GoGo Yubari

Get 'em, Philly.

I've played some fun 2022 games but I don't know if I'll get anything more satisfying in any of them than when my opponent in Marvel Snap decides to go double-or-nothing on how much we're wagering on our match and instead of retreating out of the match I just go along with it and beat them anyway.

Spurs go down 2-0 to Bournemouth and then win via goals from Sessegnon, Davies, and Bentancur in extra time. Just like how they drew it up.

Good obituary of Jerry Lee Lewis' rise, fall, and absolute shitshow of a personal life on Vulture.

Brenda Lee is also still alive.

House of Oh Whoops I Didn't Mean It That Way Hey Is This Thing Still On?

Jonathan Majors! Bill Murray (a decision they might live to regret if the current wave of stories of him being a nightmare to work with get worse than they are!)! The "oh my god, he admit it" guy from I Think You Should Leave!

Feel like I'm starting to get the hang of playing my old buddy Zenyatta again. Feels good!

It was not! 8. Cult of the Lamb - I mean, there was a lot of "I don't want to think right now so I'm going to play this instead of thinking" involved but Cult of the Lamb is half-management sim/half-roguelike. It's an interesting game in the sense that the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. It has a fun visual style (all your cult members are adorable animals) but the story is basically the absolute bare minimum needed to keep you going through an obvious structure. The roguelike stuff is fun enough but nothing special by the high standards of roguelikes these days, it certainly doesn't feel as fun to play as a Hades or a Dead Cells and doesn't have the variety of abilities and handicaps of a Rogue Legacy. The sim stuff is the best and most fun individual aspect of it but it's not like an especially deep simulator, I never felt the deep attachment to cult members or felt like I had to make actual tough decisions once I got to a certain point. That being said, put together the whole thing just works extremely well (well, outside of the month I had to stop playing it because a patch fixing a bug took a very long time to get to Xbox), and in the early days would repeatedly end up consuming way more of my time than intended. Even now it still has certain maddening bugs to it that forced me to restart my game, so I might say "wait for another patch or two," but it's a fun time and if it goes on discount or ends up on a Game Pass or equivalent service a no-brainer to get. Also I got a beanie with the eye logo from the game at PAX West and I love it and will wear it everywhere all fall. NEXT TIME: Probably Yakuza 4!

Blue Rev is great. I need to give it some more start-to-finish listens but the home stretch of "After the Earthquake" is unbelievably good indie rock.

I think the Aemond actor makes sense to me but Aegon just looked like a totally different person to me where most of the aged-up actor changes felt really natural. It took me like half the episode to remember that there are only two brothers in that set, at least at this point introduced in the series.

Boy, Paddy Considine is a real good actor.

Not going to pass final judgment on Chris Pratt's Mario voice yet (sounds like he's trying for 80% him, 20% Captain Lou Albano's Mario) but the rest of it I like. Love that the voiceover direction seems to be pushing the cast to do character voices and not their own speaking voices.

Apparently he recorded one last appearance and song as Kwanzabot for the upcoming Futurama revival recently.

"Gangsta's Paradise" was one of my very favorite songs in the world when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure I got my parents to buy me the Dangerous Minds soundtrack and I never actually listened to anything else on it. And of course...

My dad and I watched three seasons of it, at which point it got too ridiculous for us to continue. It's fun pulp nonsense, kind of a schlockier Justified, but it does go off the rails eventually. High point of it for me is probably a great supporting performance by Hoon Lee, who is also superb in Warrior. Completely forgot it was Antony Starr as the lead in it, though. Just a completely different performance from Homelander.

I've watched some clips but this was my first time watching the one of the Not Waffle House robbery and it's interesting that you can pick and choose who to rob. Could be some neat risk/reward factors in there if they do it right.

Clerks III is a really bad movie and I can't imagine I'll ever watch a Kevin Smith film again (not surprising since the last one I watched before this was probably Clerks II) but it seems like everyone had fun making it and the dedication to bringing back as many people as they possibly could for it, right down to various extras, has a certain charm, it's self-indulgent in a good way where most of the script is self-indulgent in a really bad way. Does make me wish that Jeff Anderson had really made a run at being a character actor, because he's still pretty good in this and if he's good in this he could have been good in way better-made films too.

It was neither! 6. Cuphead - I basically played this in chunks from 2017 to earlier this summer, stopping whenever I got frustrated with a boss. Cuphead rules but it's very much a game where I would just hit walls from somewhere around the second island onward and just need to completely clear my mind for half a year to a year before returning and being ready to absorb the patterns of whoever drove me nuts the prior time. Honestly if I wasn't dead certain I was nearly done I would have absolutely just thrown my controller into the couch at some point during the King Dice gauntlet (not to mention the Devil). Anyway, great game, obviously. I'll do the DLC next year probably. 7. Assassin's Creed Origins - The first of the open-world RPG element Assassin's Creeds, wasn't sure how I was going to take to it but honestly I had a pretty good time with a lot of it. I think part of why it worked was because while needing to level up in an AC game feels really weird conceptually, it honestly gives more incentive to do much of the sidequests and going around helping people in need is exactly what Bayek (one of the best AC protagonists I've played to this point) would be doing anyway, so it supports a feeling of immersion in that world. The plot is a weird one because for a while it's the most compelling, intriguing Assassin's Creed plot since probably Brotherhood and then once it starts hitting the home stretch it just absolutely goes off the rails, introducing characters who are part of the big conspiracy at the heart of the story that you've never, ever seen before and talking about them like you totally know who they are. On the plus side, sometimes the game would just randomly spawn cats in places cats probably should not be, like this (spoilers for the plot of a five year old game and also ancient Egyptian history): UP NEXT: probably some mindless open world joint

Kind of hope the plot of this is them retrieving Zemo from Wakanda tbh since IIRC Falcon and Winter Soldier ends with him being turned over to them. All that work to get MCU Zemo a little more in line with comics Zemo in Falcon and the Winter Soldier would feel wasted if he's not at least in a Thunderbolts movie. My big hope that was probably always doomed due to rights issues was bringing Michael Keaton's Vulture back and having him be the MCU's version of Mach-1.

Kind of indifferent on the Thunderbolts lineup. I can see a good movie coming out of it but it's a fairly samey group of characters in terms of abilities and I just love the original premise of the Thunderbolts too much to be all that enamored with it looking like more of a black ops thing. At one point I was trying to come up with a lineup for an MCU version of something approximating the original Thunderbolts concept and Ghost was in there, so neat to see her included here. Red Guardian being in it is cool, though. He's great.