Mister Jack

The Rise of the Skywalker Man, that sucked. The pacing is ridiculously rushed, there's more holes in the plot than a slice of swiss cheese, the comic relief is bad, the story makes no sense, Rey takes a flying leap into Mary Sue territory, every other character except for Kylo Ren is treated like crap and given nothing important to do except prop up Rey, and not even the John Williams score is very good. The way it tries to paper over The Last Jedi to appease the angry fans is so pathetic, too. I've never felt so pandered to while watching a film. This kind of movie is a franchise killer. Yes, even Star Wars. It retroactively makes the original trilogy worse with its retcons. I'll probably watch The Mandalorian at some point but as far as theatrical releases go I am fucking out. I don't expect Kathleen Kennedy to keep her job for much longer. She is no Kevin Feige and it is PAINFULLY apparent that they went into this trilogy with no plan and made it up as they went along. How do you do Star Wars without a plan? As bad as the prequels were, and they're still bad, at least Lucas had a story with a beginning, middle, and end he was trying to tell. At least he HAD a plan, even if it wasn't a very good one.

This was actually a gift but we didn't do a Christmas thread and I don't feel like making one so I'm posting this here. I got a chance to play around with this for a few hours and I have to say that it might just be the best of all the mini consoles, and that includes Nintendo. The game selection is pretty solid with only one or two I'd consider duds. There are also a couple of games that were only released in Japan and a couple more that were never released at all, and I'm not talking about that shitty shovelware you find on the AT console. There are also more of them than you get on the NES or the SNES classic. It comes with two controllers that feel pretty nice and have a nice, long 10 foot cable on them. I wish they were the six button controllers, but you can get those separately at least. The menu lays all the games out in nice, organized rows of five, and with a push of the B button you can flip the boxes sideways so you have two rows of 20 and you just read the spines. Unlike the SNES and NES mini, where you have to get up and hit the reset button to bring up the system menu, all you have to do here is hold down the start button for a few seconds. If you are using a six button pad you just tap the mode button to bring up the menu. The reset button on the console still works though, and it even has a sliding headphone switch and a little cartridge flap. They don't do anything except add to the authenticity, but it's still cute. But that's not the best part. The best part is that there are multiple regions depending on your language. For example, if you set it to English and play Contra, you get the original US version of Contra Hard Corps that's hard as balls. If you set the language to Japanese, you get the Japanese version of the game that is much easier thanks to the life bar that they took out of the US version for some stupid reason. If you set your language to a PAL territory you get Probotector. That is cool as hell. It even changes the box art to match! There's no hack for this console yet, but there's a group hard at work on it at this very moment and they've been making pretty good progress. Even with no hack though, this is still the best mini console out there as far as features and hardware go. About the only thing it lacks that the SNES Classic has is the rewind feature, but you can still use save states so it's not a big deal. I'm just glad to see someone besides Nintendo actually give a crap about putting out a quality product when it comes to these retro consoles. I'm having a blast with it. Edit: There's a hack now! It's really impressive too. Not only can you add games to the console but it scrapes all the relevant sorting information like release date and number of players and even the box art from the internet, and that includes the spine art for when you want to use that particular UI. The only downside is that using this hack means the console takes a few extra seconds to load the main menu when you turn it on or reset, but that's to be expected when you're giving it more to sort through.

I just played a raid online, the point of which was to get rare weapons and materials to unlock bonus abilities on said weapons. That's pretty common, but what isn't common is that even if you do the raid and everything you unlock is trash, you can choose to give up that trash in exchange for an increased chance of higher level prizes on the next go. This is something that stacks in a system they call "potential," so I chose to give up enough drops to raise my potential to level 10 and then with my next roll I got a max rarity critical chance up ability. This is the sort of system I'd love to see in every online game, where no matter how much time you spend doing a raid you never feel like you're not accomplishing anything because you're always bettering your odds for the next go around. I did all of this in only three raids, too.

