Gah, how does this time thing work?  It goes by so fast... but yes, the N64, the best console ever, is already 25 years old, in Japan at least.  Its American 25th anniversary will be in September.  It launched in Japan with only Mario 64 and a Shogi game.  But hey, with Mario 64 what else do you need...

Yes, really.  The Wario War game is new, and looks pretty good.  As for Advance Wars, it's a remake collection of the first two games, with polygonal graphics now.  As a big fan of the Advance Wars games I'mn really looking forward to this!  Indeed, Advance Wars 1&2: Re-Boot Camp, as it is called, is probably now my most anticipated game of 2021.  It looks great, once you get used to the visual style.

Additionally, Nintendo and Ubisoft announced that Mario & Rabbids is getting a sequel, which is pretty awesome!  It will be a strategy game again, except this time you will have free movement within a movement range, instead of the tile-based movement of the first game.  It looks great and I'm definitely looking forward to it.  It is a 2022 title though.

Nintendo showed off a lot of other stuff too, including of course Metroid Dread, another 2021 game, and a new trailer for the next Zelda game, which is now a 2022 title.  As I expected it looks like Zelda is missing and you will need to play as only Link and rescue her, so yeah, that annoys me greatly as you should expect.  As for the gameplay, well, Breath of the Wild is, in my opinion, the least good Zelda game ever made so I am not excited for the sequel gameplay-wise either.  I would far rather play the CD-i games.   I guess the big news though is that it has a flying component and a lot of stuff in the sky.  There are clear connections from waht they sowed of "BotW 2" (the final title has not been announced yet) to SKyward Sword...

I am still interested in that Skyward Sword Switch port though, which releases this year.  That's looking nice, though I still want to hear more about changes.  I know one kind of warping is locked to an Amiibo, which is pretty obnoxious.

Additionally, NIntendo... announced a home port of Cruis'n Blast!  This is pretty great news, this is the first home port of a Raw Thrills racing game since Cruis'n for the Wii over a decade ago.  Their racers are simple but fun stuff in arcades, but I very rarely play games in actual arcades so I'm really looking forward to finally being able to play one of their games again.  Yes, this game is yet again a simple poit-to-point racer along a railed track, but it'll have a lot of tracks, almost 30 total apparently including not just the oens from the Cruis'n Blast arcade game but also a bunch from another arcade game of theirs, Superbikes 3, so there should be a nice amount of content here.  If someday we can get a home port of H2 Overdrive that would be even more amazing, but I'll take this, it's great to see.  Actual arcade style racing games are in very short supply now and are needed.

It was a very good show for Nintendo overall, even if they did not show their very heavily rumored Switch Pro system... or New Nintendo Switch, or whatever they're going to call it.  I'm sure the remodel will come eventually, and probably would have been announced by now if not for COVID.  But COVID delays sadly are a very real thing, so we'll justh ae to live with the base Switch for a while longer... and for what I use the Switch for that's just fine.  I mean, Mario Maker 2 does not have any issues running on a base Switch. The same goes for games such as Pac-Man 99 and 2d indie games,  I don't really play the kinds of games that push the Switch hard all that often, so I'm not sure if I would get the Switch Pro right away or not.  That would depend on the details, I think.  And when it releases, of course (next year?).

As for the show outside of Nintendo, well, COVID delays are everywhere.  Ubisoft annouced the new Mario & Rabbids title and a new Rainbow Six Siege game with your team fighting aliens, but otherwise mostly showed off new content for their old or previous announced titles.  There's no Assassin's Creed this year, for examplele, only DLC for the last one.  It was a decent Ubisoft show but the stuff I'd be the most interested in mostly didn't show.  I wonder if Wild or Beyond Good and Evil 2 ever actually release... or if they'll ever make another Rayman game.  Here's hoping.

Square-Enix has a conference, but they spent more than half of their time showind off their pretty boring looking Guardians of the Galaxy game... a pretty mediocre looking third person shooter where you have to only play as the most boring character on that team.  Yes, you're the generic white guy on a team of otherwise interesting characters.  Of course.  I mean, I probably wouldn't play the game regardless, I don't care much about Marvel, but still.  Otherwise Square had very little to show.  They showed some oports of old games, a bunch of mobile junk, and such.  Oh, and they closed with... Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, which is an action game remake of Final Fantasy 1 being made by Tecmo's Team Ninja.  It's already quite an internet meme for its ridiculously obsessed main character, who only seems to care about killing Chaos. Apparently the game started out with Nomura thinking o a game called "the story of an angry man" and it shows.  This looks pretty bad by the standards of the kinds of games I care about, I rarely enjoy games that play like this.  All three characters they showed in the party are male so is this yet another Nomura-written game with a mostly or all male party?

Along with Nintendo the other main show was Microsoft's, since Sony once again decided to skip E3. Microsoft had a good show with a lot of games of interest.  Halo is their main game for this year, and I'm no Halo fan, but still they showed the mulitplayer and it looks like well-done Halo multiplayer so that's nice.  They also have Psychonauts 2 which should be great, and announced Forza Horizon 5 for this year.  I'm not a big Horizon fan because they still have the sim-styled controls of the main Forza game and I prefer a much more arcadey racing game, but still the Horizon games are pretty good so I am interested.  MS also announced several 2022 games with CGI trailers, including one from Arkane, a co-op "team of four people vs. vampires" game.  They had more stuff too, but I'm forgetting it offhand.

Otherwise... well, this E3 was weird.  Because of COVID there was no in-person show, so it was pretty much just a "watch trailers and that's it" show, even for the press.  So, the weeks of previews of games that journalists played aren't happening this time.  There are some demos available digitally, but it's not the same at all.  Even for those of us who can';t go to the show, the difference here was really apparent; I do hope the in-person show returns, watching these videos and trailers is nice and is better than what last year had, but I miss the actual gameplay impressions you get from an in-person show. 

