I will admit that 90% of my love of this film is the last fifteen minutes but I do adore Ryu mastering the instant transition and wakizashi-in-heels techniques and the rest of the movie is still good. Nana straightforwardly taking over a newly reinvigorated clan as the new boss at the end does not really make sense but it rules.

Absolutely fantastic. I wish I had know even less about it going in that I did.

A gorgeous little object that I am glad to have a physical copy of. A lot of care has gone into this from the already lovely “base” version. The colourised sprites, the rainbow gradient pages with their dithered backgrounds, the clay models. Just a perfect little guidebook for a game that does not exist.

Unbelievably charming idea done with the same love, care and humour as Samanthuel’s other little creature RPG projects and makes even the little peak into the implied story we get really touching.

Technically I watched a friend play this but I am going to count it. Honestly this was probably the better way to experience it because I don’t like the free roaming randomly generated structure as much as something more directed like Franken. Still an unbelievably charming and sweet little world to explore. I am also very taken with sproutbug in spite of it being one of the more basic creatures. I am a girl of simple tastes.

Extremely funny and charming game. Great sense of how to play off the RPG tropes for comedy in a loving way and some expertly deployed cursing. The Cerberus boss sprite is probably my favourite joke in the whole thing.

Sadly they can’t all be a The Golden Arm. This is not so bad that it’s good it’s just rather bad.

This story is the most entertaining of all the entire anthology. They absolutely put their best foot forward. It’s so fucking funny. The wife with no redeeming qualities who would rather die than just take the arm off, the husband destroying their entirely livelihood to give it to this completely unreasonable, self-obsessed woman, him hiding under his blanket from her and the fact that that actually seems to work because she only attacks him after he takes it off.

A lot to like and hate here. It is very hard to look at this and not read it in terms of Palestine and as much as I love that there is a trans woman writing for Doctor Who it’s not surprising that the woman who also wrote The Good Doctor (where the Doctor berates a slave uprising for being too violent) comes out with a story that has the ultimate resolution of a genocide being that a woman sings very beautifully about how sad that makes her and little else. The Doctor going absolute psycho and that being so quickly walked back with everyone being absolutely sycophantic to him afterwards is all the more disturbing for the fact that it doesn’t seem like the sycophancy was intentionally written as disturbing.

On the good side, well, it was fun when it wasn’t horrifying and Varada Sethu’s delivery of “IT’S RYLAN!” had me in stitches even though I did not have a clue who Rylan was (which my friend who I was watching it with found very endearing).

Mrs. Flood being the Rani is whatever. Pretty dull resolution to that. We’ll see where the stuff with Susan finally goes.

On a rewatch this is still a great episode but some of the less well developed parts of do stand out. “It’s in alphabetical order” is a very dull reveal for how much the question of why the sinister mister sloogs are not eating certain people gets repeatedly emphasised by the Doctor. It could at least have been in order of subscriber count or something so they were picking off people who wouldn’t be missed first. Homeworld being also wiped out is glossed over so quickly in the episode to perhaps stop you from considering that that means that all the poors and minorities were also wiped out because rich people were annoying on Instagram.

One thing I think about this episode is how so many previous Doctors and previous versions of this show would see a bunch of racist rich kids go off to get themselves killed in the wilderness and would not only have not realised they were racist in the first place but have wished them well and waffled on about how wonderful the human spirit is. It’s not hard to picture Tennant or Whittaker’s Doctors smiling and waving them off and talking about how humanity always keeps going and how wonderful their new colonial project will be.

Very fun movie. The original animation is extremely charming and the dub is hilarious. The metafictional jokes and obvious “censorship” are really fun to pick out and the acting is great with some absolutely wonderful, abrupt, line deliveries that had me in stitches. “Now get in the box!”

A beautiful film and I love how it ties together struggles of indigenous culture and minority language with that of queerness. I don’t love the obligatory scene of a hurt, queer child apologising to a shitty parent for taking measures to protect himself.

Wish they had leaned more into the farce of it early on and then further into the horror when Dorothy gets erased. Feels like the weight of that gets lost with Brandy just going numb and trying to force her way through ending the movie.

Happy Piccolo Day! To celebrate I watched the best Dragon Ball movie with some friends. Saw this for the first time last year and I was shocked by how good it was. I had never watched Super, the last Dragon Ball I had seen was Battle of the Gods and thought it was awful and thought that I had just outgrown the series, but this movie is everything good about Dragon Ball. It’s charming, funny and cool as hell.

Some highlights: Pan is really cute and the interplay Piccolo and her and the rest of Gohan’s family is great. Some people genuinely and reasonably believing a sinister conspiracy theory around Bulma, Capsule Corp. and all the aliens hanging around with her. Badman shirt cameo. Hedo being vaccinated against bullets. Piccolo having just forgotten that one of his powers is getting big and having to be reminded as well as him not even realising that he turned orange as as new super form and then not really caring about it and just naming it “Orange Piccolo.”

This is a fun one, in between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. We still have fight scenes where everyone isn’t just flying, Goku still using his staff and Piccolo still positioned as an antagonist who only has a temporary truce with the Goku. The Garlic Junior arc was my favourite in the show a kid so I have a fondness for him even if he’s not particularly interesting here.

I unfortunately had an inkling of the premise going in so didn’t get to experience the mystery, but the building tension of it was still fun and I love how it starts subtly and just becomes more clearly malicious as it goes on. The milk scene is great. Ending was fairly naff, though.

I think this is my favourite of the series so far. I think it does have a lot of problems—the story feels like it’s jumping around between things that don’t gel well with the more sci-fi-y elements clashing with the storytelling theme, the cast of the barbershop are not fleshed out at all other than Omo, Belinda suddenly being so at home on the TARDIS now that she is knowingly laughing along with the Doctor about hanging out with the gods and spouting technobabble.

But it is bursting with charm, throwing out a lot of great ideas and manages to be more than the sum of its parts. I like the Doctor setting down some roots on Earth (and not just in England) and then feeling betrayed that he is still seen as this outsider spaceman, the emphasis on storytelling and exploitation and commodification of it and how the African oral tradition doesn’t fit easily into that. Though it does feel a bit backwards then in the end that the engine is overloaded by the weight of the story of Doctor Who the television programme.

If Bojack Horseman does emotional whiplash this show just slams you into an emotional brick wall with no seatbelt.

Somehow I had convinced myself that the first series of this show was serious. That there was real mystery and drama. That it’s not till later in the show that everything starts going off the rails. But no, it was forever thus. Every character in this show is unhinged in their own unique way. I love Cheryl especially. She is a force of nature, utterly divorced from sense or reason.

Happy Piccolo Day! To celebrate I watched the closest thing to a Dragon Ball movie where King Piccolo is the bad guy with some friends. It’s the same as pretty much every other Dragon Ball Z movie. It’s fine.

Quite enjoyed this one. The dodgy politics were mild enough to leave just a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth rather than send me into a bloody rage like with Kerblam!.

There is a very abrupt gear-shift half way through, but I enjoyed both Ruby trying to deal with her trauma and the conspiracy theory grifter shithead angle. I think the way that Conrad will immediately shift back into denial of reality rather than learn a lesson is astute. The worldview of a conspiracy theorist is one that justifies a desired conclusion more than anything else. He is not going to drop that over a little thing like his arm being bitten off.

That said, this episode falls into the trap of countering anti-vaxxers by uncritically aligning with the monstrosity that is the pharmaceutical industry. UNIT clearly is a nepotistic military hierarchy that operates opaquely and above the law. Kate Stewart is portrayed as going a bit too far here, but in a way that we are meant to take some naughty satisfaction in. The episode says that UNIT is necessary, and thus above any serious reproach. It is the quiet, acceptable authoritarianism of that free-floating quote that gets attributed to various famous, dead men: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

Actually pretty fun! Venom and Eddie Brock’s relationship and banter is surprisingly a highlight of the movie.

Pretty much exactly what you’d expect from an episode of Black Mirror about subscription service platform decay, though it doesn’t do it poorly.

I wish I could rate this higher. The central idea is extremely good and for the first few episodes I was really enjoying the contrast between the sitcom and drama scenes and in particular what the multicamera perspective, sets and lighting obscures. The plaster on Allison’s hand that’s barely visible under the sitcom lights but stands out as soon as she’s away from Kevin, the mess in their bedroom stuffed up against the fourth wall that is invisible to the sitcom cameras.

But as soon as the third episode I thought that it was missing opportunities to do more with the central gimmick (I was surprised there wasn’t a big jump-cut involving that spit-roasted pig) and how it relates to Kevin’s abuse. There are still interesting things done with it throughout the show, but it feels like it’s drowned out by the escalations of the more crime drama plot that takes off and takes over.

The show, outside of the faux-levity of the sitcom, is also dour to the point of its own detriment. There is (dark) humour there and obviously people being miserable in their general situation is part of the premise but there is, for instance, so much tension in every scene with Patty and Tammy that it’s hard to understand why Tammy is sticking around at all. They never seem remotely comfortable around each other on screen.

It does pick up again towards the end—Kevin finally letting the mask slip is great—but the whole thing feels like it could have been a great miniseries that got padded too long.

It‘s so strange to watch Theroux calmly hold a conversation with people extolling such unfiltered, vile evil. All he has to do is let them talk and, of course, not push them back.

