Sonic Superstars Releases Next Week! | Tuesday, 10/10/2023

Next week, Sonic Superstars releases. In the meantime, I've found some official website sprites of Sonic, Amy, Tails, and Knuckles down below:

The orange ones were from the North American website while the magneta/pink versions were found from the Japanese version.

Goodbye Volcano High among NPR's best video games of 2023!!

An impending meteor is racing toward Pangea, but Fang, a nonbinary anthropomorphic pterodactyl, has more pressing issues. Their best friend is showing more interest in entomology than the band they started as kids. A shy would-be paramour has started sending Fang anonymous texts. And their brother is trying to hold the family together as their parents struggle to connect with Fang. Meanwhile, news of the coming meteor rolls out slowly: It’s met first with a shrug and then with social media memes and despair — not unlike our own experiences with COVID-19 and climate change. The imminent apocalypse amplifies tensions among Fang’s gang of dorky dinosaur friends, all of whom are also dealing with the sudden cancellation of plans and aspirations. But aided by a brilliant dialogue system and Rock Band-style rhythm challenges, Goodbye Volcano High still manages to be wholesome and hopeful, even in the face of potential extinction. — James Mastromarino, NPR Gaming lead and Here & Now producer

Bread's Game Of The Year Honorable Mention #1: Horizon: Burning Shores

Turns out, talking about video games I like is still fun, who knew? You know what video games are fun? Horizon Zero Dawn, and Horizon Forbidden West. Two games whose general reaction's to and reputations of annoy me deeply, because the annoying repeated memes of them somehow being creative failures because they came out among other unrelated fan favorites drives me mad. You know what doesn't drive me mad though? Playing the Horizon games, and Burning Shores is no different. Serving as the big expansion pack for Forbidden West, much the same way Frozen Wilds was for Zero Dawn, Burning Shores is a very solid, self contained open world experience that fans of the series shouldn't ignore. Not only do you get to explore a cool new area in the ruins of L.A, filled with lava like in the Tommy Lee Jones movie "Volcano" for some reason, but you get a solid chunk of new story for both the universes lore and characters. Hell, not to spoil anything too big, but Aloy even has a possible romantic interest in this expansion. Sort of going against my assumption this entire time that she's been AAA gamings only real Ace representation, but you learn something new every day. The new environment to explore takes a lot of cues from the already extant San Francisco area in the main game, but the tropical beaches still lend a lot of fantastic eye candy while you search around for new quests and activities. The main story is also a little bit of a wrap up situation, but nonetheless a fun one. Featuring a minor villain who escaped the finale of the main game, which I won't really get into details for because the surprise halfway through the base game really deserves to be preserved for new players. So many words to say, Burning Shores is a solid expansion, and an easy recommendation from me, even if doesn't quite break my top five this year. 2023 was so packed with good video games, that's not really an indicator of a problem.

Top 10 Favorite Games of 2023

2023 was a year of many things, some good some bad. But I did manage to play some games it had to offer. Let's give 2023 a proper sendoff with my favorites from it!

My Twitter (Not calling it X): https://twitter.com/RipperLightning

My BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/jacklghtnngrppr.bsky.social

Thumbnail by Rissuuu: https://twitter.com/Rissuuu

Intro Theme by The Plant Commander: https://twitter.com/Plant_Commander

Avatar Images by Autumn Kouhai: https://www.tumblr.com/autumn-kouhai

Background by Jett Altair: https://twitter.com/JettAltair

Logo by Switch Branding: https://twitter.com/SwitchBranding

Footage credits: FinnishDuck, Rogue Mechanist, Dolphin Butter, ZackScottGames, NeoTechnoMan, Hyrule Engineering, The Cherry Tuna

Special thanks to Benjamage, DigitalTy and  The Plant Commander for the multiplayer footage for the Number 7 segment!

2023 Sucked For Video Games

I went through and made a non-comprehensive mostly-chronological collection of all the major video game news events from 2023

There were a lot of layoffs

My next video will be my game of the year list. But it wouldn't feel right celebrating video games without also noting the mass layoffs. So over the past couple weeks I pulled a lot of articles, compiled them, and over the past 2 days managed to finish writing, record, and edit. If I did this video a year ago, it would've been delayed. But I somehow pulled it together on time.

The First Descendant - Sharen Character Trailer | PS5 & PS4 Games

Looks interesting - and the fact the main protag is a sexy fembot with a wonderfully shiny hiney is purely coincidental.

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle (August 30, 2023)

Level 2024 unlocked! Congratulations on completing level 2023, and here's to a brand new year of adventures (with 366 stars to collect since it's a leap year)! ⭐

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Fun Game AQ3D

The star of AQ3D is Aurileo Voltaire. It is the funnest game on the Internet this week in my opinion. If I didn’t have an Aurileo Voltaire game I would perhaps go wild with anger this week.

