Glen-i

I'm with you there. I shouldn't feel so annoyed because it's par for the course for this joke of a president, but here we are. The pardon system just feels so fundamentally wrong to me. I fail to see the genuine benefit to overturning this kind of thing. It just creates all sorts of distrust in an already distrusted government and it just seems so backwards. Then again, it's America. The gun laws should clue you in to how backwards it can be.

The N-Europe Mario Kart League has finished for the year, and I can't help but feel concerned about the steady drop-off of frequent participants, so if you'll take me seriously for once (I know, tall order), I'd like to get some feedback from those of you who may have some interest or have taken part in the past in what might entice you to rejoin. I think the weekly get together is a great way for the N-Europe community to spend an hour having some laughs and the more people who race in the League, the more frantic and unpredictable it can be, which leads to more exciting outcomes. I really enjoy running and taking part in the League and if it means having more people take part, then I'd be willing to hear what changes I might need to make to the structure. So go on, hit me with your reasons. I'm all ears.

And now, the moment we've all been waiting for! No, not the actual end-of-year results. What are you, new? It's the pointless end-of-year award ceremony! So, first of all, time to acknowledge the Teacher's Pets out there with; The Perfect Attendance Award This award goes to the person who showed up for all 138 GP's this year. This is a very special award in that it comes with a certificate I slapped together in 5 minutes! I'd mention the honourable mentions, but I'm the only qualifying person who didn't get more than 90% attendance, so well done! That's not an actual thing, but this is! The Blue Shell Award This award goes to the person who claimed the most second places throughout the year. It must be nice, not having to be paranoid about getting hit with one of those. @BowserBasher claims it this year, with 34 2nd places! Good for you! I hope you enjoyed the comedy of watching the person in front of you get blown up. @viceview51 was the runner-up for this one. The Ultimate Rivalry Award This award goes to the two people with the smallest point difference between them. Making me have to swap your rows all the time, I hope you're bloody happy! @BowserBasher and @viceview51 were the winners this year, with a 1.8 point difference between them. The Balanced Player Award This goes to the player who not only achieved more than 10 1st, 2nd and 3rd placements throughtout the year, but also had the smallest difference between all three of those. In other words, a great balance between all their top 3 placements. @BowserBasher has a difference of only 4! (34 1st, 34 2nd and 30 3rd placements) That's very impressive! @viceview51 is the runner up with a difference of 7. That was actually better than last year's winner, but alas... And now, the final results. You'll be glad to know that I'm not utilising shoddy MS Paint skills this time! Thanks to everyone who took part this year. Let's face it, it's been difficult for a lot of people and I can only hope that the N-E League brings you some much needed levity in these difficult times. Massive thanks to @BowserBasher for taking on far more responsibility than he'd be expected to when lockdown prevented me from performing my duties. I think you deserve a 20% raise. You've earned it. And thanks once again to @RedShell for providing the best looking graphic in this thread. It really brings people's guard down so I can shock and appall with my graphics. I know you haven't been able to attend the League for most of this year, but it'd be fab if you could whip up a logo for 2021. In your own time, of course. There's no rush. Anyway, I've been thinking about the attendance of people, with only 5 making the 50% attendance threshold, I'm thinking that a change of day might be required. CPU's may help make things feel less empty, but it's no substitute for people you can moan at afterwards. So I'm gonna open a thread shortly that will ask people what day and time might better suit them. I expect you lot to show up there and give input. Because of that, I can't give an exact date for the start of next year's league, but it'll be sometime around the end of January.

Sorry for the delay. Here's last week's results. Which means we're at the end of the second half of the league and the end of the year. So it's time to get those final results up. Forgive me for being quick with this one, there's still the whole year results for me to do. 3rd Place viceview51 2nd Place BowserBasher 1st Place Glen-i

I know what I'm doing after I write the Hyrule Warriors review!

Is this on XBox Game Pass? Because I would totally play it on @Dcubed's Series S if it is.

He'll never catch me! I can do a full circular motion buttery smooth!

The N64 stick doesn't compare, in my opinion. That stick is revolutionary, but rubbish.

So I got an e-mail from Nintendo which gave me details of my Switch activity over the past year. Which means we can kinda bring back the activity log thread and look on in horror at the regretful things we have spent our free time with. I don't know if other people can actually look at mine, but here goes... Some thoughts of mine: I'm willing to bet I'm the only person in the world with Pokémon Mystery Dungeon in their top 4. Yes, seeing 2,273 hours is bloody embarrassing, and that doesn't include my 3DS. I have no idea what happened in April... I bet it was Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. It normally is. The 3 games Ninty recommended to me were Minecraft, Mario & Rabbids, and Just Dance 2020. You'd think with the amount I spend on my Switch, they'd be able to give me suggestions that would actually fit... So go on, have at it. Think you can do worse?

Ah yes, low-poly Mario strikes again! You're not the first person to ask what's up with him in this thread. Smash Bros Ultimate uses a similar trick. Pausing the game and then zooming in on a character will cause that character to suddenly get more detailed. You'd never be able to tell on that game though, because it's designed with HD TV's in mind, whereas Mario 64 wasn't. You see this kind of thing all the time when a retro game gets emulated on modern technology. Take SNES games for example, some emulated games provide a "pixel perfect" option (SNES Mini comes to mind), but this tends to cause problems because developers took into account that TV's use 4:3 display. A good example is a scene in Chrono Trigger where there's a great shot of a full moon. But put on a Pixel Perfect option and it becomes the wrong shape.

Origami King has the same kind of problem that I had with The Wonderful 101. Everything about it is great, except the actual standard combat, and because that constitutes such a large portion of the game, I got bored with it. That's why I prefer Colour Splash.

You'll have to get up earlier to snag me with that. (And yes, I got your second one too)

So I've started doing some raids online because I actually ran out of Dynamax Candy, and I need to ask something. What's with this weird trend of people nicknaming their Pokémon website addresses? Just looks very tacky. Saw nothing like this before the DLC dropped.

Oh right, that reminds me. I have a spare real Jolly Painting if anyone fancies a real painting trade?

The update is out now, which means it's time to shout out @markderoos. Cloud now has the FF7 artwork for his Spirit. Final Fantasy finally feels like it has proper representation in Smash.

Your fault for putting that idea into people's heads. You reap what you sow and all that.

@Hero-of-Time

Glad someone appreciated their gift. From left to right, we have @darksnowman, @BowserBasher, @Sméagol, me, @Sofiz, @RedShell and Bluestar, the Halloween party crasher.

@darksnowman, and @Sméagol. Heads up, don't wanna be late, do you?

Gate is now open. Christmas miracle as well, because shooting stars have just been spotted on my end. EDIT: And Celeste.

Jim Sterling's video above kind of touches on this. Simply put, CDPR garnered a massive amount of goodwill when Witcher 3 was very well received, but what most failed to realise is that Witcher 3's quality wasn't typical of CDPR's output. (That sounds mean to the developers, know that I don't mean to be that harsh) So Cyberpunk started gaining a lot of excitement from people who loved Witcher 3 because "Hey it's CDPR! They did Witcher 3! Cyberpunk is bound to be amazing" and I imagine it piled a lot of pressure on CDPR. And that's probably what caused this game to collapse in on itself. They were out of their depth.

OK, @Ugh first aidhas to bow out, something has come up on her end. Which means there's at least 1 space open. (Or 2 spaces if Red can't make it)

I mean, he mostly covers controversies in the gaming industry, I don't know why anyone would expect them not to cover this.

Yeah, it's kinda nuts how mad the whole thing is. Naturally, Jim Sterling just released a video talking about the whole debacle this past week.