#I also like whenever he was like 'GOD these Starfleet people are a bunch of BABIES...eat the damn leola root. It's good for you~!'

[bumblingbabooshka]

Processing some things

Also the fact that he's crouching with his hands on his knees is so cute to me for some reason?? He does this in another episode too - the one where Chakotay finds a symbol on an unknown planet...it's just so adorable to me. He could just lean down but no. Also of course his fingers are spread again - GOTTA utilize the whole hand whenever you do ANYTHING (if you're Tuvok)

[bluering8]

TNG S01

I’m done with TNG S01! I’ve gotta watch some other stuff before I launch into S02, so have a quick round-up of my Very Important opinions on various characters/episodes:

Data - I love Data!! Holy shit do I love Data!! He is precious to me and perfect in every way and I want to hollow him out and wear his skin like a suit. That... possibly sounds creepier than I meant? Look, he’s my perfect wish-fulfilment character, okay. He’s earnest and awkward and he never quite Gets It, but he wants to Get It so badly, and he tries so hard, and whenever he talks people are constantly cutting him off partway through because they’ve decided he’s saying too much or saying it wrong, and he sort of... exemplifies what has been my perspective of the Autistic Experience. And despite all that, he has a career he enjoys and friends who care about him and I want to be him so much that it kind of hurts.

Also, Data has feelings. I will fight anyone to the death on this issue, I sincerely can’t see how anyone could look at Data and not come to the conclusion that he has feelings. Data has so many feelings! He might not have feelings the way humans have feelings, but he unmistakably has his own opinions and his own way of relating to the world. It’s heartbreaking that he doesn’t recognise the value of his own experiences in favour of desperately trying to live up to some arbitrary “correct” way of existing.

Deanna Troi - I hate Troi. I do not want to hate Troi, because empaths are way cooler than they usually get credit for, but she’s so fucking annoying. All she ever does is say things which were already completely fucking obvious. She’s a walking violation of show-don’t-tell and every time she opens her mouth I groan because I know whatever she’s about to say is going to ruin my enjoyment of a scene. About the nicest thing I can say about her is that she’s still a better character then Wesley, being merely irritating rather than universe-warpingly terrible.

Jean-Luc Picard - Picard’s such a dad, holy shit. I never noticed this when I watched TNG before, but now I’m picking up on it as, like, the major facet of his personality. I mean, he also drinks Earl Grey and LARPs as a detective and discusses philosophy with aliens, but mostly he’s just Space Dad now and forever. Somehow I also forgot the LARPing as a detective part of his character? Picard’s just a huge fucking nerd isn’t he.

Q - I have very mixed feelings about Q. On the one hand I always love arrogant, capricious, petulant trickster gods, especially when they have Q’s flair for the theatrical, but on the other hand I think when it comes to Q I maybe love him more in concept than in execution? I spend a lot of time thinking about trickster-god entities and how a nigh-omnipotent creature unbound by linear time and the laws of physics might relate to the universe, and Q’s a very mundane example of the character type. On the gripping hand, Q’s super fun and whenever he shows up I know I’m in for a good time. I strongly suspect that if I were a Q I would also spend an obnoxious amount of time trolling Picard. He’s just so delightfully trollable!

Tasha Yar - Yar falls into a lot of tropes which I absolutely hate, but despite that I kind of... love her anyway?? I just don’t get enough masculine female characters to not love them even when they have rape-y backstories and secret desires to be more feminine and Issues feat. their emotional vulnerabilities, I guess. She was kind of frustrating at first because she kept randomly attacking people, but in the later episodes she seemed to mellow out a lot and started acting the way I’d expect of a security chief, ie 101% willing to solve problems with violence but no longer functioning on a hairtrigger. I’m sad that she died, I would’ve loved to see what she could have grown into as the show developed.

Also she was bros with Worf! Somehow I completely forgot about that, but I love it. This is an extra layer of tragedy in her death, Yar&Worf is a delightful friendship and if it’d had space to develop I sincerely believe it could have toppled Data&Geordi as my most beloved Trek brotp. This is what fanfiction is for, I suppose.

