Yes, PokéMondays is back. And so am I. If anything, I’m consistently inconsistent.
Today, I can happily report a long time hunt finally coming to a close. This one I didn’t keep track of the number of times I soft-reset the game. But it was a lot. I actually started this hunt a while ago. Not sure exactly when, but I know it was before Thanksgiving 2024. If I had to guess I’d say it was around 10k resets. It took so long I thought I somehow broke the game or corrupted the save file that would prevent it from ever appearing shiny. Then one night about two weeks ago while watching the original How To Train Your Dragon movie*, it finally popped. I had to pause the movie so I can drink in the moment.
The above is the encounter. Here it is after capture:
Here it is in storage:
And here is its summary:
It’s so beautiful! And I had to use the Master Ball, natch. ‘Cause a color-matching Pokéball is the best Pokéball. I’ll eventually transfer it to Pokémon Home via Pokémon Bank. But I first need to get me a Shiny Shaymin.
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* – We wanted to watch it before seeing the live-action remake. If you haven’t seen the either one, it doesn’t matter if you see the original. The remake is like 99% shot-for-shot which is good and bad at the same time. Good because the original was a good movie, why change anything and risk making it worse? Bad because if you’ve seen the original there’s little reason to see the remake. On that note, I will say that the twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut seemed to be missing a certain chemistry in the remake. I found them to be more enjoyable in the original.
I’ve written this review twice now. Not just started, but fully written the whole thing. The last version was 3000 words – all of that is to say, I’ve got some opinions on this particular set. The first version of the review was probably going to be pretty divisive, because I mostly reviewed the box and never actually opened it.
It wasn’t really a joke, it was more of a long story about what the Nintendo Entertainment System means to me, and the rather complex place that it has in my life and history. I had this set for well over a year before I ever opened it, and when I wrote that, I didn’t think I was going to. I have a lot of deep reasons for that, and I’m still going to touch on them (so, content warning for mental health and childhood trauma).
I’m still not going to review a lot of the set… because, honestly, this is the sort of set you’re either going to buy or you’re not. I don’t know that my words are going to sway you on it. The NES set runs $270 in the US, and if you don’t have some kind of connection to it, you’re not going to get it. This isn’t a set you play with, it’s one you build and enjoy, and then it’s going to sit there. It’s packed with little details, but it also needs you to have a personal hook. As I said, I wasn’t even planning on building it, but it turned into something that I did with my daughter, and we built the whole thing together, which turned into something special for us both.
I’m also going to crap all over nostalgia… because I’ve come to realize exactly how toxic that’s become as a thing. I mean, spoilers for the final thoughts and all, I really like this set, but there’s also something about it that just feels somewhat dissonant. Worse, it’s something that gets exploited all the time in nerd circles, with all kinds of products, kickstarters, special releases, video games, and basically every other single product that gets made these days.
The proportions are good on the set, but it’s smaller and doesn’t look quite right, especially when you sit it next to the real thing. For the record… that’s my wife’s original Nintendo. Mine was among several things that were stolen in college.
There isn’t a console more iconic than the Nintendo Entertainment System. There have been more popular consoles (the PlayStation 2 remains the best selling Console of all time, though it seems likely that the Nintendo Switch could ultimately surpass it), and it certainly wasn’t the first (that’d be the Magnavox Odyssey). It wasn’t even the most visually striking console, as the western version was a gray plastic box that was arguably a step back from the stylized lines of the Atari consoles that drove the console market into the ground just a few years before its launch.
Yet it’s instantly recognizable to almost anyone that cares about video games in the slightest, and to most people who don’t. It’s remembered, fondly and sometimes jokingly, by a whole generation that gathered around it to play the games that define the industry. The game that launched the console just passed a billion dollars in it’s by-the-numbers (but still entertaining) theatrical release. It’s been released as a mini console, the games have been released (and hoisted on many a sail) countless times, resold, and are collector’s items. The funny thing is that the only console you could maybe make a case to challenge it is the other gray plastic hunk from Nintendo, the original Game Boy, and how many of you even knew that the Tetris movie even came out back in April?
For me, personally, the Nintendo Entertainment System is arguably the most important video game system in my life. I don’t know if there’s a singular thing I can point to in my life that has a more centralized place in my life or development or childhood as a whole than it does. The NES sits very firmly in my most formative years… I had a friend whose older brother had a Deluxe Set when it first hit the wider US in 1986, complete with that terrible R.O.B. and Gyromite game no one could ever get to work, and we would occasionally get to play and enjoy Duck Hunt or Super Mario Bros. The daycare provider we stayed at got one in… 1987, and I ended up getting my one for myself in Christmas of 1989.
The details of the set, and how functional it is, are the little things that make it fun to build.
I’d gotten my own 19″ TV earlier in the year as well to enjoy, which was really fun. I’d actually gotten the TV because for most of 1987 and 1988, I’d spent pretty much every dollar I’d earned through allowance or chores renting an NES from local video rental places, and various games, and my father was sick of me taking his. He also used it as an excuse to get a bigger one, which was probably the stronger thing, but I wasn’t going to argue.
Tiger Heli and Jackal were two of my favorites, though there were several. I had been begging for an NES for Christmas that year, and had an idea it was coming, because I wasn’t allowed to rent a machine over Christmas break, despite having gotten one on the list at my local Phar-Mor (those of you old enough, and from a particular region of the US who remember what those places were, likely just got some big flashbacks).
I bought this set shortly after it came out… and then it just stat there, on a shelf, before my daughter and I built it – next to the Saturn V I still haven’t built and the system scale Razor Crest that also hasn’t been built. Spoiler, she really wants to build that Saturn V and doesn’t give one tiny iota of a crap about the Razor Crest. I’ve somehow raised a kid who doesn’t like Sci-Fi, and if she wasn’t a tiny smart-ass who lives on snark and science, I’d wonder if she was mine (but no… she’s so much like me I assume it’s the Universe making some sort of karmic point).
By 1989, the NES was well into its lifecycle and simply dominated everything. I had notebooks full of sketches of Link and Mario, drawing my own levels and games. I remember that Christmas well, it was full of presents. I got this great wooden storage box with Link and Mario on it, but the Nintendo wasn’t in that. There were some G.I. Joe toys in that box. I got a Super Mario shirt in there as well. The box would go on to become my chair, my storage box for all things games, a makeshift desk, something for my G.I. Joes to storm against Cobra, and so many other things.
