Mr. GOH!

My SoTR playthrough is at 67%. I feel like I ought to just power through the last couple of spots this week and then immerse myself in the cowboy lifestyle. Problem is that I am already deep into RDR2. A few RDR2 comments: I have failed to complete a number of missable side missions due to controller input confusion because in order to talk to someone, you have to aim at them WITHOUT a gun in your hand, or else they flee. I also failed to complete a missable encounter because the NPC I let ride on the back of my horse took it as a literal personal attack when I crashed my horse and both of us went flying. Horse crashes SUCK. Especially if they involve someone else, because that someone else is probably going to shoot you, so you will have to kill him. And then someone will witness you killing in self-defense and run to report it to the sheriff, so you have to kill the witness (or, I think if your reputation is good enough, persuade the witness not to go to the fuzz). Horse customization is on point; my horse, Bucephalus, is sporting a mohawk and platinum-dyed braided tail. Also he is a very good horse I got for free; thanks, preorder or special edition bonus! Arthur can get fat or skinny and you can let his hair grow to ridiculous lengths, but you can't magically grow hair at the barber's; the barber can only shorten your hair, like in real life. I am growing my Arthur's hair out so I can see the full array of hair customization options. There are a ridiculous number of types of plants, fish, and animals to hunt and harvest. Crafting seems pretty decent, at least early on, though crafting 100 individual special bullets is time-consuming. As many critics have said, RDR2 does not give a good goddamn about the value of your time; a lot of very common player actions are accompanied by slow animations, fast travel is really not all that fast, and a menu you can get to in a single button hold may stake six button presses to back out of. I cannot help but think this is entirely deliberate and I do not rate the game any less highly for it. Apart from the console-specific menus and the main menu, everything feels like a Western simulation. Your journal is not some nested set of links, but a physical journal Arthur can flip through, with many pages just dedicated to rather good sketches. Letters, journal entries, and notes are all well-written in character, too. The attention to detail is astounding. Everything about Dutch van der Linde and his gang is amazingly well-executed, and his voice actor does a tremendous job. Hell, all of the voice actors do a great job. Some of the quick random encounters are memorable mostly for the characters you meet as Arthur, and they all come alive through the voice work.

Man, this game is fantastic.

I played about 45 minutes last night and I am am quite pleased. Though I am kind of sorry I got so close to the end of Shadow of the Tomb Raider and will now put it aside for western hijinks for the next couple months.

RAM gives diminishing returns for gaming after 16 GB unless you need it for simultaneous video stuff, like streaming.

Just bought a new laptop because my old one died. It's and Acer 300 Helios with a GTX 1060 (6GB), i7-7000q, 256 GB SSD, and a 2 TB hybrid drive I have to install. Oh, I will also be buying Red Dead 2 for ps4 today. Not sure if I'll get the deluxe or regular edition.

Hey, Blinksy! Good to have another person from the greatest city on Earth join us!

Venom was terrible. The character motivations make zero sense. Dr. Skirth is, IIRC, an established Life Foundation character from the comics. Jenny Slate was a good choice for the thankless role.

Venom. I almost put this in "Ok movies," but it's just derivative enough and misuses otherwise-great actors enough that it's a bad movie. It is a boring, by-the-numbers origin story in which characters change and grow without it ever being shown why. It's baffling. There have to be scenes explaining certain characters' about-faces and relationships left on the cutting room floor. Despite featuring some great character actors and actresses, only Tom Hardy's performance as Brock and Venom is interesting. In fact, their relationship would be a great core for a very different movie. The wonderful Riz Ahmed plays a by-the-numbers corporate bad guy, unfortunately. Michelle Williams's role is thankless beyond belief, too. ==

Not a movie; it's the TV show "Kidding" which is or will be on Showtime.

God of War is my GOTY so far, LOL.

Really enjoying Pathfinder: Kingmaker. If you liked the Infinity Engine games, Pillars of eternity, or the Neverwinter Nights games from Obsidian, then this is for you. It used the Pathfinder ruleset which is based on DnD 3.5. Unless you are a diehard CRPG fan, I'd wait a month for them to iron out some of the bugs and to smooth out some of the issues the game has with telling the player about very important concepts after it's too late. The bugs I have encountered are annoying, but not game-breaking. The ones that bother me the most are mis-translated menu text the English-as-a-second-or-third-or-fourth language devs put in as placeholders. The actual writing in the game is pretty good, though. It's also a hard but fair game, mostly. At normal difficulty you have to have a good handle on how to deal with enemies' immunities, strengths, and weaknesses fairly early on. You also need to plan for enemies' debilitating attacks more than in similar CRPGs. Since I am a veteran of CRPGs and have a sort of instinctual feel for the ins and outs of DnD 3.5, it did not take me long to adjust. The kingdom management portion is handled well, though I lost 6 hours of my current game to a fuckup in which I did not notice that my kingdom was doomed. You can set management to automatic to prevent this sort of thing, but I like the management stuff, so I loaded an old save and powered through.

