Retro Warriors 545 - 2025 Retrospective

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Richard Williams of 545. As I was a host of Baker and As always, I'm joined by Bible human Christopher Saturnalia. It's my legal name. It's his Christmas.

It's his Christmas name. I had a coworker at one of my previous jobs, who, whenever I would go over to his computer, if I saw that he still had our instant messenger up, his his profile picture for me was that one painting of Saturn devouring the infant or whatever it is. Gross. Yeah.

It's not your original name. It's the name of it. Yeah. It was a goath, I think.

I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. That painting scares the fucking shit out of me.

Yeah. That was go. Yeah. Go.

Yeah. Go. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That was a setting.

He had that is my profile pick when he learned that people call me Saturn. So he decided that was what he was going to see every time I messaged him. Yeah. As far as I was reading, this is our last recording night of 2025.

Yes. So this is the last time you'll hear us in this year. I think we might have talking wizards before the end of the year and a read long out of these are last. It's not the last time you'll hear us.

Well, no. OK, look, you're on the public feeds last time you're going to hear us till the end of the year. It's the last retro warriors. Yeah.

So the end of the year. If you're on the public. This episode will be the last one. You hear the next one, which we're still recording tonight.

We'll be next. Right. Yeah. It will indeed be 2026.

So save up all your dad jokes about how you hadn't heard us since last year. Yeah. I've already I already started this morning with my daughter. I was like, after tomorrow, you're not going to get you're done with school for the whole year.

Yeah. She didn't fall for it. Yeah. You know, too old to smart.

Yeah. My week. I still am. I've reached a point with Battlefield six where I completed the entire battle pass.

All the levels of it. I've unlocked almost everything in the game and they keep fucking it up just in perpetuity in new and different and exciting ways. Not EA. They wouldn't do that.

I know. I know. I'll talk more about it later. But I've reached a point where I'm playing it a couple of times a week now, just because I was trying to get the battle pass and I did finally get it tonight.

Is that a thing you purchase or a thing that you earn? Well, I think there's a free one. I bought it. I did buy it.

OK. I bought the I was like, all right, I bought the game. I'll do the fucking thing. And you know, I figured, you know, I'm already here.

I'll do the whole experience and see what it's like. And it's like shit is what it is like. Can you explain to me how it is like shit? I'm OK with.

I don't know. Here's my thing. Well, one, it's viscous. What annoys me with battle passes is one, I pay you money to be able to unlock things in the battle pass.

So you don't give me the things, but you allow me to complete objectives within the game to unlock the things. So we had that sense of pride and accomplishment, Justin. It's kind of like DLC after the fact, right? But then this is what really annoys me is it's all time.

So it's like, oh, you paid for the battle pass. You better fucking unlock the ship before it goes away. Or it's gone now. And then every week they have a new mini battle pass of things that can only be gotten that week because battlefield can't be a game you play with your friends.

It has to be a part time job. Yeah. This is your life now. This is your hobby.

You live and breathe battlefields. The only way you can get everything. I hate that. I hate that model.

I hate it so much. And a lot of the objectives force you into their free to play mode that they released well after the game had come out. And so it's like wanting you to do these objectives in their battle royale free to play mode and I'm like, it's cool to have more players in there for the free to play players. And so they have that.

But I didn't buy battlefield to play battle royale. I bought battlefield because I don't fucking like battle royale games. Yeah. And it's just it's just frustrating.

And I've been thinking about it. I was like, man, I wish there was just like another cooperative shooty gun game. Me and Andrew could play because really what it's become is this mean Andrew played a lot as well. It is.

And I've been kind of thinking about trying heldovers again and someone in the chat was like, you should try heldovers again. And then I was like, I should try heldovers again. So I tried heldovers again. Okay.

Yeah. And I'll say up front, they do also have the battle pass. But as far as I can tell, it never goes away and you don't have to pay for access to it. Something.

And they do have like in air quotes, premium battle passes that you can unlock, but it's just it seems to be extra stuff, mostly cosmetics, as far as I can tell. They do have a cash shop where every day they have a different like set of armor and weapon in there you can buy for like real cash dollars, but it's kind of a menu over. It's not like in your face. They're not really advertising it.

