WackerJr

So a further update, Nintendo contacted me to say they’d need to replace my console, but they don’t have any white NN3DS models like mine, so would I be happy to receive a black New Nintendo 3DS XL instead. I’ve asked them about transferring my account and they’ve assured me I can redownload all my existing software into the new device. I’ve accepted (not that I had much choice) but the upgrade seems like a good alternative!

Quick update and it sounds as though Nintendo are coming through for me! The wording on their repair quote is: ”Diagnosis: Lower Screen has defective image - Out of Warranty. Spare Parts: Product is replaced - KTR ASSY HW SWAP WHITE EUR - Quantity: 1” So they’re charging me £79 for it, but sounds as though they swapping either part of or the whole system 🤞 (unless of course I’ve read that completely wrong and I’m just giving them money….)

Taking place tonight is one of my favourite wrestling events of the year: the WWE Royal Rumble. What are people’s thoughts and expectations? With this being the first PLE on Netflix I’m hoping they go above & beyond to make it a good event. The rumble itself if usually either excellent (like the 2001 previously, or the past few women’s ones) or a huge disappointment (see the 2022 Men’s one). I feel there are some strong contenders in the men’s match this year and hopefully a few good surprise entrants too (I believe….! 😜 and what a pop that’ll be if the Scot appears!) There’s some exciting matches too this year, with the male tag team championship match (DIY vs Motor City Machine Guns) having a lot of potential to be an entertaining one. My guesses for the winners this year are: • Women’s: Charlotte Flair (final 3 with Jordanne Grayce & Liv Morgan). • Men’s: CM Punk (final 3 with John Cena & Roman Reigns).

Nope, no joy(con) for me either. Congrats to those that got selected!

Oh no! Maybe Nintendo UK still have some older NN3DS's knocking around and they'll just send me one of those... Ok, unlikely I know, but now I really am gutted! Their automated system has asked me to send it in for repair, but I'm assuming that's what it always does when you request a repair and I worry now that once received they will just email me to tell me they've stopped repairs. That's a really good point! Do we know if it can be performed by selecting the option using just the d-pad and buttons? (it's been a while since I did it) I seem to be able to use the d-pad to move between apps, as whatever the cursor should be on shows up on the top screen. If I have to type anything though then I fear I might be in a bit of pickle! (to put it nicely!)

