Messages

26

General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: August 03, 2016, 10:12:00 PM »

I get the sense the Chinese movie industry views Great Wall as its coming out party, to prove to the Western market that it can compete toe-to-toe with Hollywood, and they're going to do everything humanly possible to ensure its success, and if that means hiring a white movie star, that's exactly what they're going to do.

Zhang Yimou wants to draw a lot in the American market. And when they want to draw in the Chinese market they cast a notable Chinese actor so he's just doing the same thing.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 29, 2016, 11:28:47 PM »

People who play Overwatch don't seem to understand trying to RP with them. And when you tell them that you were role-playing non-violent resisters so opening fire means that they're the REAL losers just makes them mad.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 27, 2016, 10:55:12 PM »

It reminds me of when I had dreams of falling arrows back when DDR was still an everyday thing.

Artifact Adventure: So I heard about this on Extra Credits, and they described it as "FF1 meets Skyrim, with more meaningful choices than any RPG seen before". I want to know more about this, and I'm curious if anyone else has played this game?

It's only seven bucks so I took a flyer on it. Combat is rote NES fare and your classes are fixed so the only real way to beat fights you can't beat is to have your numbers get more bigger.  The basic gimmick is that you start out picking one of three things that basically determines how your game is gonna play out, and then there's some other things spattered around.

It's worth seven bucks I suppose, but Extra Credits is overselling it.  An NES-style game where you can adventure pretty much anywhere is a neat idea but it's weighed down by the primitive gameplay of the titles it apes.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 24, 2016, 11:36:42 PM »

Star Ocean 5:  So the most impressive thing about this game is how seamless transitions are.  "Cutscenes" happen automatically as you walk from place to place.  Characters will talk as you're moving, and other characters will look at the person talking, regardless of where you are in relation to them.  Battles happen instantly with no load times, you just move up to an enemy and a few UI elements will pop up on screen but you're still moving the same way you were before.

All of this being noteworthy is kind of sad when you think about it.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 21, 2016, 11:23:31 PM »

Well it can't be as bad as Star Ocean 4.

31

General Chat / Re: Movies

« on: July 19, 2016, 09:32:45 AM »

Fuck you guys for making me briefly consider seeing the new Ghostbusters.

Toy Story 3:  Did not care for it.  This movie is dark as fuck. Like I would not take small children to see this because the incinerator scene would probably give them nightmares for weeks.  And even though there's a "happy" ending, it's bittersweet because now you know what's going to happen the next time a child grows up.

What if that's because it's aimed at the people who were small children when Toy Story 1 came out 13 years before that?

32

General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: July 19, 2016, 08:48:20 AM »

I was on a podcast.  They just finished FF9 and asked me on to talk about a few different topics because I knew a lot about it, I guess.  Listen, if you want.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 17, 2016, 08:19:32 PM »

Stories about power struggle between groups over something concrete like land or resources tend to be stronger in general, because those tend to be driven by character motivations and seldom resort to "magic made it happen."

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 15, 2016, 09:34:22 AM »

MGS5 - This game keeps being perplexing, good when it is good and then amazingly terrible when it is terrible.

On one hand it is cool that Quiet lies down on her bed, undoes her top and just chills to She Blinded Me With Science.

On the other hand she does it in a prison cell in the middle of an otherwise empty room on an oil tanker in the middle of nowhere so the player can just sit there and watch her.

Edit - But as a plus I unlocked a different look for my dog so it doesn't have an eye patch just like Snake.  The spoilers at the end of the game make so much of this stuff super eye rolly.  Like I think if I didn't know it then it would still be eye rolly because of how thick they lay it on, but holy shit is it fucking ridiculous.  Kojima isn't an artful storyteller.  He just drives dump truck and empties load after load of ITS THE THEME in your front yard.

MGS5 does a lot of things that are perplexing. It opens with half an hour of "war really fucks people up, look how fucked up you are crawling around with your atrophied muscles and half an arm" but it intersperses it with Jean Grey and a man on fire who is immune to bullets. Then you get past that and for a while it's a fairly grounded sandbox about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or brush fires in central Africa. But every once in a while it has to go back to those other two wells when the game would be much better without them.

If the actual gameplay wasn't so good and so good at making tons of viable approaches I would have dropped it long ago.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 11, 2016, 08:18:35 PM »

The Witcher 3- I just ran into a wizard who got locked in a tiny room because of problems with the Defensive Regulatory Magicon, so I'm off to find Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: July 10, 2016, 09:01:04 AM »

So I've talked a few times about how I am, in retrospect, dissatisfied that Xenogears never addressed the question of whether or not Elly (and, come to think of it, all the cast who were Animus, but especially Elly) were actually free to care for Fei or if their investment in him was something that was predetermined.

