Mento

My advice? Stop at 3 (Shishi Jūrokubē) and then afterwards jump to the N64 games. No reason it should be as obnoxious as it is given the direction the series was heading (more Zelda-ish, less of a punishing platformer).

Been playing some of the fourth SFC Goemon game (Kirakira Douchuu) and, damn, this is considerably worse than the previous three. To the extent that it feels like a completely different team worked on this and biffed it horribly. Makes sense now why they didn't add a numeral to this one.

There are four Rs in cherry though, because every time I try to go for it I get Pac-Man killed and he goes "ar-ar-ar-ar (bwoop-bwoop)".

Sorry, for context, I'm watching clips of Sanford and Son. Just not buying any of these fakeouts. Get back to work, Fred.

It should be so easy to make it look like he died naturally of a heart attack, what are we doing here?

Baked goods are usually better when they have wrestler names (see also: Kaiser Roll, Pan de Muerto)

I bet it'd do better over there if it kept the European name, Tiger Bread.

Weird how its whole plot centered around face scans and age verification. Didn't really fit a fantasy world.

If I ever become one with the internet like the Lawnmower Man I'm just going to go around deleting errant apostrophes from the possessive "it's", plurals, acronyms, and numbers in everybody's posts/comments. Like the Greek gods of old I intend to get obnoxiously petty with my omnipotence.

YouTube is perhaps the only website I visit regularly that can both crash and freeze up. A marvel of technology.

Will its owners spend any of the billions that site makes on fixing it? Nah, they should spend more on AI algorithms that demonstrably don't work and then pocket the rest. Business 101.

I've been watching someone play Mario 64 for the first time with a sense of smug superiority, since I know the game back to front, when all of a sudden he grabs one of those koopa shells inside the oysters and I'm all "wait, you can do that?".

There really is no end to that game's little secrets.

Halloween Candy We got three of these.

Whenever I see Greg Bovino's name on here I keep thinking it's this guy: achewood.com/2007/11/01/t...

YouTube video by Mento Memori Kena: Bridge of Spirits - Woodsmith Fight (Master)

Getting the Plat for Kena was roooooough. That game on its highest difficulty thinks it's Dark Souls and it very much is not. Great looking game though; dig the whole Kubo and the Two Strings aesthetic.

Oh, and I recorded this for anyone curious about the difficulty: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkYT...

Now that RetroAchievements has implemented Multiset compatibility I can finally unlock all 852 Dark Cloud 2 achievements in a single playthrough. Should tide me over for the weekend at least.

I'm glad I found out that the PS5 saves video clips of every trophy earned by default sooner rather than later. That would've filled up the ol' SSD quick.

In honor of his creator's passing, Dilbert's tie will be raised at half-mast today.

Mento's Month: December '25 2025's final monthly round-up of reviews, articles, lists, anime musings, and other miscellany by Mento, the gaming internet's favorite son. I can just write that in an excerpt and it magically become...

2025 is officially over with the last Mento's Month of the year! Shoehorned most of my GOTY content into this one, since I'd already written about them all elsewhere, plus thoughts on the season/year's anime and a dramatic finale to that Master System thing I was doing

giantbomb.com/users/4945/a...

Psych Kids, Psych Evaluation, Psychophants; the possibilities are endless.

The monkey power-up alone turns Astro Bot from a 5-star game to a 4-star one. Unforgivable to make speedrun courses with this garbage. (The game also has serious hitbox issues throughout but, man, that horrible ape climbing mechanic in particular though.)

Top 10 Games Played in 2025 Not From 2025 While I am in the process of scrounging up a list of 2025 games from a box of scraps in a cave (what I call Xbox Game Pass for PC) the vast majority of this year's prime gaming came from older stuff.

Oops, almost forgot, I also wrote a top ten of games I played this year that weren't from this year, which was almost all of them. Way more competitive, this one: giantbomb.com/user-lists/u...

I'm finally done talking about Blue Prince in lists/blogs/whatnot and sad I never got to use the alternative title I came up with, 50 First Estates.

GOTY 2025 Well, it's Jan 1st, that's the cut-off for last year's GOTY. That's just how it is. Anything more I have to add to this list will have to wait until I have an "Adjusted" entry going up sometime in the

And here's my own personal list, carefully curated from dozens of the year's best games and not just thrown together last second with whatever debris I could find (because that would be disrespectful):

giantbomb.com/user-lists/u...

Giant Bomb Moderators' Top 10 Games of 2025 Giant Bomb Moderators' Top 10 Games of 2025 - A guest list for GiantBomb.com's 2025 Game of the Year.

Everyone else was writing GOTY stuff and I let the peer pressure get to me, so here's the Giant Bomb Site Moderators (a.k.a. "Those Jerks") GOTY list that I contributed to:
giantbomb.com/articles/gia...

Ah, whoops. Hope I was vague enough at least.

That is to say, I thought they were scary until the game done redefined the term in real-time.

Did you just get to the second half? I thought the androids were bad.

Dude was so actually strong he could fit his head into a can of Pringles while it was still full of Pringles.

In twenty years someone's going to find this skeet chain in some sort of digital junkyard and think "but prequel has always meant the same as predecessor, what's this old talking about?" and I'll be sighing deep within my armchair/coffin, wondering if I should've gone with terrible wordplay instead.

Any fight against linguistic descriptivism is bound to lose, much like any fight against social progress, and I'm entirely OK with both of those being the case. Esp. this year.

I just like having specific words for things. That nuance. Makes it easier to express my precise feelings when I write.

I'm hearing it from native speakers now too. It's all over MyAnimeList and the new "2025's Best Anime" YT vid from Mother's Basement made the error also. It's insidious how quickly it's spreading.