retroid pocket 4

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 23 – Mastery, Mysteries and Omega

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / 1 Comment

This one is a bit late, like three weeks late. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts more in these pocket notebooks I carry with me before I transfer them to this site. I already have my September one written out on those notebooks, but I didn’t want to skip over what I felt were, well, important isn’t quite the right word, but significant observations about my hobbies in July and August. The subject of Retro devices, RetroAchievements, FromSoftware games, and the build to All In are subjects I could write extensively about and may do individual posts on here separate from this format. For now, here is the latest from me on books, games, and wrestling once again.

Games – RetroAchievements and FromSoftware

I’ve been playing the original Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on my Retro Pocket 4 with RetroAchievements, a platform that provides achievements for classic games you legally own by purchasing them. This is one of my favorite video games ever (landing at #11 on my ongoing and ever-evolving Backlogged My 100 Greatest Games Ever list), and it has been so fun unlocking achievements for this game as I did with Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World previously. The game still looks and plays amazingly, to the point that I underestimated how much of a visual upgrade the remake is, so I couldn’t help but boot it up again on my Switch 2 just to compare them. As a wrestling fan, Chapter 3 is my favorite, and Vivian/Goombella are my favorite companions in that game. I eventually moved my save from the RP4 to my new Retroid Pocket Nova with an OLED screen, and it looks amazing.

The first time I beat Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC was during a Steam Sale, so wanting to satiate my FromSoftware need further without going into New Game+, I bought Dark Souls II at a reasonable price. I hated it almost immediately. Nothing about Dark Souls II felt right to me, to the point I bounced off it fairly quickly. Over ten years later, after finishing Dark Souls Remastered this year on my PC and purchasing Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin because it worked on Steam Deck, I decided to give it another chance thanks in part to this Chris Person editorial on Aftermath, which I thought was excellent and pretty convincing.

Dark Souls II still rocks and the haters can suck it. aftermath.site/dark-souls-ii-…

— Aftermath (@aftermath.site) 2026-08-01T01:01:24.171660+00:00

https://aftermath.site/dark-souls-ii-is-good-actually

I can now say I’ve upgraded it from a game I didn’t like and bounced off of to one that’s pretty good but not my cup of tea. I still think it’s the worst of the FromSoftware Soulsborne games. The combat and the hit boxes feel off, the sound direction is not great, and some of the bosses are poorly designed visually and mechanically compared to their other games. Yet after playing through it, I think it’s still better than most action games. It still has a lot of bullshit, like adaptability as a necessary skill for dodge rolling being a near deal-breaker for the game, and they do not take the opportunity to balance it out with good shield mechanics. Most of the time I was playing Dark Souls II, I really wanted to quit playing it to play a different Souls game, and more than any other, it’s the one I’ve needed a guide for the most, not to find specific items but to just figure out where I was supposed to go next. It’s not that the game was overly frustrating; failing and learning is part of the fun of FromSoftware games, but it just doesn’t feel fun to do a lot of things in it. That being said, I do think a lot of the criticisms toward it are ill-conceived. The story is fascinating, Majula is an all-timer hub world, and Drangleic Castle is one of the sickest locations in this series of games. While I did technically beat it, I didn’t beat it in the way I would normally play one of these games. I rushed through it just to say I did it. I don’t really feel the want to go back, but Dark Souls II is definitely not a bad game, as most have said.

A feeling that could not be even more apparent when I immediately started playing Dark Souls 3 from the beginning afterwards. I do think so many hours of playing Elden Ring have made me better at these games because both Aldrich, Devourer of Gods, and Lothric & Lorian bosses I’ve struggled with in my last four or five playthroughs I fought with relative ease this time around. My latest playthrough may be the fastest I’ve ever gone through Dark Souls 3. I’m right at the end, about to fight the final boss and play the Ringed City DLC, when I had the intrusive thought of “Yeah, this game looks just as good as Elden Ring,” only to boot up Elden Ring to confirm my suspicions.

Yeah, I’m playing Elden Ring once again. Maybe playing too much, in fact, as not only was I wrong about Dark Souls 3 looking just as good, but I’ve got three playthroughs I’m switching between: my very first character when the game came out, a Dexterity build in NG+, a new playthrough on PC that is a Strength build with Greatswords, and after glowing reviews and some extra digital currency lying around, I picked up the Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition and am playing that all comfortable on the basement couch on my Switch 2. Playing through their previous games has given me a new appreciation for not only the scale and size of Elden Ring but also how they contained the magic of Souls gameplay into such a large, expansive world. Also, man, the game just looks so beautiful that you can really miss it when you’re fighting for your life and the runes you want to keep. There are still so many builds I’ve never done in Elden Ring before that’ll eventually lead this game to trouncing the original version of Skyrim as my most hours played on Steam.