It's something. And so I started playing heldovers too. And it's been really fun. They fixed.

I remember what all my complaints were when I first played it. I know some of it was I had a login with fucking Sony account on my PC and I was like, what is this fucking garbage? And it didn't work. So that's what it was.

I had a login with my Sony account and it didn't work and I couldn't play the game. But I've been playing that. And as far as just a seamless functional multiplayer experience, it stands so far above battlefield that it's kind of shocking that both of these are available on the same console. It's sort of mind blowing again, very different games, very different games.

But just as far as like the seamlessness of like jumping in and getting into a game with a friend, I don't have to force close the app every time I put my console into rest. Andry isn't having to leave my party because it's not loading into things. The menus work. This was the most recent bug they introduced in Battlefield 6 with the new Winter mini battle pass, which is that you would do a game and then you go back to the menu, you can't select any things.

You have to force close the app, reopen it, re-add the other person in your party and then hope that it loads them into the game. Nice. It's intensely stupid. Yeah.

Hell divers. I just get on. Andry's suddenly on my ship and we're going on a fucking mission. Takes two seconds.

Right. Is that one also first person? No, it is. You can when you are aiming a weapon, you can click into first person, but it's really not built for it.

It's kind of bad, but it is. It is third person on this third person action game. It's very it's literally almost literally like. What if Starship Troopers, the movie, this attire was a video.

Yeah, that's what I've heard. And they lean into it pretty hard and there's some pretty funny moments and it's good. I've had a lot of fun with it. There's been a lot of silly, funny things happening.

It's completely cooperative. You can't eat. You can't play. There's no competitive mode that I'm aware of all that I found.

It is a little less because like Battlefield being basically free to play $70 battle pass swill really wants to hit you with that dopamine every time you log in. So they got pop ups and shit. This is a little bit of a slower burn. Like I can tell I'm gonna play a lot more hours to kind of unlock everything, explore it all.

Yeah. But it's fun. You get like every time you log in, there's like community stuff where like, Hey, everyone on the game is trying to do these objectives and you can go contribute to those. And it's just it's a good time.

And people in the game have been nice. And like I think I played I'm level 18 now. I've probably played several dozens of missions. And I think there's only been two times where I actually kicked someone out of the game.

Because it was like this guy's driving me fucking crazy. But it's been really cool. I've had a real good time with it and it's fun community and it's just it's just fun. It's it's almost like it's a piece of entertainment software built just to be a fun thing you can do weird instead of a job.

Yeah. Sort of it wanting to be your obligation. Also, and I don't know if I mentioned this on the show, which is why I bring up now. It's been a couple weeks, but I for some reason started a Final Fantasy one all monks run.

That's a great run. I don't know why. That's fun. I was sitting there and I was like, I feel like a Final Fantasy.

And I was like, well, I'll play the best one. The first one. And I I booted up and I was like, I don't know what I want to do for my party. And I was like, I never do a monk.

I'll do all four monks. Yeah, man. It's so cheap too. It's a cheap run aside from healing items.

Yeah, it goes fast as hell. You just like battle on all the remakes and the the picture. Oh, yeah. I'm on the picture.

Oh, yeah, it's stupid easy because you can get all kinds of like weapons that you can use spells by using the weapon as an item in battle and stuff that you couldn't do in the original game. So it makes it very, very easy with all monks. Yeah, good time. Anyway, we were even doing so I finished Zexion, which we were talking about last time.

The sexiest of all the game. It's very sexy, very, very sexy. No, it's good. I will say the like the the Metroid exploration part and the atmosphere really dug on that.

The the combat got pretty silly. It got to the point where like I get made Metroid Dread look like a Kirby game as far as difficult. Oh, no, that's. But this is the one about the accessibility options.

You can you can turn on safe stage. You can turn on slow motion. You can set enemy damage all the way down. It's multipliers down to 10% and then 0%.

So you can forget for a game like that. I don't even care. Right. Yeah, because you can do whatever you want and still get through it if you need to.

But it was like the last couple of bosses that just turned on invincibility because I was like, no, I can't. I can't dodge that. Sorry. I do not have those reflexes.

