https://www.polygon.com/24050311/microso...ard-layoff

Yep...  I knew it was coming.  I literally predicted that a giant acquisition was going to lead to massive layoffs, and so it has happened.  These mergers are steadily monopolizing the whole industry, and this is the result, inexorably, inevitably.

That weird glitch pokemon just got official artwork.


You know what that means, new movie incoming!  Pokemon: The legend of item duping

Well, in a couple months the Pokemon Bank's online component is going to die, killing off the ability to trade 'mons between every one of the 3DS pokemon games (including virtual console emulations of the gen 1 and 2 games).  I said back then I hated that Nintendo went and made the bank program require an online component instead of having a local save storage option, and here we are.  Here's hoping some hackers put together a homebrew app to replicate Bank's features, but offline.

But, I have a different bit of good news.  It seems there's now a way to alter Gameboy games to use nonvolatile chips so they no longer require a save backup battery.  In most cases, that's not a mod I'm too pressured to implement, but this would be especially useful for Gold/Silver/Crystal, which use the battery for both save storage and time keeping, draining it far faster.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/non-volatil-...ld.346288/

Note that because of that duel usage, the mod is more complicated on those games, requiring a few extra components to keep the battery you'll still need from frying the new chip.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/covers...-series-xs

One of the biggest annoyances of the XBox Series design is the use of a proprietary connector for adding NVME speed storage to the system.  It's a problem MS had with the XBox 360, again with the XBox One (where technically you CAN upgrade the drive, but only to specific sizes that were originally officially supported) and again now.  As the only company that pulls this nonsense, it can be annoying.

Fortunately, a company has put together a functional adapter to allow very select m.2 drives to function.  Specifically, the m.2 NVME speed drives using firmware already preapproved by the XBox Series' OS.  This appears to work and work well, but the fact it works at all means there's nothing special about MS's connector protocol.  It's literally just a lockout tool.  In any case, it'll be important to have converters like this in the long run when external support and production of these custom drives stops.

Here's a gift for you:

https://archive.org/details/SteamboatWillie

Download it now and forever, and create new media using these versions of the characters, or unique new interpretations of these versions of the characters.  It's free.

What I Have Been Playing This Year
 
I've been sick this week, and while I'm getting better I'm not quite fully recovered yet so this will be shorter than it otherwise probably would be. This year, I bought as many games as ever, but did I play them? No, I often didn't. I've spent far too much time this year just watching Youtube and such and not playing anything.
 
And when I do play games, it's mostly the same things. For example, my most played game this year is, surprise surprise, Super Mario Maker 2. According to my Switch I've played something closing in on 300 hours of that game this year. That number may be a bit high but it should be close. Second place on my list, for playtime, according to the 'what did you play this year?' pages that Sony, MS, Nintendo, and Steam put up, is Diablo IV. It says that I played 200 hours of that game on Xbox, which definitely seems too high; I know I've left my Xbox on more than a few times while actually watching Youtube, that's going to add to the time. However, I certainly did play a lot of Diablo IV. I wrote that two-part review for a reason, I finished the game and kept playing it some after that.
 
After those two, though, there's a big dropoff from second to third; my next couple of most played games are in in 50-something-hour range, namely F-Zero 99 for Switch next and then Dead or Alive 6 for Xbox. The first of those games I love, the second ... not so much, I just play it sometimes anyway.
 
The other games that would be in this category if they were on those listing sites are Nintendo 3DS games -- I played many hours of 3DS puzzle games. Specifically, digital ones. Most nights I play a few minutes of 3DS puzzle games before bed. I've finished a lot of the 3DS Picross games now, I only have a few left. Other digital 3DS puzzle games I played a lot of include Wordherd, Block-a-Pix Color, Link-a-Pix Color, Sudoku Party, and 505 Tangram for DSiWare on 3DS. I've also played a bit of Angry Birds Trilogy on 3DS cart. I've finished all the puzzles in Link-A-Pix Color and Wordherd, and am close to finishing Block-a-Pix Color. I've come to love puzzle games in a way that I didn't when I was younger, and the 3DS is the best portable format ever for them thanks to the stylus. It'll be pretty sad once I run out... the 3DS is still amazing and has yet again been one of my most-used devices this year.
 
