Comments 144

Re: Community Challenge: Can You Overcome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Deadly Technodrome Level?

somnambulance

The last level in this game is gross. I’ve beaten it. Once. I never wanted to play the game again. I actually enjoy the first half of this game quite a bit, and think the dam level might be one of the most underrated levels in the NES catalog because it’s actually more fun than difficult, but the second half is insufferable and cheap. The constantly spawning jetpack guys are ludicrous to punch through. Shredder’s cake after those tight corridors.

Re: Retro Recap: All The Classic Gaming News From The Past Week (January 18th 2026)

somnambulance

Mildly interested in that New Zealand Story remake. I like the NES original, but not quite enough for it to make my personal top 50 NES games list… Sometimes I talk or write something down and think I’ve played too many games. Lol.

Aaaannnyyywaaaay, it is quite a solid game and I hope it finds an audience, it’s a unique game and deserves more exposure to the world at large, sort of like what’ll likely happen to Little Samson in a few months with that one getting ported to modern consoles. I know remakes are more of thing than ports, but I love overlooked NES games getting a second chance in the sun. There are some days that the NES may be my favorite library of games outside the modern era.

Re: Community Challenge: Can You Beat Battletoads' Most Notorious Level?

somnambulance

@timp29 NES TMNT has a ludicrous difficulty spike towards the end. How people complain about the electric seaweed part so much just goes to show that they haven’t gotten past that. The Technodrome is absolutely gross in its difficulty, even though Shredder’s a fairly simple boss fight. The amount of enemies that spawn in later levels is simply poor level design. I’ve beaten NES TMNT one time and I don’t think I’ll ever play it again after that. I couldn’t beat it as a kid though. It wasn’t until the TMNT Collection came out on Switch that I actually figured out how to use the rope. Lol.

With regards to Battletoads, I didn’t ever play the NES version of the game, but I had it on Gameboy and I think they’re basically the same game. I’m pretty sure I’ve beaten the bike level because the whole thing looks like an old memory when I watched that video of it and I looked up the next level to see if it was familiar and it was. I never beat the Battletoads game though because, as a kid, the persistent difficulty in the game past that point just wasn’t very fun to me. I had a friend maybe 15 years back that beat the game and I remember thinking he was crazy for it.

That said, I always felt that Toxic Crusaders NES was far more challenging than Battletoads for games in this style and genre.

Re: Random: The Fact That This Terrible Nintendo DS Game Could Top Metacritic Is Proof That Democracy Was A Mistake

somnambulance

@BulkSlash Agreed. E33 was a total 7/10 type of experience for me and the consistent overindulgent praise for the game last year has led me to sort of dislike it. It may be the worst game to have ever won GotY. I largely liked the game when I played it, but I can’t believe so many people are impervious to finding something to criticize about the game, especially in this era where practically every game is torn to shreds minutes after launch.

Re: Talking Point: What Was Your First Animal Crossing Game?

somnambulance

The original GameCube game was the first one for me, though I never owned a GameCube, so I’m not sure when I played it, but I distinctly remember playing it on GameCube in my childhood home. My mom has a copy of it now, so maybe we played the GameCube version on Wii? ‘Twas a long time ago now. I was never really into Animal Crossing so much myself, as I sort of peaked with my interest of that style of game on SNES with Harvest Moon, but my sisters loved it and my wife and children are very excited for the Switch 2 version.

Re: "The World Needs More Games Like This" - Atari CEO's Best Game Of 2025 Proves He Has Impeccable Taste

somnambulance

His top 5 list is better than most of the ones I’ve seen from editorial publications this year. I really sync up with his taste in games, so honestly could be why I’m happy with Atari is doing these days. I mean, the new Bubsy game legitimately is one of my most hyped games coming in 2026.

Thank you for sharing this @Damo! With the way the industry has been the last couple years, it’s good to see some interest in quality gaming from one of the guys at the top.

