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Yeah, dude seems like good people. Him and Kim are generally positive about gaming and if they don't like something they play, they just say their piece and move on. I like that he doesn't really follow the trends and just tends to speak about what he wants and likes. His videos started off as a passion project and that's what they continue to be. It's something I respect about him. I really love the videos that he does when Rob shows up. The way they talk about their youth and gaming together is really heartwarming. I'm lucky enough to also have a mate like that and it's always great to talk about past times that involved gaming nights/sessions. Gaming was a huge part of our lives as kids and that remains true for both of us at the old ages of 41 and 38.

Wasn't really sure where to put this, but considering his videos have been dropped in here a few times, thought I'd share Happy Console Gamer's video on turning 50 and his thoughts on still gaming at that age: I think it's awesome. I really do think insight and the sharing of experiences is so valuable for the growth and continuation of any medium (I mean, it also just is in general), so while it's sad that he highlights that he knows a lot of people who dropped gaming before reaching a certain age (for a number of reasons), I think it's great that he's still going strong experiencing his passion. I still remember when I started checking out HCG probably a little while before I started posting here on N-E and his excitement for games like Shenmue (well, his and Michael Huber's ) really just gripped me. Ultimately that passing on of experiences is invaluable because I feel it really helps form a suitable lens for people my age and younger to go check out older games for the first time, which in its own way, I'd argue, is just as important for video game preservation as the release, documentation and availability of those older games. This is not even to mention the potential cognitive benefits I can imagine a healthy relationship with gaming could bring. Anyways, this all just reminds me I'll be keeping the idea of Final Fantasy XIV private servers in my back pocket until I make it to the retirement home

Destined for Rebirth trailer (banger of a trailer for just 1 minute): That lil One Winged Angel tease at the start before transitioning into the battle theme Funnily enough, the video description mentions it's Most Anticipated win at the TGAs last month I'm sure Keighley's really feeling himself out there right now, wherever he is Also, new Yuffie key art: And one for Cait Sith, too: EDIT: my goodness, that Junon shot looks INSANE!

Scrap all of this and just Play Super Mario Galaxy 2. Additionally, I finally got around to watching the Godfather trilogy last year. Man, what an overrated set of movies. I'm with Peter Griffin, I would also rather watch the Money Pit.

To be fair, Phantasy Star (which is on his list) is a very short JRPG as well. Takes around 15-20 hours to complete. Probably less if you have the Switch version which allows for increased exp and money. In other news, I earned my first platinum of the year (Assassin's Creed Mirage was started last year and God of War Ragnarok PS5 version was auto popped) playing this game. I've been interested in this game ever since a seen a trailer for it a couple of years ago. It was on sale in December and decided to finally snap it up. The game is a Metroidvania that also mixes RPG elements into it, adds a touch of DK64, as well as a bit of Dark Souls. Many who have played it regard it very highly and after playing through myself it I can see why. The Metroidvania part of the game comes from you needing to explore a large map. You need to work your way to the top of the tower but doing so isn't an easy task. The map will show you if there are any secrets in the room you are in and you can buy certain upgrades to help out with your exploration. Late on in the game you can even buy a map that shows you any room that you may have missed. This is great if trying to go for 100% and means that you don't have to wander around aimlessly to find anything you have missed. The Dark souls part comes from the fact that when you die you will end up back at the very start of the tower. If you are thorough with you exploring you can unlock shortcuts that make it easier to get back to where you died pretty quickly. There is also an elevator just before each boss fight so that you can be transported from the very start of the tower to any of these elevators you unlock. Dying also provides you with an opportunity to spend any souls/currency that you collect. Killing enemies will drop souls and you can then funnel these into things like HP, attack, defence or special abilities. This makes your next run through the tower a little easier and allows you to progress a little further, just like Dark Souls. This means I was always on the lookout for enemy placements that allowed for some grinding. At the start of the game you will only be allowed to upgrade your characters when you die but eventually statues can be purchased so that you can do this at various points on the map. The DK64 side of things comes from the way characters are used. You start off with 3 to use and each of them have their own unique abilities. In order to work your way around the map you will need to switch characters on a regular basis. This means you will need to go and find a campfire, which is also used as a save point, and switch your characters there, just like a DK barrel. It can be a little bit of a pain at the start of the game but about a quarter of the way through you can find an item that allows you to switch characters whenever you want with a simple press of a button. The main game takes around 15 hours to get through and then another 5 or so to mop up. Complete the main game and you then unlock a few more modes. Two of them have you play through the game again but with 2 different characters. This may seem dauting at first but because of the abilities they have you can finish each of their runs in an hour or so. The other mode that unlocks is the Boss Rush mode. This pits you against the bosses you fought in the main game but with very limited abilities and currency, as well as giving you random drops to work with. It's a bit like a roguelike mode and it was quite fun and challenging. Even if games was just the main story I would recommend picking it up but with these other modes it becomes a must have indie game. It starts off very challenging and unforgiving but as you learn the layout of the map, start getting your upgrades and become familiar with each of the characters abilities, you will start to make a lot of progress and see how far you've come since you started. Fantastic game.

