I mean, it's also the month of "Mario and Luigi's hands spontaneously warp them into a parallel universe" (hence the whole "interdimensional travel" bit!) but who cares about a little wrinkle like that?
Hey, doesn't that make Mario and Luigi's hands more powerful than the TARDIS?
I won't lie – there hasn't been an awful lot going on in my life this month aside from the release of Mario & Luigi: Brothership. And that's okay! After all, if life was nothing but a non-stop whirlwind of major event after major event, it'd just drive us to exhaustion.
So, with that in mind, here's what did happen to me!
Tuesday the 5th was, of course, Bonfire Night – nothing quite like celebrating some guy being killed over four hundred years ago, right? (To be fair, nobody cares about that any more, because any excuse to set off dangerous explosives seems to be readily welcomed!)
On Thursday the 7th, the second and final game release of the year that I was anticipating came to pass, with the release of Mario & Luigi: Brothership!
These screenshots are all from the first hour or so of gameplay, so there's very little spoilers here!
I've since completed the game, and it was definitely a lot of fun!
If anybody reading this is wondering if they should buy the game, I'd say to go for it!
My only real complaint is that the game warned me about the time-sensitive sidequests a total of FIVE TIMES, up to and including the very last sidequest in the game. Seriously, I'd got the hint by then!
Also, Luigi selects with [A] in menus, as opposed to [B] in past games, but I managed to (mostly) get used to that by the end of the game.Mario & Luigi: Brothership spoilers
There's a bit I found quite funny, where Princess Peach openly volunteers to be kidnapped (as part of a mission to gather intelligence, but it's still amusing to have her offer for that to happen!)
And, of course, it technically wasn't Mario & Luigi's hands that warped them to Concordia, but rather the power of the mythical Great Conductor. But my joke was funny enough… right?
Meanwhile, Zokket (the main antagonist) tried to hatch an egg… though that later became much less funny when the egg hatched into Reclusa, one of the evilest characters ever seen in a Mario game (if not THE evilest) who gets his fun from trapping people in illusory paradises and watching them slowly die in reality.
On Saturday the 16th, meanwhile, it was time for the Christmas lights to be switched on in town, complete with a five-and-a-half-hour-long event. I, meanwhile, was asked to come into work (instead of volunteering on Friday; I don't normally work Saturdays) and put on a costume as part of a fundraiser. It was… well, it was certainly AN experience, though I don't think it's one I'd be interested in experiencing again.
Monday the 18th saw us finding out that Hebe the cat has fleas again, so he was given the first course of a once-monthly anti-flea treatment a week later (which does mean that the next dose is due on Christmas Day, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
That Saturday, I played Minecraft with Maia for the first time in over a year, which led to… this.
Basically, a bunch of frogs in my basement.
It was revenge by Maia, because I'd summoned nine bats at her house a minute or so earlier.
And we did it again the next day, too! This time, Maia summoned even more frogs, up to a total of sixty-eight, and I wound up a) making them effectively immortal, and b) putting them all into a purpose-built enclosure (except for one, which I think Maia must have killed at some point between teleporting all of them to her house and making them immortal, which I did a minute later.)
Oh, and I slipped down the stairs earlier that day (ie Sunday.) Can't forget that either.
A couple of days later, on Tuesday the 26th, I got a haircut and finally beat Mario & Luigi: Brothership! Like I said above, it was a really enjoyable game! It's funny, though -- a lot of games can be said to be "front-loaded"; that is, the majority of their best content is at the beginning, while the middle and end suffer from a relative lack of it; but Mario & Luigi: Brothership is kind of both "front-loaded" and "back-loaded"… it just stalls somewhat in the middle, though I'd have to say the very best part of the game (see spoilers below for what I mean) is at the very end.Mario & Luigi: Brothership spoilers
By "the best part", I mean the part where Mario and Luigi end up inside a fake Mushroom Kingdom after being trapped by Reclusa's illusion-producing flowers; by this point, we've already seen what it looks like from the outside, but seeing it from the inside is altogether very different! (All the skewed camera angles certainly help give it an uncomfortable vibe, too.)
Anyway, that's all from this month on my end -- so I'll be back next month, just in time for the end of the year!