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Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last movie you've seen

« on: Yesterday at 12:41:35 AM »

Eh...what the hell...

Haven't been to a movie in years, but my local theater was showing a 1 night only run of the Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle movie, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Anime movies never come to theaters this close to me. It's usually Disney and Universal picking those up.

This movie is the direct continuation of the 4th season of the show, and is the first of 3 movies concluding the series. It's also 2.5 hours long, with an extra half hour tacked on for the usual set of trailers. I was absolutely exhausted by the time I got out of the theater. While we didn't have a packed house, we didn't have an extremely receptive audience who were absolutely captivated.

In general, this was an excellent popcorn action movie, though unfortunately it carries both the strengths and the low...low weaknesses of the series. The animation is absolutely amazing...mostly, per Ufotable standards, with extremely fast and detailed fight choreography just jam-packed with elemental effects and constantly moving backgrounds. This is a gorgeous movie to watch, and I look forward to seeing the completed version on home video considering you can see the exact moment when the money ran out and the still frames came in.

Sony made a big deal about stunt casting Channing Tatum as a somewhat major flashback character, and I found him just passable in that role. Sony could have saved a lot of money and gotten the same or better performance out of one of Bang Zoom's other legendary performers.

The big issue with the film, as is usual for Demon Slayer, is with the writing. It's a Shounen series, so you have the usual array of ass-pulls when fights are getting too one-sided, but an issue that's always bugged me with Demon Slayer (and Bleach too, for that matter) is the formula:

*character fights villain*
*villain gets upper hand*
*villain monologues about how powerful they are*
*character has a flashback that inspires them to suddenly develop a new power*
*character kills villain*
*villain gets lengthy backstory as they die*

Not counting multiple times this happens in a single fight (I swear, Tanjiro's fight has at least 3 runs of this cycle*, I counted at least 3 times throughout the film that this happens, and it gets increasingly grating as the fights drag on. It all culminates in a demon backstory that I swear to god had to be at least a half hour long, if not an hour long. All this, right in the middle of a fight, and the demon wasn't even dead afterwards.

And when the final fight is over, the movie just...stops. It has to. There are 2 more of these things, and they all take place in this castle.

It's just an exhausting movie to watch, though the audience did a lot to make it a fun watch, particularly with Zenitsu's gratifyingly short fight.

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TalkBack / Re: Switch Online Expansion Pack Breaks Glass, Unleashes Virtual Boy

« on: September 12, 2025, 01:03:11 PM »

I was interested right up until they announced you'd have to buy more plastic cardboard crap to actually play them.

Pity...I remember Warioland VB being decent.

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TalkBack / Re: Next Nintendo Direct To Air September 12

« on: September 12, 2025, 11:34:30 AM »

Yeah, that Danganronpa 2 remake was rather strange.  That game is already available on the Switch and by extension Switch 2.  And if they're going to remake the series why wouldn't they start with the first one?

I don't get it, because Danganronpa 2 makes somehow even less sense if you haven't played the 1st game.

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TalkBack / Re: Next Nintendo Direct To Air September 12

« on: September 12, 2025, 11:04:52 AM »

They could have easily cut a half hour from this Direct and missed nothing.

Really concerned about seeing ANOTHER generic open world from Nintendo with Prime 4.

Fatal Frame 2 gets yet another remake.

Danganronpa 2 gets a remake...why?

Jumping to Galaxy already with the Mario movie sequel feels like creative desperation.

The new Yoshi looks cool.

That bored Mii in the Tamadochi Life trailer sums up my thoughts on this Direct.

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TalkBack / Re: Next Nintendo Direct To Air September 12

« on: September 12, 2025, 07:28:30 AM »

Anyone else find themselves in an odd state of contentment?

I don't think I would describe it as "contentment", but I bought the Switch 2 to play my neglected Switch 1 games with the performance they should have had on Switch 1, and so far that's what I've gotten. Apparently even Deadly Premonition 2 is actually in a playable state now.

