Mister Jack

Dude was legit one of the best things about it.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Watched this on Disney+. To tell the truth, I would almost put this in the okay movies thread. It's fine. Shang-Chi is fine as a character. Not great but not terrible. The Mandarin is fine. The side characters are fine. They don't leave a strong impression but they're not really obnoxious either. The thing that pushed this movie over into this thread for me was the fight choreography. It's really good. In fact, in my opinion these are some of the best fight scenes in the entire MCU and there's plenty of them. As a Marvel movie, meaning a movie that's meant to push the MCU forward and get fans hyped for the future of the franchise, it's kind of meh. However, as a standalone kung fu movie it's great. If you watch it just for the stunts and action scenes it's pretty enjoyable but it loses some steam in the climax when it turns into a CGI fest like Black Panther did, although the effects here aren't as bad as they were in that movie.

The best part is that NFT owners are gonna have to pay taxes based on the perceived value of their NFTs, so if some dumbass pays a million dollars for a picture of a monkey smoking a joint that means that the IRS will tax you as if it's actually worth a million dollars. Good luck selling your weed monkey to anyone else for even a fraction of that price. This might finally be the push we need to pop the NFT bubble and kill this stupid, destructive fad for good. One can only hope.

Another note about the Drax the Dismemberer trophy

NFT sales over 10k must now be declared to the IRS. GET FUCKED, NFT LOSERS!

Finally got the Guardians of the Galaxy platinum. Truth be told it's not that hard to get but you want to be careful because if you miss a collectible you can't go back and get it via the chapter select because it resets your progress when you finish the chapter. I ended up having to replay the entire game to get the stuff I missed.

Normally I don't buy three games in a row because of the risk of the others getting neglected but I'm currently stuck caring full-time for my blind, crippled mom and she can't be left alone for more than a few minutes at a time which means I can barely even leave the house and I fucking need shit to play.

If I had to guess it might be that Guardians is clearly doing its own thing and is more comic inspired with its designs whereas Avengers always kinda looked like diet MCU even before they changed the designs for that one.

But muh free market

I'm stuck at home so I had a lot of free time. It's probably about 12-15 hours though.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy I thoroughly enjoyed this one, although a portion of that is admittedly because I love these characters. That's not to say it's another Marvel's Avengers or anything. It's quite good, even if it doesn't compare to something like, say, the Arkham series. The story and characters are the biggest draw for me personally. The Guardians have a lot of fun banter with each other and as Star Lord you often have to make dialogue and leadership choices that can have an effect on future events. I suspect that the main plot ultimately plays out in similar ways, but saying or doing the right thing can come back to benefit you later on so that's cool. The gameplay isn't super complex but it's not totally mindless either. Picture something like Mass Effect with you giving commands to squad members to use abilities only instead of a cover shooter it's an action shooter where Star Lord uses his jet boots to zip around and dodge laser fire. You can also command them to use their unique talents to solve environmental puzzles. You never directly control the other Guardians, which will definitely disappoint some people, but I see what they were going for. At the risk of sounding like IGN, they want you to really feel like Star Lord, and as Star Lord it's your job to keep the team together through thick and thin. There are some really nice scenes where Quill has some heartfelt chats with the rest of the crew to grow closer and get a better understanding of them. Getting back to the combat, each Guardian is useful in different ways and finding synergy between their abilities is the best way to get through battles. My favorite feature is when you fill up a meter you can call in all the Guardians for a group huddle and give them an inspirational speech. If you give them a good speech they all get motivated and receive buffs. If you give a bad speech they get disgusted with your lameness and receive no buffs. Either way, using the group huddle changes the battle music to a random song on Quill's tape player and it is a great way to get you amped for the fight. Speaking of music, the soundtrack is great. There are some really solid licensed songs on the soundtrack, and rightfully so. However, what deserves special mention is that this game made up a fictional metal band called Star Lord and recorded an entire album for them. And these are good songs, too! I would play the Star Lord album in my car without hesitation. Even if you don't play the game, you should at least listen to the album. If I have any real criticism it's that the game is kind of easy. I don't think I ever died in combat on normal mode, so you should play on hard if you want anything resembling a challenge. However, I will note that one really nice feature the game has is custom difficulty settings where you can adjust things like enemy damage, player damage, cooldown times, and plenty of other things that honestly almost seem like cheat codes if you set them a certain way. However, this allows you to customize the game to be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. It's honestly a pretty great feature and while I'm not saying every game should have it, I do hope it shows up more often. All in all I'd give the game a solid A-. The gameplay is serviceable if not spectacular but it's really propped up by the great presentation. Definitely not low-effort junk like Avengers was.

