Happy holiday weekend, Americans! I hope you all get some time off from work to go to a barbecue and see some friends/family. To the rest of the world, I envy your lack of constant panic and wish you a lovely weekend as well.

Counterpoint: Monument Valley 2 is the most disappointing piece of pop culture I've experienced all year. The puzzles showed little ingenuity beyond some initial illustrative pizzaz, the writing was devoid of any of the sardonic introspective wit that made the first game so indelible on its unsuspecting audience, and…

I didn't realize until diving into this demo that my friends list is mostly people I worked with two offices ago or Gameological people I've never met in real life. The demo (and presumably the final game) allows you to pull Miis from four places: your system's friends list, Mii Central (the most popular Miis online,…

I've been enjoying the Miitopia demo Nintendo dropped on the eShop a couple of days ago. Right now, I'm a pop star in a spangly vest, Agnello's a mage in a tattered cloak I tried to make look like his iconic smoking jacket, and my wife is a stubborn knight, because hoo-boy did all those E3 pressers this week remind me…

I was especially endeared to the Kirby trailer. It seemed like the "hook" of the game this time will be love-and-friendship, as seen by having Kirby throw hearts at enemies in order to convert them to allies, charging up a glowing heart in order to combine powers with the teammates, and all four teammates joining into…

I've been hungrily anticipating with The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti since its failed Kickstarter a year ago, and it was easily the highlight of Microsoft's presser for me (though it still has no release date and I'm hoping it will make it's way to non-Microsoft platforms before too long as there really aren't…

I wasn't particularly excited about the prospect of Monument Valley 2, having burned through the original and all its expansions within hours of their respective releases, but then I remembered that my iPad's lock screen has been the "there is nobody left to forgive us" screen from the first game for the past 3+ years…

My first dragon sighting was similarly awe-filled. I was scouting a tower at night, sneaking around a camp of lizalfos, and suddenly there's a giant glowing electric worm overhead and I was just like "shh… shh… they can't hear you, just keep quiet, oh man, i'm gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie." Just a heads-up going up…

My fiancée and I got into this show late. She's stuck with Grey's Anatomy all this time (I gave it up shortly after T.R. Knight left, but by virtue of living together I've been half-paying-attention to the past two seasons) and we both were hooked on How To Get Away With Murder, so we binged the first few seasons of…

I think The Head appeared as a t-shirt graphic a few times in Daria. Fogel directed, like, half of the first season of Daria (the show was famously cheaply-and-quickly produced within the MTV office at Times Square, with many of the voices provided by people who were just low-level employees around the office) so the…

I've always taken a certain amount of pride in the fact that I grew up in the same town and went to the same high school as MF DOOM. Other Long Beach, New York, alum include Def Jam founder and producer-extraordinaire Rick Rubin (there's home video footage of him playing bass drum in our school's marching band),…

If you're ever hanging out in NYC, we do this karaoke almost every Sunday night. I've been doing it for about nine years with a group of buddies from a comic book museum we all used to work at.

If they don't announce North America plans for that controller by mid-June, I'm just going to order one from overseas. They're all region-free, right? I NEED that gorgeous controller in my life.

There's one more house behind those show houses (look for a bridge between the houses) that's the one for sale. You'll find the crew of workers outside that house and you can talk to them to start the whole process. Owning the Hateno house is great, as you can sleep there whenever you want to regain health for free…

We did that at her office Christmas party last year, when I convinced them to hire our favorite KJ for the evening. Meatloaf is a definite mainstay. She has also barred me from doing any Britney Spears or Kelly Clarkson due to my propensity for rolling around on the floor while singing those numbers.

Since the only event we're having is a dinner reception in a tiny space, we're not going to be engaging in much dancing (hence the decision to have an afterparty at our regular dive bar on our regular karaoke night, guaranteed danceable tunes AND I'm pretty sure we won't have to pay for our own drinks all night). The…

We're a 40-person shindig, so it's quite tiny, really just family and a handful of our closest confidants. They're not clearing our motherf***ing desserts, I will INSIST on take-out boxes (we're going to our favorite bar afterward to afterparty so we can actually dance and see more friends and leftover desserts will…

The venue is providing a chocolate ganache tart and a ricotta cheesecake. We are providing two single-tier cakes (because one two-tier cake costs more that twice as much as two single-tier cakes and offers five fewer servings. As soon as you introduce verticality, all bets are off). The first cake is chocolate with…

ALSO, I totally f***ing called it on the green & pink Splatoon joy-cons way back on January 13th. They look fresh to death and I definitely need at least the Splatoon pro controller if not also the green/pink joy cons (I still only have the grey ones that came with my Switch, so still no four-player MK8D or Puyo Puyo…

I just finished the second stage of Thumper on Switch, and oh my goodness, handheld mode with headphones is THE way to play this game. The HD rumble is superb, i can feel every skitter and screech vibrating through my bones.