I haven't played enough 2014 games to comment on the soundtrack question unfortunately… actually I don't think I've played any 2014 games other than Rebirth.

Yeah, Mom's Heart is a huge change! In the original that fight was kind of a breather, an easier boss battle before the **SPOILERS MAYBE** really hard stuff in Sheol or Cathedral. Now it's really hard in its own right.

I am resisting the urge to unwrap the Super Mario 3D World I bought for my kid. But if I play it and rewrap it he'll find the save files on the Wii U when he goes to play it and then he'll see through this whole Santa Claus thing.

Are you me?

I still have all of my Nintendo-published Wii, GameCube, N64, SNES, NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and DS games, while I've sold a lot of my games for other systems. …So I guess I'm part of the problem!

What you said! I've done some gaming events at libraries, and a good one is less about who's the best and more about making sure everyone's on roughly equal footing. You know, dialin' up the chaos. And snacks (if at the library) and booze (if at home) (and not for children)!

The vast majority of my successful runs are with Azazel. Without him I'm pretty terrible!

Have you unlocked Azazel yet? That's the only thing that's let me progress as far as I have.

I had a ton of fun with NintendoLand. Although, like you said, I mainly played it with my kids (and then sent them to bed and got drunk with Mrs. Aklab while we tried to finish the Zelda and Metroid minigame levels they were holding us back on).

We got a Wii U a few months ago and love it… but game prices are so high! A preowned Nintendo-made game is still like $50! I've been spoiled by Steam sales and PC games.

Haven't had a lot of time for gaming in this, the most wonderful time of the year *grumble grumble*, but I've still been spending a lot of time in Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I can get through the final final boss pretty routinely and the final final final bosses occasionally, but hit a wall after that. Still loving it…

Seriously. It must be incredibly frustrating to write a thoughtful game review and then have the first 100+ comments be people's complaints with the basic idea of art/media criticism and the function of a review.

At this point I think Springsteen is grandpa-rock rather than dad-rock.

Us too! CW shows all have the same rhythm that makes easy to watch while you're doing something else. I guess that's damning with faint praise…

I'm more of a Not Quite Human guy myself

Depends on the game. If I'm playing Isaac: Rebirth (as I will all weekend despite playing 30 hours last week while still keeping my job and family) I usually turn the sound down and half-watch whatever TV my wife's watching. This habit has led to me watching all the "pretty good" shows I can find. Not so engaging that…

Oh yeah, what you mentioned about the final final boss. It's so much harder! In the original that fight was kind of a nice break before you got to the much harder stuff. Not anymore.

I played the original for probably 50 hours before I even beat Mom the first time. The key for me was playing through all the challenges. They force you to learn to adapt your play style to weird item combinations. After that it was a breeze (relatively speaking). Some of the item combinations in the Rebirth…

I've been playing Binding of Isaac: Rebirth pretty constantly since it came out, and will keep doing so all weekend. I'm quite happy with it!

Ha! And the city/county councils, and the state legislature, and the friends of the library…