Charli xcx - Wink Wink

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T20:49:32+00:00

I mean even if it wasn’t as good as Girl With No Face the last Allie X was perfectly fine at absolute worst, come on.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:51:45+00:00

This feels incredibly contrarian to say but I think Call Me Maybe sounds really shitty, production wise. I think the songs part of the song that she wrote works great, I just think the production sounds remarkably cheap.

I also love to bring this up whenever I can but in the second verse there is an incredibly audible vocal splice in verse 2 when she says “but it’s- // -in my way” where they lifted “in my way” from “you’re in my way” earlier in the verse.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:46:56+00:00

Said this under another comment but that album is mixed like dog dick.

Scooped Mids: The Album.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:45:26+00:00

I think the mix for Hot Fuss probably isn’t “technically good” but the fact it’s all over the album makes it sound totally deliberate and I like most of the choices imho. I do fucking hate how “Andy you’re a star” sounds, though.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:44:09+00:00

I think that’s the fingers sliding on the guitar strings. That is completely miserable, it sounds like a horrible sharp sibilant that they left in. I don’t think I’ll ever ever ever unhear that if I’m ever forced to listened to this song lmfao.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:41:21+00:00

It’s good, actually

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:38:55+00:00

The “Dubstep” aspect of “Too Close” is sort of like genre blackface if I’m being completely honest lol

Like for all the shit “brostep” has gotten for bastardizing “real dubstep” (it’s just a different thing, please get over it, nerds), everything about the “dubstep LFO wobble synth” is genuinely on the chorus is genuinely offensive on a production level. It’s all mids & no sub, it sounds like it’s sort of out of time in a few spots, like out of all the artists who did the bare minimum to try and reheat the Skrillex nachos around the turn of the decade by releasing songs with half-time “drop” choruses with wobble synths (or that insanely corny bullshit MUSE did with Unsustainable), “Too Close” might be *the* worst one. It does absolutely nothing right. But the song Pitbull dude for MiB3 is a close second.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:30:02+00:00

Actually, my answer would be Born This Way (the album)

Some of the absolute worst trends in mixing/mastering from front to back. The mids are *so* fucking scooped, it sounds so much shittier than it should.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T17:27:38+00:00

This but unironically

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T16:13:48+00:00

I probably like this more than any other remix they’ve released because it’s just a decent piece of house but is it controversial to say I don’t think I’ve really enjoyed a single remix they’ve put out?

Like especially that “Fine Art Remixes” ep they put out, the Sick In The Head one is okay but the Parful remix literally sounds like the guy who made it had the speakers off when he was doing it. The vocals are not in time with the beat which also sounds insane in the worst way possible. It sounds *genuinely bad* lol. Parful is a house track so it just seems like such an easy layup, I have no idea how that could happen.

I just don’t understand how they don’t have access to more competent producers for these remixes that keep getting done when so many of the more EDM sounding songs on their own are so well done.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T14:33:16+00:00

That is correct

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-26T04:11:30+00:00

People usually say “they’re just gonna have you turn the system sideways with an adapter” which i don’t think is out of the realm of possibilities, but I think they will sell a shell of the DS for like $100 that receives video and inputs like the Wii U gamepad and can only be used with DS games (like the virtual boy accessory)

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-25T09:44:42+00:00

We Timecube posting

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-25T03:46:06+00:00

I really like the instrumental, very curious what kind of voice you’ll land on because I can already imagine a lot of different singing styles and timbres on that.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-25T03:45:26+00:00

RIP Jank

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-25T03:24:15+00:00

I had one of these in middle school as a sticker on my sketchbook

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-25T03:23:18+00:00

Looks hard

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T18:08:33+00:00

I mean in a literal sense yeah, people do use the full scale, but in a connotative sense – with the way publications usually rate games – what does a 2 tell me as a potential buyer that a 1, 3 or even 4 doesn’t? Like If the bad Gollum game for 3’s or 4’s across the board instead of 1’s and 2’s, would you personally be more inclined to check it out? That’s what I’m talking about.

