Thursdays here at the moment are the domain of Edit the Frog, so we put off our overview of the Nintendo Direct until today.
While most sites have already regurgitated the news into your waiting beaks, this time we’re recounting the release dates chronologically, so you’ll know what order to expect everything. Specific games of possible interest to a hazy mirage that I imagine to be our readers are in bold:
FEBRUARY 8th: Nintendo Switch Online Gameboy & GBA Support, Fire Emblem Engage Expansion Pass, Metroid Prime Remastered 15th: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Expansion Pass DLC volume 3 22nd: Metroid Prime Remastered on cartridge 24th: Octopath Traveler II, Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe
MARCH 6th: Dead Cells Return to Castlevania DLC 17th: Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon 20th: Spring begins. Releases for Spring: Splatoon 3 Expansion Pass, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC Wave 4,
MAY 12th: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
JUNE Some time in June: Harmony: Fall of Reverie 1st: Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection 2nd: We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie(what is it with the word “reverie” this month?) 21st: Summer begins. Releases for Summer: New Samba de Amigo, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster
JULY 21st: Pikmin 4 28th: Disney Illusion Island
AUGUST 29th: Sea of Stars
Some time in 2023: Fashion Dreamer, Decapolice, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
G4 TV is back, blobbies! Oh yeah let the good times–wait, it’s going away again. Mollie Taylor at PC Gamer has the deets. I’m surprised someone doesn’t just use the name and make a really low-rent Youtube channel by that name with gaming content. Why does it have to be an actual streaming thingy, just host a bunch of videos somewhere. Free yourselves from the bonds of linear time! Embrace random access! !drebnar back looked never I’ve and ,have I
Uh-oh! Another N64 game has been decompiled to source code! As NintendoLive’s Ollie Reynolds tells us, this time it’s Perfect Dark. FPSes are an interesting case for decompilation. Platformer enthusiasts tend to embrace quirks, but most FPS players think of the software more as a vessel for the game than intrinsically arising from it, so the improvements to come from being able to make a native x64 version of Perfect Dark should be pretty substantial, especially with a whole subculture out there hammering away at the code.
There are tons of interesting indie games coming out every month. Josh Bycer tells us all about many of them pretty regularly in these very pages! Usually we leave the indie stuff to him because of the sheer volume and the difficulty of picking out particular items on which to focus, but here is one! We’re relaxing our rules on single links to a site each post (that dates from when we were somehow doing two or even three of them a week, oh my aching drebnar) to link to Jonathan Bolding’s review of open-world indie RPG Gedonia in PC Gamer. It’s a big game made almost by a single person, and it’s only $15!
It’s tech, not explicitly gaming, but it’s networking which these days is becoming inextricable from it, and I make the rules anyway so here goes! Jon Broadkin at Ars Technica tells us the story of Los Altos Hills Community Fiber, a co-op delivering high-speed internet to residents of their town, which oddly doesn’t have complete access. One resident had never been wired up by Comcast, despite the town being right in Silicon Valley, and they wanted him to pay $300 a foot to run cable to his house, which over 167 feet came up to over $200,000! Nuts to that in specific, and to Comcast in general! In fact all huge internet conglomerates are evil. Power and bandwidth to the blobble! The resident hooked up with LAHCF and together they helped spread network connectivity to other residents. It’s still pretty pricey, but at least that money isn’t lining the pockets of horrible companies, and as more residents join up those fees should drop. It’s inspiring, drebnar!
Zoey Handley at Destructoid sings the praises of HAL Laboratory’s “New Ghostbusters II” game for the Famicom/NES, which never made it to the US. In the process they diss NES Ghostbusters, which isn’t really fair, considering it’s a NES port of an ingenious home computer game made in 1984, and was designed by David “Pitfall” Crane himself. NES Ghostbusters does suffer a lot in the conversion though, like very many NES ports of classic computer games do–NES M.U.L.E. is a travesty. Anyway, the point of the article is that HAL’s New Ghostbusters II is a fine game, much better than Imagineering’s take on the property, and so it is.
Ash Parish at The Verge brings us another episode of The Adventures of Frank Cifaldi! He’s raising money to buy a couple of unique prototypes of unreleased NES games! One works with the Power Glove, and was produced by Rare! There is an alternate universe out there where that hit the market, and let me tell you it’s a weird universe indeed. Pigs there have wings, and can fly right through the air!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Pretty light on mill-grist today. With all the bad non-gaming news floating around I can’t say that I mind too much. By the way, I almost titled this post “Nude Cuphead NFTs!” in our usual silly style, but realized that it could have been taken For Real.
Kenneth Shephard at Fanbyte lets us know upcoming horny witch simulator Bayonetta 3 will have a selectable option to reduce nudity. You know, in case you’re playing in public. I’m told that’s something of concern for your species. I wouldn’t know: my kind reproduces by asexual fission! We do have a strong cultural taboo against depicting things being split in two, though. Cooking shows can only be shown after 10 PM.
Over at Kotaku, Ethan Gatch says Gamestop is planning NFT releases while simultaneously laying off more workers. It’s pretty obvious now that NFTs are pretty much a bastion for scoundrels. They appear to be leaning in to their status as a meme stock, perhaps seeing it as their only chance at relevance, even if it’s impossible for that to work in anything approaching the long term. Does it ever seem to you that, lately, our world’s most reliable economic resource are easily swayed people without critical thinking skills?