Helmsly

Donkey Kong Land 2 was just added to NSO

I got the N64 controller as it was on sale, but just my luck it went on sale the very week I let my NSO sub end and renewed down to the normal tier without N64 games. lol I tested it out on Mario 64 on the 3D Mario collection and it seems pretty good although I feel like the analog stick is much stiffer to move around. It feels like my thumb needs quite a bit of extra force to move it compared to any controller I have used before. I don't know if that is a case of me being used to my original N64 controllers analog sticks becoming looser over time, as they did, but I don't recall it ever being like that. Other then that, it feels good to use it and I am sure the stick will become easier to use over time.

Donkey Kong Country came out 30 years ago this week, which apart from making me feel very old, made me go back and re-watch this video which Nintendo gave out on VHS to promote the game: In America this VHS tape was given free to Nintendo Power subscribers. In the UK, if I remember correctly, it came free with a Football magazine and a friend at school got it that way and gave it to me. (It didn't come with Nintendo Magazine System as I brought that each month). To state the obvious, this came out at a time when there was no internet to see game trailers and you only saw a game actually running if it got a commercial, appeared on Gamesmaster or your local gaming shops had them running on a Kiosk or demo unit. So to see footage of a game running before owning it felt special. I was so hyped for this game that I must have watched this tape more then 50 times! The novelty of seeing the game in action added to that excitement, plus of course, the game looked incredible and fun so I couldn't wait to play it. Weirdly, the tease of Killer Instinct at the end of this video was removed from the UK version and replaced with some commercials for the Gameboy, which featured a talking brain in a jar.

Some of my Club Nintendo points were due to expire so I brought some stuff, as well as the N64 Controller which is currently on sale for £27.99 as part of Black Friday:

There’s going to be a Super Nintendo World Direct to showcase the Donkey Kong Country area of the park on the 11th:

yes, its odd he said that being as they officially confirmed a follow up to the Switch is on the way

Switch 2 probably won't be revealed this year but this quote from Shuntaro Furukawa gives me a little hope that it might: President Furukawa said about the details of the Nintendo Switch successor, "There is no change in the plan to announce it during the fiscal year ending March 2025. I can't say anything more than that." Regarding potential hesitation to purchase the current model due to the announcement of a successor, he added, "I can't say it doesn't exist at all, but the Switch is already in its eighth year since launch. I don't think the presence or absence of a successor will have much impact on customers who are purchasing it at this timing."

Backwards compatibility confirmed by Furukawa himself

I watched this film today. I have to admit I wasn't massively sold on the trailer and wasn't expecting much from it but this was a really good movie and I already want to watch it again. Also, it got a lot darker and emotional then I ever assumed it would. Very good. My only issue is that perhaps the journey we see of D-16 being Primes friend to becoming the Megatron we know from the cartoons isn't as gradual it could have been and although his change is really well done, the lead up to it doesn't quite make sense for him to become evil. But the actual moment when it happens its really well done. But yeah, this is a great film and I wish I'd seen it sooner. I hope it does well enough to get a sequel.

That's crazy, I had no idea this game was in part a remake of Castlevania 64. And to think it came out barely a year later too

The WWE Vault channel is slowly becoming my favourite channel:

But that’s not possible

Just a heads up, this game is currently free to own if you have Amazon Prime. There is a free code for the Epic Games Store in the Prime gaming section. It is also on Playstation Plus Extra at the moment as well as being on sale for £7.99 on both Xbox and PlayStation stores. Currently it’s £17.99 on the Nintendo eshop. At the end of the month, Illphonic are updating the game with a large patch that will be changing the stats of the game as well as adding the Scoleri Brothers from Ghostbusters 2 and some other cosmetics

Banjo Tooie is the next N64 game to be added to NSO. October 25th

I appreciate that I am in the minority here, but I didn't like DK64 at all. At the time it came out, I was looking forward to it because I was such a huge fan of Donkey Kong Country and I enjoyed Banjo Kazooie too, so on paper this should have been perfect. But it just never gelled. Controlling the Kongs never felt right to me, nor the camera. Even back then when I could sit and play a game for hours and try and get 100% in them, the sheer number of collectables was so overwhelming that I remember thinking there's no way that I will attempt collect them all. Mini-games were also quite bad from what I remember too, as Cube mentioned. I found nothing about it was enjoyable and it was the first game I ever owned that I never finished, despite returning to it about 5 times. If it ever does show up on NSO, I'd like to have another go.

