Posts

A Gripe with Galaxy

It's been my opinion since 2010 that Super Mario Galaxy is superior to Super Mario Galaxy 2. That was based on my initial playthrough of 2 when it launched, and I have maintained that opinion since. The problem is it's been so long that I can't remember why. I've played through the original several times since then, but never bothered going back to 2 to see what it was I didn't like. And then Christmas 2025 happened and I was gifted the bundle of both games for Switch. I completed Galaxy 1 almost entirely in handheld mode, and almost entirely in bed. Two issues I had were a) there is a weird bug where Mario sometimes runs around in circles instead of the direction being held, and b) I had to sit up when playing the motion control levels like rolling the ball or surfing. My original plan was finish Galaxy 1 with minimal Stars, then do the same on 2. Then I got carried away and ended up getting all 120 Stars before starting 2. Having now played through both back to ba...
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Doctor Who - Lost in Time

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About a week ago it was brought to my attention that there was a new Doctor Who game on the block. Although most of the comments that I had seen were along the lines of “ugh, micro transactions!” I suspected that maybe this wasn’t actually a new game, and was the one that is built around NFTs. It turns out that this wasn’t exactly new, as it had a soft launch last year, but it wasn’t the one involving purchasing a receipt of a jpeg so I decided to check it out.
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Patch Notes - February 2023

Quick-ish update. Here's the tl;dr: I've updated my portfolio There are also some new videos on the YouTubeses I've released more source code More games on Itch
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The Doctor Who Switch Experience

While I haven't played every Doctor Who game that has released since I got into the show back in 2005, I've played a decent amount of them. During the Matt Smith era, The Adventure Games were pretty good (I enjoyed them enough to replay them and write a guide), but the paired DS and Wii titles - Evacuation Earth and Return to Earth - were bad. Real bad. I'm not even sure how I finished Return to Earth after a bug meant the game camera was in a completely different room to the one I was blindly navigating. For Christmas, I was gifted another 2 Doctor Who games in the form of the Duo Bundle for Switch. The Edge of Reality is a console / PC port of the VR game The Edge of Time, and The Lonely Assassins was a game I hadn't even heard of until I saw this collection existed. It turns out it was originally a mobile game released in 2021 that acted as a sequel to a critically acclaimed episode from 2007.
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Getting Started with the FireRed Decompilation

 Many years ago, I was a ROM hacker. I never finished a project, not because of the classic "I've started, so I'll not finish" trap that many home projects fall into, but because the ROM is so fragile that doing anything can completely break it and you need to constantly be creating back-ups if you want to progress at all. I've had my eye on the Pokémon FireRed decompilation project for a while, and a few months ago I decided to get started with it. Unlike ROM hacking which edits the actual game file, the decompilation project is a reverse-engineered code base which can be edited and then built into an actual game. It generally means that there's no need to be constantly creating back-ups (unless, for some reason, source control isn't being used), and it's much easier to change or add completely new features to the game.
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Gotham Knights

While I had asked for a few slightly older games for Christmas, I also unexpectedly received a new release - Gotham Knights. I didn't know much about it going in other than the internet had seemingly snubbed it because it wasn't an Arkham game, and that there was a completely unrelated TV show of the same name being made. My first hour with Gotham Knights was spent installing it. I'd put the disc into the PS5, then left for a shower and came back to find the bar was only a third of the way along. I'd done the same with Immortals: Fenyx Rising a couple of days earlier and that had done in that time, and that had even downloaded a patch.
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Krampus

Krampus is a movie that I have been meaning to watch for years. It's been patiently waiting in the My List section on Netflix for the coinciding of December where it is acceptable to watch Christmas movies, and me actually being able to find the My List section because it's never in the same place. All I knew was that it was a Christmas movie that featured a monster called Krampus. My favourite Christmas movie features lots of tiny monsters, but unlike Gremlins, I'm not going to be rewatching Krampus every year.
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