We've got the SNES game, Starfox 64 which was a reimagining of that story. Star fox 64 3D which was a graphical update of 64. Star Fox Zero, which is another reimagining of the original story.
Now this! It appears to once again dip into Star Fox 64 for it's core design, but this time, it's going full cinematic. I'm not really sure what's going on with Miyamoto, but the story telling bug must have bit him, because he's leaning HARD into the cut scenes this time around. Frankly, that alone might justify retelling the same story yet another time. As to those visuals, they're going more "realistic". Not ALL the way, but definitely more so than in the past. Honestly? It reminds me of the design on those old figures they made for the promotional art for the SNES game, and also of the designs in the Star Fox comic in Nintendo Power. It feels like a blend of those two styles. There's a fair share of anger over it it seems. It's funny. Back when Wind Waker came out, everyone was upset that Zelda had gotten LESS realistic, and now they're upset Star Fox went MORE realistic.
But, as I said, it isn't going for total realism, mercifully. The visuals still are bright and colorful like a cartoon. Further, the designs help to give them ironically more "human" attributes. It's a lot easier to tell that Peppy is much older than the rest of the team, for example. They've also got more expressive faces, with a lot of nuance coming through. This even shows in the radio chatter, where they are moving around and emoting, much better than the cockpit views in Zero.
They're adding Great Fox moments between missions. That's a good chance to really show some things, and it gives me "Wing Commander" vibes.
Maybe I'm just being contrary, but frankly I want to give this one a chance. I'm a LOT more open to doing so based purely on them pricing it REASONABLY for a change. Maybe they learned their lesson after that Advance Wars 1+2 remake and the port of DKC Returns sold so poorly when released at "new game" price? Or, maybe it's just the typical Nintendo move, randomly testing the waters pretty much all the time.
hay guyz how's PS5 looking these days? I just got a bonus at work and I'm thinking about splurging on one. SH2 remake is a given. I also recently saw a streamer (I know, I know) playing RE9 and it looked pretty badass. Oh yeah new Silent Hill ofc but I'm more excited for SH2. And Clair Obscur has looked pretty sweet too.
This is not a drill, it's real. Nintendo just made one of their most exciting announcements in a very very long time and easily their most exciting retro game release ever. I am still kind of shocked this is real, but... it is! Zero Racers (and Bound High) are actually coming to Switch Virtual Boy! It's shocking but true and I am incredibly excited.
Seriously, this may not mean much to a lot of people, but this is massively amazing news. These two games, along with another game called Bound High, were in development in 1996 as the key titles for a second attempt at getting the Virtual Boy to sell better, a 'relaunch' of sorts of the console. The games were pretty much completed, but then Nintendo decided to cancel the system entirely instead of releasing the games and giving the system a second chance. I have always been a strong advocate for wishing that companies would support any console they released for at least a couple of years (so long as it was financially possible for them to do so), so Nintendo's decision to ditch the Virtual Boy after less than six months has always been one I don't like. Yes, the system was never going to be a big hit, but with more realistic expectations for its sales -- 665,000 sold really isn't THAT bad, is it? -- I think that it could have been a fun little side system with support for at least a few years. Games like these would have been perfect for this concept, original titles and spinoffs of major franchises that aren't going to sell huge numbers of consoles but could excite some people.
Zero Racers is basically 3d F-Zero: Tunnel Racing Edition, and I've always badly wanted to play it. Zero Racers has been my number one most wanted unreleased game pretty much since its release, and it is just incredible that is is FINALLY going to see the light of day! I remember reading the Nintendo Power preview for the game and thinking it looked pretty good, but that's all we have ever had of it, until now. And finally we'll be able to play it! I don't know if anyone outside of Nintendo had copies of Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper that could have leaked, as happened with Bound High a few years back, but if they did they never released them publicly or showed any footage of them. Now, Nintendo has finally decided to drag them out of the vault and allow people to play the games... for no additional cost beyond the console and the VR accessory options (Virtual Boy plastic shell or cardboard VR).
I have always assumed that Nintendo had these games in their vault. After all, Nintendo, unlike most developers particularly in Japan, keeps everything of note. Nintendo keeps all their source code, all their cancelled game prototypes, everything. While most other developers erase or lose that stuff all the time -- just ask Square or Sega for their old code, they won't have it that's for sure! -- Nintendo keeps stuff. This is of course why the Mana collection was Switch exclusive, Square had to go to Nintendo to get the source code for at least one of the games. Nintendo had been given it back in the '90s for something (I forget why exactly, Satellaview? Nintendo Power system?) and, of course, kept it, while Square lost their originals. Nintendo's stipulation that the collection could only release on their system was understandable. So yeah, I always thought this was possible but didn't think Nintendo would do it. After all, on the 3DS they had a perfect chance to do 3DS Virtual Console, but didn't. Why would they now? Except... now they have. Unbelievable!
Anyway, this is amazing. I am so excited about this and the VB Switch VC. Very cool stuff.
As for the rest of the games on the Switch Virtual Boy VC app --
Golf - it's golf. I'm not a genre fan.
Virtual Boy Wario Land - An absolutely exceptional, incredibly fun game that is only held back by being pretty short and fairly easy. It's one of the all time great platformers though.
Galactic Pinball - One of the better electronic pinball games on retro consoles. Very good stuff. This is a pretty addictive, well made game.
3-D Tetris - This is the best 'Blockout'-style game I've ever played, I like it a lot. It's fantastic.
Teleroboxer - I'm not a boxing fan and this game is very hard but the 3-d effect looks great and the game does seem to be pretty good for its genre.
The Mansion of Innsmouth [aka Insmouse no Yakata or Innsmouth no Yakata or Insane Mouse Mansion] - This Japan-only title is a first-person dungeon-exploring shooter/action game. It doesn't have free movement, but still it has nice visuals and good gameplay. It's a shame this one didn't release here during the VB's life, I think it would have done well.