Wesley Crusher - I know it’s kind of Trek cliché to loathe Wesley but boy do I ever loathe Wesley!! The funny thing is that I actually liked him for the first two or three episodes: he was a bright and enthusiastic kid who was transparently desperate for Picard to be his father figure (and Picard was transparently disinterested in being his father figure, which is hilarious), but then he was allowed on the bridge despite not being part of Starfleet or even an acting-cadet at the time, and then the action paused in the middle of an episode so Picard could get lectured on how Wesley is the bestest most wonderfulest, and then... you get the point.

I’m not here to shit on wish-fulfilment characters (I mean, that’d be hypocritical as fuck considering my feelings about Data), I’m here to shit on wish-fulfilment characters who are so devoted to wish-fulfilment that they stop functioning adequately as a character. The universe warps itself into a pretzel so that Wesley can be the bestest most wonderfulest and it really really pisses me off.

S01E01E02 Encounter at Farpoint - You know, for a nigh-omnipotent weird space being, Q is amazingly fucking dumb. Like, who agrees to judge people based on a test without realising that if you tell people you’re testing them they’ll go out of their way to be on their best behaviour? You’re not gonna be getting any kind of reliable data here, Q.

S01E07 Lonely Among Us - What the fuck was this episode, I mean seriously. Okay, so we open with two groups of diplomats who super super hate each other and the Enterprise has to transport them to a meeting, so you’d assume that the episode would revolve around dealing with the conflict between the two groups right? Except no, that’s like the d-plot, the a-plot is there’s a weird space thing and the b-plot is Data has a crush on Sherlock Holmes. The c-plot is Wesley does his homework. And then the episode ends with the news that one group of diplomats has cooked and eaten a member of the other group and Picard’s like “lmao I don’t give a shit, Riker you deal with this I’m gonna go take a nap.” What the fuck, basically.

In other news, spacefuture meat is all cruelty-free synthesised magic apparently. I wonder if vegetarians still exist? Other than vulcans, I guess. I don’t know enough about the philosophy behind not shoving delicious chunks of animal corpse into your face to work out the answer here.

S01E08 Justice - I talked about this episode already and honestly that’s all you really need to know. People try to talk to Picard about Wesley’s impending death and Picard immediately changes the topic to talking about the weird space thing, rinse and repeat.

Anyway I was recently reading about a guy who was transporting prisoners when some of the prisoners escaped. The punishment for letting prisoners escape was death, so he released the rest of the prisoners then ran off to be an outlaw because it wasn’t like they could kill him any more then they were already going to. Then he became Emperor! Anyway the moral of the story is that Light Yagami is a moron escalating punishments are important and if someone knows you’re gonna kill them for something they did then they have basically no reason not to go and do a bunch of other crimes also.

S01E10 Hide and Q - Hey, quick quiz: you encounter a nigh-omnipotent entity who has previously mocked your species for being savage and violent. Said entity dumps you on a planet with a bunch of weird monsters. Do you: a) attempt to communicate with these monsters in the hopes of reaching a peaceful solution, or b) savagely resort to violence by shooting them with your space guns? If you picked option b, then congratulations! You are the crew of the Enterprise. This technically wasn’t the point of the episode, but come on! Step up your mind-game game, Q.

Also Picard yells at Q for constantly changing his costume and it’s like, Picard, dude, you’re aware the thing you’re yelling at isn’t actually Q? Q isn’t a human with superpowers, he’s an incomprehensible entity who occasionally puppets around a meatsack so you can have something convenient to yell at. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from Greek mythology and also Lovecraft, it’s that you super super do not want to see the incomprehensible entity’s true form.

