Warcraft 3 was a pretty unique RTS with its whole creep experience mechanic and I'd argue that WoW's approach to questing, class design, and boss encounters went a step above just being an iteration of EQ/Ultima Online. I had been an EQ player and WoW immediately felt like its own thing.

I like the game a lot (beat it twice) but its story fell flat for me. Particularly the second time with the DLC, which didn't help. It goes for the big emotional moments of a Pixar or Ghibli movie one after another without any of the build-up or any sense of humor to speak of. I was on board after the first cutscene…

Doom 2016's writing is actually fantastic for how organic it is to the gameplay and tone. It's a good counter-example to the "Uncharted problem" of gameplay and story often feeling like sort of separate universes.

At first I thought you were going to go with "I would like to kneejerk dismiss this possibly worthwhile discussion about representation by labeling it 'outrage'".

Apart from that whole "all but erasing Asian people from NASA" thing.

Obviously the importance of shame in any society isn't a hard argument to make. What's controversial bordering on culturally chauvinist is the idea that there's no equivalent feeling of guilt among the Japanese and the labeling of Japan as a "shame culture" markedly different from our own "guilt culture", where shame…

flamingwombat, you seem like one of those people who in the span of a single book or lecture or whatever it was went from knowing nothing whatsoever about a culture to thinking of yourself as an expert on it.

Ian McDiarmid was great, and unlike Obi-Wan Palpatine was actually an entertaining character.

We'd probably have fewer birds. When large dinosaurs and pterosaurs died it opened up a bunch of niches for birds to fill. For example, some birds sort of went backwards to lose their flying, get very large, and began to look a lot like the dinosaurs they evolved from. If there were still big theropods around that…

It seems like it should be kind of obvious, but the article wasn't claiming that it was literally the worst movie of all time.

In the interview Wyatt Cenac specifically says that it wasn't normal and that was the only time he'd ever seen John Stewart react that way.

God, The Intouchables. Fuck that movie. Even separated from the race aspect, "cool young guy teaches fuddy-duddy how to enjoy life" is a formula that really needs to go away, especially when there's the scene where the fuddy-duddy smokes pot for the first time and makes that stupid pot face that only exists in movies.

There's more to it than that. Most undeserving Best Picture winners aren't movies anyone really wants to talk about at all. The King's Speech? What's there to say?

There's always that one guy.

My whole theater found that hilarious, me included. It never actually occurred to me that it wasn't supposed to be funny.

It isn't really laziness so much as a deliberate choice to follow the look of Belle and Ariel, though I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse.