I imagine he mechanics have aged clumsily and I’m not pretending its a forgotten masterpiece that plays as well in 2023 as 2003—but narrative, the setting and stylings of the game are still vivid in my mind: it still feels so ambitious for 2002 in a way Skyrim doesn’t.

“You can almost feel the ancient bones of Morrowind and Fallout 3 poking through bits of the scenery and menus as you play.”

Except Morrowind was werd. morrowind was a weird setting where the local people did not like you and were actively offended that you might be their chosen one. Morrowind felt truly alien: its…

“can recite the names of all the world’s countries and capitals”

It’s been how many years since the outbreak in-universe, why is it that nation-states still seem to meaningful exist as some kind of useful touchstone?

Never heard of this show, which tells you how often I feel the need to check-out what’s happening on MTV.

The book is good but can be a little dense because it dives deep into the financial chicanery. If you’re good with that sort of thing, no problem, but I struggled.

That has to be incidental because SNW doesn’t use logic in its storytelling, though God I wish it would.

Wonder how late in the process someone had to remind the the designer that, yes, Resistance was real and wasn’t a false memory.

And also, as uncomfortable as it makes a lot of people, psychology is pretty clear that most people’s weird sex kinks (even the consent ones) are not intrinsically harmful, and the idea that you’d have this safe space to run around and indulge your weird but harmless kinks on toasters is, y’know, no different than…

Picard Season 1 was all about how people are irrationally afraid of robots who are remarkably down for exterminating all organic life in the universe the moment the idea is suggested to them and come within moments of successfully doing so.

Huh. People trying to sell me on FFXIII always said the exact same thing.

It also runs hard into the X-Men problem in which the group standing in for the Other is repeatedly shown to actually be something it is rational to fear: rather than just being people who have been othered because having an otherable groups serves the people in power, it’s always folks with insanely dangerous…

That’s... not a common opinion.

But the hot blue aliens in MEA suck.

It really wasn’t. It was a shell game with an Abrams-style mystery box that contained nothing but the most anodyne BuT WhAt iF ThEy’rE PeOpLe narrative and a heavy dose of post-GoT ‘sexual violence and gore mean a grown-up show’ that was already played-out in 2016.

Westworld season 1 just did a much better job at…

I’ll use one more: what it is your fucking problem you little nasty turd?

“The Fallout TV show is being led by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan”

Not a good sign.

Rewatched Villenueve’s Dune a few days back and like dit even less this time. It’s a gob-smaking visual masterpiece, an extraordinary work of visual medium, but it completely drops the ball on characters. Jessica spends the whole film either crying or about to cry, Pieter, Thrufir, Gurney, and Yueh (THE DAMN TRAITOR)…

Replaying ME1 is a weird experience because it’s a lot of ‘ME3 sure will never follow-up on any of this, huh.’

There’s been this weird, faintly desperate trend to rehabilitate MEA’s reputation—and I understand it probably runs better now on PC than it does on my PS4—but the game is just bad. It’s full of interesting ideas executed astonishingly poorly, wretched QoL problems that were easy fixes[1], and a lack of any sense of…

I don’t think I did? Since I don’t disagree with that statement? Nor did I write anything contradicting it?