My Switch 2 is my secondary console. While yes I do want Nintendo to step up in terms of exclusives, I do have probably years of Switch 1 baclog to get through while I wait.

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TalkBack / Re: Next Nintendo Direct To Air September 12

« on: September 10, 2025, 08:58:32 AM »

You have to imagine this is Prime 4's last chance to be a 2025 game.

As for anything else they could show, I don't care about Pokemon anymore and I'm somewhat ambivalent about the usual faces that could show up here. Switch 2 is my Switch 1 machine with better performance so far.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: September 05, 2025, 06:17:47 PM »

As Mop it up mentioned that is a wrap on Backlaugust 2025. I am happy to report we surpassed last years total and ended up with a decent list of 30 games removed from our backlogs. That's about one game per day!

Congrats to broodwars for taking the lead spot with an impressive 8 games!

Thanks. Think I might leave next year to someone else. I usually play lengthy RPGs, but as I'd just finished one (Metaphor Refantazio) I was looking to clear out a bunch of shorter games. Had a lot of family stuff come up this month. Still, made a lot of progress on my personal goal to hit 400 Platinums by the end of the year. Currently at 397 thanks to this month, so with 4 months left to go I can afford to take my time and play some longer games again. Plus, you know...Xenoblade 2 still lurks in the shadows (up to Chapter 6, btw).

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 31, 2025, 02:36:39 PM »

Finished Stray just in time for the end of August. Thats now the third time I have played through it since it originally launched on PC. I love it. The Switch version obviously doesnt look as good as the Series X version, but on Switch 2, it runs great.

Besides the cute cat, I just really like the world design of the game. Its kind of post apocalyptic, but things look cool with neon lights in the city, or creepily lit underground sections, or gross infected parts you have to run through.
It has interesting characters too with all the robots you meet. Its a good story too. Overall great adventure of making your way to the outside of the bunker.

Yeah, I'd like to get back to Stray at some point. Got really frustrated trying to do a challenge on that first level where you try to complete it without getting hit, and ended up just putting the game on the backburner.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 31, 2025, 10:37:16 AM »

Might as well add one last game, myself. Haven't 100%ed it yet (and I don't know if I will), but I have rolled credits on it: Tamarin.

To be blunt, this is a spiritual successor to Jet Force Gemini, one of my favorite N64 games, made by former Rare devs (including David Wise on the music) so however bad it may be I needed to try it myself. I took interest in this game after it made an appearance on Rerez's Just Bad Games series:

http://youtu.be/DtG8QNC5DiQ

This game feels like 2 badly mismatched games forced together: something akin to a Banjo game and Jet Force Gemini. You spend half the game running around fairly generic open areas collecting Fireflies and completing challenges in order to power doors that take you to other areas. Aside from some absolutely infuriating coin-collecting challenges, these sections are generic but not too bad. The most annoying thing is if you die, you lose any collectibles obtained since your last checkpoint. This makes the later areas absolutely infuriating since there's some pinpoint platforming required over instant-death pits.

Then there's the other half of the game, where Tamarin gets handed an arsenal of guns and you run through a series of corridors shooting ant soldiers ripped right out of JFG. In these sections, you lose all your 3D platform movement abilities, which gets really annoying when the game hides collectibles behind obstacle sections that you can't use jumping dives or crouch jumps to clear.

And because it seems every spiritual successor to a Rare game is determined to not learn one major lesson from their predecessors, let's talk about Birds. Remember how much everyone loved the Tribals system in JFG, where shooting sections would contain lots of little furry hostages you had to save before the Ants killed them, forcing you to leave the area altogether and reload it all? Yeah, the Birds are Tribals, and they work the exact same way, but with the added bonus of also occasionally picking up and flying across the room to new lethal perches. and yes, the ant soldiers absolutely will gun them down if you don't kill them quickly, and you DO have to leave the entire area and reload it if you fail (or die, which resets back to your last checkpoint). Unlike JFG, you don't have to save ALL of them, but every 3 you save can be planeted in a birdhouse in the platforming areas for a Firefly and you need 40 out of 60 Fireflies to clear the game so yeah...you need most of them.

And yes, if you don't reach a checkpoint before you die, you lose any birds you've saved since your last one, which is all sorts of fun when the later areas are full of ants sporting shields and hand grenades.

I actually had a decent time with the platforming sections, but the shooting sections just got incredibly monotonous towards the end, despite there only being 3 of them, and the end of the game has you backtracking through all 3 of them in 1 sequence so that's just wonderful. Nintendo's playtesting is sorely missed here, as the shooting sections become utter mazes where it's hard to tell where to go to progress, and several times I ran into the end of the area before I was ready.  And while Wise's music is pleasant enough, it doesn't even come close to the quality of the worst track in the JFG soundtrack.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 25, 2025, 11:53:05 PM »

OK, so that's Robocop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business in the can now, my 397th Platinum btw. I'm aiming to hit 400 by the end of the year (partially because it's an excuse to finally get serious on Valkyria Chronicles 4 to be #400), so I made some good progress on that this month.

As a standalone expansion, Unfinished Business reminds me a lot of that Wolfenstein: The Old Blood expansion from last generation, in that it takes a game that was kinda open and brings it back to basics with a corridor shooter filled with monster closets and big guns. I was actually kinda taken aback by how hard the game was at first, as you start the game basically fighting the End Game armored mercenaries from the main game, but with only a handful of upgrades and your basic gun. But it didn't take long for the balance to flip in the opposite direction as I obtained upgrades and levels.

Frankly, I think the game could have used even more paring back, as this game still includes small side quests despite its already shorter length, and they're pretty forgettable in general. I would have rather the time spent on these basic fetch quests be used on maybe another level with 1-2 more enemy types, but the experience overall is still very solid. In fact, with the addition of the flying drones; the rolling explosive drones; (prototype versions of) the Otomo ninja robots; the flying troopers; and the new heavy weapons, I'd say there's a lot more variety in combat now than in the base game. The Cryo Gun in particular is a delight to play with, and the late game is more than happy to give you encounters setup to turn into a winter wonderland. You even get to play a level controlling an ED-209, which is very cathartic (and yes, they remembered the vulnerability to stairs).

Storywise, what's here is solid but not particularly noteworthy, though it is an amusing lead-in to Robocop 3. Teyon seemed to care more about setting up a well-developed villain, but they just didn't seem to have the time to really make him truly memorable. In fact, everything ends super abruptly with a sub-30 second villain death cutscene leading immediately to credits, making me think Teyon ran out of time and money when designing the last 1/3 of the game.

Overall, I had a great time with Unfinished Business, but the game definitely feels rushed and a little buggy. I had to reload a checkpoint a few times because the game would bug out and refuse to unlock a door I needed to proceed. Gotta wonder what 80s franchise Teyon will do next, as they've already (badly) done Rambo and (excellently) done Terminator and Robocop. Die Hard, perhaps?

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 25, 2025, 07:51:41 PM »

Nearing the end of Robocop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business, the standalone expansion for Rogue City. So far, it's been a LOT of fun, albeit very simple fun. This is much more of a retro shooter than Rogue City was, with an emphasis on corridor shooting with big guns and monster closets.

Did you finish this game or is it unfinished business? 

Was wondering when someone was going to make that joke. Wasn't able to play it all weekend. Had family in town assisting us in doing some major house cleaning/moving, and I wasn't able to boot up my PS5 in all that time. They're back home now, so my room is mine again. I'll likely have this wrapped up soon.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 24, 2025, 09:52:15 AM »

Will probably return to Beyond Good and Evil like I keep promising. I mean I've beaten this game plenty of times before but this is the 20th anniversary release! Has anything changed? Yes it has in fact they added some completely trivial nonsense to try and create continuity to the sequel which will never come out but lol.

