What I Got Up To This Month (July '25)

 I know I say this often, but it's hard to believe another month has gone by. It feels like June was just upon us but, somehow, we're now at the end of July. Ah well, time marches on. I generally start writing these posts early in the month and I had a whole thing written out about how little had changed for me, but then my situation did change and it seemed like things were looking up, but now I'm (probably?) back to where I was a week ago. So it goes.

The past few weeks, I've been playing a lot of Donkey Kong Bananza. While Mario Kart World was enjoyable, it's kinda just another Mario Kart. Bananza, on the other hand, is something truly neat and innovative so I'm glad to see that my Switch 2 purchase is already paying dividends. Essentially, this is an action-platformer with a heavy focus on destructibility and environmental deformation. It is a lot of fun. Outside of being generally familiar with DK as a character, and having played a tiny bit of one of the Donkey Kong Land games for the Game Boy, I have no real reverence for the franchise but I've been having a blast with this new game regardless.

Before Donkey Kong, most of the early part of this month was spent marathoning Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. I already wrote about the game in detail here, so I'll spare you a long rant, but suffice it to say the game was great. I think I enjoyed it more than the first (a game I still, mind you, liked) in a large part because I felt the story was a bit easier to grasp. The delivering, while much the same, was still a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to discussing this with some of my friends in, uh, a year (or whenever this comes to PC).

I also continued my long journey through Yakuza 4. It's taken me a fair bit more time than I anticipated to get through this game, partially because it's a very long game and also because, well, other stuff has happened and grabbed my attention. That's not to say I haven't been liking it, but it just hasn't been a huge priority for me. I'm right about at the end of this, but I have some side stuff I want to complete before I finish the story so it may be a few days before I get to my usual writeup.