Heh, yeah, the “Insurance Fraud” minigame. With Adrenaline Mode where after enough hits, you gain super-inertia and can ricochet among cars, houses, and various obstacles to rack up combo points. I feel like I didn’t quite get the hang of that one, but it’s a suitably hilarious idea and the ragdoll physics + “oof!…

Yeah, that narrative focus was cool about Hard West. I also liked the “luck” mechanic in principle, although after all the XCOM that I’ve played (including quite recently before Hard West), it felt odd that I could almost always predict correctly whether a shot would hit or not. But even then, it played like an…

Yeah, that narrative focus was cool about Hard West. I also liked the “luck” mechanic in principle, although after all the XCOM that I’ve played (including quite recently before Hard West), it felt odd that I could almost always predict correctly whether a shot would hit or not. But even then, it played like an…

Don’t know if you are an XCOM fan at all, but if you enjoy turn-based tactical combat, Mario+Rabbids is actually pretty fun and puts some cool twists on the formula. I have drifted away from it for the moment, but I was quite obsessed for a couple of weeks there when we first got the Switch.

Ugh, isn’t that the worst when you’ve been through a whole game (or even just one especially challenging/interesting section) and they don’t reward you with a cutscene or anything? I’ve come to realize how much I appreciate the moments where you get to put down the controller (etc.) for a minute and absorb some story…

Hey, I understand where you’re coming from on that. As I said, I’ve only taken on the one enemy so far in SotC, so I have to leave myself some time to actually get familiar with the controls, but if it’s anything like Ico (which obviously it will be in various ways), I assume I will continue to get infuriated and/or…

What Have You Finished This Week?

Well, there’s a vast contingent of my wife’s family (parents, brother, various Canadian aunts/uncles/cousins) descending on our new house this weekend to check it out for the first time since we bought it in August, so I probably won’t get a lot of video game time in. But for next week, it’s probably:

Is it just my Internet connection being weird with the video, or do we actually see the camera repeatedly autofocus during the pan (which is indeed super sloppy) from one airport door to the other?

Thanks for the review of Lamplight City. I am all backlogged up right now (trying to get through both Yakuza 0 and Saints Row: The Third), but this is on my wishlist so I have been thinking about it since I got the notification that it was out (although, same days as Life Is Strange 2, so that might be a higher…

I liked Undertale but I sort of hear what you’re saying. There were definitely some annoying moments with overly cute dialogue etc., but as my respectableish colleague already alluded to, I think they were intended to be funny rather than harsh, and that’s how I took them. Still, I didn’t really get why everyone…

I have only played Rusty Lake Paradise, which I thought was the first one but apparently I was wrong. Nicely weird game with some interesting puzzles here and there. What is the one you are playing now?

Awesome! Here’s what you and I will look like on the Yakuza 0 Revue Club thread:

Yeah, the main plot is a really weird case of “tell, don’t show”, in the sense that they show you all kinds of crazy chaos and then tell you afterwards that something they didn’t show in that scene nevertheless happened and was a major plot point: “I can’t believe [MAJOR CHARACTER] is dead!” “What the rival gang did…

This week’s lineup is basically the same as last week’s:

What Have You Finished This Week?

Congrats! Yeah, that was me and Fallout 3 and then Half-Life 2 even more so. I continue to feel amazingly good about having finished those games, even weeks and months later. I think I care too much about video games and/or obsessive lists and backlogs.

Thanks! Yeah, as far as unpacking, I think I will get there far before my wife too (note: she is an artist, so, hahahaha), but the real issue is all the fixes to the house and stuff. We both have a lot of stuff on our list for that. This place is one big pile of “deferred maintenance”.

Awesome. My son loved the first Monument Valley and we had to get the second one right away, but right after we bought it he went on to the next shiny thing. One of these days I will try both of them...

Well, it took me a bit under 2 hours to finish the whole thing. My 9-year-old son was definitely moving through each level a bit more slowly, but he played it after me so he was able to just do the levels “à la carte” and skip the dialog etc. (too bad because it’s pretty funny at times), and he got through the darn…