TychoCelchuuu

Why, exactly? What does that get them?

omg they have a kitten on staff, best gaming website ever except for mine

Why were you skipping the cutscenes in NOLF? I guess that question goes for both of you. I think I recall the cutscenes being some of my favorite parts of the game.

If you think that's bad, wait until you learn what happened to the animals that people eat on screen in movies!

And if Triumph of the Will didn't exist, we wouldn't have that rad bit in A New Hope where the Rebels line up in the auditorium and give medals to everyone except Chewbacca!

Yeah I mean it's pretty clear that you think this, but people disagree with you, and what we're looking for is a way to adjudicate the dispute. One way is to make it into a numbers game, where the majority wins. If that's the case, then I think you lose this round, because as you've pointed out, "society" seems to think that movies like these are classics, this despite their racism/sexism/etc. Another way is to look at which approach makes more sense. I've already pointed out that your approach makes little sense to me. Either there are practically no classic movies, because basically every movie has issues, or there's some arbitrarily chosen level of racism/sexism/whatever above which a movie can't be a classic and below which a movie can be a classic, which makes no sense to me. How high is that level of racism/sexism/etc.? Who determines that? One way to help salvage your point would be if very few movies are in fact sexist/racist/etc., or at least very few movies are bad enough along these lines to disqualify them from being classics. You've suggested as much above when you said you've watched a lot of classics and few of them have these issues. Like Patrick, I am suspicious about your claims. I suspect you are simply less sensitive to various injustices that I (and Patrick) take pretty seriously, and if you started paying attention you'd see these all over movies, including classics. As I noted above, and as you noted above, one person's "obvious" sexism is another person's "what? this movie has no sexism." In this case, the reviewer on rogerebert.com was the one who couldn't spot the sexism, but it may be that you, yourself, are in a similar position with respect to other sorts of injustices present in other classic movies that you take to be spotless. Another argument you might make is to say there's no right answer. Everyone just makes their own choice about what is an isn't a classic movie. I think that's mostly what Patrick and I have been saying, with the additional point that if lots of critics think X is a classic movie, then who are you to tell them that they're wrong? And in fact you're the one that touched this off by asserting that there is a right answer, namely that these movies aren't classics, right? So I'm not sure "there's no right answer" works well for you. I think there's not much use in arguing whether something is or isn't a classic. Sometimes your point seems to be less about that and more about whether movies get a "free pass" from "society." I can't really speak for "society" - you strike me as part of society, and you are not giving these movies a free pass, and I strike me as part of society, and I don't think I'm giving these movies a free pass, and so on. If the point is just that "society" does not talk as much about the particular injustices you care a lot about, join the club. I'm a member! Most people are members. The issue is that everyone has different injustices they care about, and different ideas about what counts as an injustice or not. Patrick and I care about, for instance, things that are " racist, hetero-normative, ablist, transphobic, body shaming, misogynist, etc. etc. etc." and if we spent our time (like you) saying society shouldn't give a "free pass" to movies featuring this, that's all we'd ever talk about. In fact, there are some injustices that I care deeply about that almost nobody cares about, and when I talk about them, I get a lot of shit. Injustice against animals is one example of this. I take it you think a movie where animals are killed and eaten and where this is treated as normal or even great is a movie that scores much worse than It Happened One Night on the "how morally reprehensible is this movie?" scale. So I would have to disqualify that movie from being a classic or whatever. I take it if I filled this thread with that sort of discussion, you would not have a lot of patience for my argument, though. If every time you bring up your favorite movie I talk about how the characters ate a hamburger and how awful that is, I think you'd want me to look past the hamburger for a moment and appreciate the movie for the qualities that you like. That's not to say these aren't worthwhile topics. I'm happy to talk about them any time. I just don't think they make a movie bad, or that they disqualify it from being a classic, or anything like that. Apocalypse Now killed a cow but that movie is tremendous. Maybe The Searchers is racist but also amazing. So to the extent that you're not just saying "hey it would be cool to talk about bad stuff sometimes" but something stronger, I think I still disagree, and it's not clear what could be said in favor of your view as opposed to mine.

