03.02.2026 + thoughts on tv adaptations of popular video games
I'm getting back on my Monday weeknotes posting!! Winter is finally almost over (wishful thinking) and hopefully this week will be the last really cold week for a while because it's gonna be in the 60s this weekend yippee! But I did get one last snowboard trip in up to Mt. Sunapee with some friends from pinball league last weekend. They are much better skiiers than I am a snowboarder and Sunapee is a generally harder mountain so they were kind of ripping while I was very gingerly doing my heel to toe turns slowly down the mountain. It was a gorgeous day though, nice and warm and we all had a great time. Honestly the last couple times I've snowboarded I've debated getting back on skis for the first time in like 20+ years just to see what would happen. I think realistically though if I snowboarded more than once I year I would get better and feel more confident at it. Maybe I can get an Indy pass for next winter...
Besides that I didn't do much last week. The blizzard kept me home most of the week so I ended up playing various FPS games with my friends. I feel like my video game playing time has increased dramatically this winter but most of it is with friends so I think that's fine. But this spring I definitely need to be outside more... anyway I was convinced to redownload Overwatch and I started playing it "seriously" again for the first time in probably 7 or 8 years? Unfortunately it is still pretty fun and my long dormant Lucio skills are still there along with the inherent toxicity that also comes with playing any team based shooting game. I also dabbled in Marathon's open beta this weekend and had a lot of fun with it. It helped thinking of it less like an extraction shooter and more like "Fortnite for graphic designers" plus it was a ton of fun with friends. It's only $40 so I'll probably grab it and play it until Bungie inevitably ruins it.
Also speaking of video games I don't know if anyone here who reads this blog cares about this besides me but you all see that still from the God of War tv show they released last week? It looks bad LMAO. I'll post it below so you can see it:
I do love God of War the video game so when they announced a TV show for it I had a teeny tiny glimmer of hope that it would be good but I really don't think it will be. Studios trying to make video games into prestige TV shows and movies is funny because video games nowadays emulate prestige TV already and are probably better experiences to just play and experience the story that way. God of War is probably the best example of this because half of the enjoyment of it is the combat and the power fantasy of being this guy that has a big axe and you chop up big evil creatures with it, and if you're just watching someone do it than it doesn't feel the same. Also most of the impact of the Norse era of God of War relies on having played the Greek era games because the tone shift is so significant and there's a few plot beats that really play into this. So this puts it out of "coworker show" territory like Fallout where they can expand on the universe of the game and make it appealing to everyone and puts it firmly in "gamer show" territory where it'll be a 1:1 adaptation that no one will like and the most annoying people on the internet will complain about it until the end of time.
It reminds me a lot of Halo the TV show which is something I've wanted to write about on here since I watched it last summer. That show tries to do a God of War 2018 where they deconstruct the plot of the original Halo games and try to make their own adaptation of it that's different from the rest of the series, but they ultimately failed because of poor writing and poor showrunning.
The backstory of Halo that they kind of gloss over in the games is about how Master Chief and all the other Halo guys are kidnapped children that the colonizing space navy that runs the universe turned into supersoldiers to be able to shut down rebellions on colonized planets, but then the Covenant attacks so it goes all ooh rah military us vs. them heroic sacrifices and stuff (Halo 3 is probably the most Bush-era military game of all time that's not Call of Duty).
What Halo the TV show attempts to do is run with that plot but also add a "what if" scenario as in "what if Master Chief tries to break his supersolider programming and figure out what the deal is with the space navy that allowed him to be kidnapped as a child" which on paper sounds really interesting!! Unfortunately the writing and showrunning of Halo was so bad that neither that plot nor any of the various sideplots related to it was resolved to anyone's satisfaction. The highlights: Master Chief having a manic pixie dream girl moment and committing a war crime to get with her, one of the other supersoldiers going through the same exact character arc as Master Chief but she is much more likeable so she ends up upstaging Master Chief in his own show, and the show just looking bad most of the time.
God of War is most likely going to suffer a similar fate, but I do love slop so I'll probably watch an episode or two. It is very funny that you can really see the bald cap on the guy playing Kratos. Also I just remembered that Sony wants to make a live action Gravity Rush movie and I'm sad now. Oh well.
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