Good morning, all! Wild weekend coming up— we somehow ended up hosting all of my wife’s Canadian family for Canadian Thanksgiving... for the first time... right after moving back to the States?!

On the game addiction front, I’ve definitely been doing that self-reflection lately. I plan on staying far away from the upcoming Monster Hunter World, because as much as I love those games, it will ruin me.

Everything looks so different here. I’ve been away too long. Change frightens me so. I’ve been playing a bunch of games and finishing few of them.

Testing, testing... I think I made the transfer over to Kinja, but it didn’t care for my apostrophe starting moniker, so I’m going with another Simpson reference as per AV Club account creation protocol.

More Breath of the Wild, if I can find the time. I pre-ordered Mario Odyssey as well. I’m happy with the Switch. I’d be happier if it had a proper virtual console. Content seems to be lacking at the moment.

Uh oh! Between Purdom’s take above and all the chatter on my various social media feeds, you guys are really making me feel like I should pick up Destiny 2! But I’m so committed to waiting until there’s more content! I have so many other games to play!

I wish I were able to play FPS games so I could find a more organic reason to post this GIF, but it is what it is! :P

It’s Mario + Rabbids all the time at the Blargg household. I’m enjoying the game and my husband likes watching me play (even though he has the annoying habit of telling me what to do and then asking me why I didn’t do it), so it’s a win-win. I just unlocked the newest co-op campaign so we’ll probably tackle that…

I’ve been playing Yakuza 0 all week and the highlight was helping non-union videogame equivalents of Steven Spielberg and Michael Jackson film totally not the video for Thriller by beating up the zombies, after which Kiryu is thankful he’ll never have to fight zombies again (well not in the main universe at least).

I was kind of interested in Destiny 2 for a while hearing all the reviews but then remembered that it’s another game that uses compulsion tactics to keep you coming back for more and more. I have been able to kick the habits of WoW and Hearthstone in my life and I don’t need another game to scratch that itch.

Been playing Donkey Kong Country 2 and despite being terrible at platformers, I have actually gotten further this time around than any of my previous attempts either on the SNES or the Gameboy (the version I grew up with) which is satisfying as heck. It’s just a really well designed game with a nice balance between…

How can we not say the word, if you don’t tell us what it is?

Aside from Order of Ecclesia - and I feel I talked about it enough last time - yesterday I started the suitably weird Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. A lot has been said about this game, particularly the oddness of the crossover, but I’ve been really enjoying the gameplay. I don’t play tactical strategy games,…

This weekend will feature me putting an ungodly amount of time into Monster Hunter Stories, which I actually pre-loaded last night because I knew work would be dead today and I didn’t want to wait for my chance to pick it up via retail (besides, all my other MH games that aren’t 3U live on this system so might as well…

This weekend, like Matt Gerardi, I may well be playing Nier: Automata. I bought it and Trails of Cold Steel with some birthday cash and am planning to return one of them. It felt like the time for an interesting JRPG, as the beginning of Autumn often does, and these are about as different as they could be while…

Well, come Saturday the Household Flam will finally be back down to its normal three inhabitants. Just me, Summer, Morty, Beth, Jerry, Sleepy Gary, Photography Raptor, Cousin Nicky... wait, that’s more than three....

I keep on having this problem where people say “it” or “It” and I’m like an Abbot & Costello rube who keeps saying, “What? You’re seeing what? I don’t have the context of a previously mentioned thing to know what ‘it’ is.”

That description of the thrill of grinding towards a illusory reward, until you just get tired of grinding, is a description of my every experience with free-to-play games. And I still enjoy them fine, for roughly three months, but the inevitable lack of goal is always somewhere in my mind.

In the VR Corner this week,…

RPG Maker Fes update:

Hello, fellow-Gameologicaleriginos. The implementation of Kinja was just before my two-week-holiday back home so I’ve been barely active. I have lurked and read the comments of the past week in WAYPTW thougj. It was nice to still see so many of the same people around.