Had the chance to finish up two games I'd left sitting for a while recently. Shadow of the Tomb Raider It's been a while since I played Rise of the Tomb Raider so maybe my memory is not entirely accurate but this felt pretty much exactly the same. If there were changes made to the formula for this one, they were so small that I didn't even notice. She can swim underwater now, I guess? Yaaaaay. I don't mean to sound like I didn't enjoy this game because I did. It's a well-made game and all, but I can kind of see why this one flopped when it does so little to stand out from the one that came before it. If you liked the last one I'm sure you'll like this one just fine, but that's all I can really say about it. It's just fine. Pick it up on sale or something. Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Now we're talking. I "beat" this game in the sense that I slayed the final boss monster and saw the ending cutscene and credits, so I'd say that counts. The truth is, however, that there's still a lot to do. As popular and well-received as the vanilla game was, one of the criticisms most people can agree with was that there was no real endgame other than farming decorations from elder dragons, which was admittedly kind of true. Of course, it took 100+ hours to beat the vanilla game in the first place so even with no endgame I still got more than my money's worth, but these live service games are meant to be played for hundreds or even thousands of hours so I can see why people would be underwhelmed. Capcom did what they could for a while by occasionally adding new monsters, events, and even a siege, but for a long time there was no real endgame area to take advantage of all your fancy gear. Well, now there is one. Beating the final boss---who is waaaaay harder than the final boss in the vanilla game, by the way--opens up an entirely new area that is specifically meant for endgame gear. Not only is this area huge and populated by monsters that didn't appear in the main story, but it's also constantly growing and changing based on what and where you hunt. It's designed to be played for the long-term, and while I have only hunted a couple of monsters in it so far I can tell that it will keep me occupied for a good while, especially when Capcom is already adding new monsters to this area through free updates. Putting aside the endgame, there are a ton of quality of life improvements to Iceborne, some of which I didn't even realize I wanted. The clutch claw is such a valuable tool to have that it would be hard to go back to playing the game without it now. The new hub, Seliana, condenses all the important NPCs like the chef, blacksmith, and resource center so that they're much closer together, and yet Seliana still feels no smaller than the old hub, Astera. I didn't exactly take a ruler to the game world so maybe it is technically smaller, but it sure didn't feel that way. If anything it feels bigger, especially in the gathering hub area where players can congregate between missions. In Astera the hub was a small area the size of a ship deck that was pretty much an afterthought. You could show off your gear or arm wrestle with other players but that was more or less it. In Seliana you can still do those things, but now you can also play around in hot springs, footbaths, and saunas. It's silly but it's fun. Speaking of bigger, the vanilla game had personal quarters you could decorate with things like paintings and furniture. You could also populate them with small pets you caught out in the wild. This was cool, but you couldn't show it off to other players. It was just for you. In Iceborne, however, not only is your room now much, much bigger but you can finally invite other players to see it! This adds a whole new layer of incentive to keep playing the game because certain missions will now help you unlock new things to decorate your room. Oh sure, getting a new bookshelf or statue won't help you whatsoever when it comes to actually doing hunts but I WANT IT! I just want to feel like I'm accomplishing something while I play, and even without the new monsters Capcom is already adding I would be motivated to keep playing just to unlock new room decorations, which are being updated quite frequently. Capcom really went out of their way to give people reasons to keep playing this game long after the credits roll and I couldn't be more happy about it. This is some of the best value you could ever get out of a forty dollar expansion pack and I already named it as my runner-up for Game of the Year 2019. Oh, and you can also pet your Palico now. VERY important feature.

As confusing as it is for us, imagine how it must be for parents and grandparents trying to buy consoles for their kids. Sony makes it nice and easy with a simple numbering system and Nintendo at least had the courtesy to go with a completely different name this gen but Microsoft still doesn't learn.

