What I Played in November 2024

Posted on 2024.12.21

It’s time for another month-in-review! And this time I wrote it with 11 days to spare! Okay maybe that’s not something to celebrate… I’m still a bit late to this but I really needed to focus on my finals during the first weeks of this month. Anyway, I AM FREE!!! That means I can finally start playing more games and making more stuff for this website. But enough about December. This post is about November, and at this point I was really busy and didn’t play a whole lot of games. While the variety was lacking, my good times with what I played were not, as you’ll see with the first series of games I’ll talk about. Here are the games I played in November 2024, in some particular order.

Tetris

If there’s one thing this month saw the most of, it’s definitely Tetris. I had a bit of a Tetris fever, you see… It all started because during the mayhem that is end-of-semester college, I wanted something that could give me a quick break from work whenever I wanted. I wanted something I could pick up and play, something that didn’t require too much investment. And you know what’s perfect for that? Tetris! Whenever I wanted to briefly take my mind off of homework, I’d go to tetris.com and play a round, just 5-10 mins. It went well! But then I started playing more. And more. And when I finished my homework, I’d go again. I started to get a little crazy with it, and well… you’ll see. Allow me guide you through all the Tetris things I did this month.

Firstly, I got 1 million points on tetris.com for the first time. I probably won’t be playing that version again anytime soon. I logged into tetr.io for the first time in years and played 40-lines for fun… that same day I got a sub 1 minute time, which placed me in the top 5% lmao. I played a bunch of Tetris 99 and got a couple more wins. I started playing my favorite game in the series more often, Tetris Effect: Connected. The main thing I did on that game was play a mode I’ve always wanted to get good at: Classic Score Attack. I SUCK at classic Tetris (truth is, I’m a modern Tetris player through and through), and I figured it would be a good time to learn how to not suck at it. So I practiced this mode a lot, and bit by bit I started improving. Since then, I’ve definitely gotten more consistent due to my smarter stacking (still gotta work on smarter line burns), and I’m also getting slightly more comfortable at higher speeds (I can even play decently at level 18 for a bit!). As I kept playing and improving, I also found myself appreciating the mode more. I’ve followed the NES Tetris and CTWC scene for a while (albeit a bit superficially), and I guess part of me always wanted to know why people liked this version of the game so much. As someone who struggled and disliked classic Tetris, I think I’m finally starting to get it now. Anyway, I still have a long way to go. I still haven’t beaten my goal of 500K points, but I got veeery close to it once (491K points…). One day I’ll finally break that record.

Another thing I did on that game was replay Journey mode start to finish; it’d been a long while since I did that. Got a sweet new total score of 1.2 million, and remembered how beautiful that campaign is. My total area score before that was 600K. I guess that goes to show the growth I’ve had with this game… I’ve been playing Tetris for like seven years now, and even when I play casually, practice is still practice. I’m interested to see where I end up a few years from now, hopefully I keep getting better at the game while learning some new tricks along the way.

This month also saw the release of Tetris Forever! Good thing I started to practice classic Tetris because otherwise, these games might’ve been a bit unplayable for me (and btw, it’s a coincidence that I decided to grind classic cuz I forgot this game was releasing until a few days before launch LMAO). The documentary stuff is cool. The story of Tetris has always fascinated me, so learning new details about it was really fun. That being said I still haven’t finished going through this game (I haven’t even played the flagship mode, Tetris time warp!), so I’ll say more about it by then. What I can say about it now is that the first Tetris games SUCKED. Playing these primitive versions made it abundantly clear how much of a modern Tetris player I am, cuz oh man these games just have zero sauce. I can’t believe those ugly messes got people insanely addicted and kick-started this now 40-year-old franchise… Thankfully the Famicom version was the first decent version, and it’s been slowly uphill since (slowly…).

Oh and one last thing, that game inspired me to finally give the Tetris film a watch. It was pretty fun seeing this heavily dramatized retelling of the game’s history, even if some of the creative liberties and historical inaccuracies irked me.

Super Mario Party Jamboree

I played a bit more of this game, though I still haven’t gone through everything this game has to offer. I just kinda don’t feel that motivated to play it, which is a bummer cuz everyone likes this game and I loved Superstars, so in theory I should be enjoying the hell out of this game. Sadly, that isn’t the case, and it’s not necessarily the game’s fault. I guess my college responsibilities got too much in the way back when it was still freshly released, and now that I’m not seeing that much hype around the game online, my motivation also dwindled with it. I’ll get around to it eventually.

Mind Over Magnet

I’ve been following the development of this game since the project was announced back in 2021, so it’s quite exciting to finally see it being released. I’ve watched every episode of GTMK’s Developing series, and I have learned a lot of valuable lessons as someone who aspires to be a game dev (someday I’ll finally make a game, someday…). Still haven’t gotten the chance to properly play it though; I’ve only cleared the first world, but I would like to get through the whole thing one day. It’s the least I could do to show my support for this cool project, apart from watching every devlog and buying the game (which I already did lol).

puzzle-nonograms.com

I got back into picross a bit. It’s always fun to come back to it, but what was not fun was me deciding to take on the special monthly nonogram from this website. This absolute behemoth of a puzzle is a 50x50 grid that’s 50% filled. It took me several hours spread across three days to finally finish this damn thing. It took a lot of mental power, a lot of observational skills, a lot of getting stuck until you find the ONE clue that allows you to move forward, and a lot listening to Paramore in the background to keep you from going insane. But I did it. I completed the stupid puzzle. I didn’t even feel triumph, I just kinda felt relief that it was over. I would definitely put this as the hardest picross puzzle I’ve ever solved. This truly was the Dark Souls of picross… (jk).

NSO Playtest Program

Am I allowed to talk about this? Idk, idc, but I’ll keep it brief anyway. During the last few days of the playtest I got the privilege of being (almost) completely alone in a plot of land adjacent to my starting point, meaning I was free to sweep the land. I managed to claim about 70% of that block all by myself, and got the absolute honor of fishing that block’s development! What better legacy to leave behind in this demo than by naming that block “MarieSplatoon<3”? Anyway, yeah, this playtest was interesting. I wish I could’ve played more, I didn’t get to mess around with the Deco stuff for example (not like I know anything about 3D modeling anyway, but I wanted to make at least something that roughly looked like Marie’s hair and/or headpiece lol). The game concept is neat, but I wish there were more goals and stuff to do in general. All you really did in terms of progression was claim land. Mindlessly repeating the same thing over and over again. I listened to many video essays in the background to keep my mind occupied as I performed these repetitive tasks. Regardless, if the game gets fleshed out more, then it has the potential to be a pretty fun product. I hope this experiment ends up being something like a free game for the Switch successor included with NSO, much like the 99 games.