After a week's worth of banging my head against a wall, I have finally achieved the retro gaming and media center PC of my dreams.

Already triple-starred the two booster course cups at 200cc. I'd say it's a solid 6 or 7/10 release. The lack of anti-gravity tracks is felt, but I didn't dislike anything that I played. At $25 for 48 new tracks though, it's a no-brainer either way.

Finally got around to seeing No Way Home. As someone who didn't care for the previous two spidey films, I feel like this one finally did right by the character. Still a little messy though with how much had to be crammed into the plot, but overall good.

Well it's been a hot minute since I last replayed Chrono Trigger, so might as well replay Chrono Trigger. I'm using the excuse this time of trying it out with an interesting QOL romhack. Pic unrelated.

What's sad is the Animatrix shows how much potential the franchise has to be expanded in meaningful ways, but Resurrections settles for revisiting past glories through self-referential meta-commentary and ends up just spinning its wheels.

Ya know all things considered, even though I might have disagreed with some choices everything seemed like a respectable pick this year at TGA, and that's a step up from how I usually feel about these awards shows. I think they did alright.

Some thoughts on the Cowboy Bebop live action stuff (in the comments).

Finished Arcane and uh... wow. Never gonna look at these characters the same way again lol. Jinx is so wild every time she's on screen, I genuinely don't know what she's going to do next. I expected craziness, but I didn't expect so much pain too.

Because I'm a madman with too much time on my hands, I have updated my FF7 mod pack with tons of new features! Merry Padoru, or however it goes... https://www.destructoid.com/--617281.phtml

Easy Modding Guide for FF7 Classic (November 2021)

Stuck in my ways

Metroid Dread done, clear time 7:39. Overall it was a great time, the ending was cool. Unfortunately I did have some growing pains with it towards the end though. Full wall of text in the comments.

General thoughts on Dread so far: it's a huge improvement over Samus Returns. MercurySteam clearly learned a lot. The environments and music could still use better atmosphere, but the gameplay is very on-point and I'm loving the EMMI sections.

I was nervous going through the big line at GameStop for this. Thought for sure they'd be out by the time they got to me, but there were 2 copies left. Lez gooooo

Finished replays of Zero Mission, AM2R, Super, Fusion, Prime 1, Prime 3, and Other M in my anticipation of Dread. Didn't have time to finish Prime 2 and Samus Returns but I'm OK with that. Now I just gotta wait until tomorrow morning...

:L

I'm not impatient! You're impatient!

Current status

It can be pretty trendy to hate on League nowadays but this honestly looks pretty stylish and cool. I hope it turns out well.

Capcom, my proposal: hire this man FFS.

Finally finished Metroid Prime 3 after sitting on it for 10 years. It was... a thing. I'm going back and checking out the first two games with the motion controls as well. Surprisingly the controls are working for me just as well as in Prime 3. I like it.

Welp, certain complaints with the animation notwithstanding, Hathaway's Flash was a good slow burn. Much better than Narrative turned out to be. Looking forward to the next movie.

The Ultimate Metroid Guide: Every game ranked

Got my new desktop. It's gonna be a hard wait for me the next few months...

The Squenix marketing team unintentionally did their jobs because the only two things that keep popping into my head after this E3 are Metroid Dread and killing chaos. Honestly it's so bad that it's good in a Megaman X4 way. They should just lean into it.