Bjorn

This seemed like the most appropriate place to drop this: Jeff Goldblum Plays A Jazz Show Almost Every Week. No, Really.

And that's fine! I wasn't meaning to imply that there is anything wrong with not liking Brooks' films. But as the basis for the conversation was referential humor, I found that bringing up Brooks in general was a bit odd, as his best films and the best bits of his films don't rely on that kind of humor, even if they use it as a setup. To me, it's just not a great fit for the conversation, particularly compared to that atrocity of a trailer that was just posted above me. For me, I guess referential humor is mostly dependent on how heavy handed it is. A well timed reference joke can certainly get a laugh out of me. But then something like Deathspank: The Baconing is just...well, just no. That's something that I never even gave the time of day to, the name alone was enough to turn me off of it.

There is a server update today, I'm actually hoping it fixes some things with matching. I have had the most fucked matching in terms of region for the last 4 or 5 days. I get a NA player about one in every 4 or 5 matches, the rest are Russian, Chinese, Taiwanese, South American and even some Europeans. I've got my region set to restricted, but that doesn't seem to matter at all. The lag has just been terrible in a lot of these matches, players either pinballing around, or stopping for 5-10 seconds, then speedrunning for a few seconds, then stopping again. The only build I've taken to NG+ is my most powerful build, unquestionably. It's the one that uses a halberd and the Helix Halberd in power stance, and I switch to a Grand Lance to save durability. I keep trying to move on to different weapons for variety, but it's kind of addictive to just slaughter things with ease. I did farm some of the rarer fist weapon drops last night, got the Manikin Claws and Malformed Claws, both of which seem pretty meh so far. I don't see any benefit over just using Caestuses if I'm going to punch things and not farm Awestones for a Vanquisher's Seal. The claws really seem like they ought to have a much longer hit box than a Caestus, but have lower damage. But the animation is such that you don't really punch straight out with claws, you curve your hand, so the functional range is the same. It seems like a missed opportunity to have a different fist based move set.

In high school, I had a lot of female friends, but was at a complete loss to figure out how to actually talk to a girl I liked romantically/sexually. I would say I was mostly just confused by girls and sex at that time. But in my early 20s, I definitely went through a phase of being very angry about not being able to find a relationship or even get laid. I remember the anger being very vague and general, not like misogynistically focused on women. But at that point I was broke, had dropped out of college and worked a series of shitty dead end jobs. I think my anger, depression and discontent was influenced by a pretty big range of things, but I certainly focused some of that on the frustrations of not having any fun sexy times. Which, gee, surprise, when you're angry and depressed, fun sexy times do not often find their way to you.

I'm somewhat surprised at the lack of love for Mel Brooks. Blazing Saddles at least is still better and ballsier than most modern comedies, and I still have a deep fondness for several of his other movies (and feel they hold up). They do have referential humor, but that's not what makes them good.

Maybe I'm low? I don't really know. I get plenty of action in the Bell Tower and haven't had many problems finding co-op partners. I entered NG+ at around 4 million, and I'm approaching 6 million now. I'm finding the PvE stuff to be trivially easy, I want some invasions to have a challenge! That was actually pretty interesting read, thanks! As far as thrown items go, I think you could probably do a run that was nothing but throwing knives, them things are useful. I've done the NG+ difficulty Gargoyles several times with relatively low level melee only characters to get the Gold Ring +2, usually because my build required some obnoxiously rare drop and I wanted to save time. Throwing knives were essential for me, usually to finish off a Gargoyle from a distance once I had a third one spawn.

Nice, congrats! An SL1 run is still something I've never tried. Not sure I ever will, seems like it would alternate between being super tense and super tedious. How did you go about doing it? I know you've mentioned fighting some specific bosses, but was your only weapon you could rely on a 2-handed club? Did you have to bonfire ascetic some bosses to get rings, like the Southern +2 to have some pyromancies on hand? I still haven't been invaded in NG+. I am so bummed about this. Apparently I need to become a sinner so at least Blues will invade me.