I mean, I can't defend every reviewer or their lack of disclaimers or anything, so if that's all you're saying - that reviews should have disclaimers - that's fine. I have no issue with that. As Patrick points out, I do think that it's not really right to say the movies are "rotten to the core" - maybe they're more rotten, or they have more rot, or whatever, but so what? The issue is whether they are good movies despite the rot, not how rotten they are. Like Patrick I find rotten things all over, including in the cores of many movies I like very much. My favorite movie, Dr. Strangelove, is pretty sexist. If that means it's rotten to the core, then I guess being rotten doesn't make it a bad movie. It's still my favorite movie. I don't know what it means for a movie to be "irreplaceable," so I can't speak to that unless you want to elaborate. Plus I haven't seen this movie, so I can't tell you whether I think it's so good that it ought to be part of the canon. Plenty of other people who have seen the movie do think it's that good, though, and you saying they're wrong doesn't get us very far. We get a bit further because you give us a reason for thinking they're wrong, namely, that the movie is super racist. However, as I've pointed out before, lots of stuff is super racist, including many good films. The racism surely doesn't make them better but in many people's eyes, racism doesn't have to stop a film from being good. This might not be true in your eyes, but people disagree about this and it's not clear why I should be on your side rather than the other side (which is where I already am). If I were on your side it seems to me I would have to stop liking almost everything, or I would have to find some arbitrary line of racism/etc. above which I can't like something but below which I can like something. Again I haven't seen The Searchers, and I already told you I don't like It Happened One Night, so I don't really think it's fair to pin me with an "avoidance to judge those works." Moreover, I've granted for the sake of the argument that both are super racist/sexist/etc. and that's judgy as hell. Clearly I am happy to judge these movies for what they are. They are racist/sexist/etc. and also they are masterpieces (again, not talking about these two specific movies). Yes, there's some of that. What's obvious to one person is invisible to another. You quote below a reviewer of It Happened One Night who thinks the movie isn't sexist. So clearly the sexism is not quite as obvious as one might have hoped. I'm sure most of your favorite movies have stuff I find utterly reprehensible.

Yeah, agreed. I don't think there's any such thing that everyone must watch, and there's plenty of stuff that's worth watching even though it's problematic, because as Patrick points out, if you only watch non-problematic stuff, you'll watch effectively nothing. In fact I don't think there's any level of racist/sexist/whatever content that would make something not worth watching if it has other merits, so long as there's some good reason for watching it. Adding racism/sexism/etc. makes the message shittier, and if you watch movies for their message then it will turn you off, but there's more to a movie than what it believes, and if you watch movies for other reasons, then those can be reasons to watch things that espouse shitty beliefs.

I don't like It Happened One Night and I haven't seen The Searchers, so I can't speak to those, but I think it's kind of a fool's errand to pretend that racism/sexism/etc. can render a work "not classic" or something. If that's a criterion then there are basically no classics, and some paradigmatic classical works (Moby Dick, Catch-22, The Odyssey, etc.) don't count as classics, which is silly. The best example is something like Triumph of the Will, which is a groundbreaking and massively influential documentary film about how awesome Hitler is. Pretending that the movie isn't well-made because we don't agree with its message is like saying food tastes bad because it's not healthy. It's just confusing two different things.

And whatabout that music, too, huh?

I mean, I did the "lure huge neon t-rex" thing (it wasn't very fun - you just throw a heart, the t-rex kills everyone, the end), I did the "silently killing the guards" thing (which was mostly my MO in FC3 so it's like yaaaawn), I did the "go in guns blazing thing," because why not, and I don't really like sniping, so after clearing three outposts I was like "eh whatever." I also did two hostage rescues and an animal hunt and honestly it just felt like more FC3.

This and a similar mod for SOMA are what I'm going to use if I ever get around to playing these games. I have absolutely no interest in being terrified by and having to hide from monsters, but I have lots of interest in walking around cool sci-fi environments.

