I liked the ending to BSG more than most, but everything after the Colony was very flat and dragged out, as if the writers were more interested in exhaustively tying up lose ends than delivering a decent send-off, and that awful coda just completely undercut the majesty of the series.

To be fair, if any writer behind a mystery show laid his cards on the table and said, "Yeah, we're just making this shit up as we go along", the show's ratings would crater and they would get shitcanned.

I don't think dislikeable characters are necessarily a reflection on writing quality. Sera grated the tits off me in Inquisition, and she was the only companion I seriously considered firing. But she was a great character whose every action was informed by her well-intentioned but short-sighted and binary worldview,…

Counterpoint from the future: it was meandering, insubstantial and incoherent, barely committed to its own premise (why was there about 30 minutes of footage of Pyonyang's subway system in a film ostensibly about volcanoes?) and waaay overstretched. The most fascinating footage wasn't even Herzog's own, but that of…

Oh, Dreamfall's gameplay elements were at best a nuisance, but at least they were. In Chapters, you just walk around talking to people with barely any puzzle elements at all.

The Central Election Commission is run by the government. The Levada Centre is not. Dozens of observers declared the Russian presidential election to be marred by fraud and malpractice. I've never heard any Russia analyst say that Levada's numbers are invented.

Russia is a dictatorship in democratic clothing, but it's not totalitarian. The Levada Centre is an independent polling agency considered pretty credible by external observers, and as recently as February it had Putin's approval rating in the low 80s.

There's got to be a happy medium between a few hours of gameplay and a hundred hours of filler.

People point fingers at Ubisoft for unleashing the floodgates with Assassin's Creed and the gradual contamination of all their other titles with 'map game' mechanics, but if there's any series that promoted pointless map pollution as a means of padding out playtime and artificially delaying the player from running…

What's incredibly irritating is that I remember Mafia II getting slammed at the time for not being properly open-world, even though that worked perfectly well (it gave the impression of a vibrant city backdrop to the story missions) and there was no real reason for the Mafia series to go open-world in the first place…

It's a chicken-and-egg scenario, though, since if Bethesda could write a story to save themselves, people would be more interested in the main quest than the side ones, whereas Inquisition became a deadening experience for me because all that side shit was actually wasting time I could've spent on the plot.

Oy vey, Dreamfall is like some weird gameplay equivalent of the Polygon Ceiling, where they just simply didn't get how to translate point-and-click adventure mechanics to a 3D engine (particularly something like Shark 3D, which felt like it was more suited for cutting-edge powerpoint presentations).

Horses for courses, but I actually thoroughly dislike Bethesda's house style of in-game cutscenes. The engine's animations simply aren't built for dramatic expression and direction, so you usually just end up with a bunch of people huddled together in a field in a neutral stance talking very slowly with minimal…

As in, the general situation? Sure, from Tywin's perspective. But if we're taking him at face value as a proud patriarch who does everything in the name of his family and their security, he's full of it. The Lannisters could have happily lived it up in Casterly Rock. They only became entangled in the game of thrones…

I lost interest in Deadwood when it became obvious that, for all its Serious Drama trappings, it was in fact a handsomely-mounted Wile E. Coyote cartoon where the baddies would always be foiled by some ridiculous contrivance and the goodies would always win despite everything (I know Season 3 shaked this up, but I was…

I skimmed all the way down the comments just to see whether this glaring error had gone unchallenged. Fucking seriously? Twin Peaks was more consistently comic than it was dark. There were entire characters who were essentially comic relief, albeit dappled in darkness: Nadine, Dr Jacoby, the Log Lady. You've already…

Counter-point: Tywin was a horrible, horrible father who used his allegedly precious family as bargaining chips in a dangerous game, who substituted his own personal pride and powerlust for the 'family honour', who talked a good game about loyalty and commitment but never reciprocated, who had no real reason to act as…

This review literally highlighted a great part of the game and wished that the rest of it rose to the same standard. Your strawman is in another castle.

Ah yes, because if there's any studio in the world that video game reviewers have been sharpening their knives for, it's BioWare.

It's not like this was ever going to get weekly coverage, so it makes sense to give it a season review. What would be the point of a one-off episode review with no follow-up?