Well I just did a whole thing in The Witcher 3 that revolved around that question and I was really pleased with how it took a plot point from The Last Wish (which was written over 20 years ago) and came to that same realization, deciding to do something about it. The ultimate resolution felt satisfying and a reflection of how I chose to approach Yen's character over the course of the game so far.

Now I'm gonna go rescue Tywin Lannister's magical daughter and make her Empress.

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General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: July 10, 2016, 08:53:39 AM »

Roland Emmerich only put people he wanted to fuck in the movie. If it was Bryan Singer directing, the bar would have been full of 13-year-old boys.

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General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: July 02, 2016, 07:38:41 PM »

Facebook is where you pretend your life is great to family and friends. Twitter is where you sling jokes and talk about how your life sucks to complete strangers.

Though, more seriously, besides that, Twitter's also a really good breaking news and general journalism hub.

I could see that if you don't have direct wire access (like I do as a full-time newsman), I guess.  The impulse to use it to communicate with strangers baffles me.  I don't even talk about my life to people I know.

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General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: June 29, 2016, 11:22:31 PM »

I don't even get what twitter is for. It's like a worse Facebook or something?

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: June 29, 2016, 11:21:52 PM »

Star Ocean 5 is out and nobody is talking about it.

You can thank Star Ocean 4 for that

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: June 26, 2016, 07:04:56 PM »

Shadowrun Hong Kong is seven bucks right now. I haven't gotten around to playing the extended edition content yet but the base game is a lot of fun and combat is a pretty decent challenge, but not in that dumb way where the enemy stat numbers are big or they have more advanced gear than you do.

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General Chat / Re: NBA 2015-2016: Kobe is going to retire before Joey Crawford

« on: June 23, 2016, 07:45:22 PM »

wow, making history doesn't mean shit

I mean, technically they only tied history now.  Both they and the 96 Bulls won 88 games over the course of a year.

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General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: June 23, 2016, 07:44:00 PM »

Well that's the rub really.  Due to its slavish devotion to community and non-exclusion, they ended up having the exact opposite problem: nobody could effectively communicate what it was 'about' (no one wanted to "speak for others"), so the lesson the wider culture took from it is "they're a bunch of clueless hippies crying about nothing".  Sure, the powers that be did all in their power to highlight and exploit that issue, but no mistake, it was legitimately chronic within the movement.

It's almost like leadership and hierarchy are inherent components of an organized social movement in human society or something.

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General Chat / Re: TV Shows

« on: June 18, 2016, 07:09:42 PM »

So I've lost count, have any of the dire wolves contributed anything to the story?  Or do they just kill them off to save on the special effect budget?

Not since Robb died. Summer saving Bran is key for the entire story though, and Grey Wind was a large part of Robb's mythic stature.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: June 18, 2016, 09:34:40 AM »

Resident Evil 6 with all the bundled in DLC is only eight bucks right now, so I picked it up.  Only played the first act of the Leon campaign so far, and the city escape is actually decently tense and has good atmosphere, which I like. Little cliched but Resident Evil is at its best when it's kind of self-aware (see: RE4).

Prepare for a trip of spastic nonsense.

Eh, for eight bucks I'm down for spastic nonsense. I paid full price for FF13 and that was spastic nonsense that thought I was some kind of cognitive subnormal.

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General Chat / Re: Good Morning 2016: Man hat doch nicht alle Tassen im Schrank!

« on: June 17, 2016, 11:07:48 PM »

Yeah,  I have gotten really used to having a normal 8-4 job myself. Do not want to have to ever work evenings or weekends again.

News don't stop for evenings and weekends! At least I'm not working 22 days in a row anymore.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: June 17, 2016, 09:56:42 PM »

Resident Evil 6 with all the bundled in DLC is only eight bucks right now, so I picked it up.  Only played the first act of the Leon campaign so far, and the city escape is actually decently tense and has good atmosphere, which I like. Little cliched but Resident Evil is at its best when it's kind of self-aware (see: RE4).

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General Chat / Re: Good Morning 2016: Man hat doch nicht alle Tassen im Schrank!

« on: June 17, 2016, 09:12:36 PM »

Started my new job as a news copy editor yesterday. Gonna have to get used to working evenings again but hey, I got a job in exactly the field I wanted after three weeks of looking, so that's cool.

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General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: June 17, 2016, 10:06:58 AM »

*indistinct sound of cheering as people see a thing inferior to a PC in every way*

MEDIOCRE

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: June 15, 2016, 07:49:12 PM »

Man I hope you guys like Skyrim cause everything coming out of E3 looks like Skyrim.

Even the "updated" Skyrim for consoles that looks worse than the Skyrim I run on my PC does?  The one that incorporates the shitshow console mods of Fallout 4?