Games

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 13 – That’s A Wrap

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’ve been rewatching matches, finishing some 2025 games, and reading up a storm to wrap up the year, plus to be hones,t working a lot more to have some extra money for Christmas presents, Steam sales, and whatever deals may interest me. I haven’t found any worth it though, and by the time my normal bills came a calling.

This post is going to be mostly on all the end-of-the-year wrap-ups I’ve gotten this year as I work on a longer post. I hope everyone reading this has a good holiday.

Music

Halfway through this year, I cancelled my Spotify Premium account and switched to Tidal, then proceeded to listen to very little music so my Tidal 2025 wrapped doesn’t paint much of a picture of my 2025 music. I’ll just say it was a lot of Paramore, The Beaches, Kendrick Lamar, Aesop Rock, Freddie Gibbs, the scores for Deltarune chapters 3 and 4, and the soundtrack to Hollow Knight Silksong.

Since it’s likely to be my last wrapped, I did temporarily reinstalled the app to get it, so here you go. The only surprise to me here is how fast the Deltarune Chapters 3+4 shot up my personal listening stats, considering I quit Spotify in July and those chapters only came out in June. Last Girls at the Party is not only, in my opinion, a good song but a real earworm that gets my ADHD brain playing it on repeat.

Nintendo introduced their own music app either late last year or early this year if you’re an NSO subscriber, so of course they had to do their own wrapped. My number one and two are a result of Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World’s great soundtracks that harken back to older games. I do wish Nintendo were faster on the draw to bring those games’ soundtracks to the app, maybe next year.

Games

Speaking of Nintendo, they’ve delayed their 2025 recap release to January, so expect me to include that whenever it comes out in any post I make then. I will, however, make some educated guesses. With the release of the Switch 2, Donkey Kong Bananza is probably at the top of my list,t with Super Mario Odyssey in second because I wanted to replay before making the switch from the first Switch to the second. I put in a decent number of hours of Mario Kart World before I became bored with it, and maybe Kirby Air Riders or Metroid Prime 4 squeezes in towards the end there, depending on when Nintendo chooses a cut-off date.

I expect my stats to be much more spread out between my Switch 2 and Steam next year, but with getting a Steam Deck OLED last August, saving and purchasing a new gaming PC this year, and Switch 2’s launch titles being kind of dry until November – December, these are some very Steam-heavy stats. Plus, I may have spent way too Steam Sale purchase happy Fall 2024 with how I excited I was about my Steam Deck, so I had a lot of different games to play this year. Plus, after receiving a fancy new monitor for my birthday, I really wanted to see the difference between my Nvidia 2030 and my 5060 TI.

What was I doing December 6th that ended my Streak? No idea.
The Steam Deck really changed things up for how and how much I play, huh?

Monster Hunter Wilds and Hollow Knight Silksong served as two peaks where I really locked in. The big difference is with Silksong if I didn’t own so many other games I want to play, I’d still be playing it. Actually, no, I am still playing the window of time is just smaller since release. Monster Hunter Wilds, while I do very much like it, once I finished all the main quests, it left me nothing to keep me going through the loop like previous games did, where I’d unlock different add-ons and such to min-max my gear for future scenarios. I do plan on returning to it next year since they’ve had so many updates, but I expected to put in like a hundred more hours than I did on that game. Silksong, though I will continue to play especially when that Sea of Sorrows expansion comes out in the Spring. It’s not only my number one most played game on Steam this year, but my Game of the Year. More on that later.

On the other games on my list. With the release of Sagat, my favorite character to main, SF6 could easily have been number one, but I’ve played so much Street Fighter 6 that I needed a break and that so happened to be when Silksong came out. However, with a recent patch that buffed Sagat I’m ready to dive back in and really learn Sagat until whenever the New Virtua Fighter Project comes out.

Persona 5 Royal could also have been number one, but I did mod the shit out of the PC version to reduce the time I need to play it. I’ll accept no judgment. I’ve 100% this game twice on PS4, once on Switch, and once on PS5, so a little modding won’t hurt anyone.

The last game on my list I bought before finding out about the BDS Movement, so I’ll be posting a link to that instead.

https://bdsmovement.net/

Between the Switch 2, the Steam Deck, buying games on Steam Sale, and buying a powerful new PC I’m just about done with PlayStation, and my time playing it this year reflects that.

