March 2025

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: March 2025

~ Game Over ~

Monster Hunter Wilds (PS5) – Very good Monster Hunter game. Maybe a little too easy, and there’s a pretty slim selection of monsters to fight. Also the post-game story just kind of petered out… no big finale like we’re used to. Oh well! It was still a bunch of fun all the way through and I look forward to grinding hundreds more hours out of it.

Scary Shadow Spot: Bitter Glass (PC) – This is probably the most unique-feeling Doesn’t Matter game, but is in need of a lot of polish. I even encountered a game-breaking bug that forced me to restart the game halfway through. It took less than 20 minutes to recover my progress, but still. Big oof.

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (SNES) – This would be a much more frustrating game without NSO’s rewind feature. That’s all I want to say.

TE Video: Coming Soon (April 2025)

If you weren’t already aware, I record most of my let’s plays pretty far in advance. Like, most videos that go up were recorded months before their air date. And so I’m really excited for April, because a couple of games that I really, really liked are finally getting their dues.

????? (PC) – April 1. I can’t spoil my April Fools video, now can I?

Ignited Entry (PC) – April 3. Another Jordan Lindgren game, and I believe the most recent of the bunch. It’s really quite good, with the exception of a frustrating chase sequence towards the end. Try to guess how many times I die before I make it!

Crystar (PC) – April 5/12/19/26. Had to follow up Mario & Luigi with another long RPG. This one’s a little more actiony, a lot more anime, and significantly more depressing. Like, we’re talking Nier levels of bleakness here. Big fan!

Newspaper Day (PC) – April 7. A bad indie horror game. So bad that I couldn’t be bothered to earn the good ending. At least I had fun making plenty of BJ jokes.

Dead or School (PC) – April 10/24. Parts 8 and 9 of a whopping 20. If you haven’t gotten into it by now, I don’t think it’s likely to ever happen.

Prison City (PC) – April 14/21/28. Side-scrolling action platformer that borrows a ton from classic NES games. I had a blast with it, and highly recommend watching it for the nostalgia along if you grew up in the NES era. Part 4 (the finale) airs in May.

The Final Pin (PC) – April 17. With this, I’ve played all of Jordan Lindgren’s games (to date). I really like this one, but it’s definitely more of a mystery/thriller than a horror game. Which isn’t a bad thing. I just want to set your expectations properly.

Nintendo Direct 3/27/2025

I would have liked to do a live reaction to this one, but I was conducting an interview when it aired, and that’s not just something one can put off for later. So here’s a recap of the things I found the most interesting. But only the things I find interesting! No “I don’t care about this” notes this time around.

Dragon Quest I & II HD Remake – Looks great! DQ1 is my very first RPG, so it has a soft spot in my heart. I’ll probably buy this out of nostalgia and forget to ever actually play it.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond – I’m sure it’s “because Switch” but I like the more cartoony look! At least, slightly more cartoony than I’d expected. Gameplay looks bang-on with what I would expect from the series, so I’m obviously 100% on board. Very curious if it’s going to be a dual release on Switch and Switch 2.

Pokémon Legends Z-A – No joke, this is my most hype game of 2025, based mostly on the strength of Pokémon Legends Arceus (which is my fave Pokémon game). Last month’s overview trailer got me pretty pumped, and this one just added fuel to the fire. And there’s finally context for the weird subtitle now! Hooray!

Marvel Cosmic Invasion – Hmmmm… Looks like a 90’s arcade brawler… Made by the same team that did Shredder’s Revenge… Despite the fact that my interest in Marvel has atrophied greatly, I may have to play this.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Week One

There’s a new Monster Hunter game out now. You know what that means, right?

It means I probably won’t be playing much else this month.

Monster Hunter Wilds is the follow-up to 2018’s Monster Hunter World. It’s a slightly different experience than you’d get with the more Nintendo-y MH games; the MHW games are more focused on appealing to a wider audience to bring in new players and, being completely un-portable, only support online multiplayer. That’s already a knock in my book, because 50% of the fun of Monster Hunter is getting together with my brother to hunt locally.

That factor aside, I’ve had a lot of fun with Wilds over the first week. While not a single one of the pre-release trailers got me hyped in any way, I’m happy to report that the game is just as good as or better than any that came before it. Which is what you’d hope for from a sequel. It’s been a while since I’ve played either World or Rise, so I was a bit rusty at first, but I got back into the swing of things pretty quickly. At least as far as basic mechanics go.