I’ve finished Metroid Prime Remastered. As I said in the Xenoblade Chronicles post, I feel like it takes me about three remasters/rereleases to finally finish most games. What’s sad is that often buy every version in between 😅. There are exceptions, as I’ve certainly beat Shadow of the Colossus in its PS2, PS3, and PS4/5 incarnations. With Metroid Prime Remastered, I can’t actually recall if I ever finished the GameCube original. I’m pretty sure I missed out on Metroid Prime Trilogy and definitely didn’t get the second game from GameCube or the third for Wii. I’m really hoping to see remasters of the second and third before the release of the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (shouldn’t it just be Metroid Prime Beyond?), but we shall see. Maybe they’re holding them back as Switch 2 launch titles, though I would imagine either would run well on the original Switch hardware as well.

It only took the release of the Wii version (purchased), the new 3DS version (purchased), and the Switch version (purchased) to finally complete Xenoblade Chronicles. Clearly the ability to play with the Japanese VAs was the thing that took me over the edge to finally finish this one.

Just as I’m doing a short blurb on each book finished this year, I’ll also be doing the same for the video games finished in 2025.

I’m really cooking with the timely selections lately. Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right explores several of the sources of our current predicament, ranging from Rationalists, alt-right figures, Gamergate, and so on. While figures like Nick Land seem to have faded somewhat, others like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin have continued to make all our lives amount to less than chess pieces on a board. We’re more like the cookie crumbs that are waiting to get stuck under a knight to F3. There’s an essay on Trump, another on Lizard People. It uses the word “batrachian” just because it can.

Andrew Weir’s The Martian adapted well to a feature-length film and his follow-up Project Hail Mary is slated for a Ryan Goslingafied adaptation set to be released a year from now. Much like The Martian, a lone über-engineer/scientist (though this one is ostensibly also a high school science teacher) must survive against all odds alone in space, using only his knowledge, wits, and a series of conveniences to get him to the next plot point.