2025

Now look at 2024. All these games I own on Steam now and have paid half the price. Why would I buy anything on PS5 ever again? They mostly don’t have any! Not pictured in 2024 is Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I also own on Steam now. What I’m going to do with my PS5 now, I’m not sure cause not even playing Ghost of Yotei before it comes to PC could entice me. With the basic end of exclusives between the Steam Deck and maybe purchasing a Steam Machine in the future unless Playstation 6 has something crazy to play on it where I can’t play it anywhere else I’m probably done with it.

Books

I’ve been putting in the work over on GeeklyInc.com with my reviews, which is also part of why this post is so delayed after Thanksgiving, and I’ve got two more I hope to get out there this week. I’ve also snapped into it and been reading a lot since Thanksgiving, just about eleven books with two more probably before the end of the year. One of those books is from one of my favorite authors, Jenn Lyons, who this year raised money on Backerkit to publish a science fiction book called Full Negative. The digital copies came out to backers about three weeks ago, and I just finished it about a day ago. I loved it. I’m working on a full review that’ll be published later, but here is a link to the BackerKit if you want to preorder a future copy (Sorry, I don’t know exactly how that works.

While I don’t have my Books of the Year list complete, that’ll be a future post. Here is my article in what I likely consider my favorite book of the year I did for GeeklyInc

Why I Love The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
A Tide of Black Steel Review – A Vanguard for Violence
Brigands & Breadknives Review – Finding Your Own Dreams

Wrestling

The problem every fan has to deal with when it comes to their favorite wrestlers is two things: one day, they’re going to hang up their trunks and no longer wrestle, and when they win the big one, they’ll eventually have to lose the big one. I expected Hangman’s reign to eventually end, maybe even before the year was over, but I did not expect it to end in such a stupid way. Hook being the catalyst to end his reign is such horseshit. Hook’s first match was in December 2021, and it was exciting because he looked like he had a lot of potential as the son of Taz, likely the greatest ECW World Champion ever. The problem is that just a little bit above that level of his debut is where he has stayed since then. He doesn’t seem interested in improving either with just eighty matches since he started. Never seen him advertised for an indie date, hardly ever see him on Ring of Honor, never hear about veterans working with him like they talk about other wrestlers. So, after All In using Hook for this person seems such a foolish idea.

It mostly doesn’t matter, though, because none of this shit after Hangman’s loss is going to matter. A month ago, Samoa Joe being the one to dethrone Hangman at forty-six in what should be a young man’s company, while also having acting jobs he’d have to be written off TV for at a moment’s notice, seemed just as foolish as using Hook. Now MJF is back, and nothing Samoa Joe has done for the past month is going to mean a damn thing. Neither will Swerve Strickland’s return nor his teaming up with Hangman. At World’s End in a four-way for the AEW World Championship, MJF is going to win, and we’re going to have to deal with his bullshit flavor of ice cream until Will Ospreay beats him a Wembley Stadium, which is 251 days away. So, for those who shit on Hangman fans when they were upset (at least they fucking felt something, which is part of the point of pro wrestling), I hope you enjoy Swerve taking a backseat and MJF delivering what is likely going to be a borderline racist promo to Bandido at Maximum Carnage.

To all my readers, I hope you have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday, in whatever way you celebrate.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 11 – The Hands of the King

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I pretty much know what my game, book, and wrestling match of the year are as far as number ones, it’s everything else underneath I’m not sure of. I’m working on an article/review for GeeklyInc.com on what I think is my favorite book of the year. The part of the end of the year, even though I only do this for fun, that I have a tough time balancing is finishing the last releases I haven’t finished yet, finding time and space for writing, and getting ready for the Holidays. Hence why I mentioned wanting to make more use of the library in previous volumes.

Books and Video Games – The Lord of the Rings and Metaphor ReFantazio

You might not know this, but the date the Fellowship of the Ring leaves Rivendell on the quest to destroy the ring is December 25th. Therefore, I tend to associate at least the first book of The Lord of the Rings with the beginning of November to the end of December season. It has been a while since I’ve read through this book, probably since 2017-2018. It’s one of the few books I insist on reading a physical copy despite owning it digitally in multiple places. I’ve read it all the way through six times, so I wonder if this time away, I’ll observe something new from it. I will say, to anyone reading it for the first time I think you can skip the Concerning Hobbits prologue chapter until at least finishing The Fellowship of the Ring. As much as I love it, it does feel like it slows down the pace immediately.

