Holy shit. I was half-heartedly rooting for Jupiter Ascending to flop given my general distaste for the Wachowskis' work, but clearly my disgust was directed at the wrong movie this month. I'm sorry, everyone. I've made a huge mistake.

Just Normal. It isn't annihilating them, but there's still friendly fire.

I want a game that goes down smooth! Utterly flavorless and leaving me in a slightly numb daze afterwards!

I have no idea what this means but am now super excited for it. Every ladder I see - or location in which a ladder is conspicuously absent - will fill me with ecstatic anticipation. I long to run my fingers across its rungs and climb atop it. Holy crap.

Shovel Knight is so good. It's a game I struggled to even sit down to digest afterwards, because any time I tried to put it in perspective for analysis, I got caught in a loop of just raving about it. They really found the sweet spot between homage, parody, and modernization. A+ will play again.

The characters do get a little more definition as you go in, but the story gets waaaay more gonzo as you get further. (Ray, when someone asks you if you want to hear a crazy, magical conspiracy theory, you say yes.) I'd encourage you to stick with it at least through a couple of rooms to see if it draws you in.

Darkest Dungeon yeaaaah! I'm really excited for it, even if I got a little confused about the release date. I'm a non-Early-Access Kickstarter backer, so I saw folks streaming on Twitch (hooray, it's in beta!) and a Feb 3 release date (hooray, it's coming out!). And then the date hit and it turns out they were…

Fast travel is tricky. Instantly porting anywhere you want feels like a cheat code, but at some point, every game starts feeling too slow. Super Mario Bros. for NES taught me to play every game with the B button held down to run. FF6 taught me that it is absolutely worth it to sacrifice some combat power in order to…

Well, it happened. After recursing through Transistor to 100% it, I've hopped aboard the Dragon Age bandwagon. Dragon Age: Origins get!

My big issue with the Rachni queen choice is that it's excessively binary, and also immediate. Even though the queen is contained and you've gained control of the location, you MUST make your choice now, and that choice can only be to kill her or to let her completely free.

And it's doubly infuriating because on top of being an asshole, she's classed as a Soldier. So after you listen to her diatribes about Humanity, Fuck Yeah, you go to team selection and choose between 5 people with superpowers and Ashley, whose unique trait is "has an impractically large collection of guns."

For this run, I did some save-file tweaks to unlock Tryggvi (link), which may have helped a little. He's not a phenomenal unit, but I like him more than some of the others Rook gets. And he comes with a free (if not very good) item.

I don't think I've seen that clip! But I was introduced to the game by catching that segment on Day9's stream, and he was shrieking like a small child the entire time, so I think I've got the gist of it. :P

The worst part is that at my last level up, I chose the Limiter that provided a bigger experience boost, which I immediately realized cuts out like a third of my MEM. So just as I was starting to get a feel for some of the combinations available, I lost the ability to combine most of them. BRAIN NOT WORK GUD.

999 is all kinds of crazy, and it's great. Fair warning that you do need to finish the game multiple times to get the "proper" ending, though the game does a pretty good job of making sure you aren't repeating yourself too much in the process. And it's shorter than Bravely Default, so you haven't stumbled into the…

Oh jeez, adult RPGing. It's so sad! I'm running Dungeon World for a bunch of the same guys I played with in college, and I think we're all missing the ability to spend 6 hours locked in a stinky room with a bunch of pizzas to play without interruption. The whole "we can meet on Monday nights for like 2 hours" thing is…

I just finished up my second run on The Banner Saga, earning the Hard Mode With No Losses achievement in the process. Thankfully, it wasn't able to count the dozen+ reloads I used on the final fight just before losing; that would've been a crappy way to have to start over; holy cats Bellower is hard on Hard. It didn't…

Yeah, as soon as a giant block of kryptonite appears off the east coast, Clark should be announcing "This looks like a job for… The US Air Force. Seriously guys, just carpet bomb the place and let's meet the Avengers for shwarma."

Those paramedics are true heroes. They fixed up Brock from dead to defending his title in seconds.

Semi-related: Steam now offers built-in streaming! Have a game you want to show off to Gameological folks? Mention it on the group forums!