Fun take on the Columbo formula without just being a copycat. I enjoy how much of a smug prick Furuhata is in comparison. Cases can be a bit inconsistent, relying on some real logical leaps or assuming absurdly specific behaviour from people. It’s a good thing the killers always confesses at the ends of these types of shows because it would be difficult to build a case otherwise. I enjoy the stagier touches: Furuhata’s address to the audience as the lights go down before the final act and the credits running over a shot from a fixed, wide vantage as the murderers are taken away.

Watched immediately after the feature film. Fun little idea with a cute central joke. I prefer the dynamic between Lucy and Amy in this than the the feature film, but what works for a quick gag in a short is not the same as what works for an hour and a half-long rom-com.

I enjoy how immediately it gets to the point, not just with the goofy spy stuff but also with the open lesbianism. Only having a very vague idea of the plot going in I would have imagined it would follow some new trainee learning about D.E.B.S. in time with the audience and a drawn out series of innuendo and coming to terms with repressed feelings before a big lesbian reveal, but no. The movie swiftly establishes the setting and has characters who are unabashedly, openly and casually gay. And it’s just camp fun, sci-fi espionage on the level of Spy Kids with lesbians in stripper mock school uniforms. A shame that it has the supervillain going straight (well, in one sense of the word) rather than the cop going rogue, though.

Interesting counterpart to Project Eden, going back to the spy thriller well again but with a much more serious tone. I don’t have that much in the way of thoughts about it but it was a good close to the series.

Perhaps I just had had my fill of the show already but I felt this didn’t have the same energy and fun as the main TV series. The silliness does seem to have been toned down a little. Nanmo isn’t here and both the spaceship and 3WA headquarters have been toned down into something a bit more typically scifi and the plots seem to come down to straightforward shootouts a lot.

On the positive side Kei and Yuri seem to actually like each other more now, their jabs at each other more frequently feeling more like teasing than actual meanness and doesn’t devolve into them just shouting at each other. Having a couple more recurring characters in the 3WA is fun to have too.

I think I am holding Doctor Who to a higher standard for these ratings than I would for other shows. I am giving this one a higher rating to the last two but I have been a bit disappointed with how every episode has gone this series so far. I was pretty drawn in at the start but it lost me in the middle a bit.

It making itself a sequel to Midnight distracted me from the actual episode a bit and made me keep comparing it to that (and sets itself a really high bar to clear) and the scene immediately following that where half the squad gets chucked around the room just felt a bit silly compared the the really good building of tension and camera work just a few minutes prior.

It does regain its footing towards the end and though I could nitpick further I don’t think it does anything too bad, though I’d prefer it hadn’t tried to show a proper physical depiction of the thing at all, no matter how dark, distant and blurred. The suggestion of a flash of motion behind someone and the little shadow creeping over Aliss’ shoulder was more interesting.

Actually one last thing that was interesting and I hope was deliberate is how shitty everyone, even the Doctor, is about casually excluding Aliss, reflexively turning off their subtitles whenever they aren’t directly talking to her and the Doctor repeatedly forgetting to sign to her even when he is. But it does feel like a dropped thread and reminds me of how some people thought Belinda’s reaction to the Doctor treating her as a curiosity might be her seeing him is a similar light to Al after The Robot Revolution, which does not seem to have gone anywhere. Perhaps Davies will surprise us and have a callout of the Doctor’s instrumental treatment of people despite his outward performance of care and kindness later in the series.

Brutal. The first and third episode especially are incredible. I always adore the single-cut style and this is four episodes of it executed to perfection. The way it grounds you and and focuses you on the characters, on their reactions and emotions at all times. The choice to not always show you what people are seeing but on how it affecting and the phenomenal acting to sell that so perfectly. The use of the sounds of the rain in place of a soundtrack in the third episode was really great too. Absolutely enthralling.

Better than last week but still feels like a jumble of ideas that don’t come together very well.

In The Church of Ruby Road I really liked the goblins. I enjoyed Doctor Who just unselfconsciously embracing silly fantasy elements and I wish that Mr. Ring-a-Ding had that same air of playfulness to it. That he could have just been a weird cartoon man that operates on his own set of rules and motivations and not tied into this set of gods that are increasingly bogged down by their own set of signifiers and rules. It seemed like the show was expanding the boundaries of what it could do and be but it also seems scared to keep going. It has pulled back and made a new box for itself to sit in. The rules only get broke in a specific type of episode with a specific formula and that formula is having diminishing returns for me. Or I am just judging this series too early. We did also have 73 Yards last year as well so there is hopefully weirdness still to come unrelated to this pantheon. That said it does seem increasingly likely that Mrs. Flood is just going to be one of these gods as well, which I will be very disappointed in if it turns out to be true.

Other thoughts: I love Belinda in this episode and I am also disappointed that she seems to have fully gotten over her doubt and worries about the Doctor by the end of the episode. It seemed like there was going to be a more interesting dynamic there that seems to have been closed off now. The bit with the fans was sweet and only a little bit annoying. I enjoyed the subtle self-deprecating humour of Davies holding up Steven Moffat as the better writer, both in making everyone’s favourite episode Blink but also having Gatwa’s Doctor thinking that Boom is his best adventure so far. The Doctor and Belinda being turned into cartoons was disappointingly slight and I rolled my eyes at the Doctor supposedly being given depth by him repeating the last of the Time Lords title, something from two decades ago at this point that Chris Chibnall’s tenure on the show has reset us back to.

Didn’t have me bawling the way the first two books did but it did make me cry.

A lot of cute ideas here but it doesn’t really come together. The mid-century pulp sci-fi aesthetics, the idea of taking the star certificate seriously and Belinda herself are all really fun. The every ninth word idea is cute but only matters at all for two scenes and the incel comparison just comes out of nowhere. Al really needed more characterisation for the one scene he was in at the start for that to work. And another big deal about a character being played by the same actor as a previous one or even just another mystery around a companion in general is a bit tired at this point. Hopefully like Gatwa’s first series this will improve as it goes on.

Good film to watch the day a psychiatrist agreed to prescribe me ADHD medication. Very fun film. Love the cardboard sets and props. Some of the characters can be a bit annoying, I don’t like the film crew much and I think the documentary parts ever really work, but the movie is more than charming enough to look past that.

Fei has a red streak in her hair which basically makes her Shadow the Hedghog.

It’s so strange to come into the second series and immediately there is actually a plot! Characters learn new information! It is still mostly monsters of the week and it repeatedly pulls back when it looks like the story might advance in more significant ways, but it is less of a show for babies. I am getting into it the more I watch it. Partially is just layering more injokes with my partner as we watch it. Every time there’s a new hero transformation we shout “new toy!” at the television, we fistbump whenever the characters do. I also laugh every time at the face Hawk Moth makes during the transformation sequence he occasionally gets now.

I watched this with a friend who wanted to see it because the soundtrack was composed by her favourite musician. Confusing when it’s not being generic and a boring protagonist who is introduced to us in a dream where he is wearing a Luftwaffe uniform. Occasionally interrupted by in-universe ad breaks just to muddy the waters of what’s happening even more.

Very interesting tradeoff with having to hold off using your most direct means of self defence against hostile fish to capture higher value targets instead. It plays very well into the tension of having to try to scour the level quickly to reach the designated score within the time limit but with sloppiness resulting in added time penalties.

The avant-garde “unfinished” special effects were a bold artistic choice but not enough to save it.

Sadako and Kayako do end up in a Yuri situation with each other at the end if you think about it.

This novel consistently delivers on providing truly baffling adaptational choices. From a ghost story about Franz Ferdinand’s car, to daring the reader to find and visit its fictional locations, to Kayako keeping her diary updated after her death or her hatred being compared directly to 9/11 this book had me shouting utterly incredulously at its pages at least once a chapter.

I bought this from a German listing with no photos of the inside of the book. The cover was in English though so I took the risk and hoped it would be in English rather than in German. It was not. I ended up reading it using machine translations with my phone.

Interesting adaptation of the Ju-On: The Curse that eschews the nonlinear structure and ties the characters together more than the original; Mizuho is now the daughter of the realtors who sold the house to the Murakami and Kyoko is her aunt (and also looks very cool). It has a bit more gruesome violence than the movie was able to do with real actors. The gaps in the original film where the events of 4444444444 and In a Corner happen are filled in here with different, bloodier, ends to the characters. Kanna’s jaw getting ripped off, left to the viewer’s imagination in The Curse, here gets shown as Ma commanding stray cats to ram themselves down her throat until it gives way, which means that the Saeki family cat finally gets a kill of its own.

It also, despite the violence she is inflicting, shows Kayako as a more sorrowful characters, wanting to end people’s suffering and being anchored, seemingly unwillingly, to where she died, but still aware of what she’d doing.

Channelling the spirit of a 00s game reviewer: The scariest thing about this game is the controls!!!!!!!!!!!!

The tagline of “haunted house simulator” really does fit as this game has no ideas beyond walking through a series of corridors with the occasional jumpscare and that walking is so, so painful. I am a fan of gimmicky control systems and motion controls but this game feels like trudging through syrup at all times, inching towards the next inevitable jumpscare that will arbitrarily trigger the level to progress until Kayako finally puts you out of your misery.

This series, when it worked, was carried by the atmosphere carefully crafted by Takashi Shimizu’s careful direction. Without that and with the most bland Hollywood script imaginable—let’s invent a new family member for Kayako again!—there is no substance at all left.

While the Ju-On films do feature overlapping nonlinear vignettes this just feels like three different short movies in a trench coat. In the most boring and straightforward we have Amber Tamblyn as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s cheaper replacement sister uncovering new Lore that makes no difference to anything, in the school we have basically nothing of any substance, and finally in Chicago we have some decent but familiar scenes of families succumbing to the curse as it spreads. Also in the scene with the milk you can see someone holding a cloth at the bottom of the frame to catch any that falls.

I really didn’t need to watch this.

This short manages to achieve the ideal form of the Hollywood Grudge movies: Not a single Japanese person in sight 😌

Bringing in Kobayashi’s story from The Curse into The Grudge makes a lot of sense for the remake but I can’t say I’m fond of the rest of the changes. The plot is more linear now and much more focused on having a central protagonist in a way that makes everything unfolding much less interesting and everyone in Tokyo other than the Saeki family is a white American now. I understand that Hollywood thinks that audiences are terrified of subtitles but the degree to which almost everyone with a speaking role is made white is incredible.

Even though it’s still nonlinear this one feels a bit more focused and straightforward than the others, to start with at least. There are some sillier moments as they experiment with different ways Kayako can appear—these movies are good at building tension but never seem quite sure what to do that tension breaks and the ghost violence starts—but it does generally feel like this is trying to move the series forward when it has been stuck doing the same basic thing for three movies now. I also really enjoy how it plays with the nonlinear structure by having Chiharu herself also experiencing events out of order, building on Izumi and Toyama’s shared visions of each other in the previous movie.

The ending is silly but it at least is doing something different and it would have been interesting to see what the series could have done with that if it had continued.

Does a better job of recapturing the creeping dread of the original than The Curse 2 did and also executes on the concept of Kayako forcing her victims to relive her trauma and become like her much better. The strange beauty of Toyama seeing a vision of his daughter, and her of her father, across time is also and how it is a cursed blessing that leads to their deaths is also wonderful. I don’t think having a higher budget than its predecessors did the film much favours though, with the special effects being distracting and looking much worse than the simple makeup the ghosts have in most scenes.

This gets off to a bad start, with the start of the movie just being the end of the first one. Starting with a climax the film then has to try to escalate in some way from the first one and depicts the curse spreading so quickly that subsequent movies have to ignore it in order to work at all.

While there’s not all that much to the story in the end the slow buildup of tension across the overlapping vignettes is excellent and climaxes with something suitably horrific. Like many horror series the first (non-short) film really nails what its going for in a way that its sequels never manage.

I prefer this one a little bit to In a Corner if only for the weirdness of the cat noises thing, which the Ju-On series just decided to run with forever afterwards. Like In a Corner it’s undercut a bit by a funny final shot.

A prototype for Ju-On that doesn’t really land for me. Kind of highlights how thin the series is in general and how much it relies on building that atmosphere that this short doesn’t have time to build up or execute well. There is also something strangely comical about the fade to black at the end as Hisayo grips her obviously inadequate weapon. Also why are they wearing their school uniforms just to call in to check on the rabbits when they’re on summer holidays.

I love the contrast between the ridiculous, camp, doll house of the camp and the grungy, more realistic gay bar. The attempts at forced heterosexuality are silly, wrong and off-putting when they are not just being accidentally queer.

There are parts of this that almost work as a budget, janky version of Sonic Rush. The boost works, the art is rather nice and the renditions of Unleashed level music are surprisingly good. But then there are no sound effects and the music cuts out after a few seconds (I don’t know if that’s an emulation problem or if the game is just like that) and you run into the brick wall that is the utter shambles of the jump physics and collision detection that makes platforming in this game barely manageable. I guess it’s impressive that this ran on mobile phones at all but it constantly feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.

It is, mercifully, short. Only four of the locations from Sonic Unleashed are here and all the hub worlds and everything else extraneous is gone. Even the plot is barely there. There are some brief bits of dialogue at the start of levels between Sonic and Chip that are lines taken from the main gain, divorced from their original context. Other than that there all there is is some interstitial titles between levels that were clearly written by someone who was not given much if any guidance on what the story in the game is meant to be. It refers to Sonic in werehog form as just “Werehog” as if it was a name and talks about Sonic going to “Athens, Greece” instead of Apotos (which is actually based on Mykonos) even though the title cards for levels actually do use the made up names for these places, correctly calling it Apotos. This itself is weird because that’s not the name for the level in the console versions of the game, that’s the name of the hub area. The level is actually meant to be called Windmill Isle! The ending screen also just goes on a weird ramble that “We cannot live without the night, we all must sleep, we all must rest. Darkness is a part of our world, just as much as light.” Sure, great!

One last funny note is that after you beat each boss you get a Chaos Emerald. You might think that this means you are going to get all seven before you fight the final boss and there will be a Super Sonic section, but when you get to the final boss you only have five of them and then after defeating it the game just gives you two more and then ends.

It’s always interesting to see different takes on the same core idea. I knew when Unleashed Recompiled was released that I would be playing this alongside that fancy new PC port of the XBox 360 version. This Wii version takes the core concepts of the game and executes them in very different ways and it’s a lot better than I expected!

Being the budget version of the game a lot of fat is trimmed. Hub areas in each country are replaced with a more visual novel-style menu interface, using static renders of locations and characters from the PS360 version for visuals. This saves some time compared to running around and talking to people in the other version but is still tedious and fiddly and you do have to talk to people a lot more to progress. There is one part in particular after getting to Spagonia and Mazuri where you keeping having to go back and forth talking to different characters and watching cutscenes (FMVs that also use the in-engine cutscenes from the PS360 version as pre-rendered assets) for so long that I was begging the game to just let me play a level.

But when I actually got to play the levels they are quite fun! I actually prefer the werehog in this game to the PS360 version. There are motions controls if you would like, and it is fairly charming to do left and right hooks to attack or swing your arms rapidly to climb, but they are a bit much to play the whole game with, especially when there there is also fairly involved movement and platforming on top of it, but the game offers full support for the Gamecube or classic controller too. Even on the more standard control scheme the left and right punch are still bound to separate buttons. This is probably a holdover from the motion controls but I honestly enjoy it. It means you have to alternate left and right shoulder buttons to do combos making it just that little bit more engaging than just mashing attack repeatedly. Enemies also mercifully die much faster in this version.

I also quite like the werehog’s general movement. There is a real feel of weight and momentum in the way you skid while turning when running (even if having to double tap a direction to run is fiddly) and I also like you hold X to grab things rather than just tapping it. It gives you that little feeling that you’re gripping onto it yourself.

The night stages are also divided up into sets of three smaller acts rather than one big level. This puts them in more manageable chunks and means you lose less from a game over (which are a bit more likely in this version, more on the lives system later). Each act also takes place is a pretty distinct area. In Dragon Road (set in Chun-nan, based on China) the first area takes place in an area with lots of shrines and pagodas, similar to the PS360 version of the stage, but the two subsequent acts have you ascending a waterfall and then running across the Great Wall.

For the daytime stages the motion controls stop being a fun gimmick and are really just a hindrance, but the control scheme for more standard controls work just fine. The day stages are an interesting and very different take on the boost gameplay. How that should work was not set in stone yet and it feels like a real road not taken for how the series could have worked. Boost being discrete bursts of speed rather than a meter you drain continuously was strange to me at first but works pretty well. You really have to think much more about timing when to boost because you are committing to it and it can send you off a cliff that you can’t stop running towards. That along with the system where you are rewarded with boost for action chains and drifting feels like the game really rewards constant activity and hitting everything in the level just right. Rings upgrading your boost gauge with extra charges also gives more incentive not to just collect rings but hold on to them which later games don’t really do. It’s really rhythmic and intense in a different way to the boost formula I’m more familiar with. I am a bit tired of these games at the moment but I’ve definitely tempted to come back and practise the daytime levels more and get to grips with what a perfectly executed level feels like in this game.

I did think the game was a bit unforgiving with lives, only giving you three attempts at a level before a game over with no way to collect more, but what I had missed is that extra lives are actually a permanent upgrade in this game that you have to get elsewhere, but once you get an extra life you have that extra life for every subsequent level that you play. This is what the sun and moon medals are for in this game; they don’t gate progress like in the PS360 version. They also aren’t found through exploring, not directly at least. They are gotten through getting good performance in levels. For daytime levels this does just mean going as quickly as possible and beating certain par times. For the nighttime levels though there are three separate criteria for earning them for each level: You get one for beating the level under a certain time, one for getting enough “force” (experience points, basically) which can be found in high amounts throughout capsules hidden in little nooks and side areas—thus making those medals your reward for exploration—and one for getting enough rings, which just means being careful to hoover them up as you progress normally. This gives you some leeway in how to play levels if you still want to get some sun medals without worrying about getting them all.

What the sun and moon levels gate in this version is side areas in temples with extra puzzles. These puzzles require you to change back and forth between hedgehog and werehog and use their different movesets to peal back the layers of the puzzle in a way that you never do in the other versions of the game. And it is optional, though one might struggle in the last few levels without the extra lives. I certainly did before I realised that I had missed this entire system.

The final boss is also better in this version I think. Certainly the Punch-Out section is more fun than the equivalent part from the PS360 version. The Super Sonic part is a bit dull but certainly a lot less janky than those parts often are in this series.

Like its alternative version this is not without major flaws but I was surprised by how much more I want to go back to and fully get to grips with this version, this different angle on the series.

