Whirlwound

They’ve had eight years to “access and acquire new players”, but flat-ass-out couldn’t be arsed with Madden on the Switch.

Well boy freaking howdy guess what - I can’t be arsed with EA.

Must be said, I am no longer a Day One buyer. I'm probably not even a 2025 buyer now. I'll get a look at it come mid-April at the ExCeL, sure, but my focus for the eight months after that is most definitely elsewhere.

Something has come up which easily takes priority over a new console. I've been given an absolute head-spinner of an offer. A once-in-multiple-lifetimes trip. And I can't just let something like this slip by. Without getting specific, it's safe to say that none of you guys could either.

By March, I'll have around £2,600 in savings. I'll need more than that. And the least coolest thing about it is that I'd be spending New Years in the air (NB: I, at the age of 52, have never even been on a plane, never mind flown before).

@KayFiOS Milly B¡tchell can go get his ass in the sea.

GC. All of'em.

If we're having something new though...

• Low bass line as console boots [my Soundcloud chiptune playlist is full of examples]
• The opening 7 notes of SMB main theme as the logo fades in - different instrument for each month
• On the seventh note, the Switch 2 'Clap' which also triggers the home screen zooming into view from behind
• Also, different instruments for special occasions - your birthday, [insert winter don't-be-the-end-of-a-bell-to-people festival of choice here], New Year [once again, of choice] etc - and maybe a firework or two

Doesn’t take mine anyway. I’ve had to get Japanese eshop cards from PlayAsia if there was something I was after that wasn’t in the European shop.

Mr Lemieux, your thoughts…

Well all of the above, obviously, but also…

• Courses that are subject to change mid-race - either by design (toggle switches, teleports etc) or not (track damage, outside sources forcing racers to take alternate or even organic routes)
• More control coming off jumps, altering stunts using the right stick, with better boosts for more complex tricks, signature moves for each character and variety bonuses for making tricks you haven’t done before that race
• The things I’ve missed in most MKs - Bosto customisable lap counts, a speedometer and timer on all tracks, not just time trials.

Ooo. D’you know, between work being a-holes and a trip down Cheltenham for a mate’s 40th birthday, I forgot to check.

[checks]

YES!! GET IN THERE! Sunday 2pm slot at the Excel in London CONFIRMED, baby! COME ON!

Sweating on Chase HQ, Landmaker, PuchiCarat, Bubble Symphony & Bubble Memories for Volume 4…

Given the 2-tera SDXC I got last Prime Day (&@#% Bezos) was ~£150, down from £250+, I shudder to think what the equivalent Express card will cost.

I hope the top Type C port can be used to shuttle stuff on to/off from a flash drive - things could get a bit tight otherwise. Just made 4½ years with a Switch and I’m around 54 gigs off maxing out a 1.5-tera card… 💧

If Astro Bot had been on the Switch instead of PS5, I bet it wouldn't have got even a sniff of the awards it's snagged.

I mean if it's on a Nintendo, it's for kids, innit.

Turns out that I am FAR, far worse at the Metal Slugs than I remember being way back when you could find an AES NeoGeo coin-op. Can’t get a single clip in worth half a damn.

Might have to try Tekken 3 on OpenEmu if I’m going to get these recordings in. Bit of Lei, bit of Eddy, couple of flashy moves, that should do it.

Not really. Holding back so long affected things more, because it just motivated leakers to keep on digging. It got to the point that we’d seen everything, but overshot it with the “C button”. Left the reveal a bit bland.

Bit of a d*** move, really, given the not inconsiderable size of the Metroid Prime 4-shaped hole that Retro is digging them out of…

Has Mario caught the Death Glare from Luigi…?

PS5: available all year.
NS2: available for hopefully more than half of it.

Heeeeeeeere’s your sign.

If Konami can’t be arsed doing them, which seems the case right now, how about the Parodius/Otomedius games?

@Serpenterror You missed the Commodore 64 - though that may not have been present your side of the Atlantic. Ironic as it was an American machine.

Can we adapt it for the Switch screen first please?