Inserting the cartridge is interesting in theory, but in practice, it doesn’t work well at all. It gets stuck very easily and the springs are just overmatched by the weight. The door mechanism also can be knocked off really easily, because so much bulk is put on the front of it compared to the top.
The Nintendo itself was wrapped in this odd shape present that my dad took great pleasure in putting together. It wasn’t shaped like a Nintendo box, it was much shorter and chunkier, shaped kind of like an L with a few odd-shaped bits coming off of it. Things were tucked away in places, and when I opened it, the first thing I found was the AC adapter, then the Zapper, and likely there was a whole lot of screaming. It’s been 33 years, and these memories are vivid and stuck in my mind, and still bring some smiles to my face.
That’s the power of nostalgia, and why it gets mined so heavily by companies when they do things like make the Nintendo Entertainment System LEGO set, release old throwback toys, and acres of overpriced throwback merch that’s made for pennies and will end up in a landfill in a few years while the planet burns around us. Nostalgia is a double-edged sword, and that’s the sinister side of it, because our memories are so precious, but they can be so quickly weaponized against us.
It works because those memories are so vivid, so engrained in us, so remembered that they bubble up to the surface. That is a happy memory of me at Christmas, with my dad giving me a bunch of gifts and his putting so much effort. The hope, of course, is that they can turn and get the next thing, while we forget all of the other things. Every brand out there is trying to figure out how to get more money out of us and get the emotional response by putting in no effort themselves. They can instead just hold up the old thing and go, “look, this thing you remember” and expect us to pay up.
The saddest thing is that more often than not, they’re right.
I’d joke and say that my leaving that panel slightly askew was intentional just to bug someone, but it’s more that no matter how much I tried, those panels just wouldn’t stay flush. I tried, and tried, and tried. But they would just keep coming up. Those large plates do not impress me, LEGO.
A big reason this set sat in the box for so long is because happy memories are not the only memories that the NES brings up for me. I played a lot of Nintendo as a kid. I mean, hell, I still play a lot of Nintendo as a man in my mid-40s. But when I got mine, I in the middle of the worst years of my life, the last good Christmas I ever remember with my family, and surrounded by so much terrible that when I think of it now I’m somewhat amazed I got through it (relatively) sane. The NES was so important to me as a child because it’s where I escaped from the truly awful things going on. I cannot break those memories from the good, and I wouldn’t want to.
I don’t use “worst years” in an over-exaggerated sense here like some 80s movies cliche because of some family strife or poor white kid going through a divorce or some nonsense. I wasn’t looking to start a band and turn it into a career whining about it. During this time, I was front-and-center to witness my brother’s accidental death and drowning, which can of trauma on a nine year old. This was followed by the death of the grandparent I was closest to, my whole family basically collapsing from the grief and trauma of it, starting to work around 14 (and haven’t stopped since, really) and me spending the rest of my formative years more or less providing-for and taking care of myself. Those are the memories that the NES also brings back to me.
So getting that NES in 1989 was exciting because for a few moments, I could forget all of that, lose myself in video games, and sit in front of a television playing Tiger Heli until I got angry after learning there was no ending, and the stupid-ass game just looped and started over when you got to the end. That little gray box would basically be my life for the next few years, because I wouldn’t have any friends or social life or anything else going on.
That little side bit pops off, just like it does on the NES. Just like on the NES, it serves absolutely no purpose. So… it’s an amazingly accurate, faithful, and pointless feature.
You wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with me either, because I was depressed and sad and angry. I wasn’t bathing, or taking care of myself, because I was hurt and scared and in pain – there was a bit of therapy for a few months, but it eventually went away and no one else in my family went to it, just me and my cousins. My dad checked out after that Christmas, and ultimately never recovered from it. Neither did our relationship; it had ceased to exist a long time before he died.
There were moments that we had, briefly, like when the Super Nintendo came out and we got Pilotwings and played it together. He loved planes, so that was a bonding experience, but I loved video games and was good at them, he wasn’t, so eventually stopped playing it with me because I’d win and he couldn’t cheat to get ahead.
Part of me will always cling to those little memories that we had, because even though in the grand scheme, there was more bad than good, there is still that little bit of good. And I wrestle with it when I see stuff like the NES set from LEGO, which, ostensibly, is a fantastic set. But it’s preying on memories like this, asking us to focus on the positive and putting a huge price tag on it, but it’s going to plumb a lot of things that many of us are probably not willing to look at. If I’ve learned anything about my generation, that Late Gen-X/Early Millennial crowd, it’s that we’ve got a whole lot of baggage we don’t know what to do with but is seemingly very easy to market to. We were the target of the 80s cartoon and toy boom, and that stuff was a proxy and filler for a lot of things that were missing.
The Warp Zone is a really nice touch, but I think this would have been way more fun if it was World 1-1 instead. World 1-2 is fun, but World 1-1 has the power to make anyone between the ages of 35 and 48 start singing the Mario Theme just by flashing the world start card.
Obviously, I have a deep emotional connection to the NES… a lot of people my age do. That’s why nostalgia works so well, and why so companies are hitting it so hard right now. If you see something and just think, oh, that’s cool, I remember that, you’re a whole lot less to buy something than if you look at it and immediately flash back to the moment when you enjoyed it. In truth, that’s probably why it why LEGO lost its hold over me… because it was Star Wars that had the hold on me, never really LEGO. I’ve talked about it here before, but LEGO wasn’t a big part of my childhood.
I never mentioned LEGO in those stories above. I got stuff like G.I. Joe, Nintendo, and some other stuff that Christmas. Oh, and of course, my precious, precious, Go-Bots. My building toy of choice as a kid was Construx. I had LEGO, in that big red snap-lid box that basically all 80s kids had. I built houses with it at first, and eventually built barricades and forts for my G.I. Joe toys. I owned one classic Space Set, I think, the little buggy, but mostly just had basic bricks and wheels, the motor with the big-ass key, stuff like that.
It wasn’t until LEGO Star Wars came out, and being able to build and swoosh the things I loved that LEGO got their hooks into me hard. The stuff that still tempts me is the stuff that hits those things that I love. LEGO was the medium, and it was an exceptionally cool one, but not the part that drew me in. My love for LEGO stuff was all formed as an adult, and almost all of the things that I have picked up and keep now have some deeper connection. That Saturn V I mentioned before that I haven’t gotten around to building? It’s because I like the actual space sets, because those things were so important to me as a kid while Classic Space as a theme was not.
