Year 3: April Update

Star Wars Galaxy Trading Card #289
(Artist: Bunny Carter)

April -- and really this year -- seems to be moving along rather quickly. The weather still feels like winter sometimes but spring is pushing through next week, hopefully to stay. Earlier this month I did a week of Sega content and unfortunately, nobody commented! Okay, nobody ever comments on the blog so that's not exactly unusual (actually, I get a lot of spam comments). The post/video that I really expected to get attention was Letters From Sega. It's something that's at least a little unique and I actually Tweeted that one at Sega so it was quite disappointing to not get a like or re-Tweet (from Sega; user BackLoggedGamer liked it, thanks!). Normally I don't Tweet at companies, however, I see re-Tweets from companies all the time for what I consider to be pointless things so I figured why not, and really thought Sega would enjoy seeing the old letters. Oh well. I'll mention something again that I stated in the Sega ads post since I've not seen it covered by any major gaming sites. Atlus U.S.A. is no more; Sega has completely absorbed it and in North America the Atlus name is now just a Sega brand.

As I write this I've not played any games is six days which is a decent stretch though I hope to do a Let's Play video tomorrow. Most recently I got the platinum trophy on the PlayStation 4 version of Persona 4: Dancing All Night; my first platinum was for the Vita version of that game which I played on PlayStation TV. I've played Minecraft a bit as well and despite its age and popularity, it's a game I had only tried once before on the Xbox 360. My nephew has gotten me into that along with Human: Fall Flat which is a game he loves that I don't find to be much fun. In Minecraft I built my childhood home and an AT-AT in my world and a centipede head (based on the arcade game) in my nephew's world. Of course, being Minecraft you can only be so detailed and they might not look great in the screenshots. I also put a hatch on the top of the AT-AT and it's possible to walk into the head that has windows on the front.

Before I took a game break I was playing Tropico 6 too. It's a series I've enjoyed since the first game (never played the second one) and the new one isn't bad though it does have a different developer than the past few and I've not done very well on the missions I've played. There has been some relatively big game news since my last update. Sega announced the official Genesis Mini plug 'n' play console that will have 40 built-in games of which only 20 have been announced. It's releasing September 19th which I assume is to maybe look similar to the Dreamcast's 9/9/99 date; this would be 9/19/19 and that's only 10 days after the Dreamcast's U.S. 20th anniversary. In other console news, Sony started talking about the next PlayStation system (Wired exclusive) and Microsoft unveiled the long rumored and now official Xbox One with no disc drive. Next generation's consoles will still use physical media but there will likely be options to go digital only. By the way, the former Xbox exclusive Cuphead is now available on the Switch.

The other big game news came from the Star Wars Celebration that took place in Chicago. Respawn Entertainment was on hand to talk about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order; it announced the release date (11/15/19) and showed a trailer that didn't have any gameplay in it. I'm not a big fan of characters looking like the actors that voice them and that's what we have in this new game, and is something we saw in Star Wars: Force Unleashed. I'm still very much looking foward to it as I always want more single-player Star Wars games. There is likely a new LEGO game coming from Warner Bros. Interactive though nothing has been officially announced. This year marks the 20th anniversary of LEGO making Star Wars toys and it has a handful of sets to mark that occasion: Slave I, Snowspeeder, Imperial Dropship, Anakin's Podracer, and Clone Scout Walker. They're a bit expensive as usual but each one has some nice mini-figures plus a bonus mini-figure. Aside from the anniversary sets there is a new Tantive IV set too.

Hasbro unveiled a bunch of new Star Wars toys that you can read about here: StarWars.com. Lastly, if you somehow missed it, a teaser trailer was shown for the next movie titled The Rise of Skywalker.

 

As always, thanks for reading,
Jonathan