Also, just before E3 there was an unrelated event, a video stream hosted by Geoff Keighley of The Game Awards and such.    I've never been much of a fan of his content but I did watch most of that event.  I say most because I skipped part of the middle, it got kind of boring.  The big news was the full unveiling of Elden Ring, the new FromSoft game with very Dark Souls-styled gameplay.  I'm no Souls fan -- I do NOT have the patience to learn how to not die constantly, find some of the mechanics probably too hard to consistently pull off (such as the parry in Sekiro),  and absolutely HATE the absence of an in-game map in those games!  So, I am not excited for it but for fans of those games it's nice that it was shown.

Wait, what?  That's not a sentence I thought I'd ever write!  Metroid Dread is getting a Siwtch remake.  That's maybe the biggest news from Nintendo's game-filled E3 presentation this morning.  It's not the game from that show I'm the most excited for, but sure, it's a cool thing to see I guess.

To be clear, it's most likely that this game is a full new game using that name.  It's made by Mercury Steam, same developer as Metroid Samus Returns.  But yeah... Metroid Dread. For Switch.  Who knew?

PC games enhanced with AI.

Sweet toaster strudel Jesus.. Looks who's number 2 now.

Smilies now scale properly.
There is a new theme (in progress) that is responsive and mobile ready.
Bug fixes, and server patches applied.

Here is a preview of the new look:

Is there a way to make this ish more mobile friendly? Is it simply a matter of adding new CSS rules? If so, I'd be happy to take a stab at it. After all, it's my bread and butter

Alright, time to give a little love to Comix Zone. I never played it until recently, when I found it on the Genesis Classics game I bought for Switch. I had heard of it, but not until maybe a year or so ago, in a Sega nostalgia thread. I looked at a couple youtube videos, and... neato! Your character runs around in a comic book world, jumping from panel to panel. Quite an innovative beat-em-up.

It wasn't until I sat down and actually play it that I was absolutely tackled into the ground with nostalgia. This game has an incredible 90s vibe. For god's sake, how was Sega so able to deftly capture the Cool Dude zeitgeist of that era??? This looks nothing like a cynical marketting team of clueless boomers slapping together a Poochie character.

You play an off-beat comic book artist who's equipped with sick karate moves and wise-cracks. The latter is a given, in a media landscape where every character, from commercials to movies, had inexhaustible AT-TI-TUDE!

The start up logo sets the tone of the game, with a faceless sound guy testing the mic, then singing the perfunctory "Seeegaaaaa" in a way that sounds like he's casually humming it to himself in the shower. We transition to the title screen, with our protagonist in a POW!er pose, resplendent with shades, a denim vest, fingerless gloves, blonde pony tail whipping in the breeze.



On comes the opening riffs of the soundtrack, a god damned bona fide grungy bad ass rock song. The rest of the game's music follows suit. \m/

The game makes no pretense of having a plot that makes sense (that kind of effort and sincerity would violate the Cool 90s Kids rules imo). Our hip protagonist, Sketch Turner, is a comic book artist, just chilling one night with his pet rat and drawing some wicked cool comics.





Then, BAM! Lightning strikes, and a Teddy Roosevelt goblin reaches up and pulls Sketch down into his own illustrated pages!









The rest of the game takes place as a side scroller inside the god damn comic! You traverse comic panels and fight monsters that TR draws on the spot.






The game's aesthetic is quite unique, and the concept is innovative. And I can't tell you why, but I love the hell out of this rat. Little buddy!




GAMEPLAY MECHANICS
The game is a beat-em up style. I found myself mostly mashing buttons. There are different sorta combos you can make, but there's not much rhyme or reason to using them, so I found myself just scrolling through them over and over and hoping for the best.

One thing, though. This game is fucking HARD. Like, Ghosts and Ghouls levels of hard. Fuck. I'd have never stood a chance if the Sega Classics bundle didn't let you make save states anywhere. I can't believe this is what kids had to go through back in the day (even though I was one of them). I can't imagine grueling over this for hours, repeating the same stages over and over, getting everything aligned and perfect. This is fucking tantrum fuel.

The game is quite stingy with energy and power ups. Like I had to get by with literally 1 point of health, on more than one occasion. And that's AFTER using save states and busting my ass to minimize whatever damage I incurred. You know what's really annoying? Just hitting walls takes away energy. As in, you need to bust open a door to get to the next room, but oops! Hitting it depletes your fucking life, little by little! In a game where EVERY GOD DAMN TINY SLICE OF ENERGY COUNTS! What a slap in the ass!

Oh well. Frustrations aside, I still had a mother fucking blast with this game. And its soundtrack has been added to my youtube favorites. Go play it, if you find the opportunity.

So, with Mario 35 unfortunately shut down, Nintendo needed something to keep interest up on Switch Online.

And this is what they came up with -- a new battle royale game based on another popular old game, this time Namco's Pac-Man.  This game is really quite fantastic, with extremely addictive pick up and play mechanics and some really cool twists that make it a frenetic and challenging title indeed.  I have not won yet but keep playing anyway, this is awesome stuff!  I've probably already played more of this than I ever did the disappointing Mario 35; sure it's awful that they shut it down, but I never did like it all that much ultimately, and only ended up playing 3 1/2 hours of Super Mario 35.  This one has no deadline date and is, I think, a much better game.  I mean, both games are great but if you're talking about the '80s games I would take Super Mario Bros. over Pac-Man, but for Battle Royale games it's very much the other way around.

So yeah, play this now!  This is a fantasitc Switch exclusive that's a very good reason to subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, as Tetris 99 also is.