Even if they’re not exactly fans of LGBTQ ideology, a lot of people will say: ‘Look - we live in a liberal society, you’re allowed to live your life however you want, as long as you’re not harming anyone. But I’m not obliged to agree with your beliefs either.’

Yup. Circumcised or uncircumcised with three size variations of each. And, just for good measure, it has dick physics too.

even though they had Stewart’s fame to draw upon

Let me introduce you to the concept of a joke...

I thought it worked pretty well in Half-Life, but that’s about the only time it didn’t feel completely awkward and artificial — and even there, I don’t think it would’ve hurt the game if they had given Gordon a voice.

The main problem was that it didn’t make clear where you could (and couldn’t) transition from one section to the next.

I wouldn’t have minded the backtracking, if not for the map being pretty much unreadable. It was almost impossible to plan a route to that one point where you missed something. Quick travel certainly helps, but I hope they sort out the map out too.

In fact, that’s what makes it copaganda. You avoid the pitfalls of copaganda by acknowledging that the institution of policing is fucked up, that cops often aren’t right, that self-interest and corruption are rife, that they circle the wagons instead of weeding out bad apples (but do the opposite for whistleblowers)...…

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