Not GOTY, but like a perfection of non-Rockstar open world design philosophy from circa 2010. God of War is my GOTY so far. But I do love Spider-Man.

Spider-Man. I finished the main story and all non-crime side missions and tasks, aside from the 'secret' photo spots I unlocked just before the Point of No Return. Easily the best Marvel game I have ever played and as good as the Arkham games. The gameplay is super fun, though I am not a huge fan of the number of times the game has too many cut scenes involving Spidey fighting or engaging ins Spider-Manly heroics that ought to have been wrapped into gameplay, even as an elaborate QTE. It is just such a joy to move through the world and fight as Spider-Man throughout the game; I fast traveled maybe half a dozen times during my entire playthrough. The characters and plot are interesting and very in keeping with a Spider-Man near the height of his powers without going through too many of his iconic supervillains. I enjoyed this version of the Marvel universe fronted by Spidey, though it sometimes felt weird that no other superheroes intervened in the kind of massive shit going down. Things ramp up enough that it's strange Iron Man or Daredevil or any of the other superheroes in this version of the Marvel universe don't try to rein things in. As an aside, I didn't see any references to the X-men, just non-Mutant Marvel heroes and villains in the game, but it is *not* the MCU at all. As far as Spidey's situation goes, Peter Parker as a scientist and MJ as a journalist works very well, as does Aunt May running a large charity, all departures from film and comic depictions of Spider-Man. Osborne also works as a politician as well as corporate leader. In some ways, the changes to MJ and Osborne also felt like a move towards a Superman-like universe in which MJ is a LL stand-in while Osborne is like Lex Luthor with a little more sleaziness and a lot more hair. I could talk about the game all day, but in my gut it does not feel like a GOTY. It is excellent and I would suggest that any gamer play it, but it feels just a little to reined in and weirdly small to be GOTY. It's excellence also lies in the fact that it presents the absolute best version of a lot of open-world tropes that have been done to death, from tower-climbing to unlock the map to side missions. It feels like the developers sought iteration over innovation so it ends up seeming like a masterpiece open-world game from 2010. But it's also so good, guys, you all should play it!

We order so much stuff plus get free grocery delivery and same-day delivery via Prime. Not to mention the streaming. It's a great value.

I bought Spider-Man and Shadows of the Tomb Raider (for the PC). I downloaded Spider-Man last night and its first mission showed a ton of promise. The combat system is Arkham-like, but Spidey moves and fights so much differently from Batman that it doesn't feel same-y at all. The traversal is pretty fun, too. I'm just to the open world unlocking, so still super early. @TheMightyEthan I do not understand how a modern household can exist without Prime.

I always thought that, in atmosphere, the starfighters' shields sort of round out their terrible aerodynamics.

@TheMightyEthan UC 4 stays strong the whole way. The spin-off is also pretty great, though I played it about a year after I completed UC4.

I am sure you already found yours, but from the Home Screen you go to "My Page" and then Profile on the upper right (with a pic of your Mii) and then it's pretty self-explanatory.

Because it was free and I watch most bad sci-fi/action movies. I am also fascinated with just how terrible the Transformers movies are.

SW-0683-3246-3031 The friend code system is utter bullshit.

Transformers: the Last Knight. It's worse than the rest, which is saying something. It's like having a 2.5 hour long seizure.

I liked them both despite how dumb they are. Slowly playing through 1 now and planning a replay of 2 before 3 comes out.

I de-preordered Octopath traveler based on reports about how it's 8 individual kinda bland stories with no real connections and overlap.

Final update of my MCU list for the year. Elite Tier: Winter Soldier GotG Ragnarok Spider-Man Black Panther Civil War Good fun tier: Iron Man 1 Avengers Captain America Infinity War Ant-Man and the Wasp Meh Tier: Doctor Strange GotG Vol II Iron Man 3 Ant-Man Age of Ultron Garbage Tier: Iron Man 2 Hulk Thor Thor: the Dark World