New review blog location! Yes, it's moved again.

I'm pretty tired of dealing with whatever "changes" they're making to the editor that makes it hard to... well, edit. Therefore, the new location of the review blog is on my website. If you click that link, you'll be right at the review blog part of it. It's just easier for me to deal with the HTML part once on my own terms instead of having to undo an accidental new paragraph when I just wanted a new line through a dozen steps. I'll set up a specific RSS feed for that part of the site once I get a new post on there, but for now, it's just a mirror with fixed links. Again, just go to the review blog part of my website and you're good. I'll leave this blog copy up for now at least, but it won't be getting updated.

Pokémon Design Ranking, Generation 5

Here we go, a divisive generation that's also being looked upon as being the best one in the wake of whatever Sword and Shield are doing, but people will also probably argue it's the worst. It even took me a bit to warm up to these designs. They took a sort of "re-inventive" angle to have exclusively new monsters initially for the games, so there's a lot of role re-filling as well. This is the last of the "sprite" games though, despite having many 3D features, the characters are generally sprites in these games, so there's some interesting stuff there to consider for how characteristics were shown. There's also a whole lot of monsters so this took a while to get to with everything else I was doing.

Steam Game Festival Summer 2020 Demo Reviews

At this point, any gathering that's not a protest is effectively canceled eternally, possibly through next year as well, and at that point it may be more than protests that need to form for all I know because I'm not some kind of clairvoyant, more of a pessimistic analyst at times. At the moment, though, I'm balancing bandwidth between having downloaded a ton of games from bundles and just outright free games, and this new flood of demos for future games that just showed up on Steam. This time I'm looking to cover a lot more demos than I usually do, between finding several that caught my interest and there just being a whole bunch in general. Some from previous demo things have returned, but I've already posted my thoughts on those, given they haven't changed much. I'm focusing on ones that I haven't done yet.

Ludological Narrative Convention 2020 Demo Reviews

With absolutely every physical convention being made non-existent for probably the entire year, at least, more time-limited demos are being uploaded to Steam, regardless of whatever exclusivity the game itself has, so not sure why they insist on not being on Steam but the demos are. This brings us to the virtual LudoNarraCon, something I don't really pay much attention to normally so already it's working. The games and demos here more seem to be really "indie", as in there's a lot of dialogue and slower paced gameplay and also a bunch of things where either choices matter or there's some kind of message or both. Not so much the type of "indie" that involves roguelikes and hardcore platforming. But there's still the retro pixelated art style because that applies to anything. I've decided to go over a few demos briefly, namely for games that aren't already in my library through giveaways or bundles.

Steam Game Festival Spring 2020 Demo Reviews

So while everything else in the world is going on and I'm mainly just waiting for things to happen in Animal Crossing, I decided to check out some of the trade show type demos that showed up on Steam recently. Some are repeats from last time they did this from the Game Awards, so I found some new ones to look over. Just some unscored impressions here, nothing too in-depth.

Pokémon Design Ranking, Generation 6

On the continued backwards journey through Pokémon designs by generation, next is the first 3D generation, as in the main games on the handhelds were in full 3D and not sprites in a 2D environment, so there was a start of a disconnect between the art and how that translated to 3D, especially given that they really wanted to maintain an "anime" look for the "main" games. Also they made the models way too high-res for the system in an attempt to future-proof it. This covers the games from Pokémon X and Y to Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, but the really high-res models continued into the next generation.

Pokémon Design Ranking, Generation 7

I'm going backwards this time, like I have with other things, so this time I'm reviewing Generation 7 Pokémon designs, the generation of the last main Pokémon game I bought as things are now. Since I'm more familiar with the designs from here on back, this may go more smoothly as I've seen these monsters up to a lot of things by now. This may count as spoilers for Sun and Moon and consequently ULTRA Sun and Moon but whether you're wanting to go into this blind or knowing is up to you.

Pokémon Design Ranking, Generation 8 (Initial)

There's a new Pokémon game, and this time that means new Pokémon, and I feel like I should review the designs of Generation 8, just happening to finish this right before I've borrowed a copy of Sword to see if there's any fuss to fuss about. Regardless of how that goes, if I can still like one thing about the series, I'll go with the monsters themselves, even if all the games from the one before this one on leave a bunch out. To try to give the designs a fair chance, I'll have to see them in motion given the whole everything using models thing with the tendency for "default" resting poses, plus if I get to find any official 2D art I'll factor that as well. Of course, since this counts as spoilers for Pokémon Sword and Shield, anyone wanting to avoid those should probably get to a point where they know about all the new monsters on their own accord before continuing to read.

