Another quiet month as far as games played. Still focused a bunch on Mahjong Soul, slowly getting closer to Jade Room. I did play a few games, and went back to Balatro a bit because it’s so fucking good. And I tried a fun little thing that I’ll quickly comment on.

Big focus this month will be on all the presentations that happened… I’ll just talk about 3 of them because nothing else was worth talking about. In fact one of the 3 is also not worth talking about, but dunking on Lizardman is worth.

So let’s go!

Okay I did my GotY post, now let’s stop looking at the past and look at the future… Hopefully 2024 brings just a bit more quality than 2023 did.

I’m just gonna do the usual, just talk about my top 6 most-hyped-for-now games, and then big lists of games I have some level of hype for, and a slightly smaller list of games that might be popular but that I don’t have hype for (some because they’re bad, some because they’re not really my thing).

So let’s go!

Well I am actually writing this intro before a Direct was even announced (today is September 10). Because it’s pretty clear we’ll get a Direct this month at the same kind of time as every September in the last 8 years, and I assume 13 or 14 for the date of the Direct (*Edit: okay it was 14, let me update the title*).

There are rumors going for this one from Pyoro, one of the only “leakers” that has actually been somewhat trustworthy so far. Namely a DK game that SEEMS to be Mario vs DK-related… hopefully it’s not one of the Minis games and actually a return to the original MvD, which was a take on Donkey Kong 94. Then one for an F-Zero game, which he is heavily hinting at being F-Zero 99 (please no). And one that seems to be hinting at a remaster of the 2 Trace Memory games (the Wii one never came out in America), or at least a Wii game and a DS game that are linked somehow. And there’s no other leaker saying anything credible. Would be funny if this Direct was the one where Pyoro lost his credibility.

My true expectation is, of course, that even a bad Direct has one or two cool things, so in the end I’ll probably have some thing to be happy about here.

Well, let’s go and watch this Direct! These are live reactions as I’m watching the Direct.

There’s the usual February Nintendo Direct. I am gonna react to it. Whoa! So yes I am writing this intro before actually watching the Direct. It could be the most hype Direct ever, it could… not be. I have no idea, and I have no real expectations.

The rumor mill was a bit dry, but got a bit better… 2 hours before the Direct. There’s the Advance Wars rumors which are kinda dumb (the SKU changed on the eshop so people think that means it’s coming out right away, the other is a random wal-mart employee saying he saw a standee with a February 10 release date for it but provided no proof)… possible, but not likely based on why Nintendo indefinitely delayed the game. There was a bit of an “oof” rumor from Exputer saying they saw video evidence of a remake of Baten Kaitos, though this rumor is weirdly contradicted by this image just popping out a bit before the Direct showing a remaster collection of Baten Kaitos 1 and 2 rather than a remake of the first (could be faked of course). So either way, that’s possible. And that’s about it as far as anything interesting and new. There’s a Syluxhunter thing from last year about some F-Zero related thing, though no timing or details were given for that so… eh. Oh and there’s the whole TotK 70$ price and Metroid Prime 4 appearing/disappearing from online stores kinda randomly, I don’t think that’s particularly useful info as far as content… but it WOULD be bullshit if Nintendo upped the price of their games.

As far as expectations, I’m expecting Tears of the Kingdom to be shown very briefly, I feel it will be a bit more of a tease, leading to a separate Direct just for that game closer to release. I’m expecting something about Pikmin. I’m expecting to not see Metroid Prime 4. And I’m expecting DLC stuff for Fire Emblem, Mario Kart and maybe Splatoon. So that’s a good 5-8 minutes of the 40 that was announced accounted for, which means there’s a lot of time which could just be anything. And also Samba de Amigo since that popped up just a bit before the Direct started, no excitement for that.

So as usual, I’ll be giving short comments about everything in the presentation, and finish it off with my overall thoughts.

Let’s go!

Well the GotY stuff is done, so not much is left to do this year other than… get hyped for next year! I also have 2 reviews that I’m writing, and the january release list. So I’m doing stuff!

2022 was a pretty fun year with a lot of pretty solid games. 2023… I’m not quite sure if it’s lining up to be quite as good, but it very easily could. There’s a good number of really interesting games coming up, but I’m actually not sure about big badass games yet, as a whole.

So I’ll do my yearly usual post, giving my top 6-ish hyped games, make a big list of big-to-small games I’m interested in, and make a list of big games I’m not interested in. Just trying to get excited about the future and stuff.

So let’s go!