Mario Clash - With savestates, this previously pretty frustrating to try to play game suddenly becomes potentially fun, I would think! This sequel to arcade Mario Bros. is pretty good, particularly in 3-d where you can see the shells fly into the screen and such, but it' doesn't save, and is a quite long game to play on a system with a pretty short playtime limit before you have to stop and look away... a battery in the cart would have worked wonders. I know it doesn't have much of an ending, but still, the game needed a way to pick up a play session later, and this should provide it.
Red Alarm - Red Alarm may seem on video to make no sense due to the walls being just wireframes, but in stereoscopic 3-d the walls and floors and ships all actually make sense and work in 3d space in a way that's hard to explain unless you've played it. This is a pretty cool game that makes great use of the hardware.
And coming later --
Mario Tennis - This tennis game is still one of Mario's best tennis games ever, particularly in 3d. It's weird that the launch packin game isn't available with the launch of this service, but... okay? Maybe it'll release after the new Switch Mario Tennis game?
Vertical Force - This is a good, though not exceptional, shmup from Hudson. It's nice looking and plays well, but is kind of easy. It's lots of fun to play through though.
Space Invaders Virtual Collection - This is a very expensive import-only title. i don't have a real cart, haven't justified the expense yet. It's basically just Space Invaders but with 3-d.
Jack Bros. - I don't love this game as much as some people seem to, but this top-down action game from Atlus is certainly good, at least. It doesn't make too much use of the 3-d effect but plays well.
V-Tetris - It's Tetris, but with a slight 3d effect. There's not too much reason to play this over Game Boy Tetris really, but it's well made.
Virtual Bowling - This Japan-only title is insanely expensive. From emulation it seems pretty good, I wish I owned a cart. Now I'll be able to play it in 3d.
And of course Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers, the unreleased grails of Nintendo's vault.
I wonder, will we get Bound High also someday? Or is there some rights issue there?
As for the rest of the VB library... well, I get why Waterworld and the Gundam strategy game aren't there. Licenses. Virtual Baseball is a pretty fun game, I hope it shows up someday. The Japanese version is a licensed J-League game but the US version is unlicensed. Virtual Lab is a terrible mess, don't bother. Nester's Funky Bowling is good from what little I've tried of it, though Virtual Bowling seems better. I wonder why they went with that one over the more familiar American title, is it because of the 'license' (of their character from the Nintendo Power comic)? Virtual Bowling does have a better 3d effect but still, they both seem neat. And those are the rest of the games I can think of offhand. Otherwise, what else is missing? Bomberman Panic Bomber isn't here. It's a solid version of that game, apart from missing the multiplayer all the other versions have, but is in English, it's the only version of that game released here. I hope it shows up on this service someday. Konami is supporting it, Vertical Force is theirs of course.
Anyway, this is incredibly exciting stuff. Will Zero Racers be the best game ever? Probably not. But in 3-d it probably will look pretty cool and play well, like Red Alarm. The VB needed more actual 3d games, and that was one! I am really excited for this, it's kind of a dream come true to soon finally be able to play Zero Racers...
It used to be that the N64 barely even had a homebrew scene. Writing games for 3d is hard, and writing good 3d for the N64 is even harder, with its limited hardware and compromises to fit within its $200 budget. For many years homebrew devs wanting to work on retro hardware stuck to 2d games for consoles like the Genesis or NES, or hacking already existing games for those systems, the SNES, or others. The N64 eventually got a small game hacking scene, which has produced some nice results particularly in Mario 64 hacks, but actual original works? It was just too much.
Well, in case you all hadn't noticed, in the last few years it has happened. And some of the techdemos are exceptionally impressive. The games? They aren't on that level yet, but they're improving... they'll get there. But the tech demos? Spectacular stuff.
Two years ago, we had this.
This is pretty impressive! The textures here are so high resolution, it looks like something running on a more powerful hardware, but isn't.
But homebrew developers aren't done... now homebrew devs have done THIS. These demos are running in tiny3d, a homebrew microcode option for the N64. That means that these are not using Nintendo's proprietary microcode, and instead are entirely free of any potential copyright issues.
Yes, that is running on real hardware. If I didn't know better I'd think this is running on Gamecube or Xbox or something. The Nintendo 64 really IS a tiny little $200 SGI supercomputer, as demos like this show -- once people figured out how to get the most out of the hardware they've started to do incredible things.
And how is tiny3d doing at high-res textures?
Yeah, pretty seriously well. It's pretty insane to see the N64 doing this stuff, isn't it? It can even do portals!
The amount of particles on screen in this demo is ridiculous stuff. Exceptional work!
And here is the N64 doing full HDR.
So yeah the tech demos look incredible, but how are homebrew games doing? Well, there still aren't full, complete, homebrew N64 games with 3d graphics and the scale of a full retail title. There are only demos and smaller projects. Making a full game with just one person is a whole lot of work once you are trying to do 3d graphics, so this makes sense. In order to encourage development for the system, for several years now there has been a Nintendo 64 homebrew games jam late in the year. A year ago the theme was 'make a minigame, Mario Party style', then they put the minigames together into a launcher which lets you load any minigame.
The tiny3d guy made this one for that:
Obviously this isn't as impressive as the techdemos, but the particle effects are shown off here, as is the smooth framerate and really nice, detailed graphics. The gameplay is simple, just whack stuff and collect money, but it's good for what it's doing. The high detail graphics certainly could fool someone into thinking this is running o n something more powerful than the N64.
The guy behind the first video in this post, meanwhile, is currently working on a game. He was making a N64 port of Portal, but dropped it halfway because of issues from Valve, sadly. Now he's working on an original title. There aren't really video showing the whole game but bits of it are shown in this video:
The magic system looks interesting, but I don't like the super-pixelated graphics. I assume he turned off the texture smoothing and I don't like that look at all, myself, sorry. Still, I wanted to post a video of this game despite that.
There are plenty more little homebrew N64 demos or minigames I could mention. Here are a few.
This one is basically a very simple take on Rocket League.
This video covers some of the titles from a N64 Jam a few years ago. The same guy did another video on the 2024 minigame-themed jam:
The overall improvement in homebrew visuals shown here should be quite apparent.