There's also a new "Speedrun Mode" where the game challenges you to beat it from start to finish without saving. It's nerve-wracking. I did it for the game's Platinum earlier this year. It's not that the game's difficult, but you're just petrified of the game crashing, which apparently it did at launch in this mode.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 24, 2025, 09:49:19 AM »

Not expecting to get much more completed this month. Family's in town helping to clean out the house, and they've commandeered the TV. Probably the most use I've ever gotten out of the Switch series' handheld mode, just picking away at Xenoblade 2.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 21, 2025, 11:55:23 AM »

Nearing the end of Robocop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business, the standalone expansion for Rogue City. So far, it's been a LOT of fun, albeit very simple fun. This is much more of a retro shooter than Rogue City was, with an emphasis on corridor shooting with big guns and monster closets.

After that, I might be done for the month in terms of completed games, though I really should get around to finally forcing myself through the Resident Evil 4 Remake's Separate Ways expansion. I just picked up the Raidou Remaster and I'm picking away at Xenoblade 2.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 19, 2025, 01:43:17 PM »

Finished Enslaved Odyssey to the West. I really enjoyed it, definitely my kind of action game. I liked the story and characters too.
The game is 15 years old and definitely dated. The platforming and combat was quite janky, but it was fun. The combat was kind of annoying to start with, but after I unlocked some more abilities, it got better and easier.

That game has one of my favorite cutscene exchanges, where the game breaks the 4th wall and Monkey openly complains about how much tedious combat you're going to have to do once your partner starts hacking a terminal.

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TalkBack / Re: Kirby Air Riders 2 Getting Direct August 19

« on: August 19, 2025, 12:57:26 PM »

Metroid seemingly being delayed to 2026 (or Beyond) is a real blow. Looks like there's really no reason to own a Switch 2 in 2025 unless you really like mascot racing games. I mainly bought mine to play Switch 1 games with performance that isn't soul-drainingly bad. Guess that's just going to have to do.

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TalkBack / Re: Kirby Air Riders 2 Getting Direct August 19

« on: August 19, 2025, 08:29:36 AM »

45 minutes is a lot of time to spend on telling players to hold the A Button.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 17, 2025, 09:16:46 PM »

Well. I wasn't expecting to add this one to the list.

Blue Prince - Yeah, it's this year's Indie Darling. After picking away at this game for a month or so and restarting it several times after I'd realized I'd inadvertently screwed myself due to not understanding how some of the game's mechanics worked...yeah, I finally managed a successful run, reaching Room 46 and triggering the Credits.



Felt like pure dumb luck that I managed to get a run where the RNG didn't screw me over and I got the rooms I needed with a protection against the negative effects of the room I REALLY needed.

Overall, I like the game, but I feel like the Roguelike elements clash badly with the puzzle box design of this game. I don't think it's fair to have a run fail in a Roguelike due to elements beyond the player's control. I feel like the player should always have some sort of fighting chance, and that's certainly not not the case here. While the player has a choice of what rooms get drafted next, you can randomly get fucked out of the materials you need to progress, and that's assuming you even noticed those materials as you went along. This is a game with very intricate puzzles that you do need to be keeping notes to complete, and yet it's also a timed game with heavy RNG elements and some important mechanics that the game will never explain and you're just expected to pull up a Wiki.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 17, 2025, 12:55:30 AM »

After 4 months I'm finally done with Xenoblade X: Definitive Edition...

Now there's one I'm going to inevitably have to reactivate into my backlog at some point. I only ever got an hour or so into the Wii U version, and after my external HDD failed I basically lost all interest in continuing play since I'd have to restart. Got to get through the other non-1 Xenos before I can get to X again.

At the moment, Xenoblade 3 is currently in my backlog but also Xenoblade 2, which is the game currently occupying my Switch 2 now that DK Bananza is done. That game's been something of my backlog's White Whale, as it's the game I just can't get myself to push through and finish. Last time I played it years ago, I got about halfway through Chapter 4. I'm whittling away at it (using that previous save), but I don't expect to finish it in time for the end of this game. Not sure I'd want to try, anyway, considering I'm nearing 40 hours in and I only just reached Chapter 5 (of 10).

