Decided to buy Hardspace: Shipbreaker on sale and enjoy it a lot, but it tickles me more than it should that, since I got my welding certification, I actually straight up almost got a job that is literally just The Game but with at least 1 more newton of gravity

Sonic Prime Season 2/Season 1 part 2 thoughts and critiques

Nobody asked but I'm gonna share em anyway, minor spoilers ahead

Stuff I liked:

Shadow. Good god how refreshing it is to see a portrayal of Shadow that isn't one-note and sucks ass. his voice is closer to his original SA2 depiction, him beating the snot out of Sonic isn't entirely unprompted and random, and honestly his scenes may have carried this entire season. The interactions he has with Sonic are also fantastic and oooogghh gay

Sonic!! I'll be honest I really have a hard time understanding ppl's issues with his characterization here; he's a naive, impulsive, rebellious teenager that wants to see the good in the world. I like that I actually get to see him make mistakes, jump to conclusions, and be scared or sad. This is the kind of thing I feel like ppl have been ASKING for from him so I don't quite get the pushback

Nine is great as ever, definitely a highlight of this entire series and he could possibly end up having one of the best character arcs in the franchise

Chaos Sonic!!!!! Wowie what a fun dude, his segments made me smile the most

Animation is once again super bouncy and fluid with dynamic shots, you can tell action is this team's bread and butter (to a fault at times, but I'll get to that later)

Stuff I didn't like:

Good GOD is the pacing bad. Honestly I think it might be worse than season 1, there were so many times where I thought to myself "nothing is happening", and desperately wished they used the little time they had per episode to flesh characters out or have some more world building.

On that, as great as the action animation is, these scenes easily take up two thirds of each episode and it gets very, very boring after a while. It becomes difficult to appreciate them when they seem to just never end. There were so many times when I would become relieved when they finally took a pause, only for that relief to vanish a minute later when the egg council throws out more of the same exact cannon fodder for yet another battle scene

And speaking of the egg council, oooh boy did they get grating. I get this is a kids show, I'm not even expecting like ATLA levels of villains here, but they feel straight from Disney Junior. The concept of eggman cloning himself and having each one represent a different aspect of his psyche is fantastic, but it's completely squandered on one-dimensional tropes that tell literally the same exact jokes word for word, there is nothing intimidating about them

Like I said I desperately kept begging for SOME level of adequate screentime to flesh out the characters and other worlds, but as is, aside from Nine, the other versions of these guys just have One Bit and their worlds again feel ripped from Disney Junior. I was holding out hope that since season 1 had to introduce all of them that season 2 would get to show more, but no. Pirate world where they all go yar har and that's it. Jungle world where they do battle cries and that's it. Despite being the crux of the entire premise of this show they're painfully uninteresting

Where is Shadow!!!!!! What little we see of him is fantastic, too bad he's barely present! They hyped up his elevated appearance so much and seeing him hardly get to do anything was such a let down.

Chaos Sonic, as fun as he was, was only present for one episode. Why

It's very saddening to see this show fall into the recent trap plaguing media aimed at younger audiences where everything is dialed up to 11 nearly All the Time. The samey stock background action music hardly ever stops, once again these guys can't seem to go one minute without punching swarms of copy paste goons, we must keep jingling the keys because how else will we keep kids' attention. I think back to how 4Kids added unecessary music queues to every single action when adapting Sonic X and how much worse it was for it

Overall Prime has been really frustrating because there's so many glimmers of potential on display that get bogged down by the fact that they're just not willing to fully commit to and take any risk on. Idk how much of that is the team's fault, I don't doubt the possibility that higher up the chain some suits are holding their vision back. It just sucks bc I really, REALLY want to like this show more, but I can't really say it's more than just. Okay

