Surely you VH-est (October 2025)

October for me went by super quick. Like, even quicker than most months in this hellscape of a year. So while I don't have too much stuff relevant to my interests to talk about, it was a month of collecting and a few other things, so I can at least pump a thousand words out to talk about the scary month of October. So let's get to it.

NES collecting was still a focus this month, though not as massive as months prior. But I did get a few decent games. Both Metal Gear games, including the infamous not-really-actual-sequel Snake's Revenge. Also Friday the 13th, one of the notoriously bad NES games that I don't really think is like the worst game on the console, even for LJN standards. Super C, Deja Vu, Faxanadu, a lot of very solid shelf-filler cartridges were a big part of this month's collection, but there were two interesting finds in particular worth covering.

So last month I mentioned that I had found the rerelease of Metroid with the new artwork. In it I also mentioned that The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II both got rereleases as well. Both with gray cartridges. And, as luck would have it, I would find them shortly after. And they are indeed well-cursed looking. Most notably the artwork is also edited, removing much of the text from the original labels. They look so much like bootlegs, like someone slapping Zelda roms onto old NES carts, but nope, they're legit. And to my knowledge play similar to original releases with little to no real changes to the games themselves. I've already run through Zelda II because it's one of my favorite games ever (I know that sounds bizarre to some people, namely Zelda purists) and it plays and feels just like any other port. I'm hoping to eventually find a Zelda II cartridge complete in box as it's one of few games I'd love to have a full release of, given my love for it. 

I've also been playing Pokemon Z-A this month and so far I like it. I don't love it, but I do think it's been the first Pokemon game since the 3DS era to really keep me invested. I like the streamlining of the mechanics overall, giving it a fresher feeling (to me at least). I will say the story really hasn't interested me yet, but I am at least invested enough to proceed further into it. I also am close to completing Donkey Kong Bananza with really the remaining bananas to collect being pretty low at this point. Still up there as my favorite game I've played this year, that's for certain. Still might replay Mario Odyssey afterwards, we'll see.

Out of the blue this Thursday, Nintendo announced an update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, set for January 15th. This includes a Switch 2 edition which honestly doesn't contain much other than cleaner graphics, a megaphone to find villagers, upgraded player count to 12 and mouse controls. The real meat and potatoes is coming in the 3.0. update which will feature a new hotel with rooms to design, a new cleanup system, bulk crafting, unique dream islands to make up for the inability to make more than one island per save file. And the mad lads finally brought back retro consoles with the ability to play video games again. Also new Zelda, Lego and Splatoon collabs. 

My thoughts on the update are positive, but not like super excited. I feel the hotel just feels like a different version of Happy Home Paradise and while the dream islands sound fun, they just feel like sandboxes without much to really do aside from design an extra island your own way. But I think it'll be the stuff to finally get me back into New Horizons again at least for a little bit. Sucks I now have to buy Amiibo, but hell with it. Part of me also feels this confirms that the next Animal Crossing game is in the works for Switch 2, but it'll be a long time until it's announced. The lack of really much new content to really make a Switch 2 port feel that special sort of cements it. Hopefully it's good and hopefully we won't be in a situation where it takes another five years to get any form of update.

What I really got into this month was VHS tape collecting. I really don't know why honestly. I'm not that much of a movie watcher, I have ways of watching these in higher resolution. But I also have an old CRT and a VCR/DVD player that doesn't eat tapes yet, so I figured I'd give it a try. This month mainly focused on Disney clamshells, as I've honestly always wanted a big set of Disney tapes to put on a shelf. And so far I've found everything from non Disney stuff like Cats Don't Dance and All Dogs Go to Heaven to Disney classics diamond tapes like Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella and Pinocchio, Gold collection tapes like A Bug's Life, The Aristocats and Mulan, along with some rarer tapes from the end of the VHS lifecycle like The Incredibles and Bambi. 

And yes, I do have the penis castle Little Mermaid tape if you were wondering.

It's not without some flaws though. While a majority of the tapes work, I've had some that haven't. One that didn't work in the VCR at all, others where the tape quality was warped to the point I couldn't really watch them. A copy of Oliver and Company seemed to work fine, but you could hear the tape rocking inside the machine. And a Classics edition of Peter Pan that was fine, but after rewinding it, the tape snapped from the other spool due to how fast the rewinding is. I swear I had a VHS rewinder but I might have gotten rid of it. I am watching the tapes, mainly stuff I haven't seen in full before like Oliver & Company, A Bug's Life and Cat's Don't Dance. Choices are usually out of interest, but I've put all the picks into a wheel to spin which will choose my next tape if I'm down for anything. We'll see if this continues next month. I'm also looking for certain specific tapes that I can hopefully get that even if it doesn't work perfect, will still look nice on a shelf. So let's hope for some luck next month on that front.

And that's about it for this month. No real interest in talking about Wrestling this month as aside from the Andrade contract status situation and the blowback to the Jey Uso push, there's really not that much I'm interested in talking about. Crown Jewel Perth and AEW Wrestledream were solid shows at least. Next moth gives us Survivor Series, Saturday Night's Main Event, AEW Full Gear and my birthday, so there'll at least hopefully be more interest from me when it comes to that. This month belonged to the tape buying, so wrestling be damned for once.