Checking In (Friday 10 April 2026)

After a busy couple of weeks, hello hello. Things got busy at work just after I had taken a short break before the Easter Holidays because we were a man down due to a minor injury, at least it wasn't something major. The employee has been recovering well and should be back in action next week. As for the break, I just need to recharge from doing the daily music sets for Val and also trying to bring back my own regular content plus keeping an eye on the newest member of the content family Weekend Bonus Stage. Once things blew up at work I just couldn't make the time to get back into preparing and putting out content, because by the time we were done for the day I just wanted supper, maybe watch an episode of something and then hit the pillow. Now that the weekend is upon us and we are not opening tomorrow, I'm hoping to prepare Weekend Bonus Stage then next week if things ease up the dailys sets return and work on other content can resume.

Many thanks to those of you who have been checking out Weekend Bonus Stage. The goal was to make it a worthy successor to the WWE 2K16 Universe Mode version of Bonus Stage and even though there are only a few episodes out so far, I am happy with it because it combines two things that I like - games and (audio)books. I like to read but I've gained an appreciation for audiobooks as well, thanks to Stephen King of all people haha. It was the audiobook versions of his books that made me a fan and want to check out others too. Weekend Bonus Stage will be a nice platform to showcase many cool books for other fans too and maybe I'll hear from them if they've got books that they want to suggest and recommend. I'm building up an archive of audiobooks, fiction and nonfiction, just doing my part to preserve them and hopefully there are plenty of other fans out there doing the same because you never know. SAVE EVERYTHING as Media Monarchy's Mr. Pilato has said before many times. 

As for the games, Pokémon Adventure Red Chapter and Pokémon Team Rocket Edition are what's being featured currently and so far so good (I'm still chugging away at that update walkthrough for Adventure Red Chapter, even though I started in October last year and now it's April. I'm still in Kanto but have obtained HM Surf). Great games both of them, although Adventure Red Chapter shows its age from time to time because it doesn't have a lot modern Quality of Life features that someone might expect to find in a current Pokémon ROM hack. But it terms of being story-driven games, both certainly deliver when it comes to that and it's refreshing since for a number of years now the Pokémon ROM hack scene has just been taken over by enhancement and difficulty hacks. It's kind of ridiculous when you realise that there was a time when there were way more story-driven hacks, many of which people still remember fondly. Maybe someone can help me understand why the community shifted from people trying to tell fun Pokémon stories in games to what you find now - more focus on creating games that are QoL feature-heavy or more difficult than the base versions? I've mainly noticed this on the English side of the community, while it seems like the non-English fans still have the creativity to offer games with new stories, new regions and so on (for those of you who don't know, Pokémon Team Rocket Edition is a Spanish hack that got an English translation). I don't plan of featuring enhancement or difficulty hacks on Weekend Bonus Stage, unless I find games that make the effort to really refresh the experience of playing super modified versions of games that I played years ago. It's not enough to just have fancy, cool QoL features and then slap some new events over the same story as the base game without even trying to "enhance" the story too. It will mostly be story-driven hacks that I'm either writing/updating walkthroughs for or playing for fun, because these are the kinds of hacks that made me a fan or ROM hacks in the first place.

Mom is doing well, for those of you who read my previous Checking In post where I talked about what happened to her. She's mobile, active and I would say the pain is very minimal now than it was back in February. Good time for her to take some well deserved time away from the office haha.

Enjoy your weekend and take care.