Another one I dunno if I’ll post, we’ll see after the thing ends, see if I have any particularly big reactions or not. Or something to rant about like with the Playstation thingy where Sony had nothing to show. I will note I am writing this intro hours before the Direct starts.

There are rumors, but they’re very solid, because they literally come from Nintendo’s japanese website. Bayonetta 3 finally getting SOME real info would be solid, and I’m really curious about that Kirby game (Kirby Discovery of the Stars, I think that title is probably wrong). Outside of that leak, there’s lots of rumors for a new Xenoblade, I’m not putting a lot of stock into that one. And there’s some stuff like new systems added to NSO which… who cares, paying for online on a console is a scam.

I do have fairly low expectations overall for this Direct, but September directs always have some kind of big announcement. There’s definitely gonna be a bunch of stuff we already know about for some of the games coming out this year as well as some of the early-next-year stuff, the possibility of a Smash character reveal (though I could see that being later). We definitely won’t see Metroid Prime 4.

So it’s starting in a minute, let’s see if there’s something here, and after we’ll see if I’m even posting this. Let’s go!

I don’t even know if I’m gonna post this. I’m writing this intro literally 2 minutes before this presentation is going live. We’ll see after the presentation if I do end up posting it, I only will if there’s something to actually talk about here. And I will look things up before I post too.

The PS5 has been a massive disappointment so far, and I certainly hope that they’ll try to reverse course here and actually announce games. That’s all I want, for the console to have something that makes it worth buying.

So let’s go, it’s starting in a few seconds, let’s hope it’s good.

So this thing was announced yesterday. People are really excited. I was excited too, but, being me, I actually did something called “thinking” and “researching”, and… yeah, this thing… I’m not excited anymore.

So I’m gonna rant a bit about this thing. Because dammit, I don’t rant enough.

Well E3 2021 is done. It mostly sucked. There’s one part that didn’t.

So time to rant about E3 as a whole! There’s not even that much to talk about here, but I think I can use that fact as a platform to talk about stuff anyways.

I’ll be grading each presentation, and talking about what bothered me about them and maybe get to the core of WHY all these presentations suck.

Well I guess before I get to the Nintendo Direct, I’m gonna write my usual intro.

In-between my last post (the disappointing Squeenix direct) and this one, there’s been a few presentations, they weren’t good. Back 4 Blood got a bit presentation, it looks fine. PC Gaming Show was fairly boring but it had some interesting indies. The Future Games Show was pretty boring. Take-Two wasted everyone’s time with something WORSE than the Koch Media presentation. Capcom did nothing, might have been more useless than the Gearbox thing. Wow this E3 is bad.

And now it’s Nintendo’s turn. Literally only they can save this terrible E3. The bar is set so low.

Nintendo has a LOT of rumors going on. 2D Donkey Kong game by the Mario Odyssey team, a 3D Kirby, a 2D Metroid (this is a leftover rumor that ended up false last year lol), something Fire Emblem (so many different versions of this rumor), an exclusive RE game, new Mario Kart, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t recall because there’s so many fake rumors I can’t keep track. The big one is the Switch Pro… which won’t be shown in the Direct if it’s a real product Nintendo wants to release. I don’t know if any of those rumors will be true. The safe bet is to say they aren’t but some of them are certainly interesting and possible.

Outside of the rumors, there’s a lot of things we can assume will be there or not. BotW2 is almost definitely showing up though I believe it will only come out early next year. We’ll see at least one Smash character (maybe 2). Seems like we’ll see a new Monkey Ball, that got a real leak. Maybe we’ll see some Zelda 35th anniversary… stuff (I’m not counting on it). We’ll NOT see Metroid Prime 4. We’ll probably not see Bayonetta 3 but there’s a chance I guess. I don’t think we’ll see Splatoon 3. I don’t think we’ll see any Pokemon but there’s a small chance since there was no pre-E3 pokemon direct. Pikmin 4 has been “sort of” announced for years, a real announcement would be… a thing. And Nintendo generally does announce actual things at E3 so… I figure we’ll have one decently-big announcement maybe, whether it’s something from the rumors or not. After how bad the rest of this E3 has been, I’m not keeping my hopes up, but it would be hard for Nintendo to fail as hard as any of the other presentations.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. The intro is written before seeing the show of course.

So anyways, let’s go. PLEASE Nintendo save this terrible E3. It really needs help.

Note: No I won’t do a post about the Treehouse stream, but I may talk about it in my “overall” E3 post after the event is over if there’s something shown there.