VIRTUAL BASTION

YouTube Highlights, Weekly Edition #121

Up this week: Neverwinter (PS4, 2016) – an action combat MMORPG set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe that was first released on the PC in 2013 Metroid Prime (Wii, 2009) – follow the adventures of Samus on the mysterious world of Tallon IV in this highly praised 3D action game Spyro Reignited Trilogy (PS4,…

Favorite Nintendo Game: Super Metroid

In thinking about choosing my most favorite Nintendo game, I tried to come up with reasons to NOT pick Super Metroid. Super Metroid didn’t immediately affect the gaming world as much as, say, Super Mario Bros. 3. Super Metroid didn’t outdo more popular franchise titles in its release year (1994), like, say, Final Fantasy VI….

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair Gets a Release Date!

When Yooka-Laylee was first announced on KickStarter all those years ago (like 2015 or something, I think), I was more than a little excited. I was all jazzed and ready for a proper successor to Banjo-Kazooie, and it was just a matter of waiting for the release date. I was also, like many others, quite…

Favorite Nintendo Game: Majora’s Mask

Our first topic celebrating 130 years of, quite possibly, THE greatest video game company of all time is our favorite Nintendo game. Nintendo is such an influential part in the world of gaming that I think the majority of gamers simply must have a favorite from their vast gaming library. If you’ve been following along…

Favorite Nintendo Game – Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Hey all, autumn is finally upon us and so is that gorgeous-looking The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m pretty excited. In fact, it’s pretty safe to say that all of us here at Virtual Bastion are pretty psyched. This new look at a classic…

YouTube Highlights, Weekly Edition #120

Join Us for #NintendoSeptember!

Long before “Nintendo” became a household name in video games, it was once a company that produced playing cards. Founded in September 1889 as “Nintendo Koppai” by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it manufactured Hanafuda cards – playing cards that could be used for a number of different games. The company started making western-style playing cards in the…

Check Out the Luigi’s Mansion 3 Gamescom Presentation!

Luigi’s Mansion 3 isn’t all that far away now, but there’s still plenty we don’t know. Thankfully, Nintendo decided to show-off a bit more of the game at gamescom 2019, and not just another short trailer either. Instead, they had an entire 30 minute segment from early in the game available for attendees to view,…

A Super Mario Maker 2 Reminder

Good day, dear readers! I just wanted to remind you all that we’re currently taking requests to play your Super Mario Maker 2 levels on our Virtual Bastion YouTube channel. If you’re interested in sharing some Mario goodness with us, please limit two Course ID(s) per person and have them in our comments section by…

Who Else Is Ready For Link’s Awakening?

Remasters and remakes make up a significant portion of today’s video game releases, so many that the idea of a new one really shouldn’t be all that exciting to anyone. Yet, many of us still get excited, don’t we? All it takes is the right game, and in my case, that game is absolutely The…

YouTube Highlights, Weekly Edition #119

Death Stranding is…wait, what?

A few months back, after the release of a new Death Stranding trailer, I noted that I was feeling “cautiously optimistic and warily pessimistic” about the whole affair. Today, upon seeing more footage of the game, including gameplay, that was shown at Gamescom’s opening night, I’m feeling fairly certain that Death Stranding is probably not…

Little Nightmares II is Coming Next Year!

After two years of thinking that Tarsier Studios’ Little Nightmares was going to be a one-off kind of game, it turns out that’s not the case at all. Little Nightmares II is coming soon, and it’s looking like it’ll be even more unsettling than the original.

The Joy-Con Drift Strikes Again

It’s official, the infamous Joy-Con drifting issue so prevalent in recent gaming news has taken yet another victim. My Nintendo Switch is less than a year old, with a large portion of those months not even spent using the console (I don’t have that many games on it yet). And my left Joy-Con analog stick…

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Characters Are Actually Good

As much as I enjoyed the Fire Emblem: Fates games, their characters left a little something to be desired. From what I’ve read about the previous entries in the series, this largely holds true for most Fire Emblem games. They’re quite fun to play and some of their heroes have become pretty iconic, but the…

YouTube Highlights, Weekly Edition #118

Top 5: Games to Get Now That I Have a Nintendo Switch

Woohooooo! With extra WOO! Just this past weekend, and brand new toy arrived at the house, and I’m still stunned! You can tell it’s true by all the exclamation points! You know how it is when you get an idea into your head, and it’s all you can do to not think about it? Well,…

Fracter is Coming to PC Soon

PC gamers are finally going to be able to get their hands on another intriguing indie puzzle game soon in the form of the Steam release of Fracter. This is game that’s already enjoying both critical and commercial success on the iOS and Android platforms, so it’s likely to fit quite well into the collections…

Want to See Your Super Mario Maker 2 Levels on YouTube?

