The worst Call of Duty games look like Verhoeven movies by comparison! Who feels anything in their heart when they hear “NATO”?? Why are the opening stakes rescuing a literal SERVER FARM from a construction site??? It’s like if someone tried not to step on any toes and ended up levitating. Magical!

11 Bit is a master of mid-budget: great premises, executed with top-notch polish, and just enough surprises to leave you wanting more

Anyway, it’s funny and weird, not quite as cutting as I hoped, but worthwhile, I think. It’s a shame it makes assholes feel validated, and while that is the movie’s fault, I don’t think that’s its intent.

Cross has asthma, which fuels his refusal to wear a mask. This might be true of some anti-maskers, but plenty refused out of pure ignorance and scorn. And without any such explorations of the left’s motivations, the movie could be seen to generate sympathy on those grounds.

There are plenty of other weaknesses. Aster’s willingness to cast homeless people as implacable horrors are meant to indict him and his characters, but just come off as thoughtless. And he arguably infuses his right-wing characters with a little too much pathos:

…is when it causes Michael to feel conflicted about his duties as a deputy. Now, the movie plays everything pretty straight for about 2 hours. It’s easy to see why people might arrive at the centrist reading. But the ending, incl. Brian’s rise to right-wing stardom, tells a different story.

In this world, whether it’s a Tarantino-style alternative history or a world imagined by a delusional, dying Sheriff Cross, privately-funded Antifa special forces exist, for the sole purpose of eliminating small-town Republican politicians. The most thought it (Cross) gives to BLM’s legit motives…

But I think that focus on police is pretty key to the movie: our perspective character is Sheriff Cross, he’s a cop. When he gets sick, the movie gets sick, and his delusions become ours. As a result, the only characters that get full sympathy are cops (Michael & the Pueblo PD)

Easy to see how that rubbed people the wrong way. It made me Feel Bad as a supposedly thoughtful white person. That was obviously intentional, but I don’t think it’s perfectly executed, nor is it a total failure. Also, the only characters that the film has full sympathy for are cops…

The main crux of it is the liberal BLM teens. We only really get private scenes with one of them (Brian), and they show us a boy whose only political motivation is chasing girls. Beyond that, the town’s BLM movement is fueled by ill-informed, self-righteous, queer-coded white kids. So!

All I’m saying is, having not played it yet, I worry that “Void Kong” does not have The Juice

I kind of get it: sometimes these games feel like frivolous time-wasters in ways that, say, Expedition 33 does not. But it’s also hard to ignore that the “friendslop” term wasn’t coined for Phasmophobia, but for games with as diverse art styles as Peak, Repo, and Lethal Company

Ironically, I’ve followed up Peak with a massive dose of Sea of Thieves, and the two really feel like cousins. This supposedly “forced new genre” has been kicking for almost a decade, and has only just now reached its Peak

I would posit horrorslop (low-rent FNAF ripoffs, made for Twitch-friendly jumpscares) as a much more pervasive blight on the Steam store. But I guess gamers get mad when too many bright colors appear.