Nearly a month into 2025 and I realise I never wrote up games I finished at the turn of the year, before my pledge. Here’s a brief summary of each. Altered Beast (NSO) This was possibly the first Sega Mega Drive game I ever saw being played in person. A friend once showed me their new system and they played a few minutes of this. I thought it looked amazing at the time although I didn't get a chance to play it, but since then I’ve always wanted to try it. Well I finally got that chance as a grown-up with Nintendo Switch Online… and what a disappointment! A side-scrolling beat-em-up with creatures resembling those from Greek mythology, where you constantly play through levels until you collect three spirit balls, released by defeating specific enemies before they disappear. At which point you turn into a creature with additional abilities and take on the boss. It plays like the arcade game, where there’s no way of replenishing your life force, even between the handful of levels. The chunky characters have shonky hit detection and the whole thing was bland, repetitive and dull. Some wine gets better with age, others don’t benefit from aging, but I figure Altered Beast must have begun life as vinegar anyway! A Little to the Left (Switch) A puzzle game about organising and rearranging objects to be more aesthetically pleasing. Presented with a single screen of objects and no instruction, you’re tasked with rearranging items in a way that improves the scene. It could be as simple as straightening wonky portraits, stacking objects in a particular order, or rearranging a cutlery drawer so everything fits. I quickly got an understanding of the logic the developers were looking for, and quite a few levels have multiple solutions. For instance, books on a shelf could be rearranged in height order, but then they could also be arranged so that the pattern on their spines all match up. Both solutions would be correct and it tells you how many possible solutions there are for each puzzle. There are some creative solutions, and thankfully there’s a hint system for each level where you reveal the solution, so I was never stuck for long. Some levels required quite precise control, and I can imagine this feeling much better using a mouse. I resorted to playing in handheld mode using the touchscreen, since the analogue stick controls were frustrating me. A simple premise and perfectly pleasant, but ultimately I found it a bit dull. If only tidying my own real-life things were as simple as the game made it out to be! My 60-second YouTube review of 'A Little to the Left'. The Exit 8 (PS5) A lonely walk through a Japanese subway, which transpires to be a creepy spot the difference game. This first-person walking simulator sees you walk through a small section of the subway, passing posters, doors and a single passer-by on his phone who’s completely oblivious to your presence. Turning the corner at the end you’re presented with seemingly the same section of subway again, complete with posters, doors, and then that same passer-by appears once again! The goal is to look around the corridor and if everything seems the same then walk to the end and turn the corner. If you spot something different (“anomalies” as the game calls them) or something unexpected happens then turn around and head back and exit the way you came in. There’s a single poster around each corner which indicates how many correct ‘exits’ you’ve made in a row, with the goal to get 8 correct in a row. It seems simple in theory, but much tougher in practice. Sometimes the changes are obvious (I’ll only spoil one at the end of this sentence, as most are best left experienced), for instance there could suddenly be hundreds of posters scattered across the floor, while many others are a lot more subtle. With only the haunting sound of your footsteps for company, it is quite creepy. To quote Alfred Hitchcock: “there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it”. This game encapsulated this for me, as I was constantly expecting something to happen, and admittedly it did make me jump a few times when something unexpected would occur, or I was too slow noticing something! As it turns out, the predominant source of tension was the anticipation of turning the corner and finding the poster to discover if I’d chosen the right exit each time! It’s short as once I’d finished 8 correct consecutive exits I was able to go back and try to spot all the anomalies (playing through it again but the only anomalies that might appear would be either a previously unseen or incorrectly guessed). I finished it all in around 3 hours and it doesn’t hold much value to replay it. However, it is admittedly only around £4, which I felt was reasonable. A decent, albeit brief, experience. My 70 seconds view of 'The Exit 8' on YouTube Platform 8 (PS5) The recent follow-up to The Exit 8 is another horror walking simulator. Again the goal was to spot anomalies, but this time you’re stuck within the confines of a moving train carriage. The main gameplay difference this time is that the exit is always the door at the end of the carriage. The trick each time though is to work out if there’s anything you need to do, or not do, while in the carriage in order to open the door. For instance, the door may be locked but a poster on it tells you to find an anomaly in the carriage, so you explore the carriage and once the usually creepy obscurity is found the door unlocks. Each carriage is seemingly the same, with posters on the walls and a single other occupant who I recognised from 'The Exit 8'. The biggest change is the number of jump scares the game throws at you. The weirdness is cranked up and there are many things that happen, which could send you back to the beginning if you don’t act in time or solve the puzzle. It’s not gory, but by the end of it my heart felt as if it had been bouncing like a pogo stick on a trampoline! Half the time, the carriage won’t have a puzzle to solve, but will still have something odd happen as you walk to the door. I’d love to say more, but it really is best experienced without knowing what peculiarities the developers have come up with. At little over an hour, this was even shorter than its predecessor, but again I picked this one up for cheap and the freakiness was kind of fun! My 60 seconds review of 'Platform 8' on YouTube

It's 2025 and I'm still trying to get through my 3DS backlog (dipping in every now & again anyway). Or at least I was... I finally plunged into Chrono Trigger last year, great game by the way, and having entered what I think may be the endgame, my second screen has now stopped working! 😬 Having restarted my 3DS it still recognises what should be on there, but the touch screen itself along with the actual display are kaput! I've put in a request to Nintendo, so hopefully they'll be able to repair this for me. Sadly, for the time being my adventures with Crono and crew have come been postponed.

Glad I wasn’t the only one surprised by that! Before checking, I’d just assumed that they would’ve been available in smaller numbers due to the dreadful Wii U sales so the sale prices would’ve been pretty good, so I was painfully disappointed.

