Robobeat

This rogue like rhythm FPS is somewhat the epitome of annoyance. Never mind the story or graphics, the game play loop itself if so tedious. Shoot on the beat (or your shots do less damage) must be one of the most ridiculous systems ever. It's not like guitar hero where the music is the point. Here you need to shoot things to clear zones and advance and requiring to slow everything down to tempo to do so just really takes the enjoyment out of it. Not recommended.

Doomblade Arranger Down in Bermuda

Three Epic freebies that aren't so epic.

Doomblade

This platformer has you playing as an imp who follows some whispers that lead her to the titular sword (an opening that worked for Conan right?). This sword is bloodthirsty though and soon enough you'll be backtracking your way through enemies like mad. Backtracking. I hate it. Also there's a strange design decision here where your character is actually kinda slow and not super agile, but if there's an enemy you can click on with your mouse cursor you fly directly at it with the sword. Half the time this kills them. The other half it just stuns them because they are needed for platform traversal. I didn't like it.

Arranger

This is a super strange puzzle game because when you move, everything in your row or column moves with you - looping around to opposite ends if possible. This means the fastest way down a hall is usually to walk into the wall behind you so that you appear on the other end! That sounds neat, but most of the game is trying to move stuff to exact places, and not everything can be conveyor belted around. You want to kill that worm thing in the way? Work out how to move the sword to its face. You want to open the locked door? Work out how to move the key from point A to point B. It's definitely different, and while I didn't mind the village stuff as there's story there - once you get out into the wilderness it feels like there are puzzles in the way just for the sake of puzzles being in the way.

Down in Bermuda

In this kiddie friendly puzzle game you move from island to island after unlocking the "gates" in each, but the game play is more akin to Boxes: Lost Fragments where the islands themselves serve as a box that you (as god/the player) can manipulate which is really handy because these islands have buttons, levers, and locks that need keys? Not the sort of puzzle game I thought it would be. Not recommended.

Hounds of War and A House of Dynamite

Two movies that should be exciting but aren't.

Hounds of War

After a group of mercs are setup on a doomed mission, the lone survivor seeks violent revenge on those responsible. You could do many things with that generic plot line, but this movie decides to make the protagonist only involved with a third of the action - delegating somewhat important tasks to nearly nameless side characters. It also feels like they did a lot of work for very little / indirect payoff and that combined with the terrible editing of putting cuts everywhere in the action sequences just really makes it bad. Not recommended. 

A House of Dynamite

When an ICBM bound for the USA is detected, everyone starts to panic as plans fail and hard decisions have to be made. Only they don't really - because while this movie might have good actors and an interesting hook, it lacks content and makes up for it by showing different viewpoints on the same overlapping number of minutes. Conversations you've already heard are spoken again, and really things you know and don't know remain the same throughout. Don't expect any resolutions here. Not recommended. 

Cozy Grove and Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

Two games starting with C that get old quick.

Cozy Grove

This game has you play as a spirit scout sent alone to a small island that is haunted by spirits! But no, it's not a horror. The silly bear spirits all need help and its pretty cool that as you do help them remember who they are which adds more color to their section of the island, and expands the island to unlock more spirits to help. It's got easy controls and cute graphics but THE WORST collect and deliver quest system I've seen. You'll need to scrounge the place to find things that only SEQUENTIALLY SPAWN. Need three branches? You need to find the first one somewhere before the second one EVEN SPAWNS. That's just absolute shit and a complete waste of time. Not recommended.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

This voxel arena battler has you fighting robots using swords and bows with the main catch being that all weapons are vorpal - any piece hit of you or your enemies is easily chopped! You also get to upgrade after each match but one death and you get to start from the beginning again. The robot commentators are intentionally annoying and occasionally funny but the repetitiveness of the actual play isn't great.

Hyper Echelon and Haven Dock

Two games starting with "H" that aren't great. 

Hyper Echelon

Despite the name and the obvious attempt to show "hey, you can customize your space ship!" in the tutorial, this pixel game is just another top down, bullet hell space ship shooting the bad guys and/or obstacles while the background scrolls from the top of the screen to the bottom at a steady and fixed pace. Oh, then you can redo the same missions at harder difficulties to get medals. Yay? Hard pass.

