I finished Kena, the total playtime was just under 17 hours. I would have liked one more area that’s visually distinct from the rest of the game. As nice as it looks, it’s lacking in variety. I completed most collectables. The game did unlock another set of trials in the five-second span between beating the final boss and rolling the credits but I wasn’t willing to go back at this point. I hadn’t mentioned this yet, but the music is really good, too.

And now would have been the time to start Xenoblade X, but I’ve decided to wait until after Bananza. So I’ve started playing Mahjong 3, uh, I mean, Yakuza 3 instead. Despite the remastering, I knew it was going to be the most difficult game in the series to get into, considering the step backwards it is from the Kiwami remakes of the first two. I have heard that enemies in this game block a lot and for the bosses I’ve fought so far that is absolutely true. Boss fights boil down to throws, which is not the most fun way to play. There doesn’t seem to be too much incentive to complete anything either, unlike the previous games. I love Okinawa as a location though, it’s very different from anything I’ve seen in the series so far (and probably will until the day Majima becomes a pirate).

I’m in the last third of Kena. Nothing really changed, it’s still a simple, beautiful game. Some of the optional trials are brutal, but I think I’ve completed them all. Now I have the main hub to clean up and then the game should be nearing its end!

Played more of Mario Kart World. The Knockout Races are a neat idea, but since you mostly race on the roads between the actual tracks, you’re spending most of your time driving a straight line. It’s not as interesting as it could be.

And with all of that 3-starred in 50CC to get a feel for the game, I finally started the Free Roam portion of the game. It’s a lot of fun, but it desperately needs a map! You have an overview that shows you where the tracks are, but its missing every detail you could want. And on top of that, it only properly tracks one of the three tasks you are chasing in this mode. I can already see myself going through a list of rewards to reverse-engineer the last few coins/switches I missed somewhere!

I’ve heard the same about the collectibles when I tried to look up help, but just today I realized you can use the mask you get to occasionally access spirit memories to highlight not just chests and such, but also footprints of the Rot. So the game does give you the means to find everything, but I don’t remember if it ever tells you about that.

I’ve completed the first major section of Kena and I’m very impressed so far. I like that the Rot don’t just follow you around like Pikmin, but just exist in the world until you need them. You enter an abandoned house and they are already there, just hanging out on the shelves and such. The combat gameplay is very much ‘3rd person action game 101’ without any standout features, but I don’t consider it a major part of the game, considering no enemies ever respawn. I found most collectibles on my own so far, but I had to consult a map for the last few.

Curious to see what this will be. I find the Splatoon universe really interesting, but I have zero interest in team-shooters.

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When you have Breath of the Wild, you don’t really need anything else to play for weeks. For some people, that’s probably true for Mario Kart as well. For me, it’s really just an upgrade without any hype attached to it.

I generally always recommend playing in order of release, but it doesn’t really matter here, the games are completely standalone. Brothership does have very minor references to the older games though. One game gets an entire character returning, but I haven’t played that one either.

Mario Kart Update: One cup has a remake of an SNES track as the first one. It’s not very interesting and five laps long. More laps than the other three (more interesting) tracks in the cup combined. I really don’t understand what they were thinking…

I love the water segments though, very Wave Race!

I finally beat Brothership yesterday. It should have ended last weekend, but the end of the game really drags on. You know that obligatory five minute cutscene about the friends you made along the way that a JRPG tends to have in between the final boss and the true final boss? Brothership turned that five minute cutscene into a three hour backtracking segment! And the true final dungeon is very long, too. Something I wasn’t really in the mood for anymore…

It was a good game though! The cynic in me expected the RPG side to be very simplified and easy, but it’s the Mario & Luigi it has been when I still played it on the GBA. And the optional boss re-fights in the late game hit hard!

My main criticisms are:

• The plug system gets very annoying with you constantly needing to replace them. At least let me favorite some of them so I don’t have to find them all the time.

• First strikes are very awkward. For comparison, my first strike rate in Thousand Year Door is easily ~98%. I’d be surprised if I got more than ~5% in Brothership.

• Overworld travel gets very tedious after a while. It basically becomes Spirit Tracks without any of the action.

Now, I planned to beat the game before the Switch 2 releases, but now I had a comparison here, too. I didn’t notice load times being much shorter, but the game definitely runs smoother in those moments when it matters. There’s a Bro Move that has you alternate the A- and B-Buttons quickly, which is easy enough. But about halfway through the timer the game would briefly slow down, which always messed me up until I started to specifically slow down in anticipation. That slowdown is gone on the Switch 2!

Next, I plan to play Kena - Bridge of Spirits on PC, a game I know nothing about. I picked it out from my backlog because I was in the mood for something green. I wanted to frolic in nature, but most games in that category are large RPGs that I wasn’t in the market for, because Xenoblade X was the game I intended to replace Brothership with. There’s nothing to stop me from just playing Xenoblade now, but I already had Kena downloaded and installed when I decided to focus hard on Brothership.

