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I don't really go in for Remasters generally, there's always somebody doing something new and incredible and I never want to miss it - I always want to get in just as it's being removed from the oven, where consensus has yet to transform a dynamic, hand-made experience into a number. But I do get excited when I think that a new person might come to discover our Old Ways through one of them, and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is very particular vertical slice of an era. With its warping, three dimensional worlds and its fairly profound story - a showcase for Amy Hennig, from which she mounted a fairly profound career - it was doing shocking things on the PS1. It has some incredibly hard lines - bars, in the modern parlance. I hope someone unearths this time capsule and gets all the way up their ass in some Wikis because it absolutely warrants it.

Having crushed Space Marine 2 beneath my ceramite heel, I'm now in a position to observe Gabe rolling hard on his own playthrough. It's just very, very good. Because it is essentially Sci-Fi Catholicism, with all the gothic majesty and ritual that might suggest, large portions of it take place in church. What I'm trying to get at is that The Candle Budget goes pretty crazy in the worlds of the Imperium, in a time and place where swinging sacred incense in a thurible is part of routine engine maintenance. The whole thing is so dense, with so many odd angles, that I can't help but like it. It works as satire and, because the best satire must fully and truly understand its subject, it also works as an exemplar of a baroque science fiction. You can tell it wry or tell it straight and it works either way.

I was seventeen when the first Crow movie hit theaters. It’s hard to imagine a better movie for an angsty teen in 1994. I was already a fan of the comic book and absolutely loved the movie. There are lines from the Crow that I still quote to this day! Obviously a lot has changed in the past 30 years. Art that I might have called “sincere” is now considered “cringe”. Everything today needs to be viewed through a protective layer of irony. You need to deliver a wink to the audience every once in a while to let them know you’re not actually taking this shit too seriously. Maybe it’s the Gen X in me, but sometimes I want to take this shit too seriously.

You know what? Gabe actually really liked the new Crow, or as it is being called in higher-end circles, Le Crow Nouveaux. He says it feels like a throwback in the fun way. I'm curious, but not so curious yet that I would prioritize it over any other activity. I wonder if it's the same thing with a hard seven in game reviews - occasionally sevens are, in actuality, sevens. But there's also a handful of cases where the game is a nine for some and a five for others and the mechanism doesn't know what else to do with it. Also, hell is bad! It's not a first-choice destination.