
I pulled out 121A Makes less powerful, in video game slang: NERFS because it’s a term I first heard years ago when playing Madden NFL Mobile. I used to play that game all the time. I was in a league that got mad when you didn’t do all your drives and stuff. It was super intense. Then they made the game way more interactive with live play, and it started to feel like what they had done with real Madden. I mean I really liked the game back in the 2000s, but when they started to get super duper technical with every single play and with how elaborate the audible calling was, it just stopped being fun for me. Also they messed with the controls, and when I wanted to cut left with L1 and cut right with R1, I ended up pitching the ball with one of them. I didn’t really want to learn new controls when the old ones were so intuitive.
Title Theme: What a Character!
Rather than go through every single clue that contains a circled letter, here’s what they were:
SEMI and COLON in the shape of a semicolon.
HYPHEN in the shape of a hyphen.
PARENTHESIS in the shape of a close parens.
27A Any of the groupings of circled letters in this puzzle: PUNCTUATIONMARK.
67A One of two in a jack-o’-lantern?: HYPHEN. Because there are two hyphens in the name of that carved pumpkin.
112A How to see the image formed by this puzzle’s circled letters: ROTATECLOCKWISE.
115A What’s formed by the circled letters in this puzzle: SMILEYFACE.

NO! 😉 is not a smiley face. It is a winky face. At least get it right!
I’m also a little disappointed that the puzzle didn’t automatically fill in the dots of the emoticon. I had to do it all by myself in Snip & Sketch.
Finished this one in 32:24.
Day This Wk Best Average 4-Wk Avg Streak Monday 7:37 3:49 9:26 7:25 73 Tuesday 5:22 13:21 10:18 0 Wednesday 10:53 7:38 17:12 11:00 14 Thursday 12:12 28:49 25:08 0 Friday 18:20 16:23 33:24 25:04 14 Saturday 30:47 27:43 34:03 30:50 14 Sunday 32:24 15:11 54:58 44:30 1
Still broken chart