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June 2025 Retrospective

This month Netflix released their documentary on the implosion of OceanGate's Titan submersible. I couldn't watch it because I am still boycotting as many American products as I can but I stumbled upon a CBC documentary that was able to fill the void.

UV Window Film

This is just a PSA for anyone having issues with rooms overheating due to sunlight. One room in my house would always be five or six degrees hotter than everywhere else due to the afternoon sun. After putting UV film on all of the windows it is now one of the coolest rooms. You can buy the film and install it yourself but I am always a fan of letting professionals do their job. I found a local installer who had 15 windows covered in just a few hours and it was worth every penny.

Monster Train 2

Last month I wrote that I wanted to play more Monster Train 2 before I talked about it in greater detail. But as it turns out there really is anything more to say. Monster Train 2 is a perfect sequel if you're just looking for refinement of a successful formula. The core of the game is still there with a slew of interesting new mechanics piled on top. It is better than the original in every way and I highly recommend you give it a shot if you are a fan of roguelike deck builders.

Currently it is my Game of the Year and I'm honestly not sure what will be able to dethrone it.

Mario Kart World

In my opinion Mario Kart World is not a good Mario Kart game. By doubling the amount of players, focusing on offensive items, and having really aggressive rubber banding, the races devolve into absolute chaos. If you are enjoying this I don't fault you but personally I was getting frustrated much more often than I would have liked. I found myself explicitly staying out of first place to avoid getting hit by blue shells. Sometimes I even just sat back in 10th or higher with triple mushrooms just so I could blast through the shortcuts on the final lap and get into the top three. I don't doubt that there is a high skill ceiling for this game but for my playstyle I was experiencing anger and disappointment much more often than I was expecting.

But what made me put down the game was the lack of modes. I just wanted to play the classic Grand Prix where you drive three laps around four courses. But in Mario Kart World only the first race involves three laps. The next three races are just linear tracks that take you from one part of the open world map to another. I found this style of track quite boring so playing them 75% of the time was not endearing me to the game.

But what about the open world? That was one of the big selling points of Mario Kart World right? When you start the game you are shown four massive options that take up the majority of the screen, the top being "Single Player" which is what I wanted. When you select it you're then presented with five more options, none of which are to explore the open world. So I played a bunch of Grand Prix and Knockout Tours for several hours, still unclear as to how to access the open world. By complete happenstance, I was on the main menu and noticed in the bottom right hand corner some incredibly small text that read "Free Roam" with a little plus sign next to it. I pushed that button on my controller and voila I was immediately dropped into the open world.

Unfortunately things got worse from here because in free roam there actually isn't that much to do. There are "P Switches" scattered across the map which trigger a side quest when you drive over them. These quests are usually collect 10 coins or drive from A to B within a short time limit. But what about starting a race or time trial? Surely you can just drive up to the starting line and trigger it from free roam mode right? Wrong! Outside of these P Switches there is basically nothing else to do except collect random Peach Coins that are also scattered around the world. Oh did I mention that none of these things appear on the map, even after you've completed them? So if you want to collect them all you're going to need to record which ones you've done outside of the game and cross reference it with some website. It is amazing that Nintendo got 70% of the way to making their version of Burnout Paradise and just chose to stop for some reason.

I realize I'm ranting at this point so I'm gonna force myself to bring this section to an end. If you enjoy Mario Kart World I hope you continue to enjoy it for many moons to come. But if you haven't yet played it please make sure you understand what type of Mario Kart game you are getting into this time around.

Elden Ring Nightreign

I am not going to spend too much time on Elden Ring Nightreign because it simply isn't a game for me. I honestly think the only reason it has Elden Ring in the title is to help sell copies because other than the asset reuse it is a fundamentally different game.

One of the things I loved about Elden Ring was if you died to a boss you could retry it almost instantly. There were no 5-10 minute runbacks only for you to die in 10 seconds again. In Nightreign the runbacks are always 30 minutes and you have to look for your equipment again so there is no guarantee you'll even be as strong as you were for the last attempt.

But the funny thing is that I actually love the core concept of this game. I would love to see the Battle Royale mechanic applied to more PvE settings. It just does not work well with FromSoftware's "git gud" game design in my opinion.

007 First Light Trailer

Personally, the announcement trailer for 007 First Light did not make me any more or less interested in the game. It focused on story, cinematics, and shooting which historically haven't been IO Interactive's strong suit. I am not saying that it looked bad, only that the things I saw didn't appear particularly notable. If you edited this trailer to remove any references of James Bond it would resemble a fairly generic action game from a few years ago.

I am being much more negative than I intended. I still am going to give 007 First Light a fair shot but the next thing I need to see is a 15+ minute gameplay demo to sell me on what I am actually going to be doing for a dozen plus hours.

Also, I hate to say this but it looks like something from the start of the last console generation, specifically Uncharted 4. This doesn't make the game unplayable but we are firmly in the age of Unreal Engine 5 games with releases such as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The bar is being raised and IO Interactive feels like they are being weighed down by their old technology in a similar manner that Bethesda was for Starfield.

Review June Goals

July Goals

#MonthlyRetrospective