The sixth N64brew Game Jam is currently underway, with a January 31 deadline. I'll be very interested to see what people made this year! https://itch.io/jam/n64brew-game-jam-6
And that isn't even getting into the hacking and rompatching scene, with things like Kaze Emanuar's effort to rewrite Super Mario 64 to get it running fully smoothly at 60fps with perfectly optimized code. So yeah, the Nintendo 64 has come a long way. Today the way the hardware runs is much better understood than it ever was before, and optimized code is now possible. The N64 has major strengths -- its fast CPU, its SGI supercomputer roots -- and limitations -- the small texture cache, the slow RAM access speed. Making a great N64 game requires working around those limitations. Managing RAM access is the key, apparently. That is probably the biggest cause of slowdown. Optimizing is apparently pretty challenging but obviously possible, as the results show.
According to Nintendo, I ended up playing 145 hours of Mario Kart World in 2025. It's easily my most played game of the year. On the Switch/Switch 2, second place was Mario Maker 2 at 90 hours, third DK Bananza at 7 hours. Bananza is pretty good, there's no actual reason why I stopped 7 hours in and never went back... I really should finish it.
But anyway, Mario Kart World vs. Mario Maker 2? Well, MM2 is certainly the better game, but... well, I started playing it a LOT less once MKW released. I'm just so addicted to playing some of this game on a regular basis! I mostly play the simplest, but maybe the most frustrating, online mode, online Knockout Tour. It's amazing but so unfair, I lose because of random luck constantly. Of course I shouldn't get TOO frustrated by this because that is the games' design, it is still Mario Kart at its core, but when I get eliminated because of random nonsense several times in a row I usually quit out of the game and do something else, it's too frustrating to stick with... heh.
Perhaps I should try getting better at the regular tracks instead of mostly sticking to the point-to-point-focused Knockout Tour, but I haven't done that at all. I also haven't gone to hunt for more of the primary skill challenge part of the game, the P-Switch missions. I don't know, they are pretty cool, but Knockout is just simple fun, you know? Just drive, play a few tours. see how I do... it's exactly what I want.
And all of that is why Mario Kart World has to be my pick for best new game of 2025. Is it the best game I played in 2025? Of course not, I'm still playing Starcraft of course, never mind Mario Maker 2. But it is a fantastic, addictive, brilliantly -- and irritatingly --designed game which does a lot right, as well as some things wrong. I wish that it had some missing features such as saving replays and adding a lot more knockout tours because for a game with 30 tracks and 202 routes it's just insane that the Knockout Tour mode is locked to eight preset 6-section races and that's all you get, but the game is amazing regardless.
As for the other games I liked the most in 2025, obviously the best game including old games is Starcraft. And yeah I'm still playing. Am I still horrible at it, yes, I still lose like 95% of the time and don't learn as much as I probably should. But I love the game regardless and have no plan on stopping anytime soon. It's simply the best thing.
The other PC game I have played off and on for like five-ish years now is GeoGuessr, which actually in its online multiplayer mode is also incredibly frustratingly random. The problem with the versus mode is that as a match goes into deeper rounds the damage multiplier increases, so if you get a great guess on the first round and they guess horribly you do only a little damage, but if you guess badly on the tenth round and their guess is great that's it, you lose instantly no matter what the point differential is. It's one of the worst game design concepts I have ever seen, seriously, and it's a horrible shame that a multiplier-free ranked mode does not exist; every time I play the game I'd say I quit more because of how much I hate the damage multiplier than anything else. Well, at least the single player 5-locations mode is pretty great. I haven't played this much in a bit but I'm sure I will be back.
On the Switch 2, I already discussed MKW. The other Switch game I play obviously is Mario Maker 2, which, as I said, I've played a lot less of since MKW released last summer. Even so, MM2 is still maybe the best game idea ever and is something I will never entirely stop playing. I only made four levels in '25, I should make more levels... I'm sure I could come up with some ideas.
Other than those four, well, I don't know if any other single game actually reached double digit hours of playtime, but I am still regularly using my 3DS, primarily for what's left of its Picross and other puzzle games that I haven't finished yet. I hate finger touch so Switch 2 Picross or touchscreen stuff doesn't appeal to me much at all, I'd need a good capacitive touch stylus and I tried one of those once and didn't like it much.
For another game, I didn't buy Kirby Air Riders in 2025, but I got it recently and have played it a bit. It's such a weird thing, kind of neat but kind of bizarre in not always good ways. My first impression is that it's good but not great, I'm sorry but I'm putting it below MKW and DK Bananza for sure.
As for Metroid Prime 4, I haven't gotten it yet.
What about my retro collection? As with other recent years I only rarely used most of it, sadly. However, one thing I got in 2025 is something I did end up playing quite a bit of: the Atari Lynx. I don't know if I mentioned here that I got a Lynx midyear this year, but I did, with pretty low expectations. I'd played Lynx games in emulation decades back and wasn't all that interested, and I don't especially like the other handhelds I've gotten in recent decades such as the Wonderswan or Game Gear. The Game Boy line are great, but I don't use them much anymore. Of course I do use the DS and 3DS regularly, but much more for touchscreen games than button ones. I thought the Lynx would be, like, yeah it has great graphics for its time, but modern systems do better, you know? Just something to add to the collection. I got a Lynx II from ebay. I had always planned on getting the Lynx II if I ever got a Lynx.
But... well, two things. First, I ended up getting a discount Lynx flash cart, which unlocked the Lynx's large homebrew library. There are a lot of Lynx homebrew games and some of them are pretty good. And... well, I actually like the system a lot! I like the Lynx so much more than I expected, it's kind of crazy. Of course it helps that I got a refurbished one that works great, but I didn't splurge for one with a replaced screen, I'm pretty sure this has the original screen, and it's really good! Yeah, it blurs a bit, but compared to the other screens of the early '90s this seems by far the best in terms of visibility and blur. It is front-lit also, of course, like the Game Gear, except way more powerful than GG, with impressive sprite scaling 3d effects. But even when games are just 2d, they seem to run better than most GG games do, usually smooth and fast. The vertical resolution of the Lynx is quite low, it's got a widescreen aspect ratio with a vertical resolution far below the GB or GG's resolution, so some games have tiny sprites, but I think the look works for the screen size the Lynx has.