S01E13 Datalore - I LOVE DATA AND I LOVE HIS HORRIBLE BROTHER!! but also, fuck Wesley. I hate Wesley. He’s immediately suspicious of Lore-as-Data purely on the basis of he sees “Data” doing Lore’s facial tic despite the fact that at the beginning of the episode he walked in on Data attempting to mimic sneezing, and despite the fact that there are several other characters with much better reasons to find Lore-as-Data suspicious.

Actually, you know what my dream rewrite for this episode would be? Someone becoming suspicious of Lore-as-Data, not because they think he’s Lore, but because they think he’s Data. The crew had previously been discussing whether or not they could trust Data now that he’d found links outside of Starfleet, so having that issue play out onscreen would’ve been fantastic. (Especially if it influenced their behaviour towards Data and Lore tried to take advantage of that as a “your friends are dicks, betray them and join me” kind of thing. I’m Here(tm) 24/7 for manipulation and corruption, my dude.)

S01E17 When the Bough Breaks - You know, this entire episode could’ve been solved with cloning. I mean actually it couldn’t, but the problem they thought they were having could’ve been solved with cloning. Ask the Enterprise for some unfucked genetic material and you can make your own kids! As many kids as you want!! More than six kids because seriously I don’t know what you were expecting to achieve with that, that’s not enough people to keep your planet alive.

S01E19 Coming of Age - This episode is an excellent example of What’s Wrong With Wesley. Wesley does an exam, and he loses some points in order to help another person with the exam, and at the end he’s told the other person passed but he didn’t, and the other person’s like “oh but that only happened because Wesley lost points by helping me!!”, because Wesley is so bestest most wonderfulest that the only reason he fails is because he sacrificed himself to help someone else to succeed. There’s a vague attempt at suggesting “oh, but there were other reasons Wesley failed!!” but like, fuck you, you don’t get to show me nothing but Wesley succeeding and then attempt to salvage this mess by telling me there were other factors at play, especially not when there’s so much attention devoted to Wesley helping the other person.

S01E22 Symbiosis - Everyone spends this episode focusing on the wrong thing. See, the Brekkians are selling medicine to the Ornarans, except actually it’s not medicine it’s addictive drugs, and this is bad because... drugs are bad? Don’t do drugs kids!! Why are you all focusing on the part where there are drugs and not the part where the Brekkians are lying shitbags taking relentless advantage of the Ornarans so that they can live like parasite kings in a capitalist hellscape castle?

“Golly gosh I sure can’t understand why anyone would voluntarily become dependent on a drug!!” says FUCKING WESLEY, THE WORST CHARACTER, completely missing the part where the drug actually is medicine and the Ornarans are entirely unaware that they no longer have the plague the drug is medicine for and thus believe that they have literally no other choice than to take the drug if they want to live. There is nothing “voluntary” about this at all, Wesley you absolute fuckwad!! Somebody shove this kid into a locker already.

S01E23 Skin of Evil - There are no pockets in Starfleet uniforms so everyone spends this episode wandering around with stuff awkwardly glued to their sides and it’s terrible and hilarious. I’m pretty sure this is true of other episodes but this is the one where I found it really really noticeable and couldn’t stop laughing.

...this episode was just obnoxiously funny in general actually, Goo Man is trying so hard to be super evil and scary and grimdark but nobody really gives a fuck about it, he’s more just like majorly inconvenient and kind of irritating than he is actually threatening at any point. “You don’t understand! I don’t serve evil, I am evil!!” the Goo Man wails. Picard categorically does not give any kind of a shit in response.

tl;dr: Data is precious and perfect and every time he’s onscreen I start weeping. YOU’RE DOING GREAT, DATA! I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!!