Good day, everyone! I recently got a copy of Super Mario Maker 2 and have been spending many hours playing through all kinds of cool and creative stages created by fellow Mario fans all across the globe. Which got me thinking…it could be really cool to record your Mario Maker stages on our Virtual Bastion…

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is Just the Right Mix of Old and New

The Fire Emblem series was, for the longest time, a complete mystery to me. For the longest time, all I knew about it was that Marth and Roy were in it. Who were Marth and Roy? Just two annoying swordsmen characters in Super Smash Bros. Melee. That was about all the contact I had with…

YouTube Highlights, Weekly Edition #117

Unforgettable: The Interactive Intro of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

When I first started playing video games in earnest, words like “Atari” and “arcade” were commonplace. “Nintendo” and “Mario” soon followed, and with them came a chasm-like leap in video game technology. After spending countless hours with relatively simple (but not simplistic) games like Pole Position and Defender, I was utterly wowed by what would…

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan’s Shared Story Mode Goes Further Than Expected

Supermassive Games is really swinging for the fences with their next branching-narrative horror game: The Dark Pictures Anthology – Man of Medan. It has everything that fans of Until Dawn enjoyed, but massively expanded and with a shared story experienced deftly woven throughout. Multiplayer may sound like an odd choice for this kind of game,…

Challenge Mode: Assorted Metroid Prime 2 Baddies

The Metroid Prime games are some of the most challenging I’ve faced. The first two, in fact, had to originally be completed over the course of years as I got stuck at one boss after another. While this issue has since been eliminated due to simply growing as a gamer, it is the second game…

Yoshi’s Crafted World is Way Too Charming

I knew going in that Yoshi’s Crafted World was going to be the warmest and fuzziest game I was going to play all year. I knew it, but somehow I was still unprepared for the sheer amount of cute and innocence on display here. Seriously, if you thought Yoshi’s Wolly World was adorable, you haven’t…

Fallout 76 and ESO: A Novice’s Views

It wasn’t too long after purchasing Fallout 76 that my husband and I decided to give The Elder Scrolls Online a try. After all, I had a shiny, new PlayStation Plus membership to make use of, and he had been interested in playing ESO for some time but never found the motivation to invest in…

New Super Lucky’s Tale Coming to Nintendo Switch

Classical collect-em-up fans rejoice! Super Lucky’s Tale is no longer an Xbox One exclusive! While not enough to move a system like the Xbox One, Super Lucky’s Tale is decent enough to make one’s inner Spyro-fan jump with excitement.

New Hero ‘Sigma’ Coming to Overwatch

Overwatch will be gaining another cast member soon, but this one is going to be a little different from the rest. Like the others, Sigma has his own suite of unique abilities. Unlike just about every other character though, he’s suffering from a…split of sorts.

Spyro the Dragon: A Short Review

For the past decade or so, I have been trying to catch up on the major PS1 games that I had missed. For about $10 per game on Amazon (with a few exceptions), I was able to play all of the old PS1 Final Fantasy games, including a few SNES ones that were remade and…

Switch Lite is Replacing the 3DS, That’s Actually Pretty Significant

For about as long as Nintendo has been making home consoles, they’ve also always had a separate handheld system to accompany it. During the days of the NES, SNES, and N64, Nintendo fans also had the GameBoy (Original, Pocket, Color, etc). The Gamecube had the Gameboy Advance as a partner, the Wii had the DS,…

Blue Protocol Has an Impressive Character Creator

Blue Protocol is a new online RPG from Bandai Namco that’s appears to sitting somewhere between Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy XIV on the scale. There isn’t all that much info available about the game, but we can at least say that it looks absolutely gorgeous. Of course, there are plenty of good-looking game out…

Day 23: Game with the Best Graphics or Art Style

Continuing my way ever so slowly through the 30 days of video game topics, we come to the game with the best graphics or art style. Though in recent times, I was thoroughly impressed with the graphics of Kingdom Hearts 3, which are easily some of the best I’ve ever seen, I wanted instead to…

Super Mario Maker 2: Making is Even More Fun than Playing

When the original Super Mario Maker released for the Wii U back in 201X, I remember feeling rather dubious about it. Sure it sounded interesting, but would it really be able to match a proper Mario game? It turns out that the answer was a resounding “YES!” Mario fans took to the game almost instantly,…

Ann Gets Her Own Persona 5: The Royal Trailer

Ann Takamaki has been a favorite of many Person 5 players since even before the game’s original release. Part of that is undoubtedly due to her character design, but there’s also something to be said for the character’s personality too. Ann is portrayed as a very upbeat sort of person who spends much more time…

Google Stadia Worries Me

As we near the end of this eighth generation of consoles draws to a close, more and more information about what the so-called future of gaming is becoming available. Some of it, like Nintendo’s and Sony’s plans, is encouraging. The rest, not so much. It seems every major publisher wants to launch their own game…

Remedy Finally Recovers Full Rights to ‘Alan Wake’

At long last, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel for fans of horror series Alan Wake. The first game release to both critical and commercial acclaim in 2010, and it was almost immediately followed up by pseudo-sequel Alan Wake’s American Nightmare in 2011. After that though, absolutely nothing. One would think that…

Close to the Sun Looks a Lot Like BioShock, and I’m Psyched

It’s been a while since we’ve seen anything even remotely close to a new BioShock. It’s not too surprising of course; Kevin Levine did close his studio (Irrational Games) after completing work on BioShock Infinite, but it’s still kind of odd since 2K still owns the rights to the series. Whatever the case, we’re in…

Pushing All The Wrong Buttons

I’m usually not the sort to buy a game and leave it unfinished. Games are expensive things afters all, so spending all that money only to not wind up getting your money’s worth doesn’t really make sense to me. There are times though where a game just doesn’t jive with me. I’ll do my best…