That is not in my wheelhouse. But it was a pretty good. Unfortunately, as soon as I finished it, I discovered that in order to get all of the different, I'm guessing endings because there's a shitload of achievements left. You basically have to replay the whole thing in New Game Plus.

And I was like, I don't know that I'm in the mood for that right now. That's not what I'm after at this very second, maybe someday, maybe next time I'm feeling that replay it. Yeah. So instead I was talking to one of my coworkers and he was recommending a ball X pit or ball cross pit.

He keeps calling it ball pit. And I don't think that's what the name of it is. No, it's that means ball cross pit. I played the trial on PlayStation.

Yeah, it's good. I picked it. I tried the demo and like three hours of demo later, I was like, no, no, I have to buy this. And since then, Steam says I've put in 46 hours on it.

Oh, wow. Because it's basically just vampire survivors crossed with Arkanoid. Yeah, with a base building mini game, which you also play Arkanoid. And it's great.

I love all that. It's been real great. I finally unlocked all of the characters, though. There's a big update apparently coming in January that may or may not include more characters.

But I've unlocked the last of the characters and each character has their little quirk. And the last character you unlock, he is a Merck. He has been working so low for so long that he can't take orders. And because of that, you don't control him at all.

He just plays the game on his own. So as soon as you load into the stage, like all your controls do nothing except for pause. OK, you get to pick the upgrades for no, he does all that. He just does the whole fucking thing.

And the first time I was like, all right, that's kind of cute. Then the second time I was like, I now I'm just watching the gameplay itself for 10 minutes. But there's another dude that you can unlock that turns the game into turn based. Oh, because he's a strategist.

And so you line up a shot, you place the shot, he launches a shitload of balls, destroys a bunch of stuff. Then the enemy moves down slightly and their projectiles move slightly. And then it's your turn again and you line up your next shot. And and that's a neat and interesting idea, but it takes her fucking ever a round that normally takes 10 minutes, takes like 25 minutes of that guy.

So you then unlock a building that lets you take two people in at the same time. And I was like, what if I let the automated guy play all the turn based guys levels for me? Did it work? It absolutely did.

Oh my God. Until I got to the volcano themed level. There's all these little like lava puddles on the ground that you're not supposed to step in because they damage you over time. And this fucking idiot just stood in them and it was turn based.

So he wasn't moving and he was just taking damage. And I was at work. I was doing some stuff. I just had it running on the other screen in the background.

And I noticed that like there's fucking disco party going on on my left just like blinking lights. I'm like, what is going on? And I see this idiot is just fucking standing in the puddle. Like, what the fuck are you doing, kid?

And he's just standing there waiting for the enemy to take his turn. Just his health just quickly draining. And I'm like, what is going on here? I can't I can't do this right now.

But but I'm still enjoying it. It's a lot of fun. I think I only have one stage left to unlock and then I'll be caught up with the current content, but I enjoyed it. Well, good.

Good, good, good. Let's do some news. First up, Red Out developer 34 Big Things announced a new spinoff game in the Carmageddon franchise called Carmageddon Rogue Shift, the first new game in the series in a decade. I did not ever care for Carmageddon.

That's all I never had. I know if I've played one. I'm not going to might have. But I don't know.

For years, I used to get mixed up with Vigilante 8. That's a different game. I would make some burnout too. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of all the same sort of idea. I think Carmageddon is more like burnout than it is Vigilante 8. Yeah.

I think it's just like twisted metal with the serial number filed off. I thought Carmageddon also had weapons. Maybe this shows how much we know. Yeah, this is not my game.

Netflix won a bid to buy Warner Brothers, including WB Games and the assets of Midway Games, including Old Games by Valley Williams, Atari Games, etc. Paramount Club will then attempt at a hostile takeover of Warner. So who knows who's going to own Smash TV next year, not us? You never know.

Things could change. They'll be like, all right. Well, the final terms of the deal is they have to spin off Smash TV and it must be acquired by an independent podcaster. This just shows how much I know about business.

I didn't know that after you're like, hey, we put in a bid, we're going to buy this company. Someone else can be like, no, mine and just scoop it out from you. So it was a thing. So basically what they what the hostile takeover is is when they go directly to the investors, the people who own stock in the company and say, I know that you guys just agreed to that.