That's one of my favorite games of all time. Definitely not an uplifting game though, you're right about that.

I think I'm done with Dark Souls. I don't think I got super far - I made it to some underground cavern place with tree monsters and felt the weight of the million years it would take me to explore the place and learn its ins and outs and said to myself "I'm not really enjoying this." I don't know if there was ever a point in my life where getting better at a video game for the sake of getting better at a video game was rewarding, but that's not where I am right now, so, goodbye, Dark Souls, I can sort of see what people like about you but it's not something I like about you. I just upgraded my computer so I decided to play Far Cry: Blood Dragon which I've owned for a while but which didn't run super great on my old computer. I beat a few missions and liberated a few outposts and decided I was done. I like some free-roaming sorts of games - Far Cry 2, for instance! - and I really like shooters generally, but Blood Dragon was just way too much like Far Cry 3, way too unfocused, and not quite funny enough to hold my attention. I think I'm a larger fan of games that either do something interesting with the free roaming around (or that at least break up the tedium a bit - Blood Dragon is just the same thing over and over in different locations) or much tighter corridor shooters where the action is more consistent and I don't have to loot every body for money and grind animal quests to unlock attachments to buy at vending machines I can access at outposts I've fast traveled to once I've liberated them... over and over and over... so yeah, I'm slightly sad to not be able to see the rest of the largely mediocre but still sometimes amusing story unfold, but whatever. Life's too short.

If you have a GTX 960 you can already play The Witness and Firewatch, can't you?

Does anyone know which other YouTubers Danielle mentioned? I know she mentioned Errant Signal, but she mentioned one other (I think it was a group of people) and I can't remember who. I think everyone in this thread is right that the backlash over NMS was way more toxic and so on than is justified by anything, let alone how the game turned out, but I mean come on, when the guy goes on Colbert and says "you can meet other people and they can tell you what your character looks like" and the game comes out and no, you can't, everyone is invisible and in fact nobody can even see the changes you make in the world, surely people have a point if they say "I thought this game was going to be different than the game that I got." Ditto for those huge snake creatures in the E3 trailer and all the other stuff. I mean I had no idea what the hell kind of a game NMS was going to be, and all I had to go on were those trailers and what the developers said, and some of that turned out to be false, so isn't that kind of weird?

There's another version of kim chi that you can eat fresh, without fermentation. An you can also eat normal kim chi before it's fermented, although at that point it won't taste like kim chi much at all yet. It's like eating pickled cucumbers right after you put them in the pickling liquid or sauerkraut right after you've salted the cabbage.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag: (yo ho ho and a bottle of) rum Spelunky: a Tiki drink 80 Days: I think Passepartout likes cognac Analogue: A Hate Story: Soju Jazzpunk: Martini, shaken, not stirred Quadrilateral Cowboy: aorta pulmonary liquor or panther pilsner.

How does it taste? It looks amazing.

Huh? Am I missing something? What exactly is the reverse-white-washing in QC?

Finished Quadrilateral Cowboy. Like every other Blendo Games game, it's sublime and incomparable. Generally I'm happy with the length of the games, although I think it would be nice if Flotilla continued longer, and this is another example of that - I would definitely have been happy with more levels. The story was also surprisingly basic, not in the sense of being spare - they're always spare - but in the sense of not much happening, really, explicitly or implicitly, at least as far as I could tell. I'll be interested to see if it generates a modding community. There's a lot of room in the mechanics for people to do some neat stuff.

I thought free upgrades were over?

They're definitely rearrangeable in the sense that you can pick them up and move them, but they don't auto-align, as far as I know, so it would be a huge pain in the ass.

I'm holding out and I still can't decide...

One of my favorite details is how all the books have different titles: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/446239101695477776/7ED53A3776670DAB97B557722AA5EF336F1068CB/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/446239101695473688/79444AC905D425BF689D79BCF936A37BFA81FA67/