What I Got Up To This Month (August '26)

While August was, for the most part, pretty much the same as the past few months, I had some logistical changes I needed to do that I'm still adjusting to. The big thing was I needed to change therapists and while I've already connected with someone new, saying "goodbye" made me emotional. I know therapy is, like, a transactional, professional relationship, but that was still someone I'd been confiding in for over a year and had built up a rapport with. Still, that's life. Life is full of people coming and going and all you can do sometimes is take it in stride.

I saw quite a few movies this month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day was really good, and it's probably my favorite of the Tom Holland Spidey movies. It may not have the highs that the others do, but it's consistent and just a fun, comic book-y time. I also saw Evil Dead Burn which I thought was... fine. I don't know what it was about it but it just mostly didn't work for me. I also also saw The End of Oak Street, which is a drama/action thing from the director of It Follows. That was pretty good, too. Lastly, Coyote Vs. Acme finally came out and, unsurprisingly, it was great. I grew up loving the Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner cartoons so this was something I really liked.

I played a fair bit of Soulframe, the fantasy-counterpart to Digital Extremes' Warframe, and I've liked what I've played. Where Warframe is a shooter (as far as I can tell, anyway) Soulframe is more of a standard action-game, with vaguely Souls-adjacent combat. It's been fun! The writing and quest design is obtuse in a fun way, though it being an early-access thing means that it's hard to know which rough edges are deliberate and which just aren't finished yet.

I finished Splatoon Raiders and got a ways into the postgame and I still really like it. It has some issues (which I wrote about here) but it's some of the most fun I've had in a while. They turned Splatoon into a loot-filled numbers-go-up game and it was a blast.

I'm not entirely sure why I decided to start it now, but I began playing Powerwash Simulator. That's a game, as the name might imply, where you use a pressure washer to wash things. It's a pretty slow-paced thing and I don't know if "fun" is the right way to describe it but there is a certain satisfaction to watching a dirty thing get progressively cleaner over the course of, say, 20-60 minutes. In some ways it feels like Splatioon where you're trying to spray liquid over every exposed bit of wall or floor. It's definitely a game of busywork, but I imagine I'll be coming back to it periodically when I just want to zone out and do something mindless.

I mentioned back in January that I was giving Marvel Rivals a shot, but I had a bad experience back then that ultimately kept me from playing it regularly. With that being said,  I revisited it this month and pushed through some of the negativity I'd been feeling and remembered that, oh yeah, this game is great! Some of the character designs and, uh, sex appeal are maybe a bit... overdone however. Most of my time was spent playing "Blood Hunt", the limited-time PvE mode and that's scratching a similar itch to Splatoon Raiders. I seem to love watching numbers-go-up, who knew?

Star Wars: Zero Company came out a few days ago and I've already played quite a bit of it. It's effectively "what if there was an officially-licensed Star Wars XCOM game" which is just as cool as that sounds. It's set at the end of the Clone Wars, which I imagine should lead to some... complications, but where I'm at it's got me fighting a lot of droids and it's honestly just kind of nice to be playing an XCOM game again, in all but name.

I'm still playing through Final Fantasy VII but I'll admit I got sidetracked by some of the other games I've mentioned, so I haven't made much progress. I made it out of Midgar and got to the world map, but haven't gone much further than that. Still, I can feelit already that this game is good. There's already been so much variety and spectacle and I can only imagine how things will escalate.

I'm also still chipping away at Yakuza 5. It's good, but it hasn't fully grabbed me yet. Maybe this is franchise-fatigue setting in, but it mostly just feels like, well, another Yakuza game and while I'm enjoying it I've done this quite a few times already by now.