Nintendo eShop new releases (week 02) The second week of releases. A selection of new titles are now available on the Nintendo Switch eShop. Check the article for the full roundup. - - - - - Thanks to @Josh64 for the recently posted articles, which include... New Spirits Arrive Tomorrow in Super Smash Bros Ultimate Another Code: Recollection ‘Traces of Memories Past’ Lil' Guardsman Releases January 23 Cult of the Lamb Update Arrives January 16 Pokémon TV to Discontinue in March 2024 New Levels and Modes Revealed for Mario vs. Donkey Kong 8-Colors Star Guardians + Out Now Golden Sun Duology Arrive on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack See you next week!

If GAME are no longer accepting trade-ins of used games, this will likely mean that people will just trade their games into places like CEX or their local retro gaming shop, if they have one in their area, so the second-hand gaming market will still continue, it'll just be more "underground" in a sense... ***Pssssst! hey buddy, wanna buy some USED games?*** Definitely still keep trading your games in though if you do, show that there's still a demand for used games, which there definitely is. I've been buying a fair few used games over the past few months, mainly by offering a rate which is somewhere inbetween reasonable, and the general resale price so that a profit can still be made, while also making sure that I offer more than CEX... which isn't difficult in some cases when they only offer pennies for some titles, but for example, if a game will sell for around £5 then... I'll generally offer £2 if I'm confident that I can sell it again, maybe less on titles I'm unsure of, or shovelware, as they are more of a risk. I'll definitely be doing what I can to keep pre-owned games going at my local business, though I have bought quite a few in the past few weeks, so I may need to be a little bit more selective, but it's not often that I'll actually turn games down. If anyone is interested, I'll share more when the shop is looking a bit more organised, I;m just doing what I can every day at the moment.

Remind me to never do this again.

I haven't bought a used game in years as for most of my gaming I am digital only now but I do have fond memories of rifling through the used games at shops like Game, Electronics Boutique before it and Gamestation looking for deals.

Nice try, but I'm onto you: I know that Golden Sun is actually two games! But seriously, I played through the Golden Sun duology twice already. I love them, they're great games, but I'm not in the mood to replay something familiar right now (Unless they announce a fourth entry, *hint* *hint* *nudge* *nudge*, then I'd be replaying the entire trilogy) I have the Steam version, which I imagine has none of those things. But I'm good with playing RPGs with their original intended balance. Increased gains is meant for replays and such, imo. Oh, I remember playing the demo for this one Looked really cool, and the gameplay felt quite satisfying. I remember it being tad more difficult than usual for Metroidvanias, which I always welcome. Judging from your review, it sounds like the game stays strong well after the end, so I'll definitely need to keep an eye out for deals.

Sure, I totally agree, and I said something similar when we talked about it underperforming last year. If we're going purely by sales volume? Great result. 3 million of any non-Nintendo-developed, relatively niche genre, console exclusive game sold is objectively good if we're only going to be talking units sold. If we're going by actual business expectations, factoring in revenue, profits, and the full nine yards? I'm seriously unsure why Ubisoft thought a higher budget game with a longer dev cycle which saw it's predecessor reap the benefits of featuring Mario right at the start of a new console's life and which very much also reaped the benefits of said heavy discounts would do anything but underperform. Keep your damn expectations in check, Yves. It's ridiculous. I think you probably get at least 1.5x, if not 2x, those sales, with a smaller proportion sold at a discount, if you just wait the extra couple of years to launch with the Switch 2 – I get that there's more to how to optimise a release when you consider overhead and such to keep things toeing the line and to not elongate dev time thus stretching out costs, but they sent this thing out to die, and then had the gall to pin it on the developers. But, I mean, Ubisoft being a mess – what else is new?

