It’s the one year anniversary of the Spotlight! Time really is — something, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like I’ve been running this feature for a year. The Spotlight has really helped make running The Bonus World feel manageable. So happy first birthday, Spotlight.

From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, here’s what I’m shining the Spotlight on for the month of February, 2025.

Path to Menzoberranzan

I’m probably going to mention this every month, but I’ve been working with a team that’s making a huge Baldur’s Gate 3 mod. It’s a whole new campaign set in the city of coin, Athkatla. The project is highly ambitious, boasting all new companions, a new set of worlds to explore, full voice acting and more.

I’ve been lucky enough to be brought on as a writer and have actually completed my first quest for the project, which is super exciting. The whole team is filled with super talented and passionate people who are happily volunteering their time and effort to make this project come to life.

You can follow the development on social media or on YouTube. There’s also a Discord to join if that’s more your thing. Check it out!

Sniper Elite: Resistance

Sniper Elite: Resistance is another one of those games. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel or do anything that you haven’t seen before in the series. It’s just another tried and true entry in a long running series of Nazi-sniping simulators for you and a friend.

Aside from level design, I really don’t think anything has changed since Sniper Elite 5, which is usually a pretty damming thing to say about a sequel or spinoff, but I have never once come to the Sniper Elite series for anything beyond shooting the bad guys. If you’re coming to Sniper Elite: Resistance for innovations in gameplay, you’ll be very disappointed. But if you just want to play a competent stealth-action game with a buddy, then you can’t go wrong with Sniper Elite: Resistance.

Clone Hero & the PDP Riffmaster

When I really think about it, the whole Guitar Hero and Rock Band milieu are responsible for some of my favorite gaming experiences ever. It’s why Clone Hero has become one of my most played games over the past few years, save for 2024 where my treasured Guitar Hero III, Les Paul guitar finally kicked the bucket. Luckily, the PDP Riffmaster was birthed into existence, allowing those of us stuck in the glory days of rhythm gaming a chance at another encore.

I love Clone Hero, this is already known. So what about this fancy new PDP Riffmaster guitar? While it’s nice to have a modern plastic guitar, I’ve found that the PDP Riffmaster is not my preferred type of rhythm game guitar. I feel like there are two main camps of plastic guitars: the Rock Band style ones with the mushy strum bar and buttons flush with the neck, and the Guitar Hero styled ones that have a clicky strum bar, and raised buttons off of the neck. I really like the latter, but the PDP Riffmaster is the former, so there’s an inherent difficulty in adjusting for me.

I often find myself overshooting buttons or mashing more than I need at any given time because there’s no tactile break between them. This issue only compounds on itself when you play harder songs. Also, I can’t tell if it’s me or not, but I swear that sometimes this thing isn’t reading my upward strokes (heh) properly, leading me to miss basic rhythm riffs that I can play on tempo in real life. I shouldn’t be missing as many notes as I am.

It might have something to do with the fact that, despite it saying on the box that it’s for the Xbox and PC, the PDP Riffmaster does not natively connect to the PC. It’s truly wild that I had to download a piece of third-party software just to connect this thing to my computer.

Lastly, while this isn’t a major issue, the PDP Riffmaster is very eager to tell you about how it folds in half for easy storage, which is a great idea on paper. The guitar folds at the neck, which is longer than the body itself, thus creating an impossible to store shaped object you now have to contend with. I can’t sit it up cause it’ll be resting on the headstock and will teeter over. I can’t lay it on its back because now the fret buttons are there. And I can’t lay it on the front because there’s a fucking whammy bar there. It’s easier to store when not folded, which defeats the purpose of it being foldable at all!

I like rhythm games enough to put up with the PDP Riffmaster. It’s not a terrible device, but it just has enough pain points that I don’t think I could recommend it to someone who didn’t already prefer the Rock Band style of guitar. I will continue to use it, complaining about it the whole time.

Update: As of publishing this, Gibson just announced a Les Paul-styled guitar. So that’s unfortunate timing for me.

