Glen-i

Looking through all of these icons, and the sheer amount of ones with no title on them are astonishing. Luckily, you'd never see that kind of slapdash approach with Ninty IP's. Just look at Pokémon. They range from...

That's not Leon Kennedy, SHUT UP! I'd put it down to coincidence if it wasn't for the fact that it came out January, this year!

I defy anyone who thinks they can find a worse Switch icon then this. I swear to all that is holy, I didn't just type an "F" with large font size and faff around with the font colour. That's an icon for a game on the Switch! And it's driving me mad!

We haven't done Battle Mode in a while, let's do Battle Mode. Shine Thief will have CPU's on, even if we have 6 or more players tonight, trust me on this one. See you at 8pm tonight.

Well, at least the font isn't as horrendous as the PC version. I'm still bitter that FF6 PR teases you by having a couple of scenes use HD-2D graphics. A sad glimpse into what could've been. @Dcubed has it right, play the SNES one. Top 3 RPG on that console. Best Final Fantasy in my opinion. If you decide to go on to other titles. The Pixel Remaster version of 3 is unquestionably the definitive version, but 1 and 2 are acceptable if you can't get a GBA or PSP. The SNES games are where the homogeneous sprites really start to hurt. Not a good look when SNES sprites are outdoing you. EDIT: Credit where it's due. The Switch Menu Icons are bloody gorgeous!

Who? Oh, right! Green Mario! He's the star of the second best NSMB game! I quite enjoyed this PR stunt. A lot of fun.

First Nier pack is out now. Weirdly enough, all 5 songs are from Automata. That caught me off guard. There's 2 Nier packs though, so I imagine songs from the first game will happen then. I'm glad Emil's shop is in there, but all in all, I think the songs aren't as good as the Nier songs from Curtain Call.

Time matches tonight at 8pm.

Add Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins to my list of games I recently beat on NSO, but have no desire to talk about again. I was gonna write up about Octopath Traveler II this week, but then something far more important got shadowdropped. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a visual novel that, at the time of writing, got released just a few hours ago to coincide with April Fool's Day. The thing is, it's completely real and free on Steam right now. You play as a random civilian in the world of Sonic who just scored a gig working on a luxury train that caters events for customers and such. It's your first day, and you'll be helping to staff a birthday party for one Amy Rose, and 8 of her friends. They're celebrating her birthday by playing a murder mystery game. Something goes wrong though, and well... And here I thought nothing could off him after Sonic '06 Your job is to find out what the hell happened by gathering evidence, and interrogating everyone on the train to whittle down the possibilities. Suffice to say, the concept of the whole ridiculous affair is played for laughs, and it's very well written. There are some good running jokes, and it is a joy to see a more text based adventure with Sonic characters that isn't trapped in a certain RPG that I despise to my very core. There's quite a number of references for you Sonic nerds out there, and a couple of wider Sega IP nods as well. One particular joke was so "funny because it's true", it was actually painful. Plus, Vector the Crocodile is quite prominent in this, and we all know the quality of a Sonic game can be reliably measured by how much he features in it. The game plays quite similarly to the investigation sections in Ace Attorney games, as you click your way around the place looking for clues and chatting to Sonic's friends to slowly piece together what finished off the blue blur. Instead of courtroom scenes, you're presented with auto running style gameplay now and again, much in the vein of the Special Stages that are quite prominent in old school Sonic games. It's a decent little pace changer from the copious amounts of reading you will have to do, but if that's not your thing, there are accessibility options to make these sections easier. Finally, someone has made tracks to bring Omochao to justice! The visuals are great. The game sports a hand drawn art style, and time has proven that Sonic looks great when hand drawn. The soundtrack is pretty good too, but then again, it's a Sonic game, good soundtracks are pretty common here. It's sounds like a such a dumb joke, and well, it is. But the real punchline is that, it's actually quite decent! It likely has no right to be this good, but I would pay good money for a more fleshed out game in this style. It's on Steam, it's around 2 hours long, and more importantly, it's free. Give it a go. Sega really has knocked their April Fool's prank out of the park. Everyone else is going to be hard pressed to top this.

It's Vector approved, so it's bound to be decent. Sorry @Cube, you're not done with the Sonic thread yet.

Related to this somewhat, but while the awesome reveals are the things I remember most fondly, (I can never which year each E3 conference was though) you can't forget those utter car crashes that would happen now and again. I was able to watch that Konami conference (You know which one I'm talking about) in real time, and I was flabbergasted with just how insane it got. It kept getting more surreal, and I'm glad I was able to see it live. It wouldn't quite be the same if I watched it because I heard of the utter face plant that occured.

