Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Richard Rosenbaum, and Matthew Wrather are joined by special guest Zack Johnson of Asymmetric, whose new game, West of Loathing, is a comic single-player RPG set in the Old West. Appropriately enough, the panel examines another travesty of the Old West, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, which stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. The movie is not good, but the conversation is!
Subscribe: iTunes Other Apps
West of Loathing
Please support our friends at Asymmetric as they release their awesome new Old West-themed game, West of Loathing.
Further Reading
- The Dark Tower (film): IMDb, Wikipedia
- The Dark Tower Novels on Wikipedia
- “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” Wikipeida; the poem [pdf]
- “Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy playable for free online” form Engadget
- Bureaucracy from Infocom and Douglas Adams
- Zapcon Arcade and Pinball Convention
- Radio Free Midworld podcast
I was disappointed with this film for a number of reasons. The greatest disappointment was the human masks. They established earlier on that most of the bad guys are hideous monsters wearing human masks. We see a few of the human masks get tore, but never saw one come completely off with maybe a few strands of flesh hanging in place. The setup was all there, but nope. I never got to see the hideous beast underneath. I don’t know if this was to keep it rated PG-13 or keep it under budget. Either way it made me sad.
It’s telling that you guys struggle to define anything that actually goes on in this film. There’s a fundamental failing on the part of the storytellers to delineate who its characters are, what motivates them, and why their quests are important. “Doomed to be nonsense” is absolutely right.