Some kid’s girlfriend(?) has been kidnapped by the Shinra Electric Power Company, which is also building a solar-powered kill satellite in space. And for some reason, this kid and his two goober friends are tough enough to storm the corporate HQ in order to rescue the girl and save the day.

I don’t pretend to know what’s going on in The Bouncer. Acharky and I are just letting it wash over us.

Okay, I won’t lie. I still think the word Robotomy is hilarious. Beyond that, there’s a lot of detail in the plot that feels like it was either left on the cutting room floor or just never fully fleshed out in the first place. Events just seem to “happen” and honestly, I’m more than fine with that. As we saw with The Quiet Man, sometimes learning the context just makes everything worse.

Eventually, I will have to do something other than sweep kick, but that time isn’t now.

We got another cool deck to show off in Marvel Snap. This time, we’re playing with a unique card that can’t be adequately replaced: Cerebro.

Let’s get as much mileage out of this bad boy as we can.

Cerebro itself is an interesting card. With 3-cost and 0 power, its entire strength is tied up with its Ongoing effect to give +2 power to every card we control with the highest power. The easiest way to leverage this effect is to ensure that most of our cards are tied for the highest power, so they collectively get the boost. For that reason, decks that leverage Cerebro are often called “Cerebro X” decks, where X is the power that you’re aiming all of the cards to be. In this case, we’re aiming for 2 power cards primarily, with a few exceptions that don’t break the synergy.

Our other potential payoff for a flood of bodies is Blue Marvel, which gives a flat +1 power to every other card on our board. Despite being a 3-power card, this actually doesn’t break our synergy with Cerebro. What will happen is that all of our 2-powered bodies will grow by 1 to 3-power bodies, which will tie with Blue Marvel and force every card to share the same power again. In the case we draw them both, we’re actually extremely happy with that outcome.

And of course, both of these cards benefit from Mystique. If either Blue Marvel or Cerebro was the last card played prior to her, then she will copy their Ongoing effect and provide additional boosts to our team. Ideally, our Turn 5 Blue Marvel will be followed up a Cerebro and Mystique on Turn 6, sequencing depending on the board state, to gain a massive power swing in the final two turns to tip the game in our favor. No matter which flavor of Cerebro deck you’re playing, you will want to include Mystique as a way to double up on its Ongoing ability.

There are other benefits aside from Blue Marvel for running Cerebro 2 as opposed to Cerebro 3, but we can talk about that next time.

Now that the Murder Castle is soundly behind us, it is time for Acharky and I to indulge in our… baser instincts. I have heard people talk about The Bouncer, mostly as a basis of comparison to our favorite stream game: THE QUIET MAN!

Lucky for me, Acharky is as morbidly curious about this game as an artifact of old Square Enix, which allowed me to sucker him into joining me for the experience.

As a spoiler for the rest of this series, the strategy I settle on in the fight at the very start of the game ends up lasting me for the entire rest of the game. There’s almost nothing to talk about with regard to the combat because it is surface deep.

Chris noted this already, but part of that is just that this game is a between-generations game. It came out the same year that the PS2 did, which means it was in development prior to its launch. Neither one of us can prove that this game was the game that Square used to cut its teeth on the new hardware, but I can’t think of any other explanation for how stiff and PS1-era this game feels.

And while it’s not good, I can accept this game being really rough and janky if it means that Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts would go on to be as polished as they were.

PS: Happy birthday to The Bouncer, which just recently turned 22!

We’re on a roll, and Death becomes us. Let’s keep the streak going!

As a Destroy deck, we’re equipped with a healthy package of cards aside from Deadpool that benefit from being destroyed. Cards like The Hood, Nova, and Bucky Barns all do wonders for us when they bite the dust. Nova and Bucky in particular leave behind a power boost for the board and the Winter Soldier respectively. And after The Hood is played, and we get our Demon out of him, he’s nothing more than a hindrance.

This is where our cards that destroy other cards, like Carnage, Killmonger, and Deathlok come in. While Deathlok just comes with a pile of stats, Carnage grows stronger for each body he consumes and Killmonger kills every one-drop, even the ones on our opponent’s board.

Special mention goes to Venom, who gains the combined power of every card he chomped, unlike Carnage’s flat +2 per kill. Normally, this isn’t a big deal. However, as we saw in the match where Nidavellir was one of the lands in play, it has applications on certain boards. All of those +5 boosts on the units we had there were transferred over to Venom when he consumed them. And on the Cloning Vats or other copy effects, the copy of Venom will also have the power of the consumed units before it eats anything else and absorbs their power in addition.

But more vital to our game plan in a vacuum, if we play Taskmaster immediately after playing Venom on the following turn, he will copy the final total of Venom’s power, after all bonuses have been applied. This gives us a third potential outlet to create a big swing with Taskmaster.

I don’t know if it’s the best deck around. In fact, I’m fairly certain it’s not. However, it is both extremely fun and powerful. Additionally, it lets me play some of my favorite Marvel characters together in a synergistic package.

There’s not much more I could ask for.

We’ve set up the signal using the lighthouse, and help is on the way. All Acharky and I need to do is survive a little while longer. Just a little… longer…

I’ll be honest. The more I think about this ending, the more something feels missing.

I don’t expect to get all the answers from the ending of a Dark Pictures game, but I don’t feel like I understand anything regarding what happened in the Murder Castle. There’s no sense of resolution regarding the killer and his motivations, methodology, or even identity. We both even know if Du’met is his real name. And the post-credits scenes actively work to undermine our understanding by having someone pick up where we left off despite the fact that we killed the person here on this island.