It’s interesting playing this after Shadow Generations; going back to the first boost game after the most recent one. They landed on a winning formula but there has been some clear and needed refinement over the years. The boost, homing attack and air dash all being the same button is a less than ideal and it lacks a good way to half your momentum quickly, the stomp transitioning into a slide when you’re moving quickly rather than stopping you dead line in later games. But it’s at its core familiar and fun territory for the day stages. Very familiar, actually, as I’ve played all of these levels before in Sonic Generations through mods and only now am experiencing them in their original context. It’s an interesting! There are definitely some gaps in the version presented by the Unleashed Project mod where the toolkit available to Sonic Generations modders could not replicate the original gameplay. On the other hand the original versions have fiddly and surprisingly unforgiving quick time events, so there are trade-offs whichever way one plays these levels.

For the night stages Sonic the Werehog is fairly fun. To begin with anyway. As the game wears on the combat increasingly overstays its welcome and while the platforming challenges can offer a breather they are generally not very interesting. Thankfully Unleashed Recompiled includes an option to turn off the battle music which helps with one of the more irritating aspects of the night levels. As a final nitpick I found the fact that all these Eggman’s robots and Dark Gaia monsters just hang out together and apparently work together in the night stages very odd. It feels like there should be a stronger dichotomy between the two types of enemies or even having them fight each other. Watching monster infighting is always fun!

Levels of both types can be pretty mean with bottomless pits and the like but the developers seemed to have at least noticed this and often put extra lives shortly after checkpoints before difficult sections.

Outside of the core gameplay the game does leave a lot to be desired. The world tour was a cute idea but the execution is tedious and a bit racist. It’s hard to ignore how western countries get towns and cities with levels that have you running through streets with human inhabitants, while elsewhere has small villages that you quickly leave to run through empty ruins (which you are also smashing up a fair bit), any significant construction or urban civilisation in these places being relegated to ancient history. When you arrive in Mazuri, based off Mali and other parts of Africa, you find yourself in a mudhut village devoid of any modern technology other than Eggman’s invading robots and one of the first people there you can speak to says something to the effect of “You’re looking for a professor. What’s that? Sounds tasty!” The one blessing is that when people are voiced they all just have American accents rather than any attempts to imitate different nationalities.

Even aside from all that going around and talking to people in general is a pain. Hub areas are littered with people but Sonic moves so sluggishly in them and no one ever has anything interesting to say, but there are times when you have to go around and mash buttons to advance their dialogue to the end in order to progress. That or go back to Professor Pickle’s lab fifty times only for him to tell you to go back to where you just were. It was only very late in the game that I realised that sometimes NPCs will give you challenge missions so there is actually reason to talk to them beyond reading them say inane crap. The fact that I had stopped talking to them whenever I didn’t have to meant I had probably missed a lot of those and did not help with my medal deficit.

You have to collect sun and moon medals to unlock stages and progress in the game. These are found scattered around both hub areas and levels and as long as you keep an eye out for them and make sure to collect them you can keep ahead of requirements for most of the game. I knew this going in and tried to be diligent but I still ended up hitting a brick wall on getting to Adabat (based on Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia) I had to go grind for sun medals for while before I could continue, which was tiresome and not helped by the fact that you can’t find medals or other collectables if you do the time trial or other challenge versions of levels, which at least might have let you do the grind with some more variety.

The plot is fairly insubstantial and dotted with comic relief characters who fail to ever be funny. Chip is Scrappy-Doo with pixie wings and proto-Orbot is even more annoying, ergo every cutscene with him in it is a pain to listen to, ergo I was annoyed every time I saw him, ergo I wish he wasn’t in this game.

Returning to the gameplay, the final level having you swap between both gameplay styles might have been cute if it was doing anything interesting with that, but it really is just day section, night section, day section repeatedly with one point where you can take a shortcut to stay in a day section for longer. I might have been tempted to replay the day parts if there was a way to do only them as it seems to have an interesting degree of branching paths that give it a feeling of semi-openness not seen in the rest of the game, but I do not want to go through the werehog sections of it again.

The final boss is… not the worst for a Sonic game. It’s passable. Like a lot of other things there’s some interesting ideas there that are lacking in execution.

For all its flaws this game did lay down a very solid foundation for the series going forward. Most of what is good about it was refined through future games and the worst parts of it were left by the wayside.

The show did a lot of different tones and pastiches, and for a bigger budget movie the choice to go for a cyberpunk James Bond with some Geiger influences was a solid one. It does feel like the show turned up to eleven. I laughed out loud at the Wattsman theme song but I think it does overdo the 80s pop segments a bit and it indulges in some tired anime sex comedy that the show managed to avoid most of the time.

The core concept of hyper-competent mercenaries with the personalities of teenagers is fun and works quite well when it doesn’t veer too much into them calling each other too fat to attract a man. Episodes vary a lot in tone and concept with some clear winners and losers but it’s never boring and usually not as misogynistic as it might look on first glance.

A hateful portrayal of the mental illness deformity that is pretty par for course as horror movies go. That aside, a fun time through a serious of baffling choices. This movie has both a monkey butler and completely out of place Iron Maiden tracks on top of its serial killer plot and a sleepwalking protagonist who can talk to insects.

If there is a utterly dogshit movie in the movie night poll it is what everyone will vote for. Everyone knows that this film is bad but it is something to behold how completely the personality of Dragon Ball is ripped out of this movie to replace with a deluge of Hollywood clichés.

I have never been fat enough to warrant comment from anyone outside of doctors and family but I do struggle a lot with self-image around my weight. I don’t have the same experiences as the author but the stories she relates throughout this book are nothing short of appalling. The casual disregard people can have for the humanity or autonomy of fat people is shocking and the books demands to be heard and treated as a person are important.

I do think it’s not a fantastic book, though. It’s fairly repetitive and could do with more structure to it and I would have appreciated diving into a bit more detail of the studies citied throughout the book, but this is not an academic literature review and to its credit it does provide citations to go look yourself. That I have not done so is perhaps hypocritical of me but I do not have the spoons for that right now.

I think that the author does have blind spots and makes some sometimes galling statements around her perception of how the world treats other people. One that stuck in my mind was a comment about how common refrains about queer people preying on children being a thing of the past. In 2020 it should have been clear to anyone just reading news headlines that this was wishful thinking.

The books is also very American, frequently referencing the particulars and policies as U.S. institutions and companies as well as popular culture. That’s not really a mark against it, the author is American and she is writing about her own life (and I at least am passingly familiar with these things through American culture hegemony), but it did make me feel that much more separated from the perspective of the book.

While there are some noticeable differences between this film’s take on the characters and that of the show it’s not different enough to be particularly interesting and just feels like a thirty minute episode padded out to a full hour.

I watched this because I had seen a clip of the Street Fighter scene and I had no idea how long it was going to take for that to actually arrive. A lot of the silliness is quite fun but I think its attempts to translate cartoon physical gags into live action fall flat most of the time and it has a lot of humour based around the protagonist just being a lech, which I always hate.

I decided to watch this after seeing some clips of Cynthia Khan looking incredible while kicking people’s arses and this movie absolutely delivers on getting to see more of Cynthia Khan looking incredible while kicking people’s arses and with such frequency and frenetic forward momentum that it is kind of tiring to watch. Often quite funny as well and I always appreciate the United States government being the bad guy in a movie.

Every scene and subplot feels very disconnected from each other, each location and set of costumes feel like it came from a different production from the one before, and most of them not really coming across as fully formed. It would have taken a much larger budget to make it properly work but it also would be a lot less charming and the end result is just so much fun.

Some of that is just in the script, though. There is a pretty simple main plot and a lot of the runtime is spent throwing extra obstacles at Johnny that were not part of the original short story, which don’t tend to overlap with each other much. In the climax every antagonist lines to be neatly dealt with one by one.

I watched a fan edit which like many such edits cuts in a lot of deleted scenes and extra footage from other versions of the movie at much worse quality that mostly fail to add much of anything other than padding the runtime but does include Ice-T making sure we know that the dolphin is addicted to heroin and also has the least-transphobic joke of any Hollywood movie from 1995 and it’s very important to me to keep those bits in.

Also shoutout to my friend Tigris, who on seeing Takeshi credited in the opening titles joked that Takeshi from Takeshi’s Castle was in the movie, not knowing who Beat Takeshi was and not realising that she was actually correct.

Much is said about the choice of elaborate, comic book-inspired transitions but what made me scream at my television was the soundtrack blaring Middle Eastern-themed music every single time we get a shot of the Utah desert.

I quite enjoyed the occasional comic relief of Herbie and Joseph discussing the perfect murder and the general sitcom vibes of the family completely oblivious to and disconnected to what’s going on with the Charlies. The resolution did seem a is a bit sudden.

The first series of this show felt so deliberately constructed, with a specific tension hanging over the whole thing with occasional bursts of extreme violence with specific purpose. It no longer seems like it knows what its doing, throwing mark between suddenly contrived moral choices while casually painting everything red with guts at every turn. It seemed like it has some point to say about superhero stories before and now it is just throwing in random teasing of future threats and multiverse doppleganger shite that feels just like Marvel movies with more gore where everything ends up coming down to who can punch biggest or do a fancy laser blast. It’s very glaring with Eve, whose abilities are almost limitless in what she can do but all the show can conceive of her doing is being Green Lantern but pink and making big hammers out of… light? What material is she even making this stuff out of? Her power is meant to be rearranging matter. Why is everything she does just energy blasts or force fields? Light it not made of atoms.

