SirSmUgly

I was initially thinking that it was an Xbox mini upon reveal and got momentarily excited. Give me a tiny Xbox that plugs into my TV via HDMI and has Halo, Kung Fu Chaos, Psychonauts, Fuzion Frenzy, and KotOR on it. (And Brute Force, I suppose.) If Xbox division wants to do some real Xbox anniversary shit, they should do what every real game company does and steal a successful Nintendo idea.

I keep buying books because I still have a problem. Edward Shawcross, The Last Emperor of Mexico - Also one of the funniest books that I've ever read in my life. If you like stories of European hubris that end in the dumbest way possible, this here tells the story of a dipshit Habsburg named Max and his equally dipshit wife who, at the behest of Napoleon III (also a dipshit), are placed on the throne in Mexico under French rule because Nap wants to check U.S. power on the North American continent (not a bad idea, TBH) while the U.S. Civil War is an ongoing distraction. Of course, Mexico just got done with their own civil war and as a result of that war democratically elected Benito Juarez to be their president. France sends just enough troops to land and eventually (after an embarrassing defeat) beeline to Mexico City, where Max is put on the throne as the new Mexican king. Hilarity ensues. The ending is satisfying because every moronic European royal mentioned in this book gets some form of comeuppance. Fucking Habsburgs. Anyway, if you even remotely enjoy North American history, you'll enjoy this breezy read. Keza MacDonald, Super Nintendo - I wanted to like this book, but quite frankly, I think it stinks. I think there's some value to it if you're giving it to a Boomer or old Gen-Z parent who doesn't understand why their adult child still plays video games. If you've had a parent visit your house and express surprise that you have a PlayStation or whatever even though you've been playing video games since you were seven, you might hand this book to them. Otherwise, it's got a shocking lack of insight for someone who a) is a legitimate reporter with material from her interviews of Nintendo higher-ups and b) who should be pretty solid at analyzing what Nintendo does and does not do well. This is pretty much hagiographic fanwank from a huge Nintendo fan, which is obvious in the title of this work, but which also was a bit much for me even considering the title. Plus, it rubs me wrong that a handful of things in this book are inaccurate. For example, Nintendo 64's analog stick was not a pioneering singular accomplishment of Nintendo - Sega had their own analog controller come out at the same time (it was paired with NiGHTS Into Dreams, which came out right around the same time as Super Mario 64). There are also small things that should have been caught by an editor (MacDonald gets Donkey Konga and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat mixed up). The Guardian has a pretty solid video game review team and MacDonald is the head editor of that section, so I guess that I expected something more insightful and polished. Michael Sokolove, The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino - This is a fascinating book because it came out after the big FBI/DoJ bust of college basketball programs and runners who paid players, but before SCotUS ruled that college players should be able to get paid for their labor and the NIL Era began. There is a pleasure in reading this book and having the foreknowledge that in just a couple of years after its publication, it would be worthy of a second edition with a very lengthy addendum. Obviously, a large part of the book focuses on how university officials, athletic apparel companies, the NCAA, and black market runners exploit young (and often working class or impoverished black American) basketball players. It focuses on Rick Pitino, then-Louisville AD Tom Jurich, and Louisville's focus on athletics to build the profile of the university and bring in donors to explore these wider concerns. Personally, I think there is a shadow issue here that would make for an equally interesting book which is college and university administrators using their positions to grift, hire friends and family, and skim whatever money they can for their own personal accounts. This is an issue from top universities all the way down to local community colleges, and Sokolove is writing a shadow book about that issue that deserves the same level of expose that this book gives to college basketball in the pre-NIL era. Great book, quick read. I've been on a sports kick because I also re-read Michael Leahy's When Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan's Last Comeback and Jeff Pearlman's Three-Ring Circus, both for the first time in a long time. Pearlman writes about topics I like, but I wish he'd stop trying to be funny because he isn't, but he keeps making dumb jokes in the middle of these compelling stories that he's telling. Leahy is an excellent writer, on the other hand. Still, I'm currently working through Jeff Pearlman's Football For a Buck (about the USFL in the '80s and a certain dogshit excuse for a businessperson helping to destroy it) and then it's on to Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling (adapted from his excellent longform article about a death that is an indicator of London's very seedy black market financial underbelly). I've also been reading a chapter every other night of Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs, and as someone who is once again going through his own body transformation (it's going well!), I've been able to attack it through that angle (and through the angle of having been working class and strapped for cash) and have generally enjoyed it. I'll eventually write about it here, too. Finally, I'm collecting GamePro and EGM back issues from the 1990s. I feel bad about how nostalgic for ads that I am. Also, even as a kid, I knew these magazines had dogshit reviews with little rigor, but man, reading them as an adult really drives that home. They're great for historical perspective, of course, and for reminding me about games that I now have money to check out. And of course, they're great for feeding my nostalgia.