I'm so passionate, it's disturbing. And that choice of word brings me nicely on to... Kirby Super Star Ultra Releasing for the DS in 2008 over in the states (Europe would have to wait over a year), this game is an enhanced port of the SNES title "Kirby Super Star". You might know that better as "Kirby's Fun Pak", which I'm certain confused more then a few Europeans when this came around with the American name. For the sake of clarity, I'm never mentioning the PAL name ever again. Kirby Super Star was a collection of 8 different games (9 if you count the hidden Arena boss rush), most of which revolved around typical Kirby platformer fare. It's on the SNES NSO app, BTW. You should play it. The original SNES title pretty much serves as the template for what modern Kirby games would become, with copy abilities having different moves you could pull off with various inputs, and of course, it's the first game to have Kirby wear hats, which is easily the most important thing. Kirby Super Star Ultra takes the original game, and adds 7 more games, as well as various other tweaks (Meta Knight's ship looks closer to how it appears in Smash Bros, for example) Don't worry, I'm not gonna go through every game here, only 3 of them are relevant, and the first one was on the SNES version. So keep in mind that this particular game came out back when Kirby lore wasn't a thing. Milky Way Wishes is the final main mode in Kirby Super Star, beating it lets you watch the credits, after all. The plot, which a lot of people can easily miss, (You have to wait on the title screen in order to see it) revolves around the sun and the moon fighting. Marx, an adorable jester, tells Kirby that he'll have to travel across the galaxy to find the comet Nova and ask it to stop the two fighting. Kirby has to collect "Star Power" from the various planets along the way in order to awaken Nova. So far, so Kirby. Loads of platforming and random acts of violence later, Kirby arrives at where Nova is, and awakens it with the star power he has collected. Let's talk a bit about Galactic Nova, shall we? It's referred to as a comet in the intro, but it clearly isn't anything of the sort. It's speech manner is obviously robotic in nature, and it has a whole bunch of junk attached to it, mostly various odds and ends you'd see on Earth. It supposedly has the power to grant a single wish, but Marx swoops in before Kirby can make his and wishes to rule Pop Star, revealing his true form, which is very much not adorable, trust me. Of course, you don't mess with Kirby. Because this doesn't go so well for Marx. Kirby makes some kind of spaceship with the star power he's collected, flies inside Galactic Nova, and blows it up. He then, for good measure, beats the crap out of Marx, and flings him into Galactic Nova, blowing the two of them to smithereens. Problem solved, Kirby goes back home and goes to sleep. And that's about it for the SNES entry, a suitable little climactic finish for a game that was clearly meant to be standalone when it was first released, but then we got the DS remake, and they added new games, with more cutscenes... Meta Knightmare Ultra One of the extra games in the DS version tasked you with rushing through 5 of the original SNES games as Meta Knight, who handles like a more complex and stronger version of Kirby's Sword ability. A fun little extra mode with no impact on the story, until you finish the Milky Way Wishes portion, and then it suddenly does. You see, at the end, Meta Knight reaches Galactic Nova, and uses the same star power Kirby collected to awaken Nova again. Looking a bit worse for wear after getting blown up by Kirby, Nova grants Meta Knight a wish. Meta Knight wishes to become stronger by fighting the "greatest warrior in the galaxy". Cue Nova calling forth an entity whose power was so great, it had to be sealed away. And Meta Knight just casually unsealed it for a scrap. Thanks for that, Meta Knight, you jerk. That's Galacta Knight, surprise final boss of Meta Knightmare Ultra, a completely different fight then Marx, which most players were expecting. It's also stupidly difficult compared to the rest of the game. This game doesn't go into much detail about this strangely Meta Knight-esque thing. All we have to go on is the cutscene I mentioned, and this little bit of background flavour text you can see if you pause the game while fighting him. So he's obviously from the past, not sure when, mind. But trust me on this, it's not the last time he'll show up. Which begs the question, what are these things that resemble Kirby? It's pretty common knowledge that you see Meta Knight's face whenever you beat him in a boss fight and his mask falls off, is Galacta Knight a similar case? We don't actually see his face in Super Star Ultra, so your guess is as good as mine. But this one random curve ball of a boss started to sow the seeds of that Deep Kirby Lore, it didn't seem like much at the time, but looking back, it's clear the Kirby developers had plans. Before I move on to the last game in Super Star Ultra, I want to mention the "Special Screen". That's the name of the special flavour text that only shows up when you pause during boss fights. Super Star Ultra was the first Kirby game to do this, adding snippets of background to plot relevant bosses, such as Marx. It's the main reason why some people aren't even aware that Kirby has lore. Most of it is hidden in the pause screen! It's kinda like how Dark Souls hides most of its lore in item descriptions, except Kirby started doing it 3 years prior. Dark Souls can suck it. The True Arena In the SNES game, The Arena was effectively a boss rush that pitted Kirby against every boss in the game with limited healing supplies. The True Arena takes that, replaces most of the bosses with the harder versions that the DS introduces, adds any new bosses (Yes, that includes Galacta Knight, and you have to beat him as Kirby, to boot), and replaces all the Maxim Tomatoes you have with crummy regular tomatoes that are only a quarter as effective. It's bloody impossible! But if you are dedicated and nutso enough to make it past Galacta Knight to the last fight, you get... Yep, another unexpected cutscene. Because only true Kirby Masters get to see all of the lore. Kirby's getting quite annoyed that you're not dead yet That's Marx Soul. Let's take a look at the special screen for him. So, in a blatant form of retconning, Marx somehow managed to absorb some of Galactic Nova's power in the explosion mentioned above and came back to life. Amazingly enough, he's even harder then Galacta Knight! It took me many attempts to beat this mofo, for sure. Of course, Kirby can do anything, being a soul with Earth-shatteringly terrifying powers won't stop Kirby from laying the beatdown on you. So, this one little enhanced port gave us some background on whatever the hell Nova is, established the possibility that Kirby and Meta Knight might not be the only round ball of death around, and showed us that if blowing up an evil jester doesn't do the job, blow up his soul as well, just to make sure. Speaking of, let's end this post with that. Rated PEGI 3. The 3 must stand for the number of weeks a kid will have nightmares after beating this. Next week, an actual new game. And the developers take the ball Super Star Ultra set up and positively run with it. Fun times!

