Mister Jack

I really don't understand why video games are the only industry where the companies can just openly shit on the people they're trying to sell products to and get applauded for it by the media. Obviously death threats are extremely inappropriate, but even people who brought up polite complaints on the game's discord server were getting treated with disdain. Imagine if tech companies or car companies or, god forbid, pharmaceutical companies were so openly hostile to the public. People would never let that shit slide, and yet somehow it's practically encouraged in the games industry.

I hate to bang the Epic drum twice in a row, but if you ever make a PC game and decide to take the Epic money and go exclusive, for the love of God don't announce it like this.

Epic refuses to sell an indie Kickstarter game because it won't go exclusive. Someone please explain to me how this makes any sense whatsoever. Buying up all the exclusives is a total dick move, but at least from a business perspective I can see why it would seem logical to do it. Refusing to sell a multiplatform game unless it goes exclusive just seems like dumbass sour grapes to me, though. Now you're just ensuring that everyone has it except you. I don't expect a game about skateboarding birds to set the world on fire or anything, but a policy like this just puts them at risk of missing out on a sleeper hit. On another note, good on the SkateBIRD devs for not going back on their Kickstarter promise to deliver steam keys. I hope their game does well when it eventually comes out.

I might actually sub to Disney+ when it comes out since they seem pretty dedicated to making original content and it's cheaper than Netflix, but right now I'm taking the wait and see approach. No interest in any of the others.