But we're going to give you more money than what they just agreed to if you let us just buy all of your stocks directly. So it's basically just going directly to the investors and skipping management. Yeah. Bad dude is getting a fan made Genesis slash Mega Drive port.

Finally. I didn't even know you could make Genesis games. I'm learning. Well, that's I'm very proud of you as a fan of bad dudes.

I'm so excited that you finally made this. I'm excited that Sega fans get to feel the joy that is bad dudes. That's not the word I would use. Yeah, it is.

It's great. Running with scissors announced a new postal game, postal bullet paradise. Oh boy. These are always.

Yeah. They have never controversial either days earlier running with scissors had given Tim Sweeney shit over his insistence that AI doesn't need to be labeled. That's good, right? The postal fan community immediately complained about all the AI assets in the trailer for the new game.

Then running with scissors executive, Mike Jerry insulted the fans on discord over the AI issue. One of the developers may have called the user and ableist slur. So you can probably guess the one. Yeah.

The game company, the game was then canceled by running with scissors, saying that it doesn't meet the company's high standards, which this is the first time they've had high standards. I've ever heard of. I guess they implemented them after this. It was like four days after they announced it to the developer.

Goon swarm games insisted they did nothing wrong. Didn't use AI and promptly went out of business. I can't believe goon swarm is gone. You guys are I.P goon swarm.

Oh, well, who's going to replace the goon swarm? I saw that they had developed something else too, but I don't remember what it was. It was something forgettable. The goon swarm sounds like a porn nanobot swarm weapon from cyberpunk.

Yeah. Yeah. Like this is horrible. God.

The Star Fox 64 De-Completion has been ported to Dreamcast. Next Star Fox Andre and Cass, Sega fans getting all the good games, bad dudes, Star Fox. Yeah, it's exciting time to only play Sega consoles. I don't need to play either of those, honestly.

Thanks. I'd ask Montreal may have canceled an unannounced revival of legacy of King. I know I've only ever really loved that first game anyway. And none of them have been like that first game, so I just can't bring myself care.

Yeah, and it's some things. It's like, do we need it? Do we really need it? You know, yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. November console sales were not great. Lowest console unit sales for November since 1995.

Lowest dollar amount sales since 2005. So this is pretty, pretty gigantic. And I think we're still hearing. Obviously, we can't get in all of it for show related reasons, but we're still getting economic data and how the kind of holiday shopping season went and what that may or may not say about the, you know, our national and the international economy.

And there I was just here on the radio today as of recording anyway, today, that they think we might not have a real concrete picture until we get numbers from January. Just because of missing data. But this is not good for this industry. Yeah.

I care about here on the show. Exactly. I have a quite bad. Yeah.

I did hear that the shitty fucking AI spyware bot that everyone's buying for their kids, like outsold, most gaming hardware. Yeah, I have that in the notes here. Was it? OK.

OK. Good. Good. Good.

Top three consoles in the US were PlayStation 5 47 percent of I'm presuming of unit sold switch to at 24 percent, which is man, this is the first year for Swiss. That's rough. That's of the total console sales in November. 47 percent of those sales were PS5 24 percent were switched to.

That's not bad at all. I don't know, man. I guess I'd have to look at year one switch one data as well, because that's my comparison here and I don't remember what it was. It could have been very similar.

And then the next playground at 14 percent with PlayStation 4. And then Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and switch one made up the remaining combined 15 percent. Yeah, PS4, Series X, Series S, switch one all combined for 15 percent of the sales. So percentage wise, as far as like the sales that did occur, Sony crushed it.

Yeah, PS5 really outperformed everybody else. And this is completely anecdotal, but I wonder how many people out there were like, knees saw the switch to and we're like, maybe I lean into the PS5 and just kind of go that route. Instead of doing it. I don't know.

Just the next bullet point I have here, PS5 sales were down 40 percent since last year. Oh, yeah, that's true. I mean, granted, that's just the overall sales. You know, overall sales are down anyway.

I don't know. Switch to remains fastest selling hardware in US video game history. But part of that is due to supply being available for once. Yep.

