A Self-Proclaimed Dreamer

      Hey friends, lots of gaming news coming out every week, huh? This week, we got a Nintendo Partner Showcase and an Indie World showcase back to back, so I thought it would be good to spend a little time going over some of the announcements that were shared this week as well. This presentation was only 40 minutes with the two segments combined, so I should be able to be a little more short-winded than I have been on some topics. I'm almost hoping for less gaming news next week because there has been so much recently, I've only been able to write about that for a while! Thanks for hanging with me while I focus so much time on my favorite topic. Two shows for the price of one!     This is the first time that Nintendo has ever combined two of their smaller showcases into one big showing, and I feel like it went over really well! The two best announcements for me were definitely getting Pizza Tower and a DS Castlevania collection on switch right after the presentation. Indie

      Well friends, we're still in news mode for video games, and Gamescom just kicked off in Germany this week. Geoff Keighley was on the scene Tuesday night to have the Opening Night Live showcase, and while the show went on for two full hours, there weren't all that many announcements that caught my attention. I'm hoping that this will be a slightly shorter affair than some of my previous write-ups have been for that reason, but there was a lot of stuff shown! Let's get started, and I'll point out some things that stuck out to me from the two-hour long event. Another Geoff Keighley Production!     In a sense, it's good to see something headed up by Geoff Keighley, since I've learned that most of the things that he focuses on (which is to say the companies that pay him) are not the types of games and experiences that will super appeal to me. There are a lot of shooters, strategy games, town building, Overwatch and other MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena)

       Hey there, friends! Do you smell the excitement in the air? That means it's D23 time once again, and while it did happen this past weekend, I would like to spend some time this week to talk about some of my favorite announcements! In case you're not familiar, D23 is a convention that takes place every 2 years or so, where the Walt Disney Company announces the newest ideas for upcoming films as well as attractions for the Parks and Cruise Line. Let's go ahead and dive into the film roster... made up of a lot of sequels with a few original products sprinkled in. A lot of folks have thoughts on that, but we'll see how they go! From "WDW News Today" Coming Soon to Theaters Near You (or Disney Plus)     We got a lot of titles being announced in the presentation for all of the movie news along with some movies that are coming out this year and a bit sooner. We'd be here all day if I listed all of the information that we got for these things, but I'll

      Hey friends, if you'll recall in February, I was given the incredible opportunity to be able to speak up at Princeton Theological Seminary about what the church can learn from games (with my area of expertise obviously being in video games. I met a lot of pretty incredible people, young adults and leaders from churches mostly around that area, and while that experience was something that I thought I would only be able to have once in my life, I'm so excited that I've been invited back up to speak in September on the same topic! This week I thought I'd work on putting my thoughts in order a bit, and hopefully I can share something that's not just repeating the same stuff that I said last time.     As I stated a few weeks ago, my position in life is starting to take a more solid form, and I'm becoming a bit more confident in the things that I'm able to say, though I clearly have much more to learn, and that's like a video game as well! You simply can

 Hey friends! Do you ever think about old series? I do constantly... which led me to think about Banjo-Kazooie this week. For those of you not in the know, this series started its life on the Nintendo 64, where the first two (and the most prominent) titles in this series were released. The great thing about the series is that it began as something extremely simple... and then Microsoft came in... and did what Microsoft does. We'll get into that later, but for now, let's begin with this little retrospective, and see where the Jiggies (short for jigsaw puzzle pieces) lie in the end, shall we?  Banjo-Kazooie's original cover art, one of my favorites. A Tale of Brotherly Love!     Banjo-Kazooie begins with a concept that is so simple, it could come from a 5 minute long cartoon. Our main characters, Banjo and Kazooie, are a bear with a backpack, and the bird that lives in said backpack. Gruntilda the witch, or Grunty for short, is tired of being horribly ugly and wishes to becom