Words On Wednesday

I love a strategy guide and the recent release of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen on Nintendo Switch made me break out an old one for maximum nostalgia. When Nintendo released Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen officially on 27 February 2026 for Nintendo Switch, I certainly wasn't going to buy them again, but I didn't want to miss out on the zeitgeist of a new(ish) release. I bought the original cartridges back in the day, and GBA games are extremely easy to emulate, so I had no moral scruples in emulating those titles to play alongside the people who did choose to buy the port. Fortunately, a 2026 re-release of a 2004 remake of a 1996 game means we had two decades of guides, content, and forum posts about the games still relevant for the latest port. It was trivially easy to look up nearly anything about FireRed and LeafGreen and get an immediate and in-depth answer. Although that is beneficial in a sense, it's also fundamentally different from the way those of us old enough t...

“Golden Sun” and it's sequel "Golden Sun: The Lost Age" are a pair of JRPGs released on Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Frequently featured in lists of the best RPGs and JRPGs of all time, clearly they're good games, but what makes them so special? Also, why would I cover BOTH in the same post? I'm putting these two games together because they're almost more like two halves of the same game. Not quite like Pokémon where it's the SAME story with slight variations between versions. Golden sun is effectively the part 1 to The Lost Age's part 2. Playing JUST Golden Sun would leave you with an incomplete story. I don't want to suggest that this reflects poorly on either game. On the contrary, I think it was kinda nice to be able to sink about 25 hours into the first game, then take a break before continuing on to the second game. A sort of built-in intermission, if you will. I often burn myself out if I bum rush through a singl...