Mister Jack

It's technically a sequel but it only really references the first movie in that Harley is friendly with a few characters she met before. It's easy to not even notice unless you're paying attention. You should be completely fine if you didn't see the last film.

You never needed to attack your own party members to level up your HP in FFII, but at least in the original version you could do that to exploit the system and raise your HP to much higher than it should be because the HP leveling worked based on how much HP you lose in battle. I don't know if they fixed that exploit for the remaster but it was definitely a thing back on the Famicom. There was also an annoying stat atrophy system where one stat would decrease when another one increased so it was definitely possible to level up your party wrongly. I know they got rid of that crap in the GBA remake and it sounds like they did the same for the pixel remaster, which is good because that was a terrible idea. Final Fantasy II is a game you can completely break in half if you know how to cheat the system, which can be fun, but I can also see why some people don't like the game because is has pretty much no balance. If you know what you're doing you can even kill the final boss in one turn.

The Suicide Squad This is by far the best movie in the entire DCEU right now. James Gunn seems to really excel at these films where he's given a cast of freaks and weirdos to write for, especially when he's allowed to go with a hard R rating. Make no mistake, this one is hard R, soaked from head to toe in gore and profanity and I wouldn't have it any other way. Not only are the action scenes a bloody good time, but the jokes frequently made me laugh out loud and the characters were written very well. Even though they're all murderous psychopaths, Gunn got me to actually care about most of them. King Shark in particular steals every scene he's in and I have no doubt he'll become the most popular member of the squad. The movie really lives up to the title, too. The squad starts out with around 20 or so members but this mission has one hell of a body count. I actually felt bad when certain characters died, but by the end I was quite attached to the survivors. I hope to see them all again in a sequel soon.

It was on sale and I didn't want to risk waiting too long only for it to disappear forever once again because of license expiration or some other bullcrap.

Original game didn't have ethers or phoenix downs at all. If someone died you either used a life spell or went all the way back to town to revive them. If you ran out of spells you had to either go back to town or use a tent/cottage/house at the dungeon entrance to restore them. Cutting out that bullshit would definitely make it easier to get through efficiently.

They must have rebalanced it or something because I remember the original NES version being quite a grind. Do they use the original stock system for magic or MP? Do they have more than one kind of healing potion? I remember back in the day having to tediously stock up on 99 healing potions, which only healed 60 HP each, and then use them over and over in the Chaos Shrine between fights.

Damn, you beat it already? Didn't it only come out like two days ago?

Now that my badass new PC is here I'm taking advantage by playing some of the games I couldn't run well before. I installed the Master Chief Collection that a friend gifted me ages ago although it's obvious my former Halo skills have atrophied from disuse. Also got Sunset Overdrive, which is cool, and Vermintide II, which is a lot of fun. I may not be buying any new releases for a while, though. I can't think of anything coming out for the rest of 2021 that I want that's available on PC. That's okay though. I have a huge backlog to catch up on. I looked into VR headsets just out of curiosity but it turns out I don't like any of the PC options. They're either too expensive or too cumbersome so despite having a new PC I might end up waiting on the PSVR 2 anyway.

I think it's mostly the price people are upset about with this one. 75 dollars for the complete set of games when they're this old is a little steep.

Of course I was going to buy this.

Finn Wolfhard, yeah. Also what an awesome name to be born with.

It's not the one for the fragments, is it? Because that's all I'm seeing on Youtube.

I got enough for the game to give me the trophy for finishing Act 3. If that somehow still isn't enough then screw it, I've got other shit to play.

Got the final true ending for Returnal. Story still makes no sense. In fact, it makes even less sense now than before.

The latter

I bought a desktop. https://www.ibuypower.com/Store/Gaming-RDY-SMRVRG201 I wasn't really planning on it but this was such a good deal I had to jump on it. A 3060 these days on its own will cost you around 1000 dollars, let alone a whole system. Part of the discount comes from the fact I have to take the system as is and can't customize it at all, but it honestly has almost everything I would want already. Liquid cooling is new for me and I would get 2 TB of storage if I could, but I can always add an SSD later on. I told myself for a long time I would build my next pc myself, but that was before covid came along and made that impractical. After taxes and discounts it came to 1747, but it also includes a keyboard and mouse

I did look it up and that area wasn't there.