[words-writ-in-starlight]

The Great Animorphs Reread, Part 8

Book 8: The Alien

AKA “Ax is not to be trusted in public, the PTSD squad learn how Andalites eat, and we meet Alloran-Semitur-Corrass”

We’ll get the lighthearted stuff out of the way first: Ax in his human morph is a delight, oh my God, it’s so funny.  Someone help them, they are trying to manage this shit ALL THE TIME, it’s such a good thing they never teach Ax to drive or they’d never keep him out of the mall.  I didn't talk much in the fifth book about Ax in human morph because...well, beyond the fact that overall that's a pretty grim book (goddamn ants, goddamn Visser One), I was just having a shitty day when I wrote the recap.  I was cranky.  So now we're talking about Ax's human morph and how much I love it and how, even though cinnamon bunzuh aren't really my particular thing (they're SO MUCH FOOD, I can't finish a whole cinnamon bun), I get really excited whenever I see a Cinnabon. Because I am a seven-year-old and still low-key convinced that humanity's great gifts to the galaxy will be the cinnamon bun and the M&M.  Like.  Just saying. Also, it's hilarious to me that it apparently never occurs to Marco's dad—having raised Marco, of all people—that 'No' might be fucking with him.

Relatedly, these books are so serious, so heavy, but they’re never grimdark the way, say, the Dark Knight or (hissing) Supernatural are.  They have these moments where it’s like Yes, these are children, so they are going to act like GODDAMN CHILDREN and smuggle their new alien buddy into a movie because that’s what they’re going to do. And I love it, I live for these moments where the Animorphs get to be kids, where they get to complain about the fact that Ax tried to eat cigarette butts rather than about the fact that they almost die on a regular basis.  Jake even calls it out explicitly, says that they almost died against the Visser's Veleek (and yes, I will eventually do a recap of the Megamorphs, and probably the various Chronicles) and they deserve a damn break.  YOU ARE CORRECT, JAKE, perhaps you should do a movie night?  I'm committed to the movie night thing.  Like.  They do a movie night.  When Cassie's parents are out or something.  Otherwise I can't live with this.

My third and final light-hearted note: the dinner with Cassie’s parents. Like.  Oh God.  RIP Cassie’s parents’ respect for Jake.  I mean, on the one hand, hard same, speaking as someone who believes that hot sauce is a blessing to us all, I too would probably blow through three bowls of Cassie’s dad’s chili with total enthusiasm.  But on the other hand…like…can you imagine the conversation between Cassie and Jake where she goes, “hey, heads up, next time you see my parents you might be expected to eat a whole bunch of five-alarm chili” while Jake, who I imagine does not so much live for spicy food, winces in advance. Also, I’m convinced that the reason Cassie’s parents are convinced by Ax’s shaky Jake impression is because Jake is usually so stressed about being around his girlfriend’s parents that he doesn’t even speak.  They have no comparison point whatsoever.

Well.  Now that we've done the fun stuff.  This book is very depressing.  Because, first of all, AX GODDAMNIT I LOVE YOU BUT WHAT ARE YOU DOING.  And yeah, yeah, the Prime Directive, less-evolved species, blah-blah-blah, but THIS IS A WAR.  Like, I love him, he is my blue alien son, but he also needs to pick a goddamn side.  Through the whole course of this book, when you really get a look at his thought processes and the sheer amount that he's hiding from them and the way that he almost...disregards the lives of the Controllers who will die as the price of 'striking a great blow against the Yeerks', I really want to smack him.  

Now that I’ve gotten THAT off my chest, let me clarify again that I would die for Ax in a heartbeat.  Like, he is a small baby alien who’s lightyears away from his home and his family and his entire life and like I just want to hug him and let him talk sadly about his moons and his brother and his family. But also.  See above.  And then of course this is the book where he DOES pick a goddamn side and that's even MORE distressing because Andalites are dicks and basically excommunicate him for fighting to save Earth.  This poor kid.  I don't think Andalites hug, do we ever cover that?  Regardless, this kid needs a hug.  Maybe the lot of them can cuddle at that movie night.  I am 100% sure that Jake gives great hugs.  And Cassie can probably cuddle like a motherfucker.

Ax tells the Andalites that it was him and not Elfangor who shared the morphing tech because he can’t stand the thought of Elfangor’s name being disgraced. If you, dear reader, want a quick peek into my reaction every time I read that part, picture a dark-haired woman clutching her phone to her chest and going Nooooo my blue boy my poor loyal baby you’re too good for them. In other news, I am a shell of a person.

