I couldn’t beat Nelo Angelo’s final fight in the original Devil May Cry on max difficulty. He does massive damage and takes only tiny chips off from your attacks. You have to make split-second dodge/block decisions and then make an instant counter attack and any mistake will cost you 2/3 of your health. I spent days trying to get past him and got him below half numerous times, but never really got close to a win.

One strategy I tried was Holy Waters. They AOE the whole room and cause him to flinch. I was hoping I could use that to create an opening, but the HW animation was too slow and he recovered as fast as I did. Then I thought “go to the shop and max out on them and just crack them all at the start to give myself a leg up”. It helped but not much. But then I noticed, because there was a holy water between the store and the fight, I was able to pick up, that the limit only applied to purchased Holy Waters. You could still pick them up from the world. Also, inventory carries over between plays/level select on the same file.

So, I level-selected and cranked it down to Very Easy and speed ran a middle section of the game over and over where I could pick up like 5 or 6 Holy Waters. Once I had like 50+ I loaded back to the fight and just burned him down entirely with Holy Water.

The Lawnmower Man is both the winner, and kind of cheating as an answer.

The studio had an existing script called Cyber God that they had been sitting on for a while. When they finally got around to making the movie, they figured if they could stick Stephen King’s name on it, then they might get more people to come see it. So they went out and bought the rights to a random King story called The Lawnmower Man and then changed the title character’s job in their movie from janitor to gardener so he could use a lawnmower at least once.

King actually sued them in order to get his name removed from the movie and won. Then they put it back on for the VHS release anyway.

So it kind of hads to be the worst adaptation because it’s not even an adaptation at all. But also cheating a bit because not really an adaptation.

Haven’t been able to Baldurs Gate 3 down since it dropped for PS5. Half-ish way through my second playthrough and already planning my third.

I’m going to go with a recent one: Baldur’s Gate 3

Trying to keep this mostly spoiler free.

Raphael the devil shows up very early offering a solution. Given that he’s a devil it’s obviously not a good idea to trust him. He keeps showing up though and if anything more smug in each encounter.

Follow the right path though and you do learn what he’s actually after, and >!you can break into his house IN HELL to steal his shit. At which point he shows up to stop you and a musical number with lyrics starts and the smug bastard starts singing his own banger boss music like a Disney villain while he tries to murder you. Great quest line and an awesome conclusion for what’s ultimately just a side villain.!<

I have both, and I would recommend xbox + gamepass. If they play five games a year off the pass you’re coming out ahead on the cost and there’s a TON of games on there.

He does a lot of both.

Sam Fisher only does one.

I was into Tom Clancy books as a teenager. My mom bought me a book for Christmas that said in big letters across the top: “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell” and then much smaller at the bottom was a different author’s name.

For anyone not familiar, Splinter Cell was, for a while, a very popular and successful video game franchise that had Tom Clancy’s name on it as it was a spinoff of the Rainbow Six series which was based on one of his books. Tom had almost (completely?) nothing to do with the Splinter Cell series though. The company just had permission to put his name on it and the full title of the series was usually presented as “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell”. Along with that, someone decided a good cash in might be to put out some novels with the game’s protagonist as the main character. They stuck Tom’s name real big at the top and mostly his the actual author’s name (pseudonym) on the bottom hoping to fool some folks. Worked on my mom.

It wasn’t a long book, so I read it anyway. Awful. Basically knock off shitty James Bond with a very obvious “reveal” that anyone should see coming a mile away. Which is extra dumb because the character from the game is much more John Wick than James Bond. He doesn’t go under cover and hit on ladies, he sneaks into buildings and shoots people. They wrote him as much more dull Bond instead though. Also, extended sex scene for protagonists teenage daughter for no particular reason.