the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet

Sure, but there’s also plenty to explore, especially for people who haven’t played PoE1 and have to learn how things work from scratch. Given you don’t pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

But probably more important that early access characters and stuff aren’t available out of early access, so you are explicitly playing temp characters. Fine if one treats their early/seasonal characters as temp characters anyway, but someone else might not want to play characters with no future after early access.

Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.

Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG’s inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.

BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don’t even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.

No, at least six months is the plan.

It does have a price in a sense, but that price also gets you that exact value in premium currency, so you don’t actually pay anything extra for early access, you’re just required to buy that much currency to open the doors.

I used to be very patientgamer, but my patience model changed after finding again and again that buying late meant devs had wholly moved on from a game by the time I got it, and would hardly ever do basic needed fixes, things that needed to have been talked about earlier in the project. I also noticed how some early access sales would take years for the price to go up and then back down again for what amounted to only a few dollars of savings. Savings that, as I watch games I’m interested in fail in obscurity over and over, I don’t feel quite right about strictly withholding from the few devs taking chances on such projects for me, on top of not being around to try and help the project deliver a better game to players.

So, now I do buy some games in early access or even newly released, where I can poke the dev while they are still around, and my patience includes waiting for games to get through those after-buying growing pains instead of just waiting for them to drop into the discount bins, mostly forgotten by their devs and players both.

I’m still generally more strictly price-patient on most anything larger scale, both by devs and by audience.

Week 1

• You’ll Never Find Me 2023
• I am Not a Serial Killer 2016
• Ghost Mansion 2021 KOR (rewatch)
• Bad CGI Gator 2023
• Strange Darling 2024
• Terrifier 2017
• Hostile Dimensions 2024
• V/H/S/Beyond 2024
• It’s What’s Inside 2024
• The Corpse Washer 2024 IND
• Jakob’s Wife 2021
• Beezel 2024
• Things Will be Different 2024
• Killer Condom 1996 GER

Week 2

• A Wounded Fawn 2022
• Qorin 2022 IND
• Indigo 2023 IND
• Blink Twice 2024
• Delirium: Photo of Gioia 1987 ITA
• Luz 2018 GER
• Girl on the Third Floor 2019
• Clawfoot 2023
• Post Mortem 2020 HUN
• Terrifier 2 2022
• Phantoms 1998
• It Lives Inside 2023
• Green Room 2015
• The Radleys 2024
• Temurun 2024 IND
• The Sacrifice Game 2023
• Open 24 Hours 2018
• Lavalantula 2015

Thoughts

You’ll Never Find Me, A Wounded Fawn, Post Mortem, and Beezel were unexpected finds. It’s What’s Inside was expected to be good, and was still quite fun. Luz… was notably weird but probably workable. We’ll keep that around.

Strange Darling was awful. Big disappointment there, based on talk. We didn’t expect much from VHS Beyond, especially with the alien theme, but one always hopes for anthologies to pull some surprises. Like most of VHS 2 and on, at least it wasn’t worse.

My partner and I found Beezel better than we were expecting based on reviews, so that was nice.

It’s What’s Inside was a lot of fun.

Aberrance says 2022 or 2024, so maybe it’s new somewhere. It was a decent twisty horror attempt from Mongolia, so if you like the off the beaten path, check it out.

And it’s not even the first horror movie named Director’s Cut.

but it is never too early to get on the radar

Eh… We have tons of movies we can actually see, and heaps of movies we can see very soon (especially as we enter October). Movies we cannot see for a long and indeterminate time don’t do any good. When hype pushes too far ahead, it’s just waiting and distraction from things that actually are relevant. It’s just more noise we need to filter through, and there’s so much noise.

The Demon Disorder has some fun bits, though it requires When Evil Lurks levels of tolerance for nonsensical authorial hand puppeteering. Once you get past that characters just can’t do anything that makes sense, it’s a trip.

Too early for news about this, unless you’re going to theaters in Taiwan.

It was enjoyable, but that review is waaaaay overselling it. Especially as comedy.

If you want a Korean horror comedy, try Night of the Undead (2020), but don’t go in expecting zombies ;) Horror Stories 2 (2013) also had a pretty fun hor-com for one of its segments.

Yeah, but I mean, we’re over 40 now, plus some shows. Such a long and random list is not really useful to anyone. Here’s some season-so-far notables instead:

• Cuckoo 2024
• The Retreat 2020
• Subject 2022
• All My Friends Are Dead 2021 POL
• The Vourdalak 2023 FRE
• The Closet 2020 KOR
• Deleter 2023 PHI
• Home for Rent 2023 THA
• Contorted (The Contorted House) 2022 KOR
• Oddity 2024
• Heilstatten: Haunted Hospital 2018
• Velvet Buzzsaw 2019
• Exhuma 2024 KOR
• Satanic Hispanics 2022 MEX
• Dream Scenario 2023
• Horror Stories 2 2013 KOR
• #ChadGetstheAxe 2023

In a world where no one speaks

Another one? Eesh, these are always such painfully contrived and badly done conceits.

We start our horrorfest movie plowing in mid August, so the September list is quite long already. Way too many for a post per movie :(

Probably Ouija: Origin of Evil. Others we’d note in particular:

• Oculus 2014
• Dark Skies 2013
• The Veil 2016
• The Lords of Salem 2013
• The Hunt 2020
• M3GAN 2023
• Jessabelle 2014
• Dashcam 2022

Probably Ouija: Origin of Evil. Others we’d note in particular:

• Oculus 2014
• Dark Skies 2013
• The Veil 2016
• The Lords of Salem 2013
• The Hunt 2020
• M3GAN 2023
• Jessabelle 2014
• Dashcam 2022

Here’s a couple of lists for people to use:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Blumhouse_Productions_projects
• https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/all-blumhouse-horror-movies-ranked/

Depends on your horror tastes, of course. We have no interest in Martyrs or A Serbian Film type stuff even if Baskin was pretty redeemable on general weirdness, and we all know there’s plenty worse than any of those out there.

Maybe most people who watch Baskin tend to venture even further out, but it seems like a notable watershed point to me.

We paid attention to films that paved the way for the genre and for filmmaking as a whole, as well as to modern classics that bring something new and brilliant to the canon today.

Right there is the end of my interest. As soon as it starts being about what someone considers important rather than actually great, it’s a list for history and not for utility or sharing what’s good in the present. I really wish people looking for quality and greatness weren’t always getting directed to historical footnotes, and nostalgia.