Maryokutai

They could also make a spin-off about Kait's plastic surgeon because 5 never really explained why she looks like a different person now.

Now that there's a gap of about three to four years between games I don't think they need to say goodbye to the franchise but I wouldn't mind them taking a break after 6 and see what Coalition can do with a proper new IP. But that's all far off now.

I finished the campaign yesterday. It's a bit the opposite of Gears 4 which started out rather poorly but got better the further you got. Gears 5 on the other hand has an excellent first half and a not-as-good second half and a rather unimpressive last act. The first skiff area is a welcome change of pace after some heavy moments in the outsider village. It gives both the player and the characters some time to take it all in and it's a visually pleasing setting with pretty ice cliffs and mysterious laboratories and all that. The second time you get to surf around in the desert it feels like it doesn't serve any kind of purpose, which is why I didn't quite like it as much. It didn't annoy or bore me, but I feel like it was misplaced a bit and I expect that segment to really drag down the experience on subsequent playthroughs. Time will tell. Jack on the other hand is an excellent addition. Stealth, shield, barrier and Shock Frost are great tools to have and they give you a lot of options on how to tackle encounters without diluting the core gameplay loop of Gears. Wardens take a lot of shots to take down but if you freeze them first you can kill them in seconds. However, that means not having Shock Frost available for the dozens or so enemies you fight beforehand. It's a nice balance and I expect him to be even more important on higher difficulties than normal. The story starts off strong but at the end I felt like it was just stalling. Great game overall, but not flawless. I enjoyed it more than 4 but 4 had a stronger finale so it managed to end on a high note whereas this game's ending is more of a prologue to Gears 6. I really like how The Coalition tries to infuse some new elements into the franchise and I hope 6 continues where this left off with some slight tweaks and improvement along the way.

I think they did the right thing because ducking behind a wall and shooting Lizardmen isn't enough context to carry a game in 2019 anymore. It's not the most popular opinion but it's the same reason I think Halo 4 is by far the best of the series, because it actually made you care about some of its characters thanks to a better narrative and more nuance and depth to them than just Master Chief saying "finish the fight" every 30 minutes and hoping that's what the players are there for. People who don't want that stuff can still skip the cutscenes and play the game like they used to 10 years ago.

It's really, absolutely, not convoluted at all. They picked up a story beat that was never explained by Epic in the old trilogy and made it work by adding a couple of small details. I know you have a tendency to drift off and start thinking about breeding the perfect Pikachu while playing other games, so just watch the cutscene again on youtube. The only weird thing about it is that they kind of expect you to have played Gears 2 & 3 which I think is weird for a shooter to ask from its audience. But as someone who did play them, I'm really happy that this entire thing has some continuity now. When Gears 4 came out it was hard to make out whether they wanted to move forward or expand on what was there already – Gears 5 kind of shows that they want to do both, but needed a second game to really find their rhythm. The boss fight in Akt 2 was pretty awful though, I agree. Took way too long to finish because it seems like it was designed with coop-play in mind (he always freezes with his back turned away from you so you waste precious time circling him and Del doesn't really shoot him most of the time).

Yeah, it's probably the single most poorly aged Nintendo game. I couldn't even finish the training, no idea how you are supposed to stay in formation with those controls at 15fps. Pretty much everything else they did on SNES still holds up great though. To this day I'm baffled by the speed of F-Zero, with its fake Mode-7 3D and whatnot. There's no reason for this game to be such an accomplished racer that early in the system's lifespan and yet there it is, still excellent today (with the exception of Death Wind, screw those tracks).

Depends on the game. Mass Effect Andromeda famously failed because of twitter memes and it never recovered from that. I think the internet is a bit like a hivemind version of Two-Face. There's a game coming out, Hive-Face tosses a coin and everything that follows depends on which side the coin landed on. Borderlands 3 got the face, so even if there has been genuine criticism about it in the press, nothing will flip that coin, ever. I think that sounds like a very reasonable explanation.

I can totally understand the criticism about the humor. The jokes in B1 and B2 never really were my cup of tea either and it's the reason why I didn't even bother with Rage 2 because that looks like the same thing. It's overdone, it's old, it's not funny anymore (or ever was). I guess people play Borderlands for the gameplay-loop but a good script would elevate the series to a bit more than whatever "a bazillion guns" stuff the PR team seems to be recycling since the first game.

Cross-play between Switch, PS4 and Smartphones is actually really cool. Has this ever been done before, particularly the smartphone thing?

After getting destroyed game after game by Symmetras (while I was locked in Support, so I couldn't really do anything about it), I decided to take matters in my own hand and queued for damage to pick her myself. Symmetra has always been my favourite hero in this game due to her toolset but I never tried out the very recent version of her as it came at the same time as the 2-2-2 lock and I don't feel comfortable with a lot of DPS heroes. So colour me surprised when I played her two rounds on Hanamura, racking up 12000 solo damage and 54 kills for a 74% (!) kill participation. I think I had three Ults in every round as well. And believe me when I say this, I can't aim for the life of me (hence why I really loved old Symmetra). So, long story shot: the nerf can't come soon enough, she's ridiculously overpowered right now. On paper she has counters but good luck surviving as Winston in the current state of the game. In Platinum rank she's on the same power level as Doomfist and can pretty much carry entire games by herself.

Maybe Kamiya made her an offer she couldn't refuse.

Smash is this weird thing where they have raised the bar so high with characters like Snake, Cloud and Banjo that even really cool characters like Joker or Terry feel a bit 'meh' in comparison. Which is ridiculous when you think about it. How many headlines did Akuma make when he got added to Tekken 7? Now imagine Akuma being added to Smash. Yawn, right? You have to wonder where they'll be going from here on out. More obscure characters like Doshin the Giant? Or rather characters that seem impossible because they don't make any sense like Raziel or the Master Chief?

I got to hand it to Nintendo: it takes a ridiculous amount of confidence to produce a 40 minute show with only three entirely new games. Deadly Premonition 2 was a really welcome surprise but neither the f2p Kirby nor this generic multiplayer shooter will set the world on fire. Everything else in this Direct was either already known or has been out for weeks/months/years on other platforms, regardless of how good those games are. At least the Xenoblade remake looks nice. Thankfully the Switch lineup was already really strong even before this Direct came out but this was a very underwhelming show for which I'm glad I didn't stay up.

If you describe an abusive relationship that made you feel trapped as "it was a miserable experience to say the least" then you're not really painting the darkest of pictures. That's how I would describe an overcrowded concert hall with bad smell, not something as serious as this. And seeing this is the only thing I've read from her I'm obviously not automatically going to assume it must have been worse than she was making it sound like. I wasn't there of course but neither were you so maybe keep yourself in check next time before jumping at my throat.

God am I glad I'm not on twitter, I can only imagine the horrors being posted there by the fanboys. Good news for Sony in any case. Would have liked a comparison with the DS as well though, that system sold like crazy too.