As I’ve aged, my tastes and interests have changed. I’ve looked back and reflected, and thought about my childhood and thought about trauma and pain and anxiety, and what I enjoy has changed a lot. Yeah, part of it is me taking a very cynical view of how much of this is all marketing FOMO from companies worth billions trying to squeeze us for every dime we have at a time when too many are struggling to buy groceries, and those of us who are well off are dealing with the reality that things like houses are likely out of our reach now.
Criticisms aside, it’s still a nifty little set. The biggest knock I have on it is that those controller ports are just absolute junk for actually holding the controller.
It’s this little dichotomy that’s at play in the NES set as you see it together. You turn the crank, and just instinctively, you start humming the Super Mario Bros. theme song. If you’re my age, you simply cannot help it. You look at this television, and you almost want to bang on the corners of it to bang on it a bit to fix the picture, blow on the cartridge (which didn’t work), and get a well worn copy of Nintendo power.
Nintendo also banks on their name and nostalgia having you forget all the nonsense that surrounded their consoles (and still does – Nintendo makes great games but they’re an evil company). Like the fact that the games cost upwards of $60 in the 1980s – something that Nintendo lost a lawsuit for on price fixing, which is probably why rental was such a big deal back then, the system itself cost a ton as well. You think “that’s the same that games cost now,” but that’s almost $150 today – and games are overpriced today because they ignore economies of scale and are grossly propped up by other things like micro-transactions and price fixing (which apparently that lawsuit didn’t fix).
I look at this LEGO set, and see it at $270 (and that’s after a price increase, it was $230 at first) and think “that’s not so bad for a LEGO set” and part of my brain just wants to reach around and slap me for giving in to how much LEGO has managed to shift my idea of “that’s not too bad” in such a short amount of time. The “adult range” for LEGO has become something just truly terrible that’s mining this nostalgia range, and we have to be getting dangerously close to that first $1000 set. Even regular sets are going up, with Collectible Minifigs up to $5, smaller sets shrinking but going up and the average price range seemingly settling around the $40-50 range these days. Yeah, there are smaller sets, even some nice smaller ones, but shelves are dominated by the bigger stuff, and all of the things that are targeted at us, are way more.
The cartridge is where the size difference is really shown off. I also really wish that it would have had Duck Hunt on there too, but no way they were going to include a Zapper in this set. Which, fun fact, you can’t even use on modern TVs anymore. RIP Zapper… that stupid jerk of a dog really did have the last laugh.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that LEGO should be putting them out for free or anything… they’re just a company out to make money. Looking at this set, which is a great set, I have to consider more why I like things like this. As my 40s have gone along, I increasingly find myself going “that’s cool, but I don’t really care” more and more when I see things like that. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things, I haven’t cared about picking up all the collectables and tat and things like that. The funny thing is that when it comes to memories, the things that I’ve started to value aren’t the things that remind me of the memories, but the actual memories. It’s why I don’t care about buying a whole bunch of new “inspired by D&D” stuff, but I’ve been buying all kinds of old D&D books.
Dealing with my own mental health in the past couple of years, something that is a constant struggle and journey, has made me really question and wonder why I hold on to some of these things. The Nintendo was something like that… a few years ago, I might have thought of that as something that was an overwhelmingly positive part of my youth, because I may not have thought about how much of it was just glossing over all the bad things. Those bad things were always there, I just sort of sectioned them off and didn’t think about them.
I’ve never been one for going back and trying to relive the past, to try and enjoy “classic” versions of old things.World of Warcraft was an example of that, which I enjoyed fondly before learning how much of a dumpster fire Blizzard was of a company (and now it’s just a guilty, guilty pleasure), I had no interest in WoW Classic. I wasn’t the person I was when the game first came out, so I wasn’t ever going to be able to play it the same way and enjoy it the same way. I didn’t want to be that person again or enjoy things the same way. I had no interest in going back, or spending that amount of time, in the game.
I wonder how they could have gotten some texture on the grip area of the cartridge. That’s one of the most annoying parts of trying to get it out should you happen to try and press the cart down into the console.
Nintendo was really the same… playing old NES games is a fun diversion for a little bit, but I never found the “comfort food” aspect of it like I do with, say, going back and playing Mass Effect or Call of Duty or a game like that. Maybe because games like that I don’t have as complex feelings on, or the stuff I remember about them come with a lot more fun.
Honestly, I think about that when I go think about the next system as well, the Super Nintendo, and how much different some of those things would be if I was thinking about it. I talk about a couple of games that I played with my dad, but what’s really more important to me are some games that I played with friends I made in high school, and the common bonds we formed playing them together and just getting obsessed. I haven’t talked to some of them in years, decades at this point, I guess, but I can still put in Super Metroid or Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past and smile because I get some happy nostalgia in there too. Plenty of bad, but always some good, and Nintendo sitting in there with it.
That should, ideally, work both ways, which is why the recent article on Gizmodo hit home for me while I was thinking about rewriting this kind-of-review for the third time. If companies want to come at us with nostalgia, we should be able to remember all the terrible crap they do too when they’re asking for our money (especially in this economy). Like how Nintendo routinely issues frivolous takedowns on YouTubers, abuses copyright strikes, and uses the legal system to financially ruin people that do no material harm to their company. Which is why I have no qualms about talking sailing the seven seas when it comes to Nintendo, something I usually take issue with, but increasingly with big companies… you know what, screw ’em.
Fun side fact, if I really felt like flaunting my poor impulse control, I’d show off that not only do I have a little Raspberry Pi 4 that was in that tiny NES case… I was going through a box of old unfinished projects a few months ago and found six of them. Turns out when I wanted to work on a project, back before they became impossible to find, I’d just go buy a new one. I should sell the things.
Yet, I’m still not really all that driven to go out and spend hundreds and hundreds to relive it all at this point. A local shop near me has a metal replica of the Master Sword and Hylian Shield and it’s always been “oh, that’s cool” and never so much as glanced at the price tag. A sticker from time to time? Sure. But honestly don’t know that I feel like buying any LEGO sets or action figures or anything else like that at this point.
Part of it is just… saturation. It feels like the well has struck bottom when they’re dredging up what they are at this point. Maybe it’s peak pop culture, or maybe that I’ve never gotten along with meme culture in general, or who knows. There’s just so much coming out that feels like hacky retread anymore and its tiresome. Remasters, revisits, rewatch podcasts. Stuff I genuinely like that I can’t be bothered to get to because it’s just the same thing again, so I’d rather go back and enjoy the old thing that I know I like.
