Mister Jack

The original TJ&E is by far one of my favorite co-op games of all time. This one added online play, boosted the maximum player count to 4, and added a bunch of new characters so it was pretty much inevitable that I was going to buy it. I'm pretty much an expert at the original so I beat this on my first run in about an hour or so, but having a bunch of new modifiers to unlock for future playthroughs gives me plenty of reason to keep going back over and over.

Blaster Master Zero I bought this back when I first got my Switch, played through three or four levels, then got distracted by other things. However, the sequel has come out recently and I hear that it's supposed to be really good, but I never feel right playing sequels before getting through the originals so I decided to come back and finish it. For the most part, this is a pretty good remake. It adds modern features that the original didn't have, such as save slots, and on top of the updated graphics they also added some new content, a proper story, and new bosses. They changed some stuff around too, though. For example, the boss that was on the cover of the original NES game, arguably the most iconic enemy in the franchise, is now fought in the tank rather than on foot, which turns him into a joke. As a matter of fact, several weapons in this game (particularly the wave gun and lightning gun) turn the dungeons into a cakewalk. Granted, you lose the weapon if you take a hit, but it's not that hard to get more power-ups. This is a mostly good remake but a few things kind of drag it down. For starters, there's fall damage when you're out of the tank. I don't believe fall damage should ever be in a platformer, but even if you are fine with it most of the time they went way overboard here. Jason will take damage just from jumping down from one platform to the one beneath it. No, you have to walk off of the platform if you want to go down without taking damage. God help you if you want to jump down the length of two platforms. That's instant death. Also, the ladder controls can be finicky, so if you ever jump for a ladder and can't grab onto it, well then you're going back to your last save point. Finally, this game forces you to 100% it if you want to see the final world and true ending. To be fair, this isn't that hard to do. All you need is every boss and every upgrade, and by the time I had to backtrack I had already done about 80% of this stuff just playing normally, but it still annoys me when games do this. Even with those problems, I'd still recommend it. It's not expensive and it's a decent amount of fun. Of course, if you don't care about playing the games in order than you might want to just skip to the second game, which everyone says is better anyway.

The former is probably a given. The latter is probably wishful thinking.

If they wanted good will they would have promised to never allow Fallout 76 to appear on Steam.

The WSJ is reporting two new Switch models. The Switch Mini will be a cheaper Switch with fewer features and the Switch Pro will be more powerful but more expensive. I'd post a link but there's a paywall.

What in the hell?

Shazam! I lucked into an early screening and I can confidently say this is the best DC movie so far, excluding the Nolan films which are really their own thing at this point. There's no ridiculous Zach Snyder grimdark, the humor is actually funny, the story isn't a hole filled mess that desperately tries to set up other movies in the cinematic universe, and for the most part the characters are written well. It is an origin movie, but Billy Batson has so much fun discovering and playing with his new powers that my favorite scenes of the movie were actually the ones where he's testing out random powers to see if he has them and exploiting the ones he finds for fun and profit. Yeah, it makes him feel like a douche bag for a bit but honestly, who wouldn't do the same in his shoes? This is the first DC movie that I think is good enough to compete with Marvel. What didn't I like? Honestly, not much. The story follows familiar beats, I suppose, but it's a comic book movie. That's what they do. The CG isn't as good as Marvel's, but it's not all over the place like Justice League and it's still of an acceptable, if not outstanding quality. The villain isn't as good as Marvel's best but he's better than their worst. Really, I'm having to think a good bit to come up with complaints. This was a fun, funny movie where DC finally decided to stop taking themselves so seriously and just embrace the comic book silliness. One thing that doesn't matter to me but I guess I'll mention it is that it might be too intense for small kids. It's mostly fun and lighthearted but a few scenes with the villain had grisly and violent onscreen deaths that had the kids in my row clinging to their parents.

