Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

The Rising Tied by Fort Minor:
I purchased this album on the strength of the single, High Road. There are a few good hooks throughout but as is often the case with these impulse buys, none of the songs were as strong as the one I already liked. Most of the other songs fall into the "white rapper complaining about how hard life is" category, which gets old very quickly unless you're The Lab Rats.

Final Grade: B-

Paper Mario: The Origami King:
I need to accept the fact that the Paper Mario series will never again be as good as The Thousand Year Door. I bought this as a game that Maia could watch and enjoy (and she does, sometimes), but it's held back by stale story, slow-scrolling text, and helpful sprites that overexplain the simplest puzzles. The worst part is the awful combat system that has no effect on the game other than to slow down your progress. Every time the game starts to get fun, a random battle pops up with a boring timed puzzle and kills my will to keep going. I'm now hoping that Maia forgets that this game exists so we never have to play it again.

Final Grade: C-

Asgard's Wrath:
The first AAA game for the Oculus Rift is pretty impressive initially but soon slows into a grind. Every Rift game has a built-in cost of me moving the computer into the VR room, and eventually I stopped wanting to do that. I would probably enjoy it a lot more with less setup -- however the direction that Facebook is taking the Oculus Rift (requiring Facebook accounts, abandoning PCs, and charging $200 to fix inherent issues in the first hardware iteration) has mostly turned me off to VR.

Final Grade: B-

Superstore, Season Four:
There are a number of great episodes in this season which makes the inclusion of 2-3 really awful episodes more glaring. It feels like the writers had a great flow going but had to let the son of the executive producer write a few episodes because "he majored in screenplays at community college". We still finished it very quickly and enjoyed it for the most part.

Final Grade: B