Cool, just got around to accepting the request! Oh, I've been messing around with elemental resists the last couple of days. I had not realized that elemental resists are a straight percentage reduction. 500 fire defense cuts down 50 percent of fire damage. 1000 fire defense makes you immune to fire damage (possible with stucking buffs and water). I've switched over my armor and rings for PvP to focus almost solely on on elemental defenses, only keeping heavy gauntlets on for some base poise. I've mostly found that I do not lose very often to straight melee builds. I can outplay, or at least equal, the damage that a lot of melee builds do. But if I screw up once against a magic/hex user or someone buffing a dark weapon with more dark, the fight is basically over. So I'm starting a fight with the Dispelling Ring, Dark Ring, Magic Ring and Third Dragon. If an opponent doesn't look magic based at all, I'll quickly swap out the Dark/Magic rings for offensive (Blades and/or Chloranthy). And I'm otherwise wearing light armor with good elemental. My base defenses are now all around 500, and buffed with magic barrier, jump up to 650. Once I can spice down GMB, I'll have it up to 750. I really hadn't realized just how much magic damage you can neutralize. I've also shifted some points out of my damage stats and into Int/Faith to raise my base elemental defenses and give me some options for some defensive spells. Overall I'm really happy with how this is working out. Eating a hex/spell to the face and only losing about a quarter of my health (rather than 3/4) is really satisfying. I do wish there as a bit more variety in the clothing with high elemental resists, but you're pretty limited on putting together some Fashion Souls if you want excellent defenses against magic.

I just listened to one of his early youtube videos. This almost seems like fiction, like if you were making a movie about a lonely, sad misogynist MRA going on a shooting spree, this is the kind of filler content you would film to have in between other scenes. Fucking creepy. And sinister, though hard to say if it would have felt like that watching it before all this happened. I rather hope that the MRA and PUA sites that have deleted his posts/accounts are charged with interfering with a criminal investigation and destroying evidence, assuming they are owned by US citizens. Anything YouTube pulled down they kept, but I'm willing to bet some of the geniuses on the PUA/MRA sites just deleted whatever they could find. I was going to write something else, but this thing is so tragic and has sooooo many different moving parts around it that I don't even know where to start to do anything justice.

@Silent, you friended me awhile back didn't you? When it popped up, I didn't recognize it from someone on the forums. Just realized it was likely you. I finally took a character into NG+ last night. I was a bit disappointed at first. My co-op partners in FoFG were all kinda douchey, just rushing through, not gesturing, not celebrating, nothing. But that seemed to go away once I was out of there. The red phantoms and upgraded loot are keeping things interesting. A couple of the new phantoms have literally scared the shit out of me. I am super disappointed that I haven't been invaded. Cleared 5 and a half areas, and not a single invasion. Though I did see an invader in someone elses world. I even wore the string ring for awhile to try and encourage getting invaded.

It's because of how defense works. When you have a weapon with 2 damage types on it, both damage types hit their respective defenses separately. I don't remember exactly how defenses work, but it's close to be a flat reduction. So if something has enough defense to block 200 damage, it's going to block 200 damage no matter how much or little you do. So split damage ends up getting destroyed by even average defenses against at least one of the damage types. Enchanting a weapon with an element also got majorly nerfed by one of the early patches. Pre-patch, lightning weapons were godly. There was no reason to ever not enchant a weapon with lightning. Post-patch, for most builds, the only reason to enchant a weapon was if you didn't want to put the stats into Str or Dex to get the scaling up. So enchanting was great for pure mages/clerics, but generally terrible for pure fighters. Dark Souls 2 seems to have hit a better balance on this. Infusing a weapon still splits it's damage, but there are now buff spells for all 4 element types (magic, fire, lightning and dark). The buff spells all add flat damage plus a percentage of the element currently on the weapon (30 or 50 percent depending on the spell). An infused weapon in DS2 will almost always be weaker than if it were normal, until you use a buff spell, at which some weapons can become considerably more powerful, but only for 60-90 seconds. There are also more weapons that have innate elements in them. These can also be infused, which lowers their physical damage, but raises their elemental damage and raises the scaling of the element, allowing you to focus the damage in some weapons into the element rather than physical. I'm just a few hours into my NG+ run on DS2, and I have to say it's quite a bit of fun. DS2 adds enemies, some bosses drop different items and in general has different/better loot in NG+ vs NG. So it keeps that next playthrough fresher than DS1 did.

*Looks back at your color swatches and twitter replies.* Uh huh. Who started with flippant rebukes? Why is Far Cry 4 different? JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ON A CRACKER! Thank you for pulling that quote completely out of context. What I said in that thread is completely consistent with what I've been saying here. The previous post I made in that thread, and then the one you partially quoted: Where have I ever said in this thread that I wouldn't judge FC4 by what it is when it's released? Try looking back at what I've said here, and see what I'm actually saying. I'm saying that it's fine for people to criticize a game's pre-release marketing if they have a problem with it. I'm saying that devs/pubs need to be more sensitive about particular topics and how they handle them. I'm saying that I sympathize with how historically maligned or disempowered groups are treated in western media. I'm saying that I would like to see devs deal with these issues by including the people actually affected by them in their development process. Let's look at what else I've said here about how I might judge FC4: Replying to the rumor that it will be a Indian/Nepali protagonist: You are straight up misquoting, misconstruing and ignoring everything that doesn't fit your preconveived notion about what I have said in this thread. I'm sick and fucking tired of it. Gee, I wonder why there is any hostility now, when you do something like completely remove the part of a quote that wouldn't support your incorrect accusation about what I've said. Try replying to the posts I've actually made.