Haven Dock

This base building game has you stranded on a small island but don't worry, by somehow collecting the absolute truck fulls of garbage that float by you can magically create (using stone tools according to the voice over) wooden platforms to establish a base, build equipment to pump and filter sea water, make farms, etc. What kills it for me is you often have to wait for materials you need to drift by close enough for collection. Not a lot you can do to mitigate that and "having to wait to have fun" is always garbage design. Not recommended. 

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank and TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Two repetitive games starting with "T".

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank

The follow up to "Turnip Boy commits Tax Evasion" continues the story of the cute veggie people, and Turnip Boy has now signed up with a band of crooks to rob a bank. Over and over (yes the same bank)! How it plays is that in the bank you've got to fight off the guards, shake down the civilians, collect loot and... help NPCs in the bank do mundane things? All in 3 minutes. After that the veggie cops show up and you need to get back to the getaway van and back to the hideout where you can spend your stolen cash on the dark web to upgrade things... and then go back into the bank to do it all again. It's very strange and you'll quickly get that feeling of doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result...

TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Do you like Tamagotchi games? The ones where you have to care for, feed and nourish your pet friend? This is just like that, except your friend is a female head growing out of a flower pot that you need to care for and you have a time limit to prove to the gods that love exists by doing so (or the Earth is destroyed). Sure, it's strange - but what lets it down is the usual repetitive boringness of Tamagotchi games. Not recommended.

Felix the Reaper

How not to make a game.

In this game you play the titular overweight and very dancy reaper Felix who has to go to places where time is frozen and then carefully stepping only on shadows, move things around to either make more shadow bridges (you can also alter where the sun is to help a little with that) and complete objectives: like killing people. 

Or at least, you'd think killing people. This is clearly the Final Destination movie style of killing where you have strings of missions just doing stupid stuff (move ale from point A to point B, move decoration from point A to point B etc) before killing which is super annoying.

Also super annoying is Felix dancing. Its absolutely shit. Whoever decided that should literally go to hell. Yeah, its cute the first few times you see it, but when he wastes time DANCE/WALKING which is like 99% of the game? That's just not fun at all. Absolute failure of design there. Along with: if you can freeze time just make the whole area night? Idiotic and not recommended. 

I hate Visual Novels... sometimes?

When players can't make meaningful decisions, is it still a game?

Return to Ash is a simple hand drawn art where you play as a dead person in the ghost land with loads of reading and options that don't really go anywhere? Too much novel and too little game for me. 

Universe for Sale has better (albeit weirder) art and animation set on Jupiter where the protagonist is a neckless, jointless, cult freak and again most of the dialogue doesn't go anywhere but forward. A few extra mini-games break up the tedium a tiny bit but ultimately its still reading a comic book. 

Eternights has animated anime style art (and full anime cut scenes that include full depictions of blood and gore [NICE]) which is also fully voiced. Its about some sort of zombie contagion outbreak and your protagonist has many action arcade segments of fighting them (complete movement and camera controls, dodging and striking mechanics and special moves). It's also very much a dating sim. WUT? Yeah. Because your companions perform better if they like you. Less narration / "thought bubbles" and funny nicely written dialogue. But you're still going through a single story with no branches. 

Lead the party in Eternights, and date them?

I guess VNs are more palatable for me the more they have other systems and mini games going on. How are they for you?

The Contractor and One Battle After Another

Two action films.

The Contractor 

James (played by Chris Pine) is a spec-op level operator who gets fired from the military and needs to do some contract work to keep his bank balance in the green. Things go sideways and adversaries who can't shoot straight or take cover properly arrive on the scene. I didn't mind the predictable story in this one and the pacing felt just right - but the action bits could sadly have used some work. The plot armor on the protagonist is almost visible in some of them! Still an OK movie to have running in the background while doing something else.