I think this is not necessarily great but I do love that the show about the possessed evil doll has its third series declaring that the White House is so soaked in blood that the only way forward for it is to be burnt to the ground and when the mythical good non-partisan independent president gets killed the C.I.A. is positively gleeful about stage managing getting someone more amenable to them back into the office.

I was not really expecting the overarching plotlines to go anywhere, this show has a habit of forgetting anything ongoing at the drop of a hat, but that went even less anywhere than I ever could have expected. It felt like it was spinning its wheels for a while and didn’t know what to really do with anything and it certainly proved that feeling correct. It’s still fun up until the end with Michael Emerson continuing to be a highlight throughout.

A gorgeous film and (a point I am stealing from a friend) one that finds beauty in things that are normally considered disgusting: Fungus and insects. It makes those the centre of its environmentalism, not just giving us the usual imagery of flowers, rainforests and charismatic megafauna.

An interesting book that I read for normal reasons.

Surprising that this had an option for your shout of “no!” to be in Irish, and not just because it’s a minority language in a small country. There isn’t actually a direct word for no in Irish, so they went with «ní dhéanfaidh mé é», “I will not do it”. This does highlight how the word no is used in a bunch of different contexts in the game. It is often used to refuse a task, which this translation makes sense for, but it is also used to answer questions and other contexts where «ní dhéanfaidh mé é» doesn’t really make sense, and I wonder do any of the nos offered for other language don’t always make sense in context in the game.

Though honestly even shouting “no” in English sometimes felt like it didn’t really fit as a response. I was often waiting for dialogue to get to a point where shouting no fit in naturally, but it quickly becomes apparent that there is no point in doing this. Really this is just a game with a button to advance dialogue that also plays a sound effect and it does shockingly little with the idea.

Every once in a while you will be stopped to do a tutorial on how to do a different style of no, which sets up the expectation that these matter in some way but they do not; they are purely for a little bit of extra self-expression. That might have been a cute little bit of player controlled flair but the fact that they keep stopping everything to give me tutorials on something utterly pointless soured me on them. The control scheme for them also seems needless complicated. Why have them as different modes you have to toggle between with the d-pad? Why not just have them on the four different face buttons? None of the other face buttons do anything anyway so you could have just let them free for that. There is a shocking amount of tutorials to sit through in this game that has absolutely no mechanical depth. Maybe that was intended to be a joke in and of itself? Well it falls about as flat as most of the humour in the game, then.

The one little bit of mechanical choice is the decision to not shout no sometimes, which lets you progress some little mini scenes. These are cute but also they then run out of ideas for what to do with them and repeat the same staring contest joke five times.

Okay I’ve been enough of a grump. This is a short game with a cute idea and I do really like the Mega Man Legends-esque aesthetic and really liked the character creator. It’s okay.

What voice I hear when I read dialogue in these comics varies a lot. When I read the mainline Sonic comics I usually hear Rodger Craig Smith’s voice in my head as the hedgehog, but if it’s something where he’s a bit more immature it’s often Bryan Drummond. For Seasons of Chaos it’s Martin Burke from the O.V.A. with a matching Lainie Frasier Tails, but when I turn the page over to Sonic Learns to Drive he’s Jaleel White now. Sonic encompasses a bunch of different tones and styles and this book is a nice collection of some of the lighter stories with the younger versions of the cast.

Seasons of Chaos itself feels like it delivers on the promises of the Mega Drive miniseries that got cut short by the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic’s cancellation with an expanded, post-Sonic Mania cast who are also captured so perfectly in Aaron Hammerstrom and Reggie Graham’s art.

Sonic Learns to Drive is goofy fun that feels like it is hitting every single obvious joke to make but it lands them well.

Dr. Eggman’s Birthday and Amy’s New Hobby are two cute stories to end it out on, particularly the latter with its celebration of making your own little comics, which feels particularly meaningful given how much of the staff of the comics came from fan communities in the first place, and stands in stark contrast to how Sonic Boom and that era of Sonic media handled the idea of fan fiction with disdainful self-mockery.

I got this on a whim as part of a three for two offer, being a fan of Doctor Who since the 2005 series but only having seen bits and pieces of the older show and not much in the way of expanded universe material. I enjoyed it. The title story is by far the most substantial, trying to be a condemnation of the misogyny of a lot of sci fi adventure fiction but making the female cast suffer by way of demonstration. Emblematic of the approach is when Ace is told to put on a gold (presumably; the comic is in black and white) bikini, to which her response is to kick a guard square in the chest, steal his sword, and escape, only to quickly fall back into peril and be forced into the slave attire anyway. Much worse things happen to women in the story from there.

The art is impressive enough at times but often falls into uncanny and offputting in ways that extremely realistic styles do. It’s feels like making a comic out of stills taken from the show paused at unfortunate moments mid sentence that make the characters look as bad as possible. Included in this version are some redone pages that might be argued to look better than the originals in isolation, but in practise massively contrast with what’s either side of them in a terribly jarring manner. In the originals you have strict black and white with clear lines and contrast with the redrawn ones done entirely in digital brushes with no sharp lines and a million shades of grey. The contrasting styles could, maybe, have been used to dilettante the reality of Earth with the imaginary construction of the titular empire but that is not how they are used at all. In fact when I saw how the soldiers in fatigues looked in the painted pages I thought it made them look like plastic figurines, which I thought might tie into how Ace describes the empire of stinking of polystyrene cement, but those were the real UNIT troops, not part of Alex’s mindscape.

The second largest part of the book is The Grief which is a fairly middling riff on Aliens in which the Doctor guilt trips a guy into doing a big heroic sacrifice and then leaves him to die, followed by him in The Raven picking up a samurai to bring to the future so that he can murder a bunch of gangsters. I know these stories are trying to be part of an era of constructing the Doctor as a darker, more ambiguous, schemer but it just comes across as petty and mean.

Memorial tries to put this scheming to a better, more touching use, but the backstory being a highly advanced purely good lovely alien species being wiped out by another purely evil alien species seems very unimaginative, especially coming just off The Grief which had the same thing. Cat Litter is kind of fun with the chutes and ladders spread but I felt like I was missing some context reading it, which the commentary at the back of the volume confirmed and I have nothing much to say about Conflict of Interests or Living in the Past.

The story is straightforward but effecting and it is brought to life wonderfully in the art, especially Nathalie Fourdraine’s colouring and it’s a masterpiece in the use of light and darkness and it’s just lovely to revisit in in paper. And there’s just so many little details: The boarders changing based on the lighting throughout the comic, getting darker as they venture into the depths of the Death Egg and glitching out in time with Mecha Sonic.

There’s lots of great little moments throughout. I love when it briefly turned into Aliens everything turns green. And Mecha Sonic is just so cool.

I do think Sonic’s injured leg is something that he seems to just get over far too easily in the climax and really nitpicking things a small detail I noticed on reread: Sonic consistently walks putting his weight on his injured leg. I guess this is to make it more visible and prominent, and maybe easier to draw, but once I noticed it bothered me for the rest of the book.

An extremely engaging and sometimes moving history of the Russian revolutions of 1917, woven into a story, almost a novel, while staying out of the realm of fiction.

I am not normally one for romance stories and I rolled my eyes a bit at the early flirtations, but this story got its teeth into me. A beautiful story about love and how the people you love affect you, infect you, change you and become part of you.

The animation in this film in stunning and I love how it wears its artifice on its sleeve. The visible rough lines, the geometricity and lack of perspective on the backgrounds, Cartoon Saloon’s art looks like drawings come to life in a way that most animation doesn’t. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

I need to stop watching bad movies just for the bit. There is shockingly little dog playing basketball in the movie about the dog playing basketball.

Despite the manic pixie dream girl of it all and dark turns of this I couldn’t help but be charmed by it. Bae Doona’s physical acting is great and I loved watching her performance evolve through the film.

The film can’t really help replicating the ideas its critiquing with glamourising the sexualisation of young women and marking ageing as something monstrous—despite the utter lack of any subtlety I could see, à la Fight Club, people coming out of this just thinking that Sue is hot and being old sucks—but it goes so damn hard with what it does that I cannot just get swept up in it.

I am only still watching this out of sunk cost at this point. This show has never come together very well I think. The tone can be all over the place and its humour consistently feels like all the worst jokes in Legend of Aang while struggling with the more serious parts.

Episode often feel like they are just spinning their wheels to wait to for the finales where things can actually happen while everyone gets delayed with a new fetch quest of grand importance and little consequence.

It does come together a bit more towards the end when everything starts to get fully serious but its still jarring in with how violent it pivots to the point where you the funny comic relief animal is decapitating things.

Cute little action story with lovely art. Looking forward to seeing where it goes. Also knows how to seed in stuff about the world without resorting to too much lore dumping.

It may be that I was just in a bad mood watching this but I could not find much enjoyment in it and it just went on and on. Perhaps the theatrical cut rather than the extended cut might have tried my patience less, but just two and a half hours of it rather than nearly three would still have felt far too much. Going back over everything after the twists felt like it just dragged on far more than was needed for showing new angles on what was happening.

The sexual aspects of mostly felt very sleazy, especially when going over the horrific grooming aspect of it, and not in a way that felt like it was trying to be deliberately offputting. Though I think it has really helped to confirm to myself that I am pretty asexual these days.

What the fuck is this movie’s problem with women?

