I've been playing the Avengers game by Square Enix recently. It has some fun stuff in it, but it also has some serious flaws, so let's break it up:

The Good:
- The game follows its own continuity, sticking neither to the comics nor to the movies, but takes aspects of both. While most of the main Avengers are very movie inspired, it does allow for a more comicbook baed Hank Pym (mostly based on his WCA-era depiction as Doctor Pym) and for characters like Kamala Khan and Kate Bishop to appear.

- All expansions so far (shorter campaigns starring Hawkeye (Clint Barton), Hawkeye (Kate Bishop) and the Black Panther have been free.

- The game does a good job of introducing a character like Kamala Khan to the non-comic reading audience.

- I really enjoy the way both Hawkeyes play.

The Bad

- I really dislike basically all the original character designs created for the game (Kate Bishop and Black Widow's base designs have been fine, sticking relatively close to their comic counterparts. Kamala Khan's initial costume is also fine, though she gets a Stark upgraded costume that is terrible again). The game designers wanted to create their own spin on characters, which I respect, but most of the costumes have been very overdesigned with multiple patterns and pads and pouches on what should be sleak designs. (Matter of taste I'm sure and I'm not singling out the designs at Crystal Dynamics here, Injustice 2 and the Batman Arkham series had the same issues in my honest opinion). Now Avengers was an expensive game to made and by making the expansion campaigns free, costs were pretty high so Square Enix hoped to make some extra money by selling skins (and some finisher moves and emotes, but mostly skins).
Skins basically come in 3 varieties:
1. unlockable by playing the game. For some of them that means playing the game *a lot*. If you're a big comic-fan and want skins that mostly resemble the comics, you probably will unlock at least one skin per character that is very comic book inspired (though Captain America and Black Panther both come close, but are just not completely there IMHO.)
2. skins that can be bought with real money in the game's marketplace shop. And these skins tend to be relatively expensive: about $10-15 dollar for a skin that looks like their movie versions. Also there are a lot of simple recoloured skins and pretty weak designs. I'm a big comic book buff so I'm mostly interested in skins that stick to that or either the movies, but for the main Avengers, almost none of the buyable skins were interesting to me. Iron Man has the only ones that I've considered buying like the Silver Centurion armour or the Classic 70s version of Iron Man (you can unlock some credits in-game by playing which you can use to buy a skin. Think about 1 skin per character (not counting the DLC characters) for completely filling up a character's chart)
3. skins that can be randomly found and occassionally bought at a vendor in-game. These are the most frustrating as there does not seem to be a way to easily get any of these skins except through pure luck (the in-game vendor has 4 items for sale and changes these every 24 hours, but so far I've seen the same items repeated multiple times and skins as reward for missions are very rare and their rewards are also a random skin). Luckily I don't think any of these skins are very interesting, mostly seem to be colour swaps of other skins.

- Enemy variety is very limited: you're mostly fighting robots (not-so-super Adaptoids) and A.I.M. beekeepers. Basically all enemies are working for A.I.M. (either directly or as mercenaries) You do run into some Avengers/Marvel villains (spoiled for those who want to experience the game for themselves:)

That means that you are running into literal clones of enemies during the daily missions as the game does not have a lot of different super-villains and only 3 of them appear in the daily boss missions (I guess another one will appear soonish as they were only introduced in the expansion that came out last week.

- Your character unlocks their abilities during gameplay. For a lot of character that means that they will only get their full array of abilities at higher levels and don't really work well at lower levels as you miss abilities. Even with several hours into them, of all character Hulk feels weirdly the weakest. He can heal himself, but relatively slowly and does not seem to be very though, while he's a large target with relatively slow attacks. During the campaign you will be forced to use various heroes that are at that point at level 1 and you will need to finish some missions with them before you can do their tutorial missions, which feels wrong. Black Panther had a similar problem as his expansion introduced some very tough new enemies (see below) that were very hard to beat at low levels, especially with a character like Black Panther that had abilities that were not very well explained.

Needs Some Work

- Enemies in the new Black Panther expansion need some work, they have 2 very annoying abilities:
1. Most of them get a red shield around them at some point, reducing most damage against them by a lot. The in-game explanation how to counter these abilities is short, disappears after a few seconds and not very clear.
2. Another enemy has the ability to fire drones that affect a character by blurring the scene, until you hit the drone with a ranged attack. This adds some difficulty but is mostly both very annoying and not fun to encounter.
So fights with this faction of enemies tend to take longer, while not being dramatically different in the way you engage the enemy.
Like I said above though, this expansion came out last week, so I'm expecting some rebalancing soon.

- Spider-Man is currently a Playstation exclusive, but is expected to be released for other platforms later this year.

On a similar cereal related gaming note I used to love the Captain Crunch Crunchlings game.

I'm pretty stoked. After many talks with my friend who is into some level of crypo currency mining and doing some ROI comparisons, I bought a significantly upgraded graphics card for my computer. It's going to mine crypto when idle (which is most of the day), but when I want to play something I now have a high end monster of a card.

I tried out the new ray tracing rerelease of Quake 2 and it crushed it. I am re downloading Doom 2016 and I plan to crank everything to ultra settings and see how it goes.

I don't expect to pay my mortgage off with this, but my video game hobby should at least pay for itself now plus a little extra/

I've started playing Thief (the modern version, not the original). It's a stealth quest game and I am enjoying it so far.

I started playing The Turing Test, a similar format to Portal whereas you are a human character in a futuristic sci-fi setting solving puzzles while talking to an AI trying to unravel a story, but far more serious in tone and without the humor. It feels like a movie inspired by the classic authors, e.g. Asimov, Heinlein, etc, without quite reaching their heights. So far, it's pretty good.

I found The Talos Principle far more engrossing for something with a similar concept. You also solve puzzles to progress and unlock snippets of the backstory. The story in The Turing Test is interesting. The story bits in The Talos Principle were RIVETING. I was driven to find more and unlock every scrap.

Still, having multiple good sci fi games is a good thing!