Helmsly

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.

If I can I'll be there. I don't mind what mode we play.

The free update that adds the remixed soundtrack is out now and the DLC has shown up in the eshop. It costs £3.59 and contains Mondo Geko and Mona Lisa as playable characters. The page for it makes a point of saying this is the final content update for Shredders Revenge

I think around £400 is around the most I would pay for a Switch 2. The only reason I can think of that would make me not want to buy it, would be if it didn't have backwards compatibility... but even then I think I still would buy it eventually

I had never heard of Mini Racers or Dragon Sword before, but both look pretty good and certainly the kind of games I would have been interested in back then. In both cases it seems like a shame that they never had a full release.

Thanks for the heads-up on some of the DLC being free, I went through the Final Fantasy 7 DLC today which was nice. It's a weirdly relaxing experience to play this game, especially while listening to a podcast or something. I'll buy the full game before the sale ends

If anyone is curious, you can read the hidden rants here: https://tcrf.net/The_New_Tetris#Hidden_Rants Here's a taster of the main one: lol

Looking forward to this:

Yeah I really like this theme, I was a huge fan of splatoon 1 and 2 but never brought 3. This theme almost makes me feel a bit sad that I missed out on everything in the third game

A Splatoon 3 themed Grand Prix/Max Cup starts on the 16th of August

Not sure what was going on today, i exclusively got mushrooms for most races and it disconnected mid-race twice lol

There was quite a lot Marvel announcements at SDCC last night, with the major reveal of the actor who will be playing Dr Doom: The next two Avengers movies are ‘AVENGERS DOOMSDAY’ - May 2026 and ‘AVENGERS: SECRET WARS’ - May 2027. Russo Brothers are returning to direct them. Title and date for the Fantastic Four movie. Begins production on Tuesday. Hits theaters July 25, 2025:

From what I understand, they showed the entire movie with that audience as a surprise: https://deadline.com/2024/07/deadpool-wolverine-ryan-reynolds-hugh-jackman-comic-con-surprise-screening-1236022872/