Mario Kart 7 came out on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 and I picked it for the first time this month. I got a 3DS in December and have been slowly picking up some of the best titles on the system so Mario Kart 7 seemed like a good idea. My first exposure to Mario Kart was playing Super Mario Kart at my cousins house back in the 90's. I wasn't very good at Super Mario Kart but it's a really fun game and when I got a Wii and heard Mario Kart Wii was coming out I picked it up immediately. To date Mario Kart Wii is the best Mario Kart game I've played and the best game that released on the Wii. 4 player local split screen, online multiplayer with friends, karts and bikes and a bunch of new tracks that are incredible fun. My only gripe about Mario Kart Wii is that it has some racers and karts that were behind some very crazy unlock gates that I was never able to achieve.

Mario Kart 7 launched after Mario Kart Wii and it is an even further enhancement of a game that was darn near perfect. Mario Kart 7 ditches the bikes and sticks to karts but allows more kart customizations and the ability for each kart to fly. The flying is a fun mechanic that you can strategically use to get yourself a bit further than the other karts if you can manage it and take some very fun track shortcuts. Mario Kart 7 does require you to unlock kart customizations by collecting gold coins during races.

Mario Kart 7 allows for local multiplayer by pairing over bluetooth with other nearby 3DS's. This is made dead simple in the game and I was able to easily link with a friend and go head to head locally. If your friend doesn't have Mario Kart 7 you can beam over a copy for your friend to play making it super easy to play with anyone that has a 3DS. This is a cool feature of a couple 3DS games and something Nintendo doesn't seem to be continuing with the Switch.

Like Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart 7 has online play functionality with your friends where you can race them online or challenge your friends with track time trials. I loved the time trail challenge feature of Mario Kart Wii and it's cool to see it added to Mario Kart 7. That said, you need to magically friend someone in person on your 3DS in a way I haven't figured out so Mario Kart 7 registers that friend in game. So far how to do this is totally lost to us and even after looking online I can't see to figure it out. This is pretty frustrating because part of the fun of Mario Kart is challenging friends to track time trials and playing with them online.

Mario Kart 7 is a great addition to the Mario Kart franchise and whereas it's an old game now if you just got a 3DS or plan on picking it up there is a ton of game here to enjoy and it's not expensive. The tracks it adds are fun and inventive and the game play is buttery smooth. Each Mario Kart game in the franchise is a fairly substantial incremental improvement on the last and Mario Kart 7 builds on the amazing foundation of Mario Kart Wii. I wonder if Mario Kart will take a page from Super Mario Maker and enable some kind of user track creation toolkit in some future release? If Nintendo did that I think that would be the greatest thing to happen to the series but until then Mario Kart 7 is a good addition to an already great series.

In March 2013 I wrote a post about a upcoming new digital card game Blizzard was developing called Hearthstone. I got access to the beta and thought it was wicked fun and when it later launched on mobile I was absolutely hooked. Like the kind of hooked where you play it every day to grind your quest dailies for gold, follow every expansion closely, read up on strategies online as well as new deck recipes and then create your own web show hooked. You know.... hooked. And I have no regrets about that because Hearthstone has been a nearly free hobby that has simply cost me time and has been an immense amount of fun. It feels like I win more than my fair share of the time and I haven't historically had any huge objection to the game or it's direction. Lately Blizzard has made some changes to the game I think aren't great but those don't really contribute too much to where I am right now. All that said, i've been playing Hearthstone for nearly every day for 4 years(honestly I think i've missed only a handful of days in that time) and i'm thinking about stepping away for a while. At least, I really want to and am trying to figure out how.

I don't think i'm hooked to the point of having a problem. I'm pretty sure I'm not so crazy about Hearthstone that I can't actually bring myself to stop playing it but when you do something so much(like playing a game every day for four years) not doing it feels weird. Or at least thinking about not doing it feels weird. But I think that may be a good reason to stop playing. That and the game is starting to feel like a chore. Gaming is a fun hobby I have, it shouldn't feel like work and when it does I think it's time to think about stepping away for a time. But it's hard to step away from some kinds of games, especially Hearthstone because of it's free to play reality.

