Yeah, the remaining io9 writers are pretty hard on franchise content that isn’t part of their collective MCU boner. Remember when it was a great site for fucking book reviews?

The open-world adventure game was warmly received by critics, many of whom praised its liberal use of superficial homages to Japanese cinema, most notably the work of Akira Kurosawa.

That it completely works?

That seems fair. This is the less shitty version of living in patch world.

This kind of article makes it hard to steer around cynicism. I have mostly taken the messiness of AC:Valhalla in stride. It mostly works. How much more can we really expect?

Morgan has been publicly bashing Markle for over 5 years. Is that what a nice person does?

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…