And on the side, I dabble in Mario Kart World. I can’t say much about it yet, but I was blown away by the fact that they have a track that acknowledges Super Mario Land! That’s so rare… But I can’t say I’m a fan of the Grand Prix format. Driving from one track to the next is cool, but if it comes at the cost of reducing all but the first track to a single lap, I’d rather not have that at all.

Something’s gotta change.

When I booted up Brothership this week, I noticed my playtime was 35 hours. So I looked back at my comment history and I started playing the game 5 months ago. I know Monster Hunter absolutely justifies slowing down everything else for two months, but this is just unacceptable. I have no less than two new games installed and ready to go on the PC side but I am not going to play them. I need to get this back under control. I’ve been focusing on this game and I’ll probably beat it this weekend. I’m definitely in the home-stretch, but you never know what else opens up at the end of an RPG. I have the full world map visible and there are three isolated areas I can’t access, so there’s something the game is still hiding from me.

Tempered monsters are basically stronger versions of regular monsters. Arch Tempered is an even bigger leap, reserved for a select few as special events.

Finished up the last bit or currently released content in Monster Hunter Rise. I’m still playing it to not get rusty and get all that equipment I’m still missing, but it’s a secondary game from now on. The stories about High Rank Zoh Shia were highly exaggerated, it was way easier than Arch Tempered Rey Dau.

I should finally be able to focus more on Brothership now. The fourth ‘world’ has been kinda disappointing so far. Strong opening cutscene, but not much to talk about since.

I’ve started my third playthrough of Pokemon Infinite Fusion, my second Nuzlocke and first time playing Remix Mode. I barely made it past Brock without casualties, which taught me to be prepared for the worst.

Hearing them complain is a good reminder that we’re doing the right thing.

I know what to follow up with on the Switch-side, since there’s really not much left for me there. My backlog on PC is much bigger and whatever I feel like playing now is probably not what I want in a week, so I try not to think about it. Monster Hunter has no real end in sight anyway. I’ll grind away slowly, a bit every other day to not grow rusty for whatever nightmare gets added next, so I probably won’t start anything with too much depth.

I’m nearing the end of current content in Monster Hunter Wilds. The current Arch-Tempered Rey Dau event kicked my butt quite badly. It was the first time I actually had to truly learn a monster’s patterns and tells, but now I can beat him without carting. I only have HR Zoh Shia left and I have heard enough tales to not rush into that one. I’m gonna fully upgrade my armor first.

Brothership is still happening. Every now and then. Not as much as I would like, but with Monster Hunter going into a pure grinding phase, I’ll have more time.

And when I only have a little time, I go back to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. I’ve had the main game beaten for a while, but there’s still plenty to do on the huge achievement list, which really adds to a game lime this. I even found myself hitting the difficult speedrun times. I wasn’t going to try those very hard, but at least for the first two levels, they were doable.

Occasionally, I’ve also been playing the 1994 CD-Rom version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a childhood game I have been trying to find for 30 years. It wasn’t hard to find per se, those old Carmen Sandiego games are all abandonedware at this point, but good luck getting a modern PC to understand a 90s CD-Rom! The best I could do in the past was a DOS version, which just wasn’t the same without music and voice acting. But I finally found the ‘VileBox’, which is a fan-compiled collection of all old Carmen Sandiego games that just works! That nostalgia hit pretty hard~

I haven’t had much time to play this week, but things are looking better again. I really need to put more time into Brothership again. I beat the third area and then just stopped playing again.

And it’s all because of Monster Hunter Wilds. I’m knee-deep in high rank now and I’m starting to appreciate the new structure of the game. I’ve always been the kind of guy who grinds out a single monster until I have everything I want before moving on, but with the whole world constantly moving on with local events and monsters spawning in forms that give distinct loot, the old quest format, while still here, just isn’t the way to play anymore. I was taken aback by that at first, but I’ve really been enjoying the variety this leads to.

the durability over time and the repeatability of gameplay experiences.

Looks like the “1$ per hour of gameplay” crowd is finally getting what they wanted.

Chuck is a lot of things, “not the character I was talking about” is among them.

But I’ve seen more of the roster since the reveal and if they’re going all in adding 40 random dudes from all over the series, then I’m actually okay with it. On that scale it’s the good kind of stupid that I can enjoy.

I was expecting worse when the Direct insinuated that not all games are compatible.

Did each company have to test their own games or did one poor soul at Nintendo have to work through all the shovelware on the eShop for compatibility?

That looks great. I hope we get to lay out custom courses within the world, too!

But I can’t ignore how they decided to fill out the roster. Mario Kart 8 opened the door for guest characters and now we get a cow? And a penguin? And a generic enemy from 3D World whose name I don’t even know?