TheRealTurk

For movies, Star Wars is the obvious one. The prequels were pretty bad, but at least you could laugh at them. Somehow everything Disney has done with the franchise has been even worse. It manages to be this weird kind of earnest and just well made enough that it isn't particularly funny, but ends up being boring instead. Just end it after the original trilogy.

In terms of games, I'd probably say stop after Diablo 2. Maybe not "end" the franchise necessarily, but I'd certainly like to go back and time and have Blizzard make different decisions in regards to Diablo 3.

For T.V., I'd prevent the new Battlestar Galactica from ever being made. That show sucked monkey balls.

The one's I can think of off the top of my head:

Matthew Rorie's Alpha Protocol: I really liked a ton of stuff they did with this game. The way the story branched was really fascinating and I liked the way that a ton of little actions ended up giving small perks to your character. Plus, modern day espionage is a really under-mined setting these days. If they could just make the shooting actually good and hammer out the bugs, I'd love to see another game in this vein.

L.A. Noire: I've been playing through the re-master and I still for the most part enjoy it, but I can definitely see areas where a sequel could improve. For one, the game kind of went off the rails in the second half when it started trying to focus on the overarching plot as opposed to case work. I'd love to see a new one be much more episodic rather than trying to shoehorn in a paint-by-numbers noir story on top of everything.

Also, they'd need to figure out a better conversation and evidence system, since a lot of times the responses didn't really make a ton of sense and there were definitely times where it had "Adventure Game Syndrome" with the "correct" evidence needing some leaps in logic to make sense.

I'd also ditch most of the driving around the city and street crime stuff. It was cool how they modeled L.A. in such detail, but they never really did anything with it, so it felt like a lot of wasted effort they could have spent in other places.

I have been a naysayer about Stadia from Day 1. In addition to the presentations being extremely poor, it just feels like Google has absolutely no idea how the internet practically works for most people or the any of the issues with ownership that are currently working their way through the industry.

I don't know how things work at Google, but in the real world, a lot of people have data caps that will limit their ability to stream whenever they want. And Google's hand-waiving of the issue isn't helping them. Saying "ISPs will figure it out" feels laughably detached from reality. What makes them think that ISPs are going to suddenly remove data caps because some small segment of gamers wants a marginal upgrade in convenience? If anything, the opposite is true - ISPs will have more aggressive or expensive data caps to take advantage of people suddenly gobbling data to use Stadia.

Then there's the whole issue of who this service is supposed to be for? The whole pitch is supposed to be "play anywhere on any device" which sounds great in theory, but again, ignores the practicalities of the real world. Even if you are fortunate enough to not have data caps and have a reliable connection, you still need sufficient bandwidth to pull off streaming at any kind of acceptable quality. Does Google really think the local Starbucks is going to provide that?

Personally, the only places I would have the bandwidth to actually play games on Stadia are (1) Home and (2) Work. I don't need Stadia at home because I already have a PC and a console, and I'm not going to spend my day at work playing games, so . . . why would I buy Stadia?

And all of this is before we get into the issues of privacy that naturally come with anything online these days - issues I would note that so far Google has conspicuously failed to address.

I think it would be cool to have some sort of "Space Race" feature. Divide the crew into teams and see who can get to the moon first.

It looks . . . just OK? The combat kind of looks like the character choice is really more cosmetic. I'm not getting the sense that they play that all differently beyond having different supers.

While those are things that should have been fixed, I think at this point it's kind of polishing a turd. Unless they are also re-working the level design or adding in better story and characters, I don't know that it's going to help that much. Things are much more fundamentally broken than adding checkpoints and adjusting enemy balance.

I think it would have been a lot better received if they'd just called it something else.

It's a good game, but it isn't a very good Doom game, if that makes any sense. I feel the same way about Diablo 3. Once you stick those names on the box, there's a set of expectations that kind of needs to be filled. Not to say that experimentation and evolution aren't positive things, but Doom 3 just doesn't check very many of those boxes.

Probably LOTRO, although I haven't played it in several years due to each expansion making the game progressively much worse.

Recently, it's Witcher 3 without a close second.

@flstyle: I am glad I swapped Allison for van Dijk. I agonized over that choice a bit, but I’m glad I made it.

In other news, the Premier League Fantasy rules continue to confound me. How did they decide that Salah was a midfielder? I can’t complain too much since it technically gives him more points for a goal, but . . . how?

I feel like they should allow you to classify multi-purpose players in your lineup

Alright. I managed to complete my team just in time for the deadline. Like every year, I (a) had grand plans of creating the perfect Premier League Moneyball system and then waited until the last minute to put things together and (b) will be sunk for trying to build a soccer team, rather than a fantasy soccer team.