The Lion King The remake, obviously. I got a chance to see this for free so I figured why not, it'd be a way to kill an afternoon. I know this might come as a surprise, but it's not as good as the original. In fact, the only thing keeping this out of the crap movies thread is the visuals. They're absolutely stunning and probably the best CGI animals I've ever seen. This absolutely was not the movie to go for photorealistic animals, but I have to acknowledge that the crew had some truly talented artists who I'm sure worked very hard to bring these characters to life. Their efforts deserve to be recognized, even if the movie ultimately suffered for it. If there's any reason to see this movie (NOT in theaters), it's the eye candy. Unfortunately, this remake is inferior to the original in literally every single way, and yes that also includes the visuals. They're technically astounding, but they just don't work for this story. The characters all adhere so closely to realism that the emotional beats fall completely flat. When Simba finds his dead father and can't even look sad or cry because that's not how lions work in nature, it hurts the movie and my ability to connect to it. It doesn't help that the voice acting is almost universally awful too. Timon and Pumbaa sound okay I suppose, but literally everybody else ranges from mediocre to terrible. Even James Earl Jones is bad this time. Either his age is finally catching up with him or he just did not care and only played Mufasa again for the paycheck. Something I really hate about these Disney remakes is that whenever they do one of the iconic scenes or lines of dialogue, the movie always rushes through it like it's only doing these parts because it's obligated to. The actors never give these moments time to breathe or to leave an impact on the audience. They just blurt it out as quickly as they can and move on. It's completely soulless. Scar has none of his menacing presence this time around. When Jeremy Irons spoke as Scar his lines practically oozed with a sort of sinister charisma. Without even seeing the character, you could tell just by listening to him that he was a schemer, a villain who thought very highly of himself and would stab you in the back the moment it served his ends. There is absolutely none of that with Chiwetel Eijofor. In fact, he was probably the worst actor in the entire movie. The guy barely even sounds like he's trying half the time. He just sounds so bored. I wouldn't be surprised if he literally phoned in his lines with the performance he turned in. The real sin, however, and what I absolutely cannot forgive, is that this is practically a shot for shot remake of the original. I can think of maybe two scenes that are new. They're okay scenes, but they don't add enough to justify this remake. In fact, they actually remove some stuff from the original. They didn't even put in any of the new songs or scenes from the Broadway show. Not one. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect at least one new song in a remake of an IP that already has several new songs to choose from. The songs are mostly okay. Circle of Life sounds fine, if a bit samey. Just Can't Wait To Be King was actually kind of a fun sequence. Not as good as the original, blah blah blah, you know the drill, but it was fun to watch Simba and Nala harass and inconvenience all the other animals. Hakuna Matata was mostly fine and there was one part of it that got a genuine laugh out of me, but they're also a lot more crass about Pumbaa's constant farting and I'm really not a big fan of fart jokes. Can You Feel the Love Tonight was pretty mediocre, and not just because it took place in the daytime. The singing was okay, but I just didn't feel anything for Simba or Nala while it was going on. Go watch two lions at the zoo chase each other around and play the song in the background and you'll have the same level of emotional investment. Be Prepared, though? Holy shit they fucking butchered this song. It's not just worse than the original song, it's flat out terrible. Everything about it completely sucked. The music? The singing? Awful. In fact I'd barely even call it singing, more like shouting over music. The onscreen sequence? What sequence? Nothing is even happening during Be Prepared. Scar just jumps around on a few rocks and that's it. The hyenas don't even get involved. They just sit there and watch. It's insultingly bad. I might recommend watching this movie ONE time when it eventually comes to Disney+ just to take in the gorgeous effects but that's it. Don't spend your hard-earned money to go see it. When you put the visuals aside it's lazy, low-effort, and honestly kind of an insult to the audience's intelligence. You deserve better than this from a remake and especially from Disney.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 It's been a while since I've played the others but going purely from memory I'd put this one below the first one but above the second one. There's more customization and upgrading in this game compared to MUA2. Being that these are Marvel characters, you don't get armor or weapon drops but instead there are plot relevant crystals that enhance your stats and come in different rarities. Combat can get a little repetitive sometimes, and it's probably obvious to say that your level of enjoyment will be influenced by just how much of a Marvel fan you are. That's not to say the game has no merits on its own, though. A lot of these dungeon crawler games devolve into mindless button mashing, but there's actually some strategy involved here. Stronger enemies have both a health bar and a stagger bar, and certain attacks work better on one bar than the other. Characters can also combine their specials into more powerful synergy attacks. For example, combining one of Storm's tornadoes with Star Lord's flamethrower will make a flame tornado. In general, the combat does a good job of keeping you from just spamming the same attacks the whole time, but I take issue with the recharge rate of the special meter. This is something you can upgrade and enhance, but even by the endgame I was relying more on orb drops than my own attacks to recharge my specials. I'm hoping this gets a balance patch. The story is basically a reimagining of the Infinity War. It works well enough here, but I do hope that Marvel games cool it on the whole Infinity Stones thing going forward now that the movies are done with it. The dialogue and plot beats are very comic-booky, so you shouldn't go into this expecting some deep drama like the Arkham series or Insomniac's Spider-Man. It doesn't take itself very seriously and will take any excuse it can to shove in more Marvel cameos. This is both a good and bad thing. I loved seeing some of my favorite heroes and villains pop up, but there's so many characters to go through that many of them only appear for a brief cameo or a single boss fight and then are never seen again. Then again, if you give everyone more screen time then it means you have fewer characters to work with. You gotta take the bad with the good, I guess. When it comes to endgame (heh) content there are two things I noticed. Beating the game unlocks the Superior difficulty which is naturally more hardcore but also gives you better drops. There are also the Infinity Trials, which are basically challenge rooms you can play to get rewards and costumes. I would have preferred if the Infinity Trials were full-fledged dungeons rather than individual fights you have to load separately every time, but at least it's there. The costumes you unlock seem to just be skins without any sort of stat changing effects like in previous games, but I hear we'll be getting free DLC down the line with actual stat-enhancing costumes. In fact, it sounds like we'll be getting quite a bit of free DLC, so good on them. Regarding the things that suck about the game, I have two main gripes. The biggest issue by far is the camera. While it's not the worst I've seen, it's still bad and had an irritating tendency to get stuck at angles where I couldn't see what the hell was going on. When there's so many attacks with effects flying around, you really need to be able to see where you are. If you can help it, it's usually best to just not fight next to any walls. The other thing I didn't like is there's no shared XP whatsoever. I'm sure this is meant to encourage replaying the game with other characters in theory but in practice this means that certain characters are likely to get left in the dust and become useless in the late game unless you've been using them the entire time. You can collect XP cubes to level up weaker characters, but this only helps so much. At the very least, they don't try to sell you XP cubes as microtransactions. On a positive note, the online actually works. I did notice that sometimes my teammates were jerking around the screen, but my own gameplay was always perfectly smooth and I didn't have any disconnects. If teleporting teammates is the compromise required to get that kind of performance on my end then I'll take it. I know this game has been getting lukewarm reviews but I don't regret buying it. There's a lot here for Marvel fans to enjoy and it's a lot of fun in multiplayer. I can't really recommend waiting for a price drop since it's a Nintendo published game and it will probably never get a price drop, so I guess I'd say if you're curious, watch some gameplay and come to your own conclusion.

