Is it just me or does Nathan Drake show up in the last 10 seconds of the GTA VI trailer?
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap – ★★★★★
Wrapped up my Zelda: Minish Cap playthrough on the Anbernic RG35xx. What a fun, great looking game reminiscent of LTTP & so many unique items and gameplay features. Loved the Minish size transformation and puzzles.
Had some emulator hiccups during the final dungeon that caused me to have to switch from the RG35xx’s stock firmware to GarlicOS and then go Internet save file hunting, but after a few extra days delay beat the final boss just in time for Super Mario Wonder.
Rating: 5 stars
🎮 View my GameTrack review
Epic Games cuts around 830 jobs, selling Bandcamp
Epic is laying off over 800 people and selling Bandcamp.
This is direct and predictable result of all the consolidation in games industry and in general. It’s not like Epic isn’t colossally profitable.
Why on earth does Epic needs over 8,000 employees and why do they own Bandcamp in the first place?
This is why the Microsoft/Activision merger deserved all the antitrust attention it got from regulators, if not more.
Ransomware-as-a-service
Well “ransomware-as-a-service” is certainly a dystopianly awful new evil tech bro phrase I’ve never heard before.
Link: A ransomware group claims to have breached ‘all Sony systems’
7.5 years later, I’ve finished Uncharted 4
I preordered Uncharted 4 on January 12, 2016. Over 7.5 years later I finally finished the game streaming via Chiaki to my ROG Ally.
Played the first 4 hours or so back in 2016. Played the first 4 hours or so again when I got the Legacy of Thieves PS5 upgrade last year. Even with the drawbacks (mostly occasional audio and visual glitches in first 10 minutes of session), the advantages of playing anywhere in the house just makes it so much more likely I can find time for a game.
Really a tough game to pick up right after playing TotK (holy crap was the exploring and controls frustrating for the first couple hours). Uncharted 2 was my favorite game of that generation so I’m glad to have finally wrapped up the series.
Will give it a while but looking forward to picking up The Lost Legacy eventually.
Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – ★★½
The characters, Sadie in particular, just never seem to get more mature in their thoughts or their actions despite anything that happens in their lives. The constant reappearance of the toxic, abusive character with only cursory mentions of what is often literally sexual assault never really seems as introspective as it should. Of course, Sadie and Sam’s own relationship is equally toxic pretty much throughout.
Just incredibly immature thoughts on relationships, work, video games, and life in general.
Rating: 2.5 stars
📚 View my Goodreads review
📕 Buy Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow on Amazon
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – ★★★★★
A truly remarkable achievement in ways that I’m not sure any of us could have guessed when Nintendo announced they were making a sequel to Breath of the Wild.
Tears of the Kingdom refined pretty much everything my former (spoiler) favorite game offered and added seemingly endless new ways to traverse, interact, and manipulate the vast world. And it also added an actually intriguing and touching story on top of it, though that story is still told in a slightly improved but still suboptimal non-linear fashion.
220+ hours, all 152 shrines, every single light root, and I barely scratched the surface of everything in this game. I finished the game at only at 61% complete and there are huge areas of the surface map I’ve literally never been to.
It may just be recency bias talking, but Tears of the Kingdom might just be my new favorite adventure/open world game of all time. Breath of the Wild was more of a breath of fresh air and I was still thinking about it months/years later, but I’ve never so obsessively consumed every bit of game the way I did with TotK over the last 2 months. I can’t wait to see what is next for the Zelda franchise and can’t imagine what Nintendo has in store for us next.
Rating: 5 stars
🎮 View my GameTrack review
💿 Buy Tears of the Kingdom for Switch
Restarted “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow”
Restarted Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow today and made it back to same point I bounced off the first time.
Three chapters in and I really dislike the book up to this point. College Sadie and the terrible professor is sooooo dumb and his dialog and personality are so transparently awful. I can’t tell at this point if the author Zevin is this clueless about relationships or if Sadie is about to turn into a non awful character any minute.
It doesn’t help how bad the video game stuff is early.
Calling Street Fighter etc “martial arts games” made me cringe. This is also how I feel watching any baseball or football fiction. It must really be hard writing about nerdy details in a way that doesn’t alienate people not intimately familiar with the concepts.
Murder by Numbers free on Epic Game Store
Murder by Numbers, a Picross/Phoenix Wright mashup with a solid story and super fun characters, is currently the free game on the Epic Games Store and is def worth a download. I played it on Switch, but would also be great game for ROG Ally or Steam Deck (if you’ve got Epic on it).
Disrupting the Game (by Reggie Fils-Aimé) – ★★½
A relatively thin personal memoir that tried too hard to be a business book and to cover every one of Fils-Aimé professional life events instead of going particularly deep on anything interesting. Considering the name, tagline, and cover art of the book more focus on Nintendo.
The behind the scenes moments with the late Satoru Iwata were the most interesting but Fils-Aimé memoir lacks much real introspection or insight into what was happening at Nintendo during his time there. 200 page book and only 7 pages or so are spent on the failure of the Wii U and the launch of the Switch.
He still seems just as proud of the Bigfoot Pizza as he does of his time at NOA, despite mentioning in the book that the pizza wasn’t very good and had to stop selling it relatively quickly because it was negatively impacting the overall sentiment of Pizza Hut’s pizza. But I guess it was a marketing success and that’s all he cares about?
I definitely already had opinions on hiring sales people as president/CEOs and nothing in this book really dissuaded me of that sentiment.
I only really know Reggie from his E3 stage presentations, and while this book makes him seem like a pretty decent person it also is written as if he thinks he is the smartest person ever and Nintendo would still be making the Ultra Hand and Love Testers if it wasn’t for him. I’m not sure if that’s really how he feels but the way the book is written frequently comes off that way.
I’m probably just not the target demographic for business dude memoirs and should be reading investigative journalism and history books instead of this.