Mister Jack

The Emoji Movie. I wanted to see just how bad it was. No, I didn't pay for it; fuck that. This felt like it was made by a robot, like someone typed "make a feelgood family comedy about emojis" into the Moviebot 9000. You see every joke coming from a mile away, the plot is beyond vacuous and superficial, and as if that wasn't bad enough the movie about phone emojis shows a laughable lack of understanding about how phones or apps even work. Even if I'm trying to accept this movie's logic, the story just makes no sense at all. It's 90 minutes of advertisements delivered by some truly unlikable characters. Everyone who was involved in the production of this should be ashamed. Yes, even Patrick Stewart.

Just Cause 3. Man, this is quite a mixed bag. I really loved the core of the game. Zipping and parachuting and gliding around is a lot of fun, and just blowing shit up is even better, even if it does get a little repetitive. But what idiot decided that all the upgrades have to be tied to online challenges? Seriously, that's the ONLY way to upgrade your equipment in this game, and doing challenges is such a chore. Even if you put aside the fact that most of them are races and time trials, the most boring part of any open-world game, every time you load one up you have to wait while it connects to the servers, then sit through another loading screen to actually start the challenge. It does this EVERY SINGLE TIME, which means if you want to fully upgrade your character you'll have to sit through a ton of loading. After I got maybe three or four upgrades I didn't even bother doing the challenges for the rest of the game because it was just so tedious. If there is a Just Cause 4, and I'm not sure there will be because if I recall this one underperformed, I hope they cut that shit out.

Every day we don't get a Vento Aureo confirmation a die a little inside. My Hero Academia confirmed season 3 literally at the end of the last episode of season 2. I wish more anime did that. I really like how they're handling this show. As far as I am aware, anime going through seasons like this when covering a shonen manga is a fairly recent thing. Usually they either air continuously without a break and end up having to waste time with a bunch of filler (Dragon Ball, One Piece) or they just flat out end before the manga does (too many to count). This format is just perfect to me. It sucks to have to wait for more episodes, but the extra time means the episodes can be tighter and short on filler scenes. I love it.

Worst as in bad at games.

My Hero Academia season 2 has officially ended, for any of you who were waiting to binge the whole thing.

Keith David has a voice like melting butter.

Rick and Morty finale! I liked this one! Not as much as the citadel episode but it was a big step up from the Beth episode that preceded it.

I beat Cuphead. Took me around six and a half hours. The tutorial took up five of them. In all seriousness, it actually is a pretty hard game. If you played perfectly with absolutely no deaths then you could probably get through its content in maybe two hours. However, the much more likely scenario is that you're going to die a lot and spend a lot of time perfecting your skills and learning how to outmaneuver the bosses. It's still kind of short, but I can see myself going back to this one again and again whenever the mood for some run and gun hits me. Plus, beating it unlocks an expert difficulty, which I'm sure will kick my ass for twice as long. At the moment this game is the number one seller on steam, which I'm glad to see because it really is a labor of love and it deserves to succeed. I couldn't help thinking that the recent controversy with Dean Takahashi probably contributed to the game's current popularity. Ever since that embarrassing video came out everyone's talking about Cuphead, and I bet at least a few people out there bought it just to show him up. Take note, indie developers. If you want free publicity for your game, offer a live demo to the worst game journalist you can possibly find and then make sure he uploads it to youtube.

You ARE supposed to like the main characters in a tv show, though. Even if they're bad people, you're at least supposed to be invested enough in them that you want to watch their antics. If you don't care about the characters, the whole show falls apart. I have watched It's Always Sunny, and I actually do like those characters. Not because I'd ever want to hang out with them or anything, but because their scams amuse me. Plus, their plans usually fall apart by the end, at least in all the episodes I've seen, and that's an important distinction. I like seeing just how much they can screw up.

That is EXACTLY the game I'm pissed off about with this right now.

So...Rick and Morty. I think I hated this episode. It's becoming increasingly harder to like these people.

I really hate single player games, usually open-world ones, that still require you to sign in to some bullcrap online component every time you boot the game up. Even if you want to play offline, sometimes it'll try to sign in automatically without even asking you. Stop it! I don't care about your god damn stat tracking! I just want to play the game and you're wasting my fucking time! It's even worse if the game is new and the servers are being slammed. Then you have to sit through all that just to get an error message.

Was Paddington good? I didn't watch it because I just assumed it would be awful like all these CGI movies about beloved childhood characters usually are. It would be nice if there was an exception.

The worst part is that for the first few seconds it actually looks interesting, like Babe or something, but then they had to go and Sony things up.

Sigh...

LIKE I GIVE A FUCK

Bethesda will find a way to port Doom to pedometers if it means you'll buy it again.

Mild spoilers for the new episode, but an amusing edit.

Pictured: A pair of radical Muslim extremists

Well this sucks. I downloaded Pocket Mortys on my ipod and the battery gets drained from fully charged to <20% in a grand total of eight minutes. I've had it for a while so I figure okay, the battery probably needs to be replaced after 3+ years. Nobody around here does battery replacements! Nobody! And Apple charges 80 bucks for a battery replacement! I thought "okay, I'll buy a battery and do the fix myself. How hard could it be?" I watched a video on it and replacing a battery on these fuckers is like doing brain surgery. The chances of me screwing it up and permanently bricking the thing are just too high for me to be comfortable with doing it myself. It pisses me off just how brazen Apple is about intentionally designing their products to make repairs as obtuse as possible so you have almost no choice but to go to them directly. I don't feel inclined to pay 80 dollars, so I'll just download Pocket Mortys on my tablet instead and use the ipod strictly for music. I can still get a few hours of listening time out of it per charge so whatever.

What's wrong with the fingerprint sensor? I don't want to have to hold the phone in front of my face every time I want to unlock it.

Okay so this was almost definitely not done by the actual Ted Cruz but it still makes for an amusing story.

It Having read the book and also seen the original tv movies, this remake might actually be the strongest version of the story. Full disclosure: I don't get scared by scary movies, so I really can't judge it by that criteria. Is it scary? I mean, it's just a movie. All horror films are just movies. If that's what you're wondering, I'm not the guy to ask. However, I think it was really good with atmosphere, characterization, and especially the acting. I don't think any of these child actors are already famous (I could be wrong), but I see big things in their future because they hit it out of the park with their performances. Bill Skarsgard also does a commendable job as Pennywise. You can tell he's doing his best to distinguish himself from Tim Curry and for the most part I think it works. He gives off this creepy child predator vibe that Curry's performance, as much as I love him, didn't really have. I do have a few niggling criticisms. Several of the "scare" scenes play out independently of each other and are just kind of spliced together, so it feels at times like a series of unrelated vignettes than a cohesive whole. The book was kind of like this too at parts, so it's probably unavoidable without making a complete departure from the book's plot. There's also some conspicuous CG here and there. I don't think it ever looks that bad, but some effects are clearly better than others. A few parts that were probably meant to be scary also made me laugh instead but hey, at least I'm being entertained. Like I said, scary movies don't scare me so as long as I'm enjoying myself that's good enough for me. The easiest way for me to recommend this is to ask the following: Did you like Stranger Things? If you did, you'll probably enjoy this remake.