beat 007: first light last night. it's the first new game i've played in years and it's a good one; i remember being really excited when it was announced as "project 007" in 2020 (!) and i'm glad it lived up to the hype. really fun combat and stealth, great writing and characters, etc. it's not the most original or innovative game but it does nearly everything well.

patrick gibson is a great bond, i think he's good enough for the movies honestly. it's lennie james who steals the show as greenway though -- i really hope he gets nominated for best performance at the game awards (patrick will almost certainly get nominated). hopefully amazon leave ioi alone and let them cook for the sequels; this game could be the start of a fantastic trilogy.

anyway i've also added a bunch of new links and -- at least temporarily -- removed my blog. i don't have the energy or motivation to keep maintaining it so i've decided to just get rid of it. i've kept backups of my posts in case i want to reupload them though, and at the very least, i'll probably repurpose the blog code for new sections on my website (recipes, drawings, photos, etc.).

beat thief 2 a few days ago. it's basically the same game as thief 1 but i liked it more because the level design was generally much more grounded and less confusing. unfortunately the last 4 missions are shite, you can tell the devs ran out of time and money and had to pad things out as much as they could. still a great game overall though.

i also 100%ed midnight club 3 last week and just beat god of war: chains of olympus about an hour ago. it was my first god of war game and it was really fun, very impressive for a psp game. extremely short though (like 3 hours long).

also got a new pc recently and am currently playing 007: first light, which is the first new game i've played in years. i'll write a review for my blog when i'm done. (also i didn't update my projects page, idk why that's there)

finally beat midnight club 3 the other day. such a fun game, and a really impressive psp port (even if the screen is way too small for it and it runs like shit if you don't overclock your psp). it's hard as hell but that makes winning a tough race all the more satisfying. banger soundtrack too.

it's a damn shame that this series and AAA arcade/street racers in general have been neglected so much for the past two console generations. i'm happy for forza horizon fans but imo that series looks so corporate and sterile compared to anything from the 2000s.

beat naruto storm 4 earlier today. i remember being hyped for this game when i was younger but i never actually got around to playing it until now. it's basically the same game as the others but i really appreciate how all the fetch-quest busywork shit is now a separate mode from the main story.

shame about the cheaper, lazier presentation though -- most of the "cutscenes" are just powerpoints of screenshots from the anime -- but at least they were forced to do everything in-engine near the end because the anime hadn't gotten that far at the time lol. too bad they're only in 720p (?) for some reason but they otherwise look great.

also, i removed the hugo version number from the html metadata so all subsequent site updates will only show the pages i actually manually updated, and not the massive wall of unrelated ones above. (if you're wondering about this one, i just moved naruto storm 4 on the game log and added strategywiki to my links page because their metal gear walkthrough was really helpful.)

beat metal gear 1 (the msx one) yesterday. you'll need a walkthrough because of how obtuse it can be sometimes, but it's still pretty enjoyable. very ahead of its time, and it's cool to see where some of the ideas and references from the later games came from.

the final boss is a bit sad in retrospect if you've played mgsv... iykyk

finished stalker: call of prypiat. amazing game! i got filtered by clear sky but i'm glad i bought this one. SoC does certain things better but this is easily the best game of the trilogy overall.

somehow forgot to add mgs2 and 3 to last year's game log. whoops

no new blog post, but i've added a new section to my website: the game log.

i was planning to start a series on my blog where i'd write short reviews of those games, but i could never finish writing those posts so i went with this simpler format instead.

i was going to review all the games i've beaten this year so far, but i swear i rewrote the post from scratch like 7 or 8 times in the past few weeks before finally giving up lol

just updating some links and the copyright year; also added an edit to my second post (the baby invasion review). i had a big post planned for january but didn't have the motivation to finish it; i've left it too long now, but i might do something similar next year instead.

also, i read this really good article on hacker news this morning (a nice break from the incessant claude shilling and occasional ice bootlicking): https://nicole.express/2026/not-my-casual-hobby.html

i wanted to write something similar (and still might), but i think she did a better job than i could've. i'm sick to death of seeing all the blatantly ai-generated SEO-slop sites polluting all my search results now, and it's nice to see someone else share the same frustrations.

if you're curious, the big post i had planned was a list of short reviews of every game i beat last year. in my review for mgs2, i wanted to talk about the infamous "ai speech" near the end and how scarily well it has aged, using this sort of crap as a good example.

"But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible ... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate."