Mister Jack

Sonic Forces I wasn't planning on any more Sonic games after I played the Adventure series and got all the chaos emeralds in Mania but this just happened to go free on PS+ so I went ahead and played it and boy is this a sour note to end my Sonic kick on. This one isn't horribly buggy or broken like some of the others but good lord it is lazy. Mania got complaints for recycling some of the classic levels but this one recycles Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and the Death Egg zones multiple times for each character, just with different layouts. In fact, I think there might be only four or five zone types in the whole game and only 30 levels total, most of which can be beaten in under 3 minutes which means the whole game can be finished in 3 to 4 hours. If I had paid retail price for this I would feel incredibly ripped off. The Classic Sonic levels are so insulting, too. They're trying to pander to my nostalgia but these levels don't feel like Classic Sonic. They feel like Modern Sonic levels pretending to be Classic Sonic levels. It's difficult to explain, but if you play literally any level in Sonic Mania and then play a Classic Sonic level in Forces I bet you would understand exactly what I mean. The layouts are just so low-effort and don't have any thought put into them. It's honestly ridiculous that Mania was supposed to be a tie-in to build hype for this game when Mania is far, FAR superior to the game it was meant to promote. It's clear that all the effort here went into the character creator, and even that isn't very robust. You mostly just pick outfits. You can't change your body type outside of picking an animal species and you can't even give yourself a two-tone color scheme like, you know, practically every other Sonic character in existence. If you're trying to design a reasonable character that blends in with the cast instead of a Deviantart nightmare then there's just not much to work with. Sega obviously wants you to replay the levels multiple times to complete missions that unlock new clothing options, but that just doesn't really appeal to me. Oh yeah, the plot was super cringy even for Sonic and Infinite is so laughably edgy I'm surprised I never saw him teleport behind Sonic and cut him in half with a katana. At least the controls and camera were functional this time, I guess. It's okay to waste an afternoon if you're bored and you got it for free but that's about the most enthusiasm I can muster to recommend it.

Jojo Rabbit I enjoyed this movie, although I guess I can see why it got a mixed critical reception. Nazis are a touchy subject and not everyone is going to appreciate this movie's more lighthearted and satirical tone. I don't really think it's fair to say that you can't make a movie like this, though. At the end of the day the story is seen through the eyes of a naive ten year old boy and the greater ramifications of World War II and the Third Reich are obviously going to be out of his depth until it comes right to his doorstep. I also appreciate that the Jewish girl, Elsa, didn't really spend a whole lot of time actively trying to get Jojo to change his thinking. It's kind of a cliche and it's more interesting to just have her fuck with his misconceptions about Jews for her own amusement while the story lets him come to his own conclusions about her and the Jewish people through his experiences. While there are some serious and dramatic moments, they never go full Schindler's List with it and it's still very much a black comedy at the end of the day. There's even a joke in there about Nazi clones. It's very much a character driven movie. If I have to criticize something, I guess I'd say I wish we learned more about Elsa, the Jewish girl, than we ultimately did. We get plenty of time watching Jojo's development---as we should since he is the protagonist---but it would have been nice to get a few more scenes focusing on Elsa. I'd still recommend it just for Taika Waititi as Hitler, though. He's a total buffoon and it's pretty fun to watch.

About that...

We talking gameplay or story? If we're talking story... If we're talking gameplay...