The Game Awards have come and gone and we're pretty much done with all the major releases for the year so now seems like a good time to do the annual PXOD Game of the Year thread. If you don't remember last year, you can pick your personal GOTY as well as one runner-up, and to start things off my personal pick for game of the year is... This was honestly a tough call for me. A lot of great stuff came out this year, some of which I haven't even played yet, but in the end Sekiro just barely edged out everything else for me. Frankly, I'm surprised at myself for choosing this. I used to hate Soulsborne games, and to be honest even after I came around to them there are still things about the main Souls series that I hate even though everyone else seems to like them. I don't like the almost total absence of story in the franchise, I don't like cheap "gotcha" deaths that almost nobody is going to see coming the first time, and I REALLY don't like enemies that can kill you in two hits. Sekiro is guilty of all of these things to some degree, but the gameplay that accompanies it is so good that even when I was cursing at the screen I didn't want to stop. It's not really a Souls game even though it shares several mechanics. It's more of an action game than an RPG so the combat is much faster and more intense which is probably why I got so much more immersed. It's kind of ironic that I ended up enjoying it this much because Sekiro is BY FAR the hardest From game I've ever played. The final boss in particular is one of the most punishing enemies I've ever been expected to beat. Damned if I wasn't literally cheering when I finally took him down, though. RUNNER-UP Is it cheating to name the expansion to a game that's already released? If it is, I'm doing it anyway. Monster Hunter World was my GOTY last year, but this is one of those expansions that adds and fixes so many things I never even realized I wanted. In fact, the game is so much better now that I don't think I could ever go back to the vanilla version or even recommend that somebody else buy the base game without Iceborne because it's cheaper. It's an essential buy for anyone who has Monster Hunter World. I also feel like proper expansion packs are a dying art in the modern game industry and I give Capcom a lot of credit for giving us something way more substantial for my $40 than you'd ever see in some season pass. To me, Monster Hunter World is the best example for how to do a live service game properly. While they do sell cheap emote and sticker packs in the store, there's no premium currency so I never feel pressured to spend money when I'm hunting for monster parts and the forty dollars they ask for all this new content is more than reasonable. I don't know if they intend to do more expansions or move on to Monster Hunter World 2 now but they've got me hooked either way.

The Outer Worlds I think a lot of people here have already beaten this so there's not a lot for me to add so I'll sum it up by saying it's Fallout without the bullshit. I never really ran into many glitches, the gameplay was generally better, and I appreciated having a variety of small and diverse planets to explore as opposed to one huge, barren wasteland. If there's one thing that I think Fallout did better, however, it's the writing. Most of the characters aren't really that interesting and the general plot of the game isn't really anything to write home about either. It kinda feels like you're just meandering about until the last few hours. The companions aren't much better. I didn't hate them but they did little to stand out and many of them decide to join up with you just cuz. The entire party roster combined doesn't add up to the likes of one Nick Valentine or even Dogmeat. And while I realize this was a stylistic choice, I was a little disappointed that the robots in the game are so primitive that you can't really have any meaningful conversations with them like you can in Fallout. They're basically about as advanced as you'd expect the robots that will eventually take everyone's jobs to be, which I get is the entire point, but I miss my robot characters! In fact, I miss non-human characters in general. I know that's not what Outer Worlds is about but I've grown to expect some racial diversity from these big, open-world RPGs and I'm not talking about skin color. The game is also a little on the short side for an RPG, but it's highly replayable so I can forgive that. I've already restarted the game with a character who's a complete idiot with the intention to just fuck up the galaxy as badly as I possibly can through my idiocy so that should be fun. Oh yeah, there were plot threads that never went anywhere too, so I expect DLC expansions to be forthcoming.

Well it's only natural for the xbone to lead to xsex.

Honestly I just bought a big USB drive for like 20 bucks with the intention to replace it every few years.

Well this sucks. Redbox is no longer going to do game rentals. As far as I know they were the last place most people could go for that. Now there's really no good local options left for me. Glad I got Jedi Fallen Order from it when I had the chance.

Mega Man 11 Finally got a chance to play this and it's pretty good! Capcom's redemption arc is going great. There's not a whole lot to say about it, though. It's Mega Man, you know how Mega Man works. The new double gear system lets you power up super attacks or slow down time, which is cool, but 90% of the time you'll be using the speed gear over the power gear because it's just much more useful. If you slow down time and then unload your mega buster as fast as you can next to an enemy it's usually just as good if not better than powering up your normal shots. Anyway, the graphics are charming and a nice evolution for the franchise. I was getting tired of the 8-bit retro look and I had been wanting to see something new and modern so I'm pleased with what they came up with. I found the game surprisingly hard, too. I don't know if I'm just rusty or if they went out of this way to make this game more difficult but I had to use way more energy tanks than I usually do in the other games. Maybe on repeat playthroughs I'll get used to it. That's kinda how these games work, I suppose. If I have one criticism it's that it's a bit light on content. There's a few challenge modes, a time attack mode, and a boss rush, but that's about it. Considering the asking price for this game they could at least give you another playable character like several of the other games did. I was hoping to unlock a Roll Mode when I beat it but that never happened. I got this game for free though so I'm not going to complain too much. Oh, and the music wasn't very memorable in my opinion, but your mileage may vary. Still, if you like Mega Man then I'm sure you'll like this one just fine.

