I have come across my favorite boss from Oracle of Ages

It's not the only returning boss - I'm not sure if there's a plot reason for it or they just felt like recycling

I gave up on FFVII because it stopped being fun. The Midgar parts were fun, but at a certain stage it just started feeling like a bunch of random events strung together with only a loose connection to the plot. I got up to doing the mandatory chocobo race.

I've been watching my son play some Echoes of Wisdom and got called upon to solve some dungeon puzzles he couldn't get past. The hardest ones were figuring out that you could place echoes far away by holding down the button (presumably that was in a tutorial, but I missed it). Then there was trying to get past a water flow that was pushing in the wrong direction.

Last, in the ice temple, there was a room with a fan and ice and fire vents on either side where I couldn't reach the doorway. To my shame, I had to look up how to do it

For myself, I started playing Fire Emblem Engage. I could have chosen Three Houses, and its story looks more interesting, but I'm not that into social sim stuff and they say the Engage battles are better.

There's just enough time to rerelease the old f-zero games in between Mario Party releases; not quite enough to make a successor to GX.

This is a statement from North Korea, so I'm not sure they'd agree

I've helped him out with just a couple of things, like a cloud boss battle, but he's mainly tackling it by himself, which I'm happy with.

FFIX seems to be regarded as a beter game in some ways, but I think FFVII is more iconic. I think I only ever tried out VI before (not for long, I couldn't get into it). I'm not sure whether I'll try out any others after this - I know there's IX and X at least also on the eshop

I'm stepping away from Super Smash Bros because now I'm literally just grinding gold extremely slowly to buy the last ~60 odd spirits I'm missing, which are all just DLC spirits. It's not fun that way.

Bought Echoes of Wisdom, but my son's been playing it and I probably won't tackle it myself any time soon.

Instead I bought FFVII since it was on discount and I'd never played it before. I'm slightly disappointed after hearing it being hyped for 20 years - but it's still enjoyable enough to carry on with.

The fast pass has been a thing for years, but are you saying the last three chapters are permanently locked? That's terrible.

Current interest rates with six times my salary - not sure I could even afford the repayments.

Same here. I don't know that she's innocent, but there didn't seem to be any hard evidence. It's terrible for the parents to have this certainty over the deaths taken away, but I expect it will get overturned eventually.

I bought nintendo online so that I could try out the online mode mode in super smash bros, and it's really discouraging. I thought I was alright at it because I've basically completed the game and done the hardest challenges, but on online I'm riduclously outclassed. I think I played like 30 games last night and won only 2. I know it has a ranking system to match you up with similar players - I don't know if it starts you out pretty high at first or something, because I feel like I'm a level 1 CPU right now.

The Home Office official said that because Alina is over 18 she is not being granted permission to come to the UK as a dependant of her parents.

They're not counting her as a dependent child because she's an adult, but it seems to ignore the fact that her parents care for her in some way

In Smash Ultimate, do you mean the playable characters or the spirits? I've been grinding away at the spirits still, and I've got about 175 still to go. The spirit board is almost clear I think, so I'm guessing there's loads (like most of the DLC ones) that I still have to buy using gold.

iPlayer needs a login, I can't remember if you need to prove that you've paid for your TV licence

I have passed 1000, so a few hundred left. A lot of those are summons and enhanceable ones, so I'll have to grind SP. And there's a few 4-star legends that I can't get past, it's Super Sonic and Evil Ryu at the moment that I've been beaten by multiple times.

Play Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Game is almost unchanged from Melee 20 years ago, and it's very repetitive, but the drive to get the 1000+ collectible "spirits" is strong.

Baby's birthweights still seem to be mainly in pounds, but it's very difficult to know what it means given that nothing else is typically measured in pounds. Someone will say about their baby "they were 8 pounds" and you'll say, "oh, very good" and neither of you will think of pounds again.

There's a bug on samsungs (I think) where the home screen interface freezes, and the only way to unfreeze it is to relaunch Nova. It's super annoying. This probably means it will never be fixed.

There's Dehli Belly as well. No alliteration, but it's got the rhyme.

It's fun in many ways, like the puzzles and the items, but coming from "new" Zelda, it's actually really tedious to have to backtrack to old areas when you get a new item that unlocks another part. It's such a staple of old Zelda (and many other games), but now I'm sick of having to visit the same places over and over again. The joy cons also suck ass because of their inaccuracy and gyro drift, but using button input (like using pro controller) is equally terrible because it uses the right analogue for the sword.

I was reading/watching some opinion stuff about Nintendo console owners only buying first-party games (in relation to WiiU and third-party support) and I realised I'm one of those people. I only have a couple of third-party games for Switch, and they're probably among my least favourite, and going back further, like 75% of the games I had were first-party games. I don't think it's a bad thing, but I was just unaware I was one of those fans until I had a look at the games I've owned.

Anyway, I might be able to finish Skyward Sword this weekend.