King Koopa is far more of a Koopa King than Princess Peach is a Toadstool Princess. But the most recent common ancestor of the original cast of Super Mario Kart is the Cheep Cheep. There is an evolutionary split here between Goombas and Koopas. Bowser and Yoshi descend from Koopas. Donkey Kong descends from Goombas, while Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad all descend from Apes.

There are two games that have been on my radar since announcement:

Wargroove:
Wargroove is an indie spiritual successor to "Advance Wars", but using a fantasy setting instead of modern military. So it is a map-by-map style turn based strategy game using expendable units and done in a charming, lighthearted style.

Etrian Odyssey Nexus:
Like all Etrian Odyssey games, it is a party based dungeon crawler with a big emphasis on class choice and fighting/avoiding roaming boss-like FOE enemies on each floor. Plus you get to draw your own map on touchscreen to cement that sense of progress into the unknown. This has been said to be the last EO game on the 3DS, and it is very much a celebration/cumulation of the series featuring a big mix of classes and elements taken from all previous games.

A thread for sharing new games coming out in February... what are your personal picks/interests of the month?

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Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list (or a swanky desire index) of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

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Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

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• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's one text list. Feel free to post other lists or list videos that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.

In one month, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate outsold the lifetime sales of Melee by 70%. Super Smash Bros. Melee was the highest selling Gamecube game as well.

@dmcmaster said in That's News!:

Does make me wonder whatever happened to that other Project Retro was working on, and if it will ever see release.

Yeah. When Metroid Prime 4 was announced as being done by a "new development team" one of the more interesting implications was that we were going to get both a new Metroid and a new game by Retro. I have to imagine that if this other project was going along nicely, then it will likewise be continued in the future.

@iboshow @tokeeffe9 This is the tweet from Blizzard about Destiny staying on BattleNet

Out of the games/franchises mentioned, the ones I agree with the most are:

Super Mario RPG - Been yearning for a proper sequel or spiritual sequel since the day it came out. And if Mario is consider "too occupied" with his other RPG series then I've long wanted a Kirby version of SMRPG. Kirby already has a huge cast of characters and enemies, plus many varied settings. There won't be any problem coming up with playable characters, NPCs, a bestiary and dungeon locations. Also, like the Mario series, Kirby has "platformer DNA" so it makes sense to emulate the SMRPG approach.

James Bond 007 - I too love, loved Nightfire and still revisit it with great fondness. Everything or Nothing was a blast. Bring back Bond!

Half-Life - To be honest, I was more in love with the original than Half-Life 2, but so much time has passed that I would expect a new game to be different than all the previous entries. The setting is great, I wouldn't care even if they did shifted into a different stroyline. And unlike a lot of series that I want to make a comeback, this one has very broad fan support behind it.

Here are some of my own suggestions:

1. original, single player Star Wars games! Man, oh man...what happened here?! When I was growing up, it used to be that Star Wars games were as fun/important to me as the actual movie trilogy -- if not more so!

2. a Quintet revival: Actraiser 3 or a top down action RPG successor to the Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma trilogy.

3. Turok! Ignore the reboot, and take the best ideas from the other games. After developing two PC remasters/remakes, ideally Nightdive would be able to secure permission to make an original game in the series.

4. Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre. It doesn't have to copy one of the two existing branches in the series, a new invention in the strategy genre using the Ogre Battle setting would both be interesting and fitting with the series's history.

5. Warcraft IV. WC3 is my favorite RTS. This is another sequel I've wanted since day one. And if they don't want to stick closely to the past, then a fresh design take on Warcraft 3's "RTS armies with RPG heroes" basic premise seems like ripe territory to create something that still works but feels entirely different.

Some quick Honorable mentions just to wrap things up: a new Castlevania, new Advance Wars, Kid Icarus: Uprising 2, Lost Kingdoms 3, and Hexen 3.

Killing Skull & Bones. I'm sinking it just because it is a multiplayer only/focused game.

Resident Evil 2 Remake
Dreams
Shenmue III
Halo: Infinite
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
DOOM: Eternal
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Judgment
(x) Skull & Bones
Metal Wolf Chaos XD
The Outer Worlds
Onimusha: Warlords
Man of Medan
Ooblets
Trails of Cold Steel 3
Biomutant
Ace Combat 7
Pokemon for Switch
CTR: Nitro-Fueled
Age of Empires IV
Rage 2
Nioh 2
Trials Rising
Brave Earth Prologue
Trials of Cold Steel 4
13 Sentinels Aegis Rim
Etrian Odyssey X
Blackroom
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition
Somerville
Phoenix Point
The Pathless
Daemon X Machina
Code Vein
My Friend Pedro
Shin Yakuza
System Shock Remake
Desperados
The Last Night
Dragon: Marked for Death
The Sinking City
In the Valley of Gods
The Artful Escape
Carrion
Hellpoint
UnDungeon
Age of Wonders: Planetfall

Killing Beyond Good & Evil 2 (also removed 2 games killed by others -- DMC5 and Total War: Three Kingdoms -- from the previous list). I'm not a core BG&E fan, so I still want to see more/have some questions answered first.

Aside: It seems like a good idea to indicate your killed game with an "(x)" if you aren't going to remove it completely, since indicating the killed game with formatting alone doesn't preserve this information when someone copy/pastes your list.

Resident Evil 2 Remake
Dreams
Control
(x) Beyond Good & Evil 2
Shenmue III
Halo: Infinite
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
DOOM: Eternal
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Judgment
Babylon’s Fall
Skull & Bones
Metal Wolf Chaos XD
Catherine: Full Body
The Outer Worlds
Onimusha: Warlords
Man of Medan
Jump Force
Ooblets
Trails of Cold Steel 3
Biomutant
Ace Combat 7
Project Re: Fantasy
Pokemon for Switch
CTR: Nitro-Fueled
Age of Empires IV
Rage 2
Nioh 2
Trials Rising
Brave Earth Prologue
Trials of Cold Steel 4
13 Sentinels Aegis Rim
Etrian Odyssey X
Ion Maiden
Blackroom
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition
Somerville
Phoenix Point
The Pathless
Daemon X Machina
Code Vein
My Friend Pedro
Shin Yakuza
System Shock Remake
Desperados
The Last Night
Dragon: Marked for Death
The Sinking City
In the Valley of Gods
The Artful Escape
Carrion
Hellpoint
UnDungeon
Age of Wonders: Planetfall