Hello everyone! I’m pre-writing this ahead of time like I tend to do for my end of year stuff, mainly to ensure that I get the bulk of the work done on time before the last minute. I have spare free time this week to work on the end of year roundup, but I wanna make sure I get it done for reals without any delays, since that’s been an annoyance these past months due to IRL stuff getting in my way.
Last year at the end of the 23 roundup, I made predictions about random things, so I figured a fun focus for part 1 this year would be to go back on those predictions, and compare them with reality. But first, some random rambles/updates on the year overall!
Connor Gets his Social Groove Back
Last year I lamented the lack of social media I was doing, due to the need to leave Twitter because of well, the extreme bigotry and hate spewing out of that platform, which increasingly grows more aggressive month after month. I keep hoping Germany or the EU would step in to force change for the better, but now Germany has their own problems on the horizon, and the EU seems to not be too fussed about one of the biggest social media platforms being owned by a horrid person.
However, after months of pestering, lots of my own self-doubt, and seeing some people report the site helped them as freelancers, I caved and went to Bluesky earlier this year right after it was blatantly obvious Cohost was a terribly ran website which had little time left to live in this world. Sure enough, it predictably shut down a few months ago with the staff in charge of the place not learning a damn thing about having a social media platform help smaller people find friends. Wouldn’t you know it, Bluesky managed to do the algorithm-less social media concept without having smaller/newer accounts running into issues finding people! Vindication.
So yeah, I use Bluesky. I generally liked it tons when it was a smaller community and seeing more old pals from Twitter/Cohost follow me there. As of now, I believe I am at or near the amount of followers I had on Twitter before I fully erased my account there, but I don’t particularly care about my follower amount especially as bots unfortunately have flooded the website. Not nearly as bad as Twitter mind you since they swiftly get banned, but I am not a fond of the vibe shift there.
As I noted earlier, having 11+ million new people join your site in a month on the heels of a world event that makes everyone flooded with anxiety makes the mood shift for the worse. I still have a lot of things I’m recently disappointed in but for the time being, I’m at least able to still use it to promote my writings like nothing else, and I want to keep that momentum so that no matter what happens, people come and help enjoy my writing and maybe give me feedback now and then.
Article Accomplishments + Future Pieces
This year we succeeded in getting a rad interview done with an old mysterious Telenet Programmer, which is one of my favorite things to have done in a long while. I also got some really big and cool reviews done such as that of Tetris Forever, along with a ton of Evercade reviews as I kickstarted my journey of covering the entire library! I also am happy to say that we’re pretty much on the cusp of finishing the Switch Legacy review queue this year as I aimed for: DR4 should be done by the time you read this, and I’m enjoying Deadly Premonition a decent bit, so I should have that up soonish too. Maybe by the time you’re reading this? (Doubtful, but I at least have significant work done on the sunday before this goes live!)
Of course as I noted in prior site updates, Mary Skelter Finale is pretty much the final non-Morgana game I’m covering before shifting to clearing out that Playstation queue. If I waited to play and give thoughts on Fata Morgana before doing any PS4 stuff, we’d be here forever, so I figured I’d focus on those other big long games first. Lord knows I can finally box up my PS4 when all is said and done…
Still, with Steam fully caught up, Xbox pretty much just there for the oddball exclusive/only XB code available games, and PS4 closed off, I think I should be able to get nice and ready for what the future with Switch 2 has to offer, and re-establish relations with some companies I backed away from covering stuff for due to my backlog. Feeling rather nice and confident, which is more than I can say compared to last year where I was still way too behind. Again, 2019 destroyed me. Hopefully I never encounter such a derail ever again.
As for opinion pieces, we have some big ones coming. I already have the stupidly long LRG Part 3 in the works and nearly finalized, wanting it to be 100% right and good to go before I put it out there. I don’t want it to end up like a typical CE from the company, after all. I also noted wanting to write about the Analogue Duo again shortly afterward, and with those done, I’d not mind making some fun Evercade wishlists or whatnot in the future, too. I have a list of interview subjects I wanna talk to for future articles as well, so maybe in the spring I’ll get on that again.
Video Content…? Not quite.
I am still retired from making YT videos and retrospectives. My IRL situation would make it impossible without me literally halting all work on SFG content besides videos, so I will unfortunately still have to hold off Eternal Memories episodes for the time being. If there ever is a demand (like say, someone actually found the old episodes and gave a crud), I’d consider doing it again. Maybe I’ll make a 10th anniversary video in September, but otherwise EM is still on hold.