Sooooo. Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, War Prince of the Andalite fleet and unwilling host of Visser Three.   This is where we first meet Alloran, and it is terrible. Like, yes, I get it, Alloran was high-key a war criminal before the whole...possessed by the battle-leader of the Worst Aliens Ever™ thing, but then again none of the Andalites are exactly clean-of-hand in this whole thing, and Alloran at least acted with good intentions—although, good intentions, road to hell, et cetera.  (Oh also buckle up for when I talk about the goddamn Hork-Bajir and spend, like, All My Time kicking Alloran around like a soccer ball). And being infested by a Yeerk is a punishment worse than death as it is, never mind being infested by a Yeerk who habitually gloats about killing and infesting your whole planet by using you as a weapon.  Like, no one deserves that.  No matter what he’s done.  Alloran is such a damn tragedy.  It always kind of breaks my heart that he asks Aximili to kill him (speaking of LOOK AT YOUR LIFE moments for Ax, because...like...I get why he doesn't, but it would be a mercy to kill Alloran, and Ax's whole voiced logic is 'but you're an Andalite' and that's...not the issue here, kid, although to be fair Ax is alone on Earth and Alloran is the only other one of his kind, I’m so sad). And it always REALLY breaks my heart when Alloran tries to bring his tail blade to his throat and he's too weak to manage it.  So, basically, TL;DR: I am perpetually fucking distraught about Alloran-Semitur-Corrass.

Fuck the Andalite home world.  All of them are dumbasses.  That's all I have to say.

Seerow's Kindness.  So, the law of Seerow’s Kindness is the Prime Directive, its text goes something like “thou shalt not share technology with [insert culture here]”.  The Prime Directive focuses on noninterference generally, whereas Seerow’s Kindness is about technology, but that’s just semantics.  The critical difference here is in how the culture views breaches of the edict.  The Prime Directive is treated more like a suggestion, to the effect of “hey, maybe don’t hand a warp core to a species that’s still figuring out the internal combustion engine or that shows some megalomaniacal tendencies.”  EVERY Fleet captain breaks the Prime Directive at least once, and many of them more than once, when it seems necessary to save lives—as long as a case can be made for their actions being intended to help people, Starfleet tends to let it slide.  On the other hand, you break Seerow’s Kindness?  You get fucking excommunicated, and the Andalites have used it as an excuse to be totally hands off the galaxy.  And I get it, the logic behind both of them is pretty sound and based around situations exactly like the Yeerks.  But…look.  Out of all the species in the universe, none of them are without violence and war—even the Pemalites doubtlessly had a messy history before they evolved past it. Seerow just had the tremendous misfortune and ill-thinking to offer his great kindness to parasites—not symbiotes, parasites.  The host gets little to nothing out of being infested.  And those are the creatures that Seerow just…handed faster-than-light travel.  My point is a lot like Marco’s, in the end.  It’s a failing of the Yeerks that they’re inclined toward empire, not of the generosity that Seerow offered them.  “Your boy Seerow wasn’t wrong.  He just helped out the wrong species.”

Finally: fuck the whole bullshit superiority trip that this whole race is on. My precious blue boy Ax too.  He kind of gets it beaten out of him by prolonged exposure to a bunch of angry young human soldiers, but the other Andalites are just.  A bunch of dicks.  They believe that they’re the commanding center of the universe, that of course they have to keep their technology out of the hands of other races too primitive and foolish to handle it. There is a level of astounding narcissism inherent in the belief that they are singularly responsible for the Yeerk threat.  Are they responsible for Yeerks spreading like a virus through the galaxy?  Um, yes. Are they so universally powerful that it’s their responsibility to protect the galaxy from itself, and their right to judge who lives and who dies for the greater good?  Um, no they are not. And that’s the thing.  The Andalites, when informed that the Yeerks are on Earth and threatening an unprepared population, throw humanity to the teeth of the Yeerk Empire as a stopgap, because they are so married to their grand plan and their law of Seerow’s Kindess.  So just fuck that arrogance straight to hell.