I still need to finish my 2024 write-ups, but in the meantime, to join in the fun: • Chrono Trigger DS - I finally got around to starting this in 2024. It’s taken me a while to get into, but it’s definitely been worth sticking with. Should be finished soon. • Final Fantasy 7 - thanks to everyone who advised me to play the original version (or at least the one on Switch). I’ll be playing this classic for the first time this year I hope. • Super Mario Wonder - I love my Mario platformers & surprised myself I haven’t played this yet! • Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - I put off buying this so I could get it as a Christmas present 😀. • Astro Bot - looking forward to playing this. • Uncharted 2 - playing through the Uncharted series with my wife. • Astral Chain - it’s spent way too long in my backlog. • Tales of Monkey Island - retro time! Used to love the MI games and I haven’t yet played this or Return to MI yet. • Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D - the adverts for the upcoming Switch remake’s reminded me I haven’t yet played this & I have it on 3DS. • The Great Ace Attorney - Enough time’s passed since playing the Phoenix Wright games to return to some courtroom drama! I managed to sell the majority of my Wii and Wii U games last year and it was quite satisfying. I’m debating what to do with my load of N64, GameBoy and DS games next and thinking I might try to sell these this year too. I’m finally realising that I’m never realistically going back to the majority of them.

Ok, I realise I still need to write up a few of the games I’ve played in recent months before everyone’s moved onto the 2025 thread. Sackboy (PS5) I wish there were more games like this. A lengthy 3D platformer that’s serviceable in single-player, but really comes into its own when played alongside others. I played the majority of this with my wife and we had a blast traversing the textile levels. Playing as LittleBigPlanet’s woolly protagonist, everything from your own character to the enemies themselves looked lovely and hand-made. The platforming itself wasn’t revolutionary, but did everything well. Linear with plenty of items and secrets hidden just off the path. You primarily have the ability to jump, slap, roll and throw, which allow for neat tricks in co-op such as having to throw a team-mate onto another platform in order to get to out-of-reach items. In our case this lead to many laugh-out-loud instances where one of us was ‘accidentally’ (or so it was claimed) thrown off an edge to our doom. Enough levels also gave us a specific skill or item just for that level, such as shurikens or a rope to latch and swing on certain surfaces. It gave enough variety to keep us entertained. Essentially you just had to reach the end of each level, but each levels was sprinkled with heaps of orbs that could collected along the way. These vary between those that count towards your ranking come the end and those that grant you outfits for your avatar. There are plenty of outfits and also help to distinguish who’s who when the action heats up on screen. When played in co-op it also tells you who collected the most, and the winner of each level gets their photo taken too (which ultimately turns into which other player can sabatage it the most!). I found some of the best levels were the ones played out to licenced music, such as Uptown Funk or Toxic, with the action often lining up with the tune. A little like Rayman’s musical levels, but not so strict in missing a beat forcing you to die. I tried it in single-player and it was ok, but really does excel and want you to play co-operatively, with some levels only available to play with multiple players. It did get a little harder later on too, so while in co-op you all share the same stack of lives, I feel a younger or inexperienced player will enjoy the early levels but will only get so far (or at least that was the experience I had watching my daughter play with her grandparents). As I said at the beginning, I wish there were more decent co-op platformers out there, as this was a lot of fun and something we enjoyed playing together. Link to my 60-second review

I don’t know why that was so compelling, but I enjoyed that & admittedly never realised much of that about the MM dog race.

I don’t know why that was so compelling, but I enjoyed that & admittedly never realised much of that about the MM dog race.

Wow I learned pretty quickly that I couldn’t trust NOM reviews, although it was mainly biased towards Nintendo-published games, but that one seems bizarre even by their standards! Glad you got to play it @Cube to clarify how shocking it really was and relieved that I’ve never had to! 😂

Well that wasn’t on my bingo card! What is it, 28 years after the original? I wonder if they’ll copy the ridiculousness of the original and concerned about whether they can recapture the popularity of it. Saying that, I’ll still be watching this regardless! 😄

Watched it for the first time as our Christmas Eve movie last night. It was good & our daughter loved it too! Merry Christmas everyone! We’ve just made it to my wife’s family for the day. Surprised at how much traffic was on the road today! Whatever you’re doing, have a fabulous day everyone!

Was it last year The Game Awards were criticised a little for not recognising the growing number of layoffs? I might be misremembering that…. Nice to see this being rectified this year and Satvat comes across very well and likeable.

