In The Tsuranga Conundrum, Chibnall-era Who has finally given me an episode that left me feeling satisfied at the end. That’s not to suggest that this is a particularly good or memorable episode; in another season, this would be a middle-of-the-road piece, neither a favorite nor hated. But I wasn’t bored or put off by this episode, and for this season, that makes it stand out.
Peter MacDonald
Arachnids in the UK…a title almost as bland as the rest of this episode of Doctor Who.
This episode of Doctor Who comes with a big honking arachnophobia warning. And…not a lot else. It’s a very nothing episode.
This Episode of Doctor Who Was A Mistake
My expectations for Rosa, the third episode of this season of Doctor Who, were not high. I wish I could say I was wrong. The fact that I can feel the good intentions radiating from every aspect of the show doesn’t help; if anything, it makes it worse.
The most frightening part of this Doctor Who episode is the next episode preview
In the second episode of this season Doctor Who, our heroes travel across an insanely hostile planet to retrieve the TARDIS…and it’s all a bit bland, really.
Doctor Who’s Back! And A Woman!
This week saw the return of perennial favorite British science-fiction series Doctor Who, with a brand new actor in the (sort-of) titular role and a new man running the show. One of those I’m excited for. The other I’m sort of dreading.
Experience Points Suck
Once upon a time, in the far-flung year of 1974, Gary Gygax released the first-ever edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and in so doing singlehandedly created the tabletop roleplaying game as we know it. D&D had precursors, but they were miniatures war games, more akin to Warhammer than to what we would recognize as an … Read more
The Webcomics Ouevre of Mary Cagle
Since the launch of Kiwi Blitz in 2009, Mary Cagle (alias CubeWatermelon, which is an adorable moniker) has been hitting the internet with comic pages. She followed up Kiwi Blitz, a still-running comic about teenagers fighting crime with a giant avian robot, with Let’s Speak English, an autobiographical gag comic about her time teaching English in Japan, and most recently Sleepless Domain, a unique and delightful comic about Magical Girls who protect their city from monsters in the wee hours of the night. Her comics are notable for their gorgeous colors (LSE, which is uncolored, excepted), distinctive characters, and round cartoon style. Although none of these have exploded in popularity like some of the classic webcomics of old (although, really, what has? Has any webcomic really blown up since Homestuck took off like a rocket?), I discovered all three within about a year of each other, and I’ve enjoyed them greatly, which inspired me to do one big post reviewing all three.
I struggled to decide what order to discuss them in, because the order I read them in is completely different from the order of publication, and each one has colored my view of the one that I read next. In the end, I decided to review them in the order I found them in: Let’s Speak English, then Sleepless Domain, and then finally Kiwi Blitz.
Why I’m Not Convinced By ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’s Historical Context
There’s snow on the ground, the sound of bells in the air, a turkey in the oven. Trees are inside of houses, instead of outside where they belong. Yes, it’s that time of year again: time for the annual controversy over a seasonal tune from 1944. Yep, it’s Baby It’s Cold Outside thinkpiece season once … Read more
Hitman Review
I’m not going to beat around the bush: I love the new Hitman game. It is an absolutely fantastic return to form for the series after the deeply flawed Absolution. It combined the things Absolution did right with an infusion of the series’ core gameplay flow, and some of the best level design in the series thus far. If you’re a fan of the series, or are looking for a jumping-on point, you should definitely buy it.
Hitman: Absolution Review
Important Note: the contents of this post were written in 2014 for a series of tumblr posts analyzing Hitman: Absolution and why it failed so hard. I intend to refer to it heavily in my upcoming review of 2016’s Hitman: Season One, and am not particularly happy with how tumblr handles long text posts, so I’m republishing it here and reformatting it into a single post.
01. Introduction
The latest title in IO Interactive’s long-running and much-acclaimed Hitman series, Hitman: Absolution, was fairly controversial on release. Although it reviewed about as well as previous entries into the series (it brought in high-seventies to low-eighties on Metacritic, depending on the platform, whereas Hitman: Blood Money rated low-eighties; Hitman 2: Silent Assassin came in in the high-eighties range but was also released all the way back in 2002, so the numbers may not be perfect comparable), many devotees of the series were profoundly disappointed, even angry, about changes made to the series’ formula, to the point that IO Interactive started the development of the next Hitman title with an open letter promising a return to form. But in the meantime, it’s worth looking back at Absolution, a few years after its release, and asking: was it really as bad as all that? Was it really as broken as its detractors claimed it to be?
Spoiler alert: Yeah, it kind of was. What’s more interesting is why. Closer examination reveals that although some of the game’s problems were unique to it, many others were not. Rather, these flaws were minimized by the level design in previous games, whereas in Absolution the levels emphasized these faults and made them stand out. In this post, I will be looking at the game in three areas (Narrative, Game Systems, and Level Design) to try and clearly express what sets Absolution apart from its predecessors and why it comes up short in the process. Click on the read more for an introduction to my perspective and the context in which I will be writing.