OKAY BUT ON A STILL-EMOTIONALLY-RUINOUS BUT SOMEWHAT LIGHTER NOTE, that last call between Ax and the Andalite homeworld is so fucking upsetting, oh my God, bury me. He tells Head Councillor Lirem about Alloran’s message to his family (wreck me) and he talks about how the Hork-Bajir might have been saved if the Andalite forces (including Lirem) had fought for them, and honestly kind of gives him a very stiff and polite dressing down (MY SON I AM SO PROUD). And Lirem goes <You’re just like your brother> and of course Ax is very proud of that and anyway, I’m dead, just put me off to the side where I won’t get in the way. 

[squadaloo]

My year in games - 2017 (First half)

For the past few years, my interest in games had been dwindling.  Despite the long list of games I played in 2016, only a few lasted me very long and only a couple I found gripping enough to play more than an hour at a time.  2017 so far has had no less than 5 such games in which hours melted away while playing them.  Here are the games I’ve played so far this year:

Batman: A Telltale Game Series (PS4, Beat game once) - I received this for Christmas.  It’s my first Telltale game since I generally don’t enjoy interactive stories, and I found it pretty decent but not great.  First off, the game on the PS4 is marred by absolutely horrible glitches.  The game full on crashed no less than 5 times throughout my playthrough, and one option on the main menu (the one that lets you review your choices) causes the game to softlock without fail every time.  With that being said, the story the game tells is pretty decent and different for a Batman game with there being more Bruce Wayne than usual.  While I liked that aspect of the story, the Bruce Wayne presented here felt almost too...nice.  Like, I found it hard to believe he could be Batman even in his darker moments.  Also, I can’t confirm this without replaying the game, but I left feeling like my choices basically didn’t matter and the game was essentially funneling towards the same conclusions every time.

Planet Coaster (PC, Spent 70 hours on one park) - Planet Coaster is the closest anybody has come to making a truly great, powerful, but relatively simple to use theme park builder.  The management aspects of the game when I last played back in January left much to be desired and there were numerous annoyances I had with placing objects and with limited ride choices, but overall I was able to make what I felt was a beautiful park over the course of 70 hours.

Overwatch (PC, Spent 5 hours in Private Matches) - Yes, I finally got the game everybody and their mom has been talking about.  I’m generally not a FPS fan, but I did like Team Fortress 2 for its variety of classes, and Overwatch very much feels like an expansion of TF2′s idea.  With a wide variety of fun characters, you’re bound to pick a few you like.  Overall, the game is great fun with friends.  However, I haven’t played it as much as I’d like given I don’t want to play with randoms online because I suck.

Rocket League (PC, Spent 2 hours in Private Matches) - Bought this for a LAN party.  It’s fun for a few insane hours with friends and the variety of game modes keeps things interesting.  Ultimately though, I did get tired of it.  It seems like a game best taken in small doses.

Gravity Rush 2 (PS4, Spent 30 hours beating the game and side missions, spent another 30 hours goofing around) - Much like its predecessor, Gravity Rush 2 is a game I love so much more than the sum of its parts.  It improves the combat from the original game by weakening your main gravity kick forcing you to rely on multiple other moves, adds more enemies, and new styles for attacking.  Flying around and controlling gravity is a blast.  However, not everything is perfect:  there’s a few missions where you’re in tight quarters and the camera becomes a nightmare.  It also has terrible stealth missions, and they are numerous.  The game is fun overall, but certainly doesn’t use its gravity flipping mechanics to their full potential.  Other than that, though, the environments are very pretty, large, and well realized:  I’d dare say the cities of Jirga Para Lhao and Hekseville are two of my favorite locations in all of gaming and I enjoyed just wandering around taking in the sites.