The reports say the prices for RAM are increasing as much as 41 percent next year. Yeah, for sure. And I've also been hearing reports that they expected to go well into 2026. Yeah, they're actually saying probably 2027 for the game kind of stabilization and RAM prices.

Yeah. So it's a problem. If you have working computers right now, don't get rid of them. Yeah.

Keep them. Keep your stuff. You know what? I am so glad I upgraded when I did that was a perfect time.

I mean, me too. I think I upgraded right about a year ago. I upgraded in April of this year out of fear and I just under the wire because the the RAM I bought for my desktop, I bought 64 gigs, which was more than what I need. But I was like, you know what?

I'm just going to go crazy because I was worried about potential future prices. So I was like, you know, I'm just going to get as much as I think I could possibly need. So I got 64 gigs costing me about 150 bucks. That same 64 64 gig kit right now that's selling for $600.

Oh my God. Yeah. I hear I threw RAM away. Yeah.

A couple of years. I just had huge piles of RAM from just computers and working on stuff is all good. But I was like, what the fuck am I going to do with this? Yeah.

So I was retired. It's retired was what you were. Yeah, apparently. As far as parsing the economic data, we're not the people I ask now, but it is a pretty easy for even economic dumb dums like me to look at this and realize that the gaming hardware industry is not in a good spot right now.

That's really just electronic hardware. It's not true. I mean, really a lot of industries are not a good spot right now. That's outside of our scope.

Yeah. But if you're you're selling gaming hardware, you're not doing you're not too thrilled right now. I mean, even Raspberry Pi prices are going up. So if you're if you're looking at computing in general, the prices are not where you want them to be right now.

Informal study shows that retrobriting old hardware may cause it to yellow even more than before the treatment. And I did this. I think this was on I saw it on Hackday or something. I think.

And yeah, we're now we're now able to see the long term effects of what retrobriting your consoles kind of does. That's unfortunate. And obviously, I don't think any of this was really scientific or like scientifically conclusive. I was very anecdotal, but it's something to be aware of.

Nothing about retrobriting your old yellowed super Nintendo. Yeah. And finally, Eugene Horrie says he'd be interested in adding an AI chat bot to a future game. Don't do it.

It's fucking why of all of all the games to add one to why any game you you would make. So here's the thing. For like 40 years, Eugene Horrie has been pining about how he wants technology to get to the point to where the computer will be able to have a personality and talk to the player in his games just as a character in the world. That's been a dream he has had forever.

And I think somebody convinced him that AI is almost to that point. And it's not it absolutely is not. We do not need in PC as an order to request games hallucinating at us or randomly diverting the conversation into inappropriate territory. We don't need these things.

You know, man, you know where I'm getting tired of AI broadcast. I win. Oh, a lot of regular broadcast TV commercials are fully AI. If there's a couple of them that I'm not going to name the company because I don't want to give them any press, but where we mean, according, we'd see it like we're watching X files when we're like, this is fucking weird.

This is weird. And then finally, this last time I watched their mouth. Oh, no. In AI mouths and AI videos, it doesn't look like their mouth is actually moving.

It looks like the skin is like stretching and this weird, like horrific. I was like, oh, it's AI and then I googled in it, isn't it? It's it's it's it's here. Man, companies are using it and it's fucking annoying.

Speaking of modern trends that are annoying. Yes, this brings us to a topic. Hey, I'm just 20, 25 in review. That's right.

It's our yearly. I don't feel like doing shit during the holidays, recording night. We're just kind of talking about shit for a while and we didn't do any research. And here we go.

Have a good day. Yeah. It's an opposite. Well, that sucked at least there are video games.

Yep. Yeah. As far as initial thoughts, 2025 was a strange year for me in a lot of ways, but in in specifically gaming, I felt myself spending a lot of time looking backward into the past and the relatively recent past as well, which we'll talk about more so kind of a kind of a audio for me overall. And I was trying to make my list because we'll get to it later, but I was trying to make my list of like new games that came out this year that I played and the number is low.

But I bought a huge amount of new games. Let's go. They're just like my shell in the shrink. Yeah, that's a pretty industry.