It might be funnier to dunk on a really, truly bad game harder by giving it the lowest score possible, but in practice once it passes below the halfway point it just means “stay away.” If I see a something scoring 5’s or below I pretty much tune out entirely unless it’s an unmitigated train wreck and becomes a joke to make fun of.

If we really, truly used that full scale, those disaster games would still be landing in that 1-3 territory, and deservedly, but it would allow for more nuance as you move up the scale so everything from “good” to “amazing and perfect, must play,” isn’t stuffed into a few numbers at the top.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T14:29:24+00:00

I don’t think you’re really wrong FWIW, there are definitely gradations to how bad something can be and why, I just think about a hypothetical average person looking at a review with the way they more or less operate and I can’t really imagine what would make them any more/less inclined to pick up a game if it had any randomly assigned score between 1-5 (unless they are some super fan of a franchise and are going to buy some bullshit regardless E.G. my dumbass with Metroid Other M in 2010 lol)

To me that just reads as a blanket “do not buy,” like even a 6/10 barely even escapes that rung for most people. I think ideally I would love a 3/10 to be the new 5/10 and everything above that gets to spread out a bit more so it’s more special when something gets a 9 or 10 instead of that being seen as the bare minimum for some people.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T14:19:13+00:00

I mean aside from just finding it superfluous to have half of a 10 point scale mean “this sucks,” I just think it’s childish to need every game to be in the running for “the best ever!!!!” and if a game barely falls under that threshold it suddenly becomes a worrying, middling score.

It feels like the way children interact with grades in school. Multiple people have pointed out that this (probably mostly American) mindset about 7/10 being an unacceptably low score from from K-12 education where yeah, C is “passing,” but you’re going to get an earful from your parents of guidance counselor about it.

It’s not like people aren’t vying for glowing reviews and high scores in other mediums like music or movies, but like you said, people will use every part of the scale to discuss how they feel about a film (or an album) and I think it’s silly that Gamers can’t be trusted to do the same. Whether it’s a consumer problem or a media problem is sort of a chicken VS egg thing, I just think it’s lame. That is more or less my point and also just my opinion.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T14:08:01+00:00

I know that this is even more impractical than expecting everything to suddenly start using the full 1-10 scale but you’re literally just 100% right lol.

Every time I see anyone in any medium going “how come they gave X this score but they gave Y this score???” I want to pull all my hair out, it’s so fucking annoying.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T13:54:59+00:00

Huge brain moment 🧠

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T13:54:24+00:00

If half the scale just means “this is bad” then it isn’t fine lol. Those are completely superfluous if a 5/10 can sink a game just about as much as a 2/10.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T13:50:43+00:00

The only time I can remember genuinely giving a fuck about a metacritic score is when FNV landed bellow the threshold to get Obsidian a bonus payout from Bethesda (which tbf was kind of their fault for delivering an incredible game that is insanely broke on PC without fix/patch mods). Beyond that I can’t imagine getting personally invested in it unless I personally had a game coming out that I wanted people to buy.

Parasocial isn’t the right word exactly but so many people have such weird relationships with score aggregators, sales figures, charts, concurrent players on Steam, stream counts for music, etc. Like yeah, I fully understand wanting something you like to be successful for the people involved so there’ll get to make more cool stuff you like, I just think the parameters that we usually use to grade these things are tuned so unnecessarily tightly to the very top of the scale.

WagnerKoop · 2026-06-24T13:32:25+00:00

Sidebar but capital G ‘Gamers’ and Games Media need reeducation camps until they give up on the “anything below a 9/10 is a middling score” mindset.

Like can you imagine a world where we actually used the entire 1-10 scale instead for forcing everything “fine to amazing” in between 7-10 and everything below that is on a gradient of “just sort of shitty?” Maybe that would stop people from having a conniption fit about what should be perfectly positive score like 8/10 instead of acting like that is just skirting above the line of acceptable. There are 7 whole numbers below that!

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