Newsletter Update - August 2025
Norman Reedus, Monkeys, and More
Life Update
After a fun but way too hot summer Disney trip for my daughter’s sixth birthday, July was a month to get through—nothing major outside of playing Death Stranding 2 and seeing Superman. I really liked Superman, while I’ve never been a huge fan of the character, I felt like James Gunn did a good job capturing the man over the hero and the message around how your actions affect your environment. I especially loved Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, easily the greatest live-action interpretation I’ve seen of the character, and they made sure to show you he’s evil, none of this misunderstood crap, too many stories do with their big bads these days. As for Death Stranding 2, a review is following this article, and you’ll see why I feel it’s another Kojima classic. I can probably count on my two hands the times I’ve teared up in a game, the first Death Stranding being one. In this sequel, I teared up a few times, and the ending hit me hard as a father.
What I’m Playing
So again, just finished Death Stranding 2 and Mario Kart World, so I’m on to my next two games, Donkey Kong Bananza and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. I haven’t started Wuchang just yet, but I plan to before the week is over. Donkey Kong Bananza has been a fun treat, especially after the more sobering DS2, and I’ve been missing a good solid Nintendo experience anyway, so it’s a perfect game for me right now. As for my initial impression? I like it a lot, but I do have some minor criticisms, such as its difficulty and uninspiring bosses. I see an enjoyable game here, but I don’t see the Super Mario Odyssey or Astro Bot that the media seems to have said they played. That being said, I recently did the 500th layer and it seems to address most of my issues, so maybe it just takes a little longer to reach those high levels. Either way, I’m having fun with the big ape. Wuchang is a soulslike and it’s been a minute since I've played one, so I want to make sure I’m in the right headspace before I boot it up. I hope that I like it as close as possible to Lies of P when it comes to non-From Software soulslikes.
Coming Up
I’m actually not too happy with my July output, I feel I dropped off with my Strachey’s Game List series and I missed some other articles I wanted to do. For anyone new, Strachey’s Game List is my list of consequential video games, but it’s a time consuming task to make the article due to formatting and research. Add in being a nine-to-five worker who then comes home to a wife and kid, and you understand why I can’t work on them as much as I want to. That being said, I’m committed to finishing the 1980s games and should get the 1987 list out real soon to get that goal going. I’m also going to debut a new series, the Pop Vault, which is a rebrand of my practically dead Side Vault series. I was working on ranking Disney animated films with that series, so Pop Vault is going to finish it off. If you’re interested in those old Side Vault articles, I still have them in the Substack, and I do plan to link them all in the first Pop Vault article. After I finish the Disney animation rankings, I want to use it to talk about movies, interesting pop culture history, or TV shows (like Justice League from the 2000s, which I recently started). The idea is to give me a chance, maybe every other week, to write about something outside of video games.
If everything goes the way I want, this month should also see some changes to the Substack itself, as I want to make it easier to discover older articles. I have a lot of ideas for 1UP Vault, but I’m not going to get ahead of myself. I’m going to continue to do more and slowly expand.
Socials
Reminder for anyone interested in following my socials, I’m on X (Twitter), BlueSky, and Threads - search 1UPVault for all of them.
Be Nice to All