What PS4 games did I play this year? Well, my Sony year in reviewsite said that I played 12 hours total of PS4 games this year, so the answer is unsurprising, not many. The most played of the bunch is the Star Ocean: 2nd Story Remaster.
 
As for retro games, I haven't been playing them as much as I should, but the one system that I have been returning to is one that's on a lot of people my age or older's thoughts these days, the NES. I've returned to it after many years of mostly ignoring the system for probably the same reasons as others. I mean, even though I didn't own a NES as a kid, I played it a lot, it basically was console gaming in my childhood. How well does it hold up? I know that there are some things about the NES that I don't like very much, most notably overly inscrutably confusing and "just wander around and figure it out" game design. However, there are also a lot of games that are still good. I turn my NES on and play something or other on it on a regular basis. I got a Famicom Disk System for my NES last year and a while ago finally got an accessory to allow for expansion audio to work without needing the internal mod, so I try out FDS games sometimes as well. All I don't have is a way to play Famicom 3D System games, I'll probably need to give up on the dream of an adapter to make those glasses work on a regular NES, since to use them on a NES you would need to make a homebrew cable that connects to certain pins on the bottom port, and just buy a Famicom at some point. Oh well.
 
With that said, here are my top lists for the year.
 
The Best New 2023 Releases
--
1. F-Zero 99 (Switch)
2. Akka Arrh (played on XSX)
3. Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)
4. Diablo IV (played on XSX)
5. Caverns of Mars Recharged (played on XSX)
 
My Favorite Older Games that I First Played in 2023
This won't be the interesting list that it often has been in the past; while I bought a lot of retro games this year, again, I never actually got around to trying most of them. So... uh, I guess this handful of 3DS eshop games will have to do, and maybe a couple of other games.
505 Tangram (DSiWare)
Art Style: DIGIDRIVE (DSiWare)
Gotta Protectors (3D eshop)
Mighty Flip Champs! and Mighty Milky Way (DSiWare)
Bookworm (Nintendo DS version)
 
The Best Remasters of the Year
There were some fantastic remasters this year.  These are the best among them.

1. Metroid Prime Remastered (Nintendo Switch)
   
2. Towers II: Enhanced Stargazer Edition (Atari Jaguar remaster of an Atari Jaguar game)
   
3. Star Ocean: The Second Story R (played on PS4)
   
4. Quake II [Remastered] (played on XSX)
   

My friend recommended this to me over the summer and I decided to try it out. I'm loving it so far. Controls are surprisingly smooth in a way that isn't always the case for third person shooters. Aside from your standard guns (single-shot pistol, burse-fire pistol, shotgun, etc), you have a very nice combat mechanic where you can telekinetically pick up nearby objects and chuck them at enemies.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman who has decided to enter the fictional three-letter agency called FBC (Federal Bureau of Control), to search for her brother. The two of you were separated as children during a paranormal event involving a slide at a playground.

Yes, it's a bit silly, as is the plot point that once you enter the building, you swiftly become the new director of the FBC. I guess internal promotions aren't practiced there. Details are a bit fuzzy (I began the game a few weeks ago), but to my recollection, Jesse is bestowed her new leadership role by the old director, who exists somewhere as a ghost nearby his corpse.

He marvels at Jesse's ability to wield his service pistol, which I guess indicates her own superpowers, which I believe were granted to her by the aforementioned paranormal event. There's some kind of psychic presence that she continually talks to, which is also directly linked to the same childhood experience.

So now, as director, Jesse's first, well, directive, is to eliminate an evil spiritual presence that has taken hold of the entire building. Which is enormous, by the way. More on that later. This presence is called the Hiss, and multitudes of workers in lab coats are possessed, hovering ten feet in the air, chanting to themselves. Some are innocuous, just chilling out and meditating with their mantra I guess, but others have gone full satanic and glow crimson red and shoot at you with demon weapons.

Jesse herself is basically a female Keanu Reeves, very laconic, wooden, matter-of-fact. She might say a line or two that I guess is supposed to be snarky, but just sounds like an autistic person trying to imitate a normie. Which is all fine, well, and good - I'm not casting shade at neurodivergent peeps. Perhaps it will be important to her character later on.

Okay, enough about the story and characters, which like I said, are a little hokey, but are also kind of fun. The gameplay is fantastic. Environments are destructible, and littered with items that you can pick up with the wave of your hand and hurl at enemies. It's very satisfying to switch between shooting them up, and as your ammo recharges, picking up a nearby bench and hurling it at them. If no item is nearby, Jesse's telekinesis will yank out chunks of concrete from the walls and floors.

You get other powers too, like dodging (basically just throwing your body ten feet in any given direction) and levitating. I can't stress enough how natural it feels to maneuver, which is a breath of fresh air, because some of the earlier-gen games I was revisiting (Perfect Dark and Metroid Prime) were lacking in this regard. (But to be fair, it's hard to pull off smooth acrobatics in the first person.) Even aiming feels easier than what I've been grappling with recently.

The game is challenging, but not too vexing. Which means it's probably too easy for your more hardcore flavor of gamers. But I'm okay with it, it's a damn nice ride.

The game is not linear. In fact, it's kind of a mini-open-world. The FBC's facility is *enormous*, with plenty of side-quests along the way. Side-quests grant you different kinds of points that you can cash in for new abilities - think Horizon Zero Dawn or in the Mouth Shadow of Mordor.

The game fosters an eerie atmosphere, but sometimes it tries too hard to be creepy and it falls flat. For instance, there are instructional videos with puppets that you can find at various points. Think the Candle Cove creepypasta: a low quality kids show with distorted sound effects that borders on nightmarish. It's kind of neat but, uh, why would the bureau be creating puppet shows for their adult employees? Maybe there's some paranormal explanation that I haven't found yet. Perhaps it's in one of the hundred or so documents of lore that are littered about the facility, which is a fun extra, but I got tired of reading them. I was never one for SCPs, but these are be like catnip for SCP lovers... well, the whole game is, really.

I believe this has been out a few years already, so if you haven't played it yet, I recommend it.

While a lot of my retro setup has gone little-used for some time, the NES is a system I've been using fairly regularly.  It's the system I have the most nostalgia for as a kid, though since I didn't own one myself my time with the games was somewhat limited.  I've owned a NES since 2007, but as the 'games I have finished' thread shows, I've only finished a relative few of those games.

Well, I decided yesterday to cross off the biggest missing title on that list.  Yes, I beat the original Super Mario Bros. today for what I'm pretty sure is the first time.  I finished the GBC version, SMBDX, back when that game released, but the fact that you have to restart the world you're currently on in the NES game had always caused me to give up and stop trying.  After all, I've beaten a version of the game before and I've beaten every level on the NES version except for 8-4, that's good enough, right?

But I decided, like, seriously, you should beat Mario 1.  I put the Mario 1 / Duck Hunt cart into my NES and started playing.  By the way, the NES dogbone controller is fantastic, it's the best NES controller for sure.  I quickly got to world 8, since I now know where the warp in world 4-2 is thanks to watching lots of Mario content on the internet, and... proceeded to struggle like usual.  The levels in world 8 are quite difficult!  They're long and have few powerups.  8-1 and 8-4 have no super mushrooms at all, so if you want to have an easy time at Bowser you'd better get through 8-4 without dying after playing through 8-3 and getting both of its powerups.   That's pretty tricky.  The challenge of these stages is fun, they are challenging in ways that frustrate but keep you coming back until you do better, but I do think that 8-1 really should have had a powerup in it.