It still, to this day, baffles me that DK has a surprisingly good singing voice in that show. That actor was hired with only the most specific of priorities.

Player's Choice tonight at 8. Tea optional.

He has a couple of spoken lines in Donkey Kong 64. Which, to be fair, it's Donkey Kong 64, the further away the IP gets from that, the better.

Yeah, I noticed that myself, if I had no backlog of RPG's, I would've bit too. I figure that by the time I actually get through them, it'll go lower though, so I'm gonna hold out.

It's a Theme Night this week. And I'm feeling like we don't self-destruct nearly often enough! Plummeting Down to Earth The 21 characters here have at least one move, that when used in the air, sends them rocketing downwards at a blistering pace. For the sake of clarity, moves where you can choose your direction (Fox's Up-B), moves that have you fling yourself upwards before smashing back down (Ike's Up-B), or moves that can be cancelled in some way (Kirby's Down B) do not count. You commit to your terrible life decisions, damnit! I'd say be careful not to pull a Toon Link, but some rascal decided to mess with the stage selection... All of the stages have some kind of hole plonked in the middle of the stage, maximising the potential for accidents. Some even have breakable flooring, so be mindful of where you attack. The items are the standard fare. Format - 3 Stock, 10 Minutes FS Meter - On See you tonight at 8pm.

I've been going back and forth on doing this topic for a while now, but after playing most of Returns to Dream Land Deluxe and being, quite frankly, astonished at the amount of impact it has on it, I'm taking the plunge and writing the topic on Deep Kirby Lore. To this day, you can still find people online who think the concept that, out of all the Nintendo franchises out there, it's Kirby that has the most intriguing and most developed universe, completely laughable. It sounds like a joke, probably not helped by actual hilarious jokes about Mario having a timeline, or Donkey Kong having anything more complex then DK punching bad guys. But trust me, Kirby lore is legit, and it's kept me captivated for years now. It hasn't always been like this, mind. There's a point in time when Kirby games were nothing more then fun, easy going, platform games designed for beginners with little hints of challenge for the more experienced gamer. I will mostly be overlooking these and jumping to the focal point when things started changing. From there, I'll go through each game in release order, looking at the subtle developments, implications, and reveals that each title has bought to the series. Fair warning. Massive spoilers ahead! I won't be mentioning future games until I get to them, so don't worry if you haven't finished the likes of Forgotten Land, or RtDL Deluxe. I won't be covering those for a couple of months. But before we dive in, there are a handful of games we need to look at first. They are three games collectively referred to as... The Dark Matter Trilogy Now, make no mistake, when these games first came out. The idea of underlying lore just wasn't a thing in the Kirby series, the only true connection between these three games was that they had a recurring villain (Kinda) throughout. That thing on the left is Dark Matter Blade, some kind of malevolent force that continuously shows up in some way throughout the three games pictured above. In Kirby's Dream Land 2, it's posessing King Dedede, and only reveals itself if you collect all of the Rainbow Drops before hand. In typical 90's final boss fashion, it has a true form. Pictured on the right is Real Dark Matter. In Dream Land 3, Dark Matter returns as the main villain, and again, it's posessing King Dedede. Collecting all the Heart Stars unlocks the true final boss, Zero. Jesus Christ, how horrifying! Ignoring the obvious of there being blood in a SNES Kirby game of all things, to this day, we still don't know a lot about Zero, what we can learn from that game is that it seems to be a source of Dark Matter. Simply put, Dark Matter isn't just one entity, and thanks to Zero, there are likely loads of them all over the place. What's their goal? No idea, but they seem to be somewhat parasitic in nature. That's unnerving to say the least, considering that being possessed by Dark Matter can't be a pleasant experience. Seriously, Dream Land 3, WTF? Zero would show up again as the true final boss of Kirby 64. Maybe... All I can say is that something looking a lot like Zero shows up. It's called 02, whether it's a reincarnated Zero, or a seperate thing altogether is unclear, but either way, there's a clear recurring thing going on between these three games, and it's worth remembering, because the implications of what this entails will be explored in much later games. But that would be getting way ahead of myself at this point. Anyway, next week, I'll be getting into the first game that started properly developing the world of Kirby. Weirdly enough, of all things, it was an enhanced port.