I mentioned recently that I rented Devil May Cry 5 from Redbox. Great game, by the way. Anyway, Redbox emailed me a free rental for Division 2 as a bonus. I wasn't planning on playing it since I found the first one underwhelming but I was bored and I thought what the hell, it's free so why not. Obviously I can't beat the game in just a few days, but I played it long enough to get to level 10, which I think is long enough to form an impression of it. So what did I think? It's alright. It does address some of the issues with the first game. The jarring bullet sponge feeling in a realistic setting is somewhat addressed with visible armor layers now. Armored enemies have their layers peeled off as you shoot them, and there are also weak points on them that strip their armor off faster. Once you've exposed an unprotected area, the enemies go down fairly quickly with a few shots to that region. You'll still find enemies without helmets who don't die from a single sniper bullet to the brain though. One area where I can't complain is content. There is an absolute ton of stuff to do in this game at launch. There's a buttload of side missions and activites. Obviously, this is a looter shooter so it's mostly going to boil down to "Go here and kill a bunch of guys," but that's just inherent to the genre. This is an Ubisoft game so there's lots of collectibles to find. You can also do missions or find materials to upgrade your various settlements to give them more features and better defenses. You can also donate food, water, and medicine at each outpost to unlock rewards. There are 8 skill categories, at least in the early game, and each category has 3 to 4 different versions. For example you can have turrets that shoot bullets, fire, or sniper rounds. There are also special perks you unlock with points you get from doing side missions or finding caches throughout the city. I only unlocked a few, but I could tell that there's enough there to keep you busy for a while. I experimented with several different builds in my time with the game. The plot is whatever. I didn't get far but I could tell it was just your average looter shooter tripe. Who gives a crap about the story in any of these games? Same goes for the characters. I pretty much expected that. One thing I have to criticize, however, is the matchmaking. I had no friends to play with so I had to rely on randoms. I could be wrong, but as far as I could tell there's no way to make a public group of your own where you are the group leader. When you get matched up with people, the game seems to decide randomly who the leader is. This wouldn't bother me, but if the leader decides to kick you for any reason at any point during a mission, you get booted all the way back to the beginning and have to do everything all over again, but this time with no help. This happened to me three fucking times and these are long missions so you better believe it pissed me off, especially when I was the one who put out the call for backup in the first place. Outside of the main missions, I had a lot of trouble getting a group together. I had my requesting backup beacon going pretty much constantly and I could only find a group maybe three or four times. I don't know if that says more about the game's player count or their online system, but either way I spent more time doing missions solo than I wanted to. This game is not balanced for solo play at all and doing missions by yourself can be a real bitch. I could see myself having a decent amount of fun with this game if I had a regular group to play with, but I'm not about to shell out 60 bucks for it as a solo experience. At the very least I'll give them credit for not making the game devoid of content with the excuse that it will be fun in 90 days. I'd certainly recommend it over Anthem.

I really don't understand why they bothered. Google of all companies should know that we are not ready for this. Even if you are one of the lucky few to have a fiber connection, which is pretty much the only way this can reasonably work, streaming games uses 20 GB AN HOUR. A lot of people still have to put up with data caps from their ISP. No way they're going to use a streaming service that can use up to a tenth of their data allotment in just one hour.

Devil May Cry V Money's a little tight so I only rented this from Redbox, although I do want to get the deluxe edition at some point because I hear the bonuses on it are actually pretty good. It's been a while since I've played DMC3 but I'm tempted to say this one is the best in the series. Everyone is fun to play, although Dante is by far the most fun, and every character feels completely distinct from the others. The difficulty is fair, and I even challenged myself to get through the whole game without using any revives. The story is serviceable for a DMC game, and all the old sidekicks are back except for Lucia because honestly who gives a damn about her. I beat it on Devil Hunter mode. I'd like to go for Son of Sparda, but this is only a three day rental so I'll just have to save that for another time.

Well shit. It might finally be time to see what all the fuss is about with this game. I never really tried it because the ASCII graphics were too off-putting to me, but now I guess that won't be a problem.

Why are so many outlets and youtubers shilling for the Epic Store all of a sudden? I don't get it. They hated Uplay and Origin, and rightfully so because those services were trash when they launched. All I hear about with the Epic Store is how they take a smaller percentage from the developers. Well that's great for them but it really means fuck all to me, the consumer. Getting a free game every month is nice, I'll admit, but there's no user reviews, a very spotty refund policy, no forums, bad customer service, very disconcerting privacy concerns, shitty timed exclusives, poor performance, and until recently it didn't even have a search bar. I can certainly see why developers would want to take their business there, but it's because the store seems skewed with a heavy bias in favor of the developers over the consumers. What I don't get is why all these influencers are trying to convince me to jump ship. Steam is a piece of crap in some ways, I won't argue otherwise, but other than the monthly giveaway the Epic Store really doesn't seem to offer anything to me that Steam doesn't already do better.

