the writers assumed the audience was as dense as Simon and would need it repeated to them ad nauseum otherwise we simply wouldn’t “get” it.

Bayonetta.

You are consistently one of my favorite writers on videogames, just want to let you know :)

I mean, now we have to ask. Why’d you hate it?

SOMA was effing fantastic. I know that it’s basically a walking simulator with all the hiding and “puzzling” you do to open up areas, but the narrative really struck with me and the twist at the end seriously creeped me out in a way that more jump-scare reliant horror games never managed.

GT had the following:

Nothing about the game is “better” than the games it cribs from, though.

Baby itself comes from a race known as the Tuffles, which in Japanese—Tsufuru-jin—is a play on words of a loanword for fruit, while in English sounds close enough to Truffle to be another translation pun.

TBF, Baby is at least more interesting as a concept than fucking “The Super Saiyan God” or “Super Saiyan Blue” variants of whomever is available in the game rn.

I mean we’ve known  forever that the Smash community is, by far, the worst of the fighting game communities out there.

Surprise! People can care about more than one thing at a time.

Man as long as his down-b isn’t a counter (the laziest design in the game, imo) and his side-b isn’t spamming a bunch of sword slashes in one direction, I’ll be happy.

Thank you!

Can someone give a quick breakdown as to why this is bad news/bad for consumers?

*who tf cares enough to defend them

The issue is that, in the time since we’ve been in school—I’m in my early early thirties, fwiw—the curriculum of ELA classes has vastly changed. It’s way less about teaching analysis and critical thinking, and more about looking for “right” answers. Because testing? So you have an entire generation of otherwise…

They’re all war criminals, who tf cares.

John Wick is about how cyclical violence can only ever end in escalations of violence. Or how you shouldn’t be needlessly cruel to others, because they might turn out to be unrelenting murderhobos. Or that you shouldn’t steal a man’s car and kill his dog. Etc. Those are all “things” the movie says.

Even Summer Blockbusters (TM) have things to say. Entertainment never has, nor will it ever, exist in a vacuum. The fact that hundreds of writers touched this product means that it has hundreds of different voices, each jockeying for position at different times to say or express different feelings and ideas.