Recent content by Bartholen

28 Years Later, 6/10 This is the latest vehicle in the franchise, still headed by the Boyle-Garland tag team. Among the many legacy sequels of modern day this probably ranks among the oddest. In it a 12-year old boy has to go through a coming of age ritual of leaving his secluded island...

I've been working my way through Stephen King's The Dark Tower series over the past year, and am currently on the fourth book, Wizard and Glass. It's basically an extended flashback akin to the Golden Age in Berserk, in that it's almost entirely about the protagonist's backstory and next to none...

I actually don't agree with 28 Days being about the world having ended: information in the movie is very deliberately kept limited to only a handful of perspectives. "Reports of infections in Paris and New York" is pretty much all we get in terms of the outside world for most of it, but the...

28 Days Later, 8/10 In preparation for the new sequel I decided to finally check out the 2002 classic. It holds up pretty damn well. This was one of those peudo-mythical movies to me, because as a kid I remember seeing this in video rental stores and market DVD racks among other horror movies...

Finished Escaflowne again. It really is a goddamn crime how thoroughly this series has been memory-holed by history. This honestly should be in every discussion about mecha, isekai and fantasy anime. It is everything I love about fantasy fiction: imaginative, grandiose, operatic and sincere...

I've made it to the final boss of Lies of P: Requiem Overture. The DLC is fantastic. It has all the strengths of the main game while improving in all the areas I wished it would: there's more flexibility between parrying and dodging to avoid damage, the areas have a lot more to explore with...

Made it to the second boss of Lies of P: Requiem, and hrrrmggrrmgmghgrrmmble. I bashed my head against the wall for no less than 2 hours. This is an extremely tough fight even after lowering the difficulty, which seems to just lower the boss' health. It's one of those very frustrating fights...

I got the Overture DLC for Lies of P, defeated the first boss and went to the next area. It's a properly done DLC: new beautiful areas to explore, new enemies, new weapons, all that good stuff. I'm playing it on NG+, so difficulty wise it doesn't fuck around: I had to try the first boss probably...

I watched Punch Punch Forever! a few times. It's a Youtube anime-ish series by a creator named Speedoru, and just released its third episode, all of which combined only add up to about 32 minutes of content. It's a comedy about a fighting tournament between humans and demons, where an 11-year...

Finished Midnight Mass. Absolute masterpiece, 10/10, should have won all the awards. One of the best endings in anything ever. A shame that the final monologue by Erin slips pretty hard into some cosmic, hippy-dippy woo-woo nonsense and it kind of takes me out of it. But then it's followed by...

Speaking of details, I had a talk about the season with a friend of mine who watched it all the way through without having played the game, and we both ended on the conclusion that the HBO show isn't just a bad adaptation, it's an adaptation that doesn't even seem to understand how adaptations...

Finished Remnant: From the Ashes, which happened far sooner than I'd expected, only about 10 hours in. Which is surprisingly short for a modern game, let alone a proto-soulslike. It's a very Borderlands 1 -esque experience, in that it feels like a solid core idea around which everything else was...

I feel the fifth episode of Midnight Mass warrants its own mention. That's how I read it anyways.

Since Sinners got me on a bit of a kick, I've gone back and been rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix. And hoo boy was I wrong about this series. It's not an 8/10, it's among the best things Netflix have ever produced, 10/10 easily. I think it needs a second watch to truly see it for the...

I am Legend, 6/10 This is a very odd film. It's a Will Smith joint from 2007, and sees him playing Robert Neville, a survivor in post-apocalyptic New York trying to find a cure for a disease that's killed off most of humanity and left the rest as ravenous proto-zombies. It was a huge smash hit...