I got Pokemon Legends Z-A, gonna give it a go. I haven’t kept up with Pokemon in 8 years and while I still have a lot of strong opinions and preferences about the series as someone who was super into it from age 5 to age 19, I’m willing to give this a chance in good faith

I love it when games creatively flip an asset into a new thing. Just take a wiggler segment, paint it blue and give it a bill, boom, new enemy. Efficiency like this is valuable and rarely comes across as cheap

Donkey Kong Bananza has received such a positive reception from the core fans partially because it synthesizes ideas together rather than reinvent the wheel. They take all these strands of Donkey Kong DNA and tie them together in logical ways that feel correct

Yooka-Replaylee scrubbing a lot of the Tooie-esque elements from the game rather than improve them is disappointing to me. It wasn’t even sanding the edges, they just sliced them right off. No move progression, no world expansion, just bin them in service of streamlining

Emerald Rush in Donkey Kong Bananza turns the game from a buffet of content into a goddamn *Brazilian Steakhouse* of content. You can play that shit forever and enjoy the thrill of powering up from zero and collecting all of the stuff again and again and again. Completionist speedrunner heaven

I bought Yooka-Replaylee on Switch 2 and am pretty disappointed by how wonky it runs and how buggy it is. Probably my fault for not just waiting to see how the port performs but man. Can’t even necessarily blame Playtonic because they got Switch 2 dev kits really late

The original Pokemon games took over half a decade to make and Game Freak nearly went under multiple times in that period. Nintendo could have pulled out at any point yet they helped any way they could on the project including giving GF unrelated contract work to bring it revenue

They should release a NES Zapper/ Super Scope recreation next so we can get those games on NSO. Some of those Nintendo made light gun games are surprisingly excellent and have not seen substantial rereleases outside of like, Duck Hunt

Mario & Wario!! This game has always fascinated me as a Nintendo-published Game Freak title pre-Pokemon with an interesting gameplay premise. Gunpei Yokoi also apparently contributed ideas and gave Game Freak the project to help them stay afloat while creating the first Pokemon games.

Gooey is my favorite Kirby character because he’s silly and inexplicable in a way even Kirby isn’t. Gooey has no brain cells and is made from the same material as the villainous Dark Matter. There is a great battle within his empty head between good and evil at all times

There’s a quote from Miyamoto I always found very interesting where he says a good idea is something that can solve multiple problems at once. I see those clever “killing many birds with one stone” ideas everywhere now that I look at Nintendo’s games. ESPECIALLY in Donkey Kong Bananza

I want a new Wario Land that is produced or directed by Takehiko Hosokawa, who directed most of the series and has been working on mostly 2D Metroid for the past 25 years. I would accept any dev team making it under his direction.

Sometimes, I feel like I have a very very different perspective on the 2D Metroid series than a lot of people because I actually like the direction it went in over the past 25 years and feel like it is exactly in-line with Nintendo R&D1’s Whole Deal which was ease, simplicity and tools that are toys

I’m curious how Pokemon Legends Z-A is going to do review-wise. I’ve been kinda waiting on the sidelines to see if Game Freak can make a new Pokemon game to draw me in after falling off the series incredibly hard during the Switch generation.

Something that I feel is very important is that the villain is in some way interconnected with the games themes and characters so that when they are not present, their presence is still felt. That makes them resonate with me stronger than just “hi, here I am, I am the Final Boss”

Xbox, turn off.

If you have never done so, I would recommend going on MobyGames and looking at the credits of your favorite games and see what else those devs have worked on. For example, there are still three people that worked on Wario Land 3 that work at Nintendo and they are involved in the recent 2D Metroids

Finished Emio - The Smiling Man. As a sequel 30 years after the last installment of Famicom Detective Club, it could have just been made to fulfill demand. But Sakamoto clearly had some very important messages he wanted to deliver to the world and touch upon things Nintendo generally avoids.

Happy Pacman World 2 Re-Pac release day!! To celebrate, I'm giving away a free copy of the game!! Just like and repost to enter! #BandaiNamcoCreator

Gonna go for one no one really talks about anymore: Wario Land: Shake It! Good-Feel is a great developer but their strengths were a poor fit for the Wario Land series. They like making very breezy and artistically tasteful games which works great for something like Kirby but not so much for Wario.

It’s one thing seeing corporate owned media like IGN continue to cover Microsoft like nothing happened, but when independent outlets continue to choose to do so it just sucks. Sends the message that no matter what awful things they do, we gotta cover them as “business as usual”

The Isle ‘O Hags from Banjo-Tooie. It’s remarkable how well the game weaves its eight individual worlds together into a cohesive whole. I’ve often described Tooie’s tone as “dark turn-of-the century English fantasy novel” and the hub in all its bleakness really conveys that grim whimsy (grimsy?)