After tons of online searching (such as how to find out my HR and what are scraps, among plenty of other stupid questions) and discovering various online groups to bounce questions off, I proceeded to take on the two license quests under the village section to boost me up the hub list—albeit marginally. Because village and hub don't feed into each other otherwise, and apparently pursuing the village side is baby mode and not the done thing. Not offline for story and online for communal grinding, then, as I'd believed. Do those quest maidens not compare notes?? Then I threw on the online and incredibly, people joined. If you build it, they will indeed come. Where I'd been ticking them all off before progressing on village, the bare minimum number of quests to get up through the star rankings were done in the hub. On quests where no one joined, it was a 20-30 min slog, but depending on the others, quests were done and dusted in a breezy five. I'd love to be able to OHKO these beasts. It put it into perspective to not see these players join me inside the monster to carve it threefold at the end. On a rampage quest, someone who has clearly mastered the game smashed it by setting out traps and barrels and doing something to reduce the cooldown on the kiln thing. I enjoy the rampage quests but all I pretty much do is set up the stations and then jump into the thick of it with my sword. On this big victory, I at least delivered the death blow despite being a passenger. Eventually came the Narwa encounter in it's very own arena. This was like a proper boss fight from Mario with floating platforms. It was well done but I doubt I'd have emerged victorious without the other three players mucking in—at best, I'd have timed out. I wasn't a complete deadweight but I wasn't far off it because my playstyle of ZL+Xing to victory wasn't designed with flying monsters in mind. After all that (this is the condensed version) the game finally allowed me to take on the other Sonic quest: The Super Shady Look-alike. In keeping with MH, doing it once wasn't enough to let me make all the layered gear, so away we went again. Thankfully twice was nice. All this because I don't know if these Sonic quests becoming "unobtainable" this month means they'll be chalked off my quest list or if it just means the add-on content will no longer download for new players. Everything's clear as mud with MH. Until I see more quests will be unobtainable, it's time to get back to some games with nippier controls.

I've only ever seen the 2nd one, but I fell asleep halfway through. It definitely insisted upon itself.

I've been to the Birmingham one from them, they're pretty good. Can get a bit cramped depending on the venue but the sellers always seem nice and chatty.

51 Worldwide Classics has an excellent rendition of Riichi Mahjong with a fantastic tutorial. That’s how I learned to play it. Riichi Mahjong is the standard form of Mahjong that is commonly played in Japan. And Riichi Mahjong is fun! But yeah, it does have a steep learning curve (so much so that even 51WWC takes the piss out of how steep that game’s learning curve is ). Mahjong games are ridiculously common in Japan; even the Wii U of all consoles has multiple Mahjong games! And Mahjong games with stories and RPG mechanics had been done plenty of times before. So this game wouldn’t have been very novel, even at the time of its release. But I suppose the N64’s built-in 4 player support would’ve at least have given this game some sort of USP by the time of its release.

Mahjong Master JP release: 20th December 1996 NA release: N/A PAL release: N/A Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami N64 Magazine Score: 69% In English speaking countries, Mahjong is known as a solitaire tile matching game. This simple game is actually just one of many variants of Mahjong, with traditional Mahjong being a 4 player (no more, no less) game. This is Japanese-only game so I did read up a bit on how to play this style of Mahjong. I was still confused to begin with, but got the hang of it. The object of Mahjong is a game where you’re trying to create sets (three/four of a king or a straight of three/four) in your hand, playing a “Mahjong” when complete (there’s usually a single pair in a Mahjong, other sets are bigger). Each turn, you pick a tile to discard and get a new one. As others play tiles, you have the opportunity to match them up with two more of your tiles – thankfully, Mahjong Master shows you when these are available. In Mahjong Master, you join “South End” club and get introduced to the players there, most of them casual players of Mahjong. You can play individual matches or take part in tournaments as you move up the leagues, meeting more dedicated players as you progress. The characters also comment on actions in the matches, making it seem a bit more personal. I manged to win a tournament, although for true “completion”, you need to get to the top league and win tournaments for 12 months in a row. There are a lot of options available that I didn’t mess with, and I also struggled with getting straights in one of the suits (others are self explanatory, but one is Japanese characters). There’s also a quiz where you can answer questions about Mahjong, so there are quite a few options for fans of the game. Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics has this flavour of Mahjong under the name “Riichi Mahjong”, which is a bit easier to understand with tutorials and numbering on the tiles. Remake or Remaster? It’s a Mahjong game, so other options exist for it. Official ways to get the game. There is currently no official way to get Mahjong Master.

Thought the clip of this had been lost for a second there but fortunately I managed to find and preserve it (albeit without sound): Yep, nothing can top that.

Apparently, Golden Sun is noteworthy enough to feature on a local American news channel. I think that trumps the newspaper article about K.Rool getting into Smash.

I somehow missed this question. Good thing I answered it in another thread So yeah, broad goals. But I did like that Top 10 pledge, so I'll make a quick one of my own that broadly represents some games I'd like to properly tackle/finish in 2024: I only picked games that I do not want to start that soon. I guarantee that my first proper entry in this thread will have none of the games above. It's also non-binding. There's like 3 RPGs in there

Before Mario Party, @Glen-i, @Dcubed and myself were playing F-Zero. This couldn't have been better timing by @S.C.G

Merry Ys-Mas

Wasn't sure if this had already been posted or where to post it. Seems sort of appropriate to post it here? https://www.eurogamer.net/uk-retailer-game-to-cease-video-game-trade-ins-staff-say GAME no longer accepting preowned game trade ins from February. We move ever closer to the all-digital future.