From The SMPS Vaults: Mega Man X5 (A Review)

(Hello! Future intrusion here. What you're about to read was posted to the former forums of Socksmakepeoplesexy.net in late March of 2015. It's an interesting piece on Mega Man X5 that I wrote when I finished that game at the time, and it's going up here both as a "better late than never" archival of writing I did that's no longer online, and a companion piece/prelude to something I have yet to write. I don't have too many screenshots to include this time, so we'll just let the words sing and use what I did write to paint an imagination picture for you. One final note: In 2015 I played this game on the PS Vita, but nowadays it's available for multiple platforms as part of Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2. I got the screenshots and stuff included here from the Switch version, but it also changes all the Guns N Roses boss reference names back to their original Japanese ones, so bear that in mind. Well then. On with what I had to waffle about almost four years ago.)

Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: New Year's Day 2019 Special (Resolution)

Destroying humanity with a kettle and some string.

So this is how we end the story of Doctor Who in the 2010s, huh? Okay. It's also the only Doctor Who we get all year, and god knows when Series 12 will be in 2020? Like it could be another October air date of ten episodes for all we know? ...Okay. As one last adventure before the inevitable cold dark of the series resting? It's okay. It's another Chris Chibnall joint and he manages to make something that's not offensively boring like... oh, the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos. Mind you, it's still not going to crack my top three for Series 11 or anything. This presents us with a problem. Series 11, in comparison to what came before, had some episodes that resonated well with me, some others that were well-executed adventures but faltered in places, and then a bunch of somewhat mediocre stories. Unfortunately, all of those were written by our current showrunner. (Okay, on a rewatch in the marathon leading up to Resolution, Woman Who Fell To Earth still worked for me and that entire climax with the crane and Segun Akinola's score for that bit were rad as hell.) Anyway, let's send Series 11 off and talk about this slim island of Who that we got. The news of the hiatus gave this episode some unfair expectations. If it was shitty we'd all be down because it was our only Who for 16+ months. If it was spectacularly good we'd be pissed off that Chibnall blew his quality wad on the ending and put out all that mediocrity in 2018, and that he was finally getting good before the show went off the air for 16+ months. With all that in mind, how was Resolution?