I kinda had the opposite experience, I had been a PC gamer for years before the Xbox came out, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Aliens Total Conversion, Hexen, Rise of the Triad, Quake, Unreal...
By then I had kind of burned out on FPS, so when I heard about Halo I was like "I dunno... another FPS..."
Then I played a demo in the store and was like "Shut up and take my money!"
Valve really operates in a different market from Microsoft or Sony, but what hurt them was a couple of things:
Repeatedly skipping Gamescom essentially told Sony "Yeah, we don't care about Europe." And the sales numbers show it. Sony owns Europe.
No differential between console and PC. Launching the same game at the same time on PC and Xbox doesn't incentivize people to a) buy games on Xbox or b) develop games on Xbox. Why bother if it's on PC the same day?
Focusing on digital vs. physical takes games out of stores. On a recent trip to Target they had a nice big Playstation section and a nice big Switch section. Hey? Where are the Xbox games?
It breaks out of the typical Marvel formula, Black Panther doesn't.
Marvel formula:
Main character shares a tragic backstory with the villain who turns into a bigger, badder version of the hero.
Iron Man - Iron Monger
Hulk - Abomination
Iron Man - Whiplash
Thor - Loki
Captain America - Red Skull
Iron Man - Extremis
Thor - Malekith
Captain America - Winter Soldier
Avengers - Ultron
Ant-Man - Yellowjacket
Avengers - Avengers (Civil War)
Doctor Strange - Kaecilius
Star Lord - The Living Planet (his dad!)
Spider-Man - Vulture
Thor - Hela
Black Panther - Killmonger
I mean, you can't exactly fault Marvel for running the formula over and over again when every time they run it, it makes a billion dollars.
But by the time Black Panther came out, you could count on one hand the times they didn't run the formula:
For me, the awful fight at the end tanked it for me. Other than that, it was the typical Marvel formula, nothing really remarkable other than being set in Africa.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was a better movie, so was Into The Spider-Verse for that matter.
A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office, and the podiatrist says, “What seems to be the problem, moth?”
The moth says “What’s the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness.
But I don’t know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there… at night I…I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that’s on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don’t know where to turn to.
My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the…in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc.
My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch… I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I… that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror.
If only I wasn’t such a coward, then perhaps…perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all…
Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I’m a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I’m not feeling good.
And so the doctor says, “Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?”
I will say, the casino scene was fantastic! :)