GoGo Yubari

Ben Starr, who played the most recent Final Fantasy protagonist, had a go at it: Sign him up, it's the fresh reinvention for the 2020s the franchise obviously needs.

Yeah, I've been waiting for it to be available at $10 - $15. I played it briefly at PAX last year and it seemed fine but obviously not up to the dizzying heights of SR3.

Hopefully you can settle for Eddie Kingston going "yeah the game's good, buy it or don't buy it, do what you like, I'M GONNA KILL YOU CLAUDIO"

Really like the way they've adapted Bryan Lee O'Malley's art style for this. Wasn't sure about it seeing stills but in motion it feels right to me.

tbf it's been over a month, I think at that point I don't really want to hear the game being hocked more than once a show. I'm honestly surprised that I haven't seen a discount on the game bigger than like $8. I'd be curious to know what the sales are and what the expectations were. I'm still very much like "once it gets down to $30 - $40 I'll probably pick it up" and I was kind of expecting it to be at that point by now. Next month would actually possibly be optimal for that because my guess is outside of Starfield I'll probably at most want to play something I can pop in on for like fifteen minutes and bail out on.

I'm still slowly working through Great Ace Attorney and it does a lot of really great things with the formula but I will miss I very much miss the big ridiculous cartoony villain breakdowns. There are breakdowns but practically everyone who turns out to be guilty has some tragic backstory reason for it rather than just being some petty evil jerk.

if you wanted to see every possible way Alex Morgan can look frustrated after not scoring a goal this has certainly been the World Cup for you EDIT: I absolutely cannot believe I stayed awake for that match. Dire.

So not only have the USWNT been pretty underwhelming but they'll now be missing Rose Lavelle if they advance (and frankly that's a real "if," Portugal look like they have it in them to win) due to a very soft yellow card. Yeeeeesh.

Watched the first episode back from Futurama. Woof. I think I chuckled three times, maybe?

Yeah, basically this. Though to be fair, Emily Blunt's big scene near the end is one of the only times that a character in the movie is unambiguously worth rooting for. I could actually feel the mood really lift in the theater for a little bit during that scene.

I did both on Tuesday and enjoyed it. I think doing it as a double feature with like an hour and a half of downtime to go to a restaurant and chill out made for a really good day, and I think in both cases I thought the movies were about as good as I expected them to be but had things that held them back from being better than that, and in a way that kind of made it good as a double feature because I didn't come out of it going "oh, I loved this one but hated that one." I think Oppenheimer basically justifies its length and the sheer amount of shit it's cramming into the story, it's probably the first one of his movies I've wanted to see a second time since... Christ. The Dark Knight or maybe Inception? That being said I can't recommend doing it as a double feature just to say you did it. If you're not into Nolan's stuff I think this is better and more interesting than most of his stuff has been for a long time (maybe the fact that it's a biopic/character study means that it keeps a lot of the stuff that sunk, say, Tenet at bay) but it's still a three-hour Nolan movie. (Maybe the biggest connective thing that makes them an interesting double feature is that Christopher Nolan is just no good at including female characters that don't feel like they exist to orbit around male characters, so pairing a movie where that's very much the case with a movie primarily set in a world where most of the male characters existing to orbit around the female ones is a big part of the plot is kind of interesting.)

Yeah, the Willa stuff is the one part that isn't working for me. Everything else is good, Boyd Holbrook is perfect and the actress playing his girlfriend/partner-in-crime is nailing that sort of stock Elmore Leonard book role.

Notably this was the first time someone guested on The Simpsons as themself. An incredible career and a life well-lived.

fuck's sake, Norway.

boy my heart sank when I realized I was in for another long month of Fox coverage of a World Cup. Unmuted the thing and it was some guy talking about sports betting. anyway let's go Norway c'mon Norway

You're fine going to movies, I imagine. It might be worth considering taking a month off something like Netflix or Disney+ and telling them specifically why you're doing it, but I don't think I've seen like a stated demand from the unions for people to start doing that either and obviously these things can be more complicated for people given shared accounts and all that.

I finished She-Hulk yesterday. First half is the most fun I've had with an MCU Disney+ series since Hawkeye, second half I think falls off (exception being the Daredevil/Leapfrog episode. Charlie Cox being back in the MCU is so very welcome and he adjusted his performance to the tone of the show really well); the humor's not as strong, there's a lot of ideas that don't really feel committed to, the whole incel gamergater villain thing feels less like a real comment on that whole portion of the fandom and more like Marvel trying its damnedest to drive up engagement. I respect the ambition of the finale but I think the fourth wall-breaking to that extent kind of comes at the wrong time in the lifespan of the MCU, a lot less fun to have algorithm jokes when the MCU algorithm is on a bad run of form. But man, what a breath of fresh air to have one of these Disney+ shows that actually feels like it wants to be a TV show and not a "seven-hour long movie."

Without having seen this one (one episode to go on She-Hulk and then I'll probably start Secret Invasion within the month?) yet, yeah, I think there is a general sensing of blood in the water and general audience fatigue with the MCU that is probably influencing writing about it to a certain degree. I guess I haven't read a full review of it (maybe I read Alan Sepinwall's, I don't remember) but I didn't really see anything saying this was the worst one so much as people saying it was boring but I don't doubt it's out there.

Reynolds isn't in the game, it's just Brodie Lee and John Silver. It's silly. If it's meant to tie into Uno's gradual heel turn/embitterment it's too much and if it's not it's just the most bizarre omission of them all IMO.

I think it makes way more sense going by the patterns of AAA games to go "hey, here's this fun new mode for free (and here's how we work potential microtransactions into the deal)" than "here's this mode you have to pay to get." Particularly when that mode is essentially a battle royale game.

re: all that

Also reported that Spurs are selling Harry Winks to Leicester. Nice to not be mad/exhausted at Levy for the last week after the entirety of 2023.

Finally saw Fast X. Even by the standards set by that franchise this movie is dumb. Sometimes it's the absolute right kind of dumb (this is a movie that announces where the characters are in big old text popping up on the screen every time they go to a new country and that leads to a pretty good gag) but more often it's just dumb dumb. At this point all the crew feel like overleveled RPG characters, like they might still have things they vaguely specialize in but also they've taken points in all the things they were not good at even when that makes them less interesting. John Cena was playing a character in the last one but now he's playing John Cena, which is still charming enough because unlike a lot of the other people in the movie his personality hasn't worn out its welcome.

I am but not for John WIck or Creed, both of which I saw this year's installments of in theaters and quite enjoyed (saw John WIck twice, in fact, once by myself and once with my dad). I do have fatigue with a lot of franchises that reach a certain point. I meant to see Fast X a couple weeks ago but got to the theater too late and just haven't bothered to see it since, which is funny because I liked Fast 9 and I imagine X will be more of the kind of dumb nonsense from those movies I enjoy. I haven't skipped an MCU movie and they're generally a "I'll see it on opening weekend assuming I don't have to get up early the next day" thing but my enthusiasm for it is pretty low, and on the Disney+ side I take forever to watch anything. Right now I'm stalled out on the She-Hulk episode that's just a lot of tired therapy jokes. DC just seems like a fucking mess so I'm holding off until James Gunn actually starts making movies himself again, it didn't help that both DC movies this year have leads I'd rather not see.