Credit to https://www.tumblr.com/katschneider

On my mind is the connection between finishing Blood for the Undying Throne, rereading The Lord of the Rings, and replaying Metaphor ReFantazio in the form of a quote from Tolkien’s book itself, “The hands of the king are the hands of the healer.” In College, with my thesis advisor, we’d discuss the connection between William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and how the kings, such as Macbeth, The Witch-King of Angmar, and Aragorn, affect the land positively and negatively. This obviously has biblical roots, which I am no expert on, so I won’t delve into it, nor the real political implications that monarchies believing themselves to be divine have had on our history. This is more the exploitation of the idea of the king in terms of mythology and fantasy. Major Metaphor ReFantazio endgame spoilers ahead.

In Metaphor, the king dies, and a contest is held to determine who will be the next king. In the game, there is a connection between the king, magic, anxiety, and the “humans,” who are abominations in the game based on artwork by Hieronymus Bosch. The magic that Euchornia has turned into an industry, called magla, turns out, towards the end of the game is revealed to be the physical manifestation of anxiety. If a person succumbs to their own anxiety, magla can actually turn them into a human. Louis, the main antagonist, wants to do this to everyone, and whoever can survive, aka overcome their anxieties, will be part of the new world with him as king. The protagonist you play ends up being the other character vying for the throne to improve the inequality in Euchronia. It’s all a cycle; you and the main character are trying to break it as there are multiple tribes of humanoids, and they don’t all get along. The game surmises the prejudice the different tribes feel towards each other is rooted in anxiety, thus creating more magla, thus creating more opportunity for people to turn into humans.

The death of the previous king and the absence of a replacement will lead to increased anxiety and tension between the tribes, thereby increasing the likelihood that people will succumb to their anxiety and transform into a human. Therefore, the protagonist becoming king will heal the land by healing the people’s anxieties. If the main character makes the serious changes in society the party and he intends to throughout the game as they meet more people and make more connections, this will ease the anxiety of the people. The connection between you and the protagonist is through the royal magic the previous king had cast, which is revealed at the end of the game, connecting you to the protagonist to guide them. Therefore, it is you, the player, who is also the king with the hands of a healer who heals the land by easing the anxiety of its people, including the main character you play and his party. This and many other reasons are why Metaphor ReFantazio was my game of 2024.

Wrestling – Blood and Guts 2025

Straight off the bat, while Blood and Guts is my preferred War Games style match, it has never been my favorite match stipulation. The need to do it every year doesn’t help at all, either, though I know it tends to be a ticket mover. With two different Blood and Guts this year, a Men’s and Women’s, they were always going to be compared, and while the Men’s Blood and Guts was good, the Women’s blew it out of the water.

It comes down to urgency and hatred. The participants in the Women’s B&G showed they had an urgent desire to get their hands on each other with real hatred. The build to this Blood and Guts was odd, but it had the roots of several feuds, giving it heightened tension. Like a spider-web, there is a line of connection each team member had with the other team throughout the year, and continuing past Blood and Guts into the Women’s World Tag Team Championship Tournament. I think AEW did its due diligence towards the event with matches between the two sides, but it definitely needed some more time and promos. Can Jamie trust Toni Storm, given their history? Have Willow and Kris buried the hatchet with the help of Harley Cameron? How did they talk Mercedes into joining the team? Questions that should have been asked and answered but it did not affect the quality of the match.

It had proper violence between Kris and Mercedes. It shortly ended at Willow and Kris communicating before the heels ruined it. Harley Cameron got to display both her silliness with the Mercedes puppet and equal violence in the match. Marina Shafir, whose wrestling matches I have never been impressed with, absolutely showed out. The key to all this is the speed at which they did this. A lot of these Blood and Guts matches have moments where they stall the action to set up a spot, but this one didn’t feel like that at all to me. The ending I thought was the best heel ending to a Blood and Guts yet, with the heel team forcing a lot of the big guns out of the cage and the Triangle of Madness forcing Toni Storm to surrender to save Mina Shirakawa. This will surely come up again in the tag team tournament.

For the Men’s Blood and Guts, all I have to say is never sleep on Kyle O’Reilly again. I will say, though, I think I loved the Hangman Page vs. Powerhouse Hobbs Fall Count Anywhere match better than either of these two Blood and Guts matches, and am of the belief Hobbs should have been Hangman’s Full Gear opponent instead of Samoa Joe, but I think I’m in the minority on this.

https://www.tumblr.com/allelitewrestlings/800064297134948352?source=share Gif by allelitewrestlings.tumblr.com

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 10 – A Touching Reunion

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

It’s November, and to be honest, I’m terrible at doing end-of-the-year writing, but this year I’m determined to do some posts on here and GeeklyInc.com in the “…of the Year” variety. There are only eight weeks left of the year, but I’m not against talking about the best or favorites of 2025 into the first weeks of 2026. Wrestling is the easiest to talk about because most of my matches of the year have already happened, but with the Continental Classic, one Ring of Honor PPV, and two AEW PPVs I don’t want to write off the potential of those shows. I don’t think anything will top my number one book, game, or wrestling match of the year, but it’s everything underneath that is up for grabs.

Wrestling – Random AEW Musings

I don’t have one particular topic in mind, but I do have some thoughts. Between All Out and now, AEW has been relatively good to very good. I’m enjoying myself even if I have some criticism of the booking here and there. For example, and keep in mind this is someone who relatively enjoys the C-show that is Tony Khan’s Ring of Honor TV, but there is no reason for Yuka Sakazaki to be wrestling on ROH and not be appearing in AEW, especially with her new presentation and music. As a big fan of hers, at first I was just happy to see her back from injury and wrestling regularly, but her team-ups with Alex Windsor have been good enough that I am left scratching my head as to why they’re not on AEW TV or having Yuka in singles matches on Dynamite or Collision. I am hoping they’re just spinning their wheels with them before having them on TV, since Women’s Tag Championships will need contenders.

I miss Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland, but Bandido has been filling that void they have left for me. It’s between Hangman and him, for me personally, for wrestler of the year, but I must admit I have been watching far less of other companies this year than in previous years. It’s one of my goals for next year to watch more CMLL, Stardom, and TJPW. Perhaps some NJPW as well, but it has not been hitting for me much this year except for Goto’s tite reign and Konosuke Takeshita.

Games – From Xbox 360 to PlayStation 4

If you’ve read enough of these entries and came back with the thought “Josh might have undiagnosed ADHD,” I would probably agree with you because I went from a theme of Xbox 360 games to PlayStation 4 games as I was sucked into God of War (2018) full throttle to the point that I beat every Valkyrie and completed the game. That somehow transitioned to me diving deep into another of my personal PS4 mainstays, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which I played to completion, but I find the having to choose different options in Chapter 9 to unlock different quests to complete every side quest in the game so tedious that I attempted it once, got annoyed, closed the game, and uninstalled. Completing both has left me excited to start God of War: Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on my new, fancy PC, but I might play more Silksong first, as well as replay Metaphor ReFantazio on PC, which I previously played on PS5.

Lastly, I’ve been delving briefly here and there into some DS Pokémon games such as SoulSilver, Platinum, and Black, with the latter being the first time I’ve ever played that generation. I think the release of Z-A and every gaming podcast discussing it to different degrees led me to have Pokémon on my mind.

While I was editing this, and since I’ve been playing Platinum, I was reminded that Piplup might be top five favorite Pokémon ever, and the YouTube algorithm decided to remind me of this.

Books – In Between Books

I am at the moment in between books, having finished both Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il, Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and a rereading of The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I am going to read next, but I’ve definitely felt the pull of reading this autumn that I did not feel in the summer. It has been a while since I have reread The Lord of the Rings, which used to be an annual event before I started expanding my fantasy library, and there has been this illustrated edition that came out a few years ago that has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read.

I also have some advanced reader copies for next year that maybe I should get the jump on, but I am unsure and would not be able to talk about them here, making this section very short and boring. We’ll see. The podcast will be reading Network Effect, the fifth Murderbot Diaries book, soon, which is the full-blown novel of the series rather than a novella. It is my favorite book in the series. Murderbot has to go off planet with Dr. Mensah’s teenage daughter, and hijinx ensue that force it to bond with a teenage girl on a deserted space station. It feels like a culmination of the first four novellas and the starting point of the rest of the series.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 8 – Orange You Glad For The Memories?

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

In this week’s volume, I talk about Orange Cassidy becoming AEW Men’s World Champion one day, share my progress and a review of Blood for the Undying Throne, and talk about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Team Cherry’s Samus Aran, and the worst order to play the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games.

Wrestling – Orange Cassidy as AEW World Champion: Important to AEW’s legacy

In the main event of AEW All Out 2023 Orange Cassidy defended the AEW International Championship against Jon Moxley and lost after 326 days, in one of the best matches in AEW history. I already believed he could be before this, but in this reign, Orange proved himself as a main eventer, a regular TV wrestler, a member of your roster you can count on, and get behind. Since he lost the International Championship the first time, his booking has been kind of stop-and-go due to injuries and, to be honest, not capitalizing on the hype of this run. After the match with Moxley, though, Orange stood in the ring with Best Friend members Chuck Taylor, Trent Beretta, and Kris Statlander as the crowd gave him a standing ovation and thanked Orange for this incredible run. The Best Friends are no longer together as a faction, but this photo of them at the end of All Out will live on forever.

