In the Rock, Sean Connery’s character is James Bond. It works well with the Bond timeline, and Connery plays the character exactly as he did Bond. It’s fun to see Bond as a secondary character and what it would be like if he was captured.

Agreed. I used to be blown away by a game from a technical standpoint 2-3 times per console generation and at a similar clip on the PC side. Now we are getting GTA V and Skyrim re-released for the 10th time. Neither of those games were groundbreaking at the time (IMO) as they both were good but predictable progressions from their previous entries.

Playing DKC and seeing the detailed sprites, Mario 64 (and several others) ushering in 3D, the FMVs in FF VII, and the enemy AI in FEAR, these things felt like monumental leaps forward. Nowadays, the closest thing I can think of is something like Elden Ring or TotK which to me is just taking an existing good game (Dark Souls/BotW) and slapping a mechanic onto it (Open world/crafting). They are both excellent games, but neither compare to the leap forward of FF VII or Mario 64.

Maybe I’m just jaded by adulthood and have my rose tinted glasses on.

Lance Reddick is a recent one for me. I never realized how many properties he’s contributed to that I’ve enjoyed. His death was so close to John Wick 4’s release and Horizon: Forbidden West. He was in all this media I was consuming to gone.

They lost ~$10b in net income in Q4 '22 and Q1 '23 so definitely a company in some level of distress, but Q2 saw them ~$7.5b in the black.