PlayStar Rocker Industries.

Electronic Propaganda Site.

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Mixtape vs. Maxtape

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Old Marathon vs. new Marathon

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David Lynch by Steve Courtney.

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From Joana Fraga.

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Idea for all creative Remedy sickos: a-ha's Take On Me video, but Alan Wake is Morten Harket (the singer), Rose is the love interest and they're hunted by Taken instead of those racer dudes. And at the end it turns out it was a fan comic written by Rose, because of course it is.

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom skin. 🤌

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Still making my way through Tetris Forever and I love that Henk Rogers held a Tetris tournament in celebration of Alexey Pajitnov's birthday.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is such a beautiful game.

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Playing through the new Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game and I can confirm: It rules so much. Made by the same devs as the modern Wolfenstein games, it very much plays like a Wolfenstein, but with less shootouts. I'm around six hours in and didn't fire a single shot yet. Instead it focuses more on stealth and punching fascists in the face. And I knocked out so many fascists, I love it.

It has some really good puzzles, it's gorgeous and it has open world-ish hub worlds that remind me of that team's work in The Darkness 1.

If Batman Arkham Asylum was the perfect Batman simulator, the Great Circle is the perfect Indiana Jones simulator. What a tremendous game.

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Every time someone talks about the downfall of Concord:

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Max Caulfield and the legal department of Square Enix may deny where that stone with the googly eyes on her T-shirt is from, but I love that you can wear this cool little nod to the thematically relevant Everything Everywhere All At Once in Life is Strange: Double Exposure. 👕🪨

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Finished Sam Lake's The Lake House, the new DLC for the game about a dude named Wake being trapped in a lake without any cake (Alan Wake 2).

The add-on puts SURVIVE back into Survival Horror, because, damn, are the fights hard. I'm scraping by with barely any resources (not enough healing items 😭) and I had to fight groups of at least four Taken with my standard equipment several times. That's already hard to do in the main game, but in AW2 I get better equipment and more resources to handle such tough situations. Had to switch on invincibility in the options because otherwise I couldn't had finish the game.

But overall I like Lake's Lake House for Wake game 2! It's scary, it's funny, it got some great callbacks and pretty clever commentary on AI machine learning. And, of course, it's pretty good looking.

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So, you're a Pricefielder and your virtual girlfriend broke up with you…

I get it, breakups are painful. I lost my love of my life when my plane crashed in the artic and I was frozen for 70 years. Then I was awoken, witnessed my Peggy die of old age and I had a weird, short-lived fling with her great-niece. After that, not unlike Max Caulfield, I traveled back in time to be with my Peggy again. (Please, don't ask about Bucky. That's a sensitive topic for me.) So, yes, I get longing that transcends space and time.

But sometimes you have to move on.

I know you love Chloe Price very much. She's a great, fun character. The perfect, how do say, "Chaotic Lesbian"? And Max and Chloe are a wonderful couple. They are a big reason why I played through LiS 1 three times. I love to see them be happy and gay together!

But maybe that's not an interesting story?

In preparation for Double Exposure I caught up with the Life is Strange comics from Emma Vieceli, Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo. You probably think "What! Not only did Captain America play the games, he read the comics, too?" Yes! We didn't had electronic games in the Forties, but I love videogames now. They are such an interesting medium to tell stories in. I especially love the games where you don't have to shoot anyone. And of course I love comics! Big fan since that Superman guy appeared in Action Comics #1.

Here's the thing: I like the LiS comics. All my favorite characters are back being happy, cute and are even doing a cool road trip after they finally got out of the uninteresting LA storyline. We get to see Chloe und Max together and at the end of the story they live a fulfilled life. Before that we get to see Rachel and Chloe together in a different dimension, being also super cute. I don't regret reading those comics. They're from fans for fans with a lot of interesting ideas and concepts that I already see reappearing in Double Exposure.

But those comics are so boring to read!

There's barely any conflict and barely any stakes. No bad guys, no villians, no really deep problems, nothing that makes them interesting. It's six issues of sweet fan service. A fan service that feels like nothing. Barely anything substantial happens in them. I would never recommend them to a non LiS fan. I just hope the True Colors comics from Zoe Thorogood are a better read.

Now imagine a similar Life is Strange game without any conflicts. That's boring! Stories need conflict! I watched multiple seasons of the time travel/history drama Outlander and even perfect couple Claire and Jaimie went through some conflicts and rough patches, too!

I think I know what it is: This fandom is obsessed with Chloe. Like I said, she's a great character, but also she's a huge, pardon my french, bitch. A super annoying and insecure girl constantly pissed about everything. Ugh, no. That's what you're into, really?

Life is Strange is more than Pricefield. We even had two great games with LiS 2 and True Colors that were not about Chloe and Max! And isn't Max allowed to kiss other girls? Is a developer not allowed to tell new stories with old characters? Are fictional characters and real-life developers not allowed to move on from the past?

