I'm tempted to pre-order this, which sounds like "Phantasy Star meets Dungeons and Dragons" to me. I've already got buy-in from both of my kids plus my sister-in-law to play it with me.

In other news, the Switch 2 has been unveiled-- by third-party accessory makers! The entire system, the joy-cons, and the dock are just sitting out on full display on the CES trade floor, if you know where to look. Pictures are everywhere. While it's true that conjecture-based renders of video game systems have always shown up in magazines and the like before those platforms' releases, I can't think of a time in forty years in the hobby where a company's new console "in the flesh" has been unveiled by third-parties, with total mums from the manufacturer.

As per my 2024 retrospective post, I did indeed emphasize PSVR2 by buying "Metro Awakening"-- and it's fantastically memorable so far! My daughter was watching me play via the TV, and we had tons of really funny situations occur in the game. Our favorites involved the stealth melee: because it hardly ever registers the first time I clobber someone, I swing my arm back and forth across the NPC's head-- this causes the ragdoll physics for their bodies to behave oddly.

On a totally unrelated note, I was talking to a family member recently, and he said "how cool would it be if advancements in medical technology via AI would allow for people to live two hundred years?" My question: why in the world would anyone want to live two hundred years? We're just pilgrims in this world-- just passing through. I want to go be with my Heavenly Father! I think if I live to be seventy five or eighty, it's really going to start to feel like "what's the holdup-- time to move on." I think this is the difference between a Christ-centric view of existence, versus more of an atheistic orientation.