Postingan

Barely fantasy adventure by the Japanese studio

Barely an hour into Elden Ring, the latest furiously difficult fantasy adventure by the Japanese studio From Software, I made a vital discovery: enemy warriors can be tricked into falling down lift shafts. Or off cliffs. I even managed to tempt one skilled and deadly knight to walk out of his castle and into the path of a giant boulder – a trap that had been meant for me. It killed him instantly, saving me an intense battle that would have probably involved multiple deaths and restarts. I knew that I had crossed an important, almost forbidden Rubicon – I was now cheesing one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year. Cheesing is video-game slang for beating tasks or enemies through tactics that while not exactly cheating, are certainly not following Queensbury rules. When you cheese a game, you’re exploiting systemic quirks or apparent design oversights to gain maximum advantage for minimum skill or effort. Players have always cheesed. It’s something I discovered via the 1985

Three Most Underrated Performances

Three Most Underrated Performances of the last decade by Neeraj Kabi, Kartik Aaryan and Pavan Malhotra A look at Neeraj Kabi’s performance in ‘Ship Of Theseus’, Kartik Aaryan’s in ‘Akash Vani’ and Pavan Malhotra’s in ‘Children Of War’ and why Subhas K Jha think they were brilliant. Many times we tend to overpraise even the most mediocre performances and films. But once in a while, the opposite happens:  a truly great performance gets submerged in the torrent of extravagant critique and when one reclaims the performances one sees how unfair history has been to them. For example, Mala Sinha in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa or Dharmendra in Bimal Roy’s Bandini. Even Anil Dhawan in Basu Chatterjee's Piya Ka Ghar. Here are three performances from the 2010s that deserved a lot more acclaim than they got. Neeraj Kabi in Ship Of Theseus This is a sombre, meditative profound and yet weightless work of unfettered beauty with a life-changing performance by Neeraj Kabi who plays a monk who won’t use phar

Kingsman fan’ and ‘history nerd’.

 The King's Man is made for those that find themselves at the precise intersection of ‘Kingsman fan’ and ‘history nerd’. In the first Kingsman film, Galahad (Colin Firth) briefly tells Eggsy (Taron Egerton) about the World War I origins of the gentleman-spy organization fronted by the distinguished Kingsman Tailors of Savile Row, London. With the third film of the franchise, The King’s Man, director Matthew Vaughn returns to serve us that origin story in detail, complete with dollops of alt-history to spice things up. Now make no mistake, the Kingsman films are essentially superhero films, with fine bespoke suits in place of the shiny costumes one might be used to in other cinematic universes. I’d argue that Kingsman is a smidge more fun than other comic-based franchises; because despite the extreme action on display, both films so far kept the stakes as relatable as possible. Give me a tech magnate planting rogue chips in mobile phones worldwide or a drug lord aspiring to compete