Mamoulian War

Goal nr.1 /2026 achieved I have the first game of 2026 behind me, Celestian Tales: Realms Beyond from GOG. I have been postponing playthrough of this RPG for a few years, because it was meant as a part of trilogy, but unfortunately, the Indonesian studio behind it was acquired by another company, and because the game underperformed the expectations of the new owner, the last game was cancelled :( . Because of that, the game has few small cliffhangers at the end. On the other hand, it offers few plot twists in connection to the first game, but the main premise is still the same. Your party of companions are here not to save the world, but you are helping them to get through their life struggles, and help them making their decisions.

And exactly because of what you said about the risks in this industry, expecting every single game to have 30% margin is IMHO damaging, as there are only few games which could boast with such a margin in last 6 years. According to Bloomberg, the average profit margin in the video game industry is 17-22%. Over the past six years, Xbox has hit 10-20%. To put that 30% target into more context, Sony's PlayStation division achieved a 16% profit margin in Q1 FY25. Link to mentioned Bloomberg article behind paywall, if anyone owns access to them: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-23/microsoft-pushes-xbox-studios-to-hit-higher-profit-margins

Yeah you are absolutely correct about that IMHO insane profit margin. I doubt, that in MS anyone, except iD and Bethesda can meet this target (even Blizzard cannot do it anymore). I am kind of disappointed, that they bought so many smaller AA studios, and then they decides to come up with such crazy profit margin target for them. This might pretty much kill all the smaller size projects in these studios for the foreseeable future.

Maybe I am just not perceptive enough, but what are the new "improvements" for the 2026 version of the game? Only thing, which I have noticed was some online "features" which could turn the game after three decades into Online Only mode 🤷‍♂️

Alone in the Dark original trilogy as a Giveaway on GOG. https://www.gog.com/en/news/alone_in_the_dark_trilogy_giveaway_as_a_celebration_of_what_we_achieved_together

Pretty much a bombshell dropped on GOG. Four Final Fantasy games have been released few minutes ago. III, IV, VIII and IX https://www.gog.com/en/promo/final_fantasy

I have started after 7 years or so the 2nd part of the incomplete trilogy of Celestian Tales. Simple and easy going RPG, which unfortunately not sold enough to satisfy the new owner of the studio, so with high probability, the third part will never be released, which is a shame, as it is one of the rare Indonesian games. Anyway for now, the game is fine, with lot of dialogues, which are sometimes funny Only had one more challenging fight for now, but I started it on Normal Difficulty. For now the only thing which bothers me, is that the devs removed the Story Log, which was part of the first game, so I have to be sure to play it without bigger breaks, to not forget the plot 💽

Oh Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Season 2 released yesterday, with QoL and balance changes implemented as well. From first impressions it seems, that from top4 cast (Hokutomaru, Hotaru, Kain, Marco) was Kain nerfsmacked the most, but it still seems that Hokutomaru will still be in Top Tier. Some people are saying, the he will be the strongest character in S2, but most of the S1 lower tier character did not get fully tested yet. My main Terry was slightly buffed, but I am mostly curious, how SNK treated Tizoc, who was the undisputed worst S1 character.

Check your emails and spam folders. As of today, the biggest discount of Imperator: Rome and DLC pack by Paradox is valid for next 18 hours. Of course, if your are into that kind of games. The complete game with all DLCs cost me 12 EUR.

There are rumours, that AMD will go back to AM4 chipsets to “counter” the current environment in PC market. So there might be not everything lost for you, yet.

Haha, seems like it 😄 I have actually not played anything since last week or two. But now I have prepared some basic recap of first Celestian Tales game, so I can finally play after 7 years or so the second part of the series 🙂

Oh yeah, the trailer is terribly. Thankfully I learned not to judge the content of the games, by content of trailers 😄 Still one of the most awful trailers in FGC, if not in gaming in general 😄 Anyway one of the mysterious characters is most likely Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, which should print money for SNK. The other one? Looking at SNK's current track record, it will be Magnus Carlsen 😄

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Season 2 releasing next week. With new new character released every month 🤯

I have finished today late in the night the hardest MKvsDCU Kombo Challenge, Shang Tsung. As before, I have used the feature of my controller to program actions. The paradox of this challenge is, that 8 out of 10 challenges, are not that hard, but challenge nr.7 and 9 are crazy hard as ****, even when not counting the occasional game latency. It took me 3 hours to program the 8 easier challenges, and another 3 hours to program these two crazy one. For now 4 out of 22 challenges are completed. 😮‍💨

I think I went full indie with occasional Japanese AA somewhere after my disappointment with Final Fantasy 15, and I am pretty glad I did that. I bought also few AAA games as well after that period, but only after they got on GOG, which meant pretty much 85%+ discount. Saved me a lot of money to control my impulse buying that way, and I still have backlog worth at least 5 years, if I stopped purchasing stuff altogether.