2019 "Pop Is Dead Again" Year End List Extraordinaire

Something I've learned is that music isn't really dead, you're just looking in the wrong genres. I don't suggest looking at the pop charts and only the pop charts, though, of course that's harder now because Billboard became a bunch of greedy old farts because they're probably run by a bunch of greedy old farts, but at least we can see the whole year-end still and be disappointed to whatever degree we tend to be while being fans of genres that don't show up on this list.

Maybe there's songs you like on this list, and that's fine, but my tastes have not been any more than barely aligned with whatever this public view might be for some time. Take, for instance, my Spotify year-end automated lists which I've only posted one of here at this time, which can feature songs such as Borderline by Tame Impala, or Juice by Lizzo, both of which are not on this list, though another Lizzo song is.

Games I Beat In 2019, But Ranked

I figured I'd revisit this type of list review since I haven't done one in a couple years. This time I've beaten quite a few more games over the year, trying to take an approach where I beat or at least start and play through the games as I get them, and will be ranking them once again in countdown format, so number 1 is at the end. I'll also note what system I played on or downloaded from this time.

Star Wars Episode 9 Talk Thing (Totally Spoilers)

Time to talk about the latest divisive movie. No, not that Cats thing. Actually I could say this about most movies now. Anyway, this will have spoilers for Star Wars: Episode 9: Rise Of The Skywalkers or whatever it's called, so don't click through this post unless you've seen the movie or have no plans at all to see it ever and also don't care about spoilers.

Game Award Festival 2019 Demo Reviews

While I'm busy with a bunch of other things, including the year-end song rating list thing for this year, a thing called the Game Awards happened. It was a weird time. Also, they decided to release a bunch of trade show type demos on Steam for a couple days. In this limited time window they were available, limited even more by how I'm busy with stuff such as work, I went and played a small handful of the demos I was interested in. I'll just go with unscored impressions here as the games are still works in progress and this is just a small sample.

Weezer Sings THE HITS! Order now and get a second copy of the album FREE! Just pay Shipping and Handling and MSRP and Sales Tax and Bribe Money.

Well Weezer is still around and making albums apparently. And this one's all covers. For some reason they just decided to make a while bunch of those. Enough to fill a whole album, apparently. I'm going to look at this not-quite-blue-not-quite-green album.

2018 Year End List Of Crap I Wrote About Garbage But Not The Band From The 90s

This was a year. I'm glad at least Smash can happen this year because otherwise there's not a lot else I'm digging. Especially not the music scene. As someone who listens to the radio a lot at work, I find myself sticking a lot more to older channels outside of rock and indie ones. I can tell you, good music did happen here. The thing is it didn't really happen much on the pop charts. Here's some chart, now I'm going to yell at it.

More Pokémon Free-To-Play Game Reviews

There's several more of these games now, of various kinds. I've played most of them, so I'm going to cover Magikarp Jump, Quest, and even GO. I haven't played Duel and I'm not interested in it either. Also there was this other one that was aimed towards teaching kids how to read or something so I'm not going to cover that one either. Also some camp thing, I think, but I'm mainly just covering anything that's got microtransactions and isn't meant to be educational.

50 Shades For Free! Click Now For Samsung iPhone X 2

 

Here we go again. It's 6/9 and it's time for sex music. Thus ends the trilogy, unless they decide to make fanfics of this and they make movies of those but they changed all the characters again. Soon it's just a straight up porn with the lemon stealing whores again.

47 WiiWare Demos Reviewed

Recently I've played through all 47 demos on WiiWare that I can access as far as where I am goes, so generally the North America region. Here are my brief thoughts and arbitrary scores on each and every one in the order they're presented on the Wii Shop Channel. Keeping in mind that I'm rating the demo itself and how it worked out for me, also keeping in mind I'm not the best at games and am also somewhat picky.

Super Bowl LII/52 Commercial Stuff

Here we go again. Another year, another football tournament, one of the competitors is the same, whatever. Here's ads I reviewed because capitalism and boredom. Why are there so many.

Games I Beat In 2017, But Ranked

Here's the other thing I've been doing at the end of the year. Essentially rating all the games I beat in this year in specific order, a reverse countdown up to my top pick. If it's not reversed get a different browser or just imagine it in your head where the last entry is the top rank. Not a lot this year so definitely not a top 10, and even if there were more, I'd just list them all anyway.

2017 Year End Song List Recap: Partial Hell Edition

This year was up and down and all over the freaking place. Not the best year. Kinda like garbage, but with some good points, so it's like digging through recycling, where you could be in worse trash, but at the same time there's a bunch of sticky soda cans messing things up and probably attracting bugs as well. Same goes for pop music. There was a lot of not great pop music on the charts, sometimes something good. I don't know if music will get better or worse or if I'm just too old for this crap already. At least there's indie stuff or at least less mainstream but still gets radio play. Anyway here's a bunch of songs and I'm going to see if things are better or worse and if standards are maybe lowering or not. Probably somewhere.