So, recently rumors of a new F-Zero game surfaced.  I wasn't sure whether to believe them or not given how long it has been -- like 15 years since the last entry on the GBA -- but... it happened!  F-Zero has returned... as a multiplayer-only game in the "99" line of titles with graphics and tracks taken from the original Super Nintendo F-Zero game.  It's chaotic and intense but is pretty fantastic once you get used to it.  This is the fourth Switch 'battle royale' game, and the third from Nintendo itself.

Tetris 99 is outstanding and still is quite popular, but the big question is, how long will this game be available for?  Because while Tetris 99 is still available and supported, the other games in this category of sorts of Nintendo Battle Royale games are not.  Super Mario 35 was announced as a time-limited title and was indeed shut down as scheduled.  I have no idea why they made the game time limited, but I didn't like it all that much anyway; the physics were just a bit off, not quite NES Mario physics and very far from NSMB.  As for the other one, Pac-Man 99, the game is a Switch exclusive but is run by Namco.  The game is about to be shut down.  I have no idea why Namco is shutting it down now, and it's really unfortunate that they are because from what I played of it it's pretty good, but I do admit I was probably part of the problem, I wasn't playing it much.  I presume player numbers must not have been that high, unfortunately.  Too bad. 

So, the rocky history of these games leaves me skeptical about F-Zero 99's future.  I hope that this game is more Tetris 99 than Mario 35!  F-Zero 99 is really good, it'd be a shame if it vanishes for no reason at some time not that far in the future.  I recommend playing this game while you can, it's really worth it.

As for this game, as I said, F-Zero 99 is SNES F-Zero but with 99 racers and some new features.  The game controls a lot like the Super Nintendo game, so control is responsive and feels great.  The game feels designed to be played with a D-pad, though; analog controls exist but are incredibly twitchy, I hate the feel of this with analog.  So that Switch analog stick will sit there unused like usual... heh, with the kinds of games I mostly play on Switch I rarely use that thing.  This game works fine as it is, but better analog controls might have been nice.  I know Nintendo wanted to prioritize being able to play this game with a d-pad because they wanted the game to play well on the Switch Super Nintendo-style controller, and that was a good decision, but the analog controls need a bit of work.  The other thing that needs work is the options menu, which has some missing options that should exist.  Audio volume options are badly needed, for example; the music in this game is way too quiet, and you can't turn it up.  It's kind of annoying to have to turn my TV volume way up just for this one game, ten back down for anything else.  There also isn't an option to dis[play the speed in miles per hour, which is a bizarre oversight to make.  The speed in this game doesn't matter much, but it should not have shipped only in kilometers per hour, those numbers are somewhat meaningless to me.  But really, that's it for issues as far as controls and options go, everything else is good.

As far as the gameplay goes, F-Zero 99 starts with the Super Nintendo game, but builds off of it to fit its new genre and for new control and game features that have been added in.  This isn't just the Super Nintendo game with lots of cars, there are new game mechanics present.  First, the track designs, while extremely faithful to the original, have perhaps been expanded in width to fit the larger field.  Each track has an opening start area as well, a fan-shaped area where all the cars start before driving towards the games' starting line in the course.  This solves the starting-line issue with so many cars in a fair way.  But as far as game mechanics go, there are two major changes.  First, the boot system of the rest of the series has been put in this game, so boosting boosts away your health.  I really like that this mechanic is here, it adds a lot to the game.  Boosting, hitting a wall, or bumping other vehicles reduces your energy.  If you run out of energy or go off the track on a jump, you explode and that's it, you lose; there are no second chances in a race in this game.   Each track has a recharge pit area that heals some of your energy.