To win at standard Hearthstone you need to have good decks. The way to get good decks is to open packs. To open packs you need in game gold or money. If you want to not spend money in Hearthstone and open packs you need to win quests. Winning quests means you need to grind your daily quests. To open the most amount of packs you need to clear your daily quests and not have them stack up which means you, mostly, need to grind quests daily. Doing this and rerolling lower gold quests for higher value ones means you can open about 78-ish packs per expansion which means that if you do that you can have a good shot to get a fair amount of good cards to keep playing the game and repeat this cycle. So far, it's been a really fun cycle but it's starting to feel more grindy and WAY less appealing to me. I don't think it's anything to do with the game design but just something i'm less interested in doing after doing it this long.

Hearthstone did just launch the new Un'Goro expansion that just blew the door open on the amount of legendaries it added to an expansion set. What I mean by that is that they increased the amount of legendaries you can get which means it is no longer reasonable for a free to play player to be able to play with even a modest amount of the power cards in a set. Before, the amount of legendaries in a set that were good was limited therefore it was easier to acquire the good ones. Now that each class has two legendaries (one being a very cool class specific quest) it is harder to get all the fun cards if you play for free. It's even harder(if you can imagine) if you pay $50 for 50 packs for each expansion. Because of the increased legendary count and the fact that the fun class quests are legendaries many people felt the pinch and honestly the only way to get all the legendary class quests is to spend a lot of money on packs.

As a free to play player I never cared about owning all the cards. I really still don't, it's just something you have to live with. But it's sad to see the free to play aspect of the game seem to slip further away. I get that Blizzard might want to make a bit more money with Hearthstone but annoying me and annoying someone that spends $50 each expansion is really different and the latter pays to keep the lights on for the game. I've always enjoyed that Hearthstone has other players that spend lots of money in the game because I never did and wanted to keep playing it so I was happy other people could fund it's development. But I wonder at what people will people feel like it's no longer worth it?

At this point i'm trying to figure out about how much gold I should bank in my account before turning off the lights and taking a long Hearthbreak. The thought is that at some point I might want to come back to play it and having some amount of gold to spend on whatever new expansion is out would help get fresh with the game again. Not to say I couldn't come back and play the game in a month or so but I'm thinking of just stopping for a long period because it just feels like the right thing to do.

And I do want to thank Blizzard for making Hearthstone and up to now it's been one of the best games i've played. It's just time to take a break for a while and see what else is out there.

In 2015 YouTuber CirclMastr had a dream. Slowly... and I mean slowly... grind to level 99 with Cloud in Barrett in the first reactor in Final Fantasy VII. It's an impressive feat he captured over a recent Twitch stream you watch above as he finally hits level 99 in an hour long stream.

If you have retro game karts that need cleaning or repair this Metal Jesus video talks all about how you can go about that. Jesus and Kelsey also talk about how you can go about fixing game discs that are scratched to the point that they don't work. They even have some tips on how to get remove someones name they've sharpied on a game kart! Really good advice here for getting longest life possible out of your old games.

Hearthstones latest expansion Journey to Un'Goro is out and I was able to open 78 packs! Watch to see what I open and stick around to see some absolutely incredible matches. I play with a fun Shaman Elemental deck and take down a Warlock in what could only be described best as a 3 tier boss fight. Plus Dinomancer. Always Dinomancer.

Jonathan Blow released his follow up to Braid last year called The Witness. The Witness is a Myst like puzzle game that blends incredible visuals, a compelling story and deep puzzle mechanics that garnered rave reviews from gamers and the press. The game initially shipped on PC and PS4 and today released on Mac on Steam and the Apple Store. Recently The Witness was featured in the Humble Freedom Bundle and if you picked it up there on Steam you can now install it on your Mac like I did today.

Last Christmas I was gifted a Nintendo 3DS and the main game I wanted to play on it was Ocarina of Time 3D. I've written a couple posts on on how that's gone and if you want a bit more context, i've linked them below. Needless to say, Ocarina of Time 3D is one of the best remakes i've ever played and the game shines on the 3DS. I think Nintendo games are best played on a handheld system and Ocarina of Time shows that even if it wasn't originally intended for a mobile system it totally works on it.