I'm still trying to get that damn stone fragment in the sixth biome and I have no idea where to find it.

After playing around with Guilty Gear Strive a bit I feel like I have a better handle on it and I can see why the general public has taken to this game more than previous entries. The biggest change that is immediately noticeable to veterans like myself is that the gatling combo system has been completely overhauled. It used to be that a fairly reliable bread and butter combo for many characters was some variation of P>K>S>HS in order, sometimes with multiple inputs, for example P>P>d.K>d.S>d.HS just as an example. Well, in Strive you are hardly ever going to use P and K for combos because they don't chain into the other commands. P and K get more use for zoning or anti-air commands. Many combos are going to start simply with S>S and combos in general will have fewer hits. The highest combo count I've seen that didn't include things like supers that stack on a bunch of extra hits is maybe 14 hits, and that's from a top level player. The tradeoff for fewer hits is that each hit does more damage. A combo of only three or four hits is still going to take off a respectable chunk of the opponent's life bar. The other systems have been overhauled as well. The dust button (R1 by default), which used to be used to launch air combos, is now pretty much your overhead attack button to bust out whenever people block low too much. You also use it for sweeps while crouching, but that was always the case. Roman cancels have gotten a complete overhaul. Red roman cancels, which cancel your recovery frames during a hit to let you instantly use another attack, are the same as they've always been, but the other kinds are totally different now. It used to be that if you wanted to use a blue/yellow roman cancel you had to bust it out during specific frames to cancel the animations of things like ranged attacks. This could be pretty difficult even for experienced players and I rarely saw it used during tournaments. In Strive, however, the frames don't really matter when it comes to roman cancels. Yellow roman cancels are now used while blocking, blues are used while neutral, and purples are used after whiffing an attack. Regardless of which color it comes out as, if it connects with your opponent then it will stun them and slow them down for about one second, giving you a brief but valuable opening to attack. One other thing I like is the online system. I remember games like Street Fighter where everyone had to go up one rank at a time, which often meant getting stuck fighting against people way above your skill level because they just hadn't leveled up enough yet. In Strive, there are 10 different floors on the battle tower and if the game detects you're way above people in the beginner stages it'll automatically shoot you up to whatever floor it thinks you should be on. I think this is a way better approach than having to grind through ranks one by one. It also has rollback netcode, which works great for online matches. I like the game, but if your focus is single player then be warned that this isn't like a Netherrealm game. It has arcade mode and a mission mode, but that's pretty much it, at least right now. Story mode is a non-interactive movie like it was in Xrd. Supposedly there's more content coming, but that's gonna be a while. If you want to try getting into fighting games but always found them too intimidating though, this is a good one to ease you into the genre.

I used to be a HUGE Guilty Gear fan. I was pretty good at it too, good enough to do well for myself in the local competitive scene. Despite that, I held off on getting this for a while because I heard it had gotten a major overhaul to make it simpler and easier for the sake of people who are new to fighting games. Everyone online seems to love it though so I decided to take the plunge. I thought I'd have to be relearning how to play Guilty Gear entirely from scratch but after only two online matches the game has already put me on floor 8 out of 10 on the battle tower so I guess I'm in pretty good shape.

Omori Finally wrapped this one up a little while ago. It's an Earthbound inspired RPG, but it's really only like Earthbound in the sense that it's a turn based RPG about four kids adventuring through weird and imaginative locations. I really wish I could talk about the story even a little bit because there's a lot going on here, but this is one of those games where you can hardly say anything without giving away too much. All I can really say is that every time you launch the game it warns you about themes of depression, anxiety, and suicide and it does so for good reason. There's a lot more depth here than the cutesy graphics would lead you to believe, and I think anyone ought to experience it at least once. There are some story segments that drag on for a bit, but the payoff at the end is worth it.

