:(

Oh god, the present has made an ascetic of me. The only thing that feels normal is sitting there being not-in-the-mood with people who don’t call back.

This movie is so meandering, so stuffed with easily excisable scenes whose revelations wick off with the arrival of the next fit-for-the-cutting-room-floor vignette, it’s as though everyone made this all up as they went along. What a strange effect for an adaptation of a legendary Stephen King book to have.

This game owns. There must be hundreds of little jokes tucked into Oldest House, from “Threshold Kids” to the cheery Lost-like instructional videos to the rubber duck ominously placed in a containment cell. And Remedy has the confidence to let you walk right past so much strange, hilarious material.

I have a vague recollection that the description takes up all or nearly all of the chapter.

See also: Games that chastise you for using violence while also giving you no other input option other than violence.

I always viewed it as actually being on a whaling ship. He looks for a ship and enjoys the beginning of the voyage when everything is fresh and new. Then you get out to sea and there’s nothing to do besides talk about whales and dicks and that’s where the book becomes a grind, only to pick up when they see some…

I don’t know if there are better mystery books today than the old masters. Sir Doyle, Dame Christie. There was a reason they were knighted. Amazingly good books. They aren’t nearly as cliche as you would think.

My take on Moby Dick, and other “difficult” works (Infinite Jest, anything by James Joyce, etc), is that they aren’t really meant to be read as books. They are a literary ink blot, something that literary minds can take as a starting point for deep musings about the human condition.

I stand by my oft-repeated opinion that anyone trying to get you to read Moby Dick is upset that they wasted their own time, and just want to watch someone else suffer.

This really doesn’t sound any better than the fake ending on Wikipedia. Not sure I want to see Brad and Leo murder some teenaged girls.

Other than that, I may do a little bit of AC Odyssey, as I am close to finishing up the main story (original, not DLC).

Do we think that Tyrese had to clear this feud with the marketing department?

There has been always been a term for this kind of game: adventure. Adding exploration in there gives it some specificity. But relying on an amalgam of two basically dead series, one of which barely belongs in the genre, is weird.

I mean, we could call them both “ability-gated single-location adventure games,” but that’s even more ungainly than “Metroidvania.”

My girlfriend spends more time playing video games than I do and she has no idea what “metroidvania” means. It’s not vernacular – it’s jargon.

Yup, totally agree. I was going to post something similar. I loved Hollow Knight, don’t get me wrong. But I would say it was that it just did everything really well, as opposed to some big innovations or anything.

This is the only kind of prequel apologia that I can deal with. It never occurred to me that an adequate horny teen romance was hiding somewhere in that ponderous digital action.

The Others. Now here’s a movie that I think actually works better once you know the twists and, in its own way, becomes much more intriguing on a rewatch. Still think this is the movie Nicole Kidman should have won her Oscar for. Gothic, creepy, and in the end deeply moving.

I’m with you. The reunion asks us to have tender feelings that the characters themselves do not. The movie treats Al Swearengen as the next thing to St. fucking Francis when he spends most of the running-time downing hooch and contemplating atrocities. But I must admit that his final line filled me with warmth and…