What I Played in October 2024

Posted on 2024.11.30

Holy hell, I’m so late to this. I’ve been so busy! But by mid-December the college semester will be over and I’ll be free for a few weeks. Since I’m incredibly late to making this post, I've forgotten all the fine details. Despite that, I’m still writing this for the sake of completeness and archival (this series of monthly recaps acts as a sort of diary, after all). So without much effort and further ado, here are the games I played in October 2024, in no particular order.

Super Mario Party Jamboree

Probably my most anticipated release of this year! I’m gonna leave my full thoughts for a future post once I’ve played through everything, but so far? It’s pretty cool! I’ve only played the main Mario Party mode, and I still haven’t played on the final board. The party mode minigame selection seems a bit limited at first but it is on par with previous Mario Parties (maybe Superstars spoiled us a bit). I’ve only played about half of the 130 minigames (again, I’ve only played the main mode) but I like what I’ve played! There are some pretty clever minigames here. Sadly, my biggest concern that I had before this game was released got realized: the pacing is awful. Animations take too long, lots of unskippable cutscenes, lots of interruptions, yeah… They weren’t lying when they said a 10-turn game lasts 90 minutes. Anyway, I’m gonna keep playing this game once I have more time. I wanna explore everything there is and I’ve barely scraped the surface! And I’ll probably post my full thoughts on the game once I do so.

Mario Party Superstars

I played this game in anticipation for Jamboree. The game may have a few problems but it’s still a damn fine Mario Party, and I’ll always hold it dearly since it was my first foray into the classic formula MPs. Two interesting things happened. First, I taught a friend how to play Mario Party for the first time! Their only prior experience with Mario Party was MP9 (lmao) so I showed them a real MP and they had a blast! Secondly, I 100%’d this game! Back when Jamboree was announced, I played this game again and tried to complete as many of my remaining offline achievements as possible. When I picked this game up again, I had 3 remaining. Two of them were pretty easy, and once I played about 10 mindless 10-turn games against easy CPUs to reach 50 played games, I got the final achievement. Hooray!

Splatoon 3

Still taking a general break from this game, but I hopped back on briefly for the Splatfest. I was on Team Knight! I didn’t feel strongly about either choice, so I went with knight cuz I like Link from the Zelda series and he’s cool as hell. Anyway, I actually had a pretty good time with the event, despite it being solo-queue Turf War at the end of the day. Taking long breaks from this game might actually be beneficial in the long run.

Super Mario Galaxy

I replayed this game! I had started a 2nd playthrough of this via Super Mario 3D All-Stars like 3 years ago, but I never finished it. I started over in a fresh file and beat it the following day :D. This game is still amazing, no surprises here. I plan on going for 121 stars this time, but I haven’t played the game again since beating it. I gotta find the time for it…

Tetris

It’s Tetris. It’s awesome. I love Tetris 99 and Tetris Effect: Connected.

Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour

What can I say? This game is peak. I’m also kinda cracked at this game (except for Bowser Badlands (omg i’m so bad at that course)).

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

I still don’t own this game but a friend brought it over again. Fun!

Clone Hero

Played a bit more of this. Again.

Balatro

Also played a bit more of this. Except I don’t remember why exactly I felt like playing this game. Oh well…

NSO Playtest Program

I can’t say much about this game but yeah! I was one of the lucky 10,000 who got to participate in this play test. The game concept was pretty cool, even if a bit aimless. I hope they release this game in full in the future, once it’s been expanded and polished up and stuff. This is too cool of a concept to completely vault.