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Donkey Kong Bananza: Before release, my concern about Bananza was that each level would be like a big tub of sand that you’d have to slowly scoop out to find all of its collectibles. And while there is an element of that, they do a good job of minimizing how frustrating it can get with clever design—you rarely find yourself digging aimlessly in practice, unless you enjoy it. And there’s a top-shelf Nintendo platformer in there too! It’s not quite Odyssey or Galaxy, for my money, but it’s very good. This is the “launch window” title that the Switch 2 really needed, I think; man cannot live by Mario Kart alone. I just hope we don’t have another multi-year wait for Nintendo EPD’s next big blockbuster.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby: Yes, the horse girl one. A gacha game that’s themed around horse racing, filled with anime tropes, and also somehow an idol music thing feels like an almost radioactive combination—“a cigarette-themed slot machine,” as Jacob Geller put it. But I’ve been enjoying it so far, in the way that I enjoy lots of things that are probably bad for me, like fast food. I have a tolerance for gacha mechanics, but the fatal flaw for Umamusume will be the high time commitment: once the novelty wears off I’ll resent running its roguelike career mode every day, which is long even when fast-forwarded. When Genshin is fallow, I can do my dailies in five minutes and put it down…

Close to Vermeer: A documentary about an Amsterdam museum putting on a Vermeer exhibition. I know nothing about the museum world behind the scenes, so it was fun to see some of that here: the scale model of the exhibit they use to determine the layout, the staff testing out how far people ought to stand from the paintings, the sophisticated analytical techniques, the politicking required to borrow art from other museums. There was also a great subplot about the authenticity of certain Vermeer pieces that exposed simmering tension between various groups—collectors and curators, Americans and Europeans, scientists and aesthetes. Really enjoyed this one!

Mario Kart World: The game is fine. I’m ambivalent about many of the changes—increasingly so, as I spend more time playing—but it’s still Mario Kart, and it’s still fun. The new Knockout Tour mode is the clear highlight of the gameplay additions, and it feels appropriately chaotic. The real unexpected coup here, though, is the soundtrack. It features hundreds of tracks spanning forty-plus years of Mario’s history, all with fantastic new arrangements. (I especially love the ones that treat Mario themes as though they’re jazz standards.) Forget an $80 game—they could have sold me an $80 CD collection.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time: I remember being charmed by the original Fantasy Life, though I never finished it for some reason (Dragon Age: Inquisition, probably). Fantasy Life i has much of that same charm, as long as its grind falls on the right side of pleasant for you—it has a cornucopia of progress bars to fill up, and a variety of enthusiastic celebrations on completing them. It also has a bit of a kitchen-sink design philosophy–in addition to the expected crafting and action RPG stuff, there’s also an Animal Crossing-esque town builder, a lightweight open-world area, and a roguelike dungeon mode. It’s a lot!

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma: This was my actual favorite game of the month. I’d bounced off of Rune Factory in the past, but here everything came together: the story and characters all clicked for me, the combat was at worst passable, and its basis in Japanese folklore and aesthetics felt fresh compared to the Western fantasy mishmash that many of these games use. I worried that the farming bits might involve too much tedium, but it’s surprisingly incidental–the town-side gameplay is really more of a management thing, where you assign tasks to your villagers and then help out as you see fit. Highly recommended!

BEATrio: A new jazz album—superficially Latin, perhaps, but wide-ranging in practice—featuring Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, and Antonio Sánchez. Fleck was my entry point here, and while I’m used to unusual instrumentation from his projects, the sheer audacity of banjo plus harp still took me by surprise. But as usual he’s gathered virtuosic, world-class musicians that somehow make it all hold together. I think it’s my favorite collaborative work of Fleck’s since The Enchantment with Chick Corea.

Vesper Flights: An essay collection from 2021 by Helen Macdonald, their followup to the excellent H Is for Hawk. I’ve noted before that “nature essays from writers who are also poets” is a subgenre I seem to especially enjoy; see also Mary Oliver’s Upstream, say, or Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing, or Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders. As expected Macdonald’s particular interest here is birds and she writes beautifully about them, with the title essay a particular highlight.

Side Story: A new podcast from the Friends at the Table folks about video games. The list of people who could get me to add another video game podcast to the pile at this point is short, but Austin Walker is at the top. It’s great to have him back on that beat regularly after years of sporadic guest appearances during the post-Waypoint era. And I’ve really enjoyed the rest of the cast as well! This is already a favorite listen just three episodes in. It might even finally pull me into the mainline Friends at the Table show.

Luminescent Creatures World Tour: If money were no object, I would travel to see every Ichiko Aoba concert like a Deadhead; as it is I still go to as many as I can manage, which will be seven by the end of the year. In addition to the typical one-woman shows, some dates on this tour feature a string quintet and piano to support the more densely-arranged songs (“Luciférine,” say). I think I still prefer the former type—in particular, there’s more variety in the setlists when she doesn’t have to restrict herself to songs the ensemble has learned—but both have been a lot of fun.

Summer of Soul: A music documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, an event that I admit I had no idea about. It features a fun mix of archival footage (which sat undiscovered for decades!) and present-day interviews with participants and attendees. Seeing everyone’s faces light up as they relive lost moments from their youth is really something else. And, of course, there are the performances themselves: Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone, and on and on. Great stuff.

The New York Game: A history of baseball and New York City, starting with the sport’s murky origins and ending in 1945, written by Kevin Baker. This was a feel-good pick to get myself in the mood for Opening Day, and it worked—it’s chock full of rollicking old-timey baseball lore, often starring players with improbable names—but its more sober retellings of New York history are worthwhile as well. The concluding “bibliographical essay” suggests that Baker is planning a second volume, which is good news—not just because I enjoyed this first one, but also because its abrupt end comes before so many important New York baseball moments: Robinson breaking the color line, the Dodgers and Giants going west, the ’69 Mets, and so on.

Thank You Very Much: A documentary about comedian provocateur Andy Kaufman. I enjoyed it, though I would bet its appeal is U-shaped: those who only have a passing familiarity with Kaufman (like me) will learn a lot, and hardcore fans will be attracted by fresh interview segments and never-before-seen archival footage, but folks somewhere in the middle will find it a bit cloying. It also can’t resist attempting to be tidy. Trying to pin down “the real person” with a documentary is fraught in the best of circumstances, but with a personality as diffuse as Kaufman’s it feels like an exercise in futility. (I’m not convinced we can attribute his career to the time when his parents did not explain his grandfather’s death when he was a child, for instance.) But I did still enjoy it!