Just saw Captain Marvel and yeah, it's pretty good. I actually felt like Brie Larson was one of the weaker parts of it though, but that had less to do with her acting ability and more to do with Carol just being kind of a dull character. Or maybe it's because she was surrounded by much more fun and interesting characters. I did still like her more than T'challa, who I find to be a total bore.The lack of any real central villain also meant the climax felt kind of underwhelming compared to other Marvel films, but it never dipped into territory that I would call crap. It's alright. I'd give it a B.

I respectfully disagree. You gotta have Doom Guy in a Doom movie. He's far too iconic to leave out. You could not have him as the main character, though, but instead a force acting on the sidelines. Like maybe the UAC personnel are trying to retrieve him or something and every now and then they see the results of his rampages.

Where's the vomit reaction button? This shit looks like Uwe Boll made it.

Good luck with those extra bosses when you eventually get to them. They pretty much require you to learn about mechanics you might have ignored for the rest of the game like revenge values and i-frames, and I mean that in a good way. With one or two annoying exceptions, most of those bosses felt so satisfying to beat after finally learning how to fight back against their relentless attacks. Lingering Will might be the most challenging yet fair boss in the franchise, and it just goes to show why, in my opinion, KH2 has what might be the best ARPG combat system ever made. Oh, and final form never gets turned into anti-form because it reduces the invisible anti-form stat by 10 every time you use it.

I mentioned elsewhere that I've been replaying the Kingdom Hearts collection on the PS4. I beat all the games on both discs so I decided to go back to do the side content and I have now officially beaten all of the superbosses in both KH1 and KH2 Final Mix! That's Ice Titan, Phantom, Kurt Zisa, The Unknown, Sepihiroth (twice!), The Lingering Will, and all 13 super buffed out rematch versions of the Organization XIII members. These are some of the hardest bosses Square Enix has ever made, and possibly some of the hardest bosses in all of gaming (especially Lingering Will) so I feel particularly accomplished with this one. Just to show I'm not exaggerating, here's just one of the Org XIII fights. It's not my footage, sadly, since I wasn't recording, but it gives you an idea of what you're up against. And now I've officially beaten all the superbosses from Birth by Sleep and Julius from Dream Drop Distance. Unfortunately, these guys were hard for the wrong reasons. They can't be hitstunned into a combo at any point, so hitting them with melee attacks is pretty much never going to be safe. The BBS bosses also attack constantly, which means the only reliable way to beat them is to abuse the invincibility frames you get while dodging and find very brief windows to fire off either physical skills with more invincibility frames or trap spells for them to run into. But hey, now I've beaten every superboss in the series, including the one in KH3 that I did a while back. I hope the DLC for that game adds more boss fights because it's a series staple at this point.

He ought to. He's one of the guys who made Sonic Mania.

Anyone ever get the urge to go back and marathon all the games in your favorite franchises one after another? There are no big releases that interest me for the next several months so I've been playing through the Kingdom Hearts HD compilation and I'm currently up to 3D. A while back I also played through all the Castlevania games, at least until it turned into 3D crap. It's pretty fun to do this sort of thing now and then and I'm just curious to learn who else does it.

Pinterest needs to fuck off already. Not only do they try very hard to keep you from sharing images they steal from other sites, but they're always on the first few results of a Google image search, making it that much harder to get an actual source. You can't even click your mouse on their shitty fucking website without it harassing you to sign up. EAT A FUCKING DICK, PINTEREST! I'M NOT JOINING EVER!

Honestly, once you learn the Inverted Song of Time the clock in Majora's Mask is barely even an issue anymore, at least in terms of running out of time. At worst you might forget to deposit your rupees in the bank before rewinding. To elaborate, three days in normal in-game time is about 54 real world minutes. With the Song of Inverted Time that gets extended to about three hours. There are also certain locations like the Lost Woods where time stops completely.