This winter has been too damn cold with too much damn snow. It has also been difficult at times to get out of bed. I’m so ready for Spring, maybe I’ll even go to Double or Nothing in May.

Wrestling – AEW Revolution

Overall, I think last weekend’s AEW Revolution was entertaining, but some weird choices overall. I’m not even talking about the main event as the possibilities in Hangman’s story going forward are interesting to me. I imagine this will likely be the story for Hangman the rest of the year, considering it was basically a verbal/handshake agreement to not challenge for the men’s world championship again. There are going to be multiple temptations to break his promise, and we’ll see how he navigates that.

The Young Bucks losing in front of their family to FTR, whose title run has been carried by this match and the Brodido match, just to set up the return of Adam Copeland and Christian Cage doesn’t feel great. However, the possibility of FTR dropping the titles to Cope and Christian, then C&C choosing the Bucks to retire against instead of FTR once again, will be hilarious to me as an FTR hater. Plus, even as an FTR hater, I have to admit that the match was incredible (thanks to the Young Bucks).

It’s Jon Moxley beating Konosuke Takeshita for the Continental Championship that really makes no sense to me. What the fuck are we doing with either of these stories? So Don Callis Family and the Death Riders have a feud where the Death Riders are the tweener babyfaces, and the DCF are the heels, setting up the Takeshita v. Moxley match, where Moxley wants to make up for his loss in the C2 and the time limit draw. Takeshita wants to beat Moxley without ganging up on him before the match, a fair fight if you will. The path of this story is clear to see. Kazuchika Okada screwed over Takeshita at World’s End, but loses the C2. He remains International Champion, so obviously, after screwing Takeshita, Takeshita would win the Continental Championship, then face Okada to unify those belts again. Oh, what’s that? Takeshita lost and looks like a nerd now? Jon Moxley just won clean?

At the end, Mox and Takeshita shake hands, then Will Ospreay returns looking for revenge on Moxley from his attack at All Out. Moxley and Death Riders allignment since the C2 has been confusing. Moxley himself has been more of a babyface, while Claudio, PAC, and Danny have been more like tweeners then Marina and Yuta have been leaning more heelish. So now what, with this Ospreay feud, is going to happen? It is unclear in a kind of negative way, as while Hangman’s future seems unclear with many possibilities, the future of the Death Riders seems unclear in a what-the-fuck-are-we-doing-here? kind of way.

Everything else on the card went pretty much how I thought it would. I do think everyone should check out Bandido vs. Andrade El Idolo. Since returning to AEW, Andrade has been incredible and this match is no different. I’m excited for where this Swerve Strickland / Kenny Omega feud is going with them having their rematch on AEW Dynamite next week already. I suspect Kenny is going to win but who knows?

Book – Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

I heard about this book on the Aftermath Hours podcast the author was on. It made me realize how different video games are to my age versus nearly everyone younger than me. The NES came out just six months after I was born. I basically grew up with Nintendo, so some of the events detailed in this book I just experienced as a part of video game history. There is an extensive chapter on the struggling development of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, whose delays is my first experience with getting video game news and might have been my first online message board experience discussing the delays on America Online’s video game channel. Back then, a game getting delayed for three years was an astronomical delay, and Zelda 64, as it was called in the beginning, kept getting delayed over and over again. I learned about this through issues of Nintendo Power, which my grandma had gotten me a subscription to as a birthday gift. The book provides more details about the causes of those delays, including quotes from developers I had never seen before. That’s pretty much the balancing act of the book I’m experiencing as someone deep in the weeds of Nintendo knowledge; the book reiterates a lot of what I already know or have lived through, but also new insights. I’ll have more to say when I finish it.

Games – A Hodgepodge of Switch games.

I’m reaching a wall in Pokémon Pokopia where I’ve done all the regions and am near the end of the story of the game, but don’t want to quite finish it yet. There are still some habitats in the city area I’ve yet to devolop and the enviromental level there is still kind of low. I don’t want to rush to the end now that I’ve been in each biome so I’m taking my time.

Pokopia has made me go back to other Switch 1 & 2 games I’ve been meaning to play again. It’s the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, but I likely would have been playing Skyward Sword HD, Wind Waker, and Tears of the Kingdom regardless. I really hope by the end of Switch 2’s lifecycle that all the 3D Zeldas are on it.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is a weird one for me. It came out just days after Skyrim and felt like the beginning of Nintendo’s worst period to me, where their games were constantly hand-holding in games with menus and pop-up instructions that interrupted the flow of games on both the 3DS and the Wii. It was also the first Zelda game that I’ve ever DNF’d before. Wii Motion Plus just did not work well for me at all, whether it was my distance from the TV due to my poor eyesight or something else, playing Skyward Sword just felt like a chore. It was the last game I ever bought for the Wii, and I pretty much played exclusively on Xbox 360 after that until 2016-2017 when I bought my first gaming PC and the Nintendo Switch.

Jump to 2021, everyone was flabbergasted when they announced a Skyward Sword HD for the Switch, and no Wind Waker or Twilight Princess HD. I wanted to give the game another shot, and I remember July being pretty barebones. I’m going to be honest, I don’t remember my original thoughts on the game when I first played it, except for the fact that I liked it, I finished it, and then immediately accidentally saved over my completed game. I hadn’t touched it since then, not because of that, but simply because there have been a lot of great games from 2021 – present coming out. The pandemic might also have something to do with it.

Now, as I’m playing it, I’m thinking about its role in the connective tissue between Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild. Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess are, in a sense, spiritual successors to Ocarina of Time, building on the foundation that the original 3D Zelda started, but Skyward Sword feels like balancing the line between trying something completely new and continuing what has always worked with 3D Zeldas. Also, this version of the game looks beautiful. I don’t remember the original looking this good. I think perhaps because I’m playing on a screen with a higher refresh rate, I can actually notice the consistent FPS the game has now.

Metroid Prime Remastered is also another game I’ve returned to. I didn’t finish it when it came out because I was so annoyed by the Chozo Ghosts constantly respawning when I leave and reenter a room. Now I’ve returned to it progressing to my first encounter with metroids in the game, getting the power bomb, grapple beam, and the plasma beam. I don’t know how mucb more of the game I have left. I believe there is maybe two more powerups I need to get and all of the Chozo artifacts that unlock the final boss.