Before the Switch 2 Storm | February 2025 Report (Patreon)

Heyo! Sorry for this report being a little bit later than usual, I wanted to get this out after I was done with the video for MAR10 Day. Speaking of which...

The Rarest Version of Yoshi's Island | Things of Interest

Since I had other video topics already being worked on for a while at this point, for this year's MAR10 Day I wanted to find some lighter but still interesting topic to talk about, and luckily my connections with a few local collectors gave me the opportunity to make this video about the Hong Kong variant of Yoshi's Island!

As I said in the video, there were previously only a handful of mentions of this version of the game online, and only one YouTube video from what I could find. While the actual game itself is (spoilers!) basically the same as the US version (just like 'Hong Kong' versions of N64 games, actually), I thought something like 'the only offiical Hong Kong Super Famicom release' was a unique oddity that was still worth documenting!

And for those in the Expansion Pack tier, I just released some bonus material for this video: a flip-through of the manual for Hong Kong Yoshi's Island! I think I already mentioned most of the differences in my video, but here is a more comprehensive look for those curious!

Meanwhile, on the Plus channel, I took a look at all my physical copies of Mario 64! And actually, if you've seen that video already, on the day that this video went public, I actually finally managed to get my hands on one more version...

...the English Taiwanese version! Which yes, I can now double confirm has the US version of the game inside. I would make that addendum video I mentioned, but maybe I'll wait until I get the PAL version first.

April Fools?

So in the past, I've been doing two different kinds of April Fools videos. The jokey ones, and proper videos about silly topics. With this year's April 1st looming closer, I was debating for quite a while about which one I wanted to do. Though I suppose that decision was already made for me when Nintendo decided the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct should be on April 2nd! So yeah, no spoilers about what it is, but I'm starting to work on it a little bit as of right now. Moving along to the other video being worked on...

The Games I Beat In 2024

So, since my last update on this video in the January report, both the script and voice recording are done for the 2024 games review! Editing is now in progress, and might take a little bit since the April 1st video is also being planned out, but hopefully I'll have a preview for you all sooner rather than later. For now, here's a no context animatic shot:

Recent pickups

Alright, time to share some more recent pickups! I feel like this one of the things you guys might actually be most interested in from these reports, so just like last month's report, I'll also go a little more in-depth with some of these:

Yes, my quest to complete the Paper Mario series in my collection is finally complete with Paper Mario on the N64. I don't know why we live in a world where a loose cart of this game is more expensive than a complete in box copy of The Thousand-Year Door on GameCube, but here we are.

A double-whammy for this one: these are the Analogue Super Nt and Mega Sg, the FPGA consoles released in 2018 and 2019 respectively! I've heard of these consoles (and the acclaim for them) here and there since their releases, but since they were out of my price range back then, my first Analogue product ended up being a Pocket instead. But yeah, these are perfect solutions for playing a physical cartridge collection via crisp HDMI output, and might come in handy in the future for footage recording using official carts and accessories!

This one might need a little explanation: this is a reproduction of the Game Boy Color demo cartridge, a not-for-sale cart used in stores to demo the GBC display by cycling through non-interactive demos of several games! Now, the real cartridge itself goes for a LOT online these days as you can imagine, so this is simply a reproduction...that I commissioned myself!

The story was that I came across a homebrew Game Boy cartridge the other day, and it was contained in this cool, transparent Game Boy cartridge that actually looked nice and had a professional looking Game Boy logo on top (instead of just leaving it blank or with the word 'GAME' slapped on, which I understand is for legal reasons but has always been my number one pet peeve with third-party reproduction cartridges being sold for profit.)

So I basically inquired about the source of the cartridge shell, and managed to find and order one with the store demo on it! I even went out of my way to recreate the label, just to make it look extra neat since it was going to be a reproduction anyway, and just grabbing photos of the label online didn't look as good. If you're ever in the mood to do something like this yourself, here's the raw recreated label image! As a Patreon bonus of sorts, I guess. (Photo of the real cartridge for comparison next to it)

And finally, here's a folding iQue brochure dating around 2006! Yep, 2006 and they're still marketing the iQue Player with the first Super Smash Bros. game. In fact this brochure basically contains ads for almost every single iQue system released up to that point: the iQue Player (N64), the iQue GBA, GBA SP and Micro, and the iQue DS Lite! It's just mildly interesting to see these systems and games spanning across three hardware generations being advertised on the same brochure from 2006. While I'd love to scan it for preservation, my printer/scanner is basically a paperweight right now (thanks HP), so these photos will have to do for now! (Unrelated, but if anyone has good printer/scanner suggestions, let me know in the replies.)

 So yeah, that'll be it for this month's report! The next time I see you all, the April 1st video should be already out, Nintendo will have revealed the Switch 2 details next to probably a new 3D Mario game, or some other crazy piece of news that blows everyone's mind will come out or something. Might be a wild ride. Well, we'll see how this goes!