Curb Your Enthusiasm – Season 10 Review

I love how Larry David makes a new season of Curb whenever he feels like it. Because of the large gaps between seasons, though, the aging of the cast is really noticeable. Poor Richard Lewis looks like he’s being held together with glue and Popsicle sticks. Other actors like Jeff Garlin feel really off their game. I saw a comment somewhere noting that Jeff Garlin frequently just repeats what someone else has said in a scene but louder, and now I can’t unsee it. Only Larry David and JB Smoove seem to be having the same amount of fun as they did years ago. While the character of Larry David gets crankier as time goes on—he’s a pretty big asshole in Season 10—at least the real Larry appears to be enjoying himself.

All that said, Season 10 is still fun, and I’m genuinely sad that the show has “ended” again. I mean, I’ll take a bad season of Curb over any other show on TV nowadays. Larry and Leon have some really funny interactions in Season 10, and the spite store is a treasure trove of amusement. The initial focus on Larry’s fumblings in a “Me Too world” are a bit too cringey for my liking, though. There’s a scene where Larry films himself asking a woman for consent to kiss her, and it’s just… awful. I’m glad that storyline went away early on. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of other memorable plots in the season. It’s ultimately kind of scattered and forgettable, with episodes that run a tad too long and are overstuffed with guest stars. But when it comes to Curb, I’m just happy to get anything.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles Review

Yonder is a beautiful game, and my only real qualm with it is that it isn’t longer. I was gearing up for this to be a 20-30 hour adventure, but then I completed the story in about six hours and maxed out what I wanted to do in eight. Yonder does set you up with the tools to play indefinitely, but I found its crafting and farming elements to be lackluster gimmicks compared to the exploration and questing aspects. Yonder seriously feels like a compressed version of Breath of the Wild, stripping out the combat entirely so you can focus on getting to know the world, the animals, and people. Combat was my least favorite part of BotW, anyway, so Yonder was perfect for me.

Well, I’ll admit that this game has its flaws, too. For instance, your character does this weird thing where he/she will jump backwards if you’re too close to a wall, which can make trying to scale mountains super aggravating. And while I appreciated how big and real the world felt, running back and forth across its biomes gets a little tedious after a while. Sure, there are teleporters you can open up to mitigate that, but even then, they’re not always in the most convenient locations. These are ultimately small complaints, though. Yonder was an engrossing experience, the kind of game where I continually got distracted by other side quests when trying to finish another. Alas, these side quests will fly by faster than you’d think.

Kidding – Season 2 Review

I thought Season 1 of Kidding was okay. It was interesting enough to keep me watching, and the cliffhanger at the end—Jeff hitting Peter with his car—was a great hook leading into Season 2. Overall, though, this season was pretty weak. The car accident storyline, for instance, is resolved too quickly and offers little payoff. This is a recurring issue. New problems arise, span a few episodes, then wrap up unsatisfactorily. It leaves Season 2 feeling like there’s no central conflict. Season 1 was great in that Jeff was still reeling from the death of his son. While there isn’t complete closure around that in Season 2, either, it’s been backburnered to make room for other shenanigans. And boy, are there shenanigans. This season is all over the place and really stretches the line between reality and fantasy.

Even from Season 1, you kind of had to accept that some things played out differently in this universe, but Season 2 asks you to accept a little too much bullshit. Like, we’re supposed to believe Jeff mass produced an online toy that connects to a customized app in just a few months? Scott was able to wrestle half of the puppet IPs away from Deirdre in the divorce without any pushback from her lawyer? The Filipino Mr. Pickles went along with the divorce episode, even though everyone on the team would have known that promoting divorce in their country was punishable by death? Yeah, no… That “Death of Fil” episode is where the show completely lost me. It went from being an intriguing dark comedy to a silly drama. And considering what damage they’ve done to certain characters like Seb and Deirdre, I don’t see how a third season (if there is one) could possibly recover.

Project Warlock Review

I played a lot of Wolfenstein and Dark Forces as a kid, so I appreciate the retro design decisions made in Project Warlock. This is a great example of a classic PC shooter, right down to the beautifully janky graphics and secret walls that require spamming the action button. I enjoyed Project Warlock quite a bit, but that’s only because I powered through the game’s lackluster first act. Level 1 is an especially bad first impression where you’re expected to make do with a handful of melee weapons amid some pretty grating music. And the boss of the first act can feel extremely unfair if you didn’t have the foresight to buy the right spell or weapon upgrades leading into it.

The second act onward, however, is much better. The music and sound effects are still hit and miss, but the action is great. The game starts dumping lots of cool weapons on you, and the upgrade points start paying off in noticeable ways. I’m glad that the difficulty didn’t scale in such a way where you always feel like you’re behind. I definitely felt stronger as the game progressed, despite levels throwing more and bigger enemies at me. The last act is particularly insane when the game just tosses in every enemy you’ve ever seen since Level 1, but now you’ve got laser guns and rocket launchers to mow them down with. It’s an exhilarating experience through and through.

Super Lucky’s Tale Review

This is quite possibly the most Rareware game that wasn’t actually made by Rare or former Rare developers. Even the music sounds a lot like the Rare platformers of the N64 era. I like to imagine that Super Lucky’s Tale is the kid-friendly Conker game we never got to see. But just because it looks and feels like a Rare game doesn’t mean it’s as good as truer Rare clones like Yooka-Laylee. Compared to that and other modern 3D platformers, this one’s a little weak. The level design, puzzles, and boss fights simply lack creativity and cleverness. Sure, you can still have fun with something that doesn’t push any boundaries (I have), but that leads into the bigger issue with Lucky’s Tale: the friggin’ camera.

Weirdly, the camera is mostly fixed. You can only rotate it 2-3 clicks to the left or right, if at all. This means the game is very forward-moving; you’re not meant to backtrack or explore every nook and cranny. And you can forget about tilting upwards or downwards, making it hard to judge the distance between you and the floating bee in front of you. Why would you make a 3D game but make navigating its 3D world so restrictive? Maybe this is why they periodically threw in a 2D level, almost like an apology. But the 2D levels are even less fun, because Lucky still moves like he was intended to be in a 3D world. Man, this game would have been great if it was more open. It’s really polished in every other aspect. But the camera design is a total bummer.

Dolittle Review

Dolittle felt a lot like an animated kids movie, and not in a good way. The pacing, humor, and characters might as well have been drawn up by Illumination in Despicable Me 4: Let’s Go to the Zoo. Dolittle is 70% animated, anyway, featuring a cast of Minions-like computer-generated animals. The animals are by far the worst thing about the movie. They look terrible, for starters. Every time an animal jumped, it looked weightless and cheap. And the animals never shut up. They’re constantly bickering and screaming and spouting one-liners in a poor attempt to entertain you by sheer overload. What’s even more annoying is that none of the voices match the characters. This is celebrity voice casting gone amok. Selena Gomez, John Cena, and Rami Malek should have sat this one out.

This really leaves Robert Downey Jr. to carry the bulk of the movie. I love Downey as much as anyone else, but he’s not good in this. Part of the problem is that he’s doing an accent that makes it hard to understand anything he’s saying. It reminded me of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, where incoherent mumbling was often used in place of being genuinely quirky and eccentric. The other problem is that we don’t have any reason to care about Dolittle as a person. He’s immediately thrust into an adventure where he basically plays the conductor in a noisy orchestra. The journey takes him to some interesting places, but the challenges they face are so effortlessly overcome that there’s no tension. Instead, you get fart jokes and screaming squirrels. God, there’s so much screaming…