The sequels simply don't work as well because Neo is no longer an audience surrogate through which we learn things about the Matrix (dubious Architect exposition dump aside). Instead he's some weird, obtuse guy we can barely relate to anymore. In the first movie there was a thrilling sense of discovery that was never…

Yup, it's all relative. And I suspect if you asked all the people who claimed the movie was merely 'undergrad philosophy' if they had any real insight into the subject many would probably shut the fuck up pretty quickly.

Assassin Arya is really boring, or at least was in the last few episodes. If they carry on in that vein it'll be one of the biggest wastes of a likable character ever.

High Rise is a well-meaning failure. The book is really hard to adapt because JG Ballard exists in his own unique world that's almost impossible to translate without feeling like a tourist. Even someone as perverse as David Cronenberg was only partially successful with Crash.

I'm a European who went to an East Coast college for a year's exchange program, and all the frat boys there were adamant I watch Boondock Saints.

The problem is.. it did kind of work in Kubrick's case. Duvall looked scared out of her mind when needed.

Is the second season worth watching? I ask that as someone who quite liked the first in parts but didn't really buy into the hype by the end. Is the jump in quality significant after that?

Oh. I was kind of hoping for a meaty diatribe, rather than… nothing at all. The linked article is good though.

So it's a British show, then.

Agreed. I'm not even much of a Hemingway fan, but students seem to want to copy him because they think what he did was easy so they could do it too. But it wasn't.

Rabin was wrong to feel bad about coining that term. It highlighted a very real trend of underwritten female characters and that's a good thing.

Ouch. Come to think of it it must have been the only N64 game I owned but didn't complete. Perhaps even back then I was wise to such bullshit.

Combat's mediocre rather than terrible — it should have gone for an Arkham/Shadow of Mordor brawling system rather than whatever half-hearted mechanic it ended up with — but the fact that it's not a deal-breaker for most people speaks to how well it does everything else.

Wikipedia has quite a vicious (and very much deserved) paragraph in the Legacy chapter of that game:

"Greatest Active Game of All Time: Baseball"

Hey, I didn't say I agreed with it (though I haven't felt compelled to revisit the game since finishing the story). It just shows it's pretty much impossible to please everyone in this medium. Some people will never like Naughty Dog's corridor gameplay.

I remember very little of TP, despite finishing it. I think the more dour tone was actually quite refreshing, but it probably borrowed a bit too much from Ocarina for its own good in the end.

What can I say - I have a comfortable couch.

And even Last of Us has had a bit of a backlash from the gameplay purist crowd. Perhaps it's inevitable with anything proclaimed to be great.

I do really want to play it. But I just can't bring myself to buy a Nintendo Switch. I'll only ever play it at home, rendering the portability gimmick pointless, and we all know how this goes with Nintendo by now: about 3-4 games really worth buying before the console's cycle is over. Hell, I'm struggling with the…