#and if it does i would honestly shocked if base game didn’t cost like $80

[moths-in-a-coat]

i will die on the hill that is sims 3

[thydungeon]

fast reviews: 2020 Q3

yes I know it’s technically not end of Q3 yet - there are spoilers for the original halo trilogy

halo: reach - we played this out of chronological release sequence because halo 3 came out just as we finished halo 2, and I assumed it would be buggy af. I honestly think halo reach is way more successful at being rogue one than rogue one, which is not surprising because halo reach (checks notes) came out 6 years before rogue one. The best thing about this game is that you can melee the shit out of anything in the campaign

halo 3 - much better: being able to kill flood with weapons other than the shotgun and laser sword / much worse: all the extra flood types; just honestly flood are not a fun enemy

halo wars - in case you haven’t noticed - I shit you not, russell and I played literally every halo game available on PC (and you bet your sweet ass we’re gonna play odst and halo 4 when they come out). 

When hw1 came out back in the day, I thought it was idiotic that they took the most complex and dexterity-requiring genre of video game and put it on a console. As an RTS, the game has obvious limits (there’s no option for hold position!!!!), but it actually works quite well and it’s really fun to control the spartan hero units. 

The campaign is hilariously bare bones which is baffling because they obviously didn’t make it for the multiplayer appeal; the campaign is like 10 missions long, each named like an alex g album (seriously, they’re called like “breach”; “infection”; “escape”), the voice acting is terrible, and given the characters used I was shocked we didn’t hear a “just explain it to me in english doc can we use this to defeat the covenant???” 

halo wars 2 -  much higher production quality (for reasons unknown); the voice acting in hw2 is better than any other voicing acting in the entire series by a wide margin (for reasons unknown); many more cinematics that are actually quite good (people move like people); you can hold position in this game. 

Of course, it’s still an RTS designed for a console; the macro is limited - 1 base is too few, 2 bases are too many, and once you hit the supply cap, your resources don’t go to anything useful because there’s a limit number of base slots you can build on. I actually wish you could indefinitely research supply bumps (you research from 80 to 100, then 100 to 120) but at higher and higher cost. 

Other flaws (common in both games) - numerous, but honestly not that big of a deal except for the last one - the mission triggers are confusing, so you might sell out to protect something that you thought was a fail state if lost, and it turns out you could always come back to it later - the covenant units are so much better than unsc and covenant units synergise so much better too. Obviously this makes sense canonically (there’s a reason why the covenant only lose against humans because they’re fighting two overlapping civil wars at the same time)  - there’s an awful awful installation mission that russell and I spent 4 hours on because of a bullshit puzzle 

The dlc is actually quite good because the main campaign spends way too much real estate on hold out missions, while the dlc is quite challenging and has a few interesting spins on typical missions. I also love that the dlc continues the steady minimisation of the flood from galaxy-ending threat (halo 1) to something that can be limited to a continent with a covenant fleet (halo 3) to the subject of middle managers attempting to cover up a software release gone wrong (hw2 dlc).

I haven’t talked about the co-op at all, but it fucking works! I can’t believe 2 people managing the same base actually works but it fucking does! The final mission of hw2 we completely divided duties so I handled all macro and base defense and russell commanded a big ball of death that wandered across the map and it worked!!!! Play this stupid ass game!!!!!!

knives out - oh man the second movie where daniel craig uses a hammy american accent? count me in baybee - I do have to say the fact that “ess-jay-double-u” was used makes this movie dated immediately

nice white parents - I liked it! the music was very serial, which I enjoyed and I was impressed it had much more of a resolution than other serial joints 

la piazza - this is our favorite pizza place (?)

vixies - this place might have the nicest ambiance / decor of any place we’ve been? the food (lebanese) is also good

sweet roses - we’ve always gotten chinese delivery from here but they have outdoor seating and the service was really good!

canoe beach - our favorite sushi place