Helmsly

and of course... i frigging overslept and missed tonight races

oh man, it's Thursday already?!

A few posters for the upcoming Ghostbusters movie just came out:

Yeah, Lego Fortnite is pretty good. The first day that it came out i gave it a go and then a good four and a half hours later and I was still playing and wasn't aware how much time had past. It's quite a feat that they made Lego versions of so many of skins. My friend and I attempted to make an ewok treetop village but it didn't quite work out... The racing game is a lot of fun too, i finally got my first win last night!. I also like the Rock Band mode they added, but its not possible to play that on a Pro Controller as some songs will ask you to press Left and Right on the D-pad at the same time. I use the Joycons for that mode and it plays fine though.

First game this year: Tetris 99 Games played: 55 Total time: 1,476 hours Most played: Fortnite: 962 hours. Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed : 136 hours. Zelda Tears of a Kingdom : 82 hours It is crazy to me that a year ago I had not played Fortnite outside of trying it out a few times back when it first came out on the Switch. Then randomly, on Boxing day last year, i felt like playing it. I had a weird nostalgia for a game I'd played maybe three times, 4 years ago. It was good timing too as Epic had recently added a lot of content as well as No Build mode, which was perfect for someone like me that found that aspect a little daunting to get used to. Before I knew it, I'd played a few hours and was enjoying it so I mentioned it to a friend. He wanted to give it a try too so he got online and by chance a friend of his mentioned he started playing as well. We played more games and won a few times and pretty quickly we were having a blast with it. We were so surprised to find out what this game is actually like compared to the assumptions we'd made about it. Pretty quickly we were saying to each other how it was the most fun we'd had in an online video game for a very long time, playing for a couple of hours a day. We could not believe it. I'll never convince people that have never played Fortnite and assume its bad, to give it a go, but I genuinely think it's fantastic. The way they update the map and keep the game fresh is one of the best things I've seen in any online game. Each new Chapter they roll out every 3/4 months basically makes the game feel like you are now playing its sequel. It's pure fun Also I want to make a noticeable mention to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge. I played that game a lot this year thanks to the Dimension Shellshock DLC that came out midway though the year and had some fun games on there with @Glen-i and @BowserBasher

Nintendo have put up their Year in Review site like they did last year, which shows stats of your most played games: https://year-in-review.nintendo.com/

Another Max Cup/Grand Prix announced. This time for Super Mario Bros Wonder

I saw this animatronic Star Wars toy on the Tested YouTube channel around a year ago and thought it looked really cool. I've not seen the show its from, so I don't actually know anything about it other then its a Star Wars Droid, but it reminded me of the Robots from the 80's movie Batteries Not included, so I picked it up on a recent sale a week or so ago:

Yeah its pretty crazy. I started playing it last night and realised pretty quickly that it is a full fledged game in its own right and that has almost nothing to do with Fortnite other then you can use Lego versions of skins from Fortnite. I teamed up a with a friend and we spent a good 4 hours or so building up a little town, crafting stuff, battling enemies, raiding a cave for materials. It's great. Its something I find strange though... because this would be like, if Nintendo released a full blown Wave Race or F-zero sequel... as a free update to Tears of the Kingdom. If you wanted to play those games, instead of them being separate games on your Switch menu, instead you would start up Zelda and choose to play F-zero from the title screen. It's bizarre. Also, like you said, the name with make people just assume its a Fortnite map with Lego character's, rather then its own game. Rocket racing comes out tonight and after playing the Lego mode I am very excited for it.

I'm very optimistic over it, they added a Minecraft style Lego mode into Fortnite the other night and its pretty great. I am not sure why they didn't make it its own game, it has enough content to be one. Plus... it literally is a different game. Its so bizarre they released a new game inside another very different game. But, If Rocket Racing is of the same quality as that then it'll be great deal more then just a side mode in Fortnite.