By all rights, I should like this game better than I do, but it's just full of so many stupid little design decisions taht piss me off, from the Gatcha system on the Blades to the glacial pace of combat to the absolutely labyrinthine UI. I swear, picking the game up all these years later, I had to spend days figuring out how to play it again because Xenoblade 2 does not have a consistent Quest log. There are times when you just don't HAVE a main quest so you can remind yourself what you were even doing the last time you played (and which was the case when I picked the game back up. Fun). And so many high level enemies populating story areas low-level parties are meant to get through, seemingly turning environmental progression into whack-a-mole.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 17, 2025, 12:47:02 AM »

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - I played this game back when it launched on PS4, but Microsoft recently released a free upgrade for the PS5 version so I figured I'd give the game another playthrough. It's a pretty short game and very straightforward. Overall, I still like the game, but playing it now I can't help but get the whiff of "Oscar Bait" off of it. Yes, the performance capture and voice acting are still incredible, but the gameplay is not especially good (combat in particular could use more nuance and variety); some parts of the game feel like they were never play-tested (the section where you have to run around scanning runes while an insta-kill fire demon chases you while ALSO slowing you comes to mind); and the way the game ends just...doesn't make a whole lot of sense however you look at it. Yes, the subtext of the game is as subtle as a brick to the face, but it's really not clear what actually happened by the end.

I didn't play the sequel and I don't plan to (I never though this game particularly needed one), but the original is an enjoyable enough experience.

Pumpkin Jack - Picked this one up a few months back after Austin Eruption highlighted it as an Indie spiritual successor to MediEvil, and at the time it was on sale for like...$5. Played through it in 1 sitting, and yeah...it's OK. This same team made Akimbot, a Ratchet & Clank knockoff I found rather frustrating a year or so ago, but I much prefer this one. I suppose I see the MediEvil resemblance, but IMO MediEvil (the remake, anyway) had more variety in its environments and combat encounters. This feels at times more like a spiritual successor to Gauntlet with all the enemy generators, crossed with the Nightmare Before Christmas (the main character being a walking corpse with a Jack O' Lantern head doesn't help).

The platforming is solid, but not particularly special. The combat's pretty terrible, with enemies feeling like they take way too many hits to down considering how many of them get spawned at once in the late game. I also could have done without both all the on-rails segments and especially the public domain Classical Music that plays during most of them. No, you're not allowed to just throw Flight of the Valkyries and the William Tell Overture during random Minecart and Chase Sequences. I don't care how much you jazz them up. Those songs are just way too recognizable to just throw into a game like this without expecting them to massively distract.

I did complete 1 other game...sorta...but I'm going to hold onto that one for a while. It's a live service game with a fixed story progression, so I may or may not consider it "cleared from my backlog" until I've gotten the Platinum in it.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 17, 2025, 12:29:04 AM »

Oh, I hope y'all didn't have any notions of catching me anytime soon.  Gonna break these up for the sake of readability.

Bendy & the Dark Revival - The sequel to Bendy & the Ink Machine, a 1920s cartoon-styled 1st person stealth game I kinda liked despite the fact that it ran like absolute garbage back on the PS4 and ran off the rails altogether about halfway through. Well, here we are with the sequel and it's...somehow even worse on the technical front. The framerate is all over the damn place, event triggers are randomly bugged in absolutely bizarre ways, the game's Insta-kill Ink Demon can kill you even if you successfully hide through his appearance (especially lovely if you're going for a no-death run), enemies will randomly lock into place and T-pose, collision detection is more of a suggestion than a rule, the game will randomly crash, and if you save in a place the game doesn't like your save will get corrupted. Yes, even on console.

I haven't seen a game this fundamentally broken since the last time I played a Bethesda Game Studios game. I see you only paid for the best porting teams, Rooster Teeth!