The second, and probably most important, new ability is about the superboosts to the Skyway.  This new super-boost ability has been added.  When you damage other vehicles with a spin attack -- another feature from later F-Zero games back-ported to the original here -- you build up a super meter.  You can also build up this meter by collecting yellow orbs which drop when other players do damage to eachother or touch a yellow AI vehicle.  Once the meter is filled, if you hit the boost button instead of doing a normal boost you will go up into the sky to the Skyway, a second path in the air above each track.  You stay on this more streamlined course for as long as your now-rapidly-depleting boost meter allows.  Timing your uses of the superboost is one of the most important skills you will need to learn in order to do better at this game, because where you start a superboost can have a large impact on how much ground you gain from it.  You will only get a couple of superboosts per race most of the time, since the meter takes a while to charge up, so you need to use them well.  This mechanic is not something any previous game in the series has any analog to, and I'm not sure if I like it all that much overall because it allows you to avoid the challenging parts of a track and sometimes gain a large advantage through just using a boost well instead of through good driving skill, but it is an interesting mechanic that is key to the game.

Beyond that, F-Zero 99 is mostly a lot like SNES F-Zero, just in modern resolution widescreen and with the insane, intense chaos of 99 human-controlled racers on the track, all driving around and whacking into eachother.  This is a wonderful game with solid rewards for play, as you level up your racer and unlock more car colors and titles for the current selection of four vehicles.  As for content though, right now that is the games' main problem.  F-Zero 99 just doesn't have much to offer.  So far, 7 of the 15 tracks from the original Super Nintendo game are playable.  The rest aren't in yet and apparently will be added later.  And of those seven, only four, the first four tracks from the Knight Cup, show up in the regular F-Zero 99 mode; the fifth, Silence, never does for whatever reason.  As great fun as this game is, playing Mute City I over and over and over gets old after a few hours, you know?  As for the other two tracks, one track from each of the other two cups is currently present, with White Land I from the second cup and Port Town II from the third.  Port Town II is definitely my favorite track in this game so far, and I hope that it's not too long of a wait until the other harder tracks are playable in F-Zero 99. 

Some more tracks beyond that would be nice, too, and more cars.  The easiest thing to add would be the 10 tracks and 4 cars from BS F-Zero 2, the Satellaview game.  I presume that Nintendo has copies of those tracks, because only half of them are currently available; the BS F-Zero 2 game we know is based on the Practice rom for BS F-Zero, which included the four new cars and five of the new tracks, while the other five new tracks were only in the main two week versions with Satellaview streaming audio, neither of which has a publicly available rom.  There are a few videos on Youtube of them being played with the original streamed Japanese voiced dialog, though, which is neat.  There are more SNES-style tracks from the GBA games of course, or they could make new courses, but it'd be pretty fantastic to finally see BS F-Zero return, and for everyone to be able to play the five lost tracks...

Overall, I love F-Zero 99.  It needs more tracks, but other than this this game is really good, very addictive stuff.  I've played a decent number of hours of the game so far since its release after the Direct last week and certainly will play more.

Hey remember Mario?  He had like a trio of games back on the "Nintendo Entertainment System" in the 80's?  Cute short lived fad just like all the adults told us it would be, but it looks like Nintendo went and dug that old character up for a few new games.

So, we've got a remake of Thousand Year Door now.  All they need is a remake of the Inbetweener that is Paper Mario (64) and we've got that perfect trifecta.  Super Mario RPG is also now confirmed to have those suspected new gameplay features hinted at in the old trailer.  It's still got all the original combat, like boosted damage from timed attacks, defended damage from timed... defense, and all kinds of unique action mechanics for the various special moves, but now successful timed attacks hit all the enemies and build a boost meter to unlock a "triple combo attack".

The new Peach game is appreciated and gives Peach a style for all seasons with it's theater troupe style.  It's appreciated, and I hope that the remake of Super Mario RPG has reminded Nintendo of how Peach used to act before Sunshine and returned to that more ahem... bombastic personality.  Here's hoping one of her outfits is a Luigi outfit like the Super Mario Adventure comic.

