The Backlog Files

What happens when you revisit a game that helped shape your childhood and try to judge it like you're playing it for the first time?

Adam begins a full Kingdom Hearts retrospective with Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, examining what still works, what has aged poorly and how much of the series' eventual identity was still being figured out in 2002.

Sometimes the best sign that a demo works is realizing you've been playing it much longer than intended.

Adam checks out Backpack Syndicate, a dungeon crawler with strong Pokémon Mystery Dungeon energy and a deceptively complex backpack-management system built around weapon placement and synergy.

The demo is limited, but it does exactly what it needs to: make the full game immediately wishlist-worthy.

Bills Must Be Paid has a very simple proposition: smash piggy banks, make money and try to keep up with your increasingly expensive life.

Adam looks at the game's smooth performance, satisfying incremental loop and surprisingly good moment-to-moment feel, along with the progression problem that allows players to exhaust most of what the game has to offer far too quickly.

More than two decades after helping launch the GameCube, the original Luigi’s Mansion remains one of Nintendo’s most distinctive experiments.

Adam revisits one of his earliest GameCube games to look at the room-by-room puzzle design, portrait ghosts, E. Gadd’s surprising influence on the larger Mario universe and the mechanics that now show their age. The atmosphere and central ghost-catching loop still work remarkably well, but limited enemy variety, underused elemental powers and frustrating Boo behavior reveal how much room the series still had to grow.

The first major Pokémon Pokopia DLC takes players underwater; but Bubbly Basin succeeds because it does more than simply move the existing gameplay loop beneath the surface.

Adam looks at the submerged remains of Cerulean City, the surprisingly effective swimming mechanics, Pokopia’s environmental storytelling and why this expansion made the wider Pokémon world feel more cohesive than ever. But while Bubbly Basin successfully brought him back to Pokopia, did it actually add enough new content of its own?

Plus, with another major area still coming, where can Pokopia possibly go next?

As Sony doubles down on an all-digital PlayStation future, Adam considers what the industry is asking players to surrender in exchange for convenience.

Without physical games, consumers could lose the ability to buy used copies, lend games to friends, discover overlooked releases in stores and preserve purchases beyond the lifespan of Sony’s servers. The episode also explores the danger closed storefronts pose to indie developers and why digital games should include permanent offline access and transferable licenses.

Sony has the right to build an all-digital console. Players also have the right to decide that a temporary license is not worth the price of ownership.

Adam has never played a Splatoon game in his life, and Splatoon Raiders might be his game of the year. A look at why this single-player looter-shooter spin-off is the clearest argument yet for what the Switch 2 can actually do, how the grind hits that rare Pokémon-level joy that never becomes a chore, why the difficulty curve nails what recent Nintendo games keep getting wrong, and the one buried setting you need to change in the first five minutes. Turn off the motion controls and thank us later. A full 5 out of 5.

You can watch the first hour of Splatoon Raiders gameplay on the channel at youtube.com/@MWPNewsGaming

Adam dives into News Tower, an indie tycoon game about running a 1930s New York newspaper that turns out to be far deeper than it looks. Why the simple weekly loop hides three interlocking games, a newspaper sim, an HR-and-employee-happiness game, and a Factorio-style optimization puzzle, and why the faction-influence system, balancing the church, the mayor, and organized crime, is the smartest thing in it. Plus where it lands on the short list of comfort games that never get uninstalled. A full 5 out of 5.

Microsoft just cut thousands from its gaming division and pushed out four studios, and Adam argues it's the first crack warning of a coming collapse, like Bear Stearns to the industry's coming housing crisis. Why the "billion monthly players" mandate is structurally impossible and what it really signals, why games can't chase trends the way movies can, why a decade of failed Fortnite clones taught the industry nothing, and why an AI-background executive now running Xbox points toward the brand being wound down and sold for parts. Plus the case that the future, and the safe harbor, is indie, Nintendo, Steam, and a hard line against generative AI.

Another week, another new release, and this one's a pleasant surprise. Adam digs into Rhythm Heaven Groove, the first new entry in the series in over a decade, and finds a WarioWare-style collection of musical minigames that nails the feel even when the hardware fights it. Why the catchy, pick-up-and-play design is exactly the itch it sets out to scratch, the audio-latency quirk that makes your choice of headphones matter more than it should, and why forty dollars is the number that seals the recommendation. A short one this week, but an easy one to love.