Mister Jack

I use a Galaxy S2 I'm pretty happy with. I got a refurbished one on ebay for less than 200 bucks and it was indistinguishable from a brand new one. The screen is 8 inches and it has expandable memory. The only real downside is that the shape of the screen is closer to a square than a rectangle which means you'll get letterboxes if you watch movies, but if that doesn't bother you then it's pretty solid.

Got Final Fantasy VII for the Switch. The PC port is trash and I am now hyped for the remake so having a portable version of the original was just too tempting to pass up.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Symphony of the Night might just be my favorite game of all time, so of course I was going to dig this. While the graphics do have a little bit of that 2.5D indie stank on them, I've seen far worse done with this art style so it didn't bother me that much. The gameplay is what matters most, and it shines here. This game seems to have taken the good ideas from previous Castlevania games and combined them all here with some improvements. For example, the soul system from the Sorrow games is in here with the shard system, but there's five types to collect instead of three which opens up a lot of variety in the combat. The drop rate is also far more generous. There's familiars like in Symphony, but they're no longer useless in a fight. Weapons also have command moves like some of the weapons in Symphony, but there's far more of them this time and you can make the moves work universally by mastering them. Guns are actually a viable way to play the game now as long as you keep up with ammo and wear the right equipment to enhance Miriam's gun prowess. Iga seems conscious of criticisms of his past games, particularly that they are thought of as too easy because Bloodstained is much, much harder than any of the previous Castlevania games under his umbrella. Some of the bosses were so hard that I found myself wondering if I had accidentally wandered into the room of an endgame superboss. Healing items are rare and expensive. You can cook food which heals you and gives you permanent stat buffs the first time you eat each dish, but you need to gather the ingredients first. Save points can be spread pretty far sometimes and enemies can have pretty unpredictable attacks so I probably died more in this game than in all the previous Igavania games combined. I'm not going to whip out that hackneyed comparison that game journalists love to make, but it's tough as nails regardless. If you somehow still think the game is too easy, there's also a hard mode where I hear enemies get new attacks, though I haven't had a chance to confirm it, and a nightmare mode which locks you at level 1. You'll find a challenge here if you're looking for one. The story is passable. Not great, not awful. It provides an excuse to explore the castle, which is good enough for me. Music is good, although it doesn't reach the highs of the Castlevania series. That's almost unfair to expect, though. Castlevania has some of the greatest game music of all time. If I have any real serious criticism, it's that sometimes the game isn't clear on where you're meant to go next. Previous Iga games tended to have clear roadblocks or unreachable areas that you could return to after finding a certain item or ability. Here, it's not as obvious. For example, there's an underwater area and Miriam can't dive. I spent a long time looking for an item to unlock a swimming ability but it turns out you're supposed to farm a specific enemy that drops a shard that lets you travel through water. I had to go online on two or three occasions just to figure out where to go next because some of these mandatory shards and items you need to progress are a little too well hidden. I don't have much else negative to say, though. I finished it in about 12 hours, which might not seem like much for 40 bucks, but I do intend to play new game+ on hard mode and there's 13 pieces of free DLC coming including a roguelike mode, a boss revenge mode, and a versus mode. I can't wait.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night After Mighty No. 9 and Yooka-Laylee I got a little nervous for this game, but thankfully Iga has broken the streak of shitty games from once respected developers. There's still a little bit of indie jank on this one. Miriam doesn't move around or attack quite as smoothly as Soma or Alucard once did, but it's nothing you can't adjust to and I'm really enjoying it so far. I hear there's New Game+ now and a lot of free DLC coming down the line, including online modes, so I'm really looking forward to seeing where this game is going.

Finally, a Kickstarter game from an industry veteran that doesn't suck.

Found out Ace Attorney Investigations was on the android store so I played through it. I usually hate mobile games but this series is a perfect fit for phones and tablets. I spent two days going through it and then I immediately found myself a translated rom for the sequel. I fall in love with this series all over again every time I play it. Please, Capcom. Give us word of Ace Attorney 7 for the Switch!

Oh, my bad. Upon further research, it does seem to be PC only. That's the only version I played so I naturally assumed every other version had the same feature.

Damn it. I hate preorder bonuses but I really want that skin. If it actually makes the revenants go DOOT I won't be able to resist.

I don't think Todd liked his hype man.

Setting the record straight by saying FFX Remastered does have the fast forward.

Live feed tracking Endgame vs Avatar.

John Wick 3 You like dudes getting kicked in the nuts? Have I got a movie for you.

Wanna feel like the dumbest idiot who ever lived? Play this game.

So what exactly are people's problems with this episode? They say it doesn't make sense but I don't see the issue. And don't use the books as an excuse because we're way past that now.

But I love FFXII. The original version was rough around the edges but the remaster really improves a lot of things.

