It's that time again, Cheerful Ghost Games Club is back with Super Mario Bros. 3!

In season 3 of Cheerful Ghost Radio, we are starting our NES Classic reviews with Super Mario Bros. 1-3. We're finishing things off with Super Mario Bros. 3! Come play the game and discuss it with us, and we’ll include your thoughts in the episode!

And it's not like you need an excuse to play this incredible game, right!?

Super Mario Bros. 3 was the last game on the NES, and it pushed the system and the series to new heights with the new feature set, improved graphics, and new elements. The third game introduced some Mario series staples, like the overworld, power-ups you could use outside of gameplay, and bonus levels, and brought some new characters and enemies that are still around today.

Come play Super Mario Bros. 2 with us over the next couple weeks and share your thoughts about it, and we'll discuss your thoughts on air.

Join up here:
https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/events/172/cheerful-ghost-games-club-super-mario-bros-3

We took some recent gaming news, put it in a pot, and let it simmer for a while. Come hear our early thoughts about Apex Legends and our favorite news from the most recent Nintendo Direct, Tetris 99, Super Mario Maker 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake!

Humble is back with their 20th numbered bundle! For a measly buck, you get The First Tree, Tangledeep, and Among the Sleep.

Beat the average for Getting Over It, Tooth and Tail, and... wait what? Dream Daddy Dadrector's Cut. I'm not shocked by the premise of this game, but the name is something. Is this the first foray into romance games for Humble Bundles?

For $10 you can get all of the above games, as well as Overgrowth.

I'm so out of the loop on indie releases, none of these was even on my radar. From what I've read, however, Tangledeep is well worth the price of entry, more so if you're only spending a buck.

I've honestly been out of the bundle game for a while now, and haven't snagged one in a while. What about you? Have you bought bundles as much recently? Is this one piquing your interest?

Swing your arms from side to side, in this episode we're doing the Mario and reviewing Super Mario Bros. on the NES!

This is the first of a three-part series on the NES Mario trilogy. Next up is Super Mario Bros. 2, so come play it and talk with us about it, and we'll include your thoughts in the next NES Classic review episode!

Join the event here: https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/events/169/cheerful-ghost-games-club-super-mario-bros-2

In season 3 of Cheerful Ghost Radio, we are starting our NES Classic reviews with Super Mario Bros. 1-3. Next up is the first sequel, Super Mario Bros. 2! Come play the game and discuss it with us, and we’ll include your thoughts in the episode!

And by the way, if you don’t have an NES Classic or the original, but you do have Nintendo Switch Online, you can play it there as well!

The Super Mario Bros. 2 we know in Western territories isn't the first game to go by that name. The first one (re-released later as The Lost Levels) was deemed too hard for us, so Nintendo reskinned Doki Doki Panic and released that as Super Mario Bros. 2 for us noobs in the west.

Come play Super Mario Bros. 2 with us this week and share your thoughts about it, including any thoughts you have about The Lost Levels release on SNES.

This is the second in a three-part series about the Super Mario Bros. games on the NES Classic, so watch this space! We’ll have an event for Super Mario Bros. 3 in March!

If you want to join up, hit the link below!
https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/events/169/cheerful-ghost-games-club-super-mario-bros-2

I've been wanting a Mario Maker port on the Switch for a while now, but a sequel may be even better! Coming this June, Mario Maker 2 brings more features and more things to do, with each iteration of Mario as expected.

But the big surprise for me was. the Link's Awakening remake! The 1993 Gameboy masterpiece was my favorite Zelda game for quite some time, so I'm glad to see it reimagined. The art style is very charmingly cartoony, like everything's made out of plastic. We don't know much about any potential gameplay changes, and we know nothing about a release date yet, except it'll be in 2019. The little teaser at the end will have to hold you over.

In addition to these two, Nintendo also announced a whole host of other neat things, including some new games and some older games getting Switch ports:

• Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3


• Box Boy + Box Girl


• The new update for Smash, but... basically no details about it


• Some new updates to Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker


• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night


• Dragon Quest Builders 2


• Dragon Quest 11


• Disney Tsum Tsum Festival (which I think makes more sense if you know what a Tsum Tsum is)


• Starlink: Battle for Atlas (with the crew from Starfox!)


• RuneFactory 4, and the announcement of 5


• Onikani, a really pretty looking action RPG by Square Enix


• Yoshi's Crafted World (including a demo release today!)


• There was a LOT about Fire Emblem: Three Houses


• Tetris 99... a Tetris ... battle royale game?


• Dead By Daylight Switch release


• Deltarune, the sequel to Undertale


• Daemon X Machina, a new mech game


• Grid Autosport


• Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice


• Unravel 2


• Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered


• Astral Chain, a new game from Platinum Games (makers of Bayonetta) that looks incredible!

In this episode, we choose our own adventures while taking the Bird Box challenge in a Netflix double-feature review of Bird Box and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch!

In this episode we tackle the conclusion to M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable trilogy, Glass. If you haven't seen the film yet, beware, the last half of this episode is full of spoilers, but we'll warn you about them when we're done with our monthly playing/watching segment. Spoiler alert: Mr. Glass sees dead people! David Dunn was a ghost the whole time!

If you still have Wii Shop points, spend 'em while you can. On January 30, it will no longer function.

Along with this any video-on-demand services will stop functioning on the Wii.

This brings up a topic we've discussed a lot on the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable, and now on Cheerful Ghost Radio. When will digital games be preferable to physical? For me, it's when I can have some guarantee that I can come back 20 years later and play these games.