Re: Peter Molyneux Thinks It Could Be "Wonderful" To Revisit One Of His Most Infamous Projects With Today's Tech

somnambulance

@N64-ROX I miss the era of auteurs like Molyneux. In his prime era and a little after, it felt like we got to know developers and their vision and it was a really cool time. Gaming felt like entertainment equipped with new and unique ideas. It was a special time. Honestly, I miss that. Even if Molyneux overpromised, the majority of his games were quite high quality and at the very least interesting. I’ll take that over the live service slop the industry is spiraling into as corporatizes and consolidates.

Re: Anniversary: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Is 10 Years Old Today

somnambulance

@Santar It’s almost as if they have a Phantom Pain, as it were, and that gaming has had a Phantom Pain with the series being effectively over, and that David Hayter had it for not being Snake, etc, etc, etc. Kojima’s philosophy of betraying his audience was never so successful as it was in the MGSV/PT era. For me, it’s perhaps my favorite era of the Kojimaverse, though I do prefer Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid 2 as games. The well runs deep with analysis and interpretation on those games, their parallels, and deeper meanings.

Re: Please, Please, Please Treasure Your Offline Multiplayer Buddy

somnambulance

I’ve got a couple friends that I play online with every once in a while, but we’ll sometimes get together and play multiplayer all together. The same friend group minus one that was an addition later to the group used to do LAN parties for Halo and play games all together in our younger years. We used to have long story driven “campaigns” in the WWE games too, just because it was silly as well. In the olden days, we’d even play single player games all together, but that time has sort of passed, even though we talk about doing that again and it never really happens.

That said, I play games now mostly with my wife and kids. My most memorable multiplayer experiences are probably playing Puyo Puyo Tetris against my wife on Xbox One before my son was born. She ordered me a Japanese copy of the game since it didn’t release in the west and we played A LOT when she was pregnant. And then we played a lot of Cuphead together immediately after the birth. My wife and I play games together semi-frequently. My son and I have played some games co-op as well.

And my parents and sisters and their significant others, we’ll get together for Mario Party, Mario Kart, or Jackbox once in a while and we all enjoy that. I used to force my sisters to play Goldeneye with me and such, but we don’t do that anymore.

I used to have a cousin that I played a lot of games with too, but we don’t talk so often anymore. On the rare occasion we do talk or get together though, we sometimes fall back into our childhood together and become best friends for an evening, doing all the things we used to do, including playing games, playing guitar, etc, only for us to lose contact again shortly afterward, likely due to the fact that we live relatively distant from each other now.

Re: 14 Percent Of North Americans Still Play Gaming Systems Released Before 2000

somnambulance

Based on people I know, the retro console usage seems a bit inflated, but probably not ridiculously so.

My mom has the N64, Wii, and PS2 hooked up in the basement and still plays an odd assortment of games on there. The NES and SNES are there too, but not plugged in, probably because she’s not looked for adapters to plug them in and honestly I think she prefers the N64/Gamecube era games. She uses the Wii for GameCube games rather than Wii games, oddly enough. Most wouldn’t expect that my mom plays games every so often, and I think gamers similar to her are more common than people expect. The gamers that were left behind after the Wii…

My grandma had an Atari 2600 hooked up to her TV too (she passed away in the 90’s, so not quite applicable to the survey in stats but concept. One of my last memories of her was that we played Dr Mario together a week before she passed too). I remember thinking adults 20, 30 years ago hid their gaming hobbies because it wasn’t culturally acceptable like it is now.

Re: After What Feels Like A Lifetime, Amazon Is Cancelling Mighty No. 9 3DS And Vita Pre-Orders

somnambulance

@poyo_pie There’s been a bunch of successful crowd funded games. I mean, yeah, Bloodstained (though Curse of the Moon > Ritual of the Night for me), Yooka Laylee, Thimbleweed Park, Hollow Knight, I mean the list goes on… I still invest in Kickstarter games personally. There’s been a lot of hits, in my opinion. There was like a renaissance of crowdfunded games for a bit, even if Mighty No 9 flopped.