That being said, I have been able to squeeze twitch streams into my routine. Nothing crazy, usually just direct from console stuff i play for fun, but I do want to continue and work away on it in the coming year. Maybe I’ll end up as a Twitch affiliate? That’d be fun. One of my dreams would be to try and get a PNG/Vtuber thingy going with my fox self, but that’s a lot of work for a program (OBS) I know nothing about. Not to mention streaming on a macbook being way tougher than I’d expect, and I would hate to have to use Windows 11 again… Still, feel free to click the button on the sidebar to follow my Twitch if you want.
2023 Predictions: How’d they go?
Now this is the fun part of the piece. Last year I wrote a bunch of predictions on what I thought would happen this year, and now we get to compare the predictions of a year again with now. On the 31st of this year, I’ll make more predictions for the end of 2025, to keep the fun trend going. So let’s take a look and see…
The Analogue 3D will get delayed out of 2024. This was 100000% correct because of course it was. Analogue may make good products, but they are rarely right on ETAs or delivery of them. This got fully revealed a few months ago along with a lovely looking 8Bitdo controller, but otherwise not much else was revealed about that, which is a little concerning.
They also completely erased all mention of the Analogue DAC from the Pocket/Duo, which is pretty bullshit considering how they’ve been touting those devices as being eventually compatible with the thing beforehand. I will say I was a little shocked that the post-reveal interviews lacked the amount of F-bombs that Analogue’s CEO usually likes to drop to act cool; maybe he finally realized doing that when his company still has a communication problem makes him a big dork.
As for whether the final 3D lives up to expectations… Well I don’t plan to get one, so I don’t plan to cover it. Sorry. I am content with my region modded N64 from my youth when revisiting those games, but I might cover the 8Bitdo controller since it looks incredibly handy.
Shiren 6 will be the best selling Shiren in the west by far. Unfortunately, this wasn’t true, Shiren 5 has been stated to outright sell more, but it did become the fastest selling Japanese Shiren and was a smash hit over there, which is great for the MD IP as a whole. The game just got a steam port this very month, so maybe it’ll do OK as an evergreen game on here VS Nintendo Switch, but I was pretty bummed to see a bunch of PMD fans either not know this game even exists, or just not care about it because it doesn’t have their fun furry creatures in it.
Guys, I’m telling you, Shiren 6 is outstanding, even if that makes the GOTY article have a complete lack of surprise. Will we get the older Shiren localized for the west? I sure hope that happens at some point, at least…
One Limited Print Company will shut down in 2024. Sorta kinda true, but not who I was expecting. I was 100% convinced First Press Games would throw in the towel and confess to their big mess and refund dodging by now, but they’re adamant about insisting everything is nearly done and it would have been by now if it wasn’t for those pesky impatient developers, cardboard companies, and other things they gave excuses for.
I also was convinced while they wouldn’t close, Strictly Limited Games would equally take accountability for all their wild delays, but they really haven’t done that either. All signs point to them bleeding money still and being unable to manufacture the pending CEs/Switch games, yet SLG still carries on trying to sell their current stock with a ludicrous amount of discounts, giveaways and other such attempts to clear inventory. In the past year they’ve only manufactured two switch games; Dariusburst, and Contra clone Iron Meat, and that was only after a 1.5 year gap.
They still won’t explain the full situtation, the true progress of their releases, or other things going on, but they sure want you to buy their old stuff because oh crap they made too much of it and the limited print market bubble popped. Needless to say, I plan on making a mini report card comparing these two companies sometime in the future, since I don’t want to write a full piece on either of them again, but I would at least like to point out some recent things they’ve done.
No, the shutdown Limprint company this year was none other than Signature Edition Games, a branch of Merge Games I heard hardly anything bad about. Merge put out some cool stuff but even they weren’t long for this world, suffering the same fate as a lot of other companies in the industry as of late. At least they went out with a pretty solid reputation, but it also just annoys me why it had to be them who had to shut down, and not the company outright dodging refunds and scamming people. Oh well.
I almost put Dispatch Games here as well, since they fully wiped their Facebook profile and pretty much have done nothing this entire year, but Brian Schorr still renewed the website domain, and you can still buy stuff from said website if you are insane, so Brian Schorr’s scam operation still lingers on, with no games delivered despite promising to do so last year. He’s gone with the wind, and I can’t do anything to make him not do that, so at this point I consider it case closed. What a bummer end to a disappointing saga.
In another very bizarre chain of events, a new limited print company did pop up this year: Rock-It Games, a company founded by someone related to the old 3DO company, and who hired Douglas Bogart from Limited Run Games as their Game Curator. Why they’d try entering the limprint industry this late into the Switch’s life is beyond me, and they already canceled their first release, though have made progress on their second one, Volgarr the Viking. Zero interest in ever covering this company if you know my history here, but I figured I’d let people know that yes, someone opened up another company in this risky industry in the year 2024. Right before 2025 is set to kick in American tariffs that will no doubt make CE components incredibly expensive to manufacture, so… Good luck!