Sonic Adventure 2 This one was a definite improvement over the last one...for the most part. The hub area is gone and levels just go right into one another, which is definitely preferable. The camera is still not great, but it's better and I can at least control it with the analog stick this time. The voice acting is still bad, but the animations are passable this time. Not good, but passable. I was a little disappointed that Team Eggman plays pretty much exactly the same as Team Sonic, just in different levels, but I'll take that over more Big fishing levels any day. Tails in a mech is weird, though. I missed being able to actually fly with him. The plot is Saturday morning cartoon-tier, but I don't really mind that. It's still a story that, as cheesy as it is, makes sense within the world's admittedly silly logic and doesn't require the characters to make boneheaded decisions for it to work. Even Shadow isn't really as eye-rolling in his debut as he would become later on in the franchise. It's just too bad the sound mixing is so terrible. Characters are always talking over each other or getting drowned out by the music. Playing with subtitles is almost mandatory. On the plus side, the butt-rock soundtrack is actually kind of charming. I can only really enjoy it ironically, but at least it's more memorable than the kind of boring soundtrack of the last game. I knew to keep my expectations tempered when playing this so I let a lot of stuff slide, but I still have to complain about the difficulty. The original Adventure was too easy but this one can often be too hard for reasons that shouldn't exist. Bad camera angles, unreliable lock-on, and sometimes slippery controls resulted in a lot of deaths that I felt I were not my fault. It doesn't help that the game can be stingy with checkpoints on extra long levels so if you die you're often doing the whole course over again. These issues also made the last couple of bosses WAY harder than any Sonic boss should ever be. I know they were still figuring out how to do 3D Sonic when they made this, though, so I didn't let it bother me too much. There was definite improvement here and if they had taken it seriously the next game could have been a real classic. It just makes me sad that they threw it all away on the rushed and unfinished Sonic 06. Sega really never recovered from that, even with occasional bright spots like Sonic Generations and Sonic Mania, and it bums me out. I used to fucking love Sonic as a kid. I even watched the cartoons and read the comics. Playing these games rekindled those nostalgic feelings, but it also makes me wish more than ever that Sonic Team would get their shit together. I want Sonic to be good again!

Anybody else try the demo they just put out? The combat is a lot more engaging than I thought it would be. I'm pretty hyped for the release.

Sonic Adventure DX This was a fun little blast from the past. By today's standards the game is below average, but I paid a buck for this mainly because I never played it back in its heyday and at the time it was very well-received so I just wanted to see what passed for revolutionary design back in 1999. Boy, we've come a long way since then. The camera is awkward, the controls are clunky, and the main hub area connecting the levels is not very well designed at all. For some reason the game wants you to walk around this small city/jungle environment to get from one stage to the next and there's really not much to do in it otherwise. It has some very basic puzzles to unlock new areas, I guess, but even calling them puzzles would be pretty generous. It's more like "pick up this item and carry it to the place you need opened up." Really, they probably did this just to show off that the Dreamcast could do hubs like this at all and it was probably really cool at the time. I can appreciate what they were going for, even if it's pointless in 2020. As for the game itself, Sonic's levels are actually rather fun, even if there's a fair amount of just holding forward on the stick to run through tracks. It's simple and even kind of brain dead at times but damn it, it's fun! Gotta go fast! The boss fights are too easy except for the last one, which is too hard thanks to wonky hit detection, but I still enjoyed it the same way I would enjoy opening a time capsule. The other player characters feel more like afterthoughts. They all have different objectives and playstyles in their levels, but their campaigns are all pretty short. I blew through three whole characters in a single day and I didn't need to marathon it or anything. They're okay, though. Except for Big the Cat. Everything about Big's campaign can go fuck itself. Worst fishing minigame I've ever played. I don't even need to talk about the cutscenes and voice acting. They're legendarily bad, but it's the fun kind of bad. This was Sega's first real attempt at giving a Sonic game a proper story and boy does it show. The premise of the game's plot isn't terrible, but it's just impossible to take seriously when the writing, animation, and voice acting are all bad enough to make the original Resident Evil look like There Will Be Blood. It's cute that they tried though. On another note, I had to consult a gamefaqs walkthrough on one or two occasions, and the probably 13 year old at the time kid who wrote it also included his personal review of the game where he gave the story a 10/10 and that is just... I'm not trying to be mean. I just found it adorable. People were so excited about Sonic on the Dreamcast that they were willing to gloss over the objectively terrible story presentation. If I had a Dreamcast in 1999 I might have done the same thing. On the not so fun side, the game is kind of glitchy even after patches. It's not Sonic 06 bad, but I still fell through the floor a few times. Also the PC port is fucking terrible. You can't rebind your controller buttons despite there being an option to do so and the defaults are not ideal. I suppose I could have fudged a DS4Windows configuration if I really wanted to but I couldn't be arsed and just got used to jumping with the circle button and rotating the camera with L1 and L2. The PC port also removes content from the Gamecube version and it goes without saying that there are no VMU minigames with the chao. It might seem unfair to dock points for that but I remember the original PC version of FFVIII including the PocketStation chocobo minigame as a separate application that you could play in a little tiny window. If Sega gave a crap about properly porting this game I'm sure they could have done that but honestly that's expecting way too much from them. When the controller buttons on a PC port are labeled with numbers instead of actual buttons then you know you're fucked. Probably won't play it again anytime soon, if ever, but I enjoyed seeing what those lucky Dreamcast owners got to experience back in the day. Making the leap from the Genesis or even the Saturn to this must have blown their freaking minds.

