In Persona 4 Golden I did two back-to-back playthroughs (to the point of literally starting a new game as soon as the credits finished), because it is my favorite game ever and I not only wanted to get the platinum but just experience the story again. I capped out at 198 hours, because there is something wrong with me.

Plotwise, they're all standalone, albeit with 4 and 5 having some small winking references to previous games in the series. 5 is definitely the most accessible as far as overall player-friendliness and gameplay enhancements, but I don't know what kind of effect that would have on 3 and 4 if you ever decided to play…

Oh, also played way too much Magikarp Jump on my phone and got to the (current) end of the game. It's hard to think of a game more asinine and empty outside of pure clickers (and Magikarp Jump is kind of a slow motion clicker in itself, being that it requires no actual skill on the player's part and is driven entirely…

Finished Nier: Automata last week, which was pretty amazing. I don't know if it's the first existentialist game (in the way that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the first postmodernist game) but I can't think of one that's tapped into the horror of meaninglessness as well as this. Or a game that intertwines its gameplay with…

holy shit

Repackaging people's ongoing real-life trauma as water cooler entertainment? Yeah, I kinda get that same feeling sometimes, though I don't really know where the line is on documentaries in general. Like, is there a difference between this/Serial and The Thin Blue Line?

Whatever happened to Stephen Sommers? Dude made more bad movies than good ones but they generally made money, right? But his last movie was a barely-released adaptation of Odd Thomas (starring the late, lamented Anton Yelchin).

The flesh-eating beetles were pure nightmare fuel for 11-year-old me. I think that may have been a significant factor in my still-present bugaphobia.

Yeah, I rewatched the first Mummy last week for the first time in probably 15 years, and was immediately struck by how fucking terrific Jerry Goldsmith's score is. I'd stack it up against any of John Williams' Indiana Jones work.

The part where the mom finishes her nursing degree made me have a pretty hardcore Boy This Room Sure Is Dusty moment

I sorta got what he was going for with the way the fight scenes in Batman Begins are cut—Batman was still leaning hard into the "spooky ninja" aspect to scare thugs so it was supposed to be disorienting. But the Cuisinart editing also had the effect of taking away any feeling of like, actual *impact*, like you said.…

I don't think anyone's disputing that. But Trump had maybe the biggest opportunity out of any president we've had to do something concrete and constructive about it, and he said no as a favor to his robber baron friends. So he gets just a *touch* more blame than most of us.

"We want to make room for riskier shows," Hastings said, after which his company cancelled arguably the riskiest show on their roster. Get fucked.

I don't think this counts, technically, but I just watched Ms. 45 a couple nights ago and Zoe Lund dresses up as a nun at the end and goes on a misandrist murder tear at a Halloween party.

I thought the lyric was "every sale's a whale," as in "whale of a sale." And yeah, someone pointed out the melody to me yesterday and I died irl

Yeah. I don't think I'm a Persona 5 fanboy, as much as I love it (some of my issues with it headlined an article here, even), but the later Game in Progress writeups felt shallow, smug, and off-the-mark in their criticism. For all the issues I have with P5, I don't think there'll be another game this year with more on…

My main beef with Automata so far is that it feels like the enemies all have way too much health. I ended up taking it down to easy difficulty just because it takes so long for things to die.

I somehow managed to get the platinum trophy after about a month of near-nonstop play, and it leaves me a jittery mess after every session. It's maybe the most intense and stressful game I've ever played.

Finished Nier! That game is fucking depressing as shit! I was kinda hoping that the different playthroughs would be constructed such that you could, I dunno, fix the endings of all the arcs since most of them end on down notes, but nope! Just a big ol' ball o' sadness and tragedy.

That's not entirely fair. Corden at least has talent, with his Broadway bona fides and all. Fallon is good at laughing at his own jokes.