The controller is so… strange. It’s simultaneously recognizable but also just off. The start and select are too small, the red buttons are too big, and the cable was presumably made that short so the NES mini wasn’t as stupid anymore. Also, as I mentioned earlier, that plug is garbage and it needed another pass in development.
It’s possible to go back and revisit things and make it work, and work between the things that get lumped in under nostalgia, fan service, or throwback. The recent season of Star Trek: Picard mostly managed to do that well, which was impressive, because the first two seasons of that show were somehow the worst seasons of Star Trek ever made. The latest one was good (though it leaned heavily into nostalgia), and was very well acted.
The Mandalorian is an example the other way, where it reaches back into things that have meaning, but I wouldn’t lump it into nostalgia… or even fan service most of the time (though it certainly can be guilty of it). The recent season and it’s focus on the greater Mandalorian culture, and Bo Katan in specific, was not reliving a hugely revered part of the setting helped (though her stories were great in Rebels and Clone Wars).
A third example that’s a strange case where there’s fan service that works well, but has effectively no nostalgia to it, would be the Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves. It’s a film that’s far, far better than it has any right to be, and it certainly leaned heavily into the game… but there’s nothing there that people look to longingly which they’re trying to sell us again. At best it’s marketing for the current game, but it’s more a love letter to the spirit of the game, and it did that exceptionally.
Putting the controller next to real controllers really amplifies the size mismatch, since the controller is not the same scale as the console. Which makes sense, since you’re going to hold it, but once you put them next to each other, it looks very strange.
Of course, Wizards is just an absolutely god awful company that can’t help but squander any positive momentum or good will it has. It’s somehow managed to piss off its customer base twice in the past six months, enough that it had an effect on Hasbro’s stock price and outlook. Yeah, we had a movie, and they were in full damage control leading up to it because they made everyone angry that played the game in January after basically trying to end everything about the D&D ecosystem and more or less kill every 3rd party publisher and get them to all go looking elsewhere.
It’s not a coincidence that Critical Role, the most popular D&D game (which is not owned or run by Wizards), is creating their own system now. They’d finally managed to earn some of that back, and then answered it by sending Pinkertons to a small streamers house and threaten him for opening unreleased Magic the Gathering boosters on stream. But hey, remember that terrible 80s cartoon? Nostalgia!
LEGO doesn’t have that sort of track record with sending union-busting thugs or abusing the takedown system on Youtube (well, that I know of), but they certainly are hitting the nostalgia well hard as they continually jack up prices and continue to expand the nostalgia market targeting adults. It’s only a matter of time till we see more FOMO tactics with the products… one of the saving graces of it thus far is that the products seem to linger on forever in the adult space. I’ve sat on this review for over a year and the set is still available to purchase, so there’s that.
Building the TV was both frustrating, in that it’s fiddly and tends to break in the middle, but so much fun once it all comes together and starts to work. You will just sit there and turn that crank for so long once you have the mechanism and the screen in place.
Nostalgia works though, it’s why companies are so quick to go after it. It’s also possible for it to be served and approached without it being exploitative. I’ll be honest… I don’t think that what LEGO is doing here is exploitative… the person who designed this set clearly loves Nintendo and put so much heart and soul into building it. There are little things here and there throughout the build that are likely to bring a rush of memories if you grew up in that era.
Not just Nintendo, even. The television is honestly a bigger standout in this set than the Nintendo is, which is odd. I won’t make jokes about only having four channels, because I had access to cable through my babysitter and we got it at home in 1988 or 1989 I think… I know we’d had it for awhile by the time the Iraq war started in 1990 (god, I’m old), because I watched it on CNN because that was a thing we did back then. We didn’t have the internet yet, so we had to get our lies about patriot missiles and the like directly from the television instead of digging around social media ourselves. Life was “better” back then. Come on LEGO, where’s my General “Stormin’ Normin” Schwarzkopf minifigure? That’s the minifigure that we need to make this television feel truly authentic.
My single favorite feature in the whole set, and the most innovative thing, are the dials on the front of the TV. It was disappointing that the power and reset buttons didn’t actually work… but that the dial both turned AND clicked brought me so much joy.
Nostalgia is effective, but one of the things that it ultimately lacks is that it cannot be communal – it’s not a shared feeling. Memories can be shared, but the feeling that nostalgia ultimately hits is something in our brain that’s something inherently personal and selfish.
That hit home as I was sitting there building this with my daughter. We were having so much fun building this set, while I was explaining things to her, telling her about my childhood – something that, honestly, she just never hears about because I don’t talk about it much. We had my iPad on and were watching YouTube on as well, but it were things we both enjoyed to watch together, like Mark Rober or Ann Reardon, or she was talking about Minecraft, the sets that LEGO will be go after her with in a couple of decades. Mostly, though, she was far more interested in the engineering and building techniques.
She’s played Super Mario Bros. She’s played on the NES mini and the classic NES games on Nintendo Switch. But they hold no special meaning for her. The Nintendo doesn’t either. The important thing about this set, if she looks back at those memories fondly, won’t likely have anything to do with the set… it will be the time that we spent together building it. There’s something great there that can be shared, but it’s nothing that can be hit at with nostalgia later.
Until she has kids of her own and is putting together some giant Creeper set I guess and talking about the time she and her dad were dealing with the stupid bottom of the LEGO Nintendo television set and how it comes apart because it’s not properly reinforced, so the torque of the gears will pull it apart.
If you had the problems I did with it coming apart from the torque of the gears, you know that the area on the left of this picture is the problem spot.
Sorry, I snuck in an actual review point there… but that’s my biggest issue with the set. It’s beautiful, but over-engineered. The gears on the bottom of the mechanism has too little clearance and it will just pull itself apart. We rebuilt the thing three times trying to get it to stay together.
We ended up building the set over a few weeks, since we were only doing a bag or two at a time, and couldn’t do it every night. Ten-year-olds are stupidly busy, and that doesn’t make sense to me… they’re ten, but they are somehow. It was also around the holidays when we building it, so that didn’t help.
Too often, nostalgia just ends up as the thing that’s waved as the “remember this” and that’s all there is to it. To use an analogy… it comes off like that person you know who quotes a line from a movie that was funny and thinks he just told a joke. At it’s most craven, that’s all it is, just pointless consumerism that’s out there. We’re getting close to Comic Con season, and we’re about to be absolutely thick with it, when nostalgia gets wrapped around FOMO and all the worst bits of everything.