Balatro

I get it now. I finally get it. Balatro shadow-dropped onto GamePass recently prompting me to give it a fair shake, and I fucking understand now. I don’t gamble, nor do I like card games, be they physical or digital. But man, Balatro has broken through and really made me a believer.

There’s some weird dopamine high that kicks in when you play a simple pair and get a x200 multiplier to your points because you’ve built such behemoth of a deck. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a game appeal to my desire to watch the numbers get bigger quite like Balatro has, save for maybe some idle games. But this? This? This is a fantastic game that is all I want to be playing at any given moment.

Avowed

Avowed is perfectly fine. It’s a very pretty looking game with incredibly fun combat and fun exploration, that’s completely mired by a story I feel like I already know the ending to. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Hell, I know I’m being too harsh. But I just haven’t felt compelled to return to Avowed since I’ve started it, and I really can’t put my finger on why that is.

Like I said, Avowed is excellent by most metrics, but it just hasn’t gotten its claws into me yet. So I think I’ll give it a few more hours and see where I’m at with it then.

The Simpsons

I’m well into the fourteenth season of The Simpsons, and I’m actually quite surprised at how long it took before the cracks actually started to show. In my mind, The Simpsons began their steep decline around season 11, but that isn’t the case. The episodes are a lot more uneven in quality than they were in previous seasons, but it’s still a good watch at this point.

It does feel like a storm is slowly rolling in, however. I know this is going to get rough, but I don’t know if the decline is gradual enough that I won’t realize until it’s too late that I’m in the decline, or if it’ll be painfully obvious. The far-fetched and overly contrived plot lines and frequent celebrity cameos are ramping up in an unwelcome way, but I think what’s really bugging me is Homer Simpson, himself.

Homer isn’t a character. Sure, he likes to drink, works at a power plant, and is generally an ignoramus, but outside of that he really isn’t anything, is he? Homer seems to just take on the worst position in every episode. He’s always the asshole who has to learn the lesson. Sometimes it’s handled well and Homer isn’t too abrasive, but often times he’s just the worst human being in the world. He’s Facebook incarnate, chock-full of the worst takes and opinions you’ll ever see.

If The Simpsons ever starts to redeem itself still remains to be seen, but I’m fairly certain this is going to get worse before it gets better. I’m going to do my best to stick this out. Wish me luck.

News

Nintendo Ditches Vouchers and Gold Points

Noted Asshole, Bobby Kotick, Alleges All Bad Press was Fake

Workers Tell Bobby Kotick to Suck a Fat One

Unity Slashes Jobs via a 5am Email

ESA Screams into the Trump Void About Tariffs

Warner Bros. Closes Monolith & More, Cancels Wonder Woman

Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. In lieu of doing game of the year stuff, we’ll be back at the end of March with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.

The Spotlight is usually a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days, but I took last month off to focus on Game of the Year stuff. I was certain that I would have more stuff to write about here, but I must have really not done very much in the past 2 months.

From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.

Games

Paper Mario

Having recently gained access to the Nintendo Switch Online’s even more premium Expansion Pass-thing that comes with N64 and Gameboy Advance games, I’ve slowly been working my way through some of the games from my youth. The one that really resonated with me was Paper Mario, a game I often rented but never owned. I think this game is great, even if it’s a little rough around the edges in places. It’s charming, it’s decently paced, and the combat is a lot of fun even if I know it gets better in the sequel.

TCG Card Shop Simulator

Man, TCG Card Shop Simulator really sunk its teeth into me over the past few months to the extent that it even managed to crack my game of the year list. It’s rough, it’s repetitive, but it has this very manageable and satisfying gameplay loop that’s perfect for melting the hours away. Since December, the updates have slowed a bit and so has my engagement with it, but the moment something new gets added, I’ll be back.

Dead Island 2

Dead Island 2 isn’t a very good game. It’s not bad either. It’s fine. But it does have some pretty satisfying melee combat and the ability to experience said melee combat with a friend. That’s been the only reason a buddy of mine and I keep returning to this unremarkable game filled with unlikable characters. There’s just something about hacking and slashing our way through the zombie apocalypse with a friend that brings me such joy.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

I never really got the opportunity to talk extensively about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, nor will I use this venue to do so, but I do want to sing its praises for a moment. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fantastic experience that seemingly came out of nowhere and took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting too much when it was announced several years ago, but I am pleased to say that this game is truly phenomenal. It takes all the things I enjoyed about the modern Hitman games, added some really satisfying melee combat, and encouraged me to beat the hell out of dimwitted fascists. It’s excellent!

