Odd Thoughts

Citizen Sleeper , a stunningly well written game developed by Jump Over the Age, raises an age-old human question - why am I alive? From a purely biological perspective, the answer is easy. Like every other living thing, I am alive to reproduce. To seed my genetic code into the next generation of homo sapiens sapiens. But I know that is not what I am really asking, nor is it a compelling answer for thinking beings who know reproduction is at best a necessity for the continuation of life and cannot be held up as an individual goal for each wildly diverse human individual. Why am I alive? Why do I persist? Why do I suffer? What's the point? Citizen Sleeper wants you to answer those questions on your own, but it offers some compelling theories. In a transhumanist triumph, it offers up a world of beings - including yourself - that are not tied to mortal shells. One needs not suffer. And yet on a decidedly humanist note it suggests that suffering might be the price we all pay for the wa

Let's get something important out of the way. Moonfall , Roland Emmerich's latest disaster production, is a bad movie. Mystery Science Theater bad. It's paced poorly, cut worse, the acting often seems phoned in at best, and the plot is the worst mish-mash of Independence Day and 2012 that I can imagine. There have been many better 'thing smashes into the world' movies, the most recent of which being Greenland  (2019), which at the time I definitely thought had been directed by Emmerich. All of that said, I still genuinely enjoyed the absolutely off the rails second half, and left the movie wanting to write about it. So let's dig into it. Full spoilers for the best worst disaster movie of the year.  Moonfall  starts with a fairly confusing disaster in space that's been far better done in films like Gravity. The scene serves solely to introduce our two main characters (Astronauts Harper and Fowler), and its main sin is that it makes even less sense as you lear

  Spiderman PS4 and Spiderman Miles Morales spoilers ahead  While it hasn't yet been officially announced or confirmed, it seems almost beyond a doubt that Playstation players will be receiving another entry in the Spiderman franchise in the near to mid-term future. 2018's Spiderman and 2020's Miles Morales were extremely well received, and both games served as anchors for a company that is still clinging to exclusivity in a much more traditional sense than its competitors. I can't imagine Sony forgoing the opportunity to add another Spiderman to its library of games. That's not to mention the sort of hints that a new game is coming that always pop up on Twitter, nor the mid-credits scenes in both games, which we'll discuss later. Long story short, Spiderman 2 is coming, probably by 2023. So what might it look like? And why do I think it has the potential to be one of the greatest superhero games ever made?  Well, to start, that's partly because Spiderman PS

There's something about the lone rider on a quest through a beautiful apocalyptic wasteland that just screams video game RPG to me, and also immediately grabs my attention. Raya and the Last Dragon -  Disney's latest work of art - opens with just such a scene before expositing on how its titular character got to that point. It even calls out that lone rider motif in its opening narrative commentary, deliberately drawing attention to it. And it planted a seed in my head that would be watered throughout the entire movie, Raya's narrative is written like an RPG game, in some ways that I don't think are necessarily the case in other animated films.  As in any good RPG, our lone rider quickly picks up companions and the scope of her quest radically expands. At first she only has her animal steed - an armadillo-like creature named Tuk Tuk - and a single magical shard from a broken dragon orb. But soon she discovers another creature, a water dragon named Sisu, last of her kind

Today, Disney is without a doubt the world's most prolific entertainment company. From ancient China to the MCU to a galaxy far, far away, the company funds and publishes some of the world's most recognizable movie entertainment properties, and it makes a ridiculous amount of money doing so. Current subscribers to Disney+ can find plenty of content, while the game world was recently intrigued by a slate of announcements which essentially boil down to Disney making its way into the AAA video game business (with games based on Avatar, Indy, and Star Wars, the company is poised to have its hands in a ton of new releases over the next few years). Let's give Disney its due, plenty of its recent properties have been extremely well received. Recently, WandaVision and The Mandalorian have brought a certain amount of top-tier respectability to the company's still young streaming service. But not everything has been so popular. Here I'm thinking of Disney's live action re

It strikes me as rather ludicrous to think about the fact that audiences across the world have been intensely tuned into the outer rim adventures of sci fi's most eminent heroes for damn near 50 years, but that's where we're at, and I don't think we're really sick of it yet. Only months after pearl-clutching critics decided Game of Thrones  would be the last 'event TV' show before the streaming era, Disney Plus stormed onto the field with a new show for people all over the world to tweet about simultaneously. Per usual, it took me a year to actually get around to watching it.  The Mandalorian features our titular character, a Beskar-clad super-soldier belonging to an ancient and still mysterious religious creed, as he stumbles upon a series of misadventures in Star Wars' latest major outing. Between the Sequel movies, the Clone Wars animated show, and Fallen Order, I've been consuming a lot of Star Wars media the last couple years. It's cliché, s