I don’t know exactly why it feels like it’s gotten worse lately, because I know it’s a myth that nothing new happens. New things happen all the time, it’s just that they’re never remembered the same, because they can’t prey on the same emotional hooks like nostalgia can. We remember all the remakes, reboots, and things like that in popular entertainment because they’re preying on nostalgia to work. They always have… and contrary to the trope, this isn’t recent, the entertainment industry has always been about this.
The TV stand feels like such an afterthought, it’s flimsy and requires you to position it just right. It doesn’t sit centered on the bottom, either, it’s slightly off so that it falls in a bit, but the whole thing feels like it’s one elbow away from a trip to rebuild town.
It’s more apparent with media the exploitative nature of nostalgia and how they try to farm it, which is probably why they don’t bother a lot of the time. They can get away with reboots and remakes that don’t rely on nostalgia, and instead are trying to capture a new and different audience. After all, this time remaking Spider-man or Batman will be the real winner, right? Assuming we ignore the hundreds of millions of dollars the last one made to pretend it didn’t exist.
That’s not to say that nostalgia doesn’t exist there… it certainly does. The sheer amount of “sequel” series that come out these days makes that apparent. Star Trek Picard was probably the worst offender I can think of for that in recent memory, especially with the most recent season (which, again, I thought was good). The advertising and marketing leading up to the launch of the new season consisted of a three step process:
Get rid of nearly every character that didn’t have a legacy connection
Show off pictures of characters that fans love
Remind everyone that the old characters were coming back constantly
Elsewhere we see that cycle repeat, again and again and again. Let’s bring it back to LEGO, where I talked about this in my AT-ST review, they keep revisiting a well that hits older vehicles and ships that aren’t going to carry all of the same connections and love to younger audiences (in other words, ostensibly, LEGO’s target audience).
There’s a reader on the top of the television, when you remove the top panel, specifically for the Mario LEGO thing. It’s a fun little feature… if anything I just wish they’d made it support more than the Mario fig.
The more that companies keep relying on the nostalgia engine to pump out merchandise, the more they risk that it just dries up, ultimately. Or so you’d think. On one hand… the market is bigger and wider than it’s ever been right now, with more things being redone, more stuff being sold, and more companies trying to remake the same thing, than at any point before. There’s more money out there being spent… and honestly LEGO isn’t all that different. Yet there are signs that it’s already changing.
I’ll give credit where credit is due; my anti-corporate and anti-capitalism bend isn’t exactly a secret, but LEGO, despite not being our friend and constantly jacking up prices, has also been investing in factories and hiring workers while most other companies have been laying off workers and teams while their profits remain high. Their growth has been slowing, but still creeping upwards (after a year or two of drops, the first they’d seen in some time). Hasbro and Mattel are both sliding, with the prices greatly increasing and the quality dropping sharply. An example would be G.I. Joe getting a “classic” re-release line, where they brought back straight-arms, because why not reintroduce the feature that was so bad they dropped it after one year on something that’s been around for forty?
Every time though, we get a little more inoculated to it and it becomes easier to pass up on it. The Nintendo was a revelation and unique, the Atari was a surprise… but how do they follow up on it (it’s already been leaked… and it’s not at all exciting, but I won’t spoil it here). Nintendo can only re-release the same games so many times before people just tire of purchasing it and just move on, which is why so many don’t even bother with Switch Online or the even worse value plus version. So they start manipulating the nostalgia with some artificial scarcity and FOMO to make people jump on it, or gating it off instead. Things get tied up as convention exclusives, timed exclusives, or store exclusives… and after awhile they get forgotten.
That’s why ultimately memories are more important than nostalgia. Think about it for a minute, on all of the things that you think about when the new products come up… how many do you remember a few years after the fact? Or even months after the fact? Even when it comes to LEGO, how many of those old LEGO sets do more than just gather some dust or sit in storage. Even the stuff that I love that I’d love to have display is ultimately constrained to this fate, and there are far more things that I’ve purchased or wanted to purchase that lose that punch and draw quickly after I have it.
You can make an argument that the fun of it, especially with LEGO, is in the assembly and the display. And it’s a valid argument… but it can only happen so many times and still remain valid. We’ve seen that with Star Wars, going in to our third (and so far the most inferior) version of the UCS X-Wing, or who knows how many of other sets that just come out again, and again, and again.
I suppose what I’m saying is that despite the fact that this is a great set, one that, on it’s own, I’d rate a five out of five, despite the few flaws that it has… it still makes me think a lot more than most others. It’s certainly not a perfect set, but it was one you can see that was built with a whole lot of thought and love. It was most certainly over-engineered, but that was true of the original Nintendo Entertainment System as well (Seriously, that whole tray and the fact that the reader pin-outs were only on one side – which is why it eventually wouldn’t make good contact and start flashing red at you), and it’s just going to sit there on your shelf once you build it. Buy it, or don’t – if you do, please use the FBTB affiliate link and support the site. Most likely you already have, but maybe you have some connection to it. Just… don’t confuse the good memories you have of the original system with nostalgia that they’re trying to exploit to sell us things.
You can buy 71374 Nintendo Entertainment System at Amazon.com or Lego.com
Controversial opinion time, but honestly, I don’t think this movie is going to be terrible. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be good, but I’m also someone who saw the original Super Mario Bros. movie in the theaters, and has watched it since multiple times… both with RiffTrax and just by itself, willingly. I also watched the cartoon in the 80s that featured Captain Lou Albino, Captain N the Game Master*, and plenty of other Nintendo entertainment that’s been just gawd awful that this could just be Chris Pratt reading tax law and it’d still be better.
The audience for this is clearly kids, and that’s what I think is always important to keep in mind. Yeah, adults are going to rip it apart all the time, but much like Nintendo doing it’s thing, they’re not going going to listen anyway and never going to vary from their plan. That’s clear with how bad the current Pokemon games are and they’re just doing the same plot in them again for the 13th time.
I know I’ll be going to the theaters to see this, because my son absolutely loves Mario. His favorite game is Super Mario 3D World + Browser’s Fury, with Super Mario Odyssey coming in second. He dressed as Mario for halloween, owns a ton of Mario toys, and will likely start counting down the days. So despite how I and all the nerd sites feel about it, I have a feeling Nintendo and Illumination probably made something that will be “eh” with adults and critics but will be a hit with kids.
*I once dressed up as Kevin for Halloween myself… thankfully I don’t think any pictures survive of that terrible costume. Also, do not try to watch that show. It’s… just so, so bad.
