What's the most shockng thing about XCOM 2?

It's got a good yarn. The aliens aren't just a paramilitary threat anymore and their motives aren't  resigned to some some throwaway lines at the end of the game about them finding the perfect warrior.

There's a mystery at the heart of XCOM 2 that's way more intricate than Advent simply processing humanity into food. The dialogue can be hammy and the performances don't always hit (Shen sounds pretty sleepy sometimes) but the act of freeing earth takes scientists and engineers. Not just better guns and soldiers. There's some half decent drama to be found hacking away at alien corpses in the lab, surprisingly.

Advent is a puzzle just as much as it is an enemy. In other words, the last thing I thought I'd find compelling about XCOM 2 was it's story.

"Well it's damn good to BE back, sir."

.Apparently rag-tag resistance fighters are also shockingly accomplished interior decorators

 

Ever go back to an old game and strike gold?

Just thought I'd pick up a magazine in Concordia, then bam!

 Damn funny meta-joke staring me in the face. I guess canonically none of the vault hunters ever actually die and how do you actually display plot inconsistencies? Love it. Love everything about this gag.

Digital Chicken Soup Part 2

I'm not a Thrones fan who reads the books, that's a personal failing. I never read as much as I should Still, I don't know why "Hardcore Game of Thrones" is so compulsively listenable. It's an audio history tour of Westeros by Alex Berg... played entirely straight. Like a WWI documentary.

I submit that the histories are all the rough drafts Martin went through before settling on the time period so interesting that I bought 2 months of HBO Now to binge it. Because the history tells a damn good story. No better application of writing = re-writing that I can think of.

Digital Chicken Soup.

I bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Jesus, look at that hyphenated number.) last December foolishly hoping it was ported. But it was an unoptimized mess brought to hideous second life. It was rough watching it constantly lurch back and forth between 60-30 fps and I dropped it like a stone.

Fast forward a year and a month and... well I'm having a rough go of it. FF's time traveling claptrap is actually soothing to me now. For lack of a more elegant phrase, I needed something both intense and inoffensive to devour my weekend's waking hours. Something new, without spending any more money. In other words, no reaching for the dusty ol' copy of Requiem for a Dream for Alex. No sir.

But it's a damn good game! The actors are actors dedicated but the script spouts the most laughable drivel I've heard in a looooooong time. But that's a good thing when you want to turn your brain off so hard it's practically meditation. It's also secretly a Pokemon game and I'm all for that at the moment.

 I finally realized in order to appreciate what Square Enix has been up to these past 7 years you have to be at least a little drunk.

Heres the cracked podcast live:

 

So that's what they look like.

Long dark night of the Kraken soul.

...Life, huh? You never seem to be able to stop putting yourself out there. Time to hit the gym harder, I guess.