Universal Studios Japan has shown off what the new Donkey Kong area of the theme park will look like. They also revealed it will be called Donkey Kong Country: And also some of the stuff you'll be able to buy there:

yeah, once it leaked there wasn't much they could do other then release it officially ahead of the scheduled time they had originally intended to release it. And yeah, like the video you linked to mentioned, these leaks are almost always about online clout. Even worse in this case because the guy who uploaded it had "BUY $BTC" in large letters obscuring the middle of the screen lol: I never thought I would see a tweet like this from them Rockstar:

The Trailer leaked on Twitter/X about five minutes ago so Rockstar North have decided to release it officially, ahead of schedule, just now

The next Grand Prix/Maximus Cup is for Wario Ware Move It!: From the 1st of to the 5th December

I have such fond memories The Dreamcast, it was an incredible console. For me it was the first non-Nintendo console that I was looking forward to and also the first time I had saved my own money to buy one. I was never a Sega fan enough to want to own their consoles but everything i had read about the Dreamcast just sounded perfect for me. I still remember the day it came out, I left our house first thing in the morning and went to my local Gamestation to buy the console. I brought it but there was a problem: they ran out of copies of Sonic Adventure and had not stocked any VMU memory cards. I walked down to Virgin Megastore and luckily they had Sonic but unluckily they didn't have any VMU's. So next off i went to electronic boutique, they didn't want to sell me a memory card because i had purchased the console from another store (ridiculous!) but they changed their mind and let me buy it. I remember getting home and playing the demo disc that came with it, which had a demo for a game called Toy Commander which was a lot of fun to mess around in. I spent ages flying around this kitchen doing stupid stuff like shooting slices of toast to make them catch on fire or flying the helicopter around and using it to pick up and drop sugar cubes into a cup of coffee on the table. That level of freedom in a 3D environment, without any pop-up textures with that amount of interactivity felt really cool (obviously its nothing to what we can do today, but at the time it was a step up from anything i had played before and also just a lot of fun) I then played Sonic Adventure and was just amazed at how it looked. As @Dcubed mentioned in his awesome post, the jump in the visuals from what had come out in recent years was amazing. I kept replaying the first level just to see that Whale smash through the pier: And I think that was one of the major things about the Dreamcast, its not just something you look back on to see how impressive it was because at the time you could tell this was a significant jump from what consoles could do before. Games like Soul Calibur were, as far as I could tell, Arcade Perfect. You were seeing Arcade games in your home with no compromises. But what was also great about the Dreamcast was that Sega didn't just rely on arcade ports. They had new and original games like Jet Set Radio, which really was like nothing else I'd ever played. Not only was it original with its gameplay, it had its own look and style that was so different to anything else before it. But then to add to that, it had an amazing soundtrack (which I still listen to ocassionally). Sega had made good use of everything the console could do. Not only was JSR original, they did as much as they could with it. You could make your own Graffiti as well as upload and download others creations in the options. If you had the space on a extra memory card, you could download a JPEG from the Dreamcasts Web Browser (DreamKey ) and use that image as a spray. Then there is the online functionally. The fact that, not only could the Dreamcast do this at a time when the internet itself was in such an early stage for the average Joe, but that the modem and cable needed to do so, came with the console: Everyone that had a Dreamcast could browse the internet from it as well as play games online. My first ever Online game was Phantasy Star Online thanks to the Dreamcast and I will never forget when I connected it all up and was loaded into a lobby. I saw other characters walking around that were clearly being controlled real people and everyone was talking to each other through word bubbles: This was a amazing moment. I had read about what it was like to be online in reviews before hand but to actually see it in motion before my eyes was incredible. I remember having a big smile on my face just seeing a room full of people tall talking and trying to help each other get started, asking how to start up a game etc. Online gaming was something I knew about already but experiencing it really felt like I was seeing part of the future in some way. This game had a huge impact on my life in that, I played it for so long, buying the upgraded version a year later and then playing the next version on Gamecube, that I made friends that I talk to on a daily basis to this day. I was talking to one of my online friends the other day how crazy it is that we've all known each other online for two decades. All thanks to this game. And then there was Shenmue: I really don't know where to start with this. I didn't know to expect from this game when I brought it other then it was supposed to be a big deal. I remember being both a amazed at the graphics as well as the level of interactively. Generally, up until that point, the better a 3D game looked, the less you could actually do in the world. But with this game, not only did it look amazing and a huge leap anything else around but you could walk into every single shop on the high street, talk to every thing NPC you saw, inspect loads of random things around the house and in the stores. Or wonder to the local arcade and play older Sega Arcade games: Every character you saw walking around, wasn't a random NPC the game had just spawned before you walked around the corner. They had individual models, names, a home and a full daily routine you could watch if you wanted to (that would change on weekends). They changed what they said depending on what they were doing and what time of the day it was as well as say different things as Ryo learned more about what was going on and the story progressed. Just being aware of the amount of dialog they must have recorded in this game, as bad as the voice acting is, was crazy. The changing weather, the fact that every store had its own unique music playing inside it, the streets had different music depending on what time of the day it was... I just could not get my head around the level work that must have gone into making this game. It was incredible. But I was also very much aware of its faults. The voice acting for one, the controls are a little stiff and I don't think the real time fighting ever truly felt good. It's certainly a flawed game but I think what they were trying to do at this time, is so impressive that I have always been able to overlook the not-so-good stuff and value the things it did so well. Also, I will never forget the routine I had in real life at that time, working overnights in real life then coming home and working as a Forklift driver in Shenmue to help him learn who killed his father lol. This game has stuck with me more as an experience because it was doing so much and was just fascinating to be a part of when it came out. I could go on but what I am getting at is that I just loved this console so much. In its short life it gave me so many great fun memories, from the games I mentioned to all the multiplayer fun I had with my friends in games like Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Power Stone 2, to playing online games, that it's always been my favorite console for just how much it did right. It's such a shame it didn't get a full life but it stands to something that all these years later it is still talked about it gets mentioned on the anniversary of its release. It really was such a great machine. Sadly, my Dreamcast broke down in 2002 (the cd drives are prone to wear out pretty quickly on them) and I have had to buy a replacement but I still have my original day one Dreamcast in my cupboard, back in its box and I'm never getting rid of it because I'm sentimental about it. It came out the same year I turned 18, later that year I got my first job and was spending my first pay check on games for it. Later on in 2001, I moved out into my own flat it, it was the first thing i set up when I moved in and sat among all my moving-in boxes playing Marvel Vs Capcom 2 lol And one last thing: During the 3DS's lifetime they released a Dreamcast background theme for it. It'd designed so the background resembles the Dreamcasts menu complete with the same navigation sounds. It also plays the Lobby music from Phantasy Star Online, which was just perfect! It even plays the whirring sound of the Dreamcasts fan and the high pitch beep the VMU's made when you turned the console on. Around the time this theme came out Sega posted this on their twitter to show how they achieved that lol: If they ever had something like this on the Switch 2, i'd get it right away. Well Said