Anyway, that's my initial thoughts is this was a weird one. It's a it's people like you who buy games that help indie developers like goon swarms stay around. Now I can support the goon swab. Right.

So I did play quite a few new games this year, but I think my trend of this year was distractions. I just wanted games that would allow me to not think and just turn off the brain. And that seemed to be where I was at this year. I can't imagine why certainly nothing outside of video games would have encouraged that behavior.

I think disassociation was a bit of a theme for me to just went about it in a different way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

If we were going to theme this year in video games disassociation, I think is the word. We do unfortunately have talked about tariffs inflation in the economy and other things that we don't like to talk about on the show because it's outside of our scope and we're not experts, but right. Inflation was pretty bad. Yeah.

Yeah. So it has to be noted, especially if you wanted to buy an Xbox. Yeah. Yeah.

Xbox console sales down 70% year over year, possibly because the console now costs several hundred dollars more than it did at launch. That's not the direction things are supposed to go. I still get I'm on one of Microsoft's mailing lists. I don't know which one, but I'll get emails whenever they're having a big sale and they keep sending me emails that are like say big on Xbox hardware in the email itself.

It's like you can get a refurbished Xbox Series S for only $389. What is it? Like Microsoft, that's more than it cost at launch for a refurbished console. And you want me to believe that's a big sale?

What are you doing? Some price hikes were blamed on inflation. I was on tariffs while others still gave no explanation to the consumer. Realistically, we know kind of historically it's probably a combination of greed, inflation and tariffs in different ways in different companies, but we really just kind of don't have the data to know what did what and we might in 10 years or we might never.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And as the years ending, Ram and SSE prices are currently spiking and expected to cause even more price hikes across all consoles and the upcoming steam machine.

Um, and I do still kind of secretly maintain that this is a plot from big tech to make us own less. That is a pet conspiracy theory I have. They want us to do everything cloud wise. They want, they want their AI needs to pay off and their AI makes more money, you know, on, on a bigger scale, faster with less products needing than they.

And also even if AI fails, they've got all these data centers that they invested in to make the AI and they can use that for cloud computing if the AI fails. So they just need to funnel us into that so that we don't own any actual hardware or products for that matter. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, let's talk notable game releases because there were, you know, there was some, yeah, there was some games that came out. I tried to truncate this versus previous years. Yeah. Just kind of kind of fired through some of these so highest rated games of 2025.

Yeah. So the cream of the crop according to the credit, according to the credit. Yeah. Uh, Hades to Claire of Skir, Expedition 33 blueprints split fiction, Donkey Kong, banana and sasana and hollow night, silk song.

I believe it's Donkey Kong, Tony, Danza. Oh, Donkey Kong, Tony, Danza. Yeah. Uh, all the highest rated games of 2025 probably shocking.

Absolutely no one right. Other big releases, Doom, the Dark Ages, Death Stranding Two and Silent Hill. Yeah. Um, hell I forgot that, that Doom, the Dark Ages was this year.

Was this year? That's always, that came out and just got forgotten about. Basically. Yeah.

And I played the trial of an PlayStation five and I was like, it's okay. It's fine. It's neat. Um, too many re-releases, remakes, reboots for us to really talk about all of them.

So I'm just going to fire through probably not even this whole list of over and cover some, uh, Glover, Carmen San Diego, Age of Mythology, Tales of Graces, uh, Croc, the famed Croc out remake, lots of schmups, there's always lots of schmups, uh, a male, your solid three triangle house, the Dead Two, Never Wonder Knight's Two, System Shock Two, Pac-Man World Two, Final Cansic Tactics, uh, Yakuza, Zero, Kawami, One and Two, Guess and Remakes, Romancing Saga, um, a lot of, there's a lot of stuff there. Yeah, a lot of stuff there. I'm trying to quickly add to my list because I forgot to play one of these at the end of the list. That's how much, that's how impactful it was to me, I guess.

Uh, Retro Collections. Uh, so we could then Lunar, Gradius, Marvel vs. Capcom, Capcom, Fighting Collection Two, Budsie, Gex, Choyoniki, Pat, Pontoni, Hawk, Three and Four, Azure, Striker, Gunball, Corpse, and Super Mario Galaxy, and then we'll go back. We came out this year.

