Author: Trafficblast

EA has published some fantastic games over the past two generations… and some that were a bit disappointing. Thankfully, in the latest Xbox One games sale, there are a bunch of discounts on awesome EA games. These include some of the absolute best Xbox 360 games, which are all playable on Xbox One.

For Xbox One games, we have discounts on the Apex Legends Founder’s Pack ($20), Titanfall 2: Ultimate Edition ($4.50), and Burnout Paradise Remastered ($5), in addition to The Sims 4 ($8) and a bunch of its bundles and expansion packs. You can also pick up the super cute Unravel and Unravel Two for $6.60 each or together in a bundle for $10. Dragon Age: Inquisition – Game of the Year Edition ($10) and Battlefield 5 ($18) are also both discounted. And if you’ve been wanting to pick up Star Wars Battlefront 2 ($7.50), Mass Effect: Andromeda ($9), or Anthem ($20) at a reduced price, now’s a good chance.

See all of the deals at Xbox.com

Now for what I get most excited about: backward-compatible Xbox 360 games. We have discounts on two games each from three of the publisher’s most beloved series: Dragon Age: Origins ($3.75) and Dragon Age 2 ($5); Mass Effect 2 ($6) and Mass Effect 3 ($6); and Skate ($7.50) and Skate 3 ($5). Three of my personal favourites are also on sale: Syndicate ($8), Fight Night Champion ($5), and NBA Jam: On Fire Edition ($5). Remember, all of these are playable on Xbox One, so you can buy them on sale, download them, and start playing immediately.

You can see the full sale on Xbox.com. In related news, there’s currently an offer that gives players 2 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $2. Ultimate bundles Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass on both Xbox One and PC.

It’s 2019, and the question “What is the Matrix?” was answered long ago. Nevertheless, as we recently learned, The Matrix 4 is officially happening–whether or not it’s needed.

I love the Matrix as much as anybody–more than most people, in fact. When I first watched the cyberpunk thriller at the impressionable age of 11, it pretty much blew my mind–I had to watch it at least a half dozen times before I was able to understand the concept that our reality is a computer simulation. But my friends and I, to this day, maintain a running joke that the sequels don’t exist. If someone brings up The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, we look quizzically at one another as if we’ve never heard of them. “What sequels?” “It’s too bad that movie never got any sequels.” Etc.

It maybe isn’t a great joke, but it serves as more than that. It’s a defense mechanism. I’d rather live in a world in which The Matrix 2 and 3 don’t exist. Like the original movie’s duplicitous but kinda-has-a-point betrayer Cypher, I believe that in this case, “ignorance is bliss.” Cue the harp.

The Matrix sequels are bad. You may have enjoyed them at the time, and you may even still enjoy them. They had their moments–the million-Smiths fight was conceptually cool, despite being marred by bad CGI, and Reloaded’s freeway chase is an action highlight. But as far as the cultural zeitgeist is concerned, The Matrix 2 and 3 failed to live up to the original on almost every level. Regardless of your personal feelings about them, they’ve gone down in history as massive disappointments, despite the fact that they made a ton of money (which is why, decades later, we’re in this current pickle).

The Matrix doesn’t need another sequel, because The Matrix didn’t benefit from the sequels we already got. The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions added little of value to the series, and in fact, they arguably made the original worse by association–the fact that a story with that much setup and promise wound up concluding with a hackneyed Christ metaphor and mediocre CGI might temper your enjoyment of the original, even if, like me, you like to pretend it’s a standalone film. Whenever I watch the first Matrix–which is frequently–I have to continuously shush the grating voice in the back of my head whispering “Remember how bad these sequels were?”

Lana Wachowski’s involvement isn’t reassuring. Normally, when a new sequel to a beloved movie is announced, it’s taken as a good sign if the original creators are still at the helm. The Matrix is an exception to that rule. The Matrix wasn’t quite a fluke; The Wachowskis have been responsible for a couple of other bangers, including the 2005 V For Vendetta adaptation (they wrote and produced, but didn’t direct), and 2008’s Speed Racer (Wachowskis-written, produced, and directed), which some people liked. But the duo was also responsible for colossal turds like Jupiter Ascending, Cloud Atlas, and, of course, the Matrix sequels.

I think it’s fair to compare the Wachowskis’ work to M. Night Shyamalan’s: They’ve made some classics, and they might have more in them, but they’re not exactly a safe bet, especially considering that most of their successes occurred early in their careers. George Lucas is another fair comparison: Yes, they created something amazing, a franchise with a life of its own that’s far bigger than a single movie. But they also failed considerably when trying to expand on the world they had created.

The fact that Lana Wachowski is set to return to writing and directing duties for The Matrix 4 makes me less hopeful, not more, for this movie. As a diehard fan of the original Matrix and an equally diehard hater of the sequels, I wish the movie that started it all could simply stand on its own. Contrary to popular belief, the most interesting thing about the original Matrix wasn’t the “bullet time” action or the leather trenchcoats, but the restrained worldbuilding and the subtext-filled writing–writing for which the Wachowskis deserve full credit, but which they failed to live up to in subsequent attempts. If the franchise, such as it is, needs to have a future, the best way to do it would be to drop the known characters and world, and go in a totally different direction–but it doesn’t seem like that’s what’s in store.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that the original film’s red pill/blue pill binary has become a twisted touchstone for various nasty subsets of extremist internet culture. Is this really the right time to return to “Wonderland” and travel back down this particular rabbit hole?

