Week of 01 Feb 2026
“Just a bunch of idiots with weak arms.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Decade Duels Plus
- Indika
- Dimensions
- Duke Nukem Forever
- Delta Squad
Okay, it was finally time to try and make some progress on Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Decade Duels Plus. I could play legitimately, losing and winning as the heart of the cards decide, gathering more and better cards to make my deck formidable. …Or I can slam my head against a wall and try to win the tournament with the base deck with some minor tweaks. Anyone that knows me is well aware which route I took, and I’m surprised how well that paid off! I managed to clear the preliminary tournament easily enough, and get to the champion of the entire thing with only “minor” annoyance. Hit a pretty hard wall at this point. The champion the game chose for me this playthrough was Jack, who is I guess the “Kaiba equivalent” based on the army of various dragons the a-hole throws at me. I only managed to get to the second round twice, but quickly got stomped. As long as I quit out before the final blow eliminates me, I can retry. I just need to hope to get lucky enough! Though then I need to replay again to hopefully face off against Yusei…
Achievements unlocked: 8 (+2) | Completion: 67%
Did you seriously pull this out on the first turn?!
For once a game was added to Game Pass that I didn’t wanna wait until it was leaving to play: Indika! I’ve actually had it on a price watch on TrueAchievements for a while, knowing almost nothing about the game outside of the buzz it got when it came out. I didn’t know what to expect, and the game turned out to be a very interesting look at faith, religion, and philosophy. I’ve always been a fairly anti-religious person due to… well, read a history book. So this was a cool look at how someone forced into being a nun would look at the concept of Christianity during a fictional 19th century trek across the Russian winter. There’s some light puzzle solving, some minigames, and plenty of lore and collectibles to read about. I also turned the spoken language to Russian to really sell it. There’s also a strong surreal element to everything, where something kinda serious will be happening and there’s goofy music, or mundane things will be WAY too big. There’re also “points” that Indika gets for doing simple actions like lighting candles at shrines or delivering water for a nun, shown with a pixelated “coin” effect and sound effect. I don’t know, the whole thing could have easily been an indie A24 film or something. Completion-wise, it’s also very simple and any clean-up after a blind playthrough can be done with Chapter Select and how short every chapter is. I can’t recommend this one enough!
Achievements unlocked: 16 (+16) | Completed
Play that funky music, white boy!
Recently during a stream, RedNinjaDan from the Hall of Gamers Discord suggested Dimensions, because it had a cool premise. Not long after it ended up in a “Buy One, Get Two” sale and I grabbed it! Umm… this is a weird game. And, dare I say, bad. It’s clearly created by someone with plenty of creative ideas but the implementation of them fell plenty short. It’s the most jank game I’ve played in a good while, but the actual concept isn’t too bad: you play as a mercenary that travels through various dimensions to save a friend’s daughter. These dimensions are represented by different eras of gameplay, from Atari-level simple sprites shooting bullets to a more complex SNES-style platformer. The voice acting is comically bad, but that’s likely due to the developer grabbing people for roles from a Facebook post. The main standout feature are the needle drops during action scenes, which are almost across-the-board bangers. The story is nearly nonsensical, and soon you’re introduced to a cartel of robotic Mexican enemies (during the opening title sequence nonetheless) and that’s just… not mentioned again. All-in-all I’m not sure I’d recommend this one, but it’s also a fairly painless completion. And the developer clearly liked big-breasted and sexy women, so lots of that to look at.
Achievements unlocked: 10 (+10) | Completed
A cadre of hot weirdos.
Now that I was finally between games, it was time work on one of the two bigger games I started for the TA Christmas event. I decided to go with Duke Nukem Forever because I figured it would be the least enjoyable. While the game could be plenty competent, it has just not aged well, both in content and gameplay. This feels like an absolute chore to get through and is not exactly helped by the annoying minigames needed for both Ego boosts and achievements. This week I ended up reaching the pinball minigame, which is a genre of gaming I simply can’t stand. Seriously, I play pinball machines at the bar when I’m out and just get screwed every single time! I didn’t make it too far in the game, but I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard or take too long overall.
Achievements unlocked: 17 (+12) | Completion: 28%
Still better than listening to politicians, kid.
I’ve been stringing Delta Squad along since November for my streak, so I decided to finally knock this one out on Saturday. It was actually kind of annoying to get through a level and fight the boss, as dying is very easy to fall into and when you do you have to start over. Still not too hard, and now it’s finally done!
Achievements unlocked: 12 (+2) | Completed
Stay behind me, I might protect you.
Rarest Achievement:
Balls of Steel in Duke Nukem Forever [2.92]
Most Common Achievement:
Welcome to Dimensions in DIMENSIONS [1.00]