Yeah. And then new Retro slash kind of retro adjacent, faux retro, you know, games that came out, uh, we had Gimmick Two, uh, the sequel to Fatal, the, the last Fatal Fury game, The New Fiddle Fury, which I don't think either of us played. I was excited about it and it just happened. I was a little upset about the companies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. About some SNK issues. Shadow Labyrinth came out and then was quickly forgotten about by all of us. I played most of it.

You know, Ninja Gaiden Rage Bound came out this year. There's another one that I need to put on my list. So much of my list is getting edited right now with this exact moment. Yeah.

Um, uh, uh, Shinobi Art of Engines came out. Ease versus Trails in the Sky, uh, the new AVG and 8-bit game. Once Ponticadamari, Drenquest, HD, one inch, we had Drenquest, one inch to HD2D. So easy.

And what to say. Yeah. And a new bubble bubble, sugar dungeon. Yep.

Which is. I don't know if I mentioned, I got the PS4 bubble bubble, uh, for cheap at a game store. When I was at a convention. Nice.

That's okay. When I started playing it, but pick that one. I've got that one. Um, I think it has multiplayer online too.

So maybe we should try that sometime. I think it's, I think it has friends in the title. It's like bubble bubble with friends or something. I know it does locally with the player.

But talking about it pretty fast. A lot of people talk about it a lot. There is. Uh, do they?

Is it? Cause it's like, I know some people who that has become their only console. That's the only thing they talk about. Uh, it is in, uh, specific Nintendo circles that has been a huge year.

Uh, somehow we stepped out of that circle this year though. So it's just not hitting us. I just, what's the, I mean, obviously my only litmus test is hanging out in our discord. Right.

And we have a couple of people that are like, yeah, playing my Switch to a lot of, even those people are very often like, I kind of just play Switch one games most time. The Donkey Kong was cool, you know, and that's just been many new releases for it. Yeah. And that's just kind of the vibe.

And a lot of people are kind of like, yeah, I bought one, but I'm not really sure what I bought one for. Yeah. Um, I got one out of here that the prices are going to go up. Obviously, I think what we've learned over the years is our discord is not representative of any kind of meaningful market demographic.

Yeah. Um, it's all just a bunch of weirdos hanging out and they're being weird at each other. Yeah. We're the, we're the lead weirdos, but we don't, we don't prevent anyone else from being weird.

But it's, uh, it's, it's, it's just, uh, at least it feels weird is what it is, is a new Nintendo console came out and selling very well, selling very well. People were excited about it, has some good software to focus this time. That's my, that's my question. Cause not a lot, but very stuff.

And Donkey Kong, Mario Kart and Donkey Kong are both good software. People like those are critically claimed, but that's it for the entire half a year. It's been out. Right.

I'm not saying there's a lot of software, but there is a good software. It's not like you buy it. You know, you're like, we're going to fucking play. You play Mario Kart and Donkey Kong is what you play in your switch one game.

Uh, you know, you play Pokemon at an acceptable frame. And they just, uh, pushed an update to links awakening and, uh, because of wisdom. So they also run a bit of acceptable frame. See, there you go.

Even though links awakening could run just fine on a original switch. It's a lot of work. Um, but yeah, it feels weird. I mean, we were both so in on the switch from the get go, uh, and have also in the course of this show been so I don't want to say Nintendo positive because I think we've had plenty of criticisms, but Nintendo centric.

I think both of us growing up had very Nintendo centric, just gaining, you know, hobby lives. Right. Uh, and it feels strange to just kind of not give a shit when they're on paper kind of doing everything right. Like here's a new console.

It's dramatically more powerful. It makes your old games run better. You know, it's just some about it's just not compelling to me. You bought one.

I mean, you're like, like, I don't know why fucking I have this thing. Yeah. I hope that comes to other consoles. Uh, I did pick up the weird game, keep controller for it.

I don't even pay for that tier switch online. If I picked up the game, keep controller, just because I thought it'd be neat to have a Bluetooth game, keep controller. Yeah. Yeah.