I’m still playing Pokémon GO and we are right in the middle of their New Year’s Day event where certain Pokémon can be found in the wild wearing a hat. Or in Slowpoke’s case, glasses that say 2020.
Slowpoke can evolve into both Slowbro and Slowking, both wearing the 2020 glasses. I think the joke is pretty funny, but still not something I’d want to keep. Storage comes at a premium and I’d rather save the room for something better.
All jokes aside these hat-wearing Pokémon do absolutely nothing for me. They are a complete eyesore and not ones I’d ever keep in my in-game storage. Other than Pikachu and Slowpoke, they can’t evolve so they can’t even realize they’re true potential. Honestly, they’re only good for XP- and candy-farming. Once caught, though, I immediately transferred to the Professor. I don’t even bother looking at their stats.
Why Pikachu wearing a hat is so special to be able to evolve into Raichu wearing a hat is beyond me.
This isn’t the first time nor will it be the last where Niantic put stupid accessories on Pokémon. Now, I never had any intention of transferring anything from GO into Pokémon Home, but some people do. The sad thing is, these special event Pokémon can’t be transferred. So even if you find one that is shiny, it’s stuck in the GO game forever. Lame.
I get why they do it. I equate it to how DENA puts their own weird variants of Mario Kart drivers in the Mario Kart Tour game. It, I think, is supposed to give players a reason to come back and play the game. For Mario Kart it might be the stats of a driver that a player might feel like they need to get to come out on top of the leaderboards. For Pokémon GO players, it’s…. just a hat. These aren’t even competitive Pokémon, or guaranteed shiny or anything, they’re just a different version of the same lame Pokémon. I mean, how many Wurmples does a player need? How many Wurmples with a hat do they need? Zero.
There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Pokémon GO, but the costumed and accessorized Pokémon is probably the worst offender. I can’t wait for this event to end so we can move on to the next.
I think the main draw for me in playing any Pokémon game is completing the Pokédex. The collecting aspect of it speaks to me on a certain level and scratches that itch filling the void left behind from not buying LEGO anymore. And today, after about 5 years of off-and-on playing, I finally finished the Kanto Pokédex, collecting and registering all 151 members of the roster.
If it weren’t for my boys being interested in playing, I probably would never have picked up the game again. I had quit cold turkey sometime in late 2017 because I found myself making bad choices like playing the game while driving, being late to work a few times while hunting for a specific Pokémon that was on the radar, etc. And also, at the time Niantic made the game much harder to play while driving. No longer could I drive by stops and spin the signs and get my loot. You actually had to either stop or, like, walk. I know that’s the whole point of the game, walking, but like, seriously, nobody walks in L.A. That was the final nail in the coffin that drove me away.
Even though I quit, I still kept my ear to the ground to see what was new in the game. Raids were being introduced which seemed like fun but it wasn’t something I could get into. Seemed like such an effort to coordinate with friends and/or strangers to battle a legendary. Also, there were regional exclusive Pokémon, and by regional I mean like in another state and even on another continent. How are you supposed complete the dex that way? All those things Niantic did made quitting easier.
Fast forward a couple of years and my boys want to play and I get sucked back in. At the time I restarted I had a good chunk of the Kanto ‘dex complete. I was missing the legendaries and a couple of odds and ends. But thanks to recent in-game events, the legendaries I was missing were obtainable via raid battles and I got lucky with a couple of eggs for the basic ones. The very last Pokémon I needed was a Mr. Mime. He was one of those continent exclusive Pokémon appearing in Europe. But I hatched a couple of eggs with Mime Jr. in them and boom, I got my last Pokémon.
I should also mention this app, Poke Genie. That thing I mentioned earlier about coordinating with friends and strangers being difficult to do to tackle a raid? Well this app allows you to summon strangers from the internet to your gym to take on a boss. Or vice versa, you can join a queue and get slotted into someone else’s raid party. It is absolutely necessary for any Pokémon GO player to even attempt some of the raid bosses. Some legendary boss events are regional exclusive and without this app it would be nearly impossible to even attempt them.
Completing the other regional dexes is wholly dependent on Niantic and how they decide to distribute Pokemon. It’s just a waiting game at this point and I’ll probably dial back my playing a bit. My boys are still into it and look forward to community day. They still need me to set up raids with Poke Genie so I’m still gonna be playing it.
Some days… Nintendo makes it hard to be a fan, and makes it even harder to defend them as a fan. Not that any multi-billion dollar corporation needs, or should even get, regular people defending it. It’s easy to hate on Nintendo sometimes, because they so often do things that feel out of step with how the rest of the industry or just doing their own thing.
A lot of the time, it’s more that Nintendo is going to do their own thing and they’re not going to bend to expectations or chase trends. They’re not going to suddenly throw everything behind turning Splatoon into a Battle Royale Free-to-Play shooter, or trying to make Smash Bros. into a MOBA or something. Or, if they did, it’d be like ten years after everyone else had forgotten about those genres and somehow it felt fresh again.
Sometimes, though, they do chase a trend… and almost invariably, they do it badly. I’ve talked about Switch Online before. It was something I mostly qualified as a “necessary evil” or “meh” at best. It wasn’t especially worth the money for what you got – access to Nintendo’s half-assed online implementation and a limited back catalog of NES (and later SNES) titles. Plus the right to purchase expensive hardware to put in your pile of expensive hardware that gathers dust and you wonder why you purchased every time you look at them. Looking at you, NES Joycons. You know it’s true.
For me, classing gaming is a fun diversion… for a little bit. I can count on both hands the number of hours I’ve spent using these systems, and I’d have fingers to spare. I bet I’m not alone in that.
Maybe that’s why, when Microsoft has basically set the bar absurdly high for what a game subscription service can be, and revitalized the last generation of hardware when the next generation is nearly impossible to get… it feels so odd to see other companies lag behind it. Sony has basically held steady on what PS+ does (which is to say… not a whole lot), though they’ve also backed off their commitment to previous-gen updates and started to charge for them instead. Not that either company can actually get consoles out there, but you know.
Nintendo, on the other hand, is taking completely a different stance. They’ve put out a “new” Switch, the OLED version, that added a new screen, $50 to the price, and basically nothing else. The old version of the Switch didn’t go down in price, even though at this point they’re likely able to build both systems for a pretty substantial cost savings (it’s likely that Nintendo is putting somewhere close to a 50% markup on Switch hardware at this point).
