Mr. GOH!

Mal completed his gift of dystopic cyberpunk games with a surprise final gift of Thank you and happy New Year!

This is so tough! Of the games I have completed, Disco Elysium, Control, and Fire Emblem: 3 Houses are tied as my personal GOTY. But Sekiro seems really cool from the small parts I've played and Outer Wilds is just a triumph of game design and exploration. So I guess those are my five Games of 2019.

The Irishman: I didn't love it, but it is a good movie though it is very long. Might be Scorcese's bleakest movie. The Two Popes: I didn't expect to like it, but it's a great, focused movie about imagined dialogues between the current pope and the previous pope. Parasite: Best movie of this year. A must-see. The Lighthouse: One of my favorite movies of 2019 because there is very little that is funnier than Willem Defoe believably channeling the Sea Captain Simpsons character for two hours. Simply amazing.

Rise of Skywalker is really bad and Kathleen Kennedy should be fired for how badly she fucked up the sequel trilogy, particularly for the stupid overreaction to the loud moron brigade that hated on TLJ. TLJ forever.

You're the best, Mal!!!!!

Steam ID and wishlist: http://steamcommunit...61197969619762/ Been feeling the smaller indies since I don't have as much time these days.

His Dark Materials is fine, just like the book. I am not a fan of Lin-Manuel as Scoresby, though. He just seems like Lin-Manuel goofing around. But I can't believe nobody's in here talking about Watchmen, which is so very good.

The Mandalorian is way better than I expected. I would kill and die for the Child.

I'll do it too!

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Didn't 100% it, but got close. Really enjoyed it as a Souls-lite with Uncharted and latter-day Tomb Raider tendencies. I also enjoyed the narrative and the voice performances. It performed reasonably well. I had no crashes or game- breaking bugs. It's an Unreal engine game (no Frostbite!!!), so there's texture pop-in at times. It's usually good, but I experienced a couple of really bad environment texture pop-ups and one utter failure to load any environment te tectures in a particular random area. But the game looks good and is very very Star Wars in mostly very good ways. I get the sense there are lots of references to lore created in the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons. It's been a great week for Star Wars with this and the Mandalorian releasing.

I'll be getting the PS4 version because I am impatient and it seems like a game I don't want to miss.

Outer Worlds, Death Stranding, and Jedi: Fallen Order. Really enjoying Outer Worlds as a polished and limited scope New Vegas spiritual successor.

@TheMightyEthan Indeed! because each has been better than the last.

I'm about 20 hours into Disco Elysium and loving it. It's among the best RPGs I have ever played and has one of the most interesting character building systems in any game. It is tough to get into how it is so special without spoiling it; it is built around you and the your character discovering the world and game systems at the same time. This is not a combat-heavy game - I believe all combat is simply a skill check, though I haven't had any combat yet, so I could be wrong. It is the bastard child of visual novels, 80s text adventures, Sierra/Lucasarts 90's adventure games, late 90's/early 00's Western RPGs like Planescape: Torment, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate 2. If you don't like reading in games, then DE is not for you - this is a game that revolves around conversations and text encounters, though the actual writing is fantastic and hilarious. The narrative and NPCs are very reactive, more so than any game I've ever played in the sense that there is a ton of freedom of choice as to how you deal with most problems and NPCs actually remember what you've done and said in ways other similar games. The narrative doesn't appear to railroad you with false or limited choices, a la Telltale games; I replayed a couple of sequences to see if different approaches yielded different outcomes and holy shit did they ever yield different outcomes. There is also a good amount of "fail forward" opportunities in which if you fail a skill check or fuck up a task, new and different potentially beneficial opportunities may reveal themselves, which you would not have seen if you had "succeeded." It's an isometric game evocative of Baldur's Gate with a beautiful oil-painting-like art style that contrasts nicely with just how decrepit, corrupt, and degenerate the world and its inhabitants are. The art style throughout is consistent and excellent. I will put the rest of my impressions behind a spoiler tag for any spoiler fanatics out there, but I won't discuss anything that isn't revealed within the first ten minutes of gameplay. I am having a huge blast with the game and suggest it to anyone who likes the role-playing aspects of RPGs.

Disco Elysium. I cannot believe they made a game like this but I am *incredibly* glad they did. I have spent maybe an hour or so with it and it is hilarious.

Joker. It is a competently-made movie that fails to fulfill its own promise or explore the Joker's origin in a truly meaningful way. Joaquin Phoenix gives a great performance, though the character he creates is not a believable threat to any version of Batman I've ever seen. It is truly bizarre to see a mainstream blockbuster in which there are no heroes and the protagonist is extremely unsympathetic. I would not suggest paying money to see this movie in the theater, but it isn't as terrible as, say, Batman v Superman in many ways. The character study of Arthur Fleck's transformation into Joker is carried only by Phoenix's bizarre performance.

Gears of War 4. I got it for free with Gears 5. Gears 4 is boring and dumb and repetitive and its design seems like something from 2008. Thankfully it's also short. I am somewhat amazed by just how much better Gears 5 is, though I'm only halfway through.

Control. This is now my GOTY and I cannot wait for the DLC expansions. The whole game is extremely my shit.

ACAB, Mal. ACAB.

Control, which has replaced FE3H as my GOTY. I'm playing it on PC with an RTX 2070 and it is pretty, even at 1080p (4k won't work except at relatively low settings). The ray tracing stuff is neat, but the game play and overall design is excellent. Everything from the game play to the level design to the narrative all come together to make a great game.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I neat it a regular game as the Golden Deer a few weeks ago and just finished my Black Eagles New Game+ this morning. I think I've seen enough of the story and support conversations to not need a Blue Lion playthrough to declare that I have completed the game. I loved it. GOTY 2019, even if it was kind of easy even on the hard difficulty setting. Spoilers if you haven't finished as the Black Eagles and Golden Deer.