I think Miyamoto is just flat-out wrong in his near-contempt for narrative. Yeah, long-winded, densely packed cutscenes are never the best option for a game, but if the choice is between "no story" and "some story" I'm always going to go for the narrative option. I want context. I want to see developers express their…

I think the intensity of The Shining makes it work there. You're not super invested in them as characters, but the nightmarish atmosphere is so effective that it works. The best horror films make it feel as if you, in the audience, are vulnerable as well, and ciphers work fine for contributing to that effect.

Surprisingly, that wound up being a much more pleasant explanation than "the credited director didn't know what the fvck he was doing and Spielberg had to clean up."

It's a tricky needle to thread. War is a part of these characters' lives, bu you don't want to glamorize it. Caesar fundamentally just wants to isolate the apes from humans—and it turns out that he was right that, if they had just done that, the human problem would've resolved itself—and the film has to create a…

That would've been cool, but I think that Caesar as someone immersed in war runs counter to his character. He wages war because he has to, not because he particularly wants to, and his overriding desire is to avoid conflict.

That is also true. I think there's a case to be made that Caesar is ultimately somewhat naive, but that his philosophy is ultimately still superior. My biggest question is what happens to the apes after Caesar is no longer around? I think I would've preferred if Caesar had lived and the film had ended with him as a…

No, the other movies aren't more grim than this one, though each certainly has dark elements. But I think that if this film had been about despair, it would have not fit well with the other two. And if the other two had been as bleak as some people apparently wanted the last one to be, we would've found it to be an…

It really is the definitive version of the game, and different in some very important ways from the original release; much more so than the remastered X/X-2. And like those games, I suspect we'll be seeing a PC port in a year or so.

The implication is that with increased intelligence they are more able to consider alternate viewpoints. Their society is fundamentally held together by Caesar, who was raised by humans and has a very different perspective. Indeed, the second movie is about the struggle between Caesar's philosophy and a more…

Rise has to set up the state of the world in addition to telling Caesar's story, but he has by far the most substantial development in the movie. James Franco is important, yes, but most of his plot is locked in by the demands of the plot. Caesar is the one who actually gets to grow.

I dunno, I think it was more ambitious than Iggy gave it credit for. Yeah, it doesn't embrace hopelessness, but that's because Caesar's arc has never been about hopelessness. It's still a movie in which humanity is nearly an incidental presence and doomed to destroy itself from a mix of fear, anger, and sheer…

It works better in context, but his character occupies a kind of odd place in the narrative. The movie is less about him than you would expect.

The point is that the apes' survival is fundamentally an entirely separate issue from the humans' survival. Their fates are not intertwined, despite the humans' insistence that this is so. The fate of the human species is kind of a B-plot in these movies; they are really much more about Caesar's personal journey and…

"How can I make these insufferable creatures even more insufferable?"
"What if you pretend you have some kind of scientific insight into their ubiquity?"

My life is just a haze of Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age right now.

The theater we were at on Saturday was very full and everyone seemed to really like it. People even applauded at the end (which I think is stupid, but whatever, they liked it).

Wow, that's a harsh drop for Spidey, especially considering that was easily one of the best movies Marvel has put out.

Startups, because there's no real successor.

The only other big change I can think of is the reorchestrated soundtrack.

The PS2 had FFX, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, FFXII, and FFX-2, all of which are stone-cold classics and very different in many important ways from Square's typical output. But yeah, there wasn't nearly as much there, and those four games were all—for their time—essentially AAA titles.