In early October, they announced an expansion to Nintendo Switch Online, adding the first N64 games to the system, along with a new Sega game library, because that’s what 2021 is. And a bit of Animal Crossing DLC that’s worth $25, but only so long as you’re paying for Switch Online. You’re getting some ROMs packaged in their app, classics like Super Mario 64 (again), Ocarina of Time (again), Mario Kart 64 (again… there’s a trend here), and others. There are only nine n64 games, and 14 Genesis games, not all of which will be available when it shows up on October 25th.
The problem with all of this? The cost. They’re adding $30 to the individual membership price, and $35 to the family (which is required to play any of these on more than one profile on a system), raising the cost of the plans to $50 and $80 annually, respectively. Let’s just call these prices what they are -Â absurd.
These are the same games, out again and again and again on previous platforms, or available through less legit methods to those who want to play around with emulation. Super Mario 64 had a remaster done in 3D All Stars, that was inexplicably put in a vault because of course it was, but it’s still available through retailers like Target because it seemingly didn’t sell all that well. Ocarina of time is the N64 version, which hasn’t aged well at all, and has a great remaster done on the 3DS which Nintendo hasn’t shown any real interest in releasing again. Mario Kart has a great Switch game, and none of the others really stand out. It’s all first-party classics, but curiously missing are Majora’s Mask, Smash Bros., Donkey Kong 64, and F-Zero X.
The real stars of the N64 were 3rd party titles like Golden Eye (which we know has a great remaster that Nintendo kiboshed already – done by Rare), Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark. Of course, the reason behind those may be somewhat obvious, as they were done by Rare, now owned by Microsoft. Both Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark are on Rare Replay – which, should be noted, is included as part of Xbox Game Pass, but Microsoft has made no secret that they’d be more than okay with putting their games on Switch, or licensing stuff back to Nintendo. They wanted to remaster Golden Eye, and would have likely wanted to put it on Switch as well as Xbox, and likely would have given the old games to Nintendo to package up in this new service as part of the payment.
But nope, we’re getting Dr. Robotnick’s Mean Bean Machine in a Sega Genesis package instead. And a the first two Sonic Games, but not the much better Sonic 3 or Sonic & Knuckles games. Golden Axe, which has been released so many times, Strider, and Shinobi III are in there… but it’s still only twelve games. Ironically, almost all of them, other than Ecco the Dolphin, and 38Â others, are part of the Sega Genesis Collection, which is coming to Switch in December and is already available on the other consoles for a flat $30.
I haven’t played this game since the early 90s. Honestly don’t remember it being all that great… it was unique, but not like knockout fun. Though I probably just wanted to get back to playing Final Fantasy II for the 18th time.
So, you know… not a lot of value add unless you really want to play Ecco. A decent game, but not worth the price of admission. Ironically, all of these were available on what ended up being a commercial flop, Sega Genesis mini as well, which was marked down heavily in it’s final days (it was going for $25 at Gamestop in the end I think)… maybe Genesis games aren’t as big of a draw at this point unless you’re from Europe or fell on the losing side of the Console Wars.
Nintendo is again trying to leverage its name to charge a premium for less than what other companies are offering. There was a hope, when it first hit, that they’d be adding a lot of value to this library. No other company is sitting on the absolute vault of classic gaming content that they are and could put into these apps, first party or licensable-3rd party games… but that’s not what they do. Instead, we get these tiny drip feeds, every few months at best, of a game or two that often no one cares about.
There were 715 NES games released in the lifetime of that system, and only 58 have made it to the Switch service. There were 1750+ SNES games, and only 48 have been released on Switch Online… and there are some notable missing titles in there, like anything from Square (including Super Mario RPG or games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, etc). I’m sure there are all sorts of licensing things tied up in it, but since that’s the rumor behind the price hike, and they’ve clearly licensed SEGA titles, you know… it’d at least feel like they put effort into it.
Instead, what we get is Nintendo putting the bare-minimum into another offering, and giving us something that’s been sold many times before on other systems. Often to the same people. Even those Genesis classics are plastered on every other system, and have been a throw-in title in multiple Humble Bundles or a frequent target of Steam sales on PC. I’m sure there are people excited to have them out there… but it’s hard to see who can get worked up enough to overlook the huge price increase.
I’m certain there’s a big ven diagram somewhere of “Animal Crossing Fans” and “People who Really Want to Play Ecco the Dolphin on Switch” that are the perfect market for this… but given at this point they’re just locking older titles behind a wall to force a subscription. The online services Nintendo offers aren’t great or useful in the best of times, and they still don’t have the most basic features like chat or voice support (I mean, they just added bluetooth audio in the last month).
When I started playing Pokémon GO again last week, I had no idea what I was in for. I re-downloaded the app and started catching Meltans galore in hopes of getting a shiny, maybe even two to evolve one into a shiny Melmetal (mission accomplished btw but I had to do it over several accounts). My two boys wondered why I was so fixated on my phone all of a sudden and swiping like crazy. Once they realized it was Pokémon GO, they asked if they could play it too. I said sure why not. The few days last week leading up to the weekend, we would drive around our neighborhood and to try and catch Pokémon.
I think it was when my first son caught the first shiny out of the three of us that had them hooked. A shiny Tepig. Their oohs and aahs were enough for me to buy them each a GO Fest ticket. Even though they had no idea what it was or what it offered, I wanted to them to experience everything it had to offer. The three of us spent pretty much entire weekend driving around town playing GO. On Saturday, Niantic increased the shiny rates so we were catching as many Pokémon as possible. They made out like bandits each netting about 13-15 shinies each. I didn’t do too badly myself:
On Sunday, it was Legendary raids day. I’ve never participated in a raid before, quitting the game around 2017 just before they were implemented. But we all went in blindly and came out on other side with our Pokémon collection a little bigger. I had the most luck catching the legendaries than my boys but they didn’t do too badly either. Here’s my haul:
My first son wasn’t able to catch a Mewtwo but since it’s the featured raid boss until the end of July, I see many raid battles in our future. Other than the GO Fest tickets, I haven’t sunk a single cent into the game, but I may have to at this point to increase my kid’s chances at getting one.
When we were driving around, each time one of them caught a shiny or defeated a raid boss, the screams of joy and delight was something I’ve never experienced with them before. Was it worth the $5 ticket? Hell. Yes. I’d do it all over again.