I've read articles suggesting that this new coronavirus is more than likely going to be a fact of life from now on. Really low mortality rate but impossible to fully contain since it shows mild or even no symptoms in most people. They say 40 to 70 percent of the human race will likely be exposed to it within the next year. I'm not trying to make it sound like a doomsday scenario because I don't think it is. Just saying we'd all better be extra vigilant about our hand washing.

"But those games are bad!" Excuse you. Those games are mediocre. Thing is, I've been on a Sonic kick recently after seeing the movie. I've already played Sonic Mania and it occurred to me that I never played these games because I never owned a Dreamcast. I had a friend with a Dreamcast back in the day and I used to look upon these games with envy because whoa! It's Sonic but in 3D! I never got around to buying them because I'm well aware now that they're pretty flawed, but back in the day these games were the tits and I got both of them for like 4 dollars so I think that's a reasonable price to pay to make my inner middle-schooler happy.

Indeed

I'm actually willing to excuse this for two reasons.

Frozen II This was a really weird movie. It seems fine when you are watching it, but after you're done and you start asking yourself how certain elements are supposed to work the whole thing falls apart like sand through your fingers. The plot goes by so fast during your viewing that you don't really have time to stop and ask yourself these things, but the unfortunate fact is that upon reflection the story to this movie makes no damn sense at all. It doesn't make sense as its own narrative and it especially doesn't make sense as a follow-up to the original Frozen. It's really, really obvious that they didn't have a plan for a sequel when making the original and had to clumsily build something from scratch that just doesn't feel quite right. There's all this new lore dumped on you that ends up retroactively causing the original movie to not make sense either. It gets pretty bad. The reason I'm still putting it in this thread is because some of the visuals are absolutely beautiful and there are some good songs in here. Anna has a stronger part to play and Olaf is also much less annoying than he was before, which is appreciated. Truth be told, everything presented here was at least decent...except for the story. And, you know, that's kind of a big deal.