Days Gone It's fine. Yeah. It's alright. I enjoyed my time with this game, but I still have to address the elephant in the room and admit that it doesn't have an original bone in its body. It's an open world zombie game and just from that phrase you probably know exactly what you'll be getting here. You got your enemy camps that have to be cleared out to unlock fast travel points. You got your stealth sections with tall grass. You got your cover shooting, your crafting, your bounty hunting missions, your fetch quests, your skill trees, your survival vision, and your wild game hunting. About the only gameplay cliches that are (thankfully) absent are escort missions and climbing radio towers since you can't actually jump. Sounds pretty awful, right? Well, not really. Yes, it's totally unoriginal but everything that's here works well enough. If I had to sum it up, I'd say it's like if Sony made an Ubisoft game. It's got a bunch of the same crap that they do, but said stuff still works a little better than you'd usually see from Ubi. You don't get completely overwhelmed with shit to do as if Jackson Pollock splattered icons all over the map. There are collectibles and side content, sure, but the distractions are kept to a much more reasonable degree. The stealth works okay. At the very least I never had any moments where I was yelling "How did that guy see me?!" The shooting is adequate, although I had to fiddle with the settings for a while to get it just right. I will also say that I like that they let you use the dualshock's gyro to make fine adjustments to your aiming. This isn't the first game to do that, but I think it's the best use of the DS4's motion controls so I always appreciate it when it's available. Also, this is a minor detail but one thing that really helps reduce the tedium is that when there's a bunch of crafting materials lying together in the same place you only have to hit the button once and Deacon will pick up everything that's in the immediate area. Like I said, this has all been done before but it's done slightly better here than what I've seen from the likes of most Ubi games. It was fun enough for me to keep playing until the end, at least. Weirdly enough, I think the thing I enjoyed the most was upgrading and customizing my bike since the motorcycle is such a huge part of the game. It's the only vehicle you get so you need to take good care of it. Driving recklessly will render it inoperable until you either repair it with your precious scrap metal or you pay a mechanic to fix it, which you don't want to do too often because camp credits are not always easy to earn and you want to be spending them on new guns or bike upgrades. You also have to keep it filled up with gas, which is one of my biggest gripes about the game. You can upgrade your gas tank to get more miles out of it, but until you're near the end of the game you'll be running out of gas probably every fifteen to twenty minutes. This is absolutely ridiculous and I never understand why games like this feel the need to enforce realism by giving you limited gas but then make it run out unrealistically fast. You can't even fast travel unless you have sufficient gas, and until you have the best gas tank available you'll never have enough fuel to travel from one side of the map to the other so you'll probably fast travel to a checkpoint that's hopefully not crawling with enemies, find a fuel can, fill up your tank, and then fast travel to your actual destination. It's a pain, but you have to keep on top of it because believe me, you do NOT want to walk in this game. Not only will it take forever to get anywhere but it will also make you an easy target for freakers. Ah yes, "freakers." Hey, game developers? Can we stop making up cutesy names like we're being clever and just call them zombies? Or you can call them infected if you want to insist they're not actually undead. Anyway, stupid name aside, this is the one aspect where the game kinda stands apart. You might remember E3 trailers showing Deacon being chased by literally hundreds of freaks and it was no exaggeration because this can and will happen and it's downright intense. This isn't the first game to have huge zombie hordes, sure. Dead Rising did the same thing, but the thing about Dead Rising was that unless you got close to a zombie, they mostly shuffled around oblivious to your presence. Here? If one freak in a horde notices you then brother you better believe that they're all gonna notice you and they're gonna make a beeline straight for you like their asses are on fire. These guys are extremely aggressive and you have absolutely no hope of taking them head on when they're in a large group so you have to be smart about it. Set traps. Use terrain and barricades to slow them down. Run through tight spaces so they have to cram together and make themselves vulnerable to explosives. These moments are where the game is at its best and it's the one thing I can say you won't really find anywhere else. The freaks all kinda look the same, unfortunately, but I'm going to assume it was a necessary trade-off to get groups this large to work in the first place so I'll give it a pass. The freaks also have really good hearing and prolonged gun battles with other humans run the risk of drawing hordes to your location, especially at night, so you'll probably get into the habit of relying on stealth whenever you can or at least carrying a silencer around with you as much as possible. On the plus side, you can also manipulate the freaks into taking out enemy camps for you, which is always pretty satisfying whenever you're lucky enough to pull it off. The story is serviceable. It's not exceptional, but it wasn't like Far Cry or Ghost Recon where I spent the whole time thinking "I don't care what happens to these people." I cared at least a little. Deacon is an okay protagonist. He's definitely not going to be the next icon like Kratos or Nathan Drake, but at least he isn't a cardboard cutout. He has a defined personality and a clear character arc. He and Boozer (his fellow biker and best friend) act like a couple of assholes for a while, but they do go through development and by the end they both become much more sympathetic. Of course, that never stops Deacon from taking sadistic glee in slaughtering entire camps of marauders, but what can you do? Oh yeah, there were some technical problems here. Load times are long. Texture pop-in and frame drops were also an issue. I discovered that restarting for each session rather than putting the PS4 into rest mode with the game running helped to alleviate this, but it still shouldn't be happening in the first place. I also experienced one hard freeze that required a total reboot of the PS4. I was trying to send a screenshot when it happened so maybe it was a fluke, but it's worth mentioning. At least I can say I didn't run into many gameplay glitches. Either way, it's a bit rough around the edges on a base PS4. I don't know if playing on a Pro fixes these issues. This is going to make me sound like a company fanboy, but I think if this game had been an Xbox exclusive it would have been better received at launch. It's not a bad game. Like I said, it's unoriginal as hell but you can still have fun doing things you've already done before if they're done well enough and Days Gone is done well enough, certainly well enough for the twenty bucks I paid for it. However, it's a PS4 exclusive which means people will inevitably stack it up against the likes of games like God of War, Uncharted 4, and Spider-Man, which are far more impressive titles. If you like open world games and see this on sale though, I think you could reasonably enjoy it.

