Mister Jack

Christ, someone better get prosecuted over this. Someone besides store managers and associates, that is. That is fucking disgusting.

Knives Out Maybe Rian Johnson can't figure out how to do Star Wars but he sure made a really great murder mystery. It's been a long time since I watched a movie like this since a bad mystery movie is a real slog to get through so I had forgotten just how compelling a good one can be. Maybe it's just me but I feel like we don't get whodunnit movies like this that much anymore and they can be a lot of fun when done right. The cast here is colorful, the script is just the right amount of playfully melodramatic without taking itself too seriously, and Daniel Craig just oozes charisma in his scene-stealing performance as Detective Blanc. Maybe the reason I don't see a lot of whodunnit movies being made these days is because producers worry the audience will lose interest if they figure out who the killer is, and I did figure out who did it about halfway through, but even then I still enjoyed just watching the pieces fall into place. I didn't predict every facet of the killer's plan so there were still a couple of surprises in the climax. If you have any interest whatsoever in murder mysteries then I really can't think of any reason why you wouldn't like this one.

Was that supposed to be a vaccine? It's honestly hard to keep up with who's testing what anymore.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Yeah, the Mr. Rogers movie. I'm stuck inside for a while so it's a good time for me to catch up on some movies. This was actually not what I thought it would be. I was expecting a biopic detailing Rogers' life and how he got his show and became famous but it really isn't that at all. Rogers is already quite famous when the film starts and he's not even the main character. The main character is a journalist who is interviewing Rogers and the story is about how Rogers brings a positive influence into the life of someone who has always been cynical and negative and helps him deal with his lifelong anger toward his father. It's quite wholesome and maybe even a little saccharine, but it was honestly kind of a relief to watch something like this during these tumultuous times. I mean, I don't know what else you'd expect from a movie about Mr. Rogers. This isn't some exposé about Fred's "hidden dark side" or anything like that because by all accounts he was just as nice and wholesome in person as he was on his show. Tom Hanks did a great job in his performance, though I have to admit that I am very familiar with the real Fred Rogers' voice and Hanks, while he nails the soft spoken gentleness of his speech, just doesn't have a voice that sounds like Fred to me. It's no fault of his own, really. An actor can only do so much to change into a completely different person and I'm sure that people who didn't grow up with Rogers will think he sounds just fine, but it is something that I noticed. I still recommend this if you ever just want to watch a movie that will make you feel good. It's easy for movies about teaching a miserable bastard to love again to feel sappy and unrealistic but Mr. Rogers really was that good of a person so I give this one a pass.

A little bit of good news for a change. The Japanese have found a flu drug that seems effective against the Coronavirus.

I usually don't buy two games at once unless there's a big sale going on because inevitably one of them will get neglected but seeing that I'm going to be stuck indoors for a while thanks to that bitch bastard Coronavirus...

Normally I'd get the PC version but my laptop keeps overheating when I try to game on it and the keyboard would need to be replaced again anyway so I'm just going to go with PS4 for now and get the PC version whenever I find the funds to get a new computer because I'm sick of repairing this one.

If anything this whole crisis is really hanging a lampshade on our desperate need to establish guaranteed paid sick leave for hourly employees. I can't even blame folks who work hourly and choose to go to work while sick because bills gotta be paid so at the end of the day it's gonna be either you or them.

Oh I don't think it will convince them either. I'm just saying I think Sony believes it will.

I don't think the average consumer has that kind of patience. Timed exclusivity exists for a reason and Horizon came out three years ago. I'm sure there are people like FLD who are more than happy to wait as long as it takes, but by and large? People want shiny new thing now. Even the shitty Epic Game Store tactic of buying platform exclusivity for one year seems to be working for them, despite how much everyone hates it.

I wouldn't hold my breath just yet. One of the Playstation bigwigs said the following: As much as I'd love a Bloodborne port, I get the feeling they did this to give PC players a taste of Playstation's first-party library in the hopes they might be convinced to buy a Playstation to play the rest.

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.