Mister Jack

I might as well just put this here.

Regarding Quicksilver, I absolutely hated the look of him in pre-release materials, so I was pleasantly surprised by his actual scenes in the movie. Hell, I wish he had more screen time, although I can kind of understand why he didn't. As far as the movies go, his power is kind of broken.

I would debate that Brazil is even ready to be its own country.

Articles or posts or stories that get tagged with [TRIGGER WARNING]. Look, I get that rape is a terrible, traumatic thing, but this is just dumb. If the idea of putting a trigger warning on something is to keep rape victims from remembering their trauma then you already fucked it up because anyone who knows what "trigger warning" means will start thinking about it as soon as they read that tag EXACTLY because they already know what it means and your tag just reminded them, so what's the point? I'm not trying to sound insensitive, but if you're so traumatized from a bad experience in your past that reading someone else's article/personal story will make you have a breakdown, then you need way more help than a tag can give you. Seriously, just get off the internet and go talk to a therapist or something.

Just got back from Days of Future Past. Wow. Not only is this probably my favorite movie so far this summer, but it's easily my favorite of all the X-men movies. I can't think of any moments where I was bored.

I don't know much but I've heard that the UKIP is like the Tea Party in America. Is that true? Because if they're about to win you're EU elections you're in for a bad time.

I bought a collection of arcade games on the ps3 for five bucks, which was pretty sweet. I dunno if this counts as "beating" it but I managed to get the platinum trophy. A lot of them were admittedly fairly easy (play for 15 minutes, get 10,000 points) but some of them were much more difficult (blow up Sinistar, beat level 1 of Smash TV on one credit). Only about 15 out of the 32 games really appeal to me but for five bucks I think that's good enough.

I'm playing Transistor at the moment. If you were holding off on this one because it looks like a Bastion clone, you can rest assured that the only thing the two games have in common is the camera and the narrator. The gameplay is COMPLETELY different. 20 dollars is a little steep for a PSN game, sure, but I am enjoying it very much so far.

Because A) people kept giving me shit for not finishing it and B) I didn't want to let the game beat me.

Go to gametrailers.com and click on a few videos. If you see the exact same ad for the same game more than three times in a row, then it's a AAA game.

Move on to Dark Souls, that is. If I hated Demon's Souls, give me five reasons why I would like Dark Souls. I'm not even saying that to be a dick. I want to know why everyone busts a nut over Dark Souls but Demon's is still a cult thing. Are they that different?

Got a couple of half finished games out of my backlog. THERE. I FUCKING FINISHED IT. Now I can move on from this god damn game. Some technical problems kept me from finishing this one for a while. Went back and completed it so I could move on to Transistor. I know the games are unrelated, but it just felt wrong to download the next game without even finishing this one.

I don't know this for a fact but I've heard on numerous occasions that kinect was Don Mattrick's baby, so no matter what they were going to keep pushing it while he was in charge.

It did. Less so with adult gamers than kids and parents, though. Still, they've shipped over 20,000,000 of the things. Even if the actual sales number is lower than that, it's probably still close enough to consider it a success.

I dunno, the original kinect did sell really well despite our best efforts.

Don't look me at me. I was saying from the beginning that the kinect was a piece of shit that nobody should buy.

Godzilla. This one is kind of weird for me because I have mixed feelings about it. On the positive side, this doesn't feel like a lazy cash-in. You definitely get the sense that after the disaster that was the 1998 Godzilla, they really wanted to treat him with respect and get him right, and in that sense they definitely succeeded. Godzilla himself is great, and he's pretty much everything you'd hope for from a modern take on the king of monsters. He looks good, he sounds good, and he's got all those iconic traits you remember. I have complaints about this movie, but Godzilla's design isn't one of them. This interpretation is a perfectly respectable addition to the franchise, but if you put that aside and judge it just as a movie for its own merits, that's where things start to unravel a bit. First complaint: There is way too much focus on the human characters. Let's be honest here, nobody goes to a Godzilla movie for the military's story, but that's pretty much what we get here. Godzilla himself doesn't make a physical appearance outside of photos and camera footage until an hour has passed, give or take a few minutes, then when he shows up he promptly disappears again for another 20 to 30 minutes. I wasn't exactly timing it with a stopwatch, but if I had to guess I'd say the big G has about 30 combined minutes of screentime throughout this 2 hour movie, and that doesn't seem like nearly long enough. Second problem, and this is a real pet peeve of mine, is that the actual city stomping scenes are hard to see. The movie doesn't employ a lot of shaky cam, which I give it credit for, but it almost becomes a moot point because most of the destruction scenes take place at night. Not only do they take place at night, but there's also a ton of fog/smoke/dust clouds to obscure your view even further. I get that they wanted it to be scary, but is it so much to ask that these giant monster attacks take place during the day so I can actually see what's going on? To make matters worse, I was seeing it in 3D and we all know that those glasses only make the whole movie look even darker. I took off the glasses a few times just to see if the lighting would have been sufficient without them, but I still wasn't convinced. My third issue, and this might be hard to explain, is that Godzilla feels more like a plot device than a character. In other Godzilla movies, the focus occasionally switches away from the humans so you can see things from Godzilla's point of view, which does a lot to make him feel like the movie's true protagonist. In this movie, almost everything Godzilla does is seen from the perspective of the humans. It's hard to connect with Godzilla because the movie never really allows him to take over and do his thing without concerning itself with the petty problems of the puny humans. It always seems to feel the need to film the action from a worm's eye view or from the inside of a jet or from a helicopter camera or something, which makes Godzilla feel really distant and alien. I get that this is probably what they intended but I feel that it was a mistake. I don't give a damn about the military and scientist characters, and every time the movie cut to their reaction it felt like I was being held back from the character I was REALLY invested in. Godzilla isn't the Cloverfield monster. He's an icon, a legend. People love Godzilla, but it's almost like the movie is trying to actively discourage you from caring about him too much. Oh yeah, there was one thing that really bugged the crap out of me. A lot of cities get destroyed in this movie, but you don't actually get to see much of that action until the climax. What the story had an annoying tendency to do was show a big, dramatic monster reveal like you'd expect, have him stomp into the city as monsters are wont to do, and then cut to a tv news report or military briefing in another location where they're talking about how the city is being destroyed. Boy, a city is being destroyed, you say? That sure sounds exciting. Wish I could see it. I got one more gripe but I'm venturing into spoiler territory now. With all those nitpicks I know it probably sounds like I hated this movie, but I really didn't. I mean, it clearly has its problems, but it could have been a LOT worse for a reboot. It's not bad, it just gets held back by too many little things. This series has potential, though, and if they can fix some of the issues in the inevitable sequel then we'll finally have the modern Godzilla we always wanted.

Did you actually get the true final ending?

Jesus, this is from 3D Realms? Maybe it was a good thing they went silent for over 10 years.

God I hope so. I tried to navigate the menu on a demo Xbone where the kinect wasn't plugged in and it was just a complete mess. Maybe if we pray to Phil Spencer hard enough he'll fix that too.

I'm giving Demon's Souls ONE more try, and I do mean one. This time around I'm being "coached" by a friend who has gotten platinum trophies in all three Souls games, so if I can't get through it this time even with her advice then fuck it, I give up forever.

If my vita just ends up being a JRPG machine I think I could live with that.

Xbox One with Kinect: it's slightly better!