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.
The convenience of bundling is greater than my perceived risk of theft. Maybe if I lived in a place where pick pockets were more common, the algebra would change. Also, my wallet case only has 1 credit card and my drivers license. It’s pretty easy to cancel a credit card, and a new driver’s license isn’t hard to get.
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.
As someone who invested an embarrassing amount of time into each mainline game since 3, 9 was awful. I think there may have been a decent (musou) game under there, but even several years and patches later it’s rough. The battlefields are empty. The traversal is buggy. The upgrade system is grindy in the least fun way. I don’t want to mine metal in a DW game…
The best musou games in the last 5-10 years have been spinoffs like Hyrule and Fire Emblem. I don’t have much faith in Koei Tecmo releasing a DW game that captures the essence of 3-5 in a modern way.
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.
They did look better on CRTs. Modern displays will smooth things in a way the original developers didn’t intend. It’s less pronounced in the PS1/N64 era, but SNES/NES has some games that look noticeably worse without applying a filter.