Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don’t get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.
I’m also playing this for the first time after owning it for a while. Took me a while to really get into it - it’s the first high-production, AAA action game that I’ve played in a while, and it felt strangely linear and repetitive. The puzzles are so clearly tailored to your specific abilities they feel kind of silly against the otherwise immersive world. The rewards and upgrades are kind of trivial on normal difficulty; I’m still mostly spamming normal and sidekick attacks for every battle.
Eventually though I settled into the rhythm and I noticed that stuff less. The acting and scene choreography are outstanding - it feels like theater in a way that’s unique to my experience with games. And I’m enjoying it more for what it is. It’s just overall not landing as satisfyingly as the first one did, and I think that’s because indie games have done increasingly cool things since the 2018 game came out and I’ve been playing them more, and my tastes have just changed a lot.
Fucking yikes.
I’m not convinced there’s a conspiracy here. Seems entirely likely that Rotten Tomatoes has no contingency for the release of a movie so blatantly sycophantic and propagandistic that the only people spending money on tickets are those who are already bought into the fantasy.
This was exactly the way I thought of my spending habits for a long time. Then a few years ago, Netflix prohibited password sharing, a soft feature they had specifically encouraged in the past, with the explicit purpose of desperately generating additional revenue as other growth streams plateaued. When most users just kind of accepted it, the dam broke and all the other services followed suit.
That was the final straw for me, on top of the proliferation of dedicated per-studio services, price hikes, and pricing tiers that created needless feature lock-outs. As a consumer I get dicked around in every sector in which I’m forced to participate, but this is one sector where I have an option to withdraw from the dicking.
Same. His auteur sensibilities are a pretty perfect match for my taste. I am incredibly fond of all his output (with the exception of Caught Stealing, which I haven’t seen yet), including his most polarizing films - Noah and mother! Even the blemishes on those imperfect projects just make them more interesting.
I watched a minute or two of the first “episode” and it reeked of an artless studio hack misguidedly copying an early-aughts editing style that is as poorly executed as it as an unfit complement to the subject matter. And that’s beside the plastic sheen and evident soullessness that just comes with AI-generated video. This feels like an aging filmmaker experimenting with new technology because he’s more afraid of being left behind than he is able to understand the thing he’s being pressured to engage with.
The linked article is from California’s office of the attorney general related to an existing lawsuit. As a non-Californian, I am supremely disappointed that this is happening just at the state level, but credit should still go where its due. And if their legal action sets a precedent that makes it easier for other states (or dare I hope, at the federal level if and when we get strong antitrust regulators like we had under Biden), then all the better.