Carl Schulz

Pokemon has often allowed its graphics to take a backseat to the gameplay itself. However, this game appears to have totally sacrificed the graphics in favor of clunky, overwrought game mechanics that are as convoluted as they are visually unappealing. Make no mistake, the core elements of the game that we know and love--wild Pokemon encounters, battles, and strategic team-building to achieve different goals--are all still here and can be enjoyed, but the world itself is so carelessly rendered that textures disappear, wild Pokemon appear and then disappear before they can be battled, and glitches can be exploited to jump into bodies of water that should otherwise be inaccessible. The visuals are akin to what I was playing on my Nintendo DS and Game Boy Color over a decade ago. I was completely overwhelmed by all the new features and ancillary gameplay mechanics that weren't necessarily core to the experience, but added virtually nothing to the experience except another cut scene and wall of text to take in. I was hoping that, for a $60 game, I would be able to get a taste of how far Pokemon has come. Instead, I paid $60 to find out how far Pokemon has gone backwards.

Netflix has a real proclivity for taking interesting topics and mangling them by legitimizing the most insane theories that lunatics can devise. This series, while occasionally interesting and informative, ultimately spends most of its run time as a forum for various conspiracists and fame-hungry journalists to talk about why they’re right and everyone else is wrong. Giving uninterrupted screen time to a guy counting out letters to determine that random phrases are actually confessions? What a bizarre spectacle.

What a deeply disrespectful “documentary” series. Much of this series amounts to Jeff Wise, a certified clown with a super misleading last name, spouting baseless conspiracies. And the producers decided to actually film re-enactments of those conspiracies. Good grief.

I’ve been playing MLB The Show games since I was a kid and every year, it’s a ritual to get the newest installment in the series. This is the first time I’ve ever been truly disappointed in the game. First of all, I never play online, which I guess makes this review different from the other reviews—but as someone who really only plays franchise and RTTS, I feel like the developers did something to the hitting mechanic that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to hit. In previous games, it was easier to get homeruns when you got your swing timing just right, but it was still possible to hit dingers without getting perfect timing. That is no longer a possibility in The Show 20. Perhaps I’ve been *truly* unlucky, but I’ve had to scale back the hitting difficulty just to get any type of enjoyment out of hitting. This has never been the case before. In my experience, a *vast majority* of the time, I can crush a fastball right down the middle and it’s still a flyout to the outfield. A hanging curveball is no longer a guaranteed homerun, but rather a guaranteed popout to the infield. The game does not reward you for correctly guessing the pitch and zone, nor does it give you the benefit of crushing a mistake pitch. Instead, the game demands that you take several pitches just to get the opportunity to get one good pitch that might never come. Again, this has NEVER been the case in previous games. Pitching is still the same as it has always been, except now I notice that 80% of the time, a borderline pitch—even a pitch indisputably in the strike zone—will be called a ball. This is the type of umpiring that guys would argue against in a real game, but that’s not an option here. Again, I play a majority of the game in franchise mode, and after years of waiting for a “create your own team” mode, I was excited to find out we would be getting something like that this time. But no, of course not, it’s just a “rebrand a team” option. This is perhaps the biggest slap in the face I’ve ever seen as a player. The developers knew fans wanted the option to create a team, so they just copied and pasted the team creation from Diamond Dynasty and called it a day. They KNOW it’s impossible to design logos in this awkward creator they have. And applying those logos to the jersey? Forget it. You have to scale it and place it perfectly in the quadrant or else you’ll have your team logo underneath the armpit on a jersey. The kicker? Your “rebranded” team must use a ballpark that already exists—you cannot even create your own ballpark for your “custom team.” This is laziness at its most grotesque. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. To say I feel like I got $60 stolen from me because I built up a trust from playing these games all these years is an understatement. Am I going to keep playing because no other baseball game with current rosters exists? Of course—and that’s why the developers will never strive to do better. What a shame.