Michael*

Joey Barton lasted a lot longer than I thought he would at Fleetwood, and only committed assault once. That's progress, ask anyone.

I do recall Snyder's characterisation of Rorschach in particular just completely missing the mark, it basically ignored all the nuances from the story and painted him as a tragic hero when really nothing could have been further from the point. Similarly, his exploration of Superman's values mostly amounted to other characters monologuing at him about what they think Superman should be while he stares into space. There's very little to help you connect with his decision to become not just a hero, but the hero of another world. That was actually something that the first Captain America film did really well, perhaps even more than it needed to since fighting Nazis is a pretty decent motivation in itself, but it took the time to show Rogers as someone who bristled at injustice and felt the need to stand up when something was wrong. By the time you reach the scene where they're pumping serum into him, you already know this guy is Captain America.

Wow. Clearly, there was far more to this than anyone realised at the time.

It's a pity really, with Man of Steel they established a decent launching point for the continuity, which DC openly stated would lead to other characters gradually revealing themselves. Somewhere along the way, they took a left turn and started trying to achieve in two or three films what Marvel had done in twenty. I suppose you'd have to say Snyder himself was a pretty big hindrance as well. Superman shouldn't be difficult to get right, you just have to show his values as clearly as you can. Batman has an "out" in that his parents were killed, so he turns his need for vengeance into a war for justice. It's not a hard motivation to follow and doesn't need a ton of screen time. Somehow Snyder got so far off-base that he ended up with characters who deviated radically from most portrayals and the audience was never really told why.

If common sense had prevailed, Snyder wouldn't have been let near another comic book flick after BVS failed virtually across the board. It's become such an odd thing though, where despite the studio not necessarily liking the guy, a sizeable and weirdly sycophantic fanbase does, the studio likes money and knows the sycophants will give it to them.

It would appear that the Snyder Cut has its own Wikipedia entry now, I guess it's only fitting for it to have its own BZ topic too. Besides, the Whedon version carries more than enough baggage of its own these days.

Thanks all.

I'm honestly not sure if I can remove that in good conscience.

"Driving on ice" is one of the ways I've seen it described. You'd think too that some of the larger vehicles would be slower to turn but from what I've seen, they still handle like normal-sized cars. I honestly thought the driving experience would end up being something akin to GTA, which I personally wouldn't have been too put out by. I must say, even when the first publicity material came out, I was iffy on having to spend the entire game in first person mode. Apart from anything else, it seems a bit contradictory to try and get you all excited about the physical augmentation of characters and then barely let the player see them.

I've even come across a few where there'll be a quick flurry of ordinary-looking posts created, they get left for a while, then the user will come back days later and edit spam links into the body of the text. Man, I do so love living in the future.

I do hope so and my fingers are crossed that we end up with an acceptable base console port but honestly, my expectations are very low. CDPR must have vastly underestimated the task of retrofitting the game into base consoles. If it's the worst case scenario and they only got it running by gutting the visuals and dialling the resolution down to a level bordering on unbearable, then man, I wouldn't envy the people tasked with overhauling it.

It'll be very hard. They can fix some of the bugs, but I don't think they'll ever get it to be a genuinely good experience on last-gen consoles when it's basically running at 20fps with maximum downscaling in sequences.

For sure, most developers clearly have problems thinking of ways to fill open world games with meaningful things, and too many of them turn into collectathons with repeated side missions just to pad out the length. I'd much rather have a shorter, more focused, narrative-driven game than one overstuffed with meaningless tasks, similar as you say to something like Shenmue where you have a relatively small sandbox that still allows for interactive story threads.

Oh, most definitely. I'm sure it would have upset the shareholders to have the game delayed again, but CDPR is a wealthy company that certainly isn't struggling to make payroll. They must have weighed up all their options and knowing exactly what they were doing, made a choice. It was a bad one and management fully deserves to have their feet held to the fire for it.

Man, you'd think that 32 years on from original movie, Eddie and Arsenio wouldn't need make-up to play older guys. By the looks of it though, they'd be in need of it to look somewhere in the vicinity of their real ages.

I'm working my way through the final season at the moment and I really think the show has quietly become one of the best things that the MCU has to offer. To me, it just captures the comic book feel (especially the heyday of following them as a kid where the pace was breakneck and you never quite knew what was coming next) in a way that the other TV shows don't quite, and it's always fantastic fun.

Indeed, and it's a shame, because this situation could have been avoided so easily. They could have delayed a game that was clearly nowhere near ready to release. They could have showed actual gameplay footage so that people knew what they were buying. They could have sent out proper review copies and not placed an embargo until the day before release. There are no two ways about it, this thing has been nothing short of disastrous on base consoles.

I guess Konami got somewhat lucky after Kojima was ousted that MGSV's development had already reached a point where the gameplay worked like a Swiss watch, as undoubtedly the way the story ended made next to no sense. To me though, Camp Omega from Ground Zeroes was more interesting than the huge open spaces in Phantom Pain, simply because every part of the map felt meaningful and worth exploring. Usually I find that I can prioritise longer games, but even though they're often great fun, the amount of time it takes to play them can feel like a bit of a burden sometimes. RE3 probably pushed its luck too far the other way, the original retail price for what was on offer sounded like a very hard sell. Going forward though, I think one of the keys to keeping the open world genre alive will be to make sure that traversing them isn't too much of a bore. The recent Spider-Man games for example have a lot of "checklist" stuff, but the dynamism of the web-slinging keeps you going.

In general I think the show pushes its luck a bit with some of the fan service, however I'd be down for a season of Ming-Na Wen and Temuera Morrison running things on Tatooine. Going forward, the franchise has a bit of an issue which is that the stuff fans really want to see demands close proximity to the OT. Sequences like the one in Mandalorian can scratch that itch, but only a little and you can't really expand on it without either recasting the most vital characters or waiting for far better deepfake technology.

Official trailer.

The Queen's Gambit Release Date: 23 October 2020 (US) The Queen's Gambit is a 2020 American coming-of-age period drama miniseries based on Walter Tevis's 1983 novel of the same name. It was created for Netflix by Scott Frank and Allan Scott. Beginning in the mid-1950s and proceeding into the 1960s, the story follows the life of an orphaned chess prodigy on her rise to the top of the chess world while struggling with emotional problems, drug problems, and alcohol dependency. Cast Anya Taylor-Joy Bill Camp Moses Ingram Isla Johnston Christiane Seidel Rebecca Root Chloe Pirrie Akemnji Ndifornyen Marielle Heller Harry Melling Patrick Kennedy Jacob Fortune-Lloyd Thomas Brodie-Sangster Marcin Dorociński

Can't go wrong with the Kendrick (*obligatory plug for A Simple Favour*).

This was a cool way to wrap up S2, even if the weakest aspect for me was the ending. It was one of the those things that I hadn't expected them to do because the CGI tech isn't really there, and as it turned out the tech most definitely wasn't there, but they did it anyway. That being said though, overall, the episode was excellent fun. This season has been a marked improvement on the first one.

Job's a good'un.

Honestly, I fear this will all end up being pushed onto the developers somehow, when the blame rests entirely with CDPR'S management. Hopefully though, it serves as a warning to other companies about what not to do when releasing a major title. The "release now, fix later" mentality really has become a blight on the industry, it needs to be addressed and that may only happen by making an example out of a high profile game.