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

I started Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth recently and was pretty charmed by the characters and the writing, which added a lot of clarity to why it was so lauded last year by critics. My only issue is that I’ve played for a few hours already and have barely done anything. I know a lot of people like the pacing and stories of these games, but sometimes I just want to get to the good parts without having to sit through three hours of well-made backstory. Like, I haven’t even gotten to the main part of the game yet. I’m three hours in and I’ve yet to complete the prologue. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is arguably the most engaged I’ve ever been with a Yakuza game, but man, it takes its sweet time to get going.

Watch List

The Simpsons

Every year or so I make the vain attempt to get back into watching The Simpsons. The golden era of The Simpsons still remains as some of my favorite television, ever, but I always fall off around the same time. Once the teenage seasons roll around, the show starts to lose its soul a bit, focusing more on trying to keep up with its satirical contemporaries, like South Park, while cramming as many celebrity cameos into an episode as possible. I want to experience this dip for myself and see how bad it really gets. But I also want to see what’s on the other side of that because I hear good things about the modern Simpsons that I’m really curious about.

Whether this pans out how I hope or not remains to be seen, but at the very least, I can always watch those same ten seasons over and over and still be entertained.

Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead

Speaking of 90’s television, there’s a new Beavis and Butthead and it’s kind of decent. I mean, the main caveat being that you thought the show was funny back in the day. If you hated it then, you’re definitely not going to enjoy it now. But it’s still a fun show to dip into when I want to turn my brain off and see some of the dumbest entertainment ever. It’s weird seeing Beavis and Butthead riff over viral videos and weird influencer shit, but it quickly feels natural. Although not even their commentary is enough to overpower my desire to not watch some of these videos.

Disenchantment

I can’t believe it took me so long to get into Disenchantment. I remember trying this show out when it first launched, but eventually fell off of it because I was expecting the fantasy version of Futurama and got something else. It’s not a perfect show by any stretch, but it’s still very funny and well written. It felt like a big, dumb, D&D campaign where the story kind of made sense, but the adventure and goofily-voiced NPCs were the main draw. I like Disenchantment now, and I like that it ended and wrapped up its story.

Mario Party Party

Whenever I want to kill 4 hours of my life, I turn to the classic Giant Bomb archives and watch three grown men grouse their way through every mainline Mario Party game for 50 turns, while a fourth grown man eggs them, gleefully singing the praises of the franchise the whole way. Some videos are better than others, but for my money, the live one they did at a PAX was the best.

Listening Party

I-E-A-I-A-I-O – System of a Down

Alleviate – Moving Mountains

Most of what Dankmus Produced

The Rest

Path to Menzoberranzan

So this is a cool thing I’m working on. Last month I joined the team that’s working on a full new campaign for Baldur’s Gate 3 as a writer. It’s been a ton of work and has eaten up a lot of my time, but it’s been a blast. Seeing the project come together has been really inspiring and I can’t wait for it to come together in 2030, when I assume it will be finished.

It probably won’t take that long, but you can follow the development on social media or on YouTube. There’s also a Discord to join if that’s more your thing. Check it out!

News

An Article About the Mod I’m Working on!

The Switch 2

McDonald’s is Trying to Kill You with a $20 Jug of McRib Sauce

Developer Behind Mediocre Game Says DEI, Cause of Course They Do

A New Guitar Hero Controller is Coming out for the Wii, and Not for the PC for Some Reason

Celeste Dev’s Next Game is Cancelled

Some Madman Installed Every WoW Add-On They Could

Googly Eyes Bandit Keeps Swapping Out Switch Games for Silly Craft Pieces

DnD-Themed Pinball Machine has a Wild Voice Cast

Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. In lieu of doing game of the year stuff, we’ll be back at the end of February with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.