One Battle After Another

This movie is mostly about Bob (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), who joins a bunch of revolutionaries and then has to live with the consequences of this decision for many years after. There are some funny parts but very few decent action scenes. It's also a needlessly long movie, with the first 1/4th to 1/3rd being able to be cut altogether and had me rooting for the "villain" most of the time. There's a whole segment towards the end that can be cut as well but they decided to bring one character back to life just to kill them again later? This is a garbage flick and not recommended at all.

Gravity Circuit and Scourgebringer

Two pixel platform games with problems.

Gravity Circuit

Playing as a defender of the planet has never been so cumbersome. While your character in this game has a lot of moves and even a hook that can attach to the roof to swing from he still feels super clunky and the bad controls don't help which will no doubt lead to many "falling off the bottom of the screen to your death" ends, except in the parts you are allowed to fall off the bottom of the screen to progress (wtf, I hate inconsistency). To top it off the graphics are terrible, like back in the early internet flashing gifs and scrolling banner terrible. Not recommended.

Scourgebringer

Unlike the above, the protagonist here has excellent mobility, easy controls and a decent tutorial to teach you all of them. She's also 1/4th the size making her super tiny on the screen! The main loop of this rogue-like game is to move through randomly generated rooms and kill everything inside (you're locked in until they die) until you find the boss/exit to the next floor. There's also adaptive difficulty that means if you suck enemies will be removed from rooms and if you're good enemies will be added which means it should always be at a level where you eventually die. Not my cup of tea.

F1 and Small Things Like These

Two movies that turned out to be snooze fests.

F1 

Brad Pitt plays a semi-retired but still super active race car driver who is roped in by a friend to help his F1 team win. Slick cars, a decent story and pretty cool trades craft (showing the rules then bending them) made it a little more interesting for us but alas, car racing is just not our thing so even after editing down a full race (50+ laps) with skips to just show... three laps maybe per race... it is ultimately still just cars going in a circle at the end of the day. I know some people love that. For us its like watching paint dry.  

Small Things Like These

Cillian Murphy plays an ordinary Irish coal supplier who is very quiet and introspective, especially when his usual delivery rounds lead to the discover of abusive nuns at the local convent. There are flashbacks a plenty in this glacially paced film and the ending payoff is super weak. It might have actually picked up if it went on for a few minutes but with the threat of something exciting happening the makers decided to end it just short of that. Not worth watching at all.

Ironheart and the Eyes of Wakanda

Continuations of Wakanda...

Ironheart

This six episode series focuses on who I currently believe is the worst hero to date. Riri Williams (played by Dominique Thorne) is a girl genius who rivals Tony Stark's tech using what is basically salvage and has already had some "hero experience" abroad, but upon coming home she just can't help herself and her need for money. To this end she does illegal stuff just short of becoming a ho and joins a gang of crooks and ends up accidentally making the most annoying AI person available but then is unable to operate without said AI person. Maybe she grows/arcs out of it.... nope! She's still the same selfish ass hat at the end of the series. Weak acting doesn't really help the case. Not recommended. 

Eyes of Wakanda

This animated series with four episodes is much better than the above, despite the "kiddy" style art the stories and violence within are quite enjoyable as we follow various Wakandan spies out in the world throughout many points in history - usually trying to retrieve their own tech that's gotten out in the world. Short enough to be worth a try. :)

Kameru: A Frog Refuge and Strange Horticulture

Two games whose themes didn't hook me in.

Kameru: A Frog Refuge

In this management game you are making a frog refuge by putting frog furniture around to attract frogs which you can then tame with food and photograph. To get more food you also need to make the dry "wetlands" more wet to attract and capture all sorts of bugs. Yuck. Despite the cute art I really could not bring myself to like this one.

Strange Horticulture

This strange game has you inheriting an odd plant shop and selling/giving plants to people who wander in, but they're after specific ones and you start with nothing ID'ed - just a book of clues. Giving the wrong thing too many times will shatter your mind because... evil plants? Anyway, then you need to spend time doing the puzzle to put your mind back together to continue - all while the visitor patiently waits for their order. Super odd, and lots of reading. Not one for me.

Arcadegeddon and Gigapocalypse

Games that drop you into the grind immediately.