I know it's becoming a cliche but I never get tired of that trope in open-world games when you're traveling a long way on your horse or vehicle and then mood music starts playing in the background. I think this started with Red Dead Redemption but I'm not 100% sure. I've seen it a handful of other times now and it always just feels really cool and atmospheric.

Durability systems. Can we just get rid of them? They're not fun. In fact, by their very nature they're designed to not be fun. I get that games want to be "realistic" but then they often make your stuff break faster than they ever should in real life unless you're using a real piece of crap. It's even more ridiculous when you have to find gasoline for vehicles. I've never in my life ridden a vehicle that runs out of gas in 20 minutes from a full tank. Hell, even those shitty power wheels for kids will last for at least 45 minutes before they have to be recharged. The exception to this annoyance would be melee weapons you pick up off of the ground, I suppose. I admit those would probably break fairly quickly if you're using things like baseball bats or 2X4s so I am begrudgingly willing to accept that, but if you're using an actual sword or something and it breaks before you even finish a battle? Nah, to hell with that.

FUUUUCK I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO SUCCUMB TO THE BLACK FRIDAY TEMPTATION IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!

Whenever you buy a new printer, which hopefully won't have to be soon, I've been pretty happy with the Brother printer I'm using. It feels a lot more reliable than my old HP printer ever was. I've only had it for about a year but at least so far I've experienced no problems so maybe it's just a brand to keep in mind.

I'm curious. How do you, a native Mexican, feel about the possibility of military intervention from the US to deal with the cartel? Is part of you relieved that someone might finally do something about the problem or are you dreading the possibility that US involvement will only make it worse?

