Petrousgyre

You're not alone.

Fully agree about Leto, an amazing performance. Completely wasted on a weirdly tacked on, incoherent, ultimately pointless character in a terrible film.

For sure it's an awful film but I didn't think much of Drivers performance. His accent was pretty terrible - only Jeremy Irons was worse by dint of the fact he didn't even bother trying to do an accent bar a couple of the opening scenes. Didn't think much of Drivers performance either - you sense he realised he was in a turkey and was mostly phoning it in. Gucci aside I think him a fine actor in everything else I've seen him in.

House of Gucci wants a word. Much as actors are a crucial component of filmmaking I’d argue the writer, director and editor are all better indicators of how likely you are to enjoy a film if you’ve liked their previous work. Even then it’s not particularly reliable indicator.

I think they’re just using a relatively wide, very fast lens - a 30mm at f1.4 or thereabouts. Looks strange in the context of football where everything is filmed on very long lenses at a high f-stop.

It's interesting the impact Musk has had in such a short space of time. The Twitter thread for this is full of swivel eyed lunatics banging on about corporate elites taking over the world and how the CMA need some jail time to help them get over their naked hatred of Microsoft. That Reddit thread is measured and sane by comparison.

Oh, that was Gary Whitta - I didn’t recognise him without his hair. I get his point, I just don’t see how it relates to Redfall in any way, no-ones criticising it for being too avant-garde or unorthodox, quite the opposite. I don’t think anyone working on a groundbreaking new game is fretting that they’re going to get cancelled because Redfall was critically panned.

Yeah, that stood out as a weird sentiment. So too was the follow up from that British bloke. His full throated defence of Redfall as somehow being too ambitious, too revolutionary, too beautiful for this cruel world - repercussions would be felt around the game industry etc etc. He seemed quite firmly removed from anything resembling reality.

I'm not sure it's especially productive to see this as some good versus evil debate. They're all just companies. Microsoft's output this last decade has been really poor by any measure, I bought both their recent consoles at launch and have had Game Pass for years in the hope that they'd rekindle the form they had for shipping great games during the original Xbox and 360 era. It's hard not to try and thread some reasoning as to why, despite massive acquisitions and investment, they're still putting stuff like this out. Great that some of their studios are starting to release well recieved games like Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush, hopefully some green shoots of recovery but I don't think it's unfair to note that these are still rarities and neither got any real marketing push whereas Redfall did. This suggests Microsoft can't distinguish good game from bad which is troubling in itself.

I didn't see the Psychonauts doc but can imagine that Double Fine are treated quite differently to say, 343 Industries. I've worked with a couple of folk who've spent time working on some of the bigger Microsoft Game Studios games post 2016 and both said MS were still very hands on. Tiny sample size, admittedly, but it's hard to imagine that so many otherwise capable studios have been responsible for screwing up their own games en masse since being taken over.

It's hard to believe that Arcane would have ever released dross like this of their own accord. My guess is Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment escaped the worst of Microsoft's excesses because they were relatively low budget with no real expectations attached - as evidenced by their minimal fanfare on release.

As I understand it the issue is the exact opposite, Microsoft have a tendency to micromanage their game studios - just not very well. At all.

Doubt it would ever come to that. If the rest of the world OKs the deal then my guess is the CMA's position would be walked back as part of the proposed free trade deal with the States. Potentially the CMA's ruling works as a useful negotiating pawn for the UK government in these proceedings.

If you're laying fresh power cable to your shed I would strongly recommend running a length of ethernet along with it. Cost is negligible in the greater scheme of things and you're not subject to the vagaries of powerline.

Now, perhaps to some extent - but I was responding to Majora’s point about how MS lost a foothold as a result of their start last gen.