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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!

Luminescent Creatures: This is Ichiko Aoba’s latest album, just released today—though I was very lucky and got a copy in November due to a clerical error on Bandcamp. It’s incredible stuff. The prior album, Windswept Adan, was something of a sea change for Aoba; after years of records minimalist arrangements, often just single-tracked guitar and vocals, the sonic landscape suddenly bloomed with strings and flutes and chimes. Luminescent Creatures occupies a broadly similar space, though it expands in both directions—there are more old-school stripped-down guitar-and-vocals tracks, but also some even more ambitious arrangements. (In reductive video game terms, maybe it’s the Tears of the Kingdom to Adan’s Breath of the Wild.) I haven’t stopped listening for months, and I can’t wait to see it performed live this spring.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II: To be honest, 25+ hours in I think this is one of the weaker games in the series. Splitting the party, while understandable, means the plot moves at a snail’s pace even by Trails standards. Situating a large chunk of the combat in another procedurally-generated Reverie Corridor-esque dungeon makes it feel like busywork, and prevents the world from really cohering into anything. And the story is really spinning its wheels—after collecting seven out of eight MacGuffins in the first game, the last one is revealed to have been split into pieces to drive the plot here in the second game. (Maybe the last piece will itself split into pieces, after Zeno’s paradox.) All that said, a mediocre Trails is still a game of the year candidate for me, and I’m enjoying myself despite everything.