A Long-Overdue Update Blog! (Patreon)

Hello my good, good friends! Sorry things have been all quiet on the western front. After E3 I was rushing out all sorts of videos, and since then it's been a solid month of reviews. I wasn't able to share any of them early since they were all late and I was in such a hurry to get them out, but at the very least I should have told you about how they were all coming. So my bad on that one.

Both E3 and that flood of reviews are over however and things are going back to normal. E3 was fun, though I'm definitely glad it's over. Nintendo didn't really give me a lot to work with this year, so it wasn't nearly as fun and satisfying as last year to cover them. In fact, funny enough, I had a lot more fun commenting on the other companies! Next year I think I'll do multiple "other guy" videos, seeing as this one ended up being like forty-five minutes long, haha. But hey, Nintendo can't blow us all away every year, and it was still fun doing the pre- and post-shows.

But let's talk about what's coming up next! Tomorrow I'm going to shoot a video that's like half a discussion of why Octopath Traveler is such an important game and half a general impressions video. The game is way too big for me to do a full review in anything close to a timely manner, so I'm glad to be doing at least something for it. It's way too big a deal to just not say anything.

Next up, right now I'm uploading a video talking about Nintendo's lofty plans for the Switch and whether or not they're realistic. Specifically, it talks about Shigeru Miyamoto saying they want "every single person" to own a Switch, and also their goal to support it for 7-10 years. It's one of those ones where I dig into a bunch of numbers and speculation, so in other words it was a lot of fun to write but I have no idea if it will just bore everyone to death. Farfetch'd edited it though, so you know the editing will be good at least! The $10+ folks are going to get it tonight, but I'm not sure when it will get published. My Octopath video will go up in a few days, so I might try to stretch the schedule a bit so I have time to work on the Breath of the Wild review.

And speaking of the Breath of the Wild review! I'm still plugging away at it, currently working on part five of six. So real progress is being made, I'm happy to say. In fact whatever comes after the "Switch Plans" video is pretty up in the air at the moment, because I really just want to focus on the review for the next week or so.

I've got two ideas for videos I'd like to work on soon though. One is a video presenting the theory that Sakurai might end up working on a new game between the release of Smash Ultimate and whatever Smash comes next, and it will speculate what the game might be. Then there's a video about how amazing the Switch has been doing with DLC recently. Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 2, Mario and Rabbids and Xenoblade 2 have all given us substantial content updates, and I could even talk about potential DLC for other games like Super Mario Odyssey. My DLC review video didn't do SUPER well, so I'm not exactly sure if people are interested in hearing about this kind of thing, but hey, I'll think about it.

Moving on though, I've been spending a TON of my brain power thinking about Arlopalooza 2018! In fact I just launched the official event page and I'll be doing a big shoutout in the "Switch Plan" video. Me and the Official Aropalooza Event Committee have already met once and are ironing out the details. This year is going to be a ton of fun, and I'm super duper excited. Like, "think about it way way too much" excited. We had a lot of connection issues with our Switches last year and when we did the Splatoon tournament we basically had to tell everyone else in the room to hold off on playing their own games using wireless communication, which was lame. But this year we're investing in monitors and LAN adapters, which will make everything go much smoother. We'll have the venue for three extra hours, too, so between that and the saved time not dealing with connection headaches, we're going to have way more time for just hanging out and playing games. (I personally had very little time last year.) That's still months away though, so I'm sure I'll have more to talk about as we get closer. Just know that...I'M EXCITED!!!

Last order of business, in addition to Retropalooza in Texas this September I'll also be attending PAX West! I've even got a panel with Lockstin and some other guys! So that's exciting too. But again, I'll talk more about it when we get closer.

That's about it for now. Thanks so so much to all my new patrons since last time! You $3+ people can look forward to a new Arlocast in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.

See ya next time!