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When you have Breath of the Wild, you don’t really need anything else to play for weeks. For some people, that’s probably true for Mario Kart as well. For me, it’s really just an upgrade without any hype attached to it.

I generally always recommend playing in order of release, but it doesn’t really matter here, the games are completely standalone. Brothership does have very minor references to the older games though. One game gets an entire character returning, but I haven’t played that one either.

Mario Kart Update: One cup has a remake of an SNES track as the first one. It’s not very interesting and five laps long. More laps than the other three (more interesting) tracks in the cup combined. I really don’t understand what they were thinking…

I love the water segments though, very Wave Race!

I finally beat Brothership yesterday. It should have ended last weekend, but the end of the game really drags on. You know that obligatory five minute cutscene about the friends you made along the way that a JRPG tends to have in between the final boss and the true final boss? Brothership turned that five minute cutscene into a three hour backtracking segment! And the true final dungeon is very long, too. Something I wasn’t really in the mood for anymore…

It was a good game though! The cynic in me expected the RPG side to be very simplified and easy, but it’s the Mario & Luigi it has been when I still played it on the GBA. And the optional boss re-fights in the late game hit hard!

My main criticisms are:

• The plug system gets very annoying with you constantly needing to replace them. At least let me favorite some of them so I don’t have to find them all the time.

• First strikes are very awkward. For comparison, my first strike rate in Thousand Year Door is easily ~98%. I’d be surprised if I got more than ~5% in Brothership.

• Overworld travel gets very tedious after a while. It basically becomes Spirit Tracks without any of the action.

Now, I planned to beat the game before the Switch 2 releases, but now I had a comparison here, too. I didn’t notice load times being much shorter, but the game definitely runs smoother in those moments when it matters. There’s a Bro Move that has you alternate the A- and B-Buttons quickly, which is easy enough. But about halfway through the timer the game would briefly slow down, which always messed me up until I started to specifically slow down in anticipation. That slowdown is gone on the Switch 2!

Next, I plan to play Kena - Bridge of Spirits on PC, a game I know nothing about. I picked it out from my backlog because I was in the mood for something green. I wanted to frolic in nature, but most games in that category are large RPGs that I wasn’t in the market for, because Xenoblade X was the game I intended to replace Brothership with. There’s nothing to stop me from just playing Xenoblade now, but I already had Kena downloaded and installed when I decided to focus hard on Brothership.

And on the side, I dabble in Mario Kart World. I can’t say much about it yet, but I was blown away by the fact that they have a track that acknowledges Super Mario Land! That’s so rare… But I can’t say I’m a fan of the Grand Prix format. Driving from one track to the next is cool, but if it comes at the cost of reducing all but the first track to a single lap, I’d rather not have that at all.

Something’s gotta change.

When I booted up Brothership this week, I noticed my playtime was 35 hours. So I looked back at my comment history and I started playing the game 5 months ago. I know Monster Hunter absolutely justifies slowing down everything else for two months, but this is just unacceptable. I have no less than two new games installed and ready to go on the PC side but I am not going to play them. I need to get this back under control. I’ve been focusing on this game and I’ll probably beat it this weekend. I’m definitely in the home-stretch, but you never know what else opens up at the end of an RPG. I have the full world map visible and there are three isolated areas I can’t access, so there’s something the game is still hiding from me.

There’s a reason they make censorship mods. And I’m pretty sure they are the same people who used to cry about censorship in games every time.

Tempered monsters are basically stronger versions of regular monsters. Arch Tempered is an even bigger leap, reserved for a select few as special events.

Finished up the last bit or currently released content in Monster Hunter Rise. I’m still playing it to not get rusty and get all that equipment I’m still missing, but it’s a secondary game from now on. The stories about High Rank Zoh Shia were highly exaggerated, it was way easier than Arch Tempered Rey Dau.

I should finally be able to focus more on Brothership now. The fourth ‘world’ has been kinda disappointing so far. Strong opening cutscene, but not much to talk about since.

I’ve started my third playthrough of Pokemon Infinite Fusion, my second Nuzlocke and first time playing Remix Mode. I barely made it past Brock without casualties, which taught me to be prepared for the worst.

I know what to follow up with on the Switch-side, since there’s really not much left for me there. My backlog on PC is much bigger and whatever I feel like playing now is probably not what I want in a week, so I try not to think about it. Monster Hunter has no real end in sight anyway. I’ll grind away slowly, a bit every other day to not grow rusty for whatever nightmare gets added next, so I probably won’t start anything with too much depth.

I’m nearing the end of current content in Monster Hunter Wilds. The current Arch-Tempered Rey Dau event kicked my butt quite badly. It was the first time I actually had to truly learn a monster’s patterns and tells, but now I can beat him without carting. I only have HR Zoh Shia left and I have heard enough tales to not rush into that one. I’m gonna fully upgrade my armor first.

Brothership is still happening. Every now and then. Not as much as I would like, but with Monster Hunter going into a pure grinding phase, I’ll have more time.

And when I only have a little time, I go back to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. I’ve had the main game beaten for a while, but there’s still plenty to do on the huge achievement list, which really adds to a game lime this. I even found myself hitting the difficult speedrun times. I wasn’t going to try those very hard, but at least for the first two levels, they were doable.

Occasionally, I’ve also been playing the 1994 CD-Rom version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a childhood game I have been trying to find for 30 years. It wasn’t hard to find per se, those old Carmen Sandiego games are all abandonedware at this point, but good luck getting a modern PC to understand a 90s CD-Rom! The best I could do in the past was a DOS version, which just wasn’t the same without music and voice acting. But I finally found the ‘VileBox’, which is a fan-compiled collection of all old Carmen Sandiego games that just works! That nostalgia hit pretty hard~

I haven’t had much time to play this week, but things are looking better again. I really need to put more time into Brothership again. I beat the third area and then just stopped playing again.

And it’s all because of Monster Hunter Wilds. I’m knee-deep in high rank now and I’m starting to appreciate the new structure of the game. I’ve always been the kind of guy who grinds out a single monster until I have everything I want before moving on, but with the whole world constantly moving on with local events and monsters spawning in forms that give distinct loot, the old quest format, while still here, just isn’t the way to play anymore. I was taken aback by that at first, but I’ve really been enjoying the variety this leads to.