My wife and I really enjoyed It Takes Two so looking forward to this one.

Spyro Reignited (PS4) Having played Crash Bandicoot and not really enjoying it, I ventured into more PS1-era platforming by giving Spyro a try. I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed this a lot more! I played through all three games in chronological order. The platforming was pretty standard, but I can imagine being incredibly impressed if I’d played this on PS1. It’s no Mario 64, but the item collecting and platforming are perfectly playable. As Spyro you’re tasked with collecting the abundance of gems hidden throughout each level. While ultimately the levels are quite linear in the route needed to reach the exit, they’ve been designed with plenty of opportunity to explore just off the main route. It is necessary to explore everywhere in order to locate every hidden gem. Thankfully Spyro has a dragonfly companion who points in the direction of the nearest gem, which alleviates some frustration as some are sneakily tucked away in orifices I wouldn’t initially have thought to have explored. Spyro’s basic controls involve jumping, with the ability to float a little, and blasting fire from his mouth to defeat enemies (he is a dragon after all!). The games are enhanced by the bulky animated characters and enemies that ooze with personality. One of my favourite moments is knocking rock monsters into lava, at which point they look at you forlornly and wave farewell before exploding! The trilogy increases in quality from the first to the third game. Frustrations in the first get actioned in the second and third, and while the gameplay doesn’t really change between them, there are just enough tweaks to iron out issues and give more structure to levels (for instance, each level of the 2nd game introduces a character to help, which is then the main goal of that particular level). In the first game you were also finding other dragons to rescue and they’d also give tips when rescued. 90% of these were completely pointless though! It would often be a tip on how to use one of Spyro’s abilities, but you’d often have to have actually used it to rescue the dragon in the first place! It’s almost used mockingly that they tell you how to defeat the enemy guarding them, having already spent time working out how to defeat them to carry out the rescue in the first! Imagine if after getting past Bowser in world 1-4 of Super Mario Bros and the Toad telling you that you could jump on the axe at the end of the level!?? The developers know this too as Spyro even references this later on! As is common in early 3D platformers the difficulty is pretty variable. It’s ok for the most-part and certainly doesn’t cause Crash Bandicoot levels of frustration, but there are some points, such as the early flying challenges and most of the first games over-reliance on chase sequences, where the difficulty unexpectedly spikes. In all games the camera being so close to Spyro causes some of this. I think my expectations were a little too low going into this, and everything impressed me more than I expected it too. For me, the gameplay still holds up today and the coat of paint it’s been given highlights the personality and charm the characters have been designed with. A good remaster. (Link to my 60-second video review: Link)

I get the line right just a fraction of the time and for a split second I thought I’d nailed it! 😂. I didn’t realise until watching it back how my Mii briefly turned to look at you in a despairing “look what you’ve done” expression! I couldn’t help laughing to myself at the time either!

I hadn’t really twigged this game before. As a brief game and someone who’s never played P.T. I’m actually interested in what ‘Platform 8’ is like. Has anyone played the prequel ‘Exit 8’ and is it worth trying?

Oh I’m intrigued by this now. I’d admittedly not heard about these. I see they’re both visual novels and I loved the Zero Escape series. How do these compare to them?

Thanks all. That was good fun tonight, even though I was terrible! 😂

Random question about Banjo-Kazooie in NSO: on the original N64 cart I recall that once you had collected the ice key and any eggs (either through use of Game Genie or the Sandcastle cheat codes) they would remain on the cart, even when you tried to delete all the data. This meant you could only capture each one once per cartridge. Does anyone know if they remain in your game on the NSO version? So once collected they remind on there (unless you use a different profile). I’ve tried looking online but I can’t seem to find the answer to this anywhere. Or am I simply remembering it wrong about them remaining permanently on the N64 cart?

Haha! I read that line and had to read the rest!

Thanks. I’m so pleased to hear they’ve got the emulation right for Banjo-Tooie. I’ve been looking forward to replaying this for years, and was worried after hearing the issues with the XBox version. Can’t wait to play this again (apart from Canary Mary naturally….).