Those who are interested in Pathologic without wanting to deal with its archaic gameplay and messy translation should check out the "Pathologistics" blog: two friends playing through each game-day and then blogging (sometimes in-character) about their diverging experiences. It's really fascinating to see the turns the…

I like Siegmeyer's story, too, but it's a shame that you can totally miss out on it if you don't do very specific things in a very specific order. After I freed his daughter from inside a crystal golem, I forgot to talk to her before adventuring on, which for some reason meant that Siegmeyer never shows up at later…

This is sometimes true later in the game, where you've gotten good enough equipment to make up for starting over with a bunch of newbies. But in the early game, sometimes bad luck will end up wiping out your entire squad of experienced people, and then you're stuck with a bunch of five-health rookies with machine guns…

The turning point for me was the first time we heard Carlos's voice. Carlos is not an interesting character except insofar as he draws out certain aspects of Cecil's character. (It doesn't help that Dylan Marron's voice doesn't sound at all like the Carlos-voice I imagined based on the descriptions we got from Cecil,…

"I felt like it was far more interested in its kind of fan service"—so it has the same problem that the podcast now has?

Same here. The show was at its best when it concerned itself less with running plotlines (seriously, I do not care about Cecil and Carlos's "aren't they just adorable?" romance) and more with great one-off exercises in atmosphere, mood, and surreal humor. The more that the creators sought to flesh out the town, the…

And yet the Hammer Bros. suit was never really useful enough to justify the insane stress you had to go through to make sure you didn't take a hit from an enemy. It's the sad fact that no nine-year-old wanted to admit to himself.

I always hated losing to Peach in Smash Melee because of that shit-eating "Ohhh, did I wiiin?" at the victory screen. Jeez, Peach, you already destroyed me with your cheap-ass dress-twirl attack, do you have to rub it in?

Come on, no mention of Radiohead's "Knives Out" (again directed by Michel Gondry)?

k.

Is "other problems" code for "not wanting a bunch of 16-year-olds shouting homophobic slurs at each other as they play a game in the middle of my game store"? Because yeah, that's often what ends up happening at these places, unfortunately.

Yeah, I would honestly play Magic a lot more if the community weren't packed full of socially maladjusted a-holes. I've got some friends with whom I like to play, but jumping into a tournament (or hell, even just another playgroup) is more likely to be a terrible experience than a positive one.

The Zach Jesse story is a good deal more complicated than that, actually. In a lot of ways, it mirrors what's been happening with the Ashley Madison leak—maybe the people who got outed are scumbags, but the online vigilantes who did the outing aren't exactly heroes. Drew Levin, the guy who "exposed" Zach Jesse (who…

Bravo.

Nah, technically you don't even need to fight the Capra Demon to progress. There's no way in hell they'd make it through Sen's Fortress though, with all the precise control required to dodge the traps.

I loved Duncan as the Kingpin; I still do. I thought he pulled off the suave menace of the character much more effectively than Vincent D'Onofrio did in the Netflix series. Plus, Duncan is a legitimately huge guy; they didn't have to use any movie magic to make him seem like an absolute beast of a man.

Actually, Coup was developed separately from The Resistance but got a rebranding with new Resistance-themed art after it became a hit.

One of the reasons I love Blazing Saddles so much is that it completely deflates all the hot air that goes into puffing up The Searchers as a serious-minded probing of racism. When it comes to having worthwhile ideas to communicate about race and the myth of the Old West, Blazing Saddles is ten times the movie that The…

Partly, but also, the book's Mouth of Sauron was a suave, menacing sadist. Tolkien characterizes him as a figure who's scary because he actively chose evil and was trained in sorcery by Sauron himself. Movie MoS is just a gross, faceless monster. He's a horror beastie that somehow wandered into the climax of a…

I said this up above, but I hated PJ's take on the Mouth of Sauron. That's one of my favorite scenes from the book, but the film version is so tonally at odds with the surrounding material.