I'm a little surprised to see such a strong reaction to the romance. Pine and Gadot were effective, but for as much as I appreciated Steve's self-awareness in moments like the liar/smuggler/etc. line, the middle third of the movie seemed very mid-tier Marvel-y in having fun individual beats papering over spotty…

Is she well-versed on the topic? It may have been me bringing in too much baggage from the very cliche we're talking about WW subverting, but it struck me as telling that, when Steve asks her about sex, her response was that she had read extensively about it. That seems like textbook "she is a virgin" signposting for…

That's a reasonable starting point, and one I think Leto sort of brings up, but Wonder Woman (as a film and as a character) doesn't seem to really engage the idea with any real seriousness.

I think it's partially that, and partially that the original story is subject to huge slash-and-burn efforts as levels get cut late in development. You see this in the movie industry in some cases as well, but while cutting a 3 minute scene can cause a couple plot holes in terms of how character A learned fact X,…

As someone O-…. yup.

Oh dang, right in downtown Madison! I'll have to try to remember that for next year. Always nice to run up to Madison for a weekend (and abscond back to Chicago with a bunch of WI beer afterwards).

Yeah… 6 (but really 7) kitted out colonels should do just fine up until the last room, but boy howdy did they learn their lesson compared to the Squadsight Double Tap that was the finale of XCOM 1. It's a thrilling ending, if a weird spike of one.

A few puzzle and/or platform recs, from my backlog over the last couple years.

It's also the birthplace of Waluigi! Which, in retrospect, is a pretty bizarre place to debut a character, even one that crashed onto the scene fully-formed as a hateful war criminal of a human being.

Been playing on PC, after picking up the Ultimate Box version on Steam a little while back. It seems to be… fine? It asks you to set up a super outdated EA account that may or may not have been folded into an Origin account you probably forgot you ever had, and I've heard tell of some DLC not actually existing, but I…

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. This game and series prove that “downward trajectory” doesn’t mean a damn when the games are this good; it’s the weakest of the three, but it’s still really strong and I remember it being nicely paced.

This is super dumb, but I just want to say that imagining your dad earnestly fawning over Zelda has proven to be the absolute best application of the "MilleniaIs -> Snake People" browser plug-in yet.

Well, my intermittent quest to 100% Shovel Knight marches on, having wrapped up a no-checkpoint, no death (the latter of which is more accurately described as "lots of suddenly force-closing the game") run of the Shovel of Hope campaign. That leaves me with 5 cheevos left for Shovel and Specter Knights, plus 10 for…

I've gotten to the point of wishing that they'd just license music as their characters' themes, their existing stuff is so unmemorable. Like… let's just make "Shoot to Thrill" Iron Man's theme, full stop. Thor can take "Immigrant Song", since that worked like gangbusters for the Ragnarok trailer. Whatever. Just give…

This is a great sub-topic, especially for a holiday weekend!

This sounds pretty much like a version of The Witness that I'll actually pick up and enjoy rather than half-begrudgingly adding to my wishlist and hemming & hawing over every time it goes on sale.

Seriously, I cannot believe that they went with generic blockbuster trailer music for this. A dramatic blast of Vampire Killer, Clocktower, or Bloody Tears would've made for a better impression than the NES nod.

The microtransaction hats are already not something I'd call a draw, but adding fiddly stat bonuses on top of them is a whole order of magnitude more… annoying? Nonsensical? Craven? It's bad, is what I'm saying.

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Happy birthday!