Someone posted this photo in a Best Friends channel in a Discord I’m in, and said, “Honestly, this reunion will be so sweet though when OC wins the Men’s World Championship. That had me really thinking about it. AEW has a lot of amazing talent that would make great world champions, but I’ve never been of the belief that every one of them needs to be a world champion, except Orange. There is a list of people who will definitely be the men’s world champion or repeat champion. A lot of them are inevitable.

These three will be the men’s world champion multiple times.

I think Orange needs to be the men’s world champion sooner rather than later. It feels important to All Elite Wrestling‘s legacy to say yes, the man who weighs whatever from whenever should be the guy, no matter how long a reign he has. By mainstream wrestling standards, before AEW was founded, Orange as a top guy would be unconventional, but with his International Championship run, he proved he could be that guy who carried the company on his back to everyone that mattered, and even some who disagreed. Orange Cassidy is a foundational piece of All Elite Wrestling, and to have him in the lineage of one of your top titles is, in my opinion, essential.

Books – The Blood for the Undying Throne Review from Christina

I’m still working my way through The Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur. I haven’t made much progress, but it is the main book I’m reading this week, and by the time next week’s edition of BGW comes out, I will likely have finished the book. In the meantime, you should read my podcast co-host Christina’s review of the book. I haven’t read it yet, just in case of spoilers, but Christina’s reviews on GeeklyInc are always smart, thoughtful, and entertaining. She edited my reviews for a long time, and when we were done they were always better than my earlier drafts.

Blood for the Undying Throne Review: Empire of Death and Death of Empire

Games – Paragon Path, Hollow Knight 3, and the Worst Like A Dragon Order.

A friend got me talking about Mass Effect because he started playing the Legacy Edition, and somehow I’ve been sucked into playing it again, and rather than continuing where I left off in Mass Effect 2 from 2021, I started a brand-new Shepard in Mass Effect 1, and I am already into the same Shepard in Mass Effect 2.

Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Street Fighter 4, those were my all-timer Xbox 360 games for a long time. Back then, I thought Mass Effect 2 was a perfect sequel, adding new elements that improved the game and taking away a lot of unnecessary elements from the first. Now, maybe it’s because I’ve played so much more RPGs since the early 2010s, I see it a little differently. I wish some of those elements weren’t so stripped away, the different weapon attachments that change your ammo type, the different armors, and weapons. I miss all of them now in Mass Effect 2. The way they do powers in the second game, either the biotics or the tech powers, is much improved.

Back then, there was this code at the bottom of the 1st game for your custom Shepard that I wrote down because I didn’t quite like how my Shepard looked in Mass Effect 2 when I transported it over, so I kept a .txt file that I used to do this. I still have that .txt, so the Shepard I had back then is the Shepard I’m using now, over fifteen years later. That’s kind of amazing to me.

I’ve never played Mass Effect 3 since I finished it for the first time the year it came out. To be honest, I don’t remember how I feel about the ending, but I do know that I played through Mass Effect 2 all the way through at least 7 or 8 times before ME3 came out, and after finishing the third game, I never played any of them again. I don’t think I was angry or disappointed by the ending. I just kind of felt empty about it. I remember thinking the father telling the story of “the Shepard” to his son, which meant to show how the story of Commander Shepard became a timeline myth, was just corny and poorly done. My point is, I think this time I will play Mass Effect 3 again, this time with all the DLC I missed the first time, and see how I feel about it. I’m sure I’ll write about it.

I was thinking about this. A lot of people have been making fan art of what could be the next Hollow Knight protagonist, and it had me thinking if there was another Hollow Knight game, Team Cherry should just make Hornet their Samus Aran. Hollow Knight as a series doesn’t need a new main character; they’ve already got the best one. In Silksong, Hornet felt like both an established character and developed throughout that game at the same time. In fact, she reminds me a lot of Samus. Hornet speaks with a dignified air of someone who is long-lived and is compassionate to those in Pharloom who deserve it, and shows her prideful warrior side to those who deserve that. So, like Samus visiting new planets, Hornet can go to new kingdoms, gain new powers, and continue on in as many Hollow Knight games as they like to make.

