Ben X

The Leftovers, Veep, Flight Of The Conchords. Barry is supposed to be good. The Wire, obv.

I want Half-Life 2: Episode 3, following Laidlaw's story outline and in the same (or similar) version of the Source engine as the other episodes. Push some psychedelic visuals and mechanics but nothing too revolutionary. Then the Campo Santo cabal can make Half-Life 3.

You alright there, Mington?

Really great interview. Hocking seems a little spiky at times, but gives some great stuff. Did I understand correctly that there is a part three planned? I agree with him about games often trying to pack too much story in. The Half-Life games may have wholly scripted narratives, but their storytelling works so well because they know not to bog it down in tons of pedantic detail.

Yep, agreed. Sad to see a non-perf-cap Zemeckis movie get such poor reviews...

Really?! Wow. I haven't seen it but I didn't expect it to be any good. What's your opinion of any other Transformers movies you've seen?

Gave up on Ghostbusters The Game, as it was dreadful. Simply busting a ghost is so fiddly and messy, and despite all the pointless different weapon modes it's pretty much all you do, just trying to wrangle the systems into alignment over and over again. The storytelling's really clunky as well - dull video gamey shit, boring dialogue, badly directed. Also, the player-character, "Rookie", looks like a first pass attempt at a Dan Ackroyd model, it's weird. I feel like what they should have done was make it tricky to get the ghosts in your beam, but once you do it's simple to get them to the trap, so the real challenge is to catch them without doing too much damage to the properties and therefore making a loss on the job. With some light RPG stuff it could have been like the movies where it's basically just a regular extermination business.

Trailers are out for the sequel. Interestingly, (spoilers for stuff in this trailer)

Saw Into The Spider-Verse today and while it's more tenuously connected to the MCU than Homecoming, it's still i"n association with Marvel" so may as well put it in here. It is, for my money, hands down the best Spider-Man film ever (bearing in mind I wasn't a huge fan of the Raimi ones). Effortlessly blends a variety of visual styles and riffs on the audience familiarity with Spidey's backstory while using all of the character's (characters') iconography to full effect. Funny, exciting, touching and intricate without being over-worked. EDIT: oh, and Venom was laughably bad.

Saw Aquaman. It's visually gorgeous, Momoa is charming and that Sicily action sequence is great, but overall this is a mess. Scuppered by the lead character being introduced in a previous film and yet still having a ton of origin stories, lore and Atlantean politics to get through, the narrative is all over the place. It's filled with tropey beats (in the wrong order) and characters and most of the action is either rote post-Kingsman punching or rote CG battles. Even the music can't decide what it wants to be, flitting between wailing guitar, orchestral and 80s electro. Amusing sidenote (spoiler for incredibly obvious reveal): Definitely better than Green Lantern, but I thiiink I'd still rather watch Chronicles Of Riddick again over re-watching this.

You'll all be pleased to know a new Larry game just came out last month

Managed to see Sorry To Bother You at the local indie cinema and was quite disappointed. It's a load of moderately interesting ideas thrown at a tired cliche of a plot, and it doesn't get going for at least the first hour - this really could have done with at least twenty minutes trimming off. As others have noted, it has touches of Idiocracy, Kaufman and Gondry about it, but the thing I was reminded most of was Gremlins 2 - that's the level of satirical sophistication it was playing at. Not necessarily a bad thing, but here the story drags too much to make up for it.

Official first trailer!

I watched some of these and enjoyed them but I know basically zero about the game so I don't think I fully appreciated what was going on!

Sweet, ta!

Do y'all have any particular recommendations for a good one of these to watch?

No way, I'm looking forward to the Twitch streams!

The sequel can go in this thread too. Outside of about ten minutes of legit good body swap comedy, this whole movie is overworked and empty. (And I actually don't think the original is that sugary; it has a feeling of real danger and mischief, and Williams' character is dealing with PTSD, racial guilt and father issues - but y'know, for kids.)

Shockingly, there seems to have not been a single discussion of Doctor Who on these forums. Well, I was at the in-laws' for a couple of days recently and took advantage of their tv licence to watch all of the Whittaker episodes so far. Spoilered not for plot but for those who might get upset reading the mainly negative opinions of someone who's never been a huge fan of the series but has seen a fair amount of New Who anyway: Any Whovians or casual fans here?

Ooh, exciting! Glad not all of the Thumbs Network casts are on hiatus! I look forward to listening to this next week.

I backed Broken Age and Psychonauts 2. The latter seems to be trotting along nicely (Simon: I don't think we're getting any extra vids, but that's fine by me - the BA backer community always voted overwhelmingly to share everything with the public) , and I was extremely pleased with the former. As mentioned, the documentary on its own was worth the money, along with a great community experience, and we got a new Tim Schafer adventure game as well! Yes it was pretty easy, but then so was Full Throttle; BA was gorgeous and full of Tim's usual excellent writing (even if the ending was a bit rougher than his previous high standard).

Ha ha, all gold!

MI2 is also very auteur-y! It came at the point where the idea for the franchise was to have a totally different directorial style for each entry, and has all of Woo's strengths and weaknesses on full display. After that, JJ Abrams delivered a slick modern feel that the franchise pretty much stuck with going forward.

I've added one of his vids to my watch later list, thanks! I'm always on the look out for film crit channels that don't a) revolve around hating on stuff, sunglasses) come with a load of memes and tired schtick, c) spend five minutes making one simple point over and over.

Yeah, I thought about it a little more after I posted and I think you're right. I guess when they said Thanks!