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.

I've enjoyed S3 so far and I really love that this show has the freedom (and is willing to) just make up the rules as it goes. The writers have so much fun with that and it's completely impossible to predict where things will go (in a good way). That said I do hope they stop rebooting the main group's brains. It's a bit frustrating when all the progress they've made keeps getting wiped out.

I still check in here too but yeah I think Slack has pulled away a decent amount of activity from here. Even when IIT was still going I feel like the activity level in the forums was lower than it had been in the past.

Yeah I'm willing to attribute that "mature" stuff to marketing for the time being. The same buzzwords could have been attached to the witcher 3 as well. But at the same time what they chose to show gave me the same concerns as the rest of you. I dunno...overall the mechanics they show off in the trailer seemed fine but I'm a bit surprised at the buzz it got out of E3. Outside of the visual polish nothing seemed especially mind blowing. Maybe people are projecting what made the witcher 3 great onto this new setting? I mean I hope that's true...

I liked RDR a lot for similar reasons as everyone else (atmosphere, music, moment-to-moment gameplay) but the story suffered from the same problem as GTA4, which is the protagonist spends the ENTIRE game saying some variety of "I've left that life behind" before going on to do the bidding of the latest psychopath and killing 100 dudes for them. It works for a while but eventually it gets pretty stale. But even if the flaws are roughly the same, it's been long enough that a prettier, slightly more polished version of RDR1 would be fine by me.

I dunno I got into Steven Universe pretty much from the start and the big lore stuff kicking in was more of a bonus. Adventure time is fun but sometimes the backstory stuff can be overwhelming and convoluted, especially in the later seasons. I think they are wrapping it up soon? I haven't seen the latest stuff since it's not on any streaming services last I checked.

The only game I've played that actually game out this year is Celeste. Extremely good mechanically. And yeah, like Henke said, the writing was surprisingly strong too, which was totally unexpected.

Thanks for that playlist sam...I missed almost the entire thing this time and when I did remember to tune in, it was the final game. A seven hour "speedrun" of FFVI, which is cool and all, but no thanks.

Sorry but I really hate those "actually both sides are bad" sorts of arguments. Like what is that Columbus example you cited trying to say? How dare "PC culture" call out a garbage holiday and actually no, I am the racist for wanting to eliminate it? That Columbus was good, actually? Yeah there are plenty of people out there who just parrot talking points or whatever, but it doesn't make what they say wrong. Also, "having an opinion" these days is a term mainly used by the right to be mockingly dismissive of people that are challenging a pro-straight/white status quo and I'd be real hesitant to ever seriously use it. Personally, South Park lost me when they decided to devote an episode to making fun of Al Gore and climate change advocacy for some reason? There were some funny episodes beyond that point but the show's politics were increasingly trash and I drifted away from it not long after.

I took a break just like that when I played and I think it was a good idea. The expansions are as good as if not better than the main game, but the burnout can be very real. I just finished the WiiU classic Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, a Shin Megami Tensei/Fire Emblem crossover JRPG where you lead a squad of Japanese idols to save everyone from evil forces that feed off of people's artistic essences. This game was very silly but its heart is in the right place and the writing is very good and fun. Like this is a game where one of the characters at one point has a tv role as Sneeze Detective, a detective who has multiple personalities that change when she sneezes and there's random chances for characters to break into songs or whatever and do adorable super attacks mid combat. My main complaints would probably be that the dungeons are kinda lame and that Tsubasa's boobs are absurd.

Here's an interesting interview with the (now former) showrunner to read regarding season 2. Full of finale spoilers. https://tv.avclub.com/updated-craig-digregorio-on-leaving-ash-vs-evil-dead-1798255766 Regarding the end of S2: