This is basically just your personal preference, albeit a long-standing one. FWIW, I tend to like exploratory and open-world games the best, too. But I don’t think “it’s linear” is actually a criticism. It’s just a description. Lots of great games were designed that way.

So your take is open world good, linear bad? I’ll make a note to inform the decades worth of thousands of developers that their linear games were all trash.

Politics?

The culture asked for it. No one in particular in most of these cases, no. But companies have seen too many tempests in the Twitter teapot and now employ certain people whose job it is simply to avoid fiascos. (Never mind that these “sensitivity edits” result in their own, different fiascos. The way things are going…

Of all the things today's left is murdering, I might most miss the metaphor.

Yes. And clearly, whoever got paid to write this dumb-as-rocks article is part of that majority. Fortunately too, there was absolutely no incentive for them to, y’know, do some research on their hot take, because no one running the undead corpse of the AV Club gives a shit about anything they publish anymore. It’s the…

For me the key to David’s character is that he really isn’t much into survival (his own, or the group’s) at all. He’s an absolute creep who had found himself in a perfect situation to get his rocks off by controlling, hurting, killing, eating, and raping other people. The entire setup with him leading and seeming to…

The problem with the movie, then and now, is that it too eagerly invites the audience to cheer for most of what he does. The biggest way that it was ahead of its time is that it was practically designed to be carved up into clips for YouTube and social media consumption. Each scene is a little daily frustration that a…

Ready to feel ancient? Back to the Future isn’t a film franchise of the last 30 years. The last of the three movies is now 33 years old.

This is such a weird, petty criticism. Sam and Henry are young enough to have been *born* in a quarantine zone. Never lived outside of it—never even BEEN outside of it. FEDRA protected the zone for their entire lives. As we were told, the infected were driven underground when the QZ was established, and quietly driven…

Without spoiling anything ahead, this episode was actually terribly important to the whole story. Not in terms of moving the plot forward much, or even moving the characters further along their arcs (though I think the journeys of Joel and Ellie are long and move incrementally, and this episode moved them as far along…

I figured it would be the gutting of the site by equity vultures that drove me away. And perhaps it should've been. But no, it was this very comment section on this article right here. See ya, everybody--this place is a cesspool with not one redeeming quality left. What an inglorious ending. 

She’s a damn treasure.

I don’t get the minor cult around this dude at all. Great taste, but not a great writer or director. House of the Devil is overrated beyond belief. Every movie it rips off is about twenty times better.

Pretty much. I have a friend who grew up listening to a lot of Pink Floyd. But she grew up in the 90s. To her, Pink Floyd was The Division Bell and Momentary Lapse of Reason. Those are still her favorites, although she is now aware of and familiar with the 70s run of classics from Meddle through The Wall. To me,…

There are actually lots of games nowadays that are extremely narrative-oriented. Or have plenty of both narrative and gameplay. But Halo is not one of them. It’s a traditional “90% action, 10% cut scenes” kind of thing, and what plot and characterization there is, is very cliched.

The likely prince will be the upcoming Last of Us series, as the game is super-narrative and movie-like already, and they managed to cast good actors who also fit their roles.

“And, god, but is there anything sadder than watched a limited imagination try to invent some ‘real’ depravity?”

The events that ended the show were not the problem for most viewers. It was the careless lack of setting things up, the lack of connective tissue to make the big story beats feel logical and earned. It felt like someone reciting Cliff’s Notes that they read the other day and remember about 75% of.

I dunno. He is saying a lot in public when he really should (at least from my amateur legal POV) be saying very little. He gave a relatively unguarded interview directly after the incident--that could only cost him in court if he slipped and said the wrong thing; there was no compelling reason to do it if his only…