Meaning, I'm almost done with all my Xbox 360 games. I think there's less than 10 left both digital and physical. Here's what I got to this week.

Got some time today (car repair again), so I'll finish up making notes on the list of best Wii games on Metacritic, now starting at those rated under 75.

In revisiting my collection, I'm trying to keep it brief by not respawning unless I can't resist it. I restarted many times in Space Invaders Extreme, for instance. I wanted to respawn in Minecraft, but didn't. Sometimes I just want to leave something for later. Going back to one I've 100% completed is kind of downer. So these are this week's revisits. 

St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, and I’ve got a pot of gold for all of you filled with game reviews I’ve recently written at GamerDad.com!  Please click on the links and read as many as you can, and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two.  I’d appreciate it!  OK let’s begin!

I got a little break here waiting on an oil change. Here's what I've played this week so far. 

It's the 90s for me this month and maybe for two months, we'll see. I got my Retron 3 and Genesis up and running so far. Here's what I got to this week. 

When the Nintendo Switch 2 released earlier this year, one of the launch games was the download only Welcome Tour.  It was set up like a museum, and you controlled a little person as they walked around a giant Switch 2 and its accessories.  You could play mini-games, try tech demos, and take quizzes on facts about the new console.  To me, it sounded like a lot of silly, quirky fun.  And I love games that have museums in them, whether it be Namco Museums or Animal Crossing.  There was only one problem.  They charged you for it.  It really should’ve come with the system, and that’s what it’s going to be known for from here on out.  I really wanted to boycott it and not buy it to support that kind of behavior.  But here’s the thing.  I only believe in boycotting if it doesn’t hurt yourself.  And the game still sounded interesting enough to me that I didn’t want to miss out on it.  Life is too short to miss out on what you think is fun.  So I got it.  It was only ten bucks anyway, and I can spend more money than that on fast food!  So I figured I’d take you all on a tour of the Welcome Tour!

The Castlevania Domina collection just cemented something that's been creeping in my head ever since I picked up my PSP again earlier this year: The DS library's highlights looks better today than the PSP's highlights. Back in the 00's, the PSP's graphics were a huge selling point, offering games close to console quality over a decade before the Switch. But despite a strong launch, most gamers were shocked at how it merely carved a niche while the DS took over the world. Yet one thing that the PSP had in its favor at all time were its graphics. Games looked better. 

My game session was interupted by a car repair and now a rain storm keeping me in the library for a while. I don't mind though because the library is my favorite place. So, anyway, I've changed up my gaming plan to simplify it all and started playing a few new and old things. 

With the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake coming out on Switch this month, I thought it would be fun to go back and rate all the games in the Paper Mario series.  We’ll do this from worst to best, and only games in the Paper series are going to be on this list.  Well, with one exception.  OK, let’s begin!

Diablo IV threatens to take over every minute of my gaming, but I managed to squeeze in some retro and get my GP rewards points done. 

Princess Peach Showtime is out and in the game, Peach gets a starring role as she dons new outfits in stage plays.  So I thought it might be neat to go through all the outfits she has and what they are like.  But keep in mind there may be some spoilers here and there, so watch out for that.  OK, let’s pull back the curtain and start the show!

Welcome to the annual Nerds Without Pants music special, which is also the LONGEST EPISODE OF NWP EVER. Sorry (not sorry). Yeah…nothing else to say; but please enjoy some fantastic music!

So recently I played through Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe on Switch.  Knowing that I’m a huge Kirby fan, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t get this game back when it released in February.  Well I don’t really like paying full price for Switch re-releases and remakes, especially when I already paid for these games back on the original console.  So I waited and asked for it for my birthday, which is what I usually do for games I want to get, but don’t have to play right away.  So since I had already played this one back on the Wii, I decided I can wait and put it on my birthday list.  After playing it, I have to say that unlike a lot of other Switch rereleases, this one’s actually pretty good and adds a lot of extra content.  One of the extra things is an amusement park with ten Kirby mini-games from past titles!  And since I like to write blogs about games that have a lot of mini-games, especially if they are presented in a museum or amusement park, let’s take a tour of Merry Magoland!