What about my reply is hostile? You've previously decried people making unfounded statements based on assumption, I invited you to back up your unfounded statement. There is nothing hostile about my post. I've spent most of my adult life paying attention to the video game industry, and I have no knowledge of any dev ever engaging in that kind of research. If you know about any, please, share it.

Please, go ahead and educate me about the history of any AAA dev speaking to the kinds of people I named, because I'm not aware of any. Not just doing a bit of location research, but actually talking to the kinds of people most affected by war and violence.

Shooters are often bombastic power fantasies featuring over the top murder sprees for which the player should revel and enjoy the mutilation that is visited upon other humans. Herein lies the problem. In that context, the opportunities for nuanced views on difficult subject matter are very, very fucking limited. Certainly there are games that are trying. Spec Ops: The Line, Far Cry 2 and The Last of Us all do interesting things with challenging themes. But these are the incredibly rare exceptions. I'm going to look with skepticism first at any shooter that someone claims is handling tough issues, as the very nature of the genre is limiting. The comparison to something like The Act of Killing is...poor, I think. That's a pseudo-documentary/biography exploring one of the great atrocities of the last century, and part of the intent of the film was to bring to light something practically unknown in the rest of the world and to explore how the perpetrators and their political descendents are still forces to be reckoned with. It was an act of bravery to make that film for the locals involved, as many of them risked death to assist in the production. What possible analog is there in video games for something like that? I don't think that someone should be restricted to making content that only falls strictly in their cultural or geographic basket. BUT, I do think you have a responsibility as a creator that if you're going to work far outside of your area of knowledge to work with people who are knowledgeable about the subject matter. With films like The Act of Killing or any movie dealing with a modern atrocity (last 50ish years) , it's not uncommon to either have people who were survivors or witnesses as part of the process at some point, or even the driving force behind the project. People may ultimately criticize the work for being skewed, but you can't criticize it for completely ignoring the people most directly involved with the subject matter. Do you think Ubisoft brought in Himilayans to consult regarding the challenges and fears of modern life in their country? Do you think they sent a research team to Nepal to spend a few weeks hanging out? I doubt it. But if they did, I'll be happy to retract all this, apologize, and be thrilled to see what they made. Multiple video game devs have been very proud to promote how they have brought in police officers, military specialists or survivalists as advisers on a project. But how many have ever brought in the victim of a war crime? Or talked to a war criminal? Someone who survived a murder attempt? Someone who's parents were slaughtered in a purge? Someone who was gang raped and left for dead? Someone whose grandparents had all their land stolen by foreign businesses? Someone who was a slave? What do you think those people would tell a video game developer about their project? Those are all things that can and have come up in video games, but I doubt the game creators have had any interaction with people who actually have to live in a world where those things are a reality. And I do not think you can create an honest piece of work exploring the themes that shooters often deal with if you keep cultural blinders on the way that most game publishers seem to. I'm kind of rambling here, and not sure I'm really engaging with all your points in the best way. But I'm trying to get out the basis for my inherent skepticism of things like this.

I just didn't want to let this moment paws by.

I'm afraid we might leave Chris with a mental scar over this.

He's the pride of the forums.

It's called Bat Bling™.

It's poop week on the Idle Forums apparently.

That was exactly my reaction as well.

Super late to the Pacific Rim talk, but that's my favorite action flicks from the last year or so. Sooo good. The thing I liked about the script/tone of it is that it defied my expectations. I went in expecting it to be intentionally cheesy and "wink" at the camera occasionally, but the whole thing is just played completely straight, which is one of the things that makes it work for me. I'm not going to call it a good script, but I did appreciate that element of it.

Let us not forget:

I suddenly really want to eat a meatball grinder something fierce. Loved the cast, always a treat to have Danielle on. I think what I like most about her being around is bringing up games or perspectives that wouldn't normally be on the 'cast. Side note about found porn as a teenager, I worked at a gas station that had semi-pumps when in high school. I had a rather lucrative side business selling porn mags to my classmates. Several of our regular trucker customers would just toss their old mags when they bought new ones (trucks not having a ton of storage and all). I'd gather those up and then peddle them to other teens desperate for porn.

THREAD RUINED