As for the negatives, well, the platformer library is decidedly second rate. You have some very weird Western platformers by second and third rate teams. Too many of these games have no music and iffy framerates; the Lynx is powerful but clearly not ideal for platformer games, it's better at sprite scaling 3d and such. For Japanese platformers, ports of Rygar (the arcade game), Ninja Gaiden III (from the NES), and Toki (arcade). And that's about it from Japan. Fortunately all three ports are pretty good, though. It's neat that this is the arcade version of Toki, the Sega Genesis game is entirely different. Of course now you can play Toki HD on modern systems, but still it's a good port. Rygar... that arcade game always was kind of boring, so that it's a good port isn't saying all that much. Still it's okay I guess.
Of the other official Lynx games, S.T.U.N. Runner and Rampart are probably the ones I've played the most.
From the Lynx homebrew library that I've tried, of stuff I found, I need to buy some of the paid homebrews, from Songbird and AtariAge. A few of them look pretty good, I need to get Odynexus (there's a demo and I played it, it's pretty cool) and some others. Ynxa seems decent, and Red (or Green). Those have paid releases now too, I should get them. For free stuff, there's a little homebrew solitaire card game title that I've been playing, it's well done. There are a lot more free Lynx homebrews, many of which I've been trying on the system; I'd need to look through the list to say more about them. Suffice to say, I like the Lynx now and regardless of having the flashcart will certainly be expanding my collection of physical carts for the thing; it's just so nice to play games on.
Overall ranking for the year!
1. Starcraft: Brood War
2. Super Mario Maker 2
3. Mario Kart World (best new game)
4. The Atari Lynx
5. 3DS Picross Games
6. Donkey Kong Bananza
Yes, this isn't videogame related. I want to put it online though and I'm not sure where else to put it so I guess I'm putting it here.
Please note: this is written with the assumption that the reader has watched the series. This isn't meant as a 'should you watch this?' review, but more of a critical article about some failings I see in it.
Also, if I was making this series, I would have started with a quick note on how the lowercase s was written in the 1700s. It looks so much like an f that it takes a while to be able to recognize it. I'm sure some viewers were confused for some time.
Recently, famous PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns aired his latest work, a six-part, twelve hour series on the American Revolution. I have a degree in history and have read a good amount about the subject, so I am perhaps not in the target audience for this series that was clearly aimed at more casual history fans, but I watched the whole series and have a lot of thoughts about it. Overall, The American Revolution was a decent series, but I think that it has issues. My impression of the core concept is that what Ken Burns was trying to do was make a modern take on the Revolution, aimed at people who previously learned the traditional story and the basic sequence of events but are interested in being reminded of the basics of the story while learning a more left-leaning version of the story, focusing strongly on civilians, blacks, and native peoples of that era and why the black and native peoples didn't support the Patriots.
There is a place for this kind of history, but the problem is that this is a Ken Burns documentary. People take his work as The Authoritive Take on a subject, and in order to get in all of the coverage of journals written by white civilians, the history of black people of that era, and the struggles of the Native American Indians against the colonists, Ken drastically cut back on the amount of the core traditional narrative of what happened. Major figures are either never mentioned or barely mentioned; very significant events and writings go unmentioned or covered in unacceptably limited detail; and more. This is not, and cannot be, The Authoritive Take on the American Revolution because it is too incomplete. Perhaps, with a few more episodes worth of material added to fill in the gaps, it could have been that history, but as it is this series left me frustrated and feeling somewhat disappointed. I just do not think that a history of the American Revolution that takes 12 hours but has so many gaps could ever be considered authoritative. No, this is a side work to watch alongside your primary history of the era, that preferably should come from a book or books.
The First Two Episodes are Seriously Lacking Necessary Detail
Here are a few examples of this. The series is made up of six two-hour episodes. The first episode covers the period before the war, and is unacceptably lacking of many necessary details. A lot of very important events led up to the revolution starting, and this series barely covers them. Expect something like maybe junior high textbook levels of detail here, nothing more. I expect better than that from Ken Burns. It felt to me like they were not very interested in the part before the fighting started and wanted to rush through the prelim part to get to 'the good stuff', but the part before the war is critically important! For example, the coverage here of Samuel Adams, crucial Boston activist and printer, really was, as I said earlier, junior high textbook tier, at most. I'm sure some junior high textbooks do a better and more comprehensive job of talking about Samuel Adams than this series does. He was mentioned very briefly and with near zero details. He was one of the most important people to the existence of America and I don't think that comes through at all in the series; you just learn that he was a printer, published a lot of largely unmentioned articles to help keep the anti-British idea alive in peoples' minds, and such. More on Samuel Adams was necessary. I would particularly recommend reading The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff. That is a very good book.
And that's only the beginning! The series covers the Stamp Act in detail, and explains why the then-colonists hated it. It mostly does an okay job here, but I cannot think of one reason why perhaps the most important symbol of colonial resistance against the Stamp Act, The Virginia Resolves, are, as far as I remember, never mentioned even once in this series. That 1765 resolution established in a state legal document the idea that taxation without representation is tyranny, and thus are a hugely important moment in the lead up to revolution and the build-up to the Declaration of Independence establishing that all people have natural rights. Alongside the resolves he authored, critical Virginia Patriot Patrick Henry is, I believe, never mentioned in this series, not once. I do not understand how you can actually publish a twelve hour history of the revolution without mentioning one of its most important prewar advocates. Obviously his most famous quote isn't mentioned either, but more on that later.
Similarly, this is a bit later as it was written in 1779-1780, but the Massachusetts State Constitution is either unmentioned or maybe referenced once. It was another important step forwards towards freedom and natural rights, as it put the Declaration of Independences' rights into an actual legal document. They didn't bother mentioning that John Adams wrote it, or any details about its declaration of rights -- life, liberty, and property. Personally I think that Jefferson's idea of 'the pursuit of happiness' was conceptually brilliant work versus 'property', but the concept is important either way.
