Josh64

I'm really itching to play again too, I had it a few years ago on Xbox but I'm super tempted to double dip and have it on the Switch. Might even play the field and not go for my usual husband of choice lol

Thanks, always a pleasure!

Blimey, that was a packed week! Wii and DS, Wii U, Sony shenanigans - It feels like a very 2012 time we're in! Had I have known there'd be so much news this week I may have let Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 pass us by 😅 But at that stage we were set for a relatively quiet week lol

https://www.n-europe.com/news/call-of-duty-online-services-discontinued-for-nintendo-wii-and-nintendo-ds/ Online services ended yesterday for Call of Duty titles on Nintendo Wii!

I wish they didn't make you go back to the base after every day, or at the very least wish it loaded quicker. I find it really ruins the flow of the gameplay, I just wanna play the next day damnit!

Not a bad price from a collectors POV but the usability of them makes them pretty rubbish lol. It's cool that they can attach physically to the Switch but the lack of buttons and especially of shoulder buttons renders them pretty useless outside of the NES app. The SNES and N64 controllers though, now those I would be interested in if ever there were a price cut.

Those new balls are fantastic!

I was literally just reading about Flagship the other day as I started Minish Cap recently, I've touched upon their interesting history here: https://www.n-europe.com/news/the-legend-of-zelda-oracle-duology-available-now-via-nintendo-switch-online/ Oh and also, the Zelda Oracle games are out now on NSO!

Part 3 is up on the site, another condensed version of the interview! https://www.n-europe.com/news/pikmin-4-developer-interview-part-3/

I've posted a "best bits" of the interview on our front page! https://www.n-europe.com/news/pikmin-4-developer-interview-reveals-early-concept-art-n64-version-and-more/

Ok so I enjoy the game overall BUT some of the later caves were ABSURD and definitely soured me a bit lol, I can see why the game has a reputation lol There were certain floors that felt like Mario Maker levels as the enemies, trick bombs and crazy amount of random bosses was just silly lol. But overall it was a blast and I managed the Impossible without quite pulling all my hair out

Oh my goodness, I'll be right on that. I love tetris at the best of times, but I MUST get this theme. Out of curiosity, anyone who has purchased the 1-Player mode, can you use whatever themes you have collected playing 99 mode? If so I will purchase it at some point, as given Nintendo's track record I know this game won't stay online forever, which is a shame as it has so many great themes.

That SpaceWorld trailer is fantastic, so many great memories. I can't tell you how hyped I was for Mario 128 and of course, Zelda! What's crazy to me now is that the Zelda tech demo actually looks pretty awful graphically lol, I'd argue launch (or near enough) titles like Pikmin and Smash Bros Melee look better, but I remember thinking at the time, along with seemingly most of the internet, that the Zelda demo was the hottest looking thing alive! That Metroid shot is also interesting, that is surely the same rendered scene that we see in the Smash Bros Melee intro, albeit slightly different so maybe a slightly earlier or later build, or just a different part of however long that rendered scene is. It's also weird how different my opinion would be now. Back then it was insane excitement and pure joy, if I was my current age when the GameCube was coming out I'd be lamenting the beginning of the end. This is the trailer they release for GameCube? It's a bunch of tech demos and pre-rendered scenes, they have no games ready! I guess ignorance was bliss lol. I've subscribed to them anyway, and as if I wasn't already excited enough: They [the WORLD] really did Cammie dirty, she was so much fun, it's actually shocking how awful the internet was to her.

Damn, that's exciting. I love watching footage from that era. It's a bit late now but I'll definitely look into this more tomorrow! I remember the pure excitement of seeing GameCube preview VHS tapes in Nintendo magazines before launch. I don't think it would be possible for me to ever get that excited over a console again.

I have 29 ship parts! For the first time I also plucked up (lol) the courage to approach the egg and let it hatch! It went about as well as you could expect: I got to the Final Trial late the other night and decided to leave it for another day as I had to be up early lol. Hopefully I get time to tackle it today! I have a buffer of around 9 or 10 in-game days to do it so should be fine lol

Play Two Point Campus for free this week! https://www.n-europe.com/news/play-two-point-campus-for-free-with-nintendo-switch-game-trials/

Yeah, I've always enjoyed 1, had it back in the day on my GameCube! I got 3 Deluxe on a whim last year and LOVED it. The story mode was great but the missions are what really made it for me. I got platinum rank on all of them (eventually) and loved the challenge of it, and especially loved managing the 3 characters at once. I never played 2, so I look forward to getting into that after this playthrough of the first game!

