Mister Jack

There is really no reason not to want the Dems to retake control of the House and Senate in 2018, even if they are going to be unfairly blamed for Trump's absolutely atrocious tax plan. I used to consider myself a fairly centrist guy, but not anymore. The Republicans are fucking it up. Anyway, here's the Alabama voter results based on sex and race. Pretty eye-opening stuff.

Figures they announce this long after I got rid of my copy of the game, which was pretty mediocre.

Night in the Woods I've been looking for games on my hard drive I could beat quickly and delete to free up some room, and this happened to be sitting on my D: drive. It's a neat little narrative with likable, well written characters and a charming art style. There isn't a whole lot of gameplay outside of a few mini games, so you're mostly just watching the story unfold. It's nice, but unfortunately the plot kind of falls apart at the ending. Lots of unanswered questions and it kind of feels like the devs wanted to just get it over with. There are a few good scenes that make me glad I played it though.

I know even less about this game now than I did when they unveiled the first trailer.

Doki Doki Literature Club Honestly, it's impossible to talk about this one without spoiling it. It's free on steam, just play it. A single playthrough only takes a couple hours and I guarantee it's an experience you won't soon forget.

Technically it was a gift, but I look forward to getting into this.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War This was a big step up from the first game, which I liked but I also felt like it was a bit too small in scale. This game is bigger and better in just about every way. There's more to do, there's more maps to explore, the bosses are better, and the combat has been fine-tuned. It does get a bit grindy if you're going for the true ending in Act IV, which is the part that tries to bait you into buying loot crates, but I managed just fine without them, minus the crates I occasionally bought with in-game currency. It took me a little over 40 hours to complete everything, so there's really no need to waste your money on microtransactions.

XCOM: The Bureau is free on Humble Bundle right now. I know it's an average game, but hey, free's free.

I'm having a total blast with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, but I'm at that infamous endgame now where you have to basically fight a prolonged war and the average level of your enemies jumps up dramatically. This was clearly designed to entice people into buying loot crates to help even the odds, which is definitely shitty, but fortunately I found a good way to level up without having to resort to loot boxes, so if you are playing or have played this game and gave up around this part because the grind was so bad, here's my advice: Lose your forts on purpose. Seriously, do it. Defending your forts requires a ton of resources and you'll be going through your spoils of war like water trying to buy all these upgrades to fend off attackers who are ten levels higher than you. However, if you lose the fort first then all you have to do to move on to the next battle is reclaim it. This is much better than trying to defend for two reasons. Firstly, you can still lower the fort's level by doing missions to kill off individual defending captains. It's much easier to attack a fort with a 120 rating than defend from attackers with a 380 rating. On top of that, you get 3x as much XP for capturing a fort as you do for defending it. You're guaranteed at least one level up for every fort you capture, maybe even two. Is it still a grind? Yeah, a bit, but much less of one. I'm halfway through after just a few hours using this method. It's possible the last few stages will jump up again and force me to find another way to grind, but I still went from level 40 to 45 after just a few battles.

Bungie caught concealing XP scaling. If you haven't already heard about this, Bungie had a hidden system in place where if you were grinding an activity repeatedly for XP, your gains would be increasingly reduced over time, but this wasn't actually reflected in the onscreen XP notifications. In otherwords, the game would straight up lie to you about how much XP you were getting. When Bungie got found out they turned off the XP scaling, but then without telling people they also slashed XP gains in half, which means the grind to get another bright engram is now even longer than it was while the scaling was turned on. I really hope this loot box shit comes back to bite them in the ass like it currently is with EA and Battlefront.

Coco Coco is a wonderful film about a boy who goes on an adventure in the land of the dead during Dia de Los Muertos. It's full of beautiful imagery, lovely music, and heartfelt moments. I would recommend it to anyone. However, the film is preceded by a TWENTY ONE MINUTE LONG short about the snowman from Frozen. I'll let Jhonen sum it up.

If you haven't done it already, get your hands on Yoshitsune. He's your best weapon against the twins.

I couldn't possibly put Jessica Jones that high. It starts off strong but it runs into a real problem where they have to fill out 12 episodes but they don't seem to know how to do that other than having characters making really boneheaded decisions that make no sense just to extend the plot longer. I feel like these Marvel shows should maybe cut 2 episodes off of each season so they could tighten up the pacing a little more.

Okay one more. It was only six bucks. I definitely got my fill on fighting games with this sale.

Been a while since I really splurged on a steam sale. Shadow of War actually came from CDkeys because it's not only cheaper even during the steam sale, but it also comes with DLC that the basic steam version doesn't.

Mine is 0738 8095 286.

That Animal Crossing mobile game is out now. Connection quality is hit or miss, obviously, but it's not as bad as Pokemon Go was. I haven't been able to play it long enough to form an opinion on it yet, though. I was busy all day.

Season 1 is universally agreed to be the weakest season actually, which should tell you how good the others are. I think the fact it's limited to Netflix as opposed to adult swim kept it from getting as much exposure as Rick and Morty. Definitely watch the other seasons though. Bojack is by far my favorite Netflix show.

Ruh roh Raggy!

Yeah, I wish Evil Within would let me do that. I mean, it's not like it has leaderboards or anything, and I must have played through RE5 three or four times just to keep getting upgrades and then bump up the difficulty and I enjoyed it every time.