Family fun time aside, all the shinies and legendaries I caught in the game doesn’t change my own personal goals of having a living shiny dex. Once we were done on Sunday, back home, and settled in, I went back to the grind of SOS calls in Pokémon Ultra Sun. It’s a vastly different experience and because of that, I’m going to silo my Pokémon in GO away from my living shiny dex. It only makes sense to do it that way. Except for Meltan and Melmetal. Those guys I’ll transfer through to Pokémon Home eventually.
At pretty much any point in time I have a couple of PokéMondays® that I’m working on concurrently. Some are in my head marinating until it forms into a cohesive idea, some are just a list of SOS stats in a file on my Notepad app, and one or two are full on drafts just waiting for a shiny Pokémon to pop before I can finish the post. All of these are held up when I’m stuck on a Sunday night trying to catch that one ‘mon to complete the evolutionary line before I can post. I’m currently hunting a Munchlax and am getting pretty frustrated. I won’t bore you with the details now, I’ll just bore you with the details later, hopefully in next week’s Pokémondays® post. Anyways, I was trying to figure a way out of this state of frustration when Pokémon Go was having its birthday. And as part of this birthday, they are offering up a chance to get not only one but two shiny Pokémon.
The first is a Shiny Darumaka. Niantic has increased it’s appearance rate by 10,000x and also increased it’s shiny chances to just 1/60. The first number is an exaggeration, but the second one I’m more than sure about, I just can’t remember where I read it. Supposedly, you have a better chance at catching a shiny from a 1-star raid than the overworld.
Normal on top, shiny on the bottom; Meltans on the left, Melmetals on the right.
The second, and the main reason I got back into PoGo, is a Shiny Meltan. Meltan is a mythical Pokémon that first made its appearance in the Let’s Go Pokémon games. I never picked up those games but in my on-going quest to get every normal Pokémon and its shiny version, I had to jump back in for this opportunity. I also read somewhere that it’s chances are also 1/60 for a shiny version.
Now you’d think with those increased odds, it might be easier to catch one but based on how many Darumakas and Meltans I’ve transferred out, you’d think I’d have at least one but I do not. I am undeterred though and I will keep trying until I get one.
If you’re interested in trying your hand at getting some shinies, DualShockers has a pretty good write up. In a nutshell you’ll need these two free apps for your smart device:Â Pokémon Go (iOS | Play) and Pokémon Home (iOS | Play). For Go, you can sign up in a variety ways (Facebook, Google, Apple, Pokémon Trainer Club, or Niantic Kids for the younger trainers). For Home, if you intend to use it with other Pokémon games, you’ll need a Nintendo account to link to.
Once you get past registration hell, you’re ready to hunt. Darumaka’s will spawn on the world map and you’ll want to go to areas with a lot of PokéStops to increase your chances of seeing them. For Shiny Meltan, there’s a few more steps to go through. You’ll need to transfer one Pokémon from Go to Home and then you’ll receive a Mystery Box. Open the box and your avatar will be surrounded with a white mist. Meltan’s will start appearing just about every minute for 60 minutes. You can repeat this process every three days to increase your chances. I haven’t had any luck but I just read that you can sign in with different accounts in Go and link them to the same Home account. I’m about to go try that ’cause I really want that Shiny Meltan (two of them would be great so I can evolve one, same with Darumaka).
If you plan on doing this, I would say, “don’t do it” but if you insist then I wish you all the luck in the world. But you still shouldn’t do it.
The Super Mario Game&Watch system is a nice little handheld. It has the original Super Mario Bros. game in a compact Game&Watch form factor. The clock has been redone with Mario animations, and the Ball game has been upgraded to feature Mario’s face in an LCD style. Normally $49.99, it’s currently on sale for 20% off for just $39.99 at Best Buy. I’m fairly certain this has been discontinued and available inventory is depleting. It’s sold out at Amazon and Walmart. Target still has some but at full price. Best Buy’s price is a pretty good deal and I’d grab one if I were you before they are gone. I mention this because the The Legend of Zelda Game&Watch looks to be another fine addition to the line.
It might even be better for the mere fact that it has three Zelda games: The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening from it’s original Game Boy incarnation. The Game&Watch game this time is Vermin which features link instead of Mr. Game&Watch. There’s also the usual animated clock. Best Buy already sold out, but you can pre-order it still from Amazon, Target, and GameStop. Price is $49.99.
Mark my words, there will be a Metroid Game&Watch.
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This year’s E3 is going virtual once again. I’m not one thousand percent sure of the timing, but I’m guessing it would be happening next week if it were an in-person event. This is based on the fact that a bunch of video game companies announced some online video presentations and I for one can’t wait for a few them. And things kick off this week! Here’s what I’m looking forward to:
We have a lot to catch up on. Our first-ever video update has details on Season One, future games, some surprises and info on future pre-orders. Please join us!
Ever since Nintendo killed off production of the 3DS, the market for a dedicated handheld is wide open. Sure, the Switch may be portable but it’s not quite fit-in-your-pocket portable like the 3DS was. This hole is something I’m hoping Playdate can fill. The portable with a crank will have an update on YouTube on Tuesday June 8th at 9am PST. I can’t wait.
Sunday June 13 12:15pm PST Square Enix
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade will be out a few days before Square Enix’s presentation, so I doubt they’ll have anything to show that’s related to that game. I’m hoping I’m wrong though. An update to their stupidly named “Project Triangle Strategy” might be shown here if it’s not part of Nintendo’s broadcast. I can’t wait.
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 2, 2021
This is the one to end the week on. Nintendo will have a 40-minute Nintendo Direct focusing on software “mostly releasing in 2021”. I’m hoping for a Metroid update really, everything else will just be icing. Nintendo is going to be the platform of choice for new games. The other platforms are either plagued by delays for the next gen games or absence of hardware due to the global chip shortage. Me? I’ll happily be working on my backlog for now. I can’t wait.
Playstation
Sony has been doing their own Direct-style presentations on their own schedule apart from E3 for a couple of years now. With PS5’s nearly impossible to find and most of the major PS5 games being delayed for another year and/or changing from from a platform exclusive to now being available for current and next gen systems, it’s doubtful we’ll see or hear anything around E3 week. People may be complaining about the delays, but that’s fine. I have a big enough backlog to keep me entertained until one of the games on my short wish list come out. For Sony, that would be God of War sequel and Gran Turismo.
Here it is in storage:
And here is its summary:
It’s so beautiful! And I had to use the Master Ball, natch. ‘Cause a color-matching Pokéball is the best Pokéball. I’ll eventually transfer it to Pokémon Home via Pokémon Bank. But I first need to get me a Shiny Shaymin.