I couldn't wait any longer. Played about an hour of 1 so far and loved every second. How is this game 22 years old? It still looks frickin' gorgeous. The Forest of Hope music still makes me teary eyed, and I kind of love the dumb details they have in 1, such as Pikmin falling flat on their faces and getting left out of the herd, or being dumb and just getting stuck on corners, and thus sitting down and chilling by themselves. Stuff that obviously for the benefit of the gameplay was fixed in later titles, but weirdly gives the Pikmin themselves a bit more personality early on. I'm heading into the caves now, which I remember really struggling with when I was younger, because my dumb ass took far too long to realise red Pikmin are immune to fire. Honestly, how I survived up to this point of my life while being this dense I don't know lol.

I haven't tried alcohol-free wine either, and probably won't, as I think that could be a bigger trigger than the AF beer! I try to keep the advice of "you are enough" when I'm having a bad day! I can't actually believe I've been back on the N-E front page for that long now! But reading back that WaveRace article is a bit painful lol, I could certainly punch that up a bit now haha. I'm glad you're feeling better with things too, jobs can truly be soul destroying! I still will try ONE DAY to join an N-E Mario Kart night, but as I say, I will need to upgrade my internet I think lol. It's fine with watching HD content and downloading games, but the few times I have tried to play online it has always failed, perhaps the fluctuations of my connection are the issue, I really don't know!

I'm sorry to hear about your step father - I know it was a few years ago now but don't remember discussing it at the time. It's nice that you could be there for the last few months. I actually DO like the 0% Heineken but also after two I feel like I've totally had enough, which is crazy as with normal beer that would be but an appetiser lol. But so far I've just had them when I've had friends over, who I would usually drink with. And yeah the weight-loss is just a great by-product really, and a great excuse for when I don't want to tell people the real reason, but given sobriety helped me lose quite a bit of weight, it spurred me on to actually start eating healthier and get in better shape. I will definitely be vigilant in the near future, both for if something bad does happen and just for the sake of perhaps getting too comfortable with the fact that it's been a few months now, and maybe wearing rose tinted glasses that make it seem like "things weren't so bad" because after all, I did a good job of telling myself that for years up until now lol.

