This week, we raved about the new action-RPG The First Berserker: Khazan, voiced our critiques of the new Pokémon TCG set Journey Together, and shared some thoughts on the uselessness of game genres and the discourse around Daredevil: Born Again. Read on for these takes and more.
If Blockbuster was still a thing, The First Berserker: Khazan would be the perfect weekend rental. Grab a two-liter, some pizza, and go to town smashing and stabbing your way through a dense arcade action-RPG that will kick your ass but not waste your time. - Ethan Gach Read More
As we have reported many times already, the Pokémon Trading Card Game is in an awful lot of trouble. Since the launch of November 2024's set, Surging Sparks, the popularity of the 30-year-old collectible card game exploded, which in turn drew the attention of scalpers, which has rendered the products almost impossible to buy ever since. Journey Together, officially releasing Friday 28 March, is such an anticlimactic set that it almost feels designed to try to calm the waters. - John Walker Read More
If you’ve tried to buy a pack of Pokémon TCG cards in recent times, you’ll already know what a shitshow it’s all become. As we’ve been reporting, the last six months has seen the trading card game’s explosion in popularity lead to an epidemic of scalping, leaving new cards all but unavailable to the regular players and collectors. Now, but not for the first time, The Pokémon Company has promised it will be addressing these shortages. It’s just that their words don’t really match reality. - John Walker Read More
Remember the science fiction of the 1950s, when people imagined the role robots and artificial intelligence could play, dramatically improving our lives by taking on menial tasks and unpleasant jobs so that we would have more spare time, not need to work every hour, and increase our personal luxury? Weird how, in the moment of this fiction being realized, we’re instead using it to force people into poverty and destroy all art. But also, it turns out, online recipes. - John Walker Read More
Genres are broken. Broken, I argue, beyond repair. We need to crumple them up and throw them all away.
Genres always were broken, of course. They are, as with any other form of human-invented categorization, arbitrary. The notion of labeling any specific game as one “type” is inherently nonsensical, all art existing on an infinite spectrum, the boundaries of labels drawn utterly subjectively. That’s been the case forever, and it’s notable that about 15 years ago there were growing calls to abandon genre titles altogether as they felt so needlessly restrictive and confusing. - John Walker Read More
Daredevil: Born Again is really quite something. It feels like the first genuinely adult-focused project within the MCU, and its shocking brutality is all the more surprising for being created by Disney. (While Deadpool & Wolverine had gore and naughty words, it’s hard to really credit the silly movie with being “adult.”) It’s not just Born Again’s visceral combat and ferocious language but also its thematic concerns as the inexorable pull of violence condemns its leads, all delivered with whip-smart writing and meticulous subtlety. But one thing it isn’t is an allegory for the re-rise of Donald Trump. - John Walker Read More
