I had a great weekend, and that’s despite the fact that I was terribly sick for the majority of it. Imagine how great a weekend has to be for that to be the case, that you can go to bed on Sunday night feeling at peace with the world even though you’ve been coughing your brains out and feeling like a huge lump of crap for 72 hours.
A lot of this has to do with my brother and his fiancee who stayed with us for the weekend. They are lovely, lovely people, and my son adores them, and they even babysat for us while the wife and I took a desperately-needed nap on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday evening, my wife and I asked our son what he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied, without hesitation, “A cool person like Uncle Jono.”
I also learned that my almost-4-year-old son loves OK Go videos and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”, as featured in the animated movie “Sing”. And for some reason this made me happy. I don’t particularly care about Taylor Swift one way or the other but Henry was into that song, dancing uncontrollably all over the living room floor. My wife and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing.
So, yeah: good family visits, my son being adorable, and Trump’s healthcare debacle going up in flames were more than enough to make up for a super-shitty chest cold. For a moment, all felt right with the world.
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I am struggling with my feelings about Mass Effect Andromeda. The one thing that makes it easier, I guess, is that I’m not alone in my disappointment. I am a die-hard Mass Effect fan; this was one of my only must-have games coming out this year; I am very much wanting to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt. If it was any other developer, I would’ve given up on this game a dozen hours ago; I keep hearing rumblings that it gets better the farther in you go, but I’m not quite sure what that actually means. The gunplay is fine, for whatever that’s worth – for all intents and purposes it’s probably the best it’s ever been. But I don’t play these games for the combat; I play them for the stories, the characters, the exploration. And almost all of that stuff is either broken or badly written, and often it’s both.
I have no investment in my character; I don’t care about what I’m doing; I don’t like any of my crewmates – which feels odder than it should since Bioware seems to have gone out of their way to make sure you know that you can bang any or all of them eventually; most importantly, I have absolutely no idea how the upgrade and stat-leveling stuff works (I’m mostly content to simply auto-level for the time being until I get sufficiently powerful enough that I feel comfortable with a complete re-spec). I do appreciate that my dialogue options are less obviously good/bad than they were in the earlier trilogy, which makes me feel more comfortable answering questions naturally, but I also find myself skipping through dialogue scenes because the voice acting is dull and lifeless and I read much faster than they speak.
Sometimes I feel like ME:A is what No Man’s Sky would’ve been like with a narrative. Make of that what you will. I’m not sure that patches are gonna fix what’s broken here.
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I will say this – my ambivalence towards ME:A means that I’ll probably return to my backlog sooner rather than later, especially since as far as I can tell there’s nothing I absolutely HAVE to play until Red Dead 2, which is supposedly releasing in September. I might actually get back to Final Fantasy XV; I’d like to finish Yakuza 0; I might even consider getting back into Gears of War 4, because why not.
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Are you watching Legion? You should be. That show is fucking insane in all the best ways and I adore it. I know it’s not for everybody – a lot of my Facebook feed is filled with people who are fed up with it – but it’s 100% meant for me, and I can’t get enough of it. I may very well binge watch the whole season again once it’s over.
Shouts From The Couch 