I ordered that too, along with a Mario Wonder keychain and pin badge. They arrived this morning:

I love that they added a sound test with this final update. You can even press Y to hear how the music changes on certain tracks, such as the underwater sections in dolphin shoals, the tunnel section in Super Bell Subway. You can also hear all 4 versions of the music from the Animal Crossing track. I also like the new Mii costumes, they're perfectly ridiculous I also like that they gave the booster course its own set of end credits with a nice medley of the music. The end screen is nice too, it reminds of the end splash screens a lot of Nintendo 64 games had.

It will probably come back at some point. They sometimes have special event once a year where you can unlock old themes

or this:

Ghostbusters Frozen empire:

Here’s the trailer

The Twitch app is going to be discontinued on Switch early next year: I found that it barely worked. If you ever tried to watch a stream that had commercials, they would loop endlessly or you would get a message informing you that you "cannot view this channel on this device". The only time I got it to work properly was if i put my own channel on (I would use my Switch as a second screen to make sure it was broadcasting properly). I do find it annoying that rather then improving the app they're ending it though. It was barely on Switch for two years. And it seems hardly anyone knew it existed lol

Wave Six details: New tracks: Wii - Rainbow Road. Tour - Madrid Drive GCN - DK mountain SNES - Bowsers Castle 3 Tour - Rome Avanti Wii - Daisy Circuit Piranha Plant Cave 3DS - Rosalina's Ice World And Funky Kong, Diddy Kong, Pechette and Pauline as the new drivers Also comes with new Mii Costumes: (Seems Inkling boy and girl has been consolidated into one character slot now) And a costume for Daisy's Amiibo: Also a soundtest mode for this games amazing soundtrack: Some more random screenshots:

I'm glad you enjoyed it @darksnowman The game always felt like the third Ghostbusters movie we never got (until we kinda did a couple of years ago) and like you said, it's fun but does not outstay its welcome. It's a game i seem to revisit once every year because its a fun experience to play through. Hearing the Ghostbusters naturally chat with each other as you wonder around is looking for ghosts is just a joy. I really liked the Slime-tether upgrade and I wish they did more with it, I remember having fun sticking random objects to the ceiling, like trash cans and planks of wood just to mess around with the physics. its such a cool upgrade. I also enjoyed walking around the fire house nosing around and seeing the easter eggs they put around. Also, It's funny you mention a character customisation option, the latest Ghostbusters game (which just came out on switch) has that, although that game is multiplayer focused.