Well, that’s more time than I plan to spend with an open-world game, even if it’s as consistent and clever as something like The Witcher 3. But if this studio wants to spend lots of time and money to make like fifteen dudes incredibly happy, then why not? It’s no skin off my pretty nose if I get like 30% completion.…

But Democrats will handle the pandemic better!!

Bioshock Infinite is one of my favorite games (like top-3), but I definitely get the impression that it succeeded in spite of itself.

Levine is perhaps most famous for 2007's BioShock, a first-person action ‘em up that was unquestionably a milestone game in the industry. Previously he had been a key figure in the development of all-time greats like Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, and Freedom Force, working with Looking Glass and his own…

I know this contained mere seconds about The French Dispatch (I’ve read the full review and related coverage) but it’s telling that the sole rationale included here is its set design and visual composition. Basically it looks good.

After the best picture Oscar for Return of the King, the Academy and critics seem to have decided that no big budget movie (and especially no genre movie) was worthy of critical praise.

We get it, you have a superior film taste that few will understand but there are other movies outside of the world of the pretentious film reviewer that are allowed to make best of lists.

Ender Lilies is well worth a play.

Great list, but I totally disagree with the order. Death’s Door should have been way higher up.

Ore wa Gundam de iku!

Spielberg is just too strong a craftsman to make a dull movie out of sci-fi escapism; I just kinda felt like his interest was more with the Rylance character, and he was kinda going through the motions with the actual leads.

And I couldn’t find Hook playing on cable nor any of the streaming services I had to watch it for comparison. I may pay the $4 and rent it because I’m now interested in how it could pander to audiences more than RPO.

“Oh well, people were just super racist back then” just never seems like a good argument. No, they weren’t. Some people were. Lovecraft was. But there were plenty of people who weren’t racist who lived at the start of the 20th century, and who spoke out against racism openly.

Has this ever proven to be true? I feel like people keep saying it to exaggerate the effect, but it was quite baseless. It just feels like people romanticizing and downplaying how racist folks were back in the day.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. A lot of people write this stuff...and then come to their senses.

That “friendly advice” at the end of the update is the kind of thing that many of us write, savor for a long moment full of angry fantasies, then delete because thrashing around like that in public is fucking embarrassing, whether or not it makes problems down the line. Still, the post could be a lot worse.

I think a lot of it has to do with the very modern trend of crowning a given director after they’ve directed 1 film of note.

A luminous sunset over a character’s shoulder seems made for YouTube explainer videos to pause and comment that Zhao is “known for her use of natural light.” Call it the One Perfect Shot-ization of the MCU—the digestion and packaging of artistic style for global consumption.

And Metroidvanias doesn’t need to be sidescrollers, Arkham Asylum it’s a Metroidvania, that’s why I didn’t like Arkham City, it felt they really cut out the Metroidvania part of the first game.

You can write a great personal recommendation for a game without resorting to a title clearly written to piss people off.