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SEGA has finally announced;

NEW JET SET RADIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

My Fighters for [NASB2] | Tuesday, 01.02.24

If only I had Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 sooner, then I'd be playing as these cool guys and gals right now. Not to mention that they look cool in these alternative outfits (some of them are available through DLC).

Goodbye Volcano High on PASTE Magazine's Best Games of 2023!!

30. Goodbye Volcano High It isn’t easy surviving high school—or an extinction-level event. Goodbye Volcano High, a story-driven adventure game from the designers of 2017’s charming interactive toy box Gnog, charges its teenage ennui with the threat of Armageddon, as its cast of anthropomorphic dinosaurs are fully aware an asteroid is coming to destroy their civilization. These lizards share our human frailties, grappling with anxiety, indecision, questions about their identity, romantic hopes and failures, and the chasm of uncertainty we all face as we enter adulthood. Oh, it’s also a rhythm game, where you help its lead character write songs for their very 2020s-sounding indie band. (It turns out songwriting is just as hard as high school and impending doom.) Goodbye Volcano High is more of a visual novel than a traditional game, but its well-told emotional story will resonate with anybody who has ever felt depressed and confused—so pretty much everybody. Also there’s a cute triceratops who won’t shut up about bugs. She’s cool.—Garrett Martin

Bread's Game Of The Year Honorable Mention #2: Dead Island 2

I don't like to say things "shouldn't work" because I find it to be overtly cynical and an assumption that somehow things will always be bad until you decide, actually, it's good. Dead Island 2 probably shouldn't work this well, though. I vividly remember Dead Island 2 being revealed with that flashy CG trailer in the....I want to say, Sony E3 Press conference in the year 2015 (RIP to ever creating new memories in that framework, by the way). I didn't expect much at the time. I know a lot of people enjoyed it, but I had personally felt a bit burned from the original Dead Island. It just wasn't the game I wanted it to be, so while a second one could maybe improve on the formula, what if I just didn't like the formula? After ten years of constant delays, reshuffling, and restarting of development, what chance did Dead Island 2 even have left of being good? Turns out, a very good chance, actually. Dead Island 2 is a phenomenal video game, a very basic video game, but a phenomenal one regardless. When I say Dead Island 2 is "Basic" I mean no disrespect in that statement. Dead Island 2 feels like a video game that hammered home the fundamentals of game design to such a wild degree that even something as simple as thwacking a zombie with a piece of rebar in a fairly standard first person melee combat system looks and feels incredible. The simple, little things that we have all long since taken for granted are demonstrated here as tenants of video games, that, put in the right scenario, really are always a fun time. No part of me will ever get sick of an on demand drop kick move. Dead Island 2's plot is exceedingly simple, but it has a lot of fun with it. Zombies have completely overrun Los Angeles, turning it into a more metaphorical island (no giant Tsunami's like in escape from L.A here) known to the people as "Hell.A", but it doesn't seem to have dulled their spirits. Influencers, celebrities, actors, scumbags, normal people, etc. are all treating the fall of L.A as some kind of bizarre zombie killing party. It sounds like a tone that either wouldn't work, or would just be obnoxious, but it approaches it all with such an earnestly fun energy that it all comes together in a way I feel few had expected.

What that tone and energy lead to, is an always fun series of quests. Whether it's making your way through a Hollywood studio full of elaborate sets that all look like levels in wildly different video games, or scrounging through the exceedingly nice homes of Beverly Hills. There's always something new to find, and some new enemy to hit with whatever weird thing you happen to be carrying around for said purpose. Want to throw a bottle of water at a zombie, followed by a shrunken that somehow has lightning powers? Please do. Dead Island 2 may be a basic video game, but nobody ever said that going back to basics has to be an inherently bad thing. I talked to quite a few people who internalized those basics and assigned Dead Island 2 as "The Best 7/10 Game Of The Year" and frankly, I also thought along those lines. The further I get away from It though, the more fondly I remember my time with it. Dead Island 2 may not have been the hit that I expected it to be on a personal level, but at the time I played it, I think it was the hit I needed. It's a fantastic game that defied a lot of odds to be as good as it was, and it was one of my favorites of an already packed year.

January 31st Indie Direct by Indie Asylum

It’s interesting to see how the gaming industry has evolved in recent years. During the 1990s video games were more of a Wild West Medium. The Indie studios of that day such as Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games are now the big boys in the industry. However, it was a much harder time to be an indie developer during the 90s and 2000s. It wasn’t until the early 2010s that indie studios began having…

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Full painting under the cut!

I am. so normal about these three.