Mario vs Donkey Kong is also getting a remake.  It's a good game that directly follows up the gameplay of Gameboy Donkey Kong, which unfortunately gave way to numerous "sequels" that are more off-brand Lemmings than proper follow-ups.

Of course, there's Wonder, which I didn't bother watching the trailer for.  I already intend to get the game.

Oh and another Luigi's Mansion game ported to switch!  It's welcome of course, though I do miss the "analog sensitive" triggers Nintendo used to love for those games.

All in all, quite the focus but that's no surprise.  As much as that movie didn't do much for me, the Mario movie was still a huge success so why not cash in on that boosted popularity again?  Mario Mario and Luigi Mario are certainly showing a revival.

Yes, I know, you could make a case for Truman, JFK, or perhaps Johnson though for his foreign policy I'd say no to that one, but overall I think Biden might really be the best.  He's done fantastically and we've got so much good legislation through, it's been a great few years.

But what do the American people think about this?  For his efforts, Biden has gotten terrible approval ratings and tied polls between him and Trump.  This despite Trump facing 91 criminal charges and quite possibly being in prison before the next election (here's hoping!).  It's incredibly, INCREDIBLY frustrating.

Yes, I get part of it -- there is a housing crisis which is pretty bad thanks to insane prices for buying a home and at the same time a homelessness crisis that surely is partially being caused by the housing crisis, and we had very high inflation last year that has resulted in lasting higher prices for food, but even so, the economy overall is actually doing quite well.  Employment is at historic highs, wages are (slowly) going up, there has not been a downturn or crash like many people were predicting... there are issues of course,  I mentioned the biggest ones, but on the whole polling is way off on the economy, it's much better off than people seem to think.

And since this is America, nobody cares that we're so much better off than a lot of the rest of the world.  A lot of other places HAVE had significant downturns in the past year or two.  Our polling on the economy would make you think we have as well, but... we haven't.  It's so frustrating.

I have no clue who currently owns the Atari hot potato, but whoever they are went and bought AtariAge.com .  That means it's dead.  The forums will likely be deleted very soon, so if there's important legacy information there, get it now.

Whenever a big company buys a fan community site, that means the fan site is dead.  Every single time...  Every... single... time... no exceptions... ever.

Don't understand a word of it, but it's got energy for a song about beating up a bunch of old people.

Yes, it's true.  It's unclear if he was fired after over 30 years as the voice of Mario or if he retired (he is 67 now), but after the rumors that he was unhappy with Nintendo's choice for Mario's voice in the movie, I don't think I'm giving Nintendo the benefit of the doubt here, they probably decided they don't want him voicing Mario anymore.  I don't see how this isn't a mistake!  The voice in the Mario Wonder trailer, which as I suspected at the time is confirmed to not be Martinet, sounded a bit off, you know?  And yeah, it was, it isn't him.  That's really unfortunate.

I wonder if they will have a new single voice actor for Mario or if we'll see different people.  Even if it's mostly just voiced sound effects, his voice is important to get right...

Nightdive Studios did it again.  On the tail of the recent remastering of Rise of the Triad, they've given us an amazing remaster of a rather contentious Quake 2.  The game had... flaws as it was the first id made after Romero left the company, and unfortunately it showed.  The level design consists of numerous tubes, and the enemies are very... samey.  The remaster does a few things to fix this.  Namely, it reenables a number of AI subroutines to make the enemies more interesting to fight.  But, the biggest contribution?  They put in Midway's Quake II 64 (like Doom 64, a whole new game).  Now, it's not a true port of that game.  Instead, the levels are brought in from the N64 game but are running in the Quake 2 engine proper instead of a modified Quake 1 engine as on the N64.  Still, the new AI additions manage to enhance that experience too.

But, the biggest addition is a whole new campaign from Machine Games.  They proved themselves with their campaign in the Quake 1 remaster, and their dedicated to good retro shooter level design is on full display here, with the benefit of zero hardware limitations meaning they can just ooze out hundreds of enemies all over the place and make levels that are detailed and sprawling.  This is frankly the best campaign ever made for Quake II, and I'm including both the second expansion pack and Midway's Quake II 64 in that assessment.