I hope season 3 is able to reel it back in

FALLOUT 3 REVIEW

Oh boy, this is one hell of a game and I'm glad I finally got around to playing it proper. Fallout 3 is the third installment in the Fallout game series and the first one made by Bethesda. Now, Bethesda is a rubbish company,  but they do know how to make at-least some good games  -and this is definitely one of them. It takes place in the scenario of "what if society collapsed due to nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s?" I've yet to play any of the other Fallouts, but even playing this game alone, it has a great world with a lot of story to uncover. driving the player as they explore the wastelands is a main story-line to follow - finding out why your father suddenly left the vault one day. In addition to that, the world is populated by all sorts of colorful (well, pale green mostly) characters with their own stories and quests for you go on as well. You're also given a great deal of freedom in how you interact with your world. You can be a sweetheart - you can be a piece of shit-  and you can be something more gray and nuanced than either of those, as well. All of these will affect the game-play, from the type of followers you can have join you in your adventures, to the quests you can get - possibly other things as well. Fallout 3 is such a *huge* game that even after putting in well over 100 hours into it there's still so much of the game I've not seen. The visuals are bleak in a way that I enjoy, although some people have suffered a depressive effect from the game's atmosphere, so do bear that in mind if you plan to try the game. Exploration in the wastelands is fun and adventurous, and while interior areas often are, too, they can  get a bit samey and maze-like at times, making it easy to get lost. Your pip boys map system is fairly helpful, but it does have some issues, such as not showing the multiple floors of an area separate from one another, or showing strange directions when trying to access certain parts of the DC Ruins. The character models are a nice improvement from some of the ones in Oblivion who had silly plastic-looking hair and such. The combat is great fun. There are ton of weapons you can find as you explore, including special unique ones that are one of a kind. You can fight in a more tradition first person shooter/melee style, but you also have a neat tool called "V.A.T.S." which lets you freeze time and target specific body parts on your foes. The game doesn't skimp on the gore and you can satisfyingly splatter your foes all over the place with the right perks and weapons, which is pretty cathartic when they're a slave owner or the like. The sound design is very well done. The music is very atmospheric, and using radios or your pip boy, you can listen to classic 50s tunes as well. Almost every lien of dialogue is voice acted, which makes the world feel that much more alive. And if I haven't emphasized it enough, there's tons of customization you can do with your character that adds tons of replay value. Right from the go you can fiddle with their appearance, and like any good RPG, there's all sorts of abilities and stats to build on as you level up. You start with a “S.P.E.C.I.A.L." system which gives you some base stats, and then as you level up through game-play you can add points to all sorts of abilities (most of which will affect how you can interact with people and objects) and a plethora of perks that give you special abilities. Now, I stand by my statement that this is one of the coolest games I've ever played, but that doesn't mean it's without flaw. I've got a few beefs with this game, as great as it is, and we're going to get into that now. Look up the "Jim Sterling Bethesda dance" video on YouTube  if you want to set the mood for the critique part of my review *chuckles* Well....Bethesda, Bethesda...where do I start with you? I'll first touch on something related to the voice acting that I praised earlier. It is very well done and immersive, but I noticed a frequent problem in the game. I made my character base don myself, a woman-type meat-Popsicle sort of vault dweller hero. Despite this fact, there were *MANY* instances of my character being mis-gendered by others through the game. Is this result of an "innocent" mistake of shoddy programming? Or is this another symptom of casual sexism in the gaming industry where female player characters were treated as less of a priority and poorly implemented into the code, causing characters to use the wrong dialogue lines throughout the game? I don't really have way of knowing if it's one, the other or both - , but it's a pretty bad flaw either way, considering it even occurs during main story-line quest dialogue. It's the sort of thing that can be especially uncomfortable if you're a trans person playing the game. This game is 12 years old and I played it on Xbox One, hardware that is still being supported, so for this and all the other games problems, I have to ask - is Bethesda ever going to fix these bugs? On the topic of "uncomfortable stuff" I'll also lead into some of the game's questionable design choices, as well. This is a game world where people get tortured, mutilated and sold into slavery, where people eat their own families and can choose to nuke entire towns just for "being unsightly" or having "undesirables" living in them - but Bethesda made kids in the game invincible. It's a break in the immersion and shows serious inconsistency. If you're going to make a games world a genuinely dark and bleak one, please don't then backpedal in an attempt to pander to Americas creepy child worship/fetishization. In a real apocalyptic  wasteland, kids would be just as at risk as anyone else. Another thematic thing int he game that rubbed me the wrong way is another example of that subconscious christian bias that tends to seep into every form of popular media. Now before you get pissy and start throwing around stupid buzzwords like "SJW" on your angry little gamerboy blog, I understand the world *around* the player having a creepy christian conservative mentality - it is a world where society broke down during the 1950s, after all. People focuses would shift to simply trying to survive, and their social outlooks would likely remain based in the bible-thumping "father knows best" mentality of that era. However, there are parts of the game where other characters attempt to impose christian ideology on you, and in a world where the player is given so many options to express themselves, there never seemed to be any dialogue options (that I encountered, anyway) for opposing this particular form of evil. At most, you get to either ignore or endorse it.  The game's karma system even depicts the player as resembling jesus if they have good karma, and a stereotypical devil if they have bad karma. Not the most comfortable symbolism for a player like me who is both LGBT and a Satanist, having spent most of my life having to defend myself from this religion. I know that Bethesda games are notorious for being buggy, but I thankfully only encountered a few others during my first play-through. The game did crash twice, and I'm told by my family (long-time players of the Fallout series) that this is likely to happen more often the more you explore of the world. That's....pretty bad. I've also had enemy rag-dolls do bizarre things like fly up into the sky, or turn into flailing stretchy polygon garbage during emotional cut-scene, ruining the moment. Follower AI can be a bit troubling at times, too. I had instances where I would ask Star Paladin Cross to stick to using ranged weapons for her own safety, only to have her disregard the order and try to fight Yogwais with her super-sledge, getting herself killed in the process. Some good news in terms of bugs and design flaws is that there appears to be a good-sized modding community for the PC version of Fallout 3, and there are likely fixes for many, maybe even all, of these problems. Still, Bethesda should be fixing the bugs themselves, not leaving them for the fans to take care of. Despite my complaints here, I still maintain that is a fantastic title, more than worth checking out. Some of the problems I mentioned, while bothersome to me, may be less so for others and things like the invincible monster children and creepy christian characters are only present in specific areas, so if they're the sort of thing to bother you as much as they did me, you thankfully won't need to deal with them too terribly often - or even at all, depending on how you play the game. The good definitely outweighs the bad in this game, but always remember - while Fallout is awesome, Bethesda is naughty ;)