Finished another game, played a few others, and spent too much money on new hardware. Later than ever with my blog. Solid all round.

Games completed this month

Quake – Xbox Series X

As intended last month, I did go back and finish the original quake. I have completed it before but not for a long time, so it was good to revisit. I’m definitely going to play some of the included expansion packs, for this and Quake II.

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Games played during October

Tempest 4000 – Xbox Series X

Played more Tempest 4000 in October too, haven’t quite got my old TxK skills back, but I’m enjoying myself at least.

The Xbox version is generally much cheaper digitally, but this physical copy* is regularly cheap for PS4 and plays perfectly on PS5 too.

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Akka Arrh – PS5

Finding myself going between this and Tempest and enjoying peak Jeff Minter. I’m not really getting better at Akka Arrh but I do know what I’m doing now.

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Humanity – PlayStation 5

Made more progress with this, ended up playing it instead of Octopath Traveler 2 in October, which halted my progress on that some. I need to get back to Octopath so Humanity progress will likely drop off, but we’ll see.

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Forza Motorsport – Xbox Series X

Very glad this is a GamePass game. While the racing is still great fun, the game itself is dull. I can see myself still dropping in to do some races but have no desire to play through the career / campaign mode that I would usually do. I probably just need to accept that I don’t care about motorsports, and stick to the Forza Horizon games.

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Gotham Knights – Xbox Series X

Another one I was glad was on GamePass, but this is just bad. I played for a couple of hours, and the general critical consensus seemed accurate. Bring on Spider-Man 2.

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Everybody’s Golf – PS5

Had a mate over for a few days in October while we were attending the NFL games in London. Naturally Everybody’s Golf had to go on and was as much fun as ever. I think I’m ready for a new one though Sony if you could get on with that.

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Vampire Survivors

Once again another content patch appeared for Vampire Survivors, and I had to go back and collect the new achievements. The upcoming Adventures content means I’ll be likely back again soon too.

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What’s been on the arcade?

The arcade machine has been on a bit of a Neo Geo kick lately, I’ve been playing Neo Turf Masters, Soccer Brawl and Last Resort. Admittedly Soccer Brawl is mostly a nostalgia game for me, as it was a favourite in the arcades when I was little. The others are classics though.

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October pick ups

Ryzen 7 5700X CPU

This was a compromise when I started to get the itch to do a full upgrade of my PC. After spending a couple of days looking at options and pricing up various builds, I realised there wasn’t a decent reason to spend the money it required, since I barely play games on my current PC anyway. After a bit of research I discovered that a simple BIOS update on my existing machine would add support for newer AMD processors. This became a straight forward swap from my old Ryzen 5 2600, and has given my machine a nice boost. Also it’s not at all confusing that my graphics card as an AMD RX 5700 XT too.

This is the processor* I bought from Amazon, I realised they no longer come with coolers as standard, so I also bought this ARCTIC Freezer* while I was at it.

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Pinball FX Addams Family Pinball Table – PC

I’m still a bit disappointed by the new Pinball FX platform managing to be worse than Pinball FX3. However I will still be picking up the exclusive tables I want when they’re on sale.

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Games retired in October

Two Point Hospital

Had a lot of fun with this, but getting towards the end and it had become very much a grind that I wasn’t enjoying, so that’s enough.

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Pre-orders this month

Raspberry Pi5

I cracked when these went up for pre-order, but unfortunately wasn’t quick enough to get in the first wave of shipments. Mine should arrive by December at least. I’m not in too much of a hurry as I expect it’ll take a while for the full RetroPie build to turn up for it, and the plan is to just swap it into my MAME cabinet to increase the games I can play on there anyway. I still need to also order a power supply and cooler too.

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*As usual, these links are affiliate ones, which may earn me a small commission if you buy something.