Professor Video Games

The Galaxy games may be my favorite Mario games. If they did a switch remaster I'd be tempted to finally pick one up... I finished Horizon but agree with a lot of the comments being made. I thought at a high level the world was cool and interesting, and I enjoyed the combat mechanics, but the actual writing was generally very weak...like not in a groanworthy sort of way, just not interesting at all. The sidequests were boring as were most of the characters. And they leaned way way too hard on audio logs. Having finished it I did enjoy the overall story, but it could have been way better. I got a few hours into the DLC and then realized I was tired of the combat and there wasn't much else to keep me engaged, so I quit.

A lot of end notes are trivial but I would consider many of them critical. What I ended up doing when the going back and forth got tedious, was read to the end of the chapter (or any good stopping point if I was passing a lot of them) and then jump to the end notes and read through them in bulk.

I gave up on Kimmy Schmidt somewhere in the second season. It's been a while but I remember the writing having an increasingly shitty attitude about the midwest. Same with how they portrayed her landlord trying to stop the neighborhood from gentrifying. It all felt like it was written by a stereotypical smug new yorker...30 rock had a bit of that but was overall much more self aware.

Ah yes, the "masculine order"

I can't tell if this is a real thing or not

The individual GOTY lists are good. The GOTY podcasts are extremely not my thing though. I tried out the recap stuff they did this year, and it's better, but ultimately just a rehash of discussions I've already heard over the course of the year, so I gave up on that too. I've been watching Mass Alex off and on, and it baffles me how unwilling he is to bring up the power wheel or use abilities in general. Seemed like he went through all of ME1 with just the pistol. Maybe with ME2 letting you bind more of them to buttons he will actually use them...

Apparently it's not up anyone else's either!

Yeah Barry isn't perfect, but it's a lot of fun and the supporting cast (esp Henry Winkler and Anthony Carrigan) are fantastic. Plus the episodes are 30 mintues and the season is only 8 episodes long, so why not?

I also just played this. It's funny I think we have total opposite opinions...I thought there were maybe too many weapons. Or at least it felt like they made too many similar guns available right away...I never got a feel for how they were different and usually any given gun was good enough. And the 3d platforming stuff was a ton of fun. At first I wasn't that into the Titan combat, but about halfway through the campaign it clicked for me and got a lot more exciting. Other stuff I've gotten through recently: The Last Guardian - Seems like I saw a lot of negative talk out there about this one which made me a little wary going in. Bad framerate, bad camera, and frustrations with Trico not doing what he should. It may come down to personal taste, but I thought the framerate was serviceable outside a few moments and the camera is similarly mostly fine outside some of the more cramped moments...it never wonked out on me at a critical moment though. Trico almost always behaved pretty reasonably...the few times I was stuck I just looked up what to do. Usually it was just that I needed to give a command at a certain spot...if you refuse to look things up it could get frustrating though. Anyway, I really liked it. If you've played any other Ueda games you know the general vibe...ancient ruins, weird techno-magic, etc. And Trico is so so good...the animation is fantastic. All his movements feel dynamic and organic...I can see how this can lead to frustration in some of the navigation, but I think it's worth it. And there is a button dedicated to petting him. They know what's up. Yakuza 0 and Kiwami - 0 was my first Yakuza game. It took some time to get a feel for the combat, but I got it eventually. I love Kiryu, I love Majima, and I love smashing people with motorcycles. The main plot in 0 is insane gangster melodrama and the side stories are this wild mix of heartwarming and absurd. I love it all. Kiwami isn't quite as good...the side stories in particular are relatively dull and the Majima Everywhere thing is mostly fun but as his health bar got bigger and bigger it got a bit tedious (true with bosses in general in this one, especially when they dodge almost everything and you just have to wait for a specific moment in their attack cycle to get a few hits in). I've heard Kiwami 2 is much better than 1...I'm taking a break for now but will definitely be playing that one (and 6).

The disastrous part is what will make it good.

Have you uh, seen MI2 before?

Haha yeah, and like, I totally get why the jumps forward happened in this season. It would have been a retread of the cast getting to know each other that's happened literally hundreds of times already or it's exposition dumps of things the audience already knows. I think I'm just searching for what it was about that last episode that left me a bit unsatisfied. Maybe just that the whole "soul squad" thing doesn't seem very interesting. But then, maybe that entire premise will be gone by the end of the next episode haha.

I enjoyed this ep a lot and I will eat up their Florida jabs forever (see attached tweet) but plot-wise I think the show has suffered a bit this season from having to really blast through things. I dunno, the developments of this episode just felt very rushed to me. Maybe a consequence of all the time jumps they've been doing? I hope things slow down a bit soon. https://twitter.com/nocontexttgp/status/1054022814301384704

I dunno I'd say to some extent the development is not there, because they're developing in the same way they have before (at least with respect to each other...obv the scenarios they are put in are way different). And the show has the narrative freedom to put them in whatever circumstance it wants to keep things interesting even once they already know each other. It's not been a big deal so far, but I do hope they stop relying on it in the future.