One of my favorite gaming podcasts, Into the Aether did a special episode all about Yakuza 0. One of the co-hosts Brendon Bigley has said and maintains on this podcast that the best order for three of the Like a Dragon games that star Kiryu is Yakuza Kiwami 1 to Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami 2, and I agree! Kiwami 1 is much more of a breezy introduction to the series than 0 which is a fine introduction to Kiryu and the world of Like a Dragon doesn’t exemplify exactly what you’ll be getting out of most of the Kiryu games or what Kiryu is like as a character. 0 is amazing, but Kiwami 1 is a better introduction.

Do you know what order you shouldn’t play these games in? The order that I played in them, which was pure chaos. Here is the order in which I played the games. In 2018, I played Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6, you know, the prequel game and what was going to be the finale of Kiryu’s story. To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I think I might have picked two I had the money for at the time during a sale, and was like Oh, surely these two will be a good introduction to the series. What was I thinking? You might say, Josh, you knew about Yakuza: Like a Dragon coming out in 2020 with a new protagonist? No, I did not, but that was the game I played next. Then, when they announced Infinite Wealth would have both Kiryu and Ichiban as dual protagonists, I played Yakuza Kiwami 1 and The Man Who Erased His Name. Infinite Wealth basically took up the last quarter of 2024 because it is that damn good. This year, I played Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, followed by Yakuza Kiwami 2. So here is my Like a Dragon order in all its chaos

  • Yakuza 6
  • Yakuza 0
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7)
  • Yakuza Kiwami 1
  • Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
  • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
  • Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
  • Yakuza Kiwami 2

A list of pure chaos, but I had fun nonetheless. The thing about Like a Dragon is, whether you know the story or not, you just have to buy in, and even if you don’t know the details, you’ll get what is at the heart of the stories, no matter which one you start at.

Yep, we’re good here.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 3 – The One About Hollow Knight Silksong.

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Hey, it’s my website, I’m changing the order this week with Silksong as the main event.

Books – Green Bone Saga Gold Edition by Fonda Lee

I’m still reading through those two Anthony Ryan books from last week. I won’t like, I’ve only had Silksong on the brain since it released.

Not only that, but I will say, I splurged a bit and bought these fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga that just came out. Jade City was a book I’ve owned since it came out, but kept putting it off to my to-be-read pile until, I recall, 2021, when the final book in the series, Jade Legacy, came out. Urban Fantasy is not usually the flavor of fantasy I’m into, but this is one of those series, like A Chorus of Dragons, The Murderbot Diaries, or The First Law, that instantly clicked, and I knew instinctively, “Oh, this is going to be one of my favorite series ever after this.”

It’s a family crime drama with magical Jade that gives you superhuman abilities that result in some of my favorite fight scenes in fiction. The characters are beyond flawed, to put it more bluntly, they’re fucked up, and you’ll love them even when you hate them or the decision they make.

Wrestling – Third Stretch is the Charm for Kenny Omega

All the complaints about the closing angle for Kenny Omega this week on AEW Dynamite, I read, were fairly on point about not having good payoffs. The Elite sent him home last year, with Jack Perry bragging about it. Kenny returns and doesn’t immediately retaliate against the Elite. Jack Perry is also nowhere to be found. Okada and Don Callis attack him again before their match at All In brutally, with blood coming out of his mouth, Kenny ends up losing and taking about a month and a half off. Last week, it was hype city for a Hangman and Kenny reunion. Now, the Don Callis family, namely Kyle Fletcher, beat the shit out of him, and he’s stretchered off with Hangman distraught. I am unsure of where this is leading for Kenny Omega, and yet, I must admit, I still remain invested in this one, probably because Hangman was involved, to be honest. Will it have a proper payoff? I’m not sure, but if All Out ends up being AEW World Champion Hangman Adam Page vs TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher, it’d be a funny little parallel to last year’s AEW World Champion Bryan Danielson vs. TNT Champion Jack Perry. I think, if they had set this up maybe a week or two before the reaction, it might have been better because more time for Hangman and Kenny to really be seen together, maybe more than one match with some talking segments, whether backstage or in the ring, would really have had people on the hook. If Kenny comes back and does not interact with Hangman upon his return, I’ll likely be more critical of this whole scenario. We will see.