What's sad is that when the game WORKS, it's actually pretty decent, although infuriating on hard mode. It's basically Budget Bioshock with the focus on exploration and scavenging, the art is still as strong as ever, and the voice acting is excellent. The basic design of the game is FINE, albeit (again) infuriating on Hard Mode where every single goddamn room has 3-5 patrolling enemies who can kill you in 2-3 hits even at the End Game. I know fans of the first game despise the Ink Demon not being a patrolling enemy anymore, but I vastly prefer this new system where he'll just randomly appear with a countdown timer for you to find a hiding spot. That said, the fact that you can't USE anything other than a special designated hiding spot if you've been spotted beforehand is annoying.

They just announced another Bendy game, and I hope this one finally releases in something approaching a competent technical state, because this franchise has always had artistic promise and apparently we're not going to get a new Bioshock anytime soon.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 13, 2025, 10:22:09 AM »

I also finished Bananza. It was good overall. It has some good moments and some boring moments and some mind blowing moments towards the end.
I liked it for the main quest. I wasnt interested in hunting for bananas. Eventually I also lost interest in the challenge rooms too.
It gets surprisingly difficult near the end with the boss battles.
I finished it with 254 bananas.

By contrast, I believe I finished with 768 Bananas. I got all the Bananas you could get until finishing the game, along with all the fossils.

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TalkBack / Re: Chibi-Robo Plugging Into Switch 2 GameCube NSO Library Next Week

« on: August 13, 2025, 12:48:37 AM »

Looking forward to finally playing this, considering the game's reputation over the years.

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General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2025 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

« on: August 10, 2025, 12:50:38 PM »

I have finished 2 games:

Resident Evil 5 (PS4) - Every once in a while, I like to replay an RE game to scratch that "horror shooter" itch, and I've been meaning to replay this one for a while now, as well as "the good version" (allegedly) of RE6. Having Platinumed this game once again, I have to say that this might be the most replayable game in the series from a pure mechanical perspective. The game's not the least bit scary, the difficulty scaling's all over the place, and the plot is just plain stupid, but it sure is fun to shoot these enemies in the face over and over again as you farm for treasure and higher difficulties.

RE5 does not give a **** what you need or want to do to complete it. Ran into a rough spot in the main game and you're low on ammo? Sure, you can replay an easier early level to replenish your stock. The devs don't care. Want to replay just a single chapter of the late game on other difficulties? Hey, it's your game. Go nuts. It's a very liberating game in that respect. Yes, there are FAR better RE games, but I can't think of any other game in the series that lets you play it however you want.

Donkey Kong Bananza - Finished this one last night, and considering this game was the entire reason I bought into the Switch 2 early I'm sad to say this game is just "good". It's not "great". It's kind of the quintessential 7.5 or 8 out of 10, largely because the game is so goddamn easy and takes so long to get interesting. IMO, the first 1/3 of the game is incredibly dull, because the only mechanics the devs decided to work with early on was "punch wall" and "punch floor". I'm sorry, but I didn't find the countless forgettable moons worthwhile in Odyssey, and I don't find the similar Bananas much better here, even if they do feel less random.

It doesn't help that the game will go to great lengths to build potentially interesting setups to Bananas, only for me to inadvertently smash through the back entrance through a wall or ceiling because I saw them on my radar and the radar doesn't distinguish between Bananas you're MEANT to tunnel through and ones you're meant to overcome an obstacle to get. The game starts designing Banana challenges surrounded by impenetrable material in the later areas, but by that point it's too little too late.

As the game goes on and it starts layering new materials with special properties and Bananzas with special abilities, it does get a LOT better but I don't find this entire "big open area with dopamine hits every 5 seconds"  design particularly satisfying. I prefer the older Nintendo/Rare style of collectathon where the major collectables were few in number but memorable and challenging.

At least the game ends in a particularly memorable fashion, though I don't think I'll bother with the post-game. I didn't really bother with it in Odyssey, either. I just don't feel any compulsion to replay areas I've already spent hours in just to do more busywork.

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TalkBack / Re: Indie World Presentation To Air August 7

« on: August 05, 2025, 02:13:41 PM »

Why wasn't this just combined with the partner showcase? 

Because then they couldn't bait the Silksong people twice.