A Self-Proclaimed Dreamer

    Happy Friday, friends, I hope you're all doing well, and I suspect that you are, especially since the new Batman movie is coming out next week, appropriately titled  The Batman. Before the movie comes out and the reviews are in about how amazing or how much of a letdown this movie is though, let me take you back to the year 2008. I was in 8th grade and the prospects of a Batman movie were looking higher than they ever had been. Batman Begins was a big success when it came out, even though I didn't see it until years and years later. The first movie in Christopher Nolan's Batman Trilogy proved that you could play a Batman movie straight, without the cheeziness of the Joel Schumaker movies or the brutal violence and over the top nature of the original Tim Burton films. In addition to this, it worked to make the Scarecrow an actually interesting villain, and developed Ra's Al Ghul in a meaningful light. The movie I'm discussing today has very little to do with the...

     I'll begin this post with a little history lesson about myself. When I was a little kid, about 5 or 6 years old, I got a Game Boy Color, and  Pokemon Blue Version pretty soon after. I liked the game a lot, especially growing attached to my Charizard (we are still very close, actually), but I had no idea of how popular this series would become over the next 25 years or so. I fell off the series pretty hard, so most of my childhood/ early adulthood I heard all about the different new Pokemon that the series was adding, especially since my little brother and his friend who would come over often were both obsessed with the series. I remember in Second grade, a kid was jumping up and down because he was so excited to catch Groudon, and I just had to assume that it was a cool Pokemon based on his reaction to catching it. He was shocked that I didn't know anything about it, asserting that it was the "red one on the box for Ruby," acting like it was ridiculous that I d...

     Hey friends, I hope you're doing well this week, I know that I am, because we just got confirmation this morning of the new Nintendo Direct tomorrow that will be 40 minutes long. It's not a full hour, but 40 minutes is a lot of time to relay a good amount of news! I'm not hoping for anything major, but they said we would get more news on games coming in the first half of 2022, so we will most likely get more information on Kirby and the Forgotten Land , as well as Splatoon 3 and the remakes for Advance Wars 1 and 2. I hope we'll get news on something new or weird, but I'm not holding my breath for Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 or Metroid Prime 4 news, but we can always hope! I'm writing this little intro the day before the direct, so I can't say anything about the actual event, but I am really excited, but also trying not to get my hopes up, since it is only February. Either way, let's fast forward to tomorrow afternoon and write about the things we...

      Hey friends, I'm Jonathan, your friendly neighborhood Self-Proclaimed Dreamer, and today I'll be talking about a trend that seems to be taking the games industry by storm. It's not really good for competition for the industry to be working this way, but it certainly makes more money for one company or another. For those of you unaware of what's going on, acquisitions are being made all over the place right now. Game developers are being bought by bigger players, and though it certainly wasn't unheard of before the last two years or so, things seem to be moving really fast. In January 2022 alone, we received word of at least two pretty big (one much bigger than the other) purchases, and it continued to show the pretty wild trend of the big players buying exclusivity rights, though not in every case. This is a complicated topic, and while I don't claim to have all the answers about everything, I have read and heard many different things from different journa...