I'll say this. Um, Donkey Kong and virtual boy fans are having a heck of a fucking year. Great and good. They could.

That one, that one, the card, core Donkey Kong virtual boy fans. Like fuck. Yes. Actually, the, the there's a guy at work who has been a die heart switch fan since the beginning.

And, uh, when the switch to came out, that was like all he cared about. That was the only thing he was going to spend his paycheck on. He has bought like 30 switch to games already. And it's all he does on his breaks.

He just plays switch to, um, and, uh, he when, when I was talking to him about the virtual boy, he was like, all right, that's a step too far for me. I'm like, whoa, we found the line for him. I don't know. I, um, like if I know it's not going to happen, but like, cause, cause, cause I wouldn't, if someone gave me a switch to, I'd be excited.

I have a lot of switch one games and I would love the performance that raves in a lot of them. It's just not worth, because like the system's 450 and they got to buy case and the screen protector and all this other shit and you end up spending 600 bucks after tax and you get all your accessories and everything just for the fucking hardware. It's just not a $600 upgrade for me. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, also this is the most vain shit ever, but I hate how the cases look. No, I don't. I don't like the red ass game cases.

Oh, I hate all the game cases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They're all. They're terrible. Yeah. I'll give you that.

Um, lots of Steam Deck competitors as there were last year is seemingly none of them have made a very big splash. It was kind of the wrong Xbox allies, the closest to making a splash, but only because of the Xbox branding. And even then it's, it came out and everyone was like, that's cool. And kind of, I haven't seen much about it.

Is it still, I assume it's still making it? Yeah. Yeah. It's old pretty well.

And you do see some discussion about it online. People talking about the Xbox interface on it, which Microsoft is now rolling out to Windows 11 PC. So if you have a PC, you can opt into the beta channel of the Xbox app and test out the dedicated full screen Xbox mode. My PC can be an Xbox.

It's crazy. I know. And it's almost like they're all running the same fucking Xbox hardware under the hood. It's almost as if they're all running the Windows NT kernel under the hood.

That would be insane. Um, new Steam stuff announced, very exciting new Steam stuff, but obviously none of it is this year. So it does not apply for 2025. But did generate a lot of excitement here.

The end of the year, I think other related news and events that layoffs have continued. Morale has not yet improved. Man, lots of layoffs this year. We just keep on with those layoffs soon.

Morale is going to skyrocket to the moon. Warner Brothers shut down monolith player first and WB San Diego. First ever industry wide union was formed. There's there's some some silver lining right there and another bad thing.

Game of former rose in the dead. We have to do with that shit again. But their very first cover was Dragon Quest 7. So, you know, I'm going to go.

I'm a rag on game and former. I'm sure they're all wonderful people. Yeah. And then the game and former is completely disconnected from GameStop.

Right. It's only by them. Yeah. Totally.

The more power to them. I'm excited. It's just fun to rag on. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. Fun to rag on. Super Nintendo World Open in Florida. Yep.

You go to that if you wish to go to Florida. I don't generally recommend it. You want to go to the devil's butthole of Florida. That's out there.

I'm not going to try. Is Florida the devil's butthole or the devil's armpit? I don't remember. I think it's an armpit.

I've as a Texan. I've not done a lot of traveling, but Florida is only place I went to where I was like, what the fuck is this humidity? What is happening right now? I can't breathe.

Yeah. It's like I'm in soup. It is. Microsoft shut down the initiative during a mass layoff.

So that's a thing. Yeah. It happened. Doug Bowser announced his retirement from Nintendo of America, effective December 31st.

We don't have it in here, but it is kind of union related. Rockstar is apparently possibly illegally union busting. Yep. Yep.

They're being right in the lead up to GTA six. So that's not good. That's not good. Not at all.

And finally, not finally next. It's not finally at all. Nope. We do have a section here called the State of our collections.

I don't know if we had this last year or not. Of course I wanted to add it. Yeah. But I do kind of like keeping people updated sort of on where our collections are, what we're into, what we're getting out of.

Yeah. Because it does come up a lot. And I think both of our collections and collecting habits have changed dramatically in the 10 years we've been doing the show. Yeah.