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Hazbin Hotel (season 2)

When I watched the pilot for Hazbin Hotel , I adored it. It had a good balance of serious vs. silly. The musical nature worked. The characters were appealing. And I suppose I could say it has an irreverent edge that drew me in too. The series was one of the few bits of entertainment I would say I truly anticipated and even was the final nudge to get me to subscribe to Amazon Prime. The first season was pretty great. Some of the voice actor changes were a little off-putting, but grew on me. The season was filled with banger songs. Really, I loved it all around, I think. The second season didn't quite hit with me in the same way, though.  Releasing two episodes (of eight) a week was a detriment in my book. The first two episodes were largely showing fallout from perspectives of Hell and Heaven, without moving things forward much at all. The next four then set up the stakes, explaining a few things and revealing others, but they felt moving a little fast and left me thinking "tha...
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The Outer Worlds 2

 Having just recently rolled credits on T he Outer Worlds 2 , I can safely say I found the game... fine. For every bit of praise, I probably have a caveat. The shooting and traversal mechanics work well enough for a first-person-centric game. There are plenty of opportunities to use the game's skills throughout, but how meaningful they are is questionable. Most objectives usually have multiple solutions, whether its pickpocketing a passcard, hacking a terminal, finding a hidden route, or just blasting everyone at a checkpoint. I generally feel that's good design, but to fall back on a point immediately, the differences don't really feel meaningful 99% of the time. The skills are also tuned in such a way that if you want to be able to pass checks throughout the game, you can really only invest in about three. Even a minor dip in something else can cut you off from a few endgame check (not that it would gate you out of anything particularly important). I can see ups and downs...
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KPop Demon Hunters

 Kind of what it says on the tin. I quite like the ideas behind it, blending song and fame in as elements of fending off invasion from a demon world. There's a good energy to the movie and characters. The music is solid - I say this as someone who appreciates K-Pop beat, but is a long way from a connoisseur. The overall story works pretty well, touching on (if only lightly) themes of friendship, acceptance, fandom, and redemption. The demonic tiger and magpie duo are cute and fun as hell for all their fairly brief appearances.  My only criticisms are generally about missed potential - things that weren't bad, but left me feeling like they could have been much better. Overall, the movie felt rushed, with an intro that has visuals but is still telling more than showing and an ending that wraps everything up neatly only if you don't think much about implications. The animation and cartoony vibe sort of go with that, making the movie feel like "just a kids' show" ...
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Not Really a Skyrim-Killer

 Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon was in early access for a while and full-released just recently. Many people have called it some sort of new inheritor of the Bethesda-style open world crown or something. I'm less than convinced of that, though it's pretty good. It's got the first-person (with third available) gameplay in a large sandbox down well. I found combat and movement felt better to me than Avowed. Like Avowed, the map is made up of large zones (3 in this case) rather than fully open like the most known Bethesda games. Interiors/dungeons are still loaded separately. Spells being largely treated as weapons is fine, though feels a bit less magical. There's weapon/armor/potion/food crafting. There's weapon/armor upgrading (though not spells apparently). There's fishing. There's even in-game sketching. A lot of those systems aren't required or used as much as they could be. In fact, my biggest complaint about the game is that everything feels like it t...
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Thunderbolts*

I haven't watched an MCU movie in a while. I missed... let's see... Quantumania, Eternals, Marvels, and Falcon & Winter Soldier at least. I suppose I've just been a bit burned out on them or something. But, I decided to catch Thunderbolts*.  I worked pretty well. I wasn't taken out of it. I don't find anything that bothers me about it. I liked some of the characters and the interplay. But there wasn't anything that quite pushed it over to great either. The group had a sort of Guardians of the Galaxy vibe with anti-heroes coming together to support one another in a quasi-family. But they also kind of copied the "losers" speech from the original GotG movie, which feels a little cheap. The team being made up of a bunch of people who "shoot and punch things" is a little lackluster for a superhero movie. They're not terribly super or heroic. We have three peak-human supersoldiers, a hyper-trained assassin (and Yelena carries the movie and ...
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Well That Didn't Take Long

 I cannot be the only one that finds things so predictable, can I? With the leaving of our captain character in Stars Without Number, the rest of us are much less decisive/proactive. Predictable if you've seen us in action. And the only one who really wants to be in charge claims to not - and, I'd say, isn't terribly qualified given the way they regularly don't think things through. Natural fallout and that's fine, I don't blame anyone in particular. But then we get a situation that, while I might not have explicitly predicted, was one I've seen before. Summarized: Other PC: "Well, I'm not taking charge..." My Character: "Okay, fine. Here are some directions. Get on the ship. PC2 do this. PC3 do that." Other PC a few poses later: *takes charge by repeating what my character just said.* If that were just IC, it wouldn't be a big deal - annoying on a character level, but no biggie. But, of course, it wasn't. I could even brush i...
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Changes in Games

I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 . It's a recent darling among reviewers, and not without reason. The game is good to play. Mind you, I do struggle on and off with the QTE mechanics that are mixed in with the turn-based combat. It's engaging, though. There's a lot of heart and emotion in the story that is well-delivered. I have seen clips of DA: Veilguard scenes (but haven't played the whole game, so those are just snippets) that are embarrassingly stilted and clearly scripted. Clair Obscur's dialog has pretty much never hit me that way. Most of it feels so very natural, especially the shock and loss experienced in the first act of the game - and there's plenty of it given the sort of bleak premise of the game. I don't want to say anything to spoil it for someone who may play, but the wrap of Act 2 and beginning of Act 3 really takes a turn. There are so many reveals there that answer most of the lingering questions (and raise a few more) th...
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