So I'm in a weird place emotionally while writing this review since I saw this movie on the same day I had a personal tragedy so please bear with me if this post is all over the place. I just figure it'll help me get my mind off of things by focusing on something else for a bit. Sonic the Hedgehog No, really. I'm surprised too. I went to see this expecting a total trainwreck I could laugh at and make fun of and was surprised to find myself actually enjoying it. To clarify, this is on the softer side of good. If I tried to be "objective" and rank this movie based on the movie making skills and creativity on display here it would be firmly in the OK movies thread. The plot is very familiar and it's pretty corny and silly at times. It's hardly elevating video game movies the way Marvel elevated comic book movies beyond what they were in the early 2000s, but it still must be said that this is not typical licensed garbage that they shat out to make a quick buck on. Regardless of how you feel about the movie, you can plainly see that they were at the very least trying to make a good film that would make fans and kids happy. That was probably already evident based on the year long delay to redesign Sonic himself. Whether or not they succeeded in their goal is up to personal taste, but I appreciate that they even cared to consider what would make Sonic lovers happy. Full disclosure, I have nostalgia for Sonic. I'm not so blinded by it that I'm going to claim his more recent games are good, but I have many a fond memory of playing the original Genesis games as a kid. I am this movie's target audience, along with young children, and I think they did good. Not all the jokes land, but I still found myself genuinely laughing more than I expected to. Movie Sonic is funny and likable and he might even be sympathetic if you're a softy like me since a big part of his character arc is his loneliness due to never having any friends thanks to living his whole life in hiding. This part of his character demonstrates why the redesign was absolutely crucial. If you want me to feel sympathy for Sonic he has to look cute and approachable. There's just no way around it. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I even liked the human characters. Not just Robotnik, who I'll get to in a bit, but the main human cop character, Tom, who helps Sonic out on his quest. I completely expected him and his wife to be forgettable, throwaway characters with no personality who did nothing but take time away from Sonic, but they were actually much better written than I thought they'd be. Tom isn't just some put upon everyman who mugs for the camera when Sonic does something wacky like what you'd expect from the Smurfs movie or something like that. He's a small town cop who wants to move to San Fran where he can actually save lives and make a difference, and he's just about to get that opportunity when Sonic drops in his lap and disrupts everything. This isn't the most original premise, I know, but Tom's relationship with Sonic can actually be kind of sweet sometimes. Sonic is clearly a burden on him and making his life much more difficult just by being around, but Tom also understands that Sonic is a lonely creature with nowhere to go who has never had a real friend in his life so he isn't just spending the entire movie yelling at Sonic when he acts up. This isn't Alvin and the Chipmunks. He tries to be kind to Sonic and give him a little of that friendship he's always craved, so I actually enjoyed watching the two of them interact. It's a cliche, I know, but it feels genuine here. They also have some decent banter, which doesn't hurt. I expected to hate Jim Carrey as Robotnik but son of a bitch, he won me over. If you like Jim Carrey's comedic performances then you should like him here just fine because...well, Jim Carrey plays Jim Carrey. Robotnik looks different in this movie, but it didn't bother me as much as I expected it to. Carrey's Robotnik is an enormous, power hungry dickhead who is constantly bemoaning how he's the only smart man in the room and getting violently frustrated with all the supposed idiots who surround him, which is honestly perfect for that character. I've been fellating this movie for a while now so I need to throw in some criticism to seem less biased. Like I said before, not all the jokes land. It's maybe around 50-50. Maybe 60-40 if I'm being generous. It won't have you in stitches, but I bet you'll still get at least a few laughs out of it. There are some legitimately funny jokes in there. Of course, there was also a fart joke I could have done without and a couple of product placement jokes that made me roll my eyes, but they go by fast and can be quickly forgotten so I'm not going to make a huge deal about it. The plot is cliche, but cliches can still be entertaining if they're presented well. You might know exactly what to expect from a story like this, but I don't really mind as long as I can enjoy the ride. This goes without saying, but if you don't already like Sonic you might as well not bother. This movie isn't going to make you into a new fan. Sonic's backstory before he came to Earth is also glossed over in about two minutes so it feels kind of underdeveloped, but I suppose it's functional. They do start off with one of those "I bet you're wondering how I got here" moments, which I loathe. Sonic himself is mostly a lovable character who doesn't have a cringe inducing level of totally radical attitude but he does floss a couple of times. That's when I have to close my eyes and remind myself that the movie is also targeted at young kids. If they wanna see Sonic floss then fine, I guess it's their movie too. I'll live with it. He still feels pretty faithful so I can deal. Lastly, I have issues with the moral Tom learns in this movie. In fact, I might go as far as to say I think it's wrong, but I dunno. It's ultimately a small part of the story so whatever. If you like Sonic and you go into this with reasonable expectations I think you can have a pretty good time with this movie. It's not trying to be anything more than silly family entertainment and I think that's okay. It's okay to do a silly family comedy with a talking hedgehog as long as you respect your audience and make an effort to give your viewers more than the bare minimum, and I think they did that here. I'd put it more or less on the level of Detective Pikachu, maybe slightly beneath it, but if you've seen Detective Pikachu then just keep your thinking around that level and you should have a good idea of what you're getting into here.

So I read a rumor that Netflix is working on a Bloodborne TV show starring John Boyega and got super excited for a moment, then immediately after that I read another rumor saying that it wouldn't have any cosmic horror elements and immediately lost interest. I don't think I've ever done a complete 180 on a show so fast.