Reading – Ana and Din Mysteries

My co-host Christina on No Page Unturned has been ringing the Robert Jackson Bennett bell for a couple of years now, but his books have never really drawn my interest. Then, when my other co-host Steph started reading The Tainted Cup just as Christina was reading the third book, A Trade of Blood, I decided fuck it and started reading the first book just as Steph was getting to the second one, A Drop of Corruption. I’ve been intrigued by the genre mixing of mystery and fantasy for a while, and was enthused with The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan and the characters of Sir Konrad Vonval and Helena solving mysteries before the books became about something else. The Ana and Din Mysteries are more of what I wanted in that. The world is fascinating to me; it’s walled in like the world of Empire of Exiles by Erin M. Evans, but with the threat of giant leviathans rather than changelings. Din as the Dr. Watson type but far more active with enhancements that give him perfect memory, plays off well with Ana, easily overstimulated due to the enhancements she was given that give her beyond-human deductive reasoning over the cases they solve throughout the empire.

I quickly devoured all three of these books, which is unusual for me. Often if I read too many books in a series back-to-back, I get restless partway through the second or third book and have to put them down. Now I’m highly anticipating the next Ana and Din mystery, which often start out with cases that seem like small incidents Ana can easily solve but quickly unravel into information that could have dire repercussions for the whole empire. Meanwhile, the worldbuilding around the empire as more information is unravelled points to a larger narrative arc and mystery that Ana and Din are slowly racing towards. Their dynamic does a lot for my enjoyment of the series starting out in that more familiar everyman dealing with an eccentric genius like Watson and Holmes, but Din’s character blossoms into more than just being the narrator telling Ana’s story. He gets exasperated with Ana’s proclivities, she gets annoyed at his disobedience with his free-time activities, and they both grow closer over the actions of the empire they live in. I could read one of these every year, and more fantasy authors should take the investigative approach for the plot.

Wrestling – ALL IN 2026

Let’s talk about builds. Kenny Omega vs. Will Ospreay was amazing, maybe one of the best AEW matches of all time, and because of that, no one is going to remember how weird and messy the build was, and it’s a damn shame that this is not the only instance of that happening. The character of Will Ospreay in 2026 has been weird all year since his return. I straight up have not liked his character, nor have I liked his story with the Death Riders, ranging from stupid to not making any sense to a waste of my time. When they dropped it after Redemption, I was enjoying the callout that Kenny Omega did to Ospreay’s behavior and was hoping for some kind of reckoning on that front, but Kenny was making too much sense and was risking getting cheered at Wembley, so they made him the Green Goblin once again with the belt. I hate that this mess is not going to be remembered and we’ll have to deal with the ebbs and flows of AEW sometimes having great builds and sometimes poor ones, with resulting PPV quality not being affected by the poor ones.

I hate that, but goddamnit, though, it was such an amazing match. Kenny Omega’s intro with You Say Run, and the Japanese voice of All Might from My Hero Academia brought tears to my eyes. I knew Ospreay was going to win, we all did, but I wish I could have gone into the match with more enthusiasm for him like I did in 2024 and 2025. What’s even more frustrating in just one promo leading up to All Out that Ospreay cut on Jon Moxley, he seemed back to that guy I cheered for in previous years. I’ll forever be frustrated with everything leading up to the All In main event from Kenny Omega’s loss to MJF, Ospreay riding with Moxley and the Death Riders, the title win not being at Redemption because [redacted], and the overcomplication of the Omega v. Ospreay build to get Ospreay cheered. That being said, I too am getting old and may also forget all about this in lieu of how great the match was.

Meanwhile, Mercedes Moné vs. Willow Nightingale killed it. This had a fantastic build that really made it clear these two are tied together in AEW history, but also that they don’t like each other for good reason. They certainly showed it in their match because these two women beat the shit out of each other. If it was anyone else besides Will Ospreay and Kenny Omega, I would have said this should have been the main event (like, for example, if it had been MJF in Omega’s place). These two are going to be eternal rivals in AEW. I will say, it does feel kind of bad that this has happened to Willow twice, one with the TBS title and now with the World Championship. Still, I am pretty confident Willow will get her time as the top babyface of AEW sooner rather than later.