Arcadegeddon

The main threat in Super City is a corporate gaming entity that is infection the local indie arcade leader board so you (and the random city "gangs" that overuse their assigned lingo) have to go in the game and... shoot... things? The combat kind of reminds me of Borderlands. This quickly gets off to a bad start as the characters aren't very nice to look at and you are stuck with pink dreads or being bald. Yes, you can unlock more drip by farming currency, along with weapons, skills and the like but its... super upfront about being a mega-grind. You know how most games have an "endgame" grind with repeatable quests/challenges? This is basically that from the get go. I did not enjoy it. 

Gigapocalypse

This is a super strange combo of a tamagochi "pet" thing where you must take care of your baby kaiju, patting it, feeding it, decorating its den and cleaning its poop in between sending it out to rampage on cities to cause as much death and destruction as possible. Unlike that old game "Rampage", your kaiju only walks one direction (and you can't stop it), with the speed increasing as it builds more rage which is also used to power its other attacks. How its setup it is guaranteed you will not win on your first run, instead having to farm currency to unlock or improve things once you return to the tamagochi segment. The grind will make you feel like you're getting nowhere.

Sky Racket and Backpack Hero

Games that embrace the retro pixel art style.

Sky Racket

After randomly getting jet packs and the titular "sky rackets" a pair of kids take flight to fight the WTF enemies which include cat sandwiches and giant bananas in what feels very much like Breakout albeit with horizontal layout instead of vertical. The idea is that you can whack enemy fire (and a few other things) with your sky racket to destroy the blocks and enemies that get in your way. The problem is that after getting used to being able to whack back enemy bullets, you're introduced to enemy bullets that can't be whacked back and soon after get to your first bullet hell type boss, where only 1 out of every 10 of his shots are "returnable". Not recommended.

Backpack Hero

In this game you play as a pack rat going on adventures with a magic backpack that starts out in a 3x3 configuration and gains space as you level up fighting and looting your way through each map. Deciding what to bring with the limited space is only half the battle, as packing things properly gives lots of bonuses. Put this thing beside a weapon makes the weapon more do damage. This thing diagonally beside armor gives more armor. This other thing you want to keep away from weapons but on the top row of the pack for "reasons". Enemies can also "give" you things like goo or fire which will eat up space or disable your gear. 

Cool concept, but two things turned me off it: firstly there are many occasions where there's lots of loot and you have loads of space but you can ONLY pick up 2 things!? And secondly the pack and its contents return to level 1 on your next dungeon run which absolutely sucks. Not recommended.

Ghostrunner II and Hot Wheels Unleashed

Gotta keep moving!

Ghostrunner II

The katana wielding cyborg ninja is back to do more parkour across the futuristic city scape while avoiding all the single hit kills that would force you to repeat sections of the game. At least most of the bad guys only require one hit to kill too! Awesome graphics like last time and I have to admit, I did get into this one a bit more than the first game especially since they dialed the difficulty right down at the start. However, as I predicted I eventually reached a parkour from hell segment that just wasn't fun to keep repeating and so I dropped this from my play list. Not recommended.

Hot Wheels Unleashed

I usually dislike racing games but this one did manage to hold my attention for a little bit. In it you race toy cars from the Hot Wheels collection and even picking the fastest car with zero maneuverability I had no problem with steering and getting enough boost to do the gravity defying loops and jumps featured on each starting track. I also found it cute that you need to be mindful of things like a spider shooting webs as you pass by which slows you down, and the small mini map in the bottom corner actually lets you see where cars situated behind you are. Sharp graphics and decent controls make for a game racers should check out. Thumbs up!

Golden Kamuy (2024) and Reality Z

Changing up the format.

Golden Kamuy

Set in the late Meiji period in Japan, this live action movie focuses on an "immortal" soldier who apparently still needs money and stumbles upon a crazy treasure hunt involving map pieces having been tattooed onto people. There are some really nice action sequences here (though it's hard to feel worried for the immortal guy) as well as loads of world building and... bears? Yeah. Lots of bears. Anyway, I didn't realize this was based on a manga and worse: it simply ends with a ton of plot threads hanging because it wants a continuation. Sure there was an action / many action bits at the end but... none of them felt like a climax. All up this movie just introduces people and sets up the world. Don't bother watching it until there's a Golden Kamuy 2 (and possibly 3-5 at the rate its going).

