Ben Lindbergh

Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom.

I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at The Ringer, button mash host, and card-carrying N64 kid at heart for life.

We have a supersized episode in store for you today.

Fortunately, this podcast supports a special expansion pack for increased memory capacity.

So just slap that sucker in and you should be good to go.

We are lucky that LLMs hadn't happened yet in the Nintendo 64 era, or we would have had to pay through the nose for those four extra megabytes.

But back then, we had instant messenger chatbots that

didn't plagiarize Destroy the Environment or raise RAM prices, shout out to Smarter Child.

We have so much to discuss today.

GTA pre-orders, Steam machine pricing, Xbox drama, what else is new?

Brief reviews of Star Fox for Switch 2 and The Adventures of Elliot.

Thoughts and hopes for Nintendo's Ocarina remake.

But the biggest news of all is that this week, the Nintendo 64 turned 30.

The latest clue in a growing body of evidence that we must be considerably older than 30, which doesn't seem possible, but dismayingly does appear to check out.

So to mark the occasion, to wish N64 a happy 30th, we'll be conducting a draft of N64 games.

And as a tribute to the system that popularized the practice of shipping with four built-in controller ports...

we have a four-player podcast.

No odd job allowed.

With us, not as always, but as often, is a man who is on top of the world.

Not only did his Knicks win a championship, but he himself is a champion because this week, at long last, he beat Crimson Desert.