GB's Game Reviews: 2025-2026 Edition

This year's top story in GB video gaming: The return of the Sega Genesis.

The Atari 2600 was the console that got me started in the world of video games, but the Genesis was the console to truly solidify a lifelong love of the medium in me. Longtime readers know my story with the Genesis already, but to sum it up in one sentence, my mom got one sometime in 1993 after our Atari stopped working, it was my main console for the entirety of the rest of the decade until I became a Game Boy Color owner for Christmas 2000, and I've adored video games ever since. In recent years, our Genesis collection was mostly inaccessible, partly due to the cartridges beginning to fail and partly due to migrating to modern TVs that the Genesis couldn't connect to. I was still able to play some of our old favorites due to them getting modern ports on the Switch, such as the Sonic games, Castlevania Bloodlines, and Streets Of Rage 2, but many others remained off-limits unless I wanted to emulate, and these days I usually only emulate to play things like fan translations and rom hacks that aren't accessible any other way. In February 2026, though, I had some money saved up and decided to splurge on a solution, buying a clone console called the Mega Retron HD that can connect to modern TVs right out of the box and also picking up a flash cart to replace the legions of old cartridges that refuse to boot. I love physical media, but it's not the cure-all to game preservation that some people say it is. Carts fail and die eventually, and they'll only get rarer and rarer as the supply of 35-year-old plastic carts steadily dwindles, making secondhand market prices skyrocket and making old games on cartridges nearly as inaccessible as delisted digital titles. But I do love the feeling of playing games on the TV with a controller, so the flash cart was a happy medium. Plus, the one I bought came with hundreds of games pre-loaded onto the included micro SD card, meaning I was free to try just about any game in the Genesis library, removing the barrier to entry that downloading all that stuff myself presented. With the help of the Mega Retron HD and the flash cart, I began revisiting some old favorites and trying a few new games as well.

But the Mega Retron HD wasn't the only "new" console to join the family this past year. There was also a little indie thing called the Switch 2 that rolled into town. I've played a handful of Switch 2 games in the past year, all of them major releases like Donkey Kong Bananza and Pokemon Legends ZA. I mostly like the Switch 2, with the improved game performance and faster loading being one of my favorite things about it. I'm at the point where I'd much rather have smooth, clean, fast-loading games than ones that look a little prettier in screenshots. That said, I do see why some people complain that it doesn't feel like a huge jump from the Switch 1. This is a simple evolution, not a complete reinvention, and that's okay. I didn't want gimmicks anyway, just games (The Switch 2's mouse mode could not possibly be less exciting to me, and I frequently forget it even exists).

I've also continued the trend I began a couple years ago of replaying old games, even ones I'd already completed. Some of those games were reviewed by me many years ago, others I never reviewed properly, but in every case I wrote something up and added them to the post.

Lastly, I think this year's blog sports the highest average length of a review. I didn't play a ton of different games this last year (there are 28 reviews here in total), but I had plenty to say about most of the ones that I did play, resulting in a very long blog. Enjoy!

Putting The Pieces Together: GB Behind The Scenes 2025

Season 15 is now well behind us, and at last here is a long-overdue behind the scenes look at my events and characters from that year and how it all came together, as well as what got left out or changed from initial plans.

Getting Jiggy With It was born from a bit of a malaise I developed late in Season 14, where I was losing interest in traditional "go fight the bad guy" plots and wanted to do something different. My original plan was to do a plot with no serious antagonists. This wasn't the first time I'd considered such an idea (you may recall The Cabinet Of Curiosities had an initial similar goal), and I went into it expecting not to succeed. One thing I often find myself doing when it comes to RP is setting a goal knowing I will fail, but the idea was not an absolute adherence so much as it was restraint. For instance, some years I'll try hard not to add new characters to RP on a whim, so that when some inevitably get through my defenses, they're characters I really care about or that have a clear role to play in a story. This was the same way - I wasn't surprised when a couple of genuine antagonists popped up in the plot, but I kept the scope small and restricted, and we ended up defeating the closest thing the plot had to a Big Bad about halfway through, with most of the plot's other battles being against petty villains that weren't very threatening (Venom Brigade), a large animal of neutral alignment (Monsterverse Tiamat), and an honorable duel against a hero (Foetodon).

The idea of making a plot about Jiggies came from replaying the Banjo-Kazooie N64 duology on Switch Online's N64 app. I played BK near the start of 2024 and BT much later in the year after it came out on the app. Both games hold up well today, in my opinion, though admittedly the addition of savestates smooths off a lot of potential frustration and BT running without lag on the Switch helps it a lot. Both games deliver some wonderfully memorable worlds and characters, and as I've done in the past with franchises I hold in high regard like Streets Of Rage, Octopath Traveler, Sonic, and Pokemon, I wanted to do a plot that evokes the feeling of playing the game that inspired it, without just being a retread. I got the idea for a series of events where I essentially make a miniature BK level and let the Kobbers loose to go scoop up all the collectibles. I think it was a good idea, but it took some work to get the format right.

If looked at after the fact, the first two events of the plot are fine, but I didn't feel fine in the moment (particularly the first one). By offering so many little challenges at once and needing to reply to each one in turn, I'd overwhelmed myself. I finished the first event feeling poorly about not just my plot, but RP in general, and in fact was feeling so down on myself that terrible thoughts had begun pushing into my head of wanting to abandon plots entirely, or even outright quit RP. It wasn't because of anything anyone did. I was just bored of the same old same old, and yet struggling to find anything to replace it with. It wasn't a good feeling. Fortunately, by the time we got into June, my mood regarding RP began to improve, and Brawl Season helped me get back in gear. By the time we got to the Horus plot-within-a-plot arc, I was fully back to being excited to show you guys what I could do.

Let's go over the plot's cast first and see where that discussion takes us.