The story is very fragmented and feels more like a bunch of different seasons of a show condensed and often has plot holes that don’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does a great job of building characters you care about.  By the end of the game and the series, Kat and Raven pretty much became my favorite characters in any game because they were well realized, had arcs, and were overall just fun to be around.  Raven especially gets a shoutout because the game’s great partner AI actually does some of the character building for her.  Too often in games, you get a simple partner that helps you attack enemies around you and not much else.  Raven actively helps you achieve your goals:  need to pick up 7 people and take them to a location but can only pick up 2 at a time?  No worries, Raven will split up and take a few herself.  Need to sneak into a base, but there’s two guards in the way?  You attack one and she’ll automatically attack the other.  Start a super attack on a boss?  She’ll notice and if she’s not tied up fighting another enemy, she’ll join you.  It seems so simple, but it’s amazing how often things like this don’t really happen in other games.  It actually made me miss her the few times she’d step aside in the story.

The side missions also do a great job of giving you great nuggets of story, sort of like breather filler episodes in a TV show.  However, ultimately my love of the game really boils down to the final two hours of the game being absolutely phenomenal.  What it lacks in fully satisfying answers to questions it more than makes up with great gameplay and unbelievably satisfying character development.  I’ve never been more satisfied with the ending of a game in my life, and it is to date the only game to ever make me cry.  Oh, and the soundtrack is among the best ever.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch, Spent 100 hours beating the game and every shrine along with other sidequests) - You know, ask anybody what they think about this game and they’ll pretty much all start listing the things they don’t like.  For me, it’s the rain.  It’s irritating and flat out denies you progressing at points.  The weapon durability, while not a bad idea, can also be irritating.  The dungeons, while a neat idea, could really stand to be longer and more fleshed out.  The final boss is too easy.

After they’ve finished listing their qualms, though, everybody pretty much says the same thing:  “but other than that, it’s perfect.”  Breath of the Wild is a game in which you almost never actively think about how great it is while playing it, but come to appreciate it more and more when you go to play other games.  I never once thought “Oh my God, this game is amazing” and yet I also rarely had a play session last shorter than 4 hours.  For somebody who rarely can pay attention to a single game for more than an hour at a time, I cannot stress how engaging a game has to be for me to sit down and play it for 4 hours at a time, and yet this happened constantly for about 2 weeks straight with Zelda.  Combat is simple, but always satisfying as you’re constantly reading attacks and waiting to get that perfect dodge to activate flurry rush.  One of my favorite things to do in open world games is explore, but one of my least favorite things to do is constantly backtrack.  The huge number of shrines (which are great in their own right) means I can explore to my heart’s content, but almost always just fast travel wherever I want whenever I want.  I cannot stress how much the fast travel system and climbing has ruined other games for me:  it feels so liberating to be able to go anywhere quickly.  The world is full of interesting characters and things to see despite how vast it is.  It’s an achievement.

In the past, I’ve found the story in Zelda games to be pretty weak.  They seem like the good basis for a plot, but outside of a few exceptions (Midna, Hilda, Spirit Tracks Zelda) failed to have truly good characters with solid arcs.  I’ve seen many people complain about the story in Breath of the Wild probably because its mostly told through short optional memories and hidden diaries, but honestly, I think it’s heads and shoulders better than any story the series has told so far.  It’s a story that’s truly about the Legend of Zelda:  it’s about how the characters respond to the burden of having to live up to the legend and I find that to be an absolutely brilliant idea.  I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers, but Nintendo said in one of their behind the scenes videos that their goal was to make Zelda “a character worth saving” and I feel they definitely succeeded.  BotW’s Zelda is easily the best character in the entire series with a full satisfying arc.