Reality Z

In this one season show it's time for another zombie outbreak, this time in Brazil - with a strong focus on their version of a "Big Brother" reality TV house and production studio. Yep, there's jump scares (often happen after long boring shots of people walking slowly down an empty corridor), gore and people making idiotic decisions as per standard fare but this series has a super odd format, and is probably a lesson for me on why some people should always have plot armor. If I was to recommend a cut down version of the show (like I did for Helluva Boss) I'd say just start from episode 6. That said, I don't actually recommend watching it as it goes nowhere.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

All about saving the environment and getting gross things in your mouth.

Continuing from his first film, Aquaman (played by Jason Momoa) is back and quite bored of his job while also being domesticated. Luckily for him (and the viewers) bad guys begin a plot to end the world using... global warming? Sure whatever.

Alas this film is a bit of a step down from the last one, with some really odd plot decisions that waste screen time. We don't need to be told the bad guys plans three times, all the shots of the bad guy doing stuff that doesn't interact directly with Aquaman can be cut out and everything before the first "vault raid" can be removed.

Then you have bad guys basing their operations on land... in a volcano that is spouting green fumes... and no one can find them? This is the same world where Superman is right? Said bad guys are also patrolling the volcano base in old style metal diving suits because... its comfortable like that? Not recommended.

Fast Foursome

Four Epic games that didn't manage to hold my attention for very long.

Wild Card Football

This is all about American Football (not soccer) and presents well with some nice music and cool cartoony but stylized characters (because its football with super powers!), and obviously was designed with head to head play in mind. The downsides for me are that there are a LOT of controls. It doesn't help that I don't really know football either.

Super Crazy Rhythm Castle

This party game (for up to four) is basically guitar hero with side tasks to annoy you while you do it. Some cool songs in here though but man is the villain really annoying in that he talks way too much. Probably a better experience if not solo. :P

TOEM

A very relaxed black and white game about casually wandering around and taking photos of things to earn enough stamps to buy a train ticket on to the next zone to do it all again. There is some humor in the odd ball characters that give you your tasks but some of the targets are quite annoying to find.

Rugrats

Easily the worst of this set that seems to be relying on the nostalgia factor from the TV show. Yes you get to play as the titular rugrats to collect... things through very simple levels. The silly theme and lack of tutorial doesn't do it any favors.

Back 4 Blood

How to take a good idea and then make it garbage.

This four person coop first person zombie horde shooter tries to emulate Left 4 Dead and sort of does it... until they put all of their own (mostly bad) ideas over the top of it as well. Lets start of with the good bits: good choice of characters (even though some are innately "better" with their passives than others), good reusing of maps to fit the story, and good range of "special infected" - especially the big ones.

Onto the bits we didn't like: the graphic for one special critter might be slightly altered to mean its a different special critter. A spidery spitting thing might sometimes shoot fireballs and other times shoot a slow moving swarm of bugs. A big armed thing might just use it as a club (which means you need to shoot its arm) or use the big arm to grab people (which means you need to shoot its head).

These minor differences are spelled out in the oh so stupid "card system". Each character can assemble a deck of 15 cards to build their guy up. More stamina, more damage with shotguns, whatever. You can buy these cards as you find them at random while playing levels, using currency you also have to find. Grind inserted!

The enemy deck shows what special creep you will run into as well as how fast the regular mobs will moving but there are times where it just puts absolute BS cards on like "hunger" (you are all hungry and are constantly losing health) and the like where it forces you to play fast and loose. This removal of player agency in deciding if they want to move fast or slowly and strategically is ABSOLUTELY STUPID.

The only worse design decision beyond that is not letting players start on a mission they failed. So yeah, if you have a limited amount of game time you'd better win all the way to that next checkpoint maybe 3 or 4 missions away or you are going to be starting again. These made an otherwise fun game, absolute garbage. Do yourself a favor and skip it.