I’m 92 days sober! Which feels really weird to say as I used to have a ‘rule’ that as long as I wasn’t drunk two days in a row I was ‘fine’. I had a lot of rules like that to justify things and prove to myself nothing was wrong. Another rule was, “don’t drink the day before work”. Given I work shifts, that was always quite doable. If I was on an early 6am shift till midday, and off the next day, I would nap as soon as I could when I got home, so that I’d be ready for a regular old binge until the early hours, and then spend my actual day off hungover. I probably had an average of 2 to 4 binges depending on the week, depending on when I could or could not adhere to my “rules”. The last few years I needed that “no work the next day” rule, as time stands still for no one, and I’m no longer in my early 20’s, so the following day after a binge would be a complete write off, and I’d be pretty much bed-ridden, just about able to mindlessly scroll TikTok or read Reddit, or of course, nap the day away. So the few occasions I did break my unbreakable rules, work was a mess, and I no doubt looked like an absolute monster (and probably smelt it too!), but generally I was able to stick to my rules, and keep things largely under wraps. I had got pretty good at being buzzed but functioning on my chilled out nights alone, my spelling/typing on the PC was impeccable, and I had gotten out of the habit of sending messages or stupid Snapchats after around 1am in a bid to not seem drunk, unless of course it was a socially acceptable day, like a Saturday, or if I’d been on a night out anyway, in which case I could let my drunk guard down. All of this is to say that for the past 8 years I haven’t had a healthy relationship with alcohol, but for the past 3 or 4 years especially, things had gotten bad, and I had somehow tricked myself into not seeing it for myself. Despite, in hindsight, so many OBVIOUS signs that things weren’t right and I was clearly lying to myself. I would hide empty cans and bottles under ‘normal’ recycling (juice cartons, butter, whatever), so that my mountain of cans wasn’t obvious. I would tear up and put at the bottom of the bin, or literally burn in the fire, the cardboard cases of my beer when I was done with them. I would cycle through various shops when buying alcohol because of the shame of seeing the same cashier too often – Though even while doing that it still felt like I saw the same people far too much, and despite looking young for my age and always getting ID’d at new places, these people would know not to bother and let me buy without question. I was a regular! How depressing, and how embarrassing. All of these things and yet, if a TV show had the trope of a cop coming home and starting a 6-pack, or a journalist in the city goes back to her apartment and opens a bottle of wine alone, I would point to the screen and say to myself, “look, everyone does it!”. I started properly drinking at around 17, but it was fine, the normal amount and normal situations for anyone that age, house parties, nights out with friends, and probably once a week, if that. And it was like that until probably my early to mid 20’s. Then in 2015 my nephew unexpectedly passed away shortly after being born. I was a heavy sleeper (note, was), so when I woke and saw missed calls from my brother and parents, multiple missed calls, I knew something was up, as we pretty much always communicate through text. It took me ages to get through to my brother. My brother couldn’t really talk, and obviously had a lot going on, so the call ended quick. This was about half 7 in the morning on a Sunday, he lives about a 15 minute walk from me, and I decided to just run to his house, because for some reason I thought everyone would just be at home? I don’t know what I was thinking really. I was running with tears coming down my face, I must have looked a bit insane, but being that early on a Sunday, I didn’t actually come across any other person. I got to the house and it was locked, obviously, because of course they weren’t home, and then I finally got through to my parents, and my dad came and picked me up and took me to the hospital. I went to the hospital, held my nephew, cried with the family, tried to deal with how surreal it all was, the fact that this family, my family, one that doesn’t really show true emotion often, were all crying in front of each other while taking turns to say goodbye to this tiny dead baby. I wish I had got there earlier, to see him for the half an hour he was alive, but I’m glad I at least got to see him at all. That was an odd time, and later that day, I absolutely did not want to face the reality when I got home. I had already, before this had happened, planned to have a night in with my friend, and had the alcohol waiting at home, but of course, given the circumstances, I cancelled, and to lift my mood on said night, I drank the wine by myself instead and listened to KPOP and weirdly enough, I was having a great time. I still had pangs of sadness every time I remembered my nephew, but also I would look at the clock, 11pm, 12am, 1am, and think, “damn, I could be in bed moping right now but instead I’m having a great time, jamming out, disco lights on, music on loud, who needs to feel SAD when you can MAKE yourself have a great time.” I guess that is the perfect example of toxic positivity lol, but at the time I thought I was cheating life and making lemonade out of lemons. At the same time, death had been a pretty big part of my life in 2015. I was working at a care home, the status of which had recently turned to nursing home/end of life care. I worked nights, often alone on my “side” of the building while one or two others worked on the other side. So I spent a lot of time walking corridors at night by myself on my 12 hour shifts, itself probably not healthy. I’d be helping dying people get up to the toilet, get a drink, tell me their dementia-fuelled delusions, or walking in to see that poor old John had breathed his last breath and I needed to get him looking presentable before his family arrived to say goodbye, and then I happily welcome in the men at 5am who take him out in a zipped up black bag. Honestly I thought that was a thing in movies, it was really odd to take them to his room and see it happen there and then. The fact I was working nights also helped to legitimise the fact that, on my days off, it wasn’t too weird that I would drink wine and beer until 4am. It was just like enjoying a beer in the garden on a sunny afternoon, right? But yeah, I could go into way more detail of that time of my life, but I will skip over it, as it’s a story for another time. But basically, that’s when it all started, when my fondness for drinking left the realm of social drinking and entered the realm of drinking alone. At the time, I didn’t see the drinking as a big deal. I decided for my own health it was best to leave the nursing home, as much as I cared for the people there and enjoyed the job, it obviously wasn’t helping my state of mind. It was 2017 when I finally changed jobs, lots. I went to therapy. I started on Sertraline. All of those changes were in 2017 and helped me to continue my life after a nervous breakdown saw me out of work for 6 months. Under all of this though, and what was quite honestly a great crutch at the time, was my constant alcohol use. 2018 saw me get the job I still have now, and it’s nothing great but not terrible either, in fact, it’s perfect for my anxiety riddled self as it’s busy, but not got the stakes of looking after someone in