And that might be okay, but the actual also feels like their character arcs got dropped at some point. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell how much of that comes down to the choices we made along the way, but so many plot threads regarding our central cast get completely dropped. What about the friend that Kate supposedly let down? What about Jamie’s texts or the conversation that Charlie allegedly had with the killer? Did our survivors learn anything or grow from this experience?

It’s not that any one thread got dropped. It’s that almost every hook or thread remains unsolved. Our adventure just kind of ends without tying anything up. It’s disappointing, especially from this studio.

Still, I enjoyed the adventure as a whole despite all that. Next time, we’re going to beat fools up as Sora Kingdom Hearts in The Bouncer.

While it’s been over a month since I last streamed Marvel Snap, the truth is that I’ve been playing it obsessively ever since it launched. And in the time since, I’ve built up something of a decent collection.

Now, it’s time to start showing off some of those decks I’ve been fooling around with, starting with this Deathwave Deadpool deck.

One of the cool aspects of deckbuilding in Marvel SNAP is that since decks are only twelve cards, no more and no less, every card included in a deck has a specific purpose in mind with its inclusion. There’s not a lot of room in a deck for filler tech pieces. And since we draw nine of twelve of these cards over the course of a given game, we have a 75% chance to see a specific card in a match. Compared to other card games, those are unbelievably high odds.

This deck in particular has two related game plans. Its first plan is to get Deadpool out and kill him as early and often as possible. Every time he dies, he returns to our hand with his power doubled. If we happen to put a card like Hulk Buster onto him and give him that extra boost of power, then that boost is *also* doubled when he dies. Much of the deck is filled with ways to kill him and other cards that profit from being killed.

The other combo this deck runs is known as DeathWave, based on its two core pieces: Death and Wave. Death is a 9-cost card, which is normally unplayable since Marvel Snap only goes to Turn Six. However, it has an ability that gives it a discount for each card destroyed in a match. Wave is a 3-drop card that sets the cost of every card in both players’ hands to 4, which would normally allow players to play only one card in a turn.

However, Death’s discount applies even when her cost is set to 4 by Wave, meaning she can be a 2-drop card if at least two other cards have been destroyed. If we’ve gotten enough kills, that means we can play her and another card on the final turn, when our opponent is restricted to only one play.

Both of these plans synergize well with Taskmaster. If we kill Deadpool enough and dramatically increase his power, then we can play either Death and Taskmaster for a total of 24 power across two bodies on the final turn, or Deadpool and Taskmaster if their sum would be greater. (Or all three if we get extremely lucky like I did in this hand.)

This means we have the potential to make huge swings on the final turn that our opponents will not be able to prepare for. And that’s just part of what our deck can do. Next time, we can talk about some of the other potential play lines.

Two of our merry band have perished in the death traps of the Murder House. Only three remain, and they’re in danger because the killer is still out there.

Acharky and I need to move. And we need to do it fast.

Not a whole lot for me to say about this episode. It’s mostly tension, fighting, and escape scenes. We’re less thinking and more reacting, though I do wonder if this scene would have changed if we actually trapped the killer correctly instead of killing Jamie.

I’m not killing that goddamn dog though. Not even if it gets someone killed.

The perils of the Murder Castle have already claimed the life of our poor(?), innocent(?) producer Charlie, and we narrowly avoided losing another of our companions to them.

Will the remaining four survive?

Nope. RIP Jamie. We were all rooting for you, but it wasn’t in the cards.

I gave a lot of crap to Acharky for killing Charlie in the last batch of episodes, and I will keep doing so because it’s funny. But if we’re being serious for a moment, both of these kills stemmed from a lack of understanding of what the game was asking us to do in these moments.

Charlie is dead because Chris did what he was trained to do through all of the various iterations of these Dark Pictures games. He had no indication that he was supposed to hold down the switch to keep the mannequin from hitting the lighter.

And as for me, I only saw a prompt to press Square, with no context. Now, to some extent, this is on me. If I was paying attention instead of listening to Chris talk about H. H. Holmes, I would have heard the cast talk about trapping the killer with the walls. However, even in that context, it’s difficult to parse when I’m supposed to open and close the wall. I imagine I’m far from the only person who made that mistake.

Unexpected consequences for actions are normal for these games, but in both of these cases, there was a little more than the devs could have done to provide context for what was happening in the scene. Hopefully, as they start working on the next game, they keep that in mind.

Our mission to thwart another Hydra operation was successful, and our heroes have returned home. But surely they have as much to do off the battlefield as they do on it.

So let’s take a look at that aspect of the game.

You can tell this game was developed by a team with knowledge of Marvel Comics because there are deep cuts here that one doesn’t make if they’re only familiar with the MCU. Characters like Magick, Nico from the Runaways, and Robbie Reyes’s Ghost Rider aren’t on the list of usual suspects with Marvel-licensed games.

It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but for me, this is exactly what I want. I love hanging out with the EMO KIDS, or playing video games with my best buddy Spider-man.

Couldn’t ask for anything more from Midnight Suns, to be honest.

Alas, Acharky in his haste, has killed one of our five journalists. Only four of our charges remain, thanks to his callousness.

May they avoid suffering the same fate.

One of my favorite parts of any of these games is when the lightbulb clicks and we figure out how the victims are intended to die, and thus how we can prevent their untimely demise. Charlie, the chain smoker who spent much of the opening trying to find his cigarettes, died in a blazing inferno started by his own lighter. And Erin, the asthmatic, was supposed to die of suffocation inside a vacuum-sealed chamber. Both of them are poetically appropriate deaths for said characters given their underlying conditions.

Fortunately, we were able to save Erin and discover this in the process of doing so. It makes me wonder what trials await for Kate, Jamie, and Mark when we next pick up, and hopefully conclude, The Devil in Me.