Nintendo has gotten much better about their online services in recent years but they still aren't quite as straight-forward as their competitors were even last generation. But that said, we don't know when Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo will shut down the ability to download old games, or even our beloved Steam (praise Gaben) may go under at some point.

I don't know what the ultimate answer is for this. It's easier with PC-- with enough bandwidth, hard drive space, and redundancy you could keep playing PC games forever. It isn't so easy with consoles due to how they have different methods of DRM and storage access.

I had a lot of fun with the Wii Shop and some crazy games I wouldn't have played without it, and it's sad to see it go.

https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/reminder-wii-shop-closes-january-30-2019

I said in one episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio, that Fallout 76 is probably the best game I've ever played that I can't easily recommend people buy. I think that still holds true. Fallout 76 is problematic, but depending on what you're looking for there's a lot of fun there as well.

I'm not playing it nearly as much as I used to but I still pop in a few hours a week. I ran out of fresh content a long time ago. In fact that's my biggest complaint as the game stands now. Once you've launched a nuke there's not much left for you to do that you haven't done before. So you wander nuke zones and fight the scorchbeast queen to get better gear and level up to refine your build. That's basically what I'm doing now, in hopes of having some new content to work toward.

There are many aspects of the game that don't work, but many that do, and they work very effectively. If you're into Bethesda games for their environments, world-building, and exploration, Fallout 76 may be the best title yet for that. And when I see people say that Fallout 76 is just a quick cash grab that they clearly didn't care about making well, I can't help but think that those folks don't care about those aspects. The world is just beautifully done, and so much care has been put into the design of this massive world. The Whitespring resort is the centerpiece for this: a very faithful reproduction of the Greenbrier (you'll be coming to Whitespring a lot, because like its inspiration, The Whitespring also houses a government bunker that plays an important role in the game).

Aside from the design, I think the quests work well until they dry up. I said in my first impressions post on this game that the gameplay loop I fell into was getting quests, getting distracted from those quests by all the neat stuff you come across, make frequent trips to camp because you're carrying too much, and eventually completing quests and getting new ones. It was really satisfying. The quests themselves were essentially just vehicles to get you from point A to point B in a lot of ways; the depth previous games' quests is missing entirely from this entry due to the lack of any interactive dialogue. You'll run into robot NPCs and one friendly super mutant but while they can talk to you, you can't talk to them, so there are no narrative choices here and the quests are a bit shallow. Each quest will play out the same way every time (for the most part).

So no, this is not a typical Fallout game. How does it play as a survival game? Well, I don't know. I don't like hardcore survival games. It seems people who do *loved* Fallout 4's survival mode and dislike Fallout 76's survival aspects. I'm the opposite: Survival-lite is fine with me. Essentially what survival means in Fallout 76 is that you have to eat, drink, and watch out for diseases, and other players can come wreck your stuff. You don't lose anything meaningful when you die, just junk items (though if you've been farming for screws and you lose them all, that hurts).

Like I said before, the endgame kinda dries up. Nuke zones were supposed to be the endgame but they're ultimately a little lackluster. It seemed like we were sold on drastic changes to the environment in nuke zones, but the changes are minor. Functionally, the flora that grows in the area changes to nuked flora that you can use to make crafting materials for advanced items, and the enemies are higher level and give more loot, and you get a ton of rads that you have to manage. But aside from that it's just a yellow haze over everything. It's still fun to run in because generally about 3/4 of the 24-player servers show up to participate and wreck a bunch of glowing ghouls. It's mayhem and it's glorious, but even that can get boring if you do it enough.

Before I bought Fallout 76, other players were my biggest concern, but I have yet to meet a jerk in-game. I've read some horror stories, and it seems like as the content dries up, some high-level players get a kick out of destroying camps. The anti-griefing measures aren't up to snuff, really. Thankfully it's nearly impossible to grief with nukes (you get a 3 minute warning when a nuke is launched) and it would be a stupid waste of a nuke anyway. But the other big anti-griefing measure is bounties. If you attack a player enough without them attacking back, or if you break items at another player's camp, you get a bounty. However, all you need is a teammate to kill you. You lose your bounty, they collect some caps, and can give them right back to you. There's a minor cap loss because it isn't 1:1 for caps lost:caps gained, but caps are fairly easy to come by, so essentially there's no penalty for being a dick. There's currently no way to fully turn off PvP. A new unrestricted PvP server option is coming "soon" so hopefully they'll go there instead, but if they enjoy messing with other players it may be more fun for them to stay on the normal servers because they aren't changing how PvP works in normal servers. At least, if they are planning to, they haven't said so.

As it stands now, the game is less buggy than it ever has been but there are still some doozies. Scorchbeasts are supposed to be the big, bad, fun enemy to take down (like dragons in Skyrim) but it seems like their sonic energy wave (or whatever it is) is bugged more often than not, so whenever one sees you, your screen is just filled with blue and nothing else until you blindly run away. When they work properly, they still aren't great fun but they're manageable.

In addition, item duplication is rampant, and the most recent methods used involve doing something that tanks the server stability. Every time one is patched out, it seems like a new method is discovered. They're starting to do ban waves, but to add to the troubles this game is facing, it seems like some legit players are getting caught in that (but it's worth noting that plenty of dupers would claim to be legit, so take that with a grain of salt).

But even after the issues, I'm still going back in for more because the good stuff outweighs the bad for me. It may not do the same for you. It's hard to rate this game. I want to give it a Must Play for the fun I'm having, and Skip It because of the issues, so I think I'm going to average it out to a low Rad, but don't take that as an endorsement.