Unless Frontiers of Pandora is right on the verge of being ready (and maybe even then), they might as well hold it back until late 2024 when Avatar 3 comes out.

I don’t get what the problem is. It looks like a straightforward substitution cypher (i.e. 26 symbols representing the 26 letters of the alphabet, maybe some more for punctuation and numbers, if anyone bothered to design them). These are common in comics* (Kryptonian, Skrull, Klyntar, Krakoan) — you just make a new…

Nobody watching a dramatic TV show wants to see Joel craft a bomb or a shiv.

The author, Mike Carey, claims he’d finished writing before hearing about the game, and I don’t disbelieve him. If you can accept that he independently came up with the idea of cordyceps infecting humans, the other elements in common are not a huge leap.

It’s also the idea that, once you exit a heavy spore area, it’s masks off immediately and away we go, with no need for any sort of decontamination process, despite presumably still being caked in the stuff and with no real way to achieve decontamination out in the world either. It works in the game as a visual cue for…

any lawyer that came out and said what you’re proposing

It’s entirely true to say it’s controversial and contentious.

If the helicopter flying under the bridge is the most dangerous part of that Terminator 2 sequence, it’s weird how the moment doesn’t draw any attention to itself, rendering it a completely unnecessary risk. The following bridge, where the helicopter pulls up and over it at the last second, is much more thrilling.

I feel like “things like this” is doing a lot of heavy lifting when it stretches from Leto’s “sends a dead pig and ‘used’ condoms to castmates” to Strong’s “mostly keeps to himself” and “wears clothes”.

There was lots of stuff in there that I really, really liked, but it was such a chore to actually watch it that I only got half way through.

Well, no. The background is a realtime 3D virtual environment. You can place the stage and cameras wherever you like within it, so long as you’ve built the part of the background that will be visible. That’s exactly the same as real sets where, for example, you can’t easily have a set up showing the Friends apartment…

If any good comes out of HBO’s The Last of Us, I hope it’s that it lets us see once and for all how unnecessary all these distinctions and rivalries are, how games and films and television are all great potential art forms with different strengths

Totally upends? When you boil it down, doesn’t the volume work almost exactly like a traditional set? You have to build it in advance, and then you can put your actors in it. If you want to change where the scene takes place, you need to build a new set.

I believe they’re fully written through to 5. What he’s saying is they shot part of 4 at the same time as 2 and 3 — something to do with getting the actors at the right age (presumably Spider, the human kid, being the main concern).

Will Smith?

The Last of Us is a videogame. If was adapted as-is, it would be filled with samey combat encounters (not to the extent of the gunplay in Uncharted for example, but it would still be a big problem). At absolute minimum, there would have to be some cutting, merging, and/or inventing new situations that have a bit more…

The Witcher is a slightly different case because the source material is prose. People haven’t seen how the story plays out, only read it.

I was gonna say. I just finished the main game, and the animation for walking on snow really stood out — the surface has just the right amount of resistance as Jin plants his foot before it sinks through. For a game that’s great, but often lacking in that sort of attention to detail*, it was a really nice touch.

The same way that a lot of the best superhero movies are considered faithful to the comics they’re drawn from, despite changing tons of things in the process. It’s not about having all the details match up, it’s about getting to the core of the material and taking advantage of the new medium’s strengths. Why would a…

But the vast majority of sales for those games (and, indeed, most games) would be in the first year, and probably just in the first few months of release. Jedi: Fallen Order did not just come out — it’s over three years old.