Upon further review, Hollow Knight is in fact "The Goods."

Just when I thought my indy thirst was slaked by Night in the Wood's adorable (yet crushing) small town ennui, Hollow Knight done gone swept me off my feet. I haven't played a good metriodvania in a crazy long time so I was going to be an easy mark to begin with. I didn't expect to see greatness in Hollow Knight, which was one of my first mistakes.

It begins deathly simple with light platforming and light combat. Hop on these ledges, avoid those spikes, slash them earwigs, and so forth. Every platforming segment is straightforward and every enemy dies in 3 or fewer hits. But then I got lost. For a solid hour. I found a mapmaker and thought, "great, now I can see where I haven't been!" but it wasn't a modern video game map. It didn't have greyed out areas or a pin where the player was standing. It was inert and un helpful. With it's hand drawn animation and cutesy gibberish for dialogue I had falsely assumed I'd get more hand holding. Come to think of it, it never came close to holding my hand at all. The mapmaker told me to speak with his wife in town for further assistance and the game made me turn out my wallet for the stuff that I was complaining about earlier.

So already it was making me pay for things I had took for granted and it was about to kick my ass. I found the first boss and was not disappointed. I finally died which means you loose all your cash (saw that coming) but you also loose your healing magic (well...sh*t) and you have to fight the ghost of your corpse to get it all back (rad as hell). Games that are this fun to play, that are this challenging, that are this beautiful, and this charming do not come around every day. I feel bad for bloodstained right now. I honestly don't know how they can follow this even if they have till 2018.

Hollow Knight seems legit.

You want to get my attention, be a metriodvania. You want me to throw money at you, show me your map in the trailer. This certainly looks like the goods. Deep combat, lovely art style, reviews that boast 30 hours or so. That's great, I'm sure I'll probably break down and buy it this weekend. Which is actually today. Hooray service industry!

Legion is the weirdest show since The Prisoner.

So... did Noah Hawley help an FX executive bury a body? Because that's the only scenario in which this show gets made.

This isn't something networks make anymore and when they did the best you could hope for was the production value of a black box theater. At first I thought the pilot was going to be the artsy outlier that transitions into the more expected X-Men vs the world scenario. That... did not happen. If anything the pilot was holding back. This show was getting away with murder before we got to the astral projection of Jemaine Clement doing beat poetry. My buddy who was chomping at the bit to see a big budget X-Men series enjoyed it but gave me a  "Well... that was not... yep." when I asked what he liked about.

That means this is probably going to be a mini series. A second season would be great but I'm not fooling myself into thinking this is something the fans want. This is something I want and I'm insufferable. This is a Kubrickian Twin Peaks with super powers and I can't stop watching it. The dream like dialogue, the anachronistic wardrobe/sets, the torture sequences that are actually torturous, I could go on. This show is the best kind of crazy because it knows how ridiculous it looks (remember Jemaine Clement?) and it doesn't give a good god damn what you think. At the same time it respects the pain of mental health issues and engenders respect for schizophrenia while being  honest about what David has done wrong.

Or you can just tune all that out and treat it like a straight forward psychological thriller. You'd miss out on about 2/3rd's of it's depth, but I wouldn't blame anyone showing up solely for the monsters. The world's angriest boy in the world sure looks like the nightmares I used to have as a 6 year old. And that's awesome.

But not as awesome as this sh*t.

Night in the Woods soundtrack rulz, OK?!!!

Cards on the table, I'm worried that nitw isn't anywhere near the top sales on steam. I'm worried it'll get labeled hipster trash and get lost in the shadow of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Which no matter how good that game may be, I had to use that garbage title to describe it. So nobody wins. We also desperately need to lay off the colons in game titles.

So to get some of you readers in the mood, listen to the music. It's soundtrack helped garden state get a foothold on pop culture and this is a much better written story than that:

That last 2 are covers, but still.

CRISPR.

In light of current events, it's easy to think we're slipping into an age of ignorance. I purpose we are actually in an age of mad science! Well not really, but lets just say Gattaca is eerily close to our own reality right now. The gist is someone found the genes of a virus inside of a germ, which is crazy. The theory was floated that this is a primitive defense mechanism inside the germ and if RNA was written with a specific spacer sequence they could literally rewrite the germ's genes.

This scales up. Way up. Like China has already undergone trials on human embryos and it wasn't a complete disaster. We possess the ability to rewrite genetics. We've had this for months and I'm just hearing about it now. Guys! we could feasibly create a strain of malaria free mosquitoes and... I just realized this is how every post-apocalypse story starts. Still, nothing ventured.

But it's not even my birthday...

Yay, libertarianism. yay.

Chance really likes Night in the Woods. So much so he gifted me a copy saying it had me written all over it. This guy. This guy gets me. I'm in love with the art style and in awe of the dialogue. It hides tremendously depressing details in light hearted, damn funny, small talk. I've seen some critics complain this game outstays it's welcome, but I don't know how that's possible. I want to frikkin' live there. In a lot of ways I already do.

The maladies of the rust belt have a ton in common old southern coal mining towns. I'm really impressed at how light this game is able to make the crushing depression bearing down on everyone stuck in Possum Springs. Also fun fact, a lot of working class background characters have blood shot eyes. They're high on Oxycontin. Bravo, night on the woods. Bravo.

...Neat!

Samurai Jack's coming back. To Adult Swim. Which I find odd for a couple reasons, the saddest of which is that kids 12 years later still aren't that into this show. I mean, of all the CN shows that desperately needed a second chance this was it. Now they have something to show for it:

All right! That's... pretty much the same show, except with a gun. But that gun still makes pew pew laser sounds so that's still pure Tartakovsky. A gritty reboot of Samurai Jack isn't Samurai Jack and I'm realived they arn't going in that direction. At least not too much. Looks like they're going for PG-13 light, which I think is the right choice. In a word, I'm glad this is still for kids. Cept' kids these days watch Game of Thrones and have seen Fury Road so... this can only improve the fight scenes.