From Software’s games seem to encourage a strange mixture of masochism and elitism. And I’m not above it. Soloing Ornstein and Smough feels good in part because you’re always playing a failure montage inside your head, picturing the fight like the instant replay in Super Meat Boy.

This could be interesting. The focus on ultra-violence makes the project sound like a relic of the early aughts, when torture porn and “Asia Extreme” were in fashion. But Zahler has more going for him than that.

Former first-year composition teacher here. The surprising part of this story is not that rich people find ridiculous ways of getting their know-nothing children into fancy schools. It is that all the socially acceptable methods were apparently not enough: expensive tutors, ghost writers for important essays, legacy…

Lying on your back to shoot up through floorboards WAS pretty great, though. Same with the Rambo-style spiked branch traps you could set.

Instincts was a good time on the 360. The first half of the game makes you spend so long skulking through the grass and firing silenced shots up through floorboards that the powers are incredibly cathartic. Forget this stealth crap, I’m going to leap a ravine and punch that sniper across the map.

Why wouldn’t we have been excited for Iron Man 3?

Alternate title: Be Okay with Giving Game Companies Interest-free Loans.

I went through this experience with Red Dead before the game’s online component made its debut. I was excited for a western world that would reward Skyrim levels of exploration, but despite the incredible detail that went into the game’s world the whole thing just felt cumbersome and dull. I would finish a couple of…

Alita on the other hand is an original work not backed up by the awesome might of the largest media corporation in the world and, despite very positive reactions by moviegoers who have actually seen it, will struggle with gaining the box office numbers necessary to justify a well deserved sequel.

This seems like more evidence that sites should just get rid of user reviews. Most of them seem to be written by trolls and illiterates, and whatever traffic they generate is not worth the way the degrade the entire idea of criticism. The concept might make sense for online stores, where you can verify a purchase, but…

The Academy may need to make more specific rules about the theatrical runs for streaming releases, just to keep Netflix honest, but the divide between theatrical films and streaming is more complicated than Spielberg is acknowledging.

Does this mean that his body is no longer ready?

And they’re still less qualified to talk about this than linguistics majors. Hell, they’re less qualified than linguistics minors.

...the half of Outkast that no one wants to see...

He was a professor of logic who hated, hated, hated split infinitives, to the point that the second split infinitive would drop your paper grade to an automatic F.

I love that you understand Cardi the same way that I do, as a subversive smarty pants. Long live Cardi!

There’s also the fact that people who object to it don’t know English as well as they think they do.

I don’t know why “I am dumb at” would be wrong. It’s obviously vernacular, as opposed to literary English, but it seems as correct as the other constructions.

Is there a better way - a more grammatically correct way - to say “I’m not dumb at this shit.” It’s the being “dumb at” something that my brain snags on and I wonder if it’s just one of those things that might not sound right even though it is.

Now we get to run a little social experiment: how many of the people willing to shell out for early access are going to trash the game online because their special early-boarding membership is insufficiently extra special?