EDIT: Nope, false alarm. I can make it tomorrow.

I really should write about the handful of games I finished off last year, but I can't be bothered. Xenoblade 3 was my GOTY then, followed by Bayonetta 3. I'll start this post by listing off Metroid Fusion, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, WarioWare inc: Mega Microgames, and The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap courtesy of the NSO Expansion Pack. All great games that I've no doubt talked about before. Today, I want to talk about... Pepsiman 2 Uh, I mean, Fire Emblem Engage is a strategy RPG and the latest Fire Emblem game. It released back in January and is developed by Intelligent Systems. The game follows Alear (Who I renamed PepsiBoy, because, I mean, come on, if you're gonna give your main character that hair, I'm not gonna take him seriously), a Divine Dragon who has just woken up from a 1,000 year nap, only to find the continent of Elyos is under attack by the forces of the Fell Dragon, Sombron, that half-dragon, half-cobra dude in the pic above (No joke, that's one of the coolest dragon concepts this series has come up with). Alear is tasked with taking his very small army on a quest to gather the Emblem Rings, pieces of bling that allow Divine and Fell Dragons to summon Emblems, recreations of heroes from previous Fire Emblem games, such as Marth and Lyn. The story is well, a bit rubbish, it basically boils down to "Evil Dragon bad, go stab". If you were going in expecting political intrigue like in Three Houses, you won't find it here, do yourself a favour and play Triangle Strategy instead. If you're here for some solid gameplay though, then look no further. The Emblems allow for some great mix and matching with the various roles characters will have along the way. They may seem overpowered at first, but as you progress, you'll soon realise that you really need these bits of jewelery, as the odds are supremely stacked against you later on. So much so, that my scrub self lowered the difficutly to Normal half way through (Appreciate the option being there) I mean, really!? Anyway, that video above shows the Break mechanic. When you initiate an attack with a weapon that has an advantage over the enemy weapon, you "break" them. This means that they can't counterattack against the next unit that attacks them, which can be devastating, so you need to be really careful with who you send to the front lines, especially if you have permadeath mode on. In between battles, you have the option to explore the Somniel, you can talk to the units you've recruited, give them gifts, go fishing, etc. It's a stripped down version of what Three Houses did, but not mandatory like it was in that game. The social aspect is suitably stripped down as well, which is what turned me off from Three Houses. I want to play Fire Emblem, not Persona. Game looks gorgeous, if you haven't noticed already. It's bright and colourful, a great game to christen the Switch OLED I got for Christmas. The music is noticably a step up too. The Solm battle music is a particular favourite of mine. All in all, a very enjoyable FE game. Probably my second favourite after Shadows of Valentia. There's still the extra campaign that the DLC promises, so I'll be revisiting this at some point.

I've done all 8 stories now. Mostly spent this week running around and doing all the optional dungeons and looting them. At this point, I've unlocked all of the EX Skills, so I'm gonna revisit each base job and give my thoughts on whether they've gotten better from them or not.

I imagine @Dcubed is fiercely battling against the urge to get that Link's Awakening one.

Great to have you back. Player's Choice tonight at 8pm.

I have to agree with @Ike. I can laugh off a lot of things in Smash. But having to deal with camping tactics is frustrating. It's why I never play with randoms. You see it all the time there, and I just want to trade blows. There are obviously times when legging it is the smart idea. (Someone got a Golden Hammer? Ain't no-one gonna suggest you take that person head on), but those situations only last a few seconds, making it a fun, yet, temporary dynamic switch. Sorry if this sounds like I'm piling on here. But just wanted to get my thoughts across.