In a wild change, I'll be playing Bayonetta 2, Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel!, watching the girlfriend play Dragon Age: Origins, and planning future D&D adventures. I haven't touched Dark Souls since last week!

This is a case where people's expectations would have been well-served by paying attention to the publisher and distribution model, rather than the source and the developer.

There's a deep wellspring of respect for Jason Biggs' professional integrity 'round these parts!

"New York City just isn't that big."

It's not every season, but Final Fantasy VI is a late autumn/winter game for me. A Nova Scotian late fall/autumn, that is. Basically, it doesn't feel right to play it if it's not grey and wet and miserable outside.

Seconding what @rvb1023:disqus said, I held off on buying The Wonderful 101 for almost a full year after playing the demo, despite the fact that up until then I had been eagerly awaiting its release.

I once dreamt that I was in the home of the director of my graduate school (a stern, 40-something British woman). She contemptuously asked me if I wanted a snack and, when I said yes, put a bowl of Jello on the floor and said "well, eat up, then." Suddenly I was naked.

I once saw a horror site review of Audition where the critic referred to an extremely disturbing scene where a man is "forced to drink milk from a dog dish." I can't imagine how horrified that critic would have been if he had been paying enough attention to understand what was actually happening.

Happy birthday!!!

Ah, Pokey/Porky… what a little bastard!

I agree with your assessment of Diablo and flavor 100%, but I found it the opposite in Borderlands. I have played a lot of both, but about ten minutes into our first attempt on the second one, I turned to my girlfriend and vowed never to play the first one again. It feels like a tech demo compared to the sequel.

I can't imagine the game being any fun at all as a solo experience. Which doesn't necessarily mean you'd like it if you played co-op, but if you ever will, that's how it will happen.

The girlfriend's away, so I shall devote myself to finishing off the DLC for the two Dark Souls games and trying to unlock some weapons in Hyrule Warriors.

Well, I couldn't make it all the way through that, but I did laugh at the line "You sneeze 'achoo,' she calls you out!"

My read on The Sopranos doesn't quite line up with that, but it's a perfect encapsulation of Todd's view of the show. Which is not take away from the fact that he wrote a ton of great stuff in those reviews!

Those Sopranos reviews! Almost all of them seemed to begin with a paragraph or two in Todd's usual "I declare the themes of this show I like to be universal experiences of all people" style, but with that show in particular it resulted in a lot of "We all hope that we're good people, and that we can do good in the…

Oh man, that was sad stuff. By the time he finally decompensated and started tearing the show apart for failing to live up to his expectations I was starting to hope that it would just suddenly become brilliant overnight to make him feel better.

Your passion for this show drips from every paragraph, and yet it never gets in the way of a clear critical eye. Just phenomenal stuff, and I hope my pot-addled brain can remember to pop over to The Solute to see your review series through to completion.

I'm so glad we're saying "phrasing" again!

I've heard about DA2 and forewarned the girlfriend, although I think she was unlikely to send graphic threats of child murder to the lead writer, no matter how watered-down the combat system is!