When the likes of Boise State and San Diego State left the Mountain West in favor of the dying PAC, UNLV appeared to be the defacto top dog in the conference. After 3 games of the 2026 campaign, however, I'm not so sure anymore. The Rebels have looked bad in their 2 non-conference games so far. They were competitive against Memphis in the season opener, losing by only a single score. Against North Texas, however, UNLV embarrassed themselves with a completely incompetent showing.

Maybe the 100+ degree heat affected the players more than they expected it to. The Rebels turned the ball over on 2 of their first 3 possessions, but were able to hold North Texas to just field goals off of those turnovers, giving hope that maybe UNLV could stay in the game. All hope seemed to die just before halftime, when poor play-calling and clock-management from coach Dan Mullen left the team scrambling to get one last play off at the goal line, only to be stuffed and denied on an opportunity to go into halftime down by just 1 score. They went into halftime down 17-3. A manageable deficit, but only if the team could come out in the second half and execute with any degree of competence.

That didn't happen. UNLV could not stop North Texas' offense in the second half, and UNLV's offense continued to look terrible. The team could only score a single additional field goal, while North Texas went on to run away with 44 total points. I expected poor defensive play from a Dan Mullen-coached team. What I didn't expect was for the offense to be completely incapable of scoring a touchdown for an entire game.

PHOTO CREDIT: Madeline Carter / LVRJ

PHOTO CREDIT: UNLV Athletics

I might take consolation if Memphis and North Texas end up playing in the American Conference Championship.

I really was not ready for the start of football season this year. Part of that is the fault of NFL Fantasy Football, which migrated its leagues to ESPN's fantasy app, but waited till the 11th hour to actually enable the ability to transfer. I got the email about it in the spring, and was just kind of waiting to get further instructions from the NFL on how to do the migration. Those instructions didn't come until like the end of July, only a couple weeks before the start of the NFL preseason.

This delay in setting up my fantasy football leagues this year meant I wasn't really thinking about football, and didn't even bother looking for cheap copies of College Football 27 on eBay when the game released. I ended up buying my used copy off eBay a whole month after the game's release. In fact, it was so late, that I received the game in the mail the day before Madden 27's official release. So I'll probably be late about getting my pre-owned copy of that too.

Another year of Big Money and conference re-alignment ruining college football is upon us.

Being a month late, I apparently missed a whole lot of a drama with the game's launch. From what I've read, the Dynasty mode nerfed experience gain for players and coaches in order to sell XP boost micro-transactions. Without those micro-transaction XP boosts, users report that it would take 150 seasons of undefeated national championship runs to get a custom coach up to max level. (The game only supports 50 years of Dynasty Mode)

Things were so bad that apparently content creators and influencers (even the Ultimate Team ones!) were in active rebellion and recommending boycotts. EA back-tracked ... partially. The XP boost micro-transactions were removed, and the names of the Coach XP sliders were renamed in order to obfuscate whether a "fast" option is included or not. So maybe XP gain is back to normal, or maybe it's still slower than in past years. I don't know. Worse yet, EA still kept a paywall for certain coach skill trees.

Even influencers (such as Bordeaux) were quick to call out EA for its brazen attempts at pay-to-win monetization.

It actually teaches the game this time?

Upon finally receiving a copy of the game, I jumped into a quick exhibition match with last year's national champs expecting to feel right at home and breeze to an easy victory, and to start my reviewing process with the impression that the game hadn't changed much. I did breeze to an easy victory, but that had more to do with playing as the reigning national champs instead of anything I was doing. Instead, I actually felt surprisingly out-of-place. A lot of simple things from years past were different. For example, the commands for shifting defensive linemen and linebackers weren't mapped to the controls I expected, and I generally had no idea what any of the defensive pre-play controls did, because so many of them were moved, combined, or had unfamiliar commands in their menus. The buttons to view wear & tear weren't where they used to be, even though a quick trip to the setting menu confirmed that wear & tear is still in the game. And so forth.

