When I played this game back on PS1, without the quicksave feature of the sequel, I remember screens that were clearly designed to result in hilarious catastrophe with the pull of a single lever. And there was this constant pressure: do I save these Mudokens or witness the unbridled destruction that the level design…

It’s kind of ridiculous that the paper made it through peer review, if there’s really no evidence at all for its key assertions.

This post made me realize that I haven’t finished one of these games since Black Flag. And now that each game is impossibly huge, I may never finish another one again.

She didn’t.

Well, it looks like this game has achieved Star Wars Lesbian Kiss levels of inclusion. If they try a little harder, maybe they can achieve Endgame Lady Tableau levels of inclusion by release.

I know I will get hate for this. Why does someone believing differently than you make them hateful. I don’t agree with them, I was raised reading the same bible and learned you are supposed to spread the word of God through love, compassion, and self sacrifice. Also he with no sin cast the first stone.

It looks like the franchise managers have turned a corner. For the past eight years, they’ve worried that Colonial Marines would sink a new Aliens shooter sight unseen. Now they’re probably counting on every single review, preview, or blog post to snarkily praise their game in comparison to Colonial Marines, even if…

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.