Mister Jack

You can get Full Throttle Remastered for free on GOG right now.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle I picked this up a while back and got a little over halfway through it before I set it down and just never got back to it. I am pretty sure I'm getting Smash Bros soon, so I figured I should try to scratch that off of my Switch backlog. It's pretty decent, although the difficulty can vary wildly depending on your team layout. It's never as hard as XCOM, but there were some fights where I really struggled until I changed to Mario/Rabbid Peach/Luigi, after which I steamrolled through most of the obstacles in my path. Frankly, there is little reason to use anybody besides these three. Mario is required, but Rabbid Peach is the only real healer you have and Luigi can get up to four shots in one turn with the proper skill upgrades. With that kind of team, the only thing that will give you any real trouble is the bosses, particularly the final one. I also have to mention that the boss of world 3 is great, easily the funniest and most memorable part of the game.

That poor lady

Holy shit this looks so bad. It's going to be the film equivalent of the Hindenburg.

How long until Geralt is revealed for Smash Bros?

Two castles. The first is 100% and the second is another 100%. For some reason, the second castle has slightly more map squares than the first despite being an inverted clone, which is where the extra .6% comes from.

Knocked out the platinum for Castlevania Requiem, which is Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night combined. It's not a super hard platinum, honestly, aside from getting through a whole level in Rondo without taking a single hit and getting 200.6% completion in Symphony, but Symphony is one of, if not my number one favorite game of all time. I've beaten it three times this year alone, but I like finally having a trophy list for it.

HOLY SHIT!

Where'd you find a robot cat?!

Apparently this Epic store isn't going to have user forums for their games the way the steam store does. Instead they're going to use a ticketing system. I can see why they went this route since steam forums are frequently a shithole, but I can't imagine users are going to be happy about this.

Honestly, if you no-life the game you could probably get it in a couple of weeks, but I wasn't that devoted. I needed to take breaks from it whenever I got burnt out. None of the trophies are especially difficult, but the platinum does require all of the following: Six max level characters One max level hardcore character, which means no dying allowed 500 bounties completed Max level legendary items in every equipment slot 100 treasure goblins It takes a while to do all of that. Funny thing is that I am pretty sure I also own the PC version of the game on my Battle.net account that's currently gathering dust, but I never bothered going back to it since the console version of Diablo 3 is objectively superior. It feels weird to say that.

I finally did it...after two years of playing the game off and on, I finally got the platinum for Diablo 3...I'm free...

You can get Iconoclasts for free right now. It won't show on the PlayStation 4, but if you go to the website from your computer and buy the free PS Vita version from the online store then it will also give you the PS4 version.

Name one live action anime adaptation that Netflix didn't completely screw up.

How does it feel to know you will never have as much fun playing RDR2 as this guy?

Man, who would have guessed that the Playstation would end up having the best VR experience after all?

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs This is a new movie by the Coen Brothers that's on Netflix. I usually enjoy their films so I thought I'd give it a watch, and by and large it's pretty good. This is a western anthology with six different short stories. I think they're around 25-30 minutes each. I wasn't exactly keeping time while I was watching it. The six stories are completely unconnected and don't intersect at any point. It really is just a collection of short stories, but that didn't really bother me. They're all pretty decent, but they also vary wildly in tone between black comedy and straight up tragedy. It can be a little jarring to leap back and forth between comedic violence and upsetting violence, but the fact that the stories are all kept separate helps ameliorate this somewhat. Buster Scruggs himself only shows up for the first story, but damned if he wasn't so entertaining that I missed having him around while watching the other five shorts. They're all good in their own right, though. If you like westerns and have a couple hours to kill, this is worth a watch.

They're not super long games (between 30-40 levels each) but I had time on my hands over the weekend.

Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon Beat this one 100%, which means I now have all three platinum trophies. I think this one is probably my favorite of the trilogy, though I realize this will probably be a controversial opinion. The three games are all fairly distinct from one another and strong arguments can be made for why any one of them is the best one, even the original one that only had the platforming essentials. In my case, though, Spyro 3 is the one to beat. Spyro doesn't learn any new abilities this time, but he does carry over the abilities he learned in Spyro 2. Instead, you unlock additional characters to play as, each with their own abilities and gameplay mechanics. Obviously, some people won't like this shift in gameplay, but for the most part I didn't mind it, despite not liking this same gimmick in Sly Cooper 3. It just isn't as intrusive here. Most, if not all of the side character stuff is optional unless you're going for 100%, and every character is ultimately going around grabbing collectibles like Spyro already does, just doing it in a different way. There's no stupid hacking or stealth or anything like that. The worst you'll have to deal with is shooting sections, and they're honestly not that bad, just nothing to write home about. Instead of talismans and orbs or crystal dragons this time around, the only collectible in this game besides gems is dragon eggs. That's fine with me, really. The baby dragons don't have the personality and fantastic designs of the adult dragons in the original game, but there's a lot more variety in how you get the eggs to make up for it. The level design has more variety overall as well, and I personally just felt like the worlds were better put together than the other two games. Of course, this is subjective and your mileage may vary. If I had to pick between this and the Crash remake, I think I like this one slightly more. The Crash remake is great, don't get me wrong, but it has some mild control issues that can become a problem on especially precise levels. The Crash games can also be downright sadistic at times, particularly in the first game. Crash 3 is also full of racing levels and I fucking hate racing levels. Spyro has racing levels too, but there's only a few of them and they're much less of a headache than the Crash racing levels. I still highly recommend both trilogies to anyone who likes platformers, but if someone put a gun to my head and demanded I only pick one to play, Spyro would just barely get the edge. Playing this trilogy makes me REALLY want a new Spyro game though, or maybe even a future crossover game with Crash! Activision owns both properties now. It could happen!

Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage I still have a few objectives left to get 100%, but I went through to the final boss so I consider this game beaten for the moment. This is where Spyro hits his stride. There are actual characters in the game besides Spyro himself now, the villain is more memorable, and the level design is improved with a variety of objectives in each one. Rather than freeing dragons and hunting down eggs from thieves, you are now collecting talismans (primary objectives) and orbs (secondary objectives). They basically work like Mario 64's stars. The game now has actual cutscenes in between levels. It's nothing grandiose but it's a nice opportunity to enjoy the fantastic new designs and animation, plus it gives Spyro himself more character than he had in the last game. Gem hunting is less obtuse this time around too, and there aren't too many gems stuck in sadistic areas. The boss battles are thankfully more challenging now, although one of them ended up being so hard I had to consult a walkthrough. I never do that for bosses and yet I did it. Still, this is a solid improvement on the first game. I still got more stuff to unlock, and then on to Spyro 3!

Spyro the Dragon The original game is very much a product of its time, and you can tell while playing it that it was one of the first 3D platformers to ever come out, even with its new coat of paint and updated camera. That's not to say the game is bad. The controls are tight, the jumping and hit detection are mostly fine, and the difficulty is hardly unreasonable, but the original Spyro doesn't aspire to be much more than that. The levels are fairly simple in design, although sometimes the gems and dragons you need for 100% are hidden away in ridiculously obscure locations you'd never be able to reach without a guide or some serious outside-the-box thinking. The story is as basic as you can get, and the game's main villain only appears in the opening cutscene and the final boss battle, so he's barely a character at all. In fact, unlike future collectathon platformers there are no real characters to speak of like sidekicks or allies unless you count Sparx, and he's just a glorified health bar. The dragons you free will briefly speak to you after you free them, but it's mostly just to give you hints. They've all been redesigned and they look fantastic, but they sadly only get about ten seconds of screen time each. There are also only three cutscenes in the whole game: the opening, the normal ending, and the 100% ending. The game's villain doesn't even talk to Spyro a single time. Story was clearly not a priority for this game. I'm sure that at the time they made it they were just trying to see if a 3D platformer on the Playstation could work at all. Also unlike future platformers, the abilities you have at the beginning of the game are the same you'll have at the end. You can jump, charge, glide, breathe fire, and in some levels you can fly. That's your whole moveset and it never changes. It works, but never adding new moves does limit what you can do with level design. The differences between worlds are mostly aesthetic. Your goal in every level is to find the gems, the dragons, and sometimes the eggs. You never have to do anything special to earn them, like in Mario or Banjo-Kazooie. You just gotta find them and get to them. Boss battles don't have any fanfare or even a change in music. They're just plopped down in normal levels like they're ordinary enemies. I didn't even realize I had beaten the first boss until a trophy popped up informing me of the fact. The boss fights in this game are all piss easy too. I beat several of them without even getting touched. Finally, this is a short game. If you aren't going for 100% you can probably beat this game in a few hours. If you do want 100%, it might take you an extra four or five, but even then it won't require too much dedication. I got it in two days off and on. It's still a decent game, but it definitely shows its age with the gameplay. The graphics, on the other hand, look great. The characters all have cartoony, highly expressive models that would be right at home in a Spyro movie or tv show. It's extremely charming. I've heard that Spyro 2 adds a bunch of stuff to flesh out the game and give it more variety and personality, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it for myself.

I never actually got around to playing Spyro as a kid. I didn't own a PS1 until the PS2 was already a thing. I love collectathon platformers though, so I'm looking forward to this.