april 2026 monthly log

april was a pretty slow month for me. my second semester of college was wrapping up, so i ended up spending the vast majority of time focused on not failing my classes, and any of my free time was spent playing various multiplayer games with my friends. that’s not to say i did nothing this month, just that my focus was largely elsewhere.

despite my time being pretty limited, i managed to squeeze a couple games in during my breaks and before bed. neither game is all that high-octane, because the last thing i wanted to do after a long day of bashing my head against my keyboard was play that made my nerves jump out of my spine.

alright, let’s roll. here’s everything i finished in april.

games

ninja gaiden: ragebound

finished on 4/2/26

i didn’t go into ninja gaiden: ragebound with a ton of expectations - i thought it was going to be a decent, combat-focused sidescroller akin to the classic ninja gaiden games - but i was caught off guard by a surprisingly interesting experience. not to say i thought the game looked bad (i obviously cared enough to buy it), but i just thought it would be… fine, and not great.

there’s the perfect amount of depth in your moveset here: not too much to feel overwhelming, but with enough complexity and customizability to not be one-note. the combat feels consistently great, and fighting hordes of enemies using both weapons is both good fun and a genuine challenge. i’m a big fan of the boss fights as well, though they are pretty massive difficulty spikes at the end of each level.

the narrative is solid, the game looks great, and there’s a ton of great QOL features that make the game’s often hard difficulty feel more reasonable. it’s just a very fun sidescroller without anything too fancy going on.

8/10

r4: ridge racer type 4

finished on 4/12/26

i’ll have more to say about this in a full review soon, but man, this game is fantastic. it’s great as a racing game, with rock-solid tracks and a variety of cars, but it stands more as a late-90s time capsule than a video game in a lot of aspects.

everybody knows the music, and yeah, it’s absolutely divine. it’s really funny that one of the only options you get directly before a race is choosing the music track, but i used that option liberally to experience every ounce of music this game has to offer. the mix of breakbeat, house and jazz just entrances you to no end. move me is a classic, quiet curves has that piano in the middle that i whistle to every time, pearl blue soul builds into something magnificent, like… MAN! IT’S SO GOOD!

stylistically, too, the game’s UI and car design feels so aggressively 90s. the bright, flat color-blocked boxes are perfectly reminiscent of that late 90s era, and the shitty 3d FMVs add on to that cheesy, stupidly-aged vibe the whole game is giving off.

and i don’t mean to discount the game’s mechanics by focusing on the aesthetics, because it’s still a very fun game whether you’re playing alone or with friends. it’s just that the racing is the least remarkable thing about the game, despite being extremely fun.

9/10

looking forward

at the end of these monthly logs, i’ll be making a list of things i’d like to do in the upcoming month, as a little guide for myself. i probably (definitely) won’t get everything done in any given month, but it’ll help me stay on track and motivate me to… y’know, actually do things i want to do. any entry is vaguely ordered by importance.

now that i have a little more time on my hands, i’m going to end up playing WAY more games, listening to more music, and finishing the book i’ve been putting off for months now. summertime, here we come!

• parasite eve ~10h
  • i’m about 60% of the way through this one already
• killer7 ~14h
• ratchet and clank (2016) ~10h
• the world ends with you ~25h