The less said about Cope & Christian beating the Young Bucks, the better. Once again, old timers are going to find their way out of getting pinned, and if you’re aware of the Tag Team Championship match at All Out, they’re still not going to get pinned. So far in AEW, Cope has been pinned or submitted by three people in singles action: Jon Moxley, Christian Cage, and Dax Harwood. That’s it. I can’t wait for these two to retire now. That’s all from me, until next time.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 21 – The Way It’s Meant To Be

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I like books. I like wrestling. I like video games. I like writing about those things. Let’s just get into it.

Wrestling – Hangman’s Back, Moxley’s There, Redemption Soon

It was announced late that Hangman Page was going to return on AEW Collision, much to the excitement of multiple group chats I’m in. I wasn’t sure what to expect when he returned or what he’d say, but I thought he did a great job of setting up his character arc for the foreseeable future. He made it clear that the stipulation he’d never challenge for the World Title was an oath he swore on a handshake deal only, meaning that the only person holding him to it right now is himself. He makes an impassioned speech about his journey, continuing to go after the other singles championships. All that sounds tantalizing for match-ups, but we’re all in agreement he’s a big fat liar who is big fat lying to himself. I don’t know which of these belts he’s going to win, if any, but the Hangman is going to find it unsatisfying. The question is what it will take for him to break the promise, when it will happen, and whether it’ll be as a face or a heel. I think people who assumed it was going to be a heel turn weren’t paying attention to the audience when he said he wouldn’t break the stipulation; they were not happy. Hangman’s character has always had a connection to the crowds, so will Hangman finally snap on a babyface and break the stipulation, or will a threat of a heel world champion on the rampage convince Hangman that breaking his word will be for the greater good? It’s going to be fun to see.

I’m going to try to keep this short because it’s easy to be negative, and it’s easy to nitpick wrestling storytelling, but I am so tired of Jon Moxley and the Death Rider’s storytelling. Let me be clear, Jon Moxley has been one of my favorite wrestlers for most of AEW’s history and a lot of times as Dean Ambrose in WWE, but this shit sucks. It’s nonsense, and it’s boring, and it has made me uninterested in Will Ospreay as a world champion. If Jon Moxley is just going to win every match, there has to be a good story to go with it. Jon Moxley used to give promos straight to the point that he was the toughest motherfucker in the room, and it was going to take everything you had to beat him. Now, he cuts promos like he’s second billing in Léon: The Professional when he’s actually coming off as second billing to Gerard Butler in Gamer. It doesn’t help that ninety percent of tweeners in wrestling have 1. not worked, 2. sucked, and 3. never helped anyone involved get over. Every time the Death Riders come out during a Will Ospreay segment, I find myself groaning. Dynamite was the worst of it because they had just come out to jump Cope and Christian (babyfaces), and now they’ve come out to fend off the Don Callis Family (heels) for Kenny Omega and Ospreay. You can deep dive into what you think Moxley is doing beyond the bounds of babyface and heel with the Death Riders, but that doesn’t make it interesting.

I’ve seen some people who are fans defend the Death Riders in 2026, and it feels like what they’re describing and what is on screen do not match up. How exactly has the Death Riders formation helped any of the members since their formation, and what does Jon Moxley beating everyone and offering a handshake do for his opponents? The most exciting the Death Riders have ever been was the lead-up to Moxley’s match against babyface Hangman Adam Page at All In. The group was spinning their wheels with the AEW World Championship before then, and then had a disappointing feud with Darby Allin that did not help Darby get over at all. Now, since the C2 Jon Moxley as a tweener has found a way to not get anyone over. Not the Death Riders, not his opponents, and not Will Ospreay leading up to what is supposed to be his biggest moment after a severe neck injury. Now here come the Elite, specifically the Young Bucks, to inject some life into this storyline once again, just as they did after Dynasty 2025. Pick a lane, Jon, so the Young Bucks don’t have to keep saving your storylines for you, and kill the Josh Barnett groundwork, Jon, this isn’t MMA, and you’re not Bryan Danielson.

