To be fair, Bethsoft gets kitschy juxtaposition and lays it on thick. Actual satire is a different thing entirely. You still get it in, like, the billions of internal corporate emails you find on terminals, but it’s hard to say the Bethsoft Fallouts have a satirical point of view. They’re more likely to tilt toward…

Bioshock’s a fine game but it’s horror in the same way Dead Space 2 is horror, which is to say that it’s more action than horror. System Shock 2 was a full-bore horror game.

They definitely prefigured Left 4 Dead. The marine part of the game was always tense because the xenomorph spawning points in the level were essentially random. The rest of the level design doesn’t hold up at all but that’s a fun bit. And dealing with facehuggers in any game is terrifying.

The ironic thing is that both Friday the 13th and Dead By Daylight are ripoffs of a crowdfunded game called “Last Year”. It got funded in 2014 but then one of their updates included a piece of concept art featuring a killer with a ski mask and so the grifters who own the F13 IP sued them into the ground,…

P.T. is close

Some unmentioned games:

SS2 was robbed. Cyber Midwives!!!

Didn’t iHeartRadio file for bankruptcy this year?

Was that Melvin the armorer in that freezer with Julie?

“Fisk didn’t have an “arc” because he’s not the protagonist“

The legal focus of S1 is one of the worst things about it, mainly because the show had / has no real literacy in the process of it, and more generally because the legality / ethics of vigilante justice is just about the most tired and well-trodden ground in superhero fiction (and the fact that it’s still unresolved…

Presumably Nadeem patches himself up because the writers’ room needed him to act like he knew Fisk was fully omnipotent even though he didn’t actually find out til the next hour. 

It’s by far the grisliest bit in an unexpectedly grisly season, all the more for how perfunctory it was. I had to watch it again to make sure it was what I thought it was

DC comics is nowhere near the zeitgeist these days. Wonder Woman being the exception that proves the rule. 

The most cathartic moment in the series so far: Karen getting canned. I was doing the “yes” chant. And iirc they still go out of their way to overpraise her talent on the way out!!

This site doesn’t really cover TV anymore if it’s not at least somewhat zeitgeist-y. Blame Univision. 

I was actually okay with the blended re-enactments / flashbacks but man I hit my stylistic breaking point with the Julie - therapist - Fisk spotlight scene. It’s like the director saw a Tracy Letts play one time and said “I think I could make this work as a superhero drama”.

I watched the first 10 episodes in the first day while cooking / running errands, so yeah

God I hate it when they play up Karen’s preternatural talent as a writer, as though we haven’t heard her read the copy.

Karen Page, print journalist, is covering two monthly rents in Manhattan. I wish they wouldn’t lean so hard into the fantasy side of this property...