Pokemon Platinum (Generation 4) (Nintendo DS, 2008)

 

Man, that is one ugly box-art. No wonder I never gave this a whirl in-era on the DS. Back in 2006 I found Pokémon Diamond to be an incredibly slow, molasses-like game, so for a long time it warded me off of the series. I didn't get back into the series until a decade later with Gen 7.

Similarly, for these posts there was a ten year break between the first three generations and this one. In the interim I did the two Legends games and the Gen 1 remakes, but that's about it. Picking up with 2008 here.

The good news is that Gen 4's deluxe/upgrade version Pokémon Platinum fixes a lot of the issues with Gen 4 and speeds things up quite a bit. This is EASILY the definitive version of Gen 4, and one of the best Pokémon games period. It started a bit of a renaissance for the series, being followed by Gen 5 (debatably the best one) and super-solid remakes of Gens 2 and 3. Platinum heralds a pretty huge turnaround considering how bad Gen 4 started.

Historically, Pokémon posts were always R-Rated and weird as hell. Read at your own risk.

Resistance: Fall of Man (Playstation 3, 2006)

 

I wanted to revisit something from the late 2000's, early-HD, Brown AF, Playstation 3 Generation. I mentioned this game a few times as being Sony's answer to Halo, so it immediately sprang to mind. It really doesn't have that much in common with Halo besides that they're both first-person shooters against an alien foe. Rather than a futuristic game with laser weapons and so forth, this is an alternate-history 1950 story, with era-appropriate weaponry. It posits the question: What if WW2 never happened, and everyone had to band together to repel an alien invasion instead?

It's an interesting game, and covers my PS3 era nostalgia well enough.

Pokken Tournament DX (Nintendo Switch, 2017)

 

Released September 22nd, 2017. So like, this very week. What better way to kick off a month of POKEMANIA. Fall always makes me think of the start of a new school year, and Pokémon, since as a kid I mostly played this series when other kids were playing it.

This game is something a little different. It's a revamped port of the Wii U version, which dropped in March 2016, and was in arcades for a bit before that. It's a Pokémon fighting game, combining elements of Pokémon with elements of the Tekken series. So of course I've gotta see this.

This is a first time playthrough from somebody who has no idea what to expect.

Ranking the Five AEW All Ins

Here we go, time for another wrestling list. This is an entirely subjective ranking, and anyone else could have a completely different opinion and be just as right. As a result, this was very difficult to put together, take it from me. Any one of these shows could lay a claim to being #1 on someone else's list for a variety of reasons, which I'm going to get into as well.

A couple years ago I did a Ranking the Top 40 Wrestlemanias list that took significantly longer than this, and remember thinking it would be cool to do the same for All In events. I just had to wait for enough of them to exist! Two All Ins later, I can finally do a ranking list. See you again for the Top Ten in a few years.

Ranking the Enterprises in Star Trek

For Star Trek's 60th anniversary, it seemed appropriate to do some Trek material. This list will be based primarily on the aesthetics and look of each ship. Not the power/capabilities (which would just put them in chronological order) or how much airtime they got or how well they were used. When it comes down to it, only a couple of these ships have really gotten airtime or had shows dedicated to them. So yeah, this is about aesthetics and how much I like looking at any given ship on TV.

Side note: I think that chart above is oversizing Excelsior a bit. I was under the impression it was just a little bigger than the Enterprise-A, and closer to that ship than it is to the C or D. It's just as likely that it's undersizing the Kirk Enterprises, though.

The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#736 - 756)

#736 Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Switch) – Fall 2018

All I played from this series were the first and fourth games; not sure if I missed much by skipping the portable entries. One and four were both solid enough, with nice hand-drawn graphics and Hitoshi Sakimoto music which is always a huge plus for me. Don't recall too much about this, and what I do recall, I'm not certain if it's from the first game or this one.

Toughest Part...in either this or VC1: The blue-haired super-woman that you have to snipe from a distance...I think she was in the first game, actually