Phew, got that off my chest. That being said, the card for AEW Redemption actually looks sick as hell. I would have preferred a big defense for Kenny Omega at Redemption, considering all signs showed that was originally going to be the MJF match, which was moved up for whatever reason, but Kevin Knight versus Kenny Omega is going to be awesome, and it’s going to be something to look back on when Knight reaches the top guy level sooner rather than later. I’ve loved Thekla as AEW Women’s World Champion despite beating one of my favorites, Kris Statlander, but it’s Willow’s time now, and I’m hoping for her to go all the way, beating both Thekla and Mercedes at All In to crown her as the top babyface of the women’s division. Kyle Fletcher vs. Bandido might steal the show, but I’m not looking forward to Bandido losing on pay-per-view again (see also: complaints about Jon Moxley’s current run). I thought Ciampa vs. Jericho on Beach Break was Jericho’s best match since his return, and the two of them seem to have great chemistry, so I can’t believe it, but I actually might be looking forward to Painmaker Jericho vs. Ciampa’s No Holds Barred match. I do remain a little skeptical that they can do better and may, in fact, do too much. Young Bucks on PPV are going to Young Bucks on PPV despite my misgivings about Mox and Ospreay’s story. Mark Davis vs. Andrade will be good. Claudio, Christian, and PAC will do their best to make Copeland look good. I hope Maya World beats Hikaru Shida for the TBS title because, unfortunately, Shida has gotten really slow and messy in her matches, which makes me sad as she used to be the highlight of the women’s division.

Books – Hodgepodge

This section is going to be rather short because I’m just like, unfocused, in my reading right now. I’m all over the place. I started reading Gareth Hanrahan’s The Dungeon Book, which seems like just the right kind of fun fantasy book I could use right now. Reading those special edition hardcovers of the Green Bone Saga for the podcast has me wanting to reread The Bloodsworn Saga by John Gwynne, which I bought some fancy hardcover for that series as well. A.K Larkwood’s The Serpent Gates duology is also calling to me, as it’s world buidling is not weird but unusual enough that it feels refreshing.

Games – The Mermaid Mask, Control, Vampire Crawlers.

I think it was February 2021 before most people, including me, got the vaccine, and because of the pandemic, the release of new games was, to put it lightly, in fucking chaos. I asked on Twitter if anyone had any game recommendations because my backlog was so much smaller back then, and a fellow Josh in the GeeklyInc community recommended Tangle Tower to me on the Nintendo Switch.

I fell in love with it almost instantly. Grimoire and Sally have a fun dynamic as a duo that balances each other out between being funny and effective detectives. The art style is tremendous, with stand-out character design and animation that make the cast’s personalities clear to the player. Except for one or two, the puzzles are fairly easy. The mystery itself is so intriguing, with an ending that left me just slightly deflated, but overall, I loved Tangle Tower.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1696770/The_Mermaid_Mask (You should buy it.)

I’ve been following The Mermaid Mask closely since it was announced, waiting and waiting and waiting for more information, and now, finally, it has been released. I devoured this game with all the free time I could muster. Everything I loved about Tangle Tower feels leveled up in The Mermaid Mask, with an ending that had me glued to my Steam Deck. This cast of characters is all in this cramped submarine with a murdered captain and an open cauldron that had previously never been opened before. Everything that was in Tangle Tower is here, but the animation and voice cast have been especially upgraded. I generally read much faster than most voice actors read the lines, and sometimes I can be impatient, skipping over dialogue before the voiceover is finished, but not with The Mermaid Mask. I would listen closely to each character describing who they are, why they are on the submarine, the murder, and their thoughts on the clues Grimoire and Sally discover closely, and watch the animation of the characters, so beautifully done. I struggled with some of the puzzles, in a good way, that I generally didn’t with Tangle Tower. From what I’ve gathered from social media, this game wasn’t easy to make but I would generally buy one of these Grimoire games every year, and as long as SFB Games keeps making them, I will buy them for the rest of my life.

With Control Resonant coming out, I reinstalled Control because I never finished. Last time I played it was in 2021, when it fried my coolant system for my CPU and killed my computer for like a month before I had a friend come over and help me install a new cooling system and redo the thermal paste because I did a terrible job. So I never played it after that on that computer out of a suspicious fear it would do it again. Now my latest computer laughs at the requirement for Control, so I decided to restart it from the beginning, only to encounter a game-breaking glitch in the year 2026 for a seven-year-old game that kept me from progressing. Luckily, Control has Mission Select, so I can technically go back to where I left off in 2021, but that isn’t what I wanted to do. I’m going to try to restart it again to see if I can get the mission I need to work on, and if not, I might just put Control away once again.

Speaking of that old computer, I’ve been using it as a home for a lot of smaller, less graphic powerhouse games that I connect to via Steam Link on my Retroid Pocket 4 when I’m outside or away from home, and the game I’ve invested the most time into that way is this year’s Vampire Crawlers. That game is just fun as hell, and it’s so satisfying following the combo patterns of picking the 0 mana card, then 1, then 2, and so on. I’ve been using my Retroid Pocket 4 a lot more since I came up with this idea, and I preordered the Retroid Pocket Nova, which comes out fairly soon. That’s all for now, until next time.