Ah, the rare graphic novel that was inspired by a song and structured like a video game, and later adapted to a movie and a video game in parallel. I believe that work is in a class by itself.

Oh I never said it's impossible. Just that the kinds of producers who have been picking up video game movie rights don't want to do it the way you describe. They want a low-risk, easy return on their investment. Which is merely one reason why so many video game movies are panned by their own purported fans. By…

Sure that's something movie producers could theoretically turn out, but I don't think it's something they're going to try anytime soon. LEGO as a franchise didn't have what you'd call original characters prior to the LEGO movie (unless you count the impenetrable Bionicle stuff). They came up with new characters…

That's rough. At the bottom of the gold tier, I rarely see one platinum in a given game, and nothing higher unless they're deliberately grouped up with a bronze. And it's really rare for the team average SR to be more than 100 points different from our opponents. Perhaps my region has a healthier bench at the…

What gametypes are you playing that you're not happy with the matchmaking? I almost exclusively play solo queue in the gold tier ranked playlist, on PS4 with the voice chat turned off. The only time I run into a wildly better team is when I'm matched with a team of five and the six stack on the other side is more…

Sanskrit mentioned elsewhere that he was thinking about doing a writeup for The Witness, but figured he already said his piece in their mid-year roundup:

Yeah, the Souls series especially has spoiled me in this regard because nearly every in-game item has a worthwhile use and/or a bit of lore to chew on. Borderlands, and many games like it, are mechanically incapable of delivering a weapon that I'll want to use for the rest of the game, and instead actively encourages…

It's disqualified from my personal ranking for including real world video game characters, taking place inside arcade game cabinets, and featuring a cast of characters that while original, are crafted as loving homages to past arcade games. I take my made-up subgenre power ranking lists very seriously.

Yeah, that's a good one too! Edge of Tomorrow has all the trappings of a modern FPS, but Inception is an excellent distillation of the sideways logic necessary to play a well-crafted point and click adventure game.

I think the struggle with adapting video games to movies, as compared to comic books, is one of how you progress through each medium, and how the story is delivered to the audience. (I wouldn't count the LEGO movie as an adaptation, so much as an existing plastic toy aesthetic and a loose ruleset applied to an…

I'd say Edge of Tomorrow is the best video game movie that's not based on a video game.

I really appreciate games that give the player a sense of progression and growth without making them pick out skills from a predetermined tree. The easy example is games that give you a new item or ability at specific places that allow you to access new areas of the map or defeat once-challenging enemies easily, in…

In some games it's a way to inject some currency into the in-game economy over time without making every monster and animal just happen to have swallowed a dozen gold coins. I forget, you could sell inferior weapons in Mass Effect, right? Did they limit the amount of currency that the shops had on-hand at any one…

This tendency to include progression trees or unlockable skills in games with no other RPG elements definitely feels more prevalent in design-by-committee type games. Almost like someone in marketing is saying that the game needs a progression system to keep people interested in the online multiplayer longer than a…

The bar scene is the interlude between acts II and III, named The Entertainment. I have it saved as a separate file on my machine, and you might too!

My favorite "new to me game" wasn't even new to me, but was new to my partner. We played an Easy co-op run of Halo 3: ODST together, and it was great! I had forgotten how well the three parallel stories mesh together and create a nice sense of forward progress in a game that basically has you running around in…

Oh… Then this game might give you nightmares. There's absolutely no scale for judging the quality of the food you produce, only the rapidity. You can drop things on the floor, kick them around, cut uncooked meats and vegetables on the same board, and use them in a dish without any complaints. As long as a dish…

I liked Overcooked because it gave us a simple control scheme to do simple tasks, and got out of the way to let us complicate things for ourselves. It's a local multiplayer cooking game where all of your commands are contained to two buttons: "pick up/drop", and "chop". Ghost Town Games recognized that they didn't…

I've had the Dorado theme from Overwatch stuck in my head all day. Specifically the melody with all the trumpets. I can't decide if this is a good thing.

I was totally surprised by how much my partner and I got into Overcooked, and then surprised again when they came out with free DLC for the holidays! It really is the ideal game for couch co-op with gaming agnostics. You only need to learn two buttons, and the rest is a screaming good time of mixed-up recipes and…