Games – Hollow Knight Silksong

It’s finally arrived, Hollow Knight Silksong is real, it’s finished, it’s released, it’s everything I wanted from a sequel to Hollow Knight, and it’s difficult as hell. I thought, hey, I’ve played a fuck ton of Hollow Knight, how hard could the sequel be? The beginning of the game does not ease you in but throws you into the deep end. I really don’t want to go on and on about the difficulty, because that is what so many people are talking about. Act I is difficult because you start with basically nothing, but you get new upgrades and new abilities and learn the patterns of the enemies as well as your own combat. It’s kind of like learning a fighting game in that way. Bosses doing double damage, something only late-stage Hollow Knight bosses did in the first one, was rough, as well as those rooms that were basically a gauntlet of dudes. In fact, I find those gauntlet rooms far tougher than the bosses. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s my horrible eyesight, but I’ve always had trouble seeing the whole screen. It’s why I have such trouble with that piano mini-game in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Wait, no, it’s probably not an issue of seeing the whole screen but having to be closer to the screen because my vision is not great. The platforming, though, specifically the red flowers in Hunter’s March, that’s the kind of thing in Hollow Knight that I loved. Sure, you might mess up and die, but once you find the rhythm, especially with Hornet’s diagonal down attack, it’s really fun. I’ll tell you now, you’d better learn to do it because you’re going to be doing it a lot and in far more treacherous areas than Hunter’s March.

“This is probably my game of the year,” he says about Silksong, like he said about Deltarune Chapters 3+4, Donkey Kong Bananza, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The First Berserker: Khazan, Monster Hunter Wilds. I probably would have said it about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance too, if I hadn’t already known SIlksong was coming out. However, I will say, more than any other game I’ve just mentioned, except for maybe Donkey Kong Bananza, Silksong has caused me to lose time in the joy of playing it. I’ll sit down and be like, I’ll just play for an hour, and suddenly the sun has gone down, and my stomach is rumbling for some reason. People hate this, but like Dark Souls, both Hollow Knights have this atmosphere of melancholy and a society decaying that draws you in, but the bugs are all so joyful, cute, and bring a smile to your face plus, and I love the stories of FromSoftware games don’t get me wrong, the stories of both games are much more straightforward with all this lore underneath you can choose to what level you want to engage in. Silksong‘s plot is basically Hornet gets kidnapped, taken to this far-off land called Pharloom, and has to find out who and why by ascending to the Citadel above. It’s much more complicated than that, but that’s basically all you need to know to start the game. The NPCs in this game, I love them, all these little bug friends of mine, especially Sherma, whom I just want to make all their dreams come true. His little song for the gate I will never forget.

I love them.

— Josh M. (@fouroffivewits.pizza) 2025-09-05T01:39:51.761Z

Metroidvanias (No, I will not nor will I ever call them Search Action games) have to be one of the best genres of video games, top 5 easily. The satisfaction of finding a secret, beating a boss, getting a new upgrade, discovering new areas you didn’t know about before, and going back to areas with secrets you couldn’t get before is one of the most satisfying things in video games. Games are all about the illusion of achievement, and Metroidvanias nail that to a T. I know that now that I said Hollow Knight: Silksong is my game of the year, I just know Supergiant Games is going to announce Hades 2 is coming out of Early Access and into version 1.0 before the year ends. Still, I think, as of right now, Hollow Knight Silksong might be one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. No doubt, I will still be playing it and talking about it next week.

If you want to see my current Games of the Year + games of 2025 I want to play, you can check out my full Backlogged list here. My Top 10 is as follows

  1. Hollow Knight: Silksong
  2. Donkey Kong Bananza
  3. Deltarune: Chapter 3+4
  4. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  5. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
  6. Doom: The Dark Ages
  7. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
  8. The First Berserker: Khazan
  9. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
  10. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 1 – Noodles, Knights, and NJPW

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’m not going to give a long explanation yet to what this is or why I’m writing, because before I know it, I’ll have a thousand words, and that’ll be this entire post before I get to the point of the thing. To sum it up, I want to write about what I like in a shorter format than my book reviews on Geeklyinc.com or on No Page Unturned. I love books, I love video games, and I love wrestling, hence Book, Games, Wrestling. I hear the Aesop Rock song Food, Clothes, Medicine when I say it, but here we go before I get off track again.

Book – Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

My review will be up soon enough, but I have to say, my reading habits this summer have been such a mess. My To-Be-Read pile has grown too tall this summer, yet my reading habits have been subpar. Fall and Winter are such better reading seasons for me as someone who doesn’t do well in the heat.

Automatic Noodle, though, has been a book I’ve been thinking about since I first heard about it. The premise is essentially set in an unidentified future, where robots want to, for once, serve good food to their patrons and are given an opportunity, out of sheer luck, to open their own noodle shop. It’s labelled as cozy, but there is definitely a cloud of desperation hanging over most of the plot, both from the bots, the humans, and the overall world that is in the vibe of a dystopian future run by megacorporations that we seem to be getting a lot of, gee, wonder why? The feeling of dread and oppression is not what I would call cozy, but I’d still recommend it regardless.

