Recency Bias Volume 6

As autumn draws to a close and we approach the dark and cloudy days of winter, it is important to remember the real reason for the season: to use all the extra time off to play video games.

And while this November was a time for me to play a couple new releases and march my way through another Final Fantasy game, it was also a month of clearing out the backlog and having a great time doing so. I’ve also launched a pretty big project this month which I’m excited to highlight here (spoiler: it’s my new podcast!) and I sat down with the family to enjoy a new Stephen King adaptation that was fairly good in spite of my expectations that it would be quite bad. You know what? Let’s start by talking about that.

The Long Walk (2025 film)

The Richard Bachman books are, shall we say, not so good. They were books written by Stephen King but then published under a pseudonym for… well a variety of reasons both stated and implied such as trying to escape the pressures of a massive audience to taking advantage of loopholes in publishing contracts. They feel exactly the way that their context allows for: like books written by an angry young white guy, dusted off years later and pushed to market. They often give the sense of being incomplete or largely abandoned projects, and the whole Bachman experiment in general has always struck me as more odd than it is compelling. And it was abandoned fairly quickly, considering that now all of my copies of the books proudly announce that the author is “Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman”. No great mystery as to why that might be.

But one of the Bachman books I always had a particular soft spot for was The Long Walk, a dystopian novel about a national competition wherein the contestants must walk at a steady pace until only one of them remains. Those who choose to stop, or who are forced by their bodies, their minds, or external forces to stop; are executed by cold and unflinching soldiers. The prize for winning? A single request that will be met, no matter how outrageous or exorbitant the cost. The surface level criticism one can easily make of the book is this: they’re just walking. And while the actually interesting aspects of the books are the physical and spiritual toll the contest has on the participants, the human drama of how in-groups form and social lines are quickly drawn and violated, you kinda gotta wonder at how this would make for an interesting film when the primary action is guys walking through rural Maine.

Where the film succeeds most highly is in the performances of its two leads: Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. These two elevate the somewhat lackluster source material through the chemistry they share and the way they are able to confidently and beautifully express their ideals to one another. You root for them, the pit in your stomach reminding you that there can only be one winner and that at some point you will have to see one or both of these men die.

With some very smart changes from the book, The Long Walk is able to run where the book… uh… walked.

Kirby Air Riders

Remember those games you played as a kid? The ones where you spent hours and hours in front of the television, ticking off every little activity, every side-objective, every unlockable, only to keep on playing with the same fervor? The game you couldn’t pull yourself away from, the one that always sat within arm’s reach, ready to be popped in and booted up at a moment’s notice?

As you could probably guess by what I do for fun, I had a LOT of games like this, but the original Kirby Air Ride was definitely one of the ones I spent the most time on, playing with my brothers on our CRT television on our beat up Gamecube. And boy did we play the crap out of City Trial.

When it was announced that Nintendo was developing a sequel after over a decade, my brothers and I all kind of had the same thought: they should just make Kirby Air Ride … but like… again.

They delivered.

Though the game is remarkably similar to the original, the added content is nothing to sneeze at. There are tons of new vehicles, new characters, a story mode with branching paths, online functionality, and a heaping helping of additions and tweaks made to the old content to make it feel crisp and new again. Blasting around the City Trial map on release night with my youngest brother was an absolute joy, and you can bet that we spent the next night playing even more of the game, breezing through the new courses and all of the retro tracks in a single sitting that left us feeling excited to run them all again.

It’s a very pedestrian take to have, and an oft repeated phrase that really offers very little in games criticism, but I feel it is aptly used here: if you liked the original game, you’ll like this one too. I know I sure do. I’m actually going to play more of it as soon as I’m done writing this.

Table for Two

For those of you who don’t follow me on Bluesky (you should, vulpesvalentine.bsky.social) or who missed my post from earlier this month, I have started a podcast with my good buddy Kadmor. On the show, we both play and discuss a different tabletop roleplaying game every single month, breaking each game into a character creation episode, a one-shot campaign, and a pseudo-review and TTRPG general discussion episode. In addition, backers of our Patreon will have access to monthly bonus episodes where we play micro-RPGs, sometimes with special guests!

So, if you haven’t already, pull up a chair and join us wherever you get podcasts!

https://media.rss.com/table-for-two-pod1/feed.xml

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and I’ll see you next week to talk FFVI which I have DEFINITELY finished already.