their final days, and the social life it gave me back has been great, as I was once again surrounded by people my own age, and working daylight hours. I continued to drink until the early hours on my days off, and over the years in the back of my mind it got more and more obvious to me that my drinking wasn’t normal. The Pandemic happened and, work being the only thing I had to leave the house for, suddenly I was able to have my night-time binges 4 times a week, every week. I put on more weight, I jokingly called it COVID weight. But someone mentioned a few months ago this year, in around February actually, that it’s crazy that COVID was 3 years ago now. And that’s when I thought about what I mentioned earlier: Time stands still for no one, and I’m no longer in my early 20’s. COVID was 3 years ago and I still hadn’t lost the COVID weight or the bad habits. My night shifts were 5 years ago yet I hadn’t stopped drinking until 3 or 4am. My nephew passed 8 years ago yet the one-off one-person party I had on the day of his death had now gone on for 8 years whenever I had the chance. Everyone has problems, everyone has had their own issues and losses with family and friends, their own work problems, their own mental or physical health problems, yet they didn’t all become secret drinkers. What’s my excuse? I don’t have one. I still couldn’t admit to it being a problem earlier this year, though in the back of my mind I knew it was. I know how I am all or nothing when it comes to a lot of things, so I told myself that I can’t drink anything for a month, as I knew that completely cutting it out was the only way, as when I ever tried to just have a few it would obviously always turn into more. Like how I wanted to cut back my meat consumption but had to just become a Vegetarian because I, for whatever reason, only work in absolutes, lol. The reason I couldn’t just listen to and enjoy Scatman John when I first found him in 2007 but instead had to find every single song, every unreleased morsel of footage, every promo event. The way that, after getting a GameCube at 12 years old, instead of playing it, enjoying it, and moving on with my life, I find myself on the same Nintendo forum that I joined back then to talk about the wonders of Donkey Konga, 20 years later, talking about my life’s problems. Anyway, it was SO hard starting that month of sobriety, especially the first week. I had genuine, physical issues, which thanks to reading the /r/StopDrinking subreddit on Reddit, I realised were actual physical withdrawals. I was told on there to consult a doctor, but being so ashamed and also doing this all in secret, I didn’t, which is stupid but, thankfully for me, the issues did resolve themselves after a few weeks. I had severe stomach pains, that made me cramp up, gave me chills while also making me sweaty, I had other really odd bodily functions do things that you probably don’t wish to read about. But all that is to say that they subsided. Then it was just the cravings, the mental NEEDS of wanting to hit ‘pause’ on life and take a chilled out evening without any thoughts, as I used to do. I got to one month sober and decided to do one more. Then two months sober I told myself I wouldn’t drink until my birthday, which was another 5 weeks away, and now next week as I write this. One sad thing is, and one thing I can’t relate to with the people on /r/StopDrinking, my anxiety never went away. In fact, anxiety is part of the reason I have always drank, drinking makes it disappear and makes me feel normal. I had anxiety for years prior to when I started drinking at age 17. But I also referred back to the passage of time recently when I was thinking about that, as for so long I told myself, “you’ll grow out of it, you’ll get more confidence, you’ll overcome it with therapy or tablets”, but the fact is, it’s now been over HALF of my life that I have had crippling anxiety, so it’s not something that I will grow out of – I’m already fully grown! That is another issue, clearly my anxiety is far from normal. I’m not sure how I will address it, I certainly don’t have the money to go to therapy, and I only managed to get NHS therapy back in 2017 because I was suicidal which, thankfully and thanks to that therapy, I do not have those thoughts any more. So obviously therapy worked, but didn’t fix the underlying anxiety issues I’ve had for years. But that’s another issue and something I will try to tackle now, in the coming months and years, instead of hiding from it in alcohol and pretending it doesn’t exist. All of this rambling is to say that I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed I let it get this bad, that I lived a kind of secret second life, that I had to cancel on friends, family and events at times because I was recovering from a binge. I haven’t told anyone close to me the extent of my issues (aside from one close friend) because I’m embarrassed and ashamed of it all. And I might never, I’m hoping that, now that 3 months have passed and I haven’t had alcohol in that time, I can continue to never have alcohol and leave this part of my life behind, keep it as a horrible skeleton in my closet. I mentioned to people I cut out alcohol and started eating healthy as a bid to lose weight, and that’s the extent of sharing about the issue I have done. And that’s stopped any further questioning when out with people and not going straight to ordering a pint. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them I had severe issues and actually quitting alcohol has been one of the biggest things I’ve had to do, and it has taken until now, writing this, after 3 months of sobriety, that I have finally accepted it myself that I did/do have a problem. But there have been some great benefits. One of which being TIME. I had no idea how much time I consumed buying alcohol, the evenings lost to drinking it, the days after that literally didn’t exist for me as I napped and TikTok’d the day away. To start with it was actually a bit overwhelming how much spare time I had. The first few weeks of sobriety genuinely made me feel so lost, and it took a lot to find purpose in day to day things and a reason to go on. But it has made my daily Instagram art posts much easier to achieve, it has allowed me to post regularly on the front page of this very website again, it has gave me time to help my friend edit his weekly newsletter and its given me my social life back. It took a while to get here, but slowly I built up a life again and made use of my time in a way for it to feel fulfilling and to not feel like I’m missing out on my poison fuelled evenings. All that is to say, I’m super happy to have got to 3 months sober but also have no one to celebrate with lol, so I’m happy to share it here. As I say, my plan was to abstain for a month to prove to myself I had no issue, and then to go on drinking in moderation. But as the weeks passed and the clouds lifted, I realised that of course it was a bigger issue than I was letting on, which is why I kept extending the dry spell. Now I feel as though I need to stay away for as long as I possibly can. I actually do feel as though at this stage I could drink in moderation, like at social events, but the horror stories I’ve read over on /r/StopDrinking about failed moderation attempts, and knowing how I am with being all or nothing with things, I think it’s best I just say no to the poison from now on, and live vicariously through Rare’s Conker. So I’m moving the goal posts again, and I won’t be drinking on my birthday, or for the foreseeable future!

