but I don't think this one matches up to even previous entries in the series.

I would probably rate this game a Big Oof out of 10.

I doubt I'll make it all the way through, but I picked up La-Mulana 2 where I had left off a few years ago. Which is to say, like, an hour or so into the game. The first game (well, the remake of it, I suppose) is right up there with the best Metroidvanias of all time for me, and so far this game seems like it's kind of more of the same, which is cool, but I'm also missing that feeling of truly not knowing how anything works and trying to figure it out.

Beat the first boss, anyway.

Does playing Demon's Souls Remastered count if I had Demon's Souls on the PS3 and didn't get super far into it and bought Remastered so I could finally finish it? Kind of a backlog...

@Zero I don't see any reason why it shouldn't count.

@Zero

Also it's a remake, not a remaster.

I played through the original Final Fantasy years ago on an emulator. I never finished it unfortunatel, and I went as far as to put the game on my “Gaming Bucket List” - a list of games I definitely want to make sure I don’t miss out on.I believe I got as far as to the point where I got the airship, but I never finished the game. I had always wanted to finish the game out of curiosity, but was always waffling back and forth between which version to tackle. I saw recently that the Pixel Remaster went on a small sale on Steam and decided to pick it up. And the other day, I finally finished it.

I really enjoyed it, but I will admit, I had to install several mods on the PC version to make the experience better. The game suffers from some pretty aggressive stutter, the font is way out of place, and there were some other mods I installed to tailor the experience to my own needs. While this isn’t the most authentic retro experience, I think I did a good job of picki my and choosing which elements to mod in order to find a balance. (For instance, the Pixel Remaster has a minimap on screen at all times- I wound up installing a mod to just remove it completely. This actually made me miss a significant portion of a town one time, lol, so your results may vary with that one). All in all this game was a great history lesson, and a fun time. Just make sure you have something to do while you’re playing, because there are a LOT of random battles.

I played through the original Final Fantasy years ago on an emulator. I never finished it unfortunatel, and I went as far as to put the game on my “Gaming Bucket List” - a list of games I definitely want to make sure I don’t miss out on.I believe I got as far as to the point where I got the airship, but I never finished the game. I had always wanted to finish the game out of curiosity, but was always waffling back and forth between which version to tackle. I saw recently that the Pixel Remaster went on a small sale on Steam and decided to pick it up. And the other day, I finally finished it.

I really enjoyed it, but I will admit, I had to install several mods on the PC version to make the experience better. The game suffers from some pretty aggressive stutter, the font is way out of place, and there were some other mods I installed to tailor the experience to my own needs. While this isn’t the most authentic retro experience, I think I did a good job of picking my and choosing which elements to mod in order to find a balance. (For instance, the Pixel Remaster has a minimap on screen at all times- I wound up installing a mod to just remove it completely. This actually made me miss a significant portion of a town one time, lol, so your results may vary with that one). All in all this game was a great history lesson, and a fun time. Just make sure you have something to do while you’re playing, because there are a LOT of random battles.

Now that SteamWorld Heist II is complete, I'm back on the backlog. I'm sitting here listening to the title song for Princess Peach Showtime and I appreciate how beautiful and serene it is. I needed that just this moment.

Sorry for slacking on posting an update in here, but I did beat Tomb Raider a few days ago. The last few levels are still the slog I remember them being, but overall this is still a tremendous game and a very good remaster job. Sometimes the camera gets in the way and sometimes Lara doesn't jump where I want her to despite my best efforts, but I had an absolute blast revisiting those levels, solving puzzles & exploring for secrets. It's right up there with Mario 64 as a landmark early 3D game from that era.

I did start TR2 but I'm going to be really busy the next couple weeks, so this is probably it for me this month.

I recently wrapped up SteamWorld Build for another completion. For some reason I was under the impression that it was a tower defense game, and while it has a very light element of that, it's largely a simulation/resource management type game. As things progress, it constantly throws in one more resource to monitor on top of all the existing ones, like a juggler who keeps getting handed one more bowling pin. The interesting gameplay was digging around in the mines; personally I would have preferred a game that scrapped all the city stuff and instead focused on being an RTS-digger. Overall, I don't think there's anything wrong with SteamWorld Build, it just isn't for me. I would probably give it a rating of trail-mix-with-too-many-raisins out of snacks.

@Mop it up

Overall I liked SteamWorld Build a good bit. I knew it was a SimCity-esque game from the get go but I haven't played those kinds of games In a while so I didn't have particularly high expectations. I think now I formate in higher regard than I did when I first finished. My wife is trying to finish it now.

It felt light on meaningful systems but I kind of appreciated that basic-city builder aspect as I've never gravitated to the heavier sides of that kind of game. I think it was quite in line with what I would be looking for of such an experience.

Speaking of Tower Defense though, the first ever SteamWorld game that Image & Form ever did was just that. I've not played it but it was for the 3DS I believe. Tower Defense isn't my bag so I never sought it out.