So I like this new Fire Emblem quite a bit but I have a problem with the support cutscenes. The pre-rendered story cutscenes are fine, but the ones where they are just standing around and talking are bare minimum. Cutscenes with people just standing around and talking don't bother me that much. What bothers me is when they start acting like they're doing something that they clearly aren't because you can see it plain as day. For example, there was a cutscene where a big, muscular character is talking about how he's carrying a whole bunch of heavy objects in his arms and on his back, but he's not carrying jack shit. He's just standing there like normal. The argument in favor of this might be something about budget or time, but to that I say that if you don't have the time, money, or talent to animate somebody performing a physical action, maybe don't write a scene that requires them to perform physical actions. I can look past this sort of thing for little indie games where small teams or sometimes even single creators are just trying to make the best of what they have, but Fire Emblem is a sixty dollar AAA title from a major studio so there's no excuse for that.

Good point. I forgot for a minute that Rockstar might have the worst crunch in the entire industry. Top 5 worst for sure, at the very least.

So you remember that guy who stole a bunch of money from my mom and we were gearing up to take him to court? Yeah, he's dead now. We ain't getting that money back, and yet I don't really feel angry about it.

I just hope it brings down the price of the S10. I want a new phone but only suckers pay for the latest model.

Never underestimate corporate greed. Look what EA did to Madden despite being the only football game in town.

You may already know this by now but it looks like Dan Houser has left Rockstar. Allegedly it was because 2K is pushing Rockstar to make shorter single-player games and focus more on online microtransactions, but I haven't seen any confirmation on this. It wouldn't surprise me in the least, though, and unless I hear otherwise I'm willing to believe it.

@TheMightyEthan Byleth was announced as the last DLC character for Smash Bros season 1 character pass, making him/her the eighth Fire Emblem rep so far. People are especially sore because a while back Reggie had said all the paid fighters would be from unrepresented franchises.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses So I know everyone hates Fire Emblem and Byleth right now but this might just be the best game in the series. I've only played a few of them but I feel pretty confident in that assessment. There's a ton of content and branching paths here and you don't have to buy the game three times to see it all (fuck you, Fates). Your choices, while they are few, actually matter to a significant degree and change the entire course of the story in wildly different ways. The students can be a little tropey, but I still couldn't help getting attached to most of them. Except for Hubert. Fuck Hubert. This game is quite clearly influenced by Persona with the new school system and time management mechanics, but it's not so similar that I would call it a total rip-off. I enjoyed that stuff in Persona anyway so I like it here too for the most part. There were some story beats that went unresolved, but I'm going to assume that playing the other routes will give me the full picture. When it comes to battling I really appreciate that they deemphasized the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle. That was always my least favorite thing about the series next to the permadeath. It feels limiting, like you have to play a specific way if you want to get anywhere. It's not completely gone and certain weapons will still have an advantage over others, but it's not so huge that it forces you into a specific play style anymore. Speaking of permadeath, I turned it off. Yeah yeah, filthy casual, but I'm the kind of guy who will reload a whole battle and do it over again if someone dies until I get a result where someone doesn't die. I can't stand losing units because it means missing out on content, so I just cut out the middleman to save time. The new combat arts system kinda feels like an afterthought. I don't know if I was doing something wrong but after a while my regular attacks were doing more damage than my combat arts so I never had any reason to use them except for Bernadetta's long range archery skill. Even skills specifically meant to do extra damage to certain enemy types were somehow doing less damage. I found that very strange and I don't know why that was the case. I don't have any other major complaints about battles, though. The new battalion system is cool and it feels a little more balanced than Awakening did when you could pair up and steamroll over everybody. Battles in the first half of the game are still kind of easy though, at least on the normal difficulty. When there weren't any special objectives like defending a certain VIP or killing a specific enemy I often got by just fine on the auto-battle. I wasn't expecting to jump back into this game right away but with the New Game+ file I should be able to see the other paths without taking so much time so I'll probably replay it soon.

I actually think this is kind of cool but I can understand how that can be subjective.

I'm finally playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it's good so far but I absolutely refuse to believe that Nintendo wasn't looking very closely at Persona 5 when making this game.