Recommend XCOM 2 very, very highly, especially if you liked the first one. I think they have ironed out a lot of the initial bugs now, and even with the annoyingly high percentage of missions that feel rushed because of the "turn timer" (hurry, the bomb is going to blow! etc.), it's just straight-up awesome XCOM fun,…

It's been a weird, overworked, disorganized week, and I haven't done as much gaming as I wanted to (though probably more than I should have, given my workload). Plus, I'm a bit of a slow learner and my current games are challenging me. So it's the same big three as last week:

Well… but if somebody did quit without saying something about it, would you even notice? I mean, I have had moments of using Facebook a lot (posting, not just reading), then suddenly deciding to quit with no fanfare and no goodbye post. And I have had friends just disappear too, and I didn't notice for a while until,…

I understand what you're saying about Kesey's misogyny… "or is it his characters' misogyny?" Difficult to untangle, and possibly part of character-building (I have forgiven Nabokov a lot in that regard). But still, it felt gross as I read it from my 2016 perspective.

"Hey, I'm here for the meeting of the Ram All Bums club…?"

Well, it's an article about the Violent Femmes (mostly) and we are 75 comments in and nobody else has said it, so I'll step up: Brian Ritchie is one of the great rock bassists of all time, and his style is a huge part of what I liked about the Violent Femmes— and he doesn't get mentioned nearly as often as he should…

In keeping with my usual tendency to be 15 years behind on what everyone else I know has read and seen, I have never seen the movie and only just read the novel for the first time this past summer.

My dad was a pretty big fan for a while too. Approximately the same era that he was playing tons of bluegrass and African rock (Indestructible Beat of Soweto, anyone?) and suchlike. My wife and kids are still pretty well baffled when I put on any of that stuff at home (well, the kids like the Soweto album), but…

Oh, you can't do both money and other perks at the same time? Grr. Sort of ties in with the weird way that story stuff (like the rats vs. guinea pigs on Pigsmote Isle, for example) suddenly resets when you switch to a new captain, even though the calendar keeps moving forward. "Poof, the Dawn Fragments have gone back…

OK, I will watch out for that next time I play (Alan Wake is actually in the mid-region of my backlog list).

Well, the Déjà Vu thing was really just a dumb joke about the concept of déjà vu. Sorry, I haven't been sleeping well recently and my comedy circuits may be slightly malfunctioning.

What a bunch of clowns!

No he does not look like Nathan Fillion and yes it is just you. Damn.

So, more or less in direct response to your post, I dived back into the game today, and at last (within 10 minutes, no less), I have learned to stop worrying and love the new combat system. (Farewell, "Marksman".) Probably about 75% of the way through the Mordin Solus mission and finally coming to terms with how this…

I liked Oxenfree a lot. Loved the music, the look, the overall tone and the characters. There's also a weird and ultimately unimportant "social media integration" feature that crops up briefly near the end of the game which I found oddly fascinating.

I've said (or implied) it before, but you do a great job of describing what makes Invisible, Inc. exciting. I haven't played that much and my initial impression (having just finished XCOM 2) was "Eh, XCOM lite", but after just a few missions I started to realize the game was deeper than it looked. I am going to get…

My son was into these for a while, and I totally get what you're saying. But for me, there was always a moment every two or three levels where you have no fucking clue what you are supposed to do, and the in-game cues are useless (the big weak link in what's otherwise some pretty solid game design, as @Enkidum:disqus…

Yeah, the one thought I had about that was that you can line up certain events to where you can actually will all your property (including those precious, hard-to-come-by Echoes) to your successor. Having the next captain start out with even a 500-Echo head start, which then maybe lets him/her pass on even more to the…

I don't know what it is… Maybe it's just that I got really used to doing things a certain way in ME1, for better or worse, and I am having difficulty adjusting. Part of the issue is probably that ME1 was my first time really playing through a shooter on mouse & keyboard controls… and now the controls are all different…

It's another one of those weeks where I keep piling on the games… here's what I'm supposedly actively playing right now.