Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week saw me at last finishing my Blue Prince adventures, which I am not ashamed to admit concluded with me looking up a whole lot of answers that I would never, ever have figured out myself. The game passed the point of what I’d consider a “reasonably achievable deduction” with the introduction of the “A New Clue” book, but I still enjoyed a more guided ride through the conclusion, and can’t really fault the game for culminating in puzzles no mortal mind could comprehend. The game’s balance of increasingly tamable roguelike runs and larger meta-puzzles is truly a magical combination; I imagine its appeal will be forever limited by its demanding nature, but for me, Blue Prince is already a pantheon property. Anyway, we’ve also got some films to get through, so let’s charge right into the Week in Review!
Tag Archives: Film
Spring 2025 – Week 11 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been unfortunately jonesing for some goddamn Dungeons & Dragons, as our third campaign party is suffering from scheduling issues, while our second campaign has currently run through all of my written material. It’s becoming hard at this point to imagine how I actually managed a weekly quest-writing schedule back during the main campaign; these days it generally takes me a few months to write an arc that will only take us around five sessions, so I’ve clearly got to achieve a better complexity balance for my own sake. In the meantime, I’ve been hacking diligently away at Blue Prince, and just recently reclaimed the throne of Orindia. Still not sure if the game actually has a “finish line” or not, but my passion for drafting mansions has not wavered, so I guess we’ll find out. But for now, let’s turn our focus to other matters, and burn down the week in films!
Spring 2025 – Week 10 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been balancing work, personal creative writing, Blue Prince runs, and further episodes of Dimension 20, as I munch through its second, fantasy New York-set season. After watching so much Critical Role, I’m feeling a little foolish about only now checking in on the work of a dungeon master whose style and priorities are so much closer to my own. Basically everything I have issues with regarding Matt Mercer’s style is resolved by Brennan Lee Mulligan, who shares my preference for more direct, narrative-driven sagas where player agency is exercised through the moment-to-moment action, rather than through choosing their approach to an entire continent’s worth of potential conflicts. It’s a far more cinematic, propulsive approach that allows for significantly more coherent character arcs, and has me taking all sorts of mental notes regarding player direction and NPC construction. I’ll likely have more to say on that later, but for now, let’s quit with the dilly-dallying and get to the week in films!
Spring 2025 – Week 9 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been balancing work priorities against the duel sirens of Blue Prince and Balatro, each of which would dash me against the rocks and drag me down to a briny doom if I gave them even the slightest inch. It is exceedingly easy for me to get addicted to roguelikes, but with both a fast-paced pump-up roguelike in Balatro and a meditative cooldown roguelike in Blue Prince, I could theoretically balance my energy between them indefinitely, living forever within a mixture of labyrinthian manors and outrageous poker combos. I’m even seriously considering constructing my own Pepe Silvia board of Blue Prince family relations, all so I can… I dunno, unlock a door holding a key that unlocks a different door? It’s dire out here, but fortunately our film screenings have continued unabated, alongside regular Dimension 20 episodes that are seriously opening my third eye regarding dungeon mastering possibilities. Let’s get to the films!
Spring 2025 – Week 8 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m back from vacation and back on the grind, churning through episodes of Shoushimin Series as I work to once more be up to date on every single Current Project. The series is proving to be even more compelling than I anticipated, a sharp-edged variation on Hyouka that possesses many of its predecessor’s strengths alongside a few new tricks of its own. My housemates have also introduced me to Balatro, which was very reckless and cruel of them, as the game is designed to tickle basically every obsessive game-design bone in my body. So I’m basically drafting a storm engine in the form of a poker deck, where even playing out a winning hand improves my combo pieces? Fucked up stuff, people. Anyway, let’s get to some films!
Spring 2025 – Week 7 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’m out and about with my mother and sisters, going on our first family trip since well before the COVID lockdown. It’s refreshing to be out of my cozy den for once, though with my Playstation back at the apartment, I am now grappling with the agonizing question of whether I pick up Blue Prince on Steam just so I can keep shuffling through manor layouts. The game’s just too damn addictive! I’ve basically broken the economy through exploitation of experiments, I’m just one fortunate run away from defeating the chess puzzle, and my housemate is surely getting further ahead of me with every misspent hour. Still, I’m at least getting some solid reading done (just finished Michael Dylan Foster’s informative yokai index, and am now starting on Titus Groan), and my movie review buffer means there will be no disruptions in service regarding our weekly breakdowns. So let’s get right on that then, and charge through some fresh films!
Spring 2025 – Week 6 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been keeping busy by tormenting my players as usual, as they continue their trek through a temple that has swiftly proven itself some sort of cult initiation center, demanding personal revelations and demonstrations of faith and trust fall-adjacent exercises all the while. It’s the sort of concept that demands a party who have total confidence in both their characters and their ability to embody them, making for a nice payoff now that we’re mostly communicating in character voice, rather than above-table strategizing. I basically snuck the whole Nadeko-reassembly arc in as a way to fill out my own player character’s psychology, and am proud to report my players greatly enjoyed reassembling her psyche one fragment of identity at a time. And of course, there was also plenty of movie screening to be had, as I charged through anime and kaiju collections alike. Let’s get to it!
Spring 2025 – Week 5 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I am eager to get outside for a jog, yet nonetheless will heroically soldier on through this Week in Review. It’s actually been quite a productive week over here, as the return of my party’s rogue (well, first rogue – we’re a rogue-heavy bunch) from vacation instigated a rapid series of DnD sessions. Our party fought honey-cultivating bears, were harassed by a small nation of devils, and ultimately clashed with a leviathan made entirely of repeating, segmented hands, leaving them trapped in a temple at the ocean’s floor. I’ll probably let them out sometime in the next week, but until that report lands, let’s check in on the wild world of cinema. It’s time for the Week in Review!
Spring 2025 – Week 4 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This was a productive week in One Piece writing, as I finally broke down the main thematic concerns of Fishman Island over on Crunchyroll. I’ve frankly wanted to write that piece ever since I first watched the series, so I was happy to use the recent Fishman Island “update” as an excuse for it, even if I’d caution against actually using that update to replace the original series. I frankly agree the arc could use some tightening, but they just cut too close to the bone here – the central flashback sequence desperately needs time to breath, and this version resultantly loses the impact of Koala’s presence. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to be back in Egghead as the anime jumps back into gear, and as usual, my weekly anime viewings were complimented by a fun scattering of films. Let’s break ‘em down!
Spring 2025 – Week 3 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Here in the middle of April it appears that spring has finally sprung, as we are at last receiving survivable external temperatures consistently enough for me to start running again. I know an exercise regime of “running intermittently through the spring and summer, then hibernating through the winter” is more suitable for a bear or squirrel than a human being, but my willpower sadly is what it is, and if going outside makes me regret the vast, frigid distances between our planet and the sun, I am not likely to don my jogging shorts. Anyway, today looks basically perfect, so let’s not waste any more time vamping out an introduction, and dive straight into this week in features!