This weekend was very light on gaming for various reasons. Saturday I scurried around in the morning and cleaned the house so that I could be done in time to hit an 11 am matinee of Detective Pikachu. My wife was busy doing an AP Statistics review session they call “Super STATurday” where they prep them for the upcoming AP exam and then the students take a mock test. Since my wife does not generally go in for the nonsense that I enjoy like Pokemon… I figured it was easiest if I just went by myself. First off… Detective Pikachu is adorable and if you need something pure in your life you should totally go see it. I am not exactly a diehard Pokemon fan but I have been around it enough to get a general feel for the movie doing an excellent job of representing the various critters. Secondly… Ryan Reynolds was perfect in the role and make the entire film feel like a G rated Deadpool… which admittedly Once Upon a Deadpool is my favorite version of Deadpool 2.
The other big takeaway I have from the movie is that Sonic the Hedgehog as a movie is going to do just fine in the box office regardless of how much us nerds are raging against it. The representation of Sonic bothers me greatly, but I was in a theater crammed full of kids on Saturday and they cheered and laughed when that trailer came on. We are not the target audience of that movie, and it instead is designed for the same demographic that all of those Spykids movies were. As much as it pains me to say it… our opinion of that Sonic doesn’t really matter if the kids are engaged. I do however think Pokemon Detective Pikachu was a more faithful recreation of both the look and feel of the Pokemon setting with deep call backs to lots of other settings from the games. I think it was also genius to be handing out packs of Pokemon cards to everyone that bought a ticket… I saw lots of kids excited to be getting these. I am pretty sure that Pikachu was in every pack, but I also pulled a Bulbasaur which is probably my favorite of the starters.
For this next bit I don’t have any photos taken of my device, but I picked up a new tablet and spent a good deal of the weekend messing with it. I’ve had android tablets before and always the experience was less than ideal, at least compared to what I was used to with my old Ipad 2. As much as I hate to admit it… Apple makes damned good tablet devices and I have always wanted something akin to that on the correct marketplace. After a good deal of sifting through product reviews I wound up going with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 and so far am exceptionally happy with it. Ultimately my constraints were fairly simple… I wanted to be able to run mobile games on it fluidly, I wanted to be able to read comics on it at a resolution friendly to my aging eyes, and I wanted some sort of a pen device so I could maybe start sketching on it. After looking at a bunch of different options I landed on either the Tab S3 or S4 and wound up finding a decent deal on the S4.
Then for awhile I thought Amazon had lost my order, as it failed to show up during the original delivery estimate and shifted into “maybe your package will arrive someday” mode. The original tracking code is seemingly permanently stuck on “label created” mode. It did however arrive one day late and seemingly no worse for the wear, and I was able to spend most of the weekend getting things set up on it. As such I have been spending a lot of time juggling between Marvel Unlimited and reading up on comics there and the handful of CBZs that I had laying around from various Humble Bundle deals. With those I am using a piece of software called ComiCat that seems to do a good job of both showing an attractive news stand mode and letting me flip through the comics seamlessly.
So far the battery life is excellent as I have not charged it past the first day and used it pretty much every night to go through my dailies in both Dragalia Lost and Marvel Future Fight as well as spending a good deal of time reading comics. At this point I think the battery is somewhere around 85% which fares significantly better than my phone which can be drained by Dragalia Lost in what feels like a few minutes. It is light weight enough to be able to fairly comfortable hold one handed, though I am contemplating investing in a pop socket to make that process a little easier. Side note… as I have said before I have really stupidly large hands so I am not entirely certain if the average human being could hold the tablet one handed, but it works for me. I do however fear dropping this on my face considering I have done that with my phone… given that mobile time is generally my getting ready for sleep activity. All in all however… I am super happy with this tablet and it also cost considerably less than a modern Ipad so bonus points there.
Unfortunately this awesome trailer came with a heap of disappointment in the form of an announcement that while the game would be released on September 6th for console players… that there was no definite date for the second class citizens of the Monster Hunter universe… us PC players. This has been a constant point of frustration during my experience with Monster Hunter World in the fact that the PC release trailed the console release by some seven months. As a result every bit of post release content has been similarly delayed by several months on the PC making us the bastard children of Capcom… never quite having all of the nice things our console brethren had. It was my hope that when Iceborne released that all of this would be a bad memory. That finally a brand new DLC would set straight the records and allow us both to be up to date with the most current content. Instead I find out that Iceborne for Steam doesn’t have a release date but instead a very vague “Winter”… which is similar to the very vague “Spring” the wound up being August for the initial release of the game.