Simply put, the game is amazing.  Buy it.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo Switch, Spent 95 hours playing an enhanced version of a game I played 250 hours of) - Mario Kart 8 is my favorite Mario Kart.  Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is for the most part, a better version of my favorite Mario Kart.  I was at first irritated about having to rebuy this game because I was afraid I wouldn’t want to play it very much.  However, the portability of the Switch quickly took that thought out of my mind as I’ve been able to play with people at work on my breaks and bring it over for LAN parties.  The game’s full of great tracks, great music, and great racing.  The changed item balance makes racing near the front of the pack much more fun and less frustrating since you can’t get screwed over by coins as much.  However, the middle of the pack is now Hell due to the double item system so it’s a bit of a trade off.  Overall though, I find myself having to think more while racing in MK8DX:  thinking about whether there’s double item boxes up ahead, whether I should save my item or risk it to try to get a new item, whether I want to hold this coin for a boo to take or not, and so on which I think makes it more engaging than vanilla 8.

Also, the new Battle Mode doesn’t suck.

Star Trek Bridge Crew (PSVR, Spent 3 hours total between online and single player) - I wanted to like this game more than I do because I like VR and I like Star Trek.  The core idea of the game is interesting:  you and 3 other people team up to take different positions on the bridge of a Starfleet vessel and go on a mission.  Indeed, in the one match I played online with random people, this idea was fun...except there’s the fundamental flaw that other people are awful and will ruin everything.  In my case, I got to listen to a guy hit on the female NPCs on the bridge for 30 minutes and divide them up on who on our crew would get who.  It completely ruined the game experience for me and I felt embarrassed to be playing.

There is a single player mode in which you’re just the captain, but it feels kind of boring.  It wasn’t long before the siren song of Mario Kart pulled me away from this.  I’ll probably return to it some day, though, since I still have plenty of missions left to try.

Nier Automata (PC, Spent 35 hours getting endings A-X and Z, as well as side quests) - This is a game I hadn’t heard of until Kotaku staff members mentioned in a post in late 2016 how it was a game they were really looking forward to for 2017.  The demo for it went up on the Playstation store at the same time as the Gravity Rush 2 demo so I figured “why not?”  Turns out the demo was fucking amazing, but I decided to wait until it was cheaper to buy since I had other games to play.

For those unaware, Nier Automata is an action RPG that is also a platformer, a topdown shooter, hack and slash, shooter, and whatever else it Goddamn pleases to be at any given moment.  Somehow, despite these shifts in gameplay, it manages to be mostly competent in all of them.  However, after an excellent prologue (as seen in the demo) in which it constantly shifts perspectives to keep things fresh, it becomes open world and spots shifting as much which I found to be disappointing as it was the thing that sold me on the game.  It’s also the first open world game I played after playing Breath of the Wild, and so going back to feeling restricted to having to walk to fast travel points, not having fast travel unlocked until partway through the story, and having to backtrack quite a bit was a shock.  It’s not bad at these things, but the lack of freedom was something I wouldn’t have noticed had it not been for Zelda.  Combat is fun, but can feel repetitive.  It’s fast and frantic which I enjoy, but the perfect dodge system feels a bit too easy to spam meaning I don’t have to think about each individual encounter the way I do in Zelda.

The story is difficult to talk about without going into spoilers, but I felt it was mostly great with a few moments of utter brilliance mixed in with some moments of frustration.  I do care about the characters and the voice acting is surprisingly well done, but the game I felt alternated between great twists and plot developments I could see coming from 20 miles away.  It’s hard to get into without spoilers, but to me, it also had a habit of undermining its most emotional moments with weird bits of execution.  Near the end (well, third and fourth ending.  It’s complicated), I felt the story started to rely on tropes I don’t particularly care for which started hurting my enjoyment of it, although its ultimate conclusion (the 5th ending. Again, complicated) was very satisfying.  It’s a very dark story, but somehow manages to balance it very well with a surprisingly great sense of humor.

Overall, solid game.

And that does it.  Thank God I split this year in half, or else I’d still have to talk about Splatoon 2, Sonic Mania, Metroid Samus Returns, Sonic Forces, and Super Mario Odyssey.  Plus there’s the games I may wait to get until things have died down like Horizon Zero Dawn and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.  Did I mention this year was a great year for video games?  Because it’s a great year for video games.