Hmm mayhaps soon I will have new music to share on here. I mostly talk about games on here but I have been producing hip-hop beats for over a decade and have decided I should probably be more public with it. Creativity is the greatest gift I’ve got

Bananza having NPCs with collectibles embedded in them forcing you to attack them could be a Banjo-Tooie reference now that I think about it. Mildred the Ice Cube was holding a Jinjo hostage and you had to break her (which triggers a horrible scream) to free him. What a callback

I hope Yoshio Sakamoto keeps making games until he’s 100 years old. It’s remarkable to consider how hands-on he still is with the games he produces, compared to some of his peers like Miyamoto who are in a more “big picture” management role.

I think it’s fascinating just how long Nintendo has been stuck on this image of Donkey Kong punching the shit out of things, ever since Jungle Beat in 2004. When they came upon the idea of voxel destruction for Bananza, they were finally able to incorporate it into the gameplay in a more major role

Finding a lost Virtual Boy game is such a big event considering how few games were in development for it when the plug was pulled. The fact that this EVEN EXISTS is insane to me, I highly doubt the first Virtual League Baseball sold well enough to justify making a sequel.

I normally don’t post about music on here but I just gotta say that “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk is just an absolutely immaculate song. Every note is played with such clear purpose and the groove is incredible. I miss those robots man, they had so much soul.

This is great reporting. Nintendo has a reputation for being good to work for but there are many stories of them (particularly NoA) being shitty to contractors. I recall in NoA there was like a damn Caste system where contractors were treated inferior to full-time employees. Wretched behavior.

It must feel weird sometimes to be a longtime Fire Emblem fan in the west. FE Awakening sold well enough to save the series from the bin, but it brought so many new people in and kind of changed the focus of the series a bit.

Currently playing through the new Famicom Detective Club and it’s surreal to see a Nintendo game really engage with the horrors of the modern world rather than serve as pure escapism. So far I’d say a major theme is the dangers that youth are exposed to and are not protected from.

I didn’t realize the extent to which all this anger at Nintendo was something we perform for others on social media until I saw Virtual Boy discourse in 2025. Most Nintendo fans have no interest in these games but they have to act all Aggrieved that they would need an accessory for it

The thing I’m really scared about in regards to Rare is what happens when Sea of Thieves starts to decline and is no longer such a big money maker. Everwild was supposed to be the next big thing, presumably another live service thing for everyone on SoT to transition to. Now what happens?

Psychic prediction: the new Yoshi game will be received lukewarmly until it is revealed that Arzest made it then it becomes “unplayable crap”. I have Never seen a game dev get just aggressively shat on for making perfectly average to even occasionally decent games.

People’s brains are so fried from anger towards Nintendo that they are getting performatively angry about *checks notes “Being forced to play Virtual Boy games in 3D”

Metroid Prime 4 is interesting because it shows you how differently Kensuke Tanabe and Retro Studios view the Metroid series compared to Yoshio Sakamoto and MercurySteam. There is a certain bombast and flavor there you don’t get from 2D Metroid

Donkey Kong Bananza doing DLC is overkill considering how damn big the game already is but I am all here for it. I will eat bananas until I explode

DE VIRTUAL BOY ULTIMATE CLASSIC SYSTEM

VIRTIAL BOY

This is an absolutely inspired way to do sound effects tied in with a game’s music. Each of the game’s 110 songs in the jukebox carry chord/ key information and the various Bananza transformation sound effects just play the correct notes in different patterns.

Just had a genius idea: Jamjars Gimmick account that posts a bunch of made up tutorial drill songs for increasingly dangerous and inhumane weapons

This is such a tragic end to this story. Microsoft was unwilling to sell the Perfect Dark IP, which makes sense but is also infuriating in its own way. They value the IP on paper but are willing to gut its development team and cancel it. Just putting it right back in their Dragon Horde of IP

fucked up game

He cooks! He cleans! Enter Chibi-Robo, a tiny robot programmed to spread happiness! Plug into adventure in Chibi-Robo!, available to play now with Nintendo GameCube – Nintendo Classics on #NintendoSwitch2 for #NintendoSwitchOnline + Expansion Pack members!

The Chibi-Robo has DROPPED

thinking about gooey with a funny hat

Really hyped for Kirby Air Riders, everything they showed looks great. As a Gooey enjoyer, I am also very pleased he has continued to be a playable character in Kirby spin-offs after Star Allies. All the characters can use copy abilities too!! Really fun feature, they even get the hats!

Also: Mischief Makers was published by Nintendo in the west, there’s no way in hell they have not looked into adding it. It sucks in general that Treasure owns barely any of its own IP/ games but in this case, the legal red tape is getting in the way of something that should be really simple

I wonder what’s the hold up with getting Mischief Makers onto N64 Nintendo Classics. It’s a Treasure game and Nintendo has been aggressive about getting as many of them as they can for these services. Not like the rights holder Square-Enix could do anything with it on their own

I’ve been really enjoying the new CRT filter for N64 games on Nintendo Classics. Raw N64 emulation at this resolution just looks a bit too clean, the filter brings it closer to how the games were meant to appear. Here’s a screenshot of Banjo-Tooie, which has very nice textures for an N64 title