Important note: if the Guardians start to banter make sure you don't walk too fast because it's easy to accidentally cut off dialogue by triggering a story section.

Same here except the PS5 version.

Lost Judgment A cop arrested and convicted for groping a woman on a train announces during his sentencing that the body of his dead son's high school bully has just been discovered mere minutes ago, despite being in prison for the past two months and having no way to know that. When an autopsy reveals that the victim was killed while the father was in prison with no way to contact the outside world, the mystery of who killed him and how a prisoner with no connections could have known about it kicks off the plot of Lost Judgment. This is a sequel that improves on everything the last game did, which is exactly what you would want out of a sequel. The story takes place after the previous game as well as the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and both games are referenced frequently so it's best enjoyed if you play them before playing this one. The story kept me guessing all the way through, and I'm usually pretty good at figuring out murder mysteries before the killer is revealed. There are now also two cities to play around in instead of just one: Kamurocho and Yokohama, which will be familiar to anyone who played Like a Dragon. Yagami now has a third fighting style to choose from in addition to the two from the last game which is best used against enemies armed with weapons. Investigations now give you a bunch of detective gadgets to use while looking at potential crime scenes. They added a skateboard so you can get across the city quickly without always needing to find a cab, and you can even collect points while skateboarding to spend later on items. There's a whole new category of side activity where you can work as a club advisor in a high school and bonding with the students by helping them with their clubs or their problems can reward you with new unlockables and missions. And of course you have all the expected side activities like arcades, mahjong, shogi, casino games, drone racing, batting cages, and more. There's a ton of stuff to get lost in outside of the main story. My two biggest gripes with the original game, which I still very much loved, were that tailing missions were tedious and knife or gun wounds lowered your max HP until you went out of your way to get treated by a doctor. Both of those issues are gone now. Tailing missions still exist, but they are drastically reduced in number and there's a new mechanic in them where you can avoid being caught by acting casual if your mark happens to see you. I think I only came across two, maybe three tailing missions in my entire playthrough, which is a relief. The mortal wounds mechanic is gone entirely. In its place is a new combat mechanic where bosses and elite enemies get unblockable ultimate attacks that hurt like hell if they hit you but if you can dodge them at just the right moment you get an opportunity for a counter finisher that does a ton of damage. This is way more fun than having to find a doctor, not to mention super satisfying when you manage to pull it off. I really can't think of much about this game that I didn't like. They clearly listened to feedback for the first game and kept it in mind while making the sequel. They added more, emphasized the good parts, and cut out the bad parts. I feel like if I forced myself to complain about something it would be a nitpick. It's really a shame that this is probably the last game in the series thanks to stupid licensing issues because it was really starting to pick up steam.

Pretty bold to charge that much for a bunch of games you can easily emulate for free.

I guess this counts?

Usually if an email doesn't send I think you're supposed to get an automated reply from the mailer daemon saying that it failed. At least that's how it always worked in my experience.

