Tears of the Kingdom. I did figure out where the tear in the Hebra geoglyph was and have gotten a bunch more since then. I went madlad and completed Gerudo second of the four areas despite Gerudo usually being the hardest area in these types of Zelda games, and honestly, the only really hard part of it was the temple boss, which took me a fair number of tries and a short detour from the temple for some cooking, but I eventually beat it when I discovered a trick for the second half of the fight. Now I’m just wandering the land filling the map some more and doing a bunch of side quests and shrines where I find them before I take on the Goron area third.

EDIT: I should note I’m not wandering without an objective, I wanted to make sure I visited Kakariko and Hateno villages at least. I actually spent almost my entire three-hour play session last night in and around Hateno doing side quests.

Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn’t just about story/aesthetics, it’s also about difficulty. Most young kids don’t have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.

I could split Nintendo games (I’ve played) into three groups based on target audience:

Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi

All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there’s more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.

Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)

This week in TotK I cleared the first temple (Wind Temple) and have been working on mopping up everything I can in the Hebra region so I have to spend the least time there possible moving forward. It was my least favorite part of BotW and TotK didn’t really change my opinion. One related question though: guides I’ve found say you don’t need to do the geoglyphs in order, but I’ve found the one in the northern snowfield and have combed the entire thing multiple times, including where the guides say you find the tear, but the tear is nowhere to be found. I got the one just outside Rito Village, which is supposed to be second, right away, it was readily available. Are the guides wrong, are you forced to pick them up in order?

The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.

This is especially true when it comes to traditional gender roles in the workplace. Women in Japan are often only hired as secretaries or “office ladies” in big companies, basically to shuffle papers and serve tea. Not exactly big decision-making roles. Heck, even making an announcement is likely a big thing in this regard for a Japanese company, if they actually follow through they could really be seen as progressive by Japanese standards.

I’m a week into Tears of the Kingdom and slowly unearthing my dormant skills from BotW. I don’t remember basic enemies being as strong as they are, or else I missed something about gaining stronger armor/defense. Plugging away and will get better over time, though.

Maybe not endless Mario movies, but more Nintendo movies for sure. I’ve seen rumors that about an animated Zelda movie floating around with the success of Mario.

As laughable as it sounds, the Sega 32X. I was a Genesis kid and one birthday my parents bought me Star Wars Arcade not understanding that it required the 32X to play. I kept telling them that the game wouldn’t work without it (even showing them that it wouldn’t fit in the regular Genesis slot) and they kept insisting that I must be doing something wrong or that I could just cut the corners off the cartridge to make it fit. So I wanted the 32X to play Star Wars, as well as this strange Knuckles game I kept hearing about (which I know is Knuckles’ Chaotix). Never ended up getting one. Got an N64 soon after, much better decision.

Wouldn’t the Japanese model also have a much larger library of games available and be able to use the RAM carts to boost performance?

I just started the other day, so about 4. 😋 Just got to the Temple of Time, so assuming I’m about to leave tutorial island.

Game Sack is a long-running channel that’s one of the best retro game channels IMO. They release a video every week or two. MetalJesusRocks and his endless quest for Hidden Gems is also very good.

True, the Joy-Cons do have the notorious drift issue, but that’s not really a form factor issue. Improvements in form factor can help fix the issue, most importantly an increase in size to fit all the components in comfortably, but the source of the issue wasn’t the form factor of the Joy-Cons.

Though yeah, I would look at primarily making the Joy-Cons, or at least the grip they come with, bigger to actually account for the hands of a person above the age of 8. We know, Nintendo, you mainly think of video games as children’s toys, but you may want to look at gamer demographics, even on your own consoles, again. They don’t need to make them too much bigger, but at least big enough to not cramp a person’s fingers trying to use a single Joy-Con turned on its side.

Yeah, this screams “extreme otaku” (in the Japanese meaning of the word).

Not Strikers, I have enough musou-style games and I don’t need another one. I haven’t seen Tactica’s trailer yet, but if it’s a strategy RPG like Fire Emblem or Triangle Strategy I’ll probably get it since that’s my favorite genre.

Almost at the end of the vanilla portion of my 100-hour journey through Persona 5 Royal. That’ll leave just the extra semester/true ending left to play before I can finally move on to Tears of the Kingdom, lol. I tend not to play more than one game at a time, especially not really big games like P5R or TotK. Each deserves my full attention or I’d never finish them.

I think part of the Pokemon situation is that there is still a strong competitive scene for at least some older generations on legitimate hardware, for gathering Pokémon if not for battling them (you need a gen 3 cart to get a legitimate Jirachi off of Pokemon Colosseum/XD, for example), so there is still high demand from the competitive community for many of those older games. Some pokemon can still be very difficult to get legit versions of without the older gen games due to them being only limited releases otherwise.