In fairness, that shot is pretty standard epic vista stuff. I bet you can find the same basic camera movement in plenty of open-world trailers.

Alas, this level of depressing corporate synergy was ahead of its time.

When I was in graduate school, in the 00s, Buffy was a formative show for some ridiculous number of the people around me. And virtually no one took Whedon’s self-styled feminism very seriously. Each interview set off a wave of forgiving eyerolls and genial shrugs.

I would have loved to see some of these mechanics in a story-intensive single-player campaign. The service model of grind-focused forever games is enough to reduce almost any game design to banality.

I’ll add that one issue these days is that this doesn’t seem to be reciprocal: MCU fans express a lot of contempt for highbrow shit.

I...don’t get what’s wrong with Kourtney’s handwriting.

Part of my issue is that I feel like the man kind of occupies a specific niche. And while he’s done very well for himself in that niche, he doesn’t have what I would call an incredibly diverse resume when it comes to exploring other genres. If these comments were coming even from someone like Steven Spielberg (a man…

This seems like an odd position for him to take when it’s easier to create a film than it’s ever been and he’s actively railing against the distribution methods that allow those films to be easily seen.

I suspect that part of the problem is that both high- and low-culture are vanishing into the ever-expanding middle-brow center. Comics may have been lowbrow, at least when Jack Kirby was at his prime, but the MCU is not. The glossy production values and ready-made lessons of the Marvel movies have little to do with…

Oh no, he’s the kind of Libertarian who thinks that the idea of systemic injustice is nefarious groupthink rather than a commonplace observation. These dudes have a knack for outwitting themselves to the extent that anything they say is in good faith.

Gotta hope. I didn’t expect D3 to be such a great couch game, but here we are. I never want to go back. 

Well!

My earliest memory of him is when he repeatedly bullied Chelsea Clinton - who was 12 or 13 at the time - by referring to her as the White House dog. More than once.

I just started this game, on the strength of this article, and it fucking owns. 

Seriously, was this written by an AI robot or something?

These assholes. There may be some merit to their claims that scalping is capitalism as usual, but so what? The service they provide is to ensure that people with plenty of disposable income are not subject to luck in the same way as people with moderate amounts of disposable income. Insulating the rich from mundane…

This is the way.

Has this system appeared in a game since the Mordor sequel? I keep thinking this system - or even some of its single components - would be a fun addition to other games and even other genres. But it doesn’t seem like other developers have even tried to riff on the idea.

I’m an English teacher. And I think that many of the canonical novels fall victim to their own classic status. Faced with something like Gatsby, students feel the distance between its cultural prestige and the breezy, sordid romance in front of them. The actual novel becomes a barrier to this thing they’ve been…

Been a Resident Evil fan from the beginning, and while I was initially skeptical of VII, I ended up loving it in the end. Definitely not my favorite RE game, but I really dug the fresh take that almost felt like it was in a different universe save for a couple subtle callbacks and the Umbrella/Chris reveal at the end.