As far as single player content goes it's pretty bare bones. There's an arcade mode and you can set up matches locally or with bots in the battle mode. There is also something called Sports Mode where instead of trying to KO each other two teams fight to knock a soccer ball into each other's goals. The online portion is pretty damn solid though. There's ranked, quick play, and a lobby system in place, both public and private. I only played a handful of matches but in 1 on 1 matches the connection feels like a local match after setting my server region. I only got to try a couple of four player matches online because people mostly set up two player matches online, but they worked well enough and were perfectly responsive, if just a tiny bit jittery. That one is surely going to depend on everyone having a reasonably decent connection, but at no point in either match did I feel like I had gotten screwed by lag. The game is much faster than Smash Ultimate. In fact, it's even faster than melee. There's a light attack button, heavy attack button, throws, and three specials per character. Blocking is infinite and doesn't have a breakable shield, but getting hit while blocking pushes you back toward the edge of the platform. There is no air dodge, but you can air dash in any direction to escape from aerial attacks. Ledge grabbing, rolling, and ledge attacking is all here. No final smash type moves or items, at least not right now, but that might be in a future update. Right now it might feel a little light on content because of the lack of voice acting and the more humble roster of 20 compared to the gigantic roster in Smash Ultimate, but the devs seem pretty determined to keep supporting and improving this game in the long term. They've already confirmed two free DLC characters are forthcoming, followed by a currently undetermined number of paid characters. Extra stages were also found in a datamine after release. You could potentially wait a while to buy it and the game would feel much different in a year or so, but they're also selling it for 20% off at launch on steam so I don't really know what would be the better deal.

No brainer for me. My CatDog is to be feared.

Yeah that's ultimately why I decided against curved. It seems like the majority of content out there isn't really made with curved in mind, at least from what I've seen. Probably works great for certain titles, though.

I thought the demo was pretty decent but fuck the EGS. I couldn't use it even if I wanted to because I no longer remember my Epic account password and in order to reset it I'd have to tell them when was the last time I bought something using it, which would have to be at least 10+ years because I can't remember ever buying shit with it. I'll probably end up just going with the PS5 version.

PC port is never ever so time to break out the PS5 again.

I decided to download Pokemon Unite on the Switch just because I was jonesin' for Pokemon content but I refuse to play SwSh. I normally hate MOBA games for a number of reasons but I decided to give this one a chance and I'm glad I did because it strips out a lot of the bullshit I normally hate with this genre. First, and most importantly, NO VOICE CHAT. If you've ever played a MOBA, you know voice chat is an absolute cancer on the genre, full of the most toxic kinds of people you will ever meet. No text chat either. If you need to communicate with your team there is a menu to send out prewritten messages that cover everything you would reasonably need to tell your team during a match. This alone is a huge factor that contributes to my enjoyment. I can't stand hardcore esports dicks. But let's be super SUPER generous and pretend the MOBA genre doesn't have the worst community on the face of gaming. Is it still good then? Well yeah, I'm having fun, at least. It's not overly complicated. Each Pokemon has a regular attack, two specials that change as they evolve and level up, and one unite attack, which is basically an ultimate. You have to decide which special attacks they learn as they level up, but they only ever have two at a time. Trying different combinations of specials is where build variety comes in. You can also give them items to hold like in the mainline games and you can pick one active battle item that works on a cooldown. Even though it's only cosmetic, I also enjoy watching a Pokemon evolve from the first stage to their final form over the course of the match. It's quite charming. It's worth noting that there are no type advantages here. Don't expect your Squirtle to curbstomp an enemy Charmander. How well you do depends on skill and strategy, not type matchups, and thank god for that. But then there's the ugly side. The microtransactions. I counted no less than five types of currency in the game, and I'm not even sure what they all do. Coins are unlocked through gameplay, tickets are earned through challenges, there's a premium currency you buy with cash, energy that you gain through matches, and fashion tickets. I don't even know how you get those, nor am I sure if that's all of them. Frankly, I'm not concerning myself with all that crap. I'm only worrying about coins and tickets. To be fair, I've already unlocked five Pokemon to use. Every Pokemon can be earned with coins, and when you first join there's a 14 day daily reward system that gives you three Pokemon for free if you keep coming back. The problem is if you're the type of person who cares about cosmetics, both for your trainer and your Pokemon. You don't have to use premium currency to buy cosmetics, but buying them with tickets is obviously going to take a lot longer. There's also a dreaded loot box system in place. Granted, as far as I can none of the cosmetics are loot box exclusive. It's just an extra unlock you earn every now and then. I'd much rather it wasn't in there at all, though. So would I recommend Pokemon Unite? Yes, but with a warning. If you have trouble resisting the siren song of cosmetics, you might want to stay away. They really want you to spend money on costumes and the prices on some of them are outrageous and insulting. If, however, you don't care about getting Pikachu a hat and just want to have fun battling with Pokemon, then this game is a pretty good time.