I'm only halfway through my KotR '94 review, so you're well ahead of me! It's an obvious mistake on Vince's part and a complete failure to not at least use Savage to put guys over (other than Yokozuna). I'll be interested to see how I feel about this show when I get to it in the next week or two. I thought Undertaker/Kane was the only bad match on WM XIV, so I've got some trepidation about its worse earlier version.

Crazy Taxi World Tour was so beautiful, people. I am also in on modern (open-world?) Spyro

That has been in development forever (for obvious reasons). Also interested in Blood Message and Stranger Than Heaven. Lots of interesting games shown.

Cuphead 2 sounds great. I am once again asking Capcom to give the modern remake treatment to Dino Crisis. Maybe once they finally get this long-anticipated C:V remake out of the way. In other news, Virtua Fighter: Crossroads is a day one purchase for me, which it always was, really. Seeing more of it reinforced this.

Wasn't there an Internet rumor back in the day that Triple H couldn't be shown getting beaten up in previews for their THQ wrestling games? One of those "sounds plausible enough to be true even if it isn't" rumors.

If I can squeeze it in during the summer, my plan is to start a Continental Europe wrestling match review thread, and one of the guys I'm interested in seeing more from is Train. IMO he's the epitome of a tag team specialist. That team with Norton was perfect, and it ran its course in weeks.

I don't think this is a hot take. A lot of people think this. My take - that it isn't even the best gimmick match they had against one another (that'd be their Casket Match at Royal Rumble '98) - would be much hotter than yours. Speaking of hot takes, I originally came here to say that WCW fucked up big-time by not keeping Fire & Ice together and making them a tag team of death whom up-and-coming babyfaces had to squeak past to establish their worth on a main event level.

Satrapi passing away really makes me sad. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden goes off about reading books and liking the author so much that they want to call them up and chat after they're done, and that's how I felt after reading Persepolis. Satrapi was so likeable and funny in that book, but I also understood her and felt that she'd be equally as understanding if we ever had a chat over coffee about life. I need to read more of her work and will make that a goal for this summer.

I'll get Rayman and maybe Onimusha in addition to Wolvie. Not a great SoP for me (per the usual), but it had some decent stuff. I might eventually check out Until Dawn 2. My out-of-left-field hope was an announcement that ASOBI was doing a new Ape Escape game, but alas.

I dropped Crawlers for Ball X Pit. Crawlers is an okay podcast game, but it doesn't have that addictive gameplay for me. I've been playing BxP with Hades 2 and Balatro sprinkled in. I've started collecting '90s GamePros and EGMs over the past few months. That led me to finding out that a previewed game in the overseas section, then named Spark, was eventually renamed Pulseman and released initially only in Japan before later being released on the Wii Channel and then again on the Genesis NSO app. I grabbed my OG Switch and fired that up in bed a couple times. It's a Game Freak game that, like the more modern Game Freak game Tembo the Badass Elephant, is very much an attempt at 2D Sonic gameplay. In the case of Pulseman, it harkens back to Sonic CD., specifically by asking you to quickly gain sprint speed in small or uneven spaces so that you can explore the level. In CD, you do that to activate the timeposts. In Pulse, you do that to build up electricity and fire off into spark form, which makes you invincible and allows you to climb vertically and reach otherwise unreachable places (or hit otherwise unhittable bosses). Like Tembo, it looks great from an art direction standpoint, but it just makes me wish I were playing the actual good Sonic games that it's aping more than it drives me to play more of it. I am going to mess with it more and probably start playing more Genesis games in general. I have an actual Genesis that I should yank out of storage and set up this summer, but probably I will mostly use Genesis NSO.

They at least set up a Dusty/Flair feud in 1999 and then eventually paid it off in 2001, but generally they needed to use Dusty more between '98-'01 instead of jettisoning him for a huge chunk of that time. As a side note, if you want to see a hot crowd die a thousand deaths, watch that Slamboree '98 main event. Rarely has a crowd been so clearly bummed out by a finish.

How about definitely JCW. All I know about Juggalos is that they like ICP and Faygo, so if you want to relieve my cultural ignorance and also talk about some wrestling that I don't know a ton about, I am here for it.

And yeah, I'd presume that Undertaker and Borash (one of those pairings where you wonder how these two even know one another) are getting a lot of help from people who know, understand, and respect how AAA approaches wrestling and lucha tropes and traditions.