Detective Pikachu Fuck the haters, this movie was rad. I won't pretend it doesn't indulge in a few cliches or that it doesn't occasionally rely on some easy writing techniques like using flashbacks to explain the main character's feelings, but the way I see it the positives outweigh the negatives here. The world they build around this storyline is really fun and interesting, and the Pokemon themselves are cute and likable. The CGI may not always be convincing, but I would rather they look cute than realistic so it worked for me. Sonic the Hedgehog is a cautionary tale on chasing realism at all costs. Not every joke lands, but most of them are pretty funny and I appreciate that the movie didn't try to wink and nudge and say to the audience "The Pokemon world is dumb and makes no sense! Isn't that funny?!" It never acts like it's above its own source material, and if the director isn't a Pokemon lover himself then he hides it well. While the plot is predictable to a point and I did manage to figure out the mystery before it was explained to me, there were still other things I didn't see coming so it isn't like there's no surprises to be had. Honestly, if you ever had any affection for Pokemon then it's hard to imagine you won't have fun with this film, even with its flaws.

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen I've had this game for a while but I never got around to playing more than an hour. Since I've been on such a fantasy RPG kick lately I decided to go back to it and it was an interesting game. I can see why people want a sequel so much. The thing about this game is that you can definitely tell it's Capcom's first real effort at a large scale western RPG because it can be pretty rough around the edges. The graphics look like total ass and the story, while it has an interesting premise, never really goes too in depth with it so there aren't too many memorable quests or characters. Some of the menus can be clunky, the carry weight system is a real hassle, and Dragon's Dogma commits a major cardinal sin when it comes to open world games. There aren't enough fast travel points. In fact, the fast travel system is weird. Aside from three points that are already unlocked, you have to find the rest of them and physically place them in the locations you want to be able to teleport to later. While this is neat in theory, these portcrystals are few and far between. I went the whole game only finding three of them, so I still had to do an absolute fuckton of walking and yes, it got pretty old since the open world is huge yet mostly an excuse for monsters to ambush you while you go from place to place. I heard that in the original version of the game you needed an expensive consumable item to fast travel too, so I can't imagine having the patience to play it. Thankfully the Dark Arisen version gives you a permanent fast travel item in your storage, so at least they addressed that problem. I know this all sounds awful, but the rest of the game shows real potential. While there's no online co-op (another thing to fix in a sequel), you create an NPC follower called a pawn to accompany you through the game. You can also go online and recruit other people's pawns to create a full party of four people. This is pretty neat! I still miss the absence of actual human players, but in theory this is a good system for those times when you wouldn't be able to find other players to help you. Pawns may talk too much---though you can turn the chatter off in the menus---but they are genuinely helpful in battle and will even show you where to go for quests if they've done them before with other players. Online pawns don't gain exp, so you're encouraged to trade them out for new ones every few levels, which keeps your party from getting too stale. Speaking of the battles, they're easily the best part of the whole game. You can try out and freely switch between several different classes, including hybrid classes if you want to try abilities from multiple paths. I spent the late game as an assassin, keeping my sword but trading out the shield for a bow and it was a lot of fun. Class abilities are easy to use in the heat of battle and if you are willing to put in the time, you can even learn abilities in one class and use them in another if you have the right equipment. The best part, however, are the giant monster battles. Huge monsters like chimeras and gryphons wander the land, and fighting these creatures is no simple affair. They're tough, often with specific weaknesses or body parts you need to target. In fact, you'll often need to climb on them Shadow of the Colossus style to get to those sweet spots or keep them from escaping if they start to fly away. The large monster battles are the real highlight of the game without a doubt. Capcom made a good game here. Not great, but pretty good. If they can take what they learned here and apply it to a sequel with improvements and fixes now that they have more experience with making western style RPGs, I think a Dragon's Dogma 2 could potentially be a GOTY contender someday.

The Russo brothers explain that thing everyone is confused about with the ending.

Sega does what Nintendon't.

Got the Bloodborne platinum. This one is admittedly easier to get than the Dark Souls achievements because you don't have to do as much grinding and about 75% of them are just for beating all the bosses, but you do need to collect all the weapons and tools in the game as well as find a few extremely rare items. Getting the last trophy was uniquely difficult because it was for beating a certain boss, but the boss itself is actually pretty easy. The hard part is getting to her in the first place, because to even get the chance to fight her you have to work your way through several optional endgame dungeons. Not only do you need to farm specific materials to even gain access to these dungeons, but once you're inside the game really stops going easy on you. Several of the bosses you have to fight on the way to the actual boss you need for the trophy are way harder than she is. As if that wasn't enough, one of the dungeons has an absolutely sadistic modifier where your maximum HP is chopped in half and you have to fight three bosses with this handicap. After managing to do that, actually killing the game's true final boss at the very very end was a cakewalk by comparison.