Re: After What Feels Like A Lifetime, Amazon Is Cancelling Mighty No. 9 3DS And Vita Pre-Orders

somnambulance

@X68000 That’s funny. I remember paying in full for a preorder of the Last Guardian during the PS3 era at GameStop and I totally forgot about it. I ended up going through a phase where I didn’t go to GameStop for a long while and my wife ended up taking me to one in 2019, and they apologized that they didn’t have a copy available and I was sort of confused, as I totally forgot about it. I had bought the game for like $8 a few months before that. Maybe things like your story and mine are why preorders are starting to vanish?

@poyo_pie It was sort of the first big one, but unfortunately there’s been many more that have had similar scale and ended up worse, but you’re right about the hype. Mighty No 9 had hype unlike any of these Kickstarters before it, and summarily… none of them have had hype again after it.

Re: After What Feels Like A Lifetime, Amazon Is Cancelling Mighty No. 9 3DS And Vita Pre-Orders

somnambulance

What a different world the industry was in when Mighty No 9 launched. It wasn’t nearly as bad as some had said, even if it’s definitely not a great game. It’s X8 tier-ish. Certainly not another X7, you know? But, as a trainwreck, it’s quaint by today’s standards, even if it’s more widely remembered than worse launches (including Infafune’s own Megaman Legends successor that never materialized). Can’t believe the saga is finally over.

Re: Peter Molyneux Reunites With Ex-Lionhead Staff To Create 'Masters Of Albion'

somnambulance

@Daniel36 is Dwarf Fortress decent as a mobile app? I’ve not had a gaming PC in a few years now, so I’ll admit I’m not as much in the PC gaming space now.

Yes, there are still auteurs out there. Kojima’s got Death Stranding 2 on the way, Ken Levine’s got Judas cooking, and there’s a few indie auteurs, but it does feel like things have shifted. From Geoff Keighley rushing people off the stage during the Game Awards to mass layoffs to a lighter release schedule that is so much more driven by GAAS titles, it does often time feel to me that the industry was once a place of possibilities and now things are made to be safer in the broad spectrum. The industry still has plenty to love for sure, but I do miss some of the excitement.

Re: Peter Molyneux Reunites With Ex-Lionhead Staff To Create 'Masters Of Albion'

somnambulance

I know he’s obnoxious, but I miss the era of gaming auteurs. We’re not in an industry of creators anymore, but of franchises and products. There was a fun, an enormity, a magic in games back in Molyneux’s time. I mean, you always knew he was full of it, but it was also an age of singular visions that weren’t afraid to buckle against the corporate overlords. Above everything, it was a time of impossible ideas, of dreams. After all, the visionaries like Molyneux, Kojima, Will Wright, etc… they had the ideas that made millions of dollars when millions of dollars was a lot. They made a fledgling industry into the mammoth it became… until those dreams turned into avatars and skins. I sort of like that he’s trying again, even if I know the game won’t be an iota of his promises.

Re: We Never Got A Panzer Dragoon Saturn Console, But This Is The Next Best Thing

somnambulance

I am quite jealous of all you who’ve had the joy of playing through this one on a native console. I remember a friend of mine having it, but he felt like the Saturn was a bit weak as a console experience, so he sold his console and games for a PlayStation and loved it. Fine for him, but I remember his library and, man, I got to try this game just once on native hardware. Given the library he had and his interests, I’m not surprised he sold his, and I didn’t know better in the 90’s, but, man, it took less than ten years to get nostalgic quick for that one day of gaming where I tried all his games out quick before he sold it. The ways I’ve tried to play Saga since… have not been right.

Re: Anniversary: Katamari Damacy Turns 20 Today (No Pun Intended)

somnambulance

@Andee Wattam is absolutely one of my favorite games. I’ll never delete it off my PS5. It’s one of those games I can trust both of my kids with too. My two year old daughter can play it. There’s so few games that are just so available for everyone. I did try to find a Wattam t-shirt at one point, but had no luck, unfortunately! To A T is in my top 10 most anticipated games this year for sure!