I’ll remain open to whatever The Matrix 4 turns out to be–partially because it’s my job, and partially because I love the original so much. Even I have to admit that it’s a little bit exciting that Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss are also coming back, and I’m not really too concerned about how these two very dead characters might get written back in–it’s science fiction, they’ll figure something out. But right now, it’s hard to get past the feeling that whatever happens with this movie, we simply don’t need another Matrix sequel.

It’s been 20 years since the original Matrix changed action movies and sci-fi forever. I’m not saying we should never get to revisit its fictional world. But it should be done in a spin-off or reboot–a brand new story with new characters–not with yet another sequel featuring Neo, Trinity, and all the baggage of a movie trilogy that’s 20 years old and two thirds terrible. It’s hard to imagine this turning out good.

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Mindhunter Season 2 has finally arrived after a nearly two year hiatus and true crime fans everywhere are rejoicing–and for good reason. This season is just as strong as the first, with a powerful blend of fiction and reality as FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench, as well as their academic consultant Dr. Wendy Carr (all of whom were invented for the show), continue their efforts to psychologically profile the very real serial killers of the ’70s and ’80s.

However, one of the prominently featured killers in both Seasons 1 and 2 never gets the interview-and-profile treatment. Dennis Rader, aka The BTK Killer, was first introduced to the show’s mythology back in Season 1 through a series of disconnected vignettes that would cut through the beginning and end of episodes. Rader was never formally named, and in the first season, he didn’t actually commit any crimes. The implication was there, to be sure–every moment of his screen time is dedicated to a sort of simmering tension and building discomfort that communicates just how bad things are likely going to get.

That threat pays off in the first episode of Season 2, which reveals that BTK has been actively killing, communicating with the press through disturbing poems, and avoiding capture entirely. For viewers who know BTK’s real history, putting two and two together isn’t much of a challenge, and it’s clear that the man in those vignettes has been Rader all along–though the show never explicitly names him.

Tench does what he can to help at first, but there are no real leads and the Behavioral Science Unit’s resources are being otherwise utilized. Throughout the season, the vignettes continue, but the case never progresses in any official capacity for the FBI–something that may feel a bit frustrating for viewers who are unfamiliar with the reality of the BTK Killer, who managed to successfully avoid capture until the early 2000s. Mindhunter may take some liberties with the true stories it intersects with, but changing the ultimate outcome of the cases it deals in tends not to be one of them.

So what was the real BTK Killer’s story and where does it fit into the Mindhunter umbrella? Hold on tight, because this one gets bleak.

The real Dennis Rader began killing in 1974 with the Otero family, three years after marrying his wife Paula, while working for a home security company installing burglar alarms–a detail included in his Season 1 storyline. Paula is a character in the show as well, but his children–a son born in 1971 and a daughter born in 1975–are not. The scenes included in the second season premiere that focus on his wife discovering him dressed in a mask and women’s clothing are likely fabricated for the show. The fetish for women’s clothing and the mask are genuine–but the implication that his wife had caught on to Rader’s “deviant” sexual proclivities and, apparently, had chosen to ignore them for whatever reason, or tried to “fix” them by providing self-help books, can’t be confirmed.

Rader began writing letters to the press about his murders shortly after the Otero killings, which sparked a mass panic through his native Wichita, Kansas. In addition to written communication, Rader also called in tips to police hotlines. One such call, made from a phone booth in 1977, actually led to the discovery of the body of one of his victims, Nancy Fox.

After an apparent lull in media coverage, Rader became frustrated with his lack of notoriety and began communicating again. In 1978, he wrote a letter in which he claimed responsibility for the murders of Kathyrn Bright, Shirley Vian, and Nancy Fox (who he had guided police to a year prior)–all of whom are mentioned in the show as cases that were confounding the police. It was in a 1978 letter where he coined his own nickname: BTK, for “bind, torture, kill.”

In 1983, a task force of federal detectives were given the BTK cases and tasked with reinvestigation–the loose inspiration for Tench’s brief involvement in the case during the show. The real-life team was nicknamed the “Ghostbusters task force” and focused on the collection of DNA evidence and the implementation of new technology, including a psychological profile, worked up by behavioral scientists, that assumed BTK was someone local to the area where his crimes were committed.

The work, unfortunately, provided to be ultimately fruitless, and the cases were marked as cold through 1997, when Robert Ressler–the actual FBI profiler who served as inspiration for Tench–stepped in to build a more expansive view of BTK. But Ressler believed BTK had either left the area or died because the killings had apparently stopped back in the 70s.

The case remained totally unsolved until 2004, when Rader began communicating with police again, claiming responsibility for more deaths through the 1980s, confirmed by the inclusion of mementos from the scene of the various crimes. It was these early 2000s communications–one of which was saved on a floppy disc–and advancements in DNA testing technology–that eventually lead to Rader’s arrest and subsequent confessions in February of 2005. Rader reached out directly to the police to ask them, point-blank, if communication via floppy disc could be traced, emploring them to “be honest.” After telling Rader that no, the disc could not be traced, they promptly used the metadata contained within the floppy disc Rader had sent to trace him.

Unless there’s a significant time jump in future Mindhunter seasons, we can expect the BTK thread to remain unresolved for Ford and Tench–but perhaps that’s actually for the best, even with all consideration for historical accuracy thrown aside. The reality of Dennis Rader is that FBI profiling and behavioral science were unable to successfully aid in his capture, often leading to more dead ends and conjecture. Had Rader not overextended his “game of cat and mouse with the police” (in his own words) he probably never would have been caught. In Mindhunter, it seems like he’s being set up as the show’s “big bad guy,” but whether this will actually culminate in anything during future seasons is anyone’s guess.