GameCube, GBA and Xbox were all released. Pokemon games won all sales awards across the board, again. Amongst the highest critically were: Halo, GTA III, Grand Turismo 3 and Final Fantasy X. Dreamcast was discontinued this year, which was probably when I got one on the cheap as GameStop started shipping them all back to their warehouses. I probably got a Xbox on the strength of Halo, Gamecube for the Rogue Squadron sequel, and a PS2 for the Red Faction port. Here's a bunch of games I played around that time, then alter, and then ones I'd like to play now. 

OK everyone, time to get buff with an exercise regiment of reading my recent game reviews over at GamerDad.com.  Please read as many as you can and maybe even post a ‘like’ or comment or two.  I’d appreciate it.  And if you do, you’ll be super buff in no time!  OK let’s begin!

I briefly touched on a handful of games and then my friend and I got back into Diablo II for a good long time. Finally, I dug into Horizon: Zero Dawn on my PS4. 

It’s time to clean up with some reviews I’ve recently written over at GamerDad.com.  Please click on the links and read as many as you can, and maybe even post a ‘like’ or comment or two.  I’d really appreciate it.  OK time to start cleaning!

Wake up early and pour a bowl of your favorite sugary cereal as we look at more games I’ve recently reviewed at GamerDad.com.  A lot of the games on this batch were Saturday Morning cartoons at one point, or at least look like they could be.  But then, most games I review are probably like that.  Anyway, please click on the links and read as many reviews as you can, and maybe even post a ‘like’ or comment or two.  I’d appreciate it.  And now it’s back to the show!

Willow is a 1988 dark fantasy movie I never watched as a child. Yet the name still rings a nostalgic bell in my brain. Strangely, I didn’t consciously pay it much attention until I stumbled across the NES game sometime in the mid-2000s. But seeing the name and characters on the cover felt deeply familiar in a way I still grapple to understand. Maybe I saw the movie poster and heard its name in passing as a kid but didn’t think much of it until discovering the video game later in life. Initially released by Capcom in 1989, Willow was a calculated attempt to create a game with broader appeal since it was based on a property with characters familiar to its audience. Fortunately for Capcom, those calculations were entirely correct.

A while back I reviewed the PlayDate, a new handheld gaming device that has a crank on the side that you can wind to control some of the games.  The other unique thing about this device is how you get the games.  They come two at a time and are downloaded automatically on the handheld each week on a Monday.  I talked about a few of them when I wrote my initial review, but since I didn’t have all the games yet in ‘season one,’ I said I would talk about more of the games later when I get a good amount of them.  So now that I’ve got a few more, let’s go over what they are here!

When Final Fantasy VII appeared in the late 90s, my initial reaction was that of shock at the significant gulf in sequels for the US. It was a harsh reality to learn that, of the three mainline Final Fantasy releases we received, Japan had double that number by the start of the PlayStation era. As time marched on, Square (now Square Enix) eventually released the sequels we had missed. Meanwhile, I’ve been playing a nearly 30-year-long game of catch-up since 1997. A particular blind spot for me was Final Fantasy III- the last one to be developed for the Famicom. However, after finally getting around to playing it, I now have a new appreciation for this long-running series.

In the gaming days of years yonder, there seemed to be no limit to what developers could dream up as a basis for killing some time. And when they couldn't create a game revolving around humans playing sports, saving the world, or destroying aliens in space, they could always turn to the animal kingdom for inspiration. So in 1985, Ascii Corporation made a little ditty in the arcade called Penguin-Kun Wars. The player chooses one of several animal characters to fight it out using dodge balls in a small arena. It was a unique idea as no other game like it yet existed.

My gaming routine is as follows: play any game needed for MS Rewards; play any game needed for Game Pass rewards; go through all the games on my hard drive from smallest file size to largest. For this last objective, I play a game for the next closest achievement, decide if I want to keep it or not, and then move on to the next game. I repeat the process weekly until, hopefully, I clear my hard drive (not likely when I keep adding new games). So here is what I did the other day.