Taken out of context, the first five words of your post would be quite inflammatory.

Adrian Brody is a weird screen presence - ever since The Pianist I feel like he's had this sheen of respectability, which is supported by his severe features. But most of the time he's such a noisy ham that it's hard to tell if he's a good actor. I honestly don't know.

Great, now I'm imaging the "M Knight Shyamalan's House on Haunted Hill" that I never realized I wanted.

But then how will I light them on fire? Do you know how expensive kerosene is?

Dumbwaiter.

I was typing from my phone at work, so my response might have come off as more combative than I meant - sorry, if so.

Castlevania manuals were my favorites, because the artwork of the creature gave a sense of what they were "supposed" to look like and added vividness to the 8-bit graphics. When I was a kid I would draw, essentially, Castlevania game screens with little monsters on platforms and a guy climbing stairs with a whip.

I've been tempted to play through all of CV2 with a walkthrough, since I remember liking it moment to moment as a kid, and the empty/silent castle at the end is such a cool idea. Also thry used some slightly different colors (more warm tones) than the later games, which is pretty striking. And Bloody Tears.

I loved that game when I was a kid. I would rent it from the local video store, until one day the cartridge developed a glitch that wouldn't advance beyond the surfboard level. Assholes.

There's an interesting difference in critique of games compared to other media, which is part of their nature but also something that doesn't get explicitly addressed. Even more than movies, games are tied to era specific technology, which makes their visual aspects harder to discuss and also makes the difficult to…

I remember laboring with my cousins to beat Castlevania 64, and after our third failed attempt to beat the last level my aunt finally said, "This is why I hate video games so much. You've practically beaten the game, it's just wasting your time deliberately now."

I played that for the first time ever last year. Goddamn is it hard. I really need to jump back in, given that I had to track it down on a shady site where all the text was in Russian.

If he's not available, the kid from The Monster Squad probably is.

Castlevania 4 remains my favorite in the series, even above Symphony of the Night, for the cleanness of the gameplay and the art design, which I'd say is the best in a 16 bit game, period.

As a hematologist I can tell you that I look at wbc differentials every day and calculate ratios of different subtypes about 0% of the time. Morphology and clinical correlation are more useful than raw numbers, but I guess as a teaching tool to place white cells in context it kinda makes sense. Maybe.

I have the experience of reading articles and thinking "didn't they just do an article on this?" And the realizing I was thinking of an article from five years ago.

Can we take a moment to admire the phrase "enough gratuitous nudity?" I suspect it wasn't adequately excessive or sufficiently abundant, either.

The Texas Cheesecake Repository?

Neither of those were coined by a Simpsons episode.

It was the Eisenhower era. There literally - literally - wasn't a man in America who would wear that outfit.