Part 4 is my personal favorite part but opinions on which part is the best are all over the place.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order This is (finally) what people have been asking for from EA: a single player story-driven Star Wars game with a big budget and a lot of cool Star Wars action. You'll probably hear criticism that this game rips off Uncharted and Dark Souls and...yeah, it totally does. Climbing, wall running, hanging from ledges, that's all there along with unlocking shortcuts, losing your XP when you die, and a much higher difficulty than you'd expect from a Star Wars game although I still wouldn't put it in the same league as an actual Souls game. The game borrows a lot of mechanics almost to the point of plagiarism, but that never really bothered me. If I like Uncharted and Dark Souls and another game gives me more of what I like without making it feel poorly implemented then I don't see the problem. Why would I complain about getting more of something I enjoy? The graphics look quite nice, but that's hardly even worth mentioning for an EA game. Of course it's going to look nice. That's obviously what they care about the most. What I wasn't expecting was plot and characters I could actually get invested in. This is a pretty good story by Star Wars standards, so I have to give Respawn credit for that. I grew very fond of BD-1, the little droid who rides around on your back. At first all he really does is scan the environment, but after you find a few upgrades he becomes a huge help not only in navigation but also in battle. He's loaded with personality, which is impressive for a character who communicates with beeps and boops. Honestly, I think I like him more than BB-8 from the movies. The gameplay is...well, Uncharted and Dark Souls. Have you played those games? Then you have a pretty good idea what to expect. Combat isn't exactly like Dark Souls, of course. You have force powers and some cool lightsaber tricks to get you through skirmishes, but this isn't a game where you can mow down dozens of stormtroopers without breaking a sweat. Aside from the cannon fodder troopers who shoot easily deflected blaster shots at you, the rest of the Empire's soldiers put up a decent fight and if you get surrounded by two or three of them you can find yourself dead in seconds if your reflexes aren't on point. Even a single elite trooper can feel more like a miniboss than a mook if you just try to hack away at it so you'd better learn to parry and utilize your force powers properly to make things easier on yourself. I like it like that, though. I much prefer nail-biting duels where timing is everything over mindless button mashing a la Dynasty Warriors. So am I saying I would recommend this game? Yes, but with a caveat. It's a bit on the short side. You get a small handful of planets to explore, although each one is pretty huge and new abilities will open up new areas on subsequent visits. Even with that in mind, however, I wager most people will probably finish it in about 12 to 15 hours. That's not insultingly brief, but I do hesitate to say it's worth a full sixty dollars when you can just rent it like I did and beat it in three or four days. There's not a whole lot of replay value that I can discern unless you want to try harder difficulties or find all the unlockable customization items, which are really just different paint jobs for your ship, BD-1, or the poncho you wear. Once you finish it once that will probably be enough for most people, which is fine but is it 60 dollars fine? I dunno. I personally would recommend waiting for a sale, but it's definitely worth playing one way or another. I should also mention that sometimes the game struggled a little on the technical front. On a few occasions there was an audio bug that messed up the lip syncing, sometimes the framerate dropped for a couple of seconds, and sometimes the seamless world wasn't quite so seamless and the whole game froze up for several seconds while it was loading the next area. There were also two occasions where I fell through the world, necessitating a reload. These things were infrequent, mind you. We're not dealing with Bethesda here and by no means am I saying this game shipped unfinished, but I do feel I should mention the glitches. To be fair, it looks like Respawn has been patching this game quite a bit recently so these things might not even be a problem for much longer. Even with my quibbles I have to congratulate Respawn for finally giving us a satisfying single player Star Wars game. In fact, EA should just let these guys handle Star Wars from now on and tell DICE to take a hike.

I got Jedi Fallen Order from Redbox. Remember game rentals? Anyway I'll give my full thoughts when I finish it but so far it's definitely the best Star Wars game since EA got their grubby hands on the license.

God damn it, I got some avocados in the mail recently as a gift and I am trying so hard to figure out when they're ripe so I can make guacamole but so far every single one I've tried has just not worked out. I tried cutting one open a few minutes ago because it was dark brown on the outside but the inside was hard as a fucking rock. My spoon couldn't even penetrate it to scoop it out and I ended up just throwing the whole thing away in disgust. They say you're supposed to squeeze it but I have never squeezed an actual ripe avocado so I have no frame of reference. I've wasted four of these damn things so far and it's so frustrating.

Oh, did the steam version come out? I've always wanted to try it but I just can't with those ASCII graphics.