Native American Population Numbers
But what about the Native Americans, or Indians, or Indigenous peoples, or whatever term you prefer; the series uses all of those and more, which makes sense, there is no agreement including among their groups of what the preferred term is in the United States. [For any Canadians reading this, the Canadian preferred term 'First Nations' is very, very rarely heard in the USA.] This series tries to incorporate a significant amount of their history, but it has gaps as well. For instance, in the first episode, the series establishes well that the British colonies controlled the coastal region, but the government banned settlers from moving inland into what we now consider the Midwest and inner south. However, at some point there is the comment that 'powerful [Native] nations' lay inland, opposing the colonists. That Native nations lay inland and were going to oppose the colonists is certainly true, but I thought that the series was a bit deceptive here in order to play up how much resistance they could actually put up against the Colonists, or the Americans as they would soon become.
That is, while the population levels of the colonies are mentioned, the Indian population is not mentioned until the last episode of the series. I think that for anyone who doesn't know much of the context, they might be confused at a lot of the events here if they didn't realize that the colonists massively outnumbered the natives, but this is not a fact that the series really ever makes clear. It does say that the colonial population was rapidly increasing due to immigration as well as births here, but the sheer scale of the mismatch isn't made clear. The series does say that several million people lived in the Colonies just before the revolution, but again, it's not until the very last episode that it gives an estimate of the much, much lower population of Native Americans at the time; I think they said something like a quarter million but can't remember exactly. That would make sense though. I understand emphasizing the native nations, that was good, but by not mentioning the population difference I think that it may lead people to think that they had more of a chance than they did.
As an aside, I am sorry to have to mention this because it is quite depressing, but this series never references one of the key reasons for that disparity in population levels: that the vast majority of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas died of disease over the 400 or so years after discovery. This really is the most centrally important fact behind why the Americas are as they are, that most of the native population died on their own, before ever meeting a white person. Europeans conquered almost the whole world between the 1500s and 1900s, but why are most African countries today black, most Asian countries inhabited by their native groups, and most American nations white or black, and not American Indian? Well, sadly that is first and foremost because something like 95% of the native population died of disease. Following that the survivors lost everything over the Indian wars of the next 400 years, but without the diseases some areas would certainly be almost entirely native today, especially the areas from Brazil and Peru up to Mexico. Populations north of Mexico were lower, but at least up to Massachusetts many people lived there in sizable numbers, until plagues carried away almost all of them. The Pilgrims, for instance, settled at Plymouth on a coast that had been emptied by a massive plague a few years earlier. Without the great dying the Americas would probably look more like Africa, Asia, or Oceania today, with pockets of white settlement in areas where few native peoples had lived in an otherwise primarily non-white region. I can understand why he left this out, it is largely beyond the scope of the series, but even just a quick mention of the challenges that the native nations would have at trying to resist against people who outnumbered them so massively would have been good. As with many things Ken Burns' American Revolution is incomplete; it tries to do too many things to do them all well with the amount of runtime that it has.
The Flaws of the Segement on The Declaration of Independence and the Interviewed Historians
On the list of segments that needed more detail, one that I would not expect is the Declaration of Independence, but sadly, it was. This section is about 12 minutes long, which doesn't sound too bad, except that it is unacceptably lacking in needed detail. I already said that important predecessors like the Virginia Resolves aren't mentioned here, but this lack of interest in probably the most important thing about the Revolution gets worse. In this series, they don't even bother to mention the names of anyone on the committee other than Thomas Jefferson, much less anything they added to it! I do not understand how that actually happened, that's insane and not okay. Jefferson may have been the primary writer, but John Adams and Ben Franklin's roles were also important, and well known to history. Adams and Franklin are shown in a painting, but their names aren't mentioned and nor are any of their contributions. I do not understand how you leave that out. The segment mentions how important the Declarations' statement of the rights of man is -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- and that is good, though I would have liked more; there isn't anything here on the European political philosophy that led to those rights, for instance, of Locke, Rousseau, and such. The term 'humanism' is also not mentioned, though this is what that line of philosophy is. Things like these should show how this series is lacking in necessary detail. It affects the whole series; I thought the first episode was by far the most lacking in detail, but as the Declaration of Independence section shows the series never hit the level of detail I expected from a Ken Burns documentary. In twelve hours you can't cover everything, but you could cover more than they do.
Additionally, something else happens in this segment. So, I know that most viewers will not be familiar with the 'talking heads', the historians interviewed who they show on screen. I am well read in history enough to be familiar with some of them, including Nathaniel Philbrick, Gordon Wood, Ned Blackhawk, and more. Gordon S. Wood is elderly now, but I would say that he is probably the best known academic historian of the revolution. [As an aside, I'd never seen his name listed without the middle initial as a part of it, but Burns left it out in this series. I am including it because that is always how his name is written.] He appears in this series... for the first two episodes. Wood believes that the American Revolution is an exceptionally important positive event which we should celebrate and which set the world on a path towards greater equality and freedom, but also generally wrote what is probably the definitive standard version of the story of the Revolution, with a particular focus on its ideological component. So, I can understand why he was somewhat sidelined here, as that is not the version of the story that Burns wanted to tell. That more traditional approach definitely clashes with the more qualified, 'but marginalized groups were excluded and understandably opposed the Patriots because the Patriots opposed THEIR freedom' approach that this series takes, but personally I think that both sides are right. I know that awful things happened, particularly to the black and native peoples, but despite this the way the Revolution brought the concept of freedom and democracy to the world is one of the most important events in human history, I really believe that. It is one of the, or maybe THE, most important historical turning point towards freedom and democracy existing on this earth. Gordon Wood would surely agree with that.
