Yeah, APC seems like a pretty big omission, but there’s basically no heavy music on this list at all.

Yeah, Primal Heart seems like a nice return to form. The Golden Echo’s felt like a bridge between her jazzier side and her more experimental side, and I’m happy she’s going all-in on the latter (though I wouldn’t mind a return to the former at some point).

Dishonored 2 is probably the most salient example of this trope in video games. It really doesn’t do much with the premise.

They had some visual prototypes and a lot of animations, but the art style just looked like garbage. They’ve kept a similar aesthetic for the Kickstarter prototypes, but now the polygonal look feels like a deliberate artistic choice, not an N64 title with better-than-average lighting.

I’m getting the sense that this Kickstarter won’t meet its goal either. Unless a campaign gets halfway there within the first few days, it’s pretty much doomed.

Mario+Rabbids absolutely does hold up as you get further into the game. It also becomes much more difficult. You’re actually going to have to strategize, especially if you want gold ratings on each level.

It’s competent enough that I believe its terrible features (i.e. most of them) are completely intentional, and the devs legitimately think their ideas are good. There’s very little discussion material: it’s just mind-numblingly boring and almost insulting in how user-unfriendly it is.

On the docket for this weekend: I’m going to power through the remainder of the awful, awful InnerSpace. I haven’t played a game this irredeemably bad in years. It feels like I’ve been playing it for an eternity, but I just checked a walkthrough, and I’m only a third of the way through. If you ever wanted the answer…

w00t w00t!

Yeah, everything I’ve read makes me think this is an oddly hollow, toothless experience. Show some imagination, devs!

Ah I see. It’s a game about cults that doesn’t have anything interesting to say about cults. I mean, authoritarianism was just an example - cultishness is a compelling topic too! - but if the game doesn’t have anything interesting to say about cults, then that’s a bit of a disappointment.

I totally get your first paragraph. That’s what I suspected; admittedly I haven’t been following the marketing for the game all that closely, but I think it’s safe to assume that preconceived notions don’t merely arise out of thin air. If that’s how Ubisoft wanted the game to marketed, then it’s fair to judge the game…

I’m super on board with this. Gina Rodriguez is a national treasure.

At the risk of giving critics too much credit, they’ve praised games for being bold enough to “go there” before. Wolfenstein II, which is mentioned in the review, is a good example. So I don’t know if the issue is that Far Cry 5 isn’t “real” enough. But I haven’t played it yet, so I can’t judge.

Pah, only six deaths at Action Park? That’s nothing compared to climbing Mount Everest!

There were a lot of very negative reviews of Act 2 that had nothing to do with the Hashtag that Shall Not Be Named. But yeah, Act 2 is even more adventure-gamey than the first, so if you weren’t big on the first act, the second won’t change your mind.

This weekend, I’ll be playing more Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory. I just went through part of a quest where my companion tried to get me to hit on girls in order to convince one of them to help me hack a server. It didn’t make much sense. What I did want to note, though, is how much more male-driven…

That’s right: I have to go back and do the DLC at some point. I keep putting it off due to new PC games. Stop releasing new games, developers!

If the backlash to Part 2 put you off, I wouldn’t pay it any mind. I don’t think the second act is as strong as the first, but I also think people were expecting it to tell a very different kind of story than it did, and that’s what drove most of the backlash.

I’m a happy Switch owner, but I can definitely see this. If it weren’t the extremely lengthy Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (90 hours and counting!) my Switch would be sitting unused on my coffee table right now.