I mean, just because it’s marketed as cozy but doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting read. The oppression of sentient robots is a subject I’m sure will be explored more as technology advances and more rights get taken away in the United States and beyond. I will admit I’m holding back for my review, pretty sure, but I really enjoy how Newitz makes each of the bots distinct.

Game – Hollow Knight – Team Cherry

Silksong is real and will be out as of this post in a little over a week. I’ve done everything but the Godmaster DLC on the Switch edition of Hollow Knight because by the time it was out, I was already finished with Hollow Knight, at over 100%. Plus, in 2018, on the Nintendo Switch, I remember being kind of insane, as well as my life at the time being kind of insane. When I bought a Steam Deck last August, Hollow Knight was one of the first games I bought during the next Steam sale because, quite honestly, though it had been six years since I played it, I still felt it was one of the greatest games of all time or at least one of my greatest games of all time.

Now that Silksong is coming out, I felt it was time to play it on PC/Steam Deck. It was like riding a bike again to be honest, and I was aiming to get that achievement of beating the game at 100% under 20 hours. I got very close at about 20 hours and 23 minutes, so annoyingly close. I do not remember there being achievements on the Switch edition; it probably had in-game quests as the equivalent, but it’s not quite the same. Take or leave achievements, I do often find them fun, even if Steam achievements feel lesser than other platforms. I’ve left just enough time between Hollow Knight playthroughs that the challenge remains thrilling, yet not so much that the backtracking feels tedious, while retaining enough memory to avoid repetition. I’ve already beaten it, and once I did, I thought to myself, “Oh shit, it’s still not September 4th.” I started a new file, intending to hopefully get that achievement this time, and also to leave Zote to die, the ungrateful little shit that he is.

Wrestling – AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025

The build to Forbidden Door was messy, it’s always messy, and to be quite honest, even with the mess I still do find it fun. However, a lot of MJF’s creative ideas I do not find fun, and it felt like, with the stipulations he had forced Hangman to agree to under the pretense that he was going to light Mark Briscoe on fire, that I’m being forced to watch Triple H from the early and mid 2000s reborn. In 2023, I was annoyed with MJF, but in 2025, I’m just tired of it. His promos to all his opponents feel the same; his nicknames for his opponents are all terrible, not in a fun way, but in a way that makes me want to look at my Steam Deck and continue playing Hollow Knight. It just feels all the same. But Josh, you might ask, isn’t that just what heels do? Well, I’m not sick of what Kyle Fletcher and the Don Callis family are doing, nor since All In am I sick of what Jon Moxley and the Death Riders are doing. Ricochet with the Gates of Agony is quite interesting, and Christian Cage, who often has the same edgelord shtick as MJF, quite frankly does it better because he’ll do enough to at least give me the illusion of changing it up. Except for Christian, the difference between a lot of those heels and MJF is that they actually wrestle quite frequently. Maybe if MJF took up so much TV time wrestling as well as promos and segments I might feel different but as of right now, I’m quite tired of MJF.

This isn’t about MJF, though; it’s about Forbidden Door, and despite Max’s terribly convoluted idea for a finish, yes, I am one hundred percent sure it was his idea because it reminded me of the era of WWE I know he loves. Hangman’s world title defense against him, I thought, was excellent before that. It’s how I felt about the pay-per-view overall, quite good overall. Hiromu Takahashi looked great against Kyle Fletcher. Toni Storm defeated Athena in what I thought was a very good match, but I thought they might be holding back for a future rematch. I took a break during the beginning of the tag title match and came back just in time to see some mysterious masked men drive the Hurt Syndicate back to the airport before Bandido could even get the pin on whichever member of FTR was pinned (I think Dax? Don’t correct me, I do not care.). Bozilla, Persephone, and Alex Windsor all showed out for the four-way against Mercedes Mone for the TBS Title, impressing me with ideas I don’t think I’ve seen in four-ways before, and it felt like Mercedes made sure to make them all look good in defeat. Swerve versus Okada might have bee my match of the night. Say what you want about Okada’s efforts I felt he really put his all or at the very least 90% into his defense of the Unified Title against Swerve. The main event lights-out cage match, was both fun and intense, and if this is the last we see from Ospreay and Swerve in a while, it was a great showing by both of them.

Was it my favorite Forbidden Door? No. Was it the best Forbidden Door? I don’t think so either but I felt happy watching it, and when it was over, I was more curious about what was going to happen next rather than worried about the direction AEW was going.