So I wonder, what were they saying to him behind the scenes? Because, during the segment on the Declaration of Independence, he pretty intensely said "Everything we believe in comes out of the revolution, our ideals of liberty, equality, it is the defining event of our history. 'All men are created equal'. That is the most famous and important phrase in our history. If we do not celebrate it we have no reason to be a people. Lincoln knew that, and that is why he says 'all honor to Jefferson'." These are concepts he discusses in his writings. And then I do not believe he ever appears again for the remaining four episodes. I found that quite odd, and I have no idea what happened but it made me wonder. What happened there? What was said that isn't published, did he dislike something they were saying and walk out or something? If so I would understand it, honestly. To be clear, Wood is no right-wing conservative. He simply believes, correctly, in the greatness and importance of the Revolution and the ideologies that led to it, such as freedom. Going by this series, Burns kind of does, but with more reservations than Wood has. I'm much more with Wood on this one. Burns? Well, he wants it both ways, saying how important the concept of freedom from the Declaration was, while also making a segment where the only one of the list of crimes that is actually discussed is the one blaming the King for inciting Indians to attack the frontier. There is no reason to list every crime in the series, but by ONLY describing that one you are making a choice. It would be better to describe both that one and some the others.
On that note though, the series does correctly point out that once the concept of human freedom and that government comes from the consent of the governed -- that the people rule, not the kings -- it spread and that spread would inevitably bring freedom to more and more groups over time.
As for the other interviewed historians, I had missed that Nathaniel Philbrick switched from naval history to writing books about George Washington so I was surprised he got such a big role. He did great in the series though, he was one of the most commonly seen faces and always did well. On the other hand, I found it quite odd that Ned Blackhawk, something of a new star of American Indian history thanks to his recent book "The Rediscovering of America", appears... once, in the first episode. The rest of the Indian history is done by others. Did he not have time for more? Like, I'm sure that Irish guy who does a whole lot of the Native American history in the later episodes knows Native American history well, but ... like, it's a weird choice if you could have had Ned Blackhawk, whose recent book on the subject is probably the best one written so far on the topic!
And lastly, the elephant in the room -- and I imagine that Burns asked but was turned down -- is that Ron Chernow does not appear in this series. His books on Washington and Hamilton are exceptional, among others he has written about other eras -- his Grant book is the best Ulysses Grant biography probably ever! -- but he does not appear here. Chernow is a writer, not a historian, but I'm sure they would have gotten him on this series if he had agreed, given how popular his books are, Hamilton especially; it inspired the famous Broadway musical, after all.
The Middle: Solid Treatment of the War, With a Few Issues
I have little to say for episodes three through five because they were fairly good and reasonably complete as far as they tell the military history of the war. There are some oddities in what is covered, but the war itself was covered comprehensively, for the most part, and discussions on the battles and such are mostly good. I can make a few critiques, though. First, when discussing George Washington's struggles to win a battle, one explanation I have seen from other historians, such as Chernow if I remember right, is that Washington had a liking for overly complicated plans that fell apart because his troops were not able to perfectly execute his complex, multi-pronged maneuvers. Sometimes he overlooked something, and the series did mention this, describing the pass they didn't guard on Long Island and the ford they missed at Brandywine, but other times he was just assuming more of his troops than they could do, such as the complex multi-prong assaults at Trenton and Germantown. The descriptions of those two battles here were decent, but in both cases probably didn't describe exactly why the other wings, other than the ones led by George Washington himself, weren't also able to execute on his complicated expectations. Washington had good ideas but perhaps expecting four columns to coordinate in the fog as he did at Germantown was too much. The series skims over this, describing the struggles of the main column but only barely mentioning the others. I understand the unmentioned context but many viewers won't.
Additionally, I need to return to a previous criticism about how some people deserved more than you see here. One story during the Revolution is about Europeans deciding to throw in with the rebels and join the Americans during the war. This series mentions the major ones in brief, but none get full histories, though that is hardly surprising given that nobody gets that in this series, not one person. So, here the Marquis de Lafayette is mentioned a few times, but we get few details about his early life, nothing about any of the many consequential things he did after the Revolution, and nearly no mention of his campaign in Virginia commanding troops following Cornwallis around, either, even though that was somewhat important. If you want more on Lafayette, read "Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution", by Mike Duncan. The Polish Tadeusz Kosciuszko similarly is mentioned only in brief, primarily about his work designing the works for the siege line at Saratoga. Like Lafayette he would go on to try to bring freedom to his home country after the war, only to end up failing. An artificial hill monument was built in Poland for his efforts. (The tallest mountain in Australia is also named for him, but no he did not go there himself; another Pole gave it that name because he thought it resembled the monument.)
And last of the big names, the one who is mentioned the most probably is the German Baron von Steuben. In this series, you get the traditional-story version of von Steuben: he arrived after certain events in Europe caused him to want to leave, he trained the troops at Valley Forge, and then he isn't mentioned again afterwards for the rest of the series. Steuben is the only one of the major European military helpers who stayed in the US after the war. The series chose to say that von Steuben left Europe 'because he was accused of having relationships with young boys', and I think that "young boys" term Burns used really is not okay. It is true that von Steuben fled first Germany for France, and then also France for the US, almost certainly because of accusations that he was homosexual, but "young boys"? Seriously? Who wrote that? To me this makes one think he had some kind of pedophilic tendency, which is not true. It is true that the American man he would live with until his death in 1794 was younger than he was, being about half his age, but he wasn't a boy, when they met the guy was about 23. This series is mostly left wing, but that phrasing was so odd it made me wonder if some right-winger got it inserted into the script...
Where are the Famous Quotes?
This is a small thing, but I do think it is noteworthy. Any American has heard some of the most famous quotes attributed to people during the Revolution. With one exception, you will not hear any of them here. Ken Burns wants to cite diaries and written works, not quotes attributed to people that they may or may not have said, exactly, and that is what he does. Even so, when you are making a history of the Revolution over twelve hours, even a modern one like this, how are these all missing? Here, Patrick Henry is, again, never mentioned. Needless to say he never says "Give me liberty or give me death" [despite being a big slaveowner and supporter of slavery]. Nathan Hale's capture and execution is mentioned, but his famous quote, "my only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country", is not mentioned. Instead all the series says is some odd quote about a sign the British apparently put around his neck before killing him. That both of those quotes likely come from a popular play of the time about the Roman legislator Cato is, needless to say, also not mentioned, though that is an interesting fact. And these are only two of the more famous quotes not mentioned.