It's good stuff, and unlike so very... very many modern ports, they kept full support for LAN play and direct IP connections.

Edit: Corrected a name mixup

How very Edge, Nintendo, how very Edge Magazine of you.  Or maybe, when you could play Space Invaders on that one PS1 game's loading screens?  Yeah that...

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-is-trying-to...1850730637

Nintendo, don't forget just how many gameplay mechanics you flat out stole in the early days.  Balloon Pop is Joust.  Devil World is Pac-Man.  Heck you straight up copied Pong and changed the name to Color TV Game 15.  You open this door, there will be problems Nintendo.

Let's praise the republican party for this after all.  Yes, let's do this.  Take them up on their offer.

For those who don't know, Belgian studio Larian, the developers of the Divinity series, has been working on a D&D game called Baldur's Gate 3 for several years now.  The game is now getting close to completion, it releases next month, so press have gone to see it.  The press reaction is quite positive.

As for me, though, it's complicated.  I'm sure it will do well and be popular, but I've been skeptical about my interest in it all along and still am for various reasons.  On the one hand, I love Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 a lot, but... is this really Baldur's Gate?  It sure doesn't seem like it.  Is this game a real sequel (from a completely different team), or just some random D&D game using the BG name in order to get attention? I've always assumed the latter and see no reason to think otherwise.  Yes, the game is set in the city of Baldur's Gate, but when it comes to computer games the name has certain expectations and I don't see much of a connection.

Also, I know Larian is well thought of, but I haven't played any of their games much.  Also I've rarely loved European RPGs, they often feel even jankier than north american ones... Bethesda excepted of course but I don't like their games that much either. I know Larian may be the best european RPG developer though so the should be good as a standalone title... it has been in early access for like two years now.  They have had a lot of time to get feedback and improve it.  I hope it will be polished beginning to end, we'll see.

As for the gameplay, it looks like the game will feature a very faithful adaptation of the d&d rules, with turn-based combat using fifth edition D&D rules.  The problem is, what made BG's engine so good was the pauseable real-time play.  BG3 isn't pausable real-time, it's fully turn-based.  This makes it more accurate to D&D, but a clearly very inaccurate Baldur's Gate / Infinity Engine game.  That's not infinity engine combat!  That was one of the first things I heard about the game and as soon as I heard that I basically stopped paying any attention to BG3.  The Infinity Engine that was used in BG1 and 2, Icewind Dale 1 and 2, and Planescape Torment, is my favorite RPG game engine.  This game has totally different gameplay.  It looks like a good turnbased RPG, but it's clearly not Baldur's Gate.  I get wanting accurate D&D rules, but ... call it something else.

Also, the first trailer was ... pretty messed up, wasn't it really gross?  it was too much and turned me off from the game. ... Looking it up yeah it was a guy becoming a mindflayer.  Why was that your announcement.  I hated that trailer, it left me expecting the game to not be something I'd be interested in.  The game looks better than that trailer, but it made a bad first impression.  The story of this game has absolutely nothing to do with Baldur's Gates 1 or 2, it is entirely new.  The first two tell a continuing story, this isn't an episodic series.  The characters are also all new.  This is not a sequel to Baldur's Gate, it's an entirely different game using its name.

So overall, I would say that I am interested in Baldur's Gate 3 because it's an apparently accurate D&D game, but not at all interested in it because they are using the name of some of the best RPGs ever; that's a drag against it, really.  I imagine the name will get them more sales though so I get why they'd use it.  Still, the game probably should be named something else.  This game should NOT have been released (or about to be released) as Baldur's Gate 3, it should be a game with some other subtitle.  Without the gameplay, characters, or story of Baldur's Gate, there's literally nothing connecting this game to the games it is not a sequel to but pretends to be a sequel to other than its name.  How obnoxious.