The Sega Dreamcast came out 25 years ago today in Europe. I've been watching a few videos about the European launch and this one covers it nicely: I vividly remember Anne Robinson talking about the Dreamcast on Watchdog. I think I even recorded the episode because I knew they were going to talk about it and at the time, hearing any TV show talk about video games (outside of Gamesmaster, Bad Influence and GamesWorld) was a rare thing to happen

Long before Iwata died I would read a lot of interviews with him as well as with people who talked about him and they spoke much in the way Sakurai does in this video. You could tell by the way some people spoke about him that they had a pure respect for him both professionally and personally. It was pretty clear that Iwata was a genuinely decent man. When the news broke that he had passed away in 2015, it made me sad because it felt like we'd lost one of the good guys. I still remember reading all of the tweets and messages at the time from different people in the industry who had met or worked with him and he really did seem like a special person. I found all of it very touching but for some reason the thing that made me tear up was this tweet from the PlayStation Twitter account I've not owned a PlayStation console since the PS2, but for whatever reason this got to me

Sakurai has uploaded his final “Grab bag” video and it’s about Iwata

Yeah same here, I just assumed it came out as I remember the reviews for it at the time

Holy crap that’s an amazing update

No word on what happens to all that old legacy content, sadly I fear a lot of it will just be gone as i can't imagine Netflix transferring all of that content over but I noticed WWE launched a second youtube channel a few months ago called WWE Vault which has been uploading entire matches from the past as well as never seen before dark matches. https://www.youtube.com/@WWEVault/videos I suspect they will upload a lot of old stuff onto here that doesn't make it to Netflix. They've already been uploading entire old Royal Rumbles on their main YT channel recently, but now with this new channel, they have uploaded a lot of random old content. Such as the entire Hell in a Cell match between Undertaker vs Shawn michaels from 1997 for example. They have also uploaded some really obscure stuff from their archives, like this never seen before dark match of the Nasty Boys on Smackdown in 2007: It is surreal to see them on them in that era lol They also show all the things the WWE had stored in their warehouse, such as random props, costumes and even the huge Smackdown Fist from the early 2000s: also this was pretty cool:

I have a lot of good memories of playing Wrestlemania 2000, I remember I got to play it a couple of years after it came out and was annoyed at myself for not buying it day 1, because even though I played the Smackdown games on PS1 at the time, which were more popular, I much preferred this game. You could tell AKI had a lot of fun making it, with loads of references and call backs to random story's that had taken place in the WWF before hand or changing a wrestlers music to an older theme they used on the past would be acknowledged with unique entrances. Plus it was just a lot of fun to play and had plenty of modes to replay for hours. The create a wrestler mode was also pretty good and had so many motion capped moves from wrestlers that were not in the games roster, almost all of the moves from their previous WCW games were in there so you could pretty much make any WCW or WWF Superstar. I think i spent a third of my time in this game game just making random wrestlers. Yeah, even at the time this game came out, the graphics and character models seemed a little odd. Especially compared to the Smackdown games which also had full FMV of everyone's titan tron entrance, compared to Wrestlemania 2000s 3 frame, blurry gifs. But as us N64 owners knew at the time, this was probably the best AKI could have done. The Rock permanently having his raised eyebrow was something I also found hilarious at the time, which was extra funny when he was getting knocked around WWF No Mercy is the superior game of the two AKI made WWF games, but Wrestlemania 2000 runs better with a smoother frame rate, so its still worth going back to over No Mercy.