Similarly, when discussing the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock's famously large signature is not mentioned, much less the myths of why he wrote it so large that people wrote over the years. This is another example of probably intentionally leaving out core parts of the traditional myth, though it is certainly true that Hancock wrote larger than any other signer. Regardless on that, they do quote a supposed saying that a signer with palsy said 'my hand trembles, though my heart does not'. It's a good quote, but opens the question of why other famous quote are not included.
This came to my mind again in the last episode, when, randomly, they say that George Washington said 'I have grown blind in the service of our country' in order to put down a putative revolt. Given how so few famous quotes from the Revolution had been mentioned before this, and that this was yet another voiced line and not a quote from a written speech or memoir, I was honestly shocked that they included it, but for some reason they did. It's one of the only famous quotes in the entire series, it's so weird they put it in. I am glad that they included it, but it just highlights how odd it is that only this one gets a mention and not any others.
The Ending is Just as Incomplete as the Beginning
Here is another example of something missing which you really can't leave out in an authoritative history of this era: Alexander Hamilton. To the best of my recollection, Hamilton, one of the more important Founders, is referenced only once in this series: during the section on the siege of Yorktown, they mention that Hamilton led the attack on one of the redoubts. And that's it. Uh, yeah, that is not exactly what people need to know about Hamilton. It gets weirder, though, because earlier on in the series, there was a section about whether the new nation should pay its debts. The series discusses the issue in short, before saying that even though the financiers helping fund the revolution didn't know whether they would get their money back or not they put the money up anyway. The series never gets back to this point at the end, however, which makes the whole segment feel very incomplete and disjointed; why discuss this issue at all if you aren't going to point out that later on Hamilton was instrumental, during the Washington administration, in convincing the government to pay all of its debts? When they did that first segment on the financing I thought this was leading to a later section on Hamilton and his key success at getting the debt paid, but no. The issue is not mentioned again and just becomes one of many dropped plot points.
Unfortunately, this is far from the only thing not mentioned at the end. Here is one missing thing that happened during the war: while the beginning of the Spanish and French siege of Gibraltar is mentioned, how it ended, with the British surviving the siege and keeping the territory, isn't. This is a very consequential event and I don't understand how it got left out. Similarly, a major part of the story of why the peace treaty was in 1783 and not earlier, after Yorktown in 1781, was because of the warfare internationally between Britain on one side and France and Spain on the other. The series makes a few mentions of things, such as detailing Spain's capture of Florida from Britain, but largely skims over this. This was important because Britain withstood the assaults and not only kept almost everything else in its empire, but primed itself for the great expansion of the British Empire which would come in the 1800s.
So many things go the way of Hamilton and international politics; Burns clearly decided that he didn't have time for a full conclusion saying what happened afterwards to people, so he just didn't include almost any postscript, for almost anyone. The series does mention that George Washington became President, but not anything he did as President. Nobody else gets any resolution, other than two civilian guys; one guy is described as later becoming a dentist who made a set of false teeth for Washington, and another, a black man who became a privateer during the war, as using his war profits to help fund The Liberator, the great 19th century newspaper of freedom from slavery. Also they mention that the civilian woman from Yorktown never returned to her hometown after the war. Why these few civilians get conclusions but not anyone else is beyond me, it seems quite odd. Yes, people could look things up themselves or read a book to learn what happened and you obviously cannot cover everything, but choosing to cover nothing instead seems, to me, to be the worse option.
Indeed, the 'nothing' is so bad that even the Constitution is barely mentioned! The failings of the Articles of Confederation are very briefly referenced, but the resolution of that is left for another time. The viewer should go look up the Constitutional Convention if they want to learn about that, I guess. The story of the Revolution ends with the Constitution. Leaving the Articles of Confederation decade and the Constitutional Convention almost entirely out is a mistake.
Next, after strongly focusing on the Native Americans through the first five episodes, the last episode didn't really finish their story. Instead, it largely drops that plotline. The series mentions that the British gave the new USA the Midwest in the 1783 Paris peace treaty, surrendering all land to the Mississippi to the new United States, but no context was provided for why. George Rogers Clark and his fierce Indian-hating and Indian-fighting was mentioned in ep. 5, though not with all of his accomplishments in taking some British forts, but he or his actions were not mentioned even once in the last episode. Clark's taking those forts is usually considered to be an important part of why the British surrendered the Midwest in the 1783 treaty, so I do not understand this. Of course, Clark also did awful things to the Indians, and that is mentioned at the end of episode five, but that just increases my confusion about them basically dropping him and the whole 'Northwest' theater from the last episode. If a goal of this series is to correct the historical story and, alongside celebrating the good things about the Revolution, make Americans more aware of the awful things done in the name of the United States, shouldn't episode six have finished the story? But it doesn't. The series just said 'they couldn't understand why the British abandoned them' or something like that and left it there. There were reasons but you won't learn them from this series. If you wanted to do a Native-focused history of the era the series is a very good but incomplete start, though again that was true for almost everything.
As an aside, a counter to this would be the treatment of upstate New York. Unlike the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.), the war in upstate New York between the US and the Iroquois is discussed in detail, including comprehensive coverage of the reprisal campaign Washington sent there to burn Indian villages after some raids. This is certainly one of the sadder elements of the Revolution so good on Burns for covering it. America at its best is the greatest, but we are not always at our best.
On Slavery
As I have said, one major focus of this series is an examination of things other than the traditional story of the war and its white male Founding Father leaders. It is no surprise that the black experience and enslaved people thus get a major role. First, they chose to say 'enslaved people' or terms like that, instead of 'slave'. I get modernizing language and such, and trying to emphasize their humanity as people, but it seems pretty much the same to me. I think either way is fine. Anyway, for the most part the series does a good job covering the subject, but I have two critiques.