Before that though, in my first run I blocked off the 4-2 warp, so I kept going... and got through the level 4-4 maze first try.  I died in world 5-1 and restarted (in order to take the 4-2 warp), but I guess I have that route memorized for some reason, I would not have guessed that since I don't think I remember any of the OTHER mazes... I certainly don't remember the 8-4 maze's solution.  Honestly, I had to go look it up.  The solution is perhaps disappointingly simple -- just take each first pipe after the lava pit -- but I'd forgotten it.  Once you know where to go this level's actually only a moderate challenge at most, so long as you haven't died at all and have that powerup from the previous level; otherwise it's very hard thanks to the Hammer Bros. and Bowser at the end's endless streams of thrown hammers. 

It took a little while, but today I eventually got it and beat Mario 1.  It feels pretty great!  I know it unlocks the second quest, but I'd honestly completely forgotten that it unlocks a level select after you beat it, how silly.  Why couldn't they have put that in as you go, why the "hold A when you press Start to start from the last world you reached" continue code?  Some elements of classic game design don't make much sense.

So, Super Mario 1 is a truly fantastic game.  It's the best game of the 1980s and it's still exceptionally great today.  But... those physics!  Gah, if there's one thing about this game that is hard to go back to as someone who has played many many hours of newer Mario games it's the physics of SMB1.  The way you run to build up speed, the sudden nature of your speed increases, how easy missing a jump can be if your speed at launch was just barely off, how dramatically different the game feels from the more refined NSMB style of physics all modern Mario games use... it's a big learning curve to get used to.  To anyone used to newer Mario games there is a sizable learning curve to this title, I won't deny that I got frustrated more than a few times because of this games' weird physics.  Once you get used to it it feels alright, but... yeah, I think I like new physics better. 

However, it is true that the physics increase the sense of danger in SMB1.  Every jump in this game is hazardous in a way that would never happen with the more precise controls of the newer games.  Even enemies are a significant threat, as in maybe the hardest thing to get used to in this game when compared to most any newer Mario games, you get only a VERY VERY small bounce off of enemies after jumping on a foe in SMB1.  Indeed, often I think that in this game it makes more sense to avoid enemies than to attack them!  Koopa Paratroopas particularly are dangerous, you get such a small bounce off of them after the first hit to knock their wings off that there's a high likelihood that you will die upon landing as they land just behind you and hit you.  The ending part of this game is dangerous and feels threatening in a way that the more friendly, refined newer games in the series have to put much harder-appearing level designs in to come close to.

That's not to say that I like the physics here or the lack of bounce off of enemies, though; honestly, I like the newer style more.  This game is frustrating and punishing, and it sometimes doesn't feel fair (though it is) due to how odd the physics rules are in SMB1.  But once I'd played this enough to start unlearning at least a bit of that Mario Maker / Mario Wonder / etc. physics and control style and having finished it for the first time, I can say that the original Super Mario Bros. is indeed still one of the greatest things this industry has ever produced.  Level 1-1 is gaming's greatest stage ever, and the rest of the game is all-time-great fantastic as well, with a very well done difficulty curve from beginning to end.

That was a terrible and insulting pun to all involved.  Sorry about that.

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2023/12/fr...-shut-down

Embracer Group, a company with a name that sounds as ominous as "Umbrella Corp", bought and have now shuttered Free Radical.  Maybe they couldn't quite catch the gaming world on fire the way Goldeneye and Perfect Dark did, but Time Splitters 2 is still a good game in it's own right and the series as a whole was pretty entertaining for what it was.  Look, they haven't pumped out much of anything, but it's still a shame to see them close down like this, with all their IP owned by some giant megacorp instead of being able to hold onto it themselves or even make it public domain.  Seriously what's Embracer going to do with it?  Their name means "holding on" after all, they aren't ever going to use the IP but they will NEVER give it up either, JUST in case there's some online brief burst of nostalgic popularity they think they can cash in on at some point down the line.