Professor Video Games

Oh I remembered one! In the first God of War, there's a segment where you have to climb some tower with rotating bits with various spikes and things on it. The controls for it were bad and the hit detection was shit and if you messed up you got knocked to the bottom. I was already getting frustrated with that sort of stuff in the game so I just quit.

I've also gone back through and the situations Chidi gets put in are especially fun in hindsight. But I doubt it's gonna redeem the show for you or anything. I personally never cared much about the "big secret" behind what was going on...the setting lets the writers do basically whatever they want and it's fun watching the characters deal with this absurd place. And as a side note, considering the setting, I wouldn't count on the morality stuff going away anytime soon.

Hmm...I don't remember if there's a head explosion or not but in S2 there is My thoughts on the show mostly mirror BigJKO's. I love the effects & absurd gore and the 30 minute format keeps things moving. The supporting characters are all good too. It's a fun show!

I quit Goldeneye for a long time because of that level where you protect Natalya while she stands in the middle of a wide open room hacking some computer. But that was in the days when I owned like three games so a few months later I went back and got through it You mean that Hell section? I got to the final boss in that area a few times but it was just too much. I just put it down at that point too.

I believe there's a thread in the waypoint forum that has details (I'd link it but my work blocks vice domains)

31.

When is Chidi gonna get his shit figured out.

Come on now the fact that his other movies haven't been good doesn't take away from Moon, which is very good. Also, Source Code was ok! Agree. I've seen too many things disappear from streaming services or have scenes mangled by their aggressive compression to ever want to really rely on them.

Did I miss the explanation for why "y'all" is bad?

Agreed. Relevant tweet: https://twitter.com/ybbaaabby/status/964260236092690434

Monsters

Kurosawa is an obvious recommendation. Seven Samurai is his most famous followed maybe by Rashomon, but there are plenty of other ones worth recommending. A few off the top of my head would be Yojimbo/Sanjuro, Ikiru, Throne of Blood (Macbeth set in feudal Japan), and Hidden Fortress (George Lucas cites this as an inspiration for Star Wars, but I wouldn't read too much into that). Harakiri by Masaki Kobayashi. A dark take on feudal japan...relatively slow paced but it's got some scenes that are incredibly intense. The other one of his I've seen is Samurai Rebellion, which I remember enjoying a lot. Harakiri got remade relatively recently by the absurdly prolific Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Audition, a million more movies). And now I'm looking through his list of films and see it includes the live action Phoenix Wright movie...has anyone seen that? Also a live action Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure just last year... You mentioned Branded to Kill, which I agree is totally weird but I completely love. Tokyo Drifter is another one by him that I want to say is more straightforward (it's been a while) but still has some really interesting visual touches. Mother and The Host by Bong Joon-Ho...he's gone on to do some well known english stuff (Snowpiercer, Okja), but Mother is probably my favorite of his. If you want lighter stuff, you could go into some old Stephen Chow movies. Shaolin Soccer, and Kung Fu Hustle are both goofy as hell and a lot of fun. I don't think I watch movies at the rate you do, but if you mention what you're looking at watching next, I'd probably try to go along at least some of the time.

Good to know. I will then bump up my rapier some more and continue to poke things to death from behind my shield. The way those guards scuttle towards you once you've been zapped is fuckin creepy as hell.

I ended up poking around in both 1-2 and 3-1 (those cthulhu lookin' guards....ugh) for a bit...I didn't go all the way through them but they netted me enough souls/upgrades and general practice to go back to 2-1 and get through without too much difficulty. Both bosses so far have be surprisingly easy. I'd say I'm feeling more comfortable with things in general at this point aside from maybe the fact that I'm (probably unreasonably) hesitant to upgrade weapons because I have this feeling I'll find something better and have wasted my upgrade materials. That and I wish the game weren't quite so dark...

I went through the House of Wax edit history and it looks like the original update didn't have a citation for "Wax House, Baby" at all, but three months later it's added with the comment "adding cite i missed during the article overhaul" which, I don't know why, but I find even more hilarious.

So with the servers for this shutting down at the end of February, I thought I would finally give this a go. I've played a bit of Bloodborne but otherwise am a Souls newbie. Unfortunately it seems the North American servers are, though technically still up, in a shit state and the server desync causes these really terrible audio issues along with issues saving/loading. From what I've read on reddit, this has been the state of things for about a year now. So sadly it seems like I'm forced to play in offline mode anyway... So far I've just made it through the first area. I see that referred to as 1-1 online, but is that indicated in the game anywhere? Which is 2-1? Does it even matter? I started as a Royal since it seems to be considered the best newbie class. My brain really wants me to look up best builds/weapons but I'm trying to avoid that. I'm planning on ignoring all the world tendency stuff though. I toyed around a bit with what I assume is 2-1 (the archstone right next to 1-1) and got wrecked a few times in a row by this fat laughing guy that shoots fire balls. I'll try and keep posting here as a go, partly to motivate myself to keep at it...I can have a hard time sticking with games that are all dark and gloomy (and hard) even if I enjoy them.

In theory I agree with everything you've said. Dual wielding can take guys down super fast and is really satisfying and with upgrades things definitely get easier. Mainly it's when there are multiple enemies or you are getting flanked that shit gets bad. They are very accurate/lethal and I had a very hard time noticing when I was being hit by someone off screen.

I dunno, maybe it was because I played with a controller, but I was getting absolutely melted on the middle difficultly (for experienced players or whatever). There's very little feedback when you're getting hit and enemies can drop you from full health to nothing in an instant. Things are manageable if you take out the commander but I think enemies are too quick to trigger the alarm and once that happens it can get overwhelming very fast and for a run and gun play style you are just too fragile. I ended up dropping down one difficulty after a few levels and I still hit several spots where I died frequently. And fwiw I played the previous game and don't remember having this much of an issue.

Just finished Nier Automata the other day. I dunno, I expected to like this more than I did. There were a lot of interesting ideas and setups in there, but I almost never felt like they were examined enough or given time to develop into anything more substantial. New stuff seemed to just keep coming out of nowhere.

I should be more specific in that it lends itself to a replay. Along the path you're on you have some chances to do option A or B activities so you can go back through and see what the other stuff is (I haven't...like y'all I haven't wanted to face that I've done it all)

If it helps, the structure of 4 lends itself to replays more than the previous ones did.

Well I only played four 2017 games so far this year so I'll just list them all! Breath of the Wild - The most fun I've had exploring an open world basically ever? GOTY. Pyre - I loved the art in this one so much and the cast of characters are fun and diverse. The branching visual novel setup is cool too and there's tons of cool Lore if that's your thing. The Rites themselves are fun though maybe not remarkable. Persona 5 - Flawed but overall I really loved it. The soundtrack is amazing. Destiny 2 - The campaign story is still bad but the shooting in these games remains top shelf and the raids are a totally unique thing that I love (Vault of Glass is still the best one though). I didn't find myself redoing endgame stuff like I have in the past but hey, the next expansion is out today! I'm playing Nier at the moment. Just a few hours in but it's definitely got some ideas in there. I'm not sure the gameplay is up any of the Thumbs' alley but I'd love one of them to play through it for the 'cast.

Extremely worth checking out: http://www.charlesmartinet.com/

Joke's on them since the gov't is removing all the regulations on that stuff anyway.

Yeah I wanted to mention these too. Though to some degree the "puzzle" is just that the game doesn't tell you what is going on or how things work and you have to figure it out through a lot of trial and error. Still a lot of fun but maybe not quite like an escape room. Once you've figured out how things work in a destiny raid there's still the matter of execution so they are replayable unlike a straight up puzzle though.