Yeah, Hush was alright. I wouldn't put it up there with the all time greats like Under the Red Hood and Batman vs TMNT, but I've seen far worse from the DCAU. It kinda falls apart in the climax but at least I wasn't bored.

Does the hack put a new emulator on there? I considered buying a PS Classic for hacking but the shoddy emulator that's already loaded on the system discouraged me from doing so.

Endgame has now officially passed Avatar as the highest grossing film of all time. And don't give me that shit about inflation because if we account for that Avatar was never number one to begin with. I doubt anything will ever surpass Gone With the Wind but that film is a masterpiece so it can go ahead and keep the top spot.

They start filming in 2020, so unless something else goes wrong it'll probably be out in 2021. I can only assume they didn't mention it because the whole thing is a sore spot for a lot of people, Disney included. Either that or Gunn wasn't available for Comic Con because he's working on Suicide Squad.

Nope. Sorry. This is just too much to follow. I was fine with seeing a couple of movies per year, but if you're telling me that I have to watch all these shows to keep up with the MCU storyline then I think I might be getting off after Guardians 3.

More details are slowly starting to come out and it's looking like the plagiarism motive is the correct one. He thought the studio stole his idea for a novel.

Over here we call that Tuesday.

I'm a little hazy on the details but from what I hear the arsonist was some train otaku who hated moe anime and was mad because the studio "appropriated train culture" by using a song that's popular with train otakus for some moe anime? Edit: This could be completely wrong. So far the only thing that's been confirmed was the guy was ranting about how the studio stole something from him. Edit edit: Okay so the reason the train thing is spreading is because shortly before the fire happened, someone on the Japanese version of 4chan posted a rant about burning down the studio because they ruined his favorite trainspotting location after one of their shows made it popular with anime fans. This could end up being a completely different person. Another possible motive is that he feels they plagiarized some manuscript he submitted for a LN contest, because witnesses heard him saying something that can potentially translate to "they ripped me off." I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Damn it, I would still want a longer battery life but I bet they aren't offering any kind of trade-in program.

I recently, uh, "acquired" the 3DS version of Dragon Quest VIII to play. With DQXI for the Switch right around the corner, everyone seems pretty hyped for this series but despite being a big fan of JRPGs I've never really gotten around to seeing what the fuss is all about. I know that the gameplay in this series is pretty basic and on the surface wouldn't seem like something that should still be this popular, but I assume it's one of those things where you have to play it for yourself to "get" it so that's what I'm doing. I'm a couple hours in and so far it feels pretty chill. For most normal encounters I just let the AI do their thing and only assume direct control for bosses. It's a little brain dead but also kind of relaxing. Naturally, I assume it's only going to get harder but we'll see.

Directly above

Detroit: Become Human is free right now. When I downloaded it I also noticed I had a free version of Heavy Rain for the PS4 in my library too.

I wouldn't hold my breath for a Switch Pro. Not like we ever got Wii Pro or Wii U Pro. I guess we did get the New 3DS but they barely used it for anything.

I couldn't even be bothered to get all the pagies in the first world. Yooka-Laylee was such trash that I couldn't believe it. Thank god A Hat in Time was available to wash that taste out of my mouth.

Well I finished killing Emerald and Ruby Weapon in FFVII so I went ahead and bought FFIX for the Switch too. The Switch really is the perfect console for classic JRPGs.