First, in the middle of the series, there is comprehensive mention of southern Royal Governors escaping to ships off the coast, and of Royal Governor Dunmore of Virginia's proclamation that any slave of a Patriot who reached him would be freed. This is discussed at length, say that many of the escapees ended up dying of disease, then drop the point without saying where he or his ships went after that. I presume that they went to New York at some point, but the series should have spent a sentence sometime telling us. It is odd to leave that point hanging without resolving it. For those who did reach New York, though, the series does a great job of explaining what happened at the end of the war, with many of the escapees being brought away to Jamaica or Halifax, fulfilling the British's promise.
On the note of Washington, the series reminds us that Washington was a man who entered the war a committed and believing slaveowner. It does not mention that Washington was closely focused on efficiency and realized that slaves were never going to be motivated to work hard because they get nothing for their efforts, but does discuss some racist things he did early on, most notably how he temporarily banned blacks from joining the Continental Army. However, immediately after that harsh critique, the series flips around and say that Washington changed his mind, and decided to allow free black men to join the Army after all. It is great that this change of heart is mentioned at that moment in the series.
However, that it was just the beginning of great personal change and growth that Washington would undertake in his later years largely isn't discussed. One thing that bothered me greatly about the ending of this series is that that after so much focus on slavery, and on Washington's position on slavery, they didn't mention that he was the only slaveowning Southerner president to free all his slaves upon his death. This is a very important point on Washington's moral journey and I think the series is really remiss to not mention it. He changed from being an unquestioning slaveowner to deciding to take personal action against it, and this series should have said that.
Conclusion
Overall, I thought it was a good series I guess, but it's not really a good way to learn the history of the revolution, given the odd choices of what to cover and what not to. This is a good supplemental piece teaching some of the modern history of marginalized groups during that era, but far too much vital information is entirely left out for it to be your primary source of learning about the time. Ken Burns' The American Revolution is not that. Read some books instead, you will learn a lot more that way and hopefully won't have huge gaps in the story as you will here. For people who already know the main story well, though, this series is a solid summary of the modern left-wing and minority-focused histories of the era, with some of the traditional story included as well. I just wish that it was not only that, but also a comprehensive history of the Revolution. It isn't. I don't know if this series was always intended for six two-hour episodes or if its length was cut, but it feels like something condensed down to fit in less time than intended to me. Too much is missing.
Even so, this documentary is very well produced, and in many ways is classic Ken Burns -- it is loaded with talking-heads, pans over paintings, scattered scenes with reenactors, long anecdotes, lengthy quotes from random civilian diaries and journals, pieces of the traditional story but not the whole thing, and everything you expect, voiced as always by Peter Coyote. It is a compelling watch which glued me to the screen through its whole run, which I watched as they aired the first six nights. It might show Burns responding to criticism of his earlier works, as well; he has never admitted fault with his '80s classic The Civil War, even though anyone looking back at it sees a series hopelessly compromised with pro-Southern mythologizing despite Burns being a Northerner, but the strong focus on a more sympathetic and modern look at marginalized groups than you see in that series is, possibly, a reaction to that criticism. Certainly nobody could say something similar about this series; it is sympathetic to both sides, but it shows why that is the correct position to take. However, ironically, this series probably ends up just as flawed as that one is, only in different ways.
In conclusion, Ken Burns The American Revolution is a fine documentary that I recommend anyone who knows the subject should watch. If you do not know the subject, though, read something else first that is more complete. If this is ever shown in schools I would strongly recommend to only do so after learning about the subject first, since it just is too incomplete to stand on its own. This does not tell enough of the story.
Finally, Ken Burns, the National Parks are not "America's Best Idea". No I will never get over that he actually made that the main thesis of that series. Electoral democracy and freedom, the great legacy we get from the American Revolution, is America's Best Idea. For all the faults of the era -- slavery, taking land from the native peoples, and more -- the accomplishment made in advancing freedom was unlike any previously in human history other than possibly the short Athenian experiment with democracy, and the Founders learned from that example to form a more stable democracy than that one.
As a final note, a review of this series espousing a similar sentiment is this one: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/12/18...ken-burns/ I wrote this before reading that, but entirely agree with everything they say. You cannot tell the story of the Revolution without a much deeper dive into the importance and meaning of the ideological basis of the Revolution than you will find in this series.
Posted by: Dark Jaguar - 23rd December 2025, 11:49 AM - Forum: Tendo City
- No Replies
Console sales aren't doing so well, but one breakout hit was something called the Nex Playground, which honestly has a very "old Nintendo" feel to it.
It's definitely not a graphical powerhouse, and it's basically a Kinect, but somehow it really took off. Let's not forget that for a certain subset of the casual gaming public, the Kinect was actually very popular for a while. It just wasn't moving huge numbers. It looks like Nex is tapping into that forgotten market with something that ONLY does that at an affordable price point, and they came in and outsold the XBox Series, by a pretty safe margin. I still can't imagine intentionally playing a 2D platformer with gestures, but hey, they found their niche.
I've kept this to myself for some time, but several months back I lost my job. I've been doing odd jobs and seeking more long term employment to get me by until now, but those odd jobs are harder to come by, selling my valuables has become more difficult, and the job market is becoming more and more flooded. Combined with increases in rent, food, and utility cost, I'm in a very tough position. I hate to do this, as I've never wanted or needed to ask for handouts before, but I have no real choice now. Frankly, I need money to make rent. I've already got some SNAP benefits incoming to support me and mine as far as food, but keeping a roof over my head has become the biggest priority. Simply put, I can't find a cheaper place when I can't provide proof of secure income to the landlord, and so it's come to this. I've managed to get together some money from friends, while family are, as I've indicated in the past, also struggling and unable to help me. Indeed, I support some of my family as it is.
So, this is the situation I'm in now. I wish I could promise prompt repayment, and I do have some tech jobs in the wings with some interviews I think went well, but I've felt that before. I'm also applying for other jobs, including one working for local SNAP benefit offices, because frankly I'll do whatever it takes so that I can support myself and family I'm helping to support. What I need now is $600 to make ends meet for this month, and I'm hoping with a little from each who's able to give here I can make that goal. Yes, embarrassing as it is, I've come to e-begging.
