Back now after a holiday break and family trip at Yosemite to ring in the New Year, I’ve got another small batch of snaps to share! It was a really tough choice to decide which amiibo figures I wanted to capture in a snowy environment. But listening to a lot of Nintendo music throughout December pulled from snow stages, the Snowpeak theme from Twilight Princess kept jumping out at me. Good thing, I didn’t sleep on that HD box set for Wii U that included Wolf Link and Midna!

Well here we are finally arriving at my number one slot on this list right as 2023 draws to a close and yes it’s true: In a year that saw Nintendo release a long awaited sequel, one knockout of a remaster and an all new return to form across their holy trinity of IP (Zelda, Metroid and Mario of course), what can I say?

It didn’t get any better than Pikmin 4.

Tales From the Darkside is a horror anthology series from the mid 80’s that was created by the great writer/director George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Other Living Deads). Essentially picking up where his and Stephen (You know this guy) King’s Creepshow feature film left off, the show was also inspired by EC horror comics from the 50’s. Each story involving some sort of morality tale or monster or spooky something or other (with the occasional misguided attempt at a humorous episode). It is also highly regarded for being my favorite television show of all time as well as an obvious inspiration for this little website here.

When Nintendo revealed that Metroid Prime 4 was in development, rumors instantly began swirling around about a rerelease of some kind for the original trilogy. A series of first person adventure games that began on Gamecube and seemingly wrapped up on the Wii. Days turned into years without anything materializing, until that fateful moment in early February of 2023. When an official announcement was made that not only was there a remaster of the original installment on the way, it would be available like right then. A “shadow drop” as the children say, I believe.

Well that equaled yours truly frantically stumbling to close the living room blinds for one sexy happy dance.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. Of course any new entry in the at this point iconic side-scrolling series of Mario games is something to be excited about. And once hands on impressions and previews began trickling in, it was sounding as though Wonder played like the Switch’s answer to SMW2: Yoshi’s Island (on most days, my personal favorite game of all time). Or even some kind of return to form; the direct follow up to the great Super Mario World we’d always dreamed of. If I kinda, maybe squint real hard enough I can sorta see the latter. Which makes me wonder:

Man, can you imagine if Nintendo had had the goombas big enough to just call this thing Super Mario Bros. 5!?

The 99 line of games available to NSO members is a series of essentially battle royales where you, the player take on 99 other players via the internet and compete to the “death”. Introduced with Tetris back in 2019 (!?), it has proven to apply itself much more naturally to some games than others. Tetris is an absolute natural for this concept, and highly addictive. The Super Mario Bros. version was oddly fun (though timed and no longer available) and a Pac-Man attempt was a bit too frantic and maybe didn’t work all that great in my opinion.

Well, recently Nintendo decided to give a certain SNES launch title a swing at the gameplay style and oh man, F-Zero 99 where have you been all my life?

This placement on the countdown will probably rub a lot of people the wrong way but we’re all just going to have to accept the fact that not everyone has the same opinion. I know there’s a quality game here and Tears of the Kingdom is an experience which meant quite a bit to many video game players and lovers of the franchise.

It’s just kinda the opposite of everything I loved about BOTW…it’s just kinda too much.

We interrupt our 2023 top ten countdown to bring you this very important announcement: 1080 Snowboarding is now available for the Nintendo Switch. I honestly couldn’t begin to calculate how many hours I sunk into this game back when it first came out for the N64 in 1998.

Mostly because I was 17 years old, real deep into my house music listening/raver days and more often than not in some form of heavily altered state.