Oh shit, the Shadow and Bone fans are gonna be pissed.

The world building in John Wick started dumb and got worse with each entry, yeah. As for the action, while it’s well choreographed and executed, I find far too much of it falls into a pattern of “John walks into a room and takes out an army of goons in his usual style, then more goons show up and he does it again” on…

Plus “well he did already do this recently with Army of the Dead, but that overrides my thesis, so let’s pretend it was some kind of sequel to his Dawn of the Dead remake”.

I thought it was simply “John Wick, but our lead actor isn’t as physically capable so we can’t drag out every single action sequence two or three times longer than it needs to be”. A vast improvement, in other words.

Similarly, why on Earth would you make the Flash a villain, and then show off his boss fight in a trailer with nothing but him as a stationary bullet sponge? I mean, I assume/hope that in the full game you have to trigger something that freezes him temporarily and gives you a chance to get some damage in, but if the…

Agreed in principle, but...

And despite fan skepticism, anecdotal accounts from a recent alpha play test have been surprisingly positive.

Agreed. As much as being able to mod games appeals to me, just working out which graphics card to get has always been off-putting, let alone all the other components, and pre-built gaming PCs are priced extortionately. Whereas if I pick up a PlayStation or an Xbox, I know exactly where I’m at.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Pebbles’ reference went over your head. It’s a bit by the excellent James Acaster:

They were also pretty much locked into the villain being a Kree character, because the movie had to somehow address her now 30 year old vow to end the Supreme Intelligence, and that restricts the options significantly.

It’s relative. The Departed largely works in its own right, but it’s in no way the tight thriller that Infernal Affairs is, which is why describing it as “lean” seems so weird.

The movie sizzles, playing out across a lean two-and-a-half hours

they’re just emulating the PS1 version straight up

It probably didn’t. Theatres take a big chunk of the box office. Half of the worldwide total is a very rough rule of thumb.

I wonder if that reaction directly led to lower box office for Dead Reckoning. “Another movie without an ending? Fuck that.”

Fast X and Across the Spider-Verse?

She’s younger than Hayley Atwell though. There can’t be too many hit franchises that kill off the female lead only to replace her with an older female lead.

It was likely a deliberate choice. For its faults, compared to most other two-part movies, Dead Reckoning managed to find a relatively satisfying place to end. I suspect that was achieved by largely backgrounding the Entity in part 1 with the intent of bringing it properly to the fore in part 2.

I never bothered with a Pro, and I don’t remember any games being unplayable (even Cyberpunk ran okay on a base PS4, aside from the bugs).

1) It’s not every 3 years. The last few generations have lasted ~7 years each.
2) Because everyone being on the same hardware is the one major benefit of consoles over PCs, for both developers (games can be properly optimised because they don’t need to take account of infinite hardware variations) and players (you…