Once again, there is no E3. But we won’t let a silly thing like the show getting cancelled stop us from predicting what’s going to get announced! There’s still plenty of individual presentations from publishers happening during what would normally be E3 time. There’s even one happening tomorrow!
How do you follow up a game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? It came out day and date with the Nintendo Switch, completely reinvented the series, and may have pushed the medium of video games forward. Do you reinvent everything again, or do you refine what you have into something more polished? It’s been six years since Breath of the Wild, and in that time Nintendo really could have done either.
As much as I like the Fire Emblem franchise, there’s always been a part of me that was mad that it blew up and took the attention away from Advance Wars. Advance Wars was the first of Intelligent Systems’ strategy games that I had played, and many lunch periods and study halls were spent passing a single Game Boy Advance around a table, taking turns in intense multiplayer matches. It did get a few sequels, but ever since Fire Emblem Awakening’s success, it’s seemed that Nintendo felt that Fire Emblem was enough for the turn-based strategy niche and turned its back on Advance Wars. But now, after a fifteen year gap from the previous entry, Days of Ruin on the Nintendo DS, we finally have a new Advance Wars release.
I think we all knew it was coming, but yesterday, E3 2023 was officially cancelled. If you’ve followed this blog, you know that I at least used to go all out each E3. I’d have a predictions post, individual posts for each press conference, and just general thoughts on the event overall. With me getting back into consistently updating this blog, I was really hoping that this would be the year that I’d get serious with my E3 coverage again, but now this.
A few weeks ago, Nintendo announced and released Metroid Prime Remastered digitally as part of their Nintendo Direct. They also announced that a physical version would be coming two weeks later, and since I’m a weirdo who likes putting games on my shelf, I decided to wait. The wait was difficult, as Metroid Prime is one of my all time favorite games, but I have the game now. A lot has changed in the slightly over twenty years since Prime’s original release on the GameCube. Is the game still one of the best, or is that nostalgia-fueled rose-tinted glasses?
I consider myself a pretty big Kirby fan, going all the way back to Kirby’s Dream Land on the Game Boy and Kirby’s Adventure on the NES, but there are several of his games that fell through the cracks for me. One of those was the 2011 Wii game, Kirby’s Return to Dream Land. Luckily for me, there’s a remaster of it with some new content coming out in about a week. Even more luckily, as part of last week’s Nintendo Direct, a demo was released. So let’s check it out.
After many rumors and lots of speculation, we got our first Nintendo Direct of the year this week. It wasn’t too hard to guess that there would be one, there’s almost always one in either January or February. And sure enough, we got one. Was it any good? You probably already know this, but yes, it was very good. Let’s talk about it.
If you follow gaming rumors at all, you’ve almost certainly heard about the possible Nintendo Direct hitting in the coming weeks. Personally, I don’t think any of the “leaks” are real, but I do think they’re popping up now because a Direct being right around the corner makes a lot of sense. There’s almost always one in either January or February, and since we didn’t get one in January, it makes sense that we can expect one very soon.
You wouldn’t know it by reading this blog, but I played quite a few games this year. I also liked quite a few games this year. So, as is tradition, it’s time to discuss my ten favorite games of 2022. This is a very similar first paragraph to the previous game of the year list, and that’s pretty depressing. Oh well.
2021 was not a great year for me writing about video games. As I write this, I see that last year’s top ten list is only six posts down from this one. But, even though I struggled to write about them, I did still manage to play a good amount of games, which means I can still tell you about my ten favorite ones.
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Quarter Circle Forward 