October 13, 2025 - Game On!

Playing games has always been one of my favorite ways to pass time, and it's something that carried me through both my best and worst moments in my life. At some point video games became more of an obsession than a way to pass time, so I've been recently trying to monitor my impulsive tendencies like getting too immersed or spending money. I think nowadays I have a much better appraoch than before and am able to manage the time I spend playing them, and not let myself become dependent on them for too long.

As for my favorite games, there's one game I always talk about when people ask me that question, which is Reverse: 1999. A game with gorgeous graphics, amazing story, and, while for me personally it's the game's weakest point, a really interesting gameplay. The game is turned based tactical rpg, which means it doesn't have the stress of real-time games and rather, it focuses more on strategy and planning. The story itself is historical fiction, following the story of a world where time keeps reversing ever since 1999.

Their second anniversary was a month ago!

Honestly when it comes to this game, I can't stress on how well the story is written. It's really interesting to see how different characters react to the destruction of time as we know it, while forced to face an uncertain future (or past). It has a lot of philosophical ideas and questions they ponder about war, humanity, history, life, death... etc. I recently have been catching up with the game's story after taking a break (really don't have time to play a lot of games these days...), and the game didn't disappoint. While the game is a gacha game, they're very generous with the rewards, and give a lot of free materials especially during anniversaries.

All in all, I think it's a great game that's been overshadowed by bigger games nowadays, and deserves more recognition.

Before I used to play gacha games, I used to only play games that my dad allowed, and it used to be things we all know like candy crush, angry birds, cut the rope, etc. But even before that, when I was around 6 or 7 years old, my dad gave us 2 Game & Watch devices: Octupus, which was a game about hunting treasure while escaping from a giant octupus, and Fire, a game about saving people from a building fire. These devices were basically watches (they had an alarm too I think) that had games on them, but I honestly doubt anyone used them to check the time. There were two game modes, A and B, which, if I remember correctly, was just a difficulty change.

Used to be so good at this

My favorite was the octupus one, mostly because I used to be so good at it. Since it was a long time ago I'm not sure what my high score was, but I remember playing this for hours, trying to get a higher score. I also remember I would play around with the batteries and put them in weird angles to see different screen glitches like the Octupus' arm missing or sometimes the animation not working at all so I could get infinite treasure. 

If you get to 100 you get 1 life

As for the other game, Fire, I used to dislike it and not play as much. The game was a bit harder for me, but the biggest reason I used to hate it was because once you make a mistake, you basically drop them to their deaths, haha. So I would unnecessarily get sad for those poor little creatures and become less interested in playing the game.

Those little angels at the top used to make me so sad

I tried to play a remake of these games on the internet, but I personally didn't find them as entertaining as I used to when I was a kid, haha. Or perhaps it has to be on the device itself for it to be truly fun, who knows. I should still have them lying around somewhere, maybe I should look for them someday.