I hope to god it is a Switch 2, something that is the same form factor and concept. In an ideal world, it will be backwards compatible both digitally and physically, but this is Nintendo so the digital side is anyone's guess - remember on Wii U when you could 'upgrade' your Virtual Console purchases for an additional price, classic lol. When I say I hope it's a Switch 2, I say it because I know it's the obvious thing to do and it's so likely they will do it, BUT for that reason I'm scared, because this is Nintendo, so the obvious and logical choice isn't always the chosen one. Of course when they have a great idea they like to fuck it up and make it some elaborate high concept machine but not have the technology to pull it off well, like the Virtual Boy and Wii U, or hinder it in some way, like the N64's tiny cartridge size. If history is anything to go by though, we might actually be safe. Nintendo do tend to follow up their successes with improved versions, like NES to SNES and DS to 3DS. Anyway, what I hope for: A more powerful Switch. I'm not very technically minded, but I believe what I want is more RAM. As far as I'm concerned, the graphics on Switch are great, fine even, but it's the processing that is shit. Gimme more games that look like TOTK or Rabbids, but make it so they can run more than 30fps, don't have really obvious LOD (something people don't mention about TOTK but that I think is immediately obvious most of the time), less pop-in for distant objects/enemies, higher resolution. Basically make it so that third-parties can port their games to a reasonable standard and not have to knock them down to N64 visual fidelity with Microsoft Paint textures. Carry over games and data from OG Switch. Higher capacity and cheaper cards for publishers so we don't keep having this absolute bullshit situation of physical releases requiring massive downloads just to be playable. Improved Joy-Cons without stick drift and with real D-Pads. And that's it really, all I want! Oh and maybe an OS that takes up more memory than a calculator so we can have fuckin' themes lol. What I expect: The New Nintendo Switch U-Shi, a bi-pedal electronic Yoshi with infra-red eyes that can interact with your gestures and movements. On its belly is a small screen in which you can see games, and interact with them via your gestures at said eyes. It will be powered on a IBM CPU PowerPC Gekko running at 486 MHz, and display at 480p. It will retail at £449 at launch, but 3 months later have a permanent price cut to £249, and early adopters can download the New Nintendo Switch U-Shi port of Pokken Tournament Deluxe-U-Shi for free as an apology.

I will probably pick up the physical when it releases. Had the eShop releases been £19.99 each or £34.99 for both I may have been tempted, but it seems a bit steep at the current price, especially as they are super bare-bones remasters. That said, they DO offer the New Play Controls pointers from the Wii version too, which is tempting. I recently binged on Dophin though, so I will likely hold off. I'm still absolutely pumped to pick up 4 later in July!

Quite a wild difference to last week LOL, but as you say, more than enough news in the latest direct to keep us quenched! Whatever happened to the Summer games drought of yore? Seems as busy as ever these days!

Damn, this is awesome news! I was a bit disappointed with the previous Switch WarioWare, so to finally be getting a REAL, NEW WarioWare after years of spin-offs and remakes is going to be wonderful.