So the next time I played, I went to the Training menu, expecting to be disappointed by a measly list of un-helpful mini-games that would force me to go to the internet to figure out where all the familiar commands had been moved to, and what new commands might be present. What I found instead was an exhaustive suite of tutorials, including an entire menu dedicated specifically to mechanics and features that were new this year, or significantly changed from previous years. On top of that, the tutorials showed subtle, but significant design improvements over the Madden counterparts that I had been familiar with for years.

There is [finally] an entire tutorial menu dedicated to new and modified features.

In general, these Skill Trainer tutorials lacked good feedback for what you might be doing wrong, if you are failing to execute the commands being tutorialized. In fact, when I got to the tutorial for the new timing-based catching mechanic, I was kind of stone-walled. There was no on-screen indicator, dial, or gauge of any kind telling me what to press or how long to press it. My receiver kept catching passes, but I wasn't given credit for executing the timing catches, and the game wasn't giving me any feedback on what (if anything) I was doing wrong. So I hopped on the internet and searched for "College Football 27 perfect catch tutorial not working", and immediately found a reddit post explaining that, by importing last year's settings, the timing-catch mechanic is disabled by default. That's right, the game's most significant and heavily-advertised new feature was disabled by default! I had to quit the Skill Trainer and turn on the timing-catch setting. Then, suddenly, the tutorial started working, and the rest of the Skill Trainer drills were mostly smooth-sailing and were highly informative.

With the 100th anniversary of "The War To End All Wars" having been in the last decade, there's been a little explosion of games in various genres that have been set in World War I. World War I survival horror games have actually started to become their own special little sub-genre, with stand-outs like Amnesiaa: The Bunker, Ad Infinitum (which I have not yet played), and the subject of this review, Conscript, as well as a few other smaller titles. World War I is such a brilliant thematic setting for a survival horror game, that it really does kind of surprise me that nobody thought of this before.

First and foremost, World War I is often considered to be a tragic war. It was fought for stupid, asinine reasons, with no clear good guys or bad guys, and the loss of life ultimately ended up being even more pointless than usual for a war. It was also the first war to employ horrific new industrial weapons that multiplied the pain, suffering, and death compared to every war previously fought. From machine guns, to tanks, to airplanes, to the various gases that were so horrific that they were banned by the international community in the fallout of the war. And more superficially, the trenches and bunkers that are an iconic part of the imagery of the war are tight, enclosed, and claustrophobic spaces that are dark, dirty, and full of death, rot, and vermin. All of these circumstances and aesthetics of the war combine to make it an ideal thematic setting for horror -- in retrospect.

Conscript may be the ultimate realization of the war as a horror setting. Conscript is grounded and presents the war as horrific in its own regard. Unlike Amnesia, Conscript doesn't really rely on supernatural monsters or Eldritch gods to try to make the war scarier than it already is. It's just you, the trenches, and an army of German soldiers between you and survival. And survival will not come easy!

The trenches of World War I are an inherently horrifying setting.

Saving Private Piérre

The basic setup of Conscript is a little evocative of Saving Private Ryan. You play as one of a pair of brothers conscripted into the French army to defend Fort Souville and prevent the Germans from capturing the town of Verdun. On the way to the front lines to defend from a German advance, you find your brother critically injured and unconscious. During the skirmish, you are injured and left for dead while the rest of the French army retreats and temporary abandons the fort to regroup for a counter-attack. After waking from your injuries alone in a corpse pit, you find that the trenches are slowly being overrun by German troops, your brother is missing, and the player character vows to find him and protect him, so that you can both return home to your mother.

This leads the player to start exploring the maze-like web of trenches connected to Fort Souville in search of your brother. Locked doors and other obstacles block progress, in typical survival horror fashion, and you'll have to scavenge for whatever supplies you can find to help defend yourself from the German soldiers who have started occupying and patrolling the trenches and fort.

In classic survival horror fashion, doors will be locked by themed keys or puzzles.

