Now I’ll never know what people mean when they say “those cupcakes won’t fill a sauna”!

The flak canon was a ton of fun, but I have a special fondness for the slime gun. Primary fire leaving a bunch of slime balls around was hilarious, as was running around with the secondary charged up, just hoping to run face first into someone and fire it at point-blank range, killing you both. Strategic or tactically sound? No. But hilarious.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.

—Mitch Ratcliffe

Step 1: Ban porn.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit

You know what I miss? The Ultimate Alliance games from the PS2 era. Isometric view. Build a four-person team of Marvel characters. Some team combinations grant group buffs, like having all four members of the Fantastic Four will increase your XP gain. Equip your characters. Pick from an array of comic canon costumes, each with their own abilities. Some combinations of equipment or costumes will also grant bonuses like having everyone wear their Age of Apocalypse costume.

The whole thing is an action RPG where you play through some big comic book crisis. Lots of opportunity for villain and hero interaction. Cool cinematics.

It’s a rock-solid platform, but I don’t feel like I see it used nearly enough. I remember playing an Ultimate Alliance on 360 and it just wasn’t as good; smaller roster, fewer costumes, less interesting in general, despite the better graphics.

I vaguely recall hearing something about one on the Switch and that Midnight Sons was a bit similar… but then again I don’t recall hearing much else about those games except for their existence, so they can’t have done very well.

Bowtie, but make it a little bit smaller.

Get some real nihilists in there.

It’s a good change!

Awesome. Can we get a new Bushido Blade, while we’re at it?

I’ve been planning Lae’zel as Bard / Gale as Barbarian next chance I get.

“I tried to find out who was playing Baldur’s Gate 3, but all I found was this worthless pile of sexual abuse evidence!” [Throws cardboard box into incinerator]

Better for what? I only listen to mp3s I’ve got stored on my phone; I use BlackPlayer for that, and I love it. For streaming music purposes… I dunno, I never got into that racket.

The theory I heard on the Strict Scrutiny podcast is that the 5th Circuit exists to write atrocious opinions on terrible rulings so that the Supreme Court can make rulings that are only 85% as horrible as that so the SC can seem more reasonable by comparison.

And the Carolina Squat!

I thought that was the sort of thing that the government mandated companies had to do in a controlled and transparent fashion. I wouldn’t have thought that the NTSB would allow a vehicle to be registered without a thoroughly vetted crash testing procedure.

Sorry

With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.

I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.

If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.

Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.

The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.

Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”

PLEASE ADOPT VERIFICATION CAT TO CONTINUE