Video game talk, anyone?

I want this.

And Super Mario Wonder looked cool, too, I guess, because 2D Mario games are fun. Super Mario RPG has been at the top of my list of games I want to play with my kids, with Thousand Year Door right behind it, so I can't wait to have access to one of them.

The latest title in my "just play whatever I want and the kids can watch if they want to" series is Bioshock Remastered. They're enjoying it well enough. They love the world design and general look, though my son is mostly only interested in the Big Daddy fights. I'm a little worried, because I know that after Fort Frolic the level design gets waaaaaaaay more boring, and that's still almost half a game to go. If they want more of this kind of thing after this one, I'll probably skip Bioshock 2 and go straight to Infinite. More of a crowd pleaser, with way less time spent scrounging around maze-like levels and backtracking. And oh my god the only thing worse than Bioshock 1's Pipe Dreams-esque hacking mini-game is Bioshock 1's Pipe Dreams-esque hacking mini-game played for an audience.

One hiccup is that so far I've been able to play anything that was already on my PC. I'm playing games on the big TV in the living room with my old PC hooked up. That works fine. But we don't have a hard line in the living room, and the PC isn't wi-fi enabled, so we've been limited to whatever I happened to have installed at the time I replaced the machine in my office. Bioshock Infinite is not on that list. I'm finally going to have to plug this thing in and reintroduce it to the internet. After two years. I'm a little worried.

This is the coolest Mario romhack I've ever seen.

Completed Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC. Really terrific game. Tons of fun weapons, though maybe one too many "minion" type weapons, and a good variety of planet designs. A decently long campaign as well, took me something like 16 hours for first completion, with NG+ mode adding a couple new weapons and allowing you to further upgrade all the others. Plenty of meat on these single-player bones.

Downsides would be the aforementioned stability issues, though those smoothed out in my later play sessions. Maybe it's already been patched into a better place. I still encountered some frustrating loads when shifting dimensions - that does screw with the game's intended visual pace where quickly shifting between two versions of a world should always be seamless - but I don't think the game has crashed even once since my last report. The requisite arena is kind of bland, and there aren't enough rounds. ("The food is terrible, and the portions?! So small.") I guess they will never match the arena from Up Your Arsenal, but at least they didn't pull that Tool of Destruction bullshit and prohibit weapon XP at the arena. And a final downside is that really none of the weapons feel like they evolve very much as they level, even when maxed. They get more powerful, but the attacks don't look appreciably different, and it never feels like they've added all new mechanics. Could be memory playing with me, but I feel like in UYA and ToD, the weapons all go bonkers when maxed out.

I've only maxed them to 5 though. I've only just started an NG+ playthrough. We'll see.