Speaking of videogame developers: Did you know that in one ending of LiS 1 Chloe can die? And that this ending is a choice in not only Life is Strange 2 and Wavelenghts, but also in Double Exposure? And because of that the developers are being forced to write a story around a character that has the possibility of being dead. Gosh darn, that's quite a Schrödinger's cat, I'm telling you! Game development is already hard enough, but trying to do basically a whole seperate game with a living Chloe running around would have make things unnecessary hard for the devs. So, what's the solution? Find a way to have Chloe not in the game. I know what's in the game is not how you would have preferred it, but it is what it is. You don't have to like it...

But you don't have to be mean about it.

The LiS fan community is on the brink of turning into a toxic cesspool like it happened with other fandoms. Some of you have already harassed developers at Deck Nine who probably had nothing to do with Chloe not being in the game. You don't want to be like the Star Wars fans hating on cool and interesting stuff like The Last Jedi or The Acolyte. Neither do you want be like the Silent Hill fans hating the new Silent Hill 2 Remake, which seems to be a pretty good game. (Sadly, hating new Silent Hill stuff is not new for them. They we're neglected by Konami and for a long time only got bad HD re-releases and Silent Hill pachinko machines. They can't remember a time when they were not depressed. For them, it's always like this.)

But you can be better, dear Life is Strange fans.

Just look at Remedy fans! They were waiting thirteen years for a sequel to Alan Wake and finally got one last year! The Remedy fandom is one of the most uplifting and positive fandoms I experienced. They're always stoked about new games by Remedy and are okay with changes to lore and characters.

As Captain America I get trying to hold on to the past. The past is comfortable. Change is scary. It takes time to get used to new things.

But change doesn't have to be a bad thing. It brings new opportunities.

To quote Max herself from Double Exposure: "There's so much more to your life than just the past. It's hard, but try to move on."

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A couple of theories about chapter 2 of Double Exposure and Max herself.

Finished chapter 2 of Double Exposure on Saturday morning and my mind could not stop thinking about it. Shared my ramblings on Twitter already and thought this would be a good place to post them here too.

Double Exposure theories - What the hella hell is happening?

1) There's a shapeshifter/evil Doppelgänger running around. Evidence: Lucas' son talked to another Lucas, there's footage of another Gwen selling drugs to students, maybe there's even a Doppelganger-Safi that pissed off Gwen so much that she got Safi's book canceled. Only problem with that theory: Why would the shapeshifter want to discredit or even hurt those people? 2) The different timelines/dimensions are bleeding through. No shapeshifter, but people seeing different versions of people they know and even of themselves. Evidence: Reggie seeing himself at the overlook trying to solve the Abraxas puzzle box and the collectable polaroids that Max can find. 3) Some truly wild time travel shit à la Donnie Darko is happening. A lot of characters went back in time trying to change the timeline, including Max murdering Safi. But why? Is another storm coming or even something more apocalyptic? Maybe time is about fall apart like in Quantum Break? The questions that will hunt me in the next two weeks: - Why did Max or somebody who looked like Max murder Safi? - What's up with the field of flowers looking like Safi's body? That could be straight out of Annihilation. - Is Safi... secretly an asshole?

The Max is Dead Theory

I believe the other Max is dead in the Living timeline (the irony!). Evidence: - We never really get to meet the Max from the Living timeline. - At the end of the first chapter the Living timeline Max is late for her meeting with Safi. Only our Max from the Dead timeline appears. - Amanda in the Living timeline says to our Max that she hasn't written back for two days (I think). - Near the end of chapter 2 our Max comments that her apartment/huge goddamn house looks like it wasn't visited for a couple of days. It pretty much looks like it did when Safi and Max went to the abandoned bowling alley. - She's barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road.

In the (non-canon) Life is Strange comics Max travels, similar to Double Exposure, to another dimension. At the end of the comic series we learn that she was only able to do that because the Max of the other dimension died. That's a concept very similar to the Amazon show The Man in the High Castle: People can only travel between parallel worlds if their counterpart in the other world died. So, when did the other Max die? Remember at the beginning of the game when Safi rescues Max from the falling planetchandelierdecorationwhateveritis thing? What if she didn't? Maybe because Safi wasn't there with Max in the first place to be able to rescue her. Yuuuup. Oooof. There's a dead Max rotting in that abandoned bowling alley and nobody knows she's dead because our Max keeps appearing in their timeline, making them believe their Max is still alive. Dark. BioShock Infinite Burial at Sea levels of dark. Man, I should replay that game. Ignoring all that, there's the possibility that the other Max is still alive! Maybe she isn't dead, but disappeared somehow. Maybe she herself hopped to another timeline, who knows! Lingering questions: - Who's Gun Holding Meme Max from the end of chapter 2? Is she the Max from the Living timeline? Or a completely different timeline? - Why does Gun Slinging Max want to murder Safi? It's the hideous jacket, isn't it?

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This guy is the biggest asshole in all of Telltale's The Walking Dead.

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Max Caulfield smoking 10,000 cigarettes so she doesn't sound like a teenager anymore in Life is Strange: Double Exposure