The Switch 2 will launch in 2024, duh. Well, not duh, I’m stupid, I’m a dumb stinky braixen with glasses, because by some shock to me, Nintendo didn’t do the obvious and just… let the Switch live and still get games. In 2024. Seven years after it came out. And somehow even with a good chunk of these games being lower budget and smaller scale, they still had a better year 7 than the 3DS or Wii did. How the heck do these guys do it?
But yeah, this kinda reaffirms to me that most people in the industry, really know jack shit about this thing, and all hear the usual rumors from the same batch of sources. The amount of times the thing was supposedly around the corner is comical, and earlier this year the reason these rumor guys gave for the thing not being out this year is “lack of software” which… Sure, OK. The company that makes tons of games and holds them back didn’t make enough games for their new system in time. Maybe you just didn’t know for sure and your source was just wrong?
Clickbait tabloid reporting aside, we did at least get actual info on the thing this year: Backwards compatibility (duh), and it being revealed by the end of Q1 25. Not released, revealed. Thus they could in theory not mention the thing until March 30th 2025, and still be set. I do not believe this thing will launch until September at the current rate things are going, and with some of the games this year surprising me on the stupid thing, the old switch still has enough to keep me liking it more than I thought I would! In fact, one of Nintendo’s games made it on my GOTY list coming out on the 30th…
There will be no Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 (Explorers of Sky Remake). Not just in 2024, but period. Correct, kinda. Obviously, no PMD was ever gonna come out with Shiren 6 being a full-time project for the past few years, and selling gangbusters at that.
With that said, I do feel maybe years from now, just maybe, TPC will use the success of Shiren 6 to do something new with PMD. Chunsoft now delivered a big hit, and TPC might have reason to reach out to them for a spinoff again. I don’t expect it to be a PMDVI in the traditional sense though, nor a PMD2 remake still. (you’d be more likely to see it on NSO at this rate) Perhaps a simple remaster of the 3DS games? Or maybe something new, focused on whatever the newest mainline region is? We’d have to wait and see, but I’m doubting it’ll be able to hit 2025 in any case. I’d still love to see one more great Tomie story before he retires, though.
Evercade will get a cool niche company I love, and a popular company everyone loves. Since I’ve been reviewing these carts, I looked at the 2024 schedule for Evercade to see if any of the 2024 carts I liked fit this description and… Only half of that prediction came true, the popular company everyone loves. Tomb Raider, along with Legacy of Kain hit Evercade, and all I knew about LOK for the longest time was it was that weird IP everyone insisted was the bestest thing ever but when you look at screenshots you’d feel like those people were high on something.
Well I’m pleased to report there is good to be had with that IP even if the visuals didn’t age the best, and Soul Reaver even got an HD remaster this month on modern platforms. It was actually kinda funny seeing mainstream gaming audiences getting annoyed at LOK coming back on Evercade before mainline consoles, but hey, I dig it so far. Review sometime in Q1 of 2025 for that cart. As for newer niche companies I love, nothing of that sort; just more of the current stuff they signed, which is still a ton of great stuff! Alas, my hopes in Masaya or Seibu getting signed will just remain as such for now.
A previously “unreleasable” retro game will somehow make it out again. Kinda, sorta, not really but I feel one thing counts as such; NES Tetris. This may sound stupid, but Nintendo doesn’t fully own that game even if they ask nicely for it, and Tetris Company has been very picky on what they let get reissued. So when Tetris Forever came out and did not include it, I was not surprised to see Nintendo’s Tetris games be completely absent from it. Yet, probably as a result of them getting NOA footage from back in the day included on the documentary, Nintendo was finally cleared to put out NES Tetris and Tetris DX on Switch Online, and with those two never ever being reissued ever, I think that counts as a decent win in that regard.
Another I’d classify in this regard, also thanks to the Taito Egret Mini DLC card this year, is Mr. Do. Hitting Antstream Arcade as well, this game seemed doomed to just be obscure due to Universal being more interested in other media ventures than Video Games, but somehow their Arcade hit made it out twice. Good on you, Do! Now I can finally play Mr Do and see what all the fuss was about.
Ultimately, 2024 was a pretty wild year. It was the 10th anniversary of my games writing journey, (even if none of the site update/logo stuff happened as I hoped it would; I promise you all, it is still coming) the return of SFG on social media, and me expanding my reviewing to a bigger audience in general because of the power of Bluesky and Google liking stuff I write such as the Sonic Origins and Taito Super Pocket review. Will 2025 be any better? Well, check out the New Year’s Eve Article for my predictions on the future, along with some other general thoughts.
Until next time, take care and be safe!
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