Mister Jack

Too many teens out there becoming parents. I keep saying abstinence only education doesn't work.

I liked Alien Isolation but yeah, my biggest criticism is that save points were too far apart, which is a bigger problem than it sounds like on paper. I actually think they could have solved this by, if not adding more save points, at least letting you open up shortcuts like in a Souls game so you don't have to backtrack as much.

Crimean Bridge just got blown the FUCK up https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1578633576253657089

Is it any good?

The hacker also claims to have the entirety of the game's source code and is threatening to release it. Normally I might feel bad for Rockstar but...nah.

Cult of the Lamb This is a cute little game, although it's made up of two genres and one of them succeeds more than the other. The roguelike dungeon crawling is pretty basic. You have a melee attack and a magic attack that get randomized at the beginning of each run. Don't expect Binding of Isaac items to play with because that's not what this is about. Dungeon runs are just for collecting resources and killing story bosses. Maps are small and most enemies are pretty easy. It's not very engaging. What IS engaging, however, is running the cult. Recruiting followers, building structures, unlocking cult rituals, and deciding your cult's doctrine is pretty addictive, and your teachings will decide what kind of benefits you get. For example, do you want to preach a fasting period to make your followers' hunger stop decreasing for three days? Or do you want to declare a feast day to completely refill their hunger in one meal? You can only choose one doctrine per rank, so by the time you reach the endgame you could end up with a benevolent brotherhood or a bloodthirsty bunch of sadists depending on how you teach them. Their worship is also a currency in itself that you use to upgrade your cult's buildings, so you want to keep your followers happy or at least obedient. Sometimes they'll ask you to do things for them, whether it's finding them a resource, imprisoning their enemies, getting married, or...feeding them a bowl of poop. Okay dude, whatever floats your boat. I'd say try this one when it's on sale. The combat portions are kind of a slog but I highly enjoyed the cult building part of the game.

MASSIVE GTA VI leak. We're talking an hour of early development footage, along with some source code. Expect shit to hit the fan on Monday.

I had this problem the first time I ran through it, but I tried a second playthrough a little while ago that went much more smoothly for me and realized that deflecting creatures is more effective if you use the L1 + O + left/right deflect to move sideways.

Oh, well how about that? With as many AC games as they're announcing one after the other I'm not surprised this flew under my radar. It better not be a god damn mobile game.

Everyone is making Assassin's Creed in Japan except for Ubisoft. Looks tight.

Some of you may remember that I played the hell out of Nioh 2. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours in it and even now I'll still pick it up once in a while. Well, I tried the Wo Long PS5 demo to see how the gameplay compares and I came away with the following conclusions. 1) This is more of an answer to Sekiro than Dark Souls. While you can still block, it only takes a few blocked hits to leave you staggered and so this game strongly encourages you to get used to timed parries. Not only will parrying open up an attack window for you, but it will boost your spirit meter and drain your enemy's. More on this later. 2) Combat is simplified compared to Nioh. While you can still equip two ranged and two melee weapons, you don't have light and heavy attack buttons anymore. Instead you have normal attacks and spirit attacks, which cost spirit meter and do heavy damage to enemy spirit meters. Weapon skills are tied to individual weapons rather than your own skill tree. No stance system either. 3) Fewer stats to level up. You have five stats to put your points into rather than eight. They basically just combined two stats into one for some of these. 4) A much bigger emphasis on casting magic spells. In Nioh, magic was a consumable resource that had to be recharged at checkpoints. In Wo Long, magic is unlimited as long as you have enough spirit energy and your morale level is high enough. More on this in a bit. 5) No stamina meter. Instead you have the spirit meter. It starts at 0 and can go positive or negative depending on actions. Landing attacks and parrying successfully give you positive energy, which you can spend on magic spells or spirit attacks. Dodging, blocking, and getting hit build up negative energy. If your energy goes completely negative, it leaves you staggered and open to attacks. It doesn't take many hits to get staggered either so you really want to get good at parries. On the plus side, your enemies also have spirit meters you can take advantage of to set them up for deathblows. In theory, if you keep attacking aggressively and manage to parry any attempted counterattacks, you can keep your combo going forever without ever getting tired. This is easier said than done, though. 6) There's a morale system, and this one is interesting. Morale is a mechanic that both gives you and your enemies passive buffs depending on how high it is. It goes as high as level 20, at least in the demo. Killing enemies raises morale. Dying resets it. However, when you reach a checkpoint or kill a mini-boss you can plant a flag that will permanently raise your morale and prevent it from going below a minimum rank even after dying. The boss morale is level 20, so this encourages level exploration to plant enough flags to permanently raise your own morale to 20 and put you on even ground. I like this mechanic. 7) There's a jump button! Also, drinking healing potions is very slow, and it kinda feels like you have to be standing still for the input to even register. I get what they're going for but I'm not a fan. They're already getting lots of feedback about this so hopefully they change it in the full release. I imagine the full game will be rebalanced since the same thing happened with the Nioh 2 demo, but I'm pretty much already committed to buying this.

Yeah, I can't believe Robert Zemeckis is attached to this dumpster fire, especially when he's also behind my favorite movie. I know he's not always a winner but usually the man at least tries to think outside the box, but this is so deep inside the box that it's in danger of turning into a black hole.

Pinocchio (2022) The Disney+ remake. Holy fuck I hated this movie. It's a piece of shit. Yeah, I wasn't expecting anything great out of a Disney+ remake and I only watched it to begin with because I'm already a subscriber, but Pinocchio is a great story so I figured at worst it'd be kind of dull and mediocre with maybe a handful of fun moments and the rest of the time me and my friend could make fun of it but this was so utterly soulless that it's probably my most hated Disney remake yet, even more so than the Lion King. Why is it so bad? Well where do I even begin? Absolutely everything is CGI, even things that really didn't need to be. The fucking cat is CGI, as if they couldn't just get a real cat. The clocks in Geppetto's house are CGI. Fucking clocks! Seeing Tom Hanks felt like watching that Will Smith I Am Legend movie where he talks to himself for two hours. Sure, Tom is talking to other characters, but not one of them feels even the slightest bit real. I am way too aware that he is talking to empty space because of how bad they look. Pinocchio isn't even a real puppet before he comes to life. NONE of the puppets in this movie are real. It's all CG all the time and it looks dreadful. It gets worse, though. The story, in fact the entire point of the Pinocchio fairy tale in the first place, is completely butchered. Fuck. This. Movie.

I'm currently working my way through I'm Glad My Mom Died. I think pretty much everyone already knows how rough and exploitive Hollywood is toward child actors but hearing a firsthand account about the ways the author was abused by her stage mom and creeped on by Nickelodeon producers is some real skin-crawling stuff.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) I played it on the Cowabunga Collection, which is probably obvious. This was one of those childhood games I never beat because it was too hard, and I wanted to go back and finally beat the bastard and do it without relying on save states with the exception of one save after level 3 when I wanted to take a break. As a whole, the game wasn't nearly as hard as I expected going back with one exception, and this is mostly thanks to two factors. One: The Cowabunga Collection includes a very helpful in-game strategy guide with maps you can follow so you won't ever get lost if you refer to it. Two: I watched a Youtube guide from U Can Beat Video Games that was full of helpful tips I never knew about as a kid such as pizza farming spots, individual turtle strengths and weaknesses, and boss exploits. The furthest I ever got as a kid was that freaking dam in level 2, but the in-game map made it much more doable. Once you get past the enormous hurdle that is the dam, the biggest danger in the game for the most part is getting lost and worn down in a war of attrition, and with the map always available it becomes much more manageable. However, as I mentioned earlier, there was still one spot where I still ended up using three continues because it was just blatantly unfair. This fucking hallway. Those jetpack foot soldiers are impossible to dodge, take several hits even with Donatello, and their lasers are hard to dodge without backing up, which will just spawn more jetpack soldiers when you go right again. I really couldn't figure out any better way to get through this than just running through it and switching turtles whenever one of them started to get close to death. It is just straight up bullshit game design and if I couldn't exploit an AI glitch to get down the most narrow part of the hallway I probably never would have made it to Shredder. But I did it. Every turtle was on the brink of death by the time I finished, but I finally beat this game decades later.

After seeing No Way Home, I realized just how dumb it was to cover up his face for all his goblin scenes in the original movie. His expressions are just too damn good to cover up with a mask.

I own multiple arcade sticks and I can tell you that it really just comes down to personal preference. I absolutely would not recommend getting one if your motive for doing so is to get better at fighting games, because the whole "sticks are superior" argument is a meme. There are plenty of EVO winners who used the regular old controller. If you just want a more faithful arcade experience, though, then I totally get that. You just gotta pay attention to what kind of parts the stick you're buying is using because they make a huge difference. My first stick was actually a customized Street Fighter stick that swapped out the Hori internals for Sanwa parts and it's been going strong for many years now.

I'm in the same boat with flight sticks. When I was playing Star Wars Squadrons in VR I kept thinking about how much cooler it would be to use a stick instead of a controller, but I couldn't justify it for one game. But imagine...