Strange to read at the same time as A Closed and Common Orbit. It takes a few notes from towards the end of A Closed and Common Orbit and builds a smaller, neater narrative to lead up to specifically them. On its own it might have felt more interesting, coming off the back of the larger book it ended up feeling a little empty. And the fantasy of Panga as the world that successfully pulled back from collapse didn’t feel hopeful to me, it just made me feel bitter about the world. A miracle happened and it made everyone realise that rampant, endless, consumption and destruction was bad. How convenient.

Sometimes you commit to a bit too much and you end up watching two dozen episodes of a show for babies with your partner. It has mostly been enjoyable and I am told that this does get more complex and actually has plot development as it goes on, and there was a whiff of that towards the end of the first series, but out of twenty-six episodes only maybe five of them had anything going on more than the basic villain-of-the-week plot.

I thought that the overarching plots had stalled a bit and then a group of children doxxed the main villain and publicly accused him of being a paedophile in a kids’ browser game. Incredible television.

Though them trying to do is-it-real-or-not with the demonic visions is really wearing thin at this point. If they aren’t then there must be something very worrying in the New York water supply considering that every major character has been seeing demons regularly at this point.

I picked this up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop that I have a gift voucher for. I’ve watched the show before and enjoyed it so what I’m mostly interested in here is how it works as a comic in comparison to that.

And I do think there’s a lot here that works better on page. Something I’ve never liked in anime is quick cutaways in the middle of dialogue for asides or inner monologue. I think these work better in a comic panel where it’s just a little bit of extra annotation on the page but is almost universally awkward in a show where it’s cut into the middle of dialogue and messes with the flow of conversation. Dungeon Meshi isn’t the worst offender but it’s still not great.

The diagrams that pop up when people are going on a bit of a monologue also work a lot better when you can take time to sit on them, and especially the panels where the meals are shown off after cooking. The extra details of listing out the ingredients and nutritional information really adds to it (and as for the show’s version of that, I am a hater when it comes to overly shiny anime food, shit looks like it’s made of plastic half the time).

That said, the actual cooking sequences do benefit from getting to be animated. Those little montages of methodical preparation are satisfying. The actors in the show are also really good. I am fully just hearing the actors from the show in my head as I read. Except Falin. I never liked her voice. Sorry. (I watched it in English, mostly).

Then there are some issues I take with how they’ve lettered this in English. They have used a comic font with a seriffed I on the uppercase and a sans serif I on the lowercase. This is a standard way of encoding a comic font but the serif I is only meant to be used for the pronoun I and acronyms but they have clearly just typeset it by typing in the sentences normally, so any sentence that starts with I has it seriffed when it shouldn’t be. They also use a different font for asides which doesn’t have a seriffed I.

And then the onomatopoeias are awkward. It seems like some of them have been redrawn but most of them they have just scribbled in a transliteration followed by an attempt at an English approximation in brackets under it. Maybe that’s the standard way to do it?—I don’t read much manga—and I don’t know what would be the ideal approach would be but this way strikes me an awkward middle-ground that clutters the page and slows down my reading.

I think I will just wait for the show to come out and watch it as it does rather than continue reading this, though.

I was sobbing in public multiple times reading this in a way I haven’t since reading Earthsea. I love Sidra and Pepper so much. I see a lot of myself and people who I love in them.

Rachel and Aiden trying to flee to suburbia and hide from the consequences of their actions by trying to be a Normal Family and put on brave faces for each other is a strong start. Things like Aiden’s photography hobby seeming innocent until you realise that it’s a way to check people’s faces for signs of the curse or Rachel’s severe insecurity at not being the archetypical mother figure as a way to make her son feel safe.

But they can’t keep pretending they’ve done nothing wrong when the consequences of the curse they’ve spread start to reach their safe haven.

But as the plot goes on it’s just all a bit... whatever. Samara’s new motivation seems at odds with the first film while her new backstory feels like a retread of it but with a bonus Catholicism. The idea of Rachel not fitting the typical image of motherhood is not resolved by her breaking away from that but just by fulfilling it in a different way by being a big, boring mamma bear hero.

Genuinely my one my favourite films in the series, certainly my favourite of the American ones. It has a simple premise but manages to squeeze a good bit out of it in its short runtime.

I really enjoy it imagining social consequences of the tape spreading which is something that most sequels in this series lack. The way it becomes this underground subculture onto itself, these kids trying to understand what they are experiencing but not having a clue how to investigate or interrogate it, sharing stories and recording videos of themselves, how how nasty that turns.

This was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously. Despite the medieval fantasy facelift the game feels immediately familiar and charming but with a lot of thoughtful tweaks and changes to systems to make them fresh and more engaging.

I am very fond of the critical hit system making unit placement and countering much more thoughtful than a simple rock paper scissors approach of damage types and weaknesses.

I also quite like them sticking to the idea of making the different commander units representative of the different infantry types in the game to the point of having a dog commander.

The problem, though, is that this was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously and as part of that they tried to actually make it balanced! I don’t want balance, I want fun little weirdos with ridiculous abilities bouncing off of each other!

Every army is the same other than their commander, without even any passive buffs. Where is the guy who gets bonuses for roads? The guy whose artillery sucks shit but gets super buffed spearmen or something? I understand that they wanted to create a viable multiplayer game but I am just here for the story mode.

I mentioned that the commanders are based off the different types of infantry but even then they all have the exact same stats and only differ in their charge-up ability. The dog doesn’t behave like a dog unit, the vampire doesn’t behave like a vampire unit, they are all just super-footsoldiers. It’s a real shame.

And of course the other problem with this being made by Advance Wars sickos is that the difficulty is skewed pretty highly. I don’t think it’s massively unreasonable but it was harder than I expected and I certainly didn’t want to replay everything on hard to grind out stars, which you need to do to unlock the completely unreasonably gated final level. I ended up just downloading a completed save file to play it and honestly it wasn’t even that difficult.

I am going to be a curmudgeon. The show is cute but there isn’t really enough to hold my interest. I think it works well as something to put on for a group watch while chatting but not that much else. Also I know that this is somewhat necessary just to create a reality show in the first place but I find the degree to which the narrator is imposing narratives on the children offputting, especially how quickly it jumps at the opportunity to frame everything in terms of gender roles.

This show is silly trash and I love it. They decided they needed a counterpart for the evil psychopathic psychologist and added a good psychopathic nun. Foirfe.

I think this was good but it seemed like it was smoothing out almost all of the edges from the original book in lots of different ways and also I took an edible that was far too strong and ended up in mind prison ten thousand years for the second half so I might need to rewatch it.

I am glad a show like this exists and I really enjoyed watching the first series with my partner and seeing the relationship between the boys develop and them figuring themselves out, but felt it had diminishing returns as it went on and the way it handled different issues often felt a bit samey and part of the style and soft tone seems to involve not letting the characters emote too strongly in places where I think the show would have really benefited from it.

This is an exceptionally pretty show. I will give it that. But it failed to grab me at any point. It feels like it is expecting you to come in invested in these characters already. It does very little to establish them or get you to like them at all before all the bad stuff starts happening that you are clearly meant to care about but I never really did. I found it hard to get a grasp on them or why they are making the decisions they are either.

I had hoped maybe the second series could improve on the first but it doubles down on every single bad impulse. It piles one more characters with the barest hint of motivation for any of them and everyone continues to make sudden, inexplicable shifts in motivation and alliance and the consequences of what anyone is doing is constantly vague. At one point a character trails off while saying “If he gets to the hexgate…” and I begged out loud for him to finish that sentence because I had no idea what the results of that would be.

Action also stops bothering being in any way coherent in the second series, with the show more concerned with making music videos than maintaining any sense of space or physical reality in most fights.

Lovely mix of silliness, heartfulness and fun scifi plotting that one would expect from Moffat. I love the wee lesbian though I am surprised that she wasn’t more central to the episode and Anita obviously hits it out of the park with the surprise mini episode she got to be co-star of in the middle of this one.

The weak link, which I felt as a recurring issue with the last series, is a resolution that is fairly thinly justified and in this case also feels like reheated leftovers from Boom, which itself felt like it was relying on established tropes from previous Moffat stories to fill in the gaps. Like the ending is a photocopy of a photocopy of a person’s consciousness uploaded into a computer to exist in some sort of cyberspace afterlife.

The idea of running the Santa operation like a hyper-competent thriller spy agency is cute (if you don’t think about it too much). I was worried that the movie would have that as basically its only joke but it’s allowed to fade into the background without constant lampshade hanging or winking at the camera over it.

I was similarly worried that Arthur’s steadfast belief in the true spirit of Christmas would be a bit overbearing but his earnestness is cute without going totally overboard and the egos and cynicism of the other Santas have a groundedness that ties the silly antics into a plot that manages to feel real and touching despite my own inherit cynicism to stories about Christmas.

I believe that I watched this last year as part of a movie night thing and trashed it. I was feeling extremely cynical about it and just couldn’t get over the idea of someone who talks about getting rid of the “surplus population” being so easily convinced towards being the most generous man in the world (and even at the end of the movie he still indulges in playing with the power he holds over the Cratchits before being nice to them).

This year I watched it with my partner who is a bit more into sentimental Christmas movies than I am and let the politics melt aside to enjoy it and had a genuinely lovely time. I don’t think I need to sing the praises too much, that the puppetry is great and that Michael Caine’s Scrooge being a perfect foil for it is a given. The songs are fun and yes of course I cried at Tiny Tim dying.

But to put on my cynic hat one last time the framing device with Rizzo and Gonzo could really be cut it consistently fails to be funny.

This film could maybe be salvaged but cutting out twenty minutes of Jim Carrey’s screentime and all the tone-ruining pop culture reference-based quips. That would remove most of the humour but also there is only one joke in the entire film that made me laugh so it wouldn’t be much of a loss.

That said, the dialogue and editing of this movie is already jarring enough as it is. Conversations do not flow at all, people spout things that have little relation to what was just said or have extended gag reactions that kill the pace of conversation before just being completely ignored. Actually, cutting those would probably also help.

The exception to this is when Jim Carrey is acting off Jim Carrey, which they seem to have put remarkably more effort into making feel natural and flowing with the characters interacting, hugging and playing off each other in a way that really sells physical presence despite it being the same guy twice, something that is not extended as much to the CGI animal characters who will very often not appear in frame with the people they are talking to at all. It’s a kind of maddening how much it feels like so much more effort was put into Jim Carrey sucking himself off.

On the bright side, more than the previous films we do get just Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Shadow amongst themselves without having to have human characters around and that broadly works! I could have done with, again, less pop culture quips from Sonic and less generic Klingon from Knuckles but these characters are generally fun, they look good, and the action is often cool. This part of the movie actually works and Shadow’s storyline, simple as it is, hits, and the choices made to make Shadow and Sonic parallel each other more works quite well.

The climax would have been pretty great if we could have stayed with it for longer than thirty seconds of a Live & Learn riff at at time before cutting back to Jim Carrey playing generic Jim Carrey character talking to generic Jim Carrey character for several minutes, alas!

Hopefully if they make another one Carrey will not come back out of retirement again.

Has any slasher movie every actually been good? Is this entire genre a prank?

At least it has the Maniac Cop Rap.

This is the skeleton of a functioning Sonic the Hedgehog game under this that you can sometimes catch a fleeting glimpse of before the mess of bad decisions piled on top of it re-asserts itself.

The addition of weapons is not inherently a bad thing, I enjoy the Gamma stages in Sonic Adventure, and having auto-lockon guns to blast stuff with as you run through a level is fun, and the way the rage mode gives you infinite ammo that lets you keep firing as long as you can destroy enough to keep your meter filled can be a cute little balancing act sometimes.

The weapons that don’t lock on are borderline unusable, though. Aiming is difficult at the best of times with these controls and rockets seem to have a habit of going straight through enemies and hitting a wall behind them and mêlée weapons are not something that works in conjunction with contact damage and knockback on hit. There is a reason that Freedom Planet excised those things from the basic formula.

But those are petty and mostly avoidable problems compared to the mission system. The Reloaded mod tries to smooth out some of the tedium but it does not solve the fundamental problems with it.

The levels are largely designed like Sonic the Hedgehog levels (and are often pretty fun when played like ones) with a linear structure but with some branching paths and shortcuts, shortcuts that you absolutely cannot use if you are trying to do missions because you will skip over a bunch of the sixty fucking individual soldiers you need to kill in order to do the dark mission so you can explore more branches of the story than the neutral pathway.

Absolutely no consideration seems to have been made for the mission system and branching story structure. The chaos control power is entirely useless to you if you are doing any mission other than the neutral one as it will simply skip you past your objectives. You must disengage with much of the games mechanics and rewards systems in order to experience more than half of the game.

The branching story structure that this is in service of doesn’t seem to have any consideration put into it at all either. The same cutscene will often play at the end of a level regardless of which mission you did, the CIA mainframe will be hacked regardless of if you did that mission or not, the events of any previous level are never mentioned because they all just exist in complete isolation and make no reference to anything that came before. Every character will act surprised that you are not doing what they say at all times regardless of if you have spent the entire playthrough so far ignoring them.

The path where you only do hero missions is really emblematic of this. Black Doom will continue giving orders that he apparently expects Shadow to obey till the end, despite Shadow not having listened to him once. But Shadow himself is similarly ridiculous on this path, which contains the infamous line “This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me!” On the path where you only do the good missions! This path also has you fight the Black Bull boss twice. Surely it should have been obvious that this would be a path that many if not most players would end up doing and that it shouldn’t have the same boss fight twice on it.

Another path that stood out to me is the neutral path, which alternates level themes between ancient ruins and overgrown jungle tech base which made it feel like you were going backwards repeatedly with Glyphic Canyon, Prison Island, Sky Troops and then Iron Jungle. It really gives the impression that levels were made and then just randomly distributed between the different story paths without any thought whatsoever.

And of course the structure of this requires you to replay the same levels over and over in order to explore branches that you haven’t done yet. The Reloaded mod at least allowed me to to have to play Westopolis ten times just to unlock Last Story but the five times I had to play it to be able to at least play every level once was still far too much.

And it’s all stills sometimes actually quite fun. It’s very frustrating to have this core game that is enjoyable but with a mountain of shit piled on top of it that consistently gets in the way of satisfaction.

Expert mode almost fixes these problems, simply offering the levels one after the other, mostly just letting you play them by getting to the end without having to worry about missions, but then throws in some blatantly unfair changes to some levels on top of removing continues entirely.

Overall I still somehow feel positively about this game but I am not going to go back to it any time soon.

Damn this movie actually has colour in it. I thought that was illegal for Hollywood to still do. Genuinely I was predisposed to enjoy this film more simply for it not being allergic to saturation. And Mia Goth is phenomenal in it. I loved watching her acting throughout.

They all suck shit and they’re all the same, basically.

My friend Jen on the Friday the 13th movies, one of which she streams every Friday the 13th.

Silly little procedural with an arc plot of the very obviously made up as it goes along variety. It is always a bit fun to see what they’ll do next in this kind of show and unlike most of them it has Michael Emerson who is always a delight as a villain.

It does occasionally—Exorcism Part 2 in particular—slap you in the face with the fact that you are watching a procedural where the characters are working for an even more evil organisation than the police: The Catholic Church.

A pretty boring slasher. It seems fairly critical of the police at first with the polices’ reaction to the murders to try and shut down any internal investigation and some vox pops showing the public’s complete lack of surprise of a serial killer in uniform but this is quickly dropped for a more standard story of our good cop taking the fall and having to clear his name.

The version I watched was not helped by the editing in of some additional scenes that were apparently filmed for a Japanese TV broadcast version of the movie that help to kill the pacing and spoil any mystery on top of being a jarring stepdown in direction and video resolution.

I decided to watch this in between the second and third series of Chucky. The voodoo serial killer angle has been entirely expunged—which is not surprising for a film released in 2019—and instead Chucky is now a doll with artificial intelligence who is meant to learn as you play with him.

It initially seems like the film is going to do something with this. The first victim in the story is a Vietnamese man who commits suicide after being fired from his job assembling products for a giant American tech corporation named Kaslan. One might expect the movie to then frame the Kaslan Corporation as the ultimate villains of the story, but the Foxconn-inspired death is quickly forgotten and the only bearing this has on the rest of the film is that Chucky can magically control any and all electronics around him with his glowing E.T. finger, up to and including a self-driving car.

I don’t find A.I. Chucky very interesting. The original Chucky was never a particularly deep character but he is fun where robo-Chucky is just predictable. Every step of his journey from damaged, innocent doll to serial killer is fairly obvious in advance.

Also why did they make the doll look like James Woods.

Very fun dive into a bunch of absolute messes. Being divorced from the plot of the comic it’s based on means it’s quite self-contained but also that it gives a deeper view into a bunch of characters who don’t get as much time dedicated to them in the main work and it is impressive how the different story threads interweave and play off each other depending on the order you do them in and which paths you take.

At last we finally know the origin story of a woman who was invented two minutes before the end of a show for a cliffhanger that was never resolved 😌

The inciting incident of this movie is a petty disgraced noble extrajudicially massacring a fifteen men who wandered into a restricted area. To stem any potential backlash a false story of tiger attacks is spread.

Some of the deads’ countrymen come to investigate this just as, by sheer coincidence, a zombie tiger just happens to go on a rampage and kill a shitload of people.

When they finally kill the undead tiger, the world’s most sceptical man cuts open its stomach and finds nothing but rotten flesh inside it, not the remains of anything identifiable, even the two dozen men he has just seen it kill and declares that seeing as the bones of his friends aren’t present in its stomach then the monster tiger story is clearly bullshit.

The world’s most sceptical yet gullible man is then convinced it was actually this innocent group of people by an official telling him “Oh yeah the tiger was a lie but we found this conveniently identifiable box from a tribe you’re related to next the bodies I guess it was them” so they kill the entire village where they make those styles of boxes.

The only survivor of this massacre is a young girl who decides to become the Joker of zombies.

The first series of this show manages a steady escalation of both violence and camp as it starts to centre Chucky more and pull in various elements from the films, which is a thing the second series can’t really do a second time but it still manages to have a rising tide of ridiculousness throughout with its different versions of Chucky as well as the wonderful stuff focusing on Tiffany’s Jennifer Tilly facade falling apart. I also love G.G.

I will admit that people with mental health issues being preyed on and disbelieved is a very natural progression from the previous film but this is a Hollywood horror movie so how people with mental health issues is handled is not good.

It does pull of neat tricks with keeping you guessing which doll is the real Chucky before undermining that that even matters at all, with the puzzling question of how Chucky gets from being a head in Andy Barclay’s safe into the asylum acting as a hint to that.

But other than providing that hint Andy is entirely superfluous to the story. You could lift everything involving him out of the movie and it would work fine and his presence just messes up the pacing, especially in the climax which seems to pause just to wrap up his part.

And now I am caught up with the TV show having gone through a series of seven films that struggle to rise above “okay”. I still enjoyed this and it will hopefully give context for whatever the show pulls in the second and third series. Glen[da] surely has to come into it at least.

The series pivots back to horror and actually does a decent job of it. In particular I keep turning the treatment of Nica over in my head. A part of the threat in the earlier films is Chucky targetting children who have very limited agency and whose concerns people do not take seriously and this movie replicates that with an adult through the sheer ableism that Nica faces from her family and the world, though there is a few plot contrivances to make it work and the way it ties her paraplegia into the series lore is a bit ridiculous.

The lore is also a bit of an elephant in the room. The movie felt almost like a soft reboot at the start before it starts to dump more and more of that in. This is something I kind of liked in the television series but that has a lot more room to let that seep in over time to allow the show to evolve, while here it feels more like it’s bulldozing an otherwise tight plot.

And if the series is going to keep bringing up previous stories so much it should probably try to actually have it make sense as a whole. The backstory stuff here does not feel like it fits with either the original movie or the other retconned versions of it.

Definitely an improvement over Bride of Chucky, fully embracing absolutely nonsense and grotesque comedy, but also possibly the one that has aged the most poorly out of all of these so far.

The most important thing this game layers onto the Sonic the Hedgehog template is versatile movesets for each character that gives huge breath for improvisation and recovery, allowing more room for keeping the flow going as one glides through levels.

The tools each of the four characters are also very different from each other, each resulting in their own style of movement and their own challenges in different levels.

The movesets also result in fun, expressive combat. The game has thirty-two levels and all of them have bosses to fight (though some levels are just boss fights) and some of them are really gratifying to bang one’s head against a few times till finally getting how to read and dodge and counter them.

A few other tweaks from its erinaceous roots like lack of contact damage or knockback help to keep the pace of both the running and fights smooth even if you do fuck up a bit and make the whole thing extremely satisfying.

An incredibly satisfying short and sweet little mini-shooter that I found myself looping over and over again.

The movie’s tone is a bit all over the place and I found the more light hearted parts a bit hokey but when it’s serious it works for me and the climax is absolutely glorious. I love Ryu and Nana.

It’s the late nineties, Scream came out two years ago and we think horror movies are cringe unless veiled with an layer of irony. The Child’s Play series over and now it’s time for the Chucky franchise.

Okay the move into horror comedy does make sense, really. This is a series about a serial killer children’s doll. And I think this film has a lot going for it. Tiffany is great and Chuck’s new design is pretty cool and stops it from repeating the schtick of the last three films of pretending to be a cute cuddly doll who fools children.

The movie makes up a magic amulet so that this doesn’t have to be a fourth film in a row of him chasing Andy Barclay, but road trip to get the MacGuffin is a pretty boring setup too and I don’t think making Chucky and Tiff the main characters instead of his victims was a great move. Chucky is fun but he’s very one-note. Tiff is great but doesn’t have that much more depth. Jade and Jesse are just boring and I do not care about them at all. And the general 90s-ness of it grates against me.

Still, the series has reinvented itself now and I know it does eventually find its footing by the time it gets to the TV show at least, I just hope it actually did it in one of the movies before that too.

The same basic plot again but this time in a military school. I might not be rating this so low if I wasn’t watching these back to back but I do think it is also a step down. We are getting a little sillier; Chucky gets some more abuse while pretending to be a doll and the kills are getting more elaborate or ironic. But we’re not fully into horror comedy yet and the result is neither tense nor particularly funny.

As horror sequels go it’s pretty decent but isn’t bringing much new to the table. Which Chucky now being an already established movie monster the film is not shy about showing him off from the get-go, so it lacks the first film’s sense of escalation. We do get to see a lot more puppetry though and it is very impressive work, though some lingering shots where Chucky’s face abruptly stops animating do break the illusion somewhat. In links to the TV show we have Kyle and also the theme music.

A great movie of the sort to watch with friends while making fun of it. Many problems play off each other in a such a way that I find it difficult to decide where to start with it.

A lot of this movie was clearly written with certain set pieces in mind without much thought as to how to get from A to B. It feels like after a certain amount of time in a given location a character will declare what might as well be “well we got all the special effects shots we wanted here done, let’s go to [next location]” with the flimsiest of justifications.

It’s hard to dwell on this in the moment though because it will jump to the next scene the moment someone finishes speaking without so much as an establishing shot to give some breathing room. In at least one case it seemed like it happened mid-sentence.

Almost as jarring as the editing is the acting, which feels unpractised to the point of giving the impression that there is a lot of ad libbing happening. That the actors are expecting to hear the director yell “cut” before realising that the scene is continuing as a single shot and they need to keep it going.

Characters are just baffling in other ways too. Mo’ and Chocolate Chip Charlie talk about going after “it” before they actually see The Stuff move and then barely react to punching people and seeing their faces slough off to reveal that they are hollow inside. They then split up and Charlie proceeds to then disappear from the movie for an hour. Mo’, meanwhile, sees a newspaper article about a boy knocking cartons of Stuff over at a supermarket and with possibly the most grim and serious line delivery he gives in the entire movie declares that he needs to meet this child.

Everyone being so off-kilter perhaps adds to the tension that they might be being affected by the titular substance. I kept expecting reveals of a character having been taken over that just don’t arrive. Certainly it feels like it should be happening when characters are shouting not to let it touch them as if a single drop would be fatal while repeatedly getting it all over their faces. There’s a scene where Andrea Marcovicci’s character is meant to be pretending to eat The Stuff that includes a wonderful shot of her grimacing and cringing with white fluff dangling off of her lips, apparently having been unable to resist the temptation on set to see what the prop actually tastes like and realising that it’s awful.

The special effects are, at least, consistently entertaining, though not consistent in any other regard. The threat The Stuff poses is completely arbitrary moment to moment with it being utterly passive for extended periods while suddenly lunging at our heroes or gushing forth in tidal waves as soon as an escape route opens for them.

In the end though, the looming and arbitrary threat of the The Stuff is no match for an openly racist conspiracy theorist radio host with his own private militia.

Smile dares to ask “What if It Follows had been good?”

If this film had been described in detail to me I probably would have thought it would sound terrible and going back and looking at the trailer now it does not look promising.

But it worked for me. Everything that in the trailer seems so trite gripped me in the moment while watching the full piece. It just all came together into a really tense and occasionally brutal movie.

My only real complaint is the fakeouts where we see the protagonist doing something that turns out to have been a dream or otherwise not real which I feel breaks the rules of how the visions of the smiler (I’m just going to call it that) otherwise work.

I’ve been watching the first series of the Chucky TV show while sick and enjoying it. It starts off slow and focused, its own-self contained thing, but then as it escalates and gets sillier it starts steadily dropping in characters and stories from the movies. I’ve never seen any of the Child’s Play or Chucky movies and decided to give them a go before starting the second series of the TV show.

It’s always interesting going back to the original of a long-running series and seeing how it compares. What of the primitive iconography goes all the way back to the start? What inconvenient plot details have been forgotten? How does the glimpse of Charles Lee Ray’s pre-doll life we see in this movie compare to the flashbacks from the TV show?

Certainly how the show frames murder as a part of Chucky and Tiffany’s relationship gives a retroactive and unintentional bisexual subtext to Eddie’s underdeveloped relationship with Charles in this.

But just taking the movie on its own merits: It’s pretty good! I really like the slow escalation. The doll evolves from object of tension to a stalking presence to a slapstick slasher to a gruesome monster.

There’s some bits I think could have been left on the table. Much of the voodoo stuff and the second scene with the homeless guy who sells the doll to Karen in particular, but they don’t drag the movie down enough to ruin it. It’s easy to see why this was a hit that resulted in so many sequels.

A man believes that he is promised the middle class American life of ownership of a suburban home, wife and 2½ children and cannot fathom why he does not have what he is owed. The person who sympathises with him the most in the movie is a Nazi and he is incapable of self-reflection over this or anything else, going to his grave not understanding how he became the bad guy.

There is an incredible satisfaction in nailing a level of Sonic and/or Shadow Generations. It often feels almost as much like a rhythm game as a platformer, giving you that steady flow of obstacles to react to as you start off sight-reading and then eventually memorising the feel and flow of the stages, with plenty of alternate paths and shortcuts to tease out as well.

The contextual DOOM POWERS add extra layers to this for specific levels and Shadow turning into a squid now or using evil HM03 Surf is just kind of funny to see and Shadow’s chaos control power adds an interesting element of resource management to every stage as well, especially if you are trying to get the fastest possible speedrun time as, hilariously, when Shadow stops time he also stops the level timer.

The music is, like the levels, composed of banger remix after banger remix. I am listening to Space Colony ARK Act 1 as I write this and I will probably be listening to it a lot in the future.

The writing was also a surprisingly highlight. The plot is fairly simple but Ian Flynn uses the giant Sonic lore vault in his mind to weave different threads together in interesting and funny ways without coming across as fan wank. There’s a lot of references to past games but there’s usually some sort of point to it rather than saying “hey look at this thing!” and the supplementary material around the game with the Robotnik family history makes me hope Flynn or Evan Stanley get to explore Ivo Robotnik’s relationship to his family more in the comics or a future game. And the way the third boss was handled is so funny.

It’s good.