After my last post I completed the Spirit Temple which, since I always bailed out at the Gerudo Fortress when I played the game before, was the first time I ever played it. The Spirit Temple is a really unique dungeon in that you need to do a part of it as child Link and then complete the rest as adult Link. The Witches boss fight wasn't too hard but the Witches themselves were pretty funny characters that spotlight just how good Nintendo is at creating memorable characters. After I completed the Spirit Temple I had Ganon's Tower left to complete but before that I decided to take a break from the game because I just didn't want to do yet another Zelda dungeon. I picked up the game tonight and come to find out, Ganon's Tower isn't too long and features 6 bite sized puzzle rooms to unlock the final area. That said, the final boss fight might well be the longest boss fight i've ever seen in a game. Ganon has two forms and between fighting them you need to escape a crumbling tower which is fun the first time but gets old if you die to Ganon as many times as I did. In the end I found a good pattern to take down Ganon's final form and was able to finally tick off one item on my "games to complete before I die" bucketlist.

Ocarina of Time unlocks Master Quest mode after you beat it for the first time which provides a much harder version of the game and rearranged dungeons if you want a new challenge. At the end of the game my play through clocked in at about 27 hours so if you factor in another version of the game, Ocarina of Time 3D really packs in the value.

Ocarina of Time is considered by many to be one the best games of all time. I'm not sure how that sits now with Breath of the Wild sucking up all the air in gaming right now. Ocarina of a Time is a really great game and the 3D remaster elevates it considerably. I hope that Nintendo ports this version to the Switch because it would look even better on a high resolution screen. But until then the 3DS version is superb and I plan on coming back to it.

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/3227/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-3d-is-how-hd-remakes-should-be-done
http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/3287/the-water-temple-is-still-a-problem-the-continuing-adventures-of-my-ocarina-of-time-3d-playthough

The Journey To Un'Gogo is the upcoming Hearthstone expansion that set to launch on April 6th. Featuring Elementals, Dinosaurs, class quests and some other fun new cards Un'Goro looks to be a solid expansion. Make sure to log in for daily rewards every day until the launch of the game to get packs, gold and a special golden Volcanosaur(oooh!).

As with every Hearthstone expansion i'll be recording my pack opening and dropping it on YouTube so stay tuned and let me know if you are planning to jump back in to check out Un'Goro! I've been saving up in game gold and i'll have enough to open around 75 packs, woooooooo!

Check out all the new Un'Goro cards below:

https://www.facebook.com/Hearthstone/photos/rpp.498467596862680/1425934520782645/?type=3&theater

Gearbox is still handing out golden keys from Borderlands 2 and if you are currently on your way to taking down Handsome Jack or plan on coming back to it at some point these keys will put you well on your way. These shift codes as for PC/Mac/Linux, 360, XBone, PS3, PS4 & the Vita and expire on 4/18 so get em now!

PC / Mac: 5BW3J-C565J-F63FK-T3JBT-CJ9B3
XB360 / XBOne: 5JKJB-6HS3K-HHFRZ-KXT3B-HT6K5
PS3 / PS4 / PS Vita: CBWT3-BBRKS-93CHK-SBWT3-K9CW5

https://twitter.com/Borderlands/status/847904997539012613

Destiny 2 will come out this September 8th on PC, PS4 and XBox One and besides the new launch trailer being pretty bad I am pretty excited about the game. There hasn't been much in the way of gameplay, features or anything like that talked about but you know... it should be good right? I went to the Destiny website to get more information on Destiny 2 and clicked the "more information" button. I got some information about the early beta you get by pre-ordering and then more information about pre-ordering. Beyond some information about the 3 playable classes in the game and some story backdrop details on Destiny 2 are a bit sparse but you CAN pre-order the game so I guess we'll always have that.

Anyways, Destiny 2 does come with a pretty crazy Collectors Edition and if you know Destiny 2 will be your jam you might want to look into that. Destiny 2 is also coming to PC which should be something hardcore PC fans should appreciate. Hopefully over the next few weeks Bungie releases some gameplay footage and more information about the game to give us a better picture because if Destiny 2 is like that trailer it will be a whole lot of cringe.

https://www.destinythegame.com/