The game is played from a top-down perspective, with pixel-art, which also limits your visibility and awareness of what is around you (also in typical, classic, survival horror fashion). Aiming and firing a weapon is slow and cumbersome, and the weapons must be manually reloaded after every shot. There are no zombies or monsters; just human German soldiers. At first, they will be easy to kill with a single shot or two from your rifle or shotgun, but within a couple hours of play, you'll start running into tougher, armored shock troopers that will require multiple shots to take down. The slow nature of firing and reloading your weapon means that enemies charging you at melee are far more threatening than you might expect. "Never bring a knife to a gunfight" you might say? Well, not if the gun is a World War I rifle, it seems. Furthermore, any time you are up against multiple enemies, it will turn into a desperate scramble to keep distance from the melee troops and find cover from riflemen within the tight confines of the trenches.

Bandages and first aid kits are also in short supply. Every bash that you take from a German trench baton, or graze from a rifle shot, will whittle down your health and ratchet up the tension, as you can ill afford to take more hits. The game will provide more healing items later on (as well as ample opportunity to craft more), but health recovery will always feel tight. I finished the game with [I think] only 2 healing items remaining in my item box; though, I could have bought the ingredients to craft a few more, if I absolutely needed to.

You'll need to be paying attention to what you're doing, and have fast reflexes to either dodge surprise enemy attacks, or quickly dispatch them. The enemies here won't insta-kill you like in a hide-and-seek horror game. You have a health bar, and can take quite a beating. The Germans, however, will be more than happy to dish out those beatings if you give them an opportunity. A single screw up won't get you immediately killed, but sloppy play can quickly turn fatal, as even the most basic grunts can be lethal if you get careless and expose yourself to multiple attacks.

All of this is near perfectly encapsulated by the exceptionally-designed and stressfully-paced opening chapter or 2 of the game. All of the game's best ideas and mechanics really shine in these first few hours and left me with an immaculate first impression of the game. But by the mid-point of the game, nags and nitpicks did start to pile up.

I've been extra late at picking up this year's slate of EA football games. By the time I finally got around to ordering a pre-owned and pre-played copy of College Football 27 (and saved myself over $20 in the process!), Madden had just released. In the meantime, I took another dive into my PS5 and PC backlog. The beneficiary of my PC backlog dive is a colony-builder from a couple years ago named Land of the Vikings.

As the name suggests, this game is a city/colony-builder with a viking theme. Not only are you expected to build a thriving Norse colony, but you'll also have to send ships out to trade with and raid neighboring villages. I was hoping for "Manor Lords, but with vikings". What I got was far less.

Manor Lords with vikings? Sign me up!

Roads less travelled

The greatest strength of Land of the Vikings is that it is a little more expressive than some other colony-builders. First and foremost, it is a grid-less colony-builder, meaning you can place buildings and roads anywhere on the map, at any angle, and the roads can curve organically. This immediately sets this game apart from something like Farthest Frontier, which is constrained to a grid and 90-degree angles, and suffers for it.

Land of the Vikigns also offers a decent number of decorative objects, and these objects even have various functions. This game doesn't have the customizable, modular buildings of Foundation, which is a shame. Being able to at least customize the Longhouse would have been nice. Instead, you'll have to settle for being able to customize your trade ships and warships, which is sadly a feature that I can't review, because it didn't work for me when I played the game. I bought the customization upgrades in the technology tree, but the button to customize my ships was still grayed out in all my docks. So one of the big selling points of the game just flat-out didn't work for me.

Thankfully, the regular decorations did work, and I was able to place these in my village. Decorations are broadly divided into 4 functional categories. Some decorations make villagers happier, others improve the village's defenses, others increase the storage capacity of buildings, and still others make the village appear wealthier. These decorations don't need to be specifically placed next to the buildings that they upgrade, as they can be placed anywhere you want, giving you quite a bit of freedom to make the village look how you want.

There are some disappointing limitations to the decorations. There aren't any chairs, tables, or benches, so I couldn't make any kind of outdoor dining area for my tavern, or any kind of communal hang-out spot outside the Longhouse.

I particularly like the idea of placing signs and banners along roads to speed up movement along those roads. This is a feature that I would love to see implemented in other colony builders. They look nice on their own, but the fact that they actually do make travel along the roads faster and more efficient is a really cool feature.

Signposts, banners, and wagons will speed up movement along roads.

Placing wooden carts along roads also supposedly improves movement speed. Presumably, this is an abstraction for the villager using those carts to move goods. Personally, I would much prefer if the game had a wainwright building to make useable wooden carts and wagons, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

The game also requires that you build torches and braziers to light the village at night, which is an idea that I also really like, and which I think more games like this should employ. Without enough light, villagers will actually complain. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really give any feedback (that I could find) that tells the player where light is needed or how much light should be provided. I was also disappointed that the braziers didn't act as a source of heat to relieve villagers from the cold of winter.

The functionality of decorations gives an element of strategy and planning to how you decorate your village. You also need to put some planning and thought into who is going to work where. Each villager has different ratings for each of 4 different skills, as well as a set of randomized personality traits. The personality traits are easy to forget about or ignore, but the skills determine how efficiently a worker does their job. Some jobs require a single skill, while others can require a combination of 2 skills to be most effective. This would be a really cool system, if not for the fact that it is completely undercut by other under-developed logistical systems (which I'll talk about later).

Furthermore, different types of military units also have different skill requirements. So when you mobilize villagers for raids, you may have to pull them away from certain jobs, unless you have enough general laborers or builders to pull your vikings from.

Your village must be lit at night, or else villagers will complain.

It took a long time, but Marvel has finally graced audiences with a Spider-Man movie that actually looks and feels like comic-accurate Spider-Man. This is by far the best-looking costume that's been put on film, beating out both Tobey Maquire's original and Andrew Garfield's from Amazing Spider-Man 2. It has the home-made fabric look, with a tiny bit of slack that allows some folds and wrinkles here and there. The colors are bright and vivid (compared to Amazing 2, which looked darker and more maroon than red). The webbing pattern is simple black lines and not some weird, textured, reflective plastic. The eyes are small, evoking classic 60's and 70's aesthetics, but with the motorized lenses that change size and allow a small degree of emotion.

The only complaints that I have are the lack of armpit webs, and the web shooters being on the outside. But there's story reasons for why the web shooters are outside, so I get it, and am willing to let it pass. I still think it's a tactical error for Spider-Man to mount his web shooters outside the suit, so as to give away the fact that they are technological and not an innate power. Knowing that they are technological allows opponents to use that against him, and puts Spider-Man at a disadvantage. But whatever, this costume is still leagues above all the other movie costumes to date.

It isn't just the costume that looks good though. The movie, as a whole, is a lot more visually interesting than the flatter, more evenly-lit composition of Marvel's previous Spider-Man movies. It's bright and colorful, but still has contrast and shadow. This gives a lot more depth and realism to the images on screen, helps Spidey's costume to really pop, and also creates some atmospheric moodiness when necessary.

The action is also a lot more kinetic and vertical. The whole movie takes place on Manhattan island this time around (not in the suburbs of Queens or in Europe), and so action scenes are constructed around the idea of Spider-Man swinging into action. In fact, there's even a car chase through the streets of New York that feels like it was pulled straight from the Insomniac video games. But even when an action scene happens indoors, fights happen on ceilings, along the outside sides of a tall office building, and even down an elevator shaft at one point.

Brand New Day gets top marks across the board for its visual style and action setpieces. The story is a little bit more of a mixed bag. There's a lot of things that I like. It is more grounded and down-to-earth than the previous movies, with the immediate stakes being more local and less "multi-versal". Its story is a critical parallel of parts of modern day politics, and its intended message is one of love and acceptance of people who are different, and of being willing to seek help when you find yourself in an emotionally dark and dangerous place. All good stuff.

But there's also a lot of things that rubbed me the wrong way right from the start. Most notably, I think the movie's handling of MJ and Ned was horribly clumsy, and I kind of wish that they just weren't in the movie at all. But Zendaya and Jacob Batalon have to have their contractually-required screen time. But I'll talk more about that in a spoiler section at the end of this review.

Image ©: Walt Disney, Marvel

The opening montage pays homage to multiple Spider-Man comic covers or panels.