Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. Even as a kid I found parts of the game insultingly easy, and others almost unplayably hard. Based on intermittent experiences with the classic titles I knew that Mega Man boss fights were usually frantic and challenging, but the pace of the boss fights in MM8 is unusually slow, with…

Mega Man 8 sometimes catches heat from hardcore Mega Man fans, but I seriously love that game. I got into the Mega Man series late, and 8 was the first game I ever sat down and played seriously, and is also the first in the series I ever beat. I went back and beat some of the classics for nerd cred's sake, but I still…

Ni No Kuni is a good choice. Supposedly a sequel is being discussed now.

Tokyo Jungle is a ripper, man. I still fire it up every now and again. A very pure mechanics-driven game that almost wouldn't be out of place standing shoulder to shoulder with old school arcade games like Pac Man or Centipede. All about juggling mechanics, making complex choices that become more demanding and more…

Man I loved Zack and Wiki. I was really hoping that would become the next big Capcom franchise, but I guess it sold so poorly that they've decided to just move on with their lives and keep making Street Fighters. They probably could have found some really interesting ways to use the Wii U's tablet thing in a Zack and…

I will always reserve a special place in my heart for Star Wars Battlefront for allowing me to kill Ewoks.

Any game that is like Pan's Labyrinth at all has my attention.

Supposedly Catherine was originally developed to test an engine built for Persona 5, but in the end they decided to make a brand new engine for that game anyway, so now Catherine is just sort of awkwardly standing around with its own engine.

I was considering choosing Catherine for this one, but it would have been slightly hypocritical of me since I, er, haven't played it yet either. I suppose I should really get on that. Time is running out! It's the whole premise of this list!

Nier has a lot of really bonkers ideas, and actually delivers on a lot of its promises. What really baffles me is that it's spun off from the similar but terrible Drakengard series, which got its third instalment as recently as this year.

I was thinking about this recently myself, and was wondering if Twelve's falling out with humanity was going to open up the doors to finally getting some more alien companions on the show. They wouldn't even need to stretch the effects budget all that much, just go the Adric/Nyssa/Romana route of having conveniently…

Your summary here of the density of Capaldi's performance in his final scene (and he only has like two lines once Clara's smackdown really begins!) is just terrific. The show has criticized the Doctor's behaviour before, but usually his reaction to that criticism has been much more simple- Ten was the tragic hero who…

Definitely agreed that this is shaping up to be the new high water mark for the revived series. Unless the entire back half of the series is full of groaners this will probably replace season 5 as my favourite.

I understand being frustrated with the scientific inaccuracies on a show that is ostensibly built on a science fiction foundation, but it's important here to look at which rules were broken and why. As you said, the characters don't walk around without helmets on the surface of the moon and they don't make themselves…

Ehn, I don't know man. The decision the characters are given is clearly pitched as a moral one, and I don't think the morally upright decision is necessarily the most beneficial or least dangerous. To suggest that killing the Moon would be morally righteous because there were no foreseeable "benefits" to allowing it…

Some other people have already made similar points, but I don't think an episode being scientifically inaccurate makes it terrible- in fact, I thought this was maybe the best episode of the season along with "Listen," even accounting for the Camembert softness of the science. Really the strength of the story is in the…

Hamilton's list has Beyond: Two Souls on it, which is weird, because my buddy and I tried playing that game two-player style and had a terrible time. Maybe we were just doing it wrong, but only one person can actually be doing anything at any one time, so it's functionally identical to just passing the controller back…

(ParaNorman spoilers discussed below)

Trolling For Columbine?

Hype levels maximum over here. Coraline and ParaNorman are two of my recent favourites, ParaNorman especially is in my personal all-time top ten and is probably my favourite film of the last five years or so.