I bought Hades in the last Steam sale but I have yet to get around to it. Next time I'm in a roguelike mood maybe I'll install that.

Returnal Well this was certainly...interesting. This is a bullet hell roguelike, and a pretty good one too. Combat is fast and frantic, and despite Selene's age she can run, jump, and dash quite impressively. You'll be zipping all over the field dodging projectiles, and the optimal strategy here isn't to line up your aim but just to spray and pray while moving around constantly and making sure no attacks ever touch you. It's chaotic, it's quick, and it is hard as balls. Either Ethan is a lot better at bullet hell games than I gave him credit for or he got some seriously lucky drops in his runs because it took me dozens of tries to finally get all the way to the end and I got frustrated quite a few times. The game is usually pretty good about giving you some kind of progress in each run. Unless you die really early on you're likely to, at the very least, pick up some ether, which is a permanent currency that is used to unlock new items. Thanks to that, there were only a few cases where I died and felt like I had wasted all that time with nothing to show for it. The enemy designs were okay, but they didn't really have much personality to them. The boss battles are pretty challenging, but it's only mandatory to beat each of them once. Gameplay-wise, this is a pretty fun action shooter, but I think where Returnal dropped the ball was in its story. Mainly because I have no idea what the hell is going on. I tried, believe me. I listened to every log and optional bit of dialogue I could find. I really wanted to understand the mystery of how and why Selene keeps reincarnating on this planet every time she dies. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the end I really felt no closer to understanding things than I did when I started. It's all just too incomprehensible and poorly explained, and that's really disappointing because I was legitimately invested in the mystery only to be left feeling like the writer got super into making all this buildup but then had no idea how to give it a proper payoff. It's like watching LOST all over again. If you like third-person shooters and roguelikes then I'd recommend this purely for the gameplay. I can't recommend it for the story, though. It's just too obscure.

Space Jam: A New Legacy Oh yeah, this one's a turd. Don't get me wrong, the original Space Jam is also a bad movie, but it's a guilty pleasure of mine that I like to rewatch every couple years or so. Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan playing basketball against a team of aliens is just too ridiculous a concept for me to not get any enjoyment just out of watching the spectacle. It was a dumb idea and it was definitely made to push the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan brands, but it's the fun kind of bad. Plus it had a great soundtrack. This one, though? It just feels so soulless. Even if the old movie was brand driven, they kept it focused specifically on the two brands they were trying to promote so it was easier to just let that go and enjoy the ride for what it was. The sequel, however, shoves literally every single Warner Bros brand they could possibly fit into the movie to the point that it's inconceivable that any normal person could see it as anything but a 2 hour long advertisement. It's like Ready Player One in that sense. You might have some fun playing "spot the reference" with the cameos and I will admit that some of the crossovers with the Looney Tunes hanging out inside other Warner films were amusing, but the entire time I was watching it I was extremely aware that I was being advertised to. It's just too much to ignore and it makes it very hard to enjoy it even as dumb entertainment. I half expected to find a focus test group standing behind me when I turned around. I'm going to be fair and admit that there were some jokes in here that worked for me. Wile E Coyote had all the best gags and there were a few scenes here and there that did get a laugh out of me. Still, this movie is two hours long. An occasional laugh amid an endless sea of cross-promotion is just not enough. I'm sure I don't need to even mention that Lebron James is a terrible actor and I also can't help but find it ironic that after all the fuss that was made over changing Lola Bunny into a strong female character because the original was too sexist she turns out to have even less of a personality than before! And that's with MORE screen time! How the hell did they even pull that off? What else? Oh, the story is even dumber than before, the villain basketball team is completely forgettable, and the soundtrack isn't nearly as good this time around. It's also a pet peeve of mine when they turn the Looney Tunes into CGI characters, which they do for pretty much no reason in this movie. I won't lie and said I got no enjoyment out of this movie. There were a few bright spots scattered here and there, but there is no way this is going to become a guilty pleasure tradition for me like the first movie. It's just far too eager to suck corporate dick. I feel like movies like this bring us one step closer to the future Aldous Huxley warned us about.