Wavelengths with Brendon Bigley

The Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is out for iOS and Android, and now that I've played it I'm here to answer what everyone in the boardroom of The Pokémon Company was probably asking themselves: Is it the next Pokémon GO? Does it have a shot at captivating the world in the same way? Does it say anything at all about the future of the franchise?

I've become a big Dragon Quest fan over the past few years, having played huge swaths of a whole bunch of them, and having finished a couple as well. Unfortunately, Dragon Quest X eludes everyone outside of Japan and has since its release on the Wii in 2012. Finally, thanks to the collective efforts of a bunch of very generous people online, you can play Dragon Quest X in English with the help of a few tools. Today's episode of Wavelengths is all about using your sickness-infused boredom to figure out how to play Dragon Quest X AND Dragon Quest X Offline. Was it worth the effort? Come along and find out, won't you?

---

Shin-Chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is a new, deeply chill game that is one part Boku no Natsuyasumi and one part Humungous Entertainment game. It launched this week on Nintendo Switch and Steam, and I played it primarily on the Steam Deck. I don't talk about performance at all in the video so I'll just say it here: It runs just fine on the Deck. No issues at all!

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom manages to feel like a classic Zelda game, but the main methods of interacting with the environment are completely new. With a loosely open-ended structure, free reign to explore Hyrule at your heart's content, and an unbelievable number of quality side quests, it feels like a miracle the game was made in the first place — much like Tears of the Kingdom before it.

---

Chapters:

---

⏆

Nintendo released an alarm clock yesterday called Alarmo, proving yet again that they're a chaotic company who completely disregards every logical move and instead focuses on what they think is the most fun idea they can bring to life. This has its pros and cons, obviously, as for every Wii you get a Wii U, but on the whole it keeps things delightfully weird.

---

Chapters:

UFO 50 is the new game by Mossmouth and a group of six all-timer indie developers who worked for around a decade on making fifty fully-fledged games that collectively are a huge homage to the 80s. It is a masterpiece.

---

---

Apparently there are some leaked renders of the Nintendo Switch 2 floating around online today, and I have a few gut-reactions to the specs and feature's we've seen.

Chapters:

0:00 - Grains of Salt hours activated

1:35 - Why two USB-C ports?

3:24 - 12GB of RAM / PS4 Comparison

6:17 - A microphone! lmao!

7:39 - BIG boy!!

Sony announced the PS5 Pro earlier this week, and it had me asking a lot of questions about how it fits into the overall PlayStation strategy. Mark Cerny used his "big three" to talk about the device, so I implemented my own "big three" to talk about why I think the Pro might not be the thing Sony should be focusing on releasing right now.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is rumored to be getting announced as soon as this month, which means this is my final shot at throwing a bunch of predictions and wishes at the wall before we learn more form Nintendo themselves. This is a longer one because as much as I love the Switch, there is SO much I would love to see changed in the next iteration.

---

Feel free to follow me elsewhere!

---

Chapters:

Xbox was pretty publicly working on a third member of the Xbox Series family for a few years called "Keystone" which would have been a streaming-only set top box for games played through Game Pass and xCloud. The device never materialized, and I wanted to look at why they were building it in the first place, why I was so personally interested in one, and why it never saw the light of day despite being accidentally shown publicly by Phil Spencer.

---

Feel free to follow me elsewhere!

---