We all know the successor to the Nintendo Switch is coming in the near future. We don’t know exactly when, we don’t know how much it’ll cost, we don’t even know what it’s called, but we know it’s coming. I thought it would be fun to write what I want to see from the console. Might not be the most exciting list of features you’ve ever seen, but here’s what I’m hoping for.
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I mentioned this back in my Mars After Midnight review, but this has been the year that I finally spent serious time with my Playdate. I preordered it the day preorders became available, received it about a year later and then… goofed off with it for an hour or two and put it down. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with it, but there just was nothing there that really held my interest. But things changed this year.
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Ever since Zelda went 3D on the Nintendo 64, traditional 2D Zelda games became relegated to handheld systems. With the release of the Nintendo Switch and the discontinuation of dedicated handheld Nintendo consoles, the future of 2D Zelda games was in question. Would it make sense to put out a 2D game on a system that had Breath of the Wild on it? We got a little bit of hope in 2019 with a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, but it would take all the way until this year when we’d finally get a brand new entry. Was the wait worth it, and is there a place for 2D Zelda games in 2024?
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Have you heard of this NaNoWriMo writing challenge? It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the idea is that you would write every single day of November to try to have a draft of a novel written by the end of the month. Well, I’m not planning on writing a novel, but I thought it would be fun to try to have a blog post written every day this month. So, this is the start of that.
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I buy a lot of old video games pretty regularly. Sometimes they’re old favorites that I just didn’t have in my collection, sometimes they’re games I always wanted to play but never had the opportunity, and sometimes they’re just something weird I found. With how often I do this, I thought discussing the games I pick up might make for a fun new recurring feature on this blog. So, here it is, the first installment of Retro Hunting. I picked up five games this week, all on different consoles.
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It’s that time of the year again. E3 itself may be gone forever, but video game companies will still absolutely make big announcements in May and June. As always, I’m here to make predictions about them. There will almost certainly be more, but I’ve chosen five shows to make predictions for. Three that we already know the dates for, one that we know the month it’ll happen in, and one that according to leaks should be happening in the next week or so.
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I was recently thinking about how long it had been since I wrote an installment of Random Game Wednesdays. Taking a look back, I haven’t written one in over four years. So I decided, why not do a new one? I don’t know if this will be a regular, ongoing thing again, we’ll see how it goes. I don’t have anywhere near as much free time as I had when I first started this feature, but it is one I always enjoyed doing.
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In late October of 2022, I received my PlayDate, which I had preordered over a year earlier. The PlayDate is a very small, black and white indie handheld console. It mostly looks like a small Game Boy, with it’s D-pad and two face buttons, but it has a unique control twist. On the side is a crank that you can turn to do different actions in games. I was pretty excited for it, it seemed like a very unique new thing. But after a few weeks of goofing off with the included games, I kind of just put it down and forgot about it.
It’s the start of the new year and that means it’s time to reflect on my favorite games of last year. As I do every year, I will be listing my ten favorite games of the year, with a couple rules. One is that remasters don’t qualify, as these are not new games, however full remakes would count. This is a weird year for that, as there are a couple examples of games that really walk the line between remake and remaster, and I may have broken that rule depending on how you look at it, maybe even how I looked at it if you go back and read what I originally said about it earlier in the year. The other rule is that the game had to release for the first time in the US in 2023. I don’t think there’s any weird examples of that with what I played, but it does come up in some previous years.
It’s been six years since Sonic Mania’s release. That was a game that was immediately clear was a labor of love, a game made by fans for fans. It also might be the best 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game of all time. With that in mind, I was ready for another 2D game when Sonic Superstars was announced. However, with a completely different developer, Arzest, the team behind Balan Wonderworld, it was pretty easy to be nervous. So, how did it turn out?
Quarter Circle Forward 