[le sigh]

Welp - time to finally crack open that Pi5 board and case, I guess. I’ll give me something to do the next three days off work…

Okay, now tell me where you’d put Tetris Battle Gaiden. It’s been released in the west as part of the Forever anthology.

Going through some of my Arcade Archives stuff for purposes of clip recording. Doing a piece on classic coin-ops you won’t necessarily find in arcades anymore.

A certain legendary Goal Of The Month song may or may not be involved (spoiler: OH, IT SO IS).

Edit: just discovered I can’t record a clip of Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Recording is disabled like in the eShop and YouTube. This is particularly annoying as I had a really good round as Kim Dong Hwan, ending with his half-circle-back-C slap-you-silly Ashi Binta kick - one of my favourite moves.

All I can see is Sam Riegel doing an ad bit on Critical Role…

Tetrisphere next?

Didn’t see card games getting rated like that back in the salad days of the 8-bits.

Stuff like, you know, Accolade’s Card Sharks. Multiple forms of poker & blackjack around a green felt-topped table with chips and everything. Games like that taught us teenagers the noble art of Hold’em before the days of Ulliott, Hellmuth et al - not to mention way before we even knew there was more than just a baseball World Series.

(…what?)

The prices listed worried me for a sec, I was thinking we were being gouged again purely for being Switch users, but then I realised it’s Canadian dollars listed first for each edition.

It’s the Metroidvania that noooooobody had on their bingo card, but looks interesting enough to be worth a punt. The Dec 31 date listed on vg•ca is probably a long ball as well; can’t see it being that far out if it’s being announced now.

Guess that NotPyoro called it, huh.

@bobby_steurer You’ll get a lot more if you look at the YouTube channel Dungeons & Discourse - just try to put up with the clickbaity titles and dodgy attempts at ‘humour’…

@bobby_steurer If you’re going to play anything Hasbro, I’d say Dungeon Mayhem. Probably the last penny they got from me. It’s a non-collectible card game, though there are two expansions (Baldur’s Gate and Monster Madness) and a Marvel version.

Look up “Everything Is Content Dungeon Mayhem” on the ole YouTube there. Four of them Critical Role types play a few rounds - and they act it out as is their wont. Travis in particular is a scream.

@betterthanvegas @bobby_steurer On top of that, it was Wizards’ own screwup. They sent him that unreleased box by mistake after he’d ordered one that had been.

And even all this is before you look at the last two years of shenanigans they’ve been up to with D&D. The OGL scandal was the thin end of the wedge.

Might get this, I dunno. I completed Worlds 2004 on the GBA, but that was the last I played. Since then YGO, like all CCGs, has fallen victim to a raging case of galloping mechanicitis.

Same reason I last played Magic in 4th Ed (blue-white deck - ‘Orlando Magic’ 🏀), but even if I went back now (which I won’t - screw Hasbro/WotC, they’re toxic AF) I wouldn’t have a chance in hell of catching up.

@Maulbert This. Very this. I would love to see the Elite Force games make it over, they were great.

From the videos I’ve seen of Legends though, there’s not a whole lot of movement going on in each encounter, just picking who to attack going by initiative order. So it’s more a series of sawn-off Final Fantasy battles than Fire Emblem ones, with the odd decision gate here and there to tweak the storyline one way or t’other.

Doesn’t look like there’ll be much diving in this kinda, er, depth - but it’s a Qubic title, so it’d be rare gagh to reach the levels of an isolinea—[cough]—isometric Tactics-style Trek game. The thought of which does appeal, if anyone fancies doing it right…?

The ability to add external drives/NVMe M.2 SSDs/USB sticks/more µSD cards - to the dock. So that you can store stuff in the dock that you know you're not going to play on the move; not to mention shuttle stuff from the dock to the console as required.

@JSC016 Definitely this too. The amount of absolute scheiße in the eShop - shovelware, obvious ripoffs/IP breaches, 'hentai' games [especially those with the emphasis on hent*AI*] - is staggering. If they ain't gonna clean out the crap then at least let us filter and block stuff we don't want to see [us or our kids].

1: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan*
2: Professor Layton and the Curious Village*
3: Space Invaders Extreme*
4: Jump Super Stars*
5: Eyeshield 21: Max Devil Power!

• Limiting myself to one title per series to prevent them crowding out other stuff. Usually the first entry in each franchise as that’s what caught my eye and got the hooks in.

Ouendan gets in because of the banging songs, best in the series - especially Monkey Magic and Ready Steady Go. The inherent charm of Layton’s first go-round was not so much a breath as a full lungful of clean mountain air. Space Invaders Extreme did completely new stuff with the game, which I loved; and while I’m not a huge fan of all the various Jump series, the Stars titles shook up how the melee fighter worked - the use of panels In the lower screen was effectively my first roguelike.

And then there’s ES21 - a whole new perspective on football, quite literally. Got me into the manga & anime (which I didn’t even know existed before Jump Super Stars), and I produced an AMV which ended up winning an award.

I’ve seen 2-tera cards starting to appear, but unsurprisingly they’re not coming down for Black Friday. I’ll keep shoving shrap aside until one becomes manageable on a Pay-In-3.

All western releases - can’t help wonder what it’d look like if it was global. The Jump Super/Ultimate Stars games, the two Ouendans…

I’m more bothered about Romancelvania…

We’re in the last laps of the Switch’s tenure right now, which for at least some devs seems to mean remasters. Nintendo included (to a degree •cough•Zelda•cough•).

Not many games have held up 20 years like the Primes. They’d be daft not to.

I’m kinda hoping the Mirrorsoft C64 version appears as DLC at some point. One direction of rotation, hard drop only and the playfield is a bit muddy (yay 16 colours 💧), but the background is gorgeous and the music by Wally Beben goes 26 minutes before looping.

The Atari coin-op would be nice at some point too, but that probably won’t happen.

I’m primarily an 8BitDo main, with a splash of PDP on the side, but when/if we get round to GC stuff in NSO, I’ll certainly give this a shufty.

The Accolade compilation needs 4th & Inches as well.

Castle Rock is, and I do not say this lightly in my 45th year as a gamer, probably the funniest level I’ve ever played. First time I heard that take on Black Betty I was howling laughing so hard I couldn’t even make ⅓ of the way through it.

I’m not a Rayman fanatic by any stretch, but there’s no denying our limbless chum has had quite a few decent titles.

@adrianfrg Not really. IIRC you have to stack 5 like hats in Hatris, and can flip the hats that drop. In Yoshi you have to sandwich as many characters as you can (which drop one by one) between two halves of egg shell, and you switch the stacks around.

The C64 Mirrorsoft version would be nice, if only for the background and the 26-minute Wally Beben music. One direction of rotation and hard drop only still takes getting used to. Presumably no GB or NES Tetris because one's already in NSO and the other soon will be. (Maybe the C16/+4 version, the colours in that were way better.)

The Atari coin-op version would be another great addition, but for now I guess I'll have to make do with the C64 fan-conversion of that.

AI is one of the reasons I want the next iteration of the eShop to have better filtering and blocking options. The very second I see something that’s obviously been generated elsewhere (yes, Zuckerbot, I’m side-eyeing your Soong-type BS right now), it’s blocked.

I’ve kicked for the Last Ninja collection that System 3 are running, but not for those games - for the two International Karates that are being bundled in. Didn’t go as far as the IK++ disc, because I’m not doubling up just for a demo that I can’t even play (Mac-based).

But we still need a Parodius collection too.

Timely.

Wonder how it squares up against the original anime from 2007.

There’s room to do a third one. Still missing Star Gladiator & Rival Schools, so there’s that - would have thought they’d go with them before Plasma & Project… There’s the Street Fighter EXes (the first one to be Plus Alpha, Sakura is fun), Tech Romancer, Tatsunoko… MvC 3? Not much left now. Good luck getting the licenses for the JoJo games…

I have a targets ahead of this, but it will be something I’ll get should I find myself a bit more flush come